Every Day Is Exactly The Same (November Review)

Bleh, chalk up November as the third lame month in a row for me now. While it's a bit frustrating, It's hard to get overly discouraged about how things went this month considering that I think my volume in November turned out to be the lowest of the year (besides January). Aside from the fact that I never really gave myself much of a chance to catch a heater or turn things around, the hands that I did manage to log also saw me run way below expectation. Anyways, the breakeven stretch continues, weeeeeeeee!



November

$227 Table Winnings
$2,000 FPP Value
---------------------------------
$2,227 USD

Obviously a very LOL total but I also made some decent money from my salary and I'm close enough to the 500K milestone that I coulda fudged the total if I really wanted to :) but I'll save it for December!

Away from the felt, November was a pretty social month with plenty of outings. My new roommate Mark and I went out quite a few nights and even managed to simultaneously bring home a couple of gals after enticing them with Delissio pizza (new pickup line added to teh arsenal if TV line fails). I'm pretty sure that judging by the quality of girls that I hit on when hammered the pizza line will sadly be much more effective LOL. It was great though, I first offered if the girls would like to split a cab with us and as they were hesitating Mark piped up about the pizza and BAM, they were sold. We returned home and Mark threw the pizza in the oven, which we ate a few minutes later after it came out black on the bottom. Nobody cared. I turned the TV on and sat next to my girl. The next thing I know, Mark's girl comes out of his room wearing his sweat pants and his hoodie. Mark comes out afterwards and hands her a brand new, UNOPENED tooth brush that he claims he just "had lying around." I'm not sure how the girl wasn't petrified or turned off by the fact that Mark appeared to have the one night sleepover down to a science but the next thing I know they're brushing their teeth side by side in our bathroom! Shortly thereafter, Mark grabs her hand, leads her to his bedroom, closes the door and I don't see him till morning. At this point, it's about 3:30 in the morning and I look over at my girl and see her sprawled out on the couch. She has a pretty decent body but has been a pretty big tease and seems to like playing games with me up to this point so I don't really know what's going through her head (example. At the club, for reasons that are still not clear to me, I walked up to her from behind and slapped her on the ass at one point. She really takes offense to this so I apologize but she is still fired up. I concede that I have screwed myself over here, apologize once again and then leave. 5 minutes later she sees that I'm actually not going to approach her again so she comes over and sits next to me and starts chatting again.lol.). I tell her that I'm really tired and that she should come sleep with me instead of on the couch. She says that she's not going to have sex with me, I say that's fine we should just cuddle...blah blah this goes on for a while until she seems unwilling to cave. Now I'm really tired and even though I figure she's still playing games am not going to force her to do anything obv so I give up, throw her a sleeping bag and jump in my bed and start to fall asleep. 30 seconds later she comes into my room and says it's "cold" out there and wants to sleep with me. lolz, crazy fkn girls. I'm actually more angry and tired with her at this point than in the mood for anything and pass out very quickly. I wake up in the morning cuddling her and am no longer tired and angry. She continues with her story that she doesn't sleep with guys she just meets and then decides to tease me for a couple hours, telling me all kinds of personal sexual secrets, showing me her panties etc. She then asks me if I have some paper and a pen to do her "morning diary." I tell her straight up that I think she's crazy but to knock herself out and that there's some paper on my desk. I ask her what she's writing about and she tells me that she's writing about all the things she wishes I would do to her! lol I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. I tell her to show me the list and I'll do my very best! Still no go. By now I see that things are pointless and can hear Mark banging around the kitchen so I get up for some breakfast. He's got a big stupid smile on his face, which adds to my frustration. The girls leave shortly after-we trade phone numbers because it seems to be the decent thing to do. My girl acts as though she doesn't want my number at all and has since been texting me regularly. lol, I'm pretty much over meeting girls in clubs + one night stands in general...time to take a spin class or something.

December's going to be an action packed month for the first 15 days. As it stands, my tentative plan is to earn just over 50K VPP's in this time frame, which will clear most of my salary for the year and overshoot the 500K milestone bonus by a bit. It will look like I will be ending the year with about 500K VPP's (half of my volume from last year) and 120K +salary in profits. In my mind, I'm already planning towards 2012 and will be looking to wrap up what has been a profitable but unstructured year by Dec. 15. After Dec. 15, I will turn my focus to some poker-related ideas that I have (will talk about more later, no point now as I only have ideas lol) and I will take some time off for the holidays!

Aside from completing my video series that I talked about earlier in my blog by Dec. 15, I will also be doing a short review of "How I Made My First Million From Poker," by Tri "Slowhabit" Nguyen:



To be honest, I don't think that I've ever read a single book about poker before...this isn't because I think that I don't need to or that I can't be bothered to do so, it's mostly because I don't think that there is very much good material that's catered to online play or the modern poker player. I could be wrong, as I haven't really done a whole lot of searching but from what I've seen there seem to be a lot of people that are better salesmen than poker players. Anyways, this book caught my interest so I'll let you know if I think it's worth if for you guys to pick up!

Hope you all had a good November and here's to a good December!

gl at the tables.

Movember

Just a quick shout out to everyone that's doing Movember this year. If you live under a rock and are not aware of what Movember is or why 80% of the male population suddenly has dirty 'staches on their faces you can get all of the details here:

http://ca.movember.com/

I'm not sure how many people actually go as far as collecting pledges for growing the mustache...hopefully a lot do, although I'm pretty sure for most guys Movember is just an excuse to see if they can in fact grow a mustache. Shamefully, I fall into this second category since I never even really planned on doing Movember this year and just made a late decision 1 week into the month to not shave and see what happens. I'm in a pool with a few guys for motivation...losers have to ship the winners 20 whole loonies. At the very least, I'd like to think that we're helping raise awareness for prostate cancer even though we're not raising any money. Only 1 person has quit thus far, so maybe he can just send the money to charity instead.

As it turns out, I cannot really grow much of a mustache. It's very thin and patchy and looks pretty greasy. Thankfully most of my friends aren't fairing much better than me either.

One guy said it best, "November is the best month of the year to pick up chics because our competition looks like that!" as he pointed to some dude with an ugly 'stache. I've been surprised that some girls have still talked to me out at bars and clubs...though it's more than likely that my mustache is invisible in poorly lit rooms.

Here are a couple of pics-just because you asked Rosh...try not to get too excited buddy ;/




Anyone else eagerly looking forward to Dec. 1 lol??

PokerSchoolOnline Videos

Hey guys, I'm currently in the process of making a 2-part video mini-series about full-ring cash games for PokerSchoolOnline...which kinda made me realise that I never really brought to attention the two videos that I've already contributed to the website. Maybe you've already found them by now anyways but if you haven't and are interested in viewing them, go ahead and take a look (I've also added the links to the sidebar on the blog):

http://www.pokerschoolonline.com/articles/Session-Videos-Frosty012

Both vids are strategy videos for 100nl full-ring cash. I used two different formats for each video...in the first, I'm speaking "live" in the sense that I recorded the audio and footage simultaneously. In the second video, I recorded a session and then went back to add the audio. The first video has around 2,000 views and the second about half of that (was released later). I actually like the second video much better than the first, probably because I could explain my thought process in a more drawn-out manner and there were several interesting spots that came up during play. Anyways, take a look at both of them and I'm sure you'll get something out of it. Also, there are several other videos posted at www.pokerschoolonline.com by other members of Team Online and PokerStars Pro to view as well and I think you only need like 150VPP's to see everything. Oh yeah, everything's free as well. I'm not trying to sell you something, lol.

I'll keep you posted about the release of my current project that I'm working on. The focus is going to be around "the essentials for mass multi-tabling full-ring cash games." I'm looking to have it finished before Dec.15 so I would assume it will be released shortly after that...

gl at the tables, let me know what you think about the vids!

Red Spade Open This Sunday!

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$2000? Naw, take $200

So I've continued to run poorly this month but am somehow still in the black so it could be worse. I would be be beating the games at a pretty good rate if I ran at expected value (EV) but it is what it is and I'll continue to try and play well and not worry about what I can't control.

