Whats up 2+2?!

Yes this is another Merge SuperTurbo Grind thread and unfortunately this one won't start with anything all that original. I am however hoping to get some pretty epic volume in the second month of the challenge so if you stick with me that long we should see an 18k game month here shortly.

I was actually considering doing the 18k game challenge in December but then LOLrussians came out with a 25k game goal and I figured if he hit 25k I would have no chance at the leaderboard, so I quit before I started even started. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway here is a background on my life/poker career up until now:

I've always enjoyed poker as a serious hobby and made a nice little side income throughout college playing live 1/2 and 2/5 in Atlantic City. Although I loved poker it was never a top priority. I have been a competitive golfer since the age of 15 and earned a full athletic scholarship + partial academic scholarship+living expenses to attend a Division 1 program. Thus golf and school always accounted for a majority of my time. After college I pooled some great sponsors and embarked on my journey to play professional golf. I competed for 2 years with varying levels of success but was making enough money to keep going. Without getting too much into it and turning this into a sob story I'll just say I injured myself while at the 1st stage of Q school last year and haven't been able to play competitive golf since.

Shortly after that injury a couple buddies of mine and I came up with a business idea and have been pursuing the entrepreneurial route this past year. We are a year in and things are going pretty well, but as a start up all the money goes into the business and very little comes out of it.

This leads me to grinding. I have the ability to make my own schedule and could use some supplementary income, so here we are.

I had been playing various games with varying success when I came across Jdawgs thread and like many, decided to give superturbos a try. I put a lot of hours in with Wiz developing some ranges for common situations and dove right in in November playing just 1s and 2s. I started tiling 4-6 games on my laptop, but quickly realized the potential in grinding higher volume and started revving it up. I ended up playing a little under 10k games and made a good amount of money. I ended up finishing the month 17th on leaderboard, which I hear is a decent accomplishment for just playing 1s and 2s.

I wanted to move up and I was rolled for it so at the end of the month decided to start playing 5s and mix in some 10s. While the idea was fine, I ran incredibly bad lost a little more than $600 in a couple days. During that time Zorandar was going through an epic downswing and I didn't see much to look forward to at higher stakes and decided superturbos weren't for me.

I spent most of December dabbling in some cash games and other things and although I had some success I didn't see much profit potential without moving up quite a few stakes quickly. In that time I ended up with some added RB and decided to consider superturbos again. I hooked up with Zorandar to talk about my game a bit and he really helped boost my confidence. He also thought I would be a good candidate for staking and to make a long story short, I got hooked up with a really great backer in Howie Shen and I am ready to grind superturbos from here on out. I really can't thank Zorandar or Howie enough for giving me a really great opportunity to make some decent money in this difficult poker economy.

Graph from November:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

So I started my stake a couple days after Christmas and am starting playing 2s-5s. Here is my graph so far for the last 3 days. It consists of about 86% 5s with a few 2s. Obv volume fail but I'm working hard on my game and not playing quite as many tables till January. It's a swingy game and I expect it to go both ways pretty drastically, but if I can stay around break even I'll make some good money, especially after moving up.

Graph since starting stake:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

So with that said, here are my poker and life goals for the coming month:

[ ] Play 10k games in January (333 games a day)
[ ] Study superturbos away from the table for 1 hour each day
[ ] Move up to start playing 10s before the end of January
[ ] Crack top 5 on the SNG Leaderboard
[ ] Get back to my fitness and diet routine that I have neglected during the holidays (lose 10 lbs, see my abs again).
[ ] Read either "The Mental Game of Poker" or Slowhabit's new How I made a million book.
[ ] Continue making my girlfriend as happy as I possibly can
[ ] Walk my puppy more, poor pup sits with me the entire time while I play poker. Need to get her out more during my breaks.

So that about covers it. I didn't really want to include business goals as that could be an even more TL;DR than this on its own. But I do have that aspect of my life to accommodate as well.

I will be updating this thread semi regularly but certainly don't plan on posting graphs each day. I hate ugly graphs so will probably a post a disproportionate ratio of good graphs to bad but thats just me lying to myself, and I'm ok with it.

I'll discuss some of the fitness stuff a little later, but I can provide some solid info regarding a program that should be really beneficial to a lot of grinders out there.

Also I'd be happy to answer any questions about my poker background or golf or anything else, I just didn't want to clutter the OP as its pretty long already.

I unfortunately can't compete with mexican strip club stories but I do live in a really cool town with lots of social life so will be sharing any noteworthy trouble I get into away from the tables. Spur of the moment and very long trips to AC tend to happen on occasion. At some point I'll probably share the story of my buddy's 21st Birthday at the Borgata where I sat down with 400 dollars at a blackjack table, drank a lot of Johnny Walker Black, and 10 hours later walked off with 23 $1000 chips. And proceeded to not leave for 3 days. Lol.

Thanks for reading all!

Threadsavers btw:

LTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

Continue the hard work buddy, goals are all well within your reach. Gonna be exciting following the progression of your game.

glgl

stop calling me so light on the bbl plz

I might move to AC for a couple months after Mexico so if you have any real estate connections there you should lmk.

Ill prob have some questions for you later but gonna run some errands.

glgl

Glgl, crush 2012 imo!

HI LTT777, i'm playing superturbo's myself with "decent" profit so far, good luck!

GLGL dude

Thanks guys for the support. Jdawg and Ruse both inspired me big time and still do. Thanks for participating in the thread!

Ruse, I probably should because you have it EVERYTIME. Lol. The thing about AC is, unless you are living in one of the hotels, you really don't want to live in AC. I have a few friends with vacation homes in Brigantine and Ventnor which are the towns directly next to AC on both sides. Both are literally like 2 minutes from AC and really nice. I know the Ventnor one has a basement apartment they rent out separately that might be up your alley. I can see what that would cost for you if interested. My family also has a timeshare at the Flagship (just a hotel community not a casino) in AC that I cold probably get you for pretty cheap on a month to month basis. I'm sure there are some ok places to live within the city but as a whole it is pretty ghetto.

UPDATE:
Soo starting this thread was pretty lucky, as right after I hita 6 streak. But it is such a huge beat that I hit it this month. Although the money is nice I would have realllllly liked to hit this on Jan 1 instead. I have like 1000 games this whole month so it is basically useless right now.

****, lol.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Good luck man!

Will a 6 streak even net you any money this month?

Thanks bro.

Maybe a chop for the bottom of the streaker leaderboard, but not for the main leader board. Which is why it was such a beat. I didn't start playing STs this month till after xmas. And even then I'm just working on my game, so no volume.

Like I said, can I get a 6 on Jan 1 please.

Lol.

How many tables do you play?

How many hours do you play a day to play 333 games? Seems like sick volume but I don't know much about SNGS and superturbos.

What kind of profits are possible? ROI has to be small but at micro stakes I suppose people play horri-bad so that's where your edge comes from? A lot of profit from rakeback?

I'm actually a pretty big volume fail-er. I tiled my whole poker career and when I came to STs I just kept on tiling. Probably maxed out about 60 games an hour that way. Then I see these sickos stacking for 100+ games an hour and I started working on stacking.

The thing was, no matter what I did, I would always fall behind and sit out fold on a bunch of tables. I remember one time I was stacking and fell behind and watched my self fold QQ, AA, and AK in a matter of seconds. It was only lik e8 tables too, and it scarred me for life, lol.

I asked Zorandar for help and he sweated me and saw something was wrong outside of what I was doing. Which was good as I thought I was just being ******ed. Turns out I had a merge keys setting clicked on that needed to be off for stacking. The setting was really important for tiling and I never went back into merge keys to change it. After that I haven't had a problem with stacking at all. Although I do like to pull games out on the bubble or heads up, especially if its with someone I consider to be a tough player. This slows me down quite a bit and makes regging for games tougher. Regging for games is still tough while stacking for me but I'm working on it. I probably play around 8-12 tables comfortably. Want that number up to 15 and I'll be happy. The thing is, it isn't the amount of tables that bothers me, it is constantly loading games to keep that amount of tables going. I'll sometimes get so focused on a bunch of bubble and heads up situations that I stop regging and it turns into a set instead of continuous.

So with that said I just need to enact some discipline and keep all my games in the stack and just keep regging the games. Hoping to comfortably play 85 games an hour soon.

Hey Pete thanks for dropping in. 333 games isn't much at all for the superturbos. Average duration is ~5 minutes per game. A lot of guys are getting in 100 games per hour so for them its just a bit more than 3 hours. I'm working my way up to 85 games an hour so even then it will only be about 4 hours a day. It currently takes me a little over 5 hours to play that many games.

As far as ROIs yea they are really tiny. Almost all of the profit comes from rakeback.

Jdawg in august only made like 900 bucks on the tables but shipped a $9k+ month. Zorandar (BAEventures on 2+2) is close to shipping a 5 figure month this month and he just started playing the 36$ games. Zackryan a few posts above was down a little pre RB but still profited thousands over the last couple months.

If you can break even in these games and put in some serious volume there is a lot of profit potential. Obviously that depends on how good your rakeback deal is, but even a standard merge RB deal can make some good money.

Also I just wanted to mention to others reading this thread that I worked with Pete a bit on my cash game game and he was phenomenal. Really helpful, really knowledgeable, and improved my game a lot. Despite offering a lot of 100bb coaching and vids, he markets himself as a midstack coach. I think he should start to market himself as a "Redline Warrior" coach because he taught me how to turn my redline from a gradual downward slope to a strong upward slope. I would highly recommend Pete for cash game work, especially if you want to work on your redline.

It was actually a pretty tough decision for me regarding whether to come back to STs or keep playing cash as my game was improving a lot. But I was offered a good situation with the backing and the amount I can make in RB alone will be more profitable for the immediate future.

How many games you got under your belt so far Milson? What stakes you playing?

I can play around 8-10 tables aswell, but then I'm not really focusing on the game ... It's more robotic decisions instead of thinking. Now i'm playing 4 tables, constantly regging when I bust or end the sng etc and that fits me better.
But I'm doing well so far, only 250 $1.50 games played, +$46, wich is good for me, first time I really dedicate myself in making some volume and not tilt after a big downswing or something ...

Maybe we can talk some strategy etc in the future

(btw, how many buy-ins are you playing for the $5.30's?)

$1.50? Are you playing on stars? The games are a bit different there than the merge games from a structure stand point. Not sure how well the strategies will carry over directly.

BRM depends on your ROI and your RB deal but to be really safe you want to have 250 BIs. If you are playing multiple stakes you probably want at least 150 of your highest buyin assuming you are playing an equal number of smaller buy in games. The swings can be brutal and you don't want to have to worry about your BR while grinding.

I'm backed so I can be reloaded if need be at any time, but I started with 200bis for the 5s, playing mostly 5s and 2s.

Yes, I'm playing on stars. Don't have RB deal, this is old account, dont want to play on a new one ... My ROI so far over +- 250 games is 13.4%. Im trying to build my roll, started on $73, now I'm at $105 (had a downswing from 126 to 105). Still trying to improve my "game", fixed some leaks here and there.
Do you have some links to guides or strategy topics for this format? Can't seem to find any decent ones ...

Best of luck with this. Judging by your posts in the shortstack forum you seem to have a great work ethic and a real desire to improve. I'm sure 2012 will be a great year for you

Thats because there are no decent ones unfortunately. Zorandar is putting together a package for the Merge games but like I said the formats are pretty different.

Lots of guys discuss stars hypers strat in the STT forum so I would peruse those. Other than that just study the **** out of ICM situations using Wiz or ICMIZER and you should be on your way!

Thanks bro. Really looking forward to following your challenge! Probably the sickest challenge ever in this forum!

For those who don't know B3RT is a sick CAP grinder on stars. Hit SNE this year while studying maths in the UK, and is going for 4 MIRRRIOONNN VPPs next year, which would be the all time record.

Ya if i go i would rent a house/condo on the beach. I need to be able to cook, no way i could live off room service and fast food. Didnt have to be in AC city limits, just decently close to some casinos. Ill hit you up when im getting close.

I think the lower stakes supers are super juicy right now. Jdawg left, crzzy and paulrizzo hardly ever play, collefund switched to mtts, edward12 left, im leaving in a few weeks. As long as you put in the hours and get a decent streak, (and plug a few leaks ) a 3k month should be a lock for you at 2s and 5s.

+1 to B3rt being a sicko. Have no idea how someone can balance that level of school and grinding.

Thanks for the plug and kind words. And making 3k a month playing 5 dollar sngs seems pretty cool. How bad are the swings, like 50-100bi or nothing like that? I mean with edge so small. I am a newb about these things but I used to play SNGs (break even-ish at turbos) before I really started excelling at cash.

Yea both my buddy's places will suit you nicely.

And yes the games are as soft as they have been which is very nice. There are also some new guys coming up that are decent, but just not having you in my games should be enough of an equity boost for me to overcome it.

I've personally never seen more than a 70 bi swing but yes 100 is kind of normal at some point. Pretty gross really.

You have no trouble putting in the kind of volume you want on Merge and no other sites? I had no idea Merge SNG traffic was so robust.