Back to Basics

It’s been a rough month poker-wise. Since August 28th I have 23 numbers recorded for my poker play. Each number represents play at one site for that day. Of those 23, only 7 were positive with none over $150. All the rest were negative with several over $200 in the hole. Those are some rough days. I had been trying to beat the 6-max games at several different sites. I wasn’t faring too well if you couldn’t tell. For that month period it was nearly $1,400 in the hole for poker play. Good thing for deposit bonuses which totaled nearly $800 for that same period of play. So in reality I was down $600 for the past month. Not too bad when you look at it from a different angle.

Two weeks ago I bought the new iPod nano and one of the first things I did was start downloading some old episodes (back to around 38 or so) of the Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio podcast. Tomorrow I should finally catch up with Sunday’s podcast (episode 45). I’ve been playing the shows on my ride to and from work each day, which works out great. Listening to Sean, Brent, and everyone else involved in the shows has renewed my poker focus.

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Steer Clear

I had to post this here in order to warn any poker sites out there that might run into this advertising site. It’s gam bling ads DOT com (remove the spaces). They run advertising auctions and the highest bidder gets the ad space. I noticed they were getting some good ad rates so I contacted them about getting me some advertising for Poker Chip Tricks because the site gets a lot of traffic. Michael contacted me asking for monthly page views and unique visitors. I informed him in my first email back that the stats provided by my host sucked and the numbers were way too high. So I offered him the numbers provided by my Google Ads and those by Poker Blogs Topsite which are both real counts of each page loaded. He didn’t trust the data.

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Soaring Eagle

This weekend I headed over to CMU to party with some of my friends for one of their birthdays. I got pretty wasted on Friday, and on Saturday I decided to pay a visit to the Indians at the Soaring Eagle Casino. I arrived at the casino about 3:00 p.m. and headed straight to the poker room. I put my name on the list for 3-6 hold ’em and took out $60 in chips. After about a 10 minute wait they called my name and I took a seat. Things were pretty slow for the first couple of hours as my chip stack stayed around $100, but at least I wasn’t down. Things started to pick up pretty heavily around 8-9 p.m. when I took down a nice series of pots, boosting my stack to around $250 or so. I had a nice run going and I thought it was about to get even better.

I limped from the button with A4 suited with 4-5 players to the flop. The flop came down a rainbow 3 5 9. The big blind raised and a player in middle position (player 2) and I both called. The turn brought a 2 making my 5-high straight. The big blind again raised, called by player 2 and reraised by me. The big blind now reraised me back and I capped the betting. Player 2 called every bet making this 3 players to the river. The river brought a 6, now the big blind checked and player 2 raised. ??? Odd play, so I just called and so did the big blind. The big blind showed 9 5 for a flopped two pair, I showed a 6-high straight and player 2 showed 4 7 offsuit for a 7-high straight. Talk about a bad beat, player 2 called preflop, a flop, and a capped turn with 4 7 offsuit and nothing more than a gutshot straight draw.

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One-on-One

Tonight I played a total of 6 heads-up SNGs on Bodog, ranging from $5 to $30. I won 4 out of 6 and finished up $25 for the night. I’m going to concentrate on playing a lot of these for awhile as well as other SNGs and MTTs. I need a change from the limit games for a bit. Maybe I’ll be able to shake off the bad beats I kept running into at the 6-max games.

I felt good about my play tonight. One of the losses came when I had to push with KsJs againstac2c. After the turn I had an open-ended straight draw, a flush draw, and a K or J for the win. That’s 21 outs if I added right. Can’t ask for a much better draw.

I find that in these heads up battles I fare the best if I’m aggressive, because then I’m able to trap the other player at some point. They see you raising and raising, so when you don’t come at them, they won’t believe you when you come over the top of them. All they remember is the constant aggression and when you come out with the passive play it automatically means weakness. This doesn’t work against the aggressive opponents though, so I just try to use their constant aggression against them with a few bluff raises.

If I had some long term results I think I’d find out that I win much more often against passive players than aggressive ones.

Introducing…

Hi, my name is Isaac Momrik, I am Nick’s brother. I have been asked by my brother to write for 2holecards.com to add a little something new for the site. I will be sharing some of my personal tips along with some of my personal experiences for your entertainment. For my first blog I would just like to give a little personal information. I attend Saginaw Valley State University where I work with Nick for ITS. I am majoring in Computer Engineering and plan to transfer to Kettering University at the end of the school year. I am a regular player of Full Tilt Poker and I am looking to add a few more sites to my list. You can usually find me around the lower no-limit games and in all types of no-limit Sit n Go’s. Look for DigitalChip on FullTilt and stay tuned for future tips and updates on my poker life.