School's In

Had a very nice Christmas with the In-Laws. Got a lot of neat-o stuff, especially household stuff I really needed. One thing that slipped through the cracks was the Lee Jones book I was constantly asking for and told to hold off buying because, you know, it's coming up on Christmas.

And I never got it.

So I treated myself to a trip to the book store and I have finally obtained the first tome for my poker collection. I've gotten through about 60 pages of it so far, and I've made a couple of discoveries...

The first one that immediately came to mind, especially considering the starting hand requirements, is that I've already been playing pretty much the starting hands he recommends. There are perhaps some hands in there that I consider a little on the loose side, but not that bad. In terms of interpreting the board for the nut and second best hands, I'm getting there. I think the key to this exercise is practice, and the nice thing about it is, you can sit down with a deck of cards and put some boards down and interpret them without the little "hey, idiot, you've got 20 seconds or we're mucking your hand" alarm going off.

I can't wait to get through this book to see what suggestions is has for working with marginal hands and positional strategy.

No poker for the last couple of days. It's kind of nice to have a couple of days off from it. I've been on a small upswing and I hate to break that, but I did need a day or two off to put some perspecive to my game.

I'm still Jonesing for a trip to the Indian casino to play some live cards, but I'm still hesitent about peeling $100 off my $200 bankroll, as it would set me back in the quest to get the hell out of the .50/1 games. I'm tossing around the idea of pulling out the $100, going and playing, and depositing that cash back into the online account. The only problem I have with this plan is the time it takes to move fundage back and forth between the two (though I use the IGM-Pay function, and they claim same day service after the inital withdrawl).

Anyone with more experience with this have any opinions on this plan? The lowest limit game available to me is the $2-$4 game. I think that the $100 buyin would be enough, but I can't be sure.

Forgive the sketchiness of this post.. I'm lacking sleep and my brain is mush.