Ship it

I played pretty solid today and won $4.8k over 3,800 hands. I need to work on opening up a bit pre-flop though, as sometimes towards the end of each two hour session I auto-piloted a bit and that resulted in a bit of nitty play.

It's cool that I was able to win so much even after losing a bunch of hands I should have won and being on the wrong end of a few big flips.

Here's my biggest lost on the day. Villain was 4-betting me a ton before this so he certainly has 4-bet bluffs in his range, making both of our plays here standard. It always seems to hit on the river, lol.

Just got sucked out on here when I had the best hand. Another river rat.

This guy is a shortstacker who plays all the time and seems like he's terrible but he always gets the best of me. Here's two hands vs him. Here, he sucks out vs my trips. And here he 3-bets with 22 !?!? and calls my shove... weird, obviously shortstacks getting it in with 22 has to be terrible as they are flipping vs everything and crushed a lot. He's down a ton of money in my database but somehow he's a decent winner according to tableratings.com.

I gave a really interesting lesson earlier today in which I kind of messed up vs. a regular a few different times (we were doing a live sweat with me playing)... I learned quite a bit from it as well and I think that I picked up on something that is probably one of my leaks.

Cooled off a bit...

Over the past few days, my scorching start to the month has cooled off a bit. Sunday I broke even over a decent amount of hands and yesterday I lost about $2k.

I played mostly $5/10 NL yesterday and didn't really get paid off at all and wasn't able to stack a single opponent. I did, however, manage to lose a huge flip for 170bbs here. That was really the only hand of interest in the session and it accounted for the majority of my loss.

I'll look to play well today and try and turn a tidy profit.

Decent Result

Won about $2k today. Most of the my big losses were out of my control, which is good. I didn't make any mistakes for 100bbs stacks. I did, however, make one stupid bluff at $5/10 NL vs a LAG player who wasn't going to buy it... that cost me about 1/3 a buyin there.

Here's a few hands:

Biggest loss on the day here. This was vs. a reg that I have a lot of history with. He actually runs about 18/14 which is the hilarious part. He's the definition of "TAGfish". That's not the first time he's sucked out like this... he's outdrawn me like 2-3 times in AIPF pots with suited Aces when I have him crushed.

I get it all in drawing dead! Weeeeeeeeee

I like my line here vs. this fish. Unfortunately, I didn't get the result I wanted.

That is all. I think I might hit the hay a bit earlier tonight, I'm feeling a bit tired out.

Another solid day

I had a pretty good day today as well. I ended up winning about $3.2k with most of the hands coming at $2/4 NL 6 Max on Stars. I was playing on Stars to unlock a $1.5k bonus, which I cleared today as well. I played 8 tables to clear the bonus faster and it went pretty well, although I did make a few pre-flop mistakes. I also made one spewy bluff with Ten high in a 3-bet pot which didn't work out at all...

Anyways, Ryan, a HU pro from Fargo (who is also a member of my Destined2pwn poker group) came up for the night and he set up his computer just across from mine and grinded out some hands. He had a few very swingy sessions against wild opponents and ended up down a bit. I saw him play some ridiculous hands where his opponent shipped an underpair, pocket 44 on the flop and held vs Ryan's two overs and flushdraw. Sick life. Ryan also bricked on another huge draw when the same villain checkraised all in on the turn with TT on a JXXX board. They were deep of course.

I donked around at bit at HU, $1/2 blinds deepstacked. I finished up from my first match vs. the same opponent when 4 tabling. But then I lost most of it back to 3 random, terribly passive donkeys. They all ran really good vs me and I ran AK into AA AIPF for a stack once which hurt.

Anyways, the HU play was fun but I think I'm going to stick to 6 Max for sure. The variance in HU seems like it's pretty brutal. It isn't something I really want to deal with, at least not right now.

Back to the grind tomorrow.

Off to a Smoking Start in 2009

I'm wasting no time in the new year... I've gotten off to an excellent start and I'm up $7k over 6,000 hands so far. About half of my play has been at $5/10 NL and the other half at $2/4 NL.

I've decided that I'm going to try and play $5/10 NL whenever the games are good and try and play that stake as much as possible. I'm definitely rolled for the limit and as long as there's a fish in the game I can make much more money playing $5/10 NL than $2/4 NL.

Here's the biggest pot I've won so far. The UTG player was terrible so I was trying to get into as many pots as possible with that player. Once I hit, I played it pretty standardly in my opinion. No reason really to raise at any point in the hand as the board is pretty dry.

This hand sucked, as the villain was a HUMUNGOUS fish. I thought he had AK or AA or something, as lots of these terrible fish like to min 3-bet OOP then check the flop to slowplay those hands.

I'm going to do my best to continue this short term tear into a long term one and attempt to absolutely crush $5/10 NL.

2008 Recap

2008 was a great year for me. It was my first full year as a Professional Poker Player. I am extremely satisfied with my decision to pursue poker for my profession. I am having a lot of fun with it as well as making a respectable amount of cash. My poker gig is an perfect job for me. I am certain I wouldn't nearly be as happy or successful in my life right now if I had used my degree in business management to get a job in a management position.

As far as $ results in 2008, I far surpassed what I estimated I would make on the year and am very happy with the monetary result from 2008.

I really believe that much of my success in '08 was due to getting lessons from Tim Nuter in April. I owe much of my success to his tutelage. Without those lessons, I probably make half as much as I did for the year.

I'm glad I started coaching in 2008. I began coaching towards the end of August and have had many different students take lessons from me. Most of my students, especially the ones who have taken poker seriously since taking lessons, have shown significant improvements in their skill level. I think it's pretty cool that I can help others print money and it definitely gives me some type of fulfillment from my job.

As far as my personal life for 2008, it was average. I had a fun summer shooting in a lot of sporting clays tournaments with my Dad and brother and I had decent success in those shoots. We had a good duck hunting season as well.

I didn't work out as much as I should have and I'm not in as good of shape as I was to start the year. Also, I ended a relationship that I had with a girl that wasn't working out at all. Ending it was good because we weren't the right match, but since then I haven't really put that much effort into meeting or dating new girls.

So, overall, 2008 was an excellent year for me. I hope 2009 will be even better.

December Results

Overall for the month, I ended up making about $14k from poker profits. Obviously not nearly as good as my last few months but still OK. Much of that was actually from rakeback. I got a huge rakeback check from raketherake.com because I played so much in November. Of the $14k I made this month, $5k of that was from rakeback.

I didn't execute my monthly plan as well as I would have liked. I did follow it most of the time, however, which was good. There were times where I would play more than 4 tables, times where I tried bluffing big fish, and times where I didn't make the best decisions. I think I may have put too much pressure on myself by making so many different goals and plans. Next time I'm going to make it much simpler to focus on fewer things.

I'll probably do a recap of my year sometime tomorrow.