MOMENT OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Why momentum is so important...?

Since the start of our live training, Coach Red has been telling us to build a habit of playing so we can build momentum. It's only now that I realized how important momentum is. The graph above is from my recent two-day grind. I started grinding playing good, solid poker then boom! One bad beat and I'm playing ridiculously bad.Then I win a big pot and stack someone and started playing really good. After reviewing my hands, looking at my stats, and viewing my graph, I realized that the two big swings in my graph started my losing momentum and my winning momentum. (did i say that right?) From now on, every time I lose a big pot I will stop playing so I don't build a momentum of losing. :)

"QUITTING"

Some friends were asking me yesterday to reconsider my decision of quitting tournament poker. So here I want to explain myself why I'm "quitting."

It's more like putting tournament poker on hold. I want to be a successful poker player but I have to choose between the two -- cash games and tourneys. Why not both? Well we can't have them all. I decided to choose cash games and concentrate on it so I can succeed faster.

I am a dreamer and I dream of new dreams every day. I have dreams of having my picture taken holding two cards and a pile of chips infront of me. Dreams of winning international poker tournaments. But for the new year I decided to dream more simple dreams. Dreams I can turn into reality in a year or less. For the meantime, I will dream of sitting at Table 20 at The Metro. I'll dream of crushing NL30 online. I'll dream of moving up atleast two limits both online and live. Dreams I know I can turn into reality. :D


"Feel the pain teaching us how much more we can take
Reminding us how far we've come
Let the pain burn away from our hearts
We have time to start all over again"

These big tournaments I've played  recently have brought me big time heartaches. Then I realized how far I've come and felt good about it. "Quitting" is not about me breaking down. It's about me building over... on the cash games. :)

This song says it all.

NO MORE TOURNIES

It's official. I'm quitting tournament poker. From hereon, I'm going to stick to play cash games both online and live. I really hate the feeling of busting out of a tournament. LOL!

Ice breaker! After I busted out of the I went to The Midas Touch to play cash games. After that went back to Metrowalk to have dinner. LOL. After dinner I went home. While I was waiting for a bus, jeep, FX, taxi... I saw a folded paper that looked like a twenty-peso bill. I picked it up and poof! it wasn't just a twenty-peso bill! It was accompanied by Ninoy. Hahahahahahahaha!

BTW, quitting tourney poker is a conscious decision. I've been thinking about it for quite awhile. I am not on tilt or anything. :D

WHAT A RUSH

I just took my first dip at NL30 and I'm already loving it. In less than an hour of session, I got dealt 3 Aces, 4 Kings and 3 Queens in 4 tables. Up 1 buy-in. :D I got stacked with AKo vs JJ on a pre-flop race. A few minutes later, I got my money back with my biggest pot of the session where I had QTo and spiked the nut straight on the turn vs my opponent's Top Pair Top Kicker. :)

I love this game!

NL30 :D

After two tries, I'm finally ready to move up to NL30! I'm sooooooooooooo happy! I'm excited to bring my A-game to this level and crush it. ;-) Yaaahooooooooooooooooo!

And I wonder, NL30, can you take me on?

BOOMSWITCH?

I'm too busy to update my blog. I'm putting all of my efforts on poker. I want to crush this game so badly. I'm currently playing around 12 hours (including breaks) a day, 6 days a week both online and live. To give you guys a picture of how my grind is going please create an account on checkyourbets.com and add me up as a friend. "weakend" for my live grind which started at week 11 of training and "mosh_warrior" for my online grind since week 1 of training.  I did not post my graphs here because I'm trying to encourage other poker players to log their games. Please check it out. :D

Thank you dochazard for introducing me to checkyourbets.

FRUSTRATING.

After two and a half days of reformatting, reinstalling, and updating, I finally got to play poker. BUT not after some fuck ups involving goalwin and poker tracker 3. Spent 4 hours yesterday trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with PT3 and GW. After all the hassles and frustrations, I finally got to play a decent session. 3 hours, 2 suckouts and a few tilt decisions later, I'm down two buy-ins. The universe is reminding me that this life I chose to live is hard as hell.

NEXT DAY PLEASE!

Sports Insider Challenge

This post is slightly off topic.

There's an ongoing challenge between the hosts of Sports Insider. If Sports Insider's facebook page gets 100,000 likes by Christmas this year, Noel Zarate, host of Sports Insider, poker player, pokermanila.com member and poker buddy of mine is going to shave his head bald. So guys help us get to 100k by liking Sports Insider on facebook. :D Please press the like button and suggest it to your friends. Let's support this local sports show and get Noel to shave his head in the process. They might even do it live!

VACATION MODE: ON

Just got back from a 4-day poker break. It was supposed to be a 3-day poker break if I didn't bust out of my Bacolod Tourney early. Anyway, got home around 2 o'clock from Iloilo and hit the bed immediately. I took a much needed rest and got up around 12 o'clock in the morning. (it's 5am now)

I kinda lost my will to blog since my ad application was rejected so I'm kinda not in the mood to blog. Haha! I'm thinking of moving my blog's address to some other site so I can put up ads but I don't know where and when to start.

My training is not going well and I'm on a downswing. I hope I didn't jinx my game by posting my graph. In the past, posting of my graph was always followed by a downswing. So I think I will never ever post my graph ever again. Haha!

