Update on my Poker Articles + Nightmare at the Tables

Posted by icemonkey9 on Feb 12, 2009 in General | 1 comment

First we'll get into the positive stuff. It seems my poker journalistic career has taken off, and through Nat Arem's network of poker sites, I'll be writing for anywhere between 3 and 5 sites weekly, on top of the unrelated once-a-week article I write for PokerHandReplays.com . The work is substantial so I am officially housing all my work through my business under "content development" which is something I've done before for Boost Mobile within the video game space. Housing it that way doesn't effect the people I write for, but it does allow me to allocate time for writing articles during work hours.

The sites I'll be writing for include: PokerHandReplays.com, MacPoker.com, TightPoker.com, PokerBonuses.com, and PokerSoftware.com . There might be more in the future on top of all this! Anyways, I think I owe WVHillBilly a box of cookies from Mrs Fields for the referral to Nat's blog which opened this door.

PokerStars Bonuses

If you hadn't read the industry buzz already, PokerStars is having a super promotion week. They're giving away money for every millionth hand dealt as well as a huge prize package for the 25 billionth hand. On top of that they have a 25% reload bonus up to $1k, so I deposited with the intention of immediately cashing out and just taking advantage of the bonus. I have 24,000 FPPs right now and intended to buy the $285 bonus, and will do that once the $250 deposit bonus is cleared ... so the bonus whoring works like:

$250 Deposit Bonus (5000 base FPPs to clear ... takes me about 2 to 3 weeks to clear)
$285 VPP Bonus (2000 base FPPs to clear ... takes a week)
-$60 Western Union Juice
------
$475 Bonuses, potentially all cleared by the end of Feb, or mid-March at the latest.

Another bit of good news is that on the 2+2 forums the PokerStars rep announced that hitting GoldStar will only take 3000 points and Platinum will only be 7000 starting March 1, making achieving Platinum star extremely easy. Also once I hit Supernova (which should be right around September-ish) there are some new advantages for keeping it for a year.

Deposit Doomswitch Engaged

If I hadn't had such a ridiculous day at Hawaiian Gardens and gotten the old live-doomswitch in person I'd be crying that online poker is rigged. But it's not ... poker just can rip your nuts off and shove them down your throat sometimes. Yesterday the tables were FULL of donks which means one of two things for me - either I'm going to win at least a buyin a session or get killed. Yesterday I got killed.

AA Cracked

Kinda crazy right? In terms of analyzing my play, I guess I should have made the 3bet about $7-$8 but I don't think that changed the outcome of the hand.

Over-Agro with AK suited

The villain in the hand is a 64/4/3 drooler. I figure I did have some fold equity if I stacked the flop and if he called, it's a flip. Unforunately he had hit two pair but I don't hit any of my spade outs.

AA Cracked by Shortstacker

Again this was me in a bad flop situation where it's 50-50 and the other guy just won't fold, and hits. Not much else to say, pretty standard.

QQ in 3bet pot as overpair vs Donk Bet ... I was ahead...

This guy boggles my mind with his preflop action. He's a 26/9/2 and calls a big 3bet with A7s sorely out of position. He donk bets into me on a rag flop so I let him have it and shove putting him on a draw. I was right, and he called anyway ... and he hit. Another stack gone.

Tilt Play? Maybe.

This play was probably tilt-induced after everything that had happened today. I had tried some of Tommy Angelo's breathing exercises before my 2nd session which helped. I guess I better do more today. The thing about this hand was that the villain "andydufreis" had shoved the flop the last two times against me after I cbet. This marked the third time he shoved the flop on my cbet (I had folded the other two times) so I decided to look him up on a draw. Putting the villain's stats into Pokerazor (he is a 24/5/2) I see that at the flop I'm estimated at being best here 53.8% of the time and had 68.8% equity so I guess this move wasn't horrible. He shows up with the set, dropping my outs to 8 (he had a diamond) which I didn't hit.

So in the end I dropped 3 buyins yesterday through all this which isn't horrible but the taste is still in my mouth because most of this happened in the last two sessions of the night right before I went to bed. Today I have three more articles to wrap up, shop for Valentine's Day dinner (I'm making a big dinner at home), and then hopefully I'll have time for a few sessions of poker.