February Overview

Hello everyone!

February was a very swingy month. I had more ups and downs than what you'd normally get on a roller coaster. As I described in a previous post, I also had my worst day ever. If we take that into consideration, I'm very happy with the fact that I managed to turn it around and finish the month with a bit of a profit.

I'm also pretty happy with the volume I put. So yeah, nothing too exciting happened at the tables during February overall (apart from the shock of that brutal downswing which was a lot of negative excitement accumulated). However, it was the month where it became public that I joined PokerStars Team Online, so I consider February as a great month, even though the monetary profit was small!

You may have noticed a little something next to my name in the screenshot above. And that brings me to my next subject... Sharkscope stars! As I was sharkscoping myself the other day to check I don't-remember-what, I saw it: a silver star next to my nickname! I clicked on it and saw with even bigger surprise that I had made it in the top 20 of the Profit 2014 leaderboard for the hypers between 37 and 100 dollars!

And not only I made it in the top 20, but I was at number #14 too! That was pretty cool! :) Unfortunately, I lost the star a couple of days later. The profit leaderboard is one that keeps growing as the people in it make more and more money. I had a couple of bad days, which took me out of the top 20. But still, it was a cool thing that I was there even shortly. That put the leaderboards in my radar and now I'm keeping track of what's happening. Even though I'm not among the top 20 anymore, I'm actually not that far behind so maybe I'll get one of those stars back!

About a week after that incident, I saw the star next to my name again. When I clicked on it, it took me to a different leaderboard. This time it wasn't the one about profit, but the one about count. Count is how many tournaments you've played, so that's where you'll find the people with the highest volume.

I'm 20th, but I'm closing in on the 19th. This is also the kind of score that will only grow as time goes by, so I could get out of the top 20 if I took some days off or something like that. But then again, how many tournaments you play is something that you have total control over so that's a leaderboard I'll definitely going to keep my eye on.

And to finish this post on another positive note, yesterday I had a pretty sick day. It was not my best day ever, but it came close in terms of buy-ins. I think my best record is around 96 buy-ins in a day and yesterday I won 83. Pretty awesome and if I could run every day like I did yesterday, then that's all I want from my poker career, lol!

That's all for now guys! I'll talk to you soon with another blog post. In the meantime, run crazy good at the tables! :)

Το πρώτο μου post στα ελληνικά!

Γεια σας!

Από τότε που ξεκίνησα να γράφω σε αυτό το blog, έγραφα πάντα στα αγγλικά. Σκέφτηκα ότι για ένα θέμα όπως το πόκερ που αφορά ένα συγκεκριμένο κομμάτι του πληθυσμού και όχι όλο τον κόσμο, θα είναι πολύ καλύτερο να μοιράζομαι τις εμπειρίες μου με όσο το δυνατόν περισσότερα άτομα γίνεται.

Με την πρόσφατη είσοδό μου στην PokerStars Team Online όμως, αποφάσισα ν'αρχίσω να γράφω και στα ελληνικά. Εντάξει, είμαστε γλωσσομαθείς εμείς οι Έλληνες όμως δεν μιλάνε όλοι το ίδιο καλά αγγλικά, ή ακόμα κι αν μιλάνε σίγουρα είναι πιο ξεκούραστο να διαβάζεις κάτι στη γλώσσα σου. Και σε τελική ανάλυση, καλές οι ξένες γλώσσες αλλά καμιά φορά είναι αλλιώς να το πεις στα ελληνικά βρε αδερφέ!

Το υπέρτατο σχέδιό μου λοιπόν για την κατάκτηση του κόσμου  να γράφω και στις δύο γλώσσες, είναι να δημιουργήσω μια σελίδα η οποία θα έχει αποκλειστικά άρθρα στα ελληνικά. Μέχρι όμως να αποφασίσω που και πως θα φτιαχτεί αυτή η σελίδα, θα ανεβάζω όλα μου τα post εδώ. Σε γενικές γραμμές ότι γράφω στα αγγλικά θα το μεταφέρω και στα ελληνικά. Έτσι όλοι όσοι ακολουθούν το blog μου θα διαβάζουν το ίδιο περιεχόμενο ανεξάρτητα με το ποια είναι η γλώσσα στην οποία έχει γραφτεί.

Αυτά προς το παρόν. Μείνετε συντονισμένοι για το επόμενό μου άρθρο!

Blogging στα ελληνικά!

Hello!

If you did not fully understand the title of this post (Blogging in greek), that means that you don't speak greek. And that's fine, I just wanted to give you a little heads-up.

