Back To Poker

I have not made a post for a while, and the reason for this is that I haven't played any poker, live or online for a good month. My girlfriend and I have just bought a house (sick brag :) So grinding the micros hasn't really been a priority.

I haven't been completely out of the gambling game though, I've spent a bit of time last month bagging all the sign up bonuses on sport books. Its been quite an interesting project and I have made approximately $500 completely risk free by bonus whoring a few different sites.

For those who don't know how to do this, its quite simple. Most sports books in the UK offer some sort of sign up promotion. For the most part these are in the form of a free bet. So for example, Ladbrokes offer a free matched bet up to £100.

The method that I used is by no means the most +EV way to exploit the free bets, however I just guaranteed myself the maximum amount of profit possible. So in order to do this you need to create an account and make your first bet of £100.

You want to find a bet that's close to a coin flip, so lets say you bet on a tennis match with your £100 first bet. You then need to go onto another betting site or betting exchange such as Betfair and bet on the other side of the game. Now you have both outcomes covered, It doesn't matter who wins the match, you will lose roughly about 10% to 20% of your £100 due to the bookies edge.

So whatever the out come of the match you will only lose a small amount but you are now credited with your free matched bet of £100. Simply repeat the process again with your free bet and you will end up with anywhere between 60 to 80% of the free bet as profit, which in this case would be £80. I did this on about 6 or 7 of the big sites, its important to make sure there's no wagering requirements in the terms and conditions and to spend some time trying to find the good bets where the bookies don't have to big an edge. The next month will be a great time to start doing this as the bookies will offer some great sign up deals with the world cup going on.

As for poker, I'm just getting back into the swing of this back at 10nl Zoom. I've had 3 solid days of grinding and it's been fairly smooth sailing so far.
 

Simply just getting the volume in and playing the hands is always the hard part for me. Should have a decent month of grinding 10nl before I have to move into the new pad! So that's it really, should be more frequent updates now anyway. GLGLGLGLGL

Irony/ March Review

So my last post I showed off my office set up and my new pc. Ironically a few days after that post my PC started having problems where it would freeze and then blue screen. Not ideal for grinding online poker, despite only being a very simple problem to fix it took 2 weeks to get sorted so with lots of free grinding hours in March, it was a volume write off after an already slow start to the month :(

I managed to play a few live £1/1 sessions where I came out a small loser. I spend a bit of time on my old crappy computer researching 6 max hyper turbs and experimented 4 tabling the $3.5's. Seems to be reasonable money to be made in these at least if your playing $7's and above. Not sure if a positive ROI is achievable in the 3.5s with the rake being higher, maybe 1/2% if your good which I would be happy with as you can play so many. I played 200 of these and won about $5 LOL. At the very least they are lots of fun to play and a nice break from the sometimes tedious zoom grind. 

Also played about 100 micro MTT's over the month, a few cashes but nothing major netting me another small loss. Thankfully the one live MTT I played I binked a chop which pretty much saved the month from being a loss. 

   

Online Cash losses: -$129

Online Tournament/ SNG losses: -$75

Live Cash Loses: -(£50) -$83  

Live Tournament Winnings: +(£400) +$664

FPP Value +$10

March Total: +$387

So a pretty terrible month that was only in the green thanks to a Live ROFALMENT bink! Oh well. Lets see what April will bring :) GL everyone! 

My Office Set Up

Here's a picture of my office set up:

I'm pretty happy with it and I have enjoyed slowly improving it over time. I'll list all the key components below, there's nothing to fancy involved as I think I have managed to cut costs where I can :)

Glass Ikea desk (approx £80)

3x acer monitors (approx £200 each)

3x monitor arms (approx £35 each)

Logitech M510 wireless mouse (£35)

Cheap acer keyboard that came with my old PC

Philips over ear headphones (£50)

Standard Xbox controller & Microsoft wireless receiver

 

I have two different chairs which I alternate between and these are both by far my most extravagant purchases. The one in the above pic is a standard office chair which I use when I want to grind using a mouse. I cant remember the brand but it's a pretty decent one (approx £300). The chair in the below pic is a big ass comfy recliner chair which is amazingly relaxing and great for grinding with my xbox controller or watching movies. Although it can be argued being in a relaxed position is not great for concentration. I picked it up in a boxing day half price sale at a furniture store for £500 down from £1000. 

 

I have recently upgraded my main rig. Its really sweet and super powerful. I paid £700 for a custom build online which seems pretty cheap considering the components are pretty high spec.

  

It has a cheap generic gaming case, AMD FX 8350 Eight core processor, 2TB hard drive, 16GB RAM and a really powerful graphics card which powers my 3 monitors no problem. So that's pretty much it, I think I will post a blog all about the software I use and my table set up etc, so look out for that. Thanks for reading :)  

March So Far

Volume and results online haven't been so great this month, a rather lame 15k hands played to be break even. 

Thankfully on Friday I played a live tournament just to get out and be social and ended up making some reasonable money. It was a £20+5 buy in with one optional re-buy of £20, GTD prize pool of £2k. It only got about 40 entries and didn't make the guarantee. I pretty much cruised to the final table never having my tourny life on the line and winning a couple of those crucial flips. It was a 10 handed final and 6 prizes paid with £90 for 6th and £700 for first. Basically one guy completely bulldozed the final table eliminating 6 players while I was just able to do a couple of blind steals to stay around the 10bb mark which is very healthy in a daily crap shoot like this. So it ended up 4 handed with 3 of us on approx 10bbs (100k) and the bulldozer who had about 500k. At which point he proposed a deal of him taking £500 and the 3 of us taking £400 each which of course we snapped his hand for. 

So this little bink is pretty nice and since I'm not working for rest of March I have plenty of time to commit to the pokerz. I'm planning to play a few live sessions this week at my local £1/1 game and then next week I'm heading down to London for a few days where I can free roll my girlfriends £250 a night work hotel and grind some of the juicy London games and the amazing restaurants. I was on the fence about going down to London because it can be very expensive, especially if you run bad and lose at poker on top. However a really nice free hotel room in the week needs to be taken advantage of and also the £400 tourny win pads my bankroll nicely to where at worst case scenario I can grind the 1/1 in the Vic even if the rake is horrendous it's still a +ev game with all the lol live regs. 

Even though I planning to play lots of live poker over the next few weeks I'm hoping I can also cram in another 35k hands online as well, which I know is way short of my original target haha, maybe one day I will set myself an achievable goal. Anyway as long as I dont run like death live it's pretty hard to not win so fingers crossed my hands hold. Laterz!       

Macau Big Game

Not much is known about the huge games going on in Macau, however one of the US pros shared a pic of the game showing 200,000,000HK$ ($20,000,000) on the table. 

Rumour has it that they run out of high denomination chips and started issuing vouchers instead of plaques! 

Feb Review and March Plans

I didn't hold out huge hope for Feb, I had to commit a lot of days to real life work + its also the shortest month in terms of days. I only managed to play 9 short sessions during the month so my volume really did suck :( 

Although I'm obviously disappointed with such a poor month at least I managed a small profit for the hands I did play. I also managed to spin some points up cashing in the Sunday Storm for $34.29 from a 700 FPP ticket. I also had a $5 ring game ticket on Fulltilt and decided to have some fun with that on the Adrenaline Rush tables where I run that up to $20 and then up to $50 on Roulette LOL. A swift transfer back to Pokerstars and the hit and run was complete. That's the first and last time I will play Roulette online. I'm pretty confident they let you heater on your first session at the house games! 

    

Total Hands- 16,634 

10nl-  $56.38

25nl-  $51.41

1,023 VPP's 

FPP value- $6.70 

Sunday Storm Ticket- $34.29 

Fulltilt $5 Ticket- $50 

Total = $198.78

I'm really optimistic about March and hoping to have some great volume combined with more play at 25nl. There's 31 days to work with and I'm only working 7 of those days so shouldn't be any excuses during March. 

Targets:

100k hands 

70k at 10nl

30k at 25nl

After the terrible volume of Feb I'm going to be back to Silver star which is a bit annoying. I should get Platinum Star for my efforts in March which will be nice. I know when your putting in enough hands to make Platinum star at 25nl the extra rewards you receive are pretty insignificant but the extra star on your VIP badge is enough for most people... aghhhh, the power of  Pokerstars Marketing for you lol

New 10nl Boss in town

There's a sick grinder at the 10nl  zoom pool! He's a Supernova Elite x5 

If you wondered how much volume you need to put in to make Supernova elite at 10nl it's simply about 15 million hands a year or 1.25 million per month or 40k a day. EASY!

Feb Low Volume

We have reached the half way point and I have barely been able to play any poker so far this month. I have had to do real world work quite a bit and then the free time I have had I've spent with my girl friend. I think I have played about 3 short session and played approx 5k hands for a profit of about $50 LOL

I did have the last few days free but I spent 2 days setting up my new PC. I underestimated how long it would take to get everything set up. Also I downloaded HEM2 + Table Ninja 2 and imported my database. I'm really happy with how smooth everything is running and HEM2 seems really cool with lots of powerful filters etc etc. 

I'm probably going to have about 5 or 6 days to grind for the rest of the month so at this juncture my target is to just put in at least a 30k hand month and make Gold Star, considering I'm still playing the 10NL tables. Also I will do a post all about my grind station soon because quite a few people are interested and since I've just upgraded my PC. Tomorrow is Sunday Funday so I will try and put in a big volume day and probably chuck in a few of the LOLAMENTS for jokes! 

P.S Tonight I saw the new Lego movie and it was AWESOME! It inspired me to change my avatar on Stars :)

   

January Review

My main targets for the month were to play 100k hands at 10nl and make $1,000 after rewards. In the end I made about 60% of both targets which is not great but I'm not going to be to hard on myself. I do envy some of the regs I see putting in 150k hand months but I do have a job, girlfriend and a decent social life so its pretty hard to fit it all in.

Total Hands- 61,885

10nl-  $579.87

25nl- -$150.34

4,000 VPP's + (1,000 VPP kick starter) = 5000VPP's

Stella Rewards $100

FPP value $129

Total = $658.53

So I came short of my target but considering my poker bankroll was $1,000 at the start of the month I can't be to disappointed with the first month of my role rebuilding mission. 

 

Hopefully a strong finish to the month

Had to work quite a bit last week so poker volume has been lacking. Thankfully I have the last 8 days of the month free to grind, so hoping for a strong finish to the month. Here's my month so far just at 10nl.

My original plan for the month was to play exclusively at 10nl and I wish I had stuck to it because I have been losing at 25nl. Here's my results for both 25nl and 10nl. 

Having played mainly 10nl all month my VPP count is only at 3500 so I'm going to set myself a mini challenge of getting to platinum star, thats 4000 VPPs in 8 days. Pretty tough just at 10nl but we'll see how I get on, I will need to rake $70 a day for 8 straight days. If I can get this kind of volume in hopefully I will achieve my monthly targets of 100k hands and $1000 prof including VIP rewards.

In other news my PC is starting to get a bit laggy and shite, so I'm going to upgrade that at the end of the month. The best part is its not going to cost me anything :) My girlfriend who's a career girl has been working away loads lately all over the world in New York, London, Austraila, San Antonio etc etc and she feels bad leaving me on my own, so is treating me to this because she feels guilty LOL. I'm like one of those emotionally neglected spoilt brat kids. (I'm not complaining though). 

I'm going for a AMD FX 8350 Eight core gaming PC, 1TB hard drive, 16 gigs of ram, sicko graphics card so should be the dogs bollocks. I already have pretty decent peripherals and 3 decent monitors so no need to upgrade there. Might get a razor mechanical key board though. Also looking forward to downloading the new HM2 and table ninja 2 which should run smoothly on this beast. I will probably do a blog all about my grind station and which software I use to play poker using my xbox wireless controller if anybodies interested. I did manage to bink the stars sickest set up competition last year for 50,000FPP's so im quite proud of my office set up after it got 330 likes :)

GL every one!

2 days of chill

Don't think I can continuously keep grinding 6k+ days with out a short break so I've decided to have a couple of days rest, I took today off to go for dinner with a friend at Gourmet Burger Kitchen and then after we went and played a live £25 lolament where I fired 2 unsuccessful bullets. I also had to post 3 blinds on one orbit due to a dealer error which was pretty lol, the BB twice at 200/400 and then the blinds went up to 300/600 for my small blind so ended up posting 400+400+300 LOL. 

Also taking tomorrow off to go to a nice Steak house called Miller & Carter. With my current body clock that 6pm reservation will be breakfast, cant beat steak and beer for breakfast. Following that I'm hosting a 4 max Dealers Choice home game at my flat. It's only micro stakes with the big winner usually walking away with £50 prof and the big loser about the same. We have some absolutely crazy games of which the dealer can choose any. The most popular choices are 6-8 card Omaha hi/lo split and about 10 different variations of Chinese poker. We have recently come up with our own open face Chinese game. I wont go into the specifics of it because it will take me ages but it's called... Double Deck Redraw Pineapple Open Face Chinese Poker. Its the same as Pineapple OFC except we use 2 decks and you can redraw any perfectly matching cards and also we set 2 hands each so you can make some monster hands. Here's a 100 point hand my friend punished me with last time we played. 

Hopefully I will be refreshed and recharged for the Fri/Sat/sun grind. I'm playing 25nl now during the peak traffic times and I'm also dropping down to just 2 zoom tables when I'm playing 25nl to really zone in and not worry to much about making FPP'S. Heres the graph so far for the year. 

Since I've started playing 25nl I basically just either win $100 and then lose it all back in the session or lose $100 and then grind it back. Not ideal but I'm hoping the weekend will be kinder to me. Also if I can hit the 5k VPP mark by the end of Sunday that's roughly about $250 worth of rake back I can add to the total for the month. So wont be too disappointed if I can post something in the $300-400 profit region by Sunday considering I set out for a $1k bankroll builder January :D 

Swings

Decided half way through the day to move up to 25nl. Working hard and feeling good about my game. My situational luck has just be terrible today as well as running below EV too. Just need to keep plugging away and hopefully I can start running better soon. 

 

What goes up, must come down!

Pretty frustrating day, things started off great and I was winning 15 stacks in my first session. But unfortunately I lost back 9 stacks of that for a very mediocre Sunday. My volume suffered as well due to me quitting early in frustration. Here's my Mount Everest graph for the day.

Here is the fun big pot of the day:

                                          Merry Christmas :)

                         600bbs in the middle, FFS!! PAIR THE BOARD!!!

                                                  or... maybe not.

Out the blocks for 1014

Just finished my first 2 days of solid grinding exclusively at 10nl. Its been fairly smooth sailing so far despite being a few stacks below EV.

I just realised that you get $100 in stellas for your first 5000 VPP's of the year which is a nice bonus for the January rake back total on top of the free 1k VPP's stars gave away in their January promo. I've got 8 straight days of grinding a head of me and im going to try and play 8-10k hands per day. The girlfriend is on holiday in Australia and I don't have any work shifts so I should be able to get in some good volume.

I would be interested to know how many people are constantly refreshing their HEM through out a session to see how they are doing? Its a really bad habit that I would like to get out of but it's really hard to not have a peek. I know I would be able to play better more focused poker with out this distraction and also not let the swings of the session effect my emotions etc.

I have read the mental game of poker before but I have also just downloaded the audio book so I can listen to that as I grind. It's kind of hard to take it all in while your attention is on grinding but hopefully my subconscious mind is absorbing all the important info lol

So thats it for now, if there's any 6 max grinders reading this, please feel free to contact me or leave the link to your blog and I will add you to my blog roll because all the poker blogs I know of mainly seem to be full ring. PEACE!

2013 review/ 2014 goals

2013 was pretty decent overall and my most profitable poker year to date. I grinded out 10 straight winning months but then unfortunately the wheels fell off during November and December so there's still a sour taste left in my mouth about that. November was pretty much break even but then in December I decided to start playing 50nl HU zoom where to be honest I don't really know what I'm doing. I had my biggest ever down swing and including some run bad playing live, I managed to drop about 2k in total. Combine that with the Christmas expenses of presents and going out my bank roll was left in tatters :(

It's now 2014 and I need to get back to my bread and butter to rebuild my roll. I'm going to drop down to 10nl (6max) and blast out a 100k hands in January where I win at about 6bb/100. With my current bankroll being about $1000 I will be delighted to just put a +$1k Jan up on the board to kick things off and then go from there.

I currently work part time (3 days a week) and poker is a nice tax free supplement to my earnings. My goal is to be able to quit work and become a full time pro. I think if I can make a total of $20,000 playing poker in 2014 (whilst also working 3 days a week) I could justify quitting work to play full time in 2015. So that is my overall goal for the year. I think supernova +$1250 a month profit playing low stakes zoom is a realistic target.

I'm going to make more of an effort to keep the blog updated with how I'm doing, monthly reviews etc etc. Also I'm looking to find a Skype group to discuss strategy and stuff so if anybody following my blog, who is playing the same games as me is part of one or knows any please let me know. 

Thanks for reading and good luck to all the hero's in 2014!!!