Damn Ringer's Poker Blog

I had a big winning session last night. It was a good feeling.

I got a call by my father last night who had heard the rumors of my segway, and got lectured on renter’s insurance. I took all his points and finally bought renter’s insurance! Pretty cheap all things considered and now i can get all my expensive toys covered. I also got extra coverage for my computers, as i’ve got probably 4k worth of computer at my house and about to get a 3rd strictly datamining computer.

That brings me to my next point. I am going to build a massive database in my house and put it on a shared computer so i can access it remotely. I think this will work smoothly, but if anyone has experience with this, let me know if it does.

My girlfriend is coming for halloween. Now some of you might not be aware i have a gf. Well that’s because i didn’t as of a few months ago. We dated for a year before i put the kibosh on her. After some life changing realizations, i came to realize that she is an amazing girl and that i really did want to be with her. So we are back together and she’s coming for halloween. My friends are having a HUGE party that should be completely insane. I will try to post pictures of the party on here when i get a chance. But it should be nuts. And obviously drunken. My costume is absurd and i can’t post it here, because my best friends read this and i am keeping it secret from them.

On a political note, and this is something i try to keep off the blog but its that time so i will put one plug in. I am very pro-obama and have recently determined myself to be a pretty hardcore democrat as I found myself in the last 4 years. I voted for bush in 2004 so i understand both sides and by no means one sided. I respect you if you vote for John McCain, however I can’t stand the people who are doing it because they think obama will destroy the country. Neither person coming into office could ever do a worse job than bush. Ever. People that think Obama is a secret muslim or that he is a terrorist or that he doesn’t respect this coutnry are complete morons. I got into an argument with a guy at work who was convinced he was a muslim and didn’t salute the flag (based off the one photo). I highly doubt anyone who reads my blog is dumb enough to think that any of these ridiculous hillbilly ”facts” are true. But if you do, take a serious look at the real issues. I won’t try to sway any votes here, cause i think both sides have some serious ups and downs, but don’t be swayed by fear. Neither candidate will fuck this up (minus maybe palin)… so vote on the issues you believe in.

On that note, I can’t wait for halloween!

What’s happenin guys?

Its been awhile since i updated and that’s my bad but i’ve been very busy with my big test and work over the past week. I have been having a very poor poker month this month. Honestly tho, it really doesn’t matter as i’ve only played about 13k hands. I just haven’t had time. I finished my test and feel better about it.

Alright so lets go over this one thing at a time, cause i kinda bunched it up. First, I got a segway. That’s right, a dorky ass segway. It was completely a random buy on a sunday when i decided to go tilt shopping. I got it off ebay and its a used one. It is awesome! I paid $1950 for it, from a girl in ATL. She got it here in 2 days which is downright impressive for an ebay shipping order. I decided i’m going to take it to and from work and not use my car during the week. So far its worked amazingly. I live exactly 1 mile away from my office so its a 10 minute ride into the office and i can ride it right into the building so i don’t have to worry about parking either. It also pretty much takes me to everywhere in the city i’m interested in going to and is completely green. The segway is fully electric. I think i’m also the only person in my network of friends to own one. That’s prolly cause they are ridiculous dorky but whatever, i’m ridiculously dorky so i’m not in denial. I think this toy is gonna actually end up paying for itself in the next year in saved gas and wear on my car.

Secondly, I took the FE. This is the third time i’ve taken this test. I studied more than i’ve ever studied for the test this time. This test is a complete nightmare. Its 8 hours long and basically the shittiest thing on the planet. Its completely math and just awful type engineering questions that no one remembers after they are done with the test. I did money on the morning part (the first 4 hours) but i didn’t feel good about the afternoon at all! I hate this test. If i fail it again, i’ll definitely just barely fail it and i will be pissed again. Those of you keeping score i got a 69 last time and need a 70. So in theory i should just need to get about 3 more questions right. I’m not 100% sure i did that though. Anyways, here’s to hoping i don’t have to waste 8 more hours of my life.

Thirdly, I’m a cardrunners coach! I was selected much like i thought i would be, as one of 5 Full Ring Cardrunners Coaches. I am in great company with fooz, sixpeppers and nutedawg being among the other coaches. I actually haven’t been contacted by any full ring players yet about lessons which is pretty confusing. I would have assumed i would have had a number of requests for coaching. I do need to get some of old students to write some recommendations to new students. So to all of you who have gotten a coaching session from me, please leave me some feedback in the feedback forum in the coaching session. I would love to continue coaching especially since i’ve taken a break from coaching in the last few months. Either way, i’m honored to be among such great company and am thinking about hiring one of the high stakes coaches myself!

