I'm trying to play every LAPT this year, already went to the LAPT Viña del Mar in Chile which I think went great, even though I didn't cash big I chipped up like a madman and it was a very very very easy field. I encourage anyone that wanna take a trip to Southamerica to come for any of these tourneys, I had a friend who actually won one of these LAPT while his main reason to come was just to tourist around SA.
Sadly won't be selling pieces for the Main Event but maybe for the Highroller which is 5k, if I'm out of the main event + the second chance and am not too tired.
Other than that, doing great in NL both online and live but bad in omaha, I just get destroyed in that game and don't get it yet, not sure if I should bluff more, play more tight, it just seems very hard to know what is the best play in virtually any spot. I would love to get really good at it because there's always great big games going on but I'm too bad to try those, I just rail them and try to learn something.
Luckily theres great NL games going on everywhere and they aren't gonna stop for a long time, I'm pretty sure NL reached the top, the hardest it can get, and now it's just gonna get easier and be in constant ups and downs in terms of toughness, that's my theory, could be wrong but don't think so.
Since some of you have never played live poker or aren't much experienced with it, in case you ever wanna try it I present to you some pointers that I've learned through experience by playing live for the past 3 or 4 years.
- Learn how to look at your cards correctly, you don't know how easy it is to see the hole cards of the guy next to you if they don't know how to look at them properly, try to lean your body towards the cards if possible and conceal as much as possible. This mostly happens to either very very newb live players or old guys, if it's an old guy please be kind enough to tell him you can see his hole cards!, one time is enough.
- When in doubt always ask for the floor manager. Sometimes dealers think they know the rules, but some of them have no clue and you might get screwed.
- I find that it's much better to always announce whatever your action is going to be. When you wanna raise to 200 you are better off just saying so. There's been some instances where I didn't raise as much as I wanted because I fucked up with the chips. Also saves some time with misunderstandings.
- Always double check your cards before throwing them away! It's not frecuent but it has happened to me at least twice that I folded a much better hand than what I thought I had. Can't say how tilty that is.
- Try to follow the action but if you are distracted for whatever reason and find a hand you wanna play first look at the players before you to see if someone limped or raised. It's the worst feeling when the guy that always open limps only AA/KK limped and you raise/fold with your AQs.
- Always be on the look out if you are new to the poker room. Remember everyone is there to win money and some people will do whatever it takes to get an advantage, no matter if it's within the rules or a gray area, you aren't as well protected as when playing online on pokerstars. That said have fun, you can get to know some really cool people there as well.
- Whatever you do don't be the grumpy onliner that always complains when someone makes a bad play and boasts about how much better he is than everyone else at the casino. Try to be social and stuff, it's even +EV to do it, who knows, you might get a free showdown or a friendly warning just because someone likes you.
- Don't lend money to people you don't know! Even if they seem like they are super rich and gamble very big, if you don't know them outside the casino it's a no-no. Some(most) people are just terrible at paying back loans even if they got the money and it's just not worth it.
- Be weary of people trying to look at your hole cards and signaling his/her friend, it DOES happen, if someone is right behind you the whole time and you feel uncomfortable just say so.
Will try to think of more, if you got any feel free to add!
What's up liquidpoker colleagues, been a while, I've been writing in spanish but everyone speaks english and since everyone that blog posts here seems to go into a huge good run I might as well try!
So first things first, I'm gonna be a dad for the second time! my son Alejandro is already 2 and a half years old. Don't have a recent photo in this back up PC but here he is younger than now, will post updated one later.
So I'm very very busy with all the preparations as the fathers here in LP know. Still managed to be with our very own Ket the couple days he was here in Lima, we had a great time, one hell of a guy, hopefully he got a good impression of the life here. Also managed to squeeze in almost 3 week trip to the US between January and Feb. Went to Miami, New york and San Antonio, Texas. Loved it there, especially Manhattan, what a place! Will also update pics later when I have my PC back but man I wish I could visit more often, if only online poker is legal again there I guess... My trip was mainly bussiness related and family visiting but nothing really came out of it, will see in the next few weeks when I get some word back from there. Aparently real estate in the US is pretty good right now.
