Let me offer the reader my most sheepish hello; its been a while. Why haven't I been blogging recently? A lot of reasons probably, not the least of which is that I have been very burnt out with poker, and since this is, after all, mostly a poker blog, I just haven't had much of a desire to blog it out. Since its been since just after the WSOP 50k, let me offer a quick summary of my last few months:

Bust out of the main event with KQhh AI vs J9 on J926hhh turn on day 2, ensue a sour day or two.

Extend my San Diego lease for an extra month and thus spend all of August in La Jolla back on the grind and taking in the last few weeks of sun/beach/clubbing.

Pack up Betsy (my car) with the bare essentials (clothes, computer, huge ugly painting purchased my first year in Vegas after a rush in the pit that I'm convinced brings me good fortune, other random crap) and drive solo from San Diego to Boston, stopping off in St. Louis for a few days and then New Jersey to see my parents and grind out WCOOP for a month.

WCOOP month goes awfully. Lose all MTT-related prop bets and get crushed in cash after finally having heatered up a decent online roll in August. Sad panda.

Get to Boston and move into new place in the Back Bay. The place is in a great location just off Newbury Street, and although my roommates are all still spread across the country and won't be here until the end of October, I can tell we're gonna have a great time.

In lieu of roommates not being around, I tentatively set up re-focusing on poker. New house/painting rungood kicks in and I'm currently in the midst of what will probably be my best month ever (the 3 month nosebleed degeneracy of previous years discounted).

Take break from grind to go to Miami where pokernews had rented out a mansion on Hollywood Blvd for a bunch of poker players to party it up and shoot a bit of promo stuff. Get to meet lots of much better poker players than myself - jungleman, urnotindanger, nanonoko to name a few - and kick it with old buds MacDaddy and UMD Tennis. Standard day on this trip consists of waking up at 3 in the afternoon, sitting by the pool or something, then drinking/2k PLO/Stud/whatever flips for a few hours before bottle service somewhere. Highlight of degenerate flipping was urnotindanger managing to lose 16k on the limo ride over to a club to UMDs in a matter of 30 minutes doing 3way stud flips. Luckily nobody got too badly burned on flips throughout the course of the week and we all wound up more or less even. Also I won 10k at Mario Kart/Smash Bros in one day; I won't embarrass who I crushed but step up your game brah :)

Get back from Miami in a daze and continue to grind. Grind goes well. All is good.

So that's the very very short notes on what has been an eventful, somewhat stressful, but ultimately very rewarding last few months.

The real reason that I wanted to finally sit down and pump out a blog is because I feel like in the last two weeks or so, I have made leap and bound type progress with regard to my poker game, specifically as it concerns game selection and more importantly, laboring through bad runs in individual sessions. It's funny, I'm more or less a dinosaur in the online poker world at the decaying age of 24 and have been playing for 7 years now, but I am still constantly surprised at how much more there is to learn about poker as a game, and about myself as its student.

I suppose that game selection speaks for itself. I am learning to stop pulling the trigger on 4 tables HU against competent players simply for the sake of learning a few new tricks but otherwise getting on the variance train for no reason. It's kind of amazing how easy poker seems after having gotten accustomed to playing in really tough 25/50 lineups for most of my life and then all of a sudden game selecting 5/10-25/50. But I guess that this is really only a revelation to me; it turns out most people always practice this principle!

As to toughing out bad runs though, this is something that I am really proud of. I readily admit that probably my biggest leak as a poker player used to be insta-quitting sessions, even against terrible opponents, simply because I dropped a few buy-ins really quickly and was afraid that my meta had gone out the window and I was just going to endlessly spew off buyins. Well, rewind to the last few days when I have had great games on both Stars and FTP, and have unfortunately been stuck huge at the beginning of almost every single session that I have played, despite playing in pretty soft games. I'm not sure what happened, but something finally clicked for me. I toughed out 3-6 hour long sessions every day this week, and have had really good results despite HEM telling me that I am still running below my EV. Specifically, I have been battling it out with a guy on FTP who will remain un-named but is likely a competent (though spewy) player using a formerly terrible player's account to get infinite action. As it turns out, I happen to think that I have an edge vs him and we have been 4-tabling 25/50 very regularly the last week. And this is where my new 'skill' comes into play. Here is the graph vs him for the last week:



The sessions went as follows: 1309 hands, 1624 hands, 939 hands, 779 hands, and finally 1472 hands. I'm too lazy to go through and do this myself, but it's pretty easy to pick up the fact that not only did I run unbelievably bad there in the middle of our odyssey, but that pretty much the start of every session coincides with very swift, bad downswings, peaking at -50k in under 200 hands at one point. Against a relentless, very aggressive player that villain happens to be, old me would have instantly quit and scorned my bad luck, but I am very happy to have battled through the variance this last week and let my good play shine through. I would love to post some HHs of spots where I made soul-crushing river reads but I've learned better than to post this free, specific, information on the internet, so just suffice to say that I have been playing really well lately :).

It seems that a return to blogging is always catalyzed by excessive periods of either losing/winning for me, so I'm happy that it happened to be the latter this time around since looking back to my previous posts, things had been getting a bit dreary. I'm going to try and post more in the future, both because I like writing and miss it, and also because PokerStars is taking more applications for online pros, and a little bitter to have not been selected last time, I am taking positive action to have more noticeable attributes for them this time around. Hope you are all doing well, thanks for reading and dealing with a bunch of shameless bragging.

Cheers,
Mike