Wow, where to start? Its been about 8 months since my last blog spot, I will try my best to recap the last 8 months.
Post black Friday I tried to grind live. This ended up in a complete disaster. Grinding live has huge mental swings, huge variance, and being I had no experience as a live "pro", and wasn't accustomed to the environment that comes with live poker, I failed miserably.
When i received the money from pokerstars, combined with what I had saved up, I had a really good roll to grind live. Pit problems, combined with taking shots at too many high buyin tournaments and whiffing, my roll was depleting, and fast. I ended up going to just two WSOP circuits, Chester and New Orleans, and that was all the travelling I did.
I ended the Chester trip stuck about 2k after expenses, which wasn't too huge of a hit to my bankroll and easily manageable. When I went down to New Orleans, boy did I fuck up. I ended up whiffing every single tournament for a combined 4k ish, which wasn't bad considering I raped the 1/2 game there (won about 7k in 1/2 over the 12 day span I was there). Expenses were fairly high, but what really raped me was pit games. I should have had a 1kish profitable trip if I didn't touch the pit games, but i degen'd huge and lost about 8 grand in pits, and I left the trip stuck about 7k after expenses.
As far as experience goes, fuck Chester, it sucks, but New Orleans is awesome. The 1/2 game there is insane as it has a max buyin of the chip leader at the table, and is by far the best cash game I have ever seen. And just everything about the city is awesome.
moving on.
So just about 1 month as a live pro, and im now stuck 10 grand, which was a good hunk of my bankroll, and it didn't get better from there.
When I got home from New Orleans, I was now living with mom and dad, and I went to the casino just about everyday for the next month. The degenerate side of me took control and I found myself playing pit games more often then I was playing poker.
Just as a example of how bad it was, heres a little story. One night, I went in and started playing blackjack like I usually did, and they had a lucky lady bet which is basically a retarded bet and the houses edge is huge, but I did my best at counting cards and if there was a lot of face cards in the deck, I would usually bet at least 15$ on it (if you get 20 you win 4 to 1, suited is like 10 to 1, and suited match is 20 to 1, and QhQh pays 200 to 1, 1000 to 1 if dealer has blackjack). Anyways, halfway through the shoe the deck is hot as a mother fucker, so I put down 25$ and what do you know, i get Qh Qh, and the dealer is showing a Ace. Dealer ended up not having blackjack, but I won 5,000$ for it. I was up about 200$ before that so that puts my running total of being up about 5,200$.
After that, I lost track of time, and for the next 8 hours, which seemed like 5 minutes at the time, my gambling was out of control. I ended up losing all of it, I walked out of the casino up 100$.
Needless to say, with a problem like I had, my money wasn't lasting. Thank god I was smart enough to shut myself down before I lost everything. I took a hiatus from playing poker, and more importantly going to the casino.
From Mid June, till about mid August, I spent the 2 months literally doing nothing with my life. I went out with friends about once a week, and spent the rest of my time playing video games (World of warcraft mostly), and watching TV. I literally spent everyday stoned. Weed was a good escape from reality, but at the end of the day spending everyday like that just gets you depressed and makes you apathetic about life.
Then one day, I have a convo with BigBluffzInc, and I got to thank him, because he got me out of the funk I was in. He basically just said Im wasting time, and I needed to move if I wanted to make poker work.
Instead of moving immediately, I figured it would be better to wait to work on my game, combined with getting a head start on my VPPS for 2012. I spent the rest of 2011 ghosting bluffz, push0rdie, and my student mazurite a shit ton. I also got back into coaching a bit, and picked up a couple students.
I ended up going back to the casino as well, and i did ok, I didn't make a ton of money, but i made some. More importantly, I stayed away from the pit games, which in itself is a huge accomplishment.
For the year as a whole, I lost money, which as a professional poker player is just unacceptable. Most of my losses came from staking and black friday. The PF I was apart of lost a shit ton of money. The PF as a whole had 140k, and about 40k of that equity belonged to me. We def over-stretched out bankroll, as about 135k of the 140k was out in horses, which wasn't a huge deal as we were profit chopping with horses left and right, and if needed we could reload it. But of course, black friday hits us at the worse time, and we lose a shit ton of makeup (90% of the losses), and a lot of the horses ended up rolling the rolls that they had.
Of the 140k in equity we had, we got back about 20k of that, a little under 6k for me, which is a pretty withered loss of "just" 34k for me.
List of horses who stole and haven't had any contact with us since black friday, and can go fuck themselves include
- Dacoach76
- Goober37
- Bearfister
- Illgetyouontilt
As far as poker goes, I did good early in the year, and did ok to end it, I ended up making a little bit of money as a whole, and TBH even in the 2 months I completely spewed, I still made money poker wise, But you gotta count everything. I also had a couple of students do really well (Mazurite and M1ghtyducks) which netted me 10k or so as well.
Moving onto 2012.
MrPaintball and myself decided to make the move to Canada to live with bigbluffzinc in Vancouver. I have been here for a little under 2 weeks now, and it feels good to be back to playing on Pokerstars.
It took about 10 days to get setup, half our fault for being dumb (lol printer problems), and half stars management team for taking a week to verify our accounts. I feel good about my game and the preparation I did for the past few months. The games are harder, much harder, and Its going to take a lot of work to make sure I stay ahead. This post has gone on way too long, so I will just end it with some 2012 poker goals that I have.
- SNE
- 150k game profit
- 400k combined profit between Playing/Rakeback/Coaching/Staking
- Go to vegas for the WSOP, play the main event
I know I know... pretty ambitious goals, especially considering my results in the past do not show signs of me having a year like this, but I am optimistic.
I will keep this blog more updated now, esp for the SNE chase.
GL at the tables
