Back from France

Well, I came back from France yesterday and I've just got soo much stuff to do now that I'm home! I have to unpack, meet people that I haven't seen in a while, wrapping up my final points for my Thesis so that I can present it and graduate, working on a song that I've written on vacation and in the meantime also meeting my goal of grinding hands for at least 4 hours a day. Yesterday I did 5, yay! ;)

I really wish I had more time to make a more elaborate blog entry about the stuff I'm doing right now, but I just don't have the time. My days just seem to be packed with stuff I have to do and appointments that are clustered right next to eachother :/ It's fun to stay busy, but I hope that after this week I'll have more spare time...

I'm planning on putting a schedule in place for next week, so that I can really plan my day and be a bit more organized. Lately I've noticed that I'm doing things so randomly that it just drives me crazy and a little more structure in my life would really give me some order. I'll work on that during this week. Right now I'll just continue doing stuff randomly ;)

Travelling back home

Going home
Well, this is my last night in Orlando. I'm really going to miss the great weather, even though it's been extremely cold here for the past couple of days... It was only 7 degrees celsius out tonight!! I was literally freezing and shaking as I was walking outside to get into the car. Funny, because the weather in Holland is generally a LOT colder. I guess you adjust to a warmer climate after being here for a month ;)

On the one hand, I'm going to miss the States, as I always do when I leave: the friendly people, the warm climate, seeing my family, the beautiful view from my room. However, I feel great about going back home as well, as I can see all of my friends, and also make music again, which I love to do! =)

The future of my blog
Ever since I started blogging again at the end of November, I've been thinking about what I want my blog to be like. Ater careful consideration, I decided that I wanted to change the title a bit, since I feel it's kind of limiting. Ofcoarse poker is a big part of my life, but having "Pokerblog" in the title has always kind of forced me to blog about it. In the past, I've written some blog posts about other aspects of my life, but I've always felt the need to keep most of the stuff poker related.

Now that I have changed the title, I feel that I can be free to write whatever is on my mind. I realize ofcoarse that this wasn't my original intention when starting this blog, but it's the direction that it has been heading towards for the past years, and to be honest, I feel pretty great about it! :) I never would've expected when starting this blog, that it would give me so much fulfillment in writing down my thoughts. For me, it's always been a great place to really organize my ideas and be free to write about things that are difficult to talk about.

For the poker lovers out there who really liked the poker stuff that I was blogging about, the hand discussions, strategy topics etc, don't be alarmed... :) Ofcoarse poker is still an important part of my life and I will surely continue to use this blog to keep tabs on my progress and discuss poker strategy. I just wanted to be more free in the topics that I choose to talk about and also discuss other things that interest me, such as a very important one, music.

I'm not sure how much of the content of my future posts will really change because of this, but changing the title and making the blog more about my life in general, as opposed to just poker related material is in my mind a step in the right direction. I hope you guys feel the same way. If you have any comments or ideas about it, leave me a remark cause I am always open to feedback! :)

Music
Now that the title of this blog has changed, I feel that I can share something about music as well. Everytime I go to the States, I hear some great new music that I don't hear in the Netherlands. I ended up with a couple of great bands and artists and have downloaded their albums to put on my iPhone:
- Shinedown
- Keith Urban
- Boys Like Girls
- Theory of a Deadman

I'll post two songs that I found to be REALLY awesome:




While being in the States and not really having much opportunity to actually play, apart from the ocassional piano that I found in some restaurant that I would sneak behind and play on ;) I've come up with some great ideas for writing a few new songs here and I can't wait to work them out.

During this past year, I have been buying all kinds of music equipmant and built myself a really nice "home studio", with the following:
- an electric stage piano (a Yamaha P-250)
- an external music production firewire soundcard (Saffire FocusRite LE)
- a Samson condenser microphone
- a T-Bone SC450 with pop killer
- two studio monitors (KRK RP5 ROKIT G2)
- official license of Cubase 5

I still wanna get a Behringer BCF 2000 to quickly alter the volume of the different tracks. The cool thing about it is that the faders on it are motorized. This means that whenever I open a project in Cubase 5, it will alter its settings and update the faders to their saved positions for each track! :) It's a E 180,- which isn't all that expensive. For a picture, see below:



When I come home on Monday, the first thing I'll do is probably start working out some songs on my PC =) I can't wait!! :D

Well, I guess that's it for now. It's already 1AM and I've got a long day ahead of me tomorrow. Luckily my plane leaves at 2PM, so I can sleep in until like 10 'o clock, but I'm guessing tomorrow will be pretty tiring no matter what. My next post will be from the Netherlands again! Until than take care and good luck! :)

Working hard

I'd like to start by wishing everyone a happy and succesful 2010! I hope everyone has enjoyed the holidays :)

For the past few weeks I had been grinding a ton of hands, but unfortunately I have been running pretty horrible and my results just haven't been good. I played about 30k hands at 0.5/1 and only 2k hands at 1/2. Overall I'm down 1.6k, which isn't horrible, but it's really annoying since I'm working on rebuilding my roll to comfortably grind 1/2 again.

Starting a couple of days ago, I quit playing and started working really hard at reviewing my game. I'm working up a document that contains every big pot that I have lost in the 30k hand stretch and analyzing leaks that I can find in my game. There are a lot of colddecks and coolers obviously, but I was glad to find that there are plenty of mistakes and things to work on as well. I was feeling pretty down about my results at the beginning of this week, but now that I'm working really hard on my game, I've been feeling a lot better! :)

Last night I also started another really exciting project. When analyzing my hands, I've been discussing a few with Barewire and we came across a really interesting situation:

Full Tilt Poker $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold'em - 2 players - View hand 463188
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: $101.00
Hero (BTN/SB): $165.40

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BTN/SB with 9 T
Hero raises to $3, BB raises to $10, Hero calls $7

Flop: ($20.00) 6 7 9 (2 players)
BB bets $14, Hero calls $14

Turn: ($48.00) Q (2 players)
BB bets $22, Hero calls $22

River: ($92.00) T (2 players)
BB bets $55 all in, Hero calls $55

Final Pot: $202.00
BB shows A 8 (a straight, Ten high)
Hero mucks 9 T

BB wins $201.50

We started discussing this hand and came to the conclusion that the most optimal play would be to call turn and call or fold the river based on what card comes. After thinking about it together, we found that calling turn with the intention of folding any river spade, 5/T/J/K/A is optimal. This accounts to 11 spades, 3 times 5/J/K/A and 2 times T (since we hold two in our hand) = 11+12+2 = 25 river cards. Of the 46 unseen cards, we are folding 25/46=54.3% rivers.

This got me to thinking... how can we calculate the equity needed on the turn to make the river profitable? Together we started working out a mathematical scenario:
EV=(CT*f) + (CT+CR*(1-f)*(1-e)) + (P*(1-f)*e)

CT = price of turn call
CR = price of river call
P = pot size on river
e = showdown equity on the turn
f = % of times we fold river

The first term is the EV of calling turn and folding the river.

The second term is our investment for calling turn+river, multiplied by the times that we are actually calling river as well, multiplied by % of times we call the river and aren’t good, where e is % we have the best hand once we call his river bet.

The third term is the EV of calling turn and river and ending up having the best hand.

When calculating the EV=0 break-even point on this play, the conclusion was that we would need to be good 37% of the time on the river for our turn+river play to be good.

After working this out, I really found this math stuff to be really exciting. That's when I decided to work up a document called "Math in Poker", where I document al lot of situations that we can solve using basic math. As an example, how often semi-bluffs need to be profitable on the turn, based on several river scenario's. I came up with a LOT of cool stuff and it's already 12 pages long ;) When it's finished, I might post some of it on my blog, but I'm not yet sure about that.

Well, I'm gonna continue with my document on Math and hope to finish it in a day or so. When it's done, I'll consider either posting it here or maybe sharing it on 2p2.

Grinding during the holidays

First of all, I wanna wish everyone a happy holidays and a happy new year!! :D Now that I've finished my thesis work and basically have to wait till it gets reviewed by my supervisors, I have had plenty of time to grind. I'm still in Orlando, Florida to spend the holidays here and will be flying back to the Netherlands on January 11th. It's really awesome to be here and I have a great workplace to grind. I have included a picture of my desk/room below:



When starting 2 weeks ago my roll was 6k. I've cashed out some money for living expenses and stuff and I feel that 60 buyins for 0.5/1 is plenty to start off with. My idea is to expand it to 8k and then start playing 1/2 again with a roll of 40 buyins. I'll be dropping down when I lose 2k again and just keep moving up and down until my roll is sufficient to stay at 1/2. After that I wanna try taking shots at 2/4 when I have 18k online and use the same 10 buyin stop-loss strategy.

I started grinding on December 14th and have played a decent amount of hands (20k) in the past 2 weeks, even though I've been busy with holidays and stuff. I'm sitting with everyone at NL100 who'll 2-4 table me and am playing 4 tables at once, which usually comes down to 2 regs on 2 tables each, since there aren't many people who are willing to 4-table. I suck playing like 4 different villains since I get confused in reads etc, but I really like multi-tabling more tables to get more hands in. I feel that I can exploit my edge in adjusting faster that way and also get a more fluid game dynamic going.

