Journey To Being an Online Poker Pro

Well, the results are in for this year’s Bluff Magazine Award winners.  Sorry it has taken this long to get the results (if you don’t know them already).  I’ve just been really busy but I’m planning on writing more often.  As for the the winners there were a few surprises, a few that were not surprising at all, and a few that could have gone either way.  Below are the results compared to who I thought was going to win… Read more…

At this time every year, Bluff Magazine gets ready to dole out it’s annual Readers Choice Awards.  This year there are 14 categories and 4 choices in each category.  I haven’t seen if the winners have been announced yet so I will pick who I think should win and who probably will win in most of the major categories.  There are some categories, such as best Podcast or best Poker Forum that I won’t even try to guess a winner as I just don’t know enough about them.  Feel free to voice your own opinion though. Read more…

Bit of a downturn this week, not just for myself but seemingly all over the online sites.  Not too many of the big name pros are showing up on Full Tilt in the past couple weeks so the action has almost become  non-existant.  I’m assuming Isildur1 is not going to deposit anymore money until the whole data mining thing is resolved.  I know he wants some of his money back but whether he gets it is another question.  Pokernews.com posted a pretty interesting question as to whether people should be able to change their screen names as many times as they want.  I’m sort of mixed on this one.  Read more…

I’ve been out of the loop as far as any recent happenings in the high stakes online scene is concerned so I did a little reading up last night.  I remember posting about a week ago that Isildur1 was rumoured to be broke but I just found out why.  It turns out that Brian Hastings took $4M off of him in one session.  An amazing feat to be sure but what’s even more amazing is the circumstances in which this happened.  Read more…

Things have continued to progress for me at both Full Tilt and PokerStars.  I put in some long sessions, playing .25/.50NL for the most part.  I did move up to .50/$1 at Full Tilt one night but had a rough night so I moved back down pretty quickly.  I keep a Post It note on my computer screen reminding me not to get greedy and to stay the course.  I’ve gotten into trouble before by moving up before my bankroll could take any significant beats and went broke more than once.  When you start to hit some hands it’s very tempting to just jump up and hope the same thing continues.  I know I can play the upper levels but anyone can beat anyone at any given time and you have to be able to withstand the bad runs you will inevitably go through.  It’s all about bankroll management.  Read more…

After having a few days to be with my family and our recent loss, I was able to sit down and play some poker.  Now, I was a little hesitant to actually sit down and play because I always preach being focused with no distractions.  However, I thought that maybe if I played for a little while, totally concentrating as best I could on the game that I would be able to put the other stuff out of my mind.  And am I ever glad that I did! Read more…

For myself, it’s been a “steady as she goes” week.  Some decent pots won, some decent pots lost…nothing really new to report.  I’ve played in a few more tournaments this week too but the results have been less than stellar.  I played in 6 tournaments of $11 buy ins or less and haven’t cashed in any of them.  All 6 times I busted I got my chips in with way the best of it and the last two times it was my AK vs. an opponent’s AQ.  Both times they hit their queen so it’s been very frustrating as you can imagine.  If I fade those queens, both times it would have put me amongst the chip leaders as we closed in on the money.  Read more…

With all of the happenings of the WSOP final table, I forgot about the High Stakes Poker lineup being announced by the Game Show Network.  Coming back to the show will be Daniel Negreanu, Eli Elezra, Doyle Brunson, Tom ‘durrrr’ Dwan, Patrik Antonius, Antonio Esfandiari, Barry Greenstein, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey, Mike Matusow, and David Benyamine.  Quite the lineup to be sure.  A lot of these guys were also recently on Season 3 of the Million Dollar Cash game in London and the action was pretty unbelievable.  Phil Ivey had over $1M in front of him at one point (he had bought in a few times throughout the show for $800K total) and David Benyamine was getting away with bluff after bluff.  Tom Dwan had his usual roller coaster ride and Phil Hellmuth couldn’t get dealt anything and naturally complained about it the whole time.  His interaction with Mike Matusow was funny though. Read more…

With the World Series of Poker done for another year I just wanted to make a few observations:

Joe Cada:

 This is the first year I listened to a broadcast of a final table and then watched it on ESPN afterwards and I must say, I was somewhat surprised.  The TV coverage was not friendly to Joe Cada at all.  He really came across as not much more than a suckout artist and that’s somewhat inaccurate.  Yes, he WAY overplayed his low pairs but at least he was the aggressor with them.  The one mistake he did make was against Jeff Shulman, as I’ve said before, reraising all in with the pocket 3’s vs. Shulman’s jacks.  But what the TV didn’t show was how he was earning pots throughout the final table with the same sort of aggression.  He was pretty active with preflop raises and reraises but because people were laying down a lot, it doesn’t make for good TV and therefore doesn’t get shown.  The times he did get involved in a big hand, he was behind and obviously got very very lucky.  You have to be lucky to win these things of course, but he wasn’t the only one hitting ridiculous cards to survive either. Read more…

After 8 exhausting days, a gruelling, crazy, and exciting final table that was the longest in history, we have a new World Series of Poker Champion and his name is Joe Cada.  Like most, I expected the heads up battle with Darvin Moon to not last long.  Cada was by far the more experienced player and Moon just didn’t seem like he wanted to be there during Saturday’s play.  But, as with most things at this year’s tournament, it was safer to expect the unexpected.

Before action could get underway there was a ceremony to congratulate the other 7 November Niners and then Vince Neal of Motley Crue got things started with the now traditional “Shuffle up and deal!”.  Read more…