December and January recap

I guess it's really been a while since I have posted on here, so sorry to anyone who counts on it to maintain stability in their life. I guess I'll just use this post to kind of give a catch up summary.

During my last post I was in the middle of the worst downswing of my life. On all of the forums and blogs that I read, there are always a few very good players talking about downswings, but I had never really experienced one for as long as this one. It only lasted for about the first 10 days of December, but I put in a large volume of hands, so it was probably about equivilant to how many hands I usually play in 20 days or so. It was pretty tough some of the time, but I was very proud of how I responded. By Dec. 20 I was back to even for the month, and then ended up actually having a very solid month.

I continued to play very well in January and had an excellent month. I played live 6 times and the rest was online, and I played very little the last week or so of Jan. I am going to be coaching the Laguna Beach HS JV baseball team, so I had a bunch of stuff to do for that, and I had friends visiting. I also got an XBox 360 and I've been playing a lot of Madden against my friends and online. It's nice to start the year off well.

The LA Poker Classic is going on right now at Commerce Casino and I have played in 3 of the events so far. This is one of the top 10 tournament series of the year worldwide. Like other tournament series, they start with smaller buy-ins, and end with a main event, which is a 10K buy-in for the LAPC. I played in two $540 buy-ins and a $1070. I haven't cashed yet, and the closest I came was last night in the 1060 when I busted 43rd or so and 27 places paid. The two times that I had a lot of chips in the pot were when I had AA vs. KK all-in preflop and a K flopped, and my final hand when a big stack raised preflop and I went all-in with AQ. He called with J10, which was borderline only because I didn't have a ton of chips, otherwise it would have been horrendous. Obviously a jack on the flop sent me packing. I feel like I've been playing well and I'm a break or two away from making a run at one of these. One cool thing about yesterday was that I sat next to Hevad Khan for a couple hours. He took 4th or 5th in the main event of the world series last year which was good for a million+ dollar payday. He got the most camera time of anyone by far because he acted very boisterously to put it mildly. He was actually a very cool guy and I was surprised that he instantly knew who I was when I told him my online name. Despite losing in all of these tourneys, I have been doing well in the cash games that I have been playing before and after the tourneys. I have been playing 10-20 No limit which is new to me in the last few months. I have been doing well, and feel that I'm always in the top 1-3 players at my table. With any jump in stakes you have to get used to the increase in variance. For example, one day I lost a $7100 pot and a $4600 pot and left that day up $300. Another day I went from up 1200 to down 3600 and left up 1400. these swings are the nature of the game and I know that I am not maximizing my potential is I do not play these games that I have a large edge (advantage) in. I have hardly played any online this month, so I am up a little bit for the month despite not cashing in a tourney yet.

More updates to come...