Back on Track

I've made a ton of adjustments to my game lately. I've used HEM and PTR to try and figure out where I have some basic leaks, and how to plug them. So ya, my style has changed a bunch and its made for much less stressful sessions. Most of my decisions are easy. I'm still doin some dumb crap every now and then, but with time hopefully I can stamp those moments out. I've also decided that going for Supernova is prolly worth it. I'll just continue to play like usual until finals end, the first week of December, and then make a big push to get there. Here's my graph since I took a little break and made some big adjustments.

Switching My Primary Site

[img]http://i891.photobucket.com/albums/ac112/callmenuts26/FTvsStars.png[/img]

If you're under platinum and playing on stars, without table ninja especially, you're getting screwed. If you're borderline, I'd make the argument that FT is still better. Ex: Say a fish deposits $100, and starts playing. Winning players are now at war with the poker site to see who can get their money first. On Stars, they get more of the players money that are Bronze, Silver Star, and Gold Star before we do. On Full Tilt some of the fish get rakeback, so they get some money back to donate to the regs, instead of the poker site getting it, and if they lose slower they are more likely to redeposit IMO. So ya, if you're going to reach supernova go for it! If you're under (like most of us) then Full Tilt is a better deal. GL

[img]http://i891.photobucket.com/albums/ac112/callmenuts26/TourneyHistory.png[/img]

I've sworn against tourneys, but I've never played a rush tourney and was talkin to someone on skype and decided it sounded worthwhile. I fired up 3 $4.40 rush 135 man SNG's. Finished the first in 40th for $0 the second in 35th for $0, then pulled out a 2nd place in the third for $97 and change, not bad for a $4 tourney. Maybe I'll play one every now and then. Would have been sick if I'd nutted up and bought into one that was the right size for my roll.

I'm also pulling out of my downswing and playing a lot more showdown based game. I've begun to learn when to apply the brakes, and it has saved me a ton of money and probably even more by me not getting frustrated all the time. I'm really close to buying another $650 bonus, and getting another $100 milestone bonus on Stars, plus I've released $60 of a $400 bonus on Full Tilt, so hopefully I can clear a good portion of that. I think I'll grind it out at 50nl for about 2 more weeks, then I should release about 250 of my FT bonus in that time, and get 750 in bonuses from stars. If I can manage to just break even over this stretch I should be sitting on a 5k roll, which will be more than enough to take another shot at 100nl!!!! Its really frustrating to take a shot at 100nl win a decent bit, and have to move down because I blew it at 50nl. UGH!!! Back on the climb soon.

cheers,

Chad

Back to the Grind (not the fun kind, the school kind ugh)

Welp, school is fully underway, FML. I've had to seriously cut back on my poker time so I don't fail all my classes, so yeah that sucks. I've kind of went through a transition phase, that hasn't really happened in a while, where I take a downswing at the game I'm playing and decide some other game is the best thing around and I'm gonna get rich quick at it. Unfortunately, this time I lost money at my primary game, FR, decided my style was better for 6-max, lost more money there, decided HU is where the fish are, and lost more money there. So ya, the good news is I'm back to what I know and doing well and improving, but it cost me a decent bit to come full circle.

In the end I think HU and 6 max taught me a lot. I initially thought the opposite, but I now believe both are more showdown based games at small stakes, which is basically my biggest leak right now. So contrary to my initial belief FR is probably the best fit for my current style because people have to learn to fold when hand ranges are often stronger, and HU when nobody ever has anything people just call down a lot. So yeah!

I also moved some money to Full Tilt. They had a 400 bonus waiting for me, I decided I'd fail school trying to get to Supernova, and I've got rakeback and all there, so seemed like a little better deal. I've only played there a couple days, but my initial evaluation is that it is a little softer than stars at 50nl FR, I feel like the regs are better on Stars and there's more fish on FT too. The only drawback is that TableNinja blows donkey balls there, its real spazzy, so I'm only playing 10 tables max. Once I get adjusted to the software and all I think it'll be smoother and I'll add a couple more, but for now the volume is gonna go down, but should be made up by bonuses, and the fact that nobody has hands on me, and I've bought a bunch of hands on all of them.

cheers and gl at the tables!

Chad

I'm falling

It seems like simply playing poker to the best of my ability every time I log on would be simple. I know I make more money when I do, I enjoy the game more, even while losing when I know I'm in the zone, but for some reason I just can't do it. I've spent probably the last 6 sessions spewing off a ton of money, but these last two it finally caught up with me. So ya, before every wrestling match I go through a set routine to get myself warmed up and mentally ready for competition, but with poker I roll out of bed, log on, put $700 on the tables, and go. Surely I'm not in the best possible place mentally with this routine. I'm not sure how a poker warm up should go, but I need to get it figured out before I lose any more money. It's also embarrassing how I've been playing so I'm going to try to use that feeling in one way or another to help keep me from making irrational decisions. I would never make a lot of the plays I do if someone was watching me. I've also failed to quit when I'm frustrated the last couple sessions, and I was doing awesome with that for a while. I've fallen off the path, but I'll claw my way back up, and hopefully adopt some better habits to keep me playing my best.

cheers,

Chad

Woo Hoo!

Just finished a sesh and my summer poker earnings stand at $4053.74, so mission accomplished! I could definitely hit a downswing before the end of the summer and unaccomplish this, but for the time being I'm above the goal! I still fall back into my overaggressive spewy ways sometimes, but I definitely feel like I'm making progress and continuing to distinguish the lines I take against fish and different types of regs to get the most out of each! So ya, making money and continuing to improve my game a bunch! All is well on the poker front.

My dad just went in for a pretty major surgery and everything went well and he's on the road to recovery now, but will still be in the hospital for at least 4 more days, so I'm just thanking God that its all gone as well as possible so far, and that the thing removed wasn't cancerous. Pretty scary stuff, I've never really lost anyone close to me, so to some extent everyone seems immortal, but this was a wake up call and hopefully will encourage me to make the most out of the short time we're given here.

cheers,

Chad

The Summer Home Stretch

I am too loose and I look for a reason not to make a play, instead of a reason to make a play, and that gets me in a lot of really tough spots. If I'm going to continue to play 14 tables or increase that number I've got to tighten up a little bit. My results have been good but I feel like my current style has a lot of variance. On the positive side I'm pretty sure this style has improved my hand reading a lot, or I wouldn't be winning, but ya I'd like to adopt a slightly more conservative style and take a little bit of the stress out of my game so I can play more tables and put in a little more volume.

I'm also going to start setting a target volume at the beginning of each day, and not check my bankroll until I've completed it or am too tired or tilted to play anymore that day. I think this will greatly increase my bottom line and take some of the emotion out of the game.

I've got sooooo much work to do, its definitely overwhelming sometimes, but I'm enjoying the hell out of the learning process, and am so glad I decided to give poker a pretty serious go this summer. I've improved my game immensely, it has freed up a lot of time to chill with friends and really enjoy having a summer vacation for the second to last time, and I'm sure my efforts to improve will continue to payoff dividends for the rest of my poker career. So ya, 3 more weeks left to hit my summer goals! Hopefully I can catch a bit of run good and wrap it up!

cheers,

Chad

Still Cruising

Poker can be so deceptive. Right now I am crushing it, I've just fully recovered plus a bit from a 2k downswing, but am I really playing that much better than my opponents now or am I just running good over a smallish sample??? I've made a ton of changes to my game, so I'd like to think I am playing much better now, but I probably won't know if they're really helping till I get a bigger sample and by then I'll have changed twenty other things that will skew my results. I suppose I just need to keep studying and keep thinking about what I'm studying to decide for myself if it should be profitable in my game. I can say definitively though that I am going on tilt less and quitting sooner when I do, and that has saved me a ton of money over the past month. Poker is such a dynamic game and each table is different, I just need to keep honing in on my opponents thought process, and then figure out better and better lines to take against them.

I've been incredibly lazy this summer and I'm finally starting to run and lift so that when wrestling season rolls around I'm not terribly out of shape. I feel like I think clearer and am more confident for the rest of the day when I get a good workout in, so ya this has been great on all fronts.

Poker is great, life is great, and may anyone reading run good!

cheers,

Chad

Changes

I got the 200 search trial of the PTR Premium service so I could compare my stats to some of the top winners at 50nl Full Ring and see what basic changes I need to make, and the final conclusion is that I am far too loose, so I did some pokerstove calculations and came up with a good base for what hands I should be raising from each position, and I think thats going to help me a ton. My decisions post flop are much simpler when I've generally got the best hand pre-flop, and I felt a lot less stressed the one session I played and decided to bump my tables up to 14 and play longer as a result. So ya, lots of big changes going on with my game, and I'm sure they'll make me a much more consistent winner and be step down the road to playing more tables more profitably.

cheers,

Chad

My pillow isn't nearly as soft as live 200nl. It sucks that the game is so slow, but you can't beat playing with 7 people who have never really taken poker seriously and generally started out below average intelligent to begin with, and 1 other that has a clue and wins in that game, but still is bad, and then maybe 1 other pretty solid player. I'm going to try and make the short drive to the casino at least once a week till school starts. Its a great atmosphere too, and I finally feel comfortable enough with my bankroll to take a loss, so ya good situation there.

Everything online is still going according to plan, it seems like every time I make money consistently for a good stretch it starts to feel like I can't lose, so when this good thing comes to its inevitable end I just have to make sure that I handle it well and keep playing the best game I know how, but I've really turned a corner with my tilt control and attitude towards the game, so I'm very confident I'll handle it like a champ, and hopefully I can keep climbing for a while!

Went rock climbing today, and I think I'm going to buy a rope, some quick draws, and a few other things so I can start going climbing a lot more often. There are a ton of routes within 20 minutes of my house, so ya should definitely be taking advantage of it!

cheers,

Chad

Gettin Settled In

I've made some money at 50nl now, and my roll is sitting 12 buyins above the number I said i'd move down at, so I should be able to weather some negative variance if the poker gods so desire. I did a hand history review today and really got a lot out of it. It seems like every time I take a step forward with poker and really make some improvements with my game, the biggest thing I realize is just how little I know and how many leaks I have, but I suppose thats how it should be and how it will continue to be for a long time or quite possibly forever.

Achilles157 has some great videos for Drag the Bar, and I think I'm going to go back through one of his for 50nl and take some more notes, his thought process is presented in a way that seems to make a lot more sense to me than any other video I've watched so I'm sure it'd do me a lot of good to meticulously watch that one a couple times and get everything I can from it. So ya poker is good, life is good, and I'm really motivated to learn right now so I should probably get to it.

cheers,

Chad

First Post

Hey, I used to have a blog here http://www.pokerfreerollsonline.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=8123, but I figured I'd start one that was a little more my own page.

I suppose I'll start with a little about myself. I'm a senior mechanical engineering student and wrestler at Colorado Schoool of Mines, and I started playing poker about a year ago. I won a freeroll for $20 and deposited ten bucks on Absolute poker so I could start getting player points and stuff and have been stuck to the game ever since. For my first 8 or 9 months I'd build up slowly to a couple hundred dollars then tilt, move up limits and start back over from twenty bucks, and after several months of this on Absolute and Full Tilt, I found out PokerStars had a restrict table limit feature and I immediately switched over there and started climbing through the limits a little quicker.

I had been primarily a limit player up until a couple months ago, but it seems like your edge gets pretty small around 5/10 limit, so I figured I'd eventually want to make the transition to no limit and this summer would be my best opportunity to do so. I'm currently playing 50nl FR and working on my game like crazy. I've been doing a lot of sweats, watching and taking notes on a ton of videos, and trying to make as many poker friends as possible to help me get where I want to be and make the ride more enjoyable. I'll lay some goals out here to gauge my progress.

1. Have Fun. When it comes down to it poker should be fun, and in the past I've struggled when it becomes too much about results and not enough about playing a game that I enjoy to the best of my ability.

2. Constantly improve and never get content with my game.

3. Be beating 100nl and be rolled for 200nl by the end of the year.

4. Achieve Supernova status by the end of the year.

The biggest reason I have fallen short of past goals is tilt control, so my biggest focus at the moment is on playing my A game all the time. Every one of these goals relies on me getting my tilt under control, and in the past 2 weeks I've gotten a lot better at quitting, so hopefully I'm at a turning point in that regard. Thanks for reading, and I hopefully future posts won't be so dry. gl at the tables!

cheers,

Chad