Save for playing a measly 11k hands in April and absolutely nothing in May, this year has gone pretty much as planned.  I got a decent number of hands in late winter/earlier spring, and the summer’s been a bit of a hindrance to my 400k hands goal, but I’m almost on pace.  I didn’t expect to actually play 200k hands by the end of June, saving most of the grinding for late summer to the end of the year.  Most of which was due to my expectation of being out of town and up in cottage country for much of the summer, something I hadn’t done in years.  I think I went once last year, which is just a complete waste of summer.

Anyway, despite being pretty freaking busy, I feel pretty confident of achieving my goal of 400k hands this year.  If you remember my resolution for 2010, it was to play all 400k before 2011 hit me, and if I failed, I’d go ahead and reapply myself to electrical schooling and a job placement after I passed.  My goal was a bit silly in that:

a) classes start in September IIRC, so waiting until January 2011 to see if I reached my goal would just be retarded.  If I come up short, I wait 9 months for the next wave of electrical courses?

b) I still don’t have my G1 license, which is the first of two steps to getting your full G2 driver’s license (which happens to be a requirement for getting a job with nearly every electrical company in Toronto).  It takes a minimum of 8 months, with driver’s Ed., to go from G1 to G2.  Again, bad time management on my part.

Despite all this, I think I’m going to be taking the courses and pursuing at least a start in an electrical career.

Poker’s been getting increasingly more profitable for me, namely due to my rakeback deals and increased volume (oh, raping AIEV in the butt helps too), but even so my future with the game is uncertain.  I very much so have my head in the clouds when it comes to the updates on the UIGEA and bill-passing and all that stuff, but it’s clear that there’s about a %99 certainty that electrical work will be in high demand in 5 years, and that profitability in poker is going to be somewhere below that.

Not that you’re interested in any of this, but my plan for the near future is:

1. Buy new bike
2. Take new bike on 12km ride to DriveTest centre to get G1
3. Take Driver’s Ed. course to shorten time frame between G1 and G2
4. Grind, grind, grind
5. Grind some more
6. Enjoy the rest of the summer and the beautiful cottage country
7. Look into electrical courses at George Brown and plan my application and consequent apprenticeship

Enough boring text…results time.  I’m up about 25k with rakeback on the year, and here’s last month’s boomswitch:

In my last post I mentioned I was on pace for nearly 60k hands and since then unfortunately I’ve slacked off enough only to have hit 50k hands total.  This is, however, my highest total yet and given I have had to take about an average of about two hours out of every day for family issues, and the fact that this past weekend I was at a cottage for a good three days, I feel pretty damn good.

I kicked the month off with nearly a $2k drop which was almost entirely due to all in EV.  I can’t count on two hands the number of times I whimpered “I can’t beat this game anymore” to myself and to my girlfriend.  Nevertheless, I kept grinding and ended up the month at half my expectation, but still up $2,200 (rakeback included, which accounts for like $1,400 of that).  Feels pretty good, especially considering my last real winning month was back in January.  And this is all part of the plan – even if I run like shit, I’ll be playing enough hands that makes the worst of months break even, the break-even months winners, and the winners bigger winners.

One last thing that has me feeling pretty good right now is a DB analysis with MPethybridge I finished yesterday.  He’s well-known enough that I don’t really have to worry about this, but he’s the type of coach that you don’t want others to know about because he’s so effective.  I bought a 4-hour DB analysis package from him and he pinpointed a bunch of my leaks, as well as teaching me about some filters I didn’t know about.  Some of the leaks I already had suspicions about, others I was absolutely clueless to.  Many of which are also skewed by my general spew which makes them a bit harder to fix, but my tilt is getting better and better as I play more.  He’s also a super nice and funny guy who donates any payments done through paypal to an ailing friend of his which I thought was pretty cool.  I think he’d be a MONSTER help for micro-100nl regs, and clearly helped this 200nl reg get myself into shape.

So for the first time in a while, I can actually envision myself having a ~$5,000 month without too much sweat.  Time to get to work…

A week or so ago I was feeling frustrated from running bad and feeling as though I wasn’t putting in enough work, then after looking at my actual volume rather than my bottom line, I realized I was on pace for another 40k+ hand month.  Halfway into the month and I’ve played more than 30k hands, am on pace for at least 50k on the month, maybe even 60k – blowing past my previous record for number of hands played.

I was still a bit frustrated though.  I’m running well under EV (not that it matters, but 1 or 2 ptbb actual vs 4ptbb expected), and my frustration is showing at the table.  One specific hand that comes to mind is 3betting 6Ts in the SB to a high fold-vs-3bet player, and shoving over the BB’s cold 4bet after leveling myself into aggromania.  That’s about the worst I’ve done at the tables though, and only a few times at that.  The rest has been in ‘real life’ – one broken keyboard, two sore hands from slamming my desk, and some sore biceps from doing frustration-chinups (beating my previous record and pulling 13 – maybe tilt’s not so bad afterall???).

I think I’m dealing with the run-bad surprisingly well though aside from that, and am feeling very confident moving into the second half of the month.  I’ll play well over 40k hands, will most likely end up with a mediocre month, but will still pay my rent twice or three times over including rakeback, and I’ll have a sense of accomplishment – pushing through the muck knowing that even if I break even, the RB will pay for my expenses.

Some discussion with Fredrik, some hard work away from the table, and motivation at the table all make everything seem more doable.  I guess if I were playing my best game and still losing it’d be a whole lot more hopeless than knowing I have holes to plug and work to do, and more importantly, more money to make.

I mentioned it before and I’ll say it again – assuming it’s from runbad and not tilt, breakeven and losing stretches are actually a good thing.  You can think of them as a test of your persistence and drive.  In other words, it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up.

Enough cheese for one post – I’m off to bed so I can wake up early, get through this nasty pileup of dishes, and get to work studying and grinding more.

Deb and I moved into our new loft back on the 2nd of the month, and up until a few days ago I had no internet – that is if you don’t count my phone’s handicapped connection.  No internet means no poker, no browsing the internet, no gaming, no fun.  The move itself was pretty smooth even though neither of us have driving licenses (good friends are key!), and we’ve already settled in pretty well, but the lack of internet was driving us both nuts.

The loft is otherwise really really great.  It’s a little pricey and about 850 square feet – not huge, but large enough, and actually has it’s own private entrance on ground floor which is really handy and pretty unique for a loft building.  It’s about 3 minutes from the grocery store, right off Queen Street (One of Toronto’s more interesting, lined with restaurants, pubs, computer stores, art galleries, etc), I have a liquor store almost directly across the street from me, and a beer literally a block away.  Unfortunately I don’t have a private walking spot for my somewhat aggressive dog, but that’s forced me to go on long runs with him which is good for both of us.

My new PC, which I built myself, has yet to be fully functional since I finished putting it together.  I can physically connect parts which are clearly only meant to connect to certain other parts, but when it comes to the inner workings of the BIOS, registry, code and all that bunk, my only knowledge comes from reading material online, so I’m a bit lost.  I was getting blue screen crashes and errors, weird bugginess at seemingly random times, then some days it would work fine all day with heavy usage (read: gaming all day).  With help from techsupportforum.com (GREAT free site) , it turns out I had some driver problems and defective ram.  I’m going to go buy some new ram and RMA my old ram so by the time the replacement comes in the PC will already be in use full-time and I’ll be able to upgrade from 4gb to 8gb.

Otherwise, the rig is a monster.  I built it with the suggestions of PCMech.com, and for the first few days it actually worked great, without any problems.  It runs any current game at maxed out settings (barring games that are buggy in themselves, like Assassin’s Creed 2, which I think often doesn’t let you max out settings without crashing to desktop), and I got a nice shiny new quad-core i7 processor which will be a beast for multitasking and video editing and rendering.  Oh, poker will be a breeze on it too, I guess.

It came out to short of $1,800 CDN with these parts:

Windows 7 home premium 64-bit OEM version
Intel i7-860 cpu
Diamond ATI 5870 video card
Asus p7p55d motherboard
Corsair 550w power supply
2x2gb corsair 1333 ddr3 ram
Intel 80gb solid-state drive
Western Digital black caviar 500gb hard disk drive
Coolermaster CM 690 II Advanced case

What will become of my current/soon to be ‘old’ PC?  Maybe I’ll save that for another post.

