Making 100k in [s]Thailand[/s]Vietnam, at nl50-200

HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD.

So as expected, TODAY(sunday 30-7-2017) was a very lucrative day for poker. Lots of fish online and not that many regulars. A winning formula at poker.
After the first session it seemed to be best day ever, being already 300+ up and more fish willingly to be caught. But my NL200 adventure kind of backfired. AA(preallin) got cracked in what is probably my biggest pot while in Thailand :f_p:. Eventough i lost some stacks i'm still up today, above my projected hourly so no need to whine.

Also i have this budget laptop in Thailand, kind of bought it just for this trip but it's REALLY SHIT when my database gets too big. Or when i watch 2 youtube videos it can't even buffer that properly. Got a Bluescreen of death today in the middle of a 3bet pot where i probably had the best hand, costing me atleast 30eu. I opened it up and this is how it looks like from the inside.

Hello fellow poker players, How are you all doing? i'm doing fine thank you.
How was your poker going this week? also fine thank you.

Soo if u see the title, i've been playing some more NL200 this week. Playing a bit moneyscared still there, missing some +EV spots. Mainly because it feels like 4x NL50, which it is monetary wise. But after some swongs i managed to bink a nice day today, won a few BI on NL200 today which skyrocketed my profits for this month. I'm already at 1/3 of my profits of last month, #swongs.

Only 9 more days in Thailand then i'm off to Vietnam for another month!

I also bought myself some new mascottes. The woman went totally crazy when i wanted to buy them, the big ones were 250!!! BAAAAAAHT. Which is around 6eu and the small ones were 40ish. I'm a crazy guy that buys 4 big + 6 small so that's probably more than she sells an entire month. Supergood deal for 1k BAAAAAAHT alltogether.

No idea how this, plus some new pair of shoes and all my other clothes are going to fit in my backpack.

Just swonging by and opting in to see how those mascottes will help you at the tables

Nice username.

This morning my mascottes were attacking the wrong guy, i was dropping stacks in rapid fashion ~400/500 down in an hour /wo nl200. After a shortish break and telling myself to play solid i swong around 1k back up.

After watching this guy i learned how to own a table LIKEABOSS. Probably the sickest run you'll see.

It's not a pokertable, but still a table getting owned.

He probably has 100's of mascottes and I love his own reaction @ 2.43

Think breaks are essential to gather your confidence and reset your mind indeed, well done sir

following you! maybe on 2018 sept i will be in thailand!!

LONG TIME NO SEE.

What has been going on why i haven't updated for 2 weeks? I've moved place twice basicly. Our Thai visa expired so we planned to move to Hanoi, Vietnam. HUGE difference from Chiang Mai thailand. So freaking crowded and 209319210192 Motorbikes. We went appartment hunting for 1/2 a day but most things were quite expensive for the garbage you would get. We only saw 1 place from the inside, looked fine. The girl that showed us around said: "Nice location lots of places to eat etc', after the sighting we walked around the area for a bit: basicly nowhere 2 eat, just a busy traffic street. And this was one of the better places she had to offer. Furthermore the place in citycentre or near were mostly for longterm rent available only. So we did what pokerplayers(nomads) do best, is book a ticket to Da Nang. (Forumlurkers would've known i am here since i posted in Myst's blog where he found his place here)

