Plugging along

Well it's been a couple of weeks since I have blogged and I have a ton of stuff to talk about. I apologize if I ramble or go off on a tangent in advance.

Career
So as of right now, my career choice is to go into Football coaching.  Although I do not have anything materializing lately on this job front, I do have some fall back jobs that I could end up going to after graduation.  The problem with trying to get a college football coaching job for me is that I am not available to coach until after the semester is over and most of these coaches are being hired now.  Because I am unavailable now, I am less attractive to most employers, imo.

School

Classes are very hectic to start the semester.  I picked up two extra classes in order to complete my minor in BA.  Those two classes aren't that difficult, but the couple other classes I have started off very quickly and I have been on my horse to try and stay on course early in the semester.  My International Money and Finance (IMF) has been exceptionally interesting and challenging.  The professor is a very exceptional teacher, which makes the class have a much higher incentive to show up and be attentive.  I think this is something that a lot of professors negate and their attendance is down because of it.  This is also something that I am applying to my own course because I want to have strong attendance throughout the semester.

General Poker Theory Course

The course has been going well so far.  The first class I went over the very basics of poker (why people play poker, how to make money, Variance, etc.).  The second class I went over types of players and Bankroll management.  I think that I might of went over BRM too quickly or not emphasized it enough because most of the students didn't have questions on it.  It is a very difficult concept to apply over and over again, but it is absolutely necessary in order to survive poker.  With that being said, most of the people in the class are looking to how to attack certain instances instead the meta-game of poker.  Flawed thinking? Probably, but I can't do very much about it.  All I can do is teach as many important concepts that I can and they will get out of it as much as they put in.

Poker

So I have completely changed my goals for 2009 as they compare to poker.  They were:

Goals for STTs in 2009:
* Put in 3,333+ games a month
* Start at $16's and end up at $38's
* Find ROI at every level before moving up in stakes (2k games minimum)
* Win "Earth" SNG leader board 6 times (low or high orbit)
* Work a lot on my game non stop

I am still going to try and work on my game non-stop for the semester/year, but I have turned away from STTs for at least the next couple of months and have been focusing on cash games in January.  I started very low (NL10) because I want to slowly and progressively build my 6-max NLHE skill.  So far this month I have played 9k hands.  For me restarting school and being very busy and changing games, I am pretty happy about that volume.  I will be bumping up to NL25 come February 1st and would like to put in 10-20k hands there before I jump up to NL50.  

I am going to try and put in 60-80 hours of playing time (~40k hands) over the month of Feb. and hopefully that will get me through NL50 and I can bump to NL100.  A realistic goal would be to get to NL100 by March and grind my face off during that time in order to start making some real money at cash games.

Those are most of my random thoughts.  oh, and go STEELERS!!!!

Here's a video I saw on MTVU the other day and it's pretty awesome.  Gnarls Barkley "Who's going to save my soul".  Enjoy.

FWIW,

Falker

2009 Goals and Expectations for Poker

Poker
Goals for STTs in 2009:
* Put in 3,333+ games a month
* Start at $16's and end up at $38's
* Find ROI at every level before moving up in stakes (2k games minimum)
* Win "Earth" SNG leader board 6 times (low or high orbit)
* Work a lot on my game non stop
* Working on not being short term results oriented
* Make my poker class awesome, which I'm teaching at my university
* Make 365+ posts on 2+2 forum

So this was the post I made on 2+2 a couple weeks ago and they have already changed, at least while I am still finishing up college. First, I will not be able to put in the volume that I want to because I am getting my minor in Business administration. However, I am going to try and offset the potential $$$ that I will be losing by giving personal coaching sessions to some of my students of my poker class.

Winning a SNG leader board would be nice, but I don't want to put a figure at "how many". Instead I am just going to strive to win low orbit and at least qualify for the high orbit every week. As far as making my class the best I can, I will strive to do this because it is going to be a lot of fun and it will improve my game a ton as well (or at least I hope so).

The ROI that I am looking to obtain would be around +10-15% at the 16s and 7%+ at the 27s. These are very lofty goals, but I think that they are obtainable and I want to prove to myself that I can get there. This will be by far my toughest goal, but I am looking forward to getting to a point in the 16s where I just dominate.

Here's Obama's inauguration speech from 1-20-09. I think it is very encouraging for the new year. Happy new year everyone.

WOOOO QUADS

So this gem came about while playing on Pokerstars tonight.  I don't know if there is anything else I could of done to get anymore money out of the MP player.  He was a maniac and I was wondering if I could raise on the flop and see if I could get him to make a play on me.  I say this cause the hand before he had AKo and got 70 BBs in on the flop of 543.  The CO I had no reads on, but once he raised the turn I was pretty sure he had a monster.  Any other way to play this?

--------------------
HAND #1
--------------------

BB: $2.30 (23 bb)
UTG: $10.25 (102.5 bb)
MP: $17.90 (179 bb)
CO: $12.30 (123 bb)
BTN: $28.85 (288.5 bb)
Hero (SB): $22.85 (228.5 bb)

Pre-Flop: Hero is SB with 5c 5h
UTG folds, MP raises to $0.30, CO calls $0.30, BTN folds, Hero calls $0.25, BB calls $0.20

Flop: ($1.20) 4h 5d 5s (4 players)
Hero checks, BB checks, MP bets $0.70, CO calls $0.70, Hero calls $0.70, BB folds

Turn: ($3.30) 2h (3 players)
Hero checks, MP bets $2, CO raises to $5, Hero calls $5, MP folds

River: ($15.30) 7d (2 players)
Hero bets $7.20, CO calls $6.30 and is all-in

Results:

Spoiler:

$27.90 pot ($1.35 rake)
Hero showed 5c 5h (four of a kind, Fives) and won $26.55 ($14.25 net)
CO mucked 4s 4d (a full house, Fours full of Fives) and lost (-$12.30 net)

When cards don't matter

So yesterday I played in a live 2-3 NL game ($100 Max/Min buy-in) at Hawaiian Gardens casino.  I got there around midnight and played for about 5 hours on 3 different tables.  Of the 25+ opponents I played against, only about 1 of them I thought was a good player.  People either were playing way too tight and passive or they were the type of guys who had a VPIP of about 75% with a prf of 5%.  Everyone's range was polarized on every street in every hand.  It just makes me feel stupid when I once thought that everyone who played on the internet were for the most part bad and loose players and live play was wayyyyyyy tougher.  My view on live vs. online is now reversed where I view online as tough and intellectual playing and live play as just bad (there are obviously exceptions for this though, and you can definitely find tough live games, but for low to medium stakes, live<<<<<<<<<

The third table that I got moved to had a few characters on it with the only above average player on it.  He wasn't above average for the type of style he played (he was a little too passive for my taste and would limp/fold too often), but he made good reads on other players and trapped well.  There was a gentlemen to my right who was from Atlanta and was very talkative.  He mentioned hands he played (Bad beats and quad/straight flush type hands) and how he played them.  He would talk about different strategy he uses and the fact that he hates playing QQ (I told him that every time he got QQ, that I would take them off his hands).  After I heard his speech about hating QQ, I figured out that he was the pessimist type and that unless he had a flashy (straight flush draw or AA) or lock hand that he was easy to push off hands.  After absorbing all of the information on the table, I decided that I wanted to start 3-betting certain opponents much more lightly and the Atlanta gentlemen was a perfect target for this.  

We were playing 7 handed at the time, and ATL made a standard "pot building raise" to $8 ("real" raises are closer to the $15 mark at the Hawaiian Gardens) from UTG+1 and I look down at Th3c, so instead of folding I decide to 3-bet to $22.  Now I know that there are 5 people left to act, but the type of table it was I didn't have to worry about people calling light behind me.  After a 3-bet the table would only call with a top 3% hand.  So I make it $22 and the rest of the table folds to the ATL gentleman and he makes a comment right before he throws in his $14, "So you got those Queens then?", at this exact point when he is releasing his chips into the pot, I have his hand range polarized to Ace Face.  So unless an ace or broadway hand flops, I know I can bet and get him to fold.  Flop comes 8h9h4c, he checks and I bet $25 into the $49 pot.  He thinks for 5 seconds and open mucks AdJs.  

Although live play is probably MUCH easier than online, because of the minimal number of hands seen an hour, I still think that playing online is more profitable.  But it is hard to really find out one's profitability in a wiffle ball (live 2-3 NL) game when you only see about 1250 hands a week playing live.  

I saw this for the first time the other day and died laughing, so I figured I would share it with all of you guys too.  The guy in the video is a senator's son and he is trying to make a documentary on online poker.  He is playing a $0.10 MTT...THAT'S WHAT TIME IT IS!!!!