Weekly Interview Series: Bryan "PrimordialAA" Pellegrino

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Fellow Lock Elite Pro Bryan "PrimordialAA" Pellegrino is my next interviewee for my new weekly interview series.  You can read the interview below.

How did you get started in poker?  How old were you?  What did you play?  How did you progress through the stakes and different games?

I got started at poker kind of randomly, when I was 15 on some trip for a highschool thing where the top X students go to DC for a week, my roomate (who I had never met) showed me poker, and I crushed some 5c / 10c / 25c poker game for like $50 and I was insta hooked. Was pretty amazed I won $50 and bought a hoodie with it, thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and then when we left he told me about a site called Pokerstars and told me I could play this online... that started it all

As soon as I got home I made my dad create me an account and got him to deposit $50 for me... lost it over about a week playing $5 Sit n Gos. rinse/repeat, ran it up to $100 and then took shots at 10s and quickly busto'd it and was so mad at myself for playing higher stakes... this was my first run in with BRM. I was really frustrated, $100 was a ton to me then... I bought a book, read a few chapters, and put in 'my last $50', I said if I lost it I would take a few months off and read through a bunch of books. I ran it up a little, binked a small $1 or $3 MTT for like $800 and never looked back :).

After that I played a ton of sit n gos, and eventually moved into cash. At age 17 I was 4 tabling 5/10 NL (highest stakes on PS at the time), but after a big downswing I cashed out most of my money and went back to grinding smaller. In college I started getting a bit more serious, playing a ton of MTTs, and I won the HU MTT like 5 times in a couple of weeks, it was a $20 64 man early and 128 man later (2x / day) , and shipped both the early and the late one one of those days, so I thought I was decent at HU but stuck to MTTs for a while longer. It wasn't until I did a semester abroad in Budapest that I was kind of forced into switching to something else due to how HORRIBLE the MTT schedule was for anyone living in Eastern Europe. This is when I started to move into HU, and a year later I was playing 200s+ regularly and left school to play full time and never really looked back since.
 

What has worked best for you over the years in regards to improving your game?

For a long time I was the guy who played all the time and spent very little time studying. I came up via 2p2 though so I had that standard/logical mindset, which I think in a ways held me back a lot, despite giving me a really solid foundation. Now as the games have progressed I find it much more important to focus on your game and improving and my best methods have always been keeping a very strong network of good / smart poker players to bounce ideas off of and double check your game, and also self-HH review. I try to do this once a week when I can, where I just pull 3-5 of my own HHs at random and go through them, I think it gives me a good snap-shot of what I play like on a daily basis, and seeing some of the occasional glaring errors that sneak in there keep me level headed and help me remember there is always more to work on, so I find it pretty motivating and enlightening.
 

How old are you now?

I'm 24   

How many tables do you usually play online?

 

2-6 for HU, pretty much as many as I can get. I usually do something like I'll sit 1k, 500, 300, and when I had 3 tables stop regging 300's, 4 tables stop regging 500s, and pretty much never stop regging 1ks as long as I can get action.
 

When you were playing the most poker of your career, how many hours per week did you usually play?  How many hours did you usually spend total on poker-related activities? 

At my volume peak I would play probably minimum 8-9 hours per day, 7 days a week, so right around 60 hours, with some weeks being way way more, but during that time I pretty much never took days off which wasn't really ideal. Outside of actually playing I would spend another 5 to 10 weekly coaching and studying,
 

How many hours per week do you usually play now?  How many total hours a week do you usually spend on poker-related activities now?

Due to how tough it's become for me to get decent action my play has dropped off a lot, I probably spend 10-15 hours per week now with everything mixed in, including coaching, studying, and playing, but i'm hoping to increase that in the near future, especially with WSOP coming up.
 

What kind of a computer setup do you have for playing?  Do you use any poker software?

I have a PC I built myself for gaming, so pretty high quality, with 2 monitors, a 30" and a 24". I only use hold'em manager for poker software.   

What are your short term & long term poker goals?

Short term I don't have a lot of goals, just putting in volume when I can and enjoying it, long term i'd really like to focus a bit more on playing less of the 8 hours a day every day grind, and more focused on traveling a bit to some tourney series and playing REALLY focused for a couple weeks, and then break again outside of that. I've been playing for a really long time now and finding myself wanting to add increasing amounts of balance to the poker aspect of my life.
 

At this point in your career does poker feel more like a hobby or a job?  Do you still enjoy the game as much as you used to?

Definitely more like a job, i'm outside of the place in my life where i'm living in a cheap apartment with some friends and outside of basic living expenses it wouldn't be the end of the world to me if I busted a roll, or just stopped playing, etc., I have a wife, house, and so on, so I really feel the pressure of needing to do well and succeed to support my family and keep up a decent life, so it definitely feels like a job and I try to take it really seriously.
 

You have had some nice live scores, including a top 8 finish in the 2009 $10K WSOP HU event for $92,580 and 143^rd in the 2010 WSOP Main Event for $57,000.  Were those your biggest scores ever and how did it feel to go so deep in such prestigious events?

Those were my biggest cashes (along with a follow up similar cash in the 2011 WSOP Main Event as well), These all were really unique experiences, in the 10k HU I played suchhh sick draws leading up to the final 8 and had such a big lead there that it was pretty devastating losing to the player I did (someone who wasn't very good). The 2010 Main Event I was like top 10 in chips for days 2 - 5, so it was pretty crazy, got a lot of coverage, a few feature tables, and was just really exciting the whole way through. Lost a huge hand (my 3rd place vs his 6th place chip stacks) vs James Carroll late day 5 to make a HUGE Chip Leader, and then just kind of floated through to day 6 until I busted. Then last years Main Event I never had a great stack or got anything going, just kind of survived until Day 6 and lost a flip there for like 1.8M or so, so 3 super different experiences in all of the tournaments, but all were really amazing. There really is nothing quite like going deep in a big live MTT, one of the best and most exciting feelings there is.
 

You recently attended a poker training camp held by Daniel “jungleman12” Cates, who is widely regarded as one of the best NL players in the world.  Could you tell us more about that experience?

It was great, tons of great guys there and I learned a bunch. We basically all stayed at a really nice hotel in Vienna and were in the conference room 6-8 hours a day reviewing slides and discussing high level theory. Nights were set aside for going out and having fun, and although it was only a couple days I really feel like I learned a ton. The instructors were great and the setup really was a lot more focused than most things in poker. It was well worth it imo. 

You have been focusing more on the affiliate business and also your new fantasy sports site buzzdraft.com.  Do you still plan to play a lot of poker in the future or start to focus even more of your time on those projects?

Yea, black friday was a pretty big eye opener for me on just how fragile some things were. This kind of caused me to re-evaluate some things and start to spread myself out a bit more. I do plan to play a lot of poker in the future, especially with big events like the WSOP coming up, but I have really enjoyed working on some of these new projects so that's something i will definitely continue to pursue in the future.    

Speaking of buzzdraft, could you tell us more about it?  How did you get the idea for the site? 

 So there is a really big industry of Fantasy sports, traditional fantasy sports where you draft a team and stick with that same team throughout the entire season. It takes a ton of time and dedication to keep up with it (especially in BBall and Baseball) and if 1-2 of your stars get injured your totally #!@)$(d.

Take that and run it daily now, more like a poker site where you go on, draft a team for THAT night, enter it into a sit n go or two, and then sweat the games on TV as they happen in real time and see how you do vs your competition and then win money based on your result. The upside is that it's 100% legal in the US and Canada, paypal and all major cc's accepted, etc., so no bad stigmas, accepted by a very wide audience, etc.

I actually didn't end up coming up with the idea, I came into the project after that were already underway and development had started, so I came in a bit late, but I feel like i've had a lot to offer, and the industry parallels the poker industry so much I think it's very easy for me to see where some of the other major sites are making similar mistakes to poker sites in the early days.

If you never got into poker, what do you think you would be doing for a living right now?

   
Probably would have finished my Computer Science degree and been working on some startups, I don't think I would have ended up at a 'normal' job, at least not for long. It just was never something I could really see myself doing.

How did you go about getting a Lock Pro Elite contract?  How has your experience at Lock been so far?

We had talked a long long while back, when they were still on Cake, but never really finalized anything. So then a few years later when Black Friday happened they got in touch with me and I was really honored they still wanted to work with me. My experience with lock has been nothing but great, the owner Jen has been amazing. I'm thankful every day I got involved when I did and try to do everything I can to help them out, so nothing but good things to say about working with Lock.

