Joes poker blog

So, after playing and learning PLO for about 5 months, I finally had a good winning month (given the stakes). Its basically my first real winning month since starting with PLO. Before I was mostly breaking even including rakeback, so this is also about what I am up from playing PLO so far Tbh I expected to start picking up PLO faster than how it went, but I hope and feel that it is a good start and it will mostly get better in the future.



Its mostly a mix of headsup and deep 6-max, with a bit of normal 6-max in it too.

As for the near future, I hope to be able to keep doing what I have been doing the last month and if I do, then I will probably try to move up to 1/2 PLO in some 2 weeks or so. I expect 1/2 to not be substantially more difficult than .5/1, so if everything goes well I would like to get to the midstakes in a couple months.

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The variance was huge, in the beginning lost loads due to runbad, then got some of it back. Was fun though + won 287 EVbucks, so all is good

I played like 7 different opponents, 3 fishes and 4 regs (i guess). Felt good in all of the matches, I think I was outplaying my opponents in 5 cases, in those other two I guess it was about even. Obviously just my feeling.

I basically played just to accelerate my PLO learning process, because after 2.5 months of PLOLing 6-max I still kinda suck at it. My red line (= non-sd winnings) is terrible and so are my results from the blinds and utg. So I decided to try some HU to work on that. If you PLO guys have any tips on where to look for leaks and how to learn to fix them, please post in comments.

Joe

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Hello guys!

Next week I and my gf are going to Brazil for a 3-weeks holiday. I know quite a few people from LP live there so I am looking for any tips you can give me

Our plan is aproximately this:
Feb 11 we arrive at Rio de Janeiro. We will spend 3 nights there (in a hotel in Santa Teresa) and see the major tourist attractions (tips welcome).

Then on Feb 14 we will probably leave Rio and we would like to spend 3-4 days on some rather quiet beach near a smaller town/village, but not too far from Rio (say within 300km) - tips appreciated.

Then on the 18th we would like to come back to Rio for the festival, probably spend like 2-3 days there. We dont have accommodation for these days yet, so it might be a bit problematic, maybe we will have to stay somewhere near Rio.

After that, probably on the 20th or 21st, we plan on going to the Iguacu waterfalls. There are 2 options we are thinking of - either just flying there, spending a day or 2, and flying back. Or, renting a car and making a 7-8 day roundtrip. Not sure if there is enough interesting places on the way though.

Then we have some 5-10 days left. We dont have exact plans for this period yet, probably we will mostly go north from Rio and spend some time on the beaches + if there are some interesting nature parks or something we would visit those. We are leaving on March 4.

So any tips are welcome, mostly on what to see, what are the best beaches, where to go partying, etc. but also if you have any accommodation or traveling tips, those would come in handy too. Also, if anyone wants to meet for a drink or something, just let me know

One more question - I would like to see a good football match at Maracana, any recommendation?

Thanks for tips, Joe.

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I dedicated this January to learning masstabling and deciding whether or not I should go for SNE.

I wanted to get like 100k-110k VPPs minimum and have at least positive results if I were to go for SNE.

Unfortunately, the results were not satisfying at all. I really had big trouble playing more than 12 tables and even more than 9 was quite difficult.

After like 3 weeks of playing 15-18 tables and steadily loosing, I lost the believe that it will just turn and decided to just go back to playing 6-9 tables, mostly deep games (oppossed to mostly shalow tables when masstabling).

That resulted in making less VPPs than I wanted to and the results didnt get much better either. Partly because of running pretty poorly during the whole month and partly because clearly I need to get back to my A game.

In numbers, I lost $16.3k, ev-wise I lost $4.7k, which is like my 2nd worst month ever or so. At least I played 132k hands and made 91.7k VPPs, which translates to $5.1k in rakeback purely from FPPs (not counting stellar rewards and milestones), so I can comfort myself saying that ev-wise and after rakeback I made some pocket change

Anyway, as of now chasing SNE is not a priority. In February I will try to get back to my A game by playing mostly 5-9 40-100bb tables at midstakes (2/4-5/10). I still hope to make some 60k VPPs or so, so that I could still possibly jump back to the SNE race later, but like I said, its not a priority atm. Getting back the winning mindset is.

Thats it, hopefully my next progress update will be better. Hope you guys had a better start of the year than me.

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Hey LP!

I am considering whether or not to try and go for SNE this year and in case I decide to go for it I would like to get some sidebet action on it.

I know many people did it already and its nothing special for a lot of people, but I have never been a big grinder, so its quite a challenge for me. Last year I made about 200k VPPs (didnt play exclusively at PS though), so I will need to put a lot lot lot more hands in to make it.

I am thinking of the standard 1:1 bet on whether or not I make SNE in 2011 as the main bet, but if someone has other interesting related sidebets in mind just post it in comments. Like for example some profit and/or vpps race or something.

Let me know asap if you are interested.

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Hi LP!

I am coming to the USA this sunday (Nov 21) with some friends for vacation and we are planning to spend the first 5-6 days in Los Angeles area or basically in southern California in general.

Since I know there is quite a few people from south Cali area posting here, I would like to hear some recommendations on things to visit. Primarily we want to visit everything in LA, but a a day trip (or two) is also possible, so San Diego area for example is also within reach.

Then our plan is to continue to Vegas for a couple days and then to Hawaii. I am not sure if there are any people from Hawaii posting here, but if someone can give me reccomendations on what not to miss there, it would also be appreciated.

And of course, if anyone wants to meet up for a beer or something, we definately welcome that, just pm me here or on facebook (profile name: Josef Joe Samanek).

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Hello Lp!

Year summary so far

October is over and since it has been the first month of this year in which I finally put in some decent volume, I am gonna post some results and thoughts about this year so far.

Until september this year I was quite lazy and instead of putting in decent volume and making some steady profit at 5/10NL and 10/20NL like last year, I was putting in 10-20k hands per month on average and mostly taking shots at 25/50NL or higher.

It didnt go very well as is usually the case, partly because obviously the games are pretty tough to beat and partly because you know, pokersites preffer grinders above shot-takers and most of the time they remind you about that when you try and take a shot at higher games, as documented by the following photography (in the spoiler) taken by someone from within pokerstars a couple years ago:
+ Show Spoiler +

Apart from online cash games, I played quite a few big live events and only made 1 small cash in them, which cost me quite something.

An unpleasant realisation

So, in the middle of August I took a look at my results and I found myself having a total net profit for the year in the range of what I was able to win or lose in 2-3 days at 25/50NL+.

The resolution

After realising that, I decided I really need to stop being lazy and taking retarded shots hoping I will just hit a heater and instead start putting in way more volume of good solid play in games for which I have a good bankroll and which I know I can beat (mostly meaning 5/10NL).

To accomplish that, I decided to move mainly to Pokerstars because one of the reasons I wasnt putting in the volume was that there simply wasnt enough tables at Prima very often and I didnt want to play lower or wait for games etc, I wanted to just join whenever I felt like it and always have enough tables to play. Since most action at PS is at the 20-50bb tables, I started playing a shortstack mostly (had some experience with shortstacking before, but obviously I had to put in some time into doing some math), but of course when there was good action at deep tables I played those too, not purely shortstacking.

The reality

Sadly, I didnt quite avoid playing 25/50NL+ in august yet and while it went okish at first, I got reminded about my resolution not to play those games by Pokerstars very soon: in a span of about 4-5 days in the beginning of september, I managed to lose about all of my yearly profit so far while ev-wise I should have been breaking even.

After that, I really decided strongly that I would stop playing higher than 10/20NL and except from a couple hundred of hands when there was a sick uberfish and I had the direct position, I really didnt.

I also decided I was going to play a lot in October, which by my standards I did. I played a total of 171.34 hours, which is 5 hours and 32 minutes a day on average. Thats probably at least like double of what I was putting in in the first half of the year, probably even more.

