Where I've been lately & Reading from the rail.

My online play has been few and far between as of late: A couple of months ago, I attempted a few tournaments with buy-ins outside of my comfort zone. My bankroll wasn't big enough to handle it, so now I have but a few dollars in my account. I've instead taken to watching some other people play instead. I read a couple of poker blogs every day, and if I'm bored after work, I'll see if they're in any tournaments and watch how they play.

During FTP's Tuesday 30K guarantee (6-max NL Hold'em), I was watching 2 tables: one had blogger hoyazo and the second had FTP pro Clonie Gowen. Just after the first break, Clonie is UTG and makes a standard raise with the button calling. The flop is rainbow rags, queen-high. Clonie makes the standard continuation bet, and the button calls. Turn: check check. At this point, I'm thinking "Clonie has AK." She had a hand worthy enough to raise pre-flop UTG with and, after getting her continuation bet called on the flop, had to slow down. River is neither an Ace or a King, it goes check, check. Clonie turns over A9 off-suit and the button mucks.

While I didn't get it exactly right, I was in the right neighborhood. Calling other people's hands like this is a good confidence booster for me, since my bankroll is doing absolutely nothing for my confidence.

Unfortunately, since it was late, I couldn't watch more of the tourney. But hoyazo did end up busting Huckleberry Seed (another FTP pro) from the tournament. Busting a pro gets the person their tournament buy-in back, so congrats to hoy for that.

I think I'm going to try FTP's cash transfer option for getting money back into my account. We'll see how that works.