Friday, March 13, 2009

A Phone Call to Grandma

I stumbled across someone's video on PocketFives. Here's a video I made about my phone call to my grandmama after my first 5-figure poker score.





*This conversation didn't actually take place. I am 100% sure that it would go like this. I didn't want to go there because telling this to my grandma, whom I love very, very, very much, is like posting an Ad in the local newspaper. So I just mailed her the money without the story. (Link to the original video.)

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

A Long Overdue Update

It's been a while so, here's the latest happenings in my poker life.

I'll start with the FTOPS, well, after probably spending $1500, I finally won a seat into the ME. But that was all for nothing. I was able to chip up early, but proceeded to tilt my chips off to a guy that chased a gutshot and got there when the turn game me top, two. I'd like to take some credit for giving him his start for a nice run in the event. He finished in 6th place for $78k. Congrats! Appropriately, his id is "dump22".

Well, after the FTOPS concluded, I decided to take a break from poker. Running bad and playing bad is a deadly combination for anyone's emotional health and bankroll. I had no timetable for this break, only that I wanted to clear my head and start back playing when I felt the desire.

During this break, I did something very out of the ordinary for me, I watched TV. I'm not a big TV person. I'd rather be on the computer trying to find some way to become a bazillionaire. Other than basketball and football, there are only a handful of shows that I watch on a semi-regular basis. Well, during this break I was able to catch up on CSI, Lost, Cold Case, Without A Trace and my secret vice, American Idol. That's probably all the shows that I watch. I also managed to watch a few movies from my Blockbuster Online subscription. And I managed to work on a new website that I have in the works. All of this spanned the course of two weeks.

So, exactly two weeks after the FTOPS and the start of my break, I was reading through some posts on PocketFives. Coincidently, one was about downswings. After reading a lot of posts about people's various downswings and how they worked them out, I felt a lot better about my current "normal" 50 buy-in downswing. Thus, that was the fire that I needed to put in a days work.

I then proceeded to play a good number of the regular Sunday tourneys with the exception of the Stars or Full Tilt Sunday Majors. Well, long story short, I was able to secure my biggest score to date. Although it was a second place finish, I won just short of $20k in the Stars $150k $50 buy-in tourney.

Heres a screenshot:




Here are some hands from the Heads-up battle. I started down about 4 to 1 and was down 5 to 1 before making a come back. Well, after our last break, I went from being ahead 5 to 1, to being out of the tourney in second place. I'm always looking to grow and improve as a poker player and after losing my last two heads-up matches, I'm starting to study more about that aspect of the game.

Hand #1:
This hand put me back in the game.




Hand #2: The first hand after the last break.




Hand #3: I played this hand horribly, but the guy was making some fairly thin calls with mediocre hands. I was hoping to get full value, but instead I valuetowned myself. LOL.



Hand #4 aka The Bustout Hand: Hopefully, this is the first of many 5-figure scores and a 6-figure score would be very nice.




Good Luck at the tables.

Andrew aka TheJunkie