Awesome thread Miikka. You were one of my favorite 2+2 posters even before I knew about this thread-- always makes me feel smart when you agree with me in a hand on HSMTT.

Care to elaborate on some of these? Maybe I'm just an LOLAmerican but I thought Budapest and Prague were 2 of my favorite places I've traveled to. I also would have put Barcelona in the "overrated" category. FWIW we fully agree on NYC and Rome though

It's kinda freaky how I agreed with almost everything you wrote in that epic summary. I was nodding along thinking "Jeez, this Finnish dude has hacked into my brain" but then you typed...
Confirmed: We're living in a post-truth era.

Your book being on Amazon bestseller list is a nasty brag, wp and congrats.

To be fair it's just in the poker subcategory, I think there are only like 500ish releases it's competing with. So I can assure you it's not selling huge amounts or anything. But it's still pretty cool to see, even if it's only going to be temporary, it perform better than some of the classics like Mental Game Of Poker or The Theory Of Poker etc. As I've said many times before ITT, I care very little about sales numbers per se, and when I see the book make some bestseller list the primary thought in my head isn't "yay, money", but "yay, people are interested in this" and "yay, people are actually reading something that I created". It's definitely really rewarding. And having a small amount of people actually care about the book, review it, etc, has been by far the best thing about this miserable year for me.

On second thought I would take Budapest off the overrated list and replace it with Miami. I think putting Budapest there was pretty harsh; I think it's only overrated in my brain because there's an ultra-low cost route from Helsinki to Budapest and everyone I know goes there nowadays and they all rave about it putting me on monkey tilt. I think the city does have its own charm and some pretty interesting stuff to do. So Budapest, my apologies, you are off the hook.

Miami though... it's just a terrible city IMO (I like the Keys and Everglades tho).

Anyway, Prague. I really do think it's the most overrated city in Europe and I think I've complained about it before on 2p2 too. There's definitely a bit of a lolamerican factor there - it seems that when Americans decide to go to Europe to some "culturally rich old city" they always go to Prague which is just a generic tourist trap IMO. But it's the same for us loleuropeans when we decide to go "city with a beach" and we always go to Miami which is just a terrible overpriced tourist trap. I think that all the real value in Europe is when you go further (south)east from Prague. The only good thing about Prague is that it's still fairly cheap as long as you avoid all the worst tourist stuff.

I have a really hard time to see how anyone could place Barcelona in the overrated category but I guess we're all just into different stuff. I do think, though, that many of the main attractions in Barcelona are pretty meh (La Rambla, the marina area, Sagrada Familia). But I just love the eccentric vibe elsewhere in that city and I'm a sucker for Gaudi stuff in general.

Thanks!


Avocados, man. AVOCADOS.

great post. can you really do this? Am I that far out of the loop to not know this?

GG 2016, GG blog

Grinded all Christmas, really focusing on my NL game for a change, determined to have a winning week at my "main" game for once. No dice. Lost ~150 buyins over 5 days and ran infinite below EV as per usual. At this point I'm just so over this year that I'm going to wrap it up and go get wasted tomorrow (my best friend is in town, he temporarily lives abroad and won't be seeing him until next summer after this). This has been the nut worst year in every regard and I can't wait for it to be over. I used to love those year wrap-up posts, but - shocker alert - it's significantly less fun when you've had the 2nd worst year of your career. I dug up my old year-end post from when I had a +190k year and it just made me sad, I remember writing that very vividly and just being so so happy. (There's supposed to be a screenshot of my Hendon Mob page there, I have no idea why it has been changed to a picture of a pug.)

I don't have precise bookkeeping from this year, and sharkscope isn't of much help since half my volume was on untracked sites plus I played more cash than I have in years. My best guess is that I profited ~30k euros, of which ~8k was from cash games. Could be a bit off, but along those lines. Of course I didn't get to play a full year, I was more or less unfit to play for 3 months because my thyroid malfunctioned, and another 2-3 because of book stuff. But still +30k is obviously a disastrous figure for a poker professional and as much as I'd love to blame running bad for my lack of results, the fact is that I can't afford having another **** year like this. As a poker professional it's your job to make things happen, for some they happen easier than for others, but it's not like I couldn't have played more or studied more or something to at least save a little bit of the year. But nope, here I am, one of the washed-up oldschool pros barely being able to pay the bills.


I guess I'll just post my 2016 stats, hopefully to be replaced by dog pictures at some point in time:



Year in big blinds:



Year in chips won:




One of the very, very, very few positive things about this year was that I think I cracked how to play PLO/PLO8. I made money at all cash game stakes from .10/.20 to 1/2, and nearly all of my MTT profit also came from four-card games. I'm still pretty bad with 50+BBs, but I think my short-stack game is pretty efficient and I generally have a solid skillset to beat mid-stakes MTTs in both PLO and PLO8, the latter being my stronger game. I'm missing a bunch of hands as so much of my volume was on untracked sites, but anyway this is my 2016 PLO/PLO8 sample from my HEM:





I put a lot of effort into studying o8 towards the end, and it's nice to see how the graph picks up a bit towards the end.


But yeah, overall -- holy **** what a year. Trump won. Half of the world's top 10 male singers died. There's more uncertainty in the world than there's been in decades and it's only going to get worse on January 20th. My personal health fell apart, as a result of which I missed out on two huge trips that I had paid for, including seeing 10 countries and a bunch of friends that I hadn't seen in forever. I spent two months sleeping 16 hours a day too weak to lift 2kg dumbbells. I lost at NL tournaments for 6 months straight after pretty much winning 1.5 years non-stop before that. Just a complete 360 for no apparent reason. This was the first year since 2004 when I wasn't in a relationship for a second. For the first time in years I have less money to finish the year than I had when the year started. The list goes on and on and on. It really has been nothing short of miserable.

It's telling that my favorite album of the year was Bon Iver's 22, A Million. It starts with the words "it might be over soon", sung by Justin Vernon, but not in his usual angelic voice that makes you feel cozy and warm. Instead, he sings those words through a sampler/synthetisizer, distorting them and breaking his own voice on purpose. When even Justin Vernon wants to sing about impermanence, you know the world is in deep ****. The album as a whole, though, seems to be about moving forward during dark times. Yet it doesn't offer any answers, just endless questions, which seems fitting as that's exactly how I feel about my own life too. I have no idea where any of this is going. I have no idea what direction I should take, whether I should keep pursuing poker or not, or about how this all will end. I have no idea where I'll be in five years (if we haven't all died over Trump's twitter account by then), but while the same thought felt incredibly liberating when I was in my 20s, it's suddenly almost haunting. I guess I just wish I had some sort of direction that I felt confident was the correct one, even if it was still going to take a while to get there. I'm not in a rush to be "set for life" in any regard (may it be with the opposite sex, money, or career choices), but I'd just like have some confidence that I'm at least going in the right direction.

I can't really make ends meet as a writer, assuming the books that I have published don't suddenly start selling like crazy, unless I go on and accept a full-time job as a journalist or something. But that would mean that I'd be living the 9-5 life that I still don't feel ready for. It seems, on paper, that poker is the answer for everything; my hourly is still theoretically so high that I should be able to not only make ends meet but also save money while freeing up time to write on the side. But in reality it's just not happening, for months and months it's been going absolutely nowhere, and putting 90% of my effort into studying/playing poker just doesn't seem to get rewarded in any way. If I knew there was some sort of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow I'd be happy to keep pushing, but now I just feel like I'm shadowboxing against an invisible enemy. It's a pointless fight that I can't win, and I don't even know what I'm fighting for.



I had a similar existential crisis when I was just turning 20, pre-poker. My solution back then was moving to Australia and letting the universe show me the way. That worked out quite well, as I found poker on that trip, which in turn led into my 20s being pretty incredible. Now, almost exactly ten years later, I feel like I'm at a similar crossroads. My solution? Yep, moving to Melbourne in 3 weeks. Just like when I was 20, I don't even know what I'm looking for, and I sure could use some guidance and help from the universe. But at least I'm going to move myself into that one place where magic happens. Australia really is the best country on Earth if you ask me, and if there's anywhere in the world where I'm going to sort out my ****, it's there.

I'm also going to quit this blog now. It seems that whenever I try to have a PGC everything goes to ****s in record time. Trying to be accountable to myself has never really worked out either as whenever I try to have a blog where I track my own results I just lose infinite and whine post after post. So at this point I don't have any plans to keep blogging but never say never I guess. These three hands, all from the same tournament today, are what my average session is like whenever I have a PGC (last one is one off the bubble obv):







Yeah, I'm tired of documenting those anymore.

I guess I'll post a couple of random happier hands from this week to make this entry just a tiny bit less gloomy:


1. This guy was up 80k this year. THIS GUY.





2. Such an epic river bluff (this was o8)




3. Been using this line a fair bit lately





4. One of the less obvious hands where you split the pot




5. Try harder mate





6. Not sure what mushrooms this guy was on, but can I have one?





---


To end the blog on a positive note, I'll recap the year in pictures that I have on my phone. It all looks so much more positive in pictures.


January: Finland hosted the WJC Championship and we won the whole thing. I'm an embarrassingly big hockey buff and I went to see all but one game. It was pretty sweet.



February: First book came out. It was pretty rewarding.



March: Went to Cuba. It was already a bit too touristy for my tastes. Got to ride the old cars though.




Late March: Went to NYC. Hung out with a local girl I met for a few days and she took me to this Bernie Sanders bar. Why couldn't Bernie just win? Most awesome US politician in years imo.




(That's my friend trying a VR machine for the first time. We were all VERY drunk and had eaten some... err, sandwiches -- it was day three or four of our St Patrick's day celebrations. I remember thinking that the machine was super impressive. It turned out to be a piece of cardboard wrapped around an iPhone. THE FUTURE IS HERE.)

April: relocated myself to Montreal. Worked on my French (still pretty abysmal) and went to watch some gigs. Won at teh pokers. It was cold. From the top of Plateau Mont-Royal:



May: Toronto was so very pretty. This was a few hours after Finland lost to Canada in the WHC final. No one in town gave a ****. If Finland had won our entire nation would've been running around drunk and naked and taken a 3-day sick leave just to celebrate. And you guys call yourself hockey fans?



June: I don't really have any good pictures from June. So I'll post this picture from Lucali's pizza in NYC instead where we went in March as per whitelime's recommendation. It was really awesome.



July: Went to Ostrava to see Tame Impala. Great gig. The beer was terrible and it rained for almost the entire 4-way festival.



August: Went to the Flow Festival, a tradition since 2010. It's always great, and this year was no exception.



We also have our own tradition of missing half the gigs to get drunk at this skate park next to the festival area. This year was no exception in this regard either:



September: Thyroid stuff started. Missed out on an epic Balkans tour. My friends had gotten themselves into all kinds of trouble with the police crossing borders AND got to experience a proper earthquake. I'm still so pissed that I missed out on all that. Instead I had to suffer here in Finland, which I can promise you did not look this nice on most days:





October: Was completely out of the game with the thyroid. I've got nothing.

November: I tweeted a day before the WSOP Nov 9 that Qui Nguyen and Trump were going to win. It was meant as a joke but I guess I just jinxed it all. Anyway, the only good thing to come out of that month was this:



December: Grinded a lot, lost a lot, thyroid got better. I don't really have any pictures, I had two big nights out (10-year reunion with Australia roommates and my 30th birthday), but I was super wasted on both times and didn't really take any pics. So I'll just post a picture of myself and said roommates from 10 years ago when we had all just moved to Australia. We went through a bunch of old pictures and got very drunk, it was a lot of fun and a bit sad because we're now all so old.



January 2017: Booked an Airbnb for myself and a Finnish HSMTT boss until the end of February. This is the view from my bedroom, I'll take it.



I have no idea where 2017 will take me, but it sure can't be worse than 2016. Knocking on wood.


Thanks all for reading, it's been a pleasure.


PS. I want to finish this blog with perhaps the greatest thing I discovered all year. I assume you're all familiar with Ennio Morricone's work -- he's been one of my favourite composers for years -- but for some reason I had never heard this song before. Ever since I discovered it around September I've been listening to it every single morning when I'm sipping my morning coffee. It's an incredible, overworldly feeling when the dark roasted espresso starts tickling your brain and the second part of the song kicks in (I recommend drinking the coffee on an empty stomach). I don't know what it is about this piece of music, but it's just genius. It's the most experimental Morricone piece that I've ever heard, and I think it's also his best. Go listen.

nice post, certainly going to blow my end of the yr post way out of the water

gl in 2017 broski, much <3

Haha really wouldn't have figured you for a bon iver fan for some reason

Great update, enjoyed the blog, may 2017 be better for us all

Really enjoyed your updates this year, I feel your downswing pain :/

Gl in 2017.

great posts

gl

Enjoyed following the thread, GL in 2017!

One of my favourite threads of all time, I really enjoyed following.

Best of luck in the future, I hope you figure everything out. If you do decide to start another thread on here, I'll be your first follower.

Yays : The quality of this thread, your pics, your soon-to-be refreshing renewel in Australia, God Speed seen in Montreal, that last song linked and your 2 books releases

Nays : Abysmal poker results, bad health, this thread dying (RIP) and of course, the fracking Trump election (RIP the US of A)

NoI lost a pretty significant prop bet on this blog lasting all year. Not going to try to weasel out on a "still three days left in year" quibble.

On the plus side, my prawn tattoo is going to be epic.

Great writing! Subbed. Oh, and if you love snorkeling, you should really try SCUBA diving