I'll just say if you do lose Chuck you need to get writing a lot more. The talent you have for it is very high and there is great potential for a gonzo style narrative on all the adventures you've been on - something that you're already doing subconsciously or otherwise in your work.

Have always been interested in the juxtaposition between the mirage and the reality of gambling - the bright lights inhabited by broken souls, all eager to chase the dream that year... every year until retired by the game.

its kind of easy game here just need disipline.if that money not going to remove from brm(i mean life expenses isn't included)so its quite easy to do. no need universe just need to grind and dont do stupid mistakes in case bfizz do make 10k in month
so in 4months its easy

Basically this. I hope u lose this challenge because you hope you lose this challenge which is why you have made it in the first place.

You show signs of self awareness Mikka, then add "but I'm not sure" or some other pathetic BS to enable you to continue on your pointless life wasting low stakes MTT grinding ways

You're only 5 years late quitting like anyone sensible did. You have a brain. You have options. Don't be an old man full of regret looking back on a wasted life playing a ****ty card game

I've enjoyed reading your stories. Thanks for that. Actually, I changed my mind... I hope you win.... and then quit anyway. As above, you've known its over for years now. Pretty good chance your health issues are related to your lifestyle, and you know it. SO....Can you listen to what your body is telling you? Or is a handful of end game coin flips from RNGs your preferred life path signpost

I mean it seems very doable to me? So you need 1k BIs profit @ 10$ AVG BI?
at 10$s 50% ROI that's only 17 MTT/day. Just don't run bad at the start.

Is that vid legit lol from 200/400 in 2006, so sick too watch. Makes me sad i couldn't play.

Did you get odds on the bet? And why you can't mention the amounts?

And best of luck ofc

This seems kind of crazy, gl on the journey I think deep down you are the one who decides if you win or not (if you want to continue poker or not) , will reflect in your motivation and volume/results. Do what you feel is best for your life , you are in control for the most part!


What is considered 1 buyin in this? (sorry if it was answered) since your abi would change throughout wouldn't it?

Day 3 of the bet is about to commence, going to tackle some questions quickly!




I believe in guidance from the universe to a degree with everything in life. I don't mean this in some crazy mumbo jumbo way, or in the sense that we should just stop trying and let the universe take care of us. What I mean is something alone the lines of "if it's meant to happen it will happen" / "if you really want to achieve something (that isn't too unrealistic obv) and you give it your best it will happen". I wouldn't do any truly deluded life decisions based on this obv, like I wouldn't flip a coin on whether I should marry some girl or something. But I'm also not afraid to make some risky/unconventional life decisions if I feel like giving something a shot, because I have quite a lot of faith that I'll always land on my feet one way or another. I've been through more bad **** than most people my age have I would think, so having survived all that also probably affects the way I view life in general. The tl;dr version of my outlook on life is that it's short and sometimes you just have to go for it even if it's risky.

Congrats on all the recent success btw, you are a beast


Hmm this is pretty interesting, because I also played a 2,5k WSOP that summer. I seem to remember it being for the 5k (and I can't fathom why I would have played a 5k WSOP that summer with like a 20k liferoll had I not won that package, and I certainly did play that), but I could very well be wrong so I'm not going to argue with you. If you want to PM me your screen name I thiiiiink I could confirm if it was the same tourney, I can't remember the other guy's screen name right now but upon hearing it I'm somewhat confident it'd ring some bells. No worries if you don't want tho, it's not important anyway and those were some good grindtimes nonetheless.

Tyty, I'm definitely going ultra nitty for starters tho. Limiting myself to 2ABI for the first couple of weeks at least. I'll revise the plan if it seems like I'm running out of time. I think the mental part of this challenge is quite huge and at least for now I feel like it's more important to play small and risk/variance-free ish vs. trying to get a head start. I'll definitely revise my plans on a daily basis tho. It's also easier to grind those 1000 buyins playing small.

Yeah I've got pretty much everything on the line, over 90% of net worth. I'm not sure if I'd have 1000€ left to my name if I busted today and lost all the bets. Obv I get to keep anything I win tho so as long as I don't bust the entire bankroll I'll be left with at least some €€€ for post-poker life.

