April Showers bring......MUD

To say that I've been in a rut would be an understatement. I think the push for gold in March really led to massive burnout. So far in April, my playing time has diminished greatly. I've just not had the desire to put in a lot of hours. My play hasn't been that bad, but I've been on the wrong side of the variance a few times and that hasn't helped either. As of today, I'm hovering around break even for the month, so I can't really complain I guess. Just isn't as exciting as the last 3 months of triple digit wins each month. Oh well, maybe a little more sleep will change things next week. I'll be turning in early (for me) tonite. Gotta do my taxes tomorrow....YUK!

March towards gold

Mid-way through March and I've already blown by the Poker Stars Silver FPP level and well on the way to Gold. I know I've said in the past that I wouldn't chase points or bonuses (especially after my self-destruction on Full Tilt trying to clear the 2007 year-end bonus), but as of now I've been profitable while racking up the points. I know that with summer coming up my playing time will be greatly diminished, so I'd really like to make Gold in March to rack up the double FPPs in April, which will probably be my last "big month" for a while. After that I'll look to turn the FPPs into T$ and turn the T$ into cash, without worrying about the amount I play.

Wow, it's after 2 a.m. and tomorrow's a work day. Gonna be another long week.

2009: A New Hope

Well it's 40 days into the new year, and while much has changed, some things never will. Here I sit in the dark after finishing an evening at the cyber tables, long after reasonable folks with daytime jobs have drifted into dreamland. So far 2009 has been good to me. My Stars bankroll has taken many ups and downs, but overall has more than doubled since the start of the year. Still grinding the 10c/25c NL tables, but have dabbled in the bigger stakes here and there when I found the right opportunites. I still haven't finalized my 2009 goals, largely due to the amount of hours I'm spending at the tables. I plan to do some analysis of my year-to-date play sometime soon, both to identify the factors that led to my downturn in week #3 as well as what I did right at the beginning of the year and the past week to make my comeback.

On a personal note, I entered a "biggest loser" prop bet in January. Person with the highest % loss takes the pool. After 5 weeks I'm down 24 pounds and have a decent lead on the rest of the pack with 7 weeks to go. I'm hoping to drop another 17 in that time to get to my target weight. If I can do that, even if I lose the prop bet I'll be satisfied.

Nice week

Another good day today, actually breaking my best one-day results posted 4 days ago. While I feel like I played well, I will say that my good hands mostly held up again and one big hand helped make it a great day:



I limp with 44 in mid position. cutoff raises $1.25, button calls and the guy to my right calls. Price is right to see the flop so I call. Flop is 49T rainbow. I check, cutoff bets $3, button folds but the guy to my right calls. I raise to $12.75 only to see the original raiser shove all in for his last $24 and the other guy shove right along with him for about the same amount. At this point, I figure there's a good chance I've been outflopped set over set, but the pot is so big that I can't fold. Turn is a 9 and river is a 7. Cutoff shows AA and guy to my right shows JQ offsuit. I drag the $73.50 pot and exhale. Again, the best hand (postflop) held against a lot of draws that could have sunk me. I need to remember these days for the times when the suckouts make me feel like the best hand never holds.

Happy Accidents

In the past few nights I've seen a lot of ups and downs. The one consistant thing has been that almost every night I've stayed up too late and finished on a downturn, losing all or most of what I've won earlier in the evening. I decided tonite was going to be different. Stars was good to me tonite....several big hands and with few exceptions they held up. The biggest score of the night was by total accident. I've been playing exclusively at the 10c/25c no limit tables with the full buy-in of $25. I'd been playing on 4 tables and one of them lost a few players so I got up and opened another. By mistake I opened a 50c/$1 table and proceeded to buy in for the max as usual. I guess I had action on the other tables while doing this because I was in my second hand before I realized that I had $99 on the table of the $100 full buy-in. I decided that I would see a few hands and sit out when the blinds came back around to me. In my last hand (UTG) I was dealt AA. I raised to $4 and got 2 callers....not what I was hoping for. The flop came down A25 with 2 spades. I fired $5 into the $13.50 pot hoping to get down to heads up at least. First bad guy folds but the second raises me to $16. I have $90 left on the table to his $24. Now there is more in the pot than he has left so there's no way he's folding, so I ship it knowing I have the best of it for now, and hope it sticks. Of course he calls, the turn pairs the 2 and the river is a meaningless 3. He turns over 55 for a lower full house and I take a $90.40 pot. Whew!
As I said before, I had already decided that I wasn't staying too long to lose back my winnings, so I quit soon after up $110 on the day. If only all accidents worked out so well.

Has it really been this long?

As it sit in my living room staring at the blinking lights on the tree at 2 a.m., I realized I haven't posted in nearly a year. Starting to think about my resolutions for next year, more regular posts have to be one of them. While not many others may read them, I have found that going back to see what I was thinking at a particular time has been helpful to me in the past.

2008 has been a much better year than '07.....hope '09 brings even more successes. Looking forward to another Tunica trip in January. More to come.....

Recent Sucesses

So it's been a couple of weeks since I last posted. Actually, it's been a VERY GOOD couple of weeks. I struggled to get to and stay over the $100 mark for most of the past year. The $50 iron man bonus I cleared in January got me up over the $150 mark. Then, strangely, things started to move upward. I'm not sure if it's just the variance going my way, or hopefully, all the hours I've spent in the last 6 weeks playing up to 4 tables at a time has improved my game. Regardless, I have nearly tripled my FT bankroll since the beginning of the year and have a $26 token in the bank that I won a couple of days ago. I'm still trying to decide what to use the token on. I've really stayed away from tourneys for the most part this year. The one that I did decide to play was the PokerSluts event #2 (Omaha hi/lo limit) and I took 1st place for $28. Not a big payday but the win felt good.

I'm also debating on when & how to move up my stakes now that my bankroll can support it. I have started playing some dime/quarter pot limit games (up from my nickel/dime usual games). I have had mixed results with those tables, sometimes doubling up and sometimes losing my $5, which is usually what I sit down with to limit my losses if I get a bad beat hand. So I'm wondering....would I be better off sitting down with a bigger stack at the lower limit tables so people take me seriously, or do they even care since the stakes are so low?