Unfortunately my results haven't been that great yet. I haven't been running well, which obviously shows in me running break-even for the past 20k hands. It's fine though and short-term results don't really phase me that much, although it can get a little frustrating playing these complete monkeys at 0.5/1 and not getting anything going. I feel I'm playing well though and have been working REALLY hard in analyzing my game, discussing hands with friends from 2p2 etc.

I've also been studying a lot. A poker friend of mine from 2p2 sent me some really cool poker study material that I've been reading/listening to. They really outline a lot of awesome lines and ways to adjust ranges based on villain's tendencies and such. There was also a really awesome concept in there called "randomization based on equity", which described barreling turns and randomizing your range and balancing by the times you pick up more equity etc.

Well, to sum up this blog post... I believe I promised to post some interesting hands once I started grinding, so I'll post 2 below. I'm not gonna be posting the really standard ones but will try and focus on the ones that really have some nice strategic conent to think about and discuss.

This one hand is really interesting, in which I make a pretty bad river mistake. I've discussed it extensively with a couple of friends of mine. Flop and turn are obv standard, but I should be bet/folding river, since villain's range is really polarized between flushes and air.. and he doesn't really ever have air on the river. The only thing he can be doing is turn 76 into a bluff, but this is VERY creative and not something I expect from a 1/2 donk. A pretty gross hand, but a clear river bet/fold nonetheless.

Full Tilt Poker $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 2 players - View hand 446018
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: $465.10
Hero (BTN/SB): $244.50

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BTN/SB with T K
Hero raises to $6, BB calls $4

Flop: ($12.00) 3 J 7 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $8, BB calls $8

Turn: ($28.00) 9 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $22, BB calls $22

River: ($72.00) Q (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $56, BB requests TIME, BB raises to $429.10 all in, Hero requests TIME, Hero calls $152.50 all in

Final Pot: $489.00
BB shows 8 A (a flush, Ace high)
Hero mucks T K (a straight, King high)

BB wins $488.50

This hand is pretty cool. I 3bet 65s, a hand that I have in my 3betting range fairly regularly since it's not really good enough to defend with but plays great in a 3bet pot and can flop a lot of strong draws etc. Flop comes A87 2-tone, which is an obvious cbet with my open ender and backdoor flush draw. The Jd gives me a flush draw on the turn along with my open ender so I have an easy barrel spot. I bet here with the intention of shoving most rivers, since this particular villain was peeling flop REALLY light and wasn't folding to many turn barrels either. The Jd adds a lot of gutshots to his weaker pair range and I think a lot of hands that he gets to the river with can't stand a shove. I river my straight and I think I can safely valueshove here since I don't expect villain to show up with Tx more then 50% of the time when he calls. Unfortunately he turned a straight and obviously slowplayed it until the river.

Full Tilt Poker $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em - 2 players - View hand 446027
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BTN/SB: $218.50
Hero (BB): $395.60

Pre Flop: ($3.00) Hero is BB with 6 5
BTN/SB raises to $4, Hero raises to $14, BTN/SB calls $10

Flop: ($28.00) 7 8 A (2 players)
Hero bets $21, BTN/SB calls $21

Turn: ($70.00) J (2 players)
Hero bets $42, BTN/SB calls $42

River: ($154.00) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $318.60 all in, BTN/SB calls $141.50 all in

Final Pot: $437.00
BTN/SB shows T 9 (a straight, Jack high)
Hero shows 6 5 (a straight, Nine high)

BTN/SB wins $436.50

Below is a graph of the hands I played in the past 2 weeks. As you can see, the results haven't been that great but I feel I'm playing better each day. Obviously a 2-month break is tough and it took me a little while to get back into playing my A-game etc and I do feel I've obv been making some mistakes and stuff.

It's also clear that I started off losing WAAAY too much money in non-showdown pots. I think this is due to me having to adjust to playing again and I might've played a bit too passively and weak when I started out. It looks like I've since corrected this though and my red-line looks a lot beter for the last 10k hands.



I will continue to grind the following 2 weeks and will try and make a new blogpost within the next week. Until then, good luck at the tables!

Plans after graduation

I've arrived in Orlando, Florida a week ago and we've made a road trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It's really nice out here, but the weather could be better. Tomorrow we're going to drive back to Orlando. In the following days I'm going to grind a bit and really try to put in my first few serious long-hour sessions of poker :) As I did when I took a break 2 months ago, I'll only be playing NLHE HU cash. It's the game I have specialized in for the past 1.5 years and it's what I love to play (and obviously my best game).

