Quick summary

No time to finish up a detailed trip report.

Work is quite busy, and at the end of the week, my wife and I are headed on a weeklong vacation to Canada. Lots to do between now and then, so I'll just summarize the things I want to remember.

- Played a total of about 5 hours combined at $30/$60 and $40/$80. The games are good, particularly the $30/$60. In both $30/$60 sessions I played, there were 2-3 complete donks (where do these guys get the money to play in the $30 game? They seemed to have endless wads of $100 bills coming out of their pockets. It was almost painful to watch one particular guy - he kept calling bet after bet when he was behind and then won the absolute tiniest pots when he had a hand. Even the most unobservant players could tell when he had a hand.), and a mixture of LAGs (small number), loose passives and weak tights. I played 1 afternoon session and 2 late night sessions. The afternoon session was just as good as the late night sessions.
- The sickest hand I witnessed during these sessions was when a 4 way pot got capped preflop by a LAG. The board came in this order: 76K rainbow, A, 5 no flush possible. The hole cards were: QQ, KK, AA and yes, the LAG had 34o. It's not just online poker that rigged.... The very ironic thing is that LAG did not play this hand too poorly. He 3 bet preflop againist a raiser who was capable of laying down a hand postflop, and I would argue that on a relative scale his cap was not the worst decision made in the hand - given the way preflop action developed, it was vastly apparent that none of his opponents had cards anywhere near his 34. By far, QQ played this hand the worst.
- I played well in my afternoon 30/60 session finishing down 6BB. During the late night 30/60 session, I did not play well, but got hit in the face with the deck (including my royal flush) finishing up close to 30BB in one hour, plus I probably made 4-5BB worth of mistakes. During my brief 40/80 session (from what I can vaguely remember about it), I played pretty awful finishing down 1/2 BB.
Sleep....sleep is important.

- I was very undisciplined with my time management. I slept for less than 3 hours of my 43 hours, I should have allocated more like 7-8. I played poker for less than 7 hours. Considering this was supposed to be a poker trip, this is ridiculous.

- I miscounted my results during the trip. I wasn't able to reconcile things correctly until I got home. It gets confusing when I don't write down the results after each session. The first night when I got back to the hotel room I had 6-7 different wads of cash, and I ended up getting mixed up between a craps session and a poker session.

- I had only 1 uncomped meal during the whole trip. However, this was at a nicer steakhouse with lots of wine being ordered by the alcy's. Being a non-drinker, this sucked. I don't think all the comped meals made up for it. Oh well...

- I spent almost 50% of my hours at table games. Quite embarassingly, I hit very hard at these games. Mathematically, I estimate my strategy should result in a ~$20/hour loss at these games. Well, the standard deviation is pretty large in craps. I think in the future, I'm not going to make poker trips to Vegas when I will be meeting up with friends who like to play table games. Poker trips will be poker trips first and foremost, and gambling trips will be primarily gambling trips.

I guess these are the only notable points.

My poker plans after my vacation are to rebalance my online vs live time allocation. For the last few months, it has been somewhere around 20:80 (online:live). I would like to reverse that for a couple of months. The primary reason is that I moved a large portion of my online funds into a live-only fund. I have a policy that (after making my initial online deposit last year) I will never deposit any more money online, only withdraw. It is a big waste of time (from many standpoints) to have an online bankroll that can only play at low limits.

I intend to rebuild my online bankroll while simultaneously moving back up in limits. I'll see if I can build up the funds in the Party accounts within 2 months to play $15/$30. I currently have an online bankroll spread out across all sites to play $10/$20, while the funds I have in the Party skins is only enough for $3/$6. To lighten up the monotony of online limit ring games, I will use money at non-Party sites to play in medium stakes $30-$200 tournaments and SNGs (mostly at Stars). I'm not sure how practical it will be to do this because I find it very difficult to multitable limit ring games with no-limit tournament games, since the thinking is very different. I will probably multitable limit ring games together only, and then multitable no-limit tournament/SNG games seperately. (perhaps, most nights playing ring games, and occasionally dedicating nights for tournaments/SNGs) Another alternative is to start taking a shot at no limit ring games, but that is not the current plan.