Friday, June 17, 2011

Chapter #6-The Downward winding staircase

As I have stated in earlier blog entries, I originally started this blog at Deuces cracked under then name of Figaro3000. The next 2 blog entries that you would read in chronological order are the first 2 under the titles of, "My poker history Jan-June 2008" and "My poker history, July-December 2008". Thanks again for reading and now back to our regular programing.

Rake back may have saved me from depositing. It looks as though my online challenge is still alive. I received .37 from rakeback and if you add that to the .05 I had in my account, that makes .42 or a little over 10 BBs at .02-.04. I quickly got on to a short handed FR table and am now a little over 1 dollar (American).
A little while ago I mentioned 2 brands of Scotch I was thinking of purchasing. I decided to go with the Ardberg Corryvreckan. I like it so far because it’s strong, smoky and has a little black licorice after taste that's nice. I am not partial for the sweeter single malt Scotch, as my last bottle, which was Bowmore 18 year. It’s just a tad too sugary tasting for my palate. If any of you nameless readers have any suggestions for me, please speak up.

One thing I just realized is that for all of the poker talk, I haven’t really gone into the specifics of what type of poker and stakes I normally play. Since January of 2008, I have been mainly playing FR LHE online, with the occasional trek out to the Casino. I mentioned in some previous blog posts that I started with SNGs and some tourneys, ya know, a little this and little that. The large swings that can be seen in one hand of NLHE gave me an incentive to focus on LHE, which back in 2004-2005 was the main cash games, whether you were playing online or live. As we all know, that changed rather quickly as the poker boom hit its Zenith in 2006-2007, especially with the popularity of TV shows like, “High Stakes Poker”.
Once UIGEA hit, I, like many players who were on the hobbyist side, cashed out a majority of my BR to see where things would fall. I redeposited some of that in early 2007, but was not as serious as I thought I was and saw some poor results rather quickly. Another important fact that I started to become painfully aware of was my ability level. The game of LHE was changing and becoming more complex which required not only more intense study on my part, but the use of software like Poker Tracker, so that I could get better reads and info on my opponents. I was not practicing these things and as a result I was losing money rather quickly.
My wife and I were expecting our first child in June of 2007 and we were both working busy schedules that didn’t always work well together. Being in retail at the time, I was working some nights and weekends, while my wife had a regular Monday to Friday 9-5 job. I didn’t have much time to spend studying and posting a great deal on poker forums, which in hindsight, would’ve done me a world of good. What I had to face up to was the fact that I just wasn’t serious enough about working on my game and I didn’t have any type of solid plan when it came to playing poker or improving, but my expectations were unrealistically high. 2007 was a year in poker that I would like to forget, but need to remember in order to understand how far I’ve come in my own development.
I’ve been looking back at posts that I’ve made throughout the past 4 years on the 2+2 forums and I am a bit embarrassed by the things I wrote and how I conducted myself to a large degree. I, like many others, was rather ignorant when I first got in to poker, but that changed very little from the time I started posting in different forums in June of 2005 through the end of 2007. I touched a little on this in a post in December of 2009 (link), in which I also discussed my ongoing struggle with tilt. What would’ve been good for me and my poker playing at that time was structure. Structure with regard to following how to post hands, how to respond to hands, researching how well other players were doing, and all in all, being in the middle of things rather than trying to be an individual within the poker community. I just kept myself at a distance which ended up hurting my game and stinting my growth. The main reason why I wasn’t aware of this at the time was that somewhere, I didn’t want to work at things. I wanted it to come easy. Epic failure.jpg.
Another reason for my low level of play was as I mentioned earlier, the fact that I was a new Father and was still quite busy at work. I couldn’t stay focused while playing and when I did have some time to myself, I was usually not in the best frame of mind to be playing my A-game. In October of that year, my wife and I talked about how difficult life got with having a newborn baby compounded with our mirrored schedules. We were doing well financially and rather than hire a Nanny for our son, we decided that I would quit my job and be a stay at home Father. I had some mixed emotions about it, but I never wanted to live an average life and being a stay at home Father is far from average.
Well, suffice it to say, 2007 ended rather poorly when it came to poker, but was quite fun and interesting in every other aspect. I started to get back in to playing on a more regular schedule and level of seriousness in December, but found out that things were going to be rocky for a while with regard to the results. In 2005 & 2006 I was mostly playing 2/4 or 3/6 FR LHE, but since UIGEA, the games had gotten much tougher than before and so the comparable ability level was around the .25-.50/.50-1 levels. I decided to start at .25-.50 FR LHE which at that point was the lowest limit I had really played, but it was where I should had started years before. It truly was the beginning of me learning how to play and think about poker.

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