One thing that I want to make clear is that I've said many times in the past that the "EV" stat is not really a good indicator of how a player is "running" and I still believe that even when I vent about running below EV. I don't think that EV is at all an accurate way of measuring how a player is running due to the fact that it can't account for cooler situations or situations where most of the money is already in the middle before a big suckout occurs on a sequential street. For example, I may get it in with AA vs. KK in late position 4 times in 1 day and hold each time and think I'm the best player in the world when I'm obviously just running hot. Furthermore, I may get 90% of my money in the middle with AA vs. KK on a 224r flop and then have to get the last of it in on a K turn and my EV will tell me that I was supposed to lose. Because of these two factors I don't think that a player can claim to be running good or bad based on EV alone, although it definitely provides some kind of base to work off of. What EV will tell you is that regardless of how one thinks that they are running, EV will tell you how much money you SHOULD HAVE WON based on the mathematical percentages. All I'm getting at is that it's fair for me (or anyone) to be upset after running below EV because I should in fact have $1800 more in my account if I ran at expectation, although it's not fair for me to claim that I'm running bad based on this information alone. I make that claim based on what I feel is an honest assessment of my own situation after taking into account the aforementioned factors as well. Obviously it's just an opinion rather than fact.

With that said, here are a couple of not so fun hands from my session today:

Poker Stars $200.00 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players

MP1: $200.00
MP2: $310.45
CO: $105.95
BTN: $200.00
SB: $135.55
Hero (BB): $203.35
UTG: $636.35
UTG+1: $142.20
UTG+2: $235.50

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BB with A Q
4 folds, MP2 raises to $4, 1 fold, BTN calls $4, SB calls $3, Hero raises to $18, 2 folds, SB raises to $82, Hero raises to $203.35, SB calls $53.55 all in

Flop: ($279.10) 9 6 2 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Turn: ($279.10) 5 (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($279.10) T (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $279.10
SB shows T T
Hero shows A Q
SB wins $276.10
(Rake: $3.00)

This was probably the most tilting hand of the day only because I knew the villain can almost NEVER have me dominated here but it's going to be a flip nearly every time. Even though I have no fold equity, after putting in $18 plus all of the dead money out there it seems like folding shouldn't really even be considered. This is just a spot where I feel that I clearly played the hand better than the opponent and "deserved" to win the flip since that's the best that they can hope for lol.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 7 players

UTG: $100.00
UTG+1: $127.85
MP: $91.50
Hero (CO): $100.00
BTN: $126.35
SB: $74.50
BB: $46.20

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is CO with A K
3 folds, Hero raises to $3, BTN raises to $9, 2 folds, Hero raises to $21, BTN raises to $61, Hero raises to $100, BTN calls $39

Flop: ($201.50) T 7 6 (2 players)

Turn: ($201.50) A (2 players)

River: ($201.50) 4 (2 players)

Final Pot: $201.50
Hero shows A K
BTN shows 7 6
BTN wins $198.50
(Rake: $3.00)

Scratch that, this hand was more tilting that the last. I don't really care if you want to be a playmaster (because if you look up the stats for people that playmaster, they are almost always losing players or break-even at best and this guy was no exception) but when you get caught it would be nice if the best hand could hold. Oh well.

Poker Stars $100.00 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players

MP1: $107.50
MP2: $142.00
CO: $122.40
BTN: $77.80
SB: $158.55
Hero (BB): $116.60
UTG: $114.55
UTG+1: $178.00

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BB with K A
UTG raises to $3, UTG+1 calls $3, 4 folds, SB raises to $14, Hero raises to $116.60, 2 folds, SB calls $102.60

Flop: ($239.20) 6 6 7 (2 players)

Turn: ($239.20) 3 (2 players)

River: ($239.20) 2 (2 players)

Final Pot: $239.20
SB shows J K
Hero shows K A
Hero wins $236.20
(Rake: $3.00)

Despite many tough beats, I still managed to turn a $400ish profit today due in big part to hands like these where I'm pretty much gifted some big pots from some unknowns.

In other news, I'm stoked to be going to Victoria for Remembrance Day Long Weekend! I'm going over on a ferry tomorrow afternoon with Ben and we're staying at his awesome apartment close to downtown. There's several other people that I know that will be over there, including Miles, so I'm sure we'll meet up at some point and party. Unfortunately, I've agreed to do Movember this year with a few people and am looking as unattractive as ever...it will be an epic challenge to woo an islander this weekend with my whiskers but we'll see what happens. It will be much tougher than last weekend, where I met a girl on Friday and before I could even use my TV line on her she used it on me lol. That almost never happens. Anyways, hope you all have a good weekend!

gl at the tables!