October results + vacation!!by player999, October 23
Wont play much anymore, since Im heading to the US in a couple of days. Cant wait to not play poker for a whole month So will have to stop the MTTs till late november
Just got a gold star @ sharkscope, now number 5 on the "any game up to $100 bi" leaderboard!
Not playing for a month will prob make me lose it, but I will work hard to get it back in december, thats my main goal. also currently #3 for the year in hypers, since 2 of the top4 guys play turbo/regular speed
Ugh. I'm a big Cardinals fan. The Giants just finished wiping the floor with the Cardinals and that's fine. We had an unbelievably lucky 2011 playoffs so I can't complain that much. What really makes me mad is the national media narrative that this series was won by the Giants rallying after Scutaro was slid into by Matt Holliday. Vogelsong absolutely dealt that game and in Game 6. I'm pretty sure the Cardinals only had one starter pitch past the 4th inning. These are the reasons San Fran beat STL. The Fox pregame compared Marco Scutaro to HOFer Paul Molitor. He's a comparison of their regular season avg/obp/slg
Scutaro: .276/.340/.391 over 11 years
Molitor: .306/.369/.448 over 21 years
Does anyone understand a playoff hot streak? Scutaro is 36 years old. Please hope your GM doesn't sign him to a 3 year deal for $8 million a year.
Albert Pujols left the Cardinals this year. Lance Berkman played 32 games this year. Chris Carpenter started 3 games in the regular season. Adam Wainwright is just coming back from Tommy John surgery. Rafa Furcal blew his elbow out right before the postseason. Meh.
Whatever, the future is really bright in St. Louis. Kelly, Miller and Rosenthal look like complete studs. It's been a hell of a ride this year and I'm already excited about next year.
Thanks for reading my drunken postgame sadness rant. I'm pretty sure no one like baseball here anyway.
Don't really know where to start with this, perhaps a warning to all readers that a very long and most probably very boring rant is about to commence.
I've not posted here in a long time, intentionally so, I withdrew myself from the community because of some shit I was going through irl. It all started last summer when I was in Korea trying to make things work with my then kind of ex kind of girlfriend at the time. It was an up and down roller coaster and stress levels were at an all time high, not helped by the fact I was going through a terrible downswing in PLO at the same time. To cut the story short, as I'm not here to tell tales, point the finger or talk shit about anyone, but it ended a year ago today and for that reason it seems like a reasonable time to talk about the situation. Both parties were at fault really, but I didn't deal with the breakup well. Shortly after the breakup I incurred some big losses which rounded off a $30k downswing overall in PLO which was something along the lines of 100 buyins given the average stakes I was playing, so I withdrew the remains of my battered bankroll and took to some quite heavy drinking for comfort to overcome the breakup and downswing.
I would frequently blow £100 on a night out, which is very easy to do in some parts of the world, but where I live, that's a lot of alcohol. 10-12 double JD and cokes was the norm, which for a 155lb guy is quite a lot, it was ugly and the follow day(s) were invariably a blur but it dulled the boredom and pain of life for a while. It went on from the end of October to the end of December last year, and on New Years I decided enough was enough. I got some money back online and started playing Hold'Em again, I drew up a workout schedule and started to figure myself out. Despite that, I was not over the breakup and the constant reminders of her on facebook were a major problem, it was clear from her posts that she cared not a jot about the breakup and that just rubbed it in and made it hard to forget even a couple of months on, so I decided to delete facebook for a month. This was fine for a while, she was no longer on my mind and January was a good month. I enjoyed the entire month, however deactivating facebook wasn't a good long term solution as there was a lot of stuff from friends that I wanted to see, so I reactivated, but went a different way about removing the constant reminders from her and instead decided to delete her and every mutual friend I had with her. This was a total of about 160 people, the vast majority of which I really really liked and most of whom I wish I still had contact. Unfortunately only 2 or 3 of those 160 people ever bothered to message me to see how I was doing or show any sympathy about my situation so in retrospect I probably didn't lose out on any real "friends", just acquaintances that were fun to be around at the time.
