the 50$-10k$ challenge is NOT going to happen this year.
There are 2 reasons for this: 1, it will be close to impossible to get good enough action soon; 2, i will travel to London for the WorldChamp tourney of PS in Nov + likely play EPT and or WPT Prague and cgs there in early Dec.
Given short time this is the best decision for me. Sorry to anyone looking forw to this for the hustle.
I plan to do the challenge later on when having less crammed schedule. Most likely I will improve the odds vs me also to make it more interesting+ set more restricting rules vs me such as i cant at any point play above NL400 fe. And the provisionary period would be March. Looking forward!
-life is not abt finding urself, it's abt creating urself-
love messenger reporting again. whazzup everybody? how are we doing? anyone some solid idea for a silverster in Europe?. I dont think i ll be joining the crew which wants to go to Tallin. My gut just tells me the country is too *ucked up to risk a stay there. Tbh i ll prefer some warmer place, like Spain, Italy, Malta or Gib? I feel like i want to make this New year's eve a bit more special coz many things changed in my life, the year is not over yet, but i can already tell, i got a lot positive from a year 2011.
It was esp emotionally and speaking of personal development. I feel like in 2010 i was so much just a big child roaming the much-perplexing life living w no obvious plan. Obv many things still uncertain, and some of em i want to keep open doors to, but it just feels so much more like a "man" and it's not just that i have a great gf now. That's obv also a part of it, but overall reflecting on my lately behaviour, i kinda get the impression that i know what i am doing and is worth doing a lot more than anytime before
..and THIS ought to be celebrated some place special i think. The new year 2012 will bring many new personal challenges to me on my continuing journey to becoming a better person in the first place. (more on this in early January) An outline: I will 100% concentrate on making the most out of poker i can (moneywise and comptence/enjoymentwise) and at the same time help the most ppl do the same and at the same time help my gf be the most happy she can be. I ll really try to stricly limit myself to rather rigid stereotypes, possibly and just stick with a sickening work ethic. (i trained this last month somewhat-read below)
(if u want to be truly inspired and understand the term more, pls:
To sum up what happened last month:
i played a total of 75k hands, mix of SH&HU across many limits, actually across NL2-NL2k ♦, but most of which came within 2weeks where i played 67k hands (! -the most i ve played in a 2week period in 3years! ♦) mostly on NL400€ on a platform w a rather customer-unfriendly software, where auto-rebuy or seing opponents cards when winning is nonexistant and SH tabs are 5plrmax. (easy to guess, right?) I won more than i expected so am vhappy, also: with all the promos and rakeraces and rb and the value of the ticket to London World Championship of pokerstrategy i got as a result, that equals very close to 100%rb, which was very nice actually. I mostly played my B to B- game (which i absolutely expected and esentially "planned" in a way), but i didnt rly care coz i rly just wanted to test myself on mainly other things than playing. These were:
1, work ethic 2, my emotional reactions to stress and their triggers 3, experimenting w odd lines in order to get more coaching material for midstakes for my students
1: it's hard to get to know a person w worse work ethic towards playing poker among my prime stakes (NL600-1k) esp if he is a fulltime plr. Reason? I know it, but it's complicated to rly explain. It has been written abt so much in my posts before. In a nutshell: it's my complex philosophically-selfdestructive character that i posses. Ok, i dont rly want to talk abt it here now anymore. I think i am much better than before, so lets just ignore it for a while.
2, i' ve been rly trying to follow Jered Tendler's advices on trying to understand my subconsiousness and my emotional tendencies. Everytime i see i am emotionally distracted during a sesison, i close a few tabs insta, and write the note down, what triggered this state. (it can be overextatic, it can be nervous, anxious, tilty to agression or tilty to passivity, w/e) I write down the most i can define and after a session try to consciously make the effort to memorize the triggering processes. Then whenever the same happens, i have a system of reactions which i try to take in order to negate the inherently exserted effects. I will not rly talk abt this at all, sorry, i feel like i a, give away too much on myself, which is of indefinite value and b, prevent ppl who i respect from earning $ by giving away information they made a big effort to present
3, as i mentioned before i decided to take on a big project on my shoulders. It's a special longterm poker academy, where i ll be the main coach/lecturer. more: TLN-pokerstrategy.com poker akademia ; googletranslate ftw, maybe?
anyway, its quite a lot of work and i need to organize all of my materials for coachings thematically and put a lot of methodology into everything. So therefore i will most likely play quite some NL400 still in the nearest future, even tho i got like 150+ vinteresting hands of my own play already so that should be enough for a while.
ok, i think for me, it s a time to go and make some new month's goals. I will try to put in a lot of volume again, 80k hands is the target, w a lot of emphasisi on NL1k towards the end of the month, where i should again be close to my best. I again took a few day depression-break right now ♦ fml, anyway, lets go. (I wont play fully tracked for ps anymore, so those who expected me to win ps ENranking every month now -hello Zuzka- i am sorry) Also the plan is to ship the heat in London and win the 1st price in dec. I expect a very soft plrfield actually (so even though its quite a small tourney i still rly wanted to qualify as i see the value) coz most of the ppl there will be from freerolls. Lets ship HU vs TT. Korn distant 3rd maybe
ah, yea, and share w u few of my latest visualisations:
my future dog :
my future house:
(ok, a bit smaller would maybe do, depends on the children count i guess, but the pool is a must )
-life is not abt finding urself, it's abt creating urself-
is there any real threat that € will cease to exist? if so: it will undergo a gradual inflation first (hence i still have time to convert to other currency) right? How critical is the current status quo? Do u recommend not keeping any money in € anymore?
any website i should follow to keep in touch w the most recent objectively put developments?
many thx
-life is not abt finding urself, it's abt creating urself-
Not at least another year - Greeks formed new government they will accept terms, which will give IMF and Germany one year to save Italy and Spain (their primary concern).
After that Greece could go bankrupt but most likely euro will continue to exist.
Worst case scenario - they wont let inflation to go wild - Germans reitroducing Mark and fixing fx rate for conversion.
You don't have any source that will give you early warning, every info available is already calculated in euro fx.
So let your br in euro live and pray ♦
p.s. In that scenario its hard to tell if there is going to be any currency safe because it would be chain reaction if i would have to pick i would stick to euro and exchange in Marks if it comes to that (your country's economy is anyway extremely euro dependent so any additional currency risk could be fatal for your br)
Edit: sorry thought you are Romanian (hence euro-dependent comment), since you are Slovak choice is more obvious
Originally posted by TheLastNail
any economists ITT:
is there any real threat that € will cease to exist? if so: it will undergo a gradual inflation first (hence i still have time to convert to other currency) right? How critical is the current status quo? Do u recommend not keeping any money in € anymore?
any website i should follow to keep in touch w the most recent objectively put developments?
i dont exactly know what to write, but i made myself a promise i ll post to this blog at least 5lines each day i have access to the internet, just to stay more in touch w the community and overall keep track of what i do and plan things better perhaps, esp before myself, which will overall hopefully help myself use my time a somewhat more efficiently.
ok, so last few days have been pretty damn bad mindset wise, even tho i managed to do quite some stuff as long as preparation for live poker camp goes, i didnt rly play as i regreted i spent my time badly- then ate to try to feel better + watch some starcraft games and u know how vicious it goes from there.. overeaten and watched starcraft for best of 2days.
sofar just played 8k hands this month which is pretty damn back to terrible and i have big pangs of conscience.
My gf just recently gave up work to see if she can pursue a carreer of a chess player. Currently she is woman grandmaster and would like to get to men's international master level asap. Overall i think for her it's quite a snap considering how young she is and that she has already a uni title + decent bacground (also me) + she hardly had the opportunity to train as hard as she can now. More on this maybe later, but in real short: there are several good/bad things abt this regarding me.
biggest positives:
-i get to be w her overall on more flexible times (before: just evenings when she came back from work, usually i would want to play at the time)
-we can travel together to poker/ chess tourneys (i also do play chess, tho just for fun now, think will start competitively (w/o real big goals) again once i practice a bit), it should be fun + i can have the best possible companion and the best friend w me
-she can cook for me
biggest negatives:
-harder to manage my time since i have to "avoid" her during most of the day when i rly want to keep my focus on playing (this is rly difficult imo, tho thankfully we have big enough place so i think it should be managable longrun)
-the feeling of responsibility - i partially helped her decide to leave the work, so now i kind of feel the burden of it working out for her and hence it rly messes up w my mind since i feel more "forced" to take care of her (esp timewise is the hardest issue) than before.
I hope it will work out well and that we ll be happy and succesfull.
---------------------------------------------------------------
On other note, since i rly didnt play much at all recently I again started slowlier on NL400-600. These lims i feel are just so much softer on some platforms than some NL1k, tho like 20% of plrfield is decent so i feel i get good enough practice for the higher games which i should hit again later in the next week, after we return from London. I think my wr on NL400 even 6-7tabling is slightly over 10bb/100 (excluding rb). WIll try to get decent enough of recent sample to post a graph soon hopefully.
ok, so i was rly looking forw to this actually, but after i got an email abt all the details and the tourney structure, i kind of dont even want to go there anymore. We start w 50bb and within 1.5h the total of bb on the tab will be 60bb. ♦ rofl. No postflop play deluxe. I actually will flip AI 1st hand w anyone who is up for it from my heat, what a waste of time. Just hope the hotel will be nice and looking forw to some sightseeing there.
Tomorrow i shall talk a bit more abt chess and what i think/feel abt the game / what kind of future/ potential i see in it/ my gf's plans maybe? maybe she wants to present herself? Anyway, esp the guys who play/ed chess more/competitvely, let's share what u think/ like/ dislike abt the game, let's start a tittle discussion in here. gn.
-life is not abt finding urself, it's abt creating urself-
I get the impression it's very hard to make a career out of chess unless you are a top GM and/or great chess writer. Maybe she should change to poker like you and that Martin Stazko bloke. I looked up his chess rating, and it's only a bit higher than mine, and I'm a patzer.
Who said chess?? ok I have to give my thoughts on this!
Congrats to your gf to play chess full time, it is already an achievment in itself even though the hardest has yet to come!
I haven't been in the chess community for a while now but I think I can still give my view on being a chess pro.
First off the main thing is that unlike in poker there is no money in chess. It is very very tough to get a very good living out of it. To put this in perspective to earn in chess what the best ppl of this community earn one would have to be in top 10 of the world.
I remember at the time I was playing we were saying that one had to be >2600 to get a decent living which was at the time top 100 in the world. Here I am only talking about ppl that live off chess playing exclusively which in reality doesn't happen that much since it is really hard. Most of the ppl are also coach. ofc it depends where one lives etc... but that gives a general idea. Now it isn't all black I mean I know GMs that live off chess (playing + coaching) very decently but again the amount of money earned is nowhere near what one could get playing poker.
Another factor to take into account is that there isn't much competition online (if at all) which means that a pro is on the road all the time which can be very tiring at times I guess.
Also (I'm sry it is a bit random thoughts) even though there is no variance as such like in poker there is always luck involved to win a tournament like in soccer or any other sport. i.e getting away with a bad position in a capital game because our opponent blunders etc...
So there are times where a chess player will face tough times not being able to win a tournament for a while etc... This means that psychologically it can be very hard because the income isn't steady.
Chess is way harder than poker to learn (which is one of the reasons why it is such a beautiful game). To understand this we can just look how long it took the most talented poker players to be amongst the top players in the world vs the best talented chess players. We are talking about 1-2 years for poker whereas it takes several years for a chess player ( Youngest GM ever got his title at 13-14yo I think and yet it is only GM not top of the world).
So overall I think it requires a lot of work to become good and the reward money wise isn't that great.
Now for your gf it is slightly diff since she is a woman (no offense there at all btw). There is only 1 woman that can compete with the best players in the world and the 2nd best isn't even in the top 100. Strangely enough women are as good as men in chess which is a great opportunity for your gf. So if she can become a GM she could get a good living imo (because then as a woman top 10-15 in the world she gets more invitations, can play some ladies tourneys etc...).
Overall it is a life style anyway but being able to live off your passion must be fantastic! So I wish her and yourself good luck with it and I am sure you will be able to support her in tough times as she probably does with you when you feel down about poker.
Anyway, esp the guys who play/ed chess more/competitvely, let's share what u think/ like/ dislike abt the game, let's start a tittle discussion in here. gn.