So it begins! My 180 day countdown.

After coming back from the PCA it was time to change a lot of things in my day to day life. A couple of weeks ago I already wrote about my 180 days no alcohol propbet, but it’s much more then that! It’s not about the alcohol, it’s more about playing more poker and getting back into shape. So yes one of the goals is to not drink any alcohol, but my main goal is to play 500 hours of poker in those 180 days, lose a lot of weight and get fit so I’m able to cycle up Alp d’Huez in a new personal record.

180 Days:
Start: 14-01-13
End: 12-07-13
Days left: 173

Poker
Goal: 500h
Pace: 19,4h
Played: 42,81h
Remaining: 457,19h

My goal is pretty simple, play 500 hours of poker, live or online in 180 days. I’m cheating a bit since I started counting the hours from the 1st of January but I’ve only played 11 hours before the 14th of January so that’s not a huge advantage. I’m ahead of schedule but next week I’m away the whole weekend and I have more weekends away planned already so being ahead of pace doesn’t say much. This challenge comes down to roughly 20 hours a week or 2,8 hours a day. Doable for sure but it’s not about doing it for 1 week, I have to do it for 180 days. I didn’t set any VPP or monetary goals and so far this has paid off. Last week I’ve played LHE cashgames, MTTs, Sats and Hyper Turbo SNG’s. I’ve 1 tabled and 16 tabled and enjoyed playing pretty much all the time.

I’ve played LHE cashgames most of the time and things haven’t worked out that well. I’m playing $2/$4 6-max and any full-ring table up to $5/$10. The sample is still small but I would have hoped to do a bit better since I’m playing less tables.

For sure I’m running hot on the $2/$4 Full-Ring tables since that winrate isn’t sustainable but I’m hoping as well that I’m running bad at all other stakes. My overall BB/100 is 1.44 which would be very good so I’m just holding on to that. Yesterday was a really good day at the cashgames, winning $950 so let the hotrun continue 🙂 I did have to host 5 TCOOP final tables yesterday as well so I had to mix playing and hosting which wasn’t optimal for my focus and multitable skills. I also played all the NL TCOOP events and all the deadline satellites but I bricked all of them. In the two Hyperturbo sats I bubbled twice, stone cold with a mandatory all-in from the SB (AT < 77, QQ < KK) where both I would have made it if I would have won the hand. I was really card dead in all MTTs/Sats I played, the opposite of what was happening at my cashgames. Means I’m down for the year in MTTs/SNGs/Sats but I’ve only been playing for one week.

My PC died on me Friday when I was playing some MTTs and that didn’t happen for over a year. I did a Windows Update (patches) just before my session so that was probably the reason. My laptop battery was dead as well and you can only play 4 tables max on your mobile so it was pretty frustrating, especially if 2 of those tourneys are hyper MTTs. After 15 minutes or so I got my laptop to work again but busted every tournament in the 30 minutes after, except the $5 freezout! So I was 1 tabling on my laptop and busted in 41st place, 2.5 hours after busting all the other tournaments, FML! While 1 tabling I was fixing my PC which seemed to work out. On Saturday I had the brilliant idea to test my PC by playing $3 Hyper-Turbo Sats. Playing 8-12 tables, putting some pressure on my PC seemed like a great idea. After the 1st 100 I was down and well, nobody likes to finish down so I kept on playing. I was definitely to loose at the 1st blind level and had to adjust to the bubble play, paying more attention to the stack sizes but in the end I did manage to end with some profit. I did have to play 432 Hypers but it was fun and I might try another session in the coming days/weeks.

Lifestyle
Alcohol: 0
Start: 104,7kg
Goal: 95kg
Pace: 104,3kg
Current: 102,6kg
Remaining: 7,6kg

The day I got back from the PCA I was actually 105.9kg. This was without any sleep which normally is roughly 1kg difference. The next morning I was 104,7kg so that’s the weight I will start this challenge with. I’m currently already 102,6kg which is 2.1kg less in just one week. That’s pretty standard for the first week and I shouldn’t expect to keep this up, 0,7kg a week would be fine and doable until I reach the 95kg. 93kg is my ultimate goal but I didn’t want to push it too much so I’ll leave my goal at 95kg. Of course I didn’t drink any alcohol so far this week. I did have a b-day party of one of my best friends who turned 30 but since this is still the first week it was pretty easy to stay away from alcohol. My friends were pretty happy with it as well since I could drive them 😉 Next week going away for the whole weekend will be a bit more difficult but I still just started so doubt it will get super difficult. In total I’ve bet for $350 which should keep me away from making any exceptions in these 180 days. I’m eating pretty healthy and I’m surprised that I’m not hungry at all so far. I’m eating way less than before but I guess my body has plenty of fat in reserve 😉 So far so good but it’s about the long stretch, not just the results of one week.

Cycling
Morning exercise: Avg 3* week
1st at my own strava segment: Not yet
Scheveningen in 2h 40m: Not yet
Finish AGR 150km: Not yet
Alp d’Huez in 1,5h: Not yet
Finish Galibier: Not yet

I was planning to start last Tuesday with spinning in the gym but the weather was really bad so I didn’t get out of the house. I made up some more lame excuses on Thursday and during the weekend so I’ve not started cycling yet. Tomorrow I hope to start but the weather is again pretty bad, guess I have to do it anyway. I hope the cold weather / snow goes away asap since I would prefer to cycle outside at least during the weekend, we’ll see. I did start doing morning exercises and I still hate them but I did do them every day I planned to do them. The idea is to do them each day I don’t have to work, which means I’ll do them Sat-Tue. It’s a combination of stretches, ab exercises and push-ups. I prefer to wake up and jump behind my computer to check Facebook, Twitter and forums but nowadays I start with getting my heart rate up to 150+. I already see some improvement and I hope that these exercises will keep me fit during these 180 days, old people have to stretch 😉

Other stuff

I also wanted to mention some other stuff which hasn’t got anything to do with my 180 day countdown. First of all Andre Coimbra’s short film has been released, check it out below!

He also started his $100 -> $100k MTT challenge in which he will donate any money won to charity. You can follow the challenge on his blog and check out the video below for some extra info:

As you can see his girlfriend is featuring in his videos and she also plays poker. Andre learned her to play hyper sats and in December she won $20k and made it to Supernova! She keeps a blog as well and I think it’s a great read.

I added two other blogs to my blogroll as well. Both AWice and MouldyOnions are trying to set a new yearly VPP record. Actually they want to go way beyond that and reach 8M VPPs within 1 year. I think this is pretty nuts and currently they are racing to be the first SNE of 2013 (Check out PokerStarsblog to see what’s it all about) after AWice won the race to being the first SN of 2013. MouldyOnions is currently ahead with 629.455 VPPs and AWice is having a huge downswing and currently 2nd at 464.928 VPPs. Seems like Mouldy will be reaching SNE within 1 month which would be pretty insane, especially since up till now he has profit playing hypers as well! Check out their blogs.

Last thing I wanted to add is that since last week you can also subscribe to my blog. In case you want to receive an e-mail as soon as I publish a new blog you can leave your e-mail address at the top right of my website and I will promise to only e-mail you once after I finished another blog post.

I guess that’s it for this week. I should be blogging once every two weeks and I hope I’m still on pace by then! Cya