Bet update 02/03

I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you another quickie (another reason you can call me Joejoe 'quicker than the speed of light' Whittaker...)

It's been a really good 5 days (even though I've only actually played for four), I'm currently at $726 and feeling very good about having this bad boy done by the end of March. I've played about 1036 sngs in that time and I'm not really feeling the burnout yet; perhaps because I've only had one losing day. I suspect that the real test of character will come in when I have a few losing days in a row.

I've played 3 London Poker masters events, the £300 NL, £200 NL and £100 HORSE, not cashing in any of them. I was pretty happy with my play in all 3, except my exit hand from the £300 in which I had completely misread the situation and tried to squeeze in a spot where I had much less fold equity than I thought.

Bet update;
Sngs played; 1036
Roll; 726.26
Profit; 526.26

Quick update

Okie dokie, it's been tiring and frustrating but things have started to fall into place (I hope).

Sngs played; 573
Account balance; 265.61

59.6 buyins up from 573 sngs, comes to about 9.71 roi which is obviously well below expectation, I have started to hit a bit of a boomswitch after 2 days of breaking even. Hopefully I won't be at this level for more than 4/5 more days of grinding. I feel that the land of the 2/180 will be a utopia.



Hopefully I'll get a good 250 in tomorrow before playing the £300 on Saturday.

Love you all and good luck to me xoxo

Time to get my grind on

Short blog post coming up. I've decided that Feb was a complete shambles on my part in terms of volume. I'm at 3300 VPP with little hope of getting to 7500 before the end of the month. So I've decided on a decent punishment/motivational challenge that certainly fits the crime. I've withdrawn all but $200 from my stars account and I'm going to try and Boku it up to $10k. I'm not planning on doing this as a prop bet (although if anyone wants to put any money on this then I'd be glad to take up to $5k's worth of action). If I manage to keep myself busy and determined I should be at 10k about a month from tomorrow 24th March.

The kicker for me is that aside from the 4 live tournaments at the London Poker masters which I've already committed myself to, I shan't be playing any other form of poker until this is completed. If I do, I'm going to instantly ship $1k to charity.

Here's a screenshot of my cashier now with the bankroll guidelines I've set myself. I'm going to be starting tomorrow so good luck me.

I'm a lazy lazy man

Good afternoon, I'm joejoe, the guy that pretends to blog here on a weekly basis.

If it makes any difference, I've been really lazy in every aspect of my life this month, let alone blogging. I'm currently sitting at 2100 VPPs for the month, which means if I want to maintain Supernova then I'll have to put a major volume push through next week. I really don't feel like it, but I think future Joe will be really mad if I undo all the good work I did last year and forfeit a lot of money in rakeback just because i'm feeling lazy now.

Poker is going pretty well in general since we last spoke, I won the £300 freeze at the international for £7k, then came 2nd in the £100 the week after for £1500 and on Wednesday came 5th in the new £100 for £500. Cash has been so so, I won about 1k on Wednesday before and after the tourney, but had a nightmare -2k session Monday.

I was taking an online pummelling at the start of the month; which is obviously part of the reason I was avoiding playing. I didn't cash in a 12/180 in about 3 sessions (which is about 150 $12s, 20 $36s and 5 $60s) but luckily on monday I managed to win and come 2nd in two $36s to reverse most of that bad run.

Life has been very good away from poker, have been going out a lot and just chilling when not playing. I imagine that I'll probably make it up to Cambridge sometime in March to party on down.

Currently just browsing Vegas flights for summer, I'll probably book all that jazz soon because the prices seem to be going up a lot.

loves and hugs xx

Can't grind. Won't Grind

I think I made one fatal error in my last blog post about how I'm going to be an amazing SNG and MTT grinder this year. I failed to take into account that the very reason I am who I am is because I am in the front running for the laziest man in the world competition. At about the 2 week mark I've played about 5 days, although to be fair I've put in a lot of volume those days and am sitting at about 5500 VPP (which is on pace with my targets). I think of up somewhere in the region of $2k, although it's hard to break down properly at the moment because I played some cash game and MTT sessions to help mix it up.

Speaking of cash sessions I just returned from a nightmare of a cash session live, dropped £2k at £1/3 9max. I'm actually fairly mad at myself for how badly I played, it wasn't so much that I was tilting out of my mind (which I used to do and learned to either remedy it or quit the game), but because I was at a table of droolers I thought I'd be the durrrr-esq big man, playing every hand, finding 3bet and river raises that really didn't merit it, and got myself into some really stupid spots. I suppose I've got to learn that the only way you can beat 9max holdem is by playing somewhere close to 10/8; which is obviously really boring.

The flip side is that after the game broke, 6 of us played the most epic game of Legs I've ever been a part of. We had a £1 running ante and the biggest game ended with a £78 pot. It really cheered my spirits up despite being stuck £300-500 for most of the game, just because of the sheer enjoyment of the awesome game. For those of you who don't know the game (which I'd expect would be just about everyone) I'm going to try and get Simon H to write an official Wiki for the rules, because it's without a doubt the best gambling game i've ever seen.

Not too much non-pokering news this week, except the fact that I'm really missing going out and having the amazing times I had in December. If you guys could all finish your exams quicker, that'd be dandy.

Loves and hugs xxx

I love all of you very much

I should start off by apologising yet again for being such a terrible blogger, I do appreciate that you guys take an active interest in what I do and I shall try and post more (and hopefully more interesting things).

The first and most important thing I should get into is that I made the top 200 of the Pokerstars December tournament leader board, meaning I won a seat into a very juicy freeroll with 5, 3 and 2 stamp passports as top three prizes (as well as cash prizes for 4-18 as well). For the non poker literate of you (and the cash game players), a Passport is essentially entry to the number of Pokerstars sponsored live tournaments that the 'stamp' is equivalent to. A 5 stamp is worth roughly 70k, a 3 stamp 42k and a 2 stamp 28k. I suppose the hard part is already done, as December was a very sick grind. Now all I need to do is win a tournament with 200 of the best players in the world, just looking at the Lobby with all the players registered, its choc-a-block with superstars (and D1rtyR1v3r lol). I suppose I should also give a huge shout out and well done to Aprilsfool, who at the start of 2009 I was grinding Hyper Turbos with, who put in a monster grind in the second half of the year to win the Yearly TLB and take down a 6 Stamp for himself. Well done kiddo, you're a sicko.

Part of the reason I've been such a terrible blogger is that my birthday, Christmas and New years were 11 days apart, so aside from the insane grind I spent a long time getting heavily intoxicated. I really enjoyed my birthday celebrations in the bridge with all of my lovely friends, followed by a quiet family Christmas in Watford, then an awesome night out with Lizzie in Brighton with her uni friends. Part of the beginnings of the new year is remembering how awesome you have it, and how much you complain about everything because you have a stressful job. This holiday period I really remembered how amazing my friends and family are, and how nothing would really be worth it without them.

To the future! The short term goals are mostly poker related. I've set myself the task of 10k VPP/month for every month this year, which is fairly easy if I dedicate myself. In fact, Ken and I have a $500 failure-to-grind penalty for each month, so I'll have to make sure I'm as dedicated as I know I can be. I've started off January by playing MTT Sit and Goes, mostly the $12/180 mans and whatever $36/180s that run. Two days in and the grind is firmly on, and I'm actually enjoying myself (something must be wrong?!) My current stats look something like this;

$12/180s; 338
$38/180s; 35
$60/90s; 2
About 25 MTTs ranging from $11 to $55

net; +$1045
2349.41 VPPs
8222.93 FPPs

All very pleasing so far, but I'll admit that I did win a $36/180 about an hour ago for $1700, so my stats would look much more soul-crushing without that. My other goal is Vegas related, which I'm about 90% sure I'm going to do. All I need to do now is take the plunge and actually buy the plane ticket.

My non poker goals seem to be going well too. Firstly, I want to swim 3 times a week. Since I've swum both yesterday and today, I'm one day away from freerolling the rest of the week. I'm not sure how long this will last, but we can't keep all our resolutions can we? The second is to be up and awake by 11AM each day. I've decided to keep this one quite lax, since I should probably be allowed a lay-in if I go deep in a tournament, or stay up to watch the playoffs that start on Saturday (which I am STOKED about by the way).

Aside from being a boring online geek, I managed to sample some fine live poker already, road tripping up to Nottingham on Saturday/Sunday for Dusk Till Dawn's monthly £300 with Dave, Phil, Ric and Luc. Although I only lasted until level 3 of the tournament, I had a few decent cash game sessions and ended a small winner for the weekend (although I did remember how much I hate full ring cash holdem). I do really love the venue and will certainly be heading up next month for the same tournament, hopefully it can sort out it's financial problems and stay afloat because it really is the center of live poker in the UK.

Sorry for the long ramble this week, but I had a lot to say.

Loves and hugs xxx

Getting my December grind on

Ah! Another weekend of tournament poker in the books and shock horror, I somehow booked a winner winning both the $22 6max (for $2k) and the $27.50 360 cap (for 1.7k). Obviously not the big scores I'm looking for, but it certainly feels good to win two tourneys. I also made another deep run in the million last night, eventually finishing 250th or something. I'm afraid there's no interested hand history for this one, simply lost AK to QQ for all of the cheese. Despite 2 deep runs in majors in consecutive weeks, I'm brimming with confidence and feel that the big score is just around the corner.

For those of you who are not poker players, or just not tournament players, Stars is doing a really sick promotion for the December Tournament Leader Board (http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/passport/december/?utm_id=6), which in a nutshell means that if you finish in the top200 at the end of the month, you win a ticket to freeroll with 3 Stars Passports and cash prizes are up for grabs. I currently am sitting in 236th place with 3633 points. I figure if I max out on 12/180s for the rest of the month I should be close to a lock for top 200, but just to make sure, i'm going to play a ton of big field tournaments over the next few weeks just in case. Don't be surprised to see me playing a load of $1 freezeouts!

I suppose that's about it, I'd like to give a very loving shout out to Marty who is celebrating his 21st in Tally today, I wish I could be there to get wrecked with you sir. As for my birthday, obviously anyone who is around Cambridge next Monday is more than welcome to join, just hit me up on facebook/aim/skype for details.

Love you all

xx