Well, well…spend most of the grind at the BJ tables tonight…it seems to be the quicker way to get the Comp Points although it’s basically at the same rate (10$ bet = 1$ vs 10$ wagered in “raked pot”), but you can get much more “hands” in (after all every bet counts vs only the bets you put into the pot in a raked pot)…so I’m up to over 60 points now…190 to go – side note: really insane, 250 Comp Points equals 2500$ wagered…wow. Played in one of their initial depositors’ freerolls tonight…although my play didn’t amount to much as I misread the starting time, so I basically entered the tourney “Phil Hellmuth style” (reasonably late – 45mins) and half my stack was gone with the blinds being half of my remaining stack. Oh well…so I sat until the blinds almost got to me…pushed from EP with 44…three callers…heeeehaaaw…KQ took it down…

But enough of that and on to the main topic: Poker Goals 2007

Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I and how’s the old (german) saying – roughly translated to english – “You can only achieve your goals if you have any”. So, without further ado…my poker goals for 2007:

• Get a thicker skin – While I think my tolerance of “bad beats”, major suckouts, medium suckouts, minor suckouts and all other suckouts in general is at an all-time high, it’s still not high enough. I mean, yeah, it’s understandable to go bezerk (at least mentally) after losing to a one-outer or moaning about the occasional two-outer or runner-runner-straight/flush, but apart from that, the usual “dominated hand wins with his/her shitting kicker hitting” shouldn’t affect me. Good decision made? Money in with the best of it? Yes and yes? Then suck it up, you did good, the donks will hit every now and then, this is what keeps ’em in the game in the first place. Play your game and get their money the next time.
• Move to a higher level – while I’m pretty satisfied with the levels I’m currently playing (mostly NL10/NL25), it’s -ev in the long run as good play isn’t rewarded all that much in those levels (especially NL10 – are you kidding? There’s more friggin donks hitting their miracle time and time in rotation for you to really crush the game). So I’m planning on building the roll to a higher level and moving to at least NL25 as my main feeding ground. As soon as I feel comfortable there and show a regular profit, I’ll try to move up another level. But the first goal is to establish a good winning rate at NL25.
• Play less (cash games) – while this may surprise some people, it’s one of my goals. Yes, playing (online) poker is very entertaining and a good way to spend your time, but a little less won’t hurt. My reasoning is that once I move up a little, the game will challenge me more again and the profit (if any) will more than justify playing less (after all having a huge winning rate at NL10 or similar brings out a mere laughter to the higher level player).
• MTTs – MTTs (along with SnGs) used to be my bread and butter. I just feel comfortable to play for set amount x (buyin) and go with it. A loss or “not-win” doesn’t affect me nearly as much as in a cash game. Looking back at 2006 two or three (minor) tourney scores were the difference between an empty account and life. I actually enjoyed the last MTT I played (where I final-tabled the bodog guaranteed) and that’s what has been missing in a while. So playing more MTTs again is one of the goals.
• SnGs – Try to focus on the token satellites on FullTilt to get into some of the “bigger” tourneys for cheap.
• Live (home games) – Back to the roots. Winning or losing isn’t really important. Why? Because the “tourney style” we’re playing is too much to overcome if the cards are against you. So, why did we start this home game in the first place? – Fun! So back to having fun, no matter what the outcome is.
• Live (“real tourneys”) – One goal is to play at a real tourney. As my mini-bankroll isn’t really a good starting point to chase 12/15/17k tourney packages to the WSOP, WPT or similar, it seems to be more reasonable to try to qualify for another tourney. The EPT. Less travel, smaller buyins (although 5k is still a lot of money). So my goal is to qualify for one of the remaining EPT events, most likely the one in Dortmund, Germany in March. If that doesn’t work out I’ll try to get into one of next season’s events.
• Bonus hunt – Still plenty of poker rooms left to hunt for, so many Points at the poker bonus hunt sites to get. Why not try?
• Stay away from -ev (non poker) gambling – This is my final goal. Looking back at some of the sites I busted out  on early “in my career”, it was mostly due to -ev non poker gambling (BJ, Slots, Video Poker, etc) which busted me, not poker. So this is one of the most important goals…stay away from this shit, it’s not worth it, just ask some of the pros who won fame and fortune playing poker and gave it all back at the craps table…

That’s about it…let’s see how many of them I can achieve…

On another note: I don’t know if I will be posting again until the new year arrives, so if I don’t: Happy New Year to all of my readers, fellow broggers and poker players…and a sad sad bankroll-depleting non-two-outer-hitting year for all the donks out there, hope you give me all your money, cheers! 😉

Well, not much going on. On the grind over at Pacific, mostly treading water, but hey…treading water is better than being stuck 🙂

So that works for me…36 Comp Points done, 214 to go…

Today I had enough. Enough of the bad run. Now one could argue that “running bad” is a natural thing in poker and it’ll pass – it probably would, eventually, but I’m fed up. Bad beat after bad beat, suckout after suckout. So it’s been fun with bodog, while it lasted, but I can’t take it anymore, at least not atm. So I cashed out the remaining dough…not all that much left, luckily I had withdrawn three times already, so I’m UUUUUUP 🙂

So, I need a new room to donk around and I had a look around my favourite bonus hunt site PokerSavvy (aff)…once I hit the site I remembered that the bonus at nine was still uncleared due to the network switch of nine. So first of all I contacted Mike to ask how this would be handled (as the old point system couldn’t be converted to the new system, but I had almost done all the requirements)…as usual Mike and Team PokerSavvy did an amazing job. They contacted nine and got them to clear my bonus 🙂 Two thumbs up, once again.

With that out of the way it was time to decide on a new room….many left, but some of them are not for me (as I had signed up before coming across the likes of PokerSavvy)…so…the special promotion it is…sign up with Pacific till the end of the year, grind out 250 Comp Points and receive a whoopin 1200 SavvyPoints (which equals ~ 120$, the normal promotion for Pacific is 900 SavvyPoints)…now 250 Comp Points are not easy to grind out, but it’s a challenge and Pacific’s nice bonuses are a good start (25$ instantly into your account when you sign up via PokerSavvy and you receive the 25% (up to 100$ max) immediatly too!)…

Played some Blackjack and some ring games to get my feet wet and everything worked out nicely, until I ran into yet another nice hand: A9o on the button, EP min raises (hmm Aces?!), two callers, I call, flop comes AA3 rainbow…hmm..so he doesn’t have Aces…push and shove…he shows A3…gotta love those case cards and ugly kickers, lol. Oh well…by the time that hand occured I was already ahead more than I could lose, so ‘s all good…

So…for the next few days/weeks I’ll probably focus my play on clearing that bonus…10 points done, 240 to go…. 🙂

Well, well….I thought I’d give the good ol’ bonus hunt another try today, after all I didn’t have all that much points to clear left at nine. So I try to fire it up and it only leaves me with the option to uninstall or cancel. Hmm…so I uninstall and nothing happens. Alrighty then…

I head to their site and download the new client…just to see that their POP system is gone. Hmm…that doesn’t look good…so I head over to PokerSavvy and the promotion is gone…hmm…I head to the forums and they’re still waiting for the referral-dude to get back to them about how they’re going to handle the switch…

Damn you nine! You better sort this crap out or I’ll go berserk on your arses that’s for sure!!!

Sidenote: This is the first bonus hunt that took an unexpected turn (and I don’t blame PokerSavvy one bit, it’s nine’s poor relationship management skills/customer information skills)…down over 70bucks and reward hangin in the balance…me not likey…

…so hard, that it’s hard to focus on the game that is in progress. I fired up bodog yesterday eve and hit the HU tables once again. One match stood out and it was not due to the game itself, or the result (I won, duh!), but my opponent or his trash talk to be precise.

