Been a sick month... reached 1k and decided to take shot at 50nl of course it went horribly and then I added some 100nl ended up playing from 12am to 7am chasing losses like a de gen I felt pretty depressed about the whole thing at the time. Anyway I'm going to cash out my roll 1.9k to pay for uni. I am going to be regrinding on stars probably 5plo and 10nl. From now on my sessions will be a lot more structured, reviewing hands and watching a video after every session and getting away from rush is going to be most important.
I don't know why but I decided to blog a bit more. I'm taking a break between classes atm and I'm chilling here in the student cafe, drinking some coffee.
Probably won't talk much about poker as this month has been a crucible of sorts. It was just very swingy at the limits I play NL25/NL50, but I've come to realize that this is about 95% attributable to my own strengths and weaknesses as a player. There are pearls of wisdom in the poker community that many of us gloss over or take for granted, such as very strict bankroll management, using a stoploss, taking breaks if you don't feel on top of your game, being able to ride out a solid grind vs. having the discipline to call it a day when needed. I honestly believe that these things are the most important aspects of poker success for micro/low-limits players. Forget exploitability, table image, bluffing frequencies, etc. None of this really matters at NL50 and below. It's all about who has the discipline and who doesn't - anything more than that is just icing on the cake.
I don't really fear variance as much anymore. The "ah hah!" moment came for me when I was having dinner with my parents this past weekend. I'm Korean, but I was born and raised in the US. I'm very close to my parents and I communicate with them very often. It helps that my mom moved here when she was 16 and my dad is one of the most open-minded and intelligent people I know.
Anyway, my dad was telling me this old Korean proverb about a mare (female horse). It started out as a proverb that I can't remember exactly, but there was a story behind it that I think applies well to both poker and life.
A farmer is out walking and he finds a stray young mare. Yay! This is a huge boon so he takes her to his farm. Not long after however, a fence falls down and the mare wanders off. The farmer's heartbroken, but there's not much he can do to track it down. A few months later, lo and behold, the mare comes trotting up, having wandered around so much she eventually found her way back to the farm. However, slutty girl that she is, she got herself knocked up by some stallion in her travels and woot, now the farmer not only has his mare back but a foal along with it.
The farmer has children of his own and his son is his pride and joy. One day, the son, who has grown up to be a young man, ready to take on greater responsibilities at the farm, is taking a ride on the mare. The mare gets frightened by something and she bucks, throwing the son off her back and breaking his legs. The son is disabled for quite some time, unable to help out at the farm for months as he slowly heals. A month later however, war comes to the farmer's country and young men are being conscripted everywhere to serve in the king's army. With his broken legs, the son is deemed unfit to be a soldier and passed over for conscription.
Any clever poker player should have figured out by now that the point of this story is variance. It's everywhere. It's just life. Blessings can become curses, which eventually reveal hidden blessings of their own, and so on. When you're downswinging hard and feel like variance is taking a shit on you, look for the hidden blessings, whether it's discovering the motivation to study hard and play smarter or finding a new hobby that brings greater joy at less expense. And when you're riding high, making that ez cash moneys, remember that something as simple as the dealing of some bad cards can take that away from you and never take it for granted.
Be wary of the eventual ups and downs, but don't fear them.
Anyway, this might seem kinda redundant on this forum, but hearing that little story from my dad just helped me realize that we, as poker players, aren't all that special. Any hustler out there, be he a poker player, a superstar athlete, or an entrepreneur, will have these life swings.
Stars Nl25 6max http://i.imgur.com/jssfU.jpg
After a heater start it got swingy a bit in the end Notice how it was very close to a whine blog post at the 25K hand mark
Cakepoker i dont have hands imported since there is no hud i didnt have PT3 running when playing there
but most of my profits came from that 1 big HU session i posted a pic of eariler
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/1927/hurape.jpg
Also u get pretty sick good rakeback at Cake lol ... i looked at the account yesterday and realized i got 58$ of RB in there from playing 4-5 days of Nl20$ HU lol ?
had to cash out 644$ for paying rent and living expenses stuf but stilli could move up to Nl50 but will stay at lower limits for quite some more time to grind out a very sold BR.
If i had taken NL50 shots at 25K hand mark on Pokerstars id probably lost my whole Bankroll T_T in massive ragetilt ( As u notice i was never good at showdown no matter if i had a flush,set or 2 pair villian always had the absolute 1% top of his range ...)... so for me it is sooo important to stay disciplined 1 time
RL: BOWLING FTW ! http://www.biochem.emory.edu/labs/acorbe2/pics/bowling/Bowling0011.JPG
I did start doing some bowling with my old non MMA friends a bit for fun after my MMA training recently
I have a Brunswick bowling center 6minutes away from where i live which is really cheap and nice.
