[ ] Volume
[ ] Results
[ ] Kept a poker diary, analysed a ton of hands
[ ] Kept a food diary
[ ] Kept schedule
[ ] Had sweat sessions, talked on Skype as much as I wanted
[ ] Progressed a lot with Mathematics of Holdem and Math attacks
[ ] Had a lot of circuit+strenght gym sessions http://i.imgur.com/g9q85.jpg
Although:
[x]signed up for Tai-Chi and Yoga Classes and went twice to both
[x]started studying Mathematics of holdem
[x]read Peak Performance Poker from Travis Steffen
This month started pretty well, I had my focus on again after some ghost writing jobs in July took it away. I was in the zone, exercising, eating 5 times per day, studying and I spent some 6 hours on mathematics of Holdem at the start of the month and made a ton of notes. What a baller, right? But then something went terribly wrong...First, I have decided to cash out from Pokerstars and head into rakeback waters of iPoker and to the fishy land of Bodog that 0 good regs play and the games are as good as 'back in the day'.
But sadly, because of a glitch in William Hill cashier all my money, including 100% of my real life money, got blocked for over a week, no matter that I spent over 12 hours on the line with supports of WH and my bank. Let me tell you, being busto is all right, and I am quite used to it. But knowing you have money but can't touch any of it, even to buy yourself food and not have to beg your girlfriend for change, is just another level of stress especially when you know you can lose all of it and more. Never before I could co connect with you guys that have your money stuck on FTP as much as I can now, and if someone unwisely kept most of their wealth on the site probably the best advice I would get is to just write it off as business loss, both in your account and most importantly in your mind, look at what you have now and try to do do the best you can in your situation. If the money does come, you will have a nice surprise and a bonus. As I have realized even when my money was in limbo for just a week, the uncertainty and stressful hope and everyday checking if your money got freed up will only make you worse off emotionally.
Before I got my money back, but also sometime after, the Girah thing happened. I must say I took it way more personally than I should have. First of all the scandal broke off right in the time where 100% of my wealth was blocked because of a poker site. Second, when Girah came forward, I was hooked. It was just a great story of a guy who made it in a very short time span, it gave me hope and belief and really was one of the main motivators for giving poker a full-time shot. I was hooked on his poker static interview, his well, and things he posted on poker strategy, a lot of advice from those interviews is on my wall and still in my head. And it is still good advice I must say, well it better be - it comes from Haseeb who is a great video maker and story teller. When it leaked that he cheated, that he lied about pretty much everything,that his graphs are most likely fabricated and that Girahh account was breaking even at NL1000 for quite a bit of time I felt betrayed. Never before I read more than one page on Two plus two, but this time I couldn't stop. It was a good soap opera on it's own, but even more so when I was so emotionally involved with poker blocking my money and someone I looked up to turning out to be a fraud. I read every single page, every thread, every blog, it was around 500 pages of forum posts and incredibly lengthy Haseeb's bullshitting essays and four hours of audio interviews. Again I think I simply cared too much, or was just entertained too much, there is rationally nothing I could do and engaging only in things you have some sort of control over will just make your life so much more productive.
Once that stormed off, and my money got untied I was still not able to do my job. Instead, I had to put in a ton of work in helping my GF Finish her post graduate dissertation. I felt responsible really as I persuaded her to change her topic some 2 months before submission from something she didn't care nor knew anything about but seemed easy to something she is obsessed about - Thought process, reasoning and how chicks behave when buying luxury handbags. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I just had to help her and after an all nighter of editing it, I am finally done.
So I must say this month was really hell, I hate it when I can't do my job, and poker is just that - my job. The great positive is that I now have regular Tai Chi and Yoga on Saturday and Sunday, and even though I was hyper stressed and worked all night I actually feel pretty good and energized, filled with energy ready to jump into the grind and start learning again. The classes just showed me how great is to have some anchors you have in your schedule, that you do every week at the same time, without having to persuade or push yourself - it's just something you do, like brushing your teeth, or going for a massive shit every morning. I will try to introduce more and more anchors like that. Yoga and Tai-chi, live poker on monday evening, 2-3 hours for Math study on a fixed day and time every week, 'family day' every Thursday with my GF where I can't touch poker and have to get out in the city and do stuff. Also a project I have been working on -The Awesomes poker group, that will be based on fixed schedule of group events like a sweat session, concept discussion or group coaching, each one of them happening week after week, at the same time so that they become an effortless habit.
