Another great read and 10/10 post.

By far my favorite player to root for in this sub section. Are you the player who twitch streamed his 100% total pko win? I think it was the first of it's kind for that tourney.

Nice write-ups, enjoyable read. Good luck for the rest of the year!

Im in love with this thread. It’s so inspiring for me as I want to become where you are today. Thank you so much for the blog posts and I followed your stream, hopefully you stream a day a week haha

I have a question - how many hours do you put a day or week into solvers and sims? ex. equilab, flopzilla, pio and icmizer.

I just recently bought PIO and been putting in 30-60 mins a day on it so far.

Was railing you in Big109, crazy spots especially in HU 5Bet shoving A6s and then this hand (sadly convertor doesn't work):

PokerStars Hand #203178383823: Tournament #2664857305, $100+$9 USD Hold'em No Limit - Level XXIX (3500/7000) - 2019/08/10 23:51:09 CET [2019/08/10 17:51:09 ET]
Table '2664857305 14' 9-max Seat #3 is the button
Seat 3: jays94 (586258 in chips)
Seat 6: YugiohPro (333742 in chips)
jays94: posts the ante 875
YugiohPro: posts the ante 875
jays94: posts small blind 3500
YugiohPro: posts big blind 7000
*** HOLE CARDS ***
jays94: raises 8400 to 15400
YugiohPro: calls 8400
*** FLOP *** [7h 2s 4s]
YugiohPro: checks
jays94: bets 9750
YugiohPro: raises 26025 to 35775
jays94: calls 26025
*** TURN *** [7h 2s 4s] [Jd]
YugiohPro: bets 69747
jays94: calls 69747
*** RIVER *** [7h 2s 4s Jd] [7s]
YugiohPro: bets 52500
jays94: raises 411961 to 464461 and is all-in
YugiohPro: calls 159445 and is all-in
Uncalled bet (252516) returned to jays94
*** SHOW DOWN ***
jays94: shows [6s Ts] (a flush, Ten high)
YugiohPro: shows [9s Jc] (two pair, Jacks and Sevens)
jays94 collected 667484 from pot
YugiohPro finished the tournament in 2nd place and received $2709.10.
jays94 wins the tournament and receives $3657.75 - congratulations!
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 667484 | Rake 0
Board [7h 2s 4s Jd 7s]
Seat 3: jays94 (button) (small blind) showed [6s Ts] and won (667484) with a flush, Ten high
Seat 6: YugiohPro (big blind) showed [9s Jc] and lost with two pair, Jacks and Sevens

Insanely played hands

Thank you guys. More long stuff coming!

Appreciate the encouragement carolina. I think this post helped swing me over and put out quite a few words.

Yes, that was me. Remember my boss mentioning that to me when I joined. Think I went on an equivalent downswing to that win too right after. And I won 30k+ or something and 3rd place won 1k or something? My memory is hazy but it was really an absurd payout and I could see why the format wasn't going to work. At least we made a Zoom HU TKO out of that Total-KO format out of that. Too bad Twitch takes down those VODS I would love to watch that and dissect it.

Thanks f3nix, I remember playing with your screenname a bit on Sky. Was wondering if that was you or an IMPOSTER. Best of luck this year.

Thank you adrian, appreciate the kind words. Keep in mind it took a lot of pain to get to where I am and I'm not even super happy/satisfied with where I am right now. I would say for sure the pain has outweighed the pleasure for the last 4 years, probably by far. But 2012-2014 was just an orgy of wonderful feelings enveloping my body you know. So I suppose there are tradeoffs. Just letting you know there are DARK SIDES to every inspiring story and I don't consider my story anywhere near complete.

In terms of hours, I'd say I spend at least 14 hours a week simming, mostly on my days off. I don't use equilab or flopzilla much. I muti-task while doing this, usually watching poker content or reading websites/watching LoL/random leisure.

Thanks for the rail! But please don't post hands I play terribly :P. That J9o hand is pretty bad I think with the flop XR and the river play. Instead of block/calling I think it's a clear check/decide.

WCOOP Schedule is out I'll give my quick thoughts on it now.

Sunday Update 08/20 and Streamer Power Rankings

Really cruisin and bruisin leading up to WCOOP. Not repeating the same mistakes in approach which meant skipping the $2100 1M and $530 150K on WPN. I want to enter WCOOP on a full tank so skipping marginal HS fires leading up to that point is good. Those skips might have been too conservative though. Not even playing the Sunday $530 BBHR because the lobby is just filled with good to elite regs with not enough recs/bad regs.

I'm curious what I will do when WCOOP comes. It's not my cup of tea playing against a bunch of tough regulars. There are quite a few "spot regs" who shouldn't be firing these but not enough to go around. And even the "spot regs" have some clue and can do okay if they get great card distribution and setups and skeptical people who pay off their peanut vendoring. The rough plan for now is to skip all the small field 2k+, play the good value 1K's and below, evaluate the BBHR on a case by case basis and its guarantees, and probably play the WCOOP Main if I'm having a good series leading up to that point. The $5200 buy-in just warps things considerably. It makes it very difficult/nigh impossible to even fire those value $55's that I love. Even $109's are a stretch being 1/50th the buy-in of a $5200. So you basically end up skipping every massive tournament on the biggest Sunday of the year to put all your eggs in a $5200 basket where busting that leads to crushing disappointment and as I type this sentence I'm leaning on skipping it. lol. But you can't argue against a cool MILLION DOLLARS sliding right into your bread box.

Had another great Sunday. Got 4th in the Bigger 109 for about 8k after some good banter with Egption. After that I was still in the SUNDAY MILLION so I loaded up some big WPN games on account of BOSS and all. I ended up casually shipping two NA side pieces on Stars, a $27 6-Max Turbo PKO and an $82 Turbo for $2300 combined while busting out of my last WPN tournaments. Other close calls were 56th in the 100K Mega Deep, 28th in the Sunday $55 40K Deepstack on Party, and 18th in the $88 40K on WPN. Most importantly I got 104/16000+ in the Sunday Million. Lost two decent shots to take out a $440 bounty, which was pretty big even at that stage, and then lost ATo to TT. The run never "felt real" even with 150 left because the PKO pay jumps are super withered and the Million always disappoints you until it doesn't.

A Heart Warming Story of Discrimination, Player Hating, Self Reflection, Acceptance, and Forgiveness

Part of being a good player hater is giving credit where it is due. I remember when I started grinding pretty seriously I was not impressed by Buehlero/All in PAV/Egption. I heard they were loosely affiliated/aka squad-ed-ed up/aka Ride or Die/aka Thick as Thieves. I knew the least about Buehlero but I remember being introduced to Egption from his SM video chop with Bencb. I found him a bit obnoxious at the time, thought he played that poorly, and read through his Youtube comments which had a decent number of haters. I assumed any time you have more than five public haters, there's fire to that smoke. Anyways, as time has gone on I've grown a lot of appreciation for Egption and would like to publicly CANCEL my private hater thoughts on the lad. I think he's actually a very tough regular and his Youtube content is actually quite good. Compared to the scumlord cesspool of Twitch streamers, he comes in quite high in my (positive) power rankings. Respect!

Pav as well. Or Pavithra/Pavatron I like to call him while playing by myself on a computer screen. Playing offpeak NA I play with the man a lot. I felt I was just lighting him up in most spots and didn't rate him. One day we were at an $88 final table together on WPN. I called a 3b from him BvB with 98s or something. The runout was something like AK426 and after we checked to the river I just overbet like double pot (felt it in my bones) and got the fold. I like to check in on these streams after magic moments like this (this is why streaming is a huge disadvantage and why you gotta respect long-time streamers like Tonkaaaa and Lex). He folded two pair here, like K4 or something, and offered $50 if I posted a bluff. I ended up posting my hand later (Pav has SCUMMED me out of $50 make that a story) but he missed it.

But you know, my assumption the whole time was he had a "poker streamer" personality. But the way he handled the discussion was my first time watching him streaming. And I remember really liking his personality. He seemed quite humble and actually entertaining/amusing as well. So then I run intel on the man and I find out he is up an absurd amount this year with an incredible work ethic. Became a BIG FAN of Pavatron that day and never looked back. Respect to Pav. And SHAME on me.

As for Buehlero, I wasn't too familiar with his stream or game. But after watching his content I think he's also quite a strong player and has a good head on his shoulders. Pretty cute too.

I guess the moral of this story is don't judge a book by its cover. And if you're going to player hate, at least stop player hating once you realize you are in the wrong. Here is a list of my streamer power rankings.

Streamer Power Rankings (Weighing Skill, "Juice", and For the Culture)

1. Lex- poor game selection but you have to respect the legacy/work ethic/influence/reach/humility.
2. Fintan- always rated easywithaces even when we played together at midstakes. very strong player.
3. Pav/Buehlero/Egption- I'll put them in this order because I find Pav much funnier than Buehlero. And Egption doesn't seem to stream as often as them.
4. courtiebee- Courtie is another very strong player. She is a friend of mine so I won't comment on the rest of it.
5. Spraggy- I think Spraggy is quite funny. He seems to have pretty solid game selection and I like that he provides that dry self-deprecating English slant for those who are sick of those corny ass NA sports announcer voice types.

Let's stop there. The less said about the rest the better. I don't watch cash game streams and didn't rate sporadic streamers even though they have the highest skill level.

Thoughts on the WCOOP Schedule Release

The schedule is out today. Generally the COOP schedules are iterating upon prior successes and have a lot of data supporting them for guarantees and placements. The team is very sharp at coming up with a schedule and it pretty much always performs very well. Some things I've noticed off the top of my head or were mentioned to me by my colleagues:

- Some new key words. Afternoon Deep Stack, Midweek Freeze, and UFC Branding on one of the PKOs. After reading and re-reading I'm still not sure what the Midweek Freeze is supposed to mean so that somewhat annoys me.

- I wouldn't have noticed this if it wasn't pointed out to me but the $5200 Main Event has 24 hours of late registration which is pretty cool. The Sunday of the Main Event is quite busy so this might lead to strategic decisions to late register and 1-table on a much slower Monday or something. It won't hurt the prize pool or integrity of the tournament at all and can only help, I think. I always like when the team pushes even small boundaries like this.

- The Main Event has 3 Re-Entries and there seems to be no 70-M $215 Main Event. The $5200 10M is, like the Sunday Million, an iconic flagship of PokerStars and one of the biggest overlay risks year to year. It takes a lot of careful planning and setup to hit the guarantee, especially without 3 Re-Entries fueling it. I would assume 3 Re-Entries will lead to a comfortable clear but now the tournament is definitely not a fire for the average regular. I'll skip it unless I hit a heater.

- Not much to say other than this. Once the WCOOP became 3-tiered, it became structurally very similar to SCOOP and even Winter Series and has no distinguishing features besides the $5200 Main Event. I'm sure this will be another solid series for PokerStars.

General WCOOP Takes

I was never a fan of 3-Tiering WCOOP and think it dilutes and weakens the product. I always thought WCOOP should be built in prestige and recognition but when you throw up a pros/cons list for 3-tier it's not hard to see why a corporation would choose in favor.

BENEFITS to 3-Tier WCOOP

- Increased revenue
- Increased total prize pools
- Increased participation and deposits

DRAWBACKS to 3-Tier WCOOP

- Lowered prestige
- Homogenized schedules across all series, leading to cookie cutter paste jobs

If it was up to me I would stick to these rules:

WCOOP should be ultra-prestigious

This is the World Championship of Online Poker we're talking about here. It should be the online version of the WSOP and give out gold bracelets or something similar. See this is the problem with corporations. You can no longer do "cool things" just to do them. You can't send out bracelets or Tags or hideous gold jerseys any more for the culture. Every expense has to have some line item justification.

But not TOO prestigious

I am a midstaker at heart. If WCOOP is too exclusive it just cuts 90% of the population out. But I think the third tier is unnecessary and would rather run a WCOOP low series to run along with WCOOP. I think the third tier is unnecessary. To me a $22 WCOOP with 100K is just super lame and dilutes the majesty of the series. And my theory is that recreationals are more than willing to fire a shot at an "aspirational" tournament like a WCOOP or a Sunday Million. So while WCOOPS range in buy-ins from $109-$2100, the low version would be much more digestible. The same person who fires a $22 100k will also fire a $109 500k. And they'd much rather fire a $22 250k.

The ideal schedule would have a handful of events per day, all Championship events that award bracelets. The winners would be entered into the Hall of Legends and we would track lifetime bracelets and earnings like they do with the WSOP, and try to make stories of the legends. I would spend on leaderboards as well. I realize all of this does not move the bottom line but I'm not so motivated by the bottom line here. I'm motivated by prestige and legacy. You remember when ESPN invested in Grantland and lost a bunch of money but did it for the prestige? Or when Bill Gates donates billions of dollars to his own foundation out of the goodness of his heart? I feel like when you become a billion dollar company and a dominant market leader, you can invest money in non-profit generating one-offs that empower your e-peen.

So my WCOOP would have much less events, much greater prize pools, and much more hoopla surrounding the festivities. It would cost my bottom line but I'm already the strongest poker company in the world by far. Might as well flex. And I might even hire a band to make a music video like Riot did with KDA. Or maybe imagine people knocking on doors with big over-sized novelty checks and Jimmy Kimmel giving the interviews? Just kidding on those. Maybe.

Adjusting the Main Schedule during WCOOP

So during my last year, leading up to WCOOP 2018, I was strategizing how to buff the prize pools during WCOOP. Interestingly enough, Party seems to have left this battleground. They are scheduling PowerFests before WCOOP and running other things like KO Series during WCOOP time that take advantage of the increased traffic but don't compete directly. Guerrilla warfare, I suppose. Here's the idea I came up with:

WCOOP Circuit Events

Some background info. Up to even a few years back, the main schedule would see a surge of participation during WCOOP due to all the regulars relocating and firing up all of their old favorites. Tournaments like the Big 109 would double or triple in participation. However, in recent years this has not been the case and we actually see a suppression effect in a lot of tournaments during WCOOP. When you look at all of the other competitors also throwing series at this time with big guarantees, it makes sense why a lame tournament like the $109 6-Max PKO with 10K guaranteed would suffer.

In general most of my suggestions for the main schedule were shot down due to big risk adversion. When you're the market leader and have been for so long, I felt you get paralyzed into not wanting to make moves that can affect the status quo. However, big series like WCOOP end up being fertile experimentation grounds for main schedule changes due to two factors:

1) A large % of revenue during this time comes from the Series events and Satellites themselves, reducing risk in the other main schedule offerings
2) The regular main schedule events, excluding reds/blues, become suppressed anyways during this time

So in my view, something like the WCOOP Circuit would be a slam dunk here. Feel free to substitute any name for the WCOOP Circuit, I haven't fully though that part out yet. But the idea is that the main schedule changes during this period:

- Remove everything
- Generally one Bigs replacement, one Hots replacement, one Bounty Builder replacement, one Hyper type tournament per hour. That's IT. You want your $16.50 4K turbo? Play the $15 On Demand and take a hike.

So instead of the Big $109 18k (more like Big 40K or 50K on WCOOP days), it becomes the WCOOP Circuit $109 150K, fueled by re-entry if necessary. Repeat this for every hour and suddenly you have pooled liquidity where all of the fluff is removed from the schedule and it's just big bird after big bird. I'm curious what this approach would have generated compared to the traditional approach and I've always been curious about this. In a way the Circuit Events would almost function like the WCOOP-L's and WCOOP-M's do now. Anyways, the main goal of this was to inflate the total $ of prize pools you could put under the WCOOP banner and that's not as necessary now. It was all a pipe dream anyways.

