New year, new me.. hmm scrap that, but allow me to reintroduce myself, I am J*, 35 year old from Belgium currently living in Brussels.
I had a blog many years ago ( back in '08) where I would write about my pokerlife when the poker BOOM was raging and I got bitten myself by the poker bug.
I recently stumbled upon that blog ( in dutch) https://mylifeonthegrind.blogspot.com/ and it was a great read for me as I had forgotten many of the stories I shared back then.
Also after years of absence from the poker field, I started playing in a very recreational way as I now work full time leading a training fund, am married and father to the sweetest imaginable 5 year old girl.
The recreational grind started again somewhere around the beginning 2019 but with big lapses of time in which i wouldn't play at all.
How did i got the poker stuff restarted u ask?
Well i always have been a big computer game enthusiast and as such, have always kept an eye out on twitch for some poker streamers like Unibet ambassador David.
Now poker-wise, I used to be a hardcore cash-game grinder back in the days when poker sites would just throw insane signup bonus/rakeback deals just to try to get your action but since I restarted playing a bit more, I haven't been able to enjoy the pure cashgame grind as I used to many years ago.
Off course, the poker climate has changed drastically with the abundance of free or relatively cheap material to improve one's pokergame resulting on games where the vast majority understand at least the basics of poker, even at the lowest stakes. Still, even without having read any extensive theoretical material well over a decade, I have been beating the 10nl games on Unibet for a decent chunck of green but I find the 25nl stakes to be quite challenging as the stake regulars have a decent grasp of what it means to be (over) aggro in cashgame. As of now, I believe I am only a slight winner/ breakeven player on 25nl, but I lack a decent samplesize as I haven't been grindin much cashtables in the last couple of months.
Back in the day, I would sometime play poker tournaments but I never really quite enjoyed them ( or shipped anything substantial lol) as I enjoyed the much faster paced cash game action up to 100nl online.
Anyway, from watching twitch streamers/ poker end-bosses like Jaime Staples or Fintan Hand, I slowly got the idea to maybe start some donkaments from time to time.
Playing on Unibet, I was pretty amazed how low the level of play is in tournaments and as the fields are pretty small compared to the 1k plus fields of pokerstars, I even found myself shipping some donk.. euhm I mean tournaments for 50x buyin while still feeling like I knew very little about them except for having heard terms like ICM, knowing that aggression is key around the bubble or to abuse the shorties when u build a big stack lol.
Some examples of (very) low stakes tournament results from 2019:
Anyway, after asking a 2019 mtt graph from Unibet somewhere around february 2020 where i had 100% of my mtt action, i was surprised to see that I shipped around 800eur in 2019, which is amazing since I couldn't be bothered to play anything else that the 2€ multiverse tournament and the 2€ galaxy on rare occasions since it ends so late ( between 1 and 2 am).
Playing ( and winning) these tournaments, I discovered that I much more enjoyed the thrill of shipping a tournament over 30,60 or 200 players, than winning yet another AA vs KK 4bet pot in cashgames. Also, I discovered that I tilt way more from losing that same AA vs KK in cashgame than losing a flip with AK vs TT for final table chiplead with 15 left..
Adding all these ingredients together, it was now clear that I would play way more tournaments in 2020 when I would have the time to do so.
How did our hero fare into the messy world of MultiTableTournaments in 2020? stay tuned for next update and find out :-)
J'out