Hey,
I've decided to move to my own website: fitorfold.com or alternatively, nickabourisk.com.
Check out my new six pack abs progress (finally!): http://fitorfold.com/2010/04/from-6-packs-of-beer-to-a-six-pack-and-back.html
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Kiss Me, I'm Irish! (+ 2009 in Review)
Note: This is an incomplete blog (uploading pics first).
Abs Bet Progress
Before/After for Abs Bet (Front)
Start of Weight Loss Bet to End of Abs Bet (Front)
Start of Weight Loss Bet to End of Abs Bet (Side)
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Weight Loss, and Six Packs, and Mario... Oh My!
This blog post includes updates on my completed weight loss bet, my new six pack bet, school (check out the Mario project!), and poker. Comments are always more than welcome!
Fitness Bets Update:
If you read my previous blog entry (February) then you know that I had two 3-month weight loss bets with some friends. The first was with a friend who bet me that I couldn't lose 15 lbs in three months; I crushed that bet, losing over 15 lbs in the first month alone! The second bet was more competitive, I had to lose more weight than another friend over the three months. We eventually decided that if both of us lost 25 lbs or more, we'd call it a draw. That's exactly what happened, I lost about 27 lbs. Here is a before/after pic for the weight loss bet:
Check out the previous blog post to see most of the adjustments I was making. Still not fully satisfied with where I was -- and, more importantly, not wanting to revert to old slobbish habits -- I joined in a summer six pack abs bet with several friends. Whoever ends up with the "most improved" abs (determined by a panel of judges) after four months wins.
Here's a graph of my weight loss thus far (over 5 months):
I'm really happy with the progress I've made and it's nice to see that the graph still seems to be decreasing linearly (and not decaying exponentially). I know that I'll eventually get diminishing returns but I'd be quite happy if I can continue to lose a pound per week ;). So far, I've seen quite the improvements:
Here's a side shot before/after pic:
Here's a 2-month progress pic since the six pack bet started:
Being someone who needs to see progress, often in some quantitative form, I decided to get a body composition test done for every two months of the new abs bet (at the beginning, middle, and end). I just completed the second test the other day and was very pleased with my progress: I lost 8.5 lbs (about a 1 lb/week), 2 inches from my waist (1 in./month), and 2.5-3% body fat. I also got four body fat estimates (from several formulas using different skinfold sites): 8.5%, 9.0%, 10.5% and 14.9%. They also give a rating for waist circumference and "sum of five skinfolds", I improved from 4/4 and 3.6/4 to 4/4 and 4/4, respectively. I also lost fat from every skinfold site except for my chest (the girl performing the test didn't know the reason but said the difference wasn't significant).
For the weight loss bet, I was working out three days per week. For the six pack bet, I've switched to 5-6 days per week. Here's what a typical week looks like:
Monday:
I learned the "Ab Ripper" workout from the girl who administered the body composition test; she modified it from Tony Horton's P90X Ab Ripper X routine. I've since purchased the P90X program from GNC so that I can try it when Melissa and I move to our next destination (wherever that may be).
For weight-lifting days, we perform 3-4 exercises for each of the two listed muscle groups. For each exercise, we do 3 sets of 12 reps (or until muscular failure) with increased weight on each set. We normally do the high intensity interval training (HIIT) on elliptical trainers or exercise bikes (low intensity of about 65% maximum heart rate and high intensity of about 85-90% of max HR).
Our workout was adopted from the Lean Muscle Plan found on SixPackNow (yes, I signed up to one of these gimmicky-looking websites...), a website which turned out to be pretty legit. They gave me a 200+ page pdf book covering diet, stretching, exercise, weight-lifting, and everything you need. They also email you a personalized nutrition plan a few days after signing up (you give them information about yourself and a current body shot photo).
In addition to the workouts and squash, I'll also be playing ultimate frisbee on Mondays (if we get the minimum number of girls) and slo-pitch softball on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.
School/Research:
Well, I finally finished taking all of my MSc courses (I just wrapped up "Introduction to Reinforcement Learning" with one of the field's pioneers, Rich Sutton, as my prof). The course ended up being a lot of fun, it kind of changed the way I think about life (in terms of maximizing future reward, the crux of RL). The main reason for the course being so fun was the option of working on Infinite Mario for the course project(s). I obviously chose to work on it for both course projects (the first on my own, the second with a friend, Rich, from the poker group). It pretty much took over my life near the end of the semester, I was probably spending 8+hours a day on it.
The goal of the Infinite Mario domain is pretty simple: get the Mario agent to learn how to play the game by maximizing his future reward. Mario often gets reward for things like collecting coins, killing enemies, and finishing levels. On the other hand, Mario often gets penalties for things like falling down a pit, getting killed by an enemy, or taking too long to complete a level. Mario has to learn what is good or bad through his experience with the environment. That is, he has to play through the level several times and eventually learns things like "Hey, I should not run right into that nearby Goomba, I usually get penalized or killed for doing so... maybe I'll try jumping over him". If you've ever played any Super Mario Bros. game (shame on you if you haven't!), you've probably discovered through your own trial-and-error experience that running to the right and jumping often is never that bad of a strategy (at least in the side-scrollers :D ). It turns out that Mario also quickly discovers this on his own. Here's a short video clip of one of our Mario agents in action (apologies for the quality; you can get a little better picture by clicking on the "HQ" button):
Rich (my partner, not our prof) and I decided to submit to the Reinforcement Learning 2009 Competition (open to anyone in the world) and placed second! Rich deserves most of the credit, though, as I was not able to help him out after we finished the course.
Regarding my MSc research, I recently submitted two 3-player limit hold'em bots to the 2009 Computer Poker Competition. It would be really good for my thesis if one of my bots wins. One of the bots was built by playing 43 million poker hands against two other copies of itself (learning from its mistakes over time). The other submission uses the bot just described as a base player when it's 3-handed but substitutes in some heads-up (i.e. 2-player) experts in some select preflop scenarios. For example, in the situation where the button folds, experts could be substituted in for the small blind or the big blind. Six of these heads-up experts were used and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, this corresponds to them being used for about 70-90% of all hands. Anyway, we'll get the results of the competition in about two weeks, I can't wait!
I received an email the other day from one of my physics supervisors from UPEI, he informed me that some of the work I did in my last year at UPEI has just been accepted as a publication submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics! Here's a link to the abstract and here's a link to the pdf version of the paper.
Now that all of my courses are finished and I've created some competitive 3-player bots, I'm just writing my thesis and collecting final results. Unfortunately, all results will likely be empirical. I'd like to have some theory in there but multiplayer theory is quite difficult and my background in the area is minimal.
Miscellaneous:
I have a few other bets that I haven't mentioned. I have two other $50 six pack bets with other friends (one who is already in our group six pack bet, and the other one being Brodie Champion). I also have a sleep bet where I must get at least 7 hours of sleep every night. This was really tough for me as I was a night owl who would often be up until 1 or 2am. Now, I go to bed at 11:30pm and wake up at 6:30am and then hit the gym at 7am every weekday. Finally, I have a $40 thesis-writing bet with a friend where I have to have my thesis submitted by the third week or so of September. I plan on having it submitted and defended by this date, though, so hopefully everything works out.
I've purchased a few Wii games since the last blog post: Boom Blox, Boom Blox 2: Bash Party, EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, Mario Power Tennis, and maybe a few others. Most of the games mentioned are made by EA and are great! Grand Slam Tennis and Tiger Woods are especially cool as they use the new Wii Motion Plus controller add-ons. There are still a few bugs to be worked out and the "1-to-1 correspondence" is a bit of a fib, but they are great multiplayer games nonetheless.
