The SNE race starts within the next few days. Dreams of the grind cloud my mind, so suffice to say I am ready to be back!



8 months.
880k VPPs.

This should not be too tough right? Initially I will be mass tabling between 1/2 zoom and 1/2 reg tables. 500 zoom soon to come! I do plan on getting my hands dirty and reg battling at the 2/4-3/6 regular tables soon.

I had some fun runs while out on my latest donkament tour: I bubbled the WSOP APAC 10k and FT bubbled a big field ~$1400 in Macau. While I did manage to keep it clean most days, one night I did get a chance to hang with some Philippines peeps and put down a few too many bottles of Red Horse EXTRA STRONG. What Manila lacks in terms of cleanliness, infrastructure, and general rule of law, it makes up for with cute girls who can speak English pretty well and a poppin' nightlife. And I'm only exaggerating by a little bit!



I just landed out here in Taipei and currently I am apartment shopping. I found an adequate one today, so I will likely just be getting that one, because woteva. I am just tryna grind hereeee.

Its been about two months since I put in real online grind so I will be a bit rusty. Catch you on the tables fishcakes!

My initial aspirations in poker were not at all pragmatic. I wanted to play in those big tournaments I spend so much time sweating on TV, to have Norman Chad making stupid jokes about me, to have Mike Sexton judging my play, to be donned with an unfitting poker nickname. The money would be incidental: I did not forsee myself buying fancy cars, watches or houses. My dreams were about the glory of winning it all and the fun of playing a game for absurd amounts of money. When I first started grinding out a small profit in poker, mass-tabling $11 turbo sit-and-go's all those years ago, I did not really see myself ever making it to the level of playing 10k's on TV. At the time I was happy enough to just grind out a few bucks so I could afford to eat out more than my friends and afford to buy whatever new video games I wanted. I crawled my way up the limits in those years, because I did not have much of a focus besides just playing for fun. Everything changed when I hit a monstrous and wholly un-due heater in early 2010.

By early 2010 I had grinded up a decent sized five figure roll playing midstakes cash on Full Tilt. Most of my poker instruction and attention had been focused on NL cash games, but the allure of big scores drew me into occassionally playing a donkament here and there on sundays. I would sometimes deposit via debit card onto stars to flick it in for the sunday tourneys but after a while I got tired of having to constantly redeposit. I traded with someone in HSNL, my 10.1k ftp for his 10k stars. The following weekend I chopped a $100 cubed turbo for nearly $20k. In the next week or two I binked a $100 6max tourney for 10k. After that, second in the Second Chance for nearly $40k. I won the sunday heads up tourney at some point for almost $20k also in those first two months on stars. A month or two after all this pure binkage, I ran deep, but ended up mincashing in a live $5k event. I battled with the best donkament pros out there and I knew at that point I was a favorite in almost any live 'main event'. My experience during this heater ressurrected my donk dreams of the past. I too could be a donkament super star, travelling the world in pursuit of glory and millions.

In the following months, I went to WSOP and travelled Europe to partake in some more live events. Brick followed brick, flight after flight until I found myself back at home, purturbed but not ready to surrender. I put in a ton of time at the tables and took some shots at some big cash games online, all of which did not go according to plan. I had just gone 0/15 in live events and snap-lost every session at 5/10+, despite only playing in games with donkeys. For months the poker gods stagnated me and I became complacent. Why grind 1/2 and 2/4 when I would just lose it taking a shot anyway? I spent days playing Civilization 3, just as I did when I was a kid. I knew something needed to change, so I planned to spend some time travelling, refocusing and formulating new goals. I found myself out in New York in April 2011 and decided to head up to the Mohegan Sun for a donkament. What happened next, in the words of Mike Sexton, "BINGO-BANGO-BONGO!!"

Vast amounts of playgood-rungood flowed from me at NAPT Mohegan Sun 2011. I found myself at a live TV final table and could not be happier to finally be realizing the dreams of my teenaged self. Unfortunately the blinding and unending runhot of V. Selbst knows no bounds and I found myself coolered and outflipped to bustout. The whole experience reinvigorated me. Again I felt my dreams were attainable and if I just put in the time and volume, I could see live donkament success again. Black Friday only semi-phased me, bricking off roughly 15 tourneys during the WSOP phased me somewhat, having several losing months grinding online cash disheartened quite a bit. I did not study enough and I did not grind enough. I met some cool friends out in Vancouver and I spent lots of time going out, eating well and drinking far too often. I lost sight of my goals and I wasted a lot of money. Again I found myself needing time to refocus and enact some real changes in my life. I got an apartment in Sacramento temporarily and spent some time grinding 5/10 in a cardroom out there. The live grind wore on me quickly so I holed up in my apartment with some Popeyes chicken and a 24 pack of rolling rock. 3 days later I a one-way ticket booked for Taipei, Taiwan for the following week.

With funds ever lowering, I knew it was grind time. I played around 300 hours in the next 6 weeks and also managed to put some live donkament volume in! I bricked some tourneys in the Philippines, totalling my streak to roughly 0/20. I binked a nice live score in Seoul and stayed on the cash grind and live tournament grind throught the year. In Taiwan my living expenses were low and I managed to put in 100+ hours on the online cash grind month-in-month-out. All the while I managed to play live events. I've continued to brick live events, while online cash has gone well for me. This about sums up my current situation.

At the moment I have an apartment in Melbourne and I'm sitting here typing this after bricking another ~10 tourneys out here in Australia, bringing my current brick total to 0/24. Any time I try to play higher than 500 zoom I get insta-shit on. My will to grind feels as if its at a new low. This will not be a whine-post, I am just trying to explain my current situation and mindset. I am again at a time in my life when I need to regroup and set new goals. I feel I have been mediocre my entire career, brought about by mediocre grind ethic, mediocre study habits, and lacking the will to maintain a normal life schedule. While I have made strides since starting this blog, its not enough for me. I want greater success on the tables and in life. I want to minimize luck in the course of my progress in poker, because I have seen the ugliest sides of variance now. I could speculate on how different my life would be if I did not lose in every 100/200hkd shot I took in Macau, or if I managed to cash more than ~7% of the live donkaments I've played, but speculating gets me nowhere. I see a course for me that almost always leads me to a decent amount of success at a minimum by the conclusion of this year. Anyone familiar with online poker probably knows where this is going...

I will be pursuing Supernova Elite this year. I had plans to hostel around Asia a bit in the upcoming months, but all those plans are now postponed to next year at a minimum. I will be renting an apartment from this May until the conclusion of the year and holing up for a long grind. I will be expanding my current staking operation to minimize variance (currently staking 2 people.) Live donkaments will still be on my schedule, but I will maintain a fairly strict life schedule outside of those donkaments to ensure I stay on pace for my SNE goal. Brute force and will alone are enough for massive success and I will prove this. You cannot run bad for months on end when you play 10000 hands/day.

I have tested out SNE pace for a bit and I can win on the tables handily even playing roughly 10k hands/day at 1/2. I maintained that pace for rougly 3 weeks before live tourneys called and I had some real life emergencies that followed that. Everything is going better in life and I don't forsee anything that could...

I have not reflected on my chess days in the longest time. Recently I noticed the Curtains chess videos on here and it got me thinking about it again. I got started into chess a few years too late, as would later be the case for me in poker. I am a deeply competitive person and chess allowed an outlet for that part of me. My chess journey began in 2001, where I started chess in middle school. I attended my first rated tournament sometime in 2001 and I began attending Stockton Chess Club a year or two after.

In the spring of 2002 a local high school hosted a rated chess tournament. At the time I was not taking chess seriously. I played at school against friends at the chess club, but not much beyond that. It goes without saying that we were all almost criminally terrible the game: Most employed the 1. a4 2. Ra3 insta-deploy-rooks strat as their primary opening. I had independently developed the double fianchetto, which had catapulted me to the top of our club leaderboard. This upcoming tournament would not be my first rated so I had an idea of what was to come, but I felt prepared this time. I had a year in practice schooling the halfwits at my chess club, I was bound to outperform my 0 for 5 score at the prior years State Scholastic Championships! Beyond that, my self-worth and identity was tied to winning at chess. Another horrific showing would be beyond humiliating.

Tons of Chinese and Indian kids bused in from the bay area to lord over and destroy all the locals in this tournament; that was pretty standard. These kids' parents could afford to send them to chess classes and get coaching, whereas us inlanders preferred to spend our discretionary income on big TVs and paying off 10 year old credit card debt with min-payments. This was a five round tournament and after my first four rounds I had a nice round score of zero. 0. Livid. Losing the final match was not an option. I would do anything to avoid the unthinkable outcome.

Luckily the way chess tournament matches are determined is by your current score in the tournament. Thus, I was paired against some other scrub with a zero score. When we met and got the board set up for the match, me and the kid hit it off pretty well. “At least we aren't nerds!” we said, trying to laugh off the pain and sorrow of relentless Asian chess pwnage. The match got underway and the chatting waned to silence as the game got more intense. This was the chess cripple fight of the century, a true abomination with pieces constantly being hung by either side. Towards the end, I felt as though I were on the Titantic, destined for failure. I had managed to hang a few more pieces than my opponent. Hurriedly, I scoured the board for some means to victory, some way to matrix-dodge this imminent iceberg of humiliation and regret. You could see the pain I felt in my heart on my crumpled face. Then I saw it. And the plan I would have to execute externally to the chess board to make it all work. My god.

I've attached a diagram of what I remember of the position. I am white. Illustrated in red is my preschool-level plan to win this game.


I would sac my knight to where he could very obviously take it. Then I would pause a second, and then whisper under my breathe “FUCK...FUCK” just loud enough for him to hear. Then once he takes the bait, BANK RANK MATE HIS ASS WITH MY ROOK. Its the most obvious angle of all time but desperate does not fully describe how I felt in that very moment. Now I had a hope and a plan, a chip and a chair. I took one deep breathe and made the move quickly. I paused and waited for 3-5 seconds, “FUCK! FUCK!” I said, so loud that everyone in the surrounding games started to stare at me. What a moron I am, I've made this so obvious, I thought. I could feel the sweat on my forehead and I tried to look aloof. My opponent looked at me sympathetically for a second. Then back to the board. He gave off a mini-shrug and slid his rook out to capture my knight and then pressed the clock. I grabbed that rook turbo jammed him onto that a8 square CHECK AND MATE. The duped kid was just distraught, and he could not look me in the eye after the game was done. I had done him dirty, but hey, who came out with the score. I am almost certain he quit the game forever after that. GG

Authors note: I was not proud then and I am not proud now of this. I just think its damn funny. Attached are some chess pics from when I got better and actually won some tourneys. I have a ton more great stories but I'll save them for later.

Yo sup guys, its been a while since I've updated. I spent June between Japan, Vegas, and all over California. I bricked some live donkaments and got stuck a few k grinding live 5/10 but I wasn't sweating it too much. My siblings were having a boring summer so I brought them down to Magic Mountain for a day, then sent them home on a bus and drove around southern California visiting old friends I haven't seen in a long time. Inadvertently, I attended a lesbian house party in San Francisco, ate chipotle every day, had my radiator explode while on the Grapevine, left 10k in a bag at my friends house, partied at a Coop in Berkeley and finished it off with a mini family reunion/my Dad's bday party/my cousin's bday party. Its hard to ask for a better couple of weeks. Oh, and I didn't even mention the stuff that I did in Japan!

When I left California I headed out to Macau again, dropped some more $$$ on some donkament. I made it back to Taiwan in early august and started grinding out some bonuses I have on party. Pokerstars finally decided to let me back on their site, which was nice, so I'm on that ZOOM grind. 1/2 Zoom is pretty soft in my experience and I'm having a blast playing it. Sometime in early august I started staking this guy I met through poker friends. He's a huge grinder and put in a ton of volume so I was happy with that. I also took 50% of some buddies in some Legends of Poker events out in LA. I wasn't following their progress so much, but I got a message on facebook saying they both FT'd the $550 HORSE event! One was first in chips and my other friend was 3rd. I was pretty stoked about that, but managed my expectation: At the time of the FT I was just getting to bed (time difference between taiwan and california obv) and told myself that if one dude got like 8th and the other got 2nd it would still be a great outcome. I woke up the next day and checked my FB messages, FIRST AND SECOND PLACE BOOOOM! It was not a huge field, but I still made a decent amount of money from the bink. I headed back to Macau at the end of the month, the main reason being that I have to leave Taiwan every 30 days for a visa run and its nice to mix in some live cash grinding after ZOOMING all the time. Snap-blastoff 8k on a bunch of stupid hands. I feel I played well. Then I find out that the guy I was staking (not the legends of poker guys, other dude) took my 10k I had in the stake to some 200/500 LHE tables and blasted it off. So it goes.

Swongy past couple of months but I cannot complain. Most of the time I am having a blast and loving my life. It also makes it easier when you get one of these every now and again

The party continues in the upcoming months: I have some friends coming out to Asia to visit and I'll be travelling around some more. In the meantime, waiting for them to make it out, I'll be grinding it out as hard as ever, zooming, donkamenting, and mixing in some live cashaments as well. May the grind be with you. And also with you

Updated with pics!

Walking around Akihabara in tokyo I saw this pokerstars sign on a building, so I went up to figure out what was going on. Turns out the place is a play money casino with maids as dealers O_O The dude who owns the place recognized me because of my live donkamenting and asked for a picture, lool.

Taiwan livin'.

Drunk Jenga in Isla Vista, CA

Chillin with the fam

For some reason I have been having trouble getting my own mortality off of my mind. I try to imagine what it will be like to cease to exist, but (obviously) its impossible. Then I think about if I did somehow manage to not die, the idea of living for infinity despairs me just as much as dying. Why do I have to waste my time contemplating the unknowable? If I could just Matrix blue pill this bullshit I would in a heartbeat.

I have found a way to temporarily escape this mental hangnail: pokers. I have been grinding with almost all of my free time. I took a few days off to hit Macau, but besides that I have been on the tables 8+ hours/day.


At least I can win at poker O_o

I feel like I'm in a constant state of mid-life crisis. Poker has been going well for me but I feel as though (and the general consensus is) that making a living playing poker will not always be possible. Thinking in terms of lifetime $ev it probably makes the most sense to ditch poker and start concentrating on something else. Beyond that, finding some other passion could provide greater funEV/lifeEV than playing poker longterm.

I love playing games, competition and logical thinking. These personality characteristics make me well suited for being a professional poker player. The main goals in my life is to avoid obligation to stupid shit I don't care about and fun. Being a poker pro, I achieve both of these life goals more so than I could have ever imagined. Its something that so many poker players seem to forget, something that gets lost with the monotony of the grind, and its something that a friend recently had to remind me of: Poker is fun! Inducing a 3 street bluff or finding a new spot for a c/r bluff is fun. Value-towning donks and going deep in tournaments is fun. Experimenting with new lines and trying to determine how your opponents with respond to them is fun. Money is nice but only as a means to avoid doing shit I don't care about.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, I feel as though I could play poker every day of my life and feel fine about it. This is how I feel now, but its the 30 year old Vincent that I'm worried about. I am also concerned that I am set up so well in this comfort zone of poker. At times I think I am missing out on the breadth of life, but then I remember that most other professions, most other regions of the world and ways of living totally suck. The fact that I feel that way about so many other ways of being makes me disappointed in myself and wary of my comfort. Have I really found the best way to live a life? Or something near it? I have to doubt this. Should the quality of life be judged by how comfortable someone is? I need some sort of expansion of consciousness to feel that it should not be judged in that way. Is it worth it to seek out said expansion of consciousness (live alone in the forest, hike the Andes, build schools for children in Nepal??) Or should I just keep living the same life I am now and quit when it starts to be unfun?

no
fucking
clue

been luckboxin it up in Korea, made day 3 of this donkament with 505k. 3rd in chips of 16 left, avg is like 350k, field was a lot softer earlier, but I'm def a solid favorite still. I can't get the internet at the venue to work on my phone so no twitter, but I'm getting decent coverage on pokernews. ONETIEM

Really wish I were winning more, but eh, its going alright.


Could bolster up the WR a bit if I participated in the rampant tableblocking, insta-sitting out and insta-join-table script usage. Harangutang recently made a new thread in the Zoo regarding these issues so hopefully we can convince Party to make some changes. I wish people would just play a few fucking hands against some regs, because at certain times (peak hours) when there are no open games, the 3-4handed game gets filled within minutes usually. I end up just playing regs who are better than me HU on the 6max tables for far too long while playing too many tables. It probably is costing me a bit of money, sigh. Now that I'll be playing mostly 2/4+ I should also be making a bit more in the coming months hopefully.

Out to Japan in a couple days so I'm done for the month. Wish me luck for the donkament I'll be playing out in South Korea also. peace

When I moved out to Canada to grind my mindset stunted me. To truly crush poker, one must be 100% present in every decision. For whatever reason, I was not. When my results were lacking, "Oh they were just always at the top of their range," "What am I supposed to do when they just win every flip and I get set up every hand?!?" The truth of the matter is that the game has changed. We all know that as time goes on everyone gets better: regs give off fewer bet sizing tells and don't miss value as often and the donks make fewer obvious desperation bluffs and limp/call K3s less often. I was clearly a favorite in the 1/2-3/6nl games I was playing in but I had not maintained the same edge I had had in the months and years prior. I was falling behind and I did not realize it.

The disparity between my expectations and results left me feeling apathetic and I lost the will to grind. I spent my last month in Canada watching Breaking Bad, eating Doner kebabs and waiting to drive home. I lived in Sacramento for a month(wanted to be near home but not at home, Stockton is one of the most crime-ridden and depressing places in the US D: ) and I put in some hours on the live grind. After about 80 hours of breakeven live grind I decided that life was not for me (again, obviously a huge favorite in those games but wtf@25 hands/hour, how are you ever supposed to converge doing that.) I decided that if I were to continue with poker, I would definitely have to continue online and I booked a flight out to Taipei.

I had withdrawn a bit to pay for some expenses and I had ~5k on my party account that I decided I would just run up at 1/2. Over my next 50k hands, I broke even. The problem: My game was not 100%, I wasn't considering all my options at every decision point, I wasn't thinking about the increased rake at the bbj tables and was playing very low EV games, I was not scanning the donks' every move to find out each of their unique quirks and leaks (same for regs I suppose.) I was being lazy and I expected to just crush it from square one. You can't do that in poker nowadays, not even at 1/2nl.

I now realize my flaws (and I've been running a bit better ) and my results have improved. My results are still below expectations, though, because I don't just expect do alright and to get by. In the past weeks I have been thinking about what I need to do to be at the top of NLHE online and I have come up with a million ideas for changes to my game. One thing I have come to realize is that although regs may be making fewer mistakes, they still suck at thinking. Most people have a default game and stick to their gameplan except under the most ridiculous circumstances. This is not how to play poker for maximum profit, this is a recipe for breakeven ******** grinding (which is how most regs make their money, surprise surprise.) This strategy of consensus may be the closest we have to a GTO approach, but you have to remember that a GTO strategy will not yield the greatest profit vs any opponents. Unorthodox and exploitative strategies will prevail against the vast majorities of regulars if implemented by a fully present and thinking player. For those looking to crush the midstakes in unlimited texas hold them today, this is the path.

While 2011 may have been a terrible year for poker, with my new perspective on poker and a sense of ever-improving my game, I am feeling confident. I'll dump a few pics from my phone onto here, for fun.


Breckenridge, CO in february

La Paz, BCS in May

you may recognize some of these guys! vegas in june

haircut in december :-/



some pics from my messy ass apartment, setup and pics from the roof.

Enjoy and gl at the tables all

Thanks be to the Frenchies for saving Full Tilt Poker, my roll there and of course rush pokers. I cannot wait for FTP2s launch and to get back on that RUSHHH grind crushing at 1700 hands/hour. The past few weeks have been tumultuous. I've since left Canada, spent some time grinding the cardrooms out here in Sacramento and headed out to Vegas for a weeklong grind trip. As for my plan moving forward: Miami at least for a while, considering Taiwan following that. I'm going to need a solid spot to live from day1 of ftp2 until the WSOP. To maximize grinding ability I need to cut down on the travelling and get a set place to live and a concrete life schedule.

I don't have much else to write about... I've just been hanging out and wasting a bunch of time, since I don't enjoy live poker very much and I can't play internet poker. Some things that I'm looking forward to include http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=336 random hot taiwanese chicks, RUSHHHING, chipotle obv. Although I doubt they have Chipotles in Taiwan so I'd better OD on it while I can.

LIVE WELL AND PROSPER