RESULTS: Poker for the Big Easy Challenge

For those of you who did not see my original post, I decided to play the week of 8/31/05-9/6/05 for the Red Cross. My plan was to donate my winnings for the week plus an equal amount of my own money to the Red Cross for the folks in the Gulf Coast region, and I posted in the limit and no-limit forums asking people to join me. Several said they would.

I hope the folks who joined me did better than I did. For a while there, I thought that Party Poker had it in for the American Red Cross. Going into Friday, day three of the challenge, I was down $360 playing mostly $100 NL. Then, Friday, I played this hand:

Hero has KK in LP with $140 stack. All fold to villain in MP, who raises to $4 and has me covered. All fold to hero. Hero reraises to $12, all fold, villain calls.

~$24 in pot. Flop: Kxx, rainbow.

Hero bets $16, Villain raises to $50, hero pushes, villain calls. Turn is a queen, river is a queen, villain shows pocket queens. Ouch. That put me down $360, which turned out to be the low point in both $ and morale. (Can somebody explain villain's thinking in raising me after the flop and then calling my push? I was stunned and depressed by this hand).

I was at this point pretty soured on my play at Party, so I switched over to Pokerstars and turned the $20 in my Pokerstars account into a quick $105 in about an hour Friday night.

I started fresh on Saturday and started recouping some of the losses. By the time I quit Sunday night I was basically even for the challenge week and had only Monday and Tuesday to show some profit.

Monday and Tuesday were both modest winning nights. Monday night I was two-tabling, one $100 NL and one $50 6 max and had the unique (for me) experience of stacking villains simultaneously on both tables. Unfortunately, they were both pretty short-stacked.

But the good news is that I managed to show a profit both of the last two nights. Between Pokerstars and Party Poker, I finished +$259 for the week; with my match, that's $518 for the red cross.

If anybody else participated, I'd like to know how your week went.

I'll also add another pitch for the red cross: they are still taking donations, of course, so y'all should all take a crack at matching my $259, especially since I am a little disappointed at my week's results.