So i've decided to ease back into things....I'm currently only 4-tabling the $6.50 45 mans while im at work ( might have to leave the comp if a guest comes in, so don't want to have too many goin ) and its actually feeling ok to play, not the dread feeling i've been having the past few months.

I start my mini session today and see a player with a TLB avatar, and guess who it is, fucking MI_Turtle, or Nick Rainey....so I decide to go look and see what else he's playing, and go figure, he's registered in every one of the 45 mans's i'm in. Not sure why he's mixing in the $6.50's into his sets, but whatever, I have'nt gotten into any pots with him yet.

Nick is known as one of the best 45/180 man players on the internet and is known for the legendary amounts of volume he puts in. A lot of people think he's a douchebag, I am not one of those people. I actually knew Nick and golfed with him on occasion back when I worked at TPC. He's a good guy, and fun to play golf with, he hates to lose, even if its a small amount, the dude is just competitive. I actually had no idea Nick even played poker, let alone was very good at it back when he was Patrik's assistant. Anyway, i'm not very happy to see that he's mixing in the games I play, but meh, what you gonna do?

I think i've found a way to stay motivated to play now, i've been following a lot of online grinders blogs and have been reading that a lot of them face the same problems I have, but they always grind through it, I generally don't. I'm seriously contemplating buying some lessons for the 45/180 man turbos from either acbarone, bigbluffzinc, or Nick. While I am confident that my push/fold game is good, it can always be better, and learning from any one of those guys, along with a number of others certainly wouldn't hurt, and it might also push me further in studying my own game on a consistent basis. If you aren't constantly looking for ways to improve, you'll get passed by all the guys that are. I'm positive I have leaks and plugging them is always +EV haha.

i'd like to set some goals for myself for the rest of the year, but i'll just set one, play a consistent amount....somewhere around 1k games a month and i'd consider that an accomplishment.

My sleeping patterns have vastly improved, not sure why, but they are good now...I get 6-8 hours of sleep and have plenty of time to get shit done. Hope to buy a new car in the next month or two, and move down to the cities by Feb, than back to Vegas sometime 2011.

-Bakken out

I won two dinner tickets.....yup, thats the extent of my Fall Poker Classic Week. I ended up only playing two events, was going to play four or five, but just wasnt feeling it and decided to spend those days hanging out with friends and family.

Onto the events, Event #11 was the first one I played and I lasted a grand total of 35 minutes, it was a very weird hand, and part of me is upset at how I played it and the other part of me believes I played it right because of how my opponent had been playing. Villain had been playing 70ish % of hands since the beginning of the tourney and was even trying to trap people with hands like Top Pair and an eight kicker or something weak on very wet boards. In other words, this player was not good....at all. So Villain raises from middle position and I look down at AQ offsuit and decide to three bet him. Normally early in tournaments i'll try to take a more small ball approach, but I wanted to inflate this pot early to take the lead and make it that much bigger for when I take the pot with a C bet. He calls ( which I knew he would, he hadnt folded to a three bet yet ) and we saw a flop. Flop was Q63 with two spades. Well this changed things for me, now I want him to call my c bet. He checked and I bet around 3/4 of the pot, and he called. I took a look at him and he looked very weak, I didnt notice any specific tells as of yet, just a general "I'm not comfortable" look in his posture. This actually really confused me, at first when he called I assumed it was something like QJ, QT, KQ, or a flush draw....but villain had shown that he thinks top pair is a very strong hand, so he shouldnt be uncomfortable about having any of those hands. Turn was a 3. Meh, probably a good card, but he could have A3 or something retarded, regardless I moved along as if this was a good card for my hand. He checked again and I bet 1/2 pot, than he min raises me....grrrr, this surprised me, and so did the tell I now saw from him.....normally a tell of strength. I'm cursing myself for betting this turn now, what the hell did I get myself into a big pot for this early in a tournament? lol....so after some deliberation, I decided that he could think his Qx is a huge hand is trying to trap me with it. I dont want to scare him off so I just call with the intention of snap calling any bet on the river from him ( which should put me all in )...river is a 6, good card for me, that can't possibly improve his hand. He felts me, I snap call and he tables AA....sigh. AA didn't even come into the realm of possibilities in his hand range in my mind, and it cost me dearly. I see a lot of players playing AA and KK like this and its very odd to play it as such. I worked perfectly for him here, but I think in the long term for him to play AA or KK like this is a very bad play. Trapping out of position is a very difficult thing to do and it generally costs you more equity than just barreling away with the hand. Seeing as now I had a lot of time to kill, I went and got drunk with my old man, haha.

Event #12....this event was, well rather droll. I didn't get anything going, I'd win some small pots, than lose a big one...rinse, repeat. I had 8500 at first break because I misplayed a hand against a good player. Went on a little mini heater and had it up to 20k which was somewhere around top 25 at the time, and than lost two races to shortstack all-ins and was back down to 9k. As per usual when I need the table to remain tight or need to pickup a hand, the table loosens up and i go completely card dead. I didnt play a hand for 1.5 hours and was down 6500 with blinds at 400/800 when it finally folded around to my button and I blind shoved. The small blind called with KJ and I tabled 84....damn, lol. Hit an 8 on the flop, but he went runner runner for a flush and that was that.

So I won two dinner tickets for my two events as I didnt make dinner break in either haha. Oh well, it was fun to play some live poker again and Canterbury's renovated room is very very nice. I'd rate it as one of the top five rooms in the country now....not even kidding, its gorgeous, spacious, comfortable, and the dealers/floorpersons are competent.

Later that night I went to dinner with Brook and Kat, two girls I hadnt seen in probably sixish months, maybe longer. It was good to see them, just sat around and bullshitted until like 1:30 am. I can bs with the guys for hours upon hours, but most girls I get bored talking to after 15 minutes and have to get drunk or something, but these girls keep me entertained and I can easily talk to them for hours and have fun doing it, so that was fun.

I still havent started grinding online again, really just having a hard time getting motivated to....I think I'm going to force myself to start up the 45 mans again this week. Try to set a schedule for it and stick to it, gonna have to cut back on the video games and porn heh.

Anyway, thats all I guess, pretty boring entry if you dont know anything about poker so I apologize for that.

-Bakken

Problems, problems, and more problems.....lol. I don't think I played a single session of poker the entire month of September, if I did play a session, it was probably too small to remember. I just have had no motivation to play, which probably has to something to do with these reasons:

1) Playing very low limits- I'm playing the $6 45 mans, and its just hard for me to enjoy playing and putting in a good amount of volume when at best i'll make like maybe $2500 in a month.....boring as fuck in other words.

2) I'm not sure if I can even beat the 45 mans.....these things are fucking reg infested....which normally i'm completely fine playing against regs, as i'm certain I have at least a small edge on most and at very worst give up a small edge to the very good players. The problem I find with these games now is that there are a good number of regs who play the $6's for a living, they just mass multi-table (30+ Tabling).....and these particular regs, even tho they are probably on auto-pilot playing so many tables may have better push/fold games than me.

3) My results have been super devastating.....regular speed 9 mans, and 200 nl cash are games I know I can beat....I have a large enough sample in both to know that I can beat those games and downswings don't hurt my confidence in those. But I cannot handle play 9 man regulars anymore as they take for fucking ever to play, and 200 nl cash I don't have the bankroll to play anymore since my going broke in style fiasco in vegas. So that left me trying new games, specifically the super turbo 9 mans on ftp and the 45 man turbos on stars. I have 900 games logged of super turbos and am -1%, now that could easily be just variance....but the fact that I don;t really KNOW if its me playing bad or running bad makes it seem like it could be a massive waste of my time. The 45 mans I love because I can 12 table them easily ( which is a ton for me lol ) but once again, im not sure if I am playing them correctly....I only have 450 games of these logged and am -3%....could be just a run bad streak again, but at the same time, it seems when I sharkscope the players in these fields a lot of them are regs, and a lot of them have good ROI's at the limits i'm playing....am I good enough to beat them? I don't know....the unknown is something I've always hated, I don't like investing my time into something if I don't know with absolute certainty that its going to show me a good profit. I review my hands on twoplustwo and sngWiz and everything seems like im playing pretty well, minus some spots im still learning about, but I can't help but thinking what if these posters are wrong? or what if SNGWiz is flawed? My brain is literally too negative and overactive all the damn time.

4) I've been super stressed and can't shut my brain off to sleep....so i've been sleeping like crap, my sleeping pills aren't working....so I generally wake up super late, groggy, with no motivation to do anything. I never expected to be back in MN this long, I thought I' be back in Vegas already and its really getting to my mental psyche. If you've ever read the book "The Secret" and believe it, like I do, you'll realize like I do a lot of the bad things that happen to me I bring on myself by thinking negatively about everything....and I try to change my negative attitude but I just can't seem to change that mindset....maybe I should get hypnotized or something haha.

I'll start trying to play some more again on Tuesday I think....I havent decided if I want to grind the 135 man rush tournies on tilt ( I've had a lot of good results in those ) or continue to bang away at the 45 mans and see if after 3k games if I can beat them.

I'm gonna play in 3 events at the Fall Poker Classic, so maybe i'll bink something huge there....worst case scenario, i'll break even from the whole fiasco playing the suer soft live games....I love live poker, not so much online, haha.

Anyway, just figured I'd update this beotch since its been over a month since my last post.

-Bakken out