Back

I was away for the last week, but I did get in some poker and a little bit of forex. I limited my forex trading to a couple of positions in my nano account and ended up with a ~2% gain.

Poker was another matter altogether. The day before I left I decided I would try to up my game using a variety of Pokerstar legal tools, which included a HUD and an odds calculator. I really wanted to up my game. Well, it didn't pan out. I kept changing my strategy trying to figure out what was wrong while I lost tournament after tournament. I had purchased a couple books as well, and tried out their various (albeit simplistic) strategies and couldn't find anything that worked.

Luckily, I came across one line in The Mathematics of Poker that really struck me. Essentially, it said that on a long enough timescale being too passive will hurt you, while shifting towards aggressive play leads to a higher chip count.

I took that in, because it was basically how I won my first set of tournaments. I didn't need an odds calculator or a program telling me how many times an opponent bet preflop or voluntarily added chips. I just needed to work on appropriately putting pressure on the opponent.

Anyway, after losing around $20-24 over the last six or so days, I placed first in a dollar tournament yesterday. I utilized a very aggressive, yet tuned, strategy. And it worked.