CARDRUNNERS

Last month I had a long stretch where I was break even. Actually, it started at the end of August and extended through much of September. It wasn't until I started playing PLO that I went on a very hot run and ended up having one of my better months. Right after Aruba I got into a rut again. I figured that since I was dropping in stakes due to the legislation that I might not get back to even for the month. I got to thinking and wondered why I had gotten away from PLO after I got home from Aruba. It didnt' make a ton of sense since I was beating the game so well just a few weeks ago. Anyway, it looks like PLO is going to save this month for me too. I was stuck almost 35k at my peak and now I am up around 18k. I have been absolutely crushing the PLO games. I have played mostly 5/10 but I've played a little higher too. I like playing 5/10, because its a very swingy game and it can get ugly at the higher limits. For instance, during a session yesterday I dropped 5 buyins to a guy HU in like 20 min. I wasn't really playing bad I just was getting in bad spot. Luckily, my other tables were going better and I won that session. The thing is that people just make a ton of pretty huge mistakes in PLO. Those mistakes all add up. Also, I think that people tend to tilt easier in PLO than NLHE. I have been using a super aggressive style to help encourage tilt by my opponents. I raise and reraise a ton and I basically just mash the bet pot button. This is a style that I have deemed a bet pot monkey style. I think it's more effective in PLO than NLHE. I would never play like this in NLHE. I'm hoping to get up about 30k this month. That would be a great comeback in my opinion.

I had a pretty solid weekend. We had a golf event yesterday. Basically it's a philanthropy event put on by a sorority where you go out and play golf. YOu are supposed to get 4 girl caddies for every group. We got fucked over and only had 2 girls, one of which was one of my group members girlfriend. They also weren't drinking. My friend sean and i decided to ditch our group and go find some better people to hang out with. We ran into my friend Carrie who was caddying with two of her roommates that are pretty cool. We ended up just hanging out with them most of the time. We basically just drank a lot and hit a few shots every hole. We usually either hit a drive or a ball from 100 yards out. All in all, it was a good time.

I didn't take many pictures, but I said I'd start putting some more pictures in here. So here are the 3 pics I have from the golf.

That's me driving a cart.

One of the caddies in the group we joined. She's a pretty hilarious girl and managed to crash the cart into a building because she was going backwards and not looking.

My roommate, Sean

I played a long session of PLO last night. There isn't a ton to do here at night since I'm with my family, so after dinner I've mostly just been grinding. I mentioned in my last post that I was going to move down and work on 2/4. The thing is, I pretty much just crush 2/4 PLO. I'm not sure why I struggle so much at the higher games, but maybe my game is just suited best against weaker players. The nice part about 2/4 is that it's no stress and very good money can still be made.

I did notice something interesting yesterday when I was playing. I was crushing some guys that just didn't have a chance. I was playing very aggressively and in complete control of the match. I don't think I was ever in the spot at the higher games where I didn't have a chance, but I wasn't always in control of the matches. I think control is extremely important in all forms of poker, but especially PLO. PLO is an incredibly swingy game where a lot of emotions and game flow come into play. Since your opponent can represent so many hands in PLO, you need to have a good read on him to do well HU. It's hard to do that properly if he is in complete control. I think that at the higher games it's a mix of just having more money at stake and playing against better opponent. Regardless, the last two sessions at 2/4 have convinced me there is no reason to play higher.

By the way, I've sustained 20bb/100 at HU for a fairly significant sample size (25k hands) at 2/4. Maybe it won't stay quite that high, but 15+ is very doable IMO. My 6max game is what I've been working on. I'm definitely plugging leaks lately. I think one of my biggest issues is not laying down hands enough. It can be very hard to fold a 2nd nut hand, but you're gonna run into the nuts so often in PLO.

I should also note that my VPIP is too high for HU. It was because of an opponent I was playing on 2 tables for a lot of hands who was pretty bad. We were deep at times and I was just looking to play as many pots as possible.

