Ok so I wanted to ask you guys about a situation I have.
We've had crap knives in our kitchen for a while. This annoyed me for a long time but not enough so that I actually bought new ones. A couple of days before Christmas I buy a 15 USD knife, which believe it or not made a huge difference in how fun I find our kitchen and now I want good knives. For Christmas my mother-in-law got us a 30-40 USD knife set. I don't like how they look and I would not have bought them myself.
I decide that I want good knives so I googled a bit and got myself a somewhat expensive set of knives for about 500 USD. I got a set like it for my parents like 5 years ago or something like that so I know they're very good since my dad uses them a lot and they still seem to hold up without any issues.
When I told my gf this she figured it was kind of out of line to buy new knives a week after we got some as a gift for Christmas.
I on the other hand feel that while she had a good idea to get us better knives I don't see why I'd have to use a bunch of cheap ones just because I got them as a gift. I'd rather get a bunch of very good knives myself then a bunch of cheap ones as a gift.
Would it have been in better taste to just wait a couple of months or whatever before I got them?
For me it seemed like a obvious thing to just get knives when I want knives and I have the money, but I know that I tend to be rather autistic about these kinds of situations so I figured I'd ask you guys.
I'm looking for some material on how you should be thinking as a professional when it comes to making money at poker. Nothing specific about poker strategy, just the whole psychology of a successful player. Lately I've been getting super tilted playing HU vs fish, even when I'm winning. Thats right, I dont even want to play them even when I'm ahead. The other day I played a reg for over 2 hours and loved it. To me it was fun. This seems like completely backwards thinking. I should be overjoyed to play the fish reloading 5x and should hate playing regs.
I know there are a few "how to think like a winning player" type books out there, and am just looking for opinions on which to get.
I just got done with my 10 ranked matches for dota and I have a 4134 mmr, which according to the website is 99% percentile. Lol wtf I don't even think i'm very good at the game and lost like 7/10 match i played because i hadn't played in about 3 months. If any of you want to play with a 99% percentile person then shoot me a pm.
Poker Update and Website talk by Joeingram1, December 27
Forcing myself to write that last blog post turned out to be a really really good idea and the writing spirit has been flowing through me again. I've been able to put together a few really good articles that I want to launch my site with and have recorded one podcast. I have some youtube stuff I want to put together that I think will be fairly entertaining for people that enjoy PLO and big pots.
Poker over the last few months has been going extremely well. Grinding in the anonymous shadows hasn't been as fun as grinding for glory but it has been going well. I wish I had adopted the approach to goal setting and away from the table studying that I have begun doing long long ago. When I used to play poker I really didn't have any goal beyond get Supernova elite, make a million dollars on my graph, play a zillion hands, try to have a sick ptr...... Now I have been able to set more short term goals that keep me focused but also control the degen side of me much better. I still get the itch to play the highest stakes running but I have found peace with the idea of not. Playing on websites like Bovoda, some American and sites where you have to vpn is a change and also forces you to keep less money online and usually play less games because the sites don't allow you to play more or the software is pretty bad. As it turns out this is actually a really good thing because what I failed to keep in mind during my big upswing is that playing less tables is really really really really good for you and playing alot of tables is really really really bad for you in terms of ev. I made a prop bet with a friend that I wouldn't post any graphs on social media or my blog for 6 months and I think this has actually hurt my motivation to make alot of money. That seems very very dumb but I have always been in it for the "glory". I do wish it was smart to post more PLO strategy out there or talk about it more openly on the blog or poker forums but anything beyond basic stuff has always seemed like a bad idea. With my website I have been trying to figure out a way to balance my dislike for talking strategy and my desire to help people out. But at this point in my life doing something beyond sitting around on the computer playing poker and mindlessly reading social media while living in the suburbs where I see my girlfriend each day is going to be a really really good thing for me and make me enjoy my life much more. If that means I have to help people become better poker players or happier at life, then why not. I've actually become 2000x better at improving myself with non-poker related things like working out, yoga, cooking, dieting, cleaning, basketball, fashion, piano, guitar and I guess a whole bunch of random different things I've tried to improve upon. I think that has impacted poker as well but I think I'm just being lazy using it as an excuse as to why I'm not working harder.
