April and New Working Space!

Hello!

Okay, I'll admit that during April I've neglected the blog a bit. The truth is, it was not a very productive month poker-wise like I was hoping it would be. Here's a little update on what I've been doing lately...

Moving our computers and the rest of the stuff that we had at the office back home may have only taken a day, but putting everything back to order took a lot more than that. I put quite some effort into organizing everything... Our apartment was a mess! Then I got a flu (for the second time this year!). This time the fever lasted a bit longer and I ended up staying several days in bed and spent a whole week without working.

When I finally felt better, we were already in the middle of April and my poker skills felt so dusty that I decided the best approach would be to study and stay away from the tables. André suggested that I study the equilibrium for situations that are frequent so that's what I did. For those of you that are not familiar with it, if all players involved in a hand play according to the equilibrium then none of them win or lose money. The equilibrium represents the perfect balance, the break even point for everyone. It occurred to me that all this time I had been studying the game I was trying to figure out how to play against regulars and non-regular players. That means that I was studying how to deviate from the equilibrium without ever having spent time to study the equilibrium on its own!

Anyway, I created some spreadsheets of my own for the first time and I found quite a lot of stuff that I can improve in my game. As long as there's room for improvement I'm happy, cause I find it really frustrating when I'm losing and I don't know what I could be possibly doing wrong. Apart from studying, which took most of my working time, I spent a little time at the tables but I was playing low (mostly $18s). As a result, I didn't get a lot of VPPs and I didn't meet the minimum requirement of 6,5k VPPs per month to maintain the Supernova VIP status. Fortunately, each player is allowed to skip that requirement twice. This was only the first month that was happening for me, so I'm still Supernova. I plan on putting a lot of volume during May so hopefully I'll renew my Supernova status for 2013 soon and I won't have to worry about the monthly requirements anymore.

In my previous post I promised to tell you a bit more about our new working space and post photos when it would be ready. When we first moved into this apartment, that room was destined to be André's office. I was not playing poker back then, so he had all the room to himself. Then, when I decided to learn how to play poker on a professional level we rent an office and André didn't work at home anymore. That meant that we had an empty room in our apartment. Since André started doing his physical exercise at home around that time, he decided to use it as a mini-gym. He bought weights, yoga balls, a workout bench and a bicycle.

As you can imagine, when we decided to move our computers back home it was quite problematic because the old office room was now occupied. Fortunately, that room has a built-in closet. André keeps all his computer-related stuff in there. I re-organized everything and found out that he didn't really need to be using all of the closet to store those things, but only a small part of it. The rest of the space was just perfect... for the gym equipment! It does mean of course that he has to take everything out every time he wants to work out and put everything back in after he finishes, but that's not such a big deal.

Gym-in-closet

The only thing not fitting in the closet was the bicycle which is in the middle of the living room at the moment, but I'll figure something out eventually. Back to our subject... The closet was organized and the room was cleared out to receive all the stuff from the office. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so check out the one below:

No space to walk. Literally.

I probably look happy in the picture above but trust me, I wasn't. As I said earlier, it took me days to put everything in place. The annoying part was that in the meantime we couldn't really work. Even after André installed the computers and got them working, the place was such a mess that you felt like suffocating in there. At least I did. Working was out of the question until everything was nice and neat.

The only new piece of furniture we bought was a small library from Ikea. Our collection of poker books is constantly growing and it reached the point where it wouldn't fit the small square shelves that we had been using so far.

Does anyone feel like studying?

With a lot of patience, everything was sorted out. Our desks were cleared out of all the stuff and I utilized the square shelves that were previously used as bookcases to store everything away in white boxes. I think the overall space now looks very neat and tidy. What do you think?

Room Overview

My desk

André's desk

Overview from a different angle

Storage

Everything is organized and easy to find.

Printer

Just about when I've finished and I think it's time to celebrate, André ruins the moment by telling me that he wants to put his screens on the wall instead of simply having them on his desk like he used to. I don't know if you've ever tried to put a screen on the wall, but it's not an easy task. Now imagine putting three of them while trying to keep them aligned! What a nightmare!

It took us a whole afternoon to get the job done. Even though his three screens seem to be exactly the same, one of them is a different model than the other two. We didn't really pay much attention to it at first, but it turned out they are slightly different on the back, which resulted in one screen hanging slightly lower than the other two. Then again, it's a very small difference so after spending that many hours of taking measures, opening holes in the wall and creating a mess we decided to leave it as it is.

As usual, I got the fun part all for myself...

Cleaning time!

