WBCOOP Event #13 NLHE [4-Max]

Hello again!

In this post I'll be talking about the second WBCOOP event I played, #13 NLHE [4-Max]. I had to wait for  André to finish his daily training before coming to the office (two people one car!), so I only got to open Pokerstars client at 15.45 - the tournament had already been running for 45 minutes. For this one there was late registration still open so no harm done. Actually, it was even better cause I started playing at the 4th level with just 30BB. I play better short than deep, so that was great for me.

This was the first time I participated in a 4-Max event. Overall, I prefer tables with less people but 4 sounded too few... When I asked André about the structure, all he said was basically "You need to be aggressive". Which makes sense. At a table with 10 players, the blinds hit you far less often than at a table with 4. Playing 4-max you no longer have the luxury of waiting for the best hands to play and fold your way through the tournament. You need to play a lot more. That's fine by me, I think it makes the tournament far less boring. And since I thought it would keep me quite busy, I dedicated my full attention to it and didn't play my regular satellites.

When it started, I was very skeptical about this kind of tourney. It turns out, I loved it! It was lots of fun! As soon as I got seated, one of my opponents typed in the chat "Supernova? Really?". That started a conversation about various poker topics, which was a surprising change! It's pretty much out of the question to start a casual chat at my regular games cause with a hyper turbo speed and only a few seconds to act, everyone is pretty much running like crazy (me included). I was thinking that I got lucky to be at a super nice table (two players from Russia and one from Ukraine), but when I opened other tables of the tourney I noticed that there was a lot of chatting going on.

Not only that, but players were actually cheering for their opponents and supporting each other. Of course I wasn't omnipresent and couldn't see every dialogue that was going on, but the overall feeling that I got was very very positive! Could it be that since it's only bloggers playing these series we all have chatting as a second nature so talking with opponents comes really easy?

Anyway, let's talk about what happened in the actual tournament. I'm obviously only going to mention just the hands that are somewhat interesting, skipping all the blind steals or hands where opponents folded early.

First interesting situation was when I got a pair of nines at the cut-off or UTG, whatever you wanna call it in this case it's the same (lol!) and min-raised. I got a call from the SB but then the BB shoved. I'm not the one to fold nines to a 12BB shove, so I called. The SB folded and when cards were revealed my opponent showed 88. My nines held up so that one went well!

Next cool hand was an all-time favorite: pocket aces on the button. I min-raised  and got called by the big blind. The flop came 3c-5s-As giving me a set. I bet half of the pot and the other player called. The turn was 3 of diamonds, improving my hand to a full house. This time it was my opponent that bet first, 450 chips in a pot of 1,2k. I did find the bet size a bit odd and thought of re-raising but I didn't want to push him off the hand so I just called. The river was Queen of diamonds which did not change much. He bet 450 chips into a 2,1k pot. This time I re-raised to 1350 chips. Not sure if I should have bet more. I really have no notion of how much money I could get out of the guy at that point. I don't think that he was playing with 24 that would give him a straight. Maybe he was holding a set? The only hand that could beat me was four of a kind, but in that case I couldn't justify his tiny bets on the turn and river. Anyway, he called and showed A7o. Which in retrospect, makes sense the way he played. Could I have gotten more value out of my hand? I don't know. You can check out the hand here and tell me if you would have played it differently.

Later, I got dealt AKo. That's a pretty easy hand to play. If the board hits me, I stack off. If it doesn't, I fold.  Pretty straightforward. I was in checking mode and so was my opponent until the river when an ace hit. Then I bet half of the pot, he called and showed A7o (again!). Not a super sophisticated hand, but I won a 2k pot which was nice.

Then came the KJs when I was on the big blind. The blinds had gone up one level and the button (same player as in the hands before) raised 3 times. I contemplated a bit whether I wanted to call or not. I decided to go with it. I'm not very sure how to play that kind of hand, but the flop made my job easy by giving me a straight. I checked and waited for him to bet first. This time he went big betting 1k into a 1,3k pot. I was obviously more than happy to call and the turn was another favorable card giving me a flush draw. Not that I really needed the flush cause I was holding the nuts, but anyway. We both checked (should I have bet there? I dunno) and the river gave me a flush with king high. This time I did bet, but the opponent chose to fold. I guess the flush card was really scary for him. Which made me wonder again if I should have bet the turn. This hand is a good example of how lost I feel with flops. Once upon a time (when I was playing 9max sngs) I was better in these situations but the hyper-turbos have erased whatever knowledge I had! :P

If there's one thing I can't complain in this tourney, that's lack of good hands. After a while I got a pair of pocket Queens. I raised and got called by all three players at my table! The flop was 3d-5d-4s. It is a somewhat coordinated board that could be problematic later on, but for now I had an overpair and I was pretty happy with it. The big blind made a strong bet of 1k (the pot was 1,6k) and I was the only one to call. The turn was 9s, opening another flush possibility. This time my opponent checked and I bet half the pot. If he was on a flush draw, I wouldn't give him a free card. He folded and I got that pot.

During the next level, things got a little bit more complicated. I got AJo and min-raised from the cutoff. The player on the SB (the one that had contributed most into the growth of my stack) re-raised me. Now that was a rather unusual move on his behalf so it raised some red flags. I considered the option of folding, but I had to put 750 chips to claim a pot of 2,1k. Now that I'm reviewing the play, calling would probably have been the best option. However, I got more into the psychological aspect of the thing (women, haha!) and thought that since I was dominating the player post flop in most hands we both got involved in (could be by chance, I'm not saying I'm better than him or anything) he was probably re-raising me to force me to fold. So what did I do? I shoved my AJo right there! The guy had pocket kings and owned me badly, I never saw the ace or the third jack that would win me the pot. But it's ok, lesson learnt! Next time maybe I'll play a bit more rationally instead of getting carried away and trying to discover how frustrated my opponents must be for losing against me! :P

The funny part is that one of the players at the table (the one I was chatting with earlier) was supportive of me losing and wrote "Ah, what a pity" and stuff like that. Really nice people, I'm telling you. I've never seen that in poker tourneys. Maintaining the positive spirit I congratulated my opponent on his win with the kings. I've had a lot of people calling me names when the situation is the opposite and I'm the one winning so I know for a fact it's not nice. Treat others as you want to be treated, that's what I think.

We were getting a lot closer to the money, so I opened up a couple of tables with the people that had the smallest stacks to keep an eye on what was happening. I got a few chips with a full house that didn't make it to showdown and shortly after we reached the bubble.

Again, I was surprised by the fact that the rest of the players at the table of the bubble guy were cheering up for him up until he left the table. Anyway, after the bubble burst and I was guaranteed to be in the prizes I was less worried about the way I played. I got dealt KQo and had 14BB on the SB. Action was folded to me and I decided to shove instead of raise. Maybe it was the hyper-turbo player inside me shoving and if I was more used to playing flops I would have raised instead, but I believe it was a profitable play anyway. I got called by the big blind who had a pair of sevens. I didn't hit any of my outs so that was the end of the tourney for me.

Of course, not everything can be perfect so there were a couple of railing trolls who up until then must have been watching in silence, but when I lost they rushed to type stuff like "OMG that's a Supernova playing! What a horrible play! Shoving KQo!" and other insightful comments of that sort. As people correctly say, haters gonna hate. I can't really bother!

I managed to make it into the money so that means that I'll be playing the WBCOOP main event! I'm very happy about that! This tournament was a lot of fun.

Coming up next... Event #15!

See you there!

WBCOOP Event #8 NLHE

Hi everyone!

I wasn't sure about how to make the updates on the WBCOOP tournaments, but I've decided to split them up into one post per tournament instead of doing collective ones. Knowing me and my love for loooooooong posts that could be disastrous so better stick to one at a time! 

So let's talk about WBCOOP event #8. It took place last Sunday and it was my first event of this series. Fortunately for me, I put the "Boom" hand replayer feature of Pokerstars to good use and kept all of the interesting hands I wanted to talk about, otherwise I wouldn't remember half of it! :P I'll be posting all the hands through links instead of putting the replayer here cause otherwise it's going to be a mess of chip sounds whenever you load my blog. For some reason the replayer starts automatically playing a hand when you load the page which is not so cool. From what I heard they're trying to fix this.

Anyway, back to the subject. This was your regular good old No Limit Hold'Em tourney. A starting stack of 200BB, 15 minutes blinds on the clock and we were set to start! Do I need to explain how lost I feel playing that deep? Jumping from my 10BB starting stack to 200BB I felt so filthy rich I didn't know what to do with all those chips! What do I have to say for the 15 minutes blinds? I guess that's the regular pace for a tournament of that kind but to me it looks like... Snail pace! I mean really, from my usual 3 minutes blinds I was now playing 15! 

Yet even though the structure of this event was not exactly my favorite, I was super excited to be playing my first WBCOOP tourney! When the registration period was over, there was a total of 570 players registered which made this event the biggest one of the WBCOOP 2013 so far. Not so easy to make it in the money considering these tournaments pay the top 100 players more or less and in less popular games like Badugi you only need to beat half the field to get a prize, but I guess that's a disadvantage of choosing the most popular game.

I found myself getting a lot of small-medium pairs and since I was getting the right odds for set-mining I called a lot of raises early on. Unfortunately I never seemed to be able to hit a set, which ended up in me slowly giving away some of my chips. You can find an example of that situation here.

The first interesting hand I got was AKo. The player UTG raised 3x and got called by the player after him. Holding such a nice hand, I was more than happy to call as well. Two more people got in the hand after me creating a nice pot of 2k chips when the blinds were 60/120. All the excitement for me ended on the flop that came 8s-8d-6s. Not the kind of flop I'd like to play against 4 players so I just folded. You can check out the hand here.

Next interesting moment was shortly after, with AJo on the SB. There was a min-raise from the cut-off which I called. The board came 8h-6s-7s so I basically chickened out and decided to check/fold. Since my opponent had similar views about the hand, we checked down until the river that was an ace. I decided to bet and he folded. Chips coming my way!

After the blinds went up one level, I found myself holding pocket Kings. This time it was the button raising. The 8c-Ks-Js flop was definitively favorable giving me a set. I checked, my opponent c-bet and I just called. The turn was the 8 of hearts, giving me a full house! The other player bet again, half of the pot and I called. The river was Jack of hearts improving my full house from Kings full of eights to Kings full of Jacks. This time I was the first one betting, but I bet small comparing to the size of the pot. I was afraid he wouldn't pay me if I bet big. He ended up having a pair of pocket threes, which I think was quite optimistic on his behalf. Still, I can't help but feel that I misplayed the hand, possibly not getting as much profit out of it as I should have.

The final hand of the tournament for me came during the 8th level. At that point I had 36 big blinds and was UTG+1. Pair of Kings again! I decided to min-raise and got re-raised by a guy two seats to my left. Then, the player at the SB decided to shove (he had more or less my stack)! Okay, I'm not much of an expert here and 36BB is a respectable stack but if there's a hand you want to end up all-in with preflop that's aces and kings. The guy on my left did worry me a bit cause he was still left to act after me, but I figured, he's going to chicken out after seeing two people all-in. I called. To my surprise, the player on my left also called! Guess what he was holding... Aces! The small blind revealed a pair of eights, which was kind of irrelevant. The aces held up and I was eliminated from the tournament.

I finished 297th, far from the money. But didn't really worry about it, that was only my first tourney of the WBCOOP series so I had plenty of time to win an entry to the main event!

Yesterday I wanted to play event #11, a mix of NLHE and PLO. I thought it was a very interesting kind of tournament, unlike anything I've played before and it seemed like fun. Unfortunately, Monday is my only free day of the week and other things came up so I didn't make it. That means that I'll play all the other tournaments left in the list I posted in my previous post, cause they match exactly the number of tickets I have left.

Since this is not my regular kind of post, I'd appreciate any feedback about it. I'm not sure if you guys like this presentation of hands and tournament review, but if you have any suggestions please leave it in the comments below. Also, since I'm not an expert on flops any advice on how I played the above hands is welcome.

See you at the next WBCOOP event!

WBCOOP : Bring it on!

Hi everyone!

So, earlier today I received my tickets for WBCOOP. It would have been better for me to receive them yesterday cause I wanted to play event #5 NLHE Triple Shootout, but hey, Pokerstars people stayed in the 48 hours limit they advertised so I have nothing to complain about!

I just started playing event #8 NLHE. At the same time, I'm playing the $109+R Sunday Rebuy to which I registered by mistake (I was playing some different satellites and didn't notice the ones for this tournament, same old story!). It's going to be tricky cause I cannot stop my regular hyper satellite grinding so I'll have to play the MTTs along with the hypers. This is going to be fun! :P

In the past I have said a lot of times that I don't like MTTs. Don't get me wrong, I still avoid them as much as possible, I'm a helpless sng player but... This WBCOOP series sounds super cool for two reasons: 

a) You get to play ten (!) freerolls! Great value right there!

b) This is a blogger's event. Which means, this is a blogging mini-marathon! I my blog around once per week, now I'll have a reason to put daily updates. Add to that the fact that I don't really know how to play MTTs and I don't usually blog about specific hands... I think the next week is going to be very interesting for me from a blogger's perspective!

So... Before I leave you to get back to the tables, here is the list of events I'm planning to play:

#08 NLHE
#11 NLHE/PLO
#13 NLHE [4-Max]

#15 NLHE Turbo [6-Max]

#20 PLHE Turbo

#21 NLHE Shootout Turbo [10-Max]

#23 NLHE Big Antes

#25 NLHE Deep-Stacks

#27 NLHE Turbo

#29 NLHE [6-Max]

#30 NLHE

* I just got a walk at WBCOOP Event - 8. They NEVER give me walks... Except this time, that I was holding pocket Kings! * Eye roll!*

You may notice that those are 11 events total, and we get 10 tickets... I haven't decided which one I'm not playing yet... Probably one of those that start earlier in the day. When I first saw the schedule, I excluded all tournaments that were starting at 10 o'clock in the morning. Then the next day I realized, that it was 10 o'clock ET time, which is 15.00 here in Portugal. Nice one, Katerina, nice one! Anyway, at least this way I can play the tournaments that start at 15.00. If they were to start at ten in the morning that's something that doesn't really combine with my  vampire schedule.

That's all for now! See you soon with a WBCOOP update!

WBCOOP 2013 - My best Pokerstars moment

Hi everyone! 

This post is an entry to the WBCOOP 2013. In order to qualify for the event, bloggers have to write a post about their best moment playing on PokerStars. So here is mine!

My best moment was when I made Supernova last year! It was in the early hours of December 30^th. I was multitabling hyper-turbo satellites trying to get the remaining points before the year was over. When the congratulatory message popped up I didn't even know which one of my tournaments triggered it, but I was so happy I didn't care. I stopped opening tables and wrote a blog post before heading back home.

I believe it took some time to sink in cause even though I was feeling euphoric when I left the office, there was still too much adrenaline from the Supernova chase and the multitabling for me to be able to think calmly. Too excited to go to bed, I ignored the fact that it was 4 a.m. and decided to watch a movie. I chose “What happens in Vegas” (the title seemed appropriate for the occasion), grabbed chips and soda and snuggled up on the couch with a fluffy blanket.

Hardly paying any attention to the movie, I started thinking about all that had lead to that Supernova moment. At the beginning of 2012 I was working at the offices of a multinational company. I'd been there for half a year when somehow, my professional poker player boyfriend convinced me that I would be better off playing poker than doing something I didn't really enjoy. 

I started playing poker at Pokerstars towards the end of February 2012. At first I'd spent more time studying than actually playing. When playing, I'd open the some of the lowest games I could find. Soon, I returned to my boyfriend the $600 he lent me to make my first deposit (Pokerstars gives a 100% bonus so that's free $600 right there!). Then during the SCOOP my bankroll grew a lot more so I moved up at stakes. Unfortunately, both my confidence and bankroll got crushed. In June I decided to take some time off. Then in July, there were the Micro-Millions tournaments. I started winning again and with a new-found confidence I recovered some of the money I had lost. August was great, I got intensive coaching from my boyfriend and moved up in stakes again. This time it went better. During September there was the WCOOP, another great opportunity to make money. I didn't take full advantage of it though, cause I decided to take a week off and spend some time with my family – another advantage of having poker as an occupation: you can just go on vacation whenever you feel like it. In October I moved up at stakes again, playing games up to $74! Then early in December, I saw that I had 54k VPPs. What if I made Supernova? I made some calculations and realized that with a lot of work it was possible. During the second half of the month I found a ton of TCOOP satellites running so that helped me get more points faster. Not only I reached my goal, but I did so with a $20k monthly profit!

What a great finale for a life-changing year! Poker opened the door to a lot of new opportunities and a more comfortable lifestyle... And with a Pokerstars promotion always around the corner... WBCOOP? Let's play some poker!

February Overview

Hello everyone!

February was a good month, both at the tables and away from them, but I admit that I neglected my blog a bit. What happened was that after my first post this month I started preparing for my trip to Greece. Normally, that shouldn't take much time or effort. I tend to get super excited when I'm about to visit my family and friends and that makes me lose focus a little bit, but overall I'm doing fine with keeping my working schedule.

This time however, for some reason I decided that it would be better to earn my monthly salary before leaving for Greece. Now, my departure was planned for the 14th, so that didn't leave me much time. In retrospect, I completely disagree with that way of thinking cause it's similar to setting a money goal over a short period of time which, in my opinion, can only lead to frustration. But hey, it was more of a sentimental decision than a rational one. I just wanted to have my "February business" sort of concluded so that I could go and enjoy my holidays with no worries on my mind.

Fortunately for me, it all went well. I spent some time studying (even though not as much as I should have), but the most important thing is that I redid the notes I keep on opponents from scratch. It took a bit more than a full day of work but I think it was well worth it. I studied my opponent's statistics, results (for those of them that have them public), and got to know some a bit better overall. It's good to know who is using the hypers as fillers of some other game and who actually specializes in them and has them as their main game.

I also stayed away from the $74s for the biggest part of February. I don't think I've studied enough to be able to play with the good players that frequent those games, so I would only start opening tables that high when the traffic was really really good. Which, as you can probably imagine didn't happen often. Sometimes, I would even see the great jorj95 migrating down to the $74s to play with us mortals. He's a really nice guy and all but I definitely don't want to play with him, thanks but no, thanks! Not to mention that he would often bring some other $357s+ players with him, people I also don't want to see at my tables... Anyway, it was mostly $18s-55s for me this month. Here is the graph:

I'm very happy with the result, it was definitely a good month. What I'm not so happy about, is the total number of tournaments I played: 3,5k. Even less exciting (but also expected) is the number of VPPs I gained this month: 11.720,34.  :(

Okay, the trip to Greece is partially to blame. I spent one week there. But even after I came back, I wasn't very keen on playing or studying. Yesterday for example, I came to the office with André and didn't play a single table. I wasted my time reading magazines, browsing on the Internet and other trivial stuff like that. Today, I figured I'd give some love to my neglected blog, but it's already night outside and I still haven't played at all. Making a blog post doesn't take a full day.

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I think I'm kind of lacking motivation. I was super excited with the perspective of going for Elite at the beginning of the year, but when I saw that goal slipping away I got a bit disoriented. Of course earning enough to pay for my monthly expenses is quite a motivation, but I feel I need something greater to push myself outside of my comfort zone and put in a lot of volume in terms of hours and tourneys.

On the positive side, back in January I had the brilliant idea of joining a Pokerstars promotion of setting a VPPs goal per year. You could choose among 100k, 200k or 300k VPPs. Since at that point I was aiming high, I registered for the 300k one. The first check to see if you are on pace (and therefore the first payment for those who make it) is on April 3rd, more or less a month from now. I need to have 75k VPPs by then to be on pace. Right now I'm at 41k, so I can still make it, but I'll have to work a lot more than the past couple of months and be on a tighter schedule. It's not so much for the $150 I'll receive if I make it (although I'm not the one to snob any amount of money) as it is for not wanting to fail. So that's good, I have one little thing to keep me motivated!

Other interesting poker news is that last Saturday André was talking about the Goldstar monthly freeroll. He was very very close to reaching Goldstar status that day and only missed the tournament for a few points, which got us talking about it and I decided to play. By now you probably know about my love-hate relationship with MTTs (it's more like hate-hate to be honest), but I thought, oh well, it's a freeroll so I might as well give it a try!

At some point, an interesting hand came up. The player on my right, who had the second biggest stack at that point, got involved in a huge pot with an early position raiser. When they both revealed their cards preflop, the EP raiser was all-in and showed KK. The player on my right showed pocket Jacks and got a cooler since he never hit his outs and lost a huge chunk of his chips. On the very next hand, I was the one to be holding pocket kings. The player on my left min-raised and I thought, okay, this hand has potential. I reraised and to cut a long story short I ended up all-in pre-flop. My opponent revealed QQ. I thought "Oh man! This guy is soooooo unlucky, he got JJ and QQ only to shove into pocket Kings two times in a row! Brutal!!!" I should have kept my mouth shut, cause the unlucky guy hit his queen on the turn and eliminated me from the tourney. You can check out the hand here.

I got 94th out of 9458 players which is not at all shabby and won $55 out of nothing! Pretty cool huh? Of course I was feeling kind of disappointed for losing the opportunity to continue playing the tournament with a huge stack and have a better chance at a final table (the first prize was $15k!), but it was fun to play cause  at a freeroll you always think "I have nothing to lose". Who knows, maybe I'll make a habit of playing these freerolls! And I might improve my MTT skills along the way! :P

Of course, something had to go wrong in this wonderfull story... When I opened the freeroll I was also playing my hyper satellites. After the bubble and with the blinds getting higher, things got a lot more interesting and it required more of my attention so I stopped opening satellites and dedicated myself to the MTT.

Around half an hour later... Pop! I see another table opening up next to the freeroll! Of course I had forgotten to unregister from the $109 + Rebuys tourney... Same old story! As I was mumbling to myself all the appropriate greek bad language I could think of for the occasion, I went to unregister from the rest of the tourneys I had won a ticket to. Pissed at myself, I spend some time playing the two MTTs. At some point, I lost at the freeroll and was left with only the $109+R. I refused to rebuy, I just wanted to be over with the thing to get back to my satellites grinding. 

But it was one of those times that it was meant to go well. The tournament was a lot smaller, only 57 entrants so it wasn't very long before I made it to the final table. What's best is that I was in pretty good shape in terms of chips. I don't remember exactly how I lost cause I was pretty tired by that point, but I remember that I felt kind of bummed for being eliminated before another player that had less than 20BB and a much smaller stack than me. In any case, the overall outcome of the tournament was great!

I finished at 4th place an got a nice $1390 prize. Neat! :D

That's all for now... During March I plan to get a lot more serious in terms of volume of play, and organize my everyday life a bit better so that I include my dance lessons and a better diet, things I have been neglecting lately. There's also the WBCOOP starting tomorrow and I'm seriously considering to participate!

See you guys at the tables!

Houston, we have a problem

Hello everyone!

I'm warning you in advance, this post is gonna be full of graphs so brace yourselves! 

Today is Monday, which normally is the only day of the week that André and I take off, but last week we decided to take an extra day to play a Magic: The Gathering tournament. It was the perfect day: sleep until late, wake up without an alarm, have breakfast, go to play some Magic, then eat at our favorite burger place and finish the day with a nice movie at the cinema.

Too bad that today, which is the compensation day, I don't feel at all like working. Not a tiny bit. We came to the office late, and I took more time than usual grabbing our lunch at the mall. Basically I figured, since I'm here already, why not grab some other stuff that I wanted to buy? I'm going to Greece next week and wanted to get some small presents for my family. My dad recently discovered that he loves Ginja (traditional portuguese liquer), my mom can devour an entire bolo rei (traditional portuguese sweet) all by herself, my grandmother for some reason is convinced that portuguese soaps are better than the greek ones and so on... And of course, I had to do that shopping during my working time. While having lunch, I watched an episode of a greek soap opera instead of doing something useful. After lunch I decided to take André for a coffee and he accepted without much resistance cause he's in a similar mood today.

Of course, when we got back André got straight to work, while I had to procrastinate a bit more. I washed the dishes, sent some e-mails and took some time to read poker blogs, starting of course with André's latest post which, by the way, was very good! Also, I discovered that Team Online member Tzen1 has been in a similar state lately, so that's a bit of comfort! I'm not the only one running away from work obligations! Yeay! :P

Sometime after midnight I came to terms with the fact that I'm not working today and I decided to make a blog post so that there's at least one productive thing that I did today. As you can probably guess by my lack of enthusiasm for work, poker has not been going great lately. Far from it to be exact.

Keeping the tradition of having highs followed by lows and vice-versa, my amazing December was followed by my worst month ever. At least in terms of money. I'm not sure if it's my worst in terms of buy-ins but that's a mentally exhausting score to keep anyway. Here's the graph for January 2013:

Yep, that sucks big time! That's -123 buy-ins more or less. Not to mention about the other failure, the total of VPPs I got in January: 29.239. On pace for Supernova Elite? Um, no way! Of course one could argue that I didn't work the full month due to the trip to the Bahamas and coming down with the flu. My counter argument is this: remember my one-week experiment that would show if I can actually maintain a pace for Elite or not? May I remind you, the goal was 3,8k VPPs per day. Here's how it went:

• Day 1: 3479 VPPs
• Day 2: 2272 VPPs
• Day 3: 2693 VPPs
• Day 4: 829 VPPs
• Day 5: 857 VPPs
• Day 6: Oh wait, that's today! I didn't work today! So, zero VPPs for that!

As you can see, the VPPs dropped significantly after day 4 and on. Let me explain why.

As the end of the month was approaching, I had another losing day. I had made a habit out of those so not much surprise in that. At some point, the traffic at the highest stakes I was playing got bad, so instead of sitting with my hands crossed I decided to play some lower stakes. So instead of $37s-74s, I played $18s-$37s. Now, André says I'm over-analyzing the graph, but check this out:

Can you take a wild guess when I started playing lower? You probably got it right, around tourney #350. At some point, the traffic at the $74s impoved, so I started playing those again and I cut the $18s. That was around tourney #420. Then I felt bad for getting a 1k downswing (cause lately I'm totally freaking out and check my results every 5 seconds), so around tourney #500 I cut the $74s and added the $18s again. Surprise surprise, another upswing!

Of course, that could all be a big coincidence. But the truth is, as soon as I started playing the $18s the contrast of level with the $74s made a huge impact. The non-regular player at those is far less skilled than the non-regular at the $74s. Which kind of makes sense I guess. Not to mention the absence of a bunch of super good regulars at those games. 

This situation got me thinking, so after finishing my session I pulled up some lifetime graphs. Here's how my results stand today:

$18s

$37s

$55s

$74s

You can see that the further we move up in stakes, the less impressive my graphs get. I don't know what I was expecting to see, but I got a bit of a shock when I realized that I'm a losing player at the $74s. I definitely had trouble sleeping that night. This was more than just a downswing... This was me getting the results that my skill deserved and those results were bad. I could assume that I got crazy unlucky and I was running far worse than I should, but I knew better than that. It sucks to admit, but the players I'm up against at those stakes are simply better than me.

At first, I got really sad. I've really put a lot of effort into this poker thing, yet it seems that it's not enough to beat those levels. I thought it was time to kiss the $74s goodbye, and play only up to $37s. I decided to cut down on the $55s as well, cause up to that day my stats were break-even, so I thought "I'm probably losing at these too and just run a bit better than I should". After all, I should still make a living out of my profits at the $18s-$37s. I just wouldn't rely on an income from VPPs and milestones.

Then the next day, I started getting pissed at myself for having that loser attitude. So what, there's a bump on the road and I just quit and I should be happy with myself for getting that far? At the same time, I felt frustrated. Like what, those regulars at the $74s beat me cause they're smarter than me or something? Maybe some of them are, but still, what am I, stupid? Can't I at least try to get better?

When trying to think of a plan for the year playing only up to $37s, I realized that it wasn't feeling right. The truth is, I want to be playing higher stakes than that. It's not for bragging or anything of that kind, it's simply that I want to be on the fast track of the VPPs, even if I'm years away from reaching Supernova Elite. There are benefits along the way and they have nothing to do with your performance at the tables. If you make the points you get the money, it's as simple as that.

When playing higher, I used to get an average of 500 VPPs per hour. Playing the $18s, one day I realized that I only got 400 VPPs after playing two hours. That takes the milestones away from my reach and I don't want that to happen. So even though I'm losing at the higher stakes, I can't just shrug it off and play lower. It bothers me too much do that.

After I got all the this-is-the-end-of-my-poker-career and other negative thoughts out of my mind, I decided to spend some time studying. First, I spent some time reviewing marked hands. Then, I opened hands of an opponent that I consider to be one of the best I play against, and I tried to figure out how he plays. The hands I was reviewing all went to showdown so that I could get some conlusions. My technique was to write down a range of what I would do in his position, then move on with the hand to see what he did. I was agreeing with him 100% in all of his plays. There was only one that came up that I would have played in a different way, I pulled it up on ICMizer and it turned out that I was right. Now that may sound as a good thing that I got all the plays right, but it got me more frustrated cause I know that the player in question is better than me. So he has to do some things differently and I couldn't find them. I felt like I had wasted an entire day studying and learnt nothing. Not to mention feeling bad for not seeing the obvious, cause the differences are there, I know it, but I'm too blind to see them.

The next couple of days I went back to the tables, of course staying away from the $74s. Fortunately, February started pretty well which was really needed to boost my confidence a bit. Here's the graph so far:

I've also been talking with magictuga, a colleague of mine. I prefer the word colleague over opponent cause even though he beats me ruthlessly at the tables (and I'm happy to return the favor) , I actually met him way before I started playing poker and he's a really nice guy. Anyway, talking to him made me put things into perspective a bit and cool down all the drama. Also, he helped me fix some technical problems of my Holdem Manager and now I can see my EV adjusted winnings. The famous red line of Holdem Manager has brought a lot of controversy in my poker discussions in the past and I have come to the conclusion that it's not to be trusted (of course that's just my personal opinion), but I was interested to see what the program had to say about my luck at the $74s. Turns out, according to Holdem Manager I should have a -1,2% ROI instead of a -2,5%. Which still makes me a losing player, but at least it's not so bad. I do find some comfort in the thought that I may have been running a bit worse than expected.

If I said that I have the situation under control and I know what to do next, I'd be lying. I know for sure than I need to study and improve my game and I have a bunch of ideas on how to do it, but every time I sit down in front of the computer, it seems like such a big task that if feels impossible. For now I'll keep playing the $18s and up to the $55s. I haven't dared open any $74s this month, but I've decided not to hesitate if I see that the games are really good.

Another thing that I've decided I should do, mostly after my conversations with magictuga, is to study my opponents a bit more. I need to pay closer attention to their stats and any results that they may have in public. I may have underestimated some of them and overestimated some others which could possibly end up in me having a wrong picture about what games are good and what games are not. Time for some serious opponent spying/ sharkscoping! Hehe!

Let's see how February goes... I sure hope this month will be better!

See you all at the tables!

Plans for 2013

Hello!

It's been almost two weeks since we came back from the Bahamas... Last week was kind of tough because both me and André were battling with the flu and all that jazz, but by now we have fully recovered and are finally getting back to our normal rhythms of work.

That said, this week has been pretty bad work-wise. I've been downswinging like crazy. Here's my graph for this month so far:

As you can see it's not one of my best graphs. -$5380 so far and the worst part of it all is that it kind of all fell apart in the last three days of play (from hand 2000 and on). It's a bit too much for me to take in such a short period of time, especially coming from a super profitable December...

