First month over!!

Well it's over, January has finally finished so I can put up some projections based on this month and some snippets of information. I think I know how to put a picture in this as well so I'll try and include my profit/loss graph for January.

Firstly for the non poker people - Went to strictly come dancing live shows tonight. I was taking Jen for her christmas present, I got her two tickets and said she could take anyone she wanted, ANYONE! She didn't get the hint so I went with. No Holly Valance, no Alesha Dixon, no Ola Jordan butttttt it was still really good fun and the seats were fantastic. I think Jen found it funny that being that close to Jason Donovan was the highlight for me but hey! Oh, and Chelsee Healey won, nope I'd not heard of her either.

So, anyway poker. Did a bit of research and in January whenever I've been dealt a pair of Kings I have won (at showdown) just 52% of the hands. This figure is expected to be around 75-80% and when I have kings I always get it all in so this is clearly where a lot of the run bad has come from. Nothing I can do about it just gotta play through.

January is over, I've played just under 10,000 games. I would have hit 10k had we not been going to strictly tonight but it doesn't really matter much, just gives me an easier target to beat for next month. I have finished the month in profit. This may not sound great but this month I was $4,000 down, then got back to even, then $4,000 down again then $3,000 ahead, then back down to $2,000 down so to finish at a massive $413 in profit feels like a win, and well it is. Especially given my luck this month.

Looking at how I've been playing I should expect to run around 1-2% ROI which for non poker people means for every $1000 I put in to poker I should return $1010-$1020. Doesn't sound a lot I know but I have put in over $500k this month alone so hopefully should be looking around $60-$120k profit at the games for the year. My spreadsheet is predicting $5k profit for 2012 but it basically works out my average profit per day then multiplies by 366 so doesn't account for any luck.

Now, what about my bonuses that I go on about so much. This month I have earned 140,000 vpps and just under 500,000 fpps. This puts me on course to hit supernova elite towards the end of July/start of August but I plan on doing it sooner than that so each month I have to do better than the previous one for vpps.

So what's that worth in money? Well..... 250k fpps is worth $4,000 so the fpps are worth $8,000. The first 100k vpps were worth $1,200 and the next 100k vpps will be worth $2,600 so 40% of 2600 is $1040 meaning my bonuses so far in January are....

$8,000 + $1,200 + $1,040 PLUS a $300 bonus stars gave to all players who hit 25k vpps in January so my monthly bonuses are $10,540, and that to my actual profit and for January I am up....................

$11,000!!

That's about what I'd take home from Barclays in 5 months of hitting targets! I should be ecstatic with this but I am well behind on all targets.

I should have hit 165k vpps and expected to make around $5-10k profit for the month but it's not been the best of months, I'll include the graph for you all to see how swingy these games can be! And sadly the luck has not been with me.

Now, touching on luck vs skill in poker. I have finally found an analogy I think people will be able to relate to who aren't keen poker players. Think of a game of scrabble. The best players will win at scrabble most of the time, but occasionally they are gonna get racks of QVXCBMU whilst their opponent is getting racks like AEINRST and there's nothing they can do about it. Poker can be similar, it's a game of skill with elements of luck involved.

Today I had my biggest finish in one game, I won a $100 game on nearly 12,000 chips which netted $360 profit. There's only 15,000 chips in the game!

Most games played in one day was 511. Most games played in one session was 339.
Least games played in one day was 88 when I lost $1,500 in those 88 games and got annoyed and stopped playing!

Right, I think I've got the graph in, it should be just above here, I stopped playing the $200 games after around 4,500 games so you can see how I've done since then.

Anyway, hope people have found this interesting. I still think I will finish the year on 2,000,000 vpps with an ROI around 1.5% and if I do that then I will make $227,000 just in bonuses (not included some big tournament entries they give me) and around $100k in profit so $327,000.

That's around £220,000. Wouldn't be a bad take home if I can hit that. I read today that someone earning £1m a year would take home around £450k after tax so that can be next years goal! haha.

Hope everyone is well, sorry it's such a long post but it's last of the month.

Oh, I've changed the comments a bit to stop people annoying me, No anonymous posts are allowed, If you wanna post a comment you can sign up really easily. If you don't wanna do that then just put it on my facebook. If you're not on my facebook, there's a reason for that!
Also I now have to approve all comments before they are posted to stop any trolls annoying me.

That's all, roll on February!

Back down to even :(

Since hitting Supernova on Tuesday things have gone a bit wrong!!

Played my first 300 game set for a while on Wednesday afternoon started off fine, and was round $600 up after 150 games, by 200 games that was down to even and then the horror show started. It was ridiculous, I ran 100,000 chips below EV (expected value) over the next 100 games which means I lost 100,000 chips I should have won and ended the set $1,500 down.

