In my last blog I announced I would do a little personal poker challenge to check if I still had it in me to be a real grinder. I was still thinking about how many tables I wanted to play, for how long and which stakes but all of a sudden PokerStars decided to help me out!
I already blocked my agenda from the 25th till the 30th of November and I was ready to play roughly 50.000 hands of 6-max Limit Hold’em. On Monday PokerStars announced a Ring Game Leaderboard which is all about earning the most VPP’s in 24 hours, for 10 days long. The promotion started today (23rd of November) and will end on the 2nd of December so my challenge fits perfectly in that period. I’m not sure how much VPP’s other people can grind out in 24 hours but currently after 14 hours the most VPP’s earned in my category (Low Stakes) has a little over 7k VPPs. Now at $2/$4 LHE 6-max you earn 0.52 VPPs/100 so 7k VPPs in 14 hours is about 1000 hands/hr. Playing for 14 hours in one day shouldn’t be a problem either but it could be that somebody just woke up and is earning 1.000 VPPs/hr so probably tomorrow I really know what amount of VPPs I need to grind out to make it to the top. Now the top is exactly what I’m aiming for, actually I just really like to be #1 for at least 1 day.
If I would be grinding out for SNE I would just use these 10 days to show off and make the final push to SNE but unfortunately I’m not going for SNE and I have to work on Thursday/Friday. To make the most out of the promo it would be best if I would start Saturday as early as possible, not earlier then 05:00 (CEST) since that’s the time the “day” resets on PokerStars (00:00 ET/PokerStars Time). Let’s say I start at 08:00 then I can grind for 21 hours (minus small pauses) till 05:00. I can move up from $2/$4 to $3/$6 and could mix-up Full Ring with 6-Max if that gives more VPPs so there are many ways in which I can increase the amount of VPP’s gained. For sure I will not switch games to No-Limit or PLO and I think it will especially be hard to stay ahead of some of the PLO grinders. Depending on how many VPP’s are gained by the #1 today/tomorrow I’ll finish up my plans. The idea’s range from playing 4 days of 15 hour, 60.000 hands on $2/$4 but in case I think I have a shot to finish 1st on any specific day I might change this to do a 24 hour non-stop poker grind, probably on Sunday. To me basically only top3 would be really an achievement while I treat anything else just as a bonus. So I either just grind it out for 4 days (which was the original idea) or I’ll give a shot at the top3 for a specific day and just grind some more the other days. You can check out the promotion at http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/10th-anniversary/ring-tlb/ it includes a freeroll for those people who finished top 1.000 in any of the leaderboards on any given day with a prize pool of $500.000 so for me it’s the perfect PokerStars promotion. Being #1 for 4 days is the ultimate goal but I think there are more crazy people like me, so I doubt that’s really achievable. Nowadays playing 24 tables isn’t really doable anymore on Full-Ring, let alone on 6-max. The speed the cards are dealt is just way faster as it used to be but 24 tables is still the max. I’m trying not to play more then 12 tables at any given time but already know that if I need 13 or well 14 or maybe 15 to get the #1 spot I might try and kill myself for a day. I’ll update my progress on Twitter and you can follow me on the link posted above since every hour an update of the leaderboard is given.
I could stop here but I just have to much other stuff I want to write about. Actually the first thing isn’t probably news to most people who read my blog but I just can’t say nothing about the Elky vs Raszi fight. When I first heard about it I didn’t really think it was ever going to happen. It takes so much training and before you finally have a date something else probably has come up and for both it’s not something they were already in to. I was of course happy to hear the fight was going to happen as I really like these sort of bets, for both it means that they really have to push themselves and of course like everything in poker it comes with a lot of people who want to bet on it. I didn’t really have a clue who was going to win but after I had read Terrence Chan’s blog I almost wanted to bet against Raszi (thank you Remko for taking money from some other people). I valued (and still do) his opinion since he had actually trained with Elky and just did a MMA fight himself so he knows what it is to fight. Other then both of them saying they were going to win I didn’t had any real information about the fight. Well I think it’s best if you watch the fight yourself:
I was also looking into playing some “smaller” live tourneys after mainly railing at the MCOP. The Belgian Poker Series Grand Final (BPS) is still an option but Namen/Namur doesn’t really seem like the ideal place to spent a week. Still the tourney structure is really good and there are some other tourneys in case I bust early. The other option was the Dom Classics in Utrecht which is always held in January but unfortunately the schedule (25th till the 29th) mixes up with my holiday. So I’m still thinking about Namen but if I don’t have a companion to go with I’ll probably skip this one as well. Online poker is pretty buzzing as well currently as there is plenty of promotions because of the 10th Anniversary of PokerStars. I already talked about the Ring Game Leaderboard but there are 10 promotions in total, I would suggest to check out http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/promotions/10th-anniversary/ in case you are not aware of this yet. To not make this one big PokerStars promotion blog I would like to highlight the $10.000 Class Freeroll. I think I’m a member of class 2006 but I’m probably not alone, I’m wondering how many people will show up to play the 2001 one! It’s a fun promotion and it’s just one of those things that makes sure PokerStars stays the #1.
I also just got news that Björn ‘Bjoerni89’ Schneider joined PokerStars Team: Online. Welcome to the team! I remember that about this time last year I already knew I was joining Team Online, unfortunately I didn’t achieve most of my goals I had planned for this year but I’ve already explained in many others blogs why things didn’t go that well this year. I hope I can do better next year but for now you can read more about Björn’s story at http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/.
Then something completely different which I am pretty happy about. A couple of weeks ago I’ve purchased veenman.com. Not something impressive but I think it’s really cool to own your own family name, domain name. There aren’t that many Veenman’s out there but plenty to make sure I wouldn’t get this one for free. When I first started to explore the internet in 1997 it was already claimed by a computer shop which was named “Veenman Computer Parts”. In August I found out that this shop hadn’t renewed the domain name so for the first time in 14 years this domain name would be up for grabs. You can register any free domain name pretty easily and it will only cost you about $8 a year, however when a domain names comes available after being claimed it goes thru an auction in case there are people interested. Up till the 2nd last day before the final expiration of course nobody was interested but in the last 2 days, 5 people signed up to participate in the auction. 4 people only did a minimum bid of $69 and I was left with only 1 other bidder. After putting in $325 as my maximum I was overbid again and waited till the last hour to up my bid to $375. This was probably the only chance ever to buy my own family name, domain name and I’m really happy I’ve made that final offer. From now on I’ll only pay $8/Year so I just see this as a one off. I also bought richardveenman.nl which was still free after finding out that somebody else claimed richardveenman.com. It was registered by Just add chips LLC less then 2 months after I joined Team Online, somebody hoped to make some money with my name 😉
Last but certainly not least something I used to blog a lot about, music! I’m so extremely happy that I got tickets for Justice in Paradiso on the 28th of February. They didn’t perform for almost 3 years and one of the last times they performed I actually had tickets to go. They performed on a Saturday evening in the Heineken Music Hall and I was playing some tournaments that evening. Since I was pretty deep in one of those tournaments I decided not to go and eventually won some bucks but I still regret the fact I skipped that show. Everybody who I talked to had an amazing evening, they rocked the house as if they were from a different planet and I can only hope this show will be as good. Paradiso is probably also the best venue there is for a show like this so I can’t be more happy then this. “We are your friends” is probably the most familiar song by Justice (vs Simian) but the album “A cross the universe” is just so amazing. It’s one flow of pumping music where one great song is followed by the next one. They also have a DVD out and you just have to watch it, it’s really crazy. Check out a piece of that DVD:
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