I'm not going to apologise to those people for doing what I did as they never showed me any sympathy and it certainly helped me overcome the problems I was still going through, but I do hope they'll understand my point of view. Naturally, the way I acted, shutting out so many people from my life including some friends I'd known for years just to avoid seeing anything of my ex on facebook sounds very naive, immature and unnecessary but, I was struggling real hard to overcome it and at one point was seriously considering the prospect of marrying her. I'm not here to try and reconnect with said 160 people or even apologise, but I do wish to explain my feelings at the time and hope that any of them that read this at least understand my thought processes at the time.
One of the reasons I felt inspired to post today, as well as the fact it's been a year since the breakup is due to the fact I was going through some old blog posts I made 3 years ago. I've cut off this community for a long time, but memories came back of how positively I used to be viewed here. So many people were writing in my blogs that have long since equalled or surpassed my level of success in poker and I do kinda miss the positive reinforcement from the community I guess. I don't expect any of that after this blog post, but still, it was nice to reminisce about the past and I have connected with a couple of LPers lately in Oddeye and sChOuA and have enjoyed interacting with them about poker and life and whatnot in the past couple of months.
Anyway moving on, working out was a real help in the first 3 months of this year. I went from 155lbs 20% body fat to 140lbs 12% body fat in that time frame, which ok, that's very light for a guy who is ~5ft 10, but the plan was to cut to lower body fat, then bulk afterwards rather than bulking from a starting point of 20% body fat and cutting later. Unfortunately, in March I injured my shoulder and until 2 weeks ago never bothered to get back into it. I'm really enjoying it again, and even after just a couple of weeks am seeing some progress again which is one of the most motivating things. It's an enjoyable process and that is more important if not more important than the end results. It's something I've spoke to Ket about a lot recently, and it's obviously key to spend as much time doing things we enjoy as possible. I've certainly been more productive this year than the last couple and that's the route I've wanted to take for a while and spent more time enjoying myself than I did last year.
Certainly, I've been more productive in terms of volume at the poker tables too. I've been aided quite significantly by the introduction of zoom poker, which has helped me get in a yearly total of a little less than 500k hands so far. That is probably double what I achieved in 2010 and about 50% more than last year and far more than half of those hands have come in the last 2 months where I've really made an effort to increase my productivity and reduce the procrastination to a bare minimum. Despite the positives, I haven't ran well this year, and off the back of the $30k downswing at the end of last year I immediately ran 50 buyins below EV at Hold'Em in the first 80k hands. It wasn't helping me in any way having to overcome more bullshit after the last half of 2011, but I got through it just seeing that my EV winrate was quite decent and seeing the unreal retarded plays people were making on a frequent basis. The first half of this year I was actually down money in cash games after running 25 buyins below EV @ 100PLO and, at this point, about 55 buyins below EV @ 50NL, eventually I said fuck it, said to myself "stop wasting time at these dumb stakes" and put more money online and started playing Zoom 100NL and 200NL. I immediately started running much better and in the last 2.5 months have made 5.8k at 100NL, 9.5k at 200NL, but unfortunately dropped 4k at 500NL, still, given an average of more than 1.5k VPPs/day I've made a decent bit of rakeback on top and am up over $10k in donkaments this year thanks to a 2nd place finish in some Sunday Turbo tournament for $15.5k. Overall, including rakeback I guess I'm only at about +~$30k for the year which seems abysmal for all the extra productivity, but I am about $4.5k below EV in cash games still and think I've ran pretty bad in tournaments in general, including the 2nd place finish for $15.5k where I started the HU with a 4:1 chip lead. Still, it's been drilled into my brain by constant self reinforcement that dwelling on the past is a complete waste of energy, and looking forward I have to say I'm confident about poker for the remainder of this year and the entirety of next year. Zoom NL is fun, I'm playing as well as I've played in a while, the games are very beatable and my productivity and general happiness levels are higher than they've ever been in the past year. In short, I'm well over the past and I'm looking forward to the future in every aspect of life. I may have alienated a lot of old "friends" and hope they can understand why I completely segregated myself from the community, I would not be against reconnecting with some of them, though the vast majority of the 160 people are not poker players and will never read this so that's not likely, either way, it's out there now and I'm happy with the direction things are going regardless.
Blue hoody girl in the rain??by Critterer, October 22
There is a picture. It is of a girl in a blue hoody in the rain.
