Chris Halverson’s Blog

Poker

Poker has been going pretty well, although my bankroll doesn’t show that. Tuesday night went well, up 10BB. Wednesday night, down 15BB. Thursday, up 7BB. OK, so for the whole I’m a bit up, and those “swings” are totally within any variance, so I’m not worried or anything, but I’m pissed at my play on Wednesday.

I haven’t gone through all the hands yet, but the ones I did play weren’t the best. I’m trying to work in some of Ed Miller’s tactics, so that can lead to some higher variance too, but I just didn’t play well on Wednesday. I was playing with Drac at a 2/4 table on Wednesday (although I must admit I missed seeing that he sat down until he sent me an email) and the table sucked, he thought so too. I’m not sure why I stayed on that table. Pre-flop raises in EP would cause the whole table to fold. It was a bad, bad table, and I didn’t listen to the voice in the back of my head saying, “Change tables dumbass!” I admit, I was doing some prep for some “real” work that I had to do “after hours”, so I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been. Even so, I did not play well that night. At least I realize it and I can go back and examine what went wrong.

Thursday night was more Ed Miller play. Every night that I play and try to apply some of the techniques makes it easier to do. Aggression is something that does not come naturally to me in poker. I’m still not to the point where I’m raising with AJo, and I’m still nowhere close to as aggressive as he wants, but it’s getting better. There are times I know I should raise, but just call. I know I sould raise, but still don’t. I’ve seen the passiveness lose me hands, especially now that I’m looking for it. I’ve seen aggression win me hands more and more. I still sometimes have trouble doing it especially if I am not running too well. I know it’s the right play, but still don’t do it. It’s a total mental thing that I need to get over (well, that and read SSH again and really try to absorb it). I’m getting there.

I have playing the BBJ tables lately too. Very interesting. Last night when it was at $40K it was amazing what people where playing with. Anything that may in some alternate reality qualify for a BBJ hand was played. Nobody would leave the table, which sucked if they actually got up for a bit as they’d evidently just wait until they timed out. New people would post UTG lest they not get dealt into the hand. It was crazy. When it hit and dropped down to $8K my table cleared out totally within 3 hands. They are some good places to play if you can handle even wilder play as if you have patience you can win some big hands.

The DVDs for my bounty for Sunday’s tourney are copied and ready to go. Of course, I’m kinda thinking I could have saved my time since I’m going to win this thing which means nobody will get the bounty…Oh well, maybe I’ll send them to somebody else after I win. 87 people. Unreal. I’m a big longshot here. If you’re at my table, pay attention, I’m not sure if I’ll easily be able to figure out who takes me out

Racing

Well, kinda. My son went into school this week to get his schedule and have pictures taken. He wore a Ferrari T-Shirt. Oh yeah!!

Schumacher will wrap up the championship this weekend. No problem. Forza!

Misc

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I subscribe to Audible’s service where you get 2 books a month for $20 no matter what the cost of the individual books are. I love it and listen to them on the way to/from work. Anyway, last month I accidently got a non-fiction book. The description sounded like a book I would like (I like espionage and cop mystery books, especially when in mindless mode in the car), so I didn’t read it closely enough. This isn’t a bad thing, I like non-fiction too, but starting it up and hearing it’s a “true story” is kind of like signing up for a S&G an realizing that you signed up for limit instead of NL. Yeah, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s not quite what you wanted. Oh well, it was interesting, so at least that worked out.

BTW, iPods rock. I got one a couple of weeks ago for my birthday. It is seriously cool. I’ve used iTunes as my MP3 player since it came out for Windows, and the interaction between the two is great. I was hesitant to get an iPod as I figured they were overrated. I was wrong. I used my son’s for a week before I got my own (he has the 3rd gen one). If you’re looking for a portable MP3 player, you can’t go wrong with the iPod.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2004 at 7:37 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.