I will save the blow by blow analyses, but feel the need to note that I suffered close to 6 BI in losses as pure coolers to a 45/21 maniac last night. We were 200bb deep, and usually I leave the table at 200bbs, but thought my edge was so thick I should stick around. Only down 3 BI on the night (tho my HEM says 4, it is only because I stacked the donk so quickly at the beginning of my second session that he was gone and the table closed before I even remembered to click the import HH button). I have been playing 31/25 so far this month, the majority of that upward pull coming from my last two days playing with opponents who were either weak/tight or maniacal. I am very impressed with myself at this moment, so I really need to be careful and get in some serious study and not get carried away with how awesome I think I am. I will post the bulk of my hand analyses in the days to come, but I wanted to post this one that I played last week and I discussed with Probability and Beans because it is giving me a lot to think about.


NL Holdem $0.50(BB) Replayer
SB ($68.95)
BB ($50)
UTG ($64.95)
UTG+1 ($67.50)
CO ($106)
Hero ($52.70)

Dealt to Hero 5 6

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $1.75, SB raises to $6, fold, Hero calls $4.25

When showing this hand to Probability, this is as far as I got. He said this is a fold every time. Beans brought up the point of reverse implied odds (if we were deep) and it was interesting to hear them discuss it. Basically the question is would you rather call with something like a suited connector (say 78s) and get yourself into a best case scenario of flopping a huge draw and getting it in on the flop (where you are basically flipping) against most people's 3bet ranges, or would you rather call with K9s? Everyone says K9s is easily dominated, but how often is the situation going to arise where you call with a K, your opponent bets with a K and a K hits the flop? As often as flopping a set? And how often will you flop a combo draw of some sort, or 2pair? Position and your hand reading abilities are a huge factor, obv, and adapting to your opponents' play. But what is better? I dunno really, but I think I need to come up with an answer. The results for this hand support the traditional arguments for SCs, but there are a couple of things to note. 1) I had just played a bvb hand with villain, or should I say MISplayed a bvb hand with villain where I showed a lot of aggression and took a weird line and got owned for around 30bbs in a really spewy way. 2) I had a fairly aggro image at the table. 3) Villain had been 3betting my BTN and CO opens fairly regularly, and I was considering leaving the table. I think if I didn't have an aggro image and had horribly misplayed a hand previously, I don't get the call on the river from the hand he had.

FLOP ($12.50) 6 5 6

SB bets $6, Hero calls $6

TURN ($24.50) 6 5 6 8

SB checks, Hero bets $10, SB calls $10

RIVER ($44.50) 6 5 6 8 3

SB checks, Hero bets $30.70 (AI), SB calls $30.70

Hero shows 5 6
(Pre 43%, Flop 99.4%, Turn 100.0%)

SB shows Q A
(Pre 57%, Flop 0.6%, Turn 0.0%)

Hero wins $102

Voila. I still think this is a fold most of the time, but I am struggling to put together a 3bet defense strategy for 100, 150, and 200bb stacks. It is an area that I think if I put together a strategy I will just be less anxious playing once I move up (where 3betting is a lot more common).

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

I am now playing 3 tables quite comfortably. I have noticed a few trends, though. I tend to drop a BI right away after I start playing, then grind it back up and start pwning fools once my reads are established. I think I either need to tighten up when I first sit down until I have some decent reads or pay more attention earlier on and consciously try and provoke people to see how they react to my aggression. Right now I am not doing either. BR is at 2k, booyah! I should make enough in rakeback and bonuses to make the wife happy at the end of the month at the rate I am going.

I had a session with Probability two days ago and his friend, Pat (Beans on this site), also a poker player, was in town visiting him. Matt correctly pointed out that me being with the two of them made that the most poker players I have ever been around to date. I thought that was funny. It was hard to play with two people watching and I questioned myself a lot and didn't have any fluidity. Beans is super nice and I am happy he spent some time with me as a different perspective adds a lot to the discussion Matt and I have. We went over some hands that I was less than proud of, but I learned a lot and will post some specific hands with our analyses in a few days (cuz the weekends are my days to grind). I know I have made those promises before.

I also watched The_End's 100nl video, and I will most likely watch all of his videos in a row. I really like how he breaks everything down and it is clear to me that I need to strive to go in that direction and just buckle down and do the homework to get to that level of thinking.

I am hoping that my moniker as "ten dollar baller" is soon removed from all my postings. I will leave it to the powers that be to choose something else....

