There are hundreds of blogs of players who document their ‘challenge’ to take a small bankroll of $10 dollars and turn it into $10k, or else, there are blogs where winning casual poker players decided that they are going to go professional and go all-in with their decision by moving to Vegas or grind online for 12 hours a day.
This blog is along the same lines, but from a different perspective… I'd like to do the same thing, but with a poker site, Hero Poker.
Hi, my name is David Jung, I was the Regional Director of PokerStars in Asia and nearly singlehandedly established poker across Asia, and I am the current CEO of Hero Poker, a new site on the Merge Gaming Network. I'm on a quest to make Hero Poker, the world's premier boutique poker site.
I am going to blog about the trials and tribulations of this challenge and I've chosen two poker communities to really work with during this time and one of them is LiquidPoker.net.
STACKED AGAINST THE HOUSE
If you think becoming a poker pro has some odds stacked against you, taking a new network poker site and trying to break into the top ten of global poker sites is virtually drawing dead. Even if you hit that two outer, no amount of corporate chip stack is going to prepare you for the 900 pound gorilla of the market leaders. And I should know, I worked at PokerStars as a senior manager and director from 2007 to 2010. I know the nature of the beast and from a competitive standpoint, the online poker jungle has its obvious hierarchy, we know who the lions and gorillas are.
AND THE WORD FROM VEGAS IS…
Recently I got word from Vegas that the word on the street is that, if you don't have 100M USD for seed money for online poker, you can forget about even competing. I'd reckon that would be the case for these major US live casinos (with the exception of Harrahs/Cesears) as probably they would donk off the first 50M to every type of marketing agency out there. Another 25M would go to useless online promotions and the last 25M they would start to use properly, but then realize that they actually short stacked at this point. Then things would really start to fall apart as ‘reloading’ your capital/bankroll as a public company has some major costs. And what is really shocking/breaking news is the joint venture with PokerStars and Wynn. Now the significance of Wynn making a relationship with PokerStars means that they think that the market is so damn competitive that even the legendary Steve Wynn is willing to make a joint venture...its pretty heavy news.
SO WHERE DO I THINK I COULD DO BETTER?
This is the part of the blog where I justify that my past experience will help me get the job done. And this also will lead to comments of 'good luck buddy you haven't got a chance' or 'prop bets to see how long this site will actually be up for'. And the truth is, no amount of experience could prepare one to take on such a complex and difficult task, even if you had 100M in chip. Because I accept this, I’ve let go of trying to compete with the beasts. Before I joined PokerStars, I was a senior management consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers (the biggest global accounting firm). At the time I was specialized in business strategy, international negotiations and casino investments. What I loved about my job was that it wasn't a typical bs consultant's job. My main role wasn't to take a nearly bankrupt company and bring it to life again, or turn a so/so company into a super duper company with some wonky market strategy. Rather, my role was to make strategy that allowed companies to sidestep the competition. The key thing about this kind of strategic approach is that it isn’t flashy or mind-blowing stuff, it just looks to focus on one good point that everyone would normally take as a negative.
FOCUS IS GOOD
There comes a point when a company completely controls the playing field or that there is so much competition that there is no space to manoeuvre. This is the case with the online poker industry right now. For the stand alone sites, the market leaders have a lock on it; for the smaller network sites, their own network partners can be both friend or foe. So how to side step it all to make the competition irrelevant for a moment so that you can create your own beach head in this battle? So what is the obvious most negative thing and how to make it positive? And what is the most negative thing in online poker? Player liquidity…
PLAYER LIQUIDITY NUMBERS
Without player liquidity, players sometimes can't even maximize the use of their tournament bankrolls because there isn't enough tournaments to register into. Player liquidity affects the selection of the game in term of available limits, number of tables and tournament prize pools. But everyone is so focused on player liquidity, it is easy to forget liquidity doesn't always add to the quality of the game. It is a common fact that playing at one of the major stand alone sites is a harder game to win, because the players are more educated, they use HUDs and there is just a bigger tournament field.
THE QUALITY GAME
There is this single huge cash game in Macau, the biggest in the world. It's a single table and this table moves between Starworld to Lisboa to Grand Lisboa and sometimes makes a stop at the Wynn in any given week. And this game is by invitation only. You've heard of this game, it's a game populated by casino owners and VIP junket operators where there are single 1M USD pots and you can be up 5 or 8M or be down 2 M in the same game, and to them, this is still a fraction of their worth. This is the single table game that every pro worth his salt would die to get a regular place in it. But that is at one end of the spectrum. About 6 months ago I was in Shenzen (just across the border of Hong Kong) for a casual game of poker and three guys came down from Shanghai. One guy's family sold yachts and the other two were just full on wealthy and they had just started playing poker. But since they had a lot of disposable income, we played a $10/$20 and I bought in for $1200, but in just 4 hours I was up $3000. One of the guys looks at me and says, 'Wow you are so lucky, how come you always have a flush or straight' and I said, 'this is a game of skill, you allow me the cards to make my hands' and he just laughed at me and said, 'this is just luck and you are one lucky guy!'. Now that was a quality game.
