I'm Back

I haven't been able to blog for the past couple of weeks because I haven't had Internet access in my apartment. I have an arrangement where I pay my neighbors for access to their wifi, and recently something went wrong with their connection while they were both out of town for spring break and it wasn't fixed until today. For the same reason, I haven't been able to play online at all for the past two weeks.

However, I have logged another 25 hours or so at the Horseshoe playing 1/2 and grinding out free buffets. Ridiculously, I'm now stuck $834 over 50 hours of play. This translates to about -4bi over about 2,000 hands, which I think is within the range of results that could be characterized as standard, but still makes me feel pretty shitty because I feel like my edge at live 1/2 should be massive enough to make this kind of result highly improbable.

The unfortunately reality, though, is that I've been making lots of pretty serious mistakes and losing sizable pots for stupid reasons like not looking at villain stack sizes before barreling and having to fold to a shove getting like 7:1 because I have no pair and no draw. And the times I actually do have a pair, I get raised on the turn and don't know what to do and end up folding and having to wonder, or, worse, getting shown a worse pair by some smug fat old guy. And worst of all, nearly all of my big wins that I can recall have come from sucking out and coolering people. I feel like I've been getting more than my fair share of good luck overall and yet I'm still stuck almost a grand at a game that I feel like I should be annihilating.

Now that March is over and the free buffet promo is dead, I'm undecided about whether or not I'll be going back to the Horseshoe to try to get unstuck. About a week ago, I ran into some Cardrunners employees at my table - a guy named Micah who does graphic design and video intros and also Alex Huang, who is the brand manager for Stoxpoker. I told them I was a TFPT member and hung out with them for a while and they ended up giving me a ride home so I wouldn't have to take the degen bus. We spent the entire ride home talking poker and I gave them my contact info and they told me they would let me know the next time they went and possibly bring other Cardrunners people, so I think I'm just going to sit tight and only go with those guys instead of going back regularly and aggressively trying to get unstuck. Hope they were serious!

In other news, I finally got a new computer. It's an MSI U230 that I got on the recommendation of the Netbook thread in SH/SC on the Something Awful forums. I'm pretty happy with it overall - it's light and handles streaming video well, which it should since it has a dedicated graphics processor in addition to a dual core CPU. It should be sufficient to handle Mikogo streams so I can finally cash in on offers from #smallstakes to sweat me and help me figure out why I'm barely staying afloat at NL50.

NL50 Progress

$367.25 / $500.00 after 22,898 hands