Crack Poker

Just a quick update to say that my wife's surgery went well and she's feeling better every day. It took her a little longer than we expected to recover but she seems to be getting closer to 100% now. It was pretty tough going there for about a week with her being unable to lift or hold the baby. She had different friends here with here each day after the 1st day (when I stayed home) since I had to return to work. I was then responsible for all the evening/overnight duties. Very tiring to say the least.

I actually ended up postponing the session with mpethybridge because she just didn't feel well enough on Saturday for me to leave her alone for 5 hours. I look forward to rescheduling it very soon. God knows I need it.

As far as poker goes everything was going well until Full Tilt unleashed crack poker upon the world this past Tuesday. It's very much like a drug in that I can't get enough even though I know it's not good for me. I've dropped many buy-ins sitting at the crack tables and I didn't even mind because it made me feel good. Just needed to see 1 more hand, to hold AA (and have them cracked) 1 more time, to be set-mined OOP in a 3bet pot yet again. I just needed more. Quick fold. Quick fold. Raise. 3bet. Quick fold. The buy-ins blurred by so quickly. I was losing AND having fun. But I think I'm on the mend now. No more crack poker for me. Honest. Well maybe just 1 more hit!

Funny How Something So Small Can Cause So Many Problems

Poker is going well. Winning a little and play decently. I have scheduled a stats analysis session with mpethybridge from 2p2 on Saturday. Supposedly this guy knows his shit when it comes to finding leaks (not that a blind man couldn't find mine) so I'm excited to here what he has to say. My guess is that he'll look around at my stats for a minute or two, tell me to stop being such a spewtard and take my money, but we'll see.

In other news, my wife is going in tomorrow to have her gall bladder removed (hence that horror show of a pic at the top). She had gall stones (again see the pic) and they're causing her fits of pain. It first cropped up the Sunday after Christmas when she woke me up at 4:30 AM complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath! Scary shit right? So I called the ambulance and they took her to the hospital, gave her nitroglycerin (which helped), and ran a litany of tests (cardiac enzymes, cat scan, stress test) to rule out heart problems. After being in the hospital for 24 hours or so they said it was probably an esophageal contraction and that it would likely never happen again, no worries.

All was fine until this past Wednesday evening when the exact same thing happened. Again I called the ambulance (fast entry to the emergency room and I can wait for someone to sit with Harlan before going in). Again they gave her nitro and again they wanted to run the same basic tests. This time however my wife mentioned her gall bladder to the Doc (someone had asked her if they checked it the previous time) and though he was skeptical he said it wouldn't hurt to check. Fast forward 5 hours and they're releasing her with orders to consult with a surgeon the following day, they had found the stone and the gall bladder needed to come out. So that leaves us where we are right now with her surgery scheduled for 11:30 today. I'll be staying home with the boy and her mom is going with her. If all goes well it will be an outpatient deal and she'll be home early tomorrow afternoon. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, that's it. I'll update her condition next time.

I'm Back Bitches!

Yeah, you read it right, I'm back. Since my last post I had my son, plenty of pics of him at His Blog if you're interested. He was born a month early and spent 12 days in the NICU but he's great now and growing like a weed (18 lbs. at the Dr's office today).

I'm just now getting back into playing any real amount of poker (12K hands so far this month). I think from the time he was born (Oct. 6th) through the end of the year I played ~25K hands. It just seemed like there was always something else to do or that he needed to be fed/held/changed/whatever. Don't get me wrong I'd never trade any time with him for a few thousand hands but it really did put a slow down on my pokery time.

So what's changed? Well he's sleeping a little better now so I have some time to play when he's down. So I've been taking advantage and actually putting in longish sessions for me (2-3 hrs per). I think a lot of it springs from reading LeatherAss's book "Treat Your Poker Like A Business". It's really quite good at the motivational type stuff.

I also made the jump back up to 100nl FR this month. As many of you know I've been attempting this move for WAY too long now (50>100>50>100 repeat until your head spins). I'd been dicking around at 50HUNL in December and toyed with the idea of playing that through the start of the year but despite winning at a pretty huge rate the swings were brutal and I just didn't think I wanted to subject my fragile little brain to that (I'll leave the HU to eNTy's fragile little brain). So when I decided to go back to FR I figured it was time for another 100nl shot. So far it's been OK. I've won a couple hundred despite taking some beats (8 BI's below AIEV whatever that's worth). Biggest thing is that so far I've managed to play without tilting too badly. So no super spew just yet but when I do I'll be sure to post it here.

Well that's it for now. If anyone's still out there I'll be back to posting at least semi regularly now. I'm never going to be an every day blogger but I might try to put some random crap up at least once a week.

Oh yeah, I have no idea about the video at the top but it was the 1st thing that came up when I did a search for this post's title.

It's a.........

Went to the Dr. for my wife's 20 week ultrasound earlier today. You know the one where if baby cooperates they can determine the sex. Well I'm happy to say that baby cooperated (mostly) and it's a boy.

I'm pretty excited and watching him roll around and give the tech a hard time was great fun. Can't wait to meet him in early Nov.

PS - I'd post the ultrasound pics but I'm afraid eNTy would use them in one of his fetus fetish posts. Damn weirdo waffle-eaters!

As for poker, we the last 2 days have sucked but whatever. Life's GREAT!

Pokery Update and Other News

Well let's see it's been 2 months so I guess a big recap is in order.

March was basically spent entirely at 50nl and ended up being decent. I won at 5BB/100 but only got in ~14K hands. Still it was a solid winning month and I hadn't really been having those so very positive.

Unfortunately April didn't see the trend continue. Well I did end up for the month overall (barely) my graph for April basically looked like this, V. It was an interesting month because I decided to start the month playing 6-max. The problem is that I ABSOLUTELY SUCK AT 6-MAX!!!! After I realized this and moved back to FR 50nl I won at a little less than 5BB/100 and recovered my loses for the month.

I guess the FR parts my past 2 months led into the perfect storm that has been May thus far. I started the month with a fairly small BR because I cashed out (via transfers to friends) about $1200 to pay for my WVU football tickets. In the 17 days I have played since I have more than doubled my BR! I began the month at 50nl and won at 13BB/100 for 5K hands. I also started staking KingCurtis from CC at the beginning of the month and he had a big cash to pad my roll by about $180 so far. Anyway after 1 week of play I was rolled to take yet another shot at 100nl. Predictably it started a little down when my first 2 sessions I lost 2 buy-ins but then things turned around in a HUGE way. On the month I have played 9K hands at 100nl and I'm winning at 9BB/100 (including a 7BI downswing in the middle). It's been pretty sick. I'm running better than expected in all-in pots (about 2 BIs better) and I just think I'm playing better poker than I have for a long time. I'm seeing lines, making great reads and more important than anything else I've stopped tilting my $$ away!

To help with the tiling, I've been following the breathing techniques espoused by Tommy Angelo and Jared Tendler. I've started reading books on meditation and practicing it away from the tables. I'm trying to play (and live) in the moment and focus completely on whatever it is that I am doing at the moment. Being able to instantly forget (or clear) a bad beat, or even more importantly for me a bad play, has made a huge improvement in my game. Taking control of my breath is what's helping me to return to the moment and concentrate fully on the hand I am currently playing. I know it sounds like hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo but it works for me, so I don't care. It's also helping me to play longer sessions and at the same time quit just at the time when I'm no longer able to play my best. It's a really great feeling.

And now with all that out of the way, I come to the biggest news of all; I'm going to be a Dad!!! My wife of 10 years, as of a few days ago, and I have been trying for years. We've (well mostly she's) gone through fertility treatments and we were getting set to pay serious $$ for invetro-fertilization when she got pregnant the old fashion way! I like to tell people that I actually got to be in the room during the conception because we just didn't think that was possible. It's such a great feeling and I'm so excited to be a Dad. She's due in early November (she's about 15 weeks in) and so far she's doing great.

Well there it is, a great (big) update. Things are really great at the moment and that's all I can ask for.

See you in a couple months???

Hey, Anybody Here?

Wow, looks like it's been a while. I'm still around. Still playing poker. Still doing dumb things. Only thing that's different is that I stopped updating this blog. Well I guess technically this post means that I haven't stopped, I've just slowed WAYYYYY dawn!

Anyway, there be no further BR or goals type posts here. Just random hands,a few stray thoughts, and maybe a life update or two.

The purpose of this update to to post a video I did about a week ago and posted to blip.tv. It runs about 45 minutes and it's only 2 tables so it's rather boring but enough of me trying to sell it. :)

Please feel free to comment here or in the CC thread I started for the vid.

Running With The Devil

No, not the Van Halen song, I'm referring to my current dalliance with 6-max pokers! I know, I know, I vowed to never go back because the variance and tilt inducing suckouts were too much for my fragile brain. So what made me change my mind? The Charlie Daniels Band! You see I was listening to The Devil Went Down to Georgia a few weeks ago and I realized that the Devil (is it proper to capitalize Devil like you do with God?) is beatable and the reward for beating the Devil is a golden fiddle! Now since I don't play the fiddle, I'll have to sell it but I figure I can get a good price for it by sending it to Cash4Gold! So beating the Devil has become my new goal.

In addition to the golden fiddle I realized that most of the players at 50nl 6-max are horrible AND 6-max seems to have virtually zero short-stackers (short-stackers are the current plague of FR poker IMO). An example from earlier tonight:


Note that the shortest stack is 70bbs deep and we're able to get the villain to put ~120bbs into the middle with TPNK. This craziness of course leads to some sick variance but I think the overall horrible play should make 6-max more profitable overall especially since I was never able to play more than 8 tables of FR anyway.

Anyway, only 5500 hands at 6max so far, but I'm running at a respectable 5.7BB/100 thus far. We'll see how it plays out over a larger sample. Oh yeah, and for all you young children who have no idea who The Charlie Daniels Band is, here's your YouTube video.