And finally, in exchange for helping her with her studies so much and supporting her, I have a promise from my girlfriend that she will now 100% support me in my pursuit of poker, at least until the agreed deadline at the end of February at which I will evaluate if I can make it and still want to make it in poker, and prove to myself and her that I can make decent money or if I quit it altogether and jump into a boring corporate career.
And just to add some more optimism...August is far from over. Let's see if I can get most of the boxes ticked by the end of the month
Cliffs: I do Tai-chi with average age of people in the class of 50, and Joga with where I am the only person out of 15 with a crotch cobra
Any place I could get cheap textbooks? possibly for my iPhone? Or torrent them?
I feel that the industry of textbooks is a monopoly somewhat like oilcompanies. We are forced to buy the product at whatever price they say. Also they change a few paragraphs and force people to buy their newer edition. I paid $275 for my Anatomy book and couldn't resell it because the company came out with a newer edition that semester. The human body didn't evolve within the last year, there is no reason for this. I do not agree with this, and do not want my money going directly to the company. I'd rather it go to another college student selling it or something like that.
I'm NOT paying $260+ for 2 books. That is ludicris.
Looking for "The Art of Editing"
Shots at NL10 from a week ago did not go very well, remember aces being cracked at 6 max and me quitting before tilting, and FR I don't recall anything specific. I would then proceed to run bad and tilt all the way down to 40$ before getting back on my feet.
I switched from FR to 6-max because at NL5, I don't know if it's just me, but high action tables would last only about 5 minutes before they turned into a nitfest and it was getting boring.
On a sidenote I was watching the big game season 2 and Phil Laak is freaking amazing, I find it so entertaining to hear him talk. And Elky so good.
I'm on my hotel room right now, after after a fun weekend of live poker. Busted the live event I came here to play on day one, and then took some HS PLO shots.
On Friday played some PLO5k (which is like PLO3k is USD) at a pretty soft table and ran well, won my biggest pot then at 12.5k when I 3bet AAT8ds to like 2k (there was a straddle) and then got it in HU on T92r vs AKQQ and held even after he turned a FD, and made a lil over 2bis.
On Saturday there was only PLO10k (~PLO6k USD) and capped-deck PLO20k so I sold 50% and sat at 50/100. The table had some not-so-bad tight players and one really really good 20yo kid, but also a couple marks including this german guy who pot/repot/call shove on a 6way KT3hhh with 9655hhxx. But I ran kinda bad and busted my first stack and was down 18 g's at some point but started isolating the german guy every chance I had and it went great. Won a really nice hand where he pots pf, I flat QQT4 and flop 544, he bets I call, turn Tx and I c/r to 5k and e flats, river 7x and I shove for 8.1k into 13.6k and while he tanks I'm like, "omfg wtf am I doing here, if he calls its a 29.6k pot" and all my poker career was going through my mind all the way back to playing 0.01/0.02 and now I got a fking 10k red chip on my stack. Sadly he folded but donated the rest shorty after and the table broke instantly after he got up (luckily I was already even), the guys didn't even wait till he left LOL.
In hindsight I prob shouldn't play this high a game I'm not very good at and is so so swingy, but people manage to be so much worse than me that I can't help it , and also I should probably stick to midstakes crushing and putting money aside but oh well, I'm too young to be responsible. An interesting and fun experience anyways.
