Man, I've been pretty lazy with regards to playing lately but I've been doing so much work with the stable that I've felt like my MTT game is really sharp again - I know group HH review isn't exactly a new concept to a lot of you guys but I had never really done it before until recently and it's been awesome.

Seeing how other good players play, plus being forced to constantly articulate my opinions and justify them, and essentially micro-managing ~15 MTTers, thus being very aware of their strengths and weaknesses and trying to help with them has given me a really focused understanding of how MTTs work right now in December 2011.

So when I have played I've felt powerful (like AlexeiMartov might say) and like I was pushing everything in the right direction, so I've been feeling like I might win a bunch of stuff soon.

On Sunday I got a bit of run-good to go along with that and I took down the iPoker Major for $47k, a tourney I've always wanted to win as it has such a great structure, so many fish, and I'd never really run deep in it at all.

I also got 5th in Party Highroller for $9xxx, 3rd in a $55 turbo for $7xxx, and 3rd in another small turbo for $2xxx, so it was a pretty sweet day

I'm heading back to Perth for Xmas, then Albany for a few days after that, then back to Melbourne in the new year to watch a bunch of 80s flicks and get ready to crush Aussie Millions.

#quickbragposts #happyholidaysall

Man I dunno what was wrong with me as a kid but at some point recently someone linked me this best of Arnie compilation:

http://youtu.be/pDxn0Xfqkgw

I realised that I had somehow hardly even seen any of the movies other than Terminator and Terminator 2, so decided to go on an 80s binge recently.

I watched Total Recall for the first time - soooooooooo fucking epic, and Conan The Barbarian, which was just at a wtf level of absurdly retarded genius, I'm pretty sure everyone but me has seen these movies but if you somehow haven't, do yourself a favour - in Conan Arnie punches a camel when he's drunk ffs, doubt anything could be more epic than that movie.

Predator as well, hadn't seen that, I dunno what I was doing as a kid, probably reading books and trying to actually do well at school or something, but man just so good catching up on this stuff.

Most epic battle at the end of Predator, omg. Rewatched The Terminator also, forgot how epic the music was in it, just great!

I've been recommended Commando and Last Action Hero, I am gonna watch Rocky soon (have never seen any of them), what else can you guys recommend?

Feels like I might never find a cultural leak this vast again at any point in my life...

Other stuff is going well, we played a couple shows this weekend so I couldn't go to Sydney for the live poker series there which got 300k overlay somehow, High Roller didn't get up either, sad times for Australian live poker though Aussie Millions is going to be epic, especially since I'll have like 10 horses with me grinding in the trenches.

I've been pretty lazy this month though I've been doing well when I have played, gotta admit it's pretty damn sweet having horses grinding to facilitate guilt-free laziness though I still feel like a bit of a sloth spending all my time watching 80s movies and grinding video games instead of being more 'productive' as per this thread:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19...-rich-1132946/

January is gonna be pretty intense what with PCA and Aussie Millions, plus there's Xmas and NYE before then so I guess I should feel fine not doing much atm, guaranteed stressors looming on the horizon so for now pretty happy to just chill.

More 80s and early 90s recommendations plz!

It was probably inevitable but after that 4 day stint grinding MTTs while mrs seabeast was away I've been wanting to grind them again whenever it's convenient, though lately that hasn't been very often.

I couldn't pass up playing Sunday Majors while actually wanting to play them so despite having removalists booked for 2pm Monday, I regged all the early stuff up until Sunday Million at 6:30 so that if I was still left in anything by the time they arrived it would be deep enough to be worth the embarassment of awkwardly monotabling on laptop like a degenerate while they started packing away all my stuff.

Happily when they arrived I was deep in something, 1/11 in the Party Major which was $56k for 1st, but I wound up losing a fairly massive CL flip with 7 left and busting for $7xxx.

Normally it would have been more disappointing but I felt like I got away with something even playing majors at all so making some profit before I spent the next however many hours lifting stuff was an ok outcome.

The move went well, didn't break anything, and the new house is great. Really good vibe on the street, no more slow elevators, having to buzz people in, 5 minute round trip to take out the trash, etc etc.

I set up my record player in the lounge room, got my old huge couch set up again (didn't fit into apartment) and the whole house has a really good feel.

I had my last exam for uni, it didn't go very well but I think I should pass - one of the few written answer questions was "explain the main difference between Expected Value and Expected Utility, giving appropriate examples"...

