LGW

I'm currently in Landon GatWick airport, waiting for my 15 hour 30 minute journey to Las Vegas NV to commence. Slept fairly well in the Hotel last night, I feel like I need to get a good bed at my place so I can sleep like that too, but I haz no space.
I managed to play 1.1k hands of Holdem in my room last night. I ended up losing about 280$, but I think I played pretty well and tbh I'm happy to get hands in. It's like I have trouble finding the time to play, but my new notebook should help with this. 6 tabling is pretty sweet, small, but sweet.

I'm such a fish when it comes to travelling to the US, they literally ask you like 40 questions and I couldn't answer all of them... For example I didn't know the place where I was staying (the exact address), which is obviously not a smart thing to do, but I've also never been asked something like that before at an airport.... well I guess they did in Dubai, but it's different, because they don't enter the information into a computer. I also didn't know the address in Dubai, but he could tell I was some random Euro on holidays so he didn't make too much of a fuss about it.
Anyway I managed to get a hold of Noel online and he gave me the address, so I'll be prepared for any further questions. Bring it US government!
A friend told me the other day that they've started randomly selecting people at airports with notebooks and copying their hard drives for pirate material. I didn't know they did this, anyway I'm clean so no worries.
I should geto going now, maybe I can get some duty free shopping in, but seems unlikely.
L8rs.

travelling

I'm writing this from my hotel room in London. I have to spend the night here, because my connection flight to Vegas is tomorrow at 10 and I arrived in London at 11am. It doesn't really bother me too much, it's not much of a hassle for me.
I dropped by at Marks and Spencer's to pick some food, which I am eating right now. Practically everything they sell is super healthy, which is good for me. I really do not dislike healthy food, but I end up not eating so healthy most of the time, I believe mainly due to the fact that I'm too lazy to cook, but this will change soon I hope, when I get back to Innsbruck, I'll get myself a cook book and go shopping on a regular basis (I usually end up odering in, because I don't have anything in the house).
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit. I'm very excited about going to Las Vegas tomorrow and also meeting all the weird Americans. Seeing some of the Pros will be fun too.
Later.

Sup

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. I've been busy with some exams and haven't been doing too much.
Right now I'm getting ready for Vegas, just making sure I have enough clothes and cash to travel. My plan is also to stay in London for a bit on my way back from Vegas and meet with a friend who is doing an internship there, which I'm excited about, I haven't been to London properly in a while.
I'm gonna do a bit of shopping now and then hopefully get in some hands before the EURO 2008 semi-final between Germany and Turkey.

how things are goin'

This month has been goin' pretty marginally so far. I dropped down to -3k pretty early due to my big hu session loss and running below expectation @ 3/6.
I've been up a little a bit aswell though, but right now I'd say I'm down about 400$.
I actually think I am playing well and my HU games is also really improving I feel.
I've also been working on my Omaha game, but mainly reading/watching vids (if you're a deuces cracked member, definetly check out the "Mad Potters" series on Omaha with Sensei and Riverboatking) and not so much playing.
I have an exam coming soon, so I'll be unable to put as much effort into my game as I would like to, but I'm fine with that.

no words

good morning

So it's 5:55am, which is pretty early, but the good news is that I didn't stay up till this time, but just woke up. I didn't want to wake up this early, because it means I'll be tired around 4pm-6pm, but it will help me get to bed early today so I can balance my sleeping.

I didn't actually get to see a football match yesterday in the EURO 2008, because of a missunderstanding. We're going to watch Sweden-Spain on Saturday and not Spain-Russia as I thought. Spain is on fire right now as they beat Russia 4-1 yesterday. Russia really wasn't bad from their overall game play, but Spain just had such deadly counter attacks, it was brutal.

The good thing about me being up early is that there is a decent chance my notebook is arriving today, so I won't be pulled out of any deep-sleeping.

Poker-wise I'm done with my Party rakeback days and I'm a bit dissapointed I wasn't able to play more hands, but I think my bad sleeping had a lot to do with it.
It's hard for me to filter out my exact results for Party (I don't know how to do it with HM), but I'd guess I ended up +1.6k from cash games with an extra 475$ cleared in bonusses and a wooping 1426.64$ rakeback in 5 days of play.
The plan for the rest of the month is to grind it out on iPoker 3/6, 2/4 6max and fullring and to maintain status before I go to Vegas. I'll also be playing some 2/4 hu on the side.

:S

I'm super wasted right now. I just played 1333 hands straight and ended up winning 367$ over 1/2 and .5/1. I think I played some spots a bit too aggro, giving my opponents to much credit for being capable of folding hands when my perceived range beats them.
The rake is lousy at those stakes. I only made 140$ in RB. I guess if I make it to 3k hands (not looking very likely), it'd be 300$.
I'm gonna go to town as I'm falling asleep in my chair as I am writing this.

Bad sleeping

Ok, it's time for me to admit, again, that my sleeping rhythm is completely off balance. I've decided to balance it by not sleeping today and trying to go to bed at around 9-10pm (note, right now it is 6:10am). Today is the last day I have 100% rakeback on Party Poker (which is soooo sweet), and I don't wanna waste it, so I've decided to multitable 8 FR 1/2 games and just "bonus-whore" basically.
Right now they're aren't enough 1/2 FR games running, so I'm playing .5/1 aswell ^^. I'll switch in as much 1/2 as possible, because I still think my edge is reasonable enough with little sleep and I get more rakeback there.
I'll post results of hand count and amount won (with and without rb) after I'm done.
I figure I won't be playing for too long as I have tickets for today's EURO 2008 game in Austria and Switzerland (maybe till like 4pm), Spain vs Russia.
This should be fun though.

