Quick update after week 38.

I'm still getting abysmal headaches that wipe out 2 whole days a week, so my volume is as bad as ever, if not worse.
Runbad+playbad at 25NL/10NL meant I lost 6.80 euros in a pathetic 1700 hands. I keep doing that thing where I say to myself "Oh ****, I have to fold now" but then I press the CALL button anyway.


I didn't get much action with my value overbets apart from when I jammed 3x pot on the turn with a boat vs trips... and villain rivered quads.

Tourneys are going better, especially considering I haven't wagered any real money on them and I just play with satty tickets that I built up from a 4 euro 'rakeback' freebie. The 4 euro games seem to suit my natural nittiness and aversion to risk, as I keep laddering up by making ridiculous folds on/near the bubble. I might be becoming the new Chainsaw.



87 euros. I'm gonna keep breaking up the 25euro ticks into smaller amounts until I've got about 7 of them, because the 25euro game is usually a 'winner takes all' tourney, so the variance is brutal. (7 buyins should be enough to beat it, right? )
I was sooo crushed when I came second in that tourney a couple of weeks ago. Playing HU with a 9bb stack and losing a flip for 250 euros or nothing was not my idea of fun.

This week, I'll probably play similarly low volume of 10NL/25NL and a dozen tourneys or so. I hope everyone else is doing well.

Inside question, do some of those avatarts in conjuction with the player behind it tilt u sometimes? Like somehow these puppets come alive a bit

Re: Avatars: Yes, I hate the clowns (90% of whom play like clowns), the red devils, the zombies, the homeless guy, the cigar-chomping gangster, the Swedish viking, and just about all the others too. I only really like the animals and some of the females.

Yeah, the checkraisers. The "i dont take any **** and i can see ur cards avatars", rofl.

Penguins are the worst, all penguins should be banned :P

The scuba diver gotta be the most tilt inducing avatar of all time

They usually have tilt inducing plays to match too

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Monthly review.

September was a quiet month for me. I only played about 5000 hands of cash (for 25 euros of profit - w00t!) and finished the third quarter of the year on Unibet with just 22,000 challenge points (roughly 220 euros of rake paid???), which is my lowest quarterly total since the days of grinding 4NL in 2015.

In September, I mostly...

Watched: The WSOP Main Event on YouTube, and a few 'popular-science' documentaries on i-Player. Since I'm a hypochondriac (or maybe actually dying), I like stuff like 'Trust Me I'm a Doctor', and 'The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs'.
I'm normally glued to the NFL at this time of year, but for some reason, I've completely lost interest in American football. I didn't even show up for the online draft of my fantasy league... and I'm the commissioner!

Listened to: Belle and Sebastian. They've been one of my favourite bands since 1996.

Vaped: Cherry cola and fruit loop flavours through my new Smok Mini Kooper 2 White Knight with helmet atomizer. (True story, but the words might be in slightly the wrong order).

Read: 'The Biggest Game in Town', Al Alvarez's account of the 1981 WSOP. I quite enjoyed it, and won't argue with the oft-repeated claim that it's the best book ever written about poker. It's just a period piece now, but kind of interesting if you want to know what Doyle Brunson was like before he became a brain-dead old fart. RIP Doyle.

Some words and pictures about last week's poker action will follow shortly.

Hmm i feel like I now need to check out Biggest Game in Town, maybe after i finish professor banker and suicide king

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Week 39 Review

I had another week where I suffered from crippling headaches for a couple of days. After losing a buy-in in 700 hands of 10NL, I came to the conclusion that I was unable to make correct post-flop decisions. It was literally hurting too much to think about what to do on the river, so I decided to lower the stakes and go looking for some fun elsewhere.

I had a look at the tournament tab of the Uni client, and there was a yellow button that looked strangely appealing, so I pressed it quite a few times during the week.



Evidently that button activates some sort of boomswitch. In satellites, what happened to me was that almost every time I was in danger of bubbling, I got dealt aces and got good action. Hands like this one happened daily:



Getting all in pre-flop 3-way with 85% equity doesn't happen very often. Unless you're a penguin. #SkillGame

I don't really know what typical tourney winrates look like, but prior to this week, I would have thought that in games with <30 entrants, an ROI of 30% would be pretty good. I did slightly better than that.


I finished the week by playing the Unibet Community freeroll. My only aim was to try and win Jonny's bounty, but we didn't find ourselves on the same table until we were in the final 6, where a luckbox seemed to be running even better than me, so he busted Jon before I could. I ended up coming 2nd out of 92 and picked up a couple of bounties.

The long and the short of it is that I made more money in a week of <4eur tourneys than I made in the week that I beat 25NL for 20bb/100. Low volume poker-playing is weird.

Since almost all of my profit is actually in the form of tickets that can't be converted to cold hard cash, I guess I have to get my act together and try and qualify for the Unibet Open, so that I can blow the lot in one hand. My "satty ticket roll" is now at 227 euros. #PingItUp

The plan for this week is to mostly play the 10 euro satties, but also mix in some 4s and 2s just so I'm not one-tabling my way to boresville. #Inb4Busto

I found The Biggest Game in Town a little dull... I suspect it's better if you have an interest in the ' poker lifestyle'.

I'm in another of my frequent "I hate poker" moods, so this will just be a brief update with graphs.
I barely played any cashgame hands last week (just enough for the Moving Up promo). I played a few more of the Unibet Open satties. I didn't run particularly well, but I can't complain, as it was mostly the 2eur and 1eur games where I ran badly. Winning the 10s is more important ldo.



When I add the results of those 22 little timbeys to my tourney graph for the year, it looks like this:



Note that about 300 euros of the profit is locked up in tickets that can only be used for UO events. I'm not gonna hurry to qualify for Bucharest, as there are only a few 250eur satties to go and I'm not rolled to take multiple shots. I think I'll just keep building the "ticket roll" and go to an event nearer home next year. (I hope my tickets can be carried forward to the next event, or otherwise this is a totally pointless grind). Unibet kindly provided an artist's impression of what it would look like if I ever get to meet Jonny the duck at one of the live events:



I hope everyone's OK.
*Goes back to hating poker*

Yup, you can keep them going forever really.

Ah, that's good to hear. Thanks for the confirmation, Andrew. I should really have tried to go for the UK Tour first, but the slots promo and the community freerolls with UO satty ticks led to me to 'accidentally' become a player in that system instead. Maybe I'll start doing a parallel UK Tour satty grind too, as it seems a lot of people I vaguely know from forums and facebook had a good time in Glasgow.
It's kind of odd that after all the studying of 100bb cashgame poker I've done in the past couple of years, I'm doing better in tourneys where I often spend half an hour nursing less than 10bb. I know almost nothing about short-stack tourney strategy, but knowing almost nothing seems to be working so far!

Week 41.

As well as the usual headaches, my RSI came back with a vengeance last week (shooting pains from my wrist to my shoulder of my mouse-clicking arm), so I kept most of my sessions very short.
I played minimal volume of 4NL on a free ticket from the 'Moving on Up' promo, but mostly played more satties (I'm doing some UK Tour sats as well as UO now). The rungood seems to have returned, as this strategy post illustrates:



Running well in bubble situations led to a pretty sweet graph:



Satty ticket roll is currently at 437 euros, so I'm not too far away from shotting the 50s.

I'm probably getting dealt <2000 hands a week in the tourneys, so the rapid boost to my bankroll is kind of making my head spin. This year's tourney profits have now overtaken my cashgame winnings, and I've only been taking the satties seriously for 3 weeks. #FunPlayer
I won't play much this week as I'm probably going away in a few days. I have no idea how long this heater can last, but I guess I'll continue trying to #PingItUp.

Nice ROI on the tournies, wp

Has Unibet updated their software? I read something about a v2.0 coming a couple of weeks back, but not sure what the changes were gonna be.

@Panda There was some sort of delay with the Unibet client version 2, but I think it's set to roll out in early December.

Quick results update. I had a couple of lousy weeks in the satties, but last week my graphs started heading back in the right direction.





I'm mostly playing 10 euro UO sats, but here's a typical hand from a 4 euro UK Tour satty:


Satty ticket roll (for UO and UK Tour) is up to 499 euros. #PingItUp

In the last couple of months I've mostly been watching:
'Asian Provocateur' (I love Romesh's deadpan humour), 'HIGNFY' (plenty of political stories to be satirical about recently!), 'QI' (Sandi Toksvig is every bit as good at presenting as the legendary Stephen Fry imo), 'Planet Earth II', various documentaries including a great mini-series by Dan Snow retracing the steps of the Klondike gold rush stampeders.

Reading:
Bill Bryson's 'The Lost Continent', Brooks Haxton's 'Fading Aces on the River' (a philosophical memoir about Ike's rise to pokerstardom), 'Think Like A Freak' (not as good as the first two Freakonomics books, but still worthwhile). Also loving the blogs by Irish players (and part-time Unibet Open commentators) Dara O' Kearney and David Lappin. The last few by the latter have read like a thriller, replete with cliffhangers, and have confirmed that real life is more exciting than playing poker.

I continue to steadily climb the golden staircase towards the next Unibet Open.


I haven't been running hot or playing particularly well, but I've benefited greatly from ICM lemmings on final tables.


Yearly tourney graph shows I've crossed the 800 euro mark.


I now have 602 euros in satty tickets, so I think I'm on pace to qualify for the $1100 London event even with my low volume. #FunPlayer #PingItUp

Good to see you've been running well in the tournaments haha

Hope you've been running well healthwise too

Is Qi back with Sandi Toksvig? Vn. I hadn't heard. She was always a great guest with Stephen Fry hosting and that show is one of my all time faves. Seen all the origin eps atleast once or twice and they still make me laugh and learn on rerun.
On a similar note Iv been enjoying 'insert name here' lately. Sue Perkins as a guest on Qi or Would I lie to you grates me to no end but really enjoying her hosting abilities. Guess the staff writers help but her delivery is great. Very nicely surprised.

Hope all is well on the health front.


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Thanks guys. I'm still ill, and I've kind of been losing my mind a bit due to stress in the real world. Poker went really badly in week 49 and I had another of my "I should just give up" moments. Phil Galfond used to have a slide in his apartment. I've got one now:

The updated uni client didn't work well on my 400-year old PC, and the random freezes and disconnections added to my frustration tilt and probably caused a few spews. My friend Dimitri gave a balanced review:

FWIW, the Oonibet staff have been amazing at dealing with the complaints and suggestions of disgruntled customers, and there is a new v.2.07 client available that apparently fixes most of the issues.
Switching to the browser version and just playing 1 table reduced my frustration level a little, but then this week started with more 5 bricks and I was back in "I hate poker" mode.

Yesterday was mental.
It's been a long time since I was this pissed off:

I thought I'd get more respect for my raises at the 50 euro level. I was wrong:


"Don't chase your losses", they said. "You'll only lose even more money", they tutted.

That's enough degenerate YOLO gambling for now. I'm going back on the 10 euro grind (if you can call my pitiful volume a "grind") for a week, but I might play a few more 50eu satties over Christmas while visiting relatives. Mostly I need to just chill the **** out so I don't have a heart attack, so I'm only gonna play if the tickets are on the verge of expiring. #PingItUp

Happy holidays!

Hm, i really want to venture into some of these unheard of euro sites there was recently a promo going in in this casino i played in and it was for tonybet (another euro site like uni-bet) and yeah it's supposedly an uber soft euro site as well.

I lol'd. Read through the last couple of pages, I don't check out other peoples PGC's anywhere near as often as I should as theres a ton of great ones out there. Hope your results turn around buddy, gl!

@Evo I haven't looked to see what's happening on Tony G's site recently, but I know when it started it only offered Open Face Chinese poker, but then they brought in 10NLH with (temporarily?) zero rake! I'm really not sure if TonyBet has any traffic at the moment, but - generally speaking - if you're only playing "recreational volume" in the micros, the smaller sites (like SkyPoker for the UK) can be very profitable, since they have a much lower proportion of pros/regs.

I'm away from home and relaxing with family now. I had almost no volume last week, as the downswing forced me to quit poker to take up a new career in snakecharming:



The solitary bink in the 50 euro UO satty took my yearly graph over the 900 euros threshold.



710 euros is locked up in tickets, so I'll just plod along with those as I said in the previous post. I'm sorry I've not been active in other people's threads recently. I'll fix that in the New Year. #PingItUp

The interesting thing about these satties (especially the turbos with 3 minute levels) is that I keep getting in weird shortstack spots on the final table where I have no idea whether I should be jamming ATC or folding 100%. Next year I plan to buy ICMizer and do a lot of tourney strat studying, because these sort of spots are quite alien to me:

Bubble spot. KK UTG w/ 2bb stack, and I had the BB covered by a smidge. Sick runout where everyone made a big hand, but I'm pretty sure at least one of us should have folded pre:


Two places before the bubble, and I cringed when I picked up kings, because I could have folded every hand and almost certainly made the money, even with just 8bb:


An ICM calculator told me my stack was worth 67 euros before I jammed it in pre-flop. It wasn't worth anything post-river.
(QQ is supposedly a +EV jam too, but I would have folded that for sure. #nitcast. The players in the UK Tour satties are so terrible that there's no reason to take big risks on/near the bubble).

That last hand was late on Christmas Eve and it put me in a bad mood for a while, but the weekly graph was still pretty good:


If you'd told me back in March that I'd be switching from cashgames to tourneys and that I'd make 1000 euros in 300 games after starting with freerolls, I would have thought you were out of your mind. I hate tourneys, but I'm now finishing the year playing timbeys with a 50 euro buy-in. My ticket roll is only 800, but the games are too good not to take a shot. In the final few days of the year, I'm either gonna have my biggest winning week, or my biggest downswing. #YoloPenguin

Nice going!

Yeah, those bubble spots are confusing sometimes. But since those bubbles always last deceptively longer than you'd assume based on average stack sizes, I almost never assume I can fold to the money with a stack of under 10bbs. I think both your shoves are correct, even after adjusting to the level of the field.