Almost forgot - Vegas!

I can't believe I forgot to write about this in the last post. In the second week of April, I went out to Vegas to play in a couple of the preliminary events for the WPT Championship at Bellagio. This was probably my best live poker experience to date for so many reasons. I played in three of the preliminary events: the $1500, $2000, and the $2500 event, as well as some other side tournaments and cash games. I wasn't able to get anything going in the $1500 event and busted during the third level. The $2000 event I was playing really well because I was able to be aggressive and take advantage of my weak table draw (which was very rare for these events as they were packed with both online and live pros) until this crazy hand came up with the one guy at the table who had me covered. I picked up AJ suited in hearts UTG+1 and made a standard raise and was only called by an older guy directly to my left. The flop came Ace high with one heart, and my continuation bet was called by the older gentlemen. The turn brought another heart, giving me top pair and the nut flush draw. Once, I made a solid bet and was called. The river brought another heart making my hand (so I thought) to which I bet about 3/4 the pot, and after tanking, the old man moved in on me. I of course insta called and was in shock when I saw the man turn over his straight flush. He was chasing a gutshot on the flop, which ended up in him hitting runner-runner straight flush. So not much I could do there so I went and watched Prison Break (excellent show) for about five hours in my room. The $2500 was my favorite event because I not only cashed, but I got to play with J.C. Tran to my right for about 8 hours, as well taking out Eric Lindgren. Another really cool part was playing with some of the top internet guys like Jared "TheWacoKid" Hamby (the eventual winner) and J.C. Alvarado. As for my results, I managed to make it to the bubble, but with a very short stack. Luckily for me, playing the short stack is my specialty and was able to hang around to make it into the money and then actually slowly accumulated some chips and doubled up once or twice to get me 11th place and $7000. I was still extremely disappointed at the time, because I not only bubbled the final table, but I was right at my pinnacle of the day in chips when I busted. Nevertheless, I very easily could not have made the money so I was pleased once the initial loss factor was over. All in all, I ended up down only about $500 dollars which was very pleasing for not getting a big score in these high buy-in events. I look forward to playing in more preliminary events like this until I can comfortably afford the $10k buy-in events. I will post ahead of time next time I plan on playing another live event.

A much needed update

Well, I must admit it has been a long time since I have posted and I can't really attribute it to anything but laziness and a lack of good things to post about. So let's try to sum things up. I of course have been playing every Sunday that I have the chance to and still with very little success. My poker game plan since I started back up was to concentrate on tournaments of various sizes to grind out a profit and stay afloat until I managed to land a big score in one of the Sunday majors. This game plan is still perfectly fine in my opinion and there are quite a few people who implement it successfully, but it wasn't working for me. I was managing to roughly break even during the week but I would lose on average anywhere from $200 to $800 on Sundays due all the larger buy-in tournaments. I know this is standard variance, but I also realize I don't have the proper bank roll to comfortably survive this type of variance. In retrospect, I should've been concentrating more on Satelliting in as many of these tournaments as possible to reduce the overall cost, rather than my usual wake up at noon and play one satellite with a 50% success rate for only one tournament.
Obviously since I am talking about the pit falls of my old game plan, that must mean I have a new one - and that is true. My new game plan is to play cash games during the week with a few small buy-in tournaments thrown in and to concentrate on the big tourney's (including satellites to them) on the weekend. I have chosen to do this for two reasons: 1)By playing cash games, I can maintain a relatively steady income during the week to pay off the bigger tournaments on the weekend and 2)Playing cash games makes you a better player overall. One of the main realizations I have come to from my tournament experience is that you don't need to be good to be successful. There is basically a formula that can be followed that will give you success in the long run, and playing high volumes of this style can make you a tournament pro. I don't have the time or the desire to play for 18 hours a day to be successful with tournaments, so cash games are a perfect substitute. I have been 4-tabling $1/2 NL with some pretty good success the past week. Here are my results for the past 8 days:
Of these 2,000 hands, I've played about 1,400 of them in the past two days. This is obviously way too small of a sample size to indicate whether or not I can truly beat these levels. A better indicator will be when I have collected 20,000+ hands, but I am fairly confident I will be moving up to the next level by mid summer or sooner. Also, as a benefit of the cash games, I expect my hand reading abilities to improve, which should directly improve my tournament results. Let's hope this all works out and I will continuously have things to post about.