We hardly knew ye...


I'm so pissed they removed this avatar. It was by far the best one on FTP, and they totally hosed us by giving us some more "life like" pirate version copying off Captain Jack from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series.

I decided to promptly email support:
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From: WiltOnTilt
To: support@fulltiltpoker.com
Subject: pirate avatar

please please please bring back the old pirate avatar. it was by far the best avatar you guys have. now, in my humble opinion, it's ruined :-(

I think theres nothing wrong with leaving tons of avatars to choose from. some cartoony, some more life like. please back bring it back.

arrrrrrrrrrrr

Aaron (WiltOnTilt)

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I'll keep you posted.

I was discussing with mitch, one of my students, a good strategy for trying to get this back. he pointed out i could always win one of those donkaments where you get a custom avatar then just send them a picture of the pirate above. But then I thought it might be more baller to get the blue ranger instead. I guess I'll just cross that bridge when I come to it.

Sleep schedule even more jacked up than it has been. this time i feel asleep at midnight but got woke up by the dog at 3:30am. got on to play, got stuck a bit, got back to even, then +1k or so then called it a night. Or morning. arghh

RIP pirate. We hardly knew ye...

Aaron

I hesitated to even put this on my blog but I just can't resist...

I started with a new student today and as part of my normal Q&A with a new student I asked about his poker background, stakes, what he hoped to get out of coaching, etc, then I asked him if he had ever been coached before. What did he like/dislike? Standard stuff I ask about everyone before I start coaching them so I can get a feel for how advanced or basic I need to approach the session.

So our first session went pretty well, ran sort of cold but nothing major. Then I get this email from my new student which reads:

"Thought you might like to see this. Starting hand chart for 6 max by XXXXXX. A lot tighter than how we played today!" (name has been changed to protect the guilty)

Here's the hand chart in question.

To anyone that knows anything about online 6max NLHE this hand chart is the biggest L..O...L I've seen in a long time. I mean seeing this hand chart, from a guy who charges money to coach people is simply criminal.

So the point of this blog post is that I encourage everyone who is interested in coaching to please ask around and find at least one or two good references before hiring a guy. If someone does a good job coaching it should not be hard at all for him to have one of his students send you an email saying something positive. Like everything, buyer beware. Do your homework. Poker coaching in general is a pretty expensive thing to do... so don't just trust anyone with a website. Check around...get second opinions.

The sad part is that most people who are just trying to learn the game and don't have any "inside connections" in the poker world have no way of knowing whether or not the guy they are hiring is any good. Seeing a pretty pokertracker graph isn't enough either. It's absolutely crucial you ask around and hear good things from people he/she has coached before.

If you're thinking about getting a coach, you should also ensure that the coach is professional and is willing to spend time "off the clock" helping you out, whether it be a quick hand history check on AIM or maybe once a week you send an email with a few general questions/hands. In many cases you guys are paying a lot of $ for coaching, so find a coach that is willing to go the extra mile for you.

For instance, I've got a students-only forum where my dedicated students (3+ hours per month) can post hands and help each other out, and I try to respond to every thread. I've posted videos and homework assignments for them there too, as well as other perks. As far as I know no one else on the internet offers these things as part of their coaching program. The point, (besides all this blatant self promotion) is that you should really find a coach that isn't just there for 60 minutes on the dot and out the door, you should find someone who cares about your progress and is committed to doing what he can to help you achieve your goals.

Again I won't out the guy who made this, but my goodness I feel truly sorry for those who have spent their money with this guy... He must be crazy like a fox...

Aaron

Well I'm happy to say that I've survived my first season of videos for DeucesCracked.com. I'm pretty happy with how my 8 episodes turned out and for the most part the response has been positive. I worked insanely hard on each video, not just filming but mostly coming up with content and then checking the accuracy and finally spending hours putting the content into slides. It was definitely a rewarding experience, especially when some people went out of their way to contact me and tell me they enjoyed it and learned something.

As for the for the logic and math checking I had to rely heavily on Chuck (danzasmack on 2+2/DC) who did an amazing job helping me with this series. He caught sooooo many mistakes of mine that I would have missed, and I think of the whole series there was really only one semi significant mistake that we both missed, but it really wasn't a big deal either because we had the fix on the forums within hours of the video being put up, and even with the mistake in the video it didnt ruin the idea behind what the math was showing.

Without Chuck the quality of the series would have been WAYYYY down.

So now that season 1 is in the books, I've been working on season 2's new series. I don't think it's been officially announced yet, but for some of you who have noticed me at 1/2nl HU on full tilt poker... maybe you can use my math lessons to put two and two together... ;-)

As far as my own play has been, what an up and down month... From +10k to all the way down to -13k and a little bounce back, it's been a variance filled ride.

Krantz is going to come to KC for a visit in early march. We should have a good amount of time to work on deucescracked stuff as well as get in some dual sweat sessions. I'm hoping to learn some of the secret ninjutsu of high stakes HU NL Hold'em. Should be a good time.

Other than that it's just been a lot of the same, which is why no blog entries very often. My uncle and I are getting real close to go-time on our website. Just a few more finishing touches on the code side and we'll hit the advertising hard. Expect plenty of shameless plugs on the blog.

Ok that's it for now. Really going to try to update this thing a lot more often.

BTW for anyone wondering, 1/2nl hu is insanely soft on FTP. just wow at some of the people there. It's nice to know that if I ever somehow went broke I could bum a couple g's off someone and totally rebuild my roll just playing this game. Even the regs are dreadful. I've had several challenge me to higher stakes too, which is hugely +EV not only from the $$ side of things, but general humor side as well. Good stuff...

WoT

since it's been like 3 wks since i've made any sort of update i figured i should throw something up here.

my life has been crazy busy, between my DeucesCracked video series (which takes an insane amount of time to create), coaching poker, playing poker, working on my website with my uncle, and having a wife, my time for basically anything that isn't "mission critical" is basically zero.

About the only things I've made time for lately that isn't either poker or website related are Heroes Season 1 on DVD and season 4 of Lost on TV and usually 1 episode of American Idol per week. If I'm not watching those shows then i'm working on poker related stuff or the website with my uncle. Or i'm sleeping, but i don't even do much of that lately. my sleep schedule is beyond fucked up as right now it's almost 6am and that has become my new bed time these last couple weeks. 6am to noonish give or take... 6am to 10am if it's a wednesday when I get up to go volunteer at the elementary school.

So thats been my life lately. Had my worst day of poker so far of 2008 tonight too. -10k or so in about 2500 hands. wasn't fun. all i'll say about it is that i'm getting better at handling tilt control. Like Tommy Angelo stresses in his book, you have to look at each bad run as an opportunity to practice your mental stability and discipline, so that's how i'm going to try to look at it.

Anyway I'm getting better at heads up poker which was one of my goals for the first part of 2008. I'm still not close to where I want to be, but I'm a much better heads up player than i was on jan 1st, so that's good. KRANTZ has been helping me out with some random sweats which obviously help immensely. We'll be working on our season 2 at DeucesCracked.com where KRANTZ and I play a bunch of 1/2nl heads up and talk through the different plays and logic. I think it'll be a really good series. I'm happy with how my season 1 NL Hold'em Math series is shaping up. i think the last few episodes have been exceptionally strong but of course few people watch them since it actually takes some brain power and it's not point and click spoon fed knowledge....which sort of bums me out a bit, since i've probably spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-25 hours on each of the videos, and it would have been significantly longer if not for the help of Chuck (danzasmack) who has time and time again been a life saver with checking my math and bouncing ideas off of to make my series more watchable.

so that's it for now, hopefully i'll get back into blogging a bit more in the near future.

WiltOffTilt