Back To Poker

Hey guys..It’s been a while. The last year has been pretty crazy for me and I was too busy to focus on poker much. I played poker but low volume, unfocused, and overall just played badly. I’m happy now though that everything was taking up my time is done and I can now focus on grinding and becoming a decent player again. I plan on playing a lot of live poker now because the game here is just so sick. It’s a $1/$2 game but it play as big or bigger than $2/$5. I’ve only just started playing there and have put in about 35 hours so far with a profit of $760 and I have not run good at all but the game is so soft that I manage to pull off some winning sessions.

As for online I plan to play about 25 games per day since I don’t play live until about 7PM so I can wake up..bang out 15 games, do some cardio and then play another 10 hopefully. Since I withdrew my Full Tilt money and spent it this summer I’m starting back at the $30′s which is a good thing for now because my game is still needing improvement anyway but I’m extremely confident that I’ll crush it now and move up soon. I started with $300 on Pokerstars and my roll is at about $800 after about 125 games. I want to get back to where I used to be..taking shots at $100′s but actually winning. Last time I done really well up to the $80′s but kept losing lots at $100′s. I was blaming everything on variance and thought I was playing good enough but that was far from the truth. My game sucked bad.

I made a 2+2 Thread in the “Poker Goals and Challenges” forum that you can follow which is basically a challenge to make 10k which would pay off one of my debts, but I will probably be updating my blog frequently anyway. The 2+2 thread is here:http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/174/poker-goals-challenges/make-10k-have-healthy-roll-keep-going-1093877/

I also want to thank the people that donated some money to my cousin who has cancer and his family, it’s really appreciated. I gave them the money when I went to Newfoundland this summer and they are very thankful and I’m sure it was useful with all the travelling to the city for treatments, and the good news is that my cousin is in remission and the cancer is getting smaller. I’m just hoping it continues this way.

Anyway, good luck to everyone at the tables and I will update how hard I crush the live games next week and how my HUSNG grind goes. I’ll be posting some music that I like to grind to from now on, so I’ll leave you with my current favourite track.

Random Stuff

Had some free time at work so figured I’d make a post. First of all I would like to thank Valuelol, Palinca, and fastcolt for making a donation to the fund I set up for my sick cousin who has cancer. It’s really appreciated and it will definitely help. If anyone else would like to contribute you can donate through this website http://lpcollins.chipin.com/bradley-oram-fund or you can send to me on a poker site. Newff on Full Tilt and LPC3000 on Pokerstars.

As for poker I played mostly MTT’s on my days off and had good runs in a lot of them but unfortunately got screwed when deep or made some marginal mistakes in which I didn’t bink…the one that hurt the most was when I think I busted out in 37th with AA vs. KK All in preflop and the guy rivered a King. If I won this pot I would have been maybe chipleader or at least in the top 3 with 36 players left and 1st place was around $140,000 instead I cashed for like $200. I also cashed in a lot of the ones I played and as some of you know last week I got 2nd in Midnight Madness for $3,288 which was nice. I’m having some fun playing these now because the HUSNG grind even though I was never putting in a ton of volume was getting uninteresting and I have been finding it hard to motivate myself to grind HUSNG also because I have been losing over my last 1500 games or so. I think for the next month or so I am going to play a micture of HUSNG, MTT, and some cash games just so I can make poker more fun for a while and hopefully profit while doing so. FTOPS is coming up again so I will probably play a couple of those events and also in May the SCOOP Series will be running on Pokerstars and I plan to play about 12 of those events..mostly the low-medium buyin levels and the total buyins will cost about $600 so hopefully I don’t brick every one of them. My goal now is to get my motivation and focus back because a lot of my results is my own fault for not staying sharp..I think I am going to be buying Jared Tendlers new book on the mental game when it comes out and also but Tommy Angelos book called “Elements Of Poker”.

