Whatever, fuck it

Sometimes poker just plain sucks. My last session of the day was ridiculously maddening.

I'm not even going to post any hands, it's futile. I will just say that I'm glad many of my opponents still suck really badly at playing poker and I can't wait until I can finally start running OK again.

Profitable day, but a bit frustrating

I ended up winning $800 today but had some really annoying hands occur. I just didn't run that well basically and got sucked out by my arch-rival in classic fashion. He's a reg on the site and normally he just insta-leaves when I join his tables. I swear he's 4-bet shipped a suited Ace all in on me like this at least 6 times now and he's sucked out each time when I had AK or AQ (75% chance to win or better). He just simply can't handle light 3-bets when he's OOP and just snaps and ships it in on me as a 4-bet all in bluff.

Other than that, standard coolers like running top two pair into quads, etc. Not really mad or anything as I still ended up booking a win on the day. I feel like I really need to pay more attention in the small and medium pots as I made a few retarded call downs that cost me about 1/4 of a stack at least twice.

I'm going to try not to sleep in too long so I can wake up and play the entire day. I really want to play a ton today.

Poker went better today

I ended up winning about 3 buy-ins on the day despite losing with KK vs QQ in a 3-bet pot when 200bbs deep. QQ flopped a set and my opponent was a reg who is extremely liberal in calling 3-bets... I don't like the line I took during the hand really all that much, but either way I was probably getting stacked. Kind of a cooler hand.

Hockey sucked tonight though. We ended up losing our first intramural hockey game of the regular season to the team that beat us in the Championship game last year. We now have 4 wins and 1 loss and are tied with the team that beat us for the top spot in the league standings. It was a dissapointing loss, as we were very close the whole time. We ended up losing 3-4 and the last two minutes of the game were pretty shitty...

I ended up getting called for a bullshit roughing penalty when the guy I was defending crashed into his own teammate and my teammate that was defending the other guy. That left us shorthanded for the last part of the game and then the refs blew the whistle for like no appearant reason with about 1 minute and 50 seconds left... the clock is running time in these games... so everyone was like WTF and confused and it took about 50 seconds for everyone to line up for the faceoff so most of our time at the end was wasted. We were unable to get the equalizer.

Terrible day

Got crushed today. Lost 6 buy-ins. Not much else to say other than I played mediocre, made a few dumb bluffs for stacks, and ran like a midget with a broken leg.

So many annoying hands against massive fish. Ridiculous.

QQ no good. Villain was a terrible player... HUGE fish.

This was against the same HUGE fish as the previous hand... he literally went, pot, pot, pot, every fucking hand when he had the pre-flop lead OOP. I INSTA-shoved this river. I was soooooo far ahead of his range on every street. Such a sick river.

Another hand vs. that same moron in the hands above. Such an amazing flop for me but the board runs out like total dogshit. I correctly fold and he shows the lucksacked 4 card straight after I had him by the balls on the flop and turn.

This guy was a mega-nit. I don't know, if he had raised pre-flop from early position instead of the button I would probably just fold the turn actually, he's so tight. I thought about c/c turn and just c/c river but I don't think he's ever continuing a river bluff with only $125 to bet and he could have something like KJ that's going to call it off on the turn but just give up on the river.

Whatever, it's just one of those days where nothing goes right.

Isildur1 - New Lord of the Ring Games?

Isildur1, which many believe to be Viktor Blom (aka Blom90) from Sweden, has splashed into the nosebleed cash games and ended up going from about even on his FTP account to over $5 million profit in just over a week!


He seems to be playing nearly daily... playing both NLHE and PLO HU at $500/$1000 blinds against the best players in the world. Over the past few days he's had a rough time it appears, losing nearly $3 million to Patrik Antonius at $500/$1000 HU PLO. Isildur1 also lost the biggest pot in online history to Patrik.

Isildur1 has also played CardRunners pros Cole South and Brian Townsend over the past day or two, putting in winning sessions vs each of them.

Isildur1 seems to be down around $600k over the last 24 hours... I logged onto FTP about 4 hours ago only to find him 8 tabling vs the THREE BEST PLAYERS IN THE WORLD!!! All in seperate HU matches !!! at the highest stakes on the internet ($500/$1000 NLHE) !!!

He was playing 4 tables vs Durrrr (who was apperantly playing with his whole roll at the table, as he was shortstacking with 25 big blinds for a while on one of his tables). Then at the same time Isildur1 was also playing two tables of HU NLHE vs Phil Ivey! And had two more tables open vs. Patrik Antonious. Insanity! Ivey seemed to come out ahead around $800,000 and it looks as though durrrr is winning a bit of his money back from the bloodbath he endured about a week ago.

I personally think it's retarded for Isildur1 to play 3 of the best players in the world AT THE SAME TIME! I mean, there aren't that many people who even play that high of stakes... he should spread his games out more so that he doesn't have to worry about adjusting to three different opponents at once.

I actually hope Isildur1 does really well and cleans everyone out at the nosebleeds. Not because I don't like durrrr or any of the other high stakes players, but because it would be absolutely hilarious. Some unknown kid comes and dominates the best in the world over a significant sample of hands (that's yet to be seen) and claims his title as Lord of the Ring Games, lol.

Actually, it's somewhat inspirational that Isildur1 seems to have the ability to have an edge on some of the best players in the world. It's a bit early to tell if he does have an edge or is just running hot, but if he indeed continues to dominate, then it will prove to be a lesson to all poker players what can be done through a bit of hard work.

For those who want to read more about this epic high stakes action you can go here for the offical Isildur1 thread on 2+2 or read INTERNETPOKERS' blog on CardRunners, as he made a post about it as well. I haven't read that blog posting yet but I plan on doing it tomorrow, as I'm definitely curious as to what he has to say.

As far as poker for me, I played three shorter sessions today and ended up three buyins, so it was a decent result. I'm going to get some sleep and hit the tables hard tomorrow.

Awesome weekend in Phoenix!

I ended up flying down to Phoenix last Friday and visited my Uncle. It was a blast. Allegiant Air ended up adding a direct flight from Grand Forks to the smaller Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. So the tickets were pretty cheap and the flight was a lot shorter than normal, since I didn't have to switch planes in Minneapolis like you have to do if you fly to anywhere besides Vegas. It was actually the first direct flight from Grand Forks to Phoenix ever.

I went to an NHL hockey game on Saturday night and the Phoenix Coyotes were playing the Dallas Stars. The home team ended up winning by a score of 3-2 and it was a great game. They even had a promotion running that if the Coyotes won, then you would get a free ticket to a future game of your choosing! I ended up choosing the game where they play the Chicago Blackhawks on March 20th so hopefully I get a chance to head back to Phoenix to catch that game.




Poker is looking up for the month. I've had two decent winning sessions in a row and am feeling a lot better about playing. I may have had a subtle form of unconscious tilt earlier in the month... the break over the past few days I think was both helpful and necessary. I ended up winning $1k today overall.

I'm still down overall for the month at this point, but as Nute said to me... it really doesn't matter. A month is just an arbitrary measure of time that a lot of poker players seem to use in order to evaluate their results. I can't get flustered or upset if I'm down in the arbitrary time period of a "month." I just have to play the best poker I am capable of and everything will fall into place like it always seems to do. I'm still up a decent amount for the year and I absolutely love my job. Life is good.

Site switch = winning day

Obviously a super tiny sample, as I just played one session today but I ended up 3 buy-ins after switching to a different site for the day. I felt pretty good during the session but made one river bluff that I actually liked but didn't work out. I think sometimes something as small and stupid as a different visual look of the tables and different software can help me re-focus and get back to playing good, solid, basic poker.

Although it's obviously retarded to think you are "running bad" on a particular site, sometimes if you've had a long string of losing sessions on that site you might actually subconsciously expect to lose from the moment you log in to start the session, which should be avoided at all costs. I definitely don't feel like I've logged on expecting to lose for any of my sessions this month, but I had that feeling in the past (like a year ago or so) for sure. I'm fairly certain my mental game is past that now.

Tonight we won our 4th intramural hockey game by a score of 7-1. We absolutely shelled them in the end, but our goalie played amazingly well at the beginning of the game to keep us in the lead by at least two goals in the second period. It was a very fun game and felt good to crush a team by a lopsided margin while improving our regular season record to 4 wins and 0 losses.