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Hello!

Last blog I talked about starting PLO and so far it's been going really well in terms of results. I've quickly moved up from $0.10/$0.25 to $1/$2 so far, winning at a nice winrate, although I've been running super hot at $1/$2 obviously. The game is really complex though and I'm still not very confident in my play despite the results thus far. One reason that I know my game is still very weak is because MiPwnYa keeps owning me and instantly sits in to play me HU whenever I join a new table and he's online, I feel like he may have added me to some buddy list as I've already spewed like $1k to him which is like 5 buyins at $0.50/$1 and 2.5 at $1/$2 despite winning a $1k pot at $1/$2 vs him. ! I'm getting better though and am sure I will continue to do so, hopefully I'm already good enough to beat $1/$2 and can continue learning and building my bankroll back up from there.

Here are stats so far:


Sidenote: One thing I love about PLO is how many VPPs you make, I'm not even close to Supernova and we're halfway through the year but it's definitely possible for me to get there if I'm playing $1/$2 PLO or above, even if I don't play that many hands a month.

On another note, I'm leaving Korea on August 17th. I'm going to be staying in New Jersey for a month, during my stay I'll be hanging out with the gf and her friends, many of whom I've already met when they visited Korea. I'm also going to be taking a trip out to Toronto to meet some nerds that we both know from World of Warcraft. Naturally I'm looking forward to sampling many "bad" (good) American foods, I', expect to put on a lot of weight and potentially have a heart attack, so let's hope I run good and don't die. Just before I leave, on September 8th, I'm gonna celebrate my birthday, so far I don't have any plans on what I'm going to be on that day, but I'm not planning on getting too hungover as I'm going to see Katatonia and Swallow the Sun in New York the following day. A few days after that I'm going to be returning to England "for good", where I'll go back to live with my family. I'm looking to buy a house with my parents and go 50/50 on it, so they've been looking around at houses and they like this one:



Whether we move into this house or some other house I'm planning on making the garage a home gym so I can work out without the need to go to a gym because I'm simply to lazy to travel there each day, particularly since the gym is like 4 miles away and I don't drive. I've tried to get into working out several times in the past but it never really stuck, I've gained a decent bit of weight during my stay in Korea and will obviously gain even more during my stay in the States so I'm remotivated and I feel like with a home gym I'll be way more likely to stick to some kind of schedule since it's no effort at all to just go into the garage and work out. On that note, if anyone has any recommendations as to what I should get, and potentially where I should get it from, I'd appreciate it!

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

0 votes

Comments (19)

Hey there, long time no see again! Just over a year ago I tried to make a 50c/$1 6max video for this site, and after a couple of attempts, bad content, tilt and silly plays in the video which I did not really want to show resulted in fail. With that fail, pokertableratings.com reported me as -$150 or so in 800 hands, me being OCD and all, I endeavored to fix that red report and make it green with a winrate of at least 2BB/100, I think any lower than that is a pretty bad winrate particularly for myself and particularly at a stake which is so far below where I used to play regularly. After over 100k hands, months on and off of playing those stupid stakes I've finally attained a winrate of 2.02BB/100 on pokertableratings. I can officially stop playing there now which is a huge relief for me.

I withdrew about $50k late Feb/Early March, leaving myself with just $250 intending to quit playing for a while and just robusto a bankroll whenever I restarted playing. Just 2 days after leaving myself with $250, I went ahead and started playing again, after experiencing some wild swings early on which put me up to 1.2k and then dropping to ~$20, almost bustoing a "bankroll" for the first time in my life in the process, I've managed to work it back up playing a mix of micro stakes. The results culminated in ~$2.5k profit, and attaining the aforementioned 2.02BB/100 winrate on 50c/$1 according to pokertableratings.com.

Here are said stats for those interested:



Another finally is that this is probably the start of my run at PLO. Although I'm gonna be starting at low stakes again, mainly because I don't know the game very well at all, and because I don't have a huge amount of money online anyway, I do expect to move up through the stakes fairly rapidly and improve quickly. I think long term, learning other games is extremely necessary to maximise potential winnings and I should've done this long ago. No doubt, if it wasn't for my OCD tendencies with regards to making my stats look relatively pretty I would've done so, but alas, better late than never.

