The World Revolves at 75 hands/hr

Breakevenaments-galore and what it's like to play with a 80/44

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:36:00 +0000

Oct was pretty bad month for me, I hit one of the worst breakevenaments ever. I really wanted to move up to 200NL, but in the light of the way I was running I ended up grinding out 100nl for the most part. I am quite glad I did because I just couldn't get the ball rolling all month. Heres my graph:

I guess the nice thing this month is the blue line. Despite not really winning in the games, I still ended the month +1.8Kish. The giant spike up in the rb/bonuses is a nice 1k score I made in a MTT tournament. I played the 750K gaurantee on FTP and went super deep, busting out about 90th/3.5K people. Pretty disappointing finish tbh, 1st was 133K =(. I am planning on taking more stabs at those tournies in the future. I have actually been doing pretty well in these MTT luckboxes.

Anyway, the highlight of my month was definately a really sickkkkk session vs this huge whale. He ran 80/44 with 3bet of 25%. I have never seen such a big retard in my life and I have some pretty sickly entertaining hands vs this guy. And here we go....

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4831984

pretty standard against this guy, he only has one move and that is bet pot. I basically snap called all 3 bets.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4831996

lollerskates. I have the nuts obviously....

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4831992
I actually think this is a pretty thin shove, looking back I dont know if I should of shoved here. I would much rather be shoving the nut FD here instead. gg luckbox me though.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4831987

This was such a gay hand. I had been winning the last 10 pots against him and he finally gave up. SIGH

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4831994

I LOVE SHOVING 475bb IN PREFLOP WITH 88!!!!! +ev imo!! so hilarious

So we now have a record of the biggest whale that ever lived. This is living proof that there is still easy money in poker. gg

New Month, New Grind, back to 200NL

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:45:00 +0000

So Sept is officially over and I finished last month off basically grinding 44k hands of 100NL. I ended up winning about 2.2K or so which is good enough given the fact that I didn't really even play until the last 2 weeks.

It's a new month now and I am planning on putting in some massive volume (for me anyway). I am going to be putting in 15K hands a week minimum, so roughly 60K hands for the month. I have been super lazy about putting hands in lately and I am going to up that number significantly this month. Also, I have decided to begin my transition back into 200NL. The games there seem so different since I played them 8 months ago, and it seems like a lot of the fish have really gotten eaten up, but I shall continue steaming forward and hopefully have some good results there.

In non-poker related news, Amy and I got a new addition to our family!. No its not a baby (well not a human baby), but we got a Maltese puppy! His name is Brody and he is my best friend! He's about 5 months old and a totally spoiled dog! Here is a picture of him:

As you can see, he has grind on his mind too just like his daddy! It's actually pretty nice to have him sit on my lap while I grind or just hang out with me during the day while I'm at home. I will be sure to post some videos of him soon!

Elite Poker Academy

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:44:00 +0000

So I haven't had too much time to update this blog the last month or so, its mainly because I have been working on a little poker website with my buddy Eric. We have decided to make a FREE online poker training website called Elite Poker Academy. Both Eric and I will be making cash game videos for the site to help our members learn how to beat the micro stakes games online. It really is not that hard to make money playing poker, I am confident if you watch our videos and sign-up you could learn quite a bit and make some extra cash on the side!

The link is www.elitepokeracademy.com

It is completely free for you to sign up. So why not?

Anyway, this month I have barely even played any poker. It is quite unacceptable how little I've been playing. I've been really busy with getting the site ready and producing content for it that I havnt had a lot of time to grind. I played about 20K hands this month and my graph is below.

As you can kind of see I've been breaking even a fair amount, which is quite frustrating but it is part of the life of a grinder. I just gotta keep putting in the hands. I am planning on playing 3k hands a day for the remainder of Sept. Stay tuned and be sure to check out elitepokeracademy.com!

