The Intrepid Card Player

Over and Out

2008-06-07T11:55:00.005-05:00

Well, that pretty much does it. I cannot make any traction at all in my cash games, and I'm the bubble boy in every tournament I play. I haven't had this bad of luck on the tables in a very long time.. And yes, I did use the word luck. I have lost count of the times I've made moves with anything from good to crushing win odds and came away empty.

Nothing is worth this sort of frustration. Nothing.

Anyway, I'm down to my final $7 in Pokerstars and that'll be that for there. Something isn't quite right with that site. Too many statistical longshots coming through, for and against me. You know there's a problem when I can predict not only that I'll get beat or beat someone, but on what street with scary accuracy. Stars is the king of throwing you a bone and snatching it away, too. 99 vs KK, flop gives you the miracle 9, then the turn gives HIM the miracle K. Must be some sort of sick joke, I've seen it so much.

So, unless there's a miracle in store, I think tomorrow this attempt at making $50 walk is going to be an utter failure. I'm so tired of playing at these non-productive levels anyway. Nothing quite as frustrating as finally hitting a great hand and getting action on it, only to walk away with $1.23. Weeee! Since poker isn't really fun anymore, I'm no longer amused with working my ass off for hours on end for a $0.50/hr win rate. To mitigate that, I've been playing $3.25 6-max turbo sit and goes, but with the latest string of crushing beats, that's nothing but pain and agony... So, basically, I'm out of ideas. Maybe it's just that I fucking suck at this game, but I don't know, heads up, holding top pair, statistically speaking, you should be winning more then 30% of the time, which I'm not.

I don't know how people who make a living playing this game do it. They must be masochists. I know that I, a relatively stable and happy person, am driven to throw heavy objects through my monitor when time after time I get screwed at the tables without even the common decency of being offered a reach-around.

So, to summarize, I hate this game. It's taken me a while to realize that, but truly, I hate poker. I think the only thing I might, emphasize might still like is live action tournament poker, but even that is potentially not worth it.

I'm toying with trying one more time on Bodog. I have to believe I'm again going to be farting in a windstorm, but I have a reason to try one more time there, so who knows.

I keep thinking I'm an idiot for ever pulling out the cash on my original attempt. I was actually making decent coin then. Of course, those were different times too. The Party at PartyPoker is over for us Yanks, and those were the heady days of poker when the flood of World Poker Tour wannabes were flooding like sheep into the world of online poker. I did make a fair coin off of them, to be sure, but I keep thinking what could have been if I could have just kept my interest. I mean, honestly, my skills at poker are pretty good, and I think if I'd have been able to poke my head into the $5/$10 level where not everyone is a complete tool, I could have actually done alright for myself, but alas, I made the decision to take some time off, and when I came back, the picture had changed. Party was gone, the fish either grew a brain or busted out, and now even at the loose change levels there are passable players, or at least players that don't give action on everything they see.

Anyway, word has it that Bodog is soft as a baby's butt, so I'll try once more to make this work. I'm not holding out much hope, but what the hell. It's only a game, right?

What Am I Doing?

2008-06-03T10:43:00.003-05:00

I am starting to get the distinct feeling that the poker Gods are done with me. I'm not much for posting whiny "woe is me" posts, but after a solid month of losing, one has to wonder whether this is just running bad or if I'm just cosmically fucked.

Went to Vegas for a week in the middle of May. Thankfully, I didn't spend much time at the tables. Of my 5 days there, the only ray of light was a 6th place money finish at the afternoon NLHE tourney at the Planet Hollywood. I have to say I did play some solid poker that day, but with the amount of chips at the table, by the time we got to the final table the blinds were so high it turned into roulette with cards. At one point, I was down to my final T100 chip and managed to hail-mary a couple of double-ups and a triple-up to get back into the game. 6th place basically paid 2 to 1 on your buyin, so for 3 hours of work it's sort of crappy earnings, but I had fun and learned, so that's important.

The rest of the trip gambling wise was a sea of red. I sat down at a $1/$2 NLHE table and got my ass handed to me thanks to a couple of crushing beats. Nothing suckout-ish, just good hands running into better hands. For some reason, I just simply cannot make money playing B&M ring games. I think it has something to do with the donk level at the tables.

I got talked into playing Craps with a friend which cost me a bundle, and there's no such thing as a cheap table of blackjack on the strip, though I did do decent playing 21, in spite of my abandoning attempts to count. I'm not quite there yet to try it in live games without making it obvious I'm doing it. I can't carry on a conversation with people and remember the count.

It was a good time though. I went with a friend of mine and his girlfriend, both of whom I barely get to see, so it was a good trip. Next time I'll have to plan a little more ahead and try to play some more poker tournaments. It's hard to convince your travel companions who don't want to play a tournament to be okay with your disappearing for hours.

Anyway, it appears it's only a matter of time before I'm done with online poker... again... It's just not fun. Losing seldom is, but it's usually followed by a decent winning streak, so I am content to ride it out and wait for my luck to change, but that doesn't seem to be happening. I opened an account on Absolute Poker, put in $50 and never saw a profit there. Just crushing losses and suckouts. Ironically, they keep sending me notices telling me about the $50 bonus I have yet to unlock. Thanks, assholes. I guess it's my fault. To get "points" to unlock their bonus, you have to be involved in a hand, and my involved, they mean seeing the flop, and the rake has to be at least $0.50. So, if you're gonna play tight/aggressive poker, it'll take forever. And, if you deposited $50 and play the $.25/$.50 tables, you are NEVER going to see a $.50 rake, so you're basically, well, fucked. Thanks for the deposit! The final blow about this is, the whole reason why I deposited money at Absolute to begin with didn't pan out, because I crapped out so fast.

Good times.

I was thinking about throwing some cashish at Bodog and see what happens there. Word has it it's a fish farm the likes of Party Poker of olden days, but when you can't hit a hand if you picked it out of the deck, it doesn't matter the skill of the opponent.

So, I dunno. My bankroll at Pokerstars stands at around $20. I've been trying to gain traction playing $3.25 6-handed turbo NLHE games. I was doing very well, but not lately. The latest blow that put me out before this post... I was the dominant chip leader when I get KK. 4 people left in the game, I'm the SB. I raise 3XBB, called by BB, the second largest stack, which is about 3/4 mine. Flop comes something like J66, I put out a good bet, he raises, I shove, he insta-calls and turns over...

66, for the quads.

This is my world for the last 45 days.

So, I don't know.. Maybe if I can find someone to sponsor me I can play poker at a level that doesn't equate to roulette with cards, though with my current luck, I wouldn't put money on me.

But it's gotta turn around eventually, right?! In the mean time, I'll continue to play my ass off for $1 profits at a time. My definition of fun times, to be sure!

Plus Two, Minus One

2008-05-04T01:21:00.002-05:00

"The only thing worse than a loser is someone who won't admit he played badly." - Mickey Rosa, 21

Been quiet lately around here. Not a heck of a lot to report.. Not playing an incredible amount of poker lately. Lost of stuff going on at work, so I've been busy with that, and I'm getting ready for Vegas, which involves trying to get my other games that I've been neglecting back in order. No doubt I plan on playing a lot of poker while I'm there, but not everyone I'm going with plays poker, so I have to do some time at the Blackjack tables and throw some Craps. Two games I do enjoy, but which have -EV. Except 21, under some circumstances, but I'm not much of a counter. I might give it a shot at the low limit tables, see how I do. I'll let you know if I get thrown out on my ass for it.

Pokerstars has a weekly freeroll to get into another tourney which gets you into their WSOP giveaway thing. It's an ultra long shot, but hey, you can't beat free, right? Anyway, I decide to give it a shot. It's no limit, and turbo format, so blinds go up every 5 minutes. You start with 1500 chips, but with the blind schedule it quickly turns into a free for all, but again, free.

Anyway, after a few rounds of jab and miss, I'm down to 1075 chips and I'm handed QQ in the small blind. Early positions raises the 30 BB to 300. Folded to me, I call it , confident that it's just gonna be me and him. To my shock, the BB shoves all 2900 of his chips out. Raiser responds by shoving the remaining 2700 of HIS chips out. I'm sitting with 775 in chips left, and I clearly HAVE to call this with the ludicrous pot odds I have, not to mention, I do have a premo hand, though against 2 it's a bit rougher. I shove, and then I suddenly realize I forgot the cardinal fucking rule of online poker.

"If you have a pocket pair, someone else does too".

Think I'm kidding, try looking at all the hands where you got a pocket pair and are able to see other hands that were mucked or beat you. Five gets you ten the majority of those hands had at least another pocket pair in them.

Anyway, I roll over my QQ. BB, the instigator of all of this, flips over a pair of 9's. Lead Off Raiser flips over AA, which surprises me not at all.

Of course, you KNOW who won the hand, and I make what might be the quickest exit I have ever made in tournament play.

Ring play wasn't much better. I did manage to fill up a boat against someone's flush, and that alone kept the day from being a financial bust, but a couple of 2 out rivers coming home to my opponents made for a basically break even day at the tables. I walked away with about $.20 more then I started with. Hey, it's not a loss!

Back in the Saddle

2008-04-25T19:05:00.002-05:00

100 hands played at the impressive .10/.20 tables.. 2 hours exactly, with a take of a little under 4.5 BB/Hr. Still going through a rather dry spell of playable hands, but at least the hands I did get held up, which helps a lot.

Got a Vegas trip coming up next month, so I'm working out my Blackjack chops in preparation. Gotta try to figure out a poker schedule too. I'm meeting a friend out there who is also a poker player, and we're looking to get into some tournament action. If any of my fine readers have suggestions on low buy-in NLHE tournies, lemme know!

Wow.

2008-04-18T15:34:00.002-05:00

Okay, so since last week Tuesday I have had 15 losing sessions, and 2 winning sessions. 509 hands, an average of -22.42 BB/HR. This I believe goes down as the worst slide I have had since I started playing poker. I can honestly say, after much review, that this is just a legendarily shitty run of luck. The hilariously high BB/HR slide is from hands that statistically have a better then 70% chance at the river going down in flames. I'm not going to throttle back because, eventually, this will turn around. Of course, my horribly beleaguered bankroll isn't likely to make it much further. I'm back to playing .10/.20 trying to ride this out, but even at that level, sliding at the rate of just under 23 BB/HR, the remaining $15 is gonna get sucked down pretty quick. So, one way or another, something is going to happen pretty quick. In the mean time...

My Brain Is a Tomato

2008-04-15T10:07:00.002-05:00

Nothing new to report... The slide continues, though it has slowed down a little bit. Nothing really new to report. Same stuff, really. Decent holdings getting run down when I get them, but I've been going 20 hands at a time without playing a hand. So, instead of insightful poker banter, I leave you with the worst music video ever. Enjoy!

Just to be sure, these three were signed by Sony BMG. And the record companies wonder why they're circling the drain...

Crushed

2008-04-11T16:04:00.002-05:00

So, I decided to do a little bonus whoring.. Absolute Poker has a 100% bonus up to $500, so I figured I'd throw $50 in and give it a shot.. To unlock the bonus, you get "points". 30 points and you unlock $5 of your bonus.

Sounds easy, right? Well, not so much. Here's the issue. You only get a "point" when you are actually INVOLVED in a hand up to the flop, and ONLY if that hand rakes $.50. Well, with $50 in the coffer, your chance of playing in a limit that sees a $.50 rake is pretty close to zero. When you've been having the kind of luck I've been having the last 3 days, you're pretty much solidly fucked, junior.

And, really, it's luck. The variance bitch is knocking at the door, and she wants to be paid. I've played solid poker and have just been run down time and again. Normally I'd have patience with this, but I am really chafed at getting boned by Absolute on this bonus deal. There's really no chance of me unlocking jack shit with the $15 I have left to work with in the time allotted, and truth be told, I can't stand the action, or lack thereof, at Absolute. Almost never can I find a table that's open, unless that table has no one on it. $.50/$1 tables are a good example. There's 5 of them with 9/9 players on it, there are 3 0/9 player tables sitting there, and there's 15 goddamn people on the waiting list. So, I either sit at a new table and hope that a few people trickle in, or I sit there staring at my screen for 15 minutes with my hand up my ass waiting for my number to be called. The bottom line is there's no table selection to be had and so I have to sort of play whatever is available. Not to say the tables haven't been beatable, but the steady diet of shitty hands and decent hands that get run down pretty much means you're not getting anywhere...

Haven't been back on Pokerstars since the start of this slide. The last session I had there I went down in flames, sinking about $10 in around an hour and a half. Same story. The cards have gone away.

So it goes. Perhaps I'll bust out of Absolute before I clear the bonus, which really wouldn't disappoint me at this point.

Actually, I'm sort of beyond caring at all for either. Nothing is worth this frustration. Not at this point in my life...

Claw!

2008-04-07T13:15:00.002-05:00

Hit and run here. Put in an rather solid hour of poker today and the old .25/.50 limit full ring, walked away almost doubled up again. It'd be great if the middle limits are this generous in their contribution, but the likelihood of continuing to post what is turning out to be just short of a +20BB/hr rate of return is way too much to hope for.

Really, the only things I've done is tightened up the pre-flop selection and I'm really trying to pay attention to my pot odds. There have been a few hands that I figured I was dead on, but the pot odds were such that it was worth it to call and I'm ended up scraping the pot. There is much to be said for straight mathematical poker at this level, but I'm hoping I don't get into such a rut as to not be able to play at people every once in a while. My next step is to start mastering implied odds. PT helps a lot by helping me see who's likely to call or raise me, but it's still a lot of seat-of-the-pants work.

Anyway, the bankroll stands at $48 and change. Almost back to where I started from, so I'm rather stoked.

Today's blogger link is my friend over on the other side of the drink. Ice-Cold Poker is a pro player from the UK who's putting bread on the table by punishing the no limit short-handed games. Good reads, and much more talented then my hack ass, so go forth and read!

Hanging In

2008-04-04T11:02:00.002-05:00

"where are we going?"
"where they went."
"well, what if they went nowhere?"
"then this'll be your chance to get away from it all!" -- Dr. McCoy and Capt. Kirk - Star Trek II

After a few adjustments to the game, it would appear I might be meeting initially with some measure of success again. Taking a look at the information provided to me by PokerTracker, it seems I was making some rather loose decisions with starting hands, which were putting me in bad positions on later streets.

What with me now working the ultra-low limits I can't depend on the players I'm playing with to understand or care about how I play the hand, so the concentration must be on the statistical and not the implied. What sucks is, if I ever DO get out of the low limit arena, I will need to re-tool back to better play.

But I think I'm getting ahead of myself. First I need to get in a position to be able to play at a higher limit. Even though I had a very good night last night, I'm still far and away from even getting back to .50/1 tables. After an hour and 15 minutes of work at a 10 seat .25/.50 limit game, I walked off with +$15, a rate of +24BB/hr. The lion's share of that profit came from two hands right near the end of the session.. Prior to that, I'd been floating around plus or minus 5BB or so, taking stabs, missing, occasionally raking the meager pot. Then this happens...

I'm in middle position, and get dealt AsAh. Now already, my heart is sinking.

Lately, AA is been like that beautiful girl in high school. Even though you have no business being with the likes of her, you take the chance and to your surprise, she sort of takes a liking to you. You chat after school sometimes, trade smiles in the hallway. You think she really likes you and you're getting somewhere. Then one day you find her and the varsity quarterback feeling each other up near the lunch room and you come to the realization that she was only taking pity on you.

Okay, okay.. so anyway, 3 folds and I'm first to bet. Clinching my teeth, I shove out the obligatory raise and wait to see the rest of the table call me down. Remarkably, only the guy to my left and the BB stick it out, and we're three handed to the flop, which comes down 9s8hAc. Normally I'd be dancing a jig, but remember, AA has traditionally been the kiss of death for me. BB is first to act and he checks. No ace there, I'm figuring, so I bet out. Guy to my left folds and I'm heads up with BB who calls. Turn comes a 3d, and now I'm starting to feel pretty good about being me. Only a miracle will save him now, but to my astonishment, he bets. Somewhat perplexed but having an almost 98% chance of holding the winner, I confidently raise. He re-raises and I start grinning, thinking either he holds the case ace, or he has two pair. I cap and he calls. A 5s falls on the river and BB comes out firing again. We cap off the river and I show my trip Aces. He turns over 9d9c for the trip 9's also made on the flop and I drag a very nice pot.

Next hand. I'm dealt AdJs, 5 from the button in early-middle position. Folded around to me and I put out a feeler bet. 5 guys go with me to the flop, including the table gamboooler, who is 2 from the button. Flop is Jh9h5c, giving me top pair. Not too bad, but we are 5 handed, so anything is out there. SB checks, BB bets with what could be anything. I have top pair at the moment, so I raise to see if I can't scare off chasers (yeah, right). Guy to my left cold calls the raise and the BB calls. 3 handed to the turn which is a beautiful Jc. Boom. Now BB checks. I put out the bet, thinking BB is chasing the flush. Guy to my left folds out, BB calls. River is an even more beautiful 9s and a sailing boat. BB checks again and I put out the bet expecting to end it here. Remarkably, he raises. I can't imagine what he has, but unless he has a pair of nines I have the stony cold nuts, so I re-raise. He caps and we go to the showdown, where I turn over my Jacks full boat. He turns over 9c8h and the 9's full and I dance a jig. He wasn't chasing at all, he for some odd reason thought his second pair was good. In the words of John Spicolli, "gnarly"!

A couple more hands saw me grab a few more BB and I went off the bed instantly feeling better about being me. Again, not out of the woods yet, so to speak, with the bank a little under $30, but from a low of less then $5 a few days ago, I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe I've turned the corner.

Stop The Presses!

2008-04-01T12:45:00.002-05:00

Okay, so rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated...

It would appear my math was erroneous, and as it turns out I wasn't totally busted out. I had $4.60 left in my account. Chip and a chair, right?

So, after some poking around I found my old copy of Poker Tracker, and after a quick consultation with the talented author of the program, was back in business, albeit with a completely empty database. Which really wasn't as tragic as one might think. Most of my history was from my time on PartyPoker anyway, which is verboten to us filthy Americans. I suppose it's just as well. It's a new dawn for the ICP, my friends. As Inigo Montoya might say, "I have gone back to the beginning!"

Anyway, back to the point.. I spent an hour and 15 minutes at the 10 person .25/.50 ring and ended up +$8 for the session... Not bad to almost triple your buyin. Sticking to premium hands and playing mechanical odds poker is definitely the way to go at this level... Every hand goes to showdown anyway, so finesse really doesn't bring home nearly as much as simply ramming and jamming statistically dominant hands and hoping you're just not hideously unlucky.

To be sure, I'm still very, very deep in the danger zone, but at least the slide seems to have stopped mere inches from the spiky bottom of the sinkhole. So, bank for this run, currently $12 and some change.

Busted

2008-03-31T00:19:00.003-05:00

Well, chalk this one up officially as a failure. Took my last $3.25 and put it down on a 6 Max turbo NL hold-em sit and spin.

Doing okay, with 4 left to go, when I'm dealt AKo under the gun. A modest raise from the chip leader (by a little, we were all pretty even) and it was decision time. We were getting pretty late in the game, so it was getting expensive to sit it out, and AKo 4 handed is pretty damn good, right? I shove, she calls and turns over JQ offsuit, with the Queen of hearts. Flop hits my King and I figure I'm money, right? Nope. Two hearts on the flop and of course, she runner-runners fucking hearts to send me packing.

I remember when I used to be serious about this game, and shit like that would just drive me to drink. Of course, with the run of cards I've been having, you have to expect that some bullshit hand like that would be the death of me, but hey, what the hell, right? Can't be afraid to jump out of the plane just because your chute continually fails to open! I can just hear the tables calling me:

"c'mon! It'll be different this time! Your luck is turning around! I wouldn't lie to you 9 times in a row, fuckhead, would I?!"

So, I have enough free points to make another run at the WSOP 6 step program, though with my current card luck I think I'd just be pissing it away. Maybe I'll use my Frequent Player Points to buy a nice hat and call it a day or something.

Anyway, now I have to truly make a decision about whether I'm going to plug another fifty into the jukebox and have at it again. This last week has been pretty demoralizing, but I have distant memories of what it was like to win. I think I need to get some advice from those that play on Pokerstars on which games are the best. I'm thinking the full ring limits are probably pretty good, but I just find them mind-numbingly slow. I mean, logic dictates that I just sit back and play the premium hand grind at these low levels and eke out my 2BB/hr. Maybe it's time to see about multi-tabling the full ring limit games again. Clearly trying to "play the game" at this point is, well, pointless. I gotta go for the lowest variance play while I work the $50 buyin into something I can actually maneuver with. Perhaps it's time to buy another monitor and see about some 8 table goodness! Weee!

Runnin' With the Donkey

2008-03-29T11:41:00.002-05:00

So, I'm down to my last $5 in the bankroll. Yes, folks. This attempt was a complete and utter failure, unless by some miracle I manage to hit a run of cards exactly opposite of the ones I've been getting the last week. I haven't seen a black hole of cards in a very long time, and all I can say is thank God this is happening now and not when I get up to some reasonable stakes.

The biggest problem with a horrible run of cards like this at this level is, there's no playing at people. You absolutely cannot make a move on someone because, well, they're complete tools. This, under most circumstances, is a gold mine just waiting to be plundered, but on the other hand, if you just can't seem to hit the ground falling over, you're gonna get your ass handed to you... Which is exactly what's been going on. I haven't re-installed poker tracker yet. Don't need it to analyze this wreckage. So, I'll need to consider whether I'm going to re-load and try again. This has been a pretty miserable run, and my enthusiasm to continue to get robbed like this is understandably low.

Oh well... Perhaps a little cocktail might help ease the sting of complete failure.

Annoyance

2008-03-24T10:26:00.002-05:00

Well.. Didn't take long to start sliding.

I knew I was in trouble when I sat down at a $6.60 6 max NLHE sit and spin and was served up K5 3 times in the first 4 hands. I was dealt a parade of crap cards for pretty much the entire tournament and had a guy who clued in very quickly to that, so I was never in good shape. I managed to grapple my way to 3 way action (two spots pay), but I was in woeful chip position, with less then 700 chips. I make my way back to a survivable position, and come up with 88 on the button. I put out a decent raise and the SB re-raises. By this time I'm pretty pot committed, and I never play for 2nd place, so it was go time. I shove, he calls easily, having me covered 3 times over, and turns over KA suited.

I knew right away I was fucked and was already reaching for the "leave table" button when the King dropped on the flop. No help for the Klingon and I dance out on the bubble. Again.

So the bankroll is down to a tick over $40.. Well, $35 now.. Stupidly, I've sat down at a ring game, thinking by some miracle my cards might actually get better.

Silly me. My cards have worse aim then the A-Team. Once the roll gets to $25, I think I'm going to have to slide back to .25/.50.

And now that I've just gotten my top pair eaten by a set, I think I'm gonna make that move right now.

So, The ICP is officially in damage control mode.. Stay tuned. She's definitely going down by the head, but we might yet save the ship.

Cuz I'm Free!!!! Free Rollin'!!!

2008-03-23T19:10:00.002-05:00

"A wrong decision is better than indecision." - Tony Soprano Sr.

So, I'm sitting here yesterday bored out of my skull when I notice there is a $3000 NL Hold-em free roll. So I figure, what the Hell, and sign up. By the time the first cards flew, there was around 10,000 people signed up for the thing... Then I suddenly realized that this was a turbo event, so the blinds went up like every 3 minutes. At 10,000 people, this event turned from free-roll into a free-for-all very quickly. I found myself chipped up a decent amount early, but not nearly the amount I would need to be comfortable in a turbo situation, so the blinds and antes quickly caught up with me and I got run out at around 2500, well out of the money.. which started at $.30 from 1600 up to about 800 or so.. Free money, but too much work... Then I went off to the ring games and hooked in about $10.

