The Big Climb

So ten days have passed in my project and thought I’d leave an update on how it’s been going this far. I made a goal of 200 games a week, and running on the tenth day of my project I’ve played just over 500 games total, with 430 of them being at the 180 bracket. Fulfilling this goal alone has been very satisfying, as I feel my flow 12-15 tabling has been going really well. The motivation is there, and overall I just think I’m doing really good at the moment. I’ve realized that in order to be successful at the 180’s you gotta be more willing to take risks that might seem -EV at the semi late stages as this will help your overall equity drastically later, when everyone (mostly) seems to just wanna climb up the ladder.

I’ve been mixing my usual 2.20 sessions with some 7.70’s and the occasional 3.30+R as my bankroll has gone above the 650 mark. I had some close ups in a couple of them, losing important pots just before the money which would’ve given me a nice shot at cruising into a top spot, but missed out….until tonight, where I managed to run over a 7.70 good for $378.

But as they say—A picture tells more than a thousand words. Graph of my 180 mans so far. Not too bad, huh?

I’ve been having some more close-but-no-cigar spots in the bigger MTTs so nothing really to write about here, although I have lots of complaints about the fish. E.g. tonight, 150ish left of a 3k big field in a $5.5 6-handed donkament. I’d just managed to double up my short stack and sat with an average stack (about 30 BBs) when I get in an all-in confrontation preflop. I bet, fish raises and I reraise him all in. He calls and turns over pocket fives, obviously winning the flip for a top 20 spot.

But what the heck. As long as I’m running super hot in the 180s there are no worries :-)

These are my goals for the next couple of weeks:
- 250 games pr. week
- Continue with the 2.20’s as primary focus until bankroll reaches $2.000 ($1.000 at this moment)
- Mix in as many 7.70’s as possible in my sessions
- When playing, try to register to any turbo tournament running I can afford.

I worked my ass off this weekend off the tables, so having a day off tomorrow. So I can hopefully get play a good amount there.

My two cents for now.

Thought I’d leave an update on the progress of the project and how it’s been going since I started two nights ago. To start with the positive things first, I have more than fulfilled my goal volume wise, as I’ve been home both today and yesterday.

I’ve managed to get in 108 SNGs and 10 big field MTTs during the last two nights and this morning. This is good, and my new setup, cascading 10-15 tables at a time has worked excellently. No time outs and no decisions made due to lack of time or anything like that.

Result wise things have not worked out yet, well honestly they haven’t worked out at all (see the graph below). Seven total cashes, three final tables of which only one has been in a top spot (a second) is not acceptable so far, and it is hopefully not the way things are going to continue, as my ROI at the moment is at a stunning -47%:

Obviously 100 games is not a big sample size looking at such a top heavy game with much variance, but let me say that the tendency is not great, and not something I’m looking lightly at this early in the project. Thus I’ve used some hours analyzing some middle and late game situations to see if/where I could find any small/major leaks in my game. Overall I’m not too disappointed about my game as many my exit hands are as standard as standard gets, but I have found some spots where I find that I’m either being too passive not stealing blinds in late positions with legitimate hands seeing the stack sizes, or simply too loose and maybe a tan too aggressive in my push game when it is obvious that villain has the goods. I’ve also had some unlucky situations coming in with QQ being beat by AQ for the CL 22-23 handed and standard stuff like that. And, surprisingly enough, this doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would have and like it did earlier. After I started cascading the tables it just seems much more important to go on to the next game and focus on the next decision. So in that sense you can claim the “little” downswing has also improved something — if not my game then my mental focus and attitude towards what I’m trying to become: A grinder.

Oh, and as for the MTTs I’m not too afraid either, I have begun to continuously go deeper and deeper, but lacked the last bit required to hit that glorious FT. Take yesterday night where I finished 42/2200 in a 3.3 MTT, or last week when I got 62/2200ish; those were both deep runs, and with the right cards — and play, obviously — in the final phase, that big score is not luring too far away out there I’m sure.

So despite the bad start I’m still as motivated as ever to go out there and make the grind, and play my A-game. Hopefully this turn the graph and make me a winner soon enough.

Good luck at the tables—I’m off for a session more.

Edit: Okay… I must admit I’m experiencing some tilt tendencies at last. Just had another session without any results again, and I can’t at this time stop letting it get to me. I mean WTF? How the heck is this possible? I again ran into a CL pot at 22 players left holding AK to villain’s KK. In another one I was in one of the top spots with 22k stack when my tens get cracked by KT and after that hand I push with my 4k stack and am out in 14th. Zzzzz

Edit2: Woop!! Scoop!! New update: We all know ranting ALWAYS helps, and so I decided – stubborn as I am – that I’d taht another 13 tables. Well guess that was a good Idea, as I just took down two consecutive wins in the same session!

