In no particular order, but maybe I'll make a top 10 list out of this someday!

1)"AK is a drawing hand". I've never met anyone that took this phrase seriously who has won any money at poker and I'm pretty sure I never will.

2)"I raise to find out where I am". Could you possibly find out where you are without (usually) lighting a PSB on fire? Probably. Are you guaranteed to use that information properly once you get it? Nope. Can you strategically use this phrase in a liveament to greatly alter your image as seen by the guy to your left? Definitely!

3)"I put him on AK."
3a)"I put him on two overs."
3b)"I put him on AA."

Fortunately, I found a great way to always put myself on AA, too. All I had to do was go to the PokerStars directory on my hard drive and replace every card graphic with an ace. Now I get aces every hand!

4)"[Insert site here] is rigged/has action flops/something something random number generator something"

I helped uncover a cheating scandal, but rest assured, I'm still laughing at you. However, all is not lost: buy this book and read it cover to cover three or four times. If you still believe it after this, your personality type is probably wrong for poker*.

*this does not prevent me from ironically whining about my terrible run on AIM*
**also, equally ironically, the rumor is the guy that wrote it is now busto, too

5)"I fold and wait for a better spot"

This tournament-exclusive term is one of the main reasons why cash game players laugh at us. It's not technically wrong on its own, but since it's usually used as a justification to not see a showdown after putting in 1/3 of your chips as a nice favorite vs. his range, odds are that you're doing it wrong.

Feel free to toss in more submissions in the comments :)

The good thing about April from my POV is that it's not March. I think last month was my worst month ever tournament-wise, largely due to being down something like 15K to 20K in EV (which is itself related to a whole lot of "final 2 tabling".) The less said about it, the better, which brings us to my April goal: either stop running bad or put in some hands of HU cash and join the rest of my friends at putting up psychotically high winrates. HU is the last untapped frontier about which nothing is written down, and the PT graphs show it...but I've always liked tournaments, to the point where I've probably given up some EV by playing them. I'm sure I'll resolve that conflict eventually; thus far, whenever I'm almost fed up enough to go play cash for a couple of months, I wind up winning something big and stop caring, but I guess I'm due for a really extended downswing eventually.

60 Minutes = probably happening (at least, my segment is definitely getting shot). Whether it actually does air depends on a couple of things outside my control and I have no idea when it'll be if it does - hopefully before June, since at that point everyone will be in Vegas and way too busy going into makeup to watch TV.

Finally, I recognize I haven't been updating as much as usual - this has to do with there simply not being much worth reporting. As final 2 tabling something for me these days is basically a frustrating event (I remember the days when that used to be awesome...on the other hand, my BR was roughly 100x smaller then, so it evens out), I basically have to shrug it off, which I do by playing random video games and chilling out. That, in turn, leads to a lot of boring things (not) being put on this blog, unless you want detailed coverage of my Hearts of Iron 2 campaign or, as a change of pace, how my cat decided to sing me the entire Meow Mix song at 8 AM.

With that said, I do expect to put in more entries when I find something worth updating about (such as the PPA not sucking (who am I kidding) or possibly me winning a Sundayment (meh, I average two of these a year so I've got 3 months left amIrite?).

I've finally returned to playing a full (for me - bond and shaundeeb leave me in the dust four times over) schedule; it feels good, even if I don't have much to show for it so far. Last night, I only played 3 tourneys (so much for a full schedule, right?), but took 19'th in the UB 200K after a big blind vs. blind hand went bad late; last week, it was a 10'th place in an FTP 65K in another ugly blind vs. blind spot I couldn't get away from. If either of those goes anywhere, I have a really nice month, but that plus a whole lotta overpairs getting cracked = poker. A successful tourney graph basically looks like an insane artist's rendition of an inverted Egyptian pyramid, so this isn't anything out of the ordinary...besides, judging from the news this week, anything I win is quite likely to be worthless after the apocalypse forces us all to scrounge for gas while fighting off Australian biker gangs near the world's last remaining fuel refinery. It'd certainly be nice to win something to not quite make up for what my bankroll used to be worth in USD from last month, though!

On the other hand, no matter what happens, I'm pretty sure I'm never losing 800 million dollars in six months, sooooo...

PS: No word on 60 Minutes so far - I'll update when I know it is/isn't happening.

I wasn't going to post about this until after the taping and/or when we had an air time, but since the story apparently already broke, Nat's blog pretty much covers it: we're likely (assuming they don't kill the story now!) going to be on 60 Minutes in a few weeks.

Some of you might think this is bad for online poker. I disagree. In the short term, yes, this could be a little ugly (although if the scandal itself and having people chat about it on every single table didn't drive down those AP numbers, this story, released to an audience that largely has no interest in playing poker in the first place, certainly isn't going to.) In the long run, however, stories like this, packaged properly and with an undertone of "regulation would be great for the industry", have the potential to keep the game vibrant. I, personally, do not want games full of half-baked innuendo about rigged RNG's, site owners with backdoors in the software, and the overall shadiness that comes from a marketplace that, by necessity, operates in a gray legal area; I want them full of people that, whether they win or lose, do not doubt that the operator is standing behind the integrity of the deck of cards, something that, except in one case :P, I can't physically prove at this point. Does the tennis match fixing scandal reflect badly on the integrity of Betfair? No - because it's a fully licensed European site with a reputation to uphold, stories like the one I linked have largely exculpated it from any blame and, in fact, shielded it. Compare this to the stories that have been printed about online poker and you will understand why I think we need regulation ASAP.

Do I guarantee the 60 Minutes piece will be fair? No, but I'll do my best to make it that way, and for what it's worth, everyone that I've talked to clearly understands the game. That's as much as I can ask for, and given where we are in Congress and where we will be following this election year, the need for good stories outweighs the risk of bad ones.

In the last few days, I've returned to playing more or less full time (and running terrible - I think I'm ~25% with overpairs since Sunday - but that's generally how Murphy's Law works). Aside from the runbad, life has been pretty good; whenever I'm not distracted by video games, movies, books or some other shiny thing that comes along, I've been occupied by some business idea or other, and a lot of these seem like they're going to pay off within the next year to two years. Of course, given my attention span, there are far too many shiny things in the world to keep that going for long, but hey, I try.

So, right, hey look a bike...umm...yeah, this blog. I feel like I've been writing a lot of shorter entries instead of a few big ones. There's a reason for that; when I started this project, I had half-coherent plans to use some of the strategy entries in a future book or article series. Most of that didn't go anywhere (at least for now), and instead, I've started using this page as a simple way to broadcast my results, thoughts about poker in general, the AP scandal, and other poker-related stuff that came to mind. Given that there'll be way more of that type of thing coming in the near future, I think I'm probably better off with this format than an exclusively poker strat-oriented blog, but I do occasionally wish I had a Bond18-type ability to sit down and write 3 pages on playing AK whenever I felt like it. (In fact, I've done that before - it just isn't something I could repeat for 18 entries and counting. Major props to Tony for making that work for him.) For that matter, I wish I had a Bond18-type ability to sit down and play poker, but then again, if I had that, I'd probably have the ability to sit down and work for a living/never have discovered it in the first place. It all evens out.

At any rate, today, I'm gonna take a page from Bond and write about something that's been a big deal in HSMTT the last couple of days - 3 betting light early in tourneys. If you've read my posts there, you'll know I could honestly go through a thousand tournaments without ever 3 betting a known decent player with anything but JJ+/AK, or, for that matter, without ever 3 betting period, before the antes kick in. Frankly, even vs. tourney regulars who put in a few hundred hands with you per week (or month if you're me), I don't think metagame matters nearly as much as the strength of your hand, simply because most regulars aren't opening that light from EP/MP and tend to play ABC postflop (which gets you in trouble if you're bluffing because getting an ABC player off a real hand is gonna involve putting in a huge chunk of your stack.) Once the antes kick in, it's a different story, but prior to that, the tighter opening ranges should dictate tighter 3 bets, not looser ones, and certainly not cash game-style ranges. The exception to the rule is if you (think you) play way better than everyone else, but everyone I know who plays LAG in the early stages of a tournament tends to spew off stacks on a regular basis.

This is not the case in live tourneys (where your reads are way better and you can pretty much do anything you want against the worse fields), and it's not the case in 6 max tourneys where, much like short handed cash games, you'll just get slaughtered if you give your blinds away. Early in deep stack, full ring tournaments, however, 3 betting light seems to cause more problems than it solves, especially out of position and especially vs. competent, regular players that will adjust to your perceived loose range after they see it once or twice. (Quite simply, you won't get enough big hands against them in particular to make their lighter calldowns a net plus for you, especially if their perception of you persists when the antes kick in and they call your shortstack shoves light, too.)

This brings up the question "how do I get paid off on my big hands if they know what I have when I 3 bet?" One way is simply not to 3 bet early on in HU pots vs. regulars - they aren't going to happen that often, and deception in those pots, where you can have any pair, suited connectors, AQ, etc., has a lot of value. Another is to take unorthodox lines; checking instead of cbetting some flops after you 3 bet (although this has its own problems, such as the ones in the HSMTT thread), calling preflop and then c/c, bet, bet, or just outright betting into the PFR, and the good old PF call/flop checkraise (as long as you do it with a wider range than exactly an overpair) all have merit and will all win you plenty of chips with your big hands.

Bottom line: At the end of the day, like I say in my Cardrunners vids, the important thing is that you somehow get there, and in full ring games, getting there vs. people who don't suck and have tighter opening ranges than they would in cash games isn't that simple. For that reason, I prefer to simply play a TAG game (granted, with lots of little tricks to maximize the chips I get from my monsters) until the ante rounds; it's probably not optimal, but it's also the game that gets you the closest to it with the least amount of detailed reads on your opponents, something that's a big deal in tourneys where you'll never have [insert tourney regular] on your immediate [right/left] in [insert blind level] again for a few months. It also prevents unnecessary spew, a big deal for a lot of people these days.

Of course, poker is cyclical, so a lot of the tendencies described herein and in HSMTT will be totally different a year from now. Nevertheless, unless you're literally one of the top 10 players in a given tournament, you'd probably be okay 3 betting 0% of your hands until 100/200/25.