I need a fresh view of this...

Hey guys, got some interesting news for you guys today! I've been grinding microstakes now for quite a while, and reasonably successfully but it just hasn't been fun, I busted my online BR yesterday (which isn't that bigger deal) playing some 50nl which may have cost me but was actually FUN! I was beating the table quite nicely for a few hours and then this happened:

https://www.pokertableratings.com/hand-history/stars/40049822298/5247770757

Right now I'm going to take some time off online poker, I need to find a way of making this fun again for me, the last few months of grinding has not been that great, it's not the grinding I mind, but the insignificant rewards from the hours I've put in. I'm considering depositing a larger amount of my bankroll online and moving up the limits that way, or just avoiding cash games for a while and becoming and sng / tournament player, those aspects of my game are the weakest and could use some work! Either way I'll be keeping this blog up while I'm on this break and will carry on studying poker until I feel fresh enough to get back on!

News from Maxime

Hi guys,

Here it is, my first blogpost for TiltProofPoker. I finally managed to find the time to write a little. Let me introduce myself to those who don’t know me jet.

My name is Maxime and I’m of Belgian nationality. I’m 20 summers joung, and I plan on staying 20 too ;-).

I started playing poker in september 09 and I joined the guys on pokerstars about a month ago. Since then I’ve been a busy girl and I’ve racked up 52.000 hands at the cashgame tables.

I played different stakes at PokerStars:

At 2nl I played 23K hands with 7.8BB/100 or 75$ profit. I run steady at this limit.

At 5nl I managed to get over 40$ in 20K hands but a bad run of another 7K hands changed it back into 14$.

At 25nl I took a shot playing 1600k hands at this limit. Won some big pots but lost some more medium ones, turning this session into a – 20$ session. I find the level of aggression to be higher at this level then the lower ones.

While I played I got some bonusmoney to, I cleared the 10$ stellar bonus, and got 40$. Overall I turned my 90$ deposit into 195$ at the moment.

The main goal of this month was to get Silverstar status and I got that jesterday!! So the rest of this mont I wil play for the FPP’s and bonusmoney, and I’l also try some tourneys.

Next month I plan on getting goldstar playing mainly 5nl and 2nl, I should play +- 150K hands to achieve this.

Not too bad for my first post, I’ll keep you guys up to date.

Kinds regards, Maxime xxx

The SNG challenge

Hey guys, a challenge has just been thrown down between me, Craig and Andy, $10 starting BR and it's anything goes underneath the SNG tab on Pokerstars. Rake paid isn't included in the buy-in to keep it and once you've bust out, thats it!

The general consensus is that we'll all be broke before the first night but we'll keep you updated!

Back on the felt

Hey guys, after a (rather long) weekend of drinking and merrymaking I'm back at the felt with a fresh enthusiasm to play, I guess a few days rest every few weeks does wonders for your motivation and staying power!

Not much to report in the way of poker over the last few days for me, took down an sng or two on FTP on the train home but otherwise I'm looking to my fellow players to give you some interesting news, I'll relay it to you when I hear from them!

Hello again everyone, sorry for the lack of updates but I'm currently in London celebrating my birthday so my personal poker is taking a few days off!

However, to fill you in on some news from Andy! He played a $50 70 runner live tournament last night and ended up being railed by none other than his flat mate with 40 people left, Andy's AQs no match for his flat mates KK. Not disheartened he returned home and fired up an online session winning $30 on the cash tables and 1/2c stakes and taking down a $3 Omaha hi/lo sng for $15, not a bad way to finish the day!

Once life returns to normal I'll get back to playing more online and updating the blog more often, until then I plan to play a tournament or two up in London over the weekend and I'll see you on the other side!

When you run bad, redeposit withdraw winnings, whack up the number of tables and this is the result!

My best ever single day of 1/2c NL 9-max:

Swings and roundabouts

Craig and I had a bit of a role reversal today, Craig racking up a successful day on the felt, and I, very nearly busting myself through tiredness and stupidity.

Since withdrawing 85% of my bankroll at the end of December I was pretty sure I'd have another month like December, assuming in my head I could 'beat' the 1/2c games and would have $100 in my account pretty sharpish, but it was not to be. After a shocking January and a poor start to February the situation was dire, at times I dipped below $10 and alarms were going off, lights were flashing etc etc etc. One of these days came yesterday, and my sheer desire not to redeposit despite being well in the black overall can put me on tilt without having seen a card yet.

Luckily having people around me to calm me down, talk through my game a little I went back to my hand histories and started to look for my big leaks when I'm multitabling. A few hours I was back on the tables having made some (secret) adjustments to my game and pulled myself out of the hole I'd myself into and finished on a slightly healthier $20. Crisis adverted, for now.

£2000 giveaway, 1861/7870

£250 second chance, 1563/4314

Craig on the other hand had a much better day than the day before and racked up 4 $10 PLO Double or Nothing victories for a tasty $40 profit and then had a great run in the £2000 giveaway to start plugging the holes in his BR left on Tuesday!

£2000 Giveaway, 193/7870 - $2.84

Andy had an interesting first day with us at Tilt Proof Poker, getting emotionally scarred early on by a story including the himalayas, nudity, whisky, chequers and a monsoon in no particular order he managed to pull his game together despite this early setback to produce a solid days poker. He ended the day $4 up at $49, at one point dropping as low as $39, showing good resilience to keep going through the downswing to finish strongly. He lost a little in PLO hi/lo tourneys but cashed in the £2k freeroll for a second day in a row (despite missing the add-on period both days) and has vowed to limit himself to only 1 tourney a day excluding freerolls while he builds his bankroll.

Tilt Proof Poker grows!

