Hey I bet you're probably busy with life and other things so I got a great idea that you can do so you can put in more volume ♦
You can let your wife play for you!! 
:f_biggrin:
JK man! Hope is all well with you in new brunswick man!
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Well I know I've been pretty silent the past week and a half but that was because I was in Jamaica Man!!! 
:f_thumbsup:
Had a great time, enjoyed the sun, snorkeling and scenery (you know what I mean 
)... The resort was great and the Jamaican people are fantastic. I am glad to be home though, especially now that the snow is melting!
OK... time to get some games in after a quick refresher and warm-up!
You sly dog. I'm still trying to shed the excess baggage from my jaunt!!
Glad you had a good break buddy 
Glad you enjoyed Jamaica, we should do a session soon?
btw can you check the message I sent you on skype.
Aaaargggghhh!
So I had a few days off after my trip to Jamaica and planned to make up a serious amount of volume during that time... and then the phone rang... my brother-in-law's basement was flooding!!! (this is my second brother-in-law with a flooded basement this year)... long story short - 3 very long days of clean-up later and 0 games registered... no coaching... no study group... nothing...
I feel good about being able to help out my family when they needed it, but am very frustrated about not getting my poker in... I just feel like I am losing so much ground.
So I was off today and decided to put a push on and try to get some volume in. 61 games played so far today with an ROI of 11.9%... hoping to get a few more games in tonight.
You know how certain days, your brain just seems to find a pattern - like you get dealt a certain hand much more often then you should or you see way more straight-flushes than normal for example, etc... Well today, it was my opponents making their flushes on the river... it seemed to be the cause of the majority of my bubbles and 3rd place cashes today. Oh well, it is what it is. I still fared pretty good.
Played over a 100 games during the Golden SnG promotion and I got nothing - this is the first time I haven't had at least one (also the first time I played exclusively KO's as well...).
wow nice 61 games is really good, I think i'll need to split my game into multiple sessions to hit 60 in a day.
Feeling the need to update...
Since my last post I had a coaching and it went very well. The games I played for the couple of days after that made me feel invincible - I just seemed to be in the zone making good plays one after another. I had a decent run of cards as well, so that always helps. ♦
Of course all things must balance, so tonight variance kicked my ass as I kept getting it in very good and opponents kept hitting there "get out of jail free" cards...
Frustrating to be sure, but I had a realization a couple of days ago... it sounds funny - because it is something that is so obvious, but I think I only understood at a very shallow level - this is a volume game. I kept putting too much stock in to my day-to-day results and not enough in my long-term results. The outcome of this realization is that I am happier with my progress, less worried about the day-to-day results, and motivated to get more volume in.
In real life - I had a great weekend, it was my wife's birthday and we had friends over for that - lots of drinks and laughs. Also we had a home poker game and I managed to scoop that which was nice. I lost a big hand to a Royal Flush which was pretty cool - think it is the first time that we've seen one in a home game...
On the road for work this week, and that usually means some very long days, but trying to cut back on that sort of thing... so I might get some poker volume in, although I can only 6-table on my laptop... but that isn't that big a difference really (normally 8-tabling) so not a big deal.
Originally posted by Ramble
Frustrating to be sure, but I had a realization a couple of days ago... it sounds funny - because it is something that is so obvious, but I think I only understood at a very shallow level - this is a volume game. I kept putting too much stock in to my day-to-day results and not enough in my long-term results. The outcome of this realization is that I am happier with my progress, less worried about the day-to-day results, and motivated to get more volume in.
I strongly believe this is a crucial step on the path towards becoming a semi-professional/professional player. Very pleased for you indeed!
April was a bit of a mixed month for me. I was extremely happy with my progress and results, but very disappointed in my volume. There were good reasons for my low volume (vacation to Jamaica, Easter weekend with family, helping family who flooded, etc...) but it is definitely something I am going to have to find a way to make up for.
My coachings are going great - I am definitely learning a lot and really enjoying the experience. I haven't been working with the study group at all and I need to make that work again because it was a lot of fun.
I haven't had a graph in awhile because the site I used to use isn't free anymore and I'm too lazy to sign up for another one since posting graphs is just about the only thing I use it for...
