Party Poker will give you five dollars if you join the Poker Players Alliance. The membership fee is $20, but if you sign up through Party Poker’s cashier, Party will immediately deposit $25 in your account (not your bonus account!). So you “math guys” out there will notice a five dollar difference in your favor.

Why join the PPA? Certainly not for the tee shirt (smallest size available: large). The way I see it, it can’t hurt to join. I’m honestly not sure how much influence this group will have, but I know they will have more if they have the support (and funds) of dedicated poker players like yourselves.

And Party will reimburse you and give you five bucks. +EV!!!!

I have registered for ATLARGE 2006 and you should too! Also if you’re a woman and you’re looking for a roomie at the Taj, you should let me know! (Sorry, fellas.) An unacceptable amount of time has passed since my last poker trip, and March 3 seems like a long way off as well. Fortunately, there is some interesting home game action shaping up for this evening which will have to suffice for now. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

In other news, I am trying to decide if I will begin playing one-table sng’s again. They were extremely profitable for me in 2005 and helped me build the bankroll to play the multi-table tournaments I wanted to, leading to three relatively big scores in tourneys at the end of 2005. The problem is that I believe my game has evolved to a point where I have a more well-rounded arsenal of poker skills than I had at the beginning of 2005. At that point, I had a solid one-table sng strategy which had a much higher dependence on luck than I care to have now. I’m not saying by any stretch that I’m “too good” for these sng’s – simply that the luck factor involved negates many of the tools I’ve been honing in recent months, and as well as being less enjoyable than other tourneys (presumably I am playing as a hobby and not to make a living) they also don’t reward the exercising of my poker muscles. They’re basically the only muscles I have, and when I play poker I like to use ‘em!!

Yet, there are several arguments for a return (perhaps a brief one) to one-table sng land. The strategy I have developed for these sng’s places me in the money frequently. While not necessarily “guaranteed” money, it is much easier to finish in the top three of a one-table sng than a big tournament, and while the return is not as large, the sng’s go so quickly that I can run several of them in the same amount of time it would take to run a big tourney. While not as “fun” as other tourneys, I could look at it as what it is – a practical way to fund my forays into the bigger tourneys.

This issue has come up because of the way that I keep my poker records. I keep track of wins and losses for each year, and now that it’s 2006 my tournament sheet is squarely in the red. I keep tournament and ring game records separate, so while I am showing a significant profit for the year so far which should make me happy, I get grumpy every time I look at my tourney records. Some readers will probably give me the standard lecture: “It’s all one session.” “Your results are over your lifetime – the 2005/2006 distinction is completely arbitrary.” And of course these readers are absolutely right.

I would be interested to hear how others deal with this scenario. Unless all my readers start the year off winner across the board and have never had to deal with this issue. And if that’s the case, we have things to discuss other than record keeping. ;0)

Bottom line: play one-table sng’s again or not? I can use them to build my tourney bankroll, but at the (significant?) cost of time I could spend playing other types of poker that I enjoy more. Poker is a hobby, so I should enjoy it when I’m doing it. That said, poker is a serious hobby, and I want to keep playing higher stakes and bigger tourneys to improve my game. For that I need a bankroll. The best way to build that bankroll (which I do not fund with savings or income, just the poker earnings themselves) may be to play a type of poker that is not as fun or challenging. While my existing bankroll from previous years has not ceased to exist, I feel pressure to get those numbers into the black for ’06.

Thoughts, advice, and lectures welcome.

And register for ATLARGE 2006!!!

So all last week I was crushing both the $3-6 and $5-10 short-handed games on UB. The whole time I was playing I felt like I was getting maximum value from my good hands and losing the minimum with weak hands. I value-bet the river in several spots where I might not have in 2005. But this is 2006, year of crushing limit hold ‘em ring games, and I am not messing around anymore!

Whenever I have a run like that, I always wonder how much of it is due to my superb playing and how much is due to “running goot.” I especially have these thoughts when I have a day when I can’t win a hand (like today, for example!). Today I felt like a couple of the players in the game were forcing me to play in a manner different from the one I played last week. For example, today I was up against some very aggressive players who charged to the hilt for all my draws (few came in) and forced me to make several difficult calls. I felt uncomfortable the whole time I was playing, not about the money I was losing but about how I felt like I wasn’t able to play my game.

Should I have switched tables? Maybe. Was I playing worse than last week? Could be. But I also just wasn’t getting the cards I did last week, and the swings in these short-handed games are part of the deal. I don’t think I’ll play a full table game again for a while – the short-handed games seem much more profitable – and despite today’s results, they’re much more fun!