Joes poker blog

So yesterday I finally reached the gold status on partypoker, which means I will be getting 2x the amount of partypoints a player with blue status (= starting status) would get. Not that PartyPoints are all that good, but any rakeback boost I can get is welcome.

As for poker, I have been doing decent in past few days. I kept playing NL600 and so far I am beating the game for a winrate of like 4.5ptbb/100, with which I am satisfied, although I know it could have been a lot better hadnt I made several really bad mistakes.

Anyways, I played quite a lot of hands and because I moved up recently, I made a lot of money already, at least a lot compared to what I have been used to make before.

Here are my results for March so far:


Note: the few hands of NL50 are cuz of I was making a video for czech poker community at pokergamers.cz (my website).

On another note, I have visited Spring Poker Festival in Vienna the last weekend for 3 days. It was an interesting trip for me, because I never played in a big casino before. I played NL 1E/2E, in which I lost some money due to cold deck and me not being able to adapt very good to the type of game (1-tabling, very slow, shortstacked, stations). I sometimes got bored and made shitty plays I wouldnt make otherwise. But of course I dont really mind, I lost less than what I can make playing online in 1 day.

Also, Tonny G. was there, so I watched him play a bit. He played some high stakes Omaha game, not sure but I think it was fixed limit 200/400 or something like that. It was quite funny when he went busto in one big hand and got angry and left the casino like immediately with some harsh comments

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Ok so I finally decided to move up to NL600 to catch up with that luckbox SakiSaki once again Well of course while it is my first try on NL600 and my BR is still quite marginal for the stakes (at least marginal by my criteria), SakiSaki is already taking shots at 1kNL, but whatever

My first NL600 session didnt go particularly well, I started off going down quite a lot, like 3 buyins. But in the end I managed to get it all back and end little more than 1bi up I made like 2 expensive mistakes, when i decided to play my top pair in a reraised pot even though it was pretty obvious my opponents had me beat. Well, it was obvious after the hand, not when I decided to put the money in the middle.

I dont want to make any judgements just yet, but I think I should be able to beat the NL600 game. The competition is pretty similar as on NL400 - a lot of players who play NL400 play NL600 too. Probably a wee bit tougher, but not a big deal. I would be pretty satisfied if I could beat this game for about 4ptbb/100, but I am far from sure that I will able to.

As for March results so far - I have played quite a lot, definately more than I would play in an average week. I wasnt running extra good, but not bad either. I think my winrate could have been better, but whatever, I dont complain:


My plans for the next days are:
1. to go to the Spring Poker Festival in Vienna tommorow to watch and play in some minor tourneys / cash games.
2. after that to play both NL400 and NL600 games and beat them and move to NL600 exclusively in about a week.
3. bankin!
edit: 4. oh and try to force myself to do at least the necessary minimum for school so that I dont have any problems with it.

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February was a very good month for me pokerwise. I managed to continue doing solid on nl200 in the first part of the month, although I had several bad sessions and such. In the last week of february, I finally started playing nl400, which turned out to be a very good decision, because the game seems very beatable to me so far. Of course I have been running hot, but still, the level of competition is not very high.

I am also satisfied with the amount of hands I have been able to play. I played about 55k hands overall, which is very nice given I only play 4 tables most of the time. It translates to about 4 hours per day on average. I am not sure if I will be able to keep this amount of time up in the following months, because it was partly thanks to my broken arm and also because of school break, but I will do my best.

Ok, lets just go to the results:


I have to state that this is definately way above my expectations and I am very satisfied with it I dont expect to make this much in the following months on average, but I hope I will be getting close to it. 10k/month would be cool.

As for the poker goals: I hope I will be able to continue beating the nl400 game for a decent winrate over the long run, 4.5ptbb/100 would be just nice, higher winrate would be uber cool I would like to get my BR big enough to be able to at least try the nl600 game in about a month or so and then decide, which game suits my style better. I intend to play one of these levels for quite some time before thinking of some higher levels.

Also, I plan on going to Vienna next week, to watch the Spring Poker Festival and maybe to play in some minor tournaments and destroy some cash games If someone else is coming too, just let me know and we can meet there.

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So, today after a successfull session on NL200, I decided to finally make my first try on NL400. Although I wanted to start NL400 with a little bigger BR, I decided that I already have what I consider the required minimum for me.

The session didnt start off very good. I was slightly up in the very begining but then I lost an expensive race (AQ vs 44 allin pf) and kept being colddecked for a while, which resulted in me being about $500 down. But then I started getting some hands and since I had a pretty aggressive image (I was playing little looser than usually, like 22/18 overall, but like 26/22 in the beginning), I got paid off of many of my good hands, often times with pretty crappy hands by my fishy opponents. So I finished more than 2.5 buyins up, which is uber nice for such a short session

Here are the exact results for today:


As for the NL400 competition: I was pleased to see, that there were still quite a lot of fish, basically as many as on NL200 and they were just about as bad too. The regulars though seemed kinda tougher, much less nits, from who u could constantly keep stealing without any resistance. Basically the regulars were significantly more aggressive, were reraising me light pf and overally played better than regs on NL200. But sometimes their aggression was also they weakness, since their play in big pots was quite readeable.

Thats it for now, tommorow I am leaving for a short trip to Copenhagen, Denmark with my friends, so I wont play poker during the weekend. After that, I hope I will be able to stay on NL400 and attain some decent winrate (4ptbb/100 over a bigger sample would be nice).

If I will be able to beat NL400 game, then I intent to stay on NL400 for a little longer (than on NL200), because although I will keep building my BR, I will also make some cashouts, so my progress will be slowed a bit.

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This post is just to update my february progress so far. Basically I have been running only so so in the last days, going up and down all the time, usually finishing somewhere around 0 or slightly up. The only big exception was yesterday, when I made +7 buyins, which is nice.

My initial plan for february was to play about 35-40k hands and make something like 6,5-7k USD, which means to have a winrate of about 4.5ptbb/100 on NL200.
As far as winrate goes, I am somewhat behind atm. But I made up for that in number of hands (because my broken arm restrains me from doing sports and such, so I play poker instead). That means, that the most important thing, the net amount won is just about as planned, or maybe even a little ahead of the plan.

Here are my results for february so far:


My Bankroll is coming near to the amount which I want to have to start playing NL400. If everything goes well, I think I might start NL400 in about 3 weeks.

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You guys know the song? Just a random song whichs name came to my mind when deciding how to call todays session. Really sick today. After a good but short beginning, I basically kept going down all the time losing every single hand until it stopped at -$1400 (which was almost -$1900 from where I was after the good start of the session).
So sick, never lost that much before in such a short time. Weird thing though, I didnt really care. I tried to think how bad it is, but nothing, no emotions. I was deciding whether or not to stop playing, but I was in some tourneys, so I decided to continue in the cash games too, because I didnt think that I was playing really bad (a few big mistakes yes, but overall play seemed to be ok).

So, I kept playing and although there was no sudden change or anything, after some short time I found out that i made like $400 back, so only a thousand down or so atm.
Then, I managed to win a very big pot with a marginal hand. I trusted my gut and since I was in a state of mind in which I almost didnt care about the money and results, I had no problems calling his bluff although it was for a lot of money.
After that I think I started playing really solid poker and with some good hands and some total idiots at my tables I simply managed to make it all back and ended it up at +$196.

So, today it went like 0 -> +500 -> -1400 -> +200. Sick. Here is the graph:



Overall I am basically stuck in the past few days. I made maybe $300 or $400 in the last week, which really isnt what I expected to make. Hopefully I will stop doing that many big mistakes and start doing better again. Also, my overall NL200 winrate dropped below 4ptbb/100, which isnt a big deal, but I wanted to keep it somewhere near 5ptbb/100. Basically, I need to start running good to catch up that tourney luckbox SakiSaki who already started NL400.

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Since I have my arm broken and since I already watched all episodes of Prison Break, there was not much else to do but to play poker in last few days.

So, I played quite a lot of hands, maybe twice as much as usual. But the results were rather bad. I kept swinging it up and down all the time. I had 2 days in a row in which I lost money - that didnt happen to me since December.

Overall I didnt make any progress at all as far as money go in these days, the net result since last blog post is +$67.80 over 9k hands :/
I dont think I played that bad though, sure I made some plays that werent good and I am sure I could have ended like +$500, but thats not that big of a deal I guess. Simply Lady Variance decided to slow me down a bit.

I also had a few really strange hands in the last session, two of which u may find in this guess hand topic.

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Poker has been going quite good recently. I had a few losing sessions, in one of them i lost more than 1 grand, but overall i am satisfied with my poker results:



I havent played a lot of hands, but i think its ok considering i only play 4 tables. Recently, I have been trying to add tables and play 6 at a time and so far it seems to be working ok. I will try to keep my winrate above 4.5ptbb/100 while playing 6 tables. If I manage to do it, then I will be very satisfied - this would mean about $100/hour which is really nice for me if I can keep it like that over the long run.

