Poker

Online poker went through some huge changes since I last wrote. The end result is that Americans can’t play online poker on Full Tilt and PokerStars anymore.

Not much has changed for me except that I have stopped playing on Full Tilt for the time being. I intend on waiting until they have paid all their US customers the balances in their accounts. If their business is still running happily after that, I will go back. Until then, I am erring on the side of not trusting them.

I’ve been playing turbo 180s to compensate for the lack of Full Tilt tourneys. It’s slow going for me at the start of my session without Full Tilt tourneys, but usually I have a lot to play a couple hours in. It DOES suck when I run bad and I’m 3-tabling at like 10 am, though. I admit that I kinda miss Full Tilt. The other problem is that I only seem to win on FTP and I always lose on PS, so maybe this is a bad choice…

/boring post. Another reason I haven’t been posting lately is that I’ve been blogging for PokerListings.com in their guest blog. I’ll post a link to my posts next time I write. Until then, GLGL!

Poker has been tough for me this past week. It’s been normal where wins/losses are concerned (actually quite good considering I’m only down a few hundred dollars), but it’s been difficult mentally. I’ve been trying to play smaller field sizes lately in an attempt to reduce variance and go deep more often. While it seemed to work since I did go deep in the same $22 big antes tournament two days in a row, I unfortunately took 10th and 11th. I can’t describe to you how insanely tilting that was!

Thursday and Friday were really bad for me emotionally. I really wish I could just bubble those final tables and not care. I hate how a day of tournament fail can just build up and cause me to get so pissed off during a session. I need to make myself a large neon sign that says, “This is how tournament poker is, get the F over it already!”

Things have gone really badly for Dave the last few months, which has really hurt the bankroll. Limiting our field sizes is really just risk management to protect our bankroll as much as possible while he works to get back on track. We’ve been starting at 8 am this past week, which has allowed us to play some guaranteed prize pools with smaller fields. And then capped tournaments have been a priority too. I really like the big ante tournaments (even though apparently I can’t final table them no matter how hard I try).

Tomorrow is Sunday which is the attempt-to-bink-a-huge-score day. I think I’m still going to try to play as many capped fields as possible, though. Variance is really scary to me at the moment.

I didn’t feel like playing real poker on Saturday, so I went and played a $165 liveament instead. It was pretty convenient because microstakes live tournaments are so easy and then I could also feel like I was “working” at the same time 😛 Yay for being lazy.

I think ~80 people played. The structure was, of course, really fast with shallow stacks. When we were down to 13 players, people started talking about a chop. I thought to myself, WTF seriously? LOL?!

The tournament was supposed to pay 8 players. People got really excited at the thought of making $1k via a 13-way chop. Apparently it was worth 4th place money and EVERYONE thought it was a good idea except me. I probably would have done it if I had <5bb in my stack, but at this point I had 20bb (which was slightly above average).

So obviously I was like, WTF NO! And obviously people were like wtf, that bitch! This old asian guy came up to me and asked, “Why are you so greedy?!”

They all asked me again once it got 12-handed. I told them I’d do a deal if they gave me $2k, but they wouldn’t agree to it, haha.

Once it got down to 11 players, another ridiculous request came up: could we combine both tables to one so that we could have an 11-handed final table? LOL WAT?? Once again I was the only one to say no to this, and people just could not understand why. People kept asking me, “Isn’t it better for you if we combine the tables? Do you want to get eaten up by the blinds?” Wowwwwww.

The short-handed table was AWESOME for me, btw! I got so many walks and I don’t think I got 3-bet once, woohoo!

Anyway, I lost a flip at the final table, stayed alive by winning two 70/30s (while behind), and then busted when I couldn’t win a third 70/30 (while behind). 5th place, GG.

I got up today and spent some time preparing food for our day of donkamenting. If you know you’re going to be playing a long day, I think it’s really important to have food lined up. There’s nothing worse than being really hungry and not having anything ready to eat. Tournament players have five minutes every hour to use the washroom and find food. That’s not a lot of time to make sure you’re eating properly throughout the day!

Meal one: Chicken breast with asparagus
Meal two: Spinach salad with egg
Meal three: Spaghetti with Italian sausage

Most of today’s food is leftovers from other meals. It really saves a lot of time to get leftovers ready to go on plates or in bowls, though, so that you just grab it out of the fridge and throw it in the microwave once your break starts. Then you have plenty of time to use the washroom or just relax. Five minute breaks actually feel pretty long if you’re not running around like a chicken with your head cut off 🙂

Oh and if you’re an environmental freak, take note that I don’t usually use plastic wrap to when refrigerating stuff. But when preparing meals for donkaments, plastic wrap is sooo key!

GL at the tables.

Played tournaments for the first time in February today! I started ~9:30 am and decided to stop registering non-turbos around 1:30 pm. I stopped a little earlier than usual but it was probably a good idea because I was definitely losing focus once I was down to my final few tables a few hours later.

Pretty standard day albeit with less tourneys than usual for a Sunday. Played 24 with an ABI of $31. Lost just $430 which I’m pretty pleased about. I finally cashed a $109. I’ve been getting into some sick spots in those ever since I started playing them, and today was the same. Except that this time I had the discipline to fold, YAY 😉 (hopefully I was behind, lol)

This is kind of a dumb post cuz I have nothing else to really say. The cash games that I played in preparation for the Big Game all kind of canceled out this month. I won quite a few buy-ins playing online but lost a few playing live.

Overall I enjoyed playing deep cash games and I really learned a lot while doing so. I’m definitely a better poker player because of it! I find it much easier to focus and play long days with tournaments, though, which makes sense because there’s so much more thinking involved with cash. Hopefully I can find some time to play cash every so often in between my tourney sessions because I’m sure it will help me become a much better player in the long run.

There are a couple changes for this season of the PokerStars Big Game. The good one is that there are only 6 of us competing for the NAPT Passport (last season there were 11 cannons). The bad one is that we don’t get the option to come back for another session if we have any sort of profit (last season cannons had the option to play two sessions as long as they were up money during their first session).

I think the good of the 6 cannons outweighs the bad of the not being able to play two sessions. Looks like I need another two outer for that NAPT Passport 😉

Here’s a blog post I wrote for PokerListings:

I’m the Next Loose Cannon on the PokerStars Big Game!

When I get back from Vegas, I intend on blogging about my experience. I also intend on documenting some of my trip and posting a video on FTR. Hopefully I can get some interesting stuff.

Please send me some mental run good. Thank you!!