I’ve been trying to play poker once or twice a week. It’s definitely not easy when you have to get home and put kids to bed and stuff. By the time I can get out the door to a game, it is usually 9pm. To compensate, I was playing a lot of Zynga Poker. I know a lot of people will be angry to hear that. Zynga Poker tends to elicit a very negative response from “real” poker players. I can understand why. They would much rather have me at the table losing money to them than having me dick around on my phone.

I kind of like Zynga Poker though. Or I should say, liked. The other day after taking some beats I started playing with my entire Zynga playchip poker roll on the table. It took two very disastrous hands for me to be down to 0 chips from something like 3 billion. I honestly don’t want to think about the amount of time I would have to waste in order to get back to those high stakes, so I am kind of taking a break from Zynga, and will start focusing more on real poker.

Speaking of which, the little poker room will be open tomorrow for a Pot Limit Omaha game. I don’t think I have ever run a strictly Omaha game before. It has definitely been played at my place, but in general PLO rears its ugly head late at night when a bunch of guys are stuck and want to quickly make some of their money back. For those of you who don’t know, PLO is notoriously swingy, and can make No Limit Texas Hold’em look like a .01/.02 limit game.

To be honest, I am not super well educated when it comes to PLO strategy and so forth. I generally rely on a similar level to mine of knowledge among the other people at the table. I find that like tournaments, because of the potential windfall it affords, PLO seems to encourage people who have done well once to think that they are really good at it. But again, that is just an impression I have. Could be way off base. Either way, a little bit of experimenting with it tomorrow, and depending on how things go, maybe we’ll do it again soon.