I've played 3,750 hands in the past few days. I have doubled up zero times. My biggest pot has been 50bbs vs a shorty. Yuck.

Hmm, thank goodness for rakeback, I guess.

It's actually been a pretty nice month so far, but not so much has been going on poker-wise. Last week I was in WA for a week, visiting my girlfriend's family. She had not been back there since moving to FL with me last October, and I could tell she was getting pretty homesick, so it was good to get her back with them for a while. I had a good time too. Her family is really nice, and I get along with all of them very well. They also like to play a lot of poker, which is pretty fun for me and they are totally cool with me mostly playing poker for a living.

Playing with Nicole's family is pretty fun ($5 donkaments), but her grandfather is pretty annoying to play with. He doesn't pay attention to the action, then he tries to tell people when it's their turn when, in fact, the action is like 2 seats farther along than he thinks. He's not even very old, where that could be an excuse (he's like mid 60's). He also does a bunch of stupid crap at the table like agonize over a hand, say it's probably the best hand, then fold his K7s or some crap. Other times he acts like he's on a draw, then puts in a raise, and I'm thinking WTF everyone knows you're full of shit and flopped quads or something. At least he's pretty much the most readable person I've ever seen. It's amazing, just like you see in the movies. He does tilt me, though, because he wastes so much time and does so much retarded junk.

Anyway, I also got to see one of my buddies that I used to work with at a sports training center while I was out there. We went to one of my favorite places to eat in Bellevue, WA, Rock Bottom. It's nothing special really, just a solid restaraunt with a micro-brewery, but I alway seem to enjoy eating and having a few beers there. I had the buffalo fajitas and lumberjack red beer btw. My buddy Jon I met there is a great guy and I really enjoyed hanging out with him for a while. After, I met back up with Nicole and some friends of hers at this place Joey's, which is also pretty fun. Very solid night overall.

Later that weekend we met up with our friends Dan and Elaine. They are a bit older than us, but great fun to hang out with. Every time we go to their house they pop open some champagne or some great wine, or both, and we have a great time. Last year we went to Nappa with them, and had an awesome time. It also kind of got me into wine. So later, we headed to one of my favorite restaurants in the area, Purple. I love this place. They always have great food and a huge wine selection, and they have 1/2 off bottles on Sundays which is pretty sweet. We started off with a white "Vouvray" and later had a bottle of "Ridge" Zin, which is a very solid Zinfandel. It was a great time all around.

Poker-wise. I've only played around 8K hands so far, all at 100NL and it's been fairly break-even. I feel like I've been playing well overall, but not much has been happening for me. I'm up a few buy-ins, but I'm sure I could have done better with the cards I've been dealt. I'm still liking full-ring overall and will probably stick with it for a while. I'm getting some coaching this week, which I'm looking forward to as I'm sure I have plenty of room to improve (as always). I would really like to solidly beat 100NL this month, then maybe make the move up to 200NL next month. I was rolled for 200NL, but cashed out a $K so I wouldn't be tempted. I probably wouldn't have taken shots anyway, but it's nice to cash out some extra money sometimes. I'm definately not ready for 200NL. Oh, I also had to pay out about 34 buy-ins in taxes this week. Sick!!! I really hate that I have to ship all that money to a government who seems to be doing nothing but fucking up these days. What a great democracy. The Land of the Free, love it. The whole Epassporte thing has me kind of on life-tilt right now. I do like the instant E-check thing on Stars and FTP, though. Hope that stays solid.

Ok, so I'm starting to ramble, time to end blog entry. Until next time......

I just finished my last session for the month, so here is the update. I mostly played full ring (FR) this month. I started at 25NL FR to see how the games were on FTP and to try to clear my $200 bonus there faster by playing 8 tables. I ended up liking FR, so I stuck with it all month. I'm well rolled for 100NL now, so I will probably stick with FR for a while at 100NL+. Don't think I'll be doing any more shortstacking, lol; though I think my experiment really helped me play against shorties in the last few days of the month. My graph pretty much summarizes the month. I also made like $850 in RB and bonuses, so solid month.

Some of you may have seen me ratholing 200NL the past few days, and thought "WTF?" Well, I had a look at faintinggoat's vid in this thread: www.cardrunners.com/members/forum/ubbthreads.php, and thought I'd give it a try. I just started playing full-ring in the past month and it seems like the shortstackers at 100NL FR have been giving me hell lately, so I decided to get in a few K hands as a shortstacker. Let's call it research. I did a little research with shortstacking 25NL a few months ago, but quickly lost interest, so I decided to give 200NL a shot to make it more interesting.