It's one of the hottest things ever and i cant find it anymore? Anyone know what im talking about?
I remember being quite disappointed when i found out it was from a porn shoot but theres one particular picture that was quite popular as a wallpaper a few years ago...
Another look at my betting mistakesby The Dean, October 22
In poker then there is a reality that dictates that you are either ahead or behind your opponent at any one given time. If the flop is 10c-8d-2h and you have Ac-9c and your opponent has Ad-3d then you are ahead……if they have Qc-10d then you are behind.
Taking away the rare times when you are tied with your opponent then you are other ahead or behind. If you are ahead of your opponent then you need to assess how far ahead you are. This is relevant because it helps us to establish on whether or not we can bet or raise for value. For example if we have say 10c-10d on a 10h-4s-2d board then we are certain to be ahead……however the question is “can we bet for value”? For a bet to be a value bet then we have to be called or raised by a hand that is worse than ours.
If there is no chance of this happening then you are not value betting but simply betting and if you are betting without a good reason then you are betting badly. So most of the time with very powerful hands then we should be checking to induce optimal value on either the turn or the river if there is no chance of us extracting it on the flop. However this boils down to us betting for value because either correctly or incorrectly then we deduced that we had the best hand.
If we deduce that we don’t have the best hand then we are either betting or raising as a bluff. However bluffing is the flip side to betting for value because if there is very little chance in our bluff working then we really shouldn’t be bluffing. You are only betting as a bluff if there is some chance that a superior hand will fold (or inferior hands fold that could have bluff raised back) in the same way that you are only betting for value when weaker hands can call or raise.
So it pays to remember in poker that there are only two reasons to initially place money into the pot and they are because you are value betting or bluffing and all of this is based on whether or not you are ahead or behind in the hand and by how much. Thats it for now and I will be playing another session this evening mainly NL50 cash at www.888poker.com
"Yesterday you had pain, right?
That was yesterday.
You faced it.
It’s gone.
It’s over.
You are a winner.
Why are you carrying it on to today in your memory?
Why?
Don’t you know the simple formula?
What was yesterday was yesterday.
It’s gone.
You faced it." - Yogi Bhajan
(NSFW)Hot blonde with big titsby SleepyHead, October 20
Come for the tits, stay for the poker!
I started playing at my local casino, and I decided to make this blog so I can give my thoughts and record live hands that I play. When you play online, you can post hands on forums and talk about them with good players. When you play live small stakes in a middle-of-nowhere casino with terrible players, it's harder to find solid players to talk to about poker. I think players can fall in to a lot of bad habits in this situation. Hopefully this blog will help.
I went to the casino for the 2nd time yesterday. I played 1-2 both times and have yet to see a decent player. None of them know how to value bet and they all play way too many hands in a way too passive way.
I played one kind of interesting hand. I don't remember the amounts or all of the action pre-flop but it was a hu pot where I raised in position and he called. I had 53hh or something awful. He checked in the dark. The flop was A high with 3 spades. I bet like 2/3 pot and he called and checked in the dark again. The turn was like Qc I think. I checked and he bet about 1/2 pot in the dark lol. I think this was his way of trying to steal position or something. The river brought a 4th spade and I raised 3x his bet and he sheepishly folded pretty quickly.
There was another hand where I raised with ATss and a loose 30 something half stack called out of the blinds. Flop was A66 two hearts. He checked and I bet about 3/4 pot and he called. Turn was a total blank, 4s or something. He checked and I put him all in for about 3/4 pot. He slowrolled AQ for about a minute and then jumped up and fist pumped when he won the hand.
These hands are out of order, but at some point this guy to my right raised on the button and I called out of the blinds with 9s9h. I 3bet him twice earlier and he grudgingly folded both times. HU pot, flop was something along the lines of 843 two hearts. I checked, he bet about 1/2 pot and I called. The turn brought the Jh. I checked and he bet pot. I didn't see him betting this strong with any made hand other than a flush, and his sizing on the flop was funny for a semi-bluff, so I tanked for a little bit and called. The river brought a 4th heart. I checked and he looked agitated and checked back. I said "flush" and turned over my hand, and he got really agitated and turned over 33 for a flopped set. I think my thought process was sound in that hand and he's just a weird bad player, but comments are welcome.
