Blogging with CharismA3

Hey guys,

I know it’s been a while since my last update. This March was a very interesting month for me. As some of you may know, I’m not only a poker player but I’ve also been a full time maths student for the past few years. Now I got to the point where I could write my bachelor thesis and once that is handed in I’m done with my bachelor studies for good. I tried to juggle poker and writing the thesis for a while, but then decided to take march off in regards to grinding and focus on my thesis and some other parts of my life that have fallen a little short lately.

1) Sports

I’ve finally started working out again after ~2 years of laziness. Luckily I’ve never had any issues with my weight like you might imagine now, but I’ve been easily fatigued and lacking energy for quite a while now. So my girlfriend recommended a sports club to me where there’s group courses like “workout” and “cardio fit” and so on. 20 or 30 people, 1 trainer and the entire group does the same thing. Might seem childish, but for some reason I’m much more motivated to go there and to push myself than I would be with a regular gym. I’m not sure why, but it works for me. So I’m feeling pretty great and just 2 workouts a week do wonders for your general energy, posture, some muscles and so on. Best move in quite some time to pick this up =)

2) Poker for fun!

I didn’t grind any of my regular games and hours, but after a nice working day I of course still played 2 or 3 tables recreationally
So instead of various forms of hyperturbo SNGs, which are just my best game, I clicked around Stars and looked for other fun games.

I went back into 8game at 10/20 and 20/40 which was very fun. In all these games there’s a ton of interesting spots and since I don’t usually play any Stud8 or 2-7 it’s just fun to have to think about these games again.

I also tossed a full MTT day in there. Knowing what’s what in MTTs and reminding myself of some skills and ranges and moves I almost forgot was just a good idea and I hope it pays off during in May during Scoop. Also, deep runs are fun like nothing else in poker.

Then I discovered ZOOOOOOOM!!! My god I feel that it’s just the best thing since sliced bread. If you haven’t checked it out go ahead, it’s in Beta status, but limits go up to NL100 and PLO100. Instant action and the ability to quickfold hands you don’t want to play make this a great experience, vastly superior to regular cashgames in my mind. If you have 30 minutes it’s almost not worth starting up a cashgame session. With joining waitlists, checking out which tables are worth it and so forth at least at the midstakes it takes at least 15 minutes until you have 12 or 18 tables running. With ZOOM you can actually do 15 minute sessions, no problem. No overobsessive scouting for fishy tables, which I think is one of the worst things going on in poker right now. No hit and running, no 10 people long waitlists, no waiting, just get in, play for however long you feel like, get out. Break at any time you want, for however long you want without the games breaking. No waiting until it’s your big blind when you get back, no getting kicked off tables, no nothing. Just the game, I LOVE IT! Once PLO 200 or 400 gets here I’ll be playing those games a lot when traffic is low at the hyperturbos.

3) My thesis

Oh, yeah… That happened in March and guess what. It’s 98% done

So right now it’s full speed ahead for some big grinding in April. The goal is to get to at least 50k VPPs while being no worse than breakeven at the tables. I feel fresh and motivated like never before, let’s do this!

This weekend was pretty great. Together with my girlfriend we went and visited an old friend of mine from schooltimes. He’s also a pokerplayer on PokerStars where he plays mostly 180 man Sit and Goes. Somehow he has trouble keeping his roll together once he’s playing on his own money, despite being a big winning player at his main-game. So I still stake him every once in a while and we keep in contact. Somehow, Staking is very different for everyone. I personally don’t like being staked that much, since I always feel like I have to explain myself whenever I bust a tournament. Luckily I only need staking for the very largest tournaments, like EPTs or maybe Vegas, so it’s not much of an issue for me. For him however, he plays much more seriously with my money than with his own and always tries his hardest then.

Anyway, I hadn’t seen him since schooltimes and we both wanted to go to the same concert, so we gathered at his place for a few drinks. In hindsight those were a few too many and we drank way too quickly ^^ I regretted that the next morning. Off to the concert, we saw Prinz Pi!

Some of my German readers may know him already, he’s really making a splash in the german music scene lately. I’ve never been much into hip-hop personally, since for a long time it was very “ghetto” here in Germany. The rappers were mostly guys you wouldn’t want to hang out with, talking about gangs, drugs and violence… So I never bothered. But this guy is just the complete opposite. Extremely smart, takes on all sort of different “non-street” topics, more of a poet with beats than everything else. If you want to check him out, I’ve added his video on the right side of my blog! I really dig his music a lot, so the concert was absolutely awesome as well. Small venue, sold out to max capacity and just so much energy in the room! Concerts make me feel alive. We already have quite a few coming up in the next months, including Couer de Pirate, Noel Gallagher, Coldplay, possibly M83 and I’m forgetting a few… And of course a few festivals during summertime!!