As it turns out, it's not that easy and kind of f'ing nerve racking at times. When I started out, I think I had my opening and re-raise shoving ranges off a little and was leaking pretty bad. I think shortstacking is kind of educational as far as getting a very good read on people's opening ranges and re-raise calling ranges. I found it pretty interesting. As I went along, I kind of started to get the hang of it, but there were plenty of bumps in the road. It's amazing what people call you with, and I got pretty pissed a few times when I had like 4 hands in 10 minutes get in as a 70%+ favorite and get sucked out on. In the end, though, you definately get plenty of +EV opportunites. One valuable thing I think I did learn is how much worse it is to have AQ vs AK. I was leaking bad w/AQ in the beginning and ended up taking it out of most of my range.

I think the most valuable thing for me is that I now have a lot better idea about what these little fellas are doing. I also think I'll now be a lot better at determining the good short-stackers from the crappy ones. I love seeing some terrible short-stacker limp shove like 15bb's with something like 44 (I'm pretty sure this is very bad).

I was going to try like 10K hands 8-tabling with a short stack, but I got pretty tired and fed up with it after about 4K hands. I might play a little more in the next few days. Oh, and I guess I wasn't truly ratholing. I would buy in for 20bb's and usually not leave until I had 60+bb's. I would definately stay and play deeper if I had position on a huge spew-tard or if the table in general was very good. Below are my favorite suckout hand and my best robusto hand of my short-stacking venture. BTW, I ended up making about $200 in 4600 hands for a mean 1.09bb/100 winrate. Weeeeeee!

Goooooooooo!!!!!!!! http://www.pokerhand.org/?2329886

Yaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!! http://www.pokerhand.org/?2329893

I got a $200 bonus from FTP for their tech problems last month and was trying to find a way to clear it faster. I suck at playing more than 4 tables of 6-max, so I thought I'd give full-ring a shot. So I've mostly played 25 and 50NL full ring this month, 8-tabling, and it's gone well for me so far. It's a nice change of pace, and the bonus is clearing at a good rate. It's funny, my head wants to explode playing more than 4-tables of 6-max, but 8 tables of full-ring seems pretty easy for me.

Below is my graph startng March 1. I might have to sacrifice a live rooster or something next week to keep the doomswitch away :) I'm open to suggestions.

Here is my graph for January and February. I felt like things were a bit swongy @ 50NL in Feb, but I guess I never had a downswing more than 6 buy-ins. I've been swooshing some money around and am not rolled in a single site for 100NL yet, but close in 2. I could be ready to move up any day now. I feel like I still have tons to work with my game, but overall I'm feeling pretty confident.

Things have been going pretty well lately. I had a nice sweat session w/Mr. Bishbashbosh today that went well. Nothing crazy or terribley interesting happened, but we both seemed to play solid for an hour each and each made about a buy-in. It was nice to get a sweat in, as I have not had one in a few weeks. I need to make a point to get in at least one session/week. It's really good for focus and thinking about the game.

So UB still kind of sucks, but I've played some there lately. They rolled out their new Rai$e program, which actually doesn't seem too bad. I started at the second highest level "Legend," because obviously that's what I am (lol). At this level I can cash in my UB points for up to $250/month. I realized that I only had like 8000 points, which at $.07/pt is only worth $56, so I tried playing the pts tables there to see if I could get the 37,714 I needed to get my $250 this month. You can buy in to the NL pts tables for 2500 pts, which is like $17.5, so you're kind of playing $17.5NL. The games play like $2NL, so it should be a profitable venture......and it was for me today. I went crazy ROBUSTO and got my pts up over 47K after 6-tabling for a few hours!! So I cashed in my pts for $250 and still have 11K to go robusto with again. Unfortunately I will not get enough status pts to keep my "Legend" status, so I will only be able to get $50 for my pts next month. But hey, I already have enough to get the $50 so ship-it. This all sounds great, but I realized it's not that awesome when I look in PT and see that I've paid like $130 to UB's bad-beat-jackpot this month, booooooo. Free money is good though.

I am really thinking about putting most of my roll in Stars. I hear nothing but good things about their VIP program and I would definately play enough to get Supernova by the end of the year. I'm probably going to give that a go next week. I just need to get money transferred over there.

I made it back from CO this weekend. It was a decent trip overall.

