TLDR
This thread is extremely long so I am writing a summary here for new readers that don't want to read the whole blog but still want to know the story. I will quote the yearly reflection posts.
- Started playing SnGs 'semi-seriously' in 2009 tracking my progress through the low stakes Turbos on FTP (SN 'lessonthree').
Originally posted by lessthanthreee
2010 wrap-up
Jan - mixing 12s-24s trying to move up to the reg infested MS SnGs on FT.
Feb - swongs. played mostly 12s, cashed out some of my BR to upgrade my pc
Mar - played 12s to rebuild my roll. ran hot. consistently putting in +$1k months. 16 tabling at this point.
Apr - blog dramas, still raping the 12s for >10%.
May - playing just 24s. adjusting. swinging.
Jun - solid results on 24s-36s. starting to build confidence. (first $2k month)
Jul - solid results again on 24s-36s. new record profit month. (12 months of STTs 2s - 36s)
Aug - got backing and hit the 60s, ran good played good. setting my sights on the 100s.
Sep - avg month, small sample on 119s didnt go too well.
Oct - ran like shit, about 4k < ev. 120BIs < ev on 36s.
Nov - failed @ creating a freeroll. Russian bots spammed it. Best poker month of the year. ran incredibly hot. added 216s+ (lol variance)
Dec - meh, ran bad. played good. ps.com video coach
Overall I am very very happy with my year. I started 2k10 with 2k online playing $12 SnGs in my free time. I built myself up to playing the highest stakes possible with the best players in the world. I'm also very proud to have become a ps.com coach and thanks to everyone for encouraging me to do it.I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do this as a job, but I'm going to give it a good shot in 2k11. I love the freedom of setting my own hours and not stressing about impressing the boss. There is a lot of stress in being a poker professional, but also a lot of satisfaction and rewards if you work hard.
Highlights:
-- Ranked 13 in Holdem 9 to 10 Players Turbo $36-$100 Total Profit 2010 Leaderboard
- Winning my first $555 after a 10% suck-out on the bubble.
- Coaching, both receiving and giving.
- Receiving encouraging and positive feedback from my first video.
- Back-to-back +$2k days.
Statistics
Games played: 13341
Length: 895.8hrs played
Average duration: 30.1min
Winnings: $17684.12 + $11438.38 RB = +$29122.50
Rake: $42344.80
$/hr: $32.50
ROI: 3.4%
EV$ Adjusted ROI: 3.6%+ ~12k in other bonuses/coaching/staking/etc
= + ~$41k
2010 Graph
- [
] 10k profit over 10k games
- [
- [
- [
- [
posting 2k11 goals tomorrow.
2011.
- Played STTs on FTP until Black Friday.
- Transitioned to SnG MTTs/scheduled for some months.
- Started playing some live events in my home town.
- solid first year as a pro.
Originally posted by lessthanthreee
STTs
MTTs
+~33k from staking/coaching/bonuses
17k stuck in FT
total is around 80k.not bad for my first year as a pro. but i definitely need to work harder in 2012.
2012 - Transition to 6m hypers. Make SNE .
Originally posted by lessthanthreee
I feel like I’m writing an acceptance speech. I have some people to thank. Firstly, I want to thank pokerstrategy.com, particularly, Ingrid, Sven and who ever had the idea to implement a staking forum. I want to recognise the long time SnG evaluation forum regulars Kurrkabin, Gavron23 and Demonic226. Also, a special mention to my good mates Chenny8888, Tim64 and BigAl123456. Lastly, to everyone who backed me this year, you made this possible.The format of this review will be my reflection of the year followed by graphs and some stats.
Reflection
On November 26th 2011 I entered the world of marriage followed by Christmas and a honeymoon. It was December 2011 at a live event in Sydney where I told Chenny8888 that I was relatively bankroll broke for the stakes I wanted to play. I was comfortably rolled for the 30s-60s but I had been playing up to the $300 Turbos during 2011. I wanted to play with the best STT players in the world and maybe make a run for SNE and to do that I needed help. I contacted a few of the large stables to see what they could offer. All of the deals were not appealing to me. Without going into too much detail, I felt I could get a better deal by myself. I began my year long staking quest on the 31st of January 2012, I was already a month behind the SNE chase (my staking thread).
I sold the first block quickly and started grinding the 100s. Results were normal; I was used to the swings. I continued to make profit on the stake and started adding 200s-300s in April. April was my biggest winning month pre-rb (+$13511).
In May I played exclusively 100s+. This is where I noticed the high stakes Turbo environment wasn’t optimal for me. The games were soft, but the volume was lacking. This made it hard to put in enough volume at 200s+ to overcome the high variance inherent in STTs. It was then that I started learning the 6max hypers on stars. I was studying hyper ICM for about 1hr each day while playing the 60s-100s.
In June I toyed with mixing turbos and hypers for maximum table selection but it proved too confusing for my sessions. By July, I had dropped turbos completely and transitioned to playing exclusively hypers. The stake seemed to be going very well, I had gone 5 months without hitting the stoploss and producing a net gain for my backers. Unbeknownst to me, there was a dangerous HM1 bug slowly creeping into my results.
August was another very successful month (+$12k pre-rb) playing the majority of my volume at the 200s. The swings were bigger than I had encountered before and I dealt with a big downswing in September by cutting volume at the 200s to gain confidence. I was setting a daily VPP goal of 4k, but reaching this goal on a consistent basis was an epic failure.
By October my daily VPP goal had risen to 5k and I needed approximately 400k VPPs in the last 3 months of the year. Very doable at the games I was playing but my biggest VPP month so far was 93k. My volume was increasing in October but I was mentally preparing for a big month in December.
The 9th of November 2012, I was running particularly well but something didn’t add up. HM1 showed a big +$6k day, but I was certain my account balance didn’t increase by that much. I decided to check the data view tab and discovered around 10% of my 3rd place finishes from the 60s and 200s were being credited in my HM database as a small profit when, reality is, I received $0 for those finishes. I vividly remember the exact moment I discovered this, my hands were on my head, and I was on the verge of tears. How deep did this go, how much was this going to cost to my bottom line. After three hours of manually editing the errors in my database and cross-checking with each finished block the bottom line was a massive $44k difference in reported profit, and thus profit paid out to backers, compared to actual profit received. I set myself a realistic goal of 70% retrieval and am glad to report that after only 7 weeks I have recovered 93% of misinformed profits paid out to my backers. This episode was a true disaster, but a prime example of the integrity and professionalism inherent in this community. 27 people were wrongly paid over a 6 month period and the response was always supportive and understanding. Once again, I want to thank my backers for their continued support throughout the year, and especially for sticking with me after this catastrophe.
We arrive at December where I need exactly 205k VPPs to achieve SNE. Whenever I took a day off because I wasn’t feeling it and thought ‘It’s ok, I’ll catch up later.’ Here is the ‘later’. I played 129 hours, 8245 games, raked $37,263 for 205000 VPPs. I know this is nothing to proclaim to the world, some hyper regs do this monthly with ease, but for me this was the most I had ever worked at anything. I woke anywhere from 2am-6am every day (nothing unusual for my schedule though). During the last week I was 14 tabling $100-200 6max hypers for 9-10hours (with breaks). This was the first time I had ever played more than 10 tables of 6max and I felt really good about it. Of course, I made more mis-clicks and time-outs than I would like, but I did not feel my game quality slip. However, my stress levels were much higher than optimal. I found myself waking up after only 3-4 hours and not being able to get back to sleep because of the stress of the looming monthly target. I was never in doubt, I was always going to make SNE, but the stress of the December dash is something I never want to experience again.
I am extremely proud of myself and ecstatic with my year. On a more personal note, my wife and I moved to the outskirts of Sydney closer to her work and we plan on buying a house in 2013 and starting a family in 2014. I am grateful that I can play this beautiful game for a living and plan on continuing to challenge myself at high stakes STTs.
My summarised plan for 2013 is to continue to fix leaks in my hyper game and work on sustaining myself at the 200s without backing. My medium term goal involves learning hyper satellites and playing the 300s with a long term goal of playing the 1k-3k WCOOP satellites with jorj95 et al and eventually reaching the 5m VPP milestone on stars (I want that watch!).
Graphs and Statistics
2012 All games all stakes
2012 All hyper turbos (stake/number/ROI/Time/$/Rake/Hrs)
Note: These sample sizes are still SMALL. I will have a better idea of real ROIs after another 30-40k games.2012 $60-100 hypers
2012 $200 hypers
Note: Don't ask me for EV. The red line for hypers is broken in HM1, ie. it does not calculate EV at all. (at least it's broken in my version of HM1 and I haven't fixed it, nor do i care)
Total net winnings : $24572
Total net winnings paid out to backers: $12606
Total net live winnings : $3163Bonus breakdown (starting as Bronze Star) :
Buying $1.6k bonuses with 100k FPPS : $54301
Stellar milestone rewards : $44400
Battle of the Planets : $6093
Other (collusion refunds/reload bonuses) : $731
Total bonuses : $105526Staking (me staking others) : -$176
Not included : coaching/work for pokerstrategyFun stats (ALL PRE RB)
Most $WON in 1 day : $10303 (Dec 20th)
Most $LOST in 1 day : $10338 (Dec 28th)
Number of +$ months : 8
Number of -$ months : 4
Most $WON in 1 month : $13511
Most hours played in 1 month : 129 (December)
Most hours played in 1 day : 10 hours / 679 games / $2566 raked (December 29th)
Total time played : 1052 hours
Total AVG BI : $126.6
Total number of games played : 35922
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Hi guys,
i decided to start a blog here mainly to track my progress and get some feedback on some psychological aspects of my poker 'career' that i might express here.
Ill start by introducing myself: Im a Finance/Accounting student from Australia, been playing poker for almost a year now. Ive tried MTTs/cash/SnGs and after some runs at each my favourite is multi-tabling SnGs.
After some attempts at the $5Bi levels using a 25bi rule (BAD IDEA!) i decided to adjust to a 100Bi rule and drop down to the $2 turbo single table SnGs on FT.
I get rakeback on FT (<3 ps.com!) and right now i can 10table comfortably (<3 dual monitors).
Ill post my graphs and moan and groan about the downswings but my main long term goal at the moment is to reach 2000 games (hopefully by the end of the year) with >10% ROI.
Short term Goals:
- Clear 100% of the biggest bonus ever promo
- mark and review all marginal ICM situations
- watch 5 more SnG silver videos
Current BR: $212
ill post my starting graph
as you can see im running about 25Bi below the EV line at the moment.
im just expecting to get sucked out on when im AKvAJ ; AA v JT ; KK v QJo
i just sit and wait for the suckouts to come.
lets see how i go over the next few hundred games. 
<3
, 6
