2009 Week 4

Another disappointing week online, had 2 very tilting sessions in succession were I dropped over $2.5k between them. Best forgotten about at this stage and won't even recollect them on here. On the plus side my HU game is improving a lot and I'm starting to spend much more time playing it and really really enjoying playing it right now compared to 6max. I made $1.5k playing HU this week and lost a ton playing 6max.

On that note I have been moving money around online and have put 25BI for 100nl HU into 4 accounts and put the rest in the bank. No point really in having money online that I don't really need for my roll, hopefully it will be safer in the bank!! I'm going to learn how to play HU for the month of February. The aim is to get really comfortable with it and playing tons of pots against other reasonable opponents so I can move quickly up to 1/2. The games can be ridiculously easy if you game select well and try to avoid tougher opponents. Variance can be quite high so a big bankroll is paramount. I probably am one to make some rash decisions at times so don't be surprised if I am back playing 6max on the 2nd February!!

I tried a supersat for the GJP deepstack festival next week. I played uber tight early on, basically seeing no hands what so ever. I folded JJ in the very first hand on the turn on a T high board after and Trippie from boards opened UTG and bet the flop into 3 players, he also bet the turn into 2 players and after another guy called on a 436T flush draw board I gave up the best hand, just as well as I would have been rivered!!! Results oriented thinking for the win. I went out when my AK ran into AA and that was that. No complaints there, was some very good players in it compared to the rebuy one where I lost HU for a ticket around Xmas time.

I plan on buying directly in now, there is another live super sat the night before it but to be honest its on at a really bad time for me due to work and also the fact that its going to go on pretty late and the tournament itself will last 3 days its not great preparation for a live 3 day tournament in terms of being fresh and focused for a 3 day marathon. That's one thing I realized about Killarney, by the time the third day came around I was totally wrecked due to being nervous going into the final day and also the fact that I played 26 or so hours of poker over the previous 2 days which is tough going mentally and physically.

I will most likely sell 30-40% of myself for this as a €1650 buying is not an amount my poker bankroll can comfortably afford. Me playing it as a €1k buyin would be much better for me I think and would also reduce variance. If anyone reading is interested in taking a % leave a comment or PM digiman on boards.

Miserable results for the week are -$500 over 6.5k hands, will post a full graph of the month in a few days when its all over.

2009 Week 3

Pretty bad week results wise, 3/6 and 5/10 can put huge dents into your bankroll when you do badly at them so I've decieded not to play any more 5/10 until I build up a larger roll. I will still play the 3/6 games when they are going because for some reason there does be usually 1 really soft spot at the table but unfortunately the rest of the table I probably have 0 edge in so the swings will be even bigger when this happens. I deposited more money on Full Tilt and Poker Stars despite both accounts being rigged against me severely but I want to learn how to play HU so I just put more money on those sites as Stars is good for HU action at 100nl and the games play super fast so 2 tabling is really good and you get about 450 hands per hour doing this, plus the games are super soft at these stakes.

On other news, LOST is back on the tv in USA tonight and I am such a fan of the show I will be downloading it in the morning before I go to work so it will be ready for me when I get back home. I really can't wait to start watching it again. 24 has also started back on TV again so have been watching it as well.

My results for the week are below. I lost $3.5k playing above my regular game which is really disappointing but if you don't take shots you will never get anywhere so I will just try grind through them. Anyway screenshot is below:

Very bad session

Pretty awful session there, lost 2 stacks at 5/10, one was awful by me and the other one I ran trips into a house. Played 1300 hands over 2 session and both were awful and mostly at 400nl, in the 2nd session I was down 2k for the day within 10 hands and managed to get it back to -500 but then then lost another 1.6k in about 10 hands and just quit down 2.1k. To be fair I've had an unreal month so far so this was bound to happen sooner or later. Just gonna concentrate on 2/4 and 3/6 now for the next while till I get the roll built back up a bit after today's loss and a big withdrawal as few days ago.

2009 Week 2

I've been extremely lazy this week with regards to playing poker. Today for example I managed to play 3 hands. I logged onto the site and the games look pretty poor. There was really long waiting lists for all the tables and I got on one after a few minutes. I won all my hands as the table was breaking, they are all obviously scared of me and ran away. One guy stayed but the inevitable happened him and he lost all his money to me. He left and I waited for more tables to pop up but none were coming so I just logged off!! Laziness is a killer

But results wise its been a good week. I got 2k hands in and won a nice bit of money. I've been running pretty hot to be fair and also had my biggest winning hand ever when I won a $2.2k pot with AA against a very bad player which was very enjoyable. I played some more 5/10 this week and didn't really feel all that comfortable at it. There was one bad player on 4 tables so I 4-tabled it for about and hour and got nothing going at all, I was giving up on pots pretty easily which is unlike me but the higher stakes just got to me I think. I hope to keep taking stabs at it when games look good but will mostly try and concentrate at 2/4 and 3/6 as I took out a nice bit today as the dollar is strong against the euro again so its a good time to take some out. I'm going to south of France in a month so will be nice to have some extra cash over there as I hear its pretty expensive.

