And the downswing continues

So I wrote the last post almost 24 hours ago, and in that time period I managed to lose another $300 :( I've moved down to PL25 in an attempt to stop the rot but that doesn't seemed to have done the job. Although I have to admit, I didn't feel like I was playing my best, mainly because I have less respect for the money which is a huge leak in my opinion.

I'm a bit disheartened at the moment but I know I have to keep playing through the pain, because a downswing doesn't last forever. I'll be back on my feet in no time. I'm still well enough rolled to comfortably play PL25, and with 4k hands logged in the past 2 days, my love of grinding is well and truly back.

I hope everyone else is having a better start to 2011 than I am!

New Year Post

Happy New Years all. Once again I have failed miserably in my attempt to keep this blog updated, so badly in fact that December is actually empty. It’s not that the urge to write isn’t there, I certainly will still express my opinions on various subjects and I still believe that my keeping a blog I can only improve my game, it’s just that I’ve been stretched for time. The holidays are a very busy time for a student living away from home, busier in fact than term time. One has to do the obligatory visits to every friend who’s been left behind, which in Portsmouth is pretty much the whole lot, while also paying enough attention to the family, which is easier said than done. Anyway, enough of this nonsense, how about I talk about actual poker.

So, as I may or may not have mentioned in earlier posts, I’m aiming for Supernova this year. From what I can estimate, it would take me roughly 300k hands to reach this goal, assuming I don’t move up in stakes for the year, which is also a goal of mine. This relates roughly to 30k hands per month as I believe it is better for me to stay ahead of pace. Once again I will make an attempt to keep this blog updated with how far along I am at regular intervals.

It’s January 3^rd now, and although I haven’t put in a long session yet due to New Year commitments, I have logged 1.5k hands, but unfortunately I lost $300 in the process. It’s a bit disheartening to start the New Year off so badly, but it’s important to keep in mind that downswings do happen, and through hard work and discipline, I can make the money back in no time. I need to keep working on my game, review hand histories and get as much advice as I can from better players.

I’ll leave it at this for now, but I will be writing more soon. Good luck for the year all, but not too much if you’re playing PL50 ;)

End of the Month

I'll be honest, this month has been absolutely insane. That 2 week heater propelled me from having a bankroll barely able to cover enough buyins for PL10, to now where I am safely rolled for PL50 and borderline PL100. Obviously I will not break poker player rule number one, never tell anyone what you're worth, but safe to say, it's a lot more than I've ever had! The only shame is that I'm going to have to cash out a fair portion of said gigantic bankroll in order to pay for Christmas, but you know what, this actually makes me happier.

Let me explain. When every grinder begins his long arduous crawl up the rungs of the cash game ladder, he aims to acheive 3 main goals.

1. To make his way up to the highest stakes game and eventually crush Tom Dwan and Phil Ivey for millions of dollars (not alot will acheive this)

2. To make enough money to quit their boring dead end job and play poker full time (many do achieve this, but few will become millionaires)

3. To grow their account to a size where they can make regular withdrawls to support and enhance their lifestyle.

Now, if I'm honest myself, I can't see myself crushing Ivey in the near future, and going pro, while pretty awesome, probably will not happen either. However, if I can cashout even $100 a week, that's around £60. That will pretty much pay for my living expenses, assuming I don't get too drunk at Walkabout and break out the plastic excessively. That would seriously change my life, honestly. As a student you look to cut corners in nearly every possible area. Food, drink, clothes, travel etc, it can get pretty depressing. To be able to go out and buy that brand name loaf of bread, to buy that increasingly necessary new jumper, to drink a pint of Kronenburg rather than London Pride, apologies LP faithful, would dramatically alter my lifestyle. And if we think about it, $100 isn't that difficult is it? I mean that's 2 BIs. If I keep up this months winrate, which is approximately 6BBs/100, and keep up with the volume I really should do as a PLO8 grinder, then withdrawing $100 AND continuing to build a BR should be attainable. Once I hit the promised land of PL100, and settle in nicely to what I assume is a tougher game, then we could possibly move onto withdrawing more, but I think this is more of a long term goal than a hope for the new month. Right now I need to concentrate on playing solid poker, not getting worked up after losing a few pots, an issue which is sort of troubling me right now, and most importantly, getting in that volume. Although I'm hitting the 20k hand mark for the month tonight, I would really like to be much further than that this time next month.

I've got a few things I'm going to share with you but it's getting on, and Man Utd just lost 4-0 to West Ham, yeah I know! So I'm off to drown my sorrows in a haze of watery tea and mediocre porn. We'll get around to the other stuff later. Toodles.

Summary of the month

Heater of a lifetime

Once again, I can only apologize for the distinct lack of blog entries. The "problem" is that I've been too busy winning money! I know, crazy isn't it. I've literally been on the heater of a lifetime.

If I'm honest with you, this doesn't really need alot of writing, thus I invite you, and probably myself for the next few minutes, to glare in awe at my epic month so far.

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The majority of this comes from PL25 deep stacked tables and the last 2k hands orso have been PL50. Yes I realise I'm ridiculously underolled for PL50, but give it a few days and I should be there :)

Besides this amazing run at the O8 tables, I've also been doing well at NLHE. To start with, I'd played around 50 Sngs this week as I felt rather bad about letting my staker down. Afterall, I'm about 3 months into the stake and I'm still in make-up. So after quite a bit of research down in the SSMTT forum over on twoplustwo, as well going through a ton of not only my own hand histories, but those of the other players in the stable, I thought I should put in a bit of volume. And to an extent, it's paid off. Granted it's a small sample size, but my ROI this week has been around 180% without actually shipping one yet. I feel like my NLHE game has gotten a lot better in terms of pushing and calling ranges, but I'm still making the odd mistake when I'm deep stacked. It's pretty ironic if you think about it, my shortstack NLHE game is far superior to my deep stacked game, and vice versa for O8.

