O Fortuna, velut luna statu variabilis, semper crescis aut decrescis

I ended september with a very small amount of winnings but it's ok for a downswingy month. I try to play HU with regs around but a few of them is interested. Luckily the guy "ki$$e" from Sweden played a long session with me. Although he crashed me in the beginning I managed to cath up a little bit in the following days. He thinks I run better than Hussain Bolt, I think he runs better than Flash. We'll see who is right when we'll have the oppurtunity to play enough hands to minimize the luck factor.

That game with the guy made me realize that I'm still an underdog against a good HU player. I started to play nl100 and nl200 HU's in Full Tilt and it surprised me how good the players in these little stakes are at Full Tilt. They have weaknesses but not that obvious fundemental ones. It seems that they all have a very solid structured game and playing 500 hands with each of the regs I found around was a perfect exercice for my HU during the end of the month.

By the way I made one of my worst ever run in terms of bb/100 during this exercice period. Luckily I haven't suffered this in the usual stakes I'm playing (or maybe I did and I can't count them cause it's impossible to calculate EV adjusted in Boss) Here are the results of my small stakes HU games:

Ok I uploaded the pic in a weird manner but it seems ok. Well, yes I suggest you all to give it a try to play small stakes HU at Full Tilt to exercice. I will do it a little bit more in the future and try to increase my stakes (playing with 20 bi right now, I'll increase it when I reach at 5-10 probably)


My PhD starts this week therefore I'm not sure if I'll be able to play as much as before, but I am very dedicated about playing poker and doing the PhD and sacrifice my social life except my girlfriend this year.

gl all.

ride of the valkryies or the anschluss of austria

I am here to discuss why people are playing poker. From bottom to top people have many different drives to play poker. I read an article at cardrunners.com about 2 years ago, the title was "poker economy" and the author was trying to categorize where the money comes from and where it goes in a poker network (in terms of winning and losing players, exluding the network fees). We have blue collars, white collars and whales for losing players and we have different stakes pros as winning players.

Blue collars are the ones playing very small mtt's once or twice a week and micro stakes cash. They can afford losing 5-25 dollars a week and when they hit the prize in a tourney they usually withdraw their money. Poker is a kind of entertainment for them when they come from work to home and they like to tell the stories of how they won a prize in tourney when they do. I believe this segment is the most important of all as it keeps the big machine working.

White collars have a higher status in real life than the blue collars. They are managers or small entrepreneurs with a huge ego that comes with it. They like poker because they like to compete, they like to proove that they are smarter than other people. They can afford losing up to 1000 dollars a month and satisfy themselves about being smarter than others while blaming their luck for the amount they've lost. When they hit a big prize in a tourney they usually tend to sit at a high stakes cash game. They are important because they move the money from bottom to top.

Whales are very rare to find in online poker but there are more of them in casinos. They are rich people who see poker as a way of interacting with common people and realize how rich they are. They enjoy watching other people winning or losing and seeing how important that amount of money for them. They don't care much about winning or losing, they like that ambiance where everything is related with the money in the middle. That's why they don't care which stake they are playing but they enjoy playing higher stakes more.

There's not much to talk about the winning players. Most of them are playing to earn their lives and when you're playing online you're confronted with them 80-90% of the time. But there are people who have different drives amongst them as well. When I asked Mr.Aki why he still plays poker and how he didn't lose his ambition, he replied "respect". I said I'm sure he's getting enough respect, one must be fool not to show him respect, then he said "there are different levels of respect". Well, that I believe shows the difference between being a winning player and a top player.

GL all.