I took off, hurriedly, from the office at shortly past 11am on Friday. The plan was to pick up Lori, go for a quick lunch, and then drive to Stockholm/Arlanda airport, a 2.5 hour drive. The flight to London City Airport was to leave at 4:20, so we had time - but not loads of it. The drive went fine though,without much traffic surprisingly enough, but I guess we beat the Friday rush hour by just a tiny margin.

I’ve posted about a lot of non-poker stuff lately because my life hasn’t been so focused on poker, simple as that. Stuff like the new job kicking into a new gear (loving it) having a pregnant wife (loving HER!) and dutifully dealing with gardening now that spring’s here, yadda yadda. You don’t really care, but I felt obligated to give an excuse.

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but one of the three shows that I bother watching is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (the other two: House and Heroes). If they showed it here, I’d add The Colbert Report to that list, but not every show makes it over to Sweden, unfortunately. Anyhow.

Jon has a lot of politicians on as guests, and it seems to me quite a few of them have written books. All of three remaining presidential candidates, for instance, and quite a few of the ones who dropped out - or maybe even all of them? So while I’m sitting there watching one of them promote their books on family values or what their dad used to be up to or whatever else it is they’ve written about, I ask myself “when did you find time to write it?”

Reads are awesome, reads are great. Having reads on an opponent means making non-standard plays that are hugely more profitable than just playing your own two cards against some half-assed assumption of what the other guy’s range is. But, and this is a pet-peeve of mine, people hide behind the notion of “reads” too much when they discuss hands. For example, a response to the question “Should I make a continuation bet with AK on this dry flop out of position?” might will yield a response that says “it depends on the opponent” and then explains what to do if the opponent is, for instance, extremely tight (or some other read that makes the decision easy). This isn’t a bad response, in itself, it’s just that it’s not as helpful as it could be.

Well, what’s there to say. I’m going to be one! Preliminary date is October 13, and before that I’m sure I’ll go through a whole bunch of interesting stages of worrying, excitement and panic over “how am I supposed to know what to do with it!”

Cigars for everyone!

So I decided at the end of March to devote all of April to no-limit. So far, I’ve enjoyed every minute most of it and I see no particular reason to hold on to limit hold ‘em as my main game. I really feel that having extensive limit experience pays off tremendously when playing no-limit, however. I’m used to thinking in terms of equity, which really helps when I’m faced with a decision as to whether or not to play a big pot. Getting the percentages right time and again helps a lot in situations like that.

One thing that I just never seem to be able to remedy, is my unwillingness to stop playing when stuck - and my willingness to quit when I’m ahead. If I’m up for the session, my mind starts looking for excuses to stop. If I’m down, I absolutely abhor having to get up and walk away. What’s more, I’ve noticed that the sums involved are of no consequence, at least when I’m down for the session. If I’m stuck $1k or $1 doesn’t change how unwilling I am to quit playing.

Random weird thought:

In a medieval fantasy type world (Lord of the Rings,  Game of Thrones, even Blizzard’s Warcraft) you have, basically, a technology level fitting the 14th century Earth. Right? Longswords, full plate armored knights, etc. You get the idea.

Now, in these stories, you often see references to something that happened a long time ago. For instance, in the case of JRR Tolkien, he talks about the last battle against Sauron, which happened… 3,000 years ago? More? I can’t remember. Many thousand years ago, is the point. You see the same thing in the Warcraft games, where there are references to battles also thousands of years ago.

Because since Saturday morning, I’ve been

1) in transit, and then

2) had a stomach virus, quickly followed by

3) a fairly nasty cold, and now

4) it’s already Thursday and about a week has gone since I last blogged.

Sorry about that.

…

I still have a cold. Still, I’ve been trying to get some time at the (sweet, joyous, lovely) online tables, practising my no-limit skills. 1800 hands later, and the Poker Gods have nicely enough granted me a 3.5 buy-in profit, which puts me at a completely unsustainable 11.5BB/100. I’ll get back to you on what that number is when April is over.