Further Clarification

Well, I have sobered up since my last post and got some real traction going, so it is time to provide some futhur clarification with respect to my goals.


1. In the last third of this calander year I will make my push for climbing the Black Card Leaderboard for "Low SNGs" (anything below $26). I will be playing a mix of $5.00 and $10.00 turbo games as the main and lesser buy in hypers to fill the tables. At the end of this period I intend to have my BR at least of $1500 in value.

2. At the start of 2015 I will begin at $7.00 turbo SNGs on Stars and make a push for Supernova. Hypers will be mixed in as I transition throughout the year and depending on what games are the most profitable I will hop into them as needed. I intend to clear $35,000 worth of profit and bonuses during the year. This will depend on any changes to the VIP program Stars has for next year, so I will provide an update on how I expect to get that done at the start of next year. Likely it will take either 200,000 or 300,000 VPPs, while being profitable at the table for at least half of the yearly income.

3. At the start of 2016 I will make my push for SNE. At this time I will likely have been a proven winner at both the $15 and $30 turbos and hypers, so those games will be what I will play mostly to get the job done. A detailed plan will also be released at the start of the year when I have a clearer understanding of how best to accomplish that, but I intend to clear over $100,000 worth of profit and bonuses during that calendar year.


The weekly activities and intermediate goals will need to be addressed as they happen, so I cannot get into too much detail with how I will get there as of right now. But this is my two and a half year plan that I have laid out for me. I believe this plan to be realistic in it's expectations of my efforts and well within the expected swings while I climb the stakes.

During the first phase I will continue working my two jobs and put in the time as I can. The second phase will be done while still working at the casino. The third phase will be done with my entire work week dedicated to playing poker as a professional.

To begin my weekly goals I will keep track of them on my main desktop and update on this blog as I feel necessary. But to start, I will be looking at playing 100 tournaments on Full Tilt with an ABI over two dollars to close out the rest of the week. Study will be reviewing the noted hands at the end of each mini session throughout the week and one serious study session away from the table of at least two hours per week. Hopefully I can make that serious study session sometime on Sunday while updating my weekly activity sheet to keep it simple, but regardless the goals will be tracked and the activity will me monitored via excel spreadsheet.

With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work I can actually make this dream of mine become an attainable goal and an eventual reality.

See you at the tables!

Black Card Pro

OK, so fwiw I am 6/5 intoxicated while writing this, but at the very least I thought of the best way to write it 100% sober for a few days.

From here on in this blog is something I attempt to speak of in truth alone.

I realized that after creating this blog I have no real set goal in mind. The experience I have in mental science type leanings tells me that any type of ambition without a realistic and measurable goal is folly. This is my attempt to rectify and consolidate my ambitions in poker to something worthwhile.

Full Tilt Black Card Sponsored Pro
2014

That is it, that is what I will be and am working toward to make this dream of mine come to fruition. I have no idea how to get it done either than climb the leader board for my set limits and game type. I have no real idea of what kind of volume and steaks it will take to get me there, but that is what I am aiming for in the long run either than just making monies.

Updates will come as I see fit.

100% RB and some FT swag is a pretty cool deal, but for sure being able to say that I crushed the stakes and earned my way to the top is what I want the most. IDC how bad the whole idea of running it up from bronze $5 turbo reg to BC pro is, that is what I am aiming for.

Stop me if you dare to try, lose your EV if you must.

May the whole eenternets hold me accountable, because my dream includes your vested interest.

Blogging Run Bad?

I mean, who really is going to scope these posts by me to see if they can squeeze tiny edges out of leaks in my games at the lowest stakes PokerStars offers? It has to be blogging run bad. It is kind of funny how I seem to run bad as soon as I make a post though. Forget cash out doomswitch, I have a blogger doomswitch that I need to fix.

That is my cumulative run at the 6max hypers I mentioned in my last post. Yes yes, #lolsamplesize and such, and yes yes I know how easy it is to run 50 BI below EV or have a 500 BI downswong, and yes yes I even did run good.

I DON'T CARE!!