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

Just wanted to post some results I have had as of late. First, here is how I have been doing since playing without my Heads Up Display. I think this has been a really valuable experience and has made me a much better poker player in general. I think I will play on the weekends with just basic VPIP and PFR stats and play 3 or 4 tables at a time. During the middle of the week, though, I think I will continue to play without a HUD and devote a lot more time to studying and improving my game. Here is the HUDless graph:



The other graph I wanted to post is since I really started to change how I thought about my work habits and attitude. I took a realistic look at the difference between my expectations of results at the tables and my actual results and tried to see how my attitude and work habits were affecting my play. (I think this was one of my first blogs that I ever posted on Leggo.) The catalyst was when, to my surprise, I was sat down by management at my restaurant job and told that I had been getting a lot of complaints from co-workers. It was a real wake-up call, and I realized how my attitude at work towards my co-workers had slid in the wrong direction (due to a variety of reasons that I won't go into now). I looked at that and wondered how it was reflected in my poker performance (I had been breaking even) and realized I had been making the same mistakes at poker that I had made at work. Since that revelation, here are my results:



I keep looking at these two graphs in my HEM, and now I think I am finally ready to put them to rest. I really feel like I have turned a corner in my play and plan on staying humble and continuing to work hard. I just hashed out my weekly schedule with my wife, and I will be putting in 28 hours per week of studying and playing. I am currently at 50nl and just started relying on poker as a monthly source of income in addition to my primary job as a bartender. I think 100nl is entirely attainable by the end of the year, but I really hate to create expectations like that for myself. I just tilt when things don't go as planned. Here is to a great November. I plan on 30 consecutive days of yoga and meditation along with 4 days a week of some sort of aerobic exercise. When I am doing those things, I play my best and learn the most.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

I am underwhelmed. Twice I correctly broke down my opponents' actions and came to the conclusion that I was behind, but called anyway because I also thought that they took the same actions with an inferior hand or a bluff. It really just comes down to not being able to fold and spewing, which I didn't have so much of a problem with last week. I am also besieged with thoughts of how much I am up or down in the session, lol.

I am taking a break and then will get back in there. This is the second month where I started off strong with exercise and meditation and then sputtered to a halt half way through. November will have to be better since I play so much better when exercising, etc. Now that I am semi-pro and depending on poker for $$$, I really have no choice.

Here is one exceptional hand:

Grabbed by Holdem Manager
NL Holdem $0.50(BB) Replayer
SB ($36.80)
BB ($50.75)
UTG ($20.25)
Hero ($68.30)
BTN ($51.25)

Dealt to Hero 9 T

UTG calls $0.50, Hero raises to $2.50, fold, fold, fold, UTG calls $2

FLOP ($5.75) 6 7 8

UTG bets $5.75, Hero calls $5.75

TURN ($17.25) 6 7 8 9

UTG bets $12 (AI), Hero calls $12

RIVER ($41.25) 6 7 8 9 K

Hero shows 9 T
(Pre 70%, Flop 100.0%, Turn 100.0%)

UTG shows 9 7
(Pre 30%, Flop 0.0%, Turn 0.0%)

Hero wins $39.20

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

It is official. I gave notice to my 2nd job yesterday. I might have to work one more shift on the first Friday in November, but I am now officially financially dependent on poker. It is a really small dependence (if I make $75 per week at 50nl, that is all I really need to clear what I made the one lunch shift I had per week) but it does represent a big step for me. So far, I think I can come close to what I "need" to make in rakeback and bonuses alone. Woot woot!

I have to really say thank you to everyone who has helped me get to this point. Probability, obv, and Vitas and Lingdog, too. Also, I am deeply grateful for all of the honest critique that goes on in the micros section of the forums. I will thank my wife, too, for her continued support and trust even though she doesn't read this blog.

I would like to post some graphs of my results since going without a HUD and since I turned things around with my work ethic and outlook after my manager at my primary job sat me down and told me I was being an asshole to my coworkers (okay, not that bad, but it was fairly serious), but I am having problems with the site right now and I will post that update later tonight.

I have managed to fend off winner's tilt so far after running fairly well. Here is to that continuing.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

French Press Coffee is easily the best in my opinion. Lattes are too weak for me, and the milk gets in the way of the flavor. Espresso is great for robust flavor, but you really can't sit and sip it because it goes bitter after a couple of minutes. The Starbucks "Via" was alright, and I would do that over a lot of other coffee options, but the French Press is the king of coffee brewing technique. I have been drinking it over the past few days. As it is brewing, I put some sugar, a drip or two of vanilla extract, and some whipping cream in the bottom of my cup. I whip the cream right in the coffee mug with my hand held mixer. After four minutes of brewing, I pour the hot coffee into the cup and it is soooooooo goood. All the same, I think I will just remain off of coffee. It burns my stomach and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I start to eat a lot of pastries and cookies and shit that I haven't been eating much of in the last few months. It also makes me more erratic than focused, so I will have to say good bye to coffee for now. Once in a while, maybe, when I am out for a nice meal. But I just don't think I can handle it on a regular basis, which is why I quit in the first place.

