♠ Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Several Random Points of Musing
I'm about halfway through the Krieger book that PokerDogg recommended (Krieger, Lou and Sheree Bykofsky, Secrets the Pros Won't Tell You about Winning Hold'em Poker. New York: Kensington Publishing, 2006). Although the advice in the book is good, I'm still underwhelmed.
If the learning curve has a number of plateaus, what I've read is below the plateau that I'm on. "It's better to be the bettor than the caller" is good advice, and so is "be aware of your image and use it to your benefit." But beyond a certain point of learning they seem as obvious as "mostly don't play 7-2." Still, I hold out hope that Krieger saved the meat of the book for the second half.
Another Tournament
Fresh off a fifth-place finish in one of PokerStars' $4 180-man sit-and-go tournaments (which returned 11½ buyins), Gil and I ventured to Manistee looking for a repeat of my win last week. Gil was probably a touch too aggressive and went out ahead of me, maybe 30th or so out of 50. I lasted a bit longer, but not a whole lot, when my mediumish stack got bad-beat out of the tournament. (QQ v. JJ postflop, and he hit a Jack on the turn.) So back-to-back victories was not to happen.
On the Verge
The cablemodem was installed here today, so as soon as we get the equipment I'll be setting up the network and I'll be online a good bit more. This puts me on the verge of executing PokerDogg's plan. I'm not entirely sure that my folks have bought into the plan (ermm, that's a figurative buy-in), but they seem willing to go along with the "proof of concept" part. So here's hoping I can play a month of breakeven poker to prove out the plan.
Future Tournaments
Gil suggests we play two home-game tournaments later this week, the "Pete the Dragon" game I mentioned last week and another with someone he used to play with at a short-lived "poker club" that existed while I was in Las Vegas. I'm not sure that the EV of these is better than if we were to play cash games, but my last two live cash-game sessions have been negative, so maybe I'm wrong.
("Pete the Dragon" wasn't intended to permanently be his name when we first went to his game, some time ago, but I never picked another name for him. Oh well, even "Rhymes with Joker" was originally a "filler" name until I actually came up with something clever. And then it stuck.)