Fourthly, My month. I’ve had a pretty bad month but yesterday i moved some money over to cake. Wow. In the first 1000 hands, i had guys stack off in ways i haven’t seen in years. Its like i hopped in a time machine and am playing poker 3 years ago on party. A guy called my 100bb allin with a 7high flush draw! Impressive. I think i’m going to move some more money form my FTP roll over, but hoenstly i don’t think its gonna matter that much cause i’m gonna make a fortune on this site. I might consider moving permanently if it wasn’t so sketchy. I am up money with my rakeback but down in poker. That is mainly due to several stupid ass drunk decisions. I’ve lost $1500 in 3 nights playing drunk poker. that’s really starting to hurt. I am going to cut myself off like i use to. I really need to stop giving money away. I played 8 tables of 6-max drunk the other night… wtf am i doing?

Anyways. That should pretty much update everything. Look out for NitybyNature on Cake… cause i’m coming for all those terrible ass regulars there. Peace guys.

Slothing
When you’re too high or too tired to get up and move around or do anything active. Taken from sloth, a mamal that lives their life hanging in trees and moving very slowly. The sap of the trees are said to be hallucinogenic, causing the sloths to be high most of the time. Also can be used as an adjective (slothy, slothed)

So I did just about absolutely nothing yesterday. I woke up and realized my car was over at my friends house from the night before. I decided i’d jog over and get it since it was like 9:30 and everyone know i usually still sleeping. I jogged over there after struggling a few times due to the excessive amounts of booze i had the night before. I drove home and took the dog out and went to my friend’s house. My friends have direct ticket with superfan over at their place. It is fantastic for sundays. The redzone channel is possibly the best channel on the planet for watching football. I watched the bengals continue to look like the worst team in the NFL and i’ve offically given up on them for the season and will root for my new hometown team to the go to the superbowl. Go Panthers! That’s right, i’ve abandoned ship on the bengals for the season.

We decided that binge eating was a good idea while we were sitting there watching our football. I ate an Arby’s 5 for 7 which clearly breaks my new years resolution but its all good. I’ve been really good this year about fast food. I’ve eaten it under 5 times which i think is stellar considering that use to be like 2 weeks worth of fast food in 2007. I eat that and we are watching football just slothing on the couch. Josh, one of my buddies, says he’s still hungry and i realize damn i’m still hungry too. Then the talk of steaks comes out. We decide that outback would be a great idea to have some beers, steak, and continue watching the cowboys hopefully lose. We had a great time, but I completely forgot how expensive Outback is. That was a quick $40. Whoops. But whatever, it was delicious, so no harm no foul.

On a poker front, I decided to play drunk poker on saturday night. I do what i usually do when i’m drunk and that’s play a 100plo hu match. I usually do really well in these but saturday night wasn’t my night. I got taken by one guy in a series of bad beats and coolers for just over $500. Pretty shitty to wake up hungover and realize your wallet is a little lighter. Oh well. I remember the whole match, and still now think i had an edge. After reviewing hands, he won 2 big allins while he was behind and I lost 2 set over sets. So what can you do in a headsup match. Sunday, I played a few tournaments while i slothed. I played a $20 rebuy on FTP and a $10 knockout tourney. The knockout was shitty and i lost a few small pots and ended up shoving/squeezing A7 against a LP raiser and caller. The rebuy i was killing in. I forget how bad the players in tournaments are. Its like you get paid every time you have a big hand. Its pretty unbelievable. Anyways, I ended up getting busted playing a monster pot. I got KK allin against 2 other players when i was well over the chip average. The villain that had me covered flips AK and another villain who was making an apparent hero bluff shows 78os. Flop is A45. Woof. I’m drawing to one out and my tourney life is just hanging. Turn is a 6 and river is a 7. Like that I’m from super-healthy to busto. I end up screaming at my computer screen and then obviously going back to slothing. Overall, i think i might start playing more tournaments on my weekend days as i felt like i had a pretty good grasp on everything in the tourney and the players were just awful were for the most part positionally retarded.

Anyways, my month continues to be very swingy. My graph for this month looks like a sin wave but instead of pi being the boundaries is $800 and -$800. So its been kinda all over the place. I haven’t had a winning day over 2k in like 3 months, which is pretty depressing. Either way, i’m still gonna ride out the 2/4 wave and keep this month going.

