Pretty sure could have hit the 20 buyin mark today, games were sick soft but I got really tired and felt like I wasn't playing my best poker after spewing 2 stacks vs 2 regs who never fold to 3 bets in or out of position and don't miss flops vs me, hard to counter-attack that strategy.
Sorry for the lack of updates, the last few weeks have been excruciating when it comes to poker.
Well, I bought a $4k bonus at the start of the year. I was pretty excited to grind and get this bonus over with, but what happened has absolutely shocked and demotivated me.
I've never ran this bad before. Those of you who know me well, know how I don't really like to complain about bad runs but this what has transpired is absolutely surreal. Every session I'm getting coolered and losing stacks where I get people to spazz out and still they get there. I'm aware it's a part of poker and I accept it, I'm just so frustrated atm that I have to vent, sorry about that ;-)
Anyway, here's a graph of the month up to this point... it's almost done anyway but I think I'm gonna grind hard tomorrow and who knows, I might ship 20 buyins or something :-D
That's actually 40 buyins below EV for the month, which is unparalleled for me, biggest EV difference was probably 15 or something (below EV too, but have been above EV before)
That's ok though, it's just a very rough stretch and I'm reviewing hands again after each session to make sure I make no mistakes and my game isn't being affected (only have like 1-2 major mistakes per session and most times they are like misclicks or situations where I don't remember the action in the street before LOL :-P)
Also, I'm only at 21k VPPs for the year which is laughable, I guess I should be at like 85k or so at this point.... no problem, I'll just pick up later, this month didn't start out exactly how I planned so I'll try to re-start the year properly in February.
Haven't played much this year so far, I've torn a lot of my play between my desktop and laptop so I can't post a graph or HHs so far but will def have all that stuff ready when I make a new post, probably tomorrow or in a couple of days, there's grind on my mind now :)
This is the first screenshot of something I hope to be epic some months from now, my VPP counter thus far in the year:
I was supposed to have 30k by now if I'm at pace to SNE but I'm not worried, I'll make it up with some PLO multitabling once I polish my game a bit more, 1/2 6 max PLO offers like 0.9vpp/hand so...
Hey, so here I am. This post is going to be kinda long because I'm in the mood to write so if you're interested you're definitely going to enjoy.
Last year was quite tilting when it comes to poker... (life in general was pretty good I guess, apart from gaining ~35lbs/15kg and destroying my liver =P) I made monies, but not as much as I planned to nor as smoothly as I wanted to.
First of, I started the year playing HU NLHE, that part is well documented in some of my posts in this blog. However, I stopped playing NLHE HU shortly after the end of May (not much happened between that time and my last March post here).
This is my graph of my HU NLHE career up to May/June (I don't have a good style for variance free HU, my stats are usually 76/72):
Then, my HU PLO adventure began. It started off pretty well! I was running good and, on retrospect after watching some videos and reading some books, playing pretty well (for someone who took off in the most swingy poker variant totally uneducated). I never seemed to be able to have a losing day, and when I did, I only lost a couple of buyins. I had 2 consecutive best days ever ($4.5k and $5k at 2/4 and 3/6) I was unbeatable, nobody could touch me and I surely would be ruling the highstakes FTP games by the end of the year. I was going to make a name for myself.
And then, June came along. Everything looked great, going to a couple of different places (Vilamoura and Figueira da Foz) to play a couple of live tourneys and just have a blast and making some money online. The first week in Vilamoura is pretty hazy, not much poker went on over there since I devoted most of my time to be partying with friends, but what happened next in Figueira would forever change the way I deal with variance and, above all, poker.
First couple of days I didn't play. Then I had another $4k day, pretty good. And then, I started losing. A LOT. Didn't matter what I did, I just lost session after session. Whether I got my money in ahead (didn't happen too often, I was quick to blame variance but time would prove me wrong) or in behind, I was due to lose. Every single day, for week and a half. I swear, every time I woke up, all I thought about was getting even for when the streak began (I still remember the day my downswing began, June 13th). Coming from a FR/HU bumhunting-ish background I didn't have to deal much with downswings, and when I did, few hours/days would go by before I got back to even with a lot of grind.
However, in PLO all of this changes. I still remember the first thought I heard about PLO when I saw my first PLO video: "PLO is a game of exploiting equity edges". What I interpreted this to mean at the time (and still do, although to a lesser extent), is basically: "this aint holdem, bitch... variance here will eat you up, long run has a much bigger role". I lost count to the amount of times I got it in flipping or in slim edge situations. They rarely went my way. Finally, by the end of July, I realized I needed to take a break from the game I learned so much to love and hate at the same time. The downswing (starting on the highpoint) now totalled a whopping $16k at this time, more than 35 buyins. I had to stop and regroup, but above all, I needed to recover the money I had lost.
This is my HU PLO graph, starting May and ending June:
To get back even, my plan consisted in grinding massive amounts of hands at 1/2 FR. It sorta worked, being FR the game I'm best at I made like $11k (including rakeback, one cannot be a FR grinder to the core if he doesn't include rakeback in his totals :D) in the space of a month just printing stress free money.
Having partially recovered the money and some confidence, I felt ready to again tackle PLO, so I started watching some videos and read SlowHabit's book. Ready to go, gonna start making some cash. It didn't turn out to be that simple. Now something felt different in my game (I was playing better, trying to avoid spots where variance would just chew me up) but still, I kept losing. By this time, mid-September had arrived (didn't play much in August or September) and, after travelling to Barcelona and Prague with poker buddies, I decided I wouldn't play PLO again until I had seen every video and read every book I could get my hands back on the subject.
However, I chose to play poker to make money because I'm lazy by nature. "It's a tough way to make easy money" sounds like a good maxim to me. I felt more comfortable grinding the games I had learned so well to beat (up to the tune of 4ptbb 24 tabling, which means I'm pretty damn good in the games I play at) and making stress free money, even though I had more than the skillsets required to beat larger games, with more variance.
This is my graph for the remainder of the year, starting October and ending now:
So, all told, I made approximately $65k total profit. A total of $50k came from cash tables, around $4k came from donkaments and $11k came from rakeback. I broke even in live poker.
This is my 2009 graph (it's very crudely done, I didn't get the timeframes right but I only made the distinctions so you can get a general idea of where each period was located)
Now, onto 2010 goals:
- $250k total profit - Move up to midstakes/highstakes FR and start beating them like I have done to smallstakes. - Improve my PLO game, putting in some volume and making some money. - Become the first portuguese SNE who plays mainly cash games. - Make a decent sized score at some tournament. - Play more live donkaments, I can't win money if I don't have sample size. - Drink less and enjoy life more. - Never give up on the blog.
Ok, so this is it! 52 weeks of poker ahead of me, let's tear this sh*t up. I don't want to make promises I can't keep so I'll try to blog at least twice a week with updates.
A lot of tilt and some bad play mixed in there but I'm running fairly bad, everyone hits pairs, backdoors etc in situations where I'm almost forced to look them up which sucks for me :D
Interesting hands:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3931831 - This hand was interesting.
Opponent was very peculiar, he mixed it up a lot between limping and minraising, although when he limped he generally had a weaker range. A6o is a somewhat weak hand but at this point in the match I felt I knew his tendencies postflop well enough for it to warrant a raise (he folded probably twice to a raise and never 3 bet after limping so I was positive I was going to a flop)
Flop middle pair top kicker in a very coordinated flop so I bet, for value. Not really worried about getting blown off my hand by weaker hands because he rarely raised draws in position.
He calls and the turn pairs the board, which is fantastic for me. I bet once again for value and he calls. When he calls turn he pretty much always has flush draws (this was what I was putting my money on at the time) and 78/34 and the other times he has something like 77-99. I don't think he'd flat a T again after flatting top pair on the flop, although not impossible.
Betting the Kbrick river is horrendous because I'm virtually never getting called by worse and I have the best hand a lot so all I need to do is bluffcatch by check/calling. I kinda hesitated before calling because I always hesitate before bluffcatching passive players on the river but nevertheless I called and my hand was good. He ended up having total air with J high so that was good.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?3931865 - This hand tilted me beyond belief.
Guy was steaming a bit, 3 betting most hands so I called with A9s. Flop TPTK with a BDFD on a coordinated flop so before he even bets I'm already figuring out a plan to get my stack in. He saves me the trouble by open shoving... I think that sometimes I'm getting owned by something like KK-TT here but it's heads up poker, I can't really fold.
Villain in this hand is a guy who usually sits at my tables with 20 big blinds and is a known douchebag (he hit and runs, table blocks, does all sorts of weird crap) in the headsup community.
Today he sat at some of my tables and I refused to play him, like usual, because I don't play professional shortstackers headsup. Well, shortly after, he sits at a table fullstacked and shoves over my raise. People did this to me 3 times in my short HU career... those 3 times I folded and they insta sat out and left the table so that was I was thinking would happen in this case.
Now, at the time I was steaming from a session before where I tilted off $1k to some guy and for some reason I remembered Q7o is called the computer hand because (I'm not sure on this) it has something like 51% equity against a random hand range. Tilt, the prospect of me getting closer to even on the day in an apparent situation where it could be close to neutral EV and the fact that I assumed he was shoving any two cards in this spot made me click my mouse extremely fast. I didn't suckout.
This is a hand I'm not particularly proud of and it's a secure fold on retrospect but it's probably going to be the only time I stack off with Q7o preflop with some reasoning to back it up :D
I'm done for today because I'm tired, tilted and angry and also cause I have to wake up in 6 hours for school so that's that.
Sorry for the lack of updates, I haven't really been interested in writing in the past couple of months but due to repeated requests I decided not to let a few people down and start writing again.
March is the month that marks a fresh start. New semester starts so now I'll have more responsibilities outside of poker (college, mainly) so I can't be fooling around anymore and will have to start working hard.
As such, my goals for this month are:
- 100k hands of midstakes. - $20k total profit. - Attend all my classes, both college and drivers license. - Gym 2 times a week. - Start waking up earlier. - Play the Betfair Portuguese Poker Tour, which will be my live tourney debut. - Update this blog AT LEAST 4 times a week.
That's it basically. I think I'm gonna put in a 6k hand session later so I'm planning on updating the blog again with results and some hands.
