May Update

From my post frequency, you can probably tell my focus has shifted from poker a bit.

Actually, my shift has focused from blogging about poker more than anything else...

Let's just say that I just don't have as much time idle at a computer as I used to.

So, let me catch you up on the past month or so in my poker life.

(anybody reminded of Robert's style of writing right now? What is wrong with me?)

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The first few days of May I played a lot (meaning 3 hours) on UB. Apparently there's a lot of cheaters on UB. I suspect my stakes ($2 NL, 50c limit) are pretty safe though.

Let's be honest, internet poker just isn't as fun as it used to be.

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I played one night at Garden City this month. I ended up playing 8/16 to start to get on a table, winning $21, then losing $50 once I got to a 6/12 table. I can't remember much about it, although I wasn't playing horribly, but wasn't that well either.

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When I was in LA I played on night at Commerce. OHMYGOD that is a huge casino. I played 4/8 limit with a kill and then normal 4/8 a little later. When I was there, there were at least 15 tables of 4/8 running plus another seven of the 4/8 kill game running. I really wish I lived closer to that casino.

BTW, I lost $200 in the kill game with a few bad plays (cold calling a raise with KJo in a multi-way kill pot and getting all-in with a flopped king) but won $112 back in the non-kill game. I found the kill game much harder than the non-kill game; I think a lot of bad players are scared by the kill.

Oh, and I saw a guy in the high-limit section that looked familiar, and then I realized it was Ted Forrest. Later I saw Greenstein sitting at his table too.

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A couple of nights before I played the $50+10 + rebuys Deep Stack tournament at the Bike. Again, another huge casino. The comedy came when at 6:55 when I was waiting in the main room for the tournament to start and I asked one of the six dealers loitering around how I locate my table. He said it was in the ballroom. Apparently, my feeble mind just couldn't consider that there were even more poker tables elsewhere, even without evidence of the other 300 players in the tourney.

The tourney structure was great with essentially a $200+10 buy-in, half-hour levels at first, and a slow structure. If I get a chance I'll scan and upload the structure sheet (info that I searched everywhere on the net for before I left).

My tournament: well, I doubled early when I raised with 42s, turned a flush, and had a guy push into my turn bet with a straight draw, no club. Apparently he couldn't read the board that well.

I took a big hit later when my AKo ran into AA a little after the rebuy period ended. Pretty normal stuff, except when you consider I had like 70 big blinds in my stack and I four-bet all-in with a ton left over. It was a big mistake, and I wasn't thinking straight when I did it. That said, 90 minutes in if you have a 70BB stack with near the average in chips, that's a good tournament. I wish I was closer so I could play some of the 20/30 events.

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Played a few homegames and won a little and lost a little more. No big deal. Although I did have top pair runner-runner my set which hurt a lot... until I realized I was only a 17:1 favorite (I thought it was more like 50:1).

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Won $444 at the 1/2 NL game on Saturday night. I've almost covered all my losses in that game which feels really good. I played well, but not perfectly -- I overbet a value bet, missed a few small bluffs, and bluffed in a bad spot once or twice. Mostly, I just never had a substantial second-best hand (top pair is not a substantial second best hand -- that's easy to lay down).

The nice thing about the win was it erased my losses from the month (my LA trip and a few other things). So my bankroll is scratching $3K again and near a few year high.

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What next? Well, my next few weeks are pretty busy, but after that I hope to get some more live poker at GC and play the 1/2 NL game more often as long as the host doesn't shut the game down since he's been losing $300 a night.

And in this spot, I'm going to lean more towards the short and sweet posts instead of long summaries like this.