Christmas!

Hope everyone had a good Christmas.  I had a great Christmas with Liz.  We finished decorating our tree, went out to eat dinner at the "China Grill" at the Hard Rock Hotel, and opened presents.  I'll be going to pick out my Christmas gift on Thursday because Liz wanted me to try on the bluetooth phone headsets before buying one.  That's a good idea, since the last one I bought never really stayed on my ear, it kept falling off which was very annoying.

As for poker, I had a good talk on the phone today with Seth and he gave me some good advice about poker study.  He was definitely correct in saying that my poker study has to be much more serious and focused... I will work on that for 2011.

Poker overall is going a bit better.  I've played a ton on Stars this month and I'm basically a half-day of playing away from the 300k VPP milestone which is worth $3,600.  I should get it tomorrow.

I'm looking forward to 2011 since it's nice to feel like you get a fresh start.  I will be going for 2 million VPPs which is basically 2xs Supernova Elite.  I'll be 14-16 tabling 6 Max, $2/4 through $5/10 to achieve it.  I will probably play mostly $2/4 NL and $3/6 NL for the first few months of the year until I'm able to build my roll up to the point where I have a comfortable bankroll to play $5/10.

I will make a post before the New Year begins outlining my plan for 2011 and goals.  I also plan on updating my blog much more frequently in 2011 as I want to use it as a way to keep track of my progress and help me stay on pace.

Here are some pics from Christmas.

Tried playing full ring again...

I don't know why I keep trying to play full ring... it's a fucking joke.  I was 24 tabling in an experiment to see if that is better for my SNE run next year than playing 6 max... I've come to the conclusion that it definitely is not.

Full ring is basically just a bunch of massive nits sitting around, waiting to cooler each other.  The fish are scarce and it's so tilting because when you're dealt KK and someone 3-bets you, you start shitting your pants.

Back to 6 max and from now until the end of the year I'm going to try and build up to playing as many tables as I can while still slightly winning.  If I play as much as I plan to next year I should be able to hit 2 million VPPs.

Sorry for lack of updates...

But I've been busy grinding on Stars.  Attempting to hit the 300k VPP milestone and practice for SNE next year.  I need to decide between 24 tabling full ring or just table selecting around 12 games of 6 max.  I'm currently experimenting with both and seeing what will be best for me.  I think doing the 24 tabling full ring will obviously get me more VPPs and perhaps allow me to hit 1.5 million to 2 million VPPs if I play as much as I plan to next year... but it's hard to say if I can bank on any playing profits when playing that type of volume.  I'll probably turn into a robot zombie.

Office is no more

The lease on the office is up January 15th and Tim ended up moving his stuff out last week.. and I moved my desk to my apartment today so the office is officially over.  It was a good learning experience and I feel I became a little bit better of a poker player, but I was hoping to be crushing $10/20 NL 6 max by the time of the office's expiration.  I guess I expected to get a lot better from being in that office environment than I actually did.

I learned that it's really, really stupid to have fixed overhead of any amount for a business that can be done just as efficiently from the comfort of your own home.  It just adds to your pressure to win because you have an additional $1k per month in fixed expenses.

It's over now and all I can do is learn from it.  I am going to try and finish moving my computer and monitors over to my apartment later today so I can get my primary set-up ready to roll in my apartment.

Government trying to fuck up online poker again

As everyone is probably aware of by now, Senator Reid is attempting to push a bill that seeks to "legalize" internet poker.  Well, in a nutshell... if this passes it will create mass chaos and will be very negative for online poker players for at least a few years from what it sounds like.  Here's a link to some analysis on it.

I hope and say, "IT SHALL NOT PASS!"

They have to get it done before the end of the year, so we'll see what happens.  A few days ago it seemed like a sure thing but now the latest reports are sounding like there is no way that it will be tacked onto the tax relief bill. I just hope it doesn't get tacked on to some other bill or something stupid like that.

I have been playing on Stars a ton this month and am shooting for 300k VPP before the year ends.  I'm about 71% there, and have 212k VPPs.  I think I should be able to make it if I just keep on grinding it out.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Starting to pull it together

I have been playing well the past couple of days, hopefully I can keep it up and finish the year out strong.  I really have to sit down and get my receipts from 2010 in a spreadsheet and start organizing stuff before the year ends. I have been pretty lazy in that department and it isn't good.  I want to be 100% ready to hit the ground running when 2011 begins... because as of now, the plan is a run for SNE!

