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