Marco's blog

Yeah. I failed miserably. I lost about 4000$ in the process.

Today and tomorrow, I will try to play as many HU games as possible in an attempt to test my stamina. I will try to play at least 300 games, if that's even possible. Given that there's 2880 minutes in a two day period, and that the average time it takes to play a HU sng is 11 minutes, and that I plan to play two at a time, it would be possible to play 523 games approximately. Thinking back on it, maybe I should have a smaller goal, like 200 or so.

Yesterday, I played the major tournaments on UB, Stars and Fulltilt, and ended up getting deep in the UB 200k and the Stars Sunday Mulligan, but finished 26th and 28th respectively. It's kind of dissapointing not making a final table, but at least I played good poker. I was getting tired at the end since I hadn't slept in over 24 hours because I had an exam right before the tournaments.

We'll find a way to make them work properly sooner or later. We were having trouble converting the videos into divx, but Lain finally found a way to do it. Unfortunately, I uploaded a video yesterday and started watching it just to find out that the video and audio is badly out of sync. Sorry about that. The reason why we insist on using divx is that the quality of the videos is so much better, and we can use the divx player free of charge. Check out www.stage6.com. It's like youtube, only with better quality videos.

The news on the Absolute Poker scandal is finally getting out in the mainstream media, as AP(ironically enough) and other major media networks have  picked up the story.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10...

I have mixed feelings about this because I know that a lot of people will think that online poker as a whole is rigged. The poker economy is dependant on a constant influx of money that comes from the casual players that play for thrills, entertainement, or for a shot at a big windfall. I know for a fact that a lot of potential players will think twice before making a deposit to any online site after reading about the scandal, not to mention current players that may opt to withdraw all of their money. When it comes to money, trust is very important, and unfortunately for us, the level of trust from the perspective of the casual player may be gone. 

In the long run though, it might be a positive thing for online poker. Anti-poker advocates(especially in the US) will undoubtedly use the Absolute Poker argument to prove their point, but I think the argument is even more powerfull when used for the legalization of online poker. Obviously, all of these allegations of cheating make it clear that online poker needs to be regulated in the future in order to survive. If there is a fair game somewhere, there will always be players willing to play in it. That's a fact. 

As I've said before, I won't be playing on Absolute Poker in the future, but I've been playing on UB for over three years now. Some of you may know that UB is owned by AP. I've always loved UB for its software, for its community, and for the legions of fish that played there, but I don't think I can support it now before all of this is cleared up. It doesn't really affect me anyway since I've been playing almost exclusively on FullTilt for the past few months, but I enjoy playing a few of their MTTs every other week. I withdrew another 5k from UB two days ago, but I still have a chunk of cash laying around in my account. Right now, I'm considering cashing out everything, or leaving it there to play some of their tournaments. The online poker community has mixed feelings about boycotting UB, or even AP, but I haven't made my decision yet. One thing is for sure, I will stop promoting UB for the time being.

These are turbulent times for online poker, but sometimes it takes a little chaos in order to create something better. Hopefully, this will benefit us in the long run. In any case, I think it shows the character of some of the winning players because of how they were able to piece the whole thing together. Never underestimate a bunch of critical thinking people.

With the internet being so damn boring lately, it's the perfect timing for me to recieve a few DVDs from my last Amazon order. I got the Mexico Trilogy, From Dusk Till Dawn, and of course Thriller - A Cruel Picture, also known as They Call Her One Eye. I'm going to watch one right now.

That's it. 

It's not really about the poker. I did lose in all 4 of my tournaments today, but that's not what is tilting me right now. I tried recording two videos of me playing heads up, and I failed miserably. The first one, I was playing a 200$ HU game against a good player I knew. I thought the video was very good because I had explained my thought process very well, but then when I listened to it afterwards, I realized there wasn't any audio. The mic was on mute the whole time. Then, I decided to join a 10$ HU game, and once again I thought I did a pretty good job with my comments, but for some reason the software crashed when it was time to encode it. What a waste of time. 

