Felt bad for winning so much on the weekend...

...so I gave -$1835 of it back today. Consider it a loan with interest!!!

A smooth weekend + Vienna

I finally hit a heater that paid off this weekend. It started on Thursday, when I was able to make +$1585 in just 3.4 hours of play at $109 and $215 the shorthanded SNG tables. I tried my luck again on Friday but managed to donk off -$927 to my opponents in 3.7 hours. I knew my luck would return on the weekend, though, and indeed it did. +$1199 on Saturday and +$1379 on Sunday were both a real confidence booster that I needed going into Vienna this upcoming week. Furthermore, because I've been playing so many tourneys, I'm expecting a rakeback payment of just over $1500 to arrive on the 1st of March, yippee!

Yesterday I also played the $700 Monte Carlo Final qualifier at CelebPoker after winning a ticket to it on Saturday. The final was just not meant to be, though, as I eventually lost with TT to KK with around 18 players left. They were giving away just two seats so I knew I had to be in it to win it, that was part of the reason why I made the "questionable" all-in call with TT. Oh well, there will be other qualifiers.

I also attempted the Sunday Warmup on Stars yesterday but that just wasn't meant to be either. After building up an intially nice stack, I blew it all off in a series of consecutive sticky situations that brought me down to the felt in no time.

Coming up this Thursday is the moment I've been anticipating for quite some time now, namely another trip to Vienna! As of right now we are booked from the 1st - 11th of March, but there are good chances that we will extend our trip if all goes well. I'm really excited to go back down to Vienna, it is by far the best-run cardroom in Europe that I've ever been to and the atmosphere is definitely inviting enough to keep me coming back. Also, throw in the gamblers who love calling people down with Ace-high and such and you have yourself a very profitable trip!

The Sundays

I couldn't get much going on Sunday, although I really tried. I played SNGs at CelebPoker all day breaking even and eventually losing as the night progressed. I also played a few other MTTs:

• Bodog $100k Guaranteed - lost all in my chips in the 2nd hour with AK to TT
• Pokerstars $55k Guaranteed - snuck into the money for a very small payout
• Pokerstars Sunday Million - lost shortly before the bubble after 3+ hours of play
• CelebPoker $25k Guaranteed - lost within the first hour

All in all it was a pretty unsuccessful Sunday and will leave a minor dent in my stats for the month. It's definitely not going to stop me from having a highly successful week, let that be known.

Protecting Your Poker Accounts

Lee Jones posted this at the pocketfives.com forum, the tips come from one of his top security watchdogs at Pokerstars. With all the recent hacking going on, I think that people should be extremely careful with their account info, therefore I've copied his tips here:

Jeff’s computer security tips for online poker players

1. Never let the system “remember” any of your passwords. While systems provide this as a matter of convenience, this is the most common "hack". A password does nothing for you at all if itnever has to be entered.

2. Password-protect your Windows system so that when it goes to sleep, you have enter a password to get back in. This is security 101 stuff but almost nobody does it.

3. Always choose a strong password. Never use aword that can be found in a dictionary, and never, ever use kids names, birthdays, friends names, or a password related to the site. “pocketaces” is a terrible password for online poker. Good password selection canbe as simple as picking a book off your bookshelf, flipping to a random page,and picking two words from it at random separated by the page number. Then bookmark the page and circle the two words in case you ever need to look it up again. Doing this just now with a novel I came up with a password of “great167side”.

4. Never,ever share your poker account password with anyone. You wouldn't let someone else access your online banking, so why let someone else access your poker account? Likewise, no reputable site will ever ask you to send your password for any purpose other than to actually log into the site in question. Any other time you're asked to give up your password, you're being scammed.

5. Don't use the same password in any two locations. Sure, it makes it easy to have the same password everywhere. Easy for you. Easy for hackers. You may trustthe operators of this forum, but if you sign up at a forum somewhere and use the same password (and heaven forbid,the same user ID!), then you're asking for a hack. A determined hacker is willing to go to the effort to establish a forum that looks legitimate and to stick with it for a VERY long time, in order to harvest many emails, account names and passwords. Only months later will he go in for the kill, draining at once all the accounts he's managed to find.

6. Changeyour passwords often.... very often. 3 months is too long to keep the same password on a financial account. When changing passwords, never re-use an older password, nor any variant of it. If your last password was (as insecure as) “iraisewithAA”, then your next password should not be “iraisewithKK” or even “ifold72offsuit”.

7. If someone chats you up online claiming to be your close buddy who wants a loan...call and ask first. You wouldn't hand money to a stranger in a casino because “your buddy Joe said he needs it, he's right over there in the Pot Limit game, honest”. Don't do this online, either. If he is that good of a buddy, you have a phone number for him. Call him first.

