I've just been having a think about a few things. My goals in poker have changed a lot recently. I used to just want to be really good. I wanted to play high stakes with some of the best players one day. These days I think my ultimate poker dream would just be to beat $5/$10NL, 4-tabling for 4BB/100 long-term. If you're getting in 100 hands per hour per table, that's still an impressive $320US per hour. It's not too shabby. Maybe if I was successful doing this I'd take shots at 10/20 if a mega-fish was playing. But I think I would be content with this.

Right now I am beating soft 100NL games for around 6BB/100+. So there's obviously still a long way to go. But the beauty of this goal is that it is attainable. I'm hoping to move up to 200nl in January for good. From there I'll need to build confidence and put the runs on the board. You can start to make decent money at this level (close to $100 an hour). In the "real world", that's not too shabby at all.

I had a "bad" day today. I lost very little, only around 2.2 buy ins, but I just felt tilted / frustrated. But thinking about my long-term goals helps me to put things in perspective. I know where I wantt to be and how to get there. Hopefully down the road I can meet my goals in poker. In tandem with that, I'd like to teach or do something to balance things a little two days a week. Then maybe get a nice place on the coast, meet the right girl, exercise a lot, and work out what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life.

I'll update you on my progress every now and again.

I've worked pretty hard on my poker game over the last couple of month, and put in a lot of hands by my lax standards. Once I'd reached my goal of reworking my game and making x amount of $, I found myself lacking for motivation. I woke up each day without the drive and purpose I had experienced in the two months previous.

As I result knew it was time to set some new goals. I'm away this weekend for a music festival and heading to Melbourne for ten days at the end of this month. So I figure leading up to Christmas, I should have 30 full days free for online poker. My goals are to play a minimum of 1k hands per day at 100nl, and achieve a winrate of 5BB/100 or better. This means that if I reach my goal I will play a minimum of 30k hands, and make $3k+. The medium term goal is to be comfortably rolled for 200nl leading into January. I wll update my results every few days in my blog to try and keep myself motivated.

The other thing I want to work on is my health and exercise habits. I have been fairly fit at times in my life but I've let my standards slip recently. I want to do a lot of running and swimming as we kick into the Australian summer, and eat healthy 99% of the time.

This weekend away should be a lot of fun. Hopefully I can make some sexytime with a hippy. I don't really know any of the acts playing (it's a smallish local festival), but I've heard it's a lot of fun. Drinking beer and eating hot dogs all weekend can never be that bad.

I'll update in a week or so.

James.

So it's a Friday night and I'm knocking back a few Coronas and passing the time. I'm 24 now, and one of the worst parts about getting older is that your circle of friends starts to disperse themselves across the globe. It's not so bad, and I'm happy to spend the odd night in sometimes on a weekend. But if I'd known that I'd be sitting on the internet drinking beer and writing a blog at 24 when I was 20, I may have been a little concerned.

After running pretty sick hot for a couple of weeks last month I've hit the tiniest of downswings in the last couple of days. It's no big deal. But it got me thinking about why I played so well during that two week period that just passed. No doubt I ran well, and the constant winning allows your acumen to remain sharp at all times. But more than that I think it was following routine I enjoyed. Every day I woke up and thought, yay, I'll play a little poker to start my morning, then cook up a nice lunch or dinner, have a beer, and enjoy myself. When I'm on a small downswing I go on "break-even tilt", I usually don't do anything too crazy. But my A game just goes out the window. I don't game select, and worst of all, I don't enjoy playing.

Tomorrow I have decided to start my morning off with two hours of poker. I'll try and bring my A game and quit if things aren't going well. After that I'm going go cook up some beautiful BBQ spare ribs, have a beer and play some xbox. After that I'll put in another little session then go out for the evening.

If you aren't enjoying your life as a poker player then stop playing. There's a million ways to make money, and I honestly believe that it is difficult for anyone to make good money playing poker if they are not enjoying it. I think the reason most of us started playing was because we loved it. If that side of things disappears, then find something else you do love.

