Happy Holidays

Hope those of you who celebrate Christmas had a good one.  I had 4 days off from just about everything...no work, no poker, hardly turned on a computer.  Just chilled with the family for the most part.  We've never done big gifts...lots of family to buy for and everyone likes to buy for everyone, so it's mostly pretty small, plus Jennifer and I set a small limit on what we get for each other.  So ended up with a couple nice golf shirts and golf glove (can never have too many), plus a few other little things.

I had a decent pair of headphones for my iPhone that I think dropped out of my coat pocket at my daughter's basketball practice (she grabbed my jacket from the bleachers and tossed it to me).  Didn't notice they were missing until I got home.  Went back to the gym, and they were nowhere to be found, and no one turned them in since.  I was a little pissed because they were only a couple weeks old and cost about $100.  Yesterday, I took the family to lunch and then to see Avatar.  Total for that was about $150, which kind of put the headphones into perspective.

Good news on the poker front:  I wasn't running as bad as it's possible to run in November.  Bad news:  December proved to me that it could be worse.  I've won 2 sessions the entire month, one of those for like a $20 profit.  I've had so many hands go against me that I've started to get surprised when I get the money in with a larger pocket pair than my opponents and my hand holds.  It's a very bad, dangerous mindset.  Some worse play is starting to creep in, and a few times I've felt like I'm kind of on the edge of a major spewfest.  Hopefully the time off has helped and the next session is calmer emotionally.  You can't do anything about the cards that fall, but you can control your emotions and focus on making correct decisions.

Went to a wedding Saturday for one of my wife's college roommates.  I didn't know that many people which was too bad, but it was still a nice time.  Was talking with the bride's brother, who lives in the town next to where I grew up.  He starts rattling off some of his buddies, and I knew every one of them.  Small world.

Oh, about Avatar.  Think it's definitely worth catching that one in the theater.  While I don't think it was good as the hype I've been hearing, I'm still glad I saw it on the big screen in 3-D.

Not much going on

Haven't blogged in a while because I've been playing decent but running like crap, and that doesn't make for anything I really wanted to write about.  That pattern has continued this month.  I've tightened up a bit postflop, and my Went to Showdown has dropped to 22%.  But my Won $ at Showdown is only at 31%.  Not going to show good results when you win less than a third of the time at showdown, no matter what the rest of your game is doing.

The rest of my stats look OK, except my aggression on the river is pretty low.  But I've looked through some of the river calls I've made, and I'm actually doing OK with them, both decision and results wise.  It's the stuff before the river that is dragging me down.

I've been getting money in pretty good, or else in cooler situations.  I've probably passed up a few spots where I think I could be basically flipping with some dead money in the pot.  It's not so much a matter of avoiding the variance even with a small positive EV, but more when I'm not running well, I don't want to rely on my best hand/villain reading judgment...at the edges, it may be off.  And all that has been going well as far as I can see from what villains are showing down.  But I've lost to more 2-outers and 3-outers than I "should," while not hitting my own draws.

On the flip side of that is that I seem to keep running into villains with hands, or in some cases perhaps decent players taking advantage of my aggression in spots where I can't stand the heat they bring.  I'm getting a chance to make some decent folds.  One problem in the pasts was thinking that people were more out of line than they were, so even if I'm bet/folding too much, I doubt it's a lot too much, and I'm happy that I have the discipline to be able to lay down some hands in those spots rather than making some stack-committing hero calls.  To know that I can do that, even while being frustrated, is a silver lining is this rough stretch.