Changes are happening...

It’s very easy to notice my blog is undergoing a change, and it is not that far of a stretch to say I am undergoing a change as well, both as a blogger and as a player. I recently purchased a ton of poker books and have added those and the ones I previously owned to a new section on the right side of my page. The section is called “My Poker Library”. In that section I plan to have the image and title to be a link that takes you to Amazon.com ,where you can purchase the book. This would send me a whopping 5% of your purchase. I will also be making posts as I read the book. I plan to talk about how what I am reading relates to me as a player etc… In the end I will make a review of the book and once I have read all these books, and re read for the sake of the review the ones I own previously, I should actually have a nice little collection of essays and reviews for my visitors to peruse.

I hope adding this higher quality of content will help drive readers to my site. I am actually very happy with the developments in the last week. I have been very focused on my play and this blog and really have some good ideas for the future of both. I actually have the first post about chapter 2 of the poker mindset already finished, but want to at the very least finish the “My Poker Library” section completely.

So I guess all of you will have to wait a little while longer. I am not planning to play tonight as I have tons of household tasks and such to do. However, I am hoping afterwards I will get a little bit of time to work on this humble corner of cyberspace.

For anyone that does come and read and has a blog and has linked to my old blogger address http://acefilleddreams.blogspot.com please update your blog roll and links when you get a chance. Also, If you have a blog and I have not linked up to you please drop me a line and I will take care of it. I have had the unfortunate incident of wondering blindly around the inter-web and stumble across a blogger has taken the time to link up to this humble little corner, and I don’t have them linked up.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO CLOSE...

For the second time in two days I made the Final Table of another medium buy-in tourney on Full Tilt. It started off with me getting disconnected and trying for 20 minutes to get it to reconnect. I finally e-mailed Full Tilt Customer Service to report the disconnect and hoping to get my buy in back. I managed to reconnect. I did pretty good and managed to get my money in with the best of it. Also had some people suck out on me pretty good but after reading part of the poker mindset. I managed to control my tilt and hang on. When the bubble broke at 18 ppl I was chip leader. The problem was the guy to my right turned up the aggression and got 3 resteals against me. That set me up as 7th in chips going into the FT so I shoved 1010 into AK and the A on the flop sealed my fate. Still managed a $194.00 cash though and have another final table. Biggest buy in final table for me so I am pretty happy.

Ups and downs

Was a crazy weekend on the poker front. I had so many good starts to some bigger tourneys, and most of them ended in huge suck outs for me... I try not to talk about suck outs but I got pummeled this weekend... IT seemed every time I got AK about 1-2 hours in to the tourney I would get all in for a huge pot and be up against AJ/A3/A10 and lost all three times...

I also had some good luck though managed to turn a str8 flush and got paid, and also managed a 7th place finish in a $33 buy in on FTP for $173.00. It could have been more, but it was an odd final table with everyone almost even in chips = and I just could not get anything going. I managed to get a guy all in with 8 people left holding AK when he had A3 and yet again the A3 took it down... Anyways I managed to donk of my stack tilting from the beat...

Speaking of tilt I have started reading "The Poker Mindset" I am currently in the process of rereading chapter 2 and formulating a post on how it relates to me. I have long believed alotof my problems are psychological, and if I could avoid my own emotional swings I would be a much better player. This book I think has the potential to be a huge help to me...

So after a weekend where I played less but higher buy ins I am probably lucky I ended up pretty much even. Hoping to play a few 180 man tourneys over the next week, or maybe some satellites for the Sunday Million or something.

If you have not noticed I am in the middle of reorganizing my blog roll amongst other things. When I am all done the daily reads will be for people that update frequently and the weekly reads will be for the less frequent updater's. The prestigious bloggers, are the blogger's that either have impacted my own play or life in blogging, or are just such good writers that if you missed their blog your life would be missing something...

So please give me a few days to go through it all and it will be up to par. I have also added "my poker library" to the right side and have some pretty good plans for that as well. Good night and gl and hope to see you back real soon....

Happy Birthday to me....

