Days 1-5: My first few days at the Danish poker camp
09-05-2012
, 04:25 AM
Over the next six months I will be taking part in the Danish poker camp organised by Tobias and Anders two High stakes Danish professionals.
For those of you that have not heard of it the description can be found here:
http://www.deucescracked.com/forums/...-in-Danish-Pok
I will give a quick introduction into how I ended up here. I had just finished Uni and decided that I would try giving poker a serious shot and see how far I could get. Anyway after three days of sitting in my room grinding in my boxers I spoke to Tobias who I had previously had coaching off and he said that if I was serious about poker then I should take part in this project that he and Anders had been organising, as this would be the best way of turning dreams of becoming a professional poker player into a reality. As you can imagine when I was told that I could take part in this project I was extremely excited. I literally didn’t sleep for two days I was like a kid on Christmas eve
Since being here I have barley stopped to sleep, and I love it! As soon as I got off the train in Copenhagen I phoned Tobias to meet me and instead of going to the apartment to drop my bags off we went straight to the poker office to grind, what more could you ask for? That was followed by a game of football with everyone taking part in the project (where I realised just how unfit I was), then on to a local bar for a few beers, where the main topic of conversation was obviously how much we all hate Phil Hellmuth.
The weekend was spent grinding and looking around the city. Since arriving in Copenhagen I have fallen in love with this city. It really is beautiful and very quirky, also I have never seen so many good looking girls in one place in my life!!
[IMG]
Shot at 2012-09-05[/IMG]
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Shot at 2012-09-05[/IMG]
A couple of photos from the windows in my bedroom
On Monday team grinding in the poker office began. I really can’t describe how great it is to be surrounded by such dedicated people not only to poker but to life in general, not a moment is wasted. This does wonders for your sessions; when you start to feel like you want to give up or take a break, nothing is more motivational than seeing the person sitting next to you up ten buyins after playing 4 hours straight and still going strong. Even though it is only early days yet I already feel like I have begun to improve and have plugged a few leaks of my own, being surrounded by good players all day who are able to talk about hands is of immeasurable value.
Shot at 2012-09-05
Every day begins with some form of exercise, Tuesday began with a 3km run around the lakes. The idea being that, we will do it again in 3 months’ time after having done exercise every day in between and see how much we all improve. Everybody finished in one piece and we headed to the office for another day of grinding.
Shot at 2012-09-05
The first few days here have been fantastic, even better than I had expected and I still have 6 more months, life is good
Charlie
For those of you that have not heard of it the description can be found here:
http://www.deucescracked.com/forums/...-in-Danish-Pok
I will give a quick introduction into how I ended up here. I had just finished Uni and decided that I would try giving poker a serious shot and see how far I could get. Anyway after three days of sitting in my room grinding in my boxers I spoke to Tobias who I had previously had coaching off and he said that if I was serious about poker then I should take part in this project that he and Anders had been organising, as this would be the best way of turning dreams of becoming a professional poker player into a reality. As you can imagine when I was told that I could take part in this project I was extremely excited. I literally didn’t sleep for two days I was like a kid on Christmas eve
Since being here I have barley stopped to sleep, and I love it! As soon as I got off the train in Copenhagen I phoned Tobias to meet me and instead of going to the apartment to drop my bags off we went straight to the poker office to grind, what more could you ask for? That was followed by a game of football with everyone taking part in the project (where I realised just how unfit I was), then on to a local bar for a few beers, where the main topic of conversation was obviously how much we all hate Phil Hellmuth.
The weekend was spent grinding and looking around the city. Since arriving in Copenhagen I have fallen in love with this city. It really is beautiful and very quirky, also I have never seen so many good looking girls in one place in my life!!
[IMG]
Shot at 2012-09-05[/IMG][IMG]
Shot at 2012-09-05[/IMG]A couple of photos from the windows in my bedroom
On Monday team grinding in the poker office began. I really can’t describe how great it is to be surrounded by such dedicated people not only to poker but to life in general, not a moment is wasted. This does wonders for your sessions; when you start to feel like you want to give up or take a break, nothing is more motivational than seeing the person sitting next to you up ten buyins after playing 4 hours straight and still going strong. Even though it is only early days yet I already feel like I have begun to improve and have plugged a few leaks of my own, being surrounded by good players all day who are able to talk about hands is of immeasurable value.
Shot at 2012-09-05
Every day begins with some form of exercise, Tuesday began with a 3km run around the lakes. The idea being that, we will do it again in 3 months’ time after having done exercise every day in between and see how much we all improve. Everybody finished in one piece and we headed to the office for another day of grinding.
Shot at 2012-09-05
The first few days here have been fantastic, even better than I had expected and I still have 6 more months, life is good
Charlie
09-20-2012
, 05:03 AM
Week 2
This week has been a week of hard grinding. I have done nothing but eat, sleep, exercise and poker. I think I have been spending about 11-12 hours in the office a day, playing an average of 70 turbo heads up games a day ( which is a lot), but it has been extremely worth it as I have shot up from the $30 games back to the $100 games within the space of a week .
During the exercise sessions this week I tried my hand at 2 on 2 football, which is great, although brutally exhausting. The picture below shows the court, it may look small but don’t let that fool you. You do not get a seconds rest during a game!!
[IMG]
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I have also spent a lot of time swimming, as Tobias (one of the organisers of the poker camp) reckoned that he could thrash me at a 1km swim, so I stupidly agreed to a race at the end of month and now have to get in good enough condition to beat him, which is going to be very hard to do considering that Tobias is a psychopath who would rather pass out and drown before losing in a race.
On Friday me and Soren (another participant in the poker camp) decided to go for a few pints in town, we decided on a Scottish pub down the road from the office because we thought we’d be able to chill out after a great, but very long week, however, when we walked in we found it completely infested with very drunk, middle aged, single and ready to mingle Copenhageners. We got a drink anyway and sat in a corner discussing moving to Thailand to live like kings and potential business ideas for the future, such as our own brand of ready meals and randomwank.com (I won’t go into the gory details of this, but trust me if I ever get round to making it you will all be the first to know). Mid conversation we were interrupted by two of the aforementioned Copenhageners who wanted to sit with us, they must have been 50+, dressed as school girls with brandy brown teeth, but it would have been rude to say no so we budged up and watched as they spent the night bringing a host of different men to the table in an attempt to find someone suitable to go home with for the night, whilst at the same time offering me and Soren some of their drinks and insisting that they didn’t have anything when we kindly declined. We made it out by the skin of our teeth and staggered home a little bit worse for wear.
That pretty much sums up the week. Being here is making me realise the massive commitment that it is going to take to become a professional poker player, but looking ahead to the future I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing
This week has been a week of hard grinding. I have done nothing but eat, sleep, exercise and poker. I think I have been spending about 11-12 hours in the office a day, playing an average of 70 turbo heads up games a day ( which is a lot), but it has been extremely worth it as I have shot up from the $30 games back to the $100 games within the space of a week .
During the exercise sessions this week I tried my hand at 2 on 2 football, which is great, although brutally exhausting. The picture below shows the court, it may look small but don’t let that fool you. You do not get a seconds rest during a game!!
[IMG]
[/IMG]I have also spent a lot of time swimming, as Tobias (one of the organisers of the poker camp) reckoned that he could thrash me at a 1km swim, so I stupidly agreed to a race at the end of month and now have to get in good enough condition to beat him, which is going to be very hard to do considering that Tobias is a psychopath who would rather pass out and drown before losing in a race.
On Friday me and Soren (another participant in the poker camp) decided to go for a few pints in town, we decided on a Scottish pub down the road from the office because we thought we’d be able to chill out after a great, but very long week, however, when we walked in we found it completely infested with very drunk, middle aged, single and ready to mingle Copenhageners. We got a drink anyway and sat in a corner discussing moving to Thailand to live like kings and potential business ideas for the future, such as our own brand of ready meals and randomwank.com (I won’t go into the gory details of this, but trust me if I ever get round to making it you will all be the first to know). Mid conversation we were interrupted by two of the aforementioned Copenhageners who wanted to sit with us, they must have been 50+, dressed as school girls with brandy brown teeth, but it would have been rude to say no so we budged up and watched as they spent the night bringing a host of different men to the table in an attempt to find someone suitable to go home with for the night, whilst at the same time offering me and Soren some of their drinks and insisting that they didn’t have anything when we kindly declined. We made it out by the skin of our teeth and staggered home a little bit worse for wear.
That pretty much sums up the week. Being here is making me realise the massive commitment that it is going to take to become a professional poker player, but looking ahead to the future I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing
09-20-2012
, 05:07 AM
09-20-2012
, 05:08 AM
Week 3 at the poker camp has been another week of solid grinding, although this week has been my first taste of negative variance since being here as every day I have ran below EV. Whilst it is illogical to get annoyed over this because it is just part of the game, it can be difficult at times to not get frustrated.
Luckily this week also happened to be the week that we had our first lecture from a motivational speaker. Michael Lassen teaches how to create and maintain momentum in both businesses and personal life, but also does specialist mental training specifically for poker. He started with some very interesting studies that have been carried out showing the power that mental training can have over people’s lives and the impact it can have in competitive sports.
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He then went on to give us tools that we can use each day whilst playing poker. These included an emotions list ranging from love freedom and gratitude to despair and powerlessness, the idea being that we keep this in view and remain conscious of which emotions that we are feeling throughout our sessions and if we see ourselves slipping down the list into neutral or negative emotions we should take immediate action to take ourselves back up to positive emotions. One way this can be done is using a success list, which is a list of 101 successes that we have had throughout our lives, as when things aren’t going so well it can be easy to look up the mountain and feel overwhelmed by the distance we still have left to climb while forgetting to look behind us and remember everything that we have already overcome to get to where we are now. There were two exercises that I felt would be very useful for me day to day in my sessions to improve my mental game. One was using coolers and bad beats as an excuse to challenge myself to concentrate on the correct things in game when it is most difficult, which will not just help me when I’m running bad but will improve my concentration throughout my entire sessions. The other exercise was the practice of applying light pressure with your hand to two specific points in your forehead when stressed, this has the effect of countering the fight or flight response by redirecting blood flow that has been moved to our muscles to allow greater strength and speed back to our frontal lobe to allow us to think clearer and reduce stress.
I have decided to add my use of these to my daily logbook where I report how my session went each day and hopefully next week I can report back some positive results
Charlie
PS The opportunity is now open for people to apply to be put on the waiting list to join the Poker Camp. If you are interested and would like further details just send an email with your contact information to: kontakt@pokerlejren.dk
Luckily this week also happened to be the week that we had our first lecture from a motivational speaker. Michael Lassen teaches how to create and maintain momentum in both businesses and personal life, but also does specialist mental training specifically for poker. He started with some very interesting studies that have been carried out showing the power that mental training can have over people’s lives and the impact it can have in competitive sports.
[IMG]
[/IMG]He then went on to give us tools that we can use each day whilst playing poker. These included an emotions list ranging from love freedom and gratitude to despair and powerlessness, the idea being that we keep this in view and remain conscious of which emotions that we are feeling throughout our sessions and if we see ourselves slipping down the list into neutral or negative emotions we should take immediate action to take ourselves back up to positive emotions. One way this can be done is using a success list, which is a list of 101 successes that we have had throughout our lives, as when things aren’t going so well it can be easy to look up the mountain and feel overwhelmed by the distance we still have left to climb while forgetting to look behind us and remember everything that we have already overcome to get to where we are now. There were two exercises that I felt would be very useful for me day to day in my sessions to improve my mental game. One was using coolers and bad beats as an excuse to challenge myself to concentrate on the correct things in game when it is most difficult, which will not just help me when I’m running bad but will improve my concentration throughout my entire sessions. The other exercise was the practice of applying light pressure with your hand to two specific points in your forehead when stressed, this has the effect of countering the fight or flight response by redirecting blood flow that has been moved to our muscles to allow greater strength and speed back to our frontal lobe to allow us to think clearer and reduce stress.
I have decided to add my use of these to my daily logbook where I report how my session went each day and hopefully next week I can report back some positive results
Charlie
PS The opportunity is now open for people to apply to be put on the waiting list to join the Poker Camp. If you are interested and would like further details just send an email with your contact information to: kontakt@pokerlejren.dk
09-21-2012
, 04:49 AM
@ Coggy
Yeah your right mate it's actually quite ridiculous how fast time flys here been here nearly a month now and it feels like a few days haha
@ Malibuya
Hey man yeah I'm loving it thanks only been in Copenhagen so far and no haven't had much of a chance to explore yet as I've just been grinding so much to try and get my bankroll up, but once I'm a bit more comfortable money wise I'll defiantly be seeing what there is on offer here and report back
Yeah your right mate it's actually quite ridiculous how fast time flys here been here nearly a month now and it feels like a few days haha
@ Malibuya
Hey man yeah I'm loving it thanks
only been in Copenhagen so far and no haven't had much of a chance to explore yet as I've just been grinding so much to try and get my bankroll up, but once I'm a bit more comfortable money wise I'll defiantly be seeing what there is on offer here and report back
09-27-2012
, 01:47 PM
Week 4
This week has been my best week so far results wise, I had a couple of days where it seemed I could do nothing but win, which is great! Although it did mean that I haven’t been using the mental tools that we learnt last week very much, although I’m sure that won’t be a problem in the future with poker, but I have used them and I do feel that they help to keep me in a good state when playing someone tough,
I thought I would put in a graph of my results since being here to show how my first month has gone, I’m pretty pleased with it and if I keep putting in the work I’m putting in now hopefully I can keep improving it, although it is a bit skewed because of chopping with some regs so I’ve one a few more buyins than it says here.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
On another note I had my swimming race against Tobias and thrashed him I came pretty close to lapping him, afterwards he cried a little bit then we went back to the office to grind.
We had our Friday night drink again which is feeling more and more essential each week with the hours were putting in, not that it’s not great, it’s just exhausting. It also seems like we’re adding an extra pint each week, which could turn out to be a problem as the weeks go on!
Thanks for reading
Charlie
This week has been my best week so far results wise, I had a couple of days where it seemed I could do nothing but win, which is great!
Although it did mean that I haven’t been using the mental tools that we learnt last week very much, although I’m sure that won’t be a problem in the future with poker, but I have used them and I do feel that they help to keep me in a good state when playing someone tough, I thought I would put in a graph of my results since being here to show how my first month has gone, I’m pretty pleased with it and if I keep putting in the work I’m putting in now hopefully I can keep improving it, although it is a bit skewed because of chopping with some regs so I’ve one a few more buyins than it says here.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
On another note I had my swimming race against Tobias and thrashed him I came pretty close to lapping him, afterwards he cried a little bit then we went back to the office to grind.
We had our Friday night drink again which is feeling more and more essential each week with the hours were putting in, not that it’s not great, it’s just exhausting. It also seems like we’re adding an extra pint each week, which could turn out to be a problem as the weeks go on!
Thanks for reading
Charlie
10-22-2012
, 07:09 PM
Week 6
Since my last post I have decided transition from the Turbos to the Hypers; after playing a small amount of games at the $200s I realised that the action is dead at the higher stakes of Turbos, but every time I look at the hyper games there are so many tables running at the same stake, so I decided to take the leap, I made all of the investments that I thought I might need, the Chadders video pack, I signed up to HUSNG again to get all of the Hyper videos I don’t have, I bought poker tracker 4 and the Coffeeyay HUD and I bought Sharky Strator. This was quite a big investment haha, but hopefully it will be worth it. I’ve started at the $60 games and at first was getting sat by tons of regs, but this has been dying down as the days go on, which is great! I’m also looking in to getting some coaching quite soon, so if anyone could recommend me any coaches that they have had good experiences with it would be much appreciated.
Last week we also had another seminar with Michael Lassen, where he again showed some us some tools to improve our mental ability when playing poker and help us to prevent tilt. One of the exercises involved him repeatedly asking us why questions so that we really understand why we are playing poker. This is roughly what my questions went like:
Michael: Why do you play poker?
Charlie: To make money
Michael: Why do you want money?
Charlie: So that I can travel and be my own boss
Michael: Why do you want to travel and be your own boss?
Charlie: Because that would make me happy
Michael: Why would that make you happy?
Charlie: Because I would feel free and be able to invest my time and money outside of poker into many other interests I have and I would feel very appreciative of how lucky I am to have these opportunities that the majority of people never get a chance to experience.
The idea of this is to create motivation to keep pushing through tough times and also to motivate us to do the less exiting parts of poker, such as reviewing a session and doing some maths to calculate the EV in different situations.
In other news there has been a new addition to the camp; Jeppe, a six max player from the mainland of Denmark, who came out on Saturday on my birthday and managed to convince me that sushi originated from Ghana and was originally made from fish eyeballs, so I like him haha. It was also uncovered on this night that one of the guys at the camp (SN not revealed) has a troll face tattooed on his arse cheek hahaha.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Again if anyone wants to be added to the waiting list for the poker camp you can send your contact information to kontakt@pokerlejren.dk
Thanks for reading
Charlie
Since my last post I have decided transition from the Turbos to the Hypers; after playing a small amount of games at the $200s I realised that the action is dead at the higher stakes of Turbos, but every time I look at the hyper games there are so many tables running at the same stake, so I decided to take the leap, I made all of the investments that I thought I might need, the Chadders video pack, I signed up to HUSNG again to get all of the Hyper videos I don’t have, I bought poker tracker 4 and the Coffeeyay HUD and I bought Sharky Strator. This was quite a big investment haha, but hopefully it will be worth it. I’ve started at the $60 games and at first was getting sat by tons of regs, but this has been dying down as the days go on, which is great! I’m also looking in to getting some coaching quite soon, so if anyone could recommend me any coaches that they have had good experiences with it would be much appreciated.
Last week we also had another seminar with Michael Lassen, where he again showed some us some tools to improve our mental ability when playing poker and help us to prevent tilt. One of the exercises involved him repeatedly asking us why questions so that we really understand why we are playing poker. This is roughly what my questions went like:
Michael: Why do you play poker?
Charlie: To make money
Michael: Why do you want money?
Charlie: So that I can travel and be my own boss
Michael: Why do you want to travel and be your own boss?
Charlie: Because that would make me happy
Michael: Why would that make you happy?
Charlie: Because I would feel free and be able to invest my time and money outside of poker into many other interests I have and I would feel very appreciative of how lucky I am to have these opportunities that the majority of people never get a chance to experience.
The idea of this is to create motivation to keep pushing through tough times and also to motivate us to do the less exiting parts of poker, such as reviewing a session and doing some maths to calculate the EV in different situations.
In other news there has been a new addition to the camp; Jeppe, a six max player from the mainland of Denmark, who came out on Saturday on my birthday and managed to convince me that sushi originated from Ghana and was originally made from fish eyeballs, so I like him haha. It was also uncovered on this night that one of the guys at the camp (SN not revealed) has a troll face tattooed on his arse cheek hahaha.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Again if anyone wants to be added to the waiting list for the poker camp you can send your contact information to kontakt@pokerlejren.dk
Thanks for reading
Charlie
10-31-2012
, 07:44 PM
Week 7
I have been playing the Hypers for two to three weeks now and it has not gone as well as I’d initially hoped. I thought that coming from Turbos and being a winning player, the Hypers would be no problem, as it’s just like the end game of a turbo right? Well apparently it’s not and I’m starting to think that I may have been leaking quite a bit in the end game in the Turbos.
I’m not ready to give up yet though. I have just decided that I need to improve a lot, so I have cashed out some of my roll and decided to invest it in some coaching. I had my first session with bernardc last week, which went very well and I have also signed up for his HU hyper class in a couple of weeks, so fingers crossed this goes well. I have also made the decision to drop down in stakes to the $30 games for the moment, because I don’t see the point in playing the $60s yet if I don’t know if I’m even beating the rake.
This graph shows my games over the last couple of weeks it’s got both the $60 games and the $30 games in, I’m not sure how big a sample size this is, as in does this quite clearly show that I’m not beating the rake or do I need a much larger sample than this before I can really tell?
Also if anyone else is grinding the HU Hypers full time and looking for people to to talk hands with send me a message
Thanks for reading
Charlie
I have been playing the Hypers for two to three weeks now and it has not gone as well as I’d initially hoped. I thought that coming from Turbos and being a winning player, the Hypers would be no problem, as it’s just like the end game of a turbo right? Well apparently it’s not and I’m starting to think that I may have been leaking quite a bit in the end game in the Turbos.
I’m not ready to give up yet though. I have just decided that I need to improve a lot, so I have cashed out some of my roll and decided to invest it in some coaching. I had my first session with bernardc last week, which went very well and I have also signed up for his HU hyper class in a couple of weeks, so fingers crossed this goes well. I have also made the decision to drop down in stakes to the $30 games for the moment, because I don’t see the point in playing the $60s yet if I don’t know if I’m even beating the rake.
This graph shows my games over the last couple of weeks it’s got both the $60 games and the $30 games in, I’m not sure how big a sample size this is, as in does this quite clearly show that I’m not beating the rake or do I need a much larger sample than this before I can really tell?
Also if anyone else is grinding the HU Hypers full time and looking for people to to talk hands with send me a message
Thanks for reading
Charlie