so I loosened up a bit PFby MadeInPolanD, August 21
for 3 days now i played with higer steal from BTN and SB; 2,5BB raise from BTN, trying to 3bet more from BB or call vs SB and raise good flops vs suitable for this play players, call more 3bets in position as i had before 70-75% fold to 3bet
here are my stats, 4 tables only as i try to think more lol:
and i will probably start talking loudly to myself :O while in making decision process to make myself pu ppl on ranges t all the time and think consciously about every hand
some hands that were tough for me: ( i made stats visible in hands )
but still not sure if i can call this, i mean there are maybe some draws he can play like this ( like JT, QJ, maybe J8; A-hi FDs, but first: im not sure he plays them like this, second: they stll have decent equity, third: so many hands beat me: AJ/KT/KQ/QT/J9/TT/QQ/KK and he surely can play them like this cause there are so many draws and he doesnt want to see turn with his hand that is now strong ) so i shpould prolly fold it and wait for a better spot with this guy
it's a deep spot vs -7ptbb for 150k hands 3bettor and a reg, he leads weak, then checks so i decide to take a stab, i hope that reg called on flop cause he had either a draw like T9/56 maybe 99-TT and maybe some lower pairs like 66-55, when they both check on turn i assumed i can have a chance to take the pot, i guess reg can still have something and he decided to check - not to scare fish on the king
and here's a hand i dont know what im doing lol i should check turn or if i choose to bet i should fold to a raise lol i was prolly thinking that its so small i can call can maybe he can be bluffing or 'valuebetting' an ace ;o it's like i make a small bet cause i either wont win more on this or he has me and then when proven im beat i talk myself into calling cause it's a small amount, wtf :/
here's a rather simple spot, i think turn is a check vs an active player that wont prolly fold KX or AX after calling flop and it's like the worst he can have there
i thought he can have a draw at the time on the river, i have 17 hands on him and know only that he's a fish, so not sure if call is ok, maybe bet flop, tho i preferred to check and get value on turn from weak hands that won't call flop
on turn i raise thinking he has a Q and makes a 'pot control' bet and on river if he checked i wanted to make 2/3 pot bet, this river raise is ok right?
against a 59/32/55 ( 37 hands ) it's an optimal play? i can wait for him to bet 3 streets but if he has like KJ and an ace comes or an 8/9 it will kill my action so it seems better to raise and wait for him to shove
its a call right? tho he has very small aggression, he's too tight pf to have K7/K3, tho maybe it's nor totally excludable, some KX with high club? Ac7/Ac3?
Hi, I am having difficulties setting up my HUD on Hero Poker tournament. I see the HUD, but it shows up on the tournament lobby. I went online to setup the HUD but I cant get it to appear on the tables. My cash games tables are fine. It is just weird on the tournament table. Can anyone help me with any tutorials to fix this issue?
OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.
Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.
If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.
To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.
The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)
I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.
Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.
Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.
But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
The theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, and that multiple alternative universes exist inside their own bubbles -- making up the 'multiverse' -- is, for the first time, being tested by physicists.
Two research papers published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D are the first to detail how to search for signatures of other universes. Physicists are now searching for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation -- relic heat radiation left over from the Big Bang -- which could provide tell-tale evidence of collisions between other universes and our own.
Many modern theories of fundamental physics predict that our universe is contained inside a bubble. In addition to our bubble, this `multiverse' will contain others, each of which can be thought of as containing a universe. In the other 'pocket universes' the fundamental constants, and even the basic laws of nature, might be different.
Until now, nobody had been able to find a way to efficiently search for signs of bubble universe collisions -- and therefore proof of the multiverse -- in the CMB radiation, as the disc-like patterns in the radiation could be located anywhere in the sky. Additionally, physicists needed to be able to test whether any patterns they detected were the result of collisions or just random patterns in the noisy data.
A team of cosmologists based at University College London (UCL), Imperial College London and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has now tackled this problem.
"It's a very hard statistical and computational problem to search for all possible radii of the collision imprints at any possible place in the sky," says Dr Hiranya Peiris, co-author of the research from the UCL Department of Physics and Astronomy. "But that's what pricked my curiosity."
The team ran simulations of what the sky would look like with and without cosmic collisions and developed a ground-breaking algorithm to determine which fit better with the wealth of CMB data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). They put the first observational upper limit on how many bubble collision signatures there could be in the CMB sky.
Stephen Feeney, a PhD student at UCL who created the powerful computer algorithm to search for the tell-tale signatures of collisions between "bubble universes," and co-author of the research papers, said: "The work represents an opportunity to test a theory that is truly mind-blowing: that we exist within a vast multiverse, where other universes are constantly popping into existence."
