I´ve been playing a ton of poker lately and I have to say: it´s not good for me. It´s not good for my life balance, and it´s not good for my game neither. In months, when I play poker almost any day, I am realizing a significant drop in my winnings and and play close to breakeven. So when you actually do something a lot, and don´t see any improvement in your results, it seems, that the psychology aspect overwhelms the skill aspect in that specific topic. At the moment I learn, what people mean, if they say, that being succesful in poker is 70% about psychology and only 30% a question of skills. It´s totally true.

Looking at my graph friom the last couple months, that I play solid poker for 90% of time, so my graph is steadily going up. But....there are also these short periods where my graph just drops. And it seems, that this is not variance, this is me...me playing terrible. The main leak is, that it seems, that I loose all my money to the donks, who always doing these silly minraise stuff, when the pot is already committing. Usually I am used to stack these guys, but the last couple weaks, I ve been experiencing super close call downs, in which I am losing most of the time with my overpair vs monster. These thin calls at showdown are my biggest leak or better, it´s more the unability to laydown something big from time to time. Actually this ability is one thing that made me succesfull in the game once, but lately I think I lost this ability.

I am playing good enough to realize, when I should quit a session. So this helps to reduce my losses a lot to be still in the plus. When I realize I am close to tilt, I quit right away, I don´t even finish the orbit. So I am already pretty good in this.
But what would much rather help, to figure out, when to start a session at all. I´ve been thinking about this a lot. From what I experienced, the matter of how I play, is not influenced from the day time I play. It´s not that simple.
I think, it is a mixture of so many different things, that influence my game such as food, sexual aspects, sport activeness, relaxedness, and a healthy poker-life balance.
Specially the latter is something I am going to work on, which basicly means. Play less poker, and do more different stuff. I am going to quit poker for a week after sunday anyway, and I am so glad looking foward to this to get my head free of all the poker stuff.
The only poker related thing I am going to do, is to watch DamnRingers Leakfinder which is going to be released on Tuesday, I guess. It´s a leakfinder about a session I played last week, and I am really looking foward to hear about DamnRingers thoughts. Unfortunately the session was more a reg-vs.--donk sort of thing, not the reg-vs-reg which is probably more interesting these days. Even the tables I hit were the juciest I had been playing at for a long time, I ended up in the minus.

One thing concernig my poker-life-balance is going to be pretty well covered in the close future. My lovely girlfriend, I ve been having a long-distance-relationship with for a couple months, is moving to Berlin and I am so excited about this. I will also take a further education for a couple months to get deeper into this tax law lawyer thing. My economic degree hasn´t made me a dime so far, and I hope this is going to change soon.

See you on the tables!

Since Black Friday I actually spread my whole roll over various sites, not knowing, which one is actually best for me.

I could still playing on FTP, I love the smooth running software, which is perfect to multitable. I actually got all the refund-requested within a few days. Still thinking that the site sucks in terms of how Howard Lederer and co handle the black friday incident.

I tried my luck at Lock, I enjoyed playing there, but to be honest: as a european, it´s almost impossible to get enough tables running unsless you wanna turn the night into a day. I wanna play 100NL and more than half of the tables are jack pot tables, which I don´t get, because they spread the rare player field into a format I don´t wanna play. The software is ok, but I actually had a few expensive miscklicks, when I didn´t see someone 3bet-shoved and I cold called with pocket deuces. The replayer function doesn´t work well, so afterall, it´s not the site I wanna play much. I also don´t think there are too many fishs at the tables at the moment. Specially during the week.

What really screws me lately is the weak dollar. I am a 100% bankroll nit, right now I playing 50NL with a 5K-6K bankroll, which I have in a dollar account. within every single penny the dollar is dropping compared to the euro, I losing 50 dollars. Since I expect the dollar to drop much further within the next months (everyone who has an economic degree as I have agrres to me), it´s time to bring my money into a save haven.

At party poker the funds are fixed in euro for me. the player pool there isn´t that much affected by BF at all, and the traffic appears to me pretty healthy. can´t tell about the fish-density though, but I assume, since they doing commercial on each porn site, that it is going to be like as it used to be back in the days, when I was a huge fish, who made even a profit.

the software is ok to multi-table. much better than lock poker at least. the rakeback deal is a little tricky, but I think I can get to 30% within 3 months with playing 3 or 4 hours a day. So this isn´t much of a problem.

I have been playing ring games for 3 months now. I started at 100NL at FullTilt and actually can´t complain about my results so far. Since I am pretty much new to the game (I played SNGs only until BF), I managed to make a profit of 2K in about 30K hands without having much experience with 100BB-stacks.

