Skip if you hate politics
Starting out on something non-poker, I’m experiencing a little bit of what I would call political tilt. I tend to disagree with Obama on a lot of idealogical issues, but i understand that there are people who, because of their personal values, agree with him on those issues. That’s perfectly fine, and that diversity of ideas is a big part of what makes the US great in my opinion. How people feel about idealogical topics is a function of their religion (or lack thereof), upbringing, and personal experiences.

What really does bug me though, is when people who have absolutely no sense of how the economy works say things like, “well Obama is clearly stronger on the economy, so he’ll do well in that area” or, “I can’t wait for Obama to get elected so our economy can get fixed.” A simple “why” or “how” asked after they make a statement like that seems to completely baffle them. Just because you like a candidate’s personality or some of his ideas does not make him strong on everything. Just because you hate George Bush, and Obama is the antithesis of George Bush, does not mean that everything Obama likes is necessarily good for you or the economy.

If we were to be completely honest, the President himself doesn’t even have an overwhelming effect on the economy in any immediate term. The economy has always, and will always, go in a cycle of boom/bust. The president can encourage congress to present him with legislation that can change the ways or rates by which people and entities are taxed. The president has influence into the budget and can pass legislation that has an effect on the way the capital markets function. All of this takes a long time (often years) to shake out, and expecting any candidate to have any sort of immediate effect on the economy is mind bogglingly ignorant. The thing that has one of the most immediate and transaparent effects on the economic status of the country are taxes, so…

A final thought before I move onto poker: jobs are created when and only when companies have the cash to expand. If companies don’t have enough cash, they usually cut the expense easiest to cut: people. Changing the tax rate increases or decreases the amount of cash companies people have. Your personal tax rate doesn’t matter much if you don’t have a job anymore. AMIRITE? (go here and please educate yourself if you actually care about any of this, because if you say “obama is better for the economy” in front of me and can’t explain why, i’m going to hit you as hard as I can).

So on to poker, let’s start with a graph.

horrifying isn’t it? Yeah, I agree. This is hold em only (LO8 not included), some hands are missing because of the difficulty in converting cake hands to a format that works with Pokertracker 3, and the hands are only loosely in chronological order because of the lack of timestamps. It’s safe to say that each 2k hands happenned before the previous 2k, but within that 2k, they could be nearly backwards. All that said, it does provide a lot to talk about.

1. The massive dropoff
A shot at $100NL HU. Started well with me stacking my first opponent, who then rebought and stacked me 3 times. Partially bad play, partially coolers. Not a lot can be done about flush over flush heads up 100BB deep. Positives: I set a 2.5 BI stop loss and stuck to it.

2. The slightly slower decline immediately afterwards (hand 7500ish)
A direct function of me trying to get money back at a rate faster than should be normal. Here my red line starts to decline. Basically, I was putting way too much money in pots I had a very low probability of winning. Most of this was calling WAY too many 3-bets against opponents who were far too tight. ie. I raise 67dd to 2 from LP, the button who i don’t recall even ever playing a hand repops to 9, and i call. What the hell is my plan there? It’s not playing intentionally and it’s a great way to lose money fast. Sure, if i hit a 66A flop and he has AK instead of AA or KK i stack him, but how often does that happen?

3. Around hand 12k or so I switched to full ring only. Apparently the players at full ring are way way more predictable. Obv some of this is positive variance, but here’s my full ring graph…

4. Playing more deliberately. Roughly around the same time as switching to full ring. For me this means blocking out as many distractions as possible. I’ll go over my ritual in another blog because this is so long already, but this has been very crucial and is something to always strive to do when you sit down. For me, the difference between my A and C game is so pronounced, that there’s almost no reason to play if I’m not going to sit down in a state of focus and do everything I need to in order to win. Why waste time playing poker not playing my best when there are a ton of things I could be doing that are way more productive, even within the realm of poker?

I’m reading Elements of Poker right now by Tommy Angelo and it’s really fantastic. It isn’t a strategy book for how to play hands, but more of a strategy book for how to approach poker.

Also, if I ever use a poker term that’s not clear (for those of you reading that aren’t super familiar with online poker terminology), this is a great place for terminology.

I think this first post is going to come across very awkardly because, despite being able to talk about poker for hours on end, I’m not exactly sure where to start.  It’s strange to introduce myself as most of the people who will bother to try and read this already know who I am, at least in a very vague sense.  I do feel obligated to start there though in case you misclicked your way here and have some strange variant of OCD that forces you to read everything you find.

My name is Mike, I’m 25, and I run good at life.  I was raised by amazing parents who instilled in me the value of hard work and provided me every opportunity to succeed if I met them halfway with that work.  In high school I did everything from playing the male lead in my school’s productions of “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “I Remember Mama” to playing football and running track, to helping lead music for our YoungLife club.  If you had told anyone I knew in high school that I would wind up as an accountant, they would have laughed at you. 

However… I went to Baylor in 2001 intending to get a BFA in theatre performance and a minor in business and graduated in December 2005 with a BBA and Masters in Accounting.  I’m not even that good at math.  I’m very right brained, something you would normally find in artists, musicians, or salespeople.  When I took a job in public accounting, easily one of the least rewarding professions of all time, it was clear that this was not a long term career move.  Luckily, after 2 years I made a move to another accounting type job that actually lets me go home to see my wife, build relationships with people, and do some independent thinking.  As far as accounting jobs for someone my age, it’s about as good as it gets. 

Speaking of my wife, she’s fantastic.  We met in youth group at church in high school and started dating between freshmen and sophomore years of college.  She’s beautiful, creative, and has an amazing sense of humor that’s as close to mine as anyone on earth.  Basically, I run good at life.  Also, she’s an entrepreneur and the owner and head designer of kaleighkarin.com, a company that does the digital design of wedding and other albums.  We recently bought and completely remodeled our second house.  We have two terriers: magnadoodle and pirate.  I told you I run good at life.

So none of this has any bearing whatsoever on poker, but now maybe you feel a little like you know me.  As to my poker history, I started playing with my fraternity in college, in a $5 game every Thursday night.  Having a freakish love of competition between friends, I started reading poker books.  As a big fan of Daniel Negreanu, I decided to make a deposit on fullcontactpoker.com the first day it opened its online poker room.  I played a $5 tournament that night as my first real foray into the online world and won it for around $400.  What a freaking luckbox, am I right? 

Eventually, during my first year of work in public, having worked 70 hours as of a Saturday night, I went up to Oklahoma to give live poker a shot for the first time.  Borderline overwhelmed, I sat at a 2-5 NL table.  Somewhere between flopping a set of queens my first hand and soulreading someone calling them down with queen high when I put him on jack high, I got over my intimidation pretty quickly. 

I’ve gotten to do some cool stuff through poker, including playing at the second FCP Protégé final table in the Bahamas, playing at Bellagio with James Woods, and having some moderate success at the World Series of Poker this year, where I finished 13^th in a $1,500 7 card stud hi/lo split 8 or better event.  “You went to the WSOP and played what?”  Yeah, I know, strange choice if you don’t know that I often prefer non-hold ‘em games.  I’ll get into why another day.

So what am I doing now? Well, doing that whole new house thing the right way this time meant spending my whole bankroll between down-payment and remodel.  For the next 4 months I’ll be playing primarily on Cake with the help of a backer, and I’ll be posting my journey and results here, as well as discussing whatever I feel like related to poker or not.  This is already quite long, so I’ll just post this graph as a teaser for my next entry, tentatively titled “The Different Types of Bad”.  I think there are comments you can leave, so feel free to tell me I’m retarded and can’t write!