Tonight, PokerStars was the home of an epic, impressive, dare I say almighty match between two of the best players to ever live! Yes, I am talking about helemaalnicks and myself. After one hour of intense, fearless and aggressive game playing HORSE for a colossal buy-in, the predestined winner - Me, of course, triumphed.
After taking down a massive pot in the stud hi/lo level with two pair, Kings up against Nick’s ridiculous two pair 3’s and 9’s (which he caught on the river), I had close to a 5:1 chip lead.
Shortly after that came the 2nd round of Limit Texas Hold’em, which saw chips flying all over the place - the next 2 hands, at least, were won by yours truly, after which a magnificently played T8s led me to victory. Indeed, Nick raised from the small blind. Thinking “lol minbets” and “oooh I has soooted cardz”, I called, knowing that his remaining .75BB would be mine if I managed to play the hand correctly. The flop came J9x, and I made a great play, check-raising him all-in. He made the call with QJ, and I could already feel the cash in my pocket (or cashier, more like). Sure enough, the Q came on the river, and I left with the staggering prize of 400 cents.

What? I was bored
btw my stars bankroll is now at 7.46$. That’s a good 2.46$ profit for today.

//update 25.02: I busted my stars roll a couple days ago. Note to self: Don’t flip for rollz with 2+2 players degens. They’re too lucky.
And thanks for your comments everyone

Well’, I quit shorthanded, at least for now. It wasn’t very kind to me, so I returned back to my previous game: full ring. And I must say: it’s been going pretty good again. I’m up about 600$ again in the last week without even playing all that much (6k hands). So I hope I’ll keep progressing this way again so that I won’t even have to cash in again from my college tuition. I’ll definitely play shorthanded again, but for now, I gave it a try and it didn’t work out. So I guess there’s no shame in returning to an easier game and maintaining my winrate, then to keep struggling at something I clearly don’t get any profit from.

Just received my college grades, and I flunked 3. Not that good, I expected to flunk 1. But hey, that’s what you get when you spend too much time studying and playing poker. No one to blame but myself, and I’ll be sure to do better when I have to retake them in a few months. No big deal. College started again and with that, of course, all the “side activities”, which basically means going out, chilling, hanging in bars, playing pool. I played some ridiculous game with SonicXT last week where he potted almost all his balls in one turn, and then finished it off with a huge blunder by potting the black ball in the wrong hole. So I guess I’m not only running lucky at the poker tables

Not much to say other than that, I’ll post some more interesting stuff next time.

Yours truly

I’m updating my blog, because I have to stop playing for now. Played my simple, effective game as always, and I finally did it! I broke the pokerstrategy brm. With a downswing of over 50 Buy ins, and a little 3.5 BI downswing on NL100, I now get rewarded for my strict brm. I “only” lost 1750 in the past 2 days. This is my s&g-”progression” of the past days:

As you can see, I lost a LOT of money. But I need to be able to deal with these hits on my bankroll. I can’t let this influence me in any way. I knew this job was hard when I started a couple of weeks ago, so I need to be a good professional and take it on the chin.

I remember a couple of years ago. I went out with my bicycle, to visit my friend at the other end of the city. When I wanted to grab my bike, in order to cycle back home, I noticed it was stolen. I thought “ok, well, what can I do?”, I knew there was no way in which I could get it back, and I wouldn’t get anywhere by getting angry, so I decided to walk back home, and remembered to buy a better lock next time.

That’s the right attitude. I can’t get worried about this downswing. Yeah, so I lose 1750$ in 2 days. Allright, I did everything I could in order to win money on average, but I got ‘f-ed in the a’ time after time after time. I remember losing my high pairs against all kinds of trash, like QJ, J7s, KTs, etc. etc. I remember winning no coinflip. I pushed into lots of kings and aces, and got some crazy calls on my raises at late stages, that made me bubble out again.

This shouldn’t happen, losing so much in so little time. I know. But can I change that now? Of course not. It’s gone, life goes on. I don’t even have to move down yet, because of my brm. I was saying “I won’t move up, before I get at least 1 downswing on this limit. Well, I felt it. It doesn’t feel particularly good, since I was hoping for a little bit smaller downswing, but alright, I can take this hit. I reached my goal (get a downswing) and I can go on with daily business as usual. I’d even think my goal for this month (making 5k$) isn’t out of reach yet. On the bright side, I’m still up a little over 1500$ this month, so yes, I’m way behind to schedule, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be impossible. I have to make 3500$ in 10 days, so that’s 350$ a day. I need an upswing, for shure.

It’s not like I don’t care about the money. 1750$ is quite a lot of money for me. But I can’t do anything to undo it. This is not some computergame where you can click the quickload button and you can go back again to where you started losing 3 days ago. I have to move on, and shouldn’t look back.

I know this won’t happen to me for a reason besides bad luck. I believe that there is a God, who sets the universe up in certain ways. I will never fully understand why certain things happen to certain people, but I do know, that some laws can’t be broken. Bad luck doesn’t bother me, because it is inevitable that I will lose some cash once in a while. What I control, is the way I play, how much I play, and what my mental and physical health is like when I play. As long as I keep those up to the full 100%, the universe won’t fool me, and I will win while playing poker. If I could change my luck on demand, I would’ve been a millionaire already. But in life, things don’t work that way.

I’m glad I lose some cash sometimes. It’s because of this, that fishes keep coming to my pokerplatform. Every time a fish wins a s&g tournament, he’ll feel more confident, and he’ll come back to play some more. You can’t make money if you don’t lose any. Today, I made a very generous donation to some people, with the purpose of making more money off them later. I invested 1750 as advertising money, so fishes will feel like they can win at poker.

Tonight I will play poker again, and maybe I’ll get more lucky then. If not, then so be it. But this won’t stop until it stops, and I can’t do anything about it. I hope I will see you at my coaching tomorrow, and I hope you learned something from this post. I need to get me some food now.

Good LUCK at the tables!

I decided to go on a weekend trip with my girlfriend past friday. Wow , was it the biggest mistake of my life :D. We went to a mountain and i got stuck right in the middle of the worse weather in greece past 5 years.  Not a single thing went right. First night , we felt a bit tired decided to sleep for 2 hours before going to dinner. In the end , we slept 15 hours and woke up at 10 in the morning. My girlfriend was already a bit sick , and it was inevitable i would get too. I had the bright idea to take a path from the hotel into the center of the village. Unfortunately the path was slippery and full of ice , snow was getting all over our faces , and it was extremely tiring to climb it. So after 20 minutes we decide to climb back down in desperation and take my car to go to the village. Then apparently i was poisoned by some food because i threw up in the night for the first time in 10 years or so and i was babbling in my sleep all night long. We decided to leave next morning because we couldnt take it anymore , but my car was covered in ice. So after 30 min of sitting in the cold and clearing the car and the path we managed to leave. My oddysey wasnt over because i started feeling cold again and had fever and i had to go rather slow because of the icy road  , until 60 km outside athens where the weather was pretty bad and every car was put to a halt. Then again as we were sick and tired we had to climb down and put some chains in my tires that are for slippery icy roads and we were back on the go again. Although i was tired i had to pay extreme caution because the cars would slide every once in a while and i had to make sure it wouldnt turn around. So after 8:30 hours for a trip that normally lasts 4 hours i was at home and i was rather tripping until i got to my doorstep. I immediately went to my bed and slept. I almost feel lucky that i made it out of this horrible weekend.

I should have stayed home and played poker.

Well, it looks like I’m finally out of my breakeven stretch (hopefully)(see below). I had a mini-upswing, winning ~380$ in little over 1h Quite interesting session… lots of fish, but also one very good player imo. After calling my preflop raise (I had 55), and raising my bet on a J 5 4 r board, he caught bottom set of 3’s on the turn, actually checked behind, and just called the river on a totally dry board. I don’t have the hand history, but I couldn’t quite believe it… Anyway, here’s an interesting hand, since I don’t have much else to say…

0.50/1 No-Limit Hold’em (6 handed)
Hand recorder used for this poker hand: Texas Grabem 1.9 by www.pokerstrategy.com.

Preflop: Hero is BU with 6, 5
MP2 calls $1.00, 2 folds, Hero raises to $5.00, 2 folds, MP2 calls $4.00.

Flop: ($11.50) 5, 3, 6 (2 players)
MP2 bets $3, Hero raises to $18.00, MP2 calls $15.00.

Turn: ($47.50) A (2 players)
MP2 bets $50, Hero raises to $80.00 (All-In), MP2 calls $30.00.

River: ($207.50) 4

Final Pot: $207.50

Results follow (highlight to see):
MP2 shows [ 2h, Kh ] a flush, Ace high
Hero shows [ 6s, 5s ] two pairs, Sixes and Fives
MP2 wins $204.50 USD with a flush, Ace high.

oh ya, almost forgot… I should be diamond by tomorrow… *squeeze*

Update: Make that +590, I had another rather good 2 hr session

Update 2 (16/02). I believe I just had my worst session on NL100 so far, -760$ in 2 hours. yay. I’m gonna take a break imo

Update 3 (18.02) I don’t want to steal the top spot from Nick’s very inspirational post, so I’ll just add 1-2 things here ^^
1st, I just got the PA hud registration key. Damn it’s great. I played like 30k hands on NL100 without it, and even though it’s beatable without, stats should help my game a great deal. I can immediately identify regulars, if they’re fish or PS TAGs etc
Oh and also, I got a little luck back, won about 520$ today, So it’s going pretty nicely If only all the bad sessions could be “evened” out the next day ^^
That’s all for tonight I think. nightynight