Since my last (first) blog post I haven’t really done anything spectacular.  After my good week of being up $1300, I lost about $600 the next week.  I was very frustrated with the way my tournaments were going, but I felt that I played pretty well and for the most part there was nothing I could do.  I was fed up with going pretty far in tournaments then just getting unlucky or coolered right before the cash or in the meaningless cash.  So I decided to grind for a while, and started dabbling in some cash games.

My cash game of choice for the past 2 weeks has been .25/.50 PLO.  I should probably be playing at least .5/1, but I felt it necessary to condition myself at a lower level since I don’t handle big swings very well and .5/1 PLO can have some very big swings, especially when multitabling.  I’ve been playing 4 tables at a time, which I think is a good number, and only buying in for $20 at each table.  I’ve found I’m much more comfortable with this than full stacking, since my tournament experience is usually situations with 20-40 big blinds.  This has been very successful and I think I’m up about 7-8 buy ins over a couple thousand hands.  Obviously I’ve been running pretty well, but I think I could beat these games at a high winrate if I played them regularly.  So between the cash games and grinding some sit n goes, I’ve made back probably around $800 since my little downswing.

I thought I’d post a couple hands from the past few weeks that were interesting/painful.

First one is from a PLO tourney on pokerstars that I went pretty deep in.  This has been the way tourneys have been going for me lately; it’s very frustrating to play for several hours and then lose a hand like this and get a very small profit.  I had about 60k chips not long before this and lost a couple standard hands and then this sealed the deal.  Don’t think there is any way I can get away from it with my stack size…

pokerhand

Wp, sir…

pokerhand

This hand summed up my day on this Sunday…

pokerhand

Ok enough bad beats, this hand I thought was really interesting.  Possible areas of debate: my UTG open preflop.  I think it’s pretty standard but possibly too loose, since my hand is pretty disconnected.  Also, the turn, whether to shove or call.  I’ve thought about it a lot and I think I like calling much better.  I’m about 50/50 with the bare nuts, and as it turned out I had 42% against two players since some of my outs were dead. However, I’m never getting him to fold, and shoving just introduces unneeded variance into the hand.  Yes, he will probably fold if I hit the river, but he might call if the backdoor flush hits.  Also, I could possibly bluff aces full if an 8 or 5 came off.  But I would be interested to hear some opinions.

pokerhand

I’ll leave you with a couple hilarious videos I just saw for the first time recently.  Hopefully you haven’t seen them.

Epic.

Congressman’s Son Goes Crazy Playing Poker

GL at the tables,

Evan

Hello to anyone who may be reading this blog. I wanted to start a blog mostly to help EB and Bret gather some momentum for mediocrepokerradio.com. I think the site and the show are great and would love for both to get more recognition in the poker community. If it turns out that anyone is interested in what I have to say, then I will continue writing blogs from time to time to discuss various ups and downs on my poker roller coaster.

First, I guess some background is in order. I am 24, recently graduated from William and Mary with a Master’s in Operations Research. While I was there I made a fair amount of money playing poker, mostly online MTTs. I briefly considered trying to grind it out as an online pro, but ultimately decided for the safer route and got a job in the DC area, while still playing a lot of poker in my free time.

Now my focus in poker is to try to become as good of an all around player as I can, and to move up in stakes slowly but surely. I have always prided myself on being able to pick up new games, and I always enjoy the challenge. I have played tournaments in all games offered by Full Tilt and Pokerstars, most recently picking up Badugi and 2-7 NL Single Draw.

What continues to hold me back in poker, however, is my overall nittiness. Even though my bankroll is such that I can and should be playing bigger, for some reason I am afraid to. I realized that after playing for a couple years fairly seriously, I am still playing at basically the same stakes as I was when I started. This is unacceptable to me, but changing is easier said than done. I recently decided I was going to make a conscious effort to take more “shots” and eliminate the low stakes sngs and such.

I just finished up a good weekend on the tables, making about $1300 in the past week. I also took a “shot” at the $129 FTOPS event today, and cashed. However, it ended in one of the most devastating hands of my poker career to date, when I got in a 40 bb stack preflop with aces against queens only to lose the 190k pot and bust. While the tourney didn’t end up as I would have liked, I am very pleased with the way I played, and look forward to playing more larger NL tourneys in the future.

Well that should be enough rambling for a first entry, hopefully someone will read this…

Evan

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