Double Trouble with Prim and Harrier - Poker, Sports, Cooking, Gardening, Mixed Drinks and more

No luck for Baby Peach today, no luck for Bowser jr. either. We busted shy before ITM/ticket and were a bit frustrated. But it was still early, so I decided to go and watch team Trollette, who played near my place, wanted to watch and encourage my team-mates .... and ended up with a "cameo"

Women´s doubles 50 plus

Team mates asked me, if I wanted to play the women´s doubles, first I refused (because I was in fact just the substitute player), but then I got convinced. The results looked badly after the singles for team Trollette. So, stepped in trying to save the doubles team results. But today, there was really nothing we could do! Those Villainesses were a nightmare to play - they were really really good, and even though team mate and I fought super hard and played well, we had to accept a defeat. It was a close loss: 4:6, 4:6 but the match was really fun and interesting.

Hard luck with the bubble, but what a great way to bounce back! Stepping in for a doubles match at the last minute is never easy, especially against 'Villainesses' in top form. A 4:6, 4:6 score shows you guys really put up a fight. Sometimes the fun of the match is worth more than the result. Better luck in the next session!

Originally posted by calimanpool
Hard luck with the bubble, but what a great way to bounce back! Stepping in for a doubles match at the last minute is never easy, especially against 'Villainesses' in top form. A 4:6, 4:6 score shows you guys really put up a fight. Sometimes the fun of the match is worth more than the result. Better luck in the next session!

Oh yes, we did put up a BIG fight, even though Villainesses were super tough and much higher ranked than we are! Was quite frustrated after my bust-outs, so I needed some distraction. That´s why I decided to "watch" Team Trollette and support them as a "fan". Well, and then team captain asked me to step in for a doubles match and I thought: "WHY NOT?" Good that Trollette Open was near my place, so I ran back home to get my stuff and returned with my tennis bag, got quickly dressed - and hopped on the tennis court with team mate! :f_biggrin::mdr: That was exactly what I needed after a frustrating poker session.

I had the not so pleasant task of cutting down our Christmas tree the other day, with the slight comfort of knowing that the tree needed to be cut down anyway, as it was getting too big for its space in the front yard. Next year, we will probably have a potted version - unless Prim bets it.

There was no grind before Christmas, at least for me, and since Primrose and I will be visiting our families over the holidays, and I intend to gather my stats for this year after that, there will be no more poker at all from my end in 2025. I heard Prim plans to play a few more tournaments, though, so maybe we will have a reason to get hyped after all.

Sorry for the lack of content recently, and it was honestly an extremely underwhelming advent season for me in general - hope you guys had a much better one. Next year, however, we will so be back... they may have to introduce a fifth suit because I will kick so much butt at the Badugi tables.

Enjoy the holidays, everyone! And feel free to have a vote in our Troll of the Year poll on Primrose's cash game blog, if you haven't already... because it's still tied at 2-2 and we're not sure how to resolve it.

Merry Christmas, everybody!!

I hope everybody is on Santa´s "nice" list, not on the "naughty"-list!

Merry Christmas Everyone

Originally posted by Primrose6789
I hope everybody is on Santa´s "nice" list, not on the "naughty"-list!
When I am Santa, I always ask people, "Were you a good little (girl/boy) all year?"
If the answer is "Yes", I respond with, "Well, where's the fun in that?"

I would have loved to show you some pictures already, of the French onion soup we had for lunch, as well as my original Christmas Eve cocktail called "Knecht Ruprecht" (or "Santa's Little Helper" - recipe and old photo found here), but unfortunately, the pictures I took turned out to be corrupted for some reason. I never had it happen before.

The pics from our Christmas dinner survived, though, so I will stick to my tradition of revealing the entire dinner round-up after the holidays.

Once again, Merry Christmas to all of you! I hope you have a fantastic one.

Harrier is Losing his Marbles

You know how Joe Pesci in Home Alone keeps stammering angry gibberish under his breath after falling victim to some of the traps in the big slapstick finale (which I now find more cringe-inducing than funny as an adult)? The reason for this is that Pesci is used to playing short-tempered characters who swear a lot, and he also appears to be quite a potty mouth in real life - but he appeared in a family movie here, so he couldn't keep using those bad words in the scenes. Reportedly, they had a swear jar on set, and Pesci filled it up within one day.

Yesterday, I found myself resorting to the same angry gibberish as Joe Pesci in that movie, and for the same reason: I got increasingly frustrated with my over-ambitious plan to build the marble run to end all marble runs for my nephews and felt the strong urge to swear and shout - but I knew that I shouldn't, in front of the kids. I rarely even feel that urge, not even at the poker tables, but that project was something else... worse than most real DIY tasks I can remember.

