Monday, September 01, 2008

A Little Update

Well, it's been a while since my last entry mostly because nothing super exciting poker-wise has been going on. I helped my sister move to Montreal last weekend so I didn't play any tournaments, but I did have a good time during the few days I spent there. It was actually the first time I'd ever really been in Montreal other than the airport, and I have a few friends from home living there so it was cool to catch up with them and see the city a bit. I've gotten back into the online routine a bit more lately though. I haven't been playing many tournaments during the week as I've been focusing more on PLO instead, but this weekend I put in a really big tourney grinding session.

PLO has been going ok I guess. My results at 5/10 and 10/20 on non-Cake sites have not been very good lately, but I've had a couple more good sessions at 25/50 on Cake when certain players are in the game. I feel like it's mostly just that I haven't been running as hot at the smaller stakes games which is not surprising because the variance in PLO is pretty huge. The games may also have gotten slightly tougher on one of the non-US sites I play on a lot, but I still feel like I'm learning and playing well, I just need to be careful not to drift onto autopilot too much because that's when I get sloppy. Also I have some pretty terrible fancy play syndrome at times but I guess that's part of trying new things and seeing what works.

As for tournaments I had a very good weekend. On Saturday I finished 2nd in the $300 tournament on Party for $9K. Again I was kind of upset with myself for blowing a chip lead heads up but whatever. I had a very good Sunday though. First, I finished 6th in the $500 tournament on Party for $4K, and I also came close to winning a WPT Niagara seat on Party as well. No worries though because I won a $12K package to that event later in the evening on Cake! I was also deep in the $200 rebuy on Stars as I kept winning the important coinflips but finally ran out of luck finishing in 4th place for $21K. So overall it was a very profitable Sunday which always feels nice!

I'm pretty excited for WCOOP which is starting this Friday. I'm looking forward to having a good excuse to try to learn and play some of the weird games almost as much as the huge NL Holdem and PLO events. I play basically all the HORSE games with some basic level of competence but I've never really played any draw games sober before and they seem pretty interesting. I'm thinking I may try to fit in some kind of crash course in 2-7 triple draw in the next week so I can at least know enough of the basics in that game to feel reasonably comfortable. The great thing about WCOOP is there are tons of players in all the events that don't really know how to play the games either so a decent crash course would likely be enough to make me +EV since I tend to pick up the basics of games pretty quickly. If that doesn't work I have my usual strategy to fall back on: Play bad, run good!

Well I guess that's about all I've got for now. I hope people are enjoying their long weekend and best of luck to everyone heading back to school for the fall!

Mike

5 comments:

Eugene said...

Mike,

Have you give any thought on affiliating yourself with one of the many pk training websites? I'd definitely love to see your videos and if they haven't contacted you yet, they're certainly loosing on a big opportunity.

Eugene said...

PS. Any way you can tell Steve to update his blog more than once every 6 months? thanks

Mike said...

Yeah I'd be interested but no one has asked me about it. I'm not really sure why that is as I'm pretty sure I'd be quite good at it. I guess maybe I just don't know the right people. In any event there are enough challenges just playing poker that I don't feel like going out of my way trying to promote myself to these companies. I think my online and live poker resume as well as actually having experience teaching should speak for itself. If a good offer comes along though then of course I would jump on it.

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actyper said...

Let me know if you are really interested in doing training videos. I run www.pokertrainingguide.com and have good contacts with all the decision makers. IMO Poker Savvy would be a great fit, especially since they recently signed your buddy Charder. Pwnage would be a good fit as well.