Focus on the last game as if it was the first...

Well, lots of fun in real life since the previous update. A couple weeks back was the Lewisham league AGM in the evening; I spent all of Thursday in the pub with H2, and got nicely tipsy on several pints of a lovely real ale before we went to the meeting, generally haranguing anyone within earshot. Then that Saturday was Tim's 30th drinkies, so that was good. Crashed at theirs overnight and watched the Merseyside derby on the Sunday afternoon, which Everton won 2-0 and should have won by more. In twenty-five plus years I don't recall watching a more awful performance by a Liverpool team; it was pretty sad to watch really.

Then last Thursday H2 and I shared a free lunch at the new Giraffe in Blackheath, and for the second week in a row we spent the afternoon in a pub in Blackheath, before turning up late to bowl slightly tipsy; H1 was not amused at our drunkaments when we lost the over all by just a single pin for a 10-7 loss. We thought it was pretty funny as we stumbled home though :-)

Last weekend was pretty good too, went up to Liverpool for the weekend, avoided the mice at Tina's parents' house, had a nice meal and a couple of drinkies in Gusto at Albert Dock on Saturday night, then on Sunday was the visit to Anfield for the Liverpool-Blackburn game. That was great, I'd always wanted to go to Anfield, and it was pretty awesome listening to Kop in full voice for "You'll Never Walk Alone".

So anyway, what about the pokers? Well, like always I've been pretty lazy throughout the month with regard to volume, and having made a sort of goal of making Platinum in October, six days before the end of the month I found myself over 1,650 VPP short of even retaining Gold. So I decided that enough was enough and I'd make Gold come what may.

So on Tuesday I sat myself down and, full of good intentions and mixing 2/180s and 12/180s with a handful of scheduled MTTs, I ground out a shade over 400 VPP for the day, but lost over $200 in the process, most of that from a tough day in the 12s – only 4 cashes in 59 games. The day was only just about saved from disaster thanks to a pretty deep run in an $11 turboament from the schedule, getting to 25th out of over 3500 runners, which was worth about $90. I've had a few "nearly" runs in scheduled tourneys lately, I think it's about time I FT'd another one or two of those and made a decent score. I think that's gonna be one of my November goals, fighting my way through thousands for an FT appearance in an MTT from the schedule.

So anyway, that was that day done. I found a whole bunch of useless excuses not to play at all on Wednesday, and Thursday I justified to myself that I was bowling in the evening so I wouldn't have enough time to make it worth while starting a session that I'd have to cut short, so no games that day either. Well, turns out I should probably have played poker anyway, because the bowling was an absolute disaster – a hopelessly pathetic 436 set; even if the lanes were atrocious that's still not even close to good enough. I probably should have got drunk beforehand for the third week in a row instead of bowling sober!

So Friday comes round and once again I decide that, three days left, 1250 VPP needed, and I'm gonna go for it. So I fire up the games and play moderately decent poker, again mixing 2s, 12s and scheduled; as I go through the session I realise that I'm not playing great, more like I'm just going through the motions, so I really try to tighten up my game. I remember shipping a 12 somewhere in the middle of it all, but wasn't really paying attention to how I was running over all, and it was only as I wound down my last couple of games and checked the cashier that I realised that I was actually up over a grand in profit for the day!!! I was like "Holy F***, how did that happen?" If someone had asked me to hazard a guess without checking my balance, I might have gone for maybe up a couple of hundred because of shipping one, but somewhere in the middle of all that I must have been running pretty decent without noticing. I reviewed a few of my games after the session and I really did get some great cards in some crucial spots, QQ+/AK all over the place just when I needed them. Hey, I'll take it while it lasts, I have to put up with some pretty horrendous runs of bad cards and bad beats too, so it all evens out in the end. So I had $1,179 profit from 12s, but with 2s and scheduled that dropped down to about $1,127 total profit for the day. Pretty nice!!! I also got in another 370-odd VPP, leaving me around 880 short of Gold with two days left to go.

And so on to today. I decided that as I'm gonna get this Gold, I'd like to break the back of it today. So I started and kept on through all the bad beats, and after 4 hours or so I stopped regging for 2s to focus exclusively on the 12s. I figured that on a Saturday, going into evening, there would be enough games going off to keep a full load of tables. But despite regging for every single one which started I struggled to keep more than ten tables going, and quite a lot of the time I didn't have any games above BB250. I was playing a lot better than much of yesterday yet I really was running heroically bad, about as bad as during the games when I was selling action late last month. I finally reached a point, after 7 hours, where I had simply had enough of it. It had been two hours since I'd even had a cash. Somewhere I'd had a 35k stack in one, with only 25 left and yet thanks to some retarded pots I didn't even make cash, bubbling in 19th. Bah! By this point I was down a shade over $600, and I stopped regging, vowing to play out the last few tables to the best of my ability and then call it a day.