LET NOTHING COME BETWEEN YOU AND THE CARDS
In live poker, you play that single table and can't multi-table (unless you're at the WSOP and you have that option). Now a lot of internet poker players feel that playing live poker is quite boring at first. The two aspects of continually trying to read your opponents while trying to set them up is different for live play than online, in that, it is far more intense. After setting up two poker rooms in Macau and being part of countless live tournaments working on the floor, I know that live poker players want to be, above else, comfortable. But comfortable here doesn’t mean it’s ‘Cheers’ and everyone knows your name. It’s when players know that someone is actively looking out for their interests so they can simply just focus and play their game.
I'm not saying that I want to turn an online site into a live poker room, I'll leave that to PKR, rather, I want to provide an experience where the players know that they can directly speak with the CEO and have that level of comfort to simply play their game at their best. If you’re going to play with us, then we want to provide that environment where you know you can talk to the management and get answers.
FISH COME AND GO, BUT QUALITY LASTS FOREVER
No matter what anyone says, size does matter, but size isn't about the general liquidity, but it’s about the amount of quality. To this end, we've focused our entire site on newer players and low stakes tournament players. Our focused marketing is casting the net wide to actively target and develop new players for low stakes tournament poker. Hero Poker is already part of a network that has low stake guaranteed tournaments with consistent overlays. This is the perfect environment for a low stakes player to play in relatively smaller fields with value. That being said, there are a lot of pending changes to the client and while we are one of the fastest growing poker networks, you can't ignore player liquidity as a major factor for the long term survive and competitiveness of our site. But right now, its a matter of allowing the disadvantage be a benefit and if I'm right liquidity will follow.
Now, in terms of LiquidPoker.net and HeroPoker, LiquidPoker is a bit nearer to my heart in that it is a 'sister site' to 'Teamliquid.net' where I've been a long time member. While I've kept things very separate, I do know that there is cross over, I'd just like people to respect the separation and not post on TL about whatever I'm doing business wise on LP; and while some of you already know, David Jung is MightyAtom. I still have a great love for SCBW and SC2 and of course E-sports. If I do something on TL, it would be sponsor a SCBW tournament, not that I have anything against SC2. While I do keep a blog on TL.net, its more on general business discourse, while this blog will really get into the nitty-gritty details of what is going on. I am maintaining two separate poker blogs, but I'd say that LP is quite different than the other community, so I will be a bit more personal here as I guess I can slightly let my guard down a bit more.
WE DO HAVE SPONSORED PROS, CLICHÉ, BUT SERIOUSLY THEY ARE WORLD CLASS PROS
HeroPoker is fortunate to be joined by six seasoned but still young veterans of the game, Gavin Griffin, Terrence Chan, James 'mig.com' Mackey, Daniel 'Rekrul' Schreiber, David 'u_dirty_dog' Ewing and Julian Powell. All of them play at the highest international level either both online and/or live. I know that many people in this community know Rekrul and Mig.com, obvious that was intentional from the beginning as I knew that one of the markets that I would like to focus on was the gamer market. Both Rekrul and Mig.com agreed after much discussion, I think both of them don't need sponsorship, and so our discussions weren't about the benefits more than if this was a good fit. I know both of them don't want to make a big deal out of it and don't want to seem like air headed figureheads, but that is what I'm going to do (although Rek is resisting like mad).
I know both of them are very talented but very different in personality. I don't think I need to go into details about them both here at LP, but I'm very very grateful and fortunate to have them both on the team. I've know Rek forever, and I did sponsor him for the 1st Team Asia Pros for PokerStars, but after I used him after one year, dropped him ^^ and Mig.com was introduced to me by Nazgul. I actually asked him for the best pro that he could think of that wasn't sponsored and fit what I was looking for, someone who could hold their own and was the best at what they did, and the first thought that came to him was Mig.com. Rekrul was there as we at the OGS-Liquid house (SC2 training house in Korea) and when I asked him his opinion, he was just basically speechless and said, 'Mig is as good as it gets'. After a couple weeks of talks, I had my full team. I'll get more into it about sponsored pros later, but I just wanted to share that story. I know that Rek is a controversial person and I'm willing to work through, not ignore, whatever come up because I do think he is worth it, but I'll leave it at that for now.
We will be running some type of promotions for LiquidPoker members exclusively, from some freerolls to some different type of promotions; we can even run a PLO freeroll, but honestly there isn't much PLO action on Hero Poker yet.