1 Game of Bowling (10frames)only costs 1.85€ per person which equals to like half an hour of bowling.
so most of the time we are like 5 people doing 3x 10 frames each and its really a lot of fun.
I do enjoy it a lot so far especially since i noticed with recent increase of effort i put into poker my socialising kinda faded a bit.
My day looked like wake up -> MMA Training ->Poker grind -> MMAtraining2 ->Pokergrind2 -> bed ...
Only people i did have social contact with were my fellow fighters i train with.
Now due to bowling i got in contact with some old friends again and also got better known to a nice girl i dated yesterday
Was such a beautiful evening
I dont know how things will continue with us but i try to just enjoy the time i spend with her , which really is an easy thing to do since she is great
Life is even more Variance than poker i guess
like half a year ago i was kinda at rock bottom due to BerserkerInsane Girlfriend, failing at university and being broke as fuck while living in a shithole and being on heavy arguments with my parents who had to help me out with money to pay my rent at that time >_< ( God did i feel ashamed)
the later threes were directly connected to Insane GF,too ( She still owes me 719€ i will probably never see in my life again ever)
So to all who have a hard time right now u shall never forget that things can also change to the better fast
Anyways, it looks like I'm moving to the US, was supposed to move to London to our EMEA HQ, but it looks like it will be the US. I have to sit down and talk to my GF about it (she wasn't going to come along to London), and see what's going to happen to us. The move could be short term (3 months), but possible for a lot longer (permanent).
Anyone in MD / VA?
Looks like I'm moving fairly close to DC to start off with, and hopefully to San Francisco in the fall.
So basicly, I got my FTP acc. along with the promotion of 50$ free, here in LP.net a few years ago.Since then I haven't played much, but I wonder if there is a way to get rakeback for my acc?
2. going to start considering alternative sites to play on because stars is just too demanding, i HATE being forced to play hours after work every time it comes around to end of month
3. after suffering the biggest downswing of my life at the end of last year i feel like ive matured greatly as a player. going to put more time to study the game now i dont have to play a whole bunch to maintain supernova
the bad
1. another 3 months of breakevennesssss
mandatory graph with my awesome technical analysis skills say the next 3 months is going to be gooooooooooooood!!
Hi, looking for someone to trade 210 paypal for 200 stars, looking to get into poker again after quitting sc2 and want to start my roll from some winnings i have in paypal from sc2. Willing to send first if you're a known poster . pretty easy $10 imo!
Calling out an Online Tournamentby HeroPoker-CEO, March 30
Today, I had an interesting experience,
I ran a 1k free roll for the other poker community site that I'm focused on (we're going to run something for PL as well quite soon); and there were 93 runners. Late registration was for an hour, so I was still helping stragglers get into the tournament and I had opened about 6 random tables to follow the action. In about 30 mins about half the field was gone and by a little bit past the hour, we were already in the money with 30 players left.
Now there is a messaging system that I can use to message the players, the problem is that it messages all of my players; including those who are playing in the Freeroll tournament and not. My initial intent was simply to announce the where the auto muck button was and say thanks for playing. I am sure there is some way to message within the chat box of that tournament , but I simply wished to give out a single message.
THE EYE IN THE SKY
For Hero Poker and all Merge software poker clients, it has the ability to show animated smiley faces and other very lol type of animations (like a panda bear doing a victory dance-hard to explain) and when the players type in text, it pops up like cartoon speech box. Now for a serious grinder, these have no value at all, but since it was a freeroll, people were just trash talking each other and I could see all their conversations pop up on each table. So sometimes they would ask a question to the table about the client or something; and then I'd send out a message that answered it. Now, the players at first did not know I was observing all the tables, and so after I made the comment; someone would point that out, 'Oh, CEO Dave just answered that question'.
MUCKING AROUND
After a bit of time, I noticed that some players were really trash talking hard and there was one player who had this really offensive sexist screen name and there was a girl at the table, but she took it as a joke. But I ended up messaging everyone that the guy player with the sexist name was now restricted from chatting to women on the site. It got some chuckles, but then the players were like, is Dave observing the tables, then they starting to ask a few more random questions and I would answer them as if it was coming from above. It was just pretty funny in general.
