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If my recent play is any indication, maybe it’s a good thing that online poker sites are closing their doors to US players. I’m currently in the middle of one of my famous “drop $400 to get a $120 bonus stretches”, which for those of you not so mathematically inclined leaves me in worse shape than had I not played at all.

Its not that I’m necessarily playing poorly, it’s just that I’m not devoting my full attention to the game. (Ok fine, because I’m not giving it my full attention I guess I am in fact playing poorly, shut up). Here’s the problem. I’m no longer fascinated by poker. I still enjoy it, but sitting at one or two tables, playing a hand every few minutes is no longer enough to occupy my short attention span. I have to be doing other things at the same time, writing blog posts (yes I still do that), reading blogs, looking for stock ideas, checking on my fantasy football team, doing research to support my theory that Bill Frist is in fact the Son of Satan, and numerous other things that don’t let me play optimal poker.

So I end up playing entirely too predictable, ABC boring poker, and it isn’t working out so well. Since I don’t have good reads on the rest of the table I’m way too passive and let numerous pots get stolen from me. And then at some point I’ll realize what I’m doing and try to play a few hands overly aggressive to catch the table off guard. Only I usually end up running into the nuts when I do that. I’ve also been watching too much High Stakes Poker so I like to mix it up a bit too much and play any two suited cards, which is just like me throwing an extra blind in every few hands. Playing junk might work on TV, but not so much at low stakes limit poker. So Yay. Go me.

I suppose rather than bitching about it, I could stop doing other things while playing, or stop playing, but then you wouldn’t have gotten to read this exciting post. And really, its you who I do this for. So you owe me $280.

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I really need to start playing tournaments again. I think I have most positive EV playing them, I’m just too busy to do it. There needs to be a multi day MTT where the break after each hour of play lasts 23 hours. So you play for an hour starting at 8:00PM on Monday, and if you have chips left, you come back at the same time on Tuesday to continue the tourney. I think I’m onto something here.

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On the non-bitching side, my two favorite poker rooms, FullTilt and PokerStars have indicated that they will remain open no matter what some right wing whacko has to say about it. Maybe I paraphrased that a bit. And that doesn’t mean they won’t pull out later, but for now, the world seems to have not ended as we may have previously thought.

Originally posted at blog.pokerwords.com