Back in the Game – My Phillipines Poker Journey with SV Poker

had to one site today as I await a gg withdraw so didnt get in as much volume as we'd like got it all in twice on the flop with a set and los to draws did win a small tournament for a grand total of a $6 profit on the day lol better than a loss. it is funny though thats my send single digit winning day this week i think.

Yeah i just looked at it back on the 28th we had a $6 winning day as well so thats 2 $6 winning days this week and a $160 winning day. not the $500 upswing we had last week but not in make up. (we have coaching sessions on Tuesdays so I consider Tuesday to be the end of the week)

But I am happy with how we played, played well but sometimes in poker the numbers dont always show that, but if we can play well and not run the best and still end up slightly profitable then thats a good thing, when the variance balances out we will have better weeks.

Took 2 days off while I was getting verified on a new site and had to move some balances around from different sites. For the current results we are at +33.82 since last cash out.

Did feel good to get a few days off and back on the grind tomorrow. One thing I do worry about idk if its just me but when i move to a different site/software it seems to take me a day or two to get comfortable on the new software with my hud positions and getting everything set up. But we are now back to 3 sites and they are 3 pretty soft sites so hopefully we have a good weekend and we can make some cash outs this weekend, im really not interested in cashing out my share of $33 after crypto fees and everything I'd get something around liek 10-12 bucks so not worth the effort and I'm not starving or anything currently so Hopefully we can just keep moving forward improving and keep moving up levels.

We didnt get to move up to level 4 this week sadly, one of the sites we play on has no HH so without HH we can submit our weekly reports so they cant tell if we are improving. So we have 5 days roughly before our next coaching session to play and get some HH built and hopefully get to level 4 this week if not then definitly next week. If I fail to get to level 4 in 2 weeks it would be a bummer but all we have to do is study and then take what we study and imput it into our game and we should be good and keep moving up.

Also I will be streaming for SV in the future as well as keeping this blog and streaming so I'll get those links posted probably tomorrow.

Oh another gripe for any one looking to move to southeast asia who plays poker for a living specifically MTTs, The Phillipines isnt in the best time zone for the "major" tournaments. currently I am 13 hours ahead of US central time so most sites cater big events to Either US time or EU time and that means crazy early mornings to play or crazy late nights, and I have other priorities outside of poker so the hours I play I do miss out on some bigger MTTs but it does lead to smaller fields so its a give and take, now if you were a cash game player it would be perfect you could wake up and play at peak cash game time and then when they games start to die youd still have most of your day ahead of you.

Ok guys gonna be gone for a week or two for a honeymoon that I owe my wife may do some updates while we are gone we will see. GL see you guys in a week or two

Cu next week bro

They have to improve the economy before anything else. How are the dad's going to support their kids when they can't even make enough to live on for themselves?

Minimum wage on many of the islands is under $10 per day and that's what most jobs actually pay too.

The food isn't even that cheap either, it's cheaper and better quality in Thailand. Electricity is about the same price or a little higher than I paid in the US.

It's comical to bring up child support enforcement under these circumstances.

Its not about child support enforcement its mroe about the cultural issues.

I totally agree with what you're saying. Sadly being a 3rd world country the wealthier families are few and far between.

And if the politicians would stop being so corrupt it would really really help with the economy.

I feel the solution is similar to some of the programs ran in the US during the depression. The town I'm from we have a bridge that is used a ton that was a government ran project built during the depression to help get money into the economy.

The philippines is a beautiful country and if you look at the visa aspect could steal a bunch of tourism from Thailand and other countries.

But it needs to physically be cleaned up certain places are just dirty.

But they have guards every where and the ones I've talked to make about 900 pesos a day work 12 hour shifts and get 1 day off every 14 days and they rotate shifts every 14 days. Now 900 peso a day I have no idea how they live off of that to be honest. I guess I'm just used to living a more American life style I like good food I dont eat a ton of rice either but most locals do so if tou eat a ton of rice which is pretty cheap then a few pieces of meat and maybe some veggies you could live day to day pretty damn cheap.

