Ahhhh, so I just got done with the study group for this week, and now I'm going to take some much needed time off from internet pokerz. I have only taken like one day off in each of the last two months so I felt myself starting to feel slightly burnt out, and decided that I am going to take Spring Break off from playing IP. I am really excited about it, and in the mean time I am going to be grinding out the live scene down in AZ.

Im working w a really short roll, but if I can just have a good first day then it should be smooth sailing from there. The game is ridiculously soft, and I am confident that I would come out of there on top 8 out of 10 times that I went if I played my A game. So I'll hopefully be able to juice my life bankroll, and put some in savings and not have to cash out too much from Pstars before this summer.

I have to say that life has been great lately all things included. After I switched my major to philosophy and dropped my soc. psych class I have been loving school. I love waking up every single day, and look forward to what that day has to bring me, and that is honestly the greatest feeling that anyone can ask for. I must be sure to be thankful because I seem to be running really well at life, not to mention killing it since I switched over to full ring.

Since I'm taking some time off I'm gunna go ahead and go over my results for the past 6 weeks since I switched back to full ring, and just compare them to the goals that I had set for myself when I decided to make the move back to fr. I'm still a computer donkey and don't know how to post any graphs, so I'm just going to do it my way and post some numbers that relate to my hourly and what not...


So basically my goal was to be crushing 100NL by this summer as close to 5BB/100 as possible. My goal is always to be the biggest winner at the limit that I am at. It is always good to strive to be the best, in my mind there is literally no point in working at the game if I'm not trying to be the absolute best that I can possibly be.

So at 50NL full ring I have only gotten in 51K hands, but over that span I have crushed it for 6.2BB/100. This isn't a very big sample, but I had a 100K sample at 25NL with a higher WR, so I really believe that if I were to continue grinding out 50NL for another 100K hands a WR of 6BB/100 would def be attainable, because I feel that I would only get better. This has been basically 10 tabling for the most part and my hourly was $33 over 97 hours. I am very satisfied with that because I feel I can take all the shots that I want and I can always drop back and make that hourly.

At 100NL full ring I have recently changed up my shot taking strategy and now I am only taking shots when the games seem to be at least as good as the 500NL games. Over 25K hands I have won at 3BB/100 which I def think I can improve on. I haven't always played my best, and I have noticed some leaks that I have in big pots. So my hourly here is basically the same as at 50NL at 32.5$/hr.

Once I get back from spring break I am going to be extremely focused on improving my game. I am going to get another lesson, I am going to keep up w the study group, and there are def some vids that I am going to watch. On top of that I am certainly going to maintain my blog more regulalry. It's always annoying to keep having one really long post every couple weeks.

I am going to get really focused on acheiving my goal of beating 100NL for 5BB/100 by this summer. I def think I am on the right track and I look forward to the next couple of months.

From now on my mind is off internet poker, and I gotta figure out how to dominate the live scene. If I get the chance I will post an update from AZ, and hopefully I'll be running hot!!!!

So whenever I go on the worst runs of my life by the end of them I am usually questioning whether or not I can even beat the game, that I had crushed for long before this. It's a completely demoralizing feeling, and it was usually preceded by me being extremely confident/cocky. As they say, pride before the fall, and I think I finally learned my lesson this time.

So anyways, after grinding a session of full ring last night, and crushing, it finally donned on me. I had this exact feeling at the beginning of this school year. I went on a terrible downswing, had to cash out like 1/3 of my roll for car insurance, and my roll was at like 300 dollars. I cashed out like 30K FPP's for like 285 dollars, and gave myself like 10BI's at 25NL, before I had to drop back to 10. I had been grinding 6m for like 150K hands at this point, and I decided that there was too much variance in 6m so I was going to grind out the full ring.

Once I got there I realized that full had not evolved anything like 6m had. My guess is that like 85% of the players who are really working on their game, watching vids, posting hands, reading books ext. are playing 6m and HU. This is just my guess, but I don't think it'd be to far off. I only play on Stars and it seems that there are a bunch of good, winning regs at each limit you play. I mean it's obv. argueable how good they are, but if your not table selecting hard it's more than likely 4/5 of your opponants at each table are regs. Now at full ring it seems that the only regs are the gaggillon table nitwads grinding out FPP's. And even tho they are regs, I do not cosider them in that 15% of players that are really thinking and working on their games. I really think that is the percentage of good thinking players at full ring at 50NL anyways.

It seems as if I can just completely run over the table and players just give me their money. After the first three players folds, which is very common, there are 6 players left in the hand, and it is a 6 max game. I will play accordingly, raising and reraising a ton. Except most player wont realize this concept and they will just fold like the fr nitwads that they are. I have had a + red line at full ring so far and I expect this to continue.

I remembered that the only that I quit playing fr is because I got a puppy and I didn't want the hassel of booting up so many tables. Well he's finnaly a little bigger, and hopefully potty trained, so I now have this freedom. I have gotten a ton better in the last couple months, so it was in no way a waist in the poker world. However I am going to go back to playing full ring, 8 tables for now, and grinding up steady winning days, at least 5/7 days. I will play mostly fr, but also throw in some 6m when the games are good. Its going to be sick and I am ready to start that fast progression in my poker career just like the one at the begining of this school year, right after I cashed out for my car insurance. I had 300 dollars in my account, and jumped into a game that I hadn't played since I started playing cash games.
3 months later I turned that 300 into 4K and hired a coach.
A week later I luckboxed a donkament for 8K

I can't expect to win another donkament, but I am excited to go on a similar run in the cash games, only this time I'm starting out with a bigger role, and hoping to run it up to 10K and be playing 200NL by this summer. That is very possible, and it would also be very dope.
So if I am winning consistantly at the fr, like I hope to be, then you can prolly expect some pretty consistant blog updates, lol, so talk to ya soon : )

For the time being I am swearing off heads up poker, because my style of play leads to a very high variance match, and by the end we've usually exchanged multiple stacks. I play crazy and I want to get it in w something like pocket 5's in a 3bet pot w a gutterball. This is ridiculous and my emotions go too crazy when I am playing HU.

However when I am playing 6max and fr it is very rare for me to get an entire stack in unless I have a lot of equity. After my sessions it is pretty rare for me to have lost multiple stacks unless I took some pretty rough beats. So I am going to stick to the low variance game and more view this game as a job. I need to start steadily making pay checks every two weeks. So from now on I want to set goals for myself to make in a two week span. Set a goal for the month then break it in two and try to reach that in two weeks.

And from now on when I log on and play 6m and win a couple Bi's pretty quick and log off, then want to log back on later to make 1-2BI's more. If this is the case I either need to drop down a limit, or play fr. Play a low variance game and start guranteeing weekly paychecks. I don't want to be a compulsive gambler, I want to be a professional card player. Take the edge when it comes along and understand that you don't have to commit yourself to high variance spots. Just by getting hands in and sitting at the table I am making money, as long as i don't spew it away. So get it hands and make an hourly wage.

So I took my shot at 100NL and it went well for a while. I truly feel that I am +EV in the game, and I will keep striving to get there, but another pretty gross run drops me back down to 50 for the time being. I really have no problem with this, except for the goals that I have set for myself by this summer. I really want to be rolled, and beating 200NL by this summer, and I think this is still a realistic goal.

Here's my plan of attack

*I will play 50NL until I make a minimum of 1K, before I start taking more shots at 100NL
*I will take shots at the higher limit as long as I have more than 30BI's, but will NOT make it my bread and butter game until I have over 50BI's.
*I will play a MAX of 4 tables, at any limit
*And I will NOT play high, at any limit
*I will play a standard of 1 and a half hour sessions, and if the games are great and I'm up I can play a MAX of 2 hours
*At the end of each session I will check my PT and if I am up 4+ BI's, then I call it a good and log off for the day. If I am down this much it is usually a good idea to log off as well.
*I will watch at least 4 vids a week, i've got 3 great web sites to choose from, there is no excuse not too.

If I can stick to these parameters I will hopefully sprint up too 200NL in the next 4 months. I believe this is a very achievable goal, and with hard work and discipline it's all me. Cause remember, you can do ANYTHING that you put your mind too.

So today I was playing a little 100NL a to my surprise, Pwnasorus sat down at my table whom I recognized at a high states MTT pro from Fort Worth. I started chatting w him and he seemed like a really nice guy. He apparantly went to high school w David Benefield and is just now starting to switch over to cash games. We got invovled in a hand, which I butchered, and he discussed it with me afterwords and that is starting to change the way that I think about the game.

