Later January. Hello February

Blah. Pretty much broke even since my last post. Days where I felt I should have been finishing up 1k or 2k, I was only making a few hundo, then today I dropped a grand or something. It's just how shit goes sometimes. I was down 3k at the halfway point of the month, so making 10k since then to finish ahead 7k I will consider a success. It kinda hurt me with being so lazy with my volume the first week and a half. I was trying to make up for it the last week, and prob played more than I really wanted. I could feel myself getting burnt out and tilty. I ended up playing 525 games, I guess about avg for my standards. I wouldn't mind getting that a little closer to 600 in the coming months however.

I ended up with about 4.6k profit from HU. It helped to get 2.8k from rakeback/bonuses. Had a nice bonus from FT, plus ran good in the Sunday Mil Qualifiers.

I played about a 50/50 split between the 230/345. I ran bad in the 345 which was a big reason for the slightly down month. I only banked a $2 avg in the 345 in Jan. Fucking dumb. $17/game in the 230 though. I also played 8 $570's.......4-4.

I'm just gonna try and shoot for 500 games in Feb. Heading out to Vegas for a little vacation in the middle of the month with my brother and a couple buddies. Gonna blow a little $$$$$ more than likely. Degen it a little. Should be fun.

I'm gonna keep this wrap up short......quite tired right now, been up for 24 hrs. Trying to get myself back on a nice sleep schedule after sleeping in til 2 in the afternoon a couple times. GL me.

Let's go Feb!!!!!

Jan Profit - $7,294

bartchalker

Jan shaping up decently+Vikings miss out on SB shot

I took a break from poker on Sunday to watch the NFC/AFC championship games. 2 pretty good games, although seeing the Vikings come one game short of the Superbowl for the 3rd time in my life was a bit devastating. First there was the 1998 season, when they went 15-1 in the regular season and broke the NFL points scored record. It was really quite a magical year. We destroyed the Cardinals in the Divisional playoffs and were huge favorites against the Falcons and suffered a crushing OT loss. It was also the game where Gary Anderson missed a 30 some yard field goal with the 4th quarter winding down that would have given the Vikings a 10 pt lead and iced the game. This is the Gary Anderson that did not miss ONE SINGLE kick the whole season. It's a play that lives in MN infamy for sure. The most crushing loss I've ever endured as a sports fan.

Then there was the 2000 season, where we started 11-2 and backed into the playoffs with an 11-5 record. Still good enough for a 1st round bye. We pounded the saints in the divisional round to set up another shot at the Superbowl just 2 seasons after the crushing defeat at the hands of Atlanta. This game was brutal in it's own way. Not the crushing, tear your heart out and crap it out on your face kinda brutal the Atlanta game was though. It was more of a WTF just happened kinda brutal. Vikes down 31-0 at halftime and lose by a final of 41-0. I don't remember much from that game anymore. Selective memory I suppose.

Then there was Sunday. The big difference in this game is the Vikes were the underdog, not the favorite like the previous 2 NFC championship games. I went into it knowing there was a very good chance we could lose this game. However to see us lose the game in OT left an empty feeling similar to 1998. Also the fact that we fumbled the ball 6 fucking times left a feeling of wondering what could have been. We lost 2 fumbles in the red zone. One at the 20 yard line, and one at the 10. But if you watched the game you know what I'm talking about. It was still a great game. I'm sure especially great for Saints fans. Should be a good Superbowl matchup. I'm gonna have to say that Peyton Manning wins his 2nd ring though.

I watched the Federer-Davydenko match last night, not sure if anyone else did but it was kinda crazy. How does Davydenko go from looking sooooooooo good, and like he's gonna roll Federer in 3 straight sets, to just getting murdered? Federer beat him like 13 straight games at one point. Good match though.

Now to poker. I played on Monday and just couldn't get anything going. I went 7-10 and lost around $1,100. Then yesterday it looked like the month could possibly unravel when I started 1-5 and was snap down $1,400. However, after taking a break and enjoying a bowl of Coco-Roos I couldn't be stopped the rest of the day. I went 19-6 the rest of the way and finished +$2,600 or so. Boom. Somebody even threatened to slit my throat during a game. You know you're owning people when they threaten your life. Jackass.

I will probably be playing each of the last 5 days of the month and hopefully ending in a fun way. I wanna catch a case of the run goods.

