July Goals

I'm ready and rejuvenated to get back into the swing of things at the poker table in July. June saw me have my Best Month Ever™ due to the Blogger Tournament of Champions win. I think it will be a long time until I break that record. Unless I get another big tournament score, or move up to 1000NL (lol).

As far as everything else, it was probably a break even month. I didn't play many cash game NL Hold 'em hands at all. Maybe 3000 hands. I put in a decent amount of Omaha hands towards the end of the month, and did pretty good winning a few hundred bucks.

But now that we are in July, I decided to hit those 6 max tables in full force. I'm taking a page out of EurekaKid's blog and writing down my July Goals. I doubt I'll hit them, but it is worth a shot:

- Install, purchase, and set-up Hold 'em Manager (almost complete. This will be done today)
- Play 15,000 hands
- Make $2,500 for the month (4.2 ptbb/100 at 200NL)
- Watch 10 CardRunner videos
- Three blog posts per week
- Make two videos of my play and post them on Internet for people to watch and critique my play
- Get two coaching sessions in with Twelver
- If I have the time, make sure each of my sessions are at least an hour long (Meaning: No logging off after 15 minutes and one bad beat. I need to work on Tilt Control)
- Don't berate the donks (I've grown a habit of typing in "lol" after I lose to a bad beat. I have to stop doing that cause it can put me on tilt)
- If games aren't good at Full Tilt, play 100NL over at PokerStars
- Get down to Iowa and play in some live NL at least once.

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I forgot to blog about my trip to Treasure Island last weekend. The wife and I stayed the night and met some friends, so I was able to get in a good 5 hours of live poker. Unfortunately, Minnesota does not allow NL to be played, so I had to play either limit or spread limit. I ended up playing 2-10 spread most of the night and ended up about $30 or so. I think I played pretty good. I probably lost some value on a few hands, but the boards were pretty scary, so I played them a little passively.

My biggest pot was with KK in one of the blinds. There was a raise to I think $6 and a couple callers. I bumped it up to $16 (max) and got 4 callers!! Then the flop came 976 with two spades. Yuck. I led out $10 and got called by all of them but one. Turn was an offsuit 4. So far so good. I bet out again and all three of them called. Yikes, how many of them are on flush draws? The river brought the Q of spades putting three spades out there. Great. Flush draw just hit. I checked, intending just to check/call to whomever hit their draw. But it checked around and my Kings were good. One of the guys showed 88 for the OESD. But I have no idea what the other two people had. Did they each have an 8 too? Maybe someone had a pair of 9's? Anyways, I was really surprised my KK was good there, and I dragged the $160 pot.

Towards the end of the night, I moved over to the 2-60 spread game. This game is the closest thing to NL that we have in Minnesota. But the game had died down and there were only 5 or 6 people playing by the time I got moved there (Apparently there were two groups of drunk buddies that left about the same time). I didn't play here long as 3 of the 4 other players there were pretty good. One bad old player busted 15 minutes after I got there, and then another young bad player sat down, but busted 15 minutes after that. I ended up losing about $50.

So all-in-all, I lost about $20 or so for the trip. It was fun though. During the previous times I've played live, I would get bored after a couple hours. Probably due to the slowness of the game. But I didn't get bored at all that night. That's a good sign. Maybe I'm getting better at live play.

Cheers!