Tuesday, April 27, 2004
WSOP 2004
I count 195 players from PokerStars currently registered for the 2004 WSOP. What is the best guess on current attendance, 1400? I wonder what percentage of those players will end up coming from online?
Man I wish I could be there! Even if I were not playing...
I count 195 players from PokerStars currently registered for the 2004 WSOP. What is the best guess on current attendance, 1400? I wonder what percentage of those players will end up coming from online?
Man I wish I could be there! Even if I were not playing...
Monday, April 26, 2004
Online?
Not much to speak of for online action this week. It was a pretty flat week overall and finished ever so slightly positive. I spent most of my online time playing PLO. I’m still really enjoying playing more Omaha and have found it to be a nice break from HE. I did also play one of the $2 Turbo qualifiers on Stars. I managed to win myself a seat in a $33 WSOP satellite, but I didn’t shock the house in that one. I had $6 invested and decided not re-buy or add-on during the $33 event.
Thanks to Lord G for tipping me off to the 15% bonus on PartyPoker. It shouldn't take long at all to rack up those 700 hands.
MPCS:
As mentioned previously I’ve been pretty busy helping to organize a series of monthly tournaments. We’re now three months into the Midland Poker Championship Series and everything has been going really well. We’re averaging about 24 people, which is quite large for a home game. We’ve even had to close the series to new players due to the incredible demand. I’m guessing we turned away an additional 20 players last month alone!
The basic format for each tournament is NL HE. A small part from each entry goes into a pot for the end-of-season championship tournament. Players get points based on their place at each event and the top six players at the end of the 11 month season play in the championship tournament. I stole the point’s system idea from the Bluegrass Poker Series, which Iggy invited me down to play in last year. It is a neat system and has really caught on around here.
I’d like to run some larger events, but I don’t want to get into charging for expenses.
Weekly Poker League:
Another cool thing going on around here is a potential weekly poker league at one of the local clubs. This would be one of your typical private clubs usually named after an animal. My friend AI is a member and has been playing in their pool and dart leagues. He brought the idea up to the board and it looks like it will be a go this May. AI and I will be the official organizers and as such we get free entry every week. So, for a little bit of fun work I get a weekly freeroll, woohoo!
Here is how it will work:
-16 weeks (~$10 / week)
-NL HE
-A small portion of the weekly fee goes to cover expenses.
-Another small portion goes towards an end of league banquet.
-Players get points each week based on their place (mini tournament each week).
-All players get some $$ back at end of season (similar to a bowling league).
I’ll be sure and let you know how things turn out!
Finally:
Spring is finally here and that means softball season is almost upon us. Besides poker, I don’t know of a better excuse to drink beer! If only poker were played outside on warm summer nights… Maybe it’s time to purchase another wireless laptop and hit the back patio!
Not much to speak of for online action this week. It was a pretty flat week overall and finished ever so slightly positive. I spent most of my online time playing PLO. I’m still really enjoying playing more Omaha and have found it to be a nice break from HE. I did also play one of the $2 Turbo qualifiers on Stars. I managed to win myself a seat in a $33 WSOP satellite, but I didn’t shock the house in that one. I had $6 invested and decided not re-buy or add-on during the $33 event.
Thanks to Lord G for tipping me off to the 15% bonus on PartyPoker. It shouldn't take long at all to rack up those 700 hands.
MPCS:
As mentioned previously I’ve been pretty busy helping to organize a series of monthly tournaments. We’re now three months into the Midland Poker Championship Series and everything has been going really well. We’re averaging about 24 people, which is quite large for a home game. We’ve even had to close the series to new players due to the incredible demand. I’m guessing we turned away an additional 20 players last month alone!
The basic format for each tournament is NL HE. A small part from each entry goes into a pot for the end-of-season championship tournament. Players get points based on their place at each event and the top six players at the end of the 11 month season play in the championship tournament. I stole the point’s system idea from the Bluegrass Poker Series, which Iggy invited me down to play in last year. It is a neat system and has really caught on around here.
I’d like to run some larger events, but I don’t want to get into charging for expenses.
Weekly Poker League:
Another cool thing going on around here is a potential weekly poker league at one of the local clubs. This would be one of your typical private clubs usually named after an animal. My friend AI is a member and has been playing in their pool and dart leagues. He brought the idea up to the board and it looks like it will be a go this May. AI and I will be the official organizers and as such we get free entry every week. So, for a little bit of fun work I get a weekly freeroll, woohoo!
Here is how it will work:
-16 weeks (~$10 / week)
-NL HE
-A small portion of the weekly fee goes to cover expenses.
-Another small portion goes towards an end of league banquet.
-Players get points each week based on their place (mini tournament each week).
-All players get some $$ back at end of season (similar to a bowling league).
I’ll be sure and let you know how things turn out!
Finally:
Spring is finally here and that means softball season is almost upon us. Besides poker, I don’t know of a better excuse to drink beer! If only poker were played outside on warm summer nights… Maybe it’s time to purchase another wireless laptop and hit the back patio!
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Ahhhhhhhhh
Wow! The last couple of months been busy! I apologize for the lack of updates, but as titled this Blog is about balancing poker and the rest of my life. I could have (and almost did several times) done a bunch of those short posts with little content, but I really hate doing that. Thanks for all the emails and nice comments…I was pleasantly surprised by the people who wanted to know why I wasn’t updating.
I’m going to continue to update more regularly again. My goal will be a post a week and I’ll try and make it worth reading.
Where’s Royal Been?
The single biggest thing that kept me from updating this site is the growth of my daughter. It is absolutely amazing how quickly young children grow and learn. I’d always heard that from friends, but I never truly understood it until now. She is doing something new every single day. For example, today she figured out how to smack her lips. Throughout the day she has been making this new wonderful sound.
