Back in the Saddle

Posted by longclaw

February 2, 2008

January was a very busy month for me. When you drive for a living winter can be a real pain. Bad weather means it takes longer to get where you are going and that cuts directly into my poker playing time. Tuesday was absolutely brutal. I found myself in the middle of a blizzard in northern Iowa. The temperature was around -15F with a 35mph wind with blowing snow. I experienced white-out conditions where I could see no more than about ten feet ahead of me over and over. I actually passed three different police cars that were blocking people from going the direction I had just come from. Somehow I made it through, but a ten hour drive turned into a fourteen hour nightmare. Then Thursday I had to drive through downtown Chicago at 4p.m. in a snow shower, and I almost wished I was back in the blizzard.

What does all this have to do with poker? Well, I only got in about 1100 hands for the entire month. I was pretty disappointed when I looked at my Pokertracker stats and saw how little I had played. Thankfully I ran hot (16.52PTBB/100) in the time I had and I was able to pad my bankroll a bit. I also watched a lot of videos from the training site I belong to. They offered me six months free if I would watch ten videos and write a summary of them for their redesigned video page. I took them up on it and ended up with eight videos of 6-max limit hold’em and a couple of NL videos. It got a little hard to describe the videos without repeating myself over and over but I made it through and I think I actually learned something about limit (formerly my weakest game) in the process.

February has started out much better as far as playing. I found a bonus offer waiting for me at Full Tilt when I checked my email yesterday so I guess I will be playing there for at least the next ten days. I normally don’t play much at Full Tilt because I don’t get rakeback there, but if they are going to give me free money I will take them up on it. The best way to clear a bonus at the stakes I play just happens to be limit poker, the pots are bigger on average than the no limit games which lets me clear bonus faster. I have already played about 550 hands since last night. I have found I can average about 100 hands per hour per table there. If my wife lets me use the 20″ monitor I think I can get in another 800-1000 hands tonight which would be awesome. I am datamining the tables right now so I will be good to go tonight.

Heres to grinding