Thursday 31 January 2008

Getting back on track


Since my last post I have started playing more regular again at 10/20. Although fighting it out with dave (geeforce1) for the action is tough as he plays 14 hr sessions on a regular basis. Me and dave have been friends for a long time now and came up together in the poker world, we have never played against each other on the 6 max cash tables and am not about to start. We do play live together, usually drunk on 1/2 and its a car crash but great fun.

I feel confident everytime i play again now but will be far more aware to never become complacent again. Ive also been watching some HU videos on cardrunners and trying to improve my HU game. My main reason for this was because at the moment I can only play when the tables are relatively quiet and I am usually the oe starting tables. This leads to some prolonged HU games while I wait for the table to fill and was an area where i was leaking a lot of money in the past.

Just been looking through pokertracker to find some interesting hands from the last week but none really seemed worthwhile posting. I went to see the big buddha on koh samui yesterday (pictured) and is supposed to bring good luck. Seemed to work yesterday as I booked a $10k win, despite losing with AA twice all in preflop for full buy ins. Might be worth visiting every day while im here if it guarantees $10k days, :-).

To address the issue with not being able to play 10/20 all the time I am looking to get a roll going on party as they seem to have 4-5 10/20 games going at the hours i am available to play. I will earn the money first on ipoker and withdraw it before depositing on party. Hopefully that will happen within the next 2 weeks. Its always hard moving to a new site, figuring out the good regulars, looking to exploit them etc.. This takes a lot of time, but needs to done if i want to play 10/20+ on a regular basis which I do.

As far as tournaments go, moorman has been tearing it up in 2008, check his blog. He is on the verge of breaking into the top 10 rankings on pocketfives which would be immense. I am going to try and play a few events in the upcoming ftops on full tilt and play the full compliment of sunday tournaments on a couple of occasions in the coming months. This is to try and keep my tournament game a little sharp in preperation for wsop and also the chance at a $100k+ score, lol. As far as WSOP goes, me, geeforce, moorman and allinstevie should be getting a house. We have seen a pretty sweet place that was apparently ricky hattons base for the floyd merryeather fight, altough that might just be a sales pitch. Dave is in the process of booking it and hopefully it will be confirmed by the next time I post so I can put up some pics.

Thats all for now,

Pab

Tuesday 15 January 2008

Time to reflect

After celebrating new year, and eventually sobering up I had time to reflect about why December was such a bad month for me, worst ever in fact. It would be easy to attribute it to running bad and continue as usual, but i think that would be a little naive and immature of me. The 6 weeks or so prior to December were my best on record for online poker and i think that in turn that set me up for the disastrous December. I have reviewed all of my sessions throughout the month and my play gets noticeably worse and worse as the month goes on and on. At the start of the month I felt invincible and felt all i needed to was turn up and win without any thought or effort.

I did seem to run really bad on full tilt to lose the first $20k or so with some horrendous beats that I wont bore you with the details of. However after that I was obviously becoming frustrated and impatient about how my results were going. I started playing the step 5 SnG's on stars for the PCA and quickly burnt through $8k and no package, wp pab. The rest of the month up to christmas I played pretty badly and was leaking money all over the show, and some bad beats mixed in didn't help my situation in the slightest and just increased my frustration. Christmas came and it was break time, drinking took over and poker didn't figure in my daily routine which was good as the $50k losing month could easily have become $70 or $80k.

Since new year as i said i have reviewed all my sessions to determine the cause of December's atrocities. Yes i ran bad but i made the situation worse by tilting and playing bad. I have watched some Cardrunner's videos, something i haven't done since i went on my super hot streak. I am making a conscious effort to play no more than 4 tables and to give them my full focus and not take winning for granted just because i am a good player.

I hope i have learned from my mistakes in December and will be able to tackle running bad in a more professional manner next time which there inevitably will be. I hope now i will step away from the tables sooner and review my sessions in detail to determine the problem.

I have just played my first real session of poker at high stakes since new year and was very pleased with the way I played and how much more in control I felt. $11k to the good i just over an over was a bonus as well. Some of the 10/20 ad 25/50 players on ipoker are just so bad, im gonna name and shame art113 as the biggest donk on the site IMHO. I feel in a much more positive frame of mind about poker again and am hopeful about stringing some good sessions together.


Thanks for the comments to my previous post. Alex, Ukgatsby and m3boy, thanks for the good luck 08 message, same to you guys too. Busted man ill look your blog up as soon as ive published this entry, so a return link would be appreciated, Snoopy - lol


I think i have rambled enough now, bye for now

Pab