Sorry I've been off schedule with the updates. Without going into great detail, I'm dealing with some ongoing issues related to the hacking of my accounts a few weeks ago. It's really been a pain, and having a background in technology it's really something I never thought would happen to me. I'm VERY careful about things and take a lot of extra steps to make sure things like this don't happen. At some point in the future I'll go into much more detail about it in the hopes that it might help anyone reading avoid going through a similar situation, but while there are still some open issues surrounding it I'd feel better not talking about it a ton other than to say it sucks, and I truly hope that no one else has to ever deal with anything like it.

Poker wise things have been relatively good. I'm still playing mostly PLO at 1/2 and 2/4. I've been focusing more on 1/2 as I'm making some adjustments to my game. At first with PLO I worked very hard on fundamentals, hand selection, position, etc. What I'm finding now is that playing a very solid, by the book sort of game can beat up to 1/2, but to beat much higher than that you have to start to make adjustments or thinking players will eat you alive.

Honestly it was the same in my hold em development. When I first started I literally used a starting hands chart and pretty solid fundamental strategy. That will allow you to beat a lot of weaker opposition. Over time though, eventually you reach a point where players are good enough at hand reading to stop paying you off when you're playing super straight forward, so you have to start to mix things up to keep them guessing. That's what I'm working on right now, as even though I've started to beat 2/4 now it's still not by enough that it makes sense to play instead of 1/2. At 1/2 my win rate is better than twice what it is at 2/4 with a lot less variance. So I've dropped back down to primarily 1/2 for a bit while I try out some adjustments to my game and once I get more comfortable with them I'll hop back up to 2/4 and see if it helps.

That kind of brings up a pet peeve of mine, which is that people often play the highest levels they can beat in poker without at all thinking about win rate. If a player can beat 3/6, they play 3/6 even if it might be more profitable for them to play 2/4 since their overall win rate would be higher. Same with MTTs, I find people often get fixated on playing certain buy in levels rather than looking for what tournaments will be the most profitable regardless of buy in. I know I used to get asked 'what are you doing here?' a lot when I played the $10 rebuy on Stars at 10pm. I don't view it as a $10 buy in though, I view it as a tournament that pays over $10k for first, has lots of soft opposition, and because of the rebuys plays pretty deep stacked.

I've also been playing the 'pro' tables on Lock at 7pm ET every night. Those are 5/10 and 10/20 full ring no limit hold em tables where pros from across the Cake network (myself, Doyle Brunson, Mike Caro, Kenna James, etc) play at 5/10 and 10/20 every night. The games bring in some good and not so good players and are a lot of fun. So far I've been fortunate enough to take quite a bit out of those games most nights, but I've run exceptionally well at times. I even recorded a video of it last night so hopefully that will be up on PokerXFactor soon.

As far as live events go I'm going to be hitting the Hard Rock Poker Open at the Hard Rock in Tulsa a little later this month. I'll be playing the $2k this Friday then the main event the 15th. Will be fun to get in some live poker action again and I'll be twittering updates from both events provided my phone cooperates.

-Rizen

Ask Rizen will be back next week. I haven't been able to update lately because I've been super busy in life away from the poker table. I'm going to make it a somewhat quick summary, but basically we had a scare where we thought our son had H1N1 after being exposed to it at the day care at the gym where we go. It turned out luckily that it was just a regularly virus/flu bug but it hit our entire family (except me luckily) so we had a lot of sick people around the house for a while.

This month was also my birthday and my anniversary both. We celebrated those which was fun. Around that same time unfortunately I had my Full Tilt and Bodog accounts hacked and subsequently drained. That really sucked and kind of soured me on online poker for a bit, also hampered my ability to play any tournaments as all I had left was Lock and Stars. I took a few days off since my head wasn't in the right place and have since started to play some again, but it was one of those things I never really thought would ever happen to me.

I do a whole piece with a lengthy explanation as well as security precautions to take for your own accounts in this week's PokerXFactor podcast. I don't think it's up yet but once it is I'll try and link you guys to it if you want a more detailed explanation as well as what you can do to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

I'll return to regular updates now that all that is sorted out, and Ask Rizen will return next week on Fridays again. Oddly enough even though it was a bad month for both disease and having money stolen it was a really good month for me poker wise. I'm finally beating 2/4 PLO with a solid, consistent win rate now, and have been playing the 3/6 and 5/10 full ring games on Lock in the evenings as part of a 'play with the pros' on the Cake Network promotion and have had a lot of success in those games.

-Rizen

Well, I'm saying goodbye to Vancouver in about an hour. Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been north of the border in Vancouver for a while now working on some things for Lock Poker. I can't really talk about them right now but I'm hoping that all of you will get to see them in the somewhat near future. Definitely a lot of exciting things going on and I'm really happy to not only get to be a part of it but get to have some input as well.

Since I've been doing a lot of work up here I haven't really had a chance to play any poker at all since last Saturday. I'm still primarily focused on PLO. Once I get home and have my Omaha Manager handy I'll post some statistics for the month. Over the last couple of months I've been really crushing the 1/2 games, but every time I move to 2/4 I just get hammered. I'm really not sure if I'm playing differently, the competition is just that much tougher, or if the sample size is too small. I've tried to move up about once a month since I started giving myself a 5 buy in stop loss, which isn't NEAR enough in PLO to really do much, but going down much more than that would be somewhat demoralizing and I like to keep my bankroll as close to all time highs as possible so dropping more than 5 buy ins before moving down then having to grind back 20+ buy ins at 1/2 just to get back to even isn't that appealing to me.