Speaking of poker…with StoxPoker getting absorbed by Cardrunners, and my move happening at the exact same time, some of you might have noticed I didn’t get transferred with the other coaches, and haven’t applied to any other site either.  I opted out of taking part in the suggested ‘re-application process’ at CR (ie they weren’t completely satisfied with my ratings and wanted to reevaluate me); for one, the move was keeping me busy and disconnected from the internet, and second, I actually had doubts about what I was doing with poker regardless of the move.  I’d been doing some private coaching which hadn’t been going as good as I’d hoped, I was unorganized as hell, and I was playing poker a lot less, so my confidence in joining a new site with the likes of Taylor Caby and other big names wasn’t exactly through the roof.

I think what I’ll do is get back on my grind, feel things out, and get back to coaching when I feel confident again – hopefully within a week or two.  I’m still not sure if I’ll be applying to any training site.  I’ve also thought about getting coached again myself, but with my new monthly costs, lack of playing for about a month, and uncertainty with exactly how organized and dedicated I’ll be, I think I’ll have to wait on that until I’m fully settled in and have played again for a good month.

That said, I’m at home right now doing nothing – mostly because I’m on the tail end of a vicious throat infection and head cold that’s prevented me from being in a strong enough mental state to play.  That’s my excuse anyway…

Oh, and April results?  Don’t ask me about April…I dropped about 2.5k in my first session of the month and slowly crept myself back up to an ‘acceptable’ level of loss for the month, with pitiful volume.  I damn near quit last month – spring was in the air, there was plenty else to do and actually have fun doing it…now that the costs of the initial move, new PC and other stuff have crept up to me I kind of have to start working again.  Time to make up for lost time in April, I guess.

I’ve definitely been busy lately, but hardly enough not to be playing at least 1k hands per day.  The apartment hunt goes pretty well, and with the weather recently reaching upwards of 25C (77F), I can’t help but have some lazy, beer-guzzling porchmonkey days.

My typical monthly goals for this year have simply been to play my best and log >33k hands, but I may set a goal for a month where I play 5k hands per day.  Scratch that, I WILL play 5k hands per day for at least one month this year.  Most likely when this apartment business settles down.

Speaking of which, Deb and I recently got a hold of the same people who didn’t show up for our last viewing; I emailed them expressing just how badly I wanted a place similar to what they were advertising, and to my delight they said they had one lot available for May 1st.  I called them up and booked a viewing, and after seeing it we’re %100 set on getting the place.  The floorplan is shaped like a big 850 sq ft “L”, with a bed loft in the big corner, and another loft bed opposite of that.  It includes all the classic loft stuff (exposed brick and beams, rafters and pipes, warehouse feel), new kitchen with fridge and stove, a nice new washroom, and more space than we can manage.  It even has it’s own entrance directly out the ground level, so we’re actually isolated from the rest of the building.  I think it used to be the main office for the building or something.  It’s $1550 all inclusive which isn’t too bad, and the location is perfect; right by grocery stores and Queen St. (Toronto’s downtown street).

Anyway, the place is as close to perfect as we can find, and I’m set on locking it down.  I have to hand in my application today, express to them once more how badly I want the place, maybe view it once more (and definitely post pictures of it), then hope for the best.  Wish me luck!

I’ve had my current rig since some time in 2007, which I built myself with the help of PCMech.com, a great tech site which started as a ‘build your own pc’ site.  My specs:

• Asus P5B motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor
• EVGA 8800GTS video card
• 2GB ram, unsuccessfully upgraded to 4gb later
• 320GB 7200-rpm hard drive
• Later installed another HDD, 500GB
• etc

At the time the PC was quite a beast.  It was a nice upgrade from my Dell dimension 3000.  I could actually play games, poker was a breeze, and it’s been fine up until recently.  It started lagging, crashing, and generally feeling like it was dying.

I read up a bit, talked to some people, and had it not been for my recent apartment hunt (which, since I’m a ‘lowly’ professional gambler, requires more than first and last month’s rent up front), I would have bought an entirely new PC – and still might do so in the future.  Instead, I decided to make one very important upgrade which has sped up my PC tremendously: installing a Solid State Drive.

During the install I found that my Windows XP CD was bunk, so I had to get a new one to install my operating system on the SSD with.  Instead of getting ol’ XP again, I decided to go for Windows 7, and my oh my has the combination of that and the SSD sped things up.  Loading my DB and running filters hasn’t seen any groundbreaking changes in speed, but other tasks have.  It used to take me about 5 minutes to restart my PC – now?  About 20 seconds.  Running virus scans and other stuff has skyrocketed in speed too.

The cool thing is if I do decide to get a new PC, I can actually just unplug my SSD from my current rig, reset the old drives so that they run XP like they used to (and likely use that PC for music/movies), then use my SSD as my boot drive for the new rig.

So if you’re looking for a quick boost to your poker PC, look no further than an SSD for your primary drive (ie put your OS on it!  Also don’t forget postgres/HEM!).  Depending on the size of the drive it can get pretty pricey – I got a 120gb for ~$500, and I don’t think going under 80gb ($300) is wise.  Still, it’s better than dropping $1500 for an entirely new system.  Something I’m still thinking about, but again, that won’t come until after I’ve successfully moved into a new apartment, covered all my first/last/utilities/other costs.

(Thanks to Stu Ungar from cardschat/UCP for all the help setting this up!)

————

Speaking of which, the apartment hunt is a pain in the ass.  I initially had a place lined up which was literally right around the corner.  The landlord didn’t exactly take to my being a poker player, and I have a feeling it was part of the reason why he let someone else get the flat.  That one was 900 sq ft for $1200/month, utilities included.

I was super depressed after I called him up and was rejected, but kept looking on craigslist and other sites.  It turns out there are actually quite a few other loft spaces in the city that aren’t tacky condos.  Problem is they’re not all that close to me.

My girlfriend found a place and actually got a viewing set up…

…only to find after waiting for 45 mins on Saturday afternoon for the super, that she’d left a message the night before (which we’d missed of course) on our phone saying that place had also been rented.

Fuck!

Fuckedy fuck fuck!

So we keep looking, and right now we actually found another flat in the same building (no pics as of yet), and another one:

This one’s less of a loft and more of a converted garage or something, but all in all it’s pretty great.  It looks like it has some pretty big sq footage, includes fridge/stove/washer/dryer, is isolated from other apartments (we don’t have to be quiet!), and has a huge back deck!

The downsides to this place are that it’s pricier ($1650 w/o utilities, which is another $100-200), it doesn’t have many windows, and it’s less lofty, ie I can’t just rig a punching back to the rafters, tie up some cool chinese lanterns, or have a loft bed for that matter.  It looks more like an apartment.

I’m gonna see it this week, and haven’t heard back about the other flat yet, but it looks like I’ll likely be living in a nice place for the summer, and that means spending more money, but also getting in TONS of hands because I’ll actually have some pressure nipping me in the ass!

I got word of Chase’s site, RakeTakers.com, through a poker friend.  Since then I’ve made thousands of dollars in rakeback through him at various sites, at times turning a potential losing month into a decent winner.  He uses a damn good RB engine on his site that provides daily updates, cashouts as often as you want (even several times daily if you so choose), and a really clean layout that makes finding monthly totals by site really easy to find.

When I first heard of him I wanted to move off of PokerStars, but I couldn’t move money to a lot of sites due to restrictions from my Canadian bank.  Chase offered to move my bankroll for me.  I was very cautious at first – who wants to send first to someone across the world who they’ve never met?  So I carefully moved $500 a few times, then $1000, all quickly and successfully transferred.  Eventually I just moved the remaining several thousand of my roll because I really felt he was honest, and got my money back to me in no time.  He’s said before to me that he has tons of money transferring references at 2plus2, but I never even bothered to ask for them – if you sign up at his site and need money moved, I have no doubt he would provide these for you if you asked.  Not sure if he still does transfers anymore (I now move my money via moneybookers), but I just thought that was worth sharing.

I can’t say enough about this guy and his business and just really wanted to get a post in about him at one point or another – if you’re looking for rakeback, this guy is your answer.  And I know what you’re thinking – no, he hasn’t paid me to make this post; in the future I may choose to activate the referrals (%1-2 of your rakeback) I would get from you guys visiting his site via my links, but right now it’s not something I’m really interested in.  $5/month from a micro player I’ve referred who’s struggling for every dollar isn’t something I need.

Enjoy!

It seems as though the people behind StoxPoker have decided the recent controversy surrounding the company was enough to warrant giving the company up.  If everything goes as planned, StoxPoker.com will be merged with current business partner CardRunners by May 1st this year.

First, Jason Ho, the coach who just seemed to have something fishy going on was outed by his students.  He ran some very shady coaching programs in which he apparently belittled and berated his students, eventually scamming them for thousands in a staking scheme.  I made a post about it because several people came out with first-hand experience of Jason ripping them off.  The evidence was aplenty.

More recently the founder of StoxPoker, Nick “StoxTrader” Grudzien, was accused of multiaccounting, soft play/collusion, and shortstacking (hardly anything illegal, or even accusation-worthy, mostly just the flame-war-starters doing their job).  From what I’ve read, Nick actually admitted to multiaccounting and shortstacking, but has denied colluding or cheating in any way.  I shied away from making any posts about it simply because I wasn’t as sure about the facts as I was with the Jason Ho incident, and I’m still not.  Nick seems set on keeping his reasons for multiaccounting private, but all that does is leave the situation open-ended for those against Stox. If it were for a truly good reason (I really can’t think of one), then he’d out himself to save the integrity of his company.  In the end, I assume Mr. Grudzien found all the accusations and controversy surrounding him and the company too much to handle, and resigned as the president/owner/ceo/whatever of stoxpoker.

Nick "StoxTrader" Grudzien

A few days later, I start getting some emails that StoxPoker is going to merge with CardRunners, and here we are: waiting to pull the plug.

So what does this all mean for the company and it’s subscribers?

• StoxPoker subscribers’ accounts will apparently be transferred over or refunded by request
• An undetermined number of the videos from stoxpoker’s library will be moved to cardrunners
• An undetermined number of coaches from stoxpoker will be moving to cardrunners (as of right now I’m not sure I will be)
• It is still unsure how TrulyFreePokerTraining will function after the merger
• StoxPoker’s forums will be moved to Cardrunner’s site, which in turn will undergo an overhaul by May 1st
• This sucks

To me, StoxPoker was always the smallest of the big four training sites (Cardrunners, DeucesCracked, Leggo, StoxPoker), and with that brought a smaller, tighter community.  There were some seriously great people, videos, discussions and general atmosphere to the place, and I’m sad to see it go.  Videos from Hunter Bick, Leatherass, Stoshilman, Cottonseed, Ed Miller, James Davis, QTip and Stoxtrader himself helped me turn from a FR nit to a thinking 6max aggro, propelled my learning curve and helped me move from 25nl full ring all the way to small/mid-stakes consistency.

It’s sad to see it all go.  Just an unfortunate series of events that really tarnished StoxPoker’s image, and now it’s gone.

So long Stox, and thanks for all the fish.

You can probably guess all this doesn’t exactly fall in line with full-time grinding.

I’ve been tossing ideas back and forth, from renting out a shared office space for a dedicated poker workspace to renting out my own apartment.  The latter has been something that could work out perfectly given the place I want to move into is right around the corner, and as such I could easily make it back home every day for the ‘Oma time’ and still have my own private workspace.  The flat is more of a warehouse/loft space than an apartment or a condo.  It’s got a big open-space concept with exposed beams and pipes, which makes for a really cool atmosphere.  It’s also only 1200/month, utilities included.  The problem here lies in the fact that I already revealed to the landlord that my occupation involves gambling, and as we all know, people who aren’t knee-deep in the industry can have a completely different perception of the game as a career.  I’d say anyone who is over 40 years old tends to look down on it, associating it with gambling, often thinking of the job as a back-alley card room hustling bid rather than an as a relatively consistent investment.

So if I’m getting the apartment, it means coughing up more than first and last month’s rent.  Likely first and last two months.  There’s just no way I’ll get the apartment for the normal price instead of another tenant with job history for the past 3 years.  Money talks, I guess.

Cool, I’ve got more than enough banked, have a nice consistent monthly earn coming in, as well as rakeback and my stoxpoker job to pad my earnings, right?

Cue downswing.  Cue unexpected personal life happenings with dollar-costly consequences.  Cue other personal woes that need not be shared with the general public.

I had a couple of very depressing days there involving my second-worst daily total ever (worst in buyins, not that that matters, but whatever) as well as a brutal follow-up day.  In retrospect I’m not in any deep trouble or anything, and have come out of this with a clear head and some serious motivation.

I can’t remember who said it, but you can look at a downswing as an opportunity rather than a disaster.  These are the trying times that challenge our tilt-control, our discipline, our drive.  What can I do about those two brutal days now?  Nothing!  I can only look forward, and make the best decisions I possibly can in every single hand.  All ‘swings’ are relative.  I’m down $X since 5 days ago, but I’m up a fortune since diving into rings back in early ’08.  This little swing will be but a tiny blip in my overall progress graph.

————

Clearly the poker guru who said it’s better to play shorter days when you’re losing and longer days when you’re winning was so far past conquering tilt that he forgot how much easier said than done it is.  When I’m stuck more than say 5 buyins, I either play until I’m back in the black, or until I’m so far past that ’tilt threshold’ that it takes a serious test of discipline just to pry myself off my PC.  Flipping that on it’s head, when I log a winning day in the middle of a downswing, I quit ASAP.  I remember former stox coach Hunter Bick said in one of his videos, “I don’t care how theoretically incorrect it is, but when I’m on a downswing and I have one winning day, I just quit to log it.  I need that boost in my confidence”.  (Loosely quoted of course).

I’ve played more hands/day this month than ever before and am easily on pace for 40k hands, potentially 60k (I know, I’m no Leatherass).  I guess on one hand it’s actually a consequence of me playing too many hours trying to get unstuck, but on the other hand it’s given me the experience of playing so many hands that I can now get the feeling for how tough it is to plug 40-60k hands in a month.  It’s given me so much motivation that I’m thinking, once the dust settles and I’ve actually moved into my apartment, that I might attempt a prop bet for 70-100k hands with certain winnings restrictions in the future.  I figure a low-ish profile bet of 2-3k from me with 2:1-5:1 odds against, depending on the volume and winnings, could yield a really great result even if I come up short.

(Can you tell which two days I was stuck?)

————

In my tilt-induced panicked I withdrew some static funds I had sitting on PokerStars, but while looking at my cashier I realized I still had damn-near $1,000 in FPPs sitting around.  I looked around their FPP store to see what I could buy, and realized I was <10k fpps short of a $1,000 gift card for FutureShop (electronics store for you outside Canada).  So I canceled my withdraw and decided the next week I’ll grind out the rest of those FPPs to get myself the giftcard, invest a few hundred dollars more, and I’ll be buying myself a new PC dedicated to poker.  I’ll have to take a look around forums to see what the standard is these days, but I may be looking at some solid-state drives.  If you have any suggestions please let me know.

————

Oh, by the way my next stox video is with an old friend and new student, Jay (aka Jagsti).  Most of my readers should know him from cardschat and uncontested.  The coaching’s been going real well with him and I think the video turned out pretty well.  All the best to you Jay, here’s to turning your game around and getting you to crushing the small stakes

————

I’ll be posting some pics of the new apartment and the PC when I finally get it in the future.  Less block-text, more eye-candy, I promise

Alex Huang has asked me along with the rest of the stox coaching roster to post more frequently in the blog section of the site, so from now on I’ll be cross-posting most of my entries at both ChuckTs.com and StoxPoker.com.

If you’re interested, here are some recent posts of interest:

Aggression, equity and double barreling

Foundational strategy: Why?

January in review

Bittersweet February

————

I have a big year ahead of me which includes a goal of playing a minimum of 400-500k hands – more than I’ve ever logged in any of my sadly motivationally-challenged past years of grinding.  If you’re interested, stay tuned as I’ll be posting at least once a week, sometimes more.

Oh, I’ve also had several people ask me about coaching, and unfortunately right now I’m not accepting new students.  I will be coaching players up to 100nl for reasonable rates in the future; if you’re interested you can get a hold of me here.