So this is my first update on Cardrunners since I introduced myself and my challenge for 2012.

I firstly set myself a target of $2,000 for January based on the premise that to make $25,000 I need to earn roughly $480 a week.

I started my challenge on an absolute heater and made $2,800 in the first 6 days!, it felt awesome but I ultimately knew that it was going to be impossible to match those results for the upcoming weeks. As I had already met January's target and tentatively increased the month's profit goal upto $3,500.

The second week of the month had it's up's and downs reflected by my post on t he two plus two forums.

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Update - Start of week 2

This weekend has been in credibly swingy and provoked a lot of thought so this is going to be quite a philosophical update, please bear with me as my writing skills leave a lot to be desired.

On Friday night I was on fire once again and playing really well which accumulated with 3 final tables finishing 1st, 2nd and 4th and making around $1,400 profit. Things were definitely looking positive and I was really looking forward to getting back on the tables on Saturday night.

Despite the above on Saturday I played awful and ran equally as bad. Sunday I played a few games in the afternoon and entered MTT's with buyin's ranging from $50 - $250. I once again ran and played bad causing me to cut my session short after $500 fell out of my roll. This dramatic turn events did however get me thinking into the reasons why I could play my A-Game on Friday only for me to then revert to my C-Game the very next day.

Mental Games

Although I do feel I ran significantly worse on Saturday & Sunday, I also feel that my play was below average. So what could make such a difference?

- Fatigue - On Friday I finished work and to say I was tired was an understatement... it was one of those day when you have no option but to get as much caffeine in your system as you can just to get you through to 5pm!. Upon returning home there was no chance I could play decent poker in my zombie like state so I opted to take a nap and awoke refreshed and ready to hit the table.

On Saturday I played football in the afternoon from 4pm to around 6pm in the scorching heat and then got home and had dinner and started playing. I was really tired and running around in the heat had really taken it out of me. I got easily frustrated as soon as I started taking bad beats and my play deteriorated from there.

On review, if I had been equally refreshed as I was on Friday when I played Saturday I may have still lost some money but I would have saved myself a lot more due to the fact that I would have been in better control of my emotions and could have rationalised the variance instead of getting frustrated and letting it affect my play.

- Entitlement & Overconfidence - After getting off to a better start than I could have imagined and naturally confidence was high. Confidence is undoubtedly a good attribute if managed and controlled. Unfortunately in my case, my good run gave me too much confidence and I started to think that I was going to crush every table and win every flip. This false sense of entitlement made me tilt when things didn't go my way and is attributed to unrealistic expectations of results.

The second part of this is in relation to bankroll management. In the midst of this weekends sessions I pushed the limits of my bankroll management irresponsibly and with this gamble failing to pay off, it once again gave rise to tilt. This comes back to overconfidence and when "taking shots" doesn't pay off it really affects your motivation to go back to the smaller games to recoup what you lost.

- Distractions - Why is it almost impossible for me to just play poker and not randomly read articles, browse the web and send e-mails? I made quite a few mistakes and missed a few spots due to this "leak" in my game. Sometimes I just play poker and my results are heaps better when I do, so why not do this all the time?? - Imagine the affect it has on your ROI, and if you played for 10 years then how much money would that be!

You might think that this analysis is extreme considering a have a ridiculously small sample size of 40 games since starting this challenge however I believe you should be your own strongest citric and by doing so you can address issues before they become a big problem that destroys your game.

I have now sent my laptop off to be fixed and will be able to 6-10 table once I get it back today.

On Sunday night I was lucky enough to finish 2nd in an MTT and recoup around $450, which came in handy after the losses from earlier in the day. It was a huge relief to finish the weekend on a high note and $1,300 in profit. Unfortunately Sharkscope failed to capture this tournament which is rather annoying as it makes my results harder to keep track of.

Moving Forward

I have decided to invest in a Kindle for my poker study. Firstly backpacking and constantly being on the move makes carrying tons of books impossible and secondly the Kindle versions of most books are a lot cheaper than the paper version. I am really interested in accumulating a massive poker library which will be brilliant for referencing and fitting in study on plane and bus journeys!

I have decided the keep my goal for January at the figure of $3,500 for profit and look forward to putting in greater volume now my laptop is fixed and I can dual screen.

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Staying true to my word I managed to more or less cut out the Internet browsing and invested in a Kindle along with a couple of books. I also managed to get my laptop fixed meaning I could now more than 4 tables at once. Right now I can play 7 tables quite comfortably but I don't think i'll be increasing much on that figure as my play starts to get abit sloppy and I get overwhelmed quite easily.. on the plus side it keeps me concentrating on nothing but poker.

At the end of week 2 I hit a a 20 game streak without making a decent cash which was quite difficult to deal with but I remained confident as I know this is part and parcel of being a MTT player and bigger downswing are almost guaranteed over the course of the year. Thankfully my luck did change and I managed to take down a couple of tournaments to finish week 2 with $3,482 in profit!.

At the start of this week I was as optimistic as ever, I've never had a $3,000 month before and in an effort for the progress to continue. In order to keep myself motivated, I once again increased January's target to $4,500. I had been thinking about my game alot and trying to proactively leak find. I found that I have an issue when I'm in the top 5 players during a tournament and on the same table as the chipleader, I am too willing to gamble big in order to "run over the table" and this is obviously to my detriment!.. both times recently it caused me to bust out of the tournament without cashing when I could have picked better spots vs the medium stacks.. I was so annoyed with myself for busting when making a decent cash was in sight!. To rectify my issue with the above I've spent some time studying ICM and bubble factors to kinda drill into my head the logic behind avoiding the bigger stacks that can make you go bust!

Week 3 got off to a slow start but this was cushioned by implementing a less aggressive bankroll strategy and dropping some of the higher buyin tournaments. I managed to get quite a few games in so far this week.

Here are the results.

Week: 3 of 52
Target Profit for 2012: $25,000
Profit so far: $4,635
Percentage complete: 18.5%
Progress in terms of weeks: 9/52

** Please note that at this point in time that sharkscope has failed to track $1,608 of profit as stated on my post on two plus two - also having issue's with HEM 2 but that graph is the most accurate I can get as of this time.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/174/poker-goals-challenges/travelling-new-year-25k-mtt-challenge-1148326/







The goal for month end is now $6,000 profit - fingers crossed!!

Wow 2011 was crazy... after leaving home (England) in November 2010, I started 2011 with a massive hangover after the legendary Full Moon Party in Koh Phangan, Thailand and promised myself that this is where the hard work starts....

Fast forward to 2012 new years day.. ok 2011 didn't go exactly to plan... my goal of grinding low stakes Hold Em to allow me to live in South East Asia until November fell flat purely due to my lack of discipline in regards to actually playing poker and not partying at every given opportunity. By March I had only made it through Thailand and Laos and blown almost all my cash. I had enough money to get to Vietnam and play online but I couldn't afford a bad month at the tables otherwise I was broke, a case of too little too late. I decided that I needed to get to Australia and get a job to "play it safe" in order to prevent the embarrassment of returning back home after a meagre 5 months away!

All in all 2011 was more a less a write off poker wise. I landed in Melbourne with $150 to my name but was lucky enough to find a job within 2 days and crash with people that I had met in Asia. From there on I just spent my time in Melbourne working and meeting up with people I had met travelling. The job I landed was situated 1 block away from the home of the Aussie Millions - Crowne Casino and I would often rush from my office at lunch and spend 50 minutes at the cash tables each day. I spent four months in Melbourne before booking a flight to Cairns in order to travel the east coast for the rest of my travels. I did leave work early and spent the 2 weeks prior to my flight playing full time $200NL at Crowne - which was an eye-opening and profitable experience!, I was hooked and even pulled a 17 hour session one weekend.. the money was easy but unfortunately my time in Melbourne was coming to an end.

In Cairns I spent 3 months relaxing before running low on funds again (Australia is so expensive!), I was once again looking for a job but Cairns wasn't the place unless you like working in hospitality, so I relocated to Brisbane where I am today. I sporadically played cash and MTT's over this period but due to financial restrains never had a bankroll to make any real cash instead I used this time away from playing to study, analyse my game and think where I was going from here.

December 2011 - With my time in Australia coming to end and no intention of returning to England anytime in the near future, it was time to make plans. Knowing that my visa for Australia was expiring in February 2012 I had spent my time in Brisbane saving cash to continue on my travels. The obvious choice destination wise was New Zealand.. Beautiful landscape, lower cost of living and I could obtain a 2 year visa being a UK citizen however I wanted to leave my visa option open in case I wanted to emigrate there at any point in the future. Canada, USA and South America are all too far are way and the flights are so expensive, so I decided to go back to Thailand and hopefully get to travel the countries I missed like Vietnam, Cambodia and China.

So Thailand 2012! - Flights are booked for the 29th January and I have enrolled on a teaching English course which I believe will become a useful tool for employment as a foresee myself being on the road for a couple of more years yet. I have 1 month before my 4 week course starts when I arrive in Thailand which brings me back to poker and the title of the post being the $25k MTT Challenge.

As stated earlier I took quite a lot of time away from the tables studying and thinking about my game, undoubtedly MTT's have always been my forte over cash games and sng's so once I had a little cash aside in December I made a small deposit with a view to building a roll for when I hit Asia. I decided to play only small stakes MTT's with around a $10 average buy in, with a refreshed outlook and confidence I smashed through the tables on my first few weeks back and cautiously moved up stakes to $15 and then to the $20 and so on.

2012 $25,000 MTT Challenge

Now that it is a new year, I thought it would be interesting to set myself a challenge of making $25,000 from small stakes MTT in 2012 which will help subsidise my travel costs. I will be unemployed for a month in Thailand prior to obtaining my TESOL/TEFL qualification it will give me a good head start as I think that the volume of games played is the main obstacle in achieving this goal. At the moment I have a busted laptop screen and an old school DVI monitor which can only fit 4 tables on screen! So with that, a 38 hour a week job and girlfriend, it doesn't leave me with much time at the moment but solider on I shall!

I'll be playing the challenge over the Pacific and Merge networks and I will be posting the sharkscope results on a weekly basis.

I leave you with a couple of picture from my travels thus far!



Kuang Si - Laos



Luang Prabang - Laos



Big Boobs - Koh Samui - Thailand



Koh Phi Phi - Thailand



Monkey Island - Thailand



Grand Palace - Bangkok



Jim Thompson's House - Bangkok



Sorry I had too!