down time

I think it almost a week since I last posted. Work has been a real bear lately. My PM did such a bad job estimating time for my project that I had to work an extra 20 hours this past week. On top of that, one of my poker buddies died this past weekend - car accident with a drunk driver. Great guy too. Loved playing poker with him and he's funny. Never met anyone who didn't like him.

So I was thinking about dedicating my WSOP run this year to him. Sort of in rememberence of him and to really bring to light that I'm lucky enough to pursue what I want in life. So I think I'll do that.

PS is now offering online satellites to the WSOP already. So I'll be on the lookout to qualify this year. I think my game has improved immensely since August in terms of knowledge and my game has gone deeper. I've also discovered another hole in my game. Game speed is something I never thought of. This is what I mean.

Let's say you flop trips or even a straight. Now, how do you think most people would play the hand? They'd slow-play the hand and hope someone aggressive will build the pot for them. Most of the time, that would be correct if you have someone who is aggressive. We understand that situation of "Slowplaying". But what does it mean to play "fast" then? It would be the opposite - betting aggressively when you don't have much of a hand. I think most players would play that way. I sure did. I'd try to represent when I didn't.

But how about if someone good picked up on this tendency? You'd make no money on your big hands and lose on your weaker hands. So I realized that it's a good strategy to switch to playing your good hands fast once in a while. Especially if you shown down a hand you played slow and took down a big pot. The opposite also tends to work very well for me. I think it's more difficult to pull off because you're playing a weak hand slow and so it's a very natural tendency to begin with. I think it requires another skill to assess your opponents' relative strength in a particular hand. You'll have to read them more intently.

For example, if I have a very poor hand out of position with an Ace on the flop and against two other players and they both check, I see another free card. If it turns another Ace, that's a good card for me. It's unlikely that either of them have an Ace. If either one bets at it, especially the late position player, I'm guessing he only has two pair and playing their position. Me calling is going to send a message to both players that I'm actually strong which will let me know where the middle player stands. If they call, I'll check the river and give up the pot. But in many instances the middle player will fold and I'll be heads up. Regardless of the river card, I'm going to make a substantial bet, like half the pot. At this point, the other player has to believe I've had the Ace the entire time and will have to fold unless he's a novice or a calling station. If that's the case, I wouldn't even bother setting up such an elaborate scheme because it's all wasted on someone who wouldn't understand what I'm doing. A good player, on the other hand, would have picked up on the fact that I slow-play my good hands. And that's exactly how I played this hand - slow; but for a different reason - I was actually weak.

As you can see this type of play is more difficult to set up than playing your monsters fast. Everything in the hand has to go the right way and allow you to tell a consistent story for your opponent to put the pieces together and fold the best hand.

Anyway, that's another dimension definitely worth considering when playing. Not just tight/loose and passive/aggressive.

Anyway, a quick recap of the last week regarding my online experiences.
I went on about a 6 game losing streak. I decided to play the $50 sng and lost all of them. I think I'll have to work my way up a little. My $30 record is pretty good. I think I'm over .500 so I just need to build.

So I've backed down to the $30 and have been winning again. Wierd but two distinct games involved very tight play. I mean everyone folded all the time. My usually tight game won't work because if everyone plays tight and the blinds get to $100/$200 with antes, there will be no more poker left to play. It will be an all-in fest. The only way around this is to steal blinds and build enough of a lead that once everyone goes into "all-in" mode, I should be able to stay ahead of everyone and default into the money. Which is exactly what happenned. I played more aggressive and they all folded their blinds.

However, the trend has been squeaking into the money. I've seen a lot of bonehead plays and all I can say is, "Thank you!" A bunch of thirds and seconds. I took a first and so I think I'm better at minimizing my losing streaks. Had those $50 sng been $30, I'd have an extra $100 in my account. And so my losing streaks aren't as long now. I'd sometimes go 10-14 losing game streaks.


Anyway, I might not into all the tournament details anymore. I'm not sure how beneficial they are to read. Let me know.