SplitSuit.com

I would like to take out a loan against the Sklansky bucks I have lost over the last 2 years please =)
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Went to the strip to watch the Superbowl. Had a quick lunch then went down to the sports book to get a seat. I’m not totally sure why I was surprised that there were no seats available (even though I was an hour early to kickoff). O well. Figured I would play live and watch it in the poker room. I didn’t even make it to kickoff before being down my first buyin, lol.
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200NL: I overlimp 77 and see a 5 way flop of Ks 7h 4s. BB bets $6, folds to me and I raise to $21, folds to BB who calls (he has about $190 left, I cover). Turn is a 5c. He checks, I bet $42, he CR’s to $125, I snap shove and he snap calls. He proudly tables Js6s and hits a nice Qs on the river. So there is one 70/30.
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200NL: I overlimp 8s6s, a lady with $150 small ISO’s to $10, all fold to me who happily calls OOP (I cover). Flop Ts 4c 2s. I donk $10, she minR’s, I giggle and call. Turn is an 8h. I donk for $10 again thinking she would minR or w/e. She raises to $35, I call and brick the river (just c/f). She shows AA, I am not shocked.
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200NL: I overlimp Ah6h and see a 6 way pot. Flop is Th 9c 3h. BB bets $8, I raise to $31, random callybox calls IP, and BB calls (callybox and I are about $240 deep, BB has $35 left). Turn is a 9d, BB shoves for $35, I call, callybox folds (lol, wtf?). River is a Q and I lose to QJo. 78/22 there.
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Just some other crap throughout (lost AQ v KK aipf against a spaz, never hit a single pair when I opened, etc). O well. It just sucks to lose playing live. First, because playing live is the equivilant to playing Hungry, Hungry Hippos controlling 3 hippos…and secondly because it would take years upon years to ever get a sample size. *sigh*

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The month continues to move on. I will recap the last few days:
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Thursday: Woke up fairly early by accident and got some scripting done at 10a. Only got like 5hrs of sleep and was totally exhausted. Finished every last bit of the script and prepped the hands for the video. Went out to lunch with some friends for sushi and then played disc golf for a couple hours. Was such a nice day. Like 65*, sunny, and minimal wind. A nice change of pace from the recent cold weather.
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Got home and bummed for a bit before finally getting the motivation to get the recording done. Took me about 1hr15min to finish the 35min recording. Which was with about 2.1 takes/clip on average. It was a beast of a video.
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Friday: Woke up around noon, ate a quick meal, popped an adderall, and off to work I went. Spent 7hrs straight on editing the video. My adderall makes me so much more OCD so the timing and syncing is near perfect. Hopefully those that watch it enjoy it. It is a video all about fighting for pots preflop. So things like isolating (WT v WL), squeezing, and light 4B-ing… The graphics came out really well I think. The vid is released this upcoming Saturday…so enjoy =)

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My roommate’s friend came over to check out the apartment and then we headed down to the strip to eat. It was raining and the roads here are always terrible when it rains…so I had to do like 55 on the highway…which was mind blowingly slow. Got some Noodle Asia, headed home, and crashed out pretty quickly.
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Saturday: Had a student early in the day and then spent the rest of the day fighting the urge to do work. I came up with a sick sick sick idea for poker training…and am now just waiting on the greenlight for it. I really hope it gets allowed so I can literally change how poker training is currently done. So spent the rest of the day trying to write out scripts, failing, and just went to the gym before passing out.
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Sunday: Woke up early for students…but everyone cancelled today for one reason or another. So I am just talking business stuff with a bunch of ppl and planning out the rest of the month. Need to finish the next “Boxing In The Ring” video and then pump it out. It is going to be a busy week with two tanks, a decent amount of students already schedule and then this video. O well, I will get through it =) Enjoy the Superbowl everyone!
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I linked up with raketakers.com (brought to you by Schwallie) to give you all a chance to get some free full ring coaching! The deal is that you get 1hr of coaching for every $2500 you hit in MGR (which really doesn’t take that long!). I don’t keep your RB or anything, you get your RB, and a free coaching session whenever you hit the next $2500 in MGR.
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All you need to do is click that banner, make an account, set up a RB account on your favorite site(s), and let me know when you reach $2500 in MGR. Simple! Raketakers.com offers the highest rates in the industry, great customer support, and the ability to cashout your RB at any time. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Happy grinding!
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So I ended up taking on my 3rd, and most likely, final, protégé for 2010. I am looking forward to seeing how this works out. All of them are at different points in their career, but all have a ton of potential to be murderfacing. Cheers to their success this year!
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The week is cruising onwards. Had 2 coaching sessions on Tuesday, and 2 more on Wednesday. Felt good after a 2 day vacation from students. Also got my script finished for “Boxing In The Ring: Round 1″ which I think came out fairly well. I decided to delete the 3B-ing section and focus more on squeezing and 4B-ing instead. I might end up making a 3B-ing video of my own at some point, but I feel the topic tends to be fairly saturated. O well, I will figure it out. The goal is to get this video fully recorded and edited by Friday, and hopefully done tomorrow after some disc golf.
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Ended up hitting the gym today which I needed badly. Really good lift as I added 10lbs on everything and also got a solid run in. I was feeling pretty funked this afternoon and the gym helped me feel much better. I also ate a ton today which always makes me want to do the gym more. For those that are unaware, goldfish also makes cinnamonfish…which are probably the best thing known to man. I also found this awesome cinnamon pudding cake and steak+jalapeno burritos at the store…so I have been in fat-kid heaven for the last few days. But at least I am burning it off with walking + gym every few days. Trying to make sure I live long enough to enjoy the work I put in now, lol.

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Someone also proposed to me that I consider making podcasts. I’m not really sure that I want to do that tbh, but I figured I would propose the question to ya’ll, since readers of this would be the ones who would even consider listening to it, lol. So you tell me…good idea? And if so, what would you want me to ramble on about? I can ramble about anything, just give me things you’d care about my opinion on =)
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Alright, I need to get a few hours of sleep so I am functioning for frolf tomorrow. Hope all is well!
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So I got quite a few comments and IM’s from people about my site randomly setting off their anti-virus software. I looked into it, upgraded wordpress, upgraded all my plug-ins, upgraded everything I could think of and I could still see some funky action happening. Did a quick theme change and that turned out to fix the problem. Rather than reinstall the old theme and redo all the custom images, I figured I would take the time to get a new theme up and running. All comments are welcome, though unless there is something glaringly wrong, there is a good chance I won’t be fixing it for awhile due to my being burned out from coding for 4hrs straight, lol. And my sincerest apologies for the virus crap…I promise that it wasn’t intentional =(
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Also, my fault on not updating in a little bit. I meant to last night but ended up passing out hard after I finished my work. Last Thursday I went out with Chris, Jon, and Randy to Naked Fish for lunch, which was awesome. Very fresh sushi, insanely cheap, and a cool little restaurant. Went over to play some disc golf afterwards which was fun. Had decent weather, minus the whole wind thing, and I ended up winning and setting a personal best of 63 on 18 holes.

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Got a lot of writing and planning done on Friday and Saturday. Structured out my personal video product and also structured and began writing my Stox videos for later this month. My goal for this week is to get 2 videos written and recorded (1 day for writing, 1 day for recording each), which should be no issue. Decided I am going to do a 2 parter called “Boxing In The Ring” which will revolve around fighting for pots. Should be cool, and might even make it a 3 parter if I feel so inclined.
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Ended up doing my Tank session with Mpethy on Sunday. Wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to go, since I not only had to take 7 students in mind, but also co-coach…but it worked out well and I got some really good feedback at the end for future structuring. I decided to record the whole thing (video+audio) and package it up. So if you are interested, check out the new “Products” page and click on “The Tank: HEM: Blind Play“. We are planning on the running the PT3 session in 2 weeks, so I will keep you guys updated as I get more information.
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I was planning on getting lots of writing done today. But ended up getting a late start (was up until 2a last night making edits to this thing I’ve been writing) and lounged for too many hours before noticing the whole website thing. Incase you didn’t see it on 2p2, or here, I wrote my post on getting the most out of our HUD. So enjoy that if you haven’t already =)
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Hope all is well!
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Week is going very well thus far. Finished one video for Stox due out 1week from this Saturday, and only have 3 left to do! The video was fun. Recorded a 1hr 25NL Rush video and did the audio after. Had some fun spots and talked a lot about how to approach Rush tables as they currently are. I am very interested to see how the Rush tables do in the long run to be honest. O well, they are fun and profitable now, so no reason not to enjoy it.

