Just one thing can stand in the way of success!

As I said, though, being considered a fish has benefits.

For example, after people listen to my strategic advice on next week's Collin Moshman show, they'll start playing in the opposite way.

I balance my advice range, though.

Clearly I still have a lot to learn

Oh and I'll make sure not to attend that coaching. If I do ever play some SNGs, I won't know anymore what advice to follow. Though maybe I could construct some sort of GTO advice defending range

First update.

Played 10k hands now, the vast majority of which on iPoker and a very small amount on 888. Won't play any more on 888 at least until I move up to NL5. You can only buy in for 50bb at the NL2 tables on 888

Graph:

Very far from being a pretty graph but that's okay, I'm only just getting started again

Got my standard lines pretty much figured out now both pre- and postflop. So now it's time to start building on that and start looking to really improve my post flop play and start exploiting players rather than just following standard lines without any regard for opponents' tendencies.

Last session I played was very short but very sweet. Managed to get some nice rungood so I suppose this is appropriate here:

Mark my words though, it won't be much longer before I will instead be:

It's okay to be jealous of my PhotoShop skills. I know it's something I should be proud of, but I feel like I could still do so much better, you know?

Will keep you posted

Tino

this is paintskills not photoshop right! ♦ i use the same!
did you notice significant differences from your graph in pt/hm to the money in your cashier on ipoker?
i noticed that within 1k hands i often times miss 2.5-5$ (depending on the action during it i guess) between PT4 result and Cashier result,
an example:
Yesterday after 1h of play my winnings on PT4 were 7.40$
in cashier i only had 4.20$ won
so within 1k hands i am missing 3.20 during that time which is huge.
My Pt4 calculates rake in and i have not set any rakeback in it.

is it the same with you or is everything right?

this is paintskills not photoshop right! ♦ i use the same!

You got me

I think there's a small discrepancy but for the most part it's correct. I think the difference for me comes from the fact that I play EUR and GBP tables and I don't think the exchange rates between ipoker and HM are perfectly synced.

Especially at the beginning I did notice this, but when I updated the exchange rates in HM it was basically fixed. Not sure how that works in PT though.

If that's not the problem, maybe try clearing all your filters in PT? Could be that some hands are missing causing the difference?

Not exactly an expert on this but hopefully it helps

So most of yesterday and today I spent in Germany for work. First time for me doing business abroad so I guess I'm now officially an international businessman

Won't be much longer now before I become this:

In all seriousness though, it was a really great experience. My German actually turned out to be better than I expected, considering I haven't spoken it in 3 or 4 years. Plus doing business in a different country where things work just a little bit different was great. Definitely looking forward to my next visit to Germany which will probably be in a few weeks

All this means that I haven't had time for poker this week (which is according to the plans, of course ). So, a couple of goals for the next 5 days:

• Play 5k hands
• Get really comfortable playing 6 tables (maybe expand to 7-8 if things go well)
• Focus working on flop spots, most notably when facing cbets with relatively weak hands (A high, 2nd pair, etc)

Now since I had a 13 hour work day today (I get paid for driving back home so I count that too ), no poker tonight. A new episode of Better Call Saul just aired so I'll be watching that. Also if you haven't watched Better Call Saul yet, go watch it. It's brilliant. Might not be as great if you haven't watched Breaking Bad, but who hasn't watched the best series that has ever been shown on television, right?

Right?

Either way, we'll continue printing money tomorrow!

Tino

hf printing money tomorrow

damn yeah i always forget about better call saul, didnt touch the new season yet

very intresting... good luck !

Originally posted by BadHabit1989
hf printing money tomorrow

damn yeah i always forget about better call saul, didnt touch the new season yet

You should, it's really good so far. Won't spoil anything, but will say that I'm really loving Mike's storyline so far this season

Originally posted by Turalleri
very intresting... good luck !

Cheers mate

Hitting the gym

Yes, I too will start going to the gym very soon. Seems like it's something everybody does nowadays, but there's a little twist for me.

