FloppyJT's Poker Blog

What what!?

2011-11-03T20:15:00.006-05:00

Looks like I skipped posting for a couple days. Or four and a half years, whatever. Does anyone actually still blog? Have I exceeded the maximum word count for a post yet?

Meh, I still suck at poker. Relatively speaking, I am certain that I suck much more now than I once did. I rarely play poker anymore and removed most of my online funds a couple years ago, leaving just enough for entertainment purposes only on a few sites. Being lazy, I never did bother cleaning out my Full Tilt account as they required documentation for ID verification before I could withdraw and as a result I ended up with a bit over $1K tied up there which sounded like it was long gone for a while but perhaps there is hope to see some of that money eventually now by the sounds of things.

Anyway, a bit of a blast from the past stumbling across my own blog and actually being able to log in – something I am sure I had unsuccessfully tried to do at least a few times over the past five years.

Five year update:

- Still cranking out plenty of hours at the office

- Sold a couple places, bought a couple places, renovated a couple places, hope not to do so again for a long long time

- Had baby #1

- Expecting baby #2

- Still suck at poker

Recovering

2007-05-11T09:45:00.000-05:00

I have played very little poker lately. After having managed to survive another insane tax season, I have been drained and am just taking it easy. I ended up working over 300 hours in April and over 100 hours just in the last week alone. Tonight is live poker night with the boys, so that should knock a little bit of rust off my poker game.

I still haven't updated my April results but expect them to be fairly ugly due to extreme monkey tilt which destroyed what was a good month part way through.

My golf game is looking pretty rough but I have managed to get in a few rounds already this year, which is good start for me. I hope to get off my arse and play a couple rounds a week this year. The past couple seasons, I have paid a ridiculous amount per round played and intend to get a little more of my moneys worth out of the club membership this year.

Low Key

2007-04-23T10:05:00.000-05:00

Poker is taking a major back burner to work these days, so there isn't much new on the poker front. I got smoked at Paradise again Friday night but am not sure what the total damage is as I haven't updated in a week or so. All I know is that I am losing in April. Yay for monkey tilt.

I have done a bit of play at Full Tilt as well but have only managed to clear $4 out of my $600 bonus so far. This may be the first bonus that I am unable to clear. I have until sometime in early August I think but I do not anticipate getting the whole thing. I had heard that FT was an absolute rock garden, but love the fact that I can open a pile of tables and grab data before sitting. Saturday night I opened a dozen tables or so and then just ignored them while trying to relax a bit. I didn't really plan on playing at all but there were several very juicy tables with some surprisingly loose players, so I just HAD TO sit for a little while. So far I am up a few buy ins at 25NL and will stick it out at that level until I can grow my balance to closer to the $1K mark and then test the 50NL waters there.

Poof goes the Money

2007-04-19T14:34:00.000-05:00

I am in full blown crazy work mode again, being stuck in the office until past 11pm every night this week and expect the rest of April to be more of the same. Despite being wiped out when I finally get home, I insist on unwinding with a bit of poker before crashing.

Monday night I was splashing around on a mix of 50NL and 25NL tables and was getting smoked. There were a couple coolers mixed in where I lost with set under set or fullhouses that ran into bigger rivered fullhouses, but there was some awful play on my part where I was up against obvious sets but refused to release my over pair or TPTK which did most of the damage. I dropped a few buy-ins at 50NL and 1 buy in at 25NL, which really isn't that awful but then I committed a cardinal sin. I knew I was frustrated, I knew I was tired, yet I decided that sitting at a 200NL table would be a good idea for some reason. Tilt city. Anyway, I dropped that buy in with a brilliant AQo push. So, in no time flat I wiped out the first couple weeks of April's profits plus a little. On the bright side, I didn't lose any limbs or anything, and I can now say that I have played as high as 200NL. On another bright side, I finished off my last $30 of Paradise bonus along the way.

Hopefully I learned something. Not that I didn't know it already but stopping play when tilting would seem to be a good idea. Further reinforcement that playing late and tired is an awful idea. And the one mistake I always chuckle about other people doing repeatedly is moving up to chase losses. How stupid is that?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to playing some 200NL again some time in a better frame of mind. With my schedule for the rest of the month due to tax season, it looks like I'll end April with a bit of a loss which is disappointing after such a strong March and very solid start to April. I'll have to get it all back on track in May and will continue to play 25NL and 50NL.

Messing around with 50NL

2007-04-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

I have been taking some small shots at 50NL this week with mixed results. In the first couple sessions I was up and down and up and down to end up finishing down a few bucks. Monday night I got beat up to the tune of just over $100, mainly due to playing against dream opponents who kept catching a weak piece of the flop and calling down and hitting 2nd pairs with junk on the river. I added to my own demise a bit by pushing a draw or two a bit too hard.

Last night I made those losses back and more, playing with the same type of opponents who would call every value bet I could toss out there. I had one particular player on my immediate left for a while both Monday and Tuesday nights who was a frustrating call station. Monday night I lost a good chunk to this person when I was ahead up until the river on several hands. Last night I stacked her twice within about 15 minutes after which she informed me how F*ing lucky I was, and abandoned the table. I took a fair amount of glee in this turn of events.

My withdrawal from PokerTime didn't make it to Neteller on time, so I have $50 stuck there to play around with.

I am nearing the end of my Paradise bonuses, with only about $40 left to clear now and will be heading back to Party for another $50 reload bonus first. The Party EFT limits automatically get jacked up after the first successful deposit, so now I have way more room than I ever expect to utilize there.

UFC Upset

2007-04-09T08:06:00.000-05:00

I am still in shock that GSP lost the belt to Matt Serra.

This unfortunate upset tilted me into moving up to 50NL where I proceeded to go up, then down, then up again and finally finish a couple bucks on the bad side of even in the end.

I tried to cash out the tiny balance I had stuck at Poker Time only to find out there was a $50 minimum, leaving me $25 short or so. Exercising the utmost caution in bankroll management, I doubled up to $50 and cashed out to Neteller.

I guess that yesterday was my last chance to move any money around using Neteller, so that takes care of whether or not I am going to move any money around. I have way more than I need at both Party and Stars and have ample amounts sitting at Full Tilt and Paradise as well. Four sites should be more than enough to keep me entertained for quite some time. I am a bit overrolled at each site for my current limit, so I had considered pulling a little out of the system but it looks like I'll have to take cheques or some alternative cash out measure down the road.

I tinkered around on Full Tilt for a little bit this weekend to get PA HUD all set up and cleared about $0.82 of my $600 Full Tilt bonus in the process, and lost $7 while doing it. I suspect this is a bonus I may not clear a whole lot of.

Coaching Rules

2007-04-06T14:11:00.000-05:00

I had a free coaching session Thursday night with a 2+2 small stakes player, Novles, and it went quite well. He observed me playing a couple tables at Party for about 45 minutes or so and took notes on my play which we discussed afterwards. I relayed hole card information to him over AIM while he watched and otherwise we did not interact during the hands being played. I had to fight the urge to play more like I thought a 2+2'r would think I should play and keep to my normal game in order to maximize my benefit out of the session but it was definitely a bit odd to have someone watching me play for the purpose of critical discussion about my play.

On the bright side, he thought I played quite well, which is a nice confidence booster. On the bad side, it was one of those sessions where lots of things just go right so there weren't many sticky situations for us to discuss. When I whiffed flops, I was taking it down with a c-bet. In multi-way whiffed pots when I didn't c-bet the flop, a delayed c-bet on the turn was working. Almost all of my draws came in and in at least one case, I missed my draw but was still good. Actually, this was a crazy hand: I cold called a pre-flop raise from a very active player while holding ATs on the button and both of the short-stacked blinds also called. The flop came K53 with 2 of my suit, the sb pushed all in for $9, the bb called with $3 behind, the initial pre-flop raiser folded and I sat there trying to figure out what to do. Not sure why I had to think about it really, pushed the bb all in and then watched the cards roll off without another heart hitting and figured I would watch the pot get pushed to one of the blinds and had to do a triple-take when my Ace-high won the pot. It turned out that the sb had pushed all in with A6s with a back door flush draw and the bb had called all in with Q8s for the flush draw I had dominated with the Ace.

Anyway, we discussed some of the hands afterwards and apparently I had only made one major mistake in calling a 3-bet with a small pocket pair plus missed a couple value betting opportunities. We talked about a few specific situations where I wasn't quite sure I had made the right play and how the play would have changed given different variables. It was a good experience to get some insight from a more experienced player and I hope to have another session with him.

After taking a break for a bit, I fired up a couple tables again later and by the end of the night found myself up almost 5buy ins. Having cleared another reload bonus at Party, I wandered back to Paradise Friday night to continue working on the remaining bonus there and by the end of the night found myself up another 5 buy ins again. Gotta love the upside of variance and a nice bounce back from the slow start to the month.

Fullhouse under Fullhouse

2007-04-05T08:35:00.000-05:00

I am on a wicked streak of losing with fullhouses. Well, four or five days in a row with at least one big pot lost with a fullhouse, so maybe not a wicked streak, but a minor streak at the least. In one case the money went in when I was beat, so I probably shouldn't count that one. In another case, one opponent was a silly short stack, so perhaps that doesn't really count either. Hands like this early in April have helped contribute to losses of $60 or so and I consider myself very lucky to get off that good.

There turned out to be a good reason that my transfer from Paradise to Neteller was not showing up in my Neteller account, as Paradise decided to send me a cheque instead. When I cashed out, the message indicated that the transfer was to Neteller, so I'm not sure how they managed to turn it into a cheque.

I tried my first electronic funds transfer from my bank to Party and it went off with no major problems, so it looks as though I'll still be able to take advantage of reload bonuses there. I'll lose a few points on the exchange on the way in and out as setting up a US$ account is not an option for whatever reason due to Party insisting on dealing with CDN funds only. The only other issue appears to be the low limits. I was only able to transfer $500US without having to wait a few days for the transaction to clear my bank and $500 appears to be the weekly limit as well. I'm sure there is a way to get the limits increased and it probably involves me sending all my banking and credit card info as well as a dna sample off shore, so I'm in no rush. I'll find out in a week or so how painless an EFT withdrawl is.

Free Coaching

2007-04-03T16:29:00.000-05:00

Thursday night I get a free coaching session from a 2+2 poster who is thinking about giving some coaching a try. I saw the post on 2+2 and didn't think much of it initially as I rarely post there but dropped him a line after a day or two and eventually heard back that he decided to go with me for the session. This should be an interesting learning opportunity and I'm looking forward to it.

The timing is shaping up to be pretty good as well, as I'm spewing out buy-ins all over the place the last few days. I ran into a few nasty hands last night where I was way ahead until the river. In a couple cases, the money was already in the pot and I can't really ask for any better than getting it in way ahead, but I also paid off a couple more rivers than I would like to. Pretty standard stuff.

I transferred a good chunk of money from Paradise back to Neteller about a week ago, just after the announcement that they were pulling out of Canada and have yet to see that transfer hit Neteller. So, moving that money around before Neteller ceases to deal with online poker sites for Canadians could prove to be a little difficult. Given the limits I play at, I have more than I need at any given site anyway, and may just pull some back to my bank anyway. Having the option to move it around would have been nice though. Buggers.

Bye March

2007-04-01T10:21:00.000-05:00

March was very good to me as I got off to a nice start on the 25NL tables. I took a bit of a dive in the last week as I managed to drop 5 or 6 buy-ins before making back a good chunk of it last night.

I put in quite a bit of play at Paradise this month as they kept throwing sweet 100% to $100 reload bonuses at me. After clearing almost $300 in bonuses there in March, I still have another $150 to go. The games are pretty nice over there as well, likely due to it not being the most friendly PT site out there. Going into March I was in the red at Paradise to the tune of $220 or so and got spit out on the other side up $170, vaulting Paradise from my worst site up to my 2nd best. I am not a huge fan of the software but the games are so nice there, I will have to make sure to leave some funds behind.

Paradise played a minor April Fools joke on me this morning when I flopped a delicious set of 7's in one of my first hands in April, which I proceeded to jam right into my opponents straight. Oops!

Neteller pulls out of Canada

2007-03-26T11:04:00.000-05:00

Buggers!

Ah well, I wasn't using Neteller much anyway, but this is still a pain. I don't have much sitting there, but I guess I'll be moving it to Poker Stars or Party. I wonder if this a precursor to Party or any other poker sites pulling out of Canada. Now may be the time to clean out my other poker accounts and move all my funds to Stars and Party while I still have an easy way to move money around. Perhaps it is also time to open a Full Tilt account and spread a little love their way.

http://www.neteller-group.com/press/en/127.htm

Press Release

NETELLER Announces Service Changes to Canadian and Turkish Market

Monday, 26 March 2007 – The NETELLER Plc Group (“NETELLER” or the “Group”) (LSE: NLR), the leading global independent online money transfer business, today announced several significant changes to its services in a number of markets.

The Group continually assesses the risk profile and status of the markets its serves. Recent actions by regulators, payment processors, and online gaming operators have increased the uncertainty around certain activities related to online gambling in some jurisdictions. The Board of Directors of the Company reached a decision, on 25 March 2007, that the risk to the Group’s ongoing business in Canada and Turkey has increased in the light of such developments. The Board has therefore concluded that the Group will no longer process transfers related to online gambling sites on behalf of Canada or Turkey resident customers.

Reduced Service to Canada

* Cessation of Canadian transfers to gambling merchants: the Group will cease processing online gambling related transactions for Canada-resident customers with effect from 12.01 AM MST Monday 9 April 2007.
* Suspension of InstaCASH transactions: As of today Monday 26 March 2007, at 12:01 AM MST, Canada-resident customers were no longer able to deposit funds using NETELLER’s instaCASH service either directly or from any online gambling site.
* Non-gambling services continue: Canada-resident customers will continue to be able to use their e-wallet accounts for non-gambling transactions, including peer-to-peer and pre-paid debit transactions.
* Available customer funds: Customer funds, including those of Canadian residents, are held in a pooled, segregated trust account and will be available for withdrawal by customers, on demand. Canadian customers continue to be able to use their e-wallet accounts for non-gambling transactions.

...blah blah blah blah

Three Weeks at 25NL

2007-03-26T09:29:00.000-05:00

Another successful week at 25NL is in the books. My three week total winnings at this level is now just over $500 with the bulk of the winnings over the last week coming from the short handed tables, which now account for about $150 of that total.

I am still down a couple buy-ins at 6-max at Party but this is slowly moving in the right direction. Paradise continues to be kind to me, making up $400 of the total $500 in winnings. With another $100 in bonuses yet to clear at Paradise, I expect to be playing there a fair amount.

Last night, I found an old forgotten $20 sitting on Poker Time, which was my old River Belle account. I played a bit of 6-max $10NL there and ran the total up to $30.

If things continue to go well, some shots at 50NL may not be too far away.

Monkey

2007-03-23T15:15:00.000-05:00

I will not stack off with top pair top kicker.
I will not stack off with top pair top kicker.
I will not stack off with top pair top kicker.
Yeah, okay, I probably will. Many times.

I managed to shove a whole stack overtop of a flop donk bet last night with my awesome nut flush draw with only one overcard. I slightly over estimated my fold equity, and lost a stack to the mighty flopped top pair, 6th kicker. I am continually amazed by what some people will go to the felt with and it keeps me puzzled on when I should be getting away from big pairs.

As I slowly figure out this no limit thing, I am trading a lot of mistakes back and forth. Despite playing like a total donkey from time to time, I am getting the better of the trades so far and really hope that trend continues.

Things are chugging along nicely at Paradise, despite dropping a couple buy ins last night. I still have about $120 of bonus left to clear there before sliding back to either Party or Stars where I can get my Poker Tracker and HUD fix. If it turns out that Paradise is more profitable I could learn to live without those goodies, or take the time to import hands and look into GameTime for a HUD.

Two weeks at 25NL

2007-03-19T09:08:00.000-05:00

After two full weeks at 25NL my initial trend of doing well at fullring tables and getting smoked at 6 max continues. Overall, I am up about $350 at 25NL, all from fullring play as I am down a buy-in or so at 6-max.

My former nemesis, Paradise, has accounted for $270 of the total upswing as I have been playing a fair amount there due to 3 weeks in a row of a 100% to a max of $100 bonus being offered to Canadian players. I am even doing okay at the short handed tables at Paradise, with $50 or so of the overall profit coming from 5-max play.

Party makes up the remainder of my 25NL profits over the last couple weeks, up 6 buy-ins at fullring and down 3 at 6-max.

I haven't bothered going through the hassle of importing hands to PokerTracker for play at Paradise and I do miss having a HUD when I play there but the softness of the games more than make up for it. Running hot seems to help a lot too.

I still have $200 of bonuses to clear at Paradise, so will likely be spending a good chunk of my time playing there while that clears. I expect that I will mix in some 6-max at Party as well to get my PT and PAHUD fix while I take more shots at sorting out the shorthanded games.

The issue I seem to be having with the shorthanded games is the increased aggression I face, which at 25NL really isn't that much. I find the fullring games a little easier to push people around and run over the table a bit more and I am fairly tilt-proof there while I find myself getting frustrated relatively quickly at 6-max. Whether fullring or short, I still find myself paying people off with 1 or 2 pair more often than I would like, and need to better identify which players I can take a stand against with an overpair or bottom two and those who I need to lay it down too.

I am having a blast learning no limit so far and the positive results to date only help that.

Superstitious Feeling

2007-03-14T15:11:00.000-05:00

For the fourth time in my very long and illustrious poker 'career', I cracked the $1,300 net winnings barrier. In each previous case this event was immediately followed by a fairly major downswing. The first time I made it to this mark, I promptly dropped over $600, with a smaller $300 drop and finally a $700 downswing on the two subsequent occasions.

So, as I slowly crept back towards $1,300, I vowed not to take any notice of the event this time and would definitely not be mentioning it aloud or in print. I am not superstitious at all but I just didn't want to jinx myself in any way.

I crossed the barrier for the fourth time last night for a brief period after some play at Paradise before I moved over to Party and spewed away $60 or so it. Half of which was just due to cards not going my way and the other half was 100% stupid tilt. Have you ever decided that the 6th button raise in a row on your big blind must just be pure garbage, so you re-raise with T9s? Then when re-raised again you decide to put this punk to a decision for all his chips? I can now say that I have, and the outcome wasn't pretty. On the bright side it was a somewhat liberating feeling to shake off a bit of nittiness and throw caution to the wind. Er, BS!

Anyway, hopefully I bust through my $1,300 barrier curse this time, not that I believe in curses or anything. Just in case though, I will not play black jacks or red queens, I will not raise pocket Aces and will always open raise with 94o in order to appease the poker gods. I will also not play poker while wearing matching socks without also wearing a tinfoil hat.

Up and down with $25NL

2007-03-12T08:36:00.000-05:00

I am riding a roller coaster as I settle into $25NL. Although I have only played a small number of hands so far, an early trend is developing: I am doing very well at full ring games and am getting crucified at the 6-max tables. Some of this is just due to short term variance, but for the most part I have been unhappy with my play at the short handed tables.