Amazing post, mainly a lurker but enjoy your content so much, really get the readers mind working in the right way. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and am sure you are inspirational to many other lurker aswell as myself

Sometimes see you at the tables lately! I think I’m in the category of “scum nit” right now but I am recently trying to work on my game a lot. Best of luck at the tables I’m subbed.

God, I love this thread.

Thanks for the reply back. I’m also structuring my WCOOP as I wont be playing poker until then. This will be my first WCOOP I’ve played in. BR atm is $2100. I play majority of the time between 7.50-$22 with an Ability of 73.

Im thinking of going ahead and depositing extra $1000-$2000 to shot take at higher buy ins $109+ but Im unsure of my skill level with it being WCOOP and if it would be just a waste of money.

I’ll figure it out non the less and thank you for taking the time to give your thoughts on the WCOOP. I definitely agree with you on Bracelets haha. WCOOP is the equivalent to WSOP is prestige.

What a cool write up about the WCOOP and pokerstars operations in general. Ideas on the higher prestige value of the series + nixing certain small gtds during the series to promote participate are interesting.

Also I vote for you degen regging the $5.2k main 23 hours in

My man. See this is why I don't actually like meeting players FACE TO FACE. The thought of you categorizing yourself as "scum nit" gives me pain in my heart. Best of luck to you.

Honestly I'm the biggest slurper myself when it comes down to it. I think Nietzsche said it best: "beware that when fighting slurpers at the tables you do not become a slurper yourself."

hi Blank! you post often in the Official Stars MTT Thread right? Your name looks familiar to me. I'd still like to steer people in that thread over to this one and answer any questions people might have. Unfortunately the questions seem to have dried up over the past 12 months which makes a lot of sense given the response rate.

Hey adrian, I'll give you some advice here if I may:

I wouldn't worry too much about your Ability Score for now. Scope discriminates against that buy-in range and oppresses low-mid grinders. I'm not saying you're a world-beater or anything but that Ability is pretty irrelevant compared to other metrics like winrate (bb/100) and ROI.

Having said that, with this being your first WCOOP and the background stats you posted, I think some of the higher stuff will be very difficult. Depositing for WCOOP is a good idea, but I'd mostly focus on trying to play the highest value tournaments. There are a ton of amazing $22-$55 over the course of the series, and then quite a few exceptional $109's and even $215's as well.

WCOOP can also cause a lot of fatigue because it's really slow and most of the big action happens in the second day. I would target 3-4 days a week that really interest you and then go hard on those days. But I wouldn't go blindly firing every $109+ unless you consider it part of your training budget and have it to spare.

Starting a GoFundMe for a degen $5.2k fire. No markup. You in?

Your writing has always been superb, even going back to metagame (I don't think I'm just making this up?)

You could obviously sell action for the main, especially if you're offering no MU.
I enjoyed the posts about the streamers. I don't know any of the ones you mentioned personally, but you see the same sentiments in poker we used to in Yugioh. Guy wins a tournament or is the new hot thing and everyone is super critical of them all of a sudden. You have had enough success (and so have I) that I'm just happy for everyone now, unless they have personal problems such as scamming/cheating etc.

The only slight addendum I have on that is I cannot understand sponsored pros who do not work on their game and put the effort in. When you're sponsored you have an absolutely golden opportunity. Some people truly don't know how good they have it in this game and you see a ton who just wasted tons of talent/opportunity when the scene was peaking ~10 years ago.

Thanks for the Advice Jae, I appreciate it. Definetly looked up the schedule and planned what I’ll play for 3 days. Going to be playing the 109s. I don’t think I will be playing any 215s just because I don’t see many that are decent enough when I could be playing 2x 109s etc.

Do you coach at all?

Thanks for checking back in always makes me happy to see ao. Agree with you on the rest of your post.

Sounds like a good plan. Nothing quite like running deep in one of these special tournaments so I wish you the best. I don't coach right now. Need to work on myself before I work with others!
****************************************

Pre-WCOOP Grind Update

Party has shut down service for Koreans. This is terrible news for me and puts me in a bad spot. I'm now unable to play on GGNetwork and Party from Korea, leaving Stars, Stars.FRESPT, Winamax, 888, WPN, IPoker, and Microgaming.

WPN is a disgusting trainwreck right now, pretty much the worst software update ever. I have cancelled tournaments literally every day I play on WPN. Microgaming is also not even worth opening these days. I'll write something about Microgaming soon but I am not a fan of the strategy they are pursuing.

It's a bit unfortunate. When I was working at Stars I didn't have access to two of the better sites out there (Stars.com and Stars.FRESPT). Now that I left, I don't have access to two of the better sites out there (Party and GG). I need someone to adopt me or something so I can get a different country's visa.

I have a trip to Hong Kong coming up on the 27th and then a very serious WCOOP grind so I thought it appropriate to spend some time with the family this week. Ended up taking most of the week off and losing some momentum. I fired a full session today but feel like I played quite meh and butchered a few spots. Was a bit tilted at the early-middle of the session because of my poor play and not knowing the right moves. Also ended up making a terrible dumpster fire raise/call at a final table. Got pretty tired, was already annoyed at myself, and had some poor impulse control for sure. I can do better.

