Chipstar1

I’ve decided it’s time I moved out of the micro’s and moved up to $50NL for good. I moved up to small stakes last year but ran several thousand dollars below EV which knocked my confidence and made me move back down to the micro’s where I felt comfortable. Now it’s time to take a leap of faith, I’m sure I can beat $50NL fullring, I know my winrates on those tracking sites don’t suggest I’m capable but with EV adjusted I’m a 2bb/100 winner at $100NL. As of now though I’m going to stay at $50NL and grind for a while, I’m aiming for 300k vpps this year and would like to hit Supernova by the end of June. I’ll be looking to move back to $100NL by Oct/Nov time but first of all I need to build up my bankroll and improve my game further.

I’m traveling to my dads for a week in the morning for my birthday, it’ll be the first time I’ve traveled down for over a year so I’m looking forward to it, I’ll be introducing him to my girlfriend for the first time too, I can’t wait (not). It’ll be good to see him though, and my sister,  maybe I’ll treat them both (: . On the way back we’re going to stop off at the theme park Alton Towers, I’ve never been before so it should be an experience, maybe I’ll take some pictures. It’ll likely be an expensive day out but fortunately my girlfriend being a nurse means she can get £18 off each ticket, that’s over half a buyin (: .

I should be back by Friday and then the grind begins, can’t wait.

I haven’t blogged for about two weeks now and the reason was because I didn’t really have anything to blog about. This month hasn’t been kind to me and a lot of things have gone wrong, mainly away from the tables. At the beginning of the month I picked up a virus and had a really bad cough for a while, I’ve been meaning to make a strategy video or two at the nano stakes this month but I nearly lost my voice so I’ve had to put it on hold for a bit, will probably try in a day or two. Sometimes you just know when things are going to go wrong for you, you just know it before it happens, like when you go fishing and find out that your fishing lines all tangled up, you just know your going to have a bad days fishing from then on.

Next month’s my birthday and I’m planning on going to Telford to see my Dad with my girlfriend and maybe London afterwards, I’ll be taking about a week off and I’m really looking forward to it, it’s not often I get the chance to travel.

I’ve lost too much time this month to make my goals, I think I’ll end up playing 100-120k hands in the end, I just haven’t had the chance to get my head down and grind like I did at the end of last month. Next month I’d like to aim for 150k+ but for now I just want to get this month out the way of first.

This month I was planning on playing 250k hands at $25NL but after taking a couple of days off to rest after my 100k hand challenge at the end of last month I picked up a virus and wasn’t well enough to play. Thankfully I’m pretty much over it now although with the loss of 3-4 days I’ve had to reduce my hand target this month to 200k. I want to hit 200k as a minimum this month but would like to reach 220-230k if possible, I’ll have to see how it goes.

Last months challenge was really tough, I set a target of 100k hands in 14 days but after a slow start I ended up having to play 80k hands in 7 days, I hadn’t played 10k hands in a day for probably a year prior to this so having to do it for a whole week was quite a challenge, thankfully I managed it with around 6 hours to spare,hopefully I’ll be able to complete this months challenge a day or two early.

I did it!!!!

I’ve finally completed a challenge I set myself and did it with 5.5 hours remaining.

I didn’t win a tonne of money as I was tired most of the time and played tighter than I normally would but managed to win double what I needed to win the bet I had with a few friends.

Here’s a screenshot of my hands played, the top one is fullring and bottom 6max.

Just a quick update for now, I’ll elaborate on how things went after a couple of days rest.

Thx for all the support I had throughout my challenge.

33,000 hands needed.

Quick update because twitter is down and I need sleep.

During the first half of my challenge I only managed to play 20k hands of the 100k I challenged myself to play, meaning I needed 80k hands in 7 days. I hadn’t played 10k hands in a day for over a year so it was going to be really tough, a few friends didn’t think I’d succeed and bet me $500 I wouldn’t make it. I’ve been slowly increasing my volume and today I played 13,500 hands, 2500 more than what I now have to average in the next 3 days, I think my chances have improved a lot and I’m pretty confident I’ll make it now.

I’ll be looking to get in 13,000 hands tomorrow and hopefully I’ll have time to play the Turbo Takedown on Sunday.

Don’t forget there’s a $100 bounty on my head (:

Hey guys, I’ve finally managed to come up with a name for my twitter account thx to my friend Laura, It’s chipstar_1

You can follow my twitterings? here…..  http://twitter.com/#!/chipstar_1

At the end of day 3 of my challenge I’ve played a total of 6934 hands which is around 14500 hands behind pace, I’m not too concerned as my sleep pattern wasn’t right at the start of the challenge and it’s taken me until today to sort it.

I have another 93k hands to play in 11 days which works out as 8450 hands a day from here on out.

I’ll update my results on twitter and will post a graph at the end of the challenge.

