Pokerstars party

Hello guys,

just a quick update, i will be going to the pokerstars party tomorrow in Birmingham. It is in a very nice restaurant in the city centre and Alex Millar and Jake Cody will be there too.
I am really excited and looking forward to that.

I will be making a more detailed post with photos and to let you know how the party was.

Best of luck at the tables :D

Resolutions? No thanks, just prop bets

Hi guys,

I am gonna differ from the usual new year's resolution of creating a huge list of goals etc.
Generally, I am very enthusiastic overall as a person and I know that if I set various goals I will try to make all of them.
If you remember from a previous post, I have been burnt out chasing goals and targets. So, I decided not to do any this year.
First, I don't want to be disappointed if I don't meet my goals, and also I don't want to lose focus from improving at poker by chasing gym goals or VPPs to make supernova.
Of course, the ultimate target is to make Supernova this year, I think is doable if I focus on my game, improve and move up stakes slowly. The VPPs will come along with moving up.
The only thing that I will try to keep up with is try to grind and study, and do small VPPs goals on monthly basis.
I am very positive with all the above, came back fresh from holiday and I am in a very "let's grind" mood. Along with that, I am very happy that I have a couple of people that we will help each other and study together. It's important and also very motivating.

Now, the degenerate news :P
I am slowly becoming a true "poker" player who makes sick proposition bets with my poker friends. I was talking with "Pepe Stevee" another grinder and good friend and I decided to challenge him on a weight loss bet. He told me that he wants to lose some weight, and what could be more motivating and challenging by doing a prop bet about it? He said what results he wanted to get by summer time ( new year resolutions)so what I did was to set a more difficult target for him and also offered to put some money on the line too.
It sounds crazy to bet a decent sum of money on a bet that I won't have any control over it or I can affect in any way however, it is difficult to lose 15kg in 6months.
I am excited with that challenge, wish me luck about it and let's hope that I win it.

Back to poker, I need to get back to grinding and I will be updating you about it as soon as possible. Can  I make this as my NY resolution?

Good luck at the tables

Merry Christmas

Hello guys,

Merry Christmas to all of you that celebrate xmas, to the rest of you…I hope you enjoy the festive food :P

I’m in between a family/ friends gathering and I have plans for tonight as well to meet up with some close friends.

I feel like playing poker but I am not expecting to see any traffic at this day/time. I want to make a little schedule for my holidays grinding and I know I won’t be able to do that tomorrow (cough cough hangover).

My targets for the upcoming days are to play and study almost the same amount of time and it is as follows : 

•  30mins warm up with a poker video
• 1h poker session
• 15 mins coffee break
• 1h session or 1h review (if losing) 
• 1h session or 1h review (depending on what I did before)
• Long break for real like things 
• Repeat if I got free time :D 

I think I can follow all the above schedule no matter what I have to do on the day, 4h are not too many to spend on poker anyway.

I hope my schedule to help you follow a routine yourselves and be motivated as I am :D

Happy holidays <3

Back to blogging

Hi guys,

There are not many excuses why I have disappear and haven’t updated my blog. I caught up with other things (poker and non-poker related) and writing a blog post on a regular basis wasn’t really on the top of my list.

What I have been doing the past two months? I was really focusing on my game. I was studying, playing a looooot and start talking poker and strategy with my friends.

Back in October, I felt that I wasn’t playing great, I was lazy to study and pretending not to see my mistakes. So I start grinding, I made 50k and 60k months respectively which I think is a huge number considering I still got a job :/

At some point I was chasing VPPs, FPPs and bankroll peaks. I made my targets, I can’t complaint about that. However, December found me tired and all I wanted was to go on holidays.

So here I am, taking a break and being in Greece for the Xmas holidays. I am taking my own pace, and I don’t want to stress over points and targets. I have plenty of time to do that in January J

At the beginning of the month, I realised that I have a virus on my computer and this resulted to lose a lot of files, including database and player notes on stars. I tried to play without stats but it felt ugly and awful. So I emailed stars and they send me a very large part of my lost database. I have no words to say how grateful I am with stars support and for helping me out with that.

I am still missing some hands, and graphs are not as pretty as they used to be, but to me the most important thing is to have stats on my opponents and I don’t mind not knowing what my win rate was 6 months ago.

As I am not playing as much, I am focusing on my game more, try to study and review hands and also I updated my HUD (looks so beautiful now). I decided to use PT along with HEM and take advantage of what each programme does best. PT would be used for live play from now on (did I mention my new HUD?) and HEM for review. Sorry PT but I am so used to do review on HEM J

Among all the above work, I am also in some study groups on Skype. I am very happy that I have met people who we share the same passion about poker and we can talk about hands all the time.  It’s not only about poker, I am happy that we have built some strong relationship and we help each other in any way we can. I won’t get into details but I really appreciate some things these guys have done for me when I needed them. Poker can be a lonely hobby/ activity/ job so, knowing that there are people who will support you and help you it is a very nice feeling.

This is becoming a very long post, so I better wrap it up before I bore you. I will be updating you more often from now on. Enjoy the Christmas holidays and let’s all get motivated to reach our targets. J

Good luck at the tables. 

Trip to Austria and UK laws

Hello everyone,

I feel bad for not making a post for a while. I have been busy travelling signing petitions for online poker.

