A Very Long Holiday Break from Poker

Hey guys I haven't posted on this blog in such a long time that I almost feel bad about it. I haven't done a lot anyways, had a good christmas and hung out with the family and took way more time off of poker then I should have in the beginning of the month of December. Anyways to sum things up I cashed out my roll quite a while ago and now simply have a $200 stake running with SmooveSquid as my backer on PTP. I haven't done a lot with it but my goal is to double it before the end of the month while I get the 400+ VPP's I need for my last $50 bonus this year with PokerStars. I've also been POSSIBLY thinking about seeing if I can get some action on some sort of SNG Grind challenge. Like turning a $50 bankroll into $2000 in 30 days or less. I'm still thinking about that one and will probably post the idea somewhere on either PTP or 2+2.

Party... Poker!

Alright so I know I haven't posted in a while, but I've been spending more time with myself than with poker so-to-speak lol. I had to cash out another $600 to get my liscence back which kind of sucked, but it had to be done! I'm left with exactly $1200 on Stars which is definately enough for me to play the 3's a 6's so I choose to though I don't think I will be going too hard on them this month. I'm gonna focus a decent amount of my poker time on 10NL 6max and some more MTT's and probably the 4.40 180's as well. I am very confident I will be able to build my roll up very nicely now that I won't have to cash out so much anymore. Getting my liscence back was the last of a large some of money I owed to many people and places in my life.

So something kind of new and exciting has arised. A friend, realestballr online at PokerStars showed me a site called http://www.pokersource.com/ and they give out free bankrolls on any site that you have not yet registered for. I decided to say hell with it and get $25 on Party Poker along with a $25 bonus that I get after accumulating 150 party points. I actually did end up getting the money and have been playing around on Party Poker a fair bit and wondering why I never deposited here before! I've read that the games are pretty soft and all but never really connected the thought to the action. Anyways I've played a handful of $1 STT's on there and boy oh boy is it funny. I have been destroying these games. I think I've played like 4 sessions now, taking about 30 - 45 minutes to complete 10 - 15 games and I've already ran that simple 25 dollars up to almost $60

So far it's easy money, and hopefully it stays this way. I will continue to gradually build myself a nice roll on Party Poker as I grind myself another $50 bonus on Stars. Anyways blog readers, I am sorry I took so long to get back on here and write another post but I just wasn't feeling. GL on the tables and have fun! :)

To Grind or Not to Grind?

Well, the rest of last week went okay.. I didn't lose any money playing the 45 turbos that's for sure. I didn't play much of them either though. I've pretty much just been layin back and enjoying myself, playing donkaments and getting a chance to forget about grinding like a maniac. I mean it's one thing to grind and put a lot of volume, and it's another to grind and put a lot of volume in as if it's your 'job'. Personally, it's very important for me not to see 45 turbos as if they are my work and something I have to do everyday or I can't live y'know. The minute someone tries to force something to happen like that it never seems to turn out well, it can be very stressful when you put that kind of pressure on yourself. You have to enjoy what you do and go from there. It's no different then working a real job within society that you don't like. There is pressure in that as well along with the stress. Been there done that..

Anyways I'm not sure if I'm gonna make platinum again this month unless I decide to start throwing in $12 45's for the rest of the month. I've got like 4k VPP's for this month so far which means I need almost 440 VPP's a day to make it, which I can do with just 3's and 6's but that is 200+ games a day and that gets very exhausting trust me. I'm pretty tempted to start playing the 12's anyhow. I was planning on waiting until I have at least 200 BI's but I'm not really too worried about being only 50 short considering I can play with stoploss well enough. Besides I'll probably never make it to 200 BI's if I keep cashing out money like I am lol. I just grinded 14.5k VPP's playing the 6man 280fpp hyper-turbos sats to the 1/4 mil. They have been very easy for me to beat, I have made lots of money off of those games and enjoy them, so much for saving my FPP's though, oh well. I had to cash out $300 tonight for a couple of things I won't even bother talking about right now in this blog, but I will say it was important enough for me to do it. I really do hate cashing out though lol.

Count Your Blessings

Alright so for a while it's been a rough few weeks with the 45 turbos, but I think it's finally starting to turn around. I am actually profiting after most of my sessions now and after the downswing I had this is like a blessing. I think it definately helps now that I have changed my game up quite a bit yet again and have found even more leaks that I wouldn't bother to notice before, weather it was ignorance or just frustration, I do not know. Either way I have definately realized that my 100+ Buy-In downswing I had a while ago was not just due to me running like absolute shit but also lack of confidence in my game and spews due to tilt. So anyways as depressing as it has been to watch my average ROI between $3's and $6's drop from 20% to like 8% over the last 1,000 or more games, I am actually happy about it. In a way lol.

I mean it's definately shown me some new ways of thinking in the turbos and has shown me how much of a nit I once was as well lol. I won't get into major details or nothing but basically I'll put it this way.. If you shoved 9-10bb into my BB from the SB and I had A7o or something, I would have folded it.... Pretty sad, I know. So I am very thankful for the downswing that I encountered, it's going to help me a lot in the long run. Also I'm thinking I should start reviewing my game more often. We'll see how much of that I actually end up doing though. Anyways I'm gonna keep on grindin' for the rest of the week and see what happens.

My Story

Alright so I really wanted to start off this blog by talking a little bit about my career as an apsiring professional poker player. I've played poker since about 14 years old and later realized I could make money online playing the game I enjoy so much. At this point in time, I grind online about 4-5 days of the week for 4-5 hours a day. I don't have any other means of making money except maybe the odd computer repair.. I hate jobs, I think that working for someone else is a waste of time.. I'm not trying to offend anyone that does work for someone else, this is just how I feel. Anyways I want to go on and say that I do enjoy live poker much more than online, I like to play real poker more than I like to grind 30+ games at once. My main goal is to transition into live MTT's and cash games. Until then I am mainly known to grind the $3-$6 45 Turbos on PokerStars and the occasional 20+ table grind at micro stakes cash games.

I never really went hard with grinding online until a few months ago. I went through a series of busted bankrolls this year and after about 6 months of running $10 or $20 into $400-$500 and going busto with bad BRM I finally learned my lesson and in turn am now a pretty big bankroll nit. I was staked for a while on PartTimePoker by SmooveSquid just because I had no bankroll to play with and constantly would lose it once I did get a bankroll rolling. I did fairly well for SmooveSquid and myself starting at the $1 and $3 45 Turbos making just over $700 profit between us splitting it 50/50 in a month and a half or less. I'm kinda turning this into a longer story than I anticipated, so to keep it short I paid some debts back and was left with $28 and have turned that into a very nice bankroll for myself and am more confident than ever with my bankroll management skills.

Here is my SnG graph for the year. Most of this profit has actually been from mid August.

The Beginning

Hello all who decides to join me and my poker blog. My name is Brandon Rollinson and it's gonna be a roller coaster ride, but we as poker players are all here to grow and not only be better poker players but better people as well. This blog is going to contain my life as a poker player and a few other topics on the side. I don't think that life is just about poker, so I will probably end up writing a couple of posts on other things that are going on in my life as well, but of course this is in fact mainly a poker blog and it will be a lot like a poker journal to me. I hope that you enjoy what I have to offer and hopefully learn a thing or two :)