Coaching for Rakeback Program

Hey guys. Along with playing on Lock Poker, I would like to get into the affiliate game as well. The market is crazy saturated these days with a bunch of solid affiliates out there, so I've recently been asking myself - how can I convince players to sign up through me, and not through another reputable affiliate? What do I have to offer that other affiliates don't (or don't choose to)?

The answer is coaching for rakeback.

My hourly rate for private coaching is $300/hour. That is understandably too expensive for many of you. For me, I can't really justify charging less when I can make close to that amount playing poker. I love coaching, but at the end of the day it's still a business to me.

My goal is to make this as mutually beneficial as possible. You signup through my affiliate, play your normal games, make X amount of rakeback, and then get "free" private coaching from me (paid for by rake that is typically a sunk cost). You maximize value, and I make my private coaching hourly rate. Sounds fair right?

So, how to signup for Lock Poker and get free coaching from me:

1. Clear cookies & internet history
2. Download through the following link: http://refer.lockpoker.com/hokiegreg

After signing up please make sure gtillerhokie@gmail.com is listed as a safe sender in your email. You can also email me with any questions. Before you begin playing on Lock, or even if you already do play on there, you will probably want to read this post by Lock Pro Elite, Jared Hubbard, about optimizing the software: http://jhubpoker.blogspot.com/2011/06/making-most-out-of-lock-pokers-software.html

Along with free coaching, you will also get rakeback through Lock's VIP program. At the end of this post there is a breakdown of the different VIP levels, and the rake needed for each level.

3k in rake = 1 hour of private coaching. So every 3k in rake paid, we will schedule a private session within 2 weeks of reaching your rake goal.

Other perks of signing up through my affiliate:
- Affiliate Skype Chat - you will have access to a Skype chat with other players signed up through me. I will join the chat occasionally for strategy discussion.
- 10% discount on all future FastTrack Programs
- for US players: i can get you 7 total days for wire cashouts. 5% fee on total cashout amount. the best rate available on the net. **you can also do checks by mail, but they are taking 1-2 months.

Black Elite VIP:
Requirements: Pay $5,000 in rake/tournament entry fees per calendar month
Benefits:
-Earn 65% effective rakeback (35% cashback + 10% VIP points + 20% casino bonus)
-$4,000 monthly freeroll entry
-double VIP points every Thursday & Friday (equivalent to an extra 10% rakeback)
-Deposit Bonus (equivalent to about 13% rakeback)
-Dedicated VIP Rep
-VIP Vault Access. The vault is an extra security feature where you can set up a 4 digit pin & secret question in order to gain access to your funds.

Black VIP:
Requirements: Pay $1,000 in rake/tournament entry fees per calendar month
Benefits:
-Earn 50% effective rakeback (30% cashback + 10% VIP points + 10% casino bonus)
-$3,000 monthly freeroll entry
-double VIP points every Thursday & Friday (equivalent to an extra 10% rakeback)
-Deposit Bonus (equivalent to about 13% rakeback)
-VIP Vault Access. The vault is an extra security feature where you can set up a 4 digit pin & secret question in order to gain access to your funds.

Silver VIP:
Requirements: Pay $500 in rake/tournament entry fees per calendar month
Benefits:
-Earn 30% effective rakeback (20% cashback + 10% VIP points)
-$2,000 monthly freeroll entry
-double VIP points every Thursday & Friday (equivalent to an extra 10% rakeback)
-Deposit Bonus (equivalent to about 13% rakeback)
-VIP Vault Access. The vault is an extra security feature where you can set up a 4 digit pin & secret question in order to gain access to your funds.

White VIP:
Requirements: Pay $100 in rake/tournament entry fees per calendar month
Benefits:
-Earn 20% effective rakeback (10% cashback + 10% VIP pts)
-$1,000 monthly freeroll entry
-double VIP points every Thursday & Friday (equivalent to an extra 10% rakeback)
-Deposit Bonus (equivalent to about 13% rakeback)
-VIP Vault Access. The vault is an extra security feature where you can set up a 4 digit pin & secret question in order to gain access to your funds.

Casino bonuses require you to wager 40x the bonus amount in the casino in order to clear the bonus.

Players are eligible for all other promotions (SNG leaderboard, beat beat jackpot,etc...). For a list of current promotions please visit: http://lockpoker.eu/promos/

**Thanks to Jared Hubbard for the VIP explanation, and many of the general ideas that have gone into this program.

I am a Social Media WHORE.

Hey guys. It's been quite a long time since my last blog entry here, but I figure there is no better place to return to the blog world. This blog is super old-school-HokieGreg...I started it when I was at the 33s! Pretty crazy to think about how different a player and person I am today...a lot of success, through countless trials and errors. My poker career has been a rewarding adventure so far, and I'm looking to push myself even further - expanding into other forms of poker, promoting myself in the poker community, and helping other poker players improve as well.

My main goal for this blog is to hold myself accountable to setting and achieving goals - improving myself as a more well-rounded player and as a person. It's really the same reason I started this blog back in 2007 - I figured that "putting myself out there", sharing my goals with other people, would hold me accountable to achieving those goals. Babe Ruth would have looked like a real fishbowl if he called his shot and then struck out, don't you think?

