tp's table talk

First, the good news. I went to the doctor this afternoon and he confirmed that it’s probably just a bruise on my heel and though it may hurt quite a bit, it will heal on it’s own. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the gel heel cushion he recommended at the pharmacy in my building so I’m going to have to continue to lurch around on the ball of my foot. I’m going to keep icing it regularly and hope that it might be ready to go for my second playoff volleyball game in two weeks. Hopefully my team can manage to pull off the victory tonight.

The bad news is that another of my pool players is injured. We drafted our players on Saturday before the regular season was over because it was the best chance we had to all get together. But while Bondra seems to be ok after taking that elbow from Domi on Saturday night, Kariya went down in his game yesterday and a questionable start in the first rounds. Because we did it early, I should be able to replace the pick, but I’m not sure who else I would choose. I loaded up with some Avalanche players in the west because I figure between all their scorers and questionable keeper, they should have some nice long, high scoring series.

The best news is I found my game again. I hit the NL25 tables at Empire at 5:30 and managed to triple up in about 40 minutes. I was also playing a .5/1 table as well, just to help keep the boredom at bay, but only ended up breaking even there. But, that makes up for most of my loss yesterday. I think I may follow Iggy‘s advice and stay away from the 1/2 tables. I’ll work on my bankroll at multi-table .5/1 and NL25 until I can skip up to 2/4. For whatever reason those 1/2 tables have been cursed and as much as I’d like to see that big red number in the 1/2 row in Poker Tracker turn green, it’s a big hill right now.

Last night we had a company Chili Cookoff event here at the office and I, along with 4 others, contributed my chili for the judgment of my peers. It was pretty informal, so things never came down to a vote, but my chili was the first to be finished off, so I take that as a good sign. Got a lot of compliments as well, which was great. I was a bit concerned because when I first cooked it up Wednesday night, I had salted the beef a little too much when I prepared it, and the chili was tasting too salty. But, a day in the slow cooker at the office and another jalapeno completely removed the salt taste and I ended up with a chili I was very proud of.

As part of the event, I had agreed to run a poker tutorial for anyone who was interested in learning how to play. I only ended up with a few “students” but I had a lot of fun teaching them the basics of Texas Hold’em while the 2003 WSOP played in the background. Of course, since we were just using play money while I was giving lessons, the idea of folding bad hands was hard to impress on people when they could just chase, chase, chase for free. But at least it will give them a base if they ever feel interested in pursuing the game.

In other news, a buddy of mine is coming back from his 4 month trip down under and I’m looking forward to mocking seeing him again.

Also, tonight’s my bi-weekly home PLHE tourney. Looks like we’re going to top last week’s turnout by a few bodies. *knock on wood* Hopefully no one drops out last minute. And hopefully I’ll have a bit better luck at it than I did last time.

I just got back from my California business trip last night. Started off great with a drive up the coast from San Francisco, before we turned back east to Petaluma, where we were staying. The business itself was very successful, though they were long days of meetings. And my boss upgraded our tickets to executive class on the way back, so it was great capper to a great trip. Unfortunately I’m feeling a bit under the weather today, so I’m taking it easy, hoping that it doesn’t develop into another full on cold.

I didn’t end up spending too much time reading about poker, but I’m hoping that taking a week off will give me a fresh perspective on my game nonetheless. Tomorrow is the first PJK (Poker Journal Keepers) tournament organized by Felicia over at Planet Poker and I’m really looking forward to it. Although I am a bit disappointed that more people don’t have their act together, as there are only 7 people registered to play as of right now. So, if you’re a PJK reading this right now, go make sure you have money in your Planet account and that Felicia gets your email address into Planet so that we can see each other across the felt tomorrow night.

Now I just have to go read the 100+ blog posts I’ve missed while I was gone.

After my friend left Saturday I dove into the pools at Party to try my luck at 1/2. Apparently that was a bad idea and over the course of a long night I managed to drop 20BB after being up 10BB early. I found it a real struggle and never really felt comfortable in the games. Was probably a sign I should have called it a night early, but I was determined to play through and put a good amount of time into it.

Sunday I was doing a bit better, but it helped that I was hit by some good cards in an early afternoon session. I left after only a couple dozen hands with 12BB and some errands to do. When I got back home, I quickly dropped back close to even and had trouble putting anything together. I was feeling a bit better about my game however, I just wasn’t getting the cards to work with.

Ended the night at a PL 25$ table. Some truly crazy people there. But my big pot came with pocket aces. It ended up with a 8J423 board with 3 clubs. I was pretty sure he hadn’t hit anything but top pair, but I overbet by calling the pot (which was 12$ at that point) I was surprised (and frightened) when he called, but the pot was pushed to me and I happily made up back up to 12BB on the day. I figured he was just a typical Party fish calling it down, but I checked in Pokertracker later and saw he had pocket kings. Poor guy.

Overall the weekend felt like a real grind and I’m thinking that I probably need to take a bit of a break from poker.

But, the most important news coming out of this weekend is that Felicia has got the weekly PJK tournament set up with Planet Poker. She’s done a great job getting a much better structure than you can usually get at online poker sites, so it’s going to be a lot of fun. She is also promising celebrities, which could be interesting. If you’re a PJK (Poker Journal Keeper), even a unskilled one like I am, I’d highly recommend heading to Felicia‘s site and signing up. These tournaments are going to be a ton of fun and a great learning experience. All for the low, low price of twenty bucks.

Alas, this may be the last entry until the weekend. I’m heading out to California on business tomorrow and won’t be back until late Friday. But I’m hoping to take the forced break from poker to reflect on my game and to re-read some poker books so I’ll come in fresh to the Sunday tournament. Not that I have the slightest chance in hell of bringing home any money, but it would be nice if I could someone swing the final table.

Was feeling a little bit under the weather again, but the tables at True and the last of my bonus deposit were beckoning. Unfortunately, the holes in my game that have been plaguing me all week were still not completely plugged, and a little impatience at the table had me hovering at 10BB down. Since my biggest problem is having the patience to wait for good cards, especially when I have my premium starters cracked, it should hopefully be helped by moving off True to a faster playing site.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the fish weren’t in the waters. And I was even one of them. I get stuck with A6o in MP and decide that I want to see a flop. The board comes J5A(4)(K) and I call bets all the way along with two others in the hand. The better turns A2o, called A3o, and my A6 takes it down. I could not believe that there’d be two other people in the hand with such weak aces – I didn’t even feel that I should really have been there. But I don’t think it was completely a bad play, as I had seen both players call bets – and raises – with only second or third pair, but even with that assessment, I wasn’t getting quite good enough odds on my money (figured it was probably a 3-1 chance my hand was good).

Later on I’ve pulled back to even (and my 10$ bonus is unlocked) so I was just playing out my last orbit before calling it a night. Nothing but the most premium of cards would get me into the game. Of course, I look down and see AA, an old friend who hasn’t come calling in a while. I raise it and we’re down to four people in the hand. Board comes TQK, all hearts. UTG bets out and I’m a bit concerned, but I’ve got the Ah, so there are some outs even if he does have the flush. But really, I just figure him on top pair, maybe two pair, so I raise. Everyone calls and the turn comes Jd. I’ve got the straight now, and UTG just checks so I suspect that my hand is good and I bet. The other two fold and it’s heads up going to the river. A king hits the board and I groan when UTG bets out. I make the crying call and he turns over his KJ for the boat. I was just about to leave a couple dollars up on the night, instead I’m in the hole and it’s getting late.

But I guess the poker gods felt bad about the pummelling they just gave me and they start sending me flops. Two hands after the aces I limp with QJo and drag a small pot when a J hits on the flop and the field folds after the turn. The next hand in the BB blind my QJo turns into two pair. I try to slowplay the big field, but there are no betters, and the turn bet folds most of the field. I pull in another small pot. Then it’s 42o in the small blind, but since the SB is still a full bet, I see the 4J4 on the flop. I again try to slowplay but the field folds to the button’s first bet (which I flat called) and I only get the check-raise on the turn and bet on the river. Still, my -5BB pocket aces just got made up with +10BB in good flops. I play out the next orbit and see the flop only once, where I fold my AQo with a Kxx board.