How frequently I am doubted. This is what happened to the last guy that called me out and tried to claim I am all talk and no walk. I even warned him before this whole thing started that getting into this would turn out bad for him.
About 2100bb's I won? That's all at 3/6 so that's a little shy of 13k. Including the 5k side bet we made, so that's a total of roughly 18k I took off him...almost 2 dollars per hand.
Spam Blogging (cool post-metal band inc)by nolan, October 19
Isis is probably one of the best bands of all time.
I'm not a metal fan per se, I'm not even a rock music fan per se. Somehow or another, I've been aware of this band forever and I really think this particular album is one of the best albums of this genre ever.
It has to be on account of I like it.
So sick. The entire album just flows so well. According to google the band also considers this their masterpiece as well.
Such a dope first track too. I think Carry or Maritime are my favorite though.
Anyone else familiar with Isis?
Also, everything elite in the world seems to be focused around the Northeast of the US. Quadrant 1 USA #1 region world, suck it scandis.
Indexing vs Active Managementby thewh00sel, October 17
I know I've been posting a lot of information and stock picks lately, but I wanted to make it clear that dividend growth investing isn't the only path to success in the market. In fact, after looking at the results of actively managed mutual funds versus the index fund counterparts I was a bit surprised with how rare success is in the stock market. Success in the markets, of course, is measured by how much you can outperform the indexes; because if you can't beat the gains of "buying the market" then what the hell are you doing anyways?
It turns out, that of all the types of mutual funds out there, in the past 5 years the majority of mutual funds lagged the market. Let that sink in. There are specific analysts in these companies whose job it is to know only one company. They know this company like the back of their hand...And yet they can't predict how the stock will react.
These mutual funds charge large fees; the average in the industry is around a 1.2% expense ratio (rake). Which means if a fund has 100 million dollars in it, the fund managers scoop 1.2 million off the top. On top of that, a lot of these funds have load-fees and other sneaky fees that chop down your money. And the worst part about all of this is that these funds can't even beat the market (not only that, but the % expense ratio has no correlation with its ability to outperform the market).
Since numbers can often speak better than words, here is the percentage of funds that were outperformed by their benchmarks over the past five years:
Domestic Large-Cap Stock Funds: 61.93%
Domestic Small-Cap Funds: 72.56%
Domestic Real Estate Funds: 70.24%
International Stock Funds: 77.98%
Emerging Market Funds: 82.89%
Government Long-Term Bond Funds: 93.62%
Investment Grade Long-Term Bond Funds: 96.77%
High Yield Funds: 96.06%
General Municipal Debt Funds: 90.24%
Was there any category where active managers, in aggregate performed better? Only two: large-cap value and international small-cap.
During the past five years, only 36.71% of large-cap value funds underperformed their benchmarks. However, 54% of large-cap value funds lagged their benchmark over the past one-year and three-year periods. Hence the advantage of active management is questionable at the aggregate level.
International small-cap is an area where you may to consider favoring active management. Only 26.09% of actively managed international small-cap funds lagged their benchmark over past five years, and the one-year number is not considerably higher at 38.18%.
Along with actually beating actively managed funds, index funds make it extremely affordable to "buy the market." You can buy a piece of every stock in the S&P 500 for an expense ratio as low as 0.05% through Vanguard, widely known for its cheap fees. I recently opened a Vanguard account myself to take advantage of the power of index investing.
So my basic point is: If these fund managers who are paid millions of dollars can't beat the market consistently, why should you or me think that we can do it?
Now I'm not going to stop investing in dividend growth stocks as I am confident in my overall strategy...but I am going to increase the amount of capital I allocate to indexing alongside of it. And if you are considering mutual funds, just remember how many of these companies are just investing in yesterday's winners. Today's underperforming stocks are tomorrow's turnaround story, and vice versa for the high flyers. It's easier to diversify than to pay someone to guess for you.
Disclosure: I'm not a professional adviser and my opinions are just that, not recommendations to invest
Anyway here is a story that happened to me ages ago
You wont believed what happened to me today. Me and my friend met up around 6 for me to teach him how
to drive manual. So we're doing laps around my block. He stalls the car couple of times and since my car battery
is a shitbox the car wouldnt start. So we get the jumper cables and start the car from his one (automatic).
