More Poker

Perhaps I need to add a poker category here...

I don't generally like to broadcast how I play on the internet, so I don't usually get into hand specifics on here, but I feel like my poker game has come a long way, baby.  I basically started playing a year ago (last Thanksgiving was the first time I played live, though I guess I had been playing online before that). 

I made a killing this week in my two home games (partly due to luck, and partly due to my game), and I just feel like I'm finally improving a few areas of play that hadn't been that great for me before:
1) my ability to gear shift when the game shifts.  I have always been pretty adept at realizing when the game had changed, but adjusting my play took awhile for some reason.  I've definitely gotten better at this recently, though there are a few things I still need to tinker with (sorry, no details, LOL).
2) New games.  I started playing in a Limit HoldEm, Omaha Hi Lo, and Stud8 game and I basically just started playing limit and any version of Omaha/Stud about a month and a half ago.  My learning curve has definitely been a lot faster than my NLHE learning curve was.  I really like Omaha a lot.  In addition to opening up new games, NLHE all the time gets super boring. 
3)Varying my playing style just to be random.  Perhaps I shouldn't be posting about this one.  ;)  One of my greatest strengths is that I am consistently changing my playing style, even when the game has not changed.  A lot of people seem to figure that they know how you play based on a few hands you've shown down with them, and even when they get contradicting information, they still feel like you're playing the way they think you do based on previous hands.  Heck, I've fallen into this trap myself, all the time.  I like to play the same hands different ways just to throw people off (obviously my ability to do so is dependent on what cards are on the board, what people I'm up against, etc.).  It seems to work.  I love getting the vibe that no one at the table is quite sure of what I have, or they are quite sure of what I have and they are wrong (especially afterwards when people try to put me on a hand and they are not even close, LOL).  As with the previous two things, I obviously still have a ways to go on perfecting this, but I surely have gotten better at this, especially compared to July when we were in Vegas and I felt like the good players sitting there could put me on a hand every single time.

Anyways, I know I still have a long way to go, but I am very pleased with my game recently. 

Another thing - I actually got into a long conversation with a guy at Foxwoods in May about how I got into poker.  Honestly, the primary attraction of it for me at first was not monetary (especially because when I first started I sucked!), but psychological.  Playing poker helps me to improve personality flaws that I have (impatience, pride, being too uptight, etc., etc.)  Probably no one who knows me would describe me as Zen (and I'm sure I just caused some longtime acquaintances to spit soda on their computer screen in laughter, just by saying that), but I have gotten so much better at just taking things in stride, which was something I sorely needed to work on before.  Still have a long way to go, but relatively speaking, I feel like I have made a lot of progress on this front as well.