April 2008 online results

Well... not as pretty as I was hoping for (especially when I was at that mid-point) but hey... a winning month is a winning month! Will write a month recap tomorrow.

Lesson of the day

When everybody gives you a particular advice, maybe you should follow it.

Last night I finally decided to deposit on PartyPoker, mostly to clear the 5 free books bonus from 2+2. Wow... just wow. First of all, if you have not cleared that bonus yet you owe it to yourself to do it. It's stupid easy. Took me about 350 hands to get a 25$ + 5 free books bonus. And that's playing NL10. Add to that the fact that the games last night were super soft and that makes for a pretty fun evening.

I guess the next few days will tell how much last night I was just running hot (didn't really feel like it) or how much the night games really are soft on party.

Right now I've moved about half of my roll on PartyPoker and I will most likely play a bit on stars AND party for a while. The plan is still to move up to NL25 asap and the way things look, it might be pretty quick doing that on party.

I am currently a bit behind on the pace for 12K hands in april, but I have a few days off scheduled before the end of the month so I'm pretty confident about it. That said, my goal of going 3 times to the casino will probably fall short.

Taking a leap

Alright. This blog has been my secret garden for quite a while now. I think I have one and a half regular readers (if you count my cat who's sitting on my lap when I write most of these entries.).

I've been playing with the idea of going "public" for a while and I finally came to the decision of doing it. To be honest I have absolutely no clue how many readers posting that blog on 2+2 will bring (and to be honest I don't care all that much) and I also wonder what is the value of yet another micro stakes donkey spewtard poker player blog is. But it doesn't matter, I'll make this thing public and if anybody enjoys reading it then good. If not well... I won't lose any sleep over it.

So there it goes, if you're a new reader I guess a bit of an introduction is due. I'm a 30 years old software programmer who happens to have fallen in love with poker about a year and a half ago. I've been taking it particularly seriously for the past 6 months. I am currently grinding the microstakes (NL10 to be precise) and am hoping to climb up the ladder and (dare I say it?) maybe make poker my main source of income at some point.

This blog is a little more than a year old and I'm not sure how much value there is to read it all, but if you feel like it it's all archived.

Hope you enjoy... or not.

A taste of felt

Had a rough, rough night at the casino yesterday. Went there to play 1$/2$ NLHE and came back home with empty pockets. With hindsight I should have left the table after about an hour of play. I was already a loser by then, but the fact that I was not comfortable at the table should have sent me signals that this was not a good time to play there and I could have salvaged something at least. Guess that's part of the learning process, know when to leave a dry game.

The whole evening I had borderline hands. Like I raise from early position with pocket Jacks and get 4 callers (already a bad sign). Flop comes A-K-Q... what am I to do here? There's no way none of the pre-flop callers has hit that flop. So I check and then fold to a bet from a late pos player. A bit later I open raise from early position with pocket fives to get a call from a shortstacking rock. Flop comes 8-8-3 and I figure that if he has a hand like two overcards I could get him to fold by making a continuation bet. I fire for about two thirds of the pot and he re-raises me. After that raise he was basically commited to throw the rest in on the turn. I muck my fives and keep on bleeding my chips away.

Oh well... life goes on. Time to lick my wounds before I go back to that battle.

April goals

Here is a quick bullet list of my april goals

- Play 12K hands of NLHE online
- Play at least 3 times at the casino
- Post a winning month online
- Keep updating this blog as frequently as I did in March.

March 2008 online results

Well March was kinda rough (isn't that some understatement?). First time in a while that I post a losing month. For a while there it was a downward spiral but it helped me identify a big leak I can have at times. Next step is to find how to prevent it.

Good thing is, I broke the 10K hands and the end of the month was not so bad. I managed to stop the bleeding and win some of my losses back.

On a side note, March was also the month where I kept that blog updated the most frequently with 13 posts.