Was hard not to write about raise/folding +cEV hands at the WSOP main event FT but I wussed out and just wrote about coinflips instead

I played a bit of PLO this week on the iPhone tethering grind while the internet connection gets set up and it didn't really seem to disconnect at all, so this morning I played an MTT sesh and won the Stars $320 6-max for $9xxx plus an Ongame turbo for 3xxx and had a few other FTs as well.

It's nice to run hot, and I think my MTT game is super sharp atm and I'm definitely gonna grind here and there over the next few months being on holiday and all, gonna keep my game sharp and win something big at Aussie Millions

My girlfriend went on holiday this past week so I took advantage of the opportunity to get into degen mode for a while, and ground MTTs 4 days in a row.

I won a few small things and made a bunch of FTs the first few days, and I felt my play improve by leaps and bounds - not in terms of concepts, just focus and execution - and I was really looking forward to Sunday majors today.

Most of the session went pretty poorly, but towards the end of the day I found myself in the money of the 888 Sunday Major and the Stars $200r, so I two tabled them on my laptop for hours watching the WSOP Main Event stream which was surprisingly awesome what with being able to see their hole cards right after each hand.

I strongly recommend taking a look at the coverage three handed and headsup, it's fun guessing what they have, laughing at the terrible commentary, and sweating the board run-outs in real time.

Anyway I ended up getting 4th in the 200r for $8k, and winning 888 for $24k, which was very satisfying, I love winning tourneys I've never won before.

A fun surprise was that when it got heads-up, they put a graphic of a suitcase full of cash on the table next to our match WPT style:



A less fun surprise was that when there were 10 players left on the FT bubble, it went to hand-for-hand, but one table was 6 handed and the other 4 handed... lol.

Anyway it was a fun few days and I feel like my MTT game is really sharp at the moment, so future Sundays should bode well for a while.

Tomorrow I have my one exam for the semester, Cognitive Psychology - quite a lot of the content is relevant to poker as a lot of it is to do with what guides and influences our ability to focus and make decisions, there are even small references to expected value and game theory.

I'm really relieved that the semester will be over, not because I've had to work super hard or anything but just because now I won't feel guilty if I just feel like playing poker or hanging out with my gf all the time

I'm moving house next week too, just down the road, but out of a relatively soulless apartment and into a small house on a nice street.

I think that is going to be a nice change, and I want to try and make the place more my own, though I've been saying that about everywhere I've wanted to move for the past x years.

But yeah, couple months chilling being domestic and grinding a bit, then Aussie Millions in January should be sweet, tempted to do PCA too.

So I’ve been in the staking game for a while now, maybe 18 months but only really taking it seriously this past 6 months since Black Friday.

Aside from the fact the games got a lot better after BF a lot of people moved overseas and needed new backing, plus Bax/Sheets stopped staking online afaik which opened up the market a lot when it came to quality horses, so for the first time I started staking people I didn’t know irl.

It’s been an interesting experience so far, different in some ways than I would have expected.

In some ways it suits me perfectly, my dad was a teacher and I have definitely inherited his love for teaching, I really enjoy mentoring horses and trying to help them optimise their schedules and strategies.

Plus I’m getting a little older and can’t do the 60 hours a week grinding anymore, sometimes I wake up and the thought of 15 tabling for the next 8 hours actually makes me feel sick - this never happened when I was in my early 20’s but definitely does as I get older.

Cash games, sure, and I can play Sunday majors and get excited about SCOOPs and WCOOPs, but full-on MTT grinding, week after week, with 3am starts, just feels like punishment at my old age.

So I’ve got about 15 horses now, living all over the world – Romania, Finland, Spain, Canada, Costa Rica, UK, Australia…

I got off to a pretty terrible start but it’s definitely a very long-term thing - far more than I realised, although I suppose compared to other forms of investment during non-boom times it’s not that slow, just more volatile.

In the short to mid term it’s a massive money sink, with your downswings automatically twice as big as your upswings, and with guys needing fairly large rolls to play with even if they are winning.

This can make it very stressful, it can be a weird feeling having objectively large amounts of money essentially tied up in your faith in a small group of people, and your risk of ruin is exacerbated by the fact that you can't really ask your guys to move down in stakes.

For a control freak like me who naturally tends towards cynicism and distrust, it can be very uncomfortable being at the mercy of external forces so much, but I try and stay as involved as I can.

I haven’t had anything really bad happen yet scam-wise but I’ve had personality clashes, especially since I tend to be a very opinionated person with a strong sense of conviction when it comes to things that I believe I know a lot about, with MTTs being one of those things – not just strategically but also in terms of game selection and so on.

I doubt many people have spent more time looking at MTT lobbies the past 3 years, assessing and getting a feel for which tourneys are the best, how different sites play, what styles are best where, etc etc.

I also have the Australian thing where I am very blunt too, and quite lacking in sympathy – everything is ripe for a joke, I’m pretty sure if an Australian reg FT bubbled the WSOP main event the rest of us would give him shit about it for the rest of his life, there would be very little genuine heartfelt sympathy, that is just not the Australian way...

So when guys are getting all upset losing standard flips with 25 people left in random tourneys I can probably seem harsh in my indifference.

Overall it's been bleak at times and sometimes I feel like an epic degenerate - poker wise I always felt like I had control over what happened to me, but this feels pretty much the same as betting on sports, my guys just happen to be the athletes.

One of the main things I've learnt is that you can’t groom everyone the same way.

I had this vision of taking half-decent grinders and turning them into guys who can beat 100rs and 1ks but it isn’t really like that, each person has their own strengths and weaknesses – it’s not just about a ceiling of skill level or intelligence, it’s also personal – some guys play better with more money at stake, some guys play worse, some guys should play 20 tables all the time, other guys would do better dropping all their turbos and actually thinking about the game.

Some guys are really intelligent but find it hard to accept how dumb and predictable MTTers are, other guys play tourneys like they are video games and their opponents are the computer just playing a fixed strategy they just have to learn how to exploit and then repeat that in the same way over and over and over.

That in itself is a skill and can be profitable, and trying to shape that sort of guy into a nuanced, expert player is not only going to be fruitless (because he just isn’t that sort of a thinker) but also a waste of his genuine talent, which is grinding.

I’m sure we’ve all had friends that weren’t that smart but were sick good at video games, it’s a lot like that, it’s not just mindless volume, it’s a genuine skill unto itself to be able to become ruthlessly efficient at the one thing and then just do that over and over, with genuine focus and no mercy at all.

For MTTs where 90% of the best regs “graduate” from the online grind (because it is so absurdly exhausting) and only bother playing special series and Sunday majors, that style of merciless, ruthless, repetitive robotic exploitation can actually be very profitable during the dailies when most of the field are either fish or nitty regs.

So if you have a guy with that kind of talent, screw trying to turn him into a genius, just let him make you money.

He will often turn out to be more profitable than your very intelligent poker-natural type who just can’t be bothered playing that often, and who gets disheartened when he has say 4 losing sessions in a row.

The ruthless grinder is always gonna be in touch with the overall flow of “the games” and he’s going to play through variance much faster, and be less reliant on big scores.

That said, it can frustrating when guys are so resistant to expanding their horizons and just want to play, rather than improve.

I feel really good about my stable now though, I think a lot of guys have moved in the right direction and I have been lucky enough to get some premium horses because of Black Friday.

Anyway it feels like bad etiquette to go into too much detail too often about staking, for a number of reasons, but it's been such a huge part of my life for the last 6 months that I felt like I had to address it if I was going to start blogging again.

Ultimately I hope that in 5 years time I can look back a this period as when I demonstrated my investment nous by seizing on a good opportunity, rather than the dark period where I degenned off all my money into guys I had never even met before

Well, WCOOP didn't go so great for me as a backer, though that wasn't exactly a shock to me as my stable is full of spewy lags who destroy weak fields, but can sometimes tend to lack the nuance necessary to go coast to coast in well-structured marathons containing many more genuinely good opponents than the daily tournaments ever will.

While the best poker players are obviously/ideally able to adapt their play to whatever type of game they are in, realistically most guys who play 40 hours a week of poorly structured MTTs vs weak opposition are just going to habitually and naturally (even unconsciously) be too aggressive too often in well structured tournaments containing a wider range of opponents; just as guys who only ever play deep structured tournaments or cash-games have all sorts of terrible habits to start off with in turbo flipaments.

I was cringing the whole time to be honest, but as soon as it ended and all the good regs flew off to Europe to play live, or back to the US to see family after a month on whatever island paradise, or went back to grinding cash and lolling at donkaments, I was excited again and it seems like my guys win a couple of tourneys every day at the moment which is pretty sweet to wake up to every morning.

I've been playing live a lot in the big game here which has been going quite well too - it's been a great month so far.

I'm jealous of everyone over in Cannes at the moment though. I want to do a run of EPTs so bad, I have for years, definitely have to do it next year I think.

I've also been grinding some small headsup PLO to practice it and enjoying it a bunch.

I busted my opponents account yesterday for the first time, $687.50 at .5/1 I think it was, good times

It's pretty insane how huge your edge is vs fish in headsup PLO, makes you feel like such a boss; I'm dead money vs tight and trappy regs though - I spew it off sooo hard.

