Development, Development, Development!

Howdy blog readers, hope all is well with everyone.

After my 50 buy-in downswing at the start of February I took a few days off to cool down and reconsider my goals for the month. I had originally planned to spend a lot of March studying 6max cash games, since I have a longer term goal of transitioning to cash games exclusively and to never play another sit n go again. Since February's plan went in the toilet, I've bumped this up and spent most of the past 10 days or so immersed in short-handed cash strategy. I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made so far.

Tournament poker and short handed cash are two very different games. I say this for the benefit of those who aren't very familiar with the game. I think it's fair to say that in tournament poker the quality of your pre-flop decisions will largely make or break you as a player, whereas in cash games it's your post-flop decisions that matter most. In cash you're always sitting with at least 100 big blinds which means that most of the time when you're faced with a decision to play for stacks you're sitting somewhere on the flop, turn or river. Adjusting to this has been... surprisingly easy so far. I've already learned a lot in the past week or so.

I've played about 6,000 hands of NL20 to get my feet wet and am up about 12 buy-ins, mostly 2-3 tabling. I've been playing a much more loose-aggressive style than most in order to put myself in as many post-flop situations as possible. I'm doing this not necessarily because it's the optimal way to play, but to get as much practice post-flop as I can on really weak tables. The regulars in these games are super-nitty and few have tried to adjust to my constant pounding away at their blinds and pots. And the fish are not-surprisingly... just terrible. I'll be moving up to NL50 in the next day or so and am not expecting to have to make many adjustments. I'm hoping my stay at NL50 will be brief as the goal is to settle in at NL100 as soon as I can.

Throughout this month I've been wondering about whether my decision to quit the Double Up SNG promotion was correct, or just me being a pussy. I'm pleased to say that after observing the leaderboards and the profit graphs of those competing at the top, I've never felt so good about quitting anything in my life.

To give you a little taste of what these guys are doing to themselves:

Current 1st place

Current 2nd place


You get the idea. Granted, I'm not sure that either of these guys are particularly good to begin with, but even those who were winning before the promo have that very distinct downward slope at the end of their graphs.

In my next entry I'll go into more detail about transitioning to cash. In particular we'll look at the importance of paying attention to the action even when we're not involved in hands, and the importance of taking many brief but still detailed notes on how your opponents play and react to your play. It's through these specific observations of our opponents that we'll learn how to most effectively exploit their weaknesses and end up with their stacks.

Cheers for now!

February, February, February!!

I mentioned yesterday that there were a lot of regulars in the Double Up games b/c of the promotion. The effect this has had on the games cannot be overstated! So far this month I've played 457 of these tournaments for a loss of $1413 (be sure to check out the awesome graph at the end of this post!). The thing is, everybody else grinding these games are losing at pretty much the same clip. Everybody is playing so close to optimally (also consider the flat payout structure and fast blind structure) - there really is no edge to be had in these games at all. Once you deduct the rake, everyone's a loser. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to rethink my plan for February.

After the 1st day I was 4th place in my division and close enough to 1st to feel good about being able to take it down. I still have no doubt that I can put in enough volume to win these races, I'm just not a masochist and cannot imagine putting myself through an entire month of losing steadily just to make a little profit from the promotion and rakeback.

Time to put on my thinking cap, and almost time for Lost!

January results ($2900)

This is going to be a quick results update. I barely played 1000 SNG tournaments last month which is pretty sad even considering the distractions/complications. I lost marginally over all of my games (~$200), but after rakeback and bonuses finished up on the month about ~$2900. $1000 of that came in the form of a compensation bonus from BetFred since the complications on their end made it impossible to compete in the rake races last month. I have to thank my super awesome affiliate for all of that (PM or email me if you need a good iPoker affiliate). Also it was a nice gesture from my favorite poker site and I feel pretty fortunate to have received it.

