Glad I can help, I have found personally that setting individual goals for sessions is useless. Especially playing live where in 4 hrs you are going ti play maybe 80 hands that the variance is way to high to have any expected goal. You are probably better off setting weekly or monthly goals, that way when you have a couple cold sessions you don't get let down. There are going to be times when playing 12 hrs of poker and playing perfect poker is going to be only losing one buy in.

QTs I have often heard called the rookies hand. It looks good but really sucks. I cant remember which book I read it but the quote is that hands like KJ, KQ, QJ, QT have very little implied odds to a raise. There are so many scenarios that get you in huge trouble. This is the one time you hit a huge hand but I will bet that in the long run playing QT to a raise will lose you more money that it will make you. The problem isnt when you miss its that when you hit its to easy to still be behind, other than the 2 out of a 100 where you flop a flush or straight you are going to find way to many times where you flop top pair and can only get called by hands that beat you. You are better off calling a raise with 35s than QTs, at least with 35s if you hit the flop hard you are usually ahead. Flops like AQT, KQT QJT, KJT, lead you play hands that you are -ev in. The only way I like QT is flopping a flush, a straight or QTX where the x is less than 8 and you just dont hit that enough to really make it worth playing. Most importantly you had nothing investing in the pot it costs you nothing to fold a hand that is -ev.

Wow, I had my most erratic session ever last night. I finished up $90 at a $500 buy in game so in the end at least I profited, but it was a roller coaster I'm not used to being on. I play a tight, very aggressive game leveraging my conservative but dangerous table image to move on pots when I may not have the best hand but when I sense weakness. I'm pretty good at making tough lay downs and as such if I'm in a hand going to a showdown if I'm not winning it I'm at least turning over very good cards. Because of that play style I'm more apt to gradually increase or decrease my chips and hit the occasional home run hand. All this is why last night's ups and downs were an unfamiliar feeling.

The night started off well as I flopped a boat from the BB with a few limpers. [7h] never looked as good as when the board comes [Th][7s]! I even got some decent action from a guy who had [7d] and thought he might be best since we had never played together. From there I won more, finally seeing my first set in several sessions. I was up about $450 when I got unlucky as my [Kh] ran into [Ac]. I've never been able to lay Kings down pre flop unless I'm up against a complete rock re-raising me all-in pre flop, which isn't how this one went down. Thankfully I had the opponent covered but still dropped about $550 on that hand.

So after being up $450 I was down $100. At that point I changed gears a bit and got much more aggressive for the next two rotations and hit another set in that time and brought myself back to up $250.

A while later I have [8h] and it hits a board of [7s][7d]. I think I lost as little as possible to someone with [7c], I bet the flop, checked the turn and called his bet on the river. So now I'm only up $75. Soon after that I bet a missed flush draw and got called by someone with top pair and a questionable kicker and I'm down again. After a bit, and getting near the end of the session I change back into aggressive gear and jam a few pots and get back to up $90 to end the night.

All in all I'm not terribly happy or terribly disappointed with my play. As a learning experience it gave me some good information on things to work more on and things to be more careful of. For instance, I can do a better job of changing gears in a normal session. Something else that's been bugging me, and I'll probably make a post about it in the regular forums is playing better when the board pairs. I hate calling or raising when someone is betting in to me with a paired board, and maybe that's a good thing, but maybe I'm laying my hand down too often in those situations too. It's definitely something I can improve on.

My theme lately seems to be slow but steady. I've been winning, but not having huge nights, which is probably very normal most of the time. Part of it is that the Monday game I play in has started to fill up with very good competition. Trapping players for all or even most of their chips is a lot harder when you're up against people who won't pay you off. I think there aren't many different Monday poker game options around here like there are on other nights so the hard core players all gravitate to this one. What also hurt, and this happened last Monday too, is that the big dead money action players who can really get some chips flying showed up late and got seated at the second table.

In any case, I finished up $200 after 4.5 hours of play so I can't complain. I played well overall, and made a fantastic lay down of [Js] to a rainbow board of all undercards, correctly putting my opponent on two pair. It still cost me some chips, but being able to let Jacks go even after I'm invested in the pot has saved me more money than I can count in the past year. Now if only I could learn that lesson with Queens... Really it was that hand with the JJ and another with QQ that were my only hands I didn't feel like I played well. Yes I laid the Jacks down at the right time, but I could have protected myself better preflop to keep the person who hit two pair out of the hand to begin with. With the QQ a K hit the flop which slowed down the action and my opponent with 77 stuck around to catch a runner runner straight on me. I should have gassed the turn.

Hands I played well, [Ts] paid me huge. I raised with it pre flop from late position and hit a board of [9c][4c] giving me the open ended straight draw and a Queen high flush draw. I let my opponent do all the work as he bet at me, clearly trying to push me off a flush draw, and when a hit the river he paid me even more since he wasn't expecting the straight made my hand.

I had AA a couple times, QQ once and JJ twice and some other quality hands as well. Another couple good moments were when two people, in different hands, laid down the exact same hand I had to my raise when they thought they were beat. Conservative play with raw aggression scares people. It makes it easy for them to talk themselves into a fold when they see you turning over quality hands most of the time, and when they see you make tough lay downs on other occasions.

Fantastic night tonight, couldn't be happier. One of the regulars is holding a $1,000 thirty person tournament soon and I was one of two winners in the $200+15 sattelite for that. Then I sat down at the $5/$5 cash game and made $449 in 2.5 hours of play.

In the tournament I got good cards to work with, made two tough lay downs with AJ and AQ. I might have been best in one of those, but it wasn't worth banging heads with suspect hands when I had the big stack. The best hand I had was [5s]. There was an early position raise and I gassed it pretty hard from the small blind trying to use the power of the big stack. The original raiser, who was second in chips to me called my raise. The flop came [4c][Jc]. I led out with a bet about half the pot, he pushed all in and I insta-called. He flipped over [7c] giving him the nut flush draw. The turn is a club, but it's the making him briefly cheer before the reality of my quad fives hit him.

That's a good night right there, I'm about to put my head on the pillow with dreams of winning the big money tournament, it's a lot more fun than counting sheep .

The cooler continues. Gutshots, three outers and unlucky situations continue to pound me live and in a little bit of online play I've been doing lately. I won't pretend this is a unique situation, I'm sure that everyone goes through it, but it sure does suck. It's like the poker gods are having fun at my expense lately. Kings that don't hold up multiple times, my AK that runs into AA after hitting the case Ace on the flop and every draw in the world that hits against me. I'm not one to whine about bad beats, I don't even mind getting outdrawn in general, it's just when you get a run of these things against you a few sessions in a row that it starts to wear on me a bit and some general venting can be therapeutic.

The things that get me upset at the poker table have far more to do with myself than with an opponent's play. Opponents can make all the bad decisions they want, that will pay me in the long run. I just don't like when I make bad decisions. Now I'm not perfect all the time of course, but I'm right far more often than not in my play and I go back over many hands in my head after a session to see where I could have gotten away from a hand, or gotten more value out of another, and although I've lost my last three sessions in a row I haven't really made more than one critical error. And even that one was a reasoned decision. I knew the villain had a big pair against my AK. With the Ace on the flop and one in my hand I reasoned that it was far more likely he had KK, QQ, JJ or maybe even TT or AK so I made my move. Turns out he had AA and it was the case Ace that hit the flop costing me a good portion of my stack.

Thankfully I've got the bankroll to ride out this swing, which hopefully doesn't continue for too long, and I look forward to the pendulum swinging back in my favor some time soon.

Vacations are the nuts!
Well, I hadn't posted in a little while for a couple reasons, the big one was a great family vacation to the Caribbean. Let me tell you, there no vacation like one that has all day babysitting included in the price! While there I was able to get to a casino on the island, but it had only opened up two months prior and although they advratised Hold'Em on thier brochure, they said the table that got shipped to them was the wrong thing and they were still waiting for the replacement. I ended up playing about two hours of blackjack and finished down about the amount I drank in free Captain and Cokes.

Live Game
I've only played one live session since posting last, right before going on vacation, and I got hammered again. I was up, then down, then battled back up before losing my stack in two hands. My KK against a flopped set of 3s and on the next hand losing to the same person when my flopped set ran into a flopped straight. I posted about that hand on the Ring Game forum. Not much chance of keeping my stack on that one, I just couldn't put this opponent on 56 with the preflop raise and the size of the bets. Ah well.

Vegas Baby!
With the way I've been running a little bad lately, going to book my first losing month ever, I decided to take a break from the live game until a trip to Vegas I have coming this next weekend. Me and a group of long time friends go out every year for our fantasy football draft. We do it right, fly in from all over the country, rent a conference room and have it catered. You'd think we were making million dollar deals there with all the laptops and spreadsheets projected on the walls. It's a great time. We even rent tables and dealers at the Luxor to have our own private poker tournament. Good times.

Starting Some Online Play
My break from live play left me jonesing for some action so I installed FTP again and found I still had $47 in there from like a year ago. I decided to give the online game a real shot and really focus when I'm playing instead of treating it like a video game. I have to say, after about 1,100 hands of play I'm really enjoying it. I wouldn't do online totally in place of the live game, there's too much it's missing, but I have to admit there are some nice advantages. I've been four tabling and have run my account up to about $90 now playing $0.05 - $0.10 NL and I love that you can still play a tight game but be in the action so much more often since more hands are dealt per hour and I'm playing four times as many tables. I'm definitely going to continue this for a while.

Variance, Bankroll Swings and Poker Life
I've been reading a lot more on the 2+2 forums and poker blogs and such, just trying to get a better feel for the highs and lows of playing poker for a living. It has really helped me mentally be better adjusted for the swings and tough decisions that have to be made on a regular basis in this game. As is often the case in life, once you really start learning about something, in my case by playing a lot more and doing even more research, you not only learn things you didn't know, you learn how much more there is that you still don't know. As long as I continue to improve my game, keep an even keel mentally, and make good +EV decisions I'm going to be fine from the economic side of the game, and I'll continue to have fun playing it too.