Chipstar1

This month I’m going to try and play at least 150k hands at $25NL, I’m going to concentrate on 100BB poker from now on in preparation for moving back up to $100NL. Last month my friend (the one I lost the prop bet to) won the most money at $25NL than anyone else and it’d be pretty cool if I could emulate that this month, It’ll be tough though.

I also found out which wcoop tournaments I’ll be hosting this month, event 6 which is a $215 turbo rebuy NHLE event and events 28 and 48 which are both $1050 2 day NHLE events, the wcoop schedule can be found here….

http://www.pokerstars.com/wcoop/schedule/

Pokerstars are also offering a reload bonus of 20% up to $100 so take advantage of it if you can, here’s the link with more details….

http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/bonus/wcoop/

Oh and talking about free stuff, don’t forget to check out the Lamborghini free rolls what are running every day until the 25th September for a seat in the grand final taking place on October 3rd, there’s a Lamborghini Gallardo up for grabs where the top 5000 places take a share of a $250,000 prize pool, more details can be found here…

http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/lamborghini-freeroll/

Good luck with your goals this month and maybe I’ll see you at a final table (that I’m hosting )

Today I decided which wcoop events I want to play in the upcoming world championship of online poker, well not exactly which events but more so the stakes I want to play. I’m going to play 1 $530, 2 $320 and 1 $215 event, the $530 tournament will most likely be the 2 day NL Hold’em event on September the 12th with the smaller buyins being made up of two fullring NL Hold’em tournaments and one pot limit omaha.

Septembers going to be a pretty busy month for me, not only am I taking part in the wcoop but I’m also going to be hosting a few final tables, I’m not sure which one’s just yet but I’m pretty excited to be taking part, it’ll be fun when people want to make deals, I’ll have to hunt out my abacus (: . I’ll also be moving back up to $100NL sometime next month, I’m looking forward to it because my EV win rate isn’t too bad at the 100bb tables and I’ll be able to earn more vpps and hopefully hit one or two of the milestones before the end of the year.

As far as this month goes I gave up on the prop bet I had with my friend as I was too far behind after getting off to a slow start, I am still on course to win the prop bet on 2+2 and need another 88k hands, I have 9 days to do it so I’ll be grinding hard for the rest of the month and then I’ll take a day off and prepare for September.

Well I’m a little behind pace as my sleep was messed up at the beginning of the month after I traveled down to Blackpool on the last Saturday of July. I decided to go last minute and by the time I got back home at 8pm I hadn’t slept for 30 hours. It wasn’t a total surprise that I crashed out pretty much as soon as I got home so it took me a while to get sorted, getting up at 6am when I want to be playing from 5pm-5am isn’t great for productivity.

As things stand I’m around 55k hands behind my friend in our prop bet, I’ve played 47k for the month and 30k hands since the challenge began, pace being 72k hands. We’ve had a few prop bets like this in the past and I’ve given him leads in the past so I’m confident I can catch up to him.

The $50nl games I’ve been playing have had quite a few waiting lists when I wanted to grind and it wasmaking it difficult for me to start new sessions so I decided to drop down to $25nl to help get in the volume I need to win the bet.

Hands needed: 170,000

Days left: 16

Pace/needed: 8000/10625

The title says it all, I’m going to try and play 200k hands in the 25 remaining days of the month, that’s 8k hands a day on average, I don’t think I’ve played 8k hands in a day this month so it’s going to be tough but I’m really motivated to do this and get back my grinding mentality.

I have a few propbets going on this month, I’m in the pools for the 50k/100k/150k hand month propbet the micro stakes full ring players have on 2+2 and have a $300 propbet with my friend, he’s acquired a 35k hand head start so I’ve got some catching up to do, he’s a decent winner at $25nl so could be in the running to be the highest earner at $25nl this month if he runs well.

As for me I’ll be grinding the $50nl shallow tables for the remainder of the month, if I can get in the hands I could have my first $10k month this year with bonuses, once I reach supernova I’ll have the fpps to buy the $4k bonus and then maybe save up for the Porsche (:

Moving back up to $100NL has given me mixed results and mixed feelings. I did quite well at $100NL winning around $500 in 12k hands and was $300 below EV, I also lost 3 stacks with KK vs AA and had no AA vs KK myself which means my results were even more impressive. That said I still wasn’t comfortable grinding $100NL, I was playing too tight for my liking and I put this down to not really having the bankroll to grind knowing at I could have a 20-30 buyin downswing at any time. Therefore I’ve decided to move back down to the $50nl shallow tables until I reach SuperNova, I have around 140k fpps right now and when I reach SuperNova I’ll have enough to purchase the $4k cash bonus from the vip store.

I’m pretty sure I can beat $100NL, I’m just a little nitty with my bankroll until I know I can beat it. I really want to open up my game, I’ve been playing pretty tight at $100NL which is mainly down to people wanting to play back at me because of my status, a lot of those players are better than I am and I tend to over adjust to them sometimes, people might see me 4bet them and think I’m only doing it with a big hand but the truth isn’t always the case, although alot of the time when I make a move I get owned and 5bet shoved on, I can’t always be running into monsters.

What I want is the confidence to open up, try new things and not worry about dropping 20-30 buyins in the progress of trying to improve my game, right now I don’t and won’t until I reach SuperNova.

A couple of days ago I decided to move back up to $100NL and reduce the number of tables I play to 16 whilst I’m working on my game. I think I’ll benefit more by moving back up to $100NL 40-100BB games and leaving the 20-50BB behind, I don’t think I can really maintain any sort of decent winrate at those tables with all the shortstackers playing them and it’s probably best for my game if I focus on moving up and improving rather than staying at $50NL and just grinding tonnes of hands like a zombie.

My win rate at the 100BB $100NL games is only just over 1BB/100 but my EV win rate is just under 3BB/100 so I’m sure I can beat the limit if I focus, reducing the number of table I play should help with that.

Over the past couple of days I’ve played just under 3k hands at 100nl and it went well, I’m up a couple of buy ins and been stacked with KK vs AA twice, I’ve had that scenario more than twice as often as AA vs KK so it’ll be nice when I run good and go on a heater.

The VPP  rate at $100NL is better than at $50NL so I should be able to collect VPPS just as fast, I won’t be going for 200k hands this month though, I’m just going to aim for 4-5k a day for the rest of the month and go from there.

Well I haven’t been putting the as many hours in as I had planned this month, in fact I haven’t put in many at all, partly because of the world cup and partly down to a really bad pain I’ve had in my shoulder that I picked up last week. Unfortunately it’s my right arm (mouse hand) so it’s really painful when I’m playing. I’ve been taking some painkillers lately and it seems to help, although one of the side effects are they make me sleepy.

There’s 19 days left this month and I’m going to aim to play 200k more hands, I haven’t played more than 7k hands in a day this year so it’s going to be really tough but I’m going to try really hard to get it done.

I’ll watch this video to help motivate me each day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX39J_YyKbs

I’ll update my progress every 3-4 days.

Last month PokerStars aired their new show “The Big Game”,  a poker show with a bit of a twist.

Every week 6 players made up of 4-5 well known professionals 0-1 businessmen and 1 loose cannon sit down and play 150 hands against each other, the show is split up into 5 episodes with blinds at $200/$400 with a $100 ante. Players can buyin for between $100k-$500k and $100k is given to the loose cannon, backed by PokerStars they get to keep any profit they make during the show.

I think it’s a pretty fun idea, the loose cannon is obviously the worst player at the table and the professionals and going to be jumping over each other in order to get into a pot with them.

The first show involved Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Laak, Tony G and loose cannon Ernest Wiggins. It was a quite exciting first lineup of players with Tony G constantly needling Phil Hellmuth, Ernist also seemed like quite a character. Doyle typically played his tight and quite game whilst Phil Laak was overly passive, although with Tony G to his left it wasn’t a bad strategy.

Wiggins did quite well in the middle stages and managed to win alot of money in a big hand which put him in profit by around $60k, once he was up money I think he realised the extra $60 was his own money and he went into his shell allowing Negreanu to bluff him off a pot he’d probably have called if his stack was only $90k, that said Negreanu probably knew this and may not have bluffed otherwise. Although the concept is great I do feel it has some flaws, take this for example, the loose cannon doubles up first hand with AA vs KK all in pre flop, he’s going to be up $100k straight away and he’s now playing with $100k of his own money. He’s probably going to nit it up for the rest of the show and make things less interesting. It’s unlikely that’ll happen though, although Ernist did it to a degree in the first show, anyway I won’t put out too many spoilers, well maybe one more in the form of the video clip below, it’s the funniest clip I’ve seen for a long time, Hellmuths face is so funny.

The show can be found here… http://thebiggame.pokerstars.net/ , if you live in the US you can set your dvd’s to record the show on fox 5 nights a week

Here’s a clip from the first show

The Big Game

Hey guys, just a quick update to post the details of the tournament I’m holding.

It’s a $1 tournament with $20 on my head. There will be a ticket to the Pokerstars Sunday quarter million for players who make the final table.

Here’s the details….

Tournament id: #286747158

Buyin: $1.10

Format: NLHE

Password: aaliyah

oops typo on the pw

Hope to see you there.

Well June has been a month to forget, I dilly dallied about between different stakes and formats without really settling down, as a result I had a losing month at the tables. I did run below EV for the 4th month running but I’m thinking long term and with every bad run there’s a good run just around the corner, I can’t wait for mine. I’m not going to make excuses though, I played horrible in a lot of hands this month, I guess every mistake I make is a mistake I’ll learn from.

Right now I’m half way towards making Supernova, it’s something I probably should have achieved earlier but I’ve found it difficult adjusting to people playing wierd against me because of my status, I probably over adjusted and that’s part of the reason for struggling lately. I’ve gone through my database recently and picked up on a few leaks I had, hopefully I can fix them and bring my game forward into July, I feel I’m slowly improving which is a plus I guess, something I can take out of this month anyway.

So 50k VPPS is the target I’m aiming for, July 31st is the date I’m looking to achieve it. One thing I’m going to make sure of doing this month is sticking at the same limit ($50NL fullring 20-50). Focus and concentration is what I need and switching between limits isn’t helping the mentality I have towards my game. The VPP rate at $50NL fullring is around 1/6.25 hands so I’m looking to play around 300k hands from now until the end of July, It’ll be really tough but as long as I focus on one game I’ll have a chance.

I’m not going to play any cash games today because of the England match and the Sunday tournaments I play but I’ll be starting back up first thing tomorrow.

The tournament I spoke about in previous posts will take place on Wednesday 30 June at 8pm GMT, I’m pretty sure there are no world cup games on that day so there won’t be a conflict. It’ll be password protected and open to every reader of my blog, I’ll post the tourney i.d and password on Wednesday. It’ll be $1 entry with $20 on my head, anyone who makes the final table will receive a ticket to the Sunday 1/4 million worth $11.

Hope you guys had more success this month than I did, goodluck in July.