Year to date.......

Closing in on half way through the year and it's time for the cat to take stock.

First off hows the balance?

Well Im 25,523$ up for the year so far. This is roughly $4.3k/month. Happy? Yes i think so. I was under a little financial pressure to produce some results, so overall i will take this. I would have liked to have been more in the 30-35 region but overall this is ok and I will take it.

How did i get there? First off, how are tournaments going?

Well looking back, since january 06,I've won 11 tournaments, 9 holdem and 2 omaha hi lo. To be honest im disappointed at this, i would've expected to have won more than this. What do i put this down to? Partly down to not taking advantage of good situations. I'm still working on changing gears, upping aggression at the right times.

It's funny, when i'm on my game, I instinctively know when to start getting more aggressive, when to run a big bluff, when to steal the blinds, when to slowplay. I have had this a few times this year and it's usually coincided with some good results. When I'm not feeling so confident though i drift into my shell and begin to get blinded away, missing opportunities and only doing well if the deck begins to smack me.

I'm working on trying to improve this and I think i am slowly getting there so let's see how the rest of the year goes....

Cash games.

Well this year i have been mostly playing.....Pot limit omaha. I really have developed a good feel for this and I'm running at roughly 45$/hr which is pretty good considering i mainly play 50c 1$ or 1/2$. Now my party account is back ive started off playing hi lo limit at 3/6 again which i used to be good at. Seems like playign a lot of PL has dulled my edge a little though as recently I've been logging a sluggish win rate.

The two games are very different, a lot of PLom/8 hands are very playable when in limit you're commiting suicide playing them. It's quite hard to play the two games side by side so i'll be workign on trying to improve my play in both.

Played a little omaha cash and a few tournies. Tournies im still very inexperienced though witha bit more luck idve taken a couple down. Cash sessions have been very profitable but too few to be statistically significant. I expect i will log some more cash omaha hours in the 2nd half of the year though.

Finally a recent develpment. I've been playing some heads up NLHE poker. Flushie plays these all the time and has a good record in them. I figured if that mug can win in them then the cat would be leaving a trail of kippers in his wake!

Well ive played 23 so far at 20$ level, and so far I have won 18 and lost 5, including an 11 run unbeaten streak. It's definitely been going well. I find the players very poor at this level. They nearly always make crucial mistakes and you can grind them down by playing the bigger pots in position until they do. It's good fun, although players often get quite personally abusive in these games. I actually like this as i can give as good as i get.

I played a game the other day which was fiercely contested and lasted through to the 100 200 level which is quite rare. We said nothing throughout and i eventually prevailed when he shortstacked pushed his K2 into my A8. As I won the game he said "FU U FKIN PIECE OF SHIT" LOL.

It's a 20$ game kipper chill out!

There's something about heads up games that gets the blood boiling though. ALL GOOD FUN!