…well, not quite yet, still another week of work before I’m free to celebrate christmas, the new year and get myself in the hunt for my diploma thesis. So, the “good to be back” refers to my game 😉

I started the evening with a token satellite on Full Tilt. Well, let’s just say that the first hand was the last one too. I just couldn’t get away from the hand, although all the signs were there – min raise preflop, reraise on the flop…I guess I was a little too excited about flopping two pair…oh well…

After that disappointment I took a seat at some crazy HA tables. It’s really surprising how many players are playing these without having the first clue about Omaha, lol. Still couldn’t start a bigger running and dropped a buyin. Not all that good.

So I fired up bodog and played some HU SnGs. Won the first two, then lost the next two. That really sucked, so I decided to quit HU for the night and as I checked the MTT tab I saw that the 2.5k guaranteed was about to start. The low buyin of 7$ + 0,50$ made the decision even easier.

Hours played: roughly 3.5

Times I was all-in and at risk: twice, early with a flip AK vs JJ…and then in the last hand..but more about that one below.

So I bumped and grinded and sometimes I really got a rush of cards (I must have held AA about four times, QQ about five times and some other lower pairs, but apart from that, well…not much). I had one goal for this tourney:

[Guess 1] Make money – nope

[Guess 2] Get down to last x players – nope

[Guess 3] Not get sucked out on – nope

The correct answer is: make correct decisions – and it worked out pretty good. It’s weird how sometimes a little pointer “back to basics” can really help you find your game again. After plowing through Super System II (highly recommended, but it’s sooo full of concepts and numerous games that you will have to read, re-read and re-re-read it on a regular basis), I started to read my next poker book entitled Pauly’s blog errm “The Tao of Poker”. It’s a set of 285 rules to “transform your game”. Well, I don’t know about the transformation part, but they certainly help. I only read the first 25 or something so far, as I said, I started to read it last night and I gotta get some sleep sometime, so can’t be reading all night. The first ones were really basic, but although you know all the concepts/ideas/rules (know when you’re beat; poker is a grind; ..) are clear and you probably have them all inside your head, but re-reading them really helps as they can’t get lost and/or blocked by other thoughts like “yeeehaaaw…donkey’s catch all the time, let me try this”…

But back to the tourney. There were 319 entrants, so the final four tables are ITM. As I already said, I went on a little rush early, before hovering around average most of the time. There are really only two hands I regret: one was when I bluffed off half my stack when we were about to get down to the last 3 tables. The last one was the last hand…at the final table 🙂 🙁

Yes, the final table…

…about time I saw one of these again. It’s been a while. (Side note: Don’t be fooled by the hand stats, this is for the whole session, so roughly the first 100 hands of that were HU with my usual 80+% flops seen)

Within the first orbit I busted though. After the first player was knocked out in the second hand of the final table, I was eager to play my AQo from LP…and why do I regret this hand?

[1] Remember the old “don’t go broke with a Queen in your hand”-mantra? It’s what crossed my mind before I raised preflop.

[2] I still had a chance to get away from the hand after the flop. Although the roughly 17k with 1k/2k blinds and 200$ antes would have forced me to make a move soon after that anyway (I started the hand with just under 23k, standard 3xBB preflop raise).

As you can see in the following screenshot, the flop came down Kc, 4d, Qc and my opponent insta-over-pushes. Well, what could he be pushing with? What was he calling with preflop? Basically it could have been any two cards preflop (BB, big stack), but after the push I should have believed the hand he claimed (Kx, maybe even with a flush draw) and waited for a better spot (within the next 8-10 hands). But oh well…I called and he showed KJ…turn K…river…K…them quads beetches! At least I lost to a really good hand…

Out in 8th of 319. I’m cool with that. Needless to say that I would have loved to move up some spots as the payout were starting to be really cool in the higher final table spots (1st – 625$, 2nd – 400$, 3rd – 277,50$, ..)…but hey…as I said earlier on, this one wasn’t for the money, it was for my mental game health – if there’s such a thing 😉

Last monday, November 13th 2006, marked the one year anniversary of poker-tastic.com and basically the end of my first year in online poker…and what a wild ride it has been.

