The Danger Zone

1k tournies

20k cash for funzies

Make top 2k of Pocket 5s leaderboard (currently at 5k)

Buy a Samsung Series 9 with a cashout

Ez game

Started my Feb running deep in some pretty huge tourneys (for me) with big stacks (unusual for me) and bubbled/small cashed all of them. I'm surprisingly not too disappointed, in the past I'd usually just sit right back and slide into the final table with 10bb, busting pretty soon after. Now though I've completely re-tooled my game for late stage tourneys with much better/aggro play which I'm really happy about which will obv sometimes result in some big implosions when I run super bad but result in significantly more high finishes/wins.

Most of these changes came from watching SEABEAST videos on leggopoker. They're a few years old but ridiculously awesome, the best tourney vids I've seen by far. He thinks so deeply about the game, exposing me to just how interesting/situational tournaments can be without unnecessarily overcomplicating things or out levelling himself. For example if it's 1k/2k blinds and there's a 50k stack in the blinds he'll tend to open it to 4885 if he doesn't want a light shove and 5150 if he does as people know 10x is a good re-stealing size so when they see 5xxx they know they're in that range and 4xxx they're not. Obviously he doesn't do this against everyone and all the time, but tiny adaptions like this make perfect sense and I'd think a pretty big difference when you add them all up. He talks about top 3 being "the money that matters" which I think is a really good mentality to have, not so much that you'll just completely spew with 30 left to try and accumulate chips but I always end up thinking "oh if I get 7th that'll be a pretty good day" or something retarded like that.

Also I'm super psyched for the new Samsung Series 9 laptops to be coming out this month, I think it's going to be the best travelling poker playing laptop by far. 15" HD (1600x900) screen in a 14" chasis, super light/thin, SSD, 8gb of RAM, long battery life. I've been waiting forever or macbook airs/ultrabooks to make 15" screens (I find 13" too small to play on) so I'm glad they're finally catching on. Hopefully the Australian release date will be on or near the US one, fingers crossed.

That's all for now, time for UFC and Justified.

(Not including 180s). $5 R/A

 
lolsmallfielddonkaments :(

So I got a sharkscope account, mainly because HEM/PT3 does such a terrible job at tracking tournies for me, and finally worked out how to do one of those funny colour graph things. Around two weeks in and I'm:

Doing ok imo. I need to get in more volume but that shouldn't be a problem now that I'm more used to 9-12 tabling and playing the long hours. It's definitely an interesting ride, I still play pretty poorly in places as I have no idea what to do so either play far too nitty/passive or just spew off chips. I think moving forward I'm going to avoid stars and grind the euro sites. Unsynced breaks totally suck but with smaller fields (mostly <200) and really bad players I think that'll create a winning combination of relatively low variance + high ROI = happy Mitch.

The DC tourney videos have been super solid to learn from, especially jjyykk and IWEARGOGGLES, but I watched a few SEABEAST videos today and it totally blew my mind about how deep you can go into things; betsizing, metagame, ranges etc, etc. Obviously these things won't be very applicable to the stakes I'm playing but now I understand how people can get so hooked on tourneys. Plan moving forward is grind hard (500 games/week), keep on studying and move  up to the midstakes which tbh from what I've seen it doesn't seem like that big of a stretch, compared to say moving from small stakes to midstakes in cash.

Oh btw the 70BI downswing is me trying to 30 table the 180s... lulz. Lesson learnt.

So the last week or so I've been playing tourneys and they're amazing. In ~5 years of playing poker I'd never really given them a chance, just thinking of them as a super simple form of poker, and whilst that's true they're pretty fun and far more lucractive than I expected. Also the rake is relatively low for small stakes, paying only 10+1 or even essentially 20+50c for a $5 2r1a is insane and I wish cash could be more equivalent to this rather than paying 50-150% of your winrate in rake.

Another cool (and in some ways terrible) thing about tourneys is it forces you to get in volume. Because you're hourly is low when you're loading up and finishing off tables sessions need to be long (8 hours+) and for someone who always had trouble getting in volume that's awesome for me. Also I seem to be able to put in 3x as many tourney hours as cash and feel the same tiredness.

So far I've been playing $10-20 freezouts and $5-10r on all the sites (stars, party, 888, ongame, ipoker). A few good scores in the rebuys have given me an ROI of ~80%, obv running super hot. I think for a cash player though you'll crush the early game and deep stuff, especially postflop, and short stack/late game play is pretty easy to work out. I've been watching a lot of jjyykk videos and IWEARGOGGLES. My goal with tourneys is to keep grinding them daily and use this to shoot out of small stakes, playing some cash on the side if I get bored. Eventually I expect I'll switch back to mainly cash, perhaps playing tourneys just on weekends, but for now I've got the tourney bug and I can see it's by far the best way to move up.

So TCOOP is startin tonight and it being my first tournament series is pretty exciting. I don't know how much bigger, juicier the other tourneys will get but I assume it'll be decent. For now I'll only be playing things $55 and lower, trying to sat into some bigger things or hit a big score sometime in the next few days. Living in GMT+8 is like the worst time zone in the world for peak time tourneys, most of the TCOOPs start 10pm - 6am my time so I'm waking up at 8pm like a degen and playing throughout the night. Which in a way is pretty cool.

Oh and the huge ego I have gets to compete in tournament rankings and what not which is super cool. In cash sure you have PTR and stuff but the P5 points system and scoreboard is amazing. Every time I hit a big score I'm probably more happy about the points than the cash and most mornings (or... afternoons...evenings?) I wake up and check how my ranking has changed from last night. Would be cool to be top 100 or get a triple crown one day.