One of many dilemmas facing physicists is that humans are very good at cherry-picking patterns in the data that may just be coincidence. However, the team's algorithm is much harder to fool, imposing very strict rules on whether the data fits a pattern or whether the pattern is down to chance.
Dr Daniel Mortlock, a co-author from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said: "It's all too easy to over-interpret interesting patterns in random data (like the 'face on Mars' that, when viewed more closely, turned out to just a normal mountain), so we took great care to assess how likely it was that the possible bubble collision signatures we found could have arisen by chance."
The authors stress that these first results are not conclusive enough either to rule out the multiverse or to definitively detect the imprint of a bubble collision. However, WMAP is not the last word: new data currently coming in from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite should help solve the puzzle.
University of Manchester scientists, working with colleagues in Edinburgh and Australia, have provided the first direct biological evidence for a genetic contribution to people's intelligence.
Previous studies on twins and adopted people suggested that there is a substantial genetic contribution to thinking skills, but this new study -- published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry -- is the first to find a genetic contribution by testing people's DNA for genetic variations.
The team studied two types of intelligence in more than 3,500 people from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Manchester. The paper, by Dr Neil Pendleton and colleagues, found that 40% to 50% of people's differences in these abilities could be traced to genetic differences.
The study examined more than half a million genetic markers on every person in the study. The new findings were made possible using a new type of analysis invented by Professor Peter Visscher and colleagues in Brisbane. As well as the findings in people from Scotland and England, the team checked their results in a separate group of people from Norway.
Dr Pendleton, who led the Manchester team in the Centre for Integrated Genomic Research, said: "This is the first reported research to examine the intelligence of healthy older adults and, using a comprehensive genetic survey, we were able to show a substantial genetic contribution in our ability to think.
"The study confirms the earlier findings of the research in twins. However, that research could not show which genes were or were not contributing to cognitive ability. Our work demonstrates that the number of individual genes involved in intelligence is large, which is similar to other human traits, such as height.
"We can now use the findings to better understand how these genes interact with each other and the environment, which has an equally significant contribution. With our collaborators, we will take this work forward to find the biological mechanisms that could maintain our intellectual abilities and wellbeing in late life. "
The study, in collaboration with Professor Ian Deary at the University of Edinburgh, was funded in Manchester by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
[quote[The physics world was abuzz with some tantalizing news a couple of weeks ago. At a meeting of the European Physical Society in Grenoble, France, physicists -- including some from Caltech -- announced that the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might hint at the existence of the ever-elusive Higgs boson. According to the Standard Model, the remarkably successful theory of how all the fundamental particles interact, the Higgs boson is responsible for endowing every other particle with mass. And as the last remaining particle pr edicted by the Standard Model yet to be detected, its discovery is one of the chief goals of the LHC, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth and perhaps the most complex scientific endeavor ever attempted.
Sitting underground near Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC accelerates protons around a ring almost five miles wide to nearly the speed of light, producing two proton beams that careen toward each other. Most of the protons just keep on going past each other, but a small fraction of them collide, creating other particles in the process. But these particles are fleeting, decaying into lighter particles before they can be detected. The challenge for physicists is to pick out hints of new, exotic physics from the flurry of newly minted particles. By sifting through the data, they hope to tease out signs that some of these particles are Higgs bosons.
The LHC is equipped with several detectors, but the ones that are the largest and are going after the Higgs are called ATLAS (A Large Toroidal Apparatus) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS); Caltech plays a prominent role in the latter. Both experiments recently reported what physicists are calling "excess events." That is, the LHC appears to have created slightly more events than would be expected if the Higgs does not exist. The bump occurred in the region between 130 and 150 gigaelectron volts (GeV -- a unit of energy that is also a unit of mass, via E = mc2, where the speed of light, c, is set to a value of one), which is the expected mass range of the Higgs. But the data are not yet statistically significant enough to be called a definite signal, let alone a discovery of the Higgs particle, says Harvey Newman, professor of physics.
There are two possible explanations for these results, he says. The bump in the data could just be background events due to some unknown source or it could be the first signs of the Higgs. "One could speculate that it's an unusual statistical fluctuation," he says. "But I don't think so."
The LHC is now operating with 7 teraelectron volts (TeV, a thousand times higher than a GeV) of energy at the center of mass between the two proton beams, and may increase to 8 TeV next year (the maximum energy is 14 TeV, which will be reached by 2014).
Physicists will continue to ramp up the LHC, boosting it to higher energies and increasing the number of collisions to improve the chances of producing Higgs bosons. With several times more particle interactions, the physicists are continuing to close in on the Higgs, as well as other new particles and interactions. There's a chance that by the end of next year, they may determine, once and for all, whether the Higgs exists.
Searching for SUSY
If it turns out that the Higgs does not exist, then physicists will have to do some serious rethinking about the Standard Model. "But even if the Higgs exists, the Standard Model still has fundamental problems," Newman says. For example, the theory is not self-consistent. "The most natural way to solve these problems," he says, "is with supersymmetry."
Evidence for supersymmetry, abbreviated SUSY ("soosie"), is also something that physicists had anticipated at the LHC. The theory proposes that each fundamental particle has a supersymmetric partner -- for example, a quark's partner is called a "squark." There are many versions of the theory, from simple toy models to subtler ones. So far, however, the LHC hasn't detected any signs of supersymmetry. "Many of the models we're excluding are toy models," says Maria Spiropulu, an associate professor of physics. So even though people might be disappointed, it's way too early to rule out the theory. "Some people get depressed that SUSY is being excluded. But it's quite the opposite -- we're confirming that nature is much more subtle than what the obvious thing would be."
Caltech at the LHC
Spiropulu and Newman, who are now at the LHC working on the latest data run, lead the Caltech team of 40 physicists, students, and engineers that's part of the CMS collaboration. Spiropulu, who joined the faculty in 2008, is an expert on devising ways to discover exotic phenomena beyond the Standard Model, such as theories of supersymmetry that predict particles of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost a quarter of the universe.
When Newman arrived at Caltech in the 1980s, he did a lot of the groundwork in designing the crystal detectors that are now used in CMS. He also developed the worldwide grid of networks and data centers that stores and processes the flood of data coming from the LHC. With the LHC generating gigabytes of data per second, no single site can hold all the information, so the data is handled in a distributed fashion at hundreds of sites throughout the world, including Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research, where the first university-based center for LHC data analysis was invented. Newman's team also runs the transatlantic network that links the LHC to the United States, allowing data to flow between Europe and North America. His team, together with Steven Low, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, developed the state-of-the-art applications for transferring data over long distances, enabling terabytes of data to stream between sites at speeds of up to the 100 gigabits per second. Newman and engineer Philippe Galvez also developed a system called Enabling Virtual Organizations, an internet-based tool that helps physicists and scientists from other fields communicate and collaborate from anywhere in the world.
According to Newman and Spiropulu, the Caltech team consists of experts in everything from the detector and data analysis to how new phenomena might manifest themselves at the LHC. Because the group is involved in so many aspects of CMS, Caltech is making a particularly significant contribution, Spiropulu says. "We are one of the leading groups in the U.S. -- and I would say also in the entire CMS collaboration."
Undergraduates are also a critical part of the team. In the last two years, there have been a total of 24 students from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) and Minority Undergraduate Research Fellowships (MURF) programs, as well as from programs at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the site of the LHC). This year, four SURF students are spending their summer at the LHC. "Caltech students can really 'do things' from an early age -- at a level one rarely sees elsewhere," Newman says[/quote]
As a fan of the Arnold Conan movies, I went to watch the latest remake with high hopes and low expectations, since remakes tend to be bullshit.
This movie has so much testosterone in it I found myself giggling through the super pro male moments. The story was a bit different than the Arnold version but the movie seemed to drag out for too long. The action was good/ok, gory and loud, and there was a lot of titties : ). This movie didn't really suck, but it's definately not worth paying the full movie ticket price or waiting for dvd. I also would not watch this movie with your girlfriend or wife, unless she forced you to watch Twighlight with her or something, in which that case she deserves it.
I'd give this movie a 6/10 or if you prefer the star rating, 3 stars. Keep in mind, I'm probably the least harsh critic of anything.
