CARDRUNNERS

I love Christmas. I hope everyone has a great Christmas or whatever other holiday you celebrate this time of year. This truly is the greatest time of the year in my opinion. However, I'm pretty disapointed in the weather this year. I'd like for it to be cold and snowy. It's been like 40 degrees everyday lately. Oh well, worse things could happen. I'm with my family now in Michigan. We are in Detroit until the 26th and then we'll go up to our vacation house in the northern part of lower michigan. I'll be there until the 30th. My family is staying up north until the 2nd, but I wanted to be in Chicago for New Year's, so I'm flying home on the 30th.

We had "our" christmas yesterday. We decided to open our presents at home before we came to Michigan. In the past, we always celebrated christmas morning at my grandpa's, but he passed over a year ago and we have sold his house. Therefore, we are staying at my aunt's house. I didn't ask for much this year. I mostly wanted a leather coat and I knew that would pretty much take up all my gifts. That was ok with me. The coat I got is nice. I'm deciding if I'm going ot keep it or exchange it for another one. I'm gonna try it out the next few days and see if I like the look. I also got the new Nas cd. It's great. The new DMX cd isn't as good as I'd hoped.

Bears won today, but looked awfully shitty. They looked bad last week too. I hope they can get it together. If they go to the super bowl, Taylor and I are going to go.

Over the next few days, I'm going to come up with some new year's resolutions. I can tell you my first resolution is to actually stick with my resolutions I come up with this year. I'm usually pretty bad about that. I feel like New Year's is a great chance to make some improvements in your life. I really am working on thing like working out more, reading more, etc, so I'm going to include those in my resolutions and actually stick with them. I know another thing I'm going to focus on is playing a lot less poker in the next 5 months. I only have one semester left of school and therefore, I just don't want to be playing poker. Anyway, I'm going to make some more specific goals. I'll share them with you come New Year's.

I think that it can be very hard to understand the variance that is actually associated with a LAG style of poker. I also think that the variance is much higher today than it was a year or two ago. The players, overall, are just better nowadays. I think taht the games at all levels are still beatable by good players, but not as much as they once were (although the highest games may be playing softer lately).

If there's one thing the last 3 months have taught me, its to play in your bankroll. I thought I already knew that. Of course, as always, ego comes into play with poker. For a few reasons, I felt like I didn't need to play in my bankroll. I felt like I was good enough to play higher than I my bankroll allowed. I also told myself, I didn't care if I went broke online. Which, at times, I really didn't. That's pretty dumb reasoning though. I was watching cts, stinger, em2, etc crush the highest games and wanted to do the same. That led me to taking shots. Now I can look back over the last 3 months and see my longest streak of nearly break even poker. I had some good runs and some terrible ones. The fact is that the effect of variance is an incredibly important aspect of playing winning poker. If you don't respect it, you are asking to get burned.

-10 buyin swings are going to happen. In fact, I'd say they will probably happen once every month or two. You need to be rolled to not let that negatively affect you.

Today, I swung down 4 buyins in 20 minutes. I gotta admit that at 10/20+ that probably would have tilted me. I wasn't playing bad to lose those buyins. It was just variance rearing its ugly head. However, since I was at 5/10 this time, I kept my cool and ended up in the profit less than an hour later.

This goes along with confidence as well. I always feel like I have an edge at 5/10. At some of the higher games, I would often feel somewhat scared while I was playing. It wasnt a fear of losing a buyin of that size. Even 10k pots don't phase me anymore. It's the fear of getting outplayed. I was always worried the solid players at the table would outplay me. That fear often led to them outplaying me. It's essential you believe in your abilities at the limit you play.

I guess what I'm asking you to do is to take a step back and see if that's the case for you. Are you playing at the limit where your ability and winrate is maximized? I can say that I cost myself a lot of money this year by playing higher. My maximized winrate is, and likely always has been, at 5/10nl. However, I did learn a lot while playing higher games. That is something to keep in mind. If you are playing only for the challenge and want to improve, then its an entirely different story. If you want to make the most money though, that doesn't necessarily mean playing the highest stakes.

