This is my first blog in quite a long time and the first that I'm taking seriously that has a real audience; sometimes, I forget that more than 2 people are actually reading the things I post. My last entry arose out of frustration and wasn't particularly suited to posting on a public forum - regardless of whether I've got valid points, there was no reason for me to name names or needlessly flame people. So I'd like to publicly apologize for being dumb on the Internet and talking trash to specific people - that wasn't the first time and probably won't be the last, but I'd rather not be a jackass without a good reason.

(Oh yeah - to address a reader comment, the Q4o flop call is pretty standard/I'd do the same. It's limit. This kind of stuff actually makes sense there for a bunch of reasons.)

...but my roommate, Matt, just won the 1K Sunday Million for 315K while playing and running very well. Ship 3K for getting him the chiplead while he was out for the first 15 minutes :)

Big update coming up, I'm just unavoidably/obviously delayed tonight.

Nothing going on the last two days (other than me lasting exactly two hours before losing a big coinflip in the last 1500) since I needed to move into the second house I'll be renting for the rest of the Series. Well, nothing is a relative term - there've been some crazy mixed game sessions at the house the last couple of nights (it looks like I'm the Chinese poker champion of the circuit or something), and Vivek, my housemate, just took sixth at his 3K limit final table. 4 cashes in 6 events in the 9 days since he's turned 21...the man is both very good and running awesome, a nice combination.

Tomorrow's event is another 1500, but I would ideally like to play the Sunday tournaments online, too. So it looks like I'm going to go for a double or nothing strategy the whole day - I'll either be surfing the net by 5 or sitting on a monster stack. Let's see how that works out.

The good thing about being a poker player is the ability to set your own hours. A lot of people in and around poker have written a lot of things about keeping yourself in prime shape to play, and some of that is knowing when to take a couple of days off. After the shootout the day before yesterday, I was pretty ready for a nice break, and since there was only a 5K NL event yesterday/no event at all today, it seemed like a good time. Putting in a few hours playing different games instead of grinding out SNG's and tournaments was a nice touch; instead of trying to pushbot and hoping not to get called, I spent some time making street by street decisions in limit and (tonight) some 15/30 razz at the Rio.

Razz is a game that is almost always played in a mediocre to bad fashion (I'll be fair and say I'm mostly including myself here) because it's so math heavy and compounds errors so much - one loose player who makes big mistakes on third or fourth street and locks himself into hands to the river can pretty much make the entire game. Tonight, I played with an Omaha bracelet winner, a guy who presumably understands poker, who was far too loose on third, made himself keep drawing with marginal hands because of it, and visibly tilted because he wound up down so much to people who (despite making big errors like betting with no edge themselves) just destroyed him with their better hand selection. Unfortunately, you never see this game anymore, because of the variance associated with good players playing each other and because bad ones get wiped out ridiculously fast. That's too bad, because it's one of the most fun, and the easiest to play 'decently' - while also giving you the chance to make some nice, thin value bets. It also lets you play one of two diametrically opposing styles depending solely on the guy across from you - you can either bloat pots early, tying both of you to a pot where you have a big equity edge on third, or keep them small and let the other guy make huge equity mistakes on fourth and fifth. Add in some obvious crazy semibluff spots, and it's a very subtle, but rewarding form of poker. I don't pretend to be great at it - I probably give away equity to most of the top FT pros - but, wow, did I ever have an edge over the non-2+2'ers at the table tonight. With that, I've basically talked myself into playing the razz bracelet event on Sunday.

But enough about a game none of my readers care about...tomorrow, it's back to the grind. Three hours of totally different games later, no limit sounds good again.

Unfortunately, I'm continuing to run very bad (0 for 3 big 70/30's in just one Sunday tournament is impressive, honestly, as is running Ax into AA 4 times this week), but in the meantime, there are definitely benefits to being out here. Playing live is certainly different, but the games are so much easier/the players so predictably bad that I can feel myself improving - thinking about new lines, getting people to fold through raw aggression, and opening up my game in a number of areas. Live players telegraph their hands so much and so thoroughly that simply taking away pots, including big ones, is incredibly easier.

A bunch of hands from this week:

1)The hand I posted about a couple of days ago (63d on the AA8 flop) is a fantastic Yeti theorem hand. Bluff recently published a segment on 2+2 poster's Yeti's theorem, which, in a nutshell, is "people who bet/3 bet a paired board never have anything". It's so true, especially on AAx boards, where an ace just never 3 bets a raise (a big mistake pretty often, BTW), especially not a small 3 bet. Pulling the trigger on a four bet with 6 high is something else altogether, though. I have no idea who the button is, but I'm sure I'll be seeing him on TV at some point.

2)In the 1K sat I played last night, I raised with AA and got called by an MP player who then folded QJ face up on a JT7 flop because "I bet so much" (2/3 pot, when we were 100 bets deep - this is a profitable call if he puts me on exactly AA.) This is just another "live players are so bad" post, but this week, I've been trying to see how profitable it is to check TPTK+ after a PFR, especially on multiway boards when I'm sure someone will bet. So far, that's been pretty mixed live (most of them are so straightforward that they just don't bluff no matter how much you want them to, and the rest are so bad that it's irrelevant whether you check or bet) but has gotten some nice results online. Nobody ever believes a PFR followed by a checkraise on a K72 board, either.

3)Another fun hand from the 1K: two limpers at 50/100, I raised to 500 with AK (I'd been raising a lot and had 8Kish behind, covering everyone), they called and the flop is AQJr. Both limpers thought [I was 100% sure that both had at least some piece of this flop], then checked. This is a very tough spot online that most people misplay - the fact is that you usually have too many outs to bet/fold to a CR profitably, and if you follow the predictable "bet the flop, check behind on the turn" line, when either villain bets the river you will often be folding the best hand (because you can't really call that bet profitably.) The correct play here in multiway pots, especially vs opponents that won't 2 barrel bluff, is to check behind and look for cards that change your turn equity (also balancing out the times you check behind with something like 99).

After I checked, the turn bricked off, the first limper bet 800, and the second thought forever and called. Normally, online, this is a close decision between a call and a fold, but live, it was very easy to tell the second guy just didn't have much - a weak ace at best. So I overcalled, the river bricked off as well, we checked through it and I won a nice pot. The interesting part is that I'm pretty sure I missed a small value bet on the end - something very hard to make online against anyone half decent, but pretty easy with live reads. I'll get better at these as the month goes on.

Tomorrow's event is a 2.5K NL freezeout and/or some sats I'm looking forward to; hopefully, it'll break me out of running bad :)