At about the 6:15 mark you will see a profile of Dean Hamrick, he is one of the nicest guys in poker and he crushes online as MSUsfinest.

Ok, the 6c7c hand is a bad play but I was establishing a bit of image.

I had a successful trip down in Louisville even though I didn’t get to play as often as I would have liked but I was happy with my play for the most part. I won 11,000 the first session… 1,400.. the second.. 700 the third… and 2,800 the last. The last 3 sessions were such a grind it was sick. I started off big stuck all 3 days and someone grinded back a win. I was never winner until the very end of every session but sometimes you just have to take what you can get. I really wanted to play the 5K NL tourney that started sunday but it was my friends birthday so I ended up staying in town to go out with them. That decision might have cost me alot of money though because I heard the game has been really good the past few days and the tourney field was really weak. However, that doesn’t mean I would have won money but at least the odds would have been in my favor.

I am supposed to head out to Las Vegas Wednesday to hang out with some friends and go to the PGA event but I am not sure if I should go or not. I just bought a house in my hometown of Avon, Indiana and I really need to pack and get moved over there. I guess there isn’t too much of a rush though since I still want to paint and do some other things. I almost hate to leave because I of the PLO game here in Louisville. I have won my past 8 sessions and even though I don’t really care about how many times ive won compared to how much money ive made, it is still good for my confidence and temperament.

I hope everyone else has been doing well and incase you have wondered… I still cant win online.

Matt Humphrey

humphreyin@hotmail.com

In the next few days I am going to try to sit down and think about some goals I want to accomplish, some short-term, some long-term. After reading my old blogs on blogspot.com I have realized that I used to be really focused and committed to making lots of money and having pride in my play. However, when I play just to be playing.. I tend to struggle. I have been doing really well playing live poker again in Louisville like always, but just not taking online seriously enough for some reason. I think my last 4 sessions in Louisville were 11,000..3,500…7,000…and 1,300. I have probably made about 3,000 online TOTAL during that time which is absolutely ridiculous. Especially since at one point i was up about 30k last week. I did run really really bad but it still didn’t have to be that bad. I really need to work on my attitude sometimes when playing online… i just expect to lose every big pot I play. Poker is hard enough, you don’t need to worry about all of those other little things or it makes it almost impossible to win.

The point of this whole thing is to remember to take pride in what I am doing. To remember that I want to be known as a great player and that day in and day out I need to PROVE I am a great player. And as of right now I am not. Because it takes alot more than just playing correctly to be a great player.

Tomorrow is the start of the WSOP-Circuit Event in Louisville so I will be spending alot of time down there the next two weeks. I will probably play a few tourneys and hopefully we will get to play PLO everyday and if not then at least 30/60 stud.

Good Luck,

Matt Humphrey

Humphreyin@hotmail.com

I haven’t been playing much online lately but have been traveling to play more, which I enjoy. I have been playing in some small games around Indianapolis and also going to Louisville. The Louisville PLO game has changed recently to 5-10 blinds(it used to be 10-25-50 dollar straddle. The game seems much easier and you can still get some pretty good wins. They have been playing 2/5 PLO in Evansville, Indiana every Monday and Wednesday and I have heard it is the best game in the country right now. Evansville is where I first started playing poker so I understand how bad the PLO can be there sometimes. It is weird because usually this time every year the farmers get their money and the games get really good.

I have been hearing alot about the new Horseshoe casino near Chicago. They have been playing 100/200 NL omaha which is a pretty dumb game actually but I guess the action is out of this world. I will try to update my results on how I do the next few weeks. As for Louisville I played it Friday and won 11k.. I played about 10 hours and never really had much going for me.. up about 3k most of the session then made quads and won a big pot.

I will have some friends in town this week so I’m not sure how much I will be able to play but after that I plan on getting on the road and making some good money again. I enjoy playing live soooooooo much more than online. I struggle taking online serious anymore because i have just been having the craziest swings ever.

Update coming soon.

I am near Syracuse, NY for the weekend. I am posting this with the new wordpress app for iPhone.

Nice to get some rest. I have been playing a lot of NL recently with wildly different results. I started off on UB with the idea that a lot of the good players are gone, which for the most part is true. The one thing about being super aggro at lower limits is that people call you very light. I have lost some pots being too aggressive hoping people were on draws that were not. I ran about $700 into about 10k in 3 days and then hit a dead spot. That is when I moved to Cake to give that a run. Currently I am on an uptick there but I have not been playing there long. My experience on Cake is that people call you real light. If they call the flop they are likely in for the river but when you hit your hand you can stack them. My game is mostly geared to stacking people because they think I am bluffing all the time. This strategy works better below 5-10 but there is a fair amount of fish at those limits too at both sites.

I did have a weird experience the other night when I went out to dinner. Having dinner next to me was a mother and son. As it turns out he plays online poker for a living. I almost did not believe him when he said it, I thought my wife was playing a joke on me. So we had some interesting conversation. Always nice to have another poker friend in the Twin Cities.

I know, I know… its been waayyyyy too long since I have blogged but to be honest, I haven’t had much to say.

I just started playing again earlier this week and feel so much better about my vacation away from poker. I think 3 weeks is the longest I have went without poker since I first started playing. I still don’t feel like traveling to play much unless its just for the day. Beau Rivage is having a tourney at the end of this month and I must be crazy to not go.. the action there will be really great and it was my favorite city to visit so far. The food is amazing and the people will tell you stories forever about the history of Biloxi. They would be mad if I didn’t mention that they “were the ones who got the storm, new orleans just got the flood”. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that while I was down there and they all have their won reasons why they got 0 help and New Orleans got all of it. Well actually most of them share the same opinions on it but I’m not going to say what they are on here.

As for this week of poker, it has gone really great. Low stress and good money. I put 2k on 3 different sites and have done good on all of them. I think I am up 14k on Cakepoker this week, 4k on UltimateBet and 2k on Fulltilt. For the first time in my life I haven’t had the desire to play in the really big games and just concentrate on making good money every week in the middle stakes. I probably wont have any 50k weeks for a while but I also wont have anymore -100k months…. at least I hope not. I am really enjoying the balance I have found in life recently and even though it takes a little big more discipline, I can still be just as lazy

I hope everyone is doing well and congratulations to my brother Adam who just got married and my brother Jason who recently had the first Humphrey girl in 3 generations “Lily”.

Good Luck,

Matt Humphrey

humphreyin@hotmail.com

If you still aren’t getting rakeback email me and I can help you out.

If you are a member of RakeRecovery or UltimatePals you are likely aware of the freeroll and rake races we are putting on. A lot of the wheels were rolling on this before the recent scuttle butt about UB but that really is not the point of this particular article. Well apparently the news has gotten out to our competitors are none too pleased that we are stepping up to the plate so voraciously.

Simply put if you are giving away 15k and we are giving away 40k I would not say there is a lot of room for debate. We win on that account.

I will fully admit that we rested for a long while but I think you can expect big things to continue to come and things will only get better.

One of my buddies playing in the main event was at the table with one of the Hinkle’s and it was hilarious listening to him berate them.  In case you missed Tuesday nights airing of the WSOP Grant Hinkle wins, with his mom and brother in tow (his brother later goes on to win a WSOP bracelet).  The Hinkle’s are like Care Bears, Canadians or the color violet, you are not supposed to hate them, yet you do! When Chris Moneymaker played the bumbling idiot it was cool because a lot of people saw themselves in him and that brought a lot of people into poker.  The Hinkle’s are one of this years big stories, and by all account Blair Hinkle is a prolific pokerer.  Grant comes off as a lucksack (whether rightly or wrongly the TV does not lie, wink wink), it does not matter that he stole a lot of blinds or played one or two hands masterfully, in 3 or 4 of the biggest hands he got really lucky.  Which used to play well because people thought “hey, I can play like that guy and get lucky and win a million dollars”, forget the fact that you have to be willing to make a silly play with 10 4 which most people are not willing to do.  But that was so 2004, this is 2008, even though Chris Moneymaker qualified on a $50 satellite many people have chased that same dream only to be slapped in the face with a big can of variance. 

None of this is my reality, poker has treated me well but I do not look at Grant Hinkle and think, “maybe this will be the thing that brings more people from middle America to poker”.  If you need proof that packaging a similar idea is a bad move does anyone remember New Coke ?

On a side note, while some of us may indeed like the Hinkle’s (or canadians for that matter) I think we can all agree on 2 points:

1.  Theo Tran is a douche

2.  Mike Ngo’s antics would only work at about $1-$2 typically, which further points to Theo Tran being a douche since he could not see through that.

3.  When celebrity poker players are sweating you they are not your friends.  They are owed money.  Though I thought everyone knew this at this point.  Someone tell Norman Chad.