Tysun

6/18  -$305.97

Total -$305.97

June Rakeback $517.86

I hate playing right now.  Back to the grind.

Well the last two nights did not go too well.  Playing on Cake at $100 NL I dropped 9 buy-ins total between two different sessions.  First session I was tilting pretty bad and that cost me at least two buy-ins.  I should not have even played because I was pretty tired and it was already late, but I forced myself to play.  3rd hand in I’m down a buy-in when I get all-in on the flop with Kh, Kx vs Ah, Kx on an all heart flop.  Being the idiot that I am I decided to get a little tricky preflop when I decided not to 4-bet from position as villain 3-bet me out of the small blind.  Villain check-raises the flop all-in after I bet almost the pot.  The night was pretty much down hill from there.  Tilting and what seemed like everyone in the free loving world hitting sets against me turned into a pretty bad night.  I even had two people hit quads against me.  I think at this point I can probably tell within the first 15 minutes or so of playing whether I am going to have a good or bad session.  Not winning/losing because anyone can still play the best poker and come out a loser if the cards aren’t cooperating.  Since last week was a slow week I kind of feel I forced myself to play those two losing sessions.  Hopefully I can get back on track after a couple days off after I have cleared my head. 

One goal for the month is to hit $1K in rakeback on Cake.  I’m sitting just under $500 right now so I should make it with a couple long sessions during the next two weekends.  The $1K should help with the down swing, but another goal is to play tilt free as much as possible for the rest of the month and win back the 9 buy-ins by the end of the month.  I also need to start playing a bit more on PokerStars because I have a bonus that expires the first week of July.  At the start of the year I had planned on making it to SuperNova on PokerStars, but that fell by the wayside after the first couple months of the year as I was playing the majority of the time on Cake and Full Tilt.  Well I think I have changed my mind and will play tonight.  I will post on the progress later tonight.

Back when I first started this blog way back in February of this year I was planning on writing a post about my goals for the year.  Unfortunately the blog got put on the back burner and that post never happened.  Since I have revived the blog and we are nearing the half point of the year I thought I would outline a few goals/thoughts I have for the rest of the year.

1. Where do I want to spend my time playing?  Right now I have a little bit on Stars and Full Tilt and the rest on Bodog and Cake with the majority of it on Cake.  My online roll is just under $12,000 at this point and is the highest it has ever been even pre-UIGEA.  Normally I would not have allowed it to get this high, but since ePassporte left town I have been pretty much stuck without a way to withdraw.  Currently the only ewallet out there is eWalletxpress and it is not a viable withdrawal method.  As much as I like playing at Bodog I don’t see myself playing there past the point when I clear the sign-up bonus.  Being able to only play 3 tables at a time really doesn’t fit me as I like to play between 6 to 8 on other sites.  I will probably either request a check or see if the Moneygram option is available and withdraw all the funds I have on Bodog within the next month or two.  The rest of my bankroll is on Cake which to me is a little much at the present.  Ideally I would like to get some of that money over to Full Tilt and PokerStars so I can have an adequate bankroll on those sites to play my normal stakes.  My goal is to have all this worked out by the end of July so that I have a roll of about $1500 on Stars and $3000+ on both Full Tilt and Cake.

 2. Score another final table playing in the Cake $75,000 or $150,000 Guaranteed weekly Sunday tournament.  My goal is to play in roughly two of these per month which would be another 12 or so times for the rest of the year.  This goal resulted from a $3000 cash in last Sunday’s $75,000 Guaranteed tournament in which I placed 6th.  I honestly think this is a reasonable goal and I look forward to giving it my best shot.

3. Cash game winnings.  I believe that if I put in enough time and focus that I can average roughly $2500 a month including bonuses and rakeback.  My goal will be to shoot for roughly $1500 to $2000 from cash games and another $500 to $1000 from rakeback and bonuses.  I know that time will be a big factor on whether or not this becomes a reality, but I believe it can be done at the stakes I am currently playing.  Starting July 1st I will create a whole new set of spreadsheets to track my progress.  Overall goal for the entire six months will be $15,000.  I’ll start tracking my progress for this and my other goals starting July 1st.

4. Make a couple poker videos.  I won’t set any time table because I never would meet it, but hopefully within the next couple weeks I can start making some test videos.  Bought a headset microphone and I have installed Camtasia.  So far I have tried one quick just to make sure everything works.  I will have to play around with the settings because the one minute I made initially was pretty big.  Also I hate the way my voice sounds when I listened to my test video.

5. Play some more games besides NLHE short-handed cash games.  The four I will concrete most on, which in my mind still will yield decent returns are satellite tournaments, turbo STTs, turbo heads up SNGs, and PL short-handed Omaha.  I have played some Omaha the past two nights as kind of a break from the normal grind and liked it a lot.  Both times I played Hi/Lo, but the next time I think I will give just Hi a try.  I think Hi Omaha suits me better because I feel that grinding for split pot after split pot when playing Hi/Lo tends to be a bit frustrating and I find myself taking too many chances and I end up spewing chips.  I would like to get back into playing turbo STTs, but more than likely it will be something I do every once in awhile to take a break from my normal cash games.  The recent post by ML has got me interested in turbo heads up SNGs again.  I had been playing them on and off since the beginning of the year so they are not new to me.  I had been playing the 2 player ones earlier in the year, but since I started back up I have begun playing the 4 player ones winner takes all.  I like these a lot and I believe that they can be more profitable then the regular 2 player ones.  We’ll see how it goes.

