Back to the Grind

I finally put in a good session. Albeit and very spewy session, but I put in a session. I played a little over 1000 hands, and was down a little over 2 buyins at one point. I have taken so much time off from poker, that I was spewing chips left and right. I was pushing with some great draws, but didn't take the time to read through the hands the right way. I pushed with AK suited with two overs and a flush draw, only to be up against a set for a buyin. I need to get back to playing small ball.

I got into the groove later on and ended up only down about 1/3 of a buyin total. So once I take rakeback into account, my session was a little below even. However, I was getting into the groove later in the session. There were quite a few hands in which my position and my aggression were getting me paid off. For instance, there was one hand in particular where I get AA in the BB. The button min raises, and the SB just calls. I repop it to 6 times his raise and the SB flat calls and the button folds. Right then and there I put him on 77-JJ. The flop came 3-7-9 and he checked it to me. I CBET the flop and he check raised the pot. I was thinking he might have flopped a set of 7's or 9's, but thought that if he had, he would have just called and then made a move on the turn. That's what most players do. When they flop a set, they slowplay the flop then lead the turn. So the check raise meant 10-QQ to me. So I shove to his check raise and he calls to show JJ. He bricked out and I was up quite a bit.

There were so many pots in which I was a good favorite when the money went in, but I just couldn't get it to hold. My All-in EV equity was about 3 buyins in the positive, but I ended the session down just a bit. I chalked up most of the losses to it being Saturday night and people were just either really bad and getting lucky or just tilting off and getting paid. So I am proud of the way I played, just couldn't get any traction to stick. I would get up a buyin then lose it back to a suckout a few hands later. Overall, my table image was pretty solid and I don't think the others really knew where I was coming from. They were playing very passive on flops and calling down with second and third pairs. I probably bluffed too much, but with the hands I was facing, I'm surprised they called me to the river with a lot of their hands.

So, some things to think about for the next session:
1. I need to focus on playing position strong and knowing who I can get to fold both before the flop and with a CBET.
2. I need to pull back the preflop aggression and look to get more value for my strong hands and not bluff as much as I did this session.
3. Play more small ball and control the pot more often.
4. Most of all, don't overvalue very marginal hands or marginal situations.

So those are some of the things I need to focus on for the next session. Hopefully I can get the train rolling again and get to the next level. I need to win about 15-16 buyins before I take a shot at the next level. When I do get to the next level, and I get to a specific amount I will drop down to the previous level. So time to get back to the grind and focus on making the right decisions.

Jay311md 4 - Donks 1

I've played in 5 home games now, over the past month and a half. I have won 4 of them, and lost 1 due to my own stupidity. If only I didn't push with AK against a really tight player. So, all is going great. The one I won last night was really great though.

So my sister in law calls me and asks if I want to play in a little home game they were getting together. So I decided that I needed to stretch my poker muscles and not just sit around and bitch about not playing. Things were going great for the first hour. I was slowly chipping up and had a little lead. Then I overplayed KK against a huge donkey. The table had been playing extremely weak-passive and very, very loose. They would limp just about every hand. Against players like that, you have to play position and wait for the right spots. They will call raises with all kinds of goofy hands and push with second or even third pair. SO I get KK and raise the 5 limpers. Sure enough, two of them call. The flop comes 8-4-4. Player out of position overbets the pot by 2X's. I call in position. The turn brings a 9. He bets even bigger, I shove in and he calls. He tables A4...GG me. So I had to rebuy.

From there, I just couldn't really pick up many hands, and went to my small ball approach. Basically, I would raise a lot of hands from the hijack, cutoff and button, and look to catch some reads. If I got any resistance, I would shut down. So I kept my chips around 20,000, but couldn't seem to get anything going. Long story short, we get down to 3 handed and I'm the super small stack. I still have about 20,000 and the other two each have about 90-100,000. The loose idiot makes a move with QJ off out of position in a raised pot and went broke to the nut flush. So I'm now heads up with an 11:1 chip deficit.

I had caught a few reads on my opponent, and had some good opportunities to double through. The first one came down like this. I only have about 10 BB's left. He flat calls, I check in the BB. The flop comes K-10-8, giving me a 10 with no kicker. I check it to him and I catch the read I had on him. He bets the flop, and I check raise him all in. He calls and tables J9 for the straight draw. He gets no help and I double through. We play a few hands and I take a few pots down. I'm now sitting at about 45,000. I get AK and he flat calls on the button. The blinds are 1,000-2,000 with a 300 ante. I raise OOP to 7,000. He flat calls. The flop comes 10-8-4 with two clubs. I bet about 2/3 the pot, he flat calls. The turn brings a Queen. I check with the intention of calling, depending on his bet. He checks behind, very interesting. He was an aggressive player and would have bet just about any hand, except for a draw. He would have bet any pair, but with one card to come I think my read and double would have made him check a draw and hope to get there. The river brings another 8. I check it to him and he shoves all in. Holy ape shit. Again I had caught a few reads on him and went through the hand in my head. There really wasn't any kind of hand that made sense. I decided to go with my read and my instincts and called. He showed A9 suited for just a flush draw, and I doubled through again with AK high.

