Saturday, February 24, 2007

Not a whole lot of playing lately...

Well I have started dealing cards at a couple places in town and it is really cutting into the amount of time that I am spending playing online. One of the places that I am working I think I am going to quit in the near future. I am just not making enough money dealing there to make up for missing the online action.

I have been running better at the tables and I think that I am making some good plays. I started playing around with limit poker the last few days mostly to get in shape for playing prop at a casino in town. I don't really like playing limit but I do like how it makes you think about the game differently. Specifically, limit poker makes you think about every bet and, "saving bets" when you are beat. This concept comes in very handy when you are playing NL because it lets you lay down hands that you would normally call. At NL I sometimes struggle folding a hand when it's only going to cost me a small percentage of my stack to call, but when you play limit every bet made and saved counts toward your over all winrate (same holds true for NL but it is much more pronounced in limit). Limit poker is about playing mistake free poker to maximize your edge. NL is about making smaller mistakes than your opponents. If you add some of the limit ideas to your NL game I think that it is possible to increase your winrate substantially...

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Running Poorly

I have been running poorly for the last week or so. Not really losing a lot of money but not winning either. It has been very frustrating. Right when I start to go up I run KK into AA or something similiar. I am really in need of a long winning streak to boost my confidence again. Over the last 10K hands of 100NL I have played I have been running at 5.43 ptbb/100 which is good, but at 200NL I am running at -6.45 ptbb/100 so it has really evened out. I guess all I can do is keep grinding away.

This was an interesting hand that came up in a session earlier tonight and would love to hear your comments on it http://www.pokerhand.org/?845071. The villian in the hand was 24 vp$ip and 14 pfr. He played the flop very aggressivly but tended to be a lot more passive on the turn and the river. I really didn't think that he could bet the river without having at the very least a set so I would have dumped had he pushed. What do you think of my line other than that?

The dealing job is going well. I don't really like it but it is nice to have some extra money other than my poker winnings (which have been scarce lately). Hopefully within a year or so I will be making enough off of my poker that I can feel comfortable not having a back up plan. But until then, I think the job is probably a good idea and at least it is poker related. Peace.

Friday, February 16, 2007

On the Up and Up

Things have been running very well the last few days. I have been running at 15.66 ptbb/100 for my last 10K hands on Full Tilt and I am feeling pretty good about my game. I think that I have gotten a lot better recently and think I will be pwning from this point forward (hopefully).

I have been in the process of setting up an epassporte account for probably a month now. At first every thing seemed like it was going to go smooth. They do an account verification where they send you two small amounts of money and you have to tell them how much those amounts were before you can use your account. This took about 4 days and then I deposited money which took another 7 days to get through. The problem is, on their fees page they say they are taking about $2.00 for transfers but instead they took out $5.00. This would have been fine except for the fact that I only deposited $47.00. I don't need to deposit, I need to cash out. So now my account balance is $42.00 and I can't deposit to Full Tilt because their minimum amount is $45.00. It makes me want to kill somebody.

I picked up another Job dealing cards. It's not a bad gig, but I would rather not be working. I just think with all the online gaming stuff that is going on it is the smart thing to have some means of encome to call back upon if the whole online poker thing is flushed down the toilet. In the mean time I hope to make as much money as possible grinding away...

Monday, February 12, 2007

I hate poker.

Well I haven't updated in a while because I didn't really feel up to it. I had the worst downswing of my career and just kept going down down down. Anyway, I think I finally came out of it and things are looking a bit better now, but still kinda shakey.

I have decided to play less tables and really concentrate on my game. Going for quality rather than quantity for a little while at least. Although I will miss out on a lot of rakeback, I think that playing less tables will really improve my game because I will be able to concentrate on the action. Hopefully I will be able to move up stakes a little quicker, because I don't think I need as big of a bankroll to play 2 tables than I do to play 8 tables because my edge is much larger.

Outside of poker news, things are good. I have been playing a lot of harmonica lately and I am in the process of writing a play. I'll probably post some exerpts on here when it get farther along. It's about a compulsive gambler (imagine that).