Then we went for few more laps.
My friend is driving, then these cops behind us see us , do a turn and start following us, they didnt put the siren on or anything. We stop.
The cops come over with torches.
"what are you doing?". we tell em.
"do you have anything in your car yu want to tell us about?"
"no"
"you guys better tell us to make it better for yourselves"
So yeah we tell em that im just teaching him how to drive manual since he jsut got his green ps.
"get out of the car one by one" so my friend gets out
to me : "keep you hands on the dashboard" "dont move".
i was like holy shit, this must be serious
We get out they are like "are you guys coming from [insertsomeplacename]" (we didnt even know where the place is)
"No"
They they search us, search the car for like 5 minutes maybe more. Ask us like 5 times what we're doing
So me and my friend are sitting down talking while they are searching the car. Talking we laughed cos the cops
were wasting their time so this cop goes up to us "what are you laughing about"
"what were u doing tonight" we tell em like 6th time that were just driving around.
"are you lying to me" in that tone implying that we're lying while shining torches in our faces.
Man i was pretty scared.
i said "i live right around here, i think my house is next to this one", hes like
"how long u lived here for?"
"hmm i think about 5 years"
"and you dont know if your house is next to this one or not"
I was like stop making us look like criminals. "i usually dont go around these places"
They ask us our phone numbers home and mobile. And since i dont remember my mobile number
too well and i m on the edge (shaking a little) i forgot it.
Anyhow after asking us few more questions they told us not to drive around this area at night,
or better off not drive around this area at all (implying that this area is full criminals).
They Let us go.
My friend is like "you drive" (but my license is suspended) im like "nah you drive"
hes like man im gonna stall it (since this is the first time he drove manual car ever).
So anyway we start the car, he stalls it, starts it again and we drive off......
PS they told us that they are looking for two people in the exact same car as mine and a gun.
What sort of things are you guys doing with your careers now? For the guys still playing poker, how are you enjoying it? Any plans for after? For the guys in jobs, tell us what you're doing, why, what you hope to get out of it and what the plan for after is.
Also does this TED video happen to ring true for anyone?
200k Month blog post gone off the tracksby Joeingram1, October 16
This blog post probably should be about how I made 210k in the month of September or how I live in Sydney now or how I lost 250k the first few days I was in Sydney but lets leave that for another blog post, one that probably will just never be written because I just randomly have the urge to write. Even on facebook often I will just not respond to messages for days and then randomly will reply to all of them. I do enjoy talking to almost everyone who I exchange messages with fairly often on there but for some reason I just space out and do nothing about it. I noticed I even was starting to do that with text messages, someone would text me and I would just forget for hours/ever to respond, can't figure it out. I had stars reinstate my chat the other day, since I have threatened the terrorist aka devils worshipper aka voodoo man yousseffahmed more times then I can remember. We now live 15 minutes from each other too but I don't think he is very interested in meeting with someone who wants punch him in the face until the arms can't be lifted anymore. If anyone else was to inflict as much torture to someone as he has done to me this year I think they feel the same way I do. He keeps saying in chat that he runs so bad and is losing, well obviously because you play fucking terrible for hour long sessions, of course you should be losing. I could go on forever about it but probably best not to.
