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A small flash in a big pan.
After the talk lately of there being too many diaries, I thought, I know what I'll do, I'll start a new diary. :-)
I'll give a bit of background about me and what I've achieved in the past. A lot of you know who I am but there are a lot of newer players these days and as I'm not in any teams they won't know much about me.
I'll try and put some pictures up on this. Like anything I read, I prefer pictures. 
Sorry, but they will pretty much all be from Sharkscope, apart from me doing screen shots of my bank balance (classy) that's the only way I can show my progress!
Sorry, but they will pretty much all be from Sharkscope, apart from me doing screen shots of my bank balance (classy) that's the only way I can show my progress!My name's Charles, most people call me Charlie. I'm 26, been playing poker since I was 19/20 and I've been on Sky since pretty much day 1.
I started, like most people with a small deposit, I think it was £30, played a few £1 MTTs, won a bit lost a bit until I bust a few times like everyone does. After a while I decided to use BRM, and play properly. It went well, slowly started to creep up. It all changed over the space of a week or 2, when I won my first open (the 8pm tournaments) and also came 3rd in an SPT. This gave me a very nice bankroll compared to the £200 or so I had before. From there it was just a case of building up through all the different disciplines.
It must be about 4 years ago now, the Total Player promotion started, I was lucky enough to get picked to be on Matt Broughton's team. I did a fair bit of work with him, he helped me out chatting over MSN a few lunch times at work. I didn't get far, I was in an incredibly difficult group with the likes of ljamesl, sharksbite, launder and many others who were full time professionals.
After that I started to take poker very seriously. I was a regular grinder on the 50nl and 100nl tables, playing 6-12 tables at a time and making priority every month. I was toying with the idea of playing full time. The idea was my youngest would start school in September, so I would have all daytime free and obviously the evenings when they were asleep. It was about April time, I gave myself a figure I wanted to have in the bank before I would make that step. I soon won the open again (I think it was about the 4th/5th time by then) and just like that overnight, I seemed to run terrible! I couldn't get a winning session, I was waiting for the C4P each month to put me back in the + before it would start to go downhill again. It got to the point where my C4P wasn't even making up my losses. This went on for a good 6 months. I know people say it is possible to run bad for long periods of time, but when you are playing the amount of tables and as regularly as I was then that's more than variance.
With my morale going downhill just as fast as my bankroll I decided to have a break, which turned out to be for 4 or 5 months! The trouble with this, I relied on poker winnings to pay bills. With my income alone my bank balance was going down! So I decided to get back on the site, watch 865 and try and figure out where I was going wrong. Looking back, I let people tell me I was a 'nit' too much. There is no set way to play poker. OK there may be a 'best' way to play every situation, but that doesn't mean you can do it every time. Sometimes you just need to play to your strengths. Building big pots and then not knowing what to do with them when you get resistance can get expensive!
In November last year I started to give DYMs a go. I was playing £5 games, I did well, I figured out what I felt was the optimal way of playing them, I had a very impressive ROI for a while (I think around 12%) happily moved up the stakes to £11. I felt the regs were all at £22+ so was happy to stay between £5 and £15. Then inevitable happened and I started to run horribly. I don't think even now looking back I was doing a lot wrong, just spots where I was unlucky to run into hands, or my better hands were getting outdrawn.
You can see from the graph that I never had the right strategy for DYMs before, I was around £900 down on them before I swatted up a bit and took them serious. The lowest point was May 2012, but as soon as that starts to rise the date is 2nd November, so my profit at the time was actually pretty good.
One of my problems is I'm quite impatient, and I want to win everything I play, so for me to run bad for a month or 2 and barely make any profit if at all then I always think it's me doing something wrong and I need something new, so I went back to my old faithful, MTT's which I think my strength is.
That's pretty much where I am now. Grinding the MTTs, I've been pretty successful with them too. Making 3 figure profit weeks quite often. In the first week of August, I won the Primo for the first time for 3k, then only 4 or 5 weeks later I won it again for another 3k, so it really was like buses!
You can see on this screen shot, right in the middle of the graph is where I had my bad year or so, it was not only with cash but with MTTs also.
Thankfully the 2 primo wins at the end more than made up for it all!
Well anyway that's the background. Sorry I didn't mean to write that much.
The reason I'm doing this, is I want to put extra volume in over December. I finish work on the 13th, and we don't go back until January, so I will have time in the day to fill. I'm basically going to keep a record of my wins/losses, I'll break it down for cash/stt/MTT, althought it will mainly be MTTs.
Any questions/anything you want me to add just ask. I'm on here a fair bit, normally just being a secret squirrel and not posting, so i should be able to keep it updated fairly regularly.
I'm out every Monday and Tuesday, so I won't actually be playing until tomorrow.
Comments
You have any targets in mind or is it just a way to track your progress?
GL
Ive watched you on sky poker tv for a while now and played you a couple of times since joining and youve got a very good solid game on ya.
good luck with this.but i doubt you will need it
https://www.skypoker.com/secure/poker/sky_lobby?action=show_static&page=poker_community_forums&plckForumPage=ForumDiscussion&plckDiscussionId=Cat%3a57795ac2-1793-4377-b4cf-e124b0f555f4Forum%3adf77f82c-151f-4bea-aae1-fb423dcae1faDiscussion%3acc51f231-36b1-4c29-bea6-e9089502616d&plckCurrentPage=0
Understandably hard to get motivated when there's only the mini primo for you to go at after winning the biggie twice in a month. Probably explains the drop off in performance level and you only managing 2nd
Nice turn around for the stats heading in to December, gl !