It's Been A While.....

Hey everyone, so it's been quite a while since my last update huh? Sorry about that, kinda forgot i even had it to be honest at times! :( But a few recent comments on my blog from some of you reminded me about it and i thought i'd come back and give you all a quick update for your time. 

I'm actually really surprised by how many views this blog is still getting, so thank you to those of you that still stop by every now and again and have a check :) 

So back to the good stuff....poker! So since my last update I've dropped the Supernova Elite run, i don't have a graph to show you as my SSD hard drive got full and i had to delete my poker database and start again with it. So i only have my hands since about May i think which i will post a little further down for you. But basically i decided to quit because it was just too much for me, the hours were insane and i was running horribly like $10k below AIEV i think if i remember correctly. My game was also just going downhill on almost a daily basis because of the massive hours i was having to put in, along with the increased hands per hour that i was not used to playing. 

Since deciding to stop my SNE run I've basically done the exact opposite actually of my first few months of this year, which is concentrate on winning money at the tables and improving my overall poker game rather than making as much rakeback as possible. So to let you know just how drastic my changes have been i played somewhere around 310k hands of poker in January, and in the last 5 months I've played fewer hands than that one month haha It's not all bad though as i have made more money than i did in January (wouldn't be hard though) :) So i was playing 6 tables of ZOOM back then and now i'm playing half that amount and getting less than 1/2 the hands per hour as i'm taking more time over my decisions and trying to learn from my mistakes rather than auto-piloting my way to 12k hands every day. 

This is the graph since i started my new database, not since my last update, but i don't have those hands anymore i'll probably post a full year graph in December when i ask for my HH's from Pokerstars. 

So most of that is 100nl as when i stopped my SNE run i had to move down to re-coup some of my losses before going back up to 200nl again. You can probably tell where i moved back up actually by looking at the graph, but it was around the ~190k hands mark there. Here is the same graph in big-blinds:

So really happy with my game right now, since quitting my SNE run I've been spending a lot of time on Skype posting hand histories to some great players (some fish too) :D and they've been helping a tremendous amount. I've also been working on my ranges and have changed those drastically in last 2 days also, so time will tell how those now affect my game, hopefully for the better :) 

For the past 231k hands as you can see my winrate has been 3.89bb/100 which i'm really happy with, having a bit of a heater at 200nl at the minute too which is always more than welcome! I am running a bit above EV though, my EV bb/100 is a little over 3bb/100, which is still reasonable, i don't mind running over EV though as i ran sooo much below to start the year, just getting back what's owed imo :D 

So that's it i guess, just thought i'd give you a quick update on where my game is right now and what i'm doing with poker. Hopefully i'll be able to keep on improving and keep that winrate climbing so that i can continue to move up through the stakes and make some serious cash :) 

Good luck all, let me know if there is anything else you'd like to see me post about other than or as well as poker in here. Thanks, Mike. 

Lazy, lazy February....

Hey, so i thought i'd just give you all a really quick update on February so far, the reason it's going to be really quick is because I've played very little so far and generally been very lazy and I'm miles behind pace this month :( 
A few friends have told me several times so far this year that my short term results are not the most important thing in the world with the high volume i'm putting in, and i now agree. I have always been caught up on checking my session results like every 10-30 minutes in-game, just to check on my redline and winnings at that time. I feel like i used to think if i checked my redline often i could tell when i started to auto-pilot, as often ties when my redline started to dip i was playing poorly, but this year so far my style has changes and my redline is much more negative than it has been in the past so checking is not so crucial. This, and the the fact that it is not of utmost importance that i win every single session i play this year has led me to not checking results and removing all the dollar and the winrate tabs from my Hold'em Manager apart from the evbb/100. This should be a good way to track my progress and play throughout the month without worrying too much about how bad or good i am running and so that i can still look at hands after a sesssion. So this is what my HEM2 database looks like now on the session tab:

So as you can see, haven't played much at all and currently only on ~20k vpp for the month, which is about 15k less than this time last month :( Though it's not all bad news, i spent most of today going over my game with friends who are very good players and i'm going to be doing some of that tomorrow also, so hopefully i will see some good results from this at the tables afterwards. I a still going to try my best to make another 55k vpp this month despite the bad start and get up to 75k vpp total for Feb. Basically have no chance of hitting that 90k vpp target i set myself at the start of Feb but that's ok as i'm still ahead of pace currently. As for my other Feb goals i still haven't stacked LeJean at the tables haha i thought i had a good chance on two seperate occasions when i got in KK pre vs him but he had AA and then again when i got in my AA pre, but turns out the unstackable man is indeed unstackable as he had AA also lol And let's hope i can make more than $0 by the end of the month, i'm hoping the time spent away from the tables will pay off and i can accomplish this goal. 
I also treated myself to a new grind chair :) 

My old chair had really hard arm rests and i was having to rest a pillow on there to grind otherwise i would get elbow pain. So i saw this one in a local staples store, obviously only went in to spend £5 and left having spent £155 haha But hopefully it's worth it, i spend a lot of time in my chair so it needs to be a nice comfortable one. 
So after a little more study time i'll be back on the grind full-time at some point tomorrow racking up those vpps :) don't forget to share my blog on Twitter or facebook to your friends if your enjoying following! Thanks and good luck all until next time :)  Follow @Glanza_Mike

January Review & February Goals

Hey everyone, sorry it's a been a while but I was extremely busy putting in a ton of hours at the table's last month as your about to see :) January was probably the biggest fail of a month in terms of money earnt for hours put in, in the history of poker haha. But in some ways it was also a very good month for me so i'm really not too disheartened. 

In January i experienced my largest ever downswing by some margin, from the peak of the month to the trough it was almost exactly 90 full buy-in's! By a full buy-in i just mean 100bb's. In term's of actual dollars lost that is $16,100, pretty scary huh :( Though it's not all bad new's as roughly $8,100 of that money lost was below expectation or in big blind's that's about 45 buy-in's, don't forget i play a mixture of 100nl and 200nl. Just to put that into perspective I've ran pretty horribly in some month's in the past and my previous largest downswing was roughly half of this one! and less than 1/3 in term's of dollars. I'll stop procrastinating and post the monthly graph: 

This is January's graph in big blind's, so as you can see if i take EV into consideration i should only be down 14 buy-in's which in the grand scheme of thing's really isn't all that bad at all. I actually finished down 44 buy-in's for the month, which obviously isn't all that great hah. So my winrate for the month at 200nl ZOOM was -1.58bb/100 with an EV winrate of -0.68bb/100, at 100nl ZOOM it was 0.46bb/100 and almost indentical in terms of EVbb. Here is that same graph in dollars: 

I actually also played a little bit of 200nl 6-max (non-zoom) in the middle of the month and that is included in these graph's. I found the table's a fair bit softer and the vpp rate a bit higher also. The problem for me was it takes a while to get all my table's up and running there, i was trying out 16 tables at once which actually seemed easier than i thought. I only tend to play a 2 hour session or so sometimes a little longer as i get hungry, so that time it takes to get everything up and running at the start makes my hands per hour considerably less, so i only manage roughly the same vpp/hour. And for me stacking and tiling 16 table's of regular 6-max games is much more difficult than just firing up 6 ZOOM table's and getting the vpp's and hand's going immediately. Another thing with stacking is, i'm pretty good with taking notes, i have tons on most of the regular's in my games and when i stack my table's i can't see some of the showdown's and what that player decided to do, so it hinders my note taking. I also ran really bad at 200nl 6-max i'll do a screen shot of result's so you can see: 

So as you can see if i didn't try out the normal table's and move away from ZOOM i would have lost $3,310 less and actually made a bit more money this month after rakeback. So i ran like 11 buy-in's below EV there in 11k hands which obviously isn't great but i'm still 100% certain that those table's are softer than the ZOOM 200 ones. I'll throw up a graph now after rakeback so you can all see my sick hourly wage for the month :D 

After rakeback this month then i made a whopping $1,395, i have entered the rakeback figure for SNE which i believe to be 58.1% for 6-max cash game's, obviously if i end up not making it then this month would be a losing one even after rakeback. So about my hourly last month:( I put in by far the most hour's that I've ever put into anything in my life last month which ended up being 233 hours played. I made $1,395 so my hourly for the month was a heart racing $5.99! Pretty impressive if you ask me :D Now just to beat myself up a little i want to see what it would have been if i ran at expectation, just so i know that although i had a bad month it's not really as terrible as it seems. So i would have made $7271 which means my hourly would have/could have been $31.20 which is actually pretty respectable. So enough of the doom and gloom and EV talk haha. 

This month was also a very good one for me in some ways. January was the first month in my poker career that i had set myself a vpp goal, that goal was to make 100,000 vpp's by month's end which is far and away more than any other month so far, and i'm extremely happy to say that i did infact achieve that goal last month, and i made it with about 20 minutes of January to spare :D

On top of this, January was also the first month that i have played more than 130k hands, and i hadn't even played that many since way back, when i was still playing full-ring, so at least 18 months ago haha. Think i just about cleared the 130k this month with the 307,612 hands that i ended up getting in :P 

January also taught me that even though i was incredibly lazy last year, (to be honest i probably played the same amount in the first 6 months of 2012 as i did in January) when i put my mind to something and i set myself a goal that i can achieve anything i want to. And that in it self is really refreshing and self-fulfilling. People always tell you, and i see tons of these motivational YouTube videos telling me that you can do anything you want to if your willing to make the sacrifice and just be dedicated to the task at hand. Well for the first time in my life i did this, i made the sacrifice and in one way or another i did exactly what i set out to achieve. While i am disappointed with my results' at the table's i am still confident i will be able to turn things around, even if i don't have a very good winrate at all this year. 

So after feeling a little down in the middle of the month i decided to go to evplusplus.com and use their variance simulator to remind me of the swings that i would be facing this year. And also just to remind me that it's a year long goal and i'm only (was) 2 weeks in at the time. So at the start of the year i set myself a goal to achieve an overall winrate of 0.75bb/100 for the year as whole. While that doesn't sound like a lot at all, and indeed it really isn't a very good winrate compared to winrate's I've had in the past, with the amount of hands i'll be putting in this year that tiny winrate would get me a table profit of ~$50k so including SNE benefits would get me a total of $155k, which i thin by almost anyone's standard's would be a very successful year. So i used this variance simulator just to give me a clue as to the swings i would have to face this year and to keep me brimming with confidence even through these tough times. This first calculation is over 300k hands with an expected winrate of 0.75bb/100, i use 300k hands as this is roughly the volume i will be putting in each month: 

So this simulation suggest's that with my (hopefully) expected winrate my worst month in term's of bb's could be -7500, or -75 buy-in's, and seeing as i 'only' lost 44bi's this month, really puts things into perspective for me. Having said that when the good times roll the best possible month i could expect with that winrate is +135 buy-in's, which in terms of $ would be far and away my best month ever so i'm just hoping thing's change for the better at some point and i get to see the friendly side to Mr variance. 

The next simulation is the one that really surprised me, and opened my eyes to the cruel world of poker haha. I ran this one for the year as a whole, i figure i need to play ~3,120,000 hands this year to make SNE, so that is the figure i used along with the same 0.75bb/100 winrate: 

So in this simulation it says across the whole year with that expected winrate i could either make over $100,000 at the tables or almost exactly breakeven!! Which seems pretty incredible to me, that one player with the exact same play style and skill and mind set could make $100k more just based on how the cards are being to dealt to them. Let's hope i'm on that red line hey :) The red-line also starts out with a pretty shitty 400k hand losing stretch then goes into God-mode. Whereas the green-line basically continues to lose about 140 buy-ins gradually, before breaking even for 1 million hands or so and then just about getting back to break even before the years end! Pretty sick how much actual luck there is in poker in my opinion with a small winrate. 

