AKQJ10's Poker Blog

It’s a peculiar property of poker that I can leave the Gold Strike about $550 richer than when I started today and still feel like I was a colossal failure.   It’s an even worse property of NLHE that I feel this way as the result of one hand.
First of all, you should know that my [...]

My idea is to post one hand a day here as I’m going back and reviewing ICM decisions that I wasn’t sure about. However, the problem is going to be chosing one hand each day as “the one”, in part because I’m not sure that the specific holes in my knowledge are all [...]

It’s been way too long since I’ve updated.    Eventually my hope is to make this blog more of an educational effort, including educational for me, via hand discussions, general theory discussions, etc.   But I also want to keep some of my poker friends who follow this via the RSS feed up to date on my [...]

I’ve been really low-key about poker for the last week.  Over the Labor Day holiday I took some time off work and made three trips down to Tunica, but this weekend for unrelated personal reasons I spent several days away from Memphis.
Playing at Tunica last Sunday was pretty interesting, though.  It was packed not just [...]

I’m going to try doing a “hand history” a little bit differently.   Here’s a situation I was in last night, but I’m not going to state my hole cards at the start.   I’d like feedback on:
1. Is my general approach sound?
2. What range should I be looking to make this play with?
Situation
Horseshoe Tunica $2-5 No-limit [...]

Actually I don’t make many bold bluffs at live no-limit, because I don’t trust many opponents to fold.   (The ones I make tend to be too small to be that effective; then again, the problem is that making pot-sized river bluffs seems dangerous until you know your opponent well enough to know his calling range.)   [...]

This has very little with improving as a poker player, but I really enjoy tracking silly little patterns like this.   (For example, the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament, I’m always tracking nice tidy patterns like that no 3-seeds but two 4-seeds and two 5-seeds lost so far.)
Anyway, last weekend I played about 12 [...]

Lesson #1, of course, is protect your hand. I propose that lesson #2 be something like, “Don’t blurt out information about your hand, no matter how certain you are that it won’t affect the hand.”

A friend reminded me the other day that it’s been a while since I posted hand histories. Let’s rectify that.
First of all, here’s a hand [#3] I posted a few days ago on Ed Miller’s site involving a “thin” river value bet (TPTK on a flushed and paired board). I’m not good [...]

My second hand discussion from yesterday is a bit more straightforward.   I build a big pot with pocket tens, flop an overpair, and face a tough decision.