Playing very little, coaching a lot, preparing videos...

That's exactly what has happened to me for the last two months. I'm dedicating more and more time to coaching, with an average of 20 hours a week doing hand history reviews. The quality of the sessions, be it private or group ones, is really good, and the reviews I receive from students are fantastic... as well as their results.

Last Sunday, the guy I always said was destined to poker greatness, chopped 5 ways the PS Sunday Million for $120K. When I started my coaching project, I sent him a private message on P5's telling him I wanted to work with him. I knew nothing about him, other than the many posts he had on the forum. He would ask the simplest questions, he would get harrassed by many "regulars", told to stop posting, or be plain ignored...but I knew he wanted to be really good at poker, and had one quality that many lack: He was willing to listen.

After 1-2 weeks of messaging each other, we started to work together on Sept 1st, 2,010. Prior to our deal, his average buy-in was $4, and he had very good stats at the three major poker sites, with close to $15K in profits. 7 months after, he has won the FullTilt $75 24K and 40K guaranteed, the PokerStars 10r, the 10 1r1a, made top 3 finishes in several more MTT's, won most of the UB guaranteed MTT's, etc, etc... and he topped it all last Sunday with that $120K score.

When I heard about it, my first reaction was not related with the amount of money won; I felt proud of him, proud of his consistency, hard work, willingness to learn, humility to accept criticism, to change his mind when he was wrong...he is not a one timer, he will continue to improve, to get better, to accumulate victories and final tables. Take note of his name: Joe "Shipthisplz". You'll hear a lot more from him soon enough.

We will make a video for the Pokertfives training site analyzing his play during that tournament, so stay tuned, it should turn into a very interesting discussion.

Besides Joe, in the last weeks the guys in the group have made consistent money, including a $25K and a $15K scores, along with many smaller wins and final tables. Other than the players I work with every week, many of my private students, those who hired me for 1-2 sessions, have improved their results and in some cases have experienced impressive success. It feels wonderful when, a few days or a week after a session, you receive an email saying "hey, I just won xxx on FTP-PS , my biggest cash ever, thank you"... and I am fortunate to receive that type of message very often.

Overall, coaching makes me feel better than playing. My wife, who is a school teacher, says that I was born to teach; that teaching is something you have to have in you, otherwise you won't be able to transmit to your students, no matter how much you know about something. And she thinks I have it in me, to which I won't argue, because I truly love what I'm doing right now, and will continue to do so for as long as people thinks they want to hear what I have to say.

This Saturday I will be giving an hour long seminar about basic tournament strategies in front of a 200 people crow. If the experience s good, we will repeat it in the future. I am nervous about it, mostly because my old self-consciousness regarding my poor English, but you can only regret what you don't try. I will talk about the experience next week, and let you guys know if they threw rotten tomatoes to the stage :)

In the playing department there will be no news unless I happen to do something interesting next Sunday, which will be my first day playing poker in a month. Besides that, I won't be playing much until next FTOPS and SCOOP series.

FTOPS is over, time to re-evaluate

It's been well over two weeks since the last update, and I think is time to punish readers again with my incredible bad English grammar and endless rants. After all, those of you reading these lines have already shown a likelihood for pain, so I won't feel any guilt if your head hurts after reading.

What happened in my poker life since we last spoke? There is a very easy answer to that question: I lost. I lost when I was ahead, I lost when I was behind, I lost when I was flipping, I lost whenever I had a chance to lose.

FTOPS was a particularly painful experience for me. I had some semi-deep runs, some bubbles, and one hand to add to my own "will haunt me forever" list: Lost AA vs AK all in preflop, for the chip lead, in event #20, a $216 Rush event, with 12 players left. Short after I ran 55 into 66 blind-vs-blind, and finished in 11th place. End of the "bad beat stories" section.

One of the first consequences of my recent run is that the quest for SNE has been put on hold. I am not willing to dig a deep make-up hole for the sole purpose of achieving certain status. My playing schedule for the next weeks will be focused on small-mid buy in MTT's with the addition of Sunday Majors. There will be no 24-30 tabling sessions until I figure out what I've done wrong lately...and there HAS to be something wrong.

Today I had a 2 hours HH review session with "Herschelw", and we found a couple details that needed some work, although those details alone don't justify my recent results, so I will go through many more hands until the criminal is spotted, detained, and put under custody. I am of the idea that if there is smoke, there's a fire somewhere, and I can not let this one grow anymore than what it already has. Besides reviewing my own play, I will be watching videos and reading good strategy articles in days to come.

Meantime, my group sessions have been getting better and better, with more guys joining us every week (I have opened the sessions to guests who can join us for I consider a great price), and the guys seem to be thinking and approaching the game in a more effective way. We had our biggest score to date for $25K when one of the guys finished 3rd in the FTP 150K two Sundays ago.

A week ago I sent an article to Card Player Magazine that will appear in their "Hand for hand combat" section. I believe is a decent one, but everybody will have a chance to judge once it gets published. I was nervous about it, because many good players will read it and maybe think is bad.

In the next 2-3 days I plan on sending my new series of videos to Pokerpwnage. I received feedback pointing out the mistakes made in the first videos, and expect to do a much better job with the new ones.

So far this is all, good luck everybody

Andres

Very busy weeks...

I have been extremely busy lately; playing a lot, doing 4-5 coaching sessions a week, dealing with family routine, making my first series of videos for Pokerpwnage...I am really tired.
Lat night I had to take a plane to San Francisco, show up at the Spanish consulate, give them some papers, and 2 hours later take my plane back home. Fun day to say the least, but it's done and now I can buy my tickets and go visit my dad in Spain next month.
Pokerwise the last two weeks were really bad. I made a couple decent final tables, but overall the results were awful. I do feel like my game is fairly good, and have faith on doing good in the upcoming FTOPS. I sold 15K worth of action in 48 hours, and will be playing most events, including the 1-2K's, 200-300r, multi entry Main Event, etc. The fact that people I don't even know decides to invest in me gives me confidence, and hopefully their trust will be rewarded.
Because of all the different activities I was involved, my SNE pursuit suffered, and right now I only have 70K VPP's. It's not too bad if we take in consideration that I started January 12th, but I would feel better if my count was at 90-95K by now. My plan until spring break is to play exclusively on PokerStars during week days, with the sole exceptions of those FTOPS MTT's.
Regarding coaching, I had two really good weeks, not just because I keep getting hired for private sessions, but also because some of my permanent students are improving their results month after month. In the last week they have won the PS 10r, 101r1a, FTP 20r, UB 10 and 20K, and made countless final tables. I have the strong feeling that at least two of them will turn into very well known and respected players in the near future.
On Monday we had a special guest in the group session: Alex "AJKHoosier1" Kamberis joined us for almost two hours, and my conclusion after the session is simple: I could listen to him talk about poker for an entire week and never get tired of it. His thought process, explanations, analysis...everything was incredibly rich, well said and enriching. I will consider myself fortunate if one day I am half the player than he is.
I mentioned that I've been making my first series of training videos. As I type this lines, Jerry "herschelw" is putting them together and about to post them in the Pokerpwnage site. I am terrified, and deep inside I hope everybody rates those videos really bad, so he can't ask me for more :)I think that's all for now.
 Thank you for reading, and my apologies if I am not giving updates more often. I will do my best in the future.

Take care everybodyAndres

2 UBOC final table bubbles the same day...

that's exactly what I just did. What an accomplishment, I'm very proud of myself, lol.
 Today I barely played anything outside the UB events; was looking forward to the PLO $215 1r1a. I consider myself a very competent PLO player, and by the end of the day I had my 5th PLO major final table bubble. FTOPS 109r, SCOOP 500 1r1a, SCOOP 500, and 2 UBOC ones, one of them in the last series. One day I'll ship one... I hope.
 In event #10, a $530 buy in, 250K guaranteed, I was top 3 from 100 left down to 12. Then I got assigned an awful table draw, between 2 very competent and though players, and to make things easier they were both the chip leaders. I went card dead for awhile, and every time I tried something I got 3/bet'd...with only 2 exceptions: twice I opened UTG with AKss, and those were the only times I got flatted being OOP. Both turned into 4 way pots, bricked the flops, and had to lay down.
At the end I lost a big flip with KJcc vs 88, went down to 2 BB's, managed to comeback to 14, and busted when I shoved 6-7hh into the tightest player at the table...who snapped K8cc and held.

Really looking forward to the 2K High Roller event this coming Sunday. I will not play a full schedule that day, so I can focus on that table.

Other than that, it was a very slow day in the SnG department, and my VPP count is at 42.5K. I have a quiz question for those of you that enjoy the math part of the game. It is possible to be 99.4% favorite in a hand after the flop with just 1 pair? Think about it. I asked AJKHoosier and Herschelw, and they both thought 98% would be tops. I leave it there 
Take care everybody, tomorrow more
 Andres

Can I say I'm tired?

I've been playing 12 hours a day in average, mixing up SnG's and MTT's. The schedule has been very similar every day: Wake up around 8am AK time, shower, café, some food, and computer until 10pm.
On Monday I stopped earlier, watched a movie and read a book (or should I say Nook? My wife gave me that thing for Xmas, and I'm trying to use it. Miss the touch of the paper tho, don't know if I'm gonna give it too much work). My VPP count is at 40.5K. I started last Wednesday with 7.5K, so my average is 4.7K VPP's a day. At that pace it would take me 7 months to get the job done, but I think 6K/day will be easy to achieve once my wife is back at work. I love having her around though, it makes the daily grind smoother, but being alone makes for a bigger focus.

Next week is double guarantee week on FullTilt, and that will slow me down as well, but I have zero concerns about whether the million VPP's will be reached or not.

On a side note I would like to say that it is absolutely shocking the way SnG's are played nowadays compared to just one year ago. The pushing and calling ranges have been stretched to the limits, and some reg's are literally pushing any 2 cards in BvB situations. I always thought I was a bit loose to shove, but what I've seen this week is extreme gamble.

The trend is also reaching MTT's, or maybe I've noticed this more the last week. Just to give an example, 2 days ago I was playing one of the PS 109 turbos, and with blinds at 75-150 I shoved 2,600 with JQss from the button. Player in the BB SNAPPED me with K3os...and it wasn't a miss-click. Call me tight, nit, or whatever you want, but that is an atrocious call in my book.

Last weekend I had my first front page article published on Pocketfives.com. I tried my best to make it decent, and will be happy if it doesn't go down as the worst article ever published on the site. Here is the link in case some of you feel like having a boring read:

http://www.pocketfives.com/articles/shifting-new-gears-586146/

I am also working on a few hands for Card Player, as well as a featured article. It's flattering that they reached out on me to send them something, but at the same time I feel like the poker community will make fun of my extremely simple thought process during hands once they get to read what I have to say.

I know that I don't fit the image, but I am an extremely shy person when it comes to poker. I think there are hundreds, thousands, of players with a more organized and well put together thought process, and to explain myself in some situations is embarrassing.

That's also the reason why my very good friend and Pokerpwnage.com owner Jerry "Herschelw" Watterson doesn't have a dozen of videos of mine. He keeps insisting that I should make them, but the idea of publishing those things scares me to death.

Can you imagine Gboro, AJKHoosier or Moorman watching one of my videos? They would die of laughter.

I think that's all for now. Just say hello to Luke Graves, a fine guy from the UK who had to suffer one of my table rants no long ago. I am almost cured of that disease, but it comes back from time to time.

Take care everybody, and good luck at the tables.

Slow day...

My wife had a small surgery procedure this morning, which kept me away from the tables until late at night. There is really not much to tell about the small session I played, other then I am not making any money, sigh...

Wednesday I had a frustrating MTT session, during which I managed to cash in only one event, the PS WQM; everything else was a perfect example of what a bad day is, including an unfortunate incident with David "Sheets" Haber that really upset me at the time. I'm not going to make a big deal about it, but let's just say that he made some tasteless comments about me and the possibility that I could possible be attending a live chat just to peak at his cards in the WQM.

We talked about it and he said he was "possible joking about it", but the tone of his voice and a few more things he said made for an unpleasant conversation. I would appreciate an apology, but I'd be surprised it such thing happens.

The weekend is going to be a huge grind, and I'm very excited about the upcoming UBOC series. I am selling action at 75/25% cut, and it's selling quick. I will play all the events, including the 2K high roller, the 1K championship, every single Hold'em event, and the two PLO ones. I have been doing really good on UB, their structures are great, and fields are softer than they are on FTP and PS. If their software was just a little bit better UB would be my favorite site.

I'm gonna fire a last round of SnG's, hit the bed, take care of my wife in the morning, and play until 10PM ET, which is when I have the group session with my students (let's see if one of them ships the Million and makes me happy ).

Take care everybody

Andres

and I am exhausted. Played since 8AM AK time until 10:15PM. The results were not very good, but the expectations are really high. I had forgotten how bad the play is in SnG's, and I have witnessed things I thought I would never see. The players in the Double or Nothing tourneys are hard to describe without inventing creepy words; they have absolutely no idea, and that includes some regs.


I started the day by winning one of the $82 Hyper Turbo MTT's for about $4K, which gave me a very nice kick, but after that I lost close to 25 buy ins in SnG's, running extremely poor for the most part. At one point I was down $2.3K in them, but the last round was very good and closed the day "only" $750 down.


The MTT grind didn't go well at all, with the exception made of that early win. I didn't cash in anything important, and for the most part I couldn't build a stack anywhere. The only shot I had at the end was in the UB 30r, but I ran AJ into QQ BvB at the final table bubble. I flopped a J, turned an A, but he 4 flushed on the river.


All in all, an interesting day where I tested myself by playing 14 hours with just a small break in the middle. I am positive I will pull this off; there is no way my body gives up, and mentally I am as tough as they make it.

VPP count at beginning of the day was 7,200.

VPP at the end of the session : 13,298.

I expect to make over 10K VPP's the days with no MTT's on FTP. Playing 20-25 tables for hours is something I can handle with no problem, but if I mix up different sites I have to cut down the Sng's.

Tomorrow more, take care everybody

Andres