I have officially completed my first realy month slightly dedicated to poker since black friday. Right after black friday I threw $500 onto merge. I was originially going to focus on PLO, and ran up my $500 into ~$3k pretty quickly. After that tho, I plummeted back down to my original deposit. This is the exact same PLO story I have experienced evertyime I play that god forsaken game. Run hot at the start, then run ice cold and stop playing. After that I hardly played at all over the following months and when I did I played pretty poorly and noticed a ton of rust on my game.

This month, with school back in session and thus the golf season winding down I had a lot more down time to play poker. I decided to challenge myself and see what I could do with my now $500 bankroll, playing NLHE. I was going to use a pretty aggressive bankroll management strategy, moving up whenever I had 10 buy ins for a limit, moving back down if I lost 2 buy ins when taking a shot. I didn't start off that well at .25/.50 and immediately had to move back down to .10/.25 to grind a bit but did make it all the way to playing 2/4 by the end of the month.

Once I started playing a much less auto-pilot oriented game the results started to come. I ended up winning ~19 buy ins over the 39k hands, so that is a winrate slightly lower than 5bb/100. Not great considering half the play was below 1/2, however I was 9 tabling on a pokersite that has terrible software(imo, full tilt was the nuts) so I'm not too unhappy. I also only played about 53 hours so had a decent hourly wage considering the stakes I played at ~$65/hr. Near the end of the month I felt really good about my game, and felt in control at the table the entire time. I definitiely made a ton of really bad plays during the month, mostly a lot of terrible calls as the games just don't play that aggressive. This goes back to how I generally preach bet/folding at SSNL and folding to a lot of aggression in general. They ALWAYS have it even in the spots where they rep really narrow ranges.

Anyway, here is a garph.




When you add in rakeback(~$700) and clearing some bonuses I finished up the month with slightly over $5k in my account. Not too bad after starting with $500. Hope everyone is doing great, looks like the whole FTP situation may be working itself out, and for that I am jumping for joy. This sums up what I was like when I woke up and read the news over breakfast.

Sorta.......


was rooting for a boy!


but gonna have a little baby girl in a less than 6 months!!!!!!


give me some advice! #so scared

Ok so over the past few days I have really grinded to build a website for myself as a PGA professional. As I stated in my last blog post we are getting a new piece of technology that is going to help us fit people for golf clubs much more efficiently. I wanted to have a website up and running before we got the TrackMan so that when I do promotional stuff for it, I can direct people to my website for more information and to possibly sign up for a fitting. The online sign up isn't up and running yet but the website is. If you guys don't mind, check it out at www.nelsonadcock.com and let me know what you think and any feedback you might have.

Thanks!

EDIT: oh... hey what's up cbk1013, nice of you to troll me.

for everyone else\'s reference. Foticcine appears to be cbk1013 (proof is in this thread http://www.cardrunners.com/cr_forums/showthread.php?128451-5-10-live )
cbk1013 is the OP of the thread, but Foticcine comments later on from a 1st person perspective/referencing reads so it would appear they are 1 in the same.

Not sure why he is trolling me. He got coaching from me when i was offering 4 lessons for $300 early in 2011. He did well and improved during our time together, actually having his best month ever during my coaching. I even bragged about him in my blog ( http://www.cardrunners.com/blog/NxtWrldChamp/house-heater-student-video ) So finding out who was trolling my comments hard is pretty amusing.

Hey guys, been a while since I threw up a blog and I got a lot of stuff going on so I figured I'd post an update. First things first, I'm praying that something good comes out of the FTP hearings tomorrow.

Now for the good stuff. My wife is pregnant with our first child. We had our first ultrasound earlier this morning and got to see the heartbeating. It was so cool! Looking at that monitor and being able to see the heart flickering as it beat was something I will never ever forget.



That is the baby to the right of the mouse. Sort of below the mouse is the embryonic sac where the baby is getting all its nutrients for the time being. You can see the babies heart if you look in the right spot. If you follow the mouse arrow across the baby, to the little gap between its body and head, at the base of that little canal/valley/gap is the babies heart! So my wife is around 7.5 weeks along, and has a due date of March 7th. Very exciting stuff!

