Team Clickin it Back

Last Saturday night, Matty and I decided to play some live poker @ edgewater casino, so we phoned in our names, and got on the skytrain to head to the casino.

We started talking about the whole year, and how brutal the variance had been for all of us. When I refer to all of us, I am mainly talking about Jordan (bigbluffzinc), Brandon (Mazurite), and then him and myself. Us four are a core group that have been around each other for some time now. Jordan and Matty were both involved with me in the SNGReasons project that lasted about a year, and then black Friday happened which ended that, and Brandon is a former student of mine, who moved to Vancouver and lived with Jordan last August and has since got a new place, which is just right down the road in walking distance.

A couple of months ago, we started bouncing around the idea of giving ourselves a team name.

We came up with Team Clickin it Back. The name itself is a popular online poker term, which im sure almost everyone has heard of thats familiar with online poker. Obviously our team name had to have something to do with poker, and mocking this phrase makes for a near perfect team name. Asides from us four, we also added Jay (YugiohPro), and Mike (Niet2maar3).

Anyways, before derailing this any longer, back to the skytrain conversation with Matty.

So were just going back and forth about how bad the year has been. We took so many shots, and came up just short so many times. Our group doesn't know what its like to bink a huge score. He even said to me at one point, sometimes I feel like were just chasing a pipe dream, and that binking huge scores isn't realistic. Our mindsets were clouded because we never ran good deep in the right tournaments. We would just say its variance, we just need to keep firing bullets, etc, but when you don't know what it is like to be successful you sometimes question what it is your doing.

We all had huge sweats for big scores this year, and every sweat came up short. Our biggest cash this year is Brandon's run in the 5K WCOOP main event where he got a little over 30k, which when you think about it, is a little over 6 buyins for that said tournament and isn't really a huge score given the buyin. We put ourselves in too many good situations to bink huge, and math says on average at least 1 of those would have worked out, but sadly variance is a bitch and none of the deep runs turned into anything.

We started going over plans for next year, how things will be better, how we plan on making a lot of noise in the MTT world, etc. We improved so much over the past year, we wanted to start getting rewarded for how good we are.

Matty was leaving on Monday, and given all the deep runs he had made in the past couple of weeks, including 2 milly runs, a FT bubble in a massive micro millions field, etc, I could tell the variance was starting to really effect him. We played live, we both lost money, and then we went home to get some sleep... this would be Matty's last Sunday before going back home for the holidays.

The next day, I remember it being about 2pm, and our living room, which is our grind room basically, the atmosphere was painful. Mike "Niet2maar3", who is here grinding for a little before going back to the netherlands, was just grinding SNGS, but for Jordan, Matty, and I, we were all blanking just about every MTT possible.

Next thing you know, Matty is getting super deep in one of the FTOPS, Im getting deep in the milly, Jordan has a huge stack + getting deep in the Sunday 500, and brandon is CL of the 109 rebuy super deep. Jordan and my runs ended like all the other runs in the past have ended, which wasn't good. My student/horse Hopez also had frustrating finishes in the Sunday kickoff (5TH) and the Sunday milly (11th... grrrr) but we proceeded to watch Brandon take down the 109$ rebuy for 51K, and we watched Matty take down a FTOPS for a little over 100K, plus a jersey!

Our biggest cash to date was 30k, we had two surpass that in the same day. It truly is crazy at how poker and variance work out like that. Mattys FTOPS was one of the harder ones to win as well, I think it was a 100$ buyin, and the field was huge. We celebrated with cigars and drinks on the balcony, and it was awesome seeing Matty especially after taking down a 100K score and having that surreal feeling. I couldn't be happier for both of them as a win for them is a win for all of us. We grind it out everyday together and its refreshing to finally see some good results.

More then anything, them winning two big tournaments on a Sunday motivated the whole group. We now know that positive variance in these huge field big payout tourneys is possible (not that we never did know that, but boy we questioned it a lot lol), and I think moving forward its going to motivate us to get as good as we can, to prepare ourselves for these big payday tournaments.

I am predicting a massive year for Team Clickin it back in 2013, the sky is the limit.