Inspiring for anyone with entrepreneurial spirit (ie. poker players)

I3bet: melanie weisner  playing craps with phil ivey
I3bet: the list goes on and on
Mitch: and we're not talkin dice
I3bet: why are you good at it?
Mitch: at what?
I3bet: craps?
Mitch: yeah im pretty good
Mitch: mostly because of diet though
Mitch: does most of the work tbh
I3bet: how does craps have anything to do with diet
Mitch: it has everything to do with diet
Mitch: eat macdonalds, see what happens
I3bet: you then suck at craps?
I3bet: its a gambling game where you throw dice
I3bet: wtf
Mitch: is that what you call it?
Mitch: whatever makes you feel better about it i guess
Mitch: i think we should just accept it for what it is
I3bet: what is it then?
Mitch: craps
Mitch: do you craps much?
I3bet: ive never played it
Mitch: i think you have
I3bet: no literally ive never playeda casino game in a casino
I3bet: ive played blackjack for like 2 bucks a hand with friends thats it
Mitch: ahh
I3bet: ive only ever played poker at a casino
Mitch: i craps quite a lot
Mitch: well, i think its that most other people dont craps that much
Mitch: so it just seems like i do a lot
Mitch: but in reality its quite normal
I3bet: is it even beatable
Mitch: oh i smash it
Mitch: SMASH IT
I3bet: idk how iveys up like 10 million a year at it
I3bet: you dont even play imo
I3bet: your just being a wanker
Mitch: i do, i craps all the time
Mitch: 2 or 3 times a day sometimes
I3bet: hate you

Well historically I'm not very good at fading 5%ers so not too surprising here.

 
Unfortunately the EV doesn't quite capture the magicalness of KK<AA x4 in the last 1k hands or masterpieces like this...

Party Poker $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 5 players - View hand 1546604
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BB: $30.50
UTG: $372.17
CO: $69.80
Hero (BTN): $143.80
SB: $189.84

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BTN with K K
UTG raises to $3, 1 fold, Hero raises to $9.50, 2 folds, UTG calls $6.50

Flop: ($20.50) Q Q 7(2 players)
UTG checks, Hero bets $12.00, UTG raises to $27.74, Hero calls $15.74

Turn: ($75.98) 4(2 players)
UTG bets $36.49, Hero calls $36.49

River: ($148.96) T(2 players)
UTG bets $72.98, Hero calls $70.07 all in

Final Pot: $289.10
UTG shows T T
Hero mucks K K
UTG wins $286.10
(Rake: $3.00)

So back to 50NL I go which is super lame. Oh well such is life.

Edit: just downloaded Enya discography, I'm going to abide peacefully through my 50nl  trip :)

So I'd been struggling for motivation the last few months since switching back to NL. Beating the games wasn't a problem, I'd been 10bb/100+ over a decent sample but getting in the hands was the trouble. I think it was a combination of the money being so small and the game being so mind-numbling boring that even though I knew logically if I just grinded hard for a few weeks I could blast out it was really hard to put that into practice.

Reading this guys thread, the evplusplus BR blog I did and having to deal with conversations like this daily (we're comparing November results, it's Dec 2):

Ken: only +62
Mitch: wtf play more
Michael: yah i know
Mitch: wait 62?
Mitch: total?
Michael: yah wtf ken
Michael: didnt u take him for 110 in one day?
Mitch: and then 64k yesterday
Ken: oh i thought you meant today
Mitch: lol ffs
Michael: LOLFUBUDDY
Ken: :P
Ken: last month was like
*** Mitch has changed the conversation topic to "Ken's a douche" ***
Michael: 100?
Ken: 260k last month
Michael: wow
Michael: fuck you
Mitch: zzz

... really opened my eyes up to just how much of a difference that extra effort can become when it compounds. Hit with inspiration and a 1.5k BR I decided to take a 5BI shot at 100NL.

I've only been 4 tabling so that's 20 hours so far, and I could be putting in a ton more time but sometimes there's been no good games running when I want to play (getting money on other sites now). The downswing came from having the jesus seat on a 90/0 who would call basically any size preflop and then pot donk 3 streets literally 100% of the time. I knew it was a pretty terrible idea variance wise but I couldn't pass up a spot like that, almost blew up in my face but luckily I've been crushing everyone else so it worked out.

And now against competent regs, and being able to make somewhat decent money, poker is amazing again. I'm really enjoying battling and thinking hard and all that. And strangely enough I think there's more fish at 100NL than 50NL, although the regs are a decent amount better so it negates it a little. Either way I generally have 2-3 fish on each table, games are good. So yeah I'm not up too much but feel pretty in the clear now, EV++ has me at only 5% to drop 12 BIs (down to 1K BR) at this point so hopefully I can fade that and full steam ahead.

Even though I used to play MSNL I was pretty unsure how I'd fair against tougher opponents since I've been at the micros so long but that doesn't seem to be an issue, infact I think I make a lot less mistakes against the 100nl regs than 50 and have a lot better handle on what they're doing and how to manipulate them (although they're making less mistakes themselves). So yeah the plan now is to spread money onto some other sites, get the 40 or 50 hour weeks in and move up to 200 then 400 when I have 30 or 40BIs for the next limit.

I feel pretty stupid for not taking this opportunity earlier, like I'd just been spinning my wheels for 12 months and I think I could have done this any time during that period that I wanted but was either overcautious, under confident or under motivated (well, probably a combination of the three). So now I'm making up for lost time.

Also can't not post this one, Jeb Corliss is insane.