July Wrap Up

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:53:00 +0000

So July turned out to be a pretty decent month for me. I ended up playing about 35Kish hands and winning at about 5bb/100 (something like that). With RB I ended up +2.5K. Needless to say I am quite happy with the results. Here is a graph of my month. Near the end I was breaking even for a couple of days but thats okay.

I played well for majority of the month, but the last few days I lacked discpline and made some pretty marginal calls. There was a really sick hand that occured on Lock (it says party on pokerhand.org but its actually on the Lock/Cake network).

http://www.pokerhand.org/?4524431

This is like the sickest hand I've ever had (second sickest was when I had quad kings cracked by royal flush). He 1 outers me on the turn and I 1 outer him on the river... so sick....

Thats pretty much all the updates for now.. classes are over and I am studying for my final exams.

Mid(ish) monthly report + extras

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 04:52:00 +0000

It's been a super long time since my last blog, I havn't been updating regularily mostly because I've been really busy w/ school. I just finished a massive assignment on Friday that took two weeks to do. It is definately the hardest assignment I've ever done and it feels really good to get it over with! I ended up grinding a lot this weekend to celebrate (so far played about 6k hands) and I am planning on playing the Guiness world record tournaments on stars and FTP which have like 50K people LOL. I figured it would be a good way to get in some good volume in cash games w/ the tournies forcing me to grind!

Anyway, this month is going very good so far. I am currently at +$1.3K over 17K hands for a WR of approx 6.5bb/100 which is very good for me. I am actually very happy with the way this month is going so far and especially happy with the way I am playing. I was running sick hot last month, but this month I am running pretty average but playing really really good to make up for it. Anyways heres my graph for the month.

Other then that I have some big plans coming up when I graduate, especially poker wise. I have been working on a poker related website which I will reveal when it is complete (probably in approx 2 months).I am planning on making my return to 200NL as a 10x better player then I was before.

Happy Birthday to me..

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:40:00 +0000

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)

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:38:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:59:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 01:21:00 +0000

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!!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:35:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:02:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:17:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:48:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Ko) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:07:00 +0000

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!

Orlando + My first big tournament cash

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:34:00 +0000

Well, I officially made my first withdrawal from my online poker funds! I have never made a withdrawal before, because my poker funds tend to be a 'seperate' entity from my every day life. But recently I have been doing quite well and I wanted to reward myself my first (of many hopefully right?) purchases.

Amy and I had wanted to go to Orlando for a while now, She had never been to Disney World before and I have not in like 8yrs so we decided to check out any deals/packages to Orlando! We started our search in Dec, but never really got anything going beyond just looking at hotels, prices etc. When January rolled around we began hunting for a good package more aggresively and we ended up finally finding a package we liked!

We got a 6 day trip staying at the Sheraton Vistana Resort, which is supposed to be like a nice little townhouse type hotel room i think. These are the pictures we got from the website, so i hope our rooms look like that otherwise we totally got shafted!

Thats the main living space area..its got its own kitchen and stuff, its kind of like a little townhouse I guess for the two of us. I highly doubt we are ever staying home and cooking, but its always an option right!

Bedroom... nuff said

This is the overview of the whole resort, its got a realy nice pool (i think even two?) in the centre, and the hotel rooms surrounding it is like townhouse-like... the resort actually looks very nice imo!

This is just a nice picture of the pool area!

Another picture of the outside of the resort.

Anyways, our trip is booked from April 27th to May 2nd and the price of airfare + hotel is like 700$. That is quite a steal of a price because the prices of hotels+airfare to places within Disney World is approximately 1K-1.2K! Even the places that were outside the resort which were at least 4 star hotels cost around 900$ (can't settle for less than 4 stars for ballers like us!).

In addition to hotel+airfare, we also ended up getting daily passes to Magic Kingdom, Epcott and Hollywood Studios which cost about 300$ per person. So in total the trip so far is looking to cost about 1K, which ain't bad at all. Of course there is still alot of other expenses still unaccounted for such as food and shopping (obv), but I estimate the whole trip will probably cost me around 1.5Kish. It should be a very good time and I am totally excited! I think those 6 days will be the only 6 days in my life where I dont have grind on my mind!!

Anyways, onto the poker related content. Last night I ended up playing the FTP daily doubles just for fun, and I ended up going ridiculously deep in one of them. I played until 2:30am and after a very long battle i finished 3rd for 1K! It was such a rollercoaster ride - and a lot of fun! I still really suck at tournaments, but its just a nice change of pace from cash games. As I said before, one of my goals this year is to work on my tournament game and a nice cash like this definately helps me build my confidence and skillz. That is basically it for now! This week I havn't been playing too much, but I anticipate once the weekend comes around things will pick up and grind will come back into my mind!

Crazy Week at 200NL

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:24:00 +0000

I think a simple graph at 200NL simply states how my week was. I ran very good in the beginning (as you will see.. +1Kish), then i ran like TOTAL GARBAGE (middle -1.8Kish) then I ran more on the average side of things + Played solid poker (End).
However, more importantly played a very very discplined game when I was running like total shit. I did not tilt when I lost over 1.1K in one single day! Biggest losing session i've ever had!! I was getting coolered and put into such tough spots all day long, but eventually my patience and inability to tilt finally paid off. I ended the week +1.5K which is always sexy to see.

Stoked about gettin Staked!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 04:25:00 +0000

I have great news!! A couple days ago I saw a thread on 2p2 where Doug (WCGRider) was looking for some people to stake from 25nl-100nl. After reading it i saw some pretty retarded players looking to get staked (like this one dude that plays 2NL lol), so naturally I was thinking of giving it a shot! I AIM'd Doug and sent him my graphs from 50nl and 100nl, as well as other pt3 stats and we ended up working something out!

What we worked out was he's gonna stake me for playing 200NL, and we are going to be splitting profits 50/50. That's really nice and all, but I think the real benefit for me is not the fact that I'm getting staked (because honestly I actually have enough $$ to play 200nl myself), but its the fact that I get coaching and sweat sessions with Doug. I think being given the chance to learn and talk to a player like him is so valuable to anyone's poker career. I really believe he is gonna bring my game to a new level. I said it in my last post, but I really think this year is going to be my break-out year for poker... so hopefully we see some incredible things happen!

So starting this week, I will officially be playing 200NL 100% of the time! I am so pumped!

So anyways, last night I played my first session of 200nl which turned out to be a major success! I was running really hot, and ended the night with my biggest winning day of online poker so far, +1K!!! It feels so good to win that much money, because coming from the stakes that I've played a +1K profit is such a long grind, but at 200nl not so much haha... Anyways I plan on hitting the tables again tonight so stay tuned for more updates on my venture to conquer 200NL!!!

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:26:00 +0000

Happy New Year!

I arrived back into North America on the 28th! All I can say is it feels good to be home!

For those of you who care about how my trip to Japan was, it was really quite fun! we went shopping at Ginza/Oena zoo the first few days, then went to tokyo disneyland and disney sea for another two days. After that we went to Sunjuku (I am probably spelling it wrong) to just shop and hang out. The people in Japan are the most polite and friendliest people in THE WORLD! hands down!! when you walk into a restaurant (or anywhere tbh) everyone working there always says something (probably 'welcome'?) and bows to you. There was this one guy we even wanted to tip him for his help and he REJECTED it!! Anyways, I took lots of pics but my favorite picture is this one:

Yes I hugged him!! hahaha, he was taking pictures with a bunch of like 5 year old kids, and then me and Andrew go line up to take a picture with him too LOL. people must of been thinking wtf why are these 20 year olds trying to take a picture with goofey!

The last couple of days were pretty chill, i was basically just hanging out with Amy and just shopping/eating around Toronto. I'm gonna be going back to waterloo on Jan 2nd.. I can't wait to go back and hit the tables again! I'm not gonna lie I've been itching to play for a while now! I played in Japan some 50nl during my spare time and it was pretty profitable. I mainly 10-12 tabled on my crappy laptop with no HUD but because of the time differences i ended up playing at like 5am EST which was like 8-9pm japan time. it was sick the amount of donkeys on at those hours! I think if anyone plays full time they should spend a couple nights a week trying to stay up at those hours because it can be quite profitable.

