Alexos' Adventures in Donkland

Originally Posted by Ravageur

If you have the Pape tonight, TR is required

no Pape tonite, had 7 course meal with wine pairings..--> epic

Pape will get its own TR though no worries!

you're such a valentine's day baller!.. don't let your lady talk to mine haha.

I'm going out with the gf and the dodgeball team tonight to a firkin pub -> epic.

what's a firkin pub??

haha I guess its just a toronto chain of pubs... nothing too special at all :P

The Firkin Group of Pubs

Fargin' Firkin pubs.

Played some SnG's last nite, dropped like 1.5k playing them for 2-3 hrs. Even 215$ SnGs weren't that hard but truth is I'm definitely rusty in them, so I shouldn't play 8 + at a time. Regs are too nitty and don't call/shove wide enough ranges. Stars/FT regs would destroy these for sure. I might play some more next weekend if I need a nice rake boost before the rakerace ends, it's a fun change from cash games all day everyday.

Hmm cool idea. Do you generate decent rake with them? 15$ a pop? Also do a lot run?

Originally Posted by Ravageur

Hmm cool idea. Do you generate decent rake with them? 15$ a pop? Also do a lot run?

15$ for the 215$ turbos, rake seems pretty high compared to Stars.

A decent amount run from 54$ to 215$, even today I was able to 6 tables easily without even playing any HU ones.

Originally Posted by griffey24

you're such a valentine's day baller!.. don't let your lady talk to mine haha.

I'm going out with the gf and the dodgeball team tonight to a firkin pub -> epic.

And here I thought you were cursing!

Soo having fun with SnG's these past few days since I'm burnt out of playing cash. I used to play SnGs as my main game back in 2006, but felt a bit clueless in a LOT of spots three days ago. Then I watched some BFP sng vids and it made me understand a couple things better, mostly which spots I should be an uber nit and which spots I should shove any 2, e-z game right? Thinking of buying SnG wizard even if I'll end up using it like once lol.



Who knew you can run under EV at those as well? Up 16ish in cash this month so all is good.

heard anything scary about the Bwin/party merger and consequences for betfair grinders?

Don't see why there would be any consequences. I read that they haven't even decide if they merge the playerbase, which software they'll use, etc.. I can't even think of a worse case scenario in this kind of merger, seems pretty irrelevant? Why would there be anything scary?

The companies merge in late march, I'd be surprised if there will be any changes in the next 6 months for us.

k cool, read some 2p2 thread that suggested bwin leaving would cause a complete disappearance of fish on ongame and make the network pretty useless

Originally Posted by Genitruc

k cool, read some 2p2 thread that suggested bwin leaving would cause a complete disappearance of fish on ongame and make the network pretty useless

yea all good, if that happens we'll move to BWIN/Party. But I rly don't think it's gonna be much worse, Betfair has a lot of sportsbook players.

How many GSOP events do you intend on playing? I'm gonna try to play at least a handful, and am willing to do a 500$ sidebet on who finishes higher on the overall leaderboard. What say you?

Originally Posted by Ravageur

How many GSOP events do you intend on playing? I'm gonna try to play at least a handful, and am willing to do a 500$ sidebet on who finishes higher on the overall leaderboard. What say you?

Alright booked 100$ for most pts in leaderboard, and 10% swap for each tourney with both play.

$100 bet from $500 bet? :P

Originally Posted by griffey24

$100 bet from $500 bet? :P

Not high stakes enough for you? Are you in too?

75/100hrs completed for the month, I didn't do much grinding last week so I'm a bit behind schedule, but I can still get this done!

100$ is definitely better because of the likelihood one of us gets tilted from bubbling the first 2 and says 'i'm never playing tournaments again!'.

how many you guys gonna play? want a fish in your side bet? (aka me)

Not sure how many I'm going to be able to play (I'm thinking 5ish), I was supposed to start tmr but I have something in the evening so can't. And as long as Alexos confirms, you're welcome to join the sidebet. 200$ to winner.

Probably dumb for me to do it cuz I think I'm only gonna end up playing 3 haha. Would have been 4 with the $200 tomorrow but I'm waiting on a Moneybookers cashout from PS and I doubt I'll get the funds on time.

I'll do it anyway cuz I'm a fish and also cuz I'm gonna win one which should be good enough on the leaderboard would it be $300 to the winner if I'm in?

We're probably just giving alexos free money since he'll own us and mincash in 15 of them. But yeah, 300$ to the winner sorry, was thinking profit. But if you end up not playing any or something comes up, it's no big deal if you have to back out.

Maybe one of you could ship me $222 to cover my GSOP buyins tomorrow (gonna play the $22 Mini too) and I could give PS or FTP? After tomorrow I'm not playing again until Thursday, so my money should be good by then.

