And the beat goes on...

...Or in this case, it's the coaching that goes on! For those of you who didn't read my previous post, I have been having coaching with André since the beginning of the month. Until recently I was having 2 hours of coaching per day, I was studying 4 hours by myself and playing 2 hours. I was playing the $7.49 hypers and it was going pretty well. 

That schedule was recently changed to 6 hours of playing plus 4 hours of coaching. Even though now it's a total of 10 hours per day, I prefer this program over the previous one as I find it a lot more interesting. Not to mention how lucky I feel that André decides to give me 4 hours of his working time on a daily basis. That's a lot of time.

Now to the next topic. Back in July André made me a bankroll management guide. Here it is:

So based on what my bankroll is, I can check the table and see what are the stakes that I'm "allowed" to play. Before you start arguing about whether the current bankroll management is good or bad, let me tell you that it was specifically made for my case and what I'm trying to achieve this year. It may or may not apply to other people, I don't know. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not presenting this as the "golden rule" of managing your roll or anything, it's just what I'm currently using as a guide. As you can see, the $74s are the end game for this year and I'm not going to play higher than that even if my bankroll allows me to. That said, I do feel a million miles away from the $74s not only in terms of bankroll but also in terms of game play. 

But let's move on to why I started talking about bankrolls... In the beginning of August and almost throughout the entire month I was playing the $3s and the $7s. Coaching has helped a lot and I have been running good, so my bankroll kept going up and up... Until it hit the point where I was supposed to move up in stakes and mix in the 18s... That's when I started getting cold sweat and even though I had the bankroll, I didn't move up for a couple of days... Basically because I was traumatized by the last time I played those games back in May. If you don't remember my huge downswing and you'd like to see a graph, click here.

When I eventually did start playing the 18s the impact of the first day was kind of hard, because up to the $7s there are plenty of occasional players whose names you don't recognize and you see lots of bronze/silver/gold stars. Suddenly, you move up to the $18s and it's mostly supernovas and above or people that you know for a fact are regulars... I must admit it's kind of intimidating. Not to mention the obvious, people simply play better. And you feel it right away. I remember I went home that night and I bombed André with questions and told him about stuff that I hadn't seen people do at the lower buy-ins.

That said, the poker gods do seem to favor me lately and I'm on a good run again. That's awesome, cause I don't know if I could take another downswing right after moving up like last time. Here's my graph at the $18s since the beginning of the month:

And since I started with the graphs, here is my graph for the lower stakes (it includes mostly $7s but also some $3s): 

I'm obviously on the good side of variance, but I think coaching has a lot to do with these results. Speaking of which, we've had some very heated discussions with my coach.

The other day, a pretty interesting hand came up. Now, I only have this in a video and I guess I could pause it and take a printscreen but I don't want to expose the names of my opponents or the stats I have on them so we'll have to do it the good old fashioned way with pen and paper. Here's the situation: 

So here's what we know: Players 1 and 4 are good regulars. Player 3 we don't know much about, except that he is probably tight. Player 2 is not much of an issue because he is on the big blind, extremely short and is obligatorily all-in (hence the side pot already created in the middle of the table). The blinds level is 50-100 with an ante of 20. Player 3 shoves and Player 4 shoves over the top. I'm sitting comfortably on the button with my 1448 chips and it would be an easy thing to walk away from the hand, only I've been dealt pocket Queens. What is the correct play here?

André was saying that it's a fold. His reasoning was the following: I'm the chip leader at the moment, Player 2 is practically dead (he only had 12 chips when the hand begun so even if he wins this hand he is still most likely to bust soon). We don't know what Player 3 is shoving with, but since he is short and will be getting the big blind on the next hand we can't put him on the tightest range. Now Player 4 didn't just call, he shoved over the top risking a possible elimination from me if I decide to go with the hand as well. So his hand must be good and on a tight range. If I decide to fold, Player 1 may also call cause he is also very short. That would be a 4-way all in which is very good for me since I would be the only one that folded and with the chip lead. If Player 1 folds and Player 4 wins the hand, then we would be playing the bubble where I would have an extremely good position with the chip lead and a player with less than 2 blinds left. If Player 3 wins and doubles up, then I'm still at a good spot because at the next hand everyone will be much shorter than me and I can "bully" them around with my big stack.

So what did I do? I called. Simply because my hand was QQ and it has plenty of value by itself. If I lose, I'm still in a good position having more chips than player 1 and possibly player 3, while if I win I practically also win the tournament. And there comes the guessing part, cause when you put the hand in any ICM calculator you need to guess the ranges of each opponent. Unfortunately, this was the first time that our beloved ICMizer would not cooperate. It seems that the fact that the player on the big blind was so short was messing with the program's parameters and as a result it was saying that the hand was not valid to be analyzed (same as when you put all players folding for example). And it's not like we could give a few more chips to player 2 cause him being obligatorily all in was crucial for the decision of how to play the hand.

But anyway, André did not completely dismiss my opinion and admitted that it also made sense and could possibly be the optimal play. That alone for me is a victory. There were more controversial hands like that that we discussed. I remember an ATo on the bubble which André was insisting it was a shove and I was insisting that it was a fold. That one we managed to put in ICMizer and... I was right! No matter how much André would mess slightly with the opponents' ranges here and there, it was always an indisputable fold. I tried to find the hand to include it in the post but I couldn't (I have hours and hours of footage so unless I remember the exact date and time of a hand it's almost impossible to find)... While André kept looking at the screen trying to accept his defeat, I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of... chocolate milk to celebrate (I figured champagne would not be a good option cause the coaching was not over yet). 