 

What do you like to do in your spare time besides poker?

pretty typical stuff, I watch a bunch of movies and TV shows, play video games, work on my two other companies i'm running (BuzzDraft and Coder Den), hang out with my wife and dogs, and travel a bunch.   

What are your favorite movies and TV shows?  Who are your favorite bands/musical artists?

Movies it's way too tough I watch a TON, my favorite movies i've watched in the last couple of months would be Drive, Ip Man, and The Warrior. Really really enjoyed all of them. Bands is tough too, i'm a huge music guy, my favorite band had been Tool for a very very long time, on a daily basis lately though I find myself listening to a lot of Drake, Florence and The Machine, Lil Wayne, Adele, Foo Fighters, Metallica, and Mac Miller, so pretty weird mix
 

What’s your favorite food?

   
Wow all the questions I find oddly difficult to answer. I'd say some of my favorites are a really good filet, chicken cordon bleu, and fettucini carbonara. 

What’s your favorite place you have traveled to?

Really really enjoyed my time in Europe, Budapest, Cyprus, UK, France, really love all of them for totally different reasons.   

Thanks for taking the time to do this & good luck at the tables.

Thanks a lot for having me, much appreciated and much respect to your game jhub :). GL and thanks again.
 

For more on PrimordialAA you can follow him on twitter @PrimordialAA and watch his training videos at http://www.pokerstrategy.com/.  He is also starting up a new blog at http://bryanpellegrino.com/ 

You can sign up for Lock Poker here http://download.lockpoker.com/jaredhubbard for a 150% deposit bonus and VIP benefits (http://jaredhubbard.com/lock%20vip.htm)

In case you missed the past weekly interviews, here they are:

Jeff Romano: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2012/02/weekly-interview-series-jeff.html

Mike Drummond: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2012/02/weekly-interview-series-mike.html

Pedro Oliveira: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2012/01/weekly-interview-series-pedro-skyboypt.html

Greg Tiller: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2012/01/weekly-interview-series-greg-hokiegreg.html

Matt Stout: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2012/01/weekly-interview-series-matt-stout.html

Stevie Devlin: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/weekly-interview-series-stevie.html

Marc Alioto: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-interview-series-marc-alioto.html 

A Look Back: Year In Review 2009

If you like my blog please click the BlogTopList vote button to the right. This will give my blog a better ranking & help increase traffic to my blog. Thanks.

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After signing up please make sure jhub3000@hotmail.com is listed as a safe sender in your email. You can also email me with any questions. Before you begin playing on Lock, or even if you already do play on there, you will probably want to read this post about optimizing the software: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2011/06/making-most-out-of-lock-pokers-software.html

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Going into 2009 I was on cloud 9.  I was coming off an amazing year where I led the world in single table SNG profit, & had led the world in 6 man SNG profit in each of my 2 years as a pro, doubling the profit of the 2nd place guy the year before.  2009 was going to be such a great year!  I was going to lead the world in SNG profit again & make $600K+.  After all, I led SNG profit by so much in 2008, how hard could it be to repeat?  Man was I in for a rude awakening.

I started out the year where I left off in 2008 with a $23K upswing.  The good parts of my poker year stopped there.  From there, I went down, down, down, into a burning ring of fire.

I always considered my mental game to be pretty strong.  I never went on raging tilt.  I always heard stories of pros breaking multiple laptops.  To do this day I have never broken anything because of poker.  However, I didn't know nearly as much about the mental game in 2009 as I do now, and I think going from such a high point that 2008 brought, to a complete crash in 2009 would challenge anybody's mental game.  Needless to say, 2009 was quite challenging mentally.  While I knew a large part of my losses were due to running really bad at high stakes, we didn't have the adjusted EV luck calculators out there to confirm like there are now.  I started trying to fix things that weren't broken.  I basically tried way too hard to improve.  While I was still making really good money off of rakeback, it wasn't enough to satisfy the competitor in me.

The haters also really came out of the woodworks.  All I heard was that everybody had caught up to me and I was just a luckbox before.  In my frustrated and less experienced state I responded almost every time.  Today, I delete most of the hater comments on my blog.  However, I still sometimes respond when they post comments on other sites where I can't delete their comment, even though it's probably better to just not respond.  One good thing that came from the hater comments is that they fueled me to improve more and come back strong.  I've always been motivated to prove people wrong.

In 2009, table selection was getting more advanced, as people were doing more calculations & analysis on the topic.  I wrote this post on the topic, which is probably my most popular blog post of all time: http://jhub3000.livejournal.com/84368.html.  Later in the year I wrote a more advanced version: http://jhub3000.livejournal.com/87736.html.  However, I didn't really table select on Cake or Absolute, because my rakeback was so high.

During much of 2009 I played up to 16 tables to take full advantage of the ridiculous rakeback I was getting.  Considering the structures I was playing and the fact that I was usually managing 3 sites at once, I certainly don't think that playing this many tables was optimal.

As far as vacations we went on a week long camping trip with Paula's family and overall had a great summer, as usual in Minnesota.

I played my last game on Pokerstars in July. I felt that Pokerstars SNGs basically became a reg fest with a bunch of regulars obsessing over supernova elite.  I decided I'd rather table select between Cake & Absolute, where I was hardly paying any rake after rakeback.

In August Paula and I got married.  It was nice to have a bright spot in the year.  Our wedding went great.  We went to Aruba for our honeymoon.  We had a good mix of tours where we weren't sure if we'd make it out alive, going to shows, having drinks, and relaxing on the beech.  We also bought a time share that we haven't even used yet.  That was a good purchase.

Not too long after we got married we got a white lab and named him Gunnar:

In the fall a bunch of us flew to Ohio on a Friday night.  We partied Friday night, tailgated Saturday morning, went to the Minnesota vs Ohio State college football game, drove a rented child molestor looking van to Pittsburgh, partied again, & then tailgated, went to the Vikings vs Steelers game, partied again, and flew out the next morning.  Overall it was a great short trip and nice to get away.  We wanted to make this a yearly trip but it hasn't worked out since.

Toward the end of 2009 I started talking to the guy who ran the red pro program on Full Tilt.  While I didn't get a red pro deal, I finally got a form of rakeback on the site, in the terms of bonuses, which were actually worth more than the standard rakeback.  I previously didn't have rakeback on FTP because I signed up for the site when I was a major n00b and had never even heard of rakeback, and there was a strict policy on not adding rakeback to old accounts.  I started to mix FTP, AP, & Cake together, table selecting between the 3 sites.

Toward the end of the year I also started reducing the # of tables I was playing, even experimenting with playing as little as 8 tables at a time.

Overall, I think this year was a good experience for me.  I think going through a tough year like this makes you stronger in the end.  While that might sound silly considering I still made $233K+ after factoring in rakeback and staking, I think competitive poker players would understand, especially if you're coming off a huge year.  No matter how much money you make off of rakeback, losing money at the tables is not fun.  This year sure prepared me for handling downswings.

In later years I plugged some hand histories into HEM to calculate my adjusted EV, and it turns out I ran $60K+ below EV.  That means I would have made $40K+ pre rakeback if I was running at neutral EV.  While that confirms my assumption that I was running way below EV, $40K was also nowhere near the pre rakeback profit I made in my 1st 2 years.  This shows that I clearly wasn't playing my A game very often, and is probably evidence to the fact that I was trying to fix a lot of things that weren't broken.

Today almost all of the top all time single table total profit leaders have had a losing a losing year pre rakeback.  It sounds pretty crazy, but they're low edge games with a lot of variance.  Playing a lot of tables, as most of the top profit earners do, further decreases that edge per game, and playing a wide range of buy-ins further increases the variance.

In 2009 Pokerstars introduced hyper turbo SNGs where everyone started with 10BBs and a different payout structure.  Meanwhile, jorj95 studied his ass off (I'm assuming), blocked his stats, and laughed at the world:

Clearly these new hyper turbo SNGs would change the landscape of SNGs.  However, not everybody had realized this at the time.  Apparently jorj did.  When he unblocked his stats during the following year I was simply amazed.  To have a year like that playing single table SNGs is simply unbelievable.  Congrats again to jorj.  I'm impressed.

Please click image to enlarge.

2009 5-10 Seated Total Sharkcope Profit combining multiple screen names:

1. jorj95: $466,347

Pokerstars

2. chapmoney: $198,411

Global Alias

3. Gramps: $139,596

Global Alias

4. azntracker: $96,834

Pokerstars

5. Kenny05: $95,326

Global Alias

Year 2009:

Hours: 1,577.65 

SNG Profit: $(22,746.37)

Rakeback/Bonuses: $213,977.09 

Total SNG Profit: $191,230.72 

Staking: $42,219.80 

Total Yearly Profit: $233,450.52 

A Look Back: Year in Review 2008

If you like my blog please click the BlogTopList vote button to the right. This will give my blog a better ranking & help increase traffic to my blog. Thanks.

To signup to play at Lock Poker:
1. Clear cookies & internet history
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After signing up please make sure jhub3000@hotmail.com is listed as a safe sender in your email. You can also email me with any questions. Before you begin playing on Lock, or even if you already do play on there, you will probably want to read this post about optimizing the software: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2011/06/making-most-out-of-lock-pokers-software.html

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At the start of 2008 I was coming off of a very succesful first year as a full time poker pro.  Pokerstars had now added a new VIP program that gave me much better benefits, and there were much higher stakes 6 man SNGs available to me than at the beginning of the previous year.  My goal was to close out the year as #1 in total profit on the sharkscope.com any game single table leaderboard & I believe I was shooting for about $400K in total profit.  I also planned on getting supernova elite again & getting a lot of VPPs on the year.  I believe I started the year 10-12 tabling playing exlusively on Pokerstars.

My routine throuhout most of 2007 & 2008 was that I would play late, go to bed around 4am, and set my alarm for 10pm.  This definitely wasn't enough sleep but I was so obsessed with getting more volume in while still living a pretty good social life.  I was playing pretty good hours in terms of profitability, but I never really played many weekends because that's when a lot more stuff is going on outside of poker.  I wouldn't consider 6 hours of sleep a good idea for the HU games I play now, or overall health for that matter, but 6 mans can be so easy to play once you've played a lot that I don't think it effected me as much.

The year started out going very well.  I started out doing well on Pokerstars.  After talking to jalman69 a lot of AIM, I was convinced to try out this newer site called Cake Poker.  Jalman kept telling me how ridiculously soft the games were.  I figured I could still mix in another site and get supernova elite again on Pokerstars.  Twelve days into the year I began playing on Cake.  Jalman was absolutely correct.  The games were soft as a pillow.  The downfalls were that the software was awful & the highest stakes games were only $120.  However, even $52s were still very profitable because I could sustain such a high ROI.  I decided I wanted to keep this site soft and to myself as much as possible.  Cake allowed you to change your name once a week so I did this every chance I could, using a lot of fishy sounding names like JerryYangFan & JohnsDad.  Anytime one of my screen names was doing well enough to make it onto a leaderboard (yes this happened only playing a week on each name) I would block my stats on sharkscope.

In March (I think) I took my girlfriend (now wife) on a trip to Puerto Vallarta.  We had a blast.  It's always nice to get away from the grind with a vacation.  We spent a of time participating in tours, going to shows, relaxing on the beach, and of course drinking every day.  My only complaint was that the ocean was pretty cold there.

By the beginning of April I was #2 on the sharkscope 5-6 seated total profit leaderboard under my Pokerstars name, & would have been #1 under all of Cake screen names combined.  Jalman ran into the VP of Cake in Ireland & they talked about me.  He got the email of the VP & told him I was supposed to contact him.  I decided this would be a good time to try to get some sort of special pro deal.  I certainly didn't have the name to get a pro deal for Pokerstars yet.  I wrote up a very long email promoting myself and explaining all of my profits on Cake.  I told him that if I got a 100% rakeback deal, that I would come out with a blog explaining all of the profits I had made on Cake.  I would also unblock all of my stats & converge them all into one username on sharkscope.  I would play on Cake under the name jhub3000, which was the name I was best known by at the time, and I would not change it.  I would plug Cake in any interview I did and wear Cake gear when I played live.  The idea was that when people see somebody having a lot of success in one place, they want to go there and try it out for themselves.  After all, if somebody was absolutely crushing some new site at the games you play with win rates higher than the norm, wouldn't you want to go try it out for yourself?  Anyways, I sent the email & we exchanged several emails back and forth.  The rest was just waiting for a decision on Cake's end.

About a week into April my wife and I headed to Monte Carlo for the EPT Monte Carlo Main Event.  It was a free package I received for reaching supernova elite in 2007 on Pokerstars.  The buy-in to the main event was around $16K USD, which was paid for by Pokerstars, along with the flight, hotel, and some food.  I had high hopes for the trip but it was quite the disappointment.  The prices were absolutely absurd.  If you wanted a cheeseburger or a beer you literally had to pay $40.  If you wanted water at a resteraunt you had to pay $15 for a bottle.  I may have been making a lot of money, but there's a certain principle behind not paying outrageous prices for stuff.  The normal cars in Monte Carlo were Bentley, Rolls Royce, Ferraris, & Larmborghinis.  The taxis were BMWs and Mercedes Benz.  The hotel was nice but everything was ridiculously overpriced.  The free food buffets weren't really worth it either.  We ended finding some somewhat reasonably priced places to eat, but didn't really drink much like we would on a normal vacation.  The weather was also in the 50s, so we couldn't go and swim in the sea or anything.  I did meet some other poker players and have some good times though.  I made day 2 of the tournament but busted pretty early.  During the trip I finalized a deal with Cake.  At the time as an ignorant poker player I thought was getting an amazing deal, but knowing what I know about the affiliate business now, I probably would have made more money creating an affiliate account with Cake considering I had referred 523 players to the site before Black Friday.

When I made my deal with Cake I knew it would make the games tougher.  However, the secret of Cake was already starting to get out on the poker forums and it was only a matter of time before a lot more regs starting flocking to the site for soft games.  I was already starting to see more regs at the tables.  My thought process behind the deal was that it would accelerate this process, losing me money in the short run, but making me more money in the long run because of all the rakeback I would be receiving and the fact that people were going to eventually flock to Cake anyway.

Once I got my deal with Cake I made a blog entry explaining everything, unblocked all of my sharkscope stats, & combined them into 1 username: jhub3000.  I also started doing more interviews.  I began working with the VP of Cake on getting some higher stakes 6 man SNGs added, & they ended up adding regular speed and turbo speed 6 man SNG buy-ins up to $1,800.  The traffic increased a lot and so did my average stake.  While the games were tougher, the higher average stake & more volume kind of made up for that.  

Here are some of the interviews I did in 2008:

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/12986707.html

http://www.parttimepoker.com/ptp-qa-with-jared-hubbard

http://www.pokerplasm.com/2008/06/jared-hubbard/

http://roundersradio.libsyn.com/

http://pokerworks.com/poker-news/2008/05/06/the-round-table-meet-the-sit-n-go-master-jared-jhub3000-hubbard.html

http://www.pokerverdict.com/poker-players/usa/jhub3000-jared-hubbard/

http://www.pokerlizard.com/interviews/JaredHubbard.htm

Since most of my volume was now on the Cake network, I began to start accepting applicants for a  coaching & staking combo deal.  I started with 2 stakees on Pokerstars & then adding a stakee on FTP & some foreign sites until I had 7 stakees.  I found SNGs to be pretty easy & I expected the coaching/staking process to be a lot easier than it was.  I would coach them by making videos, mostly of me playing or reviewing their hand histories.  I also shared all of the ICM push/fold charts I had made with them.  I didn't hold anything back.  I was always against making videos, but this teaching process would only teach 7 players instead of 1,000s, & should make me a lot more money than some of the joke training site offers that I had received.  There were  a few problems with how easy I thought this would be.  First off, no matter how much you try to teach somebody, they have to have the work ethic to want to learn.  Second off, no matter how much you teach somebody, they have to have the intelligence to be able to apply the concepts at the table themselves.  6 man SNGs can be a somewhat robotic game, but if you want to excel at higher stakes you still have to have the ability to adapt to different players & know when to adjust your strategy on your own.  It doesn't matter how many videos you watch or charts you study.  You still have to make the right decision in game by yourself.  The third biggest issue was the mental game.  Every player is different.  While some can sit there and take beats all day & stay on their A game, others are just too mentally weak to do this.  With work they can improve in this area, but we never really worked on any mental game coaching.  In fact, I think I probably made it more difficult for each stakee to have a good mental game.  Each stakee wanted to immediately start playing a lot higher stakes than they are used to.  In order to maximize profit, I wanted this too.  However, I think this was, and still is a big problem in the staking world.  First off, if a player gradually moves up through each buy-in level, they get a lot better at playing against different player types and adjusting their game based on that.  No matter what stakes you play you see just about every player type.  It's just that certain player types are a lot more common at certain stakes.  By skipping stakes the player doesn't get as much experience playing and adjusting to different player types.  The second big problem about having a stakee make big stake jumps is that you are really setting them up for mental game failure.  How is a player suppose to prepare mentally for an $80K downswing when they're used to having $5K downswings?  I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect most people to be able to handle that big jump in downswings and continue to play their A game.  Fixing this issue can be difficult considering the stakee wants to be staked so they can play higher stakes.  However, I think you can still have them move up in stakes a lot quicker than they would normally be able to do with their own money, while moving up through each stake while improving more and preparing themselves better mentally.  In the end I made some good money from staking, but just felt that it wasn't worth the headaches that came with it.  I terminated most staking agreements the following year.

As more and more players started to see the success that 6 man players like Kenny05, sparta45, and myself were having, more and more regs started to come over to the 6 man SNGs on Pokerstars as well.  However, this also increased the traffic of 6 man SNGs a lot, especially at the high stakes, so that kind of balanced it.  Because of this, table selection became even more important.  Most people didn't know too much about table selection in 2008, but the general rule between those who practiced is was that if there were 2 good players signed up in front of you, you would be better off finding a different game than registering behind.  I practiced this on Pokerstars, but I didn't table select on Cake since I was getting so much rakeback that it kind of made up for it.  I also sometimes arranged my scheduling around that of other regs.  I think I was a little too "my way or the highway" on my views of table selection.  It would piss me off so much when a top reg would signup behind 2 or 3 other good regs.  I do still think most people would have made more money using some of the table selecting techniques I preached.  I definitely think it worked best for me, and my results reflect that.  However, I let my emotion blind me of some things.  First off, not every reg, even the best regs, was playing simply to maximize profit.  Some simply enjoyed the challenge of playing all of the other good regs.  Even if somebody told me this I would sometimes just be a dick and tell them how stupid it was, just because it was different than my thoughts.  Obviously, I shouldn't have done this.  Secondly, some players could simply make more money not table selecting because they were allowed to focus on their games more.  Let's be honest, everybody is different, and table selecting can take away a lot of focus from your games.  For some, that lost focus probably outweighed the benefit of softer games.  As my mental game has grown stronger and I've matured more I've realized how arrogrant some of the stuff I used to say sounded.

In June we went on a 1 week camping trip with Paula's family, which is a yearly thing.  It was another nice vacation from poker.  I love the summer weather in Minnesota too, and there's always a lot going on in the summer since the winters are so shitty.  On Wednesdays, a bunch of us started going tubing down the river.  We just tie the tubes together, put the cooler in the middle, drink and float.  It's a great past time in Minnesota summers.  Afterwards we would go to a really good pizza joint to eat and drink some more beer.

In July I headed to Vegas for the WSOP Main Event.  It was part of my supernova elite package but I just took the cash so I didn't have to wear Pokerstars gear.  I was staying in a house with Kenny05, Little Kraut (1 of my stakees), and chiefsfan17.  However, by the time I got there Kenny went home sick.  The house was really nice and it had a pool, which was nice for the Vegas summer heat.  My only beef with the house was that it was in Henderson, so it was about a 20 minute drive/cab ride to the strip.  The trip itself was a blast though.  We did a lot of hanging out with clamface, DumpingKGM, Amak316, & Dcalzone as well.  While we were there clamface & I each got deep in a Pokerstars MTT & decided to swap 50% of each other.  Despite the fact that he played like a super nit and against what every other good poker mind around was telling him to do, clamface managed to luckbox himself into chopping the tourney for $30K.  I think that's the only time I ever swapped with anyone in an event so I run good at chops.  My girlfriend Paula came to visit for a weekend as well.  We saw Blue Man Group and some other shows.  I was pretty disappointed in the cirque du soleil shows though.  I think you have to be on acid to enjoy the shows.  I ended up at the feature table of the main event.  I didn't know ahead of time and they didn't allow me to where a shirt that said cakepoker.com on it since it was being aired for TV.  I called the VP of Cake so that I could get the proper TV gear.  I ended up having to run all the way across the Rio to get the gear.  I quickly just grabbed what they handed me and didn't try it on because the tournament had already started.  As I ran back across the Rio I started to put my new gear on & it was pretty skin tight since it was in Euro sizes so I was excited to look like a douche on TV.  I ended up being about 30 minutes late.  I don't think I lasted more than 4 hours.  I lost a good sized pot w/ a monster draw vs 2 pair and ended up getting it in vs Mike Matusow's TPTK with another big draw.  Neither draw hit.  They didn't show any of my hands on TV.  I also got my Cake deal extended to a lifetime deal because I had done so well bringing in new players.

