I had promise myself, very naively now that I ponder back on this, to make one deposit, see how it goes and, if I were to lose it all, never reload. Well, I remember being quite troubled by that promise when my roll was a whooping 4,76$, torn between quitting poker altogheter (well, in this competitive manner I have tried for the last 15 months or so), or reloading and (hopefully) learn from it. But, as it's often the case in life, this questioning was irrelevant, since I went on a proverbial tear which brought my roll back to a half-decent size. But it stayed in the back of my mind... Wondering what I'd do if I'd ever go broke...

In any case, I finally elected to pump some money in my Online bankroll, for 2 very relevant reasons; first, I'll probably get to play NL25 a little quicker. Second, PartyPoker has without a doubt the easiest bonus to clear I have ever seen; 125 raked hands (might I remind you that Party rakes 5% of every 0.20$ in the pot; it really is a piece of cake) and you get 25$ for free, plus five 2+2 books (yeah, you read that correctly)!!!! And it took both Nic and I one single evening of play, not even overplaying or going out of our way to log the proper amount of hands. Just like that!

So, as of now, my roll is split almost evenly between Stars and Party. I thought I'd cash out from my Stars roll the 50$ I deposited at Party to pay myself back, but I'll ponder this before, pumping a little life into my roll is not out of the question, more than a year after that somewhat silly promise.

Still, I could just quit... Yeah right!

Mid-Month Recap
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Well, I think I've logged somewhere around 4,500 hands in April so far. Not on pace for the famous 12K month, but I'm still confident that I'll make it somehow... At least to 10,000 hands... Especially since I think my hockey fever is about to get killed by the lousy bears of Boston (who ever heard of bears in Boston, really!?!?!? :P)... Now, if I can get back to playing decent, solid, ABC-poker, I think I could finally change the groove and start winning on a regular basis again... Fingers crossed...

Still, I could just quit... Yeah right!

Been reading the great The Psychology of Poker, by Dr. Alan Schoonmaker lately. Awesome book to get into the motives, desires and fears of poker players, more precisely yourself (Schoonmaker's kinda borderline obsessing over the Stu Ungar quote "At the table, you're your worse enemy"). Providing many insights and tools to better know oneself and one's opponents, I am currently doing one of these 'hands-on' given out by Schoonmaker throughout the book, this time about rating opponents (of course, all this wonderful work has triggered deep introspective reflexions, but these are currently steeping and macerating in my mind :P... 'Til I have them assimilated, I think I'll post about opponent's psychology rather than confuse my very own introspection... Once I have all these sorted out, I'll post my conclusions of course ;-)). The rating occurs on two different and yet intertwined dimensions (that most neophytes will often mistake for the very same one, by the way): tightness/looseness AND passiveness/aggressiveness. Roughly, we can define T/A as how many hands a player plays from a given position; e.g., Luc plays twice as many hands (regardless of the actual 'hand' in the hole) than Mark from the Cutoff, while P/A strictly refers to the bet-check and raise-call ratios. Well, here's an half-decent first draft, based on the only live game I play so far, our weekly micro-stakes homegame :P...

Ok. March was one hell of a roller-coaster ride!!!! It all started very badly, and I never got back in pace... The 2 first weeks, I admit I didnt make much of it, blaming variance, bad beats and a short bleed from weak play (basically not as aggro as I should be). At the end of week 2, I was starting to wonder whether I had simply been lucky so far and this was how my results should have been... That kinda took its toll on me, but I try to convince myself I only needed to log hands to back on track. Which I did. Ended up putting 13 000 hands this month!!!! And that is the most important thing from this March '08; I've put up my biggest month in terms of hands played, enough to get very close to upgrading my PokerStars status, which would be so cool :)! And my BB/100hands is still roughly around 3, so if I can keep logging between 10 and 12 thousand hands a month, I should rake a very decent profit by the end of 2008 :P...

In the meantime, here are my graphs, including a cumulative 2008 graph.

On a somewhat related side note, I bought myself a brand new laptop and am pretty satisfied for now!!! Only glitch up to now; my pahud is freezing my PokerStars tables :S... Nerf computers ;-)...

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