97 DAYS and ONE CHALLENGE (Story of STEROIDhulk)
Hi, My name is Marko. I wanted to create this challenge to get myself back to work. I have been on holiday for about two months, because of various reasons, a trip to USA watch ice-hockey and then moving to Malta. Even though I haven’t played much, so It’s given me time to think about things, my life, poker, etc. I feel like my poker life is coming to an end in quite many levels, but I feel like I need to give back to the community, which has given me so much through the years. Poker has given me a great opportunity in life, and It’s been a great ride, so I wanted to create a blog to discuss poker and life in general. I want to help other people to achieve their dream in poker and becoming a poker professional. I have been professional MTT-player for the last 6-7 years, and this is my story how I got started and how I have improved through the years. Read this to learn more about being professional or If you are just starting, learn what it takes and how to improve your game. I’m not going to talk about strategy too much because I think discussing things in writing is going to take me too much time off from playing. I’m going to leave that to million training sites/coaches, BUT I will share a lot of general knowledge you will need when you’re becoming professional or maybe while you’re becoming better one.
I will use this blog to motivate myself to push through this challenging challenge. It will be the toughest challenge I’ve done, and I hope I will learn something new from it as usual. Nothing better than going out on top! Keeping it all together for a long period is the hardest thing, because of:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Will Durant
97 DAYS and ONE CHALLENGE:
A total of 14 weeks intense poker, 98 days. Why 97 day and one? The one day is a surprise. I will do it on the 98th day, and we’ll see what happens. My goal is to play 50 hours a week. It’s a lot of working hours, especially when I’m still doing blog, vlogs and I have some coaching duties while doing the challenge so that it will be extremely intense. I will only count playing hours, though, so in reality, It’s going to be a lot of poker per every day, maybe 9-10 hours? I’m looking forward to it, though, nothing better than a proper challenge!
I thought about putting some minimum hand requirements per day, so I can’t slack and play few tables at the time. I want this to be productive and make a good hourly rate, so I think minimum hands per day should be 4300 hands. I will probably average out more, but I want to have some minimum. It’s always good to have some daily goal. I don’t want to put myself too much pressure of playing too many tables, though, because I want to vary my play between 6 to 18 tables max. Mostly playing around 8-12 tables at the same time, depending on stakes I’m playing and how deep I’m in tournaments.
My plan is to do the challenge in 5 days a week so that I will have one day for blogging/vlogging/coaching and then one day rest. Five days of intense playing every week.
In case I can’t do my 50 hours in 5 days, I will play on 6 and so on. If I need extra days I will use them, but like I said I want to do poker in 5 days, so that’s going to be my goal.
THE CHALLENGE IS:
14 weeks of professionality.
Play 50 hours a week, 700 hours total in 98 days.
Average of 4300 played hands per day, so a total of 301k hands played.
My goals:
Give 10% of my winnings to charity, after rakeback and tickets.
Become better professional through the challenge, improve.
Give people enough knowledge to start their poker journey.
Beat the challenge!
My rewards:
A trip to New Zealand.
I love to travel and I really hope I will make this New Zealand trip. My friend is moving there(for a one year) in April and I would really like to see him while he is living there.
(Pic from South Africa. Gorgeous place, highly recommend to visit.)
My screen name on Pokerstars is STEROIDhulk so you can follow my daily games there, and I will post my other screen names later.
I will later post a link to my blog, so you can read more about improving your game and life. I will post here vlogs and some other stuff, but more accurate things will be on my blog.
I will post here 5-6 times a week vlog(about how my day went etc.), then some daily motivational stuff and basic results. I'm hoping to make a new blog post to my site 5-6 days a week, depending on how my head works and how much stuff I can write down.
I will start the challenge on first of March, 2017.
Cya at the tables and keep crushing!