Getting Back on Track

I'm back, and ready to start playing again. I had Pokeroffice for a long time, and loved the program. I thought it was great and was very useful. That was until I found Hold'em Manager. Hold'em Manager is an unbelievable program. It has a much better interface and HUD. It has stats that PO didn't have, such as three bet/four bet percentage, and a lot of other ones to gauge how passive or aggressive your opponents are playing. So I decided to buy the new program, and now I just have to get it set up. I need to set up the HUD with the right stats and filters. So it may take a little while until everything is tweaked to my liking, but at least I'm getting back into the game.

I haven't played any poker since my last blog. It's been about 2+ months now. I didn't feel the urge or fire to play. But I'm getting back into the groove. I also joined Poker VT. Poker VT has been wonderful so far. I am a big advocate of small ball, and there is nothing better than learning how to play from some great players, like Daniel Negreanu, Paul Wasicka, and JC Alvarado. Boosted J and Adam Junglen, as well as the one and only Annette_15 are associated with the site. I have been going through some of the beginning strategy videos ad some of the thought analysis hands. So far it has been not only entertaining, but also very informative. I took the test of poker knowledge, and did worse than I thought I would do. SO I am going to take it again and start to focus on the areas that I didn't score very well in. So everything is coming together on the poker front.

Well, now that I think about it, I have played in a few home games over the past month. I played in four home games. I won the first three outright, then finished in fourth in the last one. The first three were cake walks. Not because my competition was totally useless, some of them were. But I was playing my A game. I was making timely bluffs and three bets, and didn't have to show down many hands. I knew I could make some moves and had some very solid reads on the players. However, I forgot that I was playing against some very rank amateurs. Here's a perfect example. Against loose passive players, who usually raise minimum or limp too much, I like to take suited connectors and small pairs to flops a lot more often even if I'm out of position. SO I limp 67 suited in second position. Sure enough, most of the table limps behind. The flop comes 66K. Great flop for my hand. But I got lost in the fact that the player in the squeeze could have had a bigger 6. We get it all in, three way, on the turn to see the following hands. I have 67, the player behind has 610, and the player on the button has K5??? I know. That's a lot of action for some crap hands. I wasn't too proud of the way I played that night and just wrote it off as a bad night and just plain poor play. I couldn't catch a hand to save my life, c'est la vie.

So I'll be getting back to the grindstone real soon. I'm almost done with Professional Hold'em. As soon as I finish that book, I'll be starting Harrington on Cash Games. I got both Volume I and II. So hopefully I can be done with those in no time.

I've been married for about 2 months now. It's been great. We are getting a couple of dogs in the not too distant future. She wants to get a golden retriever and I want to get another beagle. We already have the names picked out. She wants to name hers Molly, and I'm thinking about either Fred for a boy, or Aliza for a girl. I'm a big Audrey Hepburn fan, and my first beagle was named Audrey. SO I thought it would be kind of cool to either name the new one after another character of hers, Aliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady, or Fred, the name of her brother in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly Golightly also named George Pappard's character Fred. So that's about all that's new on this front. I have taken on a couple of students from work and am trying to get a regular game together.