This month is going to be insanely hectic. A double-up SNG race started today that will reward almost $200K in prizes over the course of the month, and over $50K in freeroll value on top of that. If I win all four of the races in my 'division' I will get an extra $10,000 from that alone this month. I've won these races in the past but it's going to be extra difficult since all the grinders seem to have come out for this promo. This is hurting the softness of the games in a pretty profound way so far, but I suspect that more than a few souls will be crushed in the next few days and the field will thin out to something more manageable (I hope anyway!). I've already put in a ton of volume today and will be putting some more games in as soon as I finish with this.

So to finish up, in terms of meeting our required monthly nut to hit the goal, January was obviously pretty bad. But this is ok and everything is still sitting well with me. I'm super excited to compete in the races this month and I will be blogging about how they're going frequently throughout the month, starting sometime tomorrow afternoon.

Cheers and thx for reading!

January is still terrible

I've been neglecting the blog because I don't want to complain, but January continues to be a thorn in my side. The registration problems I blogged about last time were only the beginning of a much more annoying problem. iPoker, my preferred poker network, has been undergoing a painful update process that has made it very difficult to get on the grind.

I figured out a workaround to the registration problem and was able to put in a solid 4-5 days. However on the 19th the client forced a major update that broke all of the modding programs. Those of you who don't play on iPoker, or play online poker period will probably have a hard time understanding the significance of this. But to put it candidly iPoker is an extremely ugly platform and the only way to facilitate mass multi-tabling is to completely change the way the client displays information.

Because iPoker uses a proprietary format for images and text this isn't a simple matter of swapping files around. In fact the problem is so widely recognized, and the ugliness of the client so profound, that there is enough demand to sustain the development of three different commercial applications (two of which I own) whose sole purpose is to make the appearance of the tables more friendly to iPoker customers (ipskinner, minimaxmod, and iBolide).

On top of this the commercial iPoker betpot application is also broken. A betpot program makes it easier to execute decisions when you're playing a lot of tables at the same time (I typically play between 12-20 tables). For example, instead of having to click the fold button I can simply right-click anywhere on the table. And instead of typing a bet amount into the betting box I can simply scroll the middle mouse wheel to increment my betting up and down. When you have to make 30+ decisions a minute these are the 'conveniences' that become absolutely necessary.

So I've basically spent a lot of the past three days trying to cope with this change in my playing environment. Until this problem is fixed I'm going to be focusing on finishing a staking arrangement on my Stars account that I started last year. Hopefully the iPoker mess gets fixed soon. Also I will be blogging more going forward. Three blogs in 23 days is pretty lazy!

Slow start to January

I knew January would be a slow start, but I didn't think it would be this slow. Both mine and my father's birthdays fall within the first 4 days of the month, so time with family took priority out of the gate. Unfortunately this was immediately followed up by the passing of my grandfather, so obviously poker wasn't even on the radar for days following that (RIP gramps).

I woke up yesterday with a plan to really kick the poker year into gear and was met with even more resistance. For some reason with the exception of a brief window I've been unable to register for tournaments on my preferred poker site since yesterday ~noon. The "register" button just doesn't do anything, and CS has offered me no practical advice but obv assures me everything will be fixed soon.

So in short, things haven't been going well. But I'm young, healthy and stubborn, and there's still lots of year left. Here's hoping for a better start to the second half of January both personally and professionally.

Here we gogogo!

I've been grinding online tournaments full time for about 3 years. This is no secret to most of my friends, family and the STT forum regulars on 2+2. This year though I'm going to do something different in an effort to curb what may be best described as extreme laziness, or total lack of motivation. In 2010 I'm going to be blogging a bunch about mostly poker related stuff. Although some non-poker stuff my sneak in every now and then (no politics, I promise).

Most importantly though at the start of every month I will be releasing my records for the previous month, showing exactly how much time I've put in and how much money I've made. My first results entry will be posted on February 1st and with enough hard work (hard work that I'm shaming myself into, obv) and the blessing of the poker gods we'll be on our way to $100k. Until then I'll be blogging periodically about whatever and grinding away.

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