I took a couple weeks off from tourneys because I wanted to have a BR on Stars before I started playing tourneys heavily again. I finally got the roll I wanted onto Stars earlier today and decided to go ahead and play some tourneys across both sites tonight. I had some fears about things getting off to a rough start or maybe that I would lose some of my edge. Well I played seven MTTs tonight and cashed in two of them including one FT. The coolest part is that the FT was on Stars… my first night playing tourneys on Stars and I’ve already made a FT! I’m quite excited though I am very disappointed with the result. I came into the FT of the $20 rebuy 3rd in chips but only finished 6th for like 1K. I made a huge and frustrating blind vs blind laydown (folded two pair) cause I was sure I was beat then I went on tilt cause I folded lol. Got unlucky one more time then shoved blind vs blind as the shortie and busted to the BB’s A-high. Oh well. Besides my six-handed play at the FT I feel like I played incredible poker the whole night. My reads and subsequent aggression are where they were in September. The only thing that seems to be missing from my poker repertoire from September is all the insane motivation (due to frustration). I’m not sure how to “re-find” that motivation since I’ve been having success… lol its tough to get motivated when you continually get the result you want! Its a problem I’m not used to having but obv hope its a problem I have to deal with for a long time! Oh well, I’m sure it will come back around. Anyway, so far things are looking good just as I planned. I hope that I continue to own the medium buy-in MTTs until I feel comfortable and confident enough to graduate to the daily higher stakes buy-ins.

Back in February and March of this year, I wasn’t sure what my future in poker was going to be. I was coming off a frustrating period where I played about 3,000 SNGs without having very encouraging results. Then one night in March I “accidentally” won a $10 buy-in MTT and won like $450 bucks. I decided then that MTTs were the way to go and I knew I had to dedicate myself to them. That was also the point when I started this blog. Lol if you look back to my very first posts in March you will see confirmation of this story. I was so silly then Anyway, I knew that the first step was to find some players who were winning a lot. PearlJammed immediately caught my eye as being a guy who played a lot of tourneys with a lot of amazing results. I wanted to know exactly what he was doing right so I looked up his stats and saw that he was basically a junkie, playing 10 to 20 MTTs per day across multiple sites. It was then that I realized I had a long way to go before I would achieve success, but I had a very specific goal in mind: To become an awesome, profitable MTT player. Six months later I have more than achieved that goal… at least by everyone else’s standards.

My exact results for the last four months look like this:

Total Cashes: $48,425
Total Profit: $29,236
Total Tourneys: 323
Avg Buy In (ABI): $59

Obv these are very encouraging results and anyone who has read my blog on a semi-regular basis over the last few months prbly thinks that I have MORE than achieved my own expectations. Its true, I have. I have come UNBELIEVABLY far from where I was just two months ago, let alone six months ago. Most ppl in my life can’t believe the kind of money I’m making by playing poker online. But heres the problem: I’m the kind of person who is almost never satisfied until I get EXACTLY what I want. So, what DO I want exactly? I mean, if results like these aren’t good enough for me, what WILL be good enough? Ok, here it is. Back in March when I got obsessed with MTTs, PearlJammed was the main guy I was most impressed with. But now that I’ve come so far in poker, I’ve got a new source of inspiration:

Scott “SCTrojans08″ Freeman -
The Most Successful Online Tourney Player The Last Four Months

Total Cashes: $611,918
Total Profit: $304,755
Total Tourneys: 1902
Avg Buy In (ABI): $160

These are some unbelievable results. Some ppl think he is a God. Maybe he is. All I know is that he follows the same exact two-step formula to having consistently good MTT results as everyone else:

1) Play a shitload of them. Scott played over 1,000 MTTs in the month of August. Think about it, the players who always make FTs and wins tons of money are the ones who are playing at least 10 MTTs/day. Its all about the math/odds.
2) Play TAG early and LAG late. And if you’re willing to get maniacally aggro at the very end of the tourney, you’ve got a pretty damn good shot at winning 1st place. Most ppl, however, don’t have that level of fearlessness in them. Thats a good thing. Thats why there is only a small percentage of players out there who are really tearing it up.

In my mind, what makes Scott stand out more than any other online player is the sheer volume of tourneys he puts in. He mentioned in a cardplayer.com interview recently how he used to play an insane amount of tourneys every day but recently tapered off and only plays the big buy-in evening tourneys during the week and of course all the big weekend monsters. I checked his stats to confirm what he was saying and he isn’t lying. He played more than 1K tourneys in August! I did the math and that breaks down to playing about one tourney every forty-three minutes of the month, non-stop. Lol, it took me four months to play 323 tourneys! Between Stars and Tilt, he cashed for a total of $203,000 that month, with $87,000 of it being profit. There may not be a harder working player in online poker right now than Scott Freeman.

Anyway, when I see all the work he puts into poker and the subsequent results he gets out of it, I can’t help but feel motivated to achieve results like those. It will obv take me awhile to get there, but look what happened to me the last time I started with only a dream and turned it into reality.

Within the next couple weeks, I will be putting a BR on Stars and playing a minimum of eight MTTs per day between both sites. I am going to continue to stick with the medium buy-in tourneys ($26 to $100) until I at least get my feet wet or feel comfortable enough to add in the evening $163 tourney on each site. My schedule right now, however, consists of playing four tourneys on each site which ALL start between 5pm and 7:30pm my time. This allows me to get through all my tourneys within a seven hour period so I don’t get burned out and tilty like I used to when the tourneys were spread throughout the day. The total buy-ins for the eight tourneys are exactly $250 on each site, which is a total of $500 per day. All eight tourneys have 1st place prize money of at least 5K, most being well above that. I have crunched the numbers several times and this plan looks to be about the best as far as my BR and comfort-level goes.

I feel this post getting insanely long. It doesn’t really matter to me if ppl read these long posts of mine. I love to write and plan things out… its part of what makes me tick. This blog is as much for me as it is for my readers. Putting my thoughts into words is very important to me. Besides, I figure that the person who puts the most into something has the best chance of getting the most out of it. I think I’ve been proving that over the last six months and I think I’m going to continue proving it as things get better for me and I get ever closer to my goal of being one of the greatest online MTT players.

Full Blog: JimmytheHat19.blogspot.com

By now, anyone who takes online poker seriously in any way has prbly already heard about what happened over at Absolute Poker in the last few weeks. It seems that a player was identified during a $1K buy-in tourney as making calls, raises, and folds that only someone with intimate, detailed knowledge of other player’s holecards could have possibly made. He was basically able to maximize his profits and minimize his losses perfectly. An investigation was launched after the hand histories were posted all over the online poker forums and AP recently confirmed that there was in fact cheating going on during that tournament. It was initially believed that a rougue techie who hadn’t worked for AP in over a year was to blame, but now it seems that the scandel came from one of the highest sources at AP: A former VP of Operations. Pretty scary shit.

This is obv bad news for the online poker world, in every aspect. I have a hard enough time as it is convincing family and friends that being an online poker pro is a legitimate profession. However, when I stop and think about how much money is being played for everyday on all the sites, I’m not surprised this happened at all. In fact, it was really only a matter of time until something serious like this occured. Given that the bad beat jackpot was recently started on AP, I can’t help but wonder how legitimate the jackpot winners were…??? I am just happy it didn’t happen on one of the two major sites, Stars and Tilt. I know that Stars WCOOP main event winner of 1.3 million was recently disqualified after Stars launched an investigation into him and determined he was cheating in some way. Everyone moved up in pay by one spot. I haven’t heard what the cause of his disqualification was, but it sure does make me wonder. I’m confident that the source of the cheating had nothing to do with the site itself (it was prbly player collusion) as opposed to the AP scandel where you had a person in charge of things at the root of the betrayal.

I doubt that these serious cheating scandels are happening on a daily basis across the sites, but with all the money out there to be won, one thing is certain: Somebody out there right now is scheming up a plan to cheat us out of our money… and there will always be that threat. Its no different from “real life”… Where there is money, there will always be crooks. Its just something we have to learn to live with.

Full Blog: JimmytheHat19.blogspot.com

In my last post I mentioned I would be playing a shitload of poker in the eight days off until the World Series starts. Well, besides earning the points I need per day so I can order the 50″ Plasma TV on Nov 1st, I haven’t been all that active online. I haven’t even touched a tourney in several days. Why? Well I guess the answer is a little complex. First off, I’ve had a lot on my mind in the last few days with my roommate moving out this month, The Rockies headed to the Fall Classic, trying to get World Series tix, my Grandma being pretty close to death, and trying to figure out how much/when to put money on PokerStars. Thats right, I’ve decided I want a BR on both FT and Stars. More on that in a bit. The other reason I haven’t been playing any tourneys lately is because I seriously just haven’t been feeling it. That might sound a little silly, but I tend to have better results when I am completely focused and motivated to play a tourney. They are ultra-competitive and require an almost primal drive to succeed at. I haven’t been feeling that “primal drive” lately, prbly due to all that other stuff on my mind right now. My life is in a bit of a transition period right now, where everything around me is changing at least a little bit. For the most part, with the obvious exception of my Grandma, the changes are all for the good.

I’ve decided its time to expand my poker horizons. Within the next month, I will be looking to move some money from Full Tilt onto Pokerstars. I’ve had the Pstars software for awhile and just the other day I wrote down the entire MTT schedule and compared it to Full Tilt: FT is a joke compared to Stars, seriously. Stars absolutely puts FT to shame when it comes to volume of MTTs in every way (quantity, size of fields, etc). I have isolated a nice period of time (between 6pm and 7:30pm my time) where there are ten seperate MTTs starting between both sites, six on Stars and four on FT, that are perfect for me to play. I will go into more detail about this and my specific plans in a future post. Right now, I need to just focus on all the things I need to do/get in order to take over the apartment after my roommate leaves at the end of the month. I’ve obv got to switch over the utilities and cable to my name, get a TV and a few other things, and some other details I prbly haven’t even thought of yet. Also, World Series tix go on sale Monday morning and they are being sold EXCLUSIVELY online at coloradorockies.com for some reason. So I obv want to make sure I can secure some tickets. In early November, after the Series is over and I’ve tied up all the loose ends as far as living here by myself, I can get back into that groove where I feel confident enough to tackle the MTTs with all my energy and focus. Until then, I’m not even thinking too much about poker.

Full Blog: http://jimmythehat19.blogspot.com/

I am an easily-depressed person by nature. When I have a streak of bad luck I tend to think the worst of things. But whether you want to call it a twist of fate or better fortune, my life has completely turned around since the beginning of September. For starters, I finally grasped hold of that key edge which gives tourney players the ability to make FTs and have huge scores. Twelve FTs in six weeks for ~47K in cashes is absolutely phenomenal. Its just unbelievable. But if you had told me that The Colorado Rockies were going to win 21 out of 22 games (starting at the same time I started winning tournaments) and then sweep their way through the playoffs (7-0) and into the record books and onto the 2007 World Series, I would have undoubtedly been thinking it was a joke. I truly can’t believe whats happening around me these days. It feels like anything is possible at anytime. My life seems to be falling into order and I’m filled with a certain optimism towards the future that I can’t say I’ve ever felt before. I’ve always been a “cup is half empty” kinda guy. But since September, the cup has been overflowing… and it isn’t showing any signs of stopping.

The Rockies have eight days off until the start of The 2007 World Series which means I finally have eight days which I can dedicate solely to poker. I’ve had to put poker on the backburner the last couple weeks as I wasn’t about to miss one minute of the history the Rockies are making right now. They have eight days off so I have eight days to play a ton of poker… and find World Series tickets!

Complete Blog At: http://jimmythehat19.blogspot.com/

Hello hello

About me:

Online pro from Colorado. Love donkaments and playing 12 cash games at once. Sick poker junkie. Been killing MTTs on Full Tilt lately. Twelve FTs in the last six weeks for about 47K in cashes. Blogging at JimmytheHat19.blogspot.com

I’m headed to the top of the online poker world. Share the experience with me won’t you???