Thats a pretty good way to describe NL25 and small buyin tournies at Stars. "Get a feel for what its like to play full time" - what a stupid idea this is. The best way to describe a NL25 6max table is, two decent players, two loose-oassives, a weak tight and one guy who has read "be agressive" and thus thinks 64o is a good hand to threebet with...So THATS what you mean by threebet light! Anyhow I four tabled these for a good 5 hours and won close to 7 buyins - not worth it. I decided to take a break when the mailman came, and in addition to my spiffy lol donkaments shirt, I got a letter stating my company's liability insurance will no longer be covering condominium projects - which is especially handy considering we have two condo projects running right now. So awesome. I figure 4 in the afternoon is a little late to be calling insurance companies, so I took the alternative route - low buyin MTT's! Nothing quite like 2000-3000 fields to win $4,000 max. And since Stars has the Dolly Parton payout system, making the final table is worth about 5% of that - totally worth 3+ hours of dodging donk-bullets, right? Six games later, not a cash one. Apparently AJ is the Jesus hand, because if I shove QQ, KK, AK, etc and you hold AJ, youre sending me to the rail. That happened three times today. The only other great one was when the CO decided to throw in a decent raise, whilst I had a couple of kings in the BB. CO decided he wasnt going to put up with my resteal-from-the-bb horseshit, and he shoved his 85s FTW. And win he did, turning a shweeet flush.

Tomorrows goal - NOT this many hours, and no lowbuyinaments. I think maybe three hours of NL25 and one $109 will suffice.

Its going to be March soon. For me that means taking a stab at playing full time. I'll be playing NL25 during the day and tournaments at night. Why NL25? Because the players suck. And I suck less. Probably could get away with up to NL100, and Im rolled for it, but I'll take the NL stuff one step at a time. My outside interests pay my bills so if I dont make any money I wont feel too badly - well, I will but I'll be able to eat and stuff. I always wanted to know what it would be like to grind 30+ hours a week, so here we go. 4 tables should keep me busy, I hope.

Im not going to Viejas this weekend because my car is giving me fits. I drive a Chevy TrailBlazer and the drivers window doesnt roll down. It makes for awkward trips to the bank, and it really pisses me off, so it goes in the shop tomorrow. I think by about June I'll have a new car, not an SUV and definately not a Chevy. I have my eyes on a new Toyota Tacoma, maaaybe a Tundra if I find a used one that fits the bill.

So since I'll be at my computer quite a bit for the next 30 days or so, feel free to send me an IM - my screen name is thealphatheory1. We can talk strategy or whatever, Im not too particular.

Yawn...Boring end of the week. Tournaments didnt go so well, cash games went okay and I was up a little on the week. Im having a hell of a time getting money transfered and I have a couple grand sitting in limbo until my account is approved, which sucks. Tonight I played the $24+$2 $28,000gtd, which became $37k because of 1558 players. I was hella card dead for the first half hour but kept rolling nicely. AT<AJ and I got crippled pretty badly. I stuck around for 35th and a little payday of like $130...Lame. Oh well

Next week is a coaching week for me...I have a MTT coach working with me on Tuesday and sometime during the week I'll be working on limit 6max with another coach, my cash game of choice. Both coaches are winners and players that I trust, so hopefully we'll be able to plug my leaks.

And for the final piece of exciting news...I bought some Beyerdynamic DT770Pro headphones to use while playing. I have a set of Ultimate Ears SuperFi5's but they make my head hurt after a long period of use. These are really comfy and sound great too, so I'll use my UE's for my workouts.


So exciting....But I gotta go get some sleep now, so seeya at the tables.

PS if youre going to the Viejas next weekend for their little $100k deal, let me know!

What a long week its been. I think Ive played about 10-15 tournies, a couple of SNGs and like 40 hands of cash. Basically hit and ran in cash because a tourney started....Fornicated the canine in the SNGs, cashed a couple of them I think. Monday night/Tuesday morning I cashed in the $69+$5 $18,000gtd event, good enough for $2600 which was nice. I was considering withdrawing some to pay for my trip to Viejas for their $100k tourney but decided it wasnt neccessary. After that I played pretty shitty....I dont know why, I guess I didnt want to play or something. But I ended up donking out of a couple nice paying events and a few satellites. After that I requested my FTP account be locked for 24 hours so I could get away, clear my head, and come back fresh. In my 24 hours off I read and studied a ton, and watched all five of Matt Matros' videos from the $2600 buyin event at FTP. If you havent watched them yet, you need to get over to StoxPoker and check them out. I have played two events since then and cashed in both of them but the scores were pretty small, 50th out of 700-something players and 131st of 1339 players. I went out of the latter when I reraised all in with AKs and villain turned over AA. What can you do? I had QQ cracked by K10 earlier and it crippled me so I was pretty lucky to finish as high as I did. I got my money in great in most every situation and really felt like I played as well as anyone in the tourney, it just wasnt mine to win. Im stll reviewing all the hands I played, hopefully I can find some leaks and fix them.

I might play in the FTOPS main event this Sunday, I dont know. Thats a lot of money to throw at 6000 players, but when I play well I seem to run well so maybe I should go for it....Im going to study really hard in the next day, and I might not play any games from now til then. We'll see.