Practice as if you are the worst...

I recently realized after going through a long downswing that part of my problem was that my confidence level was really low. I second guessed every play I made and just didn't believe I'd ever get to playing winning poker. The lower my confidence sunk the more I just couldn't win. It became a vicious circle. 

During this time there were some poker friends who were very critical of my play and while I'm sure they meant to be constructive it just made my confidence even lower. I'm now around a new group of players and have found that I can hold my own with most of them. There are a few serious sickos who I will continue to strive to play as well as but for the most part I don't feel totally outmatched. When I first joined the Imawhale staking group I was really worried that the other MTT players would be so ahead of me that it would just make  my confidence worse but I found the exact opposite to be true. This is the nicest group of guys and they are all so supportive and helpful and they never make me feel like a poker moron, even though I can be one at times.  

Things are going so well, I just finished my first set of games and finished with a nice profit. My second set started off a little rough but it's starting to pick up. I had two final tables tonight with a first and second place finish and one other cash. Tonight at one of my tables I think I got one of the nicest compliments a tournament player can receive, two people at the table told me I scared them, LOL. I didn't think I was that scary actually and I'm glad to know I may have been mistaken. 

Just remember, poker can be a brutal game. Play your best and study hard and surround yourselves not with people who make you feel worse but with people who help you to feel better. 

The Monster Turn Around

It appears that my downswing is on the upswing. This week I won the coveted Mid-Week Monster on Merge for just over $4000 and the same night I made two other final tables with a second and third finish for a $5K day. I love $5K days and they’re hard to come by in the U.S. online poker world these days. 

Between last Saturday and today I made 7 final tables one of which was my first final table on the Revolution Network and two were on True Poker with the others on Black Chip Poker (Merge).  Since starting with Imawhale (see blog here) I’ve  made 11 final tables. My second biggest cash was forth in the True $50K guarantee for $3400. 

I have to say that my game today is much improved as compared to even six months ago. A lot of things that I had a hard time with a few months back have really started coming together and making sense to me . Poker is such a complicated game and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get to a point where you can really win consistently. In retrospect I really was running bad but I was also not playing my best either and the longer the runbad continued the worse it affected my game. 

I did a good bit of reading over the last couple of months and I read Jared Tendler’s The Mental Game of Poker which is a must read for any serious poker player. It will not only change the way you look at variance and your poker game but it will even help you with everyday life things as well. I love the learning concept and I’m really seeing where as my A game improves so does my C game so that even on a not so great day I’m playing the same game that I considered my A game a few months back, thus helping in the consistent winning department. 

Two other great books I’ve read that I highly recommend are Kill Everyone and Raiser’s Edge. Kill Everyone covers a lot of fundamentals without being boring to an intermediate player and Raiser’s Edge goes into much more complicated play on a more advanced level. Reading these three books helped me tied up many lose ends with things I was struggling with as well as giving me ideas for adding new twist and turns to my play book. (LOL I think that sounds lame but I’m leaving it.)

No matter how rough things seem and how shitty bad variance gets just know that:

1. It’s probably not all bad variance so work hard to step up your game.

2. The part of it that is bad variance is something you can do nothing about so deal with it and stick it out and it will end eventually. (Try to whine as little as possible, it's really annoying but a little is allowed)

My very favorite quote and one I repeat to myself often is...

“You will eventually run worse than you ever thought possible, the difference in a winner and a loser is the loser thinks he doesn’t deserve it” 

It’s true you will, I just did and guess what, I’m sure sometime in the future I’ll run even worse than this time. I’ve had a few stretches of bad variance and the good thing is with each new one I’m able to handle it better than the last one and that is progress. Yep that sounds lame too but oh well. Here’s to some extended run good and play good!

The Decision!

Wow it's been awhile since I've written a blog post. Well I wrote a couple but decided not to publish them since I felt they were unnecessarily negative and served no good purpose. I'm really good about blogging when things are going well and I have something to brag about but I don't blog much when things are going bad or just not so great. 


Variance reared it's ugly head the beginning of May and it's all been downhill since with little recovery. I think the runbad has improved and I've made a few final tables but no wins or decent cashes so my bankroll took a hard hit. As a result I made a decision to go with Imawhale.com staking group. I've looked into other staking groups before but I've always decided against them because I didn't want to have to worry about getting knee deep in makeup and I didn't feel that there were enough positive aspects of the groups I've had offers from. Imawhale is different, they reset makeup after each set of 300 games so you don't end up up to your eyeballs owing them every dime you make. They also have a Skype group for the MTT players and it's a great group of guys (yeah as usual I'm the only female) all of whom are good winning players, some even great winning players. We can share hands and strategy and help each other to improve. The support is great! If anyone is looking for MTT or cash game backing I highly recommend this group. 


I really think this has been one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. I'm really feeling good about poker again and looking forward to working with this group. I've never fully understood why so many poker players were staked but I'm starting to really understand it now. So here's to all the good that's to come! 

Up, up and away...

Well looks like the graph is moving the right direction. After a fairly slow month it's finishing up with a bang. Tonight I finished 4th in the $22 $17.5K guaranteed and 8th in the Sunday High Roller $60K guaranteed for a total of $2993 for the day bringing my total profit for the month up to $3666.  So far this year I've made just over $11K.


I really feel like my play has improved considerably. I've had a few coaching session over the last few weeks and they've help tremendously. I'm more willing to make riskier plays when necessary and I seem to be getting the timing of these plays right more often than not. I made a pretty dumb mistake tonight in the $17.5K which probably cost me a thousand or so, yep costly mistake. It was due to a couple of my worst leaks, 1. Acting too fast and 2. Not fully thinking through the villains range in that situation. I was also being a bit of an aggrotard with that play. Live and learn though, mistakes might cost me but at least I think I'm learning from them.


One more day to go so maybe I'll get lucky and win some more money tomorrow. Until then....


Edit 4/30: Finished 3rd in the $33 $6K guarantee tonight for another $740. Ran like God in that game until I ran my AJs into 99 and whiffed. Oh and I forgot about swapping some money to Hero so my actual profit for the month was actually about $4100 before the $740 tonight which actually counts for May since the game finished after midnight. 

Black Friday One Year later...

This time last year was one sad sad sad day for online poker in the U.S. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first found out, I doubt I'll ever forget it. It's kind of like when Elvis died, yeah I'm that old, or when Princess Diana died. I remember where I was and what I doing when I heard about those two tragedies too.

I was just starting to actually become a consistent winner at the game. On Black Friday I was getting ready to go out and run some errands and looked at my phone and saw an email from Lupe Soto and LIPS about the indictments. I remember throwing my phone on the bed a saying some things about it. I didn't realize the full extent of what was happening until a couple of hours later when I got home and saw all the talk on Skype, Facebook and Twitter and realized I couldn't register for any games on PokerStars.

I had over $4000 in my account and of course panicked a bit about that. I tried to make a withdrawal but later went back and cancelled it. One of my very first reactions, and this was way before anyone knew about the mess Full Tilt was in, was thank God my money is on PokerStars. I always felt that it was safe and that I would eventually get it. As everyone knows PokerStars came through and had everyone paid in a very short period of time.

PokerStars was starting SCOOP and I had already won a couple of satellite seats through the blogger freerolls and I was looking forward to the SCOOP games. It was the first time I was actually rolled to play most of the mid stakes games and I had great hopes of doing well. The ladies Sunday $55 had just started back up and I had final tabled 2 of the first 3 games and had gotten to play with Vanessa Selbst and Liv Boeree, I had even busted Liv in one the game and had gotten doubled up by Vanessa in another. These things like everything to do with Stars was over thanks to corporate greed, political corruption and government meddling in our private lives. Thousands of professional online players were out of work in the worse economy in decades. A billion dollar industry was shut down and all for what? I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Well that's the past, it's still sad but it's over and there is nothing we can do about it. On to the present, of course I'm still playing online and I'll continue to as long as there is a place to play. It's been a rough year with lots of poker ups and downs. I've managed to bust a bankroll more than once during the year but I had a good month in October and the last couple of months have been the best ever. Hopefully the DOJ will leave the remaining sites alone for awhile and things will continue on an upward trend. My game has never been better and it's improving daily. I have to say I don't think my game would be where it is without Black Friday. Making money on PokerStars was so much easier than it has been on Merge. For so long the competition was so tough there was no choice but to work hard on improvements. So I guess as they say every cloud has a silver lining and when one door closes another one opens.

