CARDRUNNERS

What's Your Edge

Brian Hastings : Poker Blog

December 22, 2008

Hey guys. As you have notice we have updated the blogging software, hopefully it's better now and encourages people to blog more and better, although personally as I'm typing this I have no idea what the difference is nor do I really care. Anyway, I haven't blogged in a couple weeks so I'm just going to give a bit of a recap of that.

First I'll talk about poker. Unfortunately, December has been a really crappy month on that front. I went about a week without a winning session playing mostly 200/400 PLO with a bit of a 500/1k with the likes of superstars such as Gus Hansen and John Hennigan (sarcasm). Unfortunately they managed to run really well and win a very inordinate amount of allins and I downswung pretty hard. I ended up busting my FTP roll on about my 6th straight losing day when Gus was playing particularly bad, but also getting particularly lucky. I don't really regret this as I felt like I was playing well, and several times during and after the session I asked my friend Phil Galfond, who was also in the games, if he thought I was playing well and he said he thought I was too. I guess it's just an eye opener about variance in general, I basically went on a 25 buyin downswing in a few days in games where I'd estimate my winrate around 2-3ptbb, maybe even higher. I guess I always knew it was a possibility but didn't really expect it to happen, but oh well. Busting my FTP account wasn't the end of the world, I still had about 200k on Stars and did some transfers so I now have around 100k on each site. I'm going to stick to grinding 25/50 NL and PLO for the moment with a splash of O8 and maybe even HORSE when the games are good at the 100/200 and 200/400 levels. As I'm on break right now I'll have plenty of time to grind the next few weeks, and if all goes well hopefully I'll make 2 or 300k over this stretch. I had a similar downswing last year around September, even dropping to 10/20 for a while, and navigated out of it pretty swiftly, so hopefully the same happens this time.

One good thing about this downswing is that it's made me refocus on poker a bit, I think the last few months I was just kind of taking it for granted and autopiloting a bit, thinking that as long as I put in hours the money will come. In the current state of online poker this is just not the case, one must work to stay on top. And I intend to do just that. I've watched several videos in the last few days and thought about the game a bunch, although one annoying thing is I only have my Mac Air with me over break, and although I have Windows the computer runs smoother on the Mac OS so I've been mostly putting in hands there and trying to copy/paste the HH's to windows later, and PokerTracker hasn't been importing them all that smoothly. If anyone has any suggestions about this please let me know.

On the life front, I completed my finals on Friday the 12th and headed home this past Wednesday. I think finals went pretty well, I put a lot of time into studying and completing all my work after returning from Ft. Lauderdale and hopefully the effort shows in my grades. I'm shooting for around a 3.2 for the semester so hopefully I hit that goal. I was going to fly to Chicago and go to the CR Christmas party but ended up deciding against it, so since I got home I've just been playing a bunch of poker and hanging out with friends here. Although I'd say I'm mostly closer to my college friends at this point, I'm still really close to a few of my friends here as well and it's really nice to see them. Also tomorrow I'm meeting up with my ex-math teacher who introduced me to poker in the first place, we still keep in touch a bit and he's a great guy so I'm looking forward to that.

Christmas is fast approaching as well. I think I'm done with my shopping but may decide to get 1 or 2 more things (yay last minute shopping!), I think my family is going to really like the stuff I got, particularly my sister. She goes to Ithaca College, located 10 minutes from Cornell, and plays in a cover band with Bruce (cornellxc) and another 2 friends of mine at a bar down the road from my house every Tuesday night, which is always a great time. She's really musically talented and for Christmas I'm getting her some time in a recording studio to record some songs she's written. She's really excited about it and that makes me feel awesome. As for what I get, I don't really care that much, the giving feels way better, but I'm sure my family will come up with a few things that will be really neat. I'm looking forward to it as always.

I've been fairly lazy about blogging lately, and I kind of want to change that. I think I might try to shift the focus more to poker as I'm rebuilding my online roll a bit, though that could be tough when I don't have pokertracker running smoothly. Hopefully I can make it happen though. I always enjoy reading others' blogs but for some reason rarely feel like blogging myself, but I'm sure it's entertaining to some and also a good means of thinking, so I'm going to make an effort to be better at it. We'll see I guess.

That's all I have for now. Happy holidays everyone!

Entry Tags:

Dec 22, 08 02:55:01

any expanation of you and Bruce's 1/2 flipping session?

TheTyman9

Dec 22, 08 02:55:08

explanation*

TheTyman9

Dec 22, 08 04:32:12

You could try just setting the 'save to' directory for HH's to the same folder as they are in on Windows... As far as I know, OSX can write to the Windows partition but not vice versa. So when you load up Tracker I assume it'll auto import the new files from your Windows HH folders (which have been saved to there from OSX)

wpc

Dec 22, 08 11:51:43

Your best post yet stinger, well written. Hopefully this is a start of a weekly blog entry from you but no pressure.

nuht

Dec 22, 08 14:10:59

your blog sucks, might as well just give up

David B

Dec 23, 08 01:39:30

tyman,

Just having some fun after getting back from the bars. He sent back after.

Stinger885

Dec 23, 08 01:41:10

wpc,

I tried and I don't think it will let me do that, but thanks anyway

Stinger885

Dec 23, 08 01:42:21

David,

Teach me how to be more emo, maybe then my blog won't suck

Stinger885

Dec 23, 08 02:05:40

you already are, and it still sucks

David B

Dec 23, 08 06:53:02

Hey Stinger, I just downloaded this program for macs called Poker CoPilot. You can find it on the apple web site. It is still improving, but it even has a HUD with stats. Pretty easy to import tournaments and stuff too. There is a free 30 day trial and i think its \$50 if you want to buy it.

I just downloaded it a couple days ago. I use it on my macbook pro and it is working really smooth so far. Test it out and see how you like it.

huskerwank