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!!!