use rye flour to get it started (ideally organic and according to my mom freshly ground), if u wanna make a white bread take very little starter and feed with white flour should work fine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJpIzr2sCDE&app=desktop

heres one of the beteer vids i used to learn. other channels with good stuff include bakewithjack, foodgeek, binging with babish.

basically watched all of their bread related content and made my own recipe and technique

gl today in the bounty high roller, hope u ship it!

big F in the chat for my goal accomplishing ability. funny cuz month was actualyl insanely productive, i played 15 sessions (session being something thats multiple hours - the day 2 i had that i played and busted in 20 minutes i didnt count, and did tons of strat, ye missed the 140 hours total by 5 hours. good news is that i have 95% of may to grind and games continue to be great now that literally all the series have started. gonna be a pretty large month ev wise and swing wise i imagine, but having played peak all april i have now adjusted to that lifestyle and and very confident in my ev going into the month of may.

yoga i did nowhere close to 3/week, more like 1.3 per week. i ve come to realize that anything above 2 per week messes with my shoulder a little too much so scaled that down, something i didnt know going into april. cooking i will admit i slacked of a little in the forth week. having cooked every meal my gf and i ate for 5-6 weeks i kinda lost a bit of motivation and we ordered twice i think- but it wasnt good bc all of our facv places are sadly clsoed and so back to cooking we go

so, given my adjsuted knowledge of my peak grind now here's april goals

play 15+ sessions
review 30+ hours

yoga at least once a week
sort out a physio appointment to get my shoulder checked out (havent had any sicne november)

best of luck to all the heroes this month, prob biggest scoop season we ve all ever experienced. getemmmm

Played for a quite while with you in the Mini High Roller today... gave you a shout out when you tripled up with those threes or fours or whatever it was haha... GLGL my man! Long month ahead!

idk why but I ****ing love it when you say this twice a year, it gets me so pumped for SCOOP

<3 my man. gl is scoop!

had 4x day 2s today and we just fizzled out in 63rd in the ACR 265 milly

that plus this really stung a bit wont lie

Why is 1st and 2nd the same prize?

Assuming they made a deal to split down the middle.

Nope, it's the way payouts are structured in PKOs.

haha its been a while how u been

heya sorry i missed this my old man brain already having troubles with the 16 tables i usually play, mostly dont look at the chat. hope ur draws are live and the runs deep and glorious

haha i know what you mean, tbf tho this is the first scoop that hast felt like it usually does to me simply because april already was somehting like a scoop month due to corona. games continue to be absolutely massive and amzing though so vamoooooos


____

ye it used to not be that way and resulted in first getitng like 25% in some situations, this was a change driven firstly by i think winamax and then partypoker and recently stars came around too. think it makes sense in the context of the boutnies already being a massive last payjump to play for

Goals were

15+ Sessions - did this played exactly 15
And review 30 hours - failed by 3 hours

Still happy with my overall volume, up 20 hours from April so not all bad

Possibly didn’t do any yoga all month, have had issues with my carpal tunnel that was triggered by yoga so took caution bc getting an inflammation would have been the nut low during scoop

Physio hasn’t been sorted out but I will make sure that happens this month

Overall was a decently productive month but I hit burnout levels Olay week so took a few days off that I hadn’t planned to take off. Was worth it tho I’m way past the point of chasing glory when burnt out. Worked out quite nicely too with the clutchest of clutch month savers:



Hope y’all did well. Gl in summer

June goals:

14+ sessions
30hrs review

Exercise 2/week
Make Physio appointment

<3 gg on the month saver

What's the carpel tunnel? I seem to have developed some weird shoulder issue - thinking it's something to do with being on my PC more than ever before due to lockdown

The carpal tunnel is a little hole in the wrist bone through which a bunch of tendons go which when they inflame Cause a btch Level of pain. The tunnel itself is a normal part of anatomy the syndrome is what a the big problem

And ye ofc the posture u have has massive effect on your whole body make sure u get your stretches in

And thanks

GL in the stadium final high <3
great table with bencb on it

Bump!

