Hey guys, I promise to write a longer post with more insights soon. Today I just want so share some screenshots with you. I had a deep run in the Sunday Warm Up this weekend where I finished 12th for 3.200$. Busted with JJ vs AA so at least not bad beat this time which makes me feel much better about it. Today I finished 2nd in a 82 Hyper Turbo and made the Final Table of the 51$ Hyper as well. On the second one I lost AA vs T3 and AK vs K6 and finished 9th of course. In the 82$ I lost in shitty way as well but was still happy about the 3.600$ 😉
Don’t you just love the river in Poker? ;D
I haven’t posted any music lately. My favorites these days are Fleetwood Mac. Amazing how many great songs they have. When I hear this song I always think about the different Time Zones we Online-Players live in and what time it might be in China where my Chinese Reg Buddies are playing as much Stud as I do 😉
Btw it turns out when it’s 6 in the morning in Mid-Europe it’s noon in Shanghai. Anyway more on Poker next time. Take care and good luck at the tables.
Hey guys, I’ve been on vacation with my girlfriend for a couple of days. Actually it has been the longest time away from the tables in over 2 years. I guess that means I am a sick freak lol. Anyway I started with some tourneys today even though I am still a little tired from the flight. I made 3 Final Tables but only 2 decent scores. So sad to see the lowered gtd’s on Stars since the spanish fishes left. I hope the situation for Poker doesn’t get much worse.
Hey guys, it’s been a while since I had some good news. But even I can’t run like shit forever. After finishing 3rd last week for 3.500$ in the 55$ 2X I finally managed to win 5 digits again. Tonight I dealed 4 handed as Chipleader in the Big 162$ for 16.500$ my biggest score of the year. Finally I was able to win with 12 left with AQ vs AK in a setup situation and for a huge pot with KK vs AK when the flopped showed AKx 😉 At first I just saw the Ace and thought it ends like it always does. But even Stars has its doomswitch limits ;D Anyway nuff said:
Cash Game is going alright btw but only because I get so much more Rakeback. Several sick runner runners of course but maybe this ends soon too after tonight. Take care and good luck @ the tables. Imo luck is all you need skill is sooo overrated 😉
Hey folks, longtime no post. At first a small overview on my stuff and then I am gonna talk a little about how I intend to optimize my game plan for the future. I didn’t play that much during the SCOOP and to be honest I didn’t really want to either. I scratched some cash together to play the 2k Stud Highroller Event and got runner runner runnered by a straight when I had sth. about 97% equity to win the hand on 4th in a huge pot. That would’ve been the much needed deep run close to final two tables. It was a really tough lineup with a lot of big names but the edge was still more than decent for such a high buy in. Getting it in with ~97% equity however is pretty much all I can do in the end. I didn’t play much of the NL HE Events except for the Sunday. The 6max events on the Sundays weren’t too bad mostly lost 60:40 type situations early itm. In the end I am happy not to have wasted more money on the series. It’s a really nice series of course but it can get so expensive and with a damaged bankroll playing to much of the M-Events just leads to bankroll suicide in the end. And that’s what MTT-Poker has been this whole year.
That’s basically why I started to grind out the Stud Cash Game tables from 1/2$ up to 3/6$. The action is decent and I can 6-table most of the time which is fine. I wouldn’t mind playing 8 tables but I’m doing okay and made more than 2.000$ last week. On lowstakes this is a very solid result. I also play a couple of Turbos and 180s. In the 180s I made a few Final Tables but mostly finished 2nd at best. No Heads Up luck atm but after burning a lot of money in 180s and MTTs lately it’s nice to finish most days with about 300$ profit. Still tough to see my short bankroll and comparing to the beginning of the year. But no worries. With hard work there is still a lot of money to be made on the low and midstakes and I can’t afford to be lazy anymore. Even with a nice bankroll again I am still going to play 1/2$. It’s ~5BB/100 so thats about 20$ an hour but on 3 tables it is around 50$ w/o the Rakeback which is probably 5 to 10$ as well. And that’s only 3tabling 1/2$ if there are 6 tables going I can still manage to make at least 80$ per hour in the long run and most of the time there are 2/4$ and 3/6$ at the same time. On the one hand I am happy that this is still possible right now on the other hand I wish the US-Players would still be there. When I check the Playmoney Tables for fun there are thousands of US-Stud Players and many of them would give me the action I would need to make a living just playing Stud. The next step is to get the roll for higher stakes again and take the action on 5/T+ if it shows up. In my earlier days I did the same but stopped after I was back on 10/20$. I rather played a Chinese Reg Heads Up than grinding in money on the lowstakes. I won’t make this mistake again for sure. Also I don’t want to complain about making 80$+ an hour. I mean 60€/h – most people would kill for such an hourly. The only thing I am worried about is that it doesn’t get worse from now on. Poker has suffered so much it’s gotta stop now.
