since all the blogs I make are mostly whining here is a positive one
I just booked my flight + hotel (Deerfoot) for tomorrow was originally planning on leaving today but that didnt work out so the 1k tourney is likely going to be my first live tournament ever followed by the 5k HU and the 2.2k mainevent + 5/10 cash and some other smaller events if I bust early in the 5k/2k
if anyones coming to Calgary ship me a pm we'll meet up and goto the casino / for drinks or something
I've been doing well online since I took a brief trip to montreal at the end of June/start of July
up some money at staking and other stuff as well thats like 10-15k or something
I probably dont plan on playing anymore online this month and obviously it didn't end too well as I lost like 10k in the last 2-3 days but I was really tired/hungry when I played and def tilted/spewed a ton so I only have myself to blame
overall lifes pretty good right now I turned 19 2 days ago yay! and I'm looking to move to downtown Toronto by the end of the year so hopefully I can find a nice place
So, I've been living in Portland, Or for 6 months now. I know there was a post on one of my blogs that there were some people from this site that live in Portland. I have my girlfriend here and my best friend from college and a couple of other friends but not too many. If anyone wanted to meet up that would be awesome. I live in the SW on Barbour. So, let me know.
New Place, back on the grind!by JonnyCosMo, August 19
First off, note that I haven't had internet for the past week. I wrote this on my offline time so it's a couple days out dated:
Not even going to get into trying to update my blog more. When playing mostly live pokers, your time spent on the computer drops dramatically. Add that in with the release of Starcraft 2 (which is clearly a mandatory 2-3 hours of wasted time per day), and a little bit of the online poker grind here and there, I basically don't find myself with the time I use to have to update this thing.
Just came off of an awful WSOP. Played the $10/$25 at the Rio for cash games, and ended up getting creamed for ~$30kish over the week I played. Got the chance to play one of the craziest cash games ever with RaSZi where a $10/$25 turned into a $10/25/50/100. Weeeeeeeee! Although I ended up being pretty card dead during that particular session. On another day, I had probably my worst single orbit of live poker ever where I flopped a set 3 times and lost all 3 pots. Lucky for me, none of those pots where over 200bbs. I also played 3 tournaments, one of those $1k shit shows where I lasted about 2 hours then got 2 outted. The $2.5k 6-max where I lasted til 11:30pm before getting knocked out by Jeff Shulman in a sick hand where I river a set and he binks a straight . Finally the Main Event, I played on Day 3 and drew Table 1 Seat 2. Was it a sign? Table 1 Seat 1 happened to be Theo Tran, and our table didn't break all day. We had a pretty soft table for the most part and I ended the 1st day with 77k. Day 2a did not go as smoothly as I wanted, as I was working off of one hour of sleep from the night before for god knows what reason (maybe I was too excited to play or something?). My stack went on the monkey coaster for the majority of the day, swinging between 40k and 180k. Ironically, if I played my good solid tight game I probably would have ended with a pretty variance free 100k. Instead I ended the day with 125k after several hands where I just went bat shit insane and ran good. Going into Day 3 I was pretty well rested and took an adderol to make sure I would stay focused. I drew Annie Duke's table and we had the cameras around the table for the majority of the day. I played just about as good as I wanted to play and built up to 210k in chips at the 1k/2k level. Then I ran TT into JJ for a 70bb pot. The very next hand I flopped the world with AcQx on a Jc-Tc-3c board and bricked vs JT in a 80bb pot. Finally I reshipped my last 18bb's with A9s from the bb vs btn open and btn woke up with JJ so I was out 2 orbits after having a massive stack. That was pretty heart breaking, but the good news is that I might get my 15 seconds of fame as I played some weird hand with Annie Duke and the ESPN cameras were there and took down my name so... crossing my fingers!
