Hey everyone, it’s been a few weeks since posting here mostly because I’m in night shift mode waking at 2am and starting to play poker. Then when I finish my session I just want to go back to sleep instead of blog any thoughtful and deep ramblings. Yesterday I felt like I had rediscovered how to play poker for the first time in a long time. I have been making a few deep runs and busting out with two tables to go. I’m ecstatic with the results, as much as is possible, mainly because I have finally found some inspiration.

I have always trended towards nittiness and despite the fact that people always say you can’t fold into first place. I have folded into many final tables and first places. The reality is that I probably could have made many more first places and 15th places rather than lots of 7th and 8th places by being a little more aggressive.

Yesterday I busted out of the Big $100K in 20th place roughly. I ended up raising Ah6h UTG+1 seven handed with 25BB, flatted by Hijack. Flop Kh5hKs, I raise, he min raising leaving himself fold equity and I ship to get called by KJo. I don’t mind how I play this hand. I had a little history with this opponent where he reraised my UTG raise on the button and folded to a 4bet the round before. It is a bit of weird spot because he is really only ever going to have air or a King here. He would flat anything else for value and I felt he would probably flat alot of Kings as well. Anyway I still had 25% equity. The bottom line is that I played aggressive and wasn’t afraid to get the money in. I also won every allin. Granted that most of the time I had the opponent crushed, but I also won 1 or 2 actually flips. Then when I had a monster stack I was just aggressive enough to steal the blinds without appears to run over the table.

It felt good. I also played well in the Big $55 but busted out just in the money after flatted a steal attempt in the BB with Qd7d. Check raises the flop J84, and shoving the turn Q only to find KQ floating the flop. This left me crippled then ran my stack up to find TT < KK.

I also crushed the $11 + R for 15th playing a very similar style. I managed to get down to 1BB with about 100 to go, doubled up twice, then went on a run to get up to 150K and 40BB. The problem is that on these tables I nitted up with 2 tables to go. Everyone was quite deep but it was a weird dynamic where I had 25BB and relatively card dead. I had 3 tight players around me and 3 loose players opening every hand before me. I never had a hand worth opening when it actually go to me and I never had a hand worth reshoving once it was opened. It was hard to play. In the end I just blinded down to like 5BB and lost a flip. In retrospect I feel this was wrong. I didn’t have any opportunities but you can’t expect pairs to just fall out of the sky when you need them. I should have reshoved light a few times and at least kept my stack at a reasonable level even if it meant flipping for 10-15BB with 30% equity.Then if I get a double up, I have 20-30BB and I will still get any big hands that were coming anyway.

The other things is that I’ve started paying alot more attention to the game buyins. In the smaller buyins $11 and so, I will not bluff without solid reads because people happily stack off with AK AQ 88 for 50 75 100BB and when the fields are several thousand deep. It becomes hard to play QQ, JJ when people are so liberally calling off looking to flip. In the larger buyin tournaments, I have fold equity. I can reshove a 15 or 20 BB stac, when I’ve been playing tight and people can actually read that and fold TT AQ. Previously I would just play one style across all tables but now it feels like I can adjust a little better to buyin levels.

Anyway, all in all, life feels good. I plan to put in a bigger Saturday and Sunday session if I can and hopefully get some run good.

In the meantime I have been designing more niche websites to keep myself occupied. My last creation yesterday is Drunken Fails, basically a photoblog of people when drunk much like After 12 on the Failblog network. I punched out the site whilst playing poker in about 8 hours. I’m quite happy with it but we shall see what happens next. It is more of an experiment to see what sort of traffic I can generate and how much maintenance it needs etc etc. Ciao everyone.

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