Okay I haven´t written an entry in like two weeks, or I actually have but I am writing my final text about the Sopranos and since I have thought alot about it and it´s so interesting to discuss it will be a very long entry. More like an essay and hopefully at least someone will find it somewhat interesting.

Today march ends and I won´t be playing anymore, maybe som PLO but I have some school stuff to do and when I checked the tables they weren´t good enough to make me motivated to play. It has been a good month, winning more than 2/3 of the days and a result of around 26000$ including rakeback. As usual I mostly played 3-6 but maybe 15% was 5-10 and I finally won there. I have not played enough to deteminre where I am at there so I still will be careful in playing too much there. This is my first month over 20k and therefore also my best month and I think alot has to do with me winning at 5-10 instead of losing, even 3-4 buyins there takes a way alot of the profit I gain from 3-6. I have played well but not great I think, you sure think you play better when you win then when you lose for obvious reasons. I have done mistakes due to lack of focus, tilt and fps(fancy play syndrome) but as I have said in previous entries it´s hard to eliminate something like that completely. I have made more fps plays lately, alot due to me playing a bit more tricky which is positive but I guess a negative side-effect is that you sometimes will take it too far. Remember Phil Galfond saying that about durrr, he had a very different style and naturally he sometimes made some weird and not so good play just due to that. So I guess if you don´t play 100% straight forward all the time you are more likely to make sub-optimal fps plays than if you always play very straight forward. I guess it´s self explainatory but whatever.

So I am on a roll right now, had my 3rd losing day this month today and it was only 300$ so close to a break even day. Only thing that sucks it that I was up 5600$ for a while by running fantastic, then I turned around and lost that but it´s okay. I am still up 11000$ for the month so I am happy. I think I play well I am not that much to talk about my game anymore since it´s more of a grind nowadays, don´t really do much work outside anymore which is a shame since it´s not good falling behind. On the other hand I am constantly thinking when playing and today I made som moves I have never done before and some worked some didn´t. Played this hand against a decent regular where he opens preflop and gets a caller in the cutoff and I overcall in BB with A3s. Flop comes AA4 with a flushdraw. I make a standard check and it gets checked around, turn is another 4 and I now have the essential nuts. I check again since, although there are two flushdraws, no hand will call to streets that wouldn´t bet here. Again pretty standard in my opinion. The river is a offsuit 8 and here I would mostly bet to get a call from a middle pair of some sort but decide to check again. I am not sure if it´s actually good since I am not sure wether or not I can expect an 8 to bet or anyone to bluff. Anyhow it worked out and the reg bet 2/3 pot and I raise 3,5 times his raise and he pays me of with an 8. I was pretty satisfied at the time but when thinking about it more I am not sure I like the play. I don´t expect the reg to pay me of with an 8 but the guy behind him was not as good so he might. Just some random thoughts.. I guess it´s good to try new things though just need to be objective in my analysis and not go by results.

Had an exam today, went well except for the fact that I made a notation error I think, it came with the translation from english to swedish and although this error occured in most of the exam problems I hope it won´t affect the grade. Depends on how harsh the teacher is, was a silly mistake by me and I realized it only after I had left the examination. Other then that I am positive I made it and if I don´t pass it´s not the worst thing ever since it was pretty easy and I could easily pass again. Have another exam on monday though and that is tougher but I still have two days to study and I can only hope that is enough. I really don´t understand why they put the exam so close to each other.

Wow, I just can´t wait for Boardwalk Empire or the book title is Boardwalk Empire I am not sure wether that will be the title of the series.It´s not 100% sure HBO will produce this it definitly sounds very promising. Martin Scorsese(one of the greatest American directors the last 30 years) will produce a HBO mob series, how could this possibly fail. Sopranos is fantastic but this could probably be something similar, not close to shooting yet though so will probably be a while if this happen. Here is a little info:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i435ae21676ac96708ff61773efabb0cf

Steve Buscemi is a decent actor so that´s cool, from what I have seen of Michael Pitt he is also at least decent and under Scorsese he could probably be much more.

Poker is going well again, up 7000$ for the month but haven´t played that much. The following week I won´t be playing much at all. Haven´t really felt like playing much and I have alot to do in school so it´s pretty clear what I will be doing for the next week. After the 18th I will start grinding for real again when my exams are over. I hopefully will be able to take some 5-10 shots if the games are good but they haven´t been the last week.

