Brenos Poker

Move along January...

2011-01-31T23:34:00.001Z

Bleh, poor start to the year.

Work: Shit. The other lass who helps produce the papers has been in hospital and off sick a lot. Putting together three 8-page newspapers in a week from scratch yourself is a lot more work than it sounds. And it looks like I'm going to be doing it again this week as she's off again today and text me tonight saying she's still bad for tomorrow. Without question she's not well though, one of the most committed employees I've worked with actually. Get well soon.

Poker: Shit. I played a couple of really long, heavily losing sessions to start the month. Obviously forgot how to play after a long break. Infact, that is actually true. I un-learned tilt control and was emotionally edgy for the two sessions. Cue spew and heavy loss. Have scrambled to dig myself out of a massive hole and have done to a certain extent, but still will be finishing January with a £1k poker loss :-(

Shares: Shit. After the quite ridiculous commodity bubble Q4 2010 and the first two market days of 2011, I have just seen red day after red day. It's pretty depressing logging in to see -£400, -£300, -£500 day after day. I've actually made a paper profit of £2k this month, but discounting the first two market days I've seen loss after loss total over £5k.

Health: Shit. I got majorly fat after Chrimbo and into freezing January. I got an infection the second week in Jan and was in a right state. Cold sweats on top of the usual flu shitty feeling, and I had to do a full week at work as my colleague was in hospital! Not my best week! On the 16th I was 15st 3lbs and looked a mess. Slapped myself around a bit and am on a mega diet and bike routine for the next two months at least. Happy to report I've lost 7lbs in two weeks though and am on track for being sub 14st for holiday.

I've also paid for a stag weekend, a week in Egypt end of March (gulp!) and have another weekend golf trip to pay for shortly. I'm pretty badly skint at the moment as I can't withdraw from poker as roll is much shorter than normal, and any share profits are locked up for the time being. I'm hoping newsflow allows for a big sell off in ~6 weeks as I want to get some assets moved around to be more tax efficient and hopefully avoid CGT this year.

For the last week or so I've grinded NL50 pretty hard. Incidentally NL50 is a total drool fest compared to NL100 for anyone who's teetering on that brink. The regs are miles better the next step up and there aren't any juicy loose-passives to hammer into oblivion either. At least this is true of FTP RUSH, the gulf between the 50/100 levels there is huge.

The grind will continue into Feb where I'm planning on playing a much heavier schedule, as long as I'm not completely head fucked from work Mon-Wed. Initial target is 70k hands but this is far from concrete as I will not make the mistake of playing when mentally ill-prepared again. Lol remove "prepared" from last sentence...

Bring on the lighter nights, better winrate, good weightloss, shares grow and happier blog posts. Good luck all :-)

January Poker

2011-01-14T14:43:00.000Z

Nada, zero, zilch... absolutely none whatsoever... and half the month gone already!

Have been using my time off to research potential investments, work out their timelines, and how this coincides with my current investments and then under which wrappers to make my trades. Bit of a logistical and risk management nightmare, but one I've really enjoyed working out! I feel like I'm very well prepared and at the risk of sounding repetitive - am very excited for 2011.

At the start of the new year the majority of sectors went crazy, mine included, and I've made superb gains. Those have been cut into somewhat with delays these last couple of days, and I've seen £7k gains erode to £4k. Not disheartened though, just means another 6 weeks to wait and a slight rejig of my timing plan. Did you buy BEM after my end of Nov tip? You'd be on ~90% profit about now ;-)

Anyway as it's looking like I won't be selling some holdings this month, I could do with banking some cash at poker! I shall be attacking the RUSH tables starting this afternoon and continuing a heavy weekend schedule for once, as it's looking like a quiet one on the social front. Good luck all :-)

December and 2010 wrap up

2010-12-31T16:33:00.000Z

Cliffs:

December - awesome

2010 - EPIC

Played a decent volume last few days to put December at £2.2k including rakeback and bonus. Well I say December, more like a week and half of proper graft, working out at a very healthy £60 per hour on 20 winning sessions out of 23.

The share portfolio rallied late today after a poor post Xmas period, with the major holding XEL finishing 2010 at 383.5p - a nice ~420% from the 70p I first bought at.

2010 has been a very successful year for me, not just financially but on a greater whole, soul-fulfilling way too. I'm not in the mood for a waffle (see my January posts this year for that kind of stuff!) but the frame of mind I started to distill at that time has grown and developed with good application this year, and I feel great going into 2011. I am very excited about what the next year will hold, and the short term next five years in general. This promises to be a life forming time and I can't wait to see what the future brings and how I can hopefully continue to have a positive assertion.

I hope you can look back on 2010 with half a big a smile as I can, and I wish you all the very best for 2011 - make it happen!

Happy New Year everyone :-)

December coming to an end...

2010-12-24T02:21:00.000Z

I've not done what I set out to do in my last post - have only just finished my first session since the last graph. Thankfully it was a nice winning session of £400+ back at NL100. So Dec is looking good despite poor volume. Work has been pretty manic, a fairly busy social schedule and then all the Christmas rigmarole I was being a tad overly optimistic!

I hope to be able to play a fair bit before New Years as I've still got a bit of bonus left to clear and I'd really like to end the year on a high. Not that it isn't already. XEL shares have made me a shit load more money, with some more nice gains across the rest of the portfolio too. This should continue into the new year as nearly all my companies have been seriously delayed with the harsh winter in northern Europe. Passive income feels so good, I really envy people who can live off it. Hopefully 2011 will see some big strides towards it!

Anyway I hope to log ~15k more hands in Dec, clear the rest of my bonus, bank a £2k poker month to take into the new year and set out some new plans.

I didn't do any poker achievement aims for the year, more just a general approach and mindset, which overall I feel has been excellent. Yes I've slipped here and there, but this has been the most consistently focused I've been and it's been by far my most successful year. Yes a £28k score helps, but even discounting that 2010 has been great. I had two months where I logged a minor loss, one of which where I barely played. Totting up poker has amounted to ~£46k for 2010 not counting December yet, and would be £18k tax free without the EPO score. Share dealing has been absolutely ridiculous run good since my first purchase in July and I'm currently holding £20k in profit.

Writing all that down makes me wonder where it's all gone. That is an awesome year! I think a few £thousand has gone on developing my new physique for sure! Feels good to have bought a flat and have something solid (which again should hopefully grow) as all my cash is floating around in cyberspace and is just a number on a screen! When that extra digit appeared on my ISA balance though that certainly felt good! Roll on the next one... :-)

Anyway hope you all have a great Christmas, I'm going to enjoy some family time and get fat(ter)! Wishing you and yours all the best :-)

Rush Week roundup

2010-12-05T23:11:00.001Z

Grinded the NL50 RUSH tables this week for the FTP Rush Week promo. Graph above includes $500 Black Card bonus and the $250 for getting 1k points per day in the week. So all in all a pretty profitable week at NL50 - over £50 per hour - good job too as I am really poker-skint at the moment.

As you can see...cliffs from the graph: I WILL MAKE YOU FOLD!

I decided to make some very general observations and create a gameplan from there. Basically, RUSH was a nitfest this week. So I should be able to define ranges well, and the vast majority of the time you miss anyway. So phrase for the week was 'bombs away' and I tried to win every pot. Will definitely have to tone this down when I move back up.

Didn't include the EV line as was too much clutter, but it was $10 under the winnings line. So I ran average, which is a good job as playing as aggressive as I did could easily have been messy. I'll take average!

The bit around 21-24k hands looks like I forgot how to play poker. Well basically, I did. That was me playing on Saturday after a house party at mine on Friday night. I left playing really late and had to grind for a few hours outside of happy hour, which seemed like a lifetime with a sore head. Job done though and I didn't bleed too heavily. Started off on a big loss today but managed to claw back a win and round up the week nicely.

I've seen a few people 12 tabling RUSH and as I only play 4, this is quite intriguing. Will have a play with Tableninja and see what I can get going, afterall I've paid for the full version which I'm not using atm.

Will have a couple of days away from the tables now I think, but still hoping to post 70k+ hands for December, definitely going to put a good shift in. Can't wait for the market to open in the morning, weekends are boring!

Good luck all :-)

Oh hai blog!

2010-11-22T22:09:00.001Z

Yeah so I've not blogged in what seems like an age. What's worse is that the front page of this thing has had some kind of weird X Factor gay homage post doing my online rep the world of good. Anyway...

I've moved into my new flat, kitted it out and finally got proper internet in a couple of weeks ago. Loving 3D PS3 action!

I was quick to want to play poker having had such a break, and I made a bad decision. My desk wasn't finished, I wasn't properly comfortable and I played the three nights of the week where I had work and was more tired than normal. I still continued to play three nights after big losing sessions each time. GG £1k. I also ran -£800 in EV but that's not the point here, I made a bad decision and I'm mad at myself.

So have imposed another break and shan't be playing till I've finished work for the week, and even then I'll probably wait till Friday.

Haven't missed poker that much to be honest, I've been so absorbed in other things. The whole moving process is pretty labour intensive I must say, and I've still got my previous address to fall back on so it's a phoney move really. Fuck knows how long it'd take me to sort out a proper one. My flat came fully furnished but fucking hell you still have to buy an absolute ton of shit for it, and then everyday you realise you still need to get that one thing...I am 99% sorted now though, with just some shelves to go up and a couple of doors to sort. That'll be done at the weekend.

Share dealing has been taking up the majority of my leisure time, and get this, has an outside chance of becoming my biggest earner for the year behind poker. That is such a pleasing statement to be able to make after the success I've had.

Bet none of you still bought XEL after another tip on here, it's at £2.50 now from it's last tip at £1.12 and ~300% up from my first tip in August. Granted that's slightly above the norm, but hey ;-) My RRL tip would have also netted you a slightly disappointing 10%, but still better than any savings account! Next tip for free money would be BEM. I'll post back again when it's ~40% up before Christmas and maybe then you'll start listening ;-)

My whole portfolio had a nightmare today too, with some delays causing a small loss on a couple, and across the board poor performance anyway what with the Euro being a bag of shite. Pretty happy with who I'm invested in though, it pays to be well researched, quite literally. Here's to a promising end to November and kick on into December. Just hope I can break even at poker this month...

Good luck all :-)

Unlucky imo

2010-10-18T08:33:00.000+01:00

Hard lines Ben (left) on his group's exit from The X Factor last night. Always next year.

Mid Oct

2010-10-15T12:42:00.000+01:00

Pretty pleasing graph. Unfortunately doesn't include a quick £200 loss on Ben's computer last weekend. I've banked that entire profit and am going to use it as a shot at the live cash games in Newcastle this weekend and into next week. Hopefully I can continue the good runnings! Live poker updates to follow...

October so far in pictures

2010-10-07T23:09:00.000+01:00

September P&L

2010-10-04T14:30:00.001+01:00

Been having a bit of trouble with blogger lately - not able to login and when I can... unable to post or comment?!? Anyway...

As you may already know, September was a blinder. I was about £300 down before the EPO and lost a bit more online after. Not great in that respect, but I don't really care. After paying out backers my month is somewhere in the region of £28.5k - I'll take it!

I've consolidated my online bankroll, sorted out savings, bought some more shares and put some £ aside for a 3D TV and PS3 for my new flat - ready for a good grind in October. Got my Full Tilt Black Card through the post so will give that a month and see how well I'm rewarded. Finally glad to be able to cash in FTP points properly! Haven't played much yet but will be putting in some good hours in the back end of this week.

I've enjoyed being a bit of a Nostradamus on my blog of late. On the 9th September I wrote "Generally I'm a bit of a lucky bastard for whom things tend to work out, so this undersell will most likely result in a final table appearance" regarding the EPO. Before that on the 3rd September I wrote "Tip of the month would be XEL.L. Pretty much guaranteed a profit in September alone" regarding share dealing.

Well as readers will know I finished 5th in the EPO, but what you may not know is that XEL had a ~35% month rising from 72p to 112p share price as I type. It's still got more to go too, I'm expecting another good rise in October pending (hopefully) good results on a new well being drilled in the north sea - which we will see results from in early November. Still time to get in while it's cheap!

A secondary tip for October would be RRL.L who should see a double up pending good results due in the next fortnight - but these are definitely one to watch for the next 18 months or so - they have some absolutely amazing prospects.

Whilst I'm getting predictions right, I may as well punt for Liverpool to go down and Man Utd to win the league, though I think the latter is wishful thinking ;-)

Good luck in October everyone :-)

EPO 5th Place

2010-09-16T23:33:00.002+01:00

Over the course of four days in London I managed to final table the English Poker Open eventually finishing 5th for £40,750.

Friday:

Traveled down to London on the train, checked into hotel, showered and shirts ironed myself and Ben made our way across Mayfair, past the Palm Beach Casino where I'd be playing the following day, and on towards Movida nightclub. First impressions were pretty ridiculous with the six of the biggest men alive managing the door, and a lingerie model as hostess. Making our way down into the club we were delighted to find it was a completely free bar for the night, which Ben definitely made good use of. After seeing umpteen poker celebs, including Durrr, Kara Scott and Liv Boeree I point out to Ben that that's Mike Sexton over there. "Oh yeah, yeah it is!"

"Mike! Mike! Where's Vince?!? Where's Vince Mike??!"

At this point Mike was getting well into some 18 year old golddigga (yo!) but took it awesomely and was a complete legend chatting and taking the piss with us for a bit. He was obviously completely shit faced but must have seen a twinkle in my eye as he predicted I would final table. Now I'm obviously gutted he didn't predict I'd win it!

The RTR staff did an absolutely superb job on the night, granted mainly because the CEO is borderline alcoholic and complete social magnet, but still they did so well in helping people mingle and meet what little girls there were floating around. As you know we'd have probably all sat in the corner texting. Online poker social retardedness ftl.

After more beer than I'd planned but less than half of what Ben had consumed, we attempted to walk home but ended up at Trafalgar Square and flagging a taxi. Should have done that an hour ago because we were back at the hotel in 5 mins flat nipping through the empty side streets.

Saturday Day 1A:

Was seated with Freddie Deeb and after the first break was moved to the TV table. I had already chipped up a bit but missed out on a huge early chance to double on a technicality. I flopped a set versus the table soft spot and donked out, he threw in a 1k chip aggressively meaning to raise but it was unfortunately correctly ruled as a call. I am then kind of forced to check the turn and couldn't get many chips in the pot. Once moved to the webcast I can't remember but I think I was barely involved at all, maybe stealing a few times and taking a few small pots to stay around average. Actually I've just come back and remembered I 3b right before the dinner break OOP to tournament chip leader. I cbet an Axx flop and check folded the turn. I had QQ and just didn't want to do anything marginal for a hefty proportion of my chips versus someone who can afford it. Towards the end of the day I'd been getting floated behind quite a lot by Freddie, and when he did it again in a 3b pots I twice maneuvered for ~80% of his stack. After this he played quite frankly horrible poker, limp folding 4bbs and other things that may be justifiable only in a 50k HORSE champions mind. Finished the day right around average.

Day off Sunday:

Slept in. Went to the Science Museum, which is totally awesome and I could easily spend a week on each floor. So much knowledge to soak up and some superb exhibits. Feet were knackered by tea time so sacked off more sightseeing and just ate and moped around rest of the day.

Day 2 Monday:

Some ridiculous seat moving from other tables saw me sandwiched inbetween horrible spots for pretty much the whole day. Was gradually chipped away down to around 8bbs with Fabian Quoss impressing me early on day 2 with some great poker but even more so seriously impressive table presence.

I played the TV table for most of the day again, with Liv Boeree but before her I had sat with Brandon Cantu and Sebastien Krul. After I'd moved to the TV table the two of them played a huuuuge pot for ~20% of chips in play with AA vs KK, Sebastien making a straight I think with KK, though my information could be wrong here.

News was also filtering back to me that some "mates" had been emailing in a load of dirt about me to the webcast. Like tons of stupid nicknames, my car being shite (true) and some that I have no idea about - I have never been afraid of spiders and as far as I can recall never sick down the side of a chair! It seems I amassed a great following though so thanks to all my mates (and their mates) for watching. Also a huge special mention to the NPF for a great rail and support throughout, and a very special ~~"fuck you"~~ "thank you" to TeamDobb for posting 'that' photo!

Then in the final two hours I went on a mini heater shoving AJ but finding QQ behind, but I make a four flush on the river to stay in it. The bubble bursts shortly afterwards in no time at all really. Soon after I'm getting AK in preflop twice in super happy spots only to find I was unfortunately racing - but hell that doesn't matter I don't lose races in this tournament! My AK beats 99 and QQ in two spots for some decent chips. Then right at the end of the end of the night I find a near treble up in what turned out to be an awesome spot with JJ vs 42o and TT. I finish the day above average and am clearly quite pleased about it.

Day 3 Tuesday:

After not getting as much sleep as I'd have liked (about 36 hours would have done it) it's final table day. Ideal for some embarrassing press photo poses where I had to stare down the camera in a 'poker face' type moment. Anyone who has played live with me before knows this is not at all my style. When involved in any kind of pot I have a habit of just grinning ridiculously, whether I be bluffing or crushing.

After a few inane early orbits of little activity, suddenly we're down to five players, with myself claiming one scalp. I had a pretty solid bet sizing tell where I deduce he has made it a jillion BBs preflop because he has AK or JJ, and with QQ in the BB I crush this range so I make a small 3b and insta call his jam. Unfortunately it's AK but I've already said I don't lose these spots and a Q is the first flop card. Followed by a brick and then an Ace. Then a Ten on the turn gives my opponent four outs. Despite him still calling out for an Ace on the river I dodge a Jack and have a healthy amount of chips.

Five handed I then play the worst poker I've played the whole week. Fabian and Matt have tons of chips and are playing a huge levelling game between themselves, fully expectant to crush the remaining internet qualifiers. My plan was to just stay out of it, and find a good spot where their sheer amount of chips and perceived table dynamic could work in my favour. I defended a few blinds to Fabian, c/c, c/f once. Then a c/r/f to a flop b3b. This spot was weird because it screamed out very little credit (742hh) and I was hoping he'd see that as an opposite. He'd never seen me bluff though and I guess I outlevelled myself and then couldn't shove air giving him 7/1 on a call on my biggest final table to date, with all my pals watching - when he has a lot of draws he has to call off with. Hated this hand so much. Shortly after I defend vs Fabian and c/c, c/f again when I miss a gutshot + overs. Shit. An orbit later I 3b squeeze shove from the sb vs Matt open and Fabian button flat and take it down.

Another orbit and I post my BB knowing that Fabian is going to open anything that's folded to him and anything I do will reak of BS. Folded to Fabian and he opens, I look down at 99 in the BB and ~~start dreaming of Vegas and~~ think about how best to progress. I was hoping he would re-shove with a lot of Ax hands as well as smaller pairs perceiving my range to be very bluff heavy. Anyway the whole debacle turned out to be totally standard as he has AK and we just get it in pre. Obviously super happy anyway as I don't lose races in the EPO. An Ace on the turn is a minor blip as I'm sure to hit my 9 on the river. Wait a sec. What's that? I missed? Err don't you keep dealing cards till I hit? I eventually stand up, shake hands and go to the bog to compose myself a bit for post match interviews.

I was immediately grabbed by Grub Smith for the webcast interview which I've not seen and can barely recall, all I know is the adrenaline was rushing around madly and with my voice was breaking up I was struggling to string a decent sentence together. As is evident in the interview I did immediately after that one with TheNutz.tv. Was obviously gutted with how the exit played out and felt a bit "floaty" for the rest of the evening. Got the last train back home and crashed out.

Now that some time has passed and my account shows that the £40k cheque I paid in has entered the clearing process, I can say I am pretty happy about things. My share portfolio also had a 15% day today! Delighted to have done something in a reasonably major tournament, delighted with how I played (barring two hours on the final table) and delighted to be able to give something back to my investors. I sold 28% of myself in this tournament so still a very nice pay day.

A huge heartfelt thanks to the following:

Ben for his support in person down in London.
All my investors showing their support pre-event.
All my mates and family for the kind texts I received and not-so-kind messages to the webcast :-)
The NPF for an awesome virtual rail.
Karim, Glen and Jackie the RTR staff who did an absolute first class job.
All the staff and dealers at Palm Bach Casino, Mayfair. Top job.

Cheers all, still got some sleep to get caught up on....zzzzz

Bring on the EPO II

2010-09-09T19:26:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow I head off to the big smog for the EPO. Staying in the Crowne Plaza St. James which looks amazing and is an easy walk from the casino as well as places of interest for my day off on Sunday. Friday night is the welcome party at Movida Night Club, which to be frank, looks like the most expensive gay bar in the entire world. Hoping it's a total freebie as if not I'll probably need to take my entire bankroll with me to get a round in. I'll be taking it easy investors, no need to frett! Only sold 25% so far so still a few more hours if you want to buy a piece of me, details here. Generally I'm a bit of a lucky bastard for whom things tend to work out, so this undersell will most likely result in a final table appearance ;-) Still feeling great about poker and can't wait for the challenge. Let's gogoogogo!!! One time!!!!! etc etc!!!!!

August wrap up

2010-09-03T19:55:00.000+01:00

A bit late in coming, have been pretty busy last week or so. August ended badly running over £2k behind EV at NL200, but I still managed to log a healthy profit of £2.4k + $7k EPO package for the month. I'm selling shares here if you're interested in buying a (marked down) piece.

Confirmed my seat for Day 1A of the £3500+250 Main Event, have booked some swish digs and can't wait to get stuck into this tournament. Feel really good about my game and just can't wait for it really. My tourney record of late has just been deep run after deep run, especially live where I have been crushing the fields whenever I've played. Bring it on!

I've not played yet in September, though I'm probably going to log a good session later tonight. Work has been a bit stressful. I think. It's hard for me to quantify because it's obviously not doctor, nurse or teacher stressful. I've just had to repeat a lot of work I've only recently done as we have now moved the papers to a different printers and are publishing in colour. From a computer production side of things the ramifications of this are massive. You have about 4x as many things to get right, it's not as simple as just "printing in colour". Anyway a couple more weeks and the process should be pretty streamlined and I can have more time to research shares at work.

