Yes, I'm still alive... tired, but alive.

To those of you that have emailed, asking if I'm still alive... the answer is yes. Busy, that is, but alive.

Since the first of the year, I've been on two 1-week long business trips, spent this week in a series of off-campus meetings with our entire project team, and then I'm leaving this Sunday for another week-long trip to Europe. Ergo, very little time to do anything but eat, work, and sleep. Not a fun existence.

Okay, that said, I have managed to play a little late night poker now and then to unwind and/or counter jet lag. Specifically, I've done pretty well in a gaggle of single table SnGs (ITM>75%), I managed to play one moderately sized MTT (which I took down here), and goofed around in some low stakes ($25NL) hold'em just to build the 'roll. Also, I've been slowly teaching myself to get better at Pot Limit Omaha, which as many of you know, is a high-variance game that is definitely not for the squeamish. I've made a few bucks at the PLO tables, but the swings have been, uh, impressive.

I'll hopefully be able to find some time to write this next week in Germany; I'll be stuck in long, endless meetings in Germany, where, frankly, my sole reason for being there is "represent management" of my company at what will otherwise be a highly technical-oriented meeting in which I'm not really qualified to say anything. Sounds like a hoot, huh?

Then it's back across the pond heading west to the US, where I'll jump into another series of meetings. As our project's construction effort is really accelerating, this promises to be a very long year, filled with lots of flights, jet lag, late-night hotel-room poker... and sporadic bug posts. Ugh.

All-in for now...
-Bug

Omaha & Jet Lag

Here in Spain for a full week of factory testing-- which means mostly standing around for hours, waiting for technicians to complete setting up a test, then witnessing said test for about five minutes, recording the results, and then back to waiting. Hours of boredom, punctuated by minutes of, well, something only slightly better than boredom.

Jet lag is, as usual, rearing it's ugly head, often at ~2am for an hour or so. To fill the void, I've been reading (re-reading Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, plus slogging through Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) and  of course playing some poker. My game of choice this week is $.10/$.25 Pot Limit Omaha on Bovada. The games are pretty soft, and I've found that playing a 95% Value + 5% Bluff approach, sprinkled with a liberal dose of Patience and Position, has netted me a fair bit of green.

PLO is not my area of expertise by any stretch of the imagination, but a significant fraction of the other players are bad enough that it doesn't really matter. I'm basically playing a Level-1.5 approach to the game: What are my cards? How scary is the board? Am I getting heat from another player? And so on... I.e., no need to get tricky when the other players are willing to stack off with bottom two pair and weaker. PLO is by nature a high variance game, but if you're willing to be super patient (read: fold a lot when in doubt) you can minimize the swings. Three nights in a row now I've cleared a couple hundred bucks by just playing my own cards in a me-scared fashion. Dunno if I should be proud or ashamed...

My wallet is happy tho...

All-in for now...
-Bug