I started out on fire, had the usual swings every now and then and I can’t even count the number of hands I’ve played, the hours I’ve spent playing the game, thinking about it, talking about and writing about it. Well, so far so good, it’s been worth every cent invested and every hour spent!

Ups:

1. “Meeting” all the (poker) broggers who enjoy the game as much as I do.

2. Playing with all the broggers in numerous events (WWdN, DADI, Mook, etc)

3. Learning a lot

Downs:

1. Playing against donkeys day in day out.

2. Treading water

I’d like to take a minute and have a closer look at my results for the first year:

Counting all money deposited vs all money withdrawn (yup, I actually withdraw money from time to time) I’m a losing player for the first year. How much did I lose? The grand total of 29 dollars. *lol* So nothing to worry about. Most of this can be credited to a handful of “facts”:

1. It’s tough to stay ahead of the rake at the levels I started out (and still play for the most part, 5-10$ SnGs, 25NL, …). If you add the call-happy donks and variance, it’s really tough.

(2. I “donated” quite a bit of money to brogger community by playing in a lot of brogger tourneys. To be honest I had no business in some of them – early on when my “roll” consisted of 50 bucks at Stars (buyins usually at 10+1) and I had little to none experience in NL Hold’em. But ‘s all good, I marked that down as an investment/amusement charge and in retrospect it was well worth it!)
But I’m not here to make excuses, especially as the combined grandtotal makes me a winner for the first year. Combined grandtotal? Yup, add everything that was earned with online-poker and substract everything that was bought for poker (books, buyins, etc). As I did some bonus whoring (PokerSavvy, PokerSourceOnline) along the way and due to the fact that I earn some bucks with (text/review) ads on here, I’m up…and I hope that’ll stay that way in the future.As for the future: One thing’s for sure…I’m really looking forward to the next year in online poker 🙂

If I’ll step up (money wise) or not, is yet to be decided as I don’t see online-poker as my “second income” (yet). So, I guess you can look forward to yet another year of low-limit-donkery, enjoy! 🙂

Well, what brings me to this topic? The fact that a new site opened yesterday. It’s called ReviewMe and is offering bloggers an opportunity to make extra cash.

The concept is quite old, but the platform is new, although basically the same as with text-link-ads (aff). You register an account and add your blog(s) to the marketplace, where people looking for advertising opportunities can find you. They can order a review of their site/product/whatever from you for an automatically calculated amount x – which is based on stuff like Google PR, Technorati Ranking, etc, so the more “blog juice” your blog has the more money you will earn for the review. If someone orders a review, you get a message telling you that there is a new request. Then you can have a look and you can either accept it, or decline within the next 48 hours. If you accept it you’ve got another 48 hours to write the post, which needs to be clearly labeled as being sponsored. Once you’re done, you submit the link (to the sponsored review) to the system and that’s that. The cut of ReviewMe is 50% which sounds steep, but they hand you the customers and handle all the payment stuff etc, so it’s basically alright. Especially due to the fact that you can be sure that you’ll receive your money in a timely manner and I prefer having 50% in my pocket opposed to chasing down the promised x > 50% on other sites.

As for poker-tastic: as it’s my poker-blog and basically an almost ad-free zone (if you discount the fact that I slapped some poker room banners on it, which have earned me the whooping sum of 0$ thus far and some text-links, which are earning nice cash), I decided to only accept reviews that are related to poker-products/poker-sites etc.

So, I just wanted to let you readers know that there might be some review posts coming up in the near future (truth be told, the first one is already lined up as I got the first review request within 4hours of signing up)…I hope you all don’t mind, after all I gotta pay the server somehow and I dislike using part of the (ever so small) poker roll… 🙂

[This sponsored review has been brought to you by ReviewMe]