New challenges all around.

February is almost over, and a good friend made me realize I was way overdue for an update.

So where am I at? Well I lost my job a few weeks ago. As much as this suck, I still see this as a positive thing overall. Sure this means the money is a bit short, but it was time I left this place. On to new challenges on that way!

So does that mean that I'm playing poker non stop? Not really. I've invested a lot of time into finding a job and more importantly deciding what exactly I want to do long term.

That said, I HAVE been playing a bit more poker. Finally moving up to NL50. Right now I'm mixing NL20 and NL50 tables on Cake since at times it's tough to find lots of good tables. The results are not too bad so far and barring any catastrophic event, I will reach all my monthly goals.

I can't say I'm completely comfortable at NL50 yet but I could not really explain why. The stakes already don't bother me anymore and the play does not seem all that different from NL20 although it IS a bit tighter and more aggressive. Maybe I just have not been getting much cards at NL50 so far... we'll see.

Finally the Montreal Casino is opening a poker room with dealers, chips and cards on March 30th! For those who don't know, so far this casino only had electronic pokertek tables.



Playing on these is not all bad but there are quite a few things that annoy me.

After the novelty factor wears out, they seem more intimidating to casual players.

The first few weeks, the games were really juicy. But after a few months it became full of regs and shortstacking nits. The feeling of the people I talked to is that the lack of a person in place to explain rules and clarify what's happening made it intimidating to a lot of casual folks.

No authority figure at the table

I have seen many regulars show their hands to each other after hands are over or even sometimes while playing. There is no one to enforce rules like "show one show all" and "one player to a hand". THIS I hated.

Call me old fashioned

When I play live, I want to hears chips being shuffled, I want to throw real cards in the muck. If I want to play in front of a screen, I might as well stay home and multitable.

Well that's it for today, I swear I'll try to update this blog more often!

January thoughts and February goals

My January goals were :
- Play 15,000 hands of online poker
- Have a winning month
- Review my play in depth once a week

Well I fell a bit short on the volume side of things and definitely did NOT post a winning month. That said I have managed to review my game somewhat regularly. Probably not as much as I wanted, and not enough. But it's still a start.

It's really weird, since my automn hiatus, I feel my game being somewhat off and I've been working on bringing it back to what it was (and even better). That said, I'm still struggling a bit. I also have a feeling that variance has been pretty nasty towards me for the past month and a half. That's not to say that my "bad" results are just due to variance. Trust me, I have made some bonehead plays! Anyway, I have been thinking about maybe getting a coaching session or two in to help spot what makes me a spewtard lately.

Anyway, more on that later I guess. For now, here are my February goals.
- Play 15,000 hands of online poker
- Have a winning month
- Review my play in depth once a week

That's right. Same exact thing as in January!

January 2009 online results