My new hobby that. Not the "at work" bit though. I'm absolutely loving "actively" saving and purchasing shares in my ISA & SIPP. I've struck gold with one share, that is up ~160% in the two weeks I've held. September is a huge month for my holdings so hopefully I'll include some positive news there in my month end wrap up. Tip of the month would be XEL.L. Pretty much guaranteed a profit in September alone. Looking forward into how this month plays out and planning investments for the next stage.

Good luck in September all :-)

Love the weekends!

2010-08-22T23:05:00.001+01:00

Ship the £1k day on the RUSH tables. Pushing the month towards the "totally awesome" category :-)

Shame no super lie in come the morning, will try to stay positive about work but it's proving harder and harder lately!

Bring on the EPO

2010-08-21T18:28:00.001+01:00

Last weekend I won a $7k EPO package through raketherake on Ladbrokes. Absolutely delighted and can't wait to play in the event. Casino looks amazing, class location and great structure where I'm sure all the big names will be playing. I can't really justify the $5k+ buy in though so I'm looking to sell 50% of myself. There is a thread over on the NPF here where you can post if you're interested, or you could leave me a message here.

Had a busy week at work this week so haven't played online at all really. I got drunk for my 27th (eek!) birthday on Wednesday night with the pool team and again last night with the football lads at a home poker night where I was a huge donator. Ben luckboxed the massive pot catching up on some run-good.

I played 45 minutes in goal today and it's hard to put into words how bad I am at football now. I just have no ability. I thought at least I'd be able to kick and catch OK, but no. Complete retardation. We somehow drew 3-3 after being 3-1 down after 85 minutes, so I guess we'll take that!

Will do a bit more socialising tonight before some more EPO satellites tomorrow. Good luck all :-)

I wish I could run at expectation...

2010-08-13T16:59:00.001+01:00

Good continuation

2010-08-13T01:48:00.000+01:00

I continued to run good for a day after the last post and managed to rack up over 1.5k in winnings for August. Since then it's been pretty crap, but I can't grumble. Here's a graph...

So I've effectively broken even for a few days, not bad at all really. Had a couple of really brutal sessions in amongst that, but hey I ran like God for the first 15k hands so musn't grumble (I love Terry Wogan). It's been said that RUSH Poker is one big "cooler machine" and tbh with the style of play of much of the regulars it's hard not to agree. What the game needs it for 3/6+ tables to open up and the better higher stakes players to be on level 27 versus each other a few times, the HHs to get on 2+2 and everyone will go on a spew mission again. On the contrary, this is very interesting reading. It's a long post by Citizenwind who is a CR pro. I don't especially like his teaching style (or Veneers - who is an absolutely terrible coach imo), but he writes very well and talks a lot of sense here. If you're in anyway serious about poker, read it.

Outside of poker, work is going OK, nothing really to write about there. Lifestyle wise I am in an all time state of fatness, and this is being addressed. I've been doing tons of financial reading lately, having ventured into the stock market and seriously looking at savings, pensions and general planning for the future stuff. On the computer front I now have a BSh Degree in Excel 2007 from the University of Illegal Torrent Downloads. Combining these recent learnings, I have created a finances sheet that is so advanced, I am sure will form the beginnings of Skynet, signaling the end for all mankind. Pretty colours too.

Great start

2010-08-05T21:54:00.000+01:00

Played first session in August today, 4k hands for $800 and a nice start to my birthday month. This was at NL$100 RUSH and from first impressions I'd say the skill difference in between NL25-NL100 is the smallest I've seen of any site. Still loving poker and enjoying work, who needs exercise?!? Off camping tomorrow where I am going to build an awesome fire and hopefully cook something I catch fishing. Have a good weekend all :-)

All together now...blog when you're winning, you only blog when you're winning!

July wrap up

2010-08-01T02:20:00.002+01:00

July has been a resounding success for me. Some nice profit at poker, some shrewd investment in stocks, a nice short golfing holiday break (help me, help you) and a large amount of satisfaction from work. Definitely one of my most rounded months in a while.

I've figured out what it is too. Positive feedback. You get none of this being a poker pro, in fact usually a large amount to the contrary (especially if you bet KK into trup QQ). Plugging away getting nothing but negative feedback is not good for the human psyche. Anyway seems like I'm making a difference at work and have enjoyed the learning process along the way. I've worked pretty hard in the last few weeks as it's big changes from next week - of which I'm shouldering a lot of responsibility - so fingers crossed things go smoothly.

Pokerwise I've been crushing RUSH all month, that being largely responsible for a nice £1.3k profit, with a few deep tourney scores tonight and only a few hands on Laddies. Not sure how long that'll continue, roll almost entirely withdrawn there - just left enough in for me to play some regular weekend tournies. I'm still yet to win the €100k Sunday rebuy. At least I hope it's still that. I played the Saturday equivalent today, which used to be €50r €50k GTD, but was a quite pitiful €25r €20k GTD this evening :-( I came 14th for ~€100 profit, then 26th in the 2nd chance €10k GTD for small profit, and a deep run 14/~1600 on FT for $50 profit. Nice to have deep runs in tourneys alongside each other, shame things didn't run quite in my favour to be able to convert.

Whilst I've been working hard and playing RUSH on Full Tilt, I've been busy funneling money out of my other accounts and into shares. I'm in two oil companies, one very young long-term prospect, and another more established company who look good in the mid-term. Researching your market and keeping track on share prices is great fun and really engaging. Also can be pretty damn profitable! I've made more than double the interest my ISA has made this whole tax year, in just a couple of weeks, for a third of the consideration. So I've put the forms through to put all my savings in the one broker, where I can still keep my ISA wrapper and also set up a SIPP (pension), I've a few mates the wrong side of 30 now, makes me remember to plan for the future!

Two negatives to come out of this month:
1) My exhaust fell off my shit heap of a car and I had to fork out £250 for all three pipes to be replaced. After the depreciation of the new exhaust, my car is now worth about £200.
2) I'm proper fat.

The rest, pretty damn good! Best of luck all :-)

Stuff I've been doing

2010-07-17T03:31:00.000+01:00

Not blogging for a start.

As you know, I've started a part time job since coming back from my hols. That's been taking up a lot of my time but for good reasons. I've done a fair bit of overtime (both paid and unpaid!) from my scheduled 2 days a week. I'm migrating the systems to Adobe CS5, learning how to use InDesign and Illustrator to an expert standard, and creating new templates and layouts for the newspapers. I've really enjoyed doing this mainly because InDesign (and the whole of CS5 for that matter) is so powerful and a joy to be able to use well. I can't understand how some people still "hate computers", if you're reading this now... they sure make your life easier! Anyway it's a parallel run next week then we make the switch the week after, so my life will be a lot easier after that. More time for other things...

Like golf. I watched a bit of The Open today (I'm not an avid golf fan by any means) and LOL at that wind and people putting from 50+ yards. One guy made an immense - what must have been nearly 100 yard - putt from a members tee spot back onto the adjacent green and straight in. Bosh! Dunno his name though :-/

I'm going to Edinburgh with the lads for a weekend of being drunk and hungover with some golf in between at the end of the month. Something about a triangle too. I've had a couple of golf lessons at my local course from the club pro in the last two weeks. I can hit the ball but I'm pretty shit at golf. I've got a good base ability at sports so I kind of adapted my cricket teachings and developed a swing that would allow me to hit the ball as hard as possible in a general forwards and up direction. Turns out this wasn't that bad but with an hour of professional correction my new 'pro' swing is coming along nicely, still feels slightly alien but it'll come. I've hit the ball in the nets and when I connect it bloody flies. Looking forward to another couple of lessons before we head off. I want to hit some balls properly as I've only done net sessions in the two lessons I've had. Hopefully some driving too. I've never been on a range and have only hit a driver messing around. I am (was) terrible at it, hopefully I'll be somewhat improved and would love to be able to hit a ball 200+ yards away in Edingburgh... straight into the car park and smash Azz's windscreen whilst he's asleep in his car.

So I'm learning golf and CS5 so my mind has been quite engaged of late. It's not really the same for poker anymore. There's been no "a ha" moments for ages now. I've been playing a lot of RUSH lately and there's some interesting dynamics to that, so maybe I'll get one soon. I've also been playing some Colin McRae Rally on the PC and plugged in the joypad for it. I wondered if Tableninja would pick it up and unfortunately it didn't, until I googled and downloaded an awesome piece of software called Xpadder. Only a tenner for a real clever piece of kit.

So with basically no eye movement (stacked tables) and buttons covering all my betting options, I'm suddenly 12 tabling RUSH poker. That's INSANE! I reckon with this setup I could 16 table Full Tilt and 24 table Stars full ring 9 seaters (40 tables total) all at the same time. Not ideal, but doable. I found myself getting a bit frustrated - I put this down to getting used to the new setup - but I really shouldn't be. I've just bought the new Logitech Performance MX mouse too and this would more or less nullify that purchase. I broke even after finding myself wanting to call and see flops far too much. Button clicking is so easy and when the table moves behind a stack it doesn't quite register as hard that you're making mistakes. You miss so much gameflow too and stat reading goes out the window after 15 minutes.

I had my tea and reverted back to the normal mouse setup, and just 4 tables. Totally crushed it for 11 buyins and £500 for the day. So now I have nearly my 'standard' bankroll back online after it became depleted before hols and my extended break. A lot of that is in Full Tilt and I shan't be moving it anytime soon. The RUSH games are so good, especially this week with the promo. I've just checked my stats and am surprised at what I've seen. I'm at £1k for the month, having barely played in my eyes, but I've played 42k hands... that's almost a standard month of volume (3 months Ben) in just 8 days of play this month (and some of those very short sessions). Rakeback is shit on Ladbrokes now too so there might be something to this 'big site' mentality.

Unsure of my plans for the weekend, might just stay put and hammer RUSH while the promo is still running and the games are so good. Enjoy your weekend and stop by 27bslash6for a read, really funny stuff, it's been plugged a lot lately, but wanted to post my approval :-) I made the mistake of reading on my lunch at work and couldn't stop giggling for ages at a time! :-)

First poker in yonks

2010-06-24T00:31:00.002+01:00

Hello friends, not played poker in aaaages, and hence not blogged in forever too. As you can surmise from my previous few posts, I'd been having a bit of a torrid time at the tables. Good news is that I now feel absolutely amazing. I had an awesome relaxing holiday in the Caribbean where I was able to completely reboot. It's pretty obvious I needed it, because on reading back I don't come across too well in my last few blogs! Words cannot describe how much I just love lying in the sun all day, reading and going for an occasional dip in the pool/sea. The rum is good too. I'll let a few pics do my talking...

All taken with my Panasonic TZ65, which is a great camera and can be had for £150 now.

I mentioned I'd play some poker out there if the games were good. Well they were, really really good. Unfortunately only at 1/2 but even so the mood never gripped me into wanting to play much at all anyway. I did play for a few hours total, once ran up a reasonable profit of just over a Benjamin between three of us, then left to enjoy the entertainment and pina coladas. Later in the week I then played again on my own when I had some dollars and not pesos on me, and promptly lose QQ vs TT preflop. Between those few hours live, and maybe 45 minutes online that's all the poker I've played in a month.

I've also started a part time job since returning, working two and half days a week (on average) for a local newspaper office. I've completed my first "week" today, which was a bit of a learning process really and I don't feel like I'm the whizz I thought I'd be just yet. Reasonably enjoyable though. Was weird not being able to just piss off with mates to go watch the England game come lunchtime - I had to slog on till 2pm :-p It's a nice and relaxed place.

Been looking forward in last few days to attacking poker online, mainly because I know I feel fresh from such an extended break, and I know I've got my approach right again. I'm attempting to nit it up a bit and I took my first steps tonight playing Full Ring Rush on my short roll at Full Tilt. It's not so short now. I shipped just shy of eleven buyins, only at NL25, but hey I'll take it. Nice to eclipse my weekly wage in two hours on just the micro tables :-)

Going to get an awesome amount of sleep (damn 9-5 is hard!) and put the next part of my poker plan into action tomorrow. Good luck all :-)

In need of a serious change of luck

2010-05-30T23:29:00.001+01:00

Everything I've played in the last three weeks or so has been horrible. I run awful at NL50 for a week and a bit. I play some micro PLO and run twenty buyins below EV in three hours. Ordinarily I think I'd be bust had I not had such an awesome start to the year and been an insane volume monkey. I've had a few extended breaks in between the losses, and over the weekend I have played some tournaments.

I final tabled bubbled the $42k on Full Tilt (although pool topped $60k) taking 11th for ~$500 which was my "best result" of about 15 tournies. I am incredibly sad but not at all downhearted as I have been pretty much shafted in every entry. In that same tournament I lost AQ vs A2 and AJ vs A7 then shove 99 into KT and gg, $12k up top.

What I am most miffed about is the €50r on Laddies. I've played it a total of six times I think, twice again this weekend on the Sat and Sun. Every single time I have lost overpair vs underpair situations for top ten chips with less than 100 runners left. Every, single, time. Most recently it was QQ vs 99 for a jillion BBs vs Mongo VI. I'm sure my screenname get's me tons of action. I'll win that tourney before the year is out, mark my words!

Last tourney of the day was the €4k on Laddies. I'm 1st-7th from about 40 players left right down to the final table. Second hand in, UTG limps, I check T8 in the bb. Flop T83, we get it all in, him JJ, runs out 9,7 and gg you really played that well. Tenth for £50. Seriously FU. The money on the final table was pish anyway but I really should have been taking down the €1.3k.

Anyway I have a much needed huuuuge awesome break ahead of me, a fortnight all inclusive 5* resort holiday in the Caribbean. Fuck yeah! This could not have come at a better time. I'm taking my laptop but I doubt I'll play any online poker at all. There are two casinos on site and there'll hopefully be some decent games going. Not that I'm going there for that at all. This is undoubtedly a R&R holiday, but hopefully the sun will do me some good and I can maybe bring in some $ while I'm out there.

Finally if you've read this far you may wish to leave an empty comment making some unfelt remark about an element of my post, just as long as your name links to a gaming website. Well firstly, ask yourself the following questions: Are you satisfied in what you are doing? Is this an effective use of your time? Secondly, don't bother answering, because I'll just delete it.

GG all and happy holidays me! :-)

Downswing thoughts

2010-05-19T00:27:00.000+01:00

In amongst all the crap posted below is a graph, that is legitimately mine. Not had such a good month turn to shit in such a short space of time before. I've always uhm'ed and ah'ed around the idea of an effective stop loss. It's something I've thought that if you are in emotional control of yourself, you shouldn't need. But I'd never sunk twenty buyins playing good poker in one day before. Although I can grasp that it's inside the realms of possibility, I just never thought it would happen. I am 90% happy with my play too, I was playing good solid poker, getting it in more than happy, and just losing all the time. I also took call-call-call lines vs aggro villains and was non-results orientated-ly proved correct each time as they bink off perfect-perfect for >200BBs.

Anyway, the stop loss. I was never sure on how many buyins it should be, as somedays I'll play 36/30 and others 22/18. Somedays I'll four table, others nine. The answer to me now is alarmingly simple, it should be a designated percentage of your bankroll. I lost almost exactly 50% of my BR last Friday, and it will not happen again. It's a bit of a saving grace that I was quite over-rolled at the time. I think 20% is a good amount, at least for me. I tend to have particularly good or bad days either way, and I think 20% is large enough for me to feel yet not be decimated by the loss.

Since Friday I've lost a chunk to my mates at Azz's homegame. After double figure rebuys I lose KK vs T9 vs QJ on 894 flop, 7 turn, T river for big stack Azz to amass 70% chips in play and go on to take it down. I won the second game but wasn't for much and only supplemented the losses. Stayed awake for the boxing (kind of) and then had a lazy-ish few days at home. Lazy as in no poker, but tons of training. I'm getting good at running again.

Knee Update: My knee hurts for the first 5 minutes running. I've got a warm-up routine sorted that helps, once I'm warm it feels 100% OK, but that five minutes is like Chinese torture. Obviously this is concerning so I'm going to get some appointments sorted for when I get back from my hols. Sunday night I ran off my hangover completing over 7 miles for the first time in about 2 years. It was reasonably warm and started raining too, and I'm sure any runners will agree, this is just so awesome. I felt amazing and prob would have done another lap or two if it wasn't pitch black! This was in my footy boots on grass doing some laps of a few local fields.

I donned the proper running trainers today and set off on the road to do a proper circuit and not be bored by the same scenery over and over again. Mistake. Blistered to fuck after three miles and despite trying all sorts of sock witchcraft, had to walk back. Bike for a few days now and being bored again, sigh.

Poker wise, I've also hit the ground running. Back to NL50 for a bit, I've totally crushed winning over ten buyins in a couple of days and around 6k hands. Despite obviously losing here and there, I feel like playing at that level is almost like printing money, I've just got it sussed. Still slightly down on the month not counting rb and bonus. Hopefully I can continue the grind, but not tomorrow as I'm off to Alton Towers with a big group of mates who've all had the day booked off for ages. All I have to do is get up at 6am, sounds pretty simple but it's not going to be...

Oh Dear

2010-05-15T13:09:00.001+01:00

Press play and scroll down...

So yeah, back to the drawing board.

Post-saver...

Green

2010-05-13T16:38:00.000+01:00

My volume has been nothing this month compared with the long hours, mass-tabling approach I've taken for the year-to-date. I've mainly 6 tabled, sometimes 8 whilst swapping out poorer tables. I've rarely played over two hours stints, whereas previously that has been the minimum qualification for "a session". This has resulted in:

I'm hoping I can keep it up. The approach I mean. I know I'm not going to win every session this month. The thing is, as soon as I lose a few hundred, I envisage regressing back into "grind mode" and immediately want to log a shit load of hands. I'm going to seriously try not to. I'm really enjoying the relaxed approach and hope I can keep banking wins in most of my sessions.

You'll notice I've also been playing a bit of FL. This has been for no other reason than "I fancied it". Normally I'd play a bit of HU, but playing FL allows me to do some of my favourite things: steal blinds, play turns & rivers, and generally be a monkey in position. Also playing FL helps you develop that inner peace in dealing with outdraws :-D

Good luck all :-)

Sleep

2010-05-11T18:14:00.000+01:00

I have done nothing this week. Nothing.

Went up to Newcastle on Friday night with the idea of hitting the cash tables at Circus with Ben. Wasn't any tables running at ~9.20pm which was surprising at first but once we learned the tourney that evening was a late 9pm KO it made sense. Rather than make the trip to Aspers we decided to play the £15 1r which got ~45 runners. Neither of us were too thrilled about it and saw it as a stop gap for time before the cash tables opened. We'd have to win it to make it totally worthwhile. So, I did.

Nothing really to write home about. Standard was pretty awful all round apart from a handful of capable players. I slowplayed KK early on for a big pot, was double average for most of the tournament then went card dead from about 25 down to 15 players. Won a couple of races JJ>AK and then AK>TT, then made a raise/call w/KJ after a shorties shove and got there vs AK. Only time I won from behind whole tourney. Final table time. I can't really remember what happened. Infact that AK>TT might have been on the FT, or maybe it happened twice. A couple of players were pushing for a deal but once I amassed >average chips I kept quiet. I'd had a few diet cokes and was wide awake.The FT lasted bloody ages though and Ben kept coming over only to see more and more chips in front of me. Poor fella's getting on a bit now and was dropping on his feet. Three left now and they push for a deal again. I have double 2nd place so offer a deal that was quite largely in my favour expecting it to be rejected out of hand. They both snap accept and I guess I'm happy too!

So £300 ftw but £10 for the valets and a 33% share for Ben see that diminish somewhat. Good news however in that Ben has managed to gradually nit away his money on the cash table, then get it in in terrible shape but finding the river for a big pot and a tasty £12 profit.

Coked up to the eyeballs (the legal kind) I can't sleep for another couple of hours, and only manage maybe 3 hours in total. Saturday we go watch the Blackpool game at John's amazing new pad, grab some food then head out on the beers/cocktails. An eventful evening sees us back at John's playing drinking games loving our cousin (and each others') into the light hours again. I somehow stay awake the whole day at Ben's, watching Apocalypto (awesome) and having a late Indian, after probably only 1 hour more sleep.

Monday I slept more or less the whole day. Today I have again slept the vast majority. Haven't felt like poker at all yet and may put off playing tonight. I'll see how I feel after another lie down! The live win at the weekend has added to ~£500 of online profit for a nice start to the month and thankfully little pressure to play, so I've enjoyed the time off. Good news also that after a couple of heavy weekends I've managed not demolish a large pizza at the end of the night, and also not ordered ~£20 worth of takeaway the day after. So the holiday weight loss has continued in the right direction, and to be honest this holiday cannot come soon enough. Really looking forward to it! Roll on! :-)

An inauspicious start

2010-05-06T01:53:00.001+01:00

Have decided to start small this month and have just been grinding NL50 in the hope of getting a good run of results together. I really want to smash it for double figure bb/100. So far I should be, but it's not happening for me at the moment.

I should be taking positives from the graph but I'm really not. Feel a bit burned out to be honest. I played a few WSOP steps on FT this afternoon. I won a few tickets to step 2, but towards the end of the session I thought wtf am I doing multi-tabling $3 STTs?!? I was also registered for a Cruise Step STT all day on Laddies and it never filled :-(

Going for a run in the morning and hopefully this will clear my head a bit and I can concentrate on a good 8+ hours tomorrow and get some momentum going...

April P&L

2010-05-04T16:56:00.000+01:00

A very poor month comes to an end. I was fully expecting to post a loss but have been pleasantly (in the loosest sense of the word!) surprised...

NLHE Cash: -£1,664
MTTs: None
62k Hands

Staking: £87 (Soap Irish Open)

Rakeback: £1498.88
RTR Bonus: £657
Other Bonus: £173

Total: £752

Positives:

Errr...?

Negatives:

Very disappointed to post a huge cash game loss
Zero MTTs played
Wishy washy attitude
Played drunk on a few occasions

Two very disappointing month end reports in a row. I am very determined not to make it three.

The blog has been a bit neglected of late. I've had a trip away to Blackpool with the pool lads after our two leagues came to an end. The following week was the two presentation nights for the leagues we've played in (and won both) and last weekend I was in Newcastle for a wedding do. So I've been out and about a bit and drank and ate a whole lot more than I'd liked to. A couple of those nights I've logged on at poker and posted a significant loss. Hard to say how deeply sad I felt with myself after this. I hope this has truly registered now and I can force a rational decision in future.

This month shall be very different. The pool leagues are done so I won't be having very much to drink at all, this will effect both the amount I can play poker, and also the weightloss/fitness regime for my holiday at the start of June. Of which that itself is also a hugely motivating factor to win some $$$ as I'm sure the casinos on complex will be rather soft.

I plan on playing some MTTs this month again, as well as have a pop at WSOP and Cruise Step STTs on FT and Laddies respectively. The BBJ has gone on Laddies so I'll be dropping the tables and concentrating on winrate only and not being a rakeback grinder! My effective rakeback dropped significantly this month with less matched money from RTR, I'll keep an eye on that to see if I need to move my play. Even more motivation to win well this month.

I'm hoping that the increased free time, motivation to eat healthily and get (a lot) fitter, learn Spanish and win a lot of $$$ will lead to a very productive month. Let's googogogogogo!

It's all gone pear shaped

2010-04-20T00:36:00.000+01:00

Rattled off nearly £1.5k in losses today. Felt there was a few buyins that went in light but nothing too out of the ordinary. I was just beat in a lot of spots where I wasn't expecting to be, and I lost every race.

So rest of month plans are going to be trying to grind out a profit, as I'll definitely be down now. It won't be a lot, but I don't want to work it out either at that will depress me further. I think I will use my small rolls in Full Tilt and Stars to be a tournament pro for 10 days.

Blackpool this weekend with the pool team, I'm going to get completely bungalowed!

Downturn

2010-04-15T23:56:00.000+01:00

Since the very good day I had last post, I've ran pretty badly in all spots. I have been playing very long sessions as I really wanted to iron the beats out and hopefully make up some of the losses. I always play my longest sessions when I'm losing which I guess is counter productive but I don't feel like I've been in a terrible frame of mind (in the last year at least).

I've lost the vast majority of the 100bb spots lately, and been very unlucky in the cooler situations. I've had Ax flush twice on non-paired boards when villain has had a straight flush - using both his hole cards! Cheers for that!

Anyway last 11k hands I'm £800 behind EV, it was over £1k but I made a short rally and caught a bit up in the last hour. I'm now down to under £500 up for April but one positive I'll take is that my volume has been awesome the last few days which has made up for ~8 days off! I'm at 26k hands so far and hope to make the 70k mark by month end. I was ~£600 away from taking a lesser tabled, more concentrated shot at higher stakes, but the last few days has binned that plan and it's back to the grind.

Could have gone to Alton Towers today but decided against it as it's the school holidays and queuing would have been -EV in every respect. Could have saved myself £800 though!

Pwned

2010-04-12T23:00:00.001+01:00

Had a good day on the tables today, pwning all comers...

Played a small session on Saturday for a reasonable loss, but more than made up for that today. Played all the running limits of the Bad Beat tables on Laddies and thankfully didn't get setup for a loss on the bigger tables. Only managed ~2k hands in two sessions today, but this has only been the third day this month when I've been able to sit down and play two proper sessions.

I've just been so busy. Most of this has been running favours for friends and family. The usual computer stuff as well as building a greenhouse in my dad's allotment. This is the hardest self assembly I've ever done. My dad has a terrible temper and openly admitted that if I wasn't helping he'd have smashed the thing up. Tilt control ftw. I'm still in a bit of pain typing as my fingertips are totally sliced to pieces from the aluminium (spell check is telling me that's wrong, FU America we discovered it). Also this raises the point that it's actually aluminium and perspex, not steel and glass. Cheaper and lighter. We staked it into two foot deep concrete wells, so it shouldn't blow away, but he'll be lucky to get 2 years out of it before the frame and perspex warps and renders it useless. Spending two days more or less inside a greenhouse and going for a huge bike ride yesterday in the glorious sunshine means I have actually caught a wicked tan early in the year. Will try to keep it topped up for my holiday in 7.3 weeks :-)

My arse is killing me from that bike ride. My seat is basically solid metal with a sheet of nylon wrapped around it. Fucking useless. A bit like the rest of the bike really. It was a catalog order when I was a teenager if my memory serves. About £60 of utter crap. We laughed at one of the transfers (!) on it with the model name "Astra" emblazoned in comet-like text. This is funny because co-incidentally my car is an Astra and co-incidentally is also a heap of shite. MOT due this week and it's not going to be pretty! I digress.

The last time I rode that bike was a smidge under 9 years ago! I know this exactly because the last time I rode it I had a pretty ridiculous accident. Read on, I promise to raise a smile. I was 17, and helping down at the cricket ground for some pocket money. I'd ride down for 9am, cut and roll the square and be back home for a late lunch. On the way back one day, I was coming over a single lane hump-back bridge with a busy left turn shortly after it. I'm going straight on though so as I exit the bridge I stand on my pedals and take a look back over my shoulder and see a car just about to enter. He was just going to catch me up for the left turn so I immediately started to gun it but my right foot slipped off the pedal. Cue hilarity.

My superior athleticism (at the time) meant I somehow managed to stay on the bike, but this meant leaning forward and obviously unable to correct this perfectly I smash my bollocks into the centre frame. The handlebars get wedged up into my chest and I look like something out of Benny Hill. I am totally out of control, somehow still on the bike, in lots of pain, and looking very silly. I can't steer and can't find the "barrel-roll to the safety of the footpath" (you know, like in the movies) in time before I smashed into the high kerb of aforementioned left turn.

There is a high kerb there, because there is a house next to the road. A house made of brick. And these bricks are rather distastefully covered in razor sharp pebble dashing. Upon meeting the kerb, I am catapulted over the handlebars. Somehow the physics of the whole thing - approach angle, seating position, speed, trajectory, hilarity factor, future storytelling ability - meant that I went more up in the air rather than my feet flopping over me and me landing on my back. I full on front face-plant into the pebble-dashed brick wall. The left side of my face acts as a superb makeshift brake and I stop moving completely. I pick myself up, a little dazed but more embarrassed than anything else. I feel my face and brush off some of the stones that had stuck into my skin. Cue blood. Lots of it. This is definitely the most I have ever bled, my heart starts to pound which obviously only makes it worse.

I am still half a mile from home. Only way is to get back on the bike and get going. At this point I must mention that I am wearing a white cricket jumper. I can't see out of my left eye and have to keep blowing out the left side of my mouth to clear the blood. After a few hundred yards the left side of my jumper is completely blood red. I remember pulling alongside a car at the next junction and getting a look of absolute horror from the man and wife inside. I gave them a jovial "thumbs up" and mouthed the words "I'm alright" through the window. The rest is a blur until the shriek of horror from my mother as she opened the door quickly sobered me up. I hopped in the shower to clean up, which realised the full extent of my injuries. Three whopping great puncture wounds on my face, and some nasty scrapes on my side and arse, which didn't even register at the time. I look in the bathroom mirror and can see my skull bone through the top cut over my eyebrow. Off to A&E and some metal staples had me right in a few weeks. Still have the scars today and imagine I will have for the rest of my life.

What doesn't kill us...! Surprising that after all that, and it being locked away in a shed for 9 years, that it only needed a bit of WD40 and some air in the tyres and it was ok! Still I'll be buying a padded seat before I go out on it again that's for sure. Highlight of the bike ride was watching a pair of Kingfishers scouting a section of river. Hopefully on another nice day soonish I'll take the camera and fingers crossed get some good snaps.

Hoping to log a good amount of volume this week. Results have been good, I'm up ~£1.3k at the moment, but definitely need to put some grind in. Good luck all :-)

Busy Busy

2010-04-08T12:12:00.000+01:00

Done loads in April so far, and still got loads on for the next week or so. This does not include poker, but fortunately I have managed to win loads when I have found time to play. I'm up just shy of £1k in only two days of play. I've actually ran bad in a few spots too but am feeling really good about poker. Confident enough to be taking some shots in the next few sessions - but it's looking like that won't be in the next few days at least.

I also need to get sat down and work out a plan of attack for FTOPs & SCOOPs. Really want to play a lot of these so I'm going to have to free up some time soonish. Good luck all :-)

March P&L

2010-03-31T22:56:00.005+01:00

NLHE Cash £346
MTTs £430
65k Hands

Staking -£145

Rakeback £988
RTR Bonus £793
Other bonus £270

Total: £2,682

Positives:

Good volume
Great application in final 2.5 weeks
£600 behind EV this month

Negatives:

Nowhere near enough actual poker winnings
Only managed a small profit in all MTTs (inc Mini FTOPs)* EDIT: not bad now, had missed >£300 that wasn't tracked
****Absolutely awful application in first week***

Overall I'm very disappointed with March. It's obviously nice to bank over £2.5k, but being non-results oriented, I played terrible in the first week. If I played ~80% as good as I did in the final two weeks, for the whole of the month, then I'd estimate I bank at least another £1k. This is a significant amount of cash and I will not be so lackadaisical in future. I could be freerolling my holiday, or putting a bigger wedge into savings... not good! Proper application from now on!

I've bought some small pieces of Soap and Teamdobb in the Irish Open and WSOP respectively, which will hopefully see a return further down the line. GL fellas!

Looking forward to getting the approach right for every session in April :-) Gl all :-)

The week so far in numbers

2010-03-25T14:36:00.005Z

After my promise to attack the small stakes this week to put the month back in profit, well...I have! Back to completely crushing again - which I have done consistently all of this year - apart from one bad week at the start of this month. Pleased to have turned a corner out of a bad patch and hope it continues.

As you can see a pretty grim start. But reasonable (not amazing) volume and good application has put me nicely into the black. This should also illustrate just how important a good rakeback deal is! I'll be due another ~£600 in bonus & rakeback by the time month end arrives, and hopefully I can tag on some more winnings to that figure.

I'm at The Dog's tomorrow night for a pal's birthday. Should be a great night. Hopefully I can luckbox some wins on probably the most rigged game in the world (yes, even more than jokerstars ;-))

Have a good weekend everyone :-)

What could have been

2010-03-22T00:47:00.005Z

Pretty much sums up my night. Just lost AQ vs AJ in the mFTOPS ME as my final tourney bust. Not playing any more as definitely tilted. Best result of the night was 4th place in the ~300 runner €4k GTD on Laddies for €460, but really annoyed as lost AJ vs A9 and then A9 vs KJ on final table to same fish who goes on to win it. Had such an edge on the FT but not to be.

Also treated myself a to good value satellite on Paddy Power for an Irish Open package. Down to nitty gritty with 57 left and 27 packages, and I lose 88 vs 55 at a critical stage when I had a critical stack size vs another critical stack. I don't mean critical as in mega short, but structure wise and how the tourney seemed to be playing. Can't say I'd have cruised it afterwards but would have been very confident.

Had some minor cashes on Full Tilt in the $42k and $32k GTD. Am up on the night total but considering the Irish Open sat was €320 it's not great. Bitterly disappointed with that and also the €100k on Laddies. Ran up a top ten stack with ~200 left and was picking spots nicely. I 3b another huge stack who must have had some kind of brain fart 4betting me AI w/AQ for a billion BBs and I snap w/KK. Guess he thinks I need a big hand to call but neglects to reason his own mental image and also the fact that to be 3b him in the first place I have a big hand. Of course the Ace pops up and I'm down to average. I end up bubbling 99 < A5. €25k ftw. FU.

Obviously unless you TID a tourney report is usually going to contain bad beats, and this one is no different. Annoying that most are 80/20s though :/ Think I'm still going to stick out these big Sunday tourney schedules though, the fields are just LOL. I'd kill for any of my tourney tables tonight to have been cash tables! Some more (bigger) scores are coming my way, I'm sure of it!

Earlier in the week I was at Cheltenham for Ladies Day with Ladbrokes. Great VIP poker setup as per with Laddies. Free booze all day but gutted to find out that there was no Champagne! Guinness it was for me and with no winners all day was looking grim till I found two E/W places in the final race to put me about £30 in the black. I was also at this point about 8 pints into the black!

After the races myself, Ben and a couple of other lads staggered into Cheltenham town for what I am fairly sure is the least I can remember about a night out, ever. I vaguely remember the walk in, remember nothing about the bars location/names/decor/clientele and don't remember paying £10 into the worst club in the world. Ben tells me I was a star on the dancefloor though. We return to our digs at about 4am, obviously wake the whole place up, and I fail to figure out how to boil the kettle to make a pot noodle. I remember being very confused as the kettle had a button to boil it, but no plug. Obviously the base was over the other side of the kitchen and my severe tunnel vision meant I couldn't figure this out!

The next day was spent expelling pure evil from my system in the morning, then ruining our nice land ladies plans of going out for lunch with friends by not surfacing till after 2pm. She was a star though and still cooked bacon sarnies, we quickly packed and then set off. I somehow managed not to kill us driving the 6 hours+ north in really shit traffic.

Some possible lifestyle changes are coming my way. I'm going to negotiate a part time job doing some journalism/IT work for a local paper. I'm hoping I can agree a two day week, as I think this would be a pretty perfect break from poker week in/week out. It will provide some structure, a definite income, allow me to see my dad more often (he writes for them too now he's retired and lives just round the corner) and open some avenues for writing/photography which I also enjoy. We'll see anyway. Monday I'll be doing that but afterwards it's mega grind time as I'm still down for the month before rakeback & bonuses. I'll fix that this week and earn a lot more on the rake side of things too.

Here's to a new week!

Good habits

2010-03-16T01:03:00.002Z

Today I got up reasonably early, did 30 mins on the bike and had a healthy breakfast. I then renewed my car insurance online and sorted out accommodation for Cheltenham later in the week. Myself and Holmes are going down with Ladbrokes VIP which I'm sure will be awesome as usual. I think we got pretty lucky in ragging some decent last minute digs, really looking forward to it :-)

I've logged three good sessions today totaling 7hrs 30m. First one a loser, second a big winner and third a small winner. Good though in that I've burned through 6.5k hands and €350 rake. Which goes a little way as consolation for my final session, where I won €33 but EV says €393, ten times as much LOL. I still made just shy of £400 (EV £620!) and crushed souls for 12bb/100. (I've just realised I've flicked currencies as I've been messing in HEM, great update!)

Going to play some more tomorrow, after a morning jog and again after helping my dad out at his new allotment. There is something deeply satisfying about eating something that you've grown. Looking forward to it :-) Let's keep up these good habits! Good luck all :-)

Bad habits

2010-03-12T18:24:00.002Z

Been eating shit food, drinking lots, doing no exercise. Worse, these are leaking into poker. After pool last night I played drunk and lost £500. £400 of that was at 2/4 where there were two absolute idiots sat. I didn't get any of their action and lost the cash to regs :-(

I am now ridiculously determined to get back to mid January-February frame of mind and work ethic. Two good months and I go all wishy washy again. Tomorrow I'm doing a day of proper work, Sunday I think I'll do the tournies again, but from Monday next week onwards it's super grind mode.

Backside kicked!

Sunday Tourneys (now w/results)

2010-03-07T14:20:00.004Z

Have just reg'd for a boat load of tourneys across three sites where I have a reasonable roll:

Laddies:

1830 €20 €4k GTD
1900 €50r €100k GTD
2000 €20r 6m €4k GTD
2015 €1 Carnage €500 to 1st
2200 €20r €10k GTD

Virgin:

1900 €30 €10k GTD HH
1930 €20 ICOP ME €100k GTD

Full Tilt (ET):

1235 $3r $14.5k GTD
1345 $1 MiniFTOPS Warm Up $100k GTD
1400 $24 $42k GTD
1430 $20r $24k GTD
1500 $24 $33k GTD HH
1622 $22 DoubleDeuce $200k GTD

May unreg from the 2200 €10k on Laddies depending on how tired I am/what is still running. Looking forward to luckboxing the €1 Carnage on Laddies and beating 80,000 players over 10 hours for $3 profit in the MiniFTOPs warm up :-)

Gl me :-)

EDIT:

Managed some small cashes in the $1 mFTOPs Warm up, the €4k GTD 6m on Laddies and €10k HH on Virgin for a small profit on the night. Nothing really to write home about, all pretty standard hands.

I was in a great position in the €4k 6m but unfortunately blew it making a big call with KJ on JT66 turn after flop c/r (two clubs). Villain wasn't the type to slowplay preflop and weighted his c/r more towards broadway draws & club combos. Plus it's pretty damn hard to flop a set or two pair. Also my hand has excellent removal and I am crushing KQ and his straight & flush draws. JT it is though and I'm crushed. 99 loses to AQ after and gg.

Enjoyed the tourney day though, will keep a look out for some added value in the near future. Pretty sick run of tourneys coming up though, MiniFTOPs, Laddies Easter Festival and I assume WCOOP is approaching? I'm not a Stars reg though so not certain, may have to make a small deposit :-)

Good luck to anyone running deep tonight, especially Soap, Teamdobbs and Stumpy who I know are going well in respective tourneys atm :-)

Also, ship the Gatsby :-)

Not done much in March

2010-03-03T23:12:00.003Z

I'm really slacking off!

Did two full days of "proper" work Monday and Tuesday this week, as in restored & reconfigured a network computer for the newspaper office my dad reports for. Ended up doing loads of random computer kerfuffle for them, and as they employ my dad and were super chilled about me turning up at 11am each day, I didn't have the heart to charge them much. They paid cash in hand too, ka-ching!

Because of these full days of proper work, I haven't been playing much poker. I've been too tired after these *gasp* six hour days. LOL. It's not the length of worth that's the issue though, it's when it is. I've been wanting to play the Virgin Poker online series this week, they have some good value €20 tourneys running, but they start at 10pm and I'd just be dead money. As it was my plan to base poker around these this first week in March, absolutely no poker at all has materialised. I forced myself to play cash tonight (even though a bit tired) just to see if I still know how to play. I binked off more than double what I made Monday & Tuesday in just 45 minutes. Poker ftw.

Anyway I'm going to try and force a late night and consequently a super awesome lie-in in the morning. All in the name of proper application though! No play tomorrow as it's pool night (win and we secure the league with 4 games to spare!) but then hopefully some good volume over the weekend. I plan to play a proper schedule on Sunday and that means not getting horribly drunk in Durham on Saturday night. Hold one time!

February P&L

2010-02-28T12:03:00.002Z

Disappointing last week to a very good February. So close to being great, nvm.

NLHE 6max £1,100
NLHE HU £300
43k Hands

MTTs £3,100

Staking -£500

Rakeback £984
RTR Bonus £922

Live MTT -£19

Total: £5,887

Included number of hands played which I didn't for Jan. I forget but it'll have been around 70k, which means that this month wasn't good enough in that respect. I know I've slacked a bit this month. Also figs above are assuming I hang onto 3rd in RTR RR for $1,250. I'm hoping I do, I was $1k clear of 4th at last update.

Was great to have a MTT win, really takes the pressure off. I also put that down to a huge loss at staking, I head first dived into the deep end there.

Next month I really want to up the volume on the cash. I also plan to play as many Mini FTOPs as time/plans allow, and find good value tournaments to run alongside the usual cash tables. Good luck all :-)

This week has been shit

2010-02-27T14:46:00.002Z

I'm done for Feb now. Was going to play a lot today and tomorrow as worthwhile plugging on for a few extra points in both the Laddies and RTR rake races, but poker can fuck off for a couple of days.

I've consistently lost this week at a reasonable clip, putting my bb/100 for the month down to a paltry 3bb. Annoying after crushing for three weeks for Feb to end this badly. I have been on the wrong side of coolers for 10k hands and a short 1k session today really took the biscuit for -£600. Two years ago I'd have smashed something up good and proper. I'm not posting any hands though because even in a tiltrage state of mind I realise that they're not interesting and no one gives a fuck.

Still despite now feeling like shit I can't complain too much. I should still post a £5.5k month in February. If I'd somehow managed to break even this week that would have been over £7k. Still let's bank the £5k and get ready to kick the shit out of everyone next month!

Installed the new HEM update today. Pretty amazing update giving $/£/€ options which has been a long long time coming. Great for me playing on Prima obviously. I've also never really used the Rakeback + Bonus options in the HEM graphing functions. They look decent and I'm going to stay well on top of things in HEM next month as now with the currency fix is nearing a complete solution for me.

Right, have a good weekend everyone :-) FU poker!

Swongs they be one thing

2010-02-23T23:05:00.005Z

Had a pretty ridiculous few days. Minus £1.5k on Friday, and +£1k today. Was well down at one point today also...

Which thankfully rescues the month a bit after a very grim Friday night session...

Think I'm going to have to be stricter on myself about where I play. True I can take my laptop and have my HEM database, but I have a pretty sweet setup at home and am mega comfortable playing in my room. It's easy to pass blame on the smallest little thing, but +EV surroundings can't harm. Ignoring the environment that session was pretty sick anyway. I flopped top set 4 (four) times and lost every one, to regs wanting to get flush or straight draws in on the flop and bink it off. Those were deep too and well over half of my losses. Final hand of the night I am ~200bb deep with a complete 74/54 spazztard. I flop a set of 2s in a 3b pot on A2x, and he check/shoves my 12 euro cbet for 200 euros, with AA. Which is awesome because I have the only hand that can pay him off. Wp, log off, nn.

Anyway made good strides to recovering that with £300 yesterday and £1k today (graphs are effectively in €) and am pushing on for another great month. I want to win more in poker winnings than last month. I won't be able to rake as much but fingers crossed I can eclipse last months cash figures, then add onto that the €3.8k tourney score and it's happy days!

Good luck all in final week of Feb push :-)

Look how manly I am!!

2010-02-17T01:45:00.002Z

How you feeling Ben? ;-)

Yeah but seriously, it doesn't mean much. I've just quite radically changed my style again after some reading, thinking and work in HEM and I've been pwning left right and centre. Also this is so much fun to play! I was running reasonably bad at showdown but I guess it soon catches up, and it's great when you get a run going.

I delved into the world of staking on Sunday, wanting to make a nice gesture to people from the NPF who bought a % of me for the UKIPT which I was unable to play. I was in a great mood and offered ridiculously generous terms in a huge -EV move for myself, but like I say was in a brilliant frame of mind and "had a feeling" a big score could be binked off. Wrong. GG £500. I staked 8 players into FTOPS#8 and unfortunately only one min-cash and a few bounties were collected. Nevermind actually had a really enjoyable night railing.

If it wasn't for that little venture I'd be well over £5k up for the month, as it stands I'm just under. In fact it'll be over after rakeback etc. After my piss poor effort for first half of Feb I'm going to hammer away and log some hands. I'd be stupid not too when playing/things going this well. Top of the rake race at present but no way that will stand as there's a few MSNL regs and shortstackers who are sure to pull away. Top five hopefully though.

Good luck all :-)

Ship-a-dee-doo-daa

2010-02-13T04:26:00.002Z

Unable to play the UKIPT I stayed in and played online. Pretty glad I did. Ship the €10k GTD for £3,200 :-)))

February ticking over

2010-02-09T15:10:00.002Z

Have barely played so far in February, just managing to get 6.5k hands in. Thirteen of those hands were at NL400 where I saw a huge donk sat, from whom I managed to take $600 off. That's a big reason as to why I'm £900 up at the moment, as my volume has been crap. I plan to log as many hands as possible today and tomorrow before I choo choo down to Manchester for the UKIPT £550 Main Event.

Have sold some shares in my tournament already, but may increase the % I'm willing to ship out. Leave a comment or email me if you know me and want to buy a stake. Same terms as in the link above.

Will give a proper statto update once I get >10k hands in. Good luck all :-)

January P&L

2010-02-01T00:21:00.002Z

Unfortunately this isn't as detailed as I'd have liked due to my database corrupting yesterday, but thanks to my Excel spreadsheet my P&L figures are - for once - very precise:

Poker winnings: £1,682
Rakeback: £1,080
RTR Bonus: £1,000 est

Total: £3,762

I was all set for a proper breakdown of HU, 6max, PLO, SnGs, and MTTs play, but alas I can't. I can remember roughly though that poker profit was made up of approx:

6max NL50: £50
HU NL50: £100
6max NL100: £950
HU NL100: £400
6max NL200: £250
6max PLO50: -£68

I didn't play any SnGs, and I think one MTT freeroll where I didn't cash. Also the RTR bonus is estimated as they are always a few days late with their figures, but should be reasonably accurate.

Also FYI, approx 55% rakeback this month. Big drawback of me losing my DB is that I can't work out my hourly, or know quite simply how many hours I played this month. It was above average that's for sure but counted big time with more effective kickback from RTR. The 55% figure is correct though. Absolutely awesome value from them, click the link top right if you're silly enough not to have an account with RakeTheRake yet.

So without doubt the most consistently focused I've been, playing sensible and dedicated hours, with a positive and controlled mindset, sees my best ever monetary results. Spot the trend?

I shall be referring to this post in future should I ever to rekindle levels of concentration and general outlook. Here's to more of the same in February! Good luck all :-)

If only....

2010-01-31T02:23:00.004Z

Upgraded to Windows 7 today, great piece of kit. Backed up and transferred everything across no bother. Also noticed there is a hefty update to v1.10 of HEM which has a big currency and EV fix. Great I thought! Well no :-/

As you can see from the SS above, my database is completely mashed. I have not played 500k hands this month, nor have I made $22k. Good job I've been keeping a mega detailed Excel spreadsheet in 2010.

Will play tomorrow and see if it's importing OK and I won't bother touching it, otherwise it's a full wipe and new DB time :-(

Rushhhhh

2010-01-29T22:28:00.003Z

As a side to my usual games I've been playing a bit of Rush Poker over on Full Tilt. I hope you know what it is by now, cos I'm not explaining. Anyway it's absolutely tons of fun to play. My biggest downfall at the tables is image, and this almost totally eradicates it from all but the sharpest of note takers. The HEM HUD can't keep up with the action!

Anyway played a little more tonight, ran up a few buyins and decided to check my stats for the month on Full Tilt. I was pleasantly surprised!

Some days I've totally nitted it up, some days I've gone crazy and bet/3bet every flop. Really is tons of fun and hopefully I can keep plugging and build a reasonable secondary BR. I'm at $625 from $150 so a great start!

Have confirmed today that I'm going down to the Pokerstars UKIPT Manchester with Soap on the second weekend in February. Looking forward to this as the buyins are pretty much spot on for me. Big enough to warrant my A game, whilst not too big to be playing wary. I won't be playing the Main Event, but probably every side event. Might try and drum up some staking for the £300 game, am undecided how much I want to put in play. We'll see anyway.

Running good whilst running bad

2010-01-26T23:27:00.004Z

CHAMONE!!

So yeah I totally crushed today running waaay above expectation. Guess I'm not allowed to whinge about -EV if I don't accurately balance my blog posting range ;-)

The running bad bit is unfortunately pretty bad though. I was sat on 6 of 8 Bad Beat Jackpot tables, and yes you already know what's coming. It was dropped on one of the other two tables. Pretty gutting to see the BBJ counter drop from $240k to $40k in the space of a few seconds, and know that you would have been $6k better off had you even been dealt into the hand :-(((((

But...after a squiffy week of downswing, lesser focus and tons of socialising (which kind of run into each other) I've got my month back on track to being a monster, with a nice $500 day yesterday too.

Outside of poker I had my first gym session of 2010 yesterday. Ouch I'm feeling it today. Also not told you about my knee for a while, it feels good after a long break. Will be hitting the bike again soon and testing it out in the gym, as I want to get fitttttt again by summer. Extra Ts for emphasis! I ordered that HDC HD2 phone too, which looks pretty awesome. It's a bit of a monster but runs Windows so I can sync my whole Outlook as well as some important Office documents, so I should be super organised. This will replaced my ageing iPhone, so unfortunately I won't know where I am anymore, but will know what the weather's like outside ;-)

Good luck all in your last push for January :-)

Bleurgh

2010-01-20T22:01:00.002Z

Pretty yacky downswing at the moment. Am -£1.3k since last post. I really feel like I shouldn't be either. I seem to have gone approx 10k hands not ever making a top pair type hand after raising preflop. Especially in 3b pots. I am bleeding in those something chronic the last 10k hands.

Today I am -£700 and EV says -£170. Nice slap in the face! I'm now well down on EV this month even after my amazing results in week 1. I've also played 50k hands already so the sample counts for something!

Anyway I'm changing the pace up a bit. Might grind the micros at Full Tilt for a bit, trying out that new "Rush Poker". I played it for 15 mins a few days ago; and I have to say, the concept is first class and quite surprisingly the execution is too! :-)

I've also been playing increasingly longer sessions, which is probably adding a bit of wear and tear to my psyche. I also went to bed at 8am last night (morning). Not good. Might try a bit of HU action, who knows. But definitely changing up the approach next couple of days. Glgl :-)

As is

2010-01-16T19:28:00.002Z

Monetary wise pretty much the same as last time I posted. Had a seven BI downswing the session after I posted the pretty amazing graph last entry. Then kind of yo-yo'ed back and forth a bit, eventually making it all back today.

One thing I have noticed is that my effective rakeback this month is nothing short of AWESOME. Hopefully I will cling on to 4th in the RTR rake race, but a MSNL reg has put in a double shift this week to try and topple me. If I do, as it stands I will have earned 70% rakeback! RakeTheRake are pretty damn amazing value. Link on the top right of the blog if you've not already got an account.

Anyway, full day off for me tomorrow. At a mates son's Christening, then drinks all day. Looking forward to first full day off in ages! :-) Have a good weekend all :-)

Crushing

2010-01-14T01:37:00.004Z

There can be no other word for it. Absolutely crushing!

I want to get this on the blog before the run ends! The last few days of my HEM reads, $875 $785 $1075 and $650 today. Check out my last 9k hands...

...pretty incredible heater. 38bb/100. EV line included for Soap - just the 5 buyins above EV, not totally luckboxing! Have had tons of nuts vs second nuts type hands, and my decreased tables and increased focus has helped me in knowing who I can exploit later in hands. Long may this continue :-)))))))

$1k day

2010-01-12T21:44:00.003Z

BOOOOOOOMMM!!!

Ordinarily I'd completely take my foot off the gas, go out and get extremely drunk tomorrow at the pool game, and forget about logging any more hands till next week. Well not this time!

I've logged 53 hours since Jan 4th, if I can continue the volume and run at even a quarter of my current winrate, I could be on for a pretty special month. Just need to keep my head down and plugging away! :-)

So close

2010-01-11T18:35:00.003Z

When you're playing on a Bad Beat Jackpot table you can understand that I absolutely shit myself when I flopped this and it ran out two possible backdoor quads!

Still not to be...someday!

Stress

2010-01-11T01:41:00.002Z

Just shy of 5k hands today, to total just over 24k for Jan, since the 4th. I really feel a bit pokered to death at the moment. This is todays graph...

So yes thinly veiled brag. But had a total rollercoaster day. Felt great at lunch time, shit at tea time, and now, well just knackered! Pleased, but knackered!

Take note volume slackers!

Maybe a day off tomorrow, who knows. I might feel better after a good 16 hour sleep, the mobile shall be getting turned off!

Good volume, results improving

2010-01-10T01:39:00.004Z

Have played a little under 20k hands in Jan, and I didn't start playing till the 4th :-)

Also these past couple of days I've only been 4-6 tabling and really concentrating on my poker. Saying that there were a few hours of sessions where I felt I was wandering slightly and playing bad poker. Wanting to push things too hard to generate action. Today was a good example of this. I had an airey fairey session this afternoon, I ran bad, had to fold a couple of times where I didn't want to, and then start pushing things way too hard. This is tilt and I must start to recognise this sooner. Anyway thankfully I quit, got some food, got my head on straight and boom...

...comeback!

In general life stuff I feel like a proper hermit. With the amount of poker I play I guess you would think thats normal, but for me it really isn't. I do an awful lot of travelling day-to-day, but my car hasn't moved all week. I walked into town to do some shopping yesterday, and I dug the car out and cleared the drive today. Bloody hard work that was! It has promptly snowed heavily again which in the space of 20 minutes, totally shit all over my two hours hard graft. WP weather, gg.

Been cutting down on the food too. I'm sure I ate more in two days over Christmas than I have all this week! Am in a constant state of hunger but really must get my portions under control before I do a David Benyamine. Also, Man Utd are shit. I feel really down about the team. But, when you consider we have no defence, have been playing worse than a Championship side in the last 10 games, yet are still somehow 2nd... I guess I should take the positive and run with it.

Also if you've not seen it already, this image is amazing. Click for big...

Grind on the mind

2010-01-06T20:29:00.002Z

There's two foot of snow outside, with more on the way. It has to be -11 deg C here tonight. I couldn't get out this evening to play pool, and I suspect there is no way on earth I'll be going anywhere tomorrow. There is an icicle forming off the back roof that is currently ~4ft long. To put that in perspective, that's about three Azz's. Massive. I'm hoping it'll make six Azz's by morning.

I'm pretty stoked to be able to play lots on Weds and Thurs, which are usually my non-poker days. I'm hoping to break 20k hands by Sunday, I'm at 6k at the moment and have clawed back £200 today to be a little under £400 down for Jan. Gogogogo work ethic!

Resolution

2010-01-05T14:24:00.006Z

Big word that one. If you take it for it's true meaning. I'll start with some context...

[EDIT - Essay alert!]

New Years Eve for me could be perceived to have been a bit of a disaster. Sorted out a small house party with a few close friends and it promised to be a great night of friendly banter, drinks, entertainment and merryment. That was cut short before 11pm by a phonecall telling Libby that her sister had overdone things slightly and was being rushed to A&E. So Twedd and Libby have to leave and the party is cut short. Shortly before midnight we decide to head round to Dawson's mam's house to wish her Happy New Year and for me to be firstfoot. She always thought I was a bit of a cheeky bugger so it should be pretty amusing. It's at this point I must tell you that I'm in Tow Law in Co Durham, which is approximately ten billion feet above sea level, there is two foot of snow, and it's coming down so thick you can barely see two lamposts ahead of you.

The plan was to hop a fence and take a shortcut through a field. Should be a five minute walk max. Fortunately though I was the only one with enough ability to get over said fence, Dawson and Ony wimped out and walked the long way around. I was already over so I hotfooted it through the field and back onto the street to meet them halfway. I say fortunately because the events that followed us taking the long way around have definitely impacted a few lives!

As I was walking down to meet them, I saw Dawson and Ony crouching behind a car. I initially thought that they were making snowballs and about to ambush me. They weren't. They had almost walked past an old lady who had slipped and fell under a car at the side of the road, unable to free herself. Ony heard a faint cry for help and could just make out the top third of a person covered in snow, stuck under a car. We pulled her out and myself and Dawson carried her home, got her warm and called her family. Turns out she'd left the pub at 11.20, so she'd been stuck for about 20 minutes. It was one of Dawson's friends aunties, who is well known throughout the village for being the old fiendly chatterbox, so she would have been sorely missed. She'd maybe have been found in the next hour or so if a few locals had been in the pub, but certainly in a worse condition. I don't wish to speculate about such a matter, but it was deathly quiet where we found her, subzero temperature, and snow falling the heaviest I've ever seen. My New Year ticks over with me on my own on a deserted street, cold, and covered in snow to the degree that I look like a walking Jack Frost.

In the week after Christmas and before New Year, I used the downtime to get my finances in order and sort out a proper poker plan for 2010. As you can tell from my blog, my record keeping has been basically non-existent. I can tell you how much I've roughly won in a month, but I would bank varying amounts, downswing a larger bankroll than usual, and generally fritter away money day-to-day like it was going out of fashion. That's going to change. Correction. That HAS changed :-)

With Ben's help, I have successfully created the world's second-most-complex (behind his obviously) poker finance tracker in excel. I'd been up in Newcastle for FA Cup weekend and kind of a Vegas re-union. We played the Soccer Saturday drinking game at Agers, before the premiere of the DVD compilation I made of all our Vegas footage. Was well received and I had a great time making it, even if it did take forever! We then play more drinking games watching the darts, and then in true Vegas style, play beer pong. Yes, we were hammered!

Next day I see Man Utd lose to Leeds. Words cannot describe how much I hate Leeds. But with them being so out of my awareness for so long, I kind of feel a bit numb about the defeat. Still we were shite and deserved nothing less. I had cinema tickets booked for the evening though.

On my way to see Avatar in IMAX 3d, I take a wrong turn and miss the Yellow Car Park at the Metro Centre. I curse my inability and aggresively turn round between those kerbed car park divides with plants in the middle. These ones were particularly high with rockeries in the middle of them. Yep, you already know what's coming next. I way overdo the pace thinking that what I see ahead of me is slush and although I might lose it a little bit, it won't be much and we all like a little powerslide from time to time. Nope that is solid ICE! I skid the split second I turn the wheel, my rear end kicks out and I gear down and start to gun it to get out the slide before I hit this divide. It's all ice though, I have no grip and in what seems like about 10 minutes I see the huge kerb slowly approach, like in a Jaws film, about to take a huge chunk out of the nearside front of my car. Dur dum, dur dum. What happened next can only be appreciated by a poker player...

In years past I would have belted out a large 'FUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK' and smashed my hands into the steering wheel. Upon coming to rest - got out and kicked a hole in the side of my car, grab my de-icer from the side compartment, and in a fit of revenge fuelled rage, gone back and systematically de-iced the offending area of tarmac. Take that ice!

But I didn't. As the kerb neared, I thought to myself 'Meh, I'm going to hit that' in that really gay way you console and re-assure yourself in your head. Like getting it in good on the turn only to be two-outered on the river, I accepted with an inner-peace that I am now screwed and it was going to cost me a lot of money.

I limped the car into a proper parking spot and got out and checked the damage. To my amazement I hadn't lost a panel. The wheel however was bashed up and into the wheel arch and was facing ~30deg in the opposite direction to which it should be so my front wheels kind of looked like this / \ I locked up and walked to the cinema.

One thing you have to absolutely do this year is go and see a film on the new IMAX 3d screen at the Metro. The best cinematic experience I've ever had, overtaking Independance Day with my cousins when I was a young un. The effects and digital imagery in Avatar makes the LOTR trilogy look like that 1930s Lost World film with plasticine dinosaurs. Then put that into 3d. Absolutely incredible. Ignoring that side of things though, I absolutely loved the film. I think this stems from my over-playing of Final Fantasy VII on the playstation, as there are a few parallels from that storyline. Go see it!

I get the car recovered to a mates house as it would have cost £90 more to go back to mine, and he also knows a few local mechanics. I book the car in, and spend the day playing poker, losing nearly 13 buyins nine tabling NL50 over the course of the afternoon. So I don't yet know how much my car is going to cost, it could be upwards of £500 if the axle is bent, and I've just lost £600 playing poker. Remarkably, I feel great.

So I see in New Year alone, cold and covered in snow. But I potentially helped save a life. A few days later I bin my car then before it's fixed lose £600 at poker. Thankfully the wishbone took the impact so a relatively cheap £100 fix.

Follow those events and it's negative, positive, negative, negative, small positive. It would be a fair assumption to say I am now feeling good because the last major thing to happen to me was a positive. Well it wasn't actually. I missed getting home and saying goodbye to my sister by about 5 minutes. She's off to Aus & NZ for 3 months.

Yet I feel great. I feel focused and driven. I ambled through last year, playing a bit of poker and making some money, but had no plan for anything, at all. I didn't know where I'd be or what I'd be doing in two days time. My spending was ridiculous.

Back to that word 'resolution'. If something is brought to a resolution, it's solved, done & dusted. I've never written out a meaninful list of 'resolutions'. I've made false promises to myself at New Year, but nothing is a true resolution unless it actually becomes resolved, and only you can do that.

Even though it is Jan 5th and I have done absolutely nothing, I feel a great sense of achievement in that I've actually made 'resolutions' which I feel compelled to achieve, which in itself I feel has 'resolved' a part of me that needed addressing. I feel my base level of general happyness, midset and focus has risen quite dramatically in the last couple of weeks having done this exercise.

In poor 2009 record keeping style, I made ~£2.2k in December. I can't wait to post my first detailed Month End report in 2010, even if I'll have to work extra hard to make it a good one :-) One of my resolutions is to play 15k hands a week, so I best get busy. Good luck all and best wishes for 2010 :-) I'm looking forward to it!

Xmas Update

2009-12-24T18:00:00.003Z

Large amounts of retardation at the tables this time of year. Ship the 10 buyins so far today. Hopefully I'm not done as should be quite juicy later tonight.

EDIT: Ship the 15 buyins :-)

Pokerwise December has gone well. I updated my thread at the NPF a few days ago, check here for some meaningful poker content. So apart from the slight mishap at NL100, it's going well and since last updating I'm probably looking at ~£1k profits thus far, with about that again in bonus & rb. I'm sure I can add a decent amount to that before 2010 comes around :-)

Merry Christmas everyone :-)

Poker Blog

2009-12-08T02:45:00.003Z

OK thinly disguised digs and jokey posts aside, it's time to publish some poker content.

I've been partaking in a small stakes challenge this month on the NPF. All the details are in my thread, here. As you can see I've semi-regularly updated it and hence haven't been updating the blog when I really should have been. Cross post:

OK can't be chewed with SSs at this hour so I'm gonna just type up from HEM.

So far I have played a little over 11k hands at NL20 for €160, which is 7bb/100. Preflop stats are 24/20 with 7% 3b.

Since I made the big adjustments on the 2nd Dec I have actually crushed for 21bb/100. I also upped the # tables yesterday as I believe playing more tables at NL20 pushes my game into the more optimum zone... ie not getting bored and trying to win a random big pot.

My plan was to get to over 10k hands at NL20, and post results showing >5bb winrate. Mission accomplished there. Next step was up to NL50 and hopefully post the same, but most likely a much larger sample. I only wanted to play NL20 for the first week. In two minds now as it's definitely possible to crush this level. I'll start table selecting pretty hard at NL20/50 and take it from there :)

Aside from the mirco stakes cash play, I've occassionaly ground out the Super Turbos on FTP (currently at 20% roi), and this evening played an MTT session of a few hours, losing a small amount. I final tabled two $6 90 Man tournies but only managed 5th and 7th, not winning a single all in on both final tables (all AQ+, 99+)

Enjoying the change of pace so far but I've been quite lazy so far logging only 25 hours, but doing OKish at around £9 p/h :-S Looking to play a lot this week before I do a huge amount of driving this weekend down to Bristol, then up to Leeds then back up here in the space of a few days. Please car don't die!

Knee Update

2009-12-05T01:21:00.001Z

Feels OK ish.

United Fourth XI Ease Past Woeful Spurs

2009-12-02T14:31:00.003Z

Manchester United Fourth XI 2 - 0 Tottenham Shitspurs

Two nice goals from Darron Gibson who incidentally has the greatest long range shot in the world. Yes better than Ronaldo. I told you!

That is all :-)

Donkament win

2009-11-29T22:06:00.005Z

Feels great to take down such a large field tourney. After 99% cash poker for over a year now I forget the enourmous sense of achievement you can get from winning one of these. Ok so it's just a little $5 tourney but I'm chuffed to bits! There's $15 of bounties to add on too ;-)

Really happy with how I played it. Totally crushed from about 90 players left just playing the stack size game, and only racing for less than 50% of my chips, with it being nice to win on the two occasions that I did flip. Also helped to have two very weak players on the FT and as the field thinned and I remained chip leader it was just a matter of time in my mind.

Not all good news however in that I had a bad day at the cash tables yesterday, made a hero call that was not good (grrrr!) and lost a big flip, but the tourney score does help things somewhat. Hopefully I'm not done for Novemeber either as I'm going to log some serious tourney time early in the week when I can play longer sessions, whereas Weds-Fri I'm always out.

Good luck all :-)

ZOMG HAWT

2009-11-27T00:44:00.002Z

Last 5 days shortstacking cash. Pretty happy to be running well but mainly pretty happy with my strategy as EV adjusted that's still 7bb/100. I'm maxing out Laddies at 10 tables which makes for a nice hourly. I'm still -£1.5k for the month though but hopefully I can keep plugging on the SSing cash and low level SnGs to finish strong for a fresh start in December.

Incidentally if you want to set yourself a challenge in December like I do, head over to here. Gl all :-)

The Turbos

2009-11-18T19:09:00.004Z

Back in my retarded days I used to play 10 man "normal speed" sit-n-gos on the old Crypto network. After initally losing, I read HOH and got to grips with the structure and started crushing. I then learned I could make more $$$ playing cash so I made the gradual switch. The Full Tilt standard "normal speed" 9 man sit-n-gos are remarkably similar to the old crypto ones, so I started playing those this month. I'm a winner at those, but today I decided to have a pop at the turbos...

Just a quick hour and fourty five mins after my tea before I go out for pool. Ran hot obviously finishing ITM in exactly half of the tournies played. The $6.50s are "Turbos" with 3 min blind levels, and the $7.50s are "Super Turbos" where you only start with 10bbs on 3 min levels. So it's pretty mental action. I only decided to 9 table as I wasn't sure on how hard it would be, but I reckon I can do 12 next time. I reg'd for another super turbo if I bust in the first 3 levels so I got a few more of those in.

I'm going to stick to grinding the STTs for two reasons:

1) I'm 15 buyins below EV after only 6k hands shortstacking
2) I'm enjoying the tournies believe it or not!

I've also been playing the 90 and 180 manners on an evening and am +ROI there too, but no big scores yet, just consistent small cashes. I'll win some key hands late on soon for a nice return I'm sure. I'll post some more results and graphs when I've got a more meaningful sample :-)

Lack of updates = Shit times

2009-11-16T20:23:00.002Z

So since I drunkedly pissed away £1.5k a couple of weeks ago, I haven't had a winning session since. Nice timing.

There's obviously a slight psychological contribution to the downswing, but the poker side of things has been quite horrific. I have been super happy getting my money in, but not at all happy with the outcome. A session a couple of days ago really took the biscuit. For the second time in my life I flopped quads and lost. I also flopped a full house and lost, and had two set under sets. I tried to play through it pushing a couple of big draws which of course didn't get there. If you read those last couple of sentences carefully you might spot a trend. I've been trying to slow down with my big hands a lot this month, and obviously still push big draws/observed weakness for fold equity. I may be playing Devil's Advocate with myself but it could be being picked up on. At least the results make it feel that way. As I can't win a big pot taking either passive or aggressive lines at all this month, I've decided to take that out of the equation and play braindead poker... Sit n Gos and shortstacking!

I played a 'tourney night' on Sunday with poor results, but a positive mindset to show for it. I was a couple of hours into 8 tournies accross two sites, and was above average in every single one. Then in the space of about 2 minutes I bust five of them in pretty standard setup spots. Then I make what I considered a standard call in the BB for 80% of my stack with KJs after a BTN push. I realised in horror after clicking 'call' though that this was the satellite to the Aussie Millions weekly final and I was 8/16 with 12 seats. FUCK! I obviously lose to Q3o.

I final table a $5 800 runner jobbie after totally pwning the field from 90 left. I am chipleader at the final table but I do a 'Phillip Hilm' and am first out in 9th. I opened tons of hands but chose well when to call off against re-pushes. I lose AK vs AJ, TT vs 88 and AQ vs 44. I am now short and push KQ in the SB into the BB's AA. GG. Pretty soul destroying.

Anyhow the small roll at Full Tilt I mentioned earlier in the month is now a little less small, growing to $350 after that monsterous $60 score taking 9th from 800 :-/ and some $5 STT grindage. I'm at 30% ROI atm playing batches of 12. I'm going to continue that this month. I'd normally consider it a waste of my time but I actually need to do it this month things are so bad. I cleared off all my credit in one lump last month so my life roll is short, and now my poker roll is short too! I'm going to shorstack the same cash games on Laddies as there isn't enough STT traffic for my multitabling abilities. I'll get some chat abuse from the regs but it's all a good lesson in humility imo. I've fucked up but I'm going to get out of it.

Gogogogo small stakes grindage!

The Butterfly effect

2009-11-06T22:50:00.004Z

If I could make it so that one day in my life didn`t actually take place, yesterday would be it.

Was out with the lads in the local pool league, playing away out in the sticks somewhere and its not my turn to drive so I plan on having a few drinks. I sit down in one of those old deep window ledge seats with my first pint as we`re racking up for practise. I lean my shoulder blade against the window frame just gently and POP I feel it go. I half fall through the window as the whole room hears the glass break on the tarmac outside. I was lucky not to cut myself as it was an awkward break on obviously old glass, where there was some hefty shards still in the frame. Still quite embarassing to have to fetch the landlord and apologise. He didn`t believe my story one bit.

So this mishap makes me intent on getting even more drunk. But the next catastrophe would happen whilst still sober. My round, I walk through the rabbit warren of corridors out of the pool room and into the bar, and make my way back with a tray of 6 drinks. A couple of our lads were running late but had arrived whilst I was at the bar. I say hello to Steve as I walk into the room, and he turns excitedly to greet me not realising I have a tray of drinks. Too late. They go everywhere, half down him half down me and soak the floor in the pokey pool room. Landlord present. Sarcastic "double thumbs up".

We whitewash the pool, thomping home with a 9-0 away win. I wash down a nice supper with a few more whiskey and lemonades. As I`ve been in a horrible 7am-2pm sleep routine for a while now, I obviously can`t just go to sleep. I`m also past the point of wanting to sober up too, so I crack open a bottle of wine in the house.

Cock, cock, cock, cock, COCK!

I stupidly decide to play some poker. I was up over £1k for Novemeber. Was.

I`m now down £500. So I effectively lost £1500 yesterday. £300 of that was legitimately on the afternoon, but still. This was pretty much all HU NL50 which is just a totally stupendous amount of buyins. I mean really! One opponent was truly terrible and I ran horri-bad against him, but the other few were capable and once they figured out I was hammered just entered lock up mode and only played TPGK or better poker. Thing is, I even knew they were doing this, but drunken mentality rules and "I must play on to bust him". Didn`t happen.

I hadn`t played drunk online in aaaages too. I really thought I`d cracked it. And last night I really was beyond drunk. I`ve woken up to quite a few "buddy list" invites in my inbox! Flip side there though in that I`ve got some good rematches when I play again, but it won`t be for a while yet.

Punishing myself with a low stakes grind. I`ve got $200 in Full Tilt which will be at $500 by the end of the weekend, and $1500 by the end of the month. Plan is to return to usual stakes next week and then just part time grind FT after that.

I`m not done. Took another life beat today at Halfords. I bought a new car stereo earlier in the week, a fancy one that can take my iphone and that I`d hoped would hook up to my steering wheel controls. I fitted it myself the other day no bother, but couldn`t get the steering wheel controls going no matter what I tried. I`d bought the extra wiring and patch leads but it just didn`t work. Not a huge problem I thought, I`ll just pay Halfords £20 to do it, as they`ve got advertised. Managed to drag myself up and drive there for 2pm. The guy faffed on for an hour, consulted the largest book I`ve ever seen, eventually concluding that my particular model controls would only work with the stock Vauxhall radio. Cack. He fits it anyway and we go inside to checkout, "That`s £39.99 please sir". "Err, no it isn`t". I point to the sign. He belatedly explains that the offer is for basic models and mine is a super awesome complicated one. I try to string a sentence together telling him that he hasn`t done that though, it was a very basic fitting as none of the extras work. It`s all electronically linked though and it he can`t ring it through for any less. I feel like shite so just give up and pay. £40 on something I not just "could do" but actually already had done!

Anyway that`s the ramble over with. Going to enjoy a weekend off with mates :-) Also pretty impossible to feel bad about the world after you watch this. Go on, don`t laugh!

NPF Weekend

2009-11-03T17:40:00.004Z

I've had a majorly hectic and tiring weekend, but a thoroughly enjoyable one at that. So much so that this is the first time I have saved a blog draft and come back to it to add more. This could be a biggie...

Thursday I went out Student style with Rogers and the footy lads, ending up in Digital till chucking out time. Then moving onto Circus for some some early morning donking after an absolute skinful of beer. I dump £80. Friday I am mostly hungover all day at Ben's, but play some HU cash later for a nice £200.

Saturday saw the start of the 2nd Annual Newcastle Poker Forum Championships at Circus again, which I knew would be a good event, but I really underestimated what a great structure it was, how awesomely ran it was, and how much great craic everyone would have. On the Thursday after Ben had got us both registered, I had visions of running awesomely in a live tournament for once. I'd cooler the hell out of everyone early on, and win every flip and 60/40 late game and finally take something down worth winning. So in my sweep stake choice for final table I proudly had myself as the #1 pick, along with TeamDobbs and a few other solid players I knew about, but omitting Ben as a bit of a rib at him. Mistake.

I've not much to talk about my tournament really. Peaked at 14k from 10k starting stack. TD mentions on his blog but I don't remember, a hand where I win with 53o from the BB vs his AK. Must have made 2 pair in a multi way pot or something, because I know I wouldn't play TD heads up out of position with such a weak holding. They'd have to be at least suited ;-)

I remember flatting an EP raise MP call with AJdd, flop QxTdTx and it being checked to me. I fire half pot and only the BB comes along. I'm weighting him here to 90% weak Ts and occasionally a weak Q, hadn't quite figured him out yet. Turn is 9d giving me gillions of outs. I decide to fire again half pot knowing that I am unlikely to be 4x raised and priced off my draw if he does have a T, fold out a Q, and I have a very disguised hand should I hit the river. I am min-raised :-) So I make the trivial 600 into 3k call. Another diamond hits the river and I value bet nicely and get paid off by T5.

My opening table really did play very well. I was seated with Ben, TD and Jimmy Chipmunk who I already knew about, but also sat next to Rachel and had Scotty & Steve Brennan other side of table all of whom didn't take me long to figure out were capable players. Infact it was a hand with Scotty that decided my tournament.

He'd been quite active for the last two orbits and open raised the button on my BB. I flat with 78cc and see a JxJc7x flop. A fairly obvious way ahead/way behind flop, but I think I'm way ahead and can win a bet here. I check, he checks. Turn is a Kc which although giving me outs, isn't a card I wanted to fire as I didn't feel I could rep much. He checks behind. River is 6c giving me the backdoor flush. I act really strong and bang out a 2k bet hoping to get called by whatever pair he may have, or induce a raise from air. He makes a healthy raise and I umm and ahh and decide to call, as I'd kind of levelled myself into it how I played the hand. He really does have to have 66 here and the rest are bluffs. Yup he has 66. Had a lengthy discussion with Ben on this hand, specifically my turn play. Agreed with him later that a turn bet is best, and that I'm too used to playing 100bb+ deep. I later found out about an aggressive re-shove by Scotty with KJ vs TeamDobbs which made me happier about my call. That would have put me double average which is where I want to be and would have put my net worth on me making the final 20 from there. Instead I'm short and the worst thing to happen when you're short is get moved. With no image I raise 44 in LP, there's a flat out the blinds and see a K high flop where I cbet and am check raised, so I fold leaving myself only a shove. Orbit later I shove 89ss from LP but find AKo in the SB and lose the 60/40. GG.

Railing was tons of fun, especially as I now could have a few beers and crack on with a few of the people I know, and say hello to more that I didn't. I played some Blackjack for a nice £120 profit before following the final few tables in earnest. DreamDobb made a comedy appearance as Mr Flushy. Only pictures can do that justice! Phlmc drunkenly crashed off his chair, but managed to save his beer from what seemed like certain ruin.

Ben cruised it really, and retired for an early night leaving me to play some cash. Was a fun table with Rob who I met earlier (don't know his forum name) Roscopiko and Chipmunk who I already knew, and a couple of other crisps and recognisable forum contributors. My stack yoyos all over the place, losing a big pot to Rosco with trips to a bigger trips, winning it back in a 3bet pot with 94cc, losing more with AK, winning it back with a flopped wheel with 24 getting paid off 3 streets by what I assume was a sole top pair :-) Moved onto the main casino floor with my large stack but lost most of it with 77 on JJ7 vs AJ for the board to run out Q, Q. Won a large but strange pot with AK, where I had 4 bet massive preflop after a 3bet and two calls, flopped nothing but was committed with a cbet versus his stack. I flop nothing (can't remember exactly, think it was 762 flop) and bet £35 into the huge pot (around £150) He tanks for 2 minutes with £50 behind then eventually folds KQ face up. LOL. I then lose a hefty one with AK vs QQ all in pre, and finish the night £40 up :-/

Next day I follow Ben's progress at the final table, then enter the £20 bounty game last minute. I had held off as guessed it would be a 20bb shove fest, but turns out there was a decent amount of play. I also really wanted to follow Ben as a) I have a share and b) I was his only supporter. I was seated with Stumpy who knew my name from TD and Soap at the CPC, and was a pleasure to meet. I think he told everyone I knew what I was doing though! Also had a chat with Pads who seemed like a very good player. I lost my first pot with AKss after flopping a royal flush draw but gave up the river. Thankfully I managed to double up shortly after otherwise I would have given up this game pretty quickly. Pot is opened from MP, two flats, I flat the button with 53dd. Flop is 4dJx8x. It's checked round to Buzz (from Walker's Sensations) next to me who fires at the pot. I decide to float for a couple of combined reasons. Firstly, the 4d is out there! Secondly, he's in a team and I've seen him deal really well, so I assume he's decent and will play me fairly well. Also by flatting I think I can rep any hand on the turn, any turned straight card, any small card I can rep protect a Q etc etc. Unfortunately he checks the turn to me but fortunately it's the 2d. I fire a little over half the pot planning to bet value-ish if I miss and bomb it if I hit. River is an offsuit 6 giving me the 2nd nuts, he checks again and I insta ship in that Mike Caro "he's weak" way and I do get looked up by a sole J. He called pretty quickly so I guess maybe my turn thinking was bad about folding him out on the river should I miss, but hey it worked out.

I then raise quite a bit picking up some blinds and win a couple of 60/40s. With my big stack I continue the raising game in this massively aggressive structure hoping to accumulate. At this point K turns up (Ben's GF) and Ben has about 30% of chips in play at the final table, and I have similar in the bounty tournament. As we are the only two people she knows in the whole casino, she sits with him and then me when he's on a break. She gets a bit of ribbing about sitting with blokes with big chip stacks, all in good fun :-) My raising doesn't work out as I lose about five 60/40s on the bounce with my stack at an all time low of ~5bbs.

Fortunately I win a key three way all in for once in my life with JJ vs AT and AQ and never look back. I double again in another strange hand. There's a shove, Pads flats in the SB and I flat A6cc in the BB. Flop 542, check check. Turn 3 and Pads bets, I shove. He tanks. CGK on the mic announces that Ben is all in so I stand up and half go over. My table asks in amazement if I'm going to leave the table, I double check with the dealer that I am all in and it stands, and ask if she can manage the pot while I'm gone. I'd won a few bounties at this stage so I just had to go over. Ben wins the all in and I return to see a much larger stack next to my seat. Turns out Pads had trapped with 55 and made a strong fold on the turn, and I dodged a four flush for the side pot also.

I then start raising pretty much every hand. With two tables left I was sat with Pads, Koyte and Mrs CGK where I had basically the best stealing seat in the world ever, and Pads definitely knew this! I raised four hands on the bouce and was obviously priced in to call shoves by marginally better hands. I showed down such monsters as K4o, and Q6ss but the image was obviously a bit shot. I did laugh next hand as I was UTG and before the deal announced I must have a monster if I raise this hand. Sure enough I have JQcc and do raise to groans from the entire table, them all thinking who is this total monkey?!?! I get a couple of flats and check fold a KKx flop. I continue my aggression especially in LP and accumulate more, eventually taking out Mrs CGK all in pre with 78ss vs KJo. Only a 60/40 but ran out in sick fashion as she pairs her J, but I backdoor the straight. There are then a few comedy gold moments with Koyte all in a lot and seemingly the whole place on his back, he takes it so well though and was another character who it was a pleasure to meet.

Three players left (Pads, Koyte, myself) and I enter God mode. I am the bigstack so I'm looking to bully. I shove KT in the SB into Koyte's AK in the BB. He flops broadway QJT, but it runs out Q, T and I backdoor the house. Heads up Pads is at a huge disadvantage, but shows his nouse keeping things small. He traps me with Kx on KxxT for me to shove the turn with T7, he snaps but I find a 6 outer on the river for the game. Nice to run well. The hand against Koyte was the worst I ever got it in in the whole tourney, and I still win that one a quarter of the time. I think a few people think I luckboxed the whole thing but it's just that I was so aggressive (which is key in such a structure) and made correct pot odds calls with marginal holdings and got there a few times. Hope there's no hard feelings! :-) Myself and Ben are 33% shares in each other for tournaments, and 50% cash tables, so I know I owe him some money at this stage but hope that is about to turn as he's going really well at the final table.

Ben does awesomely well and gets to HU vs TD at a huge chip disadvantage. If he could double though he certainly has the ability to take it from there. He would however have been the most unwanted winner of anything, ever. TeamDobbs has done so much for the Poker scene in Newcastle, let alone the running of the forum and connected events. Everyone wanted him to win. I even half wanted him to win. I wished him well at the start of HU, which I hope didn't come across as sarky, I truly meant it. Ask me at the start of day one who you'd like to see win and he'd have been my answer, and 99% of everyone else's. A true gent and a great poker player.

TD takes it down with his KJ spiking a J vs Ben's A3, and I think I feel worse than Ben about it. Weird how I think I am more emotionally involved in poker with a friend playing, than I would be had I actually been playing myself. There has never been a more deserving winner than TeamDobbs though, well done mate :-) Was nice to support Ben going deep into a tourney, even if his fan club was rather small. I've since received a few comments and PMs (you know who you are) about how good looking I am though, sorry K ;-)

Overall an absolutely fantastic weekend. Very well ran, but taking nothing away from Circus (who were awesome poker-wise, valet-wise and craic-wise) you could have had a 7 year old officiate the thing. The spirit everyone played the game in was truly exemplary. I'd be surprised if there's ever been a better atmosphere in any poker room anywhere. S2c obviously did another quietly brilliant job behind the scenes. CardGuard was simply amazing as our compere for the weekend. The guy has talent. Also I didn't meet him, but Looseman made a great contribution with the cup, bracelet and final table medals. A big three cheers from me for that one, very classy. Was great to meet people and put some faces to names. I've also since learnt that UKGatsby of blogging fame was there on the Sunday, and I didn't say hello. Next time :-)

October for me finished really well, I'm looking at just shy of £2.9k profit, and that's (correctly) not including (Ben) my winnings from NOVEMBER at the weekend. I've also won over £300 HU already this month, so I'm looking at nearly £1k already for November, more if I do a Ben and botch my figures so I can include my Blackjack winnings ;-)

Fantastic weekend guys, thanks to everyone involved :-)

Winding October down

2009-10-27T21:46:00.002Z

I've been kept pretty busy outside of poker lately. Infact I've got quite a lot to get done before the end of this week.

Wallpaper stripping is an absolute bastard. Especially when it's the non vinyl stuff that only peels of an inch at a time. You know when you try and use old selotape, and you just manage to find the edge and get your finger underneath and start to peel, but oh no it won't be having any of that! It gives a giant "fuck you" splitting 1/16th" in running in a huge diagonal down one side leaving you with a tiny sliver of selotape that you just get caught inbetween your fingers. Well increase the scale a hundred fold and rinse/repeat a gajillion times and we're getting there. That, and then there's 20 year old stuff on underneath that. Borrowed an industrial steamer from a decorating mate and what a day I've just had. Using one of those things in a confined hallway/staircase on your own is a fucking nightmare. I've got multiple scaldings up both arms, down both legs and even on my arse. With every window open the place was still like a sauna. That was even with me working like Japanese prisoner of war scrubbing furiously to get all that shit off. Anyway that's almost done, I'll get that finished tomorrow.

I must do my tax returns that I just continually put off. I won't be leaving for weekend frivoloties in Newcastle if I've not done them. Consider this a final reminder. To do lists just don't cut it anymore!

Pool is going well, and taking up quite a bit of my time too. I'm top of the Thursday league by a mile, and was top on a Wednesday too, but I think that may have dropped to second after we only managed to scrape a win last week. I'm back lifting strong in the gym again, but not without side effects. I'm eating like a monster and not doing any cardio, so I've got a bit of winter/post Vegas belly going on.

Ah Vegas! I got the DVD of our canyon trip last week, which I must get copies done for the lads at the weekend. Also need to get some more of 'The 9 day Hangover' highlight footage sorted. Think I'm going to throw in an epic 8 hour session of editing tonight to get at least a substantial amount of storyboard down, even if it'll take a lot longer to perfect.

I'm thinking about wrapping poker up for October to allow me to get all this other stuff done. I'll still do the odd bit of bumhunting at the low HU stakes, but no more proper sessions I don't think. I recovered really nicely, looking at a ~£2.3k month if I was to stop now. Will look at maybe playing the NPF game at the weekend, will depend on if Ben can play and a few other logistical nightmares. I'm really quite busy day-to-day, yet I barely ever know what I'm doing two days in advance. I think I'm going to migrate my Gmail to Outlook and start using the Calendar/Appointments feature and becoming *gasp* organised and responsible. It'll sync with my phone too so it's a no brainer really. I'll do that now actually.

Good luck all, hope you all find some run good to end October like I have :-)

Mild brag

2009-10-23T02:59:00.002+01:00

Continues to go well :-)

Progress

2009-10-21T02:07:00.003+01:00

Good news post. Nearly wasn't.

I've played some long sessions the last few days. I think it's down to training really hard at the gym which in turn is leading to me sleeping like a baby. I'm getting ~9hrs of real quality shut eye at the moment. So my focus is really sharp over longer periods of time. Didn't do me any good last night though as I logged a -£500 session. I had just ground up to near even for the month too. EV says I missed £400 in that session and that did not feel good.