As for poker goals, I hope I will keep my good game and dont hit a big bad run. In that case I think I will be able to move to NL400 in about 6 weeks with proper BR, which I would consider very nice.

Besides poker, I finally went to the mountains few days ago to enjoy the snow and learn snowboarding. (I bought a new board in november and wasnt given a chance to go snowboarding until now. Poor winter in my country this year.) Unfortunately for me, the second day i happened to fall badly and I broke my right arm just next to the wrist. That means I had to go back home and since i cant really use the right arm now, I cant do any sports, I cant play nor starcraft neither dota, etc. So like the only activities I can do at home now is playing poker and watching movies.

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January was a good month for me in poker. After 2 months of losing (november and december), I really needed to start winning again or else I could have had lost all hope.

I didnt only start winning again in January, I actually won a decent amount, at least decent for me. Here are the pictures:





So, I basically fully recovered from the 2-months-long downswing and made something on top of it. Plus of course I am not counting rakeback and some bonuses, which makes it even better. I also doubled my Bankroll in January and started playing NL200. I dont plan to make some big cashouts in the near future, so if I will continue playing good (and running good ), I think I will be able to start NL400 in less than 2 months. (And that means properly rolled for it by my measures - Ket would prolly be playing NL400 with my BR for several weeks already.)

Besides poker, I also had my school exams during this month. I have to admit that I didnt put a lot of effort to doing well in school during the last semestr (like I went to school about 8-10 hours a week on average, which really is not much), so the exams were kinda difficult for me. Anyway, I managed to pass enough of them to be able to continue studying. I didnt pass all exams though, so I will have to study some subjects again in future semesters.

And, I also decided to renew my activity in Starcraft:Broodwar scene a bit, since my once good and known clan b!ologic was falling to inactivity and I and some of my fellow clan members do not like it. So we decided to make a new website for the clan and get a few new members so that b!ologic can once again start kicking asses! Also, I was chosen (among others) to represent my country (Czech Republic) in the new WGTour tournament for Nations - The Galactic Conquest. So I guess I will have to give it some practice, cuz my sc:bw skill went down a lot since the time I was an active player.

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Imagine a session, in which you would never get outdrawn, your AK/AQ hit everytime, you hit your sets like once out of 3 times, your draws would hit every second time and you would be always correct with your bluff catching calls. Nice imagination, isnt it? Too bad such sessions practically never happen. Or do they?

Yea they do! I just finished one such session Well maybe they outdrew me a few times, i didnt hit a set every 3rd time, but overall it was really THE PERFECT SESSION.

I could say a lot of words describing how good i run, but i think one picture will say it all



As you can see, I also reached the 10,000 USD milestone in my Party Account

For those who want to see a screen shot of my tables, here is the link: Joe NL200 Screenshot


Besides cash games, I also entered 2 tournaments:

1. $100 buyin $100,000 guaranteed tourney on Mansion poker with only 543 entrants (= overlay of more than $45k). I was doing decent and kept my stack above average basically with just some stealing and small value hands. But when the field was down to about 150, blinds were already huge and i kept being colddecked for a long long time. I didnt manage to double up and ended 135th.

2. $10+$1 rebuy tournament on PokerStars with about 1250 entrants and final prizepool of something like $53k. I decided to play the maniac way in the beginning pushing about every second hand or so, but things didnt really go my way and i lost 8 pushes in a row. i decided to make my final rebuy and play somewhat tighter with my maniac image. Soon I managed to triple up when my QQ held against K7o and 33. I didnt get any more big hands in the rebuy period and ended with about 12k after taking add-on. Average stack was cca 8k. So not too good considering i was in for $141, but not that bad either.
I proceeded playing tight and just waiting for hands for a long time. I managed to hold almost an average stack till the field was down to about 200 players. First bubble was at 180. When there was 181 players left i went allin with JJ only to get called by KK. No help came, but I wasnt out yet, was left with like 1.5bb. I didnt realise i could probably wait till i make the money so I pushed the very next hand, QTs. I managed to almost quadruple up when I hit a str8. So I made the money ($80 lol) and kept stealing till i had about 8bb. Then I pushed with 77 only to find the sb holding JJ. No help came and I was out somewhere around 160th. Maybe next time...

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