Twitch Subscribers-Win a Share of My SCOOP Action

Hey everyone, hope you're all enjoying the SCOOP :) I've cashed in 2/3 SCOOP-M events so far this series and I'll be giving away 10% of my action in SCOOP 23/24M to twitch subscribers. There will be a freeroll this Saturday-May 16th for all subscribers and the top 2 finishers will each win 5% of my biggest cash between the two SCOOP tournaments.

You can find full details of the tournament and how to sub @ http://www.twitch.tv/frosty_012. Thanks for the stream support and gl in the SCOOP!

New Custom Mod Site Now Live @ frosty012mods.com!

Hey everyone! Although it's already been made public on facebook and twitter for a few days now, I'm excited to finally be finished making my custom theme/deck and website and everything is now live at frosty012mods.com.

I've designed a custom theme and deck for functional grinding purposes and I focused on simplicity and maximum HUD space. There's an extensive list of features and details about the theme here and the deck here but the cliffs for each are as follows:

Easy Theme

The essence of the Easy Theme is the simplistic and functional layout design, tailored for the avid multi-tabler. With minimal clutter, text and distractions I designed the Easy Theme to allow for maximum HUD space and intuitive seating in order to optimize grinding.

Easy Deck

The “Easy” deck is designed to make grinding just that-easy. The relatively large font that’s used for the letters and numbers on the cards was designed to make it easier to see what matters the most across all table dimensions (the card values!). The 4-coloured card backs are meant to stand out in a way that makes interpreting the different suits fast at a glance, without being too overwhelming in brightness. The suit images below the card values are meant to be subtle and serve as a quick reminder as to what the colours on the card backs actually represent. The whole decks comes together in a simplistic way that is appealing to the eye but most importantly, ultra functional for online grinding at PokerStars.

Thanks to everyone for all of the interest in the theme and purchases made already. Let me know if you have any comments or questions, thanks!

Top 5 tips for moving up the Micro Millions leader board

In the aftermath of the Micro Millions, I decided to write an article with some tips on how to make a run at the player of the series leader board...

I stuck to my own advice last series and had a great start over the first 3 days but unfortunately, it was brick city on day 4 and 5 so I decided to scale things back and end my leader board run :)

Top 5 tips for moving up the Micro Millions leader board

 

The MicroMillions series is always a lot of fun...100 events, all different formats of poker, massive fields and huge prize pools-what's not to get excited about? Oh yeah, and then there's the tournament leader board where the winner of the series scores 6 months' worth of Sunday Million tickets! Given that the buy-ins for the tournaments in the MicroMillions are just what the name implies (micro) and the half a year supply of $215 tickets is just the opposite, there's a lot of incentive to try and finish at the top of the leader board, and there is an equal opportunity to do so even for the smallest grinders out there.
The MicroMillions series can be compatible with a wide range of goals that one may have-anywhere from playing a couple of big guaranteed weekend events to playing every event on the bleeping schedule, *cough* Acoimbra. This article is intended for the latter, for those that see the MicroMillions as a 100 Event, fun grind and embrace the challenge of winning the overall leader board. I'm not saying that you need to play all of the events to win the leader board but, of course, the more events that you play, the more opportunities that you will have to accumulate precious leaderboard points.
There are a lot of events to be played on each day of the series, and I would recommend coming up with a strategy from Day 1 as to how you plan to achieve your goals. Here are my top 5 tips to succeed at playing enough events to climb that leader board to the top!

1. Front-load your schedule
You only have so much time and energy. The 100 event schedule can seem daunting if you think about pacing yourself to play all of the events and you may become quickly overwhelmed, start missing more events than you intended to miss and become mentally and physically exhausted halfway through the series!
What I would recommend doing is front-loading your schedule, meaning that on the early days of the series, play as many events as you can depending on your leader board goals. At the start of the series, you're fully rested and motivated and won't be in any better position to play a maximum number of events. By front-loading your schedule, it becomes easier to take it day by day and direct your focus towards the events of a single day, rather than getting caught up with pacing yourself across the entire series. If the first few days go well, it will be easier to stay motivated and keep your foot on the gas pedal knowing you're right in the thick of the leader board race. If the next few days go poorly and your chances of that high leader board finish are no longer realistic, you can readjust your schedule at that point. For example, maybe you change your goals from a top 10 finish to a top 100 finish and dial back the number of events that you play over the remainder of the series in exchange for more sleep. You'll have a chance to get well rested again and who knows, maybe you'll end up with a couple of great finishes the following and can dive back into the grind at full speed again to close out the series!

2. Take advantage of late registration
You can typically late register for any event for 2 hours after it starts (with some exceptions being for rebuy and turbo tournaments, in which case late registration will be open for a shorter amount of time). Even if you late register 2 hours into an event, you typically start with a 20bb stack and have plenty of opportunity to succeed. Sure, it would be nice to play every event right from the start but it's just not going to be realistic if you want to play a lot of events. Use the late registration to nap, get groceries, grab a coffee, work out, get some fresh air and just make the leader board challenge all around more manageable for yourself.

3. Carve out a sleeping block for yourself each day
There are MicroMillions events happening around the clock and within a few hours of each other. What that generally means for you, the leader board grinder, is that sleep will be a rare commodity if you plan on doing well! The physical part of the grind is indeed real and it can be very easy to sleep through events here and there or slip away from playing your A-game when under fatigue. Fortunately, apart from taking advantage of late registration and napping when you can, there is usually an opportunity at the end of each day to carve out a nice sleeping block for yourself. The time between the last event of the day and the first event of the following day is usually about 4 hours apart (6 with late registration) and if you're lucky, the last event may even be a turbo! That last event is certainly one that I don't mind busting out of early because I know it will give me an opportunity to rest up for the next day :)

4. Calculate the leader board pay jumps
It's important to know how the leader board scoring works and even how to calculate when next "point jump" will be in a given tournament. You probably know that you get the minimum amount of points for cashing in an event but are you aware of when you'll get score the next 5? Think about it, you probably change the way you play and approach different spots around the money bubble and in the MicroMillions series, you're likely more stoked about cashing for the points than the money depending on your goals. In that sense, each tournament actually has numerous bubble spots where you'll have an opportunity to grab additional leaderboard points the further you go. However, I'm not saying that you need to nit it up and tailor your game around the point jumps. It will very likely be more beneficial to just play for the win and to try to build up a big stack to make a deep run but in certain situations (in close, short-stacked spots for example), it may be important to recognize how the leader board points are distributed. The point distribution is shown on the leader board page and all calculations require only simple math, by the way.

5. Focus on your own leader board run and not the competition
Personally, I like to have a general ballpark guess as to how many leader board points that I need to average on each day to finish in X place by the end of the series. It's nice to know what amount of points should put me in contention (based on past leader board results, which can be viewed on the Micro Millions page at Pokerstars.com) but aside from that, I don't dwell on this number or what's happening on the leader board day to day. Results are going to be very streaky...you could go an entire day without any cashes and then rattle off a few deep runs the next. Because of the nature of poker, I'd recommend only focusing on the things that you can control (such as playing well and sticking to your schedule and strategy). Similarly, I find that checking the leader board just puts more pressure on myself rather than adding motivation so I typically think it's a good idea to refrain from checking it regularly.

Alright, thanks a lot for reading. Good luck in your next Micro Millions leaderboard run!

Announcement! Win Your Millions Main Event Ticket

The Micro Millions is back again starting on March 19th and once again, I've got your Main Event tickets! I'll be holding last longer competitions out of my facebook page for various events and the winner of each last longer will score themselves a free ticket to the $22 Main Event on March 29th.

Details of the last longer contests are as follows:

• There will be 5 last longer events spread out over the series. 

• Registration for each last longer will take place on my facebook page: FACEBOOK

• Registration for each last longer will open approximately 1 day prior to the event

• To register, all you'll have to do is leave your Stars ID in the comments of the registration post

• The winner of each last longer will win a $22 Main Event ticket!

