February Stats - Updated Feb 17

Last Friday I had a bit of a downswing, which hurt my care to play and stuff plus I had a bunch of exams so I took a few days off

I've got a week off of school now, so there's probably going to be a lot of SNGs played

The last 2 days I've won about $1000, which was a pretty good way to get back on the grind, it was a pretty impressive win considering almost all of the games were between $5-10. I had a session yesterday where I won 42 buyins in like 60 SNG games, literally couldn't lose

So as it stands right now im up about $820 in February, think I'm going to try to start playing more $20 games also hopefully I could run a bit better at them then I have lately

I also just finished an MTT, I don't play them often, but i finished 3/314 in a $4 R/A tourney and I managed to cash for around $357, shitty though because 1st place got around $800 it woulda been a nice win

Here's my tournament graphs for both buyins won, and dollars won. Hopefully I could turn this into atleast a $1500 month hopefully more

Results - First 5 days of February

Well....The first five days have been interesting
I was up $500 for the month by February 2nd, and I've had some pretty big swings so far
Unfortunately I'm only up about $100 or so in February (but whatever its only February 5th I'm still gunna make a bunch this month)

SNG stats:
games played: 435
average ROI: 10.1%
Profit: $250
rakepaid: $250

Cash Game Stats:
Hands Played: 7562
Profit: -$170
All in EV: +25
Rakepaid: 572

Wish me luck for the rest of the month!
Im feeling like just grinding 500 games this weekend in 2 days all at $5-10 hopefully make like $500

January Stats

So, January is over...wasn't the best poker month although towards the end of the month i switched sites and my hope started to rise in hope of a great February of poker (february has started well so far if you're wondering)

In January i played mainly on Titan poker, 1446 games with only a $136 profit even after rakeback, and i messed around at cash games and stuff also..In total I made about $115 on Titan poker

I also messed around at FullTilt a little bit with a $50 deposit, and lost that

Although on January 26 I deposited a bit onto 888 poker, between the 26th of the month and the 31st i won $355 (this could have been a lot higher although I took some shots at higher stake games and didnt fare well at them until yesterday which was February 1st)

All in all -
Titan Poker: +$115
FullTilt       : -$50
888 Poker : +355
Total         = +420

Here are graphs

                                                                    Titan poker january

                                                         888 January - Buyins won

888 January - dollars won

High hopes for a $1500 February, I also have a week off school so hopefully I can kill the games then. Wish me luck.

What is rakeback? The benefits of a good rakeback deal

A shockingly large amount of online poker players (and poker players in general), don't know what rakeback is and they don't understand the benefits that rakeback has to the general poker player who plays casually

When I first started playing online poker on FullTilt in 2010 I didn't know what rakeback was, on FT the standard rakeback deal was 27% rakeback, I had deposited $200 and lost it all over the course of a month of two, but I had payed over $700 in rake to the site, if i had 27% rakeback I would have basically been break even after rakeback.

Now, I understand as well as anyone why a great rakeback deal is necessary for most pokerplayers. I constantly hear people say "I don't want to leave Pokerstars because I enjoy the software and the experience so much". But the reality is, Pokerstars offers most players almost NO rakeback. The single best advice I can give to someone is to play on a smaller poker site, and get a better rakeback deal, you will have a much better overall experience playing online poker this way.

Currently I play on Titan Poker, and I have a good rakeback deal, which I haven't even taken full advantage of.
My rakeback deal currently offers me:
VIP program: 35% rakeback
Constant pending bonus: up to 30% rakeback
SNG/Cash Game Leaderboards: 10% rakeback
Gold Bar Leaderboard(current promotion if you sign up at "iwantmyrakeback.net"): good for 10-15% rakeback
Many months my rakeback could get as high as 80% when i take advantage of promotions that the rakeback site i signed up with has
For example:
Lets say in February 2013 i rake $1000, but lose $100 during play, with 50% rakeback(which might be the minimum) i will still be earning hundreds of dollars

Here is my profit graph on Titan Poker(I've been playing there for 4 months)

as you can see, without a good rakeback deal I would actually be losing a lot. Although with my rakeback deal I have become a decent winner

I had mentioned it before but ill mention it again
I signed up to Titan Poker through
iwantmyrakeback.net
i have also had great rakeback deals with LockPoker from iwantmyrakeback.net

if you have any questions regarding how and where to find good rakeback deals you can add me on skype
Skype: alex.fisher14
or email me at: alex_fisher14@hotmail.com

Also, I can help you get in contact with the managing team for iwantmyrakeback.net

Interesting Session - Play before Site Maintenace

Hey, sorry for not having posted in awhile I've just gotten back to school about a week ago and my time has been all over the place

I had a really interesting session last night that I figured would be worth sharing, plus its kind of some advice to players who play on smaller sites that have site maintenance relatively often

Last night, Titan Poker was having a site maintenance that started at 6am and ran to 7am. I logged on around   1 am and was dissapointed to see that the site had stopped offering most SNGs 5 hours before the site maintenance began...There were less than 100 Tournament tables running opposed to the +500 that they usually have, and they had stopped offering most variations of games

However, they were still offering $5+.30 4max DoNs, although they were only letting 1 game register at a time. So i only played these games and was still able to get enough action to play 9-12 tables at a time, i managed to still get 136 games in about 3.5 hours

What i learnt is that before site maintenance, there are literally NO regs online playing SNGs, probably because they werent able to play the play the games they usually play. And it seemed like all weak SNG players were playing the DoNs...I had never in my life seen weaker play at SNGs than i saw during this 3 hour stretch of play

In my 136 games i managed to win $112 (which is good considering the highest stake i played was $5), and it literally seemed like people were purposely losing and giving away money

My advice to you if you play on a site that has site maintenance once in a while: PLAY POKER BEFORE SITE MAINTENANCE, it is extrememly fish infested

Here is my graph from the session

I intend on getting back into posting as of now, here is also my graph of 2012 so far... I am losing $75 in the games although Im up about $300 after bonus/VIP/rakeback...goals for january are to win +$600 and to break even or profit pre RB

Dec 12 - Grinding out a small win

I should really be doing nothing but studying right now, since my last 2 exams are 2 days from now. But clearly I'm too much of a poker degen so now here I am writing a blog post about my session from this morning (writing the post as a study break).

I generally don't play with a stop-loss, if I do have a stop loss it will be because I busted my roll (lol). But i do find i like to try and grind out a pre RB win when I can. So todays session started by losing like 8-9 games in a row, and they were all $10 buyins. So i was pretty tilted I basically ran terribly and got a bunch of 3rd places just out of the money and stuff. After losing these games I started to play $5 games instead, trying to grind back a win, and when I won a bit at the $5s I'd mix in some more $10 games and stuff, and eventually hacked away at a bit of my losses from those games

Finally, on game #137 i managed to crack the profit point and instantly stopped my session, my goal was to get back to even and i did. Shows how much variance could suck in poker, lose 8 games in a row and then need to grind well for 129 games just to get yourself back to even.

-Ended up winning $2.35 during the session
-Average ROI: 7.7%
-Total ROI     : 0.3%
-Rake Paid: $50.65 (so i ended up being like a $35 winner post RB)

Shortstacking Speed Poker

Kinda got bored/fedup with playing DoNs... as everybody whose played DoNs knows they could be a pretty boring game

Plus i had taken a pretty bad downswing at them so i decided to mix it up a lil bit

Right now I'm a slight winner post RB and stuff, due to my downswing 

I played a few MTTs for fun also

1 night i registered in a $1 R/A tourney with like 70 people in it..i registered for it while i was in bed and figured it just end up playing dumb and tired and bust away my stack in like 15 minutes. I ended up grinding a big chip stack and made it to the final table like 3rd in chips. When there were 5 left i was chipleader with about 90k and average was like 55k, i ended up losing 70k in chips one hand due to a semi bluff on the turn with a flush draw i believe.

First place only got $49.80 which is really little considering i was playing $10-20 DoNs. Yet i managed to end up grinding back a good stack and ended up winning the tournament for the $49.8 lol (so about a 50buyin cash, sure as hell helps my average ROI)

I also got like 50th in a 700 person $5 R/A which was good for like $30....i was about 15th in chips when i busted on a river bluff with a missed flush draw, the guy called me with a pretty weak hand, he was chasing like a K high flush vs my A high flush draw and rivered a K so I figured he would have folded there

But ya, so basically I've decided to give speed poker a shot, you can get a ton of hands in and action is quick and exciting so its been pretty fun...I've been shortstacking because I figured swings wouldnt be as high and Id have more edge, its nice being able to leave the game after doubling up and then instantly rejoin with whatever stack size you want

I had started out at 10NL figuring I havent played cash games in a long time and it might take some getting used to. I wasnt playing terribly at first but i wasnt playing well, my non-showdown winnings were terrible and my blind play was really bad also. Around hand 6000 a friend of mine who only plays cashgames game me some simple advice to helpout my nonshown winnings and my blind play. My first session after the advice I killed it but then kind of pissed away some of my winnings, Ive ran pretty damn bad lately, about 8buyins under EV, which is quite a lot considering i was never really playing deeper than 40-50bb

Heres my graph for total winnings since Ive started playing Speed Poker. Ive been typically playing 6 tables which plays over 1500 hands an hour. My EV is about even which isn't terrible I think, if I maintained an even winrate Id be a pretty big winner post RB and be able to move up in stakes pretty quickly