The full ring games are much tighter and far more boring but are seemingly better suited to my game, so I should probably focus on those tables for now. I do find the short handed tables much more fun however and will definitely continue to take little shots at them.

All in all, this current no limit kick is still going well and while I dropped several buy-ins at 6-max tables in the last week I have won several more overall.

After almost 18,000 hands in pokertracker at $10 and $25 NL, both full ring and 6-max, I am running at just under 7ptbb/100. This excludes play at Paradise which I figure is pretty close to that figure, maybe a bit lower.

Heaters are Fun!

2007-03-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

The current no-limit kick I'm on has been going quite well so far. I'm sure Captain Variance is lurking around out there somewhere but I'm having fun riding the good side of it for now. I am up a couple hundred at the $10NL tables, both 6-max and full ring, and have been running at just under 10ptbb/100 for the last few weeks.

I just completed a $100 reload bonus over at Party and was up a further $65 or so while clearing it, which helps pad the bankroll a little bit. All of my play at Party was spent at the $10NL tables and they were very kind to me.

Yesterday, I ventured over to Paradise as I have another $140 or so in bonuses waiting to be cleared. After playing the 5-max $10NL tables for a bit, I realized a couple things; the Paradise no-limit players are awful and there is no way I will be clearing those bonuses at the $10 tables.

So, I made the big leap up to the lofty $25 tables. I'm such a big boy now. I played one long session during which just about everything went right. I flopped a straight on my very first hand, turned a fullhouse which gave someone else a smaller fullhouse in another hand, was successful with c-bets more often than usual, and never really found myself in much trouble all day. It was a nice way to start at a higher limit and I closed off that session up $80 plus another $10 on bonus which was cleared along the way. I played a little more later in the evening and had pretty much the opposite experience. I was down about $30 or so when I decided I was making the next orbit my last. It turned out to be a good orbit and I ended up $15 or so, in addition to clearing another $10 of the bonus.

The limpers and call stations are out in full force at Paradise and it really stood by its name for me yesterday. Prior to this, Paradise held the record as my worst site. I am still down $100 there on play, but if yesterday was any representation as to the normal level of play at the no-limit tables, I do not expect it to hold that title for long.

Back in Black

2007-02-26T16:48:00.000-05:00

In the past month I have not been able to stick to one game and ended up hopping around from quite a bit. Early in the month, I went on a streak of playing $4 180-person SNG's at Poker Stars. Once I got tired of losing just out of the money in these, I went on a mini heater on baby stake single table tournaments, which quickly got replaced by a string of 6-max limit games for a short run. For the last couple weeks or so, I have been messing around with 6-max no limit ring games with some success.

So far so good with the no-limit, as I am running at a nice and unsustainable pace in excess of 10ptbb/100 over a completely insignificant sample size at the $10 max buy in level. I am in no rush at all to move up, despite being severely over-rolled for this limit and am quite content to make all the noob mistakes I can at a level that costs so little. I have been stacked a couple times playing overpairs into sets and am still need a lot of work on a lot of aspects of my game. I tend to have a complete lack of respect for short-stack players and while this has served me very well so far, I suspect it could get me in some trouble at higher levels.

With the exception of tourneys, all of the various games this month have been good to me. I am up somewhere around $100 on the month so far, which is a nice change from the previous couple of months. Somewhere along the way I managed to clear off a $150 bonus at Poker Stars as well. At the much lower rate I am earning bonuses this year compared to last, I expect that my bonuses will come in at a fraction of what I made last year. With the new tougher and tighter games these days, I will definitely have to revise my yearly goal down a bit from my original target of $3.5 million. I would like to make at least what I made last year in total, with a greater portion coming from winnings as opposed to bonuses. At the same time, I intend to play a lot less than I did last year and have moved down in limits, so I'm not quite sure how that will work out.

All kinds of useless (and not 100% accurate) stats to date:
- Gross winnings of just under $8K
- Gross losses of just under $7K
- Net winnings of just over $1K
- Party Poker accounts for $1.2K of my net winnings
- I am a net loser to date at Poker Stars of (-$100) to date, but have earned close to $3K in bonuses there
- Paradise remains my worst site to date with losses of over (-$200)
- Best game to date is 6-max $0.50/$1 LHE with winnings of just under $500
- My next best game is full ring $0.50/$1 LHE with winnings of $280. This is surprising as I haven't played full ring games in a year
- Worst game to date is 6-max $2/$4 LHE with losses of just over (-$200), which I managed to rack up in record time over a two or three day period
- My stats show that I am a net winner at multi-table tourneys but only due to one big 3rd place finish. I am fairly certain that I am dead money
- I am a net loser to date at SNG's (-$5.50). I would have guessed I was a net winner due to winnings of over $200 more recently at the $5.50's at Poker Stars but had an awful start in my first few months of play at Paradise which offsets those results
- Short-handed ring games account for 60% of my winnings to date, full ring cash games make up 25% and MTT's account for the remainder
- Limit games account for all of my winnings, with me being a small net loser at no limit and pot limit games to date
- Hold 'em accounts for virtually all of my winnings, with 7 stud hi-lo adding a very small sum to the total and HORSE, Omaha and Razz eating away at the winnings with combined losses of about (-$55)
- Winnings broken down by day of the week still freaks me out:
Sunday (-$22)
Monday +$149
Tuesday +$155
Wednesday (-$345)
Thursday (-$6)
Friday +$908
Saturday +$164
- Winnings broken down by session end time indicates that I lose money when I play after midnight and win the most on sessions ending between 8 and 11 pm
- Session table hours indicate that I am a small net loser for sessions under 1 hour and make just about all of my money on sessions that last between 1 and 2 hours (+$610) or between 4 and 5 hours (+$350)

All of this basically adds up to say that I should only play limit hold'em with Party Poker drunks on Friday nights at limits that are low enough to attract people who actually manage to play worse than I do. And quit at midnight before I'm too drunk myself.

So, naturally I will go home and play some no limit at Poker Stars.

Long time no post

2007-02-02T11:25:00.000-05:00

I have been playing a lot more than I have been posting. January was another rough month for my poker results but compared to losing $370 or so in December, this month was a huge improvement. I was in the black for most of January but managed to dip below zero at the very end thanks to some stupid no-limit play after too many drinks just the other night. Oops.

I played a bit at Party over the last couple weeks as well, sticking to super micro limits for the most part as I only had $30 or so over there. Playing 0.05/0.10 limit makes me feel like I know what I'm doing. While not the most financially rewarding limit, there is something really enjoyable about running at 15BB/100. Losing big pots doesn't hurt at all either. I was surprised at how much fun I had playing such low limits and should really consider doing more of it.

Year in Review?

2007-01-03T15:19:00.000-05:00

I keep meaning to post the year in review but I keep putting it off. Exciting news, huh!? My poker world is too boring lately to bother posting about. I lose. I lose some more. I win a bit. I lose again. I haven't taken a good hard look at my results for the year but I do know that I fell quite short of my goal to make $3.5 million on poker in 2006. Pretty sure I clocked in somewhere between $900 and $1K on poker winnings plus a little over $5K on bonuses, casino whoring, etc. Not a whole lot of money, but definitely far more than I thought I would end up with when I started out.

No big goals for the coming year have been set yet. The $3.5 million figure is kind of a nice round figure to shoot for though, so I may as well go for it. I would probably settle for any figure higher than zero and would be thrilled (and very shocked) if I could knock out a five digit figure.

December beat me up on the tables as I was down in excess of $500 at some point. I clawed back a bit towards the end of the month but ended up booking a loss of somewhere near $370. Coolers, beats and bad play do not add up to a good month of poker apparently.

Lately I have been playing some no limit cash games and have decided to play waaaay down at $0.05/$0.10. I have only put in 4k hands or so and am doing well so far but of course haven't played anywhere near enough to read anything into the results so far. Once I have won 20 buy-ins for the next level, I'll move on up and splash around in the big ole $25 pool and see where I go from there.

A Winning Night!

2006-12-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

Thought I'd better slap this down in print as it may be my only chance this month. I played poker last night.....and won! It may well be the first winning session in two weeks. If I can just string 11 more nights together like that, I'll be back to where I was towards the end of November. Woot!

Same ole same ole

2006-12-20T00:32:00.000-05:00

My Poker Stars account has now dipped below the $500 mark, which puts my downswing somewhere near $500. Ouch. The pain! I can't take any more! For some reason this isn't bothering me much. It does, of course, make me question whether I will ever play winning poker ever again but the absolute worst case scenario is that I won't. I can probably continue to live a reasonable life if that is the situation.

Anyway, that is all really boring, unlike the great big drama thread which has been going on for days now at 2+2 featuring poker world sex, money and relationship woes. And frozen turkey dinners, bebe tops, penises on backs, finger painting with blood, etc. Pretty standard I guess.

BrandiRose - Never Trust Anyone

Rapidly approaching its 3,000th reply and ruining workplace productivity throughout the world. What a train wreck.

Nuts!

2006-12-13T12:25:00.000-05:00

After taking Monday night off of playing poker completely, I ventured back for some more 6-max limit hold'em last night. Due to my recent losing streak, I dropped down to $0.50/$1.00 and sat down at two tables with people who were playing anything pre-flop and going way too far with their hands. Perfect! Not only were the tables good, but I was catching great cards too. Great! Not only was I catching great starting hands, but I was hitting flops super hard. Awesome! While all this was happening, my opponents were catching the mortal nuts at the same time however. Bummer!

At risk of exagerating, I have never in my life been shown the mortal nuts on so many hands where I thought I was way way ahead. I was flopping top two pair, sets, turning or flopping fullhouses all night and in all but one case I rammed and jammed straight into bigger hands. Going broke against quads is probably not a bad thing and by the end of my relatively short-lived night of poker I had to chuckle at the way things turned out. Wow! No bad beats to whine about either. I just ran monster hands into bigger monster hands. C'est la vie.

In trying to identify leaks lately, it appears as though I have been calling down too much with hands that are beat and I have been folding too many winners. How the hell do you fix that!? I'd like to buy some better hand reading skills please.

Monsters under the bed syndrome has plagued me over my short poker career and last night I was proud to have shook it off somewhat and really forced people to pay me off when I caught huge hands. Hahaha, I am sooo going to have a complex for the rest of my life now. Damn you poker!

As for the total damage on this skid, I must be approaching $400 or so now based on the dwindling balance in my poker stars account. Ugh. This will pass eventually though and I can get back to my massive $1/hour poker earnings rate.

Losing Streak Continues

2006-12-11T11:49:00.000-05:00

Poker is beating me up lately. I have managed to post some small wins at the odd table but more often than not, I am posting moderate losses at whichever game I happen to be playing lately. Jumping from game to game may be a contributing factor but during these losing streaks, I tend to switch to a different form of poker rather than risk throwing my laptop through a wall.

For some reason, during losing streaks, I tend to get the most enjoyment out of playing tournaments, despite a much better history with ring games. I have made it to the money in a few multi table tourneys lately but have not gone very deep.

I finally finished reading TOP and will either revisit SSHE or check out HOH, depending on which way I go with limit or no limit play.

No Limit SuperStar!

2006-12-05T17:34:00.000-05:00

After the nice Sunday night run at no limit I was ready to bust some skulls after work on Monday and as I now had a good two hours experience with no limit cash games it was clearly time to add another table to the mix. So, I sat and prepared to stack fools and then proceeded to foolishly give my stack to others. Repeatedly. I got stacked four or five times but only once did I put my money in the middle with the worst of it. In all cases though, the others were drawing to big hands and I have to go back and evaluate where I went wrong.

My girlfriends advice: Quit going all in! Maybe a good idea, but my my sets look so damned purty.

It looks like my girlfriend is an up and coming degenerate as I konked out early last night, just before midnight, and woke briefly when she crawled into bed 3 hours later after finally busting out of the freeroll she had been playing. 154th out of 10,000 or so. Hah, quit going all in yourself!

Stocking up on Losses

2006-12-04T14:09:00.000-05:00

This weekend was full of lots and lots of losing on the poker tables. I don't know (and don't really want to) the exact figure, but it is somewhere just on the good side of $200 or so. I got in a number of SNG's, several small MTT's, some $1/$2 6-max limit and even snuck in some no limit ring towards the end. A second place finish in one SNG was the only money I saw on any of the tourneys, despite playing reasonably well. My chips went into the middle with the best hand far more often than not and if hold'em were a 2 card game that might actually mean something!

Towards the end of the weekend I sat down at a $10NL full ring table just for kicks and had a blast. I can't remember the last time I played a no limit ring game and should mix it into my rotation more often as limit games continue to slowly dry up. I hadn't been playing for all that long when I set a guy off and ended up being called a donkey. I think what did it was me actually playing like a donkey. I raised a big $0.30 first in from middle position with pocket Queens and got re-raised to $0.70, which I only called instead of re-popping, intending to go crazy on a flop with no A or K. The flop brought a K and two hearts and I bravely open checked and was not surprised when he bet $1.50, leaving only $4 or so in his stack. I almost folded there but decided there were too many hands he could have that he would c-bet with that I had beat and really after dropping $200 or so over the weekend, losing another $6 or so with pocket Queens really wasn't going to be too upsetting, so I started making hee-haw noises and min bet raised him. He pushed, I called, I watched as another heart hit the board and then an Ace on the river, either of which must surely be sealing my fate. Much to my surprise the pot got pushed my way and this poor guy went ballistic, cursing all the damn DonkeyStars on this stupid shitty site. To his credit, his 65o did catch a back door straight draw on that flop and gave me some internal satisfaction that although I did play every street like a complete donkey, he deserved it. Well, not every street...I did play the river perfectly.

And that was the last river card I saw in any hand I was involved in for quite some time. The number of pots I took down with continuation bets on the flop was unbelievable. I was very surprised at how tight the table was. Raises for 3BB's took the blinds down far more often that I thought would be the case. The table loved limping but not many people were crazy about calling raises. I didn't think blind stealing would be a big possibility at such low stakes no limit but standard raises from late position often worked and when they didn't, a c-bet usually did the trick. I ended up running up my initial buy in of $10 to almost $40 with a lot of small pots. The only other large pot that I got involved in was when I got it all in pre-flop with AA against KQo when I raised under the gun, got re-raised to $0.70, popped it to $2.50 and the guy pushed his remaining $7 into the pot.

I was having a great time at the no limit table but realized that I had better shut it down when I accidentally bet $20 instead of $0.20 on the flop once towards the end.

$1,300 Barrier

2006-12-02T11:01:00.000-05:00

While searching for patterns where there really are none, I noted that every time my poker winnings have broken the $1,300 threshold I have promptly gone on a big losing streak. The first time I broke through the $1,300 barrier I proceeded to drop $600 in a very short period of time - gotta love 6-max variance. The next skid was only $300 and had much less to do with variance and a lot more to do with me messing with limits I shouldn't have been messing with. And now, having broken $1,300 again a few days ago, I find myself in the midst of a mini slide which I hope to stop shortly.

One day I hope to permanently bust through that pesky $1,300 barrier and find a new one a lot higher.

Other completely meaningless stats:
- I have won with AA over 92% of the time recently
- My best game to date, based on total winnings, is $0.50/$1 short handed
- $2/$4 short handed is my worst
- My best site to date, based on total winnings, is Party by a huge margin
- Paradise is my worst
- My best day of the week, based on total winnings, is Friday by a longshot
- Wednesday is my worst by far

Return to the Ring

2006-11-30T22:00:00.000-05:00

Poker gave me a nice warm welcome back in the early going this month as I couldn't seem to lose. The hot run continued when I took a little shot at $2/$4 and then my fortunes quickly changed as I lost all my monthly winnings and more. From that point on the rest of November was up and down and finished somewhere just north of even, due largely to a good night on the tables tonight.

Towards the end of the month I settled into $1/$2 short handed and found that game to be surprisingly nice at Poker Stars. I also had a blast messing around with some HORSE and Razz and donated to a number of limit tourneys along the way as well.

Although my winnings were pretty low this month, my bankroll got a little padding due to an old deposit bonus for $120 that had been sitting around on Stars which got cleared on the way to reaching Silver Star status.

Title Intentionally Left Blank

2006-11-24T17:36:00.000-05:00

After losing a couple hundred at $2/$4, it seems as though I may have settled into a comfort zone at $1/$2 6-max limit. Much to my surprise, I had never really worked my way up to that limit previously. I got curious the other night and wandered back through my blog and realized that I had only taken shots at $1/$2 back when I was playing more regularly and had quickly scampered back down to lower limits. In order to progress to $2/$4, I suppose I will have to take a few months off then lose a pile at $3/$6 before dropping back down to $2/$4. Alternatively, I could learn to play poker I suppose and just improve my game and move up like semi-normal people do.

Somewhere along the way in the last couple weeks I knocked off a bunch of Poker Stars VPP points and will hit the silver star level very shortly. This of course makes me wonder how easy or difficult it would be to get to the gold level but I have really been enjoying NOT grinding a pile of hands for bonus reasons, so I will try not to ponder that question too much and just enjoy being a silver star for now.

I was the victim of a pile of bad beats the other night! Really bad beats! Oh, the horror. Last night I inflicted a number of bad beats on others. Oh, the horror. I know which I enjoyed more but I have to wonder which night I was playing better (of course this is a moot point as I was clearly playing perfect poker both nights).

Win some, Lose some

2006-11-20T11:17:00.000-05:00

For kicks, I took a small break from my ultra-conservative bankroll management over the weekend and jumped from $0.25/$0.50 6-max LHE to $2/$4. Pretty natural step, right? After winning a quick $100 I couldn't remember I was always so conservative with my bankroll. Then after losing an even quicker couple hundred back, I remembered.

Bad luck plus bad play at higher limits than one is used to does not equal good results apparently. What a shocker. Although, one side benefit of the little run at higher stakes was clearing an old June deposit bonus that had been sitting at Stars.

Perhaps I'll settle into $1/$2 for a bit although $3/$6 looks awfully tempting.

$1.37 per hour

2006-11-15T11:27:00.000-05:00

It is a damn good thing that I do not rely on poker as a source of income. According to my records, I have earned $1.37 per hour with my elite poker skills. Adding bonuses to the mix ramps that figure way up in excess of $6 per hour, almost competing with the fry guy at McDonalds.

Even still, this makes poker infinitely more profitable than any other hobby I have ever had and for the most part the time spent on poker is only replacing other leisure type activities. So boooya, ship it.

Counting My Outs has a new home and destroys my hourly poker earn rate.

Who the hell banned poker!?

2006-11-13T16:39:00.000-05:00

So, I go away for three or four months and the online poker world falls apart? Sheesh, way to go slackers.

I sorta slept through the whole ordeal as it happened and still don't know the whole story, though being Canadian, I think I'm free to go play with the Europeans at any of the US banned sites. It sounds as though the biggest single change is Party drying up with the loss of the US customers. I did my part to help them on their way by withdrawing almost all my funds and finally realizing a true poker gain with a real live actual deposit in my bank account, which I keep waiting to be reversed for some reason. So, finally one year after I started playing online poker at all, I have a few grand in the bank to show for it. Or a few grand less bank debt owing, whatever.

