Friday 28 February 2014

Team Online Freeroll Ticket Winners


Hello again!

First of all, I would like to thank you for all the kind messages you have been sending me to welcome me to the team! You definitely made my day! :) I also got a lot of people telling me what they had for breakfast! I didn't thought you'd take it literally, but I had a good laugh! I was also surprised at the variety of answers, got some good ideas for my breakfast. You guys are great!

But let's cut to the chase: I made a list of all the nicknames (50 participants) and then used a very popular site for this kind of stuff to randomly choose 5.



And the winners are:

1. Rainmy

2. superfire444

3. Himbus

4. Adrian_Ac

5. HOLDON975


If you didn't win don't be disappointed, there will probably be another ticket giveaway next month! Congratulations to the winners!

Thursday 27 February 2014

My first Team Online freeroll

Have you heard about the PokerStars Team Online freerolls? They're cool for the obvious reason why we all love a freeroll. Free money! :P Apart from that though, you get to play with members of Team Online AND win a $25 bounty if you eliminate one of them. I've always wanted to play these freerolls, but they are exclusive for those who used the Team Online bonus code when making their first deposit.

However, Team Online members are giving out some free tickets. Being one of the newest members of the team myself, I have 5 tickets up for grabs! How can you win one? It's simple! Leave me a comment under this post or send me a tweet at @katerina0289. It doesn't have to be on a specific subject, could be anything from just saying hi or telling me what you had for breakfast. Whatever comes to your mind! Just make sure that you submit any comments/tweets before Friday 11:00 a.m. WET and include your PokerStars ID. Five people that will be selected at random will win the tickets. See you on Sunday at the Team Online freeroll! Good luck!

Team Online!!!

So... This is the biggest, craziest, most awesome piece of news that I've ever shared with you through my blog... I'M ONE OF THE NEW MEMBERS OF POKERSTARS TEAM ONLINE!!! :D

In case you haven't seen it already, you can find the article of PokerStars blog here.

Do I need to say how amazing this is? Two years ago I was starting out in poker and now I'm a member of Team Online! It's a great honor for me and I still haven't fully digested it yet. I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming...

Last fall PokerStars sent out an e-mail to Supernovas and Supernova Elites that they could fill in applications to become a member of Team Online. Of course I had to fill in one, not because I was convinced that they'd take me, but because it's something I really wanted and I thought "I won't lose anything for giving it a try".  So I took a shot at it. Eventually time passed and I completely forgot about it, so when I heard back from the team's manager, I literally couldn't believe my eyes. I remember I called André and we were both staring at my computer, reading the mail over and over.

Me: Does this say what I think it says?
André: I guess...
Me: It does, doesn't it?
André: Looks like it...
Me: Okay...
André: We both understand the same thing, right?
Me: I think so...
André: ...
Me: ...

There was a lot of staring, even though there was nothing complicated to grasp. The mail was pretty straightforward: my application had made it down to the last few and I was considered as one of the finalists. I'd look at the computer screen, then I'd look at André to make sure that I was not the only one seeing it. Cause after all, if there's two of us seeing the same thing there are less chances that we are both crazy, right? What was happening was unbelievable. I was happy beyond imagination.

And when everything was finalized and I got accepted on the team I was even happier, but then there was an excruciating period where I couldn't say anything to anyone until it was officially announced. But now it's finally out there and since this morning I've been playing with a red spade next to my nickname. How cool is that? :D

My first time wearing the Team Online patch! Photo by Neil Stoddart.


Before I go, I'd like to congratulate the other two members that just got added to the team: Matthias "Mati312" Brandner and Luka "LukaSteel" Kovac. Congratulations guys!

This is going to be a very, very exciting year so stay tuned for updates! See you at the tables!

Monday 24 February 2014

Crazy Weekend

In some people's vocabularies, "crazy weekend" would mean lots of partying, fun, drinks and possibly a hangover. For online poker players though that spend the biggest part of their weekend in front of their computer screens, "crazy weekend" probably refers to poker action. With a lot more recreational players at the tables and all the special Sunday tournaments, there's a lot of reasons why we like to play on a weekend.

