Chipstar1

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