8. Never log into Windows to play poker as "Administrator" or equivalent. Use a restricted user account to make key loggers or trojans have a much more difficult time gaining access. Yes,Windows XP Home Edition users have no choice in the matter, since every user account is by default an Administrator. Don't use XP Home to play online. Use XP Professional.

9. Windows Firewall stinks. It will not protect you, as it only blocks attacks from the outside from getting in. It does nothing to protect you from thingsthat managed to get in from communicating with the outside world. No matter how much it bogs down your system,you need a good bidrectional firewall that will alert you when software triesto access the Internet. Norton, McAfee,ZoneAlarm, Kaspersky. They are your friends, and they are not optional – use one (exactly one) of them. Same for at least two good spyware scanners.

10. Virus/Trojan/SpywareScanners only detect things they know about. It is still possible to catch a customized piece of spyware or a key logger that has never been reported to the scanner authors... and you'llnever know you've been infected in such a case. Thus, exercise good judgement when deciding what to download. How much do you know about that third partyHUD (“heads-up display”) tool? Does the author identify himself? Has it been around for a long time and used by many players without incident? Don't be the guinea pig that finds “malware”the hard way. Don't install downloaded software you don't implicitly trust completely... and that list should be avery short one.

11. Here’s the hard one: don’t play online poker on anybody else’s computer. We know that’s anathema to the young, mobile, hip online poker crowd. But consider this: Yougo to all the trouble to protect your computer and PokerStars account with the steps we’ve outlined above. Now you sit down at somebody else’s laptop and type in your userid and password. You know virtually nothing about the security of that computer, and have just wasted all the work that you’ve done to protect yourself. If you really “must” play online poker on another computer, do it on a machine owned by somebody that’s as careful about security as you are.

Source: http://www.pocketfives.com/2DF28868-46A3-4A49-B526-F5C8821B3FEA.aspx

A Poker Revolution

I just found this at Roulette-Forum.de, needless to say it will be revolutionary to the game:

Wieder Fehler im System entdeckt, Sherlock Burns deckt auf (German content)

SNG Grind

Since I've been back I've been playing the $109 and $215 shorthanded SNGs at CelebPoker with pretty decent success. It all started off really well as I made a few thousand right off the bat. Then I took a beating a couple days ago, only to recover the next day with another nice upswing. However, variance once again got the best of me yesterday when I managed to drop well over a grand into my opponent's accounts. I'll get it back (with interest) sooner or later.

As far as live poker goes, Sutti and I have booked our flights to Vienna for the Spring Festival at CCC. We're flying down on the 1st of March through the 11th. If you look at the schedule, you may notice that the tournaments don't begin until the 7th. The reason why we're going to be there before the tournament week begins is to take advantage of the "regular" games at CCC. The games seem to tighten up considerably during tournament weeks (most notably with tight Polish and Hungarian players), so this time we're going to try and beat the system by hitting up the loose games before everyone and their mother does.

In particular, I have my eye set on the €100+rebuys tournament on the 9th as well as the €500+1 rebuy tournament on the 10th. Both are NL Hold'em, which happens to be my specialty and coincidentally the only game I even know how to play, I shouldn't kid myself :)

Las Vegas recap

My 19 days in Vegas passed in a heartbeat and the trip taught me some valuable lessons about extended stays in Sin City. When all was said and done, I came out of the trip down just over a grand, which is perfectly fine by me. There were some nasty ups and downs, some really sick hands and plenty of good times that we had during our stay.

Don't let the looks fool you, Excalibur is a dump

Staying in a hotel the whole time was unnecessarily expensive and unhealthy for my mind as well. When you are in a hotel/casino the whole time, it is so easy to get consumed by gaming (in particularly poker) and so easy to forget to engage in other activities that are great for your mind and will eventually help you play poker when the time comes. My only outlet was to get out of the hotel and walk along the strip to, you guessed it, another casino/hotel! Because of this, it is definitely better to rent a house while staying for so long. We are planning a summer trip for the WSOP 2007 and it's just a matter of time before we book a house instead of a hotel. There are plenty of fully-furnished houses for the same price as, if not cheaper than, a hotel stay. This will also require renting a car, but that's not a big deal at all.

Olli, me and Sutti in front of the Bellagio right before the water fountain show

I have so many stories that I think are hilarious but you really would have had to have been there to fully understand the humor and meaning behind them. I am really sorry for the lack of updates during the trip, the problem was that my internet access was extremely limited (I hate you, Excalibur). I'm going to do my best to write out daily updates of my next trip(s) and hopefully provide some pictures as well, in particularly the Vienna trip that is planned for mid March. This would be equally fun for me to do and hopefully for a few of you to read as well.

On a quick side note, online poker has been running pretty well for me during the few days that I have played. I arrive back in Berlin on Monday and then it's time for me to get back in the groove of daily life and online poker, I can't wait!