I played Saturday and Sunday evening with very little to report. Both were losing sessions unfortunately, but not by a huge amount at least -£30 on the Saturday and -£10 on the Sunday. I was hopeful of securing a victory in a £1k gtd £11bh at one point, which would have completed the set for that buy-in, but back to back bad beats vs the same villain turned a healthy final table stack into a 5th place finish instead .
Also, I know this was mentioned previously on the forum, but I'm really not a fan of the Saturday night Main having been turned in a turbo. Given that Sunday's are the day most people are likely to have as a day off, it seems strange to me to choose that night for a guaranteed earlier finish, rather than a second midweek turbo instead (none of the Main's would be turbos if I was king though!).
I'd like to see this kept going after 500 games if you can muster the enthusiasm? For instance, I see you're around £1k short of £10k profit in Sky MTTs which seems like a good milestone to try and hit.
You'll probably just bink a Main in your remaining 50 games now I've said that!
I'd like to see this kept going after 500 games if you can muster the enthusiasm? For instance, I see you're around £1k short of £10k profit in Sky MTTs which seems like a good milestone to try and hit.
You'll probably just bink a Main in your remaining 50 games now I've said that!
Glad you're enjoying following and I had considered keeping this going until reaching the £10k Sharky milestone, but I'm getting a little bit of diary fatigue now to be honest so I think I'll still wrap it up after game 500. I might give the thread a shameless self-congratulatory bump if or when I get there though .
I've had a very quiet week on the poker front so it's been a little while since the last update.
I started with my usual selection on Monday night but soon abandoned the session due to feeling absolutely knackered and playing very poorly as a result. It was another one of those times where I felt compelled to play despite being far from in the right place mentally to do so. I really need to get better at following my instincts in that regard as there is little point showing up when your A game has zero chance of making an appearance. I ended up donating about £50 before finally wising up and hitting the sack where it took all of 60 seconds to descend into a full deep sleep.
I'm usually a bit of a night owl but I sometimes go to the other extreme of getting up crazy early instead, which is how the rest of the week went. The resulting early bedtimes meant that evening MTT sessions were a no go and the daytime schedule on Sky isn't hugely appealing really. I did play a small morning session on Wednesday but that was well and truly scuppered by @Angmar2626 who decided to run like Bates on a heater and dump me out of almost everything I'd registered for - despite me being well ahead every time the chips went in the middle. I heard rumours that he was quite the player but can now confirm he's just a total luckbox really .
A couple more days went by before I returned for a mammoth 2 games session on Saturday afternoon. Thankfully Angmar was nowhere to be seen this time and I managed to add another precious win to the collection in a £400 gtd £11 bounty hunter.
My body clock is slowly shifting round to something more normal (I woke up at 4am today which has been my longest lie in all week!) so hopefully I'll be back on the full evening grind from Monday onward .
Wearing your musicians hat, are you aware of a female guitarist by the name of Carmen Vandenberg? She is one half of "Bones" but maybe better known for working with Jeff Beck & co-writing an album for him.
I'm no expert on guitarists, but she seems very good, and she's certainly a very striking personality. In fact, I think I may be in love with her. She also featured heavily in the excellent Jeff Beck rockumentary "Still On The Run".
How about this for a smile to melt the hardest heart?
I'm not familiar with Carmen Vandenberg but I'll certainly take a closer look - she reminds me a little of Pink from the pictures.
I love discovering new music and back in the pre-internet era I'd go round local record shops and randomly pick out things from their bargain bins by artists I'd never heard of. One of my best finds was a 4 track live EP by a then unknown group called the Stereophonics, which I was instantly hooked by. A few weeks later I found they were playing a gig up the road from me in Brighton in a tiny out of the way venue, so I quickly snapped up a ticket for all of £4. There can't have been more than about 50 people there and to this day it was by far the best gig I've ever been to.
We're rather spoilt these days with the internet giving us instant access to almost anything our hearts desire, but it's a wonderful way for artists and audiences to find one another. On the subject of female guitarists, I recently stumbled across a young lady called Gabriella Quevedo. She's a finger-style acoustic player so probably a little more gentle than the stuff you posted above, but she's outrageously good at what she does.
Here she is doing a cover of Billie Jean which is well worth 5 minutes of ones time in my opinion...
At long last I have finally reached the 500 game milestone. By the skin of my teeth, I have also reached the £2k profit mark for the challenge, which is super satisfying too. I'll use this post to update on the last few days and follow it up with a round-up of the challenge as a whole, which I'm sure will be typically concise .
I played a small evening session of Monday, a late afternoon session on Tuesday and a full day on Wednesday.
Monday brought another near miss with 9th in the Main event, which is always a bitter-sweet experience. Obviously it's nice to make some profit but there's always that sense of "just what if" when you go close in the biggest game in your schedule. The only other run of note was 2nd in the 16:30 £5.50bh.
Tuesday was a rather less exciting affair with the exception of coming 2nd in the 16:30 £5.50bh once again.
By Wednesday I had 18 games to go and really wanted to get this wrapped up as I'll be away from the tables for a few days now due to visiting family. I opted for an early start and a day full of cheapies. The morning went rather well and for the first time in this challenge I secured two wins on the same day - a £1 rebuy and a £5.50 turbo bounty hunter. Given the small number of players in the mornings they were hardly massive scores, but they all add up in the end. Things got a little uglier in the afternoon when it felt like someone had flipped my doomswitch but squeaking into 4th spot in a £2.20 deepstack, which was the last table I had running for the day, just about got me over the £2k profit line.
Starting with some numbers, here's Sharkscope's take on the last 500 games...
The numbers Sharky reports are a little lower than my actual profits for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I've tended to use less rebuys than the average field (where available) which means my actual total outlay has been a little less than it reports here. The other factor is that I've picked up a few free tournament tickets over the last couple of months - a Main and a Mini buy-in from the weekly forum competition, a few £2.30 rakeback tokens and a £10 ticket from the Triple Takedown events. Strictly speaking I should have probably deducted these from my profit totals, but I guess they're all part of the added value of playing tournaments on Sky. I didn't include any cash rakeback or promo winnings in my profit total though.
A few other numbers...
£455 - My biggest score of the challenge for 3rd in the Gold Rush.
55 - The total number of final tables reached.
73 - The number of freerolls played during the challenge (it feels slightly like cheating to include those tbh!)
185 - The average number of entrants faced across the 500 tourneys.
At the start of this challenge I had 4 questions I was looking to answer about myself as a player, so it makes sense to revisit them now...
1. Do I still have what it takes to put in significant volume? Probably not - this was supposed to be completed by July 5th and it ended up taking until the 31st. I did rather take my foot off the gas once I'd realised the deadline was going to be missed, but 500 tourneys in 2 months is pretty far from being reasonably considered 'significant volume'. I'm generally at ease with that though and am now just happy to play at a pace I find both enjoyable and hopefully optimal for playing my best.
2. Do I have the mental fortitude to cope with the swings of grinding MTT's? I don't know. This has been by far the most sustained bash I've had at MTT's and the swings have been far less than expected. Some of this may be down to variance and running hot, but having a lot of low buy-in and small field games in the mix definitely contributes to a smoother ride in my opinion. I think I'd generally overestimated the 'swingyness' of grinding tournaments on Sky when starting this little adventure. If this was all done in 1,000+ fields on Stars, it would be a different matter entirely.
3. Can I remain profitable at these volume levels? Err... kind of! Given that my volume ended up being almost half of what was initially planned, it's hard to answer this properly. The most useful thing I can take away from this challenge is that I've added a significant number of games to my lifetime MTT sample, which has left me in little doubt that I'm a profitable tournament player up to at least the £11 buy-in range. Above those stakes I still need to put in more volume to really know either way.
