Sunday, September 21, 2008

Tilted off a lot of money

Today was the biggest losing day I've ever had in poker. I lost $2.3k at 200nl which is pretty tough going. To be fair I can't go and say I got unlucky in ever hand and got it in as a favourite all the time. I was only down about $700 in EV so there is about $1600 that I have to take into account. I did have a lot of 3b and 4b pots where I stacked off with houses, sets, top pair only to lose to quads, flushes and a lot of sets.

I probably forced myself into playing as I wanted to get this bonus cleared asap so I can move off ipoker once again. I was 12 tabling today and ended up getting in 5k hands which is the only good thing that I can take out of today. I now have 35% of an Irish Open ticket so just need to keep grinding away and hopefully do it without losing. I am still up about $1k for the month so its not to bad.

I've been trying to organise things for my trip to San Fran and Vegas. Got my hotel in San Fran booked, its in Union Sq. which is in the centre of the city so its in a great location. I plan to book the helicopter trip to the Canyon this week and also book a show. Looking like "O" is the one that we will go see.

I also bought into the Killarney game which is on in 2 weeks time. Cost me $775 to do so, After today this stands at around 10% of my roll which is probably not a great idea but its a one of thing so I will let it slide this time. I guees to be fair when I bought it my roll was over the $10k mark but today its considerably less.

Couldn't be bothered putting up any graphs or stats as they are just tilting to look at, as glorious and all that they are. So thats it, just a quick update really of whats happened in the last week. Until next time.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Traffic, traffic, traffic!!!

I changed jobs there about a week ago. I'm still with the same company as I was before hand but now I am working in an office out in Dundrum and travelling from Blanchardstown everyday which is proving to be a real pain in the ass. I used to work as a field engineer for a mobile phone network before this and things were a bit handier to say the least which allowed me a lot more time for playing poker and reading about it etc.

Now I have to leave the house everyday at 7:30am and try get to work for 8:30am, not easy some days with the traffic going into Dundrum off the M50 does be really bad some mornings. I have been trying a few different routes from going in through the city centre and exiting the M50 at Tallaght but all my efforts have been been in vain, with the time always being around the 60mins. Luckily in the evening its not quite as bad, usually around 45mins with the new barrier M50 helping a lot. So this means I don't get home now until around 6pm which really messes up my evenings poker meaning a lot of evenings I don't have time or am less bothered in playing because I am tired or whatever.

Before hand I used to be able to play in the afternoons if things were quiet at work and I could get my session done nice and early or perhaps read 2+2 or watch a few Cardrunners videos. Basically a long story short my time for poker is a lot lot shorter now and will continue like that for the forseeable future.

So far this month I've gotten about 9k hands of 100nl and 1.5k hands of 200nl. 100nl has been really frustrating for me to play on Ipoker. I'm finding it tough to adjust to all the passive NITs, I'm break even over those hands at 100nl and I think I'm playing pretty well but running pretty poor to be honest. I've has set over sets a couple of times and the usual AK and KK into better hands all in pre flop. But what I wanted to take out of this was a confidence boost. A lot of sessions I played I went into the red at the very start so often and often found myself down 4-6BI after 10 minutes. The only good thing about this is that I put in longer sessions when this happens which is good as I need to accumulate as many points as I can so I can win my Irish Open seat.

Right now my bankroll is about $8.2k so from now on I am going to play 200nl as I really can't be bothered with 100nl anymore. Last Sunday Betdaq had a €100k freeroll were I got a free ticket for it. I wasn't able to play it so I ended up getting blinded out but took about $410 from it so was pretty happy with that. My poker coach is off on some trip at the minute so he won't be able to coach me now for a while. I may look into getting another coach but hav't thought to much about this yet.

I really really want to play this tournament in Killarney. I've the Friday booked of work now so I just need to qualify for this or have a good month and possibly buy into it. I was going to play a JP poker satellite on Friday night but went out on the beer instead, which resulted in me being in poor shape on Saturday and played no poker at all on Saturday or on Friday. So I will really try and play the next satellite he has and then one on Ladbrokes if I've no luck in that one.

Above are the stats so far for the month. I was playing pretty loose and aggro at 100nl and calmed down a bit when I started playing 200nl I've been happy with my postflop play, picking out the bad spots to c-bet more often and winning my fair share of pots. As usual my biggest strength in poker is taking down pots that nobody wants and putting lots of pressure on players. This can be seen in the graph below where the red line indicates pots I have been taking down without getting showndown.


Anyway that's it for now. GL

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Moving back down for a while

I took a week off from poker after not really taking any sort of break for quite a while now. I've moved down levels now probably 9/10 times now since the start of the year and twice I've dropped down 2 levels in a short space of time. Thankfully this doesn't bother me too much, obviously I would rather have move up all the time but using good bankroll management is probably what I have done best this year since playing. I've never played with less than 15 buyins this year and 95% of the time never less than 20BI. At the minute I am well enough rolled for 200nl but I really want to get some confidence back again, so to do that I'm going to play 10k hands or so at 100nl and LAG it up for a while and try to get some confidence back into my game again.

I have started to play on ipoker again and to be honest I really am hating that god damn site. I'm playing on it because I want to clear a bonus that will give me an Irish Open ticket. I need to generate 100k points which I should be able to do in around 50k hands at 200nl which is where I hope to be clearing them but I would imagine it would take around 70k hands at 100nl. I've got 7.5% of it done so far after 3k hands at 100nl and 1.5k hands at 200nl. The Irish Open ticket is worth about €3.5k and is an event I would absoulety love to play in. I went out there last year for a while to watch it and there was a great atmosphere there with some really big name players there.

So far this month I've played nearly all 100nl and I am not enjoying it at all. The software is really bad on ipoker and my tables overlap even on a HD moniter. The 100nl games are as tight preflop as 400nl on Everest are which I thought were pretty tight but at 400nl its normal enough. There are so many 14/12 regulars at ipoker and quite a lot of 25/4 types as well. Then there are all the shortstackers who are the bain of a lot of players lives. I am having trouble adjusting to the non aggressive nature of 100nl. Very few players are 3b/4b light at all which is just something I am going to have to adjust my game too.

Hopefully next week or when I put up a new post I will be getting ready to move back up to 200nl for about the 5th time!!!