Done with Carbon Poker...good riddance

Basically, Carbon Poker sucks. Nobody plays, cant make good reads, cant analyze play (no pokertracker). There is just no money going around on that site. Ridiculous rake, 10% ON HEADS UP TABLES WTF? After a few weeks I wind up +$15.9. I decided I'm finished with this stupid site so I go to cash out. I don't have any e-wallets so I go for check or wire transfer. Guess what? They don't do wire transfers, AND THEY CHARGE $15 FOR CHECKS AND THEY DONT CASH OUT CENTS. So I'm breakeven.

So yeah. Hopefully my money comes soon but it's not important, I'm still well rolled for the games I'm going to play. I will be going back to Full Tilt Poker, mostly playing omaha8 SNG's, mixing in some cash games and some large low stakes hold'em MTT's (early double mainly).

Got a message telling me about this omaha book by Moshman, so I will someday (hopefully soon), get it and write a review.

Things are going pretty slow otherwise. Lazy as hell for school, going to fail english if I don't hand in a 5 page paper within the next few days. And sadly, I've been slacking in the data structures class I'm taking at Stony Brook University. Missed 1 homework for 5% of my grade, and I got an 82 on the first midterm. I feel pretty bad about myself for that, especially since the professor is really cool and would probably help me with some projects that I'm working on and maybe write me a letter of recommendation. Also the class is filled with fucking stupid kids...I don't think the honors program people take this class, so I should be dominating.

1 other thing I want to do is finish my table selection program. Don't know if I mentioned it here but it speaks for itself doesn't it? I have a working piece of software that I've been using for hold'em games, and it's pretty good. When I was focusing on hold'em, I had a separate machine that solely datamined 16 tables of games played during the hours I play. I want to do more tables but the problem is 16 is the max for Full Tilt so you have to do it on a new user account, and I haven't found a way to make sure the 2 accounts arent observing the same tables.

My next step will be changing the program so it works with omaha, and if I ever make it nice enough to run outside of my machine, I will certainly post it and it will be free, open source, etc. None of that selling out bullshit *cough* Full Tilt Table Opener *cough* will happen to me.

Oh yeah, brawl. Trying to play as much as possible. There's some tournaments coming up which I want to play in. No recognized names live on Long Island, especially out east like I do so it should be easy. Don't want to get too cocky though, I'll just have to wait and see.

Despite my love for brawl though, I'm going to start playing more poker again, so you'll see more frequent posting here. I've got a computer next to my T.V. which I need for finding online matches, so I might as well have a couple tables open at the same time, right?

Keep checking mooplet.com if you like brawl. We are slowly amassing an article and video collection which should be pretty respected as time goes on and we get a regular viewer base.

Thanks for reading.

March Update

Haven't been playing much poker : ( just so many other things going on.

I've got about $300 in my Carbon roll now, and ive collected about 50 in bonus so I'm playing breakeven. It's not really break even though because they charge 10% rake and I've played a lot of heads up. It turns out you only get FPP's for raked hands, not just hands dealt. I found that out after I had a few thousand hands of heads up played already lol.
So basically, Carbon Poker is stupid. I'm just going to play out the rest of my freeroll entries and try to get some of the March bonuses. I might not even finish the whole bonus. If I really want to take poker seriously there is just not enough volume at that site that I won't win fast enough even if I crush the game every time. And I don't crush the games either, as there's a lot more good players than I thought. Most of the time there's atleast 1 good player at a 6-max table that I sit at, which is annoying.

And by the other things going on that distract me from poker, I am mainly referring to Super Smash Bros. Brawl (SSBB).
Not only am I spending almost all of my time playing it, I've also started a website with my friends Mooplet and Steel Kangaroo. We'll be posting strats, vids, and a bit of personal info to keep interesting. It's named after Mooplet cause he bought the domain for himself ages ago, but he also owns brawlguide.com, which we might use somehow. Right now the current post (March 11, 2008) is about first impressions. My feelings are the same as Mooplet's so if you're interested go check it out. I wouldn't start checking daily just yet as we haven't set it up completely, but after a few weeks it'll be good to go.

Let's see.... other stuff that takes up my time.....
Well, I'm doing more research on voice separation lately. A bit before I started this blog I was given an award by Intel for a project I did with a math professor at Stony Brook. You'll hear more about that after I get somewhere in part 2, which is where the application / patenting (aka $$$) comes in : )

Also taking CSE214 (data structures) at Stony Brook, and I'm trying to get in a bit of cello and guitar practice in too, but it's hardly any now : (

So yeah, I won't be posting much unless I play some big sessions or final table a freeroll. Check out mooplet.com if you like Smash Brawl.

March Goals

So I decided to try my hand at some bonus hunting. I withdrew $600 of my Full Tilt bankroll, which I plan on redepositing to get the 100% bonus (I've been playing on transfered money so I'm still eligible for the bonus).

The first bonus venture was probably a mistake, but it's alright. I put in $250 at Carbon Poker. I didn't read the fine print so I'm stuck with no rakeback, grinding out an insanely huge amount of FPP's to clear this bonus. I'm playing 25NL headsup mostly, because the points are paid by hand so I want to get lots of hands. At this level I get 3 points per hand, and i need to clear about 60k for the bonus. Thats 20k hands. It's not impossibly insane, but it'll take a while, and with no rakeback it wont be as worth it. Also, no pokertracker! That's a serious bummer.

However there's 3 good things.
1. Almost no 2p2ers on this site. There are lots of posts on 2p2 discouraging anyone playing at Carbon Poker.
2. Lots of fish. Carbon Poker attracts just as many fish as other sites, but no good players. I don't need pokertracker to beat people, I just like it to see stats and correct some minor leaks and see graphs, etc. And especially since nobody else uses pokertracker i'm not behind anyone. They have a pretty good note system so I get my stats that way.
3. Pretty decent freerolls. $1000, 500 every day, $2000 every week, etc. Not a lot of players to split the pool with so thats good.


Unless I do spectacularly, I expect to withdraw here immediately after I clear my bonus. Then I plan to go back to PLO8.


I'll also spend a lot more time on two of my most favorite hobbies. First is writing software. I have a few ideas for tools that I'll write over the next months. As you all know there's not a lot of software out there for omaha players. I'm not sure if I'll release them, but most probably I will. I'll have more details about what they are when I actually get around to starting.

The other one is Super Smash Bros. Yep, my friends and I were avid Melee players. We were all pretty active in the New York tournament scene, but we quit because we got discouraged by the huge gap appearing between pros and amateurs. Video games aren't like poker. You have to be the best to win, and table selection is pretty much impossible : ) I think we'll have a good shot at being known figures in the Brawl scene. Hopefully there will be some money in it too, as there was no sponsorship at all in Melee games (other than MLG but that's lame).

Brawl is coming out on the 9th, and we'll all be at GameStop for the midnight release. We all started a website called www.mooplet.com. There's also brawl.magnify.net. Use these sites for videos, strats, news, etc.