Update

So I've taken a two day break or so from poker. Hopefully I come back with a refreshed mindset.

On Tuesday, my intramural hockey team ended up getting the "W" with a 7-3 win vs. a very solid team. One of our players went on a scoring spree and lit the lamp 4 times.

I'm headed to Chicago for a bit after Thanksgiving to hang out with Tim, Bryan, and some other friends. Should be fun.

lol FML

haha I just logged onto Cake poker and played 15 minutes and insta dropped 2.5 buyins mainly due to coolers. Add this to losing the past 2 days as well and I'm well into the red for the month.

This is so annoying, it feels like I can't do anything right. I think I'm just going to take the rest of the day off and get some other stuff done. It'll be a miracle if I end up breaking even this month.

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.

Another rough day

I'm really tail-spinning this month... need to kick it back in gear. I'm losing key hands at terrible times... basically I just start to feel good during a session, playing well, then BAM cooler. I'm letting it get to me a bit, which is not good.

I'm switching sites for a few days, maybe a different look will make a difference for me...

Durrr loses again

I am pretty sure Durrrr was up $1.5 million halfway through Tuesday but then dumped it all back to Isildur1 and lost a few hundred K. Here's the most recent news on it....

Here's a pretty sick hand from their session today... I don't know if this 6-bet shove with AKsoooted is very good at all... mainly because Isildur1 has been pulling a lot of his bullshit post-flop and hasn't really 5-bet that much or even been super crazy with 4-betting from the hands that I've watched. Of course he's been pretty rampant with the 3-bets.

Full Tilt Poker $500/$1000 No Limit Hold'em - 2 players
The Official 2+2 Hand Converter Powered By DeucesCracked.com

Isildur1 (BB): $347477.00
durrrr (BTN/SB): $650051.50

Pre Flop: ($1500.00)
durrrr raises to $3000, Isildur1 raises to $12000, durrrr raises to $31600, Isildur1 requests TIME, Isildur1 raises to $76800, durrrr raises to $650051.50 all in, Isildur1 calls $270677 all in

Flop: ($694954.00) 8 9 T

Turn: ($694954.00) 9

River: ($694954.00) 8

Final Pot: $694954.00
Isildur1 shows A A (two pair, Aces and Nines)
durrrr shows A K (two pair, Nines and Eights)
Isildur1 wins $694953.50
(Rake: $0.50)


I ended up losing 3 buyins today. About 5 minutes before I quit I flopped the K high flush vs the A high flush. GG my 200bb stack.

Anyways, my outlook on my future poker sessions is good, however. Today one of my friends, Forrest, (who plays $2/4 NL on FTP) and I had a long video review discussion and chat about today's games. Rob joined in as well. I must say, Forrest has some really great ideas and I can't wait to watch the video he's going to make for next week's meeting. Today was a really good study session; I learned a ton.

Most epic online HU match ever!!!

Ok so over the past few days on FTP, Tom "durrrr" Dwan (who some consider to be the best or one of the best online poker professionals in the world) has been playing super high stakes HU matches with a player known as "Isildur1". Ironically, durrrr just signed with FTP as part of "Team Full Tilt" like a day or two prior.

If you want to read more about it, go here. But in a nutshell, the two have played dozens of hours already and durrrr is getting absolutely annihilated. He is down over $2.3 million over the past few days to this opponent.

I've been watching bits and pieces of the match throughout the day, and I can't believe that durrrr is still playing this guy at 3 AM!!! They were playing earlier this afternoon too. There have been so many insane hands played, with numerous $400k pots. Durrr seems to be losing it here towards the end, as when I'm typing this out he's made 2 or 3 really dumb bluffs that cost him his stack.

It's getting late and I'm going to bed, but I wouldn't be surprised if durrrr is busto by morning. I just don't understand why he continues to play this guy as it doesn't seem like he has an edge at all. If I were him, I'd take a day or two break and review all of Isildur1's hands in HEM and try and figure him out... it's fairly likely that Isildur1 did this to durrrr and probably researched some durrrr HH's to figure out a counter-strategy to his style... there's really no other way he could be crushing durrrr this badly.

Deer hunting

Went out deer hunting on Sunday and ended up filling my doe tag so I'm finished with deer hunting. We actually didn't see that many deer, which was surprising. We did quite a bit of walking so I kind of figured we'd run into a lot more opportunities to shoot some deer but I only ended up seeing three deer all day and two of those we shot.