The past few days I’ve been feeling like I want to go back to Las Vegas for another trip but I’m going to put that off until WSOP. I won’t be playing any of the WSOP events but I will probably play one of the events in the Deepstack Extravaganza at The Venetian and spend the rest of my time grinding cash games. I think it will be June 15th that I’m going and will go for 7 days.

Poker and other stuff

Hey guys, been about a month since I updated. Before I talk about poker I want to mention seomething else. As some of you already know from Skype my 14 year old cousin just found out he has cancer in his throat a few weeks ago and it’s not looking the best. I don’t know every detail about his situation right now or whether they think it can be beat or not but I do know that it’s not going to be easy and will be hard on his parents mentally and financially. I wanted to help them somehow so I was trying to think of ways I could maybe raise a little money for them because the parents now has to quit their jobs and go to another city for at least 7 months for the treatments and they didn’t have a lot of money as it is..I’m guessing just enough to survive on but I doubt much savings.  I was thinking of things like a small tournament that some people may have played to help me but would be hard to do especially since this type of stuff is not allowed on TwoPlusTwo..Anyway I hate asking for things but figured I might as well try to do something so I set up a fund on www.chipin.com so if anyone would like to make a small donation it would be greatly appreciated. Here is the website for my fund http://lpcollins.chipin.com/bradley-oram-fund and if anyone would like to donate something on any of the poker sites you could send to Newff on Full Tilt or LPC3000 on Pokerstars.

Poker: HUSNG’s have just been horrible in the last 6 moths but I played bad in that time and to be honest I find it hard to get motivated to focus and play lately. After working a lot on my game I managed to grind out 1k over a small sample at the $50′s and then on my last days off I managed to get 2nd in the multi entry Midnight Madness on Full Tilt for 3.3K which was sweet (thx to those who railed). So feeling confident after fixing a ton of leaks and a nice score I figured since I was now over rolled again for the $100′s I should get back to playing them so I played $110 Turbos for a few days winning a few buyins but then dropped 1k in like an hour which hurt. Then I had to withdraw a little from my account so my bankroll took a little hit. I’ve decided that I’m going to move down quite a bit just so I can grind without being results oriented to see where I stand over a large sample. I want to be able to start learning a lot again and not have a downswing effect me mentally and want to see where I am as a player. I will be grinding $30 Turbos to see how my results are and am hoping to learn a lot and if my results are good I’ll probably just move up quickly. Would have been nice to take advantage of Primo and Hokies Bootcamp but can’t because of my job..I see my friend RotarySB is going which is sick, can’t wait to see how things go for him and hopefully he crushes.

Update: Poker, Vegas, and Goals for next few months.

It’s been a while since I updated because I was really not motivated to do so because poker has been going not so well but I’m confident I’m on the right track again now and am motivated to start being more productive. This post will probably be kinda long and I’ll be adding some pics when I get home..mostly from Vegas and I’ll try to find a few of myself so you guys can see what this 5’3 ginger/leprechaun looks like

Poker: For the past 5 months I have just been having losing or breakeven months and getting completely destroyed in the $100′s and having to move down to $50′s to rebuild a bit of my roll to keep taking shots. I think the big problem was that when I was crushing I felt like I had HUSNG’s figured out so when I started losing I was just thinking that it was variance and stopped working on my game. I think it was variance at first and even some later but after spending a few days going through Holdem Manager and reviewing hands I found that overall I was simply not playing well so I had to find out exactly where I was losing and why. I had some help from someone on Skype “nine_ball” and we went through Holdem Manager filters and found that I was getting destroyed OOP and the reasons were overplaying marginal hands and playing too weak. I now know mostly what I have to do to fix this and I’ve been playing soo much better lately and think I’m on track again to start climbing back to $100′s and hopefully then even higher.I also posted kind of a whine in the regs thread with my graph and how my redline was going down down down and I wasn’t expecting it but I got a few PM’s from people who wanted to help me out so I want to thank nathan for the free HH review, nicecatch for the cheap HH review, and Punchdancer for offering some help..I really appreciate it and the HH reviews helped quite a bit. I also decided to get a video review from Brent AKA ITRIED2WARNU. I watched the video but could barely focus because I was tired from travelling but I’ll be watching it on my days off and will comment on it but it was a very good video from what I got out of it so far. Will update how things go anyway.

