Happy Birthday to me..

Well on Wed it was my 22nd birthday and man do I ever feel old. I remember when someone asked me how old I was I thought I was 21 for some weird reason, I never pictured myself ever becoming 22 ever...

I ended up watching Transformers 2 on Wed and the line was ridiculous... heres a picture of the lineup:



When Amy and I got to the theatre (it wasnt opened yet) there was a massive line up just to go in! It was pretty ridiuclous and it took like 15 minutes just so everyone could buy their tickets. I heard that buying the tickets online were completely sold out and when we got in practically all the showing times were sold out too, and the theatre just opened! it was pretty crazy. Good thing we got our tickets online a few days before!! The movie was actually really good, I liked it a lot despite what movie critics/reviews say. It was similar to the first one, but with a lot more funny/cheesy lines and 10x more special effects. I have no idea why the movie review for this movie was so low, probably because there really was not that much acting and a lot of special effects.

I also got a new 27" Samsung Syncmaster 275T for my birthday! This monitor is absolutely PIMP!!!!!! Now I dont have to have a bunch of tables crammed on my 22" which hurt my eyes. The coolest part about this monitor is that it doubles as a TV! I hooked up my xbox directly into the monitor and now whenever I wanna play xbox it is right beside me!!!! It's the coolest thing ever!

Anyways, since June is practically over I am going to wrap it up on a very good note. I am finishing June on Lock +2.5kish (so far) at 100nl over 20k hands. I didnt play much at all this month but hopefully I can log more hands next month.

What's going on with me

Its been a super long time since my last update, but basically I've been really busy w/ school the last little while and havn't really had that much time to blog. In addition, May turned out to be a pretty crappy month and I ended -1.1K mostly from playing bad. After a lot of thought I decided to stop mass multi tabling and begin to work on my game from the bottom up again. Ever since I moved to stars all I did was mass multi table to a point where my game just deteriorated so much and I was more concerned about making fast decisions as opposed to good decisions. I dropped down to 100NL and I am going to rebuild my game and come back bigger and better.

So anyway, my first plan is to get one of the best 200NL players on FTP to rework my game. In June I started coaching sesh's with Kush789 and all I can say is I am very glad I did. We set up a shared percentage profit coaching deal and I have been playing on Lock Poker (on the Cake network) since then. The first thing we fixed up was loosening me up! I have been trying to loosen my stats up for a long time now without much success, however voila I now run 17/14ish! Always a good feeling.. I am actually really glad I decided to drop down and rework my game because it turns out there is a lot of small leaks that I needed to plug, which so far consists of some preflop leaks in marginal spots. In addition were gonna be working on imporving my post flop player especially in 3bet pots which is something that I have a lot of trouble dealing with. I am confident that after this I will look back at my old 12/10 style and see how much progress I've made.

Anyways, last week was my first week of playing on Lock. It was a very big first week and I incorporated everything that Kush has been telling me and the results really showed that. I played 10.3K hands at 100NL and ended up +1.3K. It was the first winning week I've had in a very long time and I was definitely super happy.

That's all for now!

May (So Far)

Well I haven't had too much to blog about recently, but since my return from Orlando I've pretty much just been going to school. This is my final term before I graduate! Unfortunately job hunting has been pretty unsuccessful and I am currently looking for some jobs that are hiring a new graduate in the Computer Science. If you know of any or can hook a brother up let me know!! (looking for jobs in the Waterloo, ON region!)

Anyways onto poker related issues this month has been pretty crazy so far. I played about 20K hands at 100/200nl and am currently +714. I've had a lot of ups and downs and as you can see i'm also running quite below equity. Although I definitely feel a momentum change as I just had a real nice +900 session yesturday followed by another +650 today. Hopefully I can see some nice results in the next update. Anyway here is my graph for the month so far.



Also in other important news, I've decided to get some coaching from Kush789! That man is a total monster and I am 100% sure he can help me improve my game. I will be moving some of my roll over to Cake b/c he wants to me play there without a HUD. It will totally suck because I am so reliant on my HUD and I feel so naked without it, but it will make me a much better player. Thats all for now...

Orlando Next Week

Its been a long time since my last blog post so I thought id write about whats up with me!

Since this school term is officially over next week I am gonna be heading to Orland to chill out and relax for a week! I am super excited because I havnt been there since I was a kid and I can't wait to go to DISNEYWORLD!!!!!!!!!

Anyways, to continue from my last post I've hit the most ridiculous downswing I've ever had. So far its lasted about 60-70K hands and I think things are starting to slowly turn around. My br took such a beating at 200NL that I had to drop down to 100NL for the last 2-3 weeks and I've been totally getting my ass owned down there as well. Heres my 100nl graph for the month.. I'm running pretty below expectation but hopefuly things turn around soon.



Anyways, I thought I would post my first royal flush ever! omg it was my first time it felt so good zomg! When I hit my royal i was totally shouting to everyone in my house 'I GOT A ROYAL FLUSH!111!!'. I got some nice action from a donk too!

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4143533

Heres another ridiculously sick hand at 200nl on FTP from earlier today. It was so sick and my first instinct was to actually fold my kings preflop to villain. He ran 13/11 its so sick!! i mean fucking 13/11!!(thats what was going through my head the whole time). But this is where my HEM came stats came in very handy. I looked at his 3bet and 4bet stats and they were ridiculously high over a 200 hand sample, something like 50% 4bet and and 18% 3bet, and his fold to 3bet was like 10% so I was like umm.. now its kind of a different decision, the dude is a total retard in a nit costume so i went with my kings and he had AK. Thank god it held up, i would have gone on serious tilt if i lost that one.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4143609

Thats all for now, I'm pretty much taking a big chill pill from stars and poker right now until the end of my trip in Orlando. I'm not quite sure if I will continue SNE yet but I am basically at 100k VPP's right now and severly behind schedule. Thats something I shall worry about after my break!

March Wrap-Up, Downswingaments and Goals for April

Well I guess I'll wrap up my month of March tonight since I got some free time.

My goal for March was to get 100K VPP points, but things were set back heavily when I had to go back to Toronto to visit my parents for two weekends (Weekends are when I get the most grind in), and then I had a very nasty flu + fever for an entire week. In addition, school was being really gay and throwing non-stop assignments and midterms at me. Anyways, I finished the month still in the green, which definitely makes me very very happy, especially since during this last week I hit a ridiculously nasty downswing (-2K in 5 days over 33K hands). Anyways here is my graph for the month, I ended up +1.8K over 115K hands so like .5bb/100. Obv a very small win-rate but what can you do its downswingaments time! I am not gonna lie I am happy to even be in the plus catagory this month!



Anyways, that was my March, and now lets talk about April.

April means it is time to put the pedal to the metal!! I am severly behind in VPP's and if I intend of achieving SNE this year it is time to get cracking! Classes are over, assignments are over and midterms are over so I have a lot of spare time to play poker between studying for finals. So here are my goals for April, which I will achieve! No more slacking, time to put in some massive grind.

1. at least 100K VPP for the month
2. Minimum 8K hands a day (Approx 5 hrs a day 24 tabling).

My current VPP Count is 68,618 and starting April, I intend on getting 100K VPP's each month to put me on pace for SNE for the year. Wish me luck!

Finally, I just wanted to post a really sick hand from a session a few days ago. This was the biggest pot I've ever played at 200NL and I am so glad I filled up, see that skill?

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4049566


Anyways its time for me to go to bed

-Ian

I Love Gold!!

VPP Count: 50,926

I've been super busy lately so I haven't had a chance to really blog... basically the last couple of weeks (plus the next couple of weeks) is going to be pretty crazy school wise. In addition I am very behind in my VPP grind right now, My goal was to get 100K VPP this month and I'm about halfway there... with only less than two weeks left in the month I really doubt I can reach my goal because of school work and other obligations, but I will try my best.

Anyways, as the title of this blog suggests i love gooooold! Today (Saturday), I just had the biggest winning day of my poker career. But before I go into details of today, I just wanted to say that before today I was on the biggest break-even slump of my life. It lasted literally 40K hands or something ridiculous like that and it feels sooo good to be out of that!!!!!