I got kinda mad at FTP, so cashed out my entire roll there, leaving me with only 4 rush tickets ¡ 20 dollars. I actually don´t know what happened, because I actually just wanted to quit playing at FTP at all so I kinda played underrolled and maybe a litte overagressive. But two weeks later, without even playing much on the site I ended up having a healthy 1.2K in my account again, mainly playing 50NL and a few MTTs (mainly Omaha and Omaha HL, which I love).

I also signed up at LockPoker. My problem here is, that as an European it´s pretty tough to get much volume on this site. So what I was doing starting my session at FTP at 8pm or later, switching over to Lock Poker at around 0 AM with a short brak in between. After all I am playing at average around 4 hours per session, more less 3 or 4 days a weak. On Lock I am playing 50NL mainly, and I am running ok I guess, cause I made another 1K within the last 4 weeks without playing much. My IPAD is also pretty much cleared. I think I gonna sell this right away and use this money to buil up a life bankroll. In Berlin we have a pretty juicy FR 1-1 going, specially in the beginning of the months, and I can´t wait to join this round as soon as possible.

Playing not much poker helps me to balance life well. At the moment I am seriously looking for a job on a regular basis, which takes a lot of effort, as I experienced. It´s kinda frustrating writing 50 applications per months without much success. I guess this kinda normal and also I had two interviews so far, but unfortunately I didn´t get any job. Financially I am doing ok. I have very low life expences here in Berlin, so I even manage to build up a roll.

I am really looking foward to play NL100 as soon as possible. At the moment, I just have my roll spread over different sites, so I actually play on each site according to my roll I have there. This is kinda annoying, but I also feel the need to get more comfortable in my decisions to play 100NL full time. I am also working on making my transition from full ring to sixmax, where I expect to loose a chunk within a few weeks until I´ll made the right adjustments. I am just sick of playing FR at the moment, because it´s so nitty, and it seems that the fishy players are way more attracted by the more action related format of sixmax.

see you guys on the tables.

To make it short: forced by the DOJ to make the transition from SNG-grinding to play ringgames, you can find me playing mainly 100NL and 50NL (Full Ring) on Lock and on FullTilt. I also played a couple thousand hands on rush poker.

I run at about 4BB/100 after all, which boosted my roll quite a bit. Due to diverse bonusses I was forced to switch between formats a little bit, lately I am clearing this IPAD-promo-thing. Running at 4BB/100 seems to be pretty ok, so from that, yes I am a winning player, but here is the thing:

In all formats I was playing I was experiencing tremendous swings, which I only know from back in the days from playing SNGs. After being pretty much on a heater running at 22BB/100 wiht skyrocking red lines and stuff, I always experience a long lasting break-even or slightly losing streak with a couple huge losing sessions in between. So for me it seems that my 4BB/100 I am running at are everything but sustainable.

That was last week. After starting to doubt that ring games or even poker is the right thing for me, I spend hours in analysing my game to find leaks. It seemed I really lost to often in this whole blind-stealing war, which I probably took too serious. While at 6max blind stealing/ restealing is pretty essential, in ring games it isn´t that much. I found myself 3 betting/ squeezing way too light, often faced by a 4-bet. It took me a while to figure out, that the regs at 50 NL Full Ring are a lot tighter, as I actually thought.

I adapted this insight to my game and it seems, that I am back on track since then.

Hey Guys,

after the black friday life got difficult for SNGs grinding. It was difficult to get enough volume at first, but second, it seemed the fish frequency droped a lot, too. I guess this is, because fishes are the guys, who redeposit more often, and as it got really unclear how this whole situation was going to develope they simply just kept away of the tables. So after a few days messing around with all the regs without making any money, I just decided to start playing 100NL full ring.

I always had fun playing ring games but a year ago I really had problems bringing a session to an end. I guess everyone knows how hard it is to find the right time to quit. If you´re running hot then it just doesn´t make sense to quit at all, so you play until you loose a huge pot, and you keep playing afterwards to get your money back, ending up on tilt losing another full stack. My mindset has changed a little as playing SNGs really forces you to keep on track and not disturb your mind by just loosing five or ten showdowns in a row. I also played the non-turbos a ton so I got a rough idea handling 50bb stacks, which is obviously not the same as a 100bb stack, but I still had to take a lot of flop and turn decision, and a big part of my edge came from there.

I was surprised of the dynamic of 100NL FR. In my fist sessions I was rarely 3-betted and found the game quite soft. I was running at 24BB/100 roughly on 6K hands with a upgoing redline. I played mostly small ball poker fairly tight preflop, pretty agressive post flop and did some huge river bluffs as well who all took it down. On my fourth day dynamic totally changed, and I suffered a lot from getting 3-betted. I ended up losing 3 stacks, because I it hard to adjust to that sort of agressiveness. I am wondering if this dynamic is mostly influenced by the time we play or if it´s more related to the stack sizes on the tables? It seems to me, that at european nightime and there are more fish on the table the preflop 3-betting drops a lot since everyone is just try to get involved into postflop play vs their targets. Gonna keep focus on that. My heater was followed by a more less 6K break even stretch.

