August Update

Sorry to my fellow readers for not updating the blog since early August. But I have an excuse! I was busy ... playing poker :-)

I played exclusively tournaments for more than a year now as most of you may know. But I decided that it was time to get back into the cashgames. First I played some live games and addded then online cash games. For the live games I played $1/$2 (mostly PL) while the online play was mostly $0.5/$1 NL.

I logged a total of 6,721 hands in 105.5 hours playing online (no multi-tabling, just one table at a time!). Therefore I reached one of my goals and became Silver Star at PokerStars. Unfortunately I wasn't able to reach the more important goal (winning money) as I ended up in the red. I had a good start but ran into the worst downswing I ever had in poker. For a full week I wasn't able to win any coinflip, hit any important flop, and so on. The total downswing was 10 Stacks from my 2 stacks peak. I can blame about two or three stacks to my own mistakes but at least seven stacks are definately belonging to the bad side of variance.

I am now using PokerTracker, especially for analysing my own game. My latest stats still could be better but I think I'm on the right path here:

• VPIP 17.54%
• PF-Raise: 8.37%
• Total AF 1.37

My total bankroll would have allowed to continue with $0.5/$1 NL but losing half of what I put aside as a cash game bankroll was a major hit. So I decided to step down to $0.25/$0.5 NL. I will stay there until I get back at least 50% of my previous loss.

Regarding tournaments I had good and bad times but today missed a huge opportunity. In the $25,000 guaranteed $3+$0.30 Rebuy at PokerStars I was in a good position (around 30th place) with 250 of 2,203 left. I received AKo in late position but had a 6 times raise (8,000) and a call in front of me from two stacks that really could hurt me if they pushed on the flop. Additionally I had a much bigger stack behind me in the big blind. So I chickend out here just to see an AAx flop. Oh my god! The initial raiser bet out 18,000 and the caller folded. This hand would have put me in a huge position. Shortly after I lost two coinflips (no complaints as I had my share of good luck in that tournament) and went out 206th (winning some pocket money).

The registration for the IPO in Dublin is open for another four weeks. They have now almost 100 players signed up and another 100 that said they will sign up later that month. I'm not sure they will reach the 1,000 but I expect them to get past 500 without any problems. I'm registered, my flight and hotel is booked ... so I will be there. If there are any players from Germany, Austria, Switzerland that will be there too (and I haven't contacted you yet) please get in touch with me. There will be a little story about two weeks before the event at IntelliPoker. And of course we will try to follow the results of the german speaking players during the event.

Shortly before my trip to Dublin I will be in Vienna for a dancing competition. I haven't decided yet if I will play the €80+15 Rebuy at the Concord during the Austrian Classics [PF=9.84-11.98] but I will play some tournaments at the Poker Royal Casino in Wiener Neustadt (50 km south of Vienna).

Beside that I will continue playing cashgames online and hopefully will be able to play some cashgame in Vienna too.