Last night was the first of what I hope will be the "weekly friendly poker night":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/001010/. There were only 4 guys in attendance, which is a little light, but there's enough interest from enough people that I'm thinking on any given week we should have at least 5 or 6. We started a bit early to get anyone who didn't know the intricacies of limit raise and no-limit hold 'em betting up to speed. The "new chips":http://store.yahoo.com/jdrazor/set5300dic11.html were awesome, and we even had a piece of green felt to cover the table. Aaron provided beers, and I brought chips and guacamole and spinich artichoke dips. As "The Donald":http://www.nbc.com/The_Apprentice/ would say, "classy... really classy." We played about an hour with no stake, where I got beaten down fairly badly, and "David":http://bigbrit.blogspot.com/ wound up doing the best.

Then we switched to a limit raise game, this time with a $20 buy-in. The bet structure was a little different than what I was used to at the other home game I had played at a few times; instead of a set $.50 raise pre-flop and after, and then $1 after 4th street, you could bet either $.50 or $1 at any point in the betting, which gave you a little leeway with trying to buy the pot or muscle people out. It probably wasn't as loose as the spread-limit betting "described here":http://www.pokersearch.com/Articles/EDHill/advantag.shtm, but since we were playing for such low stakes, you couldn't really give someone a spread from say $.10 to $3. Just wouldn't work.

In any case, I played a lot tighter with actual money at stake, and didn't chase bad hands. I don't know if the other guys were playing loose due to inexperience or just being reckless, but people were bluffing all over the place, and I won a few pots with some pretty piss-poor cards, like a pair of 2s in one case. I also won some quality hands, with a set of aces, and a nice jack-high flush that blew out Joshua's 6-high. "David":http://bigbrit.blogspot.com/ didn't fare as well that round, and lost pretty much all of his $20 by the end of 2 hours. I threw him $10 to keep him playing, and then at 10 p.m. we switched to some $5 no-limit rounds. I cleaned David out first round by hitting a pair of Qs on the river, but then lost it all to Joshua by trying to catch a lucky card all-in with JK against Josh's ace high. We went one more round, and it came down again to me and Joshua, and this time I played tight, and wound up after 5 hands of heads-up (our self-imposed limit on heads-up play) I escaped with the same $5 I started with.

So, the end result was I won $5, Aaron broke pretty much even, and David dropped $30. Joshua was our big winner of the night, walking out with about $25 more than he got there with. Looking forward to next week, and hopefully more people. With only 4 guys, you're in the blind 50% of the time, so it's harder to make your money last longer if you're trying to play tight.