SEO, New Mexico, and a Break

Posted by icemonkey9 on Mar 22, 2009 in writing | 1 comment

For many of you that frequent this blog to see how I'm doing, you'll know that I've been battling the major search engine of the internet (the G word) because sometime in mid June or July it was excluded from the search engine. Sucks! Why would they blacklist me of all people, and how the heck would I be able to get back on?

Well, it wasn't easy and took some research on the internet as well as bugging a really patient fellow that helped me out. I think the steps that I took were:

• Signing up for the Google Webmaster Tools
• Watching the "Submit Reconsideration Video"
• Moving to WordPress on a Linux Server
• Adding the SEO All in One Pack & Permalinks for the blog
• Being very patient
• Reading interesting SEO topics about Blogs on various SEO forums

This morning I checked the search engine to see if I had been added back in, and sure enough, I'm back baby!  Now I haven't seen a huge spike in traffic but I am now seeing people come in from the general internet public which is cool.

Today I am also headed to New Mexico with the wife.  She is working out there as part of her clinical trials study (she does monitoring of research projects) and since I haven't seen her in a month I decided to go along.  I'm taking my laptop and all the goodies so working and playing poker won't be any problem from the hotel room.  We're hopefully going to have a smooth trip and plan to go out with her cousin one night and then hit up one of the many resort-type casinos in the area for some food/entertainment/poker another night.  I'm looking forward to it.

Poker wise I haven't played in a few days, I think since Thursday afternoon.  It was a good time to take a break since I couldn't even win at 25nl ... the sick hand there was me stacking off with QQ on a rag board:

I played it right, so I guess I should be happy but a month's worth of every-session-playing below EV and coolers has my interest in poker down to a minimal level at this point.

Anyways, if you were like me and have your blog excluded from the major search engine, do sign up for those webmaster tools and watch the video.  The main reason that a site gets excluded is that you'll be linking to a bunch of websites in your blogroll that all just link to each other and makes the search engine think it's a link scheme so they just ban all of you (which sucks).  Anyways, good luck, and welcome general search engine traffic type people!

Zen In

Posted by icemonkey9 on Feb 14, 2009 in poker, wpt, writing, zen | 2 comments

Reading a now revived blog from ChuckTs has me focusing more on my Zen like mental state when playing poker. ChuckTs (an awesome guy and player) posted a great checklist for Warming Up and Warming Down which I blatantly stole and copied into a word file and keep on my desktop. I thought the next time I played a session, I'd use it and see if I like it.

I have to say the difference in my mental state from the last time I played to this time is a dramatic turn around. I had time to let the steam cool off, as well as do breathing exercises and write down goals for the session. The goals I set for myself were:

• Only play 6 tables of 100nl Full Ring, not 9. Just get back into the swing and give your brain time to ease back into playing.

• Play tight in EP, and look for good steal situations in the CO and BTN.
• Look for good 3betting opportunities in late position.
• Take your time making solid reads at the turn and river.
• Play 45-55 minutes once 6 tables are up and active.
• Stay positive and level headed.
• Stay focused and only have tables open on the computer.

I really liked being able to set goals like this for each session and it's a habit I'm going to invest time and money (via paper notepads!). The results were good, the first session I took what I thought was a bad cooler, but turns out I just made a marginal river call and lost. I stayed calm, focused on breathing and staying positive and playing one hand at a time. Fortunately that paid off, and I focused on playing well and not slow playing anything and got paid off for a couple of great hands and ended the first session up 1.5 buyins.

The second session went pretty well in my opinion in terms of my gameplay and mental state. I pretty much went card dead for 40 minutes and ended up -$15 but what helped is that I hadn't looked at my results at all until after the session was over, so I really don't know how that might have fluctuated. Anyways I wrapped up the night happy about my game.

In other news regarding March ...

In March PokerStars is changing their VIP program and attaining PlatinumStar will only be 7,500 VPPs, which makes it very attainable for me (playing approximately 23,000 hands in a month) so I am definitely going to go for it. Once that happens I'll probably just save up for the 50k FPP bonus instead of the 25k, because this one is worth $650 and by the time I clear my recent deposit bonus I'll be closer to 50k than 25k (specifically once I hit Platinum and that bonus becomes available to me).

Writing News ...

I got word that I'll be part of the team for a new website called www.DurrrrChallenge.com, which will follow the hotly contested challenge that Tom Dwan put out and was taken by Ivey and Antonious. It looks like my part in the site will be breaking down hands and getting some analysis from some top internet heads up specialists. Should be fun.

And finally ...

I am headed to Commerce next Friday to interview a few poker pros, and plan to really just interview anyone I can get my hands on. The video interviews will appear on Gaming Illustrated, and other interviews will show up around the internet on the various sites I write for. There's also a media tournament I get to play in, so winning that would be AWESOME because it would get me a seat at the WPT Celebrity Invitational.