I also have been trying to study for this FE test, and it truly is impossible to study all this stuff. It is just awful and there’s so much information involved it kills my traditional method of studying. So i’ve come up with a new strategy which is to study the important sections and the ones that don’t completely confuse me and just trying to get as high of scores as i can on the sections which i understand and jride the wave on the other sections. I just need a little boost from not studying at all as i got a 69 last time and only needed a 70.

Also, it would appear i was quite wrong with my assumptions in the last stock market crash post. It seemed to make since to me at the time, but after having a few things pointed out in the comments, i think i was wrong. I still think the economy slowing will affect poker but not in the ways i listed. So take it for what its worth, but i think i was mistaken for the most part in that post.

Anyways, hope everyone has a killer day and makes thousands.

Well boys and girls, the worst has happened and is not over yet. The stock market is beginning to crash and I can’t see anything good coming out of this for the next year at least. I think we are destined, as can be seen in the world economy today, to deal with the struggles of slowing incomes, job loss, and less money for leisure activities.

This hasn’t particularly hit our sector of work (poker) yet but it will. My current job has already made 2 rounds of cuts and will likely be making at least 2 more before this thing is all said and done. Whether I have a job after all this is kinda pointless. The point I’m making is people are losing their income at record pace. People like me who play stakes such as 400nl+ already have a squeeze on the fish that have access to putting 10’s of thousands online. The US government already made this difficult and the result is there’s only about 2 regulars at 2/4 that are constant big losers. It’s going to get worse. Way worse in my opinion.

People always ask me “who the hell can afford to lose $50k every year at poker”. My answer is always the rich. Its not just the rich though. They can afford it, but the other players who can “afford it” are often daytraders. I think we vastly underestimate the poker players who also plays the stock market. I’d actually venture a guess that many of the fish that lose $50k justify giving some money away online after having a big day in the market. This is going to change.

With the stock market getting leveled, both my favorite types of fish are going to become scarce. The rich are heavily invested in the stock market typically and the daytrader (gambling fish) types aren’t going to be having days where they feel like they have all the money in the world.

You can already see it. Look at the blogs that I have linked on this page… how many of these great poker players are having mediocre/break-even/losing months? Most. How many are having the best month yet? None. I’d say if you look at this month, it will be the beginning of the ugly. Regulars are going to be making less and less profit. I would expect my target for the month to be +10 buyins at 400nl. I often times catch myself not worrying about the stock market or my job because i know i always have something that pays me well beyond that. Well I’m starting to realize they are all linked. And i’m starting to worry about what the trickle down really means.

The only bright side I see to this economy will be the US will likely loosen the strangle hold it has on the poker industry. As resources become thin, they will pretty much have to look the other way with stuff bringing money into the banks aka poker. They won’t have as many agents and agencies to spend time on enforcing. That’s the only plus i see to this entire thing and hopefully that balances out all the people losing money in the market.

We are able to make as much money as we do because people are able to give away as much money as they do. Poker is a game of edges and we are starting to run out of them… hopefully the standard doesn’t turn into 0.5bb/100 @ 2/4 being a standard winrate for a regular but i don’t think we are too far off. Good Luck everyone, and remember that game selection in these times is the most important thing.

I have been playing a reasonable amount of poker in october, and am definitely feeling comfortable again back at my stakes. I have made a few brilliant plays and few dumb ones. I really am paying attention to the players i’m playing with and picking up a few plays along the way. I haven’t taken this many notes ever. I seriously have a note on just about every player at 2/4nl on FTP.

I am also doing a much better job of selecting my tables. I have chosen to stay away from one player in particular at 2/4. He’s really the only player that scares me. He goes by the name Capt. Irish. He is a very solid 2/4 reg and probably the most profitable player of full ring 2/4. The other regs are pretty predictable and tend to stay out of my way as i think most of them have me tagged as a tag solid reg. So no one seems to get too out of line when 3-bet. I’ve had a few ugly pots which is probably the reason i’m only up a small amount on the month. I have looked at each days sessions so far and seems as though i am jumping up to like +1k on a session and then getting coolered and bad beated back down to $100 in profit. Its relatively frustrating but at least i’m getting action and getting no action at all is FAR more frustrating.

I recieved an e-mail yesterday from Cardrunners informing me that they want me to join their coaching staff. As i said in posts a few months ago, i figured i was a shoe-in for the job as i am likely the most seasoned Full Ring coach outside of Nutedawg on the site. Seeing as how Nute is now a CR Pro, I am likely the go-to guy. That being said, the e-mail I recieved hardly sounded personal, it sounded like it was sent to 50+ People. So hopefully, this isn’t just an ‘anyone who signs up, gets it’ thing. However, it very well could be. Either way i won’t be upset about it. If it isn’t exclusive at all, then i’ll keep putting my time in and wait for someone to recognize the good stuff i’m doing. One of these days, i will get noticed but I by no means expect that time to be now. If it is exclusive, I’m truly very happy to be on the inside of CR so to speak. Its obviously a product I completely stand by.

I am going to go into heavy study mode for my exam coming up on the 25th. My plan from here out is the following: work til 6, play poker til 7:30, go to the gym til 9, study til 11, playing poker til bed. I just need to stop mindlessly surfing the internet so much. I am trolling CR forums and checking my fantasy leagues so much that hours of my night disappear that could be used for profit or studying. My goal for the rest of the month is to stop being so unproductive with my time.

and to finish…USA economy hold up, one time.

Alright so my october is off. I’ve played about 4k hands for a whopping $85 profit. However, i have made great mental progress. I found myself slowly beginning to play lower and lower stakes. Its really the risk you run stepping down limits. I played 200nl for 2 months and got use to the swings, and every time i got to $400nl I would play scared. Well wtf i thought. I set my brain into 200nl mode.

I think i finally managed to get it back to 400nl mode. I played about 2k hands of 400nl and 600nl this weekend. I’m going to stick to playing 8 tables this month. I find I can really concentrate when i am playing 8 tables. I am finding my play is better and my note taking is better therefore i can make more read dependent plays, which has been great so far. I can also keep a closer eye on my image at each table. I actually recommend this to anyone who finds their play becoming mundane like mine was for the past month. I moved up the ranks playing 8 tables and then tried to keep increasing that when i got to 400nl. That resulted in poor table selection, poor seat selection, and lack of image control. I hope this makes a significant change in my game this month. I will be playing all 400nl and only 8 tables of it.

I lost some gross pots yesterday, including a $1200 pot. Here’s how the hand played out… ‘Thatsabadcall’ opened from MP for 21 and a fish to my right in the sb called. I popped it to $90 (a pretty standard 3-bet here) with QQ. ‘Thatsabadcall’ folds and the fish thinks and calls. I pretty much put him on small pairs at this point or maybe AK. Flop comes down K7s4s. Not the prettiest but definitely doesn’t slam his range. Fish checks to me, i decide to check behind for 2 reasons. 1) he likely won’t call more than 1 street of value betting with JJ-88 2) my range is already pretty defined so i don’t need to define it further and possibly get bluffed off.

The pot is $197. The turn comes Kd. Perfect card for getting paid off by JJ-88. Out of the blue the fish best $220! Wow, didn’t see this line coming. I go into the tank and finally come out thinking its most likely a flush draw trying to commit itself or some sort of ridiculous bluff. I decide to shove fully expecting to see something like AJss. I get snap called by AKcc. Wow, I got outplayed by a fish with a pretty nice bet given my range. Its rare i feel outplayed but that bet put a move on me in a silly way.

On a sidenote, I managed to pull every hand i had on my computer into my new PT3 database. It makes me feel alot better. I’ve made quite a substantial amount of money since april and i can finally see it all in a graph. I will post it next time i get to make a post from home.

I am once again studying for this Engineering Certification Exam. Its called the FE and last time i missed the cut by one point. I needed a 70 and got a 69. This test is just plain shitty. An 8 hour long test is just about the worst thing you can imagine. Its a headache and a half. So now i’m studying my butt off cause i’m not failing this shit again. After this 3rd time taking it, i will have spent 24 hours taking a test. That’s right, an entire day of my life spent on this shit. Lets pass it this time.

Oh, and i shaved my head. I’ve never had short hair, but i figure its time. Its a combo of me being tired of paying hair cuts and worrying about my hair as well as starting to lose the hair. Its pretty weak going bald by 25 but ya know, play the hand you are dealt. It actually doesn’t look bad and it is maintenance free. I wake up in the morning and can walk out the door. I also have spent the last 2 years of my life trying to not look bald. So i do my hair and then avoid fun things that might mess it up and make me look bald. I haven’t gone swimming and dunked my head under water in awhile and i even avoided putting my window down in my car for fear of the wind. Well its pretty liberating to say ‘fuck it’. Anyways, i’m pretty happy with the buzz cut and i think i’m gonna leave it this way indefinitely. Here’s a myspace style picture with the new doo:

BEFORE:

AFTER: