Hanging around

I've been a most unfaithful correspondent of late, a condition I can only attribute to lethargy and ennui. I've been playing poker, but just not motivated to write about it.

Let the curse begin. I've had a bit of success on all fronts, tournament and cash, live and online.

Baseball (my son's high school games and the travel team for which I'm the pitching coach) has limited my live play, although I did win an 18-man PLO tournament last Friday and a small amount of cash afterward for a decent profit.

I admit to some blatant luckboxery in the tournament win. I'd hardly played a hand in the opening five levels that led to the first break as everyone else traded chips back and forth. The cards got better after the break and I built up a significant chip lead as play continued at the final table.

Down to six players -- four paid -- I limped with JJ44. Vinnie, to my left, potted, which put him all in and Doug Poker then re-potted, esssentially putting himself all in. That left me with a decision on whether to put half of my now formidable stack into the middle. I hemmed and hawed for a minute before having a WTF moment and deciding to gamble. The flop gave DP an open-ender with J-6-7-8 while Vinnie showed KKQQ. The one-outer jack on the turn and the paired board on fifth street sealed their fates. I was a paltry 14 percent to win that hand preflop and had the good fortune to hit. I'll take it.

Yet by the time I got heads-up against a player named Bill, I was at nearly a 4-1 disadvantage, having lost a huge chunk of my stack on a slight cooler. (Flop came ace high, I was sitting with A-K-x-x and Bill had the other two aces.) It took about 20 hands to complete the comeback and secure the win.

Online, I've been able to build my roll with some 8-Game, 45-man SNGs and tournaments the last couple of weeks. It hasn't been enough to bankroll a vacation home -- or a WSOP trip -- but it's been enough that I felt safe to finally cash out some of that roll. Since the return of eCheck to Poker Stars, I've been depositing $25 here and $50 there to finance my low-limit adventures. The cashouts were part of a psychological ploy that will reduce future guilt should I need to reload again.

I've moved up in limits. I've been playing as much $2/$4 8-Game as I have my normal $1/$2. With a 25 percent ROI over 300 games of 45-person SNGs, I've moved up to the $6.50s. And I've also upped the usual tournament buy-in amounts, especially with rebuys. I've come agonizingly close to some real money in tournaments as of late, only to get cold-decked or unlucky as the final three tables approached. With a little luck and continued solid play, I'm hoping a big tournament cash is right around the corner.

This is my last week of rehab for my knee. It's back to work after Memorial Day. It's been nice to have the time off, but I'm ready to return to the working world. My batteries are recharged and I have some interesting projects awaiting me. Given the short shelf life for my profession, I'll be needing to kick it into high gear in the coming months.

Highs and lows

Pot limit Omaha hi-lo is a funny game given all of the potential ways you have to win -- and lose -- a hand. But I'm comfortable with O8, much more so than plain old Omaha. One of the bloggers recently referred to O8 as a literal game because everything is pretty much laid out for you. If someone is betting it, the chances are extremely high he actually has it. It makes reading your opponents hands fairly simple. And people likely bluff far less in O8 than in other games, it makes it pretty easy to steal chips from late position, at least in low-limit donkaments.

Perhaps it's no accident that I'm a literal person in life. I do tend to accept things at face value. Thos 3,000 hands of low-stakes NLO8 earlier in the year probably helped as well.

I doubled up in the first couple of minutes of the tournament then mostly treaded water for the next couple of hours. (PLO8, by the way, is one sloooooooow-ass game. It took more than seven hours to complete.) I had blinded down to T1800 about 30 spots from the bubble when I went on a little that got me into the money. I continued to play solid, hit some of my big draws and stole a decent amount from position and was fifth in chips when we reached the final table.

Down to four, I was the small stack with 175K, but third-place guy (the eventual winner) had only 13K more than me. The chip leader was at 483K.

That's when I got aggressive and began opening more pots and hitting some big draws to build my stack to just over 700K and take the chip lead. That's when Eventual Winner got even more aggressive and began to either outplay or outdraw me to take over the chip lead. Likely a combination of both. I sensed he was a much better player than me.

Eventual winner had a 5-1 chip advantage when we reached heads-up. He finished me off a couple of hands later when my As-2s-8d-Th got outkicked by his Ac-2d-8h ... Qc on a board of 8s-9h-5d-5s-5h. Chips went in preflop.

While the payout ($277) is chump change for you ballas, it provides a much-needed cushion for my anemic bankroll. Sadly, it's by far my biggest MTT cash in the more than 35o I've played on Stars and Tilt since the beginning of the year. If I happen to be standing at the precipice of an online heater, I'm more than ready to take the plunge.

Zagat's bedamned

Sunday dinner is the canvas upon which I create my culinary art. Sometimes I produce museum-quality pieces. At other times it's a preschool doodle that only a doting mom would tack on thee famly 'fridge.

This evening's menu was muy facil. A roasted chicken, smashed potatoes with gravy and steamed vegetables -- comfort food for a damp, spring day. Everything, save the chicken (which I managed to roast to perfection) came out wrong.

