CARDRUNNERS

Usually I rely on Sunday to get a lot of stuff done. That has been hard lately with all of the good TV on. Take yesterday for instance, there was a Bulls game on when I woke up, then we watched some Baseball games. I have MLB.TV and we got my laptop rigged up so that my 46" LCD TV works as a monitor. The games look suprisingly good. I would say that they don't look much worse than a game in non HD. It's pretty impressive. It's also awesome to be able to switch between any game that's playing at any time. After some baseball we watched an old planet earth that I hadn't seen. Then we went to dinner. There is a steakhouse around here that has a "student special." You can get a steak, potato, texas toast, and unlimited salad bar for $9. Not bad. After dinner it was time for the two new Planet Earth's. I had to skip out on the 2nd one for a Cardrunners meeting. It was "jungles" and looked pretty sweet from what I saw, so I'll have to go back and watch it. Then after that there was a new Sopranos and Entourage. Again, I liked them both. I like the direction The Sopranos is going. They are making it look like Tony could go to jail or get whacked. I don't know which one will happen. I'd probably prefer that he gets whacked.

Anyway, you can see how I wasn't that productive. I did get most of my HW done at the end of the night, but there was a lot more I could have gotten done. Luckily, I don't typically need to go to class on Monday's. Today, I've already been really productive and I expect it to continue all day. It feels good to get a lot done in one day.

With poker, I just continue to struggle. As much as I want my head to be in the game, it's just not. I just have too many distractions going on now and I'm not giving the game my all. I also think I have some leaks that I need to plug. I want to sit down and watch some CR vids and also really look at some of my bad sessions in PT when I get a chance. I guess my plan now (which was originally my plan a few months ago and I got away from it) is to just not really play until the end of the school year and then really get back into grinding some. I will have a good amount of time to play in May. I also think that in either May or June I'm going to do another challenge like the one I did in August. I only have about 2-3 weeks left of school, so I'm going to concentrate on making sure I graduate. Last week, I wasn't paying enough attention to school and forgot to turn in a paper (well actually forgot to write a paper) that was worth 10% of my grade. OOps. I might get my first D ever, b/c I'm already doing shitty in that class.

As a side note, my friends and I had a Mustache barcrawl the other night and it made for some funny pictures. Here's one with two of my friends.

I haven't been posting much. I'm not sure why. I've been playing a decent amount. I just haven't gotten around to posting at all. I'm just going to list off some random shit:

1. I need to not play above 5/10. I have been doing well at 5/10 but losing my profits at 10/20. PLO has been kicking my ass too. I'm just going to focus on 5/10nlhe. Otherwise, I might be doomed to just keep treading water.

2. My fantasy baseball team is full of guys batting like assholes lately. I'm not happy about that. I know yesterday they batted 1/17. I have some good players too.

3. New Sopranos and Entrouage were pretty good. I have diminished expectations for both shows because of the seasons they are in. My theory is that nearly every show peaks by the 2nd or 3rd season. I believe that entourage peaked in the 2nd and Sopranos in the 3rd. I guess if we catch a good season its just a bonus at this point. I want more partying in Entourage this season. Its the best when they are just being ballers. Sopranos should have a lot of action which should make for an interesting season. I'll be dissapointed if Tony doesn't die at the end.

4. Easter is a good holiday. I love Easter brunch.

5. Planet Earth in HD is one of the sickest things I have seen on TV. If you haven't watched any of it yet, you need to. I have only seen one full episode and that was shallow seas. I now have a new life goal to go scuba diving in a coral reef. Particularly, I'd like to go to the ones off Indondesia (Must diverse in world). Taylor and I have tossed around the idea of going to Asia later this year. It's something I really want to do and now that I have the idea of going scuba diving, I just want to go that much more.

6. I puked for the first time in almost 3 years this past weekend. I am not happy about that. I had gotten to the point where I assumed I just didn't puke anymore. That's a nice thing to haveh going for you. The problem was that since I assumed I would never puke, I stopped making the move to a trash can if I felt uneasy at all. This lead to me yaking all over my friend's basement floor at 3am. We went out to the bars in my home town and met up with a ton of people from high school and even junior high. Needless to say, many shots were done. I wouldn't say I was so drunk that I'd think puking would happen, but I guess I was.