In other news, just finished with a year of living in La Jolla (northern San Diego) less than a block away from the beach, and it definitely was an awesome experience. Going into the year, I thought winning money in the online pokers was a myth but I learned (or basically relearned) what it takes to be an online grinder and so hopefully in these upcoming months I will have a winning PTR on atleast one site :-P
I just moved to a condo in the south side of the Hillcrest area of San Diego (between Pacific Beach and Downtown). Yes, it is the "gay-friendly" area. It just so happens that everyone that I've met in our condo building so far has been gay. Make fun of it all you want! We got the biggest condo in the building with a baller ass 270 degree view of San Diego for about half the price as it normally would be just because it's the "gay" area of town. New roommates: GoGators86, A2Steaksauce, Clayton_27. Only downside = when walking around the building or outside in the Hillcrest area with one of my roommates we are probably mistaken as a gay couple. The upsides = We are closer to a lot of the other poker players down here who mostly live downtown. Great location to pretty much everything (10 minutes to the beach, 5 minutes to downtown, 10 minutes to Petco Park, 10 minutes to Qualcomm Stadium, 10 minutes to PB bars, 5 minutes to golf course / driving range). And this...
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.
Poker has been rough, and I hadn't really taken great care of myself or had a good day-to-day life this month. I had enough on Monday, and I am going to set myself on the path of life-heater. So I'm going to get that gym membership I have been putting off renewing, and keeping myself to a more disciplined day-to-day life. The biggest thing, imo, is that today I got myself a poker coach who I am really excited to work with on the regular basis. He's a very strong midstakes guy who has been playing for years, and our way of thinking about poker clicks well.
I think the last thing is the most important. Being an aggressive player and having an aggressive game plan is what makes me feel good about poker, it stirs my old passion and excitement for the game back up again. That feeling that you own the game and you are calling the shots each hand. Its the most important ingredient for poker I've been missing this year.
of HoN... it's so weird, felt like I played it for no more than 4hrs.. My sleep schedule is so messed up, I can barely remember what happend through out my days and it sorta feels like im losing the feeling of time. idk im tired lol -_-
can someone reccomend me a good horror movie? good horror movies are so rare
Hi guys I am bored at work on my new droid2. I currently am 23 yrs old and am working as a civil engineer. Fwiw I suck at typing on this phone. I am a breakeven 25 nl reg on ftp.
busto @ poker/life - apology to my friendsby AgentIce, August 18
I've been too ashamed and embarrassed to talk to my friends for a while now. I'm on a big downswing at life, I made promises I couldn't keep and lost the respect of some close friends. I'm not sure they even want to hear it, but I owe them an explanation so that's what I'm setting out to do with this.
First off brief background, I've been playing poker for about 8 years now. I'm a winning player (DoctaBluff pokertableratings) and I've made about 300k from poker. Nothing spectacular. My highpoint was living in scotland with steve and iain, I had about 30k online at that point and was playing the 400$ games. I have a background in starcraft and used to play a lot with tillerman and maynard and his gang. I used the handle IceGod back then.
So here is my current situation. I have about a 500$ online roll right now. Last month I was in a similar situation with about 580$ when I decided to really try to apply myself and turn it around. I actually fell to 340$ at one point playing the 25$ games, but made it back to 1100$ after about 40 hours of play. That wasn't quite enough to cover rent and pay for food so I was planning to really push the last few days of the month when I got sick. I was really in a rock and a hard place, I had already burned too many bridges with my friends to even think about borrowing any more money, but I couldn't play because my body wasn't allowing it. I asked family and friends for money and all of them were broke. I ended up finding the number of my scientologist dad who isn't supposed to talk to me and he was able to loan me 700$. That was a funny phone call actually, he didn't recognize me because we haven't talked in 8 years. Problem is, that money was supposed to get to me on the 2nd, but the check got lost in the mail and I didn't get it until the 14th. Getting the money onto full tilt has also been a problem, I'm having a friend deposit for me but that also is not instant so as of this month I have not been able to play at all. So as of right now 550$ rent is due by the end of the month which I am going to sell off the rest of my possessions to cover (tv, couch, ps3). This is the last month I'm going to stay here because after this I'm going to either stay with my sister or move in with my girlfriends family. Neither option is ideal to put it mildly. I have no car (it was repossessed a while ago). I have no work experience. I owe money to my friends which I can't pay back and has strained if not completely broken any relationship we had.
So what happened? How does a winning player who should know better end up in this situation? Well, I actually got what I believe is a big part of the answer when I got sick last month. I ended up going to the hospital because I found out they can't turn you away even if you don't have insurance/money and I was just fed up with the pain. The doctor quickly told me I had migraines and he had a similar story to mine where he put up with pain and was desperate to the point of getting surgery on his sinuses to fix the problem before he found out it was migraines.
I did some research, and it looks like I've had migraines all my life. I've been in bad debilitating chronic pain for about 4 years now. I've had headaches, sensitivity to light, and nausea my entire life but not usually to a debilitating level. I have many strange afflictions that suddenly make sense from my past now that I know its migraines. Basically at it's worst the pain in my face/head was excruciating to the point where all I could do was go lay down in a dark room somewhere. I couldn't play games, watch movies, anything, the pain was too much of a distraction. Even when it wasn't blinding pain, I found it very difficult to relax and enjoy the things I used to. It NEVER goes away. I would sometimes hurt myself in other parts of my body just so I could feel some different pain. I can't remember what it feels like to not be in pain. I don't remember exactly when it first started getting really bad, but I know it steadily got worse, until it was an every day all day thing. Up until a couple weeks ago I thought it was sinus infections maybe related to my deviated septum, then ear infections, then TMJ. When I got back from scotland I went so far as to pay 2.5k out of pocket to get my wisdom teeth removed in the hopes the pain would go away. I was desperate, and it didnt. After I did that the only solution seemed to be to go to specialists which I couldn't afford. That was iffy though, did I need jaw surgery? Face surgery? Change in diet etc? It would obviously not be some quick fix.
The messed up part of all this is I wasn't able to really tell anyone about it so I suffered in silence and didn't ask for the help I needed. I could spend a while talking about why that is and a lot of it has to do with how I was raised but to put it succinctly A) I viewed talking about pain as a sign of weakness, and might make people not like me or view me in a bad way, so I hid it B) I was told repeatedly growing up that I was evil at my core and so a lot of the time I thought I deserved the pain and viewed it as something for me to conquer to prove I was good and C) I was taught that 90% of pain is mental so I thought a lot of it was being caused by something I was doing in my mind. Then just overall I wanted to have friends and be liked and who wants to be around someone who always complaining about pain. So I'm pretty sure most of my friends had little idea of exactly what I was going through, although I did tell them bits and pieces.
Needless to say, all that pain made it difficult to work. In fact, poker became a sort of trigger for migraines. I could just think about playing poker and instantly I would be hit with a lot of pain (more than the normal every day pain) that wouldn't go away for sometimes days. I saw my friends pulling 30 hour sessions and making all this money at poker and I just thought they were stronger than me and I was just lazy/weak. The fact that me thinking about poker made it turn on made me think poker was the cause. I truly believed it was my fault and that if I could just change how I thought I could fix it. I was blind to the fact that it was not something I could get over with just the power of my mind.
On top of the physical aspects, when I got out of scientology at 24 I was a very anxiety prone person with a lot of self confidence issues. I made poker 1000x more stressful than it needed to be, because I was a very easily stressed out person. It's truly a miracle I somehow managed to break through and become successful at poker. After 6 months of 160+ hour months at 5$ an hour I had to make a choice to quit or to fully devote myself regardless of pain. Quitting would have been horrible (hello mcdonalds) so I just forced myself through the pain. I didn't know it at the time but I was struggling with migraines back then too, just they weren't chronic and they weren't debilitating. I had a breakthrough and finally made it to the 100$ games and onwards. The last few years when everything in my life has been falling apart I devoted myself to studying when I wasn't playing and that has done a lot for my game and also my mental game while playing. I find myself more relaxed and calm and with a more positive attitude about myself and the game in general. Unfortunately as you can guess this didn't make the migraines go away.
After I got back from scotland I was only doing about 30-40 hours a month. This was still about 3k a month 12 tabling the 1/2 games and I was probably running decent too so I managed to skate by. I knew something had to be done though and my friends were telling me the same. I knew they were right and that I was heading for disaster but at the same time every time I would play I was in a lot of pain. It actually got to where I was getting sick about twice a month. I thought it was this weird head cold thing but looking back it was definitely migraines. 2 years ago I discovered weed and it actually gave me some much needed relief from the pain. Actually the first time I smoked I was so excited to actually feel good I think the high made that excitement even more so it was pretty intense. As you can imagine I started smoking a LOT. I also got a girlfriend so I started spending more money too and working even less. Sure enough I hit a 4k downswing and had to move down to the 100$ games. From then on my life has steadily been falling apart.
So where does that leave me? Well I owe my friend Kaj 5000$. He staked me for the 100$ games about 6 months ago. I thought it was a motivational issue/mental issue that I wasn't playing and when I asked him to stake me and I definitely felt motivated to play and that I had improved a lot at poker and was pretty confident. Unfortunately I fell into the same cycle which has been plaguing me this last 4 years again. Play for maybe 5 days until I wake up one day too exhausted and in pain to play or just feeling like I deserve a day off for going through what I did. That day off would turn into me putting off playing until the last second because I was trying to avoid pain. Eventually I would feel so guilty for not playing and so disgusted at myself that I would again force myself to play, which would again result in me getting sick and unable to play and so on.
Well, I suppose that's not the explanation my friends want to hear, but it's the truth. In hindsight, there are so many things I could have done to avoid all this, but if I could go back in time and do things over again only knowing what I knew back then I'd do the same thing, because I didn't know any better. I never meant to steal or lie or hurt any of them, and I am terribly sorry for any pain I have caused. I don't know when I can pay you guys back, but I do plan to and I look forward to the day we can all be friends again.
May have gotten a SSer banned!!by thumbz555, August 18
Emailed Stars in mid-July to let them know I thought odissit (Russian, I'm guessing) was a bot for a variety of reasons. He hasn't played since! Win?! I think so.
Contact Users: 839 Active, 0 Logged in - Time: 23:18
. Finally the Main Event, I played on Day 3 and drew Table 1 Seat 2. Was it a sign? Table 1 Seat 1 happened to be Theo Tran, and our table didn't break all day. We had a pretty soft table for the most part and I ended the 1st day with 77k. Day 2a did not go as smoothly as I wanted, as I was working off of one hour of sleep from the night before for god knows what reason (maybe I was too excited to play or something?). My stack went on the monkey coaster for the majority of the day, swinging between 40k and 180k. Ironically, if I played my good solid tight game I probably would have ended with a pretty variance free 100k. Instead I ended the day with 125k after several hands where I just went bat shit insane and ran good. Going into Day 3 I was pretty well rested and took an adderol to make sure I would stay focused. I drew Annie Duke's table and we had the cameras around the table for the majority of the day. I played just about as good as I wanted to play and built up to 210k in chips at the 1k/2k level. Then I ran TT into JJ for a 70bb pot. The very next hand I flopped the world with AcQx on a Jc-Tc-3c board and bricked vs JT in a 80bb pot. Finally I reshipped my last 18bb's with A9s from the bb vs btn open and btn woke up with JJ so I was out 2 orbits after having a massive stack. That was pretty heart breaking, but the good news is that I might get my 15 seconds of fame as I played some weird hand with Annie Duke and the ESPN cameras were there and took down my name so... crossing my fingers! 
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