I generally don't make my results public, but things have been going so well its tough to pass it up. I've only had maybe 3 or 4 periods spanning over a few days that have come close to the results I have put up over the last 48 hours. Of course it's nice to run 5k above EV, and I've definitely been running very well in other aspects of the game, but there are a few things I've really been focusing on to start the new year that I feel are making a huge difference. Specifically, I'm working my very hardest to stay away from any kind of tilt that may occur. The thing I'm learning is most important for me is that when things are going poorly ... which they inevitably do, even during a stretch like this... that is the time it is most important for me to keep a level head and keep my emotions from getting in the way of my play. So far this year I've had one session where I did a poor job of that and it cost me about 5k, but I definitely can tell I have made huge improvements on in that area. The other thing I'm doing is trying to put in a ton of hours at the tables. I've already played nearly 40k hands on the year, and I'm gonna keep trying to do that til I run out of steam.

Anyways, on to the screen shot.....



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

At first I was intending to likely begin making videos again around the start of the new year, but I have decided that I think it's a better decision for me to continue to put it on hold.

Since taking a break around mid October I haven't had the pressure to be making bi-monthly videos, and I also haven't had nearly as many guys to coach. This has given me a ton of extra time to spend working on my own game, and putting in many more hours at the tables than I had been previously.

2010 was a year where I made roughly the same amount of money playing as I did coaching. It's nice to be able to make a lot of variance free money, but I think for the time being I need to embrace that variance since the start of this year has already been very good to me.

I've been playing regularly in 5/10 games basically whenever they run, and over the last couple of weeks I have been taking some shots at 10/20 with great success, something I've never done before in my career. My goal when I first started playing poker was to some day play in a 25/50 game. Not just sit in one, but be properly rolled for it as well. I'm still a long long ways away from that happening, especially with taxes coming up, it's ridiculous how much I owe. Maybe it's something I can look forward to by the end of the year if I continue to put in 40 hour weeks at the tables. I have no idea if that's going to happen or not, but things are looking up for the time being.

Oh one other thing, I've altered my coaching listing slightly. You can go to my page and scroll down to the latest post if you are interested. It's in the forum section under low-mid stakes coaching.

That's it for now.

Out.

I realize that this post has absolutely nothing to do with poker, but that's the thing, it's my blog, I should be able to put up something like this just because I happen to think it's pretty damn funny. I still laugh when I watch this thing think, it's about 1.5minutes in length.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1TnzCiUSI0



Oh I suppose I could discuss a rather strange hand I played earlier today which might be kinda interesting. Was playing 500nl max buy in, 2/4 blinds.

It's folded to me on the button holding 88 so i mqke it 10 there the vast majority of the time. Villain was a somewhat competent player, but nothing to write home about, now he 3bet me from the SB , we are 125bb effective deep so I feel comfortable calling the 3bet. Also it's a spot I expect him to be light quite often... otherwise I'd just muck my hand really fast preflop. So he had been 3betting a relatively decent amount but I had yet to see him really get out of line at a showdown.



So after I call in position, the flop comes Ac9c6h and villain checks. Usually in a situation like this I try to check back the weakest parts of my range to try to feign that I am pot controlling some marginal ace that doesn't expect he can get 3 streets of value from TT-KK, so I'm sort of feigning deception, but it works very very often against most any thinking player.

So anyway, the turn came putting a 7h on board and now villain leads out for 3/4s of the pot which had to be roughly a $66 at this point--it's a bet that foils my original plan of betting turn and river if he chks flop and turn.

So I altered my plan and decided he was now value betting thinly with something like KK-JJ after I check back the flop, or something even like A2/A3 type hands.

Given this info, and my read, I think he's value betting very frequently so a call is out of the question. My only options are folding or raising, and I kinda liked the idea of raising a bit better with the plan of shoving most all rivers thinking I can rep a checked back AJ or smth like that and now is deciding to value raise to protect his hand.

Anyways, so I make it 176 roughly against his bet of about 66. Now here's where the really weird part of the hand comes in... he thinks for maybe 15 seconds then shoves the remaining all in. What to do what to do? I won't tell you what happened just yet so maybe we can stir up some discussion as to whether or not I made a mistake by not betting flop or by raising turn. And how do you want to respond to the all in? Lemme know in comments.

out

Okay well, based on the feedback I received from releasing the introduction to what is basically a half finished e-book it seems just about no one wants me to release it for free. Understandably so. The majority of it was actually written last Xmas when I was visiting my parents and only had my laptop (I pretty much only ever put in volume on my desktop as I feel being in the zone is an important thing for me when playing to have success. I get real sloppy on the laptop). So maybe when I go to visit my parents on the 22nd I'll crank out the unfinished half and just send it off to a publisher to be proof read. Who knows though, I've been flip flopping so I'm not gonna promise anything.