Have enjoyed the first couple episodes of that new show 'Homeland', starring Damian Lewis (Dick Winters from Band of Brothers) as an American marine who was held captive in Iraq and may have been turned, and Claire Danes as the obsessive CIA agent running secret surveillance on him and trying to unearth the truth.

Hopefully it doesn't go to shit like The Killing did, as I do enjoy watching some of these well-made non-HBO shows for a change - less visceral, intense, and demanding of the viewer, but still intelligent TV.

That's not any kind of knock on HBO at all as their brand of TV pretty much single-handedly shifted my attitude towards television from complete indifference to borderline obsession, but it's nice to see intelligent TV writing start to flow outward towards the slightly more mainstream (kind of like how with a movie like Inception, whether or not you thought it was mind-blowing, you can surely agree that it is a great thing to see massive, big-business blockbusters made with that kind of ambition and respect for the viewer's intelligence).

But seriously, how good were Breaking Bad and CYE this season, and after a lacklustre first episode Dexter looks like it is going to be decent now too. & Community & Parks and Rec #showsweareallwatchingnowsurely

Hey guys, think I'm going to start blogging a little bit more.

The main reason I stopped was I felt like the whole self-promotional, thinly veiled brag aspect of blogging was a bad influence on my life, and poker was a little too much a part of my ego, but I feel like I'm over that now and I miss writing, reflecting, and being a little bit more a part of the poker community.

I've started staking and coaching quite a few people, and in the process started feeling more connected to the poker world again, which I have enjoyed.

Actually I think one of the main things that influenced me was going to the US June/July and not being able to play online poker.

I found it unbearable and was forced to re-admit to myself how much I love playing online - the stresses of all of the peripheral things that come along with the poker lifestyle can be very negative and draining, but man, when it comes to sitting down to play an online session, and forgetting that there's anything else in the world other than you and your opponents, it's just the best.

Sorry if that is insensitive to some! But wow, there's really nothing like not being allowed to do your job to make you realise how much you love it.

My life seems to change one month to the next...

Like in June I was some guy in a punk band, playing shows in Baltimore, Austin, LA, SF, and Phoenix, sleeping on floors, spending entire days in a van full of dudes, playing shows every night, eating at gas stations.

In May I was an online MTTer staying in a hotel in Toronto playing all the SCOOPs, waking up then hitting the gym and the pool, before playing 12 hours online until I busted the last tourney and passed out.

In July I was a lazy lollivepro living in a Vegas mansion doing virtually nothing all day occasionally playing day 1s of WSOP tourneys and busting them with an eye-rolling indifference.

Then in August I was getting up at 8am every morning to go to the casino to play nosebleed PLO with one of my favourite opponents after he dropped his kids at school (crucial to get him before he wanders off to baccarat, so funny all of us young bleary eyed complainers super tilt-prone because of the early hours, despite playing for significant percentages of our net worths)

Now it's September and I'm a budding empire builder waking up every morning hoping one of my horses shipped something, loading every lobby and slowwwwwly looking down the lists to give myself the best sweats.

So far staking has gone very poorly for me but I have been putting a lot more time into it recently (I've barely been playing myself) and it's become that latest of things that I am determined to beat.

I'm still at uni but I'm ridiculously slack, I'm just doing 3 units and I'm basically just phoning it in so I can look my parents in the eye, keep my girlfriend from thinking (noticing) I'm a complete degenerate and not hate myself quite as much during downswings.

Extortion is going really well, we still play quite a lot of shows, we have a new drummer who is this fucking insane 19 year old skinny faux gangsta who's name is Milky (because his skin is so white), still can't quite believe he exists - the self-proclaimed king of all kings.

I'm still seeing the same girl too, it's been almost 2 years now, she's a good one.

Sometimes the poker lifestyle (despite how hard I try not to live it) is hard for her but I have learnt to segregate the two things and it's a lot easier now that most of my own play is PLO cash-games (which I can play anytime), though overall that has gone fairly poorly for me post Black Friday - I was really determined to destroy the 25/50 shallow and cap games on FTP, and had gotten pretty competent at specifically 40bb PLO, which is now a fairly useless skill, and try as I might I just can't seem to quite get there at 100bb+.

It's not like I'm losing heaps or anything, I'm winning on some sites, losing on others; it's just a bit weird for me right now to not have one definable thing that I am *very good at*, like I would hope I'm still fairly good at MTTs (main problem right now probably being lack of desire, as much as people want to believe in the power of variance when it comes to MTTs there is a lot to be said for raw hunger) but as I'm mostly playing PLO (and still kind of sucking at it after all this time) and working with horses (who so far, have lost me a significant amount of money) sometimes I feel like a huge whale, in spite of all my past success.

