I am back.

As I look back on this blog, I realize how much I have grown as a player and person over the last year.

My results and progress haven't exactly been impressive, but they have been consistent. I pretty much played 0 poker throughout june and july because I was too busy in Vegas getting super hammered like 6 days out of every week, so I obviously was in no mood or condition to blog about my experiences. Vegas would have required a handwritten journal in my case, because so much crazy stuff happened in those 2 months that it's almost kind of an haze in my mind. Dunno if I should just accept it or feel disgusted by that, I'm leaning towards the latter. Cliff notes include lots of drinking and degening. I was lucky enough to land some very very cool roommates with whom I'm still close to up to this day (well ok maybe not in a couple of cases) so I pretty much had a blast.

August I came back home and just felt like getting better at the game by studying and playing, and so I did. Played some 1/2 rush for like a month or so 'till 2/4 rush came out and since then I've just been 4 tabling 2/4 rush for 6 months now with decent results (2.5-3ptbb if I had to guess, never graphed it)

For the duration of a couple of weeks of January, entire February and couple of weeks in March I lived in Lake Tahoe with notontilt09, blaabar and ryanmack. It was a weird experience because I live in a very warm place all year around and moving into very low temperatures was just not for me. I tried skiing but epic failed and didn't really like it much, but absolutely loved snowboarding after giving it a try. Unfortunately didn't get to do it much because I was much more interested in grinding and getting drunk for some reason, so I was either playing or hungover during the mornings and early afternoons. My main regret is not getting into snowboarding earlier, would have had much better times if I did. Still was pretty epic and it is an experience I will cherish for the rest of my life... except maybe the money wasted when super drunk lol. Obviously loved the roommates, they were all awesome and pretty good at this stupid ass game.

I feel like I should be posting some graphs but I am still undecided on that right now, I have tried it before and I still dont know if I want to go down that path again. By the end of the month I will definitely post at least one graph.

Going into the present, today was my best day ever. I made 20 buyins at 2/4 rush in 3.5k hands.

Some people tell me this was impressive but I don't agree at all with it. I was on the right side of variance, flopping joints all over the place and coolering people preflop. However, in no way does this victory taste less sweet just because I am aware I was just running hot. This was long overdue.

I have been on the wrong side of variance before. In the space of 40 days I have had two days where I have lost 20 buyins. This is due to my style being very prone to massive swings. I am not scared to play for stacks, ever... and I LOVE putting people to tough decisions. Putting people to tough decisions for entire stacks gets old pretty fast when people catch on what you are doing and you don't re-adjust to it. So if you keep 5 bet jamming 55 or AJ BTN/CO vs that one reg whose strategy against you is to only 4 bet hands he's playing for stacks with (which will include AQ and 99 pretty fast) I'm obviously going to get whats coming to me. Especially when I start tilting and just stop folding. Hence, 20 buyin losing days.

I am, however, very strong minded. I just won't allow myself to give up or doubt myself and my abilities. Every time a bad string of cards or mistakes comes at me I just keep reminding myself "Better players than you have had worse times, don't give up."

Long ago have I given up on the mentality of blaming the sites or the cards when I am losing. Bad stretches happen to everyone, the way each person deals with it defines the strength of their character and how far they will go. Most players just blame it on the site, disregarding the need to re-evaluate their games. They will break even forever. Some players will just blame it on their luck, not caring about thinking about alternative lines for the mistakes they keep making over and over. They will lose forever. Some players, however, will recognize something is not right and has to be improved, be it by trial and error or by study. These players will rise to the top sooner or later. I am a firm believer in this.

Play, study, improve. That's what I have been doing and will keep on doing until I am among the best. I have a feeling it won't take long now.

Welcome back and hope you guys stick around, will try to reward you for your loyalty.

Reviving this.

Hi,

Leaving for Vegas in 2 days for 2 months, can't think of a better reason to bring this back to life. I'll update in a bit, too hangover atm haha

January results and February so far.

Hi,

January was an epic fail. Hardly played at all because my morale was down.

Finished the month with 20k VPPs total, far away from the 90k VPPs required to be on pace. That's ok, I plan to play a bunch in February.

This is my graph for the month of January:



Anyway, February WILL be an epic month.

First off, a new SICK gym will open near me and I plan on getting out of my ass and working out at least 4 days/week till the end of the month in order to lose 10kg.

Second of all, I'm midway through my $4k bonus so that's basically guaranteed profit this month, I have this sick feeling February will be the best month since I've played poker, both money wise and life wise. Stay tuned.

Last but not least, my drivers license exam is this month (FINALLY). Still got a few classes to go but I feel like I already have a good grasp on how cars work, now I just gotta keep practicing and stop exceeding every speed limit known to mankind so I can own the exam.

Stay tuned, I plan to be very involved in poker this month and to even discuss some strat so you readers will def enjoy reading this.



Cya later.

Close enough.

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.



This song played nonstop during this session.

Cool title.

Hey guys,

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.

Bye.

Already behind pace :(

Hi,

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...

See ya!

Recap.

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.

I leave you guys with this awesome clip:



Peace!