I played poker a bit after I got home from hockey and lost about a buy-in. I made a really terrible play in a 3-bet pot when I was 200bbs deep with a regular. I basically check-raised all-in on the turn for no reason and was only getting called by better... sure enough he had flopped the flush and my TPTK was no good. I definitely played lackluster today and I really need to get into gear and start playing well if I hope to have a good November.

Here are some pics from deer hunting:

Morning Sky


Dad wearing deer hunting required orange clothing



Walking around looking for deer


My new AR-15


Taking aim


Duckslayer007, lol

WOW

Got crushed today. Played two sessions... four hours total. Lost $4.3k playing a mixture of $2/4 NL - $5/10 NL. Ran $3.3k below all-in EV. Only played 114 hands of $5/10 NL and got coolered all-in pre-flop with QQ on the BTN vs a very aggro regular in the CO who had AA. I was running like 55/44 with a 10% 3-bet at that table over like 40 hands.

I don't know what else to say really. I pretty much ran bad in every way in the book. Besides running way below all in EV I got coolered a ton as well and didn't have any coolers go in my favor except for one hand.

I feel soul-crushed right now. This is frustrating. I'm calling it a night and probably going to go out tomorrow and take my frustration out on some deer with my new AR-15 rifle fixed w/ a scope.

Still even on month

Past two days basically canceled each other out. Yesterday I lost 2 buyins and today I finished up about $1k. I'm going to try to not look at my results month-to-date from now on until the end of the month. We'll see if I can restrain myself.

Yesterday, my intramural hockey team played a pretty intense game. We ended out coming up on top 5-4 but it was a battle. We were up by one with like 5 minutes left in the 3rd period but they came right back and scored to tie it up. We ended up lighting the lamp for the 5th goal with only a few minutes left in the game. The last minute or so of the game was insane. The puck was in our end and basically I just ended up eating a decent chunk of time off the clock by holding the puck close to the corner boards with my skates.

They had a face-off right outside our zone with about 20 seconds left... they won the draw and shot it towards the goal. I blocked it with my stick and started skating the puck towards the corner to kill the last 10 seconds or so and someone gave me a savage slash to the stick, breaking my stick in half. They got a penalty on the play and time expired but wow, that slash was pretty unnecessary and it broke my favorite, new stick.

Slow and steady wins the race?

Another day where it seemed like not a whole lot really happened. I played 3 sessions for a total of about 5 hours worth of play and ended up $1k. This puts me back to even for the month and I've finally recovered from that really bad day I had on the first day of the month where I ended up dumping $2.5k.

One thing I really want to focus on in my play over the next few days is being aware of when a reg is likely fed up with my 3-betting and is going to 4-bet and other similar types of situations. Also, I'm going to try and avoid making speculative plays when the villain I'm up against expects ME to be frustrated and make a stand... It seems lately over the past week or so my timing has been off in this area. Mainly, it's just a matter of paying attention and then leveling. I'm going to work hard on getting better at this over the near future.

Another small win

Ended up playing three sessions today for a total of about 7 hours... finished up $650. Nothing spectacular but I really didn't play amazingly well either. I think I'm not focusing enough on my tables... I'm getting distracted easily by surfing internet, monkeying around with music, looking at my HEM $ won stat (terrible habit by the way, super -EV). I'm going to do my best to just knock all that shit off from now on when I play.

I finished watching Nutedawg's second part of the 100NL vids on CardRunners that he made. Awesome two videos. Definitely check them out. It's obvious to me that he pays full attention when he plays, as I think if I had been playing I probably miss half of the spots or more in which he makes a unique play to scoop the pot.

An email from one of my students alerted me to the upcoming date of December 1st, 2009... the date that banks are supposed to be legally responsible for complying with all the UIGEA regulations. I totally forgot about this and I think I'm going to research the expected impact this might have on online poker and cashing out. If anyone has any good articles to point me towards on this let me know.

Slowly climbing back

So I played two sessions today and finished up two buy-ins. Nothing fantastic but it sure beats a swift kick to the shorts. Mainly, I continued getting standarly coolered which is expected since it felt like I've been running pretty decent over the last few months. I'm not mad about it or anything, just stating the facts.

Basically, these two hands prevented me from coming away from today's play as a big winner. These were the only two hands in which I got felted for 100bbs, which I suppose I should be happy/proud about. This hand, the villain was a MEGA nit... He was something like 22/8 with a 3-bet of 0.9% over a huge sample. Sick life.