On the flipside of Party drying up, it looks like a good chunk of all that business landed at PokerStars and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. I understand that Full Tilt is chugging along well too but am not playing enough to bother opening an account there for the time being.

We hit Las Vegas for a few nights in late October and had a great time. I played some 2/4 and 3/6 limit while there and ended up a couple hundred in addition to the minor liver damage done while playing. I saw lots of very nice looking poker rooms while there yet ended up doing all my play at Bally's, which hardly counts as a poker room, but it was handy and attracted nice juicy games. The 2/4 game bore a striking resemblance to 0.05/0.10 online. I had always heard that the live games were like that but really thought it was an exaggeration until I saw it myself.

Since getting back from Vegas, I have played a little bit online at PokerStars. In an attempt to lure me back, Stars has been letting me win more than my fair share with something like 19 winning sessions out of 20. Hah, I'm not going to fall for those online rigged tricks. I am just messing around with a bit of 0.25/0.50 6-max limit and 0.50/1.00 HORSE. I really enjoy playing HORSE because the ending is always a surprise. With the exception of the H, I have no clue what I'm doing as the ORS and E are complete mysteries to me. Fortunately, everyone else at the table usually sucks even worse than I do. At one point, we were 7 hands into Stud and I was still playing Razz and still wasn't the worst player at the table. Hard to beat that for fun!

All joking aside, I'm not sure why I'm winning but I think a huge factor has been short sessions. I'm not chasing any bonuses, not trying to grind out a pile of hours or hands, I'm just playing for short periods mainly for fun and it seems to be working. Oh, and I'm obviously catching a crap-ton of the upside of variance. I loaded up pokertracker onto my new laptop after a few sessions and then tracked a couple and if I recall correctly, the general thought is that a 28BB/100 win rate is not sustainable.

Alive and Well

2006-10-19T10:20:00.000-05:00

Wow, apparently when I take a Poker break, I REALLY take a poker break. Since my last post I think I have only managed to play 3 small limit tourneys which saw me make my exit somewhere around 200th or so. Other than that, it has basically been cold turkey.

I'm off to Vegas (1st time ever) next week with my girlfriend and a group of other friends for a few nights so who knows if I'll get jolted back into full blown poker-mode again or not. The only live poker I have played to date is small sit-n-go type tourneys with friends, so the whole real Vegas thing may be a shocker.

Anyway, for anyone who slides by here at all - I am alive and doing well.

Hope all is well on your end also!

Uh oh

2006-07-20T12:43:00.000-05:00

Two nights in a row without playing any poker! I have been overdue for a break and it looks like that break is here. I am busy at work trying to clean things up to take next week off and will be away for the weekend and part of next week. So, it looks like I'll be going up to a week with no poker. Hopefully the break does me some good. Perhaps I'll catch up on some poker reading in the meantime.

Blogvertising

2006-07-19T10:39:00.000-05:00

A night passed without me playing any poker. I'm not sure how that happened exactly, but I just didn't feel like playing last night, so I didn't. In order to maintain my geek status, I tried to get reacquainted with my Druid on WOW instead. The seven month break from WOW has left me more than a little rusty and it felt quite similar to playing a no limit ring game to me - I was clueless.

I received two emails out of the blue yesterday about advertising on my 'blog'. After I got over the embarassment of actually having a blog I quickly moved on to just feeling puzzled about why anyone would actually want to advertise on it. As far as I can tell, I only get about 15 visitors a day, 10 of which are usually just me, 2 of which accidentally landed here by following a strange google search link and 3 of which are tracing back from their site meters as I usually use my own links on the right as a jumping point. I know that I do get a couple legitimate visitors as well but the number is relatively small. In addition, in order to get a decent page ranking I think you have to be linked to by a large number of highly ranked sites and to the best of my knowledge, I am not.

So, I'm not sure how they found me and what threshold was crossed in order for it to happen. I'm kind of a fan of money, so I will seriously consider putting up some advertising, but I'm also pretty lazy and some part of me really likes not having anything like that on this site as well, so I'm not 100% sure which way I'll go.

To date I have not bothered doing the pimping thing. I linked to some of the blogs I read regularly and left it at that. Anyone who finds there way here will already know of anyone I could possibly pimp, so it seems kind of pointless.

Thanks for the links folks!

Ian's Poker Plan was the very first site to link to me after some correspondence between us with me asking some completely noob questions about linking etiquette. I had been following his journey from total beginner to winner but his site went down for some time due to a hacker and I haven't seen it pop back up anywhere yet.

Counting My Outs was the next site to link to me and is still the first blog I visit every day. Michael is one of the minority bloggers who play and write about limit hold'em, which is of great interest to me and he is a great guy.

Poker4peace was another of the first sites to link to me. Slimeface blogs from all over the place as he travels the US, delivering goods and taking snapshots of glorious bottoms. I also had the pleasure recently to provide him with some chips at one of the Mookie events.

Trials of a Poker Apprentice is a great source for all kinds of poker headline news.

Littleacornpoker, a thirty something boy toy, from across the big pond.

Low Limit Grinder snuck a link in there somewhere without me noticing to become the only site to link to me before I managed to link to them. I got to play with Gary not long ago in my first Mookie and was the partial cause of making him take a couple days off of poker as I managed to dish out the final suckout in a long string of them. Oops. He took it well and seems like a nice guy.

I was using Grinder's Warehouse site long before I even realized poker blogs existed. He is another limit player and is constantly running simulations.

One day the blogfather himself even pimped my blog. I am still waiting for the T-shirt. Iggy is the King of the uber post and I only wish he could post them every day. Fittingly, there was an opening quote on that post by Bill Rini along the lines of as the number of poker blogs has increased the number 0f blogs worth reading has decreased.

Somewhere along the way another one of the old guard, Alcanthang, gave me some pimpage. I would like to go drinking with Al someday. If I was allowed to stick to just rum and cokes and he went three drinks for each of mine, I think I could hang with him for half a night.

More recently I bumped across the blog of a fellow from my own town who set me up a link. Klopzi is highly entertaining and plays at limits near mine. His blog was part of a chain of events which got me to try out some casino whoring, so I probably owe him a cut of my $300 or so to date.

And the most recent blog to hit me up with a link is Inside the mind of C.L. Russo. I had added a bunch of new links to the sidebar one day and he very quickly reciprocated.

There were more than I thought. If there are other links to me out there, sorry I missed them and THANKS!

I don't intend to do much in the way of pimping in the future, so I'm going to have to get it all out today.

Check out these blogs too:

Felicia Lee - The second blog I open every day. If her name was Alicia Lee, she would probably be the first. Always a very interesting read and she'll email you nude pics of her rack if you ask nicely.

The Poker Chronicles and DoubleAs, two of several published bloggers.

Flights of Iakaris - Canadian ties, supermodel Doctor, extremely entertaining. But most of all, I love Iak for introducing me to Melinda.

Check out CC's new site with Poker Works and also follow Pauly and Otis at the WSOP.

Okay, I very quickly tired of trying to single out individual blogs and this post is taking far too long. I remember another reason I don't pimp - I hate html. Anyway, also check out all the blogs I have linked on the right bar and then check out all the blogs they have linked.

The day is flying by, time to attack the work piled on my desk.

Pool 'n Poker

2006-07-17T09:06:00.000-05:00

Saturday turned out to be great fun, despite some uncooperative weather. We arrived at my friends around 2 in the afternoon and finally rolled out sometime near 2 in the morning. Yeah, we are THOSE guests. The buggers you can't get to leave at the end of the night.

The poker was fun, but I was definitely bubble boy, going out just before the money in the vast majority of the games we played. I did manage to get a small taste of the money when I was involved in a 3-way chop which was prompted by hunger and great smells wafting from the bbq. My girlfriend and brother played as well and held their own all day.

Always eager to learn new things, later in the evening I learned that naked cannonballs can sometimes hurt.

On Sunday I took part in another of the $1K added limit tourneys at Party Poker. There were over 1,400 entrants in this one and I made my exit somewhere around 270th. Other than that tourney, I didn't play all that much poker with the exception of some micro limit stud hi lo. After three days off of ring games, I may hop back in there soon as I have a reload offer waiting at Empire for another $75.

Karma's Sweet Kiss

2006-07-14T21:49:00.000-05:00

Party Poker $1K added $6 limit tourney
3rd/926
+$444.40

I started Team Floppy today when I stabled my first two players. I got sick of watching my girlfriend and brother continue to spend $1 juice on every $5 SNG over at Paradise and begged them to join Poker Stars, at least until they move up to $10 SNG's. Neither of them had any money available to throw at another site, so once they set up accounts, I transferred $100 to each of them. I mentioned that I expect 20% of their winnings for life but judging by the laughter that suggestion received, I don't think I'll be seeing much back, which is cool.

Setting up multiple accounts all at once turned out to be a bit of an issue as Poker Stars has a security feature in place to prevent multiple accounts from being set up on the same computer. A quick email to support straightened everything out, once again impressing me with Stars support which is top notch.

I stayed away from limit ring games today and stuck to my plan to have some fun with a few small tourneys. I played in a $3 limit hold 'em tourney at Poker Stars and finished 152nd out of 315. Then my brother and I both played in one of the Paradise Million qualifier free rolls. I outlasted him but I still didn't make it much past the final 1,000 out of the 3,000+ entrants.

While we were playing the freeroll at Paradise, I started up a $1K added $6 limit tourney at Party which ended up with 926 entrants. In the matter of two hands in the early going (AA and AK) I eroded my stack down to 1/3 of what I started with and sat tight waiting for good opportunities to chip up. Eventually those opportunities came and I started working my way back up. I did catch AA three times in the first two hours and KK at least twice as well, which certainly helped a lot - when they held up.

Before I knew it we were approaching the bubble for the final paid 100 and I was sitting on an above average stack. I had been enjoying tables where I was chip leader and was able to steal blinds without opposition fairly regularly until I ended up at a table with the two chip leaders. From about 110 players to 45 players, I went completely card dead but managed to stay afloat with the odd steal here and there.

Eventually, a key hand happened which saw me taking down a massive pot. I actually botched the hand on every street when I called a pre flop raise with pocket tens from the button and ended up with an open ended straight draw with two overcards on the board. I kept meaning to raise to find out where I was in the hand, but I ended up just cheaply and weakly calling down. I found myself headsup at the river with a massive pot with too many overcards to my Tens against a pre flop raiser who had continued to bet throughout the hand. The pot was too big and I was already kicking myself for how I played the hand but I felt I had to call for one more bet and was very pleasantly surprised when the whole bundle of chips slid my way and gave me a very nice cushion to work with.

The cards dried up again and as the final table approached I was hovering just above the average stack. I just hunkered down and waited the bad run of cards out, slowly getting blinded down. As I had tightened up so much, with my squeaky image I was able to steal some blinds now and then but I had the chip leader on my immediate left making it tough. Eventually I busted the short stack and made it to my very first final table in an MTT with an average stack.

The bad cards kept coming and I went clam tight. I lost a small chunk unsuccessfully defending my blinds and for a while I never got anything even worth trying to defend with, let alone open a pot with. We played ten handed for quite a while when finally two people went out on the same hand, further inflating pile of chips in front of the big stack. Shortly thereafter the big stack knocked someone else out by which time I was the small stack. I was short to the point where I had to commit to a hand and just push it for all I could as soon as I caught something worth playing when I caught a run of pocket pairs. I pushed hard pre flop and pushed hard on the flop and took a couple decent sized pots without showdown.

After opening a couple pots in a row I raised 1st in from the small blind with pocket threes and the massive stack smooth called from the big blind. The flop came down with a very juicy 33A and I bet out on the flop while my girlfriend screamed at me to check it. On many steal attempts I had put a continuation bet out on the flop and checked the turn if I didn't improve only to have the big stack stuff bets in my face and take the pot right there. So, I was pretty certain my flop bet wouldn't scare him away, especially seeing as though he had a 6 to 1 chip advantage. I checked the turn, knowing he would bet at the pot at which time I raised and he called down from there. The blind level at this point was high enough that in just a few short hands I had quickly gone from short stack to second in chips.

That hand was pretty much the highlight for me and the cards dried up on me again but people quickly got bumped off from this point. I slid into 6th, then 5th and on and on until it was just three handed. I was severely outchipped but did what I could, which eventually saw me hitting the road with a set running into straight.

So, I made my first final table in a paid multi-table tourney. And even better, I made my first final three at the same time! I made some mistakes along the way but one thing I managed to do very well was stay patient when I needed to. I basically patienced my way from the final 100 all the way to third, not panicing when I was getting dealt orbit after orbit of crap. Of course, I was also very lucky to catch some hands when I did. Third place paid $450, so this was a pretty serious score for me and an incredibly huge bonus as I was just hitting up some tourneys for fun and a change of pace. I know a lot of it was luck, but this sure does give me some hope for future tourneys and was nice timing after the several bubble finishes recently in addition to the horrible losing streak I had been on.

I am relieved to now know exactly how to turn around a big losing streak. Just give away a couple hundred dollars and hit the money in a multitable tourney.

Oops

2006-07-14T10:18:00.000-05:00

Extended losing streaks suck and everyone has to deal with them at some point. Over and over again I'm sure. I have been on my most wicked losing streak ever but up until last night I actually felt as though I was playing fairly well for the most part, despite the repeated losing sessions. Now, there is no doubt that I have leaks contributing to the losses, but in general I don't think I had been playing horribly. Last night I managed to change that thought and played like a total idiot for a while. It was a very ugly suck fest and I was majorly tilting. I unplugged before doing too much damage, dropping another $30 on the night - but I had been up $30 at one point.

I rode the rocket up to +$1,300 and have now dropped $600 of that back in the last three weeks. Normal? Yeah, probably pretty standard and I will get back on track soon enough I'm sure. As long as I don't run around imploding like I did last night. That was my first real tilt session and I could have, and should have, stopped playing earlier as I knew full well I was going off the deep end as it happened.

Shortly after crawling away from the tables, updating my record keeping and sobbing for a while, my brother rolled into town. He plays a bit of poker online at Paradise, sticking mainly to $6 SNG's and we talked about all things poker for a while. I'm going to try to get him into a little bonus chasing to build up a bit of a bankroll. He has some money at Paradise and pretty much sticks to the $6 SNG's with some success. His downfall tends to be bankroll management as with $35 in his account I once watched him sit at a $30 SNG...which he luckboxed a win on. He has only played hold 'em, so we fired up some micro stakes stud hi lo for a while and much to his dismay he lost $1.19 of my hard earned money. Then we tried out some omaha hi lo, which was good for a chuckle or two watching him try to figure out the best hand. Much of the chuckling was at myself as well, as I still screw it up nicely from time to time.

Tomorrow is a poker, pool and bbq day. A buddy of mine out in the 'burbs put in a wicked pool last year and we have been talking about combining a poker night with a pool day for a while now. The weather is going to be perfect for hanging out by a pool and it should be a lot of fun. The host and a couple of the other regular poker guys have kids which will love it, so this should be great for them too. I suspect poker will take a bit of a backseat to everything else that is going on but poker is just a mean bitch that can bite my ass anyway.

Okay, maybe I'm a tiny little bit bitter right now. I love poker and I can't wait to play more! I am definitely taking a bit of a break from grinding 6-max limit play but will have some fun with a couple tiny buy-in tourneys, some more stud and I am looking forward to the live play tomorrow.

Win some, lose some

2006-07-13T09:44:00.000-05:00

I ventured back to play some 6-max limit at Party last night in order to keep working on clearing the reload bonus. Due to the recent beatings I have been taking, I decided to slide back down to the $0.50/$1.00 tables until I pop through the other side of the variance wall and I am quite happy to stay there as long as I need to. I have the bankroll for roughly a bazillion big bets at that limit and a even an awful night at $0.50/$1.00 will not beat my psyche into the ground too badly anymore.

The first table I started out on brought me good cards and great pots, making for a nice fast start but that table cleared out quickly. The next couple tables I sat at were nothing special and I ended up roughly break even, up a couple bucks. Tables kept breaking forcing me to move on. I was blessed with nice opponents at most tables with many extremely loose players and not too many aggressive players, however, I managed to run a couple of my big hands into monster hands getting QQ and KK cracked a couple times each, plus some other blunders. In the end, I was down somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 by the end of the night. D'oh!

But none of that matters, because I played some more hi/lo stud later and had a blast again. I moved all the way up to the big $0.10/$0.20 tables towards the end of the night after tripling my massive $2 buy in on a $0.04/$0.08 table. The level of competition at $0.10/$0.20 was fierce and I didn't have the same huge edge I was enjoying at the lower limit but I managed to break even. Does deadpan humor translate well to the written word? I suspect not, but I crack me up anyway and that is pretty much all that matters.

Summary:
Lost $30 at hold'em.
Won $4 at stud.
Threw my arms in the air and declared myself stud champion.
Threw my girlfriends legs in the air and had her declare me stud champion too.
Some facts have been altered slightly. For example, I think she threw my legs in the air and declared me stud champion.

Stud

2006-07-11T22:25:00.000-05:00

In order to spare my laptop the wrath of being tossed through a wall, I took a break from grinding 6-max limit today. Instead I played a couple really low buy-in tourneys, one no limit and one fixed limit.

I finished middle of the pack in the no limit tourney when I flopped a set and pushed all in on a brick turn to get knocked out when the river filled a flush. To her credit, she had flopped an open ended straight draw plus the flush draw and had enough chips to cover me, so c'est la vie.

In the limit tourney it seemed to be an awful long time before I finally played my first hand, when I got dealt pocket Kings and added over 50% to my stack. I stuck to solid starting hands and managed to take a few more pots down before getting moved to another table with approximately double my starting stack. I took a big hand without showdown on my first hand at the new table and took the blinds with another pre flop raise on the very next hand. This was the perfect set up for getting dealt pocket Kings on my third hand at this table, however, the river was uncooperative, filling someone elses draw, and I ended up back to where I was when I sat down.

I slowly worked my way up to the top 20 or so and fought to stay there. There was a player two to my left that absolutely clobbered me for the later part of the tourney. The table was fairly tight as the blinds increased and this player was the most aggressive player at the table. Other than myself, there weren't many opening raises and almost no 3-bets. Anyway, to make a long story short, he kept 3-betting my open raises, raising my blinds, and pretty much just beat me (and the rest of the table) up. We went at it a few times and any time it went to showdown he had the goods. With the blinds where they were and how aggressive he had been playing, I was at the very least calling down with two pair though and was dominated by him the few times this happened. I kept taking chips from the rest of the table and then promptly gave them to him. In the end he took me out with a rivered straight against my turned two pair which put him 2nd in chips with a little under 30 players left. So much for staying out of the way of the big stacks.

Again, I made the money but went out quickly thereafter as I have been doing a lot lately in tourneys. As I rarely play tourneys, I'm not entirely disappointed with results like this and in this particular case I was quite happy with my play. I didn't seize up and go rock tight, but stayed active and gave myself a fighting chance. Next time, I just won't run into bigger hands. Fool proof plan!