Basically, I bought some new marble tracks this month, hoping to have an opportunity to use them when the nephews (aged 8 and 3) are visiting, and that they wouldn't be distracted by all their other toys. I was pleased to see that they were enthusiastically on board, and they were impressed with all the sample marbles runs on the packages and in the instructions. "Ours will be much bigger!" I kept insisting.

You know how kids are at these ages. They may be excited about the end result, but they don't want to sit through big projects, so they were happy to already use the little "foundation" I built as a short run. I let them play with it for a while, but still insisted that we were not even halfway through. Naturally, I mostly kept working on it alone... and despite having to gradually lower my original plans to more realistic levels, I always failed to "thread the needle" and complete the run. There was always a tiny bit that was just slightly off. I grew frustrated, and so did the kids, who just wanted to play.

I would have just abandoned the project, but I didn't want to disappoint the kids after hyping up the marble run, nor did I want to send the message that you just give up when faced with difficulties, so I forced my way through it. So here it was, the final marble track:

As you can see, an additional challenge was that it had to be constructed over my younger nephew's wooden train set tracks that he set up earlier, which I agreed to leave alone, causing a lot of obstruction. My original vision included vertical loops, and a much more stable design for the track transitions. The final version was quite finicky in that regard, with a slight re-adjustment causing the marbles to tumble down - and obviously, little boys get excited and like to shake the track a little.

It must have taken up to two hours to build, with a lot of trial and error, and it even became physically exhausting, with all the kneeling down, getting up and crawling around. At least the kids were still happy with the final product, and I later apologized for getting so stressed out about it. In a way, it was a metaphor for my tendency to bite off a little more than I can chew with some of my projects. We will probably see more of those next year on the blog.

Oh, and the heating failed yesterday. It took until late afternoon until we could reach someone, but luckily, a mechanic could be found who was willing to help us out on Christmas Day, and who was able to find and fix the problem, with replacement parts he had on hand.

What can we say? Sometimes things don't go according to plan, but all's well that ends well.

Christmas Dinner

As usual, here is the annual Christmas dinner line-up that we had at my place:

Christmas Eve

Our tradition: Salmon in a puff pastry with rice, shrimps and fish stock sauce.

Christmas Day

This year's "wild card dish": Turkey breast strips with veggies in a bell pepper sauce.

Boxing Day

A Japanese tradition that made it to my home as well: We had KFC.

Traditional!

I´m always enjoying the traditional Hungarian food my mom makes!

Halászlé ("fisher´s soup")!

This pic is taken from the internet, because there´s no more soup! There are different versions of this soup, depending on the kind of fish you put in. Ours was made with carp.

Töltött káposzta ("stuffed cabbage")!

This is kind of a "stuffed cabbage", the pic is also taken from the internet, because I just ate most of it and there is not much left over.

And for dessert of course:

Bajgli

Yes, we still got some left-overs. This one in the pic is made with walnut, but there´s another version with poppy seed.

I hope you guys had some nice days with your loved ones. Sorry about the lack of updates recently, especially poker-related ones, but rest assured that I have been working hard on content. Stats mostly - half a decade of keeping track calls for some special graphs and stats, after all.

Since many of those stats are collected for the first time, it means creating new spreadsheets from scratch, and rummaging through old data, which may sometimes need to be harmonized first, since my way of keeping track has evolved over time. I was just driving myself crazy trying to locate one single Razz tournament from 2020 that appeared to be unaccounted for, searching through old blog posts, chat histories, and even trying to resurrect now defunct websites (RIP PokerProLabs), until I finally realized that there was no Razz in 2020, I have been looking at the wrong column the whole time.

I will still work a bit on it tonight, and I hope I will have everything ready some time within the next day. Meanwhile, I heard Prim plans to play some tournaments tomorrow. Some fireworks in time for New Year's Eve, perhaps? Best of luck, grindette!

BIG QUARTER special

Finally! We´re on vacation and that was a great opportunity to play the Big Quarter Phase 1 - for free. Remember? We qualified by freeroll. So, there it is: The 6 p.m. Big Quarter Phase I and we had no idea what to expect but soon found out that even though it´s a 11 $ tournament, the level is pretty much NL2 or even worse. Well, it´s pretty much NL2 and from time to time, my Cash Queen Pom Pom showed up and played "Cash Game" - well, just packed out some CG-moves, that was all. And there was not much to pack out, but LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of patience!! We were pretty much card-dead!!! For more than 2,5 hours! We could get a pot with AA at the beginning, but we had to wait VERY LONG for the next decent hand (which was not junk!!!).

But whenever we desperately jammed: We won the hand - and survived! For almost all the tournament we were the short stack - until finally, we got AK (which won) and could win a flip with AJ vs 99. Another AA brought us another good pot and suddenly, we found ourselves among the first 7 players, while 8 got into the Big Quarter final. A bad call from a Villain helped (we were not involved) and the tournament was over!! We made it!! Guys, we made it into the Big Quarter Final, which is gonna run on Monday, January 5th 9:30 p.m. It´s going to be a Mystery Bounty!! The first phase was a regular MTT and now, the final is gonna be a Mystery Bounty tournament. We have no idea what to expect.....we´re playing such a tournament for the first time....

Besides, Baby Peach got us another little satty ticket for the Big Quarter in PLO. The "Free to Play around the clock"-freeroll got VERY attractive!!!! You can win Big Quarter tickets and satty tickets there!!! We´re gonna play those for sure during our vacation.

Cracking job, Prim! I wish I could have railed.

I have actually shipped a fair amount of tournaments in the past where I was the shorty for much of the game.

While Prim was kicking some butt at the tables, I spent yet another vacation day doing mostly "office work". The data I collected has already yielded some interesting and sometimes surprising results, but it is pretty clear by now that I won't be able to finish it all for a big wrap-up on the blog this year, especially because I intend to spend some quality time away from the PC on New Year's Eve.

Therefore, instead of further delaying all those stats until everything is ready, let's just get to some of the ones I have prepared already, namely the MTT stats for this year, since MTTs are supposed to be the backbone of the grind anyway. Stay tuned...

MTT Stats Round-up 2025!

All right, this is where we are at. Only a little over $300 in overall MTT profit this year, which is less than in 2024, despite a slightly higher amount of games.

Badugi is still the flagship, and at least in terms of ROI, I didn't even do that badly this year with 63.28%, though it is once again lower than last year.

Let's also get to all of the other games we played. Courchevel was given another chance, and as usual only had short-term success. One 2nd place finish (which should have been a 1st place) at least made sure that we finished the year in profit, but the game overall still doesn't seem to have any staying power.

2-7 Single Draw was given another try too, after many years. I did a little better than during my previous attempts, but not enough to turn any profit.

2-7 Triple Draw also got two games - at least they didn't both brick.

Five Card Draw wasn't a complete bust either, but it finished in the red. Success in there remains inconsistent - but keep in mind that there was a big score in an event in 2022 which is unaccounted for in these stats.

8-Game is still not really getting off the ground, I guess it can't be helped with the mostly unattractive tournaments that are available to me.

PLO8 also got another chance this year... not sure why.

Stud Hi got two games, and none of them made me warm up to this format in any way.

Stud Hi-Lo was more interesting... and a massive troll in 2025. I probably gave it the most serious shot I ever gave it this year, and while I had a good amount of nice runs, many of them failed to deliver when it mattered, even resulting in some cashless FTs. I feel like there is some decent money in those tournaments, but I eventually decided that it wasn't worth the aggravation.

That takes care of the results, but I have also prepared some graphs already, which are coming up next.

Badugi was the MVP for sure, Courchevel was the only other game that finished in profit at all, and it didn't contribute much.

There was some remarkable success in the busy summer months, but otherwise, a pretty lackluster year.

Week 28, lasting from July 7th to July 13th, was the most successful one, with $150.30 in profit. The worst one followed shortly afterwards, in Week 30, lasting from July 21st to July 27th, losing us $33.81.

The monthly and weekly candlestick graphs further demonstrate the development this year.

With Badugi being the highest volume game, it makes sense to see similar patterns there.

We can also take a look at some of the other games, which may have vastly different patterns. You can see how much of Courchevel was riding on that one 2nd place finish.

Stud Hi-Lo briefly looked promising. Briefly...

Not much to say about the draw games, but here they are, for the sake of completion.

In MTTs in general, about 30% of my profits came in the form of bounties.

If we only take PKOs into a account, that number climbs to 33.26%, or about a third.

Those are the MTT graphs for this year, but I already have prepared a few graphs for the overall trends since 2020, we can take a look at some of them in our next post.

As I mentioned before, volume in terms of days played has been higher than last year, but it had been on a steady decline until then.

The decline was much more pronounced in earlier years if we take a look at the total amount of buy-ins instead, which has been relatively constant over the last three years.

Winnings show a little more variation.

And profit even more so, which is a much more important indicator. You can see that 2020 was the best year in this regard by far, followed by 2022, with a big slump in-between. The later years don't really come close.

Raw profit doesn't tell the whole story, though. According to the daily profit, which adjusts for volume, 2022 was only slightly behind 2020, and 2024 isn't that far behind anymore either. 2023 was still quite clearly the worst performing year.

And if we take a look at the ROI, which further adjusts for buy-ins, we get yet another different situation. This time, 2022 is in fact the most successful year, and even 2024 now overtakes 2020. 2023 is still in last place.

Key takeaways:

- MTT volume has been continuously declining since 2020, but shows moderate signs of picking up this year.

- Total MTT profits have been declining since 2020 overall, with swings in-between years.

- 2023 was the worst performing poker MTT year by just about all available metrics.

- Adjusting for volume and buy-ins yields vastly different results than looking at raw profit, with no clear temporal trends being recognizable in terms of ROI.

- 2022 was the best year in terms of ROI by a fair margin, despite earning only roughly 63% of the overall profits from 2020.

The work on poker stats will be continued tomorrow. Today, we will do the big yearly review instead, like every year.

2025 in Review

It seems like the year went by as quickly as it came. There have certainly been some nice highlights, but overall... I don't have many positive memories of this year at all. A lot of it was subjective, and often self-inflicted. Both due to external factors and some bad decisions of my own, I often found myself under a lot of stress. I definitely need to take care of it heading into the next year. I'm not yet sure what exactly I need to change, but I know that I need to change something.

With that mostly negative intro out of the way, there are also things that went nicely in 2025.

What went well
- A successful half-marathon finish after almost four months of training
- Another clean Gold in the Trollympics, including my first ever aquatic Gold
- A very good cashflow overall, partially thanks to a busy schedule in my side job

Contrary to that, many things went not so well, some of which have been mentioned above already.

What went poorly
- A highly stressful schedule in summer
- General issues with my perceived mental well-being, especially since the start of spring
- Disappointing poker results, a very sporadic grind with little consistency
- A completely failed attempt at OFC, also many other poker formats that ended up being dropped
- Declining physical fitness (at least when it comes to stamina) towards the end of the year

So yes, it was overall a bad year for me, certainly worse than the last few, but probably on par with 2021. Nevertheless, there have been some memorable moments, which I think I will deal with in my next post.

2025 definitely had some highlights. Prim and I always like to discuss which of our personal meetups were our favorites. She seems to have enjoyed our summer meetings a lot once again. For me, our two cozy meetups in February are among my favorites, together with the Halloween meeting, which also ranks highly for her. Even the one earlier in October, where most of our plans had to be cancelled due to a mild sickness, ended up being quite enjoyable.

We never had a "bad" meetup yet, but in retrospect, I would like to apologize for sending Primrose to join me in my half-marathon training in March, where she admirably completed her 4 mile jog, but clearly didn't enjoy the experience all that much. We also got a little carried away when we went for our hour-long swim. Even those two meetups were nice, but they were probably among the weakest of the year.

There is one highlight we are in agreement about: Our trip to the Palmengarten in April was once again amazing, despite being pressed for time.

In particular, we had a literal boatload of fun when we went on a rowboat there together, with each of us taking one oar. ♦ Even the people who were watching us seemed to have fun.

Another personal highlight was definitely the half-marathon in Marburg, where I went to university back in the day. It was great seeing all the old sights again, and even meeting a few people there who could still remember me. The weather was excellent too, and I was happy with my performance, finishing the race in just under two hours. The training was tough, but it paid off.

Both of us also enjoy swimming, and just about a month ago, I re-discovered another nice swimming facility I remember from my university days, the AquaMar. It's kind of a long trip for us, but I'm sure Prim and I will visit it a few more times in coming years - and its timed water slide, the "Black Hole".

While not everything went well, 2025 definitely had some great and memorable moments for both of us. Here's to creating some new favorite memories in 2026!

Harrier, to be honest: I have never ever found jogging enjoyable anyway! So, don´t sweat it, my friend! I used to go jogging because it gave me a bit more stamina on the tennis court - but swimming and cycling have the same effect. I´m not sad at all to give up running for good, anyway. The 1-hour swim on the other hand, was absolutely enjoyable, I think it was a bit cold though, right? We did that one in July and we were a bit unlucky with the weather in July, I guess. At least I remember a quite "cold" July, that´s why we couldn´t harvest too many green beans and our tomato harvest was pretty late (in August).

If I could pick a "favorite" meet-up this year - phew, difficult, because ALL were great! - than I choose my birthday-meetup! No more challenges, no stress (ok, we had to wait long for the food in the restaurant), fun and gaming!

And I´m 100 % sure that we will have many more great meetups and lots of fun in 2026!!

Originally posted by Primrose6789
If I could pick a "favorite" meet-up this year - phew, difficult, because ALL were great! - than I choose my birthday-meetup! No more challenges, no stress (ok, we had to wait long for the food in the restaurant), fun and gaming!

That 1,200 gram Porterhouse steak we had that day may also qualify as a highlight of 2025.

I'm glad you enjoyed our meetups as much as I did. I'm already looking forward to our next one.