The Challenge!

[Garth Kay]

Hi All,

Over recent months I have been challenged to do several things with some dollars thrown around as a wager.

This thread will document the challenge and my trials and tribulations in trying to accomplish these goals. The goals are many and varied and many of my friends and acquaintances have thrown some challenges my way to help me accomplish several things:

1.) Create a life that is more balanced, the last year for me has been dedicated to work and I have lost a lot of contact with friends and people and I need to create a better work/social life balance.
2.) Create a healthier me, for those that don't know I use to do a lot of weights and only several years ago I only weighed 80KGs, my work life has managed to dictate a very unhelathy lifestyle that has seem baloon out to over 115KG. That's pretty sickening and way too unhealthy.
3.) Get focused and passionate about poker again. Once upon a time I was a good poker player and my thought processes and ability to read situations was on a level far beyond most. Over recent months my poker game has gone to hell and I am not happy with being a mediocre player that does not have the passion to succeed.

These challenge will run concurrently from today to June 30th, here are the challenges in no particular order:

1.) Deposit $500 into 888 and turn that into $10K
2.) Give up smoking for at least 6 weeks during this period, every additional week I go without nicotine results in bonus dollars.
3.) Drop 20KG's in body mass.
4.) Spend at least one night per fortnight out with the boys drinking and socialising.
5.) Every fortnight I must spend 48 hours without using Outook, Microsoft Word, Excel or anything work related, forum excluded as this seen as a social outlet.
5.) And finally the optional one, try and find a good woman to have a relationship with that lasts longer than a month. LOL. I am so glad this one is optional.

Now most of these are pretty self explanatory but the poker guidelines are such, I am allowed to use as much technology as I like in this method. I am restricted to NLHE games only - SNG's, MTT's and ring games all count. I must play within the rules of Bankroll management, ABI for tourneys and SNG's must be 5% of my bankroll and I cannot buy into a ring game if the full buy in exceeds 10% of my roll. I am also limited to only six sessions of four hour duration each week and must multi table two or more tables.

So as I progress through my story I will try and introduce you all to HEM (hold em manager) a great database tool that is indispensable if you want to take online poker seriously, I will introduce you to terms such as VP$I and PFR and do my best to explain them and why they are so important. With time constraints I might need help from benny the cunt, Scott, Aaron and Brett to clear up some of these terms and do some side threads fully explaining these terms and how you use them.

I will also be data mining 888 ring games, now this is the ability to open the max amount of ring games and accumulate data on opponents without you, as a player, having to be seated.

Finally onto the health kick, I have bought a weight bench that remains unused for tree weeks. I have not even planned out a diet or anything yet but I do plan on walking more, getting up early, eating breakfast, at least going for a walk in the morning and then moving on to half hour sessions of weights to commence.

I hope you all enjoy this story as it progresses and can all take something away from it. If I can work the job I do and the hours I do and still find the time to balance out my life and play winning poker anyone can do it.

[Garth Kay]

Well I have completed 3000 hands in the challenge and have lodged almost $500 profit overall and once I stepped up to 25/50 I have made $660+. The initial bad run was playing 30NL and getting some beats in hands I shouldn't have been involved in.

I have found that after this period of time my game has already improved, I am now four tabling 50NL and am maintaining better concentration, playing better poker, improved my betting patterns and overall am reading situations much better.

I feel invigorated and find myself falling back in love with poker. I am also getting to know some of the regs at this level; this is bad news for them as I am able to better read their ranges and work out how to extract maximum value.

My current stats for 50NL after 2,500 hands are the following:

Hands 2503
VPIP 34.7
PFR% 16
3Bet% 5.1
W$SD% 56
bb/100 53.1
My hourly rate is $45 per hour. I don't know if I could do this grind day in and out, but no wonder Garry and Brayden are worried about me turning pro if I can turn this sort of rate just playing 50NL.

I have included my profit graph below as well as all in expected value and showdown dollars and non showdown dollars won!

ENDDAY2.jpg (96.09 KiB) Viewed 550 times

Now as an intro I will introduce most of you to some of these stats.

VPIP is an indication of how often I will voluntary put money into the pot preflop, excluding times I post the blinds. A VPIP of 34.7 indicates that I am playing almost 35% of the hands dealt to me. Considering I am playing 6 max ring games against some nitty types this isn't too bad, After 2,000 hands this was at around 42% and I was definitely playing too many hands, as such I tightened up and started winning a bit more again.

PFR% is an indication of how often I will raise preflop. I am raising 16% of my hands preflop.

3bet% is pretty self explanatory but this shows how often I will 3 bet, an average of around 5.2% is the median and anything over this indicates a very aggressive player and anything below this indicates passive player.

W$SD% is how much of my profit or money won was won at showdown.

bb/100 is a measure of how successful a player is, I am running well over expectation at the moment and am winning 53.1 big blinds per 100 hands. So every time 100 hands is dealt to me I will generally win $26. If this is a negative number then it indicates that you are a losing player.

Next post when we start discussing some hands I will explain how these above stats can help you in identifying what sort of opponent you are facing and how they help to put them on a range of hands.

For now I am going to bask in a triumphant serious return to poker! And then contemplate the fact that I start a diet, gym, regular exercise routine tomorrow!

If anyone wishes me to focus on more details or talk about anything in particular to do with my challenge or playing poker just send me a PM.