Parentheticals

Some Miscellaneous Ramblings From The Past Week:

(Temporarily) hit a nice milestone yesterday when my bankroll strayed above the $500 level. (Unfortunately) I quickly donked off a big one percent of that amount when I (stupidly) played some $.50/1.0 stud hi/lo. (Fortunately) I played some solid limit cash games again afterward and ended up finishing the day with $499.50 in the account. Grinding is slowly (but surely?) building the 'roll back up where it belongs.

Sit'nGo's continue to be a tough venue for me to crack. As I write this, I'm sitting in a $5+.50 game and have two very good players on either side of me (OPR rankings above 90%) and a bunch of loose-gooses who are making it tough for me to maneuver. My stack is dwindling and I'll need to make a move soon. I won a $1 turbo the other day, but otherwise I'm been striking out a lot in (arhghgh) 4th and 5th places.

Grinderschool.com has recently changed their digital rights media (DRM) policy-- but in a good way. They've removed the DRM tags on all videos, and have resorted to some kind of "roaming server" when a user logs in. What this essentially means (to a Luddite like me) is that if I download a video, I can use it forever, even if/when I cancel my subscription to their services. (Obviously) I'm kinda going crazy, downloading as many videos as I can. I'm starting with the 6max NL cash games, as those are some that I haven't really spent much time watching. I'd like to build up a nice little library of different games so that I can occasionally go back and tune up my game. The Grinderschool vids are sometimes amateurish and annoying, but I can't deny that they've improved my game.

One of the things I've been trying to work on this (New) year is performing postmortems on my play after cash game sessions. A couple of days ago, for example, I lost ~$10 in $.05/.10 NL cash, but didn't really appreciate how poorly I played until I went back and watched my biggest losing hands in the PT3 replayer. Chasing and/or not getting off of losing hands was a pretty serious problem that session, but until I did the autopsy, I wasn't fully aware of how prevalent it was.

Been winding down at night this week by reading a good (but small) poker book that I received for Xmas. It's titled "Tournament Poker: 101 Winning Moves" by Mitchell Cogert. There are a few things that I take issue with, but overall it's a nice little book that covers a lot of useful topics like Squeeze Plays, Floating, Playing Stack Sizes and the like. I can't help but to contrast it to Negreanu's book (that I also received for Xmas) that, frankly, is pretty damn awful. Only his chapter on small ball poker is worth a damn; the rest of the book is, ahem, fairly bogus.

(Hopefully) I'm heading out to a night of poker pub live poker. (Hopefully) I will do as well as I did on the last pub outing (took 2nd place overall). Perhaps just as importantly, I (hopefully) won't get any aces cracked again by Mr. Multi. Hopefully.

Hey! I just took second place in the aforementioned $5.50 SnG! Woo hoo! I kinda went stupid at the end when we got heads-up (called a shove with ATo), but overall I felt pretty good and (finally) in control once a few of the yahoos died off. Would have been nice to win it outright, but I can't complain, especially given the terrible results I've had over the past few months in single tables. Weird feeling, doing well in a SnG... Let's hope I can do it again (soon).

All-in for now...
-(Bug)