ActionJeff’s Blog

I’ve had a good couple of days. Yesterday I only played for a few hours total, and played some $2k HU sngs and PLO along with the Stars $1k Super Tuesday. I played very poorly in the $1k despite getting a 12k chip stack, but the rest of my games went very well. I made $8k in the HU SNGs and another $15k playing 10-20 HU PLO and some 50-100 6m.

I’ve been playing a lot of PLO lately and have been happy with my results. The game is very swingy but I believe I have a very good feel of heads up play and will continue playing most takers HU at 10-20 to 50-100 and hopefully will continue to show good results. My 6-max game is a lot sloppy as I feel slightly uncomfortable with my play in the first 2 seats. I nearly always open limp utg except in some short stack situations, but I think my open limp range may need some reworking. I also am uncertain about sizing open raises in the hijak, although I am happy opening for a pot-sized raise in CO or button with some exceptions. Would love to hear input from regular players on this.

If anyone who plays higher PLO regularly and has some experience wants to talk strategy, shoot me on a pm on 2p2 or p5s!

My introductory entry didn’t have much as far as content, so I’m going to use this opportunity to bring you guys up to speed about what I’ve been doing the past several months.

For those unfamiliar I went on a huge rush early in 2007 in the nosebleed FTP NL games at the same time as I went on a big downswing on PokerStars cash games. I think I have lost around $100k in the Stars games this year, but at my peak on Full Tilt was up well over a million. I had one very bad day months ago where I went from being up over $400k to down $250k and that night I cashed out nearly all of my FTP roll and left myself under $60k online.

I’ve struggled online since then. I’ve payed a lot of live buy-ins online for myself and backees and have dropped a good amount in the nosebleeds taking shots and playing and stupid times, so I have only gotten my online roll back over $200k a few times in that time period and never hit a big rush.

I did a mid limits challenge months ago where I wanted to win 100 buy ins at 5-10 and work my way up the limits. I crushed 5-10 winning over $75k in 25k hands or something, but I have not played much 10-20 since and have probably made only 20-30 buy ins there.

I was traveling a lot at the end of the summer and beginning of this fall, and went to Barcelona, London, Aruba, and Niagara over a period of under 2 months.  I final tabled the WPT in Niagara but ran bad from 7 players onward and only managed 6th place for $183k and a nice tv final table finish. This was my second significant live score and my biggest yet, the former biggest being a win in the Johnny Chan Classic $1k 6-max NL for $84k in Vancouver. Canada seems to be a lucky place for me.

I’ve basically been on a poker break since then, playing on and off. The break has been really good for me and a nice change of pace. I found I weighed 218 pounds after my London trip. That’s not very overweight for a 6′1, big boned guy like me, but I just felt unfit and wanted to change it. I was working out on and off prior to the big trip but I wasn’t doing a great job. I’ve completely turned that around recently. Since Niagara I’ve been taking my workouts much more seriously and have shown great results. I’ve lost over 10 pounds and have gained a ton of muscle weight. Even though I have a long way to go i feel a lot fitter and happier.

I went to Turning Stone last week to relax and have fun, but it was a really shitty trip. I’ll write about that later, some funny stuff happened. I didn’t work out the entire trip and as of this morning hadn’t worked out for 5 or 6 days. I had been pretty pissed over nothing for a few days, but I hit the gym today and I feel a lot better. I guess its become a more important part of my routine than I realized, if not going makes me emotionally unbalanced, lol. I mostly did arms and shoulders today and had one of my best workouts since I started lifting. Maybe my body needed a break? I had been lifting intensely 5-6 days a week prior to the Turning Stone trip, and was really tearing myself up. I had been having the problem of my workouts being low energy, so maybe this is a sign of good things to come.

I’ll talk about my routines in future blogs and keep track of progress. Most of my lifting program is from Arnold Schwarzennegar’s Encylopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (the updated one thats like 700 pages). I don’t have much experience with fitness books but imo its a great book and I learned a lot from reading it.

I took a shot at some high stakes today and it went well. I sat in a 200-400 6m game with position on a psycho but was stacked the first hand with AK. I probably misplayed the hand but wasn’t too unhappy with being down $40k and decided to keep playing as long as the game was good. I didn’t make any more money and quit when the psycho player left.

There weren’t any other games going but I decided to keep rolling high and played Jman (OMGClayAiken) in some 200-400 HU. I probably wouldn’t have done it but my friend Ansky
and I were talking HU NL the night before and he noted that he thought I would be a good match with Jman and that my game would do well against his, although I had not previously played him.

I checked all my PT stats and other info on Jman’s HU game and sat down to play him. Overall I feel I played tight but well . There was one interesting hand where I check-raised the flop with J10o on a K56 2 spade flop and jman called my raise and bet on 9 turn with 86o. The river was a very bad 9 and I checked and gave up the $35k pot. I may or may not have misplayed this but overall I played a good match and made something like $70k with very few showdowns. Near the end of the match I realized I was running out of time to go to the gym and still make the 9pm tournaments. Jman was also starting to 3-bet me a lot, which normally I welcome, but considering the stakes I felt I did not want to sweat the variance of the 3-bet game so I quit. Unfortunately I lost track of time at the gym and made it home at 9:01 to just miss the FTP $100r 6-max =/

I’m going to post tons of more stuff including some pictures from old tournaments in the upcoming blogs, as well as my plans the next few months and some fun hands for discussion and analysis.

GIFAFI,

-AJ

admin :: Dec.05.2007 :: General :: 4 Comments »

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