Poker wise, things are going fairly well. I think I am opening up my range too much against the donks, and, even worse, I am assuming that everyone else is too so that they can be in a heads up pot with a really spewy player. I toned that down today, and owned some souls, but I am break even after just after four hours of playing mostly two tables today.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

Since going on a nice little heater, I am proud to say that I have so far kept my habitual winner's tilt in check. My heater is a combo of running hot with cards and running hot with a huge donk sitting on my right on Sunday. I was playing today and found him, managed to get on a table with him (the waitlist quickly filled behind me), and stacked him when I picked up JJ. Eventually he ended up in a HU grudge match with another player from Sunday's session who must have been hounding him. It took some doing for me to find the donk and get him on a table as he was changing tables fairly rapidly. I started to think that this kind of bum hunting at 50nl is not useful to improving my game, which I am trying to do, and chasing a big donk around is distracting. I think in the long run improving my play will pay off the most, and so I won't spend a lot of time looking for big fish until I am at 100nl and 200nl and the money becomes more important to me. Right now, I think I can win at 50nl for a decent rate, and I want to earn my way into the higher stakes with my play and not my table selecting abilities (which will sharpen a lot quicker and more easily than my NLHE game...).

Also I made a modest withdrawal for the week, and if I can keep that up for the next 3 weeks, I think I should be able to convince my wife I can quit my piddly 2nd job.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

I ran super white hot two days ago playing 25nl and then some 50nl with Probability sweating me. I cleared $425 when the day was through in maybe 1k hands. Before that I was pretty tentatively rolled for 50nl, but now I feel much better about my BR. I am at just over 27 BI for 50nl. The reason I decided to move up sooner than later is because my wife won't let me quit my 2nd job until I actually bring home some money from poker. This actually makes a lot of sense, and I cannot fault her for being skeptical as I have been playing for two years now without ever withdrawing. It hasn't come easily to me by any means, but I think I only very recently discovered what it takes to really work hard and improve my game.

Speaking of which, since going on this winning streak, I haven't posted very much or watched too many videos and am gearing up to lose a lot of money (that is what has happened before) so I will spend most of my poker time the next two days studying and just playing a little bit.

I had my first caffeinated coffee yesterday, a vanilla Latte from Peet's. It was kind of meh, and I had some seriously bad breath again. Matt gave me a "Via" from Starbuck's, which is their brand of instant coffee. Actually, it is more correct to call it turkish coffee since it just very finely ground coffee and not the freeze dried stuff a la Folger's Crystals. The Via stuff is better than the vanilla Latte yesterday, but I won't really know if I want to continue with coffee until I make myself a french press pot at home on Tuesday.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ

This has been brewing for quite some time. The triggering moment was when I saw Jack in the Box advertising a "big" cheeseburger for $1. It sounds like a great deal, but if you really think about the situation in the US that enables a company to offer a cheeseburger to the general public for only one dollar, then you realize how backwards things are when it comes to our food policies. Let's assume that the margin of profit on fast food is 67cents on the dollar. That is probably very conservative, it is probably much more. (I know that they make a lot more profits on softdrinks and that is counter balanced by less profitable menu items, but just the point that they can make money on a $1 burger gets my point across, I think.) Think of all the disparate elements of a cheeseburger that have to come together, at a 33 cent cost. The meat is probably the most expensive, but let's not forget the bun, cheese, and condiments. Do you know what kind of scale this has to be carried out on to roll something out like this across the nation? Let's start with beef. How can you profitably raise cattle for hamburger and make a profit yourself when the retailer is paying less than 33cents per hamburger? First we need to have mass amounts of cattle, and we need to raise them and feed them in the cheapest manner possible. Cheap feed, and less square footage per cow. Probably as many square feet per cow as a cow takes up in fact. And we can use some of the offal after the slaughter to feed back to the cows. A factory of cows, penned in next to each other is best. Don't even bother to clean up after them, in fact, let them stand knee deep in their own waste, and let's just use oceans of antibotics and growth hormones, because that is definitely cheaper. They don't have to be happy right? And they just have to be healthy enough not to die on us before they reach a certain weight. And when we do do them in, we will do that like a factory, too. Let's hire the cheapest possible labor force, immigrants (don't check papers because they work for less that way), and subject them to inhumane, violent, body breaking conditions too (just like the cows). Since they don't stand up for their rights, we don't have to really give them out. The waste from these factories is probably more than a small town of humans. Thank god our waste disposal isn't regulated like a town or even a regular factory that deals in chemicals or steel or some other product. We will just dump it into the river out back. And if we call ourselves a "farm" then we are eligible for government funding, too. Sweet. Then we will ship all of this product across the U.S. and even the world, because that is cheap again. For a while gas was very expensive and it really cut into our profits, but just as people were changing their eating and driving habits, gas took a big dip in price (funny that...) and we are good again. (If we deal in chickens, we can go back to raising them in the U.S., killing them, and shipping them to China where they are processed and shipped back in pieces. It is that cheap.) Maybe we don't make a lot of money per pound of beef, but we deal in volume, and that keeps the price of our products low and so smaller companies just can't compete.

