frostbrn.net

Well that pretty much sums up my life lately, here’s the details:

• House: We’re (Kelly and I) buying a house in Toledo and dumping most of our available cash into the purchase price and some repairs.  Hence the…
• Broke: Yep, dumping $$$ into a house will do that to you, at least I can just print some more money playing…
• Poker: Uh, maybe not thanks to Uncle Sam.  In case you’re unfamiliar with the current climate in online poker I’ll summarize.  Essentially a law hindering the flow of money to and from online gaming sites was passed 4 years ago.  Over that span of time, recreational players (you could say, my clients) have slowly given up on online poker and drifted away, leaving the existing games full of very good poker players and reducing everyone’s (that is every winning player’s) overall profitability.  And just recently the fed started cracking down on existing rogue payment processors who were doing business with gaming sites, making it even more difficult to move your money to and from them.  At any rate, I’ve sort of decided that I’m going to be done with poker by the end of the year as my main source of income.  So now I’ve just got to figure out what I want to do over the next 6 months.
• Golf: Somehow I got a little better this year and am now addicted.  I’m taking my first lesson of the year tomorrow with a new instructor (BGCC’s Tom Garcia for anyone in the BG area).  Obviously the golf and broke don’t mix very well together, but I’m trying my hardest not to think about that right now and am just counting on it to resolve itself.  Those things always do that right?

In other news, Kelly is having her 2nd baby in 2 weeks, and I’ve given up drinking for the near future (read: at least the next few days, plus a few more before today).  Now I’ve just got to get motivated to get this blog running at maximum efficiency.

So I finally got my blog re-hosted and some fancy new wordpress software (so long blogger), but I had been intimidated for a while by the heap of features and settings in the WP dashboard so I kind of just put off blogging for a while. Well, that time has come to an end. Not the intimidation part, but my blogging hiatus is officially over. I still need to explore all of the bells and whistles, so I’m sure the appearance and some of the gadgets here are going to change over the next few weeks, but I am going to be posting regularly. Also, if anyone is trying to find me on facebook (I don’t use myspace that often) my username there is frostbrn. That’s it for now, but stay tuned for plenty more content in the near future.

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Crash Course in Poker

I’ve been meaning to write some (hopefully) insightful things about poker, since I really haven’t in the past, and I’m obviously committing a great deal of my time to playing it. So I thought I’d start out with a short post on what I feel are the 3 most important things to poker overall. In other words, if someone asks me how to win at poker this is what I would tell them:

1) Bankroll Management: This is by far the most important of the three here. If you’re playing NL cash games, keep no less than 20 full buy-ins for the stakes you are playing at. If you are playing limit cash games, keep at least 300 big bets, if you are playing single table tournaments, keep at least 50 buy-ins, and if you are playing multi-table tournaments you really should have more than 200 buy-ins in your roll. Whenever people have trouble understanding why this is so important I give them this analogy: Imagine you go to a casino to play blackjack. Now we all know that the casino has a mathematical edge and will win in the long run, but in the short run players can go on big winning streaks. Now imagine that you find a table with a $5 minimum and $5 maximum bet (you can only bet $5), but the casino only has $50, and you have unlimited funds. If you go on one hot winning streak, you will wipe the casino out, however there is a chance that the house could win enough initially to be able to survive long losing streaks, but their “risk of ruin” is very high. Now what if they have $100, $200, $500, or $1000. At what point is the house “safe” from going broke? Now you see how bankroll management works. As a winning player, you have a mathematical edge against your weaker opponents, you just need to have enough money behind you to survive losing streaks (they will happen).

2) Position: This is such a crucial and important concept that I’m not going to really go into much detail here as it would take me all night. There are plenty of great books and articles that deal with the topic. In short, the closer you are to the button, the more profitable you will be. But as I said, please go read more about it somewhere else for more information as to why this is such an important and fundamental concept to poker

3) Preflop vs. Postflop decisions: In NL cash games, the decisions you make after the flop are usually more important than the ones you make before the flop. In NL tournaments, the decisions you make before the flop are usually more important than the ones you make after the flop. It’s just that simple

Aaaaaand…..

…Busto!

Quick Challenge Update

So I accidentally played an extra 6.50 for a total of 101 of them.

On to the $16s, with less than 10 buy ins, lol. See you in hell $6.50s

quick gigabet challenge update:

Ok, so the 6.50s pretty much suck

At least I know what my major problem is: Not enough 1sts

quick update, just finished with 100 $3.40s, next up is the $6.50s

I’ll try and write a summary of my experience in the 3.40s later, but for now here’s a graph of the first 1o0 SnGs of the challenge

Quick update on the giga challenge: I played 26 3.40s tonight, here’s a picture summary

Gigabet Challenge

Ok, so I never updated with results from my last personal poker challenge, but I went busto somewhere in the middle of it. Poor BR management, took some crazy shots and yada yada yada bustoville. I don’t even remember the details, but needless to say I am now inspired to take on another challenge. This time it is the more structured and much tougher Gigabet Challenge (click on it for details). Although I’m modifying it a bit. Here’s how my structure will work:

Starting Bankroll: $51= 15 buy-ins for the $3.40 turbo Sit-n-gos on Pokerstars.

Playing requirements: (in this order)

100 $3.40s
100 $6.50s
100 $16s
150 $27s
100 $60s
100 $114s

The only real differences are that I’m starting with the lowest buy-in SnG, I’m giving myself more play at the $27s, as I feel these are by far the toughest low stakes SnGs on Stars, and that I’m stopping after 100 114s, as the next level buy in SnG ($225) just doesn’t fill up often enough for me to even play 100 of them in a reasonable amount of time. I’m hoping to get done with this whole challenge by teh end of February.

I’ll play until I’m done with the 114s, or until I’m busto, whichever comes first. I’m actually predicting busto somewhere in the middle of the $27s as those things are insanely tough.

At any rate I’ll be posting updates and graphs throughout the challenge, so stay tuned to see how it goes.

frostbrn out