I am not a Christian, not a Muslim, not a Buddhist -- I am not religious. I believe life relates to something more than passed down stories, passed down moralities, passed down methods of control. Where does my lack of religious belief leave me? Free. I think openly, without prejudice. I embrace my thoughts, your thoughts, the world's thoughts, in a collective boundary-less manner. I believe in the harmonization between equally experiencing the living process, while differently interpreting the living process; The realization of self and introspection of self; The desire for justification and reason; The need of inclusion and option of exclusion; The opportunity of free will, without impedance of surrounding free will. Simply, I believe in being free.
I believe absolutes define us, and we absolutely are defined as free.
Plans for 2012:
- Continue working out, and getting in shape. - Started out well, the first ~6 months went well, and they I started a new job which has had me working a lot.
- Spend less money on partying. - Sort of, but not really
- Start saving money. - Nope
- Sell my stocks to eventually buy an apartment. - Could have sold them, but will wait a bit longer.
- Plan a trip ahead, instead of going on small spontaneous trips. - Done.
- Be happy and content with work. - Done.
- Win one donkament. This should be doable, even though I don't put in the volume. - Not really close.
- Start training MMA. - No.
2012 Cliff Notes
- Dated the most beautiful girl for a year, broke up a month or so ago.
- Travelled a lot, Amsterdam, London x4, Madrid, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, New York, Chicago, Miami, Sarasota, and a few places in Sweden.
- Happy with work, even though the hours are long.
- Played a lot of Tennis, Badminton and Table tennis.
- Got glasses
- Work
- Got a suit tailored, as well as a new tuxedo.
- Evenmore work.
- Spending New Years Eve in Miami.
- Learnt a lot on Revenue Forecasting, Reporting & Analytics.
- Words used: ubiquitous, discrepancy, monetization
Plans for 2013
- Get back into a routine of regular training, try to get into my work schedule.
- Get a pay raise
- Get even more responsibility at work.
- Sell stocks, invest one part, and the other part should go towards a down payment for an apartment. (will do so even if i move)
- Keep enjoying all aspects life
- Win a donkament
- Racking up even more air miles for a new card status
- Move to NYC if the opportunity arrises
- Play more golf
I just recently decided I want to pick up the guitar. I got myself a Yamaha FG700S for a Christmas present (pic attached). Do any of you play, and how did you start? Can you recommend any starting resources or starting pointers? I've played the piano at a state/national competitive level since I was 6, so I'm pretty musically inclined, although I do not have any experience with any other instrument.
best xmas in recent years. less stress, no armaggedon, good prospects for 2013. i wish everyone here the best and thank you for being my number 1 source of inspiration and entertainment. lp + jre/stitcher + torrents = the nuts
using a tablet exclusively now which keeps me from constantly going online since these things are so bad for typing and browsing lol. ill try harder to actually be more sociable nxt year without uneccassarily drinking each time. good luck guys and props to the best site and group off assholes assembled! lolz
will post more movies once i get my internet tv box thing going. glhf
to a 11 day full time gring. Goal is 40k hands and building a solid nl25 roll, and learn lots. Will post graph so far sunday morning. Im finally done being a surveyor, was giving ppl free insulation from government and measuring houses now im gunna sell alarms after new year which should be much moar fun, 150 bucks a piece too :o p.s. How do i get hem1 work on zoom who knows? P.p.s rip neilly
open faced chinese pokerby MARSHALL28, December 21
so i played it for the first time yesterday and thought it was great. tried to do a little research to find out what strategy is out there for it. it's definitely a game heavily reliant on math. it's a game that im sure by knowing basic strategy you can find some edges on opponents, but, i doubt anybody playing it at a high level would be doing anything but tons and tons of math.
.....
i just spent like 30 minutes typing up a bunch of the strategy i came up with, then i realized, why should i just give this stuff away to people who havent earned it.
i think i have some decent basic strategy that probably encompasses several variables that i don't think most people will be taking into consideration.
those of you who have played, list some of the things you've picked up ... as you guys release information, and i deem it's valuable, i'll release information. it could be a win-win.
if not .. oh well ... no other way to get good at new games than to start talking/thinking about them.
Are there any other micro's players out there currently playing FTP?
I've been playing 5NL there despite the higher rake for my $600 first deposit bonus. I shit you not 5NL is looking more and more like 200NL. Some tight regs and some short-stack south americans all bumhunting like crazy. Tables break instantly if a fish sits out and with seemingly fuck all people on FTP it takes me upwards of an hour some nights just to get to 6-tables. If a spot does become open then I have to wait through the waiting list of people declining their seat and by then the tables broken anyway.
Decided to try some sitngo's and I'm sitting here failing to get more than 2-3 tables open at a time, the entire lobby is stone dead.
Is this just a timezone thing being in Australia or is full tilt just a dead website?
Props to the ones I like @ LP and the ones that help on hand histories.
Cynical douchebaggery never ends.
I've been playing over a year paying tens of thousands of debts with no respect, I'm the BEST MTTer that comes to the forums, and I stirr the forums up when they are boring.
Yet, its constant shit from 93.33% of you?
you guys can go fuck yourselves, n hope when you MTT, that you're not at my table.
This is my official GoodBye to LP.
This sites sucked for like 3 years, Stroggoz, TalentedTom and like 2 other people are the only ones worth listening to.
Ego-driven retards everywhere else, derailing everything, having no life, jabbin at people with a future.
Guess what?
95% of you at LP have no future at all in poker, where 92% of you think you do.
Its a case of, you guys suck so bad, you want to berate others to make yourselves feel better, but guess what? You guys only feel better for 2 seconds, I feel good for life.
LP gets in the way of my grind anyways.
so ya, my official FUCK YOU, Good Bye.
Thanks for teaching me like 5 years ago
Was fun fucking around with you nits on the forums, but well, no exceptions, if i hate 93% of you, i just hate you all
Where are we all headed?by JonnyCosMo, December 20
Been listening to a lot of Joe Rogan recently, and I absolutely love how he brings up things that people just don't talk about all that often. I've been wanting to write this for a long time now, so hopefully it will be an interesting read. Sorry if it starts sounding like I'm rambling, because there will definitely be some parts that will be. The other day, Maz posted the 'How has poker changed in 4 years' thread and it really made me think about a lot of things. Clearly a lot has changed in the past 4 years. What will change in the next 10 years? If you're a poker pro, do you plan on still being a poker pro in 10 years?
I consider 2007 the first year I became a full-time pro. I had finally made my way up to $2/$4 and $3/$6 6-max / heads-up dabbling in shots at $5/$10 from time to time. Even thou I was still in college at the time I basically brought my laptop to every single class / lecture room and played none stop. The games were still very soft, and anytime I found myself in a downswing the solution would be the same: Load up more tables and play for longer. There weren't regs that exploited auto-piloting multi-tablers. Just play more hands and eventually you'll stop running bad and win again. Cardrunners was already the leading poker training website, and anybody who was a serious pro was a member. You could see the regs fixing leaks very fast. I remember there was a 6-max reg who open-limped a ton. Every time he raised preflop it would be with JJ+ (not AK), and he just played very tight/solid post flop. I remember this guy because for a year straight I would shit all over him and he was the biggest loser on my PokerTracker by a large margin, even thou he was definitely still winning overall in these games... One day he stopped open-limping, and started raising all of those hands. That was a very sad day.
Eventually all the regs got a lot better, and the uber fish started to slowly die out. The games had become more aggressive, and with that came higher variance. Oct/Nov/Dec of 2009 there was a long stretch of time where I was down swinging online. My old strategy of just loading up more tables and playing for longer hours were only making things worse. I had lost the confidence to play. I would question if I was even winning anymore. I would always play stupidly over-rolled for any game, so it wasn't really losing money that was bugging me, it was seeing regs that I use to crush start crushing me. In an attempt to regain confidence I moved down to $1/$2 only to run into another break even stretch. One morning I woke up, and as I was loading up my tables, I get stacked in the very first hand I played. I instantly closed all the tables I was loading up and just sat there staring at the screen. I was listening to Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. Your brain can connect certain moments, thoughts, memories, feelings with certain sights, sounds, or smells. It was at this moment where I first thought about quitting poker. It's weird now that every time I hear that song Ooooh Oh, Caught in a Bad Romance... it immediately reminds me of how I felt that day. I got really honest with myself on that day and made a decision for the better. December 20th 2009, 3 years ago to the day, I quit playing online poker as a full-time pro.
Lucky for me, live poker is basically what online poker was in 2007. I know some people find live poker retardedly slow and frustrating but in a weird way I find it relaxing. There are a few things that have come to my attention over the past 3 years thou. You never notice this online since the player pool is massive (atleast at the mid-stakes on Stars & FTP it was) but when it comes down to it, poker is a negative sum game once you factor in the rake. There are so many players online that you rarely see the true effects of this. San Diego is not a small city, but it's not like Vegas, Miami, or LA either in terms of it's poker community. When I first started playing live, there were probably 40 players that called themselves a "pro". And by "pro" I mean, the only thing they did was play poker, and they brought in no outside income into the game. Of these 40 players, there are only 5 or so that remain. It's crazy how true AndrewSong's post in that thread of "90% of the regs from 2008 went busto" actually is. It will happen thou, a game needs outside income in it to run. If you put 9 pros at a table and have they are forced to play together everyday, eventually 8 will be broke and the lone winner will be left without a game to play.
For my next reference: The Hyperbolic Time Chamber from DBZ
Perhaps the funniest (soon to be sad and scary) thing I've noticed is the evolution of Hold'em in live poker and how it's starting to mirror the evolution of Hold'em in online games. In Dragon Ball Z (one of the best anime's ever made btw) there was this room called the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. When you're in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, 1 day in real world = 1 year in the time chamber. The room extends to infinity and the gravity is x100 earth's gravity and there is 1000 degree flames of fire and all kinds of fucking brutal ass-kicking shit. Goku and Gohan go in the Hyberbolic Time Chamber, evolve into higher level Super Saiyans, come out and rape everyone's face in the real world. Online poker is the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. You are able to learn the game so much faster online than you are able to live. In some ways, it's actually extremely hard to correctly learn Hold'em when playing live since it's so slow, it's very hard to see the long run.
Ronin Talken on 2p2 wrote a good article on 3betting meta game in Hold'em a while back and I'll just take a quote from it:
History of 3betting cliffnotes for lazy people:
- Everyone 3bets a merged value range.
- Everyone realizes that 4bets are really big in No Limit, and folding JJ preflop sucks.
- Everyone stops 3betting, unless they have KK+, AK.
- Everyone stops calling 3bets, because no one 3bets anything but QQ+, AK.
- Smart people started 3betting ATC because nits are hilarious.
- Nits got less nitty and started 4betting.
- Even smarter people invented polarization.
- Etc...
When I started live poker everyone was somewhere between the first two steps. Now most people have gotten to the: Everyone stops 3betting, unless they have KK+, AK. And some have moved on to: Everyone stops calling 3bets, because no one 3bets anything but QQ+, AK. This is where most live games are today, especially at the $5/$10 and $10/$20 level. That was like 2008 online poker! Sure enough thou, the improvements in player's game in live poker is mirroring how players improved online.
So now I channel my inner Joe Rogan, and get real and honest. Online poker is most likely never going to return to USA. If it does, the games will be terrible. So where does this leave us as poker pros? What's the future like 10 years from now if you decide to continue playing this game? I know it might be depressing to think about, but it's definitely something that should be on everyone's mind. The longer you play this game the tougher it becomes to transition into other real world rolls. Is this something you commit to all the way? Will it still be viable to play without another source of income in the future? I'd like to hear your guys thoughts on the subject.
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