I hadn't really had a chance to let people know where I am and stuff. I am living in Point Loma in San Diego. I work for a software company that does some consulting for the government. It's a pretty good gig, and I read a bunch of technical reports and make some Powerpoint slides. I have been here about seven weeks now. I turn 30 on March 1, so I have set some fitness goals. I have been doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and crossfit. I have been training at www.thestrongholdsd.com It's been really good.

I met SixPeppers (Derric Haynie) out here. He has been fun to hang out with. He also has a book coming out soon. I have helped him with some editing, and I think it's going to turn out well. It's focused on combinatorics and is the most thorough way to analyze a hand mathematically that I have ever seen. He is also doing good work on talking about ranges, equity, and using online tools to put it all together. I am not sure when the release date will be, but I think his goal is around the time of the WSOP.

I was going to write an emo blog. That will happen soon. Without a laptop it's a big hassle to sit down and crank it out.

Hey guys. I appreciate the approx. 50 of you who read this thing. i am in the main library waiting on a book from the main stacks. The librarian took my id and just put graduate student on my slip without asking. I am old. Or I look mature. Not sure which is better. I have a lot of stuff due tomorrow and need to get on it.


Katie has been sick, so she has been staying at my place coughing and being feverish the last few days. She felt pretty bad and her roommate is not around much so I watched her.

I had my phone interview today. This is the second one and the interviewer was a good friend of mine. I had done some reading on options, but this was a personal interview. We were able to catch up which was nice. He asked a few random thought provoking questions. I would like to hear some responses to these questions from fellow degen gamblers. Some of the questions were, in no particular order:

What makes a good team?

What three words would you use to describe life?

If you could eliminate one evil or vice in the world what would it be?

Have you had bad leaders? If so what made them bad?

What makes a good leader?

I put in about an hour session last night after I had done some homework with friends. I went on a heater and made about 10 bi at 100nl. I won coinflips and 5b 8ts and beat ak against a guy who I feel I need to 5b bluff occassionally. I have gone more toward the Samo approach to poker where I am calling more preflop and trying to outplay and extract with deeper stacks and exploit my postflop edge. I have been running hot and picking up big hands in great spots, so I am not sure how well my strategy will work at 1/2 or how much it has to do with my current run.

Take care and good luck.
ep

Happy Valentine's Day. katie and I have reservations at the Flat Top Grill here in Champaign and she is finishing up getting ready. I eat at FTG a few times a week for lunch and really like it. It is a place where you make your own bowl and then they stir fry it for you. It's only in the Chicago area and possibly Indy currently.

I heard back from the possible internship trading options. My next interview is Tuesday morning. The person conducting the interview, Darren for those of you who are from the Litchfield area, is a long time friend of mine and our families are close. I am playing it safe and reading as much of McMillan on Options as I can before the interview. It looks like I am going to be pretty busy the next few days with homework and my first big exam coming up on Wednesday. My team for my business class also met with our client on Thursday. I have some paperwork to get to him Monday and then we start working on a problem definition and solutions. I am excited about the process.

Poker is going well and my winrate at 100nl is over 9 ptbb/100 over about 20k hands. My winrate has never been that high over that large a sample and I am afraid to see if I am running crazy high over expectation. I feel like my game has some adjustments now which are helping me better given my image.

I will try and post a legit poker strategy blog in the near future.

Take care,

Adam

I had been clipping along crushing 100nl and 200nl for about 7ptbb/100 over the last 20k hands. I had the last 5kish hands at 1/2 and was up 4 or 5 bi i thinkk. Today that all ended. I dropped about 1.2k which sucks. I ran into the top of ranges and picked horrible times to bluff both because they had hands and I should not have been running a play there anyway. There were also some spots in big hands where I thought I had equity to call or raise and I ended up against big hands. There's not much I can do about all that. i will review my session but I think I took some hands that were marginal in that situation even though they may be ranked high in an absolute sense too far and didn't control the pot. I am doing some new things and there is certainly a learning curve when I am trying to work new things into my game. I am trying to find some things I can do OOP besides reraise everyone then pray I don't get 4bet and that my cbet takes it down when I whiff. I still do a bit of that also though.

