Top Twenty

My main focus this year has been on the Maui Jackpot Sit N Gos. My successful journey so far has seen me play around seven hundred games and achieve two top twenty Sharkscope rankings and win three consolation bonuses for 150 Euros. I am currently ranked seventh for the best 100 streak average profit at this level this year and ranked eleventh for the best 500 streak average profit. The former has a good chance to see the year out and become permanent but the latter could be close to call. I am very pleased with my efforts especially as there are an increasing number of regulars playing these games. Overall I am up $1713 year to date and intend to continue my Maui mission playing perhaps another thousand games this year whilst mixing in some other action on Full Tilt and Pokerstars. 

Most recently my form has been somewhat patchy but I ended May on a very high note, a sequence of 12211 leading to a consolation win and a near thing on the 37000 Euro Jackpot. In both second place games I had a chip lead during heads up play but could not quite take them down. I played the final four games simultaneously and having won one must have been at least 25% to win it all when heads up in the other three. A great effort but also massively frustrating. I could recount the hands that would have clinched it for me in these games but I won't. To be fair I had plenty of luck along the way in the five games so I can't get too hung up about the final outcomes. I have to take forward the positives from this. Once again I have got myself into a great situation. When there I was relaxed and playing well despite the huge potential jackpot. I made no mistakes when it really mattered. The key for me now is to get there again soon and hope luck and skill can take me just a little further, finally to Jackpot glory!

Good Luck.

One Dollar

The outcome of my challenge over the lent period was in a sense a failure. I did not hit forty wins in the Maui games I played and I failed to achieve a 15% win rate. I came close but I failed. However in many ways the period was a great success. It was a pretty profitable period, an enjoyable poker experience and a significant period of my life. I managed to amass over $450 profit via the 267 Maui games I played. Exactly $1 profit per game plus 150 Euros for a consolation bonus, plus a little rakeback. I also managed to achieve a Sharkscope ranking for a 100 game hotstreak. I am currently in fourth place and it should last the year out in the top ten. If I can play well over the next month or two I could also add a 500 game streak to my repertoire.

Interestingly, in the initial period of my challenge, when I set the one hundred game performance marker I was off work following an appendix operation. For the most part in this period I was relaxed, well rested and playing my A-Game. My previous response to the solid advice "don't play tired" has always been that if I didn't I would never play. I am always tired in truth, trying to jemmy in far too much each day - squeezing in some leisure time around my work and my family. In this week or two however things were different. I was compounded to rest. You could argue that this was just a coincidence but suddenly my poker skill was elevated, my patience increased, my confidence boosted. Throughout this period I was also not drinking alcohol, which I usually would have been whilst playing poker. Again a positive no doubt. I genuinely wonder what I could achieve in such ongoing circumstances. However, as I write I am back at work, way too tired to be doing this and should be in bed. Nevertheless my quest for more dollars continues.....

Giving Up - Mini Maui Challenge

My wife recently ran a Sunday School session on giving things up for the upcoming lent period and the importance of self discipline. Inspired by Jesus and by her I have resolved to give up some bad habits over the next forty days or so. The aim here is not centred on Christian belief or on a noble desire to better myself though. I am simply intending to win more money playing poker by adjusting my lifestyle. For this period I will no longer go to bed way too late, drink too much or be distracted whilst playing. Instead I will play focused poker, specifically trying to win the jackpot sit n go games I have built my poker existence around. Between 18th February and 5th April I will challenge myself to win forty Maui Jackpot Sit N Go games with an overall win rate of 15%.

None of this will be easy but I certainly play my best when well rested, focused and working to specific aims. For anyone who cares (mainly me) I will update the number of wins and my win percentage as I go along:



Final number of wins: 38 (out of 267 games)

Final win rate: 14.2%  

My recent activity has been hindered by an unexpected surgery (had appendicitis!) causing me to miss a good few days play. It may be few more days before I am fully operational poker wise. On a plus note I am way ahead of schedule in terms of drinking less and sleeping more!

A week later I have been boosted by a consolation win. One hundred and fifty Euros for a sequence of 11221. I am playing well and running good, so good that I have now established a best 100 streak average profit top twenty leader board ranking on Sharkscope. Currently placed seventh, it may not be good enough to last the year on the leader board but it is very encouraging and I am now aiming to develop this into a best 500 streak ranking. 

As I approach the end of my challenge I am struggling for a win. A couple of poor sessions have been followed by a really good one, but with four seconds and no wins. My win rate is down to the magic 15% now which is still really good overall but I am starting to run out of time to hit my target number of wins.

With one session remaining I need two more wins to hit forty in total. I am running just below the 15% win rate mark. Whatever happens it has been a solid, profitable effort with elements of really good play by me. 

No win in my final session so thirty eight Maui wins in total at just over a 14% win rate. A shame not to hit my target having come so close but a really good effort. More reaction and statistics in a few days.


Take care, good luck to you and when it arrives Happy Easter!

Jason (Kartajana)

It's a Trap!

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away Admiral Ackbar uttered the classic "It's a trap!" line as the Rebel Alliance attacked a fully operational Death Star. As a kid I loved these movies and I have enjoyed watching them again with my own kids thirty years later. The joy of setting a trap is not just for those prone to the dark side. In poker one of the greatest feelings comes from executing a successful trap move. When I started playing this involved slow playing a set. These days I trap mainly using my old friends aces and kings. In early position at most stages of a sit n go or tournament I regularly limp with super premium hands. Often faced with a raise I then exploit my confused opponents by re-raising big style. In a mixed start to the year I have had one notable success on Pokerstars which developed out of this trapping with kings and aces strategy:

PokerStars Tournament #1099432314, No Limit Hold'em
Buy-In: $13.78/$1.22 USD 
45 players 
Total Prize Pool: $620.10 USD  

Tournament started 2015/01/04 17:56:20 ET 
Tournament finished 2015/01/04 19:11:50 ET 

  1: Kartajana (United Kingdom), $192.26 (31.004%) 
  2: pipiki (Greece), $133.32 (21.499%) 
  3: Matheeeew (Slovenia), $102.31 (16.498%) 
  4: Leviathan74 (Greece), $77.51 (12.499%) 
  5: DrTee28 (United Kingdom), $55.80 (8.998%) 
  6: wondras3005 (Czech Republic), $37.20 (5.999%) 
  7: cockneyboy19 (United Kingdom), $21.70 (3.499%) 


So if you do come across me at the tables limp, three betting you don't need to be a Jedi to work out what I have. Cheers and may the force be with you in 2015.

2014 Review

2014 was a decent year for me poker wise. An overall profit of around $2300 is nothing to get too excited about but it represents progress and a period when I made money on all the three poker sites I play on. I also made a profit in all the different Jackpot Sit N Go formats. Above is the combined position on Betfred for the year (95% jackpot sit n go games), which overall I am pleased with. I definitely gave myself a chance to win big whilst making a modest profit. Not a bad scenario when you are having fun. Timing wise I am on a bad run, so the year end is helpful in a way.

For 2015 my approach is to start off by concentrating on what I am good at. On Full Tilt I will continue with the Flipout Tournaments, on Betfred the Maui Jackpot Sit N Gos where the jackpot is currently 50,000 Euros and on Pokerstars my old favourite the $7 45 man games. I will work on my sit n go strategy via Nick Wealthall's on-line course which I need to spend further time reviewing.

Ideally I will make twice as much profit in 2015 and make twice as many blog posts which I have neglected a little last year. The two are not mutually exclusive. If I get the chance at a big win again all the better. 

Good luck at the tables in 2015.

Focus On Fish

If you want to progress in sit n gos you need to focus on fish. That was the message from Nick Wealthalls latest marketing campaign for his new online training course Sit N Go Shortcuts. The solid premise being it is easier to win more from poor players than improve against the good ones. Sounds good. Count me in. For me this is a chance to update my game, review my strategy and focus once more on maximising my win rate in the jackpot games. 

A few weeks into the course I am happy with my decision. The material is interesting, useful and sometimes quite amusing. I tend to listen/watch the videos whilst playing which is probably sub-optimal in lots of ways but I am enjoying them and my game is improving. I have definitely already made a couple of adjustments. I am changing the way I deal with a specific tricky spot and have an improved heads up approach. I still though have a long way to go to entrench this material and work through all the action steps. Most of all my general confidence has improved because I am working on my game and enjoying it and as a result my results have progressed.

Recently I have had a couple of near miss sequences on the Jackpot trail. The Maui games saw a sequence of 11151 when playing for 41000 Euros and in the Rio games I played a run of 151111 for 110000 Euros. In both cases I was a coin flip or two away from the big one. Having won four Rios I had a realistic shot at a big pay day, perhaps one in twenty-five to win £100,000! Normally my fifth place in the next game would be a source of great frustration but not following my recent work with Nick and some personalised feedback relating to the jackpot games. I had e-mailed him a very specific question about the adjusting your approach/game once closing in on a jackpot winning sequence. This is part of the deal for the first sixty days after sign up. My response was in short excellent. I consider myself a bit of an expert in this sphere having played around 15,000 jackpot games and I liked/agreed with what he had to say - but it also meant quite a lot to hear another point of view on this specialist area. Without giving it all away there was three key aspects to his advice that I empathised with most:

1.Having won three or four games jackpot games on the bounce you will probably lose the next one - that's just the maths. Very true.
2.Keeping the jackpot situation out of your mind is very important. Agreed.
3.When in the later stages of sequence be absolutely playing your best poker, disciplined, focused and always aggressive. Good stuff.

Cheers Nick.

Flipin Obvious

Earlier this year, following the end of the Daily Double promotion on Full Tilt I was looking for some new action to satisfy my multi table tendencies. I found two options that complied with both my time frame and my bankroll:

1. As a sit n go player who really loves an MTT but hasn't really got the time the new Flipout Tournaments are great. The tournament begins with a shootout round, which features a flip tournament format. In this round, all players go all-in automatically on every hand and one player per table progresses to the next round. The bubble bursts at the end of the first round and all players who reach the second round in a Flipout Tournament will share in the prize pool. They are effectively a sit n go disguised as a MTT - but with an added bonus - random players not the best players make it to the latter stages. My results are as below. A higher than normal win rate with super time efficiency built in.

2. I also identified a knock-out tournament which fitted perfectly into my poker evening. OK so its turbo structure was a bit on the fast side for my patient MTT game and at $24 was a little pricey but surely I could adapt and get stuck in when needed. Or perhaps not! See below. A series of min cashes has done nothing for my overall result. In these tournaments the money is at the final table and I have only made one brief guest appearance finishing ninth. Whilst the graph does ignore probably $200 worth of bounty prizes there can be do denying my poor run playing this game. Certainly whilst luck plays a bigger role in this type of turbo structure I probably played bad as much as ran bad.

Incredibly, given the charts above, this is the same player, playing the same site, the same variant of poker at the same time. I wonder which game I should focus on - Flipin obvious really. I have removed the knock-out game from my options. See you at the flipout tables soon. 

On the sit n go front I have just embarked on a new learning chapter designed to give me the best chance possible to improve my Jackpot game win rate.  More next time. I continue to play the Maui games and this new information should help me maximise my return whilst working on improving my game.

Good Luck.