Saturday, June 30, 2007

oopsie / weekend

First off, I made a pretty significant mistake in my last post and understated my results by about $1200. I had my results filtered to only show certain limits, which omitted the success I've had at some bigger games. Anyhow, the results are now 100% accurate.


My weekend was pretty sweet. I spent friday night with some friends drinking beer, jumping off things and taking pics. Good combo, I know.



That's some serious air.

So after drinking until 6 in the morning, I was up at noon to meet my g/f at SeoulLand amusement park. Oops.

All the rides were pretty tame, but the park was surprisingly empty. NOTHING is ever empty in Korea. So we got a bunch of rides in, but the it was so humid out we called it a day pretty early.
I'm looking forward to playing a lot of poker this month. I'm hoping to log like 100-150k hands. I should also have a cool annoucement in the next week once I have it all sorted out. If you've been on pokerstars in last few days, you'll know what it is. :)

Until then...

Friday, June 29, 2007

june results

I think im done for the month:

Cash Games:
36,268 hands for $5903.25[$89.44/hr]

Tournaments:
18 played for a profit of $321.46

Pokerstars Bonii:
$1500 VIP bonus

June Net profit: $7,724.71

----------------------------------------------
Year to date: $36,621.31

So I guess I"m on pace for a $70k year, but I gaurantee $100k. book it.
I'm playing great and feeling great... im unexploitable, as my raccoon friend would say.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

off topic goodness

Yeah, I know this is totally off-topic, but this guy is amazing.



Check out some of the other videos too -- all pretty amazing.
His album is also some good music to poker to.

In other random news, I had a dream I was attacked by a tiger last night. I lived, and even managed to make away with his paw (long story). Ship!
My g/f says this is supposed to mean awesome good luck is coming my way? NIce.

Hopefully this weekend goes well. If so, I'll put it all on the tiger paw.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

easy money & coinflips

I just made the easiest $65 ever.

Dude comes to my table and asks me to buy $400 of his tourny dollars. So I lowball him as a joke and say I'll give him $300. He hrmms and haaaws, and eventually says $325.
lol, ok.

11 mins later I flipped it for $390.



Some people are just plain bad at teh interwebz.

In other news, I played a friendly game of lowlimit omaha with some friends, which escalated into an all-in fest. God, I run bad.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

all on red

I know this is an oldie, but it's a goodie. I'm sure a lot of you have never seen this:

Brit Ashley Revell bets $136000 on one spin of the roulette wheel in Las Vegas after selling everything he owned. This is what happened..



Too bad his site is lame.

Monday, June 18, 2007

finally settled

There's been a tonne of things to sort out since I returned. Glad to say that most is now taken care of.

First and foremost, it included reuniting with all my old friends here. We got a little crazy this weekend, but I guess it was overdue. Ok, maybe 'a little' is an understatement. Oh how I wish I could get into the details, but I have no idea how many people here read my blog and I'm in no mood for a trainwreck.

Other than that, I had a big issue with my apartment because the lease was up, and the owner didn't want to rent to a foreigner (my old boss from the school was in the original lease).
bastard.
This really sucked, because I love my place and all my friends are in this building or relatively close.

Eventually I got the same apartment put under my girlfriends name for the next year. Basically this means she can steal my $5k deposit at any time and get me evicted. So I pretty much signed a 1yr extension on my relationship as well. :D No problem there, though.

I fixed up most of the other problems around my place, but still have some things that need fixing/replacing.

Outside of poker, I have some new self-improvement goals set out.
1. learn korean
-This is going well, and after 2 days of study I can almost read the language. I figure if I'm going to be here for a while, I might as well.

2. work out/get healthy
-I always go through cycles in my life between being healthy and ignoring my health. Well, now its time for a cycle of a different kind... an exercycle.
Yup, I ordered an exercise bike for my place and it gets here tonight. I debated between a real bike and this, but monsoon season is upon us and the air quality here sucks.
Im about 200lbs right now. At 6'2, this isn't that bad, but I could stand to lose 10-15lbs and a few points of body fat.


That's about it for now. I hope I can get a lot of hours in this week, and stay on the good run I've been having. Wish me luck.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

나는 돌아온다!

Alright, I've made it back alive to the beautiful Republic of Korea.
I have to say, I've missed Asia. It feels like I have 2 homes now, which is cool. Either way, it's nice to be back.

My trip was pretty good, with only a few minor hassles along the way.

I managed to sleep through he bulk of the longest(13hrs) of the 3 flights, which is going to set me up nicely for the time adjustment.

I'm gonna spend the day cleaning up around my apartment and running the necessary errands. I should be back on the grind by the weekend. I've only played about 10hrs this month so far, so I have a lot of ground to make up.



I also updated the video on my last post. Not sure what happened to the original, but it dissapeared off of youtube.

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

i bet you

Phil laak and Aantonio Esfandiari now thier own TV show. Basically, its them making stupid prop bets about all kinds of crazy things. It's pretty awesome.

This is the first quarter of the 1st episode... the rest are all on youtube if you want to see more.



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Thursday, June 07, 2007

farha is a pimp

Sammy farha and online pro Brian Townsend have been going at it, playing heads up omaha and hold 'em.


At one point, Brian was down $1.2million, but fought back to book a $50k win for the entire match.

This is the awesome part though:

On the last hand, Sammy wanted to "run it" in Omaha for 100K each. This is where each player is dealt 4 cards, which you don't look at, then the flop is dealt. The first person to act then turns one card up. The next player has to beat the card the first turned up. This continues till one person is drawing dead or all four cards are exposed. I said no initially but he said two times he would put up 105K vs my 100K. I agreed and we spilt the two hands which netted me 5K. Then he took all the money he had in front of him, 470K, and said lets flip you only have to put up 450K. I thought a bit and would have accepted if I could easily get more money to Vegas to replace the loss, but I couldn't so I declined.

wow. who offers to flip a coin for half a million dollars?

Oh yeah, this man:

edit: apparently the dealer of this game has a blog(l0l), and was not tipped by either player during the game. totally unballa

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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

poker grapher

I've hand a bunch of questions about how I make graphs, and how post hand histories.

The graph is made with this software:
Poker Grapher (its free)

To convert hands, I input the raw hand history into THIS, select HTML output, and then just paste the output onto my blog.

Viola.


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Tuesday, June 05, 2007

in which I win a hand

I've been playing really well, and running well to boot. So I decided to play a little $3/6NL and test the waters. Check out this beauty:

Poker Stars - No Limit Hold'em Cash Game - $3/$6 Blinds - 8 Players - (LegoPoker HH Converter)

Preflop: the_main is dealt J J (8 Players)
2 folds, the_main raises to $24.00, 3 folds, SB calls $21.00, BB folds

Flop: ($54) 7 2 J (2 Players)
SB checks, the_main bets $36.00, SB raises to $96.00, the_main raises to $250.00, SB raises all-in to $623.00, the_main value calls his nuts all-in for $308.00
Uncalled bet of $65.00 returned to SB

Turn: ($1170) K (2 Players - 2 All-In)

River: ($1170) 9 (2 Players - 2 All-In)

Pot Size: $1,170.00 ($3 Rake)

SB had 8 6 (high card King) and LOST (-$582.00)
the_main had J J (three of a kind, Jacks) and WON (+$585.00)


I made my raise to $250 because I wanted him to think I could fold my hand to a push. Looked like it worked.

And this ends my random brag, you will now be returned to your regularly scheduled programming.




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Monday, June 04, 2007

good news/bad news

Bad news first.

I lost in the 2nd round of the full ring championship. :(

I played IanBarnes,(who I think is the favourite to win the whole thing now) and he took me down 4-2.

It was a really fast, supper aggressive match. He won the flips when he needed too, caught me on a sick cooler, a sick bluff, and then a semi-bluff. All in all we both played well, but niether of us were as patient as we should've been.

Good news is I'm running well this month. I played my first short session and won about $1200, and also came 2nd in a tourny for a $800 or so win.
I gave some of the tourny win back when I played a $650 sattelite to the wsop. I came close, but couldn't close the deal. I had $370T$ I got thru a $25 sat, so I only anted up $280. I would've loved to win that thing though and gone to the WSOP. :(


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Friday, June 01, 2007

Inside the mind of a nit.

I recently became a 'pooh-bah' on 2+2. Traditionally, when you acheive this you make a big post to give back to the community. Here is my post:


Inside the mind of a nit.

Welcome to my pooh-bah post. It took me over 3 years to get here, so hopefully I have something worthwhile to say.

In these 3 years, I have evolved I lot. Both as a person, and as a player. This is the post I wish I read 3 years ago.


Managing yourself

Poker is hard. And no, this not something people less intelligent than you say, it's the honest-to-god truth.

It takes a special person to be successful at this game.

Strategy is the easy part. Self discipline and control are what makes it difficult.

Now, what _IS_ self-discipline?

Generally,it is the ability to do something regardless of your emotional state.
This means, no matter how you feel about something, you continually act in your best interests.
With poker, deviance from self-discipline is known as tilt.

There are several forms of tilt that people encounter, and I think its dependant upon personality.

The first, and most destructive form, is moving to a game where you can not withstand the variance.
It's happened to most of us. You lose $100 playing $25NL, and instead of grinding it out, you move up to $400NL where you can recover your losses quicker.
The only problem is you have a $500 bankroll, and now 80% of it is in play.

Other people will take the $100 and go to the blackjack table or play some craps.

Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but if you do this enough times, eventually, you WILL go broke. No doubt.

This is because this is a GAMBLE with a negative expectation (busto), and poker is not about taking gambles with negative expectations.

But you know this, and do it anyways.

This is where self-discipline comes into play. Without it, you will never build and maintain a bankroll.

In this game, there are MANY good players. WHat separates the great ones from the good ones is control.

So how does one build self-discipline? Well, it takes time, effort, and practice. This article helped me tremendously:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/self-discipline/

Yes, it's long, I know. But if you can't get through it, well, then it's pretty obvious you don't have the self-discipline to be successful at poker.

One major change I've made in this regard involves WHEN I play. When you're losing, you have that desire to get even.
It's that desire that crushes so many bankrolls.
As simple as this sounds -- play more when you're winning, and less when you're losing. Even if you only break for an hour or two, it will help.

I'll also share my tip to somewhat calm your tilt. K'naan said it better than I ever could when he sung: "Smile while you're bleeding".

(BTW, I'm a pysch minor, which totally qualifies me to give the following advice. ;) )
One idea is known as the facial feedback hypothesis(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_feedback_hypothesis for more info), and states that facial movement can influence emotional experience.

When you get sucked out on, or make a bad play, there are emotions that arise within you.
What I'm proposing, is that it is not your emotions causing your reaction, but rather your reaction causing your emotion.

So, if you can manage to avoid these reactions, you can avoid the corresponding emotions.
Instead of getting angry, frowning, and slamming your mouse down, you should try to relax, smile and control your breathing.

You'll be amazed how easily this can keep you on track.

In addition to staying in control at the table, you must maintain control of your life away from it as well to be successful.

The first thing is to stay healthy. Try your best to get to the gym or otherwise get some exercise.

It will help increase your stamina and mental alertness.
This is something increasingly overlooked.

Secondly, plan your meals around your sessions. DO NOT sit down at the poker table after right a huge meal, or when you havn't eaten for a while.

For one, if you've just eaten, lots of your body's blood is allotted to digestion, and that takes away from your brain. You wont be as sharp as you'd like.

And if you're hungry, you will easily be distracted (there as a huge study on children who didn't eat breakfast suffering in school, and succumbing to ADD).

The last suggestion I have for you is to get involved (and stay involved) in the poker community.

Poker can be a very lonely job at times, and playing online deprives us of the human contact we might find at the traditional office place.

Well, treat this forum as an office. While it is not a substitute, it _IS_ social interaction nonetheless.

Share the resources of your fellow employees, and have fun with them.
We're all going through the same things, after all.


Managing your game

My second piece of advice is much simpler.
Learn as many games as you can. Play omahahaha, play stud, play high/low games, play LIMIT HOLD 'EM(seriously).

All will help you tremendously with NL hold 'em (limit hold em will help a lot with hand reading).
Last piece of advice has to do with multi-tabling.

A lot of you don't need this, because you can successfully 12-table. But for those who are struggling with it, my advice is simple.

Load up all the micro SNGs you can, and play them simultaneously. I'm talking 20-25 tables.
Try to make the best decisions you can, but don't worry about results.
Play multiple sets of these.

Now load up 8 tables of small stakes cash games and revel in how slow the play seems to be.
Slowly add tables day by day until you're at 12.
Profit.

Finally, I'll end my post with a theorem.

This is a trend I've picked up at full ring over the last 600k hands, and specifically applies to mediocre(or just plain bad) players.

One of these players leads out from OOP on the flop, and you flat call.

If the turn pairs the board (top pair, especially if it's an ACE), and the player checks, he almost always has trips. Play accordingly.

Simple? Yeah, I know. And I wish I could show some proof, but you'll just have to trust me.

I don't know what to call it, so I'm open to suggestions. ;)

cheers, and good luck at the tables!

-John


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sick graph

Yeah, so highstakes player CTS posted his graph for all of May. (click graph to see it)



lol, and I thought I was doing ok...

Yes, that's $900,000 for the month, or roughly, $30k/day. Sweet electrical jesus, talk about some motivation.



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