Back on Track

Make sure to use signup code jhub for 33% rakeback when signing up for Cake Poker. Make sure you type it in as the SIGNUP CODE, not the promotional code or any other code. There's also a 100% deposit bonus up to $500. Transfers do not count as deposits. However, if you get money transferred into your account you will still be eligible for a deposit bonus once you actually make a deposit. If you need help getting money into Cake I usually have excess money in there & can swap money for money on another site where I have an account. Just post a comment on my blog or email me.

I’m in the car on my way home from Delaware & have been really lazy w/ blog entries so I figure it’s a good time to type one up. I haven’t played much this past week. My Dad, my brothers, & I drove to Delaware for my cousin’s wedding. We drove because we wanted to go to New York for a day as well. The drive on the way there was 21 hours, which wasn’t that bad because I probably spent 10-12 hours studying poker related material. Most of it was cash game stuff. I really doubt I’ll move to cash anytime soon but studying it still helps for SNGs some. On Friday we went to the rehearsal dinner & then drank in the hotel room with some other people that were at the dinner for a while. On Saturday I worked out, then we went golfing, ate lunch, & had the wedding after a little rest. Everything was a really good time. It’s nice to see cousins, aunts, & uncles that I don’t see very often. We went out for pizza & drinks after the wedding. On Sunday we went to NY. We didn’t have much time to spend there but it was still cool to see. I also came down to Winona a day early because 1 of my friends that is currently living in Mississippi was in town.

Obviously I haven’t gotten much playing time in the past week but I’m really feeling good about my game and have been on a roll. I started out the month on a solid $27K downswing. Then on April 5th I finally decided to cut down on my # of tables. Considering that probably about half of my games are super turbos & I’m table selecting 4 sites, which takes away a lot of focus, I think I was playing too many tables. It’s easy to do w/ my rakeback deal on Cake but the way things were going I had to try something new. I’ve mostly been in the 8-12 table range. I also have been really taking advantage of Full Tilt’s color coded notes, which I think are extremely helpful. It’s getting a lot easier the longer I’ve been on the site as I get better reads on the players, especially when playing less tables. I’ve also stopped having the TV on while I play. I love a lot of the shows on ESPN/ESPN2 like Mike & Mike, 1st & 10, NFL Live, Jim Rome, Around the Horn, & PTI so I used to just have those shows on all day. Now I only have them on if I’m just starting up & loading tables or if I’m winding down to break or end the session, with less tables going. Otherwise I have just had music going, which keeps me a lot more focused. I think the combination of all of these things has had a very big positive effect on my results. Since April 5th when I made these changes I’ve been averaging over $440/hr. Obviously that’s a heater & not my true win rate, but I have been feeling way more comfortable at the tables & think I’m making the optimal play a lot more. I don’t time out much anymore & have more time to think through decisions, & also have much better reads on different players. I think it’s helped the most in post-flop play, as I have more time to reconstruct the hand in my head & have better reads so that I can adjust to different players better. Anyways, obviously a big difference in the results has been variance, but time will time just how big of a factor it was. During my big downswing DDBeast had told me that he thought I was playing very well. Even though I respect his opinion on SNGs more than anyone, he still only sees a small percentage of my hands while playing a lot of tables, & I do think that playing too many tables & other factors had a significant negative effect on my results, even if variance was the #1 factor. Either way I’ll be fine w/ all the rakeback I make. I was looking on sharkscope, & it’s pretty crazy that despite how awful my 09 has gone I think I’ve probably still made more money overall (including rakeback, bonuses, etc…) than anyone else in SNGs. Now that I have the color coded notes system down pretty good on FTP, & my table selection is much better, & my confidence is up I can’t deny that the $1Ks & $2Ks on FTP are pretty tempting. However, I don’t want that stress & variance right now, so I’m going to continue to stay away from those. I’m sure I’ll be tempted back into them sometime in the future though, no matter how sick they are.

