BrewBrain Sports Investing

So, I’ve been drinking my latest pale ale and enjoying it, but have finally decided it is not the finished, final version of the Almaden Valley Brewing Raccoon Trail Pale Ale.  It needs work.

To start with, the carbonation did finish too light.  I cut back the priming sugar in an effort to get more beer than foam in my glass when I pour.  Most of my beers, while tasty, are a bit heavy on carbonation, to the point that I actually stir them up a bit to release some carbonation.  This time, I cut back on the sugar and got a tad too little carbonation.  I’m not sure if that had more effect than letting the beer sit in the clearing tank for two months before priming, but I suspect it did.  Bring on the kegs!  Kegs solve all of life’s problems, do they not?

Second, I’m not thrilled with the hops.  The galena I used for bittering did not do much bittering.  I’m not sure if it’s galena in general, or just this particular package I had.  I’ll definitely give galena another shot just for the education.

In all, it is a pleasant, light pale ale that I do enjoy.  I think other people will enjoy it as well, but it just needs to be kicked up a notch.  The sweet needs a bitter to go along with it.  Twist my arm, I’ll give it another try, possibly next weekend.

In other news, those kegs are getting closer quickly.  As reported in my last post, I ended a miserable 20K hand breakeven stretch at 25NL with a bang.  Well, things haven’t slowed down yet.  I believe I’m running below average on the luck factor still, but not to the point where I can’t easily overcome the beats.  I tend to slowly chip my way up, take a bad beat, slowly chip my way up, take a bad beat, slowly chip my way up and then, finally, a hand holds up, or I hit my monster draw.  I believe I took an ohfer (however you spell that.  I mean zip, nadda, zero wins) when I got a miserable puke brained short stacker all in when I had the better hand yesterday.  My goal in life is to bust the short stackers off my tables so the rest of us can play poker.  They must just be terrified to play a hand past the flop.  They buy in for the table minimum and either fold before the flop or push all in.  Miserable.  How is that even fun for them?  Once they get lucky and double up their miserable little min-stack, they leave and find another table with an empty seat where they can plop down the minimum buy-in.

So, after my 20K stretch of making no money ended, I started playing the 30NL deep tables.  Instead of the usual 100 big blind stack maximum buy-in ($25 on the 25NL tables) the max is 200 big blinds, or $60 on the 30NL deep tables.  This leads to more poker after the flop as the stacks are deeper.  It was a ton of fun, and I thing the level of competition was worse than the 25NL games on average.  I did very well in that game, but it could definitely have been much, much better than it was.  Yesterday, I went over the $1,250 bankroll mark (I took into consideration the rakeback I’m due in a week or so) and moved to the 50NL tables for a 1K hand session last night.  Man, if I could have run even half decent and not been a wacko idiot on two hands, I would have put up a huge day. 

At the end of the day, I managed to come back from a 2 buy-in deficit and posted a small win on the day at my new level. 

My grand plan for the rest of the year is to run through the levels as quickly as possible until I reach 1000NL.  I’ll pause there and really work on my game for a good long time until I feel comfortable moving up to the truly high stakes and tangling with the best.  This all sounds great, but I also expect I’ll have some trouble along the way - both with the luck factor getting in the way and with the quality of my game.  I’m not sure where it will happen, but at some point, the competition will just be better than me and I’ll have to put some overtime in on the school side of the game before I’ll be able to move forward.  I can see it will not be at 50NL.  For all I know it will be 100NL though, which is up next.