Chipstar1

Decided to move back unto $100NL this week. I had to put my challenge on hold, my sisters coming up from down south and living apart I rarely see her, she suffers from cystic fibrosis so I have to make the most of our time together.

Over the past few months I’ve put in a tonne of work into my game and am more confident than ever that I can hold my own at $100NL. I’m a slight winner at the 100BB  games but with ev adjusted I’m at around 2BB/100. Staying at $25NL and grinding 24 tables isn’t what I should be doing right now, I need to push myself if I’m going to establish myself at $100NL by the end of the year. The plan for now is to 4-8 table for another 4-5 weeks and hopefully increase tables after the WCOOP’s finished.

I’m looking forward to the WCOOP and my hosting duties during the series, I’ll be warming up by hosting the Sunday Warm Up this weekend, last weekend I was asked to host the Sunday Million so stayed up for hours by playing play money only to find out stars had made a mistake and I wasn’t actually needed to host, oh well.

Last week I rejoined th gym after being away from training for about 8-9 months. I quit last month after I was diagnosed with a kidney stone but I didn’t like the fact that I was getting out of shape so I’ve started training again to get back my fitness, once I feel fit again it’ll be a lot easier for me to grind longer sessions, when your unfit you become tired easier, well at least I do anyway.

Looking through YouTube for piano music (yeah I like piano music, probably something to do with my dad being a musician) I came across this video, one day I hope I can play like this.

As those who follow me on twitter are aware I lost 3-4 days during the beginning of my challenge when the power cables underground caught fire leaving us without power. As I result I’ve decided to reduce my challenge to 125k hands by the end of the month which would equate to 125k in 16-17 days which works out as around the same hands per day as my 20 day challenge. Hopefully next month I can push on with 200k hands, although I do have a lot of commitment with the upcoming WCOOP series where I’ll probably be playing 6 tournaments and probably hosting 4-5 final tables.

By the way, if anyone’s interested in football managing games give xpert11 a try, it’s a pretty cool game and it’s free.

Hey guys, the Wcoop is nearly upon is and to get back into the grinding mode I’m challenging myself to play 150k hands by the end of the month. I’m going to play $25NL for this challenge as I’m not experienced enough at the cap games yet to grind them. I’m actually looking to move up to $100NL by October so my aim is to make as many $100 buy ins as possible from now until them. I feel really motivated at the moment so I’m going to use it to play as much as possible.

Next month sees the start of the Wcoop and I’m starting to get pretty excited, I’m going to play at least 6 events during the series with a few of them being the $1k buy in NLHE events, lets hope I can cash in one or two of them, I’d definitely help my bankroll for $100NL.

Saturday sees the start of the new premier league football season and the team I support (Liverpool) play the team my girlfriend supports (Sunderland) so there’s rivalry between us from the off  ( :

If any one’s interested in football, how about creating a fantasy league, I set my team today.

Remember you can follow me via my twitter account, I’ll be posting updates of my challenge on there on a a daily basis.

Going back through my cap hands I noticed I had a few leaks, of course this was going to be the case as I’m still rather inexperienced at cap games and figured I’d lose initially. I’ve poured through my database over the past couple of weeks, watched how the regulars play at the tables and have done a few tweaks to my strategy. Over the next couple of days I’m going to continue to do some research, getting in a few short sessions here and there and then start putting in the volume come the weekend.

Last week I went to my first ever cricket match, Durham vs Northants in the 20 over format of the game and witnessed something special. Durham batted first and made 144 runs, then went on to bowl out Northants for just 47 runs with Paul Collingwood picking up 5 wickets and a hat trick, was a really good game and I’ll be definitely be going again.

The WCOOP starts in less than two months and Pokerstars released the schedule at the end of last month, I’m pretty excited as I’ll be playing my first $1k tournament. During the scoop I managed to cash a few of the $200s so I’ll be hoping to cash a couple more in the WCOOP, fingers crossed.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been studying shortstack strategy in an attempt to grind some vpps and make supernova, having played a few thousand hands I’ve come to the decision that it’s not really for me, I don’t enjoy the all in shoving to squeeze out an ounce of equity here and there, 100bb poker is more my cup of tea.

Spending a few weeks going over the hands I’d played at 100NL cap in the past and the few thousand I played recently made me realise just how helpful the filters in holdem manager really are, I’ve really had my eyes opened up and thanks to a few posts on 2+2 I’ve realised how many mistakes I was making before. I’ve gone through the 100k hands I’ve played at $50NL fullring 100bb and found a tonne of leaks, leaks I didn’t understand about before. I know I’ve never been a great player and moving up from the micro’s with the pressure of being criticised by people has been really tough for me, with my realisation of what I was doing wrong before and what I need to do to make things right now I’m looking to the future more positively. For now I’m going to restrict myself to 10-12 tables at $50NL fullring with the emphasis on improving my game even further and moving back up to $100NL.

Over the past few months I’ve come to realise that in order for me to get out of the $25NL grind and earn the vpps I need to achieve my yearly goal of 300k I’d need to move up pretty quickly. At the beginning of April I moved up to $50NL where I wanted to stay for a while, a couple of weeks later it was my birthday and I took a weeks break to visit my dad. I was really pumped up to grind $50NL when I returned only for the situation with the American players to happen the day after I got back home. I didn’t really know what was happening and figured the games might get a little tougher at $50 and the hours I had assumed I could play wouldn’t have the available traffic ( 5pm-6am BST) so figured the games in the early morning would be tougher, too tough for me. Therefore I moved back down to $25NL to build my bankroll to help me feel more comfortable when I move back up, but it hasn’t worked out for me…..

$25NL has been a bit of a struggle for me, because of my status I get played back at a lot and when your not the greatest player in the world it’s tough going. Getting played back at made me tighten up, too much to be honest, every time I tried to open up I’d find I was doing worse. My attempt to steal was around 25% when I played my tight game and when I opened up it was more like 35%, but even at 25% I found my success rate was 10-15% lower than my friends who played the same stakes. I found myself having little fold equity with my cbets and my double barrels had even less.

I realised I had to do something about it, my goal this year was to earn 300k vpp’s and move up to $100NL full ring by the end of the year, it’s been a struggle for me at $25NL and running below EV hasn’t helped, but to be honest I know better players would still beat the game so I can’t really make excuses there, I just have to do what I need to do for myself in order to get where I want to be by the end of the year, 300k vpps and playing $100NL.

I believe my best chance of reaching my goals this year is to move up to $100NL cap to grind vpps in order to build my bankroll through the Pokerstars vip program, if I can get to 300k vpps by the end of the year I’ll have enough bankroll to be comfortable at $100NL full ring and have enough in my bank to not have to withdraw each month, there’s nothing worse than having your bankroll be reduced by table play and then having to withdraw money to live on, it’s like a double blow. Luckily I’ve got enough in my bank account right now to last me until the end of the year so my bankroll will have a better chance to grow.

Over the past 3-4 days I’ve been going over hand ranges for $100NL cap, I had played around 6500 hands a few months ago when I was trying to clear a bonus on the last day and dropped $265, although my all in EV was $200 below so I would have only lost $65 in the long run, that’s around -$1/100 Ev adjusted, obviously not ideal but when I played those hands I had very little clue about cap poker and played badly to be honest. I’ve put a lot of work in over the past few days (probably 12 hours studying a day) and I’m hoping the hard work pays off, I doubt I’ll be a winner straight away but if I can managed to lose less than 50c/100 hands for the first 100k hands I’d be pretty happy.

I’ve got another day of studying to do and then it’s time to get stuck in, hope I can hit the ground running.

This month saw my girlfriend move in with me and as a result I haven’t gotten much work done. Luckily it’s all finished with now and I’m finally free to get stuck into playing poker again. I’m pretty pumped up and looking forward to playing a tonne of hands over the next few weeks, I’ve probably only played 300k hands this year but I’m aiming to play close to 1.5m and earn over 200k vpps so I have some grinding ahead of me.

As I’ve been busy this month I’ve revised my challenge to 150k hands, I’ve played around 8k so far so have another 142k to go, that’s around 8000 hands a day. Check my progress on twitter, I’ll post updates at the end of each day.

This month’s been really bad for me poker wise, not so much the results but more so my ability to play poker, as a consequence I haven’t been blogging much. This month we had our house renovated, carpets up, wallpaper stripped, most of the furniture in storage for the month you name it. As a result I barely had the opportunity or time to play as much as I really wanted to. On the plus side I did manage to cash a couple of the scoop tournaments I played,  luckily they were the two dearest tournaments. In total I cashed for around $840, that’s over 30 buy ins at the cash level I’m currently playing, not too bad for someone who rarely plays tournaments.

I must admit I’m really looking forward to June, so much so that I’m going to challenge myself to play 200k hands for the month, and this time I’m going to make certain I achieve it. Playing tournaments was a real change of pace for me, I’m so used to 24 tabling cash games that 1-2 tabling tournaments seemed really slow for me. In the end I ended up playing on my xbox when things were slow, turns out that might have actually helped me from becoming bored and spewing chips.

I don’t want to set any monetary goals for June as I believe doing so can only set me up for disappointment so I guess I’ll aim for any kind of profit, improving my game and a positive winrate is all that matters for me at the moment.

June goals:

[ ] 200k hands

[ ] positive winrate

[ ] Improve my game

Hopefully I can tick all those boxes

I’ll be updating my progress on twitter, here’s a link

http://twitter.com/chipstar_1

Best of luck in June everyone

The Spring Championship of Online Poker begins in just over an hour and I’m pretty excited. Last year I managed to last over 5 hours in 3 of the NLHE events I played only to get unlucky when I had my tournament life on the line, only managing to cash in a $22 event in the end, I did a bit better in the wcoop later in the year so this year I’m hoping for better things. Unfortunately life has been getting in the way of my opportunity to grind of late, this month our house is getting renovated and as a result I have to strip the walls of wallpaper and clear pretty much everything from my room. It’s pretty frustrating as all I want to do right now is grind hands, I want to play 8-10k hands a day every day but it’s just impossible right now and as the house won’t be finished until the end of the month I won’t be able to start grinding again properly until the beginning of June. Hopefully I can still get in 100k hands this month, I’ve only played a handful as of now but once the rewiring is finished next week it might be a little easier to play.

Due to whats happening this month I’m not too sure which scoop tournaments I’ll be playing this year, I’ll be starting with being the host of the scoop #1 $22 event later tonight and will probably play the $22 and $215 scoop events #2, tonight I’m not sure. NLHE is my strongest game so I’ll mainly play those with maybe a PLO tournament thrown in.

Best of luck to everyone who takes part in this years scoop, maybe I’ll see you at the final table ( more likely as a host (:  )

I’m back from my holidays and it’s time to grind again!

Last week I just came back from my birthday holiday when my friend phoned me to inform me of the on going situation with the American players, I hadn’t been on any of the poker forums for over a week so I wasn’t up to date with what was happening in the poker world. As a consequence of losing the American players I’ve had to rethink my strategy of moving up. My playing hours tend to be from 5pm-5am gmt and with the loss of the Americans I think the games might be a little tougher than I hoped during the latter part of my daily play, therefore I’ve decided to stay at $25NL for a little longer whilst I build my bankroll and improve my game further so I have a better chance of succeeding against the tougher regulars at $50.

There’s 7 more days left this month and I’d like to play another 50k hands if possible, hopefully things go well.

If you haven’t heard it’ll be the last ever Turbo Takedown this month, Pokerstars are scrapping it for a all new quarterly fpp tournament, as of now I don’t know any details but will let you know more when the details are out.

The Spring Championship Of Online Poker starts next month, unfortunately it stars at the same time we’re having renovations to our house so I’m going to be all over the place, I’m looking to play some of the medium sized tournaments though so look out for me, I haven’t decided on which tournaments I’m playing yet but they’ll mostly compromise of NLHE.  If you weren’t already aware Pokerstars are offering a 50% reload bonus up to $200 for the scoop, it’s the biggest reload bonus I can remember so be sure to take advantage.

Anyway I better start grinding if I want to get in those 50k hands, until next time good luck at the tables everyone.