Well, I can tell you right now that this month's recap that I'll post in a few days is not going to be very good. Like I said in the "purpose" section on the left, I'm going to be brutally honest in my blog even if it means some embarassment about my results. Yes, EVEN IF it means my anonymous blog hater comes out of the wood work, puts another comment in the "comments" section about karma, getting what i deserve, or whatever else he wants to say (that i'll subsequently delete), I'm still going to report the truth even if it's painful to say or to read. (btw i have a sneaking suspicion who my resident blog hater is -- perhaps someone i crushed for a few buyins last year at 10/20nl hu who googled his screenname?)
Anyway enough of that. I think since I have so much to complain about this month I need to make public all the things I'm thankful for. So in no particular order, here are some of the things I'm most thankful for:
-My beautiful wife. I couldn't have lucked out any more finding her and convincing her to marry me. I never deserved to snag such a wonderful woman and I am truly thankful for everyday we have together and all the things she probably thinks goes unnoticed that do not.
-My family. I've got a loving and supportive family who would never wish anything except the best for me and who isn't afraid to kick me in the butt when I need it. Especially because of my parents, sister, and uncle I am the person who I am today. I wouldn't be the same without them and for that I am very thankful. I've been blessed with their wisdom and level headedness and for that I'm thankful.
-God. Ok I know you're thinking "wow this is one cheesy blog entry" but ya I'm going to thank the big guy upstairs. For the last several years after high school and college I stopped going to church and really thinking much about religion. In fact I was getting pretty anti-religion there for a while. I'm thankful that during Missy and my "pre-marital counselling" at her church I met an awesome pastor who has kept us interested and coming back every sunday -- even when I'm up til 5am grinding it out on the virtual poker tables. I hope this pattern continues as it reaffirms that there's more to life than this stupid game.
-Friends. I'm truly thankful for the friends that I have. The ones who truly care about my well being. The ones who aren't flakey, the ones who are there to lend a helping hand, and I hope that I consistently do the same for them. Whether you're someone who I talk to regularly on AIM and bears the brunt of my running bad bitching or whether you're a guy from back in IL that I should call more often than I do, I'm truly thankful for your friendship, support, and what you guys have done and will do in the future.
-My health. There was a time in my life where I was pretty sick. I had cancer in fact. That's something I haven't brought up in my blog and it's something that I'm thankful i've overcome. I hope and pray it never comes back. For now I'm just thankful that even though it sucked to go through it, it made me a better person.
-A perfectly made italian sub. Ok I had to lighten up this post a bit :-) I love me a damn good italian sub. Don't let anyone put ham on your italian sub either. It should go (order from bottom to top): bottom bread, capicola, salami, pepperoni, provolone cheese (optional sub mozerella), lettuce, tomato, oil & vinegar, parmesean cheese, oregano, top bread. Other acceptable subs/additions if you're going for Aaron's spicy italian specialty: pepperjack instead of provolone, and add jalapenos (after the tomatoes) and crushed red pepper(after the parmesean). For you KC guys, it's all about Mr Goodcents. Don't skimp on the half either -- go for the full. The secret is the oil & vinegar + parmesean + oregano. oh man i'm so hungry now.
-College football season. Dad's first game of his second season at southern miss starts this saturday. They play Tenn-Martin, which should be an easy game and unfortunately no tv broadcast. no worries, Missy and I will listen to it on the internet radio on saturday.
Even though I can't list all the things I'm thankful for here, there are at least the main things that come to mind. Knowing those things, I have a lot of things to work on for september. Some things I'm going to specifically work on are:
-Increased concentration. Less IM'ing while playing. -Decreased bitching. -Increased postgame analysis. I need to get back into the habit of looking at my hands in PT after EVERY session. -Stopping sessions sooner. As in, the minute I feel like I'm not playing my A game. If that means I do 4 1 hour sessions instead of two 2 hour sessions then that's what it'll be. -Increased worthwhile activity. Although I'm constantly busy with poker and the website my uncle and I are trying to launch, I need to make time to do something to help someone else out. To start, I'm going to be a "Youth Friend" to one of the kids at Missy's school. More on that when it actually gets set up.