A lot of people seem to be pretty concerned about the possible legislation being discussed recently. I just listened to a podcast from a couple guys over at leggopoker, they interviewed someone who seemed to me to be an expert on the situation and it was definitely very interesting and informative to listen to. Quite a few people have been asking me lately if I am worried about it or what I might do if it passes. Of course there are always the immediate concerns regarding the blackout, but the way ZBTHorton described it in the podcast, it's essentially just a gamble as to whether it will be worth it to us in the long run or not and a lot of it depends on the type of player you are. For me, personally, I will probably be one of the least effected by it of all players if the legislation passes and the blackout occurs. I already play a good clip on Bodog, a site that will definitely ignore the blackout and continue to run if the legislation is passed, and Bodog is pretty much just about the perfect site for me for a number of reasons....

I can't compete with these guys who put in 2 million hands a year and make 100k+ off rakeback alone. I make the majority of my money the old fashioned way, by outplaying my opponents. The way my mind works, it just has limitations in the specific area of mass multi-tabling that I'm not capable of playing more than ~9 tables and making a profit. 9 is actually quite a stretch, 4 is generally plenty for me, and that's all that Bodog even allows you to play at one time anyways. I only see this as a big advantage for me. If it gets to the point where these rakeback grinders aren't able to get the amount of hands in necessary to reach their goals, they are going to have to either evolve into more complete players or they will eventually keep trading money back and forth until they go broke. The way I see it, the sooner that happens, the fewer regs I will have to deal with. Not that I have a problem playing with a table full of regs as it is, I'm happy to do that and I am very confident I can earn a comfortable living off of them until poker completely dies off and there is no longer an influx of money being deposited by new players. The day everyone stops depositing I guess is the day that happens, but I think that there is just too much money to be made by the government, so I have faith.

I haven't been playing too many hands in the last two months. I've actually not had a situation like this happen to me before. I don't feel like I'm playing anywhere near my best poker, yet I'm running like 12k above expectation over my last 30k hands. I'm still below expectation on the year, but if things keep going this way it will eventually catch up. My swings have been pretty crazy as well. I haven't played every day, but for every day that I do play, I play multiple sessions, and over the course of any one day I don't think I've won or lost less than 4k. When you factor in my winrate, it would probably seem pretty unrealistic to be dealing with these kinds of swings with the majority of my hands being played at 2/4. I've been playing professionally for about 4 years now and I still struggle to grasp the extent of variance. I'm getting better and better at dealing with it, though I wonder if I'll ever really understand it. I wonder how many others are going through what I'm going through. I doubt there are more than 10 people out there with both a higher winrate @ 2/4 and a higher number of hands played than me, I'd put money on it. I'm actually pretty curious, any of you guys reading this experience anything like what I'm talking about?

That's all I got for now.

Okay so I know I was saying I would continue to work on the book and eventually publish it. It's not going to happen, I just don't have the time to put into it and by the time it will be finished, I don't think the information will be nearly as useful. After review, the majority of what I had written was done in Jan 2010 and many of the little tips I had written down have become pieces of common knowledge for most players since that time. I haven't decided if I'm going to release the entirety of what I have, but I'm going to put out the introduction and think for a while to determine if I should release the rest of it for free.

----------------------------------------------------

How this book came to be:

One day I took a couple hours of time to sit down and actually learn how to use my Hold em Manager (HEM). I figured out how to configure my pop-ups, how to arrange the pop-ups to pop-up whenever I hovered my mouse over a certain on screen statistic. I then slowly started going though each statistic that HEM offered, attempting to determine which ones were the most relevant for me while playing and which ones were relatively useless. Through quite a few months of trial and error I started to feel like I had a solid setup. I eventually began feeling so confident in this setup that I could create the setup for other people, explain to them what each statistic meant, explain the particular uses of each statistic, and also explain what to do in game scenarios to take advantage of the apparent mistakes their opponents make. I charged 250$ for this service and had received reviews none short of excellent. After repeating this process so many times, I began to feel bored clicking the same buttons and explaining the same information over and over. I can make more per hour playing than I could doing this mindless work, so I decided to put it all down on paper into a book form. This way, I won't have to repeat the information anymore and it will be available to anyone who wants it. So this book is the result of that series of occurrences.

What this book is about:

The main goals of this book will be to (1) give you a strong working understanding about how to operate your HEM, your Heads up Display (HUD) settings and popup configurations, (2) make clear which pieces of information available to you are the most relevant for the current state of the games (and also to clue you in to what pieces of information will become relevant once released), (3) to give you a basic understanding as to what all of the numbers and percentages actually mean, and (4) how to utilize the information the HUD gives you to best exploit your opponents' weaknesses.

I feel it's necessary to describe the types of HUD users currently out there, and to use those distinctions to point you in the direction I feel is most optimal for HUD use. The way to begin explaining this would be to make a distinction between the two polar opposites as far as HUD users are concerned. These two types of people have extremely different ways of playing (or thinking about how to play) poker in general--however both can be very profitable. On one polar end of the spectrum sits the overwhelming majority of high stakes players. They play by and large without any HUD whatsoever. There are a couple of reasons for this: (1) The player pool is so small in high stakes games that it becomes much less important to use statistical analysis in order to remind oneself about how a particular opponent plays, and (2), high stakes players feel more comfortable relying on their specific reads, which are always opponent dependant. These reads more particularly relate to long term history, recent history and most importantly game flow. Most of the successful high stakes players will tell you that those pieces of information are much more important to their upcoming decision than any of the piece of statistical information that may be at their disposal. The reason this is the approach those players take is because it is far more important for them to know how their opponents think about the game, or how they think about a particular situation in order to best exploit them. Those high stakes players are on one polar end of this spectrum. If you are reading this, it's highly likely you don't fall into this category of players, which is fine because you are the type of player that will benefit from this.

On the other end of that spectrum are the players I would call HUD-bots. These are the type of players who use statistical analysis in order to make every decision they have. These players tend to play a high number of tables at once (12-24) and thus necessarily are unable to take into consideration any recent history or game flow in their decisions. (Of course there are always occasional outliers such as Nanonoko who are able to do such things, but they are by and far the exception, not the rule) Now, while I do believe that this e-book would be helpful for players in both camps (just watch an aejones or Phil Galfond video and watch them try to use their pop-ups, they have no clue about the information whatsoever, LOL), I am aiming for those who take advantage of the information I am relaying here to end up somewhere in the middle.

Although I personally do not employ the HUD-bot approach to playing online poker, it can be a very profitable way to play. I am aware that in the past couple years that there have been several 1/2 (200nl) grinders who play 20 tables and earn somewhere in the realm of $200/hr doing this, I am not one of these people because like I said, I fall somewhere in the middle of the two approaches I previously discussed and that is the same direction I am intending to guide you. The reason I feel this topic is such an important one to discuss is that if you take this information and begin using it like a HUD-bot, sure you will be capable of making a decent hourly, but you will be foregoing a few other things that are integral to your development as a poker player; most importantly, your ability to think through hands. Your overall thought process will stagnate. You will struggle immensely with moving up in limits and will end up very frustrated when dealing with the better regulars at your current limit. The game will become quite boring for you and you may lose the desire to play. Lastly, you may make the mistake of allowing statistics to trump all other considerations during your decision making. The number one rule I use when playing with a HUD is as follows: I will never override an in-game read with statistical data--if I feel a player is more or less likely to be bluffing or value betting in a given situation based on game flow and recent history, I don't care how unlikely my statistical data says it is. I'm going to repeat that because I can't understate it's importance:

IN GAME READS SHOULD ALWAYS TRUMP STATISTICAL DATA.

--------------------------------------------------

For those of you who asked, I coach 6max pretty much exclusively. I play a decent amount of HU also but don't consider myself to be as strong a player HU so I don't coach it.

And, wow... I am really surprised at how many responses I have received for this. I thought I'd get maybe 10 people at the most but it's only been a day and I have a lot more than that. I'm sorry to some of you for this but there are so many of them that I won't be able to respond to all of you. I have to come up with some sort of approach to weeding this down to a few guys. I think I'll pick the 5 messages I liked the best and contact those people. I'll probably do it within the next three days.

Just wanted to let you guys know my situation and make some sort of a statement. I suppose I used some poor judgment in the way I went about presenting my most recent video. Admittedly, it was a bit juvenile and immature, but the reason I became a poker player was so that I'd never have to grow up. I'm not making excuses for what I did, just giving a formal apology to the CR staff and members for my behavior, and letting you guys know that it won't happen again.

As far as I know, the video will not be released, however I still plan on taking the same idea and using it in the future, just without the malicious intent. I thought that it was a strong video from an educational standpoint and that there was a lot of good content in it, but I know I crossed the line a bit.

What types of videos do you guys want to see? I know the ones I've done in powerpoint have been received the best, and that the leakfinders have been received the worst.

I've done a couple in the last few days, one of me playing 2/4 on PS live action and another video review of a 2/4 PS session I played but upon review I didn't really think either of them were up to standards for release.

I've had a couple other ideas for videos, one was a powerpoint on discussing why it is I can be so bad at math yet still be good at poker/why pot odds don't really matter. Another idea I've had would be to show you guys how I would go about analyzing my opponent's play away from the table, going through hands that they have played against me and against others and try to spot leaks that they have or understand the way they are thinking about certain spots.

Or I can just continue with more storytelling videos.

Let me know.

The progress on the book has been slow. Progress on everything in my life seems to go pretty slow as of late. When I first started writing it, I had so many ideas that the dam was literally overflowing. Since then, back in January, it seems quite a bit of the stuff that I had previously written is now plain old out dated.

It seems like both a blessing and a curse for poker books. Many of them will only be recent for about a year or less, then you need new ones to cover the stuff that's been fixed. For example, I had a long discussion about playing the SB when the action is folded to you, but most people just don't make the same kinds of mistakes that they used to. It calls for thinking more in-depth about the situations and forces us to continually take one step further. Of course, some concepts are immutable, which are the ones I am going to try to focus on the most while in the process of re-writing this thing.


I've also been doing quite a bit of introspection lately. I watched a show on MTV.com about the life of Nick Schulman which I thought was pretty interesting and was something I could really relate to a lot. Not that my life is that much like his, but that us being poker players, we share a common bond in the sense that we have chosen a certain lifestyle that is very different than the mainstream. When I first got into poker, it was such an easy decision for me. I always knew I didn't want to be like everyone else; my strongest attributes are logic and psychology--two things that would help anyone to excel at poker; I hated having a boss or doing anything that I didn't want to do; I wanted to keep my options open; I loved gambling.

The choice was ridiculously easy for me, but as I have fully made this a part of my life, it's taken a different route and has essentially become my whole life. I don't really think I've wasted my skills or anything I could have used on a career I might have chosen instead. I'm not particularly good with people, and find them to be uninteresting, and a hassle the most of the time. Of course there are always certain people I come across on occasion who I genuinely respect and feel like they get what's going on, but then again, maybe I'm the one who just doesn't get it. It certainly maybe the case, but if I don't get it, I'm not really that sure I want to.

I was just watching Curtain's chess video on leggopoker and he had a rant at the end of his video about how poker players complain too much and that they don't know how good they have it. He was saying that it's a great life and people like me should feel lucky. There are definitely aspects of that I agree very strongly with. I am lucky to be able to take any day off that I want. I am lucky to be able to sleep in until 2pm, lay in bed for an hour after I wake up and watch TV shows. I am lucky to not have to worry about money for the most part.

These are the benefits of the lifestyle, but what do I give up? It seems to me I've been trying too hard to "keep my options open" -- like if I wanted to travel to Europe and leave tomorrow, I could do that. Or if I wanted to take a random road trip wherever, I could do that no problem. But with my options open all the time it's caused me to basically never commit to doing anything like those things I mentioned. I am always busy trying to "keep my options open". Not that I really even like to do anything besides hang around the house... it's a major hassle to go out, it's a major hassle to deal with relationships and other people, I wish I didn't feel that way but I just do.

Everything seems like a hassle to me, but if I think back in my life, I've always felt like that. Money solves problems, if you don't want to deal with a problem, throw money at it and it will be fixed. Therefore, if I don't want to deal with problems, I should just make more money. This is essentially why I keep doing what I do and don't change. Whenever it comes time to do something I don't want to do, I just decide to play poker instead.

I suppose this is why the most enjoyable time of my life by far was during college when I was doing and selling a lot of drugs. I never felt that connection with other people unless I was doing drugs with them. Sort of like we were experiencing the same thing and it was evident to us both, whereas this pretty much never happens in everyday life, I always feel like I'm looking at situations far far different from 99% of people.


I kept wondering why I haven't done better in poker, why I haven't made more money, why I haven't moved up to higher and higher stakes. You'd think I'd have been knocked unconscious by now with how often these same issues have beaten me upside the head over and over. The writing is on the wall. I've been criticized a lot lately by my friends/peers in the poker community for being a much much better coach than a player. And it's impossible for me to reject this elephant in the room because it's true. I play my C or D game >80% of the time. It doesn't matter that my theoretical understanding is probably better than 95% of other professionals, my bankroll management and poor lifestyle choices reinforce my lack of ability to play my A game. I wonder if I'll ever retreat from this cycle and expand on the opportunities poker has given to me, it seems I've been thinking about this same stuff for years now and I still haven't made any strong positive change. Maybe I will someday. If I don't though, it's not like I have it that bad I guess.


