[Closed] tHINGfISH's Poker Career [SnG]

Goals for end of March 2008
-----------------------------------
- Become a Gold member at PS
* I'm sitting back at bronze now from a brief time away because of baby
- Get BR to 2200 so I can start playing $20+$2 SnG
- Buy a new monitor (22" LCD)
* Hopefully start playing 4 tables as I'm playing on a 14" LCD Laptop.
- Watch all the SnG Video's at Gold PS and articles.

As of now, I do not have to worry about income as I have investment income on the side to support myself, wife, and kid. I do not have to cash out, but then again, I do not want to spend my own money for this new job. I'd like for the poker to pay for any expenses I would have for playing which includes computer and monitor when necessary. I want to show my wife that I can do it. She laughs at me all the time when I say I can do it and do it successfully. I keep telling her that soon I'll be making more money than any fulltime job will pay.

I have a ROI of 60 when playing 2 tables. I have a ROI of 50 when playing 3 tables. This is from a small sample size though of about 700 SnG's. I hope to keep this up.

I wish you the best of luck for your poker career.

good luck with your goals!

you have msn? we have a bit of a think tank going on (well just me and helemalniiks, an sng coach here in the english section).

email me your msn address at chenny8888@gmail.com

Hi Chenney,

I sent you an email already.

I do prefer to play NON-TURBO SnG's because I'm very good at post flop play and I normally am sitting around top 3 in chips before blinds hit 100-200.

I know helemalniiks prefers the turbo. I find it doesn't give me enough time to build the chips. When I get the chips, I use them very effectively especially knowing when to throw them around. I found the ICM Trainer to be very good in late game situations, but majority of the time I'll play the players and normally I'm right.

I only follow the ICM Trainer maybe 80% of the time in late game situations. Sometimes you have to adjust.

MSN me sometime buddy.

will do

Hi tHINGfISH,

Nice read here, congratz with the baby Good to see you're setting yourself some goals. I hope you will achieve them one after another. But be aware the road to pokerpro is long and hard. But keep learning the game, reading articles, watching video's and posting hands and you must be able to achieve it!

Good luck!

Right now I have my bankroll all over the place.

$195 on UB
$300 on PS
$640 on Mansion
$775 on Titan (Downswing today lost $70)
$100 on FT
$265 on ABS

Of course most of these accounts have been made prior to joining PS except for the Titan one.

I would love to post some hands. But what program should I use if I'm grabbing info from all of these sites? I play $5.5 SnG and $11 SnG on all sites. I just consider them all as 1 bankroll. But currently I'm playing on Titan because of the $100 bonus I have left on there.

I'd like to see how some hands I've played wrong. I know I make a few mistakes but 90% of the time it's losing the tosses that are in my advantage.

And is it wrong for me to play my AA and KK all in preflop everytime? I've done it every time I play it early in tourney's. Only 1 time did my KK run into AA. Other than that, I've been losing KK to KJ/QQ/JJ/A9/A8/AJ. Losing AA to KJ/88/99/66. I go ALL IN with AA because I just don't want to lose so early in the tournament. But what this creates is confusion for others and they call me down with most pockets or AK/KQ/KJ.

I do double up playing like this many times though. It just doesn't seem like enough times as it should though.

tF

ABS? hope that's not absolute poker....

very nice read) finally some "quality" player (meaning low # of tables :)) I`ve recently found it very interesting to read high rollers blogs that I can find over the internet. spend some half an hour per day, hoping to pick some interesting ideas) Anyway, I found the blog of russian sng high roller, who made his path playing 2-3 regular tables at time. (the problem is, on higher limits it might be hard to find one).
The advantage of such approach is higher ROI and softer swings. This allows you to move up pretty fast, because of the less strict BRM.
The guy made it in less then a year, wish same to you)

good luck, keep us us-to-date)

Hi tHINGfISH,

Look here for some hand converters, including one for Titan Poker:

Hand converters

@xylere,

i 4-table turbos. but it can get very boring..

After moving up to the $11 SnG, I played for about a week.

I broke EVEN! Of course this had nothing to do with my play. I was losing pretty much every hand I was 75% favourite to win. I was losing every coin toss where I was favourite. Pretty much lost everything. But I still managed to break even which is a good thing.

