Just to mix it up slightly I started playing some heads up cash games last night – I had played a few husngs and got more or less nowhere without making any serious mistakes, and was just feeling generally put upon (obv poker is pure luck). Cellsino has HU cash games starting at 0.01/0.02, so I figured I’d mess around with those to see how it went.

Of course the difficulty is finding opponents, but the site mysteriously had only one person on each stake who was just sitting there waiting. No full tables, just these guys. Very patient people, shills or bots?

I started at the lowest limits and cleared out the first guy until he left. I then moved up to NL10 and started on the next guy. Again I was able to take his money fairly easily (almost too easily) and I started to wonder if he was a bot (which on the whole aren’t good players). So I started a little chat, and he replied so he seemed real. I kept on going until finally he sat out. He didn’t leave – he just sat out. So I left, and looking back at the lobby he had sat back in, and there was still the NL2 guy still waiting. I’m leaning towards shills now.

I then sat at NL20, and this guy had a very different style (although still really bad). He 3bet me preflop almost every hand, I switched down to 2bb openraises and widened my 3bet calling and started taking his money. Three times I built my stack up to $30 and then try a shove to get his last $10 (he wasn’t rebuying) – each time I got it in ahead which was great, but each time he hit on the turn or river putting us back to $20. Finally tilt was getting to me and I got it in with KQo against his 99. I hit a Q on the flop but then the wanker hit a 9 on the turn.

So overall I lost, thanks to that last hand and the horrific rake. I get 53% rakeback on that site, so I shouldn’t feel too bad about the Rake, but I’m pissed off that I was tilting at the end. In many ways KQo wasn’t the worst hand to get it in with against this guy (far from ideal without an A though), but the tilt made me instaquit when he spiked his set and I would have been better to stick around a bit longer and at least recoup my losses…

Nevertheless, HU cash was a lot of fun. Reading Jungleman’s well he said that he got to $30 & $50 husngs with mediocre winnings, but then switched to cash and the rest is history. Maybe that’s me too