Misc stuff

Buckeroo

I have a $1 chip from every B&M poker room I have ever played in except for Aladdin in LV and the Holiday Inn in Aruba. I'm not sure when the Aladdin -> Planet Hollywood transformation will be complete, possibly before my next trip to LV in July. If any of you readers out there have a spare $1 chip from either of these cardrooms, please let me know....

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Health

I've been doing the daily cardio thing now for a little over 2 weeks, and I'm no longer feeling nauseous at the end. I haven't yet noticed any appreciable difference in mental alertness, but maybe this will just take some more time.

Better dietary and sleep habits have been rather hit or miss. Definite area for improvement.

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Online MTTs

I undershot my target of 60 $100+ buy in MTTs for April. Part of the reason, is that I frequently got home too late from the day job to play in the 9pm Party $2k added (the only $100+ MTT that I could play on a weekday). This is somewhat out of my control. However, I skipped a goodly number of Sunday tournaments that I was available to play in merely due to lack of discipline. BAD DAVE!

I feel very good about my MTT play of late, so optimistically it feels like I just need to get enough events in.

There is a moderate amount of time management balance required when playing MTTs. The reason is because, when I have enough available attention, I try and keep a modest number of ring games open simultaneously to maximize my hourly rate. Finding the optimal balance is an ongoing learning experience.

An important component in my MTT strategy is to increase my chance of having an above average stack when the field size has been cut by 75% but only taking a reasonable amount of risk and attention. I've been experimenting with starting to pay more attention to the action at roughly the 45 minute mark (and/or when the field has been cut by roughly 40%) when my and the average players' M still allows for a wider range of plays. Restealing, trapping and avoiding traps in deep stack situations require better reads (and hence require paying more attention).

Under a number of circumstances I would allocate more of my attention for ring games. These include: My M dropping early to a range of 10 or less, being moved from a broken table to a table which will break soon and I have little info on my opponents.
A case where I would focus an above average amount of attention to an MTT is if I am able to double up early at a loose table that has a lot of chips in play and that the table will break in roughly 15-45 minutes.

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Other MTT stuff

I've taken some notice of medium -> large field $300->$500 buy in online MTTs. The average quality of play seems not substantially different than $100->$200 buy in events, so I will no longer feel any trepidation into buying directly into these events. (this goes back to time management/hourly rate considerations)

I completely skipped the Grand Series of Poker on the Poker Room network mostly because I haven't spent the time to figure out why Poker Tracker is not working for me on those sites. This turned out to be quite foolish since many of those events ended up having very substantial overlays.

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Online ring games

Ring games for the later half of April were very swingy. Up 100BB one session, down 100BB the next session, repeat....

The main problem from the last few weeks was my tendency to play shorter sessions when I was winning and longer sessions when losing. Since it is very natural to play better when you are winning, my behavior should be the reverse. I've been better about this in the past and will make a more conscious effort to follow this mantra.

I'm currently undecided on if I should be spending time trying to become comfortable 4 tabling Party $10/$20 6max or 3 tabling $15/$30 6max or 2-3 tabling $400NL.

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Live ring games

In term of live ring games, almost all of my time was spent in the $20/$40 LHE game for the last couple of weeks. I've been running very good and playing well. I switched poker rooms to play in a place where $20/$40 is the largest stakes spread, and the game is even better than the great $20/$40 games at the old poker room.

To continue the learning process, I've incorporated more selective LAGgyness into my play. This serves 2 purposes: 1) to win more pots with the worst hand vs players that are capable of folding, 2) to get more action on my legit hands. The degree of LAGgyness requires some fine tuning, and I imagine I'm going to run so bad at some point that I'll be psychologically forced back into a TAGgy style of play. For now at least, it is a lot of fun.