Ravageur's Life Thread

[Ravageur]

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty late to the blogging party, mainly because in the past I wanted to focus all my poker related energy on playing rather than wasting my time venting on a Blog (see my brother's blog ). But I then realized that I end up wasting so much time on other crap anyway, and I intend to keep this blog constructive and eclectic so fk it, let's see where this goes. This is going to be TL;DR for pretty much everyone, so don't even bother starting if you don't want to hear some nonsensical rants.

First, some background on myself for those who don't know me:

I started playing poker about 5 1/2 years ago (I came to Montreal for school 7 years ago) and despite going bust a few times in the first few months and having terrible bankroll management, I still managed to support myself through my years doing an International Business degree. Once I finished that, I had no idea what to do with myself (Mentally I wasn't ready yet for a 9-5) so I went back to school in English Litterature to pursue one of my hobbies, reading. I was doing fine, but more importantly I was starting to make significant amounts of money with poker, including some decent scores in tourneys and having good results at 1/2 all the way up to 5-10NL. And so 17 months into my new program, my brother Genitruc won a trip for two on a Caribbean cruise which also included a 3k buyin Event. Unfortunately it happened to coincide during my exam period, and that's how I ended up as one of the chipleaders of the CPC main event with 3 tables left - Special Tournaments 2008 - Caribbean Poker Classic - PokerListings.com

If you scroll halfway down, I was the guy with a Budweiser hat 'in trouble'. So I nut bubbled/flamed out of that pretty hard, but it also lead me to pursuing poker as my main focus. 2009 was a good year which included lots of poker and lots of traveling. I highly recommend to any young people to spend some time on your own in Europe. I spent three weeks walking the Compostella (Camino de Santiago) through Northern Spain and though it takes a huge toll on you physically, it turned out to be one of my better life experiences thus far. You do a good 20-40km a day through all sorts of different types of terrains and you meet people from all over the place doing the trek for different reasons. Traveling through Europe is just so fast and close, at least for someone coming from the vastness that is Canada. Bleh, i'm getting off track.

So, for how good 2009 was, 2010 was equally terrible.

I set high goals for myself last year, including hoping to buy a place for myself in the city, but I managed to start the year off on a soul crushing 65k downswing at 2/4-5/10. That coupled with a WSOP ME bustout and an EPT bustout in Tallinn and I was pretty negative/depressed about poker (I should note that Tallinn was an awesome city to visit; bars never closing ftw). So, I made a site switch towards the end of October and the past three months I've seen some encouraging results. This brings us to now (2011 bitches). This year I'm just saying fk it, cashing out a bunch of my roll with the hope/intention of purchasing a condo (i'm reverse jinxing the inevitable doomswitch) and I am going to try to either get back to school in the fall to do some film studies and/or finish my Eng Lit degree. The reason for going back to school is that in my experience, you really can only play poker for so many hours without falling into your B and C game, and I find myself with too much free time on my hands that I'd rather use learning new things.

Alright, let's get down to it.

Necessary graph of 2009 upswing/2010 downswong(Graph is a combination of GBP and Euros)




And my last few months since rededication/site change:





So I guess that's it, I'll update this with poker progress, I intend on trying to play about 1.5k hands/day 5 days/week with a mix of tournaments including the sunday mill. Also for any interested I'll share what it's like trying to get a mortgage as a poker player in Canada. I intend on having my first meeting with the bank about it next month which should lead to some super awkward questions and answers. I'm still enrolled in school despite my poker shenanigans and not stepping foot on campus in a while. Alright, off we go!

Vamos!