Anyways on Friday (Jan 2nd) I will be heading back to waterloo! I can't wait to go back to waterloo! It's nice to be home and stuff, but i really miss waterloo and most importantly i miss hitting the tables!! It's been too long since i've been apart from poker!!

Since it is the new year, I think i'll just do a quick summary of my poker goals for the upcoming year.

1. Play 200NL (or higher) full time. The monies is at 200NL and above, and I plan on becoming a regular at those stakes. I am really not far away to accomplishing this because currently i am over-rolled for 200NL but the only thing holding me back is myself. I am just sitting im my comfort zone at 100NL and not really trying to force myself to moveup! however in the coming year that will all change!

2. Significantly improve my tournament game. I have been working on this slowly with my bro, but next year i plan to have signifcantly improved my tournament game to the point where i feel like i am at least +EV (right now i am soooo -EV). I am going to mix in tournaments with my cash game sessions and see where that leads me... hopefully i make one big cash.

3. get 300K full tilt points for their 30" monitor!

I really believe that this year is going to be a big breakout year for me. I remember last year when I first started this blog, i was a total newb! I have grown and improved my game so much since then. When I started this blog, I only played 25NL with a 300$ roll and back then seeing 300$ in my account was the greatest feeling in the world LOL. I only 1 tabled on UB and I was probably a break-even player. In the course of a year I have met so many people that have helped me along the way. My game has changed so much and I can honestly see why poker is a game that takes 5 minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. I still have so much more room for improvement, and in the next few years I will continue working to become the best player I can be.

Happy New Year everyone and I hope everyone runs good in 2009!

December Wrap Up

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:07:00 +0000

Now I'm sure most of you read the title and went 'WTF DECEMBER AINT OVER YET? WHAT A DONKEY'.... well December is technically over for me because my last exam is on the 19th and from the 20th to the 28th I will be going on vacation to Japan! When I come back the month will basically be over and I won't have anytime to do anything poker-related anyways, so therefore December Wrap Up time!!

December went very very well for me poker-wise, I made the most money I have ever in a month playing poker. It was mainly a combination of running good and classes being over so I had lots of free time!
Basically the typical day for me this month was wake up at noon, study all day until about 9pm, grind 100NL until 2am, sleep, rinse and repeat!! Now thats living the high life right!

I ended up playing strictly 100NL and I've gotten very comfortable there. I've figured out who the regulars are and who are the big donks. For the last couple of days, I've been mixing in 2 tournaments into my 12 cash game tables making it 14 tables on my sexy triple monitor setup! I have decided to put some time into learning tournament poker by playing it on the side during my cash game sessions. The results havn't been good (I think I only cashed like once out of 8-10). I am not saying I am great at tournaments (In fact i am pretty bad, esp at stack sizing), however whenever I play them I just feel like their just 'for fun' because I easily make so much more grinding cash games. I mean there would be times where I go deep into a tourney and spend 1-2hrs on it, and by then I've already made like 300$ in cash games. As a result, I take some really whacky and funny lines in tournaments which usually bites me in the ass. There was one tournament where I tried to make a huge bluff at this guy firing all three streets including a river bet of his whole stack, and he called....with bottom pair. All I can say is the worst tournament player is 1000x worse then the worst cash game players i've seen, its quite ridiculous. One of these days i will luckbox a win right?

Anyways, this month I only ended up playing about 20K hands or so. I ended the month at about 5.5bb/100 or so which is very high for FR games. I am obviously quite happy with the results and below is my graph for the month.

Anyways, this month Rich (RJEJ84) and I had a small bet for the best win rate in Dec and Jan. I think I am going to win this month with 5.5bb/100, but rich still has like 12 more days to go so we'll see! Good luck!

