O-Poker

I have had a couple of crazy weeks following my vacation. I think I have worked more extra hours than I took off when we went to the beach. My blog posting has suffered because of this. I'll try to put a lot of information into this post to catch everything up to date.

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GO GATORS!!!

Wooooo Hooooooooo!!!!!! We won!! We Won!! Now the Gators have National Champsionships in Football and Basketball.

All I can say is awesome, awesome!! The Gators never had much of a Basketball program until the early 1990s. They unexpectedly made the Final Four for the first time while I was in college. They faced the powerhouse Duke and lost but everyone was just excited that they made the Final Four.

Fast forward to this year and things couldn't have gone more perfectly. They started the season on fire. Just when they were poised to take over the number #1 ranking they went on a losing streak. Towards the end of the season, they started to pick it up a little. Then at the SEC Tourney everything started clicking again and they never looked back.

The Gators totally dominated and in my very biased opinion the BEST TEAM IN THE NATION won the tourney.

Go Gators!!

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Uncapped Live Cash Games

There is a game in town that Loopy and I went to about a week and half ago. We played a tourney at one game (see my previous chop post) and then headed over to a live 2/5 NL cash game with no max buy-in.

Normally, the cap for online games is 100xBB - so $500 for this game. Some live games vary but most of the games with caps have max buy-ins in of 100xBB or less.

When we arrived at the game there were several people with stacks over $2,000. Both Loopy and I bought in for $500. The bigger stacks around the table and the loose play got me to thinking a lot about the optimal buy-in for that game. I have always said that you should have everyone at the table covered, but the biggest stack at the table was probably around $3k+. I had $1,000 on me.

So I guess the question that I have is - Should I either buy-in for $2k or not play the game? I am at a disadvantage with my $500 buy-in, but I think the loose play at the game and the large buy-ins by very loose rich players still make it a profitable game.

I would be interested to hear thoughts on this.

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$50K Challenge - CRASH AND BURN!!

Now onto the depressing news. I had the worst week and a half of poker of my life.

$50K Challenge Status - $5,240
Loss since last update - ($7,592) - OUCH!!

I'm sure you are looking at this very poor performance from me and wondering WTF happened. It really boils down to a couple of things.

1. Playing over my bankroll - I started experimenting with 5/10NL at Party Poker and had some success. I had days where I won a lot andd other days where I lost a lot - overall I was beating 5/10NL. I was playing 4 tables at one time and the wins and losses added up extremely fast. One bad day and things started to fall apart. Below is a list of how quickly you can lose a lot if you are playing over your bankroll.

- AK vs KQ all-in on a K high flop against very aggressive player. Turn comes a Q. River no help. Loss of $1,500.
- Flop a straight and all the money goes in on the flop. The other guy has two pair and make a full house on the river. Loss of $1,000
- AA vs KK all in preflop. King hits the board and my AA loses to KK. Loss of $1,200.
- Ran KK into AA all-in two times (one preflop against very aggressive player; the other on all low card flop) Loss of $2,000

Loss from above hands (all on same day) - $5,700

2. Playing 4 tables - I started playing four tables on Party Poker at one time. Even before the bad run, I was only averaging around 1.5PTBB/100. This sounds good, but my hourly rate was actually lower than playing two tables of 3/6 and pretty close to my hourly rate of 2 tables at 2/4. I play short handed no limit cash games and so much of my game is based on my "feel" for the table and my opponent's tendancies. I was losing a lot of my "reads" by playing so many tables.

3. $109+Rebuys - Loss of $609. I Played a $109+rebuys on Pokerstars and was in for $600 and wound up busting out about 7-8 spots before the money.

Moral to the story - Don't play over your bankroll, because a bad run will hit your bankroll hard. Only play as many tables as you can comfortably play your "A" game.

Things I will change.

1. I am going to play 2/4 NL (I know still over the current bankroll, but will drop down to 1/2 if I fall below $4,000) until I hit $25,000. According to PokerTracker I am cleaning up at 2/4NL. There are always a lot of tables with bad players running.

2. I am not going to play more than 2 tables at a time for the remainder of April.

3. No more $109 rebuys until the end of April unless I have over $500 Pokerstars tourney dollars.

I do not plan on updating my $50k Challenge status again until the end of April. I think this will allow me to "just play poker" and not worry about what stats I am putting up for the week. I am convinced that I will be back on track by the end of April and this horrible run will be out of my mind. I will still post on the blog regularly - just no $50K challenge updates until May 1.

OK - Feel free to rip into me now - just remember I am well aware that I shouldn't have been playing over my bankroll.

cmitch