The last week has been full of ups and downs

Since my last post last week a lot has happened. I left you wondering about a bonus (actually I wrote another post, about O8, but that seemed to be lost by blogger...) and since then I've lost some money on Party, had thanksgiving, had my first casino poker trip ever and won most of the money back on Party again.

What does this all mean? Well, one thing at a time.

I took the Party bonus with the demands of 7x raked hands (525) and seven days to clear thinking I'd probably get some playing in on thanksgiving and the weekend and this would be no problem; it started out like that, some 200+ raked hands on thursday but turned out to be much harder work than I expected. Friday became a last-minute casino visit with my boss (more in a minute) so I lost that day and then, as much as I wanted to be motivated to play I never really felt in the mood. So I kind of forced 100 odd hands per day, never really enjoying the game buy because I was down maybe $50 at that point I felt like I needed the bonus to even my losses out.

Yesterday was when I realised what was going wrong and it hinges on table selection. I was looking at my sessions in poker tracker and saw that I had had a few big losses ($25-30) and more, but smaller, winning sessions. My losses came from tight tables where it would frequently be 2-3 handed to the flop. I just don't know how to play these, and I suppose that means I don't know how to play heads-up either. Big surprise. I also discovered how to search for better tables on Party, so that I could get bigger pots and a lot more passive play around me. Then I was happy. I enjoyed the game yesterday. I played well and won most of my money back over several hours. I finished down about $13 over all that time and would have been winning if I'd learnt to leave the silly tight tables and find a new one quickly.

The other problem with the tight tables is that hands are only raked once the pot reaches $5 and there may be only 2-3 of these per orbit. It takes forever to clear the bonus this way, lots of blinds and few wins. So table selection, table selection, table selection. My new party mantra.

Tired now, casino update will follow.

a.x

Why do I bother?

This isn't a oh, wo is me kind of post, but a serious question. What makes me play poker? What drives me?
And what led me to this question I hear no-one asking very quietly indeed, well this is what happened last night...

I logged in to Party poker, not really wanting to play, but knowing table time might be limited in the next month so I wanted to keep my account active, and they offered me a reload bonus. 15% up to $75 and play 7x hands to release. OK, that's achieveable... So I moved some money around to enable me to reload here. But then I thought, do I really want to grind out all these hours at a low limit hold-em table when I'm enjoying playing Omaha at the moment? Why am I playing poker? Sure I could probably make a little while clearing this bonus and get $75 of free money, but where is the fun? I won't make that at omaha that's for sure. Playing 5c/10c O8 is never going to make me rich, but perhaps that is another story ;-)

Perhaps it is because I feel like I've reached a plateau with my Texas Hold'em and I'm just not prepared to put the time in to improve... Certainly the money is a little important, but it's more winning the money and not the amount that I seem to care about. I'm kind of freerolling on my poker right now and not making any further investments so am happy to see the level grow slowly. I'm just enjoying learning something new.

So, what am I going to do?
Probably take the bonus! I figure I can still get a little Omaha in and I'm going away in a weeks time where I will only have my mac with me and seeing as pacific poker has become my Omaha home I can play that through their java interface when the conference gets boring. Hope they don't restrict access to gambling sites!

Difficult decisions...
a.x

Can it value the rest of my life too?

Just about says it all really. Anyone want to buy it?
Should have gone to bed hours ago but I was bored and now I'm so tired that I can't sleep.

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

A mix of English sporting results

No poker for a few days as I've been busy with work. I'm also pretty tired although I blame the England cricket team for making me stay up late and then failing to deliver so spectacularly. Again. At least we're back to some sense of normality for them. It's going to make it hard to win the three-match series now, but they've only got themselves to blame. At least they start the next one this weekend so maybe they'll feel guilty and actually join in the game this time. Of course even the first innings batting performance was less than average if you forget about Trescothick's effort.

Still enjoying England's football victory over Argentina though :-) I was watching this with some Argentinian friends and had accepted the English defeat, so to have it turn round so spectacularly was very nice. And their faces made it even better! They even played liek they cared this time which was altogether unexpected.

Oh yeah, and the English rugby team destroying the Aussies so they lose their seventh game in a row! Bring it on. New Zealand this coming weekend. They are playing amazing rugby at the moment and I expect the result to be completely the opposite. Just don't be embarassing, please.

I love sports...

Downswings are never nice

I've been playing a lot of poker recently, motivated by the desire to clear a bonus on Titan poker (actually I started mostly to get my free chips -- very nice, more about these later), but have generally been having losing sessions. I don't like this very much. Now I accept that poker if full of variance and what I'm seeing is well within expected levels but I can't help but feel there is more to it than that. I've just not been feeling good about my game.

This bonus clearing encourages multi-tabling and I think this is effecting my game. And the bonus on Titan is definitely not worth dropping real cash for. So, I've pledged to drop back to one table at a time play again to see if this helps me. I suspect part of it is putting money in with weak high cards. If only Titan was compatible with poker tracker then I could see what was going on...

Started this new plan tonight. Played 1/2 for about an hour and ended up $5 plus change. Hardly ground breaking, but in the black never the less. Must do some revision again. Out comes my 'Small stakes Hold'em' book and thanks to Ed Miller once again...

The real thing that annoyed me

You might think that getting up early to faithfully listen to my football team make a pathetic attempt at winning a game (Dean Ashton (our best striker) didn't get a shot on target in the entire match) and losing 2-0 after conceding a goal in the first minute would be enough to upset me this weekend, but that isn't the most annoying thing that has happened.

oh no...

You see, I'm British but living and working in the USA for a few years and yesterday afternoon I discovered that one of my UK bank accounts has a bunch of charges on it that weren't mine. Someone had obviously got hold of a bank card and was using it. I don't know the details because my bank had suspended access to it, but it looked like lots of small payments of GBP, each one attracting a 30GBP charge from my bank. I guess that It's about 50-50 between payments and bank charges for a total of 950GBP overdrawn. Nice. I spent yesterday afternoon on the phone to them but it seems that one department deals with fraud and shut that account, another one deals with recovering money and they had suspended all my other accounts and of course, it was friday afternoon here so no one was open to actually do anything about it.

Frustrating, and I'm just hoping I'll get this money back. I just went to the bar and had a few drinks after getting off the phone. The sweet nectar that makes everything better did its job!

Maybe I'll play some poker and get some of the money back. On the other hand, a losing session would hardly help the way I'm feeling. Probably best to abstain at times like this.

a.x

Still Alive

It has been over a year since my last post. Guess I forgot about this blogging lark and didn't feel like I needed the self induced support session -- that's mostly what it is really after all. Not like I have an exciting life to tell you about anyway!

So, I aim to post more regularly now, give some background on my poker experience and targets and occasionally whinge about the results from my football team (Who incidentally won last weekend with the help of an own-goal so I'm waiting until after this weekends games to start moaning again).