So I've been playing poker for the last 16 months or so, but never ever encountered such a big downswing during that period... My confidence in my game now is like zero. I wonder if such things happens once in a while and are considered standard or im doing something wrong...
any thoughts appriciated
-30bi, nl100 6max (10bi from that is rush'fucking'poker)
I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.
I'm the type of person that puts a lot of emphasis on motivation. You read those stories about sports or musical prodigies who just seemed to have been born with that knack for whatever they were doing and surely enough they became successful. Growing up I was weak, not that good at basketball, found refuge in playing video games all day, and generally just did not have any talents or was never fated to be good at anything in particular. Overall I struggle with my future prospects, mostly with regards to this game and how my work ethic and skill directly correlates with how much I can make. Many times though it's really hard. Naturally I have some motivators that I try to keep in mind every waking day, here are some I'd like to share.
1. By far my favorite quote, even though I don't listen to much Lupe.
(Line starts at 3:22 in yt link) "Just the freedom was better than breathin they said"
Kick push is a song on the first level about skating etc. but on the 2nd level is actually about grinding (or specifically drug dealing). The line represents what I want in life, to be able to be "free" due to my exploits, instead of doing the normal thing and going to school, starting at an entry-level job, etc. "breathing"
2. Chris Paul http://chrispaulfans.com/files/2008/12/chris-paul-4.jpg
Chris Paul is the most talented player in the NBA imo. He's a stand up guy, plays his heart out, but it sucks that he has a terrible team. It doesn't help that people like Rajon Rondo who just luckbox their way into playing with some of this generations best players antagonize Chris Paul for never being able to get a ring (at least in his current situation). I have a CP3 jersey hanging above my bed, and everyday I wake up it's a reminder for me to try my absolute hardest, no matter my circumstances.
3. Young Jeezy http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/sites/sport/img/26894_young-jeezy.jpg
Jeezy raps a lot about the drug grind. Jeezy isn't my favorite rapper and is far from being on the same level of greatness as e.g. Tupac, but I like what he writes about which relates heavily to the poker grind. A lot of what he says is a reminder for me that the ends justify the means. "I say I grind like there's 10 of me, I swear to god there's just one of me,
Look I know I ain't there yet, just know that I'm gonna be" - Hustlaz Ambition
4. Conan O'Brien http://www.nerve.com/CS/blogs/scanner/2009/01/conan_obrien_la.jpg
If you've been following the drama as of late then you'd understand. I don't want to write too much but for those who know what I'm talking about, you'll know that Conan is a great person, who prides of his work and has ridiculous passion for what he does. So much, that he'd rather step down than let higher ups tarnish the name of his work. Watching Johnny Carson as a kid, he had a dream to be the host of The Tonight Show, and through decades of work he finally made it there. "Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and are kind, amazing things will happen. I'm telling you, amazing things will happen." - From his final speech on the Tonight Show, just a couple days ago. "Fall down. Make a mess. Break something occasionally. Know that your mistakes are your own unique way of getting to where you need to be. And remember that the story is never over." - Harvard Commencement Speech in 2000
All I really want to do by DustySwedeDude, January 24
[I don't want to straight-face you
Race or chase you, track or trace you
Or disgrace you or displace you
Or define you or confine you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you]
Lady Luck has finally returned to me. Well today she left me for a while to go have fun with the pool guy, but over she's been very good to me this month. I've also, finally, learned to play decently pf in omaha which really pays off and I've also started to own some souls:
Showdown trallovitz shows,
Hero shows,
Hero wins $1619.00 USD from main pot
But to be fair that guy won a few bi off me, ironically when I actually flopped or turned good. And yes, I know that call is marginal, and it's not something I have to have in my game to be profitable, but you need to trust your reads sometimes.
Had a real good time last night playing some 10€ tournaments with some friends. I think I won one and got 4th in one, missplayed one hand really bad though. I keep forgetting that I should probably try to make sure that people have fun rather then winning money when the first prize is like 50€, heh.
Started watching true blood this morning too, it seems fairly cool. Little bit weird but whatever, I'm a sucker for vampires (pun intended) in culture. I also like southern accent's and pretty blond girls in white tight T-shirts. Although, if I had to pick I'd change her hair colour.
As for music I've listened to The Byrds a lot. Their Dylan covers are really cool. The song mentioned above, "all I really want to do" is nice but I still don't really get what Dylan or the Birds tries to say with it. My best guess is that it isn't about some girl or whatever, but rather something Dylan sang to as a tribute to some genre or whatever he happened to get hung up with at the time and then the Birds just said "whatever" and rerecorded it for ratings. And it sure as hell wasn't about Lady Luck, but it sure felt that way when I heard it after my first little heater after 2 months of losing money like a sex addict at a hooker convention. The times they are a-changin' are one of my favorite songs, and The Byrds version are decent. Mr. Tambourine man can't be fucked up to badly either, at least not if you sing it with some feeling.
Also bought some Yoga-stuff. I want to get limber as hell. BJJ is so fun but I feel that "out of shape, limber as a pine and without much coordination to speak of" probably couldn't be a description of a good BJJ-practitioner, so I simply have to do something about that.
Starting to recover my fire?by Night2o1, January 24
Last day or two poker has floated back into my mind. I think that my passion, the will of fire is returning to me. Now I will try to put myself into position to be able to grind an hour or two a day and do some poker study. We will see how I feel when I start playing again and lose a couple of buyins, but my head does feel a lot better after this little break.
Yesterday I arrived in Phuket City. It is not really the touristy place to be as far as beaches and nightlife go, but before we head out from here I am hoping to take a look at some of the temples here. They also apparently have the largest sitting buddha in the world.. going to google it now.
While here I've read three books that I really wanted to get around to. First, I read The God Delusion. This book was magnificent, really thoroughly explained thoughts from the author about his views on the world and religion from an accomplished atheist scientist's perspective. Most of what he wrote were things I had atleast touched on in my own mind, but he expounded and brought quite a bit of new information to the arguments. I highly recommend this book to everyone with even the slightest intellectual leanings.
Second, I read the children's fiction called The Lightning Thief of the series Percy Jackson and The Olympians. I heard quite a bit about this book being in a similar vein to the Harry Potter series, which I really like, so I read this book with high hopes. And I did enjoy this book, but the writing style is decidedly more simplistic and juvenile than the later HP books. I'm curious to know of much of a parallel this series has with the HP series, who's writing gradually got more complex and adult as the books progressed. I hope so.. we'll see!
Finally, I plowed through The Kite Runner very quickly. I don't want to say too much except that this book was a very good drama focusing around the life, from boyhood through adulthood, of an Afghan man with a troubled childhood. At 18 he and his father are forced to take refuge in America when the Russkis come through. Eventually, he returns to see what the Taliban have done to his country and to try and right the wrongs of his own past in his now wartorn homeland. Its likely you will learn a thing or two about the Afghan way of life as well.
"PLANET HULK" full length ani movie omfgasdfha;sdfby whamm!, January 23
downloading this right now! this and world war hulk was one of the best comics ive read (online) lol
cliffs to planet hulk and world war hulk saga...
-iluminati tricks and sends hulk to space since avengers cant control him( headed by tony stark)
-hulk is enraged why he is betrayed by his own people
-hulk is on an alien planet and becomes a gladiator slave
-hulk eventually becomes god in that planet by kicking everyones ass
-hulk rounds up his own crew of new alien superheroes and goes back to earth once the iluminati finds out hulk is alive and decides to nuke the planet where he lives (LOL)
-hulks wife/queen dies in the blast , then hulk goes into raaaaage
-hulk kicks EVERYONES ass on earth
i remember from world war hulk iron man specifically anticipating hulks return and builds a robo hulk suit just for his fight with hulk, they even called on juggernaut (whos strength he'd given up by returning some oracle thing to some demon and became a less powerful hero instead of villain, but in the end he sacrificed his dream of becoming a good guy and got that oracle thing back just so that he'd be powerful enough for the hulk since no one could match up to him and juggernaut has beaten hulk before)
NOTE:
the the awesome stories happen at World war hulk and not the full length link above "planet hulk", this is what started everything and im prety sure the sequel to this will be "world war hulk"
I'm posting this a little late, but I'm looking to be staked between 40%-60% of the following tournaments that will take place on sunday on FTP. I can only accept money on FTP and will be confirming any transfers prior to the start of the first tournament tomorrow morning. I have been staked/transferred with some trusted members on this site before.
The day that Rush poker came out I moved from .02/.05 nl to .05/.10 in order to be able to play (with a BR of 140$)
As you can guess it started well until I got the infamous doomswitch, my first ever, actually. Ironically I only started running really bad when my play improved.
Both Pride and the unavailability of lower limit Rush games proceeded to drive me Busto. I always thought the doomswitch was about to end, because how could it go on longer? (a really tilted way of thinking).
HOWEVER, I'm surprisingly happy with the past few days. Sure, I lost my roll, but I have more than 10K hands worth of rake coming in, so I should be able to start micro stakes again.
I think I've improved more in the past few days than I have since the day I began poker. The ability to play so many hands and therefore learn faster has allowed me to drastically reduce my spew and realize how much of an emotional, impatient fish I am (Was!).