Got My Feet Wet

It's 5am and I just finished a session of grinding. Took my first dip at NL10 (0.05/0.10) and it looks like this:

Stacked two players a few hands after I started hence the steep climb then made a couple of "bobo moves." Took a break for a few hours and then grinded again. The first hour felt like I was re-learning how to play with a big stack. I did not have any groove whatsoever. Thankfully, that wasn't the case a few hours later. :D I'm hoping to keep that steady climb. UP UP and away...!

Note: Stacked = took all my oponents chips. (tama ba coach?)
Addional Note: LOL!  updated my graph because I'm so happy and proud of my progress. :)

Grinding Halt

I did not finish my 5k hands this week. Short by a hundred hands or so... But overall I think it was a good week. I'm getting the hang of my GoalWin set-up and I'm getting used to playing with a big stack. My stats have improved a little bit and finished the week on the positive side.

My excuse for not finishing my 5k hands is that I was busy playing tournaments. I finished 62nd in the Metro Triple Treat Freeroll out of 150+ players. Took down 5th place out of 17 players in Metro's Media Event. And lastly, I won a seat from PokerManila's satellite to the Metro Bacolod's 1M Tourney. What a sweet way to end the week.

FIRST WEEK

The first week of our APA training is officially over. It was a rough week. I am still learning how to use the poker tracker and still learning how to play with a big stack. Buti na lang I have friends like StAlbert and Zaai that gives me pointers and advice. At sa mga tao that are telling me I can't do sh*t. Okay lang. You guys give fuel to my burning desire.  

Anyway, it's tourney week (Triple Treat Freeroll and Media Event Freeroll at The Metro) this week and I don't how I'm going to finish my 5k hands for the week. I know I'm going to get it done I just don't know how. Haha!

Back to the topic! :D

Last week I learned to configure my Heads-Up Display (HUD) with the help of Zaai. StAlbert gave me a few pointers on how to use the HUD. I learned to never play when on tilt because if I didn't I would have made money this week. HAHAHA! And lastly, I was reminded that this life I chose to live is not easy and I'm already face down on the ground so there's nowhere to go but up. It is up to me how fast and how far I go up. So bring on Week #2 because I'm ready.

Very Intense Program(VIP)

Our VIP training officially kicked off last Monday. I was so damn excited that I left the house at around 1pm for an 8pm meeting. Anyway, I went to The Metro Card Club and waited for my classmate Ian. Off to The Midas Touch (a poker room near Ultra where the Wowowee stampede happened) for our first meeting.

When Ian and I arrived at The Midas Touch, our classmates, Gwyn, Rene, Jonathan, Erwin and Bordzter, and Coach Red were already busy installing softwares that we'll be using for the training. A few minutes later Coach Red gathered us and started a power point presentation of what we're about to enter. The next 10-16 weeks of our lives.

After that, Coach gave us our first assignment. We have to make a recording of ourselves playing poker while thinking out loud. To give us a clue of how we're supposed to do that, we played a 9-handed game of 10/20 where Mark Anthony (not the actor) AKA Mr. Sit In AKA MotoLGXDA joined us. In that 10/20 game, we were asked to say out loud why we're folding, making a call, checking or raising and what were our intentions in doing so.

We were also introduced first hand to one of the basic Poker Tracker 3 statistics. The VP$IP, which means Voluntarily Put Money In the Pot. Ian was a standout here because he had a VP$IP of more than 60 in more or less 30 hands. This means Ian more or less played around 18 hands. It was fun. I got to see what my classmates tendencies were. I was particularly surprised to Jonathan's tendency to limp with trash cards in the late position when the action is folded to him. (see poker positions here)

Our training ended around 11pm. We capped the night by going to a persian restaurant a few minutes away from The Midas Touch. Albert, a graduate of the APA VIP training, joined us. After having a late night meal and an exchange of words, we all went home.

Kamikazee - First Day High

Poker School

I enrolled myself in Asia Poker Academy's (APA) VIP training and we had our introductions to the program yesterday. I learned a lot! I think the most important thing I learned was, and I'll quote the sentences from my program, "Poker is not about the money. Yes, we measure ourselves by that bottom line, but poker is all about making the right decisions - the best possible decision with regards to that bottom line."

I've been playing online poker religiously for about 6 months now. And since that day in march 2010, I've been playing for the money.

Anyway, woke up early today and re-read my training program. Our training will officially kick off tomorrow and I can't wait for it to start.

Intro

I've been thinking of starting a blog, a blog not just about my poker life but my life in general, for quite some time now. I've been going through this site and that but couldn't decide where to start a blog. I have a thread in pilipinaspoker.com (PP) which I started a couple of months after the PP-PM (pokermanila.com) split. I wanted to make the same thread here but was too lazy to copy/paste the same posts.

I did a little soul searching and, with 11Finger's help, found the answer to my dilemma -- pokermanila. If I'm going to start a blog why not here where it all started?

Why against the tide? On July 28, 2010, it'll be officially my one anniversary since running away from home to play poker here in manila.  The journey from that day in 2009 to July 28 of 2010 can be described in one line -- against the tide.

This blog was originally started in pokermanila.com.