Damn Ringer's Poker Blog

November is wrapping up and good lord was it swongy! Here’s the graph…

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I’ll get the generic bitching out of the way first:

[x] I ran 2k under ev
[x] I run terrible @ 2/4
[x] Should have been a 10k month
[ ] I was actually tilted by these swings

All that said, these months happen. They can’t always been rainbows and butterflys with a straight line to the moon. I had to rearrange my schedule a bit to start taking 2/4nl shots. I could play mornings at 1/2nl and really only worry about playing with Ren as other decent competition. The 2/4nl tables in the morning tend to not only be crap but also there’s like 8 running. I have started going to bed at closer to 5am or 6am now as to allow maximum grind window at 2/4nl. I think I played fine this month all things considered just a bumpy one.

Now onto the life part of the blog post, my thanksgiving was great. I ate an abundance of ridiculously delicious food and my mother has once again outdone herself on the awesomeness of the food. We did thanksgiving with just my immediate family and a close friend of my sisters’. This is absolutely the way I prefer my holiday dinners. My other relatives that live close to us tend to be a little stuffy and “proper”. We did thanksgiving there last year and while it was great, I just like being inappropriate at the drop of a hat and that just isn’t the place for it. My family dinner however, is the place. This is, of course, the people that raised me. Other than the holidays, It’s been a pretty relaxed month.

A group of my friends have decided we want to a murder mystery party. If you are up to date on the office series, you know exactly what inspired us. We are doing it this Friday, and I’m ridiculously excited about it. It will be a “Las Vegas Murder”. Its not often that you can pull together 15 friends for an “in-character” murder mystery party. I will be playing the part of a womanizing black jack dealer… not too far from mark i suppose. If this one goes well, we will likely be doing these on a semi-regular basis. It should be sick, oh and not to mention there will be an open bar. Watching people stay on objectives while 8 beers deep should be interesting at best. Could be the greatest party of all time, or a complete disaster.

I suppose I should address a few other things. I’m still hooked up call of duty: MW2. I’m still hooked on mario party parties. I’ve been a total slack-a-potamus on the working out. Dreary weather for some reason just makes me not want to put heavy things in the air repeatedly. I passed on an Atlantic City trip this past weekend for no reason other than “i didn’t feel like it”.

I think that just about sums up everything. Til next time, Collini Out!

November 2009 does mark the first time in over a year I’ve been grinding 2/4 and felt 100% comfortable. I am going to try to stay at 400nl as long as I feel like I’m a winner there. Right now, I feel like I did back 2 years ago when I was grinding 2/4nl on the side.

For those that don’t understand the terminology above, I am moving up stakes from a $200 buyin to a $400 buyin. This in essence means I have to win at half the rate i did before to make the same amount. I will likely make more than half my rate so therefore, I’ve given myself a raise and gotten myself positioned to be a 2/4nl reg for 2010.

I realized that I couldn’t handle playing 1/2nl for another year, or else I would go insane and I gotta get moving somehow. Making 80 to 100k a year sounds really awesome now but in 5 years if I’m still only making that, I’ll have really undershot my personal poker and life goals. That’s the reason I’ve been trying so hard to make the move up to 2/4nl recently.

The only thing that was holding me back before was some ridiculous mental block I had where I got play happy when $200 was in the middle. I managed to fix that and am playing a little tighter than I was previously. I am shooting to run a 16/12 or something in that ballpark for 400nl. This is what I think will be optimal because of the number of shortstackers as well as guys who can pick off a player running 20/15 pretty easily.

I also find myself really playing well and getting my blood pumping playing 400nl. This is something I lost play 200nl about as soon as I started playing 200nl. I was just so overrolled for it, playing a $400 pot just didn’t phase me. I find myself excited about playing at 2/4 now. I think that will probably pass with time as I get overrolled for 2/4 but that’s why there’s 3/6. That said, I’m probably a little overrolled for 2/4 but its still in the ballpark of the real number one would need to play 2/4 full time.

This blog post might be a little ahead of itself too. I have only put in 10k hands at 2/4 and have managed to keep a WR of 2ptbb (which is low but I think a decent win rate while I’m still learning the players). Hopefully, I don’t write this, then go on some crazy downswing and end up back at busto 1/2nl. It’d have to be a hell of a downswing however. I find myself in a place now where I’m not going to need to withdrawal money for at least 6 months probably closer to 1 year. I am going to take a serious run at the mid-stakes and high stakes now. I have the skills now to make it there (unlike 2 years ago when I was dr. nittinstein).

Its a pretty sweet feeling realizing you’ve done such a good job all year, you deserve a raise… and then giving it to yourself. Wish me luck!

Man, Its really been an entire year since I last worked a full time job. That’s pretty ridiculous to think about. My life is wildly different than I thought it would be too. Here’s the graph from when I got laid off from my engineering job, and profit with rakeback included:

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I would also post a picture of my hourly rate, but honestly I’m not 100% sure what it is. I played so much on cake before the holdem manager software was fully compatible with it. I would assume based off my time on full tilt that my hourly rate was somewhere in the ballpark of $100/hr. That sounds way better than it is. That hourly rate is probably middle of pack among 200nl regulars.

The year in 3 paragraphs…

Most of the year I ran fine. I maintained a 3.5ptbb WR at 200nl and a 2.5ptbb WR at 400nl. I think I am good enough to have had both of those. However, I would soon realize I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was. As the cake games got worse and worse, I realized how incredibly exploitable I was in 3bet and 4bet pots. I was playing very very straight forward and had a fold to 3b close to 80%. I was just getting abused by good regulars while still crushing fish. This caught up with me quickly once the fish left the cake games and I was stuck playing against 6 of the same regs. Queue the BE stretch.

I kinda have come to consider that my run bad time. It was in that time that I didn’t feel like ballin in vegas, had my ex-gf do some skanky things, and was just really frustrated with my game. On top of that stuff, I had 2 moves to deal with (from vegas to charlotte then from charlotte to DC). It was a pretty stressful time, and it just seemed that bad thing after bad thing was happening. In retrospect, however it likely wasn’t all me just running bad. I realized how nitty I really was when I got half-way into Vegas. I finally accepted the fact that I wasn’t as good as I thought, about that time.

I completely started focusing on getting better and with the help of a particularly fantastic cow and visor wearing gentleman, I turned on my boomswitch again. That is figurative however, because I now think I’m in the top 5 best regulars at 200nl which means I could move to 400nl with very little problem. With the revamp and rethinking in my game, I know that I am more than capable of playing well in just about every poker type. I even have been winning at headsup play (which is something I could never do even at the lowest stakes).

Where does it go from here?

One year, I have moved locations twice. I have almost hit the revolve button on my best friends. I have hit the “go die” button on an ex. I have completely revamped my game from a 14/12 to 20/15. While all that sounds like it’d be pretty life changing, it really has been pretty normal. Poker is funny like that, you just learn to roll with the bad beats.

I like where I’m living (only because I don’t commute). I really like the people I see on a daily basis while still keepin in touch with my friends from charlotte. And I think I’m playing the best poker of my life. Everything evolves and this year has been the biggest evolution of my life.

I went from following the middle class American path to glory to something that truly brought me great joy. I love the fact that I got laid off one year ago. I don’t know that I ever would have actually had the balls to quit on my own, and just take the plunge into professional poker. While I haven’t made as much money as I was hoping, I still have enjoyed every day I get to make my own schedule. Every trip I get to take for 5 days, on a Wednesday or for 3 months.

I can’t wait to see what changes this coming year. Its turning into a book I’m reading where I just wait to see what happens next, as it seems that something I’m least expecting always happens. I’ll be gunning for the next year to be far more profitable and to become an even better player while learning from all the experiences of the past year. Also, I’m going to focus on giving back to the world as well.

I’ll be playing professional poker at least until my lease is up in august next year. To be honest though, the way things are going now, I can’t see myself ever truly being happy with a 9 to 5 job… but then again who really is happy with a 9 to 5 job? With money not being an issue, there’s no reason to work.

Well like clockwork, the middle of the month comes around and I get my drive to play poker again. I have put in about 15k hands in the last week and felt pretty good about my results. I had one of my biggest days ever at 1/2nl yesterday. I made 2.7k in just under 5k hands which was nice. I still thought I could have played better as I stacked off in two spots I ended up regretting but overall I played well. I think the drive will continue for the rest of the month and hopefully I can finish strong.