I talked to many tournament players lately and the opinion is clear. The ones who run good feel fine of course but the ones who don’t are disgusted by the games and they are right. Except for the variance heavy sundays the higher stakes during the week are mostly dead money and not in a good way. You can be happy to find 1 bad player at your table. Mostly it’s like 6 regs, a semi reg-fish and a fish. So let’s say you play the 100$ (309$) cubed on a Wednesday with a 10% ROI (and I don’t think you can have much more on a field like this, maybe if you are very good it’s a little more but I think 10% is accurate for most players). So you make 30$ each time you play this tournament in the long run. Now the variance is so damn huge with just a 10% ROI that it’s unlikely to get close to your EV even if you play it every day of the year. This tournament takes sth. about 4-5 hours as I recall (I final tabled it several times and won it also). So you can say you make 30/4 which is a little more than 7$ an hour. Sure you play MTTs and can play 16-20 tables but you gotta risk 309$ to make a 7$ hourly at this table and with that 7$ you also take on a variance that may only evens out over several years. Same thing goes for several other MTTs. So in the end I think most of the tournaments even though they got beautiful structures on Stars are worthless during the week. Even lowstakes Cash Game grinders with a good game plan and table selection should make more money and also get more rakeback as well. Sundays are a different animal of course but as the fields get bigger your EV goes up and so does the variance. How many Sundays I dropped 8-10k last year I can’t really remember but it wasn’t unusual. Of course there are several tournaments that can be played with a much higher ROI than 10%. Mostly the HOTs and BIGs. They got qualifiers, huge gtd pools and at least the HOTs are over fast as well.
It wasn’t easy for me to understand why Cash Game players make more money even though MTTs are known to be the softest form of Poker but I think I found the answer for the most part. They make tons of rakeback, the can table select, they don’t have to play 10 hours every day in a row, they can play fewer tables, they don’t have mtt-swings and lose money for months and they can act according to BRM-Rules much better. I used to be pissed when Cash Game Highrollers with a huge roll take down tourneys but my plan is to become more like them. They make their money all the time and when a SCOOP or WSOP comes up their EV explodes and they have the roll to risk 10-20k for a series and maybe sell a piece or two. They don’t have been waiting the whole year for this and they don’t feel so devasteted if they don’t score and get killed deep by 2outer no. 500 this year in a deep run. After the last day they go back to their usual routine where the calculated hourly is much more certain than in MTTs. Of course I know many MTT-Players with very strong results and scores lots of them play much better than me, but most of them never come close to the Cash Game players out there. I always had the feeling I might have chosen the wrong way inside Poker. If I had ever won the Sunday Million instead of busting 12th I might talk differently today but in the end I am sure my new view is the right one. In the end there are cash gamers and heads up regs final tabling the SM all the time and thats because you win much more if you don’t really need it. You run and play better cause one favors the other. So I am going to make up for lost time on the Stud Tables and also get into other Cash Games as well. There is also this Black Friday downside that it fucked up Mixed Games so much but I still think it makes sense to get into more forms of Poker asap.
Two nights ago the Lakers lost the series vs OKC but Kobe was amazing in most games. So here are some highlights from the season:
(I know its in the other post but I am to lazy to check out why ;D )
They say you should quit and leave at the top. Unfortunately most people never reach the highs they have set for themselves. Many don’t even come close. So even though I know that I am done with the game I still don’t want to leave in this worste case scenario I am in right now.
This is the situation however but I want to take one last chance. Six month starting tomorrow and it’s do or die. I want to make at least 50.000$ while spending the absolute minimum. No traveling, no daily restaurant visits, no fancy hotels, no heavy partying, no nothing. I set a spending limit of 1.000€ per month everything inlcuded. All bills have to be paid with that 1k. Obvly EPT Berlin is off the table, a Vegas flight for the WSOP is already booked but it’s a 95% certain I won’t be using it. If I achieve this goal I will be adding one more year in 2013 before I actually leave the game (as a job) for good. Couple of investments have been made so and I am looking in two more fields to get in when this last grind is over. I take a lot from this time afterall, besides having earned a lot of money I learned that one can make so much money and still be broke. I found out that many guys in Poker are broke and even though you would think they might just be bad players this is not the truth in most cases.
I met so many people including myself who suck at money management. I spent so much money on shit und useless things in my life and especially in the last 2-3 years it makes me sick to even think about it. I used to think I can make it all better when I have my major success at one point. But the truth is if I can’t manage to live my life carefree with 100.000$ income per year I won’t be able to do it with 1.000.000$ per year either. It’s amazing how many people fail at this simple lesson, because it’s sounds so easy and it should be. But even though I know all that for a while and think about a lot in a downswing I stop doing what I planned as soon as the money comes in. I become greedy, start looking for investments to get more and more money, trusting people I shouldn’t trust. Just because people made money staking me in the past led me to believe I have to get even by staking others and start earning money with them. Turns out there are many shady people and instead of getting even by this thinking I lost an additional 20.000$. I did change my life though since the first downfall in early 2011. But it wasn’t enough to spend less money in my freetime or for my monthly expenses. I should have started thinking more conservatively instead of starting to invest in people I couldn’t really trust. How good do you really know a person you see on Skype everyday? You really know him well enough to front him 5.000$ just because he chats with you everyday for a year? Overall I am out 60.000$ this year. For a majority of this I wasn’t really responsible. Downswings are part of the game for everybody, a blackout or disconnects can happen, especially in Gibraltar they are pretty common. But if I hadn’t staked bad players I didn’t really know I wouldn’t have struggeled for the last 6-8 weeks. Thinking like this: “Ok this guy owes me 2k, this guy owes me 5k, this guy owes me 3k and another one a couple of hundred. So I borrow 2.5k from another guy and pay him back when one of the other guys pay up…” This is no bankroll management whatsoever, because before I got the first Dollar back this money is gone. In most cases it really was gone at the end but that’s not the point. I should have changed my bankroll management instantly. I also misjudged people big time at some points during that debacle. When I still had about 30.000$ to work with about 2-3 months ago and one of my stakees contacted me with some weird story why he needs money fast I started thinking like this: “Maybe this guy is really just unlucky somehow and it can be fixed with an additional 500$ so he can be back on the grind to pay me back my former investment. If I don’t help him he uses the roll for the staking and I won’t get back my 2.000$. So maybe it’s worth giving him another 500 in order to get back 2.500$ + profit shares?” At this point I was already feeling bad about this particular guy but I tried to look at this situation the smart way. He had a decent OPR-Record and if he wouldn’t be suge a fuck up he might have been able to show profit. But the truth is I was already unhappy that I had staked him in the first place. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself and accept the loss of 2.000$ I looked at my Stars account and thought ok maybe it’s worth it. Would be bad to lose another 500 bucks but it’s not the end of the world and it could work out afterall. Needless to say it didn’t work out. Another 500$ down the drain.
So what’s the problem? What the fuck is my problem? Have I lost the respect for money? Was I so scared of my own downswings from the past that I thought it would really be a good investment to lower my own potential variance this way? Was I obsessed with getting even from the profits I shared with others? It’s probably a mix of all these things.
In the end everything turned against me. Almost nobody paid me back and nobody I had shares in ever showed profit. Maybe 10% of the people I had shared with. Even when I swapped people kept on cashing in the only two events I haven’t played that particular Sunday. Meanwhile I had to share close to 65% of my own big scores on some occasions. As the downswing continued more and more leaks appeared in my game. In the end even the easiest decisions made me wonder. And it’s not really a surprise. The bankroll kept getting smaller and smaller almost everyday I dropped another 1k or at least a couple of hundred. It was getting more and more certain I would not be getting most of my staking money back. Meanwhile I was planing to move into a new apartment and most of you know the story. Even the estate agent scammed me and my buddies. We still haven’t got the majority of our money back and lawyers are on the case. So I had no real home for a while, the internet connection was laggy, the downswing continued and I was still grinding for SNE. Also I had another sportsbetting investment lined up. To find out that there are bookies that don’t pay up or ban bettors if they win too much. Or at least they limit them to ridiculous amounts. Also I found out the NBA league pass is about 15 seconds behind. For live betting this is like a death penalty. The betting thing worked nice in 2010 but as the money got bigger the bookies kept creating problems. Cash Outs became huge problems and my favorite picker also started to take a turn for the worse. So this thing remains unsettled as well. Just another story in 2012 but again most of what happened is my fault. Especially my bad judgement in investments broke my neck in the end. If I had gotten the 20k back at the point it was promised I wouldn’t have struggled or borrowed anything, my bankroll management would’ve remained correct, which in order to keep SNE pace I adjusted way too late due to empty promisses. Again – I should’ve known better. Instead I fucked up more money like in the above mentioned situation.
