PokerTableRatings

In mid-2009, PokerStars small stakes player “Ballcup” decided to take prop bet action on his attempt to reach the top level of the VIP Program, SuperNova Elite. This VIP level is worth approximately $115,000 and takes one million VPPs to achieve. During this “challenge” Ballcup achieved in five months what many fail to set out to do during an entire year. Shortly after accomplishing his goal and winning $45,000 in prop bet money on top of the SNE rewards, Ballcup spent an extensive amount of time for an interview with Poker Table Ratings. This is part 1 of 2 for the interview, so stay tuned for the rest, coming later in the week.

PTR: Before getting yourself into the challenge, what was your poker life like and how did you grind yourself through the cash game ladder?

Ballcup: I started out as a fixed limit Hold’em player 5 years ago. I also played heads up SNGs during that time with moderate success. Back then I suffered from all the pitfalls of a new professional gambler. I didn’t play enough; I locked up wins and at the same time was an emotional wreck. Finally a buddy of mine who was playing No Limit Hold’em told me how great it was. I hopped into the no limit 6max game in early 2007. I immediately had success at NL50, moved up to NL100 with huge success, moved up to NL200 and continued to have huge success.

I was basically ready to keep moving up and thought “If its double the limit, its double the profit!, right?”. So I moved up to NL400 and hit a wall. I struggled there and moved back down to the NL200 games and continued there with pretty good success. I have been content at NL200 and dabbling at NL400 until now. I think now it is time to test my abilities and move up limits aided with some good coaching. It’s easy to be content with your income at these low stakes games which has prevented me from moving up. However, with the advice of friends and some thought of my own, I suppose it is time to give NL600-NL1000 a serious shot. I’m not going to live forever. Imagine my son when I am 60 years old: “Hey Pops, you’re the bomb at the NL200!”.

PTR: In July you talked to a couple of friends who convinced you that this wasn’t just possible but something that you should be pursuing. Could you talk about that process and, if possible, pinpoint the moment you felt that this was something you were going to go after?

Ballcup: My brain is fuzzy about exactly how it went down, but here is the general timeline:

Early July: Completely fed up with Full Tilt Poker’s software problems and left their site for good. I made my return to PokerStars after being gone for 9 months. At that point I got excited about playing on PokerStars for the rest of the year and going for SNE in 2010. I made an original goal of hitting 400k VPPs this year to lock up some decent milestones.

I Told Patsy (my girlfriend) about my plan to pursue SNE in 2010, and of course I had to explain to her what the hell SNE was. She responded, “Why can’t you do it this year?” to which I laughed and said, “It would be impossible to do it in 5 months.” We talked on the phone a little longer and I soon went to bed.

The next day I got on the phone with Patsy again, still talking about a SNE pursuit for 2010. Patsy proclaimed, “Seriously why can’t you do it this year?” and I replied: “It can’t be done, but fine – I’ll do some calculations to see how impossible it would be.”

I did the math and it didn’t seem any easier or harder than I anticipated, but seeing it on paper inspired me I guess. It was literally at that point that I made a split second decision to do it. I walked around the house excited and nervous, calling some friends. I called Jilly and he said, “I bet you can get prop bet action.” Next thing I know there was $45,000 in action against me and a thread with people following this prop bet.

I guess the point is, I was set up so I couldn’t fail in my mind. I was going to do this without any prop bet or thread. Would I have made it? I have no idea. I will say this, without Patsy this never would have happened. Without Jilly Dollars there would have never been a prop bet. Without Dave I would have been starving in December. Without Spaghetti I never would have gotten out of my losing streak in September. Without Squizz there would have been no Theamine to balance out the caffeine and ephedrine (haha). Without this thread and the handful of guys constantly encouraging me, I would have no motivation. Without the haters, I would have had no extra motivation. So thank you to everyone who contributed.

PTR: How did the prop bet come together and what necessary steps did you take to make sure it went smoothly?

Ballcup: My friend “Jilly Dollars” basically set the whole thing up, wrote the contract, and recruited the action. A lot of the bettors were very trustworthy and honorable members of the poker community which helped it go smoothly. He wrote up an extensive contract and he negotiated a way for PokerStars to escrow all the action from my end as well as the bettors. PokerStars then held the money until the end of the bet.

PTR: Early on you battled what you called a brutal downswing near the end of July and into August. Looking at your data posted from your blog, you did run well below EV. Do you think that the stress of playing so much added to the negative results at the tables?

Ballcup: When the Ballcup challenge first started, things ran semi smoothly. My win-rate dropped from a pre-challenge 2.0 pt bb/100 to break even, but hey, I could live with that. With the bonuses and prop bet, break-even wasn’t half bad. I expected I would lose about 1bb off my usual win-rate when I started this whole thing. Well, what happens next, I stopped breaking even and I started losing. However I was running *way* below EV. In my mind, I focused much more at EV to judge my performance, especially when deciding if something needs to be fixed.

It was frustrating but I knew I was just running awful in July and August, so I wasn’t really worried. I was 25% finished when I left for Costa Rica, a trip that was planned before the idea of the prop bet even existed. However, I didn’t want to cancel the trip as I was already committed to it, and was really looking forward to it. I got back September 1st for the toughest 4 month grind stretch of my life. September began and I lost a little over $1,000 a day for 18 straight days. This time, unfortunately, I wasn’t running below EV. As far as coolers and other variance factors, I wasn’t running great, but something was clearly wrong with my game. I had zero confidence and was really confused as to what was happening. Never during this time was a worried I was going to lose the prop bet, but I was really concerned about how much I was going to lose at the tables.

I took about 2-3 short days at the tables in order to study some leaks with the help of some HEM software and videos. I identified one major statistical difference in my game from the way I played before the challenge. This wasn’t the only leak or difference in my game from before, but it was a single major one. You asked if I think the stress of playing so much affected the negative results – yes, absolutely. Whenever you play that type of volume, you are playing worse, period. But I want to talk about this statistic, because maybe it will help someone in my shoes. Due to the fact that I was on so many tables, so much more than I was used to (I played 12-16 table before this challenge vs. 18-24 during challenge), I wasn’t C-BETTING nearly as much. Being on so many tables made me go into extreme autopilot, often times I would forget who the heck the pre-flop raiser even was. As a tight player, flop c-betting is a major factor. Someone even posted that exact advice to me in the thread after I found the leak, which helped me re-affirm the validity of my problem/solution.

PokerTableRatings.com would like to thank Ballcup for his extensive answers to our questions. We encourage all readers to check back in at the end of the week for the conclusion to our interview.

Tags: BallCup, interview, poker player, Prop bet, Supernove Elite

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 11:04 am and is filed under Featured Articles, Poker Player Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.