Today is my last day in Vegas and so far I've really enjoyed my trip. Yesterday I was playing 1/2 at the Venetian with my CR hoodie on (it's freezing there ...) and this young guy asks if I work for CardRunners. I said yes and he asked if I'm verneer. I thought "nicely deduced sir" as who else is going to be playing 1/2 live from our instructors? After that we just started chatting and it turns out he plays 1/2 a lot and lives in Vegas. He was super nice and I enjoyed talking to him about the differences in live play vs. online play - a topic that I've been struggling with a lot as you can tell from my last blog post.

Anyhow - he agreed to sweat me the next day and the following hand came up (After which I found out about the "one player, one hand" rule where I technically cannot ask for advice during a hand). But anyhow - here is the hand:

Six limpers ahead of me and I'm in the big blind with Ad Kh. I make it $17 total and get three calls. The UTG player who looks like Captain Morgan (mullet, goatee, leather jacket, weathered skin, and pirate eyes) is very loose and is a station. The MP player looks is in his early 30s, has shown down only good hands so far. He is a bit on the chubby side, has a goatee as well, and is wearing very casual clothes (T-shirt, khaki shorts) – sort of like a Kevin Smith with shorter brown hair. The button is a woman in her later 40’s or early 50’s who has a cigarette behind her ear who looks like Sally Field. So that’s the crew that goes to the flop with me.

Flop: Ks 5s 9h

This seems like a good flop for me and I lead for $40 into it. All three players call and obviously I’m not feeling great about my hand at this point. It doesn’t seem like anyone is super strong (two pair or better) as I would expect them to raise this flop.
The turn is the 8h.

To me this is a pretty big blank as I put one of the people on a flush draw, another on a weaker king, and not really sure what the other person has. The only hand I can think that this helps is 67 or 89. My gut here is to bet again to protect my hand, but Zach (the guy who is sweating me), looks really worried and advises a check. I'm all for not overplaying a one-pair type hand, but the 8h seems just so innocuous. Begrudgingly I check as we are in his domain of expertise.
Captain Morgan checks, Kevin Smith checks, and the Sally Field bets $70. I hate life and fold. Both Captain Morgan and Kevin Smith call and suddenly I feel much better about my fold.
River is the 9s.
Captain Morgan moves in for his last $100 (arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!), Kevin Smith shows JhTh and folds while Sally Field sighs and grimaces for about 30 seconds and ends up calling. Captain Morgan proudly flips over 4s 2s and I am already feeling sorry for the cigarette behind her ear which I know is about to get some serious action. She ended up having 67 for the turned straight and leaves to get more money. When she comes back she’s got two cigarettes – one for each ear and is ready to do some serious tilting.

That said, it’s amazing how much the 8h helped two people at the table – a card that in my mind would have seemed for the most part like a blank.

I am horrible at live poker. I've played at the Rio, Wynn, and Stratosphere (within walking distance of The Sky where I'm staying) and am down for the trip so far. Granted it's over only three hours, but I just feel out of my element. Maybe it's the pace (I get bored of all the folding) and maybe it's the variance - I don't know.

So ... for those of you that play live. What advice can you give me? How loose/tight should I play in general? Obviously as the stacks go deeper and the number of people in the pot continues to go up, I should loosen up, but what about opening standards?

Meh ... here is to turning it around.

As I blogged earlier, I was so tilted I had to quit twice while playing today, but overall had a good day which brings me up to 46% of my 100NL HU goal:



I've come a LONG way since my tilt days and have to give a lot of credit to Tommy Angelo. These days, I think a lot more about how to reduce my C-game than how to improve my A-game. Tommy is putting out a 8-episode series on deuces cracked which I'm really enjoying. Because of Tommy I handle beats better, can quit sooner, and am simply a better player.

I've downloaded all three episodes and will plan to listen to them again on the way to Vegas. Speaking of which - my friend PrincessDonk is in the money in the ladies event. I've been following her but the updates at the official site have not been very good. I told her that she needs Twitter but alas - nothing yet.

But ... back to tilt and poker. After I took one of the beats and decided I was going to stop, I went downstairs, packed the dishwasher, folded laundry, and realized I was just tired in general. It was around 2:00 p.m. and I've been up since around 6:00. I decided that a nap would be really good and so I went and laid down in my bed. Even though I was really tired, poker was just racing through my head and there was no way I was going to fall asleep.

Rewind back a few days. I played a morning session and then I took my dogs (2 of them) and friends dogs (3 of them) to a park. We were the only ones there, I let them all off the leash, and watched them go crazy and run around. I walked for about 15 minutes (most of them were within eyesight for that whole time) and finally found a bench in the shade to sit. Pretty soon all of them made their way there and just crashed. A petted a few of them for a while and then headed back. By the time I got home, I laid down, realized how empty my head/thoughts were, and was able to put in an awesome nap.

I woke up feeling amazing and put in a great session playing my A-game. Only today when I tried to take a nap did I realize just how great these dogs were for eliminating my tension, stress, and negative energy. For those of you that have dogs, you gotta know the feeling of coming home stressed and seeing a dog wagging it's tail and being all excited over the fact that you are there.

My two dogs (especially my little one) are massively +EV for my poker game. I always knew that spending time with my dogs made me really happy, but the direct link between that and getting off my C-game back to my A-game didn't hit me until today.

My goal was to win 100 BI's at 100NL HU. Initially I wanted to make it 100BI's in 30 days, but since I will be traveling to Vegas, I doubt I will get the time to play there enough to make that possible. Katy and I will also be traveling to Austin to visit some of her family (as all my family other than my mom and dad lives in Poland), so I won't be able to play for around a week then either. Thus, I don't have a timeframe for this, but so far, so good.

I still play really badly against players that 3-bet me a lot so I tend to avoid them unless I specifically decide to play against them to practice. I have seen a few videos which deal with this type of monkey (30% 3-bet), but I would love to see some of the better players show adjustments.

My other area where I'm struggling is by paying people off waaaay to light. I can think of hundreds of dollars that I could have if this wasn't the case. That's definitely something to work on.

Finally, I've been talking a lot of poker with two friends - one who plays 200NL HU and one who plays 100NL HU. Both are pretty big (8 bb/100+) winners at their stakes, and it definitely helps my own game to sweat them, have them sweat me, and just talk poker in general. For anyone out there who wants to improve, talking to people that play the same stakes/site that you do is so +EV if your personalities don't clash.

Still doing solid:



It's pretty amazing how good some of the games have been. I going to take today off and work on some CardRunners related stuff, watch some videos that people have submitted to me, and help a friend move.

Given the real estate market (it's a buyer's one for the most part), I've started looking into some houses for sale in pretty good neighborhoods, fixing whatever needs fixing and updating, and trying to re-sell it. I'm going to figure out how much of a loan I can get, how much cash I need, and what kind of deals are available for that. I always felt real-estate is a good investment if you know what you are doing so this might be a good opportunity for me to dabble in it.

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Pawel Nazarewicz (Verneer) is a guest pro at Cardrunners.com. Visit cardrunners and sign up for their industry-leading coaching videos.