I sat down at the table and my opponent was already waiting. The first thing he types into the chatbox is “You can only win if you suckout”. *lol*. Now I’m usually not even starting to chat during the matches, I’m focussing on my game and that’s that. If my opponent starts a quick friendly chat (the “gl”…”how you doing” type of chat), I’m cool with that and I wish my opponent good luck before getting down to business. In this particular case I had to get involved though. I went ahead and told him that it’s probably the other way around and that I wished him good luck trying to beat me. He went into insta-trash-talk-mode and tried to get under my skin with a variation of (what he thought) cool ways to get your opponent on tilt.

He started of by telling me that he was Johnny Chan to me. My comeback line was that he should stop sniffing his insecticide infested orange. *lol*…that shut him up for about half a minute before he went on about telling stuff about my mom. Now I’m all for good fun, but that’s borderline, then again, he was probably a little immature boy trying to be cool. So I schooled him a little about mommies and how I’m going to tell his mom that there should be no more WSOP for him on tv. etc etc…so it was all funny as hell, at least to me. I finally busted him after around 30 hands and he told me about how I sucked and all…I just typed a quick reply telling him that I hope that the 5$ he just lost wasn’t his whole month’s allowance…*lol*…

Another cool match was against a familiar player. I had played with him before and he’s ultra-passive. So I opened the cage and let the aggression monkey out, raising EVERY pot, c-betting every flop and generally putting constant pressure on him. In the final hands he got lucky on me twice – the last hand was A9 vs A8…he hit his 8 on the turn and I couldn’t improve on the river. To my surprise he instantly started to talk shit in the chatbox about how he finally caught me (errm yeah, getting in behind and catching a lucky card is totally catching me, d’oh) and I thought “WTF?!” so I told him what I thought about that line and he went on to tell me how I was playing to aggressive and blablabla…I justed laughed and told him that his style sucks (sir fold-a-lot) and that he’s the one that needs to be lucky to win, not me and that I’m not too aggressive, after all I “only” had a look at 72% of all flops in that particular session (~ 400 hands) 😉

All in all a nice session yet again, won 15 out of 20 matches, should have been 17, but hey…can’t count on your opponent not hitting his (few) outs all the time, so ‘s all good…

After that bodog session I remembered that I still have some bonus clearing on FullTilt to do, so I fired up some CAP NL games for a quick hit and run session – which was successfull. Then I played some Stud and Razz to close out the night. I gotta say I’m now starting to grasp why many people like Razz so much (e.g. Jordan‘s “high-roller” razz experience), it’s basically one of the easiest games around. Hell, I like 7Stud, I like 7Stud H/L even more, so Razz is basically the logical next step…just low, no straights or flushes to look out for…sweet. I guess I’ll have a go on the lower limit tables in the near future, hoping not to go brick-brick-brick all the time 😉

Well, it’s not just that I’m (still) running very bad on there, even after reloading in trying to finally grind out the last points for the PokerSavvy bonus, it’s the fact that there system just doesn’t make sense sometimes.

I log on to reload (via the client)…

So I hit the “Click here for direct deposit” button and it takes you to the nine website…I select neteller and fire the funds. I check in the poker client and the funds are not there and my sportsbook account still shows 0$. Weird. So I go back to the website and hit the account info page. It tells me that the money I just deposited is in the sportsbook wallet. Great, what a great direct deposit to poker, lol. So…I hit the cashier window in the poker client again and the sportsbook wallet is still showing 0$. Hmm…

So I fire up live-chat-support and ask the lady about what’s going on with two simple question:

1. Why is the direct deposit transferring the money into the sportsbook wallet?

2. Why is the poker client showing 0$ in the sportsbook wallet and why is it giving my an network error when I try to transfer (instead of an “insufficient funds” error – which should be the case if there were really 0$ in it)

She tells me to hold for “a moment”. Ten minutes later still no word, oh, I’ve been transferred. Now a lady from the poker department wants to help me. I try to explain to her again what my questions are. She asks me how I want to deposit. (?!) I tell her that I already deposited and that the direct deposit to the poker client didn’t work. (Pause). Well, she tells me that a direct deposit isn’t possible anymore because of the bullshit act. I tell her that that’s fine, but that this doesn’t solve my problem and that the bigger question is why the poker client hasn’t been updated to reflect that change?! There’s nothing telling you that on the website either, so two thumbs down for customer information.

