60% of the time it works every time

Have had quite a few past days. Basically left far north for a while, almost got my ass kicked by a black guy and woke up at the PCA. Also had a brief encounter with DC's Vanessa yesterday. Woo, celebrities! 

If you happen to see a guy with the brightest red hair at the Atlantis, feel free to say hello.

So, here I am now, updating my blog after a while. I have been quite busy, I started as a video coach at another site and have been generally quite busy. Last month I had a bet on working hours and I lost that one, I made a promise to include a picture. Promises are meant to be kept, so here it goes.

I got other kind of green as well, I ran very hot last month. Even though I didn't play nearly as many hours as I would have liked to, I got my second best month still. This month on the other hand has been a lot more difficult. Not enough hours and tournament poker variance means that it can get pretty tough.

Failure to plan is to plan for failure. So as I'm on to way to avoid green and hit a great success for October, I figured out about two hours before the month begins that I should have a plan. I've got somewhere to be.

So, what needs to change for the next month. This month I played more Civilization games than poker, which is fun but it doesn't generate any green. No matter how good you are at Civ V. The first step is to play absolutely no Civilization V during October. One more turn... turns into 8 hours too easily. It's a great game, but it's also very addictive. After a game you're thinking about alternative strategies and thinking about different ways to victory, which you need to test, which turns out to take 8 hours tomorrow and the day after that as well.

Second major obstacle to my volume is how much easier it is to be busy doing nothing productive instead of just doing it. I need to be able to begin my sessions faster. SNG Madness was great in a way, because the sessions started at a said time and I could put in some crazy hours during the promo. I'm probably trying to implement something similar for my schedule to keep me from procrastrinating. I need a mental "JUST DO IT"-note. 

Third obstacle was about handling downswings. I got five 4-figure downswings during last month (every time during about 100 tournaments) with average buyin of $21. It's amazing after over 20000 tournaments, how the variance beast can surprise you over and over again. Every time I was going down, I was going to cut the day short and during the next day put in next to no volume. Also the downswings affected my volume in another way, I have had no problems playing when I was winning, but during the frequent downswings I just wanted to do winning days. So I cut those days short as well. Trying to avoid that trap by playing at my comfort zone during the month and play smaller games than I would usually do, but where I have a larger edge.

I will also try to learn a new form of poker, because I use a ton of time playing and studying when I'm learning something new. MTTs would probably be the easiest choice, because they have breaks in the middle and I should be at least borderline profitable in those with my current skills. On the other hand, I have gone to smaller and smaller tables all the time, going from 180->45->18->9->6, so HUSNGs could be a logical progression. HUSNGs are something that's interesting and it would be a lot easier to fit HUSNGs into the daily grind than MTTs, which require a lot more planning. It would probably be insanity trying to do both, so there's some choices to be made.

 

Got the Black Card with the number of the beast. Now there's just a question how much the Black Card is worth? My hopes were up that the exclusive store might feature some better deals and give FTPs some more value. I was hoping it would be closer to Supernova with the cash bonuses, as it's a bit over Supernova with the requirements. I don't know how many Black Card tournaments there will be and how much value do they have, but now I'm disappointed. I'll tell you why.

The cash bonuses are significantly worse deals than tournament tickets. You can get around 7.5% more bang for the FTP with tournament tickets than the largest cash bonus and close to 50% more than the smallest cash bonus. In essence, if you really don't hate tournaments, I don't see any point of using FTPs for cash bonuses unless the prices go down. I would be willing to pay a smaller premium for the no hassle of bonuses, but the price differences are huge.  For me it now means a MTT day once or twice a month where most of my buyins come from FTPs.

Every real item in the exclusive Black Card store is just as overpriced as they are in the regular FTP Store. I mean, get a Porsche by raking 300k at Stars or a BMW for raking 750k at Full Tilt? UK / EU electronics are just bad jokes, 2500€ television for raking 58k (for the same amount of FTPs, you could get 3800€ worth of tournament tickets)? Even the overpriced cash bonuses start to look like good deals right now. 

I did calculate it a bit and for me Black Card is worth about 2.5-3% more "rakeback" with spending it on tournament tickets than I had before. Iron Man Plus was quite worthless, but I still got about 1% more from it that I won't get in the future. Rakeback + Black Card + FTPs equal around 34% now (assuming you purchase Step 3 tickets), then there's some static Iron Man value, some static Black Card tournaments value and some rake race value. I think the total will hover around 40% for me, but it is damn hard to calculate a % because of the static values. As a tournament grinder, I think my rake race value is increased because FTP moves to contributed rake instead of dealt, which should be a blow against some nitty rake machines.  Probably after the next month I'm a bit wiser and can post a better comparison.

Now I'm just hoping to see a Jetblack Card for a larger daily average which would feature some real value and compete against SNE. Black Card with lots of hype and real value of around 2.5% isn't doing it. There are no worthy grinding goals on FTP right now.

I have thought about opening a blog here for a while and now I got the kick as I made a prop bet for the next month. 

My most glaring leak in online poker has been putting in hours - or rather not putting in hours. I'm a quite nice winner over a convincing sample, but by being a lazy bastard, I can't put in the hours to win life changing amounts. So I made a bet with my girlfriend about working hours, where loser is dying hair green for the next month. The one with less hours at the end of the month will lose. 

My chances aren't looking very good, as I have got around 60 hours in during the last months, but it will change. I don't want to have green hair and I really, really, really hate losing. I'm trying to do some weekly updates on my progress with hours and probably blog some of my ideas on increasing the hours. So for October, I'm trying to get as much hours in as possible to avoid this:

If I'm losing this one, I'll post a picture of the end result, but I'm warning you that it's not going to be pretty.