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Xanta
Well it certainly feels weird to be posting on this dusty blog after not really touching a computer for 4 months, but I'm at that stage where it's past midnight and I'm too tired to play and too awake to go to bed so I might as well write.
I spent the summer bouncing about the country and beyond in work and play. I feel like a bit of a tool posting about a blue collar job on a poker blog, but god damn it it was fun and grinders don't get out enough so why not.
I spent May through July tree planting in Northern Ontario and Alberta, Canada. If you haven't heard of the job I don't blame you, it's an at times hellish bush job that features 10 hour days in any weather and putting over 3000 trees a day in the ground at 8-11 cents a piece. The job is incredibly physically demanding as you're essentially racing the whole day trying to put in as many as possible, while dealing with the bugs (unlike anything any one of you have seen before, I guarantee), the strewn trees and logs in the land, 50 lb bags on your hips and the fact that your 'home' is a tent 3 hours from the nearest hot shower. Here are some pictures for a visual.
Two planters at work (the bundle in his hand holds 20 trees)
Poplars ****ing suck
Day off tomfoolery
Aside from the money ($15k in 3 months isn't bad for a college kid) the best part about the job was that your bosses and co-workers are pretty much all students with a little bit of that hippy vibe in them but still party pretty hard. It's a weird feeling taking a day off in a tiny town and putting 50 people in a bar that usually has 15 fat old locals in it. I can't do planting justice in a length that anyone will want to read so I'll stop trying, and leave it by saying that unless I'm playing 10/20 by next summer I'm going back in a heartbeat.
I wound up the planting season in the Canadian Rockies so I went down to Fernie BC to visit friends and family and to celebrate what had been a great summer. I was going to stay with my cousin and her boyfriend there, but my Greyhound got in at 2am and I had no idea where to go and had noone to call. Having 3 months' worth of training in vagrancy, I just huddled up in my sleeping bag round the back of a church and slept until morning. Filthy hippies  . I spent a little over a week mountain biking, rock climbing, and hiking Mt. Fernie which was very cool. By this point I was in phenomenal aerobic shape from the season and I was riding better than I ever have, which felt really gratifying. Fernie has world class mountain bike traisl; brutal, sustained climbs and crazy fast downhills. I took my cousin and boyfriend to a nice sushi joint as a thanks for letting me stay at their place and hopped the plane back to Toronto.
I barely had time to unpack my stuff at home before I was off again with my family to go down to Costa Rica for 12 days. I love my family and spending time with them, but this was especially cool as usually our trips are spent canoe tripping in Ontario or backpacking in BC. We were going to be pampered!
Aside from a month in Tanzania I'd never been south of Colorado, so I really didn't know what to expect from CR. I was both impressed and dissapointed by the country. CR was the first central american country to really catch on that eco-tourism could be a big deal, and they have their act dialed now compared to everywhere else in the Carribean. Tourism is the biggest industry there by far, and with that comes the unfortunate side effect of totally drowning and legitamite culture that you can get excited about when going 3rd World. That being said, we still had a wicked time rafting, snorkeling, horseback riding, chilling in hotsprings, mountain biking beside active volcanoes, walking through cloud forests, and fighting off monkeys trying to steal our bags on the beach (seriously!). Few more pictures because those are always fun.
Myself and my sister chilling beside the Pacuare river
Aggressive monkey at the beach in Manuel Antonio
My 50 year old mom surfing!
Two sisters and myself enjoying the beach.
In closing, I had the best summer of my life. I made more than enough money, traveled a bunch, and put on 15 pounds of muscle. I'm happy, healthy, and really excited to start school in a few days. And I did it all without playing a hand of poker. Funny, huh? |
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[RANT]
Given the fact that I'm still stuck somewhere between the gall bladder and colon of variance for my 6max game and that my confidence is correspondingly at an absolute low, I wanted a change. Everyone is posting in TEH BBV about making $$$CRAZY STACKS PHU$$$ playing the new fangled HEADZZ UP UNLIMITED HOLDEM, so I decided to give that a try. If losing at limit is like slow suffocation, and losing at no limit is like accost-you-in-an-alleyway-and-stab-you-in-the-face pain, then HU can only be described as being viciously sodomized in the back of a chip truck by an overweight Serbian named Uros with too much chest hair and a passion for tight fitting clothing and hair grease.
Post-Readthrough Edit: Sorry if you're Serbian, I know this guy and he is my #1 pick to not get sodomized by.
I had never lost 5 buyins to 90/75s in 50 hands before, nor had I ever allowed a recreational 20bb shortstacker to run up a >500BB stack on one table, but believe me, it makes you wanna **** your pants and throw up at the same time. I played mouthbreathers almost exclusively, the kind of donks FR nits have wet dreams over. I had 1 winning day over just over 10kish hands (which I posted about, lol curseaments) and lost lots and lots and lots.
This is my year so far. Doesn't look like a winning player to me, looks like some ****ing breakeven robotic TAGfish mongoloid who's not smart enough to wipe his own ass because daddy married his sister. That's me.
-500 PLO, -a few K coaching, - a bunch donkaments, I don't even care. I just want to win at something.
I mean, 80k breakevens can happen I guess, but being a low volume (read: life outside of poker) player this thing has been going on for a soul crushingly long time. I have to ****ing pay rent. PokerEV doesn't work for PT3 databases but last time I checked I was >$15k below all in equity on the year and I'm creeping closer to 20 right now.
The only good news in this entire post is that I'm quitting poker cold turkey for 4 months in a week and living in the ****ing North Ontario bush, where my EV is < a quarter what it would be if I grinded pro, but I'm doing it anyways because YOU CAN'T ****ING LOSE MONEY PLANTING TREES AND THERE'S NO ****ING INTERNET WHEN YOU LIVE IN A GODDAMN TENT. CANT GET ME NOW ANURAG HAHAHAHAHA
I HATE YOU POKER AND I HOPE YOUR HOUSE CATCHES FIRE WHILE YOU ARE ASLEEP.
I AM GOING TO GO STEP ON A KITTENS HEAD.
[/RANT]
Okay, I'm probably only like 60% as angry as the above would suggest but goddamn it that was cathartic. As for what tree planting is, imagine a resourceful capitalist wandered upon a hippie protest on some university campus and tricked them into working in the middle of nowhere doing a job so hard in conditions so bad they used to have to get prisoners to do it. |
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So I got the itch. I'm pretty bored and uninspired by 6max right now given my performance in the last 3 or 4 months, so I decided to try something new. Being a degenerate action junkie (not really, I have no gamble  ) I swapped some bucks with Pureklas over to FTP and decided to try to build up a roll playing 15 buyins at NL100.
The first day I lost 1.5 buyins and was feeling a little uneasy. Today, not so much 
I ran very hot, mostly just draws hitting at the right time and TPTK holding against TPGK. I played 53 people today and of them I think that 4 or 5 were decent. The rest varied from very bad to atrocious, and I varied from pleased to doubled over laughing. One opponent in particular was quite good and aggro; I played him in a very fun match for 200ish hands while recording a video to swap with a buddy from 2+2 who's also learning heads up. Finished up -3.25 in the match, that bastard. Learned a ton though.
I absolutely loved playing, even when losing in a match. The decisions are way more interesting and they come thick and fast. When I'm grinding 2/4 it can be exciting just because the games play so aggro, but 1/2 is just so incredibly dull I can't stand it (especially when I lose).
I'd really like to become a competent HU player so I think I'll play probably 20k hands or so and see how it's going, then consider getting a coach. I made some observations today that I think I can work on:
1) I cbet too much. This is really a function of having hundreds of thousands of 6max hands under my belt and not much else. I know this is a leak because I played a bunch of people who cbet too much today and c/ring them liberally on the flop shows a large profit.
2) I don't vbet thin enough. I played a few droolers today who folded to <20% of continuation bets and I didn't make correct adjustments against them (raising bigger preflop, potting streets for value, vbetting 3rd pair no kicker)
3) I don't 3bet enough preflop: around 9.5% preflop, most of the time for value. This is because...
4) I don't get 3bet pot dynamics HU. In aggro 6max games, you have to be more willing to defend your opens and shove over cbets in 3bet pots with gutters, overs, back door draws, whatever. That's not too tough to master, you just need to learn where and against who, and then shove flops. In the HU games, I was getting lost OOP because the SPR for a typical HU rr pot is much larger than the 6max equivalent. So this is a part of my game I can't copy and paste from 6max. I kinda shy against running big bluffs in 3bet pots at NL100 too.
5) I'm not so hot OOP. Following the SSNL HU vids here the gameplan so far has been to play very tight OOP and just bring the rukus from the button. Against decent opponents, that's not good enough for me. I experimented with c/ring a lot of flops against certain opponents which was cool, but generally I struggle riding marginal made hands like MP middle kicker to showdown. I know I shouldn't be folding it on the flop because pairs are hard to make HU, but turn and river spots can get sticky. I might post some hands.
So that's what I'm gonna work on for now. I'll mix in HU with my 6max play and see if I can get my newfound rungood to transfer. |
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Won today for the first time in April (not actually, but I almost paid for my coaching session so I'll take it). Took me till 3am to pull it off, but god damn it I made it, ship the $225
I played two interesting and similar hands in my coaching session today that I promised myself to look over afterwards, so I might as well do that now. Both of them deal with hands that are too strong to fold where we get raised on the flop.
Villain in the first one was unknown.
Party Poker, $1/$2 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 5 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter
CO: $200
BTN: $552.10
SB: $140.51
Hero (BB): $200
UTG: $205.75
Pre-Flop: A  J  dealt to Hero (BB)
UTG folds, CO calls $2, BTN folds, SB calls $1, Hero raises to $12, CO calls $10, SB folds
Flop: ($26) J 4 6  (2 Players)
Hero bets $18, CO raises to $42, Hero calls $24
Turn: ($110) A (2 Players)
Hero checks, CO checks
River: ($110) K (2 Players)
Hero bets $60
Preflop is marginal but whatever. The flop raise looks really FOS here and obviously I'm never folding. The question is whether to 3bet or just call here. Calling has the advantage of allowing him to continue his bluff. In this situation my coach reccomended 3betting because we need 2 streets of betting to get the money in, and being OOP we can't control if a bet goes in on the turn or not so we're just left firing a 2/3 pot bet on the river which is obviously inferior to taking all his mobnies. Of course I don't listen to my coach so I called.
The turn check is standard. If I donk there I think he folds a J sometimes and it's a decent card for him to fire again if he's feeling spewy. Board comes bad on the river and I think he'll shove KJ anyways, so I bet an amount that I think a J will call. He called with A3 for a bluff turned showdown hand and MHIG.
Hand 2, villain was kinda tight but played weird and aggro
Party Poker, $1/$2 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 6 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter
UTG: $144
MP: $256.55
CO: $169.51
Hero (BTN): $415.75
SB: $206.75
BB: $310.55
Pre-Flop: Q  K dealt to Hero (BTN)
UTG calls $2, MP calls $2, CO folds, Hero raises to $12, 2 folds, UTG calls $10, MP calls $10
Flop: ($39) K 3 2 (3 Players)
UTG checks, MP checks, Hero bets $31, UTG folds, MP raises to $70, Hero calls $39
Turn: ($179) 4 (2 Players)
MP bets $174.55 and is All-In, Hero calls $174.55
I kinda wanted to 3ball here because of the drawyness of the board but my coach convinced me that call intending to snap-get it in on any non club turn was better because of our position and ability to shove on cards where our equity against semibluffs skyrockets. Of course we get the advantage of allowing villain to continue to bluff again, the only real disadvange is we're left in a real tough spot when a club peels. So turn is good and I call, he flips 88 and two outs me. Sigh.
The crux of the analysis in both these hands is that I have to decide right away that my hand is too strong to fold. Since I do that I have to forget about the sets in his range because nothing I do can change them. I have to tailor my line to maximize EV against the non-set parts of his range and plan ahead for different turn scenarios.
Oh, I'll throw this last hand up for head asplode value
Party Poker, $1/$2 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 4 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter
UTG: $337.34
BTN: $88
SB: $194.55
Hero (BB): $229.50
Pre-Flop: 8 8 dealt to Hero (BB)
UTG folds, BTN raises to $8, SB calls $7, Hero raises to $32, BTN folds, SB calls $24
Flop: ($72) 4 3 8 (2 Players)
SB bets $162.55 and is All-In, Hero calls $162.55
Turn: ($397.10) 7 (2 Players - 1 is All-In)
River: ($397.10) 6 (2 Players - 1 is All-In)
Results: $397.10 Pot ($2 Rake)
SB showed 9 5 (a straight Five to Nine) and WON $395.10 (+$200.55 NET)
Hero showed 8 8 (three of a kind, Eights) and LOST (-$194.55 NET)
And I like pictures so here's another from the Mills last week.
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Ship it.
Beautiful weather on campus today for the first time since fall. Girls are back outside and looking fantastic, people playing football/frisbee/whatever all over the place. Got to the crag for the first time this year and I'm 1000x better than in the fall which feels great given the work I've put in at the gym. After that we just slacklined and hung out on the grass all afternoon. Total life high right now.
Some photos I shot today:
Ugh, just realized how distracting the heinous sculpture and lamppost in the bottom one are, balls. I have a ton to learn about photography. |
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Edit: Sadly this isn't an April fools blog
Last weekend was really fun, which was nice given the exams that are just around the corner. Friday I went down to Toronto with my friend to catch the Raptors basketball game (ez win over Knicks) and then hit a bar to watch the end of Davidsons last NCAA win. Stayed with the parents overnight then back home to Kingston in the morning. I did some work on Saturday and then went to the Kingston Symphony which was pretty cool. Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky, Bolero by Ravel and Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. I'm a bit of a classical music fish but it was still quite nice especially given my growing interest in classical guitar. Sunday was the last day of my partner and self rescue course for rock climbing. We learned some pretty cool emergency techniques including how to climb a thin rope with nothing but a bootlace and a carabiner. I love being outdoors with friends and climbing is the easiest way to do it during the school year. Much fun.
On the poker front, I hit the 40 Buyin mark on my downswing which is needless to say less than cool. Thankfully 10 of them are at NL200, but whatever. A hard drive crash in mid February means I'm missing the 12ish BI I was down at NL400 beforehand, but that's up on 2+2 if you really need to convince yourself for some bizzare reason. The fruits of my labor:
I'm pretty tired of losing. |
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Figured I'd give this thing an update and see if I can make a commitment to posting here regularily.
EMO STUFF HERE
Poker stuff first. March has not gotten better, it has become worse still. The games are sick sick sick good, probably the best I've seen them in the last 3 months for some reason, but I continue to lose. This is March so far, 90% NL200, 8% NL400, 2% higher
I've been playing easily the best poker of my life at the beginning of my sessions, but maybe 30% of sessions have ended with me playing very very poorly (but not monkeytilt yet). I don't feel like a losing player, but sometimes I'm not so sure. Unless there's a massive turnaround in the next 10 days, the first 3 months and 60k hands of the New Year will be breakeven.
School has been going really poorly as of late. My sleep schedule has been atrocious and I've been missing a lot of class. Combine that with an overwhelming sense that my program is very wrong for me along with the soul crushing apathy that accompanies that lack of motivation and you've got a recipie for poor performance. I had a midterm two days ago that I had studied very very hard for, then misread my schedule and showed up for it one period late. Buh-bye 20%. Pretty frustrating as I've been a 90+ average student for all of my high school and university career. No one to blame but myself though.
I don't think that poker is interfering with school (as well as other things) in terms of time commitment especially as I've only logged 17k hands this month, but I'm god damn certain it has emotionally. After a bad losing session I find it near impossible to move on and interact normally socially or be productive with anything else. The money matters very little to me; I'm a student with a tiny monthly nut, pretty much no expensive vices and tuition has already been paid for. My only explanation of it would be that I hate losing at things I try hard at, and money is the way that I keep score in poker. Enough of this **** though, it's depressing.
EMO STUFF OVER
Climbing has been really rewarding recently. I've been taking a series of partner and self rescue courses recently that are really interesting. The idea is to teach you what to do in an emergency situation, like your partner getting knocked out by a falling rock 250 feet up a route, with a minimal amount of gear. Kinda fun and really useful stuff. I also got elected to the club executive last weekend in a junior type position which is sick and will really let me get involved a whole lot more. Top that off with sending my first 5.10d yesterday and I'm a happy camper when it comes to climbing.
To end on a happy note, about a week ago I tried pot brownies for the first time and really enjoyed the experience. The high was different than that of normal inhalation and took much longer to set in. We split the pan below between 3 people and it had about 5g cooked into it, more than enough for our purposes. About 15 minutes in I noticed a definite increase in tactile awareness. 30 minutes in Old School came on TV and the movie couldn't have been more perfect for our purposes. Watching Will Ferell take a tranq dart to the neck was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Around an hour in I became really interested in textures and started feeling everything: skin, hair, clothes, the floor, whatever. Apparently my housemate came home and watched me rub my hand on the couch for 30 minutes. 2 hours in the most intense stuff started rolling in. It felt like someone took a tight plastic balloon and started rolling it really tight down my body from the top of my head. I could still breathe fine; it just felt like my skin was being stretched down over my skull and slowly down over my face, my neck, my shoulders, then my arms. The come down was nice and I slept for a long time afterwards. Totally mellow experience and one that I'd like to try again.
Proof that drugs support communist. ARE YOU A COMMUNIST BILLY??? |
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Greetings poker goons, welcome to the first blog of an aspiring 6max grinder. I certainly hope that this blog never gets read since no one should be subjected to the creative writing of an engineer, but in case you have made it this far don't say you weren't warned.
My name is Will and I'm a 19 year old Applied Physics student at Queen's University in Canada. I started playing about 18 months ago after playing some home games and stumbling upon 2+2 through the SomethingAwful forums. Privy to this wealth of knowledge I threw $50 online expecting to take on the world despite having read 3 2+2 threads and having understood none of them. Needless to say I busted my first fifty quick snap, read more, threw on $200 and haven't looked back since. My roll has bounced around from Fortune to Full Tilt to Party where I spend the vast majority of my time nowadays. I've played every stake from NL10 to NL200 or 400 where I now reside save for fun fish chasing ventures up to NL2k (we don't talk about that day). I'm confident that I'm one of the best NL200 players on Party right now (fastest special olympian ) with a nice 6+BB/100 winrate over my last 70k hands there.
I'll get this out of the way right now: This post is here for me to vent. The last 3 months have been horse****. I've been working real hard to push through to NL400 since the New Year and have been more or less throat raped by the variance train. I'm writing this today because my NL400 downswing hit 30 buyins a few hours ago, along with a nice little 10BI downer at NL200 to boot. Nothing at 1/2 phases me anymore because I've played and beaten the limit for long enough to not flinch at variance, plus I'm constantly reassured by everyone's horrific play. At 2/4 though, the confidence in my game is completely shot. 2+2er Lefort wrote an excellent blog post about tilt and confidence and described a 'mental fog' that decends onto you when emotion starts clouding your judgement. At lower stakes the fog starts to set in when I'm about 5 or 6 particularily heinous buyins down, and it's no problem as I easily quit and come back the next day. At 2/4, the fog has been setting in sooner and sooner, and now as soon as I lose my first medium sized pot I'm not playing my A game. I'm embarrased at how mentally feeble I've become.
When people talk downswings, the poker community usually dispenses a few suggestions and tips for recovery.
Take a break
I went on holiday in Fernie BC for two weeks in the middle of February to do some skiing. Went on poker money too which was nice because I've never really done anything extravagant out of my roll before.
Move Down
After I dropped my first 20 BI at NL400 I moved back down to NL200 and murdered. Played 20k hands and won just shy of 30 BI, as well as opening up my game a bit getting my W$WSF up to 47 like all the cool kids on 2+2
Keep working on your game
I post heaps of strat on 2+2 and just released a video that got really solid reviews. I've been working with a killer coach on and off since November who's said I'm 'overqualified' for NL200 and as good if not better than his other students who beat NL400. There's obviously still room for improvement in my game though so I'm just going to keep at it.
Try another game
This is one I haven't tried yet. SNGs have absolutely zero appeal to me, and if I tilt this bad playing 6max cash there's a very real possibility I might reach through the computer screen and strangle my opponents if I play tournaments. I should really look into moving a chunk of my roll to Stars or FTP to play some HU cash, I think it would be a nice change.
Work on something other than poker
The last 3 months have seen me really start climbing more than recreationally and I've been really excited with where it's going. Yesterday at the gym I flashed a 10c which I'm thrilled about given that I started climbing like 5 months ago. I feel strong and I'm really excited to get out once the snow melts and start to learn more.
So that's that. I'm not really sure where to head from here but just keep on trying, or maybe just play NL200 forever, or maybe just stop. Despite my success I'm not sure that poker has benifited my life on the whole. How much is the money worth? What's the price of me being able to go out and have a beer with my friends without being pissed over a bad day at the tables? Do I even like the game any more? I think these are all questions poker players don't ask themselves frequently enough.
Hopefully my next blog won't be such a downer and will instead detail the $$MAD DOLLERZ$$ I'm raking in at MSNL!
Cheers,
Xanta |
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