I would be lying if I said that in my bad slide I was playing perfectly. I was tilting a bit and some of my play definitely reflected that. After going through the hands, I am convinced it was mostly due to a bad run. There were 2 hands in there that I lost to river 2 outers that were a combined $600 pots (hand 1, hand 2). There was also a handful of hands where I flopped either a set, a straight or a flush only to get 50% of my stack in before the river only to lose to straights, flushes or full houses on the river. And yes, I paid off. Sometimes when you are in cooler situation after cooler situation, it gets hard to get away from those. See Daniel Negreanu on, well, any season of High Stakes Poker.

Here’s what the month ended up looking like.

It really wasn’t that bad overall, though. After rake back and some small tournament cashes, I only lost about $100. While the bad run really tilted me, when I reflect on it as a whole, it could have been a lot worse. I had 3 months last year with worse results. 2 of them where I lost more than $1000 overall and still ended the year up like $10k*.

Last year, my stake started around May so hopefully I can duplicate those results again over the next 7 months. I’m not starting out awesome. I decided to take a break from NLHE since I was running so bad and I do think it was affecting me mentally. So what did I do? I played some PLO. I’ve now started out the gate of this month with a steep dowslide. PLO is the Murphy’s Law of poker games. If there is a bad card that can come on the turn, rest assured it will come. Actually, I’m up slightly on the only game I’ve played any significant hands, but down overall. I don’t want to make it 2 losing months in a row, so gonna work on that over the next week.

For personal stuff, it’s been a typical end of the school year for the most part. Been just super busy with a lot of stuff going on. We have basically birthday season coming up with 4 of the kids having their birthdays between now and the end of August. We had Zoe’s party yesterday and today is spent recovering from that which consists of cleaning, dealing with tired/crabby kids and then more cleaning.

There are a couple of unique situations this year, though. For one, almost all of the kids have been sick over the last week (plus a couple of days). The only one who has avoided it has been Clayton. The second one is I have a new job that I will be starting next month. I won’t go into too much detail on it until I start it, but I am looking forward to it and am coming into it being very optimistic.

* Disclaimer of that was under the stake so I didn’t get to keep all that.

So far, I’ve really been liking Rush. It’s been giving me the freedom to squeak in a couple hundred hands when I have 15 minutes, so it’s been a little easier getting hands in. I’ve read several posts from people saying they thing the players are too tight and the rush format allows people to be patient. If that’s the case, I haven’t seen it. There are a ton of pretty tight regs in the game, but they can only play 4 tables. So my tables aren’t like they were when I was playing the normal games which was like 4 or 5 tags, 2 laggy regs and 1 recreational player. I think I see a lot more laggy regs and rec type players at rush. The only issue I’ve had is it’s harder to tag them. I have to come up with a better process for that as I think color coding players is probably more important in rush.

I’ve had some nights I’ve played pretty well. Other nights, I think I’m the mark at the table. Either way, I started out pretty decent for the month so far. See for yourself.

I’ll try and post updates at least once a month. That way JT can lick his chops as he notices me fall ever so short on my motivational prop bet with him. I hope you get something nice with that $100, JT.

Oh well.

Basically just putting this up for 2 reasons. 1 is to brag about me flopping quads. The other real main reason is to test out the hand converter plugin I installed. Seems to be a success.

Full Tilt Poker $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold’em – 9 players – View hand 627579
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

MP1: $56.40
MP2: $110.55
CO: $71.55
BTN: $254.70
Hero (SB): $106.25
BB: $57.90
UTG: $100.00
UTG+1: $45.00
UTG+2: $101.95

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is SB with T T
4 folds, MP2 raises to $3.50, 2 folds, Hero calls $3, 1 fold

Flop: ($8.00) 9 T T (2 players)
Hero checks, MP2 bets $4, Hero raises to $12, MP2 calls $8

Turn: ($32.00) 6 (2 players)
Hero bets $19.50, MP2 calls $19.50

River: ($71.00) J (2 players)
Hero checks, MP2 bets $39, Hero raises to $71.25 all in, MP2 folds

Final Pot: $149.00
Hero wins $146.00
(Rake: $3.00)

I would recap the goings on in our world over the last few months, but frankly, I don’t want you to read that much and certainly don’t want to type that much. If I did, I would have been keeping it up to date better than I have.

I keep this one kinda short and mostly about poker. Those of you who don’t care, feel free to find something a bit more to your liking. don’t worry. You won’t hurt my feelings. I’m married and have 5 kids, the only feeling I have left is anger and that one doesn’t care if it gets hurt.

So let’s finish up last year. I had a decent year last year and the stake I was on went well. All told, I ended up making about $10k under the stake (only half was mine) but it at least was enough that if I need it. I likely have a staker in the future. Pretty sure he was pleased with the end result.

I quit the stake at the end of the year, though. Work was really burning me out and didn’t feel much like playing. I have not played much at all this year. I doubt I even played over 15k hands from January through March. Yeah, I could look it up, but the details aren’t important right now. Stick with me.

Enter Rush poker though. I haven’t been super motivated to play much, but I actually like Rush. There are a bunch of people I know who are sour on it. In a future post I’ll go into all the reasons I like rush. Mashing it in here wouldn’t do it justice.

I have a goal of playing 30k hands this month. Ok, sure. I’ve said that before, but for realz this time. Actually, I have a lot of things going for me right now that I think I can do much better than just 30k hands, but we’ll start there as that seems to have been my hurdle last year. To motivate myself, I even have a bet going to make sure I make it. Due to the bet, I’ll also be motivated to post regular updates back on here. Aren’t you guys lucky?

Despite all the motivation, I still seem to have great powers working against me at the moment. I was all ramped up to start my awesome month. I was even listening to Tommy Angelo’s Poker Enlightenment series again (awesome series for any DC subscribers) to get me in the right mindset. But instead of hand after hand of poker bliss, I was greeted by a broken drain pipe and a trip to Lowe’s on my schedule.

But tired and all, I pushed through enough hands to start out my month for Iron Man. I ran horrible, but I think I played decently. I had 3 hands allin preflop and lost all 3. Lost a flip, QQ vs A4 and AK vs KQ. I was also pleased to see that there was plenty of play to take advantage of. The games have not dried up and seems to be plenty of action to be had. This is good especially if I can follow through and put in the hands I think I am capable of doing.

Ok, I think that’s long enough. I know it’s time to wrap it up once it’s getting to the point where I want to write tl;dr when proof reading. I’ll be back. I promise.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

While I don’t think I’m going to hell… well, at least not for failing to update my blog, I have had the good intentions of keeping this updated. I fell a bit short. As usual, it certainly wasn’t due to a lack of content so lets see if I can correct this bad habit of neglecting this thing.

Gonna keep this “resurrecting my blog” post short and just give a few updates on things.

The family is doing pretty well. I wanted to do a whole “Sadie is 1″ post back in September, but I think that ship has passed so won’t go back to revisit that. Just gonna try and do better going forward.

We got pretty busy around our house this year, and while I would like to blame it on having 5 kids, I think it’s more to do with the older kids getting… well… older and just having more stuff going on. We are taking a break from taekwondo for the first time in almost 4 years, so hopefully that will help us get our sanity back.

Poker has been going pretty decent and I’m having a decent year so far. Gonna continue my streak of not having a losing year which looked like was possibly in danger if you asked me back in the first quarter. I won’t go into to much, but I’ll give some results since my last post. I made money in all but 1 month when I lost about $1400 in October. August I made $3100. September was my gem month where I made $3700. In November, I was on my way to competing with September, but took a bit of a slide at the end of the month and only banked $2200. I’m gonna try and be a bit more diligent with my posts, so again, will just cover things noteworthy in the future and not relive what has passed.

Work is the one area I wouldn’t mind see being a bit better. I don’t really want to get into gory details and I do feel fortunate to not be in the situation that so many people are in currently, but I’ll just say while I like my job and the people, I don’t really care for the work I’m doing and really just am sitting back and hoping things work themselves out at this point.

As I said, I’ve had tons of content, so I’ll try and find time to get the stories of my life out there a bit more frequently. I’ve set the bar pretty low this year, so shouldn’t be hard to hit. Hurray for low bars!!!

But this is intended on being a weekly poker update. I was attempting to play 10k hands this last week in hopes to catch up to my 30k monthly goal, but some family stuff ended up getting in the way. I needed to play 6k hand between Friday and Sunday to accomplish that, but only managed about 3300 hands falling short with only 7500 hands for the week. Despite missing my goal, I can’t be all that upset as my results for the week made up for any disappointment I felt.

Driven by my $1200 day on Friday, I ended the week $1900 on the positive side of things even with losing money 3 days this week. Alright, alright. They weren’t terrible days with the largest only being 1 buyin or around $200, but still, it took quite a few hands out where I wasn’t making money and had to make the ground back up.

My month is going well too as I’m up almost $3k so far and well on my way to destroying my previous best, so hopefully I didn’t just jinx myself there, but the games are good. As long as I keep playing well, I don’t see any reason I shouldn’t finish strong. Another month like this, and I’ll soon be posting about my exploits in the 2/4 games. My lofty goal for the year was to hit $400nl and with it being in reach, I feel really good about my game right now.

My graph of my month to date. Isn’t it pretty?

The rest of the week, we just had stuff going on. We had 2 taekwondo testings to attend and then this weekend we went to Fargo to visit with my other BIL who is moving his family back to California. Yeah, we’ve been traveling a lot. I still tried the best I could to at least keep up and play as much as I can so I can make a run at Iron Man this month. I can miss 6 days during the month, and still hit it. I’ve used 2 of those up so far so gonna have to be super diligent for the rest of the month.

The little bit of poker I have played has gone well. I’ve been able to stick it out at the 200s and have been running really decent. Let’s just say that if I can maintain this for the month and I hit my 30k hands, I’ll be very happy with my monthly results. I only have 3500 hands put in so far, so that means I’m really gonna have to kick it in the ass if I want to even come close to hitting that. Fortunately, the kids start school in a couple of weeks, so that will hopefully give me a bit more time once they are going to bed at a reasonable hour.

If you want to track my progress, I made a little chart to track my progress to 30k. I’m well on my way, but behind where I would like to be. Looking to catch up this week so hopefully I will have better news to report on that front next time.

I did pretty well at them but really wanted to get back to the stakes I had become accustomed. I was able to play at lower stakes, but was anxious to move up since I knew I could beat them. I was fortunate enough to find some one to stake me for the 100s back at the end of April. I had a bad run there and broke about even through May.

In June, I found some good games and made some adjustments that paid off well. All told, I did just over $3k in that month. My first $3k month ever so I was pretty stoked about that. With the stake, only half of that was my share, but it still was more than plenty to finally but me in the black for the year. Also a good feeling as I hadn’t ever had a loosing year in poker and certainly didn’t want to make this my first.

My good run also allowed me to move up to the 200s. I have played the 200s before but never other than taking shots or chasing bad players. Progress always feels good. Unfortunately, I had a bad run which is bad when trying to move up stakes. That was what killed me back in January forcing me to drop down stakes. While I still had enough to stay at the 200s, I dropped down early in the month until I built my confidence back up. I had a long break even stretch during which I thought I was playing well. It took me a couple of weeks that I was playing far to passive and it was costing me money. It was difficult to see the leak in my stats so it took me a while to come to that realization.

By the time I made the adjustments, I wasn’t able to overcome the slide I had taken at the 200s but fortunately, I had plenty of bonuses last month that eased the pain. I only suffered a $700 or so slide. Bad enough, but coulda been worse and still put me at a reasonable profit for the stake.

This month, I’m taking another stab at the 200′s as I believe I’ve fixed a lot of my issues. Last month I played about 26k hands and I would like to shoot for 30k this month. I’ll try and post weekly statuses to force me to evaluate my progress. If I can run like I did in June with a higher volume, I expect good things for the month.

But guess what, it’s already the 3rd and I only have 600 hands under my belt. Saturday I had intentions of putting in a few hands but got hit with the flu at my inlaws and really didn’t feel much like playing. Hopefully I can make up my ground. Good news is I am currently on a 5 day streak of winning sessions. In June I ended the month with 13 winning days. Seems like a good sign to me.

The kids have been super busy.

Avery and Zoe are doing swimming lessons right now. I think they are enjoying that but it’s hard to tell when you ask Amy about how Zoe refuses to get in the water every day but also refuses to leave cause she wants to swim.

Clayton just finished up his baseball season which I was helping out with cause, well, they really need as much help as they can get. I am also still gonna post the video of Clayton get his black belt, but I’m gonna throw the excuse that Amy’s laptop has been acting up lately. That, and well, between her and TJ, it’s hard to get access to it.

TJ hasn’t done a whole lot extra this summer but he’s been more helpful lately. Even offering to mow the lawn, which I’m totally cool with. We also moved him to the basement this summer which he’s been stoked about. Hopefully it won’t be a temporary solution but we’ll have to address winter as it gets like 40 degrees down there in the summer. I’m ok with that, but Amy seems to think Child Services might not be so keen on it.

Sadie keeps getting bigger and has been teasing us with her walking now for weeks. She just hasn’t built up the confidence to try it without holding some one’s fingers. Personally, I think she’s just being a baby about the whole situation.

I’ll be frank and just tell you that poker has been absorbing much of my free time. Last month, I was all kicking ass and taking names. I had my first $3k month ever and, even though I’m being staked and only getting half of that, I was pretty pumped about the success none the less. This month has been a huge kick to the crotch as far as poker goes, so hopefully I can turn it around and at least have a break even month at the end. For the first time ever, I’ve been putting in more hands than I ever have, have been really motivated to play and could even seriously consider doing this full time if I ever get to the point of playing high enough to sustain a comfortable living from it.

That’s a pretty big pipe to stuff a dream into but that brings me to the next part. There have been changes at work that have pretty much brought it back to the soul sucking source of income most people cope with and pretend to be happy. I’m not gonna lie and say that hasn’t been a big driving force for my poker playing, but I am gonna lie and say that if I ever do get to that point in my poker career that I don’t need a “day job”, that I’ll miss it terribly.

Word press is telling me I’ve eclipsed 500 words and I hate wordy blog posts when other people post them, so I’ll try and wrap this up here. I really do miss posting here and while I have been pretty active on my twitter account, I really want to get back to making more posts here. I don’t always come through with my intentions, but I’ll make an honest attempt. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don’t really know what that means, but I’m sure it really says something important about my blog.

I think I’ve been playing pretty well lately even though I haven’t been getting particularly lucky. For those of you who are going to criticize me for bet sizing, I’m going to defend it by saying I was trying to get thin value as I didn’t think he had much of a hand. How good of a hand could he have had if I had top set? Any way, he hit his 4 outer and I actually thought, could he have AT here? I quickly dismissed that as a small part of his holdings and figured if he had that, then his poor play will put me in a good position to get the money back. It didn’t happen, but this isn’t the hand I wanted to dwell on. Not that I want to dwell on any hand, but you know what I mean.

I had been playing about break even for an hour and there was this really loose players at one of my tables. He’s got a 400bb stack and talking smack with another player who really seems like he’s getting tilty. Any way, the loose player has position on me and in a previous hand got me to fold KK when he was betting strong on an Ace high flop. I called a flop bet and folded the turn to a big turn bet. Since he had been really aggressive and trying to control the table, I decided to give him some rope next time I had KK (yeah, I had a few hands).

There have been a few times where I filter my hands in HEM and see this option to filter limp/raised hands. As a rule, I don’t limp/raise just cause, well, I don’t open limp much at all. But it got me thinking if there were spots where this would be good. I can’t think of a spot better than this. I have a big hand that I would like to play a big pot with. I have a loose, aggressive player to my left who likes to see flops and past him are a bunch of players getting into verbal altercations with the loose player. This has some seriously nice potential if it works out. I decided to limp with intentions of raising if the loose player raised and we got another caller in between. Well, I got half of that plan. The loose player decides to raise to 11x. Unfortunately that healthy raise kinda cleared out the field. I decided to change my plan and since I only had 110bbs to start the hand, I called instead. I didn’t want to chase him off and my hand looks really weak. I think he will try and get me to fold in a lot of spots. So what happens? Fortune smiles down on me, but not one of those “give an old friend a hug” type smiles. No, it was more of a “Look at this fool that I’m going to plant my boot firmly into his balls” kinda smiles.

Yep, there I am staring at yet another Ace high flops. Well, at least I have a back door flush draw. I can have my time at PLO to thank for this small glimmer of hope since PLO is the type of game where you try and find any backdoor draw and jump into the pool of razor blades hoping to come out unscathed. Back to the hand though. I figured I would check and see what he does. He bet small so I figured maybe he was just taking a stab with any pair. I knew I couldn’t raise and not get called by a better hand, so I just called. Come one backdoor draw. Nope. An 8. Sigh. Well, I checked again. Now he fires 33 into like 40. I tanked pretty hard here. Can this dude really hit a hand each time? Yes we know they can. But then I thought a bit more logically. He definitely could have an Ace but I think he could also have garbage just trying to bully me out. The small flop bet was kinda weird, but again, I can’t raise and just get it in as he folds pretty much every non ace or flush draw.

I end up deciding I’m going down with the ship and call. He fires another 55 on the river which was about half pot and was most of my remaining stack. It was a shitty card to bring the flush too. That couldn’t have hit on the turn? FFS. Any way, the plan was to call down once I called the turn, so I pretty much wince and snap call. He showed down 9To. Whew. This was one of the toughest call downs I’ve had to make in a while, cause truth be told, people have been just handing me money at the table lately.

Games are dead? Far from it. They’ve just changed and you have to change to figure out how to get the value out of them in another way. Some may not care for my colorful recap of the hand, so if you want to see how it went, you can check it out.

A little while later at the same table, I played this hand. This was a completely different type of hand. Didn’t really have much of a read on the guy but I’ll go through what I was thinking a bit. Preflop, I make a raise, get called by the cutoff and see a flop that gives me top pair. I continuation bet as normal and get minraised. I’ve been seeing a lot of minraising lately, and it seems to mean different things for different people. I can’t give up on the odds I’m getting, so I call but mostly, I just want to see how he treats the turn. Turn is a king which isn’t a great card but I doubt it changes our hands much but he checks it back. The flop was pretty dry which makes it really hard to put him on many draws, but his play seems to be really odd. River is a 2 blank which, again, I don’t think changes the hand much at all, but he fires again. I tank forever but the hands I’m really worried about, I think either bet the turn or check behind the river which is QJ and AJ type hands. I end up calling since I can’t put him on a hand. Turns out I made a good call. At this point, he rants about how he can’t bluff. I almost told him I woulda folded to a turn bet, which I was totally going to, but decided not to try and improve him game any.

I think the same player made a river bluff on me a few hands later, but that was to be my last hand at the table so didn’t make another miracle call with 99 on a KQxxx board. I think that would have totally put that guy on tilt had I done it correctly, but I was leaving the table and wouldn’t get any tilt value from it.

So yeah, I still ended up having a good night at the table. My month isn’t looking too bad either. Any guesses how life’s going then? Well, I’m trying to concentrate on the good things right now, so I won’t get into that. I guess I just need to play tons more poker and let my worries wash away as I shower myself balla style in 100s. Ok, not really, but it’s a nice thought.