As the time went on my volume kept decreasing on Pokerstars.  I had decided that it wasn't worth trying to maintain supernova elite anymore.  I began to start playing some games on Absolute Poker.  Despite the software being awful, I realized that the games were very soft and that they gave away bonuses like nothing and I could actually make just about as much rakeback there as I was on Cake.  They also had a 6 man SNG structure called an ultra turbo, where players started with the usual 1500 chips but blinds went up every 2 minutes.  Despite the lower edge, these games were great for overall profit.  I suggested to the VP of Cake that we add this structure.  Shortly after, Cake added the structure and called them super turbos.  Players weren't completely sold at 1st, mainly because people are often afraid of change, but they became pretty popular in a short period of time, eventually becoming the most popular SNG structure on the site.

In the fall I also took a trip to Philly to visit Kenny05 with Little Kraut.  Philly is kind of a dump but it was fun to hang out with Kenny and the cheese steaks were pretty amazing as well.

My girlfriend had graduated from college in he spring and landed a job in Burnsville at that time as a rad tech (taking X rays) at a hospital there.  We started looking at houses together everywhere within 30 minutes of Burnsville and eventually purchased a house in Farmington.  We actually were looking in a higher price range but a co employee of Paula had told her of this amazing house in farmington that was a foreclosure.  We didn't have high hopes but were immediately sold after seeing the house.  It was definitely a nicer house than some of the houses we looked at for $100K more and had everything we were looking for.  If we had known more about the area at the time I might have strayed away from Farmington and more towards an area like Apple Valley, but you live you learn and I still love our house.  On our closing date I proposed to Paula & somehow she said yes.  We set a wedding date of August 8th, 2011.

Getting engaged and living with your fiancee may not be the best thing for your poker profits, but it was a +EV life move.  We're very happy.  I began to mostly work around Paula's schedule and play less profitable hours so that we could spend more time together.  I think it's very important to not poker run your life, as a lot of pros seem to make the mistake of doing.  Instead of making poker your life, you should be trying to make it part of your life.

Not only did I finish the year #1 in overall single table profit, but I finished #1 AND #2 on the sharkscope.com any game 5 to 6 players total profit leaderboard, on my Pokerstars and Cake accounts respectively.  I felt great achievement in dominating a year in that fashion, and my confidence was at an all time high.

Please click on the images to enlarge.

I also think I did a much better job in 2008 of balancing poker with my life.  While 1,510.88 hours may sound like a lot, it's really less than 38 40 hour weeks.  Even if you factor in some studying, it's almost surely less hours than a normal job.  I think spending the right amount of hours on poker is key to having a long and succesful career.  I think most poker pros do a pretty poor job at this.  You will see guys that are lazy and only play 20 hours a week and then you will see guys that play 60+ hours a week with no life balance.  By playing 20 hours a week you aren't taking full advantage of the amazing opportunity you have as a poker pro, and almost surely aren't always doing something better with your time.  It's pretty easy to cut out some meaningless activities during your day and be more productive with your time, thus being able to put in more hours at the tables.  On the other hand, if you're playing 60 hours a week there's a couple problems.  First off, you're setting yourself up to get burned out and probably not enjoying life all that much.  Second off, if you're playing 60 hours a week you likely aren't spending enough time studying the game, so you fail to progress as a player.  If you are playing 60 hours a week and studying enough, well then you're just setting yourself up for burnout even more.  Personally, I think spending somewhere around 35-40 hours a week on poker and taking a lot of vacations is a good recipe for a long and succesful career as a professional poker player.  Of course, there are exceptions to every rule.  Guys like Phil Ivey and Tom Dwan have been known to play 60 hours a week and are certainly having long, succesful careers.

Please click the image to enlarge.

2008 5-10 Seated Total Sharkscope Profit combining multiple screen names:

1. Jared Hubbard: $272,491
Global Alias
2. DDbeast: $194,703
Global Alias
3. Kenny05: $172,464
Global Alias
4. Scoss: $137,915
Global Alias
5. azntracker: $108,912
Pokerstars

Year 2008 Online:

Hours: 1510.88

SNG Profit: $277,395.86 

Rakeback/Bonuses: $178,589.61 

Total SNG Profit: $455,985.47 

Staking: $121,573.29 

Total Yearly Profit: $577,558.76