Likey's Blog

Just kidding…

Time for an update on my thoughts throughout this journey thus far:

First of all I have to thank BlackShuck again for persuading me to get into cash games as I’ve been meaning to make a start but kept putting it off. I already put it off a year before after getting robbed by Microgaming/Tusk but that’s another story and is old news.

It has been over 6 months now since I started but the first few months were just me getting used to the idea of grinding. Looking back, putting in several thousand hands per month does not constitute to grinding. During those months I did start off badly as nothing was going my way, I was playing 2-4 tables to get to grips with the game and also trying not to lose my money.

After several months of tiny grinding sessions and by that I meant a pathetic total of 6000 hands in June, 4300 in July and 2600 hands in August, I was still playing MTTs at the time so it wasn’t quite a full transition. My graph didn’t actually start going upwards until after 10,000 hands which was ridiculous. As for MTTs, there was a nice hot streak going for me in August where I won a $10 MTT for $5.2K and several big WCOOP Satellite seats for September. After bubbling the final table of the WCOOP $1K event I felt quite down and totally lost motivation so I stopped playing poker for 4-6 weeks although I can’t remember what I did in that time.

I was literally 2 hours away from being mortgage-free, if that happened I would have been spazzing out – jumping up and down saying ‘Click a Mouse, Win a House’ all day long!

A few people were asking whether I would still bother with cash games as I won a nice lump sum from tournaments but I was determined to make the transition. Towards the end of October I went back onto the $50NL tables and started off much better, admittedly I ran pretty damn good throughout the rest of the month playing 8000 hands. I didn’t really know how good I ran but winning felt good, it gave me motivation to continue so much that I played 32500 hands in November and reached Platinum Status. November was a really tough month as I was up and down like a yoyo but glad I got through that because it was a good learning process, the frustration I got from being in profit and losing it all 2000 hands later was immense, especially when it happened a few times throughout the month.

This month is even worse, I do blame myself for playing too many tables and not studying the game, haven’t watched a video since July/August. Instead, I have been listening to podcasts and experimenting with different lines. Chasing for Supernova this months seems to be costly as I had my biggest swing so far: from being up $500 to being -$1000 so far. I was dabbling with $100NL but have moved back down to $50NL and have even tried mass-tabling $25NL.

My feelings towards the game is towards the negative side at the moment, understandable there will be rough patches but hopefully I’ll be on the good side of that very soon. This is all part of the learning process and it’s good that I am having to deal with it, you can’t learn very much from running good afterall. For a short term goal I just want to get enough VPPs to hit Supernova so it can roll-over for next year otherwise this month would be absolutely pointless, being 3400 VPPs away it’s not that far so it would be good to be done for the weekend but we’ll see. In January I plan to really step up my game and put in a lot more time to improving so I can actually stay on $100NL. Obviously I aim to maintain supernova for the rest of the year – if I get over 200,000 VPPs for 2010 then I would be very pleased!

I also want to add a special thank you to palmer2k6 who gave me a few coaching lessons back in July/August which I found really useful – especially when I made use of the 3/4-betting in the WCOOP $1K event. For cash games however, I still need to perfect this skill as my betsizing is probably a bit off. I look to get more coaching sessions in the future to fix my leaks for $100NL but I’ll see how I get on in the new year with my studies so I know what needs improving that I can’t get via videos.

Lastly I want to thank all those who put in the time to join me in my sweat sessions, hopefully there will be plenty more in the future and keep me chatting. I used to chat a lot but lately I haven’t been speaking much so it’ll be good to get me out of the shell a bit more.

Bradley_w suggests I play MTTs at least once a week because I’ve put all that time to learn it and stopped playing, had no urge to play really but it’s still a very good idea so I’ll plan a (flexible) schedule for next year.

There’s more to say but not sure where to squeeze it in so will leave it for another post, probably at the end of the year.