You ever just not want to re-live something? I played Crazy Mike last weekend, he won 10k at 100/200. There was only one brief period where I had any semblance of control, he played well, I didn't play as well as I could, but that doesn't mean much. I won't play him again any time soon – that means a lot more. Anyway, the next night I dropped 6 racks in a 40/80 at Ocean's playing extremely good poker IMO. Rough couple days. Justin A and gonores visited from Vegas, which was great fun, but poker sucked, and then they went home after hit and running Commerce (standard).
I broke around even in a two day Commerce trip, and I lost a bit online this week. This month has been such a mess. 23k hands or so online, my most in a month since like October. I'm just around dead even, the stressful kind of even brought on by random 200 BB spikes in both directions. The only thing I won at consistently was small buy in NL but those games on Full Tilt are just not very good. Chock full of 2+2ers multi-tabling and playing way too decently. I hope to continue playing some NL just to develop the skill but I don't think I'll be getting rich off it anytime soon given my inability to feel those small games are crushable. I don't know how the higher stakes guys do it so I better just stay out of the games until I learn. I beat the fishes though, so that's something.
I have two poker books sitting around staring at me – Stox's new book and Mathematics of Poker. I really want to get through them both at some point, but it's slow going. I used to like reading – odd. This week it's back to online business, start up a new month with business to take care of for www.deucescracked.com, videos to make, and poker to be played. Next weekend I think my wife and I are running off to LA for a day or two to celebrate our birthdays (conveniently within a week of each other).
Crazy Mike and my brother and I went to a driving range today – I've decided getting mediocre at golf will be beneficial and hey, it's something to bet on. Plus I saw the sun today – somewhat rare. Ok, I'll try and be a better blogger again soon, I recruited a couple guys to make me look bad and hopefully entertain you all. I'm still looking for a couple more, feel free to drop me a line if you want to write /end begging.
After talking to DeathDonkey in depth about my 50-100 full ring game spewing costing me tens of thousands, He brought on a challenge for me to play one specific lower limit and see if I can play only that game and nothing else. I accepted as he is my self proclaimed poker shrink and might have helped me from becoming a total degenerate. So the game is 15-30 HU limit hold'em and I am glad to say that I am well on my way to completing this task. I have been very tempted to play my 50-100 and 100-200 regular online game on UltimateBet with the bots but till this point I am happy to report that I have overcome my addiction to the bots and have been multi tabling 3 games of Heads up on a different site thats not bot infested. I did spot 3 bots tho on the site I am playing on now… I HATE BOTS. =) Ok, I am done venting about them. So far since i have taken a well needed break I have played for 10.5 Straight hours and played 3,400 hands. 1,600 hands left till I can step up without being a degenerate. =) Is This sick? I am feeling a little dehydrated and my pee is bright yellow which means I will start downing some Pepsi's. hehe, just kidding.. Strickly water till clear again and for people that have met me they will find that funny but for the rest of you I am utterly in love with the soft drink known as Pepsi. Just glancing over my stats I see that in the 10 hours or so I am averaging $578 an hour and 19.30 BB an HR. I love short term deviation. =) Got to go get some food and continue playing my hands.
-Crazy Mike
Hello,
I love to talk so we will see how well I write on this blog. First before I start talking I want to introduce myself. My name is Crazy Mike and I am in the military, actually currently 50 days till exiting the Navy which will be one of the happiest days of my life since I haven't been married or had a kid and all that stuff. In 50 days I will be a civilian and start doing productive stuff with my life… Hopefully attending UNLV and getting a degree in casino management and playing a little poker on the side. That is a little introduction of who I am and over time i am sure you will get to know me a little bit better and I will share some of my life, both poker and military with you all.