Well all this should keep me busy over the next six months and I will try my hardest to post updates a couple times a month in order to track my progress and to keep me focused.  I will also write a monthly goals post with smaller and more detailed goals.

It’s been about a week since my last post so I figured it was time for an update to cover what’s been going on over the past week.

Since I have left Walker Poker I have set up shop at Cake Poker.  Pretty much for the simple reason that I had about $2K on there already and for the most part liked playing there.  I started playing there on May 25th.  Fast forward to today, 17 days later, and my balance is over $7K.  Most of that jump can be attributed to the MTT cash I had Sunday night for $3K.  The other $2K was spread out over cash game winnings, bonuses, and rakeback.  I have been running pretty good since starting back up at Cake and will probably make it the main site at which I play.

Start playing at Bodog about mid way thru last week.  The first two sessions didn’t go to well and I dropped about 3 buy-ins at $100 NL.  I credit it to getting use to the new software and the new players plus a couple bad calls that I made.  I bounced back in my third session Sunday morning where I won 3 and half buy-ins.  That coupled with about $150 in tournament dollars that I won playing satellites on PokerStars made it a good morning.

I had won an entry into the $75,000 ($109 buy-in) Guaranteed NL Hold’em MTT earlier in the week from a gold chip satellite.  I’m definitely not a MTT player by nature as much of my time is focused on cash games in that they are more flexible in when and for how long I can play.  I like to play in the occasional MTT and it’s usually a small buy-in ($10-$20) and usually on PokerStars.  After playing at Cake and Red Star for while I noticed the gold card and gold chip satellites and came to find out that they were quite soft which meant free entries into a larger MTT tournament ($100+$9 and $150+$12 buy-ins).  So far I have played in about 8 of them between Cake and Red Star and I have cashed in 4 of them with Sunday night being my biggest cash by far.  I ended up finishing in 6th place for over $3000.  Overall I think I played pretty good.  I got real lucky only once when my jacks busted aces all-in preflop.  But I also had my share of times when I got it in with the best of it only to come out a loser.  The play of the other players from what I saw was pretty horrible in my opinion and I feel that any decent tournament player could do very well in this tournament consistently.  I look forward to playing in this tournament every few weeks and hope to improve on my 6th play finish.

Hopefully in the next day or two I will make post on my goals for the rest of the year.

Had a pretty good day yesterday winning roughly 7 and a half buy-ins at $100 NL on Cake.  I eliminated all my losses from the weekend so that was very relieving.  I decided to not take some time off, but to try and see if there was anything wrong with my game.  Looking back over the weekend it just seemed like a rough stretch where I was cold decked and none of my big hands were getting a lot of action.  Also ramped up the aggression a little bit pre-flop and on the turn.  I have been playing on Cake and other sites which don’t have tracking so paying attention to how I am playing becomes that more important.  I have increased my three-betting pre-flop and I am second barreling on the turn a lot more because Cake seems flush with players looking to float with air on the flop and then try and steal the turn.

I played two different sessions, one right when I got home from work for a little over an hour which netted me around 3 buy-ins.  The other started around 10:30 pm a lasted around two hours.  I almost didn’t play the second as I was already up from the first and was a little on the tired side.  Was running pretty hot for both sessions, but the second one was a lot more up and down.  Started off really good getting up over 3 buy-ins before three bad beats in the span of about 15 minutes brought me back to being up about half a buy-in.  After the third bad beat I yelled and slammed my desk pretty hard with my hands which scared my cats quite a bit.  For a moment it looked like I might go on tilt and lose my winnings from the earlier session, but I took a few deep breaths and just tightened up and tried to refocus.  A couple orbits later I had calmed back down for the most part and just looked to start exploiting the weak players.  It didn’t take long for me to get back up and I ended the session up almost 4 and a half buy-ins.  For the most part I was pretty proud of the fact that I didn’t go on tilt and my anger was limited to a brief outburst.  Looking back I think the brief outburst actually kind of helped as it allowed me to release some of my frustrations.  Normally I will bottle it up and it I tend to stew over it which causes me to tilt and makes it a lot harder to refocus.

Plans are to remain on Cake for the week and will probably start playing on Bodog this weekend.  Will probably split my time between the two for the rest of the month.  Mirage’s post in the May Graphs/June Goals thread pretty much showed me that I need to get off my ass and focus a lot more on my game.  Thanks Mirage.

May turned out to be my best month of the year.  Unfortunately June has not been very kind.  I dropped a little over 6 buy-ins at $100 NL this weekend playing on Cake Poker.  I think I’ll take a day or two off to get my head straight as I was tilting quite a bit during my play this weekend.  I will probably give Cake a break and start playing on Bodog for a while.  I finally withdrew all the money I had on Walker and I am glad to be moving on.  Not much also to report.