Which brings me to now. I'm currently in France working as a language assistant in a private school, and it's treating me very well. 550 euros a month, free apartment, 18 hours work a week, with free food during the day. I've yet to discover a downside to it so I hope it continues.
Moving on to poker, I haven't put any money into Stars, as I still have 30 dollars leftover from my last withdrawal. I am having one last go at building a bankroll- I've set myself no targets at all apart from to not give up when things don't go your way, and play logically as opposed to thinking that pokerstars 'owes' me after I get coolered or vice versa. For this, I have bought poker tracker (more accurately Tom has a spare code which he has given me, which is incredibly generous.) This will keep me completely honest and tell me about my game so I can pinpoint my mistakes instead of blaming it on life in general which was a convenient and unfortunate habit I had last year.
Talking of which, I think last year my game worsened. While I wasn't throwing money around at the table, I was very loose and it came back to bite me. Online I was most certainly down, somewhere in the region of $150, which doesn't sound much- but when I think about how much online profit I had after 6 months of actually learning the game then I'm very disappointed in my performance. My only saving grace is my slightly above average ability to play live which put me in for a small profit. Online my concentration levels are frankly pathetic, as demonstrated last year. My Willhill and full tilt graphs, and to a lesser extent my stars graph tell quite a story, which you can look at at your own leisure. But enough about how much of an anticlimax last year was, I am giving it one last shot- I can't really say how confident I am but I know it's not 100%.
So, about these last 3 days. With this 30 dollars I have, I am treating it as if it was the first stake Isaac ever gave me. That magical $50 which set me on my way to becoming a semi-reasonable micro-stakes player. Poker tracker has given me all the information I need thus far and I know I am more profitable because of it. No more calling raises with K10 in the small blind or 78s.
My current game is Full ring 10NL and this is what the graph shows.
As you can see I am up roughly 5 buy-ins, up until my dip at the peak I was playing well and running well. I have found that my most profitable strategy is to trap and slowplay as much as possible, but obviously not all the time. The amount of river donk bets I have check called, or the amount of non beleivers looking me up after I check the turn after a C-bet has been the foundation for my small profit so far. While it's fair to say that I'm probably not getting the maximum value out of my hands, for the moment I'm going by small pot won > big pot lost.
I'm running nicely at 8.55BB over just short of 3k hands. At the 2k mark it was 15 which was obviously unsustainable. My first dip came after I made a bad call with an overpair after a guy shoved his stack after he completed his flush on the river. I didn't really understand it as he didn't put the standard value bet in so I called and got the bad news. Incidentally though the 3 previous times I made the same call and they turned out well. The next dip came after I raised JJ into the BB who flat shoved. I dwelled for about 20 seconds and called as I thought that's probably the worst way to get value out of a monster- but I lose on the turn to his 66. That's about as bad as it got. I stuck at it surprisingly and clawed some of it back. I'm going to play another session now.
Reward for the gayest post ever- but I do miss DUPS and I hope that some of the other guys like Isaac Gambon and Hannes will update their blogs and let us know what's going on. As a side note I highly doubt anybody reads this anymore, but I would appreciate a comment just to see if you're all still playing.
Tek care lads. X
3 comments:
Hey Tony. Brilliantly timed post. I just got access to the internet after 5 months in the dark. Glad to see you're still around.
Hey gambon it's great to hear from you! Hope you're doing well mate. Still pokering?
Alright lad, nice to see you posting again (i cant talk in that department obv).
After playing against you live for many hours I have huge faith in your poker game.
Poker isnt worth getting down about but thats a lot easier said than done, if your confident in your own game you will play better.
In general I think stakes are -EV for the player because it would be more profitable for them to play and move up on their own. However if your interested im willing to stake you to play some 25nl if you fancy it, $600 or so.
Hopefully we can get a big reunion going at some point and have an epic 5p 10p sesh, for old times sake.
Also ill try and think of something interesting to update my blog with.
Isaac
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