James.

This post is both a beat and a brag. The beat is that I have predominately been grinding $50nl to rework my game. The brag is my results. I will try to discuss some of the changes I have made and how they have improved my game. First a couple of screen shots:

These are my no limit and pot limit hold 'em results over the last 10 days or so:

These results are all 6max or shorter handed. I think I'd be close to commiting suicide if I played $50NL full ring.

I guess the first thing that springs to mind when looking at the above stats is how nitty I appear. Over the first 4k hands of NL on Tilt I played very tight, even in late positon. To give a little history, I had previously been a fairly successful $100nl player. My game took a turn for the worse when I started trying to learn how to impove. It's a bit like re-modelling your golf swing: you will reap the rewards in the long run, but for a while you can lose the plot a little bit.

Essentially as I became more and more agressive in late position I encountered a problem. These crazy maniac fish kept min-raising me, or calling w/ bottom pair, and I'd be sitting there with my 9-high suited connector not knowing what the hell to do. This would put me on minor tilt and running bad or not, I suffered my biggest ever downswing of roughly 10 buy ins.

So I took the ego-bruising step of moving down for the first time in my life. At first I hated it and couldn't take it seriously. But I started losing and slowly started to think more deeply about the game and what the fuck I was doing wrong. I was aware of the concept of expanding my preflop raising range to extract more value from my premium hands, but I don't think I truly understood what the whole thing was all about. If I was thinking I would have known that this is only relevant to thinking players / players using HUD's and poker tracker. I'm pretty confident that the fish limping under the gun with stats of 50 / 5 is not using statistical software to enchance their play.

So I got down to the basics. Where the hell does your edge come from in a poker game, on the most basic level? What it boiled down to for me was: Preflop equity; Position; Post-Flop Skill; & finally, Initiative.

This simple revelation and all its implication - along with running better - has led to great success. Some people with sublime post-flop skills can raise 78s on the button every time a fish limps and be profitable. But if the fish is calling your continuation bet 70% of the time and you're afraid to 2-barrel, or get tilted by his min-raises and calls, then I'm not so sure it is. We're not all CTS or Taylor Caby. If they are going to limp call w/ K9o and A7o then why not only isolate / raise KTo+ & A9o+ from the button? Maybe you're not pushing every possible edge. But you're lowering your variance, tilt potential, and stress levels. And if you're prone to tilt you're not losing any EV at all long-run. Of course, if you click on the fish's name on HUD and see that he folds to continuation bets 80% of the time, then raise away w/ your suited connectors.

I also shutdown on raising hands like KJo to limpers when I was in the blinds.

This is getting kind of long. But one of the other things I did was stop 3-betting suited connectors from the blinds to a button raise every time. I started 3-betting them far more often in position to try and set up a loose 3-betting image in case I picked up a monster from the blinds. Against non-thinking players it works a charm.

Enough hold 'em.

Next up are a small sample of Omaha results:

I had dabbled in PLO in the past but thus is my first serious go at learning (not that 1.5k hands means anything). But I feel as if Stinger and SB's videos have been very beneficial. I think a much greater winrate can be achieved at low stakes Omaha than can be done so at hold 'em. There is no way to describe the play of other people at the tables other than terrible. So I think I'll be playing a lot more in future. I want to get in my first 20k hands, and then if my full tilt account is up to around the $4k mark, I'll check out the action at $100PLO.

If you're playing low stakes Omaha w/ a VP$IP of greater than about 27%, I would seriously consider tightening up. Not that I'm an expert on the subject, but follow Townsend's advice and play tight out of position. Push your preflop equity in position and rely on your superior post-flop skills to extract value and semi-bluff people out. Don't raise junk in late position.

I'm not usually one to blog / talk about poker, and in any future blog posts I'll probably discuss general life issues / topics. But it's always nice to give people on a poker website and introduction through what has brought us all here.

Thanks,

James