Hand of they day and Sioux hockey

Played two sessions today, one on FTP and one on Cake poker. The FTP session went well, as I finished up about 3 buyins despite losing a $1k pot with QQ vs AQ AIPF. I broke even in the Cake poker session, mainly due to a few ridiculous hands. Here is one of them (it was my second hand at the table and we had no previous history or reads):

Hand of the day:


On another note, the UND Fighting Sioux hockey team got eliminated from the NCAA playoffs today in a ridiculous fashion. They were up by a goal when there was a faceoff in their zone with 6 seconds left. The other team scores with 0.1 seconds remaining to tie the game. Then, fourty-five seconds into the sudden death overtime, UNH scores to win the game. OMG! so dumb. Here's the youtube link.

Bah

Had a rough time at $5/10 NL today. It did not go well at all.

Definitely did not run good. Lost a lot of key pots when I got the money in good. Just standard crap, pretty much. I did make two pretty spewy bluffs that cost me my stack... I actually think the last bluff I pulled off was quite good, as I'll probably get a fold on the river in that particular spot at least 90%+ of the time... but the villain had a straight flush so he wasn't going anywhere.

Whatever, at least I'm making some money in the stock market! Finally starting go up after going down for like two weeks straight right after I got into the market.

Stumbled upon this hilarious youtube vid... not sure how mainstream it is or if everyone has watched it already, but I hadn't seen it until today. It has 21 million views! It's titled, "My New Haircut". Enjoy.

Long day

Today, I put in a lot of hands. I put in four sessions, each two hours in duration. I won a decent amount, mostly from $2/4 NL. I also played some $5/10 NL today (about 1/3 of my total hands).

I ran into a lot of cooler type situations at $5/10 NL so I pretty much broke even at that stake for the day. Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty swingy. I was down, then up, then down, then up, then down.

Today I was feeling great about my play again, just like I was on Monday. I think I've found a pretty good rhythm right now.

It snowed quite a bit today... I thought we were going to be in the clear and not get any more snow... I was wrong. All the snow was pretty much melted before today.

The snowplow in front of my house actually got stuck for about 10 minutes, lol.

Here's a pic (my car is in the pic as well, it's a 2006 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT)

ULTRA LAG FTW?

Tried playing a little more aggro today, but got mixed results.


I played three sessions... first one I lost. Second I absolutely crushed. And the third session of the day I lost again to break even.

It was interesting seeing how some opponents reacted to my more aggressive play. In general, I'll say that I don't think people adapted nearly as much as I thought they would.

It does suck to run bad when playing LAG cuz the money disappears quickly... as I found out in my final session of the day. It's so disappointing working up your image to open up people's felting range vs you pre-flop, then get dealt a high pair but lose vs a lower pair that you got all in pre-flop with. That happened a lot today, as well as a bunch of spots where people would have felted much worse vs me and I ended up getting coolered.

I made some mistakes... a few bad call downs and one random spew, but other than that I thought I played OK. I ended up pretty much even for the day though, but whatever... I'm going to 100% quit caring about day to day results.

Great Day

I'm back from Vegas... let the online grind resume!

I ended up about $1k from live poker in Vegas playing a very limited amount of hours.

Today, I put in an honest day's work. I played for about 6 hours and had an excellent day. I ended up winning about 7 buyins after being down 3 buyins right away during my first session. I am really happy with my play and I think I played great. It feels good to finally have a day where I crush... seems like it's been a while.

I'm going to get some sleep and keep on playing well tomorrow.

Live poker

Live poker is definitely not my favorite form of poker for a ton of obvious reasons... it's full ring, hands are dealt at a turtle like pace, you can only play one table, etc. However, it's kind of fun to mix it up a bit and get some live poker in.

I played quite a bit today at the Bellagio, starting out at $2/5 NL to get warmed up and accustomed again to the live poker feel. After a few hours, I then played some $5/10 NL. All in all, I played for about 10.5 hours and finished up around $450.

I didn't get any huge hands or win any big pots really. Most of the money I made came from just iso-raising a few limpers and then c-betting on the flop. It seemed like most of my opponents would play pretty close to fit and fold poker on the flop so long as I c-bet large enough.

I never really lost any big pots either, except a few of my c-bets got snapped off by check-raises in spots where they'd be crazy to check raise pure bluff me based upon the board texture... so I had to bet/fold a few hands where I actually hit a small piece of the board.

Overall, I was happy with my play and I was able to avoid just nitting it up and nutpeddling. I was suprised how much respect 3-bet squeezes got... I went ahead and 3-bet bluffed a few opponents that I knew would only continue with the best of hands. I pulled it off probably half a dozen times and was successful with each one.

Anyways, tomorrow is my last day in Vegas so I'll probably try to play some more live poker. I think I'll check out the games at the Wynn as I hear there are some bigger donkaments going on there right now. Also, my friend Brenton is going to be in Vegas too so I'll probably meet up with him for a bit as well.

Vegas Update

Saturday was a lot of fun. I ended up sleeping in pretty late and worked out for about an hour or so in the afternoon. Then, the drinking began. Kevin and I went over to our friend Greg's apartment for some "pre-game" drinking.

We drank some beer and then headed out to a place called "Stoney's." It was outside of Vegas probably like 5-6 miles or so and it is a country bar. Greg suggested we go check it out. They played a lot of country songs that we could "two step" dance to as well as some random standard clubbing songs. They also mixed in quite a bit of line dancing songs. We ended up staying there pretty late but it was a great night.

On Sunday, Greg, Kevin, and I drove out to see the Hoover Dam. The traffic was insane though, and it would have taken us over an hour probably to go the last 10 miles or so to get there so we aborted mission.


We did stop by some random bike race...


...and got a peek at Lake Meed


There were also some pretty sick houses around this area too.



Later on that night, we hung out and drank with a few friends from our college that also happened to be spending their spring break in Vegas.

Today, I put in a short session online and lost a few buyins. I have yet to play live poker unfortunately, but I'm going to definitely try to get a session in tommorrow... hopefully St. Patty's day will produce a lot of good games.

Vegas

Just flew into Vegas earlier this afternoon. Weather was pretty decent, about 70 degrees.

We didn't do anything too crazy today, just checked into the hotel, walked around the strip and drank a bit, and watched the Bellagio water show.



We did end up eating at a sushi restaurant which was pretty cool. It was the first time I've tried sushi and I really liked it.

Tomorrow, I'm probably going to try and get in a poker session either online or live. Then I think the plan is to go out somewhere and drink.

It's nice to be somewhere warm again and I'm looking forward to having some fun over the next week.

Polar Plunge, blizzard, and Vegas

This past weekend, before I went to the Gun show, I stopped by an event called the "Polar Plunge." It was an event that was designed to raise money to benefit Special Olympics ND. It was in the parking lot in front of a hotel and the water was 43 degrees. I saw a few people jump into the ice cold water and here's a video clip of the first two jumpers. It was pretty fun to watch but I'm sure wasn't a whole lot for the people jumping into the water after they stepped out into the freezing cold. I thought it was a pretty cool event though, and I donated a bit of money for a good cause.





Today, there was a blizzard. I didn't really think it was that bad of a blizzard, but a lot of stuff shut down. Our intramural hockey game that was supposed to be tonight got postponed to Wednesday night. I think people over-reacted to the whole storm as I've seen much worse blizzards here. This snowfall and wind seemed quite standard for the most part, although it was pretty bad for just a few hours during the middle of the day.

I'm headed to Vegas for a week with one of my friends, Kevin. It's a "spring break" trip so we're going there to just relax and have fun, but I'm sure I'll get some live poker in. I'm going to bring my laptop as well so I can get in some online hands too. We're going to meet up with a friend from high school who lives down there as well. It should be a good time.

Poker should be fun

After re-reading my last blog post, it's pretty obvious to me that was one of my classic steam/vent blog posts.

Although it's obvious and I knew it before, I'm way way way way way too short term results orientated. It doesn't really matter that my play isn't adversely affected much at all due to placing too big of an emphasis my short term results... it's just making a job that should actually be nearly stress free quite stressful.

I don't have any projects due at a certain deadline, I don't have to meet a sales quota, I don't have to write 3 TPS reports by Friday, etc. Life as a pro poker player is great as far as flexibility goes and I truly believe that if approached correctly it can be a nearly stress-free job as long as you have an overly sufficient bankroll and reserve funds to safely pay bills during rough stretches.

I got into playing poker for a living not only because it was a great way for me to make money but also because I love the game. When going through a tough run, it can certainly take the fun out of it if you get too worried about the results. I'm not going to make that mistake again. I'm going to try a few things that I think will help me out that I've done in the past, to ensure that I'm less short-term results orientated.

