I haven't written a proper blog in a very long time. June was pretty meh poker-wise, pretty great life-wise.
In real life, I'm really enjoying my job, though it is a lot of work. I'm very happy with my social life, although it's pretty difficult to keep up with everyone I want to see. Also, I live on the water in Boston, and it's summertime so it's hard not be happy. Weekends are pretty ez game; wakeboarding in NH with friends is kind of the nuts.
Ironically, the degree to which I'm enjoying my job has destroyed the old grinder mentality. I really want to be a successful poker player, but now that I'm pretty confident I'm not going to have to worry about money in my life, the urgency to make money in poker is gone. Hypothetically, I'd really like to get 30-40k cash hands played in a month, but it's just not a priority when I have work 5 days a week and have social obligations on top pretty much every day. + Show Spoiler +
Obviously I still have to check liquidpoker every 7 minutes
I do feel like I'm still improving, and I'd like to think I'm one of the best "recreational" players around. I feel really settled in at NL100, though it hasn't really shown in the results (3bb/100 over like 60k hands), and I don't doubt I can beat NL200 one day (though probably never 400 unless I get fired).
This month I won a little over 2 BI in NLHE (running bad ldo), like 15 BI in PLO10/PLO25 (half flips/half real) and binked a 90-man KO to net me out something like +450 in tourneys, with RB I think I made a little over 1k in poker this month.
At first I went really well and was crushing NL100 HU for a few hands, but then i ran into some dude whose stats are about 70/20 and lost like 700 bucks to him in one session. He seemed to hit everything everytime. And i was sure he was a fish so i kept playing. I guess i started tilting after a few bad beats, and he just started to own me badly. Luckily i quit before i lost more.
Since then i played more HU and everytime i run into a villain whose stats are about 50/20 - 70/20 and somewhat
aggressive I have alot of trouble winning against them. I dunno I think i need to adjust to their play a
little better and reeavluate on how to beat them.
I also got depressed with poker cos i was loosing at every gane i tried to play. 6 max, 9 max. I even decided
to give a shot at Limit poker jsut for the hell of it. I played some PLO, played some tourneys and SNGS.
But anyhow a new month is starting and I will try to concentrate on HU play altho I do not mind altering
if i feel like it and goign back to 6 max.
June recap. HAPPY CANADA DAY!by SmokingDough, June 30
First just want to wish all my fewllow Canadians a Happy Canada day! Alight so usually I really like Junes since I am born in June. I actually really enjoyed everything that happened this June that is non poker related because when it came to the poker part in June I sucked huge cock.
It was a bit of an eye opener this month. I was on pace to have the best month that I ahve ever had in poker. I was finally comfortably rolled for 50nl and it was really stress free. I was up around 10bi's or so when mid June hit and then it just went down hill from there. I ended up having the largest downswing I have had to date. At the bottom end it was only 13 BI downer which isnt HUGE by any standards but I am playing a lot higher now and have never lost that kind of money before. I just could not win a hand to save my life. My all in EV was soooo gross.
I really was not sure what was going on. I got a good friend of mine to help me out and do a few sweats with me. I realized that I was really playing so weak/tight robot style and plus I was running terribly so it just felt like I was getting completely owned. After a few sweats Ive really started to turn things around. I can already see a change in my game and the results are starting to show which is great for my confidence right now.
So now it is July 1st. HAPPY CANANDA DAY!!! lol. This month Im going to destroy at the tables and have the best month I have ever had in poker so far! I learned a lot this June and got to see what I was made of. It can only go up from here right? (knock on wood) So this July Im going to do things a bit different then I have been lately and hopefully it helps out my game a lot.
I signed up for this Truely free poker training deal at the start of the month. Basically if you cna earn over 8500 ftp points in a month on FTP they will give you a free month to both Cardrunners and StoxPoker. I reached the goal within the first two days but I had to wait until July started in order to get the Free month. So now that July is here I plan on watching a video everyday before I start grinding and trying out some of the things in my sessions. Im also going to be getting back to the gym. I havent worked out consistently for almost 4 months now and its really pissing me off that Ive slacked so bad. When I stopped working out I was 205 lbs but I went away to school and stopped and now im back down to between 185-190. Makes me sad Anyways Im going to get back into starting next week and murder the gym as well lol.
Ive made a few goals for the month. Here they are:
- 150k+ Hands
- 30k+ FTP points (I want to get the 21 inch monintor this month. Half way there.)
- 3k+ Cash game earnings without rakeback
- 1k+ Tournament winnings. (1 time plz Havent shipped a tourney in so long)
- 1k+ in Rakeback earnings
- 100+ Ironman medals
- Go to the gym 5 times a week
- Watch 1 CR or Stox video a day
- Be ready to play 100nl at the end of the month
- Own at life.
All of these are very reachable. Hopefully I can start the month off right!
I hope everyone had a bit of a better month then I did in June lol. Have a great month in July guys, GLGL!. Happy Canada day to all my fellow Canandians! Gonna go watch the HORSE final table.
Going to start off this blog with a big LOL because I woke up this morning with no clothes on, alone (LOL) and my phone not visable, it took me 10mins to find it, eventually I found it on the floor of the shower?? I woke up with a receipt of 211,000won = around $200 for beers and stuff :D:D I cant even tell you iam hungover, iam sure iam still drunk, so I guess this is the perfect time to blog about my month and korea.
I am pretty good at being a drunk recently, I have drank every day whilst in Korea (by the way I am in Seoul Korea staying with ToTMidiaN) lol here are some examples of me being super funny;
I went to Busan on the first weekend of being here, I decided to try and get it on with a 37 year old Math Teacher who kept telling me to call her "Nuna" which = no sex 4 u, then when she left I got depressed and took 2shots after already being completey smashed.
I love to invite girls back to the apartment and get real dirty and then forget I didnt even have a condom ROFL. Also iam pretty horrible at "get the fuck out" moments in the morning but iam working on that.
Seriously I am sooooooooooooo bad, I lost my wallet, Ive lost my shoes, slept on the floor outside Jamies apartment because I forgot his passcode to his room, woke up naked multiple times with no reason off how I got home.....
Like I said, I am still drunk I guess so this blog has no plan, no fluidity, just typing stuff.
Korea has been awesome so far, I have been here for 3weeks now and have another 5weeks left, possibly more because I am thinking about staying longer because its so good here. I have been living in Gangnam with ToTMidiaN and been out drinking every night as mentioned, during the day all we do is play poker or starcraft and then later on we go to the gym and grab some food and then drink. I love the korean culture its pretty sick, I have talked about my korea experience here so check this link out, I also talk about esports being starcraft2;
I have been speaking to Rekrul recently and roflmao, this guy is hilarious, seriously when he gets back from Vegas LOL every father who has a daughter in Korea, lock them up. Should be good funs.
I have been going to the gym everyday with Jamie and well, lets say afterwards we walk around seoul like two insanely ripped ballers, gotta feel the burn!!
Lets go into my poker for the month since this is a poker site.
I started the month with a bankroll of around $300ish because I had a sexy downswing which destroyed my roll from $1200 down to a low of $200 and after reading 'elements of poker' and reading about the C game of players, I realized that I tilt spew and simply have a HORRIBLE C game therefore have been working on that crap pretty hard and I feel good about it. I spent the majority of time in 10nl rebuilding and now and back in 25nl looking for some 50nl shots soon.
Live poker has been pretty sick for me, first time I went to the casino I sat down a 1/2 with 200bb and came out of the game with 600bb, the next time I went I lost like 50bb and then last night I won 200bb again so Ive had a good month.
I am feeling pretty good apart from hungover but pretty good about poker, I should be rolled for and playing in 50nl again but I keep withdrawing for silly stuff like to buy a fan or so I can drink more beer. In July iam really going to work hard and put in like 2000 hands a day hopefully and get to limits I should be playing!
If any1 here is living in korea, holy shit come out and drink with us, if any1 is planning on visiting with the next 2months, come come come!!!
Can't really think about much else to say so going to end this now x
I have 313 movies on my Netflix list - 179 on the DVD Queue and 134 on the Instant View Queue. Right now I'm on the 1 DVD at a time plan, which means that if I watch it as soon as I get it and return it the next day I can do about 8 DVD's a month (give or take 1-2 due to mail fuckups, holidays, etc). So we're talking 22 months to watch all of the DVD's, if I stay on top of it. But then factor in how I keep finding more movies to add or I miss movies in the theatres and then add them, and I'm fighting a pretty tough battle here. And that's just the DVD Queue - I gotta pick away at the Instant Queue at the same time, which means I gotta watch a lot of movies. And I'm supposed to be playing poker, coaching, and working a job at the same time. Shit, with that schedule I barely have time for things like hiking, going out to parties, and spending time with my lovely lady. So wtf am I to do about this gigantic Netflix Queue? What have I gotten myself into?!?!
Just kidding. I was just gonna say "wow I have a lot of movies to watch" but I started ranting and thought this was a funny way to put it. I'd love to take a bunch of time off and just work my way through all these movies cause I love movies and I feel like I've missed so many good ones. Netflix has given me the ability to have a list of every movie I ever wanted to see, which means I have another list that I will probably never finish in my lifetime. Funny how that works out.
Since It seems I got declined for KFC it looks like I'm still gonna have to try and play poker, I have 3 weeks of CardRunners through grinding on FTP - can anyone recommend any vids for 25-100nl, or any micro/lowstakes play?
Hey guys, after seeing how weak the field was in my other wsop event i decided I want to play the ME, so I'm selling pieces of myself at 1:1 up to 80% of my buyin.
%s sold so far:
Lostaccount - 10%
Woodbrave - 10%
Frinkx - 20%
For those of you who don't know me I'm a 4ptbb winner longterm at 1/2 and 2/4 6max on stars.
slammed NL10 this month imo, I played enough hands to make 1201 VPPs and keep my silverstar (lol). I think it's time to try out NL25 this month. Hopefully it isn't much harder than NL10 and maybe I can get goldstar.
Achieved every single one of my goals, but still feel empty :/ like i didnt accomplish much. Had a nasty downswing / breakeven for a while that was insanely grinding and tilting due to the fact i was on track for a HUGE month. but honestly, i'm still up and ive made like 1k from RB, so it was a decent june. Here's to july being way better? i should have played alot more hands, but i was lazy and decided to go play live which was also pretty bad due to earlier blog :
june started off terribly (see last 2 blog posts). i used to have superb tilt control but that disappeared with all of the struggling/runbad in the last 2 months. losing so much made me unmotivated and really hurt my volume (15k of the hands were played during the last 3 days). ended up recovering pretty nicely though. between hands 19k and 33k i just 12 tabled nl25 stress-free to rebuild my roll.
i dont know what changed, but the last few days ive been able to play pretty long 2-3 hour sessions. before, i'd usually get tired anywhere between 1-1.5 hours. hopefully i can keep this up and really put in a ton of hands in july. ended the month with a solid 3 hour, +2 buyin nl50 session.
thx to vlseph and balloonfight for listening to all of my recent whining.
Didn't play a lot of hands in June because I spent most of the month depressed and wondering what sort of disgusting, inhumane crimes I may have possibly committed against Howard Lederer's family to make FTP hate me so god damn much. A lot of points in this graph makes it look like I was tilting like a monkey but I definitely was not. So after rakeback and tourney deductions included, I have roughly a -5k month making it my first losing month all year.
Quick 2 sentences of complaining:
It's honestly fucked up how some regs have it so god damn good, on the good side of coolers and flips consistently, everything just goes their way while I struggle to even get action anytime I have a decent hand. I especially loved how there were many times in my month where I thought I was beginning a heater to rostucko but the next day instantly dropped thousands again, this game REALLY loves toying with my mind.
So as you can see a lot of the losses were from 5/10. Stats might be skewed for 2/4 and 3/6 because I've been playing a lot of CAP NL lately (as I'm clearly no longer a winner at 100bb poker). I sort of like the game, it's higher variance so I don't know why the fuck I'm playing it given how I'm currently running but I feel like I can adjust a lot better than most regs at MSNL playing cap and there's a lot of fish. I'm currently working on a guide discussing the adjustments from 100bb to CAP, it's 6 pages long so far, but likely no one will ever read it because who the fuck would want to play CAP :/
I'm going to Vegas tomorrow, for 5 days, mostly for fun (can't play tourneys cuz i'm not 21 nor touched by angels). Hopefully July will be a bit more redeeming, and by that can I at the very least just ask for my god damn EV back plz ftp? Maybe my horses will bink WSOP ME for a bunch, who the fuck knows. God I hate poker so much right now.
I was having a discussion with one of my friends, and he told me that NL25 is like chasing your own tail. I had a +7 bi day or something so I laughed at him.
I just lost 8 bi in two days. And then I see it: the newspaper, right behind my laptop on the dinner table.
BODY&HEALTH
[There's a picture of a dog on a treadmill.]
Caption: DOG RUNS, GOES NOWHERE.
=[
Moving down to NL10 and sticking with a 40bi rule. I don't want downswings to affect ~20% of my roll. So 40bi it is, and I've got a prop bet of $100 riding on it (which is 10bi at NL10, so steep enough for my sake).
School's over and I convinced my parents that it's too difficult to get a job for now, so hopefully I'll be breaking NL50 by the time September rolls around again.
Well I decided yesterday that I wanted to try and get Platinum star for next month and get enough FPP's for the $160 instant bonus. Due to obligations I was no where near either of these so I sat down for a 16 hr 19,000 hand grind session that went very well. Here's how it ended up......I'm extremely happy with how it went, now I'm going to go get some sleep. I'll update my month later.
Last month I played over 100k hands.
I think it was too much.
Its like an addiction, and I can't keep myself from 9+ tabling. The obvious symptoms are inevitable.
I read an article about Human Psychology and the ability of the Brain to multi-task, and I am observing some symptoms of overflow - lowered enjoyment, less focus even outside poker and increased stress levels, and its even affecting my social life.
And why do I multitable?
-Well I don't know really, perhaps I am used to it from the Starcraft days where I always tried to do as many relevant actions as possible.
-Perhaps is it my fear of losing and despair which inevitably occurs with a bad beat that is not offset on other tables and just one pot can ruin my session on 4 tables.
-Another reason may be the Pokerstars VIP level - Since May I had some hardcore milestones to pass and they were pushing my multi-tabling habits.
Yet I play much better when 4 tabling, and my learning curve increases, I hardly tilt and am much likely to cut my session when I am losing.
What to do?
As my Job starts in less than one month, I MUST get used to play super effective sessions where I improve rapidly.
The money will not be a motivation any more, my wage is going to be around $1.8k per month while my living expenses are around $1k.
Fun will be my main concern and the better people I play, the more correct marginal plays, bluffs and reads I make, the more fun and satisfaction I get from poker.
How?
I can't stop 9 -12 tabling before one last VPP milestone is reached - Supernova.
It is so close I don't think I could force myself to 4table. I won't. I will give myself few last days of grinding, and I will try to stay at least break even at 9-12 tables to own those last 3k VPP and get the red stars.
After that I will read psychology articles at Pokerstrategy, which I neglected completely so far, and after that I will try to get myself rid of the multi-tabling addiction, and try to faster achieve my ultimate goal in poker:
Hello all, last few days have been going well, am at about 20 winning sessions in a row right now and feeling pretty good. Have some team full ring challenge from 2p2 coming up next month so kinda excited to see if our team can win it, basically they did some forumla that combines hands played+winrate with some weird multiplier and best overall team average of like 7 people on each wins.
Also trying to get a few more prop bets for next month, (I am currently up 100 dollars at nl100 this month) I offered to any ps/ftp player to prop me who makes more total profit (non fpp/milestone) next month at nl100 but got no takers so now
I want to see if I can get action that I make 10k next month at NL100. I have never made more then 6k in a month before there so should be pretty easy money for most.
I think going to have the line at 2-1 as already have some interest from 2p2 people
Current #1 person on tableratings is only at 10.3k and those guys are awesome and I suck. If anyone wants to bet this with me let me know thanks.
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Anyways Im going to get back into starting next week and murder the gym as well lol.
but oh well that's just learning and fucking around, least i made it to even at 6max
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