MOVING FORWARD
I will write about everything under the sun when it comes to the poker industry, professional business, careers and the trials and tribulations of this task and for all those who are doing the same thing but on the other side of the coin as a player. Feel free to request a blog topic and if I can write something decent about it, I will.
I’d like to leave you with this.
‘There Is Nothing Impossible To Him Who Will Try’
Alexander the Great
So I epic failed my March goals and actually got crushed at 25NL. After having a session where I ran roughly 8BI below ev I got really frustrated and took a few days off, then had another big losing session and only played once every few days. Almost a month later my roll is just over 400 and I'm struggling to motivate myself to play again, but in order to save my PlatinumStar for April I'm going to have to get about 2k VPP at 10NL before the month is over...so that'll be my motivation to play for now. I'm sort of concerned with how much interest I lost in poker once I had a tiny bit of runbad, but grinding for Masters on SC2 didn't help either since it split my focus. I've actually gotten decently good at SC2 so if anyone wants to play, add me (furrychobo at yahoo dot com) and we can game
GL at the tables LP! Will be updating this in a few days with whether or not I followed through on my goal to keep platinumstar.
Why do people expect you to have an opinion about everything? It is often most reasonable to hold no opinion or verdict on a topic, especially when it is outside the scope of one's area of study or expertise. People should respect those who choose to reserve judgement when they don't have a very large amount of knowledge about a subject.
This comes up pretty often in my US GOV class. The professor gives an assignment, which he wants you to give a brief answer (1paragraph) and verdict to, on an extremely complex issue. Today I got fed up with it and spent my paragraph trying to outline the variables which an informed decision might rely upon, and then stated that I had no personal verdict. I wonder if I will get full credit.
I was kind of demoralized after getting 10th in a 7k person tourny last night so I took the rest of the night off after that. I'm ready to go today. I will not be playing many smaller tournies, and will be mainly 6-10 tabling. Here's the schedule.
Full Tilt
$256 - Sunday Brawl
$216 Sunday Mulligan
Stars
$215 - Sunday Warm Up
$215 - Sunday Million
$215 - Second Chance
Sub Total = 1117 + 5% Mark Up Total = $1173
Im selling 60% of my action. Reply to this thread and send the money if you want a piece. OPR me or look back a couple blog posts to find my stats. I only have about 50 or so tournaments logged on stars, about 7k on FTP.
Pretty much just had to adjust to the greater increase in 3betting and squeezing. Stopped 3betting from the blinds as much because I get called by the BTN a lot. Started increasing my 3betting on the BTN cause people call a lot and give me position. Learned how to fold to these 3bets more often instead of bluffing/calling cause of tilt. Fish are still fish except now they are more aggressive which is actually even better.
Here's a fun hand for yall. I run pretty good sometimes.
Call it a month since last days poker got too me a bit emotionally what i did realise by the fact i started smoking again few days ago .... T_T
+ i kinda started having problems to sleep well recent days
lying in bed for 2-3h after evening session is done and just cant sleep.
The past 13 days i have played poker every day for 2-4h a day. Not a single day off.
So last 3 days of the month i will just relaxe have fun with friends for the most part. And not concern myself with playing even 1Hand
before April grind starts
I cant complain about the results by any means and overall i guess i did run semiluckbox style.
Cakepoker Nl20 HU
+ 170$
Stars Nl256max
+ 445$
Ipoker NL20€ HU
+ 92€ (+129$)
GG.net freeroll + 5$
---------------------------------------------------------
Overall
+ 749$ in 18 days of Poker ~ 30 K hands
Have 30$ on Isildur tomorrow busting DN
So nothing special here for u guys expcet a movie recommendation
Put up a rather conservative stop loss but other then that I'm aiming for 10 hours of (effective) poker today, breaks for food, toilette thingys and de-tilting acceptable assuming they're no longer then 20 minutes and no more then 3. Aiming to start at 1300 CET+1 and have it done before midnight. Hopefully I'll get 7 or 8k hands in if I don't hit my stop loss.
If I hit 7k hands I'm happy, 10k and I'm really glad.
Path to Robusto-ness...2011 Recapby Joeingram1, March 26
Path To ROBUSTONESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
So after some very smart bankroll decisions the past few months I realized that I am near busto online. Smart bankroll decisions=losing 20BI in a session randomly, shot taking at a higher then my "regular" stakes and playing like a fucking idiot and losing more then I said I would, etc... Basic problems that have plagued me for most of my online poker career but never really had a near busto effect on me because I could always machine it up and grind it back up. This month it actually got to a point where I was a little worried if I still had it in me to be able to go through the moving down process and grinding it out there.
