MoreTBC

Playing cards on the internet (and occasionally live) - The 2020-2023 edition I played some poker between 2020 and 2023 but I didn't do a great job of recording it and don't remember a lot of it. I do have a folder on my desktop where I save win screens and deep runs but it doesn't give a true indication of volume and P/L. I also purged my HM3 DB to only keep hands from the last year or two to speed it up so I'd need to re-import them to find out more, and ultimately it's not that important. 2020 and 2023 are also muddied by transitions to and from .eu. Most sites required a 2nd account to be created so Sharkscope results are across two usernames and there were also forced username changes on some sites during that time period too. Here are the biggest results I could find in the win screens folder per year:- 2020: 3rd in the Hotter $2.20 on .com Stars for $389 2021: 2nd in €5 Micromillions-60 on .es Stars for €1299 2022: 1st in $22 McLaren Turbo Series #12-M on Party for $1963 (this was from a $3 sat probably, I don't make a habit of direct buying 22s. 2023: 22nd in $11 MB on 888 for $196 There is definitely some stuff missing from the folder, especially for 2023 :). I remember winning another Party series $22, again from a $3 sat, on my phone while feeding my youngest some milk at 1am or something and there are was at least one live seat win for €550 somewhere during the time period, as I played the MPF when Party were sponsoring it. I also had a 4 figure score on Winamax as well, but didn't save that either, what a lazy bum I was... [goes off to Sharkscope] 3rd in the Pour La Daronne for €1270 in 2022. At some point in 2022 I think I felt like I was turning a corner a little bit in regards to playing at a level that could at least break even at the micros. I started to put a little effort into study off the table, paying a bit more attention to training content and reading more than just the acknowledgments in Dara's book to see if I made it in. Playing cards on the internet - 2024 and beyond Hopefully here, there will be a screenshot of my active accounts from Sharkscope. GG is missing, because they stopped tracking (but I'm also putting no volume in there), but other than that it's some data that's kinda relevant. I say kinda because it's only scheduled stuff so it's missing on-demand SNGs/MTTs on Stars for example. I looked at HM3 for the year and it has my tournament count at just over 1300, but that's going to include all spins, battle royales and everything else... and I've not imported any Party data, so it's missing those too 🙂 It's hard work tracking properly everything these days. This is the sheet I use to track my BR now. It converts non-$ amounts into $ using whatever rates Google decides is right so I end up with a $ total. I'll update it at the end of each session and then add that to a column with the date so I can see progress over time. ... and this is said progress over time. BR was $636ish when I started recording everything at the start of Feb, peaked at $1800 and change, and is currently at a comfortable $1660 (give or take). Back to back +$300 days at the start of April and then a 3rd in the 4.4k runner $3.30 Bounty Bilder on Stars for $550 have pushed the BR into a level that makes play the games I'm playing very comfortable. I've been utilising site specific BRM because I don't think you should treat playing a site where the fields are 4 figures and tougher and a site where the fields are much smaller and softer the same. For Stars I've been using an around 250bi rule for buy-ins and for 888 it was more in the 100-150bi region. 100bi would be a hard limit to move down but in general I've been pretty fluid about it and actually being nittier than I probably need to be most of the time. I'll occasionally shot take up to $11, but they're few and far between just now. I also am very unsure if I'd be beating $11 just now. For Stars, I'm playing up to $5.50 normally, although the Bounty Builder that is running when I start my session normally is a $7.50, so I treat myself with that one 🙂. On 888/Party it's up to $8.80, although I sometimes play the $11 MB on 888 as it's pretty soft and starts at 5pm, so I can jump 2 hours into it and still get 20bb or something. I've also removed sats from Stars as well for the most part, as they tend to be a bit of a BR vacuum and take up table space for regular games, although they still sneak in now and again 🙂 In terms of volume, as you can see from the SS output, it's mostly on 888 and Stars. The games on 888 are very lively and I basically chose Stars over GG because their tournaments finish quicker and I just don't feel like giving GG money. I'll happily take their daily freebie, but they've not getting a deposit 😄. The only upside to not working for Unibet was that I got to keep the laptop Relax sent me. My old laptop had the processing power of a potato and couldn't handle multiple table and sites at all, which was frustrating, because it's hard to get enough games on almost any site in the micros, especially if you want to dodge the big two so you'd need to play for 8 hours. Now I have a functioning device, I can play all the sites at the same time, but I find it can be a bit overwhelming having too many options, so I'm trying to limit it to 3 sites. I did play iPoker for a little while, but they're lobby is painful to look at and it can be hard to find what you want easily as the filtering is not great. Party also just added a 100% deposit bonus to my account, so I'm moving volume to there for the foreseeable future. I do have 2x Day 2s to play on iPoker this weekend but will just withdraw if I make a good run in either. As far as improving goes, I'm still doing terribly at that but not quite as terrible as in past years. I tend to at least drill some hands each day, I am in an active study group now and I'm doing a little more learning when I can. Once I find a job and have a steady income again I think I'll get a DB review done so that I can target my study to my biggest leaks and have actually tangible targets to try and achieve. At the moment it's a bit "I'm rubbish at everything" and me just dotting about topics with no real purpose. Goals for the year:- Don't go broke Learn something Play live somewhere (DSO or IPO probably the target for this one) Fairly generic goals just now but I think that's ok. I don't think "Have x in my BR" is a good goal to have and my actual goal for that one would be to be a confirmed winning player at up to $22 games. That's a long-term goal and requires me to do the 2nd goal of learning something first as I'd be 99.9% I'm not winning in $22s and don't even have a big enough sample to check. I don't have an aspirations to be running around Europe on the EPT circuit or anything like that but I really like the idea of playing in Ireland and Alex has done amazing work with the DSO so I'd love to finally be able to experience one of his stops from the players side. There are probably some UK stops I could get to through 888 but I've not really looked into it yet. Another point on the to-do list after getting a job 🙂. What's next for the blog? I don't know really. Didn't really plan much beyond doing 1 update post, that turned into 3 so it's a bit of an open book now. I don't think daily or session updates are going to be particularly interesting so I think weekly or bi-weekly general update. I have got some ideas for actual "content" but as with everything, it'll depend if I can be bothered putting the time and effort in, rather than just watching Youtube videos and having a sandwich. Anyhoo, enough words for one day.

You're right, I did. For over the hill relics that can't beat Hold'em anymore, rely on the highest variance formats and only like buyin types that give an edge purely on time of registration, yes I've ruined it. For everyone else...

No. Thank you for your question.

Why I'll probably not play on Unibet Look at that clickbait title, perfect for a YouTube video or affiliate article... but luckily this post is neither of them, and not nearly as dramatic as it sounds either. It's also not going to be some bitter rant about my ex employer. The product is multiple times better than it was 4 years ago before I joined Unibet and I liked it back then, so a scathing demolition of the client this is not. What it will be about is how my profile as a player, and how I go about playing sessions has changed a lot in the last 4 years and that rather minor and 1st world issues are the only difference between one site or another getting my rake. Issue 1 - The missions I used to complete the missions pretty religiously back in the day, completely unaware of just how valuable they were compared to the rake I paid completing them. Having been on the other side of the wall I now know how much value I, and everyone else was getting, and understand that it needed to reduced and I have no problem with that. Infact, I think the reward for the 1st step in this months missions is way too high and the requirements for each step are in a wonky order relative to the time/rake required to complete them, but that's a tangent I'm not going to go down today. Needless to say, the reduction in rewards is not my issue. When I got access to my account, the first thing I did was try to complete the 1st mission step and instantly started regretting it. The banzai mission was a time and money sink and I did not enjoy it at all. Time management is something that I've prioritised in the last few years given that, with two kids and one of them liking to wake up early, I don't have nearly as much of it now to spend on poker so when I do get the chance to play, I'm not looking to play formats that I don't like. I'm also way more sensitive to how playing formats I'm not likely to win in has a negative impact on my BR for things I have a much better chance in. It's the same reason I rarely complete spins/cash promos on other sites. Now I could get over it if the rewards felt like good value but the much bigger issue for me now is that I can't access a much bigger part of the mission rewards. If you're a regular reader to the blog, you'll know that I dusted a massive chunk of my BR back in the day drunkenly playing slots one night, and as a result, requested that casino (and bingo, just out of spite because it's rubbish:D) be permanently blocked on my account. That block still stands today and means that I can't utilise the free spins that make up a much bigger portion of the missions rewards than they did previously and in turn makes the missions much less appealing to me personally. The tickets to multi-stack a freeroll also seem like they provide no additional value either so they just don't seem like a good time investment anymore. Given my lack of interest in cash/Hex promos there isn't really any promo Unibet has the functionality to run I think would appeal to me anymore. I don't have the time for LBs so MTT promos are out and I don't rake enough for the loyalty system to be relevant either. Now that's not to say I won't/wouldn't play purely on the idea that the games are good and I could win money the good ol' fashioned way but there are obviously other places I can put volume in where the games are similar and I'll get better promotional incentives on top. Issue 2 - Custom bet buttons I'm at a point now where I can comfortably have 8-12 tables on screen during a session. Part of the reason I can do that is because I have all the clients configured with my most frequent bet sizes so I can bet quickly and move onto the next decision. It took me seeing 50% pot as the min bet option post-flop one time for me to instantly dislike playing tournaments on Unibet. It's a 1st world problem, I know, but I'm lazy and I like my comforts. I like being able to open my laptop, load up HM3, Jurojin and then the clients and then just know I'll never have to worry about moving tables or tweaking anything during a session. Having Unibet in the rotation is only going to slow my sessions down and I don't really need or want to do that. Getting volume in has been another variable I've been focusing on over the last year or two and I've bounced around sites trying to find the right balance of number of games to play and games that'll finish at a reasonable time so I can play them, sleep, and still feel like a human at 6am the next morning. Now I know the Unibet schedule was designed to fit that exact plan but I can't get over not having custom bet buttons and I've found a mix of sites and games I like now. It might be one of those things I get over over time but right now I just don't see a reason to move any volume from the other sites I play on when I have everything configured the way I like it and everything is being tracked in HM so I can review it once every never and moan about the orange line being higher than the green on in my bb/100 graph. There is definitely a part of me that wants to play the schedule just to see what it's like. I built the thing, would be nice to know if it's as good as I think it is :D. I'm also aware that I'm playing in tougher games by putting volume on a site like Stars and I know there is lots of overlay value to be had but I'm not sure if any extra possible ROI would balance out sessions feeling "harder" with all the manual typing. So, yeah... that's it really. Some really minor things that make me want to stay where I play and not move back. I'm focusing on building my online BR just now but I do still want to experience a DSO so I'll likely play some live qualifiers at some point and it would be nice to say I've played the Supermoon or some of the daily majors but for the time being, the streets are safe! Next time, I'll actually do an update on poker and what I've been up to... Promise!

When flips first started running players worked out the could register them after the tables had formed just before the flip started and be sat on a new table by themselves, skipping the first flip. The first solution used to mitigate it was to close reg 5 mins early. It's obviously not the best experience for players so was replaced with caps so no additional tables could be formed. This flip looks like it still has the early reg closure on it. Not a bug, just a missed template that needs an update

Definitely wasn't related to the team, just felt like I was wasting my time not doing anything and found it incredibly frustrating not being able to help with various things that came up especially when, realistically, the work can be done from anywhere in the world and I was pretty good at it 😎. You're doing the job of 3 or 4 people just now so I'll let you off for not throwing me a farewell party. I'll just bink a DSO package or two and the Long Islands can flow again. Ok, population didn't ask, just my top fans 😋

The elephant in the room Seems like the best place to reboot this award winning (😎) blog would be to answer the question literally nobody is asking... "Why are you not working for Unibet anymore?" To answer this, we really have to go all the way back to the last blog post, when I joined Unibet. It was an incredibly exciting time for me personally, but it was also the start of a pretty miserable time for planet earth. We landed in Malta one or two days before they closed the airport in Malta and went into the first full Covid lockdown. Whisked off to the company apartment in the early hours, we were not allowed to set foot outside the door for 14 days. This caused a number of problems as Malta really wasn't ready for online shopping so getting fresh food and other items was a nightmare. My first face to face meeting with my boss, the head of poker, was at the apartment door with him handing me my laptop and 2 cartons of milk to feed my 18 month old. It was a rough two weeks locked up with an inquisitive toddler in an apartment with a glass dining table at her head height and multiple other dangers and breakables and a very limited number of food options and didn't really start the mediterranean adventure the way I hoped. Even after restrictions were lifted, we got an apartment, and settled in a bit, it was still a very isolating experience for my partner. I had the ability to go to the office now and again and mingle with the handful of people that were on the floor but for her it was very tough to find her place. Before we moved we had always said if she started getting homesick she could just hop on a cheap Ryanair flight and come back to the UK for a week but Covid also ruined that as flight prices soared and direct flights to my hometown stopped, adding extra expense to a return to the homeland. Our daughter also turned 2 which means she was now an "adult" in the eyes of airlines which also added to the cost. Fast forward to the start of 2022 and with our second child due in a couple of months, we made the decision that we wanted to return to the UK to be closer to family and friends and a better support system. I raised this in a meeting with the boss and was told there should be no issues so we started making arrangements. Around September 2022 there was a restructure of the gaming team (Poker, Bingo and Casino) so that the roles were aligned between the products. I moved from 3rd Line Product Expert to Operations Manager as a title, but almost nothing changed in my day to day. The big change came from the fact that they decided they want the whole gaming team (or at least everyone that had not already relocated) to be located in Malta, which obvious created a big problem for me. There wasn't really much of a decision for me to make, I was going to put my family and their happiness first so I informed the boss that I'd still be moving back to the UK in March 2023. To his credit, Kris did try everything he could to get them to make an exception for me and allow me to work from the UK but to no avail. The official line I was given was that it was a tax related issue (which I'm sceptical about given Kindred has an office in London and HMRC covers the whole of the UK, not just England) but there was no point dwelling on it and I continued prep to leave Malta. Luckily I hit a bit of a temporary one-outer when I was given the opportunity to continue working for the team in a reduced role by working for Relax and them hiring me through an agency in the UK that they've used previously. It was a 6 month contract and would mean I'd be able to train a replacement for the Operations Manager role. At this point, I was Content Manager (which is just a dumb name for poker room manager, basically looking after the tournament schedule and other "content" in the client (cash/SNG stakes etc)) so I could continue to do the tournament schedule but I just wouldn't have access to anything on the Unibet side (customer info to help with support queries and things like that). Replacing me took longer than expected and they extended my contract until Mar 2024 to ensure there would be someone that could take over the tournament scheduling and all the associated tasks and now that the contract is up, I'm a free agent. I'd be lying if I said the last year was fun because I actually hated it. I hated the job, I hated having nothing to do (after all the hard work of redesigning the schedule and making a years worth of series the day to day does not take long at all), I hated not having the ability to help or get involved with things outside of tournaments and I just felt like I was wasting my time. Relax made little effort to integrate me into any of their side of the product so I had almost nothing to do day-to-day. I was completely mentally checked out of the job about half way through the UOS last year and I almost didn't take the contract extension in Sept 2023 because I was so unhappy. Being able to say I created and ran the biggest series in Unibets history was the only thing that made me sign tbh. A completely useless personal goal but it was my goal and I was going to complete it. I don't want this all to be doom and gloom though, the time I spent in the poker product team was without doubt the best time I've had in any job I've done. I flippin' loved my job and it never ever felt like work. I'll be forever grateful to Kris for taking a chance on me and to Stubbe for campaigning so hard to get me on the other side of the wall. I might never find another job I enjoyed as much as the Unibet one. We must move on though... What about the poker I hear you ask! Well, I rambled on too long in this post to get into that so we'll save it for another day. I can say I've played some hands on Unibet now and I didn't like it :o. Tune in next time for some hot takes.

Yeah, first post was 2016 and I joined Unibet Mar 2020

You need a hall of fame for the bestestest community members throughout history

138% better than the current table UI.

I am struggling to start my new job. I'm struggling to leave the country at this point but flights permitting I'll be in self isolation in Malta in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Best blog on the forum IMO.

The time has come. 3 and half years (roughly) this little thread has been going for and it's been quite the ride. Engagements, babies, new clients, MTT schedules, UO packages without playing poker, slots degeneracy.. it's had it all but there was always going to be a day when it would have to stop. With a heavy heart I have to announce that today is that day. For anyone actually still keeping track of the BR I did as expected and torched the majority of the remaining funds at the end of the UOS. Couldn't get a run together and bricked the remaining session I had. Normally I'd be sad about this sort of thing but this time I actually expected it to happen and didn't really mind if it did. There is a very good reason for this lack of respect for my BR and money and that's because.. I'M JOINING UNIBET!! Not as a poker soul crushing ambassador and pro but as a '3rd Line Poker Product Expert'. This is the job that Patric used to do (He's moved on to another department I believe). Now you might be asking yourself "What does a Poker Product expert actually do?". This is a question many of my friends and family has also asked me and I don't have a short or clean answer for you, or them, so I just show them (and now you) this screenshot from the vacancy post on the Kindred careers website :) Exactly what all that means, I'll find out later this month :) Obviously I won't be able to play on the site anymore so continuing the blog seems a little pointless. Don't worry though, we have some plans to make sure you can still keep up with my averageness, it just won't involve me punting off on Unibet :) If you've ever read, liked or commented on the rambling mess I want to say thank you. You've helped me stay accountable while playing and kept this blog going for as long as it has. This is your 2016 blogger of the year, signing out :Cool: