Thursday, March 25, 2010

Coming down the homestretch

So I'm at 905k VPPs now and should hit the 1 million mark sometime next week, becoming the first Supernova Elite on PokerStars this year. I'm not exactly sure of the reason, but it really motivates me to try to be the first/best at things, even when it's goofy stuff like this. There's no reward for being first (other than watching people say "omg that Jorj95 is sick, he must play 48 tables for 35 hours a day") but still I feel the need to do it. I started playing seriously on PokerStars in April of 2007, and in May of that year I played pretty much every day and got over 500k VPPs in that month alone, just because I wanted to see how many I could get in a month. The next year I decided I wanted to be the first to hit Elite, and I accomplished it on March 18 (becoming the quickest ever to do it), and ended the year with 3 million VPPs (the highest 1-year total ever).

But my obsession with being the first/best goes way beyond poker. I remember back in about 1997 there was a trivia game on a local BBS where everyone would sit in a chat room and trivia questions would come up every 15 seconds or so and the first person to answer it correctly would get a point. It would tally your score for the month and people were put onto an all-time leaderboard for the best scores in a month. So some retired lady had the record score which was like 3 times as high as anyone else's score, something like 15,000 questions answered in a month. And everyone would say how amazing it is that someone scored that much higher than everyone else. So I decided one month that I wanted to break the record score, so I played this stupid trivia game all month except when I was working or doing other stuff, and ended up crushing her score by getting like 20,000 points, then I never played the stupid game again.

When I worked at the movie theater during the summer before my senior year in high school, someone worked 32 days in a row and everyone thought he was crazy for doing it. So obviously I had to work 37 days in a row (at a minimum wage job) just to do it.

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Since I became a "pro" last week, I've been getting absolutely crushed in the games. I doubt it's related in any way, but it's definitely frustrating. I'm 0/10 in step 6s since then (at $2100 a pop). I'm pretty sure I have an edge in these, but when my average game is around $100 buyin, obviously losing 10 $2100 buyins in a row is going to affect my results a lot. In a way it makes me not want to play them because of how much it affects my results and I doubt my edge is all that big, but part of me enjoys the silliness of playing a 10 minute tournament with a $2100 buyin. I might reconsider if I lose another 10 in a row though.

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Thanks to everyone for the congratulations on signing with PokerStars, whether it be through chat during the games, private messages on 2p2, in my Well thread, or here on this blog. There's no way I can respond to everyone but just know that I do appreciate and am thankful for every comment. I would never have gotten where I am without you guys taking an interest in what I do.

12 comments:

  1. fun stories. 37 days working in a row can be done. Idk which one is tougher though between 20k points on the trivia games and 3M vpp :)

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  2. Hey jorj, congratulations in TeamPro.

    I remember reading somewhere that you may are interested in someone to redesign your blog/site. I work in that area. If you still interested we can work in something. My email to contact is collaboratore[at]admore.it or just let me know how we can get in contact with you.

    Thanks,

    Rafael

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  3. Thanks for the offer but I already have something in the works as far as redesigning the site goes. It might be a little while before it happens though.

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  4. Old lady got crushed, I don't think either one of you will ever played that game again.

    You should write a book how you became where you are now or just a little summary? I would love to read how you ended up where you are now? or what was the biggest turning point that just made you a instant winner overnight?

    "george used to work at a theater then one day he got sick of it (after crushing and holding all the records at work of course) and logged onto pokerstars and crushed every record there too"

    Thanks for the laughs!

    all the best!

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  5. If you click the "About Me" link, there's a short writeup. Maybe I'll make it more detailed someday.

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  6. enjoyed the blog and insight...best of luck

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  7. Jorj,

    You may recognize me on pokerstars, my account name is Shaneomaceth. I am just messaging you because I just tripped out when I saw your real-life photo, because I think we were seated at the same start table at the 2009 PCA. I was the guy sitting to the left of Barry Greenstein before our table got broken up.

    I also have a pretty memorable hand against you which you probably don't recall, but it was a step 6 of the WSOP qualifier, back in april of 2008. We were down to about 4 guys and I made a donk push in the small blind with QT and you called with KT, resulting in a QQrag flop, and resulted in knocking out out.

    I see you only really play hyper-turbos now, and I don't see you in high limit sngs anymore. Any ways, really small world I guess. Send me an e-mail; shaneology@hotmail.com so we can talk poker sometime.

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  8. Hiya,

    Count me in amongst the non-degenerate (aka non-pokeryness) readers. Okay...maybe a little degenerate. Glad your better half pointed me here, I'll be keeping tabs on you (and I expect to be kept up to date on how Peanut is doing as well -- I don't use Facebook, you know).

    Hope all's well.

    Jim

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  9. Hi, Im a microlimit player of SNGs superturbo.
    Congratulations, you are the new leaderboard at sharkscope (and the only non-heads up player).

    Pedro.

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  10. wow you are the sickest play ever, that much profit from the hyper turbo's.

    As far as the 6-max step 6's go, i wouldn't play them while multi-tabling lower hyper turbo's. Ranges are so different in that step from any other step or hyper turbo that its hard to play them perfect while mutli-tabling other games.

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  11. @shane

    yeah that was me at pca.

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  12. Wow, you are the best:P Congrats, hehe:P
    You are one of the most earning poker players on earth, and you are increadibly steady in your profits..

    One thing Im wondering about is how do you get your winnings in cash? You use alot of money to buy in to those hyperturbos, but how do you get it back? You get some back in vpps I know, but do you buy into highstakes sitngos and tournaments with all of the points you win or what?

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