Poker Update - The Triple Draw and Sit N Go Adventure

I have been doing a little bit of soul searching, if you will. That sounds like I am having a bad run or something, but that's not entirely accurate. Really, what has happened is I have been playing entirely too much Triple Draw.

I freakin' love the game, but it is addicting as hell and the swings are seriously monsterous. The main reason for that is the fact that it is played 6-handed. Not to mention that they do not stay 6-handed very long. Lately, the trend at the tables is to limp into the pot. This is really screwing me up. So, I have found that I am treating limpers to be 2 card draws. The problem lies in pot-odds. The more limpers, the more likely to limp or even call a raise. Some of these people treat the game like a coin-flip and a luck machine. I have seen more 2 card draws on the last round that hit for wins in the last couple days, you would just not believe it. Actually, I think some of these people are trying to disguise there hands. My buddy Chris, who I got into the game, did this as well. His reasoning was that when you raise you are losing those callers with worse hands. The thing is, when you do not raise, you are losing value. He would occasionally limp from EP w/ huge 1 card draws like 2345 and 2347. Now, I never saw this really work out for him all that well, but I didn't see it work against him either. He would limp and get a caller or someone would raise and he would cold-call, but as soon as they saw that he was drawing one, they would back down. I really thought he was losing bets. I don't think he put enough time into the game, nor did I "sweat" his games enough to get a handle on his results...he also had the unnerving actions of limping in w/ awful starting hands. Anyway, enough about TD!

I have done extremely well at the $10 SnG's so far this month. I haven't played a ton so it is not really a good indicator of anything, but it is something that is very positive and makes me happy! I think I have such great patience in these things and once I get down to 4-handed, no matter what my stack looks like, I feel I have an edge. I was doing a little bit of research for my 1 year anniversary of online poker and found this crazy little nugget. In June of '05 (my third full month of poker), I was 34/38 in SnG's ITM (In The Money). Now because I only had a bankroll of $50 to start with in April, by June it was around $100-150, and I was playing $5 SnG's exclusively. My profit in SnG's was $292.20! To me, that is pretty damn impressive!

I have done a poor job of record keeping. I don't know why, but I am having a hard time keeping up with it. I know I had a pretty "swingy" month of January, and Febuary has not started off that great. Basically my SnG's are keeping me just a bit under even. I am contemplating diversifying again, and trying out another site. What my thinking was is that, I would keep a bit on UB, and take a couple hundred to Full Tilt or Poker Stars and just focus on SnG's on one site or the other. I don't have any real reasoning on this. My other thought was to start a second account on UB and use it strictly for SnG's/Tourneys, so I could track my progress a little better. With all of my personal research (what little I have done really!), I think I am an above average SnG player, and an average, slightly loose cash game player (that is for hold'em). I think my TD stats will even out and a lot of the things that I am experiencing in that game are variance related, and educational on some level.