Hey Guys/Girls,
I have been planning to start my blog since the beginning of January but things kept popping up all over the place in private life so I am a little bit late with this. I am 31year old Serbian and I have decided to give poker a try as primary way of earning a living some time back and I want to use this blog as a way to track my progress and more importantly network with fellow players and be a part of the community.
Some of you might know my little brother (IvicaIliev77) here on PokerStrategy and might be aware of our life story. We have both left Serbia in the fall of 1999 after the NATO bombing when we were 15 and 16 years old (I went to the US, he went to UK) and have both finished high school and college abroad, only to come back after 5-6 years back home.
I am an economist by profession and have almost 10 years of work experience working as a marketing exec for Philip Morris (cigarette company making Marlboro's and etc.) and as project manager and NGO exec in creating and implementing EU projects from Bruxelles in Serbia and the Balkans. Some might ask what the hell I am doing in poker in the first place. Poker started as a pure fun thing to do with my roommates in the US, as we played home games for beer money and etc. The game intrigued me a lot from the start and I always have liked games which pose an intellectual challenge (was always good at chess, other type of card games and in GO, Japanese Chess, I was a ranked junior as an 8th grader).
During my college years and later the first 5-6 years of my career I have played poker mostly for fun as a recreational player, a little bit online a little bit live, mostly MTTs, some cash games. During that period my interest in poker increased so I have started to follow the scene much more, read more about it and try to improve myself a bit in that area. Keep in mind still as a recreational player. The first year I got serious about poker is 2010, where I have put in a significant time and volume into playing, even though I was working a full time job.
The first format I have played was 6-max cash games which I have mostly played on small networks which where fish pools. By watching a lot of poker videos and reading some articles I have improved significantly and I was a winner on NL50-NL100, bearing in mind a soft competition on the these tiny poker rooms. Profit from poker was never a primary motivator for me since I had a great job (financially) for Serbia and made my living that way, so whatever came from poker was an extra, and I think that helped me a lot to improve and create a positive attitude about poker since I had very little pressure.
I have switched to MTTs for a short period of time after that mostly on PS and 888, since I wanted to change a little and learn a little bit more about different formats. By now beside working a full time job I was grinding a few hours a day whenever I could, and also hit live cash games once or twice a week. MTTs I had moderate success and never liked them online as a preferred format (compared to live MTTs which are fun to me and a great way to make a break from the chair and the monitor).
In 2013, I have decided to play HUSNGs exclusively and to try to move to poker as a full time source of income. My job has been wearing me down terribly. Being a 9 to 5 slave for a good salary looks always like a good thing when you are really young and want to become financially independent, but over time just wears you down especially if you have a mental make up that I do which needs a certain room for creativity and personal freedom. I am thankful to my old job that I was able to do some things such as buy my own apartment (where me and my brother live now), pay for my brothers tuition at Berklee College of Music so he can graduate, travel a lot, help out my brother with money and everything until he could stand on his two feet financially in poker and life. Without my old job this wouldn't have been possible. On the other hand my job has took away sooo much from me personally, pretty much destroyed my social life (since 9 to 5 is a myth, it's more 12 hour working days, working weekends, 100+ travel days for work a year) that I started to hate my file. That's when I decided to make it better.
I played HUSNG hypers on PS on my own, started from 1.5$ and watching videos from HUSNG.com and other sources and reading articles. I was a winner on 15$ limits in 3-4 months and doing quite well. During that time I was also wrapping up my final months at the old job. I have decided to work with Gerovit to on HUSNG and we made a deal to play on iPoker HUSNG Turbos and he has helped me a lot to improve as well in this format.
I had motivation problems towards the end of 2013 and for a few months have played very little even though I was doing well and was looking for a new challenge. After speaking Pedja (my brother's real name) we made a deal to create our own poker office, as a place we will use for playing, working on our game and motivating each other to succeed. We have a small two bedroom flat now which is our poker office, where 3 of us are spending our grinding hours every day (the third one is Pedja's best friend).
Basically the deal is the following. To learn about 6max SNGs and try to crush and move up the limits, with the focus on improving the game, poker knowledge and mental game and profit a distant second goal at the moment. I will be spending at least 6 hours a day on poker (2 hours studying and 4 hours of playing), at least 6 days a week and Pedja will be helping me out with coaching, homework, sweat sessions and etc. We started from the bottom on purpose in order to get the material down quickly and less costly, so currently I am playing 1.5$ 6max SNGs and I have played about 1.3k SNGs in 2-3 weeks and crushing with more than 6% RoI despite running bellow EV quite a lot. Looking forward to move up quickly to 3.5$ in the coming days.
So far the experience is great and I am highly motivated to learn and crush and I think that the decision is the right one to open up our poker office. Whether my coach is happy, he will have to say ♦ ♦ ♦
In general the expectation of the blog will be to update at least once a week with the graphs, results, observations, material that I am currently using regarding the poker part. On the other hand I will try also to include in some light reading in the blog about personal life, maybe troll IvicaIliev77, Gavron, Gerovit and other dudes a bit ♦ ♦ ♦
Some people would notice that both me and IvicaIliev77 must have a gene to talk too much and write walls of text, so therefore I apologize and promise that in the future that will not be a case, unless there is a good reason for it ♦
Thanks for reading and following!