Vegas: A friend and I went to Vegas for a week and I just got back a few days ago. We stayed at Imperial Palace because of how cheap it is so I wanted to see how it was for future Vegas trips. The place gets a lot of hate but I had to check it out because I’m not too picky. I don’t know if I got lucky but I found my room fine and the location is just perfect for like $40 per night. The first night there I ended up getting super watsed and passing out on the bathroom floor of my room. My friend and I met up with another friend from Newfoundland, his girlfriend, his father, and his fathers girlfriends who are all fun to party with. Most of the other days I just spent sipping on drinks but not getting too drunk and gambling on slots and blackjack or sightseeing. We met with another friends and rented a van and drove to the Valley of Fire which was pretty cool. We came acroos some wild cows in the middle of the desert and set off some firecrackers and they took off lol. The last few dyas I was there I played some $1/$2 at Bellagio, The Mirage, and The Venetian and ended up about $450 so I got back some of my other gambling losses which was cool. I’ll post a few pics from the trip later and I’d say I’ll be going for another week soon to play poker only.

Goals for the next 5 months: I want to lose about 30 pounds because right now I am really out of shape and starting to feel uncomfortable so starting next week I’ll be working hard at that. I also want to get back to winning consitently and at least beating the $100′s by June. And my last goal is to buy a new car in June which will most likely be a BMW Z4 which has been  one of my fav cars (that I can afford) for a while now..it’ll be second hand but in good condition. Anyway thanks for reading..will post some pics later.

Another failed shot at the $100′s

It’s been a while since I updated my blog, been busy with work, grinding, and going through a lot of paperwork and dealing with lawyers because I bought a house back in Newfoundland, I still live in Alberta but my parents will help take care of it for a bit. The house was a good investment for me, my aunt was selling it for 50k but sold it to me for 40k. I know some of you are thinking wtf 40k? It must be an abandoned run down piece of shit but where I’m from (Rural Newfoundland, Canada) houses are very cheap. The house I just bought would be worth about 400k where I live now. It has the main upsairs part of the house an also a basement apartment and I am renting both levels out so not only is my mortgage being paid for my renting it out but I’m also making a profit so if I put all this money into the mortgage and and replace the siding, windows, and shingles in about 5 years once the mortgage is piad for I basically get around 80k for free if I then decide to sell. It has been a big hassle dealing with this but worth it in the end.

As for poker my mind hasn’t been with it as much but now I am not so busy and ready to work harder than ever. I decided to start 2 tabling and move back up to the $80′s and $100′s once again and things were going well but unfortunately the $100′s are still cursed for me…at one point in the month I was up about 2.1k but then had some 2 tabling battles with some bad players that just kept rematching me, I was getting great action and was happy about it but it all ended brutally very quickly. In the last 3 days before I went back to work I quickly dropped 2.8k and hardly won any of the $100′s I played, I was getting my money in good, getting super coolered post flop, and running into the top of their range..kinda frustrating when a guy reshoves 5 times in a row and on the 6th time you snapcall with AJ just to be showed AK. I’ve never had a bad run like this and I usually only tilt when I know I made mistakes and played bad but after getting my money in good so often and losing I didn’t even tilt and stayed focused. At the end of the month counting rakeback I’m down about $900 so it’s not so bad. A reg at the $80′s and $100′s who I talk to who goes by “notgoingnewhere” shipped 2nd place in a live Heads Up event in the UK for 15k so congrats to him, he’s a great player..I had 5% of his action so that actually has me profiting for this month if I count that

