B-ball league starts tomorrow

Well, our team has been practicing for a few weeks and, aside from a guy we picked up yesterday, we all know each other pretty well. I feel that our practices have gone well and that we have a well-rounded team with a decent about of basketball knowledge and athleticism. Unfortunately, none of us has any idea what the competition will be like, so we won’t know until tomorrow evening if we’re any good in this league. I feel like we’ll do very well and that we’ve put together a great team, but the scoreboard will either verify or disprove that tomorrow.

Gettin’ that poker itch

It’s been about 6 months since I played poker regularly and I’m startin’ to get really antsy. I’ve been able to put it off for a while, but I’m starting to miss the challenge and intellectual exercise, so I think I’ll be getting back into it soon. First, I need to set a monthly amount that I can play with, so that if I lose, I don’t go dropping a bunch of money on a hobby. Once I’ve established a reasonable monthly amount (probably like $50), I’ll write it down somewhere and see if I can’t get the ball rolling. I’m looking forward to it.

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Poker Night update

I bought in for $5 and bought out for almost $29. I was up to just over $33 at one point, but caught cold cards for an hour or so near the end of the session. This is definitely my biggest win (with a $5 buy-in) and it felt good to earn every pot I won: I didn’t have the nut hand even once tonight and I took several pots (large and small) with well-timed bluffs.

Again, I never raised pre-flop and very rarely bluffed (although I bluffed a few times early as I could tell the table was playing tight). I’m really liking the amount of deception that I carry if I have a reputation for never raising pre-flop. I realize that some players have an advantage (ie, they know they can limp if I’m the only person left to act), but I feel the advantage I have gained in deception and camouflaging my hands is worth it. Ironically, most pots I play generally provide the right price pre-flop. What I mean is that because so many other players (mostly loose/aggressive) raise pre-flop, most of my playable hands get the same amount of money in the pot pre-flop that I would want them to, only I’m not the one raising the pot. Normally, I would be concerned about my inability to knock people out when I hold hands that are best played short-handed, but since most of these players won’t fold before they see the flop, there is really no point in trying to chase people out. In fact, the more money there is in the pot pre-flop, the more correct my opponents are to chase draws because of the greater pot-odds; I prefer to keep the pot small pre-flop, so they are making mistakes by chasing with incorrect pot-odds. The biggest advantage is that I am confident in my post-flop play and I feel I can still control the table when necessary, even if I’m not the aggressor before the cards hit the board.

Of course I know that, in a higher-stakes or tighter game, I would have to raise pre-flop to play profitably, but this game is neither tight nor high-stakes.

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I hate football

The Gators leave me no other choice. Enough about that.

What’ve I been up to?

Not much. I am taking an easy load of 10 hours this semester and that’s left me with a lot of free-time to waste; so far, I’ve done an excellent job. I have been playing a lot of poker and I’ve been doing pretty well (considering our home game is packed with loose/aggressive players, so the most important aspect of our game is the cards and not necessarily one’s skill). It’s been exciting for me to learn more about the intricacies of the game and it’s been encouraging to see that I’ve improved significantly over the past couple of months. The main reasons for my improvement are found in the following books:

Super System, by Doyle Brunson — read
Caro’s Book of Poker Tells, by Mike Caro — read
Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players, by David Sklanksy — reading
The Theory of Poker, by David Sklanksy — reading

The best thing about reading these books is that I’m really developing the analytical part of my game. When I first started playing–a few months ago at a friend’s home game–I had a knack for “reading people”, but didn’t really understand the logistics of the game very well. Through reading these books, I’ve learned more about the mathematical, analytical and strategic aspects of the game. These new aspects, along with my knack for reading people have made me a significantly better poker player. Granted, I have a very long way to go, but I’m making steady progress and that’s all that really concerns me.

I played my first “live” tournament the other night and would have had an excellent shot at winning, had I not caught poor cards most of the night. Essentially, I played two hands:

• 88 in the hole, I make a small, positional raise before the flop, simply to increase potential winnings if I hit a set. Flop came garbage and I folded to a medium sized bet.
• KQs in the hole, I raise about the size of the pot before the flop with two or three callers. A and trash on the flop, I bet about half the size of the pot and am raised to the size of the pot, 3rd player folds, so I’m heads-up with the big stack, I think and call. Turn comes low, I check, player to my right bets, I immediately raise to twice his bet. He hesitates and calls. River comes low, I bet out for about 1.5 times the size of the pot, other player says, “Let’s have a look at you (like he’s a pro, sizing me up)” and then says, “You haven’t played much all night, so you must have something nice” and folds. I guess when he had a look at me, he didn’t see that I had nothing but A-high.

Then, I watched the big stack get bigger for a while (mostly, if not exclusively, on great cards) and ended up three-handed with a shorter stack. Each round of blinds is about 1/7 of my stack, small stack goes all-in before the flop for about 1/3 of my stack and I have KQ, so I call. I lose to A2o. Two hands later–I’m now on the short-stack–I go all-in with QJ and lose to A9s caller. Then I go home.

So, that was my first live poker tourney experience. In retrospect, I may have faired better if I’d been a little more patient when it got to be 3-handed, but I had no way of knowing I’d run up against A’s with cruddy kickers and trigger-happy callers…

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Where’ve I been?

This is a question with a very uninteresting answer: Right here. Problem is, I’ve had nothing to write about for a while, so it’s been easy to neglect my memory-keeper. Lately, I feel like a jolly little elf counting the days until Christmas, until something happens. Except for me, Christmas isn’t about hopping in the sled with Santa and slathering the earth with cool stuff and good wishes, it’s about totally overhauling my life. Not that I feel my life is in need of an overhaul–I’m a college kid with more free-time than I know what to do with and I often find myself too short on energy to even sleep the days away–but a drastic change is inevitable. I think I’ve spent a lot of my free-time trying to cope with what will surely be a “quarter-life crisis”, as John Mayer calls it. I don’t deal well with transition and I doubt I’ll be very sporting about moving across the country and crunching numbers forty (or so) hours a week. Update on that in six months or so.

Poker

I haven’t played much lately because there just aren’t many people around. But I have been reading about the game and trying to figure out if I think it’s something at which I could succeed if I tried. Right now, I’m reading Doyle Brunson’s Super System, which is an excellent tutorial on all kinds of poker and Mike Caro’s Book of Poker Tells, which has been very useful that past few times I’ve played. I’m looking forward to maybe trying out a few home games in Texas if I end up moving to Dallas. It could be a good way to pass the time as I try to find a way out of spending the rest of my life as an engineer.

Be back in a month or so…

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