-----One last thing... A lot of people seem to read this blog but few if any really ever comment. It's the comments that make me want to continue updating (whether they are positive or negative I don't really care). When I kept a blog in the past, I always used to say "I'm keeping this blog for me so I don't care what you think about it", I did that to insulate myself from outside criticism I got for things I wrote, but now I just don't care at all about anything negative someone has to say about me. I occasionally enjoy reading the musings of others who share a similar life to myself, and if I occasionally jot down some stuff and somebody else enjoyed reading it, or hated it, I'd like to know.

In order to have sessions like this, you have to be one of two types of people. One of these types will just sit there and grind and grind and grind and grind. If you do that constantly. you will have occassional sick sessions where you play a large amount of hands and just by happenstance, you will sometimes come across what some might refer to as an "epic" session.

The other type of person who is capable of producing epic sessions is the guy who sits down and says "I'm going to sit here until I'm up 10 buy ins, screw everything else, I'm going to do it and you'll be hard pressed to try to stop me.

I without doubt fall into the latter category of people who have sick swingy sessions. I've dropped 20k+ multiple different days, I've had 15k heaters (all playing 5/10 and below), and some other stuff that's been fairly well documented on 2p2.

So anyways on to the session at hand. -- I got the idea of playing these games from Scott (iRock) since he was telling me he was beating them for like 5BB/100 or something similarly ridiculous, so I jumped on the 4 FR 400NL NLHE rush tables. I started playing. It'd be an understatement to say I started playing. I was embarkening on a journey of insanity. While the swings aren't necessarily comparable to 4 tabling another reg HU @ 5/10--which I've been doing quite a bit of lately with marginal success, but in terms of rush, the sheer # of hands you are able to play within this shorter time period just completely changes the pace of the game in a way that I wouldn't say it's similar to a 4 tabling HU match, but just in a way that is different from other forms of poker. The pace of rush is what makes it unique and what allows for sessions like this to occur.

So here's the screenshot of the results of this session that spanned the course of two days.

http://www.liquidpoker.net/user_pictures/9342cfe82ea056ed04486fceb2653283.jpg

So let's take a quick look before I fall out of this chair and am laid out on the bedroom floor passed out asleep since it's been well over 48 hours since I last slept.

Looks like I played an unprecedented 12,380 hand in 1 session, that's just 4 tabling FR rush. I came out in the green which is always nice, +3k. It's always nice to make 3k in day, but it's certainly not something to gloat over (especially when many of us are capable of losing many multiples times larger than that---particularly me). But anyways, 12,380, I don't recall ever sitting down and playing that many hands straight through. Looks like it took me 868.5 minutes which equals what in hours.

Believe it or not, I actually do know how to solve for this problem, all I need to do is take 868 and divide it by 60 and that will tell me how many hours straight I played this session. 14.466666 is the number I come to. I'm pretty sure I was playing longer than that, but what does it really matter at this point anyways. Let's look at what does matter. USD$206.3/hr rate. Not to mention while still running 5 buy ins under EV. If I ran at expectation I would have likely surpassed the 300/hr , in addition to the sick amount of rakback.

Apparently I contributed 1381$ in rake to full tilt, today, personally. In one day. They are making a killing off of me and they have no risk. Knowing stuff like that is going on stings a bit. But what can you do, I guess you could be like Common. Common says, "Things that I can change I should, things I can't need to be understood... this is the bliss he used to drift from the hood!"

Gotta get inside the minds of those guys pulling the strings, figure out how I can pull some strings of my own. Anyways I've digressed quite a bit. This whole post was meant to be extremely disjointed from the start anyways since I'm writing it on sleep deprivation, a barrage of anti-anxiety medication, particularly including ambien which is making me feel quite a bit odd in general, although I'm never one to complain about drugs, plus I'm at least 5 beers deep at this point.

Yeah, I started drinking about half way through the session. I find it helps to level me out quite a bit to introduce a familiar substance into my body, gives me a calming type of feeling. Stress is my #1 enemy at the table so whatever I can do to lower stress and keep things chill that's what I wanna do.

So anyways, I'm feeling pretty comfortable in these FR rush games, pretty sure I could teach anybody to do what I was doing with them, it's not particularly complicated, just have to play a bunch of hands and figure out which strategy works best against the majority of players, then also spot out the tough players who you will have to be constantly adjusting to. But just realizing that there is a difference between those two types is a big step in and of itself.

Not too often I have 7+ buy in sessions anymore, even more particularly when I was still 5 buy ins under EV for the session which is pretty brutal.

Okay that's the end of my rant, if I kept typing this blog entry would never end, so it gots to stop somewhere.

peeace.