Quick update

Well not much to say here right now but still thougt an small update was due.

The last few days have been pretty good. I don't think it's going to be possible to turn march into a winning month but whatever. At least I'm back on the right track and the poker gods seem to have forgotten whatever I had done to piss them off so bad.

Barring anythin unexpected I should definitly hit the 10K hands played this month which is basically my monthly goal right now.

I've been thinking about posting a link to this blog on the uNL forums at 2+2. Still not sure what to do about this. Kinda scary to expose this to the public eye... but at the same time if I wanted to keep this thing all to myself I guess I should not have put it online.

Anyway that's it for now. I will post more in the next few days with my end of month thoughts & results.

Over & out.

I'm back! I'm fscking back!

GOD that feels good! Played about 1,000 hands today and managed to win close to 3 buy ins. Even better, I felt really comfortable and confident the whole time. I think I broke out of my funk and I'm back on track.

Stopped the bleeding... I think

Woke up early this morning (knew I wouldn't sleep too well) so I decided to log a few hands before coming to work. Well I had a pretty good session. I made a few bonehead plays again, but much less than the last few days (weeks?). Finally managed to have a session where I felt good about my game and managed to stay relatively focused.

I also started posting on 2+2 again. I think the 2 hands I posted from this week end are quite interesting.

Hopefully I can now move on and get back on track.

Week end recap : it sucked!

What a horrible, horrible week end.

On the cash game side I played horribly and whenever I found a good play in me I would end up paying the best hand with the 2nd best hand. My roll is now in pretty rough shape and I have to reassess what I will do and do a lot of session reviewing to get out of that funk.

I am also finally out of the WSOP step thingies. After busting 4th, 2nd and then 5th on the step 3, I finally busted out in 9th, being kicked out of the loop.

Somehow I doubt I'll sleep well tonight.

Surprise surprise!

Woke up this morning and, still half in my sleep induced fog, stumbled upon this :

Ottawa targets gaming

WTF?!?!?

Are you kidding me? I guess this had to be expected from the Harper administration. It's not, after all, the first thing that they try to copy from the "oh so purrty Land of the Free/home of the brave". I have to say that I'm quite pissed right now (isn't anger the second stage of grief? I guess my "denial" phase was pretty short uh?).

Ok first, if this comes to pass it will be ugly. I don't think it will prevent people from playing poker online, after all there's still lots of americans playing on pokerstars and FullTilt. It will just make it harder and complicated to deposit and withdraw money from these sites (I don't buy that the ISPs will block traffic to gambling sites). This in turns, will make the pond dryer.

The idea that they are doing this to "protect people from bad fraudulous offshore and indian companies" is ridiculous. Making online gambling illegal will not stop degenerates from throwing money around. Actually I would even argue that online gamgling sites and the micro-stakes they allow you to play are a good thing for degenerates! You can get your "fix" while risking quite less than in traditional Brick & Mortar establishments. Anyway I disgress.

I will definitly follow this quite closely and hope for the best. Right now, my main hope lies in the fact that a lot of the targeted sites are administered on Amerindians reserves. Since the Oka crisis (quite a while ago... I feel old suddendly), the Canadian govt has always been reluctant to mess with the natives. I hope this helps tips the scale in our favor....

See, I guess I'm already at stage 3 of grief : bargaining

On to step 3!

Just managed to win a step 2 WSOP thingy on stars. Again in step 3 I have to finish 5th to stay in step 3, or 2nd to move on to step 4.

Will most likely tackle that tomorrow.

Got through Step 1

Not much to say about tonight. Played a bit of NL10, winning sessions to finally break my break even stretch. Then played a bit of Omaha8 with pretty mediocre results.

Finally decided to give the WSOP step 1 another and managed to get through. Guess I might attack step 2 tomorrow.

Challenge is off...

Well I'm sitting at about 1800 hands with about 2 hours to go. Would have been possible to do it but I have a few unexpected things to take care of.