4. Will I enjoy grinding MTT's? Yes. I had a lot more fun doing this than expected. Tournaments can be bl00dy frustrating at times but I'm now much more comfortable in that arena and feel a lot fonder of them than before.
Moving forward, I'll be continuing to make tournaments my main focus for the foreseeable future. I am starting to find the Sky schedule a little samey though, so I may soon start dabbling more on other sites for some greater variety. However, Sky will remain my first port of call for as long as it continues to exist in its current guise.
Thanks to all who have followed and commented along the way - it really makes a big difference. Knowing what I'm like, I'll soon find myself feeling directionless and unmotivated again, which means a whole new challenge will be in order .
Well played Duesy lad This challenge has been really interesting to see and you,ve made some nice profit I only wish I could be so consistent Again very well done
Well done mate. It's a shame you're knocking the diary on the head and not setting some new targets but at least it seems that MTTs have finally won you over.
Keep up the great work at the tables and here's hoping you're back with a new challenge in the near future.
In terms of the significant volume, have you compared your volume to other players and removed all in sats? I think your volume is fairly decent although I think you would maybe have done better with fewer sessions but more higher volume sessions.
This short-lived diary fulfilled its goal of getting me to put some consistent volume into MTT's and although it was tempting to keep it going, it was starting to reach the point of going stale and becoming more of a hindrance than a help (see my recent post regarding 'diary tilt').
I had a lot of fun keeping track of things on the forum though so I'm sure I'll be back with another challenge of some sort in the not too distant future .
In terms of the significant volume, have you compared your volume to other players and removed all in sats? I think your volume is fairly decent although I think you would maybe have done better with fewer sessions but more higher volume sessions.
You're right that my volume starts to look a fair bit more respectable compared to others when sats (especially all-in ones) are taken out of the equation. I also agree that I'd probably benefit from playing with less frequency but with a higher level of intensity/volume per session.
It may be different/easier with grinding cash games due to less parameters changing over the course of a session (ie relative stack sizes, ICM considerations etc.), but when I'm critical of myself for the volume I managed to put in over the course of this challenge, it's in the context of the marathon sessions I used to regularly be able to put in a couple of years back. I seem to get mentally fatigued far more quickly now than I used to which I put down to either getting older or growing slightly bored of the game. I'd like to think it's the latter but I fear it's more likely the former .
This has been a great read @Duesenberg and is a shame you are not setting new goals for another challenge. I think you have proved, beyond any shadow of doubt, that you most certainly can cut it at MTT's. Very well done sir.
Comments
I played Saturday and Sunday evening with very little to report. Both were losing sessions unfortunately, but not by a huge amount at least -£30 on the Saturday and -£10 on the Sunday. I was hopeful of securing a victory in a £1k gtd £11bh at one point, which would have completed the set for that buy-in, but back to back bad beats vs the same villain turned a healthy final table stack into a 5th place finish instead
Also, I know this was mentioned previously on the forum, but I'm really not a fan of the Saturday night Main having been turned in a turbo. Given that Sunday's are the day most people are likely to have as a day off, it seems strange to me to choose that night for a guaranteed earlier finish, rather than a second midweek turbo instead (none of the Main's would be turbos if I was king though!).
MTT's played: 447
MTT's won: 6
Profit/Loss: +£1,692.33
You'll probably just bink a Main in your remaining 50 games now I've said that!
Any chance of a diary update from your good self soon? I'm most keen to hear about your Dutch adventures
I've had a very quiet week on the poker front so it's been a little while since the last update.
I started with my usual selection on Monday night but soon abandoned the session due to feeling absolutely knackered and playing very poorly as a result. It was another one of those times where I felt compelled to play despite being far from in the right place mentally to do so. I really need to get better at following my instincts in that regard as there is little point showing up when your A game has zero chance of making an appearance. I ended up donating about £50 before finally wising up and hitting the sack where it took all of 60 seconds to descend into a full deep sleep.
I'm usually a bit of a night owl but I sometimes go to the other extreme of getting up crazy early instead, which is how the rest of the week went. The resulting early bedtimes meant that evening MTT sessions were a no go and the daytime schedule on Sky isn't hugely appealing really. I did play a small morning session on Wednesday but that was well and truly scuppered by @Angmar2626 who decided to run like Bates on a heater and dump me out of almost everything I'd registered for - despite me being well ahead every time the chips went in the middle. I heard rumours that he was quite the player but can now confirm he's just a total luckbox really
A couple more days went by before I returned for a mammoth 2 games session on Saturday afternoon. Thankfully Angmar was nowhere to be seen this time and I managed to add another precious win to the collection in a £400 gtd £11 bounty hunter.
My body clock is slowly shifting round to something more normal (I woke up at 4am today which has been my longest lie in all week!) so hopefully I'll be back on the full evening grind from Monday onward
MTT's played: 464
MTT's won: 7
Profit/Loss: +£1,775.51
Wearing your musicians hat, are you aware of a female guitarist by the name of Carmen Vandenberg? She is one half of "Bones" but maybe better known for working with Jeff Beck & co-writing an album for him.
I'm no expert on guitarists, but she seems very good, and she's certainly a very striking personality. In fact, I think I may be in love with her. She also featured heavily in the excellent Jeff Beck rockumentary "Still On The Run".
How about this for a smile to melt the hardest heart?
I'm not familiar with Carmen Vandenberg but I'll certainly take a closer look - she reminds me a little of Pink from the pictures.
I love discovering new music and back in the pre-internet era I'd go round local record shops and randomly pick out things from their bargain bins by artists I'd never heard of. One of my best finds was a 4 track live EP by a then unknown group called the Stereophonics, which I was instantly hooked by. A few weeks later I found they were playing a gig up the road from me in Brighton in a tiny out of the way venue, so I quickly snapped up a ticket for all of £4. There can't have been more than about 50 people there and to this day it was by far the best gig I've ever been to.
We're rather spoilt these days with the internet giving us instant access to almost anything our hearts desire, but it's a wonderful way for artists and audiences to find one another. On the subject of female guitarists, I recently stumbled across a young lady called Gabriella Quevedo. She's a finger-style acoustic player so probably a little more gentle than the stuff you posted above, but she's outrageously good at what she does.
Here she is doing a cover of Billie Jean which is well worth 5 minutes of ones time in my opinion...
At long last I have finally reached the 500 game milestone. By the skin of my teeth, I have also reached the £2k profit mark for the challenge, which is super satisfying too. I'll use this post to update on the last few days and follow it up with a round-up of the challenge as a whole, which I'm sure will be typically concise
I played a small evening session of Monday, a late afternoon session on Tuesday and a full day on Wednesday.
Monday brought another near miss with 9th in the Main event, which is always a bitter-sweet experience. Obviously it's nice to make some profit but there's always that sense of "just what if" when you go close in the biggest game in your schedule. The only other run of note was 2nd in the 16:30 £5.50bh.
Tuesday was a rather less exciting affair with the exception of coming 2nd in the 16:30 £5.50bh once again.
By Wednesday I had 18 games to go and really wanted to get this wrapped up as I'll be away from the tables for a few days now due to visiting family. I opted for an early start and a day full of cheapies. The morning went rather well and for the first time in this challenge I secured two wins on the same day - a £1 rebuy and a £5.50 turbo bounty hunter. Given the small number of players in the mornings they were hardly massive scores, but they all add up in the end. Things got a little uglier in the afternoon when it felt like someone had flipped my doomswitch but squeaking into 4th spot in a £2.20 deepstack, which was the last table I had running for the day, just about got me over the £2k profit line.
