Superb couple of days!!

Wow, what a few days I've had.

I made a few slight adjustments to my game in the normal fifty 50s and it seems to have made a massive difference, up around $5k just from these games in the past couple of days and feel like everything is finally clicking into place properly.

Not gonna go into any detail about what I've tweaked just in case any of my opponents to check my blog for info.

I also entered a load of multis this morning as I woke up wide awake at 7am. Did well in quite a few, came 5th in a $51 hyper turbo and won an 18 man $60 game. Then went deep in a $3 rebuy tournament (rebuy means if you lose all your chips in first hour you can buy more to keep playing)

I wasn't really paying any attention to it until it was my final game going and I was chip leader with about 30 left from over 1,000. From that point on there was only gonna be one winner. When we got to the final table some players wanted to discuss a deal. First place was $2,700 and I said I'd only deal if I got $2,500 so we played on and I won fairly comfortably. my 4th biggest online win on Pokerstars so a nice start to the day and I got a decent withdrawal out of it.

Played 300 of my normal games since and made another $1000 but the final session I played dreadfully, probably cos so tired but I'm back in insomnia mood which isn't good, especially as I start with the personal trainer tomorrow.

So I'm now around $5,000 up for the year at the games plus my bonuses so everything looks totally back on track!

Nothing else interesting has really happened, I'll hopefully still be able to play after going the personal trainers tomorrow.

Saw some friends last night and we discussed whether I could get my mouse hand insured in case anything happened to it meaning I couldn't play poker anymore. Anyone know if that's possible?

Oh. I believe someone is trying to hack my account! Someone in Mexico tried to get into my facebook page which might be where it all stars so I've changed all passwords and sorted out a security token on pokerstars making it impossible for anyone but me to log in.

Good job Facebook caught it or the first I'd have known was logging in to an empty account!

Right that's all for now. gotta play a lot this weekend but I have a lot of stuff on but I'll see what I can do.

Good luck all

Funny multi win last night...

Took yesterday off, fancied a break after all the grinding of the past few days but felt like having a multi table tournament session which started around 11:30pm.

Had a load of games looking good but they all seemed to fall by the wayside to daft beats and come about 6am I just had one game left a $4 rebuy. Not the best but it had a $1,300 first prize and $900 for 2nd which would put me level for the session.

Was chip leader for a while then took a nasty beat with 99 v A5 but got into a conversation with two people at my table about being pro. Some other people must have been reading this too because as soon as the final table started I was getting a whole world of abuse!!

It seemed there was a Colombian guy on the final table and he had about 6 friends watching, all talking in Spanish and abusing me non stop. They were also trying to tell the other players how to play me, saying I always folded when someone came over the top of my raises. I called the moderators who did nothing and so the abuse continued.

We were down to 5 and I'd gone from chip leader to last place due to having no cards and every raise getting reraised. And then the magic happened.

I stole a few blinds and made some reshoves that went uncalled. Then weakest player limped and I had AK so shoved from the button. The SB called (this was the Colombian with all the friends annoying me) with AQ, I held and was back up to chip leader.

I then got a bit cocky with the morons on the rail, typed in 'CAN YOU HEAR THE RAIL SING, NO! NO! CAN YOU HEAR THE RAIL SING, I CAN'T HEAR AN EFFING THING!' They went quiet for a bit and then I hit two pair and lost to a set to go back in trouble and they were all screaming at me again.

New chip leader was raising loads so I kept reshoving him and he folded mostly then one time decided to call with JTo and my KQ held to go back to chip leader.

I started to dominate at this point and the morons on the rail went quieter. I then took someone out with KQ v A5, I rivered a flush. This was the guy who's A5 had beaten my 99 earlier so was really nice to knock him out. I had to call his shove as he was pretty short and I'd raised quite a bit and I was now a big chip leader.

I raised soon after with QJs and the Colombian with all the friends went all in with 99. It wasn't much more to call so I did and I rivered a flush to take him out. I was a bit of a dick here and said something like 'I had nothing against you but your friends are all utter idiots so I take great pleasure in knocking you out the game'.

After that it was obvious there would only be one winner. The rail went silent and JazzyFek3000 took down another multi.

It was my 9th highest single game score on poker stars but I didn't enjoy it much due to all the abuse I was getting from the rail so I emailed the VIP team and they banned all their chat!

funs!

I had my first assessment with the personal trainer today, just testing my flexibility and making sure everything works! We start properly on Friday!

Had pancakes for tea tonight, well a very close approximation to pancakes anyway.

Getting back to the SNG grind tonight, shame cos I really enjoy the tournaments, speak to you all soon

Jon

The morality of poker

A friend of mine showed me a news article today

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1375966/My-husbands-obsession-online-poker-gambled-away-1million--idyllic-life.html

If you can't be bothered to read it then some guy basically blew over £1,000,000 playing online poker over a period of about 3 years and is now in rehab for it.

Now to be honest, my concern is not that this is going to happen to me. If I ever started losing long term at a particular game I'm smart enough to know if it's me and can change to a different style and because I'm a long term loser on sports betting I set deposit limits everywhere so can't lose much on it at any time.

A friend of mine who also makes a living playing poker has said that this kind of thing makes him feel guilty. Should poker players feel concern?

Jen once commented that what I did for a living didn't change lives and I joked that it does change others lives, it makes them poorer. These people know the risks involved when they play the games so why should I feel guilty? Does a bookmaker feel bad when someone puts their dole money on a horse? or does a landlord care when come pay day someone is filling up his fruit machines? Of course they don't. The warnings are there and if you're getting addicted there are things you can do.

Every site will let you set deposit limits or even totally exclude yourself from using the site and it's not hard to spot when someone has a problem with gambling. I don't think I could possibly feel guilty from what I do or I just wouldn't do it. To me, the opposition players are just computers. I don't see them as people, it's almost like it's just a computer game to me. And I very much doubt that anyone feels guilty when they get lucky against me.

So how has poker been going? I've been seriously pushing myself to try and get to 300k vpps by the end of February and then 500k vpps by the end of March. It works out around 500 games a day til then which is a lot of effort, around 7/8 hours a day, including weekends. Friday and Saturday I managed 600 games each day and made some decent profit too.

Sunday I only did 360 games, first session of 200 games was a $1100 profit session but at one point I was at $2k up so a tad disappointing. 2nd session was a total disaster. I have to play tighter over the weekends and that set I was very card dead and also ran badly. Ended up $1400 down for the session so it was a losing day but only marginally. Tried to get an early night but woke up at 3am. Played some multis, lost some multis, did the washing up and am about to go back to bed.

I've got an appointment at 5:30 this evening with a personal trainer. I'm gonna try and fit four sessions a week in at the gym. I've noticed the site starts dying off around 2am so I can get up at 10am, go the gym, come back, play 12-4. then have tea with Jen, play again 6-8 (if going out) or 6-10 (if staying in) and then finish with an 11-2 session. Should get me well on track if knackering me out slightly but I can ease down if I can hit 500k by the end of March and that would put me around $50k up for the year I think even if I'm stil breaking even.

Not had much of a social life this weekend so really looking forward to footie and the pub tonight, got a cleaner coming this afternoon too which is much needed, Jen can deal with that though.

Nowt else to report, comments are still moderated but my facebook isn't so comment on that or if you do want to post a comment I can then approve it.

Hope everyone is happy in whatever they're doing

Jon

February so far

Wow, didn't realise we'd been two weeks without an update! Many apologies.

So what has February held so far for me?

Everything started off pretty well, then on Thursday 2nd the site had a server restart. The games which I play were all taken off the site due to a 'programming error' This cost me an entire days worth of play! The software issues continued on Friday morning which meant I lost all of Friday too as I was going up to Lancaster Friday lunch time. I'd planned to play before I went but didn't get the chance. Plus I had to stop off at the magic shop which I financed to have a look round. I even got a little magic trick which I've been dazzling everyone with for 2 weeks now and noone can work out how it's done ;)

Lancaster with my friends was awesome, had a great time catching up, went back to the sugarhouse (student nightclub) The venue itself has barely changed however the music has gone quite downhill, their retro music was 90s stuff rather than 80's but it was mostly current chart and when the biggest cheer of the night was for One Direction we decided it was time to leave.

So didn't play all day Saturday either (Except for a $33 turbo multi whilst drunk back at my hotel) and Sunday I had stuff to do so didn't get to start playing til very late Sunday night.

Got back into it on Monday and everything went great, was about $3k up by Tuesday evening and then DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

It was one of those runs where nothing could go right at all and I lost $3k by Thursday. But in that time I unlocked some bonuses so I got to make an $11,500 withdrawal from the site which cushioned the bad run.

Thursday the site did an update and table ninja wasn't completely compatible with it so I played multis all night, did terribly and lost another $2k. The bad run in the normal games continued the next couple of days as well and things were looking bleak.

Then I tried some more multis on Saturday night to try and get back on track somehow, all was going badly then I got a 3rd in a $109 multi for $2600 and 4 other final tables.

Then I had a few good sessions on the normal games to get a total of about $6000 of the $10,000 downswing back.

I'm now around $3k down at the tables for the year. It's not ideal, but it's not too horrendous either, tomorrow I should unlock another $2600 bonus and then another $4k one on Friday.

After that I've got a ten day spell where I won't get any bonuses so will be working pretty hard to get there as soon as possible.

I've set my monthly VPP targets up til June so that hopefully I can have a couple of weeks off, nice holiday somewhere so here they are.....

End of February 300,000 vpps
End of March 500k
End of April 680k
End of May 860k
and then mid june hit the 1m vpps for my supernova elite, and a $20k bonus.

It's gonna be a massive push til the end of March, gonna have to do 6-8 hours every day between now and then but it's worth it, I'll get around $32,000 in bonuses between now and then.

Nothing else worth mentioning has happened in the past fortnight really. Poker is hard work, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone else really unless you can cope with the swings. I'm still finding the downturns very hard to cope with, only so many times in a session you can watch KK lose to ace rag.

Good luck to anyone playing. I'm pretty confident I'll finish February in profit, I came back from a lot further down in January and the horrid downswing has passed so let's see what happens.

I'll try and update sooner next time!

Jon