Swingy swings....

Well, apparently my idea that I wrote about in my last blog isn't as popular with my readers as I thought it would be. I have personally discussed my idea with every single one of my readers either in person, via instant mesenger, or email. That's right....I talked to all 6 of them and only one person agreed with me. Dad thinks public humiliation shouldn't be an option for punishment, Matt says that is a TERRIBLE IDEA, Nick agrees with me, Kevin (not a reader, but we discussed it) says no way (I wonder why?), but he does think that people who fail a driving test (me) should have to use special plates, and Josh says he likes the idea, but the plates shouldn't be permanent.

I think I probably agree with Josh the most of all those people. It would be a little bit ridiculous for someone who had a DUI when they were 21 to still be using special plates when they were dropping their kid off at school when they are in their 40's (assuming they have a clean record since their 1st DUI). So I want to revise my idea a little bit. If you are a repeat offender you get the plates for life....tough tittie said the kitty. First time offenders should have the plates and license for 3 years. If you still disagree with my idea then I hope all your loved ones are killed by a repeat drunk driver (that has the same plates he had the first time he got caught) this holiday season. Ok, I don't really hope that, because some of you that disagree with me consider me one of your loved ones and I don't want to die anytime soon.

Onto poker, The last 7 days of poker have been some of the swingiest days of poker I have ever played. I have either won or lost a minimum of $2100 each of the last 7 days. I ended up down $1915 during those 7 days, but I also ran over $5,000 below expectation during that span. I played over 40 hours online and over 16,000 hands during this time so I should be getting some pretty healthy rakeback for my hard work (probably around $6-700). I sure ended awfully badly by losing about $8,000 in the last two days alone. In fact I had probably the nastiest short term downswing I have ever had in the last two days. I lost almost $12,000 in about 1400 hands. That is impressively horrible and I am really glad I had been on such a nice run prior to the last two days. My last 25,000 hands of poker online have been break even, but it felt like anything but a break even period. There were lots of highs and lows in there, but it is what it is and I can't do anything about it now. I have made lots of improvements in my game and preparation lately and I am going to have much better results in the future from it.

I have lots of crap I have to get done before I leave for home today and there is not one of those things that I want to do....I can't wait!

I just thought of a fantastic idea....

From time to time I will come up with a great idea for an invention or a cool way that something should be done. I almost never do anything about them, but it is still fun to think about them. I have even been disappointed before when I found out that someone else started producing one of my "inventions" before I got around to it....not that I was ever going to get around to it. This time though, I don't care if someone steals my idea...in fact, I hope they do!

I have no idea what made me think of this, but here goes anyway:

I think that anytime someone gets convicted of a DUI they should be given the normal punishments associated with a DUI, but in addition they should also be forever required to use specially marked license plates and driver's license that say "I am a convicted drunk driver". I think it should be very noticeable as well, perhaps an all red license plate or something to that affect. I think it would be a very strong deterrent towards drinking and driving. Here are some of the ways I think it would improve the current drinking and driving situation:

1. Police would be much more likely to pull someone over with specially marked plates so former offenders will be apprehensive to drive drunk again with the increased risk of being caught.
2. It would be pretty embarrassing to have to show a DUI branded drivers license anytime you needed to prove your identity and no one would want the gaudy looking bright red plate on their car either.
3. Other driver's on the road would be made more aware of potential drunk drivers.

Can you think of one good reason this shouldn't be a policy? Me either!

Wow, Wow, Wow.....

I put in some serious hours of poker in the last 48 hours. I spent almost 18 of those hours playing online poker and I played over 7200 hands. I don't know what has gotten into me lately, but I have been extra motivated to put in lots of hours playing. Since November 6th, which is the last time I had people visiting I have played over 83 hours of online poker and 30,000 hands. That is averaging over 4.5 hours per day for 18 days. I have also played probably 25-30 hours of live poker during that stretch. I have been reading some of Leatherass' (he is an amazingly dedicated online grinder) blogs recently and I think he is part of the reason for the extra motivation. He just recently topped the $1,000,000 mark for the year. There are many people that make over a million dollars a year playing poker (I am guessing around 200+ in the world maybe?), but the crazy thing about Leatherass is that he does it playing very similar sized stakes to what I play. He also plays about 1.5 million hands in a year and I will probably end up somewhere just under 400,000 hands played for the year. It is really kind of exciting to see names of some of the regulars that I play with everyday cracking the list of the top 50 biggest winners for the year on Full Tilt. It is pretty crazy how much money can be won just at the stakes I have been playing if you are willing to put in the hours. I will be setting some very lofty goals at the start of 2009, that is for sure.

Anyway, my last 48 hours of online poker have been a roller coaster. I started off quickly up over $3,000 than I was down almost $4,000 and back to up $600 all in the first 4,000 hands I had played. I got all the way back down over $4,000 and then within the last 900 hands or so I went on a rush and won about $6,300 straight to finish up somewhere around $2,100. That last rush is what I want to talk about....I had just gotten back from eating with Nick at about 4:00am and decided just to play for a little bit before I went to bed. There is this guy that plays on stars whose playing style REALLY got under my skin and I decided I would fiddle around trying out his playing style to see how it worked. His style is very unique and I found out by playing it for a couple of hours that it is VERY hard to exploit. Anytime he enters a pot he min-raises and is constantly continuation betting the flop for about half-pot. I just found out that it really tilts other players (just like it did to me) to have someone constantly min-raising in their game. It really changes up the flow of the game that they are used to and they fail miserably at adjusting to it. I always found myself trying to make plays at this guy because it seems so weak when he min-raises all the time and these players can't help themselves from doing the same thing to me. It makes the effective stacks at the table play much deeper and gives you more opportunities to make decisions on later streets. They continually try to 3 bet me, but it costs me so little to call their 3bet since my initial raise was so small that it is worth it regardless of my cards most of the time. Everyone plays pretty similar preflop styles and everyone is pretty technically sound as far as preflop play goes. However, people get really lost in the hand when there is so much play after the flop and I love it. It is a really fun style to play and drives the other players bonkers. I am going to continue working on it tomorrow and see if my success rate stays the same....or even improves!

I gotta get to bed. Its about 7:30am and I plan on playing in the Sunday Million tournament on stars that starts at 1:30pm.

In case anyone reading this is wondering...I get into Evansville around 10pm on Tuesday night. See ya soon.

Advancing my game....

I feel like I work pretty hard on improving my poker game and it is really rewarding when you can tell it is working. The most obvious way you can tell that you are improving is by the amount of money you win (or don't loss for some people). To me it is much more rewarding when my hard work pays off by giving me a clearer understanding of the game of poker in general or when I learn something about myself that helps to improve my poker game.

I was perusing the 2+2 forum yesterday after I had one of my worst losing days online ever. I lost over $5,000 yesterday and I just didn't feel like my normal self when I was playing. I made some errors that I would normally never make and I let one hand early in my session affect my emotions the rest of the day. Anyway, I found a gem of a post by a pretty respected poster on there and I think it is really going to be helpful. He gave some rather non poker related explanations as to why he thought he was able to achieve a higher win rate than most regulars his advice really hit home with me. He claims that in order to win at the rates he wins at you don't have to be more skilled than any of the other typical regular players, but you have to have more self control and better awareness of what is going on while you are playing. I have always thought that most people with decent intelligence and a fundamental understanding of poker should be able to make a living playing poker. There are many factors outside of poker skills that determine what makes you a winning player in the long run and those are the ones that most people fail at. He happens to agree with me, but explains it in a much better way than I could myself.

I am going to copy some excerpts from his post and comment on how I think they apply to me. I am sure this will be pretty boring to the people reading this that aren't interested in improving their poker game, but for those of you that are you should pay attention to what he has to say....its some pretty good stuff.

#1 BW: Your mental, emotional state while playing is 80% of the work, and you can work and take specific steps to get better at that. Being in the right emotional state will allow you to open up your eyes to what you and the other players are doing without being stuck in the previous hand you lost, how much you are up, what you´re gonna eat later, etc.

Combine that with some basic technical steps that can be taken and you got the other 20% to at least achieve enough to live comfortably off poker. I believe that with today’s games and climate, anybody with even mediocre intelligence and some discipline could at the very least make a comfortable living playing this game.

I feel like I have better control of my mental state while playing that most players, but this is an area where I can definitely improve on. I know I have said this before, but no more chatting while I am playing and I am going to work on clearing my mind of outside stuff while I am playing. There is jut no excuse to not make an effort to focus 100% of your energy on poker while you are playing. I realize it is difficult to actually give 100% of your focus, but you should at least try to do so.

#2 The big difference between the average 1-2 grinder and the average 3/6 or 5/10 grinder is definitely not raw talent or God-given natural abilities. It is risk tolerance, bankroll management, game selection, tilt control. All very simple things to reign in with a little emotional control.