I didn't keep cracking jokes because, (i) I'm not a funny guy, (ii) I didn't want to distract the other players on the site as well, but in the end I watched the entire freeroll for 2 hours and did some live updates on the forum as if I was some pokernews staff at a live event.
A LIVE POKER ROOM EXPERIENCE OF SORTS
The entire experience reminded me when I had started two poker rooms in Macau and simply getting to know the players, and because many of the players had PMed me before the tournament I did feel as though I did know them all and it was a bit unreal watching a nearly 100 person tournament and knowing everyone. I mean some local tournament directors of live rooms do know hundreds of their players, but for online, I don't think so.
There really is no clear business point to this post, other than I thought it would be fun to run commentary throughout at tournament and really interact with the players as they are playing, but that would only be possible in a freeroll, otherwise I think it would be annoying as hell. Additionally, if there was live commentary on those high stakes online games, or online final tables, on a more regular basis, I think it would be something different to consider in adding to this concept of a boutique poker site.
its one of those runbads where you just expect to lose every race. I also dropped a grand at ac playing the wsop circuits a few weeks ago.
yesterday, i deposited like $100 on hero poker to test it out after i read the ceos blog post on lp. compared to cereus, the players actually seem worse at the ultra turbo sngs. here are my results after a couple of hours. i started off at the 5$-10$ ultra turbo and now im just grinding the 36$ until i have about 1000$. im also a lvl 15 farmer now lol.
Just started to play online poker today after reading article after article & book after book on it. I wanted to study the basic idea before attempting it, obviously, so i started to learned how basic math & position play into each other and how to use it in FR.
Anyways this today's session was pretty good, up 3 buy-ins. I'm going to be playing a lot more in the future though it might be hard since a new season of SC2 just started... we will see.
i've just been grinding 1-6 tables from nl50-100 because at the start of the year i basically realized that i can't become a good poker player unless i cut down on the tables and start playing properly.
I think my biggest challenge in beating this game is that i find it insanely boring to play most of the time. I've been trying to make poker more enoyable by doing other shit but since the earthquake happened, the casino/gym and a lot of places which i want to go to have been closed ever since!
how i got a good winrate (8bb/100+)by longple, March 29
I just went through my whole database and came up with a couple of realizations
it probably will be tl;dr but if u are a struggeling nl50, nl100 or nl200 player i think it can be a good read
during most of 2009 and until the summer of 2010 (july 2nd to be more exact) i was a masstabling rakebacksmallstakesgrinder, i did a database check looking through all the sites i 12 table++ ed on, 80% of hands are probably from stars 24 tabling
July 2nd was the day that i cashed out my roll from stars and started 4 tabling
i thought i was good at poker, i had watched all the videos out there, read most of the books etc, though i was a decent thinker, making all that rakeback $, running under EV and whining about it thinking i should make so much more etc made me paralized and i kinda got stuck in my improvement
during these hands i made about 17k$ in rakeback and lost ~4k$ at the tables pretty much breaking even as u see in the graph under
(i sorted out all my hands on all my aliases before 3rd july 2010 and after july 3rd 2010, alot of hands before that from the 10nl 25nl days etc are lost, i have no hands from 2008 left in my database
where i basically posted a cry me a river graph about running under EV, and that i was doomswitched etc and i was close to giving up on poker.
After this blogpost i took a break, and then grinded out the last hands to achive my next 100k VPP milestone + FPP bonuses
after that i cashed out my roll from stars, i finally started 4 tabling on bossmedia and ipoker and found myself beating nl100 and nl200 at a pretty good rate and it felt good to feel like a winner again, and not a rakebackwinner. then i started to grind alot of my volume at a swedish site where i play alot today. (if u seen some of my hands lately/blogposts with graphs they are mostly posted with the swedish currency SEK, as the tables run with SEK on the swedish site svenskaspel as i speak of)
I started taking more notes, play more pots with fish, pound on weak regs and had more time to look through stats, even though im not really a stats guy. The biggest thing i done so far probably is started thinking on my own, reading hands and ranges from simple logic breaking it down from start to finish what my and villains ranges were instead of just looking on 2barrel and riverbet CBet numbers and trash like that
i pretty much removed my hud except for the basic vpip/pfr/3bet/fold3bet from haveing a shitton of numbers befor as i felt a need to have that while i masstabled to get an idea on the villain even though it only made it worse pretty much.
all i look at nowadays is what ranges people open from different positions (the raise 1st in stat) it tells alot about peoples ranges, some 23/19 regs open different ranges, notable positions is EP BU and SB especially, i guess the steal stat pretty much is the same as this, but pound on these guys who open alot in the SB, dont give up position
the biggest thing i came to realise for REALS is how important position is, position is everything, especially the deeper u get.
pounding on people who open wide in the CO and SB from BU/BB is something u really shouldnt skip just cuz he seems tight, look through his stats, u will find that even the ones with nitty stats opens wide enough in the SB for example for you to call and 3bet more from the bigblind
and ofc be prepared to adjust to his adjustments, if he starts calling more 3bets oop or if he starts 4bet more etc and adjust ur 3bet range accordingly
for my results after the 3rd of july i was really not expecting these kinds of concistent results, as u play fewer hands/session it feels like u have more swings then u actually have longterm, its sick really :D
i havent done a complete database check for a very long time and im happy to present it soooo
here it is: (after leaving the rakeback grind on july the 3rd)
winning at almost 10bb/100 with close to 0 swings. it has taken me many hours to rake in 340k hands obv 4-6 tabling, sometimes 1-3 tabling even, but in just 8-9 months ive moved from a retarded breakeven 100NL player to a big winner on 2/4 3/6 and probably 5/10 aswell (dont have as big sample there yet, but so far so good)
it has made me sooo much better, i cant really push enough on how much playing less tables have improved my game and as u see the results speak for themself.
ive moved up from 0.5/1$ to 5/10$ in less then a year by 4 tabling.
As a tip to all of u out there who struggle at lower stakes, cut down on tables, play more heads up, take a shit ton of more notes, always try to rake in as much quality volume as possible
and seriously, playing heads up and 3 handed with good regs will not hurt u if ur a 100nl 200nl or 400nl player that want to improve
obviously it all comes down to what kind of goals u have as a player, but if u wanna get good, playing good players will get u there and not bumhunting.
but if u are happy bumhunting the lower stakes without much stress, without any ambitions on getting better at the game, go ahead
cuz exactly what gave me the opportunity to move up stakes this year is playing more deep tables, playing more heads up, and not to instasitout as fast as its 3 handed with 2 good regs
play, and improve, and u will be rewarded. there are no shortcuts in this game : ) except for MTT luckboxes obv ;D
to results, the graph with 300buy ins in 330k hands after july 3rd 2010 is played on 6 different sites, € $ and SEK, but i made some fast calculations and it ended up being about 85 000$
if any of you made it this far in the post, seriously, if u wanna get better u need to challange urself, dont be a bumhunter, crush the souls of every reg, they all suck, no one is good under 5/10 (no offence), some decent 200NL grinders, and alot of solid 400NL grinders out there for sure, but if they really were good they would have played higher already, and the good ones, that plays lower probably 16+ table to maximise their hourly so they are all just solid nits whom are not much to fear
but just get out of the mindset of getting xx$/hour on low/midstakes, as i did i calculated and only cared about the rakeback i could make. strive towards improvement and constantly try to move up and play thougher opponents, and if ur smart u will do just that
but obv u can make good money playing under 5/10, but imo alot of u guys should strive just as me to be the best possible player u can be, and for that u need to work really fuckin hard
cliffs:
-dont masstable if u wanna improve
-put down more quality volume try thinking about ur and villains
ranges in all spots instead of looking at stats clicking random
buttons
-u need to realise that u need to work hard to improve in this game,
be the best player u can be
-dont be a bumhunter unless ur happy playing the stake ur playing, then go ahead and maximise ur winnings on this stake or w/e even though bumhunting is kinda anoying
WELL after messing around with play money for a few years, I finally suckered -- I mean, convinced -- a friend to freeroll me some real monies into my account. I railed him till well after my bedtime (I work full time, give me a break) plus won a side bet so yeah, I deserved it!
I haven't been playing online as much as I used to so I'm starting this slow. Ended my first session in the micros up a little so that was kind of nice. Nothing noteworthy, other than the fact that I had a slight downswing and lost half my br at one point but s'all good now. Played an SNG and won that so was up a little more, then lost a couple but I blame a very unfortunate misclick for one of them. I really should start using a mouse instead of my mousepad...
I don't expect to be able to supplement my income with poker, especially at micro stakes, so for now this is just for fun. I don't have the patience or resources to dedicate too much time to poker at this point either. And why am I blogging about it? Bored at work I guess.
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. pretty easy $10 imo!
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