frosty012 Poker

New Website!!!!

2012-02-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

Alright guys, it's about time for the old blog to upgrade to the penthouse...we're movin' on up over to http://frosty012.com/

The new site looks really slick and has some very cool features...most notably, you will now be able to see whenever a member of Team Online is currently playing at the tables. Creepers rejoice. There is also easy access to my social media like Facebook and Twitter and the overall organization of the site is much more appealing...no longer will you have to scroll down through my essays to see where the next post begins!

Anyways, it's been a good run so far and I appreciate you all reading my blog and leaving comments. I hope you'll join me over at the new site and we'll continue to shoot the sh*t and keep it real...see you on the other side!

http://frosty012.com/

Keeping In Touch

2012-02-05T00:16:00.006-08:00

Hey guys. Man, so much stuff just keeps happening everyday in my life. It's amazing how the days still seem to fly by even though the only constant on my daily schedule is a workout at the gym. I'm way behind in blogging and I know how long it will take to catch up and the thought of that just puts me off writing even more...that's why I'm kind of using this entry to collect my thoughts a little bit. Three things that need to get done soon are 1)Road Trip, 2) Year end review of 2011 and 3) Goals/Plan for 2012. I have set a deadline for myself to get everything blog related finished by Feb 7. That means that I will be back at the tables for the first time this year on Feb. 8th and am looking forward to being productive once again. Even though I've missed a month already, I expect 2012 to be another tough grind but a profitable one as well.

One thing that I've learned about myself over the last couple of months is that I am not addicted to poker lol. To any other grinders out there, I highly recommend taking at least a month off at some point if you have the financial means to do it for your sanity and health. I save most of my money and rarely splurge on any big purchases, which can suck if you care about people ragging on you about what kind of car you drive etc. but is amazing if you don't want to feel any financial pressure everyday. I could give two sh*ts about material possessions at this point in my life...sure it would be nice to trade in my 1993 Accord for a Porsche but I wouldn't trade being able to wake up in the morning and doing whatever I wanted for any vehicle any time soon. As I mentioned, Aside from my drive to LA and the PCA trip, my days have been filled with morning coffees, afternoon workouts and lunches, evening drinks and weekend trips to Whistler. It's been pretty sweet but there's been plenty of drama as well and you know when I say drama, I mean girls.

There's been a lot of funny stories but the short of it is that old frosty's still single. It's too bad, maybe I'll go into more detail later (aka when I'm hammered) because otherwise it's a known fact that I'll be offending some ladies and we don't want that.

I'm hosting the Final Table of the Sunday Million tomorrow if you want to drop by. It should be taking place some time after the Suberbowl...go Pats! Brady, what a guy...

I've also got a new website operational! www.frosty012.com
I'll definitely be making a post that links this blog over very shortly but if you want to check it out for now then go take a look...I think it looks pretty sweet and is much more manageable/professional than blogspot.

Anyways, I've got a couple more announcements to make but for now it's off to bed. Stay turned for a blog frenzy coming over the next few days!

gl at the tables, thanks for readin'

It's getting frosty this weekend with Tyler "frosty012" as Special Guest – Poker School Online: Learn Poker Strategy, Odds and Tells

2012-01-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, sorry for the incredibly late notice (just got back from Whistler and had no computer up there :() but I'm going to be a featured guest for a PokerSchoolOnline show in about 30 minutes...here's the article:

It's getting frosty this weekend with Tyler "frosty012" as Special Guest – Poker School Online: Learn Poker Strategy, Odds and Tells

It's Turbo Time! TCOOP 2012

2012-01-23T16:34:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you are all aware by now, the first annual TCOOP is now underway on PokerStars and offers a great opportunity for players that enjoy fast-paced tournaments to hit a big score. I've personally set aside around $1,000 worth of buy-ins to play with and enjoy turbo tournaments a lot. I've taken a look at the schedule and have circled all of the events that I'd like to play in (almost all NLHE $30-$215) but don't have any kind of schedule set in stone. As of now, I've played about half of the tournaments that I plan on playing and have airballed them all :( I can take some solace in my defeats knowing that most of my losses have come from bad beats so hopefully I can continue playing alright and pick up a few late cashes.

Turbo tournaments are a lot of fun because they're largely action packed. With the blinds increasing at a quick rate, everyone is forced into playing a short stack where 10 big blinds will often be the norm and a 20 big blind+ stack will be big. Playing a short stack can actually be quite relaxing because there aren't very many decisions that need to be made. In turbo tournaments, everyone's edge is reduced simply because shallow stacks allow for very little post-flop play. As a cash game specialist, I welcome the more levelled out playing field because I know that there are some great tournaments players out there. With that said, there is still a ton of skill needed to win a turbo tournament...you need to be more aware of pre-flop ranges and push/fold strategy rather than post-flop play and sick 4-bet bluffs. It's no secret that you need to be aggressive in turbos to win...especially when your stack starts to shrink in comparison to the blinds and antes and you should be aware that other good players will be adjusting their ranges as well. Keeping that in mind, you also don't need to panic and start going all-in with any 2 cards when you fall to 10 big blinds or less. Remember that there will be so much money in the pot pre-flop from the blinds and antes alone and you will often be getting called so light that a little patience can pay off in a big way if you can find a hand.

If you haven't given turbo tournaments a chance, now would be a great time to start. The field sizes are quite big and soft and there are always a ton of satellites running if some of the buy-ins are out of your bankroll range. Hopefully you all have some fun with the TCOOP! Good luck.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

2012-01-20T15:52:00.001-08:00

The blog's back online boys!! The blog is back online...

My month long hiatus was due to what turned out to be an epic road trip down to LA as well as the PCA. I thought that I would find the time and motivation to write a bit during my travels but I just haven't until now...I've been pretty busy on several days travelling many hours and when I've had some downtime to relax by the pool, the last thing on my mind has been sitting behind my laptop.

There's so much to talk about but I'll start this post by saying that I'm happy to renew my Team Online contract for 2012 and look forward to a productive and profitable year for 2012...and by productive, I mean starting in February :). I'll detail my goals and expectations in a blog post soon after this one...I guess I can briefly say that right now I think that I'll be aiming for around 700K VPP's this year. I would in all likelihood get SNE again had PokerStars not altered the VPP allocation (which I'll also talk about in my next post) method this year.

For now I'd like to write about my road trip down to LA. The premise for the trip was to follow the Vancouver Canucks on their road trip through San Jose, Anaheim, and LA from December 26th-January 4th. I was accompanied by three great friends, two of which I had known since high school and one that I got to know very quickly.

Our driver was my good friend Jarnael. He's also my financial advisor and works for Freedom 55 Financial. Side note: *If anyone around Vancouver is interested in moving their money out of the bank and into some investments then shoot him an email at Jarnael.Payer@freedom55financial.com and he'll hook you up for probably no charge.* The plan was to use Jarnael's faithful GMC Yukon to drive as far as she'd take us (which we were hoping would be the whole trip!). Jarnael treats his Yukon as he would his woman...he will not let any other man on the planet drive her...except Iain. He even came up with 22 different excuses as to why I shouldn't drive at any point on the road trip before I reminded him that I only have my "N" license anyway and cannot legally drive more than 1 person. The vehicle has been on many a road trip in her lifetime and is pushing nearly 500,000 kilometers. Despite sinking thousand of dollars into her to keep her on the road, Jarnael refuses to sell or scrap the beast even with her suspect health condition. That said, I have never been on a voyage in the old Yukon that ended with me stranded on the side of the road, so while everyone was a bit nervous as to how she would fair on undoubably her most epic journey to date, there was nothing to suggest that the trip would end with a large towing bill.

Our copilot for the voyage was another long term friend of mine since high school-Iain. Iain and I have known each other forever and have been involved in many epic situations together...both good and bad. From crashing weddings to being at the hospital together, we've been together through the highs and the lows.

Rounding out the 4-wheel brothel was Iain's cousin Graham. I've only spent minimal time with Graham before the road trip but soon became extremely close to him in the figurative AND literal sense, as we were designated bed buddies on the road. Graham became a lifesaver on the road trip for many reasons because he was the only one with a data plan on his phone that would work in the USA. From enabling a GPS to checking sports scores, Graham and his phone took the trip to the next level. Undoubtedly, Graham's most beneficial contribution came when he discovered priceline.com

Annnd you probably already know me...but if you don't, here's a pic just so you can put a face to the name. This is the non-creepiest pic I could find.

We were scheduled to leave on Boxing Day at 11am-a time agreed upon through compromise of my desire to sleep in and everyone else's desire to get a move on. To my own amazement, I actually woke up around 7am and figured that I must be pretty excited for the trip since the only time that I'm usually up that early is if I'm too excited to sleep or I haven't gone to bed yet! Things had been so busy for me in December that the thought of driving out of the country for a couple of weeks hadn't really set in with me yet but as I started to pack, everything was suddenly becoming real. Since I was up so early, I decided to try and eat a good breakfast and then head up to the gym to get a workout in before departure. I figured that there would be almost no chance of maintaining any kind of workout schedule on the road so some pre-trip exercise would at least hold me over for a couple of days. I was staying overnight at my parent's house because I was there for Christmas and having grown up there my whole life I knew of a gym about 5 minutes away. Unfortunately, I forgot that most things are closed on Boxing Day so I was out of luck with the gym. I came back home and shot Jarn a text telling him that I would be ready to leave earlier than 11 if he wanted and we moved up our departure time to 10. I encountered some more bad news when my dad half-jokingly asked me if I remembered my passport as he was eating breakfast and I realized that I had actually left it in Vancouver. Something about driving to another country and not flying must have not registered to my brain the fact that I'd be crossing a border and would obviously need my passport. One annoying drive out to Vancouver and back to the 'burbs and Jarn and Iain arrived at my house to pick me up at our original takeoff time of 11am.

I was picked up in Jarn's faithful bucket of bolts and jumped in the back while Iain held shotgun. We made our way towards Seattle and picked up Graham about 15 minutes away from the border. The boarder lineup at the Peace Arch Crossing was minimal and we had to make a snap decision about whether or not to buy New Year's Eve tickets to an event that Jarn heard about before we were hit with roaming charges. No one knew much about the event other than it was close to the Staples Center (we would be there to watch the Kings play the Cancuks on NYE) and had an open bar from 11pm-midnight. At $60 a ticket, we figured we could get enough value out of that hour of drinking alone and decided to gamble on the event and bought the tickets online. It wasn't long before we got past the border without any problems and were officially out of the country!

...TBC.

I'd rather break up the story into 2-3 parts rather than wait even longer to post something.

A brief poker update: I'm planning on playing 10-15 TCOOP events and have already played in 4. Unfortunately, I've managed to airball all 4 so far despite playing very well. In the first event, the $134 knockout, I encountered a dream situation where someone opened, another player 3bet, I jammed QQ from the SB and the 3bettor looked me up with 88. 8 on the turn and I was out instead of having a decent stack before the money.

In the second event that I played, the $33 NLHE, I was out very early when I held 66 in a multi-way pot on a K65 flop and got outdrawn by a runner-runner flush.

The third event, the $55 6-max shootout, was very disappointing. I woke up at 7am today just to play it and was excited to see that my first table only had 3 players at it lol. One of the players was very bad and the other was mediocre. The very bad player was out pretty quickly and I had about 8K going into heads up against my opponents stack of 6K. We traded blinds for a little bit before getting it all-in with my QQ dominating his AQ...A on the river in dramatic fashion and I was crippled. 2 hands later I was out when my K5o fell to 78o.

I didn't give myself much of a shot in the 4th event, the $22R. I went back to sleep after busting the shootout and woke up halfway through the rebuy period of the $22R. My stack had dwindled from 1000 to 400 so I instantly re-bought to 1400 and got it in with AA against KQs on the very first hand. The board ran out 3 diamonds giving them the flush and I was too frustrated and tired to rebuy to 10 big blinds so I just went back to sleep. I was kinda disappointed to see that the add-on would have given me an extra 3K though, had I known that I would have rebought I think. Oh well, gotta check the tourney info next time.

Next up tomorrow is the $10R and a $33FO, we'll see if I can fare any better.

gl at the tables! Good to be back.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays (December Review)!

2011-12-25T14:20:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, happy holidays! I hope that everyone is relaxing and enjoying some time with the fam.

As I briefly stated in my last post, I wrapped up poker for 2011 on December 15th and have been on vaction ever since...or as my friends would say, doing the same thing that I was doing before. The reason that I stopped on the 15th was simply because I had cleared my last possible milestone bonus(500K) for the year and my Team Online salary as well right around that day. I could have continued to play and earn some more FPPs but without the added incentive of hitting a new milestone bonus combined with the memory of last year's hectic non-stop grind, I chose to chill out for once.

I'll jump right into the numbers for December (all 100nl):

December

$2,817 Table Winnings
$2,000 FPP Value
$3,200 Milestone Bonus
-------------------------------
$7,817 USD

My volume was pretty pinner once again but I felt alright about at least earning some positive table winnings for a change lol. The games seemed pretty good considering that I was expecting the typical December-regfest but 100nl seemed just fine.

Away from the tables, this month has been pretty sweet. Since the 15th, I've been able to fall into a routine that looks something like this:

-Wake up around 10am-12pm
-Whip up a good breakfast
-Lay some micro sports bets on Bwin
-Crush roommate in Madden
-Hit gym
-Sweat sports games at home or nearby bar

It's been tough.

I also met a girl at a Christmas party 1 or 2 weeks ago that I've seen a few times since. I'm not sure if anything long-lasting will transpire...she's like 4 yrs older than me and I'm leaving for a few weeks tomorrow but she seems pretty cool. We first hooked up at the Xmas party in real highschool fashion...first in the coatroom and then after too many people were coming into get their coats we moved to the bathroom...real PG-13 kinda stuff though, nothing serious.

As I just mentioned, I will be out of the country and on the move beginning tomorrow until Jan. 14th. First, I'm leaving on Boxing Day with three friends on what promises to be an epic roadtrip from Vancouver->San Jose->Anaheim->L.A. The premis of the trip is to follow the Vancouver Canucks roadtrip down the coast...we each got three tickets for each game (Sharks,Ducks,Kings) for $150 per person. To put that into perspective, one ticket to a Vancouver home game could cost $150 so watching hockey in the US can be a pretty sweet deal. Of course it's going to cost us $700 in gas to get there but hey, there's going to be a lot more to the roadtrip than just watching hockey. I'll also be in LA for New Year's Eve, so that should be exciting.

After the roadtrip, I'll immediately be jumping on a plane and will be flying down to the Bahamas for the PCA. I'm not going to be playing the Main Event but there's some Team Online promo stuff going on so I'll be around. Should be awesome.

All right, I'm about to head out for a big family Christmas dinner. I'll still be doing a big year in review blog post + my plans and goals for next year. I haven't figured everything out 100% but I know that next year will be a much more focused effort, which means that I'll likely be attempting to repeat SNE or something worthwhile. I'll keep you posted, take it easy.

gl at the tables!

10th Anniversary $10M Sunday Million

2011-12-18T00:26:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, just a quick reminder about the special Sunday Million today that is awarding at least $2 million to first...should be pretty epic.

In other news, I've finished up with poker for the year (aside from a couple tournaments perhaps!) and am looking forward to relaxing for the holidays. I'll give an update on how December went (poker + life) and then get around to doing the full year in review shortly after.

gl to those playing tomorrow.

Book Review: "How I Made My First Million From Poker"-Tri Nguyen

2011-12-12T16:57:00.000-08:00

Tri “Slowhabit” Nguyen’s latest book, “How I Made My First Million From Poker,” is centered around the topic of finding success in poker by emphasizing a balance between many different aspects of one’s life. The aim of the text is to show aspiring poker players that through living a balanced lifestyle and by working hard, one can gain the mental edge that is required for success and longevity in the poker world (as well as any future endeavours that one may have down the road). Whether one is just beginning their journey as a professional poker player or contemplating retirement, Tri offers valuable insight into how to approach poker throughout one’s career by drawing upon and referencing his own experiences.

The text itself is 253 pages long and is broken into 24 short chapters, each covering a different topic that helps contribute to the main theme of the book (the processes that allowed Tri to find success in poker). The book is very well written and easy to read if you’re accustomed to simple poker lingo. If words like “ranges,” “3-bet,” and “EV” are not part of your vocabulary, you may want to read some of the chapters with Google open on your laptop. Each chapter is very concise and it doesn’t feel like there is very much filler at all. Even when Tri is sharing a story about his personal experiences he always makes sure to make his point efficiently and without rushing. At the end of each chapter, Tri offers a couple of exercises for the reader to do in order to put the theories that were just talked about into practice. Even if you don’t bother doing the exercises, the presence of the workbook acts as reminder that Tri’s book is all about putting in your own work and that poker is not a game that can simply been spoon fed to someone.

I think that Tri does a great job of covering a vast array of topics that are all important to being successful in poker (from technical poker strategy to how to increase your overall happiness away from the tables). One thing to note though is that poker players that are already able to find some success in the profession may find some parts of the book to be a little redundant. That said, what I really found interesting about the book was that through sharing his poker career from the very start to where he is today, Tri makes it possible for almost everyone to learn something new-regardless of how seasoned a player may already be. For example, while I may already practice a balanced lifestyle and know how to avoid tilting, I may not know the best way to brand myself or how to approach coaching. Along the same lines, it’s nice to have the importance of things that I might already be aware of reinstated…such as setting up passive income to get my money working for me.

Overall, “How I Made My First Million From Poker” offers an interesting read and valuable insight into what it takes to succeed through poker. I really agreed with what Tri had to say in his book and it’s clearly no coincidence that he’s managed to find success in poker and life. I would recommend this book to anyone that is struggling with how to think about the game and how they should approach poker, or to those who simply have an interest in how the mind of a poker player often functions.

If you'd like to pick up a copy or read a couple of other reviews first, here's the link: http://www.dailyvariance.com/poker-books/my-first-million-from-poker/

fwiw, I'm not friends with Tri nor do I know the guy so this is a completely unbiased review. I simply got an email a few weeks ago asking me if I'd review the book and it looked interesting to me so I agreed.

gl at the tables.

Ego In Poker-Winrate vs. Rakeback

2011-12-08T00:59:00.001-08:00

There is way too much ego in poker. People are always quick to boast about their Superior poker IQ at the tables, either by pointing out where you went wrong in a hand and berating your play or by posting their opinion as fact on the forums. I'm certainly guilty of all of the above and while I'm not proud about it, I also can't think of a single poker player that doesn't have an ego problem to some extent. The fact is that in order to be a successful poker player, you need to be confident in yourself and the line between confidence and arrogance is so thin that it's easily crossed.

I want to preface my argument with the most important part to take away from this post. I have learned that flaunting one's ego is mostly just a reflection of insecurity. I know this because when I first began playing poker (and even now, but to a lesser extent though), I would berate a play or factually tell someone that they're wrong to reassure myself that I knew what I was doing, even if I didn't. In poker, it makes sense for people to be delusional about their skill level or they probably wouldn't be playing the game in the first place. When there are no definitive right and wrong answers, no clear-cut yeses and noes, it can be tough to know if you're winning (or losing) because of your play or simply because of variance. As a result, I think that a lot of people are insecure about their game and as an attempt to reassure themselves in what they are doing, they pretend or imagine that they are brilliant at poker by talking down to others.

With that said, the point of this post is not to plea to you to leave your ego aside while playing poker. Instead, the point of the post is to recognize that ego certainly exists among almost all poker players and to make a case for us mass-multitablers out there that the "winrate" statistic is very trivial so long as you're focused on the bigger picture of making money. Why am I trying to prove that people should be less focused on winrate and not other statistics? Well, if there's one thing that drives ego-centered arguments-it's people's winrates!

This post is inspired from an incident that occurred during my session today where I butchered a hand pretty badly against a winning regular and out of frustration wrote "why do I always pay off the nits?" to no one in particular, after the hand. This started a brief banter back and forth about who was the better poker player (aka the standard toolbox E-Argument) and after a quick glance at his results I found out, as I suspected, that he had only won less than 1/3rd of what I had earned in the same time frame yet his winrate was more than double mine!

Comparing Results

Results are how we keep score in poker. It's not a perfect system but it's the best we got. It would make sense then when trying to determine who is the better poker player to simply compare everyone's results and we would have a clear-cut answer to end all arguments. However, basic complications quickly arise because players have each played a different number of hands in their lifetime so it would not be fair to compare two players unless they had the exact same number of hands under their belt. This is where the winrate statistic comes into play and why people put so much emphasis on it...by looking at someone's winrate, we can learn how much money per hand someone is earning and thereby have a consistent measurement to use among all players. Sounds like the perfect way to compare people's skill level then right? A lot of people think yes but some smarter people would say NO!

Not surprisingly, those with a good winrate will be quick to defend the stat, while others with breakeven or marginal winrates will downplay it's importance. In my mind, there are two main reasons why I don't care more than I have to about my winrate.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to playing poker professionally, it all comes down to winning the most money that I can. Obviously I want my winrate to be as high as it can be so I can maximize my profits but unless you're playing high-stakes cash games it's almost always going to be the case that you can make more money from rakeback + small winnings rather than large table winnings +small rakeback(of course there are exceptions). Using myself as an example, in 2 years I've won about 130K in table winnings but because I've played over 4 million hands in this time span my winrate is nothing amazing (bit less than 1). One of the most amazing winrates that I've seen is around 6.6 from a player at 100nl but guess what, he's only earned 80K in the same time frame. The arguments starts now because you could easily say "well if the player with the high winrate played as many hands as you then he'd have won WAYY more money!" Yeah, well guess what, he CAN'T play as many hands as I can or he WOULD HAVE DONE IT TOO. There's a skill within itself that's required to mass multi-table and I think that it's very undervalued. People that have great winrates have them for a reason-they pick good tables and can pay attention to every detail. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're not fantastic poker players...just that take away their table selection and throw them on 24 tables and we'll see what their winrate drops to.

The players that I consider truely elite are those that can mass multi-table and have solid winrates to boot. I don't put myself in that category but I don't feel as though I'm leagues off either. To name a few names, guys like Ronfar3, TimStone, gutter23, Vinivici9586 and a few others have been able to maintain great winrates while maximizing rakeback and have it all figured out in my opinion.

Sacrificing Attention

The main reason why I think that the winrate statistic should not be boasted in the face of any mass multi-tabler is because they are aware that they are not playing 100% optimally and ACCEPT that in order for more overall profits, as mentioned above. When you're flying through 24 tables, you accept that you are going to miss little things, misclick more, and probably most importantly, practice worse table selection because you're going to earn more money from rakeback than you would from winnings alone. I don't care if you have a winrate of 2.x when I feel that I could have a winrate of 4.x if I also bumhunted 8 juicy tables all of the time. Of course, I'll be reluctant to prove this because I know the value of my time and will be instead busy grinding out them VPPs :)

Sample Size/How One Is Running

One last point to use against those bragging about their awesome winrate is to say that their sample size is usually meaningless. For reasons that were mentioned above, usually players with good winrates will be playing few tables and as a result, have a relatively small number of hands under their lifetime belt. People that think they have it all figured out after playing only 1 million hands (especially 100K-500K, lol) have another thing coming. I can play 250K hands in 1 month and in that month I could win $10K at the tables only to lose a few grand the very next month. When your sample size is small, variance will play a much greater role in your results and you could easily be on a heater the whole time and not even realize it.

Should We Care About Winrates At All?

Sure, we should care about winrates. I'm not saying someone's winrate doesn't matter...just that it's importance should be downplayed when getting into ego wars. Apart from the obvious reason of maximizing profit as much as possible, winrates are also important for things such as coaching. Whether I like it or not, having a good winrate and respect often go hand in hand in the poker community and therefore is not something to ignore completely.

And that's that. I'd like to hear other people's thoughts about this...especially someone that wants to defend their 2.56 winrate lol!

Every Day Is Exactly The Same (November Review)

2011-11-29T23:09:00.000-08:00

Bleh, chalk up November as the third lame month in a row for me now. While it's a bit frustrating, It's hard to get overly discouraged about how things went this month considering that I think my volume in November turned out to be the lowest of the year (besides January). Aside from the fact that I never really gave myself much of a chance to catch a heater or turn things around, the hands that I did manage to log also saw me run way below expectation. Anyways, the breakeven stretch continues, weeeeeeeee!

November

$227 Table Winnings
$2,000 FPP Value
---------------------------------
$2,227 USD

Obviously a very LOL total but I also made some decent money from my salary and I'm close enough to the 500K milestone that I coulda fudged the total if I really wanted to :) but I'll save it for December!

Away from the felt, November was a pretty social month with plenty of outings. My new roommate Mark and I went out quite a few nights and even managed to simultaneously bring home a couple of gals after enticing them with Delissio pizza (new pickup line added to teh arsenal if TV line fails). I'm pretty sure that judging by the quality of girls that I hit on when hammered the pizza line will sadly be much more effective LOL. It was great though, I first offered if the girls would like to split a cab with us and as they were hesitating Mark piped up about the pizza and BAM, they were sold. We returned home and Mark threw the pizza in the oven, which we ate a few minutes later after it came out black on the bottom. Nobody cared. I turned the TV on and sat next to my girl. The next thing I know, Mark's girl comes out of his room wearing his sweat pants and his hoodie. Mark comes out afterwards and hands her a brand new, UNOPENED tooth brush that he claims he just "had lying around." I'm not sure how the girl wasn't petrified or turned off by the fact that Mark appeared to have the one night sleepover down to a science but the next thing I know they're brushing their teeth side by side in our bathroom! Shortly thereafter, Mark grabs her hand, leads her to his bedroom, closes the door and I don't see him till morning. At this point, it's about 3:30 in the morning and I look over at my girl and see her sprawled out on the couch. She has a pretty decent body but has been a pretty big tease and seems to like playing games with me up to this point so I don't really know what's going through her head (example. At the club, for reasons that are still not clear to me, I walked up to her from behind and slapped her on the ass at one point. She really takes offense to this so I apologize but she is still fired up. I concede that I have screwed myself over here, apologize once again and then leave. 5 minutes later she sees that I'm actually not going to approach her again so she comes over and sits next to me and starts chatting again.lol.). I tell her that I'm really tired and that she should come sleep with me instead of on the couch. She says that she's not going to have sex with me, I say that's fine we should just cuddle...blah blah this goes on for a while until she seems unwilling to cave. Now I'm really tired and even though I figure she's still playing games am not going to force her to do anything obv so I give up, throw her a sleeping bag and jump in my bed and start to fall asleep. 30 seconds later she comes into my room and says it's "cold" out there and wants to sleep with me. lolz, crazy fkn girls. I'm actually more angry and tired with her at this point than in the mood for anything and pass out very quickly. I wake up in the morning cuddling her and am no longer tired and angry. She continues with her story that she doesn't sleep with guys she just meets and then decides to tease me for a couple hours, telling me all kinds of personal sexual secrets, showing me her panties etc. She then asks me if I have some paper and a pen to do her "morning diary." I tell her straight up that I think she's crazy but to knock herself out and that there's some paper on my desk. I ask her what she's writing about and she tells me that she's writing about all the things she wishes I would do to her! lol I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. I tell her to show me the list and I'll do my very best! Still no go. By now I see that things are pointless and can hear Mark banging around the kitchen so I get up for some breakfast. He's got a big stupid smile on his face, which adds to my frustration. The girls leave shortly after-we trade phone numbers because it seems to be the decent thing to do. My girl acts as though she doesn't want my number at all and has since been texting me regularly. lol, I'm pretty much over meeting girls in clubs + one night stands in general...time to take a spin class or something.

December's going to be an action packed month for the first 15 days. As it stands, my tentative plan is to earn just over 50K VPP's in this time frame, which will clear most of my salary for the year and overshoot the 500K milestone bonus by a bit. It will look like I will be ending the year with about 500K VPP's (half of my volume from last year) and 120K +salary in profits. In my mind, I'm already planning towards 2012 and will be looking to wrap up what has been a profitable but unstructured year by Dec. 15. After Dec. 15, I will turn my focus to some poker-related ideas that I have (will talk about more later, no point now as I only have ideas lol) and I will take some time off for the holidays!

Aside from completing my video series that I talked about earlier in my blog by Dec. 15, I will also be doing a short review of "How I Made My First Million From Poker," by Tri "Slowhabit" Nguyen:

To be honest, I don't think that I've ever read a single book about poker before...this isn't because I think that I don't need to or that I can't be bothered to do so, it's mostly because I don't think that there is very much good material that's catered to online play or the modern poker player. I could be wrong, as I haven't really done a whole lot of searching but from what I've seen there seem to be a lot of people that are better salesmen than poker players. Anyways, this book caught my interest so I'll let you know if I think it's worth if for you guys to pick up!

Hope you all had a good November and here's to a good December!

gl at the tables.

Movember

2011-11-27T22:37:00.000-08:00

Just a quick shout out to everyone that's doing Movember this year. If you live under a rock and are not aware of what Movember is or why 80% of the male population suddenly has dirty 'staches on their faces you can get all of the details here:

http://ca.movember.com/

I'm not sure how many people actually go as far as collecting pledges for growing the mustache...hopefully a lot do, although I'm pretty sure for most guys Movember is just an excuse to see if they can in fact grow a mustache. Shamefully, I fall into this second category since I never even really planned on doing Movember this year and just made a late decision 1 week into the month to not shave and see what happens. I'm in a pool with a few guys for motivation...losers have to ship the winners 20 whole loonies. At the very least, I'd like to think that we're helping raise awareness for prostate cancer even though we're not raising any money. Only 1 person has quit thus far, so maybe he can just send the money to charity instead.

As it turns out, I cannot really grow much of a mustache. It's very thin and patchy and looks pretty greasy. Thankfully most of my friends aren't fairing much better than me either.

One guy said it best, "November is the best month of the year to pick up chics because our competition looks like that!" as he pointed to some dude with an ugly 'stache. I've been surprised that some girls have still talked to me out at bars and clubs...though it's more than likely that my mustache is invisible in poorly lit rooms.

Here are a couple of pics-just because you asked Rosh...try not to get too excited buddy ;/

Anyone else eagerly looking forward to Dec. 1 lol??

PokerSchoolOnline Videos

2011-11-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, I'm currently in the process of making a 2-part video mini-series about full-ring cash games for PokerSchoolOnline...which kinda made me realise that I never really brought to attention the two videos that I've already contributed to the website. Maybe you've already found them by now anyways but if you haven't and are interested in viewing them, go ahead and take a look (I've also added the links to the sidebar on the blog):

http://www.pokerschoolonline.com/articles/Session-Videos-Frosty012

Both vids are strategy videos for 100nl full-ring cash. I used two different formats for each video...in the first, I'm speaking "live" in the sense that I recorded the audio and footage simultaneously. In the second video, I recorded a session and then went back to add the audio. The first video has around 2,000 views and the second about half of that (was released later). I actually like the second video much better than the first, probably because I could explain my thought process in a more drawn-out manner and there were several interesting spots that came up during play. Anyways, take a look at both of them and I'm sure you'll get something out of it. Also, there are several other videos posted at www.pokerschoolonline.com by other members of Team Online and PokerStars Pro to view as well and I think you only need like 150VPP's to see everything. Oh yeah, everything's free as well. I'm not trying to sell you something, lol.

I'll keep you posted about the release of my current project that I'm working on. The focus is going to be around "the essentials for mass multi-tabling full-ring cash games." I'm looking to have it finished before Dec.15 so I would assume it will be released shortly after that...

gl at the tables, let me know what you think about the vids!

Red Spade Open This Sunday!

2011-11-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

The Red Spade Open is this Sunday, click on the above picture for the full details. The short of it is that the tourney is a $55 buy-in with a $1 million guaranteed prize pool as well as a $200,000 guarantee for first place. Additionally, there will be a $100 bounty on the head of all Team PokerStars Pro and Team Online members (including myself of course) so that's definitely some added value! It's going to be a lot of fun so hopefully some of you guys land on my table and we can win some money.

Poker has continued to go steady for me this month-steady in a bad way, that is. Still runnin' cold but have managed to keep my head afloat and stay in the black, although I've essentially been breaking even before rakeback. Graph of this month:

As you can see, I'm still running way below EV (almost all of this is 100nl) so I'm not too bothered by the results and I think that I'm playing pretty well within this breakeven stretch. Here are 3 hands from my session today that won't even be counted towards my EV discrepancy. All hands were against the same villain (random playing 41/22)...this fish was on fire.

1.Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players
MP2: $130.00
CO: $101.50
BTN: $100.00
SB: $45.25
Hero (BB): $158.65
UTG: $137.00
UTG+1: $152.00
MP1: $47.95

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BB with Q A
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $3, 3 folds, BTN calls $3, 1 fold, Hero raises to $13.50, 1 fold, BTN calls $10.50

Flop: ($30.50) A T Q (2 players)
Hero bets $20.00, BTN raises to $86.50, Hero calls $66.50

Turn: ($203.50) 2 (2 players)

River: ($203.50) 4 (2 players)

Final Pot: $203.50
BTN shows 4 3
Hero shows Q A
BTN wins $201.50
(Rake: $2.00)

2.Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
MP2: $130.00
CO: $100.00
BTN: $187.25
SB: $47.40
Hero (BB): $114.20
UTG: $137.00
UTG+1: $147.50
UTG+2: $55.70
MP1: $106.65

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BB with A K
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $3, 4 folds, BTN raises to $7.50, 1 fold, Hero raises to $21, 1 fold, BTN calls $13.50

Flop: ($45.50) A J 8 (2 players)
Hero bets $28.50, BTN raises to $166.25, Hero calls $64.70 all in

Turn: ($231.90) 3 (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($231.90) J (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $231.90
BTN shows T Q
Hero shows A K
BTN wins $229.90
(Rake: $2.00)

3.Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
UTG+1: $100.00
UTG+2: $100.00
MP1: $388.25
MP2: $117.50
Hero (CO): $100.00
BTN: $136.90
SB: $142.00
BB: $58.45
UTG: $118.30

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is CO with 4 4
UTG raises to $3.50, 2 folds, MP1 calls $3.50, 1 fold, Hero calls $3.50, BTN calls $3.50, SB calls $3, BB calls $2.50

Flop: ($21.00) T 4 J (6 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG checks, MP1 checks, Hero bets $14.00, BTN folds, SB folds, BB calls $14, UTG folds, MP1 calls $14

Turn: ($63.00) 8 (3 players)
BB checks, MP1 checks, Hero bets $41.50, BB calls $40.95 all in, MP1 calls $41.50

River: ($186.95) 6 (3 players - 1 is all in)
MP1 bets $329.25, Hero calls $41 all in

Final Pot: $268.95
MP1 shows 7 5
Hero shows 4 4
BB shows K J
MP1 wins $183.85
(Rake: $2.00)

It didn't help my cause that this was at a Euro table too lol. The first two hands were kinda tilting because his pre-flop play is laughable...the last hand is mostly tilting because I was cheering when both villains called the turn and the river bricked a non-spade...of course he had the last laugh with his straight.

My volume has been ok this month...I've been playing a few hours everyday but my days have been cut short most of the time because my roommate and I have been going out a lot. We're both living very similar lifestyles right now (he's a pro athlete) so neither one of us feels bad about waking up at 11am and not having to be anywhere. We usually make some breakfast, play some Madden 12, then he goes off to the gym and I play poker for a few hours and meet up again later. I think we've come home at 3am on Tuesday and Wednesday this week so it's obviously quite an abnormal lifestyle compared to most of my peers. We haven't been going out and getting trashed or anything...just taking it easy actually. One of the nights we went to this hipster/jazz bar that I never knew existed but was pleasantly surprised. They had a live band and you could order some games to play with at the table...we had a couple other people with us so we ask for Jenga. They also had a life-sized Jenga game set up in this dungeon-like room in the back of the bar that we had access to. Mark had the genius idea that the loser had to take a shot of whatever the winners decided to give them...of course he ended up losing and had to take a prairie fire (tequila and Tabasco sauce) :)

I also went over to Victoria for Remembrance Day Long Weekend with my friends Ben and Iain. The voyage over there was pretty epic actually. We were trying to catch the 3pm ferry but upon arriving at the terminal we had a bunch of people waving us towards the exit yelling "everything's cancelled!" due to hurricane like winds. The wind was as crazy as I've ever seen it...sea water was actually blowing onto the highway coating Ben's car with salt. We didn't really know what to do at this point but decided to head into Tsawwassen and hang out at my friend Jarnael's house and waited to see if the wind died down at all. Iain was already there and around 4pm I called the ferry terminal and got word that a boat would likely sail at 5pm. Jarn offered to drive us down there again since there would be no way of getting on with a car (lineup was too backed up due to previous cancellations) so we headed down there to scope out the line. Upon arrival, we got stuck in a traffic line that was backed up about a mile away from the terminal and there was no way around it to the drop-off zone. Traffic was at a standstill so the three of us decided that our best move would be to jump out of the car and walk along the shoulder of the highway to the terminal. At first, this seemed like a genius idea as we started passing a lot of cars while speed walking towards the terminal. Unfortunately, the terminal was a lot further away than it looked lol and traffic started to move shortly after we exited the vehicle and soon enough every car that we walked by had passed us back. At this point, it was getting very close to 5pm so we started jogging to make the ferry. Ben had 2 bags, I had a small suitcase and Iain was in cowboy boots so together I'm sure the three of us were the laughing stock of the highway as we ran to make the boat. In dramatic fashion, we arrived right at 5 o'clock, printed out tickets and ran towards the docking bay. There was a huge herd gathered to get on the boat but we scraped on as the last few passengers and made it on board. The trip had all the makings of an epic weekend.

I had a great time, but the weekend turned out to be far from epic. On Friday, we watched the Canucks game and then met up with some more people to do a bit of a bar hop for the rest of the night. I don't know if it was the hour or the locations that we picked (or a combination of both) but there seemed to be an older crowd everywhere we went. We threw some shapes on the dance floor with some MILFs but then called it a night.

The crowd was much better on Saturday when we went to a club, although I was just with Ben and 2 chicks that I didn't really know. In my limited experience with clubbing in Victoria, the girls get aggressive! Last time I went clubbing there a girl asked me if "I was hers for the rest of the night" after dancing with her for 5 minutes and this time some wasted girl approached me, pushed her tits against me and told me to grab her ass. At first I thought that her friends must have put her up to something so I just kind of stood and didn't grab anything...the next thing I know she starts unbuttoning my shirt (well, Iain's shirt that I borrowed actually!) and asks me to grab her tits. At this point I'm thinking that this is ridiculous but she did have pretty nice tits so whatever, I grabbed them. Now she has my shirt completely off and is grinding my leg and I'm thinking to myself that I don't want to have sex with this walking STI so I did what any good friend would do and told her to go talk to my "millionaire" friend Ben and ran away. The rest of my time in the club was kind of spoiled after that point since Ben and I tried to avoid this train wreck the best that we could and eventually just left alone. Couple pics of Ben's place and Iain's shirt:

One last thing. If you haven't checked out Talonchick's short film yet, go take a look! It's a good video on how to balance a "real" job and still play poker for additional benefits. It's done by the same guys that made "I am Nanonoko" and my film as well (which should be released in the near future). Catch Talonchick's vid here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm7vbb0GwkE

Alright, I'm off to the gym and then heading downtown tonight. Hope you all have a good weekend. Take it easy!

gl at the tables!

$2000? Naw, take $200

2011-11-10T23:54:00.000-08:00

So I've continued to run poorly this month but am somehow still in the black so it could be worse. I would be be beating the games at a pretty good rate if I ran at expected value (EV) but it is what it is and I'll continue to try and play well and not worry about what I can't control.

One thing that I want to make clear is that I've said many times in the past that the "EV" stat is not really a good indicator of how a player is "running" and I still believe that even when I vent about running below EV. I don't think that EV is at all an accurate way of measuring how a player is running due to the fact that it can't account for cooler situations or situations where most of the money is already in the middle before a big suckout occurs on a sequential street. For example, I may get it in with AA vs. KK in late position 4 times in 1 day and hold each time and think I'm the best player in the world when I'm obviously just running hot. Furthermore, I may get 90% of my money in the middle with AA vs. KK on a 224r flop and then have to get the last of it in on a K turn and my EV will tell me that I was supposed to lose. Because of these two factors I don't think that a player can claim to be running good or bad based on EV alone, although it definitely provides some kind of base to work off of. What EV will tell you is that regardless of how one thinks that they are running, EV will tell you how much money you SHOULD HAVE WON based on the mathematical percentages. All I'm getting at is that it's fair for me (or anyone) to be upset after running below EV because I should in fact have $1800 more in my account if I ran at expectation, although it's not fair for me to claim that I'm running bad based on this information alone. I make that claim based on what I feel is an honest assessment of my own situation after taking into account the aforementioned factors as well. Obviously it's just an opinion rather than fact.

With that said, here are a couple of not so fun hands from my session today:

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players

MP1: $200.00
MP2: $310.45
CO: $105.95
BTN: $200.00
SB: $135.55
Hero (BB): $203.35
UTG: $636.35
UTG+1: $142.20
UTG+2: $235.50

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BB with A Q
4 folds, MP2 raises to $4, 1 fold, BTN calls $4, SB calls $3, Hero raises to $18, 2 folds, SB raises to $82, Hero raises to $203.35, SB calls $53.55 all in

Flop: ($279.10) 9 6 2 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Turn: ($279.10) 5 (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($279.10) T (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $279.10
SB shows T T
Hero shows A Q
SB wins $276.10
(Rake: $3.00)

This was probably the most tilting hand of the day only because I knew the villain can almost NEVER have me dominated here but it's going to be a flip nearly every time. Even though I have no fold equity, after putting in $18 plus all of the dead money out there it seems like folding shouldn't really even be considered. This is just a spot where I feel that I clearly played the hand better than the opponent and "deserved" to win the flip since that's the best that they can hope for lol.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 7 players

UTG: $100.00
UTG+1: $127.85
MP: $91.50
Hero (CO): $100.00
BTN: $126.35
SB: $74.50
BB: $46.20

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is CO with A K
3 folds, Hero raises to $3, BTN raises to $9, 2 folds, Hero raises to $21, BTN raises to $61, Hero raises to $100, BTN calls $39

Flop: ($201.50) T 7 6 (2 players)

Turn: ($201.50) A (2 players)

River: ($201.50) 4 (2 players)

Final Pot: $201.50
Hero shows A K
BTN shows 7 6
BTN wins $198.50
(Rake: $3.00)

Scratch that, this hand was more tilting that the last. I don't really care if you want to be a playmaster (because if you look up the stats for people that playmaster, they are almost always losing players or break-even at best and this guy was no exception) but when you get caught it would be nice if the best hand could hold. Oh well.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players

MP1: $107.50
MP2: $142.00
CO: $122.40
BTN: $77.80
SB: $158.55
Hero (BB): $116.60
UTG: $114.55
UTG+1: $178.00

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BB with K A
UTG raises to $3, UTG+1 calls $3, 4 folds, SB raises to $14, Hero raises to $116.60, 2 folds, SB calls $102.60

Flop: ($239.20) 6 6 7 (2 players)

Turn: ($239.20) 3 (2 players)

River: ($239.20) 2 (2 players)

Final Pot: $239.20
SB shows J K
Hero shows K A
Hero wins $236.20
(Rake: $3.00)

Despite many tough beats, I still managed to turn a $400ish profit today due in big part to hands like these where I'm pretty much gifted some big pots from some unknowns.

In other news, I'm stoked to be going to Victoria for Remembrance Day Long Weekend! I'm going over on a ferry tomorrow afternoon with Ben and we're staying at his awesome apartment close to downtown. There's several other people that I know that will be over there, including Miles, so I'm sure we'll meet up at some point and party. Unfortunately, I've agreed to do Movember this year with a few people and am looking as unattractive as ever...it will be an epic challenge to woo an islander this weekend with my whiskers but we'll see what happens. It will be much tougher than last weekend, where I met a girl on Friday and before I could even use my TV line on her she used it on me lol. That almost never happens. Anyways, hope you all have a good weekend!

gl at the tables!

Gunna Be A Long Month

2011-11-07T19:01:00.000-08:00

Looks like I'm still not allowed to win, at least for now. Put in a long session today almost all at 100nl because it's easier to get tables up and stay on more at a time but ran like crap. Didn't even play particularily well but still well enough to get my money in as a big favorite in almost all of the big pots that I played...too bad nothing held up and I ended the session 12 buy-ins under EV lol.

Oh well, there's always FPP's!

Could be a long end of the year....

"I grind for real and that’s no days off. You work hard for it and its gon pay off" October Review

2011-11-04T02:01:00.000-07:00

Well, this was a rough one to say the least! The stretch over the last two months has been a period of time where I have easily ran worse than I ever have thus far in my poker career. Rather than complain about it and dwell on it, I'll simply post a hand from my session yesterday that sums everything up and move on.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players

BB: $38.50
UTG: $51.05
UTG+1: $138.85
UTG+2: $130.80
MP1: $100.00
MP2: $100.00
CO: $80.00
BTN: $111.30
Hero (SB): $206.90

CO posts a big blind ($1.00)

Pre Flop: ($2.50) Hero is SB with 5 5
UTG calls $1, UTG+1 calls $1, 3 folds, CO checks, BTN calls $1, Hero calls $0.50, BB checks

Flop: ($6.00) 5 8 3 (6 players)
Hero checks, BB checks, UTG bets $4.00, UTG+1 calls $4, CO folds, BTN folds, Hero raises to $14, BB folds, UTG calls $10, UTG+1 calls $10

Turn: ($48.00) 5 (3 players)
Hero bets $18.00, UTG raises to $36.05, UTG+1 calls $36.05, Hero raises to $160, UTG+1 calls $87.80 all in

River: ($331.75) 8 (3 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $331.75
UTG mucks K K
UTG+1 shows 8 8
Hero shows 5 5
UTG+1 wins $153.15
(Rake: $-33.15)

I could have raised slightly larger on the flop but I wanted to keep UTG in if they limped with a medium strength hand or connectors (ie. mid pocket pair, 89s, etc.) and if he had AA/KK they're almost never folding by the river anyways. My sizing on the turn is pretty much perfect, as I give myself the opportunity to re-open the action if UTG shoves, which he does. At this point, I know UTG+1 (reg) has 88 99% of the time after his stupid "turn my hand face-up" cold call so I shoved it back and got snapped. 8 on river, GG. I got one outed twice that session, the second time coming after I flopped top set vs. middle set and once again got rivered. Anyways, enough b*tching, time to move on.

October

*Unfortunately I don't have anywhere near an accurate HEM graph to post since I lost a lot of hands after I had to re-install Windows Vista*

$532 Table winnings (AFTER road to 100 bill milestone bonuses)
$4,000 Cash Bonus
$3,000 400K VPP Milestone Bonus
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$7,532 USD

I'm not unhappy with the bottom line, I just hate to lose. I'm still pretty confident that I'm playing well enough to win and after reviewing the big pots that I'm losing I still feel that they're almost all coolers or bad beats. I'm not naive and I'm sure that I'm losing money in other places and have minor leaks all over the place but for now I'm going to believe that most of my misfortune can be blamed on variance. Obviously, if my bad results persist over the next two months I'll have to re-evaluate everything.

Alllllllright, enough poker talk for now, I want to talk about my Halloween. I always really enjoy blogging about my nights out but if you feel as though there hasn't been very much personal content over the last several months, you'd be correct. There have been a couple reasons for this...the first being that it's often been the case where I'll have a night out, followed immediately by another, then another, and soon I will get so backdated that I'll just say "screw it" and not write up anything. The second, and much bigger reason, is that for most of the summer I was seeing a girl and then up until about a week ago I was seeing a different one. I've learned that google is not in fact everyone's friend and figured that rather than risk typing something up that could potentially ruin the relationship, it would be much smarter if I did not write anything at all. Not that either relationship was very serious but it's more of a matter of respect...if I were in their shoes, I would not want to stumble upon my blog one day and read about how I've been hitting on other various girls or probably even worse, read about myself without knowing it. Well then, why doesn't frosty just tell them about the blog and be careful about what he writes? Funny you should ask, Mr. 3rd person voice, but the problem there is that leading any potential wife to the dusty old 2010 archives is also known as relationship suicide.

Alas, frosty is now single once again and looks forward to sharing his 2011 experiences with his friends, older British married folk, and random internet people. He will also stop referring to himself in the 3rd person from here on out.

I actually went out quite a bit this month...after I got settled into my new place my roommate Mark and I quickly became familiar with some of the local drinking establishments, although we still have a lot of exploring left to do. One place that needs no further exploring by me was the venue for my Halloween party (well, the first party of two)...the old UBC campus bar. At 24 years of age and an alumni of UBC, I am well aware that I am way too old to be attending such events. I am also aware that I could potentially face jail time should I be so lucky to hook up with some 18 year old felion that snuck in with a fake ID. I am also aware that I do not care about any of the above. A couple of me mates are in their last semester at the university so I figure I'll ride it out while I still can. Why not.

The plan for the night was to meet at my friend Ben and Miles's place, meet up with some other people, sort out our costumes and have some beers. Ben and Miles were dressing up as poker players in an attempt to mock the pictures that I posted from my photo shoot a while back (http://frosty012.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html), although it's quite obvious that they're both just obsessed with me and idolise me in every way. They went to the thrift store and somehow stumbled upon official NAPT PokerStars shirts lol...I can't believe someone would donate those to the thrift store!!! Equipped with douchey shades and backwards hats, they looked like every whale that you hope to see at your table.

Sadly, my Halloween costume idea wasn't much better. I googled around for quick ideas and settled upon being a "highway." All that I would need to do would be to go buy some white tape to put up my pants and shirt as road lines, buy some construction paper and felts and cutout some cars and roadsigns and tape them all over me. At the time I thought it had potential. Anyways, after a quick trip to Staples and $30 later, I had the ingredients to put together my costume. I arrived at Ben and Miles's place with my office supplies and a PokerStars jersey that the guys wanted me to bring to potentially use and asked them to help me start making my costume. Miles said "dude, just go as a poker player." I said "no way man, I'm not going as myself." "So you're just going to sit here for 30 minutes doing arts and crafts making a sh*tty highway costume?" "Ah f**k it, I'll just go as my f**king self for Halloween." Just then Ben came out of the bathroom wearing the jersey that I had brought for them, super stoked about how he looked in it. I told him that I wanted to see how it looked on me and that I would give it back...which I was actually intending on doing, until I saw how much better the jersey fit me than the big thrift store shirt and refused to give it back to him. Sorry Ben. From that point on in the night, any time a girl would talk to me or even look in my general direction, Ben would sit there with an angry look on his face and mutter "f*%king jersey, that should have been me!"

The three of us, along with our friend Sarah, arrived at the bar in costume around 9pm and the place was fairly empty. We grabbed some pitchers and waffle fries and amused ourselves with random conversations. Apparently at one point I claimed that I have made 90% of the girls that I've slept with orgasm...a statement that no one believed, especially Sarah. I'm pretty sure all that I claimed was that I could tell when a girl was faking it...although it doesn't really matter because both are obvious lies. I did not admit this at the time, however, and instead insisted that Sarah give me a try before judging me. This also somehow did not work.

As the place filled up and people began to dance, I hit the floor with confidence! I met a pretty cute girl from El Salvador and we hit it off pretty quickly. It's a rare night when you can spend the whole time with the first girl that you meet...usually it's a case of several rejections before finally settling with whatever (well, at least for me!). I do not remember much about what we talked about after we left the dance floor...I know she asked me what I study etc. and I had to lie. On any other night I would have just been honest, told her I graduated and now play poker but that didn't seem like an option considering I was dressed up as a poker player...I did not want my first impression to be one of a douche that dressed up as himself. Instead, I told that I'm a 22 year old Poli Sci student that plays poker occasionally (I figured that would be a nice segway if I need to come clean in the future about the poker...didn't lie 100%! Not sure about the age thing or the student thing though). The only other thing that sticks out from our conversation was her doing impressions of the Latina chick from Modern Family...apparently she's also from El Salvador or somewhere close with the same accent.

As the night was getting late, believe it or not but I actually had no hidden agenda for the evening. I was putting in no real effort to go home with her as I was content either way. However, the place was almost closing and Miles and Ben had already taken off so I really didn't want to walk back to their place and crash on the couch. That said, I offered to walk her home and she agreed. As we left, she told me that she left her jacket at her friend's place nearby and wanted to grab it. I really didn't want to walk out of the way so I was relieved when her friend didn't answer her phone. We started walking home but she received a text from her friend saying that she was awake and to come by. I keep writing "she" and "her" because I can't remember her name because it was super loud when she told me. We walked to to her friends apartment and she came downstairs with the coat. This is where things started to go bad for old frosty. Her friend took one look at me, grabbed the South American's arm and literally dragged her away from me towards the elevator. All the girl did was wave and yell "see you later!" Blocked. We exchanged numbers but I don't want to have to untangle my web of lies...better off to let it rest.

Anyways, now I knew that I was in for a reaaaaaallly sh*tty ending to the night. It was about 2am and I had about a 30 minute walk in the freezing cold back to a hard couch. Unfortunately, the walk was just the beginning of my problems. I knew that dumb and dumber were probably passed out to the point where they wouldn't be able to hear the fire alarm go off and they probably locked the front door. Not only did I have no way to get into their place, I also didn't have my car keys (which I forfeited to Ben at the beginning of the night as to not DnD, also had my house keys on the chain) AND my phone was dead. All of this bad news made that 30 minute walk seem like hours as I awaited my fate at the front door. I finally arrived, turned the door knob and just as I had suspected, it was locked. F**k. I started slamming on the door for about 5 minutes and nobody woke up. I finally just started looking for ways to break into the house...eventually I pulled off the screen to a kitchen window, took a deep breath, and tried to slide the window open. To my amazement and great relief, the window slid open! I put one foot through the window onto the stove, the other on the counter and limboed my way into the house, score! I have no idea what I would have done if the window was locked...probably keep banging on the door until someone called the police.

Alright, looking forward to next month....

Target VPPs: 80K
Target winnings: not negative

Shooting for the stars.

gl at the tables!

I've Got Two Stones

2011-10-31T00:36:00.000-07:00

No, this is not Deja Vu...unbelievably, I hit another milestone hand tonight!! This time it was hand number 69,791,000,000 and it occured on one of my 100nl tables. I guess Stars felt a bit bad about cracking my Kings on the river last night and "robbing me" of around $2K. Of course I'm just joking when I say that I was robbed when in fact I was incredibly lucky to even land on the milestone hand to begin with and score $1,104 for the hit.

Tonight, I did not look down at pocket kings...in fact I was dealt a hand on the other end of the spectrum...the 5th worst starting hand in poker, 2-6 offsuit. Here's how the hand played out:

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players
Hero (UTG+1): $102.65
MP1: $41.00
MP2: $105.65
CO: $101.50
BTN: $86.50
SB: $103.00
BB: $114.95
UTG: $107.50

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is UTG+1 with 2 6

UTG raises to $107.50, Hero calls $102.65 all in, MP1 calls $41 all in, MP2 calls $105.65 all in, CO calls $101.50 all in, 1 fold, SB calls $102.50 all in, 1 fold

Flop: ($560.45) 4 5 J (6 players - 5 are all in)

Turn: ($560.45) 3 (6 players - 5 are all in)

River: ($560.45) J (6 players - 5 are all in)

Final Pot: $560.45
Hero shows 2 6
MP1 shows A 2
MP2 shows 4 Q
CO shows 5 6
SB shows 8 K
UTG shows 7 T
Hero wins $244.00
(Rake: $3.00)

Pretty sick to go from having only 12% equity to ship the pot on the flop to binking the turn and then fading the river re-suck. On TOP of the pot, that hand was worth a cool $1,344 more for winning it. Before I even hit the milestone hand I was having a pretty decent day at the tables so it's nice to be in the black for now. I may just need to hit a few more milestones to keep my profit so let's go for number 3 tomorrow lol!

Milestone Hand #69,739,000,000!

2011-10-30T02:22:00.000-07:00

PokerStars currently has their "Road to 100 Billion" promotion going on, which makes grinding seem more worthwhile even though I have bricked like 4 of these promos before (for those who are unaware of what I'm talking about, read the details here:http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/100-billion/).

FORTUNATELY, I can no longer say that I've bricked em' all because tonight I was dealt into hand #69,739,000,000! FORTUNATELY, the hand happened to land on my ONLY 200nl table running at the time (the rest were all 100nl) AND I had been there for a while now, meaning that I would indeed have plenty of VPP's to multiply. FORTUNATELY, I was dealt POCKET KINGS!! DEM COWBOYS, KING KONG, KRISPY KREME, GORILLAS, BROKEBACK! Yes, it seemed as all of the stars had aligned and I called upon my PS Pro powers for a strong hold but alas, they could not hold in dramatic riverstars fashion.

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em- 7 players

Hero (MP): $200.00
CO: $178.10
BTN: $95.40
SB: $80.00
BB: $206.00
UTG: $200.00
UTG+1: $375.80

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is MP with K K
UTG raises to $200, UTG+1 raises to $375.80, Hero calls $200 all in, CO calls $178.10 all in, BTN calls $95.40 all in, SB calls $79 all in, 1 fold

Flop: ($955.50) 2 7 9 (6 players - 4 are all in)

Turn: ($955.50) 6 (6 players - 4 are all in)

River: ($955.50) 4 (6 players - 4 are all in)

Final Pot: $955.50
Hero shows K K
CO shows 2 4
BTN shows A 5
SB shows 8 3
UTG shows Q T
UTG+1 shows 2 T
CO wins $479.00
(Rake: $3.00)

First of all, LOL @ 1 fold. Yes, everytime a milestone hand hits there is usually at least 1 clueless customer that has no idea what is happening despite the crystal clear instructions that are posted on the table by the Host. There is also about 3 minutes to read everything and let it sink it. Regardless, one table mate thought that his time would be better spent folding to grab a beer than winning thousands of dollars but hey, that helped my chances!

It was a tough beat but let's face it, I don't like my chances with any hand in a 6-way all-in pre. You won't hear my complaining about it, as the hand still netted me a bonus of $1,104!

Man oh man, this month has just been BRUTAL. I actually feel like I'm playing some of the best poker ever and yet am having awful results. I kinda needed that milestone bonus hand to hold because even after the score, I'm still down about $1k for the month (again, pretty much nothing but the games have actually been pretty good so it's frustrating). Maybe I'm just playing badly and not aware of it, as all of this heavy volume could be fogging my perception of reality but I mean I've been checking my losing hands after sessions and they all seem standard/bad beats. 5 biggest losing pots from last session:

1. This is against a villain that I initially thought was a fish (hence the 3bet pre with QQ for value) but later saw him on a bunch of tables so maybe he's a reg or regfish. Beat.

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em- 8 players

UTG: $203.00
UTG+1: $246.00
MP1: $220.55
MP2: $60.35
CO: $155.20
BTN: $200.00
Hero (SB): $206.90
BB: $187.05

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is SB with Q Q
2 folds, MP1 raises to $4, 3 folds, Hero raises to $18, 1 fold, MP1 calls $14

Flop: ($38.00) Q T 7 (2 players)
Hero bets $26.00, MP1 raises to $202.55, Hero calls $162.90 all in

Turn: ($415.80) 2 (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($415.80) A (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $415.80
MP1 shows A A
Hero shows Q Q
MP1 wins $399.15
(Rake: $3.00)

2. UTG is a fish, I figure that after he raises me on the flop he probably limped with AA or KK...instead of pot controlling it I figured that I would 3bet and possibly have some fold equity or just take my 55% equity as the favorite. Beat.

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players

UTG+1: $200.25
MP1: $200.00
MP2: $97.00
CO: $214.55
BTN: $200.00
Hero (SB): $200.00
BB: $206.00
UTG: $103.65

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is SB with 8 K
UTG calls $2, 5 folds, Hero calls $1, BB checks

Flop: ($6.00) 9 6 7 (3 players)
Hero bets $6.00, BB folds, UTG raises to $14, Hero raises to $45, UTG raises to $101.65, Hero calls $56.65

Turn: ($209.30) J (2 players)

River: ($209.30) 6 (2 players)

Final Pot: $209.30
Hero shows 8 K
UTG shows A A
UTG wins $206.30
(Rake: $3.00)

3. Seems super standard against a reg with a high 3bet and squeeze %. Cooler.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em- 9 players

UTG+1: $106.85
UTG+2: $111.70
MP1: $97.35
MP2: $103.60
Hero (CO): $100.00
BTN: $94.50
SB: $137.45
BB: $100.00
UTG: $82.00

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is CO with Q Q
1 fold, UTG+1 calls $1, 1 fold, MP1 calls $1, MP2 calls $1, Hero raises to $6, 1 fold, SB raises to $19, 4 folds, Hero raises to $100, SB calls $81

Flop: ($204.00) 2 7 K (2 players)

Turn: ($204.00) 6 (2 players)

River: ($204.00) 2 (2 players)

Final Pot: $204.00
Hero shows Q Q
SB shows A K
SB wins $201.00
(Rake: $3.00)

4. This one could have probably been avoided. First, I hate my open pre. After that though, I think it's not too bad...the river seems like an obvious fold because some nits just won't ever bluff this spot but at the time I thought for sure the villain would bet this river with a flush. With that read, I thought that he was more likely just spazzing out trying to rep a flush that made no sense. Nits gunna nit though. SPEWY.

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 7 players

CO: $178.55
BTN: $288.45
SB: $164.40
BB: $223.70
UTG: $225.40
UTG+1: $200.00
Hero (MP): $258.70

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is MP with 8 9
2 folds, Hero raises to $6, CO calls $6, 1 fold, SB calls $5, 1 fold

Flop: ($20.00) 9 2 3 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $12.00, CO folds, SB calls $12

Turn: ($44.00) T (2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

River: ($44.00) 8 (2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $25.00, SB raises to $78, Hero calls $53

Final Pot: $200.00
SB shows A 5
Hero mucks 8 9
SB wins $198.00
(Rake: $2.00)

5. This particular villain was a spewy fish, he had just lost half his stack the previous hand in spewtastic fashion. When he min-raises me on the flop I am licking my chops rather than looking for a pot-controllish line because the min-raise=the nuts. I chose to flat to induce more bluffs and snapped him off on the river. My read may have been way off but regardless folding at any point here would be pretty atrocious. Cooler.

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players

SB: $90.00
BB: $200.00
UTG: $95.30
UTG+1: $270.20
UTG+2: $300.00
MP1: $205.15
MP2: $458.15
CO: $200.00
Hero (BTN): $427.00

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BTN with A A
UTG calls $2, 5 folds, Hero raises to $8, 2 folds, UTG calls $6

Flop: ($19.00) 3 6 Q (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets $12.00, UTG raises to $24, Hero calls $12

Turn: ($67.00) 7 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero checks

River: ($67.00) 8 (2 players)
UTG bets $63.30, Hero calls $63.30

Final Pot: $193.60
UTG shows 6 6
Hero shows A A
UTG wins $190.60
(Rake: $3.00)

So yeah, I mean I feel like I'm playing well so hopefully things can turn around for me over the next few days. I'll be playing a ton so we'll see.

I'd like to write up about the two Halloween parties that I attended this year because both were a ton of fun but it's 3am right now and all I wanna do is sleep...so I'm off to hit the hay. I'll try and write something up when I get some more free time.

Gl at the tables!

Doing Some Homework

2011-10-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

This month has been very annoying and frustrating on the poker front for a bunch of reasons. Due to computer issues and having to spend the early days of the month moving into my new apartment, I've once again put myself in a position where I need to cram in non-stop volume here on out to land around 50K VPP's by month's end. This target is pretty much essential if I want to fulfill my end of year target of 600K VPP's-something that I don't feel like compromising on. Anyways, I've been in this spot all year and the volume-cram isn't even that tilting anymore...the main issue is that the mid-stake games are always reg-infested at this time of the year and there are very few tables running that aren't all regs, especially during weekdays. As a result, I've found that rather than spend a few hours trying to get enough decent mid-stake tables up and running, my time is better spent jumping onto a bunch of 100nl tables and cycle in any decent mid-stake tables that I see. If I didn't have to hit my volume quota, I'd probably be happy to chill on 8-14 decent mid-stakes tables and put more focus on table winnings rather than rakeback. However, looking at the overall picture, it's much more likely that I will earn more money by collecting the 500K and 600K milestone bonuses by the end of the year (and of course, the FPP's from that volume) rather than table select a handful of good mid-stake games to play and likely not even hit 500K VPP's. With all that said, all this really means for me is that I'm going to have to put in more hands to reach my target goal since the vpp per hand rate is obviously lower at 100nl.

The thing I hate the most about mixing different stakes into a session is that if any big hands go down on the higher stakes tables, the rest of your tables become almost irrelevant as your profit/losses will be so heavily impacted by the highest tables that you are playing. You can imagine my frustration then when I say that I've been running pretty badly at the higher limits this month. Nothing catastrophic but lots of stupid stuff like this (and of course, according to good ol' all-in EV I was supposed to lose because I was behind! Nevermind that half of his stack was in on the flop ;) Hands like these are really why the all-in EV stat is pretty useless (of course, it also can't measure obvious coolers like KK < AA in the blinds)):

Poker Stars $400.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players
MP2: $861.25
CO: $220.00
BTN: $400.00
SB: $296.10
BB: $305.05
UTG: $550.30
Hero (UTG+1): $406.00
UTG+2: $988.85
MP1: $400.00

CO posts a big blind ($4.00)

Pre Flop: ($10.00) Hero is UTG+1 with K K
UTG raises to $16, Hero calls $16, 5 folds, SB calls $14, 1 fold

Flop: ($56.00) 7 4 2 (3 players)
SB bets $40.00, UTG folds, Hero raises to $126, SB calls $86

Turn: ($308.00) 3 (2 players)
SB bets $154.10, Hero calls $154.10

River: ($616.20) 9 (2 players)

Final Pot: $616.20
SB shows 4 3
Hero shows K K
SB wins $613.20
(Rake: $3.00)

Anyways, I was down just over a couple $K a day ago, which isn't really even enough to be considererd a downswing by most but it's frustrating nonetheless. With so much poker left to be played this month, things could get pretty ugly or they could shape up nicely...it's all going to depend on how I run and of course how well I play.

Alright, enough of this negative tone because here's where things get positive. For the most part, during my entire poker career I've really put off doing any extra-hour poker "homework" to help my game. It's not because I think my game is perfect or that I'm really lazy-it just can be hard to spend even more time at the computer after a long session when you know how much poker needs to be played ahead of you (even now I feel like I should be grinding and not writing this post, even though I'll have more than enough time to play later). Anyways, this mini-downer is what I've needed to put myself in the mood to do a bit of learning so I hit the net yesterday to do some surfing for some free poker-training vids. I don't have a subscription to any training site and I don't have plans to subscribe in the near future but I thought it would be a good idea to see what I could find just to get a different outlook on the game. Most of the stuff that I found was pretty meh but a couple clips that I stumbled upon were pretty great. Most of the free content that I found was pretty outdated (or like 2-5 min samples) but it gave me a refreshing outlook on the game nonetheless.

Perhaps the most beneficial thing that I took away from one of the videos had nothing to do with strategy at all and instead has to do with aesthetics. I'm taking about the look of the table theme, cards and chips. For the longest time, I've just stuck to using the Hyper-Simple table theme provided by stars (with custom dark-grey background), along with the standard deck and chips. I've always been aware of sites like tiltbuster.com that provide different table/card/chip mods but haven't really like many of them...enough to purchase anyways. However, in one of the videos that I watched I saw the most amazing deck...I've never been a fan of 4-coloured decks (they kinda tilt me even though most people love them) but this one that I saw was so slick and refreshing because it was so simple. It's called the "Solitude-Stars" card mod on tiltbuster and I just went ahead and bought it for $10.

Before/After

Now, I also didn't even realize that you could change the look of the chips as well but after a bit of browsing and another $10 purchase later I'm now sporting these puppies (Stars Paulson Chip Set on tiltbuster):

I didn't really prefer any of the actual table mods that are available as I think the hyper-simple with grey background is pretty much the nuts.

I've only played one session with the new look and found it very confusing for a while but was in love with it by the end...especially with the deck, it certainly makes it easier on the eyes for grinding out long sessions to see everything so clearly.

Getting into more technical stuff, I also finally got around to reconstructing and understanding my HUD in Hold'em Manager. Currently, this is my HUD for those that are curious (and I allllways get emails asking to see it lol):

It's quite simple but at the same time provides me with a ton of info. If you're wondering what the stats mean here's a link to the vocab index that you might want to bookmark:

http://faq.holdemmanager.com/questions/95/Stat+Definitions

There is so much info that HEM can provide you that it can be overwhelming and even though I still feel as though I'm still under-utilizing my HUD, I'm comfortable with it and can always continue to learn more about it in the future. Also, a quick click on the players HUD stats will bring up much more info so even if it's not in your small HUD you can still find out specific things about your opponent very quickly (for example, I don't want to put 3bet by position in my HUD to avoid cluttering but if you're 3bet by a player on the button you can just click the stats to expand the window and find out their 3bet percentage from the button/each position).

One important thing to realize is that by simply having all of this info made available to you, it still means nothing if you don't know how to interpret it. So what if someone's 3betting 15% of the time? Is this a often or infrequently? These are things that you'll need to determine by either doing your own research away from the table, getting a coach/teacher or most simply, by playing yourself!! It shouldn' take a heck of a long time to get a feel for the stats and compare other players to yourself to better understand the pros/cons of different playing styles

With my new look I booked a small profitable session today and thanks to a decent sized win yesterday I'm down less than $1K at the moment (which is often 1 bad day). It's going to be a rocky road from here on out, no doubt about it but I'll try to keep a level head and look to run well and get back in the black. Here's hopin' it gets better before it gets worse lol!

gl at the tables!

Slowwww Start To October (Computer Geek Post)

2011-10-17T23:40:00.000-07:00

Sigh, it looks like October will be another scramble of a month as I readjust my monthly VPP target to 50K (down from 60K) due to computer problems.

Picking up where I last left off in my blog entries, I had just recently moved to a new apartment and during my first poker session in the new place I noticed that things were lagging a bit when I was playing a few tables. At first I figured that the internet connection might be a little choppy but soon figured the problem must be something else after noticing that any window that I dragged across the screen left a bit of a "trail" (when or when not connected to the net). This problem didn't really make any sense to me since I have never experienced this before on my desktop and things were working perfectly when it was stationed at home just days before. I hoped that something didn't get damaged during the move and after many hours of googling for similar problems (and solutions) and after resetting, readjusting and replugging every connection between my monitor and my tower, I chose to reinstall Windows Vista.

Reinstalling Vista was a tough decision to make because even though I don't have any valuable data on my computer, the reset would mean that I would lose my player notes, HEM records etc. Actually, I'm almost sure that there would be a way to save all of that before resetting but my HEM records are way inaccurate anyways and it's probably for the best to get more current HUD stats on my opponents. The main drag is to actually go through and re-make my HUD, choose what theme I want on Stars along with all of my preferences etc. Also, the lag wasn't completely hindering my ability to play online poker, though it was incredibly tilting and almost impossible to play more than 12 tables at a time.

Anyways, I went ahead and reinstalled Vista only to learn that my computer was missing the proper drivers to allow it to establish an internet network connection. The computer came with a CD with like half of the drivers on it that I need but that's it (unless I lost another CD or something). I remembered I had this same exact problem last summer when I also reinstalled Vista after seeing the "blue screen of death" and had the problem solved by phoning Dell support, downloading the proper drivers on my laptop and then transferring them to my XPS via flash drive and installed the drivers manually (If this sounds complicated to anyone or you have no idea what I'm talking about, well that would be me before last summer...even though this is all quite simple computer stuff my knowledge before encountering any of these problems was slim to none-If you ever want to learn about how computers work, just go ahead and break yours first). So, there I was with my plan in place...I booted up the laptop, went to the Dell site, found the appropriate network drivers, downloaded them to my flash drive, loaded the flash drive into the broken tower, installed the new drivers, and bam, nothing, still no Internet!

At this point, I was pretty desperate and decided to call up Dell support knowing that they'd charge me around $130 for the phone call...but what else could I do? It turns out that it was a HUGE waste of time...I stayed on the phone for 3 hours with some guy that told me to do exactly what I had already tried lol. He was doing all he could to not give me a refund for the call, saying his supervisor would call me back in 2 days and fix it. I told him I couldn't wait 2 days and that he might not be able to do anything anyways and was refunded in the end.

The next day I made a trip to Futureshop (oh yeah, I also figured the lag could be caused by my ageing mouse or weak wireless connection so I made a trip to the store and bought a new mouse/ethernet cable before reinstalling Vista) to return my mouse and cable. I briefly explained my situation to the guy at customer service and he told me about some program that can search your computer and tell you exactly what drivers that you're missing. Even though I had already confirmed with Dell support that I was in fact installing the proper/only network drivers I figured it couldn't hurt to try. As it turns out, this program seeked out the perfect drivers for my computer and I googled/transferred the drivers over from my laptop to desktop and voila, back in business! This whole ordeal took 2-4 days when combined with other distractions and I'm happy to be computer problem free...at least for now (also, the lag issue was indeed solved by reinstalling Vista)!

Ever since I've been back online, I've only managed to crank out about 7K VPP's so far this month and it's been really lame. Not running good, not running awful, the most tilting thing has been that I'm having a near impossible time running more than 12-18 tables at a time. I'm not even looking for great tables, just satisfactory ones (meaning any table that isn't ALL regs). Things always dry up a bit towards the end of the year with a lot of regs grinding out their year end quotas and this year appears to be no different. I also haven't really played during peak times thus far, so hopefully that helps. As for my results thus far, well it's obviously a small sample size and I'm pretty much dead even. It seems as though I can't really get any sort of streak going...I'll win one big pot and then lose another:

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 7 players

SB: $229.35
BB: $369.55
UTG: $821.60
UTG+1: $214.10
Hero (MP): $472.70
CO: $501.20
BTN: $400.00

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is MP with A A
2 folds, Hero raises to $6, 3 folds, BB raises to $24, Hero raises to $58, BB raises to $92, Hero raises to $472.30, BB calls $277.55 all in

Flop: ($740.10) 2 K 3 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Turn: ($740.10) 9 (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($740.10) 5 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $740.10
BB shows K K
Hero shows A A
BB wins $739.10
(Rake: $0.60)

Standard bad beat from a player that couldn't fold KK nearly 200bb's deep in a spot where I'm probably never 6bet jamming anything but AA lol-should be an pretty easy laydown given our positions and no history.

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 7 players
Hero (BB): $388.00
UTG: $352.80
UTG+1: $52.00
MP: $280.35
CO: $200.00
BTN: $205.75
SB: $92.50

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BB with T A
UTG raises to $6, 5 folds, Hero calls $4

Flop: ($13.00) 7 Q 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets $8.00, Hero raises to $26, UTG calls $18

Turn: ($65.00) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $40.00, UTG calls $40

River: ($145.00) 8 (2 players)
Hero bets $85.00, UTG raises to $240, Hero raises to $316, UTG calls $40.80 all in

Final Pot: $706.60
Hero shows T A
UTG shows K Q
Hero wins $703.60
(Rake: $3.00)

Luckily there are some regs willing to donate to my cause in spots like these where they're almost never getting called by worse when shoving the river. I also probably c/c or c/f a set on this river a lot of the time.

Anywhooo, games are not ideal at the moment so it's going to be a tough end of the month so hopefully we catch some cards!

gl at the tables!

So Long, So Long (SNE Status-September Review)

2011-10-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

Coming into September, I had high hopes for having a very profitable month given that I would have around $7000 worth of buy-ins to spend on the WCOOP. Unfortunately, nothing astonishing ever developed from the tournament series and my cash game volume and results suffered as well.

As far as the tournaments were concerned, I don't think that I played too great overall but there's also so much variance in MTT's that I'm mildly satisfied that I won almost $3100, even though I used $6500 worth of buy-ins to do so.

I originally thought that I would be able to put in decent volume at the cash tables throughout September but unfortunately most of my time was preoccupied with moving. Combined with the fact that most of my cash game hours came alongside tournament play, it's not all that alarming to see some crappy results given that my focus was often split between the two different formats. Of course, when you only play 36K hands in a month, you're also more prone to short-term variance and I certainly never caught any type of heater over the duration of the month. Before the last day of grinding in September, I was down about 2.5 buy-ins of 200nl. I really wanted to at least break-even for the month but it didn't look like that was going to happen after I lost a flip at 400nl with AK vs. TT 3 handed almost immediately to set me down about $1K. Thankfully, the games were pretty juicy that day and after grinding for only about 2 hours I had won enough to put me slightly in the black according to HEM (and that's when I quit, although I should have played a little longer because my actual results were -$618!).

September

-$618.17 Table Losses
+$3,074 Tournament Winnings
+$1,600 FPP Value
--------------------------------------
$4,056 USD

So a pretty disappointing month, if I really wanted to I could have chosen to include the 400K VPP milestone for September since I'm less than 8K away from it but I may as well save it for October.

Now that the chaotic month that was September is over, I'm really looking forward to October. I'm now settled into my new place in Vancouver and aside from a couple of things that I still need for the place, everything is really coming together. Thanks in part to my new roommate Mark, we scored a beauty couch for $50 off of craigslist that some couple had to practically give away because they were also moving and had no way to take it with them. He also found some crazy plant lady that grows indoor plants as a hobby and sold us 6 for like $25. I have a new grind station set up that is very comfortable and now that I have minimal distractions I plan on cranking out some decent volume over the rest of the month (aiming for 60K VPP's). Unfortuantely, I no longer have SNE status so I'm going to have to grind more if I'm going to knock off a $4K bonus each month. Fortuantely, I plan on hitting 600K VPP's by years end, which will almost equate to a $4K bonus each month over the next three months.

I also just commited to a 1-year membership at Steve Nash Fitness World yesterday. Well, technically I signed a contract for 15 months but if you're willing to pre-pay you essentially get 3 months free at the end of the deal (cost is pretty good-$45 a month). There are a few locations around Vancouver and one is like a 5 minute walk from my house. Still, a couple years ago I would have never had the motivation to sign up for any gym membership longer than 1 month but I've been able to work out consistently for about a year now and am pretty confident that I'll easily get my money's worth.

I'm pretty stoked on life right now and am really looking forward to the year ahead of me. I'm living in Kits, so those of you that read my blog that are also locals will know what I mean when I say that the scene around here is pretty ideal for someone in thier twenties. You can't really step outside and go more than 50 feet before seeing a cool bar or a cute girl-2 things that I value highly :)

Staying focused on the month ahead though, I'm planning on beginning the monthly grind tonight since there won't be much going on with most people being home for Thanksgiving weekend. I'll be going to a Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow with my family and then the only other planned distractions for the month will be on my birthday next week (turning 24 on the 12th) and then of course Halloween at the end of October. Look for more frequent blog updates/twitter twats now that I will be back at the office on a regular basis for the first time since July...I'm actually really looking forward to playing.

gl at the tables!

WCOOP Wrap Up + Photo Shoot

2011-09-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

Well I received an email today with the copies of the pictures from my photo shoot that I did back in August. After standing in front of the camera for nearly 4 hours, we managed to crank out almost 300 pics! The pictures are going to be used for personal banners and team online promo stuff in the future but I figured that I'd share a few right now...

I'll start with the pic above. I threw up a couple of pics on facebook for my friends to see and some of them just lost their sh*t over this picture...like thought it was the funniest thing they have ever seen. Granted, the hat is something that I'd never usually wear, it's obviously amazing and my friends have no style. People have taken it as far as saying they're actually going to blow up giant posters and make up T-shirts with this pic on it to wear out to a bar. Also, FIVE people have actually made this picture their profile pic, no joke. Lol, after checking FB just now, make that 6. Whateva, thx for the publicity I guess!

This next picture is special only because I left that shirt at the photographers house and will likely never see it again :( It's too bad too since that was one of my favorite shirts (all I usually wear is American Apparel T's and this colour of the rainbow will be greatly missed)...the photographer said that he'd drop it off for me the next time that he was in my area but I'd say the chances of that happening anytime soon are slim to none. I'd go back and get it but it would probably cost me more money in gas than it would to buy a new shirt.

This last picture took me forever to pull off...just in case anyone is ever asked to carelessly shoot out a deck of cards in front of them, be warned that it isn't so easy. It took a lot of practice for me to even correctly shoot the deck of cards out in front of me, let alone get the timing down with the camera. About 50 takes later and a lot of 52 Pickup, I was finally able to nail the shot.

So the WCOOP is now over and I would say that it went alright for me. Nothing amazing but I was far from bricking the series...I cashed for nearly $3100 after spending about $6500 worth of buy-ins (a losing equation had the buy-ins not been compensated by my WCOOP main event ticket + a bit of team online), which resulted in me keeping all of the cashes as profit.

I didn't feel like I played tremendously well in any of the events except for the last one that I played ($500 1R+1A)...I think that I wasn't patient enough in a lot of spots and playing 20+ cash tables simultaneously didn't help my focus. Overall, I'd say that the experience was hopefully more valuable than the sum of money that I made and I look forward to doing much better in the future. As I hinted at, I had a real chance to end the series on a great note in the $500 1R1A until I lost a coinflip with AK vs. JJ right before the money and was left with a 15bb stack and out shortly after (just a min-cash was almost $2k :() but obv that's tournaments.

Sigh, my volume has been just awful this month. I'm sitting at around 17K VPP's and am down about 2.5 buy-ins. At this point, I'll be happy to end the month at 20K VPP's and break-even because I'm going to be insanely busy over the next few days. I have finally come up with an end of the year goal for myself though. I'm looking to end the month right around 400K VPP's for the year and will be looking to make 600K by years end. This will mean that I'll need to average close to 70K VPP's over the next 3 months, which will almost perfectly equate to one $4K bonus each month. I definitely look forward to getting into a productive work routine starting in October!

Part of the reason why I've been unable to grind as hard as I normally do this month is because I've been on the constant house hunt. I've been stuck at home for almost 2 months now and have been looking for a place to live out in Vancouver ever since. Well, my future roommate and I finally nailed a place on the west end of Vancouver in the exact area that we wanted! Let me tell you, it ain't easy to get a landlord to rent to two young guys with abnormal jobs (he's a semi-pro athlete) when places literally go in 1 day throughout these prime living areas. Even though we both have great references, I decided to call up the landlord after the viewing and told him that we'd be willing to pay 1/3rd of the lease all up front in cash. He never actually requested the cash from us when we signed the lease but I bet that phone call certainly put his mind at ease if he was concerned about receiving the money on time.

So that's that. We move in on Saturday and I'm super stoked about it. Living at home temporarily has been fine but a while-it's nice to be able to visit my friends that are still back here and spend more time with the family-but I've found myself driving out to Vancouver so much that a huge portion of my time has been spent in the city anyways. Between visiting a girl that I've been seeing all month and my old uni buddies my gas bill has been through the roof!

There's not a lot of things that I dislike more than moving but this time I'm pretty excited about it. I should be settled in and back at the tables shortly in October and will be ready to grind!

gl at the tables.

A Night Out With Norm MacDonald

2011-09-22T14:49:00.001-07:00

About a month ago, I missed a phone call from an unknown number but noticed that the caller had left a voicemail in my inbox. I figured that it was either a wrong number or a sales call but was pleasantly surprised upon discovering that neither of my initial assumptions were true. As it turned out, the voicemail was from PokerStars's Western Coordinator (Rich) and he wanted to see if I would be interested in joining a few other Supernova Elites for a complimentary night out on September 10th to thank us all for playing on the site. This is the kind of service that you certainly don't expect from many poker sites but given that I know how amazing PokerStars is to their players (especially VIP's), I wasn't completely surprised by the offer either. I don't usually like to tie up my weekends so far in advance but it was easy to commit to this invitation and I told Rich to deal me in!

The plan for the night was to meet at 6:30pm for dinner at Tramonto, an elegant Italian restaurant located inside the River Rock resort, before heading into the River Rock Theatre to watch Norm MacDonald preform stand-up for a couple of hours. Afterwards, we were to head upstairs to the penthouse suit and relax while playing a few Sit and Goes amongst each other for some free swag.

I arrived a bit late (around 6:45pm) and took my seat at the dinner table amongst Rich and 3 other young poker players. There were a couple of appetizers already waiting for me in the form of prawns, scallops and some vegetables that were set up for the table to share. The waiter immediately came over to take my drink order (crown and coke) and everyone got to know a bit about each other. One more player joined our party shortly after I arrived and I only recognized the screen name of one person, which I found unusual considering how few Supernova Elite's that there are. I kind of forgot that there are other games outside of NLHE lol, and it just so happened that we had quite a diverse group of players. Being a NLHE full-ring player, I recognized the only other exclusive NLHE player even though he plays mostly 6-max games. Aside from the two of us, we had a fixed limit grinder, and two PLO CAP players (although they play NLHE too). A few of us are locals from Vancouver but two of the guys had recently relocated to Vancouver from the States after Black Friday happened. Naturally, the conversation was primarily dominated by poker-related topics but also ranged from things such as what to do in Vancouver, to theories about how the world is supposed to end (brought on by the fact that there was a very recent earthquake off of Vancouver Island).

After finishing a Delicious dinner (I ordered Dungeness Crab risotto), the group relocated to the first level of the resort and entered the River Rock Theatre where we took our seats for the comedy show. There was some confusion while trying to find our seats because the usher pointed us in the wrong direction and apparently none of us could be bothered to read out tickets. After doing a few laps around the theatre, we got settled into the correct seats. The opening act for Norm MacDonald was Stevie Ray Fromstein, who goes by the stage name "The Holy Atheist." As you could probably guess, his routine was about criticizing religion in a logical sense as to not mock it but merely draw humour from things that can't be rationalized. As someone who doesn't get easily offended or fired up over sensitive topics, I found his routine to be very funny. After about half an hour, the big ticket stepped on stage and Norm MacDonald came out dressed in a fancy suit contrasted by solid blue running shoes. When it was all said and done, Norm delivered about an hour and a half of laughs and I thought he was hilarious.

After the show, we were all herded out of the theatre and made our way towards the elevators to take us up to the suit. Everyone was particularly excited because during dinner Rich had mentioned that Norm MacDonald might actually stop by and play some poker with us! Apparently Norm's a huge poker fan and aside from commentating on High Stakes Poker, he also enjoys playing the game as much as anyone. The 6 of us arrived at the suit and were treated to food and beverages as things were being set up for the poker games. We learned that there were going to be at least 3 Sit 'N Goes to be played in a winner take all format for prizes...the prizes were awesome too: two winners would walk away with a pair of tickets to see the Vancouver Canucks and the big prize was a $700 iPad! Needless to say, I was hoping to run good since the format was like a turbo with 2500 starting chips and blinds increasing from 25-50 every ten minutes.

In the first SNG, I got off to a decent start by winning a few tiny pots. Unfortunately, I eventually busted after losing a coin flip with 22 against ATs after shoving from the button over an open from the Cut-Off by the PLO CAP specialist. I believe he ended up taking it down!
Sure enough, before the 2nd SNG even got underway, there was a knock on the door and in came Norm MacDonald along with Stevie (the opening act). Everybody seemed pretty excited to meet the two comedians and they both shook everyone's hand and introduced themselves in a friendly matter while being congratulated by the group for a terrific show.