Imagine that mentality going into each and every part of a cheeseburger. And imagine how the U.S. subsidizes almost every step of the process. How? By farming subsidies going to these huge agricultural companies that farm millions of acres of corn and wheat. It is cheaper to buy corn than to grow it, and all that excess goes toward mass production of a variety of products. High fructose corn syrup finds it's way into everything, and we are making our diets less and less varied. Soda is so cheap, it is incredible. When the cheapest foods are full of crap, then that is what the lower class eats, and they reap all of the health problems, too. Diabetes, obesity, and malnutrition--sometimes all at once! Where will it end? Why is a pound of eggplant more expensive than a hamburger. And who knows what to do with eggplant anyway? Why cook when you can eat out at Applebees for roughly the same amount of money and supporting the same backwards system. What does that $1 hamburger really cost us as Americans? It costs $60,000 per year to treat someone with Diabetes, which is widely preventable (but not cureable) and our kids still have soda vending machines in the halls of their schools and tater tots in the cafeteria. You can't use food stamps at farmers markets. Agricultural subsidies are generally for mass production type farms, and not smaller, greener, farms that sell their products locally.

There is more, so much more to it as well. I am only really touching on some of the broader points. Maybe once preexisting conditions and the like are wiped off of the face of the health care industry, and these companies crunch some numbers, then they will realize how much profit they will make by preventing these types of diseases in Americans that they have to cover by law, and maybe they will throw their political and financial weight behind correcting the way Americans eat.

I do my best as a parent to introduce my kids to a wide variety of foods. They are five and two years old. They eat broccoli and edamame and lentils and asparagus. We can't stop them from picking and eating the tomatoes we grow in our back yard every summer. We raised chickens and ate fresh eggs several times per week. Once we are in a house we own, we plan on having an extensive garden and making the kids part of it. We go to farmers markets and try to buy organic. We want them to know where food comes from and how it grows. One of my proudest moments was when my daughter, overhearing a conversation two other adults were having, asked my wife what "McDonald's" was.

You can get more info on what I have mentioned above readily. A couple of books I read are "Fast Food Nation," and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." I would like to read "In Defense of Food," by Michael Pollan and "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," by Novella Carpenter. The second interests me a lot because it is supposed to be a very funny, intelligent book, and it takes place in Oakland where I lived until 3 months ago.

That's all for now. I have to get back to the tables.

I didn't quite play as well as last time. I was a little tired and should have ended my session a wee bit earlier as well. Anyway, lots of note taking and adjusting to people's games.

I vowed not to drink coffee until I reached 50nl, and it looks like I will make that by month's end. Yesterday I couldn't resist having a decaf latte at my office (the coffee shop where I go to work on poker). I thought it would prep me, somehow, for the real thing. This is, admittedly, a fairly weak justification for breaking a rule that I have been very strict and adamant about. Anyway, I drank the latte. It tasted good, but you know what, after four months of no coffee at all, I didn't really like the taste it left in my mouth. I had some serious halitosis that came from deep down. I could feel the coffee oils in my stomach and esophagus, and it was like this slow, smoking fire was burning and just leaving me feeling out of sorts in general. I always viewed decaf coffee as useless since caffeine and what it did for you was the one redeeming thing about coffee in my view. For a long time, I didn't even waste my money on lattes or cappuccinos. It was an extra $3 for milk, essentially, and why would you pay that much money for a cup of milk when you could get a whole gallon for nearly the same price? I would just hit the double espresso shots pretty hard during the week and get the energy I needed. And I needed it to get through night shifts and sleepless nights and chasing small children around during the day. Now that I am doing alright without caffeine, and the results of drinking decaf were less than wonderful, perhaps I can just go off coffee for good. I will brew myself a cup on November 1st and we will see.

Play well. Do good work. Keep in touch.

PFJ