Stay tuned for more thrilling MTT wafflings...
MTT's played: 500
MTT's won: 9
Profit/Loss: +£2,003.66
The numbers Sharky reports are a little lower than my actual profits for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I've tended to use less rebuys than the average field (where available) which means my actual total outlay has been a little less than it reports here. The other factor is that I've picked up a few free tournament tickets over the last couple of months - a Main and a Mini buy-in from the weekly forum competition, a few £2.30 rakeback tokens and a £10 ticket from the Triple Takedown events. Strictly speaking I should have probably deducted these from my profit totals, but I guess they're all part of the added value of playing tournaments on Sky. I didn't include any cash rakeback or promo winnings in my profit total though.
A few other numbers...
- 185 - The average number of entrants faced across the 500 tourneys.
At the start of this challenge I had 4 questions I was looking to answer about myself as a player, so it makes sense to revisit them now...1. Do I still have what it takes to put in significant volume?
Probably not - this was supposed to be completed by July 5th and it ended up taking until the 31st. I did rather take my foot off the gas once I'd realised the deadline was going to be missed, but 500 tourneys in 2 months is pretty far from being reasonably considered 'significant volume'. I'm generally at ease with that though and am now just happy to play at a pace I find both enjoyable and hopefully optimal for playing my best.
2. Do I have the mental fortitude to cope with the swings of grinding MTT's?
I don't know. This has been by far the most sustained bash I've had at MTT's and the swings have been far less than expected. Some of this may be down to variance and running hot, but having a lot of low buy-in and small field games in the mix definitely contributes to a smoother ride in my opinion. I think I'd generally overestimated the 'swingyness' of grinding tournaments on Sky when starting this little adventure. If this was all done in 1,000+ fields on Stars, it would be a different matter entirely.
3. Can I remain profitable at these volume levels?
Err... kind of! Given that my volume ended up being almost half of what was initially planned, it's hard to answer this properly. The most useful thing I can take away from this challenge is that I've added a significant number of games to my lifetime MTT sample, which has left me in little doubt that I'm a profitable tournament player up to at least the £11 buy-in range. Above those stakes I still need to put in more volume to really know either way.
4. Will I enjoy grinding MTT's?
Yes. I had a lot more fun doing this than expected. Tournaments can be bl00dy frustrating at times but I'm now much more comfortable in that arena and feel a lot fonder of them than before.
Moving forward, I'll be continuing to make tournaments my main focus for the foreseeable future. I am starting to find the Sky schedule a little samey though, so I may soon start dabbling more on other sites for some greater variety. However, Sky will remain my first port of call for as long as it continues to exist in its current guise.
Thanks to all who have followed and commented along the way - it really makes a big difference. Knowing what I'm like, I'll soon find myself feeling directionless and unmotivated again, which means a whole new challenge will be in order
This challenge has been really interesting to see and you,ve made some nice profit
I only wish I could be so consistent
Again very well done
Keep up the great work at the tables and here's hoping you're back with a new challenge in the near future.
This has been a terrific read, beautifully written, & as others have said, it's a shame it has to end.
Thank you.
This short-lived diary fulfilled its goal of getting me to put some consistent volume into MTT's and although it was tempting to keep it going, it was starting to reach the point of going stale and becoming more of a hindrance than a help (see my recent post regarding 'diary tilt').
I had a lot of fun keeping track of things on the forum though so I'm sure I'll be back with another challenge of some sort in the not too distant future
It may be different/easier with grinding cash games due to less parameters changing over the course of a session (ie relative stack sizes, ICM considerations etc.), but when I'm critical of myself for the volume I managed to put in over the course of this challenge, it's in the context of the marathon sessions I used to regularly be able to put in a couple of years back. I seem to get mentally fatigued far more quickly now than I used to which I put down to either getting older or growing slightly bored of the game. I'd like to think it's the latter but I fear it's more likely the former