Overdue Update

So life and poker have been good the last couple of months. I got engaged, vacationed in Ibiza, chilled and grinded in Slovakia, caught the end of the Vancouver summer, and have finally settled into a new apartment in a great part of town. I accomplished all this while getting in respectable volume and putting a ton of work into my game.

I just booked the best month of the year at table winnings ( i may have made more $ earlier in the year when I grinded out big bonuses), but either way booking a solid month feels good. I think it's some hard work paying off. I have been active with a coach and a group he facilitates, and have been grinding away in holdem manager breaking down my game. I can confidently say I am playing better than ever before.

RR

Quick May + June Update

Hey,

Havn't been feeling like blogging at all lately. I arrived back in Slovakia last night and am here with the gf visiting her friends and family. We also have a mini 5day holliday to Ibiza planned in two weeks.

Been grinding 9-12 tables of 100nl the last couple months. Have gotten decent volume putting in 130 hours in May and about 105 hours so far this month. It has been going okay and I really notice the changes in my game starting to pay off. Still the number one thing is maintaining quality focus throughout sessions and remembering to think before each action. Seems so simple.

April

Interesting Month.

First month of non-SNE grinding this year. I managed to get 90 hours - 72K hands of 100nl - and earn just over 20 buyins in $ and EV.

My game has changed alot in the last few months and I am happy with it but still feel I need to keep working hard off the tables. Im gonna start off May with a DB review of April and while going through my Alan Jackson coaching vids. Then my goal is to grind 150 hours of anywhere from 6-16 tabling. It would be great to take some 200nl shots, but the BR isn't quite there yet. I just want to focus on getting my hours in and making sure they are quality!

Ofcourse FT and Stars closed to american players. I feel sorry for all the American grinders I know personally. Man I would be so choked to be in your shoes. I wish you all good luck getting back on the grind ASAP. In the meantime I think the games are actally a bit better since black friday. All the more reason to work harder my my game and dilligently get in the hours.

I got a surprise call last weekend. It was pokerstars calling me to let me know that one of their sponsored online pros Tyler Frost (his blog is linked on my blogroll as frosty) was taking a group of there VIP players from Vancouver out for dinner on stars dime and asked if I wanted to go. Easy answer obv. They picked me up in a limo with 7 other supernovas, took us downtown to a trendy restaurant were we ran up a $1K bill on appetizers and drinks. We got back in the limo and went to a club/bar where they greased the bouncer to get us past the line. Once inside we partied like rockstars -thanks to stars- and racked up a huge bar tab by buying rounds of 25 vitamin C shots at a time. It was great to meet all the guys - I was the oldest at 25yrs, lol- It was weird to be in a social setting where it was actually fun and not weird or lame to talk poker. There was a range from cash guys, mtt's guys, plo guys and sitngo guys, all really interesting and cool people. Hope to cross paths with any of em again.

Have a Good May!
RR55.

Quest Over: Fresh Start!

My SNE Quest for 2011 has come to an end. It stings a bit to say but overall I am happy about the decision.

So what happened? The first two months of the year I was getting by. I was putting in alot of hours and trucking along at about 90% of the pace I needed for SNE. I was just slightly losing at the tables and banking decent money in bonuses. In February I decided I didn't like the status quo and wanted to actually be beating the games and planned on picking up the pace in March and April. I worked my ass off this month to make that happen. I played every single day and put in countless hours off the table working on my game. My game has changed quite a bit since I started working on it seriously in early February. The first two weeks of march things went decent and I felt like I was seeing progress. Then I hit a major downwing about 1/2 way through the month. I recovered and was back to even for the month in the third week, and then got crippled the last week and a half. And ofcourse this is all while running good above my $EV. The last part of this second downswing I felt mentally burnt out, physically out of shape and run down, and emotionally not happy.

So after working everyday of the month I decided on March 30 that I did not want to go on like this.

Don't feel sorry for me, I think it's all for the best and have no regrets. This experience has shown me how hard I can work at poker and has made me more hungry to improve than ever before. It also led me to my coach, who I still stay in touch with and has led me to other interesting ideas and people. I also did decently in terms of $, losing $3300 in the poker, but clearing $16K in bonus ($1200+$2800+$4K+$4K+$4K).

If I were to try SNE again I would want to be comfortably 12 tabling at 200nl for at least 1ptbb for some time before I ramped it up. I think 15 tabling 200nl for like 6 hours a day 23 days a month is a much more sane way to do it that 20+ tabling 100nl for 7 hours per day 25 days per month.

So now what? Nothing too major. I still plan to grind a lot of hours playing pokers and working on my game off the tables. I just won't have the stress of some pace that I struggled to stay with while working hard and would lose ground on every time I left my poker bubble for a minute to participate in real life.

I am still going to play at stars but probably cut down to 9-15 tables while I work on my game.

I am also going to be splitting my hours trying out some of the smaller softer sites. I am actually really excited about this. I have been shopping around the last couple days for rakeback deals, something I don't know much about. I have heard I can get sick unadvertised deals if I know who to talk to and can show them the potential volume I bring, maybe even 50%+. If you have any advice on this please let me know.

Finally, Here is the graph. I'm now going to back to my old ways of not posting graphs and results on the blog because it generally isn't something I feel comfortable doing. It was fun for the SNE quest though.

Just to add in an edit since I forgot when I wrote this. I made it to 214K vpps and was ~25K vpp's behind the SNE pace at the end of March when I decided to thrown in the towel on the quest.

