Wow ... am I good or what ?  I'm playing so good lately I can hardly believe it myself. From the 8 tourney's I've played in the last week I made 2 final tables, cashed 3 times and went deep 6 times. I can probably discount the 2 where everything went wrong as they were at the very start of the series of games I played.

With the money from a $2 rebuy tourney, I have gotten myself a copy of Poker Tracker and am planning to thoroughly review it here later. So stay tuned for that ... so far I have it setup mining the 5c/10c cash tables at Full Tilt so I will hopefully have some stats on the players there after a few days. I hope by that time I will have enough info to sit down at a table and have stats on a few players. This way I will be able to do some quick table selection and make an easier profit than before (hopefully).

I think I should actually concentrate on MTTs right now as my game in those has vastly improved lately and online cash games I have never been very succesfull at. The cash game at our house has been skipped for 2 weeks with it being my birthday and all.

I got a free $45 bankroll at Action Poker and since it's windows only software, I was running it on VMware on my Macbook.  Now today I tried to start the software, and after it had updated itself, it now refuses to run on VMware. It barfs out an error saying 'this software cannot run on a virtual machine'.

Now I don't know who was the master brain at Action Poker who thought of this, but it sure doesn't help me. I guess they want to prevent people from messing around with the software, or maybe they have had people with virtual machine farms harvesting all those free bankrolls or something.

Anyway, I will now have to grab my Wintell machine in order to rid the donks at AP of their money !

Late last night, I hopped onto Full Tilt Poker to play a little tournament. I saw a 6-max tourney in the list that was already running but had late registration available. Perfect, it's late, I don't want to wait. So I signed up for this $3 tournament with already over 100 players in it. A little later I noticed that during late registration this number had doubled to just over 200 players. Great I thought to myself, if I make it deep in this one, it's gonna be a looooong night.

And, in fact I did make it deep. I got lucky a few times early in the tournament, sucking out and tripling up. After that I just played some great poker. I payed loads of attention to the players at my table and their tendencies. I noticed a guy limping in and folding for a decent raise when he did so, later in the tournament I pounced on him with any two cards when I saw him do this. I also made some beauiful resteals when my stack was around 15 to 20 bb (a point where I normally have trouble because I try to steal and fold for the push because I'm trying it with ace-rag). I folded every ace rag I found and just played very aggressive once the antes started getting in.

24 places paid and when we got to 25, I was actually the shortest stack. I waited for a hand, and finally when I had only 5 bb left I got AA on the big blind. Almost tripled up there and got QQ the hand right after it. This brought me back in contention with about 20 big blinds left again. I kept doing the resteal against weak opponents and coasted my way to the final table without ever showing down a hand. Still around 20 bb left.

The second hand at the final table I'm on the big blind and get dealt AK of spades. It folds around to the small blind who pushes a 40 bb stack in ... I think it over for a little while and put him on something like a medium pair that rather doesn't see the flop. That's a coin flip situation most likely, but since I'm the shortstack at the table I figure its my chance to make some chips and there is a reasonable chance that I'm ahead too. I make the call and he shows me KJo, my joy turns to grief though as a J hits the flop and I'm eliminated from the tournament.

Made about $35 on it, but more importantly I have shows myself that my tournament play has massively improved. Stay tuned to hear about my future (big) wins !!!