I have been trying for awhile now to get back into a routine. I can remember trying to set a standard for myself to play 20 nights in a month which is basically 4-5 days per week. The last 3 months I have had so many issues trying to do this for a bunch of reasons. The biggest reason has really just been trying to enjoy the summer and our cottage. We renovated our cottage over the winter and basically transformed it into a lakehouse, we spent a lot of time setting it up and have been there most weekends.

Also occupying a lot of my time has been my older son's soccer team, I promised myself I would not try to control the team and be the manager so I settled for an assistant manager role but still ended up going to pretty much every practice and of course every game. Lastly I celebrated my 40th birthday this summer and it seemed like we celebrated for 3 straight weeks. The highlight was definitely having a big party at the cottage where we drank like we were in high school for 48 hours.

I have also been doing a lot of private coaching and started group coaching over the summer which has worked out very well. I had said at one point I didn't want to have more than 4 students and I am now up to 8 but I like it so much everytime someone asks me I do not like saying no. Hopefully when September hits I can get into a better routine between coaching and playing and I can get some decent volume in.

Lastly I can't say no to open faced Chinese poker which seems to keep happening. This game is so much fun and my degenerate friends have introduced wild cards, magic cards (used in bonus it pays double) and the death card (you have to use this card in a bonus or your hand is dead). In September I am going to curb my addiction and stick to coaching, videos and playing online.

I finally seemed to turn it around in August and had a winning month after my biggest drought in 4 years. I hope to keep it going with a lot of momentum into September. Next time I blog it should be about playing poker and not trying to play poker!

May 2012 will go down as a total blur. I had a very small profit in tourneys but spent almost all of my free time getting our new cottage ready. It seemed like all of our energies over the winter were into getting ready for when we opened the cottage. We spent almost every weekend at the cottage in May which made getting volume in very difficult however I still tried to play as much as I could. A small profit is always better than a loss although mentally sometimes I have found it tough to get up the desire to play when it feels like the wins are few and far between.

Rather than worry so much about how much volume I am getting in, I have tried to focus on making really good decisions when I play. One of the things that I have tried to use to help me do that is PL8 MTTs which I find really help you on playing proper position and reading flops and board textures. I had a couple of scores the same night I played these O8 tourneys so I have continued to play these to try to get some volume in.

I have also been experimenting with some other forms of poker like 6 max hypers. These seem to be nothing more than life tilting to me although I think if I focused on them, I can make them work. The problem for me is they just don't seem fun because to be profitable you need about 15-20 going which means you rarely if ever see what happened in them during your allins. They seem like such a roller coaster however the majority of the players make several fundamental errors which means the game is beatable.

My private coaching has been a bit of a revolving door as I had 2 really good students drop out because they couldn't dedicate enough time to practice so they did not want to continue however I picked up another new student also from the UK. I feel like I am doing a great job getting ready for the next Austin Powers movie listening to these awesome accents. I have some really good ideas to change my private coaching sessions into something a bit different. I am excited to try it out soon just need a couple of more students to get it going the way I think it will work preferably from the UK or around that time zone.

That brings me to my next brag about MWCON1. Martin who is a really great guy has been my student for about 3 months or so. The last time I blogged was about him getting a 6k+ score. His biggest lifetime score on stars was $278 before I started coaching him. I have to say he did all the work as all I did was point him into the right direction. Even after his 6k score he still took out sessions seriously. I coached him again this morning and tonight railed and watched him make another FT in the same tourney as last time this time chopping heads up for $9k. Basically Martin has about $15k in profit after pretty much breaking even before this. Martin's success makes me very excited about coaching more and I can't wait to take on more students.

My 40th birthday is fast approaching, it seems like it will be here so quickly but I am not giving in and hope to continue to improve this year's results no matter how far off target I am for now. I hope to blog some more in June hopefully about some really big wins of my own!

April 2012 was non eventful losing month for me at the tables. I guess the biggest positive I can take out of it is mentally I think I feel ok about it. Usually constant losing for a month really gets into my head but this month I did not think about it much. I still think my Q2 goal is very attainable and I am working hard to get there.

One thing I was guilty of was not putting in enough volume. I always tell people who ask how to get better or improve results that they should play more. I believe that playing more often and more tourneys gives you more of a chance to beat variance by getting enough chances at a score. There were a lot of reasons I did not get volume in but mostly was the Ottawa Senators playoff run. I watched every game with our 12 year old son. My fondest memories of my pre-teens was watching hockey with my father who passed away in 2001. Nothing reminded me more of being a kid than watching hockey with my boy who did not leave my side for any of the games. We even went to game 6 together and lost our voices cheering our hearts out.

By now you are probably wondering what the heck is up with my title of this blog when I was a losing player in April and I cheered for a hockey team that lost. Well what I have not mentioned yet was my month as a poker coach. As I mentioned before I started private coaching about 4 months ago. I felt like I was making good progress before this month and I had worked out a style that could be successful as it has worked for me so many times coaching other things in the workplace. The method was all about ownership from the student and action plans that were easily attainable before we met again.

Things seemed to be working and by the last few days of the month I had 2 players turn a 1k profit for April which is very respectable for Small Stakes MTTs. Then it happened, on Sunday April 29th I had a session with a player I am sure you will hear lots about. We were in our 5th session and this student really seemed to be clicking on his own play and picking up on some really small things I had pointed out that could make some significant changes to his game. It seemed like real minor adjustments but it kind of felt like he was really catching on by the end.

Fast forward about 12 hours later and he sends me an email to look him up on stars. About 15 mins after our session he started to play the bigger 8.80 which had over 10000 runners and he was at the FT with a chance at a significant payout. After a lot of back and forth he took down a serious chop score of about $6800. I have to say that since I started playing poker this was one of the best feelings I have ever had and it rivaled some of my own big scores as far as sense of achievement. I really felt like I could be a good poker coach even though I had coached for awhile without any kind of quantitative results it is just speculation until my students actually get results.

So even though as a player April was a fail, as a coach April was a huge success. With our newly renovated cottage opening in May I really hope this month is great both as a coach and a player. I hope to update later on in the month on my progress.

It's been a good few weeks poker wise. Not that have many big scores to show for it but I feel like that decent to big win is coming soon. Whenever I can get into a good rhythm of playing I find I kind of find a groove and the decisions I make at the table get much better. I also have this well played theory (for anyone that will listen to me) that winning MTTs is about volume that you need to play as many as you can as often as you can to show profit. I am squeaking out some small profits to keep my roll afloat and keep me from feeling like the next win is not coming. I am sure its coming just need to keep playing until it comes.

Also during March I am very happy with how my videos and coaching have gone. I release the end of my bigger 27.50 series and the video that came out today was a live video I did commentary on the actual play. The result of the FT was bad but I thought the video turned out well. I also picked up 3 new students during March which was best month so far since I started coaching. I find it's getting much easier with how I approach coaching and I really look forward to each session.

The Micromillions Main Event got me to play Sunday afternoon this week. I had enough fpps to buy into the Sunday Million too so I kind of went crazy and played almost everything from 1:30pm to about 5pm. My PC has been lagging a lot so I had to watch how many tables I opened. I didn't really run deep in anything but the million which I felt really good in but ran out of steam and ended up short. Finally with 13bbs I got KK in the cut-off. There was an MP open and shove from the hijack for 24bbs, I called, and then the button called. The original raiser folded and showed AK and I was up against JJ and AK. By the river I was drawing dead as a jack hit the flop. I was still happy with my performance and I definitely want to play it again soon. The fields on Sundays just amaze me and the poker feels even softer than pre-black Friday.

Tomorrow is kind of a dark day lol. I have 2 really great friends that I have been friends with since 1986. We were all born in 1972 and the first guy is turning 40 tomorrow. We are going out to celebrate because you are supposed to but I can't figure out where the time went and how I can possibly be turning 40 this year. I feel more like 30+10. I still have a few months to worry about it and for tomorrow I can bug my friend and being really old.

I say this at the end of every blog but I hope to be blogging about a big score soon!

So I had told myself I was going to blog at least twice a month then somehow the same thing happened and I had hard time keeping up. Just seems this year has been flying by.

I haven't really broke free yet this year still kind of inching along not being able to piece together good nights. I would love to have a great excuse like I am not playing enough or been short on time. Truth is I have been playing like crap and having a difficult time putting my finger on what the issue is. The problem I have with my style is when it works it looks great, when it doesn't work; it's a bit of a mess.

I think one of my biggest issues is just calling off too light and not folding enough when I should be. Either I get too caught up in trying to win a particular hand or I just don't want to fold when I have some showdown value and I think I could be good. The strangest thing is I am around even on the month even though I feel like I am in my biggest downswing since last year at this time. I am pretty determined to get through this latest downswing by staying positive and keep playing as much as I can.

It has been a little bit tough to put in volume it always seems like something comes up that seems better than playing. I usually do better when I can string 3-4 sessions in a row but it also isn't easy to pull that off sometimes.

I managed to make it to the Hull Casino to play the Thursday tourney last week. The funny thing is, I have never played live poker there in the 3 years since they have had it. A friend asked me last minute if I would go and even though my first reaction was to say no, I have begun to realize that if I never go out anywhere I am never going to know what the outside of my house looks like. I had a good time at the tourney, I am not a big fan of not coming home after work but it's difficult to make it to the tourney if I don't come home so we went for dinner than the tourney. The structure was fast and fun; I couldn't accumulate any chips but had a lot of fun shoving when it came time. I ended up losing vs. my friend in a huge 3 way all-in with 77, he had 88 and the bb had QQ. The board was J87xx so we had a lot of fun with that one.

Other than poker I am getting pretty excited for our cottage which we basically have torn down and rebuilt into a house. It started as a wider door for the bathroom and one thing led to another lol. Its looking like it will be ready in Mid May and we are really excited. Besides the cottage I am also really anxious for the Sens playoff run to start looking like they will be in tough stuck with Boston in the first round but still not bad for a team picked to finish last.

That is all for now....hoping to write about some big wins before the end of March!

On my quest to blog 2-3 times a month I have not done that well since I did not do it in February and it's only the 2nd month in. To say we had a lot of stuff go on would be an understatement but lets just say poker and blogging sunk really low on the priority list to the point where it was non existent and not important. I managed 6 sessions in February and turned a very very small profit but I feel like I made some good progress.

March has started ok, I have had some close calls and small profits and I managed to play 3 nights in a row so far even though 1 counted in February.

I will be taking a break for the weekend for our epic home game for zachjackmom's birthday should be a good time. I am hoping to get back into the grind again and settle into some kind of routine. Watching the Sens has gotten pretty much more exciting than I can ever remember so I have been enjoying doing that while grinding.

Coaching is going really well too as I now have 3 active students. I look forward to doing that almost more than playing sometimes because it is fun following progress on different students. I also find I learn a lot when I am breaking down hands and different hands and different situations. One of my students spent last weekend at Macau playing live so he wants to discuss live play which should be fun.

I have also had my favourite video series come out this month which was video of me shipping the bigger 27.50 on New Year's Day. Part 3 comes out next week and it was a lot of fun to do. I did another video that has not come out yet but it is live video of me playing and giving commentary as I was playing in a tourney I ended up fting. I taped over 2 hours of it and edited it to about an hour but some of it is really really funny and good video too I think.

I will be back again in March hopefully to talk about some sick wins lol.

I had promised to update my blog at least twice a month and I did not get around to updating before we left on vacation. Before we left I somehow only managed to get in 3 sessions which means 16 days into the shortest month I have put in a total of 3 sessions however it's been a busy time at home and work and I was away for 5 days so I am not going to beat myself up about it.

Coaching seems to going really well lately and I still get lots of inquiries into helping people which is really enjoyable for me.

Vegas was well Vegas lol! I am truly blessed as everyone knows, I am sure a lot of guys head to Vegas with their wife and moan and groan that she will keep them from playing poker, random gambling and drinking and we basically spent 5 days living the life, random gambling and playing poker. Simply put I can't believe how lucky I am that my spouse loves to do the things I do and when in Vegas we have a great time.

Everyone was bugging me about shipping something on this trip but it didn't work out. The schedules for the tourneys made it really tough to put in any volume. I wanted to try to play at least one deepstack event at the Venetian and even ran a bap for the $1070 buy-in in the Sunday tourney. I was really pumped to play it and skipped the Saturday tourney which I was going to have to late reg for anyway to do some cheesecake factory and forum shops shopping. I woke up early on Sunday and decided to check out the structure and realized the tourney was a 3 day event. It boggles my mind how difficult they have made these Venetian tourneys for the random average bad player to play because they don't have 3 days to tie up in a tourney. The best tourneys in Vegas to me are the 9-10 hour tourneys that end the same day. I think the better players doing better in a deep structure is a fallacy. If you know what you are doing you have an edge in any structure.

I opted to play the $350 buy-in at Caesars on Sunday and this was a total donkfest. Seriously I am pretty sure I was in the twilight zone. Literally I saw more fundamental terrible play than I have ever seen. Just when I thought someone was good they would limp call a 6x then call of their stack with a 73s on a paired board on a flush draw. There were about 120 runners and I went on a pretty sick run having two players bluff me for their stack in spots they would be crushed if called. I then went on a terrible run making hands like KxTc on an AcQc7cJs4h board to Kc9c, then lost a bunch of my stack with JJ on a 6622 board vs someone whose range including quads the .0001% of the time they have me beat. When they snap called with 66 to my turn shove it was depressing. I blinded down to 10bbs then 8bbs when it was 8 minutes from an hour dinner break. I was ready to get it in with anything when I picked up Ak and was called by 66 and lost the flip.

