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Thriving for NL1000 by the End of 2007

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Recent (un)success

A well, it's been a while and I've been recovering from a biggish downfall again. I don't even remember anymore what happend, but it's not important as I've recovered pretty well. HOWEVER!

Yesterday, my roll was around 15 buy-ins for NL100, so I figured to play one table just to get a feel for it. I think I played fairly good most of the time, but it all boiled down to three keyhands. I had KK on KQ9 flop against JT which cost me a full buy-in, then I had JJ and reraised EP raiser who had been raising a lot of pots. Now he called which made me suspicious, this is a play many do with either QQ or AK as they don't want to get all their schmuck in before the flop. Flop came down Qxx and he checked, now I make a sizable continuation bet, figuring he might've called me with JJ-. He calls, now I'm quite sure he has either big pair like kings (knowing I'd probably have AA/QQ) or he has flopped top set. So naturally I feel beat here so I check the turn behind him. River brings a Jack, giving me second nuts. He pushes for $60 more into $80 pot, I feel iffy, close my eyes and make a desperate crying call and WHAM, another $100 gone.

The third hand that eventually forced me to close the table was this. I picked the wrong calling station to try to semi-bluff out of this one and folding on flop would've been the best move for sure. Either way, shit rains and I couldn't really help it and I ended up $360 down total (some came from tournies though. I final tabled one $4.4 MTT, but died against "a stealer" who was "stealing" with pocket rockets). Other MTTs kinda went to hell after I got called by ridiculous hands and well, couldn't do much there.

So now my roll is around $1100 and I'm looking forward into playing some NL50 and 8-tabling NL25 fr for "certain" profit. I guess I'll just have to go for $3k before I even try goin' up. I also whored some bonuses which explains my raise of roll and I still might whore some more to build up since it's a quite fast and safe way to get roll going. I (think) am also attending the next months MTT challenge in (afaik) Travis' team. I'll work my ass of for it to get the points, even if it's from low buy-in tournies, I still think I can do it. Let's hope so.

Tournaments have been going well for me in general - I now have back-to-back wins of LiquidPoker weekly tournament. That's also one of my main bankroll boosters - to be honest, cashgames have been going to hell, mostly because I bluff away all that I win when I sense weakness. This of course is a bad play since most people seem to be calling stations not being able to laydown mid or lowpair. ^^

So besides concentrating more on nutpeddling, I will go through my overall thought process to get away from my bluffing addiction. So
from He's weak => Bet him out I will go to He's weak => He's still stronger than my nothing => Fold if I don't have outs. Also, semibluffing (pushing & such) with draws seems to suck at these limits and even if it was slightly EV, it's still variance increasing factor and that's not really how I like it to be. I will start posting weekly reports from next week forth again now that I'm properly back with the game.

And maybe this time, I'll play NL50 until $2500. In fact, I decide now that I won't move to NL100 before I'm there. That means 30 buy-ins. Should I be able to average a buy-in a day, it means I could move up in one month. This far it hasn't actually went so well, but it will, since I've identified my leaks, now all I have to do is plug 'em ^^

Also, if you feel like starting to play at Stars, I've recently become a PokerStars affiliate, you can message me about hmmn... well, let's say I might be able to offer some promotional thing if you're just signing up. muhweli@gmail.com will serve as a proper way to contact me.

Monday, June 12, 2006

Nice session

After going to the lives and steaming away a pile of money - partly because of ridiculous hands and partly because of bad play, I felt I could have a solid session of online poker. I felt good playing from the beginning, very concentrated and results yielded. One table kept sinking, but the other two went up a lot faster. Obviously I hit some cards as well since after about 400 hands, I was up over 2 buy-ins at NL50. 2 more to go before I break $1000 again and then 20 more to start NL100. I'm very confident that if I keep up playing concentrated like I did today, it won't take too long, perhaps a few weeks - less if I'm lucky. Going work helps me think of other things as well so it's easier to stay focused when playing.

Tomorrow will mostly be livegames, so I doubt I'll play any online, and probably won't make an update either. I'll write up a description of an idea, I'll be building when I have sparetime at work or so. Mainly to kill time, but it might be a nice system to have even for bigger crowds to use. But more of that at Pathological Case, later today - or maybe early tomorrow.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

D'oh! MTTing again.

Longish time of my last update, I will get into next update after next week as I plan on playing a bit more from monday to thursday, then again on sunday - a little less on saturday. =]

Played some MTTs. Tournies actually ended slightly up for today (like uhm... $10), but cashgames went straight down to hell, only down a bit over a buy-in, mostly because I donked off a lot with top pair, then couldn't fold top trips with ace kicker to a rivered draw and well, that's about it. Mostly own mistakes anyway. I was up at some point though so I went down ~2 buy-ins, mostly of playing bad.

As for the MTTs, I FTed LiquidPoker.net tournament, then went out when I was making a move at a bad time (which I had to make, because some schmuck called my all-in earlier with A6o - dubious). Anyway, the $22 MTT FT was (I think) my first, I've been at the final table bubble before. The final hand was pretty unfortunate as EP limped and I pushed (10 BB stack) from button with AJo and well, I can't really blame the EP limper for calling with AA. I even got a flushdraw which gave me a little false hope. Almost like it was destined to be ^^ I would've outdrawn AK/AQ though. ;P Here's a screenshot.



I won a whupping $61.20... Well, better luck next time, I think I've been ITM more often than should be averaged as I haven't played many of these tournies.

I will be concentrating on NL 6-max games mostly on the coming days - actually I'm going to play those almost exclusively besides the livegames. And my next "br report" will be posted 19.06.2006. Hopefully I have broken $1000 by then as I'm not too far away from it. I might make posts, should interesting hands occur. Here's one which I found to be quite nice. ^^

That's about it for now, the main line is that I'm going up and it feels good. Playing good also is good for it, although I think I should've skipped playing cashgames today. I made some really avoidable mistakes and I don't like making mistakes!