Two weeks ago I spend a long weekend in Salzburg, Austria. I absolutely loved that city!!! The weather was beautiful to begin with. There are a few things to see in terms of sightseeing but it is not a very touristy city. I like visiting interesting and historical places but for a weekend adventure I don’t want to spend 3 days walking all over the city and rush “to visit everything”. Salzburg has the perfect balance on that. I did a little a bit of shopping too and tried a few German/Austrian beers. I need to start looking for pubs in the UK that serve these beers now. :D

Back to poker now…the only thing that I have been focused on was the new legislation regarding the players from UK. At first, Pokestars said that from 1^st of Oct we would have to play in the .co.uk client however, we will be able to play with all the players’ pool from the .com network. So far, doesn't seem to be any problem. Along with that Gambling Commision said that in order to “protect” the players the auto-rebuy and auto-reload will be removed. So, if we want to reload in a cash game, we would have to do this manually. There was a lot of dispute over this auto-reload feature and due to that they announced that they will make their final decision in a month’s time (1^st of Nov). I read on 2+2 that GC has agreed not to force the poker sites to remove the auto-reload feature. However, there’s not an official announcement yet, but things seems to go the “right” way.  We will find out pretty soon.

I have picked up some funny hands from my recent sessions:

It was nice to have him shoving the river when I have the nutzz :D

He made a mistake betting 2/3 off my stack and he ccouldn't fold given the pot odds. But I don't think I EVER have worse than A2 there…

I was really bragging about this hand managing to get max value. :D 

Best of luck at the tables. Promise my next post to be sooner! 

Coaching

Hi Guys,

I have been asked so many times about my coaching that I have now decided to make a post about it to sum up all the details for you guys. :)

I have started writing so many different things about coaching and I really don't know where to start. So here's how I got started:
I was listening to a podcast from Mike McDonald where he mentioned at some point that he had a coach that helped him improve his game and resulted in winning an online tournament, and I started thinking that if Mike McDonald had a coach I should for sure have one as well. I mean I am not anywhere close or as good as Mike is and this guy is trying to improve his game and learn things while I am staying idle.

I have been following Felix Schneiders for quite a while and I always liked his style and approach to the game. His #grindingitiup series on YouTube had given me a few good tips about the game already. When he mention in a video that he doesn’t like tournaments but loves cash games I thought that this is the right guy.
So I got in touch with him and we started working on my game. That's why I have decided to start my blog as well, to keep track of my progress.

Felix is a great coach and he has really helped me a lot to improve my game and create a better approach to it. Having a coach is more of a milestone in your poker progress (I don't want to say career) because it is the moment you decide to take things differently and put some real effort in your game. We all have heard winning and very successful players saying that they were losing and then they made “their last” deposit and they never looked back. This didn't happen because they went on an insane winning strike but it happened because they decided to study, put some hard work and effort in the game.

This is what a coach is going to offer you. The ability to think different, to be able to see the “right” spots and play better than you used to. Close friends kept asking me how my sessions go and if I have start crushing the game. However, this is a very wrong approach. What I have learnt so far is that Felix (and every coach) don’t have a secret recipe that will make you become a successful player overnight. It requires a lot of work and mostly a looooot of studying.

That’s what I have been doing the past months. I am playing as much as I can and I am trying not to focus on the results. I even avoid to check my balance. I have HEM to tell me if I am winning or losing. But most importantly I am trying to learn and in order to do that you have to make mistakes.

With Felix, we do a lot of review and progressively talk about different topics to improve my game. Then I am trying to put into practice what I have learnt and only focus on these topics instead of all the things that I might be doing right or wrong.

At first, it seemed really difficult and a lot of times I was feeling as a complete novice to the game. However, after a lot of hours of theory and discussion I can say that I am more confident now and more importantly I feel that I am applying what we have talked about, into my game.

Don’t get me wrong, of course I don’t believe that I know everything, there’s still a long way to go but I feel the improvement. Now, whenever someone talks about a hand that he played, all I am thinking is a matrix with his range and the hands he could be playing on that spot.

If you are interested to have a coach, I would suggest you to find a person that plays the same game as you do. Of course I would recommend you Felix if you are playing 6max cash games. He is very positive and supportive and he always there to give me some feedback on my questions, something that I really appreciate. If you want more info you can visit his site http://www.grindingitup.com/

Hope I didn't bore you with my long post. Best of luck at the tables :) 

One step at a time

Hello Guys,

After my last post where I said that I totally burned out, I think it's time to do some evaluation on that.
What happened the past months was that I was adding things to my schedule without realising that you can't do everything at once. I ended up being stressed, chasing vpps and thinking poker in times that i should be relaxing instead.

So what I did the past two weeks was to take a break. Or anyway, I feel that I took a two weeks break. I slowed down in playing online, I had a couple live poker sessions (which are way more relaxing and good confidence boost) and I didn't have any poker coaching (because coaching means volume and homework).

Beginning of the week, and of September I start grinding online again. I am not playing crazy long sessions but I play zoom and it is easier to play more hands. So far I am meeting my volume/ vpps targets and I am happy with it. I feel much better and in a clear state of mind too.
I went for shopping too, and that helped a lot.

A little a bit of bragging now.. The very first hand we reviewed on my coaching session, was a hand where I folded AAs because I got scared of a flush. I happened to have correct odds to call there and recently I found myself on a similar spot where I called and won the hand. I felt quite proud in terms of putting into practise what I have learned.

Today, I played an online "homegame" with my colleagues and I won the tournament!!It was more of a sng to be honest, but I prefer to call it a tournament, it feels like a bigger achievement.  I am looking forward to go to work tomorrow and brag about it all day :)
My Sunday grind went well too. I had a solid session but I only played for two hours as I put a lot of my focus in winning that office tournament. ;) And also I had to write this blog post.

To sum up on my evaluation (and a note to self) is to take one thing at a time. It is good to have multiple things to keep us busy but not to overdo it. Small steps at a time.

I keep saying that I want to make a post regarding coaching but what I have written so far will make it a very long post. I will try to tidy it up and post it soon.
That's all for now, I wanted to share with you that things got better in all the aspects.

Best of luck at the tables.