I'm really not sure why but recently I just can not get on any sort of sleep schedule, it is really terrible. Right now it is 6 in the morning, I just woke up after sleeping for 3 hours and I can't go back to bed. I'm tempted to play because there are some pretty good games going right now and I am bored out of my mind, but I plan on falling back asleep soon so I don't want to start up.

So far this month has been pretty good for me, I have won about 100k playing poker in limited hours and close to that in staking (although most of that "win" was just makeup that my stake owed me so I'm not really sure if it's categorized as winning even though it feels like one). For the first time in a while I am going to try to focus on online tournaments for a little while, there is the FTOPS going on right now and I plan on playing a lot of the tournaments and focussing on them, rather than what's been my usual lately of playing well for the first 2 hours that I play tournaments, getting bored and hopping into a bunch of big games and losing interest in my tournaments and giving away my chips. I really want to focus on my tournament game because there are a lot of big tournaments coming up that I plan on playing both live and online and I want to make sure my tournament game is sharp.

I keep meaning to put some hands in my blog and talk about them but I don't have pokertracker on my labtop since I never used it on my older one, so I usually don't save that many hands, I'll try to start saving some good ones if I can remember it mid-session, or maybe I'll just bite the bullet and get pokertracker for my labtop. Also, I have two new videos coming out soon that I think you guys will like, one is my FTOPS final table win in the hand history replayer and the other is 2 tabling some 6 max cash. Check them out and let me know what you guys think.

Good Luck,

Isaac

So, I haven't been playing much poker lately, I lost all my profits for the month plus about 150k or so more and just haven't felt like playing since. Not really because it was a huge hit or anything but more because I had been playing a ton and hadn't reallly been spending any time with my friends who are back from school for the summer. Also, I was a little dissapointed in myself because a lot of that losing was chasing my losses and playing in games that I probably shouldn't have been playing in. It's very easy beacuse of the nature of variance in PLO to convince yourself to play in games that you shouldn't especially when you are stuck. I reveiwed some of my most recent sessions and was shocked at how big of a difference the game that I was playing in makes, when I was playing in what I would consider to be favorable games my results were outstanding, but when I was playing in bad games (usually when already stuck) my results stunk. I'm gonna take this lesson to heart and when I start playing PLO again I am gonna implement a strict stop-loss policy and also be much more strict about my game selection.

That's pretty much all there is to update, I have been partying a lot and working out a bunch and trying to eat healthy while on this mini-break from poker and I am really enjoying it. I feel really good and I have a lot more energy to do stuff than when I sit around and play poker all day. I will probably not be playing a ton until my friends go back to school which will be in a couple of weeks. Hopefully the break does me well.

One final thing, this is probably cliche to say at this point but if you haven't seen it go see The Dark Knight, it is amazing. I have seen it twice and I think I may go see it again today, its that good. Heath Ledger is soooo sick and if he doesn't win best Actor at the Oscars it will be a crime.

Good Luck,

Isaac

So... I haven't updated this thing in forever but I'm gonna try to start doing it more frequently now. Since I've been gone for so long I figure I'll try to update you guys on how things have been going for me in poker and in life.

Poker has been unbelievably swingy for me recently, more so than ever before, it has mostly swung for the good but even so I'm considering if the ups and downs are even worth playing the games I am right now (namely 200/400 PLO). To give you guys a taste of the swings I had the two best financial months of my life in April and May both 7 figure months (this is including my 4th place at EPT Monte Carlo and my FTOPS win) then the first day of June I proceeded to have by far my biggest losing day losing 350k and June ended up being my biggest losing month between cash games and WSOP staking losing over 600k. Then this month started out great with me going on a big PLO upswing while in Las Vegas, but since I have been home I have swung back down and am now close to even on the month. In the future I will try to give less monetary updates and more hands, but since I had been gone for so long I figured that I wanted to update you guys on how things have been going.

I really enjoy playing PLO and find the game fascinating, and find myself wanting to play PLO more than NL now which never used to be the case (I started out playing PLO pretty much shearly out of boredom from lack of NL games), but at the same time the game is an emotional roller coaster and if I am going to keep playing 200/400 consistently I am going to have to learn to deal with the ups and downs a little better. It seems crazy to say that since I have been playing at the 200/400 and even 300/600 levels in NL pretty consistently for alomst two years but the swings of NL really just can not be compared to those of PLO.

As for the life part of things, life is great. As a lot of you may know I just turned 21 and besides that being really cool because I can play poker legally in the US now it's also really cool because now I can legally go to bars and nightclubs and stuff, needless to say I have been partying pretty hard since my 21st and feel like my body needs a big time break, so I'm going to take a little bit of time of partying so hard and probably try to catch up on some of the Tivo that I missed while I was gone in Vegas for three weeks. Right now, I am going to see The Dark Knight and I can't wait, to be honest superhero movies aren't really up my alley usually but I have heard such amazing things about this movie that I've been dying to see it for months now.

And finally, I'm going to do a little bit of ranting (not quite Raptor style, but I'll try my best)... I have been living at the house that I bought for 8 months now and have had countless additions and modifications made to it. And literally not one of the countless times that I have brought in someone to do someting has it ever been done on time, now I can understand this as I'm not the most punctual person myself, but it is also not my fucking job to be punctual. The thing I don't understand is if its gonna take 4 months to do something just fucking tell me it's gonna take 4 months, I really don't care, but if you tell me it's gonna be done in 2 weeks and it takes 4 fucking months, I'm gonna be a little peeved. Not to mention, when you are already 3 weeks behind schedule you would think that it would be a good idea to work extra hard to try and get the job done, but no!!! It's almost as if the longer that these people take, the lazier they get. As you can tell I am pissed, mostly because I made these plans for this elaborate backyard to be built so that all my friends who are back from school and I can hang out and have barbeques and what not during the summer, now the summer is almost over and my backyard isn't even half way finished. So yeah, end rant...

Good Luck,

Isaac

So... I haven't updated this thing in forever but I'm gonna try to start doing it more frequently now. Since I've been gone for so long I figure I'll try to update you guys on how things have been going for me in poker and in life.

Poker has been unbelievably swingy for me recently, more so than ever before, it has mostly swung for the good but even so I'm considering if the ups and downs are even worth playing the games I am right now (namely 200/400 PLO). To give you guys a taste of the swings I had the two best financial months of my life in April and May both 7 figure months (this is including my 4th place at EPT Monte Carlo and my FTOPS win) then the first day of June I proceeded to have by far my biggest losing day losing 350k and June ended up being my biggest losing month between cash games and WSOP staking losing over 600k. Then this month started out great with me going on a big PLO upswing while in Las Vegas, but since I have been home I have swung back down and am now close to even on the month. In the future I will try to give less monetary updates and more hands, but since I had been gone for so long I figured that I wanted to update you guys on how things have been going.

I really enjoy playing PLO and find the game fascinating, and find myself wanting to play PLO more than NL now which never used to be the case (I started out playing PLO pretty much shearly out of boredom from lack of NL games), but at the same time the game is an emotional roller coaster and if I am going to keep playing 200/400 consistently I am going to have to learn to deal with the ups and downs a little better. It seems crazy to say that since I have been playing at the 200/400 and even 300/600 levels in NL pretty consistently for alomst two years but the swings of NL really just can not be compared to those of PLO.

As for the life part of things, life is great. As a lot of you may know I just turned 21 and besides that being really cool because I can play poker legally in the US now it's also really cool because now I can legally go to bars and nightclubs and stuff, needless to say I have been partying pretty hard since my 21st and feel like my body needs a big time break, so I'm going to take a little bit of time of partying so hard and probably try to catch up on some of the Tivo that I missed while I was gone in Vegas for three weeks. Right now, I am going to see The Dark Knight and I can't wait, to be honest superhero movies aren't really up my alley usually but I have heard such amazing things about this movie that I've been dying to see it for months now.

And finally, I'm going to do a little bit of ranting (not quite Raptor style, but I'll try my best)... I have been living at the house that I bought for 8 months now and have had countless additions and modifications made to it. And literally not one of the countless times that I have brought in someone to do someting has it ever been done on time, now I can understand this as I'm not the most punctual person myself, but it is also not my fucking job to be punctual. The thing I don't understand is if its gonna take 4 months to do something just fucking tell me it's gonna take 4 months, I really don't care, but if you tell me it's gonna be done in 2 weeks and it takes 4 fucking months, I'm gonna be a little peeved. Not to mention, when you are already 3 weeks behind schedule you would think that it would be a good idea to work extra hard to try and get the job done, but no!!! It's almost as if the longer that these people take, the lazier they get. As you can tell I am pissed, mostly because I made these plans for this elaborate backyard to be built so that all my friends who are back from school and I can hang out and have barbeques and what not during the summer, now the summer is almost over and my backyard isn't even half way finished. So yeah, end rant...

Good Luck,

Isaac

Sorry I haven't updated in a while but I have been very busy in Europe and have not been on the computer all that much at all. Me and my friend Will arrived in Barcelona on the 27th and went to the PokerStars welcome party which was a pretty good time. I met a lot of cool people there that I play against online a lot, and it's always nice to put a face to a name. I also had a decently long talk with Lee Jones, he is a super nice, smart, and genuine person, he did a great job running Poker Stars and I wish he would come back, but unfortunately he is having too much fun working for the EPT and said he doubts he will be coming back any time soon.

As for the actual tournament, it was dissapointingly uneventful; I really felt like I played fantastic throughout the whole tournament but just could not get things going. On day 1 I had my chipstack up to almost 40k with the blinds 150/300 (this was probably a top 15 or so stack) only to run KK into AA against the biggest maniac I have ever played in live poker for a 50k pot. After that I played a really tight short stack and snuck into day 2.

Day 2 started out really well as I picked up a lot of really good hands early and was able to run my 9500 chips (blinds were 400/800/100ante) to about 30k in a very short amount of time. I was feeling great because I know had a very workable stack and a very weak table. Unfortunately, I lost a race and was down to about 20k, then immediately after that my table was broken and I got moved to a really sick table. The table I was at ended up being Ansky, DMMikel, Play2kill, Schaefer, myself, and 2 aggressive young Scandanavian players. I felt really sick when I was at this table, the field in the EPT Barcelona was so unbelievably soft that to get stuck at a table like this was very, very unfortunate in my opinion. Anyways, I had to play tight at this table because the players were restealing so liberally, and I ended up running my 1010 into Schaefer's AA. Overall I played very well and really would not take back any of the plays I made, sometimes in poker tournaments things don't go your way and it wasn't meant to be, this was one of those times for me, oh well.

So after the tournament I got word that there were some very good private games going in the hotel at the EPT Barcelona, I got invited to play a very rich German player in a very high stakes heads up cash game. There were many other details and people involved, but unfortunately I can't divulge who they were or how they did. I can divulge that I ran horrible and ended up losing 110k USD (81k euro). It was really frusterating because this guy was one of those players who is into playing "friendly poker" and will always show you his hand after the hand; it seemed like every hand he would make some absurdly big river bet, I would almost always fold and he would show me the nuts, or close to it. No matter who you are, or who the other person is, if they make the nuts nearly every hand, they are going to be tough to beat. I was pretty disapointed about this loss, not really because of the amount (I have lost 6 figures multiple times, and am pretty used to it by now) but more because of the squandered opportunity and also the player that I lost it to.

After this Will and I decided that before we go to London for the WSOP Europe we would stop off in Amsterdam and hang out with some friends that are also here. The first night here I decided to stay up all night and play the Sunday tournaments. I busted in all of them and saw some good high-stakes action running on Full Tilt, I ended up playing all night and having my biggest winning session ever, +400k. Most of this came against Zigmund playing 200/400 plo/plhe. I feel like we both have distinct advantages in one of the games, he is definetly better than me at PLO, but I am far stronger than him in PLHE. However, I also feel that he tilts way worse than me, and when he is tilted his advantage in PLO drops significantly and when he is really tilting badly I have a distinct advantage over him in PLO. Clearly, this win could not have come at a better time, since I just lost 110k and my spirits were a little down.

I am really looking forward to the WSOP Europe, I am very focussed and I'm playing great, I will be playing the 10k PLO tournament and the 20k main event. I'll keep you guys updated on how I'm doing in the tournaments, and if any other interesting stuff happens while I'm in London.

Good Luck,
Isaac

I have been very busy lately playing a lot of poker, attempting to finalize the purchase of a house, and also trying to find time to hang out with my friends before they head back to school. Poker has been treating me pretty well. I made the final table of the 300 rebuy tournament after being for a riddiculous 11k in the rebuy period. I ended up getting 55k for my 5th place finish so a profit of 44k. I have also been on a really good heater in cash games, since I started the MTT bet for August I hadn't been playing much cash and hadn't been doing very well when I had been. However, that all changed this weekend when I won about 300k in cash games.

My video goes up today, and the 2nd part will go up on Thursday so hopefully you guys will enjoy. I wish I could give you guys some hands from cash game heater I have been on, or the FTOPS final table, but I just got a new computer and have been too lazy to download poker tracker yet. I should have another entry later in the week and I'll make sure to save some hands.

Good Luck,
Isaac

I really haven't been up to much lately, played a lot of tournies this weekend, nothing really too much report, made a smaller final table, and qualified for EPT Barcelona (which I had already bought into so saved 12k there). I feel like my middle-late stage game is off for some reason as I keep getting deep in these tournaments but just can never seal the deal, I also think I'm running somewhat poorly in the mid-late stages, but that's to be expected.

I played the High Stakes Showdown this Sunday, the 10k heads up tourney that Pokerstars runs and was unfortunate enough to have to play a good friend of mine and great player first round, Sorel Mizzi aka Imper1um aka zangbezan24. I thought both sides played very well, and there were some entertaining hands, so I thought I'd post a few hands from the match and go through a bit of my thought process:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374427">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374427%0D">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374427
Needless to say I'm not too happy with this hand, I am really not a very big proponent of slowplaying at all especially in reraised pots in which I have the initiative. My default line is definetly to lead this flop almost always, however because of the way the flow of the match was going I decided to try and get tricky here against Sorel, because I am pretty sure he knows I rarely slowplay and most of the time the best possible hand I'm gonna show up with when I check this flop is AJ. However, it backfired and he won a nice pot. On the river, I really didn't feel like he was bluffing, but I felt like my hand was just so underrepresented that he could be value-betting a worse hand, or maybe trying to bluff me off a weak one-pair hand, although like I said, his river bet did not feel like a bluff.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374353">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374353%0D">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374353
I rarely, if ever would reraise a hand like this in a heads up cash game format, I prefer to have a hand with the potential to hit a big flop i.e. suited connectors, broadway cards or a pair, but this is a freezeout, and even though the structure is good, there is more of a sense of urgency at all times, because you can't reload. Also, I was getting run over and I felt like I had to try to change the momentum somehow. On the flop, when he shoved I was nearly positive it was a draw, he shoved so quickly that I was not very worried about him having a lone ace, because it would take him some time to decide how he would want to play his hand (and the hands like AJ, AQ, AK, where he would have an easy decision to go all in are usually 4 bet pre in this situation) so really the only hands I was worried about him having were something like A6, A4, or 64 or a set, and I felt like the likelihood of him having a draw was much higher than one of those hands so I made the call and was right.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374364">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374364%0D">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374364
Some people may disagree with the way I played this hand, but I think I played it to maximize expectation in the long run vs. Sorel. He loves to check-raise these dryish types of flops, and to be honest I really didnt think he had much at all when he check-raised the flop and thought that there was a pretty good chance that he would try to bluff the turn and possibly even go all the way and bluff all in on the river. When I called the flop I planned on calling down on pretty much any turn and river. As it turns out he was bluffing on the flop, but got lucky on the turn and hit a great card for his hand, whether or not he would have 3 barrel bluffed I'll never really know, but I still like the way i played this hand.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374373">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374373%0D">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374373
this hand is quite standard, and pretty self-explanitory I think.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374587">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374587%0D">http://www.pokerhand.org/?1374587
This hand was probably the key hand of the match, something in my gut really told me I was supposed to call but I just couldn't think of a hand I would be in good shape and thought there were too many hands that had me in horrible shape like J9 and J10. I thought those two hands were very likely as well as good draw type hands and possibly KJ or AJ, or even a slowplayed big pair, and to be honest I really didn't think he would show up with they type of hand he had very often, which is about the only hand I was in really good shape against. However, like I said my gut told me to call which is why I nearly timed out deciding whether to call or fold. This was one of those spots where mathematically I couldn't really justify making the call against the range I had given him, but my instincts told me to go with it. A lot of times in these spots I will go with my instincts as they are usually pretty good, but this time I went with the math and was wrong.

After that I lost a coinflip with my AJ vs. his 88 and that was the end of the match. Overall I thought I played very well and if a few things had gone my way I would have won instead of lost. Oh well, good game Sorel, very well played.

That is pretty much all for today. There are a few big tournies today, so hopefully I'll make a good score in one of them. Also I should have a new video up tomorrow, barring some sort of technical problem.

Good Luck,
Isaac.

Hey Guys,

I'm starting a blog, in it I'll keep you guys up to date on what's going on in my poker life, and post some interesting hands and give some of my thoughts on the hands.

As of right now I am playing a lot of tournies, because I am in a team bet on which team can have better online tournament results in the month of August. My partner is AK87, we have a 10k bet against LilHoldem and #1pen, and a 1k bet with about 20 people. Playing all these tournies this month has made me realize how much I really dislike playing lots of tournies and how poorly I play in tournaments when I do not focus. Even though we are doing this bet I am having a really tough time taking these tournaments seriously until the tournament is down to 18 people or so, and this is causing me to make some bad plays and take a lot of unneccesary gambles; to be honest I am fine with that though because I have really never prided myself on being able to grind out a bunch of tournies and do well, and it is not something I aspire to do. One of the reasons I love the lifestyle of being a poker player is because of the freedom it allows you, and if you are playing 20 tournaments a day that freedom simply isn't there. A few times this week a bunch of friends have been going out and I could not join them because I was playing in tournaments, this really frusterated me. Especially because one of the times they were going out was to the Giants game where Bonds hit his 756th homerun. To be honest, if it was just an individual bet I would probably forfeit the 11k and just go back to my normal schedule of playing mostly cash games and playing a few tournaments a week, however my partner is working very hard and I don't want to let him down, so I'm gonna struggle through this month.

Ok, that's all I got for now, gonna go get some excersize and then be back for the tournaments tonight.

Good Luck,
Isaac