7. I tend to watch some really shitty TV when I'm hungover and laying on the coach. I watched the movie Mean Girls for some reason the day after my puking. I think mostly becausue Lindsey Lohan is hot and I also like Tina Fey a lot. It was actually a pretty funny movie. I can't say I'm proud to have watched it though.

8. I haven't really been living up to most of my New Year's resolutions. I guess that's to be expected though. I haven't had much time to read or put towards learning spanish. I also have only made it to Church once this year (easter sunday). I did try to go on Ash Wednesday but the church was so crowded when we got there that we couldn't even stand. We went to a bar instead. I have been working out a lot though. In fact, I've really kind of changed my lifestyle to a healthier one. I've started to eat healthy, I'm on a much better sleep schedule and I've been going to the gym about 5 days a week. I've managed to get up to 180lbs, which is pretty good considering I was about 155lbs last summer (I'm 6'2). I've kind of hit a plateau a bit lately though. My brother is on creatine and getting huge. I'm thinking about starting to use that, but I'm not sure.

9. I can't wait to graduate. I'm just getting more and more sick of having to do bullshit school stuff. I also really want to get out to Vegas. I'm really pumped to live in vegas this summer.

So that's basically what's going through my head lately. I'm gonna try to blog more regularly this week about some of my sessions.

I honestly feel very good about how I'm playing NLHE right now. I'm making some mistakes here and there, but I think my decision making has been pretty damn good lately for the most part. I just put in a session where I played only nlhe and I did quite well. I won about 3 buyins and I lost a monster pot w/ a setup hand. Me and a guy were having a great HU match. He had 3k he got up on me early but then I just grinded back. I then lost a huge pot and he had a 5k stack to my 1k. When he ended up quitting me he was down to about 1500. Below are two hands I saved from the session.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?970629
He was 3 betting a lot and we were somewhat deep. I also knew that i could take some pots away as I had been doing it a bit. I didn't want to overdo it though and I hadn't done it in awhile when this hand came up. I bet the flop b/c I figured he'd fold a lot of his range there. When he called I wasn't too worried b/c he had called some flop bets pretty light earlier. I decided to make another stab on the turn. When he called there I was pretty much done unless the flush hit. I figured I might bluff the flush if the right card came. The 3h was perfect. I didn't think he had an ace from the way the hand played out so it made it very difficult to call b/c the straight and the flush are out there now. Luckily, he folded.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?970642
Nasty setup hand. If I can win after losing hands like this, I'm a very happy guy. I was honestly a bit worried about 810, but there is just no way I can get away from my hand there.

Played for like 2-3 hours today. I was down about 2 buyins early, but I ended up 1 buyin. I feel good about my game. There is only one hand I can think of that I misplayed and it was getting all in pre w/ AK vs AA, so it wasn't that bad. In retrospect, the guy was too nitty to be stacking off with anything that AK fares well against.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?945834
I liked this hand. It was the 3rd hand dealt in a HU match so I didn't really want to repop it pre. I find that the first repop in a HU game often gets the guy to fold. I figured i'd play it slow and proceed with caution. The flop was pretty much perfect. When he called my c/r I was thinking he probably had a decent queen. When the 5 comes on the turn adn I push it sure looks like I have a draw. I think he has trouble folding any good queen. I think he's def gotta call w/ AQ like he did. Ship it.

Yesterday was my first day back in the gym after not working out for like 10 days due to Spring Break. Over spring break I ate terribly and basically just layed around all day. I definitely could feel the effects when I got back in the gym. I decided to do legs yesterday and that was probably dumb. I jumped right into squats and leg presses. I did fine w/ those, but about 10 min later I was completley dead. I did a few other excercises but had to leave after about 35 min because I was so tired from the squatting. I normally workout for 75-90 min without much of a problem. I felt kind of shitty for like 30 min, but afterwards I felt really good. I think today I should be able to get a full workout in. Going now.