One of the last times I was on a big losing skid I switched to some low stake Omaha for a change of pace and had a blast. Today I decided to take a shot at stud and once again I had a blast.

I fired up some play money stud at Poker Stars and dusted off Super System 2 to see what Todd Brunson had to say about Stud. Strangely enough, people were playing the play money game like they were playing with play money or something and pretty much every street was capped the whole way, leaving me as the only person who knew a fold button existed. I quickly drained my initial 1000 play chips before realizing that Todd Brunson was talking about Stud Hi Lo, so I switched to Hi Lo and ended up on a play money table that actually had people playing very very reasonably for a play money table. It was also the friendliest table I have sat at in months, with two or three 'nhs' after every hand followed by ty's and tyvm's with 'yw' and 'yvw' chasers. So, apparently stud players are total hippies. Nice. Anyway, I loaded up another 1000 play chips and quickly ground that down to 300 or so before I slowly made my way back to 2000 and then tacked on a bit of play money profit.

Boosted by newfound confidence I marched off to find a real money table to tackle and settled into a high stakes $0.04/$0.08 with $0.01 ante table, buying in with an intimidating stack of $2.00. I'm sure I played like a total donk as I barely knew what I was doing, but I had a better grasp on stud than on omaha in the early going. The table was pretty passive with plenty of checking, lots of calling and very little raising. I tried to stick to decent starting hands but probably called down more than I should have once I was involved in a pot. I took plenty of 1/2 pots with lows and scooped more than my fair share.

My biggest hand was a well disguised full house that I capped the last two streets on with a couple callers. I filled several hands on the river, which probably means I was calling to the river too much, but I found that people left at the end of the hand often had very little. Winning hands were often a lot weaker than I was expecting. I ran my $2 up to $5.39 marking today as one of my best poker days in July!

I just love that there are so many different games at such small stakes offered on the internet. Stud turned out to be a very nice break and thankfully I could try it out with very little risk. I should play Omaha and Stud and other games more often as I am sure playing other games can only help my hold 'em. Of course, it would take a lot of work to get up to stakes that make it worthwhile from a money point of view but the way things have been going recently even just losing a few dollars on a different game beats the hell out of losing $100 in a night on hold 'em.

Yay Stud!

Special thanks to Felicia for always yammering on about Stud and Omaha which probably subliminally impacted my decision to try those games out in the first place.

Losing Streak

2006-07-11T10:10:00.000-05:00

Since the last week of June, I have been bleeding money on the poker tables. July is off to a nasty start with losses in excess of $160 so far and this marks an improvement over the last week of June during which I lost close to $300. For the first time since I started playing my losses are even outrunning my bonuses.

To take a small break from poker I deposited another $100 at Intercasino for their monthly match bonus. My midas touch continued there, quickly running the $200 total to under $50 at blackjack prior to closing the casino before I could launch my laptop through a window. On the bright side, some nasty beats at blackjack always makes me feel better about poker.

Despite the accumulating poker losses this month, I am actually having fun as I am mixing in a lot of small tourneys. Tourneys are not profitable for me, but they aren't a huge cash drain either - my big losses are coming from my regular cash games. I'll keep plugging away and eventually the tide will turn. C'mon upswing!

Weekend > Monday

2006-07-10T09:13:00.000-05:00

For a nice change, I do not know exactly how much I won or lost this weekend. I won a bit on Friday and Saturday and lost a good chunk back on Sunday. I suspect overall I was up a little but not much. For the most part I was at Party working off another $100 reload bonus on the .50/1 and 1/2 6-max limit tables but I also got in a couple tourneys, finishing somewhere in the 30's in a couple Stars 180's and finishing just in the money in a Paradise fixed limit tourney.

July continues to beat on me as I still haven't broken even on play and am only booking a small overall profit due to bonuses. I trust that will change by the end of the month but I'm bound to have a losing month sooner or later, so this could be the one. On the bonus front I haven't been very active this month either, only working on 2 $100 reload bonuses right now at Party and Paradise with no plans to chase anything else down. I also have the Stars reload bonus but that will not be cleared for months as I have not been playing any SNG's lately.

I need another weekend to recover from the last one. An emergency party broke out on Friday night and all of Saturday was spent at a wedding which required further partying. I think we got to bed around 5am Saturday night/Sunday morning. Ugh.

poker no guts pansy

2006-07-07T13:48:00.000-05:00

F Google!

I had a recent visitor through here on a google search for "poker no guts pansy". Man, google sure has my game pegged.

Other popular searches that seem to find me include "Trout Blogs", "sng roi itm", "betfred bonus", and the odd person looking for a free registration key for Sit n Go Power Tools - freeloading pricks. I have no clue how google searches, page rankings and all that stuff works and I'm quite content to remain blissfully ignorant of it all. However, I suspect that if I laced my pussy posts full of sexually charged cock and bull stories, more boobs would find their way here. Or not. I really don't know.

We are on half-day Fridays for the summer now and I'm starting out by staying three hours longer than necessary today. Perhaps if I did some work earlier in the week I wouldn't be having this problem. Procrastination rules.

Have a great weekend!

Thursday Profit!?

2006-07-06T23:07:00.000-05:00

It is a Christmas miracle! I booked a win on a Thursday night! Okay, it was a very small win, it isn't Christmas and all that but I'm pumped anyway.

I have been having a blast lately with the 180 man $4 no limit tourneys on Poker Stars, so I loaded up another one tonight. I folded what turned out to be the best hand fairly early in the tourney when I got spooked by a relatively weak bet coupled with an Ace on the flop and a couple callers. I actually had the best hand the whole way and would have rivered a full house to take a large pot down had I not scampered so early in the hand. Live and learn. My biggest mistake in terms of chips was running my AQ into AA on an A high flop. Possibly fueled by the previous big stupid lay down, this time I read the weak bet as a sign of weakness, not strength and ended up losing a bundle by the end of the hand. With an A in my hand and one on the board I was really discounting AA but AK was a real possibility. Taking away the results oriented thinking, I believe my laydown was the bigger mistake of the two. This put me in shortstack mode for a while and I managed to double up through a big stack with A9 versus his A3 but later ran out of steam when I got it all in again with TT preflop and lost to AJ, finishing in 69th.

Paradise hasn't beaten me down quite enough lately, so I bravely ventured back for some more 5-max $1/$2 limit and finished with a small win after going up and down for a little over an hour.

With tonights small win, my cumulative Thursday losses have dipped to $154 while last nights complete thumping has inflated my Wednesday losses to $339. What is it with those two nights!? Every other day of the week sits in a profit position and I definitely analyze this useless crap too much if I know this. Ah well, I needed a poker strength and not having any natural talent at all, I have settled for bankroll management and record keeping as my strengths.

Ugh

2006-07-05T21:34:00.000-05:00

Strange day of poker for me today. It started out fairly well with a good showing in a 180 man $4 tourney on Stars. I cruised to the final two tables and then self destructed, finishing 11th rather than my regular 10th. This marks the third time in the last couple weeks I have bubbled just before the final table in that tourney. I'm not stealing enough around the bubble and am going in with a weak stack. Cards would help, but I'll have to open it up a bit without them too.

Then I hopped into a $6 Limit tourney at Party which had 869 entrants. Up until the final 120 or so, I had double the average stack when I hit two bad hands in a row then went card dead. I managed to steal some blinds here and there to stay alive but was no threat to anyone the rest of the way. I managed to finish 45th to win four times my buy in. Things went downhill from here.

A little later I decided to try some short handed $25-max no limit cash games at Paradise, at which time I promptly gave away $40. I was a pretty good set magnet, letting my opponent catch one anytime I had an overpair or two pair. My no limit cash game needs lots of work!

To work off a little bit of the Paradise reload bonus I fired up a 5-max $1/$2 table and proceeded to get rivered to death, repeatedly. Great in the long term, crap in the short term.

While I was getting destroyed at $1/$2, I played in the Mookie for a few minutes before making a very hasty exit and getting back to being clobbered for larger sums at Paradise. I ran JJ into KK and 99 into a flopped top pair Ten, getting my chips in both times with a pretty good idea that it wasn't at all a very good idea. I love it when my gut reaction is right and I ignore it!

UGH! I just lost another big pot when a 74o chased a gutshot down. Down over $100 and counting at Paradise tonight. This site is loose and soft and is rocking me hard.

July is off to a very rocky start. The turnaround upswing will be sweet when it gets here. If it gets here.

Live Poker, sorta

2006-07-05T08:58:00.000-05:00

My cousin is getting married to a poker nut this weekend, so we got together with him for a couple drinks and a small poker tourney last night. The blinds were escalated rapidly which turned it into a total crapshoot. I was rather card dead, with my best hands being QJs and KJs one of which ran into AKs to knock me out in 4th. I was not dealt a single pocket pair the entire night. We all had a good time though and lots of laughs.

Short post.

Come back June!

2006-07-04T08:43:00.000-05:00

With the long weekend festivities in full swing, I did not play much poker until yesterday once I shipped all my company off. Somehow I managed to lose $45, the bulk of which was at Paradise playing 5-max $1/$2. I lost a couple bucks playing a few $5 SNG's at Poker Stars and broke even playing a couple 180 person $4 tourneys at Stars as I finished 10th, just missing the final table, in one and bombed out in another.

We managed to run up a few impressive patio bills over the weekend. On Canada day we went for lunch around 1:30 and kept drinking for the next 8 hours before finally heading back to catch the fireworks from my rooftop. We then continued to drink for 4 or 5 more hours before calling it a night. Some poker broke out at some point and I think we managed to play 3 or so small SNG type tourneys. Later I had a strange dream about someone lighting a deck of cards on fire, which made a little more sense when I was cleaning up in the morning and came across a half burnt deck of cards. Fun.

Screw June!

2006-06-30T23:29:00.000-05:00

June was a bit of an up and down month for me. The first three weeks were up and the last week was down. Three quarters of the way through June it was shaping up to be a banner month as my poker winnings were hovering around $350. The final week brought a drop of $285 or so, the bulk of which came from getting beaten to a pulp on the $1/$2 tables at Party. Despite June being my worst month in 2006, at least I was in the black and booked winnings of $64.

Winnings and (losses) by poker site were:
BetFred +$4
Golden Riviera +$52
Ladbrokes (-$27)
Paradise (-$59)
Party +$154
Poker Stars (-$60)

While I had a rough time with winnings, I did manage to have a pretty solid month when it came to bonuses, racking up $749 even though I didn't hunt down any bonuses in the last half of the month. This is a bit of an inflated figure as the vast majority of the work done on the BetFred and Stars bonuses was done in April and May and both were cleared in the very first couple days of June.

Bonuses by site were:
BetFred - $265
Golden Riviera - $50
Ladbrokes - $214
Party - $100
Poker Stars - $120

I took my first shot at casino bonuses in June and the few I tried went fairly well. I ended up making $432 after clearing bonuses totalling $500.
Bet365 - $225
Intercasino - $70
Planetluck - $53
Starluck - $84

Given all the bonuses I made and the fact that I at least turned a small profit on poker play, I should probably withdraw my Screw June comment. I doubt the month will be terribly offended though, so perhaps I'll let it stand. I certainly wish I had performed better with my poker play and especially with the shots at $1/$2 but it could have gone a lot worse, so I shouldn't complain too much. Hopefully the downward trend turns itself around in July.

I have company in town for the long weekend to celebrate Canada Day so I don't anticipate getting much, if any, poker in this weekend. A little break will probably do me some good.

Good luck to all in July!

Popping my Mookie Cherry

2006-06-29T08:35:00.000-05:00

After running Empire's free $15 into the ground when my fullhouse bumped into quads and a flopped two pair ran into...I don't remember what, but it was bigger than two pair, I headed over to donate $10 to the Mookie. I haven't hopped into any of the blogger tourneys before because I am a total tourney donk who rarely plays no limit. Maybe not quite true as I do play NL SNG's at times but anything more than 1 table usually just spells donation for me. Plus these things are at outrageously high buy-ins of $10!! Holy crap, how can they afford that every week!?

It turned out to be a nice break from losing piles of money at 6-max limit, despite a reasonably poor showing, making my exit in 21st out of the 55 entrants. In my final hand there was a 5xBB raise from WLD in early position. As he hesitated 2.4 seconds before betting and put out such a large raise, I was certain he was playing 72o because the 2.4 second pause is a total online tell that I can count on every time. So, I pushed all in with my QQ, which didn't quite double the bet, only to cringe when CC (or his bot) pushed his monster stack with what turned out to be AK and WLD called his remaining stack with 72. The flop brought an A and a K, the turn filled the boat and the fat lady started wailing. I have much to learn about no limit and how to properly play the crazy hammer.

My huge pile of chips (which amounted to 1 round of blinds by the final two) certainly helped push CC to a second place finish. I expect to see my $1.74 cut show up in my Poker Stars account any minute now.

Anyway, it was much fun and a very refreshing change of pace. I'll have to make a point of donating again sometime in the near future.

Afterwards I limped back to Party and played a little $0.50/$1.00 6 max before bed, starting out my next heater with a big win of $3.

There is another donation opportunity tonight as the DADI 7 runs at 9 on Poker Stars, but I doubt I will be home on time as there is a send off tonight for someone from the office.

I hate html and will never post links again.

A New Record

2006-06-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

By racking up a single night loss of just over $148, I have managed to set a new record for amount of money lost at poker in a single day. Woot! I don't think I played quite as poorly as the results would indicate but I haven't reviewed the session at all, so the possibility definitely exists. The few times I didn't get dealt complete garbage or completely whiffed on the flop, I ran some big second best hands into some monsters and could have lost more in the process. Lots of people got added to my buddy list again. The past week has been nasty as I undergo a market correction of sorts, bringing my $1/$2 win rate back down to earth, hovering around 2.5BB/100 after losing $250 in the last several days.

So, June is shaping up to be my worst poker month for results to date. If I finish out the next few days like the last week has gone, I still have time to book a loss - which I have no intention of doing. On the bright side, there is nothing like experiencing losses to help get over the trauma of losing. I am becoming increasingly immune to feeling like utter garbage after big losing nights. Sorta. Looking back at net winnings plus lots of sweet sweet bonuses helps too.

Anyway, I may hit up another casino tonight, or I might hop right back on the $1/$2 horse. We'll see.

Monday Rebound?

2006-06-26T23:30:00.000-05:00

Well, it wasn't a huge rebound but I did manage to post a small win of $14 over the course of a little more than 200 hands for the night. Had I been playing $0.05/$0.10 this would have been an awesome showing. At $1/$2 it is slightly less impressive, but I will take a win any day of the week. Especially Wednesdays and Thursdays.

I stuck to one table all night and was very diligent about taking notes. I came across one player tonight with a note that I had made sometime in the past. Apparently I was not being quite so diligent at that time as this note didn't tell me much, other than this person likely sucked out on me. At least that is my best guess as "retarded shitcake" didn't really convey a whole lot of useful information, nor was it terribly PC. I hope it at least felt good to write it at the time.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

2006-06-26T08:31:00.000-05:00

I played three sessions at $1/$2 yesterday and ended up with a little bit of everything.

In the first session I was up $69 over the course of 304 hands. In the second session I was down $117 over the course of 382 hands. In the final session I played 653 hands, went up $50 early and then fizzled back down to even to end the day at a loss of $48.

I put on a clinic on how to check the river when ahead and put money in when behind, it was uncanny. One of the weaknesses of my game that I complain about is my mental fortitude in handling losses, so I was quite pleased to get some additional practice in this department. I need every bit of experience I can get and can't wait to lose again!

My foray into $1/$2 is going very well despite the losses over the weekend. Previously I was on a bit of a hot streak and unfortunately those come to an end eventually. I hope to start a new heater tonight.

Do you ever feel like a certain night is your lucky night and on others you just can't win? For me, Friday night always feels like a great night to play and I seem to get destroyed on Thurday nights. Well, I was messing around with check your bets and came across this interesting tidbit...

Win/(Loss) by day of the week:
Sunday $147
Monday $392
Tuesday $282
Wednesday (-$186)
Thursday (-$103)
Friday $200
Saturday $465

Apparently Saturday is my big day and Wednesdays are beating the crap out of me. Thursdays are doing a decent job of smacking me around too. If I only played on Saturdays and Mondays I would be a zillionaire, no doubt.

So, thank goodness it is Monday, my second best poker day of the week. Ship it!

Casino Bonuses

2006-06-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

Friday night I was struck with the urge (read: too drunk to play poker) to play a couple more casinos for their welcome bonuses. By Saturday afternoon I had an additional $295 en route to my neteller account. It could have been more but I stuck around at both casinos and played beyond the minimum wagering requirements and left small balances behind at both to just mess around with. These bonuses seem to be so lucrative, I do not want to dissuade the casinos from offering them by buggering off after the bare minimum of wagering is done. Not that my actions will make much difference either way, but it probably isn't a bad idea to keep my name off of any ban lists.

The first casino I signed up for was bet365 casino, which runs on playtech software. Of the limited experience I have with online casinos so far, this was by far the best. Their customer service was excellent, they offer a 100% to $200 bonus, I loved the software and to top it off, you can play pontoon, which is a blast and offers slightly less house advantage than blackjack. The fact that I actually finished up $25 on play in addition to the $200 bonus didn't hurt my opinion either I'm sure.

The other I signed up for was intercasino, which is one of the cryptologic casinos and apparently offers a monthly reload bonus as well. I did not like the software as much as playtech's but it was still better than my previous experiences with Starluck and Planetluck. I lost $30 on play while clearing this bonus which left me up $70 for the short stay.

So, in approximately 6 hours of play, I walked away up $295, which is the equivalent of a really good month of poker winnings for me. I can't decide whether this is great or disgusting. Either way, my bankroll likes it.

..........

Though I hate BetFred with a passion and have had nothing but bad luck there, I refuse to withdraw my funds until I break even on play. With bonuses factored in I am up almost $200 but I am a net loser on play alone. I paid a little visit to BetFred yesterday to whittle down that loss but ended up just adding another $30 to it instead. I truly believe I was playing my regular game but there is a huge possibility my play was impacted by the fact that I was only playing there to post a win. I can be an idiot sometimes. I WILL defeat that place eventually though!

A little later in the evening I wandered over to Poker Stars to try my luck in one of their 180 person $4.40 tourneys. After a couple hours of mainly folding garbage I managed to make my exit in 32nd when I pushed my AQo over top of Mister Super Loose and Super Aggressive's preflop raise with QQ. He was supposed to be making one of his regular moves with something like 86s at the time. All in all, a reasonably poor play on my part. C'est la vie.

Even later, I wandered over to Party to try out a 15BB challenge. I sat at a $0.50/$1.00 table with $15 and was going to move up to $1/$2 as soon as I reached $30. Instead, I reached $3 then reloaded because the table was so juicy and eventually finished down $19. So much for the 15BB challenge.

Casinos +$295, Poker (-$52)

Shots

2006-06-23T09:16:00.000-05:00

The office crew was out for some drinks and munchies, then off to a triple A baseball game for drinks and more munchies, then off to my place for more drinks. Everyone cleared out before midnight and I was left with some time on my hands while I waited for my girlfriend to crawl in from a night out with the girls. I suppose that going to bed at a decent hour should have been an option as well but that only seems like an attractive option the next morning for some reason. I wanted to play a tourney but I couldn't commit to much more than an hour of play, so I settled for my usual 6-max limit at Party.

