I just want to say that October was meh... It was lots better than September, but only 1/3 as good as August. I had a good turn around at the end of the month with my trip to the Horseshoe - Bossier City. Mostly that trip offset this trip, Return to the Shoe, but I still ended up positive for the month in live play.

My online play was still solid, my win rate has been running around 10BB/100 Hands, but I'm only playing 4 to 5k hands a month. I've got to get my quantity up to really start making some money.

I played a few tourneys online, guaranteed money down the tube since I don't play them except very sparatically.

My numbers for October look like this:
Live Ring $1/3NL: +$170
1 MTT: ($11)
PLO ($10)
SNGs ($12)
Online Ring +$496

Net = +$633.00

My chart is off once again due to Dogwatch, but it looks like this:


November Goals:
PLAY MORE HANDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, November has started off well, I'm up $181 after my first session. I've added one table of AP to my usual 3 on Bodog. If Bodog allowed more, I'd be playing 'em all there, but they don't so I'm having to venture out. Don't worry, I didn't make a deposit onto AP, they gave me $10 to come back and I've turned it into a seedling of a roll there. I'm not practicing bankroll management on AP because I'm just not going to play $10NL. It's currently at $106 as of last night and $25NL is as small as I'll play w/ it. Eventually I'm going to add more and more AP tables, but I think Bodog with it's high win rate will remain my bread and butter site.

Good luck all, may you run goot!

Rules of Engagement

For all of my loyal fans out there who check my blog every day hoping to get a line or two from me, =) sorry that I haven't written in a while but it's the end of the quarter and it's crunch time at work, we've also had lots of stuff going on at church, so I have been uber busy and have taken any spare time that I have to actually play poker instead of write about it. (Wow, that's a long sentence.)

I want to talk about managing when you play poker to optimize your win rate and minimize your losing sessions. I really feel that the players who can better manage themselves will end up making more money at poker and that they'll be the ones who are still around 10 or 20 years from now.

Everyone has his or her own quirks as far as what works best for them concerning optimal playing times. For me, I know that I play bad when I'm tired or rushed. On my trip to Biloxi, MS earlier this month, I was coming off a bout with strep throat. I was still on anti-biotics from the weekend before and wasn't fully recovered. I
figured that a few days of recovery would have allowed me to think clearly enough to play poker profitably. Boy was I wrong. Looking back, I now attribute 50% of my losses to mental fatigue and just plain not feeling up to doing the work of playing good poker. Sure my cards ran bad, that's the down side of variance, but I believe that my losses would have been a lot less if I would have been on top of my game that weekend. This fatigue carried through the next week as I proceeded to go through the biggest downswing of my life, which bottomed out at 10 buyins.

Another area that leaves me feeling tired and doesn't allow me to play at my best is playing poker after sex. I've paid the stupid tax on this lesson at least 2x already, and Saturday night, I tried my luck at it again. I guess that I thought that I had gotten good enough at poker to over come this weakness. I had cut my 10
buy in down swing in half for this month and was on the road to getting it all back when I found myself in a "Right Moment" with my wife. Once the action was over, I decided to do my next favorite activity and play some poker. Boy, what a bad idea that was, I proceeded to drop 2.5 buyins in the course of about 3 hours. I stayed up much too late and played way too long and I paid the penalty for it! I can honestly say that I have never paid for sex, but it has for sure cost me plenty of money!

I've also found that I don't play well when I'm on a time crunch. Situations of "Oh, I've got an hour before I have to be at so & so" are just not the right time to play. I've found that I make hurried calls and take the razor thin edges that are better left unplayed.

I also don't prefer to play at LAG tables where everyone is floating and calling down light. I like to be at semi-educated tables where the players have read enough Skylansky material to fold much too often. I'm not a chronic bluffer, but I do prefer heads up pots against people that I can predict what they are going to do. When I am getting floated and called down w/ 2nd pair or worse, I just need to get up and find another table.

So, what I'm going to do is reiterate to all of my loyal blog readers what my guidelines are for being at my peak when I play cards. This is mostly for my benefit, but I'm going to share it w/ you guys just so that you can help keep me accountable.

1. Don't play when I'm tired, this includes after sex, when I'm short on sleep, and after a very stressful day at work.
2. Don't play when time is an issue. This includes when my wife is pestering me and when I have to be somewhere in a short period of time.
3. Don't play at wild tables. The discipline to get up from these tables should add at least 1BB/100 Hands to my bottom line.

For the month so far, I am up ~$200 online and haven't been back to the casino for some live action since my Biloxi debacle. I was up ~$500 online prior to Saturday night and also lost $170 on Monday afternoon during a time crunched session. Combined, I'm at ~($870) for the month, and would have been half way into that Biloxi loss if I would not have broken my first two rules.

Update as of 10pm, I picked up about $50 tonight in a 2 hour session. It's not much but it's another win!

LL79

I just wanted to report in about what my best month ever looked like:



+$690 at online full ring cash games
+$725 at live $200NL at the Horseshoe-Bossier City
+$160 in MTT sharing
-$100 in Insurance
-$25 at online Omaha 8
+$200 in Home Games

Total profit of $1,650.00
This breaks down into $26/hr total
Online win rate was 31BB/100 Hands

I know this isn't Balla or anything, but Brian Townsend once played $50NL too!

In Retrospect:
Going busto on Full Tilt was the best thing that could have happened to me. It got me to quit playing $10NL and got me back on Bodog where I ended the month playing $100NL.

My live cash game is really going good right now. My game fundamentals are getting stronger coupled with the research and reading that I have done in the past concerning tells, I feel that I am really on top of my game.

Insurance is getting costly, I'm out $250 so far in the 2 months that this experiment has started. I have been running very goot though, so I might make up the difference when things turn south.

My boy BJJIII is a new dad and w/ the pregnancy and birth out of the way, I hope that he can now rejoin me on the felt, he's been missed.

Going Forward:
I'll be in Biloxi, MS for the Gulf Coast Poker Championship next weekend. I'll be playing cash games exclusively so don't even entertain the thought that I might come back with a "I Luckboxed my way into a win at a $10,000 buyin WPT event" blog.

I just got Professional No Limit in from Amazon.com, I hope to have it read quickly so that I can start it again to really get the meat out of it.

I'm hoping that my reduced time spent at home games will allow me to make more trips to the Horseshoe- Bossier City . I don't know if the wife will let this float, but if things keep going like this for a while, I don't see how or why she would try to keep me from it.

Just a quick update. My wife was out of town last week, so I got a lot of card playing in, including a trip to the casino which I'll write about tomorrow at work! =) I'm just gonna throw in a quick line about Stud 8 that I played today while relaxing and taking a break from the NLHE grind.

I'm no genius at stud 8, but the play seems really bad online. I might invest in a book or two for the game (if someone could recommend something) because the players are just chasing rediculous stuff with no pot odds and no real draws. They're chasing bad lows in heads up pots and generally just blowing money. Like I said, I'm not very good at the game, but I've read Super System 1 and try to stick to those guidelines. I love the freerolling part of the game when you make the nut low or a really strong high hand and are just blasting a three way pot, then you end up scooping the whole thing when they miss their low draws or you complete the wheel on the river.

I played about 40 minutes today and picked up $9.15 after scooping two big pots and chopping a few more small ones. I love that game, I guess because you can play it very mechanically and still do well at it. So, chalk me up for one buyin recovered on FT!
Landlord79- Shreveport trip report soon, I promise!

Bankroll update!!

I know it’s been a while since I have posted about my Full Tilt bankroll building process, so I’m gonna try to get everyone up to date on where I’m at.

After running my roll up to $91+, I decided to take a single table shot at 25NL to try jump starting things. The cards ran really bad and I was folding my life away so I opened a 10NL table just to help keep me occupied. Two tables still wasn’t enough and the cards were still running cold, so I opened a 3rd table. Things never turned to the good for the night and I ended up dropping over $30 on the night.

Good fortune came my way in the form of a new poker friend during the last week or so. We discussed strategies and theories and traded some hands for reviewing. Despite running 19/8/2 ish, my new poker pal informed me that I was still playing weak tight. OUCH!! He referred me to an article concerning 6 max tables that talked about what hands this winning player was raising with preflop. It also talked about maximizing position, which I found at Full Tilt is a very profitable tool. I’ve played on other sites where everyone was just a calling station and position is less of a tool, but to me, the players at Full Tilt are much better, which means that since they are thinking about more than their own cards, they’re game psychology is more exploitable.

So with my newly found aggression techniques, I started back at the 10NL tables. I am getting a lot more comfortable playing 4 tables at once. I’m able to remember who has done what and what position they were in better than I was during my first few 4 tabling sessions. I find that there is always something going on with 4 tables rolling and very soon I hope to move to 5 tables, though I may need another monitor to make it work right.

The session immediately following the coaching that I received turned out to be a great one for me. $17 isn’t great in the whole scheme of things, but to the fledgling Full Tilt bankroll that I have and coming off the 30% loss that I had just absorbed, $17 is quite a nice score! The session in between then and now have been slightly break even to losing, but they are small loses that I expect as I flesh this newer, more aggressive style out.

My stats have “improved” to 22/11/3ish, so I am happy with them and my bankroll is back up to $78. Still nothing superb as far as dollars go, but this is the beginning of one long session of cards! If all goes well, it should be a life-long session.


Week of 5-27-07

I had a horrible night of cards, 40% was a mix of over-aggression and variance, and 60% was one hand that I played really badly with a very deep (2 buy in) stack against an opponent who I barely had covered. To cut the bad hand down to a short version, I slowplayed trip aces on the flop w/ my A-Q, made a pretty decent raise on the turn when a LAG donked into me, and raised a river bet that I had no business raising. It was quite a bad hand and I’ll say only a few things about it, if you reopen the betting on the river, you had better be holding the goods. I’m not saying that you need to be holding the nutz every time, that would be too predictable, but if you have your opponent’s hand down to a tight range and your hand is significantly better than his range, then you can raise the river and reopen the betting. If you don’t have a very strong hand versus your opponents range, it’s better to just call the river, but exposing your deep stack to very large loss by raising on the river is just silly. When deep-stacked in cash games, it becomes more important to protect your stack than to protect your hand.

My roll on FT stands at $48.15 after dropping three buyins on this horrible night.

BJJIII and I did make a trip to the casino this weekend and will be posting some session reviews from that within the coming week.