Options? Deposit again and keep trying, or maybe even get some microstakes coaching? There’s some coaching at $25/hr which is affordable I guess.

Or just give up? Spend my time on something else, find a new hobby that’s not depressing.

I think, sadly, that it should be the latter.

2008 – 2011

(blue = with Rakeback + bonuses)

So I fired off an email, and they responded same day (Saturday too) and fixed it. I reckon that deserves a quick plug on the blog (I’m not an affiliate either, for a change!).

So here it is;

CardRunners is now offering the option of receiving a free membership through our Truly Free Poker training Promotion! Please visit http://www.trulyfreepokertraining.com/ to learn more about this exciting method of obtaining a membership or continuing an existing one at no cost. It really is Truly Free!!!

So if last post was the review of 2010, then I guess this better be the goals for 2011 post. Not that I’m feeling particularly inspired at the moment – typical post new years eve morning

husngs: Ok, well this is definitely the year for making heads up NLHE work for me. I’d started to have my doubts towards the end of last year, but Decembers results really revived me and I think I can play a bit more competently now and can work on building a bankroll. I think I need to work on making my game more consistent rather than game-shaking changes – not as interesting as triple merging your ranges, but it’s probably the thing that’ll make me profitable.

Volume: Got to put more volume in. Got to keep pressing that register button even after losing a few games. Last year I’d give up too easily and would often only play 2 or 3 games in a session. This is no way to play, and I need to do better. Kind of an eternal goal really, but I really do suck at putting in the effort.

Blogging: Post count has drifted down too. I’m also guilty of just posting results which get a bit dull (esp when I wasn’t moving up!). In all honesty I’m amazed that the regular readers are still reading when I’ve become so boring. This year I’ll try to be a bit more interesting Also I should comment on other people’s blogs more too – when you all comment it really makes it feel worthwhile, so I should be passing it on and comment on all the blogs I read (which is quite a few, yet most of them wouldn’t have a clue that I appreciate their posts).

Those are my poker resolutions, for my personal life I need to do some ordinary boring resolutions. I’m 40-ish now, and have spent most of my life changing jobs, living abroad here and there, creating & losing companies, switching relationships etc (commitmentphobe moi? They were just all polyamory-phobes! go wiki…). All a lot of fun, but has left me in a disastrous financial state – no pension or savings etc. However my newly acquired job has a decent salary, so maybe I should plant my feet for a few years and create some stability (I know last year I talked about upping sticks and moving to the west country to get back into climbing, but I’ll probably should forget that for a bit). So as part of my get-a-life-plan, this years resolution is to put a large part of my salary towards a deposit for a house. With Cambridge house prices and stupid banks and their 10-20% deposits it’s going to take a while (maybe even 2 years). Maybe poker will help me get there quicker too – One time!

That puts me on the edge of being rolled for $20s. There’s a weird deja-vu as this is exactly what happened last christmas. I guess that means I should perhaps do my roundup of 2010 now;

January

2010 was the first year I really tried heads-up NLHE for the first time. I’d messed around with a few shootout MTTs but nothing with any thought behind it. Yegor told me to switch to husngs because he was printing money and had been saying how good they were for ages. He said try 50 microstakes matches and see if it works out.

Apparently it worked out The 50 $5s went well enough, andI quickly jumped to the $10s. I immediately had a nice heater, which left me nicely rolled to try $20s.

February – May

The $20s were tricky, but somehow I managed to scrape enough to try some $30s. 4man shootouts in particular seemed to support my BR more than regular matches;

The nice BR gave me the opportunity to buy some coaching, pay for sites like sharkscope, and generally whimsical prop-bets (still hardly balla, but fun nevertheless). With a BR of $1000 I was marginally rolled for $50 games, and dipped my toes a couple of times.

May-July

Then it all went wrong;

Game after game was lost. I followed proper bankroll management and moved down as I past each threshold, but it didn’t ease off. Utterly miserable 3 months

July-December

The rest of the year was a complete rethink of what had happened. I moved right down to $2 games so I could pound out game after game with relatively no impact on the remains of my bankroll. The hope was that I could really watch what I was doing to see if there had been any element of skill in my rise, or whether the whole thing is just variance in action.

The rethink worked, and I saw what I had done wrong. Putting it into practice hasn’t been easy though – hard to change the spots of an old dog.

Essentially my fundamentals are fairly solid – preflop I was raising appropriately (albeit with some 3bet leaks pointed out by Yegor), postflop I was getting value ok (not too hard at these stakes – bet,bet,bet!), while for bluffs my flop cbets and turn double barrels were ok too. What I was doing wrong though was bluffing in large pots and making poor hero calls. Forcing myself to stop doing this was a bit tricky – to see an idiot donk out with a PSB was like waving a red flag to me.

So this month I’ve been folding, and concentrating on the value bets. The results were fairly immediate, and even better the lost matches obviously showed the same hero calling leaks which reinforced my belief that I’ve worked out where it was going wrong. Now I need to keep trying to get the balance right and not let the bluff demon back in as I move up in stakes.

Newff (a husng player on my blogroll, even though he doesn’t post anywhere near enough!) wants to try his hand at the 5k HU main event at the Canadian Poker Open in August. He started a thread on 2p2 asking for backers and people were putting up 1% shares which is about $60. I figured I could just about spare that, and he’s probably got a better chance of cashing than I have of throwing that at my $10 husngs . So I threw my share into the hat. Hopefully he’ll get enough for the ticket, although it’ll take quite a few people when everyone’s just up for 1% shares…

However I was watching some youtube of the final table, not realising it was the one where that had occurred – put into context it’s surprising he didn’t go completely ballistic. The whole thing is really worth watching – how to be completely run over by your opponents getting good cards;

episode 21, part 1/4
episode 21, part 2/4
episode 21, part 3/4
episode 21, part 4/4

(Sorry United113, 2nd Phil post in the same month – just grin & bear it…)

It was so easy to review them that I’m tempted to record games by default. The only thing that makes me hesitate is that while recording it makes Windows a bit glitchy occasionally. I’m already plagued with disconnect problems, so dunno if I want to add more crappiness to it.

I started out recording using the trial version of camtasia, and that was pretty good once I figured out how to set the frame rate & compression. At £200 for a license though it’s too expensive to buy (I’m not installing any warez – too much trouble with malware).

So then I tried UltraVNC screen recorder which is free, and it worked perfectly. Slightly more glitchy than camtasia, although I’d upped the framerate which was probably the cause. Here’s the result. I tried uploading it to YouTube and it came out really fuzzy which is a shame as the camtasia ones worked quite well, but I’m not bothered by that.