August Results

After a successful session today on the last day of the month, these are my total results (click graph to enlarge). +$5,865.
My best day was the 24th, winning $802 and my worst was the 9th, losing $179 (my only losing day). My hourly rate was $220.

My Full Tilt balance passed 5 digits for the first time today. I will now try out 2/4. If my bankroll drops back to $8k, I will move down to 1/2 again. If I get to $15k, I will probably take a shot at 3/6.

All Work and No Play

I haven't been able to play any poker since last weekend. I have been working on chess related stuff. I was hired by an oil company to take part in their stand at a petroleum exhibition, playing chess against all comers. :-) That was both fun and lucrative. School has also taken up a lot of my time. Which means that whenever I had time to rest I was too tired for poker.

Today I went to the local poker club and played a $20 rebuy tournament. I was the massive chipleader going into both the first and second break, but then my JJ ran into QQ, after which I quickly lost the rest of my stack as well. I played a successful session at 1/2 just now. August is going to end up pretty good. I only had one single losing day all month. Even though I've only played 10k hands, it's going to be a +$5k month for me. I'm moving up to 2/4 as of Sept 1st. Hopefully I can maintain a good winrate there as well so I can continue to make a decent income while putting in an embarrassingly small amount of hands.

Busy Week

My journalism studies started this week. The first week most of the time was spent getting to know your fellow students. It's been a lot of fun and I've been partying hard. There are about 60 new journalism students this year. They seem like a nice group of people. There are some pretty nice girls too. Seems like there is mutual interest between a cute blonde and myself. More updates on that later hopefully. ;-)

Naturally there haven't been much time for poker, but I have done very well the few times I was able to play. Yesterday I played the $100 HU tournament again. This time I was more successful as I made it into the "sweet sixteen" and cashed for $400. I obviously ran quite well, but I never felt threatened in any way in the first 5 rounds. In the round where I was finally knocked out I had some unfortunate situations occur, and I don't think many players could have done much good with the cards I was dealt. I'm up $1,200 in the cash games this week from more or less three short sessions. I have played exclusively 1/2, but my bankroll is quickly approaching $10k, so I will probably make 2/4 my regular game starting in September. Right now I'm sitting on the fence as to whether or not I'm going to play the 750k guaranteed on Full Tilt that starts in 20 minutes. I probably will.

I have to brag about a cool hand I played today. It's 6-handed as usual, and I raise KQo UTG to $7. That's a completely standard raise for me. Although it's one of the worse hands I will raise UTG, I generally think it's and underestimated hand in today's 6-max games. The games play so aggressively that most players are almost always 3-betting the hands that have you dominated. Thus it's possible to play top pair pretty aggressively with KQ in a lot of spots. In fact it's one of my most profitable hands. Anyway, I get called by the CO, who seems to be fishy, and by the BB, who seems solid. The flop comes T52 two hearts and I decide to lead for $16 into $22. Even though I had been rather active at the table, I reckoned my bet should get a lot of respect. It's harder for the CO to float me light with one player behind him, and the BB is usually going to have some sort of speculative hand that he is trying to hit a flop with. I expected him to play fit or fold. The CO ended up calling and the BB folded. The turn came an offsuit ace, which is obviously a good barrel-card for me. I bet $38 into $54, expecting to get a fold most of the time. I don't think it's necessary to bet any bigger. But I got called, and the river was another offsuit ace. So now I was imagining four scenarios. He either has a) the ace high flush draw that just caught an ace b) a ten that refuses to fold c) a naked flush draw or d) AK/AQ. I dismissed d) as unlikely, because he re-raises those hands preflop a lot and the aces on the board as well as the KQ in my hand makes it even more unlikely. Besides, it would have been a daring call on the flop with a player left to act. So I came up with what I thought was the optimal play, which was to check and call a bet. I didn't think he was capable of valuebetting anything less than an ace. So if he bets when I check on the river he either has Ax of hearts or two other random hearts, the latter being more likely. He bet $65, I insta-called, he showed 94 of hearts and I shipped the $255 pot with my king high.

Headsupament

I tried my luck in a $100 HU tournament tonight. In the 3rd round a very sick hand occured. I was playing against a fish. He min-raised the button and I called with J5 of spades. Flop was A34 with one spade. He bet 80 into 160, I check-raised to 280 and he 3-bet to 520. At this point I thought he had a monster, but I decided to call because of implied odds if I hit my hand. Turn was the ten of spades. I checked and he bet 780 into 1160. My first instinct here was to check-raise all-in with my two-way draw (we had 3k stacks), but then he starting chatting, saying "come on big boy", "let's do this chicken" and stuff like that. I really felt like a fish of this magnitude would not bluff and type that into the chat. So I only called. River bricked off and I had to give up because we only had a 1/3 pot bet left. He checked behind and showed... J8 for a stone cold bluff that nevertheless beat my J5. So, so sick. After that I got my stack in with an open-ended straight flush draw on the flop, but could not get there.

I'm still going as strong as ever in the cash games. I took another small shot at 2/4 yesterday night, since it's a weekend. I did fairly well with a $220 profit. Tonight I played 1/2, since I'm trying to make the top winners list at 2+2 this week. +$300 got me one step closer.

Tournament Night

On Tuesday I did an all-nighter along with a friend and played a bunch of tournaments where we took 30 % of each other. Unfortunately we didn't cash in a single one! :-) So that was $700 out the window. 300 of it was from a $5 rebuy where I made 60 rebuys. LOL tilt! At least I had a successful session at a 0.25/0.50 HU table where I destroyed my opponent for $230 in 20 minutes.