I also have a goal of hitting 200k VPPs for this year, and it looks like I should be able to hit that without any problem.

Hope everyone is doing well.

FTP Thanksgiving tip!

Here's a tip from the pro's for Thanksgiving!   I tried not getting into a flip ever and it worked great!  I just wait until the river comes to determine if I should put chips in or not, that way I can not lose a coin flip!!!!   >:D

Enjoy!  and Happy Turkey Day!

Finally had a great day on Stars

Ran well, played well aside from maybe one questionable pre-flop call all-in for 50bbs.  But I hope this is a sign that I am getting back on a roll. We'll see.

I had a great weekend hanging with Liz.  I went to the suburbs and we got a hotel room for a night after going out drinking with some of her friends.

It's late, so I'm going back to my apartment, watch NHL on the Fly, and hit the hay.

Stars experiment not going well

As I have mentioned before, I was attempting to experiment on Poker Stars this month to see if a SNE run is possible for 2011.  The games I have been playing in have not been working out.  It is a somewhat small sample... around 60k hands, but if you go by all-in EV I am losing WAY too much.  I am actually down around 10-20 buy-ins, I don't know exactly because of the unorganized database spread between my three computers.

I am throwing in the towel and just giving up.  I can't be getting crushed each day and session like I am now.

Also, the office is no more.  I decided to not renew the lease when it expires on January 15th.  It's been nice having Tim there to talk poker with and I feel like I'm a better player now than I was at the beginning of the year but my results now are not what I imagined they would be.  I sort of expected to be moving up the stakes, getting better a lot faster, and crushing a lot harder... what actually happened is I had to move down stakes due to having to cash out from all of my expenses.

It's frustrating but it was worth the shot as the potential reward was worth the risk.  Now it's just time to look at what I have left in my business and build it back up to where I was a year ago.  It starts with reducing unnecessary costs like the office.

So much for the good start...

I'm having a terrible time with poker.  I just am not playing well or running well.  It's disheartening.  I'm running WAY above EV this month, however still down in the game I've spent the most time playing.  I need to sit down and figure out a plan to unfuck my poker business because I'm seriously turning into a rakeback pro and it's ridiculous.  I'm way better than that and I know it.

8 HIGH NO GOOD SIR

Villain in this hand puts me on teh open ended straight draw and snaps me off with 8 high here.  It's no good.

http://weaktight.com/2871309


Off to a good start this month, despite having my main desktop computer in the office crash and wasting a day or two trying to fix it.  I just ended up sending it in to Best Buy and paid a ridiculous sum of money for them to fix it (so far around $500).  So hopefully it gets fixed soon because right now I'm just playing on my laptop and my apartment desktop.  I can't hook up to my 30'' monitors because I don't have the correct adapter.

I'm going to continue the grind and play my best for the rest of the month.  Last month was good but this month will be better.  Forward momentum FTW!

Won the rake race!

Had a great Halloween weekend with my girl.  Also, today I found out that I have won the October FTP rake race at raketherake.com!  So that is pretty sweet, as I worked really hard to win that.

The plan for this month is back to the Stars SNE test run.  I'm taking today off though mostly as I want to just relax for a day before I start up the grind again.  Hope everyone had a great Halloween weekend!

Happy Halloween!

Hope everyone is having a great Halloween weekend!  I'm having a great one with my girl, Liz.  Friday we went to a haunted house, which was pretty sweet.  Saturday night we went on a dinner cruise on the Mystic Blue and that was a blast.  It was our second time doing the cruise on that ship and there were a lot more people on the boat this time since it was the last fireworks dinner cruise of the year.  We also watched a few scary movies last night of course!

Today we are doing a few Halloweeny things such as carving a pumpkin and baking cupcakes.  I will post some pics later on.  I still have a lot of pics from the Fall that I haven't had time to put up since I've been busy trying to win the FTP rake race.  I'm still in first place with a big lead so hopefully I can take down the $3,750 bonus.  We'll find out if I won or not on Monday.