Yeah I'm going to look into leaderboards at some point. I never win on ****ing Party though so at least for starters I'll focus on micros on other sites than Stars and Party. Rules re: live packages etc are:

-Live satellites etc don't count; I can't satellite my way into a live tournament at all (so if I for some reason play a live satty, it's outside the challenge win or lose)
-If I win a live tournament package from a leaderboard or similar promotion, any cash I win from the package (you know like for traveling costs) gets added to the bankroll. If the target live MTT takes place during the challenge timeframe I get to play it and any winnings go straight to the roll. If the live MTT is after January 28th then unlucky me. I can also sell any package I win and the amount I sell it for will go to the roll. The max amount I can sell it for is the value of the package obv (so I can't angleshoot by selling it at a higher price to a friend or something)
-I'm not allowed to sell any shares about anything so if I end up winning a leaderboard to a live tournament, I'll have all of my action

I'm not going to particularly try to bink a live package unless some really crazy promotion comes up. My plan is to do this the old-fashioned way.

I didn't want to ask for odds because I honestly had no idea what my chances were, but my best guess was 50-50. I'm not doing this to exploit my friends by luring them to bet with bad odds, I think 50-50 is fair. I just don't have it in me to go for max ev in spots like this, it was the same back in the day when I sold packages at the marketplace for example. I generally sold at ~10% cheaper than I easily could have because I wanted to make sure the shares would be +EV. I don't mean this in some white knight sort of way and I've definitely lost an embarrasing chunk of someone else's money in the past, but I also felt it was important to ensure the deal was fair to allow myself to play the way I want and not worry about making mistakes. I was never very sound mentally especially when playing live and I'd always worry about making mistakes playing on other people's money unless I was confident the deal was fair.

No chance to quit at all, it's all or nothing.

TYty!

Too late I'm afraid. I'll answer the "why" below in my reply to Sect7G in more detail. Tyty!

Thankyou good sir!

Alright so here's another reason why doing this at 1:1 was good; I earned myself a tiny bit of leeway wrt to this specific subject. I have 0 intention to angleshoot this bet by playing a bunch of rebuys or playing them with a strategy where I win fake buyins by rebuying tons. But I also made it clear that there is no way in hell I'm going to create an excel sheet out of all rebuys while grinding or something, so any rebuy MTT will just count as one buyin. I've promised to play no more than 10% of my overall volume as rebuy MTTs and I don't think it will be close at all wrt making the 1000 buyins even if you discounted every rebuy tournament. I wanted this rule purely to make bookkeeping easier. I'm probably playing less than 5% rebuys in reality so this will affect the actual bet very very little. I also always buy in for min and generally just reg just before the addon even if I play rebuys.

Wowww, thanks so much for the kind words, I'm not sure if I hold myself to such a high regard but it was heart-warming to read that. I gotta get on the grind shortly, but I'll do my best to answer the why here quickly (and yes, it's too late to back down):

I realize that this challenge sounds completely nutso from a regular joe point of view. Why the **** would I risk whatever I have to my name as opposed to just quitting poker, embracing the good times that I've had, and moving on to something else with at least something in my pockets?

Well, the main issue is that I don't want to have second thoughts, and making the leap to quit has been really difficult for me. If I quit 3 days ago without making the bet, I'd always have second guessed myself regarding whether quitting poker was the right move. This way there are basically 3 different outcomes:

1) I lose the bet and I'm forced to quit. Makes moving onto something else a LOT easier because clearly poker's not meant to be, and I'll have to get a job super asap to, you know, not die of starvation etc. I'll be super motivated from the first second and the forgetting poker part will be done cold turkey, which is generally the way I like to quit things. Kinda like ending a relationship with someone, staying friends with them just messes with your head and makes things difficult. Rip off the bandage and never see them again and it's a lot easier on your mentally.

2) I win and still quit; well now I'm richer and got to do that one last degen thing I always wanted to do plus I'll get all the poker out of my system with a 4-month intense grind.

3) I win and keep playing; I'll only do this if I feel very very good about myself and my skills / edge etc by the time the bet ends. Back in the day when I was crushing up to HSMTTs I always had a feeling like I was ****ing raping the second I opened the clients (delusional or not). It was amazing to feel almost like a pro athlete in a way. Being good at something and knowing it + being respected by your peers is one of the best feelings in the world for someone as competitive as I am. I haven't had that feeling in a long time. IF I could somehow summon that feeling back (and have it backed by my results obv) I'd love to keep going at it hard. During this challenge I'll be forced to study 160 hours running SIMs (obv watching videos doesn't count as studying) and really step up my game, grinding methods, plugging life leaks, get in good mental shape, etc etc. If I somehow come out of this crushing the aforementioned then I'll have a good reason to keep playing. If that doesn't happen, well, easy decision to quit then.

As for the why risk all the $$$ part, well I'm a pretty natural degen. Most of you may not know this but the first cash game I ever played in, and the second time I played poker EVER, was $25/$50 where I busted my entire life's savings. I always thought that whenever I decide to quit I'll do one last degen thing. My original plan was to yolo the WSOP Main or something but then I realized that I don't want to play just one tournament. I was never a true "beast" in the sense that I would have been a favorite to crush a major tournament, so taking a big shot at one mtt would've just felt like investing 10k in lottery coupons. But in my heyday I was a pretty damn solid pleb MTT grinder and doing a completely insane challenge risking everything seems like the best way to do that last degen thing. This way the result of the degening will at least somewhat be in my own hands and the role variance plays is somewhat mitigated.

I don't know if that makes sense to non-degens but to me all this seems quite reasonable.

Re: Getting a job in the industry afterwards, I'm not sure if I want to do anything poker-related after this to be honest. I'd like to achieve things in life that perhaps benefit other people in some way or at least affect them (like writing), and let's face it -- the gambling industry is pretty sick and twisted and most of the profits come from problem gamblers. I don't mean to sound hypocritical as I'm sure a bunch of the ~500k I've won from poker over the years have come out of the pockets of people who couldn't afford to lose it. But long-term I'm not really sure if I want to make a lifelong career in this industry at least. On the flipside, it is a great feeling to be good at something, and I think I'd do pretty damn well given the right kind of creative position in the industry. I know so much about the gambling world (aside from playing for 10 years, I've worked in/with the print media, affiliates, training sites, staking, poker operators, and I know 52952385235 people in the business and feel like I have quite a lot of insight to give). So if I could get a gambling industry-related job that I feel like would suit me well and that I'd find exciting, I'd seriously consider it. But I think this is a moot topic to discuss because I don't know if there's a single company I wouldn't have pissed off royally over the years by pointing flaws in their product or security and my name would just get snap blacklisted when applying for a job

Where did we meet by the way? I'm so sorry, but I'm really bad with screen names / real life identities and it's been so many years since I last traveled the circuit so I'm starting to forget. Thanks again for the kind words, really appreciate them!

Thanks, yeah writing is the #1 back-up plan for sure. I've done gambling-related gonzo journalism for close to a decade on the side though, so maybe it's time to move onto something else. The dark side of the gambling world is something I'll never get tired of writing about though.

Feel free to try this yourself, especially with your entire bankroll and livelyhood on the line also I don't think some bfizz challenge is at all comparable, I assume he's a 180man turbo pushbot kind of guy who can easily masstable because he knows all the ranges in his sleep so it's purely a volume question. I don't even know what I can shove for 8BBs in the cutoff and I don't plan to play very many turbos at all because I suck at them. I hope to learn shoving ranges at some point during the challenge tho, lol. I really need to study LOTS while grinding to make this happen, I can't just show up and play x hours every day and win. Also I assume he didn't have his bankroll and future in poker on the line which probably made the mental aspects quite a bit easier for him.

I mostly answered this above (to Sect7G) I think. But yeah either way I don't intend to do this for very long, I most certainly don't want my life to be centered around poker/gambling for (that) much longer. I don't think sacrificing 4 more months to it matters all that much though, and like I said above losing will make quitting so much easier. The only way I'd want to continue even for, say, 2 more years, is if I feel like I'm crushing the games again.

1:1 odds, can't mention the amounts because of Finnish legislative bs that I don't want to go into. Let's just say it's not very smart to mention any sort of prop bet amounts publically if you're a Finn.

And lol at playing $10 MTTs with your last $500, you sound more degen than me haha. I don't expect to reach $10s for another 2 months at least. For a very, very, very long time I'll be forced to grind 2 ABI, then 3 ABI, then maaaybe 5ABI making like 1-2€/MTT. I think this will take 6000-8000 regspeed MTTs unless I run hot.

The 1000 buyin rule is mostly just to ensure I can't luck out by taking a shot. I can still luckbox by winning some mass field MTT (I don't intend to play those for the most part tho), but I can't just play a $109 and win it for 10k. Basically the way I intend to do this, which is by moving up the stakes slowly and carefully following 200+ buyin BRM, it's going to impossible for me to reach the 10k and not hit 1000 buyins at the same time. If I make it, I'd expect sharkscope to give me around 5ABI and 2000+ buyins won. I'm also playing 2-3ABI micros until I get to 2k at least, so by winning 1500 at 2-3ABI I'll already be at 500-750 buyins. A slightly less confusing way to put it would've been to just say I can only play 10s or lower or something and no 1000 buyin requirement, but this gives me some chance to take a shot and gamble on my future if for example I make it to 7k by playing micros and meeting the 1000 buyin requirement and have two weeks to go or something. It's more fun that way, as I can then always fire some last second 1k etc I'm really really hoping to do this organically until the end I won't be taking any kind of shots unless I absolutely have to.