It was tough, but I think the final result was worth it. Here's André's current setup:

Screens on the wall

André's desk

So now I think we're pretty much done. In the future if we have more books it is possible to add another column to the library but that's about it. I think we have everything else that we need and it's all ready just in time for the SCOOP!

Let me know what you guys think about our working space and see you at the tables!

The Aftermath

Hello!

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post but I kind of got a blogging-overdose with those daily posts, so I hope my absence is understandable. March was a bad month overall and honestly I couldn't wait for it to be over. There are some subjects I'd like to talk about before I go on with my plans for April.

WBCOOP

It's not really news anymore since this has been announced for quite some time now, but in case you haven't heard I won the WBCOOP 2013 prize for Best Female Blogger. The article about the winners can be found here. You may think that after blogging everyday for over a week I'd be super excited for winning and make a post about it as soon as possible. Well that didn't happen cause... It didn't really feel like winning. To be honest, I was feeling quite gutted about the result. I put a lot of effort to my posts and I was aiming high... At the Best Blogger award. When that didn't come, all the rest seemed kind of irrelevant.

Actually, when I first heard the results all I was thinking about was what could have gone wrong. I was comparing the winner's blog to mine, trying to find any leaks or possible improvements I could make. I came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter. It's not about one blog being better than the other, it's a matter of personal preference. Things like presentation and content are very subjective and not everyone will have the same opinion about them. I noticed, for example, that the winner's posts on each individual WBCOOP event were short while mine would vary from big to huge. Some will argue that in the blogging world and with all this overflow of information, smaller posts are more efficient. Personally I much prefer long posts cause I think those in a hurry can do some "diagonal reading" and get the overall idea, while those more interested in details can read the whole thing. Again, it doesn't mean that one thing is bad and the other is good. It simply depends on what each person is looking for and a blogger can never write something that will satisfy 100% of the readers. Which is why I've decided to stick to my personal style and quit searching what I could have possibly done different to win the title.

A last thought that I'd like to leave you with before closing the WBCOOP subject for this year, is one I read at SuperNova125's blog: "A fun series for micro bloggers really but maybe not worthwhile for higher stake players". I don't play the really high stakes, but I don't play the micro/small ones either. And I can't help but wonder if this event even compensates the time of medium stakes players. I spent close to ten days playing the freerolls and blogging about them. That was very costly in terms of VPPs and potentially harmful to my monthly profits as well. If I had won the first prize that would have been obviously worth my time (even though that might not be the case for some higher stakes players), but that's a long shot and a pretty EV- bet.  And looking back at the series, I really didn't see that many Supernovas playing. On the contrary, I now understand better the "Oooohs" and "Aaaaaaahs" I was getting every time I sat down at a table. Six stars at the WBCOOP was pretty rare. At the same time I'm saying this, I don't really know what would be a good way to fix it. One option would be to be offering different tickets to players according to their VIP status and grant them entrance to different tournaments (that would of course have different prizes, kind of like the VIP freerolls). But that would be unfair to the micro/small stakes players, plus it would destroy the WBCOOP's ability to unite all the world's bloggers in one place. Not to mention I don't think there would be enough players around the higher levels to make it worthwhile for Pokerstars. So I really don't know how to mend this situation. I just hope Pokerstars' team will find a way to improve the series and make it more attractive to a bigger number of bloggers next year. I know I'll want to participate, I just hope it won't be such a tough decision when I put WBCOOP and grinding VPPs on the same scale. Of course the freerolls can't be at the same level as normal grinding, but I'd like to be able to choose to play the WBCOOP with less of a guilty conscience, if that makes sense.

Finally, I'd like to thank Pokestars for organizing the series and choosing me as one of the winners (even though it wasn't the place I was hoping for)! I'll be looking forward to it next year!

March Overview

In terms of results, March was not good. Here's the graph of the month:

I played around 4k games and lost around $2k. Very low number of tournaments which is very disappointing, but I've no one to blame but myself (okay, maybe I can blame the WBCOOP just a little! :P). What's really preoccupying though is that my level of play has gotten a lot worse.

Of course that isn't something that just happened in the month of March. It's a gradual deterioration that has started around the time I stopped having coaching with André. The other night, I was playing a bubble and I lost with AJo. I started complaining about how unlucky I got and André came to my computer to see the replay. I was 100% sure I played fine and just got unlucky. André's opinion was that I misplayed the hand. And well, if it's a poker subject and the two of us disagree you can probably guess who is usually right...

I don't remember what the play was so I can't describe it here. It got completely erased from my memory and the only thing that remains is the AJo along with a feeling shock when I realized that something I was totally sure about was actually wrong. Being uncertain of how to play at certain spots is one thing, thinking that you are playing fine when you are actually making mistakes is another...

