My story + HU SNGs + the future

Thanks bjela!

So August is over. I fell slightly short of my goal of Platinum star, but I made some very baby steps towards becoming a real grinder again.

I think it’s the first month I’ve run significantly over the red line in years. Very weird feeling. Very mixed feelings. Still below red line in every game I’ve ever grinded since HEM1 came out (partly or largley due to the fact I don’t grind enough). Here’s my HU hypers on stars (sadly amounts to 6 months of play):

September goals are to pump out 1500 games. Sounds too easy I know, but I’m also spending 1 week in Barcelona with the misses with no poker. Sadly, it will definitely be a challenge for me! ♦

GL 4 Sept ♦

Thx Antonio!

Are the pics showing up in my last post? They were at first, but now I see broken links

atm working perfectly fine

k cool, workin for me now too thx

Originally posted by braminc
Ok so mayyyybe it was more like ~$800 and mayyyyybe it was like 14 minutes, but does anyone really think that would’ve been a good blog title?
Me neither. ♦

Anyway, as many poker bloggers do, I’m going to say “yea I don’t like complaining about bad beats” and then I’m IMMEDIATELY going to complain about a string of bad beats.

Here's the lovely link to the pic you're all dyyying to see

haha string of reds bro, so familiar. I have pages and pages (HEM) of this shit, think I went 30+ consecutive lost flips before

Nice blog mate! Keep it up!

Instead of showering you in another graph of my previous month's lousy volume and luke warm results like every other month, I'm gonna switch gears and go back to some real world blogging for a bit.

I've been lucky to have been able to travel extensively over the past ~10 years thanks to the freedom/profitability of poker as well as being born into an American passport. Embarrassingly, I was unaware what a luxury it is to be born in America or several other well to do countries until I visited Lebanon a few years ago (2008). In many poor or war torn countries, being granted a visa for travel to Europe or the United States can be extremely difficult. Lebanon is no exception. The only place Lebanese citizens are granted automatic visas is Turkey.

Anyways, so the point I was trying to work toward is that I've been super lucky in lots of different ways to have traveled to so many places around the world. However, I had never been to Spain, and my girlfriend really wanted to go somewhere--ANYWHERE-- as did i. Sooooo, in mid September I took a little airplane ride with the Misses to Barcelona to spend a week basking in overpriced tourist activities.

We did all the obvious fun stuff like visiting the Sagrada Familia, accidentally walking by Casa Batllo on our way to dinner, climbing up and down Park Guell, hittin up the nude beach, eating at some of the finest Spanish cafes around, carefully inspecting from a castletop view Barcelona's garbage procedure for compliance with international environmental ethics, making important business calls on our new cell phone covers, and letting a stranger draw pictures of us while other strangers creepily watched, BUT... and I do mean but... what we really enjoyed was the La Merce festival that just so happened to be going on during our stay.

Barcelona knows how to throw a mother-effin city-wide festival! With free concerts day and night (some of which involve fireworks being sprayed through the center of the crowd), ample supplies of radical tent shopping, and an amazing light show over the Sagrada Familia (among many other things). There was literally TOO much stuff to do. We couldn't do it all or even half of it. One of the coolest things I didn't take enough advantage of was all the illegal immigrants who walk around selling single beers on the streets for 1 euro. It's a shockingly convenient service when at a concert or doing some window/tent shopping. Some of them even sell coke, hash and ecstasy! What more could you ask for??

cool ♦

Hey guys, me and Faarcyde are starting back up the BramFaar stakes of yesteryear. Check out details and info here: https://forums.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=211748

Just read all your blog entries which are so interesting and enjoyable to read.

Want to ask you a question if you dun mind,
After bf you had to start out at mid stakes, while you played stake a lot higher in the the past and earned so much more money.

Would you find yourself less motivated to grind the lower stakes and did that bring any mental problems to you, if so how would you cope with that?

Thanks hang. That's a good question you ask, and it requires me to think and be more honest with myself than I sometimes am.

Dropping down in stakes alone is not what I think demotivated me or added mental problems. However, it is true that it's tough to go from grinding 100-500s and making a certain $/hr to working harder than before, learning a "new" game, and making less than half of what I used to. I have been OK with this transition from the standpoint of accepting BF was inevitable to happen.

The tougher part to me is watching how the games changed from 2005 to 2008 and then from 2008 to 2012. It's STAGGERING. BF greatest longterm damage done (imo) is further segregating an already weakened poker economy. Like the UIGEA of 2006 it has had a big role in greatly accelerating the decline of profitability for the average to above average grinder. There are so few opportunities for a reversal towards a weaker poker field in the future that the long term prospects of playing online poker are beginning to seem quite unpleasant.

So for me it's not about the stakes themselves. It's the poker economy, the life of a grinder, and the perhaps bleak longterm future of online poker that make me frustrated and less motivated at times. Since BF I've become more involved in a few non-poker projects, and I can't tell you how much more fulfilling and enriching those things are! As I approach turning 30 next year, I'm seeing how attractive the whole poker pro thing is for younger folks but also how unsustainable it most likely it will be over the course of our lives.

How to cope? From a purely poker standpoint I love Jared Tendler's The Mental Game of Poker. From a life standpoint I think the best thing to do is find ways to grow, evolve, and re-evaluate what's really important to you in the long run.

So now I'm just rambling and I'm not even sure if I've answered your question or not! ♦ But thanks for asking and thanks for reading

^^
Very nice, honest post. Thanks.

Thanks Tim

I had a "standard" 50 buyin downswing last mth at 60s hypers. I have to say my confidence was rattled, since in this format it is pretty easy to feel hopeless when you constantly get completely runover and lose most of your allins.

With that said, I decided to go back to turbos for a while. Faarcyde is helping me to build confidence and go over hands with me and force me to play volume (my biggest leak!) ♦.

Graph for November coming soon.

You sir, are a good writer. I pretty much knew all this information but it was still entertaining

I get exactly what you mean about that hopeless feeling. A few days ago I hit a ~40BI downswing in 100 games and just felt bewildered that that was even possible in such a short amount of time. Especially when my EV was showing breakeven

Nice blog.

thanks

also new video out on WSOP 2012 final table: http://www.pokerstrategy.com/video/27219/

Honestly, I'm pretty tired of hearing people say how dead the game is and how it's dying so quickly. Not because it's necessarily untrue, but because it's just not helpful to focus on. It's easy to be discouraged by the realization that fish are not just fewer in numbers but also much better players now than they were in the past. It's just a fact. But what poker players don't often remember (and at least I didn't for a while) is that professional poker players are also MUCH better players than they were in years past. Their rate of improvement has also skyrocketed, a fact which is easy to forget.

This doesn't mean those forces equal out. It's obvious that there's a complex, fluid ecosystem of fish and pros of all degrees of skill level along that spectrum that make up the overall player pool. That's not the point. The point is toughness of games are relative to your own skill and the future of the games will be relative to how fast you continue to improve.

Does that put the future profitability of SNGs (or any other form of poker) in your complete control? No. But in poker and life, it's always best to identify what you have control over and to put all your efforts into that. Focusing on a weakened poker economy, segregated player pools, and unprecedented low barrier of entry for fish wanting to learn to play better poker is about as useful as focusing on every board runout, every coinflip, and every suckout. It's literally a waste of time (and often worse).

What isn't a waste of time is focusing on what you do control. In this case that would include studying, finding the newer better study tools like ICMizer, and putting in volume.

Disclaimer: this is meant as a speech to myself more than anything else...

word up

yo

♦