Weekend Report + Vegas Schedule

I played a fair amount of 10/20 and 25/50 in the last few days as well as the usual bunch of tournaments. I've basically decided that when I play cash I'm just going to sit at the best tables I can find across all the sites whether they're 10/20, 25/50, or maybe even an occasional 50/100 game. While I don't want to get back into shortstacking high stakes a lot, if a 100/200 or 200/400 game looks especially good I'll allow myself to take a shot at those too. Anyways I feel like my cash game is in a bit of a funk the last day or 2, I'm just not reasoning through situations as clearly as usual and I find myself pressing that call button too much when I'm confused. Part of this probably has to do with playing more aggressive players at higher limits, but a lot of it is just me not being at 100%. I put in more hands in the last few days than usual and I've never been good at playing long cash sessions, so I'll probably cut back a bit before I leave for Vegas on Thursday.

The other thing I've noticed lately is that most online tournaments have become somewhat boring to me. Other than the Sunday tournaments and a few of the special ones throughout the week, most online tournaments are such small stakes compared to my cash games and the tournaments I'll soon be playing in Vegas, that they just don't seem important and aren't as exciting anymore. This makes me want to play more cash tables than tournaments in my mix, but as I said above I seem to do a lot better when I'm not overdoing the cash tables. I might put in some short sessions based around the Full Tilt $1K tourney on Monday and new Stars $1K tourney on Tuesday this week, but other than that I think I'm gonna play a bit less until I get to Vegas. Anyways, as for results my cash games went up and down a lot this weekend but I finished down like $10K mostly due to shortstacking big games unsuccessfully again. In tournaments I cashed the Stars Million again this week for $1100 and finished 3rd in the UB $530 for $9400, so I made back a bit there.

Ok Vegas plans. Steve and I arrive in Vegas on the same connection from Toronto Thursday evening. We'll hopefully get moved into the condo we rented without any problems and then I'm playing my first WSOP event of the year on Friday: The $5K mixed holdem event (half limit half no-limit, it's kinda weird). From then on I'm planning to just play a ton of events, though my actual schedule will depend on how a lot of things are going. Playing live poker every day may very well drive me insane at some point (especially since it's so slow compared to online), but I'm pretty motivated to really breakthrough on the live circuit and make a big final table, book at least a 6-figure score, and maybe even win my first world series bracelet if I get lucky. I've always been pretty good at playing a lot of hours when it comes to tournaments, so I'm pretty optimistic I'll be able to keep focused and play a relatively full schedule over the entire month and a half or so, and still think poker is fun at the end. Of course I'll make sure there's still lots of time to party it up bit, play some golf, and relax and enjoy things other than poker in general while I'm down there too. A lot of people I know will be in Vegas during most of the WSOP, and meeting and hanging out with all the other poker players, especially the online players I play against and discuss strategy with almost every day, is always the best part of these trips. So wish me luck, and awesome Vegas trip reports will commence on here by the end of the week!

Mike