Alright that should be all, thanks everyone for the well wishes!

Come on ...

TiltMeNot was clearly on monkey tilt at this stage so Lodden adjusted his strategy, i.e. playing rather tightly and raising big when he felt there was some value to it.

Also pretty sure the standard strategy even at the nosebleeds was to 3,5x (i.e. pot) buttons.

As for this actually being Patrik Atonius - you´ve got to be kidding.

Safe to say this was a one-off.

That being said, the state of play was obviously ridiculous back then. Just skim through some of the biggest hands of bad_ip and fast_freddie on highstakesdb.com lol.

https://www.highstakesdb.com/profile...ng/bad_ip.aspx

Hi.




Good luck u crazy fcker you hope we do get to meet eventually tho

Noticed you said the bets are vs friends? Are they very wealthy and doing you a favour by taking the bets and believe in you / wanted to motivate you? Seems counter intuitive to potentially force a friend to quit something they've devoted so many years/hours/part of their life to (plus win essentially 90% of their net worth or w.e you've bet and leave them broke).

hi

cliffs?

Hi, I think we met some years ago on St. Maarten in the Caribbean. (Were you the guy who broke his wrist on a jet ski?)

Anyway, I just wanted to wish you the best of luck with your challenge and even more with your life after poker.

Hey, gl man. Your stories have often entertained me and this will be fun to follow for sure! Hope you make it so you're 'free' to make your own decision whether or not to quit poker forever

Starting with a $2 ABI is going to be a long grind. If you start crunching numbers and we give you a 100% ROI which might be possible at a $2 ABI, then you earn $2 for every tournament you enter. So to make it to $10,000 you will need to average about 5,000 tournaments over this time period. That is 42 tournament per day. You won't be able to do it. If you allow sit and gos maybe you will be able to get the volume.

I guess OP will adjust his ABI as he wins more but I really think you need to put in a lot of volume. Even with a $10 ABI and 100% that is still 1,000 tournaments. A lot of work to do.

If you up your buy-in to $5 relatively quickly you might have a shot. I look forward to seeing the results.

In what universe is 1k tournaments over 100 days a lot?

I'm confused btw to what the 1k bi restriction actually refers. How does this work. I understand you can't luckbox 10k in a 215 tournament, but how does it really work?

Hey,

I didn't break my wrist but I was pretty banged up. Couldn't sit for like two weeks and my hand was ****ed for I don't even remember how long. I was there with Manig (swordfish007, awesome guy by the way) and a couple of other Germans. We booked jet skis to run them around the island, it was supposed to be a 4 hour ride or something. Then a crazy storm came around and we got stuck in (what at least felt like) 15ft waves throwing us around. Visibility close to zero, we were pretty far off the coast and had to stay that way to avoid crashing into rocks, and instead of going forward it was like a rollercoaster going uphill and downhill the whole time. After climbing each wave you'd fly in the air for a good couple of seconds and then land on your ass hard. I got thrown off the jet ski a couple of times too in full speed. None of us could see anything but darkness so we just kept going, followed the sound of each others' engines and hoped to not crash into anything. Sadly I have no video footage but I'd say it was pretty much like this video except slightly less crazy waves and a lot darker. One of the most fun days of my life, I'd snap do it again immediately given the chance.

I lost the skin of my palms just from gripping the handles in those waves:



Busted the main on the 1st level to a 2-outer on the turn, won the PLO rebuy side event, and on Finnish independence day midway through the festival we booked a catamaran and headed to the sea loaded with rum. We had quite minimal water as well, but we sure had no shortage of either white or dark rum. We came back so sunburned, dehydrated and drunk that when we returned to the harbor at sunset chanting Finnish songs the entire harbor took pictures of us with their camera phones. Epic trip.

Thanks for the well wishes, gl with everything as well!

Thankyou

A lot of work for sure, yea. I don't think 100% ROI at 10ABI is attainable (at least for me anyway), or maybe it was if I played very few tables which would then screw up the challenge for me anyway. I'd expect to have to play 5000+ MTTs as well, maybe 7000ish or so, and most of that at 5-7ABI.

Gotta win 1000 buyins, basically as long as there are no noteworthy scores at stakes above 11s this takes care of itself as it's impossible to reach 10k without winning 100 ABIs basically. I'm starting from 1-2e mtts, won't move to 5s until I've already won hundreds of buyins, etc. It would only ever get close if I took a shot and binked big or won some kind of leaderboard etc, but in 99% of cases it's just impossible to not win 1000 buyins as long as I make it to 10k. My plan is to take 0 shortcuts and mostly grind it up playing 5s and then 10s towards the end of the challenge. I'd expect to win closer to 2k buyins on average if I make it.

In the op up until the --- mark

Would much rather bet vs friends (used kinda loosely tho, let's maybe say "acquintances" at least partially) than randoms; less hassle with small print stuff, and I'd rather lose €€€ to friends than randoms. I'm sure they feel the same way. I don't think any of my good friends would have taken the bet had they thought I was doing myself a huge disservice, but like I said before I don't think it's the end of the world if I lose here and it will certainly help my chances at a better career doing something else. I think saying it's win-win would be an exaggeration, but this is certainly not a predatory bet by either side either. As a side note there's also a lot of side action people have booked vs each other that I have no stake on.

Holla good sir, long time no talk! Tyty, how about if I lose you fly to Finland and we go and have a busto pub crawl in the bohemian cheap joints of Helsinki, and if I win I fly to Vienna and we do [insert thoughts here]?

I don't think it was a one-off, there's a ton of similar youtube videos about HS games those days. I mean obviously it was not standard to just tiltshove $40k etc, I'm sure the video doesn't reflect the standard play from those days. But I also think it's safe to say NL40k back then was strategically poorer than NL50 is these days.

Ya I always thought that TiltMeNot was PA, and the video says that also. It appears that it might have been Bengt Sonnert's account (?) that was occasionally shared by Patrik Antonius. Or at least that's what I could find on a 5min google search. Anyway I could be well off here, not claiming to be an expert on stuff that was also well before my time so I'll just shut up before I embarrass myself. I didn't mean to diss any player, Lodden for example was the sickest endboss of them all and it's not really their fault that Piosolver wasn't invented in 2006.

I talked to this kids friend in real life, and he told me that he bet his dad because his parents are concerned and want him to stop gambling. This is a FAKE prop bet.

lol even if the first sentence were accurate, how would that make it a fake prop bet?

What a weird post. Anyway, I'm afraid that was fake news. I haven't seen my dad since ~1994 for starters.

After week 1 I'm exhausted as fuuuuukkkk and I'm pretty sure that betting this at 1:1 was a TERRIBLE bet by me. I'm sure there are people who'd be favorites to do this, but my assessment of my changes personally (without accounting for the first week's results) are now closer to 40%. I really thought I wasn't being optimistic thinking it's a flip, but little did I know.

So far played 53 hours and up around 350 buyins, so I'm on pace to make it but it's been one week and I'm incredibly skeptical about being able to keep this up even for a month let alone 16 weeks. Going to need a lot of coffee and to pray for some rungood and my body/mind to not break down before the end of January.

the people demand giraffes

Giraffes or gtfo Obv also fukyouimaspazztard hands please

Are you not concerned about Winamax not accepting anymore players not living in France as Pokerstars did recently ? It's a very likely possibility in the near future because of the shared liquidities that will happen between France/Italy/Spain/Portugal before the end of the year. (and one of the likely requirement will be that you need to live in one of those countries in order to play on the platform)

Good luck otherwise! I don't understand why people think it will be so hard, that seems totally doable especially if you focus on smaller fields and soft tournaments. Getting back in the grind non-stop mindset might take you a while but I'm sure you'll get there eventually

Winamax recently said on twitter that they have no plans to discontinue their service to German players, and I assume this goes for all the other countries they currently accept as well.

I'll post a giraffe at some point, but currently it's a bit tough (33% of volume on nontracked sites and my main site doesn't get tracked anywhere near correctly). But I think I've played 350-400 MTTs with maybe 2,5-3 ABI so far and won 900+ euros.

No spazz hands, I'm a man on a mission so spazzing out will have to wait

Yeah I'm aware of this, I asked them about their plans earlier too wrt Finland and got the same response as the poster above.

I think if Winamax stopped serving Finns that would very likely be the final straw for my poker career. Something like 50% of my volume is played there, challenge or not, and I find it tough to imagine replacing it with anything else really (at least from a professional perspective). There's an outside chance that if the Mediterranean pool really happens I might move to one of those countries depending on how hard the process would be. If the relocation would take 2 weeks or something I might just do it for the remainder of the challenge, and if the games are epic soft as expected and I win the challenge I might stay for some time and see how it goes. Same if it happens right after the challenge I guess; I could see myself giving it a shot at least. Wouldn't be a bad life to live in Italy or Barcelona or Portugal and grind epic soft **** while enjoying the weather. But IDK gotta find a way to beat this challenge first which is touuuugh.

what are your big scores from the first week chuck