The month of May has started, and whats new?

Well nothing much, the games are still awful, every time i load the pokerstars lobby all I see is this kind of crap




Just the same donk-regs who feel like playing each other in every single game that runs, stinking up the games with their 0-2% ROIs.


Some awesome news from pokerstars is that all their British players are getting a load of free VPPs this month. If you grind out at least 7,500 VPPs then you get an extra 80,000 VPPs added to your account on June 3rd.

This is easily the single best promo that pokerstars have ever run. Not only is 80,000 free VPPs insanely sick but the fact that all non UK citizens are excluded from it makes it even better, so much fun reading the threads on 2p2 full of Americans bitching about how unfair it is.

Pokerstars has to compete for market share in the UK against all the many high street book makers that are well known, established and trusted. In USA pokerstars are basically competing with full tilt.

As one person put it "Pokerstars is a business, not a charity for fat lazy americans with aspergers".




I have plans to play in a week long SNG leaderboard on a smaller poker network that will be starting in just over a week. I'm just getting myself set up with a good rakeback account, shipping a bankroll over, getting used to / modding the software and I should be ready to pwn some fools come next week.

In other news legendary SNG player Spacegravy made it very deep at EPT Monte Carlo but lost a race to the donk Matthew Woodward's awful call close to the final table.

Also, Danny Gans died at age 52. For a very healthy man who was one of the best and most popular acts in Las Vegas for the past decade to die so young is a huge tragedy. RIP.

Well the month is over, I don't really feel like writing much but I always make a blog for month end.

April started of really good and i was up $5K after 4 days, then I started running bad at the same time the games started becomin tougher and I lost the will to play poker most of the time. I got in half the volume that I planned to and didn't even clear one bonus so no rakeback this month.

I've barely played any poker for over 2 weeks. Any time I feel even slightly motivated to play I open up the lobby and see the same bunch of guys registering for every game, then I close the lobby and go play Resident Evil 5.... which is an awesome game.




Profit from SNGs : $5,928.81
Rakeback/bonuses : $000000000
Month Total $    : $5,928.81
Month Stars VPPs : 28,962

Year Total $     : $53,780.86 (target $250,000.00)
Year Total VPPs  : 157,465 (target 1,000,000)


Year targets looking a bit of a joke after April, will probably be revised downwards sometime soon.

I'm still clearing a $4K bonus plus $120 reload, then theres a $2K cash credit when I hit 200K VPP, i should get all those for sure in May, although there is a SNG promo for 1 week on a smaller site that I might get involved in, and if that goes well for me then I may look to play less on stars and more on other sites.

Well I'm sad to say that I'm just completely fed up with poker. I have barely played for the last couple of weeks after hitting a run of games where I just got screwed over game after game, day after day, with me down thousands of dollars compared to all-in ev. The games have become almost unplayable 80% of the time now as much fewer of the higher stakes DoNs are running and nobody is using game selection. It's not unusual for there to be less than 12 $104s running and the same 6-7 nits playing every game going to BB800 before the bubble bursts.

I looked up stats for the players that I know are the other best players and all of them are having a horrible time since about a couple of weeks ago. It's like something happened 2 weeks ago, someone at stars flicked some switch that made the fish dissapear and the good regs lose all their races.

this is my april so far, the last 2 weeks have been like 400 games and -$1000



Since this time last month I've had 5 people ask me for coaching and 2 training sites ask me to make videos for them. I turned all of them down basically because it's not worth the money I'd make from doing the coaching/videos if it just means more grinders are going to play the games and make the games tougher than they already are.

Since the DoNs are beggining to look so awful I've started to look at other forms of poker. I had an idea where I could grind the WSOP steps for the next couple of months and I'd probably kill them, so I put together a proposal to get staked for them, which is a bit nitty of me but since you have to play them all the way through to Step 6, which are $2100 SNGs, to get money from them, I know for sure I couldn't handle running bad and losing a bunch of 70/30s in a row in Step 6s. However stars decided to change the steps this year to a 6max SNG with $12K/0/0/0/0/0 payout and a 12man SNG with a $12K/$12K/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0 payout, where as last year it was a 9man SNG with a $12.5K/$1.5K/$1.5K/$1K/$1K/$0.5K/0/0/0 payout. The new structure just increases variance so much that I would need a crazy amount of money behind me to grind them without a high risk-of-ruin. With a 1 in 6 payout the best player in the world could easily go on a run of games into the double figures without cashing.