It's party time

Today my Party Poker VIP days begin and I'll have 100% rakeback for the next 5 days. I wanna be putting in more hands than I usually would and I hope I'll be able to do so.

Yesterday I finally decided which notebook to get for Vegas. I decided against a Macbook Pro, not because I don't like it, but because I just don't feel comfortable with paying literally twice as much as for any other notebook out there that can do the same or close to it. So I'm getting an Acer Aspire 6920g, which set me back 1350€ compared to the 2500€ for the MBP. It's a 16:9 multimedia notebook with a high res 1920*1080 (1080p), 4GB ram, Core 2 Duo T8300 and Nvidia 9500 GMs. I must admit I'm not all too familiar with these components, but the notebook did pretty well in tests from sites that I trust, so it should be good.

Recap on HU match

Now that it's been a day I've had time to reflect on my match and get the tilt out of my system. I still stand by most of my decisions and I think I made correct adjustments to his playing style, but some key mistakes in deep pots. To my defence I haven't really played much 300 and 400bb deep, it's really very challenging and every decision can be for a lot of money. Tilting obviously becomes very expensive aswell as not focusing (some people would say it's the same thing).
I think part of why he was so tough to play against was that he must have had a pretty good card distribution to where it appeared to me that he was constantly making close to nut hands when he was betting. I must admit though that he played his style pretty well and made some good laydowns to me.
I'm definetly sure of my edge against this guy and I'd take some more shots at him given the chance, but I'm not sure I'll see him again too soon. He has some exploitable lines and he adjusts slowly to your change in play, so your chipping away at the small-mid sized pots. I think he plays large pots reasonably well though.
I'm sure a seasoned HU reg would've crushed him, but I can imagine other regs having troubles against him aswell. I don't think that some of the people berating me for being weak in deep pots not adjusting well etc, are being fair on me (and also not showing great comeradeship).
What I did take from this match was some valuable experience in both deep stacked and HU poker and some self-management aspects (possibly quitting him earlier, just to keep a clear mind. I feel that for me that this is especially true. I'm generally a very calm person, but I also absorb things a lot which is a) not healthy and b) will show it's side-effects, as my brain is processing these feelings additionally to the information at hand and rations between them as weird as that may sound. An example would be say you lost 3 pots and you're in a marginal spot again, the logical part will say maximize ev and the emotional will say I don't want to lose another pot. Obviously this has to be balanced with game flow dynamics (sometimes it can be correct to fold a marginally profitable hand to save momentum and push bigger edges later on).).

These are just my after-thoughts on my HU session. I took the day off today and I'll be playing a combination of party poker (100% rakeback for the next 6 days) ring games, ipoker ring games and FTP HU poker for the rest of the month. I also have a macroeconmics exam coming up at the end of the month, right before I go to vegas.
I've also decided to get a new notebook, a MacBook Pro. I'm gonna buy it in the US though, fully tuned it's a wooping 750€ (1100$) cheaper in the US than in the EU.

HU match

I just played a guy for five and a half hours on iPoker. I ended up losing 6 buy ins on the session and probably 7 to him.
He was playing so poorly that I felt I had an edge on him. I got back a lot on him at one point, but then staked off pretty light.
I think I made some mistakes in big pots, but at the same time he was playing such a crazy predictable style that I felt I could grind it back which I did several times, but I just couldn't take down a big pot.
I've never seen somebody play the way he has before. He reraised from the blinds everytime he played a hand, he'd call say 5% of the time. He called about 85% of my 4bets. He would check/fold every time on the flop and if he bet he had a hand typically. I think he almost never bluffed, I only caught him bluffing right at the beginning of the match.
One thing I must say though was that he never made a bad call down which was party of why it was so difficult to get back up on him.
It's crazy, but it's almost like he was cheating. It just doesn't make sense for him to show a profit playing the way he does.

Here are some of my most frustrating pots:

1
2
3
4

I won't lie I played some pots poorly aswell, but the match just wasn't in my favour in general. I'm going to implement a 3 buy in quit rule for now, just to make sure I'm not tilting. I'm also going to look for another site to play hu on, most likely Full Tilt Poker because I think they have the best software to play HU on.

ECOOP # 10

I just busted in the main event with AdKd against 4d9d, the guy was bullying the whole table and I was happy to look down at AK obviously, I couldn't hold however and busted in 78th out of 1277 after playing 8 hours straight. I ended up with 3k$ and overall winnings of 3550$ in the series which I can't complain about.

ECOOP # 9

This was a 250$ buy in PLO event. With 530 entrants. I got pretty deep in this tourney and got a bit unlucky towards the end when I put in most of the money ahead, but failed to hold. I busted 38th and cashed for 750$.
Tomorrow is the main event for 1k which this has all been building up to. All in all I'm pretty happy to have cashed and it's funny that it was in an Omaha event.
The level of play is fairly poor in these events though, worse than in the Holdem events. I'm not sure I encoutered anybody that really impressed me.