Then the evening session was exactly the same, I won't list all the bad beats but they were ludicrous and I lost another $1500. Today I went $1,200 down as the run continued but finished really well and ended up only $165 down on the set putting me up $9 for the year! haha

So it sounds bad, but this was a horrendous run of luck, I tried explaining to my sister (who doesn't really get poker as a career) by saying it was like Man U losing 12-0 to Accrington stanley because of a bizarre series of events like goal kicks bouncing off the defenders and back into the net etc but she still doesn't get it.

And also I've earned over $8,000 in bonuses which is around £5,000 so if I didn't play for the rest of the month I'd still be taking home £5,000 tax free which is what someone on a £100k a year job would get so I'm content with this but I know I can acheive so much more.

Won the quiz last night at the railway getting just one thing wrong all quiz! And we barely used google heh.

Had a nice meal there too, I've found that poker is making me really hungry all the time, dunno why but guess all this extra work on my brain must be burning some calories like when I do actual exercise!

Gonna give it another whirl in a bit and get some of this back.

Hope everyone is ok

Jon

Supernova acheived for 2012....

Hooray, I've hit supernova for 2012 already, last year it took me til May, this year I've done it in little over 3 weeks. I'd hoped to do it by the 20th though so I am a touch behind schedule but it's been a tough month with that hideous downswing.

The good news is I've been doing pretty well as well. Since ditching the $200s I've been making profit almost every set, last night's session ran horribly but got that back just now. Ran horribly again though and made profit so I really think I've got this all cracked again now and hoping to press on from here!

Couple of my opponents have been annoying me, one, Kizk_ from Portugal always likes to have a go at me so I challenged him to a $20k bet on who makes more money this year. He's gone quiet since. Another one has always been the luckiest player on the site, when that run ends he's gonna lose a fortune though so just can't wait for that, just hope I pick up the pieces! haha I'm evil really!

Lost at footie again last night and the quiz was a bit shit. Got in a row with the idiot quiz master when he asked the question, 'Who is the Greek God of love' We correctly put Eros but he had Aphrodite down as the answer which is the Greek Goddess of love. He got even more annoying after that. Ah well. we came 5th.

Farmers quiz tonight, going for 4 wins out of 4 for 2012.

At the end of this month I'll post up all my profits and vpps etc for 2012 and also my projected earnings for the year based on how January has gone. It's looking quite exciting though!

Hope everyone is happy :)

Jon

Back in the right direction

Hello again everyone, thanks for reading.

Since dropping the $200 games everything seems to be going in the right direction, have made over $3,000 back since then and could have been a lot more but for some ridiculous beats.

I've really started to get to grips with my opponents more now, it's taken longer to learn their playing styles because I only see each table for a moment but I know which players I can exploit and how, and also which players might be targetting me and take action on that, one idiot Australian player is really feeling that!

I'm still marginally down for the year on the games as I've had some horrid runs, but it's only around $500 now and I've earned about $6,000 in bonuses already this year so everything is looking good.

I'm back in the top 5 of the leaderboard for the year in the $60s and $100 games, if the $200s hadn't been so bad I'd be top 5 of the overall leaderboard as well.

Now something weird that I've noticed I do, I associate the various stakes with colours, and when the table comes up I kind of see it with the specific colour border, $200s are light blue, $100s are black, $60s are red and $30s are green. Now this could be a mild form of synethesia where people associate everything with colours, or the other possibility is that I have some semblance of a photographic memory so I know what stakes the game is by the seatings of other players and when the table pops up my brain puts the border in so I know what stake it is. It's really weird but I think it's actually gonna help save me time by not checking the stakes when playing.

So at the moment I'm a bit behind schedule, I'm heading for around 1.6m vpps which is around $150,000 in bonuses so I'd be happy enough breaking even, but with a bit more effort I'll easily be on course for 2m vpps which is around $225k. so that's the plan!

It's amazing how tiring it is on my brain, but I should have expected this really. Gotta be careful to avoid burnout but I'm happy I can keep going at this pace, and even a bit accellerated.

Good luck everyone :)

Jon

Dropping the $200 games

So I had another bad downswing after getting myself back on track.

Couple of days where I just seemed to lose every pot in $200s and $100s no matter what I did. So I made a decision to drop the $200 games for a bit the reasons are thus.

I play too tight in the $200 games due to the higher buy ins.
When playing the $200s I tend to look at the stake of each game when it pops up rather than just playing the hand and opponent the same on every table.
Losing a bad pot in a $200 would send me on tilt.
Because I don't tend to play at 'peak' times I never really have more than 2 $200s running at any one time so I've dropped the 4 $200s for 2x100 and 2x60. It should work out at pretty similar in vpps and bonuses so I think it's worthwhile.

I've done four sessions since dropping the 200s and I've made profit on all of them, nothing major but a total of around $1,200. Gotta expect the swings will be way smaller without the $200 games so hopefully should be a nice steady increase in profit.

I've earned my first bonus of the year, the $4,000 one. However I've decided not to cash it in just yet. There's a meeting on the Isle Of Man next week with some high profile players and pokerstars management and there's an outside chance that the points could go up in value so I'm gonna wait and see what happens.

Outside of poker I've not done too much, been out every night since Sunday though, Jen and I won the quiz at the blue anchor just the two of us but that's a quiz for thickies. Came 2nd at the Monday night quiz losing by 4 points, also came 2nd at football and lost by more than we lost at the quiz! :S Joint 1st on the Tuesday quiz, would have won it but I got talked out of two correct answers but we'd won the last 3 on our own so probably best that it was shared this week.

Tonight went out in Hoylake with some friends. The highlight of the night being haribo sweets being dropped in everyone's drinks! hmm Played the crystal maze game on the quiz machine, got 7/8 crystals so went for the £10 prize where you need to get 60 or more gold tokens after deductions. I got all the gold tokens that were on the screen and there were just 60 of them!! cheating machine cos I got 24 silver too :(

Probs gonna try and get some sleep soon and get back on the poker tomorrow. I also think that several short sessions a day will work out better than 2 long ones but just might mean less points.

Good luck everyone, hope you're all well :) xxx

Jon

Finally back on track....

Well it had been a rough ride. This past week has been the unluckiest poker run of my life. I've had runs lasting longer in terms of time but because of the amount of games played this week has gone way beyond that, lasting almost 2,000 games.

To put this into perspective in 2009 I played a total of just over 4,000 games so it's the equivalent of me running badly for half that year!!

I knew it would happen at some point this year and I expect it'll happen again at least 5 or 6 more times just a bit of a shock for it to happen so soon.

But I've come through it, Friday I did 3 sessions, the first one I won just under $1500 and the second two were minute losses so not gonna concern myself with that.

I'm still a bit behind on my points targets, mostly because I wasn't in the mood to play so much last week when I was running so badly but a solid weekend of playing and I should be back on track there too.

In other news I've spent some time playing around on a bingo site. They have side games like slot machines and roulette and to make up for the hideous poker run I've ran absolutely golden there and made around £2,500!! Pure luck but hey, I'll take it!

I should get my first $4k bonus of the year by Monday and then will do a profit loss update along with projected 2012 earnings but at the moment everything is vastly under skewed because of the bad run and fewer games last week.

In fun news. Won the quiz on Tuesday, quite convincingly. That's three farmers arms quizzes won in a row and I'm actually slightly concerned people might be getting a bit fed up with us, but it makes up for the other quizzes I'm not winning.

Not a lot else has really happened this week, we lost at footie 5-0 but it was the most even 5-0 defeat ever! We just couldn't score and they couldn't miss.

I'll update again after the weekend blitz, see where we're at.

Hope everyone is happy and cheerful and smiling!

Jon

Down for the first time this year!

What a horrible weekend.

I am now officially down for the year, only about $200 and I've made nearly $3000 in bonuses so really I'm up around $2,800 but in terms of actual profit at the games I'm losing.

Most of this is due to running horribly in the $200 games. I'm actually ranked number 2 in the world for the $60s and $100s but I'm just struggling in the $200s. I don't think they're unbeatable I think I've just run really badly in them and also been pretty card dead in them so it's definitely no major concern just yet. What is a concern is that my sleep pattern is messed up again. I really can't get to sleep before around 7am and I really need to be up for 12 to start playing again so I think I might just try and stay up now and see how I do in the afternoon session tomorrow.

Done two quizzes this week and didn't do very well in either so hopefully we can win the farmers quiz tomorrow. Lost at footie tonight, 5-0. Awful result but such an even game. We just couldn't score and they just couldn't miss. Still always next week.

Not a lot of good news so far but I did get my grandmother's clock restored and that's up and chiming in the lounge.

Nothing else really happened this weekend, hmm this sounds a tad depressing really doesn't it. Well don't worry I'm happy and enjoying the poker a lot more than last year and am still easily on course to smash supernova elite, I've already made about 11% of all the points I made last year and we're only 9 days old!

Oh, he doesn't read this blog but an old poker friend from the betfair days won the World Poker tour Dublin over the weekend picking up $280,000 for his trouble so congrats to Dave 'Dubai' Shallow. Hopefully some day I'll get a win like that!

Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying 2012.

Will update in a few days once back on top!

Worst session ever ......

I should have known really, the year had started so well, I hadn't been updating because I'm trying to get used to all the games I'm playing.

Tuesday I managed to get 375 games in and had that incredible session where I made over $2,500.

Wednesday I played 464 games and ended up around $450 down but at one stage I was around $2,000 down so that was quite a good result.

Thursday was superb, I played 401 games and made just over $2,000.

Friday's afternoon session was 200 games and I made around $700

And sadly that's the end of the good news. I have a few people who watch me playing because when I'm playing I have no time to see any action on the all ins, I press all in and then bing my next table pops up, I don't even see my opponents cards so they tell me on MSN what's happened. Tonight it was just ridiculous. Every single all in I lost , every flip, I lost. I must have bubbled so many games and every time I thought I'd steadied it things would get worse again.

I was actually playing well and felt like carrying on but after 300 games I'd had enough so turned off Table Ninja and finished up, at the end of the session I was down $3400 taking the yearly profit down from just under $5,000 to $1,400.

Now, this is not as bad as it seems, we ran the numbers and I ran ridiculously badly, something I always say is poker is not about getting lucky, it's about not getting unlucky and tonight I got constantly unlucky. But I'm still up and on course with the 1% ROI goals for the year which I set myself, however before tonight I was on course for nearly 5% ROI which was my high aspiration goal.

The good news is that I can comfortably play for 4-5 hours with all these tables going and still play my best poker, I don't even feel slightly tired right now and could have kept playing had I not gotten so annoyed. my VPPs are pretty high, I'm already at 100,000 FPPs for 2012 which can be exchanged for $1,500 at any point but I'll hang on for the 250k FPPs which I can swap for $4,000, should get there by around the 15th Jan, maybe sooner.

Ok stats for the year.

Games played - 1,857
Total Profit - $1,455
VPPs earned - 28,197
FPPs earned - 99,442
VPP value - Approx. $350
FPP value - Approx. $1600

So I can't really complain that after 5 days of poker I've made more than a month at Barclays when smashing all sales targets.

Social life this week has been a bit quiet, Not really been out to do anything since Tuesday, Thursday evening I would have gone the pub but was asleep on the couch around 7-11! oops.

I do have to ensure I keep up a solid social life or I'll go stir crazy. I'm trying to keep all evenings free to do stuff so if anyone is bored any night just let me know and I'll always be happy to get out the flat.

Hope everyone is well

Jon

New year and time to focus!

Well hello everyone,

I hope you all had a happy christmas and a very fun filled new year. Christmas day went well and new years eve was just a party at a friends house so that my friends who had kids could do something. We got drunk and had fun, same as everyone really!

So I've gotten back into the poker grind, I've finally set table ninja up which means I can play lots more games and as soon as one ends it will register me for an identical game. I tested it out in micro stakes over 40 games but started timing out too much and at 30 games I never used my timebanks so I've set it for 35 games but at the higher stakes there aren't normally 35 games running at any time so I've found myself playing mostly around 30 games but sometimes as low as 20.

So how has it been going? I had my first session on Monday night after getting back from the pub quiz (we came 3rd) I played for about 3 hours and managed around 120 games but lost about $200. It's weird because I no longer see any of the action at all and don't even know if I've cashed the game or not because it automatically closes the game for me once it's finished. I really only know how I've done come the end. I have someone who watches what's going on and they tell me the big hands in the bigger games.

Wanted to wake up today around noon and get straight back on it but stayed up watching the college football last night til 5am so didn't wake up til around 1. Had a few things to do and didn't get started til 1:45. I played through til 5pm (when Jen had my dinner ready for me). I ran super hot in the $200 games, had one all in 66 v TT and flop came T 6 6. I cashed in 9 out of the 11 $200 games which was fantastic especially as I won 4 of them. Finished the session around $2,600 up which was incredible but I did run pretty well and had lots of big cards.

2nd session started around 11:45pm tonight after I'd been the farmers quiz (which we won) and I played through til about 3:30am. Ran absolutely horribly in all the $60 games but did just well enough in the bigger games to cover it and ended up around $170 up which sounds awful compared with earlier, but I'll be delighted with $170 average profit from a session.

The concern at the moment is the points earned. I was hoping to make around 10,000 vpps a day which would get me to 3,000,000 for the year and around $380,000 in bonuses. Today I made just under 6,000 points but neither session was a full four hour session and I know I can put more tables on so at present it looks more like 2,000,000 for the year which is approximately $250,000 in bonuses which is still amazing obviously but we'll just see what happens and whether I can maintain this standard. Lots of new players who I need to get to grips with at the moment.

So after my first full day here are 2012 stats....

Games played - 494
VPPs earned - 7237
FPPs earned - 25,330
Profit/Loss - +$2,591
Bonuses earned - $500 (The bonuses are unlocked upon reaching a certain amount but this is the equivalent value of those I've earned so far)

So there we have it, must play more but I need to maintain a decent social life!

Sorry to non poker people for boring update, I'll do something better for you guys another day

Good luck to all poker friends, and be happy to all other friends.

Jon

xxx