Quick update

A little behind my hands goal already, but I just finished up a short little session where I ran really, really good. Coolered some people, sucked out a few times, always seemed to have the best hand. Ended up finishing +$554 in 500 hands putting me at slightly under $800 for the month in 1229 hands. Not bad.

Tomorrow is hopefully more of the same. Goodnight!

First session

Not a bad start to the month, especially since I made a few mistakes in bigger pots that could have been avoided. I was 5-6 tabling for some of this but quickly went back to 4-tabling after I realized that I was having some trouble following the action on some of my tables. Too often I'd be in a hand and have no idea how I got there, so I'm going to stick to 4 tabling.

Here are some of the more interesting hands from the session:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603421

This hand was pretty cool. The limper in this hand is a pretty big donk that hates to fold to c-bets. The flop and turn are pure value, and I priced the turn to where he's going to peel with a lot of different hands, especially something like an open ender or overs + gutter. On the river my intention is to check call almost any river, and the offsuit 4 is ideal. There's certainly the possibility that he has a ten or a jack to call me down twice, but I think he would checks most tens behind, so for the most part I'm only worried about trips. There's just so many more combos of missed straight / flush draws though so I make a quick check call and he flips over Q high.


http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603423

I don't think I had any reads on villain in this hand except that he is a little on the looser side. The 3-bet preflop is sort of standard, although calling is obviously fine. I felt like he'd call with a pretty wide range of hands though so I elected to 3bet. The flop is standard, but the turn brings up an interesting spot. Most of the time this is a pretty trivial check behind, it's not a great card to barrell again despite being an overcard. However I decided to barrell the turn with the intention of shoving the majority of rivers, and that's important to note because the turn bet is awful unless I plan on shoving the river. I'd also prefer to be slightly deeper in this spot, but even though a river shove is for only half pot I think it works enough of the time to show a profit. Fortunately for me the river is perhaps the best card in the deck to continue my bluff, and when I do he thinks for a while and folds.


http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603424

Not incredibly interesting. My preflop open is larger than usual for some reason, probably a misclick. I get 3-bet by a regular that 3-bets more than most, so I call with 67s and flop an awesome pair + flush draw. When he checks he's usually giving up, but he also sometimes has a hand with showdown value that he doesn't want to get raised off like TT or 78, and finally he can also be looking to checkraise draws. Against that range I like betting half pot or so to induce a raise from air as well as all of the draws that I'm ahead of. Obviously having any of his better hands check call (or even check raise) is fine since I'm a favorite against them. He actually ends up check raising and folding to a shove, so it appears that my smallish bet did induce a raise from air like I had hoped.



http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603428

Somewhat standard calldown. Not going to go a ton in-depth on it but the river polarizes his value range, at least that's true against the regs at these stakes. A tougher regular can definitely valuebet a decent ten here, but I'm less worried about that at these stakes. I would have folded to a river bet on a lot of cards, but an overcard makes the call much easier despite improving his range on the river since it narrows his range for valuebetting.


http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603431

His checkraise reeks of being a draw or air, so in this spot I elected to 3-bet really small. My reraise looks really fishy so I'm actually hoping he rebluffs me with some kind of straight draw or a worse flush draw. That might be over this guy's head, but I definitely think he has air a lot so I'm perfectly fine with him folding on the flop.

Here's a couple of the biggest hands I lost, some of which I played badly.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603432

I wanted to fold the river but his line made no sense. How he shows up there with TT is beyond me.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603434

This one is terrible, just me leveling myself against a guy who is playing pretty straightforward.


http://www.pokerhand.org/?5603436

I like my turn call in this hand since I think he bets a lot of floated draws / gutters on the turn. The mistake is calling the river, he just isn't betting there with air much after I check call the turn.

Goals: Easier to set than complete (Introduction)

This unfortunate reality has cost me a sick amount of money since I started playing poker five years ago. This time though, things are going to be different. At least that's what I'm trying to convince myself, and seeing as how it's gotten to the point where my living expenses are growing and I can no longer rely on just grinding enough to get by, it's become time for me to take the game serious. Like, super seriously. It's time to grind.

The plan for this blog is pretty simple - to motivate me. And perhaps to motivate others. Truth be told, I could care less if anybody is reading this. I'm doing this for me, although I certainly welcome readers. The bottom line is this: every month I'm going to set some kind of goal and I'm going to try real hard to reach it. They'll mostly be hand goals, something like 30k hands a month. I could do monetary goals but I'm not particularly a fan of them. In any event I'm going to try and update this thing daily, and if I don't that means I was probably lazy and didn't put in a session. I hate when I do that, so I'll try to limit those occurances.

I already have a slightly late start to August poker wise, so this month I'm shooting for 25k hands. I'm not a grinder at all so that's actually a lot of volume for me. It averages out to about 1k hands per day which should be easily doable 4 - tabling. I've mostly been a 6 tabler during my poker career, but I've been liking the extra clarity I get with just four tables. I'll probably get back to more tables eventually, but for now I'll stick to four. Currently I'm playing $100nl which is a lot smaller than I've played in the past. I'd say the majority of my hands overall have been played at $200nl where I was a decent winner, and a decent portion at $400nl where I was a small winner. That was a while ago though and I feel like I'm a thousand times better now, and from what I've played so far at $100nl on FTP the games seem extremely soft. It's never been difficult to find a couple tables with at least one obvious fish, and I was also pretty surprised at how easy it was to run over the regulars. They just never seem to put up much resistance, and best of all the majority of the looser, more aggressive tags at these stakes play very transparently with most of their range making it easier to barrell them off of hands in various spots as well as make light calldowns or rebluffs, and of course thin value bets.

So the goal for August is 25k hands at $100nl on FTP. Again, I'm not one to set monetary goals as they can set bad habits or get you overly focused on results. I'll be relatively happy with anything over $1k plus rakeback, though. I'll be posting a bunch of hands every day and some poker theory along the way so stay tuned and wish me skill.