Easter grinding 12 hour sessions and random thoughts...

Hey!

I've just finished a few days hardcoring the multi's putting into my practice my proposed grind-schedule that I'll be using after the Summer. And I've got to say I love it! I register from 5pm-11pm every night adding in the two full tilt hyper-turbos at the end of the night to spice things up for that last minute gamble.

At the moment I'm registering for tournaments on Ladbrokes, Full Tilt, Ongame, iPoker, IPN (Boss) and pokerstars. I'm starting to build up decent sample sizes on all the sites now and I'm quite pleased to report that I'm up a lot on all of them. Apart from stars. Grrrr.... But that could all have changed if I had won a couple of those damned crucial coinflips.

Anyway, I'm in two minds about the schedule. At the moment, I load up tournaments until I'm 6 tabling and then register for the next available tournament of my choice once I donk out of my existing 6. I have 4 tables tiled on my 22inch monitor and 2 tiled on my adjoined 15 inch laptop screen. After the Summer this old set-up will be off and away as I plan on investing in a new desktop with duel 30 inch screens. Pretty sick I hope. Regardless, I feel that 6 tables is probably the most that I can comfortably manage playing across so many sites. It takes you a couple of seconds to realise what's going on, who's raised from where, what the stack sizes are behind you, what notes you have on the players involved etc. etc. I just don't think I could profitably play more especially due to current screen space issues.

A possible solution I was thinking instead after the Summer would be to just stick to 2-3 sites. With duel-30inch monitors and a good resolution, screen space wouldn't be an issue, but the amount of down-time and stress I get due to different sites messing with one another could really be massively reduced. To pick these 2-3 sites I really need to base it on the tournament schedule and the level of the competition.

Ideally I would like to choose pokerstars, full tilt and ladbrokes. By far these three have the best software on the market, best support and best structures. It's a joke how much the other euro sites like ongame, ipoker etc. lag behind in this day and age. But whatever, somehow with their dodgy out-dated business strategies of doing fuck-all they are still managing to hoard in enough punters to cough up the rake on a day-to-day basis. You see stars and full tilt have the big problem that at the mid-high stakes they are significantly tougher than the euro sites. That coupled with the bigger field sizes making the variance much bigger just make them a no-no to grind on the regular.

Ladbrokes however is a good choice to specialise in. Alone however there just aren't enough tournaments to be worthwhile. The choice is then between ongame, ipoker and IPN (boss). Now, I could play all three along side Ladbrokes. Which is a good possibility. But to be honest, I'd like to just have 2-3 sites as my main focus so that I can be able to make better notes vs. the other regs and that everything can just run more smoothly. Both ongame and ipoker have pretty good schedules for mid-hig buyins whilst IPN (Boss) which is a smaller network is somewhat limited here.

I suspect then realistically I'll just try to make myself a regular on these three sites. The only problem is, ongame repulses me. I honestly think the software is disgusting, unreliable and clumsy. Yeh, it really is. But I've done so well there lately at the same time and the players seem to be so bad. I might try installing a mod to improve the look of the program, because at the moment it's just horrible. The structures aren't bad and they have great tournaments but it's just a repulsive piece of coding. Even down to the little things like note-taking it's just so tilting! I'll probably give it a shot, and I really hope the software is improved. So I'm not too sure what to do. If it does subtely tilt me while I'm playing, and I'm timing out because there's no timebank and I can't see that someone has raised in front of me because the graphics are too shit, then that is a problem. On certain hands I do like taking my time, really analysing the situation before making rushed decisions. This is just not possible on this network (or iPoker for that matter). But I've got to include either iPoker or Ongame in the mix as there is just too much value to be had.

So that's all my random thoughts about the potential schedule blurted out. To summarise for those who quite sensibly couldn't be bothered to read through the dribble:

-going to grind 5pm-11pm sessions

-going to stick to 2-3 sites preferably. Most likely Ladbrokes/ipoker/boss or possibly Ladbrokes/ipoker/ongame if ongame sort their piece of shit software out.





Anyway, the few sessions I had were fun. I played around my friend Chris' house the whole time as my internet at home is too unreliable to put in a decent session. It was nice to grind with someone else at the same time despite him focusing on SNG's which inevitably play very differently to the MTT's I was playing. I'd love in the future to be able to move in with some other MTT grinders as even though Chris doesn't play these, I still felt I learnt quite a bit just talking stuff over with him and questioning some of the plays he was making in his games and him questioning my decisions in my games.

Despite all this, it wasn't too successful. I managed 6 final table bubbles (2 on full tilt, 3 on ipoker and 1 on ongame) with only one final table in a $50/$10k gtd on OnGame where my KK wasn't enough to beat the oh-so-powerful JQ on a J-high board. Ahhh well, despite sounding whiney and now thinking about it in retrospect, I've still been very optimistic with the week and really enjoyed the sessions.

That's the last heavy grind session in a while. I'll be flying off to Dublin on Thursday for the Irish Open then Coventry. After that it's study time. I'll try to play as many satellites as I can for the WSOP main event so fingers crossed for that.

Other than that, everything has been going really well in life. And I made my second biggest hero call ever today!! It's pretty nice and I used almost my full timebank just going over the hand and thinking about various lines he could take and how little sense it made to me at the time.

http://weaktight.com/2180764 If there's any interest I might go into my logic behind the call in a future blog entry as you'll just have to trust me on this one, tilt wasn't the reason!!