Mixers, 3/22

I wanted to accomplish a few things last night.
1) I wanted to work on actually putting people on actual hands.
2) I wanted to see if I could shake up my table image.
3) I wanted to finish pretty high and have a chance on the final table.

So I planned all day to, on the first hand, regardless of position or cards, raise it up.
First Hand: A/Q off. I was under the gun. Sadly, this is a hand I would raise anyway...but it fits the plan perfectly. I triple the blinds. A couple callers. I raise on the ragged flop with nothing. 1 caller. I raise on the turn with nothing. he calls. I should have bet on the river but didn't. He checked...and won with a pair of 4s. But it accomplished my goal of making me seem like a maniac. This was accentuated when I limped with pocket 4's (folded to big bet on flop), bet heavily and took people for a ride with Pocket Kings, and the third consecutive hand with pocket pairs showed I had bet him off the better hand. So I bet early and often and they knew that. They did not notice when I started playing more or less correctly.

I played a J/9 from the small blind. Flop gave me 4 to the flush so I called. Then I reraised...and because of my image he paid me off. So it worked. I might have to try that again.

Twice I correctly called the exact hands...and most times I at the least had the top card correct. But I did not put people on hands as often as I would have liked. I had to keep reminding myself to do that.

As usual, reached final table and as has been more common lately actually had chips. But Greg to my left was a chip monster and I played cowardly and poorly. Twice I raised pre-flop and folded to large reraises by him, once to a guy on my right. Thus I bled away a lot of chips. Then I gave away another 5000 or so chasing an open ended straight thus putting me in bad shape. With 300/600 blinds I went all-in for my last 2400. Eric called, the other low chip stack called, guy to my right got out of the way. Other short stack had j/10 so I had him dominated...but chip monster had pocket queens which meant I pretty much had to hit a King, no straight was likely. Well, maybe it was...he hit another queen. But it was pretty irrelevant if I hit my straight or not because the turn took away all his outs...all the queens were either on the board or in his hand and I was out in 4th place.

Had I not been sloppy with my chips at the final table I would have been fine. I played too much and lost too many so I had to go in with a vulnerable hand. My bad, got badly outplayed at the final table once we got to 4 people and placed probably higher than I should have.