It's been almost 24 hours since I have arrived in Thailand, where I will be for the next nine months. Together with two of my poker friends, also from Poland, we will be renting a house in Phuket and, at least I, will be grinding hard. We are currently staying in a hotel in Phuket Town and I hope we will be able to move in to the house and settle there within one week (too optimistic?). We have made the move in the off season specifically to be able to have better choice and prices of the houses. I have come to Thailand with some specific grinding challenges in mind.
The first part of my Thai grinding goal is to get to 500,000 VPPs. I currently have 187,000, but the first half of the year was full of poker trips; two weeks at PCA, UKIPT Edinburgh and London, Eureka Rozvadov, Estrellas in Valencia and Marbella. All in they took away about two months of grind time. In Thailand my main focus will be online poker so I'm not going away to a single live tourney until January 2014 PCA.
My perfect online day consist of three sessions, each 2.5 hours long. This means I play about 10,500 hands a day. Every 1,000 hands give me around 240 VPPs. I play 6-max Zoom, four $50 and four $100. I am assuming I will on average play four full days (of three sessions) and three days of two sessions each and every week. I count four weeks in every month, so the extra days will give me some space when needed. I also know there will be time when I will be playing less, especially now in the beginning, and later as we will be leaving Thailand every two months to renew the visa and visit other places in Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, HongKong, maybe some others) for two or three days. None of us have ever been to Asia before, so we want to see some other places as well. Also, there will probably be times when others friends are visiting us, so we'll be playing less then as well.
Four weeks of grinding will give me 60,000 VPPs, 210,000 FPPs and 250,000 hands. Six months will get me 360,000 VPPs, 1,260,000 FPPs and 1,500,000 hands. That means I hit four milestones and 12.5 $1,600 bonuses. This is exactly $20,000.
So what's the other half of the challenge? Well, I hope to make $20,000 on the tables, too. However, since I started playing 100bb 6-max cash games exclusively (January 1st 2011) my win rate is only 1.24bb/100 (ev1.45bb/100). Before then I played the old 20-50bb tables where I was playing 50bbs and made Supernova Elite on $100-$600NL tables. I need 2bb/100 on my 'nl75' (half nl50 and half nl100) for the
remaining of the year to make it. To be exact, 2bb/100 for the 1.5m hands would give me $22,500.
Recently, I have made some changes to the way I grind and to my mental game. That's why I decided to target 2bb/100 for my challenge.
Here is my graph for the last 2.5 years, it is exactly 4.323.934 hands:
There will not be any side bets or other bets attached to this challenge, I am doing it strictly for myself and also as a part of bigger challenge (but more of that later). Moving to Thailand is also a step towards my other goal which I did not accomplish for nine years of my professional poker career:
[ ] spending less money
However, I may do something to celebrate or to punish myself at next year's PCA, which will start shortly after my challenge ends. If you have any ideas, let me know.
Grzegorz 'DaWarsaw' Mikielewicz is a member of Team PokerStars Online.