Oops, this post seems to be dragging on a bit, for any of you that made it down this far i guess i'll move onto February goals now before you all fall asleep :) 

February Goals

• 90k VPP
• Make more than $1 at the table's
• Make fewer retarded calls on the river vs reg's
• Keep a solid diet and gym routine
• Try and cut down a little on sleep so i have a little more free time 
• Stack LeJean80 at 200nl ZOOM haha i have nothing against him, it's just that i don't think I've ever seen him lose a stack so just a mini goal hah :) 

Also forgot to mention that my training in the gym is going really well right now, i'm currently the heaviest I've been weighing in at 15 stone 12lbs :) My training partner Lewis is also the heaviest he's been at 13 stone 12lbs so were both really happy with it right now, although both of us are carrying more body fat percentage wise than we would like, that will be no problem to shift in the summer when we cut out some carbs and up the cardio. 

Also really happy with the weight i'm lifting, I've been regularly squatting 140kg pretty low for like 6-14 reps. I've always struggled with bench press, just not very good at it at all, Lewis crushed me on bench :( but i'm now getting a lot better there too, been pressing 100kg for 8+ reps reasonably well. 

I'll try and update this every week or so but obviously nowhere near as long as this one, this post was a bit of a vent and to any of you that made it this far i thank you and hope if you like reading it you follow and share it around :D Thanks again

Mike

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Doomswitch

Hey everyone, so the last few days since my last update haven't been all that much fun, I've been through the worst downswing of my poker career to date this month, which at it's worst i believe was roughly $11,00!! Which i think to almost anyone would be a lot of money. Luckily it wasn't all terrible play on my behalf as i also ran approximately $6,500 below expectation, though admittedly i also haven't exactly been playing my finest poker to date. So all in all a pretty shitty time to be honest :( In poker we have name's and slang term's for a lot of different thing's and when your running poorly people often say they have been hit with the doomswitch, which basically means it feels like you can't win a hand, and all the big pots you end getting involved in, seem to go to to the opposition. It's not fun let me tell you, here is a graph of the downswing from it's peak to it's lowest point: 

So as you can see it didn't go very well at all for me at the table's! In bb's it was an EV loss of 26 buy-in's and an actual loss of 58 buy-in's. Luckily i managed to make some money at the table's before all this nonsense took place, so here is my overall graph for the year to date: 

So currently at the table's i'm down $7,261 with an EV of -$3,138. I think it's clear to me now that while i'm playing this many hours and tables my winrate is going to be no where near as high as the +7bb/100 i was managing for the last 3/4 months of last year. Though after this initial downswing to start the year i'm still confident i'm a winning player and it will turn around in time (even if my overall winrate this year is less than 1bb/100). 

So far this year I've managed to get in 159k hands at the table's, this has earnt me 52,604 VPP. I have been slacking off a bit over the last few days as i lost motivation running under EV 13 days in a row, though now i know that these things are going to happen and it's just something i'm going to have to put up with whether i like it or not :( Here is the same yearly graph with rakeback included: 

Even after rakeback so far i'm down $1.7k, but it gives me a little hope that even after so horribly bad at the table's this year so far, if i had just ran according to EV then i would have made bout $3.5k so far. So hopefully when the run good finally hit's me at some point this year, i will be able to make an absolute killer amount of $$$$ :) 

So over the next few days and to finish the month out i'm going to get back to the pace that i started this month with. Trying to make 4k VPP per day at the table's and hopefully get some of this cash back in my account haha. It's really snowy here at the minute in the UK and pretty damn cold so i don't really have many reasons to leave the house apart from gym time :) So i have no excuses now not to end the month well. Thanks for reading everyone, and if you like my blog so far then share it around with your friends etc and follow me on twitter!! Good luck! Follow @Glanza_Mike

Week One

So the first week of the year is finally over, and what a week it was. In many ways probably the toughest week I've had in terms of poker, I have never really had to play this crazy amount of volume before and it definitely takes it's toll on you. But i do think that making sure i was prepared before the year started has definitely helped a lot, like a having a schedule and for the first time in years using an alarm clock to wake me up, not just waking up whenever my body decided it was time lol 

The result's for the year so far have been really annoying, but i guess i'm going to have a lot worse this year than what i have experienced this week! The first 7 day's of the year i managed to get in 79,252 hands, which is almost definitely the most hands I've ever played in a single week before. This is the graph:

So before rakeback in week one i made $569 at the table's, at least i'm up i guess! Started off with a $1.8k downswing, then a $6k upswing, then basically lost almost all of it and returned to the baseline lol I guess 2013 is going to be like this for the most part, hopefully i can run good though at some point! 

Rakeback soon adds u playing this many hands which is always nice though, here is the same graph with rakeback: 

So as you can see including rakeback in the first week of the year i made $3,217, so roughly $2650 in rakeback which is pretty sweet :) All these hands took me just under 59 hours to play as i'm getting roughly 1375 hands per hour playing 6-tables of ZOOM. I'm really hoping i can keep this pace up as i will complete my goal of over 100k VPP per month. I played a few more hands today and am now sitting at 27,872 VPP for year, which i think is a pretty decent pace to try and stick to. I'm trying to achieve 4k VPP per day to keep ahead of pace and have so far managed that 4 out of the 7 days. 

So i'm going to try and keep this updated as much as possible, but right now in these first few months getting VPP's is more important! So if you like my blog then please share it around and let others know about it as that will give me more motivation to keep this thing updated if i can see i'm getting a lot of viewers :) I'm also updating on 2+2 in the Poker, goals & challenges section, and also daily on Twitter so keep on following and commenting please :) Good luck everyone.  Follow @Glanza_Mike

2012 + 2013

So it's that time of the year again! The last day of 2012 and we're still here, guess the Mayan's weren't right about everything! I figured before we all get drunk tonight i'd write up one last blog post to finish off the year.

This year didn't really go the way i wanted in terms of poker and i think i know why for the most part, I've been pretty lazy! I started the year off and by the end of February i had probably played about 20k hand's lol  For the first time in my life i moved away from the site i love playing on, Pokerstars! It just has by far and away the best software for poker and i learnt this year i am a massive software nit and love the Stars client. I messed around on some small euro sites with high rake and soft table's for a while, made some money, then had to come back to Pokerstars because i could no longer put up with the shitty software of other sites. So this is my graph from Everleaf poker this year, rake was crazy high and i got 50% of it back:

So that went pretty well, i was winning at 4.6bb/100 here and with that massive amount of rake i was pretty happy tbh! I also played some small amount on Cake before moving back to Stars:

My bb/100 at Cake was actually 11.2 :) Obviously tiny sample and i must have ran pretty well i guess! 

So then i moved back to Stars, after being lazy again for a few months and just letting my bankroll dwindle away i had to start at 50nl. Thing's didn't go so well, after my first 90k hands i should have been winning, and i was but only a little, because in my last 20k hands there i actually ran ~30 buy-in's under EV (expected value) probably the worst I've ever ran in my career to date! I think this was Pokerstars' way of punishing me for leaving lol

So my winrate at 50nl was only 1.4bb/100 with an EV of 3.4bb/100 which also isn't that great tbh :( After this terrible run at 50nl and being lazy i had to get staked, i didn't want to, but didn't have much of a choice other than move down to 25nl, and i didn't really see that as an option. So a friend in my Skype study group threw some money at me and after agreeing on a percentage split said go play 100nl again, which i'm very pleased to say went well:

So my first 130k hands back to 100nl on Stars i'm winning at 6.45bb/100 which feel's awesome. I also managed to get back my Supernova VIP status playing 100nl after my hiatus from Pokerstars earlier in the year! At this time i started mixing in 200nl ZOOM also and started to talk to my friend/backer about Supernova Elite in 2013, he was all up for idea and with about 12 hours left of 2012 i'm ready for the monstrous challenge ahead of me! 

