November 30th – Q&A.Monthly goal $15.000 @ - $3.816

I got some question in an email and thought it would be a good idea to answer them here.

Do you use any software to track your opponents and which ones do you find most usefull?

Yes, I use Poker Tracker and PokerAce Hud. I have purchased and tried other products, but I only use these two.

Does Full Tilt allow you to grab hand history as an observer?

Yeah they do. I like to grab and review hands that I see Phil Ivey, Spirit Rock and others play. I don't however datamine the Full Tilt tables, I don't think the effort is worth it.

Do you use any of the rakeback sites and do you have a recommendation for that?

I have used multiple rakeback sites and have never had any bad experience. If you would like a recommendation, I can refer people if I have their emails and get a reward for referring them.

November 28th – Friends won.Monthly goal $15.000 @ - $3.546

If you read my last entry I was undecided about whether or not to play some serious poker or hang out with friends this last weekend. Well...

...friends won. That is me in the middle and Jan on the right. I can't remember the name of the girl on the left. Tróndur is taking the picture.

I have been playing a bit since then, but any plans of getting back to even this month pretty much rode on this weekend gone by.

Looking through the hands from these last couple of days, I found that almost all the hands where I lost the most were bad beats, usually featuring me with the better kicker and my opponent making two pair after all the money goes in.

JJ in the Small Blind: I am not so sure I am happy with the way I played this hand. I know that re-raising pre-flop would make it a lot less difficult to play.
Perhaps the best play would be to call the turn and call almost any river bet, evaluating if a bad card fell.

I think it will be good starting a new month. I would have liked to end this month on the positive side, but perhaps a fresh slate will help my game.

November 24th – Poker or friends?Monthly goal $15.000 @ - $2.769

I have this friend that works on a passenger ship. Every two weeks or so he is out sailing and the other two weeks he is on shore leave. Well he has been here this last week or so and I've been out doing stuff every day. Since I technically don't have a job either, I am up for doing stuff in the middle of the day and out into the night.

I have been able to sneak in some hands of poker since my last post. I've done well in NL Hold 'Em, but I lost my profits back and then some playing PL Omaha.

ATo on the Button: If there is anything I don't wan't with ATo, it's playing a big pot against multiple opponents. When the action is on me I know I want to raise, but I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how much I should make it, although my raise is weirdly small I think it was the right choice.

I am still in a dilemma if I should hang out with my friends this weekend or if I should get some serious poker playing done.

November 22th – Lazyness.Monthly goal $15.000 @ - $2.196

I havn't played poker for two days now. It seems bad runs arn't my only enemy this month, lazyness is taking it's toll aswell.

I have been playing Neverwinter Nights 2 and hanging out with friends playing board games and watching good movies. Whenever I am finished doing something I seem to have something else lined up that is more interesting and fun than poker.

Hopefully I can pull myself together in the near future and get some discipline back into my life.

November 20th – Low limits.Monthly goal $15.000 @ - $2.196

Yesterday was mostly dedicated to Neverwinter Nights 2. I did play some poker and lost a couple of hundred dollars, but not much interesting happened.

A good friend of mine has been crushing $200 NL lately. He usually watches TV while he plays, so I guess he is beating the game without much effort.
My concentration as of late has been a bit bad. When going from playing Neverwinter Nights to playing poker, it is hard to keep focus. So I got this idea of why don't I just 8 table $200 NL instead of playing poorly on the $1000 tables. Well it turned out to be a great idea, I won almost 6 buy-ins in less than 1000 hands.

Not caring about the money is a problem, when I'm used to playing with 5 times the buy-in, I did three-barrel bluff a buy-in away early on. But when 8 tables started running, I kind of forgot about the amount of money, and just focus on playing poker.

JJ from Under the Gun: Players at smaller levels slowplay a lot more than on higher levels. Therefore it might not always be correct making thin value bets like this one. I don't have too much of a problem laying hands like this down, but if I constantly start getting check/raised on the river like this I might start making bad calls.

I don't know if playing low limits as a change will become a habit. But when the games are this soft it's stupid not to play.