First bad day of month

So I played just a short, one hour session today and finished down three buyins. I didn't play my best at all and didn't run that hot either. I slept in really late on Monday, ran a bunch of errands, then watched the newest episode of Dexter, season 4 so I didn't have much time to play today at all.

I'm kinda pissed off about this hand. I think I made a mistake here. I didn't have much of a read on this player, but since he seemed kinda fishy I think it's a pretty clear fold on the river as I don't see him bluffing much and/or value betting worse. I made a pretty poor river call.

This one, the 3-bettor is a reg who's a pretty big nit with his 3-bets. I would have liked a call pre-flop to see a flop and play it from there much better than just 4-bet/calling it off, as I think his range there is super tight... maybe QQ-AA and AK. He may not even 3-bet AK and QQ all of the time... maybe half the time. Also probably never bluffing in that spot, although I can't be 100% certain.

I'm still up a lot for the month, up about $6k over 6k hands, so I've really got nothing to worry about. I just need to keep playing like I did the first 4 days of the month and I'll be fine.

Mini-tear to start the month

So I've had a great start to the month so far. Hopefully it continues, as I feel like I'm playing some of the best poker I've ever played. Played two separate two hour sessions today and finished up 5 buyins total. I'm pretty happy with my play overall. I'm especially pleased to see that I was able to run at a very aggro VPIP and PFR without spewing all that much. I think if I can keep that style of play up it's going to be a lot more annoying for the regs to play against me.



My Dad, brother, Kevin, and I went out hunting again Sunday morning. Didn't have much luck once again. We ended up going about an hour west of town and spent the first few hours of the morning trying to get in between two flocks of Canadian Geese so we could pass-shoot them. It didn't work out though, so we aborted that plan and went after some ducks. Most of the sloughs with ducks in them were posted with no hunting signs, so we couldn't hunt there. We did end up getting one duck, which our dog, Boogie, went and retrieved. Chad recorded her bringing the duck to us, it's pretty cool.

Here are some pics that I took:

Boogie spazzing out after being released from the Suburban

Dad and Boogie walking back to the Suburban

Chad trying to get Boogie to release her newly-found duck

I also played a bit of hockey Sunday night during our weekly ice rental. We had a lot less people there than normal. I think a lot of people went to the UND college hockey game instead of skating themselves! Oh well, it was still a good workout and a lot of fun. I'm really tired though. Waking up at like 6 AM for hunting a few days in a row really catches up to me fast. I NEVER wake up that early, except for hunting!

Fun Day

Went out duck hunting in the morning but it was basically a total disaster. One of our neighbors told us about a slough where there were tons of ducks, but he gave us really vague directions so we never ended up finding the place. Of course, the direction we traveled to find the place had really no other decent potholes or sloughs so we only got one duck and one mourning dove. We ended up quitting pretty early anyways as my Dad had to get back to town for something.

I played only one session of poker, finishing up a buyin.

Then, at night I hung out with a friend and we went out to eat dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings, went to a movie (The Hangover), and went out to the bars downtown. It was a blast. I'm super tired now though and I'm going to hit the hay as we're waking up early again to go duck hunting in about 3 hours.

Takin' names and kickin' ass

First session for Friday:

Nice to finally have a sick heater during a session. Played for 2 hours and basically crushed everyone. Feels good to absolutely dominate. I definitely think my play is improving.

Not sure if I'll play any more today or not. I'm going to take a break and run a few errands. I kind of want to go out tonight to the bars or something but we'll see. I'm going hunting pretty early in the morning so I don't really want to be out too late. We're not going to our normal hunting spot as the roads are probably too wet and muddy to get into our camping site. We'll just go somewhere about 1 hour west of town and set up in a small pothole or jump the ducks out of sloughs.

Decent start to October

I played quite a bit more aggressive pre-flop than normal today and it seemed to work out alright as I finished up about $1k for the day. I've been experimenting with 3-betting in different spots and I'm beginning to identify some unique spots. I've founds some cool positional set-ups to 3-bet bluff in as well as 3-betting a little bit different value range than I have in the past. I definitely like it so far. Normally my 3-bet stat is around 6-7% but today it was near 10%.


As you can see, I started out the day kind of rough, running into two unavoidable losses. This one, I just lose a big flip. This one, I get standardly two-outed on the turn when stacks were likely to go in irregardless of the card that peeled off.

The final two sessions of the day went a little better. I lost this hilarious hand halfway through my final session of the day. lol fish. I did run decently well though as I was able to stack a decent amount of opponents later in the day. Here's a nice hand where I was basically gifted a stack courtesy of a regular in the games. Really no other way for me to play this hand. I like the way it turned out obviously.

I'm going to sleep now, as I'm going to wake up a bit early tomorrow so I can go to the "Free Dance Friday" that the ballroom dance class runs. I'm a teaching assistant for the ballroom dance class at the university here so tomorrow is basically a practice day for the students before they take their test on Tuesday. They are learning the "waltz" right now. I really enjoy this class. It's a great way to meet new people and helps to relieve stress.

Solid result for September

I am pretty satisfied with my results in September. I finished the month with a total poker profit of about 18k. I nearly made the 20k mark but had a bad final day of the month. It feels great to post a solid winning month since the two previous months were kinda rough. I played almost all $2/4 NL.

I'm going to grind $2/4 NL again for another month and hopefully do even better than I did in September. Plan is to get around 100 buyins for $5/10 NL then move back up to there. I might start mixing in some $3/6 NL as I don't see any reason not to, because I now have over 100 buyins for that level online now spread amongst the sites I play on. I kind of skipped $3/6 NL last time I moved up to $5/10 NL and I don't know if that was a good idea, bad idea, or didn't matter. I guess it wouldn't hurt to grind out 30-40k hands at $3/6 NL while building towards my target bankroll for $5/10 NL.

I'm going to try and get a bit more structured in my approach to each day. I'm going to write out a schedule and do my best to follow it. Maybe once I get it wrote up I'll talk a bit about how I decided to arrange my daily schedule.

I'm going to a Captain's meeting tonight for my intramural hockey team, Blue Steel. We're going to have a pretty solid team this year... in fact it could possibly be our best team ever. I just have to pay the registration fee then track down all the jerseys and socks and we'll be ready to play our first game in about the middle of October.

Looks like I'll be going duck hunting again this weekend, with my Dad and brother. So I'm looking forward to that.

Duck Hunting

It's been awhile since my last update, which has mainly been due to being ridiculously busy. I ended up going out duck hunting last weekend with my friend Kevin. My Dad and brother also went hunting in the same spot but they hunted out of a different boat.

It was kind of a last minute deal getting Kevin's boat and everything ready to go but it worked out. I thought Kevin was going to go hunting with his Dad, but his Dad ended up going to the lake so Kevin came with us. He just had a trolling motor on the boat which was just barely enough to get by on the lake we were hunting on. Saturday was a good day of hunting as Kevin and I shot 8 ducks and one Canadian Goose total between us. Sunday it was super windy out and we just hunted from shore and killed 3 ducks. We drove back Sunday afternoon and played in our weekly hockey ice rental that night.

It was a fun weekend but we really didn't get as much shooting in as I would have liked. The ducks all seemed to be in the flooded fields instead of flying over the lake we were hunting. Next time we go out we might have to find a different location to hunt from.

Here are some pics from the hunt:

Kevin the Skipper

Kevin putting out the decoys

Kevin calling in the geese

Me taking aim

Kevin spots a flock of ducks

Me calling 'em in

Kevin's "Navy Seal" look... lol, we were bored because the ducks stopped flying

Slaughter photo