Then yesterday, when we did our usual quiz of "what would be the range to call in this situation", I got my first 100% correct guess. At some other point André paused the video and asked me "Why did you do this here? It's not correct". I justified my play with so many different arguments that in the end he had to go with it and move on.

Towards the end of the session, we were reviewing a bubble play. It was a spot where I was on the SB and I shoved against the BB. He told me that folding would be a better option in that particular case and explained why. Then he said "That's what makes the difference between a good player and a great one". I nodded, still thinking about the hand. The short conversation that followed is kind of funny.

André: I just gave you a compliment.

Me: Are you kidding me? You just said that the best thing would be to fold. I shoved, so how's that a compliment?

Andé: I just called you a good player.

Me: ...   : P

We just sat there laughing for a while. Then we decided to call it a day cause we were both tired. For all I know I may not even be a winning player at the $18s, but it was nice to receive a compliment from a hyper-turbo specialist. This past month alone I feel like I've progressed more than all the past months I've been playing the hypers all together. Which makes me wonder... Why did we lose so much time and we didn't try this coaching thing earlier? I don't really have a reply to that. I've had coaching sessions with André before, but I didn't like them or learn nearly as much as I do now. I guess it's not only the student that's evolving through the learning process, it's also the teacher.

Anyway, for the first time plays and numbers and cards actually start to somehow... make sense. Could I really be going from zero ....to poker?

August schedule and Coaching

Hello!

So, we're halfway through August already! July went by very fast and I didn't pressure myself at all when it came to FPPs and points and all that. As a result, I'm currently only Silverstar but I don't care much about that. As you probably know, I've been trying to work on my game.

After struggling by myself through the whole month of July, André finally decided to take the situation in his hands and make the following schedule for me:

10.00: Wake up

11.00: Working time

13.00: Lunch

15.00: Working time

20.00: Coaching

22.00: Dinner

Ok, you may think it's nothing exciting, and it's not like I cannot make my own schedule anyway. What's cool about this schedule in particular is that it's compatible with André's schedule and I get two hours of coaching with him. EVERY. DAY.

Do you remember a couple of months back where I almost had to beg him to coach me? I mean, yeah he was always there to guide me and give me some advice here and there, but actually sit with me at the computer and review hands? That was pretty rare. So you can imagine how excited I am that he is going to spend two hours with me on a daily basis. He said he is going to keep doing it at least until the end of the month.

What we do during those two hours? Well, earlier in the day I record my sessions. Then I take the recording to André and we review it together. I've already had some coaching sessions with him and I'm totally loving it. The first day though, we only managed to review around 30 minutes of my session in those two hours. Just by that you can see we had a lot to talk about. I don't know if André suddenly got better at coaching or if I am in a better position now to hear/understand what he has to say, but it's the first time since I started messing with the hyper-turbos that I feel I'm learning so much.

The rest of my "working time" consists of 2 hours of playing and 4 hours of studying by myself. These days, since I've only been playing for two hours per day, I play the $7.49s. Here is my graph since the beginning of the month:

Towards the end of the graph you can see that I had a bit of a downswing. On the worst day of August so far, I lost around 21 buy-ins. It's not a big deal anyway, but what's interesting is that when I took the recording of that particular day back to André, it was when he found the less mistakes than ever before. Bad variance will come sooner or later no matter how well you play, so I was happy that I was playing fine. That is the only thing I can control anyway. 

I really enjoy the coaching so far and I often find myself looking forward to that part of the day. I also think 2 hours of coaching with André makes me improve as a player much more than the 4 hours I spend studying by myself. Not to mention it's far more interesting.

Of course there are those times during the coaching sessions that we disagree about a play. I think the play is fine while André thinks it's not. Then we put the hand in an ICM calculator to find out who is right. There are two possible outcomes: either André is right or André is right. How does that happen? It's quite simple, here's an example:

Outcome #1: The ICM calculator says that my play was bad, giving away -0.05% equity. Since I lost equity, André is obviously right. Doesn't matter that my play was just slightly bad.

Outcome #2: The ICM calculator says that my play was good cause it earned me +0.10% equity. BUT André has some extra arguments there like "ICM calculators do not take into consideration what happens in the next hand", "I know it says it's good but I would still fold there because of this and that and blah blah blah" (this last one is evoking his super-powers as a pro) and so bottom line, Andre is right again.

Even though our conversations do get heated up sometimes, I have to admit that I've also been able to witness to the full extend how good he is at the hypers. When there is an ambiguous situation, he puts all the variables in the calculator and then before hitting the "calculate" button he asks me what I think the ranges will be. Most of the times I just raise my shoulders and say "I don't know" or I say what I think the range is more or less, but I never know what to say when it comes to those borderline hands. Then, he tells me his opinion. Imagine my surprise when we see the results and he gets everything almost completely right. There was one occasion where he got it 100% correct and I was staring at him like he was an alien or something. I asked him how he did that and he said "Tons of practice". Hm. I guess I have a long way to go...

I obviously have lots of things to learn, but since we starting the intensive coaching I feel that the way I play just keeps getting better and my perception of the game becomes clearer. I still have to be careful with what André calls "the fancy play syndrome", I'm learning a lot of new things in a short period of time and sometimes I tend to overdo it when I'm playing but oh well! I'm really enjoying this new approach overall!

If there's anything more you want to know about my coaching, please leave it in the comments below.

Until next time... See you at the tables!

Studying the Hyper-Turbos

Hello!

Ok, I know it's been a while since my last post but you know... Summertime, nice weather, it's hard enough to be studying when you'd rather go to the nearest beach! But, as promised, it is time to make a post about how to study the Hyper-Turbos.

I want to clear out that I am not by any means an expert on the subject. This is just a presentation of what I did during the month of July which I dedicated to studying. So let's get started:

1. Make spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are very important because they help you have a clear vision of how to play. Yes, AA is a clear shove and 32 is a clear fold overall, but what do you do with the in between hands that are neither great nor awful? I know making spreadsheets is a huge headache and there is no clear answer on how to do them, but it's a crucial step. If you already have spreadsheets, review them and look for ways to make them better.

2. Study your opponents

You probably have an idea who your most frequent opponents are. Set a filter on Holdem Manager to find all the people that you have a lot of hands on and take a look at their statistics. Play around with the filters and the different options offered by the program. Try to figure out how they play, if they are loose, tight etc. and what their ranges are. Then, go to the notes of PokerStars client that appear while you are playing against them and insert any usefull information that can help you in game.

3. Study the bubble

Okay, so you have your basic game figured out and you know when to shove or call in the early stages of the tournament. Since hyper-turbians rarely play flops, the situations you come up with do not vary that much (comparing with regular tournaments that is). But what happens when you reach the bubble? There are bubbles where the chipleader has 2k+ chips and the other two players are struggling with what's left while in other cases the chipleader is only a slight favorite with 1.1k chips. You can be the short on the bubble with 2BBs, you can also be the short with 10BBs. And so on... How do you react in each case? I know some people have spreadsheets for the bubble as well, but I find that suddenly the possibilities of different situations become so many that it's hard to use that kind of spreadsheets. Making spreadsheets specifically for the bubble is good, studying them is good because you get a good idea about ranges, but using them while playing  at least for me, is very hard. I think the best option is to pull up all bubble hands that you have and review them, taking your time to think about each play seperately. After all, the bubble is the defining moment of the tournament that separates the winners from the losers so you should give it extra attention.

4. Get your notes organized

If you have no notes, I suggest you start keeping some. There's a lot of information out there, and there is no way our minds can keep it all. Whether it's a piece of advice from a friend, something you read on the Internet or an observation or a thought you had while you were playing, write it down. There are no hyper-turbo manuals out there (at least not as far as I know), so make your own. If you keep reviewing information that you think is useful, it will obligate you to think about certain stuff. If you have some golden rules, writing them down will help you keeping them clear and not forget about them as your style of play changes and evolves. You may also be more observant of some changes you make by comparing earlier notes with more recent ones. And since sometimes it's not enough to talk in general, make notes of specific situations. I find it easier to visualise if I have everything gathered up on paper so I came up with this: 

That is an improvised 6-max table that I made with Windows paint. I print several mini tables on a A4 page and then I take notes of plays where I am not sure what to do. Then, I pull them up on SitnGo Wizard (or any other similar program) and write down what the correct play is. Not only you clear out any doubts you have about that situation, but you gather up information that you can quickly review later. I know there is an option to "mark" some hands in PokerStars, but I never managed to figure out how it works. Oh well, I'm a pen and paper kind of person anyway...

5. Play less tables

This may be obvious to some of you, but I think it's important enough to include here. If you are studying your game and looking for leaks or ways to improve, it's not just about what you do away from the tables when you are pulling up ranges in your favourite programs. It's also about making what you learn part of your normal game. And that takes time and a lot of focus. When you play your maximum number of tables, whether that's 2 or 20, you need to be playing a bit like a robot. Some decisions need to be made automatically, with almost no thought. Which is the exact contrary of what we are trying to achieve here. You need to think about the plays before you do them and make sure you don't fall back to your previous way of playing. So play less tables. I would suggest cutting what you usually play by 50% but that is something personal and you know what's best for you better than anyone else. Personally, I normally play 9 tables. Now that I'm studying I play 6. I know it's not half, but if I play less I get extremely bored and lose focus anyway. Plus, with 6 tables I rarely get to complicated situations in more than 3 tables at a time and that I can perfectly manage.

6. Talk with other Hyper Turbo players

I know this something not everyone can do, but it's very helpful. I was lucky enough to get in touch with another hyper-turbian to discuss our strategies. In the beginning the idea was to exchange thoughts on the game and help each other improve but that person was more advanced and turned out to not need my help as much after all, so it was a one-way thing. We are talking about someone that not only plays higher stakes than me, but has a completely different approach to the game. The whole conversation was very mind-opening, cause I never thought that someone could play the game in such a different way than mine. That player also made some suggestions about how to use certain stuff of Holdem Manager that I didn't even know existed :P It was very interesting to talk about the hypers to someone other than André. Sometimes I agree so much with what André says it feels like I'm talking to myself. Or I know what he will say before he says it. Anyway, I know that unless you personally know someone that plays your type of games, it's rather difficult to find someone willing to openly discuss their strategies. Read other people's blogs, write your own blog and share your thoughts on poker chat rooms, that's probably the next best thing.

7. Explore the poker programs

If you are like me, then you probably consider poker study something relatively boring (unless it includes a well-written book) and you would much rather be playing. But let's face the ugly truth: all those poker programs need to become your friends eventually. Play around with them and use them to exploit your opponents and fix your leaks. Don't limit yourself to programs you have been using since you started playing poker, try out new stuff! Two new cool things that I discovered last month are the Icmizer (which I loooooooooove) and the HoldemResources Calculator (which is still in Beta version but works fine for me). The only thing that bugs me with poker programs though and I cannot for the life of me understand why they do it, is that they ask you to put the full stack of each player before posting blinds and antes. Like, if a player has 397 chips behind after posting the blind of 200 and the ante of 40 chips, you need to put 637 as the player's stack. Since we always specify the blinds level and the beloved program knows that it's the 100/200/a40 level, why can't we put 397 as the player's stack and we need to do the boring math of 397+200+40=637?!?!? Not that it's complicated, but it's annoying and takes a significant amount of time if you consider that you need to do it for all the stacks around the table and about a million times in the day because you are studying. It's just not practical. If there is some kind of reasonable explanation that I am missing, please let me know cause this "little math" is driving me crazy. And do not tell me "because the player might have less than the ante or the blind". That is not the norm, so they could put a tick or something where we would manually put the stack. Whatever! :P

8. Get coaching

Who gives hyper-turbo coaching? I have no idea. But if you can find someone to coach you and your bankroll can take it, I strongly suggest you go for it. I've been bugging André to give me coaching for quite some time now, but I never really got much more than the occasional advice. He had a change of heart in the beginning of August though (between us, I think he's just feeling guilty for that Micromillions challenge, haha!). I'll write more about it in my next post.

I hope you found this at least a bit helpful and it gave you some ideas. If you have other studying methods /ideas that I didn't think of, please feel free to leave a comment!

See you at the tables! :)

July & Micromillions Challenge

Hello everyone!

I know that in my last post I wrote I would be studying in June and that there would be a post related to that, but since it's taking longer than expected I thought I'd just make a quick post to update you.

Basically, June flew by without me noticing! During the first week, I was trying to recover from my super intensive last days of May where I was chasing Platinum. Then, I went to Greece where I stayed for another two weeks. Here are some pics:

Flisvos bay, one of my favourite places to get a coffee back home.

Greek summer: Beach, sun and frappé coffee!

Beach in Athens

Fun way to pass the time at the beach: board games!

The plan was to come back to Portugal and study during the last week of June, but it backfired when I caught a cold and was feeling too tired to play or think. Imagine, I was even turning down invites from André and other friends to play Diablo 3!

Anyway, not only July is here, but half of it is gone already! What have I done since its beginning... Well, when it comes to playing, not much. I've been playing the Micromillions Satellites, but not many at a time. What I've mostly been doing this month is studying . And let me tell you, it is more chaotic than it sounds. I've dropped the number of tables I play to 4, so that I have more time to think about what I'm doing before I do it. Also, I've been messing around with Holdem Manager quite a bit. I've discovered some new interesting things.

This whole reviewing the way I play thing, has confused me more than it has helped me so far. I'm actually considering to put aside all the spreadsheets André gave me and make new ones on my own... Not that I want to question the hyper-turbo master, but... Maybe that specific way of playing is not what's best suited for me. My hesitation has to do with the fact that creating new spreadsheets is very time-consuming and I may be waisting my time for nothing if I find that it's not working out and go back to my previous way of playing.

Also, since I didn't play at all in June, I'm back to Bronze star. It stung a bit that I didn't get to play at all with my Platinum status, but oh well. I'm not setting any points goals for now, cause I don't want to be chasing after a status instead of studying.

As hinted in the title, I have some things to say about a certain Micromillions challenge. It's not a challenge I'm doing, it's one of André's ideas. You can learn more about it here. Basically, he decided to play ALL  100 Micromillions Events. Why is that a challenge? Because during 11 days, the Micromillions will be running pretty much non-stop. Events can start at anytime of the day, doesn't matter if it's 15:00 p.m. or 3:00 a.m. You can see the full schedule here. In theory, this means that during 11 days he could get absolutely no sleep. In practice, he gets to sleep 1 hour here 2 hours there everytime he busts early from a tournament and until the next event starts. Some of them also have late registration available, which adds a couple of hours of sleep. As I'm writing this, it is day 8 of the Micromillions series and the challenge. You cannot imagine how much I'm looking forward for it to end. Let me tell you what living with a Micromillions challenger is like from the perspective of the girlfriend...

From day 1 it became obvious that André and I could not be sleeping in the same room. There is no way I can sleep if his alarm goes off at random times and all throughout the night. Also, I cannot risk waking him up with my alarm in the morning if he happens to be taking a one hour nap when I wake up. Therefore, I was immediately self-exiled to the guest room. When it comes to meals, he mostly cooks by himself cause it is somehow part of the challenge, but I still prepare some of his meals. The worst part of it though, is the mess he leaves in the kitchen (and in the house overall). I spent around 4 hours clearing just the kitchen yesterday. You can imagine how bad it was. And I can't really say anything cause he's pushing himself to the limits as it is, we can't expect him to clean on top of it all, can we?

As if playing while being sleep deprived is not enough, he also needs to do videos about it. And guess who serves as a cameraman whenever one is needed? Yeap, you guessed right! You may think it's not such a big deal (he films most of his video blogs by himself anyway), but you'd be amazed at how many times you have to re-film a 2 minutes scene when the person you are filming is so exhausted they cannot think straight.

And then there are the accidents. Yesterday, around 5 a.m. I hear a loud BAM! followed by the sound of glass breaking. It's not the first time I hear things falling and rush to the other room to see if André is ok, but this one was worse because of the glass. I get to the computer room and what do I see? André's improvised lightning which consisted of a ladder, a huge pile of books and a lamp on top of it all, was on the floor. If you are wondering what the structure initially looked like, you can see it in this video. It was basically a wonder how it lasted so many days and didn't come down anytime sooner. And to make things worse, André was standing in the middle of the mess of books and broken glass barefooted. I told him to not move and brought the vacuum cleaner. Just my favourite thing to do at 5:00 in the morning.

Today, I woke up and went to check up on him. He was in front of the computer, as usual, and had just started explaining how he missplayed a hand due to his exhaustion the during the night, when he knocked over a glass full of water he had next to him. The water spread to his laptop which I rushed to pick up and then fell on the UPSes and the computer cables. Shortly after, the computer turned off. Oh, and there was more broken glass on the floor, of course. First we wiped the water off the laptop, then André turned it on and continued playing his tournament while I was cleaning up the mess. Again. And all that before I had a chance to get a sip of my morning coffee, may I add.

I won't bore you any further with the errands I need to run (super market, buying lamps etc.) or with the comments "You are nuts" I get when performing mundane tasks such as putting the knives and forks from the washing machine into the drawer or walking fast around the house. Or the complete lack of conversation during the past week. It feels like living with a zombie.

I'll just leave you with my favourite incident from this challenge:

A couple of days ago, I was putting the laundry out to dry. As I'm standing in the balcony, I see André coming towards the kitchen. He didn't enter however, he just stood there in the hallway, staring at the floor. I followed his gaze and saw that he was looking at a small slice of onion. I had been cooking that day, and I guess I dropped it without noticing and then the wind must have carried it into the hallway.

André stares at the onion.

The onion stares back.

André keeps staring.

A couple of minutes (!) later, he snaps out of it, goes into the kitchen and notices me out in the balcony. "There's a slice of onion on the floor there", he says matter-of-factly. "I know", I replied, "Why don't you pick it up?". He thinks a bit and then says "Cause if I bend down to pick it up off the floor I think I'll get very dizzy and may not be able to get up again!". That sould give you an idea of what it's been like in this house these past days.

In conclusion, I think poker players should consult their girlfriends/wives before launching themselves into extreme challenges like this one. After all, no one asked me if I wanted to participate in this challenge. I'm trying to be supportive and all, but it's tough work. I told him that I deserved a lunch or dinner at that nice Mexican restaurant that I've been wanting to go for ages but we never seem to have time for it. I think I should add a full day at the beach to my rewards. I've earned it, don't you think?

Ok, three more days to go. I can do this. Wish me luck!!!

May Overview and Plans for June

May is officially over (what a relief!) and since it's June 6th today, I guess you already have a hint that I was not looking forward to making a post about how the previous month went. To be honest, I dreaded the time I would have to sit in front of my computer and write this. You'll soon discover why.

To pick up from where I left you at my previous post, even though the SCOOP went pretty awesome for me, I still had a significant amount of points missing to reach my goal for the month, Platinum. I pretty much had a week before the month was over and I knew I would not be able to play all days since I had some things scheduled months in advance:

1) André was invited to speak at a SPIE UP event that took place at the University of Porto. It was cool and I enjoyed it (and since the Q&A part at the end lasted more than an hour I'm guessing that other people enjoyed it too), but it meant spending a day to go and come back.

2) Then, we had our tickets to Rock in Rio. Limp Bizkit, Offspring, Linkin Park and Smashing Pumkins. Need I say more? I think the pictures speak for themselves.

The line to go inside

Waiting in line

One of the many side shows

The stage

The audience. Believe it or not, it was even more crowded than that when Linkin Park came out.

3) This was my first music festival and I had never been to anything like it, but you don't have to be psychic to be able to forsee than on the next day you will be in no condition to play poker... All of your body hurting from standing/jumping during so many hours on the night before, ears still ringing and a nice headache make the perfect recipe for disaster if you decide to take it to the tables. Better take the day off and rest at home...

Taking all the above into account and since the $18s are not running all day long anymore, I knew it would be tight to make Platinum. Little did I know it would be the hardest thing I've been through in poker. 

After the SCOOP, my bankroll was boosted enough to allow me to go up at stakes. Instead of the $9s, I found myself playing the $18s. I should have studied quite a bit before moving up but with the days counting down and the VPPs still missing there was no time, so I just went for it. To sum it up, day after day after day I watched my bankroll disappear. One of the issues I have when moving up, is adjusting to the idea of dealing with more money at a given time. If I lose 30 buy-ins at the $9s that's $270. If I lose 30 buy-ins at the $18s that's $540. Even though in both cases I lose the same in terms of buy-ins, the difference in terms of bankroll is big. And even though it sounds pretty simple to understand (and it is), it is definitely not easy to take. Suddenly, losing the same feels like losing more. If that makes any sense!

And so I watched my bankroll taking hits of $300-$500 per day. Not that I could take lots of those hits, but I had to keep playing to make it to 7.500 VPPs. Of course it started to really bother me so I put more pressure on André to spend some time coaching me. He had given me some spreadsheets to study back in the beginning of the month but it goes unsaid that I found no time to do more than take a glimpse at them. Coaching was interesting since we talked about my biggest issue, the bubble, but do you think I really had time to think about what we discussed and implement it in my game? Of course not! I was running after the points.

My life during that week basically resumed into: waking up around lunch time, having a coffee for breakfast and then lunch immediately after, playing from 15:00 to 20:00, making an obligatory break until midnight and then playing more until 2:30. Then I went back home around 3.00 and fell asleep around 4:00. You may think that between 20:00 and midnight there's a nice gap to study, right? I assure you that my brain was so fried from that vampiric schedule that I could barely think... So for me those 4 hours were necessary to shut my brain down and have dinner (I tried to take naps but I couldn't).

On May 30th, with only one day left and still a lot of points missing, I was forced to move down on stakes. Which would happen eventually but I was hoping to make it to Platinum first. Unfortunately, I had to drop down to the $7s on the last day of the month. What's even worse, those run during only 2 hours per day, so in order to gather the points I had to play a lot of $3.74s. I made the calculations on the night before to prepare myself and counted that I needed around 10 hours. Which is far more than what I normally play, and far less possible when I'm tired. At that point, I really reached my limits. 

On the next day, I decided to stick to the plan. I played and played and played and at the rate of 0.43 VPPs that I was getting per game, it seemed to be a neverending task. Oh, I forgot to say that while doing the calculations, André threw in 12 tables at a time. Dunno if you remember, but normally I'm 8tabling, 9tabling at most when I'm well rested and felling 100%. That day was horrible and I couldn't wait for it to end. 12tabling meant that I would definitely not play the best I could. Since on top of that I was physically exhausted I wasn't even playing my B game. I would classify it more around E or F if I had to. I was just sticking to the absolute basics that by now are so intuitive that I don't even have to think. Any decisions that required some thought on my behalf, I probably messed up. The funny part is that I ended up with a $11 profit for the day, breaking the losing streak.

The results of the month:

It's very noticeable when I started playing the $18s, don't you think? I don't believe that the downswing had anything to do with bad luck. In my opinion it happened for 3 reasons:

1) If you go up at stakes without studying your game first, you are very likely to get your *** kicked. Especially if the jump is big in terms of money (as in my case, from the $9s to the $18s which is the double).

2) As a fellow hyper-turbian put it, the $18s in the afternoon are a regfest. Not that all regulars are unbeatable or winning players, but there are less occasional players so you'd better be prepared. And that takes us back to point #1, study, or else...!

3) I cannot function in vampire mode. In case you are unfamiliar with the term, vampire mode is when you turn the day into night and vice-versa, for many days in a row (staying up late for just one or two nights obviously does not qualify). I know some people can handle it and it doesn't make a difference to them, but I cannot take it. And it's not something I can simply decide to control, my body reacts to it. For me, sleeping from midnight to 8:00 is not the same as sleeping from 5:00 to 13:00. It's a total of 8 hours on both cases, I know, but in the first case I'll wake up feeling fine whereas in the second case my physical state will be similar to that of a bad hangover. Since I was forced by the schedule to go into vampire mode for the last week of May, I strongly believe it had an impact on my results.

You may think that what I did was stupid and that since I was losing and did not have the conditions to play I should have given up sooner, before trimming my bankroll. I see it like this: after a certain point (basically after the SCOOP was over and the games that were available reduced) I only had two choices: save my bankroll and give up on my goal to reach Platinum OR go for Platinum at the possible expense of my bankroll. It was one or the other and it soon became obvious that I could not both get the status and keep my bankroll high enough to play the $18s during June.

Maybe you would have made a different choice. But I would rather drop on stakes and have a small failure there (which in poker is very likely to happen anyway, even to the best players) than fail to achieve a goal I set for myself. If you ask me was it worth the benefits that Platinum gives you, no it was not. I mean, I lost $397 to get there and I will definitely not get as much in return, especially since I won't be renewing that status in June. But if you ask me that question, you're missing the real point anyway. Choosing to forget about the goal would be the easy way out. I tend to not go so easy on myself.

Anyway, May is over and it obviously took its toll on me since I haven't played a single game so far this month. Also, I'm going to Greece for two weeks which doesn't leave me with much time. What time I do have for poker, however will be used for studying purposes. I will be playing, but less tables than usual to have more time to see how new things are working out. I'll probably will go back to Bronze for July, but I don't really care. What matters to me now is improving my game, and studying is something that I haven't seriously done in months.

If you were one of those lucky ones to have me at your tournaments during that week that I was spreading money at the tables, I hope you enjoyed it. But be prepared. You will soon start paying it back. With interest.

See you at the tables!

It's getting hot in here! (+SCOOP Overview)

Hello!

So, the SCOOP is officially over. I must say, it was pretty intense for various reasons. First of all, I was planning to make enough points for Platinum before the SCOOP was over. That practically meant 7.500 VPPs until May 20th, which unfortunately did not happen. Here is my current VPPs count: 

It's not too bad and 2.183 VPPs until the end of the month is doable. But I'll get to that later. Right now I'd like to talk about the reasons I didn't make it to 7.500 till May 20th like I had planned.

I was playing the $9.18 tournaments since the beginning of the SCOOP, and that meant that I was getting 0.99 VPPS per tournament. Let's make that 1VPP to make calculations easier. To reach Platinum until May 20th, I would have to play 375 tourneys per day, everyday. I think that's where my plan went wrong. I cannot predict what each day is going to bring and even though I was determined to play every single day, I was pushing myself to the limits. After all, 375 tournaments is not playing a couple of hours, it's a full day's work, for me at least.

I was ready to give up my weekends and free days in the week, but that's when it hit me. You see, our wonderful office is located on the west side of our building. That means that during poker peak time, we are sitting right across the sunset. Even though that may sound romantic at first (awww, two love birds in their own little office working together at sunset, so cuuuute!), I can assure you it is not. For those of you who weren't in Lisbon during this month, it was feeling like summer. Picture this: nice sunny days, people going around in t-shirts and flip-flops and me sweating non-stop, trying to work in front of the sunset. The heat was so strong that one afternoon I felt like the air around me was impossible to breathe!

André seemed kind of immune to all this, which is weird since I'm the greek and I'm used to way more heat overall. But since the whole thing was physically tearing me apart (and after confirming with sharkscope that I was indeed spreading my money at the tables at that point due to lack of concentration), I decided to go home. I pictured myself outside, at my balcony, with the spring wind blowing in my face, a nice cold beverage to help me recover from the hell I was just put through and my laptop to continue my grinding. Here's a photo as proof that I tried it: 

Too bad it didn't work. Shortly after I had everything ready and started playing, I realized that the wireless in our house was pretty unstable. After getting out of Internet connection a couple of times and running around the house like a maniac with the laptop in my hands in order to get better reception, I decided to call it a day. I couldn't play at home and I was not willing to go back to the Sahara desert that my office had recently turned into. I figured the poker gods were sending me a message and went to watch some T.V.

The next day though, I was determined to play in better conditions. I gave André an ultimatum, saying that if he didn't fix the air-conditions in the office I wouldn't go back there before winter time. Oh, yeah, the irony of this is that we DO have air-conditions in the office but they weren't functioning. Plus André does not like air-conditions at all, but hey, tough luck. :P

So for the few days it would take to fix the air-condition situation, I would have to make myself comfortable at home. I connected the laptop to the Internet through a cable this time, got an actual mouse (as you may have noticed in the picture above I was only using the laptop's mouse equivalent which is far less comfortable), and connected an extra screen to have more space for multitabling. It's not that I play that many tables, but I just HAVE to play in tile. The outcome was just beautiful:   :)

Nice, huh? Too bad this didn't work either! I was playing 3-4 bubbles when the Internet suddenly went down. Since it was not a wireless connectivity issue this time but had to do with the actual network, all I could do was to wait patiently until it came back. When it finally did, I had lost all of the bubbles and was barely alive in the rest of the tourneys. Considering that as an individual unfortunate event that was unlikely to repeat, I kept on playing. It happened again. Twice! Not only was my connection bad, I was also being unlucky with the cards. And yeah you guys, I have a new record for my worst day ever: -60 buy-ins. Here's the graph:

As you can see, apart from the obvious fact that this graph is really ugly, I decided to stop after 175 games that day. Far from the 375 games I was supposed to play. There were some other days that I decided to play less as well, which resulted in me not making it to Platinum on the 20th. Lesson learnt: whatever you do, always give some margin to the timeline of your poker planning. If it's too tight you most likely won't make it, simply because you can't predict the unpredictable.

Feeling defeated and considering whether it would be a good idea to go play in my swimming suit to battle the heat, I went back to the office the following day. Fortunately, the temperature dropped a bit so it made the place more bearable. On my way back to the office after lunch, I passed by a place that was advertising its "Café frappé". To you it may not sound like much, but that iced coffee is a thing that is part of the greek culture and that I personally find it hard to survive without. I have what I need to prepare it at home, but unfortunately I never found a place in Portugal that sells it. So imagine my surprise when I saw that advertisement. I was immediately drawn in. It turned out that what they considered to be "Café frappé" was actually a milkshake with coffee-flavored ice-cream. Oh, whatever! The day that I enjoy iced coffee in Portugal may have not yet come, but I got the beverage and went back to the office.

But that thing was so loaded up with sugar that it was barely drinkable! Yuck! I drank it anyway cause it was cold, but I started to wonder how much bad luck a person can endure within a matter of days... Then my luck changed! I noticed that I was running good at the tables and whenever I checked my balance in between sessions (I'm still good at that, heh!) I watched it go higher and higer each time. The result? A new record of my best day ever, and right on the next day of my worst day ever! Life is funny sometimes... Anyway, I won 52 buy-ins, so I almost recovered all of the money I had lost. Here's the graph:

The rest of the SCOOP days turned out to be pretty good too, even though not that amazing. On Sunday morning André and I woke up rather early for our standards to seize the day and grind until the SCOOP was over. I didn't even bother with breakfast at home in order to not lose time. I brought the essentials to the office instead: 

The following graph is of all the $9.18s I played during the SCOOP. Part of it was back in April, since I was playing the satellites for the SCOOP tournaments that were scheduled to run on April 1rst. But I chose to put it this way cause it gives a better overall idea:

Overall, I'm very, VERY happy with the way things went during the SCOOP. My bankroll got an enormous boost and I am now rolled to play the next level, the $18.77s. The only negative thing in this whole story was that after my $9.18 tourneys were over, I was waiting for André to finish so I decided to play some $13.43s. My bankroll was high enough for me to play those and since I had nothing else to do, I went for it. Unfortunately, I got unlucky and within a matter of 20 minutes I lost around 25 buy-ins. Which is not THAT bad really, but if you spend 20 days grinding at the $9s, then suddenly losing 25 buy-ins at the $13s is kind of hard to take. So not only I did not wait for André that day, but I left with a bitter feeling even though the SCOOP went really well overall.

I was planning to go up to the $18.77s so as to make the remaining of the points I need for Platinum this month. It would be rather easy since I would be getting the VPPs at half the time comparing to before, thanks to the higher buy-in. However, I noticed this afternoon that those were missing from the lobby. After mailing support, I just got a reply that there will be no Sunday Cubed tournaments in the future. Those were the ones that the $18.77 satellites were feeding, so that basically means that we have the following options: the $3.74s, the $7.49s or the $37.07s which is a huge jump (not to mention out of my budget). I did notice some $18s that were feeding the 12K Guaranteed, but those only ran for like half an hour or so (at least that's how long I caught them in my lobby). The $7s would be a good option, but the problem with those is that they run for only 2 hours per day so I'm not going to make Platinum for sure... Hmm... If there are any fellow hyper-turbians out there that have any piece of advice on what I could play or have information about the schedule that I don't, please let me know!

Finally, some good news... André just got of the phone with the person who is coming here tomorrow to fix the air-conditions. We may manage to turn this into a proper working space again...

See you all at the tables!

New record & Trivia

Hello!

So, two days ago I made a new record of winnings per day: $426, or in this case around 46 buy-ins! :D

Here's my graph:

The only thing I've been doing differently is that I stopped checking my cashier every five seconds. Now I only look at it in between sessions. Which is still pretty often, considering that my sessions are one hour long at the most. Then I need to stop, make a coffee, go to the bathroom or simply sit by the window and look outside. Or check blogs and random stuff (which is my favorite thing among all those above mentioned :P ). I'm not saying that not checking my bankroll constantly is the reason why I'm winning. I've obviously been running good. But I find that it is an improvement in my attitude towards the game overall. For those of you purely interested in poker stuff, you can stop reading here.

Still with me? Good. As I was saying, it's not easy to change. I still have the urge to hit that red button saying "Cashier" all the time. But I don't. I try to focus on the game only. There are of course other distractions, like André, that make it even harder. The other day, while I was playing and resisting temptation to check my results he comes next to me and asks how I'm doing. "I don't know", I replied, "I'm not checking". "Oh, ok", he says and goes to sit down in front of his computer. Then I hear him typing something on the keyboard and I know for a fact that he is looking me up on sharkscope. And then after a couple of minutes he says out loud: "Okay, you're up today!". Like, what part of I don't want to know don't you understand? Now I know that next time he asks me how I'm doing and I don't give him an answer he's going to check my results and if he doesn't say anything I'll think that I'm losing and he doesn't want to upset me... Otherwise he'd make a comment about me winning, wouldn't he? Do you see the problem here? Does that even make sense?!?!?

Women. Complicated beings. But then again, I have to give André some credit for being in the same working environment as me, even though he is messing up my effort to not check my results. You see, another thing I found out recently is that I tend to get better results when listening to music. I can't say for sure if the music helps me play better or if it just has soothing effects on my psychology and I am less affected by losing. In any case, I feel much better when combining poker with music.

Now, you may think there's absolutely no problem with that. Wrong. For starters, I have a terrible, awful voice. Just to give you an idea, I don't listen to my own voice when I sing. I don't think I could take it. I just put my headsets and hear nothing from the world outside. Apart from that, when I really like a song, I tend to put it on repeat and listen to it for the entire day. Sometimes, many days in a row. And of course, I sing it out loud. I was recently obsessed with a french song, listening to it non-stop. Imagine my surprise when one day on our way back home, André starting humming the tune almost from the beginning to the end! He has never listened to the actual song, only my version of it... At that moment, I thought I might be causing some serious damage on a subconscious level... Poor André! If he actually started singing it too, I'd be terrified! (He doesn't speak French at all, the only two words he knows are "Bonjour" and "Fromage"). Another bad habit I have is that sometimes I reminisce about my school years and start listening to boy bands from the 90's. I'm talking about the heavy stuff like Westlife and the like. And even though it's been years and years since the last time I heard those songs, I remember all the lyrics so I have no problem singing along. It got to the point where I even asked myself out loud "Gosh, how cheesy can these lyrics get?". "Yep", André said from next to me, "They're really bad!". However, I kept singing and checking how he was reacting, it took him more than an hour to put his own headsets on to block me out. If the situation was inversed, I don't think I would have lasted nearly as long. A big round of applause for André being able to work under these circumstances. I'd run away as fast as possible.

Anyway, apart from that, the rest of our daily routine has been pretty quiet. I've been playing until late recently and on Wednesday I left the office at 3:30 a.m. That basically meant sleeping util late on Thursday and when I finally did wake up I was feeling too trashed to play. Today, Friday, I haven't played at all yet and it's already 9:00 p.m. I don't feel much like playing today for some reason...

But some music will fix that! :) I'll go chose a playlist and see you at the tables!