There's a few strategies that are a bit out of my comfort zone right now so I will have to run some PIO before the sunday grind. Despite playing and running at the very low end of the spectrum, I at least recovered the ev bb/100 to positive and will shore up some of the holes in my knowledge I had today.

Ended up 3rd in the $109 Megadeep, 3rd in the $82 Hyper, 5th in the Saturday $11R, and 9th in the 30 Euro Hook PKO on Frespt. Pretty encouraging session in the sense that this can just be my floor. I'm bricking all HSMTT this month but sustaining quite well in everything below $215.

Such an awesome thread. Best of luck for WCOOP!

Thanks Roushie
*********************

Brief Sunday Update

I've been very unhappy with my habits in Korea lately. I'm getting quite erratic sleep, about 5-6 hours on most grind days starting at something like 1 PM and waking up at 6 or 7. After the grind I'll conk out for 13-15 hours. Feel like this is taking a toll on my body and I've read articles saying that daylight sleeping is quite unhealthy. Ideally I'd work the offpeak NA hours but that's not possible on Sundays and during big series like WCOOP. I'd really like to move out of this country but all of our family is here, we have a 2 year apartment lease, and I don't know of another country that I can get a Visa for. I don't really want to take my wife and baby to Mexico so that's not an option. Canada or the UK would be ideal but how do I make it happen?

Before the Sunday grind I was lying in bed cuddling with my wife. Full big spoon with one leg draped over the body as well along with some piston-humping. You feel me? Anyways, I really feel like snuggling is super underrated in this world and a good snuggle can cure a lot of problems. Our president, for example, does not seem to be a snuggler. And I was thinking to myself how happy I was in this moment, and how I wanted to freeze this moment in my memory on some real The Notebook type ****, and how I just wanted to work hard enough to make enough where my wife could do the things she does (e-shopping for our household mostly) comfortably. And I reaffirmed with myself that I have to approach every session super professionally, always try to play my best, because her and my baby are what I'm playing for ultimately.

Had another very solid grind. Good EV, pretty happy with my play overall other than one big mistake in a WPN $215. I blame this mistake on extraneous factors with WPN. Although it's a bit hypocritical for me to say this, because I fired the $109/$215/$88 MOSS on Sunday, I would really recommend not playing on WPN right now. WPN has been one of my favorite sites overall despite its integrity issues but it's an absolute horror show right now. Probably the worst operator I've seen other than FTP/Absolute/UB going insolvent and not paying their customers. Those 3 sites are obviously in a tier of their own but WPN since the software update is #1 on my list that doesn't include outright theft and scamming.

For almost every day I've fired a session on WPN since the software update, my tournaments have cancelled due to technical issue. The problem with this is they provide no confirmation or accounting of which tournaments were affected and which tournaments were refunded. When looking at their Twitter, it seems like they are requesting customers Tweet/e-mail them with IDs of affected tournaments. I'm stuck 5 figures on their site in the past two months with around 20k+ in buy-ins and I genuinely have no clue which tournaments of mine require a refund, because their cancellation policy actually makes all players whole if the tournament is still in late registration. Meaning if you bust the tournament, you're supposed to get your buy-in back.

It really makes you appreciate some of the things we take for granted with PokerStars. I remember during the summer DDOS attacks the office was absolutely scrambling to reimburse tens of thousands of affected players but quite crucially we actually had mechanisms in play to have proper accounting and communication. Again, in fairness to WPN they were pretty great before the software update. The software update has created a buggy mess. There have been times I've hit a key incorrectly on a table and it completely hangs, meaning I have to close the table (and fold my hand in a big pot) and then rejoin the table. Absolute horror show.

Anyways, for Sunday I ran less than stellar and lost a bit but had a few exciting runs:

40/3548 in the Moss $88 300k- Received $630 1st was $47,850(!). Quite impressive for an $88 and really shows you how powerful WPN is when they have their **** together. Side note: the lobby is buggy as well and I thought I had laddered to 45th when I busted but actually got 40th. Even right now the tournament is showing 4 players remaining despite it being finished. What a joke. They should honestly just revert the update.

31st in the $530 Bounty Builder High Roller- This had a score of 82 and paid 60k to 1st while I cashed for $1679 total. I'm starting to be convinced that this is a fire on most days unless the lobby is really tough. I have lately been experimenting with firing it on good days. I think playing it with no re-entry is good unless you bust in the first level or two, since that keeps the cost of the tournament down. The PKO nature does mitigate the buy-in for me a bit since it's so much larger than everything else I play on the day at ABI $60 or so.

This tournament was going great for me and then the endgame gets quite tough. Just lost pretty much every pot I vpiped in the last few orbits. Found a good spot with my last 8bb or so getting in AK vs JJ and KK but hit the showers when I couldn't get there. Also, I'm hoping of the team frees up some time they take a look at changing PKO payouts to make 1st/2nd identical and more equitable. This particular tournament wasn't that bad. 60k/38k/23k/18k/11k/10k/7k/6k/5.5k but I know sometimes it can get a lot uglier than this with over double or even triple sometimes to first place.

I'll be traveling to Hong Kong in a few hours to spend some quality time with my coach and BFF. Going to get some fitness routines down, talk some poker, talk some bird game, and come back ready to grind for WCOOP with a pure and motivated heart. Planning on writing some more posts during my trip. Definitely want to get my thoughts down on the "flaws" with my SCOOP approach and how I plan to switch this up for WCOOP.

Regarding the relocating i think there is an "organization" called poker refuges. ( at least it used to be one im not sure if its still active but u can give it a shot,)
They are helping with all that need to be done for a poker player who want to move to a diff country and play.
Gl, im gonna state again i love this thread keep going!

Vancouver would be an amazing stay for you. If you ever do plan on moving to canada I would suggest Calgary & Vancouver. I live in Vancouver and I’d love to take you out for a beer and enjoy the nice views we have here haha.

Side note: I also have seen daylight sleeping is bad and it’s hard to adjust when the tournament times are during the night. Hopefully you can find a way to get the sleep you need.

Reflections on the Eve of Battle

WCOOP is approaching and it's going to be big. I've put a lot of time and study preparing for it and am heading into it with actual momentum this time.

Had quite a memorable trip to Hong Kong right in the middle of the protests. The protests never hit me directly but signs of the struggle were everywhere on my trip from ominous posters on the walls to late night movie screenings. Met with my coach/backer/BFF. We negotiated terms of the staking deal, future business plans, and a lot of personal stuff.

After he came "back on the market" in January or so, we got a lot closer just talking about relationship stuff a lot as he pursues online dating. I always tease him about the parallels between my mistakes playing online poker (too many tables, not enough focus, fish moves) versus his doing online dating (too many matches, not enough focus, fish moves).

While I was there, I was having a flareup in my elbow that was causing me a lot of pain. Honestly I'm just sick of the pain at this point. It really affects my day to day life quality. My friend is quite a fitness buff and he set me up for an hour with his personal trainer. I decided that I've put personal health and fitness too low on my list of priorities and will make some big changes going forward. I think if I can cut the belly fat, my gout condition should ease up. And I should have more energy and focus for the grind.

One night my friend played some motivational videos, kind of like the ones Re8uz suggested above. I remember listening to the messages, which were quite good, but my body just recoiling against the delivery method. The videos are done in a very empowering and charismatic method. I think you'll know it when you hear it. Anyways, in the middle of listening to this stuff I was getting quite annoyed. And when my friend stepped out of the shower he asked me what I thought and I just started ranting about these videos. As we discussed this I started confronting some of my biases and irrationality towards this self help stuff. I think I have several deep-seated issues that I won't go into that blocked me from accepting their method of delivery. I won't go into them in depth but a brief list: vocal delivery very similar to frauds such as MLM/evangelists/school assemblies, my own perceived wasted potential and refusal to submit to these people, my mom's tough love way of raising us with no therapy/medication, and probably a few other reasons.

By the end of it I decided to accept the messages and further explore this space. The three messages that really resonated with me are:

1) Working out very day lets you fight small battles against yourself and improve your discipline with each rep. I am sorely lacking discipline in my grind. It affects some of my raise/calling ranges, my table counts, my 4-bet ranges, and other things. I've gotten a lot better at this but I can still improve.

2) I think Will Smith was in the video saying this. Taking care of your body is self love. When you take steps to improve and protect your health, you are loving yourself.

3) My coach said he was inspired by something like "what if you wanted something as bad as you needed to breathe while drowning? what would you do?" And then we argued a bit about how to achieve this for the poker side. And I realized a lot of things I'm doing in poker are good for the short term $ but suboptimal and even irrelevant for my long term goals. Things like loading $30 PKO On-Demands. That won't get me to where I want to go.

So I came back from Hong Kong determined to implement a few life changes:

1) Exercise 4-5 days a week with the exercises the personal trainer set me up with. I have poor flexibility in my joints so I'm doing a lot of stretches and squats for now. Building that thick booty to protect myself in the Bounty Builders.

2) Improve diet. Cut sugar and red meat and focus on eating more fruits and vegetables.

3) Play poker mindfully. My goal is to become high roller caliber, even if I don't play them. And certain games I'm playing and certain life routines of mine aren't getting me anywhere closer. Cutting all games was a good first step.

4) Believe in myself. I'll talk more about this in my next post.

Before I move on to my next post about WCOOP, I just want to say that I don't plan on turning this blog into one of those corny ass motivational let's get it type deals. So don't be alarmed if you reject those like I did!

Dissecting SCOOP and WCOOP Prep

It seems like one of the core pillars of this motivational stuff is strong self belief. I've never lacked self-belief growing up so I've always been wary of the fine line between self-belief and delusion. The kind of delusion that can make the greatest player in the world lose millions to a superuser and then lose faith in his game due to all of his bluffs being called. I read that article and really empathized with Prahlad. How tough it must be to try to get back on the grind after that after having most of your fearlessness and aggression stolen from you by someone who could see your cards.

Article: https://www.pokercentral.com/podcast...-of-3-million/

Weirdly enough I've had a lot of self belief issues when playing poker though. To me poker is a game that requires a lot of skills/qualities that suit me: mathematics, logic, empathy, creativity, etc. Yet I feel I have been quite "slow" for the past few years at processing things for my own. Is it the 2+2 mentality? The "fish regular" mindset that makes us set rules for stack sizes or betting lines because they go against "established concepts" set by nit nerds like Chris Ferguson? Is it because my coaches were just mean and ruthless in 2015/2016 and never thoroughly explained things? I'm not sure.

I bought myself a stuffed Captain America shield in Hong Kong. This is to remind myself that I am allergic to the BS. The week before, I bought myself a stuffed Lion at the IKEA in Korea. I put it on my bed so that every day I wake up I see it. This is to remind myself that IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII am the Lion. Roar! I want to get into a more positive mindset. One where I believe in myself and my gifts. I think the core issue that's always hit me is just not being good enough and going on a perma downswing. For most of 2015-2016 I was just battling upstream and not good enough for the games I was playing. I felt lost really and it was only when I stepped away from poker a bit that I started changing that trajectory.

I'm going to get back to my young mindset and start believing more in myself and my abilities. And if I don't have enough at the moment, I will get there eventually.

I've been watching every Sunday High Roller ($2100) replay for the past few months. The regulars all still make plenty of mistakes. One regular in particular, who does quite well at an extremely high ABI, consistently makes some of the more objectively terrible plays I've seen (if you were to model ranges from an ICM framework). I check graphs of everyone in the P5 Top 100 to see what kinds of swings to expect. Most of the players are quite big winners but not all that glitters is gold. Plenty of players are breaking even or losing. Even players who were looking like GOATS are on multi 6-figure downswings. Bencb just posted a video where he's putting up $32k buy-ins on an average Sunday. That is just wild!

Poker is a very tough game. The fact is I've put up numbers in the past two years. +170k and double digit EV DESPITE only playing weekends until 2018 and a 70k+ downswing right in the thick of 2019. I've built back from that and I'm back on the comeup. I have every reason to believe in myself, even when things go poorly. And sometimes, when you shoot your shot but aim too high, you fall down hard. It happens to everyone and it can happen to me. The point is to handle it better in the future and I really want to push myself to that point of self belief.

Back to the high stakes regular though. I look back at myself in 2015-2016 and think it is amusing that I thought I was good enough to hang back then. I was actually playing quite poorly and I didn't realize that the high stakes battlers build a wealth of experience with each other. I try to be more realistic today and there are super elite regulars out there making/selling content that lets me compare myself and see where I am lacking and where I have to direct my goals. Today I've learned to appreciate each winning regular as a wonderful snowflake that provides his or her own unique skills and expertise. Elite regulars come in all shapes and sizes, though they are merging toward conformity lately. One regular can be an absolute animal button masher, but have incredible heart to pressure ranges and find bluffs in spots almost nobody else does. Another can be nitting sweaters to the extreme but perhaps extremely good at modeling future game ICM, laddering payouts, and has a very solid deep stack game early. These are real examples by the way!

SCOOP: What Went Wrong?

In preparation for WCOOP I've decided to take a look back at what contributed to my downswing during SCOOP (05/12-05/27). This downswing started around 04/15 and hit bottom around the end of SCOOP. Let's take a look:

Pre Downswing Context: +142,000

On 04/08 I chopped a very tough tournament, the $530 Rake or Break Whale on 888, for 5-figures. This put me at a new peak since leaving my job, something like +142k after four months on the grind. I had just won $60k or so in one day in February as well. And I felt INVINCIBLE.

Mistake 1: You are not invincible

Chopping that $530 Whale for $14k or so put me in a very dangerous mindset. I remember I was grinding that Sunday with many big buy-ins that weren't working out. And I was quite stuck that day but then won that at the end to get back to a winning day. When you're lucky, that can happen. You're down to your last few tables, in for a ton, and you get bailed out by solid play and good fortune. I caught myself doing that the past few Sundays as well, since getting 4th in the Bigger $109 for 9k or something to bail out a Sunday the week before that.

I think this is a very dangerous thing to get into. This feeling that you are playing so well, good, invincible, that you are "due" for a Sunday saver. So you just keep loading more and more games, more and more buy-ins, expecting one magic bink to bail you out. And I still remember playing the next Sunday on the 15th, and being in the final few tables of the $109 Major on WPN and thinking I would get bailed out again with $36k up top. I finished 14th.

04/15-05/12: -$31,343, 3/22 Winning Days

So around this time I decided to start taking shots at potential overlays in big prize pool tournaments. I'm not even going to call this one a mistake because I think SpaceyFCB has done some work showing how much of an edge late entrants get in tournaments. I think it's a complicated equation and risk of busting is obviously much higher if you late register with 10-20bb. But I think my short stack game and ICM are stronger than my deep stack play so it made sense logically.

The problem with this approach, one that I've avoided this time, is going into SCOOP already massively in the hole. Even -31k would probably be my second worst downswing of all time so it's just not a good idea to head into such a big series with that kind of mental drain. I blame Party for this for starting a strategy to not compete with SCOOP directly here. I also think I ran quite poorly in this sample but that can easily happen after running so hot. Looking at my biggest losses:

Multiple Powerfest 1k's
Some Stars 1k's with overly chasing
2-bulleting WPN 1k's
Too many 500's
11x tough high rollers on .FR and Winamax
Too many tough fires on WPN in the lower prize pool tournaments
Too many thin edge 215's including turbos

The wins kind of dried up during this period. Also was probably running poorly. Biggest scores were $6k in a tough $270 on WPN and $6k in the Supersonic. But I had gotten myself to the point where even outright winning the Supersonic for $23k or something on the one I final tabled would not have gotten me back to positive!

