It’s been a challenging week. I’ve had to deal with the disappointing court news and I also began my climb up the new chip stack mountain at FullTiltPoker.NET.

After spending some time at the Limit tables, I decided to do something I’ve generally been against: spending real money for virtual items. The madness of the low stakes tables was removing all the fun and challenge of playing, so I spent ten dollars and bought 1.5 million play chips so I could play in better games. This gave me a big enough bankroll to comfortably play 100/200 No Limit stakes, where the max buy in for the table is 20k. Stepping up in stakes meant stepping up my game, as I quickly learned when I started losing – I started out overplaying some idiot range hands and was down about 80k after a few sessions. Time for a break and some studying.

I started out by watching all of Daniel Negraneau’s Poker Academy videos.
This is a great series of lessons from one of the world’s top players. It had been a while since I’d read a poker book or watched lessons, and my game needed help. Sometimes just a basic refresher is good. After the Poker Academy lessons, I started looking for more specific training on the math and probabilities involved in hands and I found an excellent teacher in James “SplitSuit” Sweeney’s Poker Bank series. SplitSuit delves deep into the math and other topics like, “Should I fear the flush?”, “Can I fold getting sick pot odds?”, “Value betting postflop” and the like.

After spending several hours studying the vids I returned to playing the 100/200 tables with much better results. I tightened up my range, listened to my instincts better, and put in hours at the tables grinding away. I didn’t go for big wins, generally opting to avoid getting involved in big pots, and did my best to take and maintain the lead (control) when I got involved in a pot. I stopped playing a lot of OOP (Out Of Position) hands and opened up my range when I had position. Over the course of the week I worked my way up from 1.42m to 1.68m chips, making back all that I lost initially and turning a net profit of about 160k. Not bad for a week’s worth of work. 🙂