Anyways onto my crazy Saturday.. I started playing on Friday night at 1am and the games were soooo fricken juicy! I've never seen so many terrible players on at a time and it was the craziest thing ever. All 24 tables were full of donkeys and i was getting paid left and right! I ended up playing until 6am because i just couldnt leave with all that ez money on the tables!! On Saturday I began my nightly grind after I woke up at 7pm and the games were sooo juicy once again! I ended up playing until 2:30am and totally got burnt out! A part of me wants to keep playing at these hours every weekend but I highly doubt I can keep a normal sleep schedule if thats the case! =(

Anyways this is my graph for the day.. pretty sexy imo... you can see the end of my little breakeven slump in the beggining lol.



Thats all for now... its time for me to get some sleep!

-Ian

Feb wrap-up

Feb was a pretty poker-free month. I basically played no poker until the last 2 days of the month. I was pretty busy w/ school, and then on reading week I went to New York w/ family.

Anyways, the most interesting thing that happened this month was I picked up a new desktop from Canada Computers. My friend helped me build it, and its one of the sickest computers ever. Its got like all the best parts (Intel Core i7, Asus EN9800GTX etc). Awesome for gaming, unfortunately I dont game anymore so its awesome for 24 tabling! The only thing that sucks is that my old PCI video card is not compatable with it so I can't use triple monitors at the moment, just double =(. I will deal with that issue later on though...

So anyways, on Thursday (Feb 26th) I decided to attempt to get Platinum Star on PS. I needed to get 10K VPP before the end of Feb (3 days), however due to my computer being a total pain in the ass I got 0 hands in for Thurs. I was like well damn, I got two days to get 10K VPP now, so lets get the grind on!!

So on Friday and Saturday I ended up playing 25K hands and like 18hrs later I finally achieved Platinum Star! I also ended up with a good win-rate too!

The highlight of my month was the following hand:


http://www.pokerhand.org/?3925237

I made a sick hero call and after, that fish who ran like 64/18/5.0 starts berating me in chat. He starts trashing talking me saying shit like '88 wow, awful' etc. So I just responded by saying 'ty fish', then he starts asking me to play heads up. I'm like okay, I close out all my other tables and wait for him at 100NL HU. Eventually he sits down. Over the next hour I rape him so bad and take like an extra $235

The funny part was I kept trash talking him in chat every time I won a big pot to make him tilt. The trash talk worked and it was pretty hilarious, I would say things like 'Please top off so I can have a free dinner tmrw' and 'ty fishy, i'll be here all night long'. Then the following hand occured where I value bet his ass so hard, and as soon as he called the river i typed in chat 'welcome to value city, population you' LOL. Viffer = hilarious.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3925308

Anyways, that is basically my Feb. Now that I have reached Platinum Star, my new goal is to reach SN by the end of March. Once I get that, I will be 1/10th to SNE. I will need about 100K VPP each month, so it will be a huge grind. Stay tuned for updates...

VPP Count = 10,013

Job or no Job

This post isnt going to be very heavily in poker-related material mainly cuz the last few days i've been super busy with school (exams, assignments) and my future when I graduate. This post is mainly going to be me ranting about my feelings about work and my current situation for jobs when i graduate. Anyways, at the end of August 2009 I will have finished University with a degree in Computer Science. I have been relentlessly trying to get a job in Waterloo so that way when I graduate I can nosedive into a life-long loving career of programming for others and grinding out the 8-4pm schedule. lol.

I applied to tons and tons of places, and so far no response because the market is really really shitty right now. With the recession and whatnot (I dont know much about economics) tons of companies are not hiring as many people as they typically would be, and their laying off even more people. Basically its a pretty shitty time to graduate. On top of that I have absolutely no work experience doing programming/CS related shit, so i am basically dominated by anyone who has any sort of work experience w/ coop or ppl who decided to do something with their summers off. I am strongly considering getting into a Masters program, but by the looks of it my marks aren't high enough so that is kind of out of the question. Ideally getting into masters would be awesome because when I graduate the market should be better and I would have a higher chance of getting a job. The obvious problem with Masters is that when I graduate i still have zero work experience and I will most likely begin at the bottom of the food chain again. Jeez trying to climb the corporate ladder is such a retarded grind. Basically my situation totally sucks right now. I will continue to try to hunt down a job desperately, and hopefully land something.

