It's Been A While

Hell, I'm not even sure how many people check this anymore. I know Nikki has it in her RSS feed so she'll see this. If there's anyone else out there still checking in - Thanks!

A couple weeks ago I started doing a thing online called the Monopoly Challenge. Here's what the board looks like:



Basically the goal is to make it around the board - building your bankroll as you go. You start with a $100 bankroll so you have to play the $5.50 HU SNGs until your roll is $112.50 - then you move onto the next square. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Well let me say that it took me freaking FOREVER to make it past the first square. 66 frakkin' SNGs later I finally made it!

As I type this I'm playing square two - a $5.50 MTT on my own dime. This one happens to be a Pot Limit Hold'em game. I currently am chip leader with 7 players left. Go me! LOL

In other Robbie Robb poker news, I played in the Pokerstars WSOP Freeroll last night. The top 3 places all get a $12,500 WSOP Main Event prize package. 3048 players started the tourney and at one point midway through I was sitting in 3rd. Unfortunately I had a couple bad hands and ended up busting out 78th. So no $12K for me but I was still quite happy with my play.

During the course of my Monopoly Challenge I'll do my best to keep this updated with the current status.

Monopoly Challenge
Level 1: COMPLETE!
Bankroll: $113.50

Level 2: COMPLETE!
Bankroll: $146.75

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 3913841

Gasp! Twice! In a Week!

So, over at the forum a bunch of people have been giving a SNG Step Challenge a shot. Basically the way they're working it is that you start at the lowest level SNG. You win, you move up a level. You finish ITM you stay at that level until you win. You lose, you drop down a level. I'm tempted to try it but I have been running so horribly bad in SNGs that I don't think I'm going to risk it right now.

My $10 HU matches are still going quite well. Been a little busy so usually only squeeze in one or two a day. I'm 7 for 8 now. Can't complain about that.

Yes!

Almost 5 months since my last post. God do I suck or what?

Poker has been...no wait....*I* have been poker's bitch this past month. The bankroll has taken a real shit-kicking. Went on a horrible downswing on the $16SNGs and $50NL was also not terribly kind to me.

The past couple days I've started playing some $10 NL HU matches. So far I'm 3 for 3 on those but whenever I try to play one of the 4-player ones I can't win. (tried a $5.25 one yesterday and busted 1st round. Today I played a $10.50 one that I finished 2nd in. Unfortunately it's winner-take-all)

I don't know why...

...I can't keep this blog updated on a regular basis. Just a quick update right now. I decided that this month I am sticking to ONLY playing $16 SNGs. I had a money making month in January and I lost a bit of money in February. The thing is, I'd have actually made money if it wasn't for my little experiment at the $27 SNG. I only played six of them or something like that and only placed in the money once so they were an overall loser for me, bringing me down into the negatives.

This month, however, has been going quite well. So far, other than an $11 tourney and a $3 tourney (which, on the whole, was entirely -EV for me), I've stuck to my guns and haven't ventured outside the $16 realm. So far so good. I've got 53 under my belt with a 47% finish ITM showing a 33% ROI. That's pretty good.

As a comparison - my numbers for the entire year at ONLY $16 are: 265 played, 40.75% ITM, 20% ROI. So, well the sample size is still small, it does seem show I'm trending upward for better finishes.

This is a good thing. As it gets me one step closer to my goal of playing almost full time.

January

Wow...it's been a long freakin' time since I wrote on here. Let's do a quick recap. November SUCKED. December was better and January has been pretty kickass! I decided in early January to pretty much forego the cash games and play strictly SNGs to build up the bankroll. I'll occasionally sit down at a $25NL table if I've only got 15 or 20 minutes and REALLY want to play cards. I had actually kinda forgot about this blog until Ash posted on Nikki's blog saying I need to update.

So anyway, I've been playing the $16 turbo SNGs at Stars for the past month with the occasional foray up to the $27 turbos. Up until the past few days I have been making money hand over fist. Then the past few days hit. I don't think I had a single hand where I was all in with the dominant hand win - including aces against 59s!!! Oh, and the reverse doesn't hold true. I end up with something like sevens or tens in position, jam and end up against queens, kings, or aces. Of course THEIR dominant hand holds up. But those beats don't really bother me - they had the better hand, they deserve to win it most of the time.

Yesterday I played in a $3.30 tourney for fun and the crippling hand was AK. I raise it up, it gets reraised, and, to make a longish story short, three of us end up all in. I flip over the AKo, reraiser flips up kings and the follower flips over ATo (!!!). Wanna guess who won? Here's a hint: ten on the flop, ten on the river.

There's four more days of poker left in the month. I'm hoping to turn around my $100 slide from the past few days and build it back up. Prior to Thursday my winnings graph looked like Google stock. Now it looks more like Nortel...

It's been a while...

Wow, it's been a awhile since I posted here. Obviously, lots has gone on in the poker world in the past week or so and there isn't really much more I can say that others haven't said better than I. So instead I'll talk about the game itself. Specifically, I'll talk about Season 3 of The Talking Poker Forum League on PokerStars.

The season kicked off this past Sunday with a NL event. Unfortunately, I ended up going out on a horrible beat to jillaj. It sucked. It was horrible. I wanted to kick a cat. Well, okay, not really, but it was a bad beat. I didn't place anywhere near the money OR the points in the first event.

Last night was event #2, PLHE. I think I played a fairly tight, aggressive game that served me well. I was consistently near the top of the table until I made one bad play that cost me about 1/4 of my stack and actually ended up dropping me down to short stack for a while. I fought back and by playing tight, managed to outlast many above me until it was HU between Boobie Lover and I. Needless to say, once HU, I loosened up a bit and actually ended up getting dealt some kickass hands. When HU started Boobie had about 18,000 to my 3,000. I fought up to 9K at one point. The last hand was both of us all-in on the turn. I had K9 and he had KT. The flop gave him his T, the turn gave us our K, the river gave me my 9. I lost. Still, it was a kickass game that I feel I played really well. That 2nd place finish bumped me up to 3rd in the league standings, but it's still REALLY early. The next event is a NL event this coming Sunday.