Sleep With the Fishes, Dine on the Whales

What's up?  Been sometime since I've blogged, I've done plenty of poker and plenty of writing so there's no real excuse. Anybody interested in my strategy blogging can go places like here  http://www.pokergames.com/poker-games/texas-holdem/sitn-go-poker-strategy.html . It seems I may have another writing gig doing a blog post about once a week on poker issues.  I'm sure there will be some overlap with GCP's frontpage and this blog and I will likely cross link to it a lot.  So that's good.  Nice to be able to write about poker one year out of Black Friday. The landscape I think one year later has changed remarkably. Poker on TV is down to just a few options, most reruns.  Most fresh content comes from YouTubes of other places that still have customers for online sites to advertise to.  Enjoy this gem which reinforces the value of always looking one last time at your hand. Domestically, we have WPT and WSOP.  I think The level ...

Okay, lots to catch up with. Let's start with when I got time to play online poker , I went deep in another huge low buy-in tournament but didn't win the thing. Would be nice to stop hitting the teens, twenties, and thirties and start splashing around in the big payouts of first, second, and third. I can't even remember how I busted out. I must have run good though because even though I single tabled, I was doing a ton of other stuff I needed to do while playing. It's weird I've been playing the bigger multi-table tournaments with a strategy of just being wild and loose and teaching myself how to learn poker from a new perspective and I found some success doing that. But the last couple, I got away from it and played my normal nitty game without giving it much thought. Fortunately, I've had the same type of results. Certainly, I picked some spots to make some plays that maybe I used not to, exploiting my image a little bit more, but it's like I forgot why I...

Anytime you play Texas Hold'em poker you got to make big calls if you are going to be a winner in the session or go deep in the tournament. In the previous post, I was deliberating whether or not to make one. The worst is where you make a great call and then it turns into poker bad beat with a bad follow-up card but here there were no more cards to come. His 1500 bet didn’t make sense. I knew he had watched me find folds before so this screamed steal. I looked for tells (that’s too specific really as I more accurately tried to get a feel for his confidence as it’s not like there is a checklist I go through... even if maybe there should be). There is a less than reliable tell where the player tries to appear casual under pressure. It’s a subtle thing, but it's tricky because it’s one a lot of players will actually honestly display, or not hide, when they do have a hand. It’s not the easiest thing to look for. So you have to decide are they acting or are they really comfo...

Okay where were we? Oh, the turn card was about to fall in the virtual world of online poker. I was probably drawing pretty slim and playing a Texas Hold em poker sit and go about as bad as you can play. Okay it wasn’t that bad… well, maybe it was. Let’s just say the one guy that beat me out of the tournament played it worse. Even if he probably got sucked out on. So anyway in the hands, I’m “ME” though that’s not my real online handle. Would like it if it was, but I’m not that succinctly creative. Rather you can find me with a much more bland moniker. Trust me if I play this bad, you might want to discover that bland moniker, and search me out on the online felt, at least until I Learn Texas Holdem a little bit better. I prefer ME to Hero, as I’m nobody’s hero, despite my propensity to make ill-advised hero calls. And why call the other guy the Villain, the Villain wins way too many of these hands for me to keep calling him the villain. Bad guys can’t win that much can they? *** TUR...

Continued from previous posts... Awesome… or not. I tried to time his nap for noon but of course that day was the one day he wanted to go to sleep at his regularly scheduled time of 10 AM. This was going to make online Texas Hold'em poker a little difficult. Most days, he fights it, and if I let him, as I have once or twice in the past he can just skip the nap and be alright. Some days, he’s winding down and dive-bombing into pillows, rubbing his eyes, and getting cranky tired. Normally, I enjoy that as it means he’ll go down quickly and sleep soundly for at least an hour. Then he’ll be in better spirits the rest of the day. On this day, I wanted him to barrel right through 10 am and maybe put him down at about 11:50. I also planned to set up snacks and activities that could be done when he woke up round about 12:55 (right when the break in the tournament starts) to keep him going for another hour or so. Then I’d have to do my best to play and entertain him til about 3:30 when the...

Just wanted to let everybody know we got some server issues again. Sorry about that. Lots of Gulf Coast Poker Championships Results ready to be dropped on the site. Great news is Kai Landry and Monkey have made the final table and really shown they know how to play Texas Hold'em poker . Jonathan Little also made a decent run into day two until the cards caught him in a VERY cold half hour where he went from three times average to out. Ouch. Last night I played some online poker and upped my aggression level. Played four Sit'n go tournaments and won two, came in fourth in another, and third in the other. Not bad. I was really pushing the chips in when I felt I had the edge. I won most but not all of my coinflips. The third place and fourth place I also had sizable chip leads and watched them erode as my two good Ethiopian friends Runner, Runner visited multiple times. Was kind of sick. As I was playing all four at once, I expected the wheels to come off on the othe...

