How I Spent My Poker Week

The last week has been interesting.  April is probably not going to be a big month, but at last it should be a winning month.  I'll run down some of the things that have happened in the last week.

I had two back-to-back bad days.  The first day I just missed cashing in two tournaments.  In the first one I finished 9th.  Eight players cashed.  In the second one I think I missed cashing by four spots.

The next day I couldn't play.  I got locked out of Juicy Stakes because I couldn't remember the password.  I was going to play two tournaments but after one already started I decided to try to save the second one.

I found the paper with my passwords, got on the Juicy Stakes help page and tried to use "24 hour Live Chat."  I got a response on the screen that said they were down and I should type a message.  I tried phone support but they were down as well.  They also said that I should leave a message, so I did.  Finally I tried E-mail support, which said that their usual response time was 1-2 hours.

After four hours of no responses from any of the methods I stopped checking.  The next day I had a response from E-mail support which said that I had to send my question somewhere else.

I was able to play that night, but customer support of poker rooms continues to be horrible.

The other notable thing from the past week is that I found something new to study.  I signed up to another coaching site (no monthly fee and a lot of free stuff) and downloaded 20 Rules For Playing Flush Draws. It's going to help my game a lot.  It's actually more than I expected.  It explores two areas where I'm somewhere between weak and clueless, building a range for a situation and check-raising.  Here are the first two rules, to give you an idea:

Rule #1.  If my hand wasn't a flush draw, how would I play it?  Chances are that you should play the flush draw the same way.

Rule #2. Check the nut flush draw most of the time, except in instances where it is a very strong hand and you are borderline value betting.

There is a lot there to assimilate.  Some of the rules have three or more bullet points that further define the situation.  I was going to try it out when I played last night, but I quickly learned that I didn't have time to look through all of that to find the relevant rule and situation.

That will be even more true on the days where I'm playing more than one table at a time. Memorization is difficult for me, but I have to somehow jam all of that information into my brain.  It will be a significant piece of my study time for a while.