A little R&R

Wow. Just wow at the response of the poker community these last few days - well a very specific portion of it (i.e., people who even know what Supernova Elite means). I want to first say that I cannot express how grateful I am for everyone's kind words, the crazy number of congratulatory posts and comments, and just general support of my achievement. The attention has been unlike anything I've experienced before, and so I'm just taking it all in slowly now. Anyways, on to some business!

In addition to the response on the SNE thread on 2p2, someone created another thread dedicated to my achievement (http://bit.ly/idIYCI). In both these threads, as well as in the many comments in my prior post, there were a bunch of questions that people had about my run up to SNE so I'll try to get to all or most of them answered in this post. First and foremost, as this question seems to get asked the most often, I use 100% of my FPPs on the $4k/250k FPP reward bonus. This option offers a decent rate for each FPP, and is the most liquid form of money I can get. I don't have any interest in buying live tournament packages yet, which would be the only other use of FPPs for me. Currently I only have like 63,000 FPPs (not something ridiculous like 5,000,000 that I have earned in 2011) because I convert as soon as I have >250k FPPs.

Another popular question is about my poker setup. Well what you see in that picture on my blog and on the Pokerstarsblog article written by the best blogger in the business (http://bit.ly/azntracker if you haven't read it) is basically the entirety of my setup. And what is on my screen is usually how my tables are arranged. I only have like 15 tables there, but with 30-40 tables, I have a mass cascade deal going on, with many tables pulled aside for attention purposes. This is an odd quirk of mine, but for some reason I must see the important all-ins as they happen at high stakes, so those tables have to be pulled out of the cascade. In terms of scripts that I use, I use TableNinja and a nifty Table Count AHK script which... counts my tables. I have exactly 3 hotkeys: "End" for registering a game, "PgUp" to recascade my tables when things are really messy looking, and "PgDn" to cycle to the table that needs attention. TN also sets my default raise pf depending on the blinds (usually 2.1x to 3x), and flop/turn/river pot % bets.

People have also been wondering about my swings and how my 2011 has gone so far, "pre-rakeback." All money is the same to me no matter how I earn it, so I try not to pay attention to my "pre-rb" profits/losses but here they are. According to Sharkscope, I was -$7,029 in SNGs in 2011. However, I won a total of $7,750 from the Battle of the Planets Leaderboards, which I suppose puts me into the black for the year pre-rb, yay? The -7k figure is essentially break-even for me since it is a loss of only 40 "average buy-ins," which is $173 so far. I frequently win and lose more than 40 buy-ins in one session. This leads to the 2nd most fun, and depressing, part of this post - my graphs! Most fun part coming up down below :) I have run out of adjectives when describing my largest upswings and downswings so here's a link to a series of 12 graphs which are of my last 12 sessions/days of February (the most ridiculous sessions of my life) - http://imgur.com/a/Gb5AM. You can see for yourself what some of the swings were, both up and down. From a quick glance, it looks like my worst downswing was -21k, and best uptick was around +12k. Remember, each graph represents a single day. Here is my overall graph for 2011, with the green line representing all profits including rakeback.

And finally - my plan moving forward. Some of you may find this hard to believe but I actually feel very refreshed and in an excellent mental state. Despite putting in all that volume, I feel pretty much the same as I always do. I didn't get burned out at all from the grind, which is surprising even to me, and could probably continue to play at my February pace for another few months. But that simply isn't my interest now. I specifically decided in February to go for finish SNE by the end of the month because I knew it would be one of the worst/coldest months of the year and I wouldn't miss out too much in life. Now that the weather is getting great again, I'm going to do the fun things that I love like biking, going out with friends, popping bottles in the ice, and generally feeling fly like a G6 (joke). It's also going to start being sweet again driving my M3 around town windows down.

All this means I will be playing fewer days because I'll be taking 2-3 days off every 2 weeks. I will also be reducing my table count back down to the 20-30 range by cutting out the majority of 6mans; my strongest games have always been the 9mans anyways. My game selecting will go into affect again for all 6mans above the $200 stake level, and I won't play the nosebleeds (1k+) unless they are reasonable. Consequently, my VPP rate will drop to around the 2300-2700/hour range (while doing my insane run, I'm pretty sure I was getting 4000-4500 VPP/hour at peak times), and my sessions will return to the 13-18k VPP range.

With this relaxed schedule, I can still easily break the VPP record of 3M set by WizardofAhhs last year, and go for 4-5M VPP. However, I want to take at least a few fun trips back to Asia and Australia this year, or wherever else! so it's way too soon to tell what my eventual goal will be. I will set my sights low for now, and aim for the VPP record only simply because there's no point to push myself right now.

Enough about poker! Here's some ski footage from a short but sweet day trip to the slopes I took with a couple buddies yesterday. It was 55 F (12 C) during the day, so it wasn't exactly ideal skiing conditions lol, but we made the best of it.

We did a total of 25-30 runs (yay for no crowds) on mostly blues and blacks, so I am very happy with my performance considering it's my 3rd time ever skiing. I also lost my car key on the mountain somewhere (facepalm), so we had to get my friend to get my spare key and drive up 2 hours at night. Thank you Andrew for rescuing a tracker from his idiocy. Speaking of idiocy... here's me doing some ski jumping!

 

Sticks the graceful landing like a champ... or does he?


That's it for now! I'll probably resume playing tomorrow in light session after a 3 day hiatus. I gotta start adding points to my VPP counter up there! Good luck everyone and have a great weekend.