Next month I really want to try and play 250k hands at $25NL fullring and start building my bankroll to enable to to move back up to higher limits, therefore I’ve decided to set myself a little warm up challenge of playing 100k hands at $25NL fullring starting today. The games have seemed a lot better since pokerstars began implementing the table changes and I’m really looking forward to finally grinding seriously.

Last month Pokerstars introduced a new feature called home games. Basically it allows you to create an invitation only poker club for friends, family or anyone you like really. It’s a really cool feature as it allows you to create your own league and track your results.  I’ve already joined two leagues from two of the poker forums I post on and so far I really like the idea. You can find more information here…. http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/home-games/

Recently I’ve been thinking about creating a twitter account so I can update my progress more frequently, like post hand history or interesting hands aswell as daily hand counts and goals, I think it’ll be really good motivation for me, unfortunately when I tried to sign up I discovered someone had already chosen chipstar1 as their name so I’m trying to think up another suitable name.

On Thursday Pokerstars announced they would be changing the buy in structure for ring games and I couldn’t be happier with their decision. The long awaited announcement will be (in my opinion) good news for us small stakes players as Pokerstars are taking away the 20-50bb tables and replacing them with 20bb cap games at $50NL and above. This means that the once split player pool at $10-$25NL will now be made up of 40-100bb and 100-250bb tables as opposed to 20-50bb, 40-100bb and 100-250bb tables, the less the player pool is split up the easier it should be to sit at good tables, that’s what I’m hoping for anyway. The cap tables are already up and running for $50NL+ and on the 10th Pokerstars will begin to discontinue the 20-50bb tables.

At the beginning of last year I started out by moving up from $25NL to $100NL within  the space of a couple of months, I was doing quite well at $100NL full ring winning around 6bb/100 over my first 25-30k hands whilst running a couple of hundred dollars below EV. Back then I was playing the 20-100bb tables with the short stackers so I could avoid playing against the good regulars, it was working and I thought I’d be comfortable at $100NL until the games were changed to 20-50bb, 40-100bb and 100-250bb, now I didn’t have the opportunity to be 100bb deep with the weak players in the 20-100bb tables and had to try and grind with the good regulars. As soon as I started playing the new 40-100bb I went on a big (for me) downswing of $2000 with $1500 of that being below EV.  With the games being tougher I tried to grind the 20-50bb tables for a while, that didn’t really work so I decided I had to move down to regrind my bankroll and that’s where I’m at today.

At the moment I’m trying to work on my 6max game a little, I realise 16+ 6max isn’t going to help me improve my game at the same time so for now I’m going to four table $50NL 6max in an attempt to improve so I’ll be able to beat the limit when I add more tables later on. I’m reading a tonne of 6max strategy at the moment and I’m watching loads of training video’s so hopefully I’ll take it all in and improve my results at the tables.

In the end I didn’t manage to make Supernova Nova, with about 14 days left of the year I managed to get the flu for the second year running. It’s funny because the year before I just missed out by a couple of thousand vpps when I got the flu bad with 1 week to go and then it happened again, this year I’m going to make sure I get it way before then as I’m going to target 300-400k vpps.

My sisters wedding was on Friday and we travelled up to Scotland for the ceremony, the wedding and having the flu has meant I haven’t been able to play much since the start of the year but I’m all set to start either today or tomorrow, I still have a bit of a cough which doesn’t help with concentration but it’s nearly gone now so I’ll be ready to start grinding soon enough.

I’m going to start at $25NL at the start and will move up when I hit around 50k vpps, I should be able to do this by the end of March and then I’ll be hitting $50NL again. Last year didn’t go great for me at the tables, it seemed that every time I moved up I’d run bad and have to move back down to re-grind my bankroll, It’s not really an excuse or anything but I think I ran $3k-$4k below EV, it’s not much but it’s quite a lot for a micro stakes player trying to move up in stakes. Running bad kind of made me doubt myself sometimes last year so I’m hoping I make it all up this year and do much better at the tables.

Good luck at the tables everyone, speak soon.

……but I think I can do it.

I need to play around 11k hands a day at $50NL to make supernova now and seeing how I haven’t played more than 11k hands in a day this year it’s going to be really tough. I’m really prepared for it though and quite excited to be grinding really hard, it’ll set me up well for going for 500k vpps next year. I’ll be taking Christmas day off though, not for obvious reasons but it’s also my girlfriends birthday. Last year I held a celebration tournament for being made a member of team online and gave away $250 in prizes, if I make supernova I’ll do something similar, it won’t be the same day as last years tourney though (Christmas day lol)

There’s been talk on the forums that Pokerstars might make some changes to their vpp system, nothings been confirmed yet and it may all be speculation but my fingers are crossed for something positive. Last year Pokerstars introduced Stellar credits worth $1000 which is pretty much $1000 free money as they only cost 1fpp to purchase. There’s been speculation of maybe giving people something extra at 500k vpps, I hope that’s true because it’ll give me added motivation to get to my goal.

P.s  if anyone has a genuine blog and would like to swap links leave me a comment.