Cleveland

I've had a lot of fun so far in Cleveland with my family and friends. I've finally been able to golf since I haven't had a golf partner in Vegas. I've gone perch fishing on Lake Erie. We even made a trip downtown over the weekend that was a fun night overall. I'm heading to the Brown's preseason game on Thursday, so expect a pretty in depth Brown's blog coming up as I know we have some Cleveland fans reading out there.

On the poker front, I had my worst day of the entire year on Sunday financially, but I'm not all that upset about it. I had a pretty standard tournament buy in schedule and probably played too many tables. I think on Sundays, I'm going to limit the max tournaments I'm in to 6 at one time. I might even think about moving down to 4. The only problem with going to 4 is that I don't get a chance to play a lot of the lower buy ins that attract huge fields. These tournaments like the 11 rebuy I won can really help out a bankroll if you are consistently playing every big buy in on every site every Sunday. I have also had a mixed record in the cash games since being home. While I've beat the 2/4 pot limit omaha game, I dumped it all back in one horrendous session at pot limit omaha 3/6. Furthermore, I've had a couple of 25/50 PLO sessions where I went in short stacked with 1k and failed to do much. When this stuff happens all on Sunday, it compounds. Take away the Sunday and I'm actually up since I've been home playing a limited amount of tournaments and mostly different cash games.

The tentative future schedule of big things to come is

August 6-18. Full Tilt Online Poker Series. I'll probably be playing about 6-10 events depending on what is going on at home. When I'm at home with the family, it's often tough to make committments to play tournaments.

September. WCOOP. This is the Pokerstars big annual tournament series. I never have been able to commit to playing a lot of these events, but I'm planning on playing more this year. I know there will be a few Sundays though that I will miss in here for a wedding and of course Browns games. My Borgata plans for this year won't be coming to fruition. I love the tournaments there, but it will just have to wait for a different time.

October--Aruba??? We'll see if I can satellite into the tournament. WSOP Europe. We'll see if I can satellite into the tournament.


Other than that, I had a great comment about my personal poker leaks. Leaks are flaws in poker strategy that players should all strive to "plug up."

I decided I'll try to identify a leak in each blog and how I can fix it.

In my tournament game, I think that lately there have been times where I felt it was necessary to gamble when the optimal strategy at the time was to continue to play small ball poker. One example comes to mind when I was deepstacked with about 40,000 in the 100 rebuy on Full tilt. This is a shorthanded tournament where I was steadily picking up chips without winning too many big pots. Most of my confrontations were in pretty good shape preflop or small pots after the flop. I had KJ of hearts and called the under the gun raiser for 2100. He had 35,000 chips. When the flop came 8h 7h 7d. He bet out 4k. Now at this point, I just decided I was going to play for it all no matter what, so I put a good raise in, he reraised all in, I called and he showed QQ. I was then cripped and out shortly after. A similar hand came up in the 2k at the WSOP with KdQd on a two diamond board against a pretty large stack who had AA. Both times I missed and regretted my decision after. Let me first say that I think this play is sometimes optimal. Picking up a big draw has lots of value when you can get your opponents to fold their hands. Playing aggressively is almost always better than playing passively in poker. At times though, if I feel I'm in pretty good control of my table image and position at the table, I think it can be a big leak to just be ready to get in there and gamble. Poker is ultimately a strategy game. One component of strategy though is the propensity to gamble. Varying factors will contribute to how much a player should consider gambling in a tournament including stack sizes, relative skill levels, blind structure, payouts, etc. There are times though where I think it's a leak in my game when I take these situations where I'm in good control of lots of factors of play and waste them by gambling in possible 50/50 spots.


I hope that explanation is a good one and thanks for the questions/comments as always.