ChicagoJoey's Crazy PLO Mission - More Than 650K VPPs in 2 and a Half Months

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ChicagoJoey wants to reach the SuperNova Elite level at PokerStars this year, although at the beginning of October he only had 347K VPPs. 12-16 hour PLO sessions until the end of this year is the plan.

Joe 'JoeIngram1' Ingram, alias ChicagoJoey is not known in the poker world for his exceptional knowledge, but for his exceptional endurance and the fact that he can play a large number of tables simultaneously. Joey has already broken several records in online poker, like playing the most hands in one month (600,000) or playing the most hands in one day (51,312 hands). In both cases, he finished with minimal profit, but the prop bets probably made the whole thing worth it.

ChicagoJoey

In the middle of October, ChicagoJoey set out another incredible goal for himself: he made a 3:1 prop bet with his flatmate BallCup that he would reach SuperNova Elite at PokerStars until the end of this year.

"Just ended my life for the rest of the year and booked a SNE prop bet with my roomate BallCup. I got 3-1 odds and its my $15,000 to his $45,000 and the amount in bonuses I will accumulate along the way is around $90,000" says Joey in his blog.

The challenge will probably truly 'end his life' for the rest of the year, as 12-16 hours gameplay do not really leave much free time. Besides playing, Joey is trying hard to squeeze in an hour of working out every day.

"I am currently at 347k VPP's and need to get to 1 Million by the end of the year. For those people on my FaceBook who have no idea what SNE is, its basically a system on PokerStars where the more hands/hours you play per day, the more rakeback/points you get back for playing. To win this bet I will need to play 12-16 hours a day for the rest of the year and end up playing more hands of PLO in a month then anyone 400-600k hands per month.

Only stipulation is if I get kicked out of Canada for whatever reason then the bet is off. If i lose more then $90,000 playing at the tables I have to quit poker and move back home and get a real job. No webcam as we live together so he will be able to see its me playing.

Some people are going to ask me why in the fuck I would want to do this. Well I like a good endurance/volume challenge and this sure is a helluva one. Also the guaranteed money from SNE and the prop bet is way more then I would make game selecting/playing less tables the next few months so it makes sense to give this a shot.

My basic plan for now is to 24 table PLO50 since some of my hands need to be played there. The last few days I have been playing and seem to go on massive tilt at some point during the session and haven't had winning sessions. To be able to have a clear head and think about all decisions for hours and hours a day while 24 tabling doesn't seem like it will be possible for me to do without losing a ton of money so I have been trying to think of ways to minimize my losses while playing. I've been buying in for 30bbs and playing a super tight game right now and running up stacks and leaving when table is all regs/nitty. Has seemed to work well for minimizing swings so far and will probably stick with it for now. My vpp rate has been lower doing this since I am not playing many hands so I have been trying to overlimp in position in some spots with hands that I would normally fold in hopes to help with VPP and win money at the tables. I'm still trying to figure out a good 3bet range IP and OOP, I think I have been showing a profit 3betting all AAxx hands IP and OOP so far and shoving most of flops in heads up or BB vs SB/BTN situations but when its 3 callers and I am on BTN or BB with weak aces those have been bad spots to 3bet and have not been showing a profit. Also defending lower rundowns OOP or even IP have not been doing well so far for me with stack size and implied odds and FE lower so I am thinking it may be optimal to stick to high card hands as far as flatting pre-flop raises goes and let go of the 3456 and 5689 type of hands.

I am looking forward to getting started playing now and will be updating the blog so hopefully all goes well" says Joey.

Ingram started the challenge on the 11th October, but as it can be seen from the graph below, the shortstack strategy did not prove overly effective, so now he has reduced the number of tables and plays with a full buy-in. The result of this is the increasing tendency shown at the end of the graph.