In other news, since poker went away(basically) I've been doing a lot more golf stuff. I got my PGA membership last month which was nice. The biggest perk to that being free entry into any PGA Tour event, yes that includes the Masters :) For most events I can get guest and family in too which is great. In a couple of weeks the PGA Championship will be in town about 20 mins down the road from me, so my parents are going to come down and I can get them in for free. I think were going to go on Saturday.

As for some even cooler golf news, we are getting a TrackMan! For you golfers out there it is really the coolest piece of golf technology out there right now. The PGA Tour uses it at every tournament and every big club manufacturer has a handful at their headquarters. It's a doppler radar for golf that is used to measure 22 different things through the golf swing and the ball flight. The doppler actually tracks the ball through the duration of its flight. If you are ever watching golf on TV and they tell you the club head speed, the ball speed, the carry distance, total distance or they show the flight of the ball in real time, that is TrackMan in action.

Here are the 22 things it measures.

Club SpeedBall SpeedSmash FactorSide Total*Attack AngleLaunch AngleHeightLanding AngleClub PathLaunch DirectionCarryHang TimeSwing PlaneSpin AxisSide Last DataSwing DirectionSpin RateTotal* Dynamic Loft* Spin Loft* Face Angle*

Here is a little introduction video on the TrackMan.




You can also go to the TrackMan website to see more videos.

We will be using the TrackMan for a variety of different applications. First a foremost we will use it for club fitting. Whether someone wants a new driver, a new set of irons, or a couple new wedges the TrackMan is the answer. We can very quickly find the optimal specs an individual should have on their clubs to make them as efficient as possible. And rather then just having them hit a bunch of shots and deciding which looks and feels better, or us telling them which clubs are better for them, the data from the TrackMan will do all the talking.

Sort of related to club fittings is a gap fitting. What were are going to find out here is how far someone carries each of their clubs and the gaps between different clubs. Distance control is so important on the golf course and unfortunately a lot of amateurs have no clue how far they hit their clubs. The gap fitting will be a big but necessary ego check for a lot of golfers. Many of them choose what club to hit based off of some dream iron they smoked 2 years ago. So what we will do is have our clients to hit 5 solid shots with each club in their bag and then we will print out a nice table that lists each of their clubs and the corresponding carry distance. We will also check for gaps that are either too big or too small and find a solution.

Along with fittings we will also use the TrackMan in regular lessons. There have been some pretty revolutionary changes in the understanding of how the golf ball and club react in recent years and a lot of it has been credited to TrackMan technology. It will be a huge help in showing someone what we want them to work on and what numbers we are looking for.

Last but not least, whenever we don't have a fitting or lesson scheduled to use the TrackMan we will rent it out to our members to use during practice. It's so easy to use and can really enhance anyone's practice sessions.

The price tag on it is kind of high, $20k+, but it should pay for itself very quickly and then we will really be reaping the benefits.

As for some poker related content I have been playing every now and then but not very much at all. When I've played it has been a mix between plo and nlhe, but nothing too serious. I did recently get some footage of a CR member playing .5/1 NL so I will be trying to crank out a leakfinder series before the TrackMan gets here and takes over my life in 3 weeks. Hope everyone is doing good with whatever they are doing, be it still playing poker or moving onto a new job/career.

What's up everyone, long time no see. Hope everyone is doing ok since Black Friday and that nobody is in too much trouble considering what has happened. Since BF I haven't been playing too much poker and have been doing a lot more golf related stuff. I guess I'll start with poker. I threw $500 onto Lock poker and was just going to grind NLHE moving up everytime I hit 10 buy ins and down if I ever dropped to 5 buy ins. My plan was to do this until reaching 1/2 or 2/4 and then just settling there for a while. After a couple days I decided to scrap that plan and switch to PLO, the plan being pretty similar just allowing for larger swings. I started at .10/.25 and with bonuses and winnings have run my $500 up to about $2300 so far. I've always wanted to learn PLO and the major thing holding me back was knowing I would have to start at the lower limits to learn it, and the immediate opportunity cost was just too much. But now, sine I was forced to play the smaller limits no matter which game I decided to play I figured now was as good a time as any to learn PLO. So far it has been fun.

