Efiriti's blog

I haven't been updating my blog for a while, and I've generally taken a lot of time off poker. I've still played some heads up and got some decent results but I've lost the passion for playing a little bit. I guess taking a break is a good think and hopefully I'll get back in the game with fresh eyes.

I'm offshore again in Brazil, suffering from rought weather. There's a lot of rain and floods in Brazil and close to 80 people have died already. We're safe in the boat but the big waves and bad weather makes it impossible to do any operation, so we'll propably have good couple of days of good old doing nothing.

I've got 3 weeks left and I'm looking forward to it. I've got tickets to go see Barcelona play Tenerife on the 5h of May with my buddies so that's going to be a good trip for sure. Then few days of sunshine and traveling.

On my time off I've writen a lot of things down about poker and tried to illustrate different concepts on paper. It's working out pretty well and what I call my poker bible is expanding quick. I've got 8 pages of stuff in it which doesn't seem much but it's all solid concepts not examples or explanations. I've realized reading through it before every sessions helps me a lot to concentrate. If I weren't so tired after the work I would spend more time on it but I guess that has to wait until holidays.

I like what coinflip has done and they're expanding really quick, so hopefully this will bring a lot of new members to the site and we can get this community to grow up, it's just such a good site.

I'm still offshore working, but for various reasons that don't really consider this blog we had to come to Rio for a week or so to do some work with the boat. So it was time to hit the town with the guys.

I'm pulling a night shift here so the only option was to go out in the middle of the day. We got few hours off from the shift and took a taxi boat to downtown Rio at 8am. First thing to do was to hit the beaches. The thermometer was showing +40 degrees celcius already at 9am and the beach was getting packed. We rented some umbrellas and chairs and got a cooler and some cold beer coming in steady flow. One of the guys in the boat is dating a local girl so she joined us and took his bodyboard to the beach. He gave me a quick lesson how to use it and after couple of failed attempts I started to get a hang of it. I did flip pretty bad couple of times and ended up hurting a bit but I felt like a little kid and just jumped back straight away.

One of the coolest moments was just in the end of the day when we we're ready to get out, and we went for a final run. Quite a big wave came and started to break in a perfect moment and my buddy cought it with his waveboard straight on top. I was swimming next to him and hit the wave as well and managed to ride it all the way onshore. We landed side by side in the beach after riding the wave for about 10-15 meters. That was pretty cool. For five hours in the beach we ended up paying 62 R$ so about 30 american bucks which is not too bad at all, considering it includes the beers too for 5 persons.

First day back at the boat, 5 weeks to go.

The crew change for me didn't start too well as my flight was cancelled due to the snow storm in Madrid. I called my office straight away and they did manage to book me to a different flight to Paris 4 hours later and then to Rio. So I just ended up being stuck in the airport for about 7 hours which wasn't too bad.

The crew change in Brazil went pretty smooth, usual meeting and the going for beer with the guys. I was really tired from the trip and not sleeping too much because of the baby so I was back in the hotel already at 10:30 and in bed before midnight. Nothing exciting there but I'm happy I stayed away from the whiskey especially because of what happened in the chopper on the way to the boat.

Everything started as usual, going to the airport, check-in, wait for the chopper jump in and take off. It was steaming hot, +41 degrees Celsius in the chopper with no AC so I was really happy I didn't have a hangover. Some of the guys were really struggling with a hangover in the 1h30min flight.

I was listening to a 2+2 pokercast with my iPod already like 1h15min to the flight when we suddenly lose a lot of altitude. We're not freefalling or anything but the chopper kind of starts to dive down pretty quick and everyone is going WTF? Then I see one of the pilots tapping one of the indicators with his finger with a WTF face.

I managed finally to organize a training session with my coach and man I realized I suck. I have serious problems at bluffing too much and not picking good spots to do so. The session really helped me to get back on track and I've concentrated much more on my game in last few days and have been winning some again. Biggest thing for me is to keep concentrated all the time and not let my attention wander away.

Bad thing is that my holidays are almost over and next monday I'll be heading back offshore. Time goes so fast and I feel I didn't have time to do half the stuff that I wanted. I've bought NHL10 in christmas so that's been taking quite a bit of my time away too. I've got quite addicted to the game and I really like the learning curve, it's really difficult game to start but with little practice you can do so much with the puck. I'm getting to a point I beat pro level but I still have a lot to learn. Online games are really fun too when it's relatively lagless.