Not sure if you guys keep up with Stox news, but this Jason Ho thing is nuts. (not sure if the link will work, my apologies if it doesn’t) Weird stuff. Allegedly, he scammed quite a few people out of money in a bunch of different ways (shit coaching, terrible and overpriced strategy guides, investing into a fund that went pretty much into his pocket, etc). I will wait until all the facts are in before I give my comment on the whole thing. The whole thing comes with terrible timing for Stox (after having lost Leatherass, Jared, and Mbolt), but is terrible for the coaching community which is always on pins and needles in the first place. Hopefully things get straightened out quickly, but it sure makes for some nice drama at the moment, lol.

Everything else this week is going pretty well. Got some students done on Tuesday and have been prepping a video package I am going to release (under my name, not the Stox name). It should be fun and very unique. More details will come on that as I get more and more of it completed. As it stands now, it should probably end up being a 2-3hr video package (with a bunch of different and fun topics). I’m not sure on the pricing, but it will be very reasonable given the value. Speaking of that, Mpethy is co-coaching The Tank session with me this weekend. We will be going over using HEM to uncover some leaks and talk about how to patch said leaks. If you are interested, just let me know and I’ll give you the details!

Gonna head to bed in a few. My sleep schedule has been really odd. Randomly woke up at 7:30 the other morning (well, not that random. my roommate was grinding in the other room and I woke up to the bleeps and bloops of full tilt, lol) and then today woke up at noon exactly. O well, I’m still feeling really good which is all that matters. Doing the gym a few times a week and also eating decently (I won’t say great, but not too many calories per day and minimal junk food). Going to go play frisbee golf with some friends tomorrow and then work on getting another video done for Stox. Hope all is going well with everyone!

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Good weekend overall. I had a last minute student on Friday which went well. Almost finishes up my waves of LeakFinder students that came in (about 10 really quickly)…so knocking out the work. After that I went down to the strip to meet up with a student that was in town. Ended up having a 2.5hr lunch, oops, lol. Was good though, ate at Noodle Asia (because I love their shrimp fried rice more than anything) and just talked poker most of the time. I have a bad habit of letting meet ups turn into coaching sessions, lol, but it works. Cool guy and always awesome to meet up with students.

That night went out to Cr-EAT-e again with Chris. I feel like such an old person doing the same thing every Friday night, O well. Came home, chilled out, and actually got to bed early because I was exhausted. Woke up late on Saturday which felt good. It was actually the first day in 2 weeks that I had no students. So relaxed most of the day playing Halo and getting some light reading done. Decided I would spend the night trying to get some videos together for Stox. Recorded a 2hr session at 25NL RUSH that went super poorly. And then a 1hr 4tabling session at 50NL that was alright. Had some interesting spots in it (like 4b-ing 66 FTW) which I might decide to use. I will record a few more sessions this week and see if anything seems good to me.

Got in a very odd funk from the sessions last night. It probably didn’t help that it was my first losing day of the year. I mean it was like -$40 which is a joke, and even more so because I had an K/A pop when I had QQ 15% more often than it should have…and missed the flop with AK 20% more often than I should have. It is no wonder why I pull no profits with these hands when I miss so much more often than I should. O well. I also made 2 REEEEEEEALLY bad river check/bombs at 25NL that were really FPS. I have a tendency to do that during videos sometimes though. Live and learn.

Today I just bummed around after my 2 students early in the day. Got to do my lesson on draws which has to be my least favorite thing to teach ever. Playing draws is so damn dependent on, well, everything. Unlike AA or even AK where you can have a certain lined played for most of the time…you just don’t have the same luxury with draws. O well, hopefully I can get better with that lesson because I feel like it’s not my strongest lesson to teach. At least I’m honest =)

Alright, I’m off to sleep and then wake up for my week or work hell. Need to write 2 big things, one of them being my COTW and also get some vids done for Stox. Hope all is well!