But once you throw in other expenses like rent utilities transportation. I honestly have no idea how they survive.

They are living off of 25,200 pesos a month so roughly $445 and I'm not sure how taxes work over here.

But I'm outside of manila now I'm a subdivision and the cheaper houses rent for about 5-6k a month with no ac then you have to pay wifi water and electricity on top of that and you can easily push 8-9k a month but that depends on how conservative you are. You could also keep it under 8k a month if you hardly used anything.

F good wise if you just go to the store u can buy a kilo of rise for 20-50 peso depending on the rise you buy. And then buying fish from street vendors is pretty cheap to depending on if you want to cook it or buy it cooked.

So realistically you could as 1 single person live off of 200 pesos a day. It wouldn't be a great life but you'd survive, which most people seem to be doing.

Now my solution for the economy problems and the low income and unemployment. Get a big trash truck or two drive to an area for a few days and and any one who shows up and works for the day pay them 1k. It would be government run to make sure people aren't taking advantage of the situation and it could quickly clean up the country and it would also put money into the economy.

On top of that it would also make the country more viable for tourism other than just the people who are coming here for sex tourism.

We can see this currently happening in the Manila area they are slowly cleaning up the area and BGC has a bunch of money dumped into it. But the government needs to work from the bottom up to improve tourism which would benefit every one.

I just spent 2 weeks traveling here and stayed in some nice resorts and the place cam be really awesome if they just put a little work into it and I hope they do.

I came here because of the low cost of living and my wife's family lives here, but if I was a single guy who wanted to party have a low cost of living where I could live off of my VA paycheck while also building a bankroll and still live pretty well off, I would of chosen thailand Cambodia or one of those other countries simply due to the better infrastructure and cleanliness of the country in general.

I haven't gotten to go check out Cebu yet I hope we get to before we go back to the US later this year but with the baby coming in a few months I'm not sure we will get to.

But all of that aside we are back home honeymoon is done. We will have a bunch of stuff to do to officially close the marriage just had to honeymoon before the wife gets to pregnant to not want to do anything and we are also in the baby prepping stages we have about 2.5 months before my son will be here so got some work to do. But pokerwise we are back and we will be back on the grind tomorrow. We are also going to start streaming so bear with me as we get that setup over the next day or two. I don't currently have a great microphone just the built in one on my laptop so the first day or two might be music only until I can find a better mic to use.

I gotta get my kick and twitch links up off my pc later and I'll get those posted before we start the grind tomorrow. But I am excited to be back and ready to make some money. Definitely need it after these last two weeks. They were price.

Oh and also I decided to spoil you guys and share a photo with you all.

Cute photo, congrats on the baby!

Oh yeah I pretty much agree with you across the board. Thailand had 36 million visitors last year while Philippines had 14. There isn't really any good reason philippines shouldn't be able to catch up with some improvements. They even have the language advantage.

Thanks can't wait to have a son of my own, just the timing was never right, 7 years in the army then I started playing poker full time and that was very swings and inconsistent qhen I started and I didn't manage my bankroll or life roll well so I was just never stable enough to have one. Now that I live here cost of living is pennies on the dollar to the US and even without poker income I make enough money to be very well off here so it's probably the best time to start a family I'll have. My only regret is I wish I was a bit younger but I chose a life style that made that hard to do. I did not wanna have kids when I was in the Army and was actively deploying to some of the most dangerous places in the world. I also worked crazy long days I want to be a good dad who is present. On top of that I also want to be able to provide a good life and I've tried working regular jobs and I'm just not that type of person who can work 40-60 hours a week and not hate my life. I need purpose to my jobs that's why I enjoyed the army so much most things we did, even stupid ****, had some purpose that could be useful in **** situations one day on deployment. I also know what good leadership should look like and most people in leadership positions in the civilian world are dicks and are typically on a power trip. So civilian regular jobs didn't work out. Luckily I have a very natural ability to make money at poker and when I work hard and study I do pretty well.