Since my recent addition to PokerStars Team Online, I've decided to start blogging in greek. Don't worry, I'm obviously not switching from one language to the other. I know that a lot of the people that have been following this blog are not from Greece and would like to keep reading my posts in english. But at the same time, I feel like I should start writing in my native language too and hopefully reach out to more people from my home country.

So my master plan for conquering the world blogging in both languages is to ultimately have a page that will be exclusive for greek posts. However, until I figure out the logistics of it (where and how I'm going to do it) I will be putting up posts in both languages here. I will post in english first, and then re-write the post in greek. That way, everyone will read the same content regardless of what language it's in. So for now I'll ask you to bare with me and ignore any posts you see in greek. It will be something you have read already.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

Team Online Freeroll Ticket Winners

Hello again!

First of all, I would like to thank you for all the kind messages you have been sending me to welcome me to the team! You definitely made my day! :) I also got a lot of people telling me what they had for breakfast! I didn't thought you'd take it literally, but I had a good laugh! I was also surprised at the variety of answers, got some good ideas for my breakfast. You guys are great!

But let's cut to the chase: I made a list of all the nicknames (50 participants) and then used a very popular site for this kind of stuff to randomly choose 5.

And the winners are:

1. Rainmy

2. superfire444

3. Himbus

4. Adrian_Ac

5. HOLDON975

If you didn't win don't be disappointed, there will probably be another ticket giveaway next month! Congratulations to the winners!

My first Team Online freeroll

Have you heard about the PokerStars Team Online freerolls? They're cool for the obvious reason why we all love a freeroll. Free money! :P Apart from that though, you get to play with members of Team Online AND win a $25 bounty if you eliminate one of them. I've always wanted to play these freerolls, but they are exclusive for those who used the Team Online bonus code when making their first deposit.

However, Team Online members are giving out some free tickets. Being one of the newest members of the team myself, I have 5 tickets up for grabs! How can you win one? It's simple! Leave me a comment under this post or send me a tweet at @katerina0289. It doesn't have to be on a specific subject, could be anything from just saying hi or telling me what you had for breakfast. Whatever comes to your mind! Just make sure that you submit any comments/tweets before Friday 11:00 a.m. WET and include your PokerStars ID. Five people that will be selected at random will win the tickets. See you on Sunday at the Team Online freeroll! Good luck!

Team Online!!!

So... This is the biggest, craziest, most awesome piece of news that I've ever shared with you through my blog... I'M ONE OF THE NEW MEMBERS OF POKERSTARS TEAM ONLINE!!! :D

In case you haven't seen it already, you can find the article of PokerStars blog here.

Do I need to say how amazing this is? Two years ago I was starting out in poker and now I'm a member of Team Online! It's a great honor for me and I still haven't fully digested it yet. I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming...

Last fall PokerStars sent out an e-mail to Supernovas and Supernova Elites that they could fill in applications to become a member of Team Online. Of course I had to fill in one, not because I was convinced that they'd take me, but because it's something I really wanted and I thought "I won't lose anything for giving it a try".  So I took a shot at it. Eventually time passed and I completely forgot about it, so when I heard back from the team's manager, I literally couldn't believe my eyes. I remember I called André and we were both staring at my computer, reading the mail over and over.

Me: Does this say what I think it says?

André: I guess...

Me: It does, doesn't it?

André: Looks like it...

Me: Okay...

André: We both understand the same thing, right?

Me: I think so...

André: ...

Me: ...

There was a lot of staring, even though there was nothing complicated to grasp. The mail was pretty straightforward: my application had made it down to the last few and I was considered as one of the finalists. I'd look at the computer screen, then I'd look at André to make sure that I was not the only one seeing it. Cause after all, if there's two of us seeing the same thing there are less chances that we are both crazy, right? What was happening was unbelievable. I was happy beyond imagination.

And when everything was finalized and I got accepted on the team I was even happier, but then there was an excruciating period where I couldn't say anything to anyone until it was officially announced. But now it's finally out there and since this morning I've been playing with a red spade next to my nickname. How cool is that? :D

My first time wearing the Team Online patch! Photo by Neil Stoddart.

Before I go, I'd like to congratulate the other two members that just got added to the team: Matthias "Mati312" Brandner and Luka "LukaSteel" Kovac. Congratulations guys!

This is going to be a very, very exciting year so stay tuned for updates! See you at the tables!

Crazy Weekend

In some people's vocabularies, "crazy weekend" would mean lots of partying, fun, drinks and possibly a hangover. For online poker players though that spend the biggest part of their weekend in front of their computer screens, "crazy weekend" probably refers to poker action. With a lot more recreational players at the tables and all the special Sunday tournaments, there's a lot of reasons why we like to play on a weekend.

But before I go on about my weekend, let me tell you about what I've been up to lately. Until the end of 2013 I was playing the $12 hypers. With the beginning of 2014 (new year, new me, blah blah blah), I decided to take some more drastic actions, study more and move up in stakes. So I've been playing $18s and $37s (mostly) and occasionally $56s and $74s if the traffic is good and they're not full of good regulars.

January was a pretty good month for me. Here's the graph from last month:

A total of 2.1K games and $2.8K in winnings. Not bad at all considering I had just moved up in stakes! Plus, a good part of the month I was at the PCA so it's even better considering I didn't even play the whole month.

And that brings us to February. Things had been going pretty smoothly this month, until last weekend happened. Let's start with Saturday.

Almost 600 tournaments played in one day and an awesome profit of $1.7K. Why can't all days be like that? Also, to put things in perspective, my winnings on Saturday were around 47 buy-ins. Which is as sweet as it sounds! I went to sleep pretty happy that night. I'd charge my batteries and wake up prepared for and even bigger grind on Sunday!

Then of course reality happened. I woke up on Sunday feeling good an prepared for a long grind since it's the day of the week where I play the most hours. At this point I'd like to remind you that the graph above and the graph you will see below are only separated by a day, or to be more accurate, a good night's sleep. Here's my graph for Sunday:

Yep, that's as tragic as it looks. 738 tournaments which is a very good volume for my standards, but a devastating -$3.3K result. This day was my worstest day ever, which unfortunately beats my previous record of being in the red. And yes, I know that "worstest" is not proper English but I'm in distress so I think I'm allowed to invent words that best describe my situation. So, not only was that the biggest amount of money I've ever lost in a day, it was also the biggest amount of buy-ins.

When you start playing hypers you hear those urban legends about people swinging100 buy-ins or more in a day, usually followed by a comment in the lines of "variance in those games is brutal, man!". And most of the times, you only half believe what those people are telling you cause winning or losing 100 buy-ins in a day is pretty crazy, right? Unfortunately, it was my turn to prove that urban legend to be true. If we divide the losses by what Sharkscope says was my average buy-in for the day, we get... The outstanding number of 108 buy-ins. In case you don't remember, my previous lowest of the low was -60 buy-ins and that was not a record I was looking forward to breaking. At least that was back in May 2012, so these things don't happen that often.

I don't think I was playing badly, even though I'm sure I made some mistakes. I also had a couple of problems with my internet connection during the day, but nothing major to justify the outrageous result. I don't think I was tired while playing either. After all, you can see that the steepest downswing was towards the beginning of my session where theoretically I was more rested than towards the end of it. Which brings us to the only logical explanation... Variance. I'd say variance is a b****, but I'd like to have her on my side today so I'll just say she's a lady with crazy mood swings. Around tourney #550 I decided to cut down on the higher stakes and stick to the $18s. When I hit a new low for the day, I decided to stop. It was getting close to midnight anyway.

So yeah, can't say that I'm very happy about how this weekend went by. Right now I'm $1.2K down for the month, which will be hard to recover although not impossible. After all, we've seen what variance can do. I just need a bit of good luck coming my way.

Today I've decided to take it slow. Even if I wanted to play right now I couldn't, cause my computer is being torn to pieces. It has been freezing quite a bit lately which is not good, especially if you're playing the hypers that have a tiny time bank. The other day I folded QQ preflop, then I folded another hand when I was on the big blind and the blinds were so high that I only had 40 chips behind, and I folded AK at a very profitable spot in the Guiness world record attempt yesterday (we didn't break the record btw, where were you guys?!?). So yeah, my computer definitely needed to be fixed so I got my personal technician to work on it. I'm also getting a new disk installed, which should improve the computer's speed.

PC technician at work. Doubles as a poker coach/boyfriend.

By the way, I don't understand a thing about computer hardware, but duct tape? What's up with that? Anyway, I hope that my computer will be working soon so that I can get back to work. My plan for the rest of the week is pretty much the same it has been since the beginning of the year: play 6 hours, study 2. For now since my workstation has been taken over I'll busy myself with different activities, such as preparing lunch. So yeah, that's all for now. I hope this week will be better than the previous one. Wish me luck cause I'll definitely need it!