[Closed] RahXephon1 - Now playing NL50 with 100BB - Force of Will

14.12.2009

So long from my last update.........

Well poker is going pretty nice lately, had a -400$ on saturday, but luckily managed to get most of it back yesterday. Other than that I seem to be running into aces quite a lot lately, but maybe it's just a feeling.

Overall I'm happier about my game then I was some time ago, I still make the occasional brainfart, but I need to live with those while multitabling I think.

The end of the year is aproaching now and I think I need to think about the direction for next year. There are a couple of interesting dillemas I face.

I.SSS or another variant!

I think sooner or later I'll need to start playing some real poker. Is not that I don't feel SSS is challenging, I just think that knowing more about BSS would be great, since then I could play live and MTTs and I could also rebuy to fullstack on fishy cash game tables.

So why haven't I started yet?

The main reason for that is lack of time, my time for poker is quite limited, so my motivation to play 2 tables 6max NL20 instead of SSS is almost nonexistent. Also since I'm greatly overrolled for such limits, but also underskilled, I just tend to donk away, playing super LAG and so on. I also haven't decided if I want to be focusing on HU or SH.

Another thing is that I really want to prove to myself that I'm a winning SSS player. Having a good month or two would probably give me the selfconfidence and time to start studying and preparing the switch. I will surely think about that in the last days of the year and try to find a good plan. Also it wouldn't hurt to have a nice capital for coachings and things like that.

II. Full Tilt or Pokerstars (or both)?

Personally I really prefer Tilt to Stars, because of the nicer software and softer NL100 tables. The great stars perk though is that the Supernova bonuses are amazing. The downside is that you really need to put in some sick volume and not starting immediately on january would be a big mistake probably. I also have another 550$ of bonus to clear there which makes it even more exciting.

FT on the other hand, has a little flawed sistem, since it doesn't reward volume. Actually the opposite is true. The only added thing is Ironman (and it's end of year bonus), but since it's so easily maxed up and the bonus is max 600$ for half a year, you actually get a better value for plaing exactly what is needed (as the extra medals are of completely marginal value). I could make iron by playing just half an hour for 25 days/month.

The last options and the more likely is to just play both, it's just I like it much more on Tilt at the moment. Also playing both means double database expenses and so on.

III. Poker and life in general!

Hopefully this year I'll be able to finish my degree and become a civil engineer. This will surely take a big chunk of what could be poker time. After that there will be lots of things to consider, about my career. I'm almost 100 positive I don't want to go on in the same company as I think it would slow down my progress since from a EV perspective I don't think is really worthy to try to get trough the ranks in a company like that. the problem is that the construction business is one of the most impacted from the financial crisis and the market of jobs is not fluid at all at the moment, so having a longterm contract with healt care like I do now is surely worth something.

Another thing with switching to a more challenging and profitable job, would probably mean even longer working times and almost no time for family,poker and other activities. I don't think that capitalistic thinking is the way to happinnes in life, but is surely hard to find a nice balance in life as not being ambitiuos can really put you in a lot of hard spots during your life. Off course I'd love to just play poker full time, but specially in europe I think that's viable only for a selected few, that really are the top of the league.

Please, post some comments those of you who were brave enough to read trough all of this. Any suggestion will be apreciated.

Cya!

Hey Rahx,

I've also been giving a lot of thought to what I'm going to do next year. As to your first topic of SSS or another variant, I really believe that studying BSS will not only improve your SSS game a lot but will also give you different game possibilities. You can keep grinding SSS mid-stakes while learning BSS at your own pace. I also had very little motivation for playing SH NL10, but once I started considering my sessions as study time, then it felt a lot more productive, besides, it does help a lot with the SSS game.

For SSS, Poker Stars is really good in the long-term in my opinion, traffic is very large and there are plenty of fish. It's necessary to use table selection though. But I don't know much of FTP, so I can't really make a comparison.

And regarding your career, congratulations on getting your degree! (I know you didn't get it yet, but it seems to be really close). Now, if you actually like the idea of living off poker, then I think you should really look into that possibility, maybe speak to other players from Europe who play professionaly and get some opinions. I'm sure it's a lot more expensive than Brazil, but nonetheless it can't be that hard. We can become whatever we want to, as long as we are willing to work for it ♠_cool:.

best regards!

yeah i also have that motivation issue.
i dont i think i will ever get motivated enough to actually leave sss and start studying playing low limit bss.

i wouldn't recommend going pro, isnt it nicer to have a job with collegues and all that comes with that instead of just sitting at home grinding?
maybe its different from person to person but after living off poker for a while now i cant recommend it.

my plan is to work and then play a bit of poker on the side. that should still be a pretty sweet income.

with regards to PS vs FTP i think dandycal is probably right.

just some thoughts from an older guy whos been around the block

i finished my degree in electronic engineering 20 years ago. engineers make a lot of money in the long term. im pretty much semi retired at 40 years old, my house paid for and life is damn good for me. i worked damn hard for it but i also got the rewards. to be honest, poker is a big pile of crap when compared with my life experience as an engineer. dont even begin to think that poker can be a valid substitute because your development and progression in life will be amazing, i can promise u that!

full tilt or stars? ive played on both and stars is softer imho but the reward system sux there for low volume players like me. if i was a volume player i would go for supernova on stars as the rakeback is better then and the softer tables are very lucrative.

sss or another variant? i play sss a bit like a BSS lag, without the risk of losing a big stack, i like this balance and ive refined my play over time and spend a lot of time with holdem manager. SSS played losely can be a lot of fun and very profitable. u never need to switch to bss imho, just develop your sss game in the sense that improvement is infinite!

25.12.2009

Hello to everyone!

Holidays have started so I have no time for poker. I tried to get to diamond again this month but I was a couple of hundred points away each time. Well it seems we'll leave that for January since I will probably play just one more day this year to get Ironman.

This month was pretty nice to me and I run very well so I'm looking at over 2k$ in overall profits, quite a nice change. I withdrew most of my winnings, just left 1k on Full Tilt, which should be more than enough for NL100. I also have the money I deposited on Stars. It seems next year I will be chasing Supernova (the 300k or 400k mark), since the bonuses seem better and also FT is making some adjustments to prevent shortstacking. Hopefully this won't make games on stars much worse since I expect most of their grinders to switch.

Luckily FT wont implement the changes in the begining of the new year so I will be able to clear the 600$ EOY bonus and the 300$ Iron man bonus before the changes take place. I'm also waiting to see what will the new FT VIP program be but this will have to wait for a coupe of moths it seems. I heard some players on their sites got a 10k bonus to clear. This would surely be a nice thing to have

In other news I'm now at my GF mother's house for Christmas in a couple of days then I'll return home and than I go to Belgrade for New year.

Thanks to everyone for their opinions, I'm thinking about what I want to do with my life a lot lately and I'm taking some decisions already. I know when the time will be right I will do the right thing.

Cya all after the end of the month with Garph, month recap and other unimportant statistics we all love to watch-

Have a nice time during Holidays!!!

5.1.2010

Happy New Year to everyone!

Yesterday I came back from vacations and today is my first day at work. I missed one day because of a car failure that left me and my GF in a hotel near Zagreb for 2 days. Luckily everything finished fine and not too expensive. Serbia was fun as always, even if sometimes I think 5 days of partying is a little to much for my health :).

Although I haven't played poker in the last 10 days I was thinkig a lot about the directions I want to take in the next year. Since Full Tilt is killing SSS apparently, the logical transition is to go for some SN levels on stars. I think I could go for about 300k VPP. The main problem though is that I really can't play comfortably at stars, because of their software (well the user interface, otherwise the software is OK). The things I hate about it are:

-I don't have enough place for my HUD, since the place for the player image clutters everything, so I have to put my HUD elements in various places.

-No potsize and all in button

-telescope works much worse than Spadeye so I spend more time handling it than playing, also it's buggy when joining tables and doesn't mark tables on which I'm already playing so I spend all the time clicking on them.

-Small cards to see who's still in the hand, and also of colors not contrasting enough, so I sometimes Cbet/bluff in a multiway pot by mistake

-overall incredibly unreadable interface

Because of that I manage to make half much hands/hour as on tilt and I also make lots of mistakes since I'm not concentrated on the games.

So please anyone that plays on stars, multitables heavily and uses a HUD please tell me what are your configs.

stars is good enuf when u get used to it. tableninja will solve most of your issues. it has a free trial and worth the investment imho if u play volume. a decent stats layout is still possible on stars. gl if u move there. i still dont believe ftp are going to raise the min buyin. ill believe it when i see it tbh, it makes no business sense as it will impact their revenue in a recession ...

[Rant]

What a bullshit start of the year, I'm back at the old story of running bad. Lost around 600 dollars in the first 4 days of play, EV is of course positive. I can't take this bullshit anymore, I feel like i threw half year of time in the toilet. Overall I'm now at 240k hands of total shitty luck in which I never run at least close to EV for 50k hands.

I feel like a degenerate gambler, who is always saying that all his problems would go away if his luck would change just for some time.

Fuck my idiotic life, that wouldn't let me do what I want to do. I think I have the skills for this game, I love the time I spend playing it, it's the thing I'd like to do, but I just keep banging my head in the variance wall and it doesn't want to go away!!!

[/Rant]

[rant]
me too. I think the thing that full tilt actually implemented is making shortstackers lose against fish so that big stack regulars can laugh..
[/rant]

Hey guys,

Sry to hear your running THAT bad... Variance is a bitch.

T

i finished with FT, even i played there 2 years, and as i see i made a good decision ♦ :f_biggrin:...

Instead of Telescope, I would use TableScan Turbo

Then I should use the Classic No Images theme because that removes the avatars and stuff

And AHk/TableNinja does the betsize, highlights and stuff

And you know where to find some more information about DBs

13.1.2010

Hi evryone, time for another update.

First the most important thing! I decided not to whine anymore about results, EV and other things I can't control.
I gain nothing with that I just annoy people and give myself excuses. I'll just think about my game.

I'm putting in quite a lot of volume this month, already cleared my 575$ EOY bonus on Tilt, now I ordered the 300$ Ironman bonus. Luckily Tilt hasn't implemented higher min buy in yet, so for now I can continue to play here. I'm checking the opinions on the stars renewed VIP program and it seems to me I'd really have to play some insane amounts to get to a status that would give me some good value. I think max I could get is 300.000 VPP, which would require almost 1 million hands on NL100 (which is amazingly a lot).

Other than that my life is pretty hectic, I have seminars in school 3 days a week, which means I go for work around 7am and come back 8:30 pm after school. Good luck to me playing poker on those days :(.

Hopefully I'll get some more vacation time this month and I will be able to test how would my days look focusing mostly on poker.

Cya around!

21.1.2010

Lots of changes lately. Full tilt implemented the raise of min buy-ins, which ended my SSS career there. After of a couple of days of donking around with rush poker I cashed out most of my bankroll and restarted my playing on NL25 full ring.

I must tell you I'm a big noob there :), it's just so much different than what I'm used to, should I call should I raise, should I bet postflop or should I pot control

If anyone has any suggestions on good videos, articles or if someone would be willing to sweat me sometimes, I would be very grateful.

I'll keep you updated on my progress.

Hey Rah!
I was reading your blog from time to time.
Aren't you looking for bonus whoring with SSS on other sites?
I also plan to switch to BSS, but I need to build bigger bankroll
wish you luck!

25.1.2010

Hello everyone. After one week of vacations I'm back at work :(. It surely waysn't a real vacation since i still had school in the afternoons but it was surely better than my usual scehdule. Enough of boring real life lets talk about poker.

Since my play on NL25 FR went ok and since I decided I would aply a somewhat agressive bankroll managment (20BI up to NL50) I already moved to NL50. Off course I'm not very good ad BSS yet, but since I have a good NL50 database (which will help me make good table selection) and I'm playing fewer tables anyways I will hopefully be able to survive here. Luckily I started with 4,5 BI up there.

A couple of words on my style. Im pretty loose agressive, I'm sure I have to hone my skills in that department, since good players should be able to exploit me, but from my experience on lower limits there are only two types of players, the weak tights and the fishes and I think I generaly have the idea how to exploit both. I usually just try to exploit position and stacksize as much as possible.

I'm also doing villains handguessing all the time and it's really nice when I hit (maybe I'll start writing villains hands in the chat before betting river, that should put them off guard :)). What I need to improve is fold when I'm beat (where is the point in knowing what your opp could have and then wanting to see it by paying him off).

I also need a lot of working on my flop lines against cbets, I float quite a lot against regulars, since I find they become predictable on turn a lot, but I need to become less spewy and to study which are the spots when raising on flop would be better. Another thing is how to extract more value and slowplay monsters, without being to obvious (example: set OOP, have yet to stack someone there).

What about SSS? I played a couple of sessions on stars, I think I'm slowly adapting to the software and yesterday I had a really good one hour session there, which was missing before. I still have a very low hand/hour rate there but I'm improving. I plan to play up to one session per day there, to hopefully make some side money and unlock some rewards/bonuses. I'll focus on play during the most profitable hours and spend the other time BSSing.

Well that's pretty much it, have a nice day.

29.1.2009

First week of playing on NL50 is over. I have been running very hot and when I say that I mean VEERRYY HOTTT!!!. Hopefully I will have the 20BIs for NL100 soon. I think I'm learning something new every day and what's the most important thing, I try to play my style. Over the last year I read quite a lot of different material on poker so I try to implement those things, but mostly I try to make the right decision for any singular spot, since not two situations are always the same.

I'm reading Let there be range for the second time now and I think is a great book to learn how to play against low stakes regulars, since it exposes many of the flaws of the low limits weak tight regular.

Well most of all, I'm really having fun with BSS!

Cya guys!

Glad you're using FT's new policy to expand your game. Even if you return to SSS elsewhere I'm sure the time playing with a full stack will hone your skills and make you deadlier with a short stack too

Also, it's nice to hear you're running good at last. I think I echo everyone who follows your blog when I say that, god knows, you deserve it.

Tim

I was about to type something inspirational and cool... But my head is killing me and im still a bit drunk so..

Good luck and keep it up ♦

hey Rahx,

I'm in exactly the same boat as you, moved part of the bankroll over to stars for SSS and started playing some NL50, and I'm also running seriously hot NL50 20bb/100 over 5k hands - at least that seems good to me...

regarding shortstacking on stars, the problem is that there are so many shortstacks it's so difficult to find a good table, so I only end up playing NL400 when I prefer to have some NL200 as well..

I also just moved some money over to partypoker. There are no shortstackers! although that's what it looked like to me. only problem there is that there was only one NL400 table, so I mixed up some NL400 stars with NL200 party.. it's workable.

Do you think one should move up to NL100 bss as soon as they can? because I have the bankroll but I have this idea that one needs to have much more experience at bss for this level? what do you think? or do you think just go for it and have a loss limit where you move down.. in that case i would need to be playing an ultraconservative bankroll management..

anyway, good luck on your new ventures in bss