Hello, readers. I'll be writing some posts here, contributing as much as I can to a blog that is growing with impressive speed and quality. Glad to be a part of it. A quick introduction to me:
I'm not a poker pro by traditional standards; that is, I have a full time writing job in the TV industry and so I don't put in the kind of hours these other guys do, nor do I depend on my poker income for expenses. That said, I share a lot of other qualities with a pro, so I guess you can call me semi-pro. I'm strictly a limit holdem cash game player, though I will try out a tournament or NL cash game here and there for fun. I built my roll on PartyPoker from .50/1 all the way to 10/20 full ring, but I cashed out during the lol fristament debacle and now I only play live — in Los Angeles, primarily at Commerce with occasional sessions at Hustler, Hawaiian Gardens, Hollywood Park, and The Bike. (My regular game is 20/40 and its surrounding limits).
Most of my posts will probably deal with a lot of aspects of B&M cash games, including bankroll management, table selection, psychology, hand reading, and player profiles. I'll try to throw in some interesting hands as well. I'm still learning from the better players on both 2+2 and this very blog, but I've been a winning player for several years now and hopefully have some things to offer to help readers improve their own game.Away from poker, my main interests are movies, music, TV, and philosophy. I went to film school and I work in Hollywood, but I would have laughed 10 years ago if you told me that in 2007 I'd be making more money from a card game than from writing screenplays. I can't tell if that makes me happy or sad. Probably a little bit of both.The title of this post is a quote from the character Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." Most people know this war movie for the hilarious obscenity-fueled rants the drill sergeant delivers in the first 40 minutes. I prefer to take cues from the better, second half of the film whose message often helps me deal with poker, variance, luck, and life: it's about the duality of man. A Jungian thing.
I've been grinding hard all week and swinging like crazy. My graph for the month looks like an EKG machine, I'll probably post it at the end of the month. It's been stressful and the results haven't been great but I guess I'm happy I'm logging hands (over 20k for the month which is my most productive in several months). Tomorrow I have a match with Crazy Mike live 100/200 heads up. Trip report to follow.
After the sweet live session I mentioned last post, I found out poker isn't that easy always. Online has been rough the last few days, probably highlighted by dropping 50 bets in 100 hands at 30/60 heads up. That was a pretty ridiculous session. Brad came and stayed with me for a day in San Diego and decided he should run good and live here, which I thought was amusing and cool at the same time. We went to a cool wine tasting party at mike l.'s house where I made $300 playing ping-pong and $3000 playing poker in a friendly home game. Clearly I am 10x better at poker than ping-pong. Maybe someday we can have a WSOP event that combines the two, I like my chances.
I finally made a video for www.DeucesCracked.com after a bit of a layoff mostly caused by me having tech. trouble with my new Bluetooth headset and a little bit of laziness. I will hopefully do better this week and pop out a couple stellar ones, as well as get back to the grinding and crush some internet poker. Also maybe as soon as next weekend I have a heads up grudge match scheduled with Crazy Mike which should be fun and possibly profitable. Trip report to follow of course.
I had to take my wife to LAX on Tuesday night, so after dropping her off for her flight and finding myself in LA at midnight and wide awake thanks to vampire sleep schedule, I took the obvious trip to Commerce and found a nice 100/200 rip roaring. Crazy Mike had just left so everyone was still a bit dizzy from all the craziness – I hoped to bring my own flavor to the table and keep the fun going. 2+2er and lazy blogger Brad L soon joined me at the table and we had a nice time ripping up some fairly poor playing regulars.
We wound up putting in a marathon 12 hour session (for me, Brad kept going like a trooper) including lots of short handed yum yum play and I booked a nice win! It was nice to relax and run well and talk to Brad about strategy, as he is an online shorthanded terror. He won as well so the money went to all the good guys for one night (probably a matter of perspective).
I crashed in his convenient Commerce room and got back home last night to catch up on internet poker world and get back to the grind. I've been doing a great job of logging hands recently and putting in some real sessions, and the results haven't been bad either…well except for one nasty failed shot in a great 100/200 game online, which set me back pretty big for the month. Sucks when you can ruin all your hard work in one fell swoop, but if things had gone differently I could have been looking at a great start to April, instead of an ok one, so oh well.