Haha dead thread be dead

Been managing quite well to get myself motivated last 2 months without posting goals here so apologies to everybody who s been missing these monotonous posts

Been grinding my booty off since mid March pretty much, managed two 152hour months which seems to be roughly the cap i m capable of grinding without completely losing my sanity. Games have obv been amazing - probably the best games I have experienced in my entire career. I ve tun quite well since lockdown happened and have progressively upped my abi slowly but surely. Today was the biggest session I have played possibly in a few years. I don’t quite remember how high I used to play before my big downswing last year. I suspect I now play a bigger abi than then or if not then it’s def close. Sadly since my latest abi increase I ve run quite poorly which is ofc a thing that will happen. Have measured out a pretty decent shot to try and remain at my current abi but if if not then I ll just move down to regrind. Volume can be got all over the place so gotta make sure I don’t let negative variance get the best of me like it has before

Highlights of last couple months include:

Outright win 215 Sunday supersonic
Outright win Hotter 215
Three way chop stadium 530
Third Sunday BB215

All for sth between 15k and 25k

Got a decent day 2 tomorrow in the venom on ACR, gonna one table that then take one or two days off to reset rhythm and study up then back on the grind.

Peace

here he is <3<3<3 gl in the venom lad

Some high highlights braw, wpwp

Sir!? You forgot the giraffes!

haha i dont post those anymore on online forums

but having decent-not-great year as f now which is a downgrade from zomg best year ever a month ago

sadly i picked u some cold (fingers crossed thats what it is haha) so prob will have to replace a few grinds with a few study sessions which is perfectly fine as i played my booty off in july. gonna try and still go hard for the weekend but currently not looking good for bracelet hunt tomrorow

..

well i guess i may as well make a wrapup post seeing as all the old dogs are coming out of the woodworks to wrpa up their covid years (note: in no way do i have anywhere close to their claim to fame BUT its still been a memorable year in many a way for me personally and i m sure for all of us)

2020 wrapup

i ll prob just go through the year chronologically as its been likely the year with the most personal change (dare i say growth) for me to date.

the back story for the start of the year is that i had had a moderately shyty 2019 - it had started on a big heater which was accompanied by tons of study which as the heater progressed became less and less while at the same time both my run and my play started becoming more and more meh. so i up and quit insteasd of dealing with it and became a pokemon go semipro lol. pretty mcuh quit pursuing poker in the back half of the year def didnt study and wasnt in a great place mentally. i managed to scratch my competetive itches by peaking around spot #3 in pokemon go battles in austria (sick brags)
During that time i had switched to playing off peak MTT schedules which allwoed me to live a more normal sleep rythm and have more quality time with the mrs which was a big plus but of course there is barely any MTTs to play during the morning schedule (a full schedule starting play at 7am and regging such that the session is done aroun 5-8 was i think 2.5-3.5k in buyins in smallish fields which i think cap attainable ROIs despite being super soft) this is how i ended the year. think i had made around 20k or so at the tables, add some in staking and rakeback etc, not great considering my expenses are significantly more than that figure.


how it started

going into january i had very little ambitions poker wise, i was going to keep playing that schedule, i had the idea in mind to try and make my expenses on the year and be happy with it, no competitive drive nothing. and was still competing in a childrens game obsessively .

one great thing about my approach that i have been able to improve upon in the last 2 years is that i keep an excel sheet trackign both all my expenses and whatever other metrics i feel are important. 2019 i had decided to not only track number of sessions and days but actual hours played and in 2020 i added hours studied as i both think its relevant to planning out my work and interesting to see correlations and whatnot. also being a mentalgame fish i decided counting study hours as work hours would make me feel better about playing less


think i put in 120 hours total in both jan and feb grinding bowls, occasionally studying with friends, no high level stuff or anything, and made 4-5k in each jan and feb...

then corona happened

think fair to assume we ve all had enough of that aidsy topic so i wont go into any of it but i will mention what i was getting into at the time of it starting. freidn of mine had randomly convinced my gf and i to joing in on a group yoga session he had been attending with basically the entire gayUKcrew that lives in vienna and we got hooked to the point of doing yoga i think at least 2 maybe 3x per week then.
also a group of frieds decided to host a monthly cooking thing where each party would cook one course of the evening. we had drawn entrées and i had decided most entrees would be boring so lets do something challenging and make classic traditional italian bruschetta. but not on bought bread but own baked loafs/loaves spelling in english sux so for the record: i was baking bread way before everybody was bc nothing else was on during lockdown. it shall be known!

so ya going into lockdown both gf and i had found a few new hobbies to work on and then during lockdown i realized one thing. plaiyng a game on my phone which is meant to be played outside while walking is pretty pointless. think it was on the very first day of lockdwon where it dawned on me in a really big way. this must have been sometime in the first third of march. pretty much havent touched the game since which i m actually vrey happy about.

this whole experience once more showed me how i tend to function on an emotional level. the whole fact tha ti m a professional poker player is down to escapism. at the time of me getting into it i had no ambition of being a pro. i was in a pretty bad downward spiral induced by a bad trip on shrooms and poker was my way to completely and utterly ignore everything negative by channelling my entire focus into something - a game - which had a clear set of rules, could be learned and had some form of ladder which equates to automatically formulated goals. one of the two i was lucky enough to find a career in which then allowed it to become a lot more than an escape but the similarities are striking i think.

so in that day or week or whatever time frame it took me to drop my time wasting hobby and focus on things that actually make me happy i pretty much immediately dropped my toxic approach to poker and decided it was time to stop playing mornings and actually work at being good at what i do, something by this point in time i had neglected for almost a full year.

think from that point in march until sometime around late may i changed my sleep rythm, started doing regular reviews, started making more effective plans for my weeks and just started enjoying the game of poker again instead of feeling like i was stuck in some dead end office job. i cant really recommend a way to have this moment as to get there it took me a good few months of complete aids but it really is something i wish anybody reading this to experience. swear i remember it as everything becoming a little brighter.

the thing about me in 2020 was this: I m getting old. if i go though this forum and read my old threads there s many a post in which i post monthly sumamries saying i played sth like 200 or 250 or even more hours. with this renewd passion for my work and a lockdwon happening forcing me to make use of my time i still am jsut incapable of putting in nearly as many hours. at peak motivation last year i peaked at 167 hours worked of which i think about 125-135 were played. this was during a month with absolutely no outside of house life. i jsut cant do more which is something i have come to learn about myself last year. def useful when it comes to making plans going forward.

basically progression from mid march was this:

cook like a madman for 3 months, something new every week, find 3 new staple dishes and switch to onyl making those towards the end of the year

do yoga like a madman for 2 months then **** up my carpal tunnel and quit fully by mid summer

bake bread like a mad man from feb until i think august which is when i decided to kill my starter. this one was quite funny because bread baking in a way became my way to fill negativity or exhaustion filled days because it takes so much time and is almost meditative (see a trend here?) but then i reached a point where i could claim i had become so proficient at making my favourite type of bread that there wasnt much room to improve so i quit. we also had travel plans and i couldnt feed my starter long enough

poker wise i played hard ever since that revelation, i took one week off for travel to italy right before the second lock down and one more week because i think i got sick or so other than that wen quite hard. managed to restructure my entire approach to studying, logged more study hours than ever before and can honestly say i m a zillion times the player i was pretty much ever due to this. i ve also become a lot more effective in getting highquality volume in while balancing a relationship and hobbies so apart from i think september or october there was no month where i had what i would describe as a lack of balance - keep in mind that i know full well that to others my life def will look unbalanced as fk which leads me to the last significant aspect of last year which is sort of troublesome:

i ve realized that i m actually very content having quite limited social interactions. i m of course massively blessed by having a gf while in a lockdown so in many ways i have significantly more interaction than many have been able ot have that year. but at the same time i think i m one of very few people who can genuinely say last year was a good year for me not neccessarily financially but just life wise. i guess i often find it tiresome when meeting with people in large gatherings because many things i really hate combine into a not enjoyable experience for me:

i hate alcohol. all it does is make me sleep terribly and i have insane hangovers while it doenst really make me enjoy the drunken state

i hate small talk with people i dont know well enough while sadly i m both good at small talk and absolutely trash at gettign rid of the people that nobody else at the party wants to talk to so i always end up stuck in the nut lowest of conversations with people i ll never meet again

and lastly the other way to actualyl have meaningful meetups specifically in my friend circle here in vienna has become either forbidden due to lockdowns which would be somehting like the aforementioned cook-together type thing or has been of a nature i am currently and likely indefinitely incapable of participating in due to - yes i know i ve beaten this horse to death by now - my shoulder injury. yes i could still go bouldering with the guys but i cant fathom enjoying people do what i remember as a very strategic almost puzzle like activity passively by just watching. i will admit i havent gone so i dont know to this day but given the fact that despite being very active physio wise throughout last year i still cant lift my arm straigth above my head without help of my second hand i think its fair to say that that ship has sailed for me for good. which is a shame cuz bouldering is literally the only thing almost everybody i know has been talking about ever since it became a thing in if i had to guess late 2018 or so.

i know full well that that could be seen as me grasping at the best thing to make up reasons/excuses why i have distanced myself from the guys. was gonna add a but there but honestly no idea what to say, i m both happy for people to find new passions and at the same time a weird mix of jealous and tilted but theres not much i can realistically do so its on me to not do what i have done in the past and distance myself to the point where friendships become acquaintances. if anybody of the lads reads this - i m sorry and i ll do my best to be more present this year (yikes this reads so shitty )

so ya lastly poker:

jan, feb we talked about, i thien switched and off the bat had a massive ft to make march a super good month. this and the increased study volume gave me a motivational boost that continued until late september where i hit my lifetime highest score of a 5 way chop in some 500k prize pool mtt for 42k on gg poker. yes nitty to chop 5 ways, would probably do the same given the situation and the fac tthat it was 8 am 18 hours into my session and having lost AA to AK a couple hands prior.

trying to learn from history i remember quite vividly that i took a week off to both recover physically but also to study up and not get too cocky and repeat the slacking off that happened in 2019. however that bankroll bosst did mean that i decided to move up from what i had been playing up until this point (abi roughly 100) to something arount abi $250, reducing my table count in october and studying while playinbg as high a focus as possible. naturally i ran at -3 evbb/100 in octiber and lost every session while logging the most hours of the year. i legit can say that october was the strongest month play wise i have had in my career however it also was the worst $wise clocking in it i think sth between -30k$ and -40k$. i made a point of plaiyng this high abi thourgh the month and reviewing constantly being as sharp and focussed is i could possibly be so if put into the same spot i d prob jsut go ahead and lsoe the same amount given the distribution i had, no real regrets there. however that month triggered some anxiety that felt a little too familiar so i decided to drop the highest end of my stakes, maintain my study and volume routine and jsut try to regrind a bit for the months of november and december. bankroll wise def not ideal but knowing myself i think it was the best way to prevent worse reactions down the line.

novemebr and december i just grinded $120-$100 abi played strong volume while studying and did alright to end the year at i think $83k pre rakeback and sth like $100k made from poker as a whole.

6 figures is def a great sum i will say that i think given the way the games were last year that its probably a pinch under what my ev was in the games having played close to $600k in buyins but mtts are so weird its reeally impossible to tell and mtters are notorious overestimators of their actual rois.

for example i think in august i made the biggest final table of my career in some WPT event and cashed for roughly 30% of what my stack was worth at the start of the final table. i also came 7th in two more final tables which both had 40k and 30k for first the same month. its funny how those stick out in a year where i managed to have some insane scores along the way. i do my best to not dwell but sting they still do all i can do is work on improving, work on being more efficient with the time i have and work on being a better freind, boyfriend ,family member and cook. these are my goals for this year and for all those that made it this far here s my last year (number of mtts is wrong i correct the imports manually every session think its 5500 mtts played on 152 play days and about 1600 hours worked, 300 of which was study)



also i think this will mark the end of me having threads chronicalling my journey on this forum. i dont mind keeping this open but i dont really see myself posting regularly at all. if anybody wants to talk to me i will always see messages shot my way vie dm or as a post in this thread but as sad as it makes me i think the 2+2 part of my journey is mostly done now. on to bigger and better things i hope you all are doing as well as idiot virus can possibly allow an di wish everybody here the best year of their lives in 2021. peace lads much