My Mom just got another knee replacement and has been laid up since Monday.  She came through pretty good and I’m sure she will be up and about and jetsetting the world again soon.

Emily talks so much that I am shocked (!) that there are words left for me to write down.  If there is a finite number of them, she will use them all up at some point.  Jonathan is the exact opposite.  He is just starting to use sentences to communicate, but his progress is remarkable and distinct, so I am very optimistic about him reaching age-appropriate communication skills in the future.  We have long worried about his speech development, but he is plenty clever, so I don’t think he has any delays past his speech.  He runs DVDs and computers at 4 years old, he’s no slouch.

As I said in the last post, I’ve opened up an online T-shirt shop at www.pokertease.biz.  It has clever (IMO) sayings about poker and I think many players will enjoy the sentiments.  Well, the ones wearing the shirts will enjoy it, their opponents, not so much. 

I have guys working outside my house replacing bad fascia and soffits and painting and scraping and generally sprucing things up a bit.  It’s not particularly shocking about how much needs to be done, the house was vacant for some time and quite neglected even prior to it’s vacancy, so nature does take over fairly quickly.  I’m excited about the facelift, it just feels weird watching someone else work on my house.  I’m supposed to be that dude.  A few months from now, I will be right back at it.  Can’t wait.

Poker, poker, poker, poker.  That’s what I’m doing while I’m off.  I’ve already set the bar at profiting 2k during my off time.  I didn’t really base the number on anything, I just pulled it out of my …, ya know.  But now it has been said and that is what I’m going for.  Wish me luck.

I hope that this catches most people back up to my current state of affairs.  See you at the tables, if you play.  If you have anything you want to talk about feel fre to call, email, or comment.  I’ve got time.

I am tickled to announce that today is that day.

UPDATE:  If you see this post more than one day old, you may be confused.  I didn’t keep my winning ways, so I am now slightly in the negatives again.  It won’t be long , however, until it is positive permanently.

You’d be wrong. The average $10 dollar player is definitely not twice as good (or even, in my opinion, significantly better) than a $5 player. He/she is just willing to bet twice as much. That’s all. There are weirdo’s, lunatics, suckers and fish at every level. The only real benefit to someone like me building up his stack slowly and starting out at the lower levels is that you can figure out how to navigate around these people far less expensively at the $2 and $5 level.

They haven’t published the 2009 WSOP schedule yet, but I already know that there will be a $1500 buy-in tourney that I’m interested in starting that Saturday and going thru Monday. There is one of various stripes going on about all the time. If there aren’t any No Limit Hold ‘Em tourneys in the designated time, I will get into a Razz or Badugi tourney.  Those are both types of poker I tend to do fairly well in and would expect to money.  That is my expectation, reality is not always in accord with what I expect.

This trip, as it was last year, is for the sole purpose of magnifying my spot in WSOP history.

About the same time I told Dave about my good play, I stopped doing that.  I got loose and instead of duplicating the unpredictable play I had been using, I just played.  Everything.  It is easy in poker to forget that there is a time and a place for everything and you start believing that is just your particular brand of awesomeness that is creating your success, not the exploitation of others weaknesses.

All poker success boils down to exploiting other people’s weakness.  Your strength is never all that strong.  Even with the best hand in No Limit Hold ‘Em (which is a pair of Aces), you are still only about a 7 to 1 favorite against any random hand.  So any fool that decides to push all his chips into the middle against you still has a 15% chance of coming out on top.  And there is no way you are going to get AA every hand.  So it only gets worse from there.  All that was to say, the strongest of hands isn’t all that strong and doesn’t win every time.  But a weak player can be beat time and time again if you just figure out what scares him and, just as important, what emboldens him.

So we have established that I have been donking it up for the past few days.  I had told Dave when I was still on my winning high, that by the end of January I wanted to be back to being a profitable player on my Sharkscope rating.  That didn’t look like it was going to happen after the donkfest, I was still roughly -$200 over the course of 950+ tourneys.

I joined a $2 buy-in 180 player Sit N Go on Full Tilt.  Over the course of the next 2.5 hours I did something absolutely wonderful.  I regained my unpredictable play.  I used table position ruthlessly and confused the crap out of a bunch of players.  I made a few mistakes, but only a few and usually against players who couldn’t really hurt me.  I was even the tourney short stack once at the final table, but came back out swinging and quickly regained my position.  Heads up, I got outdrawn one time and ended up being a 10 to 1 (or worse, I can’t exactly recall) underdog, came back out swinging again and beat the snot out of my opponent.  It was beautiful.  Did I get lucky?  Hell, yeah.  You have to if you are going to win a tournament.  Remembering that I was never that weak, nor my opponents that strong, did way for me than winning a few coin flips, though.

So now 179 souls are $2.25 poorer and I’m about $95 dollars richer.  I’m also now halfway to making that profitableness a reality and I’m psyched.

The plat still hasn’t been signed off on by Columbia County, so the closing has been moved back to yet another tomorrow.

On the upside of losing 5 days of work, I play really good poker when I’m mad and my Full Tilt account balance has doubled in the last couple of days.