I didn’t play much poker at all this weekend. I had a birthday party for my daughter (she turned five) on Saturday and the next day I was really just not in the mood to get involved with all the craziness of Sunday poker. This left me with some time to rest, relax and enjoy other things. I watched most of the Making the Band 4 marathon on MTV. I love that MTV and VH1 had all these reality shows on for the summer. I was/am addicted to all of them….Scott Baio is 45 and Single. Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Hogan Knows Best. The Pick Up Artist.

Back to the aforementioned MTB4, the live finale was ok but not the best episode of the day by any means. For the record, don’t ever tell Diddy how he should run his show on MTV or you might be gone! (See original choreographer – Lori Ann Gibson) I also watched the Scott Baio finale – this was def the worst episode of the season. With the train wreck that was Johnny V relegated to only text messages and with Scott finally ready to settle down and marry his girlfriend – all the best aspects of this show that made it hard to miss (the ex girlfriends, the mud wrestling, Johnny V) made the finale kind of boring. They tried a little cutesy ending where Renee mentions she is pregnant and that Scott is gonna be a Dad as well as a husband but that didn’t quite make up for the otherwise lackluster episode.
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Tonight is the first episode of High Stakes Poker Season 4. I will TIVO this show like I do most other poker shows but I have to say that overall I’m getting kind of bored with poker on TV. Granted HSP has been the best show for the last couple of years but overall I think that the thrill of watching poker has subsided. I hope they come up with something new soon.
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I’m a bit of a video game fan and a big fan of Star Wars but it’s been a while since I tried out any Star Wars games on the PC. I was out shopping the other day and saw a box labeled “Star Wars: The Best of PC” and figured even if the games were not the latest releases a box of 5 different games for like $30-40 couldn’t be all bad. So far I have only tried out the real time strategy game called Empire at War. I am a fan of the RTS games that have come out over the years and this one is certainly not the best of the bunch but any Star Wars fan is sure to enjoy it. It has both space and ground battles as well as an overall galatic map management phase that makes it a little different than some of the other RTS games.
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Anyone seen any great movies lately? I myself have not. My older brother and I have had this ongoing conversation for like 6 months or so about the lack of high quality films. I know I don’t get to the theater as much as I once did so when I swing through Blockbuster I expect to find like 5-6 good movies that I missed the first time around. This summer I feel like I have watched a lot of 2nd and 3rd tier flicks. I remember watching the Departed when I was at the WSOP Circuit Event back in March. That was a very very good film. It may have been the last really good movie I have watched.
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Fantasy Football season is here once again. This is something I use to look forward to every single year but it’s probably been about 3 seasons or so since I have played any fantasy football at all. I’m not exactly sure why that is but I can say that I don’t follow the entire NFL as closely as I did when I was a fantasy team owner. Don’t get me wrong, I have the NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV and watch football every single Sunday. But I no longer know who the backup tight ends for each team are, or which teams are on the bye week, or which rookies will make the biggest impact this year. But I can tell you that the running back for Denver this season will gain over 1000 yards – not because I have a lot of faith in him (heck I don’t even know who it is) but just becasue that’s what you get from Mike Shanahan’s system in Denver. Good to know some things don’t change.
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It is “back to school” season which means summer is ending and parents everywhere are cheering! Just kidding, I actually had a great summer with my kids and am sad that I will be spending less time with them once school starts. All good things must come to end however (like this blog entry), so as we say godbye to summer I leave you with the following back to school joke:

A little boy was excited about his first day at school. So excited in fact, that only a few minutes after class started, he realized that he desperately needed to go to the bathroom. So he raised his hand politely to ask if he could be excused. Of course the teacher said yes, but asked him to be quick.

Five minutes later he returned, looking more desperate and embarrassed. “I can’t find it”, he admitted. The teacher sat him down and drew him a little diagram to where he should go and asked him if he will be able to find it now. The boy looked at the diagram, said “yes” and goes on his way.

Five minutes later he returned to the class room and says to the teacher “I can’t find it”. Frustrated, the teacher asked Jon, a boy who has been at the school for awhile, to help him find the bathroom.

So two fellas go together and five minutes later they both return and sit down at their seats. The teacher asks Jon, “Well, did you find it?”

Jon is quick with his reply: “Oh sure, he just had his boxer shorts on backwards”

Recreational poker players play because they enjoy the game or the thrill of gambling or they have nothing better to do or [insert whatever other reason you can come up with]. Most recreational players don’t analyze their games very much if at all. Professionals and serious poker players play to win money. (If you want to argue that professionals also enjoy the game or the thrill or want fame and fortune then I won’t argue with you that those are additional reasons pros play.) Serious players analyze their games to try and make more money in the future.

So if you are serious about making money, then you should be analyzing your game. But how do you get started you ask? Well there are a lot of things you can do such as:

- Discuss HHs with friends/other poker players to see if your thought process is solid
- Respond to posts and ask questions on msg boards/forums where people are discussing concepts that you are unclear about
- Keep good records and review your results every month to see how you are doing
- Identify anything that helps you play better or causes you to play worse

Let me give you an idea of what I did at the end of July when looking at my own game.

July was the worst month I’ve ever had for MTT results. By results, I am only looking at profit because I play poker to make money. Now this kind of frightened me when I realized this because I had a 2nd place finish in the Stars 50r for like 6k and I made 9 FTs during the month. So what the heck happened? Well, for one it was the first month where I did not win a tournament since back in late 2006. And my FTs where filled with too many early exits before the big money prizes.

I also realized that I was playing more of the larger buyin tournaments and fewer of the mid buyin games. This hurt me in two ways – the bigger buyins($300-$1000) are generally filled with top players which lowers my edge against the field considerably and without the wins/large scores at the middle levels($20-$100) I had nothing to offset the cost of large buyin events.

In looking back at my deep finishes for the month (and I’m using final 2 tables as the measure here) I realized I had developed several leaks in my late game approach. I was too willing to gamble when I didn’t need to and this cost me a lot of money. I had several friends review some key hands that I was not confident about to see if there was a better line I should have considered taking. I watched HHs from some of the MTTs I had won in prior months to see if there was anything I was doing differently. I realized that i wasn’t playing very good short stack poker. My pushing ranges and estimated calling ranges for my opponents were way off.

So armed with all this information, I set out to do things differently in August. I would play less big buyin events. I would focus on the MTTs that I thought I had an edge in. I would play patiently when there was a chance to go deep and make some real money. I would make sure I was ready to play when I sat down and I would play less or not at all if I was tired or not feeling well. I also reminded myself that even on it’s worst day, I love this job more than the ones I had in the corporate world and so I should continue to have fun.

Well August is not over just yet, but so far I have three 2nd place finishes already this month and I have lowered my avg buyin by almost half. I have taken more days off to rest and I seem to get deep almost every day. So I’m on pace to make more money with less risk and I’m having a lot of fun too. I hope that I still have a win left in me before the calendar turns to September but if it doesn’t happen oh well. I guess I’ll just have to be happy with the money that I won

- Mark

You know the feeling I’m talking about right? Nothing can harm you. You are untouchable. You don’t have to follow the rules because they don’t apply to someone who is in the zone that you are in right now.

This feeling happens in all aspects of life. Little kids always thing they are invincible. They have no fear. They jump, run, kick, laugh with no understanding of consequences. Teenagers are certainly invincible. Many of them get involved in all sorts of reckless behavior because they don’t have the wisdom and understanding that only comes with age. By adulthood, most of us realize we are not invincible. But when we are engaged in competition, we can revert back to the foolishness of our youth.

So last night in the stars $55K GNTD $10 Rebuy, I was fortunate to get to the middle stages of the tournament with a healthy stack. I starting hitting some flops and catching some cards and before I knew it, I was chip leader with under 100 players left. I played big stack poker taking the pots I wanted fearing no one. I could not lose – my cards were mostly irrelevant. If it got it in bad, I figured i’d just suck out.

Overconfidence. Cockiness. Invincibility. Those are the only reasons I have to try and explain what happened. They are the reasons I did not win this tournament. They are why I did not make the final table either. Sure my final hand was played fine. I pushed my final 170k into the pot with JJ from the BB over a min raiser and caller. With 54k already in the pot and me being out of position, it seems the only way to play it in this spot. And if I could have outraced AK maybe I would have gotten a second chance to win this thing. But frankly I didn’t deserve a second chance here because I had completely botched 2 hands so badly that I actually deserved to lose.

The bad news for me is that is not my first mistake late in a tournament. I have put myself in bad spots before with a little too much gamble and not enough solid play. But this was different. I had wasted a big stack which is something I hadn’t really done before. And it didn’t feel very good. In fact, I felt a little sick. I couldn’t sleep at all. I was so annoyed at myself.

But as I lay there last night, I kept telling myself to remember how this feels. I don’t want to forget that pain because it is my hope that I can use that pain to improve my game. When we screw up in life or in poker, we have too basic choices. We can try and learn from our mistakes or we can continue to repeat them. I for one am planning to learn from this. I burned that feeling into my memory last night so that I can call upon it the next time I am deep in a tournament with a lot of chips.

I’d like to tell you all to learn from my mistakes but that doesn’t work too often because you won’t have that feeling in your memory banks to call upon when you need it. So please learn from your own mistakes. Commit that feeling of making a terrible play to your memory and figure out why you made the play. Let it scar you a bit so that you don’t forget. Learning from our mistakes is never easy and it hurts quite a bit. But doesn’t repeating them hurt even more?

- Mark