I don't normally post personal stuff, but this blog is in the middle of a transformation of sort which I will touch on more in a post I make later today or tomorrow. I actually have written down 5 post ideas that I want to do so expect some posts in the next few days... Plus keep your eye out for some new features and such that I will be adding along the way.

As some of you may know and some of may not know I am a member of the US Military. One of the biggest pitfalls is that you are going to miss holidays sometimes. I have been in the military and have missed anniversaries, My wife's birthday, my children's birthdays, my birthdays, Thanksgivings, and one Christmas and New Years Celebration. One of the most heartbreaking things that I had happen was when my oldest son actually set me a plate out on the table on his birthday while I was TDY to England, because "daddy won't miss my birthday".

So what I wanted to share were these pictures from my birthday... I turned 29 today and I got to spend it with my two sons.

These first two are of my oldest son making my birthday cake...




These are me and my sons with the birthday cake my oldest made...

Some good things and some bad things...

Well I guess I will start off with the bad things. As any of my readers will obviously know I have been a long time member of the Raise the River forum. Unfortunately for reasons that are just as much my fault as anyone elses I will no longer consider myself part of this community. My primary complaint is I feel that the forum that once offered an oasis in the dessert of bland, cookie cutter affiliate pages that had forums attached. Has taken a step towards being like everyone else. I think they are pulling away from the bloggers that got them started. I was a moderator in fact I ran their challenges and actually had just reorganized their staking forums...

In the end I figured out that I was probably overreacting, but when talking on MSN to one of the admin they specifically said

"hopefully you will stop being a member of Raise the River".

Thats was all I needed to get me off the fence. I have been considering starting my own page/forum or something for quite sometime, and my affiliation with Raise the River really was the only reason I never did. Although the decision is not for certain but I might be making my own site so stay tuned...

Now on to the good news other then feeling a bit depressed over the above I actually feel pretty good... The SnG challenge never really took off and even though I was winning money I was bored and poker to me is about fun. I think for now I am going to stick to MTT's and try to get some decent finishes.

All you readers can look forward to some more posts as I wont be talking about my exploits on Raise the River anymore.

So I will leave you know with screenshot of something I was quite proud of... That is I finally has a 1 million chip chip stack....



Oh and if nobody noticed the blogfather himself left me a comment... I am famous!!!!

The first ten games...

Well I just finished playing my first ten games. So far I am doing pretty good and hoping for my hot streak to continue. I am playing only 2 -3 games at a time right now trying to get a feel for these. I have suffered a bunch of bad beats but recovered from most. I am having a lot of finishes early in the games, so I need to look to see if I am taking chances that I don't need to take that early. I have noticed if I suffer a bad beat on one table I tend to shove the next hand on one of my other tables. I really need to work on that as that is a a very tilty and costly habit if your multi tabling.

I will try to update every other day or so with my progress so wish me luck... and GL at the tables

A fresh start at something I tried before....

So I had a very busy last couple of weeks and have been able to play very little poker. I had a huge project at work that I had to finish and then I had to do a big demonstration for the important people at my job. It went really well and I think impressed a few of them..

Anyway, I am having trouble getting into poker again. When I do it just seems I play like a doofus. So I talked to a few people, including my wonderful and always correct wife, and decided that I wanted to finish something I tried a long time ago.

Now some of you may remember that a long time ago I was going to play 1,000 $3 SnG on pokerstars. I never did and honestly it bothered me. So I have decided to go back to my roots and play some SnG's. I will finish this challenge this time.

Starting tomorrow I am going to go through what could be a painful task and begin playing these SnG's. I am going to start off playing 2-5 at a time and as I get more comfortable play more at a time. My target ROI is 20%. I am leaning toward the non turbos right now as I was playing several turbos today in preparation and the bad beats just came one after another. I lost so many AK vs AQ/AJ hands I was numb by the end of the day.

I am starting with about 40 buy ins overall once I get my money from FTP transferred over to stars. Hopefully I can avoid a horrible run in the front and pad my roll a bit before the variance monster rears its ugly head...

I will post my current results over to the right like before. Starting tomorrow I will only play the $3 SnG until I have played 1k of them.