Tuesday is generally a heavy poker day for me, it's my day off from the gym and as Monday kind of seeps into being 'the weekend' nowadays, it's the start of my week :-/ I got straight back on the horse and won that £500 back in a couple of hours before lunch. Fastest comeback ever. Made some hands vs hands, never needing to suck out or hit a draw I hadn't already hit harder than my opponent :-)

Had some food, had a break, played some 'Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour' online. Love that game. Used to play it loads at Uni over the network with housemates. Great gameplay. Came back to the tables and played a couple more hours for a small £50 loss. Decided I wanted a bit more poker action though so popped to the Co-Op to refuel. After demolishing my pizza (with tons of extra cheese on) I sat down with my packet of Maoam Stripes to play some HU. About 3 hours later I'm £200 better off and riding the sugar rush headbanging to Queen on my earphones.

I was playing in $ though which sucks as my HEM gives all $ values, when infact the majority of my play is in €. Now I've mixed and matched a bit my HEM currency is effectively 95% of the €. Gay. Another thing I've noticed is that my HU stats are 78/72/30. I mean I've not just realised it, I knew I played a lot of hands. But fucking hell I think it's just sunk in! I give the most action by miles at the low HU stakes on Laddies. I mentally tag a 54/48 opponent as 'loose' when I'm playing them! I know I'm going to have to drop 20% to be profitable higher, but for the moment I'm having fun pwning with a massive VPIP.

I'm now roughly £500 up in pure poker play, but with RTR and rakeback it's effectively double that which is pleasing after the shit start to October. Hopefully I can continue to string some more wins together and fingers crossed I can hit the £2k mark by month end.

Also interesting in that triple my normal audience clicked the 'Brenos Poker' link lurking around other blogs last week when my latest update was entitled 'Almost dead'. Oooh you do like a bit of goss! Thanks for stopping by again on the ridiculously dull title of 'Progress'. Stay tuned next week for 'Meg Fox Porno' ;-)

Not going great

2009-10-14T00:46:00.002+01:00

Pokerwise have struggled to log a winning session this month. I've just won a couple of hundred back at HU tonight, but I'm still in a £500 hole for October. Good points though:

1) Volume is good again, getting back into the groove
2) I'm running like shit

I know 2) is probably the most common blog post ever ever ever. So I'm not going to dwell too much. But a few £200+ pots I've got the money in really good only to be sucked out on, and have been hugely coolered a few times. Not quite to the tune of Jackal vs Holmes in home poker games, but still. Also give me AA vs KK just once please.

I really need to make bank this month. I've racked up some credit from Vegas and I really need to clear that off. I've also got another £300 car bill. I hate my fucking car. Already motored my way up the RTR leaderboard though (that's the only motoring I do) so if I can just manage turn my winrate upside down then I should be OK.

I've got tons to do besides poker also. I'm playing in two Pool Leagues for the Winter Season, I'm vice captain on a Wednesday and captain on a Thursday, so those evenings are write offs. I'm at the gym three times a week and should be running on my off days. I've not so far though because I've started squatting in the gym again and boy do my legs and arse hurt! Also not got Vegas photos on Facebook yet (the family friendly ones of course) and have barely progressed on the compilation movie I've promised to make. Ben needs to get his photos copied to me though (hint/deflection). Bear with me guys, I promise it'll be good. I just need some time to make some money first. Definitely no time for any 9-5 shit I mentioned earlier!

Good luck all and good luck me. Come on Brenos get it together lad!

Almost dead

2009-10-06T02:34:00.002+01:00

This pretty much sums up what state I've been in since I last blogged. But I've had an absolutely awesome time doing it. As most will know, I've been to Vegas with Holmes and the footy lads for 10 amazing days of barely any sleep. Then when I got back I was at a Stag Weekend in Wales, white water rafting, adventure coursing and freefall jumping (!!)

Ben has totally set me up on his blog to do a write up so he doesn't have to, but that's never happening. Too much of it is 'in jokes' that no-one will get, and I won't be sharing the majority of photos either! A video compliation in the style of 'The Hangover' credits is in production, as that film was unsuprisingly a recurring theme. I will however post roughly what we did each day:

FRI: Got sozzled on the plane, upstairs was class. Shook Azz's hand many times. Picked up in Limo from Airport by the best Bond baddie of all time, Jaws. Mexican @ MGM. Created a 7 way kitty which Ad trebled up at roulette. Drank the kitty dry in Luxor bars. Ended up at a place which can only be described as...

SAT: Couple of the lads had champagne buffet breakfast at Bellagio, which is obv amazing. VIP pool party at Flamingo. Couple of the lads went to the Mayweather fight @ MGM, then Pure @ Ceaser's followed by...

I crashed early this night as I'd had about 6 hours sleep in 4 days.

SUN: Massive day. NFL Sunday in USA which is amazing. Drinking all day in Blondies@PH. Over the top high fiving at any decision given on one of the many games being shown live. 50c beers. Beer pong. Somehow we came back to the hotel and put suits on and went to Body English@Hard Rock. I pulled a munter.

MON: Par 3 Golf at Angel Park. Awesome putting course there too. Waitress @golf saw us at Blondies on national TV. Hope they got a few of the high fives and baby wanks in there! Absolutely epic night in JET@Mirage. Got in the VIP with NFL and NBA players, I forget their names/teams but they're each most likely pulling in over $5million a year.

TUES: Shopping outlet. 10 pin bowling@Gold Coast (shit hole). Advice: everyone is shit hot at bowling in America. We totally pissed around with behind the back bowls, retardo celebrations of strikes/spares and did a round where you had to 'Ronaldinho pass' style no-look-bowl. Most people gutterballed but amazingly Ad hit two strikes in a row not looking. We've got that on film and I'll post that on here when I'm done editing.

WED: Canyon via helicopter. Can't really do it justice. Photos don't either, you have to go. Fly by of strip on return journey. Amazing. All of us played a poker tourney at Sahara where the least experienced of our group final tabled for a moderate return.

THU: A few lads played a full round of golf. I played some live cash poker. We had a nice Asian meal @Wazuzu@The Wynn. Partied it up at Cat House@Luxor followed by

FRI: We toured basically what we hadn't seen already. Lions@MGM, Reef@Mandalay Bay. Amazing buffet @The Wynn. Stratosphere rides (yes I did all three). Ghost Bar@Palms which had the most amazing view ever. Also the largest spirit measures ever. Silly dancing. Oyston out!

SAT: Redic hungover Wet Republic pool party @MGM. Fittest birds ever. Volleyball. High fives. Unconscious bucket head dive man. £100 steak@Palazzo (mmm). Pure@Ceasers followed by another rsitp ucbl.

So I barely played any poker at all. Managed to win ~$400 though and I think I managed to break even at Blackjack after being in a large hole but went on an epic heater@Sahara.

Amazing place, amazing birds, amazing company, amazing laughs, amazing time full stop.

So after almost pulling round after Vegas, I then have a stag weekend in Wales to go to. Really glad I didn't bottle it though because I had an amzing time, and great to see old friends. It wasn't just a total piss up which to be honest was a fucking lifesaver for me as I'd been drunk for the last two weeks. Saturday we went white water rafting which as a first timer was great, and even better on the last few runs with two boats on a stag party and instructors who were up for a laugh, splashing and boarding each other with many a takedown and dunk in the freezing welsh river! Sat night obv did turn into a huge piss up, with us playing every drinking game forfeit under the sun.

Sunday was an early breakfast and shake off of the hangover to 'Go Ape' which is a huge obstacle course 50ft up in the trees. Some of it surprisingly hard too, but that could have been the delicate state and also the fact I had two old Uni housemates either side of me, so I'd have my obstacle rocked voilently from each side. We did have safety harnesses but a fall still would have banged you up a bit. At the end of the course was a powerfan platform which with a 50ft drop from a 3ft platform, was quite daunting to say the least. With my new found confidence with heights thanks to Strato training, I did manage to make the jump. Those last few seconds on the platform are the scariest by far, and the split second (which feels like ages) that you actually are in freefall is incredible.

That was nothing though, as seperate from the obstacle course, this place has the largest powerfan jump in Europe at 130ft. And it's not on a crane or anything, it's on a fucking massive tree, with staples hammered into the side for you to climb up. Check the second video out here, it's the first activity. Pause it for a second and look at that climb, Christ I was knackered! Also check out that platform, how small? It's really windy up there too. Once you're up there's only one way down and it's quite a task to tell yourself to step off a tiny platform 130ft in the air. You're harnessed at the back so you don't feel any tension either which is horrible! Again the last few seconds on the platform are the worst, and this time the freefall was incredible. You get that rising feeling in your body like when you go down a big dip in your car, only about a million times stronger. Also because it's such a big drop you get that huge rise, but you're still falling so your whole body goes mental and it feels amazing! I must admit it looks quite tame in the video, but also bear in mind thats a bird on there, not a 15stone 6ft bloke. I really want to do it again though, great experience!

So I've spent an absolute shit load of cash lately, obliterated my liver and put back on a load of weight. Time to eat healthy, train hard and hit the poker tables, I think...

I've played a bit of HU for a few hundred quid profit this month, but played my first 6max session in ages tonight. I've kind of forgotten what it's like! I did OK, logging a small loss but getting it in good in two big spots that I lost. Don't know how I feel about playing to be honest. I quite fancy working properly in a proper 9-5 job just for the change. But I know I'll hate it after a month. Guess I'll see after a few more sessions, I still feel like I'm short on sleep too which won't help :-S

Good luck all :-)

'H' from Steps has died

2009-09-10T21:53:00.004+01:00

Tragedy.

Pokerwise I've made a bit of a mini recovery playing solely HU on Ladbrokes. I can't be bothered grinding the normal stakes before Vegas because another big swing could put a real dampener on things. Steady away though I've been making a pretty consistent £50 a day on the HU tables and it's all been easy so far. I ran pretty badly today but am enjoying the change of pace. Decided on taking the laptop away with me which will help for emails to clubs for guest list malarkey, and to have a quick 30 min blast on the HU tables every day when we're all getting ready to go out :-)

I have been doing some grinding elsewhere though. I've made a small deposit on Pokerstars to see how I like the software and see if I can grind a bit of a roll there. I quite like these gay little projects. It's not great cost effective use of my time, but is +HapinessEV for sure :-) This will lead to a final decision on whether I want to move the majority of my roll there next year and attack Supernova benefits. Good news in that I can comfortably 20 table 6max cash. The software is top class, and along with TableNinja you have an amazing array of time savers and automation just a key press away. TableNinja is the single best piece of poker software ever. Full stop. I had though that 20 tables of 6max would be a time-out fest, but I didn't even hit the time bank once in a one hour session (1400 hands!). I think I have to send an email to support to have it raised to the maximum 24 tables and will take that approach as I continue to build. I am obviously incredibly exploitable playing this style, but it'll certainly do the trick up to NL25.

I've been for consecutive 3 mile runs these last two days also. My knee feels pretty good. Perhaps a little bit fatigued today but nothing compared to how my shoulders, back, arse, thighs and calfs feel! Got another few miles to get through tomorrow too before I drink some of my hard work away at the weekend. Potential home games evening on the cards with pool/darts/table tennis/poker and a few beers on the menu! Hope you all have an enjoyable end to the week :-)

Can't get going

2009-09-04T22:45:00.003+01:00

September so far has been rubbish. I'll log on, bluff off a buyin in the first few hands, saying to myself "he has to have a set here to call" and boom yes, shows me the set. I've also turned a couple of hands into bluffs on the river with disasterous consequences. Think I'm 0/5 in >100bb river bluffs. Villain either has the hand I'm trying to rep, or I I'm not picking the right opponent for this move :-S

I'll then get coolered a couple of times and lose an 80/20 to go £250-300 down. This has happened each of the three times I've sat down to play a proper session. I'll then grind back up and finish about £100 down and feel like I've achieved something, but not really. So I'm a few hundred down at the minute, EV says I should be £50 up but can't whine too much about that over ~5k hands. Let's try again...

EDIT: Fuck you weekend retards. 80% of £ goes in good, but you somehow get there in the most hideous of ways. Am now -£800, EV says -£300 but that can't account for Captain Retardo calling down and backdooring the world. Also, fuck you combinatorics.

August Review

2009-09-01T19:48:00.002+01:00

In a nutshell, went really well. Much better than I could have hoped for the stakes I've been playing, with the target of locking in a win before Vegas achieved nicely. Also having read Soap's and Holmes' blogs (on right) I should really do a proper monthly breakdown and keep better records. I rely on HEM too much. Anyway here's an attempt but it will be slightly out as I've played two sessions on mates' computers where my play hasn't been tracked.

NL50: £2,100 (51k hands - 90/10 6max/HU)
NL100: -£920 (3k hands 6max)
Tournaments: Only played free/bonus entries and won nothing
Rakeback (20%): £550
RTR: £620
PPs (10%) and other bonus: £310

Total: £2,660

Chuffed to bits with that result as I've effectively been a NL50 pro in August. Also if I'd had the 10 buyin downswing at NL50 instead I'd be looking at a £3k month. Crazy.

Saturday I played the £75 Will Hill added tourney at Aspers with Holmes, Soap and Jackal. Also had a catch up and chat with Teamdobbs and recognised many more faces in a 100+ runner field. Not going to discuss stuff in depth here but I chipped up nicely and was always above average. I then ran a bluff against the tightest player in the entire tournament (any guesses in comments?) which actually sounds a lot worse than it was. He has such a narrow range (ergo easily identifiable) and on this board by the river he folds most of it. Just a shame for me he turned 'a two outer' for the nut boat. Anyway by that time I'd had a few beers watching the mighty Man Utd overturn the scum of the Premiership (I fucking hate Arsenal) and was quite ready to go out and join a few friends for more drinks. Before that though I made a couple of quick stops at the Blackjack tables inbetween checking on mates still in the tourney, to eventually win my buyin back.

Yet again it's taken me till today (Tuesday) to recover from a weekend where I only got drunk once. My sleeping pattern was thrown well out of whack though, but still, getting old! Vegas is only 18 days away now so I'm going to eat super clean in a final push to shift another half stone or so. I'm also going to try and log 20k hands in 12 days, as I've realistically only got till the 13th to play properly as I've got other commitments including going to Blackpool for the Newcastle game on the 16th. I'll make a conscious effort to update the blog regularly in that time, as it'll help keep me motivated. Good luck for September everyone :-)

Older and wiser

2009-08-21T00:06:00.005+01:00

As I was doing pretty well this month, I decided to move back up to NL100. It didn't go well. I'm not sure I've mentioned this on my blog, but it's very rare I have a good weekend at poker, at least online. I tend to do well on weekdays and donk a little back at the weekend to the recreational players. I think I've got this leak plugged now and it's pretty easy to do. I just imagine their screen to have no fold button, and control the hand that way. Stop being an overly aggro spew monkey. Profit.

Anyway I decided to wait till Friday night to have a pop at NL100 again. I bluffed two rivers giving my opponents far too much credit for being able to fold a hand. Seeing triple figure stack sizes again fooled me a little. Also they have stats on me being retarded, so guess I should have known better. So I'm now a little under £200 down. But then I suddenly start to smack flops right in the face. In the next 30 minutes I flop two sets, a straight, a flush and top two pair. I lose all pots to go about £800 down. Two oversets, a bigger flush and the others got legitimately outdrawn in standard spots. I had initially said I'd stop if I somehow managed to lose £500 (a kind of bleh contingency as I never expected to be down at all the way I've been playing) but I just shrugged and carried on as I basically fist-pumped every spot where I got the money in, I just got coolered to hell. I upped and downed a little and eventually ran KK into AA and lost QQ vs AK, so I canned it after 3k hands and a £1k loss. Kind of shellshocked to dump 10 buyins in one session, and it being a doubly expensive one. Really glad I didn't blog after it cos it would have been a total Soap Emo fest. So that was last Friday.

I went out for an Italian with friends on the evening and got quite drunk finishing up on Dominican Republic rum cocktails. A few of which were made with '151' which was developed by NASA in 1965. Saturday I did nothing but gradually get a worse and worse hangover (funny stuff that rum) and get really good at Archery on Wii Sports Resort. I also messed up the diet a bit more by having a takeaway that was apparantly a Thai Red Curry. Was it fuck.

After a little play on Monday for a small profit (back at NL50) I then turned 26 on Tuesday. A quite astonishingly young age if you read a few blogs ;-) I got a pretty hideous shirt from mother. That's going back. And then general smellies/money/boy presents.

I've since had another few meals out with friends and family and completely buggered up my good progress on the weight loss, not finding time for the bike either. I felt guilty today and really wanted to do 30km. I had to jack that in at 22km though as my arse was fucking killing. I've always loved running and thus have basically never cycled in my life (apart from ploughing my face into a brick wall when I was a teenager - that's another story) so my arse isn't used to such a pounding. There's a joke in there somewhere. I have a weight loss bet on with Briggsy as to who can lose the most before we fly out to Vegas. To be honest he's really let himself go these last couple of years, and although he knows it I hope reading this will give him a further kick up the arse! I really should lose the bet and I don't especially mind either if it gets Briggs back on the right track. I might get a stone shifted in the next four weeks, we'll see mate! Lion fish!

Anyway good news in that I'm only £120 away from making back the £1k I lost last Friday. In the last three days I've done pretty well at NL50, taking the monthly total to 46 buyins in 36k hands, at 13bb/100. That's pretty damn EPIC! Just a shame NL100 had to go so badly, I do fancy another shot before month end!

Also, wanted to write a few quick thoughts down about the top sportsmen in the world. I think that this current crop of top athletes is just something else. I envy my dad's generation as he has more of a basis of comparison, but really, just how good are Bolt, Federer, Woods, Messi, Mayweather et al?!? It stands to reason that we are going to continue to improve, but to see Bolt just completely demolish the field and blitz his previous 'amazing' world records was something else. In the 200m tonight he moved up three places in the first twenty metres, taking into account the stagger for the corner! I can't stop watching that in BBC iPlayer! Yes bad timing to mention Woods, but still. I'm not a huge tennis fan, but whenever I see Federer I just think, "Wow, how could there have ever been anyone better?" I also think that Messi is going to go down as the greatest ever footballer, eclipsing Pele and Maradona. Anyway don't really know where I'm going with this, guess I just wanted to show some appreciation. Good luck all :-)

More good grinding

2009-08-12T22:30:00.004+01:00

I've continued plugging away at just NL50 this month, and well, results are good.

I don't want to blow my own trumpet a bit here, but that is the single best >20k sample at NL50 6max I've ever seen, and I've read a lot of 2+2 threads! Obviously better winrates are attainable at HU but I'm pretty pleased with the fruits of this month's labour. Thirty three buyins in 12 days, at a rate now over £40 p/h.

That $1250 from RTR will definitely be going straight into the bank now to cover my 50p Fixed Limit Omaha losses to Azz on the flight to Vegas. I'm also reasonably comfortably rolled for NL100 which is quite an achievement considering how nitty I have been with BRM. Vegas obviously the main contributor there, my car being not far behind, and a not-so-close third is buying healthy food! Super healthy diet combined with lots of gym and bike is starting to show some rewards, I'm definitely trimming down and should hopefully be looking and feeling great for Vegas :-) Expensive business eating healthy though! But yeah, the BRM... I think I'm still going to nit it up and play NL50 for this week, and if I can rattle off a few more buyins then I'll hit NL100 at the weekend.

I've kind of lost track with this blog entry, wanted to talk poker a bit more but my mind has gone to mush. One thing I have been doing is calling a lot more instead of 3betting. A big part of my profit has come from regulars thinking I couldn't possibly have that hand, as I would have 3bet preflop. TYVM another buyin :-) I'm also making what I used to consider reasonably 'big folds' as if they were nothing. I've have to re-adjust hand reading somewhat as there are only very few people making moves at NL50, but the radar seems to be spot on at the moment. Roll on more good, controlled grinding. Good luck all :-)

EDIT: Soap for Prime Minister!

Good grinding

2009-08-07T01:56:00.004+01:00

I've put in some decent hours on the tables since the last post. Albeit at NL50. Good news though, I'm crushing. You'll remember a few posts ago I talked about sustaining a 10bb/100 winrate at NL50 over a reasonable sample (10k+). Well, I've done it...

That's nearly 17 buyins in a week, and when rakeback + bonus is considered, is a nice hourly rate of around £35 ph. I'm still waiting on an RTR payment from last month where I won $1250 in their rake race. I was going to put this straight into play but I might just bank it and play another week of what has been pretty much stress free poker at NL50. I was actually below EV for the month too, but I caught that up today. I'm not too arsed about moving up, all I'm really wanting to do this month is have an easy life and be able to bank a nice wedge for Vegas in September.

Only thing that is wanting me to move back up is to be able to rake a Killarney package with Ladbrokes. After The Derby and Helicopter VIP days with them, I really want to go to this. This would be a lot easier at NL100, as at my volume of play I'd be a cert for a €1.2k package. I will have other opportunities to win one but they are mostly ~100 runner, one package MTTs. I can never be arsed in such a structure.

The helicopter day was awesome by the way. Honestly one of the best experiences of my life. Being in command of such sensitive controls in what is effectively a flying bubble is really exhilarating. I'll post some pics in another entry when Ladbrokes get round to putting official pics and video (a la Derby) that I can also include.

I did make a somewhat brief and somewhat disastrous return to NL100 temporarily the other evening. Holmes informed me of a super donk sat at one of his tables, so I also sat. Soon to be joined by Soap. Let the minraising commence. After getting 3bet by one regular in the same spot for the fourth orbit in a row, I decided to trap with 2nd pair, but was very wrong as top set is good sir. Nice timing. Soap also spazzed out after an early minraise from Holmes and also got it in pretty bad with a naked flush draw, but as any really good tournament player does, binks off the diamond anyway. I also lost a race for a stack before finally getting the donks remaining €50, so not a profitable visit at all!

Lifestyle wise I am back in training and on a super healthy diet. I've managed to borrow an exercise bike and have been giving that some hammer. It's great because as I've done naff all for so long, you really see improvements fast. First session I barely managed 20 mins and only did 6km. On Tuesday I did 20km in under 40 minutes. I actually think I over exerted slightly as I've been feeling the knee since, so didn't do any leg work at the gym yesterday, or cycle today. Doesn't feel like anything major. I'll be breaking the trend of Weetabix and berries for breakfast, and cous cous for lunch this weekend when I'll be venturing up to Newcastle for a BBQ with the lads. Good luck all :-)

Focus, and another VIP day

2009-07-30T21:51:00.003+01:00

This month I have played absolutely all over the place. I sucked at 6max, crushed at HU, sucked at 6max some more, got completely owned again at PLO, spewed off at HU, won a bit shortstacking, lost a lot shorstacking running 30 buyins below expectation, and finally... started crushing at 6max again.

