G1lius' Road to Triplenova

Yeah, I haven't updated since some time, but a very happy new year for all of you.

My pokergoal for this year was to get supernova before the end of February, but since the VPP/hand are lower then before, and I'm likely not going to get 70k+ hands in I already doubt I'm going to make it.

Either way, as you may have noticed in the blogs since 2 months ago is that something annoyed me. Right now I'm comfortable enough to talk about it since I can look at it pretty objectively.
About 5 or 6 years ago my mother dated someone who had three kids of his own. Long story short is that I got pretty close with the two daughters and considered them really good friends. I don't have any brothers or sisters myself, so I can't compare, but the bond was pretty strong I thought.
It's likely been going on for longer, but since a month ago I realized that I had feelings for the youngest one (she's almost 8 years younger then me). Since I really valued the friendship a lot and was pretty confident she wasn't interested in me that way anyhow, I was kinda mad at myself, trying to make it undone but I didn't have a clue how to do it. I made myself a little depressed at the time. I looked for help in the best person for the job (technically), which is her sister, because she understands how deep the friendship goes and how she's going to react. Practically though, it's still her sister, and you shouldn't tell girls you're in love with their sister and expect them to keep it a secret.
Which she didn't of course.
However, ever since I found out she told her she's been ignoring me. I don't blame her telling her sister, however I do blame her for dropping me when I kinda need it the most.
The youngest one is actually more supportive, although a bit uncomfortable, but that's impossible not to be I'd say. I do think once my brain starts being 100% normal again we can go on just like before. At least I hope so.
Either way, I found a couple of things that really help. It drove me mad at first, but now I'm seeing results and I feel like I'm "healing".

200000 vpp x 3.5 = 700 000 fpp
700k fpp x 0.016 = 11200$
stellar bonus: 1000$
Supernova bonus: 200$
doublenova bonus: 2600$
quarterly freeroll winnings: +/- 1700$
reload bonus: 650$
____________________________
17 350$
- +/- 700$ mtt-spew
- 5440$ loss
___________________________

11 910$

Hope 2011 will be a better year. I'll do my very best to make it happen.

Since people like graphs I'm posting my rollercoaster graph of today.

Today I played 3k hands. Might be the most ever.
10k vpp's to go. After next session I'll only have a 4 figure number to go :)

Graph of today:

It seems like the national law might be ready around the start of the new year, so it's really interesting what will happen the next couple of weeks.
As for my mental state, still the same thing, although it's getting a bit better...

So this weekend I tried to make up for the slacking.
sort or less worked.
I feel like I'm getting a lot of bad beats, so it's likely variance. I'm not really sure how much my mental state affects my game. I feel like I'm making good decisions, but you never really know if something affects you or not.

Either way, this is my graph since Friday:

15.7k vpp's to go.

It's been a while, so I'll make another blogpost.
I need to play a lot, but I haven't. There are reasons for that, but I don't want to talk about that.
I'm too close to doublenova however to just leave it to that.
It's 2.6k$ extra if you hit doublenova, so it would be stupid not to force it.
I need 21k vpp's. So that's about 22.6k hands at 5/10 FR, so 3.5k$ rake.
I get 73.5k fpp's for that, so that's 1176$ for that. So I get 3.7k$ for 3.5k rake. That's more then 100% rakeback from this point to doublenova.

Went to see Papa Roach and Disturbed last Sunday in Forest national. Pretty awesome, although Papa Roach saved their classics for last, so I didn't know the majority of the songs.

20$ for anyone that can find me! (I didn't find myself, so I wouldn't bother :p)

EDIT: oh yeah, there's actually a funny story to it. Oh well, funny...
So I went to Forest in Brussels, but apparently you need to take one more train from Brussels south, to Forest. I didn't know that, so when I looked up the train schedule I searched for Brussels south, not Forest.
Long story short, I missed my train.
The two girls I went with (yeah, I went with two girls, I'm such a player) both study in Leuven, so I went with them, sleeping at one's dorm.
I had to work at 4.20h, so there was no way I could make that since the first train leaves at 6.00h or something. So I woke up at 4.15h, calling them 8 times between then and 5.00h. Nobody answered the phone. I said "fuck them" and went to sleep again. At 5.45h I finally received a phonecall to ask where I was. I did my story and they said there where 3 sick people calling in today, and I needed to get there as soon as possible. So I stumbled out of the dorm, took the 20 minute walk to the train station, just to miss the first train. I drove to Antwerp-Berchem my car Sunday, because otherwise I wouldn't have made it anyway. So after a 40 minute wait at the train station, a 1.30h train ride and a 35 minute car ride I arrived at my work at 9.00h. I didn't have any working clothes, so I borrowed some shoes that stood some chance in the snow, and a jacket so people wouldn't mistake me for some sweat/beer stinking bum.
I've had better days.
I guess it was worth it though.

So I went to see the last movie last night.
I liked it.
One thing about it though is that it kept me from player two days. I've only watched the first movie, so I spent the last two days watching the remaining 6 movies. It's almost 2u30 for one movie, so I kinda had a harry potter overdose.
It's pretty interesting how the movies age with their public. The first one is a children's movie, but this one is actually as serious as Lord of the rings.
One thing that does annoy me are the translations of the names. The names usually are very different from the English ones.
Dumbledore has become 'perkamentus' which translates in parchmentus.
Hogwarts has become 'zweinstein' which phonetically translates in piggystone.

Anyway, I don't think I'll play much today either, because I'm really tired and my brain is fussy. Too much information in too less time I guess :)

Yesterday I didn't take a nap. Which resulted in not playing a lot during the day because tables are too hard, and being tired in the evening resulting in playing bad.
So I'll have to keep up with the napping. Maybe setting an alarm on my days off. Which should be good, because I'll be able to play some in the morning too, like I did today.
I wanted to reward myself with some online software (not pokerrelated), to get the feeling that I bought it with pokermoney. However, I couldn't subscribe to their site because I had to give a USA city and state. I mailed them stating this problem twice, and after that they just gave me 3 months for free. Likely because I detected a "bug", although they didn't stated as such.
So yeah, I'm happy with the free 3 months, but now I didn't buy it with pokermoney. I still have this gift certificate from my job which is due at the end of the month. I'll likely go buy some cd's or dvd's tomorrow since I don't really know what else to do with it.
I'm kind of a cheap person I guess.
Anyway, I hope I can sleep a bit this afternoon so I can grind a piece into the night. I'll have no time this Friday so I really need to get some hands in.

Yeah, swingin!

It's the 22nd of November today, so 2 days after the Pokerstars online pro deadline. I didn't make it :(
So it's 99.99999999% official: I will not succeed in my goal of going pro in 2011.
This year was a really big fail, but it kinda shows where I'm at. I'm not good enough to beat the solid 10/20 players. It's not surprising, since the players at 10/20 often play higher too. I just thought that is was too easy I guess.
I totally have no clue what to do next year. I'll likely go towards the path of grinding instead of trying to improve in an attempt to beat the 10/20 games solidly. But I'll see at the end of the year.
I got a couple of days off now, so I hope to get some hands, since I'll need more then 20k hands/month to get to doublenova, since I don't get as much vpp's on full ring tables.

Really tired now, I think I'll go to sleep very soon (it's 19.05h atm). fml :(

Just like poker, life has swings.
Interesting thing about napping for a couple of hours, is that you feel like it's a new day when you wake up.
Not only do I have no idea what day it is when I wake up in the morning...
I woke up this morning like this: Aahhrrgg, ain't it sunday? no, must be Saturday... wait wait... what... it's... Thursday... no... that can't... yeah... Jesus Christ it's only Thursday.. oh my god...
... but every time I wake up I've "reset" my mental state, which results in me feeling awesome at times, taking a nap/sleep and feeling a bit down, or the other way around.
I'm a bit emotional these days for certain reasons, and was pretty happy yesterday that I felt good and stable, while after my nap in the afternoon I feel cranky and weirdish. Kinda sucks I have my grinds scheduled in the evening. Totally don't want to play right now, and I wont.
On the positive side of things, I'm not really tired like I used to be at any time of day.
I've always been interested in sleep and what it does to a human. Some time ago I was searching a lot of information about polyphasic sleep, namely uberman and everyman (google it I you want to learn more), but stopped since I can't really do it myself due to my job. However, I'm still very amazed on how the body and sleep can be alternated in such ways. I might try to experiment with some things myself now. Not in a sleeping schedule way, but in a mental way. Since sleeping actually does "reset" the brain in a way, I might try if it actually has an effect on you if you force yourself to be happy when you wake up. For example doing some dancing right after you wake up. Since you wake up in a fairly neutral state of mind, that should be possible. Because if I think about it now, I really don't feel like dancing in the morning, but we'll see what happens.