So tomorrow I will remove one of my wisdom teeths(is that the plural form?) which if I remember correctly isn´t that nice. The surgery itself isn´t that bad but you can´t eat solid food for a couple of days. But what can you do? I have two exams next weekend, one on friday and one on monday. I am well prepared already for the friday´s Linear Algebra exam and hopefully there is enough time to prepare for my Stochastic process exam on monday. And as if that isn´t enough I am working on a case that my group will have to present on the following wednesday. That is economy however so not to worried since it´s such a bs subject. Just the fact that they grade how good you are at argumenting rather than what your arguments are is kind of ridicolous. I am sure that is what matters when you get into a big company or whatever, when regarding marketing and all that stuff, but if I were in charge of a big company I would listen to the ones with the best ideas and not the best presentations. This just proven my point that business economy people(students and teachers) are morons. This will be a short entry, have to go now.

So this is going to be by far the worst month ever, I have had one losing month before since I started playing poker approx 2 years ago. That was June last year, ended down 2300$ I think including rakeback. I broke even in October last year but ended up a couple of grand through rakeback. This month I am down 7000$ after my last session that I just finished. I will probably get around 3000-4000$ in rakeback which means the result will be around -3500$ and hence the worst month ever. I think I have been handling it well though, occasional semi-tilt but nothing major for a longer period. Probably been playing a bit weak now and then but it´s hard to get away from that. Today I played a awful session where I had a WWSF(won when saw flop) of only 30%(avarage 48%) and wasd(won at showdwown) of only 18% which is ridicoulosly low. There is a new month now however and I still feel very good about my game, hopefully I will have better luck at 5-10 so I can play more hands there.

Tonight I will have a birthday party and hence I won´t be playing more, tomorrow is back to the grind though and on monday back to studying. I will have a tough period of 2 weeks in school now which means less poker but I will hopefully be able to get in a decent amount of hands anyway.

I talked to my bank the other day about getting a loan for an apartment but with no luck, I am looking for one in the price class around 130000$-140000$ and today I have almost 90000$ dollars that I could spend on an apartment right now(that is excluding my online bankroll). So hopefully it won´t take too much time before I will be able to buy one, prices are low right now so would want to buy one right now if it was possible.

I hardly ever tilt anymore, except for some small suboptimal plays now and then but I think those are spots that are almost impossible to remove completely. Yesterday however I made two plays that werent completely atrocious but were definitly very bad plays. In one I got it in with AK on Adxdyd against a 300$ stack who minraised the flop. I think it´s bad given his minraise but on the other hand he was a shortie so probably not that good and hence not an atrocious play I think. Other I 3bet a very drawy board 200BB deep against an aggro regular. I didn´t like the 3bet although I won´t expect him to shove a ton and I had a gutshot and backdoor flush draw so if he calls I can do stuff on the turn to show a profit. It was a very good board for him to raise so I have some FE but sure it was a tilt play. I can´t remember last time that happened, probably many months ago. I won´t allow it to happen again although I am not in the best mood about poker right now. It reminds me of last June when I also ran awful and had my only losing month this far. As it looks now this could definitly be the next one, down slightly more than 11000$. I haven´t played 2-4$NL since October I think but might just go down and play a few sessions there, right now nothing is working. Every time I bluff I get called and everytime I bet for value they fold.

It´s just ridicolous. Over the last 1,5 week I have overbet the river maybe 8-9 times, every single time it was for value they folded and every single time it was as a bluff they called and I am not exaggerating. My overbetting strategy is pretty simple, and I have liked all spots, everytime villain has a bluff catcher I bet big both as a bluff and for value. Say they checked and call twice on 4d5s8d Js 2h and now check again on the river. Unless they are very bad or very, very good they never have anything better than one pair and hence you can bet a very wide, balanced, range and own them completely. I can probably bet 1,5 times the pot with KJ+ since there range is so weak and given how wide my value range gets I can bet a ton of bluffs aswell. If I play a certain player that I now for certain how they will react I will adjust accordingly but most of the time it´s hard to guess how they will react so I try to make them indifferent from bluff catching. All of this is in Mathematics of Poker. Hasn´t worked very well yet but I will evaluate it when I get a bit bigger sample, it is definitly not a losing strategy but is it the best one?

Watched Arsenal-Cardiff yesterday and it was a very sweet match and finally Eduardo was back and what a comeback! After being injured for a year after the brutal tackle by Mike(?) Taylor against Birmingham last year many feard that he never would walk and let alone play football again. Yesterday he scored to goals though and as a die-hard gunners fan it was very nice to watch. Overall the team made a very good game, haven´t seen them this good in a long time and honestly I think it was due to the changes Wenger made. More creative wingers in Nasri and Vela rather than Nasri and Eboue/Diaby/Denlison. Of course the opposition wasn´t of the highest quality but the first game against them was atrocious so hopefully this was a turn around for Arsenal. One of my least favorites in Arsenal Bendtner made a very good game aswell, scoring once and making one assist.

I haven´t really thought about my downswing until I checked my stats log from last year and found out that in terms of how many days I have lost this was the worst downswing I have ever had. From 2nd of february I lost 7 consecutive days counting the days I played only, last year I lost no more than 4 consecutive days at most. What is interesting however is that in terms of the amount of money I lost during these 7 days it´s less than what I lost during a period of 4 days in June last year and then I was playing mostly 2-4 and some 3-6. While during this downswing half of what I lost was from 5-10 and the rest from 3-6. So either I am better today(or that is of course obvious) or it ain´t as bad as I think. Anyhow I have handeled it very well and I am really proud over myself for that, it hasn´t affect my emotions at all almost. I had a frustrating session a couple of days ago but quit after 30 minutes or so realizing it was no point in trying to play in the mood I was. I think this has cut my losses alot. Seeing as it´s such a small part of my networth probably helps me deal with it much easier than if you lose like 25% of your net worth.

On another topic, I love making lists of all kinds of different things and just felt like doing it right now, so here you go.

Top-5 best movies ever(not a list set in stone except for number one):

1. Barry Lyndon (Visually stunning)
2. Cache (Have gone up through the ranks all the time, Haneke develops what Bresson started)
3. The Third Man (Brilliant acting in the best film-noir ever)
4. L´Ann© derin¨r© de Marienbad (As far away from narrative film you get and still being a narrative film)
5. L´Argent (Bresson´s most perfect film, watch the Departed and see how many of the photo compositions are exactly the same)

Top-5 Best directors

1. Robert Bresson (Not a personal favorite but as a brilliant film mind I talked to once said, what Bresson does it making movies in their purest form. It never was, isn´t and never will be a equally great director due to the fact that his movies are perfect in any sense)
2. Terrence Malick (My personal favorite who unfortunatly almost never makes movies, only person on this list that still makes them though. Can´t wait for Tree of Life. He has a different style and the only good director today that isn´t mainly influenced by Bresson)
3. Max Oph¼ls (The king of the noir theme, he uses the camera as no one else does even today.)
4. Michael Haneke (Okay, he also makes movies today. Director of Cache should be enough, the Bresson influences are very clear)
5. Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Word is pretty awesome)

Top-3 Best TV-shows(only 3 due to the poor quality of tv in general)

1. The Sopranos (Haven´t watch the entire series but it´s one of a kind)
2. Entourage (Entertaining and love the meta film concpets, a quality show despite the audience its aimed for)
3. 24 (Season one was innovative enough to be this high on the list, good acting aswell.)

Top-5 Best Ongame regulars(not set in stone)
1. Basshunter (Solid as hell and def. no what he is doing)
2. Jane16 (The best nit I have ever played)
3. Anothercheat (Lag that made my life hell when I played him, could probably handle him a bit better today but he isn´t around anymore)
4. Negreanu77x (Tricky, smart and I have had troubles with him. Haven´t seen him in a while though)
5. Gutshot Gerd (Very, very solid)

I played some HU 2-4$ today against a very tough opponent(after the session I found out he was playing NL10-20$ HU regularly) . Due to my ego I couldn´t stop playing him and since the stakes where relatively low I didn´t mind playing just for the experience. I think I played well and got him to quit me when I owned him in the last pot. He probably was monkeying around a bit though, at least he said so. And I do think he had the edge over a longer period of time, ended up with a 100$ profit though. I talked to some people about HU but I don´t know if I have the emotional control and the paitence to sit and wait for bad players so I will see. Apparently the money is much better though. On the other hand I never played poker for the money so I can´t let them make it about the money now(Entourage "quotes" ftw!).

I am down 12000$ for the month now and have lost 8 out of 10 days this month(played all days but one) but I feel I am in good company, read Niman Kenkre´s(aka Samoleus aka Punketty) blog and he have had exatcly the same results. Played 10 days and won 8 of them. So I am not worried it will turn the question is just when. I am not more than 15 buyins which isn´t too bad and I am afraid you just can´t get upset with those downswings since they will be happening pretty reguraly.

In my regular life not much has happened this week, everything is normal and nothing exiting has happened. Still waiting for my monster sopranos box which hasn´t arrived yet which makes me sad. Hopefully I will have it this week at least.

Don´t know why but the last 3 months have all started with me losing almost 10000$. Sure it isn´t that bad since they all ended with a 15000$+ score but find it a bit weird. I am stuck 7000$ now I think which in reality isn´t much at all since I think at least 4000$ is at 5-10 which makes it only 9 buyins total. I am also glad that I am not upset at all and am not worried or anything which shows that I have confidens in my game but I will probably not play any 5-10 til I have fixed the results.

What does annoy me however is that I can´t seem to win at 5-10$, I have taken shots every month since novemeber but everytime I have failed and end up losing too much and stepped down. I feel like have been running just horrible there and since I am pretty good at objectivly judge when I run good or bad I am still postive that I am +EV in those games. They are sure tougher but as long as I am +EV I am fine with having a small winrate to start with and then evolve. As I said I won´t play any 5-10$ now but I will continue trying until it works.

In the mean time I have actually won 6 buyins at PLO100 which isn´t much consider the standard deviation in omaha is around twice the same in texas but it feels good and although I am a brand new player I think I have the basic knowledge necessary to beat the lowlimit games. What I have enjoyed with the game is that ranges are much more defined which means you can do much more creative stuff. I can count the times I have 3bet shoved the river as a bluff in holdem on one hand but already managed to pull of two in omaha. Obviously it could have worked due to variance but I felt really good about the hands.

In my non-poker life I have just discovered The Sopranos and can´t seem to stop watching, have seen 2 seasons and just ordered a 30-disc box with all the seasons. I am in love with the concept of the therapy conversations and the complexity of Tony Soprano makes the series the most interesting show I have ever seen I think. Bracco(Jennifer Melfi) and Gandolfini(Tony) as two of the main characters are absolutely brilliant. I never thought tv could be this good. Entourage was probably the show I ranked highest before and now another HBO series, I will probably dive into The Wire when I am out of Sopranos since I have heard only good things about it and it´s HBO so..

This scene from the first season of Sopranos is pretty epic:

Nothing really interesting has happened the last week, I have played some NLH and won some buyins and played som PLO and actually won some. I think I have gotten some idea of which hands to play and all that stuff but obviously feel I need to learn alot more if I wanna climb up to midstakes. I think the opposition at PLO100 sucks and that I am for sure a winner, on the other hand I might have run good probably some combo of those two. My problem is that I don´t really enjoy playing it as much as I enjoy texas but maybe that is because I play much lower I don´t know. Hopefully that will change and I can enjoy playing both. I have decided to move up every time I win 30 buyins since the bankroll isn´t a factor. I am up 2,5 now after being stuck 5 early on, can´t wait to move up to 1-2 and eventually higher.

NLH has been going really well and I am rushing right now but not really much to talk about. School has started but I haven´t really studied much, have to start working now so I don´t have to much to do when it´s time for exams. That is´nt until march so not too worried yet though. Other than that I have nothing interesting to say, going out tomorrow and on saturday so probably won´t play much poker this month and the result will probably end on around 13000$ which is fine but not great. Hope Ferbruary won´t bring a 22 BI downswing to start with.

Yeah, one thing to mention is that I got a new computer, quad core 4GB ram and a sick graphic card. Immidiatly bought Crysis Warhead and the graphics and especially physics of the game was unbelieavble. Haven´t been playing new games in a long time since my computer sucked but they have really evolved. I am thinking about buying Far Cry 2(since the first game was so awesome) but people seem to think it´s much worse so I don´t know, will see..