Small playing break

I'm running pretty badly at the moment, so I'm not going to play any more until the weekend. I'm staying in a hotel because of work anyway, so that makes it more difficult as the connection isn't great. I'm going to be concentrating on watching videos and reviewing my play instead. I think this will have more long term benefits to me anyway.

There was this sick hand that came up yesterday, I'm not sure about my preflop play here. I have made a post about it a few minutes ago, so it will be interesting to see what people's opinions are. I hadn't come across either player before, so I didn't know what their ranges were here (although both had a VPIP of 50% from 14 hands). My thinking was that I could check/fold if I miss and I still have some chips to play with, as it happened I hit a monster flop and the guy hits his 2 outer against me.

I know logically that if I get my money in good, then I'll be fine for the most part, but beats like this still really piss me off. I guess that's something else I need to work on in my game. I've tried not having the chat on, which has helped a bit, but I still feel compelled to berate my opponent sometimes after something like this. I'm seriously considering asking support to ban my chat so that I can't do it. I'll have a think about it.

Something else I'm going to try is some form of meditation. This is something I've kind of been interested in for a little while, but had never really done anything about. I've got myself a CD called Meditation for beginners by someone called Jack Kornfield, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. I was originally thinking of this as an aid to help me with my sleeping problems, but it seems like it might help me in poker too.

Sick few days

The last couple of days have been pretty sick in SnG's culminating in last night cashing in only 2 out of 2 sets of 8. Most of the time I lost as a massive favourite, the best one being losing with AA vs K7s, the other time I was shoving into monsters.

I really need to learn how to win more often as a favourite and also learn how to not shove into monsters. Winning my fair share of coinflips would definitely be an improvement to my game too.
Things have improved a little, I cashed in 3 out of 4 today. Sadly I'm in a hotel because of work, so not getting the opportunity to play as much.

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now.

Update

Ok, so I've been away for a while. I had to withdraw my bankroll, because my bank account was busto and I needed the money to buy Christmas presents.

Since then, I have managed to grind some money back up on pokerstars playing the $6.50 turbo SnG's. I have been doing really well in them and my ROI is about 30%. I'm planning to move up to the $16 turbos when I have 50 buy ins for them.

I have re-subscribed to pokerxfactor

I was a member previously, but had to cancel due to finances, I've paid for it this time out of my pokerstars account.

Tough start

So, I'm finally playing on a new site. I need to correct my earlier post, it's UNIBET I'm playing on not Eurobet. Anyway, I deposited and started playing on Friday, and ended up down 5 Buyins. The players are really loose and passive, sometimes getting 4 or 5 players to a flop after a raise. It's taken me some time to get used to this, but I think I'm getting there, as of now, I'm finally in profit on the site, only to the tune of 1.5 buy ins over 7,000 hands, but it's better than down.

I've also cleared 100 euros of bonus in that time as well, so that's ok. Here's the graph of my 3 days playing there:





I'll be away with work all week, then will be away in Germany to visit a friend, so it's going to be a couple of weeks before I play again :-(

Bad day

I really need to learn to quit earlier when things aren't going my way. I lost with QQ vs JT on a J high board, the other guy turned 2 pair, he couldn't let top pair go in a re-raised pot. On another table I was sat between 2 huge donks, who both had over 65% VPIP, and the couldn't let any hand go once they caught a piece of the flop, and kept sucking out. It was very frustrating. I kept telling myself that I was better off staying, because sooner or later I was going to hit something and get paid off by them. I sure that would have been the case if I actually had hit something, but I didn't.

I ended the session down $175 after about 1300 hands. I played a bit more later and won a couple of buy ins back, but was still down $116 at the end. It's really my own fault for not stopping earlier, that's something I really need to improve on. I do seem to have improved on not tilting as much, which is a good thing. I kept pretty calm while all this was happening, although I probably didn't play my best either, which is another reason why I should have just quit.

On another note, I'm going to switch over from Pokerstars to Eurobet. The competition is really weak apparently, and also they have pretty good rakeback/bonus deals. I'm just waiting on my money to be transferred into neteller, so I will be unable to play for a couple of days, but hopefully it will be worth it.

Update

Ok, so I suck at keeping a blog up to date, I thought I'd make a new post and will try to update this more often.

Since making this post, I managed to lose a fair bit of money, mainly by tilting. I forget how much it was, as it was a while ago. I also lost a bit of money playing other games like Omaha.

In the last week however, I decided to to play NL25 again, because playing NL10 just doesn't bother me in terms of money. In the last week I've played 12,763 hands and I'm up $379 which is 5.98 pt/BB so it's been going pretty well so far, hopefully it will continue.

I had a discussion in an IRC channel about this hand I played, the conversation went on for about 2 hours, it turned out to be more interesting than I thought. It ended up getting into the mathematical side of things, which I'm still trying to get my head round. I nearly folded the river! I'm going to get a transcript of the chat, so I can go through it myself in more detail. I'd be interested to hear any comments. I'm going to go through my pokertracker for the last week to analyse the hands I've played, and I may post more of the hands on here.

First post

So, I thought I'd create myself a blog, mainly to help give me some focus. I'll probably post some hands on here, and maybe something else that might me interesting.

I have been playing poker for probably a year or so and had many ups and downs. The biggest thing for me was joining pokerxfactor, I feel my game has really improved.

A couple of months ago, I decided to withdraw my whole bankroll on Pokerstars as I need the money (I spent a load of money that I couldn't afford in a strip club when I was drunk, lol). Anyway, I have turned my 0 bankroll into about $1000 ($1005 to be precise). I entered a FPP satellite into the sunday millions and top 4 got paid out of 9, so this gave me 215 T$, I used these to play small SnG's, and then came 3rd in a $5 MTT for around $300. Since then I have been playing $6.50 turbo SnG's and have a 25% ROI from just over 200 played. I moved up to the $16's but things haven't been going well in those.

I am going to move back to the $6.50's and do a lot of work on my SnG game, using tools like SNGPT and SNGEGT which I have purchased, but not really used properly. This is going to be my main focus, I spend a lot of time away from home with work, so I can sit in my hotel room doing a lot of analysis, rather than in the bar drinking.

I have also been playing some NL25 6 max too, it has been going not too bad, although I did lose 4 buy ins today. Overall I'm feeling good about poker in general though, and have been tilting a lot less than normal too.