Cake in Your Face!

I hope everyone out there had a great Thanksgiving. I spent the week at my in-laws house in Orange County. I ate more than my share of turkey, watched plenty of football, saw a few movies and even took my two year old son to the beach.

But I also spent a fair amount of time working. In fact I did enough that I ended up finishing 2nd in the monthly rake race at rackbacknation.com which was worth $775. I think to some extent everyone else got derailed by the holidays so even thought I didn't put in a first class effort I did enough for a strong result.

I also picked up a few more bucks in the AP daily points races. In total I made $1,050 from that promotion. I did get totally hosed on one occasion though. On that day I started playing relatively late not logging on until 12:30. But my father in law Gerry who has been getting his feet wet in some low stakes limit hold'em games was watching over my shoulder, I was playing well and enjoying myself, and before I knew it I'd played for 6 hours with only one 20 minute break. When I checked the daily points standings I saw that I had a chance to win the race for that day.

After a short break for dinner I logged back on at 7 pacific time which meant there were only two hours left in the race (it ended at midnight eastern). After 45 minutes I had what I would describe as perhaps the most frustrating internet experience of my life.

Problems with my technology not working MAKES ME ABSOLUTELY CRAZY! AHHHHHHHH!!!!

In this instance I was able to connect to the internet, log on to AP, get into games and then it would just lock up. Over the span of an hour or so I tried 4 different computers (two of which required installing the AP software) and multiple reboots of the router and cable modem. A dozen times I logged on got dealts a few hands and then FREEZE! Everything would stop.

If I'd been able to play that last hour I'm not positive I would have won the race and picked up $500, but I would have at least been able to finish 2nd which paid $400. Instead I got $150 for finishing 5th.

I ended up winning over $1,300 that day and I earned a ton of rakeback and points so I should have felt great and I did feel pretty good. But the next day I got stung for $1,800. Right out of the gate I felt tense and I can't help but wonder if the stress from the previous day played a part.

The day after I tried playing in a coffee shop for a little while, but again I didn't have a good mindset. My laptop is 5 years old and is as slow as a dead snail. I had problems with booting and crashing and logging on to the wireless network and it took me 30 minutes from the time I sat down to the time I got my first hand. From hand 1 I was feeling negative and after an hour or so and a small loss I packed it in.

But now I'm back home. Ah home sweet home. I always feel at peace when I sit down in the morning in my usual chair with my lightning quick desktop with my hot cup of coffee. Yesterday I got off to a terrible start and found myself stuck $2,000. But I didn't let it get to me and I came all the way back to have a small win.

Today I smashed a few people right in the face on cake poker picking up $1,800 in only 750 hands of $8/$16. About half of those hands were heads up and I took the entire starting stack of 3 different players who took me on one on one. To make it all the sweeter I picked up another $700 in 1,000 hands on AP.

This is going to be my first full month of non pokerstars play. I have high hopes and lofty goals. Since I have two more weeks of vacation coming in the next 6 weeks I'm going to really need to bust my ass so I can afford to take all that time off!