So my trip is coming to a conclusion. I'm at McCarran airport now about an hour before take off. I pulled an all nighter last night, as planned, playing the Bellagio 5/10 which was fairly soft as per the usual. I managed to scrape together a $1400 win as I played from 9pm sunday night til 9am monday morning. I sweet talked the floor supervisor to give me a food comp, so I ate up the Bellagio's breakfast buffet, which was pretty dang good.

If you've been keeping up with my updates at all, it will be no surprise to you when I say the results really haven't gone according to plan. Before I took the trip, I thought coming home with 5-6k in cash game profits would have been a very conservative estimate, and if I ran well I felt it would be possible to pull 10k out of the 5/10 game in 2.5 weeks. As it turned out, I came no where close to those figures which is clearly disappointing. However, had some of my hands held up in a few of those key big pots, I would have ended up right around my conservative estimate, so I can't feel too bad.

During my all nighter session at bellagio, I managed to get 1 outed for the second night in a row (thank goodness it was a small pot and easily detectable this time) so I could chk/fold before losing anything more, but I wasn't as lucky when I got caught with second nut straight vs the nut straight. Thank goodness I wasn't playing against a skilled player, otherwise it would have cost me more money.

I'm certainly ready for a break from the live poker scene. Everytime I turn around I end this sentence with something new "the worst part about live poker is ... " but really and truly one of the worst parts is just the flat out annoying people, especially the vegas nit regulars. I could devote an entire entry just to the local vegas nits, but I'll just sum everything up with one statement to the vegas nits as a whole:

"The joke/observation/rule inconsistency you mentioned 20 minutes ago wasn't funny/insightful then and it's not funny/insightful now and it won't be funny/insightful 20 minutes from now...so just shut the hell up and fold your hand."

Ok, enough wasted keystrokes on those clowns. I'm happy to go back to KC and sleep in my own bed and happy to go back to playing mostly online again, although as you've seen in my graphs, that hasn't exactly been a cakewalk lately either. One of these days, this blog is going to be filled with lots of positve graphs, brags, and insightful poker knowledge... not all the negative drivel that has been clogging this place for the last 3 months. That said, bad runs can last a really long time... not all of us can be the high stakes online poker expert that only plays a few thousand hands a month and never has a downswing greater than 10 buyins. Nothing against those people, but they just aren't me... and they aren't 99.9999% of people either.

Ok my flight is boarding soon, so I guess I should wrap this up. I'm going to try and keep putting regular updates/graphs up on my blog, and keep an eye out for an insightful post on how board textures affect hand ranges and bluffing frequencies. I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I think there's a lot of room for growth for most players in this area of hand reading. I made a couple nice calls/bluffs because of some lightbulb moments I had in this area, so I've been thinking of sharing the thought processes with my faithful readers. I'm still sorting out all the ideas in my head, and with the wedding this weekend, I probably won't have time to put it up until next week.

Good luck,
Aaron