October results

Luckily, it proved to be the right way for me atm and I booked quite a solid month:



I am definately very happy with the amount of hands I put in. I am also quite satisfied with the results of 5/10, where I think I should be able to at least keep such a winrate longterm. I am still angry at myself for playing those couple hundred hands at 25/50NL, I could have had a really good month if it werent for that. Still, its kind of tough when I got used to winning or losing in about 2 days what I now made in a whole solid month of playing 5/10NL.

Shortstack vs. deepstack results

Anyway, since I was mixing in playing with all kinds of stacksizes from 20bb up to maybe 300bb, I was quite curious how I was doing when on a shortstack and when deeper.

First screenshot is results filtered by stacksize under 30bb:




Second screenshot is results with stacksize 30bb and above:



Plan for the near future

Thats it for the results. From now on my plan is to put in a minimum of 50k hands every month, mostly at 5/10 with some 10/20 with good table selection. I hope to be able to achieve a winrate of about 2 BB/100 at 5/10 over a large enough sample size (250k+ hands). If I manage to achieve that I will then maybe allow myself to start taking some shots again, but only while still maintaining a decent amount of volume.

Other than online grinding I will most likely attend EPT Prague in December and before that I will possibly make a trip to Los Angeles and then to Hawaii. Its suppossed to be a non-poker trip for the most part, but since I havent visited The Commerce casino yet, I am definately gonna go and play there a bit if I am in LA. If anyone from the area wants to meet up, just leave a message.

Thats it for now.

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Hello Lp,

I am going to play the 8,500€ Partouche Poker tour main event tournament, which takes place on September 2, in Cannes, France. It has 3,000,000€ guaranteed prizepool.

The buyin is quite high so I would like to sell about 25-35% of my action.

I expect the field to be one of the softest among 5k€+ tournaments, probably like top2 tournament of the season along with EPT San Remo.

Because of this I expect my ROI to be quite high and dont really wanna sell at even price, but I think selling at 1.25 is still a very good deal for potencial buyers.

It means I am selling 1% for 106.25€ or $137.
Minimum share is 5% for 531.25€ or $685.

If you want to check out my live tournaments history, its available at hendonmob: Josef Samanek @ Hendonmob

If you are interested, pm me or write in comments.

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First off, I decided to stop posting monthly results in this blog and I dont intend to start with it again. I actually thought I will just stop blogging at all here, but I got several requests to write a new blog entry, so here it is, although a bit different than what I used to post. It mostly wont contain specific results.

2009 bilancing

I set myself some goals for 2009, so lets go over them and review how I did.

I wanted to become a high stakes online no-limit regular (was a 5/10 reg in the beginning of 2009) playing everything from 5/10 up to 25/50. I think I accomplished this goal enough. I consider 10/20 NL to be my base stakes now and I play 25/50 NL when the games are good.

Then I of course set myself some monetary goals. I do not want to say specific numbers, but my 'ideal' goal was quite daring compared to what I made in 2008 and even my 'minimal satisfactory' goal was to make more than in 2008, which was a successfull year for me as well.
Well, I am happy to say that I exceeded my 'ideal' goal by quite something, so I accomplished this part too.

But, to go into a bit more details, I can divide my poker income into 3 main categories: online poker, live poker and swaps/deals.

At online poker I actually won a bit less than what I hoped to win in the beginning of the year. Also, what surprised me in the end was the fact, that rakeback + bonus deals made up for almost 25% of my total online poker income.

At live poker though I won way more than what I expected. I went deep in 4 big live tournaments (23th/2650 in a WSOP $1,500 NLHE event, 5th/168 in 5,000€ WPT Barcelona, 3rd/450 in 1,500€ Unibet Open Prague and 13th/750 in 5,000GBP EPT London) and cashed in couple more. I also played quite some high stakes cash games live, mostly NL $30/$60 (approximately) in my country and I won a decent amount in those games.

At swaps/deals I was actually a bit down most of the year, but in December my friend won the EPT Prague and I had a small share swapped with him, which was still quite a decent amount of money from the first place prize.