I also have some cool news about my plans after I graduate in the beginning of January. About 2 weeks ago a poker friends of mine whom I know from the 2p2 NL HU forum contacted me on AIM. He told me that he was planning to make a poker trip with a few 2p2-ers and asked me if I had any interest in coming along. The idea is to rent a house for like 2-3 months somewhere in the world with a few fellow online HU poker players and play a lot. The location isn't yet clear, but he was thinking about New Zealand, Buenos Aeros, Argentina etc.

I think that it would be awesome for my game to travel and play poker with a bunch of really good players and I think it's an awesome opportunity! There's still a lot to think about though and I'm still on the fence, but I am heavily considering going. It would mean that I'd leave my family and friends for a while, but I think it's worth it.

If I decide to play a few long sessions in the upcoming days, I'll try to make time and post a few hands and keep you guys updated on my progress :) until next time!

Finishing my Master's Thesis

Hi everyone! I realize that it has been a REALLY long time since I last updated my blog. At the moment I'm working really hard and have almost finished my Master's Thesis, so that I can graduate. Since my goal is to play poker full-time for at least 6 months after that, I felt compelled to make an update about my activities in the past few months, so I can start fresh when I begin my poker career.

My last post was dated June 16th, so I guess I'll start there. At that time I was really focussed on passing the exam of my last course. It was a course about deterministic models in operation research. I had the exam for it 6 days later and a few weeks after that I got the good news that I passed!! :D This meant that I never had to do another exam at the University IN MY LIFE!!! Obviously I was extremely thrilled that I was forever done with the reading of boring scientific papers, books and studying for some stupid exam!

Now that I had finished all my courses, the only thing left for me to complete was my research project and thesis, so I could graduate. After this exam, the summer vacation started for everyone at the university. While everyone on campus was chilling out, relaxing, going to the pool and stuff, I was trying to do some work on my Master's Thesis. As I'm sure you can imagine, trying to work on something that you don't really have a planning or deadline for, in an environment where it's 25 degrees Celsius and everyone around you is enjoying vacation, didn't work too well. I ended up going to the pool waaaay too often, going out drinking with friends, slacking off from doing any real thesis work and played a decent bit of poker to get money...

This lasted for about 2 months, until at the end of August the new school year started. During those hot summer months, I did manage to do some work on my project, but not as much as I had hoped. The good thing was that the campus was kind of back to normal and people were going to classes again. This made it a lot easier for me to get my mind straight and getting back to doing some real work. By that point, I had decided that it's better for me to quit poker for a while. That way I can really focus on finishing this damn thesis, ship the Master of Science diploma and move on with my life ;)

Well, I can tell you that things have really been going better since then. It's still hard to stay focussed, since there's just so much more fun stuff to do around me, like hang out with friends, exercise sports like soccer and fitness, play piano and guitar, write music, read poker stuff etc. The great thing was though that the decision for me to give poker a break really gave me some peace of mind. I wasn't really "forced" in a way to keep up-to-date with the stuff that was going on at 2+2, I didn't feel the "need" to read poker articles and keep myself sharp in that way. Even though I obviously did still read a lot about it, there wasn't so much a driving "need" to actually do it.

Well, this brings me all the way up to where I am now, at the brink of completing my thesis report. There's still a bunch of work to be done in the next 2 weeks, but I'm optimistic that I'll be able to finish it at the start of December. That's the deadline that I have set for myself, since I'll be flying off to Orlando, Florida, to stay there for a month and spent Christmas and New Years with my family. If I manage to hand in my report by then and get it approved, I won't have to work on it anymore while I'm there and I can really ENJOY my well-deserved vacation! :)

During my stay there, I really plan to get back on track and play a bunch of hands again and get right back in the thick of things. I'm sure I'll be fine, since I have been coaching a bunch and watching a good friend of mine play. At the moment I really feel that my game is still very sharp, even though I've only logged maybe around 25k hands of NLHE HU in the past 3 months.

I probably won't be making another post until I'm done with my thesis, which will hopefully be in 2 weeks. After that it's time for me to fly to the States and play A LOT of online poker while I'm there :D When that happens, I will definately be posting a lot about my progress and my blog will be revived for me to talk about the things that are going on in my life ;)

See ya in 2 or 3 weeks! :)

Studying

I just wanted to make a short post saying that I won't be playing at all this week. I'm studying for my last exam that I have to pass on the 22nd of June. After that I'll be playing a lot of poker again and updating my blog again sometime that week :)