Sunday night was more random gambling and drinking. We ate at the sushi restaurant at Encore which was great. We love the staff at the Wynn casino and it's the biggest reason we keep going back there.

Monday we planned to play the daily tourney at the Wynn again together and it was supposed to start at noon, when we got there at 11:55 they had less than one table set up. We decided to pass and walked to the Palazzo for lunch and to play the $150 bounty heads-up tourney. I actually had to re-enter this tourney which cost me $300. Although I am probably the exception anyone who doesn't like re-entries is crazy in my opinion. The amount of people busting and rebuying was great and it kept juicing the prize pool. I lost a bunch of chips calling 3b with pocket pairs and missing when I was down around half my stack I opened with AsQs and ran into a regular Vegas fish tourney pro that flatted my raise on the button with 52s on a 2sTs2x board. I bricked out and rebought.

I kind of blew most of my second stack and was down to half stack again but somehow I managed to scratch and claw myself down to 33rd place out of about 120. I felt really good at my table draw as we got deep, these players were really easy to play against but I could not accumulate and found myself with 10bbs a lot. I shoved with 44 and ran into AA and still wasn't even out. I was kind of upset with myself; I had the choice of shoving 94o where I had fold equity utg or ending up in the blinds where I felt very committed. This really tight older guy opened to 8k at the 1/2k/200 level and I had 2k in and only 5500 back. I looked down and KQ and really didn't want to get it but finally made the crying call. I didn't like calling because this guy never 4xd but somehow I talked myself into thinking it was TT or JJ. Villain shows KK and I am crushed and out.

That was all the poker I played, I really hope to play more live poker this year, I really enjoy it but play so much online I don't get out enough. Monday night we went to Stratta and then the tables again and we had a great time again, a little too great lol Tuesday was rough.

We finished off our last night again with Stratta and Elton John live in concert. Elton was an amazing performance and yes go ahead and make fun of me for being old however I was min 10 years below the avg age in that concert. We came home on the red eye today and somehow I managed to end up at work for the afternoon.

That is all I have for now, hoping to blog some good stuff this month!!

January 2012 turned out great for me at the tables. At one point my profit was over 9k for the month but I declined a bit back under 9k slightly after a few bad nights to end the month. January seemed so hot and cold for me. Even though it was such a fantastic month it seemed that all the profit came from a few tourneys however part of the reason I think I have done well is I don't over analyze, I had a great month enough said why worry about how it ended! I ended up playing 20 of 31 days in January which I am very pleased with. 20 days is usually my target and if I can somehow keep that up for the year it should be a great year!


I am looking forward to February as I have picked up a few students coaching and I feel like its going really well with them. One of the students shipped one of the first tourneys he played after I met with him. He was all-in 3 times in the first 9 hands so he really took my suggestions about being more aggressive to heart lol. February is also our trip to Vegas which we have postponed a few times, I really can't wait we went in August and it was a great time. Shipping 12k obviously helps but we were having a great time before that even happened.


Hopefully my 3 part video series on the Bigger 27.50 will also all be released during February. I felt very good about this video series and I finally had 7 hours of footage taped in a tourney I shipped. I feel like I have developed a following on my videos and I think those who see this series will be very happy.

This blog is pretty short and sweet tonight's session was very short and I am off to bed as it is the end of the month which is when it gets super busy in my real job. Can't wait for the weekend!

The last 2 weeks have been a total roller coaster....After instantly being up 6k on New Year's Day I went on a big downswing (about 2k). 2k is a big swing for me because since Black Friday I only spend about $150-180 per night on MTTs. To lose 2k in 2 weeks I have to run pretty bad. I have not had any major wins but lots of small ones and deep cashes and tonight I broke the 8k profit for the month which doesn't seem that exciting since I started off so hot but I really turned stuff around after 6k profit turned into 4k profit after 2 weeks.

I did some coaching as well which really helps me stay focused as I remind myself about how to deal with situations I come across endlessly. I find sometimes I get lazy and don't do the fundamentals like I should. When I coach I find myself explaining things that I do usually without thinking and it helps remind me of things I am probably missing.

