Beating A Losing Day

I've been a little lax on my blogging lately. Clearly there are other things I'm busy doing right now, but I still should keep updating. It's therapeutic.

Okay, boring update on America West stuff. This only figures. The Wife works at a hotel, and today they offered her a little bit of a promotion. The catch is, she sort of has to take it or leave it by tomorrow. Here's the problem, and to fully understand this problem you must realize that my wife has a little bit of a self confidence problem. She's definitely smart and capable of holding down a real job that pays real money, but I can't seem to get it through her head to do it. This promotion (and yes, believe it or not, it's a promotion) pays $7/hr. For 35 hours a week.

-------------- SNAP! -----------------

Okay, it's an hour later... I guess she can put them off a little bit. I'll make a call to my landlord tomorrow to figure out what we can do about the lease. If she's not willing to play ball, then I pretty much can stick a fork in this whole idea... There's no way I can raise the requisite capitol to move and put some money down on an apartment without the security deposit from this place. I'm good, but not that good. Can't do anything else until then.

So, on to poker.

The last two days have been pretty damn good poker wise. Yesterday, ended up around $28 in the black after some more NL goodness. The rumors of soft NL games are absolutely true, though I never had the opportunity to put someone all-in, but I did get some good pots. The real secret to the NL arena is to play only premium hands and play them aggressively. Chasing will get you killed. It is truly a mind numbing grind, but ultimately profitably in a big way. I don't have enough hands yet in PokerTracker to really get a grasp on my BB/100 hands, but short term has been spectacular. The biggest problem is boredom from all the folding. I have tried to play one limit game and one NL game at the same time, but I've caught myself several times mentally mixing the games up and either playing the limit game like NL or worse, vice versa. Playing two NL games at once is marginally better, but it's still a big exercise of fold fold fold... Just twice as fast.

Today I stuck to the .50/1 limit game, it being morning and early afternoon. Played 2 tables for about 3 hours. Early on, the situation was grim. Suckouts were rampant, and in the first hour and a half, I found myself down $16 on one table and $14 on the other. Here's where it's nice to be working more then one table... I kept busy enough where if I got sucked out or bad beat on, I was too busy on the other table to steam about losing my good hand.

The second half of the session things started to click. Unfortunately I am at work and can't give exact figures, but from a $30 deficit I managed to bring home a $30 profit. Here's the kicker. When I looked at the PokerTracker stats for the day, almost every hand was red. Pocket aces got cracked twice. The Men went down at least once that I remember. Things just weren't coming together, and I paid dearly. The table was great, with one particularly fishy fish who would call you down with anything. By sticking to the game plan and not steaming, I was able to make the chasers pay big for the privilege.

I'll throw together something tomorrow with some more analysis when I can reference the PokerTracker database. There are some very interesting stats in there, and today's session is very worthy of study since it was, by and large, a terrible day of poker that ended up being a big winner.