LA and PS+

Hey y'all, I've been in LA for the LA Poker Classic for almost a week now. The WPT main event starts tomorrow and I'm hoping to improve on a deep run I made last year when I ended up finishing 10th. So far I've had no luck in the few prelims I've played, just a $1K and a $5k event. Unfortunately I couldn't play any more as I'm pretty low in cash here. They wouldn't change my Australian $$ at the casino here because we are in the ghetto, or at least that was the reason I took from the whole thing. I probably would have played the $10K HU event, though the field was so tough that missing out on that is not a huge loss really. I also might have played the $10K PLO but it only got 54 players and was on Sunday so again no big deal. After the main event I was planning to stay around for the Celebrity Invitational freeroll event, but depending how deep I get in the main and how much cash I'm able to get to play live games here I may change my flight and bounce early.

In other news I'm on a pretty big PLO downswing because 500/1000 is just way too big. I'm pretty upset that Full Tilt made all these tables instead of just leaving 200/400 as the biggest game. Essentially no one actually has the money to play that high so obviously most people have to buyin short if they want to play as it's the only games over 25/50 that runs at all regularly. I do still think I have an edge short stacking the half holdem half omaha games against a lot of lineups though so I've been gambling a bit and playing with not so great reults. Anyways I'm probably going to take a break from playing these games except when the lineup happens to look really good.

I think my new goal in poker is going to be to get a lot better at limit mixed games. I play a few of the HORSE games fairly decently and a few others pretty mediocrely and I also want to learn 2-7 triple draw so that I can play most of the new Pokerstars SCOOP events, as well as play a lot more non-holdem events at the WSOP this summer. There is just no way I will survive the summer playing a 2000 person $2K NL event every day again. I need a new challenge and the smaller fields in the mixed games are nice too so maybe I could actually finally final table a bracelet event. Speaking of which, look at all the money I get to lose beginning in April:

PokerStars SCOOP: April 2-12 Probably around $40-50K in buy-ins.

WPT Championship at Bellagio: April 18-24 $25K main event.

EPT Monte Carlo: April 28-May 3 10K Euro main event. 25K Euro high roller. 5K Euro PLO championship among other side events. ~$60K USD.

World Series of Poker 2009 (and Bellagio Cup!): Begins May 28th with the special $40K buy-in tournament. Likely to spend close to $150K in buy-ins this summer.

Countdown to busto has begun.

The final major announcement which I haven't written about on here in a while is that I have officially joined Poker Savvy Plus as a core pro and will be contributing three strategy videos a month beginning in March. I'm very happy to be on board and hope some of you sign up and enjoy my videos, and most importantly learn from them to make some $$$! This blog is now being cross-posted over there, so a special hello to everyone reading this on PokerSavvy! I really think PS+ now has a very strong team of core pros and you're going to see a lot of really good videos coming from there this year. That's all I've got for now, going to the gym for a bit, wish me luck beginning tomorrow!

Mike