So I'll be a slightly older dad than I planned but in return my son will have a very present father a mother who can stay home with him he'll never know what it is to be dirt poor like me and his mother were growing up and he'll have a good life with plenty of opportunities and options.

On the entire Thailand thing I agree the Phillipines should be beating out thailand. The entire culture is more American/western influenced, not much of a language barrier, for visas most western countries can come here visa exempt for 30 days end extend ur visa for 2 months at a time for 3 years at which point you have to leave for 24 hours then your 3 years starts over again. In Thailand with my current age and situation the most I could do would be 2 180 day stays a year and then you get into the gray area of border hopping and they could just say no one day and you're stuck finding a new place to live. Of course that's only a problem for long term stays.

Even with that though both countries Sadly focus a lot of sex tourism but even that seems to be more regulated and "safer" in Thailand. In the philippines every month or two there seems to be a HIV warning for a high number of out breaks.

Not to mention safety, I've had one attempted pickpocket by some young boys when I was coming home from the casino at like 4 am but besides that I haven't had many issues. But I've gone down and checked out a few of the party areas, I don't drink but I could see how if you did drink you could run into some problems.

At the end of the day a lot of it comes down to corrupt politicians.

The US left the Phillipines earlier then we were supposed to and qe left them as a unstable country that is easily corrupted and a few more years of the US helping set up infrastructure and train police would of gone a very long ways

Oh also we adjusted poker sites right before we left so no more GG or ACR. I'm looking to make money not glory.

For some reason poker players including myself we all want to play the biggest vest sites, but we know that those sites attracted the best players, yet we see players who could be crushers on other sites end up being small winners or even worse losing players chasing glory on these big sites. I'll take consist small cashes over a few big scores a year every time.

I don't want to give away every site I'll be playing on because ai didn't even know one of them was a site until I joined SV and they got me playing on there.

But I'll happily take smaller fields and smaller swings over massive fields with huge prizes pools but there's several thousand people you have to outlast to get that big score. Especially when it comes to being staked, less make up more consistent profit splits sometimes multiple times a week payouts. That's a much better feeling than watching that make up number climb and climb

Actually I'm an idiot ill be streaming so I guess I can share the sites I'll be on.

This week I'll be playing on PokerDom
Chico
Winamax

Might add in Ipoker next week at we will see how these 3 feel

And sadly I can't stream Chico so you will only get to see winnamax and pokerdom games.

First day back lost about $60 made dome deepish runs lost. A massive pot with Qaq v T9s in a 3b pot 9 high flop that would of made us cheap leader in a decent tournament with about 20 left.

But just typical MTT stuff really losing all ins bluffs getting looked up by weak hands when we have a massive combo draw and miss all of our outs you know tournament poker full of fish type of deal.

Also it always seems to take me a while to get used to a new site and a new hud. This is the first time playing on winnamax and the first time being able to use the SV hud.

I don't know much about h2n which is a requirement for SV and should be the standard for most players any way but I'm currently trying to make the hud more see through or smaller because when I multi table the hud is to big and covers most of the table.

Also 99% of poker in the Phillipines is awesome but for mtts the hours kind of suck. Most sites base their mtt schedule around EU or American players so sites like Chico really suck and don't have much to offer me in terms of games to play during my hours so we will have to look into fixing that or just stick to 2 sites.

But any way nothing exciting today back at it tomorrow

Ok so right we need to be smarter with out profit splits we get here. Currently I make roughly 131k php from my monthly VA disability check. That gets split up into 20k allowance for me 20k for the wife, 20k for grocceries for the month, 20k for the baby fund, about 26k for rent, and 10k a month for our maid. so that comes out to 106k a month, i got a few other bills and debt i have to pay off back in the us still so that comes out to about 12k php which puts us at 118k total in expenses leaving us 13k php left over for the month for extra random expenses, mostly used to order in food or pay for grab rides or any other random things here and there.

Now thats not bad I could sit here for years doing that and we would live pretty well, that puts up in the upper, but not rich, income bracket in the Phillipines.

BUT I WANT MORE.

So the markets are down stock wise and crypto wise and people are panicking. So we are going to start small 10% of every cash out we get goes into crypto, 10% into some random stock that we can get ahold of, and 20% into savings with 3.75% apy. leaving us with %60 of our cash out

With this we are going to dedicate 10% to sports betting, 10% into the baby fund leaving us with 40% of our cash out being left over.

So we need to use that 40% somewhere. make our money make us money.

So lets see we have 5 things we are investing in so lets bump each one by 8%

so
18% crypto
18% stock
28% savings
18% sports betting
18% baby fund

I think that is a good plan and sports betting is a gamble of course but I have a friend who is a professional sportsbetter who is teaching me the ropes and hes giving me some picks here and there and we are betting in 1-3% units so we arent riskign our entire bankroll in a day so we can deal with the variance.

But I think this is the best way to make our money make us money currently as we build the portfolio we can start to move into bigger stuff and bigger investments with bigger returns.

Obviously the end goal would be to own several properties in different coutnries we could Air BnB out to people and still have enough in other investments to get good returns on those as well.

So thats the plan for now. I chose these options as well because I dont want to currently lock up and funds long term that I cant get to in need of an emergency until we build the other accounts.

About time to start grinding good luck today fellas

Looks like a pretty wise well diversified breakdown, maybe a bit heavy on sports but hopefully it'll go well. Good luck! Make some deep runs!

Sports may be a bit heavy but as long as were betting units of 1-3% our chance of ruin is pretty low so that basically jsut become a high risk high return investment account long term

Yeah i wouldnt click that link any one

Basically broke even today had 1 ft for 3rd just couldnt win a hand 3 handed sadly

back at it tomorrow

How the tables been treating ya?

Sadly real life happened. The baby is causing complications. Every one is fine but we have to take a ton of precautionary steps just to ensure he doesn't come to early and everything is OK. Been several ER trips with the wife and several multiple day stays in the hospital to make sure every one comes out happy and healthy after every thing is done. Luckily as of this moment mom and baby are still healthy and as happy as a mom who is going through it all can be.

With that being said I'll be stepping away from poker for a while. I luckily have other streams of income and investments so poker is a source of income but doesn't have to be my primary one.

I'll be leaving the stable since the terms say the longest vacation you can take is 1 month and I'll probably be gone till at least August just to make sure every thing turns out ok, my son is due the last week of June or first week of July, and with everything going on I'd just be torching money. I tried to play after our 2 weeks but even those 2 weeks we spent 4 days in and out of the ER.

Once I got back from that and tried to play more I just was to distracted to put in solid volume plus training time and meet the requirements of the stable.

I am upset I have to step away for a while I was getting into a good groove and I think SV is a very good stable with a very good concept and I hope to be back one day.

I may still update this but it won't be poker related much so I'm not to sure what else I would post about.

Good luck everyone I feel like we were just getting in a groove with the stable and playing again and the blog and we were all setup to start streaming but my child and my wife are more important than poker as I'm sure you all understand. I'll see you all at the tables in the future.

Damhill

Sorry to hear it, best of luck to you and the wife.

I appreciate it man. Just Sadly when I have to make sudden er runs or sudden medication runs it's hard if I'm stuck in 8 mtts or running deep in 1 or 2.

Luckily I found some smaller gold mine sites I can play cash games on that are regulated but are philippines sites so gonna see if I can't find some staking and play those for some passive income.

Good luck us and good luck everyone

Sent you a PM let me know if you got it. The new formatting of 2+2 drives me crazy (maybe it's just mobile)

Yeah I got if and I agree the new 2+2 is strange for sure

My poker career is over my reputation is ****ed.

I got staked to play cash on some smaller philippines sites.

Got staked about 26k was up to 44k
Decided to deposit some money for my own and play some hands of black jacking because I was bored. Meant to click double bet accidently clicked max bet lost a 64k hand of black jack. So gg my reputation and gg my career for probably a long long time and gg this forum.