A friend (who is also my volleyball teammate) and I will be doing a special program. The season is over and we're starting to get to the point where our technique won't become much better (we both turn 24 this year). Of course we can still improve a bit, but not too much and it'll go pretty slowly. So we can improve two other things as well:

1) Our volleyball "intelligence" so to speak
2) Our physicality

The season is over so of course we can't do much about the first point. As such, we decided it would be a good idea to start working out and become stronger physically. But not just to become stronger or bigger. We'll specifically be focusing on increasing our jumping power, so that we can hopefully jump at least 10cm higher when the new season starts in September. And honestly I want to set the bar a big higher Of course we'll also work on our core strength and stability along the way.

So starting (probably) next week I'll be hitting the gym 4 times a week. The program we'll be following is pretty intense so it will be pretty difficult. After 4 or 5 weeks I should already start to see solid results, after which the idea is to go down to 2 times a week (which is standard for this program).

Of course this will take up a lot of extra time each week, plus I'll have to adjust my diet which won't be easy. So that's where time management comes in! I of course wouldn't have done this if I wouldn't have the time for it. So here's what a sample day could look like for me (very rough guidelines):

7:15 - Wake up
8:15 - Work
17:30 - Gym
18:30 - Dinner
19:00 - Uni
21:00 - Grind
23:00 - Sleep

I'm not sure how much I like this schedule though as there's very little room to do some fun things inbetween, except after 11pm. Perhaps I'll choose to get up a little earlier so I can get some work done for uni or maybe play a session before going to work. That would give me some extra breathing room in the evening and still allow me to do all the work I have to while also leaving some room for relaxation. I'll figure that out in the next few days. Either way, my days will be pretty packed.

It's a nice extra challenge that I'm really looking forward to. Last time I went to the gym was probably 4 years ago and I only did that to help recover from an injury. So it's probably going to be pretty tough especially in the beginning. But:

Tino

GL with your challenge

Couldn't have said it any better!

Thanks sir

Hand of the day time!

IPoker, $0.01/$0.02 No Limit Hold'em Cash, 4 Players
Poker Tools Powered By Holdem Manager - The Ultimate Poker Software Suite.

Hero (SB): $2.65 (132.5 bb)
BB: $0.95 (47.5 bb)
CO: $2.03 (101.5 bb)
BTN: $2.57 (128.5 bb)

Preflop: Hero is SB with A♠: 6♠:
CO calls $0.02,

BTN folds, Hero raises to $0.08, BB folds, CO calls $0.06

Flop: ($0.18) 2♠: 7♠: 6♥: (2 players)
Hero bets $0.12, CO calls $0.12

Turn: ($0.42) 8♦: (2 players)
Hero bets $0.30, CO raises to $1.83

Hero calls $1.53

River: ($4.08) J♥: (2 players)

Results: $4.08 pot ($0.27 rake)
Final Board: 2♠: 7♠: 6♥: 8♦: J♥:

Hero mucked A♠: 6♠: and won $3.81 ($1.78 net)

CO showed Q♥: 2♥: and lost (-$2.03 net)

Will post an April overview + May plans later tonight

So the update came one night later than intended, but here it is.

April review

So April marked the new beginning of my poker career. Still finding my way which means I've lost some money at the tables but that's okay. With rakeback I'm basically break even and counting the MTT winnings I won pretty big. Most importantly though, I feel like I'm starting to get a solid foundation now and will continue to put in some time off the tables before every session, like reviewing hands, watching videos, etc.

Last update I mentioned I wanted to play 5k hands that week, which I failed kinda miserably. Only managed to put in 3k. Figured with the time I had it would be more efficient to spend a little more time on studying.

