Variance, its so sick. Last month I had two big scores, making 27k in some rebuy tournament and getting 2nd in the Second Chance for 40k. Good thing for those donkaments because they encouraged me to play 10/20 and lose furious amounts of money. I don't know why I sucked so bad at 10/20. There were at least 3 4k+ pots that I deserved to win and didn't, and zero 4k pots that I won. I do think I wasn't ready for the game, even with 1 fish in it is really tough. I need to start a bit lower, perhaps at 3/6 6max and work my way up over a few decent samples of hands. But I don't blame everything on poor skill, I blame it mainly on variance. Look at how up and down this line is, and for what a 2ptbb winrate... eventually. If you look at alot of my previous graphs they are practically straight lines at like a 15 degree upward slant. A 10/20+ 6max game graph will never look "normal." The variance is just sick huge and you have to get it in light every time you turn around. A think the main difference is 1) people are fighting over every pot and 2) the skill level between most of the players is practically equal.



Obviously the last couple sessions ended REALLY bad, I lost 8k then 7.5k in back to back sessions without winning a single pot of significance. I really didn't tilt at all, except for after the sessions when I am like, God I could really use 15k right about now. Basically its really discouraging when you overfrequently run into the top of your opponents range. The standard example is getting it in preflop with KK, obviously running into AA. But more tilting examples are bluff shoving the river and running into the nuts, or just a simple 3x flop raise bluff on a Qxx board, and getting called down by AQ, a hand they only have like 1/4- of the time. And thats basically what running bad really is, so moving along.

January was okay, certainly any winning month is a good month, but I guess I had higher hopes. But here comes February and I am looking to play alot of live poker at Commerce and hopefully grind out a nice profit. As you may know the Commerce is a goldmine and I have a large shovel. Last year I made 40k in 10 days. This year I am going for around 12 days total. Leaving today and grinding out this weekend til my brain implodes, coming back sometime between Tuesday and Thursday, then I will spend Valentines day here with the fiance and shoot back for a few more days to grind it out somemore and maybe catch the LAPC final table. I will prolly jump into a couple donkaments but I think the real money is in the cash so I will stick it out there. I am sharing a hotel room with tcblade and hopefully he final tables some donkaments and we can party and celebrate... like someone just maced us in the face :P I will keep ya updated.

Yesterday was another standard grueling tournament day. I managed to book second in the 2nd chance for 40k which felt really nice. I was crushing my opponent HU and felt like I had a huge chance of winning. I had a 2-1 chip lead at one point before I bluffed off a stack. Then 2 hands later I found myself allin with bottom 2 on a 3flush to the made flush. Oh well it was only another 15k, but I really wanted the prestige of the win. This is my 3rd big online score in the last 2 months and I am feeling more to come.

This is a link to my 3 handed to HU play. I'm not sure if you guys can see it so please let me know if only I'm allowed to view it. You have to be logged into CR to view it, that much I know.

www.cardrunners.com/members/replayer/replayer.php

I am also going to post this small sample of hands in the tourny forum to get some advice. There are only a few interesting hands. Mainly the Red one near the end where I bluff with AQ is prolly the most interesting. I think it was a good play, but I'm not sure.

Anyways, at the same time of final tabling my event, my friend Justin won the Daily Eighty Grand Sunday Special for 27k. This is awesome for him as he needs a score like this to jump start him into full time online poker. Hopefully he will quit his $15/hr job now and realize he can make alot more doing what he does best. My friend Nick point out that every Sunday since PCA we have been able to watch me or one of my friends final table a major online tournament. I'm not all to surprised, but it is awesome to think that my "crew" is destroying cash and tournaments, kinda making good $$$ under the radar (without sponsorship or too much notice).

I also liked InternetPokers post about poker, although I personally didn't find it to be new material I think it was something that needed to be said to alot of low-midstakes grinders.

LAPC is coming up soon. I will be there for a decent amount of time but I have classes on Fridays so I will be going back and forth between LA and SD. That's it for now.

So last night Shana and I are out to dinner with a bunch of 2p2ers and a few poker friends from the SD area. Its restaurant week in SD which means some of the most expensive places are serving 3 course meals for $40. We went to the Oceanaire, which was quite disappointing. They were out of 4/6 of the dishes they offered, and Shana and I just ended up getting salads, and getting drunk off some good champagne. We ended up spending more than we usually would for dinner out, but whatever. So we are just sitting at this table with 10 other people, most of who I don't really know and I get to talking with the guy across from me. We are about 30 minutes into conversation when I say I need stars money for FTP and he is like yeah I can do that, I'm like what's your stars name? And he is like Jschnett. I am like errr yeah I know you, I am also a CR guest pro... nice to meet you. Apparently we nearly crossed paths at PCA just a few days prior, and he is out West visiting his brother before heading home. It was clear I was more excited to meet him, than he was to meet me, which is fine. His videos helped me progress alot in tournies, and I can't imagine him needing to view some low stakes FR videos any time soon.

Things went well and we all drank a bit and said our goodbyes as I carried drunk Shana ("I'm not drunk!") three blocks back to the house.

Today I had a near miss in the 100R on FTP. I was looking really good on chips but ended up getting coolered right near the final 3 tables (at 6max). Also another bad beat was I intended to play the Wed nightly on stars, and had pulled up the tournament window expecting to play it, but forgot to register and when I realized what I had done, it was too late. Oh well.

I really think the rebuys are for me, I seem to pwn in them, and everyone else is just ridiculous bad, especially in the first hour. I watched Johnny Bax throw money away. Thats not how the rebuy period should be treated. I mean if his average buy in is 12 buy ins, and mine is 4, he has to increase his long term ROI by 300% (if it was 300% now it needs to be 900% which is ridiculous). And frankly you just can't accumulate that many chips in 1 hour to do that. But I prolly shouldn't teach the fish :P

EDIT: So lame the pictures weren't working. After putting all the pictures up someone removed all the files in my folder off the CR server. I don't get it. They should work now

First I wanted to say that I finished today +23k today after a decent place in a tourney (I "deserved" more but lost 2 flips back to back, like OMG can't I just keep running good forever one time). That just tops off the last 12 days of my life which have been quite rememberable, and yet quite not rememberable at the same time. Good thing I took pictures!

As I review some of these pictures, I realize we look far too drunk in most of them for me to put them up, so they have been censored for your protection.


Us Chilling outside Mesa before we get a table. (Me, Shana, Nick)




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That's Clay (MezmerizePLZ) and his sister Mo




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half of Alex (Sillynice), Tommy (tcblade), and Bob (bigbobmalou sp?)



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A bunch of us chillin' (Echo, Bob, Shana's back there, Alex, Me, Nick)



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Someone plz photoshop the Corono into the sand next to us.



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Told you there are some huge fish at PCA



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Us in front of the Bacardi store getting ready for another night



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Us getting ready for the nightclub. liquid meat, owner of liquidpoker.net I believe, aka Joy, is the guy on the far left



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Poppin Bottles all night long



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This is what the nightclub looks like when your drunk



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So needless to say PCA was alot of fun. I got a bunch more pics I will put up another day. Im off to make some full ring videos.

Here are some of my sisters pictures. A lil bit of a repeat but oh well.




Girls at the entrance



The entrance walkway. This is like a mural of people coming out of the wall.




Girls Poppin bottles


A View of our table from the bar area.




Girls working the pole.



Rikd, Evan, and Corwin



Me, Sean, and Nick




Some Pics of the Party Crack a lackin'

Getting ready for the toast.

Raging



Cheers!



The Countdown

So XS was amazing. We all had a great time and I got exactly what I expected out of the night club and the whole scene (although I got pretty hammered and left earlyish at 2:30). I'm just going to jump into the pictures I got cuz there is not much to say except WOW. In a few days I will get the pics from my sister's camera and get you some more angles on the scene.


This is Me, Shana, My Sister Katrina (Kat), and my friend Nick (he booked the club). We are chillin at the Wynn entrance before heading to Encore.



Shana and Kat at the entrance of XS, slightly to the right was the official XS wall which we got some professional photographs in.




This is from the near entrance looking out onto the dance floor, before anyone else has entered the club. There is a pool area and gamble area out back behind the dance floor as well as outdoor cabanas and tables.




This is a view from our table looking out at some beezies who were with the crew. To the left is the "pole" stage that all our ladies found fun to dance on.



This is another view from our table looking at one of the main bars. Those are imprented sculptures which seems to be a theme of the club.





This is our table area looking out on the dance floor, again before it got bumpin' We kinda got wasted later and failed at picture taking (my sis succeeded though).






This slightly blurring chandalier is really as awesome as it looks, and this is pretty much how I saw it for most the night.



This is an outside view at the pool area, the bar on the other side hosts the blackjack and table games. The white "strip" in the middle of the picture is a railing.



This is another view towards the pool area.



This is the dance floor looking in from the outside.



These are the super baller chandaliers hanging above our heads all night.



Ballin'



The ladies near the toast. Btw Steve Wynn is a genius for providing this stage and not having to pay for entertainment on it, girls just flocked to it all night.



This is Nick right after the countdown, doing his thing with the ladies. You go Nick.




I gotta run I will give a second update in a few days from the bahamas, ENJOY.

Cole South and Tri Nguyen wrote a rather expensive book that has been slowly moving its way into the minds of good online poker players. The book - Let There Be Range - costs $1800 and can only be read online, so the most important question is: Is it worth it?

This obviously depends on who you are. First of all you actually have to have $1800 to invest (and ironically I think the people that need this book the most, don't). Then you need to have a pretty good fundamental understanding of the game. This book talks to you the way two high stakes pro's would talk to each other about a hand they played at 25/50. Examples of this are the frequent references to "Finding Break-Even Folding Frequency," "Polorized Ranges," "Card Removal" and "Re-re-bluffing."

I think the book is worth it for anyone who intends to play 5/10+ at some point in their lives. Even if you think it will be a year or more to get to that level, and you have to cut your bankroll in half to get the book, I would recommend it. This is the type of book that has to be in any good players library.

Their is a lot of information in this book that has never been discussed in a book before. However, it is the kind of stuff you discuss alot with your poker friends. Obviously the book is centered around hand ranges, which is what all of poker is really centered around. Isn't it funny that all the other poker books ever written don't even focus directly on one of the only concepts that truly matters in the game.

For me I have had my fair share of hand range talk and how or why I should bluff or vbet thin etc. This book does a good job refreshing some of those concepts in my mind and honestly the first half of the book probably was more of a refresher than a huge learning experience. Being able to reconnect with some of the things I already knew but drifted away from is quite important. Just like when you start to play poorly because you are tilting, if you don't have a well written piece of literature or a friend or a forum reminding you how and why you do the things you do, you just start drifting into a meh autopilot of a poker player and your winrate slumps.

Invaluable things I picked up from the book:

Bluff and Bluff raise the river more frequently - For a while I thought the book should be called "Bluff The River" just because it tries to nail this concept in you and it gives great examples of when and how and why.

"don't turn your hand into a bluff" goes out the window - this concept really, especially recently, has been scaring me off of making bluffs and I have basically just been giving up on pots. Let's all forget this concept and use hand ranges to determine why we should bluff (a duh so simple why didn't I think of that).

Card Removal is the shizzle - this kind of goes along with turning your hand into a bluff. If you have paired with the board, you can lower the frequency of hands your opponent may have and can use this to your advantage. Don't get carried away cuz I said this here, reading the book will really help you nail this concept down (and alot of practice).

Less Tables really means Higher bb/100 - I like to play alot of tables, and I make a good amount of money doing it. But I am autopiloting and not getting better. This book helped me realize that focusing on recognizing unique situations and optimizing every spot to my fullest potential will a) help autopiloting in the future include near perfect play, and b) allow me to play in some of the tougher, higher stakes games.

Getting Caught Bluffing could be the best thing that could happen to you - if you aren't getting caught bluffing then you are not bluffing enough. All that matters when making a good bluff is whether your opponent has enough hands in his range that he folds some easily calculateable % of the time (based on your bet size and the pot size). Also getting caught bluffing is great for your image and gets you paid down the road.

People have selective memory - everyone is a victim of this, especially nonpoker players. But its more important that poker players recognize this and use it to their advantage. It doesn't matter if your bluff gets picked off, just analyze the situation and prove to yourself that its a good bluff. Of course some times you will run into the top of their range. The bad players (me included) are the ones remembering when the bluff didn't work and strongly (sometimes subconsciously but still quite strongly) thinking, "Oh, well I'm not gonna bluff in that spot again." This is absolutely wrong and you must change your thoughts now or perish. Also know that most of your opponents are thinking selectively and adjust accordingly.

Combinatorics is a word - wtf!?! - wiki quote, "Combinatorics is a branch of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_mathematics">pure mathematics concerning the study of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countable_set">discrete (and usually finite">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_set">finite) objects."


Overall the book would have been more helpful to me about a year ago, but still will help to boost my winrate by at least $20/hr (meaning if I had bought the book I would make the money back in a couple months). Also the book really helps me to know where I can study on my own and how to best do it.

If you are a low-midstakes grinder and proven winner, and can afford it, get the book!

So this year right before Christmas I was told I would be getting a free copy of "Let There Be Range" Cole South and Slow Habit's new book. Apparently it takes a while to get a copy or something since each copy has to be unique to prevent fraud. Well they said I would have it around Christmas and I was really hoping I would have it before PCA, but no love yet. Please poker Gods lemme be able to read this book before PCA. I know its gonna be REALLY good and its by far the best thing on my Christmas list. Other than that, Christmas is going great, we have 32 people over at my parents house right now and we are about to do family presents. I am really really really stoked for Vegas and New Years and having been gearing up my liver for said events. Unfortunately this leaves me worried about making weight on the 31st for the bet. Pretty sure it will happen, but I am still like 1.5 lbs above weight. This can easily be dropped in a day, but its the permanent weight loss that I really want anyways, and thats prolly not gonna happen.

I know this video has already circulated CR a bit, but I just wanna let you know its hilarious and kinda catchy.

The blog counts got reset, lets put your favorite guest pro (me) to the top of the list, before Towny and Daut take over again!!!