Trials of a Poker Apprentice: Back and better than ever

Or maybe not, but at least better than yesterday.

But I am back from by one-day exercise in brevity. Not that I ever intended to update this blog on a daily basis, but I must be cycling high right now, as that appears to be what I've been doing the past week or so.

Anyway, I'm feeling much better today than I did yesterday. I woke up yesterday feeling some strange bug that had me nauseous and achey, but it seems to be gone now.

Life at the poker tables has been tremendously dry of late. I just can't seem to stay focused on the prize. I have spells where I do everything right, and then I slip and start acting like Fishboy again, blowing all of the progress I'd made up until that point. I really need to work on my discipline, but isn't that sort of like a blind man saying I need to working on seeing better? After all, if my discipline is lacking, what's going to make me work on it? I guess that's why personal trainers stay in business.

Yesterday, I decided to switch sites for a bit, just for a change of pace, so I went back to Full Tilt Poker for another try. Wow! I've never seen such terrible players as the ones I sat with yesterday. It was almost like a license to print money. Almost, because I did suffer a couple of those horrendous suckouts that only the truly clueless can throw down on a person, and I ended up even for the day.

One cool bit of news I got the other day was notifying me that I had been one of the top 1,000 point earners at Full Contact Poker last month and, as such, had earned a place in a tournement there as part of the "Daniel Negreanu's Protege" promotion. If you haven't seen this, it's basically a competition that will result in one player getting personal tutelage from Kid Poker himself. That includes four months of guidance from Daniel, as well as buy-ins to four $10,000 tournaments.

Anyway, I'm nowhere near winning that prize, but it is somewhat nice to be playing for it. However, in order to win, I would first have to (1) place in the top three of this 1,000 person tournament, (2) win a nine-person tournament with the top three finishers from my tournament and two others like it, and (3) win another 10-person tournament against all the people who qualified via other means. Quite a tall hurdle, especially the fhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifirst one.

In addition, I've also qualified for two other freerolls that same week over at Hollywood Poker. I suppose I better be getting my tournament game face on.

Anyway, enough about me and my petty exploits. Here's what going on in the rest of the poker world: