One of the more useless things I've ever received from poker was Full Tilt's original black card. I'm not exactly sure why they sent out an actual physical copy of it - basically it was just a credit card made of titanium. Sounds kinda cool, but you couldn't actually do anything with it, and given it weighed more than an actual credit card, carrying it around made no sense whatsoever.

I thought the idea had faded into the abyss along with Howard Lederer when Full Tilt went busto. Alas, I was wrong. Starting on July 1 the program is coming back in full force. While I have no idea where my original black card went, or whether they will be sending out more of the over-hyped paperweights, I actually am very excited to see the actual program returning.

The biggest reason I'm so excited is that in the months leading up to Black Friday I was grinding out 200k hand months 6-8 tabling Rush Poker. Over the course of this time I amassed over 4 million Full Tilt points and never spent them on anything. Luckily for me, the points were still credited to me when Full Tilt reopened, and at their current market value are worth roughly $20k.

Currently I'm able to buy $5k bonuses from the Full Tilt Store but I need to play a good number of hands before I can clear the bonus. Unfortunately for me, 2/4 Rush runs pretty sparingly these days and midstakes in general on Full Tilt doesn't offer too many tables, so its pretty tedious trying to clear the $5k bonus.

As a Black Card member though, I'd be able to instantly convert my Full Tilt points into cash without having to play through to clear the bonus. Saves me a good bit of hassle and it'll be nice to finally see a big chunk of money I had tied up from Black Friday, since the US government still appears to be in no hurry to return my actual balance. So anyway, even if it means grinding out some 1/2 Rush in the coming weeks, it'll be well worth it for me to get up to the required level so come July 1 I can once again be a proud member of Full Tilt's most exclusive club.


Poker has been treating me quite well lately. I've struck a pretty good balance between playing and coaching so that I'm not getting burnt out playing and not getting spread too thin trying to coach too many players. Here are my results since I decided to cut down on my number of tables:






I definitely feel like I'm one of the top players in the 500NL Zoom pool. I really wish 1000NL Zoom would start to run as I really like the format and convenience of Zoom but would like to test myself out at a higher limit. I don't really like playing 10-12 tables of normal games so its rather hard for me to try to just play a bunch of 5/10 tables instead.

Now that I've got my feet wet with coaching again and a few of my students are wrapping up their time with me, I will be looking to take on some more new students. Since my time is a bit more filled up this month I'm tentatively looking to charge $250/hr. If you'd like coaching but feel like this is too much for you, contact me and I can see if I can work something out with you, whether its a long-term discount, group coaching with another player of a similar skill to you, or something else similar.

If you'd like more info about my coaching style I wrote about it in my last blog post, and you can always PM with any specific questions.

When I googled an image for the Black Card, I came across this as well:



So on that note, I'll stop.

This year I've struggled a bit finding the motivation to put in super high volume, which is frustrating considering I had a 6-8 month stretch last year where I was consistently putting in 150-200k hands/month 6 tabling Zoom. I've gone back and forth on whether I should just suck it up and force myself to play a ton of hands at 200-500NL, or play fewer tables and concentrate on playing mostly 5/10, jumping into 10/20 when the lineups are good, and 4 tabling 500NL Zoom when there aren't better higher stake games running.

There are definitely many positives from grinding out a high volume of hands at lower stakes. The downswings aren't as big in total dollars and don't last as long in terms of days. There's also a big “guaranteed” amount of money in the form of rake back, especially if I were to hit Super Nova Elite. On the flip side, playing so many tables can be incredibly mind-numbing. Having so many decisions to make constantly makes for a very mechanical style, and often the nuances like timing tells and specific opponent reads go by the wayside. It can be easy to get into a rut and stunt your growth as a player.

For myself, I spent a good deal of time in the last year working to improve my overall gameplan. I feel like I've come a long way and have a much better overall perspective and macro understanding of a balanced strategy. However, I often still have to consciously think of the best action while playing, as I don't think I'm at the level yet of unconscious competence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence).

Basically when I'm playing too many tables and my mind gets overworked I fall back into old habits, which worked great in the past exploiting weaker players. In today's games, though, it is much more important to be more balanced and there are more and more strong opponents who pick up on areas in your strategy that are weak. When 6 tabling Zoom I'm not always playing against these strong players, but auto-piloting and not playing optimally really continues these bad habits when I do want to play in higher limits.

Long story short, this month I've cut down on the number of tables I play, playing a max of 4 Zoom tables or 6-8 normal tables. I've also tried not forcing myself to play, only playing when I'm motivated and feeling mentally focused. Although this has turned into playing a lot of shorter sessions, the results have been great and I feel like I'm really playing well. Hopefully I'll start to find myself developing more mental stamina and playing longer sessions. Luckily for me, Zoom is pretty much the perfect game for playing many quick sessions, and with 5/10 Zoom launched a week or so ago it has the potential to be a go-to game for me.

And because a blog isn't complete without pics, here's some results:

This month:




This year at midstakes+:





Coaching:

Due to playing several shorter sessions I've found myself with a bit more free time lately. While I've used that time to do some studying/hand reviews and some Leggo videos, I would like to get back into taking on some students. I haven't coached anyone in around 18 months, but I do have experience, having coached 10-15 students in the past.

In the past I've found that the students that get the most out of coaching are those that have an idea of what they want going into coaching and are committed to doing work outside of the sessions. A couple students I've had just wanted a quick fix, or some sort of magical 1 hour session where I'd watch them play and spot all their leaks and suddenly they'd be crushing the games. Needless to say, it isn't that easy, and to be honest I think live sweats are probably one of the least effective uses of time for a coaching session.

So if you are interested in actually putting in the work contact me and I'll do my best to put together a plan that will be specifically tailored to help out your areas of need. It could be something where I prepare a specific topic-based lesson on something abstract like game theory, or helping you walk through CardRunners EV to figure out a strategy for defending against 3-bets when out of position. Basically the more detailed you are able to be in what you are looking to get from coaching, the more valuable it will be.

If you are looking for coaching but have no idea where to start, I'd recommend spending an hour going over your database with me looking at your stats to spot situations where I think you have glaring leaks. Then I'd recommend recording a short session of yourself playing and write out any questions you have on spots that come up that you are unsure how to play. I think that is so much better than a live sweat because A)you can send me your questions before hand so I know what your thought process is like and the areas I need to address most and B)Essentially you can control what is discussed by making sure your recording has spots you want to talk about. I feel like those two things will give you the most bang for your buck and would be a great start to helping you improve.


Because it's been a while since I've coached anyone, I'm going to start my rate at $175/hr. Looking through the coaching thread on 2p2 at who some of the coaches are and what they are charging, I honestly think this is pretty cheap relative to what others are charging, but I'll see what the demand looks like and adjust from there.

I get asked a decent amount what my winrate is, probably somewhat in part due to the fact that I play a lot of Zoom and thus get a relatively large sample in a relatively short period of time. Even though I've played almost 1.5 million hands in the past year, I still don't have a strong idea. Last year alone I had separate 200k hand stretches where I ran at 5bb/100 and 0bb/100. I'm extremely positive that my true winrate lies between those two numbers, but that isn't really saying a whole lot, since almost all regs are going to also fall between the two.

So what changed from winning at 5bb/100 and breaking even? Well I think a great deal of that was variance - running very well when winning and the opposite when losing. Besides that though, I think there clearly was a difference in quality of my play. For me at least, I tend to go on these type of streaks, where when I'm winning I continue to win and then when I lose my play deteriorates. I believe much of that is due to the absolute nature of poker - you either win the hand or you don't. Even if you make a correct call on the river considering the pot odds, you often will lose the hand more than 2/3 of the time. Subconsciously that has to weigh on the mind. If you run into enough situations where you call and lose, sooner or later you'll start to alter your calling frequencies, either folding too much because you "know" your opponent has it, or calling too much out of spite because you're "due" to be right.

In that regards I think there's such a fine line between being a breakeven/marginal winner and a big winner. People think there's a huge skill difference between someone winning at 1bb/100 and someone winning at 4bb/100, and while there often is some truth to that, I don't think the difference is nearly all that big in most cases. Very often it is the player who is able to stick to solid fundamentals while running badly that will be the bigger winner, while an equally skilled player in terms of hand reading and strategy who gets thrown off his game will win considerably less.

Consider these somewhat frequent spots at 1/2:

Minraise button and get called by big blind. Fire cbet and double barrel with air and get instacalled twice, often indicating a marginal hand (due to the fact that if opponent has strong hand he will usually pause to consider a raise). River is an overcard to the board, so even with a zero equity bluff opponent will probably fold enough. If you've been snapped off the last 3 times you tried to bluff you may be a little gun-shy about trying again and just check back, but if you fire $35 into $50 and opponent folds 50% you're making 3.75 big blinds.

Same scenario except now instead of bluffing you have tpgk and value bet. You don't expect villain to raise given timing tell but he does raise, from $35 to $150. He's very passive and just doesn't turn made hands into bluffs that much, but instead of thinking about pot odds you're frustrated that you have to fold a good hand and just assume he can be bluffing "sometimes" so you call. Even if he's bluffing 30% of the time you still lose almost 5 bbs by calling.

Last example, you have trash on the button that you'd usually fold, especially if you're autopiloting. However, if you're paying attention you notice two 18 vpip players in the blinds. If the SB only defends 15% (either by calling or 3betting) and BB defends 25%, you have an automatic +EV minraise open not even considering the equity you'll have when you see a flop. By the same token if you have a marginal hand you'd normally open but there are 2 players in the blinds 3betting ~20% each, over a 3rd of the time you won't even see a flop if you are folding to the 3bet. For marginal hands its gonna be hard to make up losing 2 bbs that often.

Simple fundamental stuff like this can easily add or subtract 1-2 bb's from your winrate depending if you are focused or not.

Another somewhat underrated aspect of your winrate is table selection. For some reason, there's often this perceived notion that once you have an estimate of your winrate it is somehow static and all you have to do is play enough hands to eventually converge upon it. Obviously this isn't true - even at Zoom there are vast differences throughout the day and week in player pool strength. A not great but rough estimate I use at Zoom is looking at how many players are 1-tabling the game. At 500nl it can often vary from ~8-20% of the player pool. Given that 1 fish/table equals 16.7% at 6max, when the pool is at the low end in my opinion its gonna be really hard for even good players to get much more than 2-3bb/100, given that in Zoom there generally aren't the huge whales that play 50% vpip since they can quick fold hands.

I'm not entirely sure of the purpose of this blog - but I know I'm often guilty of making some fundamental mistakes so maybe I'll look back on it when running bad and it'll help. And maybe a little reminder that making the cool c/r bluff once every few thousand hands isn't as important as the mundane stuff no one likes to talk about that come up much more often.

2012 was an eventful year for me. My wife and I made the decision to travel around Europe, so we got to see a ton of interesting places and things. The only downside, if you can call it that, was that since we were constantly moving around it was kinda difficult to really get into a rhythm playing poker. Throughout the year we ended up being in 13 countries in 12 months.

It all started when we flew out New Years Eve 2011. We were headed to Malta to live with a few friends for January and February, but had a 12 hour layover in Paris. Naturally we stored our bags at the airport and explored the city for a few hours.

The Louvre:




We got to Malta late that night and met up with our friends. The next couple months we saw a lot of cool sites – I really had no idea, but Malta has a lot of history, some of it dating back thousands of years. Poker wise I expanded my game a good bit, playing a lot of HU and a little bit of PLO, games that my roommates played that I didn't have too much experience with. It was my first time living with people that played poker, so it was nice to have others around to bounce ideas off of. Looking back, I'm definitely glad for the experience, although in retrospect it might have been better if I had spent those months grinding on Stars, since once Zoom came out that was my primary game and I came pretty close to SNE from April-December.

View in Malta outside our apartment:



March we left Malta and split up the month in 3 different places: Rome, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. It was my least productive poker month by far due to sightseeing and some internet issues in the apartments we had set up. However, we loved the food in Rome and were lucky enough to have Patrick (Beans on Leggo) show us around Amsterdam so it was still a good trip overall.

Katie and I at the Colosseum:



Ben, Patrick, and I at the Heineken museum:



Sagrada Familia in Barcelona:



April-September was spent in Manchester... I wanted someplace not too touristy so I could really focus on grinding. Once it became clear the 500NL Zoom games ran fairly consistently I decided to concentrate all my play there, usually 6 tabling the 500 and 200 NL games. It was a fairly uneventful 6 months, though we took several short trips while we were there: Scotland, London, and Dublin which were all great:

Loch Ness in Scotland:



London:



Checking out Maria Kirilenko at Wimbledon:



Guinness Factory in Dublin:




Poker during Manchester went superbly... I started April way behind SNE but was slowly catching up. I was getting in lots of hands and running well which made life great.

United game at Old Trafford:



Unfortunately after moving to Vienna in October my luck started to turn and I went on a sizeable downswing. It seemed like every time I sat down to play I couldn't win. It became very hard to get in volume, and late in the month I made the decision to cut down on volume and focus on quality play over quantity. It cost me SNE but overall I think it was the best decision. I got to enjoy my last 2 months in Europe without worrying about grinding all day long.

Vienna:



November was another fairly low volume month while I was in Prague. Besides poker, it was a fun time as Prague was very interesting to explore. In addition, on Saturdays we would often stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning to watch Notre Dame football on the internet. It was very exciting seeing them rise to #1 in the rankings when they weren't really expected to compete at a very high level this year.

Prague:



In December we made a quick stop in Munich before heading back to Canada. We moved back into our old apartment that we spent 6 months in during 2011. It was great to be back amongst familiar settings and I settled back into the grind. I was able to get in significant volume before Christmas and ended the year on a nice positive note.

Neuschwanstein castle outside Munich:



Great beers from Hofbrauhaus:



Rolls Royce at BMW museum/factory:



I had some laptop issues throughout the year, but the overall tally on Stars was 800k VPPS and ~$110k in profits. Adding in ******** and a little play on some other sites and I was fairly pleased with how the year went. After traveling so much I know now that my best results tend to be when I have a good routine and a quiet, interruption free workspace. That obviously wasn't always possible traveling and living with other people, so this year I'm really looking forward to some quality grind time in Canada.

I'm not ruling out SNE for 2013, but as of right now I've been splitting up my play a bit across a few different sites, game selecting from 3/6-10/20 while playing 500nl Zoom when waiting for games.


I also hope to be more involved with poker outside of just playing. I'm in a Skype group with a couple other good players and hopefully we're gonna get a decent amount of work done with Cardrunners EV. I'm also planning on doing more videos for Leggo this year, a lot of them will probably be theory based. I'm not sure if I will be coaching at all, but I do hope to spend some time giving back with some strategy advice. I know when I was starting out I improved a lot from reading the forums on 2p2 and these days its extremely hard to get good advice. To that end, I would like to spend some time each week in the Leggo forums responding to threads.

I've also created a poker only twitter account - @IrishmanDan07. Hopefully I'll keep it pretty active with interesting hand histories and poker related thoughts. Also feel free to send me hand histories and I will get around to giving some quick strategy advice as much as I can.

It's been a while since my last blog, so I'll just write out some updates/thoughts:

I've been living in Manchester, UK since the beginning of April. I like it here, although people weren't kidding about the weather and food not being great. Luckily Irishwife is a great cook so the food issue isn't a problem. It's a big enough city, but not so big that there's a ridiculous amount of things to do/see as there is in London. Which is good for me because I've been grinding a ton lately. The past couple months I've probably been playing something like 40-45 hrs/ week which may not seem like all that much, but when you're 6 tabling Zoom it's pretty mentally draining.

The reason I'm playing so much is that I'm really trying to make a run at SuperNova Elite on Stars this year. I'm at 450k vpps right now so I'm a bit behind pace, but the first few months of the year I was splitting my play up across a few sites, so I came into April with only like 60k vpps.

I'm heading home August 16th for a little under a week for my cousins wedding so I'm basically going to be grinding non-stop until then. The wife is heading back to the US this Thursday to see her family/help with wedding stuff so I'll have 20 days or so to focus on nothing but poker. It's going to be pretty boring but I'd really like to work hard now so I'm not too stressed out at the end of the year.

Besides all the volume I've been playing, I'm also very happy with my results. 6 tabling is pretty hard since I don't feel like I can always make the best play on each table due to there being so much going on. Despite that, here's my results at 500nl since June:



It works out to 4 bb/100 EV adjusted. I've also played over 100k hands at 1/2 during this stretch, and I'm just a little more than breakeven there. I tend to focus on the 4 tables of 500nl and autopilot the 200nl tables. If I wasn't going for SNE I'd probably just 4 table, but I think I'll probably need the extra 2 tables to make it. So if that means breaking even and grinding out some extra ******** at 1/2 I'm fine with that.

I had a few more things to write out, but its Happy Hour time on Stars, so gotta get those VPPS....

Been playing a ton of Zoom lately and just thought I'd share a couple fun hands from the past few days:

I hope this was a misclick by my opponent, otherwise I'm pretty sure he can see my holecards:

PokerStars - $5 NL (6 max) ZOOM - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BTN: $2,248.57
SB: $925.04
BB: $241.78
UTG: $522.64
Hero (MP): $500.00
CO: $697.21

SB posts SB $2.50, BB posts BB $5.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $7.50) Hero has 6 7

fold, Hero raises to $15.00, fold, fold, fold, BB calls $10.00

Flop: ($32.50, 2 players) T Q 3
BB bets $20.00, Hero calls $20.00

Turn: ($72.50, 2 players) 5
BB checks, Hero checks

River: ($72.50, 2 players) A
BB checks, Hero bets $50.00, BB calls $50.00

Hero shows 6 7 (High Card, Ace) (Pre 33%, Flop 18%, Turn 20%)
BB shows 9 8 (High Card, Ace) (Pre 67%, Flop 82%, Turn 80%)
BB wins $169.70


Really wasn't sure what to expect on this river, but certainly not this:

PokerStars - $2 NL (6 max) ZOOM - Holdem - 6 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

Hero (BTN): $771.70
SB: $110.82
BB: $765.06
UTG: $205.46
MP: $135.48
CO: $547.61

SB posts SB $1.00, BB posts BB $2.00

Pre Flop: (pot: $3.00) Hero has J A

fold, fold, fold, Hero raises to $4.00, fold, BB raises to $16.00, Hero calls $12.00

Flop: ($33.00, 2 players) A 3 J
BB checks, Hero bets $23.00, BB raises to $82.00, Hero calls $59.00

Turn: ($197.00, 2 players) 3
BB bets $146.00, Hero calls $146.00

River: ($489.00, 2 players) Q
BB bets $521.06 and is all-in, Hero calls $521.06

BB shows T 7 (One Pair, Threes) (Pre 39%, Flop 4%, Turn 0%)
Hero shows J A (Two Pair, Aces and Jacks) (Pre 61%, Flop 96%, Turn 100%)
Hero wins $1,528.32


Overall it's going pretty well. I'm getting in a lot of volume and am starting to get into some interesting spots with a lot of the regs who I play with on a daily basis. I definitely notice a marked difference between the level of play at $2.50/$5 and $1/$2. A lot of times effective stack size can be 200-300 big blinds so there can be some tricky and fun spots which you don't get to see as much when playing only 100bbs deep.

The past month and a half I've been branching out from my usual 6max grind. The guys I live with here in Malta play HUNL and PLO so I've started to learn those games as well. Not only does it give me more games to choose from, but the process of learning has been extremely helpful for playing 6max as well. Talking over hands and strategy with the guys has really made me think about how I play in a lot of different spots and has definitely improved the way I think. Being somewhat of an "oldtimer", I think I parts of my game were a bit stagnant - just continuing the way I always used to play even though in today's games some of that play was suboptimal.

I'm finding I'm actually enjoying playing a lot more these days, and I kinda wonder why I didn't start to learn these games earlier. Being a very math-based technical player I think heads up is naturally geared towards my strengths. Breaking down hands, figuring out the optimal game theory play, and then adapting that to specific opponents is actually sorta fun for me. I find when I'm in a long heads up match time goes by so much faster, whereas when I was playing 6 max I would often have difficulty playing any more than a couple of hours at a time.

Hopefully I can continue to improve and begin to move up in stakes. Its certainly pretty inspiring to be living with someone that played midstakes not too long ago and now is a regular at nosebleeds. Just seeing how he approaches the game and the work he puts in has been invaluable to me. I definitely recommend talking poker with someone better than you if you haven't already.

Anyway, here were my results from last month. It's a lot of 1/2 and 2/4, with some .5/1 in there while I was learning the games, and a few shots at 3/6 and 5/10:

I'm about to head to the airport to leave for Malta. The plan right now is to live there for 2 months, do a bit of traveling in Italy, then live in England for 3-6 months. Barring any unforeseen circumstances I likely won't be back in the US until at least July. Even though I've lived in Canada for the last 6 months, leaving now just seems a bit different, likely because Toronto was just a short drive away from America, and well lets face it, Canada is super similar to America in a lot of ways, just with higher taxes and milk in bags.

I'm really excited for Malta though. Irishwife and I are splitting a big 3 BR/3 Bath apartment right on the water with 3 of our friends - including another married couple which is great since the women will be able to hang out while the 3 guys play poker. While it will be somewhat weird to have roommates at this point in my life it should be a ton of fun. I've always been somewhat of a poker loner in the sense that I haven't had a group of people to regularly talk about strategy/hands/etc so poker-wise I think this will be a great experience.

I'm sure 2011 was a mixed bag for a lot of players, myself included. I started out the year playing almost all Rush Poker on Full Tilt and was probably one of the biggest winners through Black Friday. Luckily I had cashed out a decent amount by the time everything happened. Moving to Canada was definitely a very difficult decision but its one I'm glad we made. Even though poker didn't go as well as I had hoped, I'm still optimistic about the future of the game and definitely still love playing even though some days I hate it. I'm sure that makes sense to anyone that plays a lot.

Well I guess I gotta jump in the shower so I'm not the smelly kid on the plane. Hope everyone has a great New Years.

I know we've got some problems, but.....









































































































http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.co...about-america/

Poker-wise November was pretty tough. After getting off to a very hot start the last 2/3 of the month was breakeven. I played fairly well just couldn't get hands to hold up.


I played pretty much an even mix of 1/2 and 2/4. I'm pretty proud of my play overall, although I do think I did some dumb things toward the end of the month as I continued to run badly. Still, with an EV adjusted winrate of 4.85bb/100 I think I did pretty well on the whole.

I definitely see a marked difference in the level of play at an average table between the two limits. I think there are certainly times where my EV is at least twice as high at 1/2 than 2/4 so I'm doing my best to put my ego aside and drop down to 1/2 when the 2/4 games aren't that good.

It would be really nice to run hot in December. It's my last month in Canada and while my time here has definitely been productive, its a bit frustrating that I made the decision to leave my home in North Carolina to play poker and then proceed to run 50 buyins below EV during my time here.

So here's hoping for some Christmas rungood!