Away from poker I've been doing a lot of golf stuff. I played in a US Open local qualifier earlier this week. Leading up to it I had been playing some great golf, with 3 consecutive under par rounds. I had to get some new wedges a couple days before the event to conform with the new groove rules the USGA implemented and that kind of gave me a few problems. It wasn't so much the new grooves that gave me the issues, but the new 60* wedge that I got had 10* of bounce instead of the 6* I was used to. For those that are unfamiliar with what the bounce of the club is, it is basically that hump underneath the leading edge of your wedges. Bounce comes in real handy when you are playing out of the sand, but not so much on firm, closely cut fairways. I got the 10* bounce wedge because I thought I wanted slightly more bounce than the 6* I already had, and figured if 10* was too much I could just have it grinded down. Well I wasn't able to grind it down before the tournament so I was a little uncomfortable around the greens during the qualifier. I hit 13 greens in the qualifier but once you add in that I was 0'fer on up and down's and had 38 putts including 4 3 putts you wind up with a 79 which was 7 shots too many to advance to the sectionals.

Overall I'm not that unhappy, I only came up 7 shots shy and was only 10 shots behind the leader on a day where my short game completely abandoned me. I finished T37 our of 109 players. When you account for the strength of the field, made up mostly of nationwide, mini-tour, and college players I feel ok. I hit the ball great and just need to practice a little more, something I haven't really been able to do as much as I would like. Take away the 3 putts(which are all unforced errors that should really never happen) and give me a few up and downs around the greens and I would have been right in the hunt. Oh well, not too bad for my first tournament round in over a year. The highlight of the day was probably on the 4th hole, I had just 3 putted the 2nd hole to go to +1, but birdied the 3rd hole to get back to E. On the 4th hole I had about 25 right to left down the hill for another birdie. As I'm reading the putt I hear this guy who lives right behind the green talking extremely loudly on his phone. I recognize the voice and turn around to see Ron White sitting on his porch. I proceed to drain the putt at which point Ron waved and gave me a thumbs up in appreciation of the putt. Sadly that would be the last good putt I hit all day. The greens were super fast and I always seemed to leave myself the most difficult putts, especially after chips shots which is very unlike me.

In other golf news we nailed down a schedule for the junior golf clinics that I will be running this summer which is awesome. It's 6 days per week but my schedule is super flexible because of an intern that we just had for her first day yesterday. Also the 6 days only totals up to 19 hours which isn't bad. I think the longest day we have is Tuesday or Thursday which is like a 5.5 hour day. I should be making at least $50/hr with the clinics and then I will also be giving individual lessons for $60/hr as an instructor tailored to juniors/beginners who don't want to spend the $135-150/hr for my friend the director of instruction.

Were also looking into some more online based stuff, including a Twitter account and Facebook page that will help us spread the word of our junior academy. Were going to try to put up a lot of content including golf articles, swing tips, video drills and much more. The director of instruction already has a site www.robstocke.com and hopefully we will be able to just add a bunch of this content onto there. He's already initiated a huge surge on the 2+2 golf forums under the nickname "dagolfdoc", where he has an ask me anything about golf thread, as well as many others that are very informative. People are also posting their swings in their own threads on a pretty consistent basis looking for feedback from him, not to mention the abundance of PM's he is getting regarding possible online golf instruction. So yea I'm pretty excited about this golf season, looking forward to teaching a lot, as well as practicing and playing a ton. Once we get some more online stuff up I will link them from here so you guys can check it out and give us some feed back.

GL with whatever post Black Friday has lead you to!

Headed out with my wife and sister in law for a friends wedding this weekend. The wedding festivities are pretty light so gonna get in lots of poker and hanging out. I'll be at the Palazzo and pokering at the Venetian more than likely. If anyone is around and wants to meet up, send me a message here or on 2+2.

Hello CR world. Been a little bit since I updated and I've been quite busy during my time away from the blog world. Poker wise march pretty much sucked so lets not talk to much about that. I played pretty poorly then ran pretty poorly which made for not so hot of a month. Whatever, I've decided to drop the # of tables I'm playing and really focus a little bit better. The mass multitabling(lol 12 tables for me) is just not my thing, kind of takes the enjoyment out of it for me especially when running bad/playing bad. So I'm going to try to stick to 6 tables at a time in April and hopefully maintain a solid winrate for the month.

Enough poker, onto the good stuff. We closed on our house on March 25th which was pretty awesome. The week leading up to the closing was pretty terrible due to what seemed like some serious incompetencies with our bank. We were trying to close about 4 days early which would have been Monday the 21st until the bank called us on Friday at 4:30pm and was like, uh we need some more information on your husbands income. Nice timing asking for further clarification on my income 30 mins before the end of the day on the eve of our bumped up closing date.

Let me give you a little insight into our problem. My wife applied for the loan herself, to see if she could get approved for the full amount since I would rather not have to deal with trying to inform people at a bank how I make a reliable income. Unfortuantely my wife couldn't quite qualify for the whole loan herself, but she was very close. So they needed to add me to the loan. Well since my wife almost qualified for the whole loan herself and I make more than my wife you would think that this wouldn't be a big deal. We even got "pre-approved" which I am putting in quatation marks because it doesn't appear to be worth anything.

So we get the call Friday that they want some more info, I've already sent them every single bank statement I have as well as 2008 and 2009 tax returns. However these people cannot understand why FTP is not giving me a 1099, and I'm like lol push for regulation is this will probably be easier for the both of us. So now they are like, we want some more information on your 2010 results. So I send them a HEM screen shot for 2010 and a thorough explanation. Not enough... oh by the way we have at this point bricked the Monday close date and it is currently not looking good for our new Wednesday close date. So then I email FTP black card support(which is the nuts btw) and get them to send me my withdraw history from 2010 in excel form. I send that to the bank, that is not enough for them. So then I send them a screen shot of all of my incoming wires for 2010 which COINCIDENTALLY match my FTP withdraws. Still not enough.

At this point it is late Wednesday, we are already having to cancel appointments we had set up at the house for thing we wanted to get done before we moved in for the weekend. The new bank update is now things are not looking good period. I proceed to grill them on the "pre-approval" process and how I can't understand how if my wife can almost cover the loan on her own, and I have 3 years of tax returns proving that I make more money than she does how this is becoming such a huge problem. They keep saying "we can't verify your income" and I am like "it's on the tax returns, what do you think I just paid that much income tax over the last 3 years for shits and giggles?"

So now their new plan is to try and do the loan on my wife's income alone again. The regional manager of the bank signs off on some exception that allows it even tho they can't verify my income but because they know that I do make some money. LOL. OK. So now it is late Thursday and we are for reals close to the closing deadline. They are telling us all they need is one last underwriters signature then they can send the loan to the attorney for closing in the AM.... BUUUUUUUT the underwriter had a family emergency and had to take her grandson to the hospital. So we have to wait for this lady to get back in the office, review the changes and sign off on them. We are told it will happen first thing in the morning.

Friday rolls around, a few updates in the AM but nothing substantial as we wait around with our cars packed. Finally at 11:30... did this seriously take the underwriter 2.5-3 hours to review a few changes to the loan and sign her name?... we get the ok to head to closing at 2pm. YAY. Well the week wouldn't be complete without one more sweat, as we neared the end of signing all the papers the lawyer let us know they hadn't recieved the wire from the bank yet. It was 3:45 and bank wires close at 4:00 pm on friday. Luckily the wire came through with a few minutes to spare and we became homeowners.


We still need to get some stuff done to the house, like fence in the back yard and paint the master bedroom but overall the house needs very little work and already looks great. I won't delay the pictures any longer.

Street View

Well February was a pretty awesome month. I turned 25, bought a house, and ran pretty well. Poker wise it was kind of the opposite of January as far as swings are concerned. January started off crappy, then I hit a heater, and ended in pretty uneventful fashion but still with good results. February on the other hand started off with a heater, then came a 25 buy in downswing(luckily it was almost all 2/4 and not 3/6). However I then managed to bink a 30+ buy in upswing in a 24 hour period, followed by some more run good to wrap up the month.

I'm very happy with my overall results for the month and even more pleased with my volume. I've been 12 tabling all month on a 28" monitor I bought near the end of January based on a recomendation from a student. So due to that fact, I was able to get in ~68k hands mostly at 2/4 and 3/6 even with taking 6 days completely off for the month and 3 days where I put in very little play as well. I wrapped up the month with a solid 6.5bb/100 winrate which I'm very very pleased with considering how many tables I'm playing. For March I'm probably going to be looking into taking some shots at 5/10 if I see some good games and hopefully will continue the theme of good play for the year.