Another goal was to put in enough playtime, which I think I accomplished so so, I definately could have played more, but I still played enough to consider that ok. I think I played little over 300,000 hands online. No idea about live.

Then I wanted to connect poker and travelling as best as I could. I think I definately travelled quite some, but I want to add a little bit more this year.

Yet another goal was to find a good balanced poker lifestyle. I have to say I am not really satisfied, I definately have a lot of space for improvement in this area.


2010 goals and ideas

I will start off with monetary goals. I would be very very satisfied if I managed to make the same (or more than) I made in 2009, but tbh I dont expect it to be very likely, I am giving it maybe like 30% chance tops. Other than that I didnt set any exact amount of money which I want to make, the more the better I guess

The plans for this year are basically to try and push my poker skills as far as I can, to try and find a balanced, funny and at least somewhat fullfilling lifestyle while poker is my main focus and to travel as much as I can.

I think I will do decently enough in first and third parts, but I am not sure about the second part, that one is difficult. The rate of success in that area will influence it the most (alongside other factors like income of course) how much longer I will be pursuing poker as my main focus, it may be 5 more years but it may be just 1-2 years I cant really say now.

I think I already wrote enough, hope it will satisfy those who asked me for a blogpost, I posted it mostly because of these requests.

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I didnt post any poker updates during the summer, so I feel like writing at least a short summary now.

July

I decided to dedicate July mostly to learning and playing PLO online and see how it goes. To be honest, I didnt really do much learning, only seen like 1 or 2 videos and the rest was just learning by playing. I played mostly 2/4 and 3/6 PLO at Microgaming. I finished the month in positive, but quite below what I hoped for. I made around $4,000 + some rb.
As for the competition, the fish players were making more big mistakes than similar players make in NLHE games, but I felt the regs were rather solid and some definately (and unsurprisingly) had an edge over me.

In the end of the month I went to Venice for the Italian Poker Tour. I was the first to go out from the main event though after my AA lost to KK 600bb deep aipf first level. Surprisingly, the guy who knocked me out wasnt an Italian gambler, but a young German player. Well he said he saw a picture card in my hand when I was checking my hole cards. But my friends went quite deep, 2 made the money and overall it was a fun trip.

Btw for anyone living in Venice, how often do you see anyone jumping down from the top of the Rialto bridge? We saw couple of drunken foreigners do it, they got even an applaus from everyone who were watching, like even waitresses stopped to watch, so I figured pretty unusual. Anyways, I prolly wouldnt do it even for good money, seemed a bit dangerous.

August

In August I decided to come back to NLHE as my primary game and only play PLO when I spot a huge fish. Since there were some interesting rake races at Unibet (some specifically for Czech players) and I didnt have any big travelling plans for August, I decided to go into a grind mode and play a ton of hands. I have been a bit lazy as far as putting in hours and hands goes in the past several months and except for June the results werent very good either, so I felt like a big-grind month would be good for me. But in the begining of the month I hit a big downswing and in the middle of the month I was down about $26,000 playing mostly 3/6 NLHE. Most of it was due to bad allin luck though and I felt my game was quite ok. Of course I did a bit of analysing of the big losing hands etc. made a few slight changes in my game, but basically continued to grind a lot of tables all the time. Luckily for me, it finally started to work and in the end I managed to finish the month in positive numbers, around +$5,000 + rb.

Well so I made around $8-9k in the 2 summer months, which sux. At least I have a decent rakeback so I got another about $10k for that


September

On a most recent note, I played the WPT Slovakia tournament, which was a 4,400€ freezeout. I was quite looking forward to this event, but it turned out to be quite below expectations. Only 100 people played the main tournament, the side events were cancelled and only small number of side games were running (but they were good games). In the main event I got knocked out 21st when 18 were in the money.

Right now I am back at home, currently ill and trying to get back into shape as fast as possible, because a) my futsal season is starting the next week and b) there is quite a few decent tournaments I want to play in my country this month.

Thats it for now.

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