After another “Please hold for a moment”, (10 minutes), I ask again, why they’re confusing their customers by not updating the software. She tells me that they aren’t confusing anyone. I go ahead and tell her that I’m confused and that I’m someone. *lol*

She repeats her answer and I’m fed up and tell her to go ahead and transfer my funds if that’s what she can do. She tells me to hold for a moment (5minutes). She goes ahead and pastes some lovely information for US players into the chat box (see below*). Now it’s not that I dislike getting information that should have been on the website in the first place, but I dislike being bored with stuff that doesn’t matter, especially after I told her that I didn’t care about the bullshit act as I was located in germany (not that she could have seen that by looking at my account anyway). She tells me that my account was upgraded. I ask myself what an “upgraded account” might be – maybe I’m a super-duper customer now as I’m not based in the US, hence bringin in some dough?!

Anyway, the funds are still not sitting in my account so I ask again if she has transferred the funds. (Pause). She tells me that the funds should be in my account. I check again. Nothing. I close the poker client and reopen it, nothing. Some minutes later the funds finally show up and I say bye as she pastes some “thanks for chatting, hopefully we were able to help you…” standard text into the chatbox.

Nice, I finally got my funds where I wanted them in the first place and it only took roughly 40 minutes to do so…w00h0000…..go nine, NOT. Man, my funds will be out of there the second I hit the points and got my bonus from PokerSavvy – that’s for sure.

Infos for US players she pasted into the chatbox:

Support: As a current member of the ActionPoker network (www.actionpoker.com), Nine.com Poker regrets to inform all of our U.S. poker players that, effective immediately, you will no longer be able to access real-money poker play in our poker room. You will be able to login to the poker room, play for free money and make withdrawals of any balance you may have on account. You will not, however, be able to make deposits or play for real-money.
Support: Yes. Nine.com players will be able to login to the poker room, play for free money and make withdrawals of any balance they may have on account. They will not, however, be able to make deposits or play for real-money. Nine agents will have to transfer the funds for you.
Support: [If from a non-banned MGS state*] As an alternative, we invite our U.S. real-money poker players to open an account with our sister company, VIP.com, by clicking on the following link: http://www.vip.com/?skin=poker&source=nnpkr. VIP.com Poker, a member of the Microgaming poker network, looks forward to providing Nine.com customers with access to safe and secure poker action.

…although not as nice as yesterday’s run. Played six SnGs tonight, finished ITM four times, not a single win though, bubbled twice. Weird how it goes sometimes, you totally dominate the table and hold a commanding chip lead just to go up in flames once you’re down to three-handed play. The worst loss tonight was back-to-back from chiplead to out of here: Hand 1 I hold AKs and lose a race to JJ, not a biggie…I got the opponent covered by almost 100%…so after the hand he’s got me covered by less than 50 chips….the very next hand I look down at AKo…we get the money in preflop again and he shows A10s…nice…give me back my chips…flop AxK…nice…turn Q…river…yes…J…ding…oh well, it’s the way it goes 😉

So I’m finishing the day slightly down…but no biggie I’ll be back tomorrow (as there’s a bank holiday over here on tuesday, I took monday off to have a super extended weekend)…

Bonus hunt update: I still didn’t go back to nine, I’m still too pissed off about all the suckouts I suffered on there. Good news though, I used the first part of my points I got for finishing the bodog promotion on pokersourceonline to get a 50$ amazon gift certificate…I ordered the WPT Season 2 Box Set a few weeks ago and it arrived this week…8 DVDs of Poker Goodness…I’m already through with watching the first 4 DVDs and I gotta say: I love it…although it’s not the newest stuff – in contrast, it’s rather old school, seeing some of the now well established players hitting their first final tables and all, but that’s the thing that makes it cool, especially as I hadn’t seen the second season yet.

