Putting in a lot of hands

Since I've started this WSOP for free promo on Paddy Power I've 12k hands in 6 days which is a hell of a lot for me, about 3 times as much as I usually play in that time. Worst thing is I really don't have the time to play all these hands, Looking at HEM it has taking me 18.5 hours to play this many which works out at a measly $18/hour in winnings which is much much lower than what I normally make when I would be playing heads up or when I am playing less tables. I'm finding it really tough to play so make the best decisions all the time when I have so many tables on the go. At the end of the promo if I could make over $50/hour I guess I would take that.

It's pretty tough going as I am getting up an hour earlier each day to play before I go to work and then play for another hour in the evening (Dedication FTW). With me starting to get more into golf there really is not enough hours in the day at the moment. I really could do with a 26 hour day I reckon!!! Overall though I am 12% of the way there now with 12% of the time gone. I would like to play about 3.5k hands per day at the weekend and 6k hands over the week which would make 13k hands a week and should get me there with a day or two to spare.

I booked my flights to Vegas for the 30th of June to 15th July the other night for €550 which was a pretty good price. I am flying out that day with 2 friends so should make the trip much better, starting to look forward to it already.

March/April and Irish Open

March was a fantastic month for me in poker. I had my biggest winning month by far in cash games winning over $9k but lost about €1k in tournaments trying to qualify for the Irish Open. I went deep in a few satellites for it but in the end I bought in and sold off some % to a few different people through IrishPokerBoards.com. In March I showed a lot of discipline in game selection and playing at times when I was really focused and determined to play.

April of course was the downfall of me, I was pretty cocky and confident that I was beating the games really well and not paying much attention to good games and generally squeezing poker in when I didn't really have time to play. Like maybe I had planned to go to the cinema at 8pm and I would sit down at 7pm and say I can fit 30mins in here now and would end up losing a $1k and going off to the cinema then in a rush and down a nice bit of money which ain't great for your humor but loses like this don't affect me too much but in cases like this they are avoidable which is probably what makes them more annoying.

So as I said before I played the Irish Open. I was really looking forward to playing this from the minute I had decided to buyin as I have been dreaming of playing this tournament for the last 4 years and especically after being conned out of a ticket last year. The tournament itself was a €3.5k buying with 10k starting chips which to be honest is not good enough for the buyin. I've played much better structured tournaments before with buyins of about a 1/4 of the Irish Open and considering I am much better at playing with deep stacks in these games I was a bit disappointed and even more so when I had only a 1/4 of my starting stack by the first break after having to fold top house which was basically AA in my hand on a QQ8KQ board. This hand has probably bugged me since but after chatting to a few different people I think I played the hand optimally.

During the game this hand kinda had me on tilt as I didn't get to see his cards and it was bugging the hell out of me whether this guy was capable of pulling off an outrageous bluff there. After the break I nitted it up so much and managed to get my stack back up to about 8.5k for the dinner break. I then managed to get my stack up to about 16k and with half an hour to go I see AK in early position and get 3bet by an young active foreign player and we get it allin and I lose to his JJ. Afterwards I wasn't too disappointed as I felt I played really well over the day and after making a mistake or 2 before the first break I recovered pretty well to give my chance of having an average stack going into Day 2 but I lost the race and that was that.

Last Sunday I played a few online tournaments as I was doing really terrible at cash games and just losing $500+ every session I played so decided that I would try some tournaments instead which turned out to be a great move. I entered the $100 buyin $30k guaranteed on ipoker and beat 302 players after a gruelling 8 hours play to finish first for a cool $7878 which put the month back on track.

During the week I seen an offer Paddy Power have of sending players to the WSOP when you rake a certain amount (~$9k) so I am going to give that a go. It's going to be extremely tough for me to manage this as I don't usually play more than 20-25k hands in a month and this requires about 90k hands in 2months so I will have to up the number of tables and hours this month if I am to succeed. Hopefully I will get a chance to update on my progress on this more often as its a pretty big challenge for me to play that amount of hands but its probably my best chance of going over for the WSOP, bare in mind its only a $1k entry but it also covers an hotel for a week and flights and I would try a few super sats for the main event while I am there unless I win the bracelet in the side event.

