This Week's Grind

Man, poker is fun! That's all I got for today.


















Ok, so that's not all. Well to begin, I've been doing really well on the home front. I've been playing a lot more and this week I'll probably be there playing live 3 days. Last Thursday I was up like 25BB's in under an hour, but that managed to dwindle down to about 12 by the end of the night. I'm not sure if it was just because I was missing draws, getting drawn out on, or just donking my chips off. On Friday, I'm certain I donked off more than I should. I was getting drawn out on alot, but could have saved an extra 5-10BB's by the end of the night by just playing better poker. You should never just write off losing a few extra bets you didn't have to. On that night, I was way down, like 20BB's, after the combination of losing some huge pots with big hands and donking the rest off. I finally won a good pot when I limped in with 66 and saw a flop off 644. There were a lot of young NL players at the table. They usually bust out of the tourneys and play limit afterwards. However, they aren't very good at NL either and tend to try to bluff alot in limit and make lots of loose calls. I decided to slowplay (something I rarely do here) and got a raiser to my right. I put him on a 4 pretty quick and that's what I was hoping someone held. I started to raise to push out players because I was so paranoid after having been drawn out in this manner all night, but buckled down and just called. There were 4 more callers. The turn brought a 2nd heart and I bet hoping the guy to my right would raise and I might trap the table for another bet. He did just that and the pot was now big enough that I could knock out players and re-raised. We ended up capping it with me and the two NL players remaining. The river brought a flush to anyone with 2 hearts. The other player left woke up and raised, representing the flush, and we ended up capping off 5th street. The pot was like 33BB's, $66 or so. My boat beat the Ace high flush and the trip fours to take a big pot and put me back to even. Nothing major happened for the next hour and a half and I left $4 down and mad at myself for donking off those extra bets that could have turned a losing session into a winning one.

On the net, I got really bored playing the .10/.20 tables and moved up to .25/.50 and have been very happy with that move. I've almost doubled my 50 buy-in in just a couple sessions. People tend to play tight enough that a raise pre-flop will knock out about half the table but loose enough that they will pay off big hands. Bluffing is also a tool again and can be used to great effect at times. I already want to move to .50/1 since I've had big winning sessions, but I'll wait here and pad my bankroll a little bit and make sure it wasn't just luck. Eventually, I'll reach a level that is above my skill in limit and I'll be happy to have that extra cushion until I get better. I hope to be at 5/10 by the end of the year.

I'm playing a bit of NL as well now. Playing limit online feels too much like a job. I just played in two NL sit-n-gos. In the first, I played my style and quickly doubled up to be a big chip leader. However, I naturally discover a way to screw that up. I had AQs and decided to raise on the button. I put in 75 and totally leave the 0 in the little bet box and bet 750. I'm called by a couple people. I flop the nut draw and am pretty much pot committed to continue, never getting there and losing about half of my stack. I told myself not to tilt and forget about it, but I think I did anyways cause I went out too soon.

I rebounded by entering another NL sit-n-go and got off to the same start, a quick double up. This time I made sure not to type in the wrong amount and knocked out about 3 more players until eventually knocking out 2nd place to take it. That was a little vindication for such a huge blunder.

There's a story about Phil Ivey involved in a similar situation. He was playing against Brian Townsend at 200/400 NL heads up. Townsend meant to type in something like $3,800 but ended up entering $38,000. Phil read it as a mis-click and moved all-in hoping to pick up the dead money. Townsend was pissed at his error but called with the rest of the stack. He flipped up A8 to Ivey's K9 and flopped 878 to take the $160,000 or so pot. Ivey promptly launched the monitor out of a nearby window.

At least that's what I would think he did.

I mentioned last week about posting a blog on how to improve your NL game drastically at these lowest of limits where you're playing a lot of people that watch poker on tv and think they know how to play or the overaggressive internet players. I haven't posted yet because I wanted to have the time to post a good blog, but I think you'll definitely want to catch it. I owe the ease of my recent NL success to it and all my strategy in these games falls under this one general realization. It won't help you against people that really can play well, but it just dominates the scrubs. It's great in tourneys and cash games and I hope to have it up as soon as I'm inspired to sit down for about an hour and type it up. Hopefully, this week.

That's all,
Dan