CARDRUNNERS

Today I was having a killer session. I played for about 2 hours and I was up many buyins. Unfortunately, I gave most of it back. I played 8 tables of 2/4 PLO, so it's really no surprise that I had crazy sick variance. I was up about 12 buyins at my peak, but ended up only up 1. Oops.

Ugh. I had already given back about 3 buyins from my peak when this hand came up. Good bye 4 more buyins. haha. I think I probably should have just pushed flop, but my line wasn't completely terrible. I actually was the favorite on the flop. No way I'm not gonna stack off there w/ that hand. If he's stacking w/ bottom set there he is really asking for serious trouble in the long run. The WORST hand I would have there is what I had. Otherwise, he is basically drawing dead to my set of aces or queens.

Value town on river. Idea here was to rep some busted draw on the river. I guess he bought it.

What makes me money. I know I lost here, but how can someone really stack off with KK allin pre. I know he has a good hand, but he's gotta know he's up against AA.

I'll take it!

Tomorrow I'm going to go into the city to do cardrunners stuff during the day and then party at night. Taylor's girlfriend, Melissa, is having a birthday party at a bar, so I'm gonna go to that. It should be a good time.

I'm getting really pumped to get out to vegas, especially now that I'm playing and enjoying poker again. I feel like I'm kind of stuck in the middle now. Vegas is gonna be the shit and then I'm gonna immediately move to Wrigleyville when I get home. That too will be awesome. I'm just stuck at home and I'm not being very productive. I want this period to end so I can get to the fun and productive times. It's too hard to focus when I'm just at home and I don't have any real schedule.

Ok here it is. This is the return of the poker blog. I have blogged about a hand or too at times over the past 6 months, but I haven't really gotten into poker strategy. Part of that was because I felt pretty shitty about the state of my game. I feel like my game is pretty good right now (at least for 2/4nl) so I'm gonna post a bunch of hands from my session on a regular basis. Please feel free to post your comments on the hands.

I played a 2 hour session last night before I got into a Wii marathon w/ Excitetruck. I only won about $200, but I was stuck over $1k at one point, so I was happy.

This hand happened early on in my session. The villian was an awful player so there was no way I was folding my hand here. I just wasn't sure if I should go with it on the flop or wait for the turn. I opted to see what came on the turn and therefore also give the guy a chance to hang himself with a bluff. The turn was pretty much a perfect card.

Weird hand here. The guys line was so strange. The thing was it could have easily been a monster. However, the way it played out combined with his timing really made it look strange. It was mostly his timing on the flop combined with the push that made me think he didn't hit the flop. I was thinking he might have a hand like AK or AQ or maybe even total air. I was lucky that it was air and that my hand held.

AA hand here. It's always tempting to try to get it all in preflop with AA. I def considered it here, but I think more times that not you are better waiting to see the action on the flop. That way you can at least get a c-bet if the guy has a garbage hand like he did here. Also, you can sometimes get a flop where the person will hang themselves with a weak holding. That also happened here. I feel like people don't bet out enough. The good thing here is that by betting out I got him to commit himself (any raise would with his hand). It may have not played out as well if I went for a c/r.

Omaha hand here. Honestly, the swings of PLO tend to get to me lately. The thing is that I know the game is so profitable that I should def be playing it. It's hands like this that remind me that.

I'm going to my friends house to watch the Champions League game today. I don't really care for AC Milan or Liverpool. I just want to see a good game. I guess I'll be rooting for AC over Liverpool. Kaka is pretty sick.

I havent played much poker lately up until the last few days. I've been starting to play more again. I finally feel the urge to start making money and that's a very good thing. I think a lot of my struggling has come from my apathy towards the game. I've mostly been playing 2/4nl. I was thinking I'd grind lower just for fun, but 2/4 is pretty low stress and I can actually make some reasonable money there. I think I will focus mostly on 2/4. I have a new name that I am going ot play about 50% of my time on. I feel like so many people at the tables know me and that has to be a disadvantage. I've also been playing tighter and it's working well. I've just been grinding 6-8 tables and that makes it hard to play anything but tight. I seem to be getting paid off pretty well regardless. I think from here on out I'm going to try to play 10+ hours a week at 2/4. I'll blog about my daily results and post some hands.

