PokerTastic

Things have been going fairly decent in every aspect of my life recently. Logged nearly 5k hands of CAP cash games for a decent 4bb/100 ev! Obviously this is unsustainable but i think it is a decent indicator that i’m not a loser in the games and hopefully not breakeven either. Will be more confident once i’ve played over 100k hands but the signs are good for the moment. Mixed a bit of 100nl in as well and the play seemed very similar to 50nl so i can imagine that i will move up fairly quickly.

Before i get carried away i still have to complete my stake but can’t play any 180s until i finish my exams on the 16th as the sessions are too long! Playing 30mins of CAP every so often is good to take my mind off of work believe it or not. The VPPs i’m earning are so alien to me becuase coming from a 180 background you aren’t really earning that much in a day or even in a month. CAP enables me to earn well over 1000 in a day if i put the volume in and i certainly will be doing that over the summer. Gotta try and get myself into a position to make a SNE run next year! I’ll probably do a post after i finish my 180 stake on goals for months and the rest of the year but i’m looking to grasp the opportunity that poker is giving me!

Check out www.jdklinkz.wordpress.com for full post!

I've started up a blog over at www.jdklinkz.wordpress.com which i hope will inspire me over the next months to keep going!
I'll dual post for a while on here and on there to try and drum up some support/friends that i can talk with etc :)
Hope to talk to some guys soon!!

The following is a detailed outline of the BRM I'm hoping will work for me.

Starting BR: $1850

Step 1

• Play $2.50 and $8.00 up to 20 tables at a time. If my roll falls below $1200 then drop the $8.00s from my setup
• Play any MTT turbo i want to up to $6.00. The reason i'm using 300BI for these is the swings and also the lower volume i'm likely to put into the MTTs compared to the 180 mans.

• Add in $3.30R to my setup once my roll is above $2200. At this point i should be loading every $2.50 and $8.00 with the newly added $3.30R mixed equally in. If my roll drops below $1500 then return to step 1.
• Play any MTT turbo up to $10 and rebuy that doesn't total more than $12. 

• Add in $15s once my roll hits $3000 and drop most of the $2.50s from my setup unless i need to keep my hourly up. At this point i hope to be 30 tabling the 180s at least.
• Play any MTT turbo up to $15 and rebuy totalling less than this. Can also sell action to buy into higher events that seem +ev for me to do so.
• Start to improve my MTT reg speed games and include some of these to my daily play with a BI up to $10

• Add in the $35s when i have at least a $6000 roll. Using less than 200BI rule here as i won't be loading many of these per day due to the lack of demand other than peak hours. Drop the $2.50s from my setup completely and solely 30 tabling the 3s, 8s, 15s and 35s.
• Play any MTT up to $50 and sell action on any of the higher weekend majors up to 50%

I'm interested on seeing what people think of this strategy. I know it jumps up $3000 at the end but i feel that i don't want to be playing games JUST because i'm rolled to do so. I'd rather be conservative and sure up my roll instead of having to move down because i tried to move up to fast. In theory i could be on step 3 by the end of the year if i put in the volume and work hard on my game. This would be ideal as I would like to start the year pushing for supernova level and have a game that is profitable and solid!

Big news this week :) i shipped my first MTT last night/this morning. It was the $4.40 turbo 2k gtd, which wasn't a huge field (711 players), but i'm still very happy with it. It was a late night one, so it wasn't a hard field i don't think and it showed in the plays i had to make. I don't think I got my money in more than 3/4 times prior to the final table. I ended up chopping it 3 handed being the chip leader and i got $440 instead of the $520. I did three times as many chips as 3rd place but it was 7am here in the UK and i'd been up for over 30hrs so i didn't want to lose any equity because i made a bad call. 

In terms of my 180s I have managed to break out of my break even stretch and shipped 2 of them last night as well, which meant that I had the best day of poker in my life (taking home $600 on that day). This might not be a lot for most players but considering i had a roll of $1100 at the start of the day, I think i did ok! I also played a few $8s and found them to be very similar to the $2.50s and min cashed in just one of them. I kind of played these whilst under rolled and considering that i could brick 50 of them in a day and lose $400 i packed them in and just continued with the $2.50! Now that i have nearly 250BI for them i think that i will start to add them in again some time this week and hopefully i'll run well in them to buffer out my roll.

Graph of week:

Sick end to the week right??? I had run like SHIT all week in terms of EV and guess it came back to me on saturday. In the MTT we had just got itm and i went all in against someone and got runner runner boat to double up and become chip leader. Lucky but meh :) happens.