• *If I win any of the last longers, I'll run a free tournament from my Home Games and use the ticket(s) as a prize*

That's all there is to it! This promo has been a lot of fun in the past so especially if you're going to be playing a bunch of Micro Millions events anyways, join in for the chance at a free Main Event ticket and some extra motivation to make a deep run in the tourney.

I'm always excited to play the Micro Millions series and to try and make a run at the leaderboard. The prizes for doing well on the leaderboard are as follows:

I ended up falling just outside of the top 100 at the end of the last series so hopefully I can improve on that this time around and have something tangible to show for my sacrifice of sleep :)

I'm personally extra excited for the series this time around though because with my twitch channel up and running, I'm going to be streaming the series around the clock and have daily updates on how the leaderboard adventure is going. Come on out and sweat me in the MTTs and maybe I can make a deep run or two and navigate my way through these massive fields!

You can tune into the live streams at TWITCH

gl at the tables!

Giving Away 31% of my action in the 9M Sunday Million (March 15)

Hey everyone! As per the title, I'm involved in a promotion for the big upcoming 9 million Gtd. Sunday Million. It's basically free value if you were planning on trying to satellite into the Sunday Million yourself anyways. The details are as follows:

Simple as that. gl at the tables!

Plans for 2015!

Happy New Year everyone! I know that I'm a bit late but my life has been super busy from about December 20th until now. At first, it was all about holiday preparation and spending Christmas with the family. Immediately following that (like, the next day), I was off to Maui with my girlfriend and the family as well for about 10 days. My gf and I had our own place for most of the trip but you know me, wanting to save a few bucks we ended up sharing my parents place for a few days (it all worked out).

After Maui, the vacation was over and it was off to the Bahamas for the PCA and some serious poker business. Alright, it was basically just another vacation. The "business," if you can call it that, included one full day for the annual Team Online meeting and another hour on a later day for the HU4ROLLZ promo that the team was running (you could play TO members on an ipad and win cash). Both the meeting and promo went pretty well with the meeting being full of great presentations and me not losing more than 2 HU matches in a row during the promo.

Meeting

 HU4ROLLZ alongside DaWarsaw

The rest of the trip was filled with socializing and hanging out with the team. I'm sure most of you have seen all of the pics that I've been posting on social media so I won't bother reposting it all but I think you get the gist pretty quickly that it was a good time!

Shifting gears now, what I wanted to do with the rest of the blog post was talk briefly about how 2014 went and then get into my plans for 2015.

So last year was fine at the tables...I ended up playing a bit more than a quarter of SNE volume and took home roughly a bit less than 65K in profit. At the start of the year, my original plan was to try and reach SNE but it didn't take long for me to see that it wasn't going to happen at my normal stakes. I tried moving up stakes and was actually successful doing so...the only problem was that my vpp/hour rate wasn't much better than it was playing 100nl, if at all (due to not being able to play as many tables). I spent one month trying my hand at PLO but let's just say the year probably would have been a lot more profitable if I hadn't ;) After that, I decided to shift my focus away from primarily being on volume and more towards winrate. Last year was the first year that I really made an effort to think deeper about poker and improve my game. I'm proud of all the work that I put into my game last year and think that I saw decent immediate results. I ended up falling well short of my impromptu profit goal of $100,000 but that was more of function of the goal being too unrealistic to start with due to a severe overestimation of what my volume would be :|

Looking ahead to 2015, I'm feeling very excited and motivated to get to work! It's a bit unfortunate that by the time I'm back home and recovered from my early-year vacations the month's already half over but hey, last year it was much more difficult to get started on the right foot (literally, I broke my ankle and took 5 months to recover). The initial theme for this year will be to concentrate on quality over quantity, something that isn't usually apart of my year long plans. After last year, however, I really think the route with the highest profit ceiling is to try to keep improving and play higher stakes. Here are my goals for 2015, with a bit more detail about each:

1. Earn $100,000. I really want to get back over that 6-figure mark this year! Calling this a "goal" is probably inaccurate though...more like expectations and what I would be satisfied with by years end. I've said it before and I think that setting profit goals in general is pretty dumb because you can only control your results to a certain extent. Furthermore, for this year in particular, my end results could be all over the map depending on what stakes I end up playing the majority of my volume at. I think that goals that focus on elements that are within your control (ie. x amount of hours per day, x hands/day, x hours studying etc.) are really where you want to direct your focus and energy. That said, of course I will be implementing those micro-goals into my plan and this $100k number is mostly just to keep motivation up and have something for everyone to follow on the blog homepage!

2. Buy an income property. So I've mentioned before that I want to use poker as a way to build wealth for myself and although I'm no real estate expert by any means, the principle of investing in property is simple enough. I have to work out the details but I'm hoping that by the end of the first quarter I should have enough for a down payment on a property that would be self-sufficient with a renter.

3. Buy a new car! I've taken a lot of heat over the years from friends and family for still driving the same old car since my early days of university. I have no problem driving around in a, let's say "humble" old car as long as it works...the problem is that Old Betsy's becoming a bit unreliable these days. This is probably something that I'll look into in the latter part of the year, unless I'm forced into speeding up the agenda due to more mechanical problems :/ I'm really liking the new Jeep Wrangler though so it may be time for an upgrade.

That's pretty much it for the monetary side of things. I didn't list any social media goals but I do plan on continuing to be heavily involved in that aspect of things as well. I'll also be continuing to coach once a month for PSO. I have an interest in getting involved with twitch too and still want to make YouTube content throughout the year. It's a lot to try and balance so we'll see how things develop over the next few months and see where I want to prioritize my time. I also have some fitness goals that I won't bore you with that involve putting on some weight and strength.

So with all that said, the plan will be to get to work and see if I can move up stakes aggressively and feel things out. I might reach the same conclusion as before, where I could find it to be more profitable just mass-multitabling my normal stakes. I'm confident that I could reach my monetary goals at those levels anyways though, so let's see what happens! Let me know your plans and goals for 2015 :)

gl at the tables!

November Review-Tournaments

So the second last month of the year has now come to a close and it's time to really start working towards those end of year goals for 2014. November ended up being a short month for me at the cash game tables due to a good chunk of time being devoted to the Micro Millions. I was happy with my play in both the MTT and cash game department for the most part but ultimately ended the month with a relatively small profit.

My Micro Millions leader board run ended painfully short of the top 100. Missing out on a Sunday Million ticket isn't really a big deal for me though, I was really aiming for a top 10 or bust finish so I'm not too heartbroken over finishing 110. Like I said, I think my play was pretty solid throughout the series and had I been able to play all of the events and caught a few breaks in some of the tourneys, I think a top 10 finish would be in the realm of possibility. Hopefully I can build on this run in the next series if I choose to participate in it again. Promo-wise, my last longer contests were a success again and I gave away 5 tickets to the Micro Millions Main Event. My social media numbers are up across the board and people seemed to enjoy the contest so thanks for that!

I was hoping my cash game winnings would have trended up over $2k but variance had other plans. I ended up running pretty ugly to close out the month (well, not in terms of EV!) and finished up around 8 buy-ins. All in all, the low volume at the cash game tables has resulted in a meager monthly profit of about $2,400. It might be time to graduate from the micros ;)

Looking ahead to the end of the year, December seems like it will have to be a high volume month for me. I'm sitting on about 250k VPPs and will not settle for missing the 300k milestone bonus! Last year, I ended things on a sour note by missing the 200k bonus due to "having to go on vacation" by a certain date. This year, again I have a vacation planned near the end of the month so I'll have to make sure that I plan my days out properly. I'll be looking to up the hours mostly at 100nl and plan on including more mid-stakes tables in my game selection if things are going decently well. Hopefully I can close out the year on a profitable note and roll over some momentum to 2015. I'll be aiming for nothing less than 6-figures next year.

How's everyone else's year shaping up? Gl with your end of year goals!

gl at the tables!