Anyway its getting late and I've work in the morning so will wrap up with a screen shot of my graph and results for the week.

Jman launches new training site

Just lost my biggest pot ever today when I was playing some 5/10. I played the hand like a fish and was pretty tilted after it. I won't even post the hand history as its so bad but it did involve me trying to bluff someone off an obvious QQ or AA and the $2070 pot got shipped over to AA. The session wasn't all bad though, I did manage to lose only $300 at 5/10 after playing pretty well on another table and losing the minimum with AQ vs AK on an AxxKx board so that was ok. I done well at 2/4 and 3/6 and won just over $500 in total so not a bad 30 min session. Games where pretty poor so didn't bother playing any longer and was just after losing the $2k pot so just quit.

I'm also updating my blog lists, I'm deleting any blogs that havn't been updated in a while and going to add in some other blogs from jman, aejones, krantz and FWF. Well I just tried adding in Aejones blog but it keeps linking to some post in the leggo poker forums so I will leave it out. Jmans blog doesn't seem to work properly with the RSS feed so it looks like it will be permantly stuck at the bottom!! Sort it out Phil next time you read this!!

Jman (My favourite high stakes player) launched a new training site today which I will sign up to later for 6 months at a cost of $229. The problem is I already have 3 subscriptions to other ones at similar monthly fees. I'm thinking of dropping Cardrunners as they are producing very little high stakes content recently from the likes of CTS and stinger and only get a video from raptor very rarely. The Brian Townsend videos are still pretty good but its hard to justify paying for all these subs when I only watch about 10 videos per month which costs about $90. Deuces Cracked is still really good as the Krantz and FWF video series are usually top quality and I have recently joined Leggo Poker for 6 months and intend on watching all the aejones videos there.

I'm still running very hot so the big downswing is not to far away I think. I've a feeling its going to come right now when I taking shots in the 5/10 games. A couple of buyins lost here is going to be $1k a go so will need to be cautious here for a while. Will put in another update on Wednesday hopefully.

2009 Week 1

So from this post on now, I'm going to be trying to update the blog every Wednesday with results and that from the previous week. I might put in random posts every now and again about more random stuff as I am planning on running a triathlon later this year and hope to put in some posts about how that is going or other random stuff like holidays planned etc.

So the year has gotten off to a flyer really, played 2.5k hands across all limits from 1/2 to 10/20 but the vast majority have been at 2/4. This will be my main game now as long as I have over 35BI for this. If the tables are poor then I will add play 1/2 as well. I have been actively searching all the games from 2/4 to 5/10 and if there is any soft spots in the 5/10 games I will sit in and play. I'm not exactly rolled for 5/10 but I don't think playing 1 or 2 tables of it when there is a big fish in the game will do to much harm if I play tight and try nothing fancy.

I did play some live poker this week, I met up with zuutroy (Robert) and RoadSweeper (Paudie) from boards for a few pints and some live poker in the Fitz. I actually hate live poker after this really tilting session. I played for about 2 hours and was completely card dead and ended up getting bored and spewing off money like a donk. I managed to lose €350 in about 2 hours so I went home around 12.30 and called it a night there. I went online to see if there were any soft games but the waiting list for the soft table was way to long, not surprising when some fish done $1.5k at a 200nl table. I got none of it but one of the players there wanted to do some flips so I said I would a $200 flip with him and in the first one my Ts3c beat his 6h8d and then we decieded to do one more and again I kicked his ass with my Ks5h beat his 5s6h. So that softened the blow of losing around $500 in the casino. I took the $500 out of my poker bankroll as I made a rule last year of my own money not going into poker, just poker money going into my personal account.

I am trying to tie my coach down to Monday evenings for coaching but hes a tough man to get! I hope to do one session a week from now on as I find it really helpful and definitely improves my game. It's great to have a high stakes player watch over you now and again when you are playing and ask him questions about tough hands and situations that come up.

So the graph for the week is below, very good week and a good start on my goal of $50k winnings for the year. So overall I won $2730 this week when I take the live poker out of the online winnings.