So what have I been up to since my last post on this blog?

NOVEMBER 2010 - BLACK FRIDAY

Before BF, I was pushing myself harder than ever and grinding for SNE - I kept a blog on 2p2 from November 2010 - April 2011 chronicling this period (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/174/poker-goals-challenges/1-year-1-million-hokiegreg-hu-supernova-elite-2011-a-926951/).

Black Friday threw a real wrench into my plans, and I learned quickly a priceless lesson - Adapt or Die. The stability we experienced in the years after UIGEA was an illusion - it was not realistic for us to receive bank wires from fake companies, receiving checks in the mail but we couldn't tell the mailman where it came from ... in hindsight it seems crystal clear. For those of that left large amounts of money online, we overextended ourselves. A business savvy poker professional would have seen this more clearly ahead of time and adapted accordingly post-UIGEA - he would have kept the majority of his money offline, and had a real backup plan ready for if and when things went South. This was all abundantly clear to me on April 15, 2011 - I was the fish, not the victim.

APRIL 15 - MAY 1 2011

So what do I do? I can beat myself up for overextending myself (I had over 40k on Full Tilt, I was lucky it wasn't more), but that is unproductive. Or I can take a negative experience and make a positive out of it by learning from it. After a few weeks of life-tilting, I made the decision to move to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to play on PokerStars.

The one productive thing I did during this time period was make a tribute video to all the regulars that contributed to my success on Stars (don't take this too seriously): http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YT55SYWW

MAY 2011

Before the move to Mexico, I already had plans to run a poker camp in Austin, Texas. This became a little more complicated after Black Friday, but we had the students play on Merge and all went smoothly. It was 6 students in total - from Germany, England, Iceland, Estonia, and United States. I ran the camp with PrimordialAA. It was a cool experience.

Trip Report by the infamous IHeardJoeBlows (husng rap vid extraordinaire): http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=27910829&postcount=236

At a lake with all the guys. No homo:

from left to right - andu_andu, XXX, PrimordialAA, me, IheardJoeBlows, waaghbozz, Kierkegaard





Camp home game. I won a 2k pot in some wild-card game that I didn't know the rules of:

plaid shirt: IheardJoeBlows, maroon sweatshirt: me, big guy white t-shirt: andu_andu, small guy white t-shirt: PrimordialAA, purple hat: Kierkegaard



Between the Austin Camp and the move to Mexico, I went to Atlantic City for 2 weeks and grinded live a bunch, and also went to Rome for a week to visit my girlfriend.

Pic of us overlooking the city:



PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO

After returning from Rome, I was probably only back home in Richmond, VA for a few hours before boarding my flight for Puerto Vallarta. I moved there with former Stars regs Phmerc and SA1251. We rented a big condo way up on a hill overlooking the ocean. It really was the perfect grinding environment. Amazing weather, sick condo with 24/7 staff (maid, concierge, private chef)...just absurd.

I had been in talks with the CEO of Lock Poker about a Lock Elite sponsorship since Austin. The night after I got to PV I heard from Lock's CEO that I was being offered a Lock Elite deal. I obviously snap-accepted, and then quickly came to the realization that this meant that most of my time was going to be spent on Lock Poker now (a site that allows US players) - so why am I in Mexico when I have a girlfriend in Italy? It's a cool place, but I didn't really want to be there long term if I didn't have to.

I decided to just make a long vacation out of the trip, and ended up leaving after a month and taking a direct flight to Rome to live indefinitely.

Puerto Vallarta was a great experience. It wasn't really the crazy party atmosphere I expected it to be - mainly bc it was the off-season, but this worked out for a better grinding environment anyways. I Just climbed up and down our mountain every day going to the gym and throwing kilos through the ceiling, lol. Went to the beach a lot, rode jet skis some, drank a lot in the pool. I had an absurd upswing on Lock Poker, winning like every 1k I played - think I won like 30k that month in just a few hunrded games, which truly trivialized all the months I had spent grinding out a bunch of volume and running below ev throughout the previous year.

Here are some pictures from this trip:

Getting ready for the gym in living room:



Huge Patio:



Taking a nap while registered in a ton of lobbies:



Hanging out in the infinity pool overlooking Puerto Vallarta and the Pacific Ocean:



Discussing 3bet shove dynamics at short effective stacks with myself in the Pacific Ocean:



So yeah, overall really sick trip. I would love to go back one day. I'm grateful for Lock for giving me the opportunity to choose where I want to live, but I think things would have worked out either way - PV was a great place to live and grind. I definitely recommend it as a location for any poker player looking relocate. Contact me for any additional information.

So my new Lock deal allowed me to move to Italy and live with my girlfriend - not possible prior to this because of stars.it. I ended up just spewing really hard and lived in a hotel for the 1.5 months I was there. It ended up being pretty difficult to get reliable internet service in Rome - also, I know zero Italian and believe it or not, neither did my girlfriend (don't ask me how she got by for a year there). Hotels had solid internet, so I made a pretty simple EV calculation and realized that the EV of being able to play on a reliable connection outweighed paying a few thousand extra to live in a hotel for a few months. Baller or retarded? I'm still not sure.