There was a thread today on CR about me being busto. Obviously the OP doesn't really know his facts. However, I have barely been playing lately, so I can understand why some people might think that. I want to address this so that there is no confusion. I am a teacher on this site and it's important to me that people realize I am a winning player.

I am on a downswing. I panicked and took out too much money when Party was closing. I had most of my BR on party and frankly I just had too much money online to not panic. I did fine for a few months, but keeping a small BR online finally caught up to me around the end of 2006. I hit a bad downswing and since then I haven't had a proper BR online. I have played some since then, but not much. I had been wanting to play less poker for some time. I'm in my last year of college. I've also played so much poker for the past 3 years that I was finally starting to get legitimately burned out. When I lost most of my remaining money online, I knew it was a good time to take a step back from the game. That's what I did. Since I started taking the break, I have really been enjoying life. It's nice to have fun this last semester and not worry about all the stress that revolves around poker. I always liked to claim that poker didn't affect my personal life much, but it's almost impossible for that to be true. If you are winning or losing 10K+ in a day, it's going to affect you. I like not thinking about that stuff for once. I'm also taking a lot of hours this semester so that I can graduate in time. I've normally taken about 14 hours, but this semester I have 20. Furthermore, we've been working on a lot of backend things at CR to improve the site for you guys. I have been enjoying putting more time into CR opposed to playing as of late.

With all that being said, I still love the game of poker. I will never stop playing completely. I just felt this was the best time for me to take the break I had been wanting to take. In addition, I wasn't too crazy transferring 40k+ back online with the state of the industry. I have since decided that I think it is ok and I have had 40k put back online so that I have the proper bankroll. It's just impossible to take the game seriously when you don't have the right bankroll online. This has all been an important lesson about bankroll management to me.

I honestly don't think I even need to get on here and defend myself, but at the same time, it can't hurt. I don't need people going around and saying I'm busto, because that is just utterly ridiculous. I have invested large sums of money that will never be touched, I'm making good money from CR, and I will continue to make good money playing poker. I realize that my reputation is important as a teacher at CR so that is why I am addressing this.

I will start posting my results as I get back into the 5/10 games more. I know I will be playing a lot of 5/10+ starting in May. I will try to play as much as possible in April.

It's 830am and I"m sitting in Taylor's condo right now. His cleaning lady is here so I was woken up pretty early. It doesn't matter much, because we have a meeting with a real estate person at 10am so I had to be up soon anyway. We are going to go out looking for office space for us to start using for CR when I graduate. I'm really looking forward to having an office and getting up and going to work on CR everyday. I feel like we will be able to get a lot more accomplished. We've got a few other CR things to get done today, so I'm just skipping class and heading back to school tonight. I'm not missing much anyway since it's the first day back from spring break.

My spring break ended up well. I always feel like trips to tropical destinations are best if they are limited to about 5 days. Every time I stay longer, I really start to feel like I'm ready to go home. Staying out in the sun and drinking a lot can really take a toll on you. In the future, I'm going to try to always limit it to 5 or less. Regardless of being ready to go home, I still had a great time. It was an awesome way to spend my last spring break in college. It was just the typical college spring break that everyone imagines when they think of spring breaks. I even saw a bunch of footage of South Padre on The O'Reilly factor when I was flipping through channels. I'm pretty sure my friends and I were on in the background too, because they were filming on the days we were there and right around where we were hanging out everyday. Bill was basically talking about how America's youth (particularly women) are too promiscuous and how it didn't used to be like that. I can't say I really agree with some of the stuff he was saying.

I said in an earlier post that I was going to be playing more poker in March. It didn't really happen. I was pretty busy the week before spring break and then I was gone for a week, so that basically cut out two weeks right there. I do want to get back to playing more, but there is a good amoutn of stuff I need to get done to make sure I graduate. Obviously, graduating is the clear priority. I'm going to try to play more in April, but I'm not so sure I won't repeat my play in the last two months. I will graduate in early May. I think I'll be done like May 8 or something like that. After that, I'm sure I'll start playing a lot again. I know I'l play a good amount in Vegas. I may play live more than online though depending on what I think of the live games. I think it would be cool to get a lot better at my live game, especially with a lot of the online games playing harder right now.