Mistake 2: Fields get much tougher around this time so you need to game select the daily schedule

05/12-05/28: $-34,731, 3/16 Winning Days

Once SCOOP came I was already in a pretty tough situation due to all the losing that happened the month leading up to SCOOP. What ended up happening was I got off to a poor start, felt a financial pinch, and was just dusting 3-5k session after session. So I didn't really feel like playing any more. And I ended up missing sessions near the back end. I kind of ran out of gas.

I'm mostly fine with my fires in the 1K range. I'm super fine with 4-bulleting the SCOOP-M Main Event. I'm very not fine with the two 2.1k fires I made. The Sunday Million one was probably the toughest tournament I've ever played. I would have also liked to see myself try to just keep the re-entries in check. And then Party decided to run their KO Series during SCOOP so it was like another Powerfest all over again.

Mistake 3: Non-Stars sites are not PokerStars. COOP events are generally softer than other sites, pound for pound, because of less re-entry, more marketing, better game security, and more liquidity

It's just better to take shots at something like the Super Tuesday Special Edition as one of your 1k's rather than a Party 300k guaranteed with 2 re-entries and a bunch of tough regulars. I'm no longer allowed to play on Party from Korea but I urge those who are to take a second look! These fields are tough man.

Mistake 4: Hello again. It's me, game selection

Just writing this down again because I think a lot of my fires were just absolutely egregious. Running down the list:

Multiple 530's and 1k's on Party with thin guarantees
Still 9x Winamax and .FR High Rollers with super high ability scores
Way too many low value 215's and 109's

Which brings me to another mistake of mine

Mistake 5: When you're balling on a budget, you should re-enter the highest tournaments less often

I think I was re-entering stuff like the BBHR with 40-50bb. Was re-entering Party 500's and stuff as well in that manner. You know, sometimes it's okay to just say "I took my shot at this HS tournament and it wasn't my day." I think that really keeps your buy-ins down. Nowadays I only re-enter the biggest birds if I bust within the first two levels. And sometimes I intentionally pretend like I didn't see I busted that one, lying to myself and ROBBING myself of glory, to avoid re-entering it. Kind of like avoiding a fight back when you were young and couldn't take on the sucker.

Ok so I hope some of my mistakes have helped you and I wish all of you grinders the best for WCOOP unless you're playing against me. Then I wish the worst upon you and your extended family. I'm very excited for WCOOP but I know that regardless of how it goes, I'll do fine this year and in the future. Just have to keep working hard and working smart. I'm a much stronger player now than I was even a few months ago so I'm curious how this will pan out.
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My Lessons Learned from SCOOP 2019 Swongs

1. You are not invincible. Don't get in the mindset that you'll get a bink at the end of the day to bail you out.
2. You need to game select the daily schedule due to tougher fields
3. Non-Stars sites are generally tougher than Stars, pound for pound, so you should focus your higher shots on the Stars events with no re-entry and bigger guarantees
4. You need to game select the daily schedule due to tougher fields!
5. Re-enter your highest buy-in tournaments less often to keep costs down. You can pretend to yourself you didn't see yourself bust sometimes to force the skip

Awesome posts, great self reflection and preparation for WCOOP - good luck!

great post and preparation! Self realization and ego is important to climb up inch by inch to become absolutely great in poker.

keep your head in the game and crush!

Day 1 Update:

Today was a bit of a bittersweet day. I got off to a very good start, felt I was playing quite well. Ended up almost naturally playing an 8 table or so grind, mostly high stakes, with a lot of Winamax tables and very few Stars.com tables.

Made quite a few skips including the Big 109, Deadline 109, 215 PKO on 888, Hot 82, BBHR, Hot 109, and others. Stars hasn't updated guarantees for WCOOP and I just don't think the fields are worth it. I did play one 109 Hyper that I'll run the score on.

In the 1K Thrill I just got AJs in vs 88 and A5o for a really good double bounty spot. Table broke after that and I moved 61bb over. Squeezed QQ from the BB vs EP and lost to AA and that was that.

Rest of it was mostly brick city but ended up firing a Winamax 250 turbo with 60k guaranteed. At the time it made sense to me to fire a 250 turbo with 60k guaranteed but now I'm not sure. Will have to run the score on it to compare but the Fat Thursday had 75k guaranteed, hit 100k, and the Hot 109 had 35k. Again, I'm not too sure.

Anyways, was in a pretty good spot in that one. Was 3/19 or something with about 900k at 25k BB. I lost a few pots and then basically just lost every pot after that to blind down and finish 7th. Payouts were quite huge, 20k+ to 1st, and I got 2.5k for 7th. Very unsatisfying way to fizzle out.

It was a bit distressing because I kept getting into a bunch of marginal spots, particularly with the turbo format putting me at sub 10 and then even sub 6 big blinds. And I feel like if I had studied more I would have been sharper for some of these extreme ICM FGS type spots. I'll take a look at the final 20 hands or so of the tournament and see what I could have improved.

EV also started off quite great today but really fell down the tank. Played at 1.63 today and ran at -11.77 so pretty awful day overall.

Will probably skip tomorrow. I really dislike the way they scheduled this. Thursday just has one NLHE event which is pretty poor but everyone is excited for it. Then Friday has some pretty unappetizing NLHE events and people who come back for Day 2 won't have much to play. And then guarantees haven't really been updated either so there were a lot of skips for me.

Saturday/Sunday look pretty good so I'll spend some time in the lab, figure out if I did much wrong, and be better for the next time.