I’ve always wanted to incorporate video blogging into MPR but frankly it’s been a daunting task trying to figure out how to actually go about recording it correctly, saving it and knowing where the hell to find it and finally having something to say.  Hopefully you dig this as I talk about what we’re trying to do lately with MPR, our interview with November 9er Jeff Schulman and an update on my mediocre poker progress.  Feel free to comment.  No bean bag in this video although I do have the chair reclined.  One day I’ll actually sit up properly when the camera is rolling.

EDIT: This took forever to do. After spending all day converting shit I hate this clip, but I had to post it after the work.

View on Vimeo.

What’s the point…Same shit different day.  Today it was KK > AA and top set < bottom set when bottom set rivers quads.  Fuck it.

My alma mater lost to Middle Tennessee State for the 2nd year in a row. My Redskins squeaked over one of the worst teams in the NFL. And to top it off I couldn’t win a session this weekend despite playing tighter than a virgin on her wedding night.

In the last 3 days I enjoyed these standard beats. I flopped a set of queens and get it all in and guy hits his 2 outer on the turn. Some donk playing 54% of his hands in full ring has aces when I take a stand with QQ. I flop a set of 2’s and other guy flops set of 10’s. Another ass playing 56% of his hands calls my AK shove pre for 100 BBs with KQoff.  Of course he flops KQQ. In a multiway pot I raise AA from the BB 22x and get 4 callers of course. Some donk flops two pair with 54. I raise KK under the gun and the small blind calls with 35 hearts and flops 353.

These are standard coolers/bad beats. They happen to everybody all the time. But I don’t know if I’ve ever taken so many in such a short period of time. Being down 9 buyins in 3 days isn’t catastrophic but when you play as carefully and deliberately as I do it’s really hard to swallow. Fuck.

So for the last month or so we’ve been working out details on a project with two of the greatest online players in history who happen to be even better people.   Hac and Z Dang (aka Trex313 and Urindanger) agreed to let Bret and I and our crew head over to their house to meet the family, get a tour of their home and see what it’s like playing in the biggest cash games on the internet.

We’ve got a lot of footage that needs to be meticulously gone over and edited before we release anything.  But to whet your appetite we wanted to give you a taste of what we’ve shot.

This is our first attempt at bringing content like this to mediocrepokerradio.com.  Let us know if you like the idea, tell your friends about it and hopefully this will be the first of many more inside looks into the amazing world of high stakes online poker.

We hope this type of content is something you enjoy.

Peace,

EB and Bret

PS. Thanks to Mike Watkins and Lil Bit Money Films for your tireless efforts and Matt Myers for not dropping the boom mic.

Looks better in FULL SCREEN mode

Uhhh…I’m not sure what’s going on. But for some reason I’m winning at a sick rate for me. I know it’s statistically meaningless. Two thousand hands is nothing. But after playing over a million hands online I’ve never run 15 ptbb/100 over 2k hands. I just never have. I guess I’m running like God. Who knows. But this heads up thing is feeling pretty good right now. All because that donk Ansky basically called me a pussy for playing full ring.

Well at least until I start running normal (which means running like absolute shit and everything hits for my opponents every single time) again I think I’ll keep doing this HU thing. Not sure what to do when things actually go well. I guess I’ll quit today? I don’t know. Shit. I’m usually playing catch up all day and hoping to finish up. I have no idea what to do. I guess I’ll go talk to my wife. Ha!

So tonight we air our interview with Dani Stern aka “ansky”. Dani is one of the stars of G4’s “2 Months 2 Million” and one of the top online players in the world. You’ll hear during the interview all about the new show, his final table run in the $40K WSOP event this year and we pick his brain with some strategy questions.

Of course I have to make the interview about me at some point because let’s be honest the whole reason Bret and I do this show is to become better players. Toward the end of the interview I start asking Dani how a mediocre player can improve, I beg him to tell me that a TAG approach can still be profitable etc. But near the end of the conversation he realizes that I play full ring and he really drives home the point that heads up is the game to play at this point.

Of course I immediately object and give my pussy response of not liking the variance and not feeling comfortable in so many awkward positions. He flat out said something to the effect of “sack up” and play the game stupid. He made me realize that it’s so much easier to beat one player than it is to beat say 8 at a time when playing full ring. He also pointed out the obvious that if you are HU against a weaker player you don’t have to worry about a bunch of other donks in the hand mucking everything up and stumbling into a hand etc.

It started to make a lot of sense to me. It’s not like I’m newbie either. I’ve easily played over a million hands online. So I decided to say fuck it. I’m going to focus on Heads Up play exclusively right now. I’ll abandon my crutch of grinding away a billion tables making guaranteed money with rakeback etc and instead focus on using my experience of seeing so many hands and take guys on heads up…mano y mano.

I’m sure it will be painful but I do think it has the potential to be much more profitable. So yesterday I played almost 1000 hands HU. I probably ran good because I won 60% of my sessions but I still made some pretty big mistakes like 4 or 5 bet shoving AQoff against an unknown player to me. (Of course he had AK). Still I simply tried to focus on just a few things.

My biggest focus starting out is to pound from the button and to play very tight out of position. That seems to be common sense I know, but I want to make sure I’m not calling a bunch of raises out of position just to see flops. My goal is to play very sound fundamental HU poker and just take advantage of the lesser experienced players playing the lowest limits.

So go ahead and flame away and see if any glaring leaks are apparent from these limited stats. I’m guessing my 3bet % is too low but frankly I made a conscious decision to play very small pots out of position. Maybe as I get more comfortable I’ll be able to beef that number up a little.

This made seriously LOL. That’s your boy in the background last night during the WSOP broadcast of the Ante Up for Africa event. Look how serious I am trying to figure out what Sarah is up against.

Ok….so i got jealous of Bret’s big $800 pot he posted. So I looked up 2 cool hands for me….that unfortunately were much smaller. But then again I’m not a baller like BretO42.

(Hint: video looks better when you hit HQ and make it full screen)

The hands were a little strange.  The first hand I check raise the flop get and get called with an over and a backdoor flush draw/straight draw I guess.  I figure I’m dead as usual.  Check-check the turn and then guy tried and almost blew me off the hand.  I was proud of my call, although frankly his bet made no sense so it was probably easy for many of you.  The second hand was extremely lucky for me.  I cbet the flop with 2 overs and if he raises me I’m done with the hand.  I hit my ace on the turn, check and he bets big and I decide to go with the hand.  I must say I was shocked that he only had 66.   As usual I called the river figuring I was beat.

If this works and people dig this format, I may load up so more hands. Most hands are pretty standard for me anyway. Generally I play a monster and never get action and when I do get action I’m crushed but too stupid to lay it down. Sound familiar?

After the worst 6 weeks of poker that I can remember I decided to drop down 2 levels and start from the ground up.  It’s pretty boring playing NL25 so to keep things somewhat interesting I’m still playing 9 to 12 tables at a time.  I simply cannot play 2 to 4 tables of full ring.  To be honest many people in poker right now think the way to go is to drop down a level or two and mass multitable.  Taylor Caby for one is someone that advocates this for some people.

With my confidence so low I need to just play ABC poker right now.  I’m not stealing like crazy or going crazy with 3 and 4 bets.  Good solid poker is my goal right now and as things start going better I’ll slowly incorporate some more advanced play.  But for now I’m keeping it simple.

So far the results have been encouraging.  Nothing to get too excited about but I need to just book a winning month again and go from there.  Since moving down here are my stats.

I’ll try and find some interesting hands to post this week also.  Thanks for reading and all of the suggestions.  Peace, EB