Adam Winter

The Pokerstars SCOOP schedule has been announced and starts on the 2nd of May and I’m looking forward to taking a shot at some of the low buy in tournaments. I’m debating on whether to seek staking for the mid-range buyins (about $100-200). I’m pretty confident in my game, but I’d rather not risk $1000 on large field tournaments where there is such high variance.

Anyways, pokerstars has some cool new tournaments I’m excited about such as the PLO turbo, NL holdem 2x chance turbo, 6max PLO rebuys, NL turbo rebuys, horse, and the 8 game mix.

If you don’t know how to play the 8-game mix, here’s a few videos by pokerstars to explain things:

How to Play 8 Game Mix
How to Play Badugi

The past few days I have taken two bad beats for huge pots where I had 95% to win. I also had the chiplead in two separate tournaments and proceeded to lose 5 all-ins in a row in both tournaments where I had about 50% to win each time. This is like flipping a coin 5 times in a row and guessing the outcome wrong every time. This only happens about 3% of the time.

Poker can be cruel sometimes, but the good news is that I really only lost ~$250 after all these awful beats. I’m pretty happy about that. I know that in the end the percentages even out. I ran some luck calculations on my play just to make sure I wasn’t doing anything bad, and everything indicates I’m still playing well and making good decisions.

April is going well, although I haven’t played much. I’m up about $2800 at this point. Yesterday I won $1k. I have probably only played 14 days this month, and not for very long. I took a lot of days off to work on my rakeback site. I’m almost done with modifications on that, and I’ll just be adding articles and promoting it to get some referrals.

My poker training site has been somewhat dormant for a while because I had to ditch my payment processor, firstdata. They are scam artists and scammed me into signing a 3 year contract while implying that it was a month to month contract and I could quit anytime. There is a $500 fee for canceling. I have called to complain many times, and tomorrow I will find out if I can get some kind of break without paying the fee. I told them to get the recorded phone calls from when I spoke to their representative about signing up because I know I was not told it was a 3 year contract. It would be totally ludicrous for me to sign any kind of long term contract, and I never would have even considered using their services for 1 second if I had know it was a 3 year contract. First Data is deceptive and charges a ton of fees. Avoid them at all costs.