Keeping a promise to myself to at least briefly update the blog after Sundays:

Everything considered, it was a pretty mediocre day, one of those "oh, they've got the extreme top end of their range this time" surprise-filled funfests that make you curse the concept of G-bucks. I ran pretty bad and didn't even play that well (blah), dropping a little under a grand all told. My only cash was in FTOPS, though, and I'm 3 for 3 in that series, which is always nice. (Annoying sidebar: the guy to my left for 2 hours was pretty bad, but is still in with 2 tables left as of this writing. Of course, I doubled him up from a ~10x stack on a pretty bad button vs. SB "2:1 call" that should really have been a fold because he had just enough chips to make it bad. Meh.)

Tomorrow is "video Monday", which basically means I've been slacking on my CR vids and have to finish up recording a couple of hours worth of replays for Cardrunners. I have a good tournament HH saved up for it - the FTOPS 6 max event - and it ought to make a good video, because I play a pretty nitty 6 max style that nobody really teaches but works very well in donkaments. The natural aggression in 6 max combines with tournament players to create people that don't know how to hand read but keep on betting for no apparent reason, which means all you have to do is to keep calling their bluffs down and you make moneys. Easy game (when they don't wind up with a full house at showdown, but really, who makes those?)

After that's done, I'm going to get this blog back to analyzing hands in some detail. It's been a while.

Since the AP thingamajig started, I've played very little and have gone on a very peculiar streak. On the one hand, I'm "almost" playing well - making deep run after deep run after deep run. Since early September, I've only played 72 online tournaments (lol @ calling myself a "pro" right now - this *is* changing with FTOPS season)...and cashed in 26 of them, a > 35% clip. Given these things pay 10%, that's insane and totally beyond the normal definition of "white hot". To put it another way, last year, I had a 2xx% ROI (return on investment), another white hot number, but only cashed something like 15% of the time!

The bad news - very little money to show for it. Oh, I've made some cash, but there are only a handful of final tables in here, and it's not because I'm folding into the money. The last two days pretty much cover it, along with the playing "almost" well part; out of 8 tournaments, I cashed in five and bubbled another, while managing to lose a couple of hundred bucks yesterday and winning about 1500 today. It's not the end of the world, but in that timeframe, I managed to get it all in with overpairs on raggedy boards for lots of chips four times and be behind all four times. That's just ugly, and it's made uglier by the fact that a couple of those were folds that I should normally make. Then, there are days like today, where I got a couple of lucky breaks to get very deep into the razzament only to go 0 for 3 with A247, A42, and A543 in a 20 minute span for big pots. You can lose one of those hands and still be in decent shape; I even managed to lose two and keep some chips. But to lose all three adds up to a 92/8 or so cooler that you can't possibly get out of in a limit game.

So, essentially, I'm mildly confused as to how I'm doing. On the one hand, it seems like I'm running white hot and playing well while, on occasion, making good reads and picking my spots very well. On the other, I also seem to have a case of "I have an overpair, time to stack off" syndrome and have left my ability to fold second best hands in big pots somewhere (this'd be better if the pots didn't get big *after* I don't fold them) along with a legitimate case of running bad late in events. This type of thing is pretty rare - nobody stays at a 35% ITM rate and doesn't make huge amounts of money for very long - so either I'm overdue for a month or two that makes me hate life, or I'm about to find myself a lot better at poker. I'll find out soon enough.