Chris Halverson’s Blog

I played in GrannyMae’s TOEJAM freeroll at The Gaming Club on Tuesday night. This was a “invite only” freeroll sponsored by TGC and GrannyMae. Top 20 places paid including a $450 first prize out of a total of $1500, so there was a good potential for cashing. The tourney started with 121 2+2’ers.

In other words: Rock Garden.

Talk about weak/tight play. Yikes! There would be entire orbits where no hand went to the turn much less showdown. A pre-flop raise would buy the pot. This started at level 1 and continued until I busted. I can’t say I was much different though. Of course, I am weak/tight, so it was pretty much SOP for me

I made it to the first break in 40th place of the 61 remaining. I was below average in stack size with T1400. After the break I was basically in push or fold mode due to blind sizes. Thanks to the tightness (including mine) and some halfway decent cards, I was able to survive for a while, but that’s all it was, survival. I’m in the cutoff and look down to see AQo. Great hand to push with especially after it’s folded around to me. I push my last 1500 into the middle only to be insta-called by the button. Ruh roh. Blinds fold and the cards flip up.

He has AKo.

Shit.

Neither of us improve and I go home in 35th.

It was good to play with some of the 2+2’ers, but we all lived up to the 2+2 reputation of weak/tight. Geez, even I thought it was a bit much, so that’s saying something

Anyway, it was pretty fun, just wish I would have cashed, especially after the beating I took at the OIC table I had up before the tourney and the Party SNG I played after starting at TOEJAM. Suffice it to say I think I need a couple days off, more on that later…

Thanks Granny for setting it all up!

Balance: $71.41 (-$19.00 from previous)
Ranking: 37/173
Level: 1/2

The nice thing about my poker the last few days has that it’s been consistent. The downside is that it is consistently down. I was going through a run of very cold cards last night. I got KK once only to run into AA. Nice. There was much betting and raising and I dropped a lot on that hand. sigh Should I have put him on rockets? Maybe, but he was a typical “play any Ace, raise with any pair” type of guy. By the time the river came, I thought he may have had them, but by then I had to call his bet.

I played in one Party SNG last night and placed second including a nice 25 hand HU match which wasn’t just an all-in fest. I felt back at home there. I played well which made me feel better because I haven’t felt good about things over the last few that I played. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t got in the money, it was that I didn’t feel I played well. Granted, some of it was due to other distractions and such, but there was also the fact that I didn’t feel I played well.

Spreadsheets

Does anybody have a decent balance tracking spreadsheet that they’d be willing to share? My “problem” is that I have money spread across about 6 different sites plus a decent amount at Neteller. Basically I lose track of my amounts and I have no way of tracking bonuses and such. I have PokerTracker and use that to track winnings (and losses), but it doesn’t have the concept of a balance. I know I should probably just dump everything back to Neteller, but I don’t always do that. I keep the majority there in order to quickly react to bonuses (such as a quick $500 dump/cashout to Paradise last week to get the Turkey bonus), but I sometimes have $150 here, $200 there. I also lose track of bonus amounts and I’d like to know how much of my BR is due to bonuses.

I found one here and it appears that it will work for me, but thought I’d throw out the question to you all.

So if you have one you could share, I’d appreciate it, otherwise I’ll try to make one up myself or try the one from above.

New Laptop!

I got a new work laptop yesterday! After spending the better part of the day getting it setup (that’s right, I do it myself and don’t let our support people touch it), I was able to play poker last night. I work at a pretty laid back company and I use my work laptop to play poker This one rocks, it’s a Dell D800 w/ 1900×1200 resolution plus a DVD burner, 1GB RAM, blah, blah, blah. I’m in heaven computer wise now.

My old laptop had started to get very, very slow over the last few months. I am now convinced that the online casinos and maybe even the poker sites slow things down considerably. As I started to uninstall the casinos things started getting faster. Has anybody else experienced this? I think from now on that if I casino whore (hehe, yeah, if) I’ll be installing/uninstalling/reinstalling the software as I get done with it or restart a whoring. This may apply to the Crypto sites too, but I haven’t been able to determine that yet as I haven’t installed those yet. Party and Gaming Club seem to be fine. I hate to think that I bitched a lot at work about how slow my laptop was when it may have really been due to my casino installs We just won’t mention that to the support guys (Kent, keep your mouth shut!).

Balance: $90.41 (-$50.75 from previous)
Ranking: 30/171
Level: 1/2

Variance sucks.

I could not buy a hand on Sunday if I tried. It was unreal how bad things went. I’m not even sure if I played bad or not, but I didn’t go on tilt, at least not overtly. I’m sure there was some tilt that snuck in, but I didn’t go maniac or anything. I know I didn’t get many good cards, but even so…

To make matters worse, I played in 3 SNGs and didn’t cash in any. The highlight was when I had my aces cracked by an all in A5o. That was fun. I did, however, play a pair of aces in another SNG beautifully I think, but even so I still busted. It was basically a bad day all around poker wise.

One thing I do know about playing in SNGs is that I really need to time them better. What I mean by that is that I need to make sure I’m not going to be disturbed while playing them. All too often I think I’ll have some time, start up a SNG and then my son will come upstairs. I’ve tried to make a point that poker doesn’t interfere with family time, so if he comes up to watch TV with the family, I quit playing poker. The problem is in a SNG, you can’t really just leave. Therefore I am going to have to wait to play SNGs until about 10pm at least.

The only upside I see is that TGC got their bonus stuff figured out and I cleared another $20 and am just a few points away from another $20 (it goes twice as fast at 1/2 as compared to 50/1).

On a happier (or scarier depending on how you look at it) note, my son turns 16 today. Yikes.

Balance: $141.16
Ranking: 9/166
Level: 1/2

There has been some confusion with the OIC over the last couple of days. Specifically TGC has not correctly recorded any play in terms of BRP (bonus points) and the “official” leaderboard. They’re aware of this and promise things will be taken care of, which is good because I will have cleared another $20 of my $200 bonus. Thankfully, Gaming Club Guy on 2+2 has been updating the top 10 by hand.

What I also found out was that I screwed up when I registered. The form was working sporadically and it asked for your “forum alias”. I wasn’t sure if they wanted my 2+2 alias (chrisdhal) or if they wanted a name for the forum that I was associated with (I put 2+2). It didn’t work when I put “chrisdhal”, so I tried it again with “2+2” and it worked. Therefore, my name on the leaderboard from that time forward has been “2+2”.

This newfound knowledge led me to find out I have been in the top 10 on days 18 (9th), 17 (9th) and 15 (8th). Woo hoo!

Day 17 found me down to $119. It was one of those times where I didn’t have much time to play. I left work early (thanks to HD for pushing me out) and had about 90 minutes before dinner. I pulled up TGC and it was one of those “I don’t really feel like playing, but I know I won’t have any other time” type of sessions. I bled away about $20 and was pissed at the end of it.

That night had me hitting my brother’s party for a bit. I didn’t really drink much and basically spent all night talking to Jason and his brother while decidedly avoiding playing poker with the neighbors. I know I probably should have, just to keep things friendly and socialable, but I really didn’t feel like playing “blinds double every orbit” crapshoot tourneys.

Saturday was a better day poker wise. I played an TGC table and at Interpoker for a while hoping to hit their pocket Kings bonus. I took a beating there for a while before working back up to be down only 7BB. I thought I was going to have to go somewhere and logged off, then plans changed and I was able to play again. I decided to fire up PokerPlex instead to work off that bonus (since the Interpoker one stacks) and of course I get KK in about my 10th hand. Great, no bous for you! I won the hand though, so it was OK.

I worked my way back up to $141 which is about where I was 3 days ago. Such is life and at least it’s going in the right direction. I’m hoping I’ll get to play some more today (Sunday) and work up some more. I’ve got to finish some homework and help my son on a couple of things, but I should be able to find some time.

If you are visiting this site directly, you will notice that I have published a redesign. If you read this via Bloglines or another news reader you probably haven’t noticed, so please come check it out.

I can’t take credit for it, it is basically the Kubrick template for WordPress . I did create the picture at the top though. In homage to Henry, I have represented my three kings. There’s still a little tweaking to do, but I was never very happy with the previous incarnation, it was just something other than the default. Also, thanks to StudioGlyphic, I came to find out it didn’t really work well in IE. I refuse to use IE (get Firefox!), so I didn’t notice. This design should work fine though. You should still get Firefox though.

Please let me know if you notice any problems. I upgraded to Wordpress 1.3-alpha5, so it’s bleeding edge and may have some issues.