Jan - $7,069

Good luck everybody

bartchalker

Nice 5 day run

I've had a really nice run over the last 5 days. I've gone 67-40 in my HU games, and have also cleared a $525 bonus from Full Tilt. I've made about 7k the last 5 days and am well out of the red now. Good. I hate the feeling of still being down halfway through a month. It doesn't happen too often, but when it does I start to get a short fuse playing poker. I remained pretty solid this whole month though, and I've been playing really well even through the shit. No busted up mouses or anything!

Here's some random hands I played, haven't shared any in a while. Obviously I'm only going to show hands that make me look cool, not the one's where I look foolish :).

Me getting a little wild:




Opponent getting tricky and me luckboxing:




Me inducing my tilty, bluffy ho of an opponent to stack off:




I'm kinda hoping I can salvage an 8k month. It should be possible.

I tried out Full Tilt's new "Rush Poker" today for about 50 min. It's actually kinda fun. I played the .50/$1 and ended up making $61. I was actually up around $250 at one point. Kind of a cool little way to fuck around when you don't feel like taking the game all that seriously. Give it a shot.

Jan - $4,789

good luck grindas

bartchalker

Not a fun month so far

January has really sucked so far. I was really feeling in the groove the day after making my last post but went on to have a horrible day. I ended up losing about 2k, mostly due to a 3-10 record in the $345. Then I followed that up with a $500 loss yesterday, which was my 8th straight losing day in a row!! I know that's never happened before. I finally snapped the losing streak today by going 16-12 overall in the 230/345 for about $750.

Like I said in my last post though, I've taken a lot of time off this month and have just started picking up the volume the last few days. I'm pretty confident I'll break out of this soon. Fuck, it was just 2 months ago that I was saying all this same shit!! November started off horribly for me and I still managed to recover and make a nice profit. Gonna have to have a repeat of that this month!

Know what I love??? When I bluff off my stack and villain calls me down to win the match then they type "ty". Thank You?????!!!! Is that some sorta pathetic fucking attempt at a needle you fucking fish? When you know that they had no idea where they were in the hand, and were calling you out of nothing but spite, and the only thing going through their stupid brain was "I hope he doesn't have it this time." Go suck a dick. Go suck a herpes infested cock and get the herpes all over your dumb fucking lips. Then go kiss your fat, ugly girlfriend who you've managed to keep your dick sucking secret from, and give them to her too. That's what you can do with your little TY. Moron. Then make sure you snap decline the rematch, then type in "GG fish" and go run back down to low stakes since you obviously just doubled your roll with some degen shot. In 6 days when you lose it, just make sure you come back to donate some more. You were probably just "unlucky" anyways. Whore.

I'm gonna start owning peeps again real soon. No lies. No lies.

I'm really not as angry as I sound, just wanted to rant. Poker is the shit obv, and donkeys are the BIG shit.

I noticed earlier today that Pokerstars had over 300,000 people on it!! Is that amazing or what?! I remember before Party Poker shut down to the U.S. they used to be the big site and would hit over 100k in traffic. Then I remember Pokerstars hitting 150k and thought that was just amazing. But wow, 300k peeps on stars and 100k on FT today. Some people were saying that poker would have lost it's popularity by now. Not in the online world I guess. The day will definitely come but I think it's at least several years away.

That's it, I'm done. Good night everybody.

Jan - ($2,163)

bartchalker

Slow start to 2010

It's been a slow start to 2010 in both the volume and profit columns so far. I've taken about 6 days off already!! If you mix in a little running bad, then add a dash of playing bad, well that makes for a losing month so far. I've had 6 straight losing days now! It's not quite as bad as it sounds though. All of those losing days have been losses of between $200 and $550 which is obviously nothing. If I had actually been getting some normal volume in I'd probably be up at least a little. I'm gonna try to fix that the rest of the month.

The Vikings play the Cowboys in the divisional playoffs on Sunday! 2 games away from the Superbowl. I think the Vikes can win this game. My prediction is 27-17. I am definitely biased though.

Not much else to say other than; it's time to turn this fucking month around!

Jan - ($560)

End of the Year+Beginning of the Year

Well first, I realize I was ridic lazy with updating my blog last month. It's kinda odd being that it was my best month ever. I shoulda been bragging it up hardcore, but was just never really in the mood I guess.

Anyways, 2009 really ended with a bang for me. See below for my bigtime Dec #'s.

