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Back into the swing

Well, I finally feel like I'm starting to right the ship back into position. The past week I've made some decent runs but then tilted off about 1/2 of my bankroll in a .01/.02 PLO game. Yes one cent two cent. That's what happens when you get steamed over a guy catching perfect rivers to stack you twice.

Last night I finally won one. I was down to $12 and started a $4 180, and two $1 sng's. I busted in the $4 and won a $1 two table for $10. So I jumped into another $4 180 and ran the gaunlet on it.

That was probably the toughest final table I've ever played. I kind of went on a roller coaster ride, especially when it got to 3 way action. The chip leader had a little over $200K, the two of us each had about $20K. I seemed to be the target of the chip leader, as he wasn't putting any pressure on the other guy. I'd say he had seen some of my results and compared to the other guy he didn't want to play me heads up. I got lucky and won a race with my AQ vs his 88 after I had built up my stack to about $40K. Then got lucky again and limped into his bb from the sb with KJ and flopped 9TQ. little action on flop and turn. then river brought another T and we got it all in. He had trip tens. so that put me at about $160K and now he was playing the shorter stack. I put some pressure on them right out of the gate and got him chipped down to about $30K when I made a raise with JcTc and ended up calling his push of TT. I got lucky there and hit a flush to knock him out. Down to two of us and the other guy wasn't much to write home about. He ended up getting a $18K stack in the middle ahead, but I caught another flush and took it down. Even if I don't catch the flush there, he really didn't have a chance.

After we had played down to 8 players I noticed that a ranked pro, mkind, was at the table. He's posted over $500K in winnings on stars. I also noticed after it got down to 4 or 5 of us that the guy that I battled forever in 3 way action had posted over $100K in winnings on stars. Don't really know why the heavy hitters were in that $4.40 tourney but it made for some poker.

Now I'm back up to about $220 online. Hopefully I'm going to practice some good br mgmt skills and run this back up to a respectable amount now.

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picking up were i left off..

well, i haven't been blogging lately and thought I might start it back just to kind of keep ideas visible to myself.

 

poker.

I haven't gotten a good start to my 08 goals yet this year. I've reached approximately two final tables in a larger field tournament. and they weren't spectacular payouts. I have had a few decent runs in the $3 rebuy on stars lately but alas, no spectacular payout. I did win a $4.40 180 in early Jan, but somehow managed to not practice very good bankroll management and squandered it.

 

Speaking of goals, here is my list of them for 2008.

 

1. make at least 50 final tables in mtt with over 100 players in

them. Probably sounds weak to some but up until this year I had only

made 2 final tables over a 2 or 3 year span. Last year wrote down a

goal of 5 final tables in mtt with > 100 players. I made 32 so far.

 

2. Play event #3 of the WSOP. (or whatever that first open event is

with a $1500 buy-in)

 

3. Get a 5 digit score. up until this year only had a couple of 3-

digit scores. This year I've added about 4, 4-digit scores. Time to

nail the >=$10K.

 

4. Play classier poker. No more sarcastic 'Great call', 'perfectly

played', 'got some value out of that', or 'fucking moronic

nitwit' ( just to name a few ) in the chat box.

 

5. Better bankroll mgmt. Had this as one last year and practiced it

very well until I withdrew everything to go to vegas in Oct. That

didn't work out so good.

 

6. Lose weight. Get BP down to normal. More of personal goals but I've

put on pounds since college due to desk job and poker play. I believe

poker is part of the reason for my high blood pressure too. Late

nights and early mornings are bad for my immune system, have to get

into better shape.

 

7. Keep my records more up to date. Seems like I always fall behind

about 3 months before I update my poker tracker records. Like now,

last time I updated it was mid Aug.

 

8. Hold more live sattellites to live events.

 

9. Try to start a regular H,O,E,P,Plc ( more on this to come )

 

Numero Uno is the most important to me, behind number 6 I guess. Last year was the first year that I actually wrote down goals for the year and imagine that it was the first profitable year I've had. I've been playing online since late 2004, and at first I wasn't all that good. I would say I was about average, as I have played poker since I was really young so I knew what beat what and I could read the boards well. I knew nothing about odds and tells and such. But for the most part I was breaking even online since I started playing, until late 2006. I made my first large field final table and a $300 score from a $4 buy-in. I followed that up in 3 days making the final table again in that same tournament for about $400.

 

The new year rolled around and I made a wager with a friend on who could make more final tables in 3 months with a field of 180 or more entrants. I think I made about 8 final tables in that 3 months and the average field size was about 400. Unfortunately my buddy's day job allowed him more daytime play and in turn he got to play more fields in the 200 entry range and wound up getting about 25 final tables. Not to discredit his final tables, as he is probably the best player that I know personally, that made me realize the importance of playing smaller fields though. I had made my goal last year to make 4 final tables and ended up making about 30, so I wanted to set a high goal this year. I just hope I can come close.

 

Anyway, here we are 7 weeks into the year and I've made two final tables. That means I'm about 5 behind schedule and we are about 10 to 13 weeks from the wsop event that I was wanting to play. If I don't get back on track with #1 then #2 won't be met. I figure I need to have won about $3200 by then to affordably and feasibly make the trip. That also means I'm now about $3100 away.

 

I have started having a regular HOEPPlc game. Every-other Thurs night we have a .25/.50 NL cash game and alternate rounds of various flop games. I've done decent at it so far, as we've played about 3 times and I haven't lost any money yet. I'd say I'm up about $80 in it. I did have a slight revelation last time we played too. I believe a tell that I had on a couple of players has backfired on me and now some regulars that I play with are using it against me. No more, lol. I'm going to experiment with it next week and see if I can pick up a BIG pot by reversing it on them.

 

Also, we are getting ready to start the league back. It looks like we'll probably only have 7 or 8 guys again this year but that is a good number. I had a live $20 tournament last night to kind of kick-off the league this year. We had 12 guys show up to play and it turned out to be a group of 6 of the league guys vs 6 other guys that play together fairly often. Our league guys triumphed and took all 4 money spots, with yours truly taking 2nd for $70. It was a really good structure and the other guys just weren't used to deeper stack slow structure play. They were constantly overbetting the flop and raising too much preflop, our guys slowly just waited for big hands to trap them and pick them off.

 

Well, long post for my first blog in a looong time. I'll try to make myself do one every 4 or 5 days at least.

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a fork in the road... TAKE IT!

Well, maybe this is going to be the changing point of my lack of the "Big Score" with poker. I had a long discussion with my wife about playing this weekend. She, understandingly, doesn't like the amount of time that I spend playing poker. So we have come up with a schedule that I will play. I'm going to start playing on Monday nights after 9, Tuesday nights after 8, Thursday nights after 8 and Sundays during our league tournament. Then also the occasional big tournament when I win seats into them. I think this will be a very good thing for my play.

I have decided to start keeping better records of my play and results as well. I have also finally decided that I am going to set a big goal for myself. I am going to go to the WSOP next year. Whether it be a preliminary tournament or the Main Event (more likely a pre-lim) but I will play at least one of the events next year. I would also like to play in one of the Fiesta el Lago tournaments in Oct when we are planning on being in Vegas. Basically I've decided to start setting goals and sticking to them and taking the game a little more seriously in general. What point is there to playing (other than for fun) if I'm not going to do good, and I think all of this will improve my results.

long night of cards

Well I�m beat today. We played until around 1am last night. I came out of the cash game up around $20 and then played a heads up tournament for $10 each that I took down pretty handily when my As6s saw a flop of 668 and got all in vs a 96. So I ended the night up around $30.

I doubt that I will get to play tonight, well I doubt that I�ll even feel like playing tonight. We decided on starting the next league not this Sunday but the Sunday after. There are going to be 9 of us this year, it should be a little more challenging.

 

one more 27X27 down.

So I completed another $5/3 table SnG. This time taking down 4^th good for $14. That makes my ROI 83% while I�m almost half way through my experiment. I was pretty short stacked almost the entire tournament hovering around 15bb up until we were down to about 13 players. I got KK in the big blind and it folded around to the small blind. I thought, well this is going to be another wasted monster. Then the sb surprised me with an early Christmas present and moved all in for $4K vs my $3K. I called and the KK stood up against his A5. As it got down to the money there was one player, 2 to my left, that out chipped everyone else by about 4:1. He stayed pretty well in that position and I lost a race to get knocked out.

I also played in the $3 rebuy satellite for the big one on Sunday. I bought in for the initial $3 and doubled up, plus a little, with QQ on the button on the very first hand. I rode that very well and hit another couple of good hands without getting all in against shorter stacks. So it was one level away from the end of the rebuy period and I was above average with over $6K. This is a very good spot to be in. There was only one other player at the table that had me outchipped. I�ve been making a conscience effort to avoid larger stacks at all costs, and what happened next just drives that point home even further for me. I get KhKs in middle position and make a 5X bb raise. It folds around to the big stack and he min re-raises me. I just call, hoping he has a big ace and not AA. So it�s heads up and the flop comes all diamonds ten high. I think for a minute and d ecided I don�t want him drawing to the flush and push for $5K into a $2K pot. I get called and he shows the other two kings, one of which is of course a diamond. The turn comes out the fourth diamond, and I�m out. I didn�t rebuy since I was only in for $3 and I was kind of sick on how bad I played that hand. That was my night in a nutshell. I have a live game to play tonight, I�ll make a post on that tomorrow.

it's been a while since I've updated this thing, but I think I'm going to try to start keeping it current.
I haven't had a whole lot of success in the past few months, I have been winning some here and there but nothing major. I won a seat in the big Stars Sunday tourney. It was a the largest one they had at the time, with over 5000 entries and over $1,000,000 prize pool. The software actually couldn't handle the prize payout and they had to manually post it after the first break. I wound up making it down to around 2100 but got no money out of it.
Recently I decided to try something that I had heard about on AnteUP radio. I'm doing a 27X27, which is playing 27 different 27 player SnG's. So far I have played 10 of them and my only cashes are both wins. So I'm $45 to the good in them right now. There's nothing real special about it, the idea was that basically it would give you a good judgement of how you stack up against that level of players. If you're an average player you finish in almost every possible spot. If you're above average you'll "of course" make money and finish higher than average in most of them. Anyway, that's all for now, I'll make another post soon.