Results for April:
:diamond:Games Played: 172
:diamond:ITM: 41.9% (56.4% adjusted for KO bounties) - 24x1st, 22x2nd, 26x3rd, 22x4th, 78 rest.
:diamond:ROI:10.0% (that's a nice round number ♠_thumbsup: )
:diamond:2014 Volume Goal of 5000 games: -11% to date
Goals for May:
:diamond:600 games - this is aggressive for me but will start bringing me back towards my 2014 goal.
:diamond:2 Study Group Sessions - will try to coordinate a time with the guys and family in advance
:diamond:Continue to work on limp-stabs and blind steals
Here's to May!!!
This has been a pretty f'd up week... was supposed to travel for work this week, but my trip keeps getting delayed by a day, every day, and the week is starting to run out of days... getting pretty frustrated with it really as it is making my home life (and poker life) very hard to juggle...
I think this frustration is starting to boil over into my poker today as I started a few tables up and found myself making horrible hero calls with nothing but A-high in spots that villain just couldn't be bluffing with anything worse then my holdings... I haven't done that in months.
So I've decided to stop playing a bit for tonight and instead focus on a review. I'm hoping that this will bring me back to the level I was playing at a few weeks ago - which I was very happy with.
One good thing is that I am making progress on my volume goal from the last post - I've already played about 2/3 of my volume from last month and it's just the first week.
Looks like no travel this week for me, maybe next week... whatever... just chalk that up to life variance.
Had a very good coaching today after work. I noticed a couple of spots that we had gone over before that I thought I had fixed but are still there - so I took some better notes this time and am going to be focusing on them very hard during play and review over the next couple of weeks.
Alex also pointed out that nearly all of my plays during the past couple coachings have been +EV but not necessarily maximum value. In the spots where this showed up, it often related to me making pre-flop shoves because I lacked the confidence to play post-flop depending on the board/action. I'm looking forward to developing this area of my game.
(and a correction to my previous post - I've only played a bit less than half my previous month's volume - not sure how I messed that one up, but in any case I am doing much better volume wise so far).
Been a very gray and rainy day here, but didn't let that get us down... we took the little one to the park to chase ducks and jump in puddles and had a great day.
This evening I got a few games in and feel like I am playing well again - but am running below EV again for the day (been running below all month for that matter)... not much I can do about it, I just have to play through it... 
I'm thinking about playing with my HUD again... does anyone use the auto-rate rules to color-outline opponents in HM2? Why or why not? Any advice?
Up until now, I have been using the colors in Stars and just color opponents based on their full-ring (8-9 players) stats, as the number of players diminishes I ignore the colors and look at stats... (To be clear, I always look at stats, unless it is the first hand and they are not available, then I use the colors that are based on their early-stage STT stats... ummm yeah... that cleared things up... crystal right? 
).
Originally posted by Ramble
I'm thinking about playing with my HUD again... does anyone use the auto-rate rules to color-outline opponents in HM2? Why or why not? Any advice?Up until now, I have been using the colors in Stars and just color opponents based on their full-ring (8-9 players) stats, as the number of players diminishes I ignore the colors and look at stats... (To be clear, I always look at stats, unless it is the first hand and they are not available, then I use the colors that are based on their early-stage STT stats... ummm yeah... that cleared things up... crystal right?
I use them for a quick playing style check. Green = Loose aggressive, Blue = loose passive, yellow = tight passive, red = tight aggressive, calling station = purple. If a guy has made a single fishy play but has a red border (I use the colours so it gives me a coloured border) I might give him a bit longer before I mark him as a fish.
I like the colours more than the icons because it's all about getting to the information quickly.
My stars colours are just fish, good reg, unknown reg and bad reg.. it's for sharkystrator to do table selection with.
Originally posted by pauln
My stars colours are just fish, good reg, unknown reg and bad reg.. it's for sharkystrator to do table selection with.
Do you find sharkystrator table-selection is giving you an edge, or is it just a convenience thing (i.e. doing the same as you were doing manually - just quicker... assuming you were table-selecting manually)?
Also, I know you were using note-caddy (edge was it?) with all the custom badges, are you still using that and to what level?
These are just curiosity questions at this point, I'm not playing enough/successful enough at this game yet to plunk down yet more cash on associated software... HM2 and ICMizer were about as much as I could justify...
sharkystrator is giving me an edge as well as being very convenient.
It's $5 a month I think so if it gives me more than 0.1% ROI it's making me money. It's not a tough decision to make really in my position.
It lets me spend more time focusing on playing, so I can probably play a couple more tables, currently each table is worth around $25 a month so..
Because it does everything for me I just set a multitabling amount and total session length (in tables or in time), this is how i've been achieving longer and longer sessions.
It's also way better than me at paying attention and swooping onto the right tables. Before, I just sat all the tables I wanted to and tried to unregister if too many regs came on. This watches all the tables and registers me in when 7 people have already regged (you can set the amount of players before it will reg) if the table meets my criteria. The only thing I'd like is to be able to join a table at the start or after x amount of people and for it to unregister me if too many other regs join. Sometimes I'm at the mercy of the lobby. On the other hand, most regs don't seem to have any sort of table selection at all so I don't know how many people I'd scare off by sitting first.
All in all, worth it if you're playing 10+ tables.
Notecaddy is great but requires a lot more thought to make effective use of it. The notes are great and the SNG pack I have is really good, I need to get around to tweaking it some more. The badges are really good (they come from the SNG pack) I'm making more and more use of them.
Well this month continues to be another good one for the red line, I've been running below it for most. It's not really bothering me too much, all it does is make me question a few more spots then I normally would just to be sure my play hasn't drifted too far - and it hasn't. So in a strange way it actually makes me more confident in my game.
Volume is still progressing well for me so far. I am going away this weekend on an annual trip and that will cut into it some but that shouldn't be too big a deal.
I'm still playing with my HUD auto-rate rules and it works well for most part, but every now and then (~10% of time) I think it is mis-rating some opponents and I'm not sure why... I'm also thinking about adding a couple of stats to the HUD, but I'm not sure yet exactly which ones I want - I'm leaning towards fold-to-steal stats. 
EDIT - Oh and my blog has had 5000+ views!!!
(It's obviously not as epic as Mirceam94's blog that only features 21 posts, but 268,000+ views - but then again I don't have pics of Olivia Wilde in mine either... :P)
Had to post this hand as it was my favorite roller-coaster in awhile...
Poker Stars, $3.20 Buy-in (100/200 blinds) No Limit Hold'em Tournament, 5 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite.
SB: 3,373 (16.9 bb)
Hero (BB): 1,155 (5.8 bb)
MP: 1,345 (6.7 bb)
CO: 3,180 (15.9 bb)
BTN: 4,447 (22.2 bb)
Preflop: Hero is BB with J
T
3 folds, SB raises to 3,373 and is all-in, Hero calls 955 and is all-in
SB showed K
T - 
Flop: (2,310) J K J
(2 players, 2 are all-in) - 
Turn: (2,310) K (2 players, 2 are all-in) - 
River: (2,310) J (2 players, 2 are all-in) -
... and that is how champions are made! ♦
I would love to share the drunken cash game story. I know you're a sucker for a good poker tale. The full extent if this one will never be divulged I'm afraid!
Pretty much along the same lines as every other drunken casino experience. Start off a winner then can't quite work out where it all went tits up 
It does end badly but lessons have been learnt!! (I think I've said that before)
Luckily my recent winnings absorbed the HIT!
We did however have fun which is always a bonus.
Weird schedule this week so I am catching odd games here and there...
Anyone who has been following my poker log for the past couple of months knows that I have been meaning to work on my bubble play. Tonight was an excellent reminder to me of why - as I caught myself many times in the unfortunate position of making good decisions versus my opponents when looked at in isolation, but that turned out to be awful plays based on the context of the game - i.e. bubble factor/ICM tax...
I think this was primarily from playing too quickly and not taking that extra second to look at the table dynamics and stacks. I also think I play pretty well as the big-stack or short-stack, but am far too loose with a medium-stack.
In fact a quick look at my finishes for the past 200 games shows that I finished ITM 35% and bubbled 20% - if I could convert just half of those bubbles to ITM finishes that would make a significant change to my ROI. I think this is definitely doable - I just need to slow down a bit before clicking and remember what stage of the game I'm in...