Congratulations on the good results. I think you're absolutely doing the right thing adding the tables at your own pace and making sure you're completely comfortable before making the next step. Long may it continue!

Thanks Trend, I appreciate that.

So I accomplished my goal, which feels real good. Worked 8+ hours each day and got my 42 tourneys in. The results from today:

Tournaments: 21 (6 - $110 turbos, 4 - $100 reg speed, 11 - $50 reg speed)

1st: 4
2nd: 1
3rd: 4

Buy-ins: $1,755
Profit: $225
Rakeback: $39.15
FullTilt Points: 1,450

Here's my final November graph. I played well and overcame a breakeven 1st half, but my volume and overall profit leave something to be desired.







Putting in a lot of volume over the last two days was huge for me. I showed myself I could do it, without falling flat on my face. Obviously, it's just a start and I want to get better than that.

It also helped me figure out a change I'm going to make. This month, I played 25 days to get the Iron level Iron Man (happy to accomplished that goal as well), which meant I only took 5 days off of poker this month.

And I don't want that - to be working nearly every day. I found that many days, I'd just play 3 or 4 tables to make my Iron Man quota and then stop. What I'm going to start doing is to only play like 4 days a week, but put in serious hours and volume on those days, and then have more full days off of poker to water the other plants in my garden. I'm very happy with this decision and hopefully it will lead to bigger and better.

Congrats on getting your goals checked off. Graph is sick.

This may be a dumb question, but are you playing the the same people over and over? These games have to be reg infested.

And this may have been touched on before, but I can't find it after a skim. Are you using any specific cashout guidelines?

Keep up the good work bro

Thanks Chern.

Yeah, the games are pretty reg-infested. Every tourney doesn't have the same players in them (except the regs who are currently playing their sets), but I definitely see the same regs a lot, day after day. I'm even pretty familiar with what times of day each of them usually plays. I just try to take a lot of notes and exploit their good play (doesn't always work :P), if that makes sense.

There's a couple meh regs, but for the most part, the regs at the $100s are real good players. Lot of guys on the sharkscope leaderboards. Some aren't overly imaginative (tho a couple of them definitely are), but just super solid, and rarely make any mistakes.

I do see a lot of different regs though, now that I'm playing 3 different games/stake levels, and most regs are different at each of the games. Some play both the $50s and $100s, but rarely do I see a reg play both regular speed and turbos. Fortunately, thus far I've been able to succeed in each of them reasonably well.

Overall, since starting full-time:

$50 reg speed: 67 games, 20.9% ROI, 43.28% ITM
$100 reg speed: 244 games, 19.45% ROI, 41.39% ITM
$110 turbo speed: 101 games, 10.38% ROI, 39.6% ITM


As far as cashing out goes, I saved a decent amount of money before leaving my job, so I'm going to wait until next year to cash out so I don't have to mess with poker taxes on this year's return.

Nice to see you reach your volume goals. I also agree that sometimes playing less days but playing longer sessions is better. Even though you only played sometimes 3 or 4 tourneys in a day, just the actual logging in and grinding at some point every single day can wear you down.

Gl in December hitting your volume goals and hopefully you make a nice chunk of change too

Thanks, JDawg. And you're totally right about that ^^. I very much agree.

As if on cue, I got an email this morning from FullTilt, saying they'd changed their Iron Man requirements to accommodate playing higher volume at less days per month

Also, thanks for showing me how to put up a SS screenshot. In honor of, here's my first one ...

Ugh. Just got busted by The__D__RY on the bubble

ahh danny's a good guy, dont be mad

Good player, too. He did that mean thing where he's shoving real wide with hands like 8-7os, but when I call him with 8-8, he flips Q-Q. I love being on the other side of that play ... not so much the side I was on

I love this thread and good for you OP. My long term goal is to be in your shoes playing a game I love for my rent and food.

Thanks man, that's nice of you to say. I'm stoked if anyone besides me gets something out of this thread.

I had a real tough spot on the bubble of a $200 yesterday ... here's the thread, if anyone has any input.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/36.../#post23271656

How loose and aggressive were the blinds? Did you consider it a possibility that one of them might call your shove? Or shove/resteal if you fold?

At these stakes with those stack sizes, is calling an ever an option?

Obv hate to shove and lose a flip or be way behind. But if you call, SB or BB squeezes and UTG calls/shoves, we can confidently fold it imo.

Say you do just call, both blinds fold and villain cbets, are you stacking off with top pair in this spot and folding missed flops?

The blinds were solid as well. I was under the impression they wouldn't call a shove with anything worse than AK or 10-10, so I wasn't too worried about them.

I didn't think calling was a great play, because there wasn't enough stacks behind to play effectively post flop. If I called, it the pot would be 1950, leaving the effective stacks with an SPR of only about 1. And an unpaired high card hand like AQ misses the flop about 66% of the time.

Fwiw, if I did call and hit top pair, I'm going to the hole with it. I can't imagine calling for any other reason.

I felt there was a problem with each choice:

Shove = Risk going out on the bubble if raiser has a real hand, or either blind wakes up with a hand.

Call = weak, stacks are too short for postflop play, because raiser will get to act first I'll usually get moved off the hand if I miss, whether I have the best hand or not.

Fold = weak. UTG will be raising with plenty of hands that AQ smokes, and many that he'll fold to a shove.

So it was quite a dilemma

Today was the first day I've been able to grind at all this month. I took the 1st off after the 2-day grind, was hampered by our internet going out on the 2nd (only got in 7 sng's after the internet company fixed their sh*t, losing $431), and took yesterday off to spend time with a girlfriend.

So today my goal was to play 15 sng's, and it was pretty easy. Again, I know some of y'all play sets of 16+, so that's not much to you. But I'd never played more than 16 in a day before last week, so I'm working up to it. Anyway ... the 15 went well, but then a juicy $200 started up so I hopped in that too, trying to make a good day great. Unfortunately, it didn't - I doubled up on the 2nd hand but still wasn't able to cash. C'est la vie.

Today was still very good. Made some money, got a bunch of points, and continued to get more comfortable playing a lot of tourneys. Might play for a couple hours tomorrow afternoon, since I won't have a lot riding on football; The Steelers are the night game -- and what a game it is!! -- and both my fantasy teams are already locked into their fate. After that I'll be back doing a hard grind on Mon and Tues.



Results from today:


Tournaments: 16 (9 - $50 reg speed, 3 - $100 reg speed, 3 - $110 turbo, 1 - $200 reg speed)
1st: 3
2nd: 2 (one of which was a chop when we were virtually even - I had a few chips less)
3rd: 3

Buy-ins: $1,395
Profit: +$445
Rakeback: $31.05
FullTilt Points: 1,150

Sorry for the lack updates over the past couple days. The whole impending online poker legislation has me on tilt, and everytime I log onto 2+2, I go straight to the thread and read for days, catching up on the 850 posts that have been made in the preceding 2 hours.

I'm doing a little grinding tonight so hopefully that goes well and I'll post a real update later tonight when I'm done playing.

Done for the day. Still a little unfocused, and even though I ended +$418 today, I bubbled my last two $100s, and that was pretty frustrating.



Results from today and yesterday:


Tournaments: 18 (11 - $110 turbos, 5 - $100 reg speed, 2 - $50 reg speed)
1st: 3
2nd: 1
3rd: 3

Buy-ins: $1,964
Profit: $88
Rakeback: $41.58
FullTilt Points: 1,540


Like I said, I didn't feel entirely focused today, but much more so than yesterday. Hopefully more so tomorrow.

About the legislation - without going into details, I've been endlessly pouring over whether I want it to pass or not. And if it does pass, what I'm going to do.
But in the grand scheme, it's like rooting for a certain football team in during a game - it doesn't matter who you're rooting for; it's gonna happen a certain way regardless of what you want. And so it is with the legislation.
As for what I'm gonna do? Not really sure, but I have options and will fully explore them when and if the time comes. Until then, no reason to let it loom over me. And the same goes for everyone else.

Good luck to all of us.

Poor day (again) for volume. My comfort is that a "poor" day is now 9 sng's, when it used to be 3 or 4. I'm also happy that I seem to be adjusting well to turbos, as obviously they are more efficient to play volume-wise. They play different, so my post-flop skills don't really come into play. Tough because I feel that's my biggest strength, but so far I've held my own; In the $110 turbos I have a 10.45% ROI, which is lower than my usual, but it's also in only 127 games so the sample is way too small to draw a lot of meaning from. Just suffice to say that I feel comfortable at them now and will continue to play them as I work to increase my volume.


Today's results:
Tournaments: 9 (8 - $110 turbos, 1 - $50 reg speed)
1st: 2
2nd: 2 (one of these was an ICM chop)
3rd: 0

Buy-ins: $1,007
Profit: $367.13
Rakeback: $20.79
FullTilt Points: 770


I'm gonna eschew all responsibilities tomorrow and extend my personal record to 25 sng's in a day. Get some rakeback, get some points, and hopefully make a little money.

Hi Dervish

I just caught up on your thread. I'm happy for you! You're keeping at it, working on improving and getting in more volume. I hope tommorow goes to plan for you, and that from here your volume and results are going to be going up up up!

What's up Rabbito ...

Thanks man. Doing my best to get my volume to a halfway decent level before 2011 hits ... assuming we can still play online poker

Really impressive to watch. Not much of a poster here, but I'm certainly hoping you continue playing well.

Thanks Jager ^^ Love the screenname btw. You're more than welcome to get your feet wet in this thread man, whatever's on your mind.

So ... I did it! Got my 25 tourneys in, and it went really well. Gonna make this a short post because a) I'm pooped and b) I have to whoop my roommate's ass at Madden right quick.


Today's results:

Tournaments: 24 (23 - $110 turbos, 1 - $100 regular speed)
1st: 4
2nd: 3 (one of these was an ICM chop)
3rd: 6

Buy-ins: $2,846
Profit: $1,266.90
Rakeback: $60.75
FullTilt Points: 2,250

Got the new PT3 update and figured out how to make one of those cool rainbow graphs ... this is since Sept. 14th, when I started playing full-time. I've been running hotter than a tin pistol over the last 10,000 hands.

Nice work on the 25 games man. Keep on chuggin, $1200 profit is nice =). Do you have a graph of $$ winnings since start of the challenge/op?

Thanks BAE. I know 25 isn't much for most people but the best I can do is keep extending myself and working up to normal grinder volume.

Having volume goals is extremely helpful; I started off cashing in just 1 of my first 9 tourneys (a 2nd place), and was down $600+ at that point. In the past, I would have said, "I'm not feelin' it, this just isn't my day" and shut it down til the next day. But yesterday I knew I had more tourneys to get in, and I didn't want to go down any more than I already was, so my only choice was to grind it out and play better. I was able to fight back to near even, and then I played a set of 4 where I got three 1sts and a 3rd, and that really made my day what it was. And I never would have got there if I didn't have a goal in mind that I had to get to.

My graph since the start of the challenge:




(In addition, I've also received $1,149.39 in rakeback ... haven't figured out how to include this in a graph. Any tips appreciated)