Postovi - Septembar 2009
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Vegas and Double U Coop
Septembar 19, 2009Vegas
Every time I arrive in Vegas I feel a certain type of peace. Part of the reason is definitely that this place feels like a second home. Not only because Evy lives here and I love spending time at her house, but also cause I just like Vegas. It has a lot of bad sides and disadvantage, like the summers or the bitterness people in casino's have. On the other hand, you can bascially get anything you want here, and when you want. The service is insane everywhere and you can get the best food. I love going to the movies, cause the American theaters are 6 months or something ahead of the Dutch ones. So I basically haven't seen any of the movies apart from the ones that premiere worldwide. This trip I haven't been to the strip once yet
. Evy lives right next to the strip, but I have yet to set foot in a casino. I kind of like it that way, cause there is no games or anything now live. We'll prolly go get some sick dinners after WCOOP, but that'll be it for me and the strip.Evy's birthday was the 14th. I gave her some presents at midnight and on the actual day we pretty much chilled. We're both really laid back, also on holidays and don't have the need to go out because of certain holidays. Me Likey. Rest of the time we haven't gotten the time to do a lot of stuff anyway, because of WCOOP and Evy getting ready to move. She showed me the new apartment the other day and it was SIkkkk. It's really big and the everything in the tower looks nice. She'll move there over the next couple weeks, so that's pretty exciting.
The good thing about having such a long break between blogs is that I can post movies I used before. I think there is a lot of different people reading the blog now, and these need to be seen!
WCOOP
I love getting out of bed, waking up with some pokershows and read some news online, while the tournaments start. At a certain point when I feel awake and I ate I start to add cashgames and I play till whenever the last tournament goes. WCOOP hasn't been friendly or profitable to me at all so far. I haven't played all the events and in the ones I did play, I either played bad or ran bad, which resulted in only 1-2 deep runs. Grats to Elky and Unassigned for winning the WCOOPS yesterday. Pretty ridic that unassigned won again, after winning both hi and med SCOOPS earlier this year. Today I decided against playing the 8-game. I had a good nights sleep, but it was 55 mins in the tournament (doesnt matter THAT much though) and I didn't feel like immediately playing. Tomorrow is the main event and I might play the 10k horse, but I'm not very confident in my stud game yet, even though I did pretty well at the Stud or STud/e events.
Cashgames seem to finally be turning around. I am the most vicious downswing I have ever experienced, but last couple of days it has been picking up again. I had my first 2 winning sessions in a month. I really felt like a reversed king Midas; everything I touched turned into shit. The most annoying thing is that while downswinging for like 4-6 weeks, and losing massive amounts of money, there have to have some glithces develope in your game. IT doesn't have to be anything radical, but losing does something to your game. Maybe you don't bluff enough because you have no confidence, others might fish to hard on draws. I played a couple of sessions, where I went from 30 tabling to 4 tabling and tried to figure out which decisions cannot be profitable.
And as I thought it was mostly the 2 things named above. I called too many 3-bets out of position with useless holdings, and I wasn't 3-betting enough myself, cause of the confidence thing. I also tried to create some more creative bluff and valuebet lines, some concerning 5x pot allin, which is going really well. I try to balance it out as well as I can and it gave me back confidence. Beginning of the week I wanted to start confidence grinding, so no more 10-20, 25-50, 100-200. I started on 3-6 and lost 24 buyins, fuck. Some people that might seem like a tiltsession, but keep in mind, I played 14,000 hands thay day, so thats like a week for some people's samples.
Then I thought, ok I REALLY need a winning session and played 2-4, only to lose 8k more. What the fuck !? At that point I figured, ok @#$!$ confidence grinding, I'm just gonna play huge sample on my regular stakes and grind through the downswing. So next day I played 10-20 again and lost 34k.. sigh. This is all pretty depressing, especially if you really want to get into the grind again in stead of playing nosebleeds. It felt like I couldn't win anywhere anymore.
