Marshall28's blog

So now I'm down 16k on the day ... yeah I definitely ran pretty bad, but also ... I played completely awful. I had 2 unsuccessful attempted CRAI bluffs on the river, aside from that, I must've lost 4-5k strictly in bad call downs...

I'm a little irritated, but I feel fine. So weird that this doesn't bother me even when I play okay yet when posting the previous blog post I was incredibly agitated. Guess I really just am a head case. Probably no other explanation.


Oh and also ... if you don't frequent MSNL 2p2 it looks like I'm gonna have this HU "grudge" match against some dude who posts on 2p2 named zachvac. We r each escrowing 5k and going to 4 table 3/6 NL HU for 10k hands. whoever is up at the end wins the 10k on the side.

If you don't know how it came about and you want to ... you probably could just find the thread in 2p2 MSNL. Not sure it's really worth anybody's time to go through all of that, but I guess a lot of people want to rail the match. personally, I don't care, I just want to crush him for what he did to me.

Lastly ... shout out to my buddy Russel Thomas who is a member of the 2012 November Nine. We shared a house ~3 years ago in Vegas for the series and he's definitely a good guy (and a pretty good player too) who has made a lot of the right choices in life. Glad to see someone who has had a net positive affect on the poker community have some success--especially w/ how many shady people out there. Will definitely be rooting for him to win it all.

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So I was up 25k on the day then I lost a 9k pot after 5betting AA, getting flatted by KK then jamming a T95 flop and him spiking a K on the turn and now I'm tilted and frustrated. sigh ... lol ...

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Hey guys,

I finally just today sold my Porsche. Bought it about 6 years ago, roughly 4 months after declaring myself a poker pro. It really was the only asset I had to my name. So now I'm back to ground zero. I consider this a good thing though, because now I feel motivated to work towards new goals--which if you are a regular reader of this blog--you'd know has been a major issue in my life. At this point in my life I'm 28, and a lot of non-poker players my age are catching up to me as far as acquired wealth. I have such a different outlook now than when I bought that car at 22 years old since all I cared about then was trying to be a baller and spend every dollar I made. Now with these regular guys catching up to me, it's like a race, and I don't like to lose.

I'm ready to start building my financial portfolio and actually get myself headed in the right direction for the future--i.e. acquiring wealth (if you guys have any suggestions regarding investments, please let me know!). The car was so expensive as far as general upkeep and insurance payments that I'm actually just glad I got out from underneath it before something bad randomly happened that could have ended up costing me like 15 grand to fix. So that burden is gone. And now that I have no assets, I'm hungry to acquire new ones. This is the chance for all of you guys who told me I was making a huge mistake and how bad of an idea it was for me to buy the car in the first place. haha.

So, onto a new era. Going to take a large portion of money I received from the sale of the car and invest it, and I'm actually going to take a step down in stakes for the foreseeable future. In addition to my savings and investments, I want to follow the 50 buy in bankroll rule from now on, so you'll probably see me playing a lot of 2/4 and very little 5/10 for the next couple months. You know, for the last 12 months I've been constantly playing under-rolled pretty much everytime I took a seat at a table, and because of this, it forced me to pass up on many marginally +ev spots in order to preserve my bankroll and my ability to continue playing in those games. No longer do I have to pass up those spots which means I can get away with playing more aggressively and I won't have to just let other guys push me around nearly as much. This is going to make the game a lot more fun--and profitable--for me.

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And also.....I wanted to make a correction regarding the coaching rates I stated in my most recent video. I had said that I was currently charging 200 per hour. What I forgot to explain is that I've switched to doing 90 minute sessions. The 200 I am asking is for one 90 minute session.

I understand that in this current poker economy that the price might seem relatively high. The reason for it is because I feel very strongly that the cost of subscribing to poker training websites is incredibly low. People have been paying such a low price for such high quality content (if you think about it, like 130 bucks or something gets you every Phil Galfond video ever made--which is just completely absurd IMO).

The rest of the players who subscribe to websites have improved so much while paying so little that I feel I can't possibly charge any less than this 200 per session, especially since even after a couple of sessions I notice how quickly the mistakes you guys are making get fixed. I really hope other guys who coach have noticed the same thing and adjust their rates accordingly. Otherwise, they really are just hurting themselves way too much by improving their competition so quickly for such a cheap price. Either that or they are just scamming people by claiming that they are better than they actually are and baiting potential students with relatively low prices. This is something very important to be weary of. If someone who plays above 2/4 regularly is charging less than like 100/hr there's a good chance they aren't winning very much, or at all.