Graph for November:

Having a session with the coach tomorrow so i'm hoping that he will agree with me and i can start to play $8s and $3.30R. I'm going to do another post straight after this one which will outline my goals for the next few months from poker. This will mainly be something for me to keep referring to in the future and look back on when i'm crushing (hopefully :P ).

Good luck at the tables DCers :) gratz OMGClayDol on the 2nd series :)

-JD Klinkz

The week started off going very well but variance has caught up with me towards then end of the week when I started to put in a bit more volume. Such is life. I haven't had a chance to get my HH reviewed by my coach yet but I'm hoping that will sort out my game a bit more so I can move up. 

Just gonna keep this short because after the day I've had i just wana get on with it. Sunday is meant to be the day of fishes but I ran like complete shit! Every time i needed to have some deep rungood it never came.

Graph of week:

Graph of month:

Still having a decent month so I'm happy about that. Lets hope that this swing doesn't last too much longer. Gonna play about with SNGwiz and review some of these HH to see if I am still playing optimally or not.

Good luck at the tables guys

-JD Klinkz

FINALLY I CAN PLAY MORE THAN 12 TABLES!!!!!

I decided that I would install windows 7 using bootcamp instead of a virtual machine. This means that i don't have to run both OS X and windows 7 at the same time. Basically, it runs super fast now! I have no more lag or freezing when i play 16 tables. By the end of this week I want to be playing 20 tables and smashing the volume. 

Oh I'm also crushing this week :) you'll all see on Sunday when i post the graph (lets hope i haven't cursed myself)

-JD Klinkz

Well this week has gone pretty damn well! Not because i made HUGE amounts of money, but because something kind of clicked in my mind. After really thinking about ranges in different positions with 5bb and 10bb i've started to understand on a deeper level the ranges that i can call/reshove with. I think that i was iso shoving far too tight both pre and post ante but that has started to change and it is shoving with the results that i have had this week. In fairness i think that i've actually been under cEV if i'm honest, although i'm certainly not going to complain.

My volume this week has been pretty poor really. I went out on friday instead of playing, something that i think is important to keep me fresh for the grind. I intended to play around 1250 games this month but right now i've palyed about 600, so i've either got to beast out a few bigger sessions or add some more tables. At the moment i play 12 tables and i've recently configured my PS3 controller to use with TableNinja and that has made multitabling so much easier. The problem i have now is that i have a MacBook Pro (brag?). People that have a MacBook, or any apple for that matter, knows how difficult it is to multitable with it. I run VMWare vitrual machine and have windows XP piped through that so i can use the windows software for everything. I chose XP because all i use it for is poker and XP runs super fast compared to windows 7 on here. The problem i have now is that at some point during my session it starts to freeze up constantly and i end up missing so many hands. I'm looking to try and get a new desktop for around 400 quid but i don't know if i can justify buying a whole new PC unless i am a PROVEN winner. Want it to last a few years so going to have it with a SSD hard drive and a powerhouse CPU.

So here is my graph for this week:

This is of the month so far:

In other news, I haven't yet got chance to start my coaching which is kind of frustrating but it isn't really any ones fault. Hard work when you are literally on the opposite sides of the globe. I'm hoping that it will get going at some point this week and that it can coincide with the possibility of adding in the $8s into my sessions. If I add them in 50/50 then I would have and ABI of around $5, so using a 200bi BRM scheme i could in theory add them in when I'm at $1000 which I am at right now. I'm going to hold off for the mean time for to reasons. Firstly, i want to be told by my coach that my ranges are good for the most part and that I'm good enough to play the higher limits and secondly, it is a pretty aggro BRM scheme and although i can reload and move down, I'd rather not have to. So I'm hoping that I'll smash some big volume in this next week, maybe around 300 games, and see what my bankroll is saying after this.

Feel free to skype me at daniel..nuttall, I'm more than happy to talk to new people as i want to get a bigger poker friends group because we are cool!

Good luck at the tables guys

-JD Klinkz

Okay so i kinda missed updating last night but that was because i was majorly struggling to catch up with some java work I had to do for this morning (didn't even get it all done). Okay so i'm gonna put up some graphs here of how my month/week has gone. I kinda feel that i have been a little too tight in certain spots and been shoving hella loose from BT and SB, maybe to the point of ruin. I was on the final two tables of a knockout (only $1.30) and had a perfect re-shove stack and i blew it all shoving Q8o BvB against the BB that had me covered. Whilst i kinda think that it was an alright-ish shove, i do think that i could have let this marginal spot go as it was the final two of a MTT.