When the previous blog was written, I was likely halfway through a UofA CS grad student competition called the "Beard-Off". I entered the month-long "Most Growth" competition and ended up finishing as the runner-up :-(. I really thought I had that competition in the bag but unfortunately, I'm only the second manliest grad student in the CS department. Oh well...
Melissa and I have had a few visitors here in Edmonton. Melissa's brother Bobby came out for a week or so and that was really fun. We ended up drinking and dancing (who'da thunk?) and showing him around a bit. I also had Theriault, Arlo, and a friend of theirs, Dave, come out to visit for a weekend. That also involved drinking and dancing (again, who'da thunk?). That was about a month ago and I lost my new jacket at the bar (took it off to dance and forgot to pick it up when we were leaving).
Another exciting note is that my good ol' pal, and one of my groomsmen, McWado (name rhymes with Mike Wazowski), has since moved out to Edmonton to do his Master's in Bio (and is living with my awesome workout partner, Adam). It's been a lot of fun having him around this past month. We've been playing squash together on Tuesdays and Thursdays, working out and swimming on Saturdays, and playing video games on other random days. We also started a fun little "tradition" where we're going to make steak and potatoes on Saturdays after our swim. We're currently trying different steaks every week; so far we've tried New York Strip and Cross Rib. We're thinking T-Bone next week. Any suggestions (including marinades, basting, grilling, etc.) are welcome!
Finally, Melissa and I have sponsored a very cute, four-and-a-half year old, boy from Nicaragua named Norgen A. Molina Calderon through World Vision. I used to think it was a bad idea to give to these bigger organizations which generally take larger amounts (~18%) out of each donation for fund-raising and administration costs. However, I don't see it as such anymore. If you look at the total amount (82.1% of all donations) given to programs that help the children, I'm sure it's much much higher (in terms of absolute dollars) than the organizations that give 95-100%. Without the advertising, many of the donators simply wouldn't know about such a cause (or at the very least, think about it on their own accord). For instance, Melissa and I were shopping in the West Ed Mall and noticed a table containing portraits of these poor children. Beside the table were two (most likely paid) World Vision representatives who informed us about their program. Had these women not set up camp in the mall (which requires both fund-raising and administrative costs), we would likely have never thought about donating. Now that I have more experience with both poker and Reinforcement Learning, I think much differently about these sorts of scenarios (involving investments or future rewards).
Poker:
Poker blog begins here... if you came for the fitness update, you can stop reading.
FTPoints: 316,902.4 (surpassed my 300k goal for the year)
Iron Man Medals: 1684
I'm pretty disappointed, I've been saving up my FTPoints for the last two years and set my goal for 300k points this year: the number of points required for a 30" Samsung computer monitor. I finally reached my goal (halfway through the year!) and then they took the monitor off their store! Oh well... I still have enough points for a new 13" MacBook, or 3+ 24" monitors, or close to enough for some large HDTVs. Also, I believe the value of my Iron Man medals is a little over $300 (they can also be traded for more FTPoints).
Even though I said I wanted to stop withdrawing from my poker bankroll, I ended up taking out over $2k. I got Melissa a really nice 12.2 MP digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS Rebel XSi, and lens for her birthday. I also paid for her trip to NYC (as part of the deal I mentioned in my previous post) where she is currently visiting with friends. I miss her already :'-(.
Since the last blog, I've played 48k hands of poker. Here are my overall stats:
I haven't run very well (0.3 BB/100) over this time period (start of February to end of May). I'm starting to think this might be due to how loose I've been playing lately (it's getting eerily close to 40/30). Although I feel like I have a big edge on most players in my games, I think you really need the right game conditions to be playing that loose; it probably shouldn't be a default style.
When I get time, I plan on revamping my game (by reducing the number of tables, thinking a bit longer before making decisions, reviewing hands, and studying situations with poker software tools (like Pokerazor, StoxEV, StoxCombo, Pokerstove, Poker Equilator, and Holdem Manager). I've already spotted several leaks in my game and am creating some preflop charts (based on empirical thresholds from Stoxtrader's awesome book).
Notice that I've taken some shots at $8/16 and $10/20 and they've gone well! I actually made an appearance in one of Bryce's Stoxpoker videos at $10/20 (called something like "10/20 LHE Adventures") where I proceeded to crack his pocket aces ;). I have enough of a bankroll now to play $10/20 (using the 1000 big bet rule) so I'm quite the nit to be still mostly playing $5/10. I'm okay with that though as the money at $5/10 is still pretty good, lower risk, and lets me work out some of the leaks I've discovered.
Here are my session stats over the same time period:
It took about 154 hours to play those 48k hands. Even though I didn't run very well (in terms of BB/100), I still did well in terms of an hourly: $50US/hr ($27/hr from play + $23/hr from rakeback). Rakeback is now being paid to my FTP account on a weekly basis instead of to PokerSource. I'm so glad since I've had so many problems with PS; the only downfall is not being able to easily get Amazon gift certificates to buy books, games, and DVDs.
Here are my position stats filtered for 5-6 players:
My 6max stats are 38/28/1.9, I'm becoming such a LAGtard :-o. I didn't notice until today, but it looks like my big blind play is getting worse (in terms of winrate). I'm probably defending a bit too much right now (at least for these high-rake games) so I might tighten up a bit on my defense. I have created some defense charts so I'll have to organize those a bit and start following them. Notice that I'm running over 1 BB/100 when filtered for 5- to 6-handed (my goal for the year, a pretty respectable winrate in today's games). This suggests that I've got some short-handed and HU leaks. I'll have to look into that.
Here's a graph for the hands I've played (in BBs):
and here's a graph of winnings and rakeback (in US dollars):
Almost $8k in a working month (assuming a full-time job takes ~150 hrs/month) ain't too shabby.
Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far and thanks for reading! As mentioned, comments are always welcome!
Fitness Bets Update:
If you read my previous blog entry (February) then you know that I had two 3-month weight loss bets with some friends. The first was with a friend who bet me that I couldn't lose 15 lbs in three months; I crushed that bet, losing over 15 lbs in the first month alone! The second bet was more competitive, I had to lose more weight than another friend over the three months. We eventually decided that if both of us lost 25 lbs or more, we'd call it a draw. That's exactly what happened, I lost about 27 lbs. Here is a before/after pic for the weight loss bet:
Check out the previous blog post to see most of the adjustments I was making. Still not fully satisfied with where I was -- and, more importantly, not wanting to revert to old slobbish habits -- I joined in a summer six pack abs bet with several friends. Whoever ends up with the "most improved" abs (determined by a panel of judges) after four months wins.
Here's a graph of my weight loss thus far (over 5 months):
I'm really happy with the progress I've made and it's nice to see that the graph still seems to be decreasing linearly (and not decaying exponentially). I know that I'll eventually get diminishing returns but I'd be quite happy if I can continue to lose a pound per week ;). So far, I've seen quite the improvements:
- I've lost about 39 pounds
- I've dropped from pant size 38 to 34 (have to throw out over 11 pairs of pants!)
- I've dropped from M-L shirts to S-M.
- I've put on a lot more muscle mass and have become much stronger
- I'm not tired during the day and actually have much more energy
- I can think much clearer
- I don't get heart-burn
- My cardio and stamina are much better
- I sweat a lot less
- I'm much more confident and happy with myself
Here's a side shot before/after pic:
Here's a 2-month progress pic since the six pack bet started:
Being someone who needs to see progress, often in some quantitative form, I decided to get a body composition test done for every two months of the new abs bet (at the beginning, middle, and end). I just completed the second test the other day and was very pleased with my progress: I lost 8.5 lbs (about a 1 lb/week), 2 inches from my waist (1 in./month), and 2.5-3% body fat. I also got four body fat estimates (from several formulas using different skinfold sites): 8.5%, 9.0%, 10.5% and 14.9%. They also give a rating for waist circumference and "sum of five skinfolds", I improved from 4/4 and 3.6/4 to 4/4 and 4/4, respectively. I also lost fat from every skinfold site except for my chest (the girl performing the test didn't know the reason but said the difference wasn't significant).
For the weight loss bet, I was working out three days per week. For the six pack bet, I've switched to 5-6 days per week. Here's what a typical week looks like:
Monday:
- Weights - Chest and Biceps
- HIIT - 3 minute warm-up, 10 minutes of intervals (5 high, 5 low), 3 minute cool-down
- Walking - 15 minute walk to University and 15 minute walk back
- Ab Ripper - 240 reps total of 12 different ab exercises (uppers, lowers, and obliques)
- HIIT - 4 minute warm-up, 20 minutes of intervals, 4 minute cool-down
- Walking - 30 min.
- Squash - 1 to 2 hours
- Weights - Shoulders and Triceps
- HIIT - 3, 10, 3 min.
- Walking - 30 min.
- Ab Ripper
- HIIT - 4, 20, 4 min.
- Walking - 30 min.
- Squash - 1 to 2 hours
- Weights - Back and Legs
- Walking - 30 min.
- Ab Ripper
- Cardio - 25 min.
- Swimming (I finally started using the pool in our apartment building)
- Rest
I learned the "Ab Ripper" workout from the girl who administered the body composition test; she modified it from Tony Horton's P90X Ab Ripper X routine. I've since purchased the P90X program from GNC so that I can try it when Melissa and I move to our next destination (wherever that may be).
For weight-lifting days, we perform 3-4 exercises for each of the two listed muscle groups. For each exercise, we do 3 sets of 12 reps (or until muscular failure) with increased weight on each set. We normally do the high intensity interval training (HIIT) on elliptical trainers or exercise bikes (low intensity of about 65% maximum heart rate and high intensity of about 85-90% of max HR).
Our workout was adopted from the Lean Muscle Plan found on SixPackNow (yes, I signed up to one of these gimmicky-looking websites...), a website which turned out to be pretty legit. They gave me a 200+ page pdf book covering diet, stretching, exercise, weight-lifting, and everything you need. They also email you a personalized nutrition plan a few days after signing up (you give them information about yourself and a current body shot photo).
In addition to the workouts and squash, I'll also be playing ultimate frisbee on Mondays (if we get the minimum number of girls) and slo-pitch softball on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.
School/Research:
Well, I finally finished taking all of my MSc courses (I just wrapped up "Introduction to Reinforcement Learning" with one of the field's pioneers, Rich Sutton, as my prof). The course ended up being a lot of fun, it kind of changed the way I think about life (in terms of maximizing future reward, the crux of RL). The main reason for the course being so fun was the option of working on Infinite Mario for the course project(s). I obviously chose to work on it for both course projects (the first on my own, the second with a friend, Rich, from the poker group). It pretty much took over my life near the end of the semester, I was probably spending 8+hours a day on it.
The goal of the Infinite Mario domain is pretty simple: get the Mario agent to learn how to play the game by maximizing his future reward. Mario often gets reward for things like collecting coins, killing enemies, and finishing levels. On the other hand, Mario often gets penalties for things like falling down a pit, getting killed by an enemy, or taking too long to complete a level. Mario has to learn what is good or bad through his experience with the environment. That is, he has to play through the level several times and eventually learns things like "Hey, I should not run right into that nearby Goomba, I usually get penalized or killed for doing so... maybe I'll try jumping over him". If you've ever played any Super Mario Bros. game (shame on you if you haven't!), you've probably discovered through your own trial-and-error experience that running to the right and jumping often is never that bad of a strategy (at least in the side-scrollers :D ). It turns out that Mario also quickly discovers this on his own. Here's a short video clip of one of our Mario agents in action (apologies for the quality; you can get a little better picture by clicking on the "HQ" button):
Rich (my partner, not our prof) and I decided to submit to the Reinforcement Learning 2009 Competition (open to anyone in the world) and placed second! Rich deserves most of the credit, though, as I was not able to help him out after we finished the course.
Regarding my MSc research, I recently submitted two 3-player limit hold'em bots to the 2009 Computer Poker Competition. It would be really good for my thesis if one of my bots wins. One of the bots was built by playing 43 million poker hands against two other copies of itself (learning from its mistakes over time). The other submission uses the bot just described as a base player when it's 3-handed but substitutes in some heads-up (i.e. 2-player) experts in some select preflop scenarios. For example, in the situation where the button folds, experts could be substituted in for the small blind or the big blind. Six of these heads-up experts were used and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, this corresponds to them being used for about 70-90% of all hands. Anyway, we'll get the results of the competition in about two weeks, I can't wait!
I received an email the other day from one of my physics supervisors from UPEI, he informed me that some of the work I did in my last year at UPEI has just been accepted as a publication submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics! Here's a link to the abstract and here's a link to the pdf version of the paper.
Now that all of my courses are finished and I've created some competitive 3-player bots, I'm just writing my thesis and collecting final results. Unfortunately, all results will likely be empirical. I'd like to have some theory in there but multiplayer theory is quite difficult and my background in the area is minimal.
Miscellaneous:
I have a few other bets that I haven't mentioned. I have two other $50 six pack bets with other friends (one who is already in our group six pack bet, and the other one being Brodie Champion). I also have a sleep bet where I must get at least 7 hours of sleep every night. This was really tough for me as I was a night owl who would often be up until 1 or 2am. Now, I go to bed at 11:30pm and wake up at 6:30am and then hit the gym at 7am every weekday. Finally, I have a $40 thesis-writing bet with a friend where I have to have my thesis submitted by the third week or so of September. I plan on having it submitted and defended by this date, though, so hopefully everything works out.
I've purchased a few Wii games since the last blog post: Boom Blox, Boom Blox 2: Bash Party, EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, Mario Power Tennis, and maybe a few others. Most of the games mentioned are made by EA and are great! Grand Slam Tennis and Tiger Woods are especially cool as they use the new Wii Motion Plus controller add-ons. There are still a few bugs to be worked out and the "1-to-1 correspondence" is a bit of a fib, but they are great multiplayer games nonetheless.
When the previous blog was written, I was likely halfway through a UofA CS grad student competition called the "Beard-Off". I entered the month-long "Most Growth" competition and ended up finishing as the runner-up :-(. I really thought I had that competition in the bag but unfortunately, I'm only the second manliest grad student in the CS department. Oh well...
Melissa and I have had a few visitors here in Edmonton. Melissa's brother Bobby came out for a week or so and that was really fun. We ended up drinking and dancing (who'da thunk?) and showing him around a bit. I also had Theriault, Arlo, and a friend of theirs, Dave, come out to visit for a weekend. That also involved drinking and dancing (again, who'da thunk?). That was about a month ago and I lost my new jacket at the bar (took it off to dance and forgot to pick it up when we were leaving).
Another exciting note is that my good ol' pal, and one of my groomsmen, McWado (name rhymes with Mike Wazowski), has since moved out to Edmonton to do his Master's in Bio (and is living with my awesome workout partner, Adam). It's been a lot of fun having him around this past month. We've been playing squash together on Tuesdays and Thursdays, working out and swimming on Saturdays, and playing video games on other random days. We also started a fun little "tradition" where we're going to make steak and potatoes on Saturdays after our swim. We're currently trying different steaks every week; so far we've tried New York Strip and Cross Rib. We're thinking T-Bone next week. Any suggestions (including marinades, basting, grilling, etc.) are welcome!
Finally, Melissa and I have sponsored a very cute, four-and-a-half year old, boy from Nicaragua named Norgen A. Molina Calderon through World Vision. I used to think it was a bad idea to give to these bigger organizations which generally take larger amounts (~18%) out of each donation for fund-raising and administration costs. However, I don't see it as such anymore. If you look at the total amount (82.1% of all donations) given to programs that help the children, I'm sure it's much much higher (in terms of absolute dollars) than the organizations that give 95-100%. Without the advertising, many of the donators simply wouldn't know about such a cause (or at the very least, think about it on their own accord). For instance, Melissa and I were shopping in the West Ed Mall and noticed a table containing portraits of these poor children. Beside the table were two (most likely paid) World Vision representatives who informed us about their program. Had these women not set up camp in the mall (which requires both fund-raising and administrative costs), we would likely have never thought about donating. Now that I have more experience with both poker and Reinforcement Learning, I think much differently about these sorts of scenarios (involving investments or future rewards).
Poker:
Poker blog begins here... if you came for the fitness update, you can stop reading.
FTPoints: 316,902.4 (surpassed my 300k goal for the year)
Iron Man Medals: 1684
| Bankroll | |
| Staking | $40 |
| Party Poker | $119.70 |
| Full Tilt Poker | $19,898.76 |
| Total | $20,058.46 |
I'm pretty disappointed, I've been saving up my FTPoints for the last two years and set my goal for 300k points this year: the number of points required for a 30" Samsung computer monitor. I finally reached my goal (halfway through the year!) and then they took the monitor off their store! Oh well... I still have enough points for a new 13" MacBook, or 3+ 24" monitors, or close to enough for some large HDTVs. Also, I believe the value of my Iron Man medals is a little over $300 (they can also be traded for more FTPoints).
Even though I said I wanted to stop withdrawing from my poker bankroll, I ended up taking out over $2k. I got Melissa a really nice 12.2 MP digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS Rebel XSi, and lens for her birthday. I also paid for her trip to NYC (as part of the deal I mentioned in my previous post) where she is currently visiting with friends. I miss her already :'-(.
Since the last blog, I've played 48k hands of poker. Here are my overall stats:
I haven't run very well (0.3 BB/100) over this time period (start of February to end of May). I'm starting to think this might be due to how loose I've been playing lately (it's getting eerily close to 40/30). Although I feel like I have a big edge on most players in my games, I think you really need the right game conditions to be playing that loose; it probably shouldn't be a default style.
When I get time, I plan on revamping my game (by reducing the number of tables, thinking a bit longer before making decisions, reviewing hands, and studying situations with poker software tools (like Pokerazor, StoxEV, StoxCombo, Pokerstove, Poker Equilator, and Holdem Manager). I've already spotted several leaks in my game and am creating some preflop charts (based on empirical thresholds from Stoxtrader's awesome book).
Notice that I've taken some shots at $8/16 and $10/20 and they've gone well! I actually made an appearance in one of Bryce's Stoxpoker videos at $10/20 (called something like "10/20 LHE Adventures") where I proceeded to crack his pocket aces ;). I have enough of a bankroll now to play $10/20 (using the 1000 big bet rule) so I'm quite the nit to be still mostly playing $5/10. I'm okay with that though as the money at $5/10 is still pretty good, lower risk, and lets me work out some of the leaks I've discovered.
Here are my session stats over the same time period:
It took about 154 hours to play those 48k hands. Even though I didn't run very well (in terms of BB/100), I still did well in terms of an hourly: $50US/hr ($27/hr from play + $23/hr from rakeback). Rakeback is now being paid to my FTP account on a weekly basis instead of to PokerSource. I'm so glad since I've had so many problems with PS; the only downfall is not being able to easily get Amazon gift certificates to buy books, games, and DVDs.Here are my position stats filtered for 5-6 players:
My 6max stats are 38/28/1.9, I'm becoming such a LAGtard :-o. I didn't notice until today, but it looks like my big blind play is getting worse (in terms of winrate). I'm probably defending a bit too much right now (at least for these high-rake games) so I might tighten up a bit on my defense. I have created some defense charts so I'll have to organize those a bit and start following them. Notice that I'm running over 1 BB/100 when filtered for 5- to 6-handed (my goal for the year, a pretty respectable winrate in today's games). This suggests that I've got some short-handed and HU leaks. I'll have to look into that.Here's a graph for the hands I've played (in BBs):
and here's a graph of winnings and rakeback (in US dollars):Almost $8k in a working month (assuming a full-time job takes ~150 hrs/month) ain't too shabby.Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far and thanks for reading! As mentioned, comments are always welcome!
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Working Out is Working Out!
I've lost over 15 lbs in a little over a month!!!
For those who aren't familiar, I mentioned some weight loss bets I made a little over a month ago in my previous entry.
Basically, before Christmas, I had a $50 weight loss bet with a friend to lose 15 lbs over 2 or 3 months. I was doing all right, I think I lost 10 lbs or something but then eventually gave up and gained weight back. As a sort of New Year's resolution, I decided to try to redeem myself and asked the friend if we could do a double or nothing weight loss bet (I pay $100 total if I lose, or break even over both bets if I win). We came to an agreement of 15 lbs (I started at 215!) over a 3 month period.
I also made a second weight loss bet with a friend at school. This was also a 3 month $50 bet but involves losing more weight than the other. We decided to put a cap on weight-loss such that if both of us lost the cap amount or more, then we'd tie. This cap started off as 35 lbs (~3 lbs/week) but we lowered it to 25 lbs (~2 lbs/week) since 35 is a ridiculous amount to lose over 12 weeks (and probably unhealthy). I describe the changes I've made below along with progress updates.
Weight Loss Bet Update:
Well, so far so good. Everything is working out much better than I expected. I had two weight loss bets and I've already won the first one (assuming I can at least maintain my weight for another two months).
I've essentially changed my whole lifestyle in a month. Here are some of the changes I've made:
Our workout thus far has been a beginner workout found here. Here's a list of our exercises (3 sets of 12-15 reps):
I mentioned FitDay earlier, here is a link to my FitDay public profile. I haven't updated the food log in a few days but you can go through an archive of approximately what I've eaten every day since the competition started. It gives nutritional information and shows the weight fluctuations for that week.
Here's a graph of my weight change so far (all graphs/tables from FitDay; click on pics to see larger versions):
The short-term fluctuations were mostly from me weighing myself during different times of day. Your weight can easily fluctuate 2 lbs (I've even seen 3-4) over a day. Here's the same graph but with my weight loss goal (25 lbs):
It's always nice to see that my weight loss graph has stayed below my goal for the duration of the bet!
Here's a table showing the Nutrition Facts for the foods I've eaten since we started the competition (showing the average daily intake compared to recommended daily intake):
along with a corresponding graph (recommended daily value being 100%):
and finally a graph of my average Calorie intake since we started:
Some of the high numbers after starting are from not recording and thus averaging over a smaller week sample (like when I caught the flu). Anyway, in terms of my Calorie breakdown (in percentages) in Carbs/Fat/Protein, I've averaged 55/23/22. I've heard of two different goals to aim for: 40/30/30 from a friend and 60/20/20 from a Smoothies recipe book. I'm not too disappointed with my numbers as it's somewhere in between.
If anyone has any comments, questions, or especially suggestions about nutrition/working out/lifestyle, please leave some comments for me at the end of the blog.
RL (non-poker):
Melissa and I recently got digital cable and one of the channels we ordered as the Game Show Network (GSN). I'm pretty pumped about this because it hosts "High Stakes Poker" and the season 5 premiere starts this Sunday. On another note, my birthday is in a week (March 3) and I have a midterm exam that day :(
When browsing Google Reader the other day --this site has literally saved me hours of internet browsing a week by combining everything into one handy page with updates/RSS feeds-- I discovered a website called www.obamicon.me which gives you the opportunity to create the Barack Obama campaign type pictures. This can be done easily by either uploading a photo or taken directly using your webcam. Then, you can subtitle it with whatever you want (up to a certain number of characters, of course). Here are a couple I took while fooling around:
and nothing rounds out a blog like a NSFW pic, obv:
Now on to my poker blog, you can stop reading now if you came to read about the weight loss bet.
Cash Games:
Here's a screen shot of my overall stats for January:
I had a pretty good January, especially considering how few hands I put in. I obviously ran really well (especially at heads-up). However, I think my game has really improved a lot over the last little while (thanks a ton to my coach BigBadBabar from 2p2/DeucesCracked). The main strategy help I got from involved 3betting the SB from the BB and capping HU in position. Most of the improvements, however, have simply been psychological as I have a much better approach to the game now. I generally play fewer tables than I used to, don't check my results during a session (generally), and am trying to implement a daily stop-loss.
Here is a screen shot of my Session Stats:
I played for about 25 hrs and made $74/hr + rakeback (over $10/hr) which is pretty sweet.
Here are my positional stats filtered for 6max (5-6 handed) LHE:
Note that I am becoming even LAGgier. I played 35/27/1.9 but believe I had a significant edge on most of my opponents. I try to table- and seat-select a bit when I play so that always helps. It looks like I'm becoming even more stubborn and showdown-bound. I won when I saw the flop 47% of the time and went to showdown 47%! Thus, my W$SD is obviously < 50%.
Here's a graph of January in terms of big bets (BBs):
and here is the same graph except represented in dollars along with the rakeback made:
Tournaments:
I didn't really play tournaments at all. I played a few on a whim but didn't get into them.
Bankroll:
FTPoints: 199,328 (2/3 of my goal for this year)
Iron Man Medals: 1422
I was talking to a friend recently (actually, the one I'm competing against in the weight loss bet) and he got me thinking. I should withdraw a bunch of my roll and deposit it into a high-interest savings account. I could always redeposit onto the poker site if I had a downswing. Withdrawing some now might be a good time as the exchange rate is something like $1 US = $1.25 CAD. That means withdrawing 5k US would be equivalent to over 6k CAD. Also, I need to pay off my student credit card, I didn't know that your credit card rating is affected negatively just for having an outstanding balance, I thought you only get dinged when you are late on payments. I should have done this a while ago anyway because of the ridiculous interest rates the credit card companies charge.
Miscellaneous (poker):
Research has been going much better as of late. I'm working on multiplayer (specifically, 3-player) texas hold'em games. However, there are lots of complications with creating a 3-player equilibrium (and even if said equilibrium could be created, we're unsure of its effectiveness). Anyway, one thing we decided to do is to look at situations where you initially start with 3 players but then move down to 2 players when someone folds. We can easily solve such 2-player games so I've created some small blind-vs.-big blind bots in a 5-bucket abstraction. Something interesting that I've discovered is that the SB raises about two-thirds of his hands (mostly folds the rest with little limping) and the BB defends pretty much any two cards. Of these BB defends, the BB 3bets about 29% of the top bucket and about 14% of the middle bucket, IIRC. I actually lost a $5 bet to Bryce where we guessed how often the SB and BB would fold. I guessed something like SB folds 18% and BB folds 8% and Bryce guessed SB folds 25.5% and BB folds 0%. He said he was going to guess a larger number for SB but didn't want to come off as a nit, haha!
Also, I recently got access to a 32GB RAM machine to run a long memory-intensive 3-player hold'em game on. However, after seeing how quickly (slowly is actually a more fitting word) it was running, I discovered that the estimated time of completion of the program was about 15-25 years! Yikes!
Goals/Resolutions:
Here's a recap of this year's goals/resolutions from my previous blog entry. I sucessfully cleared the TFPT bonuses last month, I'm not sure if I'll be able to this month (it will involve a lot of Friday/Saturday play, if so).
For those who aren't familiar, I mentioned some weight loss bets I made a little over a month ago in my previous entry.
Basically, before Christmas, I had a $50 weight loss bet with a friend to lose 15 lbs over 2 or 3 months. I was doing all right, I think I lost 10 lbs or something but then eventually gave up and gained weight back. As a sort of New Year's resolution, I decided to try to redeem myself and asked the friend if we could do a double or nothing weight loss bet (I pay $100 total if I lose, or break even over both bets if I win). We came to an agreement of 15 lbs (I started at 215!) over a 3 month period.
I also made a second weight loss bet with a friend at school. This was also a 3 month $50 bet but involves losing more weight than the other. We decided to put a cap on weight-loss such that if both of us lost the cap amount or more, then we'd tie. This cap started off as 35 lbs (~3 lbs/week) but we lowered it to 25 lbs (~2 lbs/week) since 35 is a ridiculous amount to lose over 12 weeks (and probably unhealthy). I describe the changes I've made below along with progress updates.
Weight Loss Bet Update:
Well, so far so good. Everything is working out much better than I expected. I had two weight loss bets and I've already won the first one (assuming I can at least maintain my weight for another two months).
I've essentially changed my whole lifestyle in a month. Here are some of the changes I've made:
- I now eat breakfast (before I never had the appetite)
- Instead of two square meals a day, I now eat ~6: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, supper, snack
- I've reduced my caloric intake
- I've replaced bad/junky foods with good ones (generally)
- I get more protein, fruits, and veggies now
- I haven't had any alcohol yet (I likely will but not like I used to)
- I drink 8+ glasses of water a day (and don't drink pop or juice anymore)
- I've switched from 2% milk to skim milk (something I thought I'd never do)
- I'm now waking up between 6:30 and 7:30 AM every weekday (where it used to be anything up to 10 or 11 AM)
- I've switched from large lunches to smaller ones (I usually have a Subway 6" Ham with no cheese and mustard)
- I started taking multi-vitamins and minerals daily
- I'm walking to campus and back every weekday (~15 min. each way) instead of taking the transit system
- I'm doing weight training with a friend at 7 AM on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and having a having a protein shake afterwards (skim milk, banana, and chocolate whey protein powder; 37g protein for 45g whey)
- I'm doing one day of cardio (exercise bike, elliptical, etc.) on the weekend and taking one day off (I didn't take a day off for the first two weeks or so). I'm still playing about 1.5 hours of squash every Tuesday and Thursday
- I've been recording pretty much everything I eat, all my workouts, my weight, and sleep in a spreadsheet
- I've also been recording a bunch of things in the above bullet at fitday.com which is a pretty sweet site. It will calculate approximately how many Calories you take in, how many you burn, how much fat, protein, and carbs you take in (and a ton of other stuff).
- I signed up for a nutrition program where a nutrition student outlined about how many Calories I should take in per day as well as what types of foods and how much protein and carbs.
- I've already lost over 15 lbs!!
- I don't get really hungry anymore
- I don't get heartburn anymore
- I have lots more energy
- I can think much clearer
- I am more confident
Our workout thus far has been a beginner workout found here. Here's a list of our exercises (3 sets of 12-15 reps):
- 5 min. elliptical warm-up (sometimes we miss this)
- Bench press (with free weights)
- Bent-over barbell rows (with free weights)
- Seated shoulder press (with free weights)
- Lunges (with free weights)
- Barbell curls (with free weights)
- Overhead tricep extensions (sometimes with free weights, others with the machine)
- Crunches
- Back hyperextensions (sometimes replaced with another exercise)
- Core exercise (I think sometimes called bridges or something)
I mentioned FitDay earlier, here is a link to my FitDay public profile. I haven't updated the food log in a few days but you can go through an archive of approximately what I've eaten every day since the competition started. It gives nutritional information and shows the weight fluctuations for that week.
Here's a graph of my weight change so far (all graphs/tables from FitDay; click on pics to see larger versions):
The short-term fluctuations were mostly from me weighing myself during different times of day. Your weight can easily fluctuate 2 lbs (I've even seen 3-4) over a day. Here's the same graph but with my weight loss goal (25 lbs):
It's always nice to see that my weight loss graph has stayed below my goal for the duration of the bet!
Here's a table showing the Nutrition Facts for the foods I've eaten since we started the competition (showing the average daily intake compared to recommended daily intake):
along with a corresponding graph (recommended daily value being 100%):
and finally a graph of my average Calorie intake since we started:
Some of the high numbers after starting are from not recording and thus averaging over a smaller week sample (like when I caught the flu). Anyway, in terms of my Calorie breakdown (in percentages) in Carbs/Fat/Protein, I've averaged 55/23/22. I've heard of two different goals to aim for: 40/30/30 from a friend and 60/20/20 from a Smoothies recipe book. I'm not too disappointed with my numbers as it's somewhere in between.If anyone has any comments, questions, or especially suggestions about nutrition/working out/lifestyle, please leave some comments for me at the end of the blog.
RL (non-poker):
Melissa and I recently got digital cable and one of the channels we ordered as the Game Show Network (GSN). I'm pretty pumped about this because it hosts "High Stakes Poker" and the season 5 premiere starts this Sunday. On another note, my birthday is in a week (March 3) and I have a midterm exam that day :(
When browsing Google Reader the other day --this site has literally saved me hours of internet browsing a week by combining everything into one handy page with updates/RSS feeds-- I discovered a website called www.obamicon.me which gives you the opportunity to create the Barack Obama campaign type pictures. This can be done easily by either uploading a photo or taken directly using your webcam. Then, you can subtitle it with whatever you want (up to a certain number of characters, of course). Here are a couple I took while fooling around:
and nothing rounds out a blog like a NSFW pic, obv:
Now on to my poker blog, you can stop reading now if you came to read about the weight loss bet.
Cash Games:
Here's a screen shot of my overall stats for January:
I had a pretty good January, especially considering how few hands I put in. I obviously ran really well (especially at heads-up). However, I think my game has really improved a lot over the last little while (thanks a ton to my coach BigBadBabar from 2p2/DeucesCracked). The main strategy help I got from involved 3betting the SB from the BB and capping HU in position. Most of the improvements, however, have simply been psychological as I have a much better approach to the game now. I generally play fewer tables than I used to, don't check my results during a session (generally), and am trying to implement a daily stop-loss.
Here is a screen shot of my Session Stats:
I played for about 25 hrs and made $74/hr + rakeback (over $10/hr) which is pretty sweet.Here are my positional stats filtered for 6max (5-6 handed) LHE:
Note that I am becoming even LAGgier. I played 35/27/1.9 but believe I had a significant edge on most of my opponents. I try to table- and seat-select a bit when I play so that always helps. It looks like I'm becoming even more stubborn and showdown-bound. I won when I saw the flop 47% of the time and went to showdown 47%! Thus, my W$SD is obviously < 50%.
Here's a graph of January in terms of big bets (BBs):
and here is the same graph except represented in dollars along with the rakeback made:
Tournaments:
I didn't really play tournaments at all. I played a few on a whim but didn't get into them.
Bankroll:
FTPoints: 199,328 (2/3 of my goal for this year)
Iron Man Medals: 1422
| Bankroll | |
| Party | $119.70 |
| Stars | $51.32 |
| FTP | $13,059.88 |
| Staking1 | $1,545.90 |
| Staking2 | $40.00 |
| Staking3 | $640.00 |
| Rakeback | $29.95 |
| Total | $15,486.75 |
I was talking to a friend recently (actually, the one I'm competing against in the weight loss bet) and he got me thinking. I should withdraw a bunch of my roll and deposit it into a high-interest savings account. I could always redeposit onto the poker site if I had a downswing. Withdrawing some now might be a good time as the exchange rate is something like $1 US = $1.25 CAD. That means withdrawing 5k US would be equivalent to over 6k CAD. Also, I need to pay off my student credit card, I didn't know that your credit card rating is affected negatively just for having an outstanding balance, I thought you only get dinged when you are late on payments. I should have done this a while ago anyway because of the ridiculous interest rates the credit card companies charge.
Miscellaneous (poker):
Research has been going much better as of late. I'm working on multiplayer (specifically, 3-player) texas hold'em games. However, there are lots of complications with creating a 3-player equilibrium (and even if said equilibrium could be created, we're unsure of its effectiveness). Anyway, one thing we decided to do is to look at situations where you initially start with 3 players but then move down to 2 players when someone folds. We can easily solve such 2-player games so I've created some small blind-vs.-big blind bots in a 5-bucket abstraction. Something interesting that I've discovered is that the SB raises about two-thirds of his hands (mostly folds the rest with little limping) and the BB defends pretty much any two cards. Of these BB defends, the BB 3bets about 29% of the top bucket and about 14% of the middle bucket, IIRC. I actually lost a $5 bet to Bryce where we guessed how often the SB and BB would fold. I guessed something like SB folds 18% and BB folds 8% and Bryce guessed SB folds 25.5% and BB folds 0%. He said he was going to guess a larger number for SB but didn't want to come off as a nit, haha!
Also, I recently got access to a 32GB RAM machine to run a long memory-intensive 3-player hold'em game on. However, after seeing how quickly (slowly is actually a more fitting word) it was running, I discovered that the estimated time of completion of the program was about 15-25 years! Yikes!
Goals/Resolutions:
Here's a recap of this year's goals/resolutions from my previous blog entry. I sucessfully cleared the TFPT bonuses last month, I'm not sure if I'll be able to this month (it will involve a lot of Friday/Saturday play, if so).
- [x] Lose 15 lbs by April 15 (midnight)
- Lose more weight than Johnny (competitor) by April 16 or at least 25 lbs
- Have a win rate of over 1 BB/100 at 6max LHE cash
- Play and win at 10/20+ stakes by the end of the year
- Clear TrulyFreePokerTraining (free CR/Stoxpoker) memberships every month (7000 FTPoints)
- Get 300k+ FTPoints
- Make $30k+ profit
- Finish Thesis
Sunday, January 18, 2009
A Glance at 2008
I've included stats and graphs for the poker I've played over the last year. I also discuss my [again] late New Year's resolutions (along with a look at last year's).
