My Most Minus EV Cash Game Ever

A while back when I first moved to Manchester, I met up with a fellow poker player that I played with back in the early STT days who went by the name of NJD77. We had a drink and a chat after he finished work.

He said that later on in October he was gonna organise a "twoplustwo" meet with some other guys and invited me to come. Of course even though there is a big chance of losing money and more embarrassingly the chance to show how much I suck in comparison haha. Since I never use that forum I actually have no idea who most of the people are. 

The players in question were; 

Derby (or Dreuby?) - A Dutch cash game player who has an unorthodox play should we say lol 

NJD77 - A former fellow STTer now turned cash game grinder

Buffyslayer - An MTT grinder, and newly added SNGProtege Coach, who strangely enough for me lives in Milton Keynes... My hometown 

Entim - Former SNGProtege coach, 18 mans specialist and now complete baller killing live tournaments and staking. 

The game moved to my house and we had some dominoes to start the night off. We watched Entim run retardedly bad vs a fish in a few HU SNGs, which unfortunately proceeded to spill over into the cash game.

Derby who we now decided to call Deurdy due to IPhone's auto correcting, took it upon himself to have a 100% pre flop VPIP folding only a few times to some 3 bet shoves. 

Was a great night and it was awesome meeting some real life legends! haha. I'm sure that they're all gonna be humbly saying they're not. But none the less it was an experience, and I hope that I can meet more people in the future.






A 180 Man Fail

With my continuous involvement with SNGProtege as well as breakdancing, starcrafting, and going out and staying social, it has been increasingly difficult to be able to commit myself to a 5/6hrs of grinding the 180ms.

So I've decided that I'm going to have to play more shorter sessions, involving my old favourites the Single Table Tournament 9 mans, and maybe some Heads Up stuff. When I can find the time I'll throw in the odd 180m tournament, but for now my priority will be getting those VPPs/FPPs again and my status up again (I'm Bronze Star again woohoo!)

I really do think that even though they are not as profitable as before, I should still be table to make a decent amount in them, especially with the fact that a lot of players are still stuck in shove/fold mode. I'm a big believer now in relearning the game straight up, and harnessing your skills by getting lots of post flop experience.


Additions/Changes to SNGProtege

I'm aware that some blogs end up being very "advertisy" and I'll try not to be like that. This blog is always gonna be about what I wanna write about and no one can tell me otherwise!

SNGProtege has expanded now. We've got a new MTT Coach, Buffyslayer1, and has 2 new students turned coaches Bigniux and Whyme270483! Congratulations to all!!

We've also added all videos to be accessible from the forums, as well as the webinars that happen every week. The videos and webinars have evolved from simple push/fold ranges strategy, to now understanding the game from a fundamental hand reading level. Here's the titles of our webinars to date;

1. Invention Value
2. Raise/Folding <10bb Stacks
3. <6 True bb Shoving
4. Isolating!
5. Calling Shoves; Thinking Beyond EV
6. Flat Calling
7. Bluffing Lines
8. Fancy Play Syndrome
9. End Game Short Term Memory...

If you are interested in being staked in low stakes SNGs and MTTs, please feel free to apply here.

Time For A Break

I really haven't been playing all that much and have been dabbling around here and there kinda with some half arsed sessions. Feeling guilty for not "working", its become apparent to me that my hunger for the game is slowly dissipating. I've been in this situation before, and what I did was take a break and hit it hardcore when I got back... So I'm gonna not play poker at all until next Tuesday...

The P-log Changes

Well its apprent to me that this blog is pretty empty. In some ways I guess it reflects on my mood as such. My mood is effected on whereby I am making money. So therefore there has been less blog posts...

As chirped on in my previous posts, full of optimism and tips for positive thinking, and not being results orientated, I accept that I am totally not following my own advice on those as my lack of success is certainly getting to me no doubt. Hey, I'm only human (or am i??!)

But life has gotten more complicated, in that I have one! lol. Back home living with my parents it was easy to concentrate on poker, just coz I didn't have much of a social life, and in a way I kinda wanted it to be that way. Concentrate on learning this game, and make sure I play since I have nothing else to do.

Upon moving up to Manchester (my fave city... in UK ha), I'm juggling various things I wanna do, such as breakdancing, playing Starcraft (zomg), and staying social with my friends. I'm also helping with Glitlr's amazing site SNG Protege, in which my coach has certainly turned amany zeros to cash machine making heros.

Because of this, I have removed the description of this blog from being "A Puyan P[oker] Blog" to simply "A Puyan Plog". I just don't want, or need this to be a blog about poker only. I mean, it basically isn't really, I've talked about various things that aren't poker related anyways. It all comes down to the fact that I just simply don't think that poker is a huge percentage (lets statistically say) of my life anymore. There are other things going on, and I want my blog to reflect that. Plus, I'm hoping to blog more about other stuff anyways, I've forgotten how therapeutic writing this stuff down is...

Please have a look at www.sngprotege.com and see if your interested in backing and coaching in low stakes SNGs. We're now accepting applicants that are interested in playing Scheduled MTTs, with our new coach Buffyslayer! I'm pretty psyched as this weekend I'm gonna be meeting a bunch of amazing poker players including Buffyslayer, for a poker filled weekend of which I am blatently the fish lol.

Rules DONT Rule!

Rules rule!! Err... nah. Rules suck lol. But it is true that we need rules to a certain extent, but to live by them is another thing. Rules aren't necessarily there to be broken (as the saying goes), but in the other extreme case it doesn't mean that we don't need any rules at all.

Case in point;

Killing is wrong. If you kill you go to prison.

Woman kills a man, she should go to prison, coz that is the rule.

However, what if it was in self defense? What if she got attacked and her only way of surviving led to her killing him?

Do we stick to the rule that is written in stone or make an exception for the individual case?

Well I hope you choose the latter, coz the truth is that Rules are GUIDES.

Some people stick to the rules regardless, whether it defies logic or common sense. Why? Because its easy. Because you don't have to think. If the woman killed, and the rule was that you cant kill then she should go to jail straight up... because that's the rule. Maybe there'll be a few individual cases where there should be exceptions, but statistically, overall, the rule will be beneficial and justified percentage wise.

In poker, there are a lot of "rules" to help you. There are things like "be the pre flop aggressor", or "shove 10 big blind stacks blind vs blind" or "never open limp". These are good rules, they help a lot, but at the end of the day, they are guides.

I think I have been playing by the rulebook way too long. Having rules makes everything easier. You literally don't have to think. You don't have to think about the "exceptional" case. But playing by the numbers is not maximising value. You are not adjusting to the game, the game is controlling you.

Don't just blindly follow rules no matter what - Think for yourselves! (Image roughly relevant lol)

Goodbye Steve Jobs

Well when talking about breaking the rules, there's no better example then Steve Jobs. He was the mastermind of not just innovating products, but actually the idea behind making us want things that we didn't think we did. There's no doubt that he is one of the most influential people of our time, and how he turned around Apple is an inspiration to us all.

Apple has released their long awaited new phone, the iPhone 4s. Many people were speculating that this was gonna be number 5 coming out, but I had my doubts, since they brought out the 3G before the 4. Why change a successful pattern?

Just like the 3G, there wasn't an amazing amount of changes. Basically they buffed up the 4 with more faster processor and a better camera. They introduced something called Siro which is a voice activation task manager, but honestly are we all gonna be going round the city talking to our phones? Would be pretty weird. I mean, how much little time do you have where your gonna need to be talking into your phone your text messages? I dunno...

What has happened with this update is that people aren't impressed with it. But in all fairness it just hasn't lived up to the previous new changes that Apple normally brings in. People will (and have) still buy it, and I still think that the iPhone is a damn good phone/ipod/movie player/camera/GPS/app utility...

The iOS5 has also been released this month, which is the software for the iPhone. I am very impressed with this update, it has some cool stuff like quick notifications, and my favourite one being a quick way of taking photos (using the volume button as a clicker too). There are a lot of other features such as photo editing (taking out red eye and light levelling), reminders app, automatic updates without needing iTunes, Twitter integration, and automatic backing up using iCloud which is free. There are actually loads of features that they've tweaked and you can check it out here.