Here is a HEM screen shot for the month.

[

Boom, just finished negotiating a deal yesterday for the house my wife and I are going to buy. Feels pretty good to be 99% of the way to being a homeowner, just need the loan to go through. We have been looking for a little over a month, and actually had our eyes set on another house but ended up not going with it mostly because of the immediate out of pocket expenses we would have to incur to get it ready. The house that we are going to go with has basically 0 need for immediate work which is a huge plus. It is also a bit cheaper and in a better location. Here is a pic.



So that is exciting. We just got back from buyin a refrigerator which is the only appliance that wasn't left in the home. If anyone reading this does a lot of home repair stuff, Lowes has a pretty good deal where you can buy a gift card and they will credit you 10% of the card value on March 18th. I think the most you can put on the gift card is $4000, but on March 18th they will credit the card with $400. Just throwing that out there in case anyone is interested.

On the poker front things are going pretty well. I started the month off on a nice heater, then went on a like 20k hand breakeven/losing streak. I think the downswing peaked at a little over 20 buy ins and actually brought me close to back to even for the month. Then HEATERRRRR. Heres a graph. This is basically from my lowest point last Tuesday where I was stuck like 9 buy ins maybe, but ended the day up like 3. And then the following day where I won the most buy ins ive ever won in a day with ~17.5 buy ins won.



So my month is back on track. I got a new 28" monitor at the end of last month that I have been 6-12 tabling on, so I'm getting a lot more hands in. I maybe be taking a small hit in winrate but when compared to how many hands I'm getting I think it's a little more +ev. When I start taking shots at 1knl+ games again I will for sure cut down on the # of tables I'm playing. I also just purchased the 5k bonus from the Black Card store, so that is nice.

For some more poker updates the one studen I'm working with on the most regular basis is crushing. We do a lesson once a week and he is having his best month ever at 100nl which is awesome. He's really improving quite a bit and hopefully will be jumping into 200nl before we know it. Here is a shot he sent me.



So yea things are going pretty well for me. I will be doing a 2 part 400nl video hopefully this week, so if anyone reading this has any specific requests for that video comment here or send me a PM. Not sure whether I will do live play or a session review, maybe 1 part live and 1 part session review. Who knows, we will see. Well that's all I got for now, run gooooood everyone.

A few weeks/months ago Lana, the director of CR marketing, asked me to write an article for a magazine on an interesting hand I played. It ended up being a hand vs fellow CR instructor John "Nicolak" Kim. He's mentioned the hand in a video he's done and his blog I believe, mostly because we have played some pretty interesting hands over the years.

Here is the actual HH.

Full Tilt, $5/$10 No Limit Hold'em Cash, 6 Players
Poker Tools by CardRunners - Hand Details

Hero (MP): $1,000 (100 bb)
CO: $2,169 (216.9 bb)
BTN: $543 (54.3 bb)
SB: $3,963 (396.3 bb)
BB: $1,000 (100 bb)
UTG: $1,000 (100 bb)

Preflop: Hero is MP with A K
UTG raises to $30, Hero raises to $95, CO folds, BTN calls $95, 2 folds, UTG calls $65

Flop: ($300) 9 8 8 (3 players)
UTG checks, Hero checks, BTN checks

Turn: ($300) A (3 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets $150, BTN folds, UTG calls $150

River: ($600) 7 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero checks


John ended up having pocket 88s for flopped quads. I don't think I can copy and paste the article into my blog, but here is the link. Just basically an article on my thought process through the entire hand.

http://www.pokerplayer.co.uk/poker-strategy/cash-poker/11281/cash_game_thinking.html

Also, before CR started posting Cash Plays podcasts I was on the first one that was officially sponsored by CR I think. It was aired a few months ago right after I went deep in an mini FTOPS event and after a rough couple of months poker wise. I talk about downswings and trying to recover from them. John and I also discuss another very interesting hand that we played together pretty indepth and it's very interesting to hear each side. Here's the link to that.

http://www.pokerroad.com/radio/cash-plays/83


Hope you guys who are bored/interested enough to click the links enjoy! ha