Follow me on twitter @Maroonlime.

I’m getting out to Vegas in a couple of days and will be providing chip count updates via twitter.  The first event I’m going to play is the $5k NLHE tourney on June 8th.

So I finally got in 20,000 hands at HU PLO with OK results.  I feel like I still make a lot of dumb mistakes and am winning mostly just because a lot of my opponents have been droolers.  I also feel like I have really good fundamentals and have a great understanding of poker theory and that has helped me hold my own against more experienced players.  After I win 50 buyins at 5/10 HU, I will move to 10/20.  I think segregating my PLO bankroll will help me get in more hands and also study the game academically rather than just trying to win lots of money everyday.

Result totals are 24,459 hands for +$ 22375 for a 4.57PTBB/100 winrate.

It’s really shocking how unexcited I am for this year’s superbowl considering the Steelers are one of my favorite NFL teams and have been all the way back to the Neil O, Barry Foster, and Eric Pegram days.  I also had both Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald on my fantasy team and am a huge fan of both players.  I guess it’s difficult for me to choose who to root for as I sort of like both teams.  I will be rooting for the Steelers.  I’m sure come tomorrow, I will be pretty psyched.  In the HSNL superbowl squares $1k entry pool, I went halves w/ a friend for 4 squares and 3 of them landed in the 5 column for Pittsburgh (LOL?).  So basically, I need Pittsburgh to score 35 points or to get a safety somehow to have any shot.

In poker news, I’ve started to play some HU PLO.  I still think my game needs a lot of work, but having a strong analytical background has made the transition from HU NLHE to HU PLO much easier.   I have a prop bet that will prevent me from playing higher than $10/$20 until March 1.  I think this will be beneficial for two reasons.  First, I think it will force me to play more PLO and really work at getting better.  Second, I also think it will free up some time for me to pursue some other interests.  When I’m normally used to playing $25/50 and $50/100, if I see a soft game, I almost feel compelled to play regardless of what I’m doing because games don’t run that often and you really have to take advantage of the times they do run.

One of the things I’ve decided to do during some of the free time I will have is learn guitar.  It’s really shocking that despite how much I love rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve never attempted to learn how to play guitar.  I had my first lesson on Friday and purchased a cool epiphone electric guitar.  My instructor left me with some easy popular guitar riffs like iron man, pretty woman, smoke on the water, etc.  I’ve been having a lot of fun trying to learn them and definitely see myself continuing with guitar.

I’ve maintained a pretty good gym routine since moving back to NYC.  I still am stuck at around 120 lbs.  I feel like for the past month and a half, even though I’ve gotten stronger, I really haven’t put on any weight.  I have to make a conscious effort to just eat as much food as possible at every moment of every day that I’m even remotely hungry.   I squatted 175 lbs. last week which was a personal best.    I think I can definitely do a bit more but I’ve always had some ankle flexibility issues which have prevented me from getting down low enough.  I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I am stuck sitting in a chair whenever I am playing poker.  I’ve been working pretty hard at improving my flexibility and I feel like my squat is finally good enough to load up as much weight as I can handle.  I think within a couple of weeks, I should be able to squat 200 lbs.

In DeucesCracked news, I am incredibly excited about Phil Galfond and I’s new collaborative PLO series.  If you get a chance, I definitely recommend checking out the first two episodes which are up right now.  I think there is a lot of incredible discussion and I’ve never learned so much myself from making an instructional video.

Here’s a screenshot of my first 5,000 hands of my 20k.  I’m definitely running hot but I also feel like I’m getting better at the game.  While I’ve probably played 10,000 or so hands of PLO before I started this challenge, I never really got into a groove where I played them consecutively and focused on thinking about the game.  It’s easy to get complacent when you’re really good at one game but you need to take a step back and think about how you got good at that game in the first place.  For me, that involved thinking about NLHE, posting hands on strategy forums, talking to other players about interesting hands, running equity simulations, etc.  I’ve done all that with PLO and while it’s only 5,000 hands of running hot, I think the results have shown in my understanding of the game.