My girlfriend and I booked on United Airlines a few months ago and got a really good deal on the tickets. We get to the airport, and when it's time to get on the plane they send half the passengers to a door that leads outside, to a stepway at the tail of the plane. We get outside, I look at the plane and realize it's old as dirt. Also, it's not labeled United, it just says "Ted", WTF? I've never even heard of Ted Airlines (Ted Turner I assume?) It felt like that scene in Major League when the team walks out to meet their plane and end up seeing that prop beater they had to fly in. Oh, and I guess it's kind of ironic that Turner owns the Braves. I was hoping that they had at least renovated the interior of this mid '80's classic (I think it was an Airbus). Nope, might as well have had shag carpet to go with all the burnt orange trim in this thing. It flew just fine, though, and that's what matters. Also, they showed "Elizabeth" as the in-flight-movie, which I thought was pretty solid.

We got to the condo in Winter Park, and everything was pretty solid. The condo is a timeshare that belongs to my parents and they never use. It's probably older than the plane, actually, but it's kept up pretty well. I finally bought some winter footwear once we got there. I got some Merrel, hybrid-something shoe-boots thingies for like $80. They are pretty sweet, and worked out perfectly for me. We ended up just walking around, shopping, eating, and other random stuff for the first few days. The weather wasn't very good on the mountain the 2nd and 3rd days, so we decided to not try to ski. I wasn't really gung-ho about getting up there due to my previous foot injury a few weeks prior (see "Fell out of a tree!!"). Well, the 4th day the flu hit both Nicole and me. We were pretty much done for, for the rest of the trip. Our outings from that point on were to the 7-eleven to get medicine and drinks. We didn't even make it out for Valentine's Day.

We headed back down the mountain, to Denver, on Friday to catch our Ted flight back. We took this van service that I have always used when there. Wow, altutude change plus the flu is harsh! The flu + going from 9000ft to 12000ft to 5000ft = HEAD ASPLODE!!!! Little did I know that the flight would be worse. The ascent was no problem, but when we started to make the approach into Tampa I thought my left eye was going to burst from my skull. I guess it was from pressure in my clogged sinus not being able to escape. I've never felt anything like that.

Anyway, I'm pretty much back to normal now. The trip, although not the best, was still a nice getaway and I did get a bit of reading and relaxing in. I read "Sit'n Go Strategy" and promptly came back and broke the $1K barrier I've been trying to get to in the $6.5's. Yesterday I played about 24 $11's, and I think they might be rigged. I broke even. I guess I'll just have to get used to them (aka run better, as they seem pretty much the same). I've also played some six-max and heads up since I got back and made about 1.5 buy-ins. I'll be trying to get in a nice mix of SNG's and cash play in the following weeks. I also want to start trying to satellite my way into the WSOP ME. Not a huge priority, but I think it would be cool to get into.

I'm headed out to Winter Park, CO for a ski/snowboarding trip today and will be gone for a week. My foot is still not 100% from falling out of the tree a few weeks ago, but I'll just have to give it a go and see how things feel. Even if I can't get on the mountain much, it should be a nice relaxing time. I'm really not worried about it. No poker for a whole week! Breaks are always good for me, as I seem to come back fresh and motivated.

I will be reading "Sit n Go Strategy" while I'm away, so I can come back and start crushing the STT's. I have already had good success at the $6.5 turbos, but I would really like to move up a couple of levels as a nice aside to my cash game play.

My cash game play has been pretty good so far this month. I've mainly been playing 50nl and am up about 6 buy-ins. I'd like to get to around 10 buy-ins before moving back up to 100NL. I removed my roll from UB and need to figure out where to go with it. I might do a little bonus-whorng at a smaller site or two, for funzies, before I plant it at one of the larger sites (Stars or FTP). I'll figure it out while I'm away.

I deposited some money back on to UB this month, because the games are good and I like the speed of game play. Those things do not outway how much UB sucks though, so I just removed all of my money from there. The hand histories don't work w/PT/PAHUD half the time, the Bad Beat Jackpot blows goats, and the whole damn system freezes when I come up on the waiting list!!! This is the same crap that was going on over 2 months ago when I took my money out of there. I can't believe they haven't fixed this stuff!!! I know they are aware of these problems, because I've sent them emails and seen threads about the problems with the software on various forums. I have played the majority of my lifetime hands there, but I am fed up. I am never playing there again if they don't get their heads out of their asses.