September was a disappointing month result-wise for my poker. Over all, I made money playing HU, made a tiny bit playing in the WCOOP on stars, but lost in the other major tournaments that I played. And it doesn't help that the Canadian dollar reached parity not too long ago against the US dollar. Still, I managed to withdraw at least 10K from UB, so I only have 50K to go until the end of the year.

I played a lot in the last 2 days, and it has been very profitable. I made about 1600$. Also, I started playing the HU cash games on Fulltilt, and the games seem pretty bad. I was only playing 2$-4$ nl hold'em, but I will go up in limits as soon as I feel my bankroll on FT is good enough. One more thing I wanted to mention was the 320$ 4-man HU sngs that Fulltilt recently added to their list. I played 4 of them and won 1. They take a while to fill up, but they're quite profitable to play. Let's say I win about 55% of the time vs. my opponents, I would win the tournament 30.25% of the time. Since first place prize is 1280$, it means that my expectation is 1280$*0.3025=387.2$ per game. This is a 14.55% return on investment in the long run. I have to add that the 55% win average is a very conservative estimate, and that my ROI will be higher than that, probably closer to 20%.

Also, we're only 3 days from the PokerFaction.com go live, and I must say that I'm overwhelmed with all the stuff I still have to do. I tend to procrastinate a lot, and it's definitely not helping me this time. I have important homework due this week and next week for university, and I'm scared I won't have enough time to do everything. I can work under pressure though, so it should be a very productive week at the very least.

The title says it all. Besides playing a high volume of poker, I haven't done anything productive this weekend. Combined with the fact that I've been running below average, I can say it was a pretty shitty weekend after all.

Tonight, I decided to play the WCOOP event #14. It was a 1050$ tournament with a prizepool of over 3.3 million dollars. Needless to say, I didn't win. I decided to play this event even though I don't have that much money in my PokerStars account. But it's not like I ever had a decent amount of money on Stars anyway. Big deal.

I'm not in a good mood. I have to do this homework now about options strategies since I pushed it off all weekend, and I can't log in to the university site to get the information I need. 

"Désolé, le maximum d'utilisateurs est présentement atteint."

Yeah, right. It's 3 o'clock in the morning, dipshits!

So far this year, my results have been abysmal in regards to tournaments. I just can't get to that damn final table, ever. I was in the 100$ rebuy on FullTilt tonight, and I was doing fairly well. I had 20k in chips, which was the average, and a double up from having a considerable stack. Anyway, I get AA on the big blind, and asshole donk on the small blind raises me pot. I re-raise him pot knowing he's going to call because he's very bad. The flop comes J77, and he  shoves all-in without thinking. How could I possibly put him on a Q7? I called and lost. I'm really irritated by all this.

That's the thing about poker; you can get lucky in a big tournament and win a huge amount of money. And when that doesn't happen to you, you grind, you grind, and you grind even more, untill finally you make some sort of decent profit. It's a frustrating hobby.

In other news, I'm only 50000$ away from achieving one of my goal. I withdrew 10000$ from UB today, mostly because I was concerned about leaving all that cash on that site. There has been allegations by top online players that Absolute had problems with super user accounts on their site, and they own UB. Now these players aren't conspiracy nuts. They're the kind of players that will laugh at you when you say that online poker is rigged, but here they are. The cheaters could supposedly see your hole cards, and of course make perfect decisions. Very Scary. I won't bore you with all the details though. If you want to know more, just ask me.

Last week I downloaded season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, and watched it all over again. That's 20 hours of TV right there. Admittedly, I watched most of it while multiplaying 2 or 3 HU or while eating. Season 4 starts in November, and I'm very anxious to say the least.

And now, for some reason, I decided that I wanted to watch every single Star Trek, and I'm in the process of downloading The Next Generation and Voyager. I've been told by Thunderblood that The Next Generation is really good. Even though I'm probably not going to watch them anytime soon, I have to download them now, before October, when the bastards from Videotron will be imposing a 100gig per month limit on our downloads+uploads. The sum of the size of the two series is more than 100gig.