Back to the Nitty Gritty

The past 4 or 5 weeks have been a roller coaster ride for me. Just when I string a couple small winning sessions together I’m hit with a $400 loss. I’ve spent countless hours working on my game the past few weeks and have felt great while playing but the results just haven’t been there. That is until last Wednesday when everything turned around for me (hopefully for the long run).

Between Wednesday-Friday of last week I played 3 winning sessions at 1/2 equaling only 16.5 hrs but ending up $1300+ to the good. I got back to playing ABC poker, table selected well, and most importantly ran good. I never really got put in a spot at all where I had to make a tough decision and that’s the nuts IMO.

If you’re an aspiring live NL player I highly suggest you start listening to Deuce Plays Podcast hosted by Bart Hanson. Its subscription based now on Deuces Cracked training site but theres about 2 or 3 years of free episodes available online. At first I found his stuff really advanced because he’s crushing 5/10 NL but more often then not I’ll pick up something worthwhile from listening. His Hands From A Live Cash Game episodes are great. His best episodes feature a California pro named “Limon”. I think theres 4 different episodes with Limon on there. One great thing Limon pointed out is that some players focus a ton on creating a table image when they should be focusing more on table selection. Table image is something I’ve been focusing on tremendously in the past few weeks but have not been very successful with. It was nice to hear an established pro say its totally overrated. I think his little advice helped me to fall back in my ABC mode the last few days and just crush the game against inferior players at weaker tables.

So all in all I feel like I’m back and hopefully I’ve still got some run-good left in me for this upcoming week. I had to take the weekend off for Fathers Day plus today to watch my daughter but hopefully I can get a solid 30hrs+ in this week. After squaring away my finances over the weekend My bankrolls just under $4,900. I’m only a big week or 2 away from being able to take shots at 2/5. Im requiring myself a $6k roll to take periodic $600 buyin shots at 2/5 only if the game looks soft. Other than that Im still a 1/2 player until my roll reaches at least 10K. Also when I square up my money every other week Im beginning to put 1% of my winnings aside towards future live tournaments. I just feel like If I want to take shots at tourneys in the next year I better make an organized plan to do so. If I don’t I’ll either just miss out altogether or spew some of my hard earned cash game money on some spur of the moment tourney im not prepared for. This way I can emotionally detach myself from the money before I buy in with it. We'll see what happens.