I've also been playing a few HUSNGs on stars, breaking even, and some HU NL cash in party poker, breaking even. I want to get better at these because they are actually fun to play, amazing how interesting poker can be when you get to play some flops......

Anyway, as far as poker goes I'm feeling as low as I ever have been. The future doesn't look too bright and the present is hardly a lot of fun. I'm really not sure where I go from here, hopefully I figure something out.

Onto some good news..........

In february I applied for tickets to the FIFA World Cup 2010 that will be heald in South Africa. When you apply for tickets your name goes into a lottery/ballot since every match is always oversubscribed, especially the opening ceremony match and the final. You can apply for a maximum of 7 matches so I applied for the opening match, the 2 quarter finals and round of 16 match that are in Jo-burg, the 2 semi finals and the final. This is the same thing I do every 2 years when there is a european championship or world cup, and since 2004 I've always gotten tickets but never for anything better than the quarter final.

Just got an email from FIFA with the results of the ballot.






This is so sick, I got every single match I applied for except for the final. There are probably way more than 100 applications for the final for every seat on sale so that was a long shot, but getting the opening game and both the semi finals is very very lucky.

the €2,450 euro price tag is a bit steep for something I'm not going to be able to use for another 14 months but I guess it's worth it since it really gives me something to look forward to which is something that my life was lacking.

Also I got 4 tickets for one of the Michael Jackson concerts in london this July so that is gonna be sick eeeeeheeeeeeeeeeeeee

sigh

Hating april, got off to a good start but have just gone through a rough period where I can't win a single hand no matter how good I get it in.

I'm starting to forget what a winning session feels like. Every day consists of me getting screwed over by imbeciles and the resultant tilt/depression.

SIIIIGH.

April graph so far



In other news.... mcmatto who used to play the $27 sngs won half a million in the SCOOP, which is beyond sick. Nick Rainey is still grinding out his SNG volume prop bet, he's getting close, you can read about it here http://sngnick.blogspot.com/ .  And the epic fail machine that is Ebon87 was caught cheating in his double or nothing prop bet on 2p2, the hilarious thread is here http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/dont-ask-438936/ , what is hilarious is that he still looked like he wasn't going to win even with the cheating, lol, what a clown.


Tomorrow is sunday, please let me win some fucking money one fucking time.

March is over so it's time for my usual month-end update.

I was really lazy this month and only played 2760 games, playing around 4 hours per day. To give myself some credit, laziness was only half of the reason that I didn't play much. There were many times when I was ready to start a session but the games were really bad so I just chose not to play.

I had 2 500-game breakeven streaks. One right at the start of the month and one over the last week that I just pulled out off. They were pretty horrible to play through because since I was running bad I couldn't bare to play much so the 500 games actually took about 6 days.



Profit from SNGs : $14,649.37 (including collusion refunds)
Rakeback/bonuses : $8.225.96
Month Total $    : $22,875.33
Month Stars VPPs : 44,027

Year Total $     : $47,852.05 (target $250,000.00)
Year Total VPPs  : 128,503 (target 1,000,000)


Main target for april is to earn 71,500 VPPs on stars, that's $14,300 in rake and 4000-7000 SNGs depending on stakes.

If I do that I should have cleared one $4K supernova bonus, bought the $2K milestone cash credit and have 115K FPPs left over at month end.

really hating poker and most of all hating donk idiots that never fail to hit a 2 or 3 outer.




how can I fail to make money when people play this badly on the bubble?