When it became quite apparent that I had managed to mostly fuck everything up, instead of issuing a burst of profanity that typically serves as an amuse bouche for my kitchen disasters, I chuckled and brought the food to the table where Mrs. Jones and the not-so-little Joneses happily tucked into the thin mashies and gravy, woefully overcooked veggies and roasted chicken as if they were seated at the chef's table at Chez Panisse.

I realized then that culinary beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My mess of a dinner looked pretty damn good to me.

A little something

I managed to get partly off the schneid last night in the Blogger Skillz game, finishing fourth in the PLO8 tournament. While I'm comfortable with general O8 concepts, I've only played a handful of PLO8 tournaments and have never gotten deep enough in one where huge blinds were a factor. I missed a few spots where I could have been more aggressive at the FT. Good learning experience and a fun tournament to play.

Poker Jones Jr. made his varsity starting pitching debut on Saturday. He pitched five innings, gave up one run and two hits, walked two and struck out six to get the win. He wasn't facing the '27 Yankees, but he displayed good poise and threw a decent percentage of first-pitch strikes. A good first step.

Hurts so good

Not much poker lately, thus not much to write about. But it's been a good and much-needed break after a steady diet of poker that accompanied my housebound convalescence.

The baseball season is underway. Poker Jones Junior made his regular-season varsity debut the other day, pitching two innings in mop-up duty. Not a bad outing -- no hits, no runs, one walk and two strikeouts.

And there's physical therapy, a 90-minute program I suspect was created by torture specialists at a CIA rendition camp in Romania. Sumbitch does it hurt. Someone -- anyone -- can shove the cliche "no pain, no gain" up their ass?

I did find myself in the vicinity of a driving range earlier today and decided to test the leg. Hit about 30 balls, all with short irons. Hit them well, on target with proper trajectory, but the session proved conclusively that I'm at least a month away, probably longer, from being able to play even nine holes.

There was going to be a post last week about finding overlays in both the noon $30K guaranteed and the 12:15 p.m. $15K guaranteed turbo. Cashed in both, but couldn't get beyond bottom money. And I did win the now weekly CPMG 8-game tournament on Stars Monday night, coming back from a 7-1 deficit heads-up. Only 13 runners, but a satisfying win nonetheless.

About to sign up for the Mookie, where I will undoubtedly flame out somewhere in the middle of the pack. Maybe I'm starting to like torture.

Operation Overlay

In all of the time I've played on Stars, I can't recall seeing a guaranteed tournament not reach its intended prize pool. I was signing up for some 45s late this morning when I peeked at the tournament lineup and saw that the noon $30K guaranteed appeared to be well short of its target.

The sucker I am for overlay value, I paid me $22 and proceeded to fold into the money for the last 45 minutes or so. (Wasn't difficult, given the super crappy cards I was being dealt.) The tournament ended up $4,440 short of its $30K guarantee. I'll be on the lookout for similar bargains in the future.

While I've largely stayed away from the blogger tournament circuit for the past year or so, I did manage to sign up, at the last minute, for the Skillz game (limit) on Tuesday and the Mookie last night (where I donked off a middling stack bluffing with a pair of threes. Damn, I'm good.)

Given last night's performance, I have absolutely no moral authority upon which to base the following statement, but meh, it's my blog and no one can stop me: Bloggers, overall, ain't all that good at tournament poker. Too bad I have to include myself in that cohort.

Skim graph

I guess this qualifies as a brag post, given how pleased I am with the direction my Sharkscope graph is headed after 911 games. It's nice to have some good news to report.

The initial spike downward resulted from a failed effort a couple of years ago playing a bunch $20 180s on Stars. Never cashed ... in ... a ... single ... fucking ... one. I've since failed to cash in any 180 at any amount, including a handful of $4.40s. If the tournament has a 180 in it, I'm extra-dead money.

The graph began drifting upward when I started playing single-table SNGs, starting with the $3.40 turbos and then advancing to the $6.50s. As is my nature, I got bored with SNGs and moved on to less fruitful forms of poker.

The latest positive trend comes from the 45-man $3.25 turbos I've been playing the last couple of weeks. Through 169 games, I'm running at an obscene 35 percent ROI. While it's highly doubtful I can sustain that rate, I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts. Sure beats repeatedly kicks in the junk.

My only slight quibble has been a couple of HU situations where I couldn't put my opponent away thanks to some lousy luck. My ITM distribution, however, shows how evenly they are spread with 5 wins, 6 seconds, 5 thirds, 5 fourths, 7 fifths, 6 sixths and 5 sevenths. There are also 4 eighths (the bubble) and 4 ninths (bubble +1).

One of the things I like about 45s is that you do not need to cash in a high-percentage to be profitable. My ITM is at 23 percent at the moment. If I recall correctly, it was somewhere in the low 40s for single-table SNGs.

Unquestionably, I'm running better, winning more races and (ahem) benefitting from a few more suckouts. But my game is also more sharp and focused. Situations present themselves more clearly, which is a nice feeling. Basically, I'm making fewer mistakes while getting slightly better cards, which should be a good combination.