Lukcily thats when I took a step back and analyzed some stuff and talked to some friends, who gave me some good advice. Now I feel confident again, and I picked back up where I left in the race towards Supernova Elite on Pokerstars. It will obligate me to play midstakes and make a lot of hours. This week I played an ok amount of hands, grinding 50k vpp in the process. My total is at 620k VPP now, and I'm 100% positive I'll make it to elite
Tennis
In other news my friend Thiemo de Bakker played Davis Cup Tennis for Holland. He has been on the sickest heater, winning 4 challengers in 5 weeks. It's a completely ridiculous feat. He continued his good form by winning against Monfilles yesterday. This is a clip of the matchpoint:
There has always been a lot of controversy around Thiemo. He finished nr 1 ranked in the world in the juniors tour, also winning Wimbledon there. He had motivational problems after that and got sidetracked, but seems to be on the right track now. The French coach Guy Forget said, if he stays on course, he can get to the top 20 rank of the world. That would be pretty fucking sick! He is 122 ranked right now. Also it's his birthday, so happy birthday. I am so happy he found his way of coping with pressure and finally enjoying tennis.
Tomorrow I'll be playing the Main Event of WCOOP. Thanks everyone for the support so far on the tables. Comment, recommend, or hate
If you wanna follow me during trips or tournaments add me on
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/raszi
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Hyves (dutch users): http://raszi.hyves.nlCya next time!
2896 pregledano, 14 Komentari
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Backkk, lots of news O_o
Septembar 10, 2009Loooong time no writing.
I wanna pick blogging back up and do it a bit more consistently. I usually neglect bloggin when everything is messy and I'm stressed out, but that's no excuse anymore. So here's a recap of the past couple months and from now on it will be regularly updated. Expect this post to be looong. I'll put it in paragraphs, so whichever one you don't care about, you can skip
.Pokerstars deal~
Pokerstars approached me late last year for a possible sponsorship. I was pretty excited, and that's an understatement. I've been trying to get sponsored by stars for like 3 years now. They are focussing a lot more on the European Market than they used to, and launched the Shooting Stars Team in Germany. They raped all over the place, so because of that success Pokerstars also wanted to launch other country teams. Luckily, Holland was one of those countires, which is when I started talking to them. Throughout this year there have been negotiations and they've been gathering players they wanted for the team. The team now consists of Noah Boeken (Exclusive, he was already sponsored), Marcel Luske (Team Pro), Ruben Visser (Rubenrtv), Joep van den Bijgaart (Pappe_Ruk), Thierry van de Berg (BOKPOWER), Pieter de Korver (Won Monte Carlo right after everything got official, holla
) and me. Pokerstars signed our last member in the team a week ago, Fatima Moreira de Melo, an olympic gold medalist in field hockey. She always had an interest in poker and she is very talented and loves the game, therefore a good addition to the team.We're going to be playing most EPT's and some of us will play WPT's as well. Ever since I signed, I've been on an animal grind and I have regained the eye of the tiger. To be honest, this was the best thing in poker that ever happened to me. I've been playing very well live, and it's starting to pay off, which brings me to the next subject~
WSOP
This year Harrah's added a 40k$ tournament, to celebrate the 40-year existence of WSOP. This is pretty exciting, especially cause it would be a very prestigious tournament. I decided to play it and sell half my action. I had a Pokerstars Camp right before, but luckily jetlag didn't win so I felt really fit. I was fortunate enough to make the final table, but couldn't close things really. I lost a big pot with AK vs AJ of Dani Stern, a pretty standard hand, but it left a scar on my soul lol. It really hurts to see that hand on tv again, and I can't stop thinking about the 'What if's'. I'm really happy with my 7th place in that tournament though, and to me it proved that what I was trying to do in Live tourneys worked. I've had some really close ones this years WSOP. A painful bubble in the 10k LHE tournament, where I finished 2 spots outisde the 27k bubble and moreso the 5k shootout. I played heads up vs the kid who won EPT Kiev, Maxim Lykov if I remember correct. I had 2:1 chipleader on the second table and lost the heads up, cashing 16k, while winning the heads up would have put me on a 5-handed final table, with 80k minimum payout. Stuff like that kind of hurts, but I was still very happy.
Last but not least day 1a of the Main event. I've gotten and read a lot of replies about my play that day. Some people think it was awesome, some people think im a donkey. However, I don't really get the people that consider me an asshole or a scumbag because of the way i played. It doesn't really affect me, just makes me think they would make excellent Vegas 60-yr olds. I don't always play like I did in that episode, it was just that the table was perfect for it. Everyone who wanted to play was to my right, the tighter players to my left. People were very aware of the cameras and possible endorsement deals if they could make the day last. I kept showing every bluff, cause it allowed me to keep doing it. I wanted to generate the 'Im sure he wouldn't bluff again!' kind of feeling in people's heads, whereas if I wouldn't have shown anything, people would have gotten curious or disbelievers and call me. I also got paid off huge on some hands because of my hands, but they didn't show those. Thanks for everyone commenting on it and people coming up to me during EPT Barca to give props, that was really cool
.My awesome gf made a compilation of the hands they broadcasted on ESPN:
Part 1
Part 2
Swings
During the WSOP I really wanted to start playing highstakes again. I hadn't been playing 25-50+ for a long long time and I was at the top of my confidence level. It didn't start out that well having a 150k and 100k downswing back to back on 25-50. This might seem a shitload of buy-ins, but considering it were 2 20k+ hand sessions and most of it deepstacked heads up, it's not so bad. After I got back I played a lot of 100-200 sessions on Pokerstars, the craziest of which being the one vs xX JD Killer xx. I was up a lot, but lost everything back leaving me with 9500$ in my account. He asked me if I was done, and then I thought, oh what the hell and sat back in. I won everything back and won some, going from 160k down to 30k winner that day.
Swings don't really do anything with me and I wanted to play higher, so it wasn't any kind of tilting. I know my game selection is poor at times, but I don't think i'm very far behind most of the people I play. I'm not going to play people like nutsinho anymore though, that's just too crazy. He is by far the sickest on PS right now. Other people I've played might be a bit better, some I might have an edge on. I do know one thing; I improved a lot over the past month and that's worth a lot to me. I want to do everything to get the best I can, and neglecting game selection is a sacrifice I have to make to achieve that. I will definitely win a lot more on more comfortable stakes, using the stuff I learn on nosebleeds. I've been taking it easy past 2 weeks to regroup a bit and regain some energy.
Plans for upcoming months
Tomorrow I'm leaving for Vegas. I haven't seen Evy for a little over a month now and it has been bothering me a lot. She is in the middle of moving and I had some obligations at home. Its her birthday next week so I thought it would be a good time to surprise her and come to Vegas. I will be playing WCOOP when out there though, but it's better than playing it here, also with the timezone. I really love being in Vegas outside of WSOP time and I have a lot less things on my head. At the end of september, I will fly back to europe for EPT London, which I'm superthrilled about. I don't necessarily like London too much, but Barcelona was another milestone for me in my live-game. Confidence couldn't be higher and I want to play as much as I can.
Yesterday I got a call if I wanted to play in the PKR 10k$ Heads up invitational in London, which takes place right after the EPT. They're gonna make it an NBC Heads Up format, but then in Europe. People like Durrr, Eastgate, JC Tran, Phil Laak and some others will be completing a field of 32 players. It's the first time I got invited to a show like this
.Right after the heads-up tournament is the Nations Cup in Baden, Austria. Together with Marcel Luske, Rob Hollink and Marc Naalden, I'll be representing Holland in a mix of PLO, Stud and NLHE fighting 17 other teams to try and bink a couple. After the Nations cup my plans are kind of vague as of yet, but I'll def play the Dutch Championships in october and the EPT in Portugal.
Sorry I have been idle with blogging to those who were following me, but that will change.
If you wanna follow me during trips or tournaments add me on
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/raszi
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/lexveldhuis
Hyves (dutch users): http://raszi.hyves.nlIm updating regularly, so if you feel like following, much appreciated!!
See you next time
Awesome:
