Burning my boat, and taking the island!

So Thursday was my day off so nothing poker related.

Instead I hosted this 2 colombian girs from couchsurfing and we ended up having a great time in Bangkok and we decided to go into the Ko phi phi islands for this wekend. So as the next week will be my birthday I will consider this escape as a birthday present.

Now we are heading to the airport. It was a really big storm in Bangkok and the streeets are fluded. Hope we will be there in time.

Will be back on tuesday. Until then maybe I will keep you posted with pictures from the beach.

Nice to see some old faces around, will def sub to this thread! more pics plz!

wish you tones of fun and hope this year to join you in Thailand

Hi, nice blog.

What is the program you use to track your productivity?

Hello, I am back, just arrived home, did a shower and now getting ready to hit the bed. We are sooooo tired, it was a fun weekend, will post photos and stories tomorow.

@vonki, yeah, keep me close I have in plan to make it big this time

@teddy, I am wating for you, here is the good life

@ethereal aded you as a friend, pls send me a message and I can tell you as I am not allowed to do it here.

Subbed. Good luck, cleo!

A short review of the short last week.

X weekly "live play video" (play a session and record it)
X weekly review of previous week "live play video" (record again with coments)
X database review for last week hands
X weekly productivity report analysis

As I only played 2 days, not too much to say about it. Just played 2k hands being aroung BE.

The productivity its still around 50%. I have to work more on this.

Today is whensday so I will have to work hard to make this week as a full one, but I will focus on one thing at a time. Today I will start the coaching with illidek. I am excited about that. I just did some review of what I played until now and I have a ton of questions and hands to discus with him, and I know that the thing that I have to pay for coaching will make me put more volume in, otherwise it will be kind of waste of money.

Summary of the day.

X session review(previous session or previous day)
X do Equilab/Flopzila exercises
X set daily poker goals
X watch one poker video (I had a coaching session so I will count that
X worm up before session

I wanted to write that post about our time on the beach but as my 2 girl guests from Colombia will leave tomorrow, they had a little birthday surprize for me and bought me a cake and a USB hub that I was in so much need for.

Pictures and everything tomorrow, I will try to find time for some posts as I have to go to the imigration office to extend my visa for Thailand, and I have this feeling that it wont be an easy/short thing to do.

Hey guys, as I promissed here is the storry of my trip to the island.

Actually we didn't get to any island. We wanted to go on Koh Phi Phi island, so we decided to get acomodation on a nearby place called Ao nan on a beach called Ton Sai where you can only get by the boat so its pretty much like an island. We filght to KRABI for 55$ round trip, and from there a 1h buss ride + 20min boat ride and we got there.

I was with these 2 girls from Colombia, Ivonne and Gabriela. I met them trough couchsurfing after they requested me to host them as they missed their flight to Vietnam and after speding a few days around Bangkok together, we decided to go on some islands together because they dont want to pay for another tiket to Vietnam.

We just didn't think too much and bought the tickets and the next day we were on our way.

We had also boked a triple room on Booking.com on some bungalow but when we got there it was a dump, just 2 beds in a woden room with woden flor that you could see trough, and a smel...doh. But we just walked around the area asking for a room and we found a decent room at 300baht per night(thats like 10$) for all 3 of us. Of course the conditions were not that good but decent enough, and we did not cared much about that because we planned to be on the beach or at some party.

First day we enjoyed the beach as the wether was okaish, but after that was raining almost all day, and thats how we found a verry verry nice pub to spend our nights, and our days....well .. sleeping after hard nights in the pub.

Thay had some mushrum shake over there, and ofcourse that we had to try that. As it was our first time doing mushrums we had big expectations, but it was nothing special. We just got dizzy and relaxed and happy. Just enough to just chill out , listen the live music they had, or playing some board games or even trying some juggling. We also smoket something , but I am not sure what it was, but nothing to strong as I felt nothing aftar that.

The owner of that place(seen in the pic below) was a really interesting guy with a verry simple life filosofy : "why not" . This was his answer to everything, "why not". Can I have a bear? Why not ? , Will you play some live music tonight? Why not? , Can I try the mushrum shake? Why not? .... you've got the point.

Another thing that I found interesting in that pub was the some sort of rope that you could climb on, you can see in the pics below what I am talking about. And if you ask why would you do that? The answer is of course: Why not?

I asked the guy where did he came up with this rope idea. His answer: "When I get really high, I have these crazy ideas and visions, and one day I say a rope here where people could climb, and the next day I put the rope. " What can I say, brilliant ♦ That rope was good not only to climb on, but, do you know that feeling when you dance and you feel like something is missing? like you need to hold a beer in your hand or something? cause otherwise your dance moove look like shit. So the rope solves this problem as you can hold on to it and just move your feet along and the dance is there.

I would like to put more photos but the upload takes forever, so I will try again tomorrow. Go to hit the bed now as I had a long day and want to wake up early to play some poker.

2 days ago I had my first coaching session with illidek. I had a lot of questions for him and it was a really productive session as my questions were designed to improve my ability to learn by myself. However I still have a lot of questions from the hands I have played and marked and I know that will take a lot of coaching time. I had like 72 hands that I wanted to discuss with him, and in 30 minutes we only discussed like 5.

With this in mind today I analyzed by myself the remaining of 67 hands, put some of them in flopzilla and equilab and tried to come up with an answer by myself. I managed after one and a half hours to reduce the list to only 47 hands with verry precise questions so that I would maximize the coaching time.

I really have to do this as 100eur/hour its hard to pay off unless I use it at the maximum.

10 days challange : Swim effortlessly

Since I have been in Bangkok I stayed in this beautiful apartment with swimming pool and gym, but unfortunately the swimming pool was not functional more than half of the time I have been here.

Now are my last 10 days in this apartment and I decided to make this challange to learn how to swimm efortlessly in 10 days using the tips found in the "4 hour body " book written by Tim Ferriss.

Where I am now with my swimming? I was to the pool yesterday and I swim across the length of the pool (around 20m) in "my style" with the head above the water and I was tired as shit after that. I counted my strokes so I can have a measure of my improvements, It took me 31 strokes for one length of the pool.

Starting today I will go every day to the pool and swim for 10-15 minutes trying to aply the "total imerssion" tehnique presented in the book. After 10 days I want to 1. reduce in half the number of strokes needed for completing on length of the pool, and 2. swim 30 lengths of the pool with no break using the total immersion tehnique.

10 days challange : Swim effortlessly, Day 1

Today I tried to aply the exercises found in theese to videos. Are not hard, but are not easy either. Did a 15 minutes session. Start small, will do more tomorrow.

Yesterday results:

X session review(previous session or previous day)
X do Equilab/Flopzila exercises
X set daily poker goals
X watch one poker video
X worm up before session

Played verry little yesterday, hard to find my motivation to stay on the tables, I don;t have patiance, I try to play with regulars but I dont get action and waiting for the fish is just a pain in the ass.

Today I made a deposit on winamax, maybe now I will have more action playing on 4 platforms.

10 days challange : Swim effortlessly, Day 2

Today I watched the first 3 parts of this series:

I spend more then 30min into the pool and did the exercises shown there. I can see significant improvement. For example when I first did the superman exercise I was doing 7 glides to cross the pull length. Now I can do it in 5. Also I feel more confortable under the water, I start to lose the survival instinct that makes me want to kick hard while under water.

I can't wait for tomorrow to try the new exercise.

10 days challange : Swim effortlessly, Day 3

Today I watched the video below. I spent a good hour into the pool puting these axercises together and I feel more and more confident in the water. I can't wait until I will finaly swim like that guy in the video.

One thing I noticed today is that I didn't give a fuck about the other people in the pool that were watching me like I was a lunetic. Before, I was feeling ashamed when trying to swim and other people were watching me. As Peter Sage says, I was swimming in GOOP(and when he says swim he means it metaphoricaly) but here It was both literaly and metaphoricaly, I cared too much about what people around me will think about what I am doing. I still have this problem in many aspects of life, but one by one I will get rid of this bad habit.

You can listen to Peter Sage bellow if yiu want to know what GOOP means. This is one of my favorite podcasts.

Salut Claudiu.
I've followed your blogs, your poker evolution and your chellanges since 2012. Glad to see you are back again. I will defenetly follow this one also. I have no doubt that you'll crush it!
You've always been an inspiration for the romanian community. I've looked to you as to an example to follow, but I always found my excuses not to. I'll try to steal some good habits and some motivation from this, leave out my excuses and finaly get my ass out from the micros.
Best regards from Cluj.:f_thumbsup:

Thanks Craftedid for the kind words. Good luck with your plans. If I may give you an advice: Think about why you never got out from the micros until now. And then think about what you need to do in order to get out. Now it should be clear that you probably have to change everything, from the way you think about poker to the way you play, study or spend a normal day in your life, because in order to acomplish something you have never acomplished you have to do things you have never done before. Take one at a time and change your habits slowly.

Now back to my poker journey.

Yesterday results:
X session review(previous session or previous day)
X do Equilab/Flopzila exercises
X set daily poker goals
X watch one poker video
X worm up before session

Something is not working as it shoud. Today I hit stop loss. I did some stupId mistakes but I feel like I run super bad. It may be just in my head, but it;s also hard to apreciate what running good or bad means as I dont have so much experience in HU. Anyways, maybe I just play super bad, but it feels like I cant win, I can;t tie 2 winning days one after another.

Todays graph

Yes, that was and it still is clear for me.
But letting go of bad habits and than building up new, good ones, that's the difficult part.
Still, thanks for the advice. Taking them one at a time and changing them slowly must be the way!

Originally posted by cleoclaudiu
Something is not working as it shoud.

Maybe it's because you only managed to fulfill all your daily goals that you set 1 out of 12 times or something like that (only one day with everything checked on the "to-do" list)? I'm following your blog because I find it interesting and it seems you have potential. But just writting your goals down daily, then doing 1,2,3 or 4 out of 5 is not gonna do it. It shows you are, either: setting up wrong goals or are just simply slacking way too much. Hence, the results are where they are imo.

Keep on posting though, keep on improving, I've been gladly following this whole time!

MJQ.

Thanks for your feedback MJQ. Yeah for shure my lack of discipline with following the goals has an effect on the results. Will improve from now on. Here is another green day ♦

X session review(previous session or previous day)
X do Equilab/Flopzila exercises
X set daily poker goals
X watch one poker video
X worm up before session

3 big things happend yesterday

1. I decided to go back to Romania over the summer as I have a wedding in August and I have to attend. My cousin is getting married and I can't miss this wedding as we grew up toghether and we were verry verry close. So as my contract on this apartment where I stay now is gonna end on 28th, I decided to leave Thailand now on 29th because otherwise I have to do a visa run to Malaysia for just 2 more weeks of Thailand - not worth it.

2 and 3 I would like to keep private but they kind of affected me . Its about love and money ,what a good combination. The money " thing" is I have a debt that I have to pay until the end of next month and it was not in my plan before but something changed and I have to return the money - it's an important amount like a hole bankroll. So I need to find the resources to get out of this situation.

On the other hand a good friend of mine from Romania decided that we can't be friends anymore - it's a long sad story, but I have to move on. I'll get myself together tomorrow when I will go for another floating session. I can't wait for that.