So yeah if someone can trade me $222 on Betfair for PS or FTP, let me know! Then I'm in for sure.

if I get a transfer, does it negate my deposit bonus?

Can't transfer on Betfair so that sucks... You should be able to instantly deposit once you get your money on MB though, surprised it would take more than one day to get PS to MB.

And your 100$ is booked, 300$ goes to winner. I'm up vs two MTT sharks so even if I play them all I'm drawing slim

Ah that sucks... okay if my money comes in on time for me to play Event 1, I am in for the bet, otherwise I'm not participating. Sound okay? I'll post here tomorrow before the event starts to confirm either way.

Sounds good, hope you get it in time!

You can't transfer money on Betfair, but you can transfer using MB and instantly deposit onto Betfair. MB transfers are close to instant I believe.

I'd transfer you the money on MB, courtiebee, if I had any on there at the moment.

ohhh right.. I can do that Courtney.

I got my MB funds like an hour after the tourney started. Fail. I'll have to give you guys my money during the next donkament sidebet.

GLGLGL this week

P.S. Do these tourneys have late reg? I'm consistently late when it comes to registering for tournaments, so this is good info for me to know :P

Originally Posted by courtiebee

P.S. Do these tourneys have late reg? I'm consistently late when it comes to registering for tournaments, so this is good info for me to know :P

no late reg

damn! how about breaks? 55 minutes past since they start on the hour?

Yeah something like that for breaks. We both busto'd the rebuy today. I mincashed Event 1 so I have a HUGE INSURMOUNTABLE LEAD

Originally Posted by courtiebee

damn! how about breaks? 55 minutes past since they start on the hour?

Just played a cpl tournaments but pretty sure they're not synchronized like on stars.

Originally Posted by Ravageur

Yeah something like that for breaks. We both busto'd the rebuy today. I mincashed Event 1 so I have a HUGE INSURMOUNTABLE LEAD

Should I buy out? *wink

Originally Posted by Alexos

Just played a cpl tournaments but pretty sure they're not synchronized like on stars.

yeah if I end up playing tourneys on betfair, I'm gonna have to make sure that they always start on the hour so that at least a couple minutes of break are synced with PS and FTP. Otherwise my life is gonna suuuuck

Originally Posted by courtiebee

yeah if I end up playing tourneys on betfair, I'm gonna have to make sure that they always start on the hour so that at least a couple minutes of break are synced with PS and FTP. Otherwise my life is gonna suuuuck

Haha I didn't know that 5min synched break was "lifechanging" :P

it really sucks to go to the washroom or try to eat during a 6-12 hour day of donkaments without synched breaks!

Originally Posted by courtiebee

it really sucks to go to the washroom or try to eat during a 6-12 hour day of donkaments without synched breaks!

Yeah you're right. We cash game players have it easy! Switch over to the good side.

February Recap and March goals:
-Did not achieve 100hrs of play, only 85hrs. We'll try again for March. How is it so hard?
-Did not do much studying for cash games. We'll try again..
-Played some SnG's and got better at those. We'll not try again for March.
-Played some donkaments, idk if I suck at them or not. Once every few months I bink something big and get all excited about playing more. "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" kinda thing. Gonna play some more in March b/c of the propbet I have with Dylan.

The past 10 days have been super unproductive. I could find many excuses for that, like outgrinding myself previously in the month, or the gym taking a toll on my weak body :P but I need to get back on track now. I'll try wake up around 9am every day and schedule my day in advance, which will usually be 5hrs a poker and gym every other day. I absolutely need to hit the gym at least 3x a week to bulk up my lower body before I get my orthopaedic knee brace in April so I can start running again.

Some graphs I guess to make this operation worth reading:






My poker ambitions have been somewhat lowered recently. After two great years I thought sky is the limit, but with my runbad last year and online poker getting tougher, I realise it's almost impossible for me to have 50k months again unless I grind 100k hands at 5/10 monthly, which is not an option. It's sad but I think I'm alright with that and can still make a bunch of money at midstakes. The only question now is will that be enough to keep me excited about playing poker for a living? We'll see, maybe my perspective will change if I have a crazy upswing soon.

That's a damn good 'unproductive month' imo.

good luck getting in the hours next month!

Today:

-2/5hrs of play
-Gym
-small tourney cash

Tomorrow:

-Set up a couple appointments
-5/5hrs
-mincash tourney
-Gym (25% probability)

What the fuckkkk, grinding 1hr per day on average. This week I had a bunch of people come in my new condo to fix stuff, like delaminated (sp?) floor, cracks in the wall, which apparently is pretty common for new buildings. So my condo is a mess and I'm using it as an excuse since I obv require perfect grinding conditions to achieve my sick winrate :P.

Plan today is to play 5 hours again, and go to the gym. One time dealer.

One of those days where everything goes right, the usual 2/4 to 5/10, 9-12 tables.



Busted the tourney I played, will have to eventually cash in some of these to catch up to Mr.tourney donk-Ravageur, and tomorrow is a good day for that since there's also the huge sunday million which I will try to bink.

One thing I forgot to mention is we drank a nice ridiculously expensive 1995 Chateauneuf-du-Pape courtesy of Ravageur and Genitruc, and it was pretty epic. I've been drinking and enjoying wines for 5-6 yrs now and thought I knew my shit, but damn there's a huge difference between aged wine and ready to drink wine. When we first opened up the bottle the wine didn't taste that good, but then we read online that some ppl actually let the wine decant for 5 hours before drinking. We tried that and it makes all the difference, as well as swirling it in your glass for about a minute. Anyways it ended up being great, so thx guys!

Lend me your graph for one day plz.

Glad it was good, I propose a toast to final tabling the Mill tmr together. Cheers!

5hrs of play today, check. Time to get out of here and make it rain!

Ravageur swap 10% for the mill?

booked

sick graph

GL in the million. That Lambo has courtiebee written all over it though...

$2.5k in the mill! niiice.. how late did that go?

siiiiick

Yeah my dreams were crushed yesterday when I lost KK<AJ then AQ<AK (with only 4bb though) and went out 662/59,000. I like tourneys, I always feel that rush whenever I go deepish, and it's kinda fun to always have an interesting decision where I'm not sure what the best play is and have to really think things through. I mean yeah we're mostly shallow but there's still a lot of mistakes to be made for someone who isn't ShaunDeeb. Speaking of which I ran across this article on mt's today and found it really interesting : Life as an Online MTT Pro by the Numbers (It’s Hard) | NoahSD's Awesome Poker Blog

edit: Looks like his blog has articles about cash games players as well.

In other news I'm going to Riviera Maya, Mexico on March 20th-27th so I'll try to grind rly hard until then (goals are good, even if you don't always accomplish them!) So goal is 60hrs of play until then, which is 5hrs/day avg. I am motivated so that's good.

Thanks for posting that blog link, Alex. That's a GREAT article. Most people don't realize what kind of variance goes into MTT poker. While I'm just starting to realize how sick it can be from my own experience, this blog really hit it home.

At the moment I'm sharing a BR with someone and in a year we'll probably play 10k to 12k tournaments combined. It makes me feel a little better about the variance possibility, but damn!!!!

Here's the same equivalent for NL cash game players.

Life as a NLHE 6-max Cash Game Pro by the Numbers (It Ain’t Too Bad) | NoahSD&#039;s Awesome Poker Blog

I guess I SHOULD switch to 6 max cash...

Gratz Alexos!
So now you spew on tourney in addition to SH?

those blog links made me realize my suspicion that I've been running good my entire life is actually plausible. and that death runs are a statistical certainty

and congrats on a +20k february! you are such a baller

Had another nice run in an ongame tourney yesterday but I ended up busting like 28th for 650$. I feel like I had a few (very small) aha moments in tourneys last year, one of which was that I didn't need to go batshit crazy with less than 16bb and start shoving any two. It's actually okay to blind down to under 10BB if you're really card dead and the situation just isn't right. Patience is key I guess!

As for cash games, Tuesday I played 3hrs and today 4hrs, which is behind schedule obviously. I'm wasting a lot of time in the morning just talking on msn and surfing forums, maybe I should not open msn until after my first sesh. I think I'll try that tomorrow. 10 days, 53hrs to go!

Originally Posted by Alexos

As for cash games, Tuesday I played 3hrs and today 4hrs, which is behind schedule obviously. I'm wasting a lot of time in the morning just talking on msn and surfing forums, maybe I should not open msn until after my first sesh. I think I'll try that tomorrow. 10 days, 53hrs to go!

naaah.. this is lame!

Originally Posted by griffey24

naaah.. this is lame!

hmm yeah guess it is, it's 1pm, haven't used msn yet, and 0 hands played so far. .... ...................

3hrs today, lots of tables so I did play 3k hands. Feeling pretty good at the tables, maybe my timing is good but on 90% of tables at 2/4 I feel like I'm the best reg. At 5/10 there's a ton of guys doing a 2.2x 3bet on the btn and it's really annoying. They also tend to call every 4bet when they do that, making me think their range is balanced. I think my strategy will be to 4bet a wide range myself just to gain initiative and try to take it down on flops and turns, but I'll have to put some serious thought into that.

9 days, 50hrs to go.