Also, I think the smartest and most economical way of attaining good advice for your game individually is for you guys to find a friend and split the cost of a session between you. You wouldn't be getting completely one-on-one coaching, but if you have a friend who you talk strategy with frequently, likely you play a lot of spots similarly and also make similar mistakes.

Additionally, I know there are a lot of you guys out there who are in study groups. If you have like 4 guys in a study group and you pool your money together, like 50 bucks each, then you prepare a number of spots/questions you'd like to discuss, or a string of footage you'd like to discuss, that's something I'd be open to doing as well.

For you guys at 50-100nl, these I think would be the best ways for you not to have to spend 2-4 buy ins on one coaching session and still get a lot out of the information being shared.

With this new set of series I'm doing of climbing the limits, taking a look at the 50nl games, then the 100nl games and the 200nl games, there are still an alarming amount of you guys misapplying concepts spoken about frequently and at length during videos. Another other thing about it is that sometimes the right advice to give in a video is the exact opposite advice to give to an individual in a coaching session. The reason for this is that in a video, I'm usually trying to give the best general advice to a range of players at different intervals regarding level of skill. When I talk to you personally and understand your skill level, the type of advice is automatically much better--and semi-frequently completely different--this is because I am basing it off of a better understanding of the skill level of the person I'm speaking with.

Anyways, shoot me a PM if any of you guys are interested as I'm becoming more regimented with my personal life, most specifically, my sleep schedule is becoming more normalized therefore I won't have the same issues I've had in the past regarding my unwillingness to schedule appointments. From now on I plan to schedule all appointments.

Drop any comments in the section below, I always appreciate them.

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I originally posted this in my CR blog, but figured since I've started posting a bit more in this one that I should just post the same messages in both....

So since I started to take my life a little bit more seriously. I mean, considering it's very obvious that my ceiling is clearly not as high as I originally believed it might be regarding how much money I could potentially be able to make in the future as a poker pro, this is what I've come up with....

Here are my estimated monthly expenses:
HEALTH INSURANCE - 125/mo
CAR INSURANCE - 155/mo
STORAGE - 180/mo
RENT - 1000/mo
MEDICATION - 540/mo
FOOD/ALCOHOL - 700/mo
MISC - 1000/mo= 3700/mo

3700x6 months = $22,200

22k? If I'm just keeping that locked up, what am I supposed to use for a bankroll? Sometimes I play 5/10nl with less than this in my bankroll. Geez, all I need to do is double my hours weekly and I would be flush. I'm pushing 10-15 hours a week lately which is even worse than the previous few months, even after I said I need to up the hours I put in each week. Kinda sad to see I haven't made any progress, but such is life. I think it's mostly a matter of motivation. Hopefully being around another poker player with a much better work ethic than myself will push me to want to play more and earn more money. Being at the Rio today and watching Brian Hastings win the 10k HU shootout for 370k definitely helped to make me feel like I should put more effort into my poker. I'm really tired of seeing people who aren't as good as me making way more money--not saying this about Brian haha, he's >>>>>>>>>>>>me--I just am speaking in generalities.

I've been doing this for pretty much 6 years now for a living and I've never kept this kind of money as a backup. Sometimes my bankroll is less than that amount. And this is also with the consideration that I've played somewhere between 2.5-3 million hands (3/4 of that being at 400nl+). Nobody can know for sure at this point though because I've lost a lot of databases along the way, but ~600k hands a year my first 3 years and probably ~300k hands a year the following 3. This is the most accurate I can be, I mean, give or take 500k hands. Since January 08 I haven't been anywhere near close to bust.

If you play a super high variance style (or just PLO for that matter), I could see this being necessary, but even when I used to do that, I still never came close to needing this much money just sitting waiting in case something bad happened. If you watch my videos nowadays, you see I play a pretty low variance style, and I feel comfortable with just 5k as a backup.

If your lowest level as a regular isn't 400nl, then I think things might change a bit for you because, me, personally, if I for whatever reason just randomly lost 80% of everything I had, I could just get a loan from a friend for like 5k and grind .5/1nl and 1/2nl and come out and just rebuild everything I needed to live. If your highest game is lower than 400nl as a regular, then you would have a bigger problem, because you (likely) wouldn't be able to get as large enough of a loan, and you would have to start at much lower stakes to rebuild your bankroll (and your life), which will take a lot more time and probably force a lot more pressure.

What I'm deciding is that I need to probably keep somewhere between 5000-7500 for emergency expenses (obviously I can cut down on medications and alcohol expenses if it's a matter of living in the streets versus earning a wage), and now I need to start thinking about how I want to manage my online bankroll versus my live bankroll. Seems like a pretty good time to give my old coach Tommy Angelo a call and ask him his opinion regarding how I divy it up.