Soap kind of hit the nail on the head when I met him at Teeside, saying that I'm concentrating too much on rake and the bonuses that entails. I would lose £100 a day but rake £300 and I'd think, "ah well that's ok". Suppose it is as a one off but it became a bit of a trend. So this last week I've slowed things down a lot and concentrated on just four tables of 6max. I've since installed a program called PlaceMint, which arranges windows into 'slots' by program title. This is awesome and has also helped me focus on four larger tables, with two smaller slots on the side of my screen for table selection. I'll be keeping it like this for the foreseeable future.

I wish I'd done this a lot sooner. One good month last month giving me a good bankroll to play with, I try way too many new ideas and just bleed money. Lesson learnt. Sod's law that they now introduce a new rake race for Killarney, but I should manage a €1.1k package within the next couple of months regardless.

Anyway, tomorrow I am off down to London for a Helicopter lesson! It's another Ladbrokes VIP day which, if anything like the last one at The Derby, should be absolutely superb. I get a personal lesson, a free lunch, then a helicopter tour of London.

This should be pretty decent Stratosphere training. If you haven't deduced already, I have to go on all Stratosphere rides when I'm in Vegas in September, and I'm shit scared of heights. Infact, it's not that I'm 'scared'. It's damn sensible to be wary of edges leading into massive falls and inevitable pizza-like death. Somewhere down the line my ancestors realised this and I am now programmed to wince like a girl when walking over footbridges or looking out of high rise windows. Hopefully being in control of the craft will go someway to help me overcome this. I shall post some pics upon return.

Finally I would like to wish my good friend Ben a Happy 40th Birthday for Friday 31st. Please pop in to his blog and wish him well. He's away in Paris with the missus for some 'sightseeing'. Life starts at 40...

Gay poker

2009-07-25T00:43:00.005+01:00

I didn't play any NL50 since my last post. At least not in the traditional sense. I did a bit of strategy reading about shortstacking and decided to give it a go. A few sessions later and I'm a 5bb/100 winner at NL100 shortstacking 20bbs over about 3k hands. I can easily play 10 tables with this style and with the double up and leave strategy I constantly need to be cycling and sitting on new tables. This is great for the rakeback, as any Prima regular will testify in regard to Fish_Crusher owning the rake race leaderboards. Pretty sure he's a losing player though.

Anyway I had a nice handful of sessions to start and decided to move up shortstacking 1/2 at $40 a time. Queue 25 'buyin' downswing finishing $780 behind EV. Great timing. The climb in stakes was a bad move though, I didn't fully understand the variance in this style of play and paid the price. Add to that at any one time the chance of Brenos running like total shit is about 95% and it's not good. I've since steadily built back up to some semblance of a bankroll shortstacking NL50.

A few months ago give me a chance to talk to a "professional shortstacker" and I wouldn't have had much nice to say. But actually playing and understanding how you can put people in hugely -EV spots unexploitably is really quite *gasp* "fun" to play. Twenty buyin stretches behind all-in EV excluded. Still got a few spots to fine tune but I shall plug away furthermore in an attempt to rescue my third awful month in four. I couldn't resist buying in full on one table tonight though and taking a couple of regular buyins from one monster fish.

Also over the past couple of weeks I've been playing in Photoshop creating a modded card deck for Prima/Ladbrokes. This has taken probably far too much of my time but I'm really pleased in the final results and this deck of cards provides awesome visibility for multitablers and especially anyone playing Omaha. In what can only be a plus EV and high Karma move, I've shared my creation on the 2+2 forums, check out the last page of this thread for link and instructions. Good luck all :-)

The week

2009-07-20T22:14:00.004+01:00

Can't believe not updated for just over a week. I've played a fair bit of poker this month, and experienced a huge swing since the last post. I recovered nearly £1k to go up £400 for the month, and have consistently lost since to go -£1.4k down. After I got into the black I started to 9 table and it's harder than I remembered. I dropped a few hundred there but by far my worst results again are at PLO. The game continues to take huge shits on me. Thoughts on this hand? Fold the turn? Gay hand nonetheless.

I came up to Newcastle on Thursday for a long weekend starting at Aspers for £30 freezout where I ended up missing out on final table by a few players, shoving over a 'steal' with 33 but finding KK. Onto the cash tables and made a few hundred, making a few nice hands versus one player who just loved putting money in the pot. Easy game. Super LAGtard Holmes plays crazy (link amended on right) and eventually gets AQ in preflop versus QQ but finds the 3 outer.

Friday I would have played the £20 at the Grovesnor which has seen awesome numbers lately. But I'm still banned. Not going into details here but it's really quite farcical. So me and Holmes just dossed around all day playing on the Wii in between poker sessions. I dumped off another few hundred at PLO Friday and early Saturday before the rest of the lads came round for £5 rebuys, four player Mario Kart on the Wii, muchos pizza and muchos beer. I'm shit at Mario Kart but pretty handy at bowling.

The poker I end up rebuying a few times, raising and betting quite a lot, which I really can't get away with anymore. Everyone knows I'm a spewtard at these home games. Fortunately mid game with reasonable blinds I go on an epic card rack heater and with my distinct lack of any kind of table image, I amass most of the chips in play. It still takes a huge suckout HU when I shove with Q3 to find TT but get there anyway. Ship the £60. Six pizzas, 10 cans and four 12th places later we play a £10 freezout and I am deservedly the first player out, calling far too much preflop. Around 4am Sleepawoody makes an appearance and it's time to call it a night.

After approx 4 hours sleep a night Thursday-Sunday I have slept ALL DAY today. And I do mean ALL DAY. I had planned to put in about 6 hours of poker today but it's hard to play when you're asleep. I went to bed at midnight Sunday, slept till 8am, had a piss then a glass of water, slept 9am-1pm. Woke up, had lunch, sent some emails, watched some CR stuff, fell asleep 3pm-7.30pm when I was rudely awoken by a text from Holmes accusing me of slacking off as he hadn't seen me at the tables. Yeah but seriously thanks for that or I'd probably still be in the land of nod now.

After my latest downswing I shall be moving down again but this time with a bit of a challenge. Holmes is running amazing well so far this month, with a winrate of around 20bb/100. This is obviously not sustainable and we both have a laugh about it, but at NL50 and concentrating on just 6 tables I think I can actually sustain 10bb/100 which would mean I'd be back to even for the month in just 14k hands. Mid month I was just looking to autopilot and my only aim was to rake about £300 per day, which is BAD BAD BAD target setting. Time to get back on track and win my moneys back. If I do manage to breakeven this month I'll still be banking about £2k as I have already raked an enormous amount. Will wait to see how the fine points of the new PP system works as I think I might save my PPs up as I should hopefully have 100k by the time Vegas comes round, which would be a nice $1k 'bonus' to cash in just before I go. Anyway 14bb/100 tonight over 600 hands, going to play another session on the late shift tonight, sustain Brenos, come on!

Bad knee, worse poker

2009-07-11T18:02:00.003+01:00

I had the knee operation on Friday. Went well with no hiccups. That general anaesthetic is powerful stuff! 'Count backwards from ten please...', 'Ten, ni...' ZONKED! Turns out my orthopeadic surgeon is one of the top boys in the country too. I was talking to the other patients in the waiting room who also had surgery on the day. One fella had already had his right knee done by my Doc, but had his left done by another. He said the difference after surgery was amazing. A nice clean bandage and a reasonable amount of mobility for the first, but a bloody and pussy bandage and being laid up in bed for a fortnight after the second. I was in good spirits anyway but I immediately felt better that I was in good hands. Which is more than I can say for one young teenager who was literally puking with worry and was shortly after given his own room. Another old bloke was a goldmine of knee information as he had not one, but two replacement knees. Can't say he has knee crack! (groan)

I can hobble about, but am far from independant. I can't carry anything as I need both hands at all times for stablity, the stairs especially. I had hoped I'd make the gym by mid-week and be able to drive. Absolutely no chance of that. It's really quite painful today. The most annoying thing by far though, is not being able to bend your knee. Try only moving one knee within five degrees for an hour or so and that's bad enough. I've got another week of this shit. I was given paracetamol, some codeine and some diclofenac sodium enteric. I know codeine fucks you up after I was on it for disclocating my shoulder, dunno if this diclofenac is stronger or what but I plan not to take anything as long as I can bear it. Could be playing Devils Advocate there though, as poker has been shit today.

I've cooled down a bit afer writing this so far, and I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself as it's pretty awkward doing anything, but sajkhfjkldsanbgld tilted for the first time in aaages today. I decided to play 9 tables at thankfully lower stakes. I was up a bit but over 5 buyins below EV as every all in was beaten. All my winnings were non showdown. Fair enough I thought, I'm still up, just chill out. Then I instantly lost a couple more buyins as I say that to myself. Shifted the leg a bit and that hurt, so took a huge radgie out on the poker tables and just got megga aggro spew monkey. Again to be fair a few of the spots were standard that I just happened to lose, but I did silly shit like turning 44 no club into a bluff on QT77J four clubs. We were mega deep like but I really don't need to being doing this crap, gg 220 BBs. He actually re shoved the river after leading two streets after I 3bet pre, so only quads or QQ makes sense.

I'm now about £400 down for the month, not horrible but I should be doing way better. I've been a complete spew tard at 6max this month. So much so that Thursday night I decided to play some gay poker and 9 tabled the 10 seater full ring games in an attempt to tighten up. Even there I was far too loose but I crush that field so badly it makes sense to play more hands. I won five buyins in an hour. So that shows how bad things are. I think I'm about 15 buyins down at 6max and a decent bit up at HU. I played some tougher opponents HU this week. One very aggro player who I managed to get the better of, and another player who I thought was mega aggro - but wasn't - got the better of me for a couple of buyins. He had made a couple of moves early in specific spots which I won't go into detail on, but he is pretty polarized to hold monsters or bluffs. My style of play is basically bet lots, and it's a strength of mine that I merge my value betting and bluffs so well. If you can value bet 2rd pair on the river you can bluff more effectively. A consequence of this is that I have to be a bit more liberal in dealing with check raises. I think I do this very well actually, but in this instance the guy was a total card rack. Everytime - this is the nuts or a bluff - so I click call and run into top 2% of hands each time.

HU really is so much fun though. It really changes the way you think about hands, and so much is down to gameflow and feel. Hope to be a bit more pain free than I have been and can play lots this week. I only have so many DVDs I can watch!

Ugly, pretty, pretty

2009-07-08T14:46:00.004+01:00

UGLY: 6max

PRETTY: Heads Up

PRETTY: Adriana Lima

6max is dead?

2009-07-07T02:22:00.003+01:00

Well my stats tell me I should quit!

To be fair I have been getting coolered to hell at 6max so far this month, whilst simultaneously running awesome at HU. I've been lucky to sit with an easily tiltable person, win a few early spots and have them spew off some more money to me afterwards.

But not great in being £200 down. Also my volume sucks, only done ~7k hands and thats just in 2 days. However I am pleasantly surprised in that I should be able to pwn (Soap) the RTR rake race for $3k. Current top player plays my limits and I raked half his total for the month in one day. This could be skewed slightly as he may have taken a 5 day break like I did but I guess mid month I'll know better. Barring disaster I should be raking over $6k, so if that can return $3k alone from RTR, plus ~$2k from Laddies new player club thingy it's well worth a good graft this month, even if the weather has to pick up again after this week.

In other random, short sentence news: I killed a rat with a shovel yesterday. I'm benching 105kg in the gym. It's my knee operation on Friday. I know loads people who have had a baby in the last month. Congrats to Jackal who I think is my only reader. Congrats to Soap on luckboxing another huge MTT win. Good luck to Ben in his first month on the pro circuit ;-)

Smiley Face

2009-06-30T20:39:00.006+01:00

Wahay I'm really happy. Just won over £1k in under 2k hands 6 tabling NL100 6max. Ship the 50p a hand!

My plan was to grind the 6max for a few hours this evening, to make sure I get the $1500 bracket in the rake race. But obviously winning 10 buyins in no time changed that. There's a slim chance I could still make it but even if I don't I will be posting a £3.5k month for June. After April and May's horror shows, I'm delighted to get back to winning ways. That's a few times now I've ran up a couple of hundred to a couple of grand at the micro cash games, without bagging a big tourney score or anything to help along the way. I think that's actually quite an achievement, but one I'd rather not have had to make!

Basically I am now square one - back end of last year, before I went off galavanting around Asia, spending far too much money, then coming back home and running like shit for two months. I'll leave £2.5k as the poker bankroll and bank the rest. As I've previously mentioned I anticipate expenditure on my shitheap of a car soon, and I need to save up plenty for Vegas. I'd really like to splash around a bit out there and do everything I want to do. Stratosphere rides not included in that bracket.
Anyway fingers crossed the run continues. And I really hope it's sunny tomorrow cos I am going to do absolutely fuck all! :-)

HU 4 rooolllzzzzz?!?!?!1

2009-06-23T23:18:00.002+01:00

I qualified for a Laddies VIP freeroll and a RTR English Open freeroll on Sunday evening. I had forgotten all about them however, spending the afternoon at Father's house. Got a text 30 mins in from Ben so made my excuses and left, but didn't drive home very quickly. My car is fucked again, engine warning light on and it juddering at low revs. If I have to spend another grand on that shitheap I am going to be incredibly displeased. Might drive it up to Appleby in the hope there are still some gypos around, park it up and have a few beers and stay at a B&B in the hopes that it gets nicked/burned out. Insurance job ftw.

Anyway, got home and settled in for a 'tourney evening'. Fired up the two freerolls, and reg'd for a couple of others on Full Tilt, and the $5k GTD on Laddies. I bust out of the Full Tilt ones in splendid tournament fashion. A $2 double chance I lost one race and then AK vs AQ no good. The $10 freezout was LOLAWESOME though. I 3bet 99 in position and flopped top set on super dry 349 flop. I bet a retard amount to induce shoving from air cos I'm already getting paid by overpairs. So he shoves with the mighty no pair no draw A7 off suit and backdoors the flush. NB - it was the 7h that made the flush, so it wasn't even half thought through. Levels go up fast in the freerolls and I soon have 7BBs so I enter monkey mode to attempt to double up. FAIL. I do better in the $5k getting to final 50/300ish, bubble at 42 iirc. Shortie shoves EP, medium stack in MP flats for a quarter of his stack, I have AK on the button. I decide I'm either in awesome shape or flipping so blast em in, with MP just covering me. He calls. Up against AJ shortie and AQ big stack and the Q pops up for me to lose a massive pot to go top 5.

I decide that I'm not in the mood for a grind, so fire up some HU cash action on Laddies. No one wants to play at NL50 so sit with the only guy free at NL100 €. I am severley underolled for this game but figure what the hell I'll give it a one buyin shot. An hour or so later, ship the €500 :-) I've since set up a HU HUD on HEM (LOL) and although I knew at the time my opponent was super tight and I could run him over, my HEM stats confirm that he is infact waayyy too tight. I bossed the small pots, and won all four 200BB big spots. Set vs Two pair holds. Make two flushes on the turn versus decent top pair hands, and finally when he was tilting make top pair with flush redraw on turn and induce him to shove with a gutshot. Nice to get it in really good (90% minimum equity when money went in in all spots) and even nicer to have those setup spots with you on the good side :-)

I lost a bit of it back yesterday, again against a super tight opponent where I stuck to my game plan of winning the small pots and only playing a big pot if I am super strong. So I lose Jacks full Vs quads, flush under flush and set under set. Cheers GG. This was only a 3 buyin loss at NL$100 though as opposed to €Euros, so not quite as bad. I'd play this guy again for sure though.

Grinded the 6max tables again this afternoon but my hand strength radar needed some recalibration after the HU play and I was a bit too showdown happy losing half a buyin. Made up for that this evening at the HU tables though, posting a £200+ win all at NL50 $/€ levels. Feel like I've been fully in control of the matches so far, with a couple of regs not wanting to play me already, which can only be a good sign. Had some trouble with one guy though, he limped all his hands and checked a lot of flops even with strong top pair hands. LOL Hellmuth in disguise. Just as I was getting to grips with a counter strategy (make hands and bet the shit out of them) he quit me. This is a whole new experience I'm going to have to take on board and learn to control better than I have been. Getting hit and run, and quit on when you have just turned momentum around is incredibly tilting at HU. The same thing at a 6max table doesn't even register for me anymore, but it's so different when it's mano-a-mano. Don't get me wrong I've not been going ape shit smashing my monitor up or anything, but a deep breath is required here and there!

I'm now rolled for NL100 6max but think I'm going to continue playing some HU, at least while winning and enjoying it. Not sure if I'll be changing direction permanently, but I definitely want to give this a decent go. I feel my aggro-bordering-on-retardo game is perhaps more suited to the HU dynamic. Gogogogogo!

Knee Update

2009-06-18T18:51:00.004+01:00

Oh yes folks, it's that time again :-)

Good news! I have a confirmed date of the 10th July for my knee arthroscopy. Kudos to the NHS for me not having to wait yonks for this. It's minimally invasive surgery (two keyholes either side of the knee apparently) so I'm hoping I can just have a local anaesthetic and watch the whole thing! Have a pre-op examination next week but can't see that being a problem. I'm dead excited and can't wait to get onto a proper road to recovery. Great North Run in sub 90 mins again in 2011 I reckon ;-)

Bad news pokerwise however, I played really badly today. I had won another £200 odd yesterday, but today was very poor. Autopiloted too much and lacked the clarity of thought process that I've had so far this month. Still in a good position with the roll, but that's not important. I could have been moving up again with a good session today. I'm quite angry with myself as I raced up a few buyins at the start of the session, then it all just dribbled away slowly (and then a bit more) by the time I was ready for food. Going to see to it that I don't play this 'D' game again. Let's get back in the 'A' zone :-)

LATE EDIT:

LOL. Happy with how I played so I guess all I can do is laugh. Had an horrific session of run bad where I did pretty much everything right, but lost a lot of money. Finished just over 5 buyins down, with EV saying I should have won €4. Those are the spots where money goes in before a showdown too. Add to that in standard showdown spots I won only 42% (avg ~52%) and I'm going to lose money. One table was pretty sick. I was in the Jesus seat to a super donk 85/17, but he binked off 3-6 outers on me each time for three stacks (€150) which he gave away to the other players at the table before leaving. Now this month is only looking 'decent' whereas before it was looking very good. Still a 7bb/100 winner after this bad patch but I hope to improve that number. Gonna take a break tomorrow daytime and do some jobs and other stuff. Roll on the weekend :-)

Blip

2009-06-16T22:37:00.004+01:00

Won another ~€300 at NL50 to take the bankroll close to £2k. Played a bit of NL100 yesterday for a small win, this afternoon for a small win, but this evening disaster struck and I'm going to have to drop back down. I lost €700 taking the bankroll back to £1.4k (sorry for the mixed currencies!).

Just had a quick look at my big pots and I won one flip preflop AK vs QQ for stacks, and won another 100BBs with a full house vs trips. On the other side of the coin I lost seven pots over 100BBs. Set under set. KK vs AA. TPTK & 2nd flush draw in 3b pot vs small flush. JJ vs AK BvB. Another set under set. Overs + nut flush draw vs TPTK. This was a strange one, he stacked off very light (either crushed or is 45% at best, as here) and I think I can get a lot of money in good against this villain in future. I also checkraise bluffed the river all in (different villain) on K42JT in a 3b pot and got called by AK when he'd only put 30% of his stack in. Again this is light and I am playing my value hands the same. Oh well things don't always go your way, I certainly had my fair share of bad luck running hands into hands, and people not folding tonight.

Not all doom and gloom though, still in profit, still playing well and still confident about more crushing at NL50 tomorrow. More good news in that my little stint at NL100 accounts for 20% of my rake this month, at only 3k hands vs 18k hands, it will surely have bumped me a few points in the rake race. It's just really disappointing that I couldn't log a decent winner tonight, as then with a ~£2.3k bankroll I could withstand a few extra swings and stay at NL100. Bugger. Ah well things worth doing are never easy, get motivated and get moved back up sharpish!!

Poker Update

2009-06-12T21:30:00.004+01:00

Rebuilding going very well. 16k hands of NL50 for €880, crushing at 10bb/100 winrate, playing 24/21 and 3betting 10% which is tons of fun. I was actually £200 missing in EV most of the month, but I caught that up today. I've only played 9 days this month which is basically €100 per day of play. Crazy to think that I could actually be on for an awesome month just at the micros. I'll be on for at least $2k in the rake race too. Career NL50 grinder anyone?

10 out of my 12 sessions have been winners, all for over €60 which is pretty much perfect and certainly can't continue at NL100+. In my first week I raced up to win over €700, then lost €450 in one two hour session! LOL at yet another of one of my epic losing sessions. Wasn't even that bad really, just coolers. Anyway just a marker for me to say bankroll now at £1.6k, when I reach £2k it's back up to NL100 where'll I'll either play for the rest of the month or if I drop back to £1.5k, will move back to NL50 and build up again. All my rake race winnings will be withdrawn to pay mounting bills I have and go towards Vegas fund. All of the lads are all booked up, it's just me hanging on to make sure I'm financially OK (has been a nightmare since returning from Thailand). Now it's pretty much a cert I'm going so am hugely excited for that! Also John definitely has to go on all the Stratosphere rides, which will be great entertainment as he's completely terrified of heights. I, however, didn't agree to anything (I remember) ;-)

Derby VIP Day

2009-06-08T21:36:00.003+01:00

I spent the last weekend in London for the Epsom Derby with Ladbrokes VIP Poker Club. This was an absolutely class event, many thanks to Joe and Sam the VIP managers on the day, and the rest of the staff for keeping my champagne glass topped up, and saved my life on many occasion getting me to sit down on the top deck of the bus on the way back to the hotel. More on that later...

