This Charming Man (He Knows So Much About These Things)

I haven't played too much recently. This past week I've played less than 500 hands, which is rare for me. My game's been decent, but I find myself occasionally making big mistakes, realizing it, but following through with them anyway.

I've been four-tabling the $200 buy-in games on Absolute the past couple weeks, and it's a pretty good game. I'm definitely not beating it at a solid enough clip to be copacetic, but it's definitely been profitable.

I've found both my aggression factor and my preflop raise %'s decrease slightly after switching my site-of-choice from UB and FTP to Absolute. This is mainly a function of three very specific things-- 1) people are limping a lot more, which allows me to limp in behind with position more often (obviously, I'm raising behind a lot too) which is also helped by the stacks being twice as deep, 2) people seem to donk bet much more often, and specifically, they will make smaller bets throughout the hand. I raise these a lot too, but I'm calling more than I would on another site. Third, people min-raise a lot more so I'm calling much more loosely from the blinds.

Speaking of acting behind limpers, Andy Bloch's section in the new Full Tilt book brought up something that I hadn't considered much before-- he says that when you have position and people limp in front of you, you should be more apt to limp behind than to raise. His reason is that by raising, you're punishing them, but eventually they realize they shouldn't be limping and adjust to a raise-or-fold mentality, which is obviously bad for us because it's a more correct way to play. This is contradictory to the way I see a lot of the higher stakes pros play, especially in Cardrunners videos (Taylor and Brian especially). During this month, my limp with previous callers WR and my WR for any hands I VP$IP are nearly identical. My "any raise" WR is double this rate, but there are obvious differences between these things. I haven't been able to filter out raising limpers, so if anyone knows how to do it, let me know.

It's definitely an interesting problem. In a vacuum, I would nearly always prefer raising over limping, especially if we're 200+BB deep. Since we aren't, however, it would be nice to figure out a way to be able to play aggressively and take the lead in hands, while at the same time not deter people from playing weakly preflop.

In other news, I'm quitting my job at Coleman. Tuesday night is my last night. One of the reasons I haven't played much lately is because I've been working for my dad more, which has more regular hours, similar pay and a shorter drive than Coleman. Of course, I have to get up early in the morning and can't manage to go to sleep until late, so I've been too tired to want to play cards too much, especially if I'm already making small mistakes.

I also got an apartment in Ravenna. I'll probably put up some pics once I get some. I'm moving in on July 15th. In the meantime, this is as good as I've got:



This pic is actually an inversion of what the place looks like, but whatever. It's smallish, but it's nice and close to school. I can't wait to move in.