The Grind!

Hey guys, it's been a while since I last updated, so here's a quick update to my pokering as well as some random banter on the European economy and American politics that I've found highly amusing. I don't normally talk about non-poker or travel stuff, but why not change it up once in a while!

My grinding of late had definitely slowed down as I mentioned in my last post. However in the past few days, I've figured out why the action has been so dry in the mornings lately. There has definitely been a shift a few hours backwards from early mornings in terms of peak action. Now the middle of the night here, which corresponds to mid-afternoon in Europe, seems to be peak. Apparently the euro regs are out in full force then, so I have been adjusting my schedule accordingly. Riding the reg train is never fun results-wise, but I've been able to get back up to 10k+ VPP days, which puts me ahead of pace for finishing 2011 with 2.75m VPPs. I plan to finish out the next 350k VPPs by mid-December or so, taking a break here and there, then relaxing for the rest of the year and probably a month into 2012 as well.

In addition to poker, what's on my mind constantly these days is the European economic contagion that seems ready to just explode day after day. Not only are markets way down already, the worst part is that there's no end in sight for the economic woes of Greece, Italy, Spain, and even France. My stock portfolio has performed beyond abysmally and has really overshadowed any of my profits in poker these last 6 months.That has been the overwhelming dis-motivating factor for me and poker since a good week's grinding can be wiped out in a single day in the stock market! But of course, as in poker, investors cannot be emotional about this kind of stuff, so I've practiced that philosophy and haven't made rash decisions. Let us hope that both the new leadership (of Italy and Greece) and existing officials can steer the Eurozone from disaster.

In a completely different topic, I hope all you international readers of my blog are enjoying the circus that is going on in American politics at the moment, specifically the Republican party candidate debates! In an entertainment point of view, the stuff that is going on is pure gold, but from a political view, it's just highly embarrassing for Americans. One of the early frontrunners, Rick Perry (who is now governor of Texas, same state our old lollable president George W. Bush was from) recently made a super funny gaffe during the debate where he forgot a key part of his statement (The Third Agency..umm..oops). I almost want to feel bad for the guy, but then I realize this is serious stuff we are talking about... the potential leader of the United States! Not to be outdone, another candidate named Herman Cain also had his moment recently (Cain on Libya) where he had little to no clue on a major recent worldwide event. And then of course there's Michelle Bachmann (A good montage here).

Anyways, as the year draws to a close soon, I hope everyone's doing well either in the pursuit of SNE, or whatever goals you may have. There are only 43 days left, so let us gogogogo!

2.25 M Update

Hey all, just checkin back in here after a bit of a hiatus. In the good news department, I recently just cracked the 2.25M VPP milestone at long last! The bad news has been the severely decreased action on Pokerstars in the past few weeks, especially at the higher stakes ($200 games and higher). I'm not sure if you guys have noticed the same or not, but the difference has been very significant. Consequently, it's been a very slow grind each session in terms of volume. It makes me wonder how it was at all possible that I attained 30k VPP every session back in February... it's taking me days to get 30k VPPs now. Granted I was playing way more hours (~10/day vs 2-4/day lately). There simply aren't 10 playable hours in a day anymore, only 4-5. And even during those times, the rake reduction, limited action, and new players registering have causing my VPP rate to plummet. I will still aim to to play as much as I can, as my profits are directly correlated with how much I play, as is the case for any long-term grinder.

As I write this, it is easily the hottest day in Sydney since I've been here. It is currently 33 C (92 F) outside on just a completely beautiful clear day. It's almost too hot! I am really thinking of getting back into cycling these days because I just can't let these upcoming great days go to waste. I've been running a fair bit, but back home in the states, cycling was my huge passion. I'll be buying a used road racing bicycle, and if I ever do leave, it shouldn't be a big problem to re-sell it for maybe 60-70% of the price.

Here's to hoping the action picks back up on Pokerstars, although I'm not counting on it. As has been my mantra throughout the year, I'm just going to push myself to play only as much as I'm comfortable with while still being responsible and realistic with my attainable goals.

Revisiting EPT Madrid :)

Hey all, hope everyone's been enjoying the changing weather (for the better for the bottom half of the world hehe)! I recently stumbled upon the broadcast for the my final table at EPT Madrid 5 months ago and thought I'd share a link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQBfetxPkgk. They only show one hand of mine, my bustout, so it's not that interesting but thought I'd post it anyways. If you go to 7:20 of the video, you can marvel at one of the biggest nitfolds that has ever been made at an EPT final table. It annoys me that AK guy made such a terrible laydown (given his effective stack of only 23 BBs) and was still able to get 2nd in the tournament. My late friend 'Dana Gordon' would be absolutely rolling over in his grave if he ever saw this one...

I'd like to respond to some of the comments I've been getting or have received in the past. First off, I DO use Table Ninja to all those who question how I can get by without it. Honestly though, I wasn't using it as late as last year... and have no idea how I got by without it. The preset raise and flop/turn/river bet settings are invaluable, in addition to the auto sit back in feature. I also use TN to simplify registering into SNGs. Easily the most worthwhile $60 I've ever spent.

I actually don't use a HUD because when I'm in as many tables as I am, the overload of information from having people's stats displayed on the table would be too hectic for me. If I played cash games, then a HUD would be of utmost importance. However, I feel the dynamics are quite a bit different in SNGs as people's VPIP/PFR stats change throughout the different blind levels. I believe I have a feel for how most people play, even unknowns, and I certainly already know the tendencies of the most common regs (at least I think I do :p)

Also, it may look like a massive jumble of tables in that video if you've seen it, but there's actually method to my organizational madness. I always start with a standard cascade that goes down my screen, then pull aside the higher stake games ($300s and above) to the bottom left of my screen. I also drag out games that are on the bubble, ITM, or HU to the center/right. It's a flurry of activity that could make someone dizzy, but it's actually quite fun and enjoyable for me, if I'm not losing everything that is.

I've been playing quite a bit more these days, although it is hard to rack up the VPPs as action seems to be a bit limited especially at higher stakes. I'm getting roughly 8k-10k per full session, which boggles my mind as to how I got 30k+ each day back in February :) No matter, I'll see what I can do. Good luck everyone on their grinds!

Update!

My last blog post wasn't really a post at all, and it was a rather depressing one at that, so this'll be a short, fun, happy one!

In the past, I've been asked to show what it's like to mass-multitable SNGs, aka record me doing so. Well wait no longer! I recently uploaded my first video to YouTube (my late friend Paresh and our rental car exploits in Uruguay) and it really wasn't that painful. Therefore, I decided to attempt to record myself playing during one of my sessions, which is never a great idea since I'm busy enough as it is. I think I was in about 30 tables as I recorded this, which is pretty high, and something I'm looking to limit in the future (read below). You can view the fruit of my efforts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kMOW--2Su0

I was sitting pretty close to my monitor as I usually do and my phone was even closer, so I was unable to record the whole screen. You get the overall idea though! Depending on your previous notions about multitabling, the action is either not as fast and furious as you would think (I'm in that camp), the complete opposite, or just... what you expected. I'm not trying to impress anyone, but just simply showing you what my daily grind looks like for hours at time :)

On a serious note, because the vast majority (more than 80%) of my games are 6max, I am convinced that the high # of tables is having a detrimental effect on the quality of my game. It has definitely contributed to my downswing here, that I am sure of. Consequently, I've been meaning to scale down the number of tables I'm in; no more 30+ tabling if I can help it. In addition, I've actually been making some pretty significant changes to my play style in an effort to improve my overall play. I won't get into specifics, as I suspect many of the regs I play with probably read this blog. Suffice to say that I'll be becoming harder to play against even as I do maintain a solid load of games (anywhere from 15-20 range).

In other news, if any of you guys are American and/or care about baseball, holy **** what just happened??? According to my friend, the Red Sox were 95% to win their game vs the Orioles going into the bottom of the 9th, and Tampa Bay was less than 1% to win their game vs the Yankees when they were down 7-0 going into the EIGHTH inning, but both outdraws occurred to push TB into the playoffs. What an unreal run for both Tampa Bay and Boston in September, just wow wow wow.

Cheers for now!

Goodbye Dear Friend

As the poker community has heard now, one of my best friends, Paresh Jain aka Dana Gordon on 2p2 and on Pokerstars, has passed away.

I'm not used to dealing with the passing of such a loved one as Paresh, and so I may be rambling at times so I apologize in advance. Also, I think I'll have a hard time putting his essence into words because it seems bleh to summarize his life in only a few paragraphs, but I'll try my damndest. Hopefully I won't be in tears by the end of this post although I can already feel them. And I'm not sure whether to use 'was' or 'is' in reference to him, so **** it I'm gonna use 'is.'

I met Paresh 7 years ago when we first started at the University of Virginia together. We were both SNG donks back then (I guess I still am lol) and he was back then, and remains now now, my best poker friend as we helped each other quickly learn and grow as poker players to crush all those silly games back in the Party Poker days. His regimen and approach to thinking is beyond admirable and I learned that pretty early on. He is an absolute delight to hang out with, talk strategy, play MTTs with (both $20 frat tournies and eventually Super Tuesdays and such), and just plain party with. He has met many of my high school friends through me and others, and together, we have a core group that exists today and transcends poker. As luck would have it, my best friends now are actually his best friends from the small town of Roanoke in Virginia that I would never have met otherwise.

This dude is seriously the craziest, most fun-loving, adrenaline junkie, and all-around great buddy anyone could ask for. We went skydiving in college, jet-skiing at the PCA (we were the only two ppl from our group that would go), and definitely wanted to do much more. After college, we went on two separate sweet trips to South America which embodied all that is awesome about him. Who else would randomly go with me to the Amazonian jungle in Manaus (Brazil) with me? On the other trip, we randomly rented a car in Montevideo, Uruguay, drove ourselves to the LAPT in Punta Del Este, and actually came close to having a serious accident as he drove 110 kmh over a pretty steep hill on a bridge to get some air! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vk2Tpwl6eE, notice techno blaring) We severely bottomed out the car, punctured the radiator, and the car instantly started overheating haha. We had to get help from some old dude in a bar at 2am who didn't speak a lick of English, and all we could muster was an "hola" or "gracias." My friends think we are insane.

We also hit up Europe a couple times (EPT Monte Carlo and most recently the EPT Madrid). We went on a sick drive last year that started in Geneva, Switzerland, went through the French Alps and Italy, and ended in Nice (France). My other buddies were like "wtf we're gonna fly, have fun you idiots" so it was just Paresh and I. And most recently, we hit up Madrid just cruising around randomly both at night and during the day. However, I was stuck in the tournament for a while and didn't get to go around with him like I had planned to (doesnt everyone bust Day 1?) Oh how I'd give up my winnings in a heartbeat to just spend 3-5 days more with him.

Oh and the music. As someone mentioned above, he is ALL about rockin sick beats, house, trance, techno, hip hop, mashups, anything fun and exiting with a beat. We were roommates for the last year, so Apartment 1912 in Arlington, Virginia was definitely the place to be if you wanted to rock out to techno beats blasting from both of our rooms. We'd grind poker during the day together and then I'd sweat him in his nightime MTTs sometimes while he played. Little known fact - when he is deep in an MTT, he loops the same song he's on literally 30 or 50 or however many times until the final table is over. Just incredible passion. Here are a few of his favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8zFH5a59Y, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L1zqyUwefs, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqY-Q32wPv4, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ezEcaZz6Q. Listening to these are going to make me well up everytime. ****.

I hope you all now have a more complete view of the guy that is Dana Gordon. I could probably talk and write for hours more about him; he is just that special to me. I feel blessed to have met him, shared some of the most fun moments of my life with him, and simply being associated with him (and I'm not even religious!). I'll save the clichés because he is as far from a cliché as one can be. My thoughts and prayers go out to his parents, his brother, and the rest of my friends (hang in there tuttle, chuc, natt, ben, leb, gabe, cara and all). Goodbye, and may you rest in peace Paresh.

spwwacewwwavy!!

Slowing down...

It's been quite the turnaround these days! And I'm not talking about my poker downswing... that's been as brutal as ever, and I'm officially at my trough/bottom as I type this. I'm talking about my playing volume, which has taken a precipitous drop these days for a few reasons. The first and most important reason is that I have been going out with a super awesome Australian chica for almost 3 weeks now. Poker runbad be damned because finding someone in Australia who's as cool as her way more than makes up for it! I've been hanging out heaps with her, consequently I haven't been getting to sleep at a decent hour.

The other contributing factor to my slowdown is "Bjoerni89" and his ridiculous VPP accrual the last few months. He has leapfrogged me in the VPP race, and is almost 200k points ahead of me as of a couple days ago. If he continues at his torrid pace playing the 2k/5k HUs, I am powerless to overtake him and he'll probably get the record if he wants to. This would very much reduce the significance of me breaking the record.

In light of these developments, I'm currently reevaluating my end of year VPP goals. My goal is, and always has been, to play as much as I feel like. You may recall that I started 2011 with this mantra, and it has certainly paid off so far. While playing poker on a regimented schedule is importance to me, my life and enjoyment of it takes precedence always. Now that I'm in a relationship and the outcome of the VPP record is becoming murky, I'm definitely thinking about my schedule a lot more.

One factor that is on my side that could help my VPP grind is that the DST (daylight savings time) changeovers will happen soon. On October 2nd, Australia's DST starts, meaning that our time will advance by one hour. Meanwhile, on October 30th, Europe's DST ends, meaning their time will go back by one hour. As a result, for the rest of the year (and until April of 2012), I'll be able to wake up/start 2 hours later and still enjoy the peak hours in Euroland.

Accompanying these DST changes, obviously, is the new change of weather! The weather, already great here even during the winter time, has been steadily getting better and warmer. We are entering spring, and so temps have climbed into the 70s pretty much every day now. With the sweet weather, I've been running quite often and will be doing the Blackmores half-marathon (13.1 miles or 21.1 km) this Sunday. This is the longest run I've ever done and it should be really exciting since Sydney is shutting down tons of roads, including the Sydney Harbour bridge, just for this event which is expected to attract 35,000 runners. I'll try to get a decent time (under 100 minutes), but I'll let you know about that!

I also went to Maroubra Beach a few days ago and look forward to many many more beach trips this "summer" in December, January, and February. There are heaps of beaches in Sydney and around it, so I'll want to see them all. By the way, it is really weird to even think of going to the beach on Christmas Day and New Years Eve haha! Maybe I'll be getting used to that...

SNE 2x, one more to go...

Well this post has been a few days late, but better than late than never (in most cases!) I finally crossed the 2M VPP threshold on August 21st, exactly 1 month and 1 day after my 1.75 millionth point. In my previous post, I said that I aimed to get my next quarter million points in less than a month but unfortunately my pace these days has been mediocre at best. I am truly settling into life here in Sydney, more on that in a bit, and so my attention to poker hasn't been as strong. This has not been conducive to my usual 10k+ VPP days; I just simply can't do the 5am wakeup call everyday. But I'm trying my best.

In addition, while I rarely like to complain about running bad, I have been battling a horrific downswing ever since I've arrived in Sydney that hasn't come close to turning around. Even as my 10,000th game came and went (aka sample size is getting up there), my results have been downright nasty bad. It is very likely due to the high number of tables I play at a time and the fact that 90% of games are 6max, which require the utmost attention unfortunately. All things considered though, it has not been a pretty picture, and so it's been difficult to motivate myself to play with the ever-real prospect of another -5k or more session. However, even though I am down at the tables each of the last three months, I am up post-rakeback. I will continue to stick with this tradeoff of potentially negative ROI in exchange for VPP generation because the record is so close now. Only need to get SNE one more time this year :) That is, if fellow high stakes grinder Bjoerni89 doesn't challenge me I suppose.


Good time for a quick non-poker related tangent. I find myself becoming more and more desensitized to money in general (both good and bad) simply due to the ridiculous amount of swings (read: loss) that I've experienced in the last month in poker and the stock market. In case you haven't been keeping up, the worldwide stock market is suffering through its worse period since the 2008 GFC. I find it interesting to note that people who don't follow the financial world at all have little to no idea that there is worldwide financial turmoil lurking in our midst (European sovereign debt crisis, potential worldwide global recession starting with the US, etc). Only when someone loses their job or gas prices surge will most people actually care about this sort of stuff in their day-to-day lives. It's fair enough though. And yet I am glued to the world financial/general news these days.. it really is a fascinating world to learn about and keep up with. For example it is appalling to me that 1 out of 5 people in Spain are unemployed, while the unemployment rate in Australia is only 5%! And Steve Jobs? More like Steve Unemployeds....

So before this post gets too sidetracked, I'd just like to say that despite these recent uncertainties/variance, I couldn't be happier these days. I'm in such a lucky and awesome position and no amount of losses should ever make me feel negative. I simply wanted to keep people apprised of my poker swings and make sure they know that everyone goes through dark days (more like months!)

Like I alluded to before, I've been spending heaps of time out of my apartment, meeting up with familiar faces and meeting others through friends, and generally just been enjoying everything Sydney has to offer. It's also great when it seems like I know more places around Sydney (at least the touristy names of places and restaurants) than even other people who live here do.

As you can tell, I'm becoming quite fond of this place and there's no telling how long I'm going to stay. I'll have to make those decisions as time passes, but so many facets here have just worked out so well. The transportation is excellent, the banking system here in conjunction with Pokerstars has been first-rate and buttery smooth, and the weather is unbelievable with spring just around the corner. I'm even having the occasional 5-star steak dinner at Roy's in Cab. Yes, I just made that up, but it's sensational and you should try it sometime when you get a chance. #shamelessplugforsomeoneelse. Life is good these days.