Righting my Sinking Ship

I managed to play quite a bit of poker yesterday and today and I was able to right my sinking ship some. I got stacked a couple of times but I kept at it and managed to overcome my losses and record a nice winning session. I am still buying in short and building my stack from there. Right now I am just more comfortable playing that way as my bankroll is not big enough to take getting stacked with a full buy-in.

One of the things that I see at the microstakes is when a player makes a min-preflop raise. Just 2 times the Big Blind. When I first started playing Microstakes No Limit Holdem, I thought, “Oh, oh. This guy has a monster hand.” It took quite a while of playing at these takes to figure out that that wasn’t necessarily true. Many players will bet 2 times the BB if they have a small pair and they hope that they can get everyone to fold and take down the blinds. Usually the opposite happens and everyone calls as they figure another dime doesn't make that big a difference.
A lot of times I don’t know what the players are thinking when they make the min-raise and then there are the times when they do have a monster hand. That happened to me today. A player UTG led out with a min-preflop raise and with A/rag on the button I just called his raise. The flop was rag/K/rag and he checked and I checked. The turn brought the Ace and I bet about ½ the pot. UTG called. The river brought a rag and then UTG bet out a pot size bet. I pretty much knew I was beat then. No flush draws, no apparent straight draws. I figured he had a bigger kicker than me. I made the crying call because you never know at these levels what the other player is doing and he turned over pocket Kings and his set beat my pair of aces.

In retrospect I should have raised PF to see how serious he was about his hand but I fell into his trap of just calling and paid for it when he made his set. I can honestly say I have yet to stoop to those tactics when I have monster hands but still continue to raise preflop 3 or 4 times the BB.

Overall I was pretty happy with how I played and hope to continue with some of my new found success.