In the zone

I'm in the zone again. It's such a great place to be! I don't know how long it'll last, but I sure am enjoying it! Thinking it over, I wish I hadn't wimped out last June, and relegated myself to the $5/$10 tables. Who knows what my balance would be now if I hadn't? However, it wasn't a waste of time; I got in a lot of practice, and kept refining my techniques.

Like any other skill, poker requires practice. The more you play, the more automatic certain decisions become, simply due to the fact that you've been faced with them hundreds of times before. The more you play, the more you feel the rhythm of the luck. You should actually welcome the crap hands you must fold with extreme prejudice, since you need to go through your share of them before a premium hand gets dealt to you. When you get a premium hand, you need to pounce on it, but stealthily!

If you have just a tiny bit more patience than your opponents, that'll pay off huge dividends over time. Tonight my monster hand, well worth the wait, was a full house. I was dealt a pair of fours, and the flop came 9 9 4. Contrary to what I said recently, I didn't bet the pot the whole hand; I just kept betting healthy amounts which I steadily escalated. My river bet of $10,000 wasn't called, but I still raked in a pot worth $34,000.

After not having an opportunity to read my Kindle for a while, I got a chance this last weekend, and have now almost finished reading "Positively Fifth Street". I highly recommend it.

delta: $8,167
balance: $339,093