The last post I made was right at the top of that graph. That big drop is a 20 BI cashless streak, of which I was one tabling making the best play I could every time. I'm pretty sure a breakeven stretch over 1000 games would be less painful than that small session. Squeezing out a 1-5% ROI wouldn't be so bad if I was on my way to SNE, definitely not on my way to silver.

I did enjoy my time playing them and I will continue to log in some time with them while cuddling with the lady or got some time to kill with my phone, but for sure it is time to get back to serious business. Time to get myself back to 7-10% ROI on Tilt's $2.25 and $5.00 turbos and possibly start getting some minor rakeback. I may come back to them at a higher stake when I need to get some Stars rakeback, but for the foreseeable future I will only be studying and pushing my edge.

On the plus, I did develop my HUD a bit further which will for sure lead to more exploitative play when I get back to my main games. I also had some great exposure to a new(ish) type game which expanded my understanding of the game somewhat. 6max and PokerStars regs are less intimidating to me now at the very least. So all in all I am begrudgingly happy and ready to blow through the low stakes as quick as I can.

BR ~ $600

Change to the plan.... again...

Lately I have been messing around with SNGWIZ 2.0 has been fun and useful. To try it out I figured I would run a few 6-max hyper turbos to get some new data. The software has a few bugs to work out for sure, but being able to tweak the ranges as ICMizer can is a sweet bonus. Running a few trials of exactly the same situations also demonstrated the algorithm has changed as well. It does seem to have a closer to accurate representation of the true ranges, true weight of ICM and includes at least one future hand with Nash ranges included in the calculation.

The 6-max hypers have been quite the eye opener as well. A couple of the important benefits are that I can load up a full session quicker than 9-man turbos and can finish them up quicker when I want. This gives me a lot more freedom as to when I start and end my sessions and it takes a great weight off my chest when thinking about how I want to schedule my play. Just tonight I put two loads of laundry through, did the dishes, spent some time with the lady, wrote this post and got at least a couple hours and ~50 games in. I must have put in 4 or so quick sessions to get all that done.

The games themselves pretty much play themselves out to a certian degree. Just a quick glance at the basic stats and the situation I am in is usually enough to give me the decision I am looking for. There is a lot less effort I put toward making the best decision given the information present at all times, so I have a bit more brain power to give as well. With will power being a finite resource, this leaves me feeling fresh during the entire session and I feel I am playing better poker as a result. Also, maybe the most important thing about this is that I can sit on my laptop beside the lady while she watches TV in the background. She is pretty cool about me playing poker while she watches whatever she wants, as long as we are together. It is easy for me to zone out, so I don't feel that I am losing too much value while I am doing this. The plus life EV about keeping the lady happy is pretty awesome while I am grinding out a few bucks an hour building the dream, and she seems to enjoy watching my HM2 graph keep climbing almost every day.

So currently I am playing $1.50 Stars 6-max hypers to log the volume. I was sitting at $1.00 and $2.25 games at Tilt while doing this thinking there would be less regs, but it seems to be the other way around. The difference is likely miniscule in the long run, but I for sure feel more comfortable playing the Stars games. Of course the games load quicker, so it is likely better for the hourly rate as well. It isn't that they are all really terrible players at Stars, most actually seem pretty competent, but the difference is that the small mistakes seem to happen at a much higher rate. Antes likely are the main reason why this happens. The slight shove and call range errors that I catch out of the corner of my eye aren't too bad, but they are mistakes that someone who has a great understanding of ICM wouldn't make. I remember hearing that the real money isn't made about how many great decisions you make, but how many bad ones the fishes make. For that reason, as long as you can make a educated range adjustment, these stakes will always have money to be made for a good reg.

I know I have been running pretty damn well, but I do think I found myself a new main game and a new plan to move up through the stakes at the quickest pace. I'll move myself over to the $3.50 games in the next couple weeks I imagine, I just want to get enough data at the $1.50 limit to figure out where I am sitting. Over about 100 games I am sitting at an ITM of almost 60%, ROI almost 60% and running somewhat around 1.2x over what the EV line suggests. So obviously I am just killing it, but soon enough I will get my way around 1000 games and have a better idea of what I am doing. But I think I have got it close enough to demonstrate that I am a winning player at this game and stake.

Currently I believe my hourly rate to be around $3.00 - $5.00 playing these games.
BR ~$650

Haha, and I thought I was smart and current with online poker...

Like really, lol, did you know that SitNGo Wizard 2.0 beta has been released for almost a year and a half already? And I was just about to subscribe to ICMizer to get the future game simulation calculations included in my review.

Well, at least this might look somewhat promising to future grinders. If you can let something as important as this beta release slip under your nose for 16 months, you can still make money at poker.

Hey, at least I finally got it on my own eh? Here is to some epic fine tuning of my push-fold game.

And in case you missed it, ICM failing to consider future situations has been one of the topics I have been trying to wrap my head around lately.

Postflop will have to wait, lol.

A New Beginning

So it begins again...

I remember thinking about this period in my poker career at one point in time, must have been roughly two years ago. I imagined this time as the point where I would have a bunch of choices about where to take my game in the next short while. This comes as a result that I am finally grinding out my way through the low games, no longer in the micros. The regs that I see sometimes are actually significant winning players, the average losing players are getting closer to LAG rather than LPASS and every once in a while someone who is just crushing the stakes I am playing sits at my table. But the most important revelation is that I need to study and review the key hands of every session to keep the trend going. No longer does the ABC style of poker give me the most significant edge in the long run. I have to open my 3B against min raises more because they don't only mean the villain wants action on his aces. I have to open my late position ATS because those smallish +EV situations are so much more important. I have to play better post flop and extract full value from LAG regs and fish alike.

In short, poker has become much harder, much more exciting, but also a tonne more fun. Watching that BR grow also has it's way of making me smile.

I feel like I am learning the game all over again, and in reality that is not too far from the truth. I have spent the better part of two years researching, studying and deciphering the deepest aspects of ICM and it's application to poker. I still have a hell of a lot of work to do there, and I don't want to let my progress become complacent, but I do feel comfortable enough for me to open up other parts of my game to squeeze out every last bit of ROI that I can. ICM has been and will likely continue to be the strongest part of my game, almost guaranteeing me a slightly better than breakeven poker game at the low stakes, but now I want to learn more. I kind of feel like a kid who finally learned to read and is just opening his first Goosebumps book.

The concept I believe that I will spend most of my time on and give me the most value is basically post flop play. This has a lot of aspects to it, but mostly I am looking forward to being able to open up my late position steals, BB defends and the like knowing that I will outplay my opponents on the flop. Also, being more comfortable with deep stack play in early game situations will be another benefit.

This will likely be accomplished by spending more time on those types of hands as they come along and less on the ICM heavy situations that I have somewhat mastered already, but I have some other ideas. Basically I will take a look at giving cash games a try, mostly as a training ground for me to develop those concepts. I mean, it can't hurt really. My ABI is already more than a full buy in at 1c/2c, so as long as it takes me over 15 minutes to lose it I consider that cheap education. I already have tons of experience in MTTSNGs and MTT tournies, but post flop play doesn't take place too much at the micro turbos. Those seem to be more of a 3b/4b/ft3b game of value chicken to me rather than a place to practice basic concepts.

Aside from the practice, the real game plan consists of $2.25 and $5.00 games on Tilt for the grind. I have also started to play a mix of the $1.00 - 180 man hypers on Stars and $0.50 / $1.00 hyper 6max games on Tilt for those shorter sessions where I just want to chill and play some poker.

tldr

- moving up stakes
- expanding my theory in cash games
- looking forward to it

BR ~ $580

Back, But Never Really Gone >>> My Secret Game

So it has been a seed in my mind that I should keep this diary / blog ongoing. Kind of cool that it seems there may be a few people who are checking me out, interested in what I have to say. Yes, I am watching your interwebs. I wonder how many of those are fellow 2p2'ers, how many are people checking my stats mid-tournie and how many are people spamming to sell me cock pumps...

Oh well, this blog is mostly for me just so you know.

