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Look at me go

On the 3rd I started my years poker play, and acutally ended up having my most profitable day at cash games yet. I won around $950 altogether plus fpps and stellar awards.
My best ever day included my $1k+ tournament cash, and my best ever cash day in terms of buy ins was 13 1/2 at 50NL ($675) but this is my highest score in just cash games.

It actually got me onto PTR's daily leaderboard - you can see me in 6th place below.


Supernova Elite is the top tier i can get by playing at Pokerstars. I thought i may have an outside shot at it, but it doesn't look like i will be getting it this year. The new vpp structure has lowered the amount of vpps i can accrue at my current limit and means i would have to play closer to 4 million hands in a year than the 3 million+ i was expecting.
I've made a $100 bet with my brother that i can get to 300kvpps before he can get to 100k. Its not much money considering how much we will get by getting to our respective goals, but the pride of winning the bet will hopefully make me play more. Who knows, if i'm at 400k by June, i may consider moving up in limits to hit SNE.

I'm gonna start including interesting hands i played in this blog, but not in this post as its already quite long.

Steve

welcome 2010

New year = renewed efforts to keep this blog going.

Above is the graph of my 24 hour session. I completed 22 1/2 hours, mainly 24 tabling, before my computer crashed. I took this as a sign to stop, though if it were a challenge or for money i am confident i would be able to complete it.
I'm pretty happy about being positive after the session as other people who have had a go haven't done as well. On the other side, if i went on a tilt inducing downswing i reckon i would have probably stopped, so i guess i ran well in that respect.

I had a good new year and xmas. Spent New Year's eve in a pool hall i frequent in York. It was all you can drink fro the night for £40 - you just helped yourself behind the bar. Saw a lot of former uni mates which is always a laugh.

Will update you on more of my exploits soon. I'm gonna aim to update this more, but keep the posts a bit smaller so its more of a 5 minute job rather than 15!.

Steve

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

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

Tournie time

Tournaments are sooo frustrating. I'm planning to spend one day playing tournaments per week, and that day was last night. Entered about 15 tournaments all in all, some $4/180s and the rest larger Mtts. I cashed in a few, played pretty well in most of them too - i was happy with my play anyway.

I played in the $3 re-buy and came 17th. It took over 8 hours, so the hourly is pretty poor :P, but i played pretty near perfect poker for most of it. I got from 30k in chips to 1.3 million over the course of a few hours. At no point did i have all my chips in without having the other guy drawing dead. With 19 left i ran my QQ into a guy's AA, he'd been three betting a lot and i was to his left so 4bet him from the BB when he'd 3bet the button. Sucks, because the tournament is so top heavy in the payout structure.

Never mind, I'm sure i'll make another large final table soon.

Cash is on the up slightly. I've changed the times i play to early mornings and i've found a different player base to the one i've usually played against. I'm still down over $800 in all in EV, but i know its not going to suddenly close the gap. Unfortunately I'm going to be away this sunday and then all of the weekend after, so that will reduce the profitable time that i have to play in for the rest of the month. Thankfully though, I'm now up for the month across the two sites with tournies included, and am soon going to be able to buy the $800 SN bonus.

Steve

Running good? I think not

Here are the first 6 days of my month. Not a happy picture, the big downswing was mostly just one day's worth of play. I've moved back down to 50NL to just grind away. I'll probably stay there for a week, and hopefully have caught back all the difference.

As a side point, i'm playing on Mansion poker at the same time. Its a with a staking consortium called Bank Roll Supply. They stake me to play cash games on mansion up to 100NL at the moment. I'm using it to try out 6max and also hopefully shots at 200NL if i can show them i'm a winning player at Mansion. Its not that i can't bankroll myself across two sites but the three benifits i think it gives me are
1) They are all UK based players who will be having monthly, or so, meetups. It will give me a chance to join a group of players if i ever move into live play seriously.
2) It will give me chance to take shots at 200NL and also at 6 max without being as nitty as i usually am.
3) They give coaching session to their players (me!), so i get free coaching which i've not really had much of.
Added in to the fact that i'm a high volume player, so they've offered me rakeback which they wouldn't normally do. I'll keep you posted on how this goes, but i've been doing it fo just over a month now. The requirements are that i have to play 3k hands a week, which i can do in a few hours if i need to.

So aside from my bad start on stars, i'm up $200 ish on Mansion, and also $70 ish from donkaments. Donkaments are something i'm going to try my hand at again, maybe one day a week, as an effort to break up the grind. I came 4th in a $5 freezeout at the end of last month for $1019 which has sparked my interest again.

Finally my rough plans for going to America at the end of Novemeber to play in the nationals (bridge) at San Diego have fallen through, due to a clash with a County bridge tournament that i've got to play in over here. I will look to go abroad soon though, maybe for either the PCA (poker) or the spring nationals (bridge). Failing that i will almost certainly go during the 2010 WSOP.

Steve