I was not roaring drunk but I certainly wasn't sober either, and I figured I should just stick to one table of $0.50/$1 so that I couldn't do too much damage to myself. I posted in the big blind and started out right away with great cards getting dealt AQo and catching an Ace and Queen on the flop. It was looking like a great start until the one player who stuck around after the flop caught runner-runner with his 75o to make a straight. Cool trick! I chuckled and carried on and eventually posted a small win on that table. At some point I broke both of my rules and opened a second table of $1/$2. Fortunately, I got smacked in the face with the deck on that table and finished up $56 in half an hour or so before trading that table in for another $0.50/$1 table to tinker around on for another half hour with a small win, for a total of +$67 on the night.

My girlfriend arrived home as I was watching one of my "buddies" play on a $5/$10 table. I figure that timing may have saved me a few hundred dollars as I was really tempted to sit in. By "really tempted" I actually mean that I very briefly considered plunking down a few hundred dollars on that table for a shot before very quickly dismissing the idea as incredibly stupid. It may be time for a 15 or 20x BB challenge though. The last time I tried this I think I did it with 15 BB's, starting with $7.50 at my regular limit of 0.25/0.50 and moving up when I had 15 BB's for the next limit. I didn't make it far, maybe only to $1/$2, but was fun and a pretty low risk way to take a shot at some higher limits.

Very Brief Entry

2006-06-23T00:39:00.000-05:00

Drank, played, won.
+$67

Dream Tables

2006-06-22T01:33:00.000-05:00

Despite having dream tables all night, I still managed to lose $46 or so at Party $1/$2 6-max. I had position on loose passive players for much of the night. In typical fashion, they were playing all kinds of junk hands and hitting all over the place. This was only a minor factor in the loss as the bulk of it was really due to poor decisions on my part. In my experience, a turn check-raise from a passive player often means they have something worthwhile as opposed to them trying to bluff me off my hand. Well experience be damned, I just wasn't going to be pushed around tonight. Brilliant plan. Please take more of my money. Thank you, come again.

Of course, there were the standard bad beats included in there and I was card dead for much of the night, but in the end, I could have lost much less with better play. A shorter session would have helped too.

On the bright side I have a lot of new buddies on my list. Mind you, I am probably on theirs now too. D'oh!

Table Hopping

2006-06-21T09:07:00.000-05:00

My poker pysche sucks. I don't know how people play this game for a living. Just a couple losing nights makes me start questioning my poker "abilities". I use that word loosely, because I am very confident that I know enough about poker to know that there is a whole lot I don't know yet. I have been playing for seven months now and with the exception of the 2nd month, I have been in the black. For each of the past five months in a row I have increased my wins over the prior month. I originally deposited $200, have never needed to replenish it and have grown my online bankroll to over $6K (though I did deposit additional amounts to take advantage of bonuses in the early going). Bonuses make up the vast majority of that growth though, but winnings have been steadily increasing and are just under $1,300 to date. So, overall, I am doing fairly well, but I am still very very cautious.

I figure that I am only doing well because I play at baby limits with total beginners. However, whenever I do finally prod myself to move up, I find more people who play like total beginners, so perhaps all is not lost. At what point does one consider themselves to truly be a winning player? It takes a ridiculously long time for true winning rates to converge and the vast majority of poker players are losing players, so I hesitate to think of myself as a winning player yet. I am content to be a player who has won so far though.

My greatest weakness at poker is my lack of guts and the mental fortitude to handle big losses. This will keep me from moving up quickly through the stakes and will cause me to take up camp at a low comfortable level of play, stifling my potential for growth. I will not make a fortune playing poker. The flipside of this weakness is that one of my better strengths is my bankroll management (alternatively called "being a pansy with my winnings") which if it continues means my risk of going el busto should be pretty damn low. I have no problem moving down in stakes, my issues lie with moving up.

When mentioning weaknesses, I should probably include my lack of time devoted to study of the game too. That more than anything else is probably slowing me down as it would contribute greatly to adding the confidence to move up. I rarely review my sessions which leads to me rarely posting questionable hands on 2+2. I do read 2+2 a fair amount, which helps a bit but I haven't done much reading of books other than a couple readings of SSHE and I am slowly making my way through TOP right now. My desire to play for fun is apparently greater than my desire to improve. I hate losing and love winning, so perhaps my overall enjoyment factor could be increased by devoting some more time to study and a little less to playing. I'll have to ponder that one a bit.

.......

Anyway, no clue where all that came from, I really just meant to post last nights 6-max limit results, which included a lot of table hopping. I was a bit jumpy after a couple poor sessions and was quick to leave tables if I didn't like the look of them. This caused me to play at 5 tables over the course of a couple hours. Usually I am too lazy to search out better tables but it is something I should do more often. I originally sat at a $1/$2 6-max table but it was a very brief stay as it quickly dropped to three players, leaving me up $20. I then followed a buddy to a $0.50/$1.00 table and made a whopping $0.50 there over the next 15 minutes before my buddy left. And on it went through the next few tables as well, with me packing up and shipping out whenever the remaining players were either too tight, too aggressive or too few. When all was said and done, I was up $46 for the night.

In other news, Bravo Canada apparently doesn't carry Queer Eye, so I missed the Ed Miller episode.

Stormy Session in Paradise

2006-06-20T12:42:00.000-05:00

I played some $0.50/$1.00 6-max limit at BetFred for a while last night and ended up around $10. Then I headed over to Paradise for some more $0.50/$1.00 on full ring tables which started out short-handed. I stayed up far too late trying to dig out of the hole and almost managed to do so, but dug a nice deep pit in the last hour to finish somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 down. Blech.

Catch Ed Miller on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy tonight.

Poker Stars

2006-06-19T08:28:00.000-05:00

I deposited $600 at Stars in order to take advantage of their $120 reload bonus. At the limits I play there, I expect this bonus will take me quite some time as I need something like 280 SNG's to clear it.

I played a few SNG's, a $3 tourney and a $4, 180 person tourney last night. In the SNG's I finished 5th, 4th and 3rd to continue my craptastic June showing with SNG's. I have hardly played any though, so no big deal either way. In the $4 tourney I got knocked out on the first hand I got involved with when my KK turned a set and I had one person come along for the ride on a flush draw which hit on the river. In the $3 tourney I made my tourney fee back plus a whopping additional $1 per hour when I finished 161st out of the 1,500 or so.

Today feels like a real Monday as I am feeling the cumulative affect of the prior three days of golf and partying. I golfed like crap, breaking ninety on only one of the three rounds. Ironically, I played my best golf with my worst hangover. We had a great time though and I'm looking forward to doing it again.

Tilt Alert

2006-06-15T08:50:00.000-05:00

Wednesday Night Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
2 hours played, single table
(-$60)

What a swingy session. I was up, I was down, I was back up, back down, back up, way down. I went out with a bang rather than the usual wimper when I flopped a set against a bigger turned set and spewed the whole way to the river to end with a nice even $0 on the table. I had a turned fullhouse run into a rivered larger full house along the way that sent me on a downward skid. There were lots of strange suck outs by people playing garbage cards and I generally played awful, calling far too much and paying off all over the place. The highlight of my night was a misclick river call with Ace high that stood up.

I head out for three days of golf and three nights of fun after work finishes today. The weather is looking like it will be nice, so I am expecting a good time. No online poker for me until Sunday night although it is possible that we might play a little live poker while we are away.

Small Party Session

2006-06-14T09:59:00.000-05:00

Tuesday Night Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
97 hands, single tabling
+$31

I was running around last night, getting ready for a golf trip this weekend which didn't leave me much time for poker. I did get a bit of play in just before heading to bed though. For the first time ever, I actually used my Buddy List. There was only one guy playing who was on my list and I had played with him quite recently. Funny enough, when I joined the waiting list for his table I also recognized a solid player who I had played with at the same time as this buddy before. So, it looks like I'm not the only one following him around. After a bit of a wait I got a great seat that put my buddy two seats to my right.

This guy was generally very loose pre-flop and pretty passive post-flop. At one point it was four handed and I raised under the gun with KJo, the solid player on the button 3-bet, my buddy called from the small blind and the big blind folded. The flop came 3K3 rainbow and my buddy bet out, I raised, the button folded and my buddy called. The turn brough a ten to complete the rainbow and again my buddy bet out, I raised him and he re-raised, which put me into call down mode as for this guy to show aggression could mean I was beat but he played such awful cards there was no way I was not seeing a show down with such a large pot. An ace came on the river, my buddy bet out and I called expecting to be shown a 63o or maybe A3o. The pot shipped my way and he showed 92o. I don't understand his play on any street but the end result sure made for a nice hand for me. He left the table after the next hand. The solid player I also recognized left as soon as my buddy left. I think I am going to have to do this buddy list thing more often.

Tourney Donk

2006-06-13T14:00:00.000-05:00

I wrote a huge boring post about a $4, 180 person tourney I played last night and then managed to somehow close IE before posting. That is kind of how the tourney went too!

I built up a nice stack and hovered around 2nd to 5th just as the last person bubbled. I had a huge brain fart and got involved with a hand I shouldn't have been in which ended up costing me 2/3 of my stack. I got chewed on by blinds for an orbit or two and had to push any two from the big blind where I caught AK but got outdrawn by 92s when a 2 came on the river. The SB was a huge stack so my 3xBB push wasn't looking all that intimidating and my pushing range was any two cards, so I wasn't terribly surprised with the call and I got knocked out in 10th, one person away from the final table.

I was left with mixed emotions after the tourney as I actually made it much further than I had expected to, which was nice. Going from a good sized stack to short stacked on such a stupid play so late in the game was a little distressing however and the overall emotion I was left with was frustration and anger at myself. Hopefully I learned something along the way. The frustration is long gone and I am just glad to know that I can make it somewhat deep in a baby tourney. Next time I play a speculative hand and tell myself to hit the flop big or get out, I'll get out when I don't hit it big. Maybe.

Along the way I cleared the Ladbrokes $100+$50+$50 bonus while losing $25 on play there. That site could use some more traffic but otherwise it was okay.

BetFred Punts me Again, Party Delivers

2006-06-11T00:04:00.000-05:00

I wandered back to BetFred to play some $1/$2 6-max to clear my loss there before cashing out. Ms. Variance had other plans for me however and I dropped $50 there before calling it a night. There was one guy at the table who was pretty much hitting everything and that is where most of my money ended up. He was playing virtually any two cards and kept on catching. I didn't help myself any by paying off a couple times when I thought I was probably beat. No big deal anyway as it had been a pretty solid day for poker and I was still up a bit.

After getting kicked around at BetFred I decided to go try some more $1/$2 at Party. The first table I sat at cleared out in 20 minutes leaving me up $16. I loaded up another table and became "that guy". I went on the sickest hour long run of cards I have ever gone on. I was picking up great hand after great hand and I was hitting flops all over the place. The few times I was behind on the flop or turn, I caught the card I needed on the turn or river. Others were catching good hands at the same time so I was getting paid off time after time. I spent an hour at that table and was up $125.

That session pushed my Party winnings over $1k and makes me wonder why I bother playing anywhere else as something like 80% of all my winnings are from Party.

I cleared the Planetluck casino wagering requirements today apparently. This one didn't go quite as well as Starluck, leaving me with a loss of $48 on gameplay for a total gain on the bonus of $52. Not a shabby day at all with two casino bonuses clearing plus two poker site bonuses clearing on top of some nice poker winnings.

More bonuses

2006-06-10T19:37:00.000-05:00

Saturday Afternoon Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
963 hands played, 2 tabling
+$80

I got in some good poker this afternoon while finishing up the Party reload bonus, which is done and in my account. More important than the bonus being cleared was the winnings that came with it. In the time it took to clear the $100 bonus at Party I won $199 while I was at it. This was a nice successful little foray into the big scary land of 1/2. The flipside of variance is lurking around out there somewhere of course but I'm enjoying this side of things for now.

I also managed to get the $50 Golden Riviera bonus credited to my account. The fourth email was the lucky one that finally worked.

While I was playing poker I finished off the Starluck casino bonus as well. Once I confirm that I have wagered enough I will withdraw the $184 that is still there. I only lost $16 on blackjack while clearing, so except for some of the headaches that came with doing this bonus, it really wasn't all that bad. $84 for a few hours of playing blackjack isn't terrible. I'll finish up the planetluck one and see how that comes out. I may try a couple more afterwards but these two are two of the very easiest to clear, so I am not certain one way or the other at this point.

Fun with Limit SNG's

2006-06-09T12:43:00.000-05:00

Friday Night Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
1 hour played, 1 table
+$30

Early in the evening Thursday night while I was depositing at Party, updating their software and registering at Ladbrokes my girlfriend was playing a couple $5+$1 Limit hold 'em SNG's, one on Party and one on Paradise. I have no idea why she likes to play one from each site at the same time as they have different starting chips, blind levels, etc, but I haven't bothered questioning the practice. At some point, her stomach must have reached the breaking point as she jumped up to go to the kitchen to make some supper and asked me to finish her two SNG's. I was about to get started on clearing the Party bonus but playing out a couple SNG's while she made supper seemed like a pretty damned good deal to me, so I obliged.

I hadn't played a limit hold 'em SNG before and wasn't sure exactly what the optimal strategy was, so I just played fairly tight in the early going. When she handed off the two SNG's they were both in the 3rd level or so and both of her stacks were average. For the most part I didn't mix it up with anyone but did get involved in a few hands. It really doesn't take many raises to get a rather large portion of your stack in the middle, fortunately the hands held up. Slowly people started disappearing and once both SNG's were down to 6 people I felt right at home. And once these things are down to 6, people seem to drop like flies. Stacks get whittled down and people just have to commit themselves to a hand and away they go.

Anyway, before I knew it both SNG's were down to the final three and I had a bigstack at paradise and the 2nd stack at Party. I'm not sure exactly what happened at Paradise but both people went out on the same hand against me. At Party we stayed 3 handed for a while with the bigstack raising just about every hand preflop and leading the betting. Several hands went with the line of bigstack raising preflop, me 3-betting, bigstack leading flop, me raising, bigstack calling and then leading turn, me raising, bigstack calls and leads river, I call, I collect many chips. After the third or so hand like this I was sitting on a mountain of chips and shortly thereafter it was all over.

Winning back-to-back SNG's is pretty rare for me. In the 130something NL SNG's I have played at Stars I think I have only won two in a row twice. I did get some good cards when I needed them but I wonder if I shouldn't be trying some limit SNG's out myself. I have played a couple limit MTT's but pretty much got destroyed everytime. With all my 6-max play though, I felt quite comfortable once we got shorthanded.

My girlfriend got a few extra bucks in her poker accounts and I got a delicious meal. Win win. A little later she fired up an Omaha Hi Lo SNG accidentally. This made for some great entertainment. "I just won a split pot and I have no idea why!". This was all the more hilarious because I am pretty certain I said the exact same thing more than once the first time I played Omaha. Yeah, we suck.

We were out Friday night after work for a few drinks, which of course turned into seven hours of drinking. Actually, this was an earlier than normal night as we usually end up tacking a few more hours onto that. I probably wasn't in the best state to be playing any poker when I got home, so I kept to just one table. I ended up not playing like a complete idiot and did okay, posting a $30 win over the course of an hour before calling it a night.

Party Time

2006-06-09T08:26:00.000-05:00

Thursday Night Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
522 hands played, 2 tabling
+$89

I posted this last night but blogger ate the post, so this will have to be a very quick summary.

A 20% to $100 maximum bonus popped up for me at Party last night, which was pretty decent timing as I was planning on heading over there to work on some $1/$2. I am much more comfortable taking shots at that level at Party for some reason as compared to any of the sites I play just to knock off a bonus. Much of that has to do with me winning far more at Party than anywhere else, so that is where my confidence is highest. I'm not sure it really matters where I play, but I'm all about staying in my comfort zone with poker, so this is how I will be doing it.

I loaded up two tables and quickly went up $20 on one and slowly slid downwards on the other. There was a LAG raising every hand and playing it to the end on the 2nd table which gave me all kinds of trouble. I knew he was raising weak holdings and I knew he was betting out with crap but any time I pushed back he had a better hand than I did. This didn't work out so well for me and I steadily slid to just under 10 BB's at which point I was thinking I had better reload or get the hell out of Dodge. I have trouble leaving a table down though so I stuck it out and very gradually climbed back up. For most of the first two hours on that table I was around, or below $30 when I had sat with $60.

Eventually the composition of the table changed (many times over of course) and for the last 45 minutes or so I found myself sitting with 5 very loose and very passive players, which I love. At this point I went on a +$120 run to end the night on that table. I was hit with a few nasty beats along the way as they were calling everything but I knew that it should work out in my favour eventually, and it did. What beat me up more than the bad beats were the strong 2nd best hands I made and couldn't get away from. I got most of those out of the way early in the evening though.

By the end of the night I was up almost $90 with the vast majority of those winnings coming in the last half hour of the three hours I played. For most of the session I figured I'd be posting a loss and it was just a matter of how much I could minimize it, so I kind of love the way things worked out in the end. Yay Party!

I also registered at Ladbrokes last night to take advantage of the $100 deposit bonus in addition to a $50 refer-a-friend bonus plus 50% of the referrers' $100 bonus. They also offer $15 ($25 with picture) for completing a profile there. So, for 500 contributed raked hands, I can knock off $215 in bonus, thanks to 2+2 posters willing to split that referral bonus. I'd be all for getting $50 for nothing too, so if anyone happens to wander by here that plays low enough limits that $215 or $225 bonus for 500 raked hands looks really nice to them and they don't know anyone else with an account there for the RAF bonus, hit me up and I'll pop an email your way.

The casino experiment is still underway as well with my two deposits at two separate casinos. So far, I pretty much think the whole thing sucks. Bad experiences with registering, bad experiences with gaining access to the players club in order to see how much I have wagered and bad experiences with their tracking of wagering. All that said, I can still see how it could be profitable for people but it just isn't going to be worth the headache for me.

Golden Riviera Bonus Cleared

2006-06-07T22:51:00.000-05:00

Wednesday Night Summary

Golden Riviera $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
3 hours played
+$42

I finished off the 250 raked hands required for the $50 Golden Riviera bonus tonight. This was a nice short bonus and I ended up winning $51 in the process. At my limits, that isn't bad for a couple nights of play. Now I just get to wait and see how long it takes to get that bonus credited to my account as I have heard that Golden Riviera is sometimes very slow to pay. No rush on my end anyway. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of traffic on prima these days as there was only one table of $0.50/$1.00 running. I haven't been doing a whole lot of multi-tabling lately, so one table suited me just fine.

I also signed up for another casino tonight for another $100 bonus. I am only half way through the Starluck casino bonus and am a little below what the expected value for optimal blackjack would be. I played a bit at Planetluck tonight using slightly larger bets and experienced an even larger downward variance. I'm curious to see how these come out in the end. I feel pretty sure that if I were to do the top 10 casinos or so, I would be up nicely. On any given one of these deals though, it wouldn't be very shocking at all to bust out. I'll see how these two work out and decide if I want to do anymore afterwards.

I finally managed to dust off my clubs and got nine holes in last Friday and played in a scramble tournament yesterday. I hit a few nice shots here and there but my swing is pretty rusty still. On Friday I played bogie golf the whole way and wasn't terribly upset with that. I basically stank yesterday but there were a couple bright moments as well which will keep me going back for more.

Trout Blogs

2006-06-06T21:10:00.000-05:00

Wild Bill, professional poker player and author of The Grind just released a site meant to capture all 2+2 blogs. I happened to bump into the site yesterday, very shortly after its release and was surprised to see my blog listed there. At the time there were about 30 blogs listed and it has already grown to over 70 in just a day. Blogs can be added very easily on the site if yours is not listed yet. Check it out at www.troutblogs.com

I pulled a big chunk of change out of Poker Stars with the intention of cashing some out but before I got around to that, I got hit with the urge to chase down another deposit bonus. I decided on Golden Riviera, based on all of the 2+2 and Bonus Whore posts complaining about how tough it was to cash out and what an overall pain that site was. I am a sucker for punishment, so thought it may be a fun one. I am not quite as aggressive at bonus chasing as many people, so I hope to have a nice smooth experience with them. It is only a $50 bonus and only requires 250 raked hands to clear, so it should be nice and quick anyway. After BetFred I am not up to dealing with a large bonus.

At the same time I figured I would hit up another prima site and decided on Bet365 so as to finally take advantage of a rakeback deal as well. I was informed by the affiliate I was going to sign up through that as of last week there is no more rakeback deal for Bet365. Kind of hilarious timing seeing as though the only other time I tried to sign up for rakeback was with Empire the very day Party bought them back and cancelled all affiliate deals. Customer support at Rakemeback.com was very apologetic, much moreso than they needed to be as this is completely out of their control. I may sign up there anyway to clear the $100 initial deposit bonus but we'll see.

Then, basically at the same time, I got hit with the urge to try out a casino deal. For quite a while I have been reading posts on 2+2 in the internet bonuses forum about people making a killing on casino sign up deals, so I figured I would give it a try. I signed up at Starluck Casino and deposited $100 and was credited immediately with a matching $100 bonus. I have to wager $1,600 before any of the deposit can be withdrawn. I don't know if it was a bad night there or what but it took me several tries to register and the software went all wonky on me at least twice. My first impression was not great. I stuck to blackjack and went up $40 or so before slowing drawing back to even. I'm not sure how much I have left to wager, but I can already see how these casino deals can be some pretty quick money as the wagering requirements clear quite quickly. I don't anticipate doing many of these as I much prefer playing poker but I will probably try out a couple and see how they work out. It wasn't long ago that I swore I would never try out a casino but at one point I wasn't going to play at more than one poker site as chasing bonuses just seemed like more trouble than it is worth too. Give me another month or two and I'll be going busto on online roulette or something equally stupid.

Another Bonus Cleared

2006-06-04T16:31:00.000-05:00

Sunday Afternoon Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
9 played
3 - 3rd, 1 - 4th, 2 - 5th, 1 - 6th, 1 - 7th, 1 - 9th
(-$22.50)
(-45.5%) ROI

Not my best run of SNG's. On the bright side, I did get my chips in the middle with the best of it in all but two of my exits. Doesn't really help me this afternoon, but I suppose in theory it is a good long term habit.

I did finally finish off the $120 Poker Stars reload bonus today, so the bankroll continues to grow steadily. My ratio of bonuses earned to winnings is disgusting which in turns makes the limits I play compared to my bankroll also disgusting. I could have worse problems than being overrolled I suppose. I ignore bonuses won when considering when to move up in levels and will continue to stick to that, so maybe I'll pull a bit of cash back out sometime soon. I managed to spend about triple my entire poker bankroll last month, so any little bit extra would help right now.

It is time to start closing the gap between bonuses and winnings. Therefore, my plan for the rest of the month is to win piles and piles of money. Sounds simple enough.

Digging Out

2006-06-04T11:50:00.000-05:00

Sunday Morning Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
1.5 hours played
1 and 2 tabling
+$17

$20 to go and I'm in the black at BetFred. OCD rules.

BetFred Bonus Cleared

2006-06-04T09:39:00.000-05:00

Saturday Night Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
4 hours played
single table
+$14

I finally finished the BetFred initial deposit bonus for $250, plus I picked up another $15 bonus for unknown reasons along the way. This turned out to be yet another deposit bonus which just turned out to be a pain. I have no idea why it took me so long but I realized this morning that I had signed up there in March. Well, I have a pretty good idea why it took me so long actually - I dreaded playing at BetFred for much of my stay there. For the most part, the players there are exactly what I am looking to play against. Lots of cold calls, lots of people willing to play with any two cards and lots of people willing to go to the river as long as they are holding two cards. While this is really an ideal situation, I still managed to get my butt handed to me for most of my play there. Frustrating.

The best I can figure is that I played approximately 6,000 hands of 6-max limit at BetFred and ended up with a loss of $37 for -0.6 BB/100. Not my greatest streak and I still can't figure out why clearing this bonus took so long. With the bonuses I am up a healthy $228 there but losing money on play really bothers me. This isn't the first time I have been slightly down after clearing a bonus at a site. I was down $25 at PokerNow after I cleared the $100 deposit bonus. After taking a break from that site for a few weeks I went back and ran the -$25 up to +$10 and then never went back again. While I know I'd be better off just moving on to another site and deposit bonus or back to the safe haven of Party Poker, I strongly suspect I'll find myself back at BetFred attempting to turn that loss on play into at least breakeven or a small profit.

Not exactly sure where I'll be taking the bulk of my limit play next. I really really wish I would have had the foresight to sign myself up for a rakeback deal at Party Poker. It is still my favourite site to play and the only place I tend to play with no bonus to work on. I suppose I could close my account for a while and then open up a new one with a rakeback deal but I'm leary to go that route. Then again, there are piles and piles of sites I haven't yet tried with all kinds of legitimate rakeback deals to work with, so maybe I'll just keep on looking. There are still lots of sites with easy initial deposit bonuses to clear that I haven't yet checked out as well. Perhaps I'll check out a few sites I haven't tried before.

In the meantime I'll probably knock off the rest of the Poker Stars bonus with some baby stake SNG's. Another $76 or so of profit on those and I will be making the big move to the huge $11's. Huge money.

BetFred Strikes Back

2006-06-03T14:54:00.000-05:00

Saturday Afternoon Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
2 hours played
(-$55)

Wow. I got pummelled in a 2 hour session at BetFred this afternoon. I was up $20 or so early on and watched that gradually disappear and continue to spiral down as hand after made hand got stomped on. I ran into quads and straight flushes three times each and of course I had full houses or nut flushes each time in order to extract the maximum out of my pocket. Second nut flushes got crushed with a fourth flush card on the river several times, giving someone with the single ace the better hand. Back to standard BetFred practice for me. I paid off a pile of people when they hit those hands on me. My bad.

Thanks to the wicked run last night, I am up $40 there over the last two days. I'll repeat this to myself all afternoon to take the sting out of that session. I am very close now to clearing the $250 deposit bonus as another hour should do the trick. Now I am down $50 at BetFred and will stubbornly work that back to a positive figure before I pull out of there. This will give me a great opportunity to lose my full deposit and bonuses and give me something good to whine about.

Round 2 in June goes to BetFred. I'll head back tonight to extract my revenge on that damned place. Or get further pummelled, we'll see.

BetFred Revenge

2006-06-03T10:19:00.000-05:00

Friday Night Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
4 hours played
1 and 2 tabling
+$97

+$10 bonus

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
3 played
1 - 1st, 1 - 6th, 1 - 7th
+$6
36.4% ROI

I played some limit poker for the first time in over two weeks and went on one hell of a hot streak. It was a nice warm welcome back to fixed limit. I got hit in the face by the deck, hit lots of flops, turns and rivers. Pretty much the opposite of how BetFred had gone for me in the past. The winnings last night were enough to dig me out of the hole there completely and leave me just barely over break even. Last nights play also got me a lot closer to finishing off the raked hands required for the $250 deposit bonus which has taken me forever to clear. Another hour or two should finish it off. There was also a $15 bonus showing as pending in the software which previously did not work for bonuses, so they must have gotten that all fixed now. I cleared $10 of the $15 with play last night and only need another 30 hands or so for the last $5. I have no clue why I had this bonus in my account, but I'll take it. It was listed as a May 31, 2006 bonus with almost a full year available to clear it.

I also played a few SNG's very late last night and don't have the slightest clue how they went. I vaguely recall being short stacked pretty early in all of them due to nifty beer + rum strategic play. I do know that I went out fairly early in two of them and finished first in one. I should take a look at the hand histories on those to see what sort of idiotic moves got me knocked out and how badly I sucked out on people to take down first place in one.

I haven't verified, but I believe that yesterday stands as my best single day results to date. I don't recall cracking $100 in one day before. That also pushes me through my first $1,000 in winnings. That milestone took quite a while to hit as I have been playing since November 2005. Winnings have been coming steady but fairly slow and seem to be gradually picking up speed as I continue. I'm liking this trend and hope it persists.

June Begins

2006-06-02T07:56:00.000-05:00

Thursday Night Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
3 played, 1 - 3rd, 1 - 5th, 1 - 7th
(-$7.50)
(-45.5%) ROI

I'm not sure what possessed me to raise first in and then call the SB's all-in push while I was holding pocket 7's but as I was doing it I was thinking "FOLD IDIOT, FOLD" and watched helplessly as the mouse cursor moved to the call button and some jackass actually clicked the button. That brilliant move earned me a 7th place finish in my first SNG of June. At least I got what I deserved - which ordinarily would suit me just fine. I was kind of cheering for an underdog suckout on that one though. I lost less than what a sandwich at lunch would cost anyway, so I'll probably live. The other two SNG's didn't go much better, although I did avoid making any huge bonehead moves and barely snuck into the money in one.

I am finally going to knock the dust off my golf clubs and get out for at least 9 holes this afternoon. This means I have to work my butt off this morning, which is why I am posting right now. Procrastination rules. Speaking of procrastination, the fifth year of my four year car lease ended last month and I finally got around to buying it out. I do not recommend doing this as it makes for a rather expensive way to finance a vehicle purchase.

Another Month

2006-05-31T23:05:00.000-05:00

May Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 and $1/$2 6-max Limit
(-$58)

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 and $1/$2 6-max Limit
+$220
+$100 reload bonus

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
95 played
+$139
26.6% ROI

$11 SNG's and misc. tourneys
(-$23)

+$2,500 milestone hand bonus

Wednesday Night Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
6 played, 1 - 1st, 4 - 2nd, 1 - 5th
+$43.50

Tuesday Night Summary

Poker Stars $4.40 & $3.30 tourneys
30th/180 & 265th/1,473
(-$8)

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
2 played, 1 - 5th, 1 - 6th
(-$11)

I played a pile of SNG's this month, knocking off 95 of them at the $5.50 level. The more I played, the lower my ROI fell as reality started catching up to my early hot streak. Not that I really expected a 40% or high 30%'s ROI to continue, but it sure was nice while it lasted. Given my low amount of experience with the SNG's, I am very happy that my ROI is hanging in there above 25%. If I expect to do decent at higher levels though, I am going to need to throw some more studying into the mix but I did get a nice bump in the experience department this month.

My initial goal before moving to the $11's was to play at least 100 SNG's at the $5.50 level and build my bankroll from my initial $200 to $500. I passed the 100 figure this month and ended the month up $225 which gets me within $75 of the winnings criteria. I have been fairly patient so far but I increasingly feel that I am a huge wimp when it comes to pushing myself and moving up, so I may not wait out the full $500 bankroll. If history is any indicator though, I will hit that goal and go well past before I convince myself to tackle the next level.

Speaking of next levels, I have been talking about moving to $1/$2 6-max Limit for months I think. I did play a bit at that level in May, with some success at Party, but got sidetracked somewhere along the way by SNG's. In June I hope to get back to 6-max limit hold 'em and take some more shots at $1/$2.

On the bonus front, I don't have many raked hands left to finish up a $250 bonus at BetFred but it seems everytime I play there I get my butt handed to me in some fashion or other. It isn't the tough competition either, I have just run bad there ever since the second week I was there. Also, I am almost done a $120 bonus at Poker Stars which will be easy to wrap up in June if I just play a few more SNG's there.

May turned out to be a banner month for me. The huge amount of bonus is due to hitting a milestone hand at Poker Stars as their 5 billionth hand approached. It also turned out to be my best month to date in terms of winnings. I have won a little bit more each month since I started playing poker in November. This of course is a trend that can't continue forever but so far so good and I hope it continues for another few months or longer should I be so lucky. I took a big downturn with the SNG's a few days ago and it looked like if I continued to run poorly I could lose enough in the last few days of the month to slip below April's winnings. That turned around tonight though when I placed in the money in 5 out of 6 SNG's. I finished 2nd in four of them, 1st in one and 5th in one. A couple of those 2nd places really should have been 1st places but I screwed myself with over-aggressive headsup play...if there is such a thing. On the flip side, I really snuck into the money in a couple others and was happy to take 2nd place. The +$43.50 night inflated the winnings at the end of the month, bringing me back to where I was a week or two ago before leaking away some winnings. As fun as the SNG's are, my best bet for making money likely lies with 6-max limit poker. The variance is definitely more pleasant with SNG's though.

Last night I gave myself a little reminder why I shouldn't play MTT's as I donated a few bucks to a couple tourneys. I played far too tight for far too long, letting myself get blinded down. I have to loosen up and play some more hands after the first couple levels. I outlasted a pile of people but that is all I did as I was always well below the average stack and never gave myself a fighting chance. I did have fun though!

I'm wiped and rambling and boring myself now. Not good.

Hope your May was great and your June is even better.

Not much poker lately

2006-05-30T08:22:00.000-05:00

I have only managed to play a handfull of SNG's since last Thursday and didn't play them particularly well. I have been busy building up GBP's as my girlfriend was offering double good boyfriend points for a limited time only for the painting of her new place. I have my eye on the threesome in the points catalog and figured this would be a good opportunity to push me over the edge in points. She moves in today, so it may be the end of double points, but there is still a lot left to do so who knows.

As far as poker goes, it doesn't look like I am going to finish either the Poker Stars or BetFred bonus in May. Both of these bonuses have taken me a long time and should make for easy bonuses in June. I think I said that about BetFred for May though also. May will definitely close out as the month I earned the most bonuses simply due to hitting a $2,500 score at Poker Stars for a milestone hand. Without that it would have been my worst month to date as I only cleared a $100 Party Poker reload bonus otherwise. May could also be my highest winnings to date as well but that depends on whether I am able to play the next couple nights.

Strange Hand Followup

2006-05-26T08:12:00.000-05:00

Just the other day I posted about a Strange Hand I played when the big blind folded a pot of 1,350 to the short stacked small blind for an all-in bet on the flop of only another 22 chips. I had forwarded the hand history to Poker Stars support and heard back from them today:

Hello Floppy,

Thank you once again for reporting your concerns to us. Although we do monitor the games for collusion, we always appreciate vigilant players such as yourself reporting any strange or unusual play to us for review. I have completed my investigation into the accounts of XX and YY.

We have investigated these players and they are clearly related. From time to time, they engaged in softplay or avoided confrontations.

In your tournament, they appeared to play straight up, and as such, the final results of this event will stand. We have educated the players on these rules available here:

http://www.pokerstars.com/tournamentsrules.html
http://www.pokerstars.com/cardroomrules.html

As a further precaution, we have also flagged their accounts so that they cannot play together in real money ring games and Sit and Go tournaments.

Thank you once again for helping us keep our games honest and fair.
Regards,

PokerStars Support Team

Softplaying is a far cry from straight out collusion I suppose but it is so easy for this to happen online. In this case, and many others I'm sure, the people may not even have a clue that they are doing anything at all wrong.

I once played a SNG with my brother while we were on the phone together at the same time. We played tougher against each other than we did against others in the tourney. He would raise my big blind with nothing when he had position and I'd go over top of him with my 83o - thankfully he didn't spite call in that situation. We did talk about the game, but never about what we held until one of us was out of the hand. I like winning and money just as much as the next person, but damn, respect the game and your opponents by playing on the level please.

Per a post on 2+2 a couple days ago, a team of 8 people were apparently shut down on Stars for working together in Omaha. I am not sure whether they all worked together at the same table at the same time, but even with just a few of them there would be a huge advantage simply due to the number of hole cards known amongst the team members, not to mention team betting to manipulate pots.

I'm sure the sites will do whatever they can to stay on top of the various forms of online cheating as it poses a pretty major threat to their revenue stream. No matter what the sites do though, they will never be able to come close to preventing all cheating.

So don't cheat, M'kay?

2+2 Forum Game

2006-05-25T08:46:00.000-05:00

Poker Stars $11 2+2 Forum Game
20 players
8th
(-$11)

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
4 played
1 - 2nd, 1 - 4th, 2 - other
(-$8.50)

One of the main reasons I created a Poker Stars account a few months ago was to participate in some of the 2+2 forum games. I finally got around to playing in one last night and ended up burying myself with a stupid play. I stayed quite tight for most of the tourney managing to steal some blinds here and there with legitimate hands. For the most part, everyone was playing very tight as many hands were being taken before the flop or on the flop.

I finally got involved with a hand that was raised 3xBB pre flop when I called with ATo from the blinds. The flop came Ten high, giving me top pair top kicker and I threw a donk bet for about one-half of the pot at the pre flop raiser who then doubled my bet which I called. The turn was a J, I checked and was faced with a minimum bet which stank to me of begging to be raised. So, because I like to oblige, I did raise and wasn't surprised at all to have the bet doubled on me again which I yet again called. The river came down and he pushed the remainder of his stack in the pot leaving me with a tough decision. There was a possible straight on board, no flush draw and I had no clue where I stood. In a normal $5.50 SNG, I probably walk away from this hand but because I was playing with 2+2'rs I was hyper-sensitive about being bluffed and I felt there was still a very good chance I was ahead. I had him covered, but not by a lot and I eventually called after almost folding the hand. He had a busted straight draw and my hand was good. I was happy to win the hand but it left me wishing I had a much better grasp on no limit.

For a time I had a good stack and stayed quite tight with the odd standard pre-flop raise taking down the pot uncontested. I finally managed to get myself in trouble by re-raising with AQs only to be reraised behind which I stubbornly called despite thinking I was looking at AA, KK or AK. The flop came KJx, with none of my suit. I checked and he bet out . I was already kicking myself for calling the reraise prior to the flop but the bet was so small I felt I had to call. The turn checked through and then he again bet very small on the river. I made one last crying call and got shown pocket Aces. Turns out the K on the flop slowed him down as he had me on KK. So, I lost a huge chunk of my stack on a pretty stupid play...but at least I didn't get bluffed!!!

After this I was pretty short stacked, which is actually the part of SNG's I am probably most comfortable in playing, as I can just push when conditions are right and not worry about getting outplayed on later streets. I doubled up when my pocket nines held up against overcards and managed to take down blinds a few times with a couple standard raises. Eventually I got blinded down though and was back in push or fold mode and pushed an A-rag into a KQs which hit the flush and was sent on my way. With the exception of the two hands detailed in agonizing, yet still incomplete, detail above, I was pretty happy with my play and I faired better than I expected to. It was a lot of fun to play with the 2+2 bunch and it sure was different to play in such a tight environment. Next time I would be doing myself a favour not to worry about who I am playing with though and just play my game.

Afterwards I played a few SNG's. And that is all I have to say about that.

In other news, I got a mega major promotion after a big meeting with all the pooh-bahs in our firm to discuss my productive (or lack thereof) hours. Great news for my life bankroll but potentially awful news for my poker bankroll as I will have to slim down my forum and blog reading during the day. I figured I might have to become a mature and responsible individual one day. I could stand to do a little more work at work so I'm sure it will be all good, plus working for oneself will be all the more rewarding.

Strange Hand

2006-05-24T09:43:00.000-05:00

Given the very low level of stakes I play at I have never been very concerned about collusion but I saw a hand that was so bizarre the other day it made me wonder. We were down to 3 remaining in a $5.50 SNG with blinds at 300/600 and a 25 ante. I folded the button with a stack of 9,000, the short stack was in the small blind and limped in leaving her with t22, the big blind with a stack of 4,000 or so checked. The flop came down TJ8 rainbow, the small blind bet her remaining 22 chips into the pot....and the big blind folded. I know that I have made some really stupid folds when I was getting odds to call but never in my life have I considered folding to a t22 bet for a pot of t1372. You could rip up and throw away both of your hole cards and make that call.

Now, given the very low level of stakes, I can't really seriously consider that there was any collusion going on but wow, that hand was crazy. That must have been a misclick. Please please let that have been a misclick. I know they happen as I make them fairly regularly. The last misclick I can recall was raising pocket Aces with blinds at 10/20 in the first level of a SNG. There was one limper and I wanted to raise 80 but hammered an extra 0 and smacked return right away for a pre flop raise of 40xBB. Smooth champ. Strangely enough, everyone folded. Then again, at the $5.50's I wouldn't have been all that surprised to get 4 callers either, it could have been a brilliant move.

It had to be a misclick! Or I had really really pissed off the big blind somehow. Or it was some strange metagame tactic. Whatever it was, I thought it was pretty hilarious.

Winning SNG run comes to an end

2006-05-23T22:29:00.000-05:00

Tuesday Night Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
6 played
1 - 2nd, 1 - 3rd, 1 - 4th, 1 - 5th, 2 - 6th
(-$10.50)
(-31.8%) ROI

I had a nice little winning streak going with SNG's but my luck finally ran out tonight. Some bad play added to the lack of luck issue. I made one very large blunder to get knocked out 6th in one SNG when I failed to believe that the very aggressive big stacks river check raise meant anything significant. It did. Other than that, I just lost a couple races and got all-in with a short stack against dominating hands more than once, running my AK into AA, AQ into AK and AJs into AK. Given the relative stack sizes and blind levels, I was fine with all of my pushes for the most part.

I was pretty tired tonight so didn't push for any more than 6 tourneys and almost bailed before that. Time to recharge my batteries.

Another Pile of SNGs

2006-05-22T23:30:00.000-05:00

Monday Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
20 played
4 - 1st, 1- 2nd, 3 - 3rd, 1 - 4th, 7 - 5th, 2 - 6th, 1 - 7th, 1 - 8th
+$20.50
18.6% ROI

I spent the final day of my long weekend just like the first two days of the weekend, playing a buttload of poker. I spent much of the day getting my arse handed to me but salvaged it with a hot streak towards the end which had me placing in the money four games in a row and taking down 1st place in three of them.

My no limit game still needs an awful lot of work. I know just enough to stumble through these SNG's with some success but find myself feeling like a fish out of water at times, even at the $5.50's. Fortunately, others are very willing to make some pretty significant mistakes in the early going. I would like to convert some of my bubble finishes to money but I am happy to be winning and have been pleased with my results so far. I will definitely need to do some learning before I go too much further though. I still have Harrington Volumes 1 and 2 I haven't cracked open yet and mean to get to those just as soon as I get through Theory of Poker, which I will do soon seeing as though I finally finished reading Small Stakes Hold 'Em for the second time.

More review and analysis of my play would help as well and I should probably do a little more reading and maybe even some posting over at 2+2.

Back to the office grind tomorrow. More sitting on my butt looking at a computer screen but with a significant boost in my hourly earning rate.

SNG Fever

2006-05-22T10:32:00.000-05:00

Late Saturday Night Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 and $1/$2 6-max Limit
few hours of play
(-$49)

Sunday Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
25 played
7 - 1st, 2 - 3rd, 4 - 4th, 3 - 5th, 5 - 6th, 3 - 7th, 1 - 8th
+$38
27.6% ROI

Late Saturday night I played some 6-max at BetFred and gave back $49 after having been up $63 earlier in the day. It was a bad decision to play so late as I had exhausted myself with all the Poker Stars milestone chasing earlier in the day/evening. Just another reminder to watch my session lengths and fatigue levels. I get lots of these reminders and am pretty sure I will get more. I was playing with LAGs who kept hitting their hands and caught myself playing way off my game as a result. By then the damage had already been done and I eventually, and reluctantly, shut everything down and got myself to bed.

The weather on Sunday turned out to be cooperatively poor afterall and I got in a pile of SNG's. I have never come close to putting in 25 SNG's in a day before and doubled my month total to date with that run. I played 3 at a time and for the most part found that to be quite manageable. I did try one set of 4 at a time and found that to be fairly unmanageable once all 4 were still going after 45 minutes. I can see how people can play a large number of these at a time if using a good monitor which can handle 4 windows with no overlap. I play on my laptop which has MAJOR overlap and is very difficult for me to follow the play well and get good reads and notes on players. Even still, 3 tables at once at the $5.50 level is okay, though far from ideal for me.

Not surprisingly, my ROI and ITM dropped when playing multiple tables and everything took a big turn south after I had played 8 hours straight, yet continued to play for another few hours. Towards the end of the night I did make some pretty nasty mistakes and got yet another reminder to watch my session lengths and fatigue levels. Deja vu.

Strangely, I had a lot of 1st place finishes relative to my normal distribution. I had been a bit worried about the lack of 1st place finishes compared to 2nd's and 3rd's but after this mega session I now have a distribution of 17 1st, 15 2nd and 14 3rd place finishes. I was playing for 1st all day and as a result I bubbled a lot, finishing 4th or 5th 7 times, never finishing 2nd and only finishing 3rd twice.

I took some time this morning to review a few of yesterdays SNG's and this is something I should definitely spend more time on. While I do want to be the best player I can be, I do get much more enjoyment out of playing rather than studying and this leads me to spend the vast majority of my poker time on play rather than learning. I reviewed a few SNG's in Poker Tracker and spotted some ugly big errors (this was pretty easy to do in the last few SNG's of the night) and a few on-going leaks to work on. I also reviewed a few SNG's in SNGPT in order to identify situations where it was +EV to push all in. Unless I am short stacked I usually opt to raise a portion of my stack rather than push it all in as long as a normal 3xBB raise doesn't represent 30 or 40% of my total stack. SNGPT is a great tool for identifying situations where I should be pushing as it analyzes relative stacks, position and blind levels and provides EV calculations for a push given different calling ranges. For anyone who plays a lot of SNG's or MTT's, this is an incredible tool worth many times what it costs to register. Check it out at Sit n Go Power Tools. For anyone who plays SNG's or MTT's against me, this software is a piece of crap, don't waste your money.

Milestones!

2006-05-20T21:26:00.000-05:00

Alternate title: I want to birth Lee Jones' babies!

That was one helluva day of poker...or sorta not poker. Due to hitting Poker Stars milestone hand #4,995,500,000 my poker earnings reached a milestone I didn't expect to hit for quite some time. The $2,425 bonus plus another $63 won at BetFred $.50/$1.00 6-max while all the Poker Stars folding was going on pushed me through the $5,000 barrier. I wish more of it were from pure winnings rather than bonuses, but I'm pretty jazzed about the big bankroll boost anyway.

Check out all the milestone hand winners during the Poker Stars promo. Several tables and individual winners, including one of the final table winners, are 2+2 posters or lurkers. I would imagine a blogger or two got in on the action too but I haven't had a chance to do the rounds yet.

Major props to our entire group! The six of us who were together at the very end had stuck together for almost 11 hours straight to the end of the promo and had the process down to a science. Two of the group members had been at it all night long as one of them was part of the original group we formed at 10pm Friday night and another was my replacement at 2:30am. Another joined up with me this morning and the two others got picked up sometime during my 5 or 6 hour overnight nap. It turned out that we were a bit of an International crew with the Netherlands, Greece and Canada covered in addition to California, Texas and Rhode Island. This was by far the longest amount of time I have played poker with the same group and it was quite fun. I made $1 in folded blinds over the course of the day.

I owe Poker Stars some real play after all of this and plan to rattle off a pile of SNG's tomorrow if the weather is cooperatively poor. Quite some time ago I had laid out a plan of moving up to $11 SNG's once I had played at least 100 $5.50's and had grown my $200 deposit to $500. I will hold myself to the 100 played part of the plan but I highly doubt I'll have the patience to hold out for the full $300 in earnings. My results to date at the $5.50's are a pretty good indication that I have been running very very hot. Of course, the number of SNG's I have played is so low that I can not take anything from the results to date. That said, I do not anticipate having any major difficulties with $11 SNG's once I get there, despite my current (-18%) ROI at $11's. And if I do, well, I don't mind moving back to the baby SNG's anyway.

I hope to finish up the BetFred bonus sooner rather than later too. I covered a bit of ground in that regard today while I partially dug myself out of the hole. I am still down $44 and plan to be well above even by the time I finish up there.

Score!!!

2006-05-20T13:10:00.000-05:00

Alternate title: I love Poker Stars!
Alternate title: The Best Hand of my Life!
Alternate title: Holy Crap!
Alternate title: Yay!
Alternate title: Eating my Words!

Anyone remember when I said "I am certain it would be more +EV for me to sit at tables and raise just to steal blinds as everyone else folds but oh well." Okay, probably not, but I was dead wrong. I was feeling a little silly about hunting the Poker Stars milestone hand bonus by folding rapidly in order to get in as many hands as possible as the milestone approached. Well, I am not feeling the least bit silly about it right now.

My group hit milestone hand #4,995,500,000 on Poker Stars earning each of us a cool $2,000 and the winner of the hand $5,000. As fortune would have it, all 6 of us are 2+2 posters or lurkers. A couple of these guys had stayed up literally all night long trying to get lucky and hit a milestone hand. I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep, so got up and fired up Poker Stars to do some folding. And Bingo! Major luckbox hit a few hours later.

So, now I get to feel like even more of a tool as I play my big $0.50/1.00 6-max with a bankroll in excess of $5k. All in good time though. Due to bonuses, my bankroll is growing much quicker than my skill and comfort level. Actually, I feel that my skill level is ready for $1/$2 but I'm waiting for my comfort level to catch up still.

Now I have a very odd "Best Hand of my Life" as it turned out to be a 75o that I folded without seeing my cards as the glare of the hand #xxxxx00000 blinded me. For further let down on the biggest hand of my life, the hand got folded around to the blinds. There were about 100 observers in our room immediately afterwards screaming about the fact that we donkeys just folded someone $5k. I think we'll all live just fine, as the winner of the hand graciously chopped the difference equally amongst us all. They were also screaming that we were bots, all the same person, the hand wasn't dealt and thus didn't count, we were all witches and should be burnt, Poker Stars was going to take back the money when they heard about this and other various niceties. Even though HostJacob repeatedly posted in the room that the hand indeed was dealt and there was nothing at all wrong with the win, the crazed mob carried on. It was kinda cute really.

Friday Night Summary

Poker Stars $5.50 SNG's
7 played
1 - 1st, 2 - 2nd, 2 - 3rd, 2 - 6th
+$29

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
3 hours
(-$9)

It was a pretty good night for SNG's last night too. One of those 2nd place finishes should have (could have) been a 1st as I was very much in control of that SNG but it went headsup during a rush of folding on 8 tables for milestone hands and I would either push all-in or fold pre-flop depending on whether I had time to slide the bar all the way to the right or only had time to click fold. That guy must have thought I was a complete donkey and I probably made his buddy list.

In between folding sprees I managed to play some 6-max limit at BetFred in order to try and work of some more of the raked hands I require for the $250 initial deposit bonus. In standard BetFred practice, I got beat up for most of the night. The combination of river suck-outs and just plain ole outdraws was crazy at times. In many cases, people were chasing total crap and catching on the river, which is great in the long run and I'm cool with. In many other cases, people were just on good draws that were coming in for them on the river too, which isn't as quite as fantastic in the long run but I'm cool with that too. I guess overall I'm cool with it. But it sure does make me want to break things sometimes. In the end it was a pretty minor loss for the night anyway and I did get a bit closer to the bonus.

As for now, I am still folding like a madman on Poker Stars for another 5 hours or so as the 5 billionth hand approaches and sneaking in some 6-max play on BetFred in between. I am looking forward to playing a pile of SNG's later tonight and tomorrow at Poker Stars. Running well at the SNG's plus the nice bonus pay off there has me feeling pretty good about PS right now.

Between the lack of sleep and the adrenaline shot to the heart when we hit that hand, I could really go for a nap.

Stars SNG's and Milestone Hands

2006-05-19T16:29:00.000-05:00

Thursday Night Summary

Poker Stars $5 SNG's
5 played
1 - 1st, 1 - 3rd, 2 - 4th, 1 - 8th
(+$4)

There isn't much I can say about the SNG's last night. I won some, I lost some more but came out slightly ahead in the end. I got extremely unlucky at times and extremely lucky at others. I was getting run over by aggressive heads up play in but eventually overcame it with some luck to take the 1st. I would get whittled down and whittled down some more and then push all in and double up. This went on for a while. I couldn't tell during the downward runs if I was just up against better cards or not but when this guy had the chip lead he applied tons of pressure and was betting my stack on almost every flop it seemed. I was catching a whole lot of air so really couldn't call. I pushed back hard a couple times, sometimes with absolutely nothing with some success but really got lucky on a couple key all ins in the end.

I got unlucky on a couple of the bubbles and on the 3rd place finish, but that is poker and fortunately I have forgotten all the gory details now. The only other hand of the night I remember was pushing all in from the button with my AQs, getting called by 66 and watching a flop of 888, followed by a brick on the turn and another 8 on the river to give me the hand and send some poor soul packing. Standard stuff really.

I then lost $3.45 in blinds while folding around on a pile of tables as another milestone hand approached. I am certain it would be more +EV for me to sit at tables and raise just to steal blinds as everyone else folds but oh well. A quick $2k score would be much more fun than making a few bucks stealing blinds. Even the thought of a quick $2k score is more fun than stealing instead but in pure EV terms, I'm a sucker on this one.

Tonight, I expect I will play some more SNG's and then lose some blinds.

What's up Doc

2006-05-19T11:07:00.000-05:00

I hate being sick. I am a big suck about it and just lie around waiting to die. I took Monday off and slept until past noon. The next three days, I went home immediately after work and slept for 1 to 2 hours each evening and still got to bed at a decent hour. I have consumed so much orange juice this week that a crack addiction may be a cheaper habit.

My girlfriend has been at my place the entire week coughing evil germs at me and it turned out that she had some sort of bacterial throat infection. As I was showing near identical symptoms I figured I had better go see a Doctor sooner rather than later as I must have the same problem.

If there is something I hate more than being sick, is being told by a medical professional that I'm not nearly as sick as I think I am. While it could be a bacterial infection, apparently it could also just be allergies, so while my girlfriend takes antibiotics and gets hopped up on freaky narcotic-filled cough syrup, I am supposed to take over the counter allergy medication. I had been taking allergy medication all week long already. I hate Doctors. I did feel a bit for this poor guy though. It was a walk-in clinic and it was very busy this morning. He was the only one on staff and is trying to get out of town for vacation. The patient he saw immediately before me had her 2 year son with her who screamed like he was being tortured for the entire visit. Apparently the kid had a 'bad experience' at this clinic another time. I'm sure I could have been holding my severed arm on my lap and he would have told me to take a couple aspirin and drink plenty of fluids. I hope he enjoys his vacation. And gets leprosy.

I won't even start about my own Doctor, who I'm beginning to think doesn't even exist anymore as his office is always closed and when it isn't, I can never get an appointment within the next month. This is the same guy who told me about three years ago that I don't need another physical until 2011. Canada's free health care system rocks!

In other exciting news, my new neighbors moved their couch in through my window on the seventh floor this morning. The couch was too deep to fit in the prehistoric elevators in our condo (built around 1920 or earlier) and apparently this couch has a lot of sentimental value to them. They have a young daughter and my best guess is that she was conceived on the couch. Apparently it has travelled all over the world with them and they were pretty intent on keeping it. My unit is the only one on the floor with windows large enough to get the couch through, so I offered the use of it to them. Getting the couch in the window turned out to be a breeze as they hired a boom truck or crane or something. Getting the couch out of my place into the hall was not. For a while it didn't look like it would fit, but a few gouges out of my walls and a bit of twisting, squishing and cracking later, it popped free and the rest was easy.

I played some poker last night as well. Maybe I'll post about that later. Doctor hatred took precedence today for some reason.

More Stars Play

2006-05-18T20:43:00.000-05:00

Wednesday Night Summary

Poker Stars $10 SNG
1 played, 3rd place
+$7

Poker Stars $5 SNG's
3 played
1 - 2nd, 1 - 6th, 1 - 8th
(-$3)

Poker Stars $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
(-$3.50)

I have been on a bit of a SNG kick this week while Poker Stars is offering double frequent player points. SNG's are almost the only form of no limit poker I play, as I rarely play MTT's and almost never play NL cash games. I would eventually like to get into NL cash games as I suspect that is where a lot of the fishiest of the fish are hiding but I want to take some time improve my limit game first before moving on to NL. As a result, SNG's are a bit of a treat for me and tend to suit my game as far as no limit goes, allowing me to play a weak-tight game for much of the tourney. The difference in my aggression level between limit and no limit is huge, but I had to force myself to be more aggressive in limit so I expect to be able to learn to play more aggressive in no limit eventually as well.

I am not weak tight, I just tend to play that way sometimes.

Poker Stars

2006-05-16T23:40:00.000-05:00

Tuesday Night Summary

Poker Stars
$11 SNG
1 played
5th place
(-$11)

Poker Stars
$5 SNG's
3 played
1 - 1st, 1 - 2nd, 1 - 6th
+$19.50

Poker Stars
$0.10/$0.20 Full Ring LHE and $0.50/$1.00 6-max LHE
+$1

I played a few more SNG's at Poker Stars and then hopped on a few limit tables for a bit as the next milestone hand was coming up. I was on a few 6-max tables with some 2+2 posters who were intending on just posting blinds and folding it around in order to get in as many hands as possible as the milestone hand approached. A couple of the lower limit full ring tables I was on had people doing the same thing, however there were some where people were still playing out the hands. I'll have to keep an eye on the forums as these guys are doing a good job at nailing the times on the next milestone hand.

We were going through piles of hands and I was folding like crazy. I did pause briefly a couple times when AA and KK came up. It felt awful to fold those hands, but actually made sense under the circumstances. Due to timing of the blinds folding around, I finished up a whopping $0.75 on the 2+2 tables. What an overrated site, I pwned them hard (sarcasm emoticon thing goes here).

Live Poker Plus

2006-05-15T22:04:00.001-05:00

Friday Night

Friday night was live poker night and a great way to kick the weekend off. We had our regular nine, plus more who wanted to play. My first of many mistakes of the evening was to show up a couple of hours before we usually start. I was supposed to take my car to the dealership, which just happens to be within a few blocks of the hosts house, first thing on Saturday morning. I figured there would likely be some drinking going on during the poker games and chances were high that I would not feel like leaping out of bed first thing on Saturday morning to take the car in, so it made sense to drop the car off Friday evening instead. Anyway, by the time anyone else showed up we had polished off a few more drinks than we probably should have.

Everyone finally arrived and we got started a bit late. The first game of the night is always brutally slow because most of these guys are just happy to be out of the house and are busy catching up with each other and paying minimal attention to the poker. I am plenty happy to see them and catch up as well, but think it can be done while keeping the game moving along too. It turned out to be a really tight start compared to normal. We made it all the way to the second hand before someone was eliminated. The second person eliminated lasted a good solid four hands. I have never seen so many people fall so in love with ace-rag. Well, I guess I have actually. The game slowed substantially at this point as people stopped getting ace-rag at the same time.

I was card dead for the entire first game and made my exit somewhere along the way in very undramatic fashion. I think 1st and 2nd chopped and we finally got on with game two. We got back to our regular looseness in game two and lost someone on the first hand. Once again I was completely card dead and ending up bubbling out.

By the time the second game was over it was past midnight and we lost a couple players before starting up a third game. By this time the host and me were into our sixth hour of drinking and at least one of us was showing the classic symptoms. I am certain that I was under full control and not being the least bit obnoxious, but I can't really remember very well one way or the other. In the third game I started catching decent cards and while I still had to show down a lot of hands in order to win pots, pre-flop raises plus continuation bets started to take some pots down uncontested as well. I pretty much controlled the entire game and rubbed out the host with my QTs against his AK along the way, which made for a good fifteen minutes of entertainment afterwards. He was a little pissed. I had raised first in from the button, he had pushed his remaining short stack into me and it wasn't enough to allow me to fold. I hit my flush and he hit the roof. Good times. I went on to win that game eventually.

It was about 2am by the end of the third game, so we lost a couple more players and decided to play one more. Brilliant plan. We were down to five people and decided that first would get $80 and second place would get their money back. I don't have much to say about the last game as the combination of fatigue and nine hours of drinking have made it all a hazy memory. I learned Saturday night that I finished second as I got it all in against 52s which hit a straight. So that left me up $20 for the night. It was great fun but I was a wee bit tired on Saturday as I finally crawled into bed around 4:30 am.

Saturday Summary

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
130 hands played
+$16

I slept in fairly late on Saturday but managed to knock of a few hands towards the Party Poker reload bonus in the afternoon. I started out hot, winning $18 in the first 10 minutes or so before that table cleared out. Then won another $8 in the next 10 minutes before losing $10 over the next hour. I had to cut the session off there as I had a ticket for the Sens playoff game Saturday night.

We got out to the rink with plenty of time to spare and had a couple drinks while waiting to meet up with some other friends. We watched Buffalo rub out the Sens playoff hopes in overtime and headed back downtown. I met up with a couple friends from work at a pub not far from my place and my girlfriend came out to meet us. To make a long story short, there were plenty of drinks, a bit of dancing and another very late night.

May generally goes like this for me. I work like mad all winter and then things let up a bit in May. I party my head off until I get sick, then ease into the summer. My girlfriend has had a nasty cold since Thursday or so and has been staying at my place all through the weekend. Coupling her cold with those late nights and plenty of partying meant that by Sunday I had a cold for myself.

Sunday Summary

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
1,304 hands played
(-$76)

Party Poker $1.00/$2.00 6-max Limit
185 hands played
+$18

The onset of a cold plus back to back late nights with a healthy dose of hangover thrown in for good measure added up to feeling like crap on Sunday. I suspect that I wasn't playing my A-game given how I was feeling, but I did play a pile of poker anyway. I ended up putting in a marathon session of over nine hours pretty much straight, so I won't bother complaining much about losing. I suspect that the majority of times I play that long I will come out behind. I did play some 1/2 after taking a break for a few hours and faired a bit better.

Monday Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
242 hands played
+$30

Poker Stars
$5 SNG's
6 played
1 - 1st, 2 - 2nd, 1 - 3rd, 2 - 4th
+$26

I woke up long enough on Monday morning to call the office and let them know I wouldn't be in. I've always been a big suck when I'm sick and I'm not about to change that. I then proceeded to sleep until past noon and felt quite a bit better when I finally dragged myself out of bed. I hopped on Party poker and knocked off the rest of the hands required for the bonus while playing 1/2 on a single table. I was up and down a little for most of the session and finished off strong. The tables are notably tighter during the day as compared to evenings and weekends. It seemed to agree with me though for the most part.

I took a long break and then played some sng's at Poker Stars in the evening. I have a $120 bonus stacked up there that I have barely put a dent in and figured now would be a good time to play a bit there as they have double frequent player points from May 12 to May 21 while they celebrate their upcoming 5 billionth hand. In addition to the double FPPs they are offering some bonuses for selected hands. If you are lucky enough to be playing a ring game in the actual 5 billionth hand they are paying $10k to each person dealt in and $50k to the winner. There are a number of other pre-selected hands along the way with $2k to each participant in the hand and $5k to the winner. There are under 50 million hands to go as of right now. Each of those bonus hands will come along about every 1.5 million dealt hands between now and the 5 billionth hand. Even though the odds are crazy long against actually hitting the big hand, I will certainly be tempted to play a bit there as the big one approaches. Stars even has a deposit bonus right now as part of this celebration. I have never known them to have an initial deposit bonus before, but I am new here. With the bonus only being $25, I think you can find better deals out there. I'm sure there are affiliates (rakereduction.com??) who offer $50 for signing up through them. I probably just broke blogging protocol by not having myself signed up as an affiliate and offering up my own code to be used, but as I said before, I am new here. I am pretty sure the two people who read this blog monthly already have Poker Stars accounts already anyhow.

Anyway, I played six SNG's and had piles of fun with them. I play them in tiny sets of two at time and finished 2nd in both in my first set, 4th in each game in my second set, then had a 1st and 3rd in the last set.

The end.

Party Time

2006-05-11T22:30:00.000-05:00

Thursday Night Summary

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
240 hands, single tabling
+$38

I deposited another chunk at Party to take advantage of a reload offer for $100 bonus. They have been offering piles of reload bonuses lately it seems. This works out well for me seeing as though I enjoy playing there even with no bonus.

It was a fairly uneventful night on the tables. I won more than my fair share of pots and a took a couple of them when I was 'sure' I was beaten. Thank goodness for crying calls sometimes. I played three different tables over the course of the evening, while watching television, as tables kept breaking up on me. I have been on a big kick of only playing one or two tables at a time lately, which is probably good for my game. I have run into problems playing four tables at a time in the past.

Tonight is a live poker night with the gang. I expect a fun night filled with bad poker. Most of these guys start out hyper aggressive and just get worse with each beer.

TGIF!

A BetFred Win

2006-05-10T23:02:00.000-05:00

Wednesday Night Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
1 hour played, single table
+$23

After a couple days without, I managed to get a little poker in tonight. It was a nice night for me at BetFred with my good hands holding up and really no bad beats to speak of. It was actually a fairly quiet hour of poker with a lot of very small pots. On both tables I played at play was fairly weak-tight with a single flop bet taking down the pot often. I only saw one very loose player all night and he busted out quickly.

I missed poker last night due to an emergency sleep session. After a big bike ride and some grocery shopping I konked out super early and woke up only long enough to move from the couch to the bed. A few more nights of 10 hours sleep and my system should be back on track. Unfortunately, I only get that much sleep about once every 2 years, so catching up will take some time.

Monday night was hockey night. After arriving at the stadium with only a few minutes to spare, my buddy realized he left all our tickets on his kitchen table. Oops. We lucked out and were able to get three tickets for below face value and we went on with the show. It turned out to be an expensive way to watch the home team lose.

Hey, I won money at BetFred!
Yay! Only $98 to get back to even there. I'll aim to get that back and tack on a couple hundred before finishing up that bonus. Good luck me.

Spring Cleaning

2006-05-07T22:42:00.000-05:00

Sunday Night Summary

BetFred Omaha hi lo $0.05/$0.10 Pot Limit
1 hour played
(+$0.17)

I'm in the process of slowly losing my $10 buy in at Omaha while winding down for the night and writing this. I meant to get some more poker in this afternoon but the day just got away from me completely.

I did a couple things this weekend I haven't done in quite some time. Yesterday, I went on a major clothing shopping spree. I'm not a big fan of shopping, so I tend to ignore it for years at a time. Eventually, I need to stock up for the next few years and end up going on a slightly insane shopathon. Sometime during the four or so hours of the shopping event, I half-jokingly mentioned to my girlfriend that credit card security was probably trying to contact me to find out if my credit card had been stolen. Sure enough, when we got home, there was a message from the credit card security department asking me to phone them. Needless to say, I spent a sick amount of money yet somehow still seem to 'need' a sick amount of clothes. I definitely need less today than I did prior to yesterday though.

I meant to get in more poker this afternoon but have some spring cleaning that needed taking care of. After six hours of working on it, I have barely put a dent in the cleaning. My little kitchen is looking pretty spic 'n span though.

I'm still feeling dead tired after the crazy April at work and am finding I don't have a lot of energy to devote to poker. I just feel too tired to play much. Which is why I am just toying around with a little Omaha hi lo tonight. I won't get in much poker tomorrow night either as tickets have landed in my lap for game 2 of the Ottawa Senators vs. Buffalo Sabres series.

I am only down a little more than $2 at O8...victory is mine!

Down and Up

2006-05-07T13:14:00.000-05:00

Saturday Night Summary

BetF'ingFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
5 hours played
1 and 2 tabling
(-$9)

This turned out to be an exercise in frustration, while watching a couple movies. The movies weren't much better than the poker. This is turning out to be one of those bonuses really not worth the trouble. I still can't figure out why I am losing at BetFred but I am starting to look forward to finishing this bonus there and moving on. Okay, other than playing for far too long while leaking too much focus onto things other than poker while multi-tabling, I can't figure out why I continue to lose. Maybe I was lucky to come out only down $9. Another 1,000 raked hands or so to go and I'm done there either way.

Sunday Morning Summary

Party Poker $1.00/$2.00 6-max Limit
300 hands
+$46

Weekend morning poker at Party agrees with me for some reason. The last couple stabs at $1/$2 have gone well also. The big test for me when moving up limits is losing sessions and how I react to them. I don't mind not testing my reaction to that situation however. I'm sure I will get plenty of practice soon enough.

So far in May I have won $194 at Party and lost $87 at BetFred. So much for bonus chasing.

Saturday Morning Session

2006-05-06T11:28:00.000-05:00

Saturday Morning Summary

Party Poker $1/$2 6-max Limit
95 hands
+$50

I had an hour this morning to chill out and play some poker while enjoying breakfast and coffee. When I considered playing at BetFred for an hour and went into convulsions at the thought, I figured it would be better if I hit Party instead. That turned out to be a good choice.

It was one of those sessions where almost everything went right. When I had the best of it, I got paid off very well. I managed to get away from a few bad hands relatively cheaply. I caught some decent cards and hit a few flops. Sometimes poker is easy. I wish it were that way more often.

Friday Night Beating

2006-05-06T11:15:00.000-05:00

Friday Night Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
1 hour, single table
(-$28)

BetFred $1.00/$2.00 6-max Limit
40 minutes, single table
(-$14)

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
230 hands
+$19

I continue to get my butt handed to me at BetFred for some reason, while I continue to do very well at Party. I wonder how much of this phenomenon is due to my own mental state of expecting to lose at BetFred and win at Party now. I feel that I am playing the same way on both sites though, so perhaps this is just variance in action. Who knows.

Tables kept emptying out on me last night at BetFred which always bugs me to no end. No sooner would I finally get a seat at a table and everyone would leave. Argh! It bugs me even more when I sit down, lose several hands immediately and then the table clears out. I probably wouldn't be complaining at all if I was up. After I got a seat at a table and lost $7 in 7 minutes after which I was the only one still sitting at the table, I packed up and headed to Party.

Party was much nicer to me last night. Tables emptying out happen to me all the time at Party also and last night was no exception. The first table I sat at lasted for about 40 minutes before breaking up, leave me up $13. The next table I sat at cycled through a crazy number of people. It was very short handed a couple times but I was too lazy to get up and find another table. I was down for most of the session but walked away up $5 with a rush near the end of my stay.

Friday night usually seems to be a nice easy night to make money as the drunks are out in full force giving it away. My head feels fine today, so I am pretty sure I wasn't all that drunk, but I was still in the camp of those giving money away. Next Friday is mine! Actually, next Friday is likely a live poker night with the boys I believe.

Heads Up Recovery

2006-05-03T22:29:00.000-05:00

Wednesday Night Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
1.5 hours of play on a single table
+$13

That is right, I won money at BetFred tonight! I don't know what sort of funk had befallen me at BetFred in the recent past but I managed to shake a little of it off tonight and posted a positive session there for a refreshing change. If it weren't for the last 10 minutes of play, I would have been posting a small loss. The table cleared out quickly towards the end leaving just four of us, which turned into three and then heads up before I knew it. I almost got up and left but the remaining player was down to his last $10 or so and for some reason I felt like I could do well against him based on our previous play. A combination of aggression coupled with good enough cards when we did go to show down gave me the rest of his stack fairly quickly. It is rare that I feel like I'm in control of a table and even more rare that I feel in control of a heads up situation, so this turned out to be fun. I raised almost every time I had the button and continuation bets on the flop took down most pots. The few times he picked to take a stand were just unlucky timing on his part as I had the goods. Fun!

I am still down $70 at BetFred and I'm not sure whether that place has gotten in my head but I didn't even think about playing more than one table tonight. I am still wiped out, so it is probably just as well I didn't bother trying to multi-table at all. At this rate, clearing this bonus will take another month or more. Ugh.

May Kick Off

2006-05-03T10:49:00.000-05:00

Tuesday Summary

BetFred $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
(-$29)

BetFred Omaha hi lo $0.25/$0.50 Pot Limit
(-$20)

Party Poker $0.50/$1.00 6-max Limit
270 hands
+$42

Party Poker $1.00/$2.00 6-max Limit
150 hands
+$37

Poker Stars $5.00+$0.50 SNG's
2 games played
(-$11)
Finished 5th and 6th

I couldn't decide whether to play at Party, work off some of the BetFred bonus or start up somewhere new. After pondering this very important decision for far too long, I decided to deposit another $500 at Party and see if one of the recent reload bonuses would work for me. I knew they were supposed to be account specific reloads but a lot of people were getting them when depositing with the reload code. It looks like Party fixed the leak after a few days as there was no bonus waiting for me after the deposit.

I figured I would knock some hands off for the BetFred bonus at the same time, so I loaded up one table at each of BetFred and Party. Between the two tables I was staying pretty much even, up a bit at Party and down a bit at BetFred. Then I went on a huge rush down at BetFred and finally shut down that site after losing almost $30. I finished up about $10 at Party and took a big break.

I started up a couple other tables at Party later and went on a nice rush and decided to take a little shot at 1/2. I started out by dropping about $10 at the 1/2 table, got back to even and stayed there for a while before going on a great rush which left me up $37 overall. Taking shots at the next limit is great fun when it goes well.

To celebrate my 6-max limit success at Party I drifted over to Stars and dropped a couple SNG buy ins. I hadn't played a single SNG since late March, so I was looking forward to playing a couple of these. I forgot how boring SNG's can be and both of mine turned out to be fold-fests. I didn't get any cards worth playing and just slowly got blinded down. In each game, I pushed all my chips in with sketchy holdings in steal situations and got called with sketchy holdings that held up against me.

To celebrate my unsuccessful return to SNG's I rounded off the night with some pot limit Omaha. Pot limit Omaha is definitely not my best game, but it is a lot of fun. By this time, it was well past the time I should have been in bed, I was fully horizontal with the laptop on my chest, and I was playing with one eye closed. I somehow managed to lose $20 before falling asleep despite my heightened state of alertness.

So, May started off lousy at BetFred and great at Party. It was encouraging to have a good session of 1/2 to start the month and I hope for many more of those.

April

2006-05-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

Okay, this poker blog is now about poker again. No more work.

April turned out to be a pretty good poker month for me. I was up $524 for the month and although February and March were higher overall, I didn't play the last week in April and I had my highest monthly winnings to date. I won $219 and made bonuses of $305 along the way. I like bonuses and all but I would rather see my winnings grow, so I am happy with these results.

April winnings by poker site:
(-$68) BetFred
+$37 Empire
+$173 Party
+$77 River Belle

April bonuses by poker site:
$80 Empire
$100 Party
$125 River Belle

Party Poker was back on top for me this month after taking a break in March and beating me up.

I still have a $250 bonus to clear at BetFred which I am about half-way through clearing. Other than finishing that bonus off, I don't have much in the way of goals for May other than to continue winning and continue taking shots at $1/$2.

Survived!

2006-05-02T10:48:00.000-05:00

Wow, what a month and what a week to finish it. Six straight days without a drop of poker to finish up April. I ended up working 102 hours in the last week and just over 300 hours for the month. That really really cuts into my free time for poker.

Keeping with tradition, our office had a big party last night and after exhausting ourselves working like dogs, we further exhausted ourselves by consuming ridiculous quantities of alcohol. Everyone is enjoying the day off today, though I suspect many are nursing hangovers. It is almost noon and my girlfriend still hasn't moved too much so far today, so I'll have to count her in with the 'many'.

I have piles of things to do, but I suspect I will spend much of the day just relaxing on the couch. Maybe I'll figure out if I still remember how to play some poker.

A Poker Free Night!

2006-04-27T09:34:00.000-05:00

This blog is no longer about poker and from now on will only be about how much I work. I managed close to 17 hours yesterday and didn't leave the office until sometime near 2am. At my hourly poker rate I could have made $17 instead, dammit. Plus bonuses!

Last night was the first night in April that I did not play any poker and only the second night that I did not play any online poker. Hi, my name is Floppy, and I'm a pokerholic. I'm not getting the shakes or anything yet but if I don't get a dose of poker soon I'm afraid it could get ugly.

Five more days and all this madness is over.