I feel like the whole glamorous side of poker that once existed has slowly eroded over time into a wasteland of terrible things. Maybe there is no glamorous side of poker and maybe the state of online poker is going to slowly deteriorate until it doesn't exist but as someone who's life has become something I never could have imagined from poker, I think there is inspiration to be shared, stories to be told and hopefully motivation to be given to someone out there hoping to make it at poker and change their life for the better. This is one of the visions I have in my head for what I can come up with for a website and I have no doubt it will be that on some level.
The whole idea for my website came to me when I woke up and did my usual go on twoplustwo and do nothing for 15 minutes in the morning. I was just confused why there aren't more poker related sites that I go to. I love poker, i love following poker, reading about it, being entertained through poker related things but it just seems like everything that exists out there is the same. The interviews are all the same general style and no one is really trying anything new. I think alot of this is to be expected as the American market declines and less people are playing poker online. I figured if there is no website that exists that I am looking for and no one is doing podcasts that would interest me then I would figure out a way to do it myself. I think another big reason, which I talked about a bit before, is my life living in the states in the suburbs with a girlfriend has become pretty boring. I love my girlfriend and love being around her but without raging and cold weather, I really don't end up doing too much. Diving into something like this and seeing what happens has to be better and more fun.
When playing HU, if your opponent knows you 3bet light, is it correct for him to 4bet hands like 67s? Is this just like some gambooley situation where he has to 4bet light since you're obviously 3betting light, so he expects you to fold pretty often when he does it. When you dont fold he obviously knows he's crushed, but hey at least he has something to suckout with?
I didnt know if my opponent was making the correct adjustment to me, and therefore I need to readjust, or if he was just being an idiot and I should totally keep on 3betting and getting it in with AJ, 77, 44, etc.
there's a new building right in front of my bedroom, and there's 2 big fucking machines making noises every morning, wouldn't be a problem if the noise was continuous, but the fucking machines keep BIPPING, some times they even beep together, it's a fucking nightmare
I use to sleep 4-5am and waking up 1pm, not I'm sleeping 4 am and waking up 9 am
fuck my life, when I seem to be solving a few problems there's always more and more coming, I guess I'll just have to change my schedule ir order to have some decent sleep, maybe I'll try uberman sleep or something crazy
also my girlfriends devil cat was here because she is on summer vacation, and the damn cat was pissing everywhere in my place, he pissed in one of my monitors, so everytime I turn it on there's a black spot that keeps growing, I sent to the technician and he said I'll have to buy a new one because the cat piss is like acid and everytime I turn the monitor on, the black shit will grow like a cancer
fucking devil cat, I guess I'll have to grind with only one since I'm spending too much money and I don't know where, I'm in this place for a year already and I don't even have a couch yet lol, maybe I'll break up with my gf, kill the cats and move to another country
Last blog I talked about my epiphany that sets and flushes make you lots of money. I've been developing my own little system for playing Bovada Zone poker (their version of anonymous zoom) since I get a thrill out of all the hands I can play. I did well, grinded my $100 deposit up to about $700 playing NL25 and NL50 with a few donk shots at NL200 thrown in to round out at $1000. Part of my "system" (lol) involved only buying in for 50BB's to limit my exposure to variance. I know I know shorter stacks are supposed to increase variance, but I dont adapt my hand range to my stack size at 50BB's. I play it like 100BB's, so I dont really find myself in any variance heavy spots as a result of my stack size itself.
Anyway after examining my HEM stats I noticed I was missing tons of value with all those big drawing hands I cant play effectively for 50BB's.... OR WAS I?
Turns out I sorted my results wrong. I was only looking at "hands at showdown". Well no shit if 3 streets of betting take place flushes and sets are going to dominate the rankings. But not every hand you win goes to showdown. In fact I have one of those silly reverse profit graphs with positive redline and negative blue line. Most of my actual money is being derived from cbets, and lots of which end with me having some kind of pair.
So whats my point? These fish at bovada microstakes are so unconscionably bad that I feel I am forced to introduce this "variance limiter" by buying in shorter. They've already put the variance through the roof playing 40% vpip minimum, so if you buy in fullstacked well you might as well be buying in short because you're going to be getting a lot of money in the pot every time you have a hand. They make the most absurd nonsense plays that I just have no choice but to stack off repeatedly with a wide range of hands. "Whats that? You limp called utg and the flop is J95? You should totally check call there and then open ship the turn when an offsuit 3 hits. Good thing I'm playing 50BB's and can call with QJ now. Ah there it is, you have pocket 8's. Good shove" What happens here is I can make these calls much easier with a shorter stack, and the suckout odds are reduced for those times when they catch their miracles. I really dont find myself in a lot of draw heavy scenarios where I want a big stack. No, instead I am constantly battling it out for pairs, and I need to be able to see these hands to showdown since the fish dont adjust to your stacksize at all. They float without intent to bet, they chase draws on action killing boards, or against cards that hurt them if they hit, they turn every hand with showdown value into a bluff by raising where nothing worse could ever call. The whole thing is just pure chaos.
Now here comes the fun part; a big part of my strategy involves preying upon their emotions. What do I mean by that? Well fish are very emotional creatures at the table. A big part of what they do all involves their gut feeling. "I felt that ace coming on the river.... i was due for a flush... 7's have been hitting all night so I had to call". Every single thought process of theirs begins with some sort of emotional response to whats happening at that precise moment. So what I try to do is wrangle them together to get the desired result. A fish will never look at your cbet size and make some sort of decision upon the odds of whether or not it's worth it to call. They simply see a bet and if it scares them they fold, if it doesnt they call. For instance; most of my cbets are FULL POT. Thats right, I cbet basically 100% with any two cards for full pot, even on the most hideous of boards with no equity at all. Why? Because if they DONT have anything it will generally freeze them to the point that they go away entirely. I lose far too many pots "pricing fish in" with 3/4 pot bet to call down with K8s holding no draw or anything at all only to win with an 8 on the turn. I sometimes think fish are practically offended when you bet anything less than pot. It's like they call out of spite. Thats great and all for when you have a hand, ergo I value bet half pot every time. In these circumstances I find myself getting called on the flop and turn quite often only for the fish to finally give up on the river. Another advantage to bluffing full pot is you basically put someone in a push/fold position against your stack size. If I bet pot and someone jams, I can safely fold pretty much anything that doesnt smash. There's just no room left for them to bluff back at me. I still see tons of dumb bullshit where they had like pocket 6's so their shove was ridiculous, but technically they did have the best hand and I avoid getting felted. (Remember I can see all of this since Bovada lets you downloads everyone's holecards)
Anyway to wrap all this up, since the day I started playing full stacked again I've been on an instant downswing. I finally decided to go back to "what works" and immediately I am back up again. Fuck these stupid fucking donkeys and their call station strategies. You will NOT be winning 100BB a pop from me with your constant suckouts anymore. You want to play some dumb bullshit with a rigged RNG? 50BB's is all you get slut.
notes: No I dont believe in a rigged RNG. Yes I know everyone says play fullstacked. No I am not really whining about bad beats. All I know right now is when I buy in for 50BB's things get a lot easier, and I'm actually making money playing this way.
-competitive league with poker friends: lots of sharks in here and 2-3 complete fish. overall tough league, finished 1st/12. buyin 400, cashed for 2k
-7 yahoo pro leagues: these are 10 man public leagues with buyins of either 20, 100, or 250. i ran 1x20, 2x100, 4x250. Won the 20, won a 100, and finished 3rd in 2x250. buyins 1220, cashed for 1100
-league with friends from home: they are pretty bad, 14 man league, won total points for season and finished 3rd on year. buyin 50, cashed for 100
-league with college friends: finished 4th, buyin 100
-league with friends from home: finished 4th, buyin 150+$2 transaction fee * 32 transactions = 214, cashed for 95
-auction league, co owned with roothlus. didnt make playoffs, buyin i believe was 500
-national fantasy football championship league, buyin 350, won individual league for 1500, finished 26/1800 in overall standings for additional payout of 500.
total buyins: 2834
total cashes: 5295
Feel like year went pretty well and i could feel my edge in every league. also learned a lot and will be a bit stronger next year.
Daily Fantasy
As the year progressed, I started getting more and more into daily fantasy sports. At the beginning of the year there was a nice guaranteed tournament over on draftkings (www.draftkings.com, has some poker crossover, their VIP manager is Jon Aguiar aka fatalerror and they have a partnership with the WPT) and a deposit bonus, so i threw 1200 on, fired 6 lineups in the $200, think i had one small cash, fired most of it away and had like 38 bucks left in the account. Let it sit there for most of the season, but a bunch of my friends had been getting into daily stuff so I decided to start firing.
didnt feel like redepositing but i wanted to make as many lineups as i could each week to try and learn as much as possible for next season. so first week i made 19 lineups and entered them in the $2 tournament, got back $49. the following week i fired in 1 $11 lineup and 19 $2 lineups, did well, got back $113. then fired in 2 $11 lineups and 45 $2 lineups, did very well in a few with 4 top 30 finishes out of 8500 and cashed for $240. first place was 3500 and i was pretty close to that so it was a little frustrating to have so many entries do so well and cash for so little but a good sign that im getting a much better grasp of things. this past week there was a bigger $150 guaranteed tournament, and since it was week 16 i fired in a lineup and put in around 40 smaller lineups, did bad in the large one and only got back $40 which is ok cause week 17 is so unpredictable with resting starters to prevent injury. most of the games do matter this weekend but a lot of teams that are eliminated just throw in the towel and some of the later game players know their fate by then and the games become meaningless.
but now having entered a few hundred lineups the past 4 weeks i feel good about my daily fantasy game and think ill put in a lot of work over the next 8 months and plan on going hard in it next year cause it feels like there is more money to be made here than in year long stuff, albeit with smaller edges and more variance. will probably deposit 10-20k next year and work out a year long plan for grinding it out. hopefully it goes well! if you dont play daily, i suggest you look into it, its really going to explode in the next year and its big for NBA/MLB/NFL.
I made a transfer with Loco, my PP for his FTP. Now I would have liked to withdraw the money, but seemingly I can't, cause I am trying to withdraw money for others. OK. I ask them how many times do I have to play through the money for it to be considered mine and they say that I can only use that money for playing on the tables, cause FTP is not a financial institution. WTF? Ok, I understood that from the first mail, but will that amount always be blocked on my account? What if I never lose that amount and build up a 10k BR, will I still not be able to withdraw that 100 bucks? Sometimes I really hate these robotic responses they give, without giving a single thought to what the client actually asked for.
Share your thoughts please. Have you ever experienced such thing? WTF do they do with someone who is constantly selling shares of tourneys and transferring back and forth big amounts of money? Can they not withdraw it?
Seeking advice, Coaching/Stake.by HaiVan, December 22
Hey guys, first blog.
I started playing poker like many of you because i was a casual SC:BW gamer and used to visit TL.net daily. I remember back in 2009 some threads on there about poker and how alot of BW players were pretty good at it. So i started to play on PS with play money around november 2009, after a couple of months playing and reading LP i had gathered close to the then maximum allowed 20 million play chips. So i sold those for about 100$(maybe after a couple of tries because i got scammed for probably half of the play chips), and started to play nl2 on my laptop 12 tabling while in bed using the touch pad (fun times), after some time doing that and moving to nl5 then nl10 i decided to get a desktop for poker because it might be worth it. I remember when PTR was still tracking stars that i was listed somewhere in the top5 biggest winners on Stars at nl10 for 2010 i think. Shorty after that i moved to nl25 and im sad to say that with some short spells of breaking even at nl50 and nl100 thats still where i currently am. Ive been a Supernova since 2010, the current database i have on my desktop is ~1.5 mln hands and im ~2bb/100 winner according to HEM. In reality i probably have more than 4mln hands on stars and should be closer to a 3bb/100 (laptop, previous pc and so on). Ive played on Full Tilt before Black Friday and had a significantly better winrate at 25nl/50nl and 25nl/50nl zoom, i think i had >4bb/100 winrate over ~500k hands. Ive also played at 2-3 other poker rooms on Merge and Boss and was a decent winner there, but always left after 1-2 months due to being addicted to multitabling and the ease with which you could do that at PS.
The reasons for me being stuck on those levels for so long are probably complex, but one of them was that at first i was trying to prove to someone important to me that poker is more than just gambling and you could actually be a regular winner at it. That was done by me keeping a detailed chart of results for each month for about a year. I wanted as little variance as possible so i was content with playng 24 tables at lower limits than my bankroll allowed, in order to have a better chance of winning every single month. So i did that and i was succesful, won every month but didn't really progress much skill wise i think. By that time though this kind of play had become the norm for me, and with Stars raising my table limits from 24 to 28 and then to 32.... well i guess you can figure out what i did. Since i started to play i have had 4 losing months in total first two being one random month in 2011 and 2012 each(-50$ to -100$ kind of loss). Until last two months which combined are a loss of -1400$, which is not that big of a loss considering i play on the $,EUR and GBP tables, and might be due to variance, but it has made me seriously think about my game and what i wanted it to be before i got stuck in the multitabling SN maintaining kind of cycle that im in today. I currently have ~4k vpp's to go if i want to keep my SN for next year, but i am seriously considering not keeping it in order to change my game and not just autopilot 32 tables and not develop my game. I would appreciate any advice about that from people who have been in similar situations, and anyone really.
So i started to think about getting coaching, but i have always felt that just getting coaching from someone doesn't really make the coach look at the player he is coaching as anything but an additional source of income and not much more. So i think a Coaching/Stake situation would be much more productive since the coach would have an incentive to really improve the game of the player he is staking and thus increasing his profit from the deal.
Im looking for that kind of deal here because i've been an active member for a long time and i think this would be a much better option than getting a stake/coaching from 2+2 offers. If there is no interest i might seek one there, but id preffer to deal with LP players. Im open to disscuss different options and variations of the coaching/stake situation. Im very motivated to improve my game and move up, and i know i can put a significant amount of work to do so. If anyone is interested PM me or post here.
Sorry if that got a bit too long , any kind of advice is welcome.
backed my first pledge at kickstart for 799.. only need 12 or so more backers and I save around 400. http://i.imgur.com/xsCYd2l.png
whatever I get needs to be compact and I was initially looking at efold up bikes like the electric brompton & volt metro but going this route not only is cost effective but seems like it could be used in more spots, easier to maintain & lug around and overall more handy & fun
figure some ppl here might find uses for one too and if the pledge doesn't go through I will probably wait a bit to see user usage reviews before getting one
Launching my new projectby Joeingram1, December 22
What's going on guys, I am having an impossible time actually writing anything for the past few weeks so I am making myself write about the project/idea/website thats been in my head for the last bunch of months. After I started writing about drug experiences and shot taking and about my time spent in Vancouver I thought I could figure out a better way to write about all this degen stuff I've spent the last 6 years of my poker career doing.
I was listening to a podcast interview a few days later and realized I never listen to anything poker related on podcasts anymore and for the most part most of the content out there, strategy or of a more entertaining nature is not very interesting. I think this is to be expected as poker in america isn't what it used to be when poker road, poker after dark, hsp, etc was going on and alot of different people were talking poker all the time.
I thought about it a bit more and realized I love love poker and its basically been my life for along time now and the only poker site I really ever go to anymore is twoplustwo which is basically a place you go when you want to talk about nothing of any substance. Through some type magic I then came up with the idea to build a site that poker players would be able to go that could have entertaining interviews, poker (PLOOO) strategy podcast, an in depth view into what its like to be a high stakes poker player who travels the world and randomly decides to go on week long benders (rage). From that point the wheels started going crazy in my head and I started brainstorming on the type of things I could write about, youtube videos I could make, things I could talk about on podcasts, and then I started working on building the website.
When I started using wordpress I was a bit annoyed that I couldn't do some things I wanted to do with basic themes so naturally I decided that I would study html, css, and some php and build my own theme and be able to customize everything exactly how I wanted. I also thought that learning more about programming and getting started down that path could help me eventually get into learning how to build my own programs for poker. At this point I realized how much I was neglecting actually playing poker so I went back to 10 hour days for about a month and kinda forgot about the idea.
Learning all this new language for programming I wouldn't classify as difficult but rather very time consuming. Friends have asked me why I don't just pay someone to do all this and play poker instead but all of this is really interesting to me and something I want to learn. I've never been the best with balancing 2 really big things at the same time and it seems like when I am working on this, I'm not really playing poker at all. Right now all I really need to get the website launched is this little thing known as content. I haven't been able to write anything at all or even get into the zone to write anything and when this whole idea is generated from the things in my head, it is problem.
This is all a pretty basic introduction to it and with that said I will make myself write another blog post explaining the website a bit more
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then shoot me a pm.
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