Updates

Some updates on what I'm doing and thinking about:

1. Americas Cardroom: It's an even bigger mess now.  I wanted to have three options for playing poker: Juicy Stakes Poker, Americas Cardroom and live tournaments.  It doesn't look Americas Cardroom is ever going to get straightened out so it looks like Juicy Stakes is option 1, live poker is option 2 and there is no option 3. I will use the money I was going to deposit on Americas Cardroom to start building a live bankroll.

I just looked at the most recent poker forum posts about ACR.  Here are four of those posts:

Usually they pause them [tournaments] but straight up cancelled.
"Technical issue"

down for me.. rip

I can login now but no tables showing and it just gets stuck on configuring account

I can login but after that I am unable to click any tabs or tables.
EDIT: Nevermind it's all good now but the tourney schedule is ****. All the good mtt's for the evening were cancelled.

2. Database issues: I had one more issue with my database connection, but it's worked for several days in a row so I guess that everything is OK now.

3. Tournament selection:  I'm making some changes.  Just because I'm able to play a lot higher (due to a bigger bankroll) doesn't mean that it's always a good idea.  I'm competitive at the high end of what I'm bankrolled to play, but I dominate the field at the low end.  I'm been playing mostly the high-end tournaments.  I'm up a little bit doing that, but the swings are so big that I'm not sure I want to deal with that kind of variance right now.  I'm bankrolled (100 buy-ins) to play up to $8.80 tournaments, but the variance can be nasty.  Here's an example:

When I play a $6 rebuy and add-on tournament, to be competitive I have to buy-in for $6.60, get an $6 rebuy at the beginning of the tournament (so that I have a big starting stack) and pay another $6 to get the add-on.  That's an investment of $18.60.  Failing to cash in a few of those took a chunk of my bankroll, but I also had a couple 3-digit cashes that made up for the losses.  Even so, I'm going to back off and decrease my average buy-in a little bit.  Just because I can live life on the edge doesn't mean that I should do it.  I'm going to keep my buy-ins at $5.50 or lower for a while and see how that works out.

As always, your questions and comments are welcome (see box below.)