My apologies go out to both Nick and to anyone who read my blog when I was still writing on a regular basis. I’ve played very little poker since making a big withdrawl about a month or so back, and thus have had very little to write about as I’ve had very few new experiences with my poker playing.

Only very recently have I started playing with my Titan bankroll some more due to my lack of hours at my job which is slowing down with the season. I work in landscaping/gardening, which surprisingly goes well into december, but this happens to be the slowest part of the working season being in between the bloom of spring and all the leaf cleanup of fall.

Between two out-of-the-blue $35 bonuses, a tough $100 win in a cardschat sunday buyin, and some ring game swings, my bankroll has moved from roughly $100 to swinging between $250 and $400. I’ve recently tested out Limit Holdem again to test my skills, and had four or five very nice $20+ sessions at the 0.25/0.5 and 0.5/1 tables only to have my optimistic outlook on the game shattered with a $40 downswing at an extremely loose 0.5/1 table. I’ll still play LHE in the future, but it’s a very frustrating game when you are losing constantly to suckouts at the lower limits; I’ve found myself with AA in a preflop capped pot losing to 57o calling down to the river only to hit his two-pair. I think I’ll wait until I have a big enough ‘roll to play at 0.5/1 and higher if I can handle the play.

I don’t have much of a bankroll at PokerStars anymore (roughly $20), and so haven’t been playing there nearly as much as I’d like to. I just don’t have to patience to grind out the micro tables, and I don’t want to gamble with $5 SnGs to try and build it up. I also have $100 of unclaimed freeroll winnings still sitting at DreamPoker that I’ll need to make a deposit and play some raked hands (which I heard are tough to earn there) to be able to withdraw. I won’t be playing at either of those sites for a while until either I make enough with my Titan ‘roll to withdraw or my job hours pick up so that I can make a deposit.

The long-forgotten 200 SnG Challenge has gone slow for me aswell, to say the least. I’ve got around 100 recorded, but have played many more on Titan which have not yet been imported into PokerTracker. PT has recently made an upgrade allowing for iPoker (Titan, CD, Noble, others) tournaments to be inputed aswell as hand histories to be auto-imported, and alot of my SnGs were played before this upgrade and will take some time inputting manually (which I might add is a royal pain in the poop chute!). My current stats for the SnGs I do have imported into PT can be found here. Considering I lost most of my $600 bankroll on PokerStars with a terrible streak in SnGs, my stats so far actually don’t look so bad :).

I feel that my game has improved considerably. I can give most if not all of the credit for this to reading and re-reading the first two volumes of Dan Harrington’s Harrington on Hold’em . After learning a lot of new things about the game, I realized a few things I was doing wrong and I’ve since corrected or improved upon them. Namely, I was playing aggressively in the wrong spots; I’d make continuation bets with the wrong conditions. For example, I would happily C-bet into a tight player with AK and the board showing QTx (and such type situations), and would become befuddled as to why they would call me down or raise me every time. I figured my raw aggression would be enough (as it often was) to push people out of pots. My incredible swings (read about them throughout this thread if you’re interested) were a mystery to me, as I would play fairly tight, and get rid of mediocre hands in most of the right situations. I’ve also learned alot about pot odds, something that Harrington considers to be essential for sound poker-playing. I used to play strictly through my reads and was clueless with odds; his books made me realize the importance of pot odds, aswell as make my decisions easier in general situations with simple odds calculations.

Another thing I’ve somehow improved upon is my patience and control of my emotions. I’m not sure what the cause of that improvement was, but I welcome it with open arms. Tilt was (and still is, just to a much lesser degree) one of my biggest leaks. I would lose a SnG, and immediately play another, but with a deteriorated level of play. I’d sometimes go on streaks playing 5-10 SnGs within an hour or two, busting out of one and going on to the next trying to make up for my losses. Silly stuff, I know, and I’m just glad it’s nearly behind me.

Of course, having said all that, I still make my donk move occasionally (maybe too often): coming over the top of a raise and a reraise from two tight-aggressive big stacks in an MTT with JJ, calling an all in reraise over the top of my AT versus a medium stack or even pushing JJ into an AQx flop. I used to find that roughly half of my exits in tourneys were due to bad beats, the other half being poor play or tilting on my part; now I find that I generally leave on a bad beat which is a good thing. All I know is that despite all that, I think I’ve moved up a step and hope to see that translate into better results at the tables. Confidence can be a great thing for your game…of course only until you get aces cracked and decide you hate the game again!