I have some videos to catch up on making and some hands to log with my wife out of town, I have even less excuse than usual. This weekend I'm going to a party with lots of poker friends so maybe even a juicy homegame is on the horizon, who knows? 
I went to the Bellagio and had a big session. +3.4k in about 4 and a half hours. I don't even think I played that well, but when you're running that well it's hard to play badly since everyone at the table plays so badly against you. It wasn't the type of night where I won a lot of big pots, but more the type of night where I won every pot I played. Like someone opens in LP and I 3bet with KTs and completely miss the flop but they check fold. Or if I do flop a hand they get all aggressive and try to get me to fold. So anyways it was a great session and I need something like that every once in a while.
My last two months have been my worst since moving out to Vegas and playing live exclusively. I booked a $3k win in Feb and a $2k win last month, which are both pitifully small considering the amount of hours I put in. Both months included one hundred big bet downswings and me being stuck for the month halfway through. So far in April I’ve only managed 13 hours because I spent the better part of this week in bed sick. I am winning a little bit so far, and I plan on putting in a ton of hours this week before I head to Texas to visit my brother.
Tonight’s session was good for a number of reasons. For one thing I got stuck almost two racks when I first started, but then still managed to book a decent win. Another reason is that being stuck didn’t affect me at all, I was still in good spirits. I also feel like I played really well the entire night. In general I feel like I played well on nights where I’ve been picking good spots to bluff, and in general doing a good job deciding whether to bet or check when I have the initiative. Most other decisions I face throughout the course of an evening are pretty easy and have an easy answer. It’s knowing when to continue firing barrels and when to give up that really make a big difference in my opinion. An example:
I raise K9o in LMP, button calls, BB calls.
Flop is AJ5 with a flush draw that I have none of. Check, I bet and they both call.
Turn is a 6. Check, I bet and they both fold.
I found this hand really interesting, because I’d almost always just give up there. But a few things came together that made me fire again. For one thing, the button had shown a fondness for raising flops after cold calling, and his lack of a raise here made me think there was a decent chance he’d fold the turn. The BB agonized for a moment before calling, which I took to mean either a very small pair or no pair and a weak draw. When the turn came, I felt that betting into two players would give my bet more credibility, and so neither player was likely to call me down light. The button folded and the BB agonized for a good 15 seconds before folding what I presume was either a weak jack or a pair of fives.
The point of all that was that I had decided to just bet one time when the flop came down, but in the span of just a couple seconds I was able to put the pieces together and make a very profitable bet. Hands like that make a big difference over the course of a night because so often I raise preflop and have to continue on postflop without much of a hand, and often times these situations are very feel based in live games.
Played live last night and how's this for a big pot. I lose a huge hand with KK unimproved to AA unimproved where I restraddled. 6 ways for 6 bets preflop, 5 ways for 4 bets on the flop, 4 ways for 3 bets on the turn, 3 BBs on the river. The very next hand I bet call the turn with Kc Qc on a Qh Jh 6d 9s board knowing I'm drawing to a chop because someone has the nuts and that the Th is no good, and check/fold the river when it is the Th. I still won 25 BBs last night but it easily could have been 120.
One funny hand. Self taught LAG who probably beats the game opens UTG, I 3-bet red 99 UTG+1, button coldcalls, SB coldcalls, BB coldcalls, UTG calls. Flop is KT8. Blinds and UTG check, I bet, folds to the SB who checkraises (likely a K like KQ), everyone folds and I call. Headsup for 9.5 BBs. Turn is a 6 giving me a gutshot. Bet/call. River is an Ace and he bets. I decide this is a good bluffing card and I raise. He calls quickly and says, "I have Ace King" and I turbomuck. He asks, "What were you representing?" and I laugh and say, "Ace King."