Life has a way of preventing us from doing the occasional stupid thing. Yesterday, I planned to play SnGs until I either went bankrupt (relatively speaking) or made $500. Well, I only played seven SnGs (rather than the 10-15 I planned), and basically broke even. I was held up by –in order- oversleeping, working with a contractor who is building a shed, feeding the kids lunch, eating lunch myself, spending time with the kids watching ROTJ and the Special Features disc from the new Star Wars DVD pack, eating dinner, and meeting with the pastor for my kids’ upcoming baptism.

I curtailed my planned evening play because my wife had scheduled the pastor visit at 700pm, which meant that I couldn’t really start a tournament past 530pm (pastors tend to frown on online gambling, especially during discussions of baptism and accepting God and all that crap), nor could I start a tournament until he left around 900pm. That sucked over three hours of play away, and likely three SnGs as well. So I have no way of knowing how well I might have fared had I got to 10 SnGs in one day.

I did get a chance to play in my first 7-card stud SnG later in the evening, finishing second. 7-stud is really really easy to play, almost robotic. It’s just a matter of comparing your first three cards to the exposed cards of your opponents. Your draw odds are dictated by the cards of your opponents, so you should have a pretty solid idea of your chances right off the bat. My first hand, I had three diamonds all below 9. The board showed NO diamonds, so I figured I’d see at least two more cards, as long as my opponents didn’t get any of my diamonds. Sure enough, I popped two more diamonds on the board for the flush and took down a meaty pot to break my 7-stud cherry. Once it got down to the final two, I really had NFI how to play the heads-up portion, not knowing when to push with the blinds and bring-ins, so I lost when I probably should have won. Either way, it was a nice change of pace, and it adds another table to my online resume.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to play at the $100 level. Maybe I wasn’t meant to piss away my entire online bankroll in an ill-advised attempt to play in a big tournament. Maybe I’m just a $10-20 SnG grinder. Maybe I ask too many rhetorical questions. Oh well, that’s why I changed the name from Todd’s Last Stand. It appears that I will have a lot more stands to make before I quit this damn game.