Basically what happened was I got dealt AQo in the SB and he opened UTG. He had been playing pretty tight and I didn't think it was a good idea to 3bet him. So when the flop came down Q high I put in the c/r, and then barreled an ugly card on the turn, and thought I was value betting and I was acutally bluffing, hahaha. For the same reason that I didn't want to 3bet pre, I shouldn't be c/r'ing his tight range from UTG. When I c/r AA, KK and better will continue, and then those might even fold to a turn bet. So the only thing I can really get value from here is draws.

So he made me realize that poker is a subjective game. I don't think there are any rules, or correct ways to play certain hands, because every single situation is so dynamic. So whenever I try to make up these rules, or schemas in my brain it is basically only good for auto piloting, or not thinking about the hand in front of me.

This has to be basically the worst way to play poker possible, I have to be thinking about each and every hand as they come up, and I have to keep myself from ever auto-piloting. If I can dyanmically think about every single different situation that arrives then I don't think I'll ever be too far off from the correct answer. But if I auto pilot and think, ohh i should do this because that's what they would tell me on 2+2 yadayadayada I will keep getting owned by thinking players who are one step ahead of me. So just remember that every situation is unique and there isn't always one correct way to play a certain hand, and think about that situation and decipher the right decision for myself I will become much better much quicker.

So I was just reading raptors blog and it reminded me of some stuff and I thought why not steal his idea.
5 years ago today I was a freshman in high school. This was prolly one of the lower prolly one of the lower points in my life socially, but I really think it helped shape me into who I am today. This was the time period when all of my friends were trying out drinking and smoking weed, and I decided that I didn't want any part of that, so naturally we all grew apart. I never hung out with them anymore, because all they were doing was stuff that I didn't do.

This was the year that I decided baseball wasn't for me. This is one thing that I have always been really good at in my life, when I stop enjoying what I am doing I am able to quit and move on very easily. I stopped enjoying baseball the previous year and was basically pretty miseralbe all year long, while my dad was putting his life into our baseball team. He built a battting cage in our backyard, and we traveled to a new town every weekend of the entire summer. I got burnt out and simply quit enjoying the game.

I played basketball that year and really had a terrible year with that as well. There were four different teams that you could make and I happened to make that lowest one, just because I was a freshman and the coach was an idiot. The team I played on was pathetic and the coach ran practice like boot camp. Basically I had more triple doubles that season than our team had wins. Believe me I was no ball hog at all, the coaches told me to shoot more, so if you know anything about basketball you understand how ridiculous that team was.

So basically when I showed up to the first day of baseball tryouts and realized I was going to be playing for a coach who was very similar, if not worse, I just decided that it wasn't worth it to go through that again and I didn't go back. My dad was heart broken, but he understood, I had found my new passion...golf. I devoted my heart to golf the year before and spent all of my free time on the course. I was up there literally from 9-7 playing as long as I could. I just absolutely loved the game and devoted my heart and soul to it.

Freshman year I traveled six hours away to play in my first real tournament. I was a little 15 year old playing against seniors, and one of the kids who finished 2nd at state the previous year. I was pissed that they didn't have a 15 and under bracket to play in, because most tournaments did, but o well. I went out on the front side and careered it out of my mind, running hot in golf, I think I shot 4 under on the front and then a 39 on the back for my first ever round under par. I shot the lowest score by one stroke, but unfortunately it was a two day tournament.

I was there with my mom and my infant little brother and I swear I didn't get 2 hours of sleep that night. I kept tossing and turning like you wouldn't believe. The next morning I force fed myself some McY D's thinking that was the nourishment I needed for victory. I was so nervous I didn't even know what to do. I went out and somehow shot a 77 to tie the player in 2nd place and win the tourny by a stroke.

I was hooked and went on to have a really good high school golf season making the varsity team for every tournament but one, I got snubbed out of the regional team cause the coaches son was on the team and had "more experience in tournaments". Fucking ass hole, me and my dad were so pissed that he was ready to up move to a new town and play for a different school.

i remember that year and it litterally seemed like everything that could go wrong did. It was pretty ridiculous, but I never really moped around I kept my head up and was greatful for what I had. I have always been good at this, and I hope I will continue this for the rest of my life.

I am hoping that this year, 5 years later will kind of be my redeemer year. Hopefully everything that can go right will. My life is litterally incredible and to be honest I could not imagine it being much better. I have so much to be greatful for and things seem to be going my way. This is a much better feeling than I had about life 5 years ago, and I can't even imagine where I will be 5 years from now.

To be completely honest I think these next 5 years are most likely going to be the absolute prime of my life. I am young and I literally have the world at my fingertips. I am in college which is a great place to meet people, and I have what you call finacial freedom, that is only going to get better. I can't imagine that I will be continueing with poker after those 5 years and while the time in my life after that might be a lot more fullfilling, I can imagine that my next 5 are going to be a lot more fun.

I have got the world at my fingertips, and I gotta soft touch
I swear I wont sink tha ship, or love it too much

so it has been a rather difficult question for me for quite some time trying to figure out when I am suppose to log off when I am up, or down for that matter. I have tried a few different things for a while and only one thing really worked for quite some time. Back when I was grinding the 25NL I would log off when I was up 4BI's and that worked pretty well.

However I have found that it is never good to be results oriented in poker. It needs to be a question of whether or not I am playing well, and if the games are good. I have found that I play my best poker up to about 1 and 1/2 hours then I usually flatten out for that last 1/2 hour, or start spewing before then. That 1.5 really seems to be the sweet spot for me, but I don't always play well all that time. So if I start tilting/spewing before then and I find that I'm not playing my best poker then usually I have to log off and quit.

So from now on whenever logging on to play a sesh it will be my goal to play well for the next hour and a half. I will time that out and if at the end of that I feel that I am playing well and can continue this, and the games happen to be really good, fish got alota money in front of them, then I can continue playing for then next half hour. But I will be extremely cautious and try my best to play tight.

So really try to make it to that 1.5 spot and if the games aren't exceptionally good, log off, no matter what your results are. Cause I never play my best poker after that time period. I think this will be huge for me, and I think I'm bout ready to run hot at the 100. My goal right now is to make 3BI's in the next 3 days straight and then I will be back for another blog.

So basically ever since I took down that donkament I took a shot at 200NL where they play way aggro and are thinking way ahead of me and thought I could just do that to the players at 100NL and I was wrong. I was making to many moves and spewing and calling and it was just gross. So now I am forced to cash out some more of my role and take a step back to 50NL for a little while to rebuild. I was playing underrolled as it was and it did not work out for me.
This whole time moving up the limits I have had a plan for success. I do not want 1BI to matter to me so I want to play w 50BI's. I need to respect the players at 100NL and play a lot tighter. I am moving back to 50 and it would be very good to rebuild my confidence. I have been losing in the cash games for like a month and a half now and I am not used to that. My confidence is shot and it will be nice to win again. I am going to crush the pussies at 50NL. I am not going to take another shot at 100NL until I have at least 40BI's. So that's 30BI's that I need to make at 50 and that shouldn't take me but maybe a week, but it's absolutely fine if it takes me the entire month. If I can just crush 50 for the rest of this month and be ready to beat 100 by the end of next month and prepare myself to beat 200 in the next month or two after that then I will still be on track to be fine finacially to not get a job this summer. That is the goal right now and I need to do everything that I can in order to do this.
Do not worry about how much I did have or where I was playing, the bottom line is I aboslutely learned a ton and am an incredible amount better right now than I was before this downswing. So be happy that you have learned all of this and be ready to shread through the limits an insane amount quicker than I would have if this last month didnt happen. So do that and this last month was def + to the EV. That's what we're looking for.

Well I can't figure out for the life of me how to upload multiple hands into my blog, and since nobody reads my blog anyways I guess it doesn't matter, I can just talk about what happened and what I have learned

I ran into this rough situation a couple of times and made the worst play both times, and each time it cost me a stack. A donkey opens in LP, and they've got a real low fold to 3bet percentage and I look down at AK. I obv. 3bang but it blows cause I know they are going to call then what if I don't connect with the flop? They might not have either, but I am not getting much respect in 3bet pots so I decided to c/r AI which I think is the worst option. Not many hands are going to get bet folding here. I need to just cbet rather big and don't worry about owning myself with that bet. Sure not many worse hands are going to call, but I can't c/c myself, and c/r really owns myself. So I just have to suck it up here and cbet big and hope to take it down, and if I get raised o well nh, and if they call me I have 6 outs and they likely won't bet on the turn with an underpair.

The next hand I hit trips w a 10 kicker and a reg took a slow play line with trips A kicker and got me call off my whole stack on the river. The one spot I messed up is on the flop, he cbet into a 4way pot, and I called w tp 10 kicker telling myself, "well you can't fold" the monicker that keeps me away from playing great. Then on the river he c/r'd AI and there was just nothing that I was beating. I CAN"T BE CALLING ON THE RIVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thats a huge leak in my game keeping me from moving up throught the limits the Dang bros said it themselves.
QUIT CALLING ON THE RIVER!!!!!!!!!!! It's losing me so much money that it's ridiculous. Anytime I am thinking about calling I really need to take my time and put him on a full hand range and I better be fucking right or I will be heated!


When I am planning on taking a big bluff line that I usually take I need to stop and consider what better hands I would actually make fold. If I am not repping anything and they will prolly look me up light with this line then I need to def not take it and risk an entire BI or close to it. Reconsider to normal lines that I take, they have to be dynamic and I can't just decide what line I am going to take on the flop or pre flop.

It is a very good idea to have an idea of what you want to do and be prepared for what might happen, but it is not good to say I have to take this line and not even consider what cards come. So have an idea of what you want to do, but only if certain cards come. And if those cards don't come don't get frustrated and freak out and think that you still have to take that line and get all your money in. Holdem is a boring game I have to sit around and wait for my spots.

Ok so I have basically been donking off monies for the last month and I am over it! Ever since I got my puppy I have completely neglected improving my game. I don't even know why I have been a member to CR for the last couple months cause I've only logged in once or twice!!!
Well this certainly will not do anymore. I still have the chance to beat 100NL, which I am confident I am good enough to do, and I do not want to blow this chance while I still have it. I am giving myself 7-10BI's to try and stay at 100 and if I loose that then it's back to grinding 50.
Its really cool because I know that I have a guranteed rate back at 50NL and there is no shame in going back to that limit for a month. However I basically have 5 months to make this my full time job so that I don't have to get a job this summer. For this to be the case I want to have at least 25K in my BR so I can cash out 1/10 of that each month to live on. That equals 5 god dam K a month and I believe this is very realistic if I can beat 200NL in the next couple months or so.
I have to take this seriously and no more fucking up if I want this to be possible. No more worrying about yearly wages, set more short term goals and try to acheive those, cause it's impossble to estimate a yearly wage when i have know I idea what limits I am going to be playing and when.
So my short term goal for this next month is to profit 5K at only 100NL. I am only going to be playing 6m until I have consistantly started winning. I need 11 days making 500 so just set yourself short term acheivable goals.
Like 2/3 days I wanna win 5BI's with a net profit of >10BIs. This is not hard to do, in fact the problem that I am most worried about is what am I going to do for the rest of the day after I make 5BI's haha.
Well I'll tell you what the fucks going to happen. You are going to use that time to improve your game. I am going to be watching at least 1 probably more videos a day for the remainder of break. Anytime that I have a session of over 1K hands or + or - 3 BI's I am going to blog about it. And no it's not going to be a diary anymore its going to be a poker blog. I am going to figure out how to upload hands into my blog.
I remember CTS doing something that he thought helped him a lot when he was moving up throught the limits is posting every hand where you get stacked. So from now on every time after a session that I play I have to go throught my PT and review the big pots that I lost. If there are any spots that I got stacked for 100BBs+ or really need to learn something I am going to upload it onto my blog, and discuss what I should have learned.
So from now I am going to have to really want to play a session because I am going to have to do all of this after I am done, no ifs ands or buts.. I want to take this seriously and actually move up through the limits, so I cannot slack off, I have to do what is necessary in order to move up.
If I am really focused on improving my game I can be playing 400NL by this summer, but if I just jack off and mindlessly play too many tables because I have nothing else to do I will still be struggly to beat 200NL by this summer and have cashed out any profits that I may have had.
Thats what happened to me over the past 5 months when I could never seem to move up to 50NL, it took me so much longer than it should have, but I have learned from my mistakes and I think I can rush up through the limits now.
I heard the difference in 10 and 100NL is comprable to the difference in 100 and 1KNL. If this is even remotely close to true I have what it takes to be 4tabling 1KNL by the end of this year. I am going to go about it the right way and instead of mindlessly grinding/browsing BBV all day, I am going to only play when I am extremely focused, and go over every session afterwards, and work on my game for the rest of the day after I won my 5BIs.
If I go about this the right way I will be at 1KNL by the end of this year, if not I'll prolly be struggling to beat 200NL, so remember that!
I will not be playing more than 4tables of 6m, or 2tables of HU. I won't be playing any100NLHU for a little, but I might get in some hands at 50.