Starting now I will review at least 3 HH’s after work, at least 2 while at work if it’s slow, I will write down all obvious mistakes I see and any that I am unsure about I will post hands on 2+2. I’m also going to watch as many videos as I can. Right now I think the weakest part of my game is the 15-25bb level while being OOP even though I don’t think I am too bad in that area but it’s definitely something I want to focus on and I’ll be watch all of Mersenneary’s vids. I plan to go back to 2 tabling the $50′s until I make about 1k and then I will once again try the $80′s and $100′s. It sucks knowing that I’m able to beat them kind of easily but just running bad every time I take my shot, the fish there are no different than at the $50′s and $80′s so. The sample I have at the $100 reg speeds is only like 350 games though so it’s nothing, I’ll have to run better eventually but for now it’s been swingy..mostly due to variance :)

Overall I’m still confident and looking to improve and expect things to get better soon, especially now that I’ll be putting in a lot more volume..I’ll be doubling my volume from now on while also working on my game a lot more. Oh, and I started a diet about a month ago and have about 8lbs gone so far so that’s good and will hopefully continue on a downward trend. Thanks for reading and good luck at the tables.

Newff – Need to turn things around

I haven’t posted in a while..in my last post I mentioned I was planning to play the 5k HU event in Calgary…well I decided to go to Newfoundland (my home province) and try to get a mortgage for a house that my aunt was selling. I went there and had a good trip, didn’t play much poker but when I did things were not going so good and then I came home very drunk one night and decided to play some $100′s against some regs and I never play drunk..especially at my normal stakes…well I lost 5 games in a row trying to pull off some stupid and obvious drunken bluffs   I did have a good time while I was home though and have some pictures that I will post in my next entry..I’m going to try and update a little more now that I’m done with travelling and trying to get some volume in.

So once I was back I had to work for 7 days..played some games after work when I was tired and lost some money, and then I had 7 days off. I ran horrible but also felt my game was getting weaker so I decided it was time to really look at my game and find some leaks so I first wanted think about where I thought I was going wrong. The first thing I decided was that my preflop game needs work and especially with shallower stacks so that called for some coaching from Mersenneary. I made a video of me playing some Super Turbos because they are good endgame practice and a good way for him to see the mistakes. His detailed written report of my endgame play which I highly reccommend for anyone needing help with their endgame play found a few leaks, and I’m sure if the video had more interesting spots he would have found a lot more..so I’ll be getting some more sessions from him soon. The biggest leaks he saw were that I was not shoving enough when shortstacked so now I need to learn nash better, I was shoving my good hands at around the 12BB area and losing value instead of minraising them to induce a shove from a weaker hand of my opponent, and some other things..so I’ve been concentrating on a lot of those spots and since then I feel my play has been a lot better..still runing bad at the monent though. I also have found some other leaks on my own like calling 3bets too light and not adjusting as well as I used to.

I am down about 2k since my last blog entry but a lot of that has been due to the $500 I lost when drunk, playing very tired after work, running under EV, and of course I wasn’t playing the best while going through this. So now that I have identified some leaks and have fixed some of them I have to do a few things which are; not play drunk at all (I never do anyway besides this time), don’t play after work unless I feel really alert, and review my game more. I also need to get back to putting in more volume because these bad stretches really suck when your putting in low volume.

Anyway, for now I’m going to move back to the $50′s for a few weeks..adjust my game and hopefully win some money..then I will try the $100′s for the 3rd time and this time I think things will be different and go much better. I have 10 months left until I want to start playing for a living and move back to Newfoundland..obviously this will only happen if things work out..I won’t be trying to grind my ass off for a living if I am not good enough but I am hoping I’ll improve a lot by then and my results will be good. Hopefully on Tuesday I’ll find out that the house I’m wanting to buy is now mine..I’ll be renting it out so the house will pay for itself in about 3-4 years and then once the mortgage is payed off I am profiting whatever the house is worth + rent money from tenants..so it”s a really good investment for me. Anyway thanks for reading, I’ve been getting some PM’s on 2+2, messages on Skype from people wanting me to update so now that I’m bored at work I figured it would be good time.

The going is good

So after about 6 weeks of not making poker a priority because I was burnt out and having some fun in Vegas I was ready to get back to the tables and was once again motivated to crush. I watched a leakfinder video HokieGreg made for that pointed out some things I have to work on so I learned things from it which gave me even more confidence.

I started sitting back at the $80 and $100 reg speeds but there was not much action and for about 3.5 hours of playtime I waiting for games about 4 hours..so almost 8 hours in front of the computer just to get to play for 3.5 hours. I decided I need to start sitting both reg speeds and turbos if I want to get in more volume and increase my hourly rate so I started sitting turbos at the equivelent stakes. It seems turbos almost always load before the reg speeds so most of my games will be turbos from now on I guess.

I made my final decision about playing the 5k Heads Up Main Event at The Canadian Poker Open in Calgary, Alberta on August 23rd. I’m not sure what the payouts will be but I know if it fills (128 players) 1st place will be 170k. I will put up 1k of the buyin myslef and sell the other 80% of action so if anyone is looking for a sweat you can check out my thread in The Marketplace on 2+2 right here http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/163/staking-selling-shares/2010-candian-poker-open-5k-heads-up-main-event-shares-823965/ .

On my 7 days off I played for 5 of them and managed to make about 2.5k which is great so I am hoping I can do well on my next 7 days off as well. Anyway here is my graph for the month so far.

Update, Vegas, and more

Hey guys, it’s been a while since I posted and this may get kind of long. After taking my shot at the $105’s things were going well and I was up 13 buy-ins but then started to run horrible and I lost the 13 buy-ins back. Even after that 13 buy-in downswing it was still my best month ever and I think I finished +2.8k. It was nice to have my best month but losing 1.3k quickly felt brutal and it killed my confidence even though I knew I was running bad, I was unmotivated to play and decided I needed to take a little break.

The break ended up being longer than I expected, I was still not motivated to play and I felt if I forced myself to play it may make things worse so I figured I’d ride it out until I got the itch back to play. I was waiting for HokieGreg to make a leakfinder video for me and I was hoping that once that was done he could find some leaks and motivate me to get back to playing and fixing them which he did. The video was posted on HUSNG.com so check out my how bad I am :( and he pointed out some things I was doing wrong and I can’t wait to go over the video again. There were a few embarrassing hands that even I was shocked when I seen them on video, I couldn’t believe I played them that way but I think that goes to show that while in sessions we make mistakes that we do not notice even though we know it’s wrong and it takes someone else to point it out before we say damn that was bad.

So after watching the video I was eager to play but I couldn’t because I was going to Vegas for a week which I was extremely excited about. This was my first time going to another country and I was looking forward to something new and especially Las Vegas where almost every poker player dreams of going to. My first day there I went to The Rio to check out the WSOP, it was kind of frustrating because I kept getting lost inside The Rio lol…everything looked the same so I was like going around in circles. I played some $1/$3 there and I think I won like $240 for the session.

I spent most of my trip playing cash games at the Treasure Island poker room which was the hotel I was staying at. I played a session at The Venetian with mostly 50+ year olds, It was just so boring but noisy/busy there. There was a ton of limping which is kind of the standard in Las Vegas small stakes games but in this game they were not putting in much money post flop. Everyone wanted to limp and see a flop but then action would die afterwards.

Of the 3 poker rooms I played at which was The Rio, The Venetian, and Treasure Island I liked Treasure Island most by far. It’s small, quiet, and the games have more post flop action. The waitresses were great; the dealers were very good and friendly. One of the dealers blew my mind with how fast he was. Overall for the trip I made about $200 at poker , I ran pretty awful while in Vegas but am happy to turn a small profit at the tables for my first trip there.

I did check out the 10k Heads Up WSOP Event and railed Primo and Livb’s games which they both lost but was still cool to see them playing in person. Some pros I saw while there were Barry Greenstein, Elky, Phil Ivey, Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari, Michael Mizrachi, Tom Dwan, and some more that I can’t think of. I don’t follow mainstream poker on television or anything really and am not a fan boy of the popular pros but it was definitely cool to see them around, especially Phil Ivey which I’m pretty sure everyone is a fan boy of lol. On my last day there I met up with “derosnec” from 2+2 for a few drinks and a chat, very nice guy and it’s great to meet people who post in the HU Forum.

Well I am back and have to work for 7 days now, then I plan to get back into crushing some HUSNG’s…I’d like to make around 3k at least in July and I will probably get back to playing the $84’s and $105’s. I also want to improve my game a lot as I’ve been slacking in that area so I’m hoping to step it up and become a good reg at the $84’s and $105’s and one day be beating the $200’s

Here are a few pictures from my hotel room window in Las Vegas.

April Results

Well I’m done playing for the month, and back to 12 hour shifts at work now for 7 days. April has been my best month in regards to profit from 2- man HUSNG’s but at the same time I also just went on a downswing. I played mostly $105′s this month and I was doing ok, up about 13 buyins but then started to run just horrible and lost back about 10 buyins which really sucked. This downswing affected me mentally quite a bit because it was my biggest downswing in a while and it was also at the biggest stakes I’ve played so far. I decided that even though I was still +3 buyins at the $105′s and my shot was not yet a failure I would go back and play some $50′s and $80′s until I get my mind right. It sure does kill your confidence when you run bad and you start asking yourself if you developed some leaks or not adjusting right. I will go back and review those games and while I know I was a little tilted at times I think variance was the big factor here. I played in the $535 FTOPS #8 HU Event but things didn’t go well. I drew PlauZee and he had a 2-1 chip lead early after being aggressive and then I get QQ, raise my button, he 3-bets, and I jam, he calls with 66 and flops a 6 for a set Oh well, I always run bad in bigger tourneys.

I’ve been eating better in the past month or so and on these days off I went for some long walks because it was so nice out, got my heart beat up a little and actually lost a few pounds in April. It does feel better and I plan to do even better in May. I am dying for a night out..because of some medication that I need to take for 2 months I cannot drink alcahol, I’m one month in and still have a month to go.

Anyway..I plan for a big month in May, playing mostly $84′s and $105′s and hopefully I run better on my next 7 days off. Once I get settled in better at these stakes and feel really confident again I will be trying to work on getting more volume. I just think it’s still important for me to work on my game instead of trying to get in as many games as I can.

Here is my Sharkscope graph for April.. gl at the tables

April so far

Hey guys, I wasn’t gonna bother posting an entry yet but I’m just so damn bored at work today so I need to do something. I had a good week off from work..mostly just played poker but done well after moving up to the $84′s so I’m happy about that. I was sitting $84′s and $52.50′s at the same time and just playing whatever loaded first but it was mostly the $52.50′s loading first and I wasn’t getting enough volume at the $84′s so I started sitting $84′s only but now decided that because I did well I will sit the $105′s also and if I have to move down I will. I managed to watch quite a few HUSNG.com videos and learned a few new things from them. I’m going to start rewatching most of them because I think now that I understand HUSNG’s more now I will notice things I haven’t noticed before in them and understand the coaches thought process better. I have to work 3 more days then I get another 7 days off, I love this shift. I’ll probably play a lot of poker again because I can’t go out drinking because of some medication i’m on for 2 months, kinda sucks but at least I will save money for Vegas..I’m sure I’ll do enough drinking there

I’m thinking that most of my play will not be against fish this coming week off though. I kinda got into a unintended war with a reg “badbeater777″ so now he sits me whenever we are both online. The action was slow very early in the morning so I sat him and he lost his head completely, said it was war now and sat me for 3 days straight I think but then I had to work. I have a feeling he will still be looking for me on my days off so it should be fun.

Anyway here is my results for the month so far..it’s 100 games at $84′s with exactly 2k in winning from them, and a few $52.50′s and $105′s. Good luck at the tables.