Sorry for such a serious blog but I felt like I needed to get all that out. Next time I'll try to get back into more Kriss Kross or other long since forgotten pop culture ;-)
I'm dreading sept 1 when I post my august recap as the graph is going to be sick bad. So to preempt all that, I figured I should say a lot of stuff I'm thankful for before I bust out all the complaints.
It's finally here, the first homework assignment for my students. Here's how it will work:
I post a hand, you analyze it and tell me what our brave donkslaying hero's thought process is (or should be) in the hand and how he should proceed. Sometimes I'll give the complete hand history, other times I'll leave the next action blank for you to describe, but in all cases I expect you to think about the hand ranges of all players involved (on each street), how they would typically react with each part of their hand range and what our Hero should do based on that. I'll try to provide plenty of reads and current game dynamic to make developing a hand range easier.
In our first example, our Hero has been playing about 24/20, pretty LAG game. Hero has been 3betting a good amount and playing generally aggressive with both good hands and bluffs. Hero hasn't shown down any bluffs but based on the aggression it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that he hasn't had the nuts every time.
SB has also been a very LAG game preflop at stats of 29/19 and being generally aggressive postflop. We've seen some minor bluffs being shown down from SB, but nothing too ridiculous. SB seems to a decent hand reader, at least insofar as he can recognize when it's likely someone has a weak hand.
MP is generally a weak player, he doesn't reload his buyin to full, he doesn't play his hands very strongly and generally can't read hands very well. He's the soft spot at the table for sure.
Now here's the hand:
Poker Stars - No Limit Hold'em Cash Game - $3/$6 Blinds - 6 Players SB: $825.00 BB: $597.00 UTG: $954.65 MP: $300.30 Hero (CO): $671.00 BTN: $484.80
On the river the effective stacks are about $450. What should hero do? Launch the bluff or take the showdown? Most importantly, tell me WHY ?
When all the students have responded I'll decide who I think has the best answer/analysis and perhaps after the first 5 homeworks whoever has the most correct answers will win a prize. Maybe some free coaching time or something.
I played over 5k hands yesterday -- something I havent done in quite some time (by design). The tables were so juicy and I had been running well and playing well and I saw no reason to stop. Of course that was around hand 1100.
I proceeded to have one of the most swingy sessions ever with multiple 4-5 buyin ups and downs until I finally settled up a pittance. 3500 of the hands were at 5/10 and the other 1500 were a combo of 2/4 and 3/6. The real story is about table King Mesa on FTP 5/10nl. The hero being yours truly and the villain being oboy80, an "unorthodox" (read: donktacular) 56/17 lunatic who and the 5 us regulars sitting with him at the table drooling. Not to mention the 20 (yes, 20) players on the waiting list trying to get a seat.
I first sat at the table around 1:30am. Things weren't going spectacular when i sat but it was nothing too terrible. I was still up over 3k on the day and looking for someone to help me get back some of the gains I had given up. Enter oboy80. For the next several hours, oboy continually sucks out and sets up all of us regulars on the table as he amasses buyin after buyin. Giving up one, taking back two. I had donated a good 3k to him on various hands. He was tough to play against because he was so reckless. Shoving in a lot of spots. I pussed out on two hands against him. I should have called at least one of these based on the speed of his bets but I'll fully admit that I simply couldn't pull the trigger.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1399659 At this point I didn't know what he was capable of honestly. I hadn't seen him overbet the river like that ever. He had been minraising with strong hands mostly so the huge bet really looked like he didn't want a call. plus the speed of his bets were so fast, typically when donkeys bet real quick it's on a bluff. when people have something good postflop, they usually have to take a second to at least consider how much to bet. On this hand on the river i had $1538 in my stack and he insta insta insta bets 1530 -- so fast i have no idea how he typed it so quickly.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1399662 This one was much later in the night and again I pussed out and folded to his shove. he has busted diamonds here plenty enough to call, and the whole reason I checked instead of bet was to induce that bluff. classic case of inducing a bluff and not following through to make the call.
Both of these hands illustrate me screwing up some fairly basic deep stack concepts. I shouldn't have kept building a big pot on the turn if I wasn't ready to play a big pot on the river vs someone who isn't afraid to shove in a lot of hands in the face of "weakness". I was struggling with that vs just trying to get max value out of this guy who was loosely throwing money away. Easy to play monday morning quarterback I suppose, but I think either blocking or committing myself to c/c, especially on hand 2, is superior than c/f.
In the grand scheme though, those hands only accounted for a small bit of the downward turns on this graph. It was pretty amazing really how it seemed like simultaneously on 3 tables i'd stack 3 people, then 5 minutes later i'd be getting 2pair cooled by flopped flush on two tables simultaneously followed by a set that can't dodge an OESD with 1 card to come. Easy come, easy go i guess. Although how "easy" it the money comes in is pretty debatable... haha.
So around 5:30am rolls around. No seat has changed on our table in roughly 4 hours since I got there. villain is still sucking out left and right and cooling even the hottest running regulars. It was a sight. Soon, this hand:http://www.pokerhand.org/?1400364 went down. Pretty sick huh? Thank God I didnt see the flop... lol...Not long after that oboy gets all in preflop with A9o crushing AK and before we know it he's got almost $13,000 on the table. The waitlist swelled into the low 20s -- almost unheardof.
It took another two hours or so. Surprisingly, this guy actually didn't hit and run. Two hours later, about 7:30, he finally busts. I kept playing until about 8:30am since there were several other very good games as well. I finished down about 2600 at oboy's table overall - not reaping any fruits of my labor. Standard.
And as you can see the final downward turn at the end of my graph, coupled with the fact that my wife had already left for work 45 minutes previously and the fact I had been up for around 22 hours straight made me decide to just pack it in and live to fight another day. Pretty sick though. I crawl in bed around 9:00am and although my body and eyes were dragging, my mind wouldn't stop going over this hand or that hand that I could have played better. It just wouldn't stop. I couldn't get to sleep until almost 10. 4 hours later it was time to get up since I had a commitment at 2:00. Still going strong now at 8:45pm haha... but it'll probably be a fairly early night for me tonight.
All things considered, one of the worst parts of this marathon was towards the begining when I was up 5k after about hand 1100 or so. I pulled up AIM and took a few minutes to tell some of my closest poker buddies that the "poker gods" were finally smiling on me after such a drought. I really did sit back and just take a moment to be thankful that my hard work was finally paying off. I was playing excellently, reading hands well, and my hands were olding up for the most part. It was nice.
It was also short lived.
lol :-)
Next time there will be a positive blog entry I promise. Sorry for all the doom and gloom all the time. With Jay's help keeping my mind and game sharp along with my students sending me hand history after hand history -- forcing myself to analyze and defend my stances on how to think about playing certain hands -- I really feel like I'm playing some of my best poker ever...despite some mistakes on the above hand histories.
So it's been a whole week, lazy lazy on the blog front. Thought I'd give a fairly quick recap of the happenings in my life in the last week.
I'm starting to get some more interest in coaching. I'm back up to 2 regular students now with a couple others showing signs of interest. I enjoy having students because it keeps my mind sharp and forces me to explain concepts that are intuition based, which helps a lot for my own overall thorough understanding of concepts. Once you understand something well enough to explain it to someone else, it makes it much easier to think one more step ahead and consider more things.
I think I might start a once per week homework assignment for my students as well. Perhaps I'll put it on my blog and they (or anyone) can post their thoughts and i'll respond back to my students with my thoughts on their thoughts. Reasonable idea? I think so. Maybe it'll drive some more traffic to my blog as well.
