Where have I been?

Wow, I have been slacking on my blog. I seem to blog the most when grinding online poker and only played online one day in October. I cashed out some money to take care of some things and to play live  and then kept playing live. There are two decent casino's with poker here and both offer a 15k freeroll every month for the players who log 40 hours of live play. After playing a couple days I realized I was almost half-way there and decided to get qualified. I got to 40 hours at one casino and then started in at the other one.

I ran into a couple obstacles on my path to the 40 hours at the second casino and ended up coming up short. My first day chasing the second 40 went great the first 4.5 hours, but the last .5 hour was terrible. I was up a buy-in and then we consolidated tables. I ended up at a table where a guy with about $1500 was open shoving all-in in the dark about 7 out of 10 hands. Apparently he had been doing that for hours and was in the game for a few thousand. I got it in ahead against him four times only winning the second one. I wanted to keep playing as this was a dream situation but was not rolled for that kind of gambling so cut my losses and left 2.5 buy-ins loser. I went back the next day winning a buy-in, lost 1/3 a buy-in the following day, and then had one of those nights that require a day off or two after. I only lost 1.5 buy-ins but it was ugly. Obviously its just variance and I laugh about it now as I write this, but I am sure we have all had those nights.

So I decided to take a couple days off and then got hooked on SOA and watched 3 seasons in about a week. It's a good show though, haha. Now it's a new month and I got started on my next 40 hours last night winning a buy-in. Online poker seems to be in a bit of a funk at the current moment so I think I will play live another month and the re-evaluate. I plan on trying to make both freerolls this month because truly they are decent incentives to get the hours. One of the casinos average around 100 players for the freeroll and the other around 60. It's a pretty decent shot at up to about 4k.

I did pick up two more students this week and am still enjoying giving lessons. Even though I am not playing online as much I am still working on my game, talking poker with friends live and in the chat, watching training videos, and writing strategy articles. I actually just finished my newest article this morning and it should be up this weekend.

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the grind. I know I have been seeing lots of players making way to many mistakes way to often, so my advice to everyone is do what you can to try and improve and always be working on your game.

If you are interested in taking poker lessons or would like any information, contact me at variance101@gmail.com and/or visit http://variance101.com/# and http://variance101.blogspot.com.