Read an article recently on whether or not online gambling sites should sell virtual goods. I say yes. The article brought me back to one of my favorite now defunct online poker sites "Let's Poker." Let's Poker offered a little bit of everything from poker (including California Poker), to casino games but no sports book or Horse race betting . Anyway, one of their ideas in building the site after they had built up a player base was to appeal to gamers transitioning over to poker. Gamers have been very receptive to virtual goods and the thought was they'd be very receptive to a poker experience that was similar to a gaming experience. Kevin Flood wrote the article that brought these memories back. Read it here . The influx of poker players from strategy games like the original Starcraft is evidence the guys at Let’s Poker had tapped into an emerging market for the future of poker. The “Internet” kids are no longer the emerging market, they are the market. F...

So recently I was able to get in two sessions of poker at Harrahs . It was so nice to not just get my fix from Texas Hold em online and get into a live casino. That’s always fun especially now as my time seems to be pulled in every direction. Vacations, busted pipes, busted attic, busted yard, busted grill (requiring a dental appointment or two), and a baby seem to be enough to keep me away from my second vocation too often. Recently, I went on a bachelor party for a friend of mine who is a CPA in town. He’s one of the smartest people I know. You need a good CPA that will keep you out of tax trouble and keep your money in line I highly recommend him. Course he mostly works with businesses and only high income personal clients (who aren't friends or else I wouldn't be considered). Email me for contact information if you are interested, especially if you are killing the nosebleed Sit and go poker tournaments , you'll both be happy. Anyway, I was joined by a couple of non-pok...

Myself, Gene D, and our partner publisher John Price is Right are getting together our 2 nd issue of the Gulf Coast Magazine. As always, and by always, I mean like we did in our first issue, we will profile local live and online poker players. We pay particular attention to those Gulf Coasters who have done well in our local poker tournaments at the Beau, Harrahs , the IP , Coushatta and other rooms and haunts. Obviously, we profile successful poker players no matter the game be it No Limit Texas Hold 'Em players, Omaha pros, Stud experts, and mixed game specialists. With one exception, we hate Razz, so if you are a Razz player you can forget about getting into our magazine. Just kidding... we don't hate Razz just people that play Razz. Joking, of course. But if you are Razz player--where do you play? More seriously, if you know a player we should be paying attention to let's us know and we'll get them up on the Who's Who section of our website and consi...

I'm trying to get amped up for all the poker on the Gulf Coast in the next couple of weeks. The IP is running poker tournaments concurrently to the Beau Rivage. Is this good poker strategy ? At first glance this may seem like they are splitting up a rather small pool of poker players and we'll have to see if that is the case. I hope not. I hope it means they are expected a huge turnout and I have to say I think with the timing of the Beau Rivage event being a little bit after the PCA they may just get that. A lot of the poker pros will be heading back to the mainland with a layover in Miami which is just a hop away to Biloxi. Ignoring the trouble of connecting flights and looking at it just from a geographical perspective this might mean the biggest turnout on the coast in some time--and hoping that's the way it's looked at by the returning poker players. Course, those are mostly deep pocketed online and live pros that MAY be coming. The IP's event will draw ...

Perhaps inspired by the guys over at Poker Immersion or Jonathan Little coaching Steve Begleiter at the Main Event, I agreed to do some coaching the last couple of weeks. I have to say it's been a great experience. Maybe one day I'll open a poker school . The person I'm working with is already one of the top players, in my opinion, locally and I think I am able to learn quite a bit from him. Teacher is the student? Well, he approached me because he recognized a skill set that I possess and one that he wants to add to his game. He's a voracious reader and he's already burned through a book I thought could help him out. It's interesting because I had some trepidation in starting this process. This wasn't anything like hand selection, aggression, or any of a myriad of poker skills that he already possessed, though we do discuss those things, no this was about reads. He's played with me and seen me make some tough calls and has been very flattering about my ...

This latest scandal on UB could just be a computer glitch. It could be a freak occurrence that just happened to happen when the face of their company was playing limit poker. Allegedly he's been on a tear... playing limit poker. Allegedly not only isn't he a good limit poker player he's been a bit of a fish of that game. And he's been on a bit of a tear. Last go around everything smelled real funny, real funny and finally people were able to show it was. This go round, this would be brutal for poker. If Hellmuth goes down we all suffer greatly. I don't think it lights a fire under the collective asses in Congress to regulate it I think it puts a fork in a "rogue" industry. Of late I've been pimping bWin poker ( https://poker.bwin.com/poker.aspx ) for many reasons. Anybody that follows international sports will know they advertise on AC Milan's jerseys. You might see David Beckham wearing one in the next couple of weeks. What's significan...

On the front page of www.gulfcoastpoker.net under the poker news section Daniel Negreanu's linked poker blog kind of answers my own question that I posed a few posts ago. I play small ball, know where I am in the hand and then watch my opponent catch on the river. Usually it works out that the river card also improves my hand but makes his. You can tell by my tongue in cheek cyncism on the front page about getting rivered that I'm tired of this happeneing. It happens in online poker and in live poker. In one texas hold 'em tournament I called a guy until the river with second pair--tens. The flop was king high but he was last to act and I felt like was betting some sort of draw. On the turn, he looked like he wasn't improving and threw out another just go away bet when I'd check to him out of position. I call. His river bet didn't bring a flush or a straight card but was a Queen. This time he bet with some confidence and I felt I was beat. Yet, it was...