In any case I am very much enjoying life and working harder than I have for quite a while, the trip to the US was really good in that way.

There's nothing like a life of drinking beers in the spa, going out to amazing restaurants every night and mindlessly grinding NBA 2k in a country where online poker is outlawed to make you want to get home and fucking grind again.

So yeah, I hope to update this fairly frequently again and I hope y'all are well, I was very sad to miss the Leggo party in Vegas but I had already booked a hotel in Portland when I found out when it was on. Next time!

Hey all,

I am considering playing the Aussie Millions 100k this Saturday.

Last year it was surprisingly soft - although Ivey, Durrr and Antonius all play as AM is unofficially an FTP event, last year the field of 24 also included 5 amateur businessmen, a bunch of over the hill sponsored pros, and there were virtually no young overseas phenoms (I guess it's hard/expensive/annoying to get hold of $100,000 AUD).

If the field includes more young overseas players this year (the type who played the PCA 25k) then I won't play.

I'm a cynic and a bumhunter at heart, but I'd like the opportunity to play on the day if it looks good.

If anyone is interested send me a PM. Cheers! I'll do a real blog update soon.

Dear Blog,

Hi! It's been a while, and I feel like posting an update. Plus uni is done for the year, and I have been playing a ton of poker.

The middle half of the year was really stressful - balancing uni, poker, girlfriend, etc.

I had a sharp downswing playing live in August or so, losing 200k in the space of three sessions - we play 25/50/100 usually, sometimes 100/100/100 or 25/50/100/200.

It really stung since before that I had sorta been doing the play live once a week and every third Monday donkament session 'poker is free money when you feel like showing up' thing.

Think I forgot what it was like to lose, and it really bruised my ego.

So for a while I went a bit insane and wound up playing way more of the WCOOP than I would have otherwise (trying to get unstuck), and not putting as much effort into uni as previously.

I also took a couple of months time-out from the live game, to lick my wounds and work on PLO.

For the first time in a long time I started feeling like I was under a ton of pressure, and I was finding it hard to balance everything.

Fortunately I managed to prioritise and after WCOOP was over I realised how ridiculous I was being, and to just let go of the money and stop degrading myself chasing tournament scores, and make sure I took care of uni/gf.

Then with poker forgotten about that all came together nicely (funny how easy succeeding at life is when you aren't playing poker at all), before I was done for the semester in October.

Since then I have been playing a bunch of PLO cash, bumhunting 6-max on pretty much every site.

Have been running pretty well higher and terribly lower, which is fine with me.

Here's a graph since I am going back to WA for Xmas and thus, free from karmic punishment as I won't be playing again in 2010:



Overall, it's been a really good year.

I might start updating more since I'll be playing a lot of poker until uni starts again next March.

Hopefully I can keep running above expectation...

Happy holidays!

So on Wednesday I managed to take down the SCOOP High 1k/rebuys event, for $205,110!

The tourney went slowly and smoothly from start to finish - I played quite carefully throughout and won the important hands when I needed to.

I ended up beating David Benyamine headsup, with Steve Sung coming 3rd - it was interesting playing shorthanded with live players whose betsizes and math related play were far less optimal than mine, but who were using creative and unorthodox lines at different times to kinda stay afloat.

I got really lucky with about 15 people left when my AQs beat Amak's KK after 4betting allin preflop - this gave me a commanding stack and also knocked out probably the best player still in the field.

It was a long grind and I was exceptionally proud of how I played, I thought I held my own throughout - though of course I was very lucky, even in the final hands, where I won a big flip with TT vs Sung's AQ and then coolered Benyamine to win the tournament with straight vs set on J754...

I really enjoyed playing these last couple of weeks, and it's going to be weird not to be getting up at 3:30 am and getting a redbull out of the fridge to kick off the day.

Obviously I had a good series overall, and I feel really good about poker at the moment.

There's a ton of variance in this game, but it's amazing how often when you DECIDE you are going to win, and you put in the requisite effort, things come good for you (as opposed to when you are simply going through the motions, and hoping for the chips to fall the right way).

I said to my girlfriend if that tournament had been held on the first day of SCOOP I wouldn't have won, but because it was 10 days in and I'd been sharpening and refining my game 12 hours a day for 2 weeks straight, I was tuned in enough to channel the good fortune I had into a win.

Anyway, I guess I have to go back to the real world now and finish off the uni semester.

I'll probably come back and write here from time to time, I hope you all had a good SCOOP - what a great exercise in profitable degeneracy it always is