Getting out of it

Still in the midst of my worst ever downswing in cash games but I am about about half way out of the $14k that has troubled me for about the last 4-5 months. Have been really picky with game selection in the last month which has no doubt helped me win at the rate I currently am. I've been playing as little tables as I can, often only 2 6max at times but I could have up to 10 open in the background waiting for people to sit with me at HU tables from 100nl up to 400nl. I would basically play anyone at 100nl HU no matter how good they are on PTR but at 200nl and 400nl I am not going to be playng someone that I don't think I have a decent edge on.

Hopefully as my bankroll grows I will be able to play anyone at 200nl and be less selective at 400nl as even though I have been playing fish mainly at this level I have managed to lose over $1k at this game alone. But this is really nothing as its not even 3buyins which is just nothing at HU but my point is that its a lot for me and the less edge I have on someone the more chance I have of losing buyins!! But at 100nl its good to play stronger players as it improves your game as there are much less fish as you move up the stakes and inevitably you meet better and tougher opponents so I need to be able to hold my own against these types.

Heading over to Liverpool tomorrow, staying there Saturday night before I get the train to Manchester in the morning for my first game at Old Trafford. Really looking forward to the match vs Fulham as I have wanted to see a Man Utd game since I was about 7 or 8. So hopefully Rooney will continue his form and actually plays on Sunday and United can stay top for the rest of the season now :)

Overdue update

Havn't updated in a long time as I have been on the worst run of my life up until the last 2 weeks I guess. Things turned around for me last weekend when I came first in a tournament for $3900 and I won some money in cash games for a change as well as collecting some rakeback and bonus ended up making this one of my most profitable months ever.

Have been up until now playing in tournaments, played about 10 tonight. Most went really bad apart from 2 on ipoker were I was going well in the Irish Open supersat until I shoved allin with A8o for a lot of chips only to get a very relucatant call from QQ. Then in the 250k guarantee I was going really well with about 65 people left and I was over the average chips but my 99 could not hold vs A8 which crippled me, would have moved into the top 10 in chips had a club not fell on the river. Ended up cashing for $1k in that.

Also played a load of other tournaments but probably broke even at the end of them. So after things going well in the last 2 weeks my bankroll has got a considerable boost and I am back in the green for the year now so hopefully onwards and upwards from here on now. With WSOP coming up in July, I would really love to be able to go back again this year so have a lot of hard work and some luck needed before July.

2010

So first of all Happy New Year to all my readers. Just got back into poker today for the first time this year. Was away sking for the last week so haven't played any poker in the last 11 days which was a nice break away from the game. Saying that though I have been looking forward to getting back into it after the break off and hopefully will be refreshed and will get back playing better than before. Things got of to a winning start in the short sessions I played today which is exactly what I wanted. Got some heads up action against a regular and destroyed him so that was a confidence booster. Won about $300 from him before he quit me and also played a couple of hands against a few other guys before they went bust/quit. I am well set up this year bankroll wise now after finishing 2009 with a few tournament results and winning some in cash.

The plan will be to play only 100nl for this month mainly at HU/6max but also to get some more PLO hands in also. Going into February I aim to be in a position to be playing 200nl 6max. I have sufficent money on 3 different sites were I am very comfortable to be playing my games so with that I aim to game select much more this year and try play the best games possible over my 3 sites. Towards the end of last year I started playing some heads up SNGs. I done quite well in the small sample that I played so this is something else that I plan to play more off.

I have tried to make up an excel document to track all my profits/loses for the year. I'm not very good at excel, I can do basic stuff but wouldn't be much use at working out formulas across multiple sheets but am giving it a go. I am just basically trying to keep a very accurate track on how things are going for me. Nothing else to mention for now, will post again around the weekend.