Conclusions? Well, since I have to call this off it's hard to come to any conclusions but I'll still try. I think spending a lot of time playing online poker (like maybe 5/6 hours a day) would definitely be possible. That said, this little experiment helped me identify things about myself that I would need to take care of. Mostly, I need to schedule breaks for myself. I tend to push it a bit too far before realizing I need even a short break.

This was by no mean a "huge extraordinary" challenge, but still fun. I definitely will try something similar at some point. Maybe even tomorrow?

Friday night tally

Well I finish the night with 967 hands. A little short of the 1000 goal but still, getting to 2500 tomorrow is definitly still possible. I have overestimated the pace of the week end game a bit though, so it's not going as fast as planned.

Tonight ended up pretty well. It started ugly when I came back from work, but then I took a break and when I came back to the tables it went really well. If not for fatigue I would have pulled a few more hours, but right now my focus is starting to falter and I'm not playing my best. Figured it'd be better to get some rest and attack the week end fishies tomorrow.

2500

Somewhat inspired by the law school dropout blog, I decided to give myself some sort of challenge.

Before supper time tomorrow, I want to play 2500 hands of online poker. Figuring that's approximatly 10 hours of play on 4 tables. If I add more tables or realise that I'm crushing the required pace for the 2500 hands I might up that figure (and add it to this blog).

So there, you have it. Dear imaginary friends, I plan on playing 2500 hands of online poker before supper time tomorrow.

Trent, you fscking made my day!

nuff said

Casinos! (finally)

Finally I got some casino experience under my belt! About a week ago I went to the Montreal casino on a friday night. Despite finishing the night stuck about 100$, I had a great time and I definitly feel that the week end night games are beatable there. I played 1/2 NLHE and even though I was a bit short and felt a bit pressured by having only 1 bullet and the bigger stakes, I ended up being pretty comfortable. The 2 biggest pots I lost in the night are a suck out I ended up being on the wrong side of and a play I attempted at the wrong time.

First I limp in a pot that has a few limpers before me with pocket 8s. Flop comes and 8 and 2 heart rages. I bet and an asian dude who seems to be a decent player flat calls. Turn is a rag, I bet again and get called again. River was a heart and I made a smallish bet and got called. He flipped over 10-5 of hearts for a rivered flush. He was fully aware that he was playing a trash hand but I guess he was in a gambling mood. Oh well... not much that can be done about this.

Then later on in the evening I pick up pocket 10s in the big blind. A guy who was playing somewhat tight and mostly playing fit or fold on the flop raises from mid position. It's folded to me and I decide that he's the perfect type of players to 3 bet light so I re-raise it. A crazy spew gambler to my left calls my 3 bet and the initial raiser calls. Flop comes Q-Q-5. I figure there's a pretty big chance he was on a hand like A-K or a medium pocket pair. I decide to fire a continuation bet. Crazy-spew-gambler folds and the pre-flop raiser min-raises me. So far I'm completely good with the way I played the hand, but here I should have folded. The guy played strong before the flop and is not scared by my close to pot sized bet here. So I have to give him credit for something like AQ. Instead I ended up calling the min-raise and check fold on the turn when an A came.

The rest of the night was pretty uneventful, but I can't wait to go back on a friday night and play with these spewtards again! Makes for a high variance game but in the long run I think I can be a big winner in there.

Then last saturday being in Gatineau I went to the casino there. Ended up with a bit of profit again playing 1/2. Not really any interesting hands that comes to my mind though. The one big thing for me though about this sessions is that I was focusing a lot on trying to spot tells on a few players and I ended up having really good reads on 3 players at my table and ended up exploiting these. One guy in particular I always knew when I would be able to push him out of a pot and I managed to win quite a few small pots against him thanks to that.

All in all I loved my casino experiences and definitly feel like I can make good profits there. So you can be sure I will be going back asoften as possible.

February 2008 online results

Well I finally took a shot at NL25. Sadly, this afflicted me with a severe case of Fancy play syndrome combined with a getting cold cards for quite a while. As you can see from the graph, results were pretty bad. Stepped down at NL10, returned to basics, and I am almost ready to move up to NL25 again.

Missed the 10,000 hands mark again, goal in march is to hit it. Also as a goal in march I want to move up to NL25 but for good this time.