So we play for another hour and a half, and I slowly chip him down. I knew once I doubled through the first time that I had the advantage. So I ended up pushing him with small raises and cbets. If he played back, I would re-evaluate and either fold or look to get good pot/implied odds. The final hand was pretty standard. Button shove with Q8 off, and I called with A3 suited. No pairs hit and Ace high was good. Not a bad result, so I need to keep it up.

I have been watching a lot of videos on Poker VT. Boosted J's videos were kind of boring and he played really poorly, I thought. Hopefully his next videos will be better, because he is a good player and I was not impressed with the sessions he was putting together. JC Alvarado is a great cash game player. His videos were quite informative and impressive. But the coup de grats was Negreanu's Small Ball videos. By far worth the price of admission. I am going to go through and review them one more time. They are so great.

There's a few players blogs that I wonder why they took them down. Goldseraph and Jimmythehat19 I'm looking in your directions. I looked forward to reading your musings, rants, and bragaments. Wonder what happened to the "great" Jimmy. He didn't lack for confidence, but for some reason he took his blog down....hmmm.

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.

Don't Know What's Wrong

I have been writing e-mails and complaining for quite a while about not being able to get rakeback on my account. I finally get my wish and Full Tilt gives me rakeback, so what do I do? I haven't played a single hand since I got it. Go figure. I don't know what the hell my problem is right now. I'm just not motivated to play and have been reluctant to sit down and put in some volume. I can feel myself slowly getting back into grinder mode, so maybe taking a short break will be a good thing. So rakeback should start to help out a little, even if it just levels out some of the short term variance. I'm still playing at the same level, and am just a few buy-ins short of moving up. Again, if I take a shot at the next level and drop below 50 buy-ins at the previous level, I'll drop down and take another shot some other time. The brief session I did play at the higher session was productive, so I just need to stay TAG and keep my head in the game and read players well.

So poker is going great, outside of the lack of will to play right now. I got my check from Full Tilt last week and it hasn't bounced yet. So hopefully the checks will start to flow again. I just got the Harrington on Cash Games series, so I'll be reading that. I'm almost finished with Professional No-Limit Hold'em. So far it has been a great book. I really love how it has gone into aspects that other books really don't cover. It focuses more on the odds (pot, implied, tilt), SPR (stack to pot ratios), and other topics. It is more about the way to think through hands and about your opponents. It's not your typical, raise with XX in such and such position and how to play big hands or draws. Poker is so complex, yet so simple. Poker is a game that can make you decent amounts of money if you play pretty straightforward and mix up your game. It can make you ridiculous amounts of money if you can add exploiting your opponents and position to your game.

My plan is to finish the Harrington series, then get done with some of the books I have on reading players and the math behind the game. Then I will go through the books I have on Omaha and Seven Card Stud. Once I've finished all of these, I want to re-read all four Harrington books, Negreanu's Power Hold'em, and the Zen of Poker. So that is pretty much it for the poker front.

The wedding is coming along and only a month away. My fiancee and I talked about the reception and ceremony and such. We pretty much have everything planned and just need to get through the final details. I still have some things to get done. I do have a few secret projects and things I want to get done for the wedding. I want to get a photo slideshow together that she doesn't know about. It will feature pictures from us as kids to today. The best one is going to be the dance. I have a special song that really represents her, to me. We will have our first dance together, which we both agreed on. Then I want the DJ to announce to the crowd that I have requested this song for just her and I. So I have to coordinate with him to get that taken care of. We get fit for our suits this sunday, so other than that, all is well.

The job is going well. It sucks that to stay employed with the company, you have to join the union. But whatever. I'm not a big supporter of unions, especially for teachers and some segments that always seem to hijack production for wages. Boeing engineers and teachers are perfect examples of why unions are not what is in their best interests. The boeing employees threaten to strike every year. They get great compensation, and forget that the company needs to procure orders to maintain workforce. If the employees price themselves out of the market, it simply leads to layoffs and firings, usually the higher or more senior employees. Teachers unions protect horrible teachers and our school systems have way too many administrators.