These are almost the exact same things I have been working on lately without even really knowing I was working on them. My bankroll management has never been an issue. However, I was always complaining how I wasn't comfortable in bigger games and I felt like my hands were face up when I played them. Forcing myself to play in bigger games has somewhat solved my risk tolerance problem and I have definitely been practicing better game selection lately. Of course I was going to feel like my hand was face up when I previously used to take shots at bigger games without giving any thought to game selection. I always ended up in games with the best players/regulars at those higher limits and they obviously had more experience than I did and outplayed me at will. In my opinion improved risk tolerance and game selection are definitely the two most important things when attempting to move up in limits.

#3 Also, as I mention above, I believe hand reading to be a function of your mental / emotional state at the time more than anything else.

Ever noticed that some days you can put people on hands right and left, other days you´re just fumbling in the dark? They haven´t changed, you haven´t changed, your skills have not diminished. But you are probably not in that same emotional state you were in when playing the first game.

Brilliant! Hand reading being a function of your mental/emotional state is some of the wonderfully written poker advice I have ever read. It is so easy to read hands when you are winning and everything is going your way and sometimes seemingly impossible when things aren't going your way. I think that people almost always write this phenomenon off as "running good" or "running bad" instead of placing the blame/success on their own state of mind. When people are losing and get put in a tough spot they just say to theirself..."Geez, I never get put in spots like this when I am winning, this is just such bad luck piled onto my already bad luck". When in actuality, they do get put in those same spots when they are winning, but their mind isn't clouded with doubt and the decisions are seen with so much more clarity. How many times have you been in a live game where you are not involved in the hand and you are watching someone agonize over what is such an obvious decision to you? It is so easy because your mental/emotional state isn't being bombarded with doubt when you are just observing the hand and have no emotional ties to the result.

Here is some more of his thoughts on results being tied to your emotional state of mind:

BW: Realizing that most regulars actually were not that solid and didn´t have their own game (most just basically have picked up somebody else’s preflop game that they´ve seen on a training video and have no clue why they are doing what they are doing - postflop they are usually spewy as xxxx). When you start zoning in how to scalp the regs, that´s when you start improving and that´s when you start beating the game for more than 1 ptbb / hour. And the basis for all of this was realizing how much of my game was dependant on playing when in the right emotional state, and learning how to maintain that mindframe.

Most of you guys have no basic technical problems when it comes to this game. You understand pot control, way ahead / way behind, position, equity, pot odds, 3-bet equity, etc. The reason you struggle with the more subtle technical aspects is that they usually require a good and clean state of mind whilst playing and analyzing. If you are on constant subtle tilt you will never understand your own image, your opponents projected image vs the way they actually play, what your history with a specific opponent really means and CORRECT adjustments (as opposed to a couple of 3 bets and now you´re waiting to shove any 2), and what all this basically boils down to; hand reading and putting your opponent on accurate ranges, and knowing what to do with those ranges. These qualities will separate a 2 ptbb winner, from a 5 ptbb winner. I believe that although I display a 4,7 ptbb winrate, I could have easily avoided many situations where I KNEW I was making the wrong play and made it anyway, and could easily have had a 5,5 - 6 ptbb winrate. I take responsibility for these results.

#4 BW: I go through a studious prep pregame, and I have papernotes around me that I use whilst playing. I have very specific tradition throughout the day. I always start, for instance, by reviewing yesterdays hands.

As for a check-lists, start small. Whenever somebody calls or raises you preflop, jusk ask yourself about his range of hands. You would not believe how many pros fail to ask themselves this one simple question (which they always used to when they were improving). We all know we should, and yet when we sit down we start autopiloting our usual abc game. We´re on the ball the first 5 minutes, and then go into droid mode. Just start out by doing this every time you have any preflop decisions. Then extend to the flop. Then extend to asking yourself about your perceived range (2nd level). If you have been autopiloting for the last 2 hrs, you will have no idea what he perceives your range to be, because you have no clue about your own image. You can add levels as you go on, but do not overdo it. And the absolute most important thing when faced with a big decision, is to first breathe and relax for a couple of seconds.

Have you ever noticed when you get sucked into a hand? Like you have an overpair and you get raised on the turn, you know you´re beat, and beofre you know it you have called anyway? Or what i call the bluff-vortex, when you start with small flop raise, and before you know it you have fired three barrels and you´re all in and get snapcalled by the nuts? What the hell just happened? A 200 bb pot lost out of nowhere!!? If, at any point, you would have just stepped back, taken a breath and realized how little sense your line makes or how narrow his range must be, you would have saved a stack. When you look at it in retrospect, it is very clear to you. This alludes to my earlier point; most of you guys are fine when it comes to the technical aspects of the game, but you need to hone some of the mental and emotional ones.


This is all great stuff, but he most important part that I took from it was developing a routine prior to playing that gets me in the right state of mind to play. I usually have a small pregame routine that I do most of the time, but I needed to expand on it a little bit. I usually take my adderall and get in the shower before I start a serious online session. Today I took an extra step to help clear my mind before I played. I took my normal shower and then set a 10 minute timer on my computer while I laid on my couch with my eyes closed thinking about the most common mistakes I make when playing and how I could avoid them. I also tried to reenact some situations where I felt I made really clear decisions that sometimes seemed tough to me. I tried to focus on the emotional state I was in when I made those decisions and get myself to be in that same mind frame before I started my session.

#5 BW: I try to live my life in accordance with many buddhist philosophies. The greatest lesson that can be applied to your poker game is the buddhist lesson of being mindful and aware of one´s thoughts and actions at all times. I believe that this is the one single most powerful tool in any game (or profession) and the separator between many of the nosebleeders, the midstakes grinders and the low-limit strugglers. Unfortunately as simple as this teaching is, it is not easy.

I think this is so true of all of the most successful people in any sport. I think a persons mental makeup/approach to a sport is way important to their natural ability. For example: Everyone on tour can hit the same shots Tiger does. Jordan didn't make a higher % of his shot attempts than other shooting guards in the league. Peyton Manning is slower than your average NFL QB and he throws aren't ones that can't be made by the rest of the QB's in the league. However, all of these people just have WAY better control over their emotions than their opponents do and this is what makes them the best at their sports.

I am sorry this was so long winded, but I really needed to get these thoughts down while it was fresh in my mind.

Oh ya, I had one of my best days ever today after my semi-meditation to start my session: +$7,221, Ballin!

Minor hiccup, but back on track....

I sometimes get what I call "computer eye" when I play too much online poker or spend too much time on the computer for whatever reason. It is a pain behind usually one eye and sometimes both, but almost always results in a pretty decent sized headache. The only real cure for it is to spend less time on the computer. Most of the time it isn't bad enough that I have to quit playing, but it is really annoying to have to deal with. I have been putting a lot more hours in online recently than I am used to playing, therefore, my computer eye had been acting up a bit. I woke up one morning after playing pretty late the night before and my computer eye was still lingering. I decided to try to play online anyway and I just wasn't in the right mood from the get go. I ended up losing about $2800 in a couple of hours and quit. I won a bit back later that night and then lost some goofing of playing PLO before I went to bed. The next day I decided to take the day off from poker and I went and played racquetball with my buddy, Joe Tehan. There were some decent fish playing that night and I decided to play for just a bit. They were playing 10/20 NL and I ended up getting involved in some big hands with some of the regulars that didn't go my way. I feel like I played well, but it just takes a few hands at those stakes to add up quickly. Anyway, I think I have lost about $4600 online since I last posted, but I have done awesome playing live the past two days.

I won $4200 yesterday and I won $6600 today playing 10/20 NL at the Bellagio. Obviously, I am running very hot in that game, but it is so nice feeling like the best player in the game the majority of the time I'm in it. I am making some big hands and staying out of trouble very nicely. If I can get myself to play like I do online that game seems like a breeze. By that I mean to just always make sure I am in position when I play big pots, keeping the pots small when needed, and picking my spots well as far as not getting tangled up too much with the other solid players in the game.

So despite the minor setback with the loss online I am still on my fantastic heater thanks to my live play success. It isn't an exact figure, but I think I am up somewhere around 31K in the last 10 days or so. So, since I have averaged winning $3,000/day for the last 10 days that MUST be my expected average win rate from here on out. Therefore, I can expect to make exactly $1,095,000 in the next 365 days.....I WISH!

I plan on playing some online tourneys tomorrow including the FTOPS main event. That would a a great tournament for my heater to continue in for sure!

Well well well....

If this is what it looks like around the corner I think I have turned....I LIKE IT! I thought it was a pretty solid heater after winning 12.6k in two days time, but it has only gotten better since then. Yesterday I won around $4500 playing online and then went to the Bellagio and played for over 8 hours and lost $1370 playing 10/20. I could just never get much going for me and it was a struggle the whole time even though I felt like I was the best player in the game for a majority of the night. Today, however, was a different story...I had my biggest winning day of cash games EVER! I won $9,132! I obviously ran super hot and hardly lost any races and didn't get cold decked at all that I remember. Anyway, that brings my 5 day heater to a total of somwhere in the neighborhood of $25,000....so sick to think about.

One really cool thing I have done recently is that I have gotten set up with Jeff's good buddy, Adam Estes. He is a personal financial advisor and apparently pretty darn good at it. He helped me get my Roth IRA switched over to his firm and also set me up an account that acts as a checking account in the sense that I am able to withdraw funds to it DIRECTLY from my full tilt account! That makes saving MUCH easier.

One retarded question that poker novices will sometimes ask me is "what is the best hand you have ever gotten?" or sometimes it is "have you ever made a royal flush?" It is as if they think the better the player you are the more likely it is you will make a royal flush. I couldn't even remember if I had made a royal flush before today until this hand happened:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3434014

I hesitated for just a second before I called his all-in bet on the turn and typed in "whoops". This was the chat that followed:

rakata: i hate you thakilla
rakata: hope you get raped by 1 big horse
spades42011: only 1?
spades42011: i guess thats all it takes ...
rakata: uhmm... ok maybe 2
rakata: 1 for him and 1 for his mom
rakata: pfff.... floped royal flush! pfff! i never get
one of this and he flop that sick hand

(Mom and Grandma, I'm sorry that you had to read that, but I thought it was pretty funny)

Anyway, it usually isn't going to be very profitable flopping a royal flush since it will be difficult to get much action on it so I was very happy to get the guy to stick all his money in drawing completely dead :)

Also, Jeff played really well after coming back so quickly after having his appendectomy. He finished T18th and T21st I think the past too weeks and ended up finished 118th on the money list which means he will maintain full status on tour next year.

All is well in the land of thakilla.

I think I might be turning the corner....

I think I am finally starting to get to the point that I wanted to be at where I am comfortable playing higher limit games. I am starting to feel like I have a decent edge in most of the 5/10 NL games I play in online and just recently I have felt really good in the 10/20 NL games at the Bellagio when I have played them. I'll admit I have run really well the past two times I have played the 10/20 game at the Bellagio, but I think that is probably what it takes for me to get comfortable in the game. In the past two days online I have won $8,658 in almost 6400 hands and just over 13 hours of playing. Also, I won around $4,000 playing at the Bellagio. $12.6K in two days is preeeettty sweet if you ask me.

It is scary how much money it is possible for me to make if I can be a consistent winner in 5/10+ games online and 10/20 NL live.....I am definitely looking forward to the increased "salary".

I feel like I have put a lot of work in and made some big improvements in my game and I think Hold'em Manager has a lot to do with it. All the extra stats are really helpful once you get comfortable with them and know the proper way to apply them.

I know myself really well and it seems like everytime I have a boost in my confidence like I am currently experiencing I get cocky/complacent and stop working on my game or caring about the losses. I am going to make an effort to not let myself get out of grinding mode and try to just keep plugging away making solid profits. One thing that I think helps me to do this when I am online is to not check how much I am winning or losing until my session is finished. It unneccesarily affects my mood when I constantly check how much I am up or down during my session.

I am gonna go get a good nights sleep and get back on the grind tomorrow.

Two big days.....

I have had two really good days out of the last four days of playing. There is a notoriously bad player that I keep an eye out for anytime that he is playing. I managed to find him playing twice in the last few days and both times he started right about the time I was planning on quitting. I feel like I am giving away money if I ever quit while he is playing so I try to stick it out. That resulted in me playing two 9+ hour sessions of cash games online. I don't ever remember playing that long before.

Anyway, one of the days I won almost $4800 and the other day I ended up breaking around even. I played in the $550 Venetian Deep Stack tourney today and only lasted a few hours. I built up my stack nicely and then lost an 85K pot when my opponent rivered two pair to knock me out. Oh well, I went to the Bellagio and played 10/20 NL and FINALLY had my first good session ever at 10/20. I ran pretty well in the game, but they also didn't play all that well either. I won almost $4,000 in the game in about 3 or 4 hours time. It is 4:16 am and I need to hit the sack it I plan on playing and of the Sunday tourneys online tomorrow.

My fish tank is coming along nicely...I promise to post some pictures really soon.

Also, Jeff is really putting on quite the display of guts....he is tied for 14th and on pace to lock up his spot in the top 125 with one more round to play. Hopefully he can move up another couple of spots and he'll be able to take next week off.