On the project front, my uncle and I are still pluggin away and shooting for the end of the month to have our first release of the site up and running. Right now I've got a pretty good skeleton of the site going with some base functionality... front page, login/forgot password/account management/cookies/product searching/results paging/click logging and some other things. The next phase of the site we're going to add in a lot more fun user interface type functionality that should help our site be as rich in user experience as it is in product content.
If you're interested in a sneak-peak of what I have been spending so much time on, here are a couple of preliminary screen shots. Keep in mind the site logo is going to be much nicer than it currently is and the "mon/tues/wed/etc" tabs will actually have product content in them once I code that piece of the site. In other words, it's still a work in progress.
As soon as it gets going, i'll expect all of you poker ballers to be pouring orders in for the latest really expensive handbag or your significant other ;-)
So besides the new site (aka 'da proj') and coaching I've been trying to find a few hours here and there to put some hands in. I'm thankful to report that I've started running a bit better than I was with that last graph you saw, but unfortunately my overall month is still pretty sucky. I've got two weeks left before the end of the month and I'm confident that by Aug 31 I'll be in good shape.
Friday night Missy, Kyle, and I are headed to see Carrot Top at the Ameristar. I'm told it's a great show with lots of profanity. We'll see how it goes.
Aaron P.S. The picture above is my pop coaching down at southern miss univ. I think it was taken last year sometime.
Since it had been a while, I decided it would be a good idea to go play some 3/6 LIMIT poker at one of the local casinos where my buddy Kyle often plays. We originally met playing that game several years back so it's usually a good time when we go donk around a bit playing min-bet poker.
Back when I first started learning texas hold'em, I only played structured limit poker, and 3/6 is where I got my feet wet. It's pretty amazing how many familiar faces were there, even though I barely ever play live poker -- especially limit.
At first it was your typical cast of characters, everyone playing entirely too loose, and wayy wayy too passive. no one pushes small edges in that game, and the truth is, there are often VERY BIG edges lol...
For instance, this one older lady goes 4 bets on the river with A 2 on a A Q 7 J 2 board. Yes that's right, she ended up 3betting the river and calling the guy's 4-bet who had K 4 and was betting/raising it the whole way.
It was truly amazing.
So naturally seeing all the donkeys lined up in a row, we figured we'd be shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel. Unfortunately the fish shot back. Kyle got coolered twice bad with 2pair vs set, once w/ overpair vs set, he got gutshot at least once that i can remember, among others. I ended up getting 2 outed twice, 3 outed twice, 4 outed once, 5 outed a few times, and 6 outed a few times. In the span of 8 hours I went through 3 racks ($300) and kyle went through 2 racks of chips. It was the worst bloodbath at a 3/6 limit table i've ever seen in my life. the beats and setups just never stopped.
I also had the biggest pot I've ever lost in my 3/6 history. It was a 5 way capped hand preflop, i had JJ. Flop was J 9 3r, cap it 4 ways. turn K, cap it 3 ways, one guy dropped after 2 bets i think. River was a blank, one of the guys was all in, so it was me and the other and I got 1 bet only out of him.
As soon as the K hit on the turn on the turn I just busted out laughing. I "knew" someone had KK, or at least QT. Sure enough the guy who we capped all in on the turn had the KK. It was such a sick pot and truly fitting for how the night went.
So much donkey logic going on too. The guy to my left was the worst. He had an o'shay's poker room shirt on, probably in his 40s and doing everything in his power to slam down beer after beer. He's one of these guys, you know the type, that can't just shut up after the hand. I mean literally after every single hand he has to discuss what he had -- (either "a $6 hand, or a $3 hand" -- meaning if he could call a raise with it or not) -- why he played it this way or that, which invariably was almost always wrong. Then, the icing on the cake for this guy, is he's one of these guys that everytime he makes the slightest joke he turns and stares at you right in the face and BUSTS out laughing as loud as he can -- waiting you to join in with laughter. The worst part is, the only time he said something funny was when it was unintentional.
So there I am sitting there with one of the biggest donks I've ever seen, listening to his vince van patten style postgame analysis, chugging his beer, and making unfunny jokes but insisting on getting in my face to laugh "with" me. UGH. Oh ya, his other great quirk, everytime he got a phone call he'd tell us who called and why they were calling. This guy, "bless his heart" (as my grandmother would say), really and truly felt like we cared what he had to say and felt he was doing us a favor by telling us. WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
So ya I think it's going to be a while before I venture back to the 3/6 game. The donkeys are a bit more tolerable when they fail to suckout. It was fun chilling with my friend there but holy cow I don't know how anyone could stand putting up with that crap on a regular basis. Wow.
Hahah, stupid poker. Whateva. Through an AIM conversation with a coach that shall remain nameless, we talked about websites, running dogs, and these two young chaps on the left. The internets always provide plenty of low hanging fruit, do they not?
So for some reason my brain has been fried lately. I'm having trouble formulating intelligent thoughts and I kind of feel crappy about the fact that my blog has lost some of the progressive steam it was building when I was updating every night in vegas. I keep thinking of all these great topics and say to myself "wow i should really write a blog entry about that" but it never materializes. So please excuse my lack of ... i dunno i lost my train of thought. typical for me today.
Ok so I've been putting in tons of hours on this project that I've mentioned a few times. Essentially it's an affiliate website, but not related to poker. Many big name online sellers (think buy.com, amazon, dell) as well as some smaller, niche sellers have affiliate programs. It works much the same as a poker affiliate, where we get a % cut of sales based on traffic (and subsequent purchases) we drive to their site.
This type of website is nothing new. They're everywhere, in fact. My uncle and I think we have some ideas that can separate us from the pack. Hopefully we're right. It's been a lot of work though. So far I've been averaging around 8 hours per day writing Java/HTML/JSP to make this all happen, while my uncle has been doing database stuff. Very time consuming, but I think we've got a pretty professional look so far and a lot of the base functionality is in place.
Currently, I'm developing the code for this site in such a way that it will hopefully be very easy to change some configuration files, a little HTML/CSS, and a new database connection and we'll have a separate, fully functional niche site with a completely unrelated name and product base. It's kind of funny though... I almost hate to admit what our first niche group is we're trying to conquer...Are you ready?
...
Women's fashion.
Yea that's right... women's fashion. Why women's fashion? Well lots of reasons, but one major reason in particular is that getting 10% of one $4,000 "handbag" sale is pretty damn appealing. So the obvious #1 reason is we think we can make a lot of money in this market. There are some other reasons but I won't bother with that now. So despite the fact that I don't know the first thing about what is fashionable or what women like to wear, we're moving forward on this effort.
So wish us luck. You can be certain that the instant our site rolls out, there will be a ridiculous amount of shameless promotion going on at plusevpoker.com :-) It's too bad there aren't more female poker ballers out there, otherwise we'd have a nice market cross section to work with :-)
So why am I telling you about all this now? Pretty simple really... this is the stuff I think about when poker goes like this...my current month of August (almost all fish stakes of 2/4 and 3/6):
If this isn't wiggida wiggida wack, I don't know what is
Granted, I don't really know what wiggida wiggida wack is, but I've got a pretty good guess, and i'm sticking with that graph qualifying.
So yea in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, this may (or may not) help. If for no other reason, play the video just to take you back in time for a few short moments.
Well, I can tell you right now that this month's recap that I'll post in a few days is not going to be very good. Like I said in the "purpose" section on the left, I'm going to be brutally honest in my blog even if it means some embarassment about my results. Yes, EVEN IF it means my anonymous blog hater comes out of the wood work, puts another comment in the "comments" section about karma, getting what i deserve, or whatever else he wants to say (that i'll subsequently delete), I'm still going to report the truth even if it's painful to say or to read. (btw i have a sneaking suspicion who my resident blog hater is -- perhaps someone i crushed for a few buyins last year at 10/20nl hu who googled his screenname?)
3
(6 Players)
5
(2 Players)
2
on a A
Q
