Only a few more weeks before I head off to Vegas for the WSOP! I'm really excited about it... and nervous. Next weekend, my wife is flying out to do the women's event. I get to stay home from work and take care of the baby, so that should be fun. Man, he's getting huge . He's 6 months old, but we've had to put him in 2 year old sized clothes. My wife made some awesome baby clothes (black, pirate skulls, etc), but he only got to wear them for a couple of weeks. I hope she does well. Sh...

Huh. My referrer logs show that a couple people hit my previous post by searching for heads-up starting hand requirements. That's probably not the best way to think about heads up play. Pretty much any two cards are "playable" in heads up no-limit hold'em. A majority of the time no one will hit the board, so competing for pots becomes a game of chicken. On the flip side, when you do hit the board it's sometimes better to be holding weak cards. When weak cards hit, the board tends to look p...

Heads up, no-limit hold'em tournaments are just two people, playing head to head, until one player has all of the chips. I usually get into a session on my lunch hour and they can last anywhere from one to thirty minutes (depending on my opponent's skill). They're a lot of fun and easily my biggest money maker per hour. But it takes a lot of concentration to pull off, since you're playing every hand. Against weaker opponents, I've found a pretty nice standard strategy that works out well...

It's been a long time since I've blogged. I'm still playing poker here & there, but I've been having a hard time coming up with something to write about. Heh, I think the more hands you play, the less important any individual hand starts to seem. I have a hard time getting too excited about any individual hands or sessions. I'm still stuck at some pretty low stakes. I count my online bankroll separate from my cash bankroll now, and I don't have all that much online at the moment. So I've j...

I read this story by Doyle Brunson, where he was talking about a guy he was playing with who started raising nearly every hand. By the time the rest of the players adjusted to him, he tightened back up and got his good hands paid off. Once they adjusted to how tight he was playing, he loosened up again and started bluffing down big pots. It made it very difficult for the sharks at the table. Afterwards, the player apologized to Doyle about how bad he was playing. Apparently, he had gotten int...

As I said in my last post, my new favorite game is HORSE. It's a mixed game, so switches between a different form of poker every ten hands. I'm earning over 5/BB hour (that's five big bets an hour) pretty consistently. I'm sure a lot of that is due to getting lucky; I haven't had a losing session all month. But most of it is surely from the extremely poor play of the competition. I'm currently hanging out at FullTilt, on the $1/$2 tables, and it really is a gold mine if you've got a good gras...

It's been a long time since I posted, sorry for the break. With the new baby, I haven't had time for pretty much anything that doesn't involve milk or poop. I did get to play some poker here & there and learned a couple of valuable lessons the hard way. 1. I can't play poker when my baby cries. Seriously, it puts me on insta-tilt. I could probably ignore any other baby, but when it's my baby, it puts me into fight or flight mode. Which usually translates into fight mode, which means p...

I've seen some pretty hefty swings in the last few weeks (by my standards, at least). But I suppose that's to be expected, now that I'm playing no-limit almost exclusively. I had worked my $650 at Ultimate Bet up to over $1k, making about $100 a day for a few days a week. Then I lost nearly all that profit in less than 15 minutes! I had the second best set twice in a row... for example, the flop came K3J. I had 33, but my opponent had KK and stacked me when all the money went in. The very ...

Work hooked me up with a new cell phone. It's pretty swanky, it's the Treo 650. Huge beautiful screen, nice keyboard, camera, email, web browser, etc. I've been using it as a kind of portable computer. When looking for some poker software to put on there, I found out that Ultimate Bet has a version of their software that let's you play online, from your phone, for real money! Bonus Whores showed that UB had a 100% deposit bonus, up to $650, so I transfered some cash from Full Contact int...

Thanks for the concern, but I'm not dead yet. Just lazy about updating the blog. I haven't really had much to write about, but, as was pointed out, that has never stopped me before I've pretty much just settled into a routine of doing $50 SnG's most nights. I've been winning enough to show a profit there, but not really getting any big scores. And because of the new human expanding my wife's belly, I haven't had a chance to make it out to San Pablo much. I was able to go a couple of week...

So I've pretty much settled into a daily routine. I play the $50 buy-in no limit game on Party Poker and earn between $25 & $50. Then I play the $22 tournament and lose it. I keep getting close, but it's so freakin' hard. Even if I manage to only get all-in when I have an 80% advantage, I'm still going to go out once every five times. I've been getting better at taking some early chances to grow a big stack, though. But the pattern usually is that I'll be the table chip leader, someone with a...

Well, the buzz from my WSOP adventures is starting to wear off. Work can do that. I played some cash games for the rest of my stay, winning a decent amount in each game. Man, Vegas is great for low-stakes poker. Sooo many tourists sitting down to try the game out. My wife got pretty sick for the last half of the week, so we didn't do much besides hang out in the time share. She had to be hospitalized the day before we left, and then again when we got here. But she's all better now and the ...

Wow, what a roller coaster yesterday. The WSOP was pretty amazing, the Rio was packed with people. Pros were everywhere, I saw a different big name every few feet. Chris Moneymaker was outside having a smoke, Freddy Deeb was standing around with some friends, Amir Vahedi was sitting on the floor smoking a cigar, Phil Gordon was standing for pictures, etc. I was loving it. Dutch was with me, getting me psyched and prepped. I also ran into Tim from San Pablo, who's at the event for Card Play...

Well, not really. I've been doing pretty well the last few weeks, so I've pretty much got the buy-in covered with just cash on hand. I'm doing event #2, the first $1,500 no-limit hold'em tournament. There are a few of us from San Pablo doing events, Dutch & Chris are doing event #4 (limit hold'em) and JD is doing event #6 (no-limit hold'em). Tim, another guy I play with, will be covering the event for a publication Card Player magazine is doing. Hopefully, he'll get to play in one of the pres...

It's been a good week so far, these SNG's have been treating me pretty well. I haven't really had enough time to play $3/$6 lately, so I've just been playing a single $50 SNG before bed. It's about the same risk/reward ratio that I'm used to. I either lose $54, or I win $196, $96, or $46 depending on if I get 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. I've gotten 2nd place two nights in a row, then got 1st last night. Nearly $400 for the week feels pretty good. The $50 SNG's are a bit different than the $20 SNG's ...