Grindin'

Put in about 20 hours over the past few days and had decent results.  I've switched up my RUSH playing strategy to basically eliminate the full ring bullshit and just play all 6 Max now.

I'm leading the rakerace still but not by much so hopefully the people who are close to me don't play that much this weekend.  I think I have definitely played enough though to at least retain the #1 slot and will attempt to put it out of reach for them on Monday-Thursday as I will play a minimum of 10 hours per day.

Getting that free $3,750 is going to be nice.  I just need to keep on truckin' and I should have it locked up.

I'm going to head over to Liz's place now, as it will be the last weekend we have to hang in her town home she was living in.  It ended up selling and she is moving out.

I have tons of pictures of Fall adventures Liz and I have had. I haven't had time to post them, but I'll post some of the best ones maybe at the beginning of next month once this rake race thing is finished.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Update

I've played a ton over the past few days but ran quite poorly.  I'm shooting for 1st place in the FTP rake race at raketherake.com.  Currently, I'm in first place but there are a few other people who are nipping at my heels so I'm going to have to put in a ton of volume for the rest of the month so I can win the $3,750 bonus prize.

I'm going camping tomorrow with Liz so that should be fun.  I'm looking forward to it.

blah

Played a ton over the past few days but my results were pretty damn mediocre as I broke even.  I feel like I missed HUNDREDS of flush draws and the two times I did actually hit today I ran into the nut flush when I had the 2nd nut flush.  FML.

I honestly ran pretty bad, lots tons of flips, etc.  RUSH is pretty damn annoying sometimes.  Some regs are just so stupid aggro it's hilarious.  I flatted TT on the CO vs a raise, the squeeze happy 20% 3bet reg squeezes, initial raiser folds, and I just 4-bet ship and he SNAPCALLS with 33.  Obviously I lose.

Only really good thing about past few days is I will be getting a shit-ton of rakeback and I am about halfway to unlocking the first $2k bonus from my FTP black card membership, so at least my roll is growing.

Going to hang out with Liz tomorrow and take the day off, so I'm looking forward to that.  Hope everyone is having a great weekend.

NHL SEASON BEGAN THURSDAY!!!!

Forgot to mention that!  I will be going home right now to watch NHL On The Fly to see all the highlights from today's games.  I can't wait.

Summer is always tough with no hockey to watch, I'm glad it's back.

18k hands today

I played a ton of hands today.  Ended up 5 buy-ins for the day but I was actually up 16 buy-ins at my highest point for the day.  I think I definitely let my play deteriorate by around hand 10,000.. as that's basically when I wasn't crushing souls anymore.  Could have just been a run hot then run cold type of deal too.  I'm not to concerned about it, still had a winning day.

I deviated from my SNE trial run basically because I got fed up with full ring bullshit.  I might do it next month, but for now I'm playing RUSH on FTP and going to attempt to take first in the rake race for raketherake.com.  So far I'm in 7th place so I've got some catching up to do.  I might as well do that, because if I just focus all my play on one site I can pick up an extra $1,000-$3,750 in rake back at the end of the month, which is definitely a nice little bonus.  Also, in order to win the damn thing I figure I will need around $30,000 in rake paid for the month, which, at 27% rake back comes out to be $8,100.  

So as long as I can keep winning I should have a nice little month in October.  We'll see what happens.

EPIC last 38 hours!

So, over the last 38 hours I've played a shit-ton of poker.  I slept for about 4 hours at the office, otherwise I was playing poker, eating, pissing, or taking a short break.

Over that span of time, I ended up playing 40,845 hands!  That's by FAR the most I've ever played in 2 day period.

Needless to say, I'm pretty exhausted so I'm going to head back to my apartment to get some sleep before I take the train to Liz's place in the morning.

Here is the garph:

Long Day

Played a TON of full ring hands today... ended up playing 12,000 hands in about 10 hours.  I finished up 4 buy-ins but I tend to stack off a little lighter than I really should towards the end of my sessions and get a bit careless... I shouldn't have stacked off two pair in a 4-way pot on the flop vs the inital raiser... he min-raised my lead with 2 other people yet to act... I should have just called and checked the turn to re-evaluate.

