"Dead as dead can be," my doctor tells me...

After helping my roommate setup his own Party Poker account with bonus code "Performify" and watching him play pretty solid for a while, I sat down at a $25 NLHE table to work on clearing more hands for my latest reload bonus.

Took a nice little pot with pocket aces with a third ace on the flop only a few hands in. Hanging around, playing solid tight-agressive, when I caught a chatty, poor-playing short stack moving all-in over the top of me. His hand held up, despite my having four to the flush plus an overcard against his middle pair, and he (of course) immediately continued talking trash. Hand history posted as Comment #1. Question for the readers: bad call on my part, or just good luck on his part? Fortunately for the table, as these poor players usually do, he busted out a few hands later with his continued poor play.

Table I was playing was EXTREMLY passive. Probably the most passive no limit game I'd ever seen. I'm talking frequent $.25 raises in to a $4 pot. People folding when almost any two cards would have been right to call with. Passive enough I got the opportunity to drop the hammer... and even called it out! See Comment #2.

I wanted to go to bed early tonight, but was having such luck dragging small pots on the passive table that I couldn't walk away. Started playing very mediocre hands when it became obvious I could catch free cards when I was on a draw, could semi-bluff out pots sucessfully with great frequency, and even win showdown pots with bottom or middle pairs. Climbed over $60, clawing out pots $2-$5 at a time. Did managed to get aces cracked by a fun, friendly solid player (Comment #3), but then A9o turned in to quad nines three hands later and won half of the loss back (Comment #4).

Heh, happened again. Aces cracked again, same player even (Comment #5) and then two hands later, trip eights on the flop improve to a full house to win back the losses from the cracked aces. (Comment #6) Poker gods are kind tonight...

The table turned over quite frequently and certainly was replaced with decent players that it was no longer a pushover game, but even so my run of good fortune continued to the point that I just couldn't walk away. I managed to drag a nice pot with jacks over aces (Comment #7) and then a monster pot when my pocket nines flopped trips (Comment #8).

And the string of good luck just kept going. Won four decent pots in a row, posted consecutively in (Comment 9). $25 table buyin run up to just over $120 now. 300+ raked hands played, and I'm sitting +EV on the reload experiment (once the bonus kicks) despite poor play while two-tabling yesterday. Guess I should have reloaded the full $500 instead of just reloading $250, as i've managed to just about clear the requisite number of hands in all of two days of play.