I should play more Hold'Emby ToT)MidiaN(, August 19
Bit drunk right now and felt like blogging a bit, anyway, it's been a long time since I last blogged. Last time I posted, I was talking about how I was looking to play tons of PLO, make lots of money and VPPs and aim for SNE, pass my driving test, get a Porsche Cayman S and get sexy this year. Hasn't really worked out that way thus far. In April, I came back to Korea after leaving last September. I had lived in Korea for around about 2 years total time in between Jan 08 and Sept 10, but this time back was a little different. This time I came with Ket and we got a hotel instead of living in my own place. When I lived here, I always lived either near or with my girlfriend at the time, but we broke up in January, so it was a different atmosphere in April. Still, I hung out with her a lot, and truthfully, a large part of the reason I wanted to come back to Korea was to get back with her. In any case, all this time I spent with Ket and the ex resulted in a lot less poker, workout, driving related time, so I had put the back burners on a couple of goals, and completely destroyed any chance of making SNE by that point already. Not that I'm saying I regret it, but in some way it always feels depressing to set goals and fall at the first hurdle, like I wasn't even close to SNE or getting sexy by then.
As for my driving test, well, I failed my first attempt back in March, just before I came to Korea for the first time. However after 4 hours of lessons and a 2nd attempt in May, shortly after I left Korea in late April, I managed to pass. I still don't have a car though, but I am looking at a few cars. BMW 320d, Mazda RX8 R3 and Ford Focus ST-3 are the cars I've mainly been looking at. They're all very different, but I think I'll probably end up going for the boring, economical and comfortable choice in the BMW 320d, but we'll see how the next month goes. Going back home to England Sept 8th (My birthday) so will make the decision then, will see how poker goes, hopefully get some test drives in when I'm back and make the decision from there, maybe I'll even consider some other cars in the £10k-£15k price range if anyone has any other suggestions.
Anyway, I've actually been back here in Korea since late May, I left the day after my 2nd driving test and have been here ever since. For the first month I was mainly alone, stayed with the ex-girlfriend's parents for a few days and then found my own place. Some of her friends from the States stayed at my place, we all went to Thailand together for a few days and then we came back. Mid June, Ket came out again and we've been living together since, we're staying in some 2 room apartment in central(ish) Seoul. I's a fairly nice place, but nothing special. One plus is that it's quite close to my old apartment (7 minutes by taxi) that I lived in here in the past, so I'm familiar with the area and we end up hanging out in a lot of the old spots I used to hang out in. It's quite nostalgic, it reminds me of the good times and makes me feel quite regretful for ever leaving Korea and getting into a situation where I basically had to lose my girlfriend. Still, you do what you want at the time and obviously in the moment I wanted to be alone and play more poker, make lots of money, get SNE and all that worthless shit that actually means diddly squat. Oh well.
The "getting sexy" goal has not gone entirely to plan either. I mean, it could've gone worse I guess. After leaving the States in late Sept 2010 I weighed in at my heaviest ever - about 82kg (I'm like 176~177cm ish), after a month of atrocious eating in the States where I had gained about 7kg in 1 month. When I came back to Korea I was about 76kg and now I'm 74kg after 1 month of gymming with Ket so I guess it's some improvement, but it's pretty tough to get anywhere in Korea. This is largely because all the people I know here go out frequently, and this most often times involves lots of alcohol consumption and lots of greasy, unhealthy foods. Not that I'm saying that this is a bad thing, obviously I enjoy hanging out at good resutaurants and bars with friends having a good 'ol chinwag, but it's not exactly conducive to weight loss. It's ok though, I'm gymming a decent amount at the moment, showing some small progress despite the awful diet, and am confident that when I'm back in my home town I'll focus on this more and make more progress, but I mayaswell have some fun while I'm here afterall and not focus TOO much on the poker and workout grinding.
As for some poker results, this year started fairly well. I was up about $35k in cash games by the end of March and looking towards an easy ride to a $100k+ year on the tables and whatever else in rakeback, but a recent $20k+ downswing in PLO has fucked that idea over. I've ran pretty shit at $2/$4 and $3/$6 PLO overall, but on top of that, I've definitely let it get to me a bit too much aswell and have ended up playing some very poor PLO at times and spewing a lot of money. That's the thing in PLO, the variance is massive, and even if you're a big winner, it's only gonna be so long before you experience a big downswing, and how it effects you is going to make a huge difference to your long term winrate. Unfortunately, this is definitely the worst downswing I've experienced buy-in wise in my 5.5 year career of poker and I've definitely let it get to me too much. God only knows what I'll do if this continues for another 50 buyins, but let's not hope that happens. I think I have a reasonable edge in the $2/$4 PLO games on Stars, almost every table I sit at has 1 player with <3BB/100 winrate, and often times there are 2 players that are that awful, and yet I still can't seem to win. PTR is a little off with my winrate, I think it says I'm down like 8.1k total in $2/$4 PLO at the moment but in actuality it's more like -$5k and I'm almost breakeven in terms of EV, but even still, the games seem so soft that it's hard to take that I'm even "breakeven" in terms of winrate. I'm sure it's just variance though.
Hold'Em wise, things have gone much better. I'm above $1/hand so far in my database, though as a sidenote, this is just my laptop and I'm missing some hands that I lost when my laptop blew up in Korea, thus losing whatever hands I played from late May-late July when it blew up and I don't have the HHs from my desktop. That being said, there's not many Hold'Em hands missing anyway, infact, there's about $2k in profit from Hold'Em games missing, mostly from a 5/10Euro game I played where I won $1.5k in about 30 hands, unfortunately Ladbrokes won't send me the hand histories in a format I can import which upsets me a little cause I'm quite OCD and like to keep track of my actual results and not just stare at some half-true numbers.
I also won a $109 NLHE headsup tournament for about $7.6k and came 7th in a $500~ PLO 6max SCOOP tournament for about $5.6k so I'm prob up like $10k~$11k in tournament winnings on top of this, about $14k-$15k in rakeback/bonuses so far, and probably another $4k-5k in cash game winnings that are either lost hand histories or on my desktop. Probably about a $50k ish year so far all inclusive, which is definitely better than the last 2 years but not really what I had planned at the beginning of the year, still, there's a few months left, I feel like PLO is very beatable and a big upswing is just around the corner and Hold'Em games are still beatable, I'm def gonna get sexier when I get home, I've passed my license and will inevitably get a car when I get home, so things can only get better and I'm gonna close in on the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year.
Cheers,
maybe I'll blog again by years end, I do blog pretty infrequently though!
Feel like there's been a wave of quality, cool blogs and I hate to break the trend, but I'm getting desperate here. Does anyone know how to fix the seating on Hero Poker tables so that your own avatar is always in the same spot? I know this was asked by Night and answered on a different thread, but we both can't seem to find that thread anymore lol.
I like starting out everyone of my recent blog posts with the same line: It's been a while since my last blog post. But this time I can't really attribute that to laziness. Been hard on the live poker grind ever since Black Friday! Games are good! Still trying to figure out ways to play online thou. Most of my online poker grind time at home has been replaced by Starcraft 2 / Heroes of Newerth. Like many other poker players I know, I've also been looking elsewhere for new sources of income. I guess they call it "diversifying your portfolio". Started staking some good friends in some of the live games, which is nice because when I come home from a soft game it still feels like I'm grinding the game. Also, putting a lot of time and effort into a website that will be launching later this year. More on that at a later time
In the meantime, check out how good I'm getting at golf...
Golfing at Night!
Golfing during the Day!
Here is 4th of July from our deck in San Diego:
On a side note, I sold out and signed-up for Twitter so follow me @pokercosmo
Just played a random mtt and binked :)by Drakk, August 17
While i was watching the very deceiving Dota2 stream I decided to touch my poker account for the first time in a decently long time, single tabling a turbo mtt while watching the stream inbetween 2 server crashes, and binked it no sweat really. http://img847.imageshack.us/img847/2842/poker17aout.jpg
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, and also I should probably stick to midstakes crushing and putting money aside but oh well, I'm too young to be responsible. An interesting and fun experience anyways. 
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