Well long time since I've been writing on this blog, and I have much to say.
When I moved to Tilt I received intense coaching from discobisco, and he really raised the bar for me to really get a grasp on 50nl and got me to 100nl games, it was always a plan to get professional coaching and it was worth every cent.
Firstly the good news, I made one of my goals a reality. I'm playing poker for my main source of income, I officially ditched the job just before black friday and was playing 100NL Games on FullTilt and was doing very well, beating my normal jobs wage. it ment a tremondous amount to me, and it was one of the best feeling I've had when I thought how far I came from grinding $1 SitNGo's on PKR, to playing 100nl games as my job it was a very big personal achievement for me.
But lets not get stuck up in the clouds, what comes up must come down. two words being
'black friday' sent me hurdling back to earth pretty harshly!
Back to Earth
Firstly when you just turn to be a profesional poker player, the last thing you need is black friday! My entire bankroll was locked up on tilt meaning I was completly screwed, I thought to myself '...well there goes my dreams' after days of listning to quadjacks radio who was covering the events 24/7 at the time, I realised feeling sorry for myself wasn't going to make my situation any better, and fulltilt wasnt paying out anytime soon. I figured I had two choices.
1. Get a normal job, rebuild my bankroll and play.
2. Get staked for 50nl (since thats the only large sample I have)
The thought of getting a job again, just felt terrible, after what I achieved it just felt like, if I did that I couldn't do what I loved, and also the slight embarsement of telling my friends and family that poker didnt work out, and to know deep inside they have some smug judgement, a
'I told you so' attitude and a feeling of failure, eventhough I didnt fail myself it was out of my hands, I still sort of feel that way.
I decided to do what I loved, eventhough writing this on hindsight I feel if I was slighlty more sensible I should have gone for option 1, since it would meen, more money and less stress, I just love poker and want to do whatever I can to keep this job title I worked my ass off for, which writing this still sounds silly.
Getting Staked
So I found a very good staker, so good in fact I dont think I could have found a better one, very nice guy and extremley bright. with part of my staking deal he's been giving me some free poker coaching on top of it and he's very, VERY good.
the staking deal was after every 50k hands we would split the all profits 50/50 and the staker choses the site which I was able to get a 60% rake-back deal on.
As for how I'm doing with his staking deal, to be honest not as good as I initially thought.
I intially thought, 'okay, I'm going to stomp through this 50nl field and prove to the staker he should move me to 100nl pronto' - that didnt happen!
In fact I've found this new site I've played on to be harder to play at than fulltilt, its mainly because there isn't as big of a player pool and you play with the same people so much that reg wars happen alot, which meens sometimes getting paid off is harder.
Admitdly though I had some teething problems, geeting used to a new site for one, building a player database from scratch was also a hurdle. But in the first week or so I was just playing bad, maybe becuase of the reasons I said before but also becuase I hadn't played for a few weeks.
I was out of touch alittle, even though I got throught it eventually and started having some success and started showing a nice profit I decided to play 10 hours a day every day. My reasoning was, I need to get in alot of hands and I need to play as much poker as possible for rake and to get to the 50k hands goal quickly, so I can maybe move up as fast as possible. I played in 3 hour intervals with 1 hour breaks in between each session.
I had a 150 stop loss per session. and my daily total stop loss was 300.
I'm gunna keep it short and sweet, IT WAS A FUCKING TERRIBLE IDEA!
I dropped like 20buyins in over 2 weeks, Meaning it wiped out all of my winnings profit I acumilated. It was also the biggest downswing I've ever experienced. Luckily for me though My rakeback still made me profitable enough where it covered my stakers losses and gave him and myself a small profit. One thing I did accomplish though was doing 50k hands in just under a month, although not for much gain. the staker has agreed for another 50k hands and I'm 15k hands in so far taking my old approach of 6 hours a day, 150 stop loss and With rakeback and winnings I've so far made nearly as much as the 50k hand sample, so hopefully all will go well soon.
The real plus sides of this staking deal has been once again, I'm learning alot, the coaching and playing every day 6 hours and that 2 week period of 10 hours a day really makes you learn, specially when your being put on your ass!
although I think when I do evetually get my own roll back, I'm going to be playing either PKR or Pokerstars just becuase there is softer fields either due to size like pokerstars or due to small field of bad players like PKR
This blog so far
It's actually really funny looking back at my past blog entries, like 20k hands was the nuts to me at one point is really laughable compared to what I do now, but its nice to see how far I've come.
Here is what the owner of FullTilt poker says about people like me getting our bankrolls back....
Good Luck all, Keep grindin!
Here is some great sites to try out:
- Learn poker at DragtheBar for 7 days free! click here
- PKR is a cool 3D poker site, also super soft! PKR Poker