February

February has always been my least favorite month of the year, and this year was no exception. Pokerwise I put in a lot of effort and had a bad month in terms of results and volume. In terms of life it wasn't all that bad but my girlfriend and I both got whacked with the flu that has been going around, I also wasted about 4 full days this month being really hungover, where I am not productive in poker or life.

I played 132.5 hours this month, 197600K hands, earned 65.7K vpp's ($5145 in bonuses), and finished -$698 (-$EV-3279). So I actually ran really hot in terms of $EV and still had a losing month. I also went on a big heater the last couple days to make it seem not as bad as it felt. The fact that I was down so much in $EV last month and this month started to bother me, which turned into motivation to improve.



The one really positive thing that came out of this February was I can confidently say I worked harder on my poker game than I ever have before, Alot harder! I put in 4coaching sessions this month, went over the recording of these sessions and made pages of notes. I also spent alot of time on my own playing around in HEM looking at my game. It is such a valuable tool. I guess I never really spent much time with it before since I didn't feel comfortable with all the filters and stuff. But if you spend the time to learn the program you start to see alot of cool stuff. I would guess that I put in about 30 hours of non-playing time on my game this month. I have a ton of things to try to improve upon and will slowly work on them one by one.

I currently sit at 141K vpp's on the year. 20K vpp back of the SNE pace. This is not where I wanted to be when I mapped this out at the start of the year. I am also going to be dropping the number of tables I play for the next while as I work on improving my game. I am absolutely not giving up and don't count myself out it at all. I am only 5 full work days behind pace. I plan on working really hard this month and want to put in over 200 hours. How much of this is grinding on the tables and how much is off the table work depends on how things go. I am so motivated to play the best poker I can and learn to both beat the games and grind SNE. Also knowing that if I could work my way up to 1/2nl where you earn way more vpps per hand is huge motivation to improve.

Good Luck in March!

January

I was super busy this month with a bunch of life stuff, so didn't get as much poker in as I should have. I had 6 full days of no poker and a bunch of 1/2 - 3/4 days. Beata and I moved back to Vancouver from Slovakia, we had to settle into a new apartment, and I spent alot of time helping with her resume and job applications. I still managed to get in 144 hours, 230495 hands, 75.2K vpps, and finished up 3 buyins on the month (-24 buyins $EV, so I ran good again).

I finished the month 8K vpps behind SNE pace. Im not too worried about it since it was such a busy month. My goal for February is 90K vpps which would but me back on pace. I really plan to go big in March, April and May.

Some other cool stuff on the poker front. I bought 5 sessions with a bluefire pokercoach who specializes in HEM analysis. I have already had my first session with him and I thought it was great.

I ordered gunnar glasses after seeing them in the fpp store and reading some online reviews. Today was my first full day playing with them and I think they are absolutely awesome and make a huge difference. Fwiw - I ordered them at www.gunnars.com for $100. The fpp store charges like $160 in fpp's and only has one style to choose from.

Not too into blogging lately, but I will stick to my monthly updates. Life outside poker has been awesome.

Good Luck in February.

December

Woot!!! I just shipped the 500K vpp bonus and cashed another $4K bonus to finish off the year :)

I grinded 255,827 hands in 158.92 hours for 1610 hands/hour. Finished +32 buyins on the month (-7 buyins $EV) so I finally ran hot! The 85765 vpp I earned is worth $8K in bonuses. Finishing the year off with a +11K month is a great feeling, it hasn't been an easy year so this helps alot.



As far as the grind went it was interesting and I learned alot. The month started with a brutal downswing that lasted about 100K hands. It was psychologically one of my tougher moments in poker. Being down +3K so early on in the month, my bankroll hitting an all time low on the year at $7K, and having to work everyday - 7.5hours (I didn't take my fist day off till Dec 17h) made me question if continuing was even a good idea. I had to shut out images of grinding so many hours this month and breaking even or losing money. At the worst times I feared going broke in my account before even making it to the bonus. I'm not proud to admit that I had these thoughts. But it is important that I acknowledge them and learn from them. I know I am stronger for showing up, facing these fears and grinding day in and day out. I constantly tried to play better every day and thought about and worked on my game the few hours I was away from the table. I anticipate I will see many swings like this in the year to come as I attempt SNE. It is really just more motivation to improve my game from break even to even a 0.5ptbb winner, doing so would dramatically reduce the impact of varience.



Then the heater came. Not much to say other than it's a fun game to play when everthing goes your way. I took 3days off over Christmas and enjoyed Slovak Christmas with Beata and her family. Good food Good people and some intersting new traditions :) I got back to work on the 27th and had to face a little drama at the end of the month. With 2K vpps to go, during a break I was surfing the web, clicked on something I shouldn't have clicked on ;) on boom accidnetly installed some type of virus or malcious addware on my computer. The program that installed itself is call "HDD Low" it acts like a windows security center and creates all these pop ups saying I have all these problems "full handrive, not enough ram etc" which is BS cuz I have been able to run PS, HEM, and TN fine with no lag since it installed itself. I also can't figure out how to uninstall it, as it isn't in the normal place to do so. Also wierd is I can no longer start task manager with "ctrl,alt,del". Anyway at the end of my day I restarted the computer to check that it would start up this morning so I could play, it didnt go well, all that showed up was a black screen with the HDD adware and nothing else. I decided to call it a day and spent a restless night figuring out plans on what to do if I couldn't play on my computer. I decided if I had to I would play on Beata's netbook, hooking up my 24inch screen and 6 tabling with out a HUD for the appox 12 hours it would take to get 2K vpp. Glad it didn't come down to that.

Plan on spending the next few days fixing my computer and updating all my programs so I am good to start grinding Jan 2nd. Going to a New Years party in Bratislava and am stoked!

Happy New Year!