A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...

...sessions like this that just make you want to put your fist through the closest wall? I work full time (and then some) and am horrible at LHE. I really don't want to be spending 85% of my non-study time trying to get back to break even. At least it wasn't a 45 degree angle heading down. Guess my mistake here was trying two tables for the second time in my life (up until about hand 117). PH says this is normal and I'd be more ok with it if I didn't have to tell Mrs. Wifey I played 99.5 minutes and all I could show for it is the price of a cheeseburger happy meal for the kiddo. Blah blah sample size, I know.

One thing interesting I did discover in reviewing the session is my showdown winnings were up 37% over yesterday while going all the way 12% more often. I refuse to attribute anything to "skill" at this point...or maybe even anything in the next 6-12 months for that matter. That being said, I did hit a lot of full houses tonight. Some guy was tilting away in chat somewhere between hands 10-25. Not sure why I even watch it, but part of it is curiosity I guess. It was awesome being the one to take the last bit of his stack on a bluff I called down though. Not sure why people expect bluffs to work in micros. I think it was danzasmack who said you'd have to unplug their modem to keep them from calling. 

Anyway, back to the grind tomorrow after a couple of sick days. Pretty light meeting schedule and no more pager duty, so I should be able to catch up on the rest of the Hey Ball podcasts and maybe another ep or two of Passing the Torch. <3 iPhone.

 

What is it about holiday weekends that make returning to work just awful? Maybe someday I'll be able to make the jump to pro, but I'm not holding my breath. Until then I'll just have to keep dreaming about not knowing what day of the week it is, waking up at 11a every day and hitting the tables in a robe and pink bunny slippers.

Didn't have much time for the games this week, partly because of being so tired and wanting to stay on my A game (except I don't really have one yet) and partly because of being on-call since Tuesday. I did manage to put in 294 hands over 198 minutes single-tabling. For you guys who mass multitable, please tell me what the trick is to do EV calcs, etc that fast. And no, saying it's possible because you only play 30% of your hands doesn't count :)

Pyg is going to strangle me for being too results oriented again, but here's how things looked tonight. I hate it when I start off a session on a downswing. I'm never sure whether I'm chasing losses or I just have more time to kill before I'm ready to call it for the night. The awesome part about playing micros is that your wife gets to make fun of you when you tell her your hourly was more when you were flipping burgers as a 16 year old. At least I haven't had to redeposit lately.

I've recently started getting on a frozen Sobe kick. You should try it. 1x Sobe + 1x freezer == good times. Kind of reminds me of Icees but with more exotic flavors than just blue raspberry, coke, or cherry. 

 

I ended up taking Thursday and Friday off, which meant a 5 day weekend for me with Memorial day. The weather is perfect for a holiday BBQ. I guess the bad thing about it being Sunday is that I'm already dreading Tuesday.

Anyway, after my session with PH yesterday, I got really motivated and put in a bit over 3 hours of play. I'm only single-tabling while I work on the fundamentals (yes, I'm a low volume player), but have been known to add a second table if there are a couple of orbits with no playable hands. I was really keeping in mind the things we discussed and found that the results really showed it. This is probably the best session I've had yet. I don't think I got more good cards than usual but I was definitely winning more pots without going to showdown. 

For anyone interested in graphs, here it is. Probably a bit too swingy, but not sure if that's par for the course with a TAG playstyle in limit or what. Keep in mind I'm completely green here.

Hope everyone has a good holiday weekend.

 

Welcome to the inaugural post of Brandon's blog. I hope it will be filled with interesting tidbits on life, my thoughts, philosophies, and of course, some poker.

I'll start out with a little bit of background on me...

I'm 27, married, and have two daughters. We live in California. My wife is currently a stay-at-home mom, and I'm an engineer for a Fortune 500 company who's name most people would recognize immediately. My youngest daughter has a congenital heart defect called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. You can read up on the technical details here if so inclined. 

I've always been in to poker as far back as I can remember. For one reason or another (life), it kind of fell by the wayside until December of 2009. The baby's recovery period after her 2nd procedure meant lots of downtime in the ICU. It was during this time (and thanks to my iPhone) that I stumbled across the 2p2 site and forums and began soaking up everything I could find, for better or worse. I was essentially starting over. I ended up buying a couple of the classic Sklansky and/or Miller books (ToP, SSHE, etc.) and put my toe in the water by making a tiny deposit in early January and started at the bottom of the ladder in the micros. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that my initial deposit was totally gone somewhere around hand #1238. 

I somewhat expected that this would be the outcome. Undeterred, I went back to the 2p2 forums and stumbled across a post where someone had rated a number of sites, one of which was DC. I checked out CR, Leggo, and DC, then settled on DC after the trial membership ended. If I didn't have a case of information overload before then, I definitely did about a week later. It was difficult to keep my thoughts straight with the sometimes conflicting advice of different books, forums, DC vids, etc. 

I knew that individual or group coaching was a possibility, but one that would almost universally be frowned upon this early in my "career" due to the wealth of cheap/free information out there already. The argument that such a thing would force me to commit the time required to improve was what sealed the deal in the end. It's just how I am. I reached out to BBB, explained my background, goals, etc. and he pointed me to PygmyHero.

I have to admit that I had no idea what to expect going into it, but after seeing the forum posts, hearing the podcasts, seeing the videos, etc. I truly believe anyone DC endorses as a coach is of the highest caliber. PH is no different. After only session #2, I'm already thinking about the game at an entirely different level. 

That's all for today. I can't promise daily updates but I'll try to post at least a few times a week on progress and things I think are interesting from the west coast.