Eric Rizen Lynch

Hello from Vancouver

Well, I'm saying goodbye to Vancouver in about an hour. Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been north of the border in Vancouver for a while now working on some things for Lock Poker. I can't really talk about them right now but I'm hoping that all of you will get to see them in the somewhat near future. Definitely a lot of exciting things going on and I'm really happy to not only get to be a part of it but get to have some input as well.

Since I've been doing a lot of work up here I haven't really had a chance to play any poker at all since last Saturday. I'm still primarily focused on PLO. Once I get home and have my Omaha Manager handy I'll post some statistics for the month. Over the last couple of months I've been really crushing the 1/2 games, but every time I move to 2/4 I just get hammered. I'm really not sure if I'm playing differently, the competition is just that much tougher, or if the sample size is too small. I've tried to move up about once a month since I started giving myself a 5 buy in stop loss, which isn't NEAR enough in PLO to really do much, but going down much more than that would be somewhat demoralizing and I like to keep my bankroll as close to all time highs as possible so dropping more than 5 buy ins before moving down then having to grind back 20+ buy ins at 1/2 just to get back to even isn't that appealing to me.

I'll probably take another stab at 2/4 this month and see how it goes. It's kind of odd because after I took second in the PLO SCOOP event in March i splashed around in lots of PLO between 1/2 and 5/10. I was a winner at every level (over a small sample size) except 2/4! I think part of it is there are just some really good mid stakes grinders playing at that level, some of it is sample size, and some of it is that I still have a lot of room to improve in my PLO cash game.

I'm probably going to make some 1/2 PLO vids on PXF real soon. I'm in the process of learning how to record myself 4 tabling then dub in audio after the fact that way I can pause the action and really go over concepts. I feel confident enough in my game that I could make some good instructional videos on how to beat the games up to that level, but it's not quite as fluid and natural to me as NLHE is yet so I'd prefer the ability to go back and go more in depth and not record in real time. For those of you who have ever asked, yes ever video I've ever done 'live' has been one take, no audio dubbed in afterwards real time thoughts into my brain. Every time I've ever recorded live with the exception of once where I ran AA into KK and lost a MTT in 3 hands has gone up too, so I don't just pick and choose the ones that work out well.

At any rate, I have my fingers crossed that we're going to be able to offer rakeback to North American players on Lock real soon (non North American players can already get it). I'm really not normally a guy who does this, but I would definitely encourage everyone to sign in and check it out over the coming couple of months if that happens. There are a couple of changes I am hoping will go into effect real soon, and the games start to get really good in the fall as the weather turns cooler, more people spend time indoors, and since there are a few sports books attached to the network, football season is upon us.

'Ask Rizen' will be back this Friday and I have about 12 questions still in the queue so plenty of people to get to. Feel free to submit new questions as well, just fair warning there is a 5-6 week lag time between asking and answering right now. I was also thinking of resurrecting my old 'hand of the day' post into a 'hand of the week' post. Let me know if that is something you all would be interested in. I would basically take one user submitted hand each week and break it down into what I would be thinking about and do on every street. The key to doing that really is getting feedback and hands from you all. It died out last time because I stopped having enough hands submitted, but if I brought it back and did it once a week it might work, and if I get a ton of submissions I could do some bonus ones or start to do it twice a week. Let me know if that's something you guys would be interested in and if it is I'll bring it back. If I don't hear much on it then I'll assume no one is that interested.

-Rizen