New milestones have been achieved in my WHEELS & ARMS challenge!!

How many hands? How many tournaments? How much money? o_0

Find out HERE.

March round up coming next week... or so...

25 events have been set up by Pokerstars.fr in HIGH and LOW buy-in formats (50 tournaments in total) with entry fees ranging from a couple of bucks to a few hundred. As I am playing on Pokerstars.fr (p0tpourri) for my WHEELS & ARMS CHALLENGE, I have decided to play as many LOW tourneys as possible selecting tourneys from 2,5 to 50€. This will be my first French SCOOP series as I have registered to this room only 3 months ago. Have a look at the complete schedule HERE.

By playing this SCOOP challenge as I intend to do it, I will be buying in for an average of 21,83€ over the 15 events. This is more than twice the maximum buy-in I pay in regular tourneys and I don't think it is a good idea to finance the whole project with the charity bankroll only. I therefore took the decision to offer you a share of the madness. I am selling action in packages.

Find out more about the staking project HERE.

Hi everybody! I'm sorry for not giving you more detailed news sooner about my last WPT qualifier in Brussels. I've been busy with the WiPT and WPT coverages these last 10 days and I have not been able to find enough time to sit down and write more about this last try to win a WPT BRUSSELS Main Event ticket than the few line I dropped on the Facebook page.

I am now taking advantage of a 3 hour train trip to do so amongst other tasks I have been skipping lately.

So I played the 220€ re-entry satellite on March 5th at Grand Casino Viage. Many people showed up that night for this satellite and for the High Roller satellite. More than 200 players had gathered in the Viage Poker rooms.

I was pumped, feeling very well. I had spent the previous days working on the coverage and live streaming of the Winamax Poker Tour finals at Cercle Clichy Montmartre in Paris and I traveled from Paris to Brussels during the afternoon to play cards myself finally at Viage.

I started well on a weak table with good spots to take advantage of. I tripled my initial stack in about 3 hours. Sweet! As the tournament went on, I became more and more card dead and the blinds were increasing at an insane rate. Viage is not really known for offering great tourney structures but this one was really harsh in my opinion.

Towards the end of the tournament, tables were breaking up at a turbo pace. This didn't help as my table draws always put me UTG or UTG+1 forcing me to pay the blinds 4 time in 25 minutes #runningbad

I finally stayed on a table for more than 3 hands and got involved in a pot where I raise A9 off from middle position with a raise and a re-raise behind... I fold. I also decided to play A7 all in from the button against a short stack in the big blind who pays with A4: AJ4 on the flop.

After that, I'm left with around 6 blinds and discover KQoff in middle position. We are around 40 left for 24 tickets and some cash for 25th place. I'm all in, button shoves for 15bb with QQ and the big blind tank calls with 99 with a stack of 20 bigs. A King on the board would have assured me a ticket I guess, but instead we got a 9 on the river busting me and the QQ guy. Intuition...

All in all pretty standard stuff. I'm really sorry not to have had the opportunity to offer a great return on investment to the backers this time and I'd like to truly thank everybody for their support.

I'll be back soon with more card stories and challenges.

If you are interested, you can have a look at the pictures I took for the casino and for Poker Invest Belgium HERE.

Take care,

Damian

Hello everybody!

As I have already sort of pointed out in previous posts in the main blog and on Facebook during the month, February has been a tough grind live and online for me. I have experienced a lot of 'almost good' situations adding up numerous small losing sessions that ended up building a relatively negative month on a bankroll point of view. Nothing too bad actually as I am right where I wanted to be when I scheduled this challenge but you know how card players are: 'it could be better' and so on... :)

It has not been different for my Wheels & Arms bankroll challenge. The colour of the month is 'red' and the trend is 'down'.

After the big hit in the Storm 2€ Rebuy, I kept playing a lot of SNGs starting to take shots at 5€ games. I played roughly 30% of my SNGs at 5€, the rest at 3€. After 10 days I had lost so many crucial hands, I got back to my notes and hand histories to pick information about my coinflips. By February 13th, I had identified 61 crucial coinflips I had played in SNGs and MTTs. I won 12. That's less than 20%. What kind of coin is this? :p

It made me think again of how swingy those Hyper SNGs and MTTs are. Additionally to my exceptional coinflip record, I was losing a ridiculous amout of AJ-vs.-A6-ish hands. Somehow there was often a 6 on the borad or a runner runner draw that came in. Add finally the fact that I have been playing significantly more MTTs than before, which adds some variance again, a little bit of steaming and you get an intense swing program over a couple of hundred tourneys.

I think I started to get a little bit frustrated with the Hyper format after 300+ tournaments and I started to play my D-game in some spots... so I decided I would play some cash games for an unknown period to switch away from the SNGs and I continued to play a lot of MTTs. I actually played a little less than 20000 hands this last month picking up zoom games again and plo cash games at 5, 10 and 20€ tables.

Things did not go significantly better though. I think it affected me emotionally that the first half of February went so off plans – especially after the big jump of my roll in late January. These last days, I have been in a more positive state of mind. I have been losing the biggest pots of the cahallenge so far in cash games (2 pots of +/- 40€ in plo20 games) but it did not affect me too much as I am more happy to play again since a few days and try to give more attention again to my decision making than to 'how could he call with a 4' :) Some .FR calls nevertheless still send some shivers down my spine... I have read somewhere this would be good for me in the long run. We will see :D

I picked up Hyper SNGs again and, for now, I am planning to go on like this month alternating Hyper SNGs and cash games in order not to get fed up with any of both formats too quickly again.

I will keep playing MTTs throughout March – as many as I can. My R.O.I. is around 15% after 132 games, so I don't really see a reason to slow down. I have reached a few final tables in February again and I won two small MTTs (one with 40-50 runners and one with 215 runners). I will also try to focus more on satellites to access higher buy-ins with smaller fields from time to time to try to induce a new big bankroll jump in March besides the sensible grinding.

WHEELS & ARMS CHALLENGE in figures after two months:

• 471 tournaments played
  
  
• ITM: 29,51%
  
  
• Tourney R.O.I.: 12,86%
  
  
• -0,95€ / 100 in 5-20€ cash games
  
  
• 29997 Poker hands played all together
  
  
• BR at the end of February 28th: 707,58€
  
  
• Profit: 207,58€
  
  
• Donation to W&A: 62,27€ (250€ = minimum I plan to donate)
  
  

Please visit the WHEELS & ARMS Facebook page for updates about the project and view pictures of the shooting of their new promo video at ESKALAR Climbing Center in San Jose.

Thanks for your attention.
Damian