Never in the past have I even considered keeping both a live and an online bankroll since, well, for one I never have planned on playing live games for a living, and two, I always felt like any cash I had that was outside of an online poker website wasn't to be used for anything other than spending cash.

Times are changing and I have to adapt. I've been adapting in one form or another the past 6 years regarding online poker and if you've watched my videos you'd know just as much. This type of adaptation is a bit different, but it's obviously something I'm going to figure out. I always figure things out, despite all my terrible habits and self-destructiveness. But this whole idea of starting to play live as well as online is forcing me to re-think the way I've done things in the past. One thing I'm realizing is that I never really prepared myself to play live before since all I would do is withdraw a certain amount from my online roll and play way higher live than the amount I withdrew could handle. I don't want to do that anymore, so I need to make some changes.

I did attempt to make a change when I went to Arizona to coach that HS basketball team. And I actually had some pretty good success. I was pushing 210 pounds and ended up dropping down to 175 by the time I left. 35 pounds isn't something most people could let go of in 3 months, so I know when I put my mind to something I can come out with strong results. When I head up to NorCal, I want to drop another 15 pounds and get to my target body weight 160LB while also putting on some muscle this time. I don't really wanna be a beefcake dude or anything like that, but if I can get a little toned it'd definitely do nothing but increase my self-esteem. I guess that will be my goal when I head up there since my roommate and I are going to be hiring a trainer on full time to work with us in the gym and on our diet by preparing our food for us. It'll be expensive but I'm willing to work a little harder because of the potential benefits I see. He won't be able to do anything to stop my drinking, but when I was working out so much in Arizona my drinking actually receded considerably, so I do expect that to happen again. Only good things I see in the future. As long as I don't choose to be a bum.

I've never been one to state blatant lies or agree to something then go back on it, so I think I have a pretty good chance, and either way, I won't be lying about how well or how poorly I'm doing. So I guess it's just time to wait and see what happens.

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Okay so I'd like to get a graphic created to both be posted for my CR videos and also to be posted on my personal website upon it's creation.

What I'd like to do is have my real name used, 'Peter Jennings' as the main focus with the words 'AKA Marshall28' somewhere in smaller print on the design. Also, anything that you might know about me that could add a personal touch to the design will likely be rewarded.

Be as creative as you like but I can't accept something that has anything vulgar or inappropriate for a relatively young audience. Whichever one I receive that I like best I will ship you $75 on either Black Chip Poker or on America's Card Room, or $50 on paypal. Completely your choice.

Please send me a PM to get my e-mail address as I would have to be completely nuts to release that information publicly.

Thanks in advance.

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I know quite a few of us struggled to get along in the past. I know I was a huge asshole (and sometimes I still make mistakes), but I've been around online poker for a long time now, almost 6 years. It all started for me here. I am still making videos on cardrunners (albeit only a few), and I had been posting a lot in MSNL 2p2, but I think I've outgrown that community.

I noticed there are some really good players posting strategy here semi-frequently which is cool and I think I'd like to partake more often. Obviously I knew from the start that guys like northface, talentedtom, nolan, ket, andrewsong, pooruser, baalim, fayth were all really good (I'm sure I'm leaving out some people), but I've also been impressed with evilsky who I hadn't heard of previously and I think Jonny gives pretty good advice too.

With all these great players posting advice, I feel silly not to at least try to get involved since I know there's a lot I can learn. Hopefully you guys can be forgiving of the way I acted in the past. I am 28 now so I've grown up a bit (yeah there's still bound to be an occasional outburst, but I'm definitely a more mature person).

Look forward to arguing with you guys =p

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I know I don't keep a regular blog here anymore since becoming a CR pro (my regular blog is over there now) like over a year ago, but I know a lot of people still frequent this site, and I'm trying to post this basically everywhere.

I have up to 40k on Merge network I'm looking to trade, I'm willing to negotiate %'s for vig, please PM me if you have any interest in trading at minimum 5k.

Thanks.

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2009 Review, what went well and what went wrong?

So, I guess I shouldn't have expected this year to end any differently after all this negative momentum I've had throughout December. I begrudgingly agreed to purchase a step 4 ticket to attempt to satellite into the PCA because one of my non poker friends begged me to try it. I took the 4th step by storm and moved on easily. I beat the 5th step even faster, completely dominating the table (obviously because I ran like the sun). I had 6k at one point while all remaining players had less than 1500. Then I went for step 6, prepared by getting a friend who has a very strong SNG game and actually grinded these steps last year to sweat and help me through it. It was a pretty tough line up and some big names were in it, but with just 10 of 18 remaining, I was actually in 1st place. That didn't last long though. I went card dead and was slowly grinded down (and everyone who seemed to be at risk when all in kept seeming to win at showdown. Anyways, 6th place paid 700, 1st and 2nd got the 15k trips, I ended up placing 7th. Kinda standard for me and donkaments. Oh well enough complaining.

2009
Things I did well:

--I finally swallowed a chunk of my pride.
Moved back in with my parents in Feb of 2009. Began grinding, starting all over again at the .05/.1 games (yes after playing the 3/6 and 5/10 games the previous year).

--I heavily increased my studying time and spent many hours with coaches.
I spent a little under 10k$ this year on coaching alone and I definitely think it helped me in a number of ways. (1) It gave me some semblance of a support group, and (2) it gave me access to the thoughts of players much better than me. I learned a lot and I'm glad I am happy with the investment.

--I cut out the majority of auto-piloting that had ruined me over the course of 2008.
It didn't hurt to run a little good in those first couple of months either.

--I put in heavy hours at the tables.
I booked 250 hours in each of the 1st three months I returned.

--Most importantly I think, I completely paid off all of my debts.
I had accrued about 50k worth of debt over the course of 2008, 5k worth of debt to poker players, 15k to credit cards and 30k to my parents. It sure is quite a relief to have completely paid all that back in less than a years time and to have plenty left over.

--I worked diligently at building a student base in order to secure additional means of variance free income. I now have a strong long term student base with solid referrals. The majority of my students are thriving, and those who aren't have some disgusting EV graphs. I also began making training videos for grinderschool.com, and while the compensation I receive is rather minimal, I am getting good experience and helping people along the way. Things in this department have gone so well for me that I've begun writing a book about optimal HUD use pertaining specifically to HEM. I expect to finish it sometime in February of 2010.

I also have plans to create a website in which a community can be formed between players and coaches. Coaches will be evaluated and will contribute content such as free training videos and responses to questions in forums to the site in return for free advertising for their services. Hopefully it will be a place where students can come together and form peer groups or poker circles to discuss theory and find support from others with similar goals.

--I played in some of the toughest games in the world this year (5/10 and 10/20 across FTP and PS) and fared well.
I set a goal 3 or 4 months ago claiming that I wanted to have built a big enough bankroll (about 50k) to have taken a shot at the 5/10 games by February of 2010. I accomplished that goal midway through November and felt as if I was +ev in many of the games in which I sat, even if it was all regulars. (There were clearly some games I sat in where this wasn't the case, but that's for the part where I talk about the things I did wrong).


I'm actually surprised I was able to come up with so many positives for the year. It makes it difficult to feel negatively about the situation I'm currently in, but for some reason I do. I guess it just shows how seriously I am affected by momentum. Regardless, I need to feel satisfied with my accomplishments in 2009, I left the situation I was in in 08 in the dust and definitely am stampeding in the right direction now.

2009
Things I did poorly:

--TILT CONTROL TILT CONTROL TILT CONTROL TILT CONTROL.
My tilt control was horrid, it was atrocious, it was flat out embarrassing, insert any other synonym you can think of and that's what it was. My win rate when I play my A-game is somewhere around 4.5BB/100 at 400 and 600nl. When I'm playing my D or F game, it's got to be -15BB/100. My lack of tilt control is at the very core of all my poker related problems. I lost 1/3rd of my overall profit for the entire year in two separate sessions.

I even went so far as to make a blog post bragging about how "epic" it was that I was down 10k at 3/6 and CONTINUED TO PLAY, somehow luckily winning the money back. I was being ridiculous. It's happened in the past, and it will probably happen again, what can I say, I'm ego-driven by nature and it's something that will always be a part of me. I can do my best to push it down when I am aware of it, but when my self-awareness falls flat, I fall to the whim of my ego. I'll get back to what I'm planning on doing about this in my next blog post--Goals for 2010.

--Bankroll management.
I wouldn't say I managed my bankroll that poorly, however, in terms of my new form of BR management, it will be considered poor. I feel this one of the core principles that relates specifically to my lack of tilt control.

--Having a balanced life
The balance in my life was nothing short of a disaster. It also lies within the same core concepts that relate to my problem with tilt control. The bigger a part of my life and well-being that I make my poker graph, the more I remain at its mercy.

The more I think about it, the more it seems these three concepts seem to feed off each other. When I am playing on a short bankroll, I over-concern myself with my daily wins and losses because it has more of an effect on my daily mood. The more I allow poker to control my mood, the more often I tend to tilt and play too long and refuse taking breaks. The more I tilt and refuse to take breaks, the more I think I need to play in order to make up for the lost money from my tilt.

I’m glad I worked this all out on paper, I really feel like changing my bankroll management is going to have a huge effect on the rest of my life, that’s going to be my number one goal for 2010.

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