Adventures in finding my specialty...

I truly believe and have learned that winning online poker players are ones who specialize in a particular game. They play only that game and move up in stakes as they become better players and increase their bankrolls. You find this to be true with the vast majority of winning, successful pros and semi-pros. They may play some of the Sunday MTTS but Monday through Friday they grind their regular game.

Why is this true? Because by specializing you learn your chosen game backward and forward. You become familiar with the regular players and the structure and you hone your skills until you are great at that one game. It's very difficult to bounce from one type game to another and get really good at any of them so I'm trying to figure out what I want to specialize in and my next few blogs will be about my adventures in finding my niche in the crazy world of online poker.

Up until now I have bounced around trying to find a game I like and that I do well in with very mixed results. I thought I preferred multi-table sit-n-goes but the variance is very high and they take forever, even the turbo ones. I have never played a lot of 9 man single table sit-n-goes but I seem to be 1/2 way decent at them so I am going to play $6.50 9 man turbos for awhile and see how it goes. I will play about 200 - 250 of them and see what my win-rate and ROI are at the end of that and if they haven't caused me to go broke by that point I will stick with them until I've played 1000 of them and see how I did. If I've lost too much and haven't done well with them at the 250 mark I may switch to something else or drop down in stakes.

I will make weekly or twice weekly posts about my progress or lack of progress and I trudge ahead in my quest to find my specialty.

So wish me luck in my quests for specialization.

Don't have much to say except thank God I seem to finally be running better. I took down the first 45 man sng this month tonight and ran deep in the 3.30 4 max MTT.

I found some great poker quotes and thought I'd post some here:

There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a "flush." It is enough to make one ashamed of the species. ~Mark Twain

Poker is the game closest to the western conception of life, where life and thought are recognized as intimately combined, where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or of chance, where men are considered moral agents and where - at least in the short run - the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens. ~John Luckacs

I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream. Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and - when played well, nourishes the wallet. ~Lou Krieger

Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life. ~Anthony Holden

You have it in your power to turn a bad-beat around simply by realizing this simple truth: The more bad beats you encounter, the luckier you are. It's a sign that you are playing against opponents who continually take the worst of it, and if you can't beat someone who always takes the worst of it, you can't beat anyone. ~Lou Krieger

Most of the money you'll win at poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but from the ineptitude of your opponents. ~Lou Krieger

There's opportunity in poker.... If Horace Greeley were alive today, his advice wouldn't be "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Instead, he'd point to that deck of cards on table and say, "Shuffle up and deal. ~Lou Krieger

Hope anyone reading this (all few of you) enjoyed this.

Life is like poker, both deal you bad beats...

and you have two choices either suck it up and persevere or give up! I choose in both cases to persevere! I've often said poker isn't for the depressed or bi-polar person. The ups and downs are huge and they can really get to you if you don't have the right mental attitude. How do you manage to blow it off? Volume, volume and more volume! Why? Because the more tables you play the less you notice the variance and more your volume makes up for it.

I've been playing 3 to 4 tables and thought I needed to see them all so I tiled them. I am beginning to think I should stack them. The benefits of stacking are numerous.

1. I make plays and then before I can watch myself getting sucked out on another table pops in front of that one so I miss the suckout and using table ninja the table just closes and I don't have to suffer over the beat.
2. I can play at least 6 tables thus increasing my volume and reducing the overall variance.
3. With more going on I am less likely to make stupid plays out of sheer boredom.

So I'm going to try stacking and see how it goes.

I am also in a prop bet to play 150 45 man games this month and whoever makes the most profit over the 150 games wins. This should make me stick to one game for a while instead of bouncing around so much.

Okay now I'll talk about April results. April was pretty awful!

April Goals:

Play 100 27 man MTSNGS with a decent profit and ROI not quite
Play 100 other MTSNGS with a decent profit and ROI - yes
Play 100 STSNGS with a decent profit and ROI - yes
Play 15 MTTs - yes
Maintain silver star status - yes
Study 10 hours per week - not quite
Review at least one hand history per day - nope failed miserably

Barely broke even for April.

I'll do a post for May soon but that's all for now folks

Yep it's a full moon alright!!! Have to say that after a very rough month of running really bad things have finally picked up and I'm winning a few games.

I'm way behind on my goals this month and don't know if I'll make any of them but I have four days left so I'm still holding out for success.

Looks like we are doing a prop bet on the $3.25 45 man turbo sngs on Stars for May. The bet is 150 games and a bet of $25. I'm hoping this helps me stay on track since I have a tendency to bounce around different games too much.

Well I'll be back in a few with my less than stellar April results.

Just got back from a great trip to Tunica. I played lots of live cash poker and did really well the first 3 days but then lost a little the last 2 days. Amazing how much better I played overall since the last time I played live.

I played in 3 tournaments and 1 freeroll, man what total donkeys! I was pretty card dead in all of them so didn't really get too far. I never got a pocket pair above 5s and very few aces or kings and all of those had crappy kickers. Most of my cards were 8 high! Yuck! How can anyone be that card dead.

I'm actually glad to back to playing online and don't let anyone ever tell you that online donkeys are worse than live donkeys because it's just not true. I've played better players on .1/.2 penny table online than at $1/2 live.

I'm going to have to really bust my tail to keep my star rating on Pokerstars this month. I played too many MTTs the beginning of the month and didn't earn many points and then being out of town for several days made it even worse. I'm also going to have bust it to end the month with a profit since I'm currently down around $70.

Well back to the grind!!!

The Bitch is Back

I've kicked the chihuahua to the curb! After half a month of running bad I just took down a 45 man turbo. Not really a huge deal but the first time I've placed 1st in a multi-table sng all month I think. I also tried four of the new 9 man knock sngs last night and place 2nd in one and 3rd in one so not to terrible.

This is the first day I haven't been in the red in 4 or 5 days. I'm still down a bit for the month but hopefully my crappy run is about over. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it I'll be gambling it up in Tunica for the next few days so I hope my running good carries over to live play.

Anyway after my last two post about pushing through the bad run I thought I'd post something positive.

Well the Chihuahua is still winning...

And I'm still pushing forward. Part of the problem is I've been playing a lot of MTTs and in MTTs the variance is so much worse than MTsng and STsng variance. I have now switched back to what I know and what I'm good at, multi and single table sit-n-goes. I will limit my MTT play to one day per week from this point forward and I will play only 27 and 45 man sngs with a few 6 max single table games thrown in when I don't have time for the 27 or 45 man games. I will also stick to the $3.40 buy ins.

I made my first withdrawal from Pokerstars on Friday and it's nice to reap some of my profit. It only took 1 business day to reach my account.

This morning I was thinking things like well maybe I wasn't really playing any better in February and March, maybe I was just running good and now that I'm running bad I'm going to lose everything I've won. Well this is a bunch of bull! I am definitely playing better and I'm just running bad and it's mostly because I departed from what I do best, smaller MTsngs.

I saw a video of a Michael Jordon commercial for Nike on another poker players blog last week and it was a great message, to succeed we must endure failure. In poker we endure failure on a daily basis. The wins don't come easy and they don't come without hard work and perseverance. They also don't come if we feel sorry for ourselves and give up. The only way the wins come is through pushing on and working through the failures.

Well this has turned into yet another blog of talking about pushing on so for the one or two people who may read this, sorry for being redundant.

On another subject, whew finally, I'm going to have a break from online poker starting on Thursday of this weekend through Tuesday of the following week. My daughter is going to Germany on Wednesday and my husband and I are heading to Tunica on Thursday for 5 nights. Live poker with live fish, yehaw! I can hardly wait! I love the Gold Strike and Horseshoe poker rooms. They both always have great games running with the worst/best fish around. Hopefully I will take down a few nice pots, wish me luck!

Well TTFN!