I don't really have a path or goal with poker at this moment in time, which has alot to do with how I made 200k in September. I just didn't give a fuck, played in mostly whatever games and won bunches in short sessions. Like always the longer the session I play the worse I tend to do/play, I think my ideal sweet spot is probably less then 60 minutes to be honest, I don't think I would ever adhere to something like that but it would be amazing if I could be disciplined enough overall to do that. Stinger will just play when games are good forever and suggests I learn to do the same but still not strong enough mentally to do that. I really didn't have any poker goals and still don't have any poker goals or for that matter even life goals, I pretty much achieved a majority of those already and never really thought I would. I made more money then I ever dreamed I would have, set some poker grind records, played highest stakes online, become known to the online poker world. I could try to become some famous name in poker but I realized at some point this summer that there really isn't much of a point to pursuing that because I don't even know what/where/how/why/anything about what I want out of life. Money doesn't really matter to me once I go past a certain point because I have done the same things when I have a 100k roll to when I have 500k roll to when I have 300k roll. Sure I could buy fancy car (have thougtha bout that but don't have any permanent living plans) or could invest/buy property/save up which once again doesn't interest me. I really haven't even spent much of my winnings this year. I have realized that this constant obsession you have over money when you play poker and the desire to play the highest stakes online or make alot of money till no money is left in the world to have is just fucking crazy. But if you aren't playing poker for money or to play the highest stakes which were original goals of mine and many many others out there then why else even play it. The people that are content with grinding xxxyyy stakes and making a projected xxxyyy amount of money a month and are legit content with it amaze me because I really wish I could do that and be able to focus on other potential passions in life. This constant obsession with money though is just wild, like after every session you check your balance and are trying to figure out your life roll to the fucking dollar. FUCK i lost 2843, i only have 398,435 left to my name, fuck, I just had 400,289 or whatever. I used to do this for like 2.5 years with poker and this year when something clicked I just stopped worrying and became some ultimate discipline machine. Lately though all my discipline for the most part has vanished. There are still sessions where the light is on and I revert back to earlier this year me but maybe constant drug use for 2 months is the answer, maybe thats just an excuse and the real answer is I'm just not trying hard enough because I am not motivated enough because I don't have any direction/goal/light at end of the tunnel. I just live in the moment and always worry about that moment when really it doesn't even fucking matter a majority of the time.
I came to Sydney because I met a girl in Ibiza this summer and I will save this story but we had an amazing time. I was unsure if I could actually go through with it and move out here but said fuck it, summer is coming up, it could be a magical time of my life, lets go for it. I came to Sydney with around 260k online. Fast forward to a few days later, I had 5159 online. I HAVE to blog about how it even is possible to do this because it needs to be out there as a way to show how fucked up you can become sometimes and maybe one person reads it and it saves them from fucking up at some point in their lives. I get alot of messages on here and 2p2 and fb from people who tell me what an inspiration I am and how they look up to me in how hard I have worked/what i have achieved/ how i live my life now. I felt at some point this year I turned a corner and actually said yea maybe I am to some extent for some people, but then I go and do that and launch off most of all my money from a 280k high point online. Like what a fucking idiot right? But in reality, it doesn't really matter and quite honestly with the mentality I have had the last month it was inevitable. Obviously it is great I still have lots of money offline and had Ben86 help me get some more money online and realize that I need chill the fuck out for awhile and still to nothing higher then 10/20 because the stress/swings you go through at the higher stakes really just isn't worth it. The positive doesn't outweigh the negative. Some would say 10/20 is still high but losing 2k 5k 10k is nothing on the stress level when you take a 120k losing day or lose an 80k pot. Somehow after I settled down though I was able to win 70k in the next 2 days playing only 5/10 and 10/20, i reverted back to old mentality and discpline and reminded myself how it felt to be broke and 24 tabling .25/.50 for 14 hours a day and wanting to die, that usually snaps me back into how hard it COULD be poker wise and that life is still good.
I was in the zone there for a bit and wrote all of the above but now I don't feel much in the zone anymore. Basically I'm hoping I can find some goals in poker and in life sometime soon. Basically now I just load up every 5/10 and 10/20 table and try to get as many deep games started as possible, I usually won't play like 2 or 3 people who like to start as well because they god mode me/are lot better hu but I like to learn and if someone is better then me but I still run medium against then I will battle and build the games so the players can come. It does suck that every reg who starts tables are all fucking bosses and up hundreds of thousands from poker but I think has helped my game alot and study what they do in certain spots has helped me to apply same thing in my game (sometiems for good and for bad). Sometimes a reg (jan82) will say he will play me hu anytime. Well I don't like to stick to only 1 v 1 without option for others to play but I will be sitting at 5/10 10/20 and 3/6 everyday until I can't anymore and you guys can get all the hands of heads up with me you want until the table gets going. Or at some point I might realize it more +ev in most aspects of life to be big big bumhunter again and go for variance free graph but where is the fun in that.
Side Note: I wrote all this like 2 hours ago and randomly decided to stop at some point. I think I was on another planet when typing but was completely sober, I am a crazy person I think
Contact Users: 525 Active, 0 Logged in - Time: 08:33
So will have to stop the MTTs till late november
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