This put me 6BB to the good for the night. And I’ve unlocked my last 10$ bonus. The last three night’s of play have made up the cost of the WBT II event, plus a little extra for my backroll, so I’m at least satisfied, if not exactly happy. There were some huge fish at True and I really should have taken more money off them. I mostly feel good about my play, but I know my lack of patience was hurting me at times. Hopefully when I move back to Party, or another faster dealing site, that won’t be as much of an issue. Or, you know, maybe I could just learn to be more patient at the table. Nah! Why should I do any of the work?

Tonight is the 5th of my bi-weekly tournaments. We’re getting a few new bodies and we might finally hit 18 players. Hopefully I can continue my trend of money finishes, but maybe this time I could win it. Again, that’s going to require some patience, particularly when we get down to the last few players. I always get frustrated trading blinds back and forth and end up picking a bad moment to make a move.

Well, I think I’m on the mend, though I’m still not feeling anyhere near 100%. Hopefully I’ll remain coherent enough to get through my day at the office and to avoid going out first in tonight’s World Poker Blogger Tournament. Unfortunately I only got about 3 hours of sleep last night, so we’ll see how things go.

I managed to get a little bit of poker in yesterday, but nothing spectacular to report. I pretty much ignored all my weaknesses that I’ve mentioned here and lost a bit of money. I think I might need to take a little bit of a break from poker. Just a few days to recharge my batteries and get over this cold. Then again, maybe I just need to focus a bit more when I’m at the table.

Oh, apparently the Canadian Idol winner Ryan Malcolm is downstairs at BMG right now. And I don’t think I could care any less. Celebrity is a very strange thing.

I found out the price for the table we test drove on Friday. He wants $370 (Canadian, about $275 US) for it. It’s a very good table, but it’s going to take a while for me to make the money back for it with the $2 entry fee at my bi-weekly tournament. I’m leaning towards getting it, as I’m not sure I’d ever get one cheaper, but I’m hesitant about dropping that much money.

I just had the most thoroughly miserable day. Was feeling pretty ill and I managed to drop $20 at a table in Empire over the course of an hour. I guess I should have stuck with the plan and not ventured into a game while doped up on medication. But I was pretty bored just reading in bed all day, even watching Season 1 of Alias stop being interesting. I was playing ok poker, but had a few brutal suckouts that were pretty demoralizing. I really need to start stabilizing my play. Whenever I get down, I start concentrating on making my money back instead of focusing on playing good poker.

Because I was unable to round up a sub for my volleyball game tonight, I ended up playing. I had some experience with the opposing team before, so I was pretty sure they would have defaulted us for not having 6 players, even though we had a good reason. After I was able to shake myself out of a bit of a daze, I played not too badly. In fact, our whole team player pretty well and we won what was our better matches of the seasons. We always seem to play better against better teams. But I got home feeling a bit run down. After a shower though, I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I hopped on Empire.

I decided to hit a 5+1 SNG for a little practice before I surrender my money on Wednesday. I had intended to hit a limit table – how that would be practice for the tournament is an interesting question – but didn’t check and ended up in a pot limit game. I realized it was for the best, as it would be better practice. For the record, fish at a 5+1 table are crazy. Someone went out on the very first hand. And they didn’t even have much of a hand.

I played pretty cautiously, waiting to hit a hand to try to earn some chips. As I determined who was reckless and who was a bit more solid, I started stealing a few pots to keep pace with the blinds. Enough succeeded to keep me slightly ahead of the curve. As we got closer to the bubble, people started to tighten up and I started to take advantage, stealing where I could and putting pressure on the small stacks. Going in to the last three, I had a small chip lead.

The final three did not last very long as my opponents were very happy to call me when I put them all-in. And they called with pretty marginal hands. It was the quickest I’ve ever finished a tournament in the final three. And it was a nice $19 in my account.

Of course, I couldn’t be happy there. I was only a quarter away from breaking even on the day, so I went back to the .5/1 table to try to squeeze out a small win. Of course, my 97 in the big blind turns in two pair on the J97 flop, but the AT stays in to hit his runner runner broadway straight. So, instead being down for a quarter, I’m facing down for $5. I guess I’ll need to concentrate on playing good poker.

I just had the most thoroughly miserable day. Was feeling pretty ill and I managed to drop $20 at a table in Empire over the course of an hour. I guess I should have stuck with the plan and not ventured into a game while doped up on medication. But I was pretty bored just reading in bed all day, even watching Season 1 of Alias stop being interesting. I was playing ok poker, but had a few brutal suckouts that were pretty demoralizing. I really need to start stabilizing my play. Whenever I get down, I start concentrating on making my money back instead of focusing on playing good poker.

Because I was unable to round up a sub for my volleyball game tonight, I ended up playing. I had some experience with the opposing team before, so I was pretty sure they would have defaulted us for not having 6 players, even though we had a good reason. After I was able to shake myself out of a bit of a daze, I played not too badly. In fact, our whole team player pretty well and we won what was our better matches of the seasons. We always seem to play better against better teams. But I got home feeling a bit run down. After a shower though, I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I hopped on Empire.

I decided to hit a 5+1 SNG for a little practice before I surrender my money on Wednesday. I had intended to hit a limit table – how that would be practice for the tournament is an interesting question – but didn’t check and ended up in a pot limit game. I realized it was for the best, as it would be better practice. For the record, fish at a 5+1 table are crazy. Someone went out on the very first hand. And they didn’t even have much of a hand.

I played pretty cautiously, waiting to hit a hand to try to earn some chips. As I determined who was reckless and who was a bit more solid, I started stealing a few pots to keep pace with the blinds. Enough succeeded to keep me slightly ahead of the curve. As we got closer to the bubble, people started to tighten up and I started to take advantage, stealing where I could and putting pressure on the small stacks. Going in to the last three, I had a small chip lead.

The final three did not last very long as my opponents were very happy to call me when I put them all-in. And they called with pretty marginal hands. It was the quickest I’ve ever finished a tournament in the final three. And it was a nice $19 in my account.

Of course, I couldn’t be happy there. I was only a quarter away from breaking even on the day, so I went back to the .5/1 table to try to squeeze out a small win. Of course, my 97 in the big blind turns in two pair on the J97 flop, but the AT stays in to hit his runner runner broadway straight. So, instead being down for a quarter, I’m facing down for $5. I guess I’ll need to concentrate on playing good poker.

Well, it seems like my cold is just getting worse. I ended up staying home from work today, but I’m feeling enough out of sorts that I’m hesitant to sit down at a poker table online. I’ll have to be satisfied with the $18 I pulled out yesterday. I guess I should probably throw some money in my TruePoker account though, so there won’t be any problems for the tournament Wednesday. Ugh, I think I’m going to go crawl back into bed.

I had a great dinner last night at a Portugese restaurant with an old friend I hadn’t seen in far too long. The BBQ chicken, roast potatoes and rice was pretty simple, but the hot sauce it comes with to dip is to die for. I’m looking forward to going back in the summer when they have the patio open and apparently they have BBQ pig on a spit that they serve while you are waiting for your meal. And I have to order some of the other delicious sounding things on their menu.

I came home late and sated and decided to forgo poker for the evening, so no poker tales today (for which my friend Chris is probably grateful. Instead, I’m going to update my link list to the right with a few more of the great poker blogs that I read on a regular basis. I still haven’t listed everything yet, but I’ve got most of my favourites up. Of course, davidross doesn’t have an official blog of his own, but I love his weekly updates over at 2+2.

I played in my Tuesday night Ultimate game last night and we won handily. Of course, the other team was short a player, so it wasn’t much of a contest. But it was good to get the female players some more action. They were making a lot of good catches and throws and were learning how to move to space.

Because of the game, I didn’t get home until a later in the evening. At first I was going to forgo poker for the evening, but when I saw that I had my cashout confirmation from Empire, I decided that maybe I would test the waters at TruePoker. From what I had read from other bloggers, I was looking forward to the experience.

Unfortunately, when I got it installed, I saw that the lowest real money stakes were 1/2. I’ve always promised myself that I wouldn’t move up a limit until I hit 200BB, so I decided I would just play around on the play money tables to familiarize myself with the interface. I played for a good 2-3 hours (losing 10BB or so) and I’m still not sure that I like it. I went from enjoying the novelty of it to disliking all the extraneous features to a comfortable satisfaction. I’ll have to put in some more time before I decide if I want to put some money in when I get my bankroll to the 200BB mark. I’m also going to have to check out what the formula is for unlocking the 20% sign-up bonus.

Of course, with that 200BB goal looming over me, I started up a table at Empire so I could try to make some money while getting used to TruePoker. Of course, it didn’t quite work out like that. I was 12BB down before I knew it. I shouldn’t have started up another table when I was paying so much attention to the TV and already distracted by a foreign table. I was down at 2$ of my 20$ buy-in at one point but managed to claw my way back up to 15$ with some solid play with some pretty unspectacular cards. Unfortunately, I fought a little too hard to get back up to even and ended up at 5$ when the table broke. If it weren’t for my bad play at the start of the session (which cost me 12$ and an additional 3-8$ when I went to the felt on a good flop) I would have posted a small profit on the night. Instead I’m another 15$ distant from the 200BB mark. Hopefully I’ll be able to hit the nice run I’m about due soon and I’ll finish off the difference quickly. Then I can move to squeaking out small profits at a slightly higher limit. Still, I’m averaging 6.5BB/hr according to Poker Tracker, and that’s not accounting for me huge wins when I first started playing online before I realized I could request hand histories.

I just got back from visiting some friends in Cambridge and instead of taking the nap I meant to, I took a quick shower and sat down at my computer. First thing I do is start the poker blog tour, catching up on the weekend’s posts. Since I took Friday off from work, I was anticipating a bit of a backlog, but I didn’t get any farther than checking the first poker site listed to the right. Iggy at Guinness and Poker is probably the king of poker bloggers, and a strong supporter of the blogger community. But, today when I visited, I didn’t even get through his first new post.

There it was, near the end of Thursday’s post, a link to my very own small weblog. I had hoped that one day I might get mention on Iggy’s popular blog, but I didn’t expect that it would happen already. In fact, I’m not even sure how anyone would even have found this site, as it’s been up only a few weeks and the only people who know it’s here were the few friends that I mentioned it to.

Of course, getting added to the blogroll at Guinness and Poker merely helps to reinforce my unworthiness of mention. So, it’s time to put the WPT on the TV (CityTV, a local station, bought the rights to rebroadcast the first season) and finish earning my reload bonus at Empire. Then maybe I’ll have some good poker to write about.

I love my company. Tonight the glee club had arranged an outing to go curling at the Leaside Curling Club. Not many people knew how to play so I ended up skipping one of the teams, but we all had a lot of fun. We managed to win 6-1 over the other team on top of that, and we had free beer and pizza afterwards, so all and all, it was a great night. Of course, when I realized it was only 10pm when I got home and I’d have a little time to go online for some poker, even though I was a little toasted and should have known better. But, fortunately I was in and out and pulled a 5 dollar night. (which works about to a 6BB evening) Of course, I managed to drop 40$ last night, but with a winning percentage of 3%, I’m pretty sure it was the cards. And without any kind of cards, there was no way I was going to win the 3 SNGs that I entered.

Fortunately, tomorrow is my home hold’em tournament. For the last month, I’ve held a 20$ buy-in pot limit texas hold’em every second friday and it’s been a lot of fun. We had 12 people the first night and 11 the second. I finished 4th and 3rd respectively, so it’s been pretty good, but I’m looking for a 1st place finish. I just hope that the weather holds out tomorrow so that we don’t have any cancellations.