The Big Climb

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.