Back to school

Pud's Poker Progress / Matthew Pitt / 28 September 2009 / Leave a Comment

The one thing I remember from my fixed limit days are that the swings are mental, you are either killing the game for an unsustainable amount or losing at the same rate, never anything in between.

There seems to be a trend at the minute where poker players are ditching the game and going back into education. David Benefield and Isaac Baron are the latest high-profile players to return to school and now yours truly is following in their footsteps.

Well I tell a bit of a lie there as I won't be quitting poker, and nobody would care if I did, but I am going to go back and study for a degree in the next couple of months all being well. For a while now I have felt like I should be doing something productive that could make a difference but I've basically been too lazy to do anything about it.

I've always fancied teaching or being a social worker with kids, something that is both challenging but also rewarding at the same time. Whilst I love writing it doesn't really make a difference to anyone's lives at the end of the day and I feel I have the life skills to do just that.

There is a big recruitment drive in the social work sector right now so I have made a few enquiries and requested more information on the necessary degree courses that are available and whether or not I'll have to go to Uni full time or if I can study in my own time etc. Whatever happens, it will be a lot of hard work for the next few years but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and get on with things in life.

With that out of the way I guess I better talk about poker too with this being a poker blog and all! My staking deal has been very frustrating to say the least and I have essentially broken even over 285 tournaments! I won $279.75 at the $3 games but dropped $282.00 at the $6 version. I really can't put my finger on why this happened but according to Hold'em Manager I am owed a ton of EV in the $6 games which would suggest I simply ran bad at them.

I spoke to my back, well chatted via MSN, last night and asked if he would mind me playing some cash with the same terms of a 50/50 split of the profits. I asked this for a couple of reasons, first one is that the tournaments need so much time devoting to them and this is leading to me playing until late at night and neglecting the Mrs. The second is that I can actually play more because I can jump onto a cash table for 25-30 minutes whilst I eat my dinner where as with tournaments I have to set aside 2-4 hours worth of playing time.

We agreed that I would go back to playing some fixed limit Hold'em, mainly because I have turned a profit over a few significant sample sizes and also because the rakeback and bonuses are easier to rack up playing min-bet poker. I played my first session last night, only two tables of $1/$2 to get back into the groove and quickly found myself 30BB down! FML!

The losses were down to a couple of silly plays by me where it was obvious I was beaten but I also lost an 11BB pot when my Aces were outdrawn on the river by KQ on the river after being capped preflop. I made a few changes to my game whilst I was playing and by the end of my session I was actually 4BB to the good! Busto to robusto or what! The one thing I remember from my fixed limit days are that the swings are mental, you are either killing the game for an unsustainable amount or losing at the same rate, never anything in between. Once I'm playing 4-6 tables it should be pretty easy to get 25-30k hands in each month which should mean a decent return on my backer's wonga and hopefully help smooth out some of the variance.

Nothing much else to report to be honest apart from I spent yesterday afternoon in A&E after my left eyeball swelled up! I sat there for over three hours to have a nurse squirt some yellow dye in my eye then shine a brilliant blue light into my now glowing eye to be told I had a corneal abrasion. I've been given some weird ointment that I have to put into my eye four times a day for five days and all should be fine.

This seems like a good place to leave things, as always, thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!