This past week or so I've really gotten back to the online grind.  Like I mentioned in my last blog I've been playing low stakes online cash games and really working on my game.  I've also been really studying the game through cardrunners.com and its helped my game tremendously.  I'll usually watch a cardrunners video or 2 a day by different online pros and get a grasp of the different playing styles these top pros have.   I've also purchased a couple poker programs that really help keep track of all my online stats and opponents which allows me to go back and evaluate all the hands I play after a session.  I've pretty much just gone over all the big hands I lose after a session and see if I did something wrong and how I can fix my play.  Here's a graph showing my stats over the past week and a half or so.  To help some of you who aren't familiar with this understand it, BB = Big Blind (or big bet).  A lot of times guys will say how much they won or loss by saying how many BB's they won or lost.  For example if you're playing 1/2 NL and won 100 BB's, you would won $200.  So the left side of the graph shows the BB's I've won and the bottom shows how many hands I've played.  

As you can see I've had a good steady win rate since I've started the cash games.  Around the 19,000 hand point I took a big dip where I had some insane coolers.  In the future I'm going to be posting some of the hands I play through a cool new site I found which posts hands history's quite clearly.  But till then, I lost a couple huge hands where my nut flush lost to a straight flush and my nut full house lost to quads.  Not much can you do though, just have to roll with the punches, its part of the game.  People always ask me how the hell I deal with all the bad beats and coolers of poker and I try to relate to injuries in sports.  When you're playing sports a lot of times you suffer bumps and bruises and some times a break without your control. When this happens you have to heal up and get back in the game.  Same goes with poker.  Taking bad beats is kinda like getting hurt in hockey or football game.  If you're a pussy you can sit on the bench and cry about it, but if you're true player you get stitched up and get back in the game.  That might be a dumb analogy but thats the way I look at it and as an athlete my whole life no injury ever held me back!

Non poker related I'm going to be going home for the X-mas break and spend time with friends and family.  I actually have to go to a funeral home tomorrow because a good poker friend of mine lost his father to heart attack so I'll be going to pay my respects.  This friend of mine is about my age and lost his father suddenly at a young age so this visitation is going to be tougher then most because I'll really be able to relate and put myself in shoes because of our age.  I really don't know what I would do at this stage of my life if I lost my dad, so my deepest condolences go out to my friend and his family.

When I go home I'm going to try and get some sessions in if I have some time.  I'll bring home my laptop so hopefully I can get an hour or two or playing before I go to bed.  From past result I've always had the most success when playing from my home in Guelph for some reason.  So hopefully I'll run well over the break.

I'm not sure if I'm going to get a chance to write another blog before Christmas, so everyone have a Merry Christmas!