I realized that the only times this year that i had no money, or things weren't going well, are also the times when i became complacent with my work and I've decided i'm not going to let that happen again by going foe SNE in 2013 :) My highest volume month so far was about 125-135k hands and that was about 18 month's ago lol My aim for Jan, Feb, March & April is 300k hands+ per month, so you can appreciate how much extra effort will be needed i hope! So my graph from Pokerstars since getting staked looks like this: 

I've been really struggling at 200nl ZOOM since moving there, i also feel like I've been running really poorly there so i hope that turns around soon and i can have a reasonable winrate, though i know 200nl is quite a lot harder than 100nl ZOOM imo. This is the same graph in bb's:

So overall winrate since September 27th (when i got staking) is 4.93bb/100 which i'm really happy with! 

Now onto 2013 and my goals for the year and targets for the first few months. 

• Make Supernova Elite
• Profit at the tables
• Make a combined total of $150k or more from rakeback and table profit
• Apply for Pokerstars Online Pro
• Keep this blog, my 2+2 thread and my Twitter updated as much as possible
• Keep up my gym routine and eat healthily
• Finish SNE by December so i can take a long overdue holiday to Southeast Asia with the girlfriend
• Get ahead of pace and stay there in terms of VPP's, i think this one is crucial for me, i will be attempting to accumulate over 100kVPP every single month until the start of May and then pick up that pace once again in September allowing for some downtime from the tables in the tiny, tiny summer that we get here in the UK :(
• Have fun and try not to get too down when i experience large downswings that come naturally with this kind of grinding.

And i think that just about wraps up this long blog post, sorry if i rambled on a bit but i thought it would be cool to finish off this year with a review and some target's for the following year! 

So i hope you all have a wicked NYE and an excellent 2013, i wish you all the best of luck and maybe i'll see some of you at the table's. If you like my blog don't forget to share it around and let others know about it :) Thanks for reading, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! 

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Merry Christmas!!!

So there's about 25 minutes left of Christmas day here in the UK and i figured it was time for a blog update. 

I hope you all had an excellent Christmas with your families and hope that Santa brought you all the present's you asked for and more. I had a pretty awesome Christmas myself, i spent more time and money, collecting and buying presents this year than any other but i'm pretty sure that has something to do with having a girlfriend this year and having not had one for quite a while before! Was all good fun though because i got my fair share of present's back and love  all of them, was actually really surprised a couple of hours ago when i spread them out over my bed to see what i had, to see this ridiculous amount of presents :) 

So that was pretty awesome! As you can probably tell i have a bit of an obsession with superhero's and Arnold Schwarzenegger, so i got a load of t-shirt's with Superman, Batman and Hulk on, along with 3 Superman pj bottoms and 2 Arnie books! Along with 2 awesome pairs of Nike trainers and enough chocolate and sweets to put Willy Wonka out of business! :) Got a ton more present's including a watch, hoody, photos, wallet, belt, scarf and ton's more, was a really great Christmas. I hope all of yours was too, was just what i needed before this massive grind i have coming in 2013 for at last the first four months, it was really great to see all my family and some friends and just eat, drink and chat all day. This is a picture of the presents before they got destroyed and ripped to pieces, along with the rest of my family's under the tree:

So all in all i had a brilliant Christmas. I hope everyone is enjoying following the blog so far, and let me know if you have any topics you'd like me to discuss in the comment's below or on Twitter! Think i'll post up some sort of routine for poker and life/gym before the New Year and take it from there. Also don't think i'll be playing much poker from now until New Year, think i'll enjoy this precious rest!! Good luck all, thanks for following!

Mike.