Yesterday I head out to the city at like 230pm. I was supposed to be there earlier so that Tay and i could go out to get a sushi lunch, but I overslept. oh well. It takes about 45 min to get there and it's pretty easy directions. I think I'll probably go to Taylors place at least once more to work on CR stuff. We got a pretty good amoutn of stuff done, but not everything. There are a ton of things that go on behind the scenes that we constantly have to make decisions about. We spent a lot of our time discussing the best ways to handle different situations. I think we made good progress. After a few hours of working on that, we played some fifa. We went 1-1 at the time. I would show my dominance later though.

Our next plan was to go to eat at Benihana. I have a feeling that we were influenced by the latest Office. We were all pumped to do saki shots and just eat a lot of good food. We looked up the closest one and took a cab to where we thought it would be. However, it was nowhere to be found. We walked around and didn't find it. We asked some guys working in subway. THey had never even heard of it. We even tried calling some friends to google it, but no one was at home. We finally threw in the towel and went to some sushi place called Ra. It was pretty good. We ordered a ton of stuff and had a few drinks as well.

We were planning on meeting up with some people, but we didn't know where we were going yet, so we just headed out to Linkin Park area and went into the first bar we saw. It was a chill bar called the Lions Pub. We had a few drinks there and my friend, Brad and his girlfriend, Meera, showed up. After that we went down the street to a bar called John Barleycorn (at least i think thats what it was called). A bunch of girls that lived in my neighborhood as I was growing up and hadn't seen in awhile met up with us there. It was good to see them. One of the girls I hadn't seen in probably 6 years. It's always fun shooting the shit about old times. I also ran into some friends from U of I there. Apparently, some girl was having a birthday party so a ton of girls from her sorority were there. I didn't expect that, so it was a nice surprise. Earlier in the night it was looking like we wouldn't have many people to hang out with. I'm glad it ended up like it did.

After the bars I fleeced Tay in Fifa. I beat him twice in a row and by wide margins. We decided we were gonna play some low limit poker on UB. We went with 25nl. We basically ended up going allin almost every hand. I ran my stack up to $300 on one table, but lost most of it back by the end. I think I dumped about $250 or so. Kind of dumb, but it was fun. I hadn't gone crazy at a low stakes table in a long time. It reminded me of the old days when I played poker less for money and more for enjoyment.

Awhile back, my friends and I wrote a pretty dumb rap song. It was basically about getting in trouble for drinking and smoking in high school. It's become kind of a cult classic. I have run into people I've never met before that can recite the lyrics to my song. It's pretty crazy. Anyway, the girls I hung out with last night know the song and kept rapping it. Taylor suggested I put it up on my blog. It's obv a bad song, but people seem to enjoy it. I'm probably a dumbass for making this public, but I really don't care.

http://www.cardrunners.com/cms...cfm/path/84140/149119/

So the time has finally come where I can't really put off studying much longer. I have a test on both tuesday and wed and then two tests on thursday. However, this time of the year is always when I waste more time than ever on stupid shit. For instance, I end up reading pocketfives a lot rather than studying. I hardly read that site normally, but come finals time, i'm there many times each day. I also end up talking to random people on aim that i dont normally talk. I go to facebook a decent amount. You get the idea. I'm just terrible at time management when it comes to studying. This year my tests don't really mean anything either. Two of my four classes I'm taking pass/fail. That means I just gotta pass the finals and im good. I've never failed a final in my life. Of the other two classes, one is incredibly easy. The remaining class is Accounting 405. That final will be hard. It could possibly be very hard. I need to do decent on the test to get a B. I wouldnt really care if I got a C though. Also, theres only so much I can study for that class. Regardless, I'll be glad when this week is over. It will be nice to get back home and relax for a month. I'm also really excited for the Bamahas trip in early Jan.

My friends and I made our New Years Eve plans yesterday. We decided to go to a bar called Mcgee's in Linkin Park. It's supposed to be a fun bar, but I've never been there. The deal was $80 for open bar from 9-130. Decent. Also, if we got 25 people to go wed get our own booth. I'm pretty sure well easily get 25. At first, I wasn't so sure, but weve been telling a lot of people about this since we made our reservations. Most people hadn't figured out what they were doing yet so they were cool with going to Mcgee's. We were just giong to stay in a hotel downtown, but we couldn't find any cheap ones to stay in. We decided were gonna get a 22 person limo to drive us from the bar back to my friends house in the suburbs. We'll have an afterhours there and then just pass out there at some point. It should be a great night.