My plan was to move back to 2/4nl but once again I just can’t seem to get anything started there. I will try to take more shots at the end of this month, but the tables are pretty reg/sser infested. I realize that if I want to move up that this is what I will have to deal with, so I need to just bite the bullet. Oh well i’m not gonna force anything. I’m gonna focus on playing shorthanded FR tables for the time being because i’m finding it to be one of the most profitable things i can do.

So Modern Warfare 2 dropped. I decided not to buy it, because it will really hinder the best usage of my time. Ok, I couldn’t keep that up… of course I bought it. I have played an assload of it. It’s a GREAT game. I haven’t touched the single player yet but i’ve heard good things about it. I have always been a multi-player guy and have been focusing on keeping my kill to death ratio (the winrate of COD) up. I am crushing. To be honest though, its really not that time consuming. I’m still playing just as much poker as usual. Just gives me another option of things to do. Its a damn good time though. If you play on xbox live, let me know and we can play together sometime.

It’s also been one year since I’ve gone professional in poker. Its been a great one year so far. Another post addressing that is on the way.

Hopefully this isn’t turning into a habit for me, but I have lost the bug to play again. It’s like I work so hard to get a month complete and feeling really good about my game then I almost push the reset button on my drive. I think it comes from the fact that I basically live in months where people with jobs live in years. I shoot for a monthly goal and then if I meet it, I’m content and have a feeling of pride. This in-turn i suppose leads to having no interest in playing the next few days of a month. That said, I have played around 6k hands, and have run about $1k under EV. Probably leading to my lack of love for the game at the moment.

I have been trying to move to 400nl, but to be honest its really almost impossible with the times I play. The games are just so infested with shortstackers and there’s so few games, there’s almost no way to do it. I have been subbing in 1/2 deep and 1/2 ante deep tables to play to the size of those games. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea of $800 pots again, but I am not comfortable with playing against 7 ssers. Lets hope that FTP finds a fix to this issue and stat.

Enough Poker.

The hokies suck. Haha. I went to the game, and got blitzed while hanging with some pretty awesome friends so i can’t complain too much. That said, that was the least amount of fun I could have possibly had in blacksburg without getting arrested. See Fuppnasty on FTP for hilarious stories about being arrested. Either way, that was great fun minus the hokies sucking part.

We came back on saturday morning so we could do halloween in DC. I dressed up as “rocking out with your cock out”. This is something new for me. Usually I do awesome costumes but I’ve never gone the raunchy route, and I don’t think I’m doing it again. It was a huge hit among my friends, but basically everybody I spoke with at the bar was kinda creeped out. The fake unbuttoned fly looked so real that I think people actually thought I had my pants unbuttoned all night, thus I creeped people out. I think in the future of my halloween onwards I will be something cute, cuddly and fun. Here’s the pic of me from halloween:

Its just a fake fly that went over my real jeans.

We tried to go to the biggest party in northern VA at a place called clarendon ballroom. This went over terrible as by 8pm there was a line that was literally around the block and it was already 1 in and 1 out. We aborted that plan and went to another bar which was actually surprisingly not packed because the fire marshall was there making sure they didn’t go over capacity. It was great, and definitely the least packed i’d ever seen that bar. We basically had the patio to ourselves.

I went a few “dates” to movies in the past weeks. I went to go see “the invention of lying” which I thought was really funny and clever, but I was the only person in the theater laughing, which made things awkward. I also saw “zombieland” which was pretty great. I liked that it didn’t really go anywhere but just murdering zombies. I have a few more movies I’d like to see, but that will likely be with dudes instead of with a girl as apparently I love burning bridges with chicks right now.

That’s basically all that is exciting. We have another hokie game tonight, and I honestly don’t care if we lose or not. But I will be throwing down for it. So on that note, LETS GO! BUD LIGHT!!!

Lets hope i get some motivation to play some volume before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 comes out… cause ain’t nothing getting done for days after that thing drops. Have a good weekend ya’ll.

Also, Look forward to a “1 Year as a Pro” post coming up in the next week or so. I will discuss how much my life has changed and how stress-less being a professional poker player really is when you do it right.