Fortunately a couple of mates also got packages, so I was down with Soap & his wife, Ben and K, and as my guest I took Briggsy as it was a bit of a classy do and he's the best behaved lad I know. The blokes were nicely suited and booted, Jean looked lovely and Katrina took a break from wearing the trousers in her relationship and also looked lovely in her dress. You can check out Soap and Holmes' blogs on the weekend also, links on the right. I'm last so I get to be lazy.

The buses left at about 9.30 and no exaggeration, I was smashed by 10.15. I had a full English in the hotel restaurant, but bacon butties were also served on the bus. No worries there, Ben 'dustbin' Holmes finished mine. There was a Jazz group playing for our entertainment, though you couldn't hear past the midway point of the bus. So they just serenaded Ben and K at the front the whole way. We were also waited on hand and foot by staff pulling champagne bottles from a Mary Poppins style never ending ice bucket. A band and bar staff on a bus, who'd have thunk it?!

Once we got parked up in the enclosure at Epsom, lunch was served in a covered area. Lobster cocktail, roast beef and finally strawberries and cream was a real 9/10 three course meal. I didn't leave a thing. A constant stream of staff also made sure my champagne glass never got under a quarter full.

We watched all the races from the top deck of the bus, as the rain was holding off nicely by now and I had no need for my umbrella (sensible me) at all. There was a huge screen next to our space in the enclosure. Huge, as in, as big as your house. This was great for the close up bits and figuring out how your nag is doing (it's doing shit Brenos, don't fret) but unfortunately spoiled our view of the home straight, as you could really hear the horses thundering down and then just appear from behind the huge screen. A minor point anyway. I did in the end manage a few e/w winners for a small loss on the day.

The free drinks continued all day, thanks to our sponsors, Pommery. I have since priced up that I had well over a hundred quids worth of champagne, and well over a million quids worth of the jam and creme scones that came round just before we left. Thanks to Boisdale restaurant for those. The proprietor of which was actually present. We had a bit of a chuckle at a stereotypical old english gent earlier at lunch as we all had name tags on, he was called Ronald MacDonald. Turned out he was the owner, I bet he was used to catering for a slightly different class of clientele altogether!

The bus journey on the way back was truly awesome. My memory is now well dodgy, but basically there was a 1920s Jazz band playing on the top deck to a bunch of rather merry 20 somethings. Yeah that didn't last. We took over, belting out a few Oasis classics, then upon finding out that there was a group of Arsenal fans at the back of the bus (we were at the front) the football songs started. Ben is a Spurs fan, and I just plain hate Arsenal. We also sang a few anti-Liverpool songs, and one about Ben's dog who he really likes to look after. I looked for my umbrella to Jedi light saber the Arsenal fans with, but alas it was long gone.

Back in the hotel bar I have no idea what went on at all. Apparently some knob head called check el-oh-el was spouting about how great he is at poker, and challenging random Yorkshire nits to heads up for rollzzzzzz. I passed out around 10pm.

The hangover wasn't that bad actually considering it was champagne I'd been drinking since 9.30, and not beer. So a surprisingly nausea free end to an absolutely awesome weekend. Thanks again to Ladbrokes, Boisdale and Pomerry.

Poker wise for me this month is OMG OMG OMG awesome as I am £600 up which feels great. I hope to continue the rebuilding this week. In the meantime though...

He's half a girl, he's half a boy, Torres, Torres...

Poker, music & mood

2009-06-02T15:44:00.005+01:00

I'm sure the vast majority of us have something else on the go whilst playing poker. I know some like to stick a DVD on, some watch the telly, some try to have no distractions at all and immerse themselves in the game. I like to listen to music. Easy listening, happy music. I'm very partial to the odd bit of rock and heavy metal, but it's no good thrashing about getting aggressive when making calculated non-emotional decisions at the poker table. Especially when you are in a huge downswing.

On my old computer, I took the time to create some playlists especially for poker purposes. Since my new laptop arrived literally hours before I flew to Thailand, I simply whacked all my mp3s over and have used the 'Genius' feature in iTunes to create playlists. Don't get me wrong, this is quite brilliant. You pick a song, and it suggests 25/50/100 similar songs of that particular genre that you might like. It can't get it spot on everytime though and there are inevitably a few songs that I have to skip whilst playing. I do have quite ridiculous taste in music though. Read on...

The benchmark session for the last two months was just well under way. Double barrel KK in a 3bet pot 200BB deep on 467 8 board, and check fold to a 9 river. Lose a flip. Bet/fold a million spots and be about three buyins down in total.

Then some stupid arse song comes on and I flick the iTunes up to change it. After an awesome day out on Saturday to the Lake District, I got a bit cidered up and we enjoyed a good sing along to The Backstreet Boys in the car on the way home (I wasn't driving!). So I click on their Greatest Hits album and queue it up, hoping to rekindle the positive frame of mind, enjoy some tunes and maybe, just maybe win some money back.

BOOM!

I go on a ridiculous-sick-heater-card-rack-super-awesome-run-good period of about 20 minutes enjoying such classics as 'Everybody', 'Show me the meaning', 'I want it that way', 'Incomplete' and the hugely underrated 'Drowning'.

So two things for the rest of this month:

a) 3bet QQ in the BB
b) Listen to the Backstreet Boys

and I should obviously sustain this 190bb/100 winrate :-)

I'm lost, help!

2009-05-29T19:26:00.002+01:00

OK, I know no-one read my last post, which in fairness turned into a monster. Don't blog bit by bit and lose track of just how much crap you have written! This one is serious though, I could do with some help and advice...

I don't know what to do. Poker is just so incredibly, ridiculously, impossibly bad for me. I lost another £200 today, with EV saying I should have won 50p. So another £200 the Poker Gods/Jesus/Buddha/Moses/Krishna/Joseph Smith/Xenu sees fit to deny me. I had thought of praying to a different God prior to starting my next few sessions, but this has a few flaws:

1) Blasphemy. The one God who I may not have got round to yet might be pissed off at me praying elsewhere and infect me with further run bad.
2) My praying won't be heartfelt, I'm an athiest.
3) My roll might not last long enough to get round to Scientology.

I'm going to post a few HHs from today that basically epitomise my last 8 weeks of poker completely taking the piss:

Standard, he's a total spewtard monkey and I'm crushing his range here. I lose races something chronic. I'm actually going to see if HEM can produce results for when I get it in preflop with 40-60% equity and work something out. It'll make me depressed I'm sure.

These spots knock the confidence a bit, because a lot of the time lately I've been running into the tops of ranges, and getting crushed. But sometimes, just sometimes I get it in awesome versus the larger portion of villains ranges... and still lose.

Finally, when 82% preflop, and 90% on the turn just isn't enough.

My roll is in absolute tatters, and the real world of work may well be round the corner for Brenos. And in the current climate I'm not going to be able to walk into something decent I don't think. Time to hold the hands up and ask for help. It's been approx 2 months, over £5k in moneys and just under 100k hands of utter shit. My frame of mind is really starting to suffer. Anyone been through anything like this before? Can anyone offer any advice?

End of season bash, Prem final day, BBQ, Poker and Reflections

2009-05-26T13:43:00.003+01:00

Not blogged for a while, partly because I've been busy working, partly because it would have been negative whiny crap, and partly because I've been waiting till after the bank holiday weekend for stuff to write about. Well now I have, this could be a long one.

Saturday was the end of season footy team afternoon of drinking, bar games, steak dinner, more drinking, piss taking and general fun and laughter. Unfortunately this once-a-year-pre-planned-months-in-advance event co-incided with a normal, standard Saturday for Ben and he was unable to attend. We started the day in the Punch Bowl at Jesmond, with Iggy winning a 501 darts match against a completely spannered local. At 2pm. After the game he stumbled over to our group and accused us of foul play and lack of respect, claiming that Iggy is a pro. Iggy is not a pro. Anyway this drones on and on and escalates into life lessons from this wise old man, with several high profile celebrity friends apparently. Myself, John and Briggsy chat in the corner chuckling at him going on and trying to work out if we'd run into this character before. Gav argues back and forth with him for a bit, asking if there's any fooking need for his behaviour. John unfortunately mistimes a laugh and glance at the Crazy and gets a snappy response of, 'at least I've got some hair left!'. Shot down! Anyway turns out that this is the infamous 'John 2' from a couple of seasons ago at the Christmas do in the Lonsdale. He tagged onto our Killer Pool game (after John in the list, hence John 2) and talked utter shite all through that too. Also turned out he wasn't a regular and had already pissed off a group over the other side of the pub, and when it became apparent to the bar staff that he was annoying us lot too, he was kindly asked to leave, being pointed in the general direction of Osbourne Road.

The afternoon got a whole lot funnier when Adam King turned up half an hour later, exclaiming as he entered, 'Have one of you guys just played an absolute mentalist at darts?!' Adam had endured a 15 minute ramble along the same lines of what we'd just had, but had been stopped in the street, on his own. A testament to his character indeed that he didn't just tell him to fuck off and carry on walking! We then played a few games of killer darts, with my name on the board being 'Retard'. Which was a little harsh at first but fully justified when I failed to grasp the scoring system on several future occasions. I took down the two games of killer pool before we moved next door to an Italian restaurant for some grub.

We were seated and served by Paulie from 'The Sopranos' and shortly after we got our three-quarter full pints, he took our order. Several times. He was rubbish. Really rubbish. I went for the fillet steak with peppercorn sauce and chips, and for just over a tenner, was pretty decent. Our table got a mix of steak and pizzas as mains, however Gav opted for a calzone with extra pepperoni/no mushrooms/extra mushroom/no pepperoni/unfolded/with a little umbrella/god-knows-what-else which they obviously got wrong. After a slightly longer than planned meal, it was off into town for a crawl along the central station bars, ending up in Linekar's (old Bar 55) which is surprisingly nice and had some hot dancers on stage, which ensured we stayed away from a much more expensive final destination. An extra hot meatball sarnie from Subway before the taxi home ended my day out quite nicely.

Sunday late morning we awoke and waited for Briggs to get back with Ager, then we went hungover meat/beer shopping at Tescos for Azz's 'four years in the making' home BBQ afternoon. Being four blokes we obviously went waaay overboard on the meat shopping, buying loads of burgers, chicken breasts, wings and several hundred beef 'shoulder steaks' just to take the piss out of Cranny. Anyway turned out he said "No" to the invite so plenty of food to be had.

Azz was a quality host, slaving away under a hot BBQ on an absolutely gorgeous day. After lunch we headed in for the giant survival last day to watch the Villa Vs Newcastle showdown. With Ager and Blackaz being big Toon fans in our group it was easy to get drawn into the tension. Ben drew up a sweepstake, where it was £2 in, and we each drew a 15 minute period for first goal, and three potential first goal scorers. Nice and fair. Except that Ben totally rigged it so that he got added on time, and along with two potential scorers, he also got all own-goals (28 players in total) and also no-scorers at all! This massive edge meant he took down half the pot for Duff's o.g. We reloaded at half time and again with the huge edge he created for himself, he won the whole pot second half when it finished with no change to the score. A minor point anyway considering Newcastle had just been relegated. They were absolute rubbish too. You wouldn't think that they needed a goal to stay in the Premiership! Felt bad for my mates who had just witnessed that shambles, and at the time felt bad for Shearer who conducted himself really well in that post match interview. I'm all healed now though as he is back to being a cheating miserable twat in my eyes, and I'm obviously happy that all the overly arrogant 'we're a big club' geordie retards get to wallow in the Championship for the next few years. Yes, the next few years. No way are they bouncing straight back up. They need to make wholesale changes in not just the playing staff, but the whole infrastructure of the club. Then they need to avoid becoming a yo-yo team but that will be difficult as they can no longer attract any decent calibre of player (mercenaries a la Jenas, Dyer, Robert et al) with Man City's money floating around. On a sidenote well done to Burnley. Enjoyed a lot of banter with a school mates dad growing up as he was from Burnley and a huge fan. He had a double garage, and had painted one claret and one blue, what an absolute eyesore that was. A couple of years later after the paint faded he decided to change them to the 'Brazil colours' of one yellow and one... blue. Upon arriving back from school the afernoon after he did it, I told him that the Brazil home colours are infact yellow and green. Adamant they weren't he finished off and went inside to look it up. He was quite redfaced the next day! I guess that story tells you all you need to know about Burnley fans! Cusworth.

After the football we set up the £5 rebuys which promised to be good, with bloggers Brenos, Ben and Carl all particularly gunning for each other, with the ultimate goal being to slag each other off in each others blog reports of the game. I'll try not to disappoint...

Seven of us sat down, myself, Carl and Ben as mentioned, Azz our host, Briggs, Blackaz and Ager. The rebuy period promised to be exciting/retarded as I know that myself and Carl were looking to play a lot of pots. The same cannot be said for Ben however, who is always content with folding to third. I can remember a few tasty hands but missed quite a few biggies as I had seriously broken the seal at this point. I won a few pots early, including a cruel two-outer to Ager when we both have A,X on an ace high flop, but he outkicks me and has a flush draw to boot. I bink the river though to have roughly a 3x stack when Ben decides to play a hand. He isolates (lol never happening) for 5BBs from MP after Carl and Azz had limped. I look down at Jh6h in the SB but this really wasn't important as I obviously make the call OOP. Carl and Azz come along and we see a Js 8h 4h flop. About as good as they get for me, so I donk out. Carl calls (he probably has a four at best here) and Azz folds. Ben raises which is at least an overpair (NIT NIT NIT) but I'm clearly getting it in. Unfortunately I am totally crushed in that he has 88 for middle set. I continue the run bad and he holds, my stack lowered somewhat.

Carl builds about a 4-5x stack with total junk and I luckbox a good sized double up to cover him when I get AA in on a 7,5,3 flop versus Briggsy's set of 7s for the turn and river to run out 4, 2 to make a wheel. Then the inevitable 200BB clash happens. I open 4x 10,6 in late position, Carl re-pops something ridiculously huge to like 20x from the BB and I decide to lay a sneaky trap and just call, my hand being well ahead of his range. I think the flop was K,Q,9 and he leads out for near pot. I 3x raise him here for value and to my surprise he ships his whole stack in. I do some rough sums and am clearly not getting any sort of price to call. But LOL gutshot LOL massive pot LOL potential suckout LOL potential massive chip lead LOL I call! Turn bricks and the river is a beautiful J for my straight to get there against Carl's (omg a hand) AK.

A few more rebuys happen when again Azz limps, Ben raises it up, I flat Ah2h on the button, and Carl obviously comes along in the BB. Flop is As 10h 8h it's checked round to me and I try not to wet myself as I bet, Carl calls, Azz folds and Ben checkraises the entire field a large amount. I insta-ship, Carl folds and Ben snap announces call as soon as Carl releases his hand! He loved that flop too with his QhJh but (un)fortunately I have him completely crushed. Turn bricks and the first river of Ks would have beat me but it was sneakily dealt from the bottom of the pack, as had been done a few times previously. Infact the four of the five times it had been done, it would have produced a suckout and drew a decent reaction each time! I was happy to win this one though after the true river bricked off. I just about finished the job crippling Ben in a blind battle where it went Ben raise, me flat. Bet, call. Check, check. Ben bet small river, I ship, Ben folds. Just checked his blog and he mentions it was a 664T7 board, so he clearly wants to know what I had. Let's just say this... I was value shoving ;-)

On my umpteenth piss break I miss Ben spiking a Q with QQ Vs KK and another exit hand, although details are now hazy. What I do remember though is that three handed between myself, Carl and Briggs took absolutely ages. Carl was fortunate enough to have position on me when my bravado took over and I called every one of raises out of position. Briggs also managed to play absolutely perfect in every spot, folding top pair for like 5BBs when I had top and bottom. Crazy. Eventually Carl knocks him out and we are heads up super deep which is torture as I can smell the mountains of food being cooked up metres away on the BBQ. First hand of HU Carl completes the SB to 2k. I raise to 10k, Carl obviously expecting this and also potentially trapping, insta ships all in. I snap call as with A,10 I am crushing his range for making this move. He does indeed flip over A,3 and we don't bother with a count until after we run the board out. A,4,5 on the flop. Not great. I turn over a horrific 2 on the turn leaving me dead to a river 3 for a split. I'm not saved and when we do finish counting I had 85k and Carl had 80k. So it turned out to be a quite horrific overshove but in his defence it was hard to tell how deep we were and it was also against me! I win one and then lose the final all in, where I was in with any two. Make money on the day but would have been nice to book the win I can't lie :-D

Wow this blog is long. I started after lunch and have been coming back and adding a sentence here and there between phonecalls to Dell, browsing a million websites pricing up the best quote, and phonecalls to a local newspaper who's office I am upgrading with a completely new computer network. I've worked harder this last week than I have in years! Enjoying the break too as I'll be making some money from 'proper work' which has lifted the reliance from poker, which has been going horrible. I think a couple of weeks ago my head had completely gone. I was pushing myself too much to get out of the horrible hole I've been in since getting back to the UK. I was fucking up the simplest of tasks in general life and even a casual phonecall to a mate Ben said I sounded zonked and was talking at a hundred miles a minute. Good to get some perspective and although you don't realise it as much at the time, my head wasn't right and I've definitely been miserable. I'm sure you can tell just from my writing style that I am now super happy. I'm done for the day too having just chucked a few £k at Dell for some new computers.

Pokerwise next month will see me back on my own and unfortunately in the position of needing to rebuild. I think we were a bit too aggressive in the payback structure, then a bad month left me slightly underolled and the recovery never materialised. I undoubtedly ran bad, played bad, played too many tables, played too many hours, got stuck in a rut and things multiplied from there into what totals two horrific months. Thankfully Soap has agreed to end things a little early, and let me keep a larger portion of the bonus and rakeback this month than initially agreed upon, which will help in the rebuilding, thanks mate. I've gained so much perspective this month it's uncanny. This is not to say that the bad run has ended, it could yet continue, and I'll certainly have more in the future. But what has ended is my frankly terribly depressing frame of mind over the last month. I'm booked up for the Laddies VIP Epsom Derby day, which I'm sure will be awesome. Can't wait to unleash the new tailored suit and hot shoes amongst the well dressed female Epsom crowd ;-) Vegas plans are getting finalised, I'm back in the gym feeling strong again and I've got my appointment soon with the Orthopaedic Surgeon where fingers crossed we can get something in motion for a proper recovery for my shot knee! If I could go for a five mile run now on this gorgeous evening it would really round things off, I would feel amazing. That'll have to wait for a while though!

I think I'll log some poker this evening, continuing a recent mini-recovery I've put together only 6 tabling. I'm just waiting on computer stuff to arrive before my next stint of work, so that leaves a couple of days to turn my positive frame of mind to the poker tables, and hopefully turn out some positive results. Hope you all had a great bank holiday and (new found perspective alert) good luck OFF the tables! :-)

Another day another $

2009-05-17T00:44:00.002+01:00

...in missed EV

I really am starting to think that I am furthering the impossible everytime I play poker. Four buyins lost tonight, but should only be down less than one apparently. Haha as if that was ever going to happen. Lost AA vs QQ early preflop for stacks, board runs out total rainbow unconnected 24QT6 and I murmur to myself, "Hmph he probably has Queens" as a second later the cards are revealed and the pot ships his way. It really is a case of looking at the board, looking at my hand, and then thinking of a holding that beats me, and my opponent has it. KT on K4K4T is totally golden because I beat all Kings that gave me action on the flop and turn. But no, quads are good. Straights and flushes fail to hold vs sets, and sets fail to get there versus opponents straights and flushes. Standard stuff, but it's every pot, every session.

I'm obviously absolutely delighted that Man Utd secured three in a row. I'm also really happy that I've got a VIP package to the Epsom Derby. I'm hugely excited at the fact that Shearer is looking more and more likely to be taking the toon down. So there are some positives to take from the month. Guitar Hero World Tour has some awesome tracks, there's another. These are unfortunately heavily outweighed though as how bad poker is going. Two months, and over 140k hands of torture. I'm not enjoying the game at all. When I rarely do win a pot, I kind of feel privileged that I've been allowed to win. Which is obviously no good.

I took a pretty decent three day break, having a great long weekend with mates who were off work, and felt really fresh today. But when playing it really was a case of SSDD (I'll let Ben work that one out, he's crap with acronyms). I think I'll video my next few sessions as it's starting to get pretty critical that I book a few winning sessions soon.

LOL Donkaments

2009-05-13T23:56:00.004+01:00

A classic title.

Have stayed away from the cash tables for the last couple of days because as you have surely gathered by now, I run like shit. Since busting my Full Tilt roll last year playing HU with all my $180 bankroll on the table getting it on the turn with 90% equity and losing, the account has laid dormant.

It has since slowly collected a trickle of referral fees from RakeTheRake (link on the right) and upon checking a few days ago had $36 as the balance. Well boooya ship the low level SnGs my balance is now $285 and climbing. I started off playing some $5 HU SnGs which initially I broke even at. I quickly found out that weak cash lines are however generally strong low level tournament lines. So as soon as I forced myself to forget everything I've learned, I began to crush. I made enough where I could then nine table the 9 manners. I tried 4 tabling HU and timed out all over the place and was totally rubbish. The 9 mans allow me to play more at once, increasing my hourly ($15 booya) eek out more of an edge at one time, make more rakeback etc etc. I could probably play twenty of the 9 mans, though I've not yet experimented with a decent layout for more than 9 tables. A hundred tournies later my balance is $250 to the good with an ROI of 32%. I've actually really enjoyed thinking about ICM decisions and it's fair to say I totally pwn the $5 field on the bubble. You can't argue with that ROI.

I shall keep going when not quite in the mood for cash as it's certainly less of a strain playing tournament poker post flop with 15BBs. Saying that though I remember 'back in the day' when building my first semblance of a bankroll that the £3/$5 STTs were A LOT easier. Moving on a bit from what I said about NL50 previously, things are a lot harder now! However I shall share my three-volume-fool-proof strategy that guarantees to get you out of the $5 SnGs. Forget Harrington on Hold Em (Harrison on Hold Em is better anyway, awesome whole thread here). Here's 'Brenos on crushing $5 Sit n Gos':

VOL I
EARLY GAME:
1) Identify tight set miners and capitalise. Isolate raise preflop and cbet half pot. