Bad Beat on Cancer Charity Tournament on Full Tilt

Please join me Sunday, November 15 for the Twitter Poker Tour Charity event to
benefit Bad Beat on Cancer on Full Tilt Poker.

Tournament Details
Place: Full Tilt Poker
Date: November 15th, 2009
Time: 6:15PM EST
Cost: $10 ($5 entry plus $5 donation to BBoC)
Tourney ID#: 113220604
Tourney PW: TPTFORBBOC

Additionally, there will be a live stream broadcast along with the
event, featuring Jan Mahrer, Andy Bloch, Andrew Feldman, and the Pro's
of DeucesCracked, who will be giving away prizes to everyone who makes
the final table.

11 Red Pro's are already signed up.

Lets raise some money for BBoC!!!

Updates and Lock Poker Pro Tournament

Ok, so I have been slack as usual with my blog. So much has been going on since signing the deal with Lock Poker. I was on vacation for a week with my family in the Outer Banks of NC. We had a blast and it was great to have some time away. Of course, I did play poker online a few nights while I was there, but still had time to relax on the beach, by the pool and to do some fishing with my nephew and his buddy. We caught a bunch of fish and had a big fish fry the last night we were there. Good stuff.

Since being back, I have been playing a lot, working on my training material and doing some one-on-one training sessions. It's funny as sometimes I wish I was just playing poker and doing fun stuff, but then I get into my training sessions and I remember why I am putting so much time into all of that too. I love talking poker and love helping other people get better. I' m really glad there are so many people out there that think they already know it all and don't actually work on their games and try to get better. That's awesome for all of us. Really dumb for them - awesome for us.

Speaking of training, I just got back from a weekend in Orlando teaching at a WPT Boot Camp. Mike "The Mouth" Matusow was our lead instructor and I had the honor of teaching with him and 3 of my favorite poker players and friends, Nick Brancato, Rick Fuller and Nick Binger. The camp was great. We had about 75-80 students and I really think they had a great time and learned a lot. If any of you want more information about the WPT Boot Camps or any of my own training sessions, definitely let me know. I think they are all worth so much more than the cost of the camp and anyone who takes them seriously will recoup the cost of the classes in no time. Oh, and by the way, Mike's book is awesome. If you have not read it, get it and do so. I read it in two sittings. I found it hard to put down and just really loved how honest Mike is and how he provides so much insight into what his life has been like and all that he has been through.

Things are really starting to ramp up with Lock Poker as well. We have our first Pro Bounty Tournament next Monday, August 31, at 9:00 pm ET, we are hosting a $10+1 tournament vs all the new Lock Pros. If you knock a pro out, you will receive 1 hour of free training from that pro. Also, with my bonus code, CHILDS, you will not only get a 110% bonus on your first deposit up to $600, you will also get a free entry ticket for this tournament!

If you have not already downloaded Lock Poker, you can do so at http://www.lockpoker.com/download/childs. Make sure CHILDS is in the bonus code field, enter your e-mail address and download the software. If you have already deposited, you can also use my code or the code AugustPro and get a 25% reload bonus and entry into the tournament.

I am thinking about starting some Acumen Poker specific tournaments on Lock where any former and current students will have the opportunity to play against me and each other, so if you have been to any of my classes or are currently taking lessons, be sure to download and install it using my sign up code so that you get the free money and have the chance to test your skills against the other Acumen Poker folks.

Well, that's about it for now. Gotta get some things done and then probably log some time playing online tonight.

Decide to Win!

lee.childs@acumenpoker.net
leechilds.blogspot.com
http://www.lockpoker.com/download/childs
http://www.acumenpoker.net

Seat Open - LOCK it up!

Just a quick blog to announce some exciting news for me and several of my fellow PPI pros. As of August 1st, I am honored to join Eric 'Rizen' Lynch, Jason Young, Mike Leah, Matt 'AllInat420' Stout, Joe 'JoeytheB' Brooks, Kyle 'kwob20' Bowker and Jonathan Jaffe as the professional poker players representing Lock Poker. We have formed a truly unique partnership with Lock Poker and are all dedicated to making it the best place to play online.

I will continue to post about everything that is going on with me, Lock Poker and the other Lock Pros. I know we will have lots of exciting things going on and to kick things off, I have been authorized to offer a 110% sign up bonus up to $600 to anyone that signs up at http://www.lockpoker.com/download/childs. Be sure that the bonus code 'CHILDS' shows up before you download the software and Lock will match 110% of what you deposit up to $600.

Well, I need to get some rest before heading back home tomorrow from Borgata but I wanted to make sure I got the news out to everyone as soon as I could. I'll have a couple days at home and then finally a vacation week at the beach. I'm sure I will be spending some time on Lock while I am there and you'll definitely find me there pretty much every day once I am back.

Feel free to let me know if you sign up and pass along any suggestions for the site. I am really excited about joining the Lock family and will be looking for any and all ideas to help make the site better for all of our players.

Decide to Win!

http://www.lockpoker.com/download/childs

ClubWPT Bounty Tournament Tonight at 9PM ET!

Tonight at 9PM ET, please join me at ClubWPT for another bounty tournament where you get to battle me and other Poker Players International Pros.

ClubWPT is the subscription-based online site of the World Poker Tour and only costs $19.95 per month. You can sign up for a free two week trial and come take on the PPI pros. Knock one of us out of the tournament and you win $50!

If you don't know much about this site, you can read about it by clicking the How it Works link on their home page. Basically, you just pay your monthly membership fee and you can play in dozens of points-based tournament to win more points or cash. It's a great way to learn how to play online with no risk of losing money.

Joining me tonight will be the following PPI Pros:

Eric Lynch
Kelly Armentrout
Tony Salerno
Mike Borchetta
Jena Delk

Hope to see you there!

Decide to Win!

WSOP 2009 Update

With Day 1 of the Main Event in the books, I figured it was time to get back on the computer and finally get some updates out. I know lots of folks have been following the action on Twitter so I wont give a lot of play by play in here. I played 15 events prior to the main event and have 3 cashes. Certainly not the year that some of these kids and men have been having (multiple two-bracelet winners and Jeff Lisandro with 3?!?!? - wow!), but overall 3/15 is actually pretty good. They were all first or second level cashes, so the finishes have been a bit disappointing, but I really do feel like I have been playing some of the best poker of my life. I bubbled one event where I tried to pick off a bluff in a pot that was just too big for my hand. My read was right that they player didn't want a call, but he was bluffing with the best hand. If I had let that one go, I had plenty of chips to still make a run and would likely have four cashes and potentially another deep run.

My dad has been out here for several weeks now too and he has been playing great. He has two WSOP cashes and he won a nightly tournament here at the Rio. He strongest finish was in the $5K six-handed event where he finished 36th! That field is one of the strongest there is and we are all really proud of how great he played. 90 players made the money in that event and I finished 69th. The event before I cashed in the $3K Triple Chance event, so I was happy to have the back-to-back cashes heading into the Main Event.

My wife Jenny has been able to visit me twice out here and we also met in Wisconsin for our friends' wedding a couple weeks ago. The wedding was great and a nice relaxing vacation away from the Vegas madness. Last year I only got to see her for one long weekend, so getting to see her three times this summer has really been awesome. Unfortunately she had to head back home today, but she was here yesterday faithfully on the rail all day long! She rocks - I am really a lucky guy!

I played day 1c yesterday of the Main Event and when I first got to the table, I only recognized one player. I was pretty happy about that, but it turned out that the table was really strong. No one was making big mistakes and it was a struggle to get any chips. After starting out really tight, I won a couple of small pots with AA and KK and was up to 32k from my starting stack of 30K. From there, things just went downhill until dinner break. I kept making a lot of second best hands or getting raised on continuation bets when I totally bricked the flops. I also had to make a lot of tough laydowns throughout the day, but the great thing about my table was many of the guys kept showing their hands and validating the correct folds. The player to my left got hit over the head with the deck and just about everytime that he re-raised me or we got to the turn or river and I was forced with a big laydown, he would oblige and show me his cards. Overall, I feel great about how I played yesterday. I was down as low as 11-12K and battled back to end the day at 26,950. I have two days off now before playing day 2b on Wednesday.

Today I am catching up on e-mails, writing and relaxing. I will likely go down to the Amazon Room and check in on some of the PPI team and some of my other friends that are playing today. I'm thinking about trying out my Flip Video and getting some footage from everything that is going on. We'll see if I get anything worth posting.

That's it for now. I will try to be better about blogging and am going to look into the video posting and maybe even linking in the tweets on here. For now, all the action can be followed at www.twitter.com/leechilds.

Decide to Win!

lee.childs@acumenpoker.net
www.acumenpoker.net
leechilds.blogspot.com
www.twitter.com/leechilds

On My Way to the 2009 WSOP!

I’m on the plane heading to Vegas for the 2009 WSOP and am about as excited as I was heading out in 2007 to play my first Main Event. I had played some preliminary events in 2006 and 2007, but when I took the trip out to play the Main Event in 2007, I had just quit my job and was just excited to be going out to play in my first World Series of Poker Main Event. I had no pressure on myself or specific expectations. My goal was to have fun and get through day one and then take it from there. Once I got through day one, the goal became to just cash. As the tournament went on and on, it started to become clear that I had a chance to really do something in that tournament. I will never forget calling my wife on break and she said, “Do you know that you are the chip leader?!?” What? I was the chip leader in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker? That was cool.

Heading out last summer for the 2008 series, I put way too much pressure on myself. I had worked on my game a lot and had had a couple decent scores in live tournaments, I had won a Sunday Major on Full Tilt and I had an unbelievable number of people asking for updates and wanted to follow every step of my progress. I didn’t want to let any of them down and I also wanted to prove myself as a legit player. One that should be respected at the tables. I started off pretty strong, earning a 12th place finish in the $3K NLHE event for about $24K. After that, I think the pressure got to me and I just didn’t play the best that I could. I didn’t get enough rest throughout the series and going into every $1,500 event, I really just had the mindset that they were crapshoots and that they didn’t fit with my more naturally conservative early game. I think I gambled a bit too much early in the wrong spots and played a style that was not comfortable for me. I didn’t expect to win – I just knew it was more likely that I would bust early and I went in with what I realized later was a losing mindset. Plus, I knew I could just head over to the Bellagio and play an afternoon tournament or go jump in some single table tournaments.

This year, I am coming into the series with a much different mindset. I have done less traveling to play live so far this year and I have been playing a lot online. I have logged about twice as many tournaments this year online as I did all of last year and I have really been working on my game. I have experimented with a lot of different styles of play and worked on incorporating some new concepts and strategies into my tournament game. I started off the year pretty strong (no, not to the tune that the guys that are absolutely crushing the online tournament scene have, but a solid start nonetheless). For the past six weeks or so, I really worked on a lot of the new things and testing reads with my online play. This led to some erratic results and actually many tournaments where I chipped up nicely and then lost some big flips late that cost me some pretty serious money. After doing a lot of analysis of my play, what was working – what was not, I feel really good about all of this experimentation and incremental adjustments. I was feeling really unlucky about these tournaments where I chipped up and either got cold-decked late or lost a big flip, but realized that in many of those cases, I was actually in some avoidable situations quite often. Combining all of the new things that have been working for me, eliminating the new things that have not, and going back to the roots of my core game that I still really believe in, I have a new-found confidence in my game and am really excited about the upcoming series.

I am not going to make any bold predictions for X number of cashes, X final tables, or X bracelets, but I am going to predict that I am going to be entering these tournaments with a renewed confidence in my game and a lack of outside pressure to perform. I will be updating my progress on Twitter, Facebook and my blog, and I really hope that I give my family, friends and fans a lot to root for along the way. But, this year, the focus is going to be on playing the best that I can every day and everything else will follow. I am not going to be consumed with getting back to every single message and I apologize in advance to those that are already waiting on responses and those that might not hear from me until after the summer. Just know that its simply too much to keep up with and I owe it to myself and everyone else to focus on my game.

I am starting off the series with a satellite Tuesday night for the $40K tournament that starts on Thursday. Wednesday night, I am planning on playing in Annie Duke’s charity tournament at the Hard Rock – Sucking out on the Rivers – to help support Annie’s charity Refugees International. After that, its onto the $40K if I win my seat or I will kick off the series with the big $1K event on the weekend.

My boys, Pat and Bob, are staying with me in a condo for the first month, so I expect to have some great results to report for them and all the other friends I have made in the poker world. I also have a lot of students coming out this year, so I really hope that Acumen Poker is well represented deep in many tournaments. I think this is going to be a good series for me, not only for my results, but also because I have so many friends that I will root for to have a great series too, so for those final tables that I don’t make, I hope that I will get to provide lots of rail support along the way too.

I am also excited that the folks at Bluff have asked me to start putting my blog on their site, so I will be double-posting it on my blogspot site and on Bluff. Hopefully this will help keep the fire lit under my butt and I will be better about blogging.

Well, time to read a little bit and listen to some music – maybe even catch a little nap before I get to Vegas. I wish everyone safe travels over the holiday and throughout the summer. Hope to see lots of you here and good luck in the tournaments.

Decide to Win!

lee.childs@acumenpoker.net
leechilds.blogspot.com
www.twitter.com/leechilds

GUNNAR Optiks - Standard Issue for Online Poker Players

A few weeks ago my friend, fellow poker player and agent – Randy Kasper – was raving about GUNNAR Optiks and the glasses that they make for folks that are on the computer many hours a day. These glasses are designed to protect your eyes, enhance resolution, prevent dryness of your eyes and more. Since I am on the computer pretty much all the time – playing poker, playing poker, playing poker, playing poker, working on training material, writing my articles and doing my web-conference training sessions – I had to get my hands on a pair to try them out and see if they really lived up to what Randy was saying.

I usually wear regular glasses when I am playing online. I had LASIK a few years ago, but I still have a slight astigmatism in both eyes, and I have gotten to where I have to wear glasses while playing online and occasionally when driving. When I first tried on the GUNNARs, I immediately noticed that I was seeing almost as good as I do with my prescription glasses. The resolution was definitely enhanced – images were really crisp and some of the 3D type images really seemed “pop.” The first thing I noticed was the Cashier button on Full Tilt pretty much jumping out of the screen. It was really cool!

I was using them when I was playing and even though I was seeing better and things were sharper, after a while I realized I still needed the vision correction of my prescription. So, I did what any normal person would do and I tried wearing the GUNNARs over my regular glasses! Although I looked really, really cool – especially when I used twist ties to keep the two pairs of glasses together – I figured this was not the best long-term solution. Especially since they have design features to prevent your eyes from drying out. So, I did what an actual normal person would do and contacted GUNNAR about getting a prescription pair.

I got my prescription pair last Friday and all I can really say is Wow! It’s hard for me to even look at my computer screen without wearing them now. I played a couple of six-max tourneys Friday night on Full Tilt and had one final table and just bubbled another one (for those of you who don’t play poker, that means I missed it by one) – finishing 5^th/234 in the Turbo $40K Guarantee and 7^th/261 in the Friday Night Fight. I logged a ton of time playing over the weekend and the last couple of days and I have to say, I agree with Randy – these things are standard issue for online poker players. I love ‘em. It’s pretty obvious to me that they would be great for anyone that is on the computer for long stretches at a time.

After giving Randy and the folks at GUNNAR my feedback, they asked me to help spread the word. I can’t guarantee final tables if you purchase the GUNNARs, but I can pretty much assure you that your eyes are going to feel better after logging hour after hour playing poker or whatever else you are doing on your computer. If you want final tables, we can talk about lessons and some coaching :)

To check out the GUNNARs, click any of their links in here to visit their online store. You can get a free hat by adding it to your cart and when you check out, use the promotion code PPIChilds. You must click from one of my links and use that code to get the free hat. Be sure to let me know if you try them out and what you think.

FTOPS starts tomorrow on Full Tilt, and with quite a few deep runs the last couple of weeks ending with some pretty bad beats down the stretch keeping me from the serious money, I’m hoping me and my GUNNARs have a good series!

Decide to Win!

Get a free hat with purchase using code PPIChilds.



Get a free hat with purchase using code PPIChilds.