I'll probably take another stab at 2/4 this month and see how it goes. It's kind of odd because after I took second in the PLO SCOOP event in March i splashed around in lots of PLO between 1/2 and 5/10. I was a winner at every level (over a small sample size) except 2/4! I think part of it is there are just some really good mid stakes grinders playing at that level, some of it is sample size, and some of it is that I still have a lot of room to improve in my PLO cash game.

I'm probably going to make some 1/2 PLO vids on PXF real soon. I'm in the process of learning how to record myself 4 tabling then dub in audio after the fact that way I can pause the action and really go over concepts. I feel confident enough in my game that I could make some good instructional videos on how to beat the games up to that level, but it's not quite as fluid and natural to me as NLHE is yet so I'd prefer the ability to go back and go more in depth and not record in real time. For those of you who have ever asked, yes ever video I've ever done 'live' has been one take, no audio dubbed in afterwards real time thoughts into my brain. Every time I've ever recorded live with the exception of once where I ran AA into KK and lost a MTT in 3 hands has gone up too, so I don't just pick and choose the ones that work out well.

At any rate, I have my fingers crossed that we're going to be able to offer rakeback to North American players on Lock real soon (non North American players can already get it). I'm really not normally a guy who does this, but I would definitely encourage everyone to sign in and check it out over the coming couple of months if that happens. There are a couple of changes I am hoping will go into effect real soon, and the games start to get really good in the fall as the weather turns cooler, more people spend time indoors, and since there are a few sports books attached to the network, football season is upon us.

'Ask Rizen' will be back this Friday and I have about 12 questions still in the queue so plenty of people to get to. Feel free to submit new questions as well, just fair warning there is a 5-6 week lag time between asking and answering right now. I was also thinking of resurrecting my old 'hand of the day' post into a 'hand of the week' post. Let me know if that is something you all would be interested in. I would basically take one user submitted hand each week and break it down into what I would be thinking about and do on every street. The key to doing that really is getting feedback and hands from you all. It died out last time because I stopped having enough hands submitted, but if I brought it back and did it once a week it might work, and if I get a ton of submissions I could do some bonus ones or start to do it twice a week. Let me know if that's something you guys would be interested in and if it is I'll bring it back. If I don't hear much on it then I'll assume no one is that interested.

-Rizen

I'm a bit late on the 'Ask Rizen' this week obviously (or a bit early I guess, depending on how you look at it). I've been fairly busy with things over at Lock Poker and FTOPS. We also got a new puppy at the house for my kids, and it's been fun, but is taking some time out of my day. I've been managing to hit the gym pretty regularly as well, which has felt nice. I only got a chance to play in 8 of the 25 FTOPS events. I cashed in 2, neither a super significant cash. I collected one pro bounty as well, which made me right around break even for the series. I bubbled both the NLHE and PLO heads up events, which always feels brutal. I really hate losing the first round in a heads up tournament, but at least then it doesn't use up quite as much time! In the 4 other events I never really got anything going. Here are a couple of questions for an abbreviated ask rizen. I'll do a full slate this Friday.

Q: I've been reading and re-reading all the relevant poker books, played 200,000 hands at least and analyzed my play afterwards. Still, I don't seem to advance at all and running break even for a year. I play online at the 25NL-cash and $5 SnG's so it's hard to blame it on bad luck, because the level of play is so low at these stakes.

I tried to figure it out and come to the conclusion I'm fine when I can analyze a hand for a few minutes, but at the tables I feel like I don't have enough time to find out the best play. My brain is just too slow I guess. Do you think there's a way to work on this, or is it only possible to become a good poker player if you're able to make fast and correct decisions?

A: Most people if they tell me they're running break even over that sort of sample size I would tell them to drop down, but I'm not sure how much softer the games are going to get if you drop to 10NL-cash and $2 SnGs. Without knowing more about your play it's hard to say if you're playing poorly or not, but based on your self assessment this could be right. Without knowing how many tables you currently play, I would honestly drop down to a single table and try and stay really focused and make good decisions. I'd slowly add more tables once I was able to play enough hands to get a feel on if my results were improving. I know as I was learning to play going from 1 table to 2 was a tremendous hurdle and going from 2 to 4 seemed nearly impossible at the time.

If you're already playing 1 table and struggling with timing and decisions, I'm not really sure what to say. Live poker obviously would allow you more time to think out your decisions, but if you're needing the full time and time bank to make these decisions one tabling you probably need to do some more work away from the table mastering the concepts so they come a little more automatically at the table.

Q: Generic question about the release of Volume II of the book here.

A: I've gotten probably a dozen of these questions. Quite honestly at this point I don't know. I should have a firm release date in the next few weeks and when I do I'll share. There were some unexpected delays in finishing the second book that I can't really go into here. I think it's going to be a great book and I do share in the disappointment that we haven't been able to get it out sooner. Once I have a firmer release date I promise to let everyone know, but at this point anything I post would be speculation or guesswork. I would be extremely disappointed and surprised if it slipped all the way out of 2009 though and anticipate it to be out well before then.

-Rizen