Also been running hella bad over the past week blah blah blah downswing blah. Don't want to bitch about it because we all know what the swongs are like in the 180s and i have run kinda decently today tbh. Still gotta work on my FT play because i don't think that i am playing well at all and i'm a complete donk once we get short handed. I'v been in the top 3 11 times this month and only won 1 of them :( yeah i know....i suck at life. Im hoping that i will get my first session with OMGClayDol and that we can start to work on my leaks and ranges.

Graph Of Week:

Graph Of Month:

Not such a bad month really but could have been so so much better. Lets hope i can keep this going this week!

See you at the tables everyone! 

Skype: daniel..nuttall

It's been a while since I've written in this blog and it is mainly due to laziness plus a little bit of life. I've started uni again for my last year, so that's been pretty busy for me and october is generally a busy month.

So onto what's been going on. Basically i've lost a bit of enthusiasm for cash games and grinding out such little profits etc etc stuff like that. I've decided to move over to SNG and MTTs. More specifically the 180 tubro SNGs! This decision came about after i played some 45 and 90 man games and i just found them a lot more interesting and engaging than grinding out cash game tables. I just get a lot more of a buzz knowing that I'm on a final table than i do by being on the same tables for hours. I also watched the brilliant series 'The Top 0.56 Percent' by OMGClayDol and thought that the 180s are something that i think i could pick up fairly easily and become successful at. OMGClayDol is going to be my coach too which kicks ass as he is a complete beast at these games and i can't really think of anyone else that i would want to help me crush these games!

I'll post graphs and what not in here at the end of every week (sunday night) and hopefully i'll get a couple of people that read this and join in my journey! My goals haven't changed at all but i do think that $10,000 is way more than achievable and would be kinda upset if that was all i had made come december 2012.

So i'm having quite an intense discussion on 2+2 (thread link here) with a few guys about PokerStars rakeback bonuses and wether it should be included in your winrate.

My personal belief is that you shouldn't be considering it at all. This is based on the fact that, unless you are a pro, then you probably should be more concerned about being an absolute winner at the tables before you are worried about anything else. Now i'm not trying to marginalise rakeback and its importance to your winnings and overall poker game. But i think that micro and small stakes players can use rakeback as something to cover over the leaks and problems with their games because the are 'winning' overall. 
Yes it is always good to be a winner, but should you be playing limits that you aren't winning at in terms of table profits but are once you buy your bonus?

It's part of your income.

Example:
Your rakeback is 4bb/100
Your winrate at 100NL are 1bb/100, or $1/100
Your winrate at 200NL are -1bb/100 or -$2/100
With rakeback, your winrate is 5bb/100 at 100NL and 3bb/100 at 200NL
So you make $5/100 at 100NL and $6/100 at 200NL
Play 200NL
(taken from PitaPita of 2+2)

Now if you are a pro then perhaps playing 200NL is fine because all you are caring about is your hourly and overall profit. But i feel that if you are learning the game and trying to get better then playing 200NL in this situation is a quick way to busto your BR. Your downswings are going to be brutal if you are -1bb/100 compared to if you are +1bb/100 at 100NL.
I'm a believer that you should move up when you have beaten your limit at the tables. Rakeback bonus is a promotion that PokerStars run and can be taken away at any point. This may be a purist kind of view and i'm sure their are plenty of people that will and do disagree with this point of view but i just feel that as a poker player you should be learning to win at the tables and enjoy the 'bonus' you get from rakeback as a supplement, not a requirement.
What is more fun....grinding 100NL for 1bb/100 and getting your rakeback that boosts your BR nicely or grinding 200NL for -1bb/100 and then wainting for your rakeback just to become a winning player? 

Tell me what you guys think about this.

Okay so aside from that i have been away for a little bit, hence not updating here for over a week. I was meant to have a review session with someone but life has got in the way and i haven't even had a chance to talk to him, so i'd like to apologise to him for that!! 
In terms of poker it has been a bit up and down. Tried my chances at 10NL earlier in the week and got crushed again and my BR went back to $250. After that i went back to 5NL and hit a MASSIVE heater and won 10BI in a day got some deposit bonuses out the way and have moved back up to 10NL and seem to be holding my own, WHICH ROCKS. I'm only playing 2 tables of it right now just to get used to it and limit my bankroll exposure. FWIW my BR is currently $350 so i'm defo rolled for 10NL. I'm hoping that i can start to win at 10NL and get grinding harder.

Good luck at the tables guys