Going forward

Between work, volleyball, poker, gym and fun/social life, I have a lot on my plate. Of course I knew that which is why time management is so important for me. I feel like I could still improve. So in May I want to time everything I do. By doing this for a month for a month (maybe two weeks will be enough too) I can figure out how much time I roughly spend on everything I do on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Hopefully this will help me to improve my schedules, but also my focus and productivity. For example, perhaps it will end up being better to get up earlier and do some uni or poker before going to work. Or maybe I should move some of my workload to the weekends or my day off. This will all become clear soon enough

Other than this I won't set myself any goals yet like play x amount of hands or win x amount of money. As long as I keep planning my days the way I have been, I will get in plenty of time to work on my game as well as play. At the end of the month I'll see how many hands that will end up being.

Gym life

Non-poker related, went to the gym for the first time today to get an idea of the techniques required for the exercises I have to do. Friday I'll go again to figure out what the max weight I can do 1 rep with for each one. The program I'm going to follow uses pyramid schemes for training so it's very important to know what my max is.

I also did a baseline measurement to roughly see where I'm at now with regard to my jumping power. Unfortunately none of the gyms in my hometown have equipment to actually measure jumping height which is unfortunate. But there are other ways to measure progress of course by doing some isometric tests. So here are some numbers for those who are interested:

Honestly I thought especially my max force would've been higher, especially considering I already jump quite high. So I suppose technique and maybe general athleticism also play a large part in jumping height.

Also, jumping as far as possible on one leg while also landing on that one leg is fkn difficult

Thanks for reading, have this GIF as a reward!

Tino

End of week update

Anyone playing SCOOP and having any luck?

As usual, I've been extremely busy. Because of this I felt like my poker progress has been a little bit too slow. I've done a lot of studying and have not played as much as I'd like. This is not because of time restrictions but because 4-6tabling regular tables is simply pretty slow. So I decided to add some fast poker in the mix to increase my volume. There's no NL2 Speed Poker though so I moved part of my roll to Stars to play some NL2 zoom there as well.

This allows me to put in more volume, which subsequently allows me to put what I study into practice at a higher pace. Once I move up to NL5 I'll probably move my entire roll back to ipoker because they do have NL5 Speed Poker, but that's still a long ways away.

I'll probably also try mixing regular tables and speed/zoom tables because I'm still convinced good table selection is incredibly +EV, plus fish tend to play a lot looser on regular tables than on speed tables. This is of course because on speed tables they can just click fold until they get a good hand and have fun that way. Gameplay is a lot slower on regular tables which means they will have to wait much longer until they get a good hand. Of course they just want to have fun, so they start playing random hands. And that's where we come in and make money So that's an edge we definitely miss when playing fastfold poker (though that has its own advantages, like volume).

Anyway, here's a graph of my progress so far:

Pretty notable is that the last 3.5k hands or so were played on Stars. In those hands I actually managed to get a positive redline, whereas on ipoker my redline was definitely going down. I didn't change my strategy so this is pretty interesting. Maybe it's because I already have to adapt to other players on ipoker (I already have 1k+ hands on a number of players there) and I'm still readless on the entire Stars playerbase, so I can play pretty standard there. Or maybe it's just because there's a difference in tendencies between the average NL2 player on ipoker and the average NL2 Zoom player. Either way it's a pretty interesting observation.

Like I said though, maybe it's also just some short term variance so this might even out as I continue playing. Also I don't really care about the redline or blueline being positive or negative. All I care about is that green line and for the past ~6k hands it has been going in the right direction so hopefully I can continue that trend

Keeping track of time is also going well. Already starting to see some areas where I can improve my time management and scheduling because of this. But will keep doing it for at least another week to get some more conclusive information.

Tino

Originally posted by TinoLaan

Anyone playing SCOOP and having any luck?

yes to playing, no to luck! ♦

I love your time management, back in the days people (in an other area) just complained ahhhhhhh I don't have time for that.
They would just not understand that if there is enough passion you will always have time for it. you just have to cut time on something else.

may that be facebook/twitter/snapchat/instagram/youtube-time (waste of time unless educational poker videos (and cat videos for sure)) some other hobbies or socializing (socializing is important but not in a way to get drunk every single friday+satuarday) or even important things like sleep, yeah you can even cut on that(most people sleep to much anyways and should rather work on improving the quality of sleep than on the quantity)

They always complained that they had to work so long hours and only have that 10 mins /week for that so called "passion" of theirs.

I was never going to tell them what kind of spoiled plebs they were even tho I would have liked to tell them plenty of times! (some people need to hear that to wake up).

I just always told them the story of a good friend.
He was a very busy guy with family, weird working times, plenty of hobbies, plenty of neccessary stuff etc (I wrote like half a page that they would understand how busy that person was) and told them he got up at 4:30 (after 5 hours of sleep) am to find that 1 hour/day for his passion. That's just true passion! And he achieved great things (in my eyes) with his passion!

Some who had to listen to the story tried out for 1 week to cut for example on their facebook time, but fell short after that, they went back to old habits.
It was just easy to tell them afterwards that the passion is just not high enough on their priorities and they will not achieve anything in that specific field.

Others tried to manage their time better and found sucess!

So if you dont find funny groups on facebook, half naked women on instagram and weird stories on twitter anymore you can blame me!

I love what you are doing and that you are showing a great time management to everyone in this forum.
keep up the great work and always stay happy an positive.
when people want to hear about whine they have enough other places (including my blog ♦) so i enjoy coming here and reading only positive stuff!

Thanks man, appreciate it and good to know I have at least one reader

Now, brace yourselves, it's time for:

They would just not understand that if there is enough passion you will always have time for it. you just have to cut time on something else.

Exactly! Basically everything you wrote is true. People tend to spend a lot of time on 'meaningless' things such as social media or other random things. Which is completely fine, I do those meaningless things too! However if you want to improve productivity or put more time and effort into your passions like you said, you just need to cut down on those things.

"Time is money." One of the most overused phrases in the history of forever, but it's true even when there's no actual 'money' involved. A lot of people around me have the same issue like you described, complaining they don't have enough time. But there's a lot of 'unused' time every day that people simply don't think about. For example like the guy you mentioned, you can get up earlier to free up some time for your passion before work. Or instead of sitting on the couch watching TV after work while you wait for dinner, use that half hour to do something productive. Or maybe you can use that half hour to spend on your stamp collection if that's your hobby (dunno if stamp collections are still a thing nowadays, first thing that popped in my mind tho for some reason )

Long story short, there's a lot time people spend doing essentially nothing that they could invest so much better.

However, that's incredibly hard for some people. And I know how sweet it is to finally get some rest after a long day of work! I was exactly the same half a year ago. Of course it's perfectly fine to be like this. But if you want to increase your productivity or if you want to increase the amount of time you spend on your hobbies/passions, you may have to cut down on your free time. Not only that, but I firmly believe that increasing your productivity or increasing the time spent on your passions will increase your happiness even if you have to cut down on a little bit of free time

So like you said, maybe don't be as active on social media. Instead of watching two episodes of that series you just love, just watch one episode. And perhaps the thing that has helped me the most...

Put your fkn phone down!

There have been tons of studies on how much time we spend on our phone per day on average and the actual results are all different, most ranging from 2-4 hours a day. The conclusion is the same though, we spend a ton of time on our phones nowadays. Most people can't resist the temptation of looking at their screen when they hear a text coming in or when their phone vibrates. Usually people don't just stick to looking at that text though. They also want to reply and then also proceed to check Facebook, Twitter, that funny video they just remembered... And that's another 15 minutes gone! And not only that, it can also be extremely distracting when you're trying to get some work done.

For example, when I grind or when I'm doing work for uni, I turn my phone off completely. I don't put it on silent mode or vibration mode, because I know it might still be distracting. But I've also managed to come to a point where I don't feel the need to immediately reply to a text when I get it. During my free time when I see a whatsapp message coming in for example, I don't mind waiting to read it after just 15 minutes or so. I'll just finish watching an episode of my series (for example). And when I'm grinding/studying I'll check my phone quickly during my breaks and then just put it down again.

99% of the time whatever happens on your phone is not going to be too important so it's no big deal. The world doesn't fall apart if you don't reply to texts within 30 seconds or if you hold off on watching that funny for 30 more minutes!

Long story short, this has helped me a lot. Yea I still do plenty with my phone. I still text people, I still scroll through Facebook and I still do other random things. Point is, I don't do it all day long.

I find that despite increasing my productivity by a tenfold, I still have plenty of free time. I can still go to all my volleyball practices and games, I can still combine uni and poker, and so on. Hell I've even found time to also start going to the gym. And I still have plenty of free time to socialize and do random stuff like watching series, watch football, etc! Also don't get me wrong, I don't believe everyone needs to become a complete machine. It's important to have free time and socialize.

However, I think it's very important to maximize your life EV (to stick with poker terms a bit) and I strongly believe that making time for your passions and increasing your productivity is paramount for that! Plus if you have a passion you should want to make time for it right? You love doing it (otherwise it wouldn't be a passion) so what's stopping you from making time?

People need to just make time for what they love instead of making excuses

That last sentence just summed up everything I wrote I think. gg me, rambling on as always

I love what you are doing and that you are showing a great time management to everyone in this forum.
keep up the great work and always stay happy an positive.

Thank you sir, will do

Being positive and open minded is another thing that raised my life EV (I love saying this now lol). I could probably write for half an hour about that too but I'm tired of typing so I won't

also cat videos are of course the one exception to everything I just said, those are too +EV to skip out on

great post i loved reading it

Cheers man

Also great news!

Ajax just went through to the finals of the Europa League! Couldn't be happier right now! Insanely nervewracking game but this is fkn amazing! Been more than 20 years since Ajax reached a European final!

:f_drink::f_drink::f_drink::f_drink::f_love::f_love::f_love::f_love:

Time for another update. Let's do non-poker things first

Beach volleyball

The beach volleyball season has finally started again and we had our first tournament last weekend. The weather was absolute trash but was still fun to finally be playing again. We finished in 4th place which is okay. At the same time, in the semi-finals we lost very marginally and if we had been just a little more clinical finishing our chances we would've won that game. In that case we would've gotten at least 2nd place. Still though, those guys were a lot better than us and we did very well putting up such a great fight

Also got invited by one of our opponents to come train with their indoor team. They play the second highest division in the Netherlands so it's really awesome they asked me. I don't think I'm good enough to play at that level (just being realistic) but it's a nice opportunity to get a taste of playing at such a high level. Will probably take him up on that offer, should be able to learn something from it even if I'm not quite good enough. It's four divisions higher than the division we played in last season (although we did get promoted) so there's a huge gap there.

We'll see how it turns out, either way it's really cool they asked me for this

Gym

Can be really quick about this. Going to the gym 3 times a week now and my body hurts basically all the time so I'd say things are going in the right direction

Poker

Poker is also going nice and steady at the moment. Able to get in decent volume, enough to the point where I think I can get to 20-25k hands this month. That's a really good way to start although I do hope I can increase that a bit in the weeks/months to come. Pure volume isn't important though, right now it's all about improving my game. I'm still slowly but surely implementing new things in my game. Still mostly playing incredibly straightforward most of the time. Things are definitely moving in the right direction though.

Graph of total progress so far:

Cheeky 1 BI profit

Bit of a rough patch after a nice little upswing but that's okay. Coolers happen, suckouts happen and unfortunately bad plays happen. Still making some light river calls for example that I shouldn't be making. At least I'm not calling turn raises light anymore which is a good thing. Turn raises are pretty much always the nuts at this limit which took me longer to realise than I had hoped for

I'm still roughly break-even which means that as I improve my game, that green line can only increase. I've said it before, but things can only go up from here

Tino