CARDRUNNERS

Hey, quick update since I'm about to get a new haircut for my halloween costume(which is dressing up as the my new haircut guy) but I just figured I'd tell you guys that in the last 30 hours I recorded 7 hours of videos.  I hadn't made any videos in a couple months so I definitely owed you guys a bunch of videos. 

I feel like the format of my videos might not be too highly praised but I really did my best. The cardrunners replayer doesn't support Ongame hand histories and my HEM didn't import the HH correctly(ongame hand histories are really dumb... they don't get saved by table or tournament so they get intermixed when multitabling). Anyways, I played around 600 hands and only 560 got imported. I then went through the rest of the hand history(which if you haven't played on ongame, it makes your eyes bleed more than some other sites) and found the 40 lost hands and copied them all to a text file.

Now theres no good way to determine when a "skipped" hand is coming up, so my method was to have an offscreen text file telling me the times in which the skipped hands occured and checking the time of the current HH and trying not to miss(obviously not all hands take the same amount of time, so this was far from foolproof). I think at first things were pretty shaky, but after I got the hang of it it became much more fluent. Unfortunately these 40 hands had to be displayed in text format so it still wasn't very visibly friendly.

Very few hands were skipped in the first few episodes so it will probably be like a month or two before I receive the major complaints... just warning you guys in advance.

The last few weeks I've been getting back into lifting and eating reasonably well. I'm not much stronger than I was this time last year, and slightly weaker than I was winter of last year, but I am definitely enjoying going through the newbie gains again. Plateauing is pretty lame and its definitely enjoyable to be able to be getting measurably stronger each workout even if I'm not setting any personal bests. I've been going 3-4 times a week for the last couple weeks and I think thats about optimal for me such that I have ample time to recover between workouts while still being able to go pretty regularly(at one point last winter I was going 6 times a week and thats definitely too much for me).

Other than that the last few days I've been catching up on some TV shows, this season of dexter seems much better than last season so far, and have been enjoying Its Always Sunny quite a bit so far this season. I also finished watching 2m2m, that was a pretty entertaining show, was pretty cool to see people who I know starring in a reality TV show and seeing how TV exaggerates their personalities.

I ended up playing Saturday night as well as Sunday. Saturday I cashed a bunch of stuff(7 cashes out of 26 tournaments) and won the 30r on Party but because of getting in for infinite in 3x turbos as well as bricking most of the big buyins, I finished just under breakeven.

Every once in a while I have a Sunday where Sunday morning and Sunday night feel like entirely different days, thats pretty much how this Sunday was.
In the morning I played 24 tournaments, cashed 10, bubble 1 or 2 final tables and final tabled 3 others.

Sunday night I played 19 tournaments and mincashed 1.

My Sunday was extremely promising right from the start, I had huge stacks in the 12:00 FTP 109 and Stars 109 and also final tabled a small ongame 108 within the first few hours of the day. I kept building stacks and shortly later also had big stacks in the Ipoker Major, Paradise Major, Sunday Warmup, 109r, 108r on ongame and a massive stack in the Stars 109. I then went through the standard "everything goes awful" phase where I lost all my chips in the 109r, busted the warmup and ipoker for mincashes, lost AA to TT for over 3x average to mincash Paradise, lost most of my chips in the 108r and got down to 5BB with 4 tables left in the Stars 109. Immediately after getting short in the Stars 109 I got K5s>AJ, AK>22 and JJ>AK to get back into good shape. I went really card dead with 2 tables left but managed to final table, continued to be carddead, then ran 88 into KK to bust 6th for 6.4k. At the same time Ongame 108r was going extremely well. I was basically just winning every pot I got involved in any everything was going my way such that I had over 100BB like 5 or 6 hours in with over final table average and 3 tables to go. I then lost a bunch of races to shortstacks and ran AA into AQ and AJ into AA to be middle of the pack with 15 or so left. I then went through another very carddead phase and just barely made the final table before instantly busting KJ<AT in 10th for 1.6k.

After my 11 cashes, I managed for profit about 2k on the day, but essentially all Sunday I had this idea in my head that I was going to have back to back amazing Sundays. I probably only expect to win money maybe 1/3 or 1/4 Sundays so even having back to back profitable Sundays is pretty sweet.

Oh ya, lately I've been having trouble thinking of a great halloween costume, if anyone has good ideas and doesn't mind sharing, feel free to comment with any ideas. I'd prefer if it has something to do with something that happened in recent times rather than a costume that could be used any year.

Lately I feel as if I haven't really been as proactive as I normally like to be, so for the next little while I'm going to try to do more things with a purpose. For a while I was killing very little time on my computer, but lately thats increased significantly so I'm going to try to limit that for the next little while. I've also been pretty lazy and after 3 consecutive (Canadian) Thanksgiving dinners this weekend I realized I would probably be a lot happier if I just agreed to do the best I can to stay in shape wherever I am. So often when travelling I feel like its difficult to jog when I don't know the roads/paths well but at the same time its a lot more enjoyable to jog a mediocre route than sit in my room regretting not doing something. The same goes for lifting, I'll often feel not in the mood to lift if I'm eating inconsistently, but in general I just need to make due with whatever is accessible at the time and even though it won't be as enjoyable as if I had everything I need at my disposal, it will still be a lot better than if I opt not to do things.


Anyways, I'm home from Ottawa and saw my family for the first time in over a month. It is always pretty nice to be home, but I'll probably be gone fairly soon. I played online today and yesterday and will probably play 1 or 2 more days this week before either leaving back to Ottawa or possibly going to play EPT Warsaw and then going to Ottawa. I was talking to KingDan and he asked if EPT packages are must play since he was thinking of playing a sat to EPT Warsaw without intending to play, then we started talking about it and decided it might not be a bad idea to  just go to the tournament. We're gonna decide tomorrow and look into flights etc, but thats the one EPT that has been on the schedule both years that I haven't played and figured I may as well play it just to see if I'm missing anything when it comes to planning for future years.

I've realized in my blog I rarely commit to things, so instead of continuing my flaky streak I'll just say I've been playing some small-mid stakes 7 game lately and although I'm enjoying it a lot, I'll almost certainly end up getting bored and playing other stuff soon rather than actually putting in lots of hands.

Ottawa has been pretty fun so far, I played 3 days of WCOOP this week and unless my 12k stack in the main event turns into something, it was pretty disappointment filled.

The first day(300 PLO rebuy) I just had a ton of mincashes in smaller tournaments, but ended up not really making any deep runs and having just a pretty standard boring/losing tournament session.

The next 2 sessions have been kind of the opposite and I basically got chips in everything.


Thursday I played 22 tournaments with 6 cashes for a small profit, but I had stacks in everything. At one point with a few tables left in each tournament, I was still in the FTP 50 cubed, Stars 109r, FTP 163, Paradise 50 euro rebuy, Stars 109 cubed turbo and among the chipleaders in the 500 rebuy.

I ended up turning those stacks in everything into like an 8th, 5th, and 30th or so in the non 109r's and like 12th and 20th in the 109r's and in the 530 rebuy I lost 2 pots which if I had have won them would have been a sizable chipleader, AQ to KJ on KQQx board and QQ to AQ allin preflop, so that was pretty soul-crushing.

Today I played a much lighter schedule than usual since the WCOOP main event is one of the few tournaments of the year where I really want to be able to focus a fair bit and Molly's friends were going out tonight for her birthday and didn't really want to miss that because I was coming 12th in a 75 freezeout.

Anyways, I got chips in pretty much everything and despite winning a tournament today its been pretty lame. I won the 109 freezeout on Party for 5.5k so I kinda considered that a satellite to the WCOOP main and I managed to get 11th in the Betfair major, 21st in the 1851 player 109 freezeout on Stars and 14th in the Party major after being 3rd/17. I had a bunch of chips in other tournaments as well, but decided to waste the rungood in the 109 freeze. Maybe I'll just turn things around and win the WCOOP main, after that I promise minimal ranting in my blog for quite some time.

Alright, so I decided against writing a full trip report for Barcelona, basically I just was mildly card dead most of the tournament, but every single time I got a hand someone else got a hand nearly as strong and I always held. My big pots throughout the tournament were 55 v KQ on a K85cc board, TTv AJs allin pre where he flopped an A, I turned a T, AA v TT where he called my squeeze and raise called the 986 flop, AQ>KQs, KK>QQ, JJ<AA and then KQ<66 to bust in 11th. I have no idea how much differently people react to me than to other people in the EPT events, but unless game dynamics have changed significantly since 2 years ago when I started playing live tournaments, I think I have a lot of fear equity which basically just seems to result in blind steals and cbets working way more than they should for me, and coolers needing to be much bigger for me to actually stack off, so I don't usually get that many super interesting spots.

Anyways, I flew out the day after busting and went back to Waterloo for a few days to play WCOOP before going to Kingston and Ottawa. So far I've played 8 WCOOP events and have 4 mincashes, and although there is obviously a lot of value in most of these events I really wish my focus when playing online were good enough to take full advantage. 

When playing even like a $500 live tournament or something, I see everything that goes on at the table, listen to every conversation, think about peoples motives and in general just seem to profile people extremely well and combine that with the hands that they have played/showndown to get a very good idea of what I can/can't expect from people.

When playing online, no matter how many or how few tables I'm playing, I always have twoplustwo and AIM going, often am watching youtube videos or trying to do something else while playing. Once I get to the last few tables of tournaemtns I can usually focus really well and adapt better to the gameflow, but for tournaments like the WCOOP where they are so deepstacked with people making such significant mistakes the whole way through I really should be trying to focus better to fully take advantage of the poor players in these high-buyin deepstacked tournaments. My results so far have been alright and I have no idea whether focus would have even really improved them much, I guess I am just disappointed that last weekend as I was doing well in what I think is the 3rd largest online tournament of the year(1k Sunday WCOOP) I still wasn't paying anywhere near the amount of focus I would to a much smalelr 1k buyin live tournament.

Online has been going pretty solid for me in the 3 days I've played since getting back, I won the morning 109 freezeout on Stars one day and the 55r on AP one of the other days, both were pretty small(12k and 5.5k for first) but combined with a bunch of other smaller cashes things have been going pretty decent. This Sunday was pretty frustrating but I ended up squeezing out a profit. I cashed both the warmup and 1k  wcoop's as well as the Ipoker 500(1m guarantee this week... these were the 3 biggest tournaments this Sunday) and had great stacks in each before all went falling down in a short span(ran QQ into AA for over triple average in warmup, lost KK to QQ for a top 20 stack over 120BB deep against Stevesbets when I 3bet his UTG+1 raise from UTG+2 and he jammed) and lost 5 consecutive allins to lose a massive stack on Ipoker. I ended up squeezing out a marginal profit after running super good in the 55r on AP, but it was annoying to be 2 tabling the 55r which was 5k for first and the 1k which was 500k for first and wasting my run good on the 55r.

Anyways, I'm probably going to play the 300r PLO today, might play Thursday and will definitely play the main event this Sunday. I'm going to play the main event at Stevejpa'splace in Kingston but other than that I'm in Ottawa until I leave for WSOPE on the 25th.

I still need to rewatch my recent video series and go over the comments from it, but after I get back from London I'll definitely be making some more videos.