Heads up - $19,589
Other Sng's - $319
Rakeback/Bonuses - $1,367

That makes for a grand total of $21,275. Pretty sick by my standards for sure. What makes it even more sick is how lazy I was with playing the last week or so. It was all good though since I'd just play like 8 games in a day and go 7-1 or some shit. It was nice to end the month in god mode after running like poo in Nov. I still ended up playing a total of close to 500 games, my hours just were not there like they usually are. I must have had a lot of quick matches or something.

Here are my heads up graphs for the month of Dec. I played more on Full Tilt this month then Stars which is a little strange for me, but I completely tore up FT so it worked out nice. In the future I think I'm gonna try to keep more then 50% of my games at Stars.






It feels great to have the kind of success I experienced in Dec. It would be sweet if I could score a couple 20k+ months in 2010.

I'm actually kind of shocked to see that I still made 3 spots on the sharkscope leaderboards despite playing a lot on Full Tilt the last few months. I made the $101-$300 HU total profit, the $101-$300 any game total profit, and the pokerstars total profit leaderboards. I prob could have easily hit top 5 on the first 2 if I had remained playing on stars 100%. However I'm sure there are a few people who could make statements like that.

I consider 2009 a success for me. Here are the goals that I had made for 2009 in an entry around this time last year:

1. Play at least 625 heads up games/month(at least 20% at the $230 level)

2. Control tilt(getting better at this all the time, but I still go a little retarded every now and then)

3. Exercise 3 times/week(gotta get back into doing this, healthy body=healthy mind)

4. Continue to study/improve my play

5. 100k profit(if I keep my 4 goals above this should happen)


I didn't quite accomplish #1. I averaged playing about 565 heads up games/month this year, however my % of games that were at $230 and up was way above 20%. Not sure exactly what it was but prob around the 85% range. My main game continued to be the $115 in the beg of the year, but after scoring a 19k month in April(9k more then my previous best at the time) playing mostly $230/$345 I never really looked back. So even though I didn't avg 625 games/month, I'm still gonna consider this goal as a success being that I killed the 20% at $230+ goal.

Goal #2 is kind of hard to tell. I def tilted. I don't think I'll ever get to a point when I don't tilt at all. It's just my style, I realize that now. Trying to get rid of tilt completely for me is just not gonna happen. However I will say I did "control" my tilt better overall so this goal was also a success.

Goal #3 was, without a doubt, a failure. Getting exercise and staying healthy is such an overlooked part of success in this game. When I play after getting in a good sweat I always seem to be thinking more clearly, and get tilty/upset way less when things don't go my way. I kinda started off strong with this goal the first 2 months then it went to complete shit until about Nov when I picked up doing it again and have been doing it ever since.

Goal #4 I will call a success. I think I study the game more then I even realize I do. I'm constantly reading different articles on poker strategy and whatnot. It's great that after all the time I've put into this game I still find different strategical concepts amazing. The game constantly evolves also, so there is always something to think about. I've also made a habit of going back through a game in the hand replayer when I'm done playing it and looking through all the hands. This is basically studying the game, and seeing where maybe I fucked up and could have done something differently etc etc. I feel I am a better player now than year ago. You have to constantly improve in this game. In poker not improving is like going backwards.

Goal #5 was a monetary target that I was hoping would be the end product of accomplishing the other 4 goals. I finished the year with a poker profit of $139,103, so I obv nailed this one.

Now it's onto 2010. My 2010 poker goals are going to be the same as above with changes to goals #1 and #5

1) Play an avg of 550 games/month.(I'm not gonna push myself with crazy volume goals or anything. I don't want poker to become too much of my life. I will be happy with 550 games a month. Quality over quantity FTW. Maybe if I'm feeling motivated I'll be able to avg over 600.)

5) 150K profit.(If I can match what I did this year I'll be happy, but 150k sounds like a nice round figure to shoot for.)

I'm also debating how hard I want to push playing higher stakes games. I feel uber comfortable in the $230 and $345 right now, but still can't help but feeling a little uneasy playing $570. I will prob just keep with what I'm doing now and randomly take shots in the $570 when I feel like it. Who knows, at the beg of 2009 I was very uneasy about playing the 230's. Maybe by the end of 2010 I'll be a 570 reg. Never know.

I am also going to try to keep updating my blog somewhat consistently. I'll try to not have a repeat of the 1 post performance of Dec. The times of making 10 posts a month I think may be over, but I will def update on a weekly basis. You can count on your pal bartchalker.

Good luck in 2010

bartchalker