I’ve lost a little over 30 lbs as I’m trying to get in shape for my wedding in August (& just for the sake that it’s a lot healthier). It’s pretty easy to get out of shape as a professional poker player, especially if you go on a decent amount of trips. I’m going to stick with it now though. I have a personal trainer who designs my workouts (tailored to my goals) & tells me how many calories, carbs, protein, & fat to shoot for in a day. He’s been very helpful & recently launched his website at performancetraining.com I would highly recommend him. If you have the money it’s well worth the cost. Everybody should workout at least a few times a week. You’ll feel much better if you do.

As time goes by with this Minnesota bill I really doubt much is going to happen with it. They tried the same crap in Kentucky & it got overturned in appeals court. Every lawyer I see comment on it thinks that we’ll be ok because it won’t hold up in court. If anything does happen with it, I’m hoping there will be a way around it so that I don’t have to move. One thing that really bugs me is how they report online gambling as being illegal in the US. While it’s true that it’s illegal for an online gambling site to run its’ operations in the US, it is not illegal to play online poker in the US. If it was illegal I’d be in prison. Star Tribune did an article on me playing online poker for a living. If it was illegal that would be like them interviewing some drug dealer in MN about his “career” & the cops doing nothing about it. Everybody knows that site pros like Greg Raymer & Phil Ivey play online poker. If it were truly illegal you can’t tell me that there would be nothing done about it. The thing is, it is a bit of a grey area & there’s people who do believe it’s illegal to play, but anybody with any knowledge of the situation knows that they would have no shot of convicting a player. It just wouldn’t hold up in court because it isn’t illegal, & that’s why we continue to play. It’s truly baffling the kind of trash that passes for news these days. Some of it just has no credibility. Somebody mentioned it in the comments section of my blog, but when commenting on the issue one player made up a good point in my opinion. He talked about how many people look down on poker players because we’re basically taking other people’s money. In reality, almost everybody who works does this. When you work for a business you’re taking business away from other businesses, & are therefore taking money away from other people. It’s just not the direct route like it is in the poker world, so people don’t see it for what it really is. Therefore, poker players take slack for it, but there’s certainly nobody criticizes Joe Blow who sits in his cubicle selling electronics over the phone. He’s just a hard working citizen while we’re a disgrace. While the opinion on poker players has softened a lot in recent years, there’s still a long ways to go as there’s many uninformed and/or dillusional people out there when it comes to the subject.

For a while the Cake games were getting pretty tough, & I was even considering table selecting a little on there despite my high rakeback. One of the newer sites on the network, Lock Poker, was giving out under the table rakeback deals at up to 60%, despite the fact that it’s against network rules for them to offer rakeback at all. Basically they were stealing some of Cake’s biggest players by offering them 60% rakeback, when they weren’t even allowed to offer rakeback period. Some of these players thought 60% rakeback made it ok to register for games where they were the 4th best player & it got a little ugly for a while. Then Cake found out about everything & shut the lock rakeback program down. They’re lucky they didn’t get booted from the network. Needless to say, there’s going to be some unhappy players on lock who aren’t going to be receiving their rakeback.

People always ask me why I don’t play MTTs. There’s various reasons. They lock your schedule down. The good ones are mostly on weekends. Despite the weekends being the softest time to play, I rarely play weekends because there’s often way more other stuff to do since most people have work off. I can make plenty of money without playing weekends & don’t need to sacrifice social life to do it. Just because a certain time is the most profitable to play doesn’t mean it’s the best life decision to play at that time. Too many players just get in the habit of having their lives revolve around poker. I mostly just play around my fiancee’s schedule now that we live together, w/ differences usually being less than a couple hours. Another big reason I don’t like MTTs is that since I don’t play them as my main game, I’ll never really get to the long run in them in terms of sample size, so I’m basically gambling. Even if you play them for a living the variance can be very high & it can take a while to get a good sample size. I believe it was DJC311 that made a very good point about MTT variance. Most of the biggest money jumps in MTTs are at the final table, so performing well at the final table is probably the most important part of MTTs (obv you need to get there 1st but you get the point). Well, the final table of an MTT is basically a SNG, just with a different payout structure. Look at the variance of SNGs. Top players can run breakeven or losing over several thousand SNGs. Now how many final tables are you going to make in a year? I don’t care who you are, it’s going to be nowhere near several thousand, or even one thousand for that matter. The point is that luck probably plays a much bigger role in the difference of results between the top MTT winners & the marginal winners than most people realize. That’s just another reason I’m not a big MTT fan. While the thrill of winning them is like no other, the wins are way outnumbered by deep runs where you play extremely well & then continue to get screwed over & over until you bust, in which the disappointment matches the joy when you win.

Normally I try to play 5 days (Mon-Fri) a week at around 40 hours. Obviously there’s a lot of days/weeks where I have other stuff going on & don’t work at all or take time off for some days where I don’t reach that 40 hour mark. Contrary to what people seem to think, I “work” a lot less than most Americans, & probably less than most professional SNG players. Last year I ended up “working” the equivalent of 39 40 hour weeks. People just see how many SNGs I play in a year & assume I play all the time, without factoring in that I get in way more SNGs/hr than most people. I’ll probably play more than that this year but we’ll see. I’m not going to worry about it too much. Being able to make my own schedule is one of the things I like most about being a professional poker player. That’s right up there with the money & be able to actually do something that I truly enjoy for a living. One thing I have done this year is started to keep track of net vacation hours. For every day of the week other than the 1st week of the year (which started on a Thursday), the normal work week would be 40 hours. So at the end of each week I calculate how many hours I was over or under 40. If I was over they go into an overtime column & if I was under they go into a vacation column. I then have a forumula to subtract the difference. Anyways, so far this year I have taken 13.82 vacation days. I’ll probably have 2-3 more this week. I just thought it was another thing that’s nice to follow.

Injuries are really hurting the NBA playoffs this year. I thought it was going to be a great year for the playoffs until Kevin Garnett got hurt. Now the Cavs are pretty much going to walk right into the NBA finals, possibly without losing a game in the east. Since KG got his title last year I do want to Cavs to win it all, but I would have rather it been playing against the best & actually having some good games along the way. Now Yao Ming is out for the playoffs & the Lakers are going to get a walk into the Western Conference finals. At least the Nuggets-Lakers series should be good, & then the NBA finals should be good no matter who represents the West. Even though I can’t stand the Lakers, part of me wants them to win the west just so we can see a Lebron vs Kobe NBA finals matchup. That said, LeBron used to play against Melo in high school & that rivalry could be interesting as well, although there’s no debate of who is better like there is w/ Kobe vs Lebron.

It’s been way overdue but I’ve finally started watching The Sopranos & TheWire w/ Paula. Both are supposed to be very good. I’m not far enough in to comment though & it will be a long time before we’re through both of them. I’m a big fan of watching TV series on DVD. My favorites, in no particular order, are Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Weeds, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Office, Californication, & Everybody Loves Raymond. I also tried watching Dexter & Mad Men after hearing very good things about both. Dexter was ok but nothing special. Mad Men was just flat out awful & boring. It’s so slow moving & nothing happens. I have no idea how that show has won awards or what anyone could see in it.

As long as we’re kind of on the topic & I’m bored sitting in a vehicle, my favorite kind of movies are comedies. My favorite comedies of all time, in no particular order, are Dumb & Dumber, Office Space, Old School, Anchorman, & Wedding Crashers. I might be leaving some out but Superbad & Borat would probably receive honorable mentions.
Results:
Month of April 2009:
150.77
SNG Profit: $ (863.25)
Rakeback/Bonuses: $ 24,077.82
Staking: $ 9,100.00
Total Profit: $ 32,314.57
Year of 2009:
Hours: 631.89
SNG Profit: $14,910.79
Rakeback/Bonuses: $ 113,373.20
Total SNG Profit: $128,283.99
Staking: $24,450.65
Total Yearly Profit: $152,734.64








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