life happened

Wow - no posts since February. Wow.

Guess that's what happens when you meet an amazing chick: just don't find myself wanting to spend 12 hours in a casino poker room, when I could be spending much of that time with an amazing person.

I still dabble online a bit, but even that has been cut down dramatically. When I lived alone, my routine was: work, come home, fix dinner, sit down to some FTP, shower, bed. Now that my fiance and I are living together, we end up doing things together when I get home from work. We only moved in together a month ago, so we still have plenty to do to make our apartment "our" home.

I'm also finding myself in the kitchen much more than I had been. I do the cooking, and find that when I'm not just cooking for myself that I put a lot more thought and effort into the preparation. For myself I'll just throw any old thing together, and if it's not that great, well - eh, no biggie, it'll provide the nutrients I need. But cooking for someone else is a whole different can of worms.

That said: I do sometimes miss being at the casino. My last trip was far from successful: I made a lot of bad, goofy mistakes and left down 2 buy-ins. I did have fun, though.

New law in the state of WA goes into effect 10/15: raising the max bet at non-tribal casinos from $40 to $100. Currently you can play $2-$40 spread at the mini-casinos just north of Seattle. These will most likely be switching to the $2-$100 spread soon enough. Those 2-40 games are pretty soft, and with the right patience, I'm betting on being able to make a pretty good score at the 2-100 games. I'll probably be checking those out at the end of the month.

Maybe I'll post a real poker post after that.

Rush through the stars

So I've been playing Rush Poker for a couple weeks now. It's got me thinking about poker in a whole different way. Turns out that as of now at least, either I'm not very good at Rush Poker, or I've just been severely unlucky. My FTP account is down VERY low right now; I want to get in there and play some Rush Poker but I'm affraid of going completely broke there. So I'm backing off for now, and trying my hand at some other things - like tournaments.


It's been EONS since I played any tournaments online. Sure, I'll do a random $2 turbo sit n go every now and again, but I haven't played any bigger tournaments in a long time. Until tonight. I decided to try my hand at a couple 90-person tournaments, one on FTP, on on Poker Stars. I registered for a $1.10 deepstack 90-seat sit n go on FTP, and a $2.20 90-seat sit n go on Stars. Both started at approximately the same time.


First - the good news:

I final tabled both. Took 6th in the FTP one, and 2nd in the Stars one.

Makes me feel good; gives me some more confidence in my game again - I learned poker from tournaments, then migrated to cash games, and haven't played a tournament in years really, so I wasn't sure if I would have the skills with me still. Turns out it's still there - and I think Rush Poker helped, too -- first off, that I've seen tens-of-thousands of hands over the past couple weeks, thanks to 2 or 3 tabling Rush poker, I've just been able to have the experience of seeing all these odd things happen, and I had to try to adapt to them - adapt to my opponents' tendencies. Rush is tough since it's a different set of opponents each hand, but for me it helped to start to classify a "super-set" of my oponents, not as individuals, but as groups of opponents with different tendencies.

I might try playing more tournaments for the time being, and hopefully I'll build up a decent roll on FTP to dive back into Rush poker. After all, it's so much fun!

I definitely like the tournament structures at Stars MUCH better than on FTP - more time, slower levels - you get a lot of room to play there. But I like the feel of the FTP site better than Stars. Whatever, that's just cosmetics, so it's easy to deal with. And I like that all the tournaments (on both sites) take breaks at 5 before the hour - nice that they're together like that.

Rush Poker - wow. What a goldmine in rake - brilliant from a business standpoint! It is a lot of fun, too. Pauly's post about his Rush Omaha experience is worth the read - I can identify with a lot in that story.

I'd better get back to playing. I'm unemployed, with a lot of time on my hands, so playing online poker has become a BIG distraction. I'm glad I just fell back into the spell of tournaments, though - I forgot how much fun they can be! And who knows, maybe I'll have a big score one of these days!