Likey's Blog

My motivation and passion for the game is back which is great however I seem to be coming to a crossroads lately with what to do.

On one hand I have a burning desire to improve in cash games mainly because I see it as a consistent way to make money and even more when moving up the levels (hopefully), I would be very content to be beating the top end of SSNL and if I could beat the game at even the bottom end of MSNL for a decent winrate of ~2BB/100 over a large sample each year I’d be a very happy man! I’m a long way from that so I won’t worry too much about that for now.

On the other hand I would like to get back into the tournament scene again, it was how I’ve grown my bankroll and it seems to be where the value is at the moment since the cash games have dried up somewhat. Don’t get me wrong, there is still money to be made in cash games but it takes a lot more work than tournaments I think. I sort of regret not pursuing the tournament path when it was all going well for me in 2009 but I did learn a lot from going down the ring game path too, which I am grateful for despite not winning from it.

For the foreseeable future I have decided to ban myself from watching TV shows, it may seem extreme but so is watching an entire season over a weekend! So enough of the TV show binge, it’s time to use that time for more productive activities like grinding, studying and regular visits to the gym. As a treat, I could watch a movie or two but definitely won’t be watching TV shows for a while.

My router at home seem to have fried recently so whilst waiting for a replacement router I think I’ll be spending more time doing some studies this weekend, I’m out most of Saturday but will try cram some study time when I get home in the evening. What I will also do is just not go on the Internet on certain days or have blocks of time in the evening where I will remain off-line to study so I don’t have distractions. Time seems to go really quickly when I have my Internet browser open and it’s worrying as I don’t feel I’ve done anything productive!

Another thing I’ve noticed about myself is that I don’t take downswings very well, in fact it’s so bad that it completely stops me from wanting to play hence why I stopped for over half a year! I need to work out how to combat this and push on – at the end of the day Time is Money and I need to stop wasting it!

Big oops for 2010 – I planned a big productive year and had high hopes but that didn’t go according to plan. In essence this is what happened…

As mentioned in a previous blog entry, each year I played poker I made more than the previous year in winnings so was hoping that would be the case again for 2010. One of my biggest aims was to grind 300,000 VPPs on Stars starting from May and if it went well do like 600,000 VPPs in 2011 and go for SNE in 2012 (very ambitious I know!). I created a spreadsheet to see how I would do depending on my winrate and was expecting to play at least a million hands this year, even at a modest winrate it was worthwhile.

To help me with this I was debating whether or not to hire a life coach. I was speaking with Wazz about life coaches and he recommended a good one to me so I got in contact and met the guy, the chat went really well but I hadn’t made a decision yet (bankroll nit alert) and said I’d get back to him after my honeymoon. The reason for the life coach was to help with motivation and to keep me on track throughout the year, I’ve always had problems with completing projects that I start so figured this would be a great investment. If I could be cured of this then surely I’d be successful in anything I wanted to pursue providing I put in the hard work and followed it through. He asked me what 3 mini goals I’d like to have for the year and I mentioned poker, keeping fit and studying for IT exams which I think is a good balance as the goals themselves complement each other well.

At the time, I maintained Supernova status but lost that whilst on my honeymoon in the Maldives back in April. I ran good due to the volcanic ash cloud in Iceland as all flights were grounded which meant I got an extra week’s holiday all paid for by British Airways. However, it also meant I lost Supernova so I emailed SteveD whilst I was out there and negotiated a deal to get me back on track for when I got back in the UK. I tried but couldn’t meet the target he proposed so ended up giving up on the mega grind, mainly because I lost Supernova but also because I wasn’t even winning at the tables so felt like I was just being a rakeback pro for the year. So in short – I gave up before I even started.

I took a massive long break of around 7 months where I didn’t play cash, in-between that time I decided to play a few live tournaments at International Club and just chilled, watched loads of TV shows/movies , browsed websites or caught up with friends. Getting away from the Supernova grind definitely felt good as it was like a big weight lifted from my shoulders, the same sort of feeling when you’ve passed all your exams and it’s the end of the semester or something. So for now, I’M A FREE BITCH, BABY!

In hindsight, I should walk before I run because I feel all this grinding has ruined my learning curve as I was essentially being impatient by playing more tables and moving up to stakes that I couldn’t handle. Recently I got the motivation to start playing again and this time I’m looking to work a lot harder on my game than before. You can check out my new journey on EMS forum: Likey 2.0

To conclude, I want to mention that BlackShuck has successfully reached Supernova Elite status for 2010 and this has been an amazing achievement and shows what hard work can do for you. He is a big inspiration to me and his fellow EMSers, hopefully he’ll continue to guide us to where we want to be because he is our biggest hero!

Happy New Year everyone! All the best to all you people who have set goals and challenges for yourselves.

First off, I got engaged near the beginning of 2009 and had our Chinese wedding a few months later. The official wedding is scheduled for around Easter in 2010. Apart from that there wasn’t anything special happening for the first 5 months, all except running bad in tournaments – it was very common for me to reach the last two tables cashing in peanuts for all the hard work.

Since then I had far better results, took down the $20 cubed again in May so I was one away from getting a hat-trick in that tournament. August and September were very successful months for me, as mentioned in my August blog entry I won several seats to play the WCOOP events. I went super deep in the $1050 WCOOP 2-day event finishing 10/3268 which was extremely gutting but winning shy of $20K helped cushion the blow. One of my goals of 2009 was to cash 5 figures in a tournament so I got that one locked.

Here’s a screenshot of my OPR results for August and September 2009:

After that I had to take a really long break from the game to get over it and mid-October I got back to playing cash games again. I made just over $1K profit at the end of the month playing mainly $50NL which was a good start, I calculated that I could reach Supernova star status if I kept pace playing most days so that’s exactly what I did.

In November, I decided to use some of my winnings to have a home office setup, this includes two desks joined together along with two ergonomic chairs for me and Laura. I also built a new PC and got two 24″ Dell monitors to go with it – the whole project wasn’t cheap that’s for sure! Before that I was playing on the coffee table with my laptop whilst sitting on the floor with a cushion – very balla indeed!

There were some rough times ahead but it made me stronger and I have learnt from the experience. I think I’m starting to come out of the dark tunnel now but no doubt another bad run will be inevitable, I just have to ride it out when it comes. Looking back, I was running very bad and not realise I was playing in auto-pilot mode on 8+ tables to get VPPs thus playing bad too.

The good news was that I managed to reach Supernova on New Years Eve but the bad news was that I was down about $750 in December and my game suffered a lot trying to get there.

2009 was a very successful year overall for me, with each year winning more than the last. I can only hope that 2010 will be an even better year – hope it turns out well for you too!

Links:
Likey’s Cash Blog Latest update: 17th Jan 2010.
Likey is in the Well
WCOOP 28: $1050 Day 1
WCOOP 28: $1050 Day 2
WCOOP 28: $1050 Final Table Report by PokerStars Blog
Good luck to a forumite Gutshot Forum – WCOOP $1050 sweat thread.
They even put my table up on the plasma TV for everyone at the club to view that night.

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.

I may have been a bit ambitious saying I would play 10,000 hands this month, so far I have only managed 3500 hands at $50NL and a pathetic 1250 hands at $25NL. I am still finding my feet this month and the lack of volume put in is not a good start, at least I will still be on Platinum Status until the end of next month so all is not lost. I’m just worried that I won’t be able to reach the June bonus as planned, there’s still a week to go so perhaps this is still feasible.

I purchased a geeky piece of software called Holdem Manager last weekend and a lot of players prefer it over PokerTracker so felt I made a good choice. At first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking I were sat at a Bloomberg Terminal but with playing cards – there’s certainly a lot of stats you can record from the players that you come across on the virtual tables but I really need to customise a HUD that works for me so that I can absorb the data instantly.

I have reduced the number of tables from 6-8 to 3-4 because there’s too many numbers on screen as it’s overwhelming and currently a distraction! Hopefully soon all this will become second nature to me and my decisions will be lightning quick so I can bump up the tables again. It was only recently that I could multi-table as many as 8 on my tiny laptop screen, it was to bump up my VPPs to qualify for the May VIP Promo playing Fixed Limit $0.50/$1.00, I got used to it quite well and when I did play the NL tables it wasn’t so bad either.

I did have to install a piece of software called x-mouse to deal with the table overlapping though. This awesome software, brings to the front, the window your mouse is hovering over so that you don’t have to click the table you want. Saving a click each time will save you a lot of time which of course can save you money! I don’t have the URL to hand but I’m sure you can Google it.

The last few weeks have been a roller-coaster, I started off up almost 2 buy-ins then it swung down to almost a 4 buy-in loss and been trying to get out of the hole ever since. I then decided to make yet another change to my game by switching from $50NL Full Ring to 6-max, I must say that Full Ring is so boring because it’s such a tight game, 6max should help my hand reading skills, reads on players and more importantly – improve my aggression.

I finally managed to claw back out of the hole recently and in profit for $1.55 which I am happy with. However, this is still early days evident from the number of hands played but it would appear that I do better in the 6max games. I will continue my journey with cash in 6max and further develop my game in this format via forums, videos and time on the tables.

Despite the lack of hands played, it has been an interesting month on the tables as I am still settling in. Hopefully I’ll have time to increase the volume to at least double next month and not to go below the $0 line ever again.

Bring on the uphill graphs!