PokerStars Game #26452662641: Tournament #151421816, $50+$2 Hold'em No Limit - Level VI (100/200) - 2009/03/28 14:07:28 CET [2009/03/28 9:07:28 ET]
Table '151421816 1' 10-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: Crash711711 (1310 in chips)
Seat 5: Lallinger (5705 in chips)
Seat 6: ARIANNA_11 (3035 in chips)
Seat 7: adfeghjkk (2410 in chips)
Seat 9: Daleroxxu (1265 in chips)
Seat 10: Sjos de Nos (1275 in chips)
Crash711711: posts the ante 20
Lallinger: posts the ante 20
ARIANNA_11: posts the ante 20
adfeghjkk: posts the ante 20
Daleroxxu: posts the ante 20
Sjos de Nos: posts the ante 20
Lallinger: posts small blind 100
ARIANNA_11: posts big blind 200
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Daleroxxu [3c As]
adfeghjkk: folds
Daleroxxu: raises 800 to 1000
Sjos de Nos: folds
Crash711711: raises 290 to 1290 and is all-in
Lallinger: calls 1190
ARIANNA_11: folds
Daleroxxu: folds
*** FLOP *** [5h 2h Qh]
*** TURN *** [5h 2h Qh] [7h]
*** RIVER *** [5h 2h Qh 7h] [Qd]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Lallinger: shows [Td Ts] (two pair, Queens and Tens)
Crash711711: shows [Tc Kc] (a pair of Queens)
Lallinger collected 3900 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 3900 | Rake 0
Board [5h 2h Qh 7h Qd]
Seat 1: Crash711711 (button) showed [Tc Kc] and lost with a pair of Queens
Seat 5: Lallinger (small blind) showed [Td Ts] and won (3900) with two pair, Queens and Tens
Seat 6: ARIANNA_11 (big blind) folded before Flop
Seat 7: adfeghjkk folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: Daleroxxu folded before Flop
Seat 10: Sjos de Nos folded before Flop (didn't bet)


Can't believe there are only 3 more days left in March. It's gone by pretty fast, probably because i've been sleeping about 12 hours every day. Maybe if I can go on a mini-heater over the next few days it might give me motivation to put some real volume in during April but right now every time I start up a session I expect to get screwed over and that's exactly what happens. My last 4 or 5 sessions have all been like +20% roi when $EV adjusted but the actual results are like + or - 5%, I'm running awful in all in showdowns basically.

As soon as I start running normal or good all you donks are going to be leaking off money to the Bank Of Dale faster than if you invested in stocks or bought a house in 2007. Idiots!

After the awesome recent prop bet success of Boku87 turning a $100 bankroll into $10,000 in a couple of weeks playing low buy in SNGS there is yet another sick SNG prop bet going on right now.

Nick Rainey has proposed that he can play 16,000 SNGs in one month on Full Tilt. Some of the constraints are that Full Tilt has a table max of 16 tables and he has to show at least $10K in profit over the 16,000 games.
In his favour is that FTP have Super Turbo SNGs which last about 10-15 minutes each so he can potentially play > 60 games per hour playing continuously.

This sicko has jut had 2 days in a row where he's played for about 18 hours over a 19 hour period and played more than 1000 games. That is just plain sick and I doubt that anyone has ever come close to playing that many SNGs in one day before.

You can check out his progress at http://sngnick.blogspot.com/

There is also a live webcam at [myspace keeps censoring the link but it's link from his blog anyway] where he likes to entertain the viewers with answering questions, telling stories and shooting hoops in style (the rainman over the light and off the wall shots and the spacegravy underarm off the wall shots are pretty sick).

The last few days monday - wednesday have been pertty rough. The games have been really awful as soon as the weekend ended and I've been running like shit so not a good combination.

I really despise poker right now and most of all I despise all the idiot regulars signing up for SNGs behind be with their 1% ROIs. I'd really like to meet some of these spastics IRL so I can spit in their face.

On a happier note I was really pleased late on Sunday night to see reef2287 cash 4th place in the sunday milllion for 72K. A year ago he went deep in the million only to get raped by some donkey on the last couple of tables so this was a well deserved score. Glad there is some justice in poker.

There are 6 days left of march and I've only played 2304 games. So much for my plan to play 5000 games, sighhh. I think there is pretty much no chance of me getting supernova elite this year unless I start mixing in some other games like 114s 9mans which are $9 rake. Unfortunately these games only run in volume for about 1/4 of the day and they are jam packed with decent players like you wouldn't believe. Scossett suggested that I could just put in a sick amount of volume playing HSSNGs during the double vpp week (whenever that will be), but I'm not sure it's such a good idea as every decent grinder has the same idea and the games have no value at all.

SNGs just seem really bad just now and I'm not sure if I want to keep playing them. I'd say the chances of me migrating to cash or MTTs in the next few months is about 50/50.

I've cleared my second bonus of the month plus a reload bonus so I'm at +$8224 for bonuses for the month and at +$11707 for SNG profit (down from a peak at over $13K). So just under 20K for the month. I need to make another 2.5K in the next 6 days to make march a better month than january. Unfortunately the current trend involves me losing money every session but hopefuly I can get some good volume in friday-sunday when the games are softer and start making some monies.