So Da Nang it is.
First few days we booked a cheap hotel to get settled and look around the city a lil bit to see what part of town we wanted an appartment. Supercheap for 12eu p.p. for 2 nights, 200m from the beach lol. Also rented 2(!) motorbikes, or basicly 3 because we declined the first one(shit af). Drove around with motorbike for shops and around the shoreline to see the city a bit. Then we got a flat tire on i think the most busy round-a-bout of the city. NO CLUE how to fix this. First some old guy came driving past, pointing somewhere, all i could make of it: "there's a motorbike shop there". So we walked in a general direction, then suddenly 2 FREAKING HOT(read: average) Vietnamese girls stopped: 'we help you'. 'ok' After pointing to our rear tire 3 times they finally noticed what was wrong. Apparentely we we're 50meters from a mobile repair service, you just had to call the random # on some airtank. Which we could never do with 0 vietnamese language skills. So the girls helped us.
So While the local guy who got called was repairing our bike, i tried getting, with the help of Google-translate, to find an appartment. As i read in myst's blog you should use a local for that. Can't get more local than this i assume. Where we got was basicly her parents adress, NOT what we planned. So we just waited till the guy fixed our bike. I expected it to cost ATLEAST 20euro's, because it wasn't planned and some random instant call business. All in all the costs were 20K vietnamese dong, which is 0.80eurocent LOOOOOOOL. A beer on the beach is basicly the same cost(which is cheap as fuck aswell).

That was the first time the bike broke down, we managed to drive 3km's with it. Quite the distance before it happened. The 2nd time it broke down it was around the same amount of km's!. This time it wasn't a flat tire. But the freaking chain snapped in 2 because i had to make a sudden stop. This time there weren't HOT(read: average) Vietnamese girls to help, so we had to walk 1km with the bike. Atleast our hotel owner didn't charge for this shit bike and just gave another bike after some Mimeshow about what happened to our bike.
2nd Bike wasn't much better tho, we drove back in the evening when it was getting darker, We had no lights. And traffic is superchaotic here if you aren't used to it. Basicly the person with the biggest horn, has the biggest rights. So mostly truckdrivers. Some drive at full speed into round-a-bouts and if u don't pay attention you're basicly fucked as they can't break that hard. But when you get used to the traffic rules here, i'd say they work better than european rules, there's less delay and seeing how it goes, i'm amazed at how little accidents actually happen.

Appartment hunting
Ofcourse we could've stayed in hotels, they're not that expensive here. And there are ALOT of them here. I expect this city to be a booming leisure city in 2020. There are already 100+ hotels here and another 50 skyscrapers being build, its pretty crazy. There are no building rules in vietnam, so when u build a house somewhere. Someone else could plan to build a crematorium next to you, that's probably also why there are so many hotels being build right now. During our appartment search(on the beach on our mobiles with a beer), we stumbled upon a site that was offering LOTS of appartments of random sizes etc. We just mailed the guy our prices and what we wanted. We had a sighting at 9:15 in the evening, that was 1min away from a bar we already had some drinks the night before. So we decided to do some drinks before we went there lol. It's near the city center, near the dragon bridge if you know Da nang. So at 9:20 in the evening we had a good place to stay and start to grind. ALOT better than our place in chiang mai, for only 60eu p.p extra per month. It's so big, we got our emergency exit sign.

All in all the live in vietnam thusfar is quite nice, still need to get used to it. In thailand, or chiang mai most could atleast a little bit english. Here most of the older locals can't even count to 1 in english. In hanoi city centre it was okay, but Da nang is anything but a tourist place(yet) so they don't need to either. If we ask a taxi to bring us to 'the dragon bridge'(which is the most iconic thing in this city) they just look at us flabbergasted. thankfully there's googlemaps.

Pokerwise: Because of all the moves i haven't been able to play alot obviously. Don't know if i posted it in my last post, but i think i had my best weekend right before we moved. I tried to cashout my roll but i was denied. I changed my skrill recently from $ to € so i had to go through new verifications. I thought i had the right papers to verify my adress in thailand, but apparantely i didn't so my account on this certain site is currently blocked, which sucks bigtime. I will try to verify it through a vietnamese bank here if possible so i can play on it again and also cashout.
Furthermore, i've played 2 sessions in our new place and i basicly earned back the rent i have to pay for this play, so that's nice.

There's probably a lot i still have missed, Feel free to ask questions how life is here (we're also still learning tho). As Vietnam isn't known as a country where most pokerplayers go, whereas Thailand is pokerpro valhalla.

