Dear Leggo,

This is probably a longshot, but does anyone happen to know anything about how cash games are in San Remo with regards to stakes/amount of tables/level of players etc.? Your input would be greatly appreciated

Cheers.

Uni is not for me I don't think. the lectures are good, but I don't care to do their dumb ass assignments and I don't care much about all the 19 y/o being 19 y/o with a few exceptions. It such different worlds, I don't particularly enjoy student life especially when surrounded with people that are not a level with me. It sucks up a lot of energy and together with the shitty-ass weather wears me out. My biggest problem is determining whether I am just a pussy and push through or throw the towel. Spiraling down in apathy sucks. I feel best when meeting old poker buddies which unfortunately doesn't happen often. I want to travel, I want to meet random weirdo's, look around on this planet, watch it function, I want things to be less static and predictable. I feel caught up in shit I don't care about, I actually start to recognize people at the metro station grinding there 9-5 jobs and its horrible!
Everything is going to be fine though. It finally stopped snowing a few days back and I am going to study the shit out of Forex and make an amazing comeback financially through it after funding my trading account with poker money from Italian fish. I win marginally at 100nl zoom and it's embarrassing. Maybe I should switch sites even before going to Italy. If someone knows where/what I should play let me know! Let the summer start already!

Ps: pro cycling is heavily underrated and Paris-Roubaix was a fanatstic race today!

6 weeks deep into the new studies, hardly skipt any lectures, went to all tutorials and fairly certain I picked the right studies. This, I would consider rather positive, however not a fan of the whole studying thing yet. I knew the change was going to be immense after doing jack for 5 years and before I started I anticipated there was going to be a lack of motivation as soon as the newness of the experience faded and fall/winter was coming. It happened earlier than expected. After 3 weeks I was in trouble, and only because I knew it was coming I was able to cope. bad guy brain doesn't care for you to succeed at all. I made myself go to uni and didn't allow myself to fall to far behind. Being behind seems like another great excuse to quit. As for now it is still pretty swingy. When wrestling through public transport in rush hour or talk to old travel buddies I hate life at times. Then again when attending lectures with people I get along with it's all fine, fine, just fine.

It's funny how many of you are unwilling to talk about poker to randoms, while, at the moment I am always tempted to do so anyway instead of boring ass school shit. It probably got to do with myself being insta bored when talking to the 6000th backpacker that is taking a gap year from school. 2 days ago I happened to get into conversation on the train back home with a pro snowboard girl who was doing world cups, x-games etc. Let me tell you this; there is no way I would rather tell her about the awesome new studies I am doing, and the region of specialization I am choosing then telling her a fun travel/poker story. Seems fair to say; I miss the old life millions. The old life made me extremely lazy though, maybe even more so then I realized. Vincie feels waaay to content about himself when its Friday and he didn't do anything that week except for not missing the whopping 20 hours of class. I blame poker.

To improve things, I am going to be a little more active now that the first shock on my system, caused by waking up before 9 am all the time and expectations of me being somewhere at a set time is wearing off. For starters I am picking up lifting again, re-introduce poker in my life, gonna stop playing dumb games on the smartphone*, move to the Hague at some point hopefully -since it would save a lot of time + also connects harder with "student life".

That would be all.



*download "Epic Raiders" it's the nuts

.

Thanks to everybody who commented on my decision time blog a couple of weeks ago, its much appreciated. I choose indeed to go back to university and study something called International studies. Its pretty cool I think and suits some of my interests quite well. You also get to learn a new language wich is sweet cause I want to keep improving my Spanish since I picked some up while living in Mexico.

Anyway, I think for me the time is right to move on from a professional poker career even though this month has been decent. Upswung in the beginning of the month nicely to my desired 100nl BR and kept winning modestly from there on. Also managed to put in roughly 100k hands again for the 4th month in a row now. But how my overall feeling about a random day is so influenced by poker results is retarded and something I rarely had before. So yeah maybe it should not have been that hard of a decision after all.

To reward myself for my worldclass dicipline and my responsible choices I went ahead and looked up RobinRipper up for a mid-week mini vacation in Italia. Robin, Morton and Alies picked me up from the airport in Rome. Morton is also a poker player and super easy to be around and his sweet girlfriend Alies who sings a lot. We had dinner in one my most favorite cities in the world before heading to their house 2 hours away from Rome.

I cant say anything other then; its relaxing and beautifull here sometimes a walk, def. swimming pool everyday and today Robin and myself went for a scenic drive to a lake nearby with the red hot chilly peppers blasting through the speakers.













I got to go, minitrip is almost over, flying home in like 24 hours already after eating an ice-cream in Rome or something, but first dinnerrr time.

GG life as pro poker player.

File: HH20120820 Triangulum #12 - $0.50-$1 - USD No Limit Hold'em.txt
PokerStars Zoom Hand #84978883509: Hold'em No Limit ($0.50/$1.00) - 2012/08/20 7:54:49 ET
Table 'Triangulum' 6-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: yarik83038 ($106.96 in chips)
Seat 2: vrnMike ($123.69 in chips)
Seat 3: HERO ($471.26 in chips)
Seat 4: dedo1972 ($57.69 in chips)
Seat 5: PussySinger ($121.32 in chips)
Seat 6: VILLAIN ($377.30 in chips)
vrnMike: posts small blind $0.50
HERO: posts big blind $1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to HERO [Js Jd]
dedo1972: folds
PussySinger: folds
VILLAIN: raises $2 to $3
yarik83038: folds
vrnMike: folds
HERO: calls $2
*** FLOP *** [Jc 4c 4s]
HERO: checks
VILLAIN: bets $332
HERO: raises $136.26 to $468.26 and is all-in
VILLAIN: calls $42.30 and is all-in
Uncalled bet ($93.96) returned to HERO
*** TURN *** [Jc 4c 4s] [2h]
*** RIVER *** [Jc 4c 4s 2h] [Th]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
VILLAIN: shows [9d Td] (two pair, Tens and Fours)
HERO collected $752.30 from pot

university <-> poker

I crashed and burned pretty bad in poker recently due to mentality, but there is so much money still to be made, and I dont think I would make those same mistakes again. It feels almost silly to throw a skill away that still has so much money in it at least for now. I am sure I ll be able to figure stuff out when poker dies at some point anyway.

But given I dont enjoy poker all that much anymore, the clear advantages that a degree would mean in the future, learning new skills and do something new/else besides clicking buttons right from the start makes university a huge option too. Biggest counter argument is that the lifestyle of a travelling poker player is super nutted.

These are the arguments in a nutshell and the decision Ive been putting of to make last few weeks. Might need to add that I am 23 already. and another one; I really really hate the winter months in Holland that I cant move away from when I am studying.

July was not a great poker month, but not too bad either when I think back of the first 3 sessions where I insta dropped 30 bi and couldnt find the motivation to keep grinding. Ended up Playing 90k hands winning 10bi + RB and a good bunch of Sklansky bucks. unfortunately 650 short for a 6k roll and the number I set for myself to play 100nl again. Hopefully I pick those dollars up quickly in the new month, sick and tired of 50nl, been long enough now.

At the start of this month I sat down with myself to come up with a plan to turn stuff around. I needed to finally accept the new situation and take those homo stakes I am playing seriously. I needed to adjust my game more suited for those stakes and put in VOLUME. I am kinda happy to blog that I sticked to that plan and shipped a few thousand dollar for the first time in like forever.

Final score: 65k hands 25nl + 45BI / 65k hands 50nl + 25BI


most of the 50nl hands

These results, are better than expected, also because I ran well. Still there are a few things that bother me/need to change:

1: My win rate almost dropped with 50% at 50nl, sample is not big enough but still bad for my confidence.

2: I started to play worse again towards the end of the month. I think the main thing is calling of river bets too wide. I always used to be kinda stationy but people at micro stakes zoom tend to have more value. This particular issue has def. been a problem since I started moving down. Maybe I just ran worse last part of the month who knows, not being entirely sure sucks.

In general Zoom is kinda boring, I read someone saying it is going to be the future of poker. I really don't think its true and god do I hope it's not true. For people who actually enjoy poker, Zoom is the devil. It takes out so much of the fun elements; the battles you have with regs, coming after a random stupid avatar or pounding and pounding on donks, Or maybe seeing someone open for 10bb, you dont even know how exploit that shit, cus you dont know how he plays his other hands. Zoom is a monotone grind where you play a ton of your hands in a vacuum and make changes to your game based on the mass. There is no other way since nobody is adjusting to you either. If the mass doesnt 4bet bluff ever you are basically bluffing with hands like AK and JJ cus people are reluctant to stack of pre with anything less than KK/AA. you can 4bet a lot with shit and get away with it because the mass is 3bet/folding. I 4 bet a ridiculous amount atm and yet I cant stack off with 99 bvb. This is true for 25 and 50NL it may or may not be different at 200 or 500nl.

There is obv pro's to it like easy to play a lot of hands, no breaking up tables etc, etc. It just makes us lazier than a lot of us already are. ah well halleluja zoom .

I am posting this, because my blog is almost a diary, not to entertain leggo

Dear blog

Back from Mexico for a good 3 months already came back to have close to 0 expenses and build my roll back up quickly. So I went ahead and won like 10 dollar in those 3 months. Amazing results yooo. I had so much freedom the last 3 years, I always bought whatever I wanted, did whatever I wanted and went where ever I wanted, the contrast couldn't be bigger from the way I currently roll. I have 42 cents in my bank account and 10 euro in my wallet, I am trying to hold on to my 10euro as long as possible so I dont have to cash out from my small Stars roll.

Its so fkn tilting to see the WSOP coming, to see travel buddies go new places, miss weddings and being unable to join them because I am/have been such a moron.

In the meanwhile I just play poker 4-6 hours a day wich is unheard of in my book. I played 110k hands last month and I am at 60k hands at the 11th. of this month. If only I was so work happy when I played stakes worth 1 vvp per hand>SNE is easy! The only reason I am blogging right now is cus I ve got nothing else to do since the power cord of both of my laptops broke this morning.

I Made my brother pay for a new cord and I would ship him some money on Stars where we found the first deposit bonus offer for 600us, To illustrate my current situation and did the math on grinding my SN status vs clearing that bonus plus some stellar etc. on his account. To cut a long story short I am going to play 50-100k hands on his account for a whopping 400 dollar difference in RB. el oh el.

MLIA!

Where can I find the results of the HU-turbo-SnG-adventures of a friend of mine that plays on Stars?

That's right after almost 8 months Mexico its time to go back to Holland, not because I want to although its nice to see friends and family but because I've been spending to much money and winning to little in poker for the last 14 months. Especially the last couple of months were difficult, trying to do well in something like with your entire lifestyle on the line is hard and I am not gonna lie, I failed pretty miserably...I don't remember how to do successfully do this thing lol, kudos to passed Vince yo. Anyhow financially forced, I am currently mid-journey leaving the beautiful country of the United Mexican states behind along with a bunch of good friends and my sweet girlfriend.

Currently waiting at San Diego airport for a flight that brings me to back to Europe.

I flew from La paz to Tijuana and took a shuttle that brings you across the border to downtown San Diego. It was so very busy at the border though, and I still need a permit I figured it was gonna be close me making or not making it in time also beacause I expected some trouble for technically overstaying in the USA last time I was there. At some point after not moving for a good hour, I climbed on top of the van took of my bag, and tried my luck on foot. After wasting almost 2 hours and only 45 mins more left to get across. I still didn't have my I94 form still a ton of people in front of me and a bum sitting right next to me eating a banana without peeling it. -like wtf- I was sure I wasnt gonna make it. Especially after the one the guards taking the the "Bitch-please-snap-over" when I am asked over/under 1 hour.



Maybe he was lying/being a dick with me since he was the biggest asshole ever but somehow I went to first in the permit line within 30 mins. official in there let me of super easy + he gave me this super pass which allowed me to skip all the other lines to help me catch my flight . Muchos gracias! It still being a sweat the taxi driver went bananas and luckily enough I made it to the airport in time only to find out my plane was 2 hours delayed



Might be a ramble in the end, I got to run, almost home!