Starting a new job is hard. I’m gonna be running the global e-learning function for the company. Or at least starting it.

I suppose I should be glad I even have a job. A number of people have expressed admiration and surprise that I found a new (and better) job in such a short time. I’m not sure if their surprise is based upon the current Bay Area job market, the time of year, or their lack of faith in my hire-ability, but whichever way you slice it, I didn’t have much time to “play”.

But, like I said, I’m basically getting double pay for the next month or so, and I decided to take some of the severance and plan a nice trip for the family in the summer. And this also means that my poker stake has been re-activated for whoring and bonus purposes. I’m still restricting my play to SnGs at FullTilt and PokerStars with no time for MTT. One hour, win or lose, get the heck out.

I’m in one of my periodic slumps right now, with declining balances at both sites. Some of it is bad luck, some is bad play. I’m not a good enough player to overcome bad luck, and my bad play moments have been doozies. Called a re-raise preflop with AKs. Got the Kxx rainbow flop and got my money in the middle against one of the two hands that had me drawing virtually dead (KK). Not sure if I’m a good enough player to get away from that one. Other times, my flopped straights run into rivered flushes that chase against pot odds. More times than any, I get chipped down in the early going by playing overtight. Playing shortstacked means that I can’t take even ONE bad beat without packing it in. In reality, I need to chip up to be 1.5x to 2x the chip average when the table gets down to four or five to withstand the inevitable bad beats while the blinds are escalating.

If I had to guess, I’d say my losses are 40% bad luck, 50% bad play (and that includes letting myself get shortstacked), and 10% getting outplayed. Of course, all of my victories are due to superior play on my part. See, when I win, even if the other guy makes a stupid play, it’s because I made a good read or because I goaded him into the stupid play. Last night, I have a slight lead heads-up in a $15+1 at PokerStars. I make a standard preflop raise with wired 8’s. We’d both been raising preflop on every hand, but this time I was willing to take a coinflip for the pot if he re-raised. When he re-raised for 2/3 of his money, I pushed expecting to see overcards. Instead, he had 85o and was virtually drawing dead already. This was a wonderful play on my part. See how that works?

Championship Day

In my opinion, usually a better day than even the Super Bowl for football, but with these four bland teams, I may not even watch. I’ve already made my predictions and I’ll stand by them. Denver and Carolina in the Super Bowl and they’re gonna play in Detroit. Oooh, I bet Fox is crapping their pants right now thinking about the horrific ratings for this one…