The Well: gobboboy (12.19.06)

[gobboboy]

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do you think you would still be playing mtg if not for poker?

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Yeah, probably. I went directly from one to the other. How sad would that be...

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can you even fathom what your life without poker would be?

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Very very unhappy. I'd still be stuck in the same college (hopefully) with no clue where I wanted my life to go.

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what is so enticing to yo about omaha other than the fact that everyone else sucks at it?

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As I said before, the quick action of it. It's so sick. If I actually had the bankroll for 25/50 PLO I think I would crush it.

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have you ever seriously considered quitting at any point in your career?

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Nope.

[Clayton]

IWEARGOGGLES,

My theory is that STTF'ers play shorter sessions so have time to do other things, namely more baller stuff. MTTC'ers success is derived from very long sessions (from a relative standpoint) and as such are content with more humble things. The lone exception, of course, being nath.

[shaundeeb]

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Gobbo why does randall have such a crush on you?

Would you date him if he matured a little?

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Hmm...

Randal's cool, I just think you hate me.

And you ain't gettin none o dis.

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wtf you think I hate you? Or, are you just 3rd leveling me

[gobboboy]

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1. What was your most exciting/important cash for you as a player?

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My birthday for sure. Two huge tournaments wins in one night followed by 4 months of nothing. Opened my eyes to how much variance there is in poker.

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2. Critique my play, I think you are one of the people who know my game the best, where are my holes.

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I barely know your game at all other than I remember you being a good player with not that many leaks. From now on I think you just need to find good spots to resteal and work on how you can pick up chips like an OgreNinja.

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3. Why do you play so passive HU? Why do you always win HU and I always lose HU?

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Playing smaller pots decreases variance. More hands = less variance. It lets you learn about your opponent and get better at HU overall.

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4. If you were going to Outback right now for a free meal what would you get?

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A Bloomin Onion to start, followed by an 11 Oz. Outback Special cooked medium with baked potato, butter and sour cream, a size of broccoli and maybe the addon shrimp on the side. If i get dessert, the brownie/chocolate/ice cream thing.

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5. Are you coming to the Canterbury Fall Classic next year so I can play too?

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Of course.

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It was good to meet you when you were in MN, you are a great player and person.

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I appreciate this a lot.

[bosoxx05]

Over the past year, I've had a decent amount of success playing nothing but low buy ins with the occasional shot at a high buy in. The variance in tournaments can obviously get frustrating at times.

Do you think there is a happy medium between cash games and tournaments? Or do you think most of a poker players energy should be focused towards one or the other?

[KingDan]

What college did you briefly attend?

If its not too personal, mind giving a ballpark of your BR?

[gobboboy]

"Someone on 2+2 asked me recently to post how I got started in poker and how things have happened since then. I won't be totally accurate in numbers or dates, so just believe in the general idea (general idea: I'm awesome).

Okay, so I first started playing back in early 2005. I was a pretty big participant in Magic the Gathering and most of my friends were too. Slowly but surely, most of them stopped playing magic and moved over to poker. I was getting bored as hell and decided to play too. It was either February or March. Two of my friends started up an affiliate program (ducktherake.com) and one of them offered to teach me how to play poker for free. Being the lonely guy that I am, I decided to do it.

I started out at .5/1 ring games off a 'bankroll' of bonuses and my friend staking me. I was terrible. But I won $15 my first session and thought this was the greatest thing I've ever seen. I had a lot of trouble playing just one table since I was so impatient. But eventually I was off on my own once I got the basics down.

So I had a $300 bankroll playing two tables of .5/1. I had poker tracker and a heads up display tool. That's it. At this point, I posted very very few things on 2+2 and never read other posts. I was in the micro limits. You can probably dredge up a few of my early posts there. This is about april of 2005.

So I went nuts. I started playing limit $5 sng's on party having absolutely no clue how to do them. But it was fun! I punted my bankroll completely down to like $20 and then worked it up playing SNG's I had something like 4 buyins for. It was terrible. And so was I.

A week or so later, BUSTO. I hated myself. I guess poker wasn't for me. I told myself I was done.

Except that I'm a degenerate addict, so I put $50 there to start playing .5/1 again. I went on a ridiculous rush and built that up to $280 in one night. From then on, I worked my way up the limits and never took a big risk again. Hurray!

Wait a minute, no I didn't!

So I punted my bankroll down to $120 playing .5/1 the next day and decided to play in a $20 MTT. From some ridiculous run of luck, I get 2nd in it for $3500. I was on top of the freaking world. I had never seen that kind of money before, and it was ALLLLLLLLLL MINE. So I started playing 2/4 limit and $20 mtt's. I still sucked. I reaaaally sucked. So I punted all that money down to like $600 when I finally started getting better. This is about when I started college, and I played a lot more poker than I did school work. I moved about $10 over to pokerstars to have fun with and try to get better at mtt's. I stopped playing limit and just played those. I would play a $5 mtt or a few $3 ones and lost them, then I would rebuild the money by playing in the 45 man $1 sng's. Those things were a goldmine for me at the time.

You can track my progress in the small mtt's from thepokerdb.com. I really sucked, but somehow I started doing well. I started learning from my mistakes and kicking ass while taking names and such. I finally got a big 'win' from an mtt and decided that mtt's were for me and would focus on them.

So, in the middle of all this, my grades were slipping and I wasn't really trying in college. I won a few tournaments (mostly the small rebuys and PLO tournaments) and just kept playing more and more poker and posting on 2+2. I finally won the 3r on stars to get my bankroll over $6k and after that I was basically set to go on a run. Sometimes things have been tough, but overall it's been a great experience. I dropped out this semester to hang out and play poker, and I might go back later if things don't work very well. After last night, I'm feeling good about things.

So that's basically it. I'm a lucky fish who somehow has lots and lots of mobneys now. I have tons of time to improve and hope things go as well as they have before. Have a good one, yo. I'll answer most questions that are directed at me."

That's taken from my blog. It was written the month of my birthday, April, of this year. That was before my awesome run of winning three 400+ person field MTT's in a week. Since then, I've played a lot more live and just generally pokered it up. I've had a great time, mostly thanks to you guys. You rock.

[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]

[gobboboy]

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Over the past year, I've had a decent amount of success playing nothing but low buy ins with the occasional shot at a high buy in. The variance in tournaments can obviously get frustrating at times.

Do you think there is a happy medium between cash games and tournaments? Or do you think most of a poker players energy should be focused towards one or the other?

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Cash games during the day and tournaments at night is fine to me. Then fill up your tournaments with cash games as you bust from them until you get to a final table. Then grind the cash games all night. If you actually got on a sleep schedule of like 5 AM to 4 PM and just played poker from 7 PM to 3 AM it'd be very very profitable but eventually you'd go insane. I've done it before, it's very hard to do.

Cash games are fine if you can find games you can beat.

[gobboboy]

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What college did you briefly attend?

If its not too personal, mind giving a ballpark of your BR?

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I attended UIUC in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I live 10 minutes away from it in Mahomet, Illinois. It's a great school, it just wasn't for me.

And as for my bankroll, I have over 50k online for poker.

[RichC.]

I asked this of Nath and Steve, so now I pose it to you.

What concepts do you feel are misapplied and/or misunderstood the most? These can apply to tournies and cash.

Also, how do these concepts differ compared to short stack vs deep stack play? Tourney vs cash play?