It's funny, really. I mean, technically, I shouldn't be playing the $.50/$1 games, given the $70 or so I have in the bankroll right now, so this is really the dangerous part. If I recall from my Grinder 101 courses, one should have about 300 BB in the bankroll for the level you're playing. That means I should be sitting on a $300 bank to be playing the 50/1 action. At the current rate I'm playing, that's gonna be a long time. But the real stick is this. Using that logic, I'll need to have banked $600 to comfortably play the $1/$2 rings. So, if I went "by the book", I have to grind out another 530BB at this level. At an average earn rate of 2BB/hr, which should be easily attainable, that's 265 hours of play. If I played 2 hours a day, that's 132 days of grind. 19 weeks. IF I play 2 hours a day every day. Just to get to $1/$2 ring play.

The temptation to pad my bankroll with outside cash and push into the higher stakes is already starting to nag at me. Remember, I spent most of my last couple of years playing low limit, though at the end before I cashed and took a break I was regularly sitting $3/$6, but that was Party Poker, which was like sitting PokerStars $1/$2. God I miss the glory days of Party Poker. We were like mice in a cheese factory back in the day.

Patience is going to be the buzzword around here. The idea is to learn a little more while I'm doing this. Beyond that, I haven't really figured out the end game. When have I "officially" parlayed this into a "fortune". I have a vision in my mind of sitting down at the WSOP or other major tournaments, but that's not really definite bar where I get to and say "I've made it". Winning one of those tournaments obviously would put me over that bar. I just don't have any concept of when I can say "I've made it... I've made a fortune". Clearly I have time to ponder this as I grind away at mini limits!

Uh oh

2008-03-19T10:43:00.003-05:00

Some days you just know it's coming.

Today was one of those days. I put in all of about 30 minutes on the tables today... And rolled up and smoked about 20% of my bankroll.

Really not much to say about it... Just wasn't happening for me today. The perfect storm of not quite completely shit cards but good enough for me to pay off people who had better hands. Ran through half my buyin on the .50/1 6 max limit table, so I decided (stupidly) to give a sit and go a shot, and was promptly hosed when my two pair of kings and aces got run over by the set of aces. Good times. So, As the song knows, ya gotta know when to run away. Off to go do something less productive!

See you tomorrow!

ICP Can't Hang

2008-03-17T11:54:00.002-05:00

Greetings my two listeners!

So, in an effort to get back into the "swing" of things, I've sojourned off to the usual blogging haunts I remembered from my poker youth and did some reading. Looks like there's still a lot of good content out there, and the community looks to be going strong. I'm sort of kicking myself for fading away into the ether for as long as I did... Getting back to writing in this blog has reminded me how much I enjoy writing in this blog. Sort of like therapy, it's a good way to unload the thoughts in your head. As it is, I haven't had a lot of thoughts lately, which is good.

Not that things haven't completely changed in my life. M and I bought a new house, the chronicling of which can be found here. Now that we're living the cushy suburban life (well, almost.. To accomplish this on my income I had to move an hour away from work) we figured it was time to try again for a family expansion. After much work and effort, we're expecting our first, a little boy, in early August. So what little free time I have left is gonna be long gone for the next 18 years. Somehow I have to figure out how to shove a few more hours in each day.

That's about it, really.. As for poker, I'm really kind of pacing myself. I don't want to get to the situation where I was last time where I was playing so much that I completely burned out. Not only is that generally -EV from lack of playing, but it was really effecting the quality of my play. I would quickly get bored and start forcing issues. I tried to solve that problem by multi-tabling, but for me, it really was lowering the quality of my play, and I think it was leaving a lot of cash on the table... Hard to analyze a play on someone when two other tables need your attention! I think occasionally I'll go back to multi-tabling, but even at the paltry .50/1 tables I'm back to now, I seem to be able to make more in the long run playing a single table of 6 max. The advantage I'm finding is that the quality of play on the 6 max tables is WAY worse then on a 9 person table. The fish on these tables get VERY aggressive, which is good times for one who has patience.

Which is the theme song for this attempt at turning this $50 buyin into something. Patience. It's one word, and it's so hard to follow, but follow it I must. The temptation to make a run at higher limit tables is burning at me, though. My poker theory is several years out of date, having also not really taken the time to study the game in my nearly two year hiatus, but if memory serves, I should have a bigger bankroll before moving up. Right now I've moved the $50 buyin up to almost $78. Not mind-blowing progress, but it's in the right direction. I have to keep my eye on the project, which is to take $50 and see what happens, though at this point, it's sort of like watching a glacier move.

Sinner's Swing!

2008-03-12T23:30:00.002-05:00

Okay, okay... So I guess I might have given myself a bit too much stock in terms of my ability to make a run at the WSOP using only my frequent player points... Though it would have made a good story, the truth of the matter is I went down in flames at step 3 when I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I don't have the hand history in front of me, as I was playing this one on the laptop downstairs while watching Eddie Izzard standup. Not to say I was distracted... Indeed laughing at hilarious British comedy has a way of keeping me off tilt. I don't recall how the hand went down, exactly, but I do know that the table was laying down everything to the slightest aggression, so I was doing a bit of ramming and jamming but not making much headway since everyone was putting on a folding exhibition. I flopped top pair and fired a big bet, but was kindly called up by the monster stack. nothing hit on the turn, and the pot was bigger then my stack so I pushed, only to be insti-called buy the banker who rolled over the pocket overpair and I was history in 8th place.

So, I was a little over-aggressive, but it was a freeroll, so what the hell.. No guts, no air medal.

After that, sat down at another $6.60 6-max NL STT and scored a second, which basically doubles your money, then ran the rest of the show out playing good old $.50/$1 6 max turbo limit. I ran by $20 buy-in up to about $47 but then ran aground amongst a reef of shitty cards and got pounded down to a little over $30, for a +$10 score. Not too shabby for an hour of work at the mini-limits.

Off to visit friends in Wisconsin tomorrow and the next day, so I'll be invisible. I was toying with the idea of wearing my Bears jersey up there to poke fun at the mourning masses in light of the "end of civilization as we know it", but then I realized even with the departure of the Most Holy and Apostolic QB, the Packers are still 3 times more likely then the Bears and Lovie "Rex Grossman Is Our Quarterback" Smith is to even see football past the regular season this year. I was all ready to turn into a Green Bay Koolaid drinker but now suddenly the Pack are in a rebuilding year too... Oh well.. Go Rush.

My line on the Bears next year, 7-9,IF Grossman gets hurt early. And the defense and special teams will be directly responsible for a majority of those wins.

Wait.. I just realized. Mohammed? Gone. Barrien, Gone. So, who do we have to catch the football in the rare instance Rex actually THROWS the ball to someone with a orange "C" on the helmet? Devin Hester, who can do magical things with a ball that is kicked to him in the open field, but can't seem to run a pattern to save his life, and Mark Bradley, who still doesn't really know what an NFL football feels like in his hands.

Not that it all matters. Once the D gets in Rex's face, he completely loses focus and starts spraying footballs all over the place like Scarface and his "Leetel Friend"...

I guess you could say, I'm not looking forward to next football season.

The Incredible Lightness of Being On The Button

2008-03-10T21:04:00.002-05:00

Somewhat like Elvis, I'm not dead, I'm just on vacation.. A long, long vacation! Like all vacations, though, they come to an end, and so it is... The Intrepid Card Player is again poking his toe back into the pool to see if it is still full of nice tasty fish!

Actually, I've been back in the micro-limit action for a little over three weeks, and again, I have embarked on the journey to parlay $50 into a fortune. In a way, we've come full circle! What started so many years ago as a fun experiment wound up with me meeting many good friends, having an excellent time and, though I didn't really parlay a "fortune" out of my $50, I did manage to scrape up a decent coin. If I had had the discipline to not occasionally plunder my poker account for cash, I probably would have made it out of low limit land. I'd like to say my discipline will be a bit better this time around, however, I've already planned to pickpocket my account should I make headway, as I'm planning a trip to Vegas in the middle of May... A trip that will see me both playing a bunch of poker and sweating a close friend of mine who also has gotten into the scene and is turning into a pretty good player. So I guess really I'm not so much robbing my account but rather cashing some of it for some live action.. The stitch comes in whether I actually re-deposit it when I get back... We shall see.

I have noticed some pretty significant changes in the scene since I was last involved, some 500 days or so ago. Biggest of these was of course the legislation that basically screwed many U.S. online players. My favorite place to pick off fish, Party Poker, immediately ran for the hills. Luckily, not all virtual poker houses have wimped out. I've found a new home at Pokerstars. Though the players there generally are a little more knowledgeable and skillful, there are still plenty of cash stations logging on and donating to the cause! In a way, it's good that the players are better... First off, it helps to be able to actually improve my game in the event I actually DO get out of the low limits and into some actual cash generation, and second, it makes victories just that much more sweet.

Most of the friends I have met previously are still out there! Some have taken their poker to new levels, others are still very active, and some have just simply faded into the ether, with one that basically went out with a big Foxtrot Uniform to the community. This blog, until now, was one of the ones that seemed to just fade away... Let's see if anyone notices I've stirred back to life, eh?

Anyway, in addition to haunting the .50/1 limit hold-em tables, I've also discovered the $6.60 NL Holdem 6 Max tables. These pay roughly $27 for first, and I've found that it's relatively easy to score on these. The players are a bit better then the old $5+$1 PartyPoker NL tourney specials, but most of them are the tight/aggressive types and are rather predictable.

I also discovered that they have a "6 step tourney" for qualification to the WSOP. Entry for level 1 is 500 frequent player points. I found that I had a little over 700 points that were doing me no good, so I figured I'd take a run at it. For the first two levels, the 1st and 2nd place prize is a ticket to the next step, and I have managed to score the next step in the last two events, so now I'm at level 3, which I may play later on today.

So, back to work!

Point!

2006-07-29T20:21:00.000-05:00

PokerStars Tournament #28981254, No Limit Hold'emBuy-In: $11.00/$1.00
45 playersTotal Prize Pool: $495.00
Tournament started - 2006/07/29 - 18:35:40 (ET)

Dear The_ICP, You finished the tournament in 1st place.
A $154.00 award has been credited to your Real Money account.
Congratulations! Thank you for participating.

Hey, look! I still got game!

Yes, still playing poker... nice and quiet like!

I haven't written, basically because there's really nothing going on.. Going to go look at a new house tomorrow morning.. We'll see... Home prices are completely out of control here in Northern Illinois. In any event, we'll see what happens here.

Boink!

2006-05-20T09:10:00.000-05:00

Yo, sup all you Freedom Fighters on da Middle East side! Peep dis. Da homies done busted out a phat rhyme fo all you foos kickin it in yo crib. Check it.

Lazy Ramadi!

Word.

Leaves!

2006-04-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

"Welcome to the real world." - Morpheus - The Matrix

So I'm not quite keeping up with the site, it would seem. Part of the reason is that I just haven't been driven into playing much (any) poker in the last few months. Midnight shift at the jobsite pretty much quashes any attempt at a social life. Lucky for me, this month brought me to the afternoon shift and I am slowly rediscovering falling asleep in the dark and have whole days off. It's very cool.

Unfortunately, these few months off haven't really shored me up with much content to spew out.. Well, that's not entirely true.. I have a lot of things to talk about, but they don't have much to do with poker. I'll pontificate on some of these subjects in the next few days. In the mean time, here's an example of a nutcase giving props to a certifiable nutcase. Words fail, so here's the link. The video is just precious in a "our society is irrevokably doomed" sort of way...

Jesus wept.

The World Is Ending...

2006-01-31T03:21:00.000-06:00

Howdy folks! Well, long time no update, so I'll hop on here and pontificate about pretty much nothing just to let you all know I'm not dead...yet...

So, it's been awefully mild here the last month.. Which means that when the groundhog comes out to see his shadow, he's going to freeze in place like a tongue on a metal pole. The other shoe HAS to be falling soon, and I'm sure we're going to be walking around in down coats and hats in May. Most likely right when the Little Angels annual motorcycle ride is.. So I'll freeze my nuts off. This happened last year, and since I was riding the Virago last year, with no windshield, I decided to skip it. I'll be able to tolerate the cool air a little better on the Goldwing, so short of actual falling snow, rain or rediculous low temps, I'll be making this ride. Unless of course I get ganked by having to go to work.

The eyes are doing okay. Left eye now has x-ray vision... really sharp and clear... Right eye, not so much.. Good acuity (still at LEAST 20/15...), but with some haze. Going to go see the doc for my month check-up in the next day or two and we'll see what's up with that.. Hopefully it goes away on its own.. I don't want to have to get zapped again, though if it means clear vision out of it, what the hell.. The hard part is over with (getting the flap cut). Inside of 6 months, it's possible to lift the existing flap and blast away some more.. Of course, since my vision is already damn good in that eye, there runs the risk of overcorrecting it if we go for more smoke-making, so who knows... Best case is it just gets better, which is the most likely scenario.

Really have been playing remarkably little poker... Not any troubles reading the screen, just lack of time in general to do anything.. I gotta get off this midnights crap. It's sucking my will to live.

The Eyes Have It

2006-01-09T11:14:00.000-06:00

"There's going to be a little pressure, but this won't hurt" - My Lasik Doctor before putting the microkaratome on my eye.

Well, it's done. And for all the horror stories I've seen of Lasik, mine was pretty straight forward. One day after surgery I had 20/15 in both eyes. The procedure was not without some side effect though.. I have mildly dry eyes (normal and goes away) and my right eye is effected such that it's like I'm looking into a fog. This has also gotten better in the last day, and I'm told that it will go away as my eye heals. Strangely, this phenomena isn't occuring with my left eye with near the sevarity of my right, but I can see well enough to drive at night.

It's pretty bizzare to think what I just subjected my eyes too, and even more wild to think that, after all of that, I can see with amazing acuity.

Now if this right eye would just clear up!

No poker since last post.. It would be a strain to stare at a screen for the length of time I'd play.

Oh The Weather Outside Is Frightful....

2006-01-03T21:22:00.000-06:00

Okay, so Christmas was fun in a sleep deprived, run into the ground sort of way. For those who don't know, I work midnights at the moment, and of course, no one else I know does... This is normally not a huge problem, but when it comes to the holidays this becomes an issue. Now if I were a bachelor I'd be home free. My family is spread all over the country, so we don't get together for Christmas, but my wife's family seems to want to get together 9 times in 7 days, and of course I have to go to every single fooking event. Sleep? I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead, which will be soon at this rate. I fully fell asleep behind the wheel on the way home yesterday. Only for a second, but imagine my discontent to find me closing rapidly on the car in front of me and not being able to recall where the hell that car came from! I think the short term solution to this is to catch a 15 or 30 minute nap in the quiet room at work before hitting the road.. At least it gives me enough boost to get home without nodding off.

Oh well.. I'm off them in April.. Just have to survive until then...

As for poker, I have for the moment laid off the tournaments. They were interesting, but I've sort of burned out on them for now. Instead I've taken to grinding the .50/1 tables at PokerStars. I rather like the interface of PokerStars better, but I need to get around to changing the "hey, bud, it's your turn" sound they have.. It's probably one of the most annoying sounds known to man.

Getting Lasik done tomorrow, so I'm probably going to not be playing any poker for a few days while I wait for my eyes to adjust.

Fun With Tournements

2005-12-17T21:01:00.000-06:00

Yes, still here... And I am still a sucker for the tournement action on Party.

I have recently discovered the Step Tournements on Party. On the surface, they look like a pretty decent deal, but they're a bitch, don't you doubt. I've probably played 30 tournys and I've gotten to the money round once... and lost. Dammit.

I've been screwing around with their mini-step tournements. At first I figured I'd buy in on the 1st level. The prize pool is 6th place pays $4 for your $6 investment, and the 5th through 2nd spots pay you a freeroll to try level 1 again. Top spot sends you to level 2. Sounds equitable enough.. Even rather sloppy tournement play will more then likely get you at least a free roll to try it again, but I find I'm stuck there. I got sick of screwing around at level 1, so I took the rest of what was left in my account and bought into the second round ($20+$2). This is really where you need to be buying in, IMHO. 9th through 6th and you get punted down to the 1st step. 5th through 3rd and you free roll your 2nd level, and 2nd and 1st pay you up. Short a complete brain lock and a 10th place loss, you're going to be doing SOMETHING with your buyin.

I managed to make it to the money round, and not surprisingly found a table full of fold-mongers... Once you make it to the money round in the mini-steps, the last 5 places pay.. Yes, half the table walks away with a check...

And I couldn't pull it off. (><)

Really, I knew I was screwed when the first 25 hands went by without us seeing a showdown. I still have a hard time shifting into aggressive mode in the face of this table... Something I'm getting better at, but after all the work to get there, I pussed out. I'm a wimp.

Anyway, I don't completely suck.. Went to Stars and did this:

PokerStars Tournament #16657275,
No Limit Hold'em Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
27 players
Total Prize Pool: $270.00 Tournament started - 2005/12/17 - 19:49:10 (ET)
Dear The_ICP,
You finished the tournament in 1st place. A $100.00 award has been credited to your Real Money account. Congratulations! Thank you for participating.

So I don't completely suck.

Anyway, I've still got a freeroll sitting around on party... and a $1.75. So maybe I'll turn that freeroll into something, or I'll just head over to the no-limit table and turn that $1.75 into another buyin...

Level 5 will be mine.... Oh yes. It will be mine.

Enuff Z Nuff

2005-11-27T16:39:00.000-06:00

Well, that was fun, but this tournement challange is too exhausting to continue... For those of you following at home, you know that I went to the $10 level and managed an unabated slide for around 10 rounds, crippling me within a day. I decided to fall back to the $5 level to regroup, which I did, but you just can't make any real progress at that level. Bolstered by my good run at the $5 level I decided to go back to the $10 level.. And again got my ass handed to me. Since I'm not rolled properly to get anywhere near the $20 level, I'm just going to throw the towel in on this.

Really, the biggest problem I've had with the last few games was just a simple lack of playable hands. Of course, at this level, you are going to be showing down the best hand in order to win, so with no real playable hands, you're pretty much screwed.

In other news, I moved my cash from Eurobet (3000 players online) to PokerStars (55000 players online). Partly to hunt for some squishy soft games, and partly because I wanted to get in on the final round of Saturdays With Pauly... Which I managed to miss because I was too preoccupied to read a clock. So I played two tables of .50/1 for a little while and broke pretty much even.

So, thus ends what could have been a decent run.. I'm still completely baffled as to what the hell happened with the $10 level. Variance, I'm guessing... It's a bitch.

Trends

2005-11-17T16:43:00.000-06:00

"Bears one hunerd tirty-two, Packers, negative tree!" - Superfans

Well, for the first time since I started this whole sit and go deal, I dropped briefly below my original $50. This slide reminds me of the one that ultimately put me out of poker for most of the year. I couldn't believe the difference in caliber of player from the $5 to the $10 level, and by that I mean that the skill level actually went down considerably, and the aggression of these really bad players went up. Normally, this would be a good thing, but unfortunately, you don't have time in a sit and go to just hang out and wait for the hand to club these idiots into submission with, so I'm forced to make moves with drawing hands, and you know how Party is about drawing hands. Forget odds, it's a crapshoot.

So, as for the challange, I've fallen back to the $5+$1 level to regroup and attempt to stop the bleeding, which I've been only mildly successful in doing. I've been hovering right at my original $50 for the last few rounds. I had a great opportunity to score a win on my last round, finding myself against a genuinely bad heads up player, but I ended up with a couple of bad draws and that was that.

Incredible how I managed to get my ass eaten out by the $10 level. I really honestly thought it was bad luck, but with a little research I found that I was mixing with these idiots a little too early in the game attempting to get into a decent position early, and many times I'd get into the later rounds somewhat crippled. I actually ran into a post I remember some time ago from the Poker Nerd, who was doing sit and goes for bankroll building, and getting some impressive numbers. He posted a little guide on how he does things so, since Doyle's advice seems to not be working, I've adopted his plan for a little while to see if I can get out of the basement here. Still, I'm awefully close to going bust here, so if I can score the 50% ROI he says he was getting with this strategy, I might still find myself out of it. Luck is a bitch.

Speaking of bitch, I saw on Coral (which now has about 3 dozen players, thanks to the Party split) that they had a $200 guerenteed NL tourney for $2+$0, with unlimited rebuys for $2 for the first hour and one add-on after the first hour. I'm never doing that again. The first 30 minutes was a complete all-in fest, and when the smoke cleared the luckiest of players (and I do mean the luckiest, because when you have a pot contested 4 ways all-in, skill is gone, my friends) had stacks around 12000 chips. Meanwhile those that were unlucky ended up with stacks anywhere from 2000 to 3500 chips. My the end of the first hour the average stack size was 5500 chips. I had 2800. What a waste of time. My math was wrong anyway.. There were only like 30 people in the tourney, and with a $200 guerenteed pool, the overlay was tremendous...With all the rebuys, though, that was out the window. Unless I didn't do any rebuys, but for that to have worked, I'd have had to get lucky at least twice inside of 30 minutes. May as well have walked up to a slot machine. I was out in 14th, remarkably.

Level DOWN!

2005-11-12T05:24:00.000-06:00

Okay... The Poker Godz hate me. I've been sucked out on more then Ron Jeremy at Hedonism III, so it's back to the $5-$1 level for me until I manage to somehow unfook my game.

I've done some piss poor playing, I'm sure, but it just seems to me that all the friggin nutcases and gamboooooooolers have found a home at the $10 level. Raise a good hand? Called.... Often times in multiple places. Insert witty fish schooling quip here. The last few games I haven't gotten anything worthwhile to play, and in the rare instances I did, no one would go with me, so I'd get the blinds. In truth, with such a crappy ROI at the lower level, I probably had no business going up until I managed to figure out what was going wrong. Back to the proverbial drawing board, I guess.

Happy joy time.

Weeeeee!

2005-11-12T01:25:00.000-06:00

Whelp... Not much to say here! I moved to the 10+1 level, and my luck dried up. 0 for 7 in the money on the 10+1 level, so I'm thinking I'm going to pretty much be done with this before first snow. Outstanding.

Level Up!

2005-11-10T20:32:00.000-06:00

"Remember your training, and you WILL make it out alive!"

Okay the party at $5+$1 is over... I cut it short by a few rounds simply because I think I'd rather gouge my eyes out of their sockets with a crab fork then play another round of that level. I can face just as crappy players at the $10+$1 level and the ROI will be better just on principle.

Let's go to the graphics..

As you can see, not the best results from this level...

Starting with $50, I ended this level in 93 hands, with a final balance of $167, for a +$117 gain.

Part of the problem I think is that by and large, the players suck at this level, and thus, do much sucking out. I'm trying to amp up my aggression, which is certainly good, and it works against decent players and works great against the sea of tight-passive players that seem to be emerging on Party, but you just can't hammer on a loose-aggresive with raise after raise without having to occasionally come up with the goods. Today in particular was a good day for the dominated hand. I played about 6 rounds of $5+$1 today and I saw AT LEAST a dozen instances where hands with less then a 15% chance end up taking the pot. It was craptacular. I only ended up on the receiving end of two of those, and managed to suck out on a third, so it really didn't directly effect me, though indirectly it made a difference I'm sure. I saw one hand where it was 22 vs 99 vs AA. You can guess who got the river miracle.

I've been mining around for some information on single table tourneys, strategy and the likes. I've poked around 2+2 a little bit, but I was quickly reminded why I haven't been there in over a year. Very little useful information, and it's buried deep in the condecending replies and the idiot hand discussion (I'm short stacked in the big blind and have AA, Button goes all in, what do I do?)... I've had my nose in the Super System bible for No Limit for the last two weeks or so, and am on my second readthrough of that section, but again, his advice is only useful against players who know what the hell they're doing (his quote, "you can't put a man on a hand if he doesn't even know what he has" certainly has meaning here).

Hopefully this next level will at least see a better return on investment percentage. There's still plenty of gawdaweful players at this level, but hopefully not quite the schools I've run into as of late...

Book Smart

2005-10-30T21:30:00.000-06:00

"The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness." - Annie Savoy - Bull Durham

So, as some of you know, I work in the public sector now. Since crime never sleeps, neither do we. For this month and the next two I get to do the midnight shift. Undeniably the hours suck hard, and sleeping until 4 in the afternoon is something I haven't done since college! The nice thing about this shift though is, generally, things are slower, so I get time to work on other things.