Hawaii is still great. I went surfing again yesterday. It was definitely harder on my own. I didn't have someone to help me spot good waves, push me off and just help me with my form. I think I was sitting too far up on my board early on when I was surfing on my own. I started to get it down again by the end though. Surfing really takes it out of you. You have to paddle a ton and it just takes a lot of your body strength to do everything. I'm fairly sore today. I want to get out and suft again tomorrow before I head home.

Here is a pic from scuba diving the other day with me and my brother in it.

I love this place. I'm definitely coming back next winter if I can find some people to come with me.

Last night I wasn't feeling particularly well. I've felt stressed out lately and that's not something that usually happens to me very much. I decided to play a little bit of HU PLO on Full Tilt. I played for about an hour against a guy that seems to be a regular at HU. I lost 2 buyins to him at 3/6 after the super bowl, but I was playing completely horrible. I really sat down and tried to focus on the game this time, and I fared better this time. We played a relatively low variance match, where we only got it all in on the flop/turn probably 4 or 5 times in an hour. I ended out up about 1.5 BI's, which was okay by me.

Some thoughts on the session:

-It's cool to play a new game. One of my roommates walked by and asked "What are you doing??" He knows that hold'em has two hole cards and when he saw four he was confused. He also knows that I pretty much look for an edge in everything I do (within reason) and that is why I don't play a ton of games other than NLHE.

-It was really interesting to genuinely have no idea what to do in certain situations. I made some mistakes, and I think folding the button when reraised preflop is usually a mistake (help here?). My favorite part of PLO is that you can literally always represent a hand. If you don't play too crazily OOP, you can pretty much always get the guy to fold on Ax or Kx flops by firing a second barrel, as long as you don't overdo it. Also, reraising OOP with hands like AAxy KKxy can get you into some trouble, it's probably best to reraise more mediocre hands so that opponents can't bluff raise you as often when the flop comes 873 or something.

-I think I could become a great PLO player. In some ways poker is poker, and I have great natural poker instincts. In other ways, the games are very different, but I have always had great discipline and motivation when learning new games. I suspect I could beat most 2/4 PLO HU games, and probably up to 5/10 6max. It'd be nice to be a winning 10/20PLO player, so that I could either shortstack the biggest games when they were good, or fire up a few extra PLO tables when the NLHE action is dead.

-I think it's important that aspiring pros learn a couple games. I would recommend specializing in one game, but hten spending at least 1-2 days per week playing a different game. I think just using your brain in a different way (ie thinking about PLO instead of NLHE) will help you improve all of your games, as long as your are disciplined and objective with your decision making. For example, there are more playable PLO hands than NLHE hands in most situations, so you need to make sure you don't develop bad NLHE habits. I also think it's proper to play with a much lower AF in PLO than NLHE, where as in NLHE, it's almost never right to have a low to medium AF (let's say, <2).

Just some thoughts. It's been a tough week, I'm going to Champaign tomorrow with Andrew, Mork, and Justin (J_V) to watch the Illinois/Indiana basketball game. We're coming home Friday morning, then I'm going to Wisconsin with Melissa and my extended family. We rent a cabin up in the Dells one weekend per year and this is the weekend. It's nice to see my cousins, aunts, and uncles, so I'm looking forward to that. Next week I am headed to Santa Barbara with Andrew, cts, stinger, peachy, schneids, and ezra to stay at Brian's place for a few days. It should be a pretty fun trip, I'm looking forward to seeing Brian's house on the beach. There will probably be a lot of poker work to have done too, as we have two meetings in LA that monday. Finally, I am headed to Miami the wednesday after that for a long weekend with my girlfriend. We are staying at the Shore Club, which I'm told is a great place to stay, and are just going to try to relax and enjoy the beach/weather. I'll try to leave my laptop in my room as much as possible and just get some R and R.

I'll probably try to update this on Friday, but might not be back until Sunday. Until then, later.

tc