havent't blogged in over 9 months. all is well on the poker front though. It's just that I came to the conclusion that 90% of all blogs are people whining about how bad they run. Not me....

The only reason I came back was to publically set a goal for myself. Up until my birthday in ~ 3weeks time I want to play 100k hands. Not really concerned about quality of hands played, as long as I break even that's ok. Basically, I feel that the only thing that is holding my poker career back is the ability to seriously grind.

So lets see what sort of numbers I will be able to put up in 3 weeks time then...

Hi everyone,

so it is done now. I moved from London to Berlin and will support myself solely by playing poker.

My January has been interesting so far. Initially, I started out on a -15 Buy-in downswing at NL 200 or for the non-poker crowd reading this I lost 3000$. In retrospect, I put too much pressure on myself to show up with good results because I wanted to impress my parents/family who are of course somewhat sceptical of this poker thing. Of the downswing, 10 buy-ins was just normal poker stuff, losing races, getting coolered, running bad.. and more worringly 5 buy-ins were definitely tilt-induced stupid plays on my part....

I basically know that my A-game is good enough to beat 98% of the rest of the player pool. I just have to make sure that I make use of that A game 100% of the time. It was a huge self-realisation on my part that I am just not the type of person who can play his A-game continuosly for more than 2hours. After that, I have lapses in concentration, get tilted....and start reaching a vicious circle of running bad and playing worse.

The good news I have found a solution for this problem. I play several shorter sessions a day. Usually 3-4 1,5 hours sessions/day. One other amendment is that I have a piece of paper close to me when playing which has four statements written on it:

1. No f***cking blow-ups

2. A-Game

3. 1,5 hours session

4. Not looking at PnL while playing


So these where the changes I made and slowly but surely things improved. I made good lay-downs, good call-downs, thinner value bets and then the results came in.

For the month including rakeback I am up like $5k.

Next time I will post a little more about my life in Berlin.

Hi everyone

decided to start blogging as I am going pro at the end of January.

There are two main reasons for blogging:

1) I will post mothly PnL updates so that I don't have to deal with the same old questions ( how much did you make today? Is it luck or sikll ? ) everytime I speak to a member of my family or friends. Eventually, I will just say: " Go to my blog"....

2) I want to write down goals and measure myself against them.


I am not gonna go into too much detail about poker and life background cause its fairly generic. Started playing at university, sucked, got addicted, got better, and here I am. At least I finished my degree though =)...

So without further adue here is my Year 2008:






Add another 8k in rakeback and you have a solid ~40k USD. Not bad for a part-time player.

Now I wanna try to make the jump into the big leagues.... =)

Next time I will write a bit more about me and formulate goals for 2009.