Trials of a Poker Apprentice: Back and ready to write

I suppose I should do a quick little update to let people know that I'm not dead. I've been working on my return post for a couple of days, but it's extremely long and I'm only about half-finished. No telling when I'll get a moment to actually finish it, so I might as well post a quickie just to get the ball rolling again.

Work is finally settling down, which allows me to return to blogging again. As I mentioned before, my job has been overloaded of late, with the busy graduation and election season, and then we lost a person in my department and I've had to pick up the slack the last few weeks. That's meant an exceptionally busy time for me, and even when I've had a few spare moments, I've been either too tired to write, or busy with family obligations.

One of those was a return trip to Caesars Indiana. My super-long post is primarily about that trip, so I'll skip the details for now, except to say it was a triumphant return.

Online poker has been decent to me lately. I've managed to rebuild a little bankroll, one where I'm not too worried about one bad session. One of the weirdest things to happen to me was an Omaha (high only) SNG I played about a week ago. About the second or third hand in, I flopped a decent but vulnerable hand, watched two maniacs raise and reraise and decided to risk it and pushed all-in, only to get drawn out on at the river. Because the winner of the hand had a few less chips, I was left with $15 in chips, with the blinds at $10 and $20. I was steamed and folded the very next hand, although with that few chips, I don't know what I was waiting for. The next hand I went ahead and called all-in and managed to quintuple up to $75. I pushed all-in the next hand, got called by one guy and doubled up again. Next hand, I was all-in again, had a few callers and got pushed up to over $500. I was getting giddy at this point and pushed all-in yet again. I only got one caller this time, but it was the new short-stack, a guy who had been each of my previous all-ins and was clearly starting to get flustered. Once again I won the hand and was over $900. After that, I settled down and started playing smarter (i.e., not pushing all-in every hand) and managed to actually win the tournament. I was amazed. Down to less than one big blind and actually coming back to win. Obviously, it wasn't skill that got me back in the game, but rather four lucky hands in a row. Still, it was fun.

Well, that's enough for now, other than the poker news, of course. However, I'm back and should be posting regularly again now.