Black Deuces – Poker Blog

Played two more $4.4 rush tournaments last night, and won one of them (actually, we made a deal when we were heads-up, splitting it) cashing $222. Huray! This means I’m now looking at a profit of $379 over 37 tournaments, resulting in 259% ROI. Sweet.

For those who love graphs:

Obviously, I am runnng pretty good. But most importantly, I’m playing with a lot of confidence. I’m not afraid to make plays when I think they are the right one. An example:

Hands like these not only can be pretty profitable, they also keep your spirit up. Just imagine what happens when he shoves on my check-raise. I loose a third of my stack and start blaiming myself for making a stupid, unnecessary move (although technically it might be the right play in this spot). I start steaming a bit and start playing too loose ot too scared. A good pokerplayer shouldn’t be affected by this, I know, but maybe I’m not mentally strong enough, just yet. When I’m playing good and luck isn’t too much against me, I’m pretty hard to beat (this might come of as arrogant, but hey, like I said, my confidence-level is way up ), but when I’m confronted with adversity I’m an easy target. Something to work on and think about before this amazing run ends, and the bad-beats start coming!

For reasons unknown to me, many players look down on Limit Hold’em. I even heard it being referred to as ‘an old man’s game’. They find LHE isn’t as ‘exciting’ as No-Limit or Pot-Limit games, mainly because there isn’t much action and the pots stay relatively small.

True, the amount you can win in one single hand is smaller than in No-Limit (duh!), but Limit Hold’em might be one of the most action packed poker games out there these days. Players stay in hands way too long with a marginal hand, chase draws even when they are drawing dead, fill up and as a result donk a lot of cash away in short periods of time. And the best part: because the pots stay relatively small, they don’t get the feeling they are loosing big, so they KEEP donking chips away.

A good example:

And the best part: ‘lebruske’ was one of the better players at the table! It’s a goldmine out there, go check it out.

This used to be a blog about me trying to build an online bankroll. Not that I failed to do so, I was actually on the good track: I made 50$ into 3k, but after a big loss one night (-700$) I decided that online poker just wasn’t for me. “Take the money and run” I told myself.

Besides of the mega loss that one night, I also found the daily online grind quite boring and less suited to my poker skills (if I indeed have any ). My experiences teach me that online poker is much more math based, where live poker is much more of a “feeling” game. That emphasis on mathematical calculation and analysis of the game has even been growing recently by the widespread use of tracking software such as Pokertracker (which I refuse to use, since I think it’s killing the game).

Or to quote Azn_Cutie at Pokersift:

To be a successful online player, you have to have solid fundamentals and a very strong foundation in math. While both live and online require calculation of ranges and equity in decisions, it is so much more vital online. My opinion is that NLHE is very close to being a solved game, especially MTTs, in an online setting.

Live poker, on the other hand, will never be solved. It has much different subtle nuances than online poker, especially in terms of reading tells. Hand equity calculations don’t need to be exact because you can narrow hand ranges so much more through live tells and this, rather than exact calculation, provides you with a lot of the edge in the game. This is not to disparage online poker or say that online players are better/worse than live players, it is simply my opinion that both of these arenas utilize completely different skill sets and mine are much more suited to live play.

I agree. But this doesn’t mean I’ll never play online again, I’m just going to focus on live poker from now on. I’ll play the occasional MMT (like the upcoming Mini FTOPS at Full Tilt Poker), but the cashgame grind is over.

So, from now on this blog will be more about my live poker, and less (although I will not abandon the subject completely) about my online game. Now it’s time to hit the local casino!