Wednesday 11 November 2009

24h session? I must be mad


I've read a post by CMAR on 2+2 that says you should try and have a hobby or something constructive to do whilst you are not playing. It was a decent point, and excluding bridge and pool, i often spent a lot of time during my non-playing sessions drifting on the internet or sleeping. I decided to get a couple of jigsaws and here is the first one completed. Took me a few days and got pretty hard when i only had the white bits left, but am pleased with the outcome. I'm going to get a frame and put it up on the wall because it looks pretty good.
Its one of M.C. Escher's impossible drawings, called 'ascending and descending'

Having read this post on 2+2 i've decided to give my own attempt on playing poker for 24 hours. It won't be easy and i will have to sort out food, drink and red bull in advance, but it'll put me back on target for my milestone bonus to be hit by the end of this month.

As I write this one person is 18.5 hours into his challenge, the other guy has dropped out. He's run pretty BE (Break Even) but he will have earned a fair amount of fpps for doing so. If i 24 tabled for the 24 hours, i would earn about 5400 vpps, which translates as 18900 fpps or $300 ish in cash. I doubt (severely!) that i will be able to maintain 24 tabling for that long so will probably cut to 9 or 12 after about 10k hands.

I won't be saying when i'm doing it, but it will likely be before the end of this month. I just don't want regulars picking on me at hour 16 onwards!

Steve

Monday 2 November 2009

October ends :)


Hey y'all.

I see why some others don't update their blog that often now! It just slips out of my mind to be honest, but here i am with a summary of my last few weeks.

The graph above is from the 50NL i played after my poor start to october. It took me a few days to get going, but finally had some decent grinding after the downswings i was having at 100NL. I didn't play nearly as many hands as i was panning on doing which was due to three things. 1) bridge 2) Some pretty bad insomnia 3) Laziness

I think i have finally got my sleeping pattern back on track (he says after waking up at 4:30 am) but i have been trying not to take 2-3 hour naps as much. I've never really had a problem with my sleeping pattern before, so it probably has something to do with the fact i haven't had a schedule for months. I'm going to try to stick to a schedule as well as increasing the amount of exercise i do and improving my diet.

I've been playing a lot of bridge at the moment, but for half of October i was playing pretty poorly. I went to Birmingham for a weekend on the 23rd to play in the Autumn congress. I didn't play great, partly due to the lack of sleep i got and partly due to the system we were playing. We were playing an unusual system, designed by my partner, which enables us to enter the bidding on more hands and is also quite fun! However, I think the strain of remembering, alerting and explaining things to the opponents caused a lack of concentration on my part. The good news is that since i returned, i've played pretty well. We won our NICKO match (national Knockout) and also the latest intercity match VS York - my old team.
The system we played in Birmingham has caused a controversial topic on the governing body's website (here) but you'll only really understand it if you actually play bridge.

I'm aiming to get the 200k milestone bonus on Pokerstars this month, which at 5k hands a day should take me about 2-3 weeks. I've got a pool weekend this weekend at Blue Dolphin and I'm playing Bridge for Yorkshire on the last weekend of the month, but aside from that i should have enough time to get the $2000. I'm going to stick to 50NL for the rest of this month and do some hardcore grinding, and then reduce tables and work on my game at 50 and 100NL next month.

Thats all for now

Steve