I'm on the home stretch this month in a couple ways. Firstly, poker has been going pretty damn well this month. I've had a couple bumps in the road, but nothing more than I've been through before. As long as I don't majorly screw it up this week, I should be poised to have my best month ever. I hesitate to put this 'brag' in my blog, as every time I seem to report good news here, PartyPoker flips the doom switch on me. Case in point, hand ~9000 below was my last entry bragging about my biggest pot ever won. Notice the sharp downturn which ensued :-)

Obviously anyone who knows me realizes that I don't believe in such superstitious nonsense, but it is sort of funny how that works out. If I were to look back at other blog entries, similar occurrences have come to pass, but it's all part of the fun I guess.

The other 'home stretch' I'm on revolves around my professional life. I guess you could say I'm reaching for a way home in the form of a new job. I've got two interviews lined up this week, both in KC doing some independent java development. They're both 6 month contracts, one pays a bit better than the other -- but both are significantly more than I make now. I will have to pay my own benefits though. I think either of these positions will be a positive move for my career and personal life. I've been on the road almost 100% for the past 15 months or so. It's getting old. Another bonus of the independent contracting thing is that I can be selective of which jobs I take -- which means I'll have more time to play poker in between contracts :-)

Here's the graph of my month so far. Click the image to get a full sized version.

This weekend was pretty fun. I went to play some low stakes live poker and have a few drinks with my buddy Kyle. He's a mostly live limit player and we had a good time. 3-6 limit hold 'em was the game, the new Argosy Poker Room was the venue. The room was new, the beer was cold, and the players were absolutely atrocious. I mean terrible. Value betting is the name of the game in limit hold'em, and these players couldn't get any more loose and passive if they tried. People were getting sick and tired of me raising, but they would never play back. I could push all the edges I had getting the max from everyone, while they would never get the maximum from me. It was great. Some of the older crowd didn't like my constant raising screwing up their friendly check/call game, but too damn bad. I don't see how any half decent player could possibly be a long term loser in a live 3-6 game. It's so soft. Definitely a good time to hang out with a friend and play. Ended up going on a rush right before we left to make a respectable $169 profit LOL.

Coming up at the beginning of next month, Missy and I will be heading to Vegas for a few days to meet my parents out there. A high roller that's a big donor to the Southern Miss athletic department is taking all of the football coaches and wives to the Venetian for an all expenses paid trip. So me and the girlfriend will be meeting Mom and Dad out there for a 3 days or so, which will be a great time I'm sure.

Hey all,

I haven't played a whole lot of hands this month. It's June 12th and I've only got roughly 8700 hands in. Because of work (yes, not all of us can be internet poker pros), I've been so beat on the weekends that I haven't played much at all. Also, I've split time between Empire and Full Tilt. On FT, I generally play less than 4 tables at once usually because there aren't 4 good games at once (at least, in 400 level). I've actually dabbled in some of the higher stakes games. I played a few hundred hands at the FT nl600 game and ran well. Played less than 100 hands at the $1000nl game on FT but nothing exciting happened.

I'm still doing the coaching thing with jkrantz. It's going well, even though I run terribly on Party/Empire - even during the coaching sessions. As he put it last week "This session is one big BBV thread". I just got my new PP account set up yesterday, but I'm still working out some of the kinks with neteller. Hopefully that will get resolved soon. Until then I'll still be playing under Empire primarily.

So far the breakdown of hands has been: Empire = 6900 hands, $667 profit. FT = 1800 hands, $3200 profit. On Empire I started off the month with a nice -7 buyin downswing, although it's somewhat washed out in my graph because of the concurrent FT hands where I ran quite a bit better.


So as you can see in the graph, the sharp upward turn at the end was mostly as a result of the following hand. Many of you read about the "Biggest Pot I've ever Lost", now you can read about the biggest pot I've won. The game is $600nl on Full Tilt. There are 2 marks at the table. I've already busted one of them, and he rebought. The other one is getting sick of my antics. Whenever I bluffed he layed down, and whenver I had a hand he paid off (usually it's the opposite, lol). But things are going right. On to the hand:

Effective stacks in this hand: $975.90

Donk (53/4) open limps in MP, another guy calls, I raise the pot ($30) with A A in the SB. BB mucks, Donk calls, other guy folds.

Flop ($72) A T Q

I've got top set, but it's far from a lock. This guy's range is any two sooted, any broadways, any pair (probably not JJ+ though, even this guy would raise those). We're both semi deep and I've been real active, so no reason to slow down. I lead right out for $70. Donk insta-raises me to $270 to go. WTF? Of course the doomsayer in me thinks great he's flopped the straight or the flush. He could certainly do this with 2pair...but he's so passive, which is what worries me. He's been in check/call or bet weak mode all day, now he wakes up with a big bet. I decide that before I get my $ in as a 2:1 dog (he's got the straight or flush) or a 3:2 favorite (he's got a big draw, like K + pair), I'll wait to play a big pot on a safe turn card where my equity is much greater. I call.

Turn ($612) Q

Most beautiful card in the deck. I couldn't have asked for better. Not only does it negate his draws, it very well could have hit a made hand of his. Might as well give him the rope so he can hang himself. I check, he bets very quickly $630. I do a double take to make sure it's $630 and not $63. Yep, sure enough, my eyes are not deceiving me. I push obviously, and he starts running down his timer. What's he doing? It's $45.90 more for him to call in a $1900 pot. What's taking him so long? Finally his timer runs down to like 5 seconds and he calls. You'll never guess what he turns over....

9 7 for nine high, no pair, no draw ... CHA-CHING.

The river blanks off and I scoop the $1,960.80 pot. So the biggest pot I ever won was against a donk who just wanted to take a stand against my aggressiveness. I happen to wake up with a hand and a lock turn card. Boy, the poker gods were smiling down on me this night!

I've got another coaching session tonight and I'm going to try to make an effort to put more strategy posts up on my blog soon. I've been slacking a lot in that department.

Good luck,
Aaron

Hey all,

So it's been a while since I've updated. I figured I should provide some sort of recap for the month of May. Poker, as usual, has been an up and down battle. Somedays I play great and my results are great. Otherdays I play great and my results are poor. Still other days I play like crap and, guess what, the results are crap as well. :-)

Starting in May, I've taken two new steps to help me get as good at this game as I possibly can (which of course, is my ultimate goal). First, I signed up at CardRunners.com, a site created by a guy named Taylor Caby (Green Plastic on UB), where by he and his buddies create videos of their play at various stakes and sites. I've watched all of GP's videos, and I've started in on some of the other contributor's vids. So far I liked GP's videos, although they are sort of short. The primary benefit is just hearing him verbalize his thoughts at the table. The things he's considering, etc. He specializes in short handed play with a loose aggressive style, which is good for me to listen to as it will help me find some extra spots to open up my tight aggressive game. I haven't been too impressed with the videos of the other "pros" there, but to be fair I've only watched a couple. If you decide to sign up, please use my link above so I'll get credit for the referral.

The second step I took was hiring jkrantz from the 2+2 forums to be my NL Coach. So far it's going well and I would highly recommend him to anyone that needs to learn anything from the basics to advanced concepts - or if you simply need a knowledgeable resource to affirm what you're doing is correct. Given the nature of short handed NL, it's often easy to fall in love with your play because of great results or get real down on yourself because of poor results. In both instances, it helps to have an unbiased 3rd party be able to review your play and make sound judgments. Jay has been great for all of these things, and I look forward to each Monday and Tuesday night for more of his insights. He has also emailed me some interesting hands to get me thinking about how I can improve my hand reading. In short, I think he's helping to accelerate my poker growth at a much higher rate than I could be doing on my own.

One more thing that I'll add that I think will help with my poker growth is that I've actually gained some internet friends to chat with who play the same mid-stakes NL games that I do. If you recall back to one of my earlier blog entries (if you actually do recall, then that's scary :-), I stated that I really wanted to gain some friends who knew as much or more about poker. I've certainly done that. With the addition of a new AIM screen name (WiltOnTilt) I've added 2+2's jsnipes, triumph, and jalexand42 to my buddylist and I've been in contact with them while playing. It's been great to share stories and run hands by them at a whim.

Ok on to some results. May was a bittersweet month. On one hand, in terms of money made, it was my best month ever with a profit of: $7,125.05 and another $700 or so in various bonuses. On the other hand, I had some nights where I really played poorly and my results reflected that. My goal was to clear $10,000 in profit, which as you can see from the graph below, I did eclipse that mark at one point, however another bad run and combined with more undesirable play resulted in a downswing that I just couldn't recover from.

I had a few sizable downswings...For the most part I kept my spirits up mentally, but I'll have to admit the downswing towards the end of the month really got to me. I wanted badly to post a great brag blog about earning 5 figures this month in my hobby...Instead it just turned out to be a month with ~33k hands played and a crappy 2.59 ptbb/100 winrate resulting in my $7k and change. I feel like I'm doing all the right things to become the best player I can be, it's just a matter of taking what I learn and using the hard work I put in to execute in the heat of battle. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Hopefully surrounding myself with these knowledgeable players (who, btw, are murdering these games for 5 figures/month on a regular basis) will help me to achieve these goals.

I'm going to try to update my blog more regularly in June. One final note is that I've closed my Party account, so you won't be seeing WiltOnTilt there anymore :-) Kind of a shame because I am fond of that screen name...but you have to make certain sacrifices in the name of positive EV... ;-)

Take care,

Aaron