I've decided to dedicate some of this time to trying to study some more about my poker game. I'm beyond the training wheels at this point, and it's time to start polishing my game. Yes, I'm still in the mini-limits, but that is more a function of bankroll then skill, I believe. Besides, low limit poker isn't an excuse to play sub-par poker. Anyway, I dove into Brunson's tome last week and have been studying diligently. I'm still just scratching the surface, but there are many things in there already I hadn't considered, and have striven to apply these new found nuggest of wisdom into my game.

Perhaps the most profound, and really one I pretty much knew but never really paid attention to, is patience. I'll dive more into this in later posts...

The Sit and Go Challenge is now 53 hands into the $5-$1 level. Today was a good day, booking two wins to really bolster the roll.

Edging Back In... The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing

2005-10-28T15:04:00.000-05:00

"...I wish I could unscrew my head and kick it out the door..." -- Joe Satriani

Party Poker Rule #7: If you have a pocket pair, so does someone else.

Ah yes... The subtleties of Party Poker. Of all the interesting...quirks...of Party, this one stands out as most obvious. Note to all mathmeticians out there... What are the odds, given a 10 person table, of two people having pocket pairs? Three? Let's take it a step further... How about the odds of the inferior pocket pair hitting the set on any street?

Okay, I'll leave that for now. I have managed to meet the $50 minimum for my rakeback, and will be taking my leave of Eurobet, now that their subscibership has been reduced by 90%... So I'm looking for a new home for my ring game play. I don't really want to put it into Party just yet, seeing as how I'm still farting around with the Sit and Go Challange (46 rounds done at $5+$1).

I'm also trying to catch back up on my fellow bloggers....blogs. Hopefully you all haven't forsaken me as I have neglected to post since...forever.

So, who still out there that reads my drivel?

For the moment, I'm going to hold off on my ring games until I can extract the cash out of Eurobet and move it elsewhere and concentrate on the S&G challange. It will be slow going, intentionally. I've resolved to only play at most three sit and goes a day. Beyond that, either I'm on a good run and don't want to ruin it, or I'm dying and don't want to lose my temper!

Okay... off to the showers. 12 hour day ahead of me at work. Happy...joy...

Do You Believe In Miracles!

2005-10-26T23:27:00.000-05:00

'Nuff said.

Fossilman, Dammit!

2005-10-26T15:47:00.000-05:00

"How about a nice game of chess?" -- WOPR - Wargames

I've had a cold the last couple of days. Not one of those wimpy sniffly colds either... We're talking agnus of God kind of headcold. I woke up the other day so congested I literally could not swallow. Thankfully, that only lasted for about an hour, but I was still in pretty bad shape... Since I've been in nasty shape, I've had time to cruise the daytime television fare. Bottom line, I found the coverage of the WSOP 2005. The words "sea of humanity" doesn't seem to fully describe the field at the event. These days to make it to the final table you need to be good AND extremely lucky.

I want a piece of that action!

Unfortunately, I'm about $9700 short of the buyin at this point... Oh well..It's a goal.

The grind continues. It appears that Party has taken their ball and gone home in terms of the skins. I was on a rakeback deal with Coral. Trouble is they don't pay the rakeback until you have $50 totalled up. I'm about 30 cents short of that, but playing $.50/$1 limit, that goes pretty slow. When you're playing that level and they're only a dozen tables around, well you get the picture... I'm going to finish out the $50 and then move that cash over the where the party really is...Party.

Speaking of Party, the Sit and Go challenge is still plodding along. Managed a 5th place finish and a 1st place finish yesterday. Wins are a little harder to come by, these days. The day of the über-fish seems to have come and gone, at least in the sit and goes. There's plenty of fish left in the pond, but I haven't seen one of those games where three people are gone within the first 5 hands anymore. Luckily, there seems to be a lot of weak-tight people to take their place. In many ways I much prefer those types.. At least they're predicatable.

Anyway, here's the graph of my progress so far... With 35 rounds played in $5+$1 NL Hold-Em, and a starting bank of $50, I'm now at $125, or +$1.43 per tournement.

Okay, off to do battle with number 36...

Time....

2005-10-15T20:28:00.000-05:00

It's been an enjoyable and productive summer, and now that the leaves are starting to turn it's time to get back into the grind.

Over the summer I've sort of take small stabs at my poker game. all in all, I can't complain. progress has been slow, but when you only play maybe 200 hands a week, it'll happen that way.

Since Party has put in .50/1 6 max tables, I've been playing those almost primarily for my ring games, and have worked steadily forward. I've resolved to try to be more patient and hold off moving up in limits until I have a true 300BB bankroll for it. That means $600 in the bank before I move onto the $1/$2 tables. I'm a little under half way there.

I managed to get a buddy of mine to sign up to Party and scored a free $50, so I started another Sit and Go Challange. For those not familiar, the idea of the challange is to play 100 sit and goes at each level. Right now I'm 31 games into the $5+$1 and am at $115, for a profit of around $2 a game, or translated loosely a 2BB/hr rate if I were to play comparable to 50/1 limit...

Hopefully I still have some readers out there. Sorry about the gap. I really needed to just take this summer and unwind. What with the new job and all that had been going on, it was something I just needed to do.

Good luck, welcome back, and thanks for reading!

Hey Look! It's Still Alive!

2005-06-13T17:09:00.000-05:00

Yes, my faithful and loving automated RSS reading programs, This blog is still among the living. I guess I've managed to not post anything for a whole month and a half. The level of suckage on this blog never fails to please, I guess. So, enough self-berating... On with the countdown...

Okay, first excuse. I've been up to me ass in classes, training assignments and deadlines. If you've seen how much poker I've played in the last month in a half, you'd understand. Throw a house purchase and of course the obligitory move that accompanies such a purchase, and that sucks several weeks out of your month right there.

On the poker front, what little I've played that is, just steady and thankfully upward progress. I took a shot at the 1/2 tables just to be crazy, and managed to darn near double up my buyin. Feeling good about being me, I decided to give it another shot a few days later and got slayed... So back to the 50/1 tables for me for a while. The bankroll, at a little under $300, is still pretty far away from the confort zone of 1/2. I'll need to double that before I put the old 50/1 tables to bed, and at the rate I'm going that'll be a quite a while, but I'm significantly less worried about that then I was the last time I went about this little adventure. The only thing that really sucks about grinding away at 50/1 is that my rakeback bonus creeps along. There are significant numbers of hands in 50/1 that result in no rake being taken out whatsoever so it takes an insane number of hands just to get enough rakeback built up to get it paid out to me.

Not a huge amount else going on, just the usual grind. We're finally getting settled into the house. I've got broadband again, so I can actually get things done in a reasonable amount of time on the internet, so that's a relief. Training continues at work. One of these days I might actually get through the darn process. Looks like they're thinking August 1st, so we'll see.

Party Poker Ate My Homework

2005-04-25T16:23:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I was sitting here yesterday afternoon and I decided to get a quick couple of rounds of poker in, so I set everything up and am sitting at a really mediocre table when all of the sudden another table pops up with your's truely sitting in one of the seats.

WTF?

I take a closer look at the table and realize I had just been seated in a multi-table tournement. In fact, it's the Freeroll that RakeTracker put on, and I had completely forgot about! So there I was, apparently going to play a multi table tourney... Which my brain was completely not geared up for.

Turns out, I wasn't the only one to forget. Of the 80 or so people registered for it, only maybe 40 showed up, so we basically conspired to blind steal in turn until the dead money was gone. We whittled it down to about 50 players and the game was on...

While we were doing the whole blind steal thing, I mucked at least 3 AKs, an AA, two KK, and some other juicy playable cards. Of course, when we got down to playing I started seeing a healthy diet of 83o, K2o, 95s.... I managed to hang on for a while, but when I took a shot at a guy I had covered (barely) and flipped over my AQo that hit the Ace and he the ATs that also hit the ace, I cringed. This is Party Poker. And in true Party style, the T floated in on the River and I was down close enough to the felt to not make much of a difference. A round later and I'm gone in 27th. Woot.

So I make precisely dick on the Freeroll, and it's back to my regularly scheduled 50/1 grind. Which, by the way, I'm not doing terrible at, but when you play maybe 5 hours a week, progress is understandably slow... But at least it's slow in an upward direction!

Stay tuned!

Fly To The Angels

2005-04-15T12:50:00.000-05:00

"The LORD didn't die and rise again to make bad people good. He did it to make dead people live."

The one constant in this crazy world we live in is that nothing is constant. Try as we might to capture it all, nothing will stop the cruel march of time.

The last three weeks of my life have been a blur. A tumultuous journey of joy, pain, sorrow and loss. A journey that has transformed me in ways I cannot fully comprehend yet.

In the early hours of April 6th, amid the thunder and lightning of a spring storm, my mother answered the call, and left on wings sewn of a lifetime of love and compassion.

Many times before her death, she would tell us to celebrate her passing, as she's heading to a place where pain and suffering don't exist. Where the loons are always singing. And we do.

But I miss my mom.

I Hate Computers...

2005-03-25T17:06:00.000-06:00

Okay, so not much playing of the Poker game at all in the last week. Instead, I decided to finally get the upgrades done for the computer, which includes an upgrade to 1 GB of RAM and a pair of 80 GB serial ATA hard drives in a RAID array.

Sounds rather simple, right? The memory goes in, works perfectly, and I was going to go ahead and Ghost over my C: drive to the array and use that as the boot drive...

Nope. Can't find the drives unless I'm in Windows... Vunderbar.

So now I'm trying to figure out where to go with this.

Stay tuned!

Truth In Advertising

2005-03-19T15:51:00.000-06:00

This month thus far, I've played 780 hands of .50/1 limit poker, and for that work, I'm up around $35.

Yesterday I was getting spanked early with some outdraws and quickly found myself down 10BB. I was getting annoyed with this so I took my $15 that was left and headed to a 25 NL table... In 70 hands I had won around $35.

Go figure.

Back when I was playing before many of the fellow bloggers encouraged me to dip a toe into the no limit tables, extolling the fishiness I would find within. The table I sat down at last night was rather tight, but the nice thing about NL is you have much more flexibility to play the game according to the table texture. Since the table was tight, I loosened up a little bit and was able to gank some small pots here and there when I figured no one else wanted to play. Once I had a little bank to where a play wouldn't see me pot committed so soon, I was better able to put people to decisions.

Anyway, it was fun. I still don't know if I want to head over there as my staple game, but last night certainly was good for the confidence. I'm still not in the "comfort zone" with my bankroll yet for 50/1, but this certainly helped out a bit.

The Ides of March

2005-03-15T09:45:00.000-06:00

Poker continues at the nice slow pace I've intentionally set. I've hit a little bit of a wall here lately, where I'll make a big score early and then slowly get wittled down to my buyin again, so that's a little frustrating, especially yesterday when I found a total ATM machine to my right. Unfortunately every time I was in a position to punish him he'd come up with a hand, so instead of walking away with his cash, he took mine and spread it around the table. Oh well, that's poker, and I'm sure I'll see him again when his luck isn't quite so good. In the walk of a hundred miles one has to expect to stub your toe occasionally.

Yesterday brought some pretty ugly beats for sure. Nothing soul crushing, mind you, but ones that a few months ago would have seen me chopping my desk in half with my hand Samauri style. Strangely enough, my biggest reaction was a shrug of the shoulders and a quietly muttered "fuck" under my breath. Amazing how much easier it is to control your emotions when you're not under a ton of stress from outside resources. This leads to the meaning of this post and my first dabble into the Psychology of Poker. Please keep your hands inside the ride until it comes to a complete stop.

Those of you who have been playing poker for any amount of time knows how the game is. You do everything right, by the book, and in the end your chips... YOUR chips slide off in the wrong direction. Baffled you look across at the opponent and see a complete crap hand that turned to gold with the flip of the last card.

What happens next depends not at all on how you played the hand, or what the hand was, for that matter, but rather it depends on events so far outside the game as to not even be readily considered relevent to this immediate event, but never is it more relevent then at this exact point in time.

Much of how you play your game is decided outside of the actual play, indeed before you even sit down at the table, depending on the emotional state your in at the time. Ask any professional competitor what the most important part of their game is, and they're almost certainly going to talk about preparation. Now to us in the poker playing world, this is obvious. Most of us know the importance of study and mental preparation, but there's one thing that seperates decent poker players from real pros, and that is emotional control.

Again, many of you are thinking in your head, "well, duh". We all know that the guy who gets beat on a hand and starts flying off the handle is probably not going to sit back down and play his "A" game. A good player knows that once he's hit this point it's long past time to rack up and head for the pool. Obvious tilt is, well, obvious. What kills many games though are events that have seemingly nothing to do with the actual table action. Consider:

Our subject, we'll call him Joe, is a part time grinder in online poker. He has a regular job that pays the bills, so poker is a source of completely disposable income for him. Joe likes his job, but lately there has been talk around the office of downsizing and the possibility of an office relocation. Joe figures that he can't control what happens in relation to that and figures that his best bet is to continue doing his job the best he can and hope for the best. Why stress out about something he has little to no control over?

After an average work day of kicking ass and taking names, Joe chows down a quick dinner and sits down for a stint at the tables. Things start off well enough, and before long Joe notices the guy across from him at the table is the classic overaggressive fish. Joe's eyes light up. "It's payday", he mutters as he looks down to see suited Big Slick and raises it. Fishboy and a blind are all that ride along. When the flop comes A29 Joe starts hammering. Fishboy is nice enough to bet out and Joe figures he's on some sort of ace and pops it for a raise. The blind runs for the hills and Fishboy calls, solidifying in Joe's mind that he's dealing with a smaller ace. The Turn comes a 4 in a suit not matching anything and Fishboy bets out again. Joe's sort of curious about this, but since this guy has shown a complete lack of understanding for the game already Joe figures Fishboy must have forgotten about the raise last street. Joe pops a raise in again but this time Fishboy three bets him. Joe's wheels are turning. Did he hit his kicker? Joe calls it down, weary but unconvinced. When the river brings a beautiful K to match up his kicker, Joe and Fishboy raise to the cap. Joe triumphently turns over his two pair and fishboy flips up...

35o for the straight.

Joe hits the desk with his fist and shouts and explitive loud enough to send the cat scurrying for cover.

Really, what happens after this is irrelevent. Joe has departed from his A game, likely never to return to it for this session. The question is, why did this reaction happen? I mean, Joe seems like a pretty even keel guy, and it's not like he's never been beaten by idiot hands like this before. Indeed, Joe is well aware that this happens with regularity at the tables. Indeed, Joe's day at the tables was decided long before the chips ever flew. Stress got the best of Joe, not the cards.

Stress is for some people so insidious their first hint that they're really under stress is when they completely melt down. Never the less, its effects are apparent to those who know what to look for. Those that "handle stress well" are still subjected to and experience stress. Handling it well doesn't make it "go away", it instead sits there and begins to erode away your foundation, including your basic ability to deal with things that anger you. And we all know that anger leads to tilt, which leads to chip bleed.

What makes me Dr. Phil all of the sudden on this? Well, last year I was Joe. I had a job I liked, and I did well at, but the industry, as has been well documented, is a disaster and getting worse. I worked for a company who was contracted by another company that thanks to the Bankruptcy laws, was free to have it's way with us, and did they ever. The net result was, even though I had a great job that I loved, there was always that nagging doubt that any day now we'd get our walking papers. The stress of this was started to effect me in ways I didn't readily notice, including my poker game, which slowly deteriorated. In the end, I went on a horrible slide that ended with me throwing in the towel for a few months. In review, yes, the cards were very brutal on me, but half the problem was, I was overreacting to the things happening on the table. I was in a hurry to "get through" the bad run.

The moral? If your game is suffering, don't forget to consider what sort of stresses you might be under outside of the immediate game. If you have stress in your life, trust me, poker is a lousy escape from it for what should be obvious reasons. Most of us play to win, and that just adds stress. To maximize your success, remember to constantly assess your stress level before you even sit down. If the answer to the question "I might lose today" is anything other then "so what", this might not be a good day to be playing cards.

Ooops, I Did It Again...

2005-03-06T16:12:00.000-06:00

...I forgot to update. I have an excuse. I moved back to the Chicago area, started a new job, got screwed out of around $600 from my old job, and caught a cold.

Yes, folks, I've been productive indeed. Oh, I've played a little poker too. Not doing so bad, all things being equal. The bankroll is generally moving in the right direction.

To my new readers out there, welcome and thanks for the comments. Last post had several folks asking why I don't play no-limit. Couple of reasons for that at this point. The most pressing one at the moment it bankroll protection. My comfort level at any level is around 300BB. Since I play on the Party skins, the lowest limit game is .50/1, which for my comfort level requires about $300 in the roll. At the moment, I have around half that.

Also, no limit requires a different mindset and approach then limit. I consider myself a good no limit player, and have played it many times, but I would like to concentrate on the limit side of it for now.

That being said, I'm to understand that the usually soft no limit games have completely turned to goo. I may have to wander over there with a sawbuck and see what's up.

pwnd

2005-02-23T23:09:00.000-06:00

"The defense department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid." - Goose

Hit and run post here. Of course, any time I say that, this ends up becoming some long, drawn out blathering on bad beats and stuff.

Actually, since getting back into the game, I've have an absolutely incredible, wholly unsustainable run, It's nice to have a huge start, especially when you only start out with a 50BB bankroll. In the period of 3 days I find myself up over 120BB. I switched from Party to Eurobet to take advantage of a bonus and before tonight was up damn near 150BB.

I mentioned to HDouble that I was on an incredible run, which was I'm sure the kiss of death. Never, NEVER say you're on a winning streak to ANYONE. It will end it.

And so it was. I sat down at a pair of tables (remember that bullet point a few days ago about NOT multi-tabling? yeah, me too.) and immediately began getting my ass handed to me. I should have known it was time to go when the evening started like this:

Party Poker 0.5/1 Hold'em (10 handed) converter

Preflop: Hero is SB with Ah, As.
4 folds, MP2 calls, 3 folds, Hero raises, BB 3-bets, MP2 calls, Hero caps, BB calls, MP2 calls.

Flop: (12 SB) 9d, 3s, 2c (3 players)
Hero bets, BB calls, MP2 calls.

Turn: (7.50 BB) Td (3 players)
Hero bets, BB calls, MP2 folds.

River: (9.50 BB) Js (2 players)
Hero bets, BB raises, Hero calls.

Final Pot: 13.50 BB

Results:

Hero has Ah As (one pair, aces).
BB has Kc Qd (straight, king high).
Outcome: BB wins 13.50 BB.

Genius. Of course, play like this is what juiced the bankroll so nicely in the last 48 hours. Anyway, for some bizarre reason I'm sure has to do with the full moon, this crap was happening with annoying regularity today. It didn't help that I completely ignored my own fooking advice and was sitting there two tabling with a beer buzz on and 5 hours of sleep under my belt. I certainly wasn't on my 'A' game, I admit, but there's just no defense against a lucky bonehead.

Okay, I think to myself that this table just has it out for me and it's time to pick up and find somewhere else to roost. So, that's what I do. I go into tight-information gathering mode for a while, glean some useful trends off the players, and this happens:

Party Poker 0.5/1 Hold'em (10 handed) converter

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with Ah, 7h.
1 fold, UTG+1 calls, UTG+2 calls, 2 folds, Hero calls, CO calls, 1 fold, SB completes, BB checks.

Flop: (6 SB) 9h, 2h, Ac (6 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG+1 checks, UTG+2 bets, Hero raises, CO 3-bets, SB folds, BB folds, UTG+1 folds, UTG+2 calls, Hero calls.

Turn: (7.50 BB) 8h (3 players)
UTG+2 bets, Hero raises, CO calls, UTG+2 calls.

River: (13.50 BB) Ad (3 players)
UTG+2 bets, Hero calls, CO raises, UTG+2 3-bets, Hero calls, CO caps, UTG+2 calls, Hero calls.

Final Pot: 25.50 BB

Results:
UTG+2 has 7c Kc (one pair, aces).
Hero has Ah 7h (flush, ace high).
CO has 2s As (full house, aces full of twos).
Outcome: CO wins 25.50 BB.

Stunning. Kids, Party has only gotten sweeter as time has gone on. Never the less, this one had my seeing through a red mist for a few hands. As you can see by my river betting, I just fooking knew I got shafted by that river ace. The first flush I actually complete in almost 1000 hands, and that shit happens. Thank you, drive through. Couple of hands later I try to convert an open ended straight draw on the flop and miss, bringing me down to about 6BB left on the table, which promptly goes away when my pocket pair doesn't convert and I push it anyway. Hey, if someone can hit their runner runner 3 outer, I should be able to pick up a 2 outer miracle, right?

Or something. Okay, it was a tilt move. Bad me.

Anyway, even with that train wreck of an evening session I still ended up up about 11BB for the day before the bonus clearing, so I can't complain too loudly. It'd just be nice if things wouldn't go back to suckout city and bad beat county like it did a few months ago.

I've been thinking that I should put a "stop loss" on my play, more for tilt control then bankroll protection, but I'm not sure exactly what I need to make it work. I've been tossing around the idea that if I go 15BB down from my buyin (considering a 25BB buyin typical at Party) it's time to pack up and end the session. I absolutely have to get out of the mindset of going to another table to try to get it back. Mentally I'm shaken at this point and I'll start playing defensive poker, which I'm sure is what kicked my ass last time out. Anyway, this is what looks like happened tonight when things started breaking bad. I failed to keep up the attack. Well, actually, part of the reason that happened was I was getting craptacular cards, but I could have done better on the boldness front.

Taking a quick glance at my numbers too, it looks like I might be having a bit of trouble with my river play. For February, over 820 or so hands, my aggression factor post flop is 2.20, but my river aggression factor 1.3. Well, okay, looking at it, it doesn't look that bad.

Okay. Mas sleepy and failing to make sense at this point. More later!

Serious

2005-02-21T19:57:00.000-06:00

Okay, I've been poking around for the last few days catching up on my blog reading, and I ran across LordGeznikor's blog, which I hadn't read in several months.

Now, LG is a pretty regular poster, and it seems he's been running aweful bad the last few months. From his writing I can see some patterns that I, unfortunately, have seen before.

His last post was January 31st. Nothing since then. I'm worried that LG might be in trouble. If anyone knows what's going on, email me. If anyone knows him personally, help him. He needs intervention.

Seriously. Get in his face. I've been in the position to help before, but I didn't understand the signs back then. I understand them now. Someone please find LG.

Learning To Fly

2005-02-20T22:33:00.000-06:00

Okay, no witty quote this time around... I'm just too lazy at this point to look one up. As some sort of final insult here in the land of Chedder and ice fishing shantys, we got some gawdaweful amount of snow. Not the usual arctic circle kind of blowy white shit either, but these little flakes of lead that really by all rights should be rain but somehow fails to melt until June. Went outside to find over six inches of this crap sitting on my driveway. It wasn't fun at all.

June in Wisconsin

Anyway, as a reward for my busting my ass digging out my driveway (which no doubt by now is buried in another 6 inches) I sat down for a quick hit and run session of poker. Long story short, I came out almost 15BB to the good after a little over an hour of play. Just to review, PokerTracker plus Gametime+ = rockin' in the free world. At least so far. With only a 50BB bankroll to start though, it's good that my initial swing is up rapidly.

Made some more progress on the whole Rakeback thing. I'm the definition of small time, but like I said previously, any return is better then no return. All I have to figure out is how to get signed up on something like Eurobet without the benefit of a computer that doesn't already have Partypoker installed on it. Or something. In spite of a busy day at work I have managed to fish out some information about how to go about doing this, though I do hope I don't have to melt down my cookies in IE to get 'er done, or I'm going to be spending the better part my the next year hunting down passwords I've long since forgotten.

We shall see...

Reload

2005-02-19T22:08:00.000-06:00

Ooh, that plan is well known. You'll have to do better than that. - Merlin

Well, now I've gone and done it. The ICP has waded once more into the turbulent and unpredictable waters of the micro-limits. I've been sort of circling the pool for some time, the desire to get back to the grind and give it another shot growing steadily, but the opportunity finally came and away I go. Another try at turning $50 into a fortune.

I'm initially back in Party, but I have some thinking that I might want to try to go somewhere where I can get a decent rakeback. I'm not exactly a high dollar or, at this point, high volume player, but I figure any return is better then no return. I'm currently hunting around for a decent rakeback offer (making good progress) and trying to figure out if Eurobet and Party can co-exist on the same computer (zero research accomplished). Any advice greatly appreciated. K, thanks.

Anyway, had a decent if short return. Up about 6BB in an hour or so of play. I've been messing around with Gametime+ and it seems like it's definately a keeper. I hear there's some issues with multi-tabling and Gametime+, but I only played one table this afternoon, so I can neither confirm nor deny that. I'm not in a big hurry to multi-table anyway unless I get into some rakeback deal where a higher volume of hands is beneficial.

Still want to get my hands on that Ed Miller book. Perhaps once the move is over with I can pick up a copy.

Speaking of the move, looks like Friday the 25th is the day. Everything's set, so all I have to do is, well, do it. Should go reletively smoothly. First day of work is the 2nd of March.

I'll probably throw a few more cards around tonight when I get home. Can't pass up on the Saturday night fish fry at Party! Here's to hoping I have what it takes to make another run with this!

Long Lost Friends

2005-02-15T20:45:00.000-06:00

In catching up on my blog reading, I read that HDub has changed jobs! So, congrats to you, H! Though I did notice that I'm not on his list of blogs anymore, so I imagine he stopped reading this blog. Oh well. Can't say I blame him. In the realm of poker blogs, this one pretty thoroughly sucks, especially lately.

The Golden Parachute

2005-02-14T20:32:00.000-06:00

I find your lack of faith disturbing - Darth Vader

It's been a very hard time waiting, but I am happy to report that I will be moving back to the Chicago area to take a position with the aforementioned dispatch center. The call came Friday afternoon and I've found myself suddenly extremely busy trying to get everything in order. It looks like everything is lined up and all I have left to do is finish up here, pack up the rest of my things and head on down the road...

I want to thank those of you who put in a good word for me in the comments of the last post. Nice to see that, even though I've been a dissapointment in terms of any actual, you know, content that I still have people checking in on the old ICP every once in a while. I'm really hoping that I can restart with the business of pontificating about my poker antics. Alas, as of now, the only thing I can report is that playing the play money tables sucks.

Apparently the Oneida casino in Green Bay has a weekly no limit tourney on Wednesday nights. $60 buy in with a $5 dealer tip option that will win you T300 more in chips, with apparently unlimited rebuys for $20 for the first two rounds. At least, this is how it was explained to me. I don't know how many chips you start with for your $60. I don't think I'll make it this Wednesday but I might try for next week, depending on how funding looks. Logic dictates that I take the $65 and throw it in Party, but I think the tourney might be more fun in the sort term... Someone talk some sense into me!

Speaking of Party, I'd really like to get started on it again, but from my play on the play money tables, I think I need to sit down and do some review reading before I get serious about it. The trouble is, I traded my Lee Jones book to a friend and he gave me Theory of Poker, but I think at this point my game has eroded to the point where getting into a heady tome like ToP might be counterproductive. I really would like to get my grubby hands on the new Ed Miller's Small Stakes Hold'em book. I'm not a 2+2 deciple by any stretch, but I've heard good things by and large about it, and I guess it's "basic" enough, if you will, to help me get my game back on track and advanced enough to allow me to grow my game into the upper small limits at least. Some things I KNOW I have to adjust.

Ease up on the multi-tabling
If I get bored and feel the urge to wander off to the Internet or something, quit.
Read, study, discuss
Resist the urge to play single table tournements in an attempt to "turn it around"

This is just the beginning.... again.

Oh, and Decker, what were you thinking of helping with?

Introspection

2005-02-06T21:21:00.000-06:00

"I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. " - Henry David Thereau

It's been quite a while since I read my fellow bloggers' offerings, if I could still be considered a "fellow blogger". I haven't played poker in a good long while, other then the occasional home game against truely terrible players, and I've contributed not at all to the discussion, but I hold out hope that I'm still embraced by the community.

This post won't be much about poker, except to mention that once all of the things going on in my life sort themselves out I'd very much like to make another run at it.

So, what's it all about? Those two and a half people still reading my mental blatherings know I work for the airline industry. The endgame on this whole thing might play out in the next couple of weeks, as United has said they're going to make their decision soon... Which could mean anything, really. The staff in Chicago have reported, and the management here has confirmed, that there is a "Transition Team" from United wandering around the Chicago operation. One could logically surmise that if there exists a transition team there's likely something to transition. Management has been remarkably silent about this, except to confirm that which they cannot hide. That, and the mass exodus has begun. We're seeing about 4 or 5 openings a day being posted, and it's not like we're growing, so again, deductive reasoning suggests that these positions are being vacated, not created.

I have decided to leave this industry I love. It's a difficult decision, but it's become clear that this isn't the industry I grew up around. It's now getting to the point where your typical airline employee makes less then a McDonalds manager. The people you see on the ramp throwing bags and servicing the airplanes? They'd make more money at WalMart. Even pilots are getting shafted. Given the amount of training and money it costs to become qualified to be an airplne pilot, it should amount to more then $17,000 a year to start. It's getting worse too. The only thing keeping the industry from becoming dangerous is the fact that pilots have pride in their work in spite of what amounts to indentured servitude by management.

Anyway, I've been going through the process for the better part of two months to work at a police and fire dispatch center in suburban Chicago. Why the change?

Previous to this airline gig, I was in the I.T. industry for around 7 years, most of that time as a contractor. I spent an average of 6 months at any one job. Some of the time the contract ended, some of the time I was offered a substantial raise to move. Anyway, I did a lot of moving around. Once the industry collapsed, the market went from employer saturated to employee saturated. A job I used to do now requires a Master's degree, 20 years of experience and a Master MCSE certification, and pays 2/3 what I used to make. The point being, I've spent my entire professional career looking over my shoulder, wondering when the pink slip will come. My move into the airline industry was supposed to solve all of that, but alas, after 9/11 this industry too is in the process of imploding. I'm 32, I have a wife and I'd like to start a family. I can do none of that if I have to worry about whether my next check is my last check. I need stability. Public service can give me that.

The waiting is killing me, though. I'm in the final stage of this whole deal, having done enough tests to qualify me for crypto clearance, I have made the cut. Now the final step of the process, the background check. It's taking forever. Part of it is my fault. I filled out my application with the same information I filled out my previous applications with. I figured I passed a police and airline background check, both equally thorough, with this information, so in it goes... Well, a lot changes in two years. I got at least 3 phone numbers wrong due to changes, closing, moving and one was plain stupidity on my part. I called up the person doing the background check and corrected all of this information, but it's supremely embarassing to have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth on this application, only it's not correct information... Duh. So now, in my typical style, I'm worried sick about it. Did I get this right, what are they going to think about me getting the information wrong, where are they in the process...

Clearly I'm being irrational about this, but when I think about why, it's seems I'm counting on this job more then I initially thought. The truth is, there is a very real prospect that this job I have now is at the worst, gone in 4 months, and at the very best, a dead end career. I will never see the inside of a major airline dispatch center, and I'll never make more then $55,000 a year here, and that will be 15 years from now. I'm not greedy, but I would like to give my kids a decent shot at higher education and still have a little left for me and my wife when we retire, considering Social Security will be relegated to the history books by then.

In short, I just want a phone call.

And a spare $50 so I can make another run at the Party tables... See? This site isn't COMPLETELY devoid of poker content! Oh, and a copy of Ed Miller's book. That'd be nice.

But for now, I just wait. and wait.

Thanks For Playing!

2005-01-29T18:27:00.000-06:00

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends. The Airline show, that is. In case anyone hasn't kept up on current events, I work for an airline. Specifically I work for an airline that works for another airline, that airline being United.

It's been happy fun times for the last few weeks here. For those of you unfamiliar with the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy laws in the United States and what it means to people who hold contracts with the bankrupt company, here it is in a nutshell.

You, the contractor, must continue to follow the rules of your contract. They, the contractee and bankrupt, are under no obligation to do the same.

Delightful, eh? Anyway, a year ago United decided to put our work up for bid to the lowest bidder. We managed to "win" our work back, but given our prices and reluctance to put a bunch of money into more airplanes for a bankrupt company, we weren't invited to add any more airplanes to the operation. Well, it appears that, since we're the only carrier United contracts with that didn't substantially change our contract (read: didn't add airplanes) we were prime for the "fucking with" again. Two months ago, United again put our work up for bid to the lowest bidder.

Now, here's where it gets a little fuzzy. When this initially happened, it seemed that the brass at the top were trying to sort out whether United was serious about this or whether they were just putting pressure on us to lower our costs by using threats. My opinion is that they guessed United was bullshitting them and put up a marginally lower bid. United said that we had a month to put in our bid, then they would take a month to review it. That put the deadline of when United was supposed to make a decision at January 10th. Of course, the 10th came and went and United said.... They need more time. Imagine that. Meanwhile, apparently they were in contact with the brass asking "clarification" of the bid, whatever that means.

Dateline January 13th. The COO of our airline puts up an email stating that United had come to town and that it was "clear we had significant work to do to win our work back". Read: We guessed wrong.

The next day, the COO didn't show up at work. Concerned, the other brass eventually went with the police to his home to find him dead. No one is saying how. In fact, since this event, we've heard pretty much dick from Mahagony Row. Well, that's not entirely true. We returned one of our airplanes to the lease holder and are going to return another one in March. Oh yeah, and on the 25th we were told that we had until the 28th to put in another bid.

So, not to draw any conclusions or anything, but no good can possibly come out of this. By making us rebid, they're clearly indicating that they've sent our first bid to the round file. This, combined with the leaseholders now reclaiming their airplanes paints a dismal picture. I'm not going to speculate on the death of the COO, but I can't completely discount the possibility that the two events might be connected.

Not that this makes much difference. The mechanics at United decided that they weren't interesting in giving any more concessions to the airline. Further, they've indicated that, should United decided to throw out the collective bargaining agreement between the airline and the mechanics, they're going to go on strike. Nevermind that it's probably not legal for them to do so, it'll only take about a two or three day strike to end United.

United plans to go to court on Monday to ask permission to end the contract, which the court will allow. Look for the contract to be wadded up shortly thereafter, and the mechanics will walk within a week. The Bush Administration will take a week from that point to realize that even though they think the airlines should stand or fall on their own merits, the total collapse of United will completely screw about 45% of the travelling public domestically, and will effectively shut down many International routes, since existing airlines that might have the ability to cover the void lack the liquidity to do so. Meanwhile, at least 3 "regional" carriers will flat go out of business, as well as several subcontractors. Since the market will also be flooded with a glut of used airplanes that lease holders desperately want to get moving again, look for stock in Boeing to completely shit itself, as those who would have bought new commercial aircraft instead find holders of United airplanes wheeling and dealing with the potential new owners. Airbus will probably feel some pressure too, but not nearly as hard as Boeing will be hit.

Look for Presidential intervention around the 3 week mark... Maybe.... Oh, wait, nevermind. United would be well into rigormortis by then.

Can anyone say "Eastern Airlines"?

Shovel, Shovel, Shovel....

2005-01-08T14:35:00.000-06:00

So, this is what corporate desperation looks like.

Jesus wept.

As Before, So Shall It Be

2004-12-03T13:05:00.000-06:00

Well, that was fun.

I've managed to bust out again, so I appear to be done until Lucy lays another bonus on me.

I've come to the conclusion that I just suck. I can't get anything to happen on the 50/1 ring games, which by all accounts I should be destroying. Nothing can beat luck, though, and I am on the wrong side of that equation way too many times lately. I figured since I was getting the living shit kicked out of me on the ring games I'll go and collect some cash at the $5/$1 NL sit and goes.

Nope.

Something evil has happened to those games lately. Gone are the games where you see 3 people go all-in on the first hand. Couple that with some truely shitty runs of hands, and well, my balance at Party is now $0.20. Wooot.

So, back into the background with me until the next generous handout comes around.

It was nice while it lasted, though.

Not Bad, For A Rookie...

2004-11-27T07:37:00.000-06:00

I'm not off to Australia... Which really doesn't surprise me, so I'm not really disappointed in it. I finished 16th of 42 players. I have to say I really did have a good tournement. I got into a little bit of trouble early on when my AK didn't amount to anything and I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar trying to represent a hand, but made it back up a few hands later with a well played AA against the chip monster on the table. My stack pretty much followed the tournement average for the entire go-round. Then this happens. I get 67h in the small blind. Folded around to me so I pop it up to 3x the BB for the steal and get called... Flop gives me the open ended straight draw and 4 to the flush. I throw out a pot sized bet and BB doubles it. Hmmmm. BB is a good player but is in chip trouble, so this raise could mean anything. I check, he shoves. I have him readily covered in chips so I call it and I catch my straight on the river to knock him out.

Next hand I get AA on the button. A couple of limpers and I pop it for a decent raise to see if they're serious. SB (an equal stack to me) calls and the limpers bow out. Flop comes with a rainbow of low cards and I'm thinking I'm money here. SB throws out a pot sized bet and I double it. He calls and a K of whatever falls. No flush possible and I'm feeling pretty good about my aces. SB checks and I sense weakness, so I shove and he calls and turns over a pair of 8's. I'm eleated until I notice an 8 fell on the flop. No help for the Klingon and I'm gone. Hero to Zero in two hands.

That's Poker!

I did WHAT?!

2004-11-24T13:07:00.000-06:00

Congratulations,The_ICP! You won Entry to Aussie Million Satellite A.

I won the damn freeroll! How's that for a friggin return to the game? So, tonight I get to play the multi-table qualifier. Not sure HOW I'm actually going to make a showing to that, seeing as how I'm going to be out of town in Elgin tonight, but I'll give it the college effort to try to get 'er done.

I almost wish I could just take the cash equivalent to the freeroll and run!

Moving In Stereo

2004-11-22T17:15:00.000-06:00

Knocked out about 180 hands this morning towards the 500, and made out almost $10 to the good. Since I'm just trying to build the bankroll back to a comfortable level and get my sea legs back under me, I'm playing ultra-conservative. I missed out on a couple of hands I would have won on, including one where I was sort of trolling along with KJo with two people in who kept betting into me, so I just called away. River brought a third heart and I figured I was dead. EP betting out only solidified my feeling so I folded away, only to be shown a split pot between the other two... One with K5o and the other with K7o. My KJo would have been good for a moderately good pot... Oh well... I think I would have lost that hand more then I would have won it, but it still stung a little bit. As usual, I was in some trouble early on, but most of it was missed hands rather then beaten hands. All in all a pretty standard day, and it helped my confidence immensely to start this all off with a notch in the Win column.

I'm going to have to do some more research on that Aussie million thing to see when I'd have to play the qualifier in the unlikely event I win the sub-qualifier sit and go. It'll be fun to get into one of those though, especially since I apparently don't have to pay for it!

Rebirth

2004-11-21T17:56:00.000-06:00

It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

So another month passes by and not a peep from me on the ICP. I do most thoroughly suck. It's not that things aren't happening, it's just that I've been busy dealing with the things that have been happening.

The business venture I mentioned earlier is still alive... Well, dormant, but alive. I've reached the point where I need to raise capital, and my potential investors are dragging their feet, so I'm probably going to have to think about funding this little venture myself... Not impossible, but it will severely delay the start of business.

Perhaps the biggest buzz kill of this month though is United has decided to arbitrarily place all of the work my company provides to the company up for bid. Nevermind that we just went though this shit a year ago and had a contract with the company. Thanks to the wonders of the Bankruptcy court, they can simply ball up our contract and toss it in the fire. WE, of course, are offered no such freedom since we, you know, have a contract. The legal system is broken. Anyway, we pretty much will know in 45 days whether or not I still have a job. If it turns out we get shoved out the door, I'm pretty much well and truly fucked, but since there's precisely dick I can do about it at the moment, I'm choosing to bury my head in the sand and hope it all works out.

But, this is the Intrepid Card Player, not the Intrepid whiner, so onto information you'd care about. I got an email from Lucy Jones (anyone who plays at Party knows her well) telling me about a free $50 in my account. I have to play 500 hands by the 28th to make it mine, so I have to get to it, since I'm going to be out of town for Thanksgiving. I really don't want to multi-table just yet, but with 500 hands to complete in limited time, I may well have to just to meet the deadline. Also handed down was a freeroll on the Aussie Million sit and go. I'd really rather I just got the money equivalent of that in my bonus account, but what the heck, when you've got nothing you've got nothing left to lose, so I'll take the shot at that and see what happens here in the next few days.

I'm kind of stoked about getting back into the game, but some of that excitement might just be the possibility that I can pull off the same stunt I pulled the last time I plunked down $50 into Party. I think several months off should be good enough to break the hideous streak I was on, so here's hoping my skills are still at least semi-intact... Of course, the 50/1 level is sort of a crapshoot, so I have about an even chance of doubling or busting before the 500 hands are through. No comment on the freeroll, but I don't have my hopes set too high on that one.

Always hard to argue with free money, though. The ICP is back.... Hopefully for more then a weekend.

Stepping Out

2004-10-18T09:57:00.000-05:00

"I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretary's that any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this picture, of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. you see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV, and there's just more of it. The $87 Million lottery winner, that kid actor that just made 20 million on his last movie, that internet stock that shot through the roof, you could have made millions if you had just gotten in early, and that's exactly what I wanted to do: get in. I didn't want to be an innovator any more, i just wanted to make the quick and easy buck, i just wanted in. The Notorious BIG said it best: "Either you're slingin' crack-rock, or you've got a wicked jump-shot." Nobody wants to work for it anymore." - Seth Davis, Boiler Room

It's been a month since I've updated this site, and I feel like, even though at this point I've walked away from poker I can't just walk away from The ICP.

I still have some desire to play poker, but with taking this month off, I've come to realize that poker online really ceased being any kind of fun some time ago. I think I was sort of fooling myself by thinking that I was having a good time, and who doesn't when you're winning, but after a solid year of playing, I really was not where I wanted to be. I have no idea if I'm a good or bad poker player because I've never been able to play at a level that will let me know that. Playing against a table full of people who don't have a friggin clue what they're doing is no way to gauge poker skill, but it's a great way to validate the odds tables. Since the odds tables are already validated, I'd really rather have just moved onto playing skill based poker.

Perhaps I'll delve more into that later on. Things on the life front have been rather quiet. Still working, still loving it, though we're not getting anywhere financially at all. I can't remember the last time I didn't live check to check.... Okay, I do remember, and it's depressing.

I haven't been sitting back doing nothing. I have, for some time, been thinking of going into business for myself. Now, I'm a pessimist. When I think about going into business myself, I immediately start thinking "Yeah, right, me?" I actually have two business plans already worked up from various other ideas. One is a sports bar which was WAAAAAAAAY too ambitious, especially considering my business partner and I had, between us, exactly zero restaraunt or bar experience. Not that it wouldn't have worked. Bill Gates built an empire by surrounding himself with people that knew things he didn't, and thus was our idea. However, investors like to see business owners that, you know, KNOW something about the business. I knew how to consume beer. Who knows.. It may well have worked. We took our plans to an accountant (what a joke, but that's a blog for another day) and also went up to the local Small Business Development place. Amazingly, the Small business place DIDN'T laugh us out the door, but the fact remained that we needed to raise roughly $1 million in capital to solidly survive year 1, and that's a lot of cashish. The other plan was for a retail computer sales and service joint. That one was derailed by the IT industry shitting itself and dumping both me and my partner into the unemployment lines. We didn't have the time to invest in it, since we were looking at starving to death. As fate would have it, the business plan did get carted out to Michigan and, I guess you could say it resulted in a viable business, but the end result pretty much had nothing to do with the business plan we put together, since neither of us are actually in control of its fate.

Anyway, like I said, I've been working hard on this, and it looks like it's a viable plan, but I'm having trouble believing my numbers are correct. I've done everything I can think of to "break" the plan, including reducing my market share to 1/1000th of 1 percent, and I STILL end up with a healthy bottom line. I also considered only a 15% growth factor for the next two years, and the numbers are very, very healthy. Again, I'm a pessimist. I don't believe my own numbers. Now, of course, I've made some VERY general assumptions about the market. The business is a custom order computer sales business... Check me on this:

The 2000 U.S. census indicates that 54 million households have a computer. Now, many homes have more then one computer, and these do not include businesses, but for now, we'll assume that each household has exactly one computer. We will also, for the purpose of this exercise, not consider market growth in the 5 years since the census was taken (and if current trends follow the trends set out in the census data, market growth is considerable).

Computer technology isn't moving forward at the breakneck pace it was in the '90's, but it's still advancing at a pretty good clip. Given market factors, software and hardware development and current reliability of computer hardware, I'll make the assumption that the average home computer has a useful life of 5 years. Personally I think this is a little on the conservative side, but again, I'm trying to break my plan. Anyway, we'll assume that 1/5 of the households will be in the market for a new computer, so 10.8 million households will be shopping for a new computer.

I'm certainly no Dell or Gateway, so I'm not advertising on television and I'm not a household name... In fact, when I open the doors, I'm a nobody. Some target marketing will help to change that, but I have to assume that for the first year, I'm not going to be exactly a "recognized name" in the computer industry. Given my small initial budget, I'll probably be marketing initially through search engines. Let's say that only 1/2 of 1 percent of the total market will actually find me. That makes "my share" of customers 54,000.

Now that I've got them at my site, I have to sell them a computer. Now, since I'm entirely a web based company, the web page is my sole sales instrument. I'm no web designer, so I'll assume that my web page will not initially be as polished as some others. Let's say I particularly suck at selling these things, and I only complete sales to 1 percent of my market. 540 units.

So, I think these are pretty conservative estimates, and 540 units in the first year still ends up with a pretty good margin.

Of course, I'll still need to round up the startup capital. Remember, I'm poor.

So, anyone looking for a good deal on a computer?

¡No Más!

2004-09-24T19:03:00.000-05:00

It's been several days since my last update. The reasons are many, but paramount to what you,my faithful readers, are interested in is that I've been doing much thinking and next to no playing of poker in the last week. Any poker I have attempted to play has had the recently very predictable result of a loss of bankroll.

A mere couple of weeks ago I had great aspirations for my poker play. The idea was to work my way slowly, as I always have been able to, though the 50/1 level to an appropriate level for 1/2, and just carefully sort of grind my way up from there. To beat the boredom of the grind, I was thinking of playing a multi-table tourney a week (starting a the $5 ones). -EV, to be sure, but it's good experience and it mixes things up a little bit. I was hoping to be able to comfortably sit the $3/$6 limit games by the time the weather was warm again, but so long as I was making progress towards my goal, I would be happy.

Well, after about 3 weeks of almost straight losses, I'm completely baffled by what is going wrong. I think I'm making the same plays I've made a hundred different times in the situations I see, but they all invariably result in me losing. I've tried to break down the numbers, to look for holes, but there's just nothing that is jumping out and saying "here's the problem, bonehead". My basic stats from the previous few months compared to this one look essentially the same! It's not like I've suddenly become a maniac or a calling station so far as I can tell, but again, the frustration and the disappointment is likely clouding my judgement. All I know at this point is that when I get a hand that connects and I bet into it, I expect to lose.

I'm just very disappointed in myself. I've been playing poker for almost a year now, and by this time I should be crushing the 50/1 game and I should definately have game for the 1/2 tables, yet that's not what's happening. I am only marginally successful at 50/1 and any attempts to play the 1/2 tables result in steady, sometimes crushing losses. The short handed 1/2 games were likely big winners for me due to varience and finding tables with God aweful players on them. It seems that the truely bad 1/2 shorthanded players have either busted out or grown a brain. I can't find anyone these days on the 1/2 tables voluntarily putting money in the pot 80% of the time. These guys were like taking candy from a corpse. Just wait until you have a hand and pound them to dust. Any idiot could win against these guys.

So, I only have to assume that I'm not improving at all. Likely because I'm playing at the lowest level with the worst players, and the only way to win against the random array of hands that bottom level players play is to play straight A-B-C poker. There is no reward for betting for results. If you have a hand, you bet/raise. If you don't you check/fold. This is where I've been for a year. If I were any sort of a programmer, I could have written a bot long ago to play this level and just let it rip. God knows I could have used the time to sit and read a few poker books and maybe learned a little something.

So, this long and bizarre journey has come full circle for me. I have taken a majority of my bankroll out. There were several things I wanted to do with my poker money, but when I was making steady gains it was easy to say "I'll just wait". If I were making money at the rate I'm losing it, I'd be bankrolled for the 1/2 game by this time next week. As it is, I just couldn't stand to lose the opportunity to do this as the possibility existed that I would lose to the point that I no longer had the opportunity, so out it went.

The bankroll stands at a tick over $50.

I have, in effect, started over. Maybe. I'm not even motivated at this point to continue in the way I have been going. Poker has ceased being fun, and the reason is as I stated before. I'm on automatic. I can't afford a coach, especially if I'm constantly losing, and anything I learn would be wasted on a majority of the bottom limit cretins. I feel like an ass asking for someone to mentor me. There's gotta be better things for better players then me to do then spend valuable time breaking my of bad habits, and if I were to get into a mentor situation, I would want to actually have "sessions" where we can talk and go over things. I can't ask anyone to do that and not repay them somehow.

So where does this go from here? To be quite honest, I don't know. As this is a poker blog I'd be remiss if I were to begin deviating into other subjects. I could come on here and start taking about poker stuff, but without me actually playing, I can't imagine there being enough content to be worth visiting here anymore. I don't want to stop playing poker, but I don't want to continue to pound out the hours if I'm not improving. I mean, at this point, I don't even know if I suck or not. I don't know a goddamn thing, really, except that I feel like I'm sitting at the bottom of a well and there's no ladder. I've spent enough time trying to climb out to know that, unless a ladder is thrown, there is no point in continuing to dig at the muddy walls.

Same As It EVER Was...

2004-09-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

Well, the slide has turned into a plateau. Or I've hit bottom. Either way, I'm not necessarily losing money anymore, though I most decidedly am not making any either.

Well.. Not entirely true. I did lose about $3 today. But I won about $3 yesterday. Yesterday sucked. I played 2 tables of 50/1 and one 1/2 table. I kicked serious amounts of ass on the 50/1 tables, ending up doubled through on one and up $5 or so on the other. The 1/2 table was another story. After raking an early monster I treaded water until the last 10 minutes, where I lost 3 premium hands in a row. That turned a $35 at least win into a break even day.

Being stuck in the mud like this is infinately frustrating, and playing for hours and not getting anywhere has me antsy to move on to something else for a while. I poked around in a $25 no limit table for a little bit, but only came away a buck or so up. I actually rather enjoyed playing at the no limit table. It was refreashing to actually see people respect bets and raises, but by and large the play was still bad enough where I could exploit people's mistakes for profit.

But perhaps the most important aspect, I was actually enjoying myself. For the first time in a long time I was having fun playing! It wasn't so much of a grind, and it wasn't as frustrating to have a pair of Queens, see a King hit the board, and have to assume I'm beat.

I toyed with heading back to the $1/$2 short handed tables too, since history shows me as a consistant winner at those tables, but with only around $415 in the bankroll, I'm still a little thin to make that move.

None the less, I think for the sake of sanity I need to move off the grind for a little bit. I still haven't decided whether I'm going to play more no limit or poke my head back into the short handed tables. Any input and opinion is always welcomed!

Same As It Ever Was

2004-09-15T19:59:00.000-05:00

Apologies for no updates in a bunch of days. Short answer is, nothing much has been going on. I'm still bleeding chips, though today was a small winner. So far this month, I'm about 75BB down, which while by no means a tragic slide is certainly the longest streak of losing hours I've put up in my short poker career. So far, my average is -2.3BB/hr. Since I'm at work I'm not sure how many table hours I have in, but I do know I'm closing in on around 1700 hands.

I've seen stories of big, monsterous slides lasting for weeks but never really believed things like this were possible. I always assumed something changed that caused such a hideous downturn to an otherwise successful player. Sometimes this is true, and it is what prompted me to do some research on why I'm in such a dive. Granted, I didn't do a real in-depth analysis in terms of breaking down individual plays, but rather looking at my stats. One thing that stuck out above all others was that my aggression factor is higher.

Now, before my post flop aggression was around 1.6, which is kinda-sorta aggressive. This month it's up to 2.0, so I've turned up the heat a little bit when I'm in a hand. The trouble is, the pre-flop numbers. The aggression is about the same, but it looks like I'm really not getting my "fair share" of starting hands. As mentioned earlier, I'm also not winning my "fair share" of hands I'm in and when coupled with the stepped up aggression it all adds up to losing more money then I should be losing given this situation.

I firmly believe that the upped aggression is a result of covering my stack, thus having the "guts" if you will to put in those last bets on the river when I THINK I'm good, but I'm not POSITIVE I'm good. Unfortunately, when playing the 50/1 level, where no one folds for any amount, this ends up costing me extra bets when someone connects with bizarre cards and I bet into them.

I imagine that I'll be at least marginally more successful when I get to a level where I can at least read some of the players. At 50/1, you have absolutely no frikkin clue where these guys are coming from. I can't tell you how many times I'm sitting there with AK with a K and rags all over the board, no flush possibility, no straight possibility and some bozo pops a raise at me on the river only to show me his 53s and pulling down the pot with some effed up 2 pair he caught on the river. That's enough to want to put my fist through the monitor, covered up stacks or not.

I've also busted out of tables much more often then I used to. I think before I was covering up my stacks I busted off a table twice. I've been all-in at least a half dozen times, and have busted out twice this month alone, and it's only half over.

So, what to do... I guess in the short term, it's time to tighten way the hell back up and just wait it out. My best bet to get out of this 50/1 hell and move on with my poker life is to just ride this out and stick to absolute ABC machine-like play. In 50/1 you have to assume that the opposition could have anything. The last two weeks has made it painfully clear that this is indeed the case.

The good news is, I had a winning session today. It's one session, but it's not a losing one. One step at a time and eventually I'll get out of this crappy bottom limit hole.

Also, I want to thank my readers for taking the time and contributing through the comments. It's good to know you're out there and taking this crazy journey with me.

Smoke On The Horizon

2004-09-11T20:04:00.000-05:00

Been a rough week. It wasn't supposed to be this way, but hey, what's life without a little strife? I've already blogged about the Labor Day Weekend debacle so I won't go there, and those that are paying a little bit of attention will know that I've been on a pretty brutal slide the last few days. Today was no different. I knew I was in trouble when I started getting good hands cracked mercilously. Two pair? No good. Flush? Not in the two times I hit them. Top Pair top kicker was a recipe for disaster. I've started to get that bad feeling any time I get a hand. You know that feeling; you get a good hand and you just KNOW it's not going to win. I really REALLY don't want to start thinking that way because that leads right back into Weak/Tight. I know in my mind that this can't last forever, but at the rate I've been losing money, it doesn't HAVE to last forever.

Really the most frustrating part of sliding is I'm ready to move up in limits. I know I've got game to get out of the 50/1 Hell I'm in, but I just don't want to play beyond my bankroll. So, I wait until I hit $600. I don't know where I am right now. Yesterday I was down to $440 or so. At the beginning of the Labor Day weekend I was around $510. After today's debacle I have no idea how much damage was done, and I don't really WANT to know. Not yet, anyway.

So, the plan is as it always was... Keep plugging away. I certainly know I'm a winning player, and the hands I've been losing are +EV hands. If anything I need to be more aggressive when I have a hand. These guys at 50/1 won't fold for any amount so the only thing I can do is depend on probability and statistics to win. One think for certain, I've lost some pretty monsterous pots today, including one where I turn the nut flush only for someone to river the case 7 for four of a kind and a 32BB pot. 5 people in for a capped turn and a three bet river. That one hurt.

In other news, I picked up Doom3 the other day. In a word, excellent. I haven't had a game actually give me chills in a good long time. The presentation is downright creepy. Good stuff. A great way to vent the frustration of getting my ass handed to me at the poker tables too.

Statistical Anomaly

2004-09-10T21:28:00.000-05:00

So for the last couple of days I've gotten the impression that I can't get anything going, and any time I think I might I get brutally beaten down.

Turns out I was right. Took a peek at my stats and in the last two days I've dropped about 60BB in roughly 4 table hours of poker.

Today alone saw a 40BB or so slide. I effectively busted out of a table again (down to my last $0.13) and lost about $5 to $10 on the other 3 tables. Over 300 hands and I won 2 percent of the hands. Craptastic.

I've been getting the bug to just say "what the fuck" and make my move to the $1/$2 tables, but I know that would be foolharty at this point. I gotta stay the course and ride this out to the requisite 300BBs for that level. It's just frustrating to see so many decent hands either completely shank (most of what happened today) or get beat on the river (happened enough today, but not unusually often). It's just the Hell that is 50/1 getting its revenge on me, but it'll turn around.

Tomorrow's another day.

Parts Is Parts

2004-09-09T17:36:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine who has been trying to get up here for some time was finally able to get here on Saturday on his Honda Goldwing. The plan was to head out on Sunday for a good, long ride on what promised to be a beautiful riding day. My wife got him a hotel room at the hotel she works at and on Sunday morning we head over there to meet up with him.

That's when the trouble started... He goes to push his bike backward out of the parking space and it won't budge. A little working back and forth and it broke free, and after a mile or two down the road it seemed to be working okay, so we rode on to breakfast, where the rear got stiff again, but not as bad... So we went on a little ride and halfway through the brakes started to get mushy, then later completely crapped out. Luckily the Goldwing has an "assist brake" on the front wheel, so he didn't go careening into anything, but now we had a problem. So we get the thing back to my place and take a look. Turns out the rear brake had worn almost to the caliper piston and the caliper piston overextended and jammed against the rotor, effectively destroying the rotor and, for all intents and purposes, the caliper.

Anyone who knows anything about the Goldwing knows how much fun it is to do work on the rear wheel. The Goldwing is a full dress touring bike. It also weighs about as much as a VW Beetle. Anyway to replace the rotor we needed to remove the rear wheel of the bike. Sounds easy, right?

Took us 3 days. Maintenence on this bike is not easy when you have a crappy shop manual, no bike lift and you have to stop every 45 minutes to go get a tool at the store.

Oh, but it gets better. We are now on a parts crawl. We need a caliper, brake pads and a rotor. Oh, yeah. By the way. It's Labor Day weekend. So we can't even BEGIN to look for parts until Tuesday.

Tuesday comes around and, sure enough, finding parts proves difficult, for lack of a better word. No one has a rotor. Further, no one will turn the rotor we have (which wouldn't have worked anyway... This rotor was cashed). Add to that, we still don't have the rear wheel off the bike. We did manage to get a caliper from a local bone yard, but it's quality was questionable. After about 3 hours of searching we find a place that says they can get a rotor for us tomorow...

...In Kenosha. 2+ hours away from here. Whatever, we found a part, and it was cheaper then everyone else. We figure we can head out around 9:00 or so to get there by 11:00, when UPS shows up with the part. So we get the wheel the rest of the way off and throw it all in the trunk and start putting miles behind us for Kenosha about 9:30 or so. Halfway there the shop calls and says our part is there and we're thrilled.

We arrive at the shop and have them mount and balance a new tire, but to make sure it's all balanced, we ask that they put the rotor on the wheel. So our wheel disappears behind the wall along with the rotor in the box and the guy who I had been dealing with and who ordered the part, Lou, goes off to pick up lunch for the guys. About 15 minutes later one of the shop guys pops his head around the corner and asks who I assume is the shop owner to come in back with him... Mike and I think nothing of it, and a few minutes later the shop owner comes back and goes back to work on whatever he was working on. Few minutes later Lou returns and the shop owner asks him "where did you get that part number for the rotor?"

Mike about loses it. I'm ready to head over the counter myself but it looks like Lou is already shitting himself as he realizes just how badly he fucked up. Finally after a minute he turns around, looks at mike and mutters "I fucked up" and disappears around the back, supposedly to see how badly he fucked up. I go to work trying to keep Mike from just grabbing the next heavy thing he can find and destroying things and after a few minutes Lou comes back and says that he can order the part and have it drop shipped to us. We let him know that Mike here is stranded in Appleton and he turns even more sheets of white. Finally it gets worked out where we find the right part at the warehouse and we can go pick it up... In Janesville, WI. Another hour and a half away and not any closer at all to Appleton. We're now driving the bottom part of a triangle. We go, get the part and 7 and a half hours of driving and 10 hours after we left, we return to Appleton with the parts in hand. The actual reassembly of the bike actually went very well, and we had the bike on the road by around 1:00am.

So, instead of a nice enjoyable couple of days visiting with my buddy, we spent the whole damn holiday weekend elbow deep in 25 years of accumulated dirt and oil.

Oh yeah. I also topped it off by getting my ass handed to me in a short session of poker.

Weeee.

The Final Insult...

2004-09-04T08:39:00.000-05:00

I'm sure the French have a word for this...

For now, I'll have to refer to the English translation:

Party Poker 0.50/1 Hold'em (8 handed)

Preflop: The_ICP is MP2 with Ac, As. UTG posts a blind of $0.50.
UTG (poster) checks, UTG+1 calls, 1 fold, The_ICP raises, CO calls, 1 fold, SB calls, BB calls, UTG folds, UTG+1 calls.

Flop: (11 SB) Kh, 7h, 7d (5 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG+1 checks, The_ICP bets, CO calls, SB raises, BB calls, UTG+1 folds, The_ICP calls, CO calls.

Turn: (9.50 BB) 9s (4 players)
SB checks, BB checks, The_ICP bets, CO calls, SB calls, BB calls.

River: (13.50 BB) 6c (4 players)
SB checks, BB bets, The_ICP calls, CO raises, SB folds, BB folds, The_ICP calls.

Final Pot: 18.50 BB
Main Pot: 18.50 BB, between The_ICP and CO. >

Results:
The_ICP shows Ac As (two pair, aces and sevens).
CO shows 7s 2c (three of a kind, sevens).
Outcome: CO wins 18.50 BB.

Translation: You got fucked, buddy boy.

Ups And Downs

2004-09-03T16:45:00.000-05:00

The last few days of poker have been an exercise in frustration. Since I don't actually know how I'm doing over all due to the hidden stacks, I can only guess at where I'm at in terms of win/loss... Which, of course, is the point.

I have, however, discovered another natural human reaction. When left with an absence of information, we tend to "fill in the blanks".

Yesterday I was sitting in on 3 tables of 50/1. I waffle back and forth between 3 and 4 tables, depending on the challenge and my mental capacity at the time. Anyway, on one of the tables I'm getting brutalized. I mean, really taken to town. AA cracked twice in 10 hands, with the second one going down to a guy playing the HAMMER against a capped pre-flop and getting the miracle two pair flop that, of course, turns the boat at the river. The coup de grâce was KK getting owned by Q8o. It was the first time in a good long time I had actually busted out of a 50/1 limit game, and it was not a good feeling.

So, naturally, I'm thinking I'm getting stuck this session for copious amounts of my bankroll. After closing the busted out table and buying into a new table, I'm doing mental calculations in my head and come up with a figure of about -$45 by this time.

Of course, what I FAILED to realize was, when I first sat down on a different table, I went on a hellatious rush to more then double up. It quickly settled down to a standard grind so I had conveniently forgotten about my great run, instead focusing on the immensely more frustrating losses on the other table.

So at the end of it, I was chatting with a buddy of mine and bitching about how much I must have lost, doing my usual "I should just withdraw all of it and put the money to something useful" pissing and moaning I always do when I have an immensely bad day at the table, when he asks what I currently have in the bankroll. I hem and haw a little and do some mental calculations given the amount I remember having 3 days ago when I last looked, minus the last couple of "rough days" I was having and came up with, effectively, a completely off the cuff guess. I couldn't stand it any more, mentally geared up to withstand the bloodbath and took a peek.

I was up $14 for the day.

I was completely stunned. I figured I was in dire straits, but in reality I made off with a GAIN! The net 3 day total wasn't that impressive, but it wasn't negative either. The day before I had lost a fair amount of cash, but had actually come within a few bucks of catching back up.

So, this was a very interesting lesson to me. It proved to me that I could completely bust off a table and still come out ahead. This was something I just would never be able to wrap my head around, because the idea of leaving a table with nothing was so traumatic to me. If I get to playing no limit cash games, I'll really need to be able to recover after a rebuy.

So I'm making reasonable progress. August was a pretty lackluster month, thanks to a bad mid-month slide in the $1/$2 tables. I don't know why I can't come to terms with those tables, but I'd better figure it out and fast, or I'll never be able to progress past them. I think with my new policy of hiding my stack I may find it easier to stick to my game, but we'll see. I'm still about $120 away from having the appropriate 300BB roll for $1/$2, so it'll be at least a couple of weeks, unless I have a legendary run.

Anyway, August was a complete train wreck until the last four days, when I went on an amazing run on the 50/1 tables to end up in the green for the month. Overall I had a win rate of about 0.87BB/hr, with the worst damage being done at the full ring $1/$2 tables. Before getting back into that game, I'll need to sit down and really compare how (or if) my play differs between 50/1 and 1/2.

In the mean time, I'll keep on keeping on with the bankroll building. I'm still hoping to make it to at least 2/4 by the end of the year... Not a ton of time left!

24 Hours In A Day...

2004-08-31T16:08:00.000-05:00

...is not enough for everything I want to do.

I haven't abandoned blog. Just not much really going on. I've been playing copious amounts of poker, and have been getting some horrendously bad beats laid on me, but even so I have managed to make some gains. I countinue to play without reference to my stack and only take a look at my progress every couple of days to see where the bankroll stands. It's helping some now, but I figure it will help me even more not to know what my stack looks like when I get into the higher limits.

I was playing 4 tables last night and about 20 minutes into it I look and see SirFWALGman sitting there. Funny thing is, I had played against him before and hadn't realized who it was, but it struck me this time and I mentioned it to him. He, likewise, didn't seem to know who I was until I mentioned it. The table we were at was pretty weak so he and I were pretty much running over it. He invited Doubleas over to play and it got interesting. It was refreashing playing with some good players! At one point we got to talking about stacks. I was apparently treading water at that point, but of course my stack was covered so I didn't rightfully know. We played on for a while and at the end Gman said I did well, so I took a peek and indeed I was up around 20 or 25BB on the table. The nice part about THAT was, that wasn't my most profitable table. I got up almost 45BB on the other one, including this winner of a hand...

Party Poker 0.50/1 Hold'em (10 handed) converter

Preflop: The_ICP is BB with Th, Kh.
UTG calls, 1 fold, UTG+2 raises, MP1 calls, 2 folds, CO calls, 1 fold, SB calls, The_ICP calls, UTG calls.

Flop: (12 SB) 9h, Jh, Ah (6 players)
SB checks, The_ICP checks, UTG bets, UTG+2 raises, MP1 folds, CO calls, SB folds, The_ICP calls, UTG calls.

Turn: (10 BB) Tc (4 players)
The_ICP checks, UTG checks, UTG+2 bets, CO calls, The_ICP raises, UTG folds, UTG+2 calls, CO folds.

River: (15 BB) Qh (2 players)

The_ICP bets, UTG+2 calls.

Final Pot: 17 BB
Main Pot: 17 BB, between The_ICP and UTG+2. >

Results:
The_ICP shows Th Kh (Royal flush, ace high).
UTG+2 shows Js Jc (three of a kind, jacks).
Outcome: The_ICP wins 17 BB.

Third time ever! And I got some action on it. What more could a growing bankroll ask for?

Where's Summer?

2004-08-25T21:51:00.000-05:00

It's been entirely too frickin cold out here for this to be considered a summer. I don't think we've had one 90 degree day YET here in beautiful, exotic northern Wisconsin. We certainly haven't seen 80 degrees in the last 3 weeks, and except for today, we haven't had any appreciable rain since June. Now, I'm not a huge fan of constant 90 degree days for weeks straight, but I would at least like to see some evidence of this whole "global warming" thing everyone is going ape about. For now, I'd wager the opposite; we're heading for another ice age.

So, since I managed to miss out on the Blogger Tourney that wasn't (I thought I was going to be busy on Sunday.. I wasn't), I hopped on the $5 mega-multitable on Party, along with almost 1400 others. First hand, I'm in MP and look down to see AA. Hmmmm.... Hero or goat time on the first deal. Go figure. 3x the BB gets 4 callers and the flop comes with my set A and two clubs. Checked around, and I bet half the pot to keep people in. I lose one and we're three to the turn, which is the third club. Suddenly EP wakes up and throws a half pot bet in. I just KNOW he's hit his flush, but I've still got a whole boatload of outs so I call. The river is a beautiful 4 to pair the board and fill my boat. EP shoots out another half pot bet and I shove. He insta-calls and I double up on the first hand.

About 10 hands later I hit a flush on the turn and scrape another monster pot and I find myself with a healthy lead early. I do reasonably well, but still manage to bust out 78th when my cards dry up and the blinds are huge. My last act was to shove in the face of an all-in from the CO from the BB with 77. The good news is, I did isolate him, the bad news was he flipped over AA, and it was all over but the crying. It's frustrating to make only $14 in profit for over 3 hours of work, but I do like the multi-table tourneys.

I think the grinding at the 50/1 is doing well, though again I don't have any idea, since I cover my stacks and I am only checking my balance every week or so. I really think this is helping to get my game back to an even keel. I have no idea whether I'm up or down, and when I'm multi-tabling, without the stacks to remind me, I don't linger on bad beats or wins too long. The next hand is waiting for me.

This has also been helping my home life. I would get way too upset when I got brutalized because I would know just how brutalized I was. I still have bad days, but I don't have any idea HOW bad of a day I had. I just sort of take it as it comes. Likewise, if I have a great run at one of the tables, I don't feel inclined to push edges and make loose calls.

It's impossible to be results oriented when you don't know your results.

So, the grind goes on.

In other news, my wife and I had a rare day off together yesterday. Couple that with a very good month on the money front and suddenly we had some disposible income, so we went out for a day on the town. Anyway, we're driving down the road and I see a guitar shop I wanted to go to earlier but it was closed last I went there. It was open now, and I wanted to look for an electric guitar, so we stopped.

Now, as an aside, I'm a lefty. Apparently, unless I go Jimi Hendrix and just string the guitar upside down, I'm pretty much screwed. If I want a left handed guitar I'll have to order one. Sounds expensive.

Okay, so we're in there and I get to talking to the guy in there about, well, guitars. Now, I know just about dick about guitars. I have one. I've had it for 10 years and have played it not much at all until recently. So this guy starts asking me questions about what sort of guitar I want and what style music I'm looking to play. Dude, I don't friggin know! I want a guitar that sounds decent and won't break me financially! Who do I want to sound like? Yngwie Fucking Malmsteen, but I'm about, oh, 15 years of constant playing away from that, so let's stick to "I'd like to get through 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' without screwing up more then twice". The conversation gets to lessons, and I mention that I've been using EGuitar Method vol 1, which is good, but I think that now that I've figured out how to make some somewhat passable sounds on this thing I might benefit from some live lessons, so I sign up for the guy there and am now taking lessons once a week. We'll see how it goes. I was a music major in college and was heavy into theory and performance. This seemed to really catch this guys attention and I got the impression that he and I are going to have some long sessions talking over theory. Hopefully he and I get along well. The last guitar teacher I had really didn't gel with me. Hopefully this guy and I will. We shall see.

Blind, Broke, Bedlam

2004-08-21T12:31:00.000-05:00

Well, after a couple of days of "going blind" I checked up on my progress. It really wasn't that bad, but looking at the individual table results, I'm very glad I had my stacks covered up. One table I left with $4 of a $25 buyin, while another one I walked away almost doubled up. All in all, I ended up up about $6 on Thursday and around $15 on Friday.

Then I played some today. Now, of course, I didn't look. I don't want to look.

Ever.

You know those hands where you have a pocket pair and the board flops all undercards, expect, well you know that pair on the board? They had the set.

Every
fucking
time.

Again, no idea how bad the damage is, but even NOT knowing how bad it is I feel it. It was even more frustrating then that. On one of my tables was a bone-fide maniac. Bet and raise. That's all she knew. And people were just cashing in on her ass. That is, except for me. See, every time I'd get into it with her, she'd pull some funky ass hand out of her ass and smack me down with it. I wanted to put my fist through her avatar.

It's been that kind of poker day. But what the hell, it's not my money.

Onward

2004-08-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

A few days of reflection and perspective have a way of sharpening the senses. Talking with others who have an outside view help to point out things that should be obvious but aren't. Talking with an old friend brought about a very interesting point that should have been as obvious as the nose on my face.

I've been results oriented.

As soon as he said it it was like a cold shot of water. I looked at my blog. Right there on the right. Total winnings. Total bankroll. Win rate per hour.

I was keeping score and let me tell you, I don't like to lose. Looking back on it, the last couple of losing sessions weren't very damaging from a bankroll point of view. I mean, I've dropped $100 before on losing streaks, and I had just gotten there in a few days of losing, but let's not forget I won $90 in one sitting the day before the slide too.

I think part of the "focus on the negative" aspect has much to do with what's been going on in my life lately. I'll not bore you with the details, but suffice to say I haven't had spendable green in my pocket in months. I mean ZERO disposable income other then my poker money, which I really didn't want to tap into because I'm trying to build into a bankroll I can contend on the higher levels with. Alas, after the stress of the impression of not getting anywhere and faced with a computer that has started to do some funky things (my hard drive is starting to show signs of hanging it up), I decided it was time to upgrade. So, my bankroll is back in the .50/1 realm. Given the success I've had at that level I'm not too worried about the extra time I'm going to be spending there.

Seeing as how I've been getting very worked up about the status of my stack at the tables (results oriented), Hank suggested I start covering up my stack size with sticky notes as I was doing a few months ago.

I forgot how much that helps. It makes me concentrate on playing the hand correctly. Lately I've found myself looking at the raises on the table and checking them against my stack to see if I should pop it again or not. This isn't good. Play the hand correctly, and it's irrelevent what's in your stack. So here's the deal. I'm not going to look at ANYTHING related to how my money is doing for the immediate future. I have the appropriate bankroll to handle standard varience on the 50/1 tables, so I'm not worried about busting. I haven't quite decided yet at what intervals I'll take my bankroll's temperature. For now, I'm inclined to never look at it, but that's unrealistic. Maybe once a week, maybe once a month. I've just got to get my head out of the results and into the play of the hands or the higher levels will eat me alive. In the mean time, I've got other distractions.

So, what will this do to this blog? Well the last couple of months worth of posts has been a "state of the bankroll" sort of dialogue. Since I won't even know how my bankroll is doing, that's obviously going to go away. I suck at theory dialogue, though I might make occasional stabs at it, but for good solid discussion of theory I suggest you head over the the masters of the game. What the Hell, no one reads my mindless drivel anymore anyway. It certainly hasn't made for very mentally stimulating reading, I admit, but the silence from the peanut gallery is deafening as of late. I've resolved to begin studying the game more, and I'll probably start with a review of Lee Jones, but I need to get a hold of Miller's new book too and I've heard that Ciaffone's tome on the middle limit games is decent, but a few weeks off yet for me.

I want to thank my 6 1/2 readers for sticking with my humble little blog. I'm not as verbose as The Man Guiness Fuels or as theory savvy as Hank. Hell, I'm just some idiot from Illinois who is living within morter shot range of the enemy stronghold who happens to be able to count decently well. Never the less, I'll head to the front line and fire a few theory salvos from my pea shooter and maybe someone will recognize my effort for a second or so.

Or at least long enough to tell me I'm wrong!

Whipped

2004-08-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

Taken to Dash n cash - $50
Taken From Dash n cash - $0

Jesus Christ am I tired of fucking losing.

Seriously thinking of just hanging this game up for a while. It's so hard to gather enthusiasm after getting hideously beaten down by people with far better luck then I.

Bottom To Top

2004-08-13T09:32:00.000-05:00

My luck has, for the moment, run out on the short handed tables. The ugly side of a shorthanded game has shown itself, in that, if you don't get decent cards or they don't hold up to any action, you're in a world of shit. Of course, when you're running good you can make a mint, since it seems that players on the 1/2 short handed tables think that you couldn't POSSIBLY have a hand so they have to keep raising you to get you to fold the ace high flush you hit on the turn. Great work if you can get it, but I've been getting my ass handed to me the last few days.

Given this fact, I figured I would ride out the dry spell by heading back to the .50/1 tables and running 3 tables of that for a while.

Two and a half hour later, I walk away $90 towards the green.

Why do I even bother playing $1/$2 anymore? I'm semi-serious. Seems that the only tables that are ever open are the short handed ones, and so table selection on $1/$2 full ring is impossible. The 300BB bankroll gap from $1/$2 to $2/$4 is only $400, and I'd rather make slow upward progress towards that then deal with the goofnut swings of the short handed games. Don't get me wrong, I still really enjoy the shorthanded games, but I think since Party's hand history generator is porked and I can't use the GameTime window in PokerTracker, I might as well head back to the bottom limit for a bit, and see if I can't leapfrog the 1/2 tables and go right to the 2/4 full ring games when the bankroll supports it.

For those who do play shorthanded, let me strongly recommend using the Gametime window in PokerTracker. If you play one or two tables, you can set PokerTracker to get 20 hands every 5 minutes, and when it gets a hand, import it immediately and it will update the Gametime window with the information. It's great to be able to tell at a glance whether you should take that early position raise seriously or not. Of course, until Party gets it's shit together, nevermind, since the chance of getting valid hands at this point are around 50/50.

Needless to say, this months statistics are going to be completely invalid. I figure at this point I'm missing around 300 hands that I'll never get back. It's insanely annoying, but I'll get over it, I guess. Don't have a hell of a lot of choice.

Fun with desk training continues at work. The kid sure has his regulations down and he's getting better with the dispatching system. All he needs is practice. My only complaint thus far is he tends to get loud and has the habit of cutting people off in conversations. Since he basically knows what he's doing, I find myself not doing much except monitoring and giving the occasional suggestion. Really, I find this to be extraordinarily hard for me. He's not checked out to work the desk yet, so he's releasing flights under my certificate. I'm not concerned about him doing something stupid or illegal, but still I just feel out of control since I'm not working the desk myself. For hardly doing anything for 10 hours, I find it the hardest days of work I've ever had.

In Living Color (Oneida Trip Report)

2004-08-11T09:05:00.000-05:00

So the casino right up the street from me finally opened a card room. This is interesting, since many of the casinos in Wisconsin are closing theirs, but I'm never one to complain when things fall my way.

I manage to scrape together a few hours to go check out the action. Now, this casino actually has two properties within 3 miles of each other. There's the main casino, and there's a "slot hall". The card room is set up in the Slot Hall, which initially made me nervous, thinking about how noisy it would be. I was pleasantly surprised to find it rather quiet.

The room advertises betting starting at $2-$4 and going up to No Limit. I found this to be a bit of a misrepresentation. I called ahead to the card room and got a message machine, so I requested to be placed on the $2-$4 list for 6:30. I got there right around 6:30 and found myself on the $4-$8 list. It appears there is no $2-$4 LIMIT table, but rather the NO LIMIT table has blinds of $2-$4. Uh huh. This seems to be a confusing trend in this cardroom, as they occasionally referred to the limit structure as the "bet structure". In any event, the lowest limit game they were dealing was $3-$6, so I bought in for $100 and sat down there.

My first impression was that this game played almost EXACTLY like Party $.50/$1. This, remarkably, was the tightest live game I had ever played at, and it was MUCH easier to get a bead on the other players. Mostly the table was loose/weak, with the obligatory loose/~~idiot~~aggressive guy who would raise complete crap just to try to run over the table. The guy on my immediate right was a semi-loose/calling station, but he seemed to have a decent read on the rest of the table and felt obligated to share it with me. He and I immediately set our crosshairs on the LAG.

Of course, my live luck followed me there. After a good hour of mucking garbage, I finally find myself in early position with KQo. I raise it UTG (with a comment from the guy to my right muttering about a raise under the gun) and it's called 4 ways. The raggy flop completely misses me low but the pot is big enough to call the 1 bet for the turn card, which comes a K. Now I'm thinking I'm in good shape, and bet out, eliminating everyone but the small blind, who mumbles some more and calls me. River is an unremarkable 7 and I bet out again and get called. I turn over my top pair, and he turns over 36o for the turned 2 pair. I chew on a couple of words, but decide against saying anything other then "nice hand" and silently stew.

Then the evening took a turn for the surreal.

Later I'm dealt ATo in middle position. 5 people to the flop, which is not that impressive. Early position bets and I call, along with 2 others. 4 to the turn, which brings my ace. EP bets again and I raise to see where we're at. LP cold calls as does EP and we're three to the river which is a K. I start to wonder if I might have run into Slick here, but EP checks. I bet and LP and EP call me. I turn over my ATo.

EP turns over ATo
LP turns over ATo.

3 way split using both cards in hand?! Someone please tell me the odds of THAT happening? I think, after the rake, I actually ended up losing a buck or two on that hand.

A few orbits later I look down at JTo in the SB and get to see a cheap flop, which comes QKA, all spades. I have the ten of spades and the Jack of hearts, so I've flopped a straight and the gutshot royal. I bet out, everyone except LAG and the BB fold out. Turn comes a JACK...of diamonds. BB bets and I curse my luck and call him down to the river for another split.

All said, I managed to walk away about $46 lighter. If I would have won the split pots I'd be waaaaaay up (the AT debacle was a HUGE pot).

I feel much better about my live play this time around. I'm getting over my "oboy we're playing live" jitters and am starting to play my game. This table was VERY accommodating to a tight/aggressive player. If someone raised, it was because they were sitting on paint or a decent pair, with the exception of LAG-boy. There were three or four people who would call down anything, and I identified only one player that I would consider dangerous.

About the room, the things I liked were, well, it's close. Only about 30 minutes from door to floor. They have an autoshuffler built into the table, which makes the time between hands much shorter, but the autoshuffler device was sort of recessed into the table, and occasionally cards and chips would prove difficult to extract. The dealers all were very competent, accurate and quick. No booze at the tables, which I think is verbotten at all the Indian casinos, far as I can tell, but I don't drink at the tables, so that didn't bother me.

There were a few things I found annoying. The rake is 10% up to $5, but I found that the $5 would be extracted from the pot long before there was $50 in there. I adjusted my dealer tipping accordingly. Eventually a player asked for the pot to be counted out because of the rake situation, and it ended up the pot was $45 at the river, so the appropriate rake was taken out, but the full $5 was on the drop before the river betting took place. Also, if you're not playing, they don't allow you to stand in the card room and watch. I imagine this is to keep everyone from crowding into the cardroom to watch the action. The rail is pretty close to some tables, but not all of them. I didn't know this and wandered into the room to sweat the No Limit action. When they called my name to the cardroom I wandered over from the tables and was admonished (pleasantly) by the floorman. No one apparently noticed I had wandered into the cardroom and I was there for about 5 minutes. Whatever, that's really not a big deal. As it was, I really wanted to sit in on the No Limit action, but I didn't have the bank for that yet. I told myself if I ended up $100 up at the 3/6 action I'd pick up and go to the No Limit table, but, clearly, THAT never happened.

As for online action, I've hit a bit of a dry run on cards. I haven't been able to find a real good $1/$2 short table, so I picked up 4 $.50/$1 bad beat Jackpot tables. Yes, I know. I told myself I'd never play there again, but I noticed the Jackpot was up to almost $8000.

What I didn't know is they changed the requirement for hitting the Jackpot. Now Aces full of Kings has to lose to hit the Jackpot. As it was, though, there were plenty of bad beats being dealt out at the table. Your's Truely received a soul crusher.

Party Poker 0.50/1 Hold'em (10 handed)
Preflop: The_ICP is MP3 with 7d, 7h.
UTG calls, UTG+1 calls, 2 folds, MP2 calls, The_ICP calls, CO calls, Button calls, SB completes, BB raises, UTG calls, UTG+1 calls, MP2 calls, The_ICP calls, CO calls, Button calls, SB calls.

Flop: (16 SB) Js, 7s, Qd (8 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG bets, UTG+1 folds, MP2 calls, The_ICP raises, CO folds, Button calls, SB folds, BB folds, UTG calls, MP2 calls.
Turn: (12 BB) Jh (4 players)

UTG bets, MP2 calls, The_ICP raises, Button folds, UTG 3-bets, MP2 calls, The_ICP caps, UTG calls, MP2 calls.

River: (24 BB) 6c (3 players)

UTG bets, MP2 calls, The_ICP raises, UTG 3-bets, MP2 calls, The_ICP calls.

Final Pot: 33 BB
Main Pot: 33 BB, between UTG, MP2 and The_ICP. >

Results:
UTG shows Jd Qh (full house, jacks full of queens).
MP2 shows Tc Jc (three of a kind, jacks).
The_ICP shows 7d 7h (full house, sevens full of jacks).
Outcome: UTG wins 33 BB.

Yup. Bad beat jackpot indeed.

Party Poker's hand history system is fooked up, so I'm probably missing some information from many of the hands I've played in the last day or two. Hopefully they'll get their shit back together and I can get this information to me, but for now, Pokertracker is rendered useless.

Getting Off The Mat

2004-08-06T12:03:00.000-05:00

Few things bother me quite as much as constantly losing to the same friggin guy at the table. The guy in the 2 seat had a VP$IP of damn near 80%, and the only freaking time he'd hit a hand is when I was in it.

Infuriating.

That being said, I did manage to take money from the rest of the table, and the aformentioned guy was certainly paying everyone else for his indescretions, though he was on a legendary tear for a while, going up as much as $80 he finally got his come-uppins.

Holy crap was that a run-on sentence. Oh well. Onward.

I'm now back to where I was before the huge slide of a few days ago. It seems in the last few days the shorthanded tables have changed, but the numbers don't bear that out. The players are just as loose/aggressive as ever, so that leaves two possibilities; my play has changed or my cards are cold. I did a little research.

Last month I played 1,930 hands of $1/$2 (6 Max). For those hands, my VP$IP was 29.22%, I saw the flop from all hands 42% of the time (27% when not in the blinds). I won $ when seeing the flop 29% of the time... I'm not sure why that would be important, but there it is. In any event, I won at showdown 61% of the time. My aggression factor is 0.91

This month so far, I've played 1,221 hands of $1/$2 (6 Max). My VP$IP is 27%, I saw the flop 41% of the time (25% when not in a blind). I won $ when seeing the flop 29% of the time. I won at the showdown 60% of the time. Aggression factor? 0.91.

A model in consistancy. Clearly my play has not changed, yet last month I was on an incredible tear of almost 13BB per 100 hands, whereas this month so far I'm at 3.24BB/100 hands. Nothing to be complaining about, to be sure, but before today, that number was much, much worse. Variance is a bitch.

So, it looks like I've hit a slower patch of cards. This is, surprisingly, encouraging. It means that even with reletively suck ass cards, I'm still able to scratch out a meaningful profit. I've also learned a few things.

- You can still fold in a shorthanded game and win.

- Even though you're seeing people playing any two cards to the river and you really really want a piece of that cash on the table, it doesn't allow you to play as loose as them.

- Don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

The point of the last point. You get dealt JTs. Naturally, you raise it up, and naturally, you're called 4 ways to a flop of 67T all of a suit you don't have. You call down the 1 bet (or better, raise) with 4 still in and the turn comes a Q. It's bet around to you again... You look around the table and your notes and notice that these are typical "play any two" kind of people. There's a decent, but not huge pot in there, and you know that you're going to see a showdown.

Do you really want to pay at least 2 more BB with this hand? Yeah, your hand MIGHT be good given the crap these jokers will call down with. The temptation is maddening.

Off to get some food and head on to the office again for more +EV goodness.

The next time you think you've had a bad day at work, just remember it could be worse. Welcome to my nightmare.

Stuck

2004-08-05T12:44:00.000-05:00

Super quick post.

Not making much ground. After the assbeating the other day, I managed to scrape back a little bit, but the last two days have been spent in a very slow bleed. Nothing severe, but it's been brutal in that I've been up pretty good and then the cards turn to shit.

I can't tell you how many times I got good starting hands that just didn't materialize on the flop, or were obviously beat. Frustrating as Hell to get AKs, hit both the A and K, and watch the board come 4 to a suit. Expensive too.

I see that Party is now doing a "progressive" bad beat jackpot thing (which sucks) and they have 50/1 tables there now (which doesn't suck too much). I fired up one of those tables. An hour later, I got two or three bad beats. It sure lives up to its name of being a jackpot of bad beats. Unfortunately, I never saw a Queens full of 9's sink to a bad beat, so no prize for me. Just brutal suckouts.

A frustrating, though not bankroll damaging day at the tables.

Work is really taking the life out of me. Yesterday was, and I shit you not, the worst day I have ever had at work. We took on a whole bunch of new flying. This is great, except that the system we have in place right now can't handle the existing work, so when you add 40 more flights a day to it, it just collapsed into a pile of shit. It was downright hostile in that office yesterday, and I fully expect that it will be this way again today, seeing as how they've not made any changes. It may get to the point where we cite a safety issue and stop the operation.

Yes, it's that bad.

At least the rest of this month will be overtime, since I'll be training someone. If I survive this month, I'll be pretty good money wise.

Let's hope I don't have a brain attack first.

The Other Shoe

2004-08-03T13:36:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't been paying attention to current events, we just got our asses kicked, pal! - Hudson - Aliens

-$71.

That sucks, indeed. Here's the kicker, though. I lost $30 of it in 6 minutes. Nothing like sitting down and getting sucked out on twice in 4 hands.

Not much to say here. I knew this day was coming. Let's just hope it's one day, and not the beginning of a trend. Yesterday should have been the warning, what with the cards I was getting. It pretty much continued today. No cards, and the ones I were getting didn't amount to anything. Draws missed, flops missed, and I don't think I've seen a pocket pair turn a set in a week. No, I take that back. I had a pair of Kings that flopped a set yesterday. They lost to a straight.

I tilted a little today. When I was getting the shit kicked out of me at the shorthanded tables, I moved over to the Bad Beat table. I figure if I'm going to get hideously sucked out on today, I might as well get paid a jackpot for the pleasure. Of course, I forgot that to win the jackpot, you need to at least HAVE A FOOKING SET. Duh. Finally, I went back to the 50/1 tables and 4 tabled to try to get through this bad run of cards faster, whatever that means.

So, I'm bleeding, but I have to acknowlege the amazing run I was having to this point. This time last week, my bankroll was $590, and now even after this ass beating I took today, I'm still at $788.

Just not my day, I guess.

Bitchslapped

2004-08-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

"Look, defenseless babies!" - Erwin Fletcher - Fletch

You know how I was saying I love short handed tables because you'll find people who will put their money in there with terrible hands? It's great fun, but I think I'm going to avoid entire tables of them. Here's a little background. I sit down and do my typical tight thing until I figure out what these people are all about. After two orbits, I'm seeing an AVERAGE VP$IP of over 80%. I can't make this stuff up. So, I get ready to start punishing these guys...

Riiiiiiight.

Party Poker 1/2 Hold'em (6 max, 4 handed) converter

Preflop: The_ICP is SB with Ad, Ah.
1 fold, Button calls, The_ICP raises, BB (Luckybitch) calls, Button calls.

Flop: (6 SB) 7h, 5d, 2h (3 players)
The_ICP bets, Luckybitch raises, Button folds, The_ICP 3-bets, Luckybitch calls.

Turn: (6 BB) Td (2 players)
The_ICP bets, Luckybitch calls.

River: (8 BB) 4h (2 players)
The_ICP checks, Luckybitch bets, The_ICP calls.

Final Pot: 10 BB
Main Pot: 10 BB, between Luckybitch and The_ICP.
Results:
Luckybitch shows 7s 2c (two pair, sevens and twos).
The_ICP shows Ad Ah (one pair, aces).
Outcome: Luckybitch wins 10 BB.

Nothing like getting hammered by someone who defends the friggin HAMMER to a raise.

So, I'm stinging from this, but hey, shit happens and my toes are still tappin'. A few hands later this unfolds.

Party Poker 1/2 Hold'em (6 max, 5 handed) converter

Preflop: The_ICP is BB with Kh, Ks.
UTG (Luckybitch) calls, 2 folds, SB completes, The_ICP raises, UTG (Luckybitch) calls, SB calls.

Flop: (6 SB) 5d, 5c, 9h (3 players)
SB checks, The_ICP bets, Luckybitch calls, SB folds.

Turn: (4 BB) Ac (2 players)
The_ICP bets, Luckybitch calls.

River: (6 BB) Ah (2 players)
The_ICP bets, Luckybitch raises, The_ICP calls.

Final Pot: 10 BB
Main Pot: 10 BB, between Luckybitch and The_ICP.

Results:
The_ICP shows Kh Ks (two pair, aces and kings).
Luckybitch shows 5s 9s (full house, fives full of aces).
Outcome: Luckybitch wins 10 BB.

What the fuck? That's twice now in short order. I have to admit to a little raised blood pressure now. I'm still okay, though... I've pulled the occasional small pot to keep the damage to a minimum. After a few more hands I look down and see KK again.

Party Poker 1/2 Hold'em (6 max, 6 handed) converter

Preflop: The_ICP is SB with Kc, Ks.
UTG calls, MP calls, CO calls, 1 fold, The_ICP raises, BB calls, UTG calls, MP calls, CO calls.

Flop: (10 SB) Qh, 9c, 2h (5 players)
The_ICP bets, BB calls $0.50 (All-In), UTG calls, MP folds, CO calls.

Turn: (6.75 BB) Jd (4 players, 1 all-in)
The_ICP bets, UTG calls, CO raises, The_ICP calls, UTG calls.

River: (12.75 BB) 9d (4 players, 1 all-in)
The_ICP checks, UTG checks, CO bets, The_ICP calls, UTG calls.

Final Pot: 15.75 BB
Main Pot: 6 BB, between BB, UTG, CO and The_ICP. > Pot won by BB (6 BB).
Pot 2: 9.75 BB, between UTG, CO and The_ICP.

Results:
The_ICP shows Kc Ks (two pair, kings and nines).
BB shows 2s 9s (full house, nines full of twos).
UTG shows Qc 8s (two pair, queens and nines).
CO shows Kh Td (straight, king high).
Outcome: CO wins 9.75 BB. BB wins 6 BB.

Wooot! Not only did I lose, I lost TWICE! I ran like a sissy from that table and headed for greener pastures.

Even given the hideous suckouts going on at that table, I was still able to post a nice $43 profit for the day, so I'm certainly not one to complain.

Okay, I have to go work some bonus dollars at work today. Not by choice, believe me. I will get that "month in review" post up here in the next week or so...

All That Glitters Ain't Gold

2004-07-31T12:37:00.000-05:00

"You lazy, half-ass bully! Any asshole can pull a gun on somebody! You don't know the first thing about stealing a car! What, you need a role model! " - Donny - Gone In 60 Seconds

After the small road bump of two days ago, things have been going pretty good. My love for the shorthanded tables is certainly being cemented as I run into table after table of people who put their money into the pot with substandard or, in many cases, non-existant hands.

I've particularly come to love the guy who seems to think that, after 3 rounds of me betting and raising the pot, he seems to think that he can convince me to fold on the river. Once, I can understand.. Perhaps he's feeling me up to see what I'd do. But every opportunity he gets? Look, I'm here to tell you, if you're not playing on Party Poker, you're simply missing out on the best things in life. While you're at it, help a fellow blog brother out and use bonus code IGGY on your first deposit. I'll forgive that his complete idiot friend managed to pull down 50 Large the other day pulling a Gus Hanson on the 2+2 tournement the other day. And by idiot, I do most certainly mean idiot. Of course, he's the one with a stack of cash, and here I am grinding away, so he's clearly an idiot with a gift for cards. Anyway, if ever you wanted to know why I turn chat off on Party, there's your reason.

Goddamn kids.

Anyway, I think it'll be quite a while before I win a pot like that, so onward with my grinding.

Yesterday was a rather big varience day that ended up in the green. If table selection was important in the $.50/$1 tables, it's absolutely critical at the shorthanded tables. Looking at the sessions yesterday, I bounced around from a couple of tables after playing 10 or so hands and deciding that the table texture wasn't good. It paid off with a $29 win. I also paid a visit to the $1/$2 Bad Beat Jackpot tables. It was interesting, but I'm not going back. I would think that my chances of winning that jackpot are probably equal or less then my chances of winning next year's WSOP. Anyway, this is not the time to get creative with the bankroll. I'm on a mission.

Today started out decent enough. I sit down, post the blind and this hand unfolds...

Party Poker 1/2 Hold'em (6 max, 5 handed)

Preflop: The_ICP is BB with As, 5h.
UTG calls, 1 fold, Button calls, SB completes, The_ICP checks,

Flop: (4 SB) Ah, 8d, 5s (4 players)
SB checks, The_ICP bets, UTG calls, Button raises, SB calls, The_ICP 3-bets, UTG calls, Button calls, SB calls.

Turn: (8 BB) 3c (4 players)
SB checks, The_ICP bets, UTG folds, Button raises, SB calls, The_ICP 3-bets, Button caps, SB calls, The_ICP calls.

River: (20 BB) 6d (3 players)
SB checks, The_ICP bets, Button calls, SB folds.

Final Pot: 22 BB
Main Pot: 22 BB, between Button and The_ICP. >

Results:
The_ICP shows As 5h (two pair, aces and fives).
Button shows 8c 9h (one pair, eights).
Outcome: The_ICP wins 22 BB.

Nice start. Next hand, half the table bails and we're suddenly 3 handed. I pull down the blinds on the next hand and leave.

Then I sat down at the table I would have LOVED to run over. 4 guys who haven't a friggin clue what the Hell they're doing. I swear to you, these guys were betting and capping third pair, raising and capping the pot with 2 gappers, it was unreal. The varience on that table was massive, and I got the worst of it, coming within $5 of busting out of my buyin. I managed to catch a couple at the end, but still left that table $30 in the red.

Last table was great. A real loose/passive extravaganza and finally I was starting to hit some hands. All said and done, I finished today up $53.50.

So I'm still running pretty damn good. I'll break down the month in the next post. From the initial look at things, I can honestly say that this is a good win rate I'm on here. Almost 4BB/hr. I feel good about this as it's not an insanely high win rate and thus it's a rate that can be sustained.

Okay, gotta go push some more tin!

...Comin' Fo' To Carry Me Home

2004-07-30T09:45:00.000-05:00

The great run has finally reached terminal velocity, it would seem.

Yesterday was a painful string of lackluster cards and second best hands. I was able to hold on for a little bit, but there was no way to survive the combination and I started the inevitable slide downward.

It really was a shame. I was at a table where, and I shit you not, two people were voluntarily putting money in the pot 100% of the time. It could have been huge, but alas, I fell on the wrong side of varience this time around.

As it was, I only dropped about -$25 so I'm really not bothered by this. After such an amazing run of cards, it almost comes as a relief that my inevitable first "bad day" only cost me a small bit.

Since I was having no luck at the $1/$2 limit tables, I decided to pay a visit to the $25 No Limit tables. I couldn't get much going there and walked away after about 30 minutes about $2.50 richer, so nothing doing there... I can see where, now that my bankroll is actually a decent shape, I can have some fun with that game. Stay tuned!

Swing Low, Sweet Variance...

2004-07-28T22:33:00.000-05:00

What is up with the waiting lists for the $1/$2 full ring games at Party? I mean, seriously. It's not like there's no demand for the game, as there is always a waiting list to sit down. Albeit a short one at 11:00 am CDT on a Monday, but there was one none-the-less. In primetime, I imagine the list gets pretty insane. Anyway, I did manage to sit down at 2 full ring tables and collected absolute crap for cards for the next half hour, getting whittled down about 10BB. Previous to this I was at a shorthanded table and saw a dry run cost me another 6BB or so. The full ring games were just sucking my will to live, so I went back to the shorthanded game and bought in for less then the amount I took off one of the full rings; about $39.

I immediately went up to about $50 and then wallowed around there for a while.. Up $5, down $5... Really making no progress (but not losing!). Then a couple of playable hands turned up for me. Missed the first two or so, but then I caught with a couple for some mas healthy pots and I found myself doubling my buyin again. Ended the day up $10 and change after initially being down a fair bit.

I am thinking that there is absolutely no reason at this point for me to go to the full ring game at this level. It is truly astonishing what I see on these short handed tables! Three bets on the river on total bluffs. Raising with 3 gap unsuited middle connectors. Any two s000ted is definitely a raise/re-raise hand. Any ace. Any King. In many cases any Queen! As I said in my previous post, it is not uncommon to see someone at the table who voluntarily puts money in the pot over 60% of the time. It's nuts.

For now I'm going to stick to playing one table of shorthanded. I was tossing around the idea of opening up a second table, but when I play short handed I have to pay much more attention to the other players so I can get a read on them. It's remarkably easier for me to follow and learn the trends of 5 other people then 9 other people. The Gametime window from PokerTracker is also an invaluable tool in helping to identify ultra-loose players.

I'm still in a bit of shock from my good fortune yesterday. To follow it up with a hard fought win helps to bolster my confidence that yesterday wasn't a fluke. I'm feeling pretty good about my game, but I'm a little concerned about AKo. It has been a very sub-par hand for me and I've gotten it many times, so I need to find out if I'm mis-playing it or letting it go too early.

I hope that playing these short handed games doesn't diminish my full ring game skills. I can be quite a bit looser on the shorthanded games, but I have to be careful not to let that seep into the full ring games. On the other hand, I don't want to get TOO tight on the full ring games either.

Okay, enough incoherent rambling. More tomorrow!

Hammer Time

2004-07-28T09:42:00.000-05:00

"...he's got a vibrating horseshoe lodged nineteen feet up his ass." - James McManus - Positively Fifth Street - talking about Chris "Jesus" Ferguson at the final table of the WSOP.

Yesterday was one of those days where I was just looking to push the bankroll that $10 I needed to move into the $1/$2 arena. Nothing fancy. Since it was my one day off in the 11 I'm working these two weeks, I figured it was a good day to tweak the bankroll up and make a shot at the next level.

After a nice shower and some Headline News over breakfast, I went to work.

An hour and a half later, I walk away from two $.50/$1.00 tables up an incredible +$52! The deck simply ran over me. I sit down at one table, post in the cutoff and get dealt T4o. Okay, whatever. No less the 8 limpers in the hand and the flop comes KdJs4d. So, I'm ready to send this hand to the muck when, incredibly, it's checked around! The turn is a Th giving me bottom two pair. I'm not in love with it, but I have to assume that since it was checked around that either no one has anything or someone is slowplaying (yeah, Party rules). BB wakes up and tosses a buck out and it's called 2 ways to me. I pop a raise to see where I'm at. SB mucks and the other three call. 12BB in the pot and the river? An incredibly beautiful 4h, and my insta-muck pre-flop hand is now a monster. In true Party style, late position bets out and I'm only too happy to pop a raise. BB and UTG fold and late position calls and shows AdTc and I rake the 15BB pot. I had found the perfect table.

3 hands later the Hilton Sisters pay a visit, call a friend on the flop, and charters a boat on the river for another 15BB pot. A couple more 10BB pots and I'm sitting incredibly well.

The other table was, remarkably, better. This one had the occasional pre-flop raise but it didn't matter. I was en fuego hitting the draws. No incredibly huge pots on that table, but just a nice steady diet of $6 and $7 wins.

Thrilled to be finally over the hump, I decide to unwind with a little no-limit Sit and Go action. I really just wanted to screw around and not have to worry about winning it, so I logged into a $5+$1 sit and go. After a rough start, I managed to bag a second place in that, for an additional $9 to the bank.

Later that evening, I decide it's time to make the jump. Logging onto Party I see that we're again at damn near 40,000 people on. I toss around whether I want to sit down at a full ring table or a 6 Max table. Peeking into a couple of full ring tables and seeing the waiting list made the decision for me, and I sit down at a shorthanded table and prepare for battle.

Second hand I'm dealt QcAc in the small blind. One guy limps ahead of me and I pop a raise. BB calls it and the limper now raises it?! I recognize immediately the Party Poker special, the limp/raise and call it down. Flop is 6h9sQd, giving me top pair, top kicker. I throw a bet out and limp/raiser-boy raises me again, so I go to check/call mode on the turn (Kh) and river (6c). He turns over TT and I rake the $20 pot.

This is the kind of game it would be all day. I can't tell you how many times I saw the feared "total river bluff" from these guys. As I always do with the short handed games, I use PokerTracker's Gametime window, and it showed that of the 5 people at the table, 4 of them had VP$IP percentages over 50%.

An hour and 40 minutes later, I leave the table up +$84.50, and what I believe is my winningest day so far since I started this. All told, the bankroll was padded an additional $145.36 after the dust settled.

The question though is, was the $1/$2 game a fluke, or have they gotten even SOFTER then they were when I was running them over a few months ago? If I can keep finding tables like this shorthanded, there's no reason for me at all to ever go to the $1/$2 full ring tables. I imagine, though, that the inherent variance on the shorthanded tables will rear it's ugly head.

For today, though, I'm feeling pretty damn good.

Oh, and just when you though the Most Holy and Apostolic HAMMER had lost it's punch...

Party Poker 1/2 Hold'em (6 max, 6 handed)

Preflop: The ICP is SB with 2c, 7s.
4 folds, The ICP completes, BB raises, The ICP calls.

Flop: (4 SB) 3s, 2d, 2h (2 players)
The ICP bets, BB raises, The ICP 3-bets, BB calls.

Turn: (5 BB) 5h (2 players)
The ICP bets, BB calls.

River: (7 BB) Jd (2 players)
The ICP bets, BB calls.

Final Pot: 9 BB
Main Pot: 9 BB, between The ICP and BB. >
Results:
The ICP shows 2c 7s (three of a kind, twos).
BB shows 5d Ac (two pair, fives and twos).
Outcome: The ICP wins 9 BB.

Patience

2004-07-25T21:01:00.000-05:00

It's been two days days since I posted my Crossroads post. Two days to sit back and reflect on what I was thinking.

It's been said that the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. Though I have certainly already taken several steps to my goal, that bit of advice also applies to the second, third and 5000th step. I have put myself in an excellent position to persue my aviation interests, this is true. More importantly though, I've given myself outs. By planning on doing all of my training while working my job, if I run out of money or something else happens, I haven't really lost anything. What's more, by trying to use poker to pay for my training, I avoid taking out costly loans that would become due just as I am starting a job that doesn't pay particularly well to begin with. As a fledgling pilot with no loan monkey on my back, I'm far more flexible then my counterparts.

Also, some more perspective. I'm 32 years old. I don't have delusions of becoming a senior 777 captain for American or anything (may happen, but you know Isreal and Palistine might build a campfire, roast some marshmellows and sing Kum-By-A too), but even if it takes 8 years to realize my goal (which I would imagine it wouldn't, unless I really suck), I'll still have 20 years of flying left in me before Uncle Sam says I gotta hang it up.

Anyway, I operate best when I have goals, and now I have one. Whether I reach it or not is irrelevent to the point that I've set the bar high, and I'm motivated to clear it. I guess that makes me a dreamer, but without dreams, I wouldn't have this opportunity to persue at all.

Anyway, enough of that drivel. Today was an amazingly good day of poker. As with all days, it seems, it could have been better had I had the discipline to leave earlier, but as it was I managed to score a touch over +$25 in about 6 table hours of play.

The great thing about this is, it really wasn't what I'd call an amazing card day. I got my fair share of playable hands the connected, but what's better, they stood up. One hand in particular I was holding the stoney nuts and I had some guy who was gracious enough to bet and cap the turn and river. What's more, another guy was nice enough to pay 4BB to see the river, which obviously didn't help him and he folded out. Let me tell you, there are few things quite as satisfying as holding the stone cold nuts and having guys feeding you more action then Paris Hilton at a swingers party. All it takes is one hand like this and you're set for the day.

I got two of them. It don't get no better then this.

So, after some thinking, I think I'm going to go ahead and make the step up to $1/$2 when I get to $600 (300BB). I really think I've got game for that level, and there's no point sticking around the lower limits. If the goal is to build the bankroll to an appropriate $3/$6 level, I need to lose the training wheels.

Of course, I'm not there yet, so the $.50/$1 grind will continue.

Juuuust a Bit Outside

2004-07-24T18:43:00.000-05:00

You get three ants together, they can't do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral. - Annie Savoy, Bull Durham

A few days ago I was lamenting about my good steady run of profitable sessions and quietly wondering when the other shoe would fall.

Though for a few days I didn't take a dive, I certainly wasn't feeling very good about my play. A couple of days where I didn't go anywhere, really. Down a buck, up a buck. Yesterday I managed a $16 or so profit, but it was ugly. At one point in that session I was down about $30, and made a rather miraculous run on one table to double my buyin, which scratching back to even on the other. Then I started to slide again and got out while the getting was good.

Today, the bottom finally dropped out. I don't know exactly how much I lost since I'm at work and have access to neither Pokertracker nor Party, but I'll estimate around -$20 was distributed to various others.

I'd like to say that I played my best poker, but it just didn't seem that way. I caught myself several times making the wrong moves against people I knew wouldn't fold. Fancy Play Syndrome started sneaking into my game, and that probably cost me some.

Of course, a completely nasty run of cards didn't help out much either. Yesterday it was good hands that kept getting beat by an unfavorable board, like 4 cards to the flush on the board beating my two pair, crap like that. Today, I just wasn't connecting. I can't tell you how many times I got AKo and not once did it connect with anything remotely playable. Frustrated by this, I caught myself on at least two occasions continuing on with a hand with just two overcards.

I certainly don't want to push any envelopes, but the $1/$2 6 Max game has been calling my name lately. Though I don't have the bankroll I would like to have to make my "move" to $1/$2, I can't help but look at my past performance in the shorthanded game and wonder if it was a fluke or if I really can run over that game.

I think tomorrow might begin with a session of Pokertracker analysis, then maybe I'll take a crack at a shorthanded game and see where that goes.

Or maybe I'll come to my senses and head back to the 50/1 game and just stick with the damn program.

Oh, one other note to pass on. I've moved my other non-poker content off to here, so if you want to listen to my other idiotic ramblings and misquoted facts, please head on over there!

Crossroads

2004-07-23T19:23:00.000-05:00

"You're sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you're too big of a pussy to cash it in." - Chuckie, Good Will Hunting

This is going to be a bit of a bizarre post in that I think that there will be much personal stuff in here. I'm the sort of person that values opinion and am not afraid to solicit it. Sometimes the path you don't see is obvious to those standing next to you. So be it.

My father spent his life piloting airplanes, and for the entirety of my existance, did so flying jets for an airline. For anyone that has a pilot friend/wife/husband you know how the schedules they work are nothing like the 9 to 5 grind of the "typical household". I spent most holidays without Dad around. Christmas on the 21st, Thanksgiving on Tuesday, you get the point. Didn't matter to me. I was a kid, and it was just the way it went. I imagine this has seeped into my adult life, as the actual day Christmas and the actual day Thanksgiving and such really are not important to me. I have a small family and they're scattered across the country, so getting everyone together is an extreme rarity anyway.

Anyway, to my dad, flying wasn't a job. It was his life. And I, as his son, saw how excited he was about work and about flying airplanes for a living, even during the hard times. Thus, I became enamoured with airplanes and flying. I wanted to be like my dad, and so I started flying at age 14. Of course, I couldn't get my pilot's license until I was 17, so it was slow going.

I ended up with my license when I was 19. Why so long? Here's where it gets complicated.

(Here I wrote about two paragraphs that rambled on about academics and work and... blah blah... then erased it. I'll publish my autobiography later). The short story, I spend most of my effort through high school and college trying to get through high school and college with the least amount of effort. I missed out on some golden opportunities. Dad sat me down my senior year in high school and said, "give me two good years of junior college, and I'll send you to any University you want to go to", and was dead serious. If I had been accepted to Harvard (not that going to Harvard would have interested me in the least), he would have found a way to fund it. I never really grasped how amazing of an opportunity I had, until it was way to late.

Having effectively blown off school, I eventually had to start working and the dream of becoming a pilot sort of faded away. I did score the pilot license while in school, but I lacked the money to do anything with it, and I wasn't able to see the possibilities of tying aviation and academics into one in the same. Work and other things took my attention, and I eventually ended up in the IT industry and figured I had my career set.

Every once in a while, though, I'd get the little twitch in my gut. When the train rolled past the airport on the way home from the city, my nose was always to the glass. I'd sometimes drive out to where my dad and I would sit at the end of one of O'Hare's runways and watch the planes land. I was happy with my life, but sometimes I would sit and watch the planes go by and wonder, "what if..."

Early 2001, I would be uncerimoniously laid off from the place I fully intended to spend the rest of my professional life with, and dumped into a job pool that fully had passed me by. I spent 4 months looking for work and made zero progress. I was sitting on a nice bit of cash that my company had given me as a severance package, but I had been living partially off of it for this whole time and it was slowly eroding away. As I sat day after day scouring the job rags and making phone call after fruitless phone call, that pilot twinge was getting stronger. One day I decide to see what, if anything, I could do to get into this aviation game. It took me very little time to realize I didn't have the cash to put myself though a dedicated airline flight school but I did have enough to go to dispatch school. I was thinking this was my ticket to the cockpit. I'd struggle for the short term while I made shit for money at some little regional airline, but at that point you were about 3 years from working at a major airline and some acceptable money. I could live on the cheap, put money away, and work on my ratings while working in the industry.

So off to dispatch school I go, and I kick ass, getting my license. I already had a job lined up before I graduated and after returning home for my stuff, I packed up and headed down to Nashville, TN. for my first day of work.

That day was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.

I didn't even make it into the office, and that afternoon my fiancee and I drove back to Chicago, listening to the news and trying to find a gas station that wasn't charging $4.00 for a gallon of gas.

As I was to learn very quickly, that day changed the face of aviation. For me, in the immediate future, I was looking at a license that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. As the smoke cleared and things started moving again, it was clear that this was the straw that might well break the backs of the major airlines. No longer were they hiring with abandon, but instead they were laying people off. The pipeline from regional dispatcher to major airline dispatcher had become clogged, and was even backflowing some, as furloughed dispatchers were looking for any work to feed their families.

Three months later, I was able to find work with a small regional airline in Wichita, but I was making very little in the way of money and I was now married. Again, the path towards the front seat of an airplane was blocked.

Fast forward to now. I've moved onto another airline. It's still a regional airline, and the pay is only marginally better. I'm in a much better location, but I am still faced with making just enough to cover the bills.

The frustrating part of all of this? I work day in and day out with flight crews. Our office is on the airport, so I watch the planes come and go. Hell, I even ride in the cockpit of these flights. The airline I work for is hiring pilots at an alarming rate. Pilots who have no other airline experience. Hell, some of these guys came right from the instructor ranks to this job.

If ever I was in a position to take advantage of this, it would be now. The chief pilot's office is right down the hall, I have the endoresement of literally dozens of pilots should I choose to apply for the job, not to mention my immediate supervisors and, I would hope, the Director of Operations. I've sat and talked with the fleet management pilots, the regional chief pilot, the director of flight standards... Everyone says that if I had the certifications and the experience (flight time), I'd find a stick somewhere.

The only problem is, I just can't get the cash to get back into the airplane and get my training done. All that stands between me and my childhood dream is, roughly, $25,000.

Thanks to a broken first marriage and a broken promise, my credit is shot, so a loan is out for something like this, and frankly the last thing I want when I get a job as a pilot is a loan payment, as I'll be making less initially then I make now (though, surprisingly, not much less, and if I had the option of a loan, I probably would take one out). So that leaves cash.

For a guy like me, $25,000 in cash might as well be $25 million.

But there's that little glimmer in me. Maybe, just maybe, I'll continue to be successful with poker. Maybe I'll get to a level where I can grind out a decent coin. Even if I make a fraction of what David Ross makes. Hell, Schneids at Two Plus Two made a hell of a run. He fell short by almost half his goal, and still that alone would have more then funded my required training. Obviously a "$60,000 in 60 days" challenge would be, at this point in my poker career, quite ambitious. But I look at people like Lord Geznikor and what he's doing is an attainable goal for me, though I would expect that I wouldn't be able to put the hours he does into it. I'm no professional, nor do I have any aspirations of becoming one.

Maybe someday.

Forward In Reverse

2004-07-22T22:05:00.000-05:00

Well, again, is seems like I'm stuck in some sort of rut just short of a milestone. This happens entirely too regularly.

I sat down this morning for a nice short session of poker. Three and a half hours later (7 hours of table time), I get up $1 richer. Actually, I'm glad to have gotten away with that, and frustrated all at the same time.

It started out well enough. After about 40 minutes of spinning my wheels, I caught fire and was up $15 on one table and about $10 on the other. I immediately thought about quitting, but these tables were ripe for the taking, so I stayed put. For the next hour the cards dried up and I slowly bled down to my buyin on one table and stayed about $10 up on the other. Then the cards started coming again.... But this time was different. I got brutalized with river suckout after river suckout. Absolutely nothing would hold up and in the order of 30 minutes I was looking at putting the last of my chips in the middle on the formerly even table, and I was down to my buyin on the "better" table. I was kicking myself a ton for not getting out when I was way up.. Now I was about $20 down. I managed to scratch (and I do mean scratch) my way back to even. I was actually up again by about $10 but the suckout monster returned and I quickly made good my escape before I went down for the last time.

So, there it is. So close to the requisite 300BB I need for the $1/$2 level, but not quite there yet. I'm also trying to figure out how I want to go about going into the $1/$2 games. I'm toying with the idea of playing one $1/$2 full table and one $.50/$1 full table, or playing one $1/$2 6 MAX table. I guess two $1/$2 full tables could go in the choices too, but I might feel a little intimidated by having that much cash in play, though technically speaking it's not all "at risk". I seem to have good luck on the shorthanded tables, but the swings are bigger and I think that I can exact a better BB/hr rate at the full ring tables.

Millstone

2004-07-22T09:46:00.000-05:00

The grind continues in the 50/1 arena. I'm making slow but steady headway and am pleased with the progress this month. I had my first losing session in a while yesterday, dropping -$2.75. Definately not what I would call a disaster, and considering the cards I was getting, I'm glad to get away that clean. It was a pathetic day of bad cards and worse boards on cards I did have. I can't tell you how many times I flopped a set only to see the board either fall 4 to a straight or 4 to a flush on suits I had none of. Yeah, one of those days.

Oh, yeah... I also dumped some of my casino whoring money back into my account, thus the sudden increase you saw on the right. I had to divert some of it to help the wife get a passport for a job she's interviewing for. She said she'll pay me back, but I'm not counting on it.

Stay On Target...

2004-07-19T22:27:00.000-05:00

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid. - Han Solo, Star Wars

I'm just waiting for the other shoe to fall. I'm over halfway through the month, and I am running very well. With such decent success, I have been left wondering if I've changed or the cards have changed. Perhaps it's a little of both.

So far this month, I've managed to rake 5.66 big bets per 100 hands. This is the best I've ever done in 50/1, though I have substantially better numbers on 1/2 6 max. There are a lot of numbers and statistics I can look through, but it's almost information overload for me to try to break it down. In any event, I will try. Luck or skill? Gillette says, "You Make The Call".

To date, I've played 2,625 hands.
- I have been dealt AA 8 times, and have won with them 6 times, averaging +$4.31 a hand.

- I have had KK 12 times, winning 7 of those hands for an average of +$1.48 per hand.

- I saw QQ 12 times also, but only won 5 times with the ladies for a loss of -$0.25 per hand.

- Big Slick suited and unsuited have both been huge letdowns. I saw AKs 8 times and won only twice with them, for a -$0.88 per hand average. AK off suit hit my screen 17 times but only held up twice for a loss of -$0.73 per hand.

So, of the top premium hands, I've lost more then I've won. Interesting.

- My biggest winning hand thus far is, remarkably, K9s. I've seen it 13 times and have won just over half the time with it. Looking at the hand summaries, it looks like a hand that has either flopped complete monsters or was easy to get rid of post flop. Small losses, big wins. That hand is worth +$3.57 per hand.

- Biggest loser? pocket 3's. I've seem them 16 times and they've held up once, for 2 bucks. I'm thinking these are probably being overplayed by me.

Other useless statistics: The hand I've seen most is 82o. The least is 97s. I have gotten the Most Holy and Apostolic HAMMER 22 times, but sadly, they've failed to produce this month.

AA is my biggest winning percentage hand. My second winningest hand is A4o. Huh?

I've voluntarily put money into the pot 14% of the time. When I saw the flop, I won the hand 26% of the time, and I've won at showdown a little under 65% of the time. My aggression factor is 1.09. If I were to take pre-flop out, my post flop and beyond aggression factor is 2.37. Fold pre-flop, pound post-flop.

Okay, so that was fun with numbers. I've noticed that the last few times I've played, I've started out down significantly for the first hour or so, once quite significantly, and I've managed to pull out a win. I think most of the problem (and solution, strangely enough) are people that play any two cards to the river if they catch a piece of the flop or have even a remote draw. Statistically, you need to pound the living shit out of these guys with bets and raises post flop if you're holding what likely is the winning hand, as they will pay you off more often then you pay them. Losing two or three hands with this tactic though hurts badly. On the other hand, you only need to score two or three of these hands to be sitting awfully good for the day. In 50/1 Hell, there is one other factor that helps.

   Table selection. Kids, I'm here to tell you, Party is the place to be. I logged on at 10:30 Central tonight and there were over 43,000 people playing poker on Party Poker. To this I can say only two words:

Holy shit.

   Envision Yankee Stadium during the Playoffs. 'Nuff said.

   Anyway, there's absolutely no reason why you should be sitting at a table that isn't working with your playing style. Trouble with the table bully? Move tables! Think there's collusion going on? Move tables (and report it)! A known shark just swam up to the felt? Time to head to fishier waters! There are approximately 2.2314 shitloads of people out there on Party that are nothing but calling machines at the lower limits. Your chance of hitting a table full of them in prime time on Party? 100% if you do a little shopping.

Party on, Wayne.

Another One Bites The Dust

2004-07-17T16:54:00.000-05:00

Breaking my promise of keeping news and other items out of this primarily poker blog, I can't help but point out that puff of smoke on the horizon...

Looks like another airline is about to be torpedoed by a mechanic's union who's response to the news that the ship is goin' down by the head is "Full Pay To The Last Day!" Trouble is, we've Seen this strategy before.

I figure they don't make it past Christmas.

Day Shift

2004-07-17T11:54:00.000-05:00

Quick hit here.

Been running about average on the 50/1 grind, so I'm happy with my progress. Of course, now that I've blogged about it, I just jinxed the hell out of it, so prepare to read about the kicking of my ass tomorrow.

Much as I want to get out of the bottom limit hell right now, I'm going to stick to my guns about not stepping foot there until I've got 300BB in the bankroll. I've tried to short cut this before with limited success, but I really don't want to have to look back. Hopefully the goldmine that is 2/4 and 3/6 will still be there when I finally build the bank to play in that sandbox.

Crawling

2004-07-16T22:00:00.000-05:00

You've Got To Go Through Hell Before You Get To Heaven - Steve Miller

   So, as you all know, I've been grinding away at 50/1, trying to get to a logical bankroll such that I can move upwards comfortably. Most of you also know that I play 98% of my poker on Party Poker.

   This is a blessing and a curse. The blessing obviously, is the sheer magnitude of people who are apparently trying to lose money as fast as humanly possible. The curse is, the players are so absolutely bad you have no idea what you're up against. Nothing sucks quite as much as getting that surprise raise from your calling station opponent when a seemingly harmless card falls on the river.

    Another interesting thing. I have played over 20,000 hands of 50/1 limit poker. Thanks to PokerTracker I have notes on every player I've sat down with for more then 10 hands; and estimated 6,500 players, give or take a few hundred. I am lucky if I see 3 people with notes when I sit down. The player turnover is huge. People either move up or bust out. I guess if I'd have been a little more disciplined and not withdrawn a couple of hundred out of my account from time to time, I'd be out of the 50/1 Hell I'm currently in, but alas, there I sit. I've got some money left from my stint in casino bonus whoring, but I wasn't nearly as successful at that as others are, and my brush with busting out at Captain Cook's has sort of curbed my enthusiasm on that little operation. As it is, though, I did manage to come away with 400% return on my investment, so I should't bitch too much. Of course, for some reason none of that cash has found its way back into my poker account. I'll have to rectify that tomorrow sometime.

So, anyway, to the point. Given my vast 50/1 online experience, I've discovered a couple of things;

- Dump or Pump. If you're beat, you're beat. You're not going to win the pot by betting and hoping for a fold. On the other hand, these cretins will call you with anything and, often times, nothing at all. Build that pot up!

- Shut off chat. I have yet to see anything useful pop up in the chat window. Tilting these guys has little value since they're too stupid to know they're getting their asses kicked.

- Playing multiple tables keeps me from getting "creative". If I get bored, I'll start trying to play hands that require finesse and skill to make work. It's like singing to deaf people.

More nuggets of amazing poker knowlege in future posts. What the heck, I'm small potatoes in the blogging community anyway. A rest stop on the highway to such hotspots as Cards Speak or The Blogather.

I won't really feel like a player until I get on Wil Wheaton's regular reading rotation. I imagine that would require quality content though, which this site is decidedly devoid of, so I'm pretty much screwed...

Big Dollars!

2004-07-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

Okay, here's another sobering statistic...

Since November of 2003 I've paid $752.30 in rake.

Holy crap.

Anyone know about any rake rebate programs for Party? That's a bunch of money.

Blogging Is Hard

2004-07-14T09:37:00.000-05:00

Okay, I admit, I'm failing miserably in the "update every day whether there's news or not" mentality I was so gung-ho about earlier.

Let's face it, no news makes for boring commentary, and I didn't play poker the last two days. I could go on tangents about other topics, and trust me there are plenty, but that would stray from this being a poker blog. I'm sure those of you here to read about my poker antics won't want to have to wade through my political and socioeconomic rantings to get to the content you are looking for, so I will refrain as much as I can from littering our little playground with such muckity-muck.

Speaking of muckity-muck, I decided the other day to poke around my statistics to date since I started recording my poker results. Here are some of the hits.

- I have, since November of 2003, played about 26,000 hands. Of those, I have played the most, about 20,000, in 50/1.

- My first losing month was November of 2003, where I dropped $51. My last losing month was November 2003.

- My average BB/hr is +1.11 BB/hr over almost 432 hours of play over all levels and limits.

- My best win rate has been in No Limit $25, where I hold a 8.8 BB/hr rate. I have only played roughly 6 hours at that level though.

- My worst win rate is on Pot Limit $25, where I hold a -30.00 bb/hr rate, however I've played that level a grand total of 6 minutes.

- Of the levels I've played at for a reasonable amount of time, I have the best success at $1/$2 6 Max, where I hold a +2.83 BB/hr rate over 31.45 hours of play. I have the worst results at $1/$2 full tables, where I hold a -0.18 BB/hr rate over 45.25 hours of play. Incidentally, my win rate at this point in 50/1 is exactly +1.00 BB/hr.

- My aggression factor to this point is 0.99, though during the first 6 months or so of play, I was wickedly weak/tight, so these are skewed, I believe.

- On the tournament side, I have played 194 tournaments. I have won $2,175.00. I have paid out $2,000 in tournament fees and buy-ins, for a total of +$175.00 in tournament winnings. My In The Money percentage is 39.69%, with an average finish of 4.19. I've had the best results playing $10+$1, and the worst results playing $20+$2.

- I have, to date, won $560.36 from ring games, and $175.00 from tournaments, for a total winnings to date of $735.36. From my initial $50 investment, I have not had to deposit additional money, so my return on investment to this point is $685.36, or about $76 per month. This does not include any live play, which I have yet to have a winning session at, however at this point I consider my live bankroll separate from my online bankroll, since local limits force me to play beyond my bankroll means when I do play. I would estimate at this point that I've lost about $250 playing live poker.

So that's the status thus far. It seems to me that, at least according to the numbers, I should be playing $1/$2 6 Max poker, however, I think this requires a little more analysis. I think I have the best success at that level because it seems like the players there are more likely to chase then they are in full ring games. Part of it I think is the mentality that short handed any pair is a winner. Indeed top pair/top kicker will hold up more often in short handed play, but the pot odds are even worse for you to chase hands, since generally there are less people involved and the implied odds to do so are not there. This is what likely separates good player from bad at these tables. Bad players have no concept of pot and implied odds and frequently overplay drawing hands.

The risk of 1/2 6 Max, of course, is the frequent blind rotation, so if you're into a bad run of cards, you can get hurt by just that. Table selection is also critical in short handed tables.

I forget who's blog I read this, so I apologize for not giving props, but I read another summary of how 50/1 limit sucks copious amounts of ass. Given the atrociously bad play there and the fact that I've only managed to squeak out a little over 1 BB/hr from these tables, I am inclined to agree. It seems from what I'm hearing that the 2/4 level is the Holy Land at this point, but I certainly don't have the bank to be playing there. As it is, heading up to 1/2 would be a pretty big risk to the bankroll, but I am starting to get antsy again.

Okay, enough of this.. I'm heading to the tables for some more ~~abuse~~ poker. Thanks for reading!

Half of Half

2004-07-11T11:37:00.000-05:00

For all the disasterous hands I got yesterday, today's session started out with me winning 4 hands back to back to put me in very good position to have a good day...

Almost. After that, I spent the next 30 minutes in a slow bleed that saw me back to my buyin on both tables (I was two tabling today... More on this later). I was actually content to stay around my buyin amount, but then I went on another crazy run of cards and when the dust settled, my short session saw a +$27.00 profit. Not quite the $40 I lost yesterday, but recovering over half of it back in a little under 2 table hours certainly is considerable progress in the correct direction.

About yesterday. Here are some grim statistics:

I played 260 hands yesterday. Of those, I saw the flop on 56 of them.
Out of those 56 hands, I won 8 of them, or a little over 14%.
My win rate for the 4.43 hours was -9.16 /hr.

But enough about that.

Today I didn't even have to use my AK. I gotta say it was a good day.

Я был всосан вне на реке

2004-07-10T20:38:00.000-05:00

Remember that great run I was having for this month?

Nevermind.

In 2 hours, I managed to erase a week's worth of work in a spectacular display of crap cards and absolute bullshit suckouts. In the first time in I can't remember, I actually busted out on one table.

It was absolutely craptastic. Net result, -$40.63.

So, basically, I'm at zero.

I'm at work right now, so I don't have access to the database, but I do remember doing some quick review of the carnage. I lost at least 4 BB a total of like 15 times. I can vividly recall two hands where I was at least a 95% favorite at the river and lost. Countless more where I was the clear favorite, and a nice spattering of hands like a flopped set that ends up seeing a board of 4 to a suit (of which I, of course, have none).

It was a complete train wreck. I had to get away from my computer for a while after that, so I didn't get a chance to update the tally to the right, so that'll get done tomorrow morning. Bottom line is, I'm back at zero, plus or minus a dollar.

As previously stated, craptastic.

We Coulda Been Huge

2004-07-09T23:12:00.000-05:00

Friday night at Party Poker. I had found a nice couple of tables, and was working a nice little profit on two of them, but getting a little down on a third.

This third table featured two or three people who were flooding the chat buffer talking smack to each other. We had the typical Party low limit conversation going on. One guy who would just smack talk to try to tilt the table, one guy who was the table professor. You know this guy well. He starts trying to "educate" the fishes by trying to explain to them that by calling down a raise with an 9 high is, like, bad, and all the while everyone else at the table is desperately trying to find the "kick/ban" button on their screens to get rid of this joker. Then there's the guy who ends every hand with "nh". I mean, it was almost to the point where we'd be betting pre-flop, it would get folded to the button who would position raise and the blinds would fold, and he throws out a "nice hand" comment.

Yeah, great hand nipplehead. STFU, plz, ty.

Anyway, about a half hour in, I get two real monsters in a row on one table. First one goes like this:

Party Poker 0.50/1 Hold'em (9 handed)

Preflop: The_ICP is BB with 4c, 6h.
1 fold, UTG+1 calls, 1 fold, MP2 calls, MP3 calls, CO calls, 1 fold, SB completes, The_ICP checks,

Flop: (6 SB) 6d, 4h, Js (6 players)
SB checks, The_ICP bets, UTG+1 folds, MP2 calls, MP3 calls, CO raises, SB folds, The_ICP 3-bets, MP2 folds, MP3 calls, CO calls.

Turn: (8 BB) 9s (3 players)

The_ICP bets, MP3 calls, CO calls.

River: (11 BB) 4s (3 players)

The_ICP bets, MP3 raises, CO folds, The_ICP 3-bets, MP3 caps, The_ICP calls.

Final Pot: 19 BB
Main Pot: 19 BB, between MP3 and The_ICP. >

Results:
The_ICP shows 4c 6h (full house, fours full of sixes).
MP3 shows Qs As (flush, ace high).
Outcome: The_ICP wins 19 BB.

64o. There's no possible way anyone could have put me on that hand. Two words: Cha and Ching. Next hand, please.

Party Poker 0.50/1 Hold'em (9 handed)

Preflop: The_ICP is SB with 4d, Ad.
UTG calls, UTG+1 calls, MP1 calls, 1 fold, MP3 calls, CO calls, 1 fold, The_ICP completes, BB checks,

Flop: (7 SB) 9h, As, 4c (7 players)

The_ICP bets, BB folds, UTG raises, UTG+1 folds, MP1 folds, MP3 calls, CO calls, The_ICP 3-bets, UTG caps, MP3 folds, CO calls, The_ICP calls.

Turn: (10.50 BB) 3s (3 players)

The_ICP bets, UTG calls, CO calls.

River: (13.50 BB) Ah (3 players)

The_ICP bets, UTG raises, CO folds, The_ICP 3-bets, UTG calls.

Final Pot: 19.50 BB
Main Pot: 19.50 BB, between UTG and The_ICP. >

Results:
UTG shows 4h 4s (full house, fours full of aces).
The_ICP shows 4d Ad (full house, aces full of fours).
Outcome: The_ICP wins 19.50 BB.

Now, that sucks. And I can honestly say I know exactly how this guy feels, because not 5 minutes later, this happens:

Party Poker 0.50/1 Hold'em (10 handed)

Preflop: The_ICP is MP1 with 8d, 8h.
1 fold, UTG+1 calls, 1 fold, The_ICP calls, MP2 raises, 4 folds, BB calls, UTG+1 bets $1.17 (All-In), The_ICP calls, MP2 calls, BB calls.

Flop: (9.86 SB) 9d, 8s, Qc (4 players, 1 all-in)
BB checks, The_ICP bets, MP2 raises, BB folds, The_ICP 3-bets, MP2 calls.

Turn: (7.93 BB) Kh (3 players, 1 all-in)

The_ICP bets, MP2 raises, The_ICP 3-bets, MP2 caps, The_ICP calls.

River: (15.93 BB) Qd (3 players, 1 all-in)

The_ICP bets, MP2 raises, The_ICP 3-bets, MP2 caps, The_ICP calls.

Final Pot: 23.93 BB
Main Pot: 4.93 BB, between UTG+1, The_ICP and MP2. > Pot 2: 19 BB, between The_ICP and MP2. >

Results:
UTG+1 shows 8c 6c (two pair, queens and eights).
The_ICP shows 8d 8h (full house, eights full of queens).
MP2 shows Qs Kd (full house, queens full of kings).
Outcome: MP2 wins 23.93 BB.

There's just no way to have avoided losing my ass to this pot. It was the hand MP2 was hoping I had, and I did. Never even considered KQo. That one hurt big. As a result, what could have been an incredible night turned out to post up a meager $2.33 profit. But after a shellacking like that, I'm just glad to be walking away even. Insane.

Wow...

2004-07-08T23:08:00.000-05:00

You know, there has been much writing lately about how if you're not playing on Party Poker, you're just missing out on the best things in life.

I can't tell you how true that is.

I'm here to tell you, at least on the 50/1 level, I am constantly amazed at the absolutely atrocious play I'm presented with. If you're not playing on Party, you need your head examined.

Today was one of those days where it paid to just stick with it. I "3-tabled" it today, and almost immediately I was in trouble. The cards had gone simply evil on me, giving me such heart breakers as a flopped set that would see a 4 flush on the board, or a pair of kings that gets sucked out on the river to some bizarre two pair. I was quickly down $30, but then finally a couple of hands held up and I clawed back to my buyin. Then it happened. I get the Men in the pocket, and flop the set with two callers. Turn is capped, and the river is capped and the Cowboys hold up for a monster pot. A rather good hand ensues about 15 minutes later on the second table to put my up around $8 there, and the table I was having the most problems with ended up back around even, so I called it a day and took my $16 profit, thrilled to be walking away with a win after such a rough start.

So far, I'm right where I should be on the BB/hr front, at around 2 and change. I'm trying to be more aggressive when I'm in a hand, especially against people that seem to want to try to bluff you out of pots (in 50/1! Oh the humanity!). I'm not crapping you, I had some Bozo three bet the turn trying to buy me out of a pot. What did he have? 48o for nothing at all against my TPTK hand with a flush draw. Glorious days indeed, and mind you, this is at 11:00 in the morning Central time, when the tables are supposed to be more challenging.

The month is still early, though. It will be interesting to see what transpires as the month drags on, but it does seem like the überfish are starting to swim back upstream to spawn, so this may shape up to be a very good month. If only I was playing the 2/4 tables.... Sigh.

Captain Cook's finally paid me. Actually, they were very pleasant about the whole thing, and though they promised the money on Monday and it actually showed up on Tuesday, I didn't have to "remind" them and I do have the cashish in the account now, so all is well. Now all I have to do is decide whether I want to dump that cash into the poker account or hold on to it for now. I was going to put in into the bankroll (since that's where it originally came from) but I'm on such a good run in 50/1 right now I don't know that I want to make the move up to 1/2 just yet. I do think I'm going to exceed the 300BB bankroll suggestion for the move up, as I will likely at least 3 table that level too. I'm thinking around $800 to $1000 as a good stepping up point. It's a very long way away at this rate, so I may well cave and make the occasional move up there. The other possibility is to replace one of the 50/1 tables I play with a 1/2 table. Anyone tried this before, and if so, does it seem like a decent idea, or should I avoid doing this?

More poker goodness tomorrow!

Back In The Saddle

2004-07-07T11:28:00.000-05:00

Well, after a nice, refreshing 3 weeks of not having to worry about pretty much anything, it's back to the grind, in more ways then one. Today is the first day back at work since the middle of last month. Strangely enough, I'm looking forward to getting back into the groove. I never really realized how burned out I was until I took this time off. Now that I've gotten my perspective back, I have come to realize how much I really do enjoy my work. It'll be good to get back into the swing of things.

I have, of course, also gotten back to playing some cards. After a good while off I have come to rediscover what it is about poker I enjoy too, though I do wish I could have played some cards in Florida. Alas, it didn't happen and it seems like, at least for the immediate future, there'll be no cards in Wisconsin, so if I want to get to a live table, my best bet is to head to Vegas. Since I work in the travel industry, that's not entirely out of the question, but air travel for standby passengers has gotten much more, ummm, interesting in the last few months, what with load factors firmly above the 90% mark. It was by sheer luck that my wife and I didn't get stranded in Washington D.C. on the 2nd trying to get back to Chicago. As it was, I couldn't get from Tampa direct to Chicago, so we had to go to Washington, and at that I had to ride in the cockpit as there weren't enough seats in back. I did manage a seat in back on the way from Dullas to Chicago, but given the guy I had to sit next to, I think I'd have rather been in the cockpit for that one also... Certainly anything is more comfortable then trying to fit both of our arms in the same little plot of space. I can't complain too much though, I guess. It got me back home.

So, Hurry up and get to Vegas so I can hang with someone, Grub!

I also need to get back to reading the blogs. I haven't been paying much attention in the last month as it's been completely insane around here. At that, the folks at work have apparently beefed up the Net Nanny, as I now can't get to half the friggin blogs. If any of you gurus have some ideas on how to circumvent this little problem, I'm all ears. I'm thinking a web based RSS reader might be a good thing, but I could use some direction on a decent one.

Thanks for reading, and sticking around during the thin posting time around here. It'll be back to business as usual here in the next few days, I promise.

Oh, and this just in. Ronald Reagan is still dead.

Reagan Still Dead, Nation Can't Get Over It...

2004-07-04T14:27:00.000-05:00

Okay, folks. Reagan died like some 3 weeks ago. I loved the man, and he meant a lot to me, as he was the President in my "formitive years". I was truely sad when he died.

For about three days.

Come on, folks. He was 92 years old and had advanced Alzhiemers disease. He wasn't shot. He wasn't murdered. He wasn't beheaded by a bunch of idiots.

He died because it was his time to go.

So, someone please explain to me why, after three weeks, we can't see fit to raise the flag to the top of the fucking pole?!

People. This is a proud nation. Great men have lived and died for and in this nation. It is right to mourn the passing of great people and heros. It is also okay to move on.

So, let's move on, eh?

Vacation

2004-07-01T14:02:00.000-05:00

It's a liberating feeling, not having to worry about anything.

Yes, your Intrepid Card Player is in the Sunshine State soaking up a whole bunch of whatever it is you Floridians soak up while you're down here, at about 1.76732 gazillion degrees. Sweet Baby Jesus is it warm around here. I figured I'd take a dip in the Gulf to cool off, except that the fooking Gulf's water temperature is presently 90 degrees! The bloody air temperature in Wisconsin hasn't hit 90 yet this year!

I love this place!

So now I'm trying to convince the Wife to go to the track and play some cards. She's not going for it, so I'm thinking this is going to be a pokerless trip for me. Bummus.

Also, It looks like Captain Cook's is going to fuck with me about my withdrawal. At least, that's what it looks like. I requested it on the 22nd of June, confirmed with them in email that they have the correct withdrawal information...

And since then I've heard precisely dick. An email was sent scant minutes ago, and I'll keep an eye on what they have to say about that. Bonus whoring has become significantly less amusing as a result of this.

Sorry for the apparent abandonment of my ~~seven~~ occasional google referenced readers. I haven't quit writing, I haven't quit playing, I've just, for this week, quit caring about anything.

Just like you're supposed to on vacation.

Feeling Lucky

2004-06-23T23:05:00.000-05:00

About two hours ago, a rather brutal storm was brewing outside our house. Then the tornado horns go off. For a while, nothing of interest happened. It wasn't even a very big storm, by most standards. A little bit of rain, a few flashes of lightning. Then it seemed to pass by. I could see the blue sky out to the west... But something wasn't quite right. I looked up and saw the most curious sight... Clouds going in 3 different directions.

Then the wind picked up. It was blowing from the south... but that tree across the parking lot is leaning to the NORTH. As I was contemplating this, I swear I heard a strange whistle from the north. Like wind blowing through a sailboats rigging. Not very loud, but definately noticeable. As I was contemplating heading for the basement, it suddenly went very still. I was about to turn for the stairs when I took one last glance outside and saw about a half dozen people standing outside the apartment building immediately out of my back door, just staring to the East. I head to where they're standing, turn around...

And there it was. A funnel cloud. Not 200 yards away from us. I thought it wasn't on the ground, from the look of it, but then I saw the telltale flashes of power lines breaking, and I could hear faintly the sounds of the tornado. I was moving rapidly away from us, and I couldn't help but feel that we dodged the biggest bullet of our lives. Had that tornado saw fit to touch down just 2 minutes earlier, I'd be sifting through the debris of what would be left of my house.

Sometimes luck is more then pulling that one-outer on the river.

If this was even luck at all.

Busy Busy

2004-06-23T14:50:00.000-05:00

Another hit and run post from Your's Truely. This weekend is Ham Radio Field Day, so I'm going to be pretty busy for the next few days, then it's off to Clearwater for some more R&R with the wife.

I have been playing some poker, and actually I've been running pretty good. Managed to break $400 on the bankroll, then took out $100 for this vacation thing, which really isn't that big of a deal. The Captain Cook's money should be getting in some time soon, so that'll take it back up to $500+, which is a Good Thing(tm). I'm debating on whether I should make the jump back to $1/$2 when I get the 300BB level ($600), or wait until I have a little more pad. I guess it's a personal choice in terms of comfort level, and I think I'll be more comfortable if I have a little padding under me before going to the $1/$2, especially if I'm going to multi-table it.

Lots to think about.

I haven't forgotten you all... Been wicked busy around here.