Brazil is going to be seriously hot this time of the year and the air in the sea is humid as hell. Last January I remember one day we were setting some chains up in the back deck at +36 degrees celcius. I drank 6 bottles of gatorade and 10+ bottles of water and didn't go to toilet even once. Man it was hot.

Year 2009 is over and it's time to make a recap of the events from the past year.

Pokerwise the year was not that great for me. I started the year with 2000$ bankroll and ended it with 620$. I did cash out some money on the way so in the end I made 2950$ playing poker in year 2009. I spent much less time playing than the year before but still I'm not too happy with this number. Year 2008 I won over 10k$.

2009 was really broken due to my constant travelling and I also played on many different websites, and I never felt I got a good long run grind going on. I spent long stretches not playing at all or playing very little and I felt I lost my touch few times along the way.

Good part is definately that I've improved in my heads up play and hand reading, especially towards the end of the year. I still feel I have a lot to learn though and I hope 2010 is a year when I finally make the break to midstakes and can play NL200 and maybe even NL400 comfortably. This is going to require a lot of work though and I'm not sure if I will have the time. We'll see what the new year brings.

I've spent the whole christmas time not playing poker and I'm just starting to play again after the holidays. I've got an OK start with about 100$ won in couple of hours. I've still haven't had any time to do my coaching sessions and I really want to do those soon. Having a small baby takes a lot of time.

It's good to be back home. My baby girl had grown up so much in the last 5 weeks, and she's starting to behave much better too. She tends to only cry when she has a need anymore, and there's much less tantrums for no reason.

I've been playing some poker after coming home, but much less than I expected. The family life with a new born baby takes so much time that there's very little left for poker. I think I've managed to play maybe 7-8h in total in little over a week. I deposited 600$ and surprise surprise have been running bad again. This hand is a good excample.

http://weaktight.com/1786728

I've found a lot of fish but haven't been able to extract value, I've lost key big pots and called down some pots too light not giving credit. I went down to my last 250 bucks when this hand came against a huge fish.

http://weaktight.com/1786725

I have litle over 400 bucks left now and I've started to play NL50 heads up as I don't feel like depositing again soon.

Offshore work is a funny thing. It can be the best work there is and it can be the worst work there is. It gives you a total freedom for half the year but steals the other half away. Sometimes when you've worked for weeks pulling 12h+ shifts every day and you still have weeks left, you just feel like dying, and that chopper that takes you towards home feels so far away. My chopper arrives tomorrow, if the weather allows.

So this is the best part of the work. Going home knowing you have almost 5 weeks time off before you have to come back. Somehow still when I'm home some days I miss being on the boat. Life is easy here. It's a bit like being in a prison put with more freedom, playstation 3, tv, internet access. Everything becomes a routine. You wake up every day at the same time, and you go to bed more or less at the same time. You have you meals at a given time, and you do your morning routines in a given order. Some days back home I miss this, most days offshore I miss home.

Hi everyone,

I work offshore in an seismic oil exploration ship, doing 5 weeks rotation. This means I work for 5 weeks and I'm on holidays for 5 weeks. When I'm home I tend to spend a lot of time playing poker and really focusing on my game. This lifestyle gives me a nice financial support from my career and some extra income from online poker, and suits me very well.

I've been playing poker little over 5 years now, starting from MTT's and then expanding to cash games later. I had success playing MTT's quite quick and especially after joining cardrunners my game improved a lot. I've won couple of smaller tournaments and the biggest one so far was a 3$ rebuy tournament on Pokerstars which I won for 4500$. I've had about 5 or 6 1k$+ tournament cashes playing tournaments ranging from 5$ to 50$.

For last couple of years I've really focused on my cash game and I've been progressing nicely. It didn't take me more than a month to crack NL25 and move up to NL50 with nice 5PTBB/100 results. I worked my way up to NL200 in about 6 months but that's were my troubles started. I couldn't crack NL200 no matter what I did for a long time and I was a small loser in those stakes.

It's now been about two years since I started cash games and I'm finally comfortable multitabling NL100 6-max. I keep NL50 and NL100 as my main games as I like to multitable and I can crack these levels quite nice playing 9-12 tables. I haven't tried multitabling NL200 with more than 3 tables so far but with 2-3 tables I've been doing fine. I even took couple of shots tho NL400 and the results weren't too bad, I was a small winner but I still don't feel comfortable playing that high.