Stevie ducked out shortly after arriving because he was flying out early the next morning but Norm sat down and was ready to play some poker! The second SNG was the big one too as the winner would be walking away with the iPad. The very first hand of the match I found myself in a dream spot. Norm limped UTG, the PLO CAP player made it 150, I looked down at KK and made it 450...Norm called and so did the CAP specialist. They both checked a low flop to me and I fired out a Cbet with no intention of folding...they both folded. I couldn't believe The CAP player showed me AKo as he threw it into the muck...I guess my full-ring nitty reputation cost me stacking him pre-flop :( After winning that fairly large first pot I was out to an early lead and was cruising towards that iPad...until Norm MacDonald crushed my chances of winning. At 50-100 Norm opened the cut-off to 500 (ok, I'm not going to critique his speculative bet sizing lol :)) and I shoved AQo from the SB...he called with 22 and won the flip. I was out shortly after when my A5 lost to 78s. Norm kept making hands and soon amassed a sizable stack. It came down to Norm heads up against the CAP player that won the first SNG and they were pretty even in chips. Obviously you'd have to give the Supernova Elite the edge at this point but Norm check-raised him out of a few pots and before we knew it he had the chip-lead! All of the money went in soon after when both players made top pair on the flop but Norm had the bigger kicker...the hand held and Norm beat all 5 of us "pros" to scoop the iPad!

The next SNG was for more Canucks tickets-something that I value very highly. On top of the tickets, a few players and Norm agreed to a $200 last-longer that would see the last man standing take home the whole pot. I opted out of the bet for a few reasons-I had no cash, I was getting tired and didn't like my chances, but mostly I'm just a life nit. Anyways, again I got off to a solid start after calling from the BB with 77 and getting some value after flopping a set against the limit specialist. I kind of hung around without doing too much for a while and before I knew it I was heads-up with probably a 3 to 1 chip disadvantage against the limit player. With the format being so crazy, I knew that it would mainly come down to whoever got the cards at this point as the blinds were very high. I managed to pull pretty close to even in chips and then decided to make a move with J8 after folding twice in a row. Unfortunately, he called with Ace-rag (I think) but I hit a jack to scoop a massive chip lead. Unfortunately again, I was unable to find a hand to finish him off and after he battled back he eventually busted me to scoop the tickets. Oh well, I didn't walk away completely empty-handed...I was given a PokerStars jersey on the way out!

At this point, it was around 3:30am and I could barely stay awake anymore. I had had a great time all night socializing with Norm about many different aspects of life and he genuinely was a super nice guy and was naturally hilarious. I haven’t met very many celebrities before and it was a very cool experience! I said goodbye to everyone and a few of us left the penthouse suit to head off to bed and call it a night.

Quick WCOOP Update

2011-09-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

So I've played in a few WCOOP events now and have a couple of cashes but nothing extremely significant.

I busted from WCOOP 42 ($1050 NLHE) a short while ago, finishing 207th for $2,207. I was happy with the way that I played and proud of myself for cashing for the first time in a $1k, especially because I was unhappy with how I crippled myself in the last $1k that I played.

I registered for the tournament 1.5 hours late and only missed THREE levels and started with 150bb's lol...that gives you an idea of how slow/good the structure is. I don't mind playing shallow stacked at all but it certainly has a more "cash game" feel when you're not in push/fold mode from the get-go. Anyways, after taking down a few tiny pots I had worked my 15K starting stack to just under 20K when I doubled up with 55 against AKcc on a 852cc flop. I stayed around 45k for what seemed like hours until I got involved in another big pot after getting all of the money in the middle with KK against fellow Team PokerStars Pro AABenjaminAA (my KK vs. his QQ- CO vs. BTN). Thankfully, that hand held and I was in great shape to at least make the money. I really put a lot of pressure on myself to cash in this tourney and although I wouldn't say that I was playing scared by any means, I definitely was taking the more conservative line if I was faced with 2 options (ie. call a raise pre-flop with TT/JJ instead of 3betting intending on getting it in). As it turned out, I whiffed almost every pot that I got involved with anyways and after one hand where I called from the BB with AThh, check-raised a 678hh flop, fired on the 6 turn, then check-folded an off-suit K river, I was left with about 60K approaching the bubble. I was under little pressure around the money bubble, fortunately, as I had at least 40bb's and soon locked up a payday of at least $1765. I hung around a little while after the bubble burst but ultimately busted at level 20 (1250-2500) when I shoved 45K over a big's stack's UTG open with AJo and ran into AK. It was a pretty marginal shove but I had already seen this opponent open and then fold to a short-stack shove and he was quite active so it felt a bit too nitty to fold AJ there, especially since I was well below average to begin with. C'est la vie.

Whew, that tourney was quite exhausting as I was playing for about ten hours (even after being 1.5 hours late!) and I found myself having to shut down my cash tables after about 5 hours to stay focused and relax a bit. Cash games went pretty well today too though and I cranked out about 3K VPP's and a few buy-ins profit. I haven't played very much cash at all this month yet and am about even before rakeback.

I think that I'll be back in action tomorrow for WCOOP 44, the $320 2x NLHE. I still have 3-5 events to play, including 1 more $1K so we'll see what happens.

I'm going to try and get up around 9:30am tomorrow and hit the gym before firing up another session of poker. I tried to get up at 8:30 today to play the $215 WCOOP event as well but after hitting snooze on my iPhone for 2.5 hours (no joke, gotta be some kinda record) that turned out to be a huge fail. I'm telling you, if you want to have some weird crazy dreams, try hitting snooze for a while lol. I have faith that I can be up earlish tomorrow though since I'm about to hit the old hay and it's not even midnight yet. I haven't been getting much sleep this month because I've been spending a lot of time at a new girl's place and she works at 8am, at which point she kicks me out and I drive home with the single goal of not driving off of the road and crashing into anything/anyone. I then nap all day and am wired until 3am, rinse repeat. I don't think this relationship is going very far, however, because she's moving away pretty soon...it very likely wouldn't even have begun had I not left my gym sack at her place after the 2nd time we got together and needed to retrieve some valuable items. Meant to be? Who knows.

Some exciting news...I got to see the final cut of my short video (ie. frosty012 version of "I am Nanonoko") and think the guys did an awesome job on it. Still no final word on when it's going to be released but probably in a couple of months. Will keep you posted for those that are interested.

WCOOP going alright for everyone else?

gl at the tables.

The WCOOP Has Begun!!

2011-09-06T15:00:00.001-07:00

So I just registered for WCOOP-09: $1050 and this will be my 3/13 event for the series.

I've already played in two WCOOP events on opening day ($215 6-max and $215 Freeze-Out (01 and 03) and also already have my first cash of the series, which came in the $215 6-max for $450. It's nice to know that I can't totally airball the series but it would have been nicer to have a deeper run of course!

In event 03, the $215 FO, nothing really got going for me and I busted fairly early after shoving 55 from the SB against an active button open while sitting on 7.5k (blinds 150-300) and he called and won with AQs. Pretty standard stuff I think.

I planned on registering late for the 6-max because it started at 7am PT and I knew that was not going to happen for me lol. Originally, I was thinking that I wouldn't be a fan of 3 hour late registration at all but after seeing it in action I think it's pretty awesome. Since the first couple of hours are quite slow anyways, I think there's still a ton of value in late registering and of course if you do register on time it's even more beneficial for you (because you will have more reads on the table, more time to pick off softer players, potentially much deeper stack etc.). You can kinda think of the WCOOP start times as flexible now imo.

Anyways, getting back to the 6max. The 6max was much more interesting than the FO and was quite a roller coaster the whole time. I got an early double up very shortly after I registered by flopping a set against top-top and held. I think that I won some more mid-sized pots and then lost half my stack with KK against AA all-in pre to drop me back to 15K (10K starting stacks). I can't remember exactly how but I ended up running my stack all the way up to about 75K before the money bubble (I think there was a pretty big 3-way all-in and I spiked a set and won with QQ) but then lost 20K with KQ against A3o in a steal situation. I went into the money sitting on about 50K, which was probably close to an average stack. Unfortunately, one ill-timed 3bet bluff later (3bet blockers against an active big stack who shoved on me) and a few raise-folds later I was sitting on 30K at 1k-2k blinds. My last hand was annoying for a couple of reasons. First, in the previous hand, the CO opened and I had A7s...it's a tough spot but I think that it's a pretty clear shove against most players but I chose to fold because that was literally the first open I had seen him make in a couple of orbits. As it turned out, the BB called and I found out that he had 45s. The very next hand, he opened the hijack and with this new information I decided to shove my 15bb stack with KQo...and he called with AA lol. The flop ran out KQJ and it looked like I might suck out but that was not to be as the turn and river came 3 3, counterfeiting my 2pair.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the series even though my tournament game feels really rusty. I don't feel like I was playing that well in the previous events so hopefully I can learn quickly and get lucky. Especially in the $1k's, I know that I have no edge over the field and will need to run amazing in order to have a deep finish. Maybe if I practiced or got a coach my tournament game would be where it needs to be in order to compete at this level but that ain't gunna happen at this point. I'm freerolling the series anyways and make my living playing cash games so I'm definitely just going to go for it!

I'll be tweeting my progress as the tournaments run so if you want to stay updated go ahead and join my twitter at ***https://twitter.com/#!/frosty012*** (or follow the link on the right hand side of this blog). Thx guys, hopefully I can post some good news over the month!

gl at the tables!

Attention New Players: Team Online Freerolls

2011-09-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

I know that most of you guys that read my blog already have an active account on PokerStars but for those of you who have yet to sign up-now's a great time to do so:

I’m proud to be a member of Team PokerStars Online. Along with myself, Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew, WCOOP Event Winner Anders ‘Donald’ Berg, Shane ‘shaniac’ Schleger, we make up some of the biggest names in online poker.

Now, you will have a chance to test your skills against me and the rest of the team, for FREE!

Team PokerStars Online is going to give you a chance to win some cash by playing in our new Team Online Freerolls.

Each month, $1000 will be up for grabs. You will also get the chance to play against me and other Team Online members, all with bounties on their heads. Eliminate a Team Online member and win a $25 bounty. It’s that simple.

If that isn’t enough, PokerStars is giving you even more chances to play and win. There will be TWO Freerolls every month!

To enter the $1000 Team Online Freeroll, all you have to do is create a PokerStars account and make a real-money deposit on the PokerStars client using the Marketing Code ‘frosty012’.

For players who can’t deposit but still want to play on PokerStars, there’s still a tournament for you to play. This tournament will also be played by Team Online members and if you our fortunate enough to bust one of us, you will win $10 to help build your bankroll.

To enter the $100 Team Online Freeroll, all you have to do to play is:

1. Download the free software from www.pokerstars.com.
2. Open a new PokerStars.com account.
3. During account signup, enter the bonus Marketing Code “frosty012”
4. You are now ready to play!

New Signups Freeroll Details

Tourney Name: Team Online $100 Freeroll
Date & Time: 12:00 ET – The first Sunday of every month.
Buy-in: FREE – just signup using the Marketing Code ’frosty012‘ and you are eligible to play in the freerolls every month.
Prizes: $100 prize pool in each freeroll. 20% payout structure.
Team Online member bounty – $10 for each Team Online member you bust.

Depositors’ Freeroll Details:

Tourney Name: Team Online $1000 Freeroll
Date & Time: 13:00 ET – The first Sunday of every month.
Buy-in: FREE – just create an account with PokerStars and make a deposit using the Marketing Code ‘frosty012′ and you are eligible to play in the freerolls every month.
Prizes: $1000 prize pool in each freeroll. 20% payout structure.
Team Online member bounty--$25 for each Team Online member you bust.

To register for a Team Online Freeroll tournament, open the PokerStars lobby, click ‘Tourney’ & ‘All’.

*PokerStars reserves the right, to cancel, modify or suspend this Promotion at any time.

Looks Like We Made It! (August Review)

2011-08-31T22:06:00.000-07:00

Whew. Again I managed to save my SNE status for one last time before it expires at the end of September...and this time I did it with 20 minutes to spare!

It's been the same old story for the last 4 months or so where I begin each month by taking two weeks off and then have to cram 50K VPP's into the latter half of the month. While this strategy has worked out (and the time off is amazing), it's far from ideal from a financial point of view and a balanced lifestyle perspective. In terms of maximizing profit, playing all of my volume in the last 2 weeks definitely hurts my bottom line. Most importantly, it's near impossible to stay on top of your A game when you're playing so much and when you're forced to play even when you're tired/don't feel like it etc. It's tough to stay focused and as I first experienced last December (when I was cramming hard to get SNE) and again at the end of last month, my play got sloppy and spewy. Sometimes it's hard to determine when you're playing bad or just running bad but especially this month I could tell that I was being abnormally spewy, although I was trying a few new experimental things in my game as well. Secondly, I think that last minute cramming has also hurt my bottom line simply because I've had to play in the games during the worst of times. I would normally not even bother playing when the games are bone dry but obviously that's not really an option when you need to make VPP quotas. From a balanced lifestyle point of view, 2 weeks on 2 weeks off also seems like a fail. The time off is great and I spent most of my time outdoors at the beach and at the gym but when it comes time to get up and play poker/rinse repeat...things aren't as wonderful.

Thankfully, I think that I will finally be able to break my habit in September. As I've blogged about before, I'm planning on playing 13 WCOOP events next month and I think that if I revolve my cash game hours around the tournament schedule I should have no choice but to avoid the last minute grind. I certainly have no desire to fire up a MTT and one-table for 6-8 hours or until busto...I'll almost definitely be playing 16-24 decent mid-stakes cash tables at the same time. First tournament(s) is on Sept.4 so I should get off to an early start of the month!

Anyways, before I get too far ahead of myself let's talk about August. The 107K hands that I played over the last couple of weeks were anything but consistent. After being down money over the first 40K hands I finally caught a mini heater and my profit shot up over the next 40K hands. After that, I gave a little bit back and stayed pretty much constant until the end of the month. Here's the graph:

August

$5,050.55 Table Winnings
$4,000.00 Cash Bonus
---------------------------------------
$9,050.55 USD

So I fell a little short of a 5-figure month but especially after the way August started (combined with the fact that I didn't hit a milestone this month) I can't be too disappointed. I feel like I played alright for most of the month-before spewing a bit at the end-but for the most part just let variance take me for a ride. I didn't feel that much control at the tables but hey, it's hard to feel invincible while playing poker.

Looking ahead to September, the one big thing on my plate right now is finding a new place to live! I had the chance to view a potential beauty today but with my poker schedule I just didn't have the time. I'm pretty confident that my buddy and I will find a place in a hurry now that we're both going to be way less busy for a little bit...for me, the sooner the better. It's been fine living at home, don't get me wrong-there are several perks. It's nice to be around my friends that are still in the area as well as my family...it's also nice to have better meals and cheaper rent :) However, school season is almost upon us and even though I'm not technically a student, I can justify creeping the campus bar based on the fact that a few of my good friends are still in classes. If and when I meet someone there, I will not be that guy who still lives with his parents!

I got a random text yesterday from a girl that was away for the summer but is now back in town. I can't remember exactly when we met but it was sometime earlier this year and it was fun hanging out but I think that I spent most of my time trying to convince her that I wasn't a douche after she read my blog or something. You know what, that's all I'm going to write about this in case she still reads it, lol.

I also got a random facebook add from a girl that I did not recognize based on her tiny ass profile pic (f u facebook privacy settings!) but from what I could tell she looked hot. I figured that she just added the wrong guy but thought why not and sent her a message when I was pretty drunk saying "Hooooows it goin? Don't think I know you?" Her response was "hey sorry i dont get on facebook much. we met downtown oo its been a while now. you gave me your facebook to add you. unless i have the wrong guy :p woops. hope not :( sorry
.." As soon as I read that flashbacks started filling my brain about what she was talking about...still can't be 100% certain she's got the right guy but now that I think about it I'm pretty sure that I remember where we were that night and saying that to her...and even if I'm not, I'm pretty good at pretending. Will keep you posted on developments.

Well, that's about it. I'm going to try and wake up at 7:30am tomorrow (1 time!) and hit the gym because I've got a busy day of house hunting ahead of me and I think I'm doing the Grouse Grind at some point. Hope you all had a good month, take it easy.

gl at the tables!

Stayin' In On Saturday

2011-08-28T02:43:00.000-07:00

I know that the games are usually going to be the best on Friday and Saturday night but I rarely get the opportunity to play poker during these times because I'm usually out and about with the peeps. This Saturday, however, I had no choice but to stay at home and play poker if I wanted any chance of retaining SNE for one last month. As it just so happened, most of my friends were out of town anyways so I didn't feel as though I was missing out on anything. I also got my fix of drinking and socializing on Friday, so that helped.

This month has been pretty lame, as I was saying in my last post...before my session today I was up a fairly meaninless/valnurable $700. Obviously breaking even is always going to be profitable with SNE rakeback but without any milestone bonuses in August a $4k month is definitely something of a disappointment. Fortunately, I was rewarded for putting in the hours today both in terms of VPP's earned and money won and hopefully I can continue my uptick over the next few days.

I ended up putting in more volume than I planned today...I was hoping to earn 4k VPP's but cranked out 5.5K. I have no problem putting in the hours when I'm losing but today was very unusual because I was a pretty big winner in both of my sessions today yet still wanted to keep grinding. The games just looked too good to pass on I guess...also in the back of my mind I know that whatever extra hours I put in now means less work in the coming days. Hopefully I can log some solid hours tomorrow as well so I can avoid the variance of playing the CAP tables on the last day of the month (because in all likelyhood it will come to that)!

My two sessions today felt very opposite to one another despite booking 4-figure scores in both parts. In the first session, I felt very comfortable and the most in control that I've felt all month. There were almost no good 400nl/600nl tables running so I was playing nearly 100% 200nl and the session was very pure...for the most part hands always held when I was ahead and I didn't suck out when I was behind. I got my money in good more than bad and came out ahead about $1k.

The second session was much different. The games were looking much more juicy and there were way more higher mid-stakes tables running so I decided to embrace the variance a little bit and found myself running about 30% of my tables at 400nl/600nl. The action was pretty crazy and after some key holds and favourable setups I booked a session to the tune of $2.2k, bringing my daily total over $3k.

This is how my month looks so far:

It's been pretty wild and I'm still a bit below EV but at least I have a bit of a cushion at the moment in terms of profit. Who knows how long that will last but if I can keep the momentum going over the next few days I can definitely salvage the month. I'm currently sitting on 30.5K VPP's so I have a heavy workload ahead of me and anything can happen!

I figured I'd post a somewhat interesting hand from my session today that got me thinking after the fact. I think that I played it really well/somewhat standardly for the most part but made a pretty clear mistake on the river. Here's the hand:

CO= A reg that I wasn't too familiar with, saw him at some 6max tables but no reads
BB= huge calling station whale

No-Limit Hold'em, $6.00 BB (6 handed)
Button ($393.70)
SB ($648)
BB ($709.65)
UTG ($626.70)
Hero (MP) ($600)
CO ($600)

Preflop: Hero is MP with 7, 7
1 fold, Hero bets $12, CO calls $12, 2 folds, BB calls $6

Flop: ($39) 7, Q, 8 (3 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $30, CO calls $30, BB calls $30

Turn: ($129) A (3 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $90, CO calls $90, BB calls $90

River: ($399) 8 (3 players)
BB checks, Hero checks, CO bets $198, 1 fold, Hero calls $198

Total pot: $795

Results:
Hero had 7, 7 (full house, sevens over eights).
CO had Q, A (two pair, Aces and Queens).
Outcome: Hero won $792

The flop and turn are obviously standard-need to bet for value and protection from draws. By the river, the fish could certainly have a wide range of junk that he's hanging on with from anything from ace rag to a busted flush draw...I'm almost never going to be behind him at this point.

I'm much more concerned about the range of the regular. In the moment (as I was flying through my 24 tables and didn't really pause to think too hard about the spot) I remember thinking that he probably has AQ but may also have 88,QQ or a busted flush/combo draw (something like 9Tcc or JTcc). I think that most people will bet here and hope to get called by AQ because that's about all that will call you (and that will even fold some of the time since the call is basically to chop) but I was and still am very happy for my decision to check. By checking, obviously you're inducing a bluff from a busted draw (though it's much less likely that this will happen from a capable reg while the calling station is still in the pot) but you're also inducing a bet from AQ to get the hero off of the exact same hand. I also snap-checked, which may or may not have factored into his decision to bet since I was trying to rep AQ myself this way. Anyways, I'm not happy with my decision to call his river bet and after thinking about it I think that it's a pretty clear shove. As I said, at the time I thought that he might have 88/QQ/AA and also wasn't sure if he'd call a check-shove with AQ anyways (he had about $200 behind and $400 in) so I just called. After thinking about it, I think that most players are going to be raising that draw-heavy flop with a set almost always (even with the fish in the pot) and even though he may in fact have a hand that beats us a small percentage of the time when he slowplays a set, I think that it is usually going to be profitable to ship the last $200 and hope that he thinks that he's priced in to call with AQ to chop it up. Nits gunna nit I guess.

All right, well I think that I'm going to try and satty into the million tomorrow since I'll be playing a bunch anyways. Hopefully I can book another solid session tomorrow, we'll see what's in store either way!

gl at the tables!

A Bit Of Everything

2011-08-22T00:31:00.001-07:00

What's up guys? I haven't been blogging a whole lot this month due to spending less time in front of the computer in general. On the poker front, I've only completed about 1/5 of my target volume for the month (about 10K VPP's so far) and things have gone quite badly. I basically got off to a terrible start on day 1 and then booked a series of extremely small wins over the next few days to cut my "downswing" in half (down only about 4 buy-ins at 200nl). Just some pretty standard runbad variance, although playing a bit rusty certainly can't be helping matters. There is going to be a lot of poker ahead of me over the next 10 days so hopefully things will start to go my way.

I also did manage to play the Supernova Quarterly freeroll yesterday but busted well before the money. I was excited to play the event considering that I had a deep run in the last one cashing for almost $3k. Unfortunately, things were not to go as well this time after I shoved my 10-15bb stack from the SB with A8o and got snapped called by 97s in the BB for 2/3rds of his stack lol and he made a flush.

It's been kind of a meh month...I don't really know how to describe it but it's like I've done quite a bit of stuff but I feel as though I haven't really accomplished anything. I guess that only makes sense though, considering that I've hardly worked at all and my number one goal of finding a place to live by September 1 has not been accomplished yet. It's been tough to house hunt because my potential roommate has had a crazy schedule this month and has been out of the country for most of it. Hopefully we can get lucky and time a good find during the last week of August...otherwise I'll be stuck at home a bit longer than expected-not the end of the world.

One cool thing that I did last week was go out to a photographer's in-home studio for a photo shoot for PokerStars. They wanted some pictures of me to use for the website and for upcoming promotions so I drove out there never having done anything like this before and didn't really know what to expect. The photographer was a really nice and laid back guy so we were pretty much on the same page during the whole process and cranked out several hundred pictures in a couple of hours...I've been told that I'll be able to see the pics so I'll post some of them when I get them. One of the reasons that I was most excited about joining Team Online was to get the opportunity to do some out of the box things like this so hopefully I'll get to do some more cool stuff in the future.

Another fun thing that I've done this month was a fishing trip to Tofino with my dad and grandad. This was the 2nd annual fishing trip for the three of us and we were fortunate enough to once again bring home enough fish to last us the rest of the year! Of course it helped that we had a guide and didn't really have to do anything with regards to finding the fish lol...a few pics:

Even though I've been stuck in the suburbs this month I've still spent a huge portion of my time in the city. The summer weather finally revealed itself to Vancouver and I've tried to take advantage of it by going to the beach as much as possible during the day. It's great to have some friends that have places where the action's at, especially for going out at night. Hanging out at night in the suburbs with some of my closest friends is always a good time but without the randomness of meeting new people you pretty much know what to expect. Having no ladies no hit on usually means the night will end something like this, lol...

I actually wanted no part in burying my good friend and financial manager JP with whatever we could find while he was passed out until I found the feather duster just lying there and couldn't resist...it's too bad we don't have the pic of him erupting out of the pile of household things.

Going back to the topic of ladies, it's been a long time now since I've blogged about any random hookups. The truth is that I haven't been with anyone since the end May and have been a little turned off by the idea of one-night stands all summer. I wouldn't say that it's because I'm more mature because I still think that random hookups can definitely be fun but maybe it's more of a "been there done that" situation for me. Unless I'm really into the girl, taking home some questionable bird that I won't ever want to see again now seems a bit boring and not worth my time. Also, I've done some pretty reckless shit in the past and don't really want to keep testing my luck with Vancouver's sluttiest.

My ethics were tested 3-4 days ago when I received a text message at 1:30am on Friday morning from a girl that I've slept with a couple of times telling me that she was at a club and misses me. She was obviously hammered and maybe horny but I was proud of myself for not responding.

I spent most of June and part of July putting in a lot of effort with a girl that is about as far away from the club scene as you can get. She was pretty cute and I put in as much effort as I ever have (which is admittedly not a lot) trying to pursue a relationship but things didn't work out. We went on a couple of dates but the majority of our interaction was spent over the phone. I don't know, she seemed pretty shy and would text me 40 times a day and then make up some excuse to not get together on the weekends. Like, if you don't want to see me, fine-I can take the rejection...just don't call me up on Monday and act as everything's golden. Eventually I just gave up and stopped the texting...oh well, can't say I didn't try.

Anyways, it looks like the weather is going to be pretty bad in Vancouver this week so it should be easier to grind out some heavy hours at the poker tables. Hope you're all having a good summer!

gl at the tables!

World Championship Of Online Poker 2011

2011-08-09T18:54:00.000-07:00

With less than a month before the start of the WCOOP 2011, I got to work today and built my ideal schedule for the series. Assuming that I can trade in my WCOOP Main Event $5,200 ticket that I earned last year for obtaining SNE, I will have $7,030 worth of buy-ins to work with for this year's WCOOP (I had just over $1800 of leftover SCOOP buy-ins to cash in as well).

After printing off and taping together an awkward looking schedule, I pulled out a pen and started circling the events that I wanted to play for sure. My approach was pretty simple...I wanted to diversify as much as possible but I also wanted to play in a lot of events that would normally be outside of my comfort zone in terms of buy-in amount (ie. play in events higher than $215 but stay away from non-NLHE games entirely). Don't get me wrong, I'm still signing up for a bunch of $215 events because they're going to be great value and still have a huge prize pool at the final table. With that in mind, I am planning on playing the following:

WCOOP-01: $215 6-max
WCOOP-03: $215 NLHE
WCOOP-06: $215+R Turbo
WCOOP-09: $1050 NLHE
WCOOP-21: $215 NLHE
WCOOP-22: $530 NLHE
WCOOP-28: $1050 NLHE
WCOOP-40: $215 NLHE
WCOOP-42: $1050 NLHE
WCOOP-44: $320 NLHE 2X
WCOOP-48: $1050 NLHE
WCOOP-52: $320 NLHE
WCOOP-61: $215 NLHE
---------------------------
Total Buy-Ins = $7060 (Assuming $615 for the $200R and only 1 bullet in the $320 2X)

So I managed to make a schedule that fit my budget almost perfectly and I'm really happy with it and super excited to play in all 13 events. I'm mostly excited to be able to play in the $1k's as I'm too much of a nit at heart to ever register for anything higher than a $215 FO on my own dime. When I first started building a bankroll from nothing back in 2007ish, I told myself that one day I would have a big enough bankroll to play the Sunday Million every week if I wanted to. I used to watch the players in the Sunday Majors and especially the Super Tuesday and say to myself "how could anyone ever spend $1,000 on a poker tournament?!" Obviously the same question could be asked about cash game players and now that I've been playing full-time for 1.5 years I definitely understand the mental attitude that goes into playing high buy-in tournaments and cash games. When I play poker now, I still always hate to lose but it's much easier to shake it off knowing that you've really just lost someone else's money...assuming you're a winning player of course. That said, for me it's important to try and find as much consistency as I can each month and that is why I don't like to mix cash games and tournaments even though my bankroll could take probably take it so long as I worked on my tournament game during downswings. I've always wanted to participate in the WCOOP though and once again Supernova Elite has provided me with yet another great fun and hopefully profitable opportunity to do so.

It really was as if this WCOOP schedule was made for me considering that all of the events that I really want to play never land on a Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday lol! My September is pretty much going to be 2-3 days of partying, maybe 1-2 days off/cash games and the rest WCOOP...Can't wait.

I don't have any expectations for the WCOOP as I feel like I'm freerolling the entire thing anyways. I will consider cashing for $7K+ a success, cashing for $2-4K satisfactory, cashing for $1-2K a fail and anything less an epic fail. However, it's not that tough to brick 13 tournaments in a row so we'll see what happens.

In other news, my house-hunt for a new place in September still continues. I've been looking on a daily basis but nothing amazing has been coming up and I'm still remaining quite picky at this point. I've yet to log any hours on PokerStars in August, as anticipated, and will likely get back on the virtual felt early next week. I'm leaving on a fishing trip tomorrow for the weekend with my dad and granddad for some quality time so hopefully the weather will continue to cooperate and we'll catch some dinner.

Anyone else planning on playing any WCOOP events or satellites?

gl at the tables.

Move Along (July Review)

2011-08-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

Another successful month is now in the books despite a poor finish to July. Once again, I managed to cram a typical month's worth of work into two weeks after taking time off during the first half of July to relax and address some long put-off chores (car tune-up, vaca up to Penticton).

After returning from Penticton, I tried to stick to a well thought out plan of earning 4K VPP's per day in order to hit the 50K goal by the end of the month. I kind of surprised myself for a while with how diligent I was being with regards to executing my plan but during the last weekend of July things got pretty sloppy. I decided to go out Friday night, which meant that I had to play hungover as balls on Saturday. That led to a shorter session than I had originally planned and less than stellar play, although I still turned a profit because the games were quite good. I went out that Saturday night as well, which meant more of the same on Sunday. I left myself needing 6.5K VPP's on Sunday and after ending the first half of the grind at 2:30pm (having started at 10:30am) I still needed to earn 4K to hit 50K. Needing a half hour break for food, I realized that it would be mathematically impossible to reach my goal by playing 24 tables of full-ring (unless I played like all 600nl). I thought that it wouldn't be worth enduring a potential downswing of a few thousand dollars just to retain a SNE status that expires at the end of September anyways so my other option seemed to be 6-max CAP tables. With that in mind, I loaded up 24 200nl 6-max CAP tables having never played them before in my life. Considering I had no real idea what I was doing, I think that I did alright. Most of the CAP "professionals" seem to be previous losing full-ring players anyways so the competition was pretty soft. That said, the variance while playing those tables is absurd as you're all-in wayyy more than my liking and have to leave more up to luck. I played the CAP tables for 4 hours and averaged more than 2K hands per hour and managed to earn about 1K VPP's per hour as well. After the third hour I was up about 12 buy-ins but over the last hour I somehow seemed to lose every all-in that I played and finished down 2 buy-ins lol. The VPP's are great, but I don't think that I'd ever play the CAP tables for a living. I'm glad that I was kind of forced into trying them at least though because now I've discovered somewhat of an "emergency" tool for bailing myself out of my VPP deficit at the end of the month.

I ran quite good for most of the month but a few awful days near the end took away the potential for a great month. That said, I'll never be too disappointed with a 5-figure month.

July

$6,767.47 Table Winnings
$4,000.00 Cash Bonus
$2,800.00 300K Milestone Bonus
-----------------------------------
$13,567.47 USD

So I just finished moving out of my old condo and back into my parent's house for the month. It's been about 3-4 years since I last lived at home lol but with my brother back as well (after his visa expired in London) my parents have a full nest once again. I made arrangements with my parents in July to let me live at home for a month while I searched for another place. Basically what had happened was that my 1-year lease on my condo was coming to an end and while I didn't want to renew the lease, I knew that I wouldn't have the time or effort to find a new place before August since I had to play so many hours of poker so this seemed like a sensible idea. I think that this month will fly by pretty fast considering that I'm planning on going away on a few trips that will probably total 10 days anyways but I'll be doing my best to secure my own place by September 1st. Thankfully, I still have a few different couches to crash on if I want to make the journey downtown on the weekends as well. I'm currently searching for a new place to live with my good friend Mark, who I'm definitely looking forward to living with since we're both pretty laid back and like to have a good time.

The move itself was a pretty big nightmare. I didn't have time to pack anything until I finished all of the poker stuff and that didn't happen until about 8pm on Sunday. I had to have everything out of the place by noon on Monday so I started to pack up some things on Sunday night but that didn't go very far because I didn't have more than 2 garbage bags to throw my stuff into. I went to bed at 2am and after getting close to no sleep I was up by 7:30am and immediately off to the grocery store to pick up more garbage bags to pack with, along with some breakfast. Things went pretty smoothly over the next couple of hours and I managed to pack everything up and clean my room in an efficient manner. The biggest issue was that I had no easy way of transporting my mattress and box spring to a Public Storage location a few blocks away. My roommate was far more organized than I was for the move and since he was also moving far more large items he had hired some movers to do the moving for him. I asked his movers if they would move my stuff when they were done with his but they said that they'd have to call their boss and it would be a 3-hour minimum charge at $95 an hour. I asked them if they would just do a cash job for me off the record and they said that their boss had put a GPS tracker in the truck and they would get in shit for doing that. Since I only wanted to move my stuff literally 10 minutes down the road I didn't want to shell out 300 bones. My alternate plan was to drive 40 minutes to pick up my aunts pick-up truck and then drive another 40 minutes back to my condo. This is what I ultimately ended up doing and after meeting with my mom we drove both vehicles back to my place. My friend Ben also agreed to help me move out so with three of us things started to move pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, I hit a pretty big bump in the road after taking down only the first load of stuff. Before leaving my unit, I felt my back pocket to see if my keys were there. I felt the beeper that's attached to my room key so I assumed that it was all good. As it turns out, once we were were down 23 floors to the lobby what I had felt was actually the beeper for my aunt's truck and I had left my keys in my Condo on the counter. The door to my unit wasn't even locked but as with most newer buildings you can't even access the floor without someone buzzing you up. Normally this wouldn't be that big of deal because I could just phone my roommate but he had already left with the movers and had also forfeited his keys to our counter. I called the building manager and knocked on the office door but because it was a holiday he wasn't even around. I called to leave a message and was directed to an emergency number...I called that number and was directed to another emergency number...I called that number and spoke to a lady that told me that she couldn't do anything to help me, lol. It was about 11:45am and my landlord was coming to do an inspection at noon so I called him up and told him the situation and hoped that he at least had keys to our place. Somehow he didn't even have a copy so the only solution that I was left with was to ask random people coming in and out of the building if they lived on the 23rd floor (or knew anybody that did). There wasn't very many people coming in and out and those that did were of little to no help. I decided that I would just start buzzing random people until I spoke to someone on the 23rd floor that would let me in. Of course the buzzer system was set up in a way where the buzzer number had no correlation to what floor that person lived on. After buzzing 15-30 people (half of which didn't answer, 1/4 of people could barely speak a word of English and the other 1/4 simply could not help) I finally hit the jackpot with a young Asian sounding man that said he was on the 23rd floor. The conversation went like this:

"Hello?"
"Hey man, is there any chance you live on the 23rd floor?"
"Yeah..."
"Wow really? Do you think you could buzz me up to the floor I'm moving out today and managed to lock myself out of my floor."
"Uhh which unit are you in?"
"I think it's 2307...you get out of the elevator, take a right, another right, then it's the last one on the left."

He hangs up.

I call him back.

"Hello?"
"Hey man, did I just talk to you?"
"Yeah..."
"Can you buzz me to the floor..."
"Yeah fine."

Success!

I don't blame him for thinking that I was some kind of scam but at least he came around and let me in. After that things went pretty smoothly...we loaded up all of my stuff into the 3 vehicles, did some questionable rope job with the mattresses in the pick-up, drove to Public Storage and dropped off all of my things that I didn't need to bring home and then went out for lunch. Of course once I got home I realized that I left some stuff in storage that I actually needed (like my keyboard to my computer and ALL of my boxers and socks lol). I drove back out there yesterday and picked up the stuff along with a wireless USB card for my desktop. I settled in rather quickly and am now back in business.

I'm not exactly sure when I'm going to start up poker for August. I'm thinking probably sometime next week but my main priority will be finding a new place to live in September. I don't really have high expectations for August anyways since I won't be hitting any milestone bonuses and will be lucky to hit 50K VPP's with all of the distractions going on in my life right now. Aside from finding a new place there are a few other things that I need to take care of so we'll see what happens when it's all said and done.

I also got word that the "I am frosty012" video should be coming out in a couple of weeks, so it will be very cool to see how that turned out.

Anyways, hope you all are having a good summer and are keeping busy.

gl at the tables!

Night and Day

2011-07-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

There's been a bit of a weird pattern occurring since I resumed playing poker after my weekend vacation. It seems as though my boomswitch gets turned on after 10pm and then gets turned off before 10am. You might even say that the contrast between how I run when the sun's up and when it's down is as clear as night and day :)

You won't hear me complaining about the running bad (yet) though because I've still managed to turn a profit in the worst of times. Even though it hurts to look at my EV graph for my daytime sessions, it doesn't really bother me so long as I'm not losing a lot of money. On the same note, I don't really get tilted at all even if I do book a loss so long as the blame can be put on EV. I don't often lose my cool over a bad beat to a recreational player either...I understand that it's part of the game and is the reason why poker is profitable to begin with (since getting it in with the best of it will be favourable in the long run). I will become frustrated though if say a regular pulls some horrible move and sucks out on me. Even still, It's a million times more tilting to be placed on the wrong end of an obvious cooler situation (ie. KK into AA in the blinds) then to lose all-in as a statistical favorite.

Anyways, I just thought it was kind of interesting to see a bit of a pattern developing...even if only over a couple of days.

Day 1

Night 1

Day 2

Night 2

Day 3

I'll most likely be putting in a couple of hours tonight as well so we'll see if the pattern continues and if I can strap on my Nikes and run well again.

I've been sticking right to my game plan as far as VPP's are concerned with regards to retaining SNE once again by the end of the month. I need to average 4K VPP's a day from here on out, which is doable but I have a lot on my plate right now outside of poker. The main issue is that my 1-year lease on my apartment is expiring at the end of the month so I'll have to move all of my stuff out of here and look for a new place. Thankfully, some of the pressure of finding a place has been taken off of me since I can crash at my parents place (WINNING) for a couple of weeks until I find a new home. I'm actually really excited about the move because if all goes according to plan I'll be living with my good friend Mark before September.

Aside from relocating, I've also been busy with a couple of other things. I just set up a bunch of investments with the bulk of my earning from last year so instead of keeping 6-figures in a "high interest savings account" at the bank, I will actually have my money start working for me. Or I will lose everything, only time will tell.

I also went to the barber today and shaved my head, lol. I've done the buzz cut before in the past and figured now is as good a time as any since the weather's decent. I think it looks alright and it's always a great feeling to step out of the shower without having a wet mop on your head.

I guess I'll close by saying that this has been a great month so far on and off of the tables. Hopefully the upward trend on my graph continues for the rest of July and I can book a solid 5-figure month. Things that I'm in the process of working on include finishing my "poker story" and a look at my upcoming WCOOP schedule that I'm really looking forward to.

All right guys, gl at the tables.

Phase 1: COMPLETE

2011-07-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

Since taking the first two weeks off of July, the latter half of the month has been broken into two parts (which I'm going to call Phase 1 and Phase 2 for no particular reason). In between Phase 1 and 2 lies my weekend vacation up to my good friend (and recent financial advisor) JP's cabin, which serves as a nice break to get away from all of the poker and enjoy the hot weather. Well, after working for 6 days (4K VPP's per day), phase 1 is now in the books! I got off to super hot start where I ran very well and played equally solid for the first 4 days. Unfortunately, I have since cooled off and was brought down to Earth yesterday, though I still turned a small profit. Today was a pretty big disaster, however, and although I wasn't playing my A game I pretty much just got beat by the deck...just one of those days where I couldn't hold with a set vs. flush draw, a made flush vs. a set, flush over flush, cooler after cooler etc. All things considered, this month is off to a good start (feels funny saying that on July.21 lol) especially after comparing July's early results to June's (where I was actually down about $1700). Here's the graph:

Running Good

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (8 handed)
MP1 ($149.25)
MP2 ($400)
CO ($314)
Button ($327.55)
Hero (SB) ($400)
BB ($400)
UTG ($183.50)
UTG+1 ($260)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 8, 7
UTG calls $4, 4 folds, Button calls $4, Hero calls $2, BB checks

Flop: ($16) 6, 9, 3 (4 players)
Hero checks, BB checks, UTG bets $8, Button calls $8, Hero calls $8, BB calls $8

Turn: ($48) 5 (4 players)
Hero checks, BB checks, UTG bets $20, Button raises $76, Hero raises $336, 1 fold, UTG calls $151.50 (All-In), Button calls $239.55 (All-In)

River: ($850.60) Q (3 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $850.60

Results:
Button had 6, 6 (three of a kind, sixes).
Hero had 8, 7 (straight, nine high).
UTG had K, K (one pair, Kings).
Outcome: Hero won $868.05

Running Bad

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (8 handed)
UTG+1 ($391.40)
MP1 ($399.35)
MP2 ($281.70)
CO ($207.50)
Hero (Button) ($273.85)
SB ($209.90)
BB ($203)
UTG ($213.25)

Preflop: Hero is Button with K, K
1 fold, UTG+1 bets $5, 1 fold, MP2 calls $5, 1 fold, Hero raises $26, 3 folds, MP2 raises $95, Hero raises $247.85 (All-In), MP2 calls $173.85

Flop: ($555.70) A, A, 9 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: ($555.70) 2 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: ($555.70) Q (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $555.70

Results:
Hero had K, K (two pair, Aces and Kings).
MP2 had J, A (three of a kind, Aces).
Outcome: MP2 won $552.70

Anyways, this vacation couldn't come at a better time since I was feeling a bit off while playing today after logging a ton of hours this week. I'm heading up tomorrow around 5pm with my buddies Matt and Iain and am really looking forward to it. The cabin's right on a lake and we're bringing a boat up to do a bunch of water sports while we're not busy sitting in the sun doing nothing with a cold drink in hand. This trip used to be somewhat of a tradition amongst my core group of friends dating way back in the day but for various reasons most of us have been unable to make it for the last couple of years. Some of the best experiences of my life have been created from these trips, including crashing some random wedding along the beach, learning how to double wake-skate while drinking a beer, and perfecting the down-the-shirt boob grab with some random girl that I met at a drive-in movie on the hood on her car. Ah, memories.

Hopefully I return on Monday refreshed and ready for a busy week ahead of me to close out the month. I've earned 20K VPP's in July, which means that I'll need to earn 30K in 7 days when I get back-certainly attainable but difficult to say the least. Maybe my run-good will restart, which would be nice because the games have certainly seemed to be above average in quality as of late.

gl at the tables!

Back at the Office

2011-07-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of the month that I logged some hours on PokerStars after I played about 4200 hands in 3 hours. The first day back can always feel a bit rusty but I think that I played decent enough and ran pretty well too. I ended up booking a win to the tune of a few buy-ins...which obviously means close to nothing at this point but feels satisfying nonetheless. The game quality yesterday seemed to be a bit above average and I was able to find spots against randoms where I could win big pots with little to no risk. Case in point:

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (9 handed)
UTG ($203)
UTG+1 ($247)
MP1 ($210.30)
MP2 ($202)
Hero (MP3) ($200)
CO ($270.05)
Button ($171)
SB ($251.40)
BB ($85.25)

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with 7, 8
1 fold, UTG+1 bets $6, 2 folds, Hero calls $6, 2 folds, SB calls $5, 1 fold

Flop: ($20) 7, 5, 8 (3 players)
SB checks, UTG+1 bets $9, Hero raises $36, 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $27

Turn: ($92) 8 (2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $56, UTG+1 calls $56

River: ($204) 6 (2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $102 (All-In), UTG+1 calls $102

Total pot: $408

Results:
UTG+1 had J, 10 (flush, Jack high).
Hero had 7, 8 (full house, eights over sevens).
Outcome: Hero won $405

I talked a little bit about what I had been doing with my time off in my last post and I mentioned that I was heading up to Penticton for the weekend with my two good friends Ben and Brandon. Well, that trip has now come and gone and I had a great time up there despite the vacation being relatively short. I'm used to the weather being a bit hotter than it was but on Saturday it was still about 26-28 Celsius and sunny all day, which meant perfect beach weather. After waking up at some unearthly hour (8am-9am), we grabbed a quick breakfast and then made our way into the center of the city with plans to tube down the canal that runs through the city. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, one of the "things to do" in Penticton is to grab some kind of flotation device (or you can rent tubes) and some beers and spend 2-4 hours chilling while floating down the river towards Skaha Lake. Since it was about 10am and we were all somehow hungover from the previous night (all we did once we arrived around 9pm was sit on the balcony and slam some drinks while randomly creating offside parody lyrics to "Last Friday Night" by Katy Perry because the song came on Penticton's one music station every half hour) we skipped the brews and brought a football instead. There was so much water in the canal this year that we went down in 1/3rd of the usual time, which was fine because that meant more time could be spent at the beach later. The tube ride was relatively uneventful-though at one point Brandon almost lost our football by trying to through it over a bridge that we were floating under. I told him that he didn't have a chance of making it from his sitting position but he insisted that it wouldn't be a problem...he through it up and at first it looked like it would be lost forever as it was heading for the center of the bridge. Luckily, it didn't even have enough juice to make it that far and hit the near ledge and dropped back into the river. $10 saved.

After the canal float, we gathered our beach supplies and headed to the lake. Obviously the most important part of the beaching experience is choosing prime real estate close to as many girls as possible so that you can try and meet them throughout the day. I guess that there are many icebreakers that one could use to introduce themselves to those around them but something that has worked well for me in the past has been to through a football just out of your partner's reach and have it land near the target. Once the girl has kindly returned the football you can thank her and ask her to join in with a witty line, such as "thanks, you actually throw better than he does, did you want to join in?" I can't tell you how many girls that I've rounded up for a campfire later using this technique (at least 1). It is quite immature and slightly retarded but that's what I am sometimes.

Anyways, while the beach was somewhat crowded it was mostly filled with families and there was a noticeable absence of people in my age range. It was slim pickins' and unfortunately I didn't even get an opportunity to hit anyone with my football. We just spend the day relaxing in the sun over some beers and it was quite nice.

We met a couple of guys at the end of the canal float that recommended two places that we should go out to at night-the first being a bar right on Lake Okanagan and the other being a club down the street. Both places were pretty good, although the crowd was definitely on the douchey side of the spectrum. We were at the bar for a while because it was beautiful sitting outside on the patio and pitchers of beers were only $10. For no particular reason, I suggested that the three of us swap names with each other for the night and from that point on I introduced myself as Brandon for the duration of the evening. Unexpectedly, the swap turned out to be slightly in my favour after some drunken bafoon ended up sitting next to us later in the evening and introduced himself as "Tyler." He basically lost his shit with excitement when he found out that Ben had the same name as him (after having to introduce himself as "Tyler") and I didn't have to deal with that. Our waitress was pretty cute and very nice and she spent a lot of time almost hanging out with us lol. She seemed to enjoy our company as I'd like to think that we were a relief from the normal crowd that she has to deal with, such as Tyler on our left, whose response when asked if he was doing alright was "No, you're too slow again. I had to send my buddy up to the bar to get drinks." I also realize that it's her job to flirt for tips but our entire bill for the evening was less than $30. After Tyler (who now decided that he was a boss) ordered shots for our table and the table on his right (3 girls that wanted nothing to do with it), I had to endure one of the most painful conversations of my life with his buddy who slurred out a story about how he installed Andrew Ladd's cable and it was the greatest moment of his life for almost an hour. WINNING. It was getting quite dark out by now and after Douch Mcdoucherson (Tyler) spewed out some comment about how the Germans really won WW2 because they killed 6 million people, our friendship could no longer be bought with free shots and we headed inside.

We ordered a few more beers and played a bit of Foosball before some random girl came up to Brandon and straight up asked for his phone number. He thought it was probably some kind of immature dare and said she was "terrible" anyways, although I thought she was cute. Obviously one of us had more to drink at this point I suppose. He gave her his brother's phone number. We eventually made our way over to the club around midnight but the three of us were almost like zombies by then. Drinking in the sun all day seems good in theory but in reality has some flaws-such as having little to no energy by the end of the night. We didn't stay very long...I remember making a single effort to meet what I thought was a cute girl on the dance floor, only to discover that she was a 4 at close range and left after a brief conversation that was heading nowhere. We went back to our place and shot some hoops before passing out around 2am.

The next day, we were all awake before 10am and just spend the day playing a bit of tennis and chilling at the beach briefly before making the 5 hour drive home. I'm definitely looking forward to more vaca's this summer, even if they are just weekend adventures.

I was at the gym yesterday and looked out the window to see this sign. I lol'd so I thought that I'd share:

Alright, I should probably start work for the day.

gl at the tables!

I Can Go Out Any Night of The Week (June Review)

2011-07-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

I decided to load up the last two weeks of June with a ton of hours instead of distributing my time evenly throughout the entire month. The main reason for this approach was simply because I was mentally exhausted at the end of May after my 40 hour, 3 day poker marathon SNE saving session. With that in mind, June turned out to be a pretty decent month, especially considering that after the first of two weeks I was actually down around $1700. Fortunately, things turned around pretty quickly and the second week was much better...netting me a profit of about $8k-setting my winnings for the month at around $5.5k. Combine my winnings with a 4K bonus and I'm looking at a month just shy of 5-figures! Keeping in mind that I didn't even hit a milestone bonus this month, I'll certainly take it!

June
$5,486.42 Table Winnings
$4,000 Cash Bonus
--------------------------------------
$9,486.42 USD

I can't believe that the year is already halfway over and after doing a quick review of my results for 2011 so far I'm very satisfied with how things have gone. Here's a quick summary of my poker winnings thus far:

January- $2,064.01 USD
February-$17,918.34 USD
March- $11,002.81 USD
April- $20,300.00 USD
May- $18,243.18 USD
June- $9,486.42 USD
-------------------------------------
$79,014.76 USD

I've taken a completely different approach to this year than I did for 2010. Last year, poker was somewhat of a "feeling out process," meaning that I began the year without really knowing what to expect and I put in a lot of effort more or less hoping for the best. I thought that my best chance of succeeding at poker would be to play as much as possible to try and reduce the variance and learn as quickly as I could. Without having very much money in the bank, things were obviously more stressful as well and I couldn't really go against my personality and just take a lot of time off before I had really accomplished anything. The end result was that I ended up distributing my work time evenly throughout the month and while I never had frequent marathon sessions at the end of the month, I was almost definitely logging more hours than I have been this year.

Now that I have a year of experience under my belt and have become a lot more comfortable to the nature of poker (ie. the swings, playing 24 tables, etc.) and with my poker abilities, I have inadvertently been taking "blocks" of time off this year instead of taking routine days off. Although I haven't made a conscious effort to play on and off for week long stretches, it has kind of worked out this way due to a combination of me burning myself out at the end of each month and having less immediate financial pressure-due to not having a ton of expenses each month.

Given that I've played much fewer overall hours this year, it's certainly nice to see that I have results that are almost as good as last year (84K). This can probably be attributed to a bunch of factors, such as me playing much better than last year and playing when I more or less want to instead of when I "have to." Of course variance plays a large part into anyone's results as well and I also began playing the year at higher stakes than I did in 2010. It's worth mentioning that I haven't been factoring my Team Online salary into any of my monthly results either and after taking that into account I've far surpassed my 6-month results from 2010.

I'm optimistic and looking forward to the latter half of the year for a couple of reasons: 1) I'll start to clear the higher milestone bonuses (up to this point, I've only cleared the 100K and 200K milestones) and 2) I have around $7K worth of WCOOP buy-ins to spend in September due to achieving SNE last year + a couple K worth of leftover SCOOP buy-ins that I never used.

I'm finally starting to get a clearer picture of what should be in store for me for the rest of the year. July and August will probably be relatively slow months in terms of playing poker (will still plan on clearing at least 50K VPP's) due to a bunch of reasons, such as my lease expiring/looking for a new place to live, having a bunch of really good friends back in town and having several awesome vacations planned. Come September, however, I'll be ready to work and am looking forward to playing a ton to close out the year.

So far July has been a pretty awesome month. The weather has been amazing and since I'm once again planning on playing around 120 hours over the last 2 weeks of the month, I've been taking time off up to this point to basically just enjoy life without feeling too guilty. I spent some time at the beach yesterday with some friends and then went out for dinner and drinks afterwards, although it was all very low key. I also went on a date a couple of days ago that went pretty well but it was just a dinner. A few days ago I went home to my parents house for a couple of nights to spend some time with family and friends that are still back home and to get my car tuned up. While my car was in the shop, I spent time playing some golf in the park as my dog ran around, I played some tennis and I walked along the sea wall a couple of times, all the while workin' on my tan. Thankfully, Old Betsy came out of the ER in "perfect condition" and all that needed to be done was an oil change.

I'm going to need Old Betsy to run as fine as she can tomorrow because I'm off to the interior with Ben and Brandon for a weekend trip at the lake. I'm super stoked about the trip and the weather's supposed to be awesome. Should be a great weekend for bird watching and I'm about to go put a playlist together for the ride up. Hope you're all having a good one and GL if you're playing in the Main Event this week, I'll certainly be keeping an eye on how things progress!

gl at the tables.

Still SNE, Baby

2011-06-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

Another month and it once again came down to the last day to keep my SNE status. This time, however, things were much less stressful and I easily hit the 50K milestone with several hours to spare (despite a brief scare where the software froze (which I don't think has ever happened to me before since I moved into this condo) with about 200 VPP's left lol). I feel like I ran pretty decent this session and ended up booking a big winning day despite running AK into AA twice blind on blind, losing to AQ with JJ on an AKJ flop, running KK into AA from the hijack vs. btn (sometimes a fold I guess), and losing to KK with AA all-in pre-flop in a spot where a good player could find a fold with kings (all pots were worth close to 200 big blinds). On the other side of the coin, I'm pretty sure that I only had 1 meaningful suckout all day and that was with JJ vs. AA blind on blind...hmmm, maybe they always have AA in the blinds lol.

I did however ran good in the sense that I made a ton of hands against people today and got a lot of value out of each of them.

It feels great to ship a $2K+ day to end the month and somehow net me another 5-figure month despite the poor start to June. It also feels great to have stuck to a disciplined schedule and ultimately crank out a ton of hands in the last 4 days and still play good poker!

I figured that I might as well address the comment on my last blog entry about that other poker site losing their licence so I don't get asked a million times over for my opinion. Unfortunately, I don't really have a whole lot to say...I'm just as well informed as the next guy and get all my news from the same places as you guys. I mean, to me it makes sense for the other poker sites to lose their licenses after what has happened with "Black Friday." Ok...so you don't actually have the money to repay your players?? LOL what kind of idiots are running these billion dollar businesses...it's as if not one of these clowns was able to see 1 step ahead of the game and ask themselves "what if." If you're doing illegal things with other people's money do you seriously expect that it won't eventually catch up with you? Obviously I don't know all of the inside details but from an outsider's perspective the whole situation seems rather pathetic.

PokerStars, on the other hand, just gets it. It's seriously as if the other sites are sitting at a table with Stars and it's so obvious that Stars is the pro and the other's are just fish. PokerStars has always handled their business by the book according to the rules/laws and has nothing to hide. People get banned from playing online poker in the States and BAM, everyone's money is refunded ASAP simply because THEY HAVE THE MONEY. Aside from the fact that Stars is not even under the same licensing agreement as the other sites, I see no reason why they would ever have their licence revoked simply because they have done nothing wrong. I couldn't be prouder with my affiliation with the company and trust PokerStars entirely.

Anyways, I'll do a month recap in a couple of days but for now it's off to the gym before heading out for some drinks tonight. Hope you all had a solid month!

gl at the tables!

Fun Day

2011-06-29T23:04:00.001-07:00

I took a pretty big beating for most of the day today as I ran quite badly and wasn't playing particularly sharp either. Case in point:

The SB was a fish that I was hoping would come along for the ride, otherwise I'd be more inclined just to fold 66 pre as the UTG raiser is an ok reg. Why can't they both just have AQ?!

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (9 handed)
BB ($209)
UTG ($203)
UTG+1 ($270.65)
MP1 ($239.05)
MP2 ($205.25)
MP3 ($214.30)
Hero (CO) ($276)
Button ($200)
SB ($196.05)

Preflop: Hero is CO with 6, 6
UTG bets $5.30, 4 folds, Hero calls $5.30, 1 fold, SB calls $4.30, 1 fold

Flop: ($17.90) Q, 6, Q (3 players)
SB checks, UTG bets $11, Hero raises $34, SB raises $190.75 (All-In), UTG raises $186.70 (All-In), Hero calls $163.70

Turn: ($604.05) 2 (3 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($604.05) K (3 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $604.05

Results:
SB had Q, A (three of a kind, Queens).
UTG had K, Q (full house, Queens over Kings).
Hero had 6, 6 (full house, sixes over Queens).
Outcome: UTG won $601.05

I was originally planning on playing three sets of 4500 hands with breaks in between but ended up playing 14,404 hands STRAIGHT lol. Not an ideal situation obviously but the combination of me needing VPP's/wanting to pull back to even/better than usual games (likely because that other big site lost their licence) meant that I played for 9-10 hours in a row. This is something that I have only done probably less than 10 times in my career and will try to never do it again. It's just not healthy, although I feel surprisingly fine right now or I wouldn't even be on the computer.

That big spike just before hand #14,400 was after I won a big pot off an amateur player at 400nl. It turned out to be a giant cooler disregarding his poor play pre-flop...I was 100% willing to stack on this flop but was happy with how much value I ended up extracting anyways. On the river, I really had no clue what he was holding and was pretty much just betting because I had what I considered to be the nuts lol (the way he was check-snap calling made me think that he wouldn't have 45, but who knows) and was hoping that he'd call with 1 pair +.

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed)
MP1 ($518.90)
MP2 ($479.25)
MP3 ($415.75)
Hero (CO) ($443.45)
Button ($660.55)
SB ($129.80)
BB ($575.25)
UTG ($400)
UTG+1 ($441)

Preflop: Hero is CO with Q, Q
4 folds, MP3 calls $4, Hero bets $20, 3 folds, MP3 calls $16

Flop: ($46) 3, 2, 9 (2 players)
MP3 checks, Hero bets $32, MP3 calls $32

Turn: ($110) Q (2 players)
MP3 checks, Hero bets $76, MP3 calls $76

River: ($262) 6 (2 players)
MP3 checks, Hero bets $184, MP3 calls $184

Total pot: $630

Results:
MP3 didn't show [2s, 2d ]
Hero had Q, Q (three of a kind, Queens).
Outcome: Hero won $627

Anyways, the good thing about that marathon session is that I now only have 4K more VPP's to clear tomorrow to hit 50K. It will still be a long day but there will be no stress about whether or not I'll make it (barring power outage or computer fail lol, that would be a tough beat to take....) but I really hope it just goes somewhat smoothly! Can't wait to take some time off in early July!

gl at the tables!

Solid Session

2011-06-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

I put in a pretty profitable session on Sunday netting about $1K after playing just under 4K hands. I was planning on playing longer but decided to call it quits and go to a BBQ with some friends back home. Unfortunately, this now means that I have to earn 20K VPP's in 4 days to once again keep my SNE status. While things won't be quite as hectic as they were last month, I definitely have my work cut out for me before the month expires.

I figured I'd post one of the more interesting hands of the session where I actually had a huge suckout at 400nl. It was kind of a weird spot because the player that overshoves the flop is a huge fish and I have him beat like 95% of the time but the first caller was a nitty reg that could easily be trapping with KK+. At the same time, I think that it's reasonable for the reg to be holding 66-99 and probably even more realistic that they have TT-QQ (which I thought they might actually fold to my shove). The hand also happened fairly early in my session after I had already lost a string of small-medium pots in a row so I guess I took the higher variance line by shoving after already making some big lay downs in the day. Looking back on the hand I guess that I should be folding but I think it's going to be pretty villain dependant.

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed)
UTG+1 ($412)
Hero (MP1) ($400)
MP2 ($400)
MP3 ($415.40)
CO ($434.10)
Button ($217.20)
SB ($206.25)
BB ($128)
UTG ($220.10)

Preflop: Hero is MP1 with 10, 10
2 folds, Hero bets $8, 1 fold, MP3 calls $8, 2 folds, SB calls $6, 1 fold

Flop: ($28) 4, 4, 4 (3 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $18, MP3 calls $18, SB raises $198.25 (All-In), Hero raises $374 (All-In), MP3 calls $374

Turn: ($1010.25) K (3 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($1010.25) 10 (3 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $1010.25

Results:
SB didn't show
Hero had 10, 10 (full house, tens over fours).
MP3 didn't show [Ah, Ad ]
SB doesn't show [5c, 5h ]
Outcome: Hero won $1007.25

Anyways, hope I can run well and play decent over the next few days.

gl at the tables.

The Next 15

2011-06-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

Well, the next 15K VPP's have gone much better than the first 15 but unfortunately that isn't saying a whole lot! Nonetheless, I think that I've won enough money to be even on the month or up some meaningless amount (aside from rakeback ldo). It feels good to be running better though and I think that I'm still playing solid. The games always seem to slow down in the summer a bit and that ain't making things any easier.

Aside from this Fri/Sat, all that I've been doing everyday for the past 10 days or so is playing poker and working out. It feels nice to have some structure in my life for a change. Usually, I wake up in the afternoon and when I eventually get around to "working" I end up playing until the early hours of the AM. Over the last couple of weeks, however, I've been waking up extremely early (before 8am in most cases) and have gotten the pokah out of the way early enough to have most of the day to relax and keep on top of chores/gym. The main reason why I've been making an effort to get up early is to play during busier hours (now that Euro's comprise the majority of players...well maybe Canadians, not rly sure) and it's been working out pretty well so far.

Oh yeah, I finally got around to opening a new database in HEM also and should now have accurate graphs that aren't missing a ton of hands. This should be a pretty precise graph of the month so far:

After a somewhat stressful work week I was ready to get my drink on this weekend. Friday night involved going over to my friend Dan's place for a going away party as he is leaving in a couple of days for summer employment. I ended up hanging around there for a while and then left to go downtown with Ben and Brandon. We were planning on going to a place called "Library Square" because we knew a few people that were already there but once we arrived there was a massive line-up. One of the girls that we knew there came out to talk to us and showed us her stamp. I suddenly had a stroke of genius and thought that I could replicate the stamp if we could find a sharpy. We hit up a nearby 7-11 and bought a black felt and walked back towards the bar. The three of us drew our best impression of what we thought the stamp looked like on our wrist and I volunteered to go first and try to fool the bouncer. I walked up to the line and took out my phone and pretended that I was talking to someone to make it look like I had just left the club to make a call. The bouncer opened the rope to let someone out and I tried to walk in simultaneously while flashing my wrist to the guy. The conversation went like this:

Bouncer: "Wait a minute, let me see that stamp again."
*I show him again*
"I don't know about that. Bouncer #2, hey Bouncer #2! Come and look at this stamp. Is it real?"
Bouncer #2: "I dunno"
Bouncer: "Ok, well how much is cover tonight?"
*I don't have a fing clue*
Me: "Ten bucks"
Bouncer: "No!"
Me: "Yeah, I paid $10 earlier."
Bouncer: "No, cover is $12."
*I try to convince the bouncer that I paid $10 for cover 2 hours ago but he isn't having any of it so I turn and walk away. Fail.*

After we couldn't get into L.Square we ended up going to a couple of places down granville. I'm pretty sure we went into a strip club at one point but Ben was too cheap to pay $10 cover...I don't ever want to hear that I'm the cheap one again, though I didn't care at all and hate strip clubs to begin with. We spent most of the remainder of the night at an Irish bar and it was relatively uneventful. When we arrived the three of us went up to an empty table and were approached by 3 girls claiming that they already had the table reserved. I told them "no problem" and started to walk away when they said that they were "just joking" and wanted to share it with us. Nothing developed though. Fail #2.

I went out with Brandon again tonight to the Lamplighter where we were meeting a group of about 15 people and I had only previously met 3-5 of them. I like the venue at the Lamplighter, although it is a bit cramped, and I ended up talking to one of the girls in the group for quite a long time. It was a difficult task because it was incredibly loud in there but she was very nice and down to earth...though i wasn't overly attracted to her. Brandon and I spent several hours in the bar before texting our friend Ryan, who was at a nearby club, to see how his night was going. He told us that we should come and meet up with him so we bailed on the L.L. and walked down the street to meet him. He was hanging out with three girls, one of which I've met before and two that I've never seen. It turned out to be a pretty perfect arrangement...I had a great conversation with one of the girls before we all headed to the dance floor and kind of paired off and threw some shapes and got our grind on. I ended up getting the number of the girl that I was talking to so hopefully I see her again soon because I had a great time.

The most impressive accomplishment of the night would have to be me writing this blog right now, while quite boozy, with minimal grammatical and spelling mistakes!

gl at the tables!

Bad Beat Jackpot?

2011-06-23T17:18:00.001-07:00

Of course there is no actual bad beat jackpot promotion on PokerStars but if there was I would have been involved in it today (well, depending on the requirements I guess...I've seen some pots qualify for the BBJ if aces full (AA as hole cards) gets cracked but it might be more common to have to have quads get beat)! Regardless, since there is no BBJ, I'm glad I came out on the winning end of the cooler lol.

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (8 handed) -
Button ($91.10)
SB ($152)
BB ($213.30)
UTG ($288.25)
UTG+1 ($222.85)
MP1 ($200)
Hero (MP2) ($200)
CO ($200)

Preflop: Hero is MP2 with Q, J
1 fold, UTG+1 bets $6, MP1 calls $6, Hero calls $6, CO calls $6, 3 folds

Flop: ($27) A, K, 10 (4 players)
UTG+1 checks, MP1 checks, Hero bets $16, 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $16, 1 fold

Turn: ($59) 4 (2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $36, UTG+1 calls $36

River: ($131) K (2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $76, UTG+1 raises $164.85 (All-In), Hero calls $66 (All-In)

Total pot: $415

Results:
UTG+1 had A, A (full house, Aces over Kings).
Hero had Q, J (royal flush).
Outcome: Hero won $412

Always nice to get full value out of the nuts and more importantly get to show down a royal flush! I've heard of people actually checking behind royal flushes to get a badge on ptr but the value of such a badge to me is about $0...so unless I misread the board or misclick expect me to raise the nuts on the river heh!

gl at the tables.

The First 15K

2011-06-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

I guess that I've been pretty fortunate up to this point to not really have any sort of downswing at all this year. It seems as though I haven't been running very well all year but I also haven't been running terribly bad either.

That said, the first 15K VPP's have been nothing short of brutal this month. Just standard running bad...losing flips, getting coolered etc. I've also been playing sort of spewy and have been making bad calls in close spots and it seems that I've been wrong most of the time. I currently find myself down about $1700 and considering that I won't be hitting any milestone bonuses this month, it would take nothing short of a miracle to prevent this from being my worst financial month this year (well, not counting January!).

Thinking positively, my deficit can be erased with 1 good day so it's certainly nothing worth panicking about but it's obviously annoying. Oh well, hopefully it doesn't get worse before it gets better!

I was going to post a bunch of bad beat histories for therapeutic reasons but there were too many and the post got ridiculously long. That and no one cares. I'll leave you with one of the more tilting hands of the day...it was only a flip but his play is so bad that it seems like a beat lol. The play was made by a huge winning player as well, so either he made all of his money back in 2006 or I'm doing it wrong...he reps exactly what he has and there's no way he can ever have anything of real strength in this spot so unless he thinks that I'm squeezing with like A2 and is shoving for value the play seems spewy at best. If only I didn't have the bottom of my range here or if only I won the flip!

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (8 handed)
Hero (BB) ($200)
UTG ($200.30)
UTG+1 ($419.35)
MP1 ($202)
MP2 ($203)
CO ($188.55)
Button ($200)
SB ($382.45)

Preflop: Hero is BB with A, Q
3 folds, MP2 bets $8, CO calls $8, 1 fold, SB calls $7, Hero raises $34, 2 folds, SB raises $374.45 (All-In), Hero calls $164 (All-In)

Flop: ($416) K, 4, 2 (2 players, 2 all-in)

Turn: ($416) 7 (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($416) J (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $416

Results:
SB had 8, 8 (one pair, eights).
Hero had A, Q (high card, Ace).
Outcome: SB won $595.45

Anywho, hope this month is going more smoothly for the rest of you! Will give another update in 15K VPP's or so.

gl at the tables!

Canucks Go Down In Flames

2011-06-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday was a very disappointing day for the city of Vancouver as the Canucks fell to the Boston Bruins 4-0 in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. The Canucks had two chances to seal the deal but after getting blown out in game 6 on the road they ultimately fell short in game 7 as well. I've told many people that the Canucks lacked the heart that was necessary to close the deal but after more post-playoff information has leaked I've got it completely wrong. The Canucks just looked like they were out of gas after game 5 and didn't have the will to win but the fact is that they were a physically broken down team. New injuries have now been revealed that help explain why certain players were underperforming in key situations:

"Alex Edler admitted he played with two broken fingers. Christian Ehrhoff admitted that he had to get a troublesome shoulder shot up and it will need addressing in the offseason. Chris Higgins admitted that his foot was never quite right after blocking a shot in the second-round series with Nashville and will need further attention. And Dan Hamhuis wasn't around to admit that he was probably sidelined in the Stanley Cup final series opener by a torn groin muscle.

Ryan Kesler? He wouldn't admit to anything.

Despite playing on one leg and having his teammates marvel at his resolve to take shots to endure the pain of a suspected groin tear and hip labrum tear, the Vancouver Canucks bit his tongue when he could have leaned on a crutch of convenience following a bitter 4-0 loss to the Boston Bruins in Game 7 at Rogers Arena.

Tambellini walked into a dressing room Wednesday that looked more like a hospital ward.

"There were probably shooting six guys up today," said Tambellini."

-"Canucks played despite brutal injuries" The Province. 2011

After learning about this new information, I think that it's safe to say that the heart of the Vancouver Canucks should not be called into question.

Even more disappointing than the loss were the events that unfolded after the game. I was surprised to hear about the shenanigans that were taking place in the city because I watched the game outside at Canada Place and there was no misbehaviour in the area at the end of the game. Even on the SkyTrain home people were tame. Basically, a riot broke out downtown and cars were tipped over and set on fire, fights broke out against the Vancouver police, store windows were smashed and some places were looted. It's obviously an embarrassment for the city, especially when the idiocy is caused by maybe 1% of the people that were down there to watch the game. Furthermore, the morons causing the damage are obviously not Canucks fans/hockey fans and most of them went down there with pre-meditated motives to cause damage win or lose. The real Vancouver fans are those people that stayed in Roger's Arena or in the streets and gave the team a standing ovation for an outstanding season despite the game 7 loss. The Canucks clearly gave us an all-in effort anyone that says bad things about the team is just a bandwagon-jumping fake.

Poker/Life

June has been a busy month so far, as expected. Aside from all of the hockey going on I also spend a couple of days shooting a video for PokerStars that basically profiles my poker story (basically same idea as "I am Nanonoko") and how I balance poker and life. I had a good time making it and I'm sure it will turn out pretty good. We probably have about 12 hours of film for a 5-10 minute movie so it will be interesting to see the finished product, which will probably come out in a couple of months. Will keep you posted.

My headache from yesterday's hockey game was made a lot worse today due to the fact that I got 2 wisdom teeth yanked from my head a few hours ago. I had a cavity on my top left tooth and instead of filling it I was advised to just get it pulled. I was also advised to get the other one pulled at the same time to avoid complications that will likely be inevitable in the future (I only have 2 in the top, no bottom ones are even in the gums...something about being an evolutionary progression. What can I say, I'm a marvel to modern dentistry). Anyhow, the extraction went well and I just got them pulled after taking some local anesthetic (freezing), despite being quite worried about the whole thing ahead of time.

With regards to poker, I haven't played a heck of a lot this month yet...surprise, surprise. I'm basically starting work for the month tomorrow and need to earn about 47K VPP's before the end of the month to once again retain my SNE status. I don't have very big expectations for this month in terms of money won because I won't be hitting any milestone bonuses but with some run-good I can still hit 5-figures. I've at least got enough days ahead of me that I should be able to comfortably earn around 3K VPP's each day by playing 4-6 hours from here on out. I was originally thinking that I might lose 1 or 2 days due to my dental work but hey, if Kessler can play through the pain then so can I!

gl at the tables.

The Bruins Are In Town

2011-06-09T23:20:00.000-07:00

So I went downtown tonight to meet up with my friend Miles, who was in town for just the night as he is heading off tomorrow to work at a fishing lodge for the rest of the summer. I joined him and my other friend Ben at the Empire Landmark hotel and after enjoying the view from the 30 something floor we headed down to the water to have a few drinks and appetizers at Cardero's, an upscale seafood restaurant located right next to a harbour. It was quite warm outside despite being cloudy so we elected to sit on the patio overlooking the ocean and docks, which were occupied with yachts. I was making small talk as the hostess seated us and she admitted to being a Boston fan and pointed out a hotel across the bay and claimed that the Boston Bruins were currently staying there for the hockey game tomorrow. The hostess seated us and asked us how we liked our seats and I replied "perfect, I can even watch over my boat from here." I have used this joke before with good results! but this time it was not well received and I got 0 laughs :( Anyways, sitting 2 tables behind us were some familiar faces and after putting the pieces together we realized that it was none other than James Duthie, Darren Dreger, and one other TSN member that none of us recognized and we assumed that he worked behind the scenes:

We were all thinking that this was pretty cool since the three of us watch SportsCenter all of the time and it was neat to see the guys off camera. I didn't recognize Dreger at first because he was unshaven and Duthie was talking on his cell phone and was wearing a pretty ugly purple T-shirt.

Out waitress was very cute, she kind of looked like Erin from the office only with blone hair. Miles disagreed with me at first but came around the 2nd time he saw her...Ben said "what are you talking about, she's not even brown!" (confusing Erin with Kelly, fail lol). We ordered a pitcher of Sangria because it was on special, as well as some calamari and muscles to share and started tweeting/facebooking how awesome it was to be in the presence of TSN celebrities. It wasn't too long after we got our food that we looked towards the streets and saw three big guys in suits all sporting playoff beards walking towards the restaurant. We immediately assumed that they were Bruins players coming from the hotel and got excited about the fact that they might be eating at Cardero's...not only that, but there was a free table behind us that had room for 4. Sure enough, the staff started to get excited and moments later the three Bruins were seated directly behind us! I recognized Milan Lucic, who is actually from Vancouver I believe, and I did not know who the other 2 players were (no, they obviously weren't Chara/Thomas etc.). Miles, Ben and I didn't really know what to do...do we tell these guys that they suck and to go back to Boston? Drink more and then try and fight them (l o l)? I'm not really sure what the appropriate play is here but we chose to more or less ignore them and not acknowledge their presence. It was interesting to watch everyone's reaction to the players eating in a Vancouver restaurant. They received a ton of stares from everyone but most people were star-struck and seemed to forget where their loyalty should lie. A couple of older people went over to them and shook their hands and said things like "I hate to admit it...but you boys are doing a great job!" An older women went over with her son and even got one of the guy's autographs...for a second there I thought that they were coming up to me for mine. These guys ordered a lot of food, starting with a soup and salad and them mowed down a big burger and fries + a side of asparagus. As we were leaving I contemplated making some kind of last minute remark. I eventually decided that I was going to go up to them and say "good luck tomorrow boys, you're going to need it!" Unfortunately, I pussied out as expected at the last minute and walked on by without saying a word. I ultimately decided against saying anything because A) I would look like a fool B) I was wearing a blue T-shirt and we were drinking Sangria...it might look like I was hitting on them and not insulting them C) These guys are NHL ballers that can bang any girl in the city, they don't care what some homo says to them and D) my whole plan to not acknowledge their presence would be foiled. Alas, I can only hope that the burgers slow these guys down on the ice tomorrow and the Canucks send them packing out of Vancouver with their tails between their legs! Game 5 goes down at 5pm tomorrow and I'll be watching it downtown with about 1 million other people. The series is currently tied at 2-2 so this is obviously a huge game, especially considering that game 6 will be played in Boston. My dad actually has tickets to the game so he'll be watching it front and center! The Canucks lacked a lot of heart on games 3 and 4 so hopefully they find their mojo because they ARE the better team this year. Let's go!!!

Do the D.A.N.C.E. (May Review)

2011-06-06T14:01:00.001-07:00

May was a pretty crazy month in terms of a lot of stuff happening. The month seemed to pass by slower than expected, especially after considering that I was having fun on vacation for most of it. I was able to pretty much just drop everything at the end of April and travel over to London and Spain on a whim after having a successful $20K month. I returned home from my trip overseas around the 14th of May and immediately got to work grinding at the poker tables over the next few days for the first time that month.

On the 20th of May, I took yet another small vacation and headed over to Victoria with my good friend Ben to visit my old roommate and frequent blog guest star, Miles. I wanted to do a big write-up from this weekend because it was pretty awesome but it doesn't look like that's going to happen because so much stuff keeps happening in my life right now that I can't even keep up with myself lol! Needless to say, I pretty much knew that it would be impossible to have a bad time over there and I wasn't disappointed. It also helped that I cashed in the VIP quarterly freeroll that Saturday for just under $3k, which meant that I was now buying the drinks that night if I wasn't already ;)

The VIP freeroll was actually quite interesting the way it all panned out. I woke up early on Saturday on the floor of Ben's place extremely hungover. I had actually forgot about the freeroll almost entirely and had plans to go hit some balls at the driving range with the guys that afternoon so I was never even intending on playing it. However, I changed my mind once I saw that registration was only at about $3K players (I think the previous one got 6k-10k players or something) and figured as a poker pro I could not pass up on this value. I had basically not taken into account what the turnout would be like without any American players and as a result 1 in 3 players would be min-cashing for at least $200. My plan was to try and win like 1 hand lol, squeak into the money and pay for the weekend and then jet off to the golf course. Things started to unfold pretty much as I had planned and after a combination of winning a few hands early and then going extremely card-dead near the money I managed to slip past the bubble with a 10bb stack. Miles had joined Ben and I at Ben's place around 1pm and were getting restless so I told them that I would go all-in and try to bust or double up, that way we could all leave right away or they could go without me and meet me later. The very next hand I shoved A5o from UTG and picked up the blinds. I folded my rags in the BB the next hand with a lot of action in front of me but picked up QQ in the SB the next hand and got action from TT against the cut-off and doubled up. Two hands later, I shoved ATs from the CO and got called by the BB with JJ but I spiked an ace and suddenly had like a 40bb stack lol. With that, Miles and Ben headed for the golf course and we arranged to meet back at Ben's place later as I certainly wasn't about to punt off a 40bb stack in the money to go hit some golf balls when first place was $100K! I continued to run well for a while, which always seems to be the case when you feel neutral about the result since I wanted to go to the grocery store and pick up stuff for dinner anyways. I was playing pretty well too though...there was one hand that I remember where I 3-bet AKo in position against a cash game reg that I play with on a daily basis and checked back a KQ9 flop, blank turn, and then fired big on the river and got called by AJ high, lol. I was pretty much among the top 10 chip leaders for the entire tournament until I lost a huge pot with about 50-70 players left for close to the outright chip-lead. I was opening a ton of pots, mostly due to picking up quality hands, and opened TT from MP and got shoved on by one of the other big stacks at the table. Even though he was another big stack, everyone was pretty shallow and we were all playing 15-50bb stacks so I didn't think he'd have to be super tight in that spot (he had also been quite active too). I also thought that if he had the top of his range he would be more likely to 3bet small or even flat call so I pretty much snap-called him and he showed me 55. Unfortunately, he hit a 5 on the flop and I didn't re-suck so I was left with about a 15bb stack. I certainly didn't give up and managed to navigate my short stack to 25th place, when I busted after losing a coin flip with TT to AQ all-in pre-flop and cashed for $2800. Oh yeah, I was also hosting two SCOOP final tables at the same time, which was a bit tricky but worked out just fine!

Aside from having some great plans in place for Saturday night, another thing that helped take the sting off of busting in the final 3 tables was that I was meeting up with a girl later that night who I figured was 99% down to have fun. I had met this girl the last time I was on the island, probably about 6 months ago, and hadn't been in contact with her in any way, shape or form since. While rather intoxicated the night before I had sent her a message telling her that I was in Vic and asked her what her plans were for Saturday night. I told her where we were planning on going and she said that she was going to the same place with her friends...haha, no shit...anyways, it was kinda tough to find her because I barely remembered what she looked like but we eventually met up and I had a great time-she was indeed down to have fun.

So with all of this time away from the tables I left myself in a bad spot for the last week of May. However, after cramming in 40 hours of poker in the last 3 days of the month I am still Supernova Elite and ran well enough/played well enough to order that gold statue of myself that I've always wanted. I literally started to bust out dance moves uncontrollably in the shower after I had finished my grind and am beyond stoked that I didn't lose my mind or my bankroll!

May

$8,638.85 Table winnings
$3,004.33 Tournament winnings
$4,000.00 Cash Bonus
$2,600.00 200K Milestone Bonus
----------------------------------------------
$18,243.18 USD

This graph is wildly inaccurate but hey, it's a graph! I have yet to fix my HEM simply because I find it more relaxing to be unable to check my results while playing. I will fix it eventually...most likely during my next downswing! For now, these are all of the hands that HEM has recorded from last month (and since it's missing tons, it's entirely meaningless and doesn't even resemble the correct shape, oh well!)

So I've been taking some time off this first week in June to get my head back on straight before resuming the grind (which will be tomorrow). I'd like to think that I've learned my lesson about leaving everything to the last minute so I don't anticipate anymore 12 hour poker days this year but I guess that time will tell. It's been crazy around Vancouver right now because the Canucks have taken a 2-0 lead in the Stanley Cup Finals against the Boston Bruins and are potentially two games away from winning it all! I watched the last game outside downtown and had no idea that many people even lived in Vancouver lol. I think that most people want the Canucks to let the Bruins win one game in Boston so that they can come back home and close it out in 5. As I type this game 3 starts in about 1.5 hours and I don't even know where I'm going to watch the game...it will be nearly impossible to get into any establishment as they have all been full about 3-6 hours before puck-drop.

What else has been going on...well, on Friday I had my first patio pops of the year on my balcony because summer is officially here and the weather is awesome. I even hung out at the beach for a while yesterday. I went out on Friday with a group of about 10 people and I ended up meeting a cute half-Brazilian girl that gave me her number. I sent her a message last night around 11pm and she responded by saying that she wanted to call me and chat on the phone in a couple of hours...oh boy, this has stage 5 clinger in the making but hey I'm not going to judge just yet. I didn't get back to her until this morning because I was exhausted and did not want to talk on the phone at 1am lol. I'll take her out to dinner sometime this week and go from there...and then come back and delete this paragraph before it bites me in the ass as this blog has already done over and over ;)

Finally, the same crew that made the short video "I am Nanonoko" are flying into town this weekend to do a similar video for me! I'm pretty excited about it and hope that we have fun making it and that it turns out well. I'll keep you posted with more details about this as it unfolds.

gl at the tables!!!

VICTORY!

2011-05-31T22:50:00.000-07:00

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeehawwwwwwww!! I feel amazing right now-relieved, proud and happy to have retained my Supernova Elite status until hopefully September. I hit the 50K VPP mark around 8:40pm PT, which of course is 11:40pm ET, meaning I only had 20 minutes to spare before midnight! I honestly wasn't sure if I would have enough hours in the day to make it before June 1 despite putting in a ridiculous amount of hands over the last few days. The plan was to wake up today at 6:30am after having a 3 hour sleep and grind for 12 hours with an hour break in between somewhere. Well, the alarm went off at 6:30am and I obviously felt terrible so after pressing the snooze button 7 or 8 times I rolled out of bed closer to 8am instead and started the grind. I grinded until about 2:30pm and only had time for a half an hour break to get some food, shower, and take a quick walk outside to clear my head a bit. I got back to it around 3pm and grinded non-stop always trying to have 24 tables running at a time...things were fine for the first few hours but around 6pm my fear of the games slowing way down started to become realized as the traffic dropped. As a result, I found myself playing more 400nl/600nl tables as well as a handful of 6-max tables-whatever it took to keep the VPP's coming in. I made sure to check my pace every couple of hours and as it got closer to the deadline I would check more frequently to make sure things were going according to plan. Three days after I began my operation to keep SNE, mission accomplished! It wasn't just about my pride to keep SNE that kept me motivated throughout the last few days- it's also extremely beneficial to be a SNE for monetary reasons for the upcoming months. Basically, by putting in the work now I can be lazier in June, July and August because I can purchase a $4K cash bonus by hitting only 50K VPP's instead of the 70K VPP's I would otherwise need as a Supernova. Now, I have the option to either have more free time or more money! Oh, and also as fishylol said, I can't exactly say "hey baby, I used to be SNE but now I'm just Supernova..."

This grind was by far the most intense poker related challenge that I've done this year and for some reason it felt even more difficult than my end of the year push for SNE last year in December. Tony G's got nothing on me when it comes to heart! I played 40 hours of poker in 3 days, that's #%@!ing crazy. I'm only beginning to fathom how much poker and how many hands that I played just now because if I thought about playing 40 hours of poker 3 days ago I would have just told myself F$@K it! Not only did I put in the volume but I also was able to keep my focus and stay level headed as I fought off tilt after getting smoked by variance for most of the grind to crank out a sexy profit.

Overall, I earned about $7K in profit in table winnings alone over the 3 day grind and perhaps the most amazing feat was that I had my best day EVER in terms of money won at the cash tables TODAY and it happened during the final stretch of my grind. As I mentioned in my update today, I managed to break even during the first half of today's session after a disappointing spell of runbad over the final few hours. The start of the 2nd half of the session was very good but then the variance started to even out a little bit again as I gave some of the money back. However, I caught absolute fire at the high stakes tables that I was playing and won 3-5 pots all over $1K to set my new personal best day at about +$4,500!

BINGO!

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed)
SB ($810.95)
BB ($200)
UTG ($696.60)
UTG+1 ($390.60)
MP1 ($400)
MP2 ($166)
Hero (MP3) ($551.20)
CO ($311.45)
Button ($496.15)

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with 5, 5
4 folds, Hero bets $12, 1 fold, Button calls $12, 1 fold, BB calls $8

Flop: ($38) 8, 4, 2 (3 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $24, Button calls $24, 1 fold

Turn: ($86) 2 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button checks

River: ($86) 5 (2 players)
Hero bets $80, Button raises $200, Hero raises $435.20 (All-In), Button calls $260.15 (All-In)

Total pot: $1006.30

Results:
Button had A, 3 (straight, five high).
Hero had 5, 5 (full house, fives over twos).
Outcome: Hero won $1058.35

This is the hand that started the rush. I think that everything is pretty standard. I carefully considered whether I wanted to shove the river or just call the raise for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't think that I could get called by much worse by shoving and 2) along the same lines, a good player will pretty much only be showing up with 22 or 88 (maybe 44) here given the action since there was pretty much nothing invested until the river...however, I ultimately decided to shove because I felt that calling would be too nitty against a random because I'd be pissed if they tabled 2x, a straight, or especially 44. Also, you never know what randoms will show up with-he could be sitting there with a horribly played AA/KK and think he has the nuts! He snapped me off pretty quickly with his lol straight.

