What the poker gods giveth, the poker gods taketh away.  10+K hands.  Down 5 buy-ins.  A night of gutwrenching agony.  Yes - I've been a life-long Yankee fan (later post).  Awaiting hate comments from Bostonians...

On the bright side, I had my first cash in a multi-table tournament for 2010.  I placed 115th in the 2,102 person $1million guarantee, and took in $1261 (which means I made $726).  Sort of a bummer, because I won a few flips and QJ > KJ.  I would have hoped with that much run-good, I would have gone deeper.  I made even less, because I pissed away another $378 to enter two other MTTs.  But Hey!  I'm not complaining!  When you haven't had your cherry popped, you're happy to get anything.  Anything.  Or maybe not...

But getting back to the cash games, I'll obviously need some more hands to evaluate my progress.  I have been a little spewy lately, but I don't think that's the primary cause of my struggles.  It may be just variance, but when "variance" goes on too long, you have to look for other causes.  The games play a little differently every month, so you always have to be readjusting.

POKER

Lately, I've been thinking about where my edge is in poker.  As you know, I think about poker in a game theory context.  So for me to make money in the long run, I need to be able to say, "vs these types of players, I do ___, ___, ___ better."  It's hard for poker to be lucrative if you don't do anything better than your peers.  Poker is a negative sum game, and if you are not better than the other regs, you are just relying on the kindness of fish.  To be honest, so far, I've been focusing more on getting to parity with the better regs - especially postflop.  I think preflop is somewhat solid, but I'm always looking to add new hands into the mix.  My biggest focuses now are adding more suited cards to the mix pre and thinking more about bet-sizing pre and post.