hey guys, little update on my August challenge...

Early this month, I moved back up to NL200, and tried to adjust my game to that limit, by playing quite a bit more loose/agressive than I was used to, and learnt quite a lot from TwiceT when he came over. Unfortunately, I also developed a few leaks which took a long (way too long) time to spot -- I finally noticed what was wrong around the 10th, and up till then I had basically been playing -EV poker at 6-max. HU wasn't going great either, so I was basically breakeven (or close) for a third of the month. Long story short, there's no way in hell I'll make the $20k I had set myself as a goal.

So, with that said, what now? After this afternoon's little downswing, I'm at a measly +2.3k for the month. There's still 1.8k of my bonus to come, so I'd like to reach at least +10k$ this month. Maybe I can do more, but I don't want to burn myself out, or play when I shouldn't just to reach a goal. Besides, I'm sure to burn myself out in September, with Party's upcoming promotion, so I'll just rest in anticipation ;)

I've also had to cashout about 2k, so I'm a tad short for nl200.. I suppose I'll just grind NL100 for the easy moniez and only open the juiciest 200 tables, till I have a bit more security.

So, all that boring stuff aside: BLACK MEMBER PARTY! We've decided to do it "right" and rent a house for 10 days with some of the English Diamonds (i.e DaPhunk, Kruppe, TwiceT, CrazyNail, and Erptech) -- TR with pics to follow imo ;) 

and.. that is all, I think. Will report back when busto or successful. 

Sorry, that's the only title I could come up with.

"Day 3" is over, and was by far the sickest. TwiceT arrived earlier today, and coached me for a session of HU (mostly nl100, plus one table nl200). I don't think I've ever learned so much, so fast. His insight and general game are amazing...In short: we crushed 

FTP is really cool for heads-up too, we only once played a regular (who was a DC coach and mid-stakes HU regular...and we crushed him :P), otherwise there's really good traffic and plenty of fish, so whenever I can't get enough NL200 SH tables on party, I can always play huhu.

The first two days didn't go very well, with a big upswing followed by a similar downswing. Actually, today's upswing doesn't quite top the last one, but I don't care. I feel great about my game now (and my chances), so...we'll see what the next sessions bring!

Here's a graph of the day, mostly HU but with a few NL200sh hands (the 400$ up in the red line...don't ask, I'm not sure how it happened):

And here's the month, up til now (August 4th 4am CET):

By the way... check out our setup ;)

Hi all,

In case you're wondering why I haven't posted in ages..it's pretty much that I haven't had anything interesting to say, what with playing very little hands at rather boring limits. In case you're wondering who the fuck I am, you'll have to dig through the blog to find my older posts. deal with it.

First, let me sum up what's happened between then and now in a handy list format.

- I almost busted my roll making a stupid BRM mistake in February or so (that, I already talked about)

- I played NL50 then NL100 for a while, mostly making money through bonuses.

- The reason why that phase lasted almost 6 months is that I was working (a little more than usual) for school, and was too lazy to make proper time for poker.

- Somewhere in there, I broke my back in two places on the last day of the ski season (nothing too serious, but very annoying), had exams, won a $1000 propbet on my maths one (6/6, ship it holla), recovered and continued to be super lazy with poker.

- Oh, I recently started playing HU too. Also, I watched a few videos and improved my 6-max game a ton. I'm not grinding stupidly anymore, thinking about every decision I make and soaking up advice from excellent coaches. 

AND NOW:

Today is the 1st of August. I have an entire month free ahead of me. For those of you who read my blog a year ago, the title should start to give you a hint of what's up next. (quick summary for the new ones: I grinded like crazy during July '08 for a promotion, 120k hands nl100-nl200 in <30 days)

That time, I was shooting for 20'000 partypoints in a month. This time, I'm going for 20'000$. Just to step things up a little. The way I'm going to do this is simple: eat, play poker, eat, play poker, eat, play poker, sleep. Let's see how it goes. 

Seriously though, my roll now stands at 6700$, spread between Party and full tilt. I'll be starting at NL200, playing *maximum* 8 tables (I'll fill up with nl100 when traffic is bad). I play 6-max on party and HU (nl100 at first) on FTP, though that might change once I get my bonus. Speaking of which, I have a 3k$ bonus I can buy on party as soon as I reach Palladium again, and rakeback on full tilt -- the 20'000$ include bonuses and rakeback, by the way.

What's perhaps noteworthy as well is that I am not going for any specific promotion, top250 or otherwise, so I don't give a shit about volume. My main goal will be to improve my hourly rate as much as possible (frankly, that should be the goal of every poker player), and beat NL400 as soon as possible. Thankfully I have lots of videos I can watch, and I might get some private coaching if I feel I need it. 

I will hopefully be playing 6 days per week full time, to leave a few days for playing live (I play NL1k or 2k and put 75% of my winnings towards live tourneys). It'll probably end up being less than 6 days though, since TwiceT is coming over in a few days ^^ 

I'll post updates here if there's enough popular demand, otherwise I'll just start a thread in the forum blogs I guess. On that note, I'll leave you with an awesome video while you wait for the first update. Wish me luck, I'm officially starting tomorrow!  (well, this afternoon i guess. whatever.)

//edit: check out TheLastNail's blog! He's doing the same thing, only way more baller 

Yay, I'm platinum again! Good excuse for a short mid-month blog update! (Spoiler: Graph after the break). I've played 29k hands so far, but I'll keep that for later.

That new style I learned and developed on NL50? It doesn't apply _at all_ at NL100. The play is waay more aggressive and loose preflop, and there are way less fish. So while I wait for my potential coach to get back to me, I'm just playing as best I can with almost the same style as before (you know, the kinda high variance one...).

Aside from poker, there are a couple (maybe) interesting things going on; most importantly, I think, my exams. More specifically, my written math exam. A couple months ago, I made a propbet with a friend that I could get at least a 5.5 (the scale is 1 to 6, with 4 being the minimum to pass). Now, that may seem quite feasible, but there is one catch: my previous yearly averages have been: 3.5, 3, and (at the moment of betting), 3. I've basically never done any work at home, so even though I understand everything perfectly (pretty much), I have 0 practice. So, long story short, I gave him stupidly good odds, betting my 660$ to his 1000$. Yes I know, I'm a propbet fish. However, a couple of weeks ago I was able to improve my odds a little by betting 100$ to 300$ with another friend, bringing the total bet to 760$:1300$. Talk about motivation to work ;)

So here we are, I suck at math, and I'm supposed to get in the top (probably) 2% or something in under 2 months; the math exam is on June 9th. I do have tons of material (old tests, 5 old exams with complete corrections, etc), but still, it's going to be a tight one. Well, as I like to say, it's going to be either epic, or very painful

Regarding that last post I made, I know I promised a NL1k trip report but unfortunately, due to general newbiness and lack of common sense, I didn't immediately note down any hands, and so only had 3 left in my measly memory. Which I wrote on my phone. And forgot. And reformatted the  phone. So I'm sorry to say that the TR will hold on one line =(

So, a friend (the same one I bet against) staked me for a NL1000chf (=~1kusd) live game at the Montreux Casino, the only high stakes game around that is fishier than NL25 online (I'm not kidding, it's insanely easy). I would get to keep 50% of the profit should I win. Long story short, after a few bad beats and setups and 4 hours, I was down 820chf, at which point I had to leave. Losing a good friend's money really sucks by the way, I really wouldn't recommend you staking / getting staked by a friend. So anyway, what I learnt from this is that the players really suck ballz, and as soon as I have a big enough BR, I'm going back to get a piece of the action In the meantime, I'll be playing a live NL100 game in 3 hours, which I'll relay here if it's interesting -- stay tuned ;)

Just a couple more things while I think of it: First, just in case you never read news, you absolutely must have a look at this and vote for your favorite blogger! I really want to get this blog more active, it'll make it much more interesting for you, but also for us -- more posts and more feedback (I can't stress that enough) really motivates us to produce frequent and good updates. By the way, if you have any requests as to posts, anything you'd like to see written, just ask! 

Other thing: since the ski season is basically over, I'll make the most of this opportunity to post the rare pictures I took during this winter, as well as finish up that little Zinal trip report that's laying in here as a half-written draft.

Aaaand back to poker. Here's the graph I promised:

 (More)

Hi and sorry for the long update-less period. But fear not, I'll make it up! Here's a little teaser of the next posts:

- Pretty pictures of snow, TR of the Zinal Freeride competition

- NL1000 live TR

- A prop bet involving my maths exam!

And now, for...now!

I'm pretty much unable to play, since there are only 2-3 good tables with open spots on Party at the moment (mondays suck.), so I'll give y'all a short update on this month.

I can hardly believe how little I've played... because of skiing and school (very tired when I get home), and mostly, laziness (and also playing on my fancy new Google phone ^^), I've put in only 15k hands in March.

However, the new style is working really well, and even with only 6-8 tables (as opposed to 12+ before), I find the game very interesting again. Other good point: it seems to have very low variance (see graph). Now I really have to record a session or two to try and find leaks, but overall, I'm very happy with the switch.

It's really encouraging to win steadily. I feel like playing professionally could be even more enjoyable than I thought if I can keep up this kind of winrate. I guess we'll see how it goes at NL200 and higher, when I get back there =)

Money wise, I'm at €2600 (3400$)+ 15k PP (600$ immediate value, or ~1500$ in bonuses). I'm about to release another 300$ chunk of my bonus, after which I'll have 1500$ left to release. In other words, bankroll is at $4400, and with 0 winrate, would eventually be 6700$. It feels like a relatively safe amount, but I still want to grind as much as possible, since I'll need to cash out some money soon.

Thus I decided to set myself a couple goals for April:

• - Play 40k hands
• - Keep a regular pace, to cash in the Gladiator promotion
• - Record at least one session
• - Mark interesting hands, to be posted (which is something missing from this blog imo)

I have two weeks holiday, but I'll be spending a lot of time working for school, revising for exams, and making the most of the two last weeks of skiing left, so 40k hands isn't that easy to reach. Plus I'm only playing ~500 hands/hour now, so volume is obviously much lower than before.

I'm not sure I included everything I wanted to, but it's late and I should go. Also, interesting posts coming soon!

Here are this month's graph and stats, by the way: