I'm an idiot, I thought this run was the main

Thanks man. I get freerolled into every event of the next FTOPS (the real one) and a custom avatar.
Well, because you don't know how long you're going to be in each one. You might go deep in the early ones and then the later ones pop up and you have too many tables to focus. I think pre-registering is a terrible idea.
Thanks man, and thanks to everyone else who railed. Obviously sucks to get so close but I have confidence that won't be the last time I get a shot at close to 100k. I'm happy to be patient and I'm really pleased with how I played.

And besides, I still have tournaments left to win tonight! Vamoooooo

Anyway, congrats and ship the main event

gg man!

now go bink sth else

How much is that worth? 11k I read? That`s sick.

As an unstaked guy, is this your profit? Guess it`s different in every contract.

Yeah it's 11k worth of tournament buyins.

It's probably not different in every contract to be honest - I'm just getting freerolled into the tournaments, so it's not profit because it's not money that goes into my FTP account. It's just a bunch of tournament tickets. But it's obviously awesome as I get a bunch of free shots at huge scores, which I wouldn't normally get.

22nd in 888 Mega Deep, 66<A3o vs ch0ppy. Getting pretty ludicrous how many mid/high stakes majors I've gotten 10th-30th in so far this year. Guess I can't complain about a breakeven/marginally winning Sunday, and I definitely can't complain about how I'm running in general, but it sure would be nice to run good in a couple of these huge ones with 20k+ up top.

grats on leaderboard

Thanks man, grats on your ridiculous crushing during April.

On another note, I woke up this morning to discover my stablemate Owen 'Ozzie' Shiels, ozzieowen on most sites, had got 3rd in the Sunday Million for $116k! Really happy for him, dude runs ridiculously awful so often that he was really due for a huge score. Obviously ridic jealous, but together with yesterday's 11th place finish it helps me keep the faith that a huge score is coming my way sometime soon. GG Ozzie!

Wow thats awesome ozzie is a top bloke

Absolutely. Dead happy to see him ship it.

Okay, so I typed out a big post here and it got deleted, which is pretty annoying. I'll try to recapture it as best I can.

I've been doing a lot of thinking today about my plans for SCOOP, and about how to make sure I get the most out of the series. I've been trying to get a bunch of non-poker stuff in line recently and add a little more structure to my life, so I figure this is a good time to try to synchronise my poker improvement with other kinds of life improvement. It's also a good time to get back to reviewing my own play, as this is something I really haven't done enough of lately.

Summary of my SCOOP goals:

- Play every day during the series (duh)
- Play every Low event and make a run at TLB
- Play as many Medium events as my buyin levels dictate
- Don't neglect other sites like .fr where the Flash Series is happening
- Review the previous day's play every morning
- Save interesting hands and send them to others at the end of every session
- Keep table count to 12 absolute maximum except on Sundays, and on Sundays be extremely picky with what tournaments I play (at the moment I'm looking to cut out a couple of huge field low stakes turbos in favour of some freezeouts - the Hot 11, Hot 16.50 etc are great but I doubt I'll have much space for them) NB: Someone asked recently why I can't just register the tournaments I want to play and be done with it - a big part of why I can't do that is that if I did, I would be playing every single tournament on every site, every day. I have real trouble turning down a good value tournament, even if it's in favour of a better one.
- Work out at the gym every day during the series, not just at home
- Get into a regular but flexible sleep pattern; wake up between 10-11am every day
- Eat right; stick to 2 meals and 2 protein shakes per day, which is what I've been trying to do for ages, and not order any takeout meals throughout the series
- Stay focused during sessions, even if that means staying quiet on Skype, and especially not browsing 2p2/Facebook/Twitter while I have tables up
- Keep my apartment in good shape while the series is ongoing; during miniFTOPS I just forgot about doing any cleaning, laundry etc and it became an absolute mess


If I can accomplish all of these, it'll be a good step on the way to keeping up with my poker goals while also beginning to attach these poker goals to life goals that I also want to achieve.

EDIT: I've also been thinking a lot about some very interesting 'big-picture' poker-related stuff that relates to my plans for beyond this year. All of the stuff I'm thinking about - which I'm not ready to discuss in detail just yet - relies on me continuing to progress and improve this year, so that should be good motivation to continue working on things and getting better.

solid goals, great read man. i ll be trying to do something similar so thanks for sharing. best of luck during scoop, hope u bink that leaderboard as well

Hi theginger45,

I am new to this site (and to poker) but i just want to say that you are a great inspiration for a newbie like me!

If you got the time i would very much appreciate if you could answer a few questions i have.

Did you have a "normal" job before you set out on this great voyage? And if you did, what results did you have before you decided to quit?

How big (or small) was your bankroll? And how much do you pay for buy-ins? Do you ever play any satellites?

Any recommendations for good books to read?

I am sorry if my english is not so good but its not my first language

Anyway, good luck to you!

QueenTen

Thanks man, gl to you too!
Hey QT, thanks for reading. Glad the thread has been helpful for you. Let me answer your questions (this is gonna be tl;dr):

1. Normal job - yes and no. I got into poker during my Master's year at college, just playing £5 homegames with friends. I fell in love with the game and just kept playing more and more, learning more and more and eventually deciding to try to make decent money at it and getting my first backing deal in early 2011. After I left college I did some work with a student-run charity I had volunteered with, and got a full-time job working with them based in Ireland.

This job turned out to be one of the worst jobs I could imagine, and I spent most of my time holed up in my room playing poker as a way to escape from it. When I finally quit this job after 8 months in December 2011, I still wasn't making much money from poker at all, but I just didn't really have many other career options as I just wasn't motivated for anything else. I moved back home from Ireland to live with family again, and having got my current backing deal in September 2011, I started grinding it out to try and make my way as a professional poker player.

In hindsight, the logic I used to make the decision to play poker full time was terrible. I thought I could calculate exactly how much money I should be able to make doing it, and had no idea how big variance was. I struggled through the first six months, borrowed money to move out of my family home and get my first apartment, worked a 'normal job' for 10 weeks over summer and grinded part-time, racked up $26k of makeup between July and September, got really unhappy, started seeing a therapist, considered quitting the game, actually started actively looking for other jobs as I was pretty much totally broke, and basically hated life. I kept grinding it out though, and throughout October I chipped away at my makeup and got it down to $17k.

Then, at the end of November just as I was about to ask my backers for a cashout loan so I could pay the rent for December, I binked the Big 109 for $20k, and all of a sudden I was out of makeup and actually had some money again. That made me financially secure through the first few months of this year, and thanks to not running as terrible this year as I did last year, I'm now managing to actually make a living as a professional poker player pretty comfortably, and I'm very optimistic about the future.

In short, I had no idea what I was doing when I decided to play poker full-time, and I would not recommend anyone else to do what I did. I made a lot of decisions throughout last year that were very detrimental to my ability to make a living, and as a result were very detrimental to my overall wellbeing. I now understand the nature of MTT variance, and I know enough to basically never let myself get into that situation again. If you're considering playing poker professionally, do your homework first. It's overwhelmingly likely that it will be extremely difficult at first, and you should definitely have around 6 months' financial expenses saved up before you do so.

2. Bankroll stuff - I've never had my own bankroll. At least, not since when I used to donk around in the micros back in college, and even then I was underrolled for what I was playing. I've always been backed since I started taking MTTs seriously, as I've just never had enough money to afford my own bankroll. I still don't - if my backing deal somehow collapsed right now (which is like 0% to happen), I'd be looking for another one instead of going out on my own. Not to say I'm not considering going out on my own in future, but I absolutely can't afford a professional poker player's bankroll right now.

As for buyins, my average buyin right now is about $40. Last year it was around $15-20 for most of the year, so I've obviously stepped up a little since then. I think one interesting thing I've discovered is how higher buyin tournaments can actually be significantly lower variance than low stakes ones, because the fields are so much smaller. If you gave me the chance to make a living playing either the $109 10k on 888, or the $22 12k on Stars, it's an absolute no-brainer to play the $109.

I do play the occasional satellite (actually played some on Sunday) but mostly as a way to keep my Sunday buyins a little lower, as it's getting to the point where I can easily rack up $5k in buyins on a Sunday just by playing all the good value majors. Generally though, since I'm backed if my backer and I both think it's good value to play something, I just buy into it directly, but sometimes there'll be the odd thing that I'll hop into a couple of satties for it and forget about it if I don't get a ticket.

3. Books to read - Honestly, once your game gets to a certain level, don't read poker books. They are not even close to being an effective way to learn poker any more, because it takes so long to publish them, and so many things about the way the game is played will usually change between writing and publication. That said, there are some exceptions - I believe Jared Tendler's books, The Mental Game of Poker 1 and 2, are essential reading for anyone who takes poker seriously, and if you're a beginner then there are certainly some useful books that will give you an insight into basic strategy and terminology.

The books I read when learning the game were Harrington on Hold'em, Kill Everyone, Raiser's Edge, Gus Hansen's Every Hand Revealed, and Jonathan Little's Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker. All of these were useful to my game in some way, even though all of them are now in some way outdated. The Gus Hansen one especially contains some really terrible advice, but it definitely broadened my mind.

If you're serious about improving at poker in today's climate, you absolutely need to sign up to training sites. I've talked a lot in this thread about which sites I believe are best, so I won't go through all of that again as you can probably find it, but I've had multiple training site subscriptions since I turned pro, and I consider it an investment in my edge to continue paying for them. If each one improves my ROI by even 1% over time, it will probably pay for itself.

Getting involved with training sites, posting on forums, watching videos and listening to podcasts are really the only way to keep up with the changing nature of the game - poker is really just one big system of adjustments and re-adjustments, so in order to predict what kind of adjustments to your game are going to be necessary for you to continue winning, you need to be watching a lot of training videos to find out what the best players are doing. It also helps you reconfigure your thought processes and your 'inner monologue' that guides your decisions, by aligning it with the processes you see and hear from top pros. Just watching videos by one specific pro who explains things really well could completely transform the way you think about poker hands.

Hope all that is helpful. Good luck man, and thanks again for reading.

After seeing some of the pain you went through in your last thread, really happy to see things coming together for you and crushing the games.

Thanks man, I appreciate it. Last year was really tough, but it's been worth it.

Nice post, do you consider winning the big 109 as a turning point in your career? In other words, do you think you would have worked a day job if you lost the first flip? :P
GL at the scoop, will you be playing the big ones?

It was a turning point in that it was my first big score, of course, but I don't think I would have just quit at that point if I hadn't binked one off. It's really impossible to say, since you can obviously say "if I hadn't won this flip X could have happened, and then Y and Z, etc etc", but you can also say the same thing about any number of situations earlier in the year, where if I won X flip then I might have won Y tournament and never been in that situation in the first place. It's all part of the same cycle, so hypothesising is pretty useless. I'm definitely pretty happy I did make a big score at that particular time though, as it would have been difficult to go on much longer without another form of income.

As for SCOOP, think I outlined it in my post above. I'll be playing all the lows and some of the mediums (pretty much anything NLHE that's <$300), but none of the highs. GL to you too.

Ah sorry, didn't see that. GL trying trying to get into a good sleep schedule, I mostly live like a zombie during the scoop lol. Won't play as much as I used to, just to prevent having a scoop jet lag.

Just did a short interview with PocketFives about miniFTOPS and some other stuff. #SoFamous

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. You really have a great story, maybe you could write a book about it some day?

You have been very helpful and and i want to express my sincerest thanks to you. I will certainly keep reading.

Good luck to you and thanks again.

Haha. Thanks, although I don't think my story is even half as interesting as some other people I know.

Besides, books aren't my thing. Maybe I'll write myself into a movie or a TV show.

I dunno, pretty interesting life imo. Only a matter of time before poker, in the online grinder sense, makes it onto the silver screen.

As part of the FTOPs tlb winners package it says you get a custom avatar. Is that one of your choosing? Ginger Chuck Norris, surely.

He told me he was gonna have just an empty box with the word luck in it as his custom avatar.........

Maybe they'd do him a sack?!