I'm going to reboot both my computers either today or tomorrow. I feel like it's a good time to get them cleaned up now that I am a grad. After I reboot I'm going to get pahud and PT setup in order to make posting hands and results easier.

I've been saying for awhile that I'm going to be posting more in my blog, but now it's actually going to start. I've been thrown off lately with my schedule. I had finals, then I graduated and came home and was busy, but now I'm ready to get settled down.

I'm at Taylor's now. We are renting an office for Cardrunners that is very close to Taylor's condo. Taylor and I first moved some stuff in there last week, but today we are going to try to get a lot of it setup. We want it to be functional for when we get home from Vegas.

I don't have any hands to post from today because I forgot to click auto save HHs for the new name I was on. I played for about 45 minutes and made about 2 buyins at 2/4nl. I'm pretty happy with that result.

I "graduated" on Saturday. I put that in parentheses because I still have one online class that I need to finish. That's not a very big deal though and I'll get it done soon. Anyway, I walked and it was a pretty good experience. I can't believe that college is finally done. It was weird leaving the campus knowing that I would never come back as a student.

Here is a pic with me and my good buddy Manzo.


I've been pretty busy since I got home. I got back to my house Saturday night and went to bed soon after. Sunday I had a long day. We got up and went to church and then drove downtown to meet up with some family friends to have brunch. Interestingly enough, the girl that chose where to eat chose the pub that I went to for New Year's Eve. I got a kick out of that and it brought back some good memories. After that I came home and watched the Bulls look good, the Tigers get crushed and Golden State play tired ball. Monday we headed downtown to look for apartments. We found a great place that is about 2-3 blocks from Wrigley stadium. It's a four bedroom apartment and it's really nice. I'm living with three of my long time friends from high school. It's gonna be a blast living there. Our lease starts July 1, so I'll move in as soon I get home from Vegas. I didn't take any pictures of the inside, but here is the outside of it. We have the main floor and the basement.


I haven't commented on Sopranos/Entourage for awhile. I think this season of Sopranos has been very good. I've liked every episode and I like where it is going. After fairly disappointing 4, 5, 6 seasons I didn't expect much. I'm really glad they are delivering.

As far as Entourage, it's not as good as years past. I even think that since season 2 it has gotten worse each season. It's still a funny show that is worth watching. I just wish they wouldn't try so hard to input a story line and instead would show more of the guys balling and hooking up with hot chicks. That's why everyone likes the show, isn't it?

Strange note: My brother decided as a way to make money he would buy these exotic frogs and sell them. He also decided that my bedroom would be a good place to put the massively large aquarium. I have this huge aquarium with three big ass frogs in it. As I was typing out this blog I looked up only to see one of the frogs eat a cricket. Pretty cool. The only problem was that the crickets in there were making noise the entire last night and they made it hard to sleep. Oh well.

I would take a picture of the tank but my camera is broken at the moment. I dropped it at a bar one of my last nights in champaign. I've dropped it many times before but this time it basically landed on the lens and now it won't work anymore.

We all wanted to see the De La Hoya vs Mayweather fight and the Bulls game was on right before it, so we decided to have a party. We got two kegs and a bunch of people came over and watched both events. Originally we were giong to have us all in my apartment, but too many people ended up coming. We probably had about twice as many people as the superbowl. Also, the guys next door have a pretty nice HDTV now as well, so we ended up ordering it in both apartments. Unfortunately, both went poorly. The bulls looked pretty awful. They weren't supposed to win that game, but they also weren't supposed to get blown out. I'm confident that they can adjust though and rebound from that loss. I also really wanted De la hoya to win. Mayweather is just too ridiculously cocky for my liking. He is a sick athlete though.

