Adam Winter

Had a good night tonight. I grinded a few 180man turbos on pokerstars and got a 3rd, 5th, and 7th. I also finished 18th out of 500 in a random $8.80 6max 10minute levels tournament, which I really screwed up a few hands late game that probably cost me a lot.

5.5 hours of grinding with a net profit of $328, so a good night overall. I was running really good most of the time so I don’t expect every night to go this well. Pokerstars roll up to $2200 now.

I also ordered the sports jacket for 2500 fpps. Looking forward to wearing it since I really don’t have any poker clothes and it will be a nice conversation starter when I’m out and about Madison.

After two nights of drinking lot with friends and having a good time, I needed to get my grind on. Sunday I loaded up a few tournaments starting around 3:30pm. I final tabled a random $8.80 10-minute levels tourney on stars and finished a respectable 6th out of 2800+ for $735. I also won some smaller prizes and netted +$810 on the day. The tournament hand history I might turn into a free video for Smart Poker Training. There really wasn’t anything too special about it – although I think I made a few great laydowns, and some hands are worth discussing. I did give one guy a pretty bad beat late in the tourney when my AJ beat his AK all in preflop. I only had 11.5 bb’s and shoved over his late position open raise. About 20 hands before this, I lost QQ to AK for a 1.5 million chip pot that would have put me as the chip leader with only 15 players left. If I had won that hand, I think my chances of finishing top 3 would have been about 75%+.

My final hand I had 10-10 in the small blind and two players limped in 6 handed. I had 400k chips and the blinds were 20k/40k so I had to shove. The only thing that made me suspicious was that the player who limped in first was playing 7% of his hands and raising them, so I was immediately suspecting a big hand, and sure enough he had KK. I still think shoving is correct though in my position because of the extra chips in the pot, my hand strength, and position (I was in 6th by a wide margin). The opponent could have been doing this with Ax suited, QJ/J10, 33-99 as well. It was a good feeling making a final table after barely playing mtt’s the past few months. Once I get back in the groove of things, I expect to have some nice scores.

-Adam

Yesterday, I decided to voluntarily resign from my nightshift supervisor position. I had many reasons for quitting this job besides the pay being sub-par. The main one is so that I can focus and devote more time to my business and playing online poker. Some other very important reason are that I want to go through life doing what I want, instead of reacting to life’s challenges all the time. Now I feel that I am the master of my own destiny. No longer will I feel trapped inside a cubicle working hours I don’t want to work, and doing unchallenging and mundane tasks all night.

The pay at the job I’m quitting is approximately $20/hr, which by most standards is a “good” job. The benefits are decent and comparable to most IT jobs, with very few side perks besides a generous holiday schedule. So I could continue to work this job, making about 42k per year, working lousy hours, and feeling unchallenged. But everyday for the past year I have gone into work knowing I want to do something else. I know in my heart that there are so many things in life I want to accomplish, and I just can’t do those things if I’m stuck working for someone else.

My last day is October 29th, which will give me two full months this year to really focus on my new business, and online poker. I will also be able to spend more time with my girlfriend, visit my parents and brother more, get on a better workout schedule, and get more things done that have been on my to-do list for years.

I want to go through life doing what I want, and be happy doing it. I realized after nearly 4 years of working for an IT company that I would never be fully happy working this kind of job. People always say find a job that you love doing, and I know this is it for me. I have over 10 years of online web development skills and about 8 years of profitable online poker to back that up. I know I can do this, and it will be fun, and challenging at times, but also easy at times.

My goals for the rest of the year are to increase profits on Smart Rakeback and add a ton more functionality to the website. For Smart Poker Training I want to have 100 videos by the end of the year, as well as phase 2 of the project completed. Profitability isn’t important for SPT yet, since it is not well known enough, but I think 2010 will be a great year for SPT once I get over a few hundred videos. For online poker, this year I am going to try and achieve supernova status on pokerstars. This may be difficult since I still need 55,000 vpps. I plan to play mostly $12 180man and $12 45man tournaments for November. At 5 vpp per game, I will need to grind up a nice roll before playing hyper turbos again to complete this goal. I do not think I could grind even close to 10k of these games in 2 months – I have too many other things to do. Although… my roi is quite good and 10k of these might net me about $25k. Hmm….

Well that’s enough of an update for now. I will post more after this weekend. Badger hockey game on Saturday, and plenty of time to get things done.

So I’ve been super busy lately like always and barely had time to play poker. It’s probably a good thing because I went on quite the downswing, dropping my roll about 4k from it’s peak. That’s ok though I think I just needed a break from it all and I wasn’t playing well or getting other things done. So I cashed out most of my roll from pokerstars. This year I’ve cashed out 11k, which will suck to pay taxes on but oh well.

The main thing that has kept me busy the past 2 weeks is a new business I purchased. The website is Smart Rakeback. This is an established poker rakeback website that is well ranked for search terms such as Aced Rakeback and some other rakeback terms. I’m really excited to update this website and make it a huge success. Obviously, I feel very lucky to acquire this site since I was able to get it for a fair price which included some affiliate accounts. Also, there are a ton of useful articles already written which bring in some quality traffic.

I plan to integrate both Smart Rakeback and Smart Poker Training together so that rakeback members will receive “Smart Dollars” at SPT, which can be used to buy poker training videos, poker books, poker software, basically anything poker related for players I want to offer. I really hope that I can make this is a huge success with players so when they want to get rewarded for playing, they earn both rakeback and rewards.