You have been mentioning that "random woman" in nearly every post. Are you upset that I am still interesting enough to a woman after she knows I am broke and trying to get my life back in order? Does it hurt you that she is offering me sex and food without it having any benefit to her, apart from the amazing sex ofcourse.

Listen kid, I am glad I can feed your desire to **** on people. It's probably the only thing in life you have.

BTW in the end she only paid for a few groceries. By now I have a pile of cash that will hold me over for a few months. She still cooks for me, but she pays for jack. So I am not depending on her, she was just a very welcome helping hand at a very convenient time. Maybe if you weren't such a flaming ******* you'd have people like her in your life too.

And please do some research on what LSD can do for a person, before thinking it is even remotely intelligent to laugh at my advice like I am some junky saying drugs help stop the withdrawal effects. You have serious mental issues and I think psychotherapy with a psychedelic like LSD or psylocibin would be extremely useful to you.

Had an extremely rough day at the tables. played 2 very long sessions and both went disastrous. First hand of first session I get in AA on K762 in a 3 way 3bet pot vs KJ and 88 and the fish rivers a J on me. Few hands later I get in TT vs flatted AA in the BB on 789. Slowly grinded it out and managed to squeeze out a 1,5bi win. Then started my second session and that's where things really got heated. Got in KK vs AA twice, QQ vs KK once and lost TT vs AK twice.

I will take at least one day off now as I am doing 2 coaching sessions tomorrow and have a sweat session with the other student planned. Will be back at it on Thursday or Friday. Roll is now at 105$ and totally not in the mood to post a graph for obv reasons.

Dude the tournament circuits are so expensive to travel/play with the super gnarly variance of live MTTs no shame in getting your head knocked around.

Every time I price out going to play like 1 week at a non-local circuit spot, as basically a rec expecting to lose $$$ I always end up at the question "how do pro circuit grinders do this and enjoy it and not either live super frugally or flirt with brokeville regularly"?

Maybe it's cause many of them sell of action and pretty significant markup to cover expenses?

I think learning to buy/swap/sell pieces with the right people seems a pretty integral part of being a successful circuit/live player. If you can sell 50% of yourself and buy 50% of 15-20 others then you're limiting variance significantly.

The only question I've ever had on that is how the f they keep track of who they have peices of etc.

Good read. Will b following. Gl mate!

I am still up a bunch on live MTTs. My first 3 trips i bink 90k, 275k and 500k so I ran extremely well. Travelling was also done on a relatively nitty budget. I once stayed in a Hilton hotel for a month between two tour stops in that location which was stupid and I dusted a lot off playing nosebleed mixed games online.


I was never big on selling pieces of myself, so can't really help you on that subject. Swapping is mostly a thing amongst friends that run deep in a tourney. I personally think it's quite stupid, as swapping will not reduce the variance, it will just place it in another pile of equity. That equity may be lower than mine, or be played at a higher variance. It's hard to find good swaps unless you handicap, and players generally don't take kindly to that. I would just advise anyone coming up to play way below their roll requirements. Don't play higher stakes with higher variance, play more on lower stakes and print. We are not here for a good time, we are here to make money.

That being said, I hardly ever followed that advice. I have played some of the highest stakes games online and played fairly high stakes live as well. But that was a younger, more foolish and ego driven version of myself then there is today.

Thanks man, I love your sn!

Do you miss travelling and playing live events? For example, do you wish you were at PSC Barcelona right now? For me as someone who would love to be able to go and do that kind of thing and call it work, I would hate to have 'done it' and now not be doing it.

More Degen stories and anecdotes plz, less 2nl

Barcelona is a great stop, so not really the best way to set a standard for how playing "the circuit" is. I have been at my fair share of anus destinations purely for profit and can't say that it contributed all that much to my life. I hated Bahamas, Las Vegas, Monaco and London with a passion. The only destination I would still go is Las Vegas, purely because there is just way too much value there. The PCA was a reg infested ****hole where even a good fart would cost you 3 buyins. London is just a miserable city in an even more miserable country and Monaco ... well **** MONACO!!

I would still like to go to Barcelona and Prague because they are great places and always have a good selection of events/cashgames. I would also still go to the WSOP because it is just very difficult to find any place/time of year where your value is higher.

Other than that I don't miss it at all, and I could be a millionaire many times over and still not go to like an EPT Tallinn or whatever.

I understand your hunger for these stories, but I must admit it feels a bit akward. It makes me feel like a giant has been (which atm is an accurate description of me). But because I am doing this topic just as much for you guys as I am doing this for me, I will oblige every now and then.

Ok so this is back in like 2008ish, my bankroll had just seen a significant increase thanks to talking myself into an extremely juicy homegame with 100% criminals. There was literally not 1 good player at the table. I made about 180k in the span of 3 weeks when the roll I started with was just shy of 20k.

One of the things about these live settings is that you need a hustler's mindset. You can't grind out every single percentile edge. You need to give and take, just take a bit more than you give. One of the guys in the game was an absolute joke. He was a giant tatted juicehead with the brains you would typically attribute to such a person. He obv knew I was winning big in the game and texted me asking to spot him 30k to buy a kilo of blow so he could keep his business running. He offered 25% interest on the loan. I knew he drove a beautiful Ferrari F430 and was way more interested in that than 7.5k. I said I would forget about the interest and that he could take as long as he wanted with paying me back, if I could drive his Ferrari until he paid me back every last cent. He snap agreed to the deal and I came to pick up his car. This thing was set up in a way where the car was registered to a company, I just had to log every trip and list "meeting" as a reason. I even had a card which I could use to pay for fuel.

I expected to only use the car for 2 weeks tops, as cocaine is never much of a hard sell. However one night he gets gangster and ends up in a barfight and pistol whips a fool that eyeballed his girlfriend the wrong way. Because of the weapon they decide to sweep his house, and they find like 3 quarters of the kilo on his kitchen table in the house he lives. After he is taken into custody I get a call from his lawyer, if I would be so kind as to take care of the car till his legal problems fade away. He ends up pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and some kind of possession with intent charge. He gets sentenced to 5 years. At this time I am partly happy and partly pissed off. First off I get to use this awesome ride at virtually no expenses for the time being. But I also realize it's gonna be extremely tough to see a shred of the 30k I lent him. The coke is gone, and he's gonna be under such close supervision that it will be practically impossible for him to pay me back after he gets out.

Fast forward 2 years later and he gets off for time served for being a good boy in the locker. I get a phonecall while I am in a disaster of a downswing. I was down about 20k on the weekend, almost was losing every day for like 3 weeks straight absolutely hating life. Then the doorbell rings, I look down and it's Mr. Juicehead. I run down to open the door, tell him to grab a drink and a snack and come join me upstairs. We make the regular "how you been" talk when he says, ok let's get down to business. He felt horrible about the loan and was super greatful that I took care of his car all that time. He asked me what expenses I had made to have it under my wings. So I told him I rented a garage for 150eu a month to store it away from the elements. I put a new set of tyres on it because it looked like it needed them, and I had it serviced to replace a windwiper motor. He ends up giving me 5k for my expenses, pays off the loan in full then and there and says he's going on a holiday and I can use it for another month. Since I had pretty much written off that money, I was over the moon because of the situation. I say this calls for a drink just before the 55 past the hour break starts. I run down to take a **** and grab the booze and tell him to play a few hands for me if the break ends and I am not back. I only had MTTs open so he couldn't do all that much damage.

I come back to him smiling ear to ear and saying, I won a huge pot. I look at the table and see it's the Sunday Million, where I have a stack of just over 800k with 2nd place in chips having 495k. I open the HH replayer and see UTG open, UTG1 flat, MP 3b ... my buddy flats 66 on the button. The BB flats, UTG flats and UTG1 decides to click it back. MP flats and my budy the juicehead thinks there is no other option than that they all have AK and decides this is a great spot to rip it in for just over 60bb eff. All players end up calling, we're up against AA, KK, QQ and AK. We river a 6 and eliminate all players. Now it goes without explanation that I would have never taken this line in 100 million years, and given the hands and how the board ran out I don't see any way where I would have ever gotten to the river in that spot.So I have nothing else but his stupidity to thank for my enormous chipstack. I laugh it off and we start drinking. A few hours later I win my first Sunday Major for just over 200k. I nearly kiss the guy as he quite literally just "gifted" me almost quarter of a million, while I was fully expecting never to see my loan to him again.

The end of this story is the sweetest bit of the whole deal. Him being locked up so long had left him high and dry for quite a while. He suggested we get into the car to drive to a red light district and **** some hookers. Now I wasn't in the mood for a random hooker after this exciting turn of events, and remebered that I was recently informed by someone who had ****ed Aletta Ocean for like 1k for an hour. I tell him we should book her. He ends up sleeping on my couch that night, we wake up monday afternoon and call the escort agency. She's available but in Prague at the moment. We make the booking for the next day and get into the Ferrari and drive off to Prague. We double team Aletta Ocean for 3 hours and had the most incredible **** you could imagine. I would have never thought I'd ever do that, but with a filthy porn star and a guy I am not really super close with it felt like the right spot for a YOLO moment. We had to race back home to get him back in time for his holiday and I got to enjoy his Ferrari for another month before he picked it up. About 6 months later the guy gets killed in a rip deal and I never got to hang out with him again.

The cynic inside me is telling me that these stories are wayyy too ludicrous to be true, but the rest of me is loving it and I don't see why anyone would make up anything quite so ridiculous and try to pass it off as truth.

Your life reminds me somewhat of Layer Cake... keep 'em coming OP... don't think anyone else has ever won the Sunday Million in those kind of circumstances.

This is how I feel: if it's fake it's awesome and I love the story and if it's real it's awesome and I love the story. I've had my own share of wtf life moments so I figure why couldn't cool stuff happen to him rip juicehead you're a hell of a mensch

+1 to less poker more stories rip juicehead

I mean I am obviously gonna tell the most extreme **** that happened to me, because that is what the people want to read about. I also have about 5 dozen top 25 finishes in random sunday majors where I played a very solid game to lose 77s vs KJs for 16bb pfai. Barely breaking even for the weekend and going to bed after a frustrated wank.

I am not sure if I ever want to out myself in this thread, mostly because of the prescription drug habbit which is quite a dent in my ego. But also because I don't want people clowning on me after knowing my old sn and my real name. (yeah sorry im multiaccounting 2nl bruvs)

To be fair, I can't keep this up for much longer. I have maybe 2 or 3 more stories that are worth writing about, that are on a similar crazy level as this one. Point is that the more I tell, the easier it will be to put the pieces together for people that have been in the know since like 08/09. New degen stories will also be a rare occurence as I like to believe I have left that life behind.

Fair enough. I'd still like to hear them, feel free to PM me them at various points over the next few months

Great thread... and its great to hear you kicked your pill habit( I heard its tuff to do). Good luck and keep this thread going.

To keep stuff in balance a small poker update. I've put in quite a bit of volume on 2nl since my last failed shot at 5nl. I think I had made some adjustments to the field that weren't good and I also just got cold decked quite a bit.

We are now back at a 116$ roll from a 130ish peak, back up from about a 95ish low. I don't have a lot of time to put in work on Pokerstars anymore as my students take up more time than I expected, but I expect that time to yield a higher hourly than my 2nl grindaments. Apart from that I have also been getting HU action on a bitcoin site which falls under the staking deal that we loosely started. Not grinding hard for the stable yet, but he needed a guy to opensit the lobby on 2 btc sites and I obliged. I will keep up the micros grind on the side, but more and more of my activity will be shifting towards the students and taking up more volume for the staking deal.

Here's the latest on my progress, I had to leave out the skydive 5nl session as those hands are on my laptop and I couldn't be bothered to manually import those files to my grind setup. Plus I get the impression most of you don't really care either way

The evbb has been steadily going down. Most of it had to do with some adjustments that I think in hindsight were a bad idea for micros. Main thing I changed was checking some stronger hands to induce bluffs, where I now believe that just doesn't happen enough for it to be a better strat than just valuebetting all your made hands. But a reasonable part of the decline is also in the cards. I've been getting coolered in some massive pots.



A pretty flatlining graph. Still believe I can climb back to a 10evbb winrate but not that bothered by it. We'll see what happens. I will be playing a lot less on Stars from now on. So the next poker updates will probably be from the stake.

Nah I will share a story publicly or not at all. I have 2 stories that are safe to share, one of them not a living soul knows about. And the other one involves a player that is even more desperate to stay anonymous than I am. So he won't speak up either.

I'll get around to sharing them at some point. I promise that much.

Thanks for the kind words, it wasn't easy I'll tell you that much. Physical withdrawl is something I cannot acurately describe. I am a big lover of weed and miss it when I don't smoke regularly, but in a very slight annoyance type of way. It doesn't get in the way of anything. It's just a luxury I like to have. Compare it to walking up to the staircase and seeing the elevator is out of order. No way I am gonna stay downstairs, but it sucks the elevator is broken.

With physical withdrawal it's a whole different ballgame. Every inch of your mind is engulfed with the desire to just give in. I am fairly certain if the withdrawal was from an illegal street drug, as opposed to a prescription drug, it would have been far more difficult to stay away. Now to get the drug I would need a new prescription from an unknown doctor in a foreign country while having no real reason to get it prescribed. That is one of the reasons I went abroad, not only for the social lockdown situation.

I was rereading some of this thread and it reminds me of a famous Finnish player.( that blogs a lot) Meaning your writing style and the stories. Keep up the great work!!!!

awesome stories and hope you crush the tables as you crush degening, good luck!

I am guessing you are referring to Chuck Bass? I am not him, I can tell you that much.

I don't think I will ever crush poker as hard as I've crushed life. If that were ever to have happened, it would've happened already. I had my early come up around 05/06, then really got things going between 08 and '12 and after that I was pretty much coasting life and poker. I don't think I have the character that you need to deal with six figure swings in a session. After one of those I would always either fly off the rails partying, or be depressed and not leave the house for 2 months. I took my first shot at the nosebleeds vs Ivey playing HUPLO, I think this was late summer early fall of 2010. Now don't get me wrong, I definitely didn't think Ivey was a spot. But he wasn't good by any means. He is sticky as hell and puts a lot of pressure on his opponents. But fundamentally his game wasn't very good. Thinking I had an acceptable edge against him and having a youngsters heart of fire, I decide to battle him. I get absolutely hammered and lose more than 250k in an absolutely ridiculous way. In all honesty I don't remember much at all of the days after that session till about just after Black Friday. I still clearly remember the feeling being glad it was FTP that was in trouble, as I had just lost nearly all of my money there anyway. But I pretty much did nothing for several months because I was just mentally destroyed from what had happened to me.

Talking about Black Friday, look what I just got in my email inbox:

This was quite possibly the best news I've had in years and I can't possibly begin to describe how liberating this is. I am sticking nearly all of it in crypto and keep like 4/5kish back for living expenses. I considered using the money to go play on my own again, but I think there is more value in that money sitting in crypto than me playing the same stakes as I am playing now but taking 100% of myself. I am crushing it and already playing 400nl exclusive with some shots at 600nl. I would also lose access to some of the amazingly soft networks I get to play on through my backer. So all in al I am pretty happy to stay with him.

Good for you! I had friends collectively lose Millions in Black Friday. Even though it's been 6+ years everyone who gets made whole is s small victory

Crypto is good, eth and btc is making me rich. Just dont put it in the drug dealers/hookers pockets lol.

nice upswing with getting that 44k back...and yes I was talking about chuck bass..lol.

I believe everyone will be made whole. I see no reason why they would pay me, and not someone else.

I am strongly considering to order a high class escort to suck my dick during my next session just to spite you.

No money has ever felt sweeter. It was completely written off the balance, and I was vaguely hoping to some day get back pennies on the dollar.

Now I won't be able to share much of my grind anymore. A few websites do not support tracking software, and I also want to keep the fishing pond as secretive as I possibly can. But this one hand was played on a website that works with a HH converter for tracking purposes. So you guys will never know where it was played by posting it.

Wasn't getting much action so decided to jump in a 200nl game. I was card racking like a mother****er and had an isane image because most pots were won without showdown. UTG is one of the whales of that limit and basically just punts a few stacks every single day. I consider I am probably well ahead of his hand, but have redraw equity if I'm behind. So decide to iso ship to try and get this heads up.

Then madness!!!!