Trials and Tribulations of an Internet Grinder

Today is friday, the last day of the week, and this week was very good to me...so far. As of now I am up $1,841 for the week, by far the best week of my poker career (excluding tourney wins). So far, I have played 110 $55's and my hourly rate for the week is a whopping $92.50! If only all weeks were this kind to me, lol. The month is over on monday and after having a horrible first two weeks I think I should be pulling off a pretty profitable month. Well, back to the $55's. Holler.

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Motion City Soundtrack - My Favorite Accident
Atmosphere - Say Hey There

Today was a great day and I feel that it was a big steping stone on my path to fulfilling my desire to become a professional poker player. Today after a mere 22 $55's I was up an astonishing $1,090. Now I know I won over $7,000 for 1st in a tourney last week, but those types of scores only come very sparingly. A big reason this is so serious to me is because I can literaly remember little over a year ago, I was dreaming of one day becoming one of those guys on the 2+2 forums who made posts about winning over a thousand bucks in one day of normal play. I feel great right now and fully understand that tommorow I will probably lose $700 of it back but as long as I feel like my game is up to par, which I do, I will keep playing the $55's. Also after reading over some past posts I am starting to realize that the posts seem to say alot of the same things. So over the next few weeks I am going to try and start making more informative and innovative posts. i think I will start tommorow by picking out some hands to post, which I feel demonstrate some higher level skills. Thaks for reading. I'm riiich, beeeyach. Holler.

Not much to report, I have been slacking on my hours but I think I needed to tone downt the playing for at least a week. Starting tommorow I will be back to the normal grind. Over the last 4 days I made about $700 over 61 $55's. I think I have been playing pretty solid lately, I find that the players in the $55's are a lot worse than i originaly thought. I have been sucked out on many times, but today I did 5 ITM in a row 1,1,1,2,1 so I made up some much needed ground. I think I may play a couple tounreys each day this or use mon-wed to try and qualify for a bigger Party tourney. My main goal however is just to get in at least 25 SnG's a day. Well I'm off to bed, bye bye weekend fish and hello weekDAY grinders ! :) Holler.

It seems as though everytime I start to get positive about this game and everything seems to be running smoothly some unknown powers strike down and punish me for enjoying life too much. So today i lost $500 and was palying the best poker of my life, I can't even mention some of the beats cause I might throw up, but it was bad. The good news is that I have discovered that the $55 SnGs are filled to capacity with stupid, fishy donks. Did I mention that I love stupid, fishy donks. It is only the 3rd day of the week and I am still up $620 but it is so frustratng that I cannot pull together a solid winning week. I have talked to guys that say that have 5 losing days a month and I always seem to have 12-15 losing days a month. What makes it worse is that there is no way around most of my bustouts, I can;t fold AA/KK preflop even if I "know" that my opponent is going to hit their 2 outer. I guess that is why I called this blog 2 outer, it is a big problem in my poker life. I still hope to clear $1,500 more between now and Haloween putting me at +$2,000 in SnGs for the month, after starting off on the worst downswing of my life. Looking ahead to November, I am going to devote my time to playing $55's only and will play about 1000 of them. i should have rakeback set up again by then and need to clear $5,000 including rakeback. New longterm goals are: $12,000 bankroll by Christmas and $25,000 by my birthday on April 14th. Also between now and next summer I need to get $17,000 together for a new car purchase, I really want to get a 2001 Lexus GS300 and poker might make that possible. Holler.

Between yesterday and saturday I played 35 $55 SnGs and profited a cool $1,129. Today I have played 10 so far and am down about $376 but am not too dissapointed as I played well and had to expect some losses after running so hot for my last few tourneys. I also played a $22 qualifer for the Super Monday tounrament on Party Poker. The entry is worth $162 and first place is over $30,000. I busted on the bubble in my last "Party Super", so let's hope things go better this time around. I am going to play about 16 more $55's today and hopefully I can turn a small profit for the day. I'll post an update tonight if I have a noteworthy finish in the tourney or if i have a my first -$1,000 day, which seems to be possible with how bad I am running as I type this. (KK lose to QQ, next hand other table AA lose to QQ).

Since that big tourney win that I last posted about things have been low key for me poker-wise. I have taken a little time off, which has been much needed and dropped back down to 4 tabling. Now that I am working with a $7,000 bankroll I am palying the $55'sa nd with no pressure for instant results which is really reflecting nicely on my game. Today I only played 15 $55's but managed a whopping $825 profit which is a 100% ROI, if only it were always this fun and easy. And to be perfectly honest I ahve not really had any crazy suckout luck, just getting paid off with good ahnds and not getting sucked out ON. I am hoping that my good play and fortune can continue but my goal is only a 10% ROI which should be very doable especially since I am only 4 tabling. That tournament win was VERY good for my confidence but I am not going to let it compromise my dedication to this game, on monday I will be abck to the grind and trying to get in at least 35 SnG's a day. So today I only played for 3.5 hours but had my biggest 1 day profit without a tounrey score. I'm going to play a couple qualifiers for tommorow's Party $500k garunteed and since it would be my first tourney since the win hoepfully I will be known as back-to-back Zach. Holler.

Out.

Those were the famous words shouted by Scotty Ngynn after taking down the 1998 World Series of Poker main event. Last night at about 3:30 a.m., I too shouted those words after winning a $33 buy-in tournament with 1060 entrants. The prize for this feat was a cool $7.2k!(almost 4 times my current bankroll!) I know in the big shceme of things it is not that big of a deal but for me this couldn;t ahve come at a better time. Before entering the tourney last night I was at the lowest point, emotionally, of my poker career. Nothing was going right, although I was playing good poker, and my bankroll was dwindling down to the $2k mark after ahving it up to $3.5k last week. I feel like a huge burdon has been lifted off my back and now instead of worrying about grining it out as much as possible, I can really focus on my game and try to break into the $55's. This next week I will be tweaking my game and making some major observations and adjumstments so watch out for the new Zach next week.

Since this was my first tourney win over 30 people I will be posting a full tourney report on Sunday. It will include all key hands and my proud moment of busting Gigabet when we were down to 4 handed. For those that don;t know Gigabet aka Darrel Dinkins is widely regarded as one of the best if not the best online poker players in the world. I learned a lot from palying a shortahnded final table with him, which was like a bonus on top of the money. I almost equate it to getting to sit at a live table with soemone like Phil Ivey. Well that's it for now I just thought I would update so you all didn;t think I had jumped off a bridge.

Holler. Yeah Son.

Things are not going good this week and I am currently in the midst of a 41 buy-in downstreak which equates to over $1,200. This is not fun but I am hoping that things turn around soon. If the streak gets down to 50 buy-ins I will bite the bullet and drop down to the $22's. But as of now my bankroll is still at about $3,000 so I am not in any danger of going broke anytime soon. I just really I hope I can turn things around and have a profitable week and more importantly a sucessful month. Well I am going to bed but I just pray I don't wake up to more bad beats and horibble luck in general. I will proabably not update until the end of the week on Friday, so stay tuned to see if I can turn this dwonstreak around.

Today was a bad day for people like me who multitable online games with a rakeback deal. Party Poker today announced that they are no longer sharing their tables with sites such as the one I play on, Empire. Because of this there is a shortage of bad players and I will be forced to move over to Party Poker and play without rakeback. This means that i will be losing about 1/6th of my profits overall. I am still trying to look on the brightside and realize that I should still be able to clear $4k-$6k per month and after Jan 1. that figure should jump to $6k-$10k/month. There is also a VERY small chance that I will be able to get rakeback at Party Poker but that is still just a dream as far as I am concerned. This was definatley a hectic day in the online poker world but overall I can't blame Party Poker for the move. They are a business and it is in their interest to increase profits. I guess I am taking this news a little better because I had a winning day, I only got in 26 SnGs and profited $319. One other change to note is that Party Poker now allows players to be on up to 10 tables at the same time. This will at least help me keep my bankroll in one spot and save a little time when i tcomes to multitabling. That's all for now, it ahs been a pretty long day and I need some sleep. Tommorow for a change of pace I am going to try and win an entry into the Party $500k Garunteed Tourney. As always wish me luck.

Holler.

So after putting of my official career start until Jan. 1 I have decided to use the next 13 weeks to make $10,000 giving me a good bankroll to start my "career". that equates to about $770/week which is doable but after week 1 it is gonna be a little tougher than I had hoped, nuless the cards start falling my way again soon.

So from now until Jan.1 I will post my results week by week and make random posts to mention out of the ordinary results and things going on in my life. Week 1 is now over and it wasn't to fun, actually until my last day I was up $390 but then dropped $492 yesterday including a 15 OOTM streak. Brutal. I am however very pleased with the amount of SnGs that I was able to play and since I didn't have my second monitor until day 3 I think I will be able to get in 300+ SnGs per week.

Week 1 Stats
$33 SnG's Played: 262 (30 hours)
Profit: -$102 (-$3.40/hr)
Current Banroll: $3,322

Now that I am able to get so many SnG's done per day it is a little bit easier to handle some of the swings but when things go bad they go bad eight times over. :)

After my losing day yesterday I am glad to report that I had a profitable day to the tune of $528 over 54 $33 SnG's. This puts me at +$390 for the week with one more day left. I am starting to realize that I may be paying too much attention to my short term results and that it is taking away from my normal studying of the game during my downtime. I am going to try and only focus on week by week data rather than day by day. I am really a stat junkie so I probably will not be able to hold back. I think that since my bankroll is online and I cannot have it in my pocket I tend to treat my Excel spreadsheet like a safe and admire my stats like stacks of money. Just a thought. Well it is 3 a.m. and tommorow night is Friday Night so it's time to PARTY!

Out.

Well the title says it all, things aren't going all to well right now. This doesn;t really suprise me as I just started 8 tabling and everytime I embark on a new poker "quest", I seem to be in perfect timing with some bad variance. I'm sure I made a few mistakes as a result of 8 tabling such as being too passive in some hands because folding or checking takes less time than raising. The good news is that i am getting a sick amount of games in each day. In the past 2 days I have played 114 $33's and profited about $170. My totals for October so far are 184 SnG's played and a profit of -$138. Luckily things should turn around pretty quick due to the volume at which i am now playing these tournaments. I am now shooting for 1400 SnG's played this month, and even if I can only manage a 9% ROI my monthly profit will be about $5,500 with rakeback. Only time will tell.

It is now 3:00am and I think that I am done for the day, tommorow should be another 50+ SnG day so wish me the best, I will need it.

It feels so good to ahve 22 SnG's played before 4 pm, normally I would only have like 6-10 done. I also am doing pretty good today so far my placings have been: 6/2/3/11 for a profit of $534, not bad for 2.5 hours of work. But as always I can't and don't expect these results to continue. I will update this post later tonight hopefully i will have 50 done by then.

Well. I finally did it, I got a second monitor today and a new video card. So from this day forward I can be playing 8 tables at once across 2 screens. The monitor I picked up is just a 17" Gateway LCD, it was only $299 so it isn't really that big of an investment as I hope to get a couple of Dell 20" LCD's as a Christmas gift to myself. So now I am getting around $6-7/Hr from rakeback alone and once i move up to the $55's it will be around $12/Hr. So after getting it all set I started up 4 tables on each of my two Empire accounts. I ended up playing 12 $33's and went: 1/1/0/10.
**In case somer eaders dont't know what that means it is # of finishes 1st/2nd/3rd/4th-10th**
So i start the day down a cool $126, however, I feel like i was playing optimally as I took soem brutal beats in some crucial pots, but hey what else is new? :)

I feel like a small wieght has been lifted off my shoulders because now I can get in 30-40 SnG's a day and have no excuse not to do 1,000 SnG's per month. I think I will play mostly 33's this month as I will want to get used to 8 tabling at a limit I am comfterable with. As soon as the bankroll get's to $4400 I will switch to the $55's. My new goals for this month are:
- 1000 $33's/$55's
- >10% ROI
- >$3500 profit w/o rakeback (I would really like to do $5,000 including rakeback)
- Use at least 20% of month's profit to pay off credit card.

I will update again tommorow night after my first full day of 8 tabling. It feels good to say that I should have over 50 more SnG's played by tommorow night.

Out.

Well September is over and I am very happy about where I ended up considering I went through a 400 SnG breakeven streak and I only played 570 total for the month. Overall I made about $2,000 including rakeback. All but $300 of that money went back into my banroll, as I am hoping to have it up to $5,000 byt he end of this month (Haloween). This new month started off bad yesterday as I only got in 12 SnG's (half day cause i needed to go party, hey it is Saturday!), 9 $33's and 3 $55's, got 2nd in 1 $33 and 1 $55 for a -$233 day to start off the month. Luckily I woke up this morning (suprised to not have a hang-over) did 2/0/1/1 for my first set, bumbing me up to +$6 for the moth of October, Holla.

I am currently playing right now and hope to at least get 20 SnG's in today. Sunday night's I play in a Single Table Tourney with some friends,w e ahve been doing it every Sunday for about 18 months. So if I get knocked out of that early enough I may be able to get in closer to 30 SnG's. I know that I have been talking about getting a second monitor for a while now but between my nice little breakeven streak and me being very conservative with my bankroll, it hasn't ahppened yet. Latley though I have really been thinking that I need to get one ASAP, I mean if I consider myself to be a winning SnG player, I could be increasing my income by as much as 80%. So I am vowing to spend the next week scouring stores and the internet for a good deal on any 17"-19" LCD monitor. I am not going to worry about overlap and getting 2 20" Dell's like all the "cool" multitablers, but once I get closer the $109's I will look into splurging on two 20" lcds.

Out.