Have fun!

If you want something translated, you can always Skype me! ♦

BrokeSoBroke
brokesobroke@gmail.com

Heeey, awesome post about Danang. Sorry I was too late to reply and help. I think we went to check this apartment out, it has awesome internet right with 80MB?
Yeah lol about the traffic, there were some moments that I just started laugh while driving. Specially where there is 3lane road, green light and going straight doesn't mean a thing as people turning left and passing over can decide they have the right of way. Well same if you are turning left But really interesting how smooth everything goes.
I think there are a lot of tourists coming to Danang, but most are Chinese , Korean and locals.

For the food in the beginning I found this webpage and we made a tour of these restaurant: http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/09/best-street-food-crawl-summer-le-danang-vietnam.html
We went to Mi Total a lot as we had it like 3min away, really easy to get to it after you cross Dragon Bridge and you have fruit shakes like 20 meters away as well. Soup, fried chicken and rice (com ga quay) , rice with beef and especially "pho ap chao" was great. There is one street in the area filled with restaurants and they are opened at least until midnight, I think even longer. It can save you as a lot of places close relatively early. If I find location will PM it to you But I am sure by now you discovered some cool things already.
I liked Banh Xeo as well interesting experience, but it is wrong address in the article for Ba Duong, just search for K280 Hoang Dieu and follow this narrow alley all the way to the end it is right in the end where you need to turn. It is different, but interesting food, just sit down and they will bring you food on the table, no need to order anything (they don't understand anything anyway).

Did you notice that during weekends the dragon on the bridge breathes fire, water and smoke. It is some mini show I think at 8pm or 9pm haha.

If you have some more questions, I will try to help If you are into gym or need protein powder we checked it out some if you need some info on that How long will you stay there?

Oh I just remembered one more thing for when you will be leaving. It is really good to exchange all VNDs back to dollars (I guess EUR as well) before leaving the country, as dongs are worthless outside of Vietnam. If you will be doing it at the airport when you get downstairs, first exchange has people promoting it outside and their rate is awful, they would give me like 25% less money. I luckily went a bit ahead and one was accepting just foreign currency and then next one or a bit ahead without any people outside gave me same deal as in XE converter. So it is worth it to ask for the offers first.

@BsB, we already know what Beef and chicken is. Makes ordering some stuff a bit easier. Not a big fan of all the seafood so most of the time we order that stuff. Although at some local places with chicken, they really mean chicken, so you can expect ALL pieces of a bird in your food. We just want the meaty parts lol.
The language barrier is so big, the guy that cleans our rooms knows literally 0 words english.

@myst, yea we found a place quite fast, dananglandlord.com has alot of appartments/studios for rent. So we just checked 1 out after some drinks at a bar. Snapcalled it because it's quite luxurious and location is good. After we got in the price suddenly went up 90$ per month, so our snapcall probably told them it was rather cheap.
The traffic looks like mayhem from the outside, but while driving in it, it actually feels natural. The big round-a-bouts with 4 lanes probably work better than traffic lights. Also there aren't that many that are racing like maniacs, which is just suicidal with these trafficrules.

Yea we noticed the dragon spewing fire, the area was supercrowded the first weekend we got there and i read something on facebook about it so we walked 100m from the pub to check it out, pretty neat.

Finding a good gym was a bit of a hassle at first, first we went to one at ~11:30, apparentely it was closed from 11 to 1, so no luck there. 2nd time we went there it was SUPERcrowded but managable. Everyone did look at us like we were monkeys cuz we're white. 2nd gym we went to was the californiagym (the expensive one on the main road). We just wanted to lift some weights or tryout 1 session, we got an entire gymtour showing us 10 yogarooms, saunas and all the gibberish we don't need. They even wanted to measure our fat% etc. All we wanted was try it out, they wanted us to get a membership for 100$ a month! Waaay too expensive, but you do get alot of stuff for it.
3rd gym we found by accident, we we're looking for 1, couldn't find it, drove a bit around, spotted another one. BRAND NEW. ALL of the equipment is 100% new, most still have plastic wrapped around the bars/seats lol. Total cost: 7usd/month. It is kinda small, but since it's so new it's basicly me and my roommate plus some random guy doing bicep curls all day.
We haven't really looked for protein powder, should be rather expensive here? We just buy chicken filets from the supermarket and bake that at our place to get some protein in.
I've already booked my ticket back home halfway september so i'm leaving then, but my roommate will stay and he'll just buy all my vietnamese dong so i don't have to worry about it. He'll also get our deposit back of this appartment after i have left so he'll be walking around with alooooooot of cash money. Already had problems closing our wallets when we went to an ATM. He'll have 4-5x more money then.

Pokerwise i haven't been playing that much lately, hard time getting in good hours of sleep. And i don't like playing sleep deprivated so not many hours last week. Did play my biggest pots of the year today. Lost all of them and have some money stuck on a site so i'm kinda forced to drop nl200 for now.

It's time for updatessssss.

So in my last post i said something about an account being locked up and not being able to play. Now it's unlocked and i have acces again to my funds. so back to NL200 it is.

Recap of august:
August started out greaaaaat. Booking my best weekend ever in the first one of august, so a massive heater to start the month. But Quickly after that my account got locked where i won most of my money so eventough i won alot, i was still 'down' for the month if i didn't count the money to my bankroll. But seeing it is unlocked now, i could say last month was one of my better months ever.
Eventough we moved places twice, from Thailand to Hanoi in Vietnam. To then to Da Nang when Hanoi didn't please us that wel.. Alot of traveling and househunting resulting in less time to play. And of course we had to be a little tourist else there's no point in moving and you can play from your mothers basement for 10 years.
I haven't tracked my Hours since we moved from Thailand properly, but i haven't had a single day where i played more than 4hours, so shitty volume for the last 2 weeks of august. (Tracked my first day /w 6hours today, but today is september) ♦

SB winrate: Earlier in my blog i said some things about my sb winrate, how 'high' it was and if it was possible to sustain it. Let this be a lesson for y'all. Cuz my roommate keeps saying the same, it matters ALOOOOOOOT if HU is included. (Since when ur HU, ur SB is IP). So when i look at my last 30k hands, my SB seems
POSITIVE (EV=4.84), but when i change it to 3players+ it drops to EV=-4.74 (NEGATIVE). Still a great winrate for the smallblind, but the sample is rather small. Now you might think i played alot of HU for this 10bb difference. In fact it's only ~20% of my total volume from the blinds and quite the heater in those HU hands.
So keep in mind when you see someone's stats and there's a huge difference between the hands played from sb/bb and the rest. Take those winrates with a grain of salt, as most HU winrates(esp sb) run alot higher than most 6max winrates.

Tomorrow we will play another session and after that it's weekend for us. We're planning on checking out the local casino here. On the internet it says it's a great place to play poker. Alot of chinese gamblers come here after some regulation issues of some kind in Macau. But when i hear Macau i think of super highstakes, which is a bit too high. Still it's fun to check it out and see if there are some stakes with juicy tables that i can afford to play.
And on monday we will be even more a tourist and go to Hoi an, the old capital of vietnam, should be nice.

The weird thing is: Vietnamese people aren't allowed to gamble, so all the gamblers in the casino are guys on holiday.

Quick update:

Casino story: We went to the casino, to find out there wasn't any poker running. Nor did we get any explanation as all the employees seemed to speak either vietnamese or chinese. All the other games were also in chinese so we had no clue what they were doing so we left in 5minutes.

Pokerupdate: 2nd time this week i hit 1k+ profits on a day but then lost alot of it afterwards, there's a barrier that doesn't let me add 1k+ on a day apparently. Next time i'm 1k up i'm just going to quit my session and show the poker gods it's allowed. So i can move towards 2k+ days.

Also if you see me doing some handjudgings sporadicly, i'm just clicking the topics in my right banner of 'new topics'. So that's 5 maximum really. If you want some hand judged by me just post it, or the link, here.

Whats the story for Thailand or some other Asian country? Are you going to be there in January?

I will likely buy ticket for mid January and hope to meet you there my friend!

Good question, i don't know yet really. I'm flying back to Holland this weekend. Have to see if it's grindable there, but if i miss Asia alot i might return here.
Probably vietnam then, i think it's alot nicer than Thailand. Certain parts of Thailand are so aimed at tourists. Where we are now, Da Nang, there are basicly zero tourists so you get alot better feel for the culture etc.
My friend isn't flying back home this weekend so he'll still be in Vietnam probably by that time if u care to meet him.

There's a chance i'm forced to stay a bit longer, there's a typhoon heading our way and is planned to hit the shores on friday-saturdaynight. Right when i'm planning to leave. So it's the question if there'll be any planes flying.

I will following this blog !

:f_drink::f_drink::f_drink:

How is the Netherlands?

Cold.

Do like my old 24" monitor tho.

Didn't you take the monitor with you?

How should I transport a 24" monitor on an aircraft?

My laptop doesn't really like it tho, it's quite laggy to play now. I'll probably have to decide to buy a huge ass desktop pc, already have 2 24" screens so that would save alot of costs. Bought this laptop last january for ~450eu, so for poker it's rather shit. It did print alot of money in asia. Just look at the wallet picture in a previous post.

Okey time for an update: As Ladyboyrapeme said i'm currently back in the Netherlands and it's cold as fuck. Wearing long pants and upperbody clothing is weird as fuck for me now. oh and socks, i never wore those in asia. A big plusside for the weather here is that i'm not sweating 24/7 and my skin doesn't feel all greasy because of it.
My flight back to the Netherlands was almost cancelled. There was this Typhoon Doksuri, Previously mentioned, about to hit Vietnam when i was planning to leave the country. On paper it was the biggest storm in years to hit the country. Me, coming from europe never experienced a Typhoon so i was somewhat curious to see how much flooding etc there would be. Most of the flooding i saw was because of a leaking window, there was a puddle of water in our room on the 1st floor. The rest of the 'storm' i didn't notice because it hit Da Nang in the middle of the night. (Never slept better there) ♦ Eventough in the provence just north of Da Nang people have drowned. Believe it were some poor people that didn't have any internet or swimming experience so they didn't know what hit them.

If i had to fly that particular day my flight would've been cancelled, but my flight was going 1 day later and that wasn't cancelled, just delayed a couple of times. At first i had ~3,5hr to catch my 2nd flight in Hanoi, which should've been more than plenty. But because of the storm they delayed my first flight a couple of times leaving me a small 1,5hrs to catch my 2nd flight.
Me being stupid never thought of just booking an earlier flight to Hanoi to give myself extra space. It only came to mind when we arrived at the Da Nang airport and saw all these earlier flights going there. Cost me about 80euro, but that's better than missing an international flight. Funny thing: I booked 'the last seat', in the plane i had an entire row of seats for myself.

Back home i still have to find the best routine for playing, in Asia we got up early to play in the morning/halfway the afternoon. And we were off duty the rest of the day, a great way to play imo since your brain isn't tired yet in the morning.
So i'm trying to play roughly the same pattern here, but the action on the tables is alot different. Have to see if this is grindable or if i have to flip my schedule.

Here's some picturesss.

That line is the height last years flood came. It's roughly 1.5m high:f_o:

Monkey sign near the islands of Danang, we didn't see any tho

One of the 'mountaintops' of the islands, we got down from the top to here in roughly 5minutes. The brakes got a hell of a beating.

Da Nang