Random Thoughts Of The Week

I'm posting this from Google documents. Workplace has again blocked my Blogger access. The short time I was able to post & comment from work was again enjoyable, but I guess they prefer that I do better things with my time here. We are a large company, and it's very possible that my actions have no effect on their on-again, off-again policy, but I'm beginning to think that they might.

BTW, can anyone give me advise on posting from Google Docs to Blogger with a title? Everything I've tried so far has ended up title-less.

Anyways, not much to say about poker lately. I went through the rest of my bankroll (which was less than the number of years I've been alive, so it was no big deal) when I stayed home after getting a severe case of the Mondays. I had a hard time sleeping, mostly because of my Diabetic medication, and when 7am rolled around, I decided my 2.5 hours of sleep wasn't enough. Once I finally woke up, I fired up FTP and turned $13 into $1, then back to $10, before finally going busto.

But it wasn't all bad on Monday. I did finally get through DragonForce, Medium difficulty, on Guitar Hero 3. Only 3 stars, and I limped my way to the finish line, but anyone who's played this knows that it's a pretty decent accomplishment nevertheless. But that's for another blog.

The good news is, as planned, I will be back. I've got a deposit that I'm waiting for ePassporte to process, and of course, they take unnecessarily long. That should be coming through any day now; until then, I play the waiting game.

I started going through some of my poker texts, starting with HOH2 (I read the first one sometime last year). I've yet to get into anything incredibly insightful, but even the bit I've read so far has helped me to start focusing on known leaks in my game. I haven't made it through the first chapter yet, but Harrington's discussion on bluffs got me thinking about the way I bluff.

In $5 SNGs, certain bluffs are fairly easily. C-bets are easy money because very few people will pickup on c-bet frequency; they have a hard enough time seeing past their own cards. Obviously, I reign in the c-bets on coordinated boards andor large pots, but standard c-bets work pretty often. Bluffs like resteals, on the other hand, doesn't work as well. Again, players at these stakes can't see past their cards, so most resteals are going to get called down (if the player doesn't decide to REreraise with their KQo or A8o).

What I need to do is learn to pick my bluffs better. I need to be more observant when I'm bluffing in a game outside of the structure I normally play (see my rant post from two weeks ago ). Most $5 SNG players play the same, but moving to something like a blogger game, I need to remember (and stay reminded) that, until my observation skills become closer to automatic, I need to think through my bluffs more. In the Mookie against Buckeyes, I decided to resteal with no other information other than A) the bet seemed kind of stealy-looking and B) the way he played a hand against Hoy on another table I happened to be watching (and really, I used that information wrong anyways). I put my whole tournament line trying to bluff a player I knew little about. As I progress into more MTTs, I can't be making those kind of mistakes.

I'm hoping to be back on FTP this week, but since I'm at the mercy of ePassporte, it may not be until next. Either way, good luck to all this week.