So what's new pokerwise, I was doing well and dandy, too well actually in 2011, felt super confident in game and decided to try a lot of shots at the 50/100 and 100/200 starting 2012 with 0 table selection of course. Even found myself in a 100/200 game w Sauce, Kanu, patpatman (some say its durrr) and me just duking it out like a champ, turned out the poker gods didn't want me to roll in cash just yet and I lost a lot in those games, buyins wise it wasn't THAT bad, but still something I think it was more than 200k.
Here's the only graph I could get before my PC crashed
I made some back in usual 10/20 and 25/50 but then after talking to a lot of friends decided to try and go for SNE, would be the first peruvian to do it and thought it would be cool, I have the experience and am good enough to at least breakeven playing 24 tables and it's still 100k in profits, but doing it mostly for the bragging rights.
Way behind pace at 83k but I can do at least 5k Vpps/day 6 days a week easily and regain pace. Was doing pretty well first 2 days but then it hit me
I started having PC troubles, man PCs are great but they sure need maintenance. If it's not the video card it's the hard drive, then the internet, then the power supply, then it's hold em manager that closes spontaneusly every once in a while. At least this showed me that I'm way over tilt, cuz I kept my cool throughout all those shitty inconveniences.
That has been my life so far in 2012, hopefully you guys are having it better than me at least moneywise! (Actually I think 100% of lpers are doing better than me moneywise this 2012 haha).
First of all hope everyone had a blast and aren't too hangover, wish you all success in 2012!
Second I'm restarting my old blog, sorry it's in spanish but for those who can read mexicano locoo20.blogspot.com
I'm going for SNE this year(my real goal is somewhere between 1.5 and 2M VPPs).
Also gonna try and hit every LAPT this year, those are amazing value, still not sure if I wanna sell action or not but if you have some interesting offer feel free to contact me!
substract -24k$ for 50/100 live and -10k$ in ongame and I got a breakeven month, oh well shit happens.
Pretty swingy month, but Im confident about the next one especially because filtering this graph I can see that I'm actually up at my regular 10/20 and 25/50 online games by 100k$, and I lost 100k$ between 50/100 and omaha, so that means I'm up for about 85~90% of the hands played, and I lost all of that taking shots so it's not bad at all.
Will continue doing the same, winning a lot (hopefully) at 10/20 25/50 and when I'm feeling confident I will play bigger and try another shot in Omaha.
Now for other stuff new Richard Dawkins book is coming out http://richarddawkins.net/articles/64...lease-15th-sept-the-magic-of-reality, hopefully I can get a copy as soon as I can as I'm loving his and Sam Harris work on religion, humanism, etc. They are very inspiring and I actually think I could be passionate about this kind of stuff, as I've always spend a LOT of time pondering about these subjects.
For the hardcore ones, I recommend
Skip Craig's stuff as it's just semantics and very technical logic (imo) and just listen to Harris, the questions are also pretty funny.
Hey, recently had a phonecall that my regular cash game live was gonna be running again (it stopped coz of WSOP vegas and ppl traveling all around). Mostly consists of bussiness guys, one live pro that plays ok and myself, mostly 7-8 handed NLHE.
We used to play a lot of 25/25 at first 4k min buyin, then it was upped to 25/50 10k min but they always wanted to up the stakes (Which I didn't want because I didn't feel comfortable, most of them are multimillionaires). Now they wanna do 100/100 (which im gonna try for it to be 50/100) with 20k min buyin. I'm not really comfortable with this big a buyin so I wanna sell pieces of myself.
How we go around this for people more into the live games and staking?
I wanna sell 50% but dunno what good odds be, probably like 1.2:1 in my favour? game is really easy for an onliner like myself. I do have a lot of live cash game experience as I've played in this game a lot before and I'm up a fair ammount like 40~50k on it, although it should easily be 120~150k EV wise as I've been in a lot of bad beats.
Anyway, anyone interested contact me. Games are supposed to start today or tomorrow.
First days of august were shitty, especially that day where i lost a bunch, i fucking tilted, i'm not supposed to tilt but I did. It was such a pathetic tilt too, basically that day I had my glasses fixed and I borrowed my dad's for a couple days while they fix mine, not great but I can see ok at least for driving, promised myself I wouldn't play poker until mine were fixed... yeah right.
