Chris Halverson’s Blog

Poker Tracker Guide

(Yes, this is even more important than anything else I have to say, and no, I don’t get anything out of it.)

If you use Poker Tracker at all, and if you don’t you are costing yourself money, you must go get Hank and Iggy’s book. It is good stuff and I learned a lot from it. It’s only $20. At 50/1 it is only 20BB and you will get more than that out of it. If you play higher, then it won’t even take that long and I’ll wager that you will still learn things from it. Playing higher does not necessarily mean that you play smarter. You want to play smarter, get the book.

Go get it here. You can thank them later.

Tourneys: Live vs. Online

I have to say that my betting in live tourneys is particularly bad. This was made painfully obvious by Drac shooting me weird glances all night during the tourney on Friday. I am so used to playing online where the pot total and my chip total are staring me in the face.

When playing live I’ve got four different colors of chips to worry about, a pot that’s all mixed together, lots of noise and other distractions.

Oh, and usually there is alcohol involved.

A prime example is the pocket 8s hand from the tourney. The pot was about T500 when Al bet T500 and I min raised to T1000. Besides the fact that min raises make baby Jesus cry, I had left myself with only about T200. WTF? Obviously I was pot commited, so why not go all the way? I think my reasoning was that I wanted a call. But leave just T300 behind? If anything that’s screaming, “I’ve got a monster hand, raise me all in!” instead of, “I have a semi-strong hand (or bluff) and don’t want a call”.

Big hole. Must fix. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has this issue though.

Slow Weekend

As I thought, I really didn’t play much poker this weekend. I didn’t play at all on Saturday, and only two SNGs on Sunday. I was sweated by Drizz on both of them, and proceeded to play fairly poorly in both. The first one I got zero cards. The second gave me opportunities, but every time I made a raise pre-flop, everybody folded so I was not able to take advantage of the big cards. Of course, what this should have told me was that I could have stolen a lot more, but I was busy watching NASCAR and doing some other stuff, so I didn’t catch it until it was too late.

I have yet to even start the new Party bonus. Don’t worry though, I will be there…

Why do I suddenly hear a stampede of people running to the 25NL tables?

Ultimate Poker Challenge

The finals for the Ultimate Poker Challenge were shown over the weekend and it had a great final table. The big names included Scotty Nguyen, Jeff Shulman, “Minneapolis” Jim Meehan, James Van Alstyne, and David Plastik. Doyle and Todd Brunson were co-hosts this week.

I love to watch Minneapolis Jim. He always seems half in the bag, and there are many people who say that it is true. Doyle even mentioned something to the fact that it appeared that he “had a few already”. He’s a hoot to watch though, he just talks and talks and he makes very strange bets. He doubled up twice very early in the game and during one of the hands he said “Fuck” and got a penalty. This is after he stood up for about a minute and somebody called the clock on him. He went into the tank and let it rip. I don’t think he took any extra time than he normally does, so I’m guessing they edited some time out. He plead his case to Matt Savage and the rest of the table, but Matt (thankfully) held firm and dealt him out for 20 minutes. Evidently nothing happened during those 20 minutes because the next hand they showed was one with Mpls Jim in it and they commented that he was back. I love to watch him though. Anyway, it was pretty entertaining to watch, despite Scotty going out early.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 3:14 pm 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.