What all these little changes mean for me is I’m needed to help out more. When I last updated Mrs. Royal was just heading back to work fulltime and Baby Royal was heading to daycare. I’m happy to say both of those are working out great! However, dad has to drop her off at daycare every day and that takes extra time.
I could typically get in 2-4 hours of computer time a night if I wanted to. I’d use that time for email, web site updating, on-line game playing, surfing, blog updating, and poker. For the last two months I’ve probably had 25-30% of my normal computer time. In fact, I hardly played a hand of online poker during March. Baby Royal has started going to bed pretty regularly now and I’ve got some decent online playing in the last week. More on that below.
As mentioned above I don’t want to do a bunch of quick junk posts. I’m writing this stuff for my benefit and maybe someone else can learn something too. As all bloggers know it is tough to keep cranking out posts with good “unique” content. Updating got to be more of a chore…which was another reason it got dumped down the priority list. I still enjoy writing and want to keep doing this. I think setting the goal of one post per week makes it seem like a reasonable task.
I went through about 1.5 months of cold cards. I’m not talking about bad beats…just bad starting hands. Hot steaks do happen! Cold streaks do happen! It’s tough to get motivated to write about poker when your cards are so bad for so long.
Quest Update
I’ve played very little online poker lately and very little of that has been $1/$2. I’m probably averaging about 50 hands per week at those stakes. I’ll get to 10,000 hands...it’s just going to take awhile!
Omaha!
Lately I’ve been fixated on PL Omaha. I still needed a few hands to complete my last PokerStars bonus offer. As discussed previously, the required rake coupled with the caliber of players (compared to Partypoker) makes the EV on the HE tables not very attractive. So, I started playing the PLO tables again and found them to be much loser than the HE tables. Of course that is many times the nature of Omaha…I found playing only the best hands allowed me to start making a decent profit and complete my bonus.
And like a lightning bolt a thought occurred to me. If the Omaha tables on Stars are loose…what would they be like on Party? Oh yeah, as expected they are even looser. It’s very much like the PL and NL HE ring games on Party except with Omaha you give the bad players twice as much rope to hang themselves. The last ten days have been some of the most profitable I’ve ever had playing online poker.
Last
While I haven’t played much online during my time away from this Blog I have been playing frequently in real life. I’ve helped organize a monthly game which features a point series. I’m also working with AI to setup a weekly league at a local establishment.
More details on that stuff later.
Royal
Wow! The last couple of months been busy! I apologize for the lack of updates, but as titled this Blog is about balancing poker and the rest of my life. I could have (and almost did several times) done a bunch of those short posts with little content, but I really hate doing that. Thanks for all the emails and nice comments…I was pleasantly surprised by the people who wanted to know why I wasn’t updating.
I’m going to continue to update more regularly again. My goal will be a post a week and I’ll try and make it worth reading.
Where’s Royal Been?
The single biggest thing that kept me from updating this site is the growth of my daughter. It is absolutely amazing how quickly young children grow and learn. I’d always heard that from friends, but I never truly understood it until now. She is doing something new every single day. For example, today she figured out how to smack her lips. Throughout the day she has been making this new wonderful sound.
What all these little changes mean for me is I’m needed to help out more. When I last updated Mrs. Royal was just heading back to work fulltime and Baby Royal was heading to daycare. I’m happy to say both of those are working out great! However, dad has to drop her off at daycare every day and that takes extra time.
I could typically get in 2-4 hours of computer time a night if I wanted to. I’d use that time for email, web site updating, on-line game playing, surfing, blog updating, and poker. For the last two months I’ve probably had 25-30% of my normal computer time. In fact, I hardly played a hand of online poker during March. Baby Royal has started going to bed pretty regularly now and I’ve got some decent online playing in the last week. More on that below.
As mentioned above I don’t want to do a bunch of quick junk posts. I’m writing this stuff for my benefit and maybe someone else can learn something too. As all bloggers know it is tough to keep cranking out posts with good “unique” content. Updating got to be more of a chore…which was another reason it got dumped down the priority list. I still enjoy writing and want to keep doing this. I think setting the goal of one post per week makes it seem like a reasonable task.
I went through about 1.5 months of cold cards. I’m not talking about bad beats…just bad starting hands. Hot steaks do happen! Cold streaks do happen! It’s tough to get motivated to write about poker when your cards are so bad for so long.
Quest Update
I’ve played very little online poker lately and very little of that has been $1/$2. I’m probably averaging about 50 hands per week at those stakes. I’ll get to 10,000 hands...it’s just going to take awhile!
Omaha!
Lately I’ve been fixated on PL Omaha. I still needed a few hands to complete my last PokerStars bonus offer. As discussed previously, the required rake coupled with the caliber of players (compared to Partypoker) makes the EV on the HE tables not very attractive. So, I started playing the PLO tables again and found them to be much loser than the HE tables. Of course that is many times the nature of Omaha…I found playing only the best hands allowed me to start making a decent profit and complete my bonus.
And like a lightning bolt a thought occurred to me. If the Omaha tables on Stars are loose…what would they be like on Party? Oh yeah, as expected they are even looser. It’s very much like the PL and NL HE ring games on Party except with Omaha you give the bad players twice as much rope to hang themselves. The last ten days have been some of the most profitable I’ve ever had playing online poker.
Last
While I haven’t played much online during my time away from this Blog I have been playing frequently in real life. I’ve helped organize a monthly game which features a point series. I’m also working with AI to setup a weekly league at a local establishment.
More details on that stuff later.
Royal
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