Cash Games:
Here is my 2008 graph for all cash games (LHE/NL/PL) at Full Tilt. The green represents just table profit while blue represents profit including rakeback.
and here are the corresponding stats:
A few things are depressing about the above. Firstly, I played less than 10k hands/month on average. If I was playing full-time (8 hrs/day), I'd be able to play the same amount of hands that I played all of last year in just one month. Secondly, I am still playing the same stakes that I was playing last year (whereas I moved up from $0.25/$0.50 to 3/6 and 5/10 in a few months).
The upside to the above stats is that I could easily do this as a full-time job if I so choose after my Master's. I'd be able to clear $4k-$5k/month if I played 100k hands and another $3k+ profit. That's also assuming that I don't improve at all (same winrate and not moving up in stakes at all). There's a regular at my stakes (over 3/4 of his hands are at stakes that I play) whose played ~660k hands in the last 9 months (according to tableratings). He's made ~$82k profit + ~$42k rakeback at a similar winrate to mine.
Here are my 2008 stats for just LHE:
My average win rate was ~$24/hr (including rakeback) last year. For the last 6 months, it has been ~$30/hr.
Here are my 2008 stats for 5- to 6-handed LHE:
and my last 6 months of 5- to 6-handed LHE:
Notice that (even though it's over a smallish sample size) I have a higher win rate by about 1/4BB and my average stats have changed from 27/19 -> 33/23.
Here is my small sample of NL/PL:
The 5c/10c was me shoving most hands at a $3 CAP game. If it wasn't for me seeking out tougher regulars at deep stack $50 HU NL, the win rate would have been much better. Of course, none of that really matters since the sample size is so small.
I recently hired a coach, BigBadBabar from 2p2/DeucesCracked, to look over hands I've played and give me feedback (through documents/Skype). I've payed him for 6 hours of work so far. The biggest changes to my game haven't really been strategy-related but more of the psychological aspect. Here are some of the changes I've made:
Since the coaching session, I've been running super hot:
Over this small sample size, it looks like I've become LAGgier preflop, I 3bet more, steal more. Something that I've really been trying to work on is bet/folding more on the turn and river. I'm also valuebetting thinner and not check/calling so much (along with check/folding more). This has done two things, I have a higher river AF and I have a higher W$SD (it's 51.6% whereas it's normally 49-50%).
Tournaments:
Here are my OPR stats for the last year (~$14k profit, 29% ROI, 16% ITM, $32 ABI, ~1500 MTTs):
It's pretty sweet that my rating is in the 99th percentile (and top 2000 players) for 2007 and 2008 even though I only played part-time during part of the year. I haven't really played MTTs for a while because I needed a break after the brutal $5k or $6k+ downswing. Luckily it followed my biggest month. Also, I want to get back into LHE cash games.
Bankroll:
FTPoints: 186,762
Iron Man Medals: 1422
The reason why this month's BR is lower than last months is because I've withdrawn $3k ($1k for Xmas and $2k for tuition since I used tuition money to buy plane tickets home to PEI). I really hate withdrawing from my roll all the time. This brings the total to ~$15k+ withdrawn. I'd almost be rolled for 15/30 had I never withdrawn. Oh well, I'll just have to start logging more hands.
Combining the cash game hands, rakeback, and MTTs, I made about $22k last year. I'm pretty happy with this considering I didn't get to play too much (an average of 1 hr of cash games and 4 MTTs per day) while going to school (at least compared to a full-time grinder).
Here is a graph of my BR plotted monthly (based on numbers from blog entries):
and here's a chart of the rakeback earned for each month of 2008:
Notice how it decreased almost linearly every month for the first half of the year. This is because I kept logging less and less hands (due to school, research, laziness, playing MTTs instead of cash). The most rakeback was ~$1500 a year ago (Jan 2008).
Miscellaneous (poker):
I haven't worked on the Preflop program I was describing in the previous blog entry. Instead, I started writing a new program. I originally started writing it in Java but it took a ridiculous amount of time to run. I then tried to figure out how to set up the Pokersource project but ended up giving up on that (their nice Java code was old, unused, and nonfunctional and I didn't really wanna use their C stuff). Instead, I found the C# project that's used by the Pokerazor guys. Of course, I didn't know any C# but I decided to learn a bit of a new language, and hopefully come up with a faster way to computer what I wanted. I ended up with a primitive program that is much faster (but I still wish it was faster). I really like how easy it is to create a GUI.
What it does: Given a board, it ranks every possible holding (hot-cold equity and current hand strength). These can then be sorted from highest to lowest or vice versa. There's a huge list of things to add/change but I haven't worked on it since before Xmas. For instance, I need to group equivalent/canonical hands together and be able to output ranges/subranges (e.g. top 50%) or compare equity of hands vs. another range or distribution.
Here is a screenshot of the preliminary program:
RL (non-poker):
Okay, so I obviously lost the weight loss bet I had with my buddy for before Xmas. I kinda just gave up (although I was moving at a good rate for a while). However, he's giving me a chance to redeem myself. Another 15 lbs /3 month weight-loss bet. If I win this one, I'm even, otherwise I owe him $100. I also have another $50 weight loss bet with a different friend; this one is for whoever can lose more weight than the other guy.
That said, I've been making pretty major changes already. I'm drinking 8+ glasses of water a day, exercising every day (fitness room and squash), eating less, eating breakfast every day, eating healthier. Melissa and I also ordered a blender and a slow cooker today with our grocery store points. Today, I got a decent 1L water bottle and "My Weight Loss Coach" for the DS today. To top it all off, I've been reading a bit about exercise/nutrition (book, magazine, online) and asking others. I might even look into getting a personal trainer or someone to teach me proper gym techniques for a bit. Finally, I have something where I can implement my competitive drive (aside from poker). I'm going to crush you ______! (you know who you are).
On a somewhat related note, I've also worked out a deal with Melissa. It's a pretty win-win deal for both of us IMO. She wanted to go on a trip/vacation with some friends in a few months (with a budget of ~$800-$1k). I proposed that she cook a healthy meal for me every night (that she doesn't work) and I'll give her $800 (since I'll have extra time to play poker) and we settled at $825. Both of us are pretty pumped about the deal.
Goals/Resolutions:
Below are last year's goals/resolutions (from my old Cardrunners blog). I'll use the standard 2p2 [x] vs. [ ] check boxes to denote whether I succeeded or not.
Cash Games:
Here is my 2008 graph for all cash games (LHE/NL/PL) at Full Tilt. The green represents just table profit while blue represents profit including rakeback.
and here are the corresponding stats:
A few things are depressing about the above. Firstly, I played less than 10k hands/month on average. If I was playing full-time (8 hrs/day), I'd be able to play the same amount of hands that I played all of last year in just one month. Secondly, I am still playing the same stakes that I was playing last year (whereas I moved up from $0.25/$0.50 to 3/6 and 5/10 in a few months).
The upside to the above stats is that I could easily do this as a full-time job if I so choose after my Master's. I'd be able to clear $4k-$5k/month if I played 100k hands and another $3k+ profit. That's also assuming that I don't improve at all (same winrate and not moving up in stakes at all). There's a regular at my stakes (over 3/4 of his hands are at stakes that I play) whose played ~660k hands in the last 9 months (according to tableratings). He's made ~$82k profit + ~$42k rakeback at a similar winrate to mine.