This is how it looks now:

I’m off for bed now, with the stomach feeling on top again ;-)
Good weekend everyone

During my short career at the poker tables on Stars, I’ve tried quite a bit things out. At first I thought I was hooked on the 9 mans, but eventually got bored when I almost had broke even over the course of some hundred games of ‘intense’ grinding as I thought it to be myself. Then I tried some 18/45 man grinding, but didn’t really have the will to outlast the variance or whatever (basically I played 4-5 sessions and decided I was going nowhere with that). I then had a break from poker, god forbid, for about a month and a half, after which I came back with renewed focus and (as I like to think) as a result of that, I made my first real MTT cash for about $950. Not bad for a 2 dollar donkament! I obviously got hooked on MTTs again as a result of that, but wouldn’t believe it to be true when I didn’t cash the following month. I then played some HU, but found them to be going too slowly, and didn’t really wanna practice that format. Then, after getting somewhat tired of poker and the triviality of grinding SNGs I thought that cash games might just be what I should start practicing — and thus I watched a couple of cash videos and thought I was settled for good. Played a few thousand hands at a buyin I couldn’t afford, resulting in a swing too unhealthy for my bankroll. So I decided to quit that as well.

Now you might wonder what the heck I’m doing. Why don’t I just focus on one game, and only that? Well, to be honest I think I’ve just not managed to maintain the optimal focus required to be grinding the same format for weeks or months. I simply got too bored at some point when I didn’t immediately see the results. So I thought I’d better do something to help myself get going again. I have been reading a lot of blogs by real grinders the last week, and that has made me realize that besides wanting to get better and have my bankroll growing steadily, grinding one format is just the way to go. And since I consider myself a decent SNG’er as well as loving MTTs, I am now starting to exclusively grind the 180’s. I know there is a lot of variance in this bracket, but after reading how the real grinders overcome this, I am willing to at least play 1000 games and reevaluate.

So for the weeks and months ahead I will be grinding the 180’s. Since my bankroll currently is around the 400 dollars, the stake I’ll start with will be the 2.2’s. Besides my 2.2 180 grinding I will take the freedom to play a random big field MTT or two, so that the ratio between these will be something like 90/10.

As I also have a part time job to be concerned with, I have set a goal which I think is quite realistic and obtainable, but still requires hard work and does not allow for day breaks from the tables.

Weekly goals:
- 200 180’s at least.
- 5 hours of studying.
- keep the mental focus

In the longer run:
- victory in a big field mtt (by the end of april)
- go from $400 to $2000 allowing me to play $12 180s (by the end of may)
- reach at least 10.000 games played on Pokerstars (by the end of 2010)

Hopefully this should keep me going for a while!

Ps. Should any of you be grinding the 180’s or similar, I am very interested in maybe doing some sweat sessions or some mutual HH review, should anybody feel for it.

So long!

So it’s been a while since my initial blog, and a bunch of games have passed by since then. Basically, I went on a rather big downswing about November- start December which gave me less motivation as to playing the small SNGs and continuing on improving my game. But then something fortunate happened late in December, when I by coincidence found myself boasting through the field of a two-dollar short handed tour. With about 4.000 entrants I managed to get heads up, but seeing it was a turbo and that the blinds were astronomical, I failed to outlast the rather fishy guy I met, losing with my AQ against his Q6 in a preflop confrontation. Nonetheless this was by far my biggest online cash (apprx. 900 dollars), and it gave me renewed motivation and belief in own abilities at the tables. Since then, I’ve been on a bit of a downswing on Pokerstars which is partly a result of little bankroll management and concentration, aswell of the choice of the rather swingy 180-mans — but it isn’t fortunately so bad it has turned things around totally.

On another note, I decided together with a friend who was willing to stake me, to try out the 5-max SNG’s they have running at the euro network Ongame, and I’ve practically been owning those since I started this out the “challenge” this monday. Although not a big sample (soon 200), my bankroll has soon grown to the $400 mark, starting out at 80, in less than a week by grinding only the 5 dollar games. Somehow that format, combined with the extreme softness of the skin, fits me perfectly, and I’m planning on grinding those for a good while. Next week I’m hopefully moving up to the 10-dollar stakes, so I’ll see if the opposition is as soft there.

