US Government Crackdown on Online Poker

I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this hypocritical government crackdown on online poker in the coming days, weeks, and months once I calm down about it and collect my thoughts.  As a wise man once told me: “Calmer heads prevail.”  Unfortunately, right now (and quite often), I do not have the calm head necessary to share any good solid thoughts on what happened, what it means, and what will happen. 

All I can say right now is that if you are a poker player, you should feel obliged to visit the following link and support the cause.  Even if you are not a poker player, take a look at the following link as it supports the basic human and American freedom of choice: http://theppa.org/takeaction/

Red Line

Well, it’s mid-April, and I’m still running like hell with an EV-adj of $441 and total winnings of -$1951.  Just slightly under $2500 EV, which is horrendous over 18.6K hands.  However, after a solid database review tonight, DR helped me to identify a key way to mitigate the suckout fest by focusing on my Red Line winnings.  I can’t affect my Showdown winnings right now as that will come with volume, but what I can do is take measures to affect my Non-Showdown winnings. 

So we took a look at my Red Line over the past 2 weeks, and just as suspected, I’ve been bleeding money at a higher rate than what I should at around -$2K.  So I really focused on that tonight as I played my session, and I played 1K hands with Red Line winnings of right around $0, which is outstanding!  Going forward, this will be my focus right now – just be more aggressive and play well in small pots until the negative EV straightens itself out over a larger and larger sample size. 

HAHA – unfortunately, I did manage to lose AA to AKs PF for stacks tonight!  So no luck changing EV yet.  However, I did grind out a solid profit tonight, so hopefully I can keep the momentum into my 3 day weekend as I play a ton of hands. 

On a side note, life ain’t so bad sometimes, as I do occasionally get my share of lovely suckouts, just not in All in situations.  Enjoy:

http://www.cardrunners.com/pokertools/session/304262/replay/

Highs and Lows of March

So I’m only supposed to make Blog posts when I do good in poker, right?  Well, at least i’d like to only do that.  Unfortunately, I can’t do that now because March was a little rough to say the least.  I know it’s terribly brutal and corny to use this phrase (and anyone can feel free to berate me for doing so), but March for me came in like a lion and out like a lamb.  I’m honestly on one of the worst 2 week swings that I’ve ever been on right now.  I started out March up over 10 buy ins and ended down about 2 overall.  See below:

The good news is that my stats are improving with coaching right now as I’m running 15/11/3.1, which is much much better.  Also, the better news (err maybe not better news) is that during March, I managed to run at a horrific EV$ Adjusted rate of $2278.14 while losing $282.40 total!!!!  For those that don’t understand this, the EV$ Adjusted stat means that this is the dollar amount that I should have won based on my equity in All-In pots with 1 or 2, or all 5 cards to come.  Since I lost about $282 this month, add that amount to the $2278, and I ran about $2500 under what was expected!!!  Absolutely brutal. 

Anyways, I could share some bad beats here (including a 1 outer!), but I will resist the urge to complain!  In all reality, I’m happy with my play in March, and I’m looking forward to running good for a change!  The key right now is to not tilt and just understand that variance is a big part of the game, and I will overcome variance with one thing and one thing only – more volume.