Yesterday I started grinding cash games to win back my monies. I wasn't feeling especially fresh, so I fired up some 0.5/1 tables. After a short while I was down 4 buy-ins. So I did what any poker player would do. I moved up to where they respect my raises. Two hours of 1/2 (deep stacks) later I was sitting with $3k+ spread across 6 tables and my bankroll was basically back to where it was before the tournament meltdown. I just finished a standard half hour session at 1/2 with a $150 win. If I have the heart and commitment to the game I might play another session later tonight, but I doubt it. :-)

There is this amazing new site Tableratings where you can track the cash game results of all players and also play through their hands, at least at Full Tilt. I found the epic HU session from April 25th when I built my bankroll from $1k to $2,700 on a single table and played through all the hands. That brought back good memories.

FTOPS Continued

I played the $240 6-max Knockout FTOPS event today. But yet again I didn't cash. :-(
I started slowly, but once I got a feel for my table I began steamrolling. At one point there was a series of 10 hands of which I won 8. But then I made a horrible river call with top pair when it was obvious that I was up against an overpair. After that some idiot shoved 20 BBs on me from the SB and after a long think I called him with A8 only to lose to his A3...
That made me shortstacked and I ended up shoving AQ only to brick off against JJ. We'll try again next weekend.

In cash games things are going better. Yesterday I experienced my first bad run in over a week. I dropped $350 at the 0.5/1 tables. Partly because of bad luck, but probably also because I was a little tired and a little bummed out that I was sitting at home all alone on a saturday night. After relaxing with a couple of beers I decided I might as well chase my losses at 1/2. I quickly managed to even the score, but then a couple of bad beats brought me back down. Late at night I sat at a 0.5/1 HU table, just waiting for fish to give me action. After busting a couple of shortstackers I ended the day about $150 in the red. So nothing to worry about at all.

I just came off a very good session at 1/2. In less than half an hour of 4-tabling I made a $600 profit. It's been a great week and I'm looking forward to the next. I had to make a $2k withdrawal yesterday and I've given out loans to some of my broke friends :-p which means that my bankroll is still at $8k, but once I get it to $10k I will take a serious shot at 2/4. In the meantime, peace.

FTOPS

Like I predicted in my last post, this was going to be a good week. I have dropped down to 0.5/1, 6-tabling on Full Tilt. My hourly has been $160, which is pretty awesome for those stakes.

So when the Full Tilt Online Poker Series 9th edition started, I decided to take a shot at some events. Today was the 6-max quadruple shootout NLHE. My table draw was so, so. There was one shark who had $550k in tournament winnings. Fortunately he was at the opposite end of the table and got coolered quite early. The other players all seemed solid. On my left was another guy with great tournament results. He was also very aggressive. I never really got things going. I started sort of a grudge match against the player on my right by showing bluffs and talking trash in the chat. I owned him and busted him out early, but I also had an unfortunate confrontation with my jacks against KQ where I lost the flip. When we were down to three, I was the clear shortstack. At one point I had 800 of the 18k chips in play. But I picked my spots and grinded my way up by playing aggressively. Then I went on a rush, knocked the weakest player out when my AQ held against A5 and went heads up with the chip lead against the aggressive guy to my left. I continued my rush by making some power moves and all of a sudden I had 14k vs. his 3k. That's when I flopped bottom two pair and got all the money in against top pair. Unfortunately he sucked out. After that I had no hands for a long while and lost my chiplead. In the final hand I called a raise with KQ and flop was Q73 rainbow. I check-called the flop. The pot was now already massive. The turn was a 3, which looked like a safe card. But he had 63 and busted me. :-(

So now I'm more or less on tilt and I won't be playing more poker until tomorrow.

Bad Week

My week started out as bad as it could. On Sunday I was up $400 and tried to push my luck late at night in an attempt to have a 1k payday. I was tired and should have known better. After a big cooler hand, I went on tilt and dropped $900 in less than an hour. I was tired, there was a record-breaking heat wave that day and my internet was disconnecting randomly for some reason.
I should definitely have quit a lot earlier.

During the week my connection continued to be bad and I tilted off some more money at the tables as a result of this, but to be honest I had a lot of bad luck as well. On Thursday I was tired of Full Tilt hanging all the time, so I took my business to WPX instead. I had less disconnection trouble there (plus they have disconnect protection), but nevertheless dropped $1k pretty fast (sigh) playing 2/4. On Friday I grinded the 0.5/1 and 1/2 tables for several hours and was up $1,100. But then I took a horrible bad beat and challenged the guy who beat me to a heads up match. That was probably not a good idea. I was pretty tired after playing long hours, and my opponent was a solid heads up pro. I started out chipping away at him and was up almost a buy-in (at 1/2) when I decided it was time to quit. Just to be polite I gave him a 5 minute warning. In those 5 minutes he managed to crack my aces and bust me. Now I continued playing after all. Bad idea, as my once +$1,100 turned into -$400... I was tilting pretty bad at that point. I did manage to win back some, though, and ended the long and hectic day with a total $100 profit.

It's 7 am Sunday morning now and my day/night has been pretty good. When I got up I played a little 0.5/1 at Full Tilt, winning $200 (although I did lose AT vs. AT all-in for 400 BBs on a KQJ rainbow flop to runner runner flush :-/...) My friend Joar was home from a chess tournament in Switzerland. He brought his laptop over to my place for some grinding. I made $400 profit from a short 0.5/1 session at WPX and $200 playing HORSE at Full Tilt. My internet connection seems to have improved. I am playing well and am confident of a good next week!