41 Days of Poker

The last two weeks have been eventful, to say the least.  Too much happened to explain every point, so I'll just list what happened and elaborate in future posts:

The downswing was relentless, and as I burned though most of my poker money, I started mixing in some online play.

Online is going very well, when Americas Cardroom doesn't stall or crash.  Playing $1 to $3 tournaments, I increased the $47 that was sitting on the site to $147.  I don't want to rely very heavily  on online poker, for several reasons I will detail in a future post.

I finally blew though all of my poker funds.  My wife gave me $60 out of the family budget, and Sunday 10/18 in my local poker room I took 4th place out of 62 and got myself a few buy-ins.  I will be playing the same tournament, which runs twice a week in two miles from my house, tomorrow (Thursday.)

That isn't the first time type that I had to fight through a big downswing.  Downswings (the mathematical term is  "negative variance are unavoidable in any game with significant variance--math doesn't lie. When I first started playing poker I put $50 on an online site, played about even (mostly $1 tournaments) for a while, then finally lost it all after three months.  I gave it another try with another $50 and before long I cashed a $3 tournament, coming in 7th of 4,200 players for $384.  I'll just have to make an equally good comeback with live poker.

In my slow, step-by-step, plodding way, I continue to learn and improve.  I have improved a lot in two areas:

1. I'm getting out of trouble when I need to.   I've played several live hands lately where  I had a big hand, but realized it wasn't good enough and got out of trouble just in time.  In each case I had top pair or better, I folded at some point in the hand, and every time villian showed me a straight or better.

2. I'm getting a lot better at playing more hands.  I'm working at getting lot of speculative hands into the mix.  I'm doing well with that and I'm definitely confusing some opponents when I win pots with hands like 65s, 86s and 98o.

More detail to follow in future posts.