Some pics from Rome:

Out for dinner with girlfriend:





After 1.5 months in Rome, my girlfriend and I decided we had had enough sweaty, hot Italian public transportation for one lifetime and decided to return to the United States. I was cool with not paying $200/night for a hotel room too. Also a car, air conditioning, drive-thrus, Starbucks...I'm a sucker for this country.

So we went back to the US, but only for a short time as I had already planned to run another poker camp in Barcelona, Spain in late August. I felt it was a great location for a camp because of the nice weather, fun atmosphere, and relatively cheap travel costs for my European students. We rented out a villa just outside the city of Barcelona to host the camp. My students at the camp were Kierkegaard, Andu_Andu, Xereles, Eric791989, ValueLOL, NicoASP, and JackONeill and one other French donkey that players on stars.fr <3.

This was my first time doing any one-on-one coaching focusing on hyper turbos - half the players focused most of their volume on this structure. I had spent some time in the previous 2 months working in the FastTrack Forum on HUSNG.com and absorbing as much information as I could from Mersenneary - I learned a ton, but I was still a bit anxious if I was ready to coach $200-$300 Stars hyper regs. I was sure that I had enough to offer them as a coach to justify them paying for the camp, but my goal as a coach is to maximize every dollar you spend - I want to you to come away from coaching thinking about the game better than you did before, with more clarity and confidence in your decisions. In the end, I think the camp was a huge success. It was a challenging, rewarding experience for me.

Here are some pics from the Barcelona Camp:

Home game at the villa. Winner of the HU MTT received a free hour of coaching from me. I won the tournament, so noone got coaching. Bitches. :



Out to dinner with all the guys from the camp. This is me and RaisedByJews after an epic credit card roulette battle. The cc roulette came down to 3 cards, 2 of mine and RBJ's (i was paying for gf too)...I had the sickest hold of my life on a 800 euro tab. RBJ was essentially busto at this time, so it was relatively soulcrushing. It was a hilarious experience nonetheless, and he was a great sport about it:



The infamous tab:



Most homosexual drink of my life with Kierkegaard:



pictured: big guy far left grey tshirt - eric791989, plaid button down shirt goofy-ass grin - Kierekegaard, black t-shirt - Palinca22, small guy white tshirt - Xereles, big guy white tshirt - JackONeill, dude in semi-pink shirt lookin all fresh - Me, orange tshirt - andu_andu, far right white button down shirt - raisedbyjews



Massage before dinner:



After the camp, Brittney and I flew back to Richmond. First class all the way! Champagne you say? Don't mind if I do.:



We rented a 3 bedroom apartment and got settled back into a normal routine. It had been a crazy, adventurous, non-stop past few months. I got back into my routine of coaching, grinding, and going to the gym. Was also running the FastTrack Forum as well.

After being home for a month, it was time to head out again. Lock Poker sponsored a retreat for all of it's pros just outside of Lyon, France at a castle.

No words can do this justice, so here are some pics:

Brittney and I at dinner on the first night:




All you can eat breakfast buffet in a fucking castle? I'm all in!:



Me, BigGuyLegend22, and PrimordialAA looking fresh to death:



Sick View:



Took a carriage ride out into the country for a picnic one afternoon. Obv a peaceful carriage ride quickly turns into a high stake Roshambo showdown with BigGuyLegend and PrimordialAA:



Lock hosted an archery tournament. Awful form imo:



Gardens:



60 person dinner table:



Just an absurd trip. So cool of Lock to do that for us. It was good meeting all the other pros, as well as Lock's staff and upper management. Really great people, and I'm proud to be a part of Lock Poker.

In mid October, we finally returned home from France. I've been in Richmond since then, coaching a lot and trying to get back into a consistent grinding routine. I ran the FastTrack Forum up until this month. I've been making new videos on HUSNG.com, as well as my first hyper turbo videos. I'm trying to get into the social media scene a bit more - I want to promote my name, grow my coaching business, and help others improve their game - I was going to be a teacher before poker turned into a profession for me, so there really is some passion and natural ability there...I love it.

So that's it for me since Black Friday. I think I turned what was a negative experience into a very positive overall experience. It's been a whirlwind journey, and I'm happy to be settled back into a predictable, AMERICAN routine now.

Thanks for reading.

Links of Interest:

Facebook Fan Page: "Like" me on Facebook and feel free to direct any strategy or poker related questions you may have to my wall here. I would like to turn this into a running strategy forum for my former and prospective students over the next few months. Thanks.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/HokieGreg/107396202710164?sk=info

HUSNG.com: I am still making videos here and will be running the FastTrack Forum a few months in 2012.

http://www.husng.com/

My current coaching rates and options:

http://www.husng.com/content/coach-profile-hokiegreg

My twitter page:

http://twitter.com/#!/HokieGregLock