If that wasn't enough, I ran good outside of Pokerstars. Whilst updating my Twitter, Grimiscool for those who use it, Sky Poker had a little give away, where the first 5 people to return an answer to a trivia question received free entry into one of their £5 rebuys in the evening. Seeing as I ran like god this week, obviously I was the 5th person to return the correct answer and thus sealed the ticket. I'd never played a proper tournament on the site so thought I might as well give it a good shot. The tournament was a fairly deep stacked affair, with a 2500 chip starting stack and 12 minute levels. The play was very passive and I spent the majority of the tournament stealing and restealing whenever it was folded to me. After 4 hours of arduous play, I made it to the final table as the shortstack but after winning 2 important flips, as well as constantly stealing the now fairly large blinds, I became an overwhelming chip leader and shipped that bad boy for £144. Even though I didn't get my money in bad ever, that fact that I ran well in those important flips meant I had a more than healthy chip stack for the majority of the tournament. I must thank Sky Poker for the ticket into the tournament, and now that I have some funds on their site, I'll be crushing the O8 on there :)

I don't know how long this run good is going to last, but I might as well put in as many hours as humanly possible so that I have enough money next month to be able to cash out some money to pay for Christmas. On that note, I better return to the tables so until next time, take it easy e-world :)

Little rant about short tables!

I can't really call my move from half stacking to full stacking a "transition", just common sense. Nevertheless, I have experience at both forms of the game and thus I think I can compare the 2 games impartially. Shortstacking is just not real poker! (Still being impartial obv ;))

I've had so many discussions on the 2+2 forum about this subject and although people have brought up some valid points about why I should embrace the new 50BB table trend, I don't think I ever will. Most of the reason I enjoy poker so much is that it makes you think, you're pitting the strength of your decisions up against the decisions of others, so why would I take away this part of the game and replace it with just pure gamble. It's not enjoyable for me, and according to my Omaha Manager, it's definately not profitable either.

Unfortunately for me, others don't share my disdain for it. Right now as I write this post, there are 10 tables running at PL25, not one of them a full stack table, or even a deep table. Even when I sit on my own at these tables, they'll take an hour to fill and if I'm honest, sitting HU or 3 handed with decent regs isn't the most profitable idea in the world. I assume that most players who have decided to have a go at PLO8 are new-ish to the game and would like to learn how to play it properly, so why sit at a table where you're going to be pushing around small stacks without even having a clue what equity you're going to have. Come play some full stacked poker and you'll learn so much more about the game and become adept far faster than you will at the short tables.

Sorry this isn't a meaningful blog post, just a bit of ranting and raving about silly short tables. I write something actually half decent later. So bye for now :)

Back for a bit of cash grind

Sorry for getting a bit lazy about updating this blog. It’s been a really busy few weeks, and finding a few spare moments to just write down my thoughts have been few and far between. So, seeming as it’s been a while, I feel I should give you a bit of an update.

The NLHE SnG grinding had been going along nicely, but unfortunately I hit a bit of a rough patch and busted my stake. Now, literally, there is no worse feeling than having to face up to your backer and admit that you just lost all his money. Even though I had been running on fumes for about a week prior, I was still optimistic that I could turn it all around. After all, only 2 weeks previously I had almost doubled my money, so it was definitely within my capability to do it. Luckily for me, this feeling was mirrored by my backer and he very generously reloaded me, which again I thank him for. Rather than jump straight back into haemorrhaging money, I thought it better to take a step back, review my game and more importantly, just take a break from push/fold poker. I would get into my thoughts on the subject, but let’s leave that for another post, don’t want this one to be a bit tl;dr.

Being the degenerate gambler that I am, I couldn’t just withdraw from poker altogether, after all that would give me far too much time than I care to have, so I thought why not go back to my passion, PLO8 cash games. Once again, I thought better of just jumping into games which I was quite clearly losing money at, it would be a fools move. So I started doing some research on my HEM database as to what I was making money at, and the results were quite baffling. Overall I had been a small loser at PL25, which was quite shocking in itself considering that I was above $400 in profit at the game at one point, and a big winner at PL10. Obviously the change in skill level would account for a chunk of that difference in performance, but surely it could not be responsible for t he whole problem. And then it dawned on me, when I was playing the PL10 cash games, it was back in the days of regular 100BB buyins, rather than the crazy 50BB games that were running these days. So I filtered my database for games in which I only played with 100BB stacks or greater, and the results were unbelievable.

In effect that report told me that I was losing over 20 buyins at the 50BB games! If I had picked up on this sooner I could have saved myself a lot of heartache, let alone a boat load of cash. It was clearly obvious that I should exclude myself from these games straight away, but that brought up a different problem, I was nowhere near rolled for deep stacked PL25 games, but, I was nicely rolled for PL10 deep, so why not give that a try. Now I cannot say in any certain terms what a goldmine these games are!! I’m still playing for $25 stacks, just with a lot more play, so in effect I’m risking the same amount of money but with more of a chance to use my skill advantage to outplay what were, in almost all cases, significantly worse players. WHY HADN’T I WORKED THIS OUT SOONER!!!!

So I think, I’ll be playing these games for a bit, then graduating to PL25 when the roll gets deep enough, but still with one eye on reviewing my NLHE SnG game so I can get back to crushing those. Actually, let’s go do that now J Til next time, adios!!