André told me that I had to do something about it immediately or else I would see my bankroll evaporating in no time. Combine that to the fact that I'm down so far for the year and you'll get an image of what kind of mood I was in. At first I got pissed at André and told him that he couldn't judge the way I play overall just with one hand that he saw. He told me that he could because what he saw was indicative of the way I see  and understand the game. I still don't know how he got all that from one hand, but he was right.

When we had a mini-session of coaching he asked me about some ranges and pulled them up on ICMizer. First, when he was asking what I'd do at a specific situation I felt lost and found it really difficult to answer. Then, when I compared the correct answer with what I had written down on my paper I saw that it was a million miles away. Crap. This is bad. The worst thing is, that I remember myself knowing those ranges. I remember sitting down with André trying to solve a problem and my range would be closer to the correct answer than his. Where did that all go?

You know when you stay away from the tables for some time and then when you finally go back you're out of shape? You probably need to take it slow at first, study and try to remember things you knew but have forgotten. My theory is that the exact same thing happens to me, only instead of happening when I'm away from the tables it happens when I don't get any coaching with André. It's frustrating really, especially considering all the hours that both of us (André and I) have invested in me learning poker.

Anyway, it's pretty straightforward what needs to happen from now on. I have to study a ton and... get more coaching with André. The tricky part here is that he doesn't have much time. He has his own challenge going on, he needs to film videos about it, get some coaching himself, study, blog, etc. He is working so many hours that if we didn't live in the same house and work in the same space I don't think I'd see him much! So where will he find time to give coaching to me?

The Office

As you probably know, in February of 2012 we rent an office and transferred our computers there. The idea was to separate our work life from all the rest. We wanted to increase our concentration and productivity. And it worked, having the office was a very positive thing. Unfortunately, the truth is that we have to spend quite a lot of time going around. Even though it's not that far away from home, going in and out of garages, waiting at traffic lights and driving around quickly adds up. Not to mention it's ok when you leave in reasonable times, but quite often we happen to leave the office at 2, 3 or 5 a.m. At that time you just want to teleport to your bed if possible. We may be able to save only an hour or so per day, but that is huge for André. I'm kind of sad that we are leaving the office cause I've spent endless hours of grinding there and have a lot of nice memories but the truth is if that will allow him to have more time to coach me, fine, I'll take it. Plus, since poker has not been very profitable lately that's one less expense I'll have to worry about!

So from now on we'll be playing from home. We only moved back two days ago so not everything is ready yet, but when it is I'll make a photo tour to show you guys!

Computer dating

If you think this is about dating other people on the Internet... You are mistaken! What I meant was really dating a computer! Some months ago I spotted a great laptop at the mall... The Samsung 900X3C! The price was $1,7k which was way too high and I wasn't really considering to buy it, but every time André and I would go by the store I'd drag him inside to go take another look at "my" laptop. You know how some women will melt looking at showcases full of bags or clothes? That's kind of what I looked like, only I was hooked on that computer! I was very much love struck! I didn't even realize until one day as we were approaching the store André said "Do you wanna go inside and check your laptop?" How did he know in advance that I wanted to do that? "You are dating the computer", he said. It was true! 

As time went by, they dropped the price to $1,3k. Still too expensive. Then a month after, they took it further down to $1k. This was getting interesting. How much further down were they going to take it? Not at all apparently, as the next model of the series had already been released. The thing is, I hated the next model. Yeah it had better characteristics but it also had a major flaw: it was heavier. You see, one of the things I loved about the 900x3c in particular was that it weighed only 1,16 kilos! Even lighter than a MacBook Air of the same size!

But the next model was already here and weighed as much as a brick, while my favorite feather-light laptop was about to get discontinued... Our dating days were officially over! Things either had to get serious between us or... I would have to let go of the laptop once and for all. Around the same time, the WBCOOP money arrived. I didn't win that money at the tables, so it made sense to not include it in my poker bankroll. And even though it wasn't enough to buy my laptop, it would get me a pretty good discount. I don't have a computer of my own (I'm using André's hand-me-downs) so... I went for it!

I don't want to make it sound bad that I'm using André's old computers, they're still far better than the computer an average person has at home and that's what I use to play poker, but... I fell in love with that laptop and I didn't have a computer of my own. Plus, I travel quite a bit which was one more reason to make that purchase! I'm super happy with it, although I'm still getting used to Windows 8... That's gonna take some time!

That's all for now... See you soon with a new post!