First real post

I want to start off by saying I’m really looking forward to starting this blog and beginning to make it pour even more with some fellow rainmakers. Ive been meaning to start a blog for some time now and just never got around to it, so this was the motivation I was looking for. Guess Ill start off with a brief background on myself. Name’s John O’Rourke, go by J.R. to most of my friends, play poker under screename UMD Tennis on Full Tilt. Graduated from Univ. of Maryland last may , played tennis there and had best 4 years of my life. Also met my girlfriend Katie there who Ive gone out with almost 3 years (trust me sounds like a lot longer than its felt). I’m from Lower Merion, PA right outside Philly and currently live in Manayunk (which is part of philly so I can finally say im from philly without having to argue with people who tell me “youre not really from philly”) with 3 of my best friends from high school (St. Joe’s Prep ftw): slikky, xfactor, and uncle natty. Im currently a graduate assistant at St. Joe's U, getting my MBA and coaching the tennis team there.

Don’t wanna bore anyone with my poker story, pretty much same as everyone elses. Deposited a couple times, busted a couple times, got lucky to run up a roll on the “last time” I was gonna put money on when I was still horrible at poker. Found twoplustwo and cardrunners, realized how bad I was, started working hard on my game and started moving up through the limits after switching over from sitngos and multi-table tournys to cash games (best move I ever made). Currently still trying to improve my game so I can take some shots at some of the higher limits. I could write a more detailed description of my whole poker story if anyone’s actually interested in reading it just let me know.

The primary purpose of this blogs gonna be to post interesting poker hands, my thought processes behind how I played them, and my recent results. I think having to explain my thought processes behind moves I make and having other great players critique them is really going to help take me to the next level. The results will lead to some friendly competition with the other rainmakers which will help motivate us to play well and do well (and lead to some prop bets Im sure J). Not gonna be too boring w just poker all the time will also throw in some entertaining stories from nights out, pictures from said nights, random thoughts, random video clips or anything else I might find entertaining (granted Im easily entertained sometimes). (and if you haven’t noticed yet I like using parentheses when I write stream of thought so get used to it!)

Im probably going to be posting most of my entries on my laptop and I play all of my hands on my desktop, so there might be some delay between when Im talking about a session and posting a graph/hand histories from a session but we’ll see how it works out.

Last night played about 5k hands and went from being stuck 4k to winning 1k, but played from 12:30am-6am when I had planned on stopping at 2:30. Two things I know I do that aren’t good and are general leaks in terms of being a poker player are play too long when I get stuck and not being focused when I first start a session. Last night epitomizes what is unfortunately becoming a trend. Im sitting at my computer browsing the internet and talking to ppl on aim and then I just start firing up 8 tables on ftp. I don’t take any time to get in the right mindset to play, im not focused at all and before I know it im stuck a few buyins which actually motivates me to start focusing on the games. From now on im going to make sure Im actually ready to play and actually wanna play before I start (as Jman said its never a bad idea not to play) (there I go with the parantheses again) and im only gonna start with 4 tables so I can get some specific reads on how some of the regs are playing before I gradually start adding more tables. Last night was even worse than usual. Usually I only go down about 2k or so before I turn it around. Last night went down 2k then started running very bad and before I knew it im stuck 4300. I almost stopped playing then because this was at like 4am, I was not playing well at all, was tired, and could feel myself not really thinking about each hand. I wasn’t even tilted, just wasn’t playing well and knew I should stop. Then I started getting hit in the face with the deck and decided I was gonna play until I was even and wound up 1k.

The thing I don’t think about sometimes is that the games are always gonna be there and the fish are always gonna be there. Its never bad to stop a session when youre down and know youre not playing well. But I just think about all the fish at the tables and cant bring myself to leave until I make some of my money back. The good thing now is that I don’t get tilted at all by bad beats anymore at 2/4, so playing these looong sessions when im down isn’t the worst thing for me. Im sure theres some more minor things it causes me to do that I don’t even realize but in terms of it affecting my mentality or causing me to make straight up stupid plays it doesn’t happen anymore. Playing solely 5/10 for a month has played a large role in this im sure. While I could financially handle the swings there, I couldn’t deal with them emotionally. I started off there on a 22 bi upswing and thought pokers so easy then came the downswing that culminated in a -13k day and I was like I cant handle this anymore. 8-10 bi swings are very common for me at 2/4 meaning 13-15 bi swings have to be very common at 5/10. That’s a difference between winning/losing 3-4k at a time and winning/losing 13-15k at a time. A big jump. The way this works is that as you move up in levels your edge/winrate decreases which causes variance to increase leading to bigger swings in terms of buyins. Im a lifetime 4 PT bb/100 winner at 2/4 (including 100k hands when I first moved up after only 25k hands at 1/2 and should not have been playing 2/4 yet and was winning at like 1-2bb/100). Now I think im closer to a 5 bb/100 winner at 2/4 and a 4 bb/100 winner at 3/6, but im probably only a 2 bb/100 winner at 5/10. I wanna work hard on my game to the point where I feel my winrate at 5/10 is something over 3 before I take more shots. That being said I still play there sometimes now if a big fish is sitting (I’v even played 25/50 2 times bc of a big fish and have a maintainable winrite of 170 bb/100 over like 70 hands, probably dumb move on my part).

Alright this blogs getting way too long sorry bout that guess I just threw in a lotta random stuff for first entry and was real bored in class tonight. In future gonna be more short spurs of session or hands or something funny, just wanted to give some background. Let me know any other suggestions for the blog or anything you would wanna hear about.