A huge help, when I get around to it, is that I'm going to attempt to sell my WoW account and never play the game again. I don't regret playing the game, and to be honest I still find it kinda fun, but it's too much of a time sink and I need to focus on poker as I've severely underachieved/underplayed the last 1.5-2 years or so. Hopefully I'll get a few buyins for the account and pad the roll I have left in Stars account a little too.

Goals from here on out are to move up through the PLO ladder, hopefully getting to a point where I can win at PLO400 or so for a reasonable winrate, rebuild my bankroll so I can then play a mix of 400PLO, 600NLHE, 1kNLHE for the rest of the year. Hopefully, without WoW, and without 50c/$1 winrates holding me back, I can get to where I should be again, and sort myself out.

Here's hoping!

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Comments (57)

Hi guys. I have $25 left on my UB account which I released AFTER I withdrew from there stupidly so I want to exchange that for $25 on either Stars or FTP. I'd be ok with paypal or neteller exchange if there's no interest. PM me please!

0 votes

Comments (8)

Last blog I posted that I would coach one lucky LP member for free, and I have made my decision. I chose mknybtlr for a few reasons, firstly his PM to me was by far the most detailed, informative and indepth response I got and he answered my questions better than everyone else. Secondly he is a friend of Ket, and since Ket got me into poker I thought it would be cool to kinda hand the baton on from Ket to me and from me on to mknybtlr. Ket assured me that he's a good guy with the motivation and intelligence to succeed and it does seem that way to me so far from his PM and the short chats we've had so hopefully we'll see some improvement pretty soon. He is in the process of creating and sending me a video for review and then I will attempt to work some magic, I will probably use this blog as a way to keep track of his progress.

On another note, I was looking through my laptop the other day and came across some old PT2 stats from when I used to play Prima, Crypto, Betfair and Party and it reminded me of how I used to roll. I do feel like I'm beginning to get back on track, albeit at much lower limits, but still, not as good as back then:







I seem to recall a -30 buyin downswing included at $5/$10 HU there too :O

Here are the stats this month:



Obviously tiny sample, but over the last month or so this is pretty much how it's been going. Things are looking up for me lately, and with me, hopefully for mknybtlr also. Stay tuned for progress updates!

2 votes

Comments (14)

Hey guys, long time no see. In the last 2 months since I last blogged I've continued to play a decent amount of low stakes, the $0.5/$1 Stars and $1/$2 FTP games continuing to try and get my stats prettier on PTR. It's been up and down, though my $1/$2 winrate on FTP is getting closer to where I want it to be (At least 2BB/100) but I'm still a way off, and my $0.5/$1 on PokerStars is further away if anything due to running a fair bit below EV, running shit in general and subsequent tilt. Same old, same old huh?

Here are stats since Sept. 1st:



Since getting back to England I've been playing World of Warcraft again, and that's severely cutting into my poker playing time. Poker is just extremely boring when you're constantly losing to morons and running bad and games are a good escape, the thing is I think I'm focusing harder and trying to fix my game more than I have the rest of the year when I am playing and I think the benefits are just beginning to show, I just need to put the time in. Over the last 2 days I've won 9 buyins at $1/$2 6max in only ~1k hands and although I ran pretty fucking well in this small sample my play has been much better than in the last few months, and this entire year as a whole.

I'm hoping that at least my $1/$2 winrate on FTP is above 2BB/100 by the time I head back to Korea (2nd January) and that my $0.5/$1 winrate on stars is at least closer to that target, even though I know it's not going to actually get there in that time frame unless I play a ton of hands or run insanely well, which is possible if I break 2BB/100 at $1/$2 FTP very soon but still unlikely. This year has been a depressing year pokerwise, I've spent a lot of time just trying to make my stats on a stupid website look good and not even successfully doing that, not doing well in my usual games due to running far below EV again and playing bad in stupid spots.

I think a large part of the reason I've done poorly at these stakes is to do with the fact that I'm trying to get those winrates up, I'm trying to hard to simply win that it often blinds my judgement. I don't care that this guy is 11/10 and he's called twice on a dry board and shove a blank river repping the nuts in a spot he's never bluffing, I care that I have an overpair and there's $400 in the pot and I want to win it, so I make a shit call that I would berate on the forums because It's obvious what he has, and I know it, even when playing, but it doesn't matter to me. I'm calling anyway. That's something I never used to do in my usual games, I used to simply go with my gut. I head into the river saying I'm gonna bet/fold, and I follow through, but nowadays I don't do that, and it's cost me a lot of money and a huge chunk of winrate. Same thing when it comes to bluffing, I have nothing and he is folding some hands, so I do my best to think of the worst hand he can possibly have and go "Aha! he's folding something!" so I bluff, and don't even considering his entire range. Same with thin value betting, I end up talking myself into going for too thin value saying "Well this is a spot I could be bluffing in! He has to hero call me, surely!" without thinking about the fact that he simply doesn't have any hands in his preflop range that gets to the river to even make a hero call, or that the villain is a nit that he would fold the same hand I'm trying to value bet. It sucks because when I analyse hands after the session, I look at my hands and just shake my head, and it happens again and again. I'm not fixing these errors, I just continue making stupid plays against extremely unbalanced players and their exploitative plays are just raping me because I'm not focusing enough on exploiting their exploitative plays.

That's another thing, I think I've worried far too much this year about "balance". I used to watch cts and sbrugby videos a few years ago and balance never seemed to be the main issue when making a play, but then you watch a lot of other philosophical thinking video makers and they harp on about balance far too much. I think that's gone to my head way too much and I need to worry more about exploiting other peoples balance, and worry about my own balance second. Realising things and doing them are 2 completely different things, and even though I think I'm playing better and following through with my plan far more often lately, I could still be doing better.

On another note, I'm thinking about coaching again. I don't mean I've coached in the past I mean I'm thinking about it again. I say this a lot and then never actually do it, but I have a little bit of motivation this time around. So I have a real life friend that I got into poker a couple of years ago, he started with $50 or so and over the course of 2 years has gone from a breakeven $0.01/$0.02 player to a breakeven $0.05/$0.10 player. Hardly the progress I was expecting from one of my more intelligent friends. I think my motivation for teaching is just to prove to myself that I can do it, that I can turn a breakeven or marginally losing player at a stake into a winning player at a stake higher than that he's playing right now. I think part of my problem when I sit alongside my friend and "coach" him is that I simply tell him what to do, and don't let him make his own play or mistakes first, he's basically just following instructions, and while he does win most of the time he's at my house or I'm at his, it mayaswell be me playing rather than him. Don't get me wrong, I do explain why I'm telling him to do whatever it is that I'm telling him, but I'm not sure if it's that I explain in too much depth, not in enough depth, if it's because I don't let him do whatever he would do himself and then tell him why another play is better or if he simply doesn't "get it". The thing is I dunno who I want to teach, what stakes I want to teach, how long I'd be interested in putting in to it or how long it'd take before my student would be expecting to see progress, I don't know HOW I want to teach either. I'm guessing just video review and some discussion over MSN or whatever, but I'm not sure that's the best for the student.

Either way, I guess I'd like to start taking PMs from players who are breakeven at any stakes at or below $0.25/$0.50 with PT3 or HEM screenshots (Must have AT LEAST 50k hands logged with a maximum winrate of +0.5BB/100), screennames at relevant sites, what they would want from a prospective coach, what hours they'd be available and why I should choose them.

Thanks for reading, back to WoW for now I guess. . . -_-

2 votes

Comments (24)

Hello again~ I just finished adding audio and producing the first part of the 200NL video I recorded a week and a half ago, here is the link:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=A488JHD2

Listening over some of the commentary there are parts I'd like to expand more upon but time constraints stop me from talking about everything I want to. When I'm posting a reply in a thread I sit there typing for like 15 minutes just for 1 hand so I often times make long posts with almost all of my thoughts on the matter, however in this video I'm trying to cram my thoughts into as little time as possible.

For instance on the KQ call preflop at 8:20 or so I said I would like to 3bet rather than call in that spot sometimes and I didn't fully explain. With youthoughtwrong in the pot, 3betting and driving him out would be pretty bad when I know how bad he is, how wide he's going to be overcalling there and how much top pair good kicker is worth against him. However if the situation was different and the button open limps a lot but either folds a lot pre or plays reasonably post to the point where I think it's more profitable to squeeze the money out of the original raiser preflop (Who would have to be raising wider than CasualCay was in that spot) than trying to flop a top pair and extracting vs the donk in a 3 way pot, then I would prefer to raise there than call. I guess with a suited KQ I would basically always call in that spot having position on the raiser and getting it 3 way with a donk in there, but KQo doesn't play that well multiway, though it's perfectly good here against youthroughtwrong who, as you saw in this hand was limp/calling Q5o and sucking on huge cockbags.

With that being said, even now I don't agree with everything I said in the video and I definitely didn't say all I wanted to, so feel free to post any comments or questions on any hands where I wasn't clear or if you didn't agree with what I said. I haven't done this very often but I wouldn't mind to make more videos in the future and have thought about getting into coaching multiple times, but never quite did it so any criticism is welcomed.

I got my body composition tested at the gym yesterday and I've lost 1.6kg of fat and lost 0.1kg of muscle in the last month. I've gone from 74.7kg with 23.6% body fat to 72.8kg with 22% body fat. This represents much slower progress than I was hoping for, I was hoping for a small gain in muscle and a bigger loss of fat. I know it's difficult to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, but I know it's possible, especially in beginners, which is basically what I am but I must be going about it wrong. I think diet is still the main problem and I'm having huge difficulties getting a routine down. I'm skipping breakfast a lot, only eating like 4 times a day and the meals are too low in protein. I'm hoping that in the next month I'll be able to get my act together and speed up my progress.

Poker results this month have been poor, mainly because the month started off just how the last one ended - running WAY below EV and getting cack all over my face. After losing 16k in 2 days (30th Sept + 1st Oct) I decided to play some 200NL and 100NL and I've been playing a lot of those limits. I've been running below EV there also, but winning at least. I've tightened up my play preflop, mostly UTG and UTG+1 where I was definitely raising too wide in the past. I feel good about how I've been playing at 100NL and 200NL even though in the past when I played there I've been unable to take it seriously, and there have been signs of that from time to time this month also, but by and large I feel that I've been playing reasonably well.

Here are stats for the month:



I'm happy with how many hands I'm getting in at least, usually 20k is more than I play in a month. I'm enjoying the game and feeling like I am making some progress even though results aren't following just yet. I'm probably going to continue to stick around at 100NL and 200NL for a while and then move back up to 600NL, 1kNL again. I feel like this is something I never did in the past, partly because last year I didn't go through many downswings, but it's definitely necessary to take a step back when things are not going your way and I'd rather play 200NL or whatever than not play at all. Need to play to improve and running away and not playing at all does not solve anything.

Time to go watch the first 2 episodes of the new Dexter series and eat. Enjoy~

2 votes

Comments (31)

Before today I was up 10.6k for the month, this morning I loaded up 6 tables, some Stars some FTP and began to play. Things started off bad right off the bat. I ended up playing the longest session of the month, and possibly of the year for me, getting in 3813 hands and playing about 7.5 hours without a break. I ended down 7.6k, almost 8k below EV. Whenever I coolered someone they sucked out, I managed to lose KK v TT on KJT in 3bet pot, AA v QQ AIPF, AA v KK AIPF, 88 v 34 on 763 in 4bet pot vs some super retard maniac, TT v JJ against a 39/39 with 40% 3bet and 0% fold to 3bet, 0% fold to 4bet. Lost tons of other suckouts, flips, coolers and didn't manage to get there with barely any of my draws.

Here are some stats of the month:







The only good things I can take from this are that I "should" be up a lot for the month and that I put in more volume than I have in a long time. Just sucks that I'm running like dog crap.

0 votes

Comments (10)

Hi there! Poker seems to be going well just lately. I just finished up my 2nd session of the day, finishing up about 2.6k, and I won about 400 or so in the first session despite being down about 6k and semi-tilted not long into the session. I've played about 2.6k hands in the last couple of days which is quite a lot for me and the swings have been pretty wild. I've not been doing well in terms of All in EV, worst of it was probably losing a 420bb pot AA vs QQ all in preflop against a fish who 4bet to 60big blinds and tanked before calling the shove, but I've still been having reasonable results as of late which is a good sign.

I'm beginning to enjoy poker once again, and it certainly helps that I'm bored of pretty much every game I own right now. StarCraft, WoW, Diablo2, some PS3 games, all of them are boring to me now and right now I'm playing poker with focus, I'm thinking about each situation more clearly than I have in pretty much anytime in the past year and it feels great.

Here are the stats and graph thus far for the month:





As you can see there are a few 200NL hands, that's because I made a 50 minute 4 tabling video on FTP. Currently I haven't added sound to it though so I probably won't be releasing it for a while but I've talked about releasing a video a few times in previous blogs in the past and never got around to it for whatever reason, but finally I've got one recorded, I just need to record audio over the top. Whenever I tried making them in the past I tried to do live audio with 4 tables and it was just too much action to talk about so now that I can actually record over the top, pause the video and talk about situations it should turn out pretty well when I get around to doing it.

Outside of poker I've pretty much been a hermit in the last month or so. Apart from my birthday on the 8th, a friends birthday a few days after that and going to watch K1 WGP Seoul yesterday I've done nothing but workout, poker, eat and sleep. I'm perfectly happy with that though as playing as much poker as possible and getting fitter are my main ambitions right now. I have missed a few days at the gym here and there, particularly on weekends or days when my girlfriend doesn't work, and we end up going into couch potato mode. I feel like I have definitely made a little bit of progress at the gym though, I feel like I've lost a little bit of fat and my cardio ability has improved a fair bit. In terms of size and strength I can't see any noticable gains, but I'm ok with that because the main focuses right now are fat loss and endurance. I haven't got my body composition retested because it hasn't quite been 1 month just yet but in a week or so I'll get that rechecked and have some numbers to compare myself then with myself 1 month ago and hopefully see that decent progress is being made numerically.

Time for some food now, hopefully next blog post I'll have that video done and uploaded and hopefully some continued success to report.

0 votes

Comments (16)

Hello there good sirs and madames. Tomorrow is my 25th birthday, so give me some birthday wishes etc. I'm not that much of a holiday person, but I have to do a little bit of something, I can't do nothing. Some of my friends recently left the country though, so I'm a little sad about that and recently I'm trying to drink the least amount of alcohol possible so I'm not gonna go partying or anything. I think what I plan on doing is just going out for some food with a few friends and the girlfriend then coming back to mine and just chillin' with a few drinks and nerding in my apartment room, nothing special but I prefer to be in smaller groups of people anyway.

The reason I'm not drinking lately is because I started getting personal training at the gym 8 days ago and making the biggest effort I've ever made to get fit and healthy. I'm currently around about 5ft 10 (178cm), 74.7kg (165lbs) and 20.x% body fat, obviously I need to cut that body fat way down and pack some muscle on, and that's my goal. I'm going to the gym everyday so far, walking 50 minutes everyday and doing some light weights and various other exercises 3 times a week. I have the time, money and drive to make some serious progress this time around (I made a few half hearted 1 month attempts before where I did close to 0 cardio, only went to the gym 3 times a week and continued to drink and eat bad foods) but there's a few nutritional details I'm not sure about yet. The problem is, when I'm home and I'm sitting in my chair and I have nothing better to do I just waste away the day, I'm lazy as fuck when I'm home alone and it takes some serious effort to get up and make food. So what I really wanna know is what are good healthy high protein, low fat "snacks" that I can make real quick or simply pick up and eat straight out of the cupboard/fridge/whatever, if anyone has some good nutritional advice, please share because nutrition is my main concern right now as my Personal Trainer takes care of all the exercises that I do and I don't have to worry about that. I'm already feeling slightly healthier and more awake during the day as opposed to in the past, and feel like I'm going to be able to stick at this this time around so I'm really feeling good about that.

Poker lately has been fairly bad. Last blog I posted I was up over 10k just over half way through last month, running well, playing well etc and I got up to a peak of +$15k for the month 1 or 2 days after the blog post. However things quickly turned around when I took some 20 buyin shots at $10/$20 (Don't worry I have more money offline so it's not like I'm playing out of my bankroll) that went very poorly and I ended up being down $1k for the month a week after the blog post, which was my biggest trough for the month. In the end of the month I finished up somewhere between 5.5 and 6k with some continued success at $5/$10, but it was disappointing overall because I felt like I was just beginning to get into a good momentum, and was hoping to run well at $10/$20 and make that my main game for the rest of the year, but alas, it didn't work out.

This month things have started out poorly aswell. I've only played $5/$10 and I am actually up money, but I'm not doing well in showdowns as my hands are either not holding and my draws are not getting there and I've also already had 2 set vs oversets in this small sample, but I guess the fact that I'm up is a positive and I do feel like I'm playing well. I feel more focused in my sessions, possibly the working out and eating healthier in general is having a positive effect here and overall I feel like things are going to turn around for me this year and I'll end up having a reasonable year by the end of it even though I'm only up like $20k so far this year.

Month stats so far:


Anyway, wish me a happy birthday and those who know what they're talking about can leave me some nutritional advice for my birthday present *^^*

0 votes

Comments (34)

Today I played the longest session of poker that I've played this month ~1k hands for about ~1k profit, which is nice but not the main reason for my happiness. First of all, I was simply happy that I actually played a longer session for once, and that it was at $5/$10. My HEM stats have been set to "This Month" for the entire month and I'm really happy that I've only played $3/$6 and $5/$10 and not pissed around at $.5/$1 or $1/$2 like I did in previous months. Anyway I changed "This Month" to "All Hands" and saw that I've reached a milestone of winnings on PokerStars:



BB/100 = ptbb/100, I didn't like the bb/100 stat since I'm so used to seeing winrates in ptbb/100. In the past months I cared too much about my stats on PTR and played too much at lower stakes trying to make my stats pretty, but I should've never cared simply because these are the only stats that matter. I've already crushed $.5/$1 and $1/$2 in the past (The stats used to look much better than they do now =[ ) and I should only care about playing for the maximum success and profit. This is only Stars and a few FTP hands.

Here are the stats just for this month:



As long as I keep this up it'll be the 2nd 5 digit month in a row, the first time that's happened (If it happens) in quite a while due to inactivity this year and playing too many low stakes in the past months. If I can continue focused, put in a lot of hands and only play at reasonable stakes then I should still be able to salvage a decent year. At the moment I'm probably up about 25k or something for the year which is pitiful considering I made about 10 times that last year. I still have a few months left though and if I play a lot and play well I can still make the kind of profit I was hoping for when this year started. I'm not sure I can force myself to do it alone though, I don't talk poker to people anymore or hang around with poker players and self motivation has always been a problem for me. Perhaps I'll try and go to some live tournaments when I'm back in England in November, maybe visit some poker players too and try to get more involved with the poker community in general. I definitely have to do something, but this is a nice start and this blog post itself may help me, just as a reference point, I can look back on this, see that my lifetime stats are perfectly fine and I don't need to worry about proving myself or looking perfect in every possible database when they clearly lack a lot of hands and information and are thus not even worth bothering about.

I only wanted to write about poker today, I'm happy with how this month has gone in terms of results and in terms of stakes played, I just need to continue this momentum and start playing more. I guess that's all I needed to write for now.

0 votes

Comments (34)