It's actually just plain sickening how careful you have to be in the full ring games I'm playing in.  It's pretty disgusting when you're holding KK in EP and get 3-bet by some uber-nit who 3-bets EP raisers like 0.5%... and BAM, you're SET MINING !?!  with your KK.  Pretty ridiculous IMO.

I am getting more and more used to playing 24 tables each day I do this.  I handled it really well today until my computer decided to spazz out and I couldn't click on anything... thus causing me to lose my time banks on all my tables and press the power button on my computer to restart it.  I still don't know exactly why that happened.

I'm super tired, I'm going to post the pics from last weekend sometime tomorrow.  Goodnight all.

Full Ringing

Played a ton of 100NL Full Ring today on Stars.  It went kinda "meh".  I won a few buy-ins but my last session  of the day was frustrating.

I'm going to play it again tomorrow and the plan for October is to put in 40 hours per week 24 tabling full ring for a SNE trial run, so we'll see how it goes.

My weekend was great and I'll post some pics and talk more about it tomorrow, because I'm off to my apartment to watch the first new episode of Season 5 of DEXTER!!!  This show is AMAZING!  I love it.  It just keeps getting better, and better, and better each season.  I don't really even consider it a TV show, it's more like a long movie in which the plot keeps thickening and gets more and more exciting.

If you haven't ever seen Dexter, watch it!  You will love it.  It only took me 30 minutes of watching it to get hooked.

Have a good night everyone.

Back to RUSH

I decided to go back to playing primarily RUSH for a few weeks.  Focus is to put in volume and not get disgruntled when I have a bad sesh or day.

My weekend was pretty fun, I hung out with Liz and got to see one of my good friends from NYC who was in town.  We went to a barbecue at one of my friends girlfriend's place, which was a blast.  The food was really good and both Liz and I had a good time.

Halloween is coming up and it's Liz's favorite holiday, so we're going to be doing a bunch of fun fall-related stuff this weekend.  She has already decorated her place really well.

Here are some pics from two weekends ago, pics of the decorations, and some pics from the barbecue.

Considering SNE in 2011

I spoke with Tim today and yesterday about me possibly going for Supernova Elite on Stars in 2011.  This would net me around 110k guaranteed in bonuses plus a seat in the WSOP Main event.

I would likely do it 24 tabling full ring... starting out at either 100NL or 200NL and hopefully ending the year at 400NL-600NL or higher.  I played with the FPP Pro calculator Tim has and if I'm able to maintain a 1-2 ptbb/100 winrate over the hands I play I could have a really great year.

I feel it's a good idea because it's likely to be a lot less stressful compared to grinding 4-6 tables of 6 max and table selecting, because when I do that I'm relying mostly on my poker playing profits for my income.

I've figured out an easy way to play 24 tables at once with some software and my hardware.  The only thing I have to do now is perfect my full ring skills in order to seriously consider going for SNE next year.  The games have changed a ton and even at stakes as low as 50NL there are tons of nits.  I really have to get used to the ranges in these games because they are way different.

I'm going to try this out over the next few weeks along with playing some 6 Max RUSH on FTP to insure that I'm still making some money this month.  I feel like I've beaten that game quite well but just got frustrated after running like a midget with a broken leg for two days in a row.

RUSH has gave me 3 OK months in a row so I need to stick with it a bit while experimenting with full ring so I can have some incoming cash flow.  I don't really know if my full ring experimenting will result in a positive cash flow at the beginning so I don't really feel like I can stick to that 100% right now.  I've messed around at 50NL so far to get the software and hardware and timing down but I'm down around 10 buy-ins so far.  I've definitely stacked off way too lightly in a few spots and been running bad so there is room for improvement.

We'll see how it goes.

FML

Played slightly over 10 hours today and basically felt like I just kept running my head into a wall.  I just couldn't catch a break.  I got coolered so many times and got raped in all-ins, had 5 flips preflop and won one of them, you name it... it happened.  I'm so sick of getting bent over nearly every session now, it's getting old.

I hope I start running better soon because I don't know how much longer I can take it.

I did have a session with Tim today and he watched me play 4 tables of 200NL.  I definitely picked up a few things I need to work on from what we talked about and I felt that I did a pretty good job of improving on those things while playing the remainder of the night.  I just can't forget about it and must continue to apply it from here on out.

So I dumped about 5 buy-ins today and I actually feel that I played as well as I have in a long time.

Here's the garph.  Fun stuff!

Labor day and poker update

Liz and I ended up going to Lake Geneva on Labor day and we brought along her dog, Bella.  It was really relaxing and we just had a picnic in the park and chilled out for the day.

Poker has been pretty frustrating lately for me, as I haven't really been able to string very many good days in a row.  I'm making some adjustments to my game though and really working hard on getting better.  Today, my buddy Forrest and I did a vid review of one of my sessions and that went really well.

I ended up playing for about 5 hours today since I spent a few hours doing that vid review and ended up around one buy-in.  I'm looking forward to tomorrow and Saturday, as I'm planning on playing pretty much all day so hopefully I can have a big weekend and play well.

Here are some pics from when Liz and I were hanging out.

No more RUSH

I'm giving up on RUSH for the rest of the month.  Had three HORRIBLE days playing it.  Got absolutely annihilated running really great hands into the nuts over and over and over and over.

I'm going to play regular 6 max for the rest of the month and will be grinding out 200NL as well to build confidence.  I feel like I still am able to beat 400NL regular 6 max but honestly my overall poker confidence is a bit low at this point after getting crushed at RUSH.

I'm going to be table selecting like crazy and trying to really focus on dominating fish.  Hopefully the rest of the month goes better than the first three days of disaster.

Running into American Airlines

Ran into AA about 6 times today pre-flop and got stacked each time.  Each time I had a nut type hand, QQ+ or AK.  Overall ran pretty horrid and it was not a fun day.  I was down $1.3k at my low point, but decided to abandon RUSH for the day and play regular poker and made a decent comeback... finishing down about $500.

I think tomorrow I will just stick to regular 6 max because there should be more big fish out and about due to the weekend coming up.  I just need a break from the swings and frustrations of RUSH.  I had one, one hour session of RUSH today in which I dropped 7.5 buy-ins.  It was pretty sick, but I did make mistakes that cost me one, maybe two stacks.

I am going to try and not look at results at all when playing tomorrow, as I think I'm letting it affect my mood too much depending on how much I'm up or down, etc.  I just need to focus on the task at hand and treat every hand and situation independently.  My focus should be on playing my best at all times... and I don't know if I've been doing that lately.

Great weekend

I ended up having a fun and relaxing weekend with my girlfriend, Liz.  On Saturday night we went on a really fun dinner cruise for three hours on Lake Michigan on Saturday.  It was easily the biggest boat I've ever been on before in my life and it was pretty cool.  They had a full buffet, music, dance floor, great service, and great views of the city from the top of the boat.  The city lit off fireworks at 9 PM and again at 10 PM above Navy Pier so that was pretty cool to watch them from the water.

We also saw a few of the "tall ships" which are basically really large sail ships with massive sails.  There was one roaming around at night and it got within about 800 yards of us.  I ended up requesting a swing dance song and they played it... so Liz and I did some swing dancing, which was a blast.

We just hung out by my pool on Saturday and did a few other small things.  Overall it was a great weekend and I had a blast.

I'm looking forward to playing poker a ton for the rest of the week as I'm going to really work on building up my roll in case FTP ends up offering $2/4 NL 6 Max RUSH poker... which they may or may not do.  I'm guessing the variance in that game would be absolutely insane so I want to be over rolled for that game for sure.

Here are some pics from the weekend.

Frustrating day

Played a bunch on Stars today and renewed my Supernova status so it's now good until the end of September... in the process I lost about 4 buy-ins while multi-tabling full ring.  It's so frustrating getting coolered non-stop in full ring, I don't know how people can sit there and play that ever day.  I gave up with that, played some 6 max, ended up doing a lot better but still didn't win due to running like a midget with a broken leg.  Whatever, fuck it.

I'm taking a few days off and I'm looking forward to hanging with Liz.  I definitely need a few days away from poker, I'm super tilted right now.  Last hand to end the day... a 50 vpip drooler holding A4 turns a 4 vs my AK on AQX4 and ships for like a min raise on the turn.  FML.

Decent day

I didn't end up going to the office today so I just played from my apartment.  Played a bit of RUSH and regular 6 max and finished up about 6 buy-ins.  I actually ran quite badly as I had many spots where I just shipped it in as a favorite and got outdrawn by total droolers.  It happens, part of the game.