Oh, and I just had my 20th birthday at the 11th, hurray for me.

My two cents for now, happy New Year to everyone.

Djurhuus

Another new blog, another new poster — and so what?, one might ask. Hopefully the name will equal this posters transition from break-even SNG’er to winning SNG’er, but but now it is just some dreamy unfulfilled title. Honestly this blog is my attempt to keep focus on improving my game, and a way – I hope – to get inputs and critisism on how to get better. Hopefully this blog can become more interesting in time, but for now you will have to bear over with my noviceness as to blogging. Also, you will probably find this my first post abit confusing and not-very-structural. This is an issue I will look into in future posts – but at this point I just need to get something down to have some kind of fundament.

Anyways! To briefly introduce you to myself, I am a 19 year old high school graduate from Denmark (which also explains eventual bad grammar – sorry :-)), taking a year off after having finished high school this summer. I have known poker for little over two years, but started taking it more seriously over the past 3-4 months. Before that I was marginally losing, would randomly deposit 50 bucks on a random site and spew it away playing random micro stakes and games. What I did know from the beginning though, was that tournament poker appealed to me the most, and that’s why i began playing a mix of MTTs and SNGs. In march 09 I read Collin Moshman’s great SNG strategy book, and got even more hooked on getting serious with SNGs hereafter. I feel I’ve had a pretty easy time incoorporating the most basic SNG strategies, ICM fundementals etc. in my game, and by now I have no worries as to 6-tabling in regards to the stress level of having multiple tables opened at once.

As said I feel I know many of the basics of 9-man SNGs and at the same time I think I’m not totally spewing chips off in tournaments. But this blog wasn’t made if I’d just felt everything went as it should, and I had no needs of learning and improving my game.

So where am I right now in my ‘poker career’? Well, back in mid september I started a SNG 9-man project where I deposited 500 dollars to my account and started right off multitabling the $6.5’s. It went tremendously good the first week where I was more than $200 up over the course of like 120 games. At the same time I finished 20th in the battle of the planets leaderboard, and released a $50 bonus. So about 300 up, my confidence was really good – at least at that time. But only for a very short time, as my downswing then hit really hard the following week, me losing more than 150 dollars in SNGs and some 50’s playing tournaments. And it has just been going down since, with a few exceptions, eg. me going really deep in a 5 dollar tournament, finishing 1st in a 2 dollar 180 mands etc. But the really big score didn’t come as the tour I mentioned, I was out just before the final table in 20th place. Anyways that was kinda the peak time and eventually I got pretty tired playing the 9 mans.

What I didn’t realize while on the downswing – or tilt some may say – was that I had some obvious flaws in my game. I did, and have for a long time, been good at the tight-early game that is the general winning strategy, but many times I’ve just been finding myself in spots post flop where it was just so obvious I was beat but I didn’t stop. Also, I think my pushing 6-handed and up has been very critiziable at times, and I’ve often found myself overplay small PPs out of position. But this is just memory stuff, and I don’t have much of the HHs more as my old computer burnt down a little while ago.

Anyways, as it is now I have looked a lot into how I might improve my game and also asked the question to myself, if 9 man SNGs really are what I wanna be grinding. Thus I’ve looked into maybe trying some of the multi table structures such as 18, 45 and 180 mans and found that there is great potential in them. So the latest week I’ve been experimenting a bit as to those but my roll, which is at this point down to 400, has been staying there pretty constantly. The past few days I’ve been watching a few videos of some of the SNG gurus here on the site, and will continue to do so in the future. Especially vandweller, bones and AMT have been great.

To end off this first (very confusing, I know alot might think!) post, I’ll give to you my sharkscope graph although I am not proud of it. Hopefully it will be more positive over the next 1000 games! :) (note: 215 of the minus was from a 215 dollar tour I played after winning a step 4 ticket, so those really shoudln’t be regarded as a “minus”.)

The first graph covers my sole SNG winnings whilst the second also include regular MTTs, satelites etc.

Again, I realize there’s probably alot of things I didn’t cover in my first post here, but this is just some kind of fundament for me, as I will bring some HHs, general and stretegic thoughts, analysis etc. in later posts, but guess this is a start :)

Feel free to post comments, advice or anything else that might appear interesting. I’m humble and open to input and ideas for future posts etc.

So much for now!
Oh, and my name is – as suggested by my very original pokerstars name (runedjurhuus) – Rune Djurhuus :)

See you.