2012 Review and 2013 goals....

Hello everyone,

Happy new year to everyone, and to celebrate the new year I've decided I'm going to ressurect this blog and try and keep it updated a lot more.

Firstly, 2012 results.....

I made SUPERNOVA ELITE! 1,000,000 vpps. I completed on the 27th December doing the final 12,500 vpps in one day over 20 hours. I ended the year on a horrible downswing which was due to a few things, playing too many tables, playing too many hours, too many regs on and poor card distribution but I still finished the year with $30k profit (More than any other fifty 50 reg who made SNE) and had $100,000 in bonuses so you have to admit that's a pretty good year by anyone's standards BUT, I want more!!

So, what does 2013 hold for me?

I am going to aim for 2,000,000 vpps. I know I can do this but I have things standing in my way this year such as getting married in September and then honeymoon and also quite a few trips away throughout the year. I'm going to aim for the 2m, if I end up with only 1.5m vpps then so be it.

I'm going to try and place less emphasis on profit this year, my ego is too large to cope with losing but I need to get out of that mindset and just focus on the VPP grind. I'll be mostly playing the fifty 50s but will have some MTTs and some 18 man and 45 man SNGs in there as well which are better for profit.

Outside of poker I'm going to try and get to the gym 3 times a week, gotta be looking good for the wedding. I'll also be going to every Everton home match and having plenty of weekends away and nights out but still think I can acheive my goals.

I'm also going to be posting on the two plus two forums much more this year. It'll be a nice distraction when not playing which will hopefully stop me sports betting and might also help me make some decent contacts within the poker industry.

That's all for now, I'm not starting poker up again til about the 7th of January but may update between now and then.

Good luck all,

Jazzy

Need a bigger online profile.....

I haven't updated in six weeks, that's disgraceful and I do profusely apologise! I have little excuse except I've been playing a lot of multis so less free time and I've been playing lots of bingo and online slots in free time!

So what's happened?

March was my best profit month ever in the fifty 50s! I beat last April by $500 but it came right down to the wire, I lost a bit in the multis and only earned just over 100k vpps for the month which was a bit disappointing.

I've been doing more things with my life though which accounts for it. I've signed up with a personal trainer for 2 hour sessions a week and I had a four day break in March when Jen and I went to London to watch the swimming trials for the olympics and stayed with some friends down there which was a great time.

I've also decided I need to treat myself to something, this may sound arrogant but it's not meant to. Basically right now I'm making more money than I ever imagined I could and I feel I deserve some kind of treat and I'm not into cars so I've decided to buy two VIP memberships at Goodison for next season.
Gets me into every home match, 3 course meal, free bar, champagne on arrival, box seats and NO RESTRICTED VIEW! which every Everton fan will tell you is immense! Gonna be taking different friends with each week as well cos feel like I wanna treat my friends cos I'm nice like that.

Took my dad to the Arsenal game a couple of weeks ago and realised I definitely wanted to go ahead with it, and as a bonus I'm getting tickets to the Sunderland game on Monday and also FA Cup Semi final tickets!! woo.

What's been happening with poker this month? Played a lot of multis, I've actually won 6 or 7 so far in the past week but only one has been especially decent which was a $33 rebuy where I won for $3,200. I've started April up over $3,500 which is fantastic but I've actually started every month that well this year and January and February ended up just as small profit so can't get too excited just yet.

Regards VPPS, I'm well down on where I should be, currently heading for about 1.5-1.6m whilst my target was 2m. It's about $70k less in bonuses if I fall that far short so I have to decide if I can make that up by winning lots of multis, I had Sunday free this week so had a bash at the million. I won 5 seats for it! so got lots of Tournament Dollars. Finished about 500 places off cashing after AK lost to TT but I'd won three flips to get to that stage so can't complain really.

And the big news is that I've applied to become a team pokerstars online pro. It's unlikely I'll be accepted as I don't really post on the forums as I don't have time but I have this blog and my fb and twitter and the fact that I'm a serious grinder who also has some pretty decent multi skillz so you never know! Fingers crossed. Plus I'm prettier than most poker players so will look good for their publicity shots!

Yesterday was Jen's birthday, got her an iPad, she carries it round with her everywhere like a child with a blankie! quite sweet really!

Hope everyone is well, and please post lots of positive comments so pokerstars can see how utterly amazing I am :)

Jazzy

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

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!