Couldn't grind $200 any longer.

The variance got the best of me and I couldn't grind $200 anymore and decided to play some $400 games. Fortunately it worked out and I'm up $2950 in 44 hours of play since re-posting again. It still feels like I'm playing well and running way under expectation. I kinda butchered the $5k challenge thing, but I'm going to continue to post to try and keep myself in line. Really focus and keeping a good hourly rate.

Frustrating game.

I've been going through a lot of swings, which is to be expected, but still very frustrating. I was up about $4k and have gone through a pretty ugly downswing and up $1250 after 10,500 hands running at 2.97bb/100. I've watched a couple videos and learned a few things, but overall do not plan on playing as tight as the guy plays. I've mixed it up between 4, 6, 8, and even 10 tabling. I've got money on UB now and plan on playing there a bit as well as stars and ft. I'm 26.5 hours into the little challenge and winning $47 an hour, which isn't a bad job to have at all so I'm going to keep that in mind and try not to beat myself up too much. I'm trying to play as aggressively as I can and trying to do as many things as I can to work on my red line but my aggression hasn't really been paying off and it's tough to stay aggressive when you keep getting punished, and it adds up much quicker playing fast. My all-in EV says I should be up around 4k but that doesn't tell the whole story so I'm not going to read too much into it. I have used it to try and force myself to focus and play aggressively but I'm still tempted to go back to playing nitty and pick spots well.

I think today I'm going to 4 to 6 table and play deeper then I usually do and buy-in for 200bb's and try to play aggressive. I know that I need to stay calm and really make sure not to tilt as that will be that much more costly. Hope today goes better and GL me.

Tough start, good finish.

I decided to play a much more aggressive style than I'm accustomed to. I played 35/22/4 with a steal of 49 and a cbet of 65. I ended up losing about $60 in 881 hands and got pretty discouraged about 700 hands into it when I was stuck about $850. I knew I was wrapping my session up at midnight and decided to continue playing like I was and to evaluate after and fortunately made a nice comeback.

After looking at the pots played where I won or lost $100 I've noticed some mistakes. I think I try and take into account overall equity when facing a 3 bet and need to take into account more what hands flop well enough to account for that equity, pretty much meaning no danglers. Also, I really need to make sure to not call 3 bets OOP.

One other thing to note was that I was in the positive with my red line and that my all-in equity had me winner for the session so I'm going to try and continue this aggressive style.

Working on my game.

Blogs are great for helping you stick to the goals/plans/ideas you have so it's time for me to start blogging again. I've pretty much been playing all PLO for the past few months and I'm going to stick with that. As to the goals/plans/ideas I have, well I haven't really thought much about it but that is what this is for. I just used 100k FPP's on stars and bought the $1,500 bonus so I'm going to plan there until I unlock the bonus. I'll be spending the majority of my playing time on fulltilt after that because they have cap and ante games and stars doesn't. I'm going to play $200 until I win 25 buyins and get a feel for how many hours/hands that takes and then most likely play $400 and $600 for that many hands and try to make more then I did while playing $200. There is so much volatility to PLO that hopefully I won't get to emotional over and will just use that as motivation to play my best. I'm going to try and stick to playing 6 tables and 8 if I decided to add a full-ring game or two, as well as really focusing on making sure I'm playing in good games. There are so many tables going that it would be a huge error in judgement not to do this. I can't promise that I'll stick to it, but I need to try and not forget it. I joined bluefirepoker to watch Phil Galfonds videos so I need to make sure I'm watching/studying the videos on a regular basis.

What else...well some rough timelines for how long it will take to win $5k/25 buyins...I'm expecting it to take between 70-80 hours if I win at a rate of over 4bb/100 which I definitely expect to do if I'm game selecting and playing my A game. Again, there is so much volatility to PLO that I'm going to try and not put too much stock into it and just use it as motivation to play well. One last note, I'm going to try and blog about productive things and not complain or post about things that aren't productive to improving my game/life.

More fun PLO swings.

I'm still getting over some crazy flu bug which has been pretty brutal. I last wrote how I was sick for a few days but was feeling well enough to try and play. It didn't work out to well. I ended up losing about $1500 and on top of that I ended up getting sicker than I was the day before. I was fortunate to get it all back and then some during today's session. I ended up winning $2800 in PLO playing from $100 up to $600. I also played a $109 NL Turbo and a $55 PLO and got 3rd in the PLO but only cashed for like $350 because it had about 50 players in it. I had the chip lead 3 handed and pretty much got screwed to finish 3rd. To top it all off I cleared a $650 stars bonus. All told it has been about a 4k day. Much, much needed.

I haven't given up blogging already.

I've been sick and bed ridden the past 4 or 5 days and haven't played any poker at all. I dunno what I had but I'm still not fully over it. It really doesn't matter, but I would guess it was some minor form of bronchitis. It was like there was just the right amount of fluid in my lungs to annoy me, but not enough to where I was scared for my health. I slept maybe 60 hours the past 4 days and probably the longest stretch without waking up was maybe 4 hours.

I really don't have all that much that I want to say, but I will admit that I'm not as mentally sharp as I would like to be when starting a session, but I'm going to give it a go. I guess I'll set some parameters for the day and really focus on sticking to what I say I'm going to do.

1) I'd like to play 8 tables so that I can reach the 50,000 hands as fast as possible. If i lose 2 buy-ins during my first 500-1000 hands, I'll jump down to 6 tables.

2) I'm going to focusing on playing tighter pre and post flop to begin my session because I've not played a in a few days.

3) If I lose 5 buy-ins then I'm done for the day.

Time to grind.

Trying to fix my leaks.

I, like everyone else, have plenty of leaks that I'd like to fix. I've let plenty of mine get out of control and I'm putting an honest effort to try and plug as many of them as possible. In poker, and in life. The past two weeks has gone alright. I'm up about $4,000 which is nothing to complain about, but I feel like I should be doing better. I haven't stuck to playing $200 PLO like I planned on doing and have been 'parlaying' my winning days trying to break out and have a big month. It's ok to do that every now and then, I suppose, but I'm going to settle down for a while.

I was having a pretty solid day and was up around $1400 or so playing PLO and saw a $10/20 PLO full-ring game that looked pretty good so I sat in. I had this pretty little peach happen not to long into the session http://www.pokerhand.org/?4399080. Talk about a buzz kill. I decided no more 'parlays' for a while and I plan on grinding out the smaller games for a while and play in some stress free, low variance games.

I've been focusing on fixing leaks outside of poker and it will definitely transition into leaks being fixed in my poker game. I've had a pretty horrible procrastination problem my entire life so I decided to pick up a book on time management to help me. I haven't gotten that far into the book but the little bit that I've read has been helpful so far. It's pretty much stuff that seems like common sense after you read it, but having it fresh on your mind keeps you on track and in the right direction.

I've logged just under 20,000 hands at $100 PLO and have had good results and relatively little swings/stress so I'm just going to take it easy for the next week or so and try and get to 50,000 hands and see what rate I end up at. I should be able to grind out a few thousand and work on my game at the same time. Yea, its a bruise to my ego stepping down but who cares? If I can beat it for $40 - 70 an hour is it really THAT bad? That is more then I need anyway.

I've also decided that I'm not spending enough time away from the tables working on my game so starting tomorrow I'm going to spend at least 10 hours a week thinking about the game away from the tables. A modest amount, but it's a start. I'm going to count blogging toward those hours so I should be updating this regularly. I'm hesitant to post some pics of my stats thus far because of the atrocious downswing I went on after posting screen shots from a few blogs back but oh well.



I just realized my VPIP and PFR were higher in Full-ring then 6 max. LOL I don't think that is how it's suppose to work, but I'm not gonna complain.