skilfulpokers last blog

[HardGain]

hi! all the best wishes to your dad, to get better asap! 
Hope you get the 250 ticket in time! i'm doing something similar, but for the Supermoon 250EUR 🤞

[SkilfulPoker]

On 10/29/2023 at 10:57 PM, SShcherbyna said:

What program do you use for time management (shown in the screenshot)? I've been using Microsoft To Do but haven't really been enjoying it lately so I'm looking for something new.

The app I use is called TickTick, and it's brilliant. I spent quite a bit of time looking into apps before settling on this one. I was using Fantastical before, but it doesn't even come close to TickTick in terms of functionality and ease of use.

What I really like about TickTick is that it combines to-do lists with a calendar. Once you get the hang of it, it's very useful. The app allows you to categorise your tasks into folders, making it easy to click into specific areas of your life. For example, I have a folder just for health appointments, and another for dentist appointments. 

But what's even better is the flexibility it offers in terms of viewing your schedule. You can either look at tasks in their individual folders or see everything at a glance in the day view or calendar view. It's just really versatile in that way.

Beyond that, the app has a host of other features like setting up timers for focus sessions and the option to use a Kanban view, which I enjoy. The cross-platform integration is superb, as it works seamlessly on my desktop, phone, and tablet. There are even widgets available for quicker access to your tasks.

 I can't recommend TickTick enough. Hope it works well for you if you try it out 🙂

[SkilfulPoker]

16 hours ago, HardGain said:

hi! all the best wishes to your dad, to get better asap! 
Hope you get the 250 ticket in time! i'm doing something similar, but for the Supermoon 250EUR 🤞

Awesome hope you get it to my friend !and thanks for well wishes for my dad 🙏🙂

Edited October 30, 2023 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys I had a go at qualifying for Bucharest and also roped my friend in but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. My friend actually won 4 €250 tickets but didn’t manage to convert any. 
 

I didn’t win one but did win a few 50s , unfortunately my dad has been unwell lately and is currently in hospital. So I had to prioritize and get to the hospital instead of playing so I withdrew my remaining bankroll of €150. 
 

if there are any more Unibet opens I’ll try again for sure , if not I hope to meet you guys at another live event sometime. 
 

if you’re going to Bucharest, good luck ! Take it down!!

Edited November 16, 2023 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys, quick update my dad is still in the hospital, but stable which is good. He's had not one, not two.. but FIVE serious infections in the last six weeks requiring hospitalisation! Anyway, he's stable and we're doing our best to get him the best care and try to get him better as soon as we can. He's a fighter which is helping! 

Reason for this post is my friend managed to convert his 250 ticket for a Unibet Deepstack Open (is that what they're called?) and consequently I've learned that these exist. I thought when I read malta is likely the last Unibet Open, that would be the end of Unibet live tournaments... but now am realising maybe I was wrong?

Can someone tell me a bit more about these deep stack tournaments, are they replacing the original UO? are they planned on-going? 

I'll be having a go at qualifying for one of these, as I see they are running until the middle of next year currently, so that's great, and means my hopes of getting to a live Unibet event and seeing some of you are still very much alive!

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys. How's poker going? Hows your Christmas league going? Mine is going pretty decent I've cashed 2/3 so am very happy with that, as my goal is to win the shiny shark avatar. It's been fun playing so far, and I enjoyed popping into Discord the other day and chatting with some players there. For me that's one of the main attractions with poker the social aspect, so I am looking forward to popping into Discord a bit more. 

I also won a hexa ticket as part of the Christmas league promotions, and managed to convert that into a 250 euro prize! Which is just great on top of Christmas, and feels like a lucky present from poker 🙂 I'm deciding what to do with that now, and the choices are, either: 

1) Use it to start a live qualification campaign off and running and start grinding the 10's with a view to winning some seats to live events, or

2) Find someone nice I like and buy it, so I have that present to remind me about the league when I use it or think about it in future. 

A nice decision to have to make! I'm edging towards using it as a bankroll for live qualification but will keep you posted. 

Live poker is going very well for me, I also played some live roullete lately and very luckily also managed to walk away in profit, despite losing at several times in the game. 

So all in all, things are going very well here. My dad is also home from hospital now, and we're hoping for a decent recovery! 

Here's to a strong weekend on the tables guys, have a great weekend!

[SShcherbyna]

14 hours ago, SkilfulPoker said:

I'm deciding what to do with that now

Play another five €50 Hexapros 

Spoiler

God, I'm 33 years old, it's 5 in the morning, and I'm drawing pictures in Excel 😫

 

Edited December 9, 2023 by SShcherbyna

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys the live games are going ok I got to get better at tracking but I’m sure im up about £500 this month. 
 

I have a mental coach now and one thing we agreed is that I will use a stop loss limit. Because I spew chips on to roulette sometimes if I start losing! 
 

yesterday I won £700 at 1/2 today I lost £600 - but I never felt better , because this was the first test for my stop loss, and I effortlessly stopped after dropping 3 stacks. 
 

there’s only one thing better than the feeling of winning and that’s the feeling of great self control!

 

cheers guys

Edited December 16, 2023 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey my friends, lots has happened the past few months. 

I've played a lot of live poker cash 200nl, and unfortunately have not that much to show for it! 

I have at least not lost any money playing 200nl live which is something. 

But I'm not sure grinding 200nl for a living is really my cup of tea. I like the idea of playing part time, and when on holiday, and also travelling and playing in poker tournaments, but it really is a bit of grind just playing day in day out, one table, and there is so much short term variance involved. 

So I've decided to continue my poker exploits online for now. The other day while playing live I was so bored I deposted 100 euro on unibet and started playing online at the same time... not great concentration ! This morning when I checked my account I had 11 euros left in my account, and played a 5 euro mtt about an hour ago and finished 4th for a 24 odd euro profit. So now I have 32.26 in my unibet account. 

For the forseeable future I'm going to play Mtts <=5 euros (unless community games in which case I'll allow myself to play any), and I'm going to grind 4nl, (with the odd 10 euro table also if there's no traffic) multi-tabling. 

I'm going to record a lot of my sessions and post a highlights video here, so you guys can tell me where I'm going wrong, or generally just laugh at my play 🙂

3:46am here, and I'm going to play for about 8 hours starting now. Will report back after how the first session went. 

I think my greatest accomplishment with poker this year, is sticking to this one blog thread - and not starting a new one every few weeks 😄 

Edited February 20 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys not much to update since last post , unibet bankroll wise, it was down about 10 euros. But at 3:57am on the way home in an Uber from another frustrating live cash game session, I've decided to really commit to doing something with my poker this year and it's going to be on Unibet. 

I need to get strategic with my poker now. It's no good just playing cash indefinately and making a few quid one day and losing some the next, I need to make the time I put into the game count for something. So I'm going to concentrate most of my energy on Unibet Live Satelites. Because at least then I get to travel a bit. I don't have the funds to buy directly into these events this year, but I can satellite in i'm sure, if I focus my efforts at becoming a winning satelite player. 

My main push for the rest of the year, will be to attend the last three Unibet Deep Stack Open's. If successful that will see me playing poker in Barcelona, Sanremo, and Marrakech.

What an amazing year of poker that would be. Dara, the Unibet pro is a world class satellite player, and has written a great book on how to beat satellites, I am going to be learning Dara's strategy and applying it on the Unibet felt.

I'm also going to play MTT's less than or equal to 5 euro buy in, and will allow myself to play 4nl if i feel like it. So that's the rules of my challenge going forward: 

Games allowed: 

- Unibet Live Sats (grinding them so using the exchangers to ensure i always have 20 tickets in reserve before attempting the next ladder)

- 4nl 

- MTT's <= 5 euro buyin

- 5 man sngs 5 euro or below

Update a minimum of once a week with games played, and running profit / loss for this venture. 

Week 1 commencing Friday 15th March 2024 (today)

Edited March 15 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys one week on I played a fair bit on one day and then have not played with the consistency I would have liked to - but hey we are up and running — 

I had a 5 buyin winning session at live cash a couple of days ago which helped my confidence as I’ve been losing with great frequency this month before that ! 
 

in terms of my Unibet open challenge I have the following tickets. 
 

So we are up and running ☺️

i got 15x 0.40 cent tickets and 2 x 2 euro. 

I really like the ticket system as it keeps me disciplined 😀 as I feel like I have a set amount of resources and I need to build them. 
 

I made £50 profit at sports betting this week then promptly set a £1 profit / loss on sports so I can’t give it back 😀 

In other news I started a challenge with my friend to cut out junk food from our diets yesterday and so far I’m on track. 

I am also trying to get healthier using walking as exercise and am enjoying that. Two days ago I walked my longest ever walk of 12 miles 🚶🚶🚶

So all going quite nice here , hoping to breach the 10 euro ticket threshold in next weeks report 🙂

 

Edited March 23 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

And here we are another week on! So to keep me accountable for this challenge, I'm back with the weekly update. 

I hardly got to play last week due to a busy week. Here's the challenge resources as of right now: 

1. 5 x 0.40cent tickets

2. 12 odd euros in cash

3. 520 bonus points

Thoughts and thinking about Money

Thankfully things are moving along in my life a little faster than they are in this challenge. I've been reading a great book called Money by Rob Moore this week: 

I'm learning a lot from it. Key take-aways so far have been that: 

Money is fluid and there is more or less an infinite supply of it waiting to be acquired. This is different to the scarcity mindset that it's a limited resource. It sounds simple but the impact is quite significant once you take it on board. It's motivating me to take a longer term view to accumulating some wealth instead of thinking I have to make money quickly if I want to acquire money. 

Another take away was that to acquire wealth you can do so in one of three main ways. By increasing your income, by gaining equity in something or by getting assets. 

Third key takeaway was that in order to make money you need to take risks, and that most people fall into one of two categories. Either they are too risk averse (they don't take enough risk) or they take too much risk. 

OK so what does all this mean for me? Well I was going to play some live poker yesterday with a few buy-ins, but I decided not to. This was too reckless. My bankroll is fluid so for instance if I had lost a few stacks yesterday I could play again in a week or two anyway, but the point is this new thinking about money shifted my whole approach here. It's too much of a risk to take with the one asset I had available to me at the time (the cash). 

Instead I chose to invest part of that asset in software and tools to further my freelance career. I also purchased the kindle version of the above book (because I had been listening to it on Audible) and I purchased another book I have been listening to about communication. I'm investing in myself here and I'm confident these investments will reap a decent return going forward. 

I also used some audio hypnosis which is designed to change how we think about money and to break down old limiting beliefs about money. 

I got to say it was powerful and I feel my approach to money is changing for the better. 

Freelancing

i signed up to a new freelancing platform recently after deciding I need to increase my income (since reading the Money book), and yesterday I won my first client who has hired me. Which was really inspiring because it was the first bid for work I placed on the site. The client contacted me back yesterday and asked if I was free for a call to discuss the work. Interestingly if I had went to play poker yesterday I wouldn't have picked the message up. It's amazing how seemingly small decisions can have knock on effects in our life elsewhere, don't you think?

We've agreed about a month's worth of work - and that feels great. I'm excited to be getting back into web development and digital marketing - because I have just kind of been floating about since my last employer folded about a year ago. 

It's much more sensible for me to play poker alongside other regular income until I'm confident in my abilities and am actually bankrolled to play professionally. For now I'm going to enjoy trying to get to some live events and rely on other more stable sources of income to start developing wealth 🙂 

I'm writing this on a train - on my way to visit my sister for the weekend (120 miles away from where I live). My brother is heading up too, and will be here later in the day. It was my idea to come up and see her for the bank holiday weekend - and i'm looking forward to it! 

So with that in mind I'll wrap this update up. Plans for poker for the week ahead is to start getting some traction in this challenge,  so to support that goal I'm going to commit to playing at least 15 satellites next week, I'm also going to record one of the satellites I play and upload it with next weeks update, and would appreciate your thoughts on how I played. 

Have a great Easter weekend guys!

 

Edited March 29 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

won a ticket to 100 euro main event from 10 euro sat,  unfortunately lost in the first hand of the main event.woops!

 

 

Edited April 2 by SkilfulPoker

[SkilfulPoker]

Hey guys I’m going to start tracking my live play here for time being also to hopefully bring me some good luck 🙂 

just sitting down to play some 1/2 now , will update how it goes along the way. 
 

main goals are :

 

- focus on getting my opening range decent preflop. 
- taking low variance lines if it’s close told!

 

cheers !

[SkilfulPoker]

Well that was annoying first stack I lose 

against someone I’ve seen a tonne before calls me down three streets and river jam with 86 ,, on Q642Q after I raise pre and be calls from the blinds and check calls every street 

Then 10 minutes later straddled pot I make it 15 over. 5 straddle , two callers and a shove I call of course with QQ and he has aces 😂

I wouldn’t have posted had I not posted above but needed to update at least! 
 

I’ve decided I’m taking a long break with poker and focussing on my day job so will be back in about a year fresh 🙂