Cardrunners, goals

Finally signed up for cardrunners a couple days ago. Doylefish commented on an old post that he wouldn't recommend it, but by that time it was too late. Anyway, I think I've heard enough good feedback about it (from lucko, mag and urbluffingme) to want to check it out anyway.

So far I've watched a couple SNG videos by actionjeff and stinger which were both decent. I was surprised at how tight actionjeff was playing in it early on. I always thought I played tight in them, but his play made mine look LAGtardesque. I'm definitely gonna check out a few more of these videos. I think that my early round play is decent and my bubble play is solid enough (at least, compared to my competition) but I definitely have to put some more work into situations where it's 5-6 handed with pretty high blinds.

I played a few a couple days ago and didn't run too well. I took a couple sick beats, but overall I definitely could've made some better decisions. I have to do some more $-equity analysis for the marginal situations when there are still 5 or 6 players left but my effective stack dictates I jam or fold. It can be difficult, though, because it's hard to give players accurate ranges when they keep shifting their opening ranges (correctly or not) as the blinds increase and players drop out. This is accentuated because I have been playing the turbos on FT a lot which have really fast levels, so the readjustments at a certain point in the tournaments are occurring very often. I should probably switch back to the regular SNGs, but the sick action junky in me wants to play turbos for some reason.

Back to cardrunners, I've watched 3 of sbrugbys 4 videos so far. This guy is a genius. One thing he's mentioned a lot so far is that if you keep continuing to fire (on flop, sometimes on turn) with your hands like AK/AQ/etc. that whiff on the flop, it protects your big pairs from opponents who are trying to set mine against them. It's a really great concept and something I definitely need to put more thought into. I think that's basically the idea behind an old cbal post that in turn referenced an old 2+2 post. I'm not entirely sure it's the same thing, because the 2+2 thread was pretty damn confusing. If it is saying the same thing, Townsend dumbed it down enough for a dolt like me to understand.

His PLO video was really interesting too. It made me feel like I need to pick up that game again. I know that I've played a little bit of HA games (half PLHE, half PLO) on Full Tilt, and they've been really juicy.

So, goals for the near future:
1) Improve my NL cash game. This has been a constant goal of mine for a while. I have a few leaks I definitely have to work on, but easily my biggest is playing too long when losing and too short when winning.
2) Work out all of the kinks in my SNG game. This is gonna take a while and a lot of work. I was thinking about this last night, and I believe that the top tier of SNG players have put in more hard, solid analysis into their games than any other form of specialist, particularly mathematical analysis.
3) Start playing PLO a little more regularly again. People in the lowest limits (maybe higher, but I'm not really qualified to be the judge of that) seem to play the game pretty atrociously, so as long as I can tackle the variance of the game and put in a little more study, I'm not too worried about beating the low limits.

On a non-poker related note, my friend Justin, an English major at Kent, got a typewriter the other day. Every time someone has come over to his place to hang out, he's coerced them into writing a haiku on it. His blog so far has been dedicated to writing acrostics using a word of the day calendar, but we just started a new one to throw haikus on. I'm sure this is painfully interesting for anyone reading my blog for poker content.

Alright, that's about all for now. Arielle is going back to school tomorrow night, so I will probably be playing about 10x more hands per week soon than I have the past two weeks.