Anyways, where I am going with this post is that right now I am in the middle of a debate to become a full time grinder or not. If I dont get a job, I may very well have to take this option (which tbh I don't mind). The only problem with this is that it totally throws my CS degree away and my parents/family would 100% object to playing poker full time(they think it is just gambooling). It really sucks because these are the only two things stopping me from doing what I truly want to do. I would love to play poker full time, be your own boss and set up your own schedule etc etc. There are a lot of perks for playing full time, but there are also negatives (which i wont bother going into). The biggest reason for me to play full time is simply because the money playing poker is simply better than any job I can get. I talked to a lot of professors/relatives who graduated with CS at waterloo, and the conclusion is that I should aim for a salary between 40-45K a year. This turns out to be about $21/hr based off of 8 hour work days. The problem is that currently playing poker I make anywhere from $85-90/hr on a good month, and on a shitty month about $25/hr. Rakeback is already $18/hr on FTP for me LOL. Why the hell would I work full time when I can easily make so much more playing poker? The only reason that I prefer not to play full time is that the swings can be pretty ugly, and thats when a full time job truly beats poker, simply for the fact that the income is so stable and gauranteed. Basically I've been on the fence about job or no job for a while now with my dillema.... that is until I got pushed over to the no job side recently!

In comes Pokerstars Super Nova Elite program. I dont play on stars and I never bothered looking at their promotions, but wow this VIP program is the sickest on the net. It sure as hell blows ironman at FTP out of the water. I did a lot of research about SNE and what I found was some pretty sick numbers. Basically you need to accumilate 1million VPP in a year, and you become SNE and the bonus'es are just disgusting. Based off of what I found so far, (please correct me if I am wrong, it would help me a lot!) a SNE player would make about 110-120K a year in bonuses. This includes lots of tournament entries like sick packages to PCA, world series, WCOOP etc. So basically a I would be making six figures WITHOUT any of my poker winnings counted. That is just sick.

Now there is no such thing as free money, basically to grind SNE out it would take about 6.5K hands a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to get the promotion. I intend on getting SNE in about 6 months logging ridiculous hours a day (12K hands minimum a day) just so I dont have to play 7 days a week for the remainder of the year. I think once you get SNE you only need to play 3-4K hands a day to maintain it, which is no probems. I am still working out a lot of details, and learning about the program , but I have decided that once Jan 1st 2010 comes around, and there is no job in sight for me I will go SNE! It sure as hell beats any job that I can ever get.....

I don't know what the future lies for me, but these are my thoughts on my current situation. If I get a job, then meh I will have to suck it up and work, if I don't then its time to mass grind for the monies.

-Ian

Swingaments

This week marks my first losing week at 200NL..and it sux =(

I think a simple graph will show how my week went... i could not get anything going all week and despite my greatest attempts to finally break even i still got raped at the end. I am actually playing very disciplined and patient poker despite running pretty awful this week. I didn't tilt or spew chips (except one time) which is good I guess. Hopefully things turn around soon. Thats all for now

Writing this blog to break a curse!

A couple months ago, I remember writing about how I kept busting out in the 20-30th place and couldnt seem to get past that. Well after I wrote a blog about it, I broke the curse and final tabled 2-3 times!

So i'm writing this blog to break my newest curse...

Everytime i final table, I always seem to bust out 4th place.
Last week I final tabled the UB 8K gaurenteed, and busted out 4th for 700$
Just today I busted out the FTP 10+1 tournament in 4th place again for 590$ :|
And the list goes on.. :|

I would like to see this curse broken because its quite frusterating when players at these final table luckbox against me WHEN THEIR SO BAD! Especially at the smaller buyin MTT's like the UB 8k Gaurenteed and FTP 10+1.

So.. I hope this blog breaks my curse. That way next time I final table a MTT, I can rake in the dolla bills!