Right now I am about to clear a rush poker bonus. And after two sessions playing rush, I have to say: I really like rush poker. I played four tables which I felt wuite comfortable with, and ended up with $280 plus, without RB and bonusses. The set ups ran really my way. For example I made a straight flush on the river facing a reshove by a guy who flipped over a king high flush and this was a 200BB stack at 50NL. I just hope that variance won´t strike back soon.

See you guys.

Hainberger

So well, here we go.
After turning a one dollar fifity into a hundred I started putting some deeper thoughts into the game. Focusing on MTTs mainly I managed to do well ending up wiht almost 3K mainly due to a step tournament which I luckily won. I cashed out the most of it though.
Couple months later I singned up at full tilt. It was actually the night when Tom Dwan lost a big chunk of his roll to Isildur. For me, who just knew 5000NL from party poker it was really akwared to see, how guys can play 100K NL heads up 8-tabling.

I played SNGs mainly but also tried myself in the micros 6-max. But after a while I figured out the rake at the micros too high to build up a bankroll. It just felt senseless to play 10 or 25NL, making a 3BB/100 but getting raked 10BB/100. Specially for me, who suffered from tilt a bit which can be terrible at ringgames. So I kept grinding the $5.50 and the $11 SNGs, did quite ok and made the transition to the $22 SNGs. I made about 4.5K (including RB) with that I guess. Unfortunately I had to cash out couple times though. Another thing I learned with SNGs to get less prone in being tilted, thus I can say that I was playing my A or B game like 95% of the time.

When the Black Friday hit the poker world I thought it was time to make the transition again towards playing full ring games. I think it is really ok using SNGs for building a roll, and make the jump to cash game. Maybe it is a little unclever to jump right into NL100 righ away as I did. But for me messing around with so many regs at 25NL and paying 3 times as much rake as you actually make yourself seems not to make much sense to me. In terms of bankroll management I was doing ok I guess because I could easily loose a ten buy ins.

Well and thats where I am now. Jump into the cold water playing NL100 without any experience. So far I am doing ok, and I really doing a lot of analysis too. I started with an incredible heater, where I made 1.5K in about 9K hands (without rakeback), but also had days where I lost between 300 and 500 USD. So right now I am up 1K, running at 8BB/100 after all. A big part of my poker life is doing session reviews to learn from big mistakes and to find costly leaks.

I guess this is enough for today, the next time I will getting more specific as this and my first entry seemed to be more introductional.

Hello Cardrunners.

Yeah all my friends know, that I do well at poker. But to be honest: when I tell them stories about playing some online poker, they just think about a lonely guy one-tabling 10NL. The more I play, the more complex my thought process is getting, and the less any of my friends will be able to follow. You guys can, by reading this blog and which I am going to update frequently.

I got curious about poker a couple years ago, when I met this swedish guy on a surf trip in Indonesia. I guess his name was isildursomething. I asked him, what he was doing for living, and he admitted to be a poker player. I had no idea about this whole poker thing and to be honest I started feeling sorry for him. I asked if he can live well from that, and he said, he already made a quarter mill that year. It was spring 2006.

Getting back I was introduced to online poker by a friend, who is a serious grinder at 200NL nowadays. But at that time he was only taking shots at somefreerolls. And yes, I was pretty stoked to realize, that poker desnt mean getting five cards, switching three of them and start betting your house, care wife...

Of course I had to redeposit a couple times. Stupidly I cashed in 10 dollars, the first time, not thinking about any rakeback and first deposit bonusses. Luckily that this was at party poker. My first lessons costed me abot 300 bucks. But I saved some money because I also wnated to buy a car at that time. The lesson here costed me a lot more, cause the car I ended up with only ran a few miles before breaking down. So I was broke, and I really needed a car for work as a freelancer, and the only thing I could to do to cash out the rest of my roll except 1,50 USD and get another car on deferred payment.

I went abroad for 6 months to go surfing and do my job, not thinking about poker much. But when I came back I remembered this one dollar fifty in my party poker account. I logged in, and realized, that the only thing I could play is this silly one dollar sit´n´go. Yes, I won the first one, .... and the second. Building up my roll to nine dollars. And since then I never had to deposit again except for opening accounts on different sites.

Before this is getting too long and boring, I bring this to an end.

Thanks for reading,

Hainberger