Breaking Up is Hard to Do

DAMMIT! I'm done with you, RUSH poker cash games! I've injected you into my veins one too many times, enduring your hellish swings and illusions of riches. GET OUT, I SAY!!!

I'm sorry, honey. It isn't you. It's me. And it's tough for me to say that.

I'll remember you fondly for teaching me better preflop and postflop skills, the ability to mass multi-table, for bringing me out of being a losing player at NL5 and NL10, and for building up my roll.

I'm not sure you're going to want to hear this next part. There's... another game. I've been playing you both, baby, and I want you to know the truth. That's right, I'm going back to my first love: the tournaments. They know how to treat a man right. And it's partly about the money.

Cliff Notes: Lost more at RUSH cash games, bringing me down to ~$650. Tourneys brought me all the way back to $994. So long, cash games!

Massive Update: The winning life?! + Poker goals

Disclaimer: LONG post! It more resembles a Hoyazo lifestream thesis than my usual posts. You've been warned!

I know I haven't updated in a while. No, I'm not dead, I didn't get crushed by the 4k water bill (still not resolved, btw, don't wanna talk about it), and I haven't lost my liferoll to poker.

Quite the opposite, actually. As the sharper ones among you may have gathered from the title, I've been running incredibly well at the poker tables. So well, in fact, that I have a very hard time believing it's true. Just a month ago I was almost positive I was just a marginal tournament winner and a cash game loser. The numbers since then are pointing to the possibility that all my hard studying and review might be showing really, really good results.

My bankroll on FTP a month ago was around $60. It's now $300, and I'll be getting $51+ in rakeback soon. How? Well, it started when Waffles posted about superturbo sngs. I tried them, ground out a few hundred of them, and rolled myself up all the way to $145. Woot, hooray for the run good!

And then, just a week ago, I decided to hit the Rush Poker tables again in preparation for Rush week. This is when the fireworks went off. I made a few significant changes to my cash game, and suddenly shot up 12 buy ins at 10NL! Sadly, that was over maybe 5k hands (hardly a good sample size), and another few thousand hands later, I lost 10 of those buyins, putting my roll at $156. So I studied my game again, closed a few big leaks that I noticed, and moved on down to 5NL (hooray good bankroll management!). I've played somewhere from 15k-20k hands at 5NL since then and got myself up the 19.5 buy-ins to $250, accumulating $50 in rakeback along the way (Rush Poker spits out rake and rakeback like a BP oil well!).

Then yesterday I moved up to my previous nemesis, 10NL Rush Poker, and promptly lost 3.5 buy ins. But lo and behold! I felt I was just running bad, and gave myself another 1.6 buyins to lose before moving back down, and just 20 minutes ago I finished grinding my way to finally breaking $300.

Rakeback's gonna be enormous o.O (Can't tell, www.fulltiltrakeback.com doesn't update very often, maybe every 3 days. So meh, no link for them).

And I've set an ambitious poker goal! I want to grind my bankroll up to $750 by mid-August, and move up yet again to NL25 Rush Poker. I know even the 20-30k hands I've played recently are most likely largely due in part to running really, really well and FTP's Rush Week, which has probably brought all the donks out to play. I've got like a 8-10 pt/bb win rate, not certain because my PT3 trial ran out, which is ridiculous since I was a losing player a month ago. Still, I figure I'm playing really well and I'm probably at least a 5 pt/bb winner at these tables that I've been crushing.

I'll try and post goals and progress reports more to keep me motivated. Oh yeah, and I 4-table the Rush. Boo yah. The sky's the limit, and I'm gonna run with this as far as I can.

Best. Hobby. Ever.

May the run good be with you!

Hooray for Rush Poker!

Yay! I've played almost 1000 hands of Rush Poker so far for a profit of exactly a buy-in, winning at a little more than 5 pt/bb. And I'm actually running a little bit below EV, according to PT3 :).

I like this thing more and more.

Moving Away from Rush Poker

It's time for me to leave the Rush Poker games and head on back to the regular cash tables.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fast pace and the number of hands you can get in per hour. I've probably played as many hands of poker in a few weeks than I have all last year with Rush Poker, and I've learned a lot and closed a lot of leaks by sheer virtue of that fact.

On the other hand, I'm a definite losing player at the Rush Poker tables. With all of the aggro-donks everywhere, it's next to impossible to exploit overaggressive people's play. You don't know if they're usually folding or double and triple barreling with air when they make that pot-sized bet. Add to that the chances that they actually DO have you beat, and you just have to let the hand go.

So tonight I finished off my last few hands of Rush Poker to clear another ten bonus dollars, and headed on over to the normal cash games to try and get a good, old-fashioned "read-and-adjust" edge over my fellow micro-stakes players. I have to say, it went really well. I finished up two buy-ins in about 200 hands, most of it coming from incredible luck.

Highlight of the evening: Having my turned straight making a straight flush on the river vs. villain's rivered nut flush to scoop me up a buy-in.

Hell yeah, I'll take it. I love upswings.

I shall poker until I become a long-term winner, and then I shall poker some more!

Thorn