2009 in review

Have been meaning to update this for the past week or so, but havn't been playing any poker at all so ended up never bothering with it. December started off a total disaster, I only played 6 days and averaged about -$350/day or about -$200/hour. To be fair to me though I ran horribly bad, instead of being down $2.2k I should have been up $450 but I sucked pretty bad at winnings pots when I was a huge favourite to. Last Saturday took the biscuit altogether with me losing 1.8k and after that I had decieded that that was enough for the month and was going to have an early end to my poker month and year. I decieded to play a few tournaments on Sunday which was pretty successful but in the end no major result. I did finish 14th/800 players on Everest for $2.5k but ran QQ into AA for a big pot and that dashed any hopes of a $57k first place finish.

So 2009 wasn't really all I hoped it would be, I went backwards in online cash, started the year taking shots at 5/10 6max and finished it playing 50c/$1 hu cash and 1/2 6max. I did have $8.5k of cash winnings and made about the same in rakeback so wasn't a total failure, I did withdraw a lot of my roll each month for about 8/9 months of the year so never ever really got to progress and move up levels, mostly moved down levels. I also was supposed to play the Irish Open but that never happened due to me basically being robbed of my ticket worth €3.5k. As it turned out I would not have played it anyway due to my uncle Michael passing away that weekend (God Bless his him). Graph of cash games below:



I guess the highlights for the year would have been winning a $13k package and living my poker dream of playing the World Series of Poker Main Event and playing at the same table with some truely amazing players like Elky, Kipster, Marty Smyth, Neil Channing, Scotty Neguyn, Steve Davis and Jamie Gold :). I made my first live final table in the Cork Poker Classic and taking home €5.5k for 8th place. I won the baords Division B heads up league for $2k.

Overall it has been a pretty great learning experience for me, I didn't run great this year and ended the year on a $10k downswing. I never played out of my roll and always moved down levels at some point. Sometimes I should have done it earlier but certainly never once put myself in any danger of busting my bankroll. Overall I made about $25k profit on the year which isn't to bad considering I do have a full time job and poker is getting tougher by the day to make money from.

2010 my aspirations would be to:

Start at 100nl HU cash, 100PLO and 200nl max cash but move up the levels more aggressively/quicker than I have done before. $50k online cash winnings (Fuck the 8k-100k challenge :) )

Play more live touranments including the Irish Open and WSOP ME with a side event.

Win the boards Div A heads up league

No doubt I will get a few hands in between now and 2010 but I would imagine 2k hands and a few tournaments would be the height of it. Havn't played now in a week and am really starting to look forward to 2010 already. Thanks to everyone that read this for the year and Happy Xmas and happy new year to everyone. Until 2010, good luck!!

October is in the past

The title is how I will view October, it was without a doubt my worst month ever since I started playing poker and there hasnt even been a close second. I lost in the region of $6.5k between 2 live tournaments, live cash, staking someone in a tournament and online cash games which was the biggest loser by far.

As I just said in my challenge blog, me starting sessions in the wrong frame of mind and knowing before I start that I wasn't going to be playing my best game has cost me a lot of money last month, I still have a decent bankroll so I really need to safeguard it this month. The last thing I want to do is go bust as I have no ambitions to start at micro stakes again and run my way back up.

I think one of the biggest mistakes I have made in the last 2 years regarding poker has been cashing out money. While this may seem like a stupid comment, I really should have cashed out less which would have left me overrolled for limits and be able to move up quicker. This is especially true when you are playing small stakes as the money you make for the month isn't that much so when you take this out your bankroll is not much ahead of were it was at the beginining of the previous month. So with this in mind I do not intend in cashing out in the forseeable future. I may reward myself at times but will not be taking out specific amounts at the end of each month like I have for the last year.

So for Novemeber my main goals are a change in my attitude when I start playing, quitting session earlier and playing well and results will be a minor goal.