PokerListings Blog

Nathan “Blackrain79” Williams claims to be the biggest winner at NL2 and NL5 ever on PokerStars.

Judging by the six million recorded hands he’s got, we’re inclined to believe him.

PokerListings.com met Williams in Vancouver to talk about his new book Crushing the Microstakes and find out what it’s like to attain some of the highest winrates ever recorded.

Click through here for our feature news review of Blackrain79’s book and keep reading for the full interview transcript.

I’ve been enjoying a much needed break from poker the last month, but it’s about time to get back on the grind.

In fact, I hope to have played a session by the time you read this.

I have been carefully considering my poker goals for 2012. I want to challenge myself and strive to do well this year, but I also don’t want to set goals that are unrealistic.

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right balance. To be honest, I have no idea what I should be expecting of myself at this point.

Happy holidays! I hope everyone has been able to take some time off to enjoy their friends and family this month. Life has been crazy for me, but I really wanted to try to post this before the year ended.

Where poker is concerned, 2011 was a pretty interesting year for me. I went to PCA, played on the Big Game, and went to the WSOP for the first time. While none of these get-rich-quick schemes worked out for me, they were great experiences and I learned a lot.

It’s that time of year! Christmas lights are going up, grocery stores are playing merry music 24/7, and the malls are a nightmare. Oh yeah, and all the grinders are online trying to cram in as many games as possible before the year ends. 

Right now I have 91,551 VPPs, which means around 6 full days of poker until I hit Supernova. I play a lot of half days, though, so I probably won’t hit it until December 18^th (which is, coincidentally, the day of the giant Sunday Million).

Where has the month gone?! It feels like November just started when, in reality, it’s actually almost over.

It’s amazing how quickly time can fly when you have too many things to do!

The VPP grind continues. I’m on track for the month so far, having earned 13.6k VPPs to date.

So I’m done playing liveaments and back to the online grind. Last entry I wrote that the games would be getting a lot tougher from now until the end of the year thanks to the Supernova and Supernova Elite grinders. This has been very true and perhaps even worse than I expected.

The SnGs just have a crazy number of regs right now. I have never had to game select so meticulously before. Saturday during the day was particularly terrible, which makes sense since all the grinders were online to play the Supernova freeroll. I feel like I spend more time game selecting than playing poker.

This is what I get for deciding to earn all my VPPs in the last third of the year. You can bet that I’ll be done grinding by this time in 2012!

I earned a bit of money in October. Here was how it ended up:

Supernova progress is well on track for 2011. Ideally I will make it by mid December so that I take some time off before the holidays. A friend recently pointed out to me that it’s also good to take time off because games get tougher around this time.

Last time I blogged here, I talked about a volume prop bet I had. Considering my free hours in September, my goal was a little ambitious, but I was on pace to JUST make it by the end of the month.

However, I’m sad to say that there is no happy ending! I caught a very annoying cold on September 29, so I ended up buying out of my bet and spending the next few days in bed.

I briefly considered playing low stakes in an attempt to finish my bet, but I quickly decided it wasn’t worth it. Playing ill is almost always a bad idea.

I’m still happy with the volume I played last month, although the results weren’t very good:

We’ve seen some incredible poker graphs over the years, including Nanonoko and Ben Grundy’s incredible runs, but we’ve never seen anything quite like the one for online player I7AXA.

As you may or may not know, I7AXA binked second place in the PkerStars Sunday Million this week for a total of $148k.

Sweet right? Well, apparently I7AXA wasn’t satisfied with his victory so he decided to take a shot at some high-stakes $5k heads-up hyper turbos.

Yep. You read that right.

It proved to be the worst mistake he could have made and just a few days after his huge win, he’s lost nearly everything.

As they say, “Degens gonna degen.”

Finally here with an update! It’s been a very busy month, mostly because I decided to make a volume prop bet with someone. The original purpose of the bet was to ensure that I would play a suitable number of hours per week, but I think I made my goal a bit too ambitious.

As a result, I’ve pretty much had no life because if I take too many days off, I’ll lose my bet.

Brian "Stinger88" Hastings has joined the Great American Poker Exodus, packing up shop and shipping himself to Vancouver in order to get back in high-stakes online cash games.

This marks a departure for us since, being from Vancouver ourselves, we're used to traveling all over the world to run down poker stories. This time the story came to us.

I met Hastings three blocks from my apartment in Gastown for a few late-summer patio drinks and we talked about American pros like himself who have left the US to pursue their careers in online poker.

The is the full interview transcript. Click here to check out the feature news article.

Last week I didn’t have enough room to talk about how August ended up, so I’ll do that today. Here were the numbers for August:

# MTTs: 594

Hours: 106

Net result: +$2,440.85

You might remember that I had a goal to play 650 tournaments in August. I didn’t end up playing 650 MTTs because I worked SnGs into my schedule near the end of the month. I played over 100 SnGs but didn’t technically reach my goal since it was meant for MTTs.

I ended the month in the middle of a $9k downswing but was still up over $2k overall thanks to how well the month started. My total buy-ins for the month were just under $20k so it’s a pretty dismal ROI, but I can’t complain too much since I didn’t lose money.

Let’s look at my overall numbers for the year so far. 2011 summed up:

I didn’t get the chance to post last week because I was quite busy, so today I will report on two weeks of poker. You will soon see that things didn’t change much, though, and that I kept losing money! Here are the unfortunate numbers:

August 15^th to 21^th:

# MTTs: 168

Hours: 26.5

Net result: -$2,125.99

August 22^nd to 28^th:

# MTTs: 100

Hours: 21

Net result: -$2,335.87

That brings my total MTT losses since August 6^th to $9,098. Yikes.

As the title would suggest, my hot streak finally came to a close!

I played four days this week, but two of them were half days which is why my hours are pretty low.

And the good run continues! I played four days and 34.5 hours last week, which is exactly what I hope to do every week. I also wish the results could be like this every time:

Well I ended up playing four days of poker last week, but only 3 days were spent online. I got convinced to spend the other day at a brick-and-mortar playing 1/3 NL, although I can’t complain much about it because I made a couple buy-ins.

Here were the numbers for the three days I played:

I am so happy to be back in Vancouver! Vegas is fun, but it’s way too hot and loses its appeal after a few days. Plus I really started to miss online poker!

Hi guys, long time no blog! I meant to post last week but life was still so hectic. Plus I played zero hours of poker the week before that, and I didn’t want to get berated for not putting in any volume again ;)

I played three days of online poker last week, one day this week, and a live $330 tournament at Edgewater Casino. I busted early in the liveament, and here were the online results:

Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking, quitting my job and attempting to play poker for a living. Looking at it logically, it was a really stupid thing to do.

I had no sample size of games that proved I was a winning player. I pretty much quit my job and thought to myself, “Well time to learn how to play poker. Hopefully I’m good at it.”

The 2011 PokerStars SCOOP results and stats are in and we plugged the key metrics into our trusty MS Word chart tools.

Don't let the Word part throw you; you'll barely have to read anything. That's the beauty of the infographic.

If, however, you are a fan of the written word, click here to find out why the drop in SCOOP numbers wasn't as big as we thought it would be.

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