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.