Ambitions

Tired of whimperin’ ’bout legal applesauce. I wanna talk poker.

Has been a busy week or so, but I have been able to put in a few sessions of pot-limit Omaha over the last few days. Am sticking primarily with the $50 buy-in tables these days.

Have gotten involved in some pretty big pots here lately (for yr short-stacked friend, anyway), including several $100-plus ones that have gone both for and against. I might’ve won my biggest online pot ever the other day (over $175) in a slightly hair-raising hand versus a maniacal yet untutored player. Have also dropped some biggies, too.

Now that I’ve gotten all of my old hand histories (dating back four friggin’ years!), I’m thinking I will probably go ahead and get a copy of the Omaha version of PokerTracker, mainly just to sort through everything and perhaps get a line on just how swingy PLO has been for me since I made it my main game during the middle of last year. I’d also like to get a better idea about my actual win rates over these last eighteen months or so, as well as some figures comparing how I do in 6-max. games versus full tables. I keep records of every session and could calculate some of this stuff, but I like the idea of having PT do some of the math for me.

I might’ve asked this question here once before, but I’ll throw it out here again: Anybody have any thoughts about the PokerTracker Omaha program? I have the Hold’em one and like it very much, though almost never use it anymore since I’m not playing Hold’em.

Like I say, I believe it would be very interesting (not to mention instructional) to use PT to help me see a bit more vividly how my PLO game has changed over the last year-and-a-half. Like any player who pays attention to what he or she is doing, I’ve sensed a number of changes in my own approach to the game, mainly with regard to my strategic understanding of PLO.

There have been other changes, too, such as my emotional response to playing big pots such as the ones alluded to above. I still get excited over them, but it has been a good while since I’ve found myself getting especially up or down about a given hand or session. Keeping an even keel (regardless of one’s results) is obviously an important attribute no matter one’s game, though being able to remain so is especially useful in a game like pot-limit Omaha where the variance can be especially high.

So when this hand $175-plus pot hand happened I was happy, for sure, but not overly ecstatic. Stayed at the table and ended up taking a bit more off of poor Bissonette who rebought and got a little tilty after this one. You will see I was trying to isolate the short-stacked Jeeves and ended up in a big one. There was some other history that preceded this which made me fairly certain I had Bissonette on the end (and that he’d stack off). (RSS readers might need to click through to see the hand.)



I’m still way too covetous of my bankroll to harbor serious ambitions about moving up, up, up in stakes. Will always stick with games and limits at which I’m comfortable, where losing will not represent a hit significant enough to affect me inordinately.

Always fun to find new challenges, though, and learning how to deal with bigger pots is certainly one.