I bought Poker Tracker 3 a while back and it has been on moth balls ever since. Mainly because I’ve never been able to get the HUD to work smoothly while playing as many tables as I do. Members of Deuces Cracked get Hold ‘Em Manager at a 30% discount and after seeing a few others using it in videos I decided to give it a go. I’ve only been using it for a few sessions, but I already love it and it has motivated to study my leaks a lot harder.

The first and most important difference I have noticed between HEM and PT2/PT3 is import speed and the speed of the whole program general. It seems to be a lot less resource intensive and there seems to be a lot less loading time than PT (even though I imported my entire database). The HUD also runs flawlessly across many tables and I find the pop-up tabs for more information way more useful that the old PAHUD pop-up.

There are a few things that are going to take getting used to, like not seeing a summary of each hand value and its profit when I load up the cash game tab. I think I’m really going to enjoy the filters within HEM and the numerous ways you can analyse hands and situations.

I’ve been very slack with my blogs this month and for that I apologise. I’m running low on inspiration/ideas for posting at the moment. August has been pretty good to me so far and I am well on my way to achieving some goals (besides blogging more).

I still have a bit of poker grind work ahead of me to close out the month, but I’m looking forward to it. The last few days I’m been taking some time away from the game and I feel pretty fresh now. One thing I am disappointed with is the amount of study time I have put in this month. I have been visiting 2+2 forums rarely and I haven’t watched as many videos as I would have liked to. I feel like my play, thought processes, but most of all my confidence have suffered.

I have been keeping up with going to the gym, although probably not at the intensity I would like. I’m starting to get a bit of tendinitis in my left foot again, so I have had to ease off the treadmill a bit. I’m not really starting to see or feel any results yet, but I think just getting away from life for a bit at the gym each day is benefit enough, I’m not really looking to bulk up.

The other night Emmy and I went out with a few of her friends from work. They were all hanging out at this Karaoke bar near her work. So I went along not really knowing what to expect or with any intention of singing at all. Anyway, it turned out most of them were fluent in Chinese and this place was pretty much a haven for Chinese Karaoke. We had our own private room for the night, with a machine and big projector. All the menus on the machine and stuff were in Chinese and all the songs they were doing were completely foreign to me. It was kind of amusing to watch the video clips and stuff. Chinese punk rock is kinda catchy.

It would have been pretty boring if it wasn’t for this fun drinking game we were playing. It was some sort of variation of Liar’s Dice, basically just a game of bluffing, which appealed to me of course. I wouldn’t mind studying the official rules and maybe some strategy for future instances. We ended up playing it for multiple hours and it was a really fun and unusual night.

The Olympics have been a very fun time! It is great that they are being held in a similar time zone to Australia and I am able to follow everything at a reasonable hour. I’ve had some success betting on some of the events, with a number of long shots getting home. A few times I’ve had to bet against my own country, but the wins have softened the blow when Australia misses out on gold.

I actually did some real world work this week! My good friend Jason Berge is involved in FIlm and Television and one of his gigs is to be the camera man at Olympic Park for the big screen. He needed a cable runner this week and he asked me because he knew I’d probably be at the Melbourne Storm game anyway and it’d be a good opportunity to get to go out on the field etc.

It was a really fun experience, the job was actually pretty challenging of keeping the cable from getting tangled up or in people’s way. It wasn’t made any easier by the fact that it was a cold and wet night and I couldn’t feel my hands the entire time.

The most exciting bit was getting out on the field and amongst the players post game. He had to film post match interviews, so we were right up close and personal. It was pretty well paid too considering it was a lot of just sitting around and then only a short period of work.