Long time

Wow it's been a really long time since I last posted, and even longer since I posted anything with some actual content. A friend of mine asked me to go to Commerce Casino over in LA next weekend and I think I'll go. There's some special tournaments going on there right now and the one he wants to play is a $400,000 prize-pool guaranteed 335$ buy-in. Not sure if I'll play the tournament but I've been meaning to make it out to Commerce so I can see some of the more prominent posters on the poker forums I read. Quite poker nerdy I know, but we've always got time for making new friends.

So March was my least successful albiet quite successful still month. I put in a good amount of hours, 85 to be exact. I did earn less than my hourly expectations, but I'm just happy to have put in as many hours that I did and feel very solidly confident that I played very well. In fact, I think my playing abilities as of late have been growing rapidly. I've added more "moves" or plays to my arsenal as well as making more optimizing plays in general.

April has been a monsterous month. I haven't put many hours at all this month so far mostly due to schooling obligations that I've had, but I've been earning way over expectations this month. A lot of it is luck, but a lot of it has also been because of my new main choice of location to be playing at. The games I feel have been much softer than what I experienced over at Bay101, but that could just be because I've been luckier as of late there.

I also received an indirect compliment the other day from my friend Jesse. We were in the same game sitting next to each other when a regular who's not very good, Kenny, had made some comment with the intent to irritate me or something. Forgot what the comment was exactly and whether I won the pot or not, but Jesse responded, "that won't really work on him". I guess he thinks I'm tiltless even though I'm not but I guess its a testament to my ability to control my frustrations. I think that its a very important part of being able to play well. Sure there's a lot of thought process involved both in and outside of the game, but while in the game it's hard to continually be in that objective thought process when you've lost pot after pot. One thought that continually gets me going is, much like a pool hustler, the players donating money to the games have to win or else they never come back. The reason the game is so easy to beat is because of the incredible amount of variance there is with the game. A guy who's play probably deserves to lose ~$40/hour can have pretty strong profit for even as much as 150 hours of play. Its really hard to learn this game when you're earning money somehow over 150 hours when you should be expecting to lose a significant amount of money with the play that you were carrying out. It falsely confirms your idea that you are indeed a winning player.

I find it most fun to crush the players that think they are strong poker players and happily flaunt their abilities to play the game as high as 20/40 (even though its not really very high at all). Guess I'll end the post with a story about how I hit and ran a table and I think the table got somewhat irritated at it but whatevers.

So I was playing for about 3-4 hours at this table when it's time for me to go, but I had a friend who was coming to Garden so I thought I'd hang around for a bit and sit behind my other friend who was at the table so I can say hello to my friend who was coming. At one point 3 people all left or went busto and left the game and my friend had not arrived yet. I decided I'd sit in for one more round and I post my blind in between small blind and Button (kinda too lazy to describe it but essentially its 1 big blind left of button, and then a small blind and a big blind left of that extra big blind).

UTG limps, MP(middle position) middle-aged Asian regular lady raises, I call with 56o, sb calls, bb calls, UTG calls.

Flop: TT6
Everyone checks to MP who bets, I raise, everyone folds to MP who calls.

My plan was to check and fold if she bet on most turn cards (except obviously a 6) cause she's not betting the turn unless I'm beat
Turn: 6
course miracle card comes, i bet she calls
River: 9
I bet she calls and mucks her JJ in disgust.

I play the round up to the big blind and rack up my chips haha. I pretty much doubled how much I had won that day from getting uber lucky in that 1 round where I hit and ran, so go me.


- Dan Low