At night even when my head hurt from using glasses that didn't belong I had the amazing idea of playing "for a bit", what's the worse that can happen. So i open 10/20 PLO (even more genius from me, play a game i barely know) and start playing like a crazy maniac and not even thinking about any spot, just shoving and shoving, whenever I tried to think my head hurt a bit, sometimes more, so I probably unconciously decided not to think. But I don't stop, because after 10 mins im already down like 10bis or whatever, tilt comes and my head hurts even more. Bah this is retarded I'm just gonna stop, fucking stop. I stopped... for a while. After 30~ minutes I come back, I'm thinking well I'm in the hole already, might as well go deep, so I open 25/50 PLO and try to actually play good, ofc I still have no idea wtf I'm doing but I get lucky, and I win like 10k right away... cool... Not, I start running badly and lose all my profit and then some more... Finally I see what's going on, im tilted and it's retarded to keep playing, i'll make it all back when i'm sober.
Took me a couple days to get back my mental state, I'm so ashamed because this can't happen, not anymore. My tilt wasn't primarily because I was losing money, of course that didn't help either, but because I didn't listen to myself when I perfectly stated that I wasn't gonna play before I get my glasses back. Fucking glasses, my sight is shit I should get surgery, prob will.
Oh, this helped me a lot to get back to my mental state, you guys have heard for sure about Penn & Teller, I watched their whole show Fool Us on youtube, highly entertaining if you like magic, maybe even if you don't but who the fuck doesn't like magic.
There are better and worse than that, but for some reason I really like that one. I also watched some Eps of their Bullshit show, but most weren't that good to be honest..., seemed kinda rushed. Most of their shit is pretty good tho.
Looking forward to see their show in Vegas if I ever make it there.
Most important one is that in the past months I decided to embrace my profession rather than to be ashamed of it, what I mean is that I would always feel the need to lie to people about what I did for a living, because I truly felt that what I did wasn't a good thing and I wanted to get out as quickly as possible after making some bucks. This was fueled by the people around me mainly my parents, who never approved of it.
Nowadays it's no problem for me to say I play poker for a living and maybe explain a bit about it, in general people are pretty cool and some even wanna hear more about it.
I mean, how hard is it to find something that you are good at and enjoy and you can make a living off it? I should be pretty happy with poker and enjoy it as long as I can.
Now that I decided that I wanna continue being a pro as far as I can go I feel so much better and ready to commit again.
Truth is that because I have a family now with a wife and a 2 year old it's really hard to put in as much volume as I would want. But it's ok because I enjoy spending time with the family so much that I wouldn't have it any other way. I just have to try a bit harder everytime.
I'm really pushing myself lately to have a really balanced life, sleeping and waking up somewhat early, working out in the mornings, trying to see my friends as much as possible, spending a lot of time with my wife and kids and going out on sundays with parents as well all the while having to keep up with the massive swings that high stakes poker brings. It's no easy task but i'm getting the hang of it.
I want this blog to address many different topics, as I feel I'm pretty far and away from the naive, non experienced guy that started it so many years ago.
I've been having really good months lately playing mainly on stars, ongame and ipoker. Still not 100% satisfied with this month because I didn't put in as much volume as I would've wanted to, and because I didnt play my best all the time, I played pretty bad especially when I was losing which is a mistake I cant afford to make anymore, it can be REALLY costly but I'm working really hard on it.
Still I'm pretty happy because I picked up PLO and did pretty good at it, EV wise I did even better and I believe that EV in PLO says sooo much more than in NLHE. So I'm looking forward to improving there because the action at high stakes is pretty good.
I'll leave you guys with a series of videos found on tl.net http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=122917 I'm not quite sure why but after watching a few of them I played the best session of the month, not money wise but EV and decision making wise, for some reason those vids really inspired me.
Im thinking about playin the whole series, it's like 14k~16k without the rebuys and the high rollers and some weird limit games, wondering if I could sell some action. I'm not a tournament player but I've played 5 big live tournaments and final tabled 1 of them, got ITM in 2 of them, also won a 320$ on stars for 50k and some other final table at fulltilt for 27k. Keep in mind that I only play tournaments very rarely. Some other small cashes.
Wanna see if theres some interest, hopefully would like to sell a big % to few people.
My motivation is the WCOOP ranking stars hold for the whole series, I wanna see if by playing most (all) of the tournaments I can have a chance of ranking high. If enough interest and action sell I could start thinking about the highrollers and the underground games like badugi etc
EDIT: Got bad news, I just realized Ill be back in uni for september, fml, will post updates when I know my uni schedule with the tournaments I actually can play. Thank you all for the interest tho! got much more than what I would've thought