Here’s the link to amazon as I’m too lazy to take a picture of the box myself 😉

Just as I was about to submit a lovely post about DADI9 and how the poker dealers/gods crapped on my head again, the server foobared and the post was gone 🙁

As I’m too lazy to retype everything again, here’s a wrap-up:

DADI9 tonight! Be there or be squared! …Unfortunately I’ll be squared as my new real-life commitment (internship) has me on a new schedule, which is more related to my actual timezone, so poker tourneys at 3 in the morning (which is 9pm ET) are out of the picture for the time being 🙁

Have fun, nontheless and don’t let the donkey…errrm…horse kick you 😉

Attention:

1. DADI9 moved to FullTilt, so don’t wonder that you can’t find it on PokerStars 😉

2. The password is pokertrust

I finished the original post with a rant about how the dealer/poker god crapped on my head again (set over set, set to straight, etc)…I hope to be reporting better news soonish, after all I can’t lose all those monsters in the long run 😉

…what else can I say?! Stacked some fools at the cash tables. Cool. Then in return got stacked by some chasing mofos who can’t even spell poker ( 😉 )…

I’m really doubting that I’ll be able to even finish the bonus on nine, so, I guess it’ll be either bust or getting the remaining 80 points with a next to nothing roll, as I don’t see myself putting any more money into this trash-can…

I’m not getting too deep into the tinfoil-hat stuff, but it’s just mind-boggling how often this crap (see the following hands of the night) happened to me over the last few weeks…and I can’t even really blame the donkeys for chasing – after all the money card hits with such a regularity that you can almost forget about odds and outs…this is just sick…
Hand #1: Jc8c, flop 6s7h9h, I lead out…two callers…turn 10c…bingo…I lead out, player to my left reraises, player to his left calls….I push…both players call and I’m shouting at the screen “no heart…one time!”…Qh hits on the river…damn you nine, damn you fucking chaser(s)….showdown…me: straight Q high, player to my left: Js8s, straight Q high…player to his left…4h5h…flush Q high…

Hand #2: This one pretty much had me laughing as I didn’t have much business to be in this hand in the first place, but still: what the heck? 6h2h on the button…three limpers…I call…blinds stay in…flop comes down 7hQcKs…checked around…I check…turn 10h…EP min-bets…one caller…I call…river Ah…EP bets…MP reraises…now I’m pretty sure that at least one of the donks has a higher flush, on the other hand one could have slowplayed broadway on the turn, the other a week ace or even KQ/AK/AQ/…so I call…showdown: me: 6h2h, EP: QhJh, MP: Kh10h…nice shuffle mofo!!!!
Hand #3, 4, 5: flopped set lost to rivered flush, turned top two lost to a rivered straight, turned straight lost to a rivered, ugly, four flush…

Current mood:

Well, what can I say, I’m not doing good in the nine promotion so far. I’m not even half way through the points and all the suckouts and the bad run in the other side games (especially guts) is really taking it’s toll – half the bankroll gone and half my nerves with it. It’s just making me sick how unlucky I get in some of those pots, especially in guts again…I’m holding the nut straight in a monster pot, someone has three of a kind…I’m holding the nut straight again in a monster pot, someone has a straight flush…this is so sick – even winning one of these pots would have brought me right back to life, but no such joy. Then I get stacked in the ring games by a chaser with one card to come and I call it a day over at nine. Maybe tomorrow will bring me some better luck.

Off to WPX I go to play some SnGs. Same game, same shit, same results. Chasing M*****fuckers catching every time. So I call it quits there too and head over to Full Tilt.

At least some went my way there as I was able to stack some people who just couldn’t let go of their TPTK/TPSK. A HORSE SnG to finish the session and I hit brick city in Razz, then Stud H/L and finally in Omaha to seal the deal.

So I’m done for the day, at least I had some fun watching the latest tuff_fish (party poker) monster “shows”…man, tony just keeps crackin me up – even when I’m running bad 🙂