Life is going well. School is keeping me busy. I am going to meet an undergrad advisor for Econ and make sure I can pull off this double major. In my business class the clients are coming to give a brief presentation and then the four teams rank who they want to work with by preference and each team is assigned a project. I hope my team gets someone who we can help and will be good to work with.

Besides that it is time to go to sleep.
Take care,

Adam

I have not been out on campus drinking yet this semester. A friend of mine turned 23. I was not able to make it out until 11. The local Irish pub was crammed with people and the line was about 35 people deep.

I enjoy drinking quite a bit. I go to most of these places during the day and have a beer or lunch and hang out with friends. I do not enjoy standing in line for an hour when it's 32 degrees outside. It's better in the summer when girls are dressed slutty. That helps with the wait. In the winter I don't want to look at uggs and sweatpants for an hour. That actually makes it worse. Now that I am in a relationship, when I go drinking I just want to hang out with my buddies and have a good time. When I was out trolling, I did not mind waiting in line for awhile since there were probably a lot of ladies inside.

I did not drink too much, but I did get to sleep late. I now have to finish homework and am pretty tired. This weekend I have the Army Reserves so I get up really early and don't get home until 5:30 or 6 which is pretty brutal.

Not much excitement in my life otherwise. I'll put something up about my business class this weekend.

Sorry this blog kind of sucked,
Adam

I have some people ask me what I think about the economy and if we will be in a recession since I am an econ major. I still live in the world of Econ. that is a magical place where we only study instantaneous supply and demand and there is never more than a two variable equation. The business majors look horrified when algebra starts occurring. I have no idea to the general question of stimulus, taxes, deflation, etc. A lot of other people are pretty sure. Read some blogs and you will know everything there is to know in a short period of time. Having your own blog is a sure sign of genius. / sarcasm

For my business class the four team leaders, including myself, had the opportunity to interview the rest of the students in the class and then place bids on who we wanted based on the allotted number of points we had. I won't go into all that too much since people from the class may end up reading this blog and the bidding process is confidential. I am happy with how things turned out for me. I will blog about that some since it will be an interesting part of my life.

While we were at the new large gym waiting to do these interviews, a business career fair was going on. From what I heard from the Business majors in our group, the number of employers who came to have a booth was down about a third. None of the businesses were looking for full time employees. The people who came in and did try and get interviewed were encouraged to submit something online. It was implied that the people who came to represent the company were there to hang out and go party that night. This is all second hand information though. That does seem to be a bad sign though.

I bumped into my Calc 3 TA after class today. We were both on the bus and we chatted for a bit. He's a Ph. D. student in math and has finished all his research. He is at the point now where he needs to write up his paper, edit, submit, and then defend. While we were talking, I did realize one bright side of the current economy. A lot of intelligent people who would normally go into industry and make a bunch of money now have a strong incentive to stay in academia and do research. The research budget is going to be smaller than before, but hopefully some exciting results will come out of this academic push and some of the innovations can help our economy.

Thanks for staying with me this far. Good luck at the tables and good luck in life for you non-degenerate gamblers out there.

ep

My phone interview went pretty well. I have some gaps in my finance knowledge, so that hurt me. I probably shouldn't repeat any questions verbatim. The math questions were pretty straightforward and I answered them successfully. There was a question about present value, some basic ideas in options trading, and some definitions. I was asked about a particular exotic option that I wasn't familiar with. I was able to replicate the option with calls though, so that got me some credit. My interviewer was a West Point grad, so we had a lot of military stuff to talk about at the beginning which helped me. I should hear in the next few days about whether or not I will get an in person interview. I feel pretty good at this point.

I am in a business class where the students form teams and do consulting for an actual small business. I was picked by the prof to be a team leader, so I conducted interviews today 3 students at a time to choose my team. After interviewing this morning, it was interesting to be the interviewer. The talent in this class is pretty amazing so anybody I end up with will make a good and talented team.

I am going to play some 1/2 for the first time in months tonight. I have homework to finish, but I have not got any hands in this month. Hopefully I can run super hot some more and pay off my credit card.

I hope all of you are doing well and thanks for reading my blog. I have gotten a reasonable n umber of views and I appreciate it. I am going to try and update this blog daily. I will get a poker blog up this weekend hopefully. I have Army Reserve weekend, but I should have evenings free.

Take care

ep

A good friend of mine from high school started working in Chicago trading currency about 9 or 10 years ago. He is a few years older and we ran track and cross-country together for many years. He is now a manager and two more of our mutual friends are in the same company trading now. I am a math and econ major with an interest in finance. I really want to intern in Chicago this summer and sent them a resume. Tomorrow at 8:30 I have a phone interview. There are going to be some questions about financial math, probability, and statistics. This came at a bad time because I have been sick and have had a very busy week. Let's hope my cramming on the time value of money pays off. I will post somethign tomorrow about how it went.

Take care
epdog

I had a really stressful November and December because of school. I did not have enough time to make supernova, so I decided it would be a good time to play some PLO. I played it for about a month with mediocre results. I know people suck, and I thought I could be making money soon and have a steep learning curve. I found this did not work out as well as I had hoped. I went to San Antonio with Katie during break. I was going to try and see Vitas23 but he left as I was getting there. When I got back to Champaign, I realized that I did not get my full month's pay from the government, so I was sucking hard for rent money and such. I dedicated myself to playing 100nl. My goals were to make platinum again and make 1k this month I could cash out.

It ended up being a very profitable month. I don't have pt3 open, but I made around 2.6k over 16k hands. I think my winrate was around 8ptbb. I have been trying some new things and working on being more sensitive to game flow. I'm still pretty laggy and I find myself not getting in peoples' heads and knowing when I should 4b bluff or fold rivers. The pyschology of poker was something I have not worked on since I played 9 tables. I think that is a main reason why I suck so hard at HU. I stuck to 6 tables max except for today when I needed 600 fpps and have a presentation to prepare for. I played 9-11 tables but it was only about an hour of this month's play.


As far as school, I am taking my intermediate microecon class. The Prof has an attendance policy that is pretty harsh, and I was going to screw with him because of it. It turns out that his son is a friend of mine from the math program. I let it go and he has helped me out with some questions about econ graduate schools. I am taking Real Analysis and Graph Theory as math electives. The R.A. teacher is the head of the department and is very good. The Graph Theory class is time consuming but interesting.

That's about it for my ramblings. Thanks for staying with me this far. I will make a post with some of my non standard plays in Feb. some time hopefully.

May all your cards be live and pots be monsters.

epdog

Hey guys. sorry it's been so long. Classes are going well, so I have had a reasonable amount of time to play poker. I am at school now so I can't post much. I did play an interesting hand against a real laggy 2p2er who thinks I'm a nutjob which I will post at the end if I can find it.

Katie is coming to visit this weekend, so that is exciting. A lot of my friends are gone, so there is not much to do around campus. i bbq'd with a buddy and we got drunk last week. I recommend the Omaha Steaks and burgers if you have never had them they are delicious.

I am at 100nl currently. I have had real rocky results. I have been playing 8 or 9 tables which is hurting some I'm sure. I have not played real great either. I am trying to implement the call in and out of position to preserve implied odds with some hands. I think it has merit, but when I play that many tables it's hard to have the reads that make it plus ev because of the steals you can make. I am not sure what I like best. Anybody who has thoughts on the issue post here or pm. I think it's an important poker concept.

I am almost at 3000 posts on cardrunners. I am very happy I joined the site and have grown a lot as a player and met people from all over the world. I am looking to do something awesome for my 3000th post, so let me know what you think.

Hallelujah Hollaback

adam

hand with acemanhattan

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2782249