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Woke up Monday and had a a normal coaching session and then a free coaching session from the bounty I put for “biggest bluff run” in the uFR-HU tourny. Oddly enough that is the first event I’ve ever put a bounty on that all my bounties have been claimed. Always fun though. Spent the rest of the day writing. I have a lot of things coming up in the next few weeks. I have a COTW, 4 Stox videos, and some personal stuff I need to be writing. O well, things are getting done.

I have also been getting to the gym more, which is feeling amazing. I’m increasing my run by 1 minute per session, so about 3minutes/week. This may not seem like a lot to a runner, but going from running for 5 minutes straight to 10minutes straight is a huge difference. Doing some arm and back, and then spend the rest of the time just hitting the racquetball around. Get a bunch of different kinds of workouts, and I feel amazing afterwards. I keep going late at night, which is helping me sleep, and my body appreciates it.

Tuesday I got woken up by my roommate who was telling me I had to come see something. I was shocked like hell to see poker tables on his monitor as he hasn’t played a hand in like 4months at least. He was giddy as hell telling me about the new RUSH poker on FTP. I won’t lie…it was like Christmas morning when I saw the game. Tables looking soft, ~300 hands/hr/table, and just the feel of 2005 Party…I put in a session later that night and it’s a whole different kind of poker. Fun as hell, but takes away from my overall skillset. O well, still soft and nice. This weekend should be fun =)

After watching the RUSH games for a bit, I finished up 2 LeakFinders that went well imo. Got to work with a very well known grinder which was cool to see what his game looked like from the other side of the glass. After that I had my 4hr database with Mpethy. Holy fuck was it awesome. Got to see some spots where I wasn’t maximizing. I will admit it is humbling. I am still torn between saying “meh, fuck it, it’s a stylistic difference and I have to take a small pass here to make a big pass there”…but I’m pretty sure the real “answer” is somewhere in the middle. I need to improve my WR with my AK/AQ (though both of those are due to my stacking off PF, lol) and JJ+, esp AA/KK. My overall WR with trash hands is way high at least, and my blind loss rate is a lil high. I think I am missing about .4 streets of value with my big hands, I also had 2 really bad stackoffs against tight regs with my overpairs, and was a little too liberal against 1/2 stackers preflop. Fairly easy things for me to fix imo, just need to get back to work and patch them up.

Today I got a late start waking up at 1p. Took an adderall and got to work prepping hands and stuff for the Tank session tonight. Was a very cool session, ran 2hrs (I really do need to start making sure they don’t go on forever, lol), and we went over facing a 3b and OOP play. Everyone seemed to enjoy it as we spent the entire time on just those two concepts, and really just going over like 15 hands. I think I might have Mpethy co-coach the next one with me and go over DB stuff and review strategic ways to patch stat leaks. Hopefully that ends up working out, as it would be a very cool session imo.

Alright, that’s enough from me tonight. Hope all is well!

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Ended the week with just one student per day, which was a nice cool down to the week. I did 17 coaching hours last week, which is a little more than I normally do. Felt good to do that much work, but coaching that many hours is fairly intense. O well…felt good to do none the less. Decided to relax on Friday night rather than grind out. So Chris and I went to Cr-EAT-e for some burgers, played some H3, and just chilled. I got the urge later in the night to go see “The Book Of Eli” because I randomly remembered it came out that day…so went over to Red Rock Casino to see it. I’m not sure if I enjoyed the movie or not tbh…I certainly didn’t dislike it…but I’m not totally sure. O well.

Saturday did a student at noon then put in a session of my own. Weekend games are always hilarious. I made a mistake in the session so I got off it and spent most of the day trying to figure out why I did that. (For the record, the mistake was overbet shoving rather than going for a bet/bet line…still won the hand…but didn’t maximize…and playing sub-optimally is like the #1 tilt factor for me). I’ve noticed a couple of things lately. And a big thing is that I have become obsessive about my WR…and probably because people make such a big deal about it.

Now obviously this doesn’t matter nearly as much for the normal person, but it does when you are a coach, especially on a training site. I constantly get grilled about my PTR and judged on a metric that, imo, is only a small piece of the puzzle. I mean I tell my students (and mean it) that WR really isn’t shit. Technically you could be the best player in the world, play lights-out poker for the rest of your life, and yet never win another pot. I mean, its nearly statistically impossible, but the point is still valid. The important thing is how you are improving, implementing, and growing. The big thing about WR is that your WR seriously doesn’t mean too much. Poker, if you chop it up into slices, is just a bunch of samples. Certain styles/plays will work best in certain slices…and of course that is all barring normal variance. So unless you can show me a 2M hand sample size played within a month or so (what I would consider the normal “slice” for FR)…your WR is janked over many slices and thus isn’t “real”.

So why does this matter to me? Well WR is one of the bigger determinants of an “up in the air” customer for a coach. Don’t get me wrong, it is certainly important to ensure that your coach is a winning player…but it’s not the whole thing. Well this means that I have to super focus on my WR…I can no longer play poker just for hourlies and such…I have to maintain certain WR’s to keep people interested. So it has actually created a need for me to play results-oriented. No longer can I just play and grind mindlessly on a bunch of tables…I have to play less tables, hit a solid WR, and can only play when I am at my mental peak…no lazy sessions. This is stressful as hell. What also makes it stressful is the misunderstanding of what a good WR is now-a-days. A lot of people still opperate under the thought that “5PT/100 is the standard good reg WR”…it is not (at 50NL+). Ask Mpethy, the man who goes through more DB’s than anymore…and he will confirm with you that 3PT/100 is actually a damn good WR at FR. The game has changed, but the expectation from people has not.

That being said, I hate my WR from the past. I mean I could attach a bitch story to every person who asks for my DB screenshots about being 93BI below EV in 2008 at 100NL. I could mention that my WR is janked because I was trying a lot of different styles and plays for periods of time. I could mention that I was playing 14-40 tables for a lot of my samples. But, nobody (other than the poor people who just read this…my bad =( ) wants to read that. So I will take my 2.8PT/100 WR at 50NL, and 2.2PT/100 lifetime WR @ NL with pride…and focus on my WR hardcore for at least a decent ammount of this year because I feel I have to.

Sorry for the semi-rant. Saturday night I spent having a total ADD attack. I wanted to get some work done (had some writing I wanted to get done), so I took some Adderall to help…and it ended up making me focus on being un-able to focus. It was terrible. Got nothing accomplished except for a 1hr gym session at 2a…and a late bed time of 4a. Well I guess you could say I accomplished something as I went through my DB for like 3hrs trying to figure out hands and WRs/postion/hand and such…but just opted to pay Mpethy to do it for me on Tuesday =) Today I got a student done then spent the rest of the day totally zoned out and doing some business thinking. I need a vacation, lol.

Hope all is well…and sorry if you hated this blog post

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So I officially know the most life tilting thing in the world…waking up to computer/technology issues. Not 2 months ago my laptop died on me for fan reasons, and this morning my damn 24″ monitor decided to bite the dust. So woke up really stressed because that was happening, I had a lunch meeting scheduled, and my Tank session at 4p. Ended up finding the “last” (in quotes because I’m pretty sure the store just says it is their last…not that it actually is) 24″ monitor in Vegas and bought it right after lunch. Nice to be back in business, though sucks that I went from a 1900×1200 to a 1900×1080…i assure you, 120 pixels means a lot, lol.

Did sushi with Matt/GTPoker282 from the forums today. Awesome little place that is all-you-can-eat sushi. It is always odd meeting up with poker players because I feel I just turn it into a coaching session, lol. I am such a strat nerd that we ended up making most of the convo about handling 3b’s and other fun spots. O well, I guess that is what happens when all you do all day is coach and play.

Speaking of coaching, the Tank session went super well tonight. Ended up having 7 students in it (one no-showed) and we went a little longer than I meant to…oops. Was such a cool experience though as I have never taught more than 3 handed before…so it was fun having lots of people to cater to. Everyone was social, and everyone seemed to be on the right track through out it…so teaching CB-ing and 3b-ing seemed to go over quite well. I am running another one next week as well, at the beta price, and then we’ll see what happens from there. I have a lot of ideas for it that should provide a stupid amount of value for the student…so hopefully it all works out.

Nothing else has really been going on. Just coaching (I think I will be at 20hrs of coaching by Sunday…so it has been a busy ass week) and I have a Stox video series next month that I will start scripting. And I swear, I will get my chores done tomorrow…the ones I have been putting off all week, lol. Hope all is well with everyone…

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