Speaking of festivals, I’m trying to figure out what Poker festivals I want to attend this year. There’s so many cool ones coming up and I’d like to attend a few of the smaller ones. EPTs are still a little bit too expensive for my taste (and also pretty tough), so I would only go there to play in the side events. But I’ve looked into Pokerstars Regional Tours a bit, all the UKIPTs, Estrellas, Eureka Poker Tour… and there’s a bunch of great ones. For my own reference I’ve made a small list of everything that I’m currently considering.

EPT MADRID 12th – 17th March 2012
ESTRELLAS Valencia 26th March – 1st April 2012
EPT BERLIN 16th – 21st April 2012
ESTRELLAS Ibiza 14th – 20st May 2012
UKIPT DUBLIN 17th – 21st May 2012
ESTRELLAS Barcelona 15th – 19th August 2012

… and of course Vegas for the WSOP. Personally, I’d love to check out Dublin. I’ve never gone there and it seems like a cool place to visit. I usually try to plan my live-events in a way that I get to travel to fun places that I haven’t been to, so Dublin sounds great in that regard. So does Ibiza of course, but there’s a bit of a scheduling conflict. With EPT Madrid I’m not 100% sold since the casino is 45minutes by shuttle bus from central Madrid, so I’d mostly likely not go there. Valencia is such a beautiful place that I really would like to make it work out as well. And for Berlin I can always just go for a few days and play in some side-events. That’s almost a given. Let me know what you guys think of the different venues, any recommendations are appreciated

… hands like that start to happen.

I’ve started playing a few hyperturbo HUs in the last days and it’s been very fun so far! This particular opponent was very agressive and ultimately got the best of me, but it was quite the battle! These are a very enjoyable change of pace for me and I’m sure I’ll play a more of them in the next days, especially when action is low in my maingame.

Wow, a lot has been going on lately. First of all the TCOOP has just ended and while I’m not much of an MTT player it’s been a fantastic tournament series in my opinion! I played 25 out of the 50 events, anything from a $22 Draw tourney to the $2100 Highroller and I had a blast. To be honest, I’ve never had the mental endurance to play great for 12-15 hours in the WCOOP and  SCOOP events. And I’ve historically been a much better player with the short stack than with a very deep one anyway. So this series has had my name written all over it (in my mind at least ^^) and it did not disappoint!  Some of the days I didn’t even plan on playing beforehand, but just jumped into whatever was next. It’s so very comfortable to be able to do that and to know it’s never going to take longer than 4 or 5 hours max. I just love the series, for me this could happen every other month.

I even went deep in a few events, making it to 150th/17000 in the $5.50+Rebuys where I was very much in control until I went carddead for a while and shoved from the SB with with around 10 Big Blinds, got called by and the flop left me drawing almost dead… Oh well.

Event 46, a $215 NL went even better. This was the replacement for the warmup and I just steadily made chips. Always on the right end of AK vs AQ and AQ vs KQ, never in danger of losing my stack until with 99 players left I get TT, one guy has me covered and I run into QQ.. Tough luck. For some reason that felt like a tournament I could have won.

I barely made the money in the mainevent and then I just felt like I had to try my luck in the $215 hyperturbo, the very last event. I won a few flips and never got it in too bad until we wound up on the bubble. This structure was very, very quick and after a bunch of people stalled for basically two levels I was left with a superlow stack and got it in with vs …
I was mentally packing my bags already and the board came … oh well…. …there is hope… BINK!  on the river and I was back in the game!

Stacks were very shallow of course, so almost all play happened before the flop. Someone busts out, my table breaks and who do I find to my left on the new table? The one and only Isildur1! I’ve been a fan of him forever and even without playing any pots with him it did feel kinda cool to go up against one of your idols! With 36 players left and me being ~8th in chips I finally got . 15 big blinds deep, from the cutoff with very big antes and only one guy who covers me that’s an automatic shove I’m very happy about… Until the one guy that covers me finds and I go from 8/36 right to the rails… oh well.

Lots of excitement for sure and with those scores I bascially broke even for the series. Usually with MTT series you’re either down a medium amount or sometimes up huge, so breaking even is already pretty nice overall, but of course once you go deep you kinda want to win the whole thing. But I’m sure I’ll get my next chance soon. This is already pretty long so I’ll stop the post right here and write another entry soon! Stay tuned! Any comments or suggestions you have are always welcome!