I was really fired up after winning this pot and may or may not but definitely did an actual fist pump and yelled profanities of joy to nobody in particular.

BANGO!!

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (3 handed)
Button ($400)
SB ($174.15)
Hero (BB) ($400)

Preflop: Hero is BB with J, J
Button bets $12, 1 fold, Hero raises $32, Button calls $24

Flop: ($74) 9, J, Q (2 players)
Hero bets $48, Button raises $132, Hero raises $316 (All-In), Button calls $232 (All-In)

Turn: ($802) J (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($802) 7 (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $802

Results:
Button had K, 8 (one pair, Jacks).
Hero had J, J (four of a kind, Jacks).
Outcome: Hero won $801

Quads will do pig, quads will do.

BONGO!!!

No-Limit Hold'em, $6.00 BB (8 handed)
Hero (BB) ($619.35)
UTG ($273.75)
UTG+1 ($736.20)
MP1 ($570)
MP2 ($677.90)
CO ($261.60)
Button ($355.45)
SB ($735)

Preflop: Hero is BB with K, K
2 folds, MP1 bets $18, 2 folds, Button calls $18, 1 fold, Hero raises $66, MP1 calls $54, Button calls $54

Flop: ($219) 10, 4, J (3 players)
Hero bets $144, MP1 raises $498 (All-In), 1 fold, Hero calls $354

Turn: ($1215) 10 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: ($1215) 6 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $1215

Results:
Hero had K, K (two pair, Kings and tens).
MP1 had 2, A (one pair, tens).
Outcome: Hero won $1212

This was the biggest pot of the day. I wasn't too concerned about being behind when the money went in on the flop because this guy was a random that was playing pretty much every pot but talk about a SICK sweat! I was surprisingly at ease with the outcome of the hand before the turn and river were even dealt since I already had a few huge pots under my belt so I could afford to take this hit. Needless to say, after such a sick fade more fist-pumps and cries of joy were to be had! The neighbours were probably getting curious at this point.

Just for good measure, I had two straight flushes today! Here's the only one that HEM recorded, which was much smaller than the other pot that I won unfortunately.

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB
(3 handed)Button ($172.15)
Hero (SB) ($801)
BB ($400)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 7, 6
Button calls $4, Hero calls $2, BB checks

Flop: ($12) 7, 5, 8 (3 players)
Hero bets $8, BB raises $28, 1 fold, Hero calls $20

Turn: ($68) 8 (2 players)
Hero checks, BB checks

River: ($68) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $48, BB calls $48

Total pot: $164

Results:
Hero had 7, 6 (straight flush, eight high).
BB didn't show
Outcome: Hero won $163

I'm no homophobe, but I do prefer my flushes STRAIGHT!

Ahhh yeah, I am definitely looking forward to taking some time off for the next 2-4 days of June! I'll probably spend a lot of time working out and cleaning up my place/room and do some laundry/chores and try to get up to date with my blogging. I'm actually looking forward to doing a monthly recap of May now that I cranked out an $18Kish month in almost literally 3 days lol. OH YEAH, and the Cancuks are in the Stanely Cup FINALS baby!! I'll definitely be sweating every game against Boston and I'm calling the Canucks in 6! It's time...

Oh, there might be an issue with blogger when it comes to leaving comments for some users (I know I can't even make a comment right now, it's an issue on blogger's end and I think they're working on it) so if you want to hit me up send me an e-mail or tweet if you can't post.

EDIT: Yeah, seems to be an issues with logging onto google accounts...hopefully blogger fixes it soon!
gl at the tables guys!

No Time For An Update!

2011-05-31T14:01:00.000-07:00

Well, there really isn't a whole lot of time but here we go!

I played my 5 hour session last night and ran very well, taking like $2K off of the tables. I earned 3K VPP's in the process and left myself having to earn 8K today.

I just finished up my first half of today's grind and it started off really well and then ran about as bad as I have all month. Seriously have no clue how some of these idiot regs make any money but I guess if they run as good as they do against me all of the time then I can see it (no, I'm not talkin about you gutter :P You're just a box). I could post a dozen hands but there's no time. I thought that I pretty much lost that $2K that I won last night after this session but the start must have been much better than I remeber because I was EVEN!

4K down, 4K to go. Only taking a half hour break right now then back to the grind...honestly no idea if I'll even make it to 50K, it's going to depend on if I can maintain having 24 tables up at a time. Obv going to try my best, hopefully I can run better and make some money in the process. Should be a decent month regardless!

gl at the tables, apologize in advance if I say stuff in the chat today...def in a tilted mood!

Poker MARATHON

2011-05-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

These last couple of days have been insane trying my best to retain my SNE status for the rest of the year (well, until September). I am playing my ass off and giving it everything that I've got and it's still could be all for nothing lol. Yesterday, I grinded for 14 hours! Yes, 14 f*cking hours playing 24 tables of 200nl+ at a time. Today, I've played for about 6 hours and am about to start up another 5 hour grind before taking a 3-4 hour sleep and then I'm going to have another 12 hour race against the clock the following day.

Playing this amount of volume requires intense focus and discipline...my focus has never been an issue while playing but my discipline is why I'm in this mess to begin with. Little things, such as setting the alarm for 6:30am yesterday and then shutting it off and waking up at 11am, really start to add up. It also didn't help wasting 2 hours in the gym just now talking to some cute girl (wasted?) but it is what it is!

This reminds me a lot of last December all over again...I'll be happy to not lose my bankroll but I've actually managed to turn a small profit thus far. Another problem with not waking up very early in the morning PT is that the games get very dead at night and it's nearly impossible to run 24 tables at a time so I'm getting much fewer hands per hour. As mentioned earlier, the plan from this point forward is to grind out 3K VPP's tonight, which will take around 5 hours, and then wake up at 6:30am and do a 4K-break-4K session to close out the month. I've been running abysmally bad over my marathon so far and I don't expect things to change quickly...I've also been playing kinda crappy making too many calls in spots against the most unbalanced players on Stars where they always have it even though they rep like 1 hand. Oh well, we'll see how things turn out.

Anyways, I'm going to try and pull this off for all of the procrastinators out there. About 11K VPP's needed at this point, I'll try to throw an update in tomorrow but we'll see how much time I have.

gl at the tables!

Busy As Tits!

2011-05-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

Wow, sorry for the lack of updates everyone-things have been quite hectic as of late but I wanted to post something quickly. You would think that after already missing the first two weeks of the month due to travelling it wouldn't be the best idea to go away again for the long weekend with only 14K VPP's under my belt (but that's just what I did). It also probably isn't the best idea to go out tonight to a friend's birthday BBQ but whatever, I'm not going to sweat it. I currently have earned 25K VPP's for the month after putting in a long grind over the past 3 days and need to average about 6K VPP's over the next 4 days (about 9 hours a day at 200nl+) and it's going to be tough but I'll make it. You can see when 8-10 hours of my day has been devoted to poker over the last little while and 8-10 hours to sleep it can be hard to find the time to blog. Nevertheless, things will slow down a bit in June and I'll have time to recap a pretty blogworthy weekend in Victoria this past week!

As for how things are going on the poker front...not very good. Just been running really bad and being forced to play during non-peak hours is not helping. Somehow I'm still in the black though and have hopes for another 5-figure month. I made a deep run in the VIP freeroll cashing for $2800 after getting knocked out in 25th place...disappointing but satisfying at the same time. Anyways, like I said, my next post will be about my long weekend which will include a tourney report of the freeroll.

Biggest pot won this month:

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed)
CO ($900.70)
Button ($295.15)
SB ($165.50)
BB ($413.45)
UTG ($232.50)
UTG+1 ($416.40)
Hero (MP1) ($465.75)
MP2 ($447.10)
MP3 ($422.85)

Preflop: Hero is MP1 with A, A
UTG calls $4, 1 fold, Hero bets $20, 5 folds, BB calls $16, UTG calls $16

Flop: ($62) Q, 6, 7 (3 players)
BB checks, UTG checks, Hero bets $40, BB calls $40, 1 fold

Turn: ($142) 9 (2 players)
BB bets $69.50, Hero calls $69.50

River: ($281) A (2 players)
BB bets $100, Hero raises $336.25 (All-In), BB calls $183.95 (All-In)

Total pot: $848.90

Results:
BB didn't show
Hero had A, A (three of a kind, Aces).
Outcome: Hero won $898.20

Biggest pot lost this month (no it's not a bad beat...it was unfortunate that I was out of position though because I think that I'm pretty much forced to shove the turn here against 2 fish, especially given their ranges based on pre-flop action and the amount of draws that are out there (though if I had a read that btn was a nit I could call the turn and fold to a raise obv)):

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed)
UTG ($400)
UTG+1 ($405.20)
MP1 ($418)
MP2 ($321)
MP3 ($370)
CO ($431.50)
Button ($251.10)
SB ($223.15)
Hero (BB) ($406)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 8, 9
6 folds, Button calls $4, SB bets $6, Hero calls $4, Button calls $4

Flop: ($24) 9, 8, 6 (3 players)
SB bets $8, Hero raises $36, Button calls $36, SB calls $28

Turn: ($132) 3 (3 players)
SB bets $24, Hero raises $148, Button raises $207.10 (All-In), SB calls $155.15 (All-In), Hero calls $59.10

River: ($725.35) A (3 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $725.35

Results:
Button had 7, 10 (straight, ten high).
SB had Q, 10 (high card, Ace).
Hero had 8, 9 (two pair, nines and eights).
Outcome: Button won $722.35

Time to hit the gym then hit the BBQ. Talk to you soon.

gl at the tables!

Surrounded by Donkeys!

2011-05-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

Yes, it seems that even halfway around the world I still cannot escape the presence of donkeys! The good news it that the donkeys in Spain didn't take my money.

I've been back home in Vancouver for a few days now and have been (and will be for the rest of the month) busy as tits trying to cram a month's worth of work and obligations into two weeks. The work part is pretty standard-I need to earn at least 50K VPP's before June to retain my SNE status until it expires in September...I can predict that there is almost no chance that I will exceed much more than the minimal VPP requirements for this month. As for the obligations, well part of my duties for being on Team Online include hosting a bunch of SCOOP final tables this year (5 in total). A couple of the tournaments that I'm assigned to host will likely end around midnight on Friday and Saturday, which will complicate my plans for the long-weekend coming up but it's all good. PokerStars has been more than accommodating to me in that they took my holiday into consideration while planning the hosting schedule so I'm grateful for that and am happy to help out hosting. I've already hosted 2 "High" buy-in SCOOP events where the winner took home around $150K in both cases...pretty sick money.

On the other side of the coin, I also have the opportunity to play in some SCOOP events that I would normally pass on due to having some more buy-ins to work with for being on T.O. Instead of playing a bunch of low-medium events that I'm more than adequately bankrolled for anyways, I've decided to play a couple of bigger buy-in events to take a shot and gain some experience in larger stake MTT's. My SCOOP schedule is quite small and looks like this, keeping in mind the possibility of adding some minor changes if I see fit to do so at the last minute:

May 17: SCOOP 26- $1050, $109, $11 Turbo
May 22: SCOOP 37- $215 6-Max
May 22: SCOOP 38- $1050, $109 Main Event

I played the turbos today and cashed in 2 out of 3 of the events...but I didn't cash in the $1k so who cares lol! As I said, these buy-ins are compensated so I'm in a zero risk situation and all of the cashes are pure profit but it woulda been nice to at least min-cash the $1k :(

In the $1k, I was extremely card-dead throughout the entire tournament. My only premium hand in 2 hours was AKo and other than that I got AQs in the early levels and nothing else. I remained patient but my stack soon dwindled in half before I eventually found QJo, which looked like the stone cold nuts at this point, and shoved from MP for about 7 BB's and got called by A3o. The board ran out 9KxxT and I doubled back up to the 10K stack I started with. I went through the blinds and then shoved the aforementioned AKo from the Cutoff for 9K and got called by A5o in the Big Blind. That held and I doubled to just under 20K but could gain no momentum. In turbos, there's just no escaping the fact that you need to catch hands...not exclusively premium hands but you need to pick up at least mediocre hands that will play alright if you're called or you need to find a lot of spots to steal. Unfortunately, my position at the table was quite bad because there were a lot of bigger stacks on my right that were opening every pot and I wasn't picking up any hands to re-jam with since I had no fold equity. I busted when it folded to me on the button and I made a standard shove for 13K with KJo (1k-2k blinds) and ran into JJ in the SB. A little disappointing but I think that I played alright.

The $109 showed much more promise as I had worked my 10k starting stack up to $55k at 2.5k-5k blinds right before the money. We were down to around 620 players and 585 got paid and I was dealt AKo in the Cutoff. It folded to me and I decided to min-raise to 10k to induce a shove from somebody that might try to exploit the fact that we're on the money bubble (and assume that I will fold very often). The problem with the min-raise here is that it's should be so painfully obvious that I'm super strong as I would normally just shove my whole range here, especially on the bubble, but I had no reason to believe that any of the players behind me would pick up on this. The player in the BB ended up taking my bait and re-shoved his 50K stack with T4o...unfortunately my fish got off of the hook when he hit a pair on the flop and I missed. This left me with less than 1BB so instead of calling it off on the next hand I took my time and folded into the money a few hands later before busting.

I also made a deepish run in the L event working my stack up to about $140k and eventually busting in a standard hand where I shoved KQhh from MP for 10bb's but ran into AQo in the SB and didn't suckout. All in all, I had a fun time playing and look forward to the rest of the SCOOP and making a little bit of money!

So I'm still pretty jetlagged from my trip...I've been waking up around 7:30am PT (about 5-7hrs earlier than usual lol) and it's been great, hopefully it lasts! I was pretty out of it a couple of days ago though-I spent 15 minutes talking to my friend on the phone thinking it was a different friend the entire time. Hopefully my wits are back with me now.

Speaking of my trip, I had a great time in London hanging out with my brother and my cousin and then with my parents in Spain. It was nice to spend some time with the family, especially after missing out on a vacation to Hawaii last year due to the SNE chase. I could really spend hours and hours blogging about my travels but I really need to get some sleep! Basically, in London, I found different ways to amuse myself during the day while my brother and cousin were working and then we would meet up afterwards. Daily activities included getting lost around the city many times, shopping, working out, recruiting girls to join us later at a club (epic fail), and even a 2 hour soccer match one day. At night, we alternated between taking it easy by going out to a movie or dinner/casual drinks and going out to clubs. We went to a couple of amazing clubs, stuff that you'd never see anywhere in Vancouver that's for sure lol. It was very tough to get in since you need to either be a member or willing to drop 150 pounds each at these places but my brother had a couple of connections to luckily bypass the strict entry. It's worth getting in though, especially if you know someone with a table inside. You're basically looking at top shelf liquor, no girls below an 8.5, good music...fk one of the clubs even had circus performers on stilts/strippers lol. And a sexy doorman with the biggest triceps you've ever seen! (inside joooke)

I don't have any pics from London, basically because I couldn't be bothered to carry around my camera. I do have some pictures from Spain though courtesy of my dad. We stayed in a remote village about 1.5 hours out of Malaga where almost no one spoke any English. It was a complete 180 from London and was very relaxing...although we did travel around to a couple of bigger cities like Serville and Marbella. These pics are from the village, Serville, and Marbella, respectively:

Flights. Flights were somewhat of a nightmare this trip. Going over to London wasn't that bad at all, apart from the airline being quite unorganized upon check-in and we didn't have any time to spare once we got past security. The flight to Spain from London was much worse...because my brother and I missed it! We were at the airport before scheduled takeoff but the flight was already "closed" and we couldn't get our boarding passes. It was 100% our fault but after being out quite late the night before there was no chance that we could get up any earlier than we did, especially after we thought that we would still have enough time to make it. We ended up getting on the next easyJet flight after paying a 50 pound "rescue fee."

Coming home was painful. On about 4 hours of sleep, I got my ass to the airport at 8am (2 hours before my 10am flight back to Vancouver) only to see the biggest lineup imaginable for check-in. Apparently the computer system went down earlier so things were very slow and on top of that there were two giant flights checking-in at the same desk (one to Van and one to Calgary). Waiting in what turned out to be a 2 hour lineup was bad but the worst part was that nobody was able to tell us whether or not the plane would be delayed or if it would leave with about half of the passengers on it. Obviously it would be ridiculous to leave without half of the people on it but after witnessing easyJet's "we don't wait for nobody!" policy a few days prior I couldn't help worry about missing yet another flight. Things only got worse when I go to the check-in desk. Each person is allowed a 20kg bag to drop and a 5kg carry-on. My bag was about 15kg but my carry-on was about 10kg, double the limit. I was pretty frantic at this point, still worried that I'd miss the flight so I said fine whatever, I'll drop 2 bags how much is the cost? The man told me it would be a charge of 15 pounds per kg over (75 pounds) so I thought fk that and frantically started shoving clothes from my carry-on into my bigger bag. For the next 5 minutes I was "that guy" who was too stupid to weigh his bags before he left and was now holding up the entire line to save a few bucks. Eventually, after kneeling on my bag to keep it closed, I got both of my bags to fall under the respective limits and I was on my way.

As I had suspected, luckily they did delay the flight so that everyone could board and I walked on to take my seat. I arrived at my assigned seat of 31F only to see a mother with a crying baby sitting in my seat. I figured that she was one seat over from where she should be since the seat on her left was open and thought "you've got to be kidding me!" "Uh, is this 31F?" I asked her. "Oh, yeah, but we switched seats with someone up there" as she pointed in some vague direction. "Okay, no problem, what seat did you switch with?" "23A or B" she said. I walked up to take a look and saw a cute girl sitting in the aisle seat and two empty seats to her left. "Is anyone sitting there?" I asked. The answer was no and suddenly the 9 hour flight didn't seem so bad! We talked on and off between between me watching movies and her reading a book and to make a long story short we're facebook friends. Yeah, pretty much married. We might be going for drinks soon (and by might, I mean she hasn't said no yet)...I haven't decided if I want to use my "one time" on the SCOOP main event or this situation, we'll see.

gl at the tables, thxx for reading!

Back Where I Belong, Yeah I Never Felt So Strong (April Review)

2011-05-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

What up guys, it's been a wild month and there's a lot to talk about! I've been crazy busy since around "Black Friday" and have found little to no time to update the ol' blog. I anticipate this post being quite long so let's get to it!

I'm actually writing this blog post from South Kensington, London. I sort of decided that I would arrange a last minute trip across the pond to visit my brother and cousin if I had a good month in April and I made my mind up about 1 week ago to go through with the plan after only having like 1 losing day all month. Definitely one of my favorite perks of playing poker for a living is the flexible lifestyle that I can live. I literally packed the morning of my flight and was good to go. I left YVR yesterday and I arrived at Gatwick airport and took the express train into Victoria station, where my bro and cousin were waiting for me holding a sign that said "Big T," lol. The plane left at 2pm pacific time and got in at 7:45am BST (about midnight PT) so I had decided to go without sleep for the day so I would be on normal time today. The three of us had a pretty busy day and I was exhausted by the end of it...went shopping for an inflatable mattress + pump (got both for 17 pounds), went for lunch, went for "tea time" and slammed some tea instead of brews, then played "football" for 2 hours with some guys from my brother's work. I nearly collapsed from exhaustion but feel better for it today. The plan for tonight is to go out to a club and throw some shapes and talk to questionable women (or shoot for teh stars).

Poker went very well this month. I pretty much tied my previous record for the most profit won in a single month (set back in November, 2010), taking around $16.5K off of the tables by playing only 1/3rd of the volume. I'm currently at my all time career peak in earnings and am feeling very comfortable with my game right now. I had to jam a whole bunch of hours in the last few days of the month and wasn't playing anywhere near my "A" game (it started to remind me of last December) but I still ended up winning quite a bit so it's all good. I certainly ran well for most of the month and am fortunate for that...hopefully it continues in May when I resume play around the 15th. I'm also looking forward to playing a lot of SCOOP events in May and will likely even play a couple of tournaments overseas while I'm here (I'll actually be in Spain from the 7th-13th). I'll likely do a detailed writeup of all of the SCOOP events that I plan on playing in the very near future.

I don't have the exact numbers for the month (will update when I get home) because while I can access my Stars account, I don't have the piece of paper where I wrote down my beginning balance for the month. That said, these numbers should be very close:

April

$16.3K Table Winnings
$4K Cash Bonus
---------------------------
$20.3K USD

I had originally planned on playing about 1.5x the volume that I ended up playing to clear the 200K milestone bonus but after "Black Friday," combined with NHL playoff games, I was lucky just to hit 50K VPP's and retain my SNE status. I guess that I only lost a few days to BF-not wanting to play amongst all of the immediate confusion I chose to take some time off and see how things unraveled. The situation in the US is far from resolved and I hope that things will turn out in favour of the US players in the not so distant future but for now, as far as the games are concerned for teh rest of the world, things seem fine (in terms of traffic on the site, quality of the games, cash outs being processed etc.). It will be interesting to see how things unfold over the remainder of the year but I'm optimistic.

I'd say that the main distraction from meeting my volume quote was easily the 7 NHL playoffs games that the Vancouver Canucks were involved in. In my last post, I said that the Canucks had a 3-0 lead in the series and would easily close it out in 1-2 more games. This was hardly the case. Chicago ended up catching on fire and won the next 2 games in blowout-type fashion before forcing a game 7 after an scoring an OT winner in game 6. The city was in a state of depression and anger after witnessing the habitual choking that seems to plague the Canucks in the playoffs every year but I stayed cautiously optimistic about game 7. I really hate bandwagon fans and if there's ever a time that your team needs support it's in big games so to hear people saying things like "F the canucks" before the series is even over is annoying. Of course, after the Canucks won game 7 in dramatic OT fashion everyone is sporting jerseys and car flags again...lol. They're currently tied 1-1 in round 2 against Nashville and I think that it will be a good series. Nashville always seems to have Vancouver's number for some reason but I think that the Canucks are too talented and hungry to drop the series this year. I'm saying 'Nucks in 6!

I received an email from the Team Online manager at Pokerstars a couple of weeks ago asking me if I would be interested in organizing a night out in Vancouver with some Supernova VIPs and everything would be paid for. Would I be interested in doing what I would likely be doing anyways only bigger and better and I wouldn't have to pay for it? Hmmm let me think about it. I set it up so that a limo would pick me up at my place and then we'd round up the other guys. I didn't really know what to expect in the other poker players but it turns out they were all really cool, down to earth, sociable guys. Two of the guys decided to meet us at Joey's on Burrard and Robson (where I had dinner arrangements) because one of them was from Montrael and was sweating the Montrael/Boston game and the other was at a final table playing for 36K lol. We popped a couple of bottles of campaign on the way to dinner and the 7 of us took our table. The other two guys joined us shortly after (one after winning $10K from the FT) and I told them to order whatever they wanted without going insane. When I got back from the restroom there was like 10 appetizers and 3 trays of shots waiting on the table...as it turns out, no one even ordered a meal lol all the money went to appies and mostly drinks. We left Joey's just after 10pm and got back into the limo and went down Granville to Ceili's, which is an Irish bar that turns into a bit of a club on Friday/Sat. I figured it would be a good choice of venue since not everyone likes dance clubs and not everyone likes to sit at a bar so it was a bit of both worlds. I had a guest list but wasn't aware that it expired at 10pm (wtf is the point of a GL before 10pm lol Vancovuer) so I had to negotiate our way in through the bouncer. He originally wanted $180 to let the 9 of us in but I got him down to $120 for the group...not sure if he would have gone lower but it didn't look like it. Once inside, before I even set up a bar tab the dude from Montrael had already ordered more shots. I'm pretty sure that he made sure that everyone either had a shot in their hand or there was one on the way for the entire night now that I think about it. There was a pretty good scene there that night, it was actually busier than I expected and we found a couple of tables to relax at and continue talking. I think that a lot of people found it kind of weird to talk about poker and actually have the other person understand what they were saying...sometimes poker lingo can be like another language and because of that I normally never go into great detail when I'm with my friends (and it seems to be the common course of action according to the other guys as well). Anyways, I certainly didn't need a heck of a lot more liquid courage after already being at Joey's for a couple of hours and a few of the players started approaching some random girls. I thought that I had a good thing going with a redhead for a while but things just fizzled out. It was for the better though, as I met a cuter girl shortly after on the dance floor. How I could even muster a coherent sentence at this point I have no idea but I eventually convinced her to leave with me despite her saying that nothing was going to happen (lol, never heard that before...). The rest of the crew kind of dispersed around the same time (2am) and made their own way home. I got on a bus with the girl and noticed that her friend was with her and thought that this might be trouble. I had no idea where I was going and again the girl told me that nothing could happen tonight but asked me if I wanted to see her another time and offered her number. I declined, like an idiot, pulled the eject cord and got off the bus at Granville and Broadway I think. One of the other poker players who I had been kind of wingmaning with I guess called me shortly after and said that he had a cab going back to his place. I asked him if he would pick me up on the way and he agreed. I ended up crashing at his place on the floor and that was that. All in all, I had an absolute blast and met a lot of really cool people, most of which I'm still in touch with via FB and hopefully we can all go out again at some point. Thanks PStars!

All right, hope you guys had a solid month and things go well for you on and off of the tables in May.

gl at the tables from London!

No Comment

2011-04-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that almost everyone that reads this blog is now aware of the current online poker developments taking place in the US. If you're not, the gist of what happened is that the US government banned their own citizens from playing online poker for real money on any of the major poker sites on Friday, April 15th. The situation still remains very muddy and PokerStars has understandably requested that I do not make any comments on the issue. To be honest, I don't know anything more than the information that's been made public anyways, although I do have my own opinions on the matter at hand/the future of online poker that I'm sure I'll be able to express in a short period of time. For now, I would recommend watching a good interview with Ryan "The__D__RY" on PokerTube, as he rationalizes the irrational situation very well (should be easy to find on the front page).

My volume is once again lacking a little bit this month, not because of the frenzy that took place on April 15th but because my days have often been cut short due to the NHL playoffs!! The Canucks are on fire right now and took a 3-0 lead in the series last night against the former Stanley Cup champions the Chicago Blackhawks. The Hawks are no match this year as their team was decimated by the salary cap and they've lost 1/3rd of their squad from last year. Before the series started I predicted that the 'Nucks would win in 5 games but at this point I think a sweep tomorrow night is more probable given how good the team is playing. However, the Canucks have a bit of a bad habit of making it to round 2 every year and then losing so the true test will come next round...if the 'Nucks make it to round 3 they will undoubtedly experience a huge confidence boost after shaking the monkey off their back and will have a very legitimate shot at the Cup. Let's just take it one step at a time.

Like my hockey team, I've been unbeatable at the tables so far this month, as my heater has continued. I haven't had a single losing day after playing about 14 days this month and have almost averaged winning $1K a day even before rakeback. As is often the case when I'm running well, my volume usually decreases. I haven't played over 6K hands on any given day and the average number of hands has probably been around 3.5K (currently sitting around 28K VPP's). Now that I've made this post, I fully expect things to take a drastic turn for the worse but I'll hope for the best!

Here's an interesting hand from yesterday where I make a non-standard call pre-flop hoping to win a big pot with the button involved, who had already shown signs of being a weaker player (61/35). Thoughts on the hand can be found below:

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (9 handed)
UTG+1 ($270)
MP1 ($205.85)
MP2 ($217.65)
MP3 ($362.70)
CO ($200)
Button ($300.30)
Hero (SB) ($201)
BB ($53)
UTG ($100)

Preflop: Hero is SB with 3, 5
3 folds, MP2 bets $6, 2 folds, Button calls $6, Hero calls $5, 1 fold

Flop: ($20) 4, A, Q (3 players)
Hero checks, MP2 checks, Button bets $9, Hero raises $28, 1 fold, Button calls $19

Turn: ($76) 5 (2 players)
Hero bets $48, Button calls $48

River: ($172) 4 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets $75, Hero calls $75

Total pot: $322

Results:
Button had 7, J (one pair, fours).
Hero had 3, 5 (two pair, fives and fours).
Outcome: Hero won $319

I didn't have to think too long before calling the river bet with 3rd pair given that there are many draws in his range and more importantly there are very few hands that would just call the flop/turn and then value bet the river. If he had a hand like A4+ he would very likely just go with it on the flop, or at the very least the turn. I think that AK or 4x would be pretty much the only hands that would take the line of call-call-bet in this spot and given the pre-flop action I think that AK needs to be discounted because even some recreational players know to 3bet AK.

So, what was my plan for the hand? Well, with my flush draw + gutshot I check-raised the flop with the intention of stacking off. Given his call pre-flop and his loose style, his flop bet is going to be weighted to a lot of pretty bad hands (ie. a naked 4, a Q with a decent kicker, medium pocket pairs, Ax, broadway cards that have a gutshot). I'm happy to take the pot down right there with my C/R and even if he has a real hand we still have a decent amount of equity assuming we're not up against bigger spades.

After he calls my small check-raise (my sizing was poor and likely done in a hurry due to being on many tables) I'm left in a bit of an awkward spot with $167 behind and $76 in the pot. I decide to try and use my fold equity again and bet out $48 because I think that he is going to call the flop with a bad ace a lot of the time and now hopefully fold, given that my check-raise on the flop was so small. Even though I have spades, I have to now start to seriously consider that he might have a bigger spade draw since that is the most obvious hand that will be flat calling flop check-raises. The good news is that we've now made a pair and are ahead of every flush draw except the nut flush draw (and that may likely 3bet the flop) and we are almost never going to get raised on the turn given the action unless he has A5. Even if the villain shoves, we're still calling and are going to have some equity in the pot.

As it turns out, we were in pretty much the worst case scenario had the money gone in on the flop. Thankfully, this is what happens when you're on a heater.

I'm going to hope that things continue to go well at the tables for the rest of the month and hope that the American players can run better off of the tables. Obviously this situation affects every poker player but I truly feel sorry for those that have had their livelihood affected immediately. Hopefully things will unfold favourably and in a timely manner and work out for the best. Aside from that, I have no further comments for now.

gl at the tables.

Let's Talk Poker

2011-04-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

April is off to a fantastic start on the poker tables. I still haven't fixed my Holdem Manager because to be honest, it's been refreshing to not have to constantly think about what my results are during a session. I think that not being able to check HEM while playing has probably had a positive impact on my game, though any impact likely hasn't been drastic. The drawbacks to having a "broken" HEM are that I'm not getting accurate HUD info on some of my tables (I think the hands that aren't importing properly are isolated to 400nl/600nl tables) and the bigger drag is that I don't have any graphs to show you guys. I've also been recording my results by pen and paper each day and while this is kinda lol it's actually the most accurate way of doing it.

That said, I do plan on fixing my HEM in the near future-likely after I go on my next downswing. For now, things have been going very smoothly online and I've been running exceptionally well having earned over 8 stacks already this month. I put in some fairly heavy volume April 1-5 and averaged over $1K each day and then took a 3 day weekend. I put in around 4K hands on Saturday and then another 4.5K hands today and won a bit over $3k in the process so things are obviously going wayyyy better than normal. I've been playing well but haven't radically changed anything in my game since the start of the year so most of my upswing can just be chalked up to variance and running well. I expect a downer in the near future but hopefully I can ride the heater out a little longer!

I've taken a bunch of ugly beats this month but I've been running pretty "pure" for the most part. Most of my rungood up to this point has just been centered around being on the good end of cooler situations (ie. sets holding vs. draws, draws getting there when they need to, AA vs. KK a lot etc.) Of course, hands like this help!

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (8 handed)
UTG($218)
UTG+1 ($88)
MP1 ($214)
MP2 ($80)
CO ($216.20)
Button ($155.20)
SB ($201)
Hero (BB) ($200)

Preflop: Hero is BB with A, A
3 folds, MP2 bets $5, CO raises $18, 2 folds, Hero raises $54, MP2 raises $75 (All-In), CO raises $100, Hero raises $144 (All-In), CO calls $82

Flop: ($481) 10, Q, 9 (3 players, 2 all-in)

Turn: ($481) 4 (3 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($481) 8 (3 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $481

Results:
Hero had A, A (one pair, Aces).
MP2 had K, K (one pair, Kings).
CO had K, K (one pair, Kings).
Outcome: Hero won $478

Always nice to fade the Jack.

Usually, every Sunday I try and play the 2500 FPP VIP satellite to the Sunday Million that runs at 11:30 PT. I'd say I normally wake up on time to play it about 60% of the time and cash in it about 30%-40%. Last week, I also discovered another high value satellite to the "Mill," the 1500 FPP round 4 hyper-turbo satellite that runs around 12:30 PT I think. If you win the round 4 satellite (which pays 1 seat per every 3 entrants) then you move on to the 4500 FPP round 5 satellite, which again grants entry for 1 person to the Sunday Mill for every 3 entrants. Anyways, all I'm getting at is that for 4000 FPP's (valued at $64) you can have a very inexpensive and probable way of playing the Sunday Million (or any Sunday major, for that matter). I would assume that I have about a 50% chance of cashing in at least 1 of these satellites every week, although that number may be a bit high. Regardless, I'm going to try and continue to invest in both of these satellites every week because not only do I enjoy playing in such a potentially life-changing tournament each week, I also think that it will be profitable in the long run. Even though at this point I have a big enough bankroll to be adequately rolled for most tournaments online, I just think that there can always be more value added from satellites. I also find it more exciting to play knowing that even a min-cash will earn me a profit of around $300 instead of around $100 (if I just bought in). Anyhow, I just thought that I'd bring this to the attention of other high volume players that may be interested in dabbling in high-value tournaments for a minimal cost.

Today, while I had my 24 cash tables up and running I was also playing in the Sunday Million after gaining entry through the before mentioned round 4, 1500 FPP satellite (and of course winning round 5 as well). Things started out fine and I won a couple of small pots by isolating and then value-betting against a couple of weak players bringing my starting stack up from 10K to 12K. I went pretty card-dead for a while after that until I got my then 10K stack in the middle against my opponents 7K stack holding AQ vs. AT on a Axx board and held. Things went pretty quiet for a while...I called one opponent's small bluff with 4th pair and won a couple of uncontested pots pre-flop moving my stack up to 20K. I eventually doubled up again with KK vs. 67 on a 456 flop and was sitting on 40K. I opened a couple of pots but was met with some 3bets and had to fold, dropping my stack back down to 30K. My tournament ended 195 people away from the money when it folded around to the button and he opened to 6K at 1k/2k blinds and had me covered. I looked down at ATo in the SB and had a decision to make. Even though the button had been playing pretty tight up to this point, re-shoving ATo with 15 bb's here is obviously profitable as it should be well ahead of the btn's opening range. That said, folding here basically locks up $300 for me as I would probably have to wait about 1 more orbit until the money bubble bursts. I think if you have a small bankroll or satty'd into the tournament and the $300 means a lot to you then folding these +EV spots is fine...I couldn't bring myself to do it, however, as losing another orbit of blinds combined with the ever increasing blinds would greatly diminish my chance of a deep run/higher cash in the tournament. Having said that, I shipped my 30K stack and got called by 77 and lost the flip to bust me out of the tournament. There's always next week!

With the SCOOP upcoming in May, now seems as good a time as any to work on my tournament game. I plan on playing in many SCOOP events, although I haven't made a schedule for myself just yet. I'll likely be making a detailed post about the SCOOP in the near future and I'd be interested to hear what you guys are planning on registering in as well...maybe we can get some friendly/low stake last-longer bets or competitions going if there's enough interest.

gl at the tables!

$100K Means That I Can Afford a New Chair

2011-04-04T00:33:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, it has finally happened, one hundred thousand dollars earned through playing a card game! Alright, well technically I've earned more than that already in my poker career but not through straight table winnings. Earning $100K is no small feat, especially given the stakes that I play. The fact is that with SNE you can actually earn over $100K a year just by breaking even and cashing in on FPP's but if you're as competitive as I am then that will not be satisfying enough. I would say that it takes a very good player just to break even at mid stake cash games so making a living off of rakeback is certainly nothing to scoff at. It takes an exceptional player to have any sort of decent win-rate at poker and a truly elite player to crush the games while playing 24 tables. I can only think of like, less than 5 people that I would put into this last category (and no, I would not include myself lol). So with all of that in mind, I'm very proud of how I've advanced in my poker career and am pleased with my growth thus far. Variance is a biatch, so who knows how long I'll be staying above that 100K profit floor. Thankfully, I've been through enough at this point that I should know how to claw my way back if and when I dip below it!

Yesterday, disaster struck...I was feverishly doing what I love and my chair collapsed (playin' poker ya pervs). It was a long time coming and she will be deeply missed. She was with me since the early days of my professional poker career and has had a strong impact on the posture bestowed upon my back. Without her, I may fully well be half an inch shorter than I am today.

Given the circumstance, I had to make an unscheduled trip out to IKEA this afternoon. After navigating through more people than at a sold out Vancouver Canucks game, I was able to find a deserving replacement.

BEFORE

AFTER

I didn't trade up just for looks, this new chair has a few new features that my old chair did not:

1) Comfort
2) It swivels
3) It goes up and down

May my new chair and I see many hands together.

gl at the tables!

I Did It Again (March Review)

2011-03-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

Sigh, once again I can't seem to learn from the procrastination mistakes that I made last month and had to scramble together a 6K hand session today in order to retain my SNE status for at least one more month. It wasn't quite as close to the final hour this time (made it by like 17 minutes last month) and I had secured my black stars with about 1.5 hours to spare!

So with 50K VPP's earned in March, I'm looking at enough FPP's to buy a $4K bonus and cash in on my $1200 100K VPP Stellar Rewards-not bad for putting in below average hours compared to last year's standards.

Overall, I feel like I ran pretty awful at the tables but I won't be able to prove anything in terms of EV since my HEM has been giving me trouble all month and won't import around 20% of my hands. I've been putting in no effort to fix the problem since I've actually found it quite nice not to be able to check my results until the end of my session...even if that means recording my results the old fashioned way by using a pen and paper! That said, I managed to win enough money to record another 5-figure month...so I won't be complaining anymore.

March

$5,653.81 Tournament + Table Winnings
$4,000 Cash Bonus
$1,200 Stellar Reward Bonus
$150 Reload Bonus
----------------------------------------------------------
$11,002.81 USD

Again, I'm satisfied with the results although it was ugly compared to last month. Also, because of HEM missing so many hands I don't have an accurate graph to post...I'll be sure to fix it before I play too many hands in April.

With all that said, I'm actually going to make a volume related goal for April for the first time all year. I'm going to try to earn 76K VPP's by the end of the month to reach 200K for the year and collect the first milestone bonus worth $2600. With some discipline, this goal should certainly be attainable. Hopefully I just run good...I feel like I played a whole lot better in March than I did in February but the results don't reflect this. I'm about $2K away from reaching $100K in profits according to ptr so this is a pretty exciting milestone that I hope to cross in April.

Away from the tables, March was alright. I worked out a lot and have been eating relatively healthy all year so that's definitely a plus. I had quite a few good nights out but a lot of the fun was overshadowed by drama. It's tough these days, being such a recognizable poker icon around the city, every girl that I meet has already read my blog and wants nothing to do with me. Alright, that might have only happened once and nobody knows who I am but you get my point. I also had to deal with some roommate drama amongst other minor things but life is good :)

Anyways, I might have some good karma coming my way because I donated a bit of money to the Japan Earthquake Relief tournament(s) on PokerStars. If anyone is interested in donating, click on the Tourney-Special tab and you'll see a wide range of purple-coloured tournaments labelled "Japan Earthquake Relief" ranging from a $1 buy-in to a $1000 buy-in. These aren't actually tournaments, you just register for whatever one you'd like to donate to and all of the money goes to the Japanese Red cross.

Hope you all had a good March and get it done in April.

gl at the tables!

Rollin' Along

2011-03-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

March is beginning to shape up quite nicely at the poker tables despite the fact that most of my sessions have being incredibly frustrating. I managed to put in just over 6K hands on Saturday and booked an $800ish win but played pretty badly throughout the day. It was just one of those days where I was being way too much of a calling-station and would go against my read because the standard play would seemingly be to call. I think that I'm definitely capable of making huge laydowns a lot of the time in spots where most people would snap-call but I was totally off of my A-game today. That said, I was a little unlucky to be put in such tough spots but hey, that's the name of the game. I managed to run really hot in the last 1500 hands of the session getting lucky on more than one occasion, including 1-outing TYROMPER when I got it in with set under set with a flush draw out there and binked the river. The games were also very good so I was able to find a lot of spots where I could get my money in as a huge favorite and ultimately grind out a decent profit.

Here's an example of a hand that I'd like to have back from Saturday where I probably should have folded. This was against a reg and while his shove is pretty lol, there really aren't any other hands that he would likely do this with unless he was just tilting like crazy, I guess:

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (8 handed)
MP2 ($420)
CO ($400)
Button ($400)
SB ($955.20)
BB ($451.70)
UTG ($469)
Hero (UTG+1) ($597)
MP1 ($414)

Preflop: Hero is UTG+1 with K, K
UTG bets $12, Hero calls $12, 2 folds, CO raises $400 (All-In), 4 folds, Hero calls $388

Flop: ($818) 5, 7, 8 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: ($818) 5 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: ($818) 9 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $818

Results:
Hero had K, K (two pair, Kings and fives).
CO had A, A (two pair, Aces and fives).
Outcome: CO won $815

Annnnd here's a hand where I got lucky! This hand happened shortly after the hand posted above. I don't usually shove in these spots against randoms because while their hand is almost always face-up as a medium strength pocket pair, they almost always make the bad call anyways. They don't seem to care that they can't really represent anything of actual strength and are essentially guessing whether or not that they are crushed. It was a bad move on my part to even think that I had fold-equity but I was kinda steaming from the KK hand a few minutes prior:

No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (9 handed)
MP3 ($325.60)
CO ($237.95)
Hero (Button) ($400)
SB ($858.95)
BB ($523.40)
UTG ($412.20)
UTG+1 ($433.50)
MP1 ($529.20)
MP2 ($400)

Preflop: Hero is Button with A, J
5 folds, CO calls $4, Hero bets $20, 2 folds, CO calls $16

Flop: ($46) 4, 7, 4 (2 players)
CO checks, Hero bets $24, CO raises $52, Hero raises $356 (All-In), CO calls $165.95 (All-In)

Turn: ($481.90) J (2 players, 2 all-in)

River: ($481.90) A (2 players, 2 all-in)

Total pot: $481.90

Results:
Hero had A, J (two pair, Aces and Jacks).
CO had 8, 8 (two pair, eights and fours).
Outcome: Hero won $640.95

Finally, here's an example of getting my money in good risk-free!

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (8 handed)
Button ($117.85)
SB ($81.20)
Hero (BB) ($369.40)
UTG ($331.65)
UTG+1 ($180.60)
MP1 ($215.50)
MP2 ($301.15)
CO ($200)

Preflop: Hero is BB with 4, 10
1 fold, UTG+1 calls $2, 5 folds, Hero checks

Flop: ($5) 10, 4, 7 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG+1 bets $8, Hero raises $26, UTG+1 calls $18

Turn: ($57) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $42, UTG+1 raises $152.60 (All-In), Hero calls $110.60

River: ($362.20) 6 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: $362.20

Results:
Hero had 4, 10 (full house, fours over tens).
UTG+1 had J, 10 (two pair, tens and fours).
Outcome: Hero won $359.20

All in all, I think that I'm up around $5K at this point and will hopefully be able to close out the month strong. I'm looking at about $4-$6K in bonuses this month so another 5-figure month is in sight. I'm currently sitting at 42K VPP's for the month and will likely close around 50K-55K VPP's.

I've also been working on some training videos for PokerStars's Poker School Online. I've got to get two videos finished by the 31st and currently have the footage done for one and need to add the audio tomorrow. It's certainly going to be a busy next few days but hopefully I can get everything done and run alright to finish off March.

Away from the tables, life is good. The weather is finally getting nice outside and it looks like spring is finally here in Vancouver. I got to dust off the old sunglasses + football the other day and enjoy some time outdoors. I've been going out a reasonable amount as well this month and despite this blog almost ruining my chances for me to hang out with this girl that I met 2 weeks ago, she decided to give me a chance. Gotta love it when a simple google search can lead to how I will only talk to girls that are > 7/10 to go along with detailed write-ups of my nights out. I probably should have seen this coming but what can ya do.

gl at the tables.

Home Game Hilarity

2011-03-22T22:02:00.000-07:00

Haha, I recently stumbled upon this thread on pocketfives.com that talks about funny home game experiences. This thread hit pretty close to home for me since when I first began playing poker with my friends I remember some ridiculous stuff occurring and we were definitely not playing by the proper rules of the game. We didn't know what the blinds were so we always used to just ante every hand, we would usually chop the pot if two players had a flush and an "A" was on board etc. I can't remember what other incorrect rulings happened on a nightly basis but looking back on it, I'm almost positive that we were playing our own version of Texas Holdem'. Here are some funny excerpts from the thread:

1. "It was a tournament $15 buy-in. only 5 people and not that im great but i was def the best one there. super super deep but with a time limit of only 4 hrs so it was gonna be all over at 12:30.

There was no timer they just wanted to go up when they felt like it. I.e first level lasted 2 hours. then on a hand i had the nuts i raised the host re-raise i go all in and she said that she was all in. i show her my hand and she said she was just kidding and keeps her chips.

The final thing before i just started to not care was there where 2 people in a pot one with 77 the other with 10 8 the board runs out A J J K K I tell them its a split pot and they argue back that well the one with the 7's is a better hand cause she started with a better hand. So i pretty much dumped my chips and left."

-Sean B

2. "Just after the Moneymaker boom, I was playing in a .25-.50 NL homegame. The hosts were adament that if you went all in or called all in, ALL of your chips were on the line (ie. Player A goes all in for $5 and Player B calls but has $20, Player A can win all of Player B's stack).

I argued that it was beyond retarded to do that, until I wised up and just kept reloading WAY short and started shipping in on everyone who had built up some pretty deep stacks... The hosts changed their "house rule" soon after that."

-m4ch1n3

3. "lol i played in a home cash game one time where there were no all ins... They argued that since people could rebuy and add on at ANY time that it was not possible to be all in ,since you could borrow, or leave if you wanted (according to their rules) to go get more money DURING a hand if you wanted to play a really big pot with a good hand. They also said that if someone put you all in and you didnt have enough chips to call, you had to fold....

none of it made sense so i drank some beers and left."

-MasturNate

4. "I played in a weak home game once where I was berated by a player because I shoved on a 4c6h9h board with 102 off on the button and the other player folded. I showed the bluff and the guy that folded went nuts. His argument was, "I had Ace Jack of hearts! I could have made a flush or hit and ace or a jack if you wern't playing like an idiot." I didn't even try to explain.

Later in the game I was holding 9c7s and another played called down with 8hjs on a 4 spade board and the guy that was running the tournament said it was a split pot because the ace of spades was on the board giving us both ace high flushes.

sighaments. Last time I ever played with those guys."

-pgasean

5. "I got an invite back in High School to play with a group of black kids from my class... tiny place, way too many people showed up, lots of conyac and weed.. when I arrived, they were playing a NLHE cash game 15 handed with 2 decks. I left.

I hear a story the next day that "Big Sen" flipped the table because he had 5 aces and lost to 2 royal flushes (chop pot)."

-bdubz9180

6. "Right after we started getting games together in HS after the boom we had a couple great hands.

#1 Dustin had the around the bend straight. QKA23.

#2 My all time favorite was Jon's full house..........

of suits! Guy didn't have a fucking pair and declared he had a full house."

-GeorgeMorris

7. "I played in a home game where the board came 10 J Q K 9 and both players flipped over A8. This was a problem because normally the winner went to the higher kicker (lol). So they ranked the suits club, diamond, heart, spade and if the kicker card from the straight didn't settle it, then the suit would settle it :)"

-CynicdarK

Lol so how about it, anyone else got some funny home game stories that they want to share??

gl at the tables!

Video: Micro Stakes Poker Strategy

2011-03-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

So I've been meaning to get around to making another strategy video for all of you guys that have been following my blog for a while now and I finally got something done! I get a lot of emails from people that are still trying to build a bankroll for themselves and have been stuck playing the micros for a while now so I wanted to make something that would be relevant to you guys. Rather than dragging on for a couple of hours I tried to make this video short and sweet (just about 25 minutes), although I probably rambled on a lot, and touch on some basic yet complex poker theory.

The last poker strategy video that I made was about me 24-tabling 100nl (link found on the right of this blog under "links") and the focus of that video was centered around showing you how to play/keep up with playing 24 tables at a time, rather than going into great detail about strategy. I wouldn't call anything that I did in this new video mind-blowing but the emphasis this time was on strategy/theory instead of demonstrating how to multi-table effectively.

Anyways, this seems about as good a time as any to give something back to you guys seeing how this blog almost has 150 people following it, which is hard to imagine since I started it a little over 1 year ago thinking that I would be mainly talking to myself the whole time. I'm thankful for everyone's support and I plan on doing a lot more for you guys throughout the year, whether it be more videos, coaching, staking, whatever.

The video quality may be a little fuzzy...I recorded it on a wide monitor but then had to produce it at a lower resolution because it was too big. Oh well, the audio is the most important anyways. Here's a link to the Megavideo download:

<>http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DVY2LUKB

If you're interested in Mashup music then you might like the audio track that I used at the beginning and end of the video. DJ MattyB is a part-time DJ with a sick ear for music and makes some great stuff without any professional equipment:

<>http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0WCN2M1C

Anyways, take a look at the video and I'd love to hear any questions or comments!

Edit: If anyone is having problems playing the video, try downloading the VLC player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) and it should work with the .avi file.

gl at the tables!

Keeping Busy

2011-03-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

What up. I hope everyone is doing well and keeping busy, I certainly have. Here's how things have shaped up for me as of late on and off of the poker tables:

Friday + Saturday

After having a slow start to the month, mostly due to being a bit burnt out after putting in heavy volume at the end of February to retain my SNE status, I decided that I would have to stay in and work for the majority of the weekend. Unfortunately, that meant skipping a trip over to Victoria with a couple of friends and this put me in a bad mood on Friday.

My play was certainly reflected by my mood and I was playing like a complete spewtard. I was trying to make way too many things happen to compensate for missing out on having fun with my friends but obviously this only resulted in me losing money. I was pretty frustrated by the end of my session and finished down around $1K.

Saturday was much better. I came to the tables with a ton of discipline and focus and ran good enough to recover all of my loses in about half the time that I put in on Friday. I was playing really well and don't think that I made more than 1 or 2 minor mistakes the entire session. The good session put me in a much better mood and I decided to join three buddies for "stick and puck" that evening-basically drop in ice hockey with minimal equipment. I played ice hockey as a kid growing up and miss it a lot...it felt good to put on the skates again, despite being more than a little rusty lol. We went out for a few drinks afterwards but kept it pretty low key.

Sunday

Sunday was another day that I dedicated to poker. The session was extremely frustrating...I felt like I was playing very well for most of the session and was getting pretty unlucky. 80% of the session seemed to be taking beats or getting coolered and I was chasing losses for the entire day up until the last hour or so. Fortunately, I instantly caught fire with a good run of cards and recovered everything and then some before I quit at the end of the day.

Here's a hand that put me into the black near the end of my session. I didn't play it well-in fact I played it really bad. My bet sizing was awful and river call more than suspect. I actually checked the river for pot control because I was somewhat readless and figured JJ and QQ could easily be in his range. However, it was against a random opponent who I didn't trust and was playing pretty badly but it mostly just came down to me being sick and tired of folding/getting coolered all day. I literally said "f*ck you, I call" to my screen, lol.

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (7 handed) -
BB ($100)
UTG ($208.65)
MP1 ($294.55)
MP2 ($282)
CO ($200)
Button ($245)
Hero (SB) ($406.65)

Preflop: Hero is SB with Q, A
1 fold, MP1 bets $4, MP2 calls $4, 2 folds, Hero raises $20, 1 fold, MP1 calls $16, 1 fold

Flop: ($46) 4, 9, J (2 players)
Hero bets $26, MP1 calls $26

Turn: ($98) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $48, MP1 calls $48

River: ($194) Q (2 players)
Hero checks, MP1 bets $200.55 (All-In), Hero calls $200.55

Total pot: $595.10

Results:
Hero had Q, A (flush, Ace high).
MP1 had J, Q (two pair, Queens and Jacks).
Outcome: Hero won $592.10

Monday

After putting in long hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday I decided to take Monday off. I got in a good workout and met my mom for Japanese food for dinner before heading "home." I'm sure that most people know that Monday night was a big, big night...that's right, the season finale of "The Bachelor!" Haha, I don't really want to get into why I watch the show...it actually started as a big joke amongst my old roommates and I and we'd turn it into a drinking game or whatever. We watched some pretty suspect shows that's for sure but I guess I have to admit that I'm actually entertained by the Bach now seeing how I ended up watching the 2 hour finale + 1 hour after show with my mother. Hello ladies.

Tuesday

Tuesday seemed like a repeat of Sunday. I was playing alright, probably worse than I was on Sunday but I was running really badly for most of the session. I lost an $800+ pot with the 2nd nut flush against top set, got 1 outed for a $400 pot etc. etc. However, just like on Sunday I caught on fire near the end of the session and actually turned what was likely a -$1.5K session at one point into a +$1K session by the time it was all said and done.

Basically, I feel like I've been swimming against the current all month but am playing fairly well on the whole. The games have been very good and this month hasn't been terribly stressful...I don't think that I've been up or down more than $2K. Currently, I'm up a pretty meaningless $1K and am looking at $5K or $6K in bonuses by months end. Hopefully I can build on my small profit and turn this month into a pretty successful one by the 31st...it certainly has potential and I'm optimistic at this point in time.

Today

I decided to take today off and focus on the little things. I set my alarm for 10:30am and ended up rolling out of bed by 11am (been waking up around 2pm for most of the month so this was quit a feat). I had a good breakfast of eggs + fruit and hit the gym for over an hour. My laundry's in the dryer and this blog is almost done so things have been pretty productive for me. Reading this back I realize how sad this must seem to most people but yes, waking up before noon, eating, exercising and doing my laundry earns me a gold fking star in my books. Anyways, I'm going out tonight to get my drink on but will try to keep things under control.

gl at the tables!

Interview + Follow Me On Twitter?

2011-03-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, I just created a Twitter account (no I never had one before, lol) and will probably start using it frequently so if ya wanna follow please go right ahead:

http://twitter.com/#!/frosty012

On a similar note, I recently did an interview with poker media touching on my poker story, how my year went last year, etc. If you want to check it out, there's a link to it on my Twitter! Thanks guys.

Month Reset

2011-03-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

Well, I haven't played a heck of a lot during March (8K VPP's) but I was steadily building a profit for the month until everything unravelled today in one horrific cash session to set me back to even. I wasn't playing fantastic but the coolers/beats that I suffered today were nothing short of amazing. I could post like 10 but I'll keep it to the worst two...the second is probably the biggest cooler that I've ever been on the wrong end of, especially dollar wise.

1. This was against some 41/27 random. I had stacked him a few hands earlier with 99 on a 98x flop when he couldn't get away from QQ. This river is just so sick, obviously with his playmaster limp-raise I'm putting him on a very narrow range weighted towards AA and KK and possibly AK. I call pre-flop because his bet-sizing is poor and I already know that he can't fold overpairs. You see how cautiously that I'm playing it...I check back the flop because it looks like he has AA and might not call with KK/QQ/XX if I bet. He leads the turns and again I just call because I'm still afraid of AA at this point and I don't think he'll call a raise with worse. When the river hits, I don't really have a choice but to change my read a bit. At this point, the chances of him having AK/KK are so much greater than AA so with only 1 hand that beats me (can pretty much safely assume he's never limp raising 77 or if he did he'd prob lead flop) there's pretty much no way I can't raise/call for value given the unlikelihood of him holding quads. Sweet.

No-Limit Hold'em, $2.00 BB (7 handed)
SB ($205)
BB ($84.90)
UTG ($289.80)
MP1 ($214.35)
MP2 ($100)
CO ($226.95)
Hero (Button) ($433.40)

Preflop: Hero is Button with 4, 4
UTG calls $2, 3 folds, Hero bets $8, 2 folds, UTG raises $18, Hero calls $12

Flop: ($43) A, 4, 3 (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($43) 7 (2 players)
UTG bets $16, Hero calls $16

River: ($75) A (2 players)
UTG bets $33, Hero raises $128, UTG raises $220.80 (All-In), Hero calls $125.80

Total pot: $582.60

Results:
Hero had 4, 4 (full house, fours over Aces).
UTG had A, A (four of a kind, Aces).
Outcome: UTG won $579.60

2. This sickest part about this hand is that it's against the table amateur and the table was just starting to close down as I picked up KK. It looked like I was going to finally get some money off the guy before everyone left. Seriously, fk off!!

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $4.00 BB (4 handed)
Hero (UTG) ($497.60)
Button ($1123.10)
SB ($400)
BB ($549.20)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with K, K
Hero bets $12, Button calls $12, SB calls $10, 1 fold

Flop: ($40) 6, 4, K (4 players, 1 all-in)
SB checks, Hero bets $24, Button calls $24, 1 fold

Turn: ($88) J (3 players, 1 all-in)
Hero bets $60, Button calls $60

River: ($208) 4 (3 players, 1 all-in)
Hero bets $176, Button raises to $576, Hero calls $225.60 (All-In)

Total pot: $835.20 Rake: $2

Results:
Button had 4, 4 (four of a kind, fours).
Hero mucked K, K (full house, Kings over fours).
Outcome: Button won $1009.20

It's too bad that I had such a bad session at the cash game tables because up until this point things were going pretty smoothly and I even had some extra profit coming in from some tournaments! Unfortunately, my run in the Sunday 5mill lasted all of about 18 minutes when I overplayed AK and ran into AA pre-flop, oh well. I ended up firing up a few more low stake tournaments later that night for fun while I watched the final few tables of the 5mill wind down and ended up shipping the $8 2R1A for $736!

I got in some good volume today so I'll probably take tomorrow off entirely and go out for some fun later on at night. It will be good to clear my head from today's nightmare and I'll be ready to get back to the grind Thursday!

gl at the tables!