I was 4-6 tabling for a week or two and super game selecting at nl100 and made about 35BI in 6k hands which is pretty amazing results but wasn't being disciplined enough to stick with it and would throw some random PLO sessions in there and win a few BIs most sessions and then go off the deep end for a -25BI session. I have not been running to well but at the same time I certainly wasn't playing well either. A few days ago I was looking at the fact that I basically NEEDED to make a certain amount of money for the rest of the month or I would either need to re-evaluate my current living situation or get a stake.
I have compiled a pretty sick ptr buddy list of small stakes nl100 fish and plo25-400 fish and decided to hunt then when they are playing and not play PLO like a fucking idiot and fold more hands OOP (which was my BIGGEST leak by far x10000).
There is also a WSOP circuit event in town at Harrahs Rincon and another SNE grinder Hodge05 was in town so we decided to go up there and meet some other guys he is talking to about getting a place together out here. There was a few cash tables running and I decided to play some 1/3 for a little while. Was talking to an asian girl at my table for awhile about SNE that turned out to be Kristy Arnett who does all the poker news reporting stuff. Only took me a few hours to figure this out lol. There is one seat open to my right and new player walks into the room, only 4 tables running right now, and gets the seat
Obviously its the CHAMP himself Jerry Yang coming to get light 3bet by me lol. Played for a few hours with him and following my rule of "if i'm ever playing with a wsop main event champ I must make him laugh" I proceeded to talk to him a bunch and threaten his stack by telling him I can't wait to stack the champ! He was a really really nice guy though, super friendly. Played pretty well too and did really well. Iso'd him a few hands and obv lost all of them but only played one pretty big hand towards end of night.
2/5 1k effective I raise 89dd UTG and Sharon (60s woman I had been flirting with the whole night who got hot and bothered when I took off my hoody and told me if I wanted her I could have her lol) flats on BTN and Champ flats BB. Flop 10 6 2 with a backdoor flush draw for me so I cbet 40 into 60 and Champ c/c. Turn 7 (bink) and I talk a little to the champ who is in fatdan mode and bet 100 and he calls pretty quick. River is Q and he checks and I laugh hysterically because I am very excited and bet 300. Champ tanks forever and I keep talking to him and he keeps laughing. I say the champ doesn't want anyone to bluff him ever, and if he calls I will be able to afford to marry his daughter (he told me earlier in the night that if I wanted to ever marry his daughter, in his culture I would have to pay him lol wtf). Eventually he called and I was
Fun live session, I saw the older woman a little closer when I was about to leave and if she was about fiddy pounds less things might have gotten serious. Ended up 1200usd on the session, rounding out a good past few days. I'm not really sure what my poker plan is going forward but going to just keep putting in the hours/hands and hopefully keep winning.
NAPT LA BOUNTY SHOOTOUT
I posted in a previous blog about how I was playing the formerly NAPT bounty shootout in LA. ESPN recoreded it, 10,3k Buy-in 2k for each bounty and 40k for winning the table. 81 people played it total and I sold about 85 percent of my action for it. I got to the casino pretty early and chatted with some of the company that produces/records it and got my picture taken for the bounty chip that you give out to people. SNE grinder George Lind was to my right, John Hennigan was to my left and Dennis Phillips was a few to my right, I ended up chatting with him for most time I was alive and he was a pretty awesome and super nice guy. I was actually playing really well to start but in typical Joe Ingram fucking idiot fashion I donked off a bunch of chips to Hennigan with 22 preflop vs his QQ.
I flatted the opening raise hoping someone would sqz and i could jam. Once the guy who was super short went all in and then the sb foreign doctor thought for few seconds and went all in I figured there was a good chance he wanted to go for the bounty and could have had a hand like 99-jj ajss-ak and then george thought for awhile and finally sighed and called with aqo. At this point I guess I could fold QQ and still have 30-40bbs left but I was kinda on tilt from losing half my stack/wanted the bounty/had a pair.
I will get my 10-30 seconds on ESPN and At least I took this pic with Dennis before I busted out lol
The rest of 2011 has gone pretty up and down for me so far. After went on 70k downer in December, I just laid in bed for the start of the year pretty angry at myself for losing that much fucking money. Eventually I got out of bed and started to play some poker but was playing to high of stakes for how I was feeling at that time and didn't pretty meh. I've been in a pretty psychotic relationship for most of this year which I finally ended a few weeks ago and was keeping me super stressed out for most of the year. My poker results at the table have been about breakeven so far because I have just not been playing my A game very often or putting in enough volume. I'm hoping now that I am getting refreshed mentally from all of that, my poker results will continue to be good.
To leave you my blog readers, here is my graph from December when I finally achieved SNE
They added me to the featured blog lists on here too so hopefully this will encourage me to actually blog more. I should probably write up some Trip Reports of recent dates I have been on as well. Has been interesting to say the least lol
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