My last 2 sessions have felt like I couldn't miss and felt like I ran super hot. I busted deep in the TCOOP #13 tonight 89th for $300. Considering this thing pays $36k for first, I was really hoping for a deep run. I lost a huge 30bb pot (in these turbos 30bbs is huge) with AK vs. AQ and 33. The board ran AxxxQ. I stayed in and battled back but could win so many miracle flips. I also started at 630pm tonight which I never do because I rarely can or want to start that early. It felt great to get in so many tourneys; I had 15+ tourneys running for almost 2 hours which is something I haven't been able to do since before black friday.

I am also pretty happy that I have played a lot of sessions this month, playing 12 of 21 nights which is pretty good. I can remember making goals to play 20 of 30 (31) days in a month but I haven't really been putting that kind of pressure on myself in recent months. Its helped the weather has sucked and no one wants to go outside. I am probably not going to play as much in February so it's good to get the volume in now.

I bought myself and Zac tickets to the NHL All Star Game next weekend. I really haven't been this into hockey since before poker. I actually got into poker because of the NHL strike but I used to be a huge NHL fan and Sens fan. The 2011-12 Sens have made it really easy to get back into them since they have been so exciting with lots of close games and surprisingly great record. The only crappy part is they 1-5 when I have been to the game. I don't get why that is but I have not been to 6 games in a season since before my kids were born and they basically lose every time I go....they have made up for it because they seem undefeated when I watch on TV.

I don't have much else to report on but I promised myself I would blog 2-3 times each month so here it is, hope to talk to everyone before Vegas!

It's been at least 3-4 years since I have blogged on a regular basis. I mostly stopped because I felt like I didn't have the time and people didn't really care what I had to say. I still don't have the time and still don't feel like I have much to say but I am starting again in 2012 for a bunch of different reasons.

The biggest reason is I feel like blogging and talking about poker is what made me very successful in the first place. I got into poker different than most in that when the poker boom hit in 2003 I was already 31. I didn't get into playing right away and was mostly a home game player until I really started to excel online sometime in 2007. Even in 2007 the wins online were in lower stakes but I had a heck of a time doing it and put the time in to keep improving. In 2010 things kind of changed where I went on a run for 9 months where I was making more money playing than working while at the same time keeping a full time job. Even in 2010 when I was doing so well poker was still fun to me, lots of fun and I really enjoyed the rush of playing.

2011 was a very strange year not just for me but the whole poker world. It started out for me great, January - February I kept up the same pace I did in 2010 and was hoping I could top the 50k profit from the previous year. Sometime in March things kind of went south and the downswing started even though March showed a small profit. Once April hit, it kind of felt like everything was falling apart and then April 15 things changed forever. Enough was written about Black Friday, I don't need to say more, I consider myself very lucky. I had just signed the Cardrunners deal and I thought I might lose that. Cardrunners has been great and they really know how to keep this product fresh before and after Black Friday. I was able to keep playing on stars (one of the benefits of being Canadian). I also somehow managed to cash out every penny I had out of FTP before it went under.

After black Friday and into May, I couldn't even buy a win; it felt like nothing went right. I took breaks, played everyday, watched videos, ignored poker and no matter what nothing seemed to go right. I tried to stay positive but it seemed like the game changed so much and I couldn't adjust.

Then the first day of June hit and I won the shrunken $3r for a good score making up all my losses for the past 2 months. I felt like that was my ticket back to success and I kind of ran with it turning over $9k profit in June and July. The summer is always a difficult time to put volume in as we are running to the cottage alot and even though we have internet there, I never play there.

Onto August and a trip to Vegas for our 15th anniversary which was a great time while there I played 3 mtts and shipped 2 for over 13k in profit. I didn't play cash or anything else but felt like for the first time in a long time I was ready for a break on an up note. I didn't play again in the month of August until the last couple of days of the month.

September was another losing month which made 3 for the year; I didn't really worry too much about it since I had been on such a good run. October and November showed a very small profit which as always is better than a loss; I felt good going into December. I had some good scores at the beginning of December and played the huge Sunday Million with the 12m in prize money without success. December ended with microscopic profit however I barely played during the month as we were super busy in December with the holidays and parties, travel etc.

I don't feel like 2011 was a fail for one it brought me Cardrunners, for 2 I still had a good profit ($17k plus about $12k live). I also restored a lot of my love for live poker which had basically disappeared in 2010.

I am very excited for 2012; it's already started off great with my biggest online score since before black Friday on New Year's Day. I have said this before but I am no doubt one of the luckiest guys alive. My wife is super supportive of what I do and she does everything she can to help me be successful at work and poker. I am really hoping to spend more time in 2012 getting better as still feel like I have a lot of spots of my game that need improvement.

I am going to try to blog at least twice a month but hopefully no less than once just to talk about how things have been going and where I hope they will go.