Been a hell of a long time since my last post, so let's recap. For the first few months after my last post things went basically as planned. On tilt I played the $1.00 turbos mostly and mixed in some $0.50 hypers. Occasionally I would take a stab at the $2.25 games with some moderate results, just not a heck of a lot of volume. IIRC, I made a transition back to MTTSNGs shortly after that. Stars rolled out some new $0.50 turbos, 180 man and 360 man. I logged a ton of volume with those and had some moderate success. That put my roll somewhere around $300 by Sept - Oct.

I made a real change to the games I played right around that time. I played the MTTSNGs almost exclusively and tried to work my way up the ranks there. The $1.50 45 man turbo burnt quite of bit of my profits there somewhat due to lack of volume, but I managed to keep on trucking. The real problem was I was starting to have my edge reduced from the shit ton of regs at that game and the variance was unreal. From here I started playing almost every NLH MTT that stars offered during my normal play hours. Pretty much broke even, had a couple fun nights and did pretty decent overall. During that time the best result I would imagine was placing 3rd out of ~1400 in the $0.25 MTT that runs late at night, cashed for ~$43. Had one real decent run at the big $2.20, I think I placed somewhere around 60th or 70th for once again ~$40, but got three outted OTR with a 1.5x avg stack where I imagine I could have made a serious run at the FT. I felt like I was playing great, started to see the value in large MTTs and almost made my first 3 figure score (or even 4 figure).

Anyways...

While I was playing the large MTTs, I would load up some of the $1.00 180 man hypers to get some volume and keep myself interested. With the strong ICM background I developed playing STTSNGs I felt that I could at least make a few bucks in the long run and possibly gain some rake back; the thought never occured to me that I might actually make those my main game.

That is my graph from basically late December of 2013 until now. By far my winningest game in somewhere between 1/10th to 1/4 of the time of all the $0.50 turbo games combined. That also doesn't include the games I played on my phone! I mean, it basically plays itself, who needs a HUD in that game where the avg stack at the FT is like 6-7 bbs. I have registered I think three double diget winning days since I started playing almost exclusively those. I mean, I don't even play the MTTs anymore because I have such a better hourly rate playing these. Maybe I shouldn't be saying anything, but then again, not many people reading this will have the background that I have. I mean, once you REALLY know your ICM, and I mean REALLY know your ICM with respect to MTTSNGs, this game is printing money. Sure, I may still be averaging out something far less than minimum wage, but this is seriously a BR builder. The regs that are beyond my skill level play far higher stakes and the vast majority of people playing this game either have know idea what they are doing or are just looking for quick gambolz.

As a result I have build my roll to ~$565 and have just about passed this game behind me. I have catapulted my BR to the point where I can comfortably play the $3.50 turbos on stars, face off against mostly fish and poor regs, get a decent hourly rate and start looking at seriously replacing my income with poker winnings. I have a few more levels to jump through, but I do believe that if I played the $1.00 hypers during the peak global hours and the $3.50 during my regular hours, put in 60+ hours per week, I can cover my meager expenses and still build the roll comfortably each month. Plug that in with the occasional bink in a  'Big $X.XX' tourny and we have ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, someone who made it. I am SO close I can taste it, got a tonne of work to do as far as volume goes, but I know I am at that point where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

//

On a personal note, I quit my old job and found one that is better suited for my personality and is much more flexible with my time. I am sleeping better, eating better, exercising more and generally have put my life on the right track to ensure I keep this momentum rolling. It is kind of funny really, the momentum started about 6 years ago now when I first made the decision to learn about success principles and apply them to my life. I guess this is the point that I was working toward all along. Super pumped to bring myself to the next step, the plan is still there to break $100K in a year and now I can plan for the next immediate steps.

Also, not so humble brag, I finally broke the friend zone during the past few months. Bagged me quite the little cutie who I was friends with for a few years. Just kept at it, not pushing anything and finally woke up at the right time and right place to put a solid foundation down. She is easily the best thing going on in my life at the moment and I hope that when you read this babe you know just how special you are. Yes, you and your face! You dork!

Here is to a great 2014, the best year of my life thus far!