The studying is going okay my friend. I'm putting a dent in the free material out there, and I'll be looking to start a paid program at some point.

My drinking is catching up to me again and I haven't played much. I've also been gaining weight from drinking 50 ounces (1.5 liters) of 8% malt liquor every day when I don't play, along with an additional half pint (250 ml) of whiskey at the table when I do play. It's time for a change.

I don't enjoy total abstemiousness; short of that, I need a plan. Here it is: I will be sober during the "weekdays," which means sober at the table as well. I will drink on the "weekends," but not to any more excess than my previous daily drinking. If I decide to take a day off from playing during the work week, I will not drink that day.

I didn't drink yesterday, but I didn't play or run very well either. I was at a pretty good table, but early on I lost a bunch of hands and folded others, and it seemed like everyone was beating up on me. Rather than switch tables, my adjustment was to try to make a hand and then get sticky with it vs the most aggro player at the table, who was on my left and who had been floating all of my opens.

That opportunity came when I called his EP open with A3 in the BB, then check/called 3 streets on a AT68A board.

He bet the first two streets for half pot or less, then he put out a 3/4 pot, $130 bet on the river, and my trip aces were a bluffcatcher at that point. I called and was shown the 88.

Bally's:3 hours:
(-$446)

Considering that weekends are the best times to play, wouldn't you want to move your drinking slot over to monday-tuesday?

"Weekend" in this case is in scare quotes. My weekend as a poker player is generally Monday and Tuesday, as you suggested.

roger, wp. gl and best wishes

All things considered, are you content?

Thanks for the kind words kaeru! I appreciate you.

I'm not wired for contentedness beyond the short term. Am I feeling less dissatisfaction overall? Yesss.

Duh, winning!

When one of my downswings lasts long enough it triggers an accompanying crisis of confidence, during which I present myself with Questions:

Why am I not getting better? Why am I learning so slowly? Why am I not executing new knowledge at the table? Am I forgetting what I've learned? Will I ever learn enough to make a decent living?

I am not a naturally talented poker player. I've known that from the outset, but I believed that I could make up for enough of that with hard work and determination, going back to Michael Jordan's Restaurant signs at the Mohegan Sun.




Let's be realistic: Those sort of bromides worked for him because he's Michael ****ing Jordan. He could have slacked off significantly and still have been a very good player.

Me: It should have been obvious that I wasn't putting in enough work, not more than a few minutes a day for two or three days a week, and I wasn't putting in the work at the tables. I was drinking, lollygagging, and staring at my phone, like every other weak $1/$2 reg. It's difficult not to fall into the habits of the people who surround you all day.

I've lately bumped up my study habits on and off the table, since I came up with my 30 hours work/10 hours study scheme. Time will tell if this will be the scheme that finally puts me over the hump.

One promising sign: Yesterday at Bally's I played at a table with 6 other regs. That's right, there were 7 of us there at one table, and we all knew each other. Several of the regs put in for a table transfer right away. I stayed because I knew that I was the best player there, and that there was value to be taken from these guys. And that was the first time I've felt really comfortable at a reg-infested table. So there may be some hope for me.

Now, if I can just get 6 hours of playing per day consistently...

Bally's: 4 hours:
+$144

I haven't heard an update on the challenge lately. Is it on the backburner?

Yeah it's on the backburner until I resolve the confidence issue. I don't want to be playing bigger stakes with scared money.

One of the side effects of putting in significant time studying poker is falling into Fancy Play Syndrome. On Sunday I ran two big bluffs at two different tables. I feel that my stories on that day were correct, but on both occasions I bluffed into the exact hands that I was trying to represent: funny but expensive.

Bally's: 5 hours:
(-$276)

Ok, you ran into the top of their range, but that's not necessarily FPS.

That is true uberkuber. You make a good point. At the lower levels, though, they're more likely to call down with the middle of their range as well, as they may not be receptive to the stories that I'm trying to tell.

Bluffing can still be profitable, as everyone's playing too many hands and their range is missing a lot of the time, but the players often make up for that by calling down lighter with a piece, and that sends the variance through the roof. I'm still a fan of simple value betting at $1/$2.

Yesterday I played well and I ran badly. Here's a hand that's at the extreme end of the exploitative spectrum. I won't fault anyone for saying that they would never make this play. I'm almost never hitting this particular button here either.

I had played with the villain for more than two hours and had seen him open exactly one hand for a raise: KK. Otherwise he had limped and limp/called 80% of hands, including QQ, AQs and AK. Postflop he had slowplayed his good hands into some bad spots, allowing his opponents to catch up a few times in multiway pots. In HUD stat terms, he was playing 80/5 with a negligible aggression factor, maybe 0.1 where 2.5 is average and 8 is maniacal.

UTG--the other villain--opens for $10. His stack has us covered. I call in the CO with AQ and around $290 back. Our passive main villain calls on the BTN. He has $204 back and I cover him.

(Pot $30) - Three Players

Flop: Q73

UTG checks, I bet $20 and get two calls.

(Pot $90) - Three Players

Turn: 9

UTG checks, I bet $50 and BTN shoves for $184. UTG folds.

(Pot $324) - Two Players, one is all-in.

I have top top and the nut flush draw (discounting straight flush draws) on an unpaired board. It's a fantastic hand, up near the top of my range. It needs only 29% equity to call.

I fold.

Bally's: 4 hours:
(-$120)

Villain obv had a set so good fold

I fold too.

Right you are, boys. Someone that passive will not bluff or semibluff in that spot, even with the two straight flush combos. At the worst, his range for shoving over me on the turn is two pair or better.



I'm giving him a lot of two pairs here, because he's calling hands like Q7o and 97s pre and probably not letting them go on the flop. 93 and 73 were a stretch, even suited, so I didn't include them.

So it's very close: 28%. But I think this is the widest range that he'll be shoving with. If we take, say, the 97o out, which he might fold on the flop or flat on the turn, it becomes more of a clear fold for me.



Interestingly, when I threw overpairs AA and KK into the range--as it's possible for him to have no preflop 3-bet range on the button--and my equity actually went up to 27%. I think that's because set hands have a redraw to a boat or quads if I make my flush with the 3, but overpairs do not. I lost the screen grab on that one.

Yesterday, the Bally's Freeroll had 59 runners, with 80 normally paid, so no one left without some money. Good thing for me, given my luck at these freerolls lately. I was out in less than an hour on a super-standard 3-bet 20bb shove with AKo<JJ.

Bally's Freeroll: 1 hour:
+$124

Nice I’m glad I read that hand right it tells me I can still ID how people play at this level live after a lengthy break.

Don’t know if I have the discipline to fold at the moment, though .

Nice score in the free roll, every day in the black is a good day

All right: here's hoping that this doesn't blow up in my face.

I'll start with a disclaimer. The following is not so much a socio-political statement as it is an exploration of the effect of taking aboard small pieces of additional information while navigating through an emotionally charged scenario, one where the information that you had was limited to begin with, particularly when the new information doesn't seem to get you any closer to an objective truth.

All this has to do with an old-timey song called Chattanooga Choo Choo.



The song came out in 1941, and it won the first gold record ever awarded. I knew it from a snippet from a golden oldies album compilation commercial that ran in constant heavy rotation throughout the late 70's and early 80's. The snippet they played from Chattanooga Choo Choo comprised two short lines of lyrics.

Pardon me, boy/
Is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?

I had heard that snippet played on TV so many times that--decades later--it still pops into my head from time to time. Yesterday it popped into my head again, followed for the first time by a question.

Who is this boy?

After all, this isn't a Japanese RPG, so it's unlikely that the song's protagonist is relying on a child for information, particularly on train routing. No, the protagonist is asking an adult. And what sort of grownup would one address as "boy?"

From the 1860's through the 1960's there was a profession known as the Pullman porter. Pullman porters rode along on the trains and jumped off briefly at each station, providing information on the train route, as well as helping with car and seat locations, helping people with their baggage, serving food and drinks, and generally being useful in a hundred different ways.

By all accounts it was a decent job backed up by an effective union, and it paid solid middle-class wages. The porters took a lot of pride in their work. They were also all black men.



All great until some 1940's Rail Station Becky goes out of her way to call you, a grown man, boy. To your face. It's the juxtaposition of careful politeness and acute contempt that really riles. Pardon me.......mmmBOY.

So, that was my initial understanding, until the nit in me asked if I was sure that I knew what I was talking about. Sure I'm sure. I mean, it's not a stretch. People were racist as **** back then. The first movie to win a bunch of awards was Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan with all that organization's vile precepts laid out in cinematic terms. Why wouldn't the first gold record follow along in the same rut?

You're familiar with exactly 9 seconds of this song, said the nit. Why not listen to the whole thing...like once? So I listened to it.

Right on Track 29/
Boy, you can give me a shine.

Really? Really? She wants the porter to give her a goddamn shoeshine? Or was that not a serious request, but just another entirely unsubtle put down aimed at a man who was trying to carry out his duties with some dignity?



And that's when it hit me: the protagonist is not addressing a porter. She's talking to a shoeshine boy--an actual child--and shoeshine boys hailed from all sorts of different races and ethnicities. A shoeshine boy was likely a regular at the train station, and he would be in a good position to know which train was which.

Boy was I embarrassed.

Let that be a lesson to me, I thought. I will write this up as a lesson in making a bad read due to a preexisting tendency towards tilt given the emotional content embedded in a particular subject.

Hold on. Look a little further into this, the aggro side of me demanded. No use getting righteously worked up about something just to have to calm down due to what might be a misleading scrap of information.

So I ran into this better version of the song, featuring a great dance routine, and Dorothy Dandridge, who's worth a look.



No mention of a shoeshine in this version, and Dorothy's rail guides are two dandies in straw hats and baggy suits. I think we can agree that it's okay when she calls one or both of them boy.

So this video was the bit of extra information that served only to confuse and obfuscate. Who is the boy? I'm almost afraid to look for more information. For all I know, I'm covering old, well-trodden ground that shows up in every Black History 101 course that I never took.

Now for the last bit of information that I picked up less than an hour ago, well after I started this piece.

From the Wiki:

A porter was expected to greet passengers, carry baggage, make up the sleeping berths, serve food and drinks brought from the dining car, shine shoes, and keep the cars tidy.

I enjoyed that post very much, Suited. I have to disagree with you on one thing though: Glenn's version with the Andrews Sisters is the better one imo. You also reminded me of this song:

Thanks Sheep! That was a post where I felt that I was going out on a limb. Glad to hear that you liked it. So we have another piece of info in favor of the shoeshine boy, from Red Foley? Curiouser and Curiouser.

We can agree to disagree on which song version we like better, especially when it's hard to nail down a seemingly simple character in the song.

why do you size up so much on your lead? your NFD has enough equity so you want to try and entice weaker draws to come along

its hard chiseling nickels from jewish dragons...


sample so small it makes it tough, but if bet fold is in your gameplan why bet $50? The turn should not help any reasonable calling range and improves your hand as you pick up equity with the FD. If you are willing to bet/fold bc you have a tight read you can bet $30 and lose less..