I had eight games left, either just started or not in great shape, and I calculated that I needed to ship one and cash another to beat breakeven for the day. One by one the tables disappeared in a frustrating string of retarded bad beats, until I was left with just three. So I was like, it's OK, if I can fashion two 2nds, or a win and a cash, then I'm OK; but I didn't really believe it was gonna happen. And then, slowly but surely, I started to build stacks in two of them just before the blinds started to go up near the bubble, and suddenly I had stacks which I could use to bully and intimidate people. I lost the third game somewhere, but because I was so keen to focus on the two with stacks I didn't even notice it until some time after I must have bust. So I used my stack to bully my way to two FTs as decent chip leader in both. Suddenly, it was on. Suddenly I could still make a profit on the day. Although both FTs formed within a minute or two of each other, I pretty much steamrollered one of the FTs for the win there, although the last hand was a bit of a sweat, ATvJ9 aipf for about 90% of the chips and he flopped an open-ender. But thankfully blanks on turn and river and I was home and dry. And given I was already on the other FT, I had guaranteed profit for the day. Now to see how the other table went. Well, players suddenly dropped out quickly to others and I was now longer chip leader. Because of the other clashes I suddenly found myself 3/3 with about 10BB and then in a BvB spot we both had pairs but he had the bigger pair (55 vs JJ iirc) and it all went in pre and I didn't bink the set so I was out in 3rd for $235.

Magically, almost out of nowhere, I'd gone from what seemed like an almost certain huge losing day into a day where I actually made a decent $217 profit. All because I kept my focus right to the very end, kept making the plays which I know are profitable over the long term despite the recent bad beats, and it all paid off. Funny thing is, I'd only been chatting about this in our skype group a day or two before, the fact that, in MTTs, profit and loss for a session is decided not by how you start, but by how you finish. After hours of grinding, the last few games running will (hopefully) be the ones you are deep in, where all the money is, and that's when your concentration levels have to be at their peak; you can't allow fatigue to get in the way. So that's the moral of the story... Focus on the last game as if it was the first!

Sickest ever day at 180s

Gonna keep this short and sweet.

Friday evening was pretty decent cos I skipped on the poker entirely that day and went out for a meal after a last minute invite from a friend I hadn't seen in far too long, and I enjoyed a delicious duck curry in a Thai restaurant in Witham, followed by a couple of beers in a pub which was surprisingly quiet for a Friday night.

And then came Saturday........... far more epic than I could possibly have imagined, and obviously the result of good karma for restarting my blogging a couple of days before :-)

Basically I just couldn't miss. I played just 18 of the 12/180s on Stars, but I spent the whole day on an absolutely insane 830% ROI heater, profiting to the tune of 1,580 dollars plus change. In just four short hours I shipped one of them, and I also got two 2nds, a third and a 5th, along with two min-cashes. After reviewing the games I could even say I was disappointed with the way I played and lost one of the HU matches, which I should have won against a poor player, perhaps costing myself another 200 dollars, but perhaps that would be greedy. And I even ran decent in the 2s I was loading at the same time to fill spaces, also managing a 2nd there, although that was a more modest 30 dollar profit. But it all added up to a profit of over sixteen hundred dollars on the day. Just wow!!!

So, that meant a big leap in my OPR, which is now up to 99.61% and a ranking of 3,937. If I put in a big effort I'm not that far away from a 9* rating, and if I push hard for the rest of the month, perhaps with a bit of rungood in a couple of scheduled tourneys, I can make a real run at the TLB for October to try and get in the top 200 and win myself one of the monthly cash prizes. Even a top 1,000 finish gets me into the 20k freeroll they do, so I definitely will be looking to make that. Currently ranked 462, but still hardly played this month. Volume was down on Saturday mainly because I stopped regging so early after making all those FTs and wanting to focus on them, but frankly I'd rather bink the massive amounts of cash instead of grinding VPP.

If I can run half decent for the rest of this month to make up for the awful luck I had last month then this will easily end up as my biggest ever month. Gogogogo.

12/180s - dipping the toe in the realm of the pro

So, didn't blog again last month, or the month before either, but back at it now. So, what's been happening?

Well I didn't put in much effort at the tables in August. Soooooo fucking lazy. I know I was in Denmark at the start of the month, and at the cricket a lot in the second half of the month, but even so, in the second half of the month I managed a rather pathetic 227 games, and I ran pretty bad in them too, posting an overall loss, though the loss was less than $5. This basically means that the whole of the second half of August I didn't actually make any money at all. I just about clung on to Silver, and that was only salvaged because I finished up the month by playing 2.20 HUSNGs for some HU practice. They are pure torture. I played 73 of them, finishing with a 42-31 record, for an awesome profit of $7.40 (ROI ~5%). The standard of play was absolutely awful, including mine to be fair, but fortunately I was slightly less awful than the field. The 10% rake in them is sick. Also they're regular speed; Stars could really use some turbos in the nanostakes HUSNGs.

And then onto September. I started with all the usual good intentions – you know, good volume, discipline, and all that crap, but surprise, surprise I didn't put in the volume I intended. I did plan to play enough 2/180s to get to Gold by the end of the month, but although I got to Gold, I really did it by cheating a little.

On the 15th I decided that my 4,000 games sample was worthy of a move up to the 12s, but I wanted to insure myself a little against the massive variance that is continually being talked about in them, so I started a thread in the Marketplace where I offered to sell 50% of my action in the 12s (at no markup) selling and playing the tournaments in blocks of 100 games at a time. Although everyone was in the middle of WCOOP-fever in there, I was rather gratified that all the action was snapped up in 8 minutes flat, and I soon built up a lengthy list of standby backers too. Guess I undersold myself a little, but it was my first package, I didn't have a Marketplace reputation and I wanted to give myself the best chance of selling my action.

However, the games themselves went awfully. I genuinely believe that I have never run so bad in my entire poker career as I did for the 300 games I sold. KK was like my own private nemesis; the number of times I had that cracked was absurd, and usually deep in tournaments too, at times when there were large amounts of equity at stake in the pot. So, after 300 games I was down almost 75 BIs ($900), although I was "insured" for 50% of that by the action I sold. Grinding those games also helped me to clear the WCOOP reload bonus of $100, and I also collected about $30 worth of FPP so the whole ordeal only actually cost me around $320. The future benefit was that it also got me to Gold, and the FPP rate increase I got from that for October is now paying off as well. I expect to earn about an extra $50 in FPP in this month as a result of it. So anyway, I lost money in every single one of the three blocks I sold.

Thoroughly dejected and tearing my hair out in frustration at my epic runbad, I decided enough was enough, so I dropped back down to the 2s to grind out the remaining VPP I needed to make Gold while I considered my next move. The runbad continued to haunt me there though, and I dropped more money at a level I'd been crushing for three months.

I finally decided that despite my misfortune in the games, I am definitely +EV in 12/180s, and I have enough money offline that I can deposit if needed, so I'm going to go it alone in the 12s. If I'm profitable and can afford it why should I split my profits 50/50 with someone else, be it a single backer as part of a formal staking arrangement, or a group of players as part of a more ad hoc arrangement sellling shares in blocks of games. That's just wasting my own money and my own effort, letting others earn money off my sweat. I don't need to do that. So I've decided I'm going full time into the 12s on my own money, although for the time being I will continue to mix in 2s during quiet periods, simply for convenience to fill empty slots in the number of tables I play. I'll still earn money from them, and I'll still accrue VPP/FPP too. I can now afford to just dump them if a number of the 12s demand closer attention. But I'm looking to play more daylight friendly hours, like a normal person. So if I do that then at the start of my day at least the 12s will be loading very slowly indeed; adding a few 2s won't reduce my EV in the 12s by more than the money I'll earn from the 2s.

I've also decided to spend some time learning cash games to broaden my knowledge and experience. Obviously bankroll for this is a total non-issue, because in theory I have enough to play whatever level I want to start, but I'll start at the bottom and work my way up. This should help improve my deep stack play should I run deep in any of the scheduled tournaments I am going to be mixing in with my 180man grind. It will also be invaluable at some later point, when I (hopefully) move up the buyin levels again to play some of the daily, or even weekly, majors. Some of those play very deep and cash game skills will transfer nicely. I'm gonna start at 5NL or 10NL and work up from there, maybe with a bit of coaching.

So that's the plan. How's it going so far?

Well, it seems my decision to go it alone in the 12s has been generally rewarded by the RNG. In 162 games on my own coin I've shipped three, and FT'd plenty of others too, for a profit of around 1600 at an ROI of around 85%. Obviously this is a ludicrous swong in the other direction from the awful luck I endured through my first 300 games, and is probably about as unlikely to continue, but I'm happy to ride it while it lasts. It gives me a net OPR profit from 12s of $770, and an actual game profit (before rakeback) of around $1,200 because of the shares I sold. I'm currently sitting as a 99.3% player on OPR, ranked 6842 and still with my 8* rating.

So my goal for October is to play enough games for Platinum, which should give me an extra FPP boost for the rest of the year, and if I can do that and feel I can maintain that volume on a regular basis then I think that for a while I will finally be able to describe myself as a pro. I should be earning a decent amount and I will actually be playing full time. If it goes really well then I'll be able to make a solid push for Supernova next year just by playing 12/180s for less than 30hours per week plus whatever I decide to do with scheduled MTTs and cash games.

And away from the tables.....

I started my Danish classes three weeks ago, going OK so far. I think I'll be in the top half of the class and am looking forward to going to Denmark for a couple of days in early November for a bit of practice.

Also, bowling leagues have started again, and last Sunday at Tolworth I finished with a 278 game, my best game since my 299 about four years ago. So that was nice.

I'm feeling pretty buoyant right now, after a +700 day, but all in all I'd say things are looking up :-)