I'm taking some time off from being sucked out on to announce that the Tilt Proof Poker team has grown, doubled to be precise! We're happy to welcome Royalmaxime and Andy Jordan to share their experiences and stories with us as we battle our way through bad beats, heroic river calls and inexplicable bluffs. Heres a little more about our new guys!

Royalmaxime joins us from Belgium and is the first female addition to the team! She has racked up a huge number of hands in a short amount of

time with her trademark tight mathematical and theoretical style with a good degree of success, inspired by Skalansky and Caro. She has recently move over to Pokerstars to join the rest of us and has got off to a flying start on the 5NL tables.

Andy Jordan: Andy is from Belfast and has been playing poker for four years and is now taking the step from playing for fun to attempting to play more profitable and successful poker, starting at the lowest stakes and working his way up, mixing in sng's, mtt's and cash games.

Over the coming weeks I'm sure you'll here a lot more from these guys as the results start to come in!

Greener pastures?

Evening guys, its been a pretty eventful day online, lots of hands played with mixed results. Today I ventured away from Pokerstars for the first time, Craig tempted me away with promises of easier games and easier money. Not being one to turn down easy money I rebooted my Mac into Windows and downloaded the Windows only software for the poker room.

It transpired quite quickly that the game was indeed a lot softer and I managed to rack up $10 profit in around 30 mins at 2/4 cent tables before either their servers or the software threw a wobbly and all the games on the site paused and that was that.

Now I'm sure you'll all agree that 30 mins play isn't enough to truly evaluate the situation but here are my first impressions:

1) The games are indeed softer away from Pokerstars and Full Tilt

2) The software that Pokerstars provides is fantastic, I found the software which I used today (to remain nameless for the time being) to be buggy and fiddly, and somewhat confusing to navigate around.

This leaves an interesting dilemma, am I willing to sacrifice PS brilliant software and rewards system, all my Mac only poker software that I've already paid for to switch to the possibility of softer and more profitable games on smaller sites? Answers on a postcard.....

We played a good evening session of MTT's and here are my results from the evening:

$1.10 6-max, 594/4413

$0.90 UK and Ireland Div 1, 176/281

2000 pound freeroll, 1694/8130 - $0.75

250 pound second chance 74/4451 - $0.57

$1.10 9max 199/1000

$1.10 9-max 644/5835 - $0.70

I wasn't profitable as you can see, but considering I'm pretty new to the MTT scene I was pretty happy with the runs I put together, especially with the 250 second chance, finishing in the top 2% made the evening worth it from a poker standpoint, if not financially!

Unfortunately Craig's day wasn't very successful, although not completely without merit!

3 Victories in PLO $10 Double or Nothings

$25+2 sng, 7/9

$2+0.20 sng, 37/180

$20 sng, 8/10

$1.10 9-max, 2976/5835

Freeroll, 1039/2976

$1.10 9-max, 755/1000

$2.75 9-max, 2913/7011

Freeroll 9-max, 4171/8130

$1.10 9-max, 1519/1622

UK and Ireland Div 1, 280/281

$50 Double or Nothing, 10/10

$50 Double or Nothing, 10/10

Unfortunately this was just one of those days for Craig, suckout after suckout taking their toll on Craig;s bankroll, but he'll be back tomorrow as we always are...

Another day done, I'm heading to the cash games before I hit the sack, good luck at the tables!

UK and Ireland Poker League

As part of our poker day we've decided to start playing the UK and Ireland Poker League, a daily tournament on 'stars that has a monthly leader-board with prizes for the top 100 players every month.

There are 3 divisions:

Division 1: $1 buyin, 19:30 GMT

Division 2: 2000 play chips, 19:45 GMT

Division 3 (FPP division): 25FPPs, 20:00 GMT

Where you place in these tournaments determines the number of points carried to the leader-board and ultimately determines what you can win at the end of the month!

For more information head to:

http://www.pokerstars.com/uk/poker/promotions/ukpl/

Both Craig and I will be taking part in this, at least Div 1 and we strongly recommend all other UK and Ireland players join us!

To get the ball rolling here are our results from tonight's Div 1 tournament:

Jake: 43/317 - $1.28

Craig: 273/317

Time to get down to it...

Hey all, welcome to our blog!

This blog was born during the dawn hours at the microstakes tables at Pokerstars, me (Jake) and my co-blogger (Craig) losing large amounts of our bankrolls to each other, both previously being relatively tiltless we managed to get under each others skin and generally batter each other into bluffing with whatever crap we managed to pick up, but more about this later.

A little bit about each us!

Jake: I'm 19 (20 next week), I live in London and have been playing live poker with friends and others for around 5 years, and online for about a year. I play mainly cash games but am now starting to play some mtt's since we started this blog, and my best game is nlhe, although I can play some of the other variants, probably not very profitably in the long run! I'm currently a student in London and live on my own.

Craig: I live in Aberdeen and have been playing online poker for around 2.5 years, but have played with mates for 10 years having watched the pros playing on high stakes poker. I play more mtt's and PLO, but am beginning to play more cash games now.

We met on the friendlyp community where I arranged daily cash games where we all played together and had some fun. As the hours went on and people came and went me and Craig would be left at the table with considerable stacks, and would then proceed to take each other on, showing audacious bluffs and unrestrained aggression with the sole goal of felting each other. A week later we decided to start writing this blog where we're going to post our tournament results and cash game progress hopefully daily and anything else we feel like sharing with you!

First things first, we've set some goals for ourselves to give ourselves something to aim for.

Jake: Get my bankroll back over $100 after withdrawing all but $15 just before xmas by the end of the month.

Craig: Final table one of the regional tournaments we're scheduled to play over the next 2 weeks.