Adminstrators are the ones that make all the money when you pass the levies. They might tell you that the kids need the money or the schools need to be refurbished. But a small percentage of that money goes to the kids or schools. My ex's parents were both administrators, and let me tell you, they both made over 100k a year. The average teacher makes about 45k a year. The administrator to teacher ratio is about 4:1 (T:A), you do the math. If we eliminated more administrators, we could hire more teachers, lower classroom sizes, and pay them more. But anywho. I'll get off my soapbox.

We need to get our priorities straight in this country. We need to value our money and our free time more. We need to stop paying athletes millions of dollars, and stop going to movies and paying actors millions to entertain us. We need to spend more time reading, instead of watching TV and movies. We need to spend more time with our kids, not just sitting with them in front of a TV. The average consumer has a lot of pull against the inequities of society. The only problem, is that one alone can't do it. It has to be a collective. We have to get together and decide what is important and what is not. If paying athletes $5 million a year to hit a baseball, or an actress $20 million for one movie is important, than keep doing what your doing. If making sure your kids have a great education and your neighborhoods are safe and clean, than we need to find a new solution. I can't wait for the new election cycle. HONESTLY, I don't think we could go wrong with either McCain or Obama.

I'm Such a Bad Player

I played incredibly bad tonight. I played about 1700 hands, and I'm down almost 3 buy-ins. I spewed pretty bad tonight. I kept running into passive, tight players and a ton of calling stations. For example, I raise in late position, first in the pot with A10. Guy behind calls. Flop comes 9 high, no flush draw and no straight draw. I cbet the flop about 2/3 the pot. He calls. Jack of diamonds on the turn, giving me a flush draw to go with ace high. I bet again, he calls again. The river brings a 10, I make a defensive bet, he calls one more time to show KJ off. UGH!!! It went that way most of the night.

During the first session, I ran like total ass. Way too aggro and way too spewy. I was leaking chips for the first hour. My hands never hit, and when I did get a big hand, some idiot would check raise with nothing. Here's another fun one. I have KK in the BB with the UTG making it 3X's to go. A shortstacking cockroach flat calls, leaving himself about 20 BB's. It comes to me, I raise more than the pot to isolate and get the shortstacker to committ. Sure enough, he pushes in and it's an easy call for 4 BB's. He flips QJ off, and hits two pair. GG me.

During the second session, I was running well and was slowly chipping up and was almost even. Then the wheels fell off and I ended up down for the second session as well. I get 55 in late position and the button raises. It felt like a squeeze from the button, so I flat call after the early limper calls. The flop comes 9-6-5, sweet. There's two clubs on board, and we both check to the button who makes a very small bet, around 1/3 the pot. The early player flat calls. I check raise, and sure enough, I run into the nuts. The early limper had 78 suited. The board blanks out and I lose my stack on a pretty dumb play. Sure there were a couple of hands he could have had, like J10 of clubs or two pair. But with the board coordinated, there were only a few hands I could beat. I should have been willing to take a card off and see what happens on the turn. There was really no reason why I needed to push with bottom set like that. But you have to live and learn.

The bankroll is at 56 buy-ins right now. I've been 6 tabling and lately I have been playing way too LAGish. I really need to buckle down and play position a lot better as well as get back to the small ball approach. I have run into so many bad players and calling stations, it's just sickening. Normally, I want those players at my table, they are the true ATM's. However, lately I just can't get my hands to hold against them. It doesn't matter if I'm a huge favorite or a slight dog, I just can't get a hand to hold or catch my draws with the right odds. Normally at the level I'm playing at, you can get players out with a simple cbet, sometimes you have to double barrel them. But today was quite different. Here's a tip. If you flop a strong hand and you have position, just check the flop on a benign board. Then bet the turn. If they have any pair, they will call you down or push on you. It's just amazing.

So I need to find the leaks in my game right now. Most of my losses have come from losing with big hands versus some very weak players who overvalue some very marginal hands in very marginal situations. So hopefully AK, AQ, QQ, JJ, KK, and 10's will hold for once. So here's a few things I need to work on before the next session.
1. I need to focus on 3 betting loose players IN POSITION.
2. Make better value bets with strong hands.
3. Stop overvaluing hands and thinking they are always bluffing.
4. Focus better at the table and trust your reads more.
5. Stop worrying about the money you are up or down. Just play and let the rest fix itself.
6. Work on your small ball approach and stealing blinds to set up plays later on.

So those are a few of the things I need to work on. I think today was just one of those downward spirals of variance. Hopefully tomorrow night will go much better than tonight. Time to get some sleep. GL.