Jerking Off...

I put in a quick session this morning before work with disastrous results (ok not that bad but down $15 anyway). Why? I was tired. I was rushed by wanting to play in a short time frame. I played too many hands trying to 'make something happen'. Just dumb approach to poker in general. Of course, we have to do that every now and then to remind ourselves what not to do.

Horse

No, not the game HORSE, this post is about being a Horse. That's right, I've been staked by someone else to play poker! I qualified for $50 in staking from GetASTake.com (GAS) for lasting the longest of GAS members in an online poker tournament.

What this means is that GAS will stake me in 4 $11 events and one $6 event. There is no makeup, so if I lose it all, there’s no loss to me. Games must be played on PokerStars. When the event is over, I get to keep 50% of the profit.

I’m primarily a cash game fool. I’ve played/studied Limit Hold’em for a while, but currently spend most of my time on the micro-limit PLO tables. I play only the occassional SNG/MTT, mostly to use my FPP points or partake in the weekly blogger games.

To get started, I spent some time on a Saturday afternoon to go through all the FAQs and tutorials on the GetAStake.com website. Zorag has a great question and answer thread that really helped me get comfortable with the process. Check it out:

here

After all that reading I was ready to embark on to my first stake. I followed the process and quickly had $11 deposited in my Pokerstars account. I’m not much of a tourney player, so headed straight for the comforts of the PLO micro-limit cash tables. I had a quick session and turned $10 into $17.35 for a gross profit of $7.35. I entered my results as a ‘rail’ on GAS as you can see:

here

I follow the directions to submit the results and get a PM from the site that tells me to ship the $14.68 back to my staker (GAS) which is the original $11 plus 50% of the profit. Then I have to ship 5% of the profit ($0.18) to GAS as the administrative fee. The remainder is mine to keep ($3.49).

Not bad. It was actually all pretty easy and any questions I had along the way were quickly answered by Mike or Zorag. Lastly, I received a PM that told me I had been credited with 3.68 players points on the site. Players points are displayed in your profile and next to your avatar and let others know how much profit you’ve generated on GAS. There is a similar metric for stakers so you can see how much money they have made off their horses.

There are a lot of stakes on GAS waiting to be claimed for micro-limit play. If you don’t have an online bankroll, or have a small one, its a great way to play online poker cheap and jumpstart the growth of your bankroll. Head on over, and tell them PointLedge sent you…

So Long and Thanks for the Fish…

My Mini-Ftops experience was awkward, quick and un-satisfying. I never got a good toe hold. I won one or two hands, but every time I bet I was raised out of the pot, after about an hour, I went I had 88 I bet same guy raised me, I shoved, thinking he would fold his cheese, nope he had AK flopped a K and out the door I went.

I did get into Event 10 buy winning my $30 seat in a $4 Super Satellite. I am going to try to get into the Stud 8 event on Friday and get a token to play the $24+2 KO on Sunday afternoon.

On a side note, I got to work at 7AM and the final table was still being played, I would have had to be late and go to work on no sleep. This was not a good day for that. So there may have been a reason for not doing well, other then being the DONK I normally am.

Phoenix Rising, Part II

Ok, so you've heard this story before. After grinding out micro-limit hold'em for three months for a meager return, I shifted to micro-NLHE. The first few months went well, then disaster struck and I was felted (I did sell off a good deal of my profit to another player that needed an online bankroll refresh).

Anyway, if you hadn't guessed from my lack of posting, I've taken a little time off and did some soul searching. Where I ended up was PLO. Man is this a great game. I've been playing a mix of full ring and 6-max, basically whereever I can find a good table. PLO is an action game, which makes it more exciting than NLHE. The thin edges and re-draws are awesome. I'm just really enjoying the game.

So what's the downside? Well, I'm probably playing way above my bankroll for the wild swings that I've seen in PLO (especially after a night of heavy drinking... don't do that again). The pots are much larger than NLHE; probably twice the size of a similar stake NLHE game.

But, bad is not all bad. I'm raking in the FT points (on excellent pace to make Ironman for the first time) and my weekly rakeback deposit is very nice. In fact, my rakeback deposit for the first week of May is almost as large as all of my rakeback from April! With the FT points, I usually play the 1,800 SNGs that pay out $26 tokens, but I'll have to look into the VIP store and consider a CardRunners membership. There are very few resources out there that address PLO, so any tips I can pick up from some pros will be a huge benefit.

That's it for now. More frequent updates to follow. In the meantime, for some light hearted poker humor, log on to the Full Tilt Poker Academy and watch Ali Nejad's HORSE session videos. Truly entertaining.

- Jack

Playing for Change

This is an amazing video, from a really cool sight. I would encourage everyone to checkout Playing for Change!

SNG's

So I forgot and did not post my results on this blog, so I thought would add them now. I looked at my SNG results, this is lifetime, so it includes when I really sucked. Here is Poker Stars



I think I need to continue with SNG's

Update:

It has been a while since I posted on this blog, primarily due to the fact that I am not bankroll building as I want to be.

I have been playing too late and too tired and often losing my profits later in the evening. I have also not always utilized my resources effectively, often enough.

It is funny when we have our A game, poker is easy and quite profitable, I have been playing too much with my C game. I tilted off 4 buy ins last week, when I was steaming. I did get 2 of the buy ins back last night.

I am going to be using my time this week to play smarter, I am also going to continue to watch the DC videos, and hopefully they will continue to sink in.

Poker is funny as hell! I continue to feel that I am "this" close to crushing it. I guess that is what all the fish feel like.