I am assuming once you read this, I will be long gone to another continent far far away! So i would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Next year is going to be a big one for me poker wise.. I can feel it.... stay tuned...

-Ian

KK Loses to AJ! I win about 3000$!

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Ko) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:48:00 +0000

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I just busted out of the Fulltilt poker 32K guarantee in 4th place and win $2958.72..
My KK couldnt beat AJ.. oh well :|

If i feel like it, i will maybe post more about the tournament later..

How to final table tournaments (joke)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Ko) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:16:00 +0000

So yesturday I final tabled a small 5$ MTT which had about 400 players. I ended up placing 4th for about 182$. Although the money is very insignificant, i'd like to discuss some very SERIOUS strategies on how I made it to the final table. Lets begin:

I register for this small tourny with the plan of donking around and just wasting time. The first orbit, I pick up 22 when 3 players limp ahead of me. I decide to shove 1500 LOL. I get called by 3 players holding AJo, QJo and AJo. Since the 3 players have each others outs, my hand holds up! +ev shove for sure :P. So I win a massive 5k pot in the first orbit. After I win, I decide to go eat dinner since I really didn't care about this tournament. After dinner, I come back to my computer to surf the internet before finally deciding to sit in. While sitting at my computer, I was looking for sites to watch Hellboy 2. While being frustrated at megavideo for removing the full movie on their website, I realized that I picked up AA in the tournament. Basically i get my whole stack in preflop vs QQ and i get up to 11k. Good result!

Since im in good shape for the tourny, I spend the next hour trying to update my Counter-strike source with the hopes of multi tasking CS source and grinding this 5$ tournament on the side. I soon realized that tabbing out of CS is too slow and I should play a smaller game.. like Starcraft.
I played 1 game of starcraft and decided that I suck at this game and quit.

Once I quit playing star craft, i spent the next 45 minutes cleaning up files on my desktop and reading old chat logs (yes I was super bored and wanted to leave the tournament!).

That is when I realized that we are playing hand-for hand (with 36 people left)! So I finally decided to start focusing on this tournament.

Once I began focusing, I managed to get my self quite a big stack and cruised into the final table with about 145K in chips. We play down to 4 people when the final bust out hand happens:

Full Tilt Poker Game #9381319914: $5 + $0.50 Tournament (71511972), Table 24 - 3000/6000 Ante 750 - No Limit Hold'em - 23:44:36 ET - 2008/12/07
Seat 2: LiquidFireAK (101,832)
Seat 3: zachs4 (157,657)
Seat 5: TheAdmiral54 (170,403)
Seat 9: pennyante59 (162,608)
LiquidFireAK antes 750
zachs4 antes 750
TheAdmiral54 antes 750
pennyante59 antes 750
pennyante59 posts the small blind of 3,000
LiquidFireAK posts the big blind of 6,000
The button is in seat #5
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to LiquidFireAK [Jd Ks]
zachs4 folds
TheAdmiral54 folds
LiquidFireAK: what did u fold admiral?
pennyante59 calls 3,000
LiquidFireAK raises to 18,000
pennyante59 raises to 161,858, and is all in
LiquidFireAK has 15 seconds left to act
LiquidFireAK: uhh
LiquidFireAK calls 83,082, and is all in
pennyante59 shows [5d 4c]
LiquidFireAK shows [Jd Ks]
Uncalled bet of 60,776 returned to pennyante59
*** FLOP *** [2h 7d 8h]
*** TURN *** [2h 7d 8h] [7s]
*** RIVER *** [2h 7d 8h 7s] [5h]
pennyante59 shows two pair, Sevens and Fives
LiquidFireAK shows a pair of Sevens
pennyante59 wins the pot (205,164) with two pair, Sevens and Fives
LiquidFireAK stands up
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 205,164 Rake 0
Board: [2h 7d 8h 7s 5h]
Seat 2: LiquidFireAK (big blind) showed [Jd Ks] and lost with a pair of Sevens
Seat 3: zachs4 folded before the Flop
Seat 5: TheAdmiral54 (button) folded before the Flop
Seat 9: pennyante59 (small blind) showed [5d 4c] and won (205,164) with two pair, Sevens and Fives

Normally, I would never make a crazy call like this with KJ, but after watching the villan play many hands i knew he ALWAYS opened pots with any Ace. So this shove by him made NO sense. I knew king high was winning.. so I called... and lost! Bah! oh well.. i guess i cant really complain because I didn't really put much effort into this tournament :P

So I hope you guys learned some SERIOUSLY good strategies on how to final table a tournament.. because this experience has taught me one thing:
I need to get better at Starcraft so I can play it while grinding MTT's!

November Wrap Up

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:54:00 +0000

November is officially over and despite the month starting off extremely good, it ended on a pretty bad note. The last week or so I've been running terrible....I have never been outdrawn on the river so much in my life! Today I finally had a winning session in about a week (and it was a big one!). But before I talk about today I'll wrap up November (more particularly my 200NL venture)

I ended up playing 200NL for about 2 or 3 days, the first day was more or less breaking even while the next two days i dropped about 600$. It's obviously not much b/c its only about 3 buyins, however they all generally came from mistakes where I found myself overthinkin things. I talked to a lot of people that have moved from 100nl to 200nl and the conclusion is basically stick with your game and make adjustments from there.
I think I was pretty 'overwhelmed' but the shear amount of money on the table at 200nl. I had a hard time adjusting to the massive pots, I mean only like 2 weeks prior I was still playing 50NL. After those couple of days, I came to the conclusion that I was playing my C game at 200nl, because I was just not comfortable with the level. There would be situations where I would 3bet preflop and didn't feel very comfortable 3betting because it made the pot too big! lol! i know! I feel like I moved up wayyyyy to fast. I mean it was only a few weeks prior that I was playing for an avg pot of 10$ at 50nl, and now i'm playing pots that average around 40-50$. So to make a long story short, I have basically dropped to 100NL for now until my comfort level is adjusted and i'm ready to make a move again. I think I will start mixing 200NL tables with my 100NL tables soon.

Anyway, more recently 100NL hasnt been going too good. As I said I've been running pretty horribly and have been having huge losing sessions the last week. However today was a really nice booster, I had a giant winning session! I played a really long session today 12tabling 100NL. I set up a new layout for my tables and i really enjoy it. So far (I might play later tonight again) I played around 2.5K hands and ended the day at 15bb/100. So far I'm about +800, obviously a huge winning session! Below is my PT graph for the day. I think this might be the biggest winning session i've ever had.

I just love the huge spikes upward! w00t. Anyway, in other news I downloaded a program that allows me to record my desktop, so I think i'll be makign some videos of me playing. Hopefully they turn out good and I can fix a few leaks here and there!

-Ian

blah.. I win 1000$ and still frusterated!

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Ko) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:25:00 +0000

So I played the UB 200K garentee and busted out 24th out of 1075 for $1000. It was still pretty frusterating though becuase i had a very big chip stack, and I could of easily cruised to the final table if i didnt go EXTREMELY card dead. I think i folded 2 full levels before getting down to push-bot mode.. which kinda sucks :(

Anyways, I decided to post the big turning point in the tourny where i accumulated a huge chip stack:

Stage #1337721641 Tourney ID 2113141 Holdem Multi Normal Tournament No Limit $3000 - 2008-11-30 22:37:36 (ET)
Table: 78 (Real Money) Seat #6 is the dealer
Seat 1 - GAM187BLER ($91838 in chips)
Seat 2 - CARDKILLER34 ($47015.50 in chips)
Seat 3 - SODAKBOY ($27089 in chips)
Seat 4 - KRIKEYMATE ($33508 in chips)
Seat 5 - ROODOG222 ($83253.08 in chips)
Seat 6 - WHATARUNAA ($36331.84 in chips)
Seat 7 - AAKKJJ ($103550.48 in chips)
Seat 8 - ANDREWKO ($56628 in chips)
GAM187BLER - Ante $300
CARDKILLER34 - Ante $300
SODAKBOY - Ante $300
KRIKEYMATE - Ante $300
ROODOG222 - Ante $300
WHATARUNAA - Ante $300
AAKKJJ - Ante $300
ANDREWKO - Ante $300
AAKKJJ - Posts small blind $1500
ANDREWKO - Posts big blind $3000
*** POCKET CARDS ***
Dealt to ANDREWKO [9c 9d]
GAM187BLER - Folds
CARDKILLER34 - Raises $9000 to $9000
SODAKBOY - Folds
KRIKEYMATE - Folds
ROODOG222 - Calls $9000
WHATARUNAA - Folds
AAKKJJ - Folds
ANDREWKO - All-In(Raise) $53328 to $56328
CARDKILLER34 - Folds
ROODOG222 - Calls $47328
*** FLOP *** [Jd 2c 6s]
*** TURN *** [Jd 2c 6s] [9s]
*** RIVER *** [Jd 2c 6s 9s] [7s]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
ROODOG222 - Shows [Ad Qs] (ace high)
ANDREWKO - Shows [9c 9d] (Three of a kind, nines)
ANDREWKO Collects $125556 from main pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total Pot($125556)
Board [Jd 2c 6s 9s 7s]
Seat 1: GAM187BLER Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 2: CARDKILLER34 Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 3: SODAKBOY Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 4: KRIKEYMATE Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 5: ROODOG222 HI:lost with ace high [Ad Qs - P:Ad,P:Qs,B:Jd,B:9s,B:7s]
Seat 6: WHATARUNAA (dealer) Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 7: AAKKJJ (small blind) Folded on the POCKET CARDS
Seat 8: ANDREWKO (big blind) won Total ($125556) All-In HI:($125556) with Three of a kind, nines [9c 9d - B:9s,P:9d,P:9c,B:Jd,B:7s]

So Basically CARDKILLER raises to 9k and gets called by ROODOG222. When I saw CARDKILLER raise, I was actually considering folding 99 becuase hes been playing pretty tight/scared poker, and seemed like he was just trying to sneak up payout spots. However, Once ROODOG called, I couldnt resist the squeeze play! Also Since ROODOG only called the 9k, I figured he must of have a weaker hand like AJ or 55-88 which would easily fold to my squeeze.
Also, doing a squeeze on CARDKILLER puts him in such a tough spot. He would be less willing to make a call with AJ, AQ or AK, since he still doesnt know if ROODOG will be calling behind him. On top of that, he's been playing scared poker so I think he would be less willing to gamble with me. With all that in mind, I went for the squeeze and somehow got called by ROODOG's AQ. Since my squeeze was clearly +ev, I win the race lol!

After that big pot, I pretty much went super card dead until i busted out :(

Oh well.. Hopefully my next post will be about me actually winning a tournament instead of busting out in the last 2 tables! :P

The Ultimate Poker Station!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Ko) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 05:04:00 +0000

I finally did it today, I got myself a third monitor! I picked up a cheap PCI video card for 50$ and hooked it up into an Acer 22" monitor! Its not the exact same as my first two monitors but it still matches pretty well. I attached some pics of my new setup.

The setup is so sick... I also got a new keyboard (a while ago but I'm gonna show it now).. its like this crazy gaming keyboard that GLOWS IN THE DARK!! Check it out:

I love my new setup!

Anyways, on to more poker related issues... the last couple of days have been pretty bad poker wise, I ended up dropping down from 200nl to 100nl. My main reason for dropping was because I just did not feel comfortable playign 200nl, and everytime i played i was bringing my C game. So instead I began to play 100nl with the intention of mixing in some 200nl tables until I get comfortable, however the last 3 days I've been running pretty aweful :(. I have been on a complete heater the last month or so so its probably ineveitable that the doomswitch gets pulled. I quit after a quick session today because nothing would go right, so hopefully tmrw I will have a better session.