Played my first 2 hours today of my intensive month long trial on Cake Poker for the Pro Poker Challenge and got off to a good start. Played 8 tables…..3 at NL50 and 5 at NL20 won $109. I also have over a hundred dollars in rakeback about to go on as well so the month has started really well. I decided to play NL20 as well as I cannot always guarantee enough NL50 action in the afternoon GMT.
I have decided against playing NL100 too soon and this is not what I am aiming to do anyway as the goal is to show that a player can hopefully turn pro with little starting capital. Dont know how many hands I played as my stats dont get updated until after midnight.
I thought that my play was pretty good considering that I was 8-tabling. I even managed to get away from having KK under AA on a Q-J-8 board and saved myself $15 by not stacking off in a NL20. I would have stacked off here last week because of the amount of money but 100BB is 100BB whatever the level of play.
Lost a $91 pot when I flopped bottom set with 7-7 on a 10-8-7 board that also had a flush draw. One player held the nut flush draw and another had flopped the nuts with J-9. The board didnt pair and I lost the pot…..actually this was the one hand that I wasnt happy about. Need to be wary of flopping bottom set in multi-way pots. But when you are playing 8-tables, you dont have an awful lot of thinking time.
But I ran the hand through Pokerstove and I had about 35% equity but this was the best case scenario as the way that the hand was played out on the flop and pre-flop, I could have been looking at a bigger set with 10-10 or 8-8 and then I would have been buried. It cost me around $30 as these were the stacks of the other two players so it wasnt a disaster when the cards were on their backs. But that was the only grey area play in the entire session.
Speaking of sessions, havent played the 25-50 game at all recently. This game seems to be getting tough and there never seems to be any value. I called my partner last night just to check to see if he was still scouting the games as I was getting a little paranoid. Have been looking at 10-20 recently as an alternative and if I dont start seeing some action soon then I may have to look at that. My goal at the start of the year was to make $250k but that looks a long way off after my first quarter which has seen me make only $37k from that game in three months. In Sklansky dollars I am only about 4k behind where I should be so I cant even blame that.
Have been really scouring my data on Poker Office 5 like a madman. This really is the proverbial dogs balls and you really need to get a sniffer like this, it just opens up so many doors.
My results so far this year have been OK and are as follows,
NLHE 25-50 +37K
PLO +1.1K
Limit +$679
Small Stakes NLHE: +$502
Heads up: +$3712
The 37k isnt all mine from the 25-50 sessions and I only have 33% of that now and it was only 25% at the start of the year and I am paying a few other little bits and pieces out as well so I am about $15k ahead. So keeping that up should see me make $60k by the year end…..problem is that I wont be putting the hours in for a while except on the challenge but the long term implications of making that work far exceed anything that I could make playing poker at my current capacity and MO.
I reckon that if I totally dedicated myself to the game then I could make somewhere between 100-150k a year (dollars) but that means sitting in front of a computer all week and I sure as hell dont want to do that. Also I dont know if 100-150k is a utopian figure. I cant concentrate for long periods anyway so I may not reach that figure at all even if I tried.
Anyway take care and see you soon
CAKE POKER……THE SITE THAT HAS ONE OF THE BEST RAKE DEALS ON THE NET AND THE SITE THAT DOES NOT ALLOW TRACKING SOFTWARE.
The Dean is sponsored by Cake Poker and can be contacted at Carl@Pokerquest.f9.co.uk