My leaks:
I was constantly trying to bluff micro stakes fish,trying to steal the pot whenever my hand didn't connect with the flop, ignoring the fact that it was unprofitable because it felt so good to successfully steal/bluff.
I couldn't put down TPTK unless the flop was super fag, and I played small PPs badly.
Now I'll have a workable roll to begin micro stakes (along with the 3400 FTPs I have no idea what to do with). I will start again, playing solid, patient poker.
Poker Prisoner's Dilemmaby blackjacki2, January 23
Let's say there is a situation in poker where it's something like $1 in the pot with a royal flush on the board and you're heads up. You're first to act. If you shove, a call from your opponent will be -EV since he pays more in rake than he will get from the chop.
Do you shove and hope he makes the +EV play so that you can pick up the free pot?
Or, if you check, do you fold if your opponent shoves or do you call out of spite?
I could never fold in this spot, even if a call is -EV. I'd probably lose more from the tilt of letting the guy get away with that.
Ok, so I deposited $50 today to half-stack NL10 rush on FTP. That's 10 buyins, seemed adequate for one-tabling anyway, already tried full stacking it for fewer buyins but the variance at me up. So what I sacrifice in value I make up for in surviving.
The list goes on, and ultimately im busto, again... A lot of the rags in there are just tilt after some monkey limp calls my iso raise and gets it allin with bottom pair on an AK9 flop and stuff.
So where do I go from here? Well everyone says you want loose fish calling you with rags. Since I cant handle this online as I get too impatient/tilted, I'm gonna take another shot at live. Since the lowest limit offered in my city is NL200, I cant afford it right now. With my wife currently job seeking and all the bills falling on me I'm just stuck in a rut poker wise. Too broke to play higher limits, too tilted to play lower limits.
Once the money starts rolling in though I hope to be able to take a few lucky shots at live and build a roll from there. I cant beat fish at NL2 because I get too tilted at the shit they stack me with. But the good thing about live is that it forces you to keep your composure (at least for me), since I'm not gonna act like a jackass in front of 30 people. Combined with the calming effect of the social atmosphere, alcohol, and fewer hands = fewer bad beats, I never get spewy. There's still variance, so it might take me awhile before my 2 BI shots turn into a real bankroll, as I fully expect to bust the first few times. Or maybe ill get lucky and just run good the first night and walk out with 5+ BI's.
Whichever happens, I'll have to wait a long good while before deciding when to reload online again. The only limit I can take seriously is NL200 and up, but I certainly need a bankroll there since I'm outclassed by the player pool. So unless I absolutely demolish live tables for 2-3 months straight, I'll probably never have enough funds available to use from my live roll to play online with again, since I just refuse to play anything less than NL100 anymore.
On a side note; Rush poker has been an interesting experience. I learned to play poker from an AI simulator, and the cool thing about that was it had a "next hand" button to just fast forward your way through the crap and find good spots to play in. This is exactly how rush feels, so I thought I might pwn at it since I'm used to playing with blinders on and just quickfolding my way to position with some kind of playable hand. Unfortunately rush changes things a bit. The simulator continues to act like a normal ring game, but rush players are making all sorts of adjustments which make it a little more complicated. The fish are still there jamming and calling off their stacks with garbage, which even the simulator never did, but the light 3betting is something I still havent quite figured out how best to play vs. Since I'm no good at 4betting I opt to just call most of what I suspect are light 3 bets, take a flop, and try to play from there. I figure if they're bluffing they'll lead the flop and I can just raise and rep something that calls a 3bet with, or I can even cbet if they just check it to me, or delay my bet for the turn to look a little more defensive but believable etc etc. But I just couldnt get enough hand volume in to figure it all out. From what I recall light 4betting really does seem to be the best answer, but I just wasnt willing to run into 5bet shoves and folding hands like 98s and KJo, where I could probably either win a large or small pot with once the flop chills everyone the fuck out.
Beyond that I dont really have much else to say about rush, other than I officially take the side of ring game players saying normal poker is more +EV compared to rush, no matter how you play it.
Oh, and about moving to vegas, well the idea was just a long shot, with my wife being unemployed for so long and my job future going nowhere, we thought we might just start looking for employment in las vegas (doing normal white collar shit), which would give me the opportunity to calmly play live in a legal environment without all the ghetto'ness of playing in my city at peoples houses and shit. We're fascinated by the Vegas landscape and culture and think we might actually enjoy living there regardless of playing poker. But it would be a huge undertaking to acquire a new job out of state like that to secure our futures if we ever really decided to move.
i decided to download WC3 and TFT on my netbook thru b.net and found out i can herp derp my way into the korean version. does the korean version have the same hotkeys as the english version? would playing dota affect anything as well?
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