Last Wednesday I came to the office earlier than usual because of a TCOOP tournament. I thought I'd profit from the extra traffic during the two hours leading up to the tournament. I was definitely not prepared for a -35 buy-ins downswing. That was the last hit I could take cause I'd been losing for days. The great results of December seem to be distant past by now. I'm in one of those phases that I don't even remember what it feels like to be winning.

After less than two hours of work, I decided that playing was immediately suspended. You know you need to stop playing if you are consciously not playing your best. I caught myself folding in spots where I knew I shouldn't, just because I was playing scared. No reason to add poor skill to my bad luck so I turned the computer off.

I went to the mall, and had lunch. After that, I met with a friend for a coffee. That friend has nothing to do with poker so the game was not a topic of choice. Which was good and... refreshing. I really needed to take my mind off of it a bit, cause it's all I've been thinking lately.

Lunch time!

Then, I hit the stores. This was the first month that I got a poker salary. It was weird to be spending money that came entirely from poker. Good obviously, but kind of weird at the same time. We're still on the sales period and even though the best merchandise is long gone (you shouldn't really wait for the end of the sales to go shopping), I still managed to find some good stuff.

You can say all you want about shopping therapy and how we are brainwashed by modern society to buy things we don't really need. Some people say that they feel the urge to buy stuff, they enjoy the buying process and then they regret it all once they go home with their hands full but their wallets empty. My perspective is, I was emotionally low because of the downswing, I went on a shopping spree and I was feeling a lot better when I came back. Three days later, and I still don't regret it. I just set a limit of up to how much I was going to spend before going to the mall and stopped shopping once I reached that limit. I am very prudent with my bankroll in poker so it wouldn't make any sense to go bankroll crazy in real life!

Shopping goodies! As you can see, I'm going through a candle phase... Oh, and I bought another pair of fluffy socks (they have owls on them)! Plus some completely unnecessary nail polish! Yeay! :D

Some clothing items...

One super cute top! Not the kind of style I usually go for, but it was on discount so I couldn't resist!

But enough small talk already. Let's get to the subject of this post: my plans for the year!

Back in December, as soon as I realized in τhat it would be possible for me to make 50.000 VPPs in a month, I started thinking about all the possibilities (or as we say in greek πήραν τα μυαλά μου αέρα!). Obviously 2012 was close to an end, but what about 2013? I started making calculations to see if Supernova Elite is reachable. And the truth is, it IS reachable depending on how much you are willing to sacrifice. I did all the possible combinations I could think of: working 5 days a week 8 hours per day, working 6 days a week, working 7 days a week but less hours per day... Anything you can think of I've tried it.

The big catch here is to always keep your expectations realistic. I know for a fact, for example, that I cannot work 7 days a week. Maybe I could do it if my life depended on it, but otherwise I can't. I'm sure I'd snap somewhere along the way, if not the first month then the second or the third. It's just too much for me. Another limitation that I have is that I need to take at least a month off during the year. All my family is in Greece and I live in Portugal, so it's really important for me to go and see them from time to time. And since the journey is pretty long (there are no longer direct flights, so in general it takes a full day to get there) and the tickets are not exactly cheap, it's not worth it if you don't have at least one week to spend. So, realistically speaking, let's assume 3-4 weeks spent in Greece plus the 2 weeks spent at the Bahamas (1 week of travel + 1 week of recovery)... That's like 1,5 months that I count off from work for 2013.

I've been talking with some Supernova Elites or with Supernovas that are considering to take the extra step during this year. The overall feeling I get is that it's a lot of work, but also a lot of sacrifices. In some of the stories I've heard, people practically gave up on social interaction. No more going out with friends, no holidays, etc etc. I'm ok with not going out with friends and having less time for hobbies and stuff like that, but I draw the line where my family and my boyfriend are concerned. I need to travel to Greece and I need to have one day per week to spend with André. Period. That's not negotiable. Cause after all, I could make all the money in the world playing poker but what's the point if I'm feeling miserable in the process?

That said, I do want to push myself to work a lot harder than I did last year. Even harder than what I did in December. So the question is... Is it possible for me to reach Supernova Elite? And if yes, how do I do it?

At the Bahamas I had a very enlightening conversation with Kevin Thurman and his girlfriend Trish. You've probably heard of it already but a couple of years ago Kevin (WizardofAhhs at Pokerstars) went for the VPPs record. He wanted to reach more than 3 million (!) VPPs and he actually made it, so he's the best person to give advice on how to plan for your goals. The thing that made the biggest impact on me out of everything he said is that whatever goal you set in terms of VPPs, that's what you are getting. Not more not less. You see, up until talking with him my calculations were for around 800.000 VPPs and I was hoping to get the remaining 200k from the special months like the SCOOP etc. Kevin clearly put that out of the question.

So, taking that into consideration along with the fact that I need 1 day off per week and 1 month total to go to Greece, we reach the magic number of... 3.800 VPPs daily. That's how much I need to do in order to make Elite this year. Just to put this into perspective, in December my goal was 2.400 VPPs per day. As you can see that's quite a big difference.

