Horrible, horrible fscking nite yesterday; donked over 7$ total ... came in pre-tilted cause of the buses, the stupid snow and my stupid friends and their fscking xmas parties, and definitely tilted when my uber 7-2 offsuit from the BB turned into a boat only to find out the dude on my left had been slow playing a pocket pair turned to set by the flop (or just passively playing every hand for that matter)... and then, I hit rock bottom :P... After being constantly re-raised pre-flop with my semi-bluff/semi-steal attempts (which were way too numerous in my vain attempts to get my money back), I wake up with Hockey Sticks and raise 3xBB and get fscking re-raised again but this time I call. Flop is absolutely dry so I bet half the pot, only to get raised again by the fscking button. I re-raised and he shoves while some donk between us does the calling station trick... I call, knowing full well that:

1. I'm beat by a bigger pocket
2. I am on super uber tilt, which argues and makes a solid case for me to gamble this 2-outer piece of shit of a hand...

Off course the board and poker Gods do not come to my rescue (i guess that humoungous suck out in the satellite had its cost :P) and the guy indeed has rockets. I go berserk, quit my 3 tables, folding a pair of jacks in the process, cause lets face it, I would have played those like aces surely but the board would have been A-K-Q for sure ;), and go watch that awful hockey game... Which ended 4-1 Wings... Even the Habs are going to hell... lol!


Trying to retrieve some positive from this nite, I think I might have nailed a couple of factors that could explain those "Downward Spiral" moments... And they could also explains the state of my poker graph (see last post)... I'll need to check my hand logs and ponder a little more on this though... To be continued...

Finally reached the 10,000 hands plateau last week. Not much to say or brag about it. Interesting fact: I seem to have started to play differently around 5,000 hands. I think I either switched stakes or begun to think and tried some fancy poker... I will try and find what happened around this time because I feel something went awry and I can't quite put the finger on it.

Big time reality check yesterday evening; went to play some NL25 cash game in a private card room and I must admit I never felt comfy with these stakes, pathetically being the highest I've ever played. I felt way out of my game, constantly doing the exact thing I was repeating myself NOT to do, such as not announcing to everyone "it's time to change gear" with my first live straddle... In short, I've been the boorish american :P... See, there's some 2+2 dude who wrote a partial European version of Rounders and instead of the proverbial sucker at the table, it's the boorish american:

"If you can't spot the boorish american in your first half-hour at the table, than your are the boorish amercian"

See here for the 'complete' partial rewrite. Lots of fun, let me tell ya!


In any case, this whole experience got me thinking about my game, and my relation to money. I am a scared little boy when it comes to dough, even though I paradoxically could not give more than a RAT'S ASS about my personal finances... Weird...

It also got me thinking about those pathetic stakes I'm playing and the humongous amount of fear involved in choosing those rather than investing to actually learn how to comfortably play at some more interesting levels...

- So now what?!?, asks the Cynical Voice in my head.
- I don't know actually... Shall I just quit?? Reassess my ambitions and just play for fun, perhaps even with play money??
- lmao
- Shut up, I'm serious...
- I know... You could also take this as a very good sign that you will never gamble your house or lose the bread'n butter money, that you have, in fact, a good basis of money management skills...
- Meh.
- Or take the bull by the horns and either pump some more money into your bankroll to extricate yourself from those pathetic micro-micro stakes...
- ... and accept the fact that to learn to win, I probably have to lose (read PAY) a decent amount of money...
- How many times you think Doyle went broke?

To be continued...

Nic, my (only) poker buddy, and I just made an interesting prop bet: 10$ on who logs the most hands from Monday, Nov. 12, 2007 at 12:01am to Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008 at 12:01am. Why Jan. 17? Cause it's my birthday.. My 30th birthday at that... And I figured it could do as a deadline :D...

Day 1 tally:
Nic: 150ish
Alex: 216

I've just noticed that I only played about 16 000 online hands in a year, tourney and cash games combined. That's way not enough to reach any sort of satisfactory competency level, and I think I can fix that.

Having recently gone through the roughest patch of my very thin and still infant-like poker career, I got away from the game a little before going back on the felt in a freeroll. What better venue to get back on the horse than a no-buy-in event?! Turned out, I played great, making the best of the greatest (maybe 2nd greatest) suckout of my life - dealt QTo on the BB, 3 limpers, I check. Flop comes T-T-Q with 2 suited cards, and I'm first to act. Having not even played very very passively since the start of the tourney (we're at the 3rd or 4th level by then), I decide to continue doing just that and check, with sandbagging in mind of course :P. UTG bets about half the pot, UTG+1 calls, and I go for the ultimate trap by simply calling, hoping for a suited turn improving my opponents hand to a flush I'm beating. Alas, turn comes A offsuit and I decide to take the action in hand and bet about 3/4 of the pot. UTG insta-raises all-in and UTG+1 folds. Now, I must admit having NEVER put UTG on any hand, so sure of the strength of my hand. Now, I'm thinking is either sitting on K10s, K9 or J9... Or, and of course this hits me as I'm clicking "Call", he's got me beat with the infamous AT... Too late, I've called and he flips exactly that. I'm still kicking myself in the nuts for not having played my nuts more aggressively, whining about how life's a bitch and I should just quit poker and maybe everything else, when the river hits me like a sledgehammer with a 20 to 1 shot, peeling one of the 2 remaining queens. BOOM! I almost tripled up right there since i was getting short-stack, and got pot-commited early in the hand... This hand got me on track to finishing 13th out of 1614 players, for my best money finish in a large field tourney. All in all, my confidence started to build up again and I got back in the game, going back to penny cash games as well since my bankroll was already borderline before I was felted almost 3 times in that mere 50-hand interval...

And now, I seem to be back to the better me; even my homegame ROI is back to a somewhat decent percentage :P... But, I have been analyzing my game a little more, only to find out I haven't logged nearly enough hands to analyze properly. Thus, I have fixed myself a new objective: log in 10 000 hands before my 30th birthday (which, unfortunately is the next one :P). This means that I have to log 144 hands a day for the remaining 69 days before January 17th. I might not get it since I cannot dream to play every day (for instance, I know for a fact I will not be playing any hands on Nov. 17 and 18, which means I'm already stuck 288 hands :P), but if I do, I will have logged in some serious poker playing hours and should be closer to define what exactly is my favorite style of play and the best behavior for me at the tables.

Well, I feel I should write some clever conclusion here, but I must admit not reviewing this post so I'll just publish it and hope for the best.

A couple of days later...
For the record: I played for 13 days now and logged 1,301 hands, for an average of ~100 hands a day. Close but not good enough :P... On pace for a measle 6-7,000 hands. Still, I'll be seeing more hands as it goes by...

I am not dead. Not physically, nor mentally, nor even poker-wise... Got bloody close to retirement though :P...

Following my last post, including the 'getting back to par' bid, I felt pretty confident around cash game tables... For a while that is... In the span of a mere 250-some hands, I manage to lose half my bankroll with very very donkey calls and moves. I then had to find the humility to step back down to penny games, which was quite hard to do. It ended up taking me the best of a month to finally get back on the horse so to speak. I did on a lousy uneventful boring Friday night, finally logging about 100 hands or so of profit on a ring 0.01/0.02 table, and felt I could do good in a tourney, so I got my Railbirds freeroll password and registered to the 9pm tourney. After a humougous suckout for which I was standing on the 'good' side for once, I manage to go deeper than ever before, falling a little short of my first final table (that was disappointing), finishing 13th out of 1614. And well, since I do have a shaky self-esteem, that was a very good pat on the back and I felt I could still do well around the felt. Back on the horse as they say :D!!!

I hate to break this to you nice folks, but Doyle was right. Again... Is there someone really surprised by that, beside me??

I think I read that bid in Poker Wisdom of a Champion but I also seem to remember reading it somewhere else in the broad Doyle Brunson literature. Anyway, the jist of it being "do not play poker if your mind is preoccupied". Basically, if you have family concerns, health issues, girl troubles, and the likes, JUST DO NOT PLAY FSCKING CARDS!!!!

Now I am what I hope is an educated mind, with a great tendancy towards introspection and self-examination. What this means is that usually, in life as well as poker (maybe more in poker :p), I try to be aware*. I try to be a conscientious lucid dim-witted dumbass, roughly staying awake about what's going on in my life (more the with the world, to be perfectly honest ;)). Which basically means that I'm constantly doubting myself and asking questions about ... well everything... Which also means I tend to know where I'm at when I'm there :p, or I have a very good insight. All in all to say this: all of what I am should warrant the proper poker wise behavior and management.

Moreover, waking up not with Aces but rather with rags (very very bad poker analogy with my love life here...:confused:), I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER!!!!

Well it seems I did not know better and ended up spewing almost 1/3 of my whole Bankroll in 3 consecutive lousy cash game sessions, donkeying my chips away with the second worse hand while misreading completely my opponents, putting them on even lousier hands when in fact they were holding the nuts, nut flush or nut straight, or worse case scenario, the second nut.


3 days later:
Ok. I';m back to par. You know what they say: unlucky in love, lucky at cards. Guess it's true, especially since it did hold true in yesterday's homegame :P.


* How can one resists the temptation to make fun of Van Damme right now: "Il faut être aware" - the french speaking Railbirds should get that one ;-)... Just know that the guy, from Belgium, speaks both french and english, but basically mixes them according to his audience. For instance, when on a french tv show, the guy doesn't remember much of his french and babbles in a very broken french-glish. And vice versa... Guess he thinks it's sexy or somethin'... And I didn't even mention his 4th grade philosophy ;-). Have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsMiW8K8g3Q.