Even though it’s all my fault I still hope the scammers (and I expect some of them are still reading this blog) will rot in hell and a Gibraltar Judge rules that the Gibraltar electricity company has to pay me at least 10k$ back and put the estate agents wet finger in a socket.
That being said I want to start over. Even though this is my life and my bad judgement that lead to this mess I advise everybody in Poker or not and especially the younger guys out there to remember this: Do not stake people you can’t trust 100% to pay you back somehow at some point. 85% isn’t enough if you care about the money. Don’t forget what money is worth and that things are changing. Where money is to be made the competition always grows constantly. And make the money while you can. There are so many things that can change the world in one day and the people in the biz have no idea what hit them. For the Pokercommunity this occurrence was the Black Friday. But it can happen to anyone anywhere. The world changes fast and if you don’t act smart you will always be wondering what could’ve been if you had played your cards right back then.
Can’t believe I’m writing these words after making 250.000$ and working like crazy for it. The next big lesson for me is to be more happy with what I got. It’s kind of disgusting to feel unsatisfied after cashing 10.000$ for example. I am happy for about 2 hours and after that I am already thinking about how to get more. And in the end? What would I do with more money? Drink more alcohol? Watch more movies? Visit more concerts? Travel more – even though I hate flying and airports? Can I eat more than 3 times a day? Fuck no. I enjoy the food from my Mom and Grandma more then most of the restaurant food anyway. So in the end many of the best things in life are free. But if you are fucked up in the head it doesn’t help. I wanted too much too fast and in the end I had to work even harder to get by. Let that be a lesson to you. If I haven’t learned my lesson this final time I swear I am gonna hang myself the next time. The next time I am missing money it’s gonna be when the financial system collaps or the world crashes somehow. But if that happens I want to be able to tell myself I did the best I was capable of. I am 24 years old now – time to grow up!
Thanks for sticking with me. Hopefully from now on I have happier things to share with you guys. Take care and don’t just read it if you have the same or similiar problems. I knew all that before I wrote it down, but for the most part I didn’t do it anyway. Especially in Poker where money comes and goes fast you gotta be smarter than me to survive this game at the point it is at right now.
Cheers!
PS: I know this is a german song, but it really fits the situation better than anything else I can think of.
I took a short vacation last week which was really nice. I feel somehow rejuvenated and I think this is a perfect moment to make a clean cut at this point. The first three months of this year may have been sort of a disaster but it’s time to start focussing on the future. I just checked my stats for last years tournament-grind and I had won 145.000$ even though I never won anything higher than 25.000$ last year. That’s a great result but not yet satisfying.
Since I don’t want to cancel the long term investments I have made and nobody making any effort to pay me what they owe I have to take the matters into my own hands now. Pokerstars recently released the shedule for this years SCOOP and it’s looking great of course. The tournament offers keep getting better and better on Stars everyday it seems. My biggest interest in the SCOOP is the Stud-Event of course, since I won it last year. This time they lowered the Buy In which I think is a great idea to attract more players, especially for the High-Event this will be helpful. This year it will be 2.100$ instead of 3.150$. Even though that’s a nice change it brings me to my next problem. My bankroll was hugely damaged during all this scam-madness at this point a direct Buy In into the High-Event would leave me with almost nothing left in my account. Therefore I need a rebuild-plan to get back on my feet before the SCOOP starts. So prepare yourself for a lot of screenshots in April guys. The goal is to win at least 20k this month and this can be done. Right now I am only playing up to 55$, next week I want to be back at 109$ by the end of the month I want to play every stake again because SCOOP is hammertime!
This brings me to my next topic. I am looking for a new image on Stars as well. Nick the Greek didn’t work. I want something cool this time. I recently watched Grease with my Mom and John Travolta looks so damn funny. I formerly wanted to take a picture of Kramer but the 70’s Travolta is also a nice idea. And I just got back to Germany for a vacation and saw that Magnum is back on Thursday night. That’s also a classic! What do you guys think? Maybe some of you want to share your opinion on this life changing matter. Afterall I have to look at this everyday 😉
Just if any of you are under 20 and don’t know who the hell I’m talking about 😉
Ok guys, I catch up with you later this week. With hopefully some final table stories and a new image as well. Take care & good luck at the tables!
just a short update: 150.000 VPP for now. Since I am still waiting for my new computer + screen and have stuff to figure out I put the SNE chase on hold at this point. I might pick up where I left off later this year. Probably around summer. But after all this scams I have some rebuilding to do. Also I have to prepare for SCOOP 2012 and try to defend my Stud-Title 😉 More on my plans for the SCOOP in my next post.
Hey folks, after a bad run on Sunday I finally managed to win a tournament again. Tonight I had a couple of deep runs and dealed heads up for 7.6k in the 44$ Turbo. So tonight I am up about 5k which is fine considering the usual Sunday results (except for the last one). So this was my 2nd winning Sunday this year hopefully a lot more will follow.
Tonight was also the Birthday of the Sunday Million. The biggest Online-Tournament of the week is running for 6 years now. So tonight they had 6 million dollars gtd w 1kk for the winner. The event had 33.732 starters which shows that Online-Poker even without americans is far from over 🙂 That is the good news. The bad news is that I finished around 2500th place for 5xx$. Isolated a limper in the key hand with AJ when he had A8o and the flop showed A89. Huge value these tourneys obv but you need more than just one lifetime to get what you deserve EV wise ;D So that was the MTT weekend. My new shedule leaves me 3 days for tournaments. Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday. Other than that I grind Sng/mtts and Cash Games for the points. So there will be more news on the SNE chase and maybe more screenshots of MTT Cashes after Tuesday. Take care & good luck at the tables!
Hey guys, no big scores last weekend except for the 180 player sng/mtts. Pokerstars is running 60$ 180’s every Sunday as a test and I was able to win one of them for 3k and finish 2nd in another for 2k. In the other MTTs I don’t run to good in the important spots. Lots of mincashes but nothing useful. I hope for a turn around in my tournament luck soon. Since I am grinding hard every day and the plan is to reach Supernova Elite (SNE) by the end of this year I want to keep track of my VPPs from now on. So expect posts on a more regular basis from now on. Right now I only have 125.000 VPP. Thats 12.5% of SNE. Considering the bankroll damage in the beginning of this year I am still satisfied with it. I hope to make a lot more points when I get back to playing higher stakes. But if tournaments keep fucking me up I grind it out on 2/4 – 3/6 and Sngs between 15 and 60$ Buy In. For my health I hope I won’t have to do it but I won’t give up the chase even though most people advised me to do so. And I gotta admit it’s much harder than I expected. But I want to keep going until I reach my goal. Maybe things pick up during the next 2-3 months and I can play higher to get back on pace. But if I stop now it would be much harder to get back into it when the time comes. The next milestone is 200k of course and I want to reach it by the end of this month. It’s gonna be very hard but maybe I get there. I am in a good state of mind and started doing sports about 4 times a week a couple of weeks ago. And I really enjoy it which is a big surprise since I have been lazy for almost 4 years. Anyway let’s see if I reach the 200k milestone this month there won’t be any breaks for sure!
And since I don’t have to work hard enough already I got back into Sportsbetting. Only NBA since thats the only league I used to make profits. So far I am up 1k€ this week. If I post on evenings or afternoons and made my picks already I share some of my favorites form now on with you. So here we go:
Moneyline & Handicap:
Utah Jazz (+7.5) vs Philadelphia 76ers
Cleveland Cavaliers (+13) vs Oklahoma City Thunder
New Orleans Hornets (+11.5) vs Denver Nuggets
Dallas Mavericks vs Sacramento Kings (+2)
Totals:
Utah Jazz/Philadelphia 76ers (O 185)
Los Angeles Lakers/Minnesota Timberwolves (O 193)
Portland Trail Blazers/Boston Celtics (O 184)
Los Angeles Clippers/San Antonio Spurs (U 195)
Let’s see if I still got it in me. Def I am gonna stay away from soccer bets or the MLB. Don’t make the same mistakes twice 😉
Even though I was never a huge fan of Henry Maske, I find the song really motivating.
And because it’s been so long since I had a screenshot to post here is the recent 180 player ship:
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