I've been working out regularly over the past 2 or 3 weeks or so and I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping it up.  I have a gym in my apartment building so there are 0 excuses for me to not be in shape.  I began just lifting weights every other day but now I'm trying to go there every day... so I am running 30 minutes per day on the treadmill and then lifting weights for one hour per day.  I am alternating between chest & shoulders on one day, and biceps & triceps on the other day, while mixing in other random exercises on each day too.

It's working out pretty well and I can already see that my upper body has a lot more shape and bulk... even some of my shirts don't fit anymore because my chest is too big.  I have also lost a bit of body fat around the stomach area which is always good too.

Plan is to hit the office hard tomorrow so I'm going to go to sleep a bit early and try and wake up before noon so I can hit the gym before I head to the office.

Fun Sunday

I had a lot of fun today, as Tim invited me over to his place and I spent the day there.  I watched him play a bit on his laptop then I played a few sessions as well.  His girlfriend, Maggie, was over too and we all ended up watching four "Lifetime" TV channel movies, lol.  The acting was pretty weak in a lot of them, haha but the movies were still fun.

Also, Tim cooked up a pretty kickass piece of marinated chicken and porkchop for dinner, which was quite tasty.  I'll have to return the favor and cook something at my apartment and invite them over sometime.

Poker ended up going really well today and despite only playing for a few hours I won quite a bit.  Yesterday wasn't that hot though, as I ended up losing a decent amount and ran $1.2k below EV for the second day in a row (Friday I ran pretty far below EV too).  The EV stat isn't really all that healthy or do that much good to look at but whatever, I do look at it.

I'm going to try and avoid making it a big deal in the future and also start doing a better job of not seeing how much I'm up or down for the day until I'm done playing for the day.  I'd like to say I'm not going to look until the month is over or something but let's be honest, that's going to be nearly impossible to do so I'm going to start out small.

It really kills my motivation to put in volume if I'm already up quite a bit to start off the day, which is silly because poker is just one long session over the span of my life.  It shouldn't matter if I start playing again an hour or two from my last session or the next day, unless I don't feel like I'd be playing well.

Great day despite getting pretty unlucky

Honestly, I don't really care if I ran pretty terribly... I still had one of the bigger daily wins that I've had in a while.  I finished the day up $1.8k after playing around 5k hands over 6 hours.  I played a bit of everything today... started out mass tabling $1-2 NL full ring, then played some regular $2-4 NL 6 max and even ended up playing in two amazing $5-10 NL 6 max games.

I'm pretty happy with my play overall.  Nutedawg was able to sweat me for about an hour or so while I was playing and that was very helpful.  I definitely learned a few things.

I did run pretty badly though... should have won $3k if I would have run at EV for all-ins.  The 5 times I got stacked, I could basically do nothing about.  Two of them were me losing with KK vs AA when we were all-in pre-flop.  I also lost when I had AA vs KK all-in pre-flop.  Lost a coin flip on the flop and lost a hand to quads in a ridiculous fashion.  The player in this hand was HORRID... he was running 78/31 over 109 hands and had run up a $3.4k stack at $2-4 NL at the time of this hand, lol.  He was so bad he's calling this full pot river shove with any pair for sure... he may even call that shove with nothing, play the board, and hope to split the pot too.

I'm glad I was able to have a good day at the tables though and hopefully this gives me momentum to finish off the month strong.  Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Good Weekend

Overall, I had a good weekend.  Friday night went as planned and Liz and I ended up going to Enclave and watching the Black Eyed Peas.  We both ended up getting pretty wasted though by the end of the night, haha.  The Black Eyed Peas performance was pretty limited, as it was just one guy on the mike and then a DJ that apparently was part of the group.  Also it seemed like it took forever for them to actually go on stage and do something too because two slobs just ended up dancing on stage for probably over 30 minutes.  It was a fun night though.

I ended up hanging with Liz for a bit on Saturday then spent the rest of the weekend playing poker.  I tried my luck at the Sunday Million today and of course I standardly lost a coin flip with AKs vs 77 to bust.  I played cash the rest of the day today and ended up winning despite running pretty poorly.

Here are some pics from the weekend.