I’m going to make a legitimate effort to learn PLO.  I think I’m definitely a winning player at like 5/10 but I’m not sure if I can beat 25/50.  My goal is to play 20,000 hands by the end of the year.  I will also post as many interesting hands as possible on the PLO Forum at www.deucescracked.com.  I will post a screenshot of how I’m doing at the 5k/10k/15k/20k marks.  In playing PLO recently, I’ve found that the biggest thing I have going for me are my NLHE skills.  A lot of the important concepts in NLHE that I understand really well apply to PLO as well.  In NLHE news, I’ve mostly been playing HU 10/20-50/100.  I think I’m probably up about $110k in the past month or so.  I’ve also dabbled a bit in some good 200/400 games and 500/1000 sharing action.  The games have been unreal good and after losing 5 straight all-ins where I got it in as a statistical favorite at rail heaven, I finally got to win a few. 

 At the gym on Monday my trainer had me bench press to determine my one rep max.  I was able to do 135 lbs which I was pretty happy with considering I weigh 122 lbs.  I had steadily been putting on weight and muscle for a while but the past month and a half I feel like I’ve plateaued.  I’ve definitely gotten stronger but I just haven’t put on any more weight.  I’m going to have to make a better effort at increasing my calorie intake in a healthy way.  Anyone with experience on this, please give me some insight.

In baseball news, one of my readers asked me what I thought about the Yankees and C.C. Sabathia.  I think he’s a terrific pitcher who seems to be maintaining or improving upon his production.  The Yankees will inevitably end up overpaying for him which is the case with most free agents but they can afford it and need a starting pitcher pretty badly.  The Mets on the other hand will probably not make any big signings other than possibly signing K-Rod.  I think this would be a bad move.  Looking at K-Rod’s statistics, everyone seems to focus too much on his 60+ saves last year.  However, if you look at some of the more important statistics such as WHIP, ERA, and K’s/9, K-Rod is already on a steady decline.  I want no piece of him.

In other news, Jay and I are looking to move into a sweet condo in NYC in a few days.  We elected to pay a full year’s rent up front because it got us a better deal.  Since it’s a condo and not an apartment, we also had to go through an application process to be approved by a board associated with the building we are going to live in.  The process is the most annoying, time consuming, extraneous nonsense I’ve had to go through in a while.  We have to get letters from our CPAs, multiple personal AND professional reference letters, copies of our bank statements and photo IDs, and a rundown of exactly where our assets lie and what our liabilities are.  The process is further complicated by the fact that Jay is in Seattle, I’m in NJ, and our broker is in NYC.  I would understand having to do all of this if we were applying for a loan, but we’ve already pre-paid a full year’s rent up front and also have been approved by the owner!

I haven’t gotten a chance to blog in a while but I’ve been grinding a good amount recently with really good results.  I’m also trying to learn PLO and so far that is going well also.  I’m eagerly awaiting the start of baseball season and I’m thinking of hosting some sort of contest where every week, I will send the winner some small amount of money.  If you have any ideas on how to structure the contest, please let me know.

Compared to other poker players who are as successful as I am, I think I’m one of the worst at dealing with having a losing session.  I’ve done some reckless and ridiculous things just to try and get “unstuck” from very minor losses.  It’s baffling why I haven’t been able to change this mentality in the ~4 years of so that I’ve played poker professionally.  My number one short term goal is to change this mentality.  I feel like I check my account balances every 2 minutes during a session to keep track of how much I’m up/down.  It’s absolutely ridiculous.  Starting today, I’m not going to allow myself to do that.  I’m going to try and keep a completely objective mindset towards poker.

I was first introduced to poker for $ late my freshman year of college (2003). I was studying finance at NYU at the time. One of my friends asked me if I wanted to play a $10 game of poker.
 
Rewind about 3 years to high school. There was a big blackjack craze at our high school where during class when nothing was going on, we’d deal blackjack for $1/hand or whatever. Of course, as we lost we’d increase the stakes and end up playing for $10/hand which was a ton of money back then. I obviously had no idea blackjack was -EV and ended up losing around $100 which was a [censored] of money back then. Fast forward a couple years and I remember this one specific instance at a friend’s house where we degenerated to the point of playing high card for money. We spread shuffled the cards facedown on a table and just drew cards and then shuffled and repeated. It was one of the biggest rushes I’ve ever had b/c it was non-stop gambling. We laugh about this to this day. I definitely liked gambling.
 
Anyway, back to the $10 poker game, being the gambler I was, I could not refuse. We played dealer’s choice with a 50 cent betting cap on any street. It wasn’t too serious. We’d usually drink a lot while playing. It was definitely good times though.
 
Next year (2004), I purchased a poker table and chipset off ebay. We had a good group of regulars to play a $10 buy-in game with. Now we were only playing NLHE. We had no idea what we were doing as we were using .25/.50 blinds so it was basically tourney style with only 20 bb’s. As before, it was more a social thing as there would be a lot of drinking and blunt rolling. Nevertheless, I think I ended up making $500-600 off this game overall. I was definitely one of the biggest winners in the game. I also met a lot of people through this game including J-Mac, Ezmogee, and P.Dirty who all post here.
 
Anyway, I wasn’t introduced to online poker until one of my friends from UNC started telling me how much money he was making playing 2/4NL and 3/6NL online. Back then, those were the biggest regularly spread games on the net. Apparently, one of his friends (Grandiose), was making like $450/hr. Intrigued by this, I figured out GoldenPalace had 10 cent giveaways and micro-stakes STT’s so I could build a bankroll without ever having to deposit. As crazy as it sounds, I grinded that up to $170.
 
I was told that games were softer on Prima, so I moved the money there. I had no idea what bankroll management was at the time. I grinded that up to around $6000 by the time the summer rolled around. Then I decided WTF, I never lose so let me rock this clown sitting at 25/50.
 
I suffered what was probably the worst relative beat of my career. I’ve been 1-outed for $30k pots before, but had never lost such a large % of my bankroll in 1 hand. I open JTs f/ the button. He reraises. I call. Flop is a beautiful Q98 rainbow. He open shoves for his whole stack. I insta-call. He turns over KK. Turn and river come running T, J and I lose.
 
I was so distraught over that hand I took about a 1 week break from poker which was a lot for me. I used to play every opportunity I got. I couldn’t stay away forever but it was probably the gambler in me that made me sit down again.
 
From there, I have never looked back. In the fall of my Junior year up to the winter, I made somewhere around $15k playing mostly 1/2NL. I had a few forays into high stakes again but my bankroll never dipped too low.
 
This is when I discovered 2+2 and shortly thereafter PokerTracker. For the next 3 months, I somehow convinced myself to learn/play LHE because the players seemed so bad. I was OK at it and won at around 1.2ptbb/100 over 35-40k hands of 5/10, 10/20, and 15/30. I had a couple of decent tourney scores around this time as well and my roll was up around $40k when PartyPoker introduced 400/600/1knl.
 
This is when I started to make serious money. For the next month or so, I crushed the 1knl on Party for around $35k. However, I went on my first prolonged downswing/breakeven stretch over the next few weeks. I probably lost $15k or so. Never having experienced such a large downswing before, I assumed the fish had all gone bust and decided to go back to LHE. Meanwhile, I won a WSOP satellite.
 
My time in vegas for the WSOP was the best vacation of my life. I met Grandiose and his friend Sharpie82 while down there and brought along 2 of my good friends from HS/College. None of us are really the clubbing type but we went to 6-7 crazy vegas nightclubs and had a great time.
 
Grandiose convinced me to go back to NLHE and try the 6-Max tables. I decided to give 600NL a try. In the few hands I played there it seemed really soft. I busted out in the main event late day 1 losing AQ vs QJ all-in preflop for a 50k pot. I was distraught but had a great time in vegas for the remaining week.
 
When I got back to NYC, I decided to forget about LHE and focus on NLHE. NLHE has been my main game ever since. For the first 20k hands of 600NL6M, I was running insanely hot winning at 14PTBB/100. It seemed completely impossible to ever have a losing session at 6-max NL. I decided to move up to 5/10 6-max and it wasn’t any tougher. Over my first 125k hands of 6-max 600/1knl, I was running at 9.5PTBB/100.
 
I felt extremely confident I could make significant $ playing poker for a living. I was registered for classes in the fall of my senior year but ended up withdrawing a couple days into the semester. I regret this decision slightly, although it might end up being the correct one if online poker suffers from US legislation.
 
In late September and October, I hit the worst downswing of my career. I lost probably $70-80k and around 30 buy-ins. Some of that was at high stakes (25/50+). I was running bad and playing much worse. I decided I needed to take a break. Like always, I couldn’t stay away from poker for too long and decided I’ll regain my confidence at 1/2NL. I screwed around with that for a few days and decided I was ready to go back to 5/10.
 
From November to March, I went on another ridiculously hot run winning at around 10PTBB/100 for about 110k hands. I played the PCA in bahamas which was a great time. They had beautiful weather compared to NYC and I also met some 2p2ers who I had chatted with a lot on AIM. In March, I decided I wanted to buy a car. Even though I would have absolutely no use for one and it would sit at my family’s home in NJ for the most part, I really wanted one.
 
I’ve always been into cars and after pricing/comparing, settled on an Audi S4. I paid for the car in total up front. This coupled with having to pay six-figures in taxes for 2005 winnings (I didn’t start filing quarterlies until April 2006) left me with only $30k or so online. The majority of my winnings was stashed away in an ETrade acct in some mutual funds.
 
In early April, I played in the LA Poker Classic WPT event. I ran really hot early day 2 and was chip leader for part of the tourney. However, on day 3 I lost a big pot on a coinflip and finished just out of the money. I met a lot of 2p2ers out there including Matt Matros, AZK, fsuplayer, flawless_victory.
 
Unfortunately, later in April, I ran/played bad again. I went on a 20-25 buy-in downswing and a long breakeven stretch that carried on through most of May/June. I also wasn’t playing anywhere near as much as I should have been. Probably a good thing considering how badly I was playing. The one silver lining during this stretch was that I won 3 out of the first 6 double shootouts I entered for WSOP seats.
 
Most of June/July I spent learning/playing golf and drinking with my friends who have all graduated but most of who have yet to find jobs. I figure this might be the only time I’ll be able to spend quality time with them.
 
In September I registered for classes and took a half-load for both the fall and spring semesters.  I played poker very sporadically.  This was about the time that the anti-gambling legislation was passed and soon enough PartyPoker stopped serving U.S. customers and it became increasingly difficult to get money on and off the other sites as Neteller stopped serving U.S. customers as well.
 
I didn’t play much poker with school going on but over the summer I had a great run at nosebleed stakes.   I was playing as high as $200/400 and $300/600 NL on Full Tilt.  I was probably playing the best poker of my life and living in a house in Vegas with FoxwoodsFiend, Krantz, and FlawlessVictory definitely helped my game.   The run continued for about two more weeks when Krantz and I went back to NYC but then we hit a sick downswing.  The downswing continued until the end of 2007 but luckily w/ my last semester of classes going, I wasn’t playing as much.  
 
Right now, I find online poker to be somewhat of a chore. I really find it boring and would much rather be doing other things. However, I really feel like I need to get in as many hours as possible while games are good and anti-gambling laws have not been passed. From April 2006 till today, I’ve probably only averaged 7-8 hours or so of poker a week. Pathetic.  Two years ago, I could play 12-14 hours in a day and have so much fun doing it. It was such a thrill to play a strategic game and make money doing it. These days I play for 2 hours, look at the clock and go “WTF!, how has it only been 2 hrs”.
 
I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with my life at this point.  I’ll probably still keep playing poker for a while but ultimately, I’d like to do something else.   I finally graduated in Dec. 2007 and it’s been fantastic having that weight off my shoulders.  Now I will have much more free time to get back in a poker groove and hopefully come up with some interesting business idea.