I should have this down by now obviously since I've played over a million cash game hands, but I think everyone has their breaking point. Before I'd really bitch about just one or two sessions but here it's taken me nearly a month and a half of run-bad to really get worked up about it. So my tolerance level for getting frustrated over a bad run definitely seems to be getting better, but I want to be completely separated from my short-term results emotionally and mentally as long as I'm playing well.

Even though I had a rough day today as well and didn't win nearly as much as I should have, I finished in the green. But most importantly, I laughed while playing for the first time in a week or so.

I flatted a huge donk's open raise with KQs in position, flopped top pair on KXX with a flushdraw out and the donk c-bet shipped $400 into a $30 pot. I snapcalled and he had K4o for top pair no kicker. I held up and just laughed. The massive display of retardedness by the donk put a smile on my face and made my day.

fk my life again

The nightmare from last month continues. Ran as bad as I've ever ran today.

Don't read this if you're going to made a dumb comment on this post accusing me of whining. It's my blog and I'll write whatever the hell I want on it.

I'm sick and tired of people suggesting I don't have a good mental game. You don't even have a clue. I'm very solid in that aspect, in my opinion... I continued to play my best throughout this whole session after getting raped over and over again when I had the best of it. I've read the poker mindset, understand the realities of poker, etc. but it's just really tough to remain happy and motivated to play when severely getting crushed by no fault of your own. It's pretty demoralizing.

It's so natural to get frustrated in extreme instances of "run bad". There's a difference between being frustrated over the results and letting it affect your play. People who have a poor mental game let it affect their play and I definitely don't.

I think that most players would have been on severe monkey tilt towards the end of the session I just had. It was pretty ridiculous.

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I got stacked for 100bbs twelve different times. I've reviewed the hands and I think that only one of them was a marginal stack off, and that was a somewhat close pre-flop shove blind v. blind with 88 vs someone with a 18% 3-bet stat over a decent sample... He had AA in that hand.

The only other hand was perhaps that JJ overpair on the raggedy wet board but I am pretty sure that player does that with 88-TT as well as a ton of draws, so I think that was fine. Otherwise, pretty much every hand I posted I think I played pretty well.

I only stacked 4 opponents for 100bbs or more. I have run really bad on UB since the merger with AP when the CEREUS network started to get tracked by tableratings.com. I absolutely crushed it before that merger. I don't really think anything fishy is going on but then again who knows, they dont' have a great track record obviously...

I think I have to switch it up and play on a different site for a while, even though I was trying to place high in the rake race they have there every month, it's like a free $1k or so in extra rakeback. I'm just getting the feeling like I don't have a chance to win when I first sit down and obviously that isn't a good feeling to have. Definitely not a confidence booster.

I'll just switch the site up for a bit, keep playing well, and hopefully it'll turn around sometime soon. The only plus about this recent bad run is that I moved down to 400NL during the carnage so at least I'm getting unlucky there instead of 1k NL.

FML.

Shorstacking ratholers and Intramural hockey playoffs

This vid about shortstackers is great. I've watched it like ten times and still laugh every time I watch it.

Last night my intramural hockey team, "Blue Steel," won our first intramural hockey playoff game of the season by a score of 9-1. We played pretty well and got plenty of goals from a variety of people. We have to win two more games to claim the Championship. Hopefully we can play well the next few games and be victorious.

Poker has gone OK so far this month. I haven't really put many hours in and I'm not quite sure exactly why. I think it's been due to keeping busy doing other stuff like coaching, playing hockey, and going to a big get-together with relatives over the weekend. I'm going to try and make sure I put in a ton of hours this weekend. I'd like to play at least 50k hands or more this month.

First losing month as a pro

February was a month to forget. It was my first losing month as a professional. I ended up losing a lot less than I thought I would, which I guess is good... I made a small comeback at the end of the month. Over the last 4 days of the month or so, I was able to put in about 5-6 consecutive winning sessions in a row.

Overall, the reason for the poor month was pretty much a result of three things combined together: shot at 10/20 NL that went south, not playing nearly as many hands as I usually do, and moving down to a much lower stake to regain confidence ($2/4 NL). Part of my losses were due to unfortunate hands and situations. Part was due to playing to many tables (8 tabled for like a period of a week or so). And part was due to not playing my best poker combined with some pre-flop experimentation which consisted of a significant increase in 3-betting.

A losing month is no fun, but I'm still in great shape for the year compared to where I was at this point last year. My January was super solid so I'm actually still up a decent amount for 2009.

I'm going to focus on the things that are important in March. I'm going to play 4 tables. I'm going to make the best decisions I possibly can. And I'm going to avoid being results orientated. I'm confident this month will be better than the last.