Originally Posted by Alexos

3hrs today, lots of tables so I did play 3k hands. Feeling pretty good at the tables, maybe my timing is good but on 90% of tables at 2/4 I feel like I'm the best reg. At 5/10 there's a ton of guys doing a 2.2x 3bet on the btn and it's really annoying. They also tend to call every 4bet when they do that, making me think their range is balanced. I think my strategy will be to 4bet a wide range myself just to gain initiative and try to take it down on flops and turns, but I'll have to put some serious thought into that.

9 days, 50hrs to go.

So they are going 30->75?

If they are making it so small, I'd def say that gives us more room to call pre and c/r a range of different flops no?

I think I mentioned this to you the other day, but lately my counter has been to include more premiums into my calling range, than widening my 4bet range. Not sure which is best yet.

The reason I re-started this thread was to motivate myself to play 100k hands at 5/10 and higher to see if I'm able to achieve decent success. This started out pretty badly as I lost 16k ish at 10/20 right off the bat. The nit in me ended up winning the battle and now I'm back to my usual ways of playing 2/4 through 10/20. I'm cool with that, and I won't try to change this anymore, it's just not worth it for me to keep trying to ONLY play higher. The money is good where I'm at and I'll content myself to playing higher whenever I feel like it.



I also said I will review every reg and try to crush the games, but then again, since I didn't play 5/10+ only, I didn't need to do that. I truly feel 2/4 and 3/6 games are as soft as ever, and even most regs are so terribad that I don't even need to thoroughly evaluate their games away from the tables in order to crush them.

/

I'm feeling pretty sick today and don't feel like grinding much. I'll play this GSOP tourney and maybe add some cash on the side. Might switch to my laptop so I can just watch tv while I stack these donks.

Was sick pretty much all week so didn't play much, just one rungood sesh and one runbad sesh to cancel each other, whatever. Leaving sunday for Mexiicooo so don't really care about poker right now.

Tomorrow there's a pretty big fight for boxing fans, Bute vs Magee. Bute is a beast but Magee is lefty and has a pretty good record, so should be awesome as always. GOGOGO!

Also here's a glimpse of what romanian TV/culture is like. Tbh it's a great country to live in when you're rich, might consider a move some day.

Videonews :: Video :: Neatza: Roxana Vancea, concurentă la postul de vecină, face sărituri ca mingea

LOL

Bute via domination, I will go with TKO round 4.

For those that didn't read this : A Portrait of the Artist as a Mid-stakes Grinder - INTERNETPOKERS

A lot of truth in that.

And tyty Bute for shipping it, he's slowly going from great to legendary.

not to rain on the parade because i love bute and hope he never loses, but i think the general public's consensus (outside of Quebec) is that he needs some more high profile wins to achieve great/legendary status. He needs to beat some of the super six guys to get there, but I think he gets by all those in style except for andre ward which would be an awesome fight.

damn that haseeb post is solid. Definitely inspiring, I think I forgot how to go about getting better (i.e. trying to play every fkn hand better than i am) instead of just 'hoping' thing works out and my natural poker skills will cruise me to victory.

Originally Posted by Ravageur

not to rain on the parade because i love bute and hope he never loses, but i think the general public's consensus (outside of Quebec) is that he needs some more high profile wins to achieve great/legendary status. He needs to beat some of the super six guys to get there, but I think he gets by all those in style except for andre ward which would be an awesome fight.

yeah i agree, kind of what i meant by slowly going into legendary status and I hope he gets those fights soon. Besides Ward/Kessler I don't see any other superstars he can fight.

yeah...maybe pavlik? also it'd be so epic if pascal beat hopkins convincingly in rematch, bute beat kessler/ward and then bute moved up to fight pascal. i think quebec would spontaneously combust though.

Yeah would be cool but I don't think that's gonna happen in the next 2-3 yrs, reason being a fight like this will generate a lot of interest/money even if it happens when both players aren't at their peak. I don't know much about boxing though but that's my theory, lol.

Pavlik is downswinging hard I think.

Boxing = Tyson, holyfield, Roy Jones Jr, De La Hoya, Foreman, Sugar Ray, and Ali.

/boxing knowledge

Past 2 months have been good despite poor volume. I'm up a decent amount and close enough to put me on pace for my yearly goal.

Sooo new month, same goals!

100hrs of the pokers. 700hands/hr (9 tabling?) x 100 = 70k hands
gym 3x a week
read/skim 1 chapter of mathematics of poker per week

I'm pretty motivated right now, I need to take poker seriously cuz it's my job after all.There are still some good profitable games and there will be for the next 2 years at least, so I need to take advantage of this to make up for when I'll be 35ish and jobless (hopefully not though!).

Shark is huuungry!