Hawaii Blue

I'm on a week-long biz trip... which is turning out to be incredibly tiring and stressful. The only good news is that it will force me to take a short break from poker, which I think I need. See, I've been playing ~30-45 minutes a day on Carbon, which isn't a lot, but the results have been horrendous. This is mostly due to... well, to me playing like crap. For the past month or so, I've had a tough time focusing when I play. Worse, I'm stuck in some kind of "I know I'm probably beat here, but let's call anyway" mode. Lather, rinse, repeat. The bottom line is that I'm taking everything very seriously... right up to the point when I make a really stupid call. I'm reading well, estimating where I'm at in the hand, deciding on the right lines... and then my right hand on the mouse decides to do the opposite of what my brain is telling it to do. Arghghg. I guess I do need this biz trip to force a break from this virtual form of banging my head against the wall. Sigh.

In other poker news, I've been following the WSOP fairly closely. 6865 entrants, with first place being worth a cool $8.7M. Not quite the high from 2006, but not too shabby, either. Who says poker is dead?  The only bad news is that the theme this year seems to be solid players getting chewed up by donks. For instance, I just saw Dusty Schmidt and his K-K getting booted from the tourney by a yahoo calling off with J-To who had to know that Leatherass had a big hand. This seems to be very typical of the Day Ones of the tourney. If I ever manage to find the time and money to play in the event, I will try hard to remember the advice I heard once from someone I know who has gone deep in tourney on multiple occasions: Keep your head down during the early days and try really, really, really hard not to get it all-in unless you have the stone-cold, mortal-lock nuts. There are just way too many bad players willing to gamble for your tournament life.

All-in for now...
-Bug