♪Turn up baby, turn up, when I turn it on
You know how I get too lit when I turn it on
Can't handle my behavior when I turn it on
Too fast, never ask, if the life don't last♪♪
After the realization of my newfound love for tournament poker, I started 2020 still cheating with my old cashgame love, grinding a bankroll to be able to play 25nl after i cashed out my roll in December to spend in the holiday season. I would still play a tournament on occasion but nothing spectacular.
Its only from halfway march and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic that I started playing more tournaments and slowly making it my main game.
One of the main reasons for the transition was a new passed law going into effect in April that prohibited online casino's to hand out any kind of bonuses or play incentives to players.
To understand how bad this is for players, I'm going to explain a bit how (online) poker works: every time players go to a flop, the poker-site providing the game takes a percentage of whatever money the players will put in the pot.
For the 25nl limit ( meaning players join the table with 25€), the percentage is 4,5%. So lets say two players go all-in putting each 25€, the winner of the hand won't get 50€ but only gets 47,75€.
When playing many hands, the amount forfeited to the poker-site becomes a really big one pretty fast.
Poker-sites want as many players possible to play as many hands as they get money because of this. To incite players to play more, most have bonus programs handing out money or other kind of rewards ( tournament tickets,..).
To get more action, they also design all kinds of promotions based on played hands.
For example, one of the bonus i got last year:
In this bonus, players losing 20€ or more in 1 week get a free tournament ticket where the top100 finishers get 40€.
The new lam prohibiting Belgian players from partaking in any bonuses means that we as players are at a major disadvantage as these bonuses are a inherent part of a players earning from poker.
This fact accelerated my transition as I didn't have any incentive for grinding cash games anymore and from mid April, I started viewing myself as a tournament player and stopped playing cash-games altogether.
I stated in my previous post that my knowledge of tournament play was very limited but this didn't stop me from playing tournaments lol..and I guess my luckbox was nicely filled because I quickly shipped a tournament over 147 players for my then best score of my newborn tournament life:
hello hun?? yeah it's me, I did it, it is done, i took all the cash
Because of the pandemic, i was working from home and keeping my daughter at the same time in a time period that is the busiest in my line of work ( I'm managing a training fund) meaning I didn't manage to find much time to grind in April.
I did get an email from Unibet stating that the Unibet Online series ( UOS), a tournament series with buy ins ( entree fee) range from low to high, would be running the first 3 weeks of may!
In my mind, this could only mean 1 thing: LET'S GET OUR GRIND ON!
After receiving the spousal ok, I then started grinding the satellites and did pretty well in them ( a satellite is a lower buy in or entree fee tournament that gives out a number of tickets for a higher entry fee tournament):
Despite my resolution to grind hard during the UOS, I didn't manage to find much time in the first 2 weeks of May to play the events I wanted, still I did play some tournaments and did fairly well in them, ending in the money ( paid places of tournaments) more often than not.
In no particular order ( warning: looots of screenshots)
Our hero also did pretty good in some UOS events, in order of shiippingz:
1) E88 Rebuy Nano: shiiip
2) UOS83: runner up!
3) going places: good luck mister J*
4) non UOS event but nice score in the galaxy
5) started from the bottom...now we getting somewhere lol
UOS125: 4 left as the shortstack but without a care in the world as i was guaranteed at least 242€
3 left and our hero is still short..but guaranteed 329€!
Aaaaaand headsup lol: the headsup lasted 1 hand as villain woke up with AKs and flopped the world..but biggest shiiiip for hero for his first tournament month: 451€
That's right, not bad for a few hours of clicking buttons lol
So yeah, May was pretty good poker-wise, I feel like I won way more money than I deserve playing a poker format I know very little about but it feels damn good to see that decent amounts of money can still be made in poker with more or less basic understanding of some poker concepts.
Moving forward, I want to start studying tournament poker as I find myself unsure of the correct action in too many spots and know for sure I'm playing way too tight toward the end of tournaments.
Poker Goals for June:
1) get a membership on a training site and study for at least 4 hours a week
2) get the business side of poker in order (taxes wise)
3) lower the table count to focus more on each action while playing( i was playing 9 tables..)
Life Goals for June:
GET IN SHAPE lol ==> after a back injury in December 2019, I gained a ridiculous amount of weight as I had to give up any sports for a few months and i love eating good food. Just as I started going back to working out, the pandemic hit and I couldn't be bothered working out on my own..so yeah much kilo's to lose for our hero.
In short: bankroll UP, weight DOWN
Before I leave: I like to put song lyrics in my titles and posts as they reflect my mood or state of mind while writing my posts.
For this post, I chose the song i have been using on all my tournament final tables on loop, it's clearly a winning song !
J*out