But before I go on about my weekend, let me tell you about what I've been up to lately. Until the end of 2013 I was playing the $12 hypers. With the beginning of 2014 (new year, new me, blah blah blah), I decided to take some more drastic actions, study more and move up in stakes. So I've been playing $18s and $37s (mostly) and occasionally $56s and $74s if the traffic is good and they're not full of good regulars.

January was a pretty good month for me. Here's the graph from last month:


A total of 2.1K games and $2.8K in winnings. Not bad at all considering I had just moved up in stakes! Plus, a good part of the month I was at the PCA so it's even better considering I didn't even play the whole month.

And that brings us to February. Things had been going pretty smoothly this month, until last weekend happened. Let's start with Saturday.


Almost 600 tournaments played in one day and an awesome profit of $1.7K. Why can't all days be like that? Also, to put things in perspective, my winnings on Saturday were around 47 buy-ins. Which is as sweet as it sounds! I went to sleep pretty happy that night. I'd charge my batteries and wake up prepared for and even bigger grind on Sunday!

Then of course reality happened. I woke up on Sunday feeling good an prepared for a long grind since it's the day of the week where I play the most hours. At this point I'd like to remind you that the graph above and the graph you will see below are only separated by a day, or to be more accurate, a good night's sleep. Here's my graph for Sunday:


Yep, that's as tragic as it looks. 738 tournaments which is a very good volume for my standards, but a devastating -$3.3K result. This day was my worstest day ever, which unfortunately beats my previous record of being in the red. And yes, I know that "worstest" is not proper English but I'm in distress so I think I'm allowed to invent words that best describe my situation. So, not only was that the biggest amount of money I've ever lost in a day, it was also the biggest amount of buy-ins.

When you start playing hypers you hear those urban legends about people swinging100 buy-ins or more in a day, usually followed by a comment in the lines of "variance in those games is brutal, man!". And most of the times, you only half believe what those people are telling you cause winning or losing 100 buy-ins in a day is pretty crazy, right? Unfortunately, it was my turn to prove that urban legend to be true. If we divide the losses by what Sharkscope says was my average buy-in for the day, we get... The outstanding number of 108 buy-ins. In case you don't remember, my previous lowest of the low was -60 buy-ins and that was not a record I was looking forward to breaking. At least that was back in May 2012, so these things don't happen that often.

I don't think I was playing badly, even though I'm sure I made some mistakes. I also had a couple of problems with my internet connection during the day, but nothing major to justify the outrageous result. I don't think I was tired while playing either. After all, you can see that the steepest downswing was towards the beginning of my session where theoretically I was more rested than towards the end of it. Which brings us to the only logical explanation... Variance. I'd say variance is a b****, but I'd like to have her on my side today so I'll just say she's a lady with crazy mood swings. Around tourney #550 I decided to cut down on the higher stakes and stick to the $18s. When I hit a new low for the day, I decided to stop. It was getting close to midnight anyway.

So yeah, can't say that I'm very happy about how this weekend went by. Right now I'm $1.2K down for the month, which will be hard to recover although not impossible. After all, we've seen what variance can do. I just need a bit of good luck coming my way.

Today I've decided to take it slow. Even if I wanted to play right now I couldn't, cause my computer is being torn to pieces. It has been freezing quite a bit lately which is not good, especially if you're playing the hypers that have a tiny time bank. The other day I folded QQ preflop, then I folded another hand when I was on the big blind and the blinds were so high that I only had 40 chips behind, and I folded AK at a very profitable spot in the Guiness world record attempt yesterday (we didn't break the record btw, where were you guys?!?). So yeah, my computer definitely needed to be fixed so I got my personal technician to work on it. I'm also getting a new disk installed, which should improve the computer's speed.

PC technician at work. Doubles as a poker coach/boyfriend.

By the way, I don't understand a thing about computer hardware, but duct tape? What's up with that? Anyway, I hope that my computer will be working soon so that I can get back to work. My plan for the rest of the week is pretty much the same it has been since the beginning of the year: play 6 hours, study 2. For now since my workstation has been taken over I'll busy myself with different activities, such as preparing lunch. So yeah, that's all for now. I hope this week will be better than the previous one. Wish me luck cause I'll definitely need it!

Blockquote

Unordered List