Nevada and now New Jersey seem to be making great strides in legalizing online poker within their states and maybe this year we'll finally see some good federal legislation pushed through. We can continue to work for it and to hope but at least the states are starting to move in the right direction.

Well Happy Black Friday anniversary to everyone, such a sad day it was.

March Madness 2012...

At the beginning of the month I wasn't sure how much I was to even going play Poker Maximus events but luckily on Sunday, Mar. 11 I decided to play a few games. I bought into the $33 event 23 with only a $167 bankroll, not a bankroll strategy I'd actually recommend. I ended up finishing in 3rd for my best cash ever. After that I was a full fledged MTT addict again.

I went up to Harrah's Cherokee with my Mom for couple of days the day after this nice finish and played some live cash. Netted a $570 profit for a few hours play on my first day but then lost a couple of hundred the next day but left with over a $300 profit so not too bad, beats losing.

Then on Wednesday night I won the $11 2r 1a $8.5K guaranteed for another nice cash. I was on a roll, or so I hoped. Alas nothing else great happened. I had a couple of other cashes in Poker Maximus events but nothing great but that's just how it goes in MTTs.

Funny thing.... all my best cashes have been in March. In March 2009 I finished 49th in the Cake $250K guaranteed for $645. This was my first real money cash and I'd only been playing for real money for a few days before this game. Then March 2010 I won the $4.40 $2K guarantee on Stars for $640. March 2011 I finished 7th in the $11r $50K guarantee for $1571 and made the most in a month ever for a total of $3400. Then these two great cashes above this March. Next year I guess I should go to every live event I can find in March.

I hadn't played much on Carbon until recently since I'd mostly been playing on Hero so my previous MTT results weren't too great so below is what a SharkScope graph looks like when a fish gets lucky and wins some nice money...

Guess I'm going back to the cash grind now. I'll still do MTTs a couple of days a week but I'll mostly be playing cash on Intertops for April and maybe into May. MTTs can really drain a bankroll without something to supplement it so I really want to get to where I play cash for a steady income and MTTs for the extras. Needless to say I'm pretty happy with my results this month and hopefully I won't have such a long dry spell between good cashes this time.

Run good saved the day...

The Prop Bet:

Finished the 10K hands prop bet and won! Many thanks to the poker gods for the run good over the last 3K hands. Not that I ran that bad over the first 6 to 7K but I just stayed in the red during that time. It was my worst run since I started playing cash in January. One thing I realize and fully admit is there was some play bad mixed in during that downswing. I made some bad decisions and I paid for them. As you can see from the graph I didn't really run below EV very much at all but at times I wasn't running that great either. That coupled with some play bad cost me but that's poker. I learned from every mistake and corrected them as best as I could.

I have to say I was pretty happy about how well I handled the downswing. In the past I would of gotten all tilted and wanted to give up swearing that I just suck at cash instead of excepting that's just how it goes. This time I evaluated my play and figured out how much was my fault and how much was just normal unavoidable coolers and moved on, got back on the tables the next day and pushed ahead. I had only two episodes of insane monkey tilt and it went away really fast once I interjected a little logical thought.

The Month:

I played 19,142 hands this month with a decent profit for 10NL. I wanted to try to make it to 20K but after the last two days trying to finish the prop bet I was just too tired and/or lazy. Overall I was very happy with my February results. I'm playing pretty well overall and really improving my post flop decisions, which was a really weak area prior to this cash grind. I'm learning to slow down and think more about my opponents ranges and on what level they are thinking and thus making more correct decisions. Hopefully next month will go as well.

The Total Results:

Almost 30K hands down at 7BB/100 which is just amazing. My total Carbon bankroll is now $300. My goals for next month are dependent on what I decide to do about playing Poker Maximus games, the MTT event series running this month on Merge. In the past I would of been so excited about an MTT series like this but now I'm kind of so so about it. I hate to take much time away from cash to play for hours in MTTs and min cash or less. Of course there is the reason we play MTTs, those big cashes that actually happen sometimes but just not nearly often enough. I'll know by the middle of next week which direction I'm going and I'll post some March goals at that point. No matter what, I want to get in a minimum of 10 to 15K hands of cash and I'd love to move up to 25NL by month's end but that might be a bit of a stretch. For now, decision time...