Stable Success

I've had two more days very much like the last day I wrote about. Yesterday I won about $350 on a day where I was winning all day but never ahead more than $600. In fact I was ahead $600 about 10 minutes into my day after an insane flood of monster hands which made the whole day pretty pleasant.

Today I started off a little rough, but after a few hours I found myself even again and when I decided to call it a day I was up close to $500. These last three days have been exactly the kind of days that I need to make this year long quest a major stress free success.

In other good news I cleared my first $1,500 FPP bonus of the year today (as a supernova I can sell 100,000 FPP's for $1,500). So after a topsy turvy start I'm right where I wanted to be 11 days into the year. I've decided to cash out $1,500 every Saturday as if I was getting a regular pay check. I'm hoping that at some point I'll have enough in my account where I can give myself a raise, but we'll all be happy and in good shape if I can make it through the year with 52 $1,500 cashouts.

Small Bounce Back

I made a minor recovery today winning about $350. Much more valuable than the dollars won was the win itself. If I'd had another significant loss today I'm sure my morale would have suffered dramatically. If fact, despite all the volatility I've been experiencing in general today was a shockingly stable day. At my lowest point I was losing less than $200 and at my best I was winning about $500. That's sort of how I expected things to go at these limits, not plus $1,400 one day minus $1,600 the next.

Also I made a royal flush today. I think it's about the 10th one of my life and unlike most of the others I got good action since I didn't get there until the river. I'm up to 22,100 points and expect to be up to 30,000 by Saturday.

So Far So Blah!

Well, I'm 8 days into my quest to become supernova elite and so far I've had mixed results. After taking the first off I started off my work year with two moderate winning days and then gave back all of my winnings on the third day. I wasn't too upset because I'm still getting the feel for these 6 handed games and after all, if I can just break even I'll have a pretty good year.

Then on Saturday I kicked some major ass winning a little over $1,400! BANG! I'm going to be rich bitches! I think actual dollar signs appeared in my eyes when I thought about the kind of money I'd make this year if I could break even for the most part and then drop a 4 digit win on the pile every now and then.

I took Sunday off and reveled in the glory of my well earned grand and a half. Unfortunately Monday was a slap in the face. I got rocked all day and ended up dropping $1,600. Today wasn't much better and at one point I was down about $1,400, but I staged a late inning comeback and only ended up losing about half that much. With the amount of money involved, these games shouldn't be so volatile!

Working harder than I'm used to hasn't been so bad. As you might expect, when I'm winning it's fine if not fun, but when I'm losing and it's dark outside and I can hear Peyton giggling in the other room it's really tough to keep playing.

So far I've earned 18,430 of the 1,000,000 points I need by the end of the year. If you extrapolate that our for the year, I'm behind pace. But my plan it to take it month to month and I'm not worried about hitting the 83,000 points I'll need this month to be on pace.

Hopefully next week will be a little more productive on the point side and much more productive on the dollar side.

A Big Plan for 2008

I've been a big time blog slacker lately. Sorry! Not much of interest has been going on pokerwise lately, but I do have a major plan for 2008. This plan started when one day I was looking at the pokerstars website and I decided to drool over the benefits a player could get by reaching the highest level of pokerstars VIP status: Supernova Elite.

To reach that level you need to earn a million base frequent player points (FPPs) in a calender year. For every dollar in tournament juice that you pay you get 5 points meaning you'd have to pay $200,000 in juice in one year (an insane amount) to make it. Or for every cash game hand you play where they take at least a dollar you get 1 point and if they take two dollars you get 2 points (there's not bonus if they happen to take more). To give you some perspective in 2007 I earned about 300,010 base FPP's.

So what do they give you for making it to this nut-so level? Well they give you FREE entry into TWO $10,000 buy in poker tournaments (you get to choose between the WSOP main event, the Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure and the EPT Monte Carlo) plus $2,000 for expenses for each tournament and a $2,600 entry into the WCOOP main event. They also give you cash bonuses along the way . When you reach 200,000 base FPP's they give you $2,000. At 300,000, you get ANOTHER $3,000. At 500,000 you get ANOTHER $5,000 and at 750,000 points you get ANOTHER $7,500.

So as I was drolling over all of this sweet stuff and dreaming of playing in the WSOP main event again as well as the PCA which is in the Bahamas I thought to myself "I need to find a way to make this happen!"

I did the math and discovered that I would need to play about 90 $109 SNG's a day, 20 days a month all year to make it happen. That amounts to 10 hour days, every day with little or no vacation. Keep in mind that these aren't 10 hour days like normal people have 10 hour days. They have commute time and time talking to other people and time eating. This is 10 hours of making a decision every 8 seconds. I'm sure there are people out there who could do that, but I am not one of them.

I knew how many points I could earn playing NL cash games and knew it wouldn't be enough (I'd have to play about 1.75 million hands in a year), but I wasn't sure about limit cash games. So I decided to do a little experimenting. I quickly discovered that playing $5/$10 six-handed limit hold'em games I can make about 1.05 base FPPs per hand. Meaning that if I play 80,000 hands a month I'll be able to earn enough points to become Supernova Elite. I can play 500 hands an hour so that should be exactly twenty 8-hour days a month.

Amazingly, neglecting all of the year end bonuses and the milestone bonuses, just the FPP's alone from playing 80,000 hands in these games are worth $4,500! If you add it all up it means that if I can BREAK EVEN I'll end up making $96,652 in bonuses next year!!!

While I suspect I should be able to beat these games, I'm not certain that I can. I've got about $20,000 in my pokerstars account right now and I figure I'm willing to lose about 2/3 of that before I pull the plug and go back to playing NL tournaments as my main poker activity. Also I don't know if I can handle the work load for an entire year. This also means that I won't be able to play much in the the way of tournaments in person or online since all of my energy and effort is going to go into this one major goal. I don't know if I have it in me, but I'm going to try. If I can make a measly ten cents a hand that would be another $100,000 on top of the bonuses. This could be really big!

I'll try to keep you posted on my progress. My plan for the blog in the new year since I'm going to be working more is to try to post at least weekly, but just with short posts since all I'm going to be doing is going after this one goal. Wish me luck!

A Few Brief Tournament Results

Things have not been going well in tournament land. I had two close calls in the fulltilt series the first of which took place in the $216 pot limit hold'em event. The tournament paid 216 spots and with about 375 players left (of the 1468 that started) I got dealt KQ. With blinds of 250/500 I opened for 1,500 and the player in the small blind called. We took the flop heads up and I was happy to see K T 5 on the board. My opponent checked and I bet 3,000. To my surprised my opponent moved all in and left me with a tough decision. I'd started the hand with about 12,000 chips which was just about average, but if I folded now I'd be left with around 7,500. I felt like I was probably behind, but I decided to call anyway since there was so much in the pot already. When the cards got turned over I saw that my opponent had KJ! AH HA! All I need is to dodge a jack and I'll have more than twice average getting close to the money! And then...Jack on the turn. Shit! I was out.

The next tournament I played was the $109 with rebuys. I managed to get in for only $209 and again found myself in good shape as we approached the money. We'd started with 1,600 players and again they were paying 216 spots. With about 350 players left I was faced with another tough decision. The blinds were 300/600, I had 15,000 chips which was about average, and I got dealt AQ in the small blind. A player in front of me moved all in for a little over 12,000 and I stopped to think.

This was clearly an excessive raise and under normal circumstances my first thought would be that the raiser had AK. But this guy was TOTALLY nuts. I'd been involved in half a dozen hands with him and he was making very strange plays. The wackiest thing he did was with blinds of 250/500 a player raised to 1,100, the next player to act moved all in for 3,800, and then the nut job moved all in for 10,000 with J 2! You can't bluff the guy who's all in and since he's already reraising the chances of J 2 being the best hand are absolutely zero. This may be the worst play I've ever seen this late in a $200+ tournament. It turned out the player who made it 3,800 had AK and the nut job rivered a 2 to win the pot.

So faced with an all in raise from this guy I figured he could have just about anything. In retrospect I should not have risked 80% of my chips on this one hand when I could have avoided it. Just making the money was worth $460 and I had enough chips that I didn't need to be taking massive risks. Anyway I called, he had AK and I lost almost all of my chips. Two hands later I got my remaining chips in with 33 vs AJ and lost that one as well. What a disappointment.

While I was very close in both of those tournaments, my seat barely got warm before I was out in the $1,060 tournament at Lucky Chances. We started with 4,000 chips each and about a half an hour in I lost about 1,000 when I made a semi bluff with a flush draw against a short stacked player and missed. A few hands later with blinds of 50/75 I raised to 250 with KQ and got one caller. The flop came all small cards and after he checked I bet out 500. He thought for a moment and then called. The turn was another blank but this time my opponent bet out 1,000 and I was forced to fold. I was down to less than half my starting stack.

About 10 minutes later with blinds still at 50/75 a player in the field opened for 250 and got two callers. I was in the big blind and thinking to myself that if I found anything at all I'd move all in for my remaining 1,800 or so. It might be counterintuitive to think that with three people already in it would be a good time to make a move. One of them HAS to have a good and right? Wrong! In fact the only player I was really worried about was the initial raiser. If the other two players had something they really liked they'd have reraised, but by just calling they were telling me that they had good, but not great hands. Certainly it was very likely the neither had a hand worth calling an extra 1,550. Furthermore the initial raiser knows that not only does he have to worry about my hand, but one of the other players might decide to call as well if he continues.

So when I looked down at 44, I confidently moved all in. If someone had a big pair I was pretty much screwed, but I thought I might get called by unpaired overcards which would make me about 50/50 to win or win the pot without a fight. I got rid of the first two players to act after me but the third called with AQ. The flop came down K K T which was not a good flop since I'd now need to dodge an A, Q, J, or T on the turn. The turn was a 6 which meaning I had to dodge a 6 as well. Sadly the river as an A and I was out.

When you add up all the results I still have $2,284 of my $4,000 starting bankroll. I have three more tournaments that I'm going to play to conclude the series and all of them go down next Sunday. The first is a $163 no limit hold'em "Knockout." I've never played a tournament like this before and I'm really looking forward to it. The tournament plays just like an normal tournament except that for every player you eliminate you win cash on the spot. I think it will be something like $20 for every player you knock out meaning of the $163 I buy in for $13 goes to the house, $130 goes to the general prize pool and $20 goes to the player who knocks me out. It should be fun.

The next tournament is the $535 FTOPS main event which has a 2 million dollar guaranteed prize pool. Finally I've decided to throw in the $215 Pokerstars Sunday Million. I may also play the $215 Pokerstars Sunday Warm up and/or the $215 Pokerstars Sunday Second Chance. If I do so I'll be including those tournaments as part the series, meaning my backers for all of the fulltilt and Lucky Chances tournaments will have a piece of that action as well. If you're a backer and you have any objections (I can't imagine why you would) just let me know before Sunday and I'll count you out. There's also a 10% chance that I might play one of the other remaining tournaments on fulltilt, but right now it doesn't seem likely. By the way I'm wes1279 on fulltilt not ACESEDAI so if you want to watch from your computer you can find my by searching for that username. The action starts at 11 am pacific and I'll recap all of it on Monday.

Tournament Recaps

Sorry again for the major laziness on my part in updating the blog. I know those of you that have financial interest in my results are probably very interested in knowing what's been happening.

I'll start with what's been going on at Lucky chances. On Wednesday I played the $550 NL tournament. I arrived at the casino feeling good about my chances since I'd done so well the previous day. My first interesting had came about 45 minutes into the tournament with the blinds were 50/75. I was in the big blind with K6 when three players called in the field as did the small blind.

The flop came down K 9 2 and I thought there was a good chance I had the best had, but against so many opponents it was hard to be sure. I considered betting but decided to check. An aggressive player bet about half the pot and I was the only player to call. The turn was another 9, I checked again and my opponent bet about half the pot again. I knew she was a little loose so she could have a wide range of hands and I also knew she was a thinking player that could lay down a fairly strong hand if she thought she was behind. I decided to move all in since that would be exactly what I would do if I had a 9. I also knew that if she had a king it wasn't AK, KQ, or KJ since she would have raised those hands preflop meaning if a A, K, Q, J or 9 came on the river I get half the pot if she also had a K. I figured it was more likely she had a pair between 33 and 88. She thought for about 5 seconds and then called me with 96. At first I thought to myself "why the hell did you do that," but upon further reflection I think it was an OK play if not a good one.

On Friday I went back to Lucky Chances to play the $550 shootout. In the first hour and a half I won one pot and it was because I stole the blinds preflop. In fact I didn't even play a hand to the flop during that entire time because my cards were so bad. Then I picked up AK suited and was first to act. I raised, the big blind moved all in and I called. I was happy to get some action with by far the best hand I'd seen all day, but I was unhappy to see my opponent turn over AA! I was only about 7% to win and I didn't catch a miracle.

While it sucked to go out early twice in a row, that's actually not the worst possible result. Going out just short of the money is much more time consuming and painful than going broke in the initial stages. Because of my misfortune I managed to dodge the rush hour traffic and enjoy the rest of my day, so it wasn't all bad.

On Wednesday after I went broke I came home and played in the $216, 6 handed NL event on Fulltilt. I was lucky to start at a table with a bunch of weak players. It seemed like every time I reraised them they folded. Not surprisingly I started to do a lot more reraising even with marginal hands. I've forgotten any interesting hands along the way, but I know when I made they money (yay!) I had about an average sized chip stack.

A short while later I had slightly less than average with about 20,000 chips. The blinds were 800/1,600 and I open raised to 4,800 with AJ suited. The player in the blind blind moved all in for something like 30,000 and I decided to take a chance. I could have folded, but in order to go really deep I needed much more than I had. Hoping to see a pair below jack I called. My opponent showed a pair of tens which meant I was just shy of 50% to win. Sadly the tens held up and I was out. I finished in about 250th out of more than 3,600 which paid $375.

I'm out of blogging time, but I'll have more recaps soon. Tomorrow (Sunday) I have the $1,000 event at Lucky Chances. Wish me luck.

Massive Blog slacking!

Sorry about my lack of tournament updates! I'll have a recap of the three tournaments that I've played since my last post as well as the one I'll be playing tonight, sometime tonight or tomorrow.