Later on in the conversation where I was arguing that I have no idea if I can do it or not, Kevin and Trish had a great idea: to try it for a week, see how it goes and decide from there. Before talking to them, I thought that Elite could not be planned, you just put in as much volume as you could take and then see how it went from there. If towards the end of the year you thought it possible, then you pushed it a bit more (or a lot more) and that was the way to do it. Talking with Kevin completely changed my perspective. By the way, he and Trish are super cool people and it was great meeting them! If you want you can check out Kevin's blog here.

Also, I had a conversation with Caleb from Pokerstars staff while André was doing his iPad Heads-Up contest at the Players Lounge. I asked him how many female Supernova Elites there are and he said like five or six. I knew there wouldn't be many, but that number seems so low!

I left from the Bahamas super motivated. Of course when I came back I wasn't in great physical shape so that slowed me down by quite a bit. When I started playing again, I kept the number 3.800 VPPs in my head. Here's how many points I actually got:

- 17/01/13: 1200 VPPs

- 18/01/13: 2953 VPPs

- 19/01/13: 3754 VPPs

- 20/01/13: 1756 VPPs

- 22/01/13: 3007 VPPs

- 23/01/13: 709 VPPs, snapped with the downswing & gone shopping!

As you can see, there was only one day where I reached the goal (and even then I was 46 points short). Did I try my best? If I'm honest with myself, no, I didn't. To my defense, I'm not fully in working mode yet. But then again, that's my fault and no one else's. The swing obviously made things worse. I'm a lot more willing to put in the hours when I'm winning. On the contrary, when I lose I feel like doing everything else apart from playing. Last Sunday, after I arrived at the office I felt like I had to clean and organize everything around me before finally sitting in front the computer to play. There was literally nothing else to do in there. I take procrastinating to a whole new level!

After my slight tilt on Wednesday I felt more like studying and not so much like playing. Last time I seriously sat down to study was back in November, so a looooong time ago. Some things get rusty no matter how much you play. But starting the year losing money took its toll on me and I couldn't sleep fine. I ended up falling asleep at 7 o'clock in the morning so the next day, instead of studying I took a long afternoon nap. But enough with being disorganized. Starting tomorrow, I'll go for the week Kevin and Trish suggested. But this time I'll try my best. 

My plan is this: I'll wake up around 12 o'clock and try to be at the office around 15:00. I'll have lunch at the office and start playing at 16:00 at the latest. I'll make a two-hour session. Then at 18:00 I'll either go for a dance lesson or study. I'll resume playing around 21:00-21:30 and then keep playing until 2:00. I'm not sure if that's enough to make 3.800 VPPs and that's something that also depends on the traffic, but we'll see how it goes.

In terms of studying, I'm going to start marking hands while I play. Marking hands is an excellent option that I haven't been taking advantage of. I think it makes a lot more sense to review hands that I found problematic while I was playing than to review entire sessions. It should be much more efficient. Also, I followed André's idea and made a list with all the situations in game that I feel I'm uncomfortable with. During my studying sessions I'll review them one by one.

The big challenge here will be to actually keep calm when losing money. That I have no idea how to do. I seriously hope that I'll start winning a bit cause I'm not very good at controlling my emotions so far. I'm better than before, yes, but I don't handle it well yet. Anyway, I'll see how this week goes and then take it from there. Maybe I'll have to go down at stakes if I keep losing and running bad. And that would take me back in terms of VPPs. At this point, I think it's pretty far fetched to say that I'm going for Elite. My current goal is to do the best I can, keeping in mind the possibility of making Elite my goal later on during the year.

Moving on to a different subject, I want to thank every one that has been leaving me comments and supporting me! Some people asked if I give coaching. I am very honored that some of you would like to get coaching with me! However, as you can deduct from the schedule I described above, I have a very limited amount of free time (that's not enough for everything I want to do on my free day) and it's practically impossible to squeeze coaching in my working days. So for now, giving coaching is not something I'm considering but if I change my mind in the future I'll let you know in one of my posts!

As I mentioned in a previous post, back in October I got some health issues that were caused by the way I was sitting on my chair while working. Ever since I started being a lot more aware of how small things like that can affect my health and among other changes that I made, I decided to get a new chair. André and I went chair hunting and visited several stores before I could reach a final decision.

Fortunately I found the chair I was looking for. Unfortunately for me, I didn't find it in a store. I decided that the best chair is the one André was using back at the office. It's the Embody chair by Herman Miller. And that's a bad thing because the chair costs... 1700 euros!!! And that's the discounted price we paid! I know that to most people that may sound a crazy amount of money to pay for a chair. But the truth is, that health is priceless. Not to mention that if I'm not well like when I was getting the vertigo, I won't be able to work at all... If you've tried the chair, you could definitely tell the difference from all the other ones that are out in the market. Is it worth the money? Honestly, I don't know if you are paying for the materials the chair is made of that are better quality, the research they company put into making it, or the brand... What I do know is that it's the best chair out there so I'm willing to pay the 1700 euros for it.

It finally arrived yesterday!

Last news that I have for this week is that I've changed my address on Pokerstars. So now it's no longer katerina289 Greece, but katerina289 Portugal. To be honest, I feel a pinch of sadness that it doesn't say "Greece" next to my screen name anymore, it's like I'm severing ties with the place where I came from... But the truth is my life is in Portugal now so it made a lot more sense for practical reasons. Both countries feel like home to me anyway, so it's all good! :)

Anyway, that's all for today! I'll stop here cause this post is already humongous! Thank you all for your support and see you at the tables!