I just finished watching the first episode of WCG Ultimate Gamer (gogo inc pwnin) and it made me wonder if they will ever make a reality poker show. I guess it would probably be really boring as any sort of competition. It would have to be one of those MTV style follow around the biggest idiot you can find type of show. Just get some young guy who's made millions and spends like an idiot and acts like a moron and film that for long enough to put together 8 episodes. And that sounds horrible.
I have a feeling inc is gonna win Ultimate Gamer. And even though the show wasn't amazing I am definitely gonna watch every episode, mostly to cheer inc on. Kinda funny how he's answering questions about the show on the TL.net forum but he can't tell us if he won or not =)
Also watched W tonight and my GF hated it. Like it made her angry cause she thought it was so boring and bad. I personally thought it was ok but there was nothing new in there that I didn't already know. Overall it was disturbing to see the parts in the white house, especially anything that had cheyney in it. What a fucking nutjob creep that guy is.
Poker goes well. Having a good month and a definite heater. Playing more hands as I get more comfy. Eventually I'll downswing and end up wanting to grind through it and everything will even out, haha.
Showdown pennman14: shows (a pair of Tens)
Hero: mucks hand
pennman14 collected $815.50 from pot
Summary Total pot $818.50 | Rake $3
Board
Seat 1: Moneyball16 (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 2: Marshall28 (big blind) folded before Flop
Seat 3: pennman14 showed and won ($815.50) with a pair of Tens
Seat 4: Hero mucked
Seat 5: Black_Jon folded before Flop (didnt bet)
Seat 6: =AK=AZO=818= (button) folded before Flop (didnt bet)
And this wasn't even that long of a session, but the coolers and beats came out of the woodworks to get back at me for dodging them with all my short sessions! lol.
Oh btw, I had a Marshall28 sighting:
He managed to cooler me by rivering 2pair to beat my turned 2pair, right after I'd recovered my money from the maniac fish from the hand above. That's what the final dip in my graph is from, haha. Oh well.
Anyway not the end of the world, just a 2 bi loss. At least I played well. Made one bad bluff vs a nitty player but I really thought he would fold a lot. I think I may have fooled myself. I tried to do the bluff at a time when a bunch of waitlists had hit so I suddenly had 12 tables up and was a bit too distracted to give it full attention.
This is when those EV graphs are good - to help heal the heart while licking your wounds. haha
Strange how it's so much easier to grind a shit load of hands while breaking even or losing than when winning.
I've played like 6k hands this month. That's horrible. Last month I'd played like 20k hands at this point. I'm fighting 3 things that are keeping me from achieving mass grinding:
1) Winning - I'm consistently winning and winning quick. Like I sit down and in the first 100-200 hands I'm up 2 buyins. I stay a bit longer and hit the 300-400 hand mark and am at about the same place in terms of session winnings so I quit before I get apathetic or lethargic or greedy or pretty much anything that might get me into a bad mental state. And because I keep winning and it's a higher limit so 2 buyins feels like a huge score, I have much less motivation to grind it out.
2) Higher limit and less tables - Last month I did a lot of 12-16 tabling of NL100 cause I had a huge BR for it and about 250k hands of experience, so I felt very confident and was fine with mass grinding. This month I try really hard to stick to 6 tables because I really do play my best game when I have 6 tables or less and time to think about everything. Being up at a higher limit where I don't have hands on everybody or long term reads to use, I really need to pay more attention. I don't have the 100k hands winning here to get myself confident in playing a lot of tables. Plus I'm trying to learn as much as possible - I don't want to just grind it out and do what I already know.
3) Mental fatigue - I'm not watching TV while I play anymore and am thinking very deeply about all hands/situations, and that's much more taxing on the brain than 16 tabling NL100 while watching a movie and just robot pokering. 500 hand sessions are hard to get myself to do cause I have trouble maintaining a peak mental state for that long. And when I take a break I never want to go right back to grinding because of reason #1. I guess there's also the mental fear of a downswing or losing session. I still haven't gotten used to the bigger loses and wins per session of NL200 compared to NL100. So I have a mental battle to deal with there. I think when I hit a 10k BR I'll feel a lot better and not so scared of a losing session.
So I just gotta keep grinding it out, hit that higher BR, and eventually my comfort with NL200 will be complete and I'll be able to put in longer and longer sessions. I'm already feeling better but I can feel a huge gap between how I was with NL100 and how I am now with NL200. Luckily all these things have basically only held me back from playing mass hands... sux for the FPP but is great otherwise cause I am nearly always playing in a great mental state and playing my best poker. I'm not playing with scared money and the second I feel myself protecting a win I quit. So overall my volume has decreased but that's not bad considering that everything else is going great. I feel like over the last 30 days I've played the best poker of my life. It's been really great.
Anyway here's March so far:
BR @ 9k. It's down despite winning because I made a payment to my awesome coach, cause without him I'd still be stuck on NL50/NL100 =)
Oh and one last piece of good news is that I'm finally a lifetime winner on NL200! I was down like 3k in failed NL200 shots or something like that but the last 30 days I've recovered and am in the green! WooT
I just got this email... wtf... it sounds way too good to be true and if it is true then damn, I don't want fish getting more training.
k2o4, you are invited to the Full Tilt Poker Academy...
Now there's a new way to Learn, Chat and Play with the pros, with the launch of Full Tilt Poker Academy. Take your game to the next level at Full Tilt Poker Academy, where you can learn from the best players in the game for free.
Full Tilt Poker Academy offers a unique interactive experience that allows you to learn from members of Team Full Tilt including Chris Ferguson, Howard Lederer and Phil Gordon. You'll use a library of multimedia content - including video, podcasts, hand replayers, quizzes and tests - which is updated daily and suitable for players of every skill level.
You can begin with Lessons on key strategies and techniques, view live Sessions to see the theory in action, take a Pro Challenge online at Full Tilt Poker or put your knowledge to the test with an interactive Sit-N-Learn.
To start learning at the most comprehensive training ground in poker, go to Full Tilt Poker Academy and enroll for free.
See you there,
Full Tilt Poker
personally I think it's probably a load of BS. I can't imagine them ever doing any sort of real free training with these guys. I figure it will be the quality level of the free articles they send out in the emails, which is pretty low.
Holy Heater! 11 Bi day... haven't had one of these in FOREVER. I think things are evening out from the horrible below EV shit I suffered in Feb. The lines have nearly re-converged and I'm only $600 below EV rather than $2,000. Winning flips and having hands hold up makes a huge difference!
Today:
I made up for my Sunday night spewfest earlier today and then sat down for a post dinner session and it was clear from the get go that I was on a heater. Pretty awesome to keep seeing good hands dealt and clean flops when you get it all-in. Also made some good plays and got guys to bluff 3 streets into me or payoff with crap hands like Q7s. I did make a few small mistakes and I am about to go review all my hands to find them, but overall I played really well. Much easier to play well when on a heater though!
I'm at a new BR high of $9,400. That won't last long though, for two reasons... 1) I'm on a heater and heaters are always followed by painful downswings to even out the variance, and 2) I have to make a payment to my coach when I hit $9.6k so that will take a bite outta the old BR. But overall I should be sitting above 40 BI for NL200 which is where I like to be. I need me a good cushion.
Anyway here's the full month so far:
March:
It's funny cause I'm more in shock and fear than excitment and joy. Shock at actually winning and the amount won, fear cause I know it's all very temporary and I'm not excited about the part where I lose it all. Overall I do think my play has become much better and that's having a huge effect on these results. Obviously the heater is affecting things, but I'm talking about my overall NL200 shot so far. A year ago when I tried NL200 I wasn't even close to ready, I had so much left to learn. When I started trying it again in November I was at the point where I could beat it but not crush it, and since I ran bad while taking shots I wasn't getting anywhere. Then since January I've had a lot of breakthroughs with my game and have been capable of crushing NL200 but just ran bad everytime I took a shot. Finally the variance has been on my side and my skill has made up for times when it isn't.
It's been a very long poker journey for me. Feels crazy to actually be playing NL200 and feeling confident about what I'm doing. I've spent so much time thinking about being at this point and to actually be living it is awesome =) I love being at a limit where a good day feels like a shitload of money. NL100 was kind of like that, but it doesn't compare to this. And I know to the big ballers NL200 is chump change so this rant may sound silly, but I've been a broke fool for so long with dreams of making money at poker and this is the real beginning of it all.
I've played over 600k hands lifetime and that's given me time to learn how to deal with the swings. I think without all those hands and experiences I'd be set up for a big potential fall right now. I am spending a lot of time reminding myself to stay unattached to the money and thinking about all the tricks I've learned to deal with downswings. So I'm prepared for that to come. But I'm also focusing on staying in the moment. I can't be thinking about how I'm about to downswing. I have to just focus on each hand as it comes and make the best decisions possible. And when that downswing does hit, revisit NL100 asap, have fun with NL50 HU, take a break, and all the other things.
Yeah, won all my flips when I got it in AIPF vs another full stack and lost all my flips AIPF vs short stacks, which is the way I prefer it to go =) Was able to get back to even for the month so now it's time to get really started.
But man, I hate sessions that are all about winning flips. Builds a lot of anxiety. When you're winning cause you have the nuts and are getting paid off it's awesome and relaxing. When you are getting into 3bet/4bet wars with regs and jamming JJ it gets a bit more tense, cause even though you know it's the right move you also know it's time for variance. Nice when that variance goes in your favor though!
Also got a nice concierge cashout of $1,110 so I feel good cause I know I've got all my bills and shit paid for this month. It's gonna be a fun month. Sitting on 41 buyins for NL200 so I have a good cushion. If I can get 50k hands in this month I'll be really happy. That will get me a solid amount of FPP and I should learn a lot. And if I run well it will be my biggest winning month for sure =)
No more stupid drunken sessions or playing while at all tilted! God, I was doing so good on that and then I slip 1 night and have my biggest losing session. Tilt is so evil.
Or I did. It was my birthday on Sunday and I hadn't played poker since Thursday because I worked all weekend, so I was drunk and eager to play on Sunday night and jumped on a bunch of NL200 tables. Ran like total shit with coolers and beats that were so ridiculous that I just laughed cause they were funny, not maddening. Kept playing and felt like I'd recovered to even so I kept playing, got coolered more and it finally got to me and I started to spew. I quit the session expecting a 2 buyin loss and it was actually 6.5 buyins............ FUCK.
Yesterday (monday) my GF and I went out to do birthday shopping and indoor skydiving so I didn't play at all, but I didn't feel like playing either. I felt down, scared, beat up. I'd had my biggest losing session @ NL200 and it all could have been avoided. It shot my confidence.
Today I had a full day alone to refocus on poker. Spent the morning setting up the new 23" monitor that I got for my Bday. Then I spent a bunch of time getting my confidence back. I felt like shit and didn't want to play and had to take a walk and talk to myself for a while. Eventually I felt good again and played a very good session and won nearly 3 buyins. On the road to recovery!
Anyway, here's the Feb results. They were good despite about 2 weeks of running horrible at the beginning. Ended the month moving up to NL200 and doing well there:
March has started shitty cause of Sunday night but today was the start to a recovery. Gonna keep grinding away and hopefully get to play NL200 all of march which could lead to a huge winning month. We'll see. I plan to do at least 100k hands @ NL200 before taking any NL400 shots, so it's gonna be a while =)
I also am planning to buy an ergonomic computer chair cause I spend so much of my time in front of a computer and already have lots of neck/back pain from sports injuries when I was younger, and this shit makes it so much worse. Has anyone done research on the best chairs to get? I'm gonna have to do a research session but if anyone has recommendations that would help me a lot so that I can make this process much shorter.
I had a bunch of other shit to say but I can't think of it now. Guess I will end up doing another blog soon when I remember it!
It's a cycle. This show goes from totally awesome to painfully stupid and in the last few seasons it seems to hit each extreme several times. This season started off pretty well, dipped a bit, got better, and then crashed. I just caught up with the last 2 episodes and god damn they were painful. Stupid as hell. They were completely unrealistic and moronic. From little things like a guy dying in 2 seconds from a knife to the back, to big things like the white house being taken over by terrorists. When 24 is good they do crazy shit but explain it well. This time they have guys take over the white house and all along the way it's impossible to stop thinking about all the simple things that people could do to stop the situation from developing. At no point do they offer any solid explanation for how these fuckers are pulling it off. Good stories put forth something that you think is impossible and explain how it is possible in a way that makes sense. Right now 24 is just saying "yeah it's impossible and we dunno how to explain it so just suspend your logic and common sense and watch it!"
I thought it was fucking awesome. He nailed it. He's sticking to the campaign promises that I remember and wanted him to go after, and he's approaching everything just the way I expected him to. I'm not at all let down, am extremely impressed and feel like he's living up to my expectations. There's been a lot of people trying to bring Obama down lately and since I haven't been paying much attention I have wondered whether the naysayers were right. But he totally re-assured me that I made the right choice in supporting him with this speech. I love his plan for the country, the scope of his longterm vision, and his understanding of the problems at a deeper level. And I think he delivered the speech masterfully. There's very little that he could have done better, imo. I loved how he joked around a bit, how he reached out to both sides, how he was stern with the bankers and called on Americans to take action. I loved the line addressed to high school students about how dropping out was not only quitting on themselves, but quitting on our country.
I'm totally confident that he will get us back on track if people just put aside partisan BS and get working. Obviously the far right wing will never agree, but their philosophies were rejected by the vast majority of this country after seeing the way those policies got us into such a mess after 8 years of a president who was their bitch. Those guys will never be happy and sorry, but tough shit, you had your chance and failed so now it's time for us to fix your mess.
And maybe I've got a skewed perspective because of the bush years, but usually during these speeches 90% of applause lines have half the chamber sitting and half the chamber standing. During this speech there were only a handful of times where all the republicans stayed seated. There were quite a few times where most republicans stayed seated, but nearly every single applause line had republicans standing and clapping along with the democrats. And there were a shit load of times where the entire chamber stood up. I've never seen that much support for a president. That was amazing. And inspiring. It was good to see so many republicans who were willing to toss the partisan shit aside and stand up and clap and show support for the good ideas coming from the president.
I found the entire thing on youtube for those of you who missed it. Seriously, it's worth watching. It's the best speech he's given since the campaign imo.
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(a pair of Tens)
