Best Day Ever

Yesterday was fun:

• +6 BI in 330 hands and then played another 1k hands on the plateau. Stop at $2/hand imo.
  
• Won a 27 person donkament for $100. 
  
• $82 Step 3 ticket --> $215 Step 4 ticket --> playing in my first Sunday Million which is actually the Sunday 2 Million yay!

Also going to play in the Turbo Takedown considering the sick changes they've made to it. Basically going to be playing to try for consecutive cash's which give you free bonuses of $100(n) up to $1k. And I guess a car would be nice too.
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I managed to bust out of the WBCOOP Event #2 shortly after this hand which tilted me slightly being results oriented and all. PLO is the game of the future if this is going to continue to be standard. I'm definitely not any sort of PLO expert yet but this baffles me.

Poker Stars Freeroll Pot Limit Omaha Hi Tournament - t125/t250 Blinds - 8 players - View hand 499287
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: t17225 M = 45.93
UTG: t23395 M = 62.39
UTG+1: t70 M = 0.19
MP1: t18214 M = 48.57
MP2: t2640 M = 7.04
CO: t25867 M = 68.98
BTN: t5730 M = 15.28
Hero (SB): t35107 M = 93.62

Pre Flop: (t375) Hero is SB with J 8 7 Q
UTG raises to t875, 5 folds, Hero calls t750, 1 fold

Flop: (t2000) 9 7 6 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets t2000, Hero raises to t8000, UTG calls t6000

Turn: (t18000) 2 (2 players)
Hero bets t18000, UTG calls t14520 all in

River: (t47040) A (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: t47040
UTG shows A J 5 J (a pair of Aces)
Hero shows J 8 7 Q (a pair of Sevens)
UTG wins t47040

This tournament kept me away from FPSing a lot in my cash games. I might throw one in if I'm planning on playing a longer session and see how it works out.

Blizzards, Run Goods and Donkaments, oh my!

So today is the first time in the decade since I got my drivers' license that I actually got stuck. At least I did it right. Black ice and white out conditions made for some interesting driving on my way to work this morning. I'm pretty thankful no one happened to be coming in the opposite direction - I did about 60 feet each at 45 degrees, sideways, and backwards. A co-worker happened to be behind me and brought me to work (yay!) and another co-worker brought me right back before I was going to call a tow-truck and pulled me out (bink!). ty sirs.

The grey lines represent where the road ends and the ditch filled with 5 feet of snow starts. Unfortunately I don't drive a Jaguar irl but I can put one in my diagram because it's my blog.

Other that that January has been super awesome. On track for my best month ever. The major factor here has been my no-50nl-FR-New-Years'-resolution which I have stuck to. Plus it helps that I've been running at 5 ptBB/100 at 100nl FR over what's becoming a small significant sample.

I'm about to start playing in WBCOOP Event #1. I have a love/hate relationship with donkaments - namely loving the start and hating the end. I've been reading a bit about cEV and some of Tommy Angelo's thoughts on dollar value of your seat so hopefully that will start to work out for me.

FTP Rush

I've been checking out the FTP Rush games the past couple days. Couple things I noticed right away: no HUD possibilities, no image, no real reads besides stack size and line (although I am working on a system to do post session review and apply that info to player notes and colour coding). It's basically poker in a vacuum.

Considering it's watered down or completely missing so many key elements of the online game, I almost feel bad to say that I actually enjoy it. Each table basically runs at 4x a regular table in hands/hour. I don't really have any BR over on FTP so this is actually perfect for me. I can play 4 rush tables = 16 regular tables with only 4 buyins + change and build it up quite quickly.

It also effectively turns all the 1 tablers into 4 tablers who are making 4x as many mistakes per hour - well maybe not quite that much since hand ranges are stronger due to the impression of having to play fast (you don't) and the ease of getting better cards with a simple auto-fold pre.

With all that said, I'm still on the fence as to whether this is good for the game in the long term. People will run out of money much faster. People will clear bonuses much faster. People will earn more rakeback. No one can improve playing more than 1 of these tables and having the HH replay open.

Very interesting and innovative concept at the least. I'll have to continue to evaluate. I'm considering grinding out a quick Iron Man on FTP due to this while maintaining Supernova on Stars so that I'm primed for either site in case one takes a nose dive in the loyalty program department.

PokerStars Haiti Earthquake Appeal

Just a quick post to encourage everyone to donate to the Haiti Earthquake Appeal at Stars and the funds set up at other sites. Stars is matching whatever is donated


From the PokerStars News:
The appeal is running until noon on January 31, and here's how you can get involved:

- In the PokerStars lobby, go to Tourney >> Special and enter one of the dummy 'Haiti Earthquake Relief' tournaments listed there. 'Buy-ins' range from $1,000 all the way down to $1. You will not need to play an actual tournament, instead all of the 'entry fees' go straight to the fund.

- Alternatively you can make a private player transfer for any amount to the account 'Haiti Fund'. Go to 'Requests' in the client top menu and select 'Transfer Funds'.

As of January 18th, $400,000+. gogogo

2010 Resolution

New Year Resolution for 2010: No more 50NL Full Ring. It's time to move up. You can't really become comfortable doing something unless you actually do it.

I've had a really good start to the year at 100NL and 200NL FR. I'm starting to really enjoy the game dynamic at those levels and I'm finding myself getting a lot better in 3bet/4bet pots. Also feeling a lot more in control postflop and manipulating peoples' ranges pretty effectively. I'm still playing 50NL 6max as I haven't accomplished the winrate that I think I should be having there yet.

I recently read Dusty Schmidt's new book, Treat Your Poker Like a Business. I'd say it's about 30% motivational, 20% promotional (which I found quite lame considering I already paid $ and anyone reading this book already knows about rakeback and Stox) and 50% content - about 1/3 of that new-ish content. I was actually hoping for more of a workbook style, but it ended up being more what to think about with not much what to do. Anyone thinking about going pro (ie. people that need to know this info) might be a bit disappointed in it seeing as how most of the what to think about is already available for free on most forums. Still a decent read.

But if I take anything from this book, it's the fact that I need to treat my bankroll not as money, but rather as inventory. It's just an inventory of chips used to aquire more chips. Invest x chips here and expect a return of x + y chips here. Hopefully I can maintain that mindset and continue moving up this year.

Good luck to everyone in 2010.

2009: Year in Review

What a busy year. Lots of poker. Lots of life.

I nearly completed my poker goals for the year. I wanted to be a 200nl reg at this point but I'm not quite there yet. Despite that I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out. I ended up with a lot less time online than I anticipated and still managed to learn a ton of strategy and work on my game a lot offline.

I started off the year still playing mostly 25nl with some pretty big confidence issues. After finally figuring out how to consistently beat 50nl in the first few months of the year, I decided I wanted to take a more pro-active approach to learning and decided to cut down on tables for more sessions. I decided to start taking mini shots at 200nl which worked out well for the most part and played a good mix of 50nl and 100nl throughout most of the year.

Confidence is such a tricky thing. Without it, you get run over. With the wrong kind, you get into all sorts of FPS and put small stakes regs that litter the 100nl+ games on this pedestal of genius. But with the right kind of confidence you feel like you can hold your own and that your normal poker thought process is enough to beat this game without going to the 7th level.

I did go through a pretty soul crushing last 2 months of poker for 2009, December being one of my toughest months ever. I came very close to having my first losing month but managed to pull it back together the last few days to put in a decent result.

I also joined some great coaches over on BestFreePokerCoaching.com and started doing a bit of coaching myself. I really enjoyed putting out some videos - and it's tough to do when you're getting crushed by variance in your regular game - and they helped me think through exactly what I was doing and pointed out a few mistakes to myself.

In life, my daughter turned 1 year old and we found out that we are expecting another one this year! So life will be super busy again but it's so much fun and I wouldn't trade it. We're about 96% finished the house we built a few years ago and should be completely done in the next couple months - those last final details always seem to get put off.

2010 is going to be interesting. I'm probably going to get a decent amount of time off and that should help with some family time and VPP accumulation. I finished up 2009 with 150k VPPs. I was hoping for 200k but it just wasn't going to work out. So this year I'm hoping for 200k-300k or more and that's going to require some moving up. Hopefully those goals will work together.

I hope everyone out there had a great Christmas and Happy New Year!