Here are my 2008 stats for just LHE:
My average win rate was ~$24/hr (including rakeback) last year. For the last 6 months, it has been ~$30/hr.Here are my 2008 stats for 5- to 6-handed LHE:
and my last 6 months of 5- to 6-handed LHE:
Notice that (even though it's over a smallish sample size) I have a higher win rate by about 1/4BB and my average stats have changed from 27/19 -> 33/23.Here is my small sample of NL/PL:
The 5c/10c was me shoving most hands at a $3 CAP game. If it wasn't for me seeking out tougher regulars at deep stack $50 HU NL, the win rate would have been much better. Of course, none of that really matters since the sample size is so small.I recently hired a coach, BigBadBabar from 2p2/DeucesCracked, to look over hands I've played and give me feedback (through documents/Skype). I've payed him for 6 hours of work so far. The biggest changes to my game haven't really been strategy-related but more of the psychological aspect. Here are some of the changes I've made:
- I cover my stack sizes so that I don't know how I'm doing
- I don't look at my results (through Cashier/HUD/HEM) until I've finished a session
- I play shorter sessions
- I play less tables
- I pay more attention (not chatting/browsing internet)
Since the coaching session, I've been running super hot:
Over this small sample size, it looks like I've become LAGgier preflop, I 3bet more, steal more. Something that I've really been trying to work on is bet/folding more on the turn and river. I'm also valuebetting thinner and not check/calling so much (along with check/folding more). This has done two things, I have a higher river AF and I have a higher W$SD (it's 51.6% whereas it's normally 49-50%).Tournaments:
Here are my OPR stats for the last year (~$14k profit, 29% ROI, 16% ITM, $32 ABI, ~1500 MTTs):
It's pretty sweet that my rating is in the 99th percentile (and top 2000 players) for 2007 and 2008 even though I only played part-time during part of the year. I haven't really played MTTs for a while because I needed a break after the brutal $5k or $6k+ downswing. Luckily it followed my biggest month. Also, I want to get back into LHE cash games.
Bankroll:
FTPoints: 186,762
Iron Man Medals: 1422
| Bankroll | |
| Party | $119.70 |
| Stars | $179.97 |
| FTP | $10,250.81 |
| Staking1 | $1,545.90 |
| Staking2 | $50.00 |
| Staking3 | $500.00 |
| Rakeback | $52.09 |
| Total | $12,698.47 |
The reason why this month's BR is lower than last months is because I've withdrawn $3k ($1k for Xmas and $2k for tuition since I used tuition money to buy plane tickets home to PEI). I really hate withdrawing from my roll all the time. This brings the total to ~$15k+ withdrawn. I'd almost be rolled for 15/30 had I never withdrawn. Oh well, I'll just have to start logging more hands.
Combining the cash game hands, rakeback, and MTTs, I made about $22k last year. I'm pretty happy with this considering I didn't get to play too much (an average of 1 hr of cash games and 4 MTTs per day) while going to school (at least compared to a full-time grinder).
Here is a graph of my BR plotted monthly (based on numbers from blog entries):
and here's a chart of the rakeback earned for each month of 2008:
Notice how it decreased almost linearly every month for the first half of the year. This is because I kept logging less and less hands (due to school, research, laziness, playing MTTs instead of cash). The most rakeback was ~$1500 a year ago (Jan 2008).Miscellaneous (poker):
I haven't worked on the Preflop program I was describing in the previous blog entry. Instead, I started writing a new program. I originally started writing it in Java but it took a ridiculous amount of time to run. I then tried to figure out how to set up the Pokersource project but ended up giving up on that (their nice Java code was old, unused, and nonfunctional and I didn't really wanna use their C stuff). Instead, I found the C# project that's used by the Pokerazor guys. Of course, I didn't know any C# but I decided to learn a bit of a new language, and hopefully come up with a faster way to computer what I wanted. I ended up with a primitive program that is much faster (but I still wish it was faster). I really like how easy it is to create a GUI.
What it does: Given a board, it ranks every possible holding (hot-cold equity and current hand strength). These can then be sorted from highest to lowest or vice versa. There's a huge list of things to add/change but I haven't worked on it since before Xmas. For instance, I need to group equivalent/canonical hands together and be able to output ranges/subranges (e.g. top 50%) or compare equity of hands vs. another range or distribution.
Here is a screenshot of the preliminary program:
RL (non-poker):
Okay, so I obviously lost the weight loss bet I had with my buddy for before Xmas. I kinda just gave up (although I was moving at a good rate for a while). However, he's giving me a chance to redeem myself. Another 15 lbs /3 month weight-loss bet. If I win this one, I'm even, otherwise I owe him $100. I also have another $50 weight loss bet with a different friend; this one is for whoever can lose more weight than the other guy.
That said, I've been making pretty major changes already. I'm drinking 8+ glasses of water a day, exercising every day (fitness room and squash), eating less, eating breakfast every day, eating healthier. Melissa and I also ordered a blender and a slow cooker today with our grocery store points. Today, I got a decent 1L water bottle and "My Weight Loss Coach" for the DS today. To top it all off, I've been reading a bit about exercise/nutrition (book, magazine, online) and asking others. I might even look into getting a personal trainer or someone to teach me proper gym techniques for a bit. Finally, I have something where I can implement my competitive drive (aside from poker). I'm going to crush you ______! (you know who you are).
On a somewhat related note, I've also worked out a deal with Melissa. It's a pretty win-win deal for both of us IMO. She wanted to go on a trip/vacation with some friends in a few months (with a budget of ~$800-$1k). I proposed that she cook a healthy meal for me every night (that she doesn't work) and I'll give her $800 (since I'll have extra time to play poker) and we settled at $825. Both of us are pretty pumped about the deal.
Goals/Resolutions:
Below are last year's goals/resolutions (from my old Cardrunners blog). I'll use the standard 2p2 [x] vs. [ ] check boxes to denote whether I succeeded or not.
[ ] Reduce my procrastination significantly (I am a very bad-- or good, depending on how you look at it-- procrastinator). Although I've done well (school-wise) in the past, I can't really do that for my Master's.
[x] As mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I want to have a $10k bankroll online by April 4 (3 months from when we got back from our Xmas trip).
[ ] Get into the top 100 on the tournament leader board (TLB on Full Tilt) for at least one month.
[x] Have a tourney score of over $5k
[ ] Be a winning player at $10/20 or higher at 6max LHE
[ ] Start playing and winning at NL 6max cash and SNGs as well as some more HU LHE and possible HU NL.
[ ] Get into better shape
[x (if you count withdrawn amount)] Have a BR of > $25k by the end of the year
[ ] Spend more time studying/calculating/reviewing hands and situations
[x] Always use proper BR-management
[x] Take a break/quit when I'm (a) tilting or (b) not playing well
Well... 5 out of 11 obviously isn't that great. Here are my new goals/resolutions for 2009:
- Lose 15 lbs by April 15 (midnight)
- Lose more weight than ______ by April 16
- Have a win rate of over 1 BB/100 at 6max LHE cash
- Play and win at 10/20+ stakes by the end of the year
- Clear TrulyFreePokerTraining (free CR/Stoxpoker) memberships every month (7000 FTPoints)
- Get 300k+ FTPoints
- Make $30k+ profit
- Finish Thesis
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