In this hand, the villain was also the mark at the table. He was pretty passive but bad... so I actually figured he had a hand here, something like AQ or AJ. I just call him down (standard IMO) on the flop and turn since he's betting so big and quickly... it was so likely he'd at least bet the river, so then I could just jam the rest in. Well turns out he just ships it in for me on the river after binking his 4 outer.

I actually took these two hands a lot better than I normally would. Of course I spazzed the chat in all caps a bit just for fun/show, but I really didn't give a fuck that I just got sucked out on at all. It's tough to completely remove emotion from the game after you get an unfortunate result. I've always been a little pissed when shit like this happens. I never really let it affect my play at all, but really there's no point to even be pissed off at all in the slightest bit. I think reading this article over before I started the session was really good for me. I definitely recommend everyone to read it. I don't know exactly who the poster is, but I saw someone recommend that Rob, my student, read it... so I took a gander.

The post was written a long time ago (2006) but I feel what he's talking about as far as mentality and approach to the mental game still is relevant. The stuff he talks about is pretty standard and known by most poker players but how many people actually have that kind of attitude? We all know we should be happy when a fish sticks all the money in vs. our monster when he only has a 10% chance to win. It's the luck factor that brings the poor players back and makes this game possible to profit from. But how many of us actually take the attitude that Tien is speaking of in this article?

From now on, when I get sucked out on, my mentality = "Whatever I don't give a fuck" It's a hell of a lot simpler than remembering all the stuff from "The Poker Mindset", lol. Basically it's a way for you to help yourself master #1, #4, and #6 of The Poker Mindset's key principles (Understand and Accept the Realities of Poker, Desensitize Yourself to Money, and Remove all Emotion from Decisions).

In fact, it's pointless to even post or look at hands where you know you did everything right but just got unlucky. I don't even know why I posted those two hands above, lol. I guess they are fun to look at sometimes, but really it's a waste of time. I'll try to minimize posting hands like that in the future. I guess I show hands like that sometimes because I don't really want to show the super interesting or hands I played trickily because I'm sure some of my opponents read my blog. :)

Anyways enough about that, here are a few pics from Halloween! I went out to the bars with some friends and it was an absolute blast. I even ran into my friend Brea, who I've known since I was like 12. She's the daughter of the sporting clays range owner in Bismarck so she was there throwing targets or keeping score every time my Dad, brother, and I went there to shoot. We didn't get to talk all that much though, as she took off with some friends to a different bar after awhile. Here's a few pics she took of us.

Brea and I

Brea, myself, and Kevin

Graph posting curse, lol

Ok so I post a graph then I get the well-deserved pile of coolers the next time I play, haha. I actually don't believe in that, but damn I ran pretty poorly on the first day of the month. I've got a little bit of a hole to dig myself out of already.

Ended up putting in two sessions for a total of about 5 hours worth of play. Lost $2.5k. Ran at EV but the hands I lost were mainly coolers vs shitty players. This one was the worst of them. No point in 4-betting pre-flop as this guy was a mega-nit. Also, if I raise the turn he might even lay down AK since he's such a nit... so I think I played it super-standard. Terrible river obviously.

This one was very frustrating as well. It was versus a very random/ spazzy fish. Earlier, I saw him 4-bet all in for 200bbs vs my button raise of 2.5xs the bb. I had him covered and folded my trash... after everyone folded he triumphantly flipped up his fish-hooks to scoop the $16 profit. I think there's no getting away from this because he was the mark at the table and the turn overbet actually made me insta-call... I figured a player like that would be shoving something like KdQx not a flopped flush. If I was 100bbs deep it's a no-brainer stack off, but since I was a little over 150bbs deep with him it was a sickening hand. Still feel it was a cooler though vs this particular opponent.

Pretty standard here. I just jammed because his 3-bet is so large that a smallish 4-bet would almost appear comitting anyways. Villain had a 3-bet and squeeze stat in the double digits over a large sample. Ran into a monster and ended up drawing dead once the flop rolled out.

Other hand, also lost 100bb's with a flopped top two pair. The villain had top set. We were mega deep (450bbs) and it was played in a very interesting way by both players so I'm not going to post the HH. There was a massive fish in the pot as well that appearantly we both were trying to drag into the action unsuccessfully.

I definitely didn't play perfectly though, I spewed off at least 2 buyins do to random, non-logical bluffing. Really didn't pick that great of spots.

I'm going to just forget about today and start with a fresh mindset tomorrow. No point in worrying about the past.