I took a week off of SnG's trying my hands on at SH NL. Watching some videos and reading a few articles, I tried to learn a bit more about this game. Boy did I learn a lot. I managed to win about 20BI's for BSS at the 10NL. Of course, these games are starting to make me so much of a better poker player. I am now currently playing 25NL SH games and I know I can beat this limit too. I also tried 25/50NL and was also successful for a few sessions but wasn't too comfortable so I'm back down at 25NL.

Today, I finally moved back to SnG's. Well actually yesterday I went back. I tried 2 $22 SnG's to see what the level of play is like. I was again unsuccessful in both attempts. First one, button raised, I was SB with KK, I put him all in blinds were 25-50 too!!!. Of course, he had A10, and guess what he rivers(No need to answer). Second one It was bubble 4 handed with everyone at 4k chips. I pushed all in, 99, and K5 diamonds called. Flop flush draw, guess what rivers.

I moved back down to the $11 SnG's to attempt this once again. I did 3 sessions of 3 SnG's at a time. Ended up winning ~$110. Not bad considering I lost a few coin flips too.

My advice to all the SnG players is to try playing some SH NL games because it has helped my play tremendously. I was always a solid SnG player but I was able to play 6 handed so much better than before. I used to sit and watch ppl play until it was about 4 handed. Now, once it hits 6 players, I'm able to build up more chips than before.

Of course same goes with HU, as the more you practice, the better you'll get.

So I'm back! And at about 1k SnG's, my ROI is hovering around 30%. Still too small of a sample size but I think it can even be better as I still have many leaks in my game. I'm going to start posting hands as soon as I figure it out.

Hi tHINGfISH!

Very nice blog, was a good read. I also took a lot of valuable experience from my SH NL games that helped improve my SNG and tournament play. The great thing is that the aggresive atmosphere and necessity of being able to play postflop as well as re-raising pre-flop with a wider range of hands really helps one adjust their play.

Good luck for the future, I look forward to hearing more.

Best regards,
SoyCD

Hi tHINGfISH,

Very good ROI you have there. Keep going like that. And nice to hear that you enjoy SH games as well

Good luck!

I don't know if it's me, or if I'm just way too unlucky.

$11 SnG's aren't working very well for me today. -5 BI.

All hands are allin preflop...

AQ-A10 Lost
AQ-AJ Lost
KK-JJ Lost
KJ-K10 Lost
99-AK Lost

Keep losing these and it makes it hard to have any ROI.

Not to mention this one...

A9 button all in, 2/3 suited called my all in...

flop 33, river 9

Ewww... He wasn't even short stacked... I was...

i really enjoyed reading your blog! Its great to hear someone sticking to what they set out to do and set goals for themselves! its very motivating. I'm a young poker player and I lack the discipline needed to be the best I can. I know if I have a disciplined session, I will be up money. Hearing that your doing so great really motivates me to practice practice practice. Thank you so much! And good luck to you in the future!

Best Regards,
Blazerkid57

i lack discipline also. i found that after i had a good knowledge of what was +$EV and -$EV, and a good understanding of poker in general, multitabling cuts down a lot on boredom, and allows you to play disciplined poker

Originally posted by tHINGfISH
I don't know if it's me, or if I'm just way too unlucky.

$11 SnG's aren't working very well for me today. -5 BI.

All hands are allin preflop...

AQ-A10 Lost
AQ-AJ Lost
KK-JJ Lost
KJ-K10 Lost
99-AK Lost

Keep losing these and it makes it hard to have any ROI.

I know this all too well. Sometimes while playing SnGs I would make a list of suckouts I had and found that I next to never flew out of tournaments with the worse hand. Although this is frustrating it also showed me that whatever I was doing - I was on the right track.

Sometimes I would check the statistics of the players who had sucked out on me just to see they were running with -33% ROI over 1400 SNGs - which puts things back into perspective. In the longrun solid play pays off. Otherwise we wouldnt have those sessions in where we get ITM in nearly every SNG we play with several first places.

Keep your head up - keep playing well - and it will go back up

Best regards,
SoyCD