A friend of mine who has been on a downswing in OnGame (hi RNG!) was trying to get his HEM to work with the updated software. So we fire up ONE table, just to TEST the thing, so we need to get dealt only a COUPLE OF HANDS. 20 minutes before that we lost ~3 buyins all in standard coolers. FIRST HAND, we get 66, and start joking about how he's going to catch a set and get oversetted. What do you know, flop comes 956ss, OnGame nl100, 4 fish at the table, all in the pot, one reg who's folded and my friend.

Fish donks, we start laughing, and go like "wtf, raise it up - it'd be rigged if the other guy shoves and the donk shove it in too". Be careful what you wish for! We raise, the guy right behind us shoves it in for 100bb, and we are starting to crack up. thankfully the original donk-bettor folds, we go like "wtf, go 99 vs 66!", the fish turns over QQ and spikes a Q on the turn.

I haven't laughed like that in a while

One of my weaknesses is good food - I can agree to live anywhere (tent, crappy flat, trailer etc) and do almost anything, but I've got to have good food. I refuse to eat some low-grade meat or fast-food hamburgers, or drink cheap wine/champagne, actually I'd rather starve than eat something I don't like and there were certain periods/situations in my life when I didn't eat for days simply because I didn't like the food I was getting. It may sound too fancy and I may look like a fag to you now, but that's the way I am and there is nothing I can do about it. So if I have, say, 100$ in my pocket and have a choice between taking a cab and getting a hamburger or getting a good steak or w/e in a restaurant (average bill for a great meal here is ~65-80$) and going on train (which are pretty dirty in Russia, fwiw), I'll definitely pick the latter option.

The other weakness of mine, which I've almost gotten rid of by now is clothing. I mean, really expensive designer clothing. Thankfully, I'm almost through the period of my life, when I felt obligated to buy every t-shirt, jeans, sweaters or shoes I liked, no matter what the price was (right now I have 1.5k$ jeans in my collection, along with 1k$ hoodie and 700$ t-shirt among all other things, which is fucken ridiculous). Now I've ordered a couple of suits and handmade shoes, that I'm intending to wear on daily basis, since I feel much more comfortable in them, and that'll be it - no more purchases on this front for years, because my wardrobe is overpacked as it is, and I'm not intending to blow another couple of grands on anything. Fuck that. Simplicity is the key. I guess this weakness of mine ended on the very day when I was watching Russia - Canada hockey match (IIHF WC 2009), we wound up getting wasted, and I woke up in one of those designer outfits, covered in vomit. Yay!

That's all I've got for now - been very busy with the site, a lot of interesting things are happening around it!

p.s. couldn't resist to write smth about poker - 20 minutes after the last entry i recovered all the losses, so it's going okay right now, although i'm not playing much at all these days, but my game has definitely improved big time.

and insta down 3.5 buyins in QQ vs AA, backdoored flush vs str8flush, and then hand of the day:

board 346hh, i have 7h6h, i cbet, fish minraises, i 3bet, he calls, turn is a 2o, i shove, he calls with 28o (no kidding) and wins, river 8. gg. and THE VERY NEXT HAND i get KK, some tag raises, i "tilt" 3bet, this same fish 4bets and we get it in. Fish - QQ, Tag - AKo. Board runs out Axxxx.

bleh, not playing was way more fun than this! or maybe someone is telling me "stop playing poker you dumb fuck - can't you see!"

UPDATE! HOT!!!! - I've just won a flip!

Don't really have time to write a thorough blog post, but earlier today i met with the owner of Grand Havana Room private club, who turned out to be a decent guy, and interested in doing poker-related business in Moscow. Can't disclose more, but if we manage to pull off a couple of things together, "we'll be bigger than US Steel".

And really, fuck grinding - there are other ways of making money in poker.

P.S. I've seen what kind of cigars Woody Allen stores in his locker @ the club. Jeez, they stink more than anything i've seen.

Haven't played a poker hand in 3 weeks or so, which is pretty lol. And it's not because i'm running bad - in fact, i have no idea how poker gods are treating me right now

We've been working really hard on our rakeback-coaching site (to be launched exclusively in Russia and somewhere else, but i can't tell you right now, in June), obviously we won't be standing in Leggo's way rather, we'll be looking to become partners, but we'll get to that a bit later. As far as the site is concerned, we have a bunch of decent ideas with great implementation and our deals are better than anything our local competitors can offer. So far so good, but we'll see how it turns out, although there are some concerns with regard to the recent rumors that online gambling may get banned in Russia (in a similar fashion to what they did in the US a while ago), but we have already thought about this scenario and have a nice set of countermeasures in stock.

Other than that, I was offered to translate a movie script from English into Russian for a hollywood guy (can't disclose his name or where he works). hint: you probably don't know his name, but definitely have seen him a lot in photos with some bigshots. i guess that'll be a pretty interesting experience. honestly, though, i expect the script to be so-so judging from the movies he worked on before, but who cares, it's all about money and connections.

cheers

Okay, so here is one thing i've come to learn from live poker and my epic downswing, and something i've been teaching people to pay attention to. Mental presence at the table.

In his book Bobo says that once you stop paying attention to the blinds and no longer focus on winning them, you should just quit the game. And it makes a lot of sense (hello d2themfi and your nl400 vid hu on preflop edge). But there is another side to this concept. You should always keep your THOUGHTS attached to the table, rather than blinds alone, meaning that it's very easy to lose track of what's going on when playing 9 or 12 tables and your thoughts start randomly flying around all tables you have open at the moment. And that's bad. Like, really bad - you start missing some very +EV spots, and so-called "autopilot" comes into play. Very intuitive so far, right?

Now the tricky part. Even when playing 4 to 6 tables it's relatively easy to get lazy and lose your mental presence at the table and stop looking at every situation in-depth. How to avoid that? I know you've been running into this mental state for months now and couldn't get your mind working again, couldn't get it to stay sharp. So you've been making breaks or quitting some very profitable games because you couldn't focus anymore etc. But there is a solution. In fact, there are many ways to get your mind working again, but i won't tell you all of them right now after all, i'm still making some money by teaching this.

One way to do that would be to cut down the number of tables you're playing to 4-7 (with 8 or 9 it becomes slightly more challenging, and you'll need a pretty big monitor, so that tables won't overlap and will still have relatively big fonts) and do a very simple thing nobody has ever thought of - uncheck "Auto Rebuy" box. How can it help, I hear you ask? It's easy, really - it makes you keep a close eye on every table, in order to start every orbit with a full stack. In other words, you maintain a very strong mental presence at all tables and along the way start noticing interesting dynamics or discovering minor leaks in other ppl's games, paying more attention to hands you've had a glimpse of, but otherwise wouldn't have noticed. It also motivates you to keep track of every table - when you get AA with 85bb and stack a fish, you'll definitely blame yourself for being so sloppy. I hope you see the point.

This won't work in HU, though, simply because your mind HAS to stay sharp to play this game, while in 6max or FR games it's insanely easy for your mind to get lazy and start missing some very +EV spots.

That's all for now.

partly joking, but... it's fucken awesome, amazing, sick, insane etc. really, now i literally have enough proof to say for sure what the core reason behind all my swings is... however the thing is there is nothing i can do about it, because it is... take a deep breath... bad weather.

like.. i don't know how else i can explain this, but april-march-may time span clearly shows this - i crush souls when it's ~ +10-25 Celsius outside and reasonably sunny. but when it starts raining, or gets cloudy and somewhat frosty - that's it, i start losing.

i've been looking at the temperature graph and my HEM graph for a week now - wtf is going on? the degree to which they correlate is pretty sick. am i a tree or smth, i don't get it

so today i've met with an old friend of mine, who turns out to be a pretty talented composer and pianist - i was pretty amazed by some of the music he wrote, even though i'm not really into these things. long story short, i happen to know a lawyer who used to handle the first America Got Talent esque show in Russia, although it was quite a bit different (they picked a group of people and tried to make pop stars out of them), but the gist was the same, and i'm going to approach him with a couple of this guy's records to see if we can actually work something out and talk to some Russian showbiz big shots.

of course that friend of mine needs to polish a lot of things in his works and so on, but i feel he's got quite a bit of talent, and if things go right, i hope i won't need to grind nl-whatever ever again.

so, wish me luck!

pretty dull day today, but thnakfully it's better than yesterday when i spent like 6 hours in a place with WiFi but where all poker-related and file hosting sites (including freaking StoxEV!!) were banned via their firewall. Stupid jerks. also made a value shove with 55 on the river on JJ434r board for 80bb, but still not sure how i feel about it, though it worked and i won.

btw, to all ppl who think it's still all bears, Stalin and vodka in Russia - no, it's not :P and it's hot here in summer (+20-30 Celsius), so all you California and Miami kids won't freeze over here.

oh, and i made a couple of decent videos at a supercar drag racing event here in Moscow (500 hp+), will post later - there were some pretty sick cars, including one McLaren SLR, 1000hp Ford GT, etc, although everyone was really waiting for Zonda and Enzo, their owners didn't show up and instead lost 10k$ in a prop bet (Ford GT did break 350 km/h). more to come

So, i guess most of you guys know that Russia did it again and won two consecutive hockey WCs. woot!

was watching the match with friends yesterday, but by the end of the second period we were so wasted already, that it didn't really matter. i passed out @ around the anthem part. jesus, i hadn't gotten drunk like that in years maybe, because as some ppl say, they tried to wake me up but i kept saying something in spanish or language that really resembled that. ffs, i don't know a word in spanish!

the best part was that 10 hours later when i woke up i found that the 500$ hoodie i was in was covered with some suspicious-looking stuff that looked like vomit or smth, and i didn't remember the result of the game, so i crawled to the nearest laptop, tried to turn it on, but then it asked for some password and i just couldn't remember it, but that's fine, i pulled another one out of my bag, saw the score and MVPs (on which i had a couple of bets going), and then tried to think of how much i won/lost but fuck it hurt so bad, that i decided not to think about anything (which i believe was the first time in years when i wasn't thinking about something =) ) and without better alternatives i simply passed out again. bleh, hopefully nobody made any videos there, that'd be quite a shame =))