Week One

Well, week one of 25NL is completed, or at least what we are calling week one (July 2-6). I got in 10,980 hands, all four-tabling, for $164.90 or exactly 3.00ptbb/100. I wanna thank any and everyone who has sweated me this week and those guys who are always there when I have questions about something or need to rant/rave about something. I am lucky enough to have been able to come into contact with some pretty damn good poker players (mainly through FCP) whom I am very thankful I am able to learn from and even pick the brains of some of them occassionally.
All in all it was a pretty successful week and I am really feeling confident that I can beat 25NL for a decent rate. Hopefully the upward trend in the graph continues to mount and July turns out to be a great month with a lot of positive momentum towards August and the fall.
Before I get to the graphs, I did the math today for my online class and I have a 97% in there so I am almost guaranteed to pass that, ship the credits! Just gotta make sure night class goes well and hopefully we can get things straight and ready for the end of August and senior year at SVC.

Now, my favorite part of my blogs/sessions/poker playing in general, graphs!


As always, if you guys have any questions or comments leave them here, PM me on FCP, or IM me on AIM if you have it.

GL in life and at the tables,
-Sean

America's Birthday

So today was the Fourth of July, which marks the day America declared our independence from Britain. I hope you all took time out today to thank (or say a prayer for) anyone you know or come across who has served or is currently serving our country in the armed forces. Without these fine men and women we would not enjoy the freedoms that we have (like the freedom to pay >$4.00 for a gallon of gas =))

I've played a decent amount in the past two days, July 3rd really sucked, but the 4th was much better. The 25NL games were really good tonight, I guess because of a lot of people either loaded from 4th of July celebrations or just a bunch of donks on or what. I ended up making like 5.5 BIs tonight in about 1,800 hands and it felt pretty good. I was up as much as 7 BI but ran into a couple of coolers, grinded back and then a couple of more coolers when I finally decided to call it a session because I could feel a little bit of tilt coming on.

It really seems to me that I have been running into spots a lot lately where I'll flop a pretty big hand (either a set or two pair) on a board like TQ3r or something and get called on the flop by a donk and the turn and river will proceed to run out like J K or A K or K 9, etc. and more often then not the donk gets there chasing down with middle pair. This is definitely a profitable situation for us, and I hope that they keep calling when we can start fading too!

I have a bunch of hands I kept in a text file the past two days to post on here, but a lot of them are pretty standard or coolers so maybe I'll look back through and see if I can find some interesting ones and post them the next update.

Graph for the last two days:
That's about all I got for now, if you guys have any comments, please feel free to leave them or hit me up on AIM.

Day One

Well, Day One of 25NL is officially in the books. I played two pretty long four-table sessions for a total of 2,911 hands and $51.10 profit good for 3.51ptbb/100. Not a bad start to the month. If I could run at ~3.51ptbb/100 for the month I will be pretty pleased as I plan on getting in a decent amount of hands which would make for a decent profit.

In those 2,911 hands I ran at a whopping 14/11.5. Yea, I'm a nit. Hopefully I can start to open up my game soon, just still working on getting a hang of 25NL again.

Below is my graph for today and a couple of interesting hands.












This is a pretty lol hand. When villain turned over his hand I was NOT expecting to see that hand. I thought that I was going to see AK or something. I liked how I played the hand, open raising and his 3bet was small enough that I felt I could stack him if I hit the flop hard as he had been flinging money around the last few orbits.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?2837756

This hand is pretty much a cooler. Min 3-betting preflop ftw. I would play this hand the same just about 100% of the time. He is going to be calling with so many hands that I am ahead of that it is basically throwing money away to not ship river. The only thing I would ever do differently in this hand is maybe check/call the river.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?2837789

I love this hand. Even nits play a little maniacally sometimes. I call pf just looking to see if I can outplay him postflop. I decide to bet the flop because I'm not really all that happy with my hand and want to see where I am and charge him for a flush draw while I'm ahead. The turn comes and is another great card for me as now I pick up even more outs if he has an A and he flats again. River is basically the prettiest card in the deck and I decided to ship it in because he is never ever folding an A and my hand is so well disguised here.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?2837769


This hand was by far the biggest pot I played, a ~400BB pot vs a pretty loose opponent. Felt very good to 1. get paid off with top set and 2. be on the good side of a cooler.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?2837747


Night class went well tonight, we learned about different types of Fallacies (I'm taking an Intro to Logic course at the local Community College along with an online Civil War class). We got our tests back from the first two chapters and I got a 68/75, 91% imo. Woulda been higher but I changed my answer on an answer or two that were right. Oh well, only need a C to transfer into SVC, but I'd like to do well in these classes to springboard myself into the fall semester.

That's all I got for now, it's 6am and I'm tired as hell. Peace.

-Sean

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Robusto

Welcome, I'd imagine you know who I am if you're here, but if you don't, my name's Sean and I'm 21 from Pittsburgh, PA. I'm a huge Steelers/Pens/Pirates fan and I also love the Boston Red Sox (almost as much as I hate the Yankees). I'll be a senior at Saint Vincent College in the fall and I hope to work in sports upon graduating.

The main purpose of this blog is going to be to keep track of my poker playing results, I will be starting at 25NL on FTP, as well as discuss interesting hands and other poker concepts. I am always looking for people to discuss hands with and do sweat sessions with so if you have a mic and Ventrilo or Skype let me know and I will gladly take part in a sweat session.

Also from time to time I will talk about real life stuff in here too since, well, real life > the interwebz.

But, for the time being I will start off with my Poker goals for the month of July.

1. 35,ooo - 40,000 hands. This is a very important goal of mine and I hope to accomplish this with relative easy. Ideally I wanted this goal to be 50,000 but my goal last month was 30K and it was a lot so I don't know how much of a huge jump 20K extra hands would be.
2. Show a moderate profit. I don't really want to get into a habit of setting monetary goals for myself as 1. I don't know what a consistent win rate would be for myself yet and 2. I don't want to have to force myself to feel the pressure of living up to a certain dollar amount.
3. Watch a lot of videos and a lot of sweat sessions. This is extremely important. Videos help a ton with improving your game and personally I feel like sweat sessions with someone who knows that they are doing (at least a solid player) are the best tool that someone can have to help them get better at poker.
4. Clear Ironman Bonus. Yea, this one is a gimme, I only need 1,500 FTP points, I will probably have this done by the end of the weekend, hopefully.
5. Non-poker related: Do well in the two summer classes I'm taking (one online, one classroom lecture) and take care of some loose ends at college and get ready for senior year while still enjoying summer and making the most of my summer internship working in baseball.

So far in July I've played 2,441 hands of 10NL and lost $14.15 so that sucks, but I'm not to worried about it. Played three sessions, the first one was dead break even, $0.00 the second I won like $14.60 and the third I lost about $28.75, while running pretty bad and having some good hands end up running into marginal spots by the river where I was forced to fold.

Tomorrow I start playing 25NL on a stake, so I am anxious for that. I don't want to reveal who my backer(s) are in case they don't want it out there, but I am very grateful to them and hope that I can make good on the positive faith that they have shown in me and reward them by playing good poker and winning any and all parties involved lots of monies.

Well, that is really all that I have for now, I'm sure that I've forgotten something.