We got up and decided to go to Olive Garden for lunch. They have a deal where for $5 you get unlimited soup and salad. It's a pretty solid deal and we go there for it every once in awhile. We ended up having to wait for a table. We decided since it was cinco de mayo we'd start drinking. We ended up getting the waitress to give us a few samples of wine. We then decided to stop in at a local bar that we pass all the time but had never been to. It's basically just a hole in the wall that's been there for 50+ years. It's called Icehouse, because their token beer is Icehouse. That should tell you enough right there. There was one guy in there and he was a lifelong towny. Super nice guy and he even bought us all a round. The day started off well.

Outside the Olive Gardern there was a garage sale going on in a parking lot for some reason. We bought a game and a hat. My asian friend found a hat that says Jackie Chan in huge letters on the front. We thought it was a pretty funny hat for him. Here is the game.

Some people were posting on some other boards about me being broke. I don't really care to respond to them, because its ridiculous, but I might as well explain what my plan with poker is. I haven't really made it a secret that I have been struggling in 2007. Honestly, I blame it mostly on my head. It's just not in the right place to be competitive at the levels I used to play. That's fine with me. I'm just not dedicated to actually playing poker like I once was. However, I still want to make videos for cardrunners, so I'm definitely not going to quit. I also want to enjoy poker like I used to. It's been so stressful for me when I've played lately that it's driving me crazy. I don't want that. When I played on Friday, I actually had fun. It was nice to play to win and not to make money. MTTs were always my favorite form of poker and I've probably only played one or two this entire year up until Friday. So basically what my plan is is to play low stakes and mtts. However, I'm not just going to be "grinding it" down there. I want it to be a challenge. My plan is to completely retool my game. I don't think that LAG play works as well these days. I would like to become more of a TAG player. I've basically played at 28/21 my entire career and I would like to become more of a low 20s/high teens player. I also want to work on understanding Omaha more.

Long story short, I'm completely changing my approach to the game. I don't have the drive to win at the higher games anymore. I will be blogging more about poker as I work on my game at the lower stakes. I think it should be pretty interesting.

I really had nothing to do today and I wanted to play some low stakes poker and mtts for fun and to kill some time. I played 3 mtts and then just 4-5 tabled .5/1 plo. I gotta admit that my MTT game is way off. I'm going to play a decent amount before I get to vegas, because I really want to do well in some of the wsop events. The good thing that I remembered was how much dead money there is in those tournys. I saw some miserable plays. I played for a few hours, and won about $50 total. That included my mtts buyins and also a $100 sng that I didn't make the money in. I god pretty deep in one of the mtts and managed to just miss the FT. I really misplayed a hand towards the end in a blind to blind confortation. I think I'm going to watch some of AJ's videos on here and regain a feel for those things. I wouldn't mind pulling down a decent score sometime soon.

We had our senior barcrawl for my frat the other day. Pretty much everyone came out and it was a really good time. My only complaint was that no one had classes the next day so the bars got really crowded later in the night and it was impossible to get in anywhere. I guess that was to be expected. We also did our "senior wills" last night. Basically seniors sit in the middle of a big circle and people go around and tell ridiculous stories from the past 4 years. The seniors then pass down some of their frat stuff. There were some great stories. That's pretty much the last thing I'll do with the frat while I'm here. I can't believe we are seniors and its all almost over. Pretty damn sad if you ask me.

On the bright side, we got some great things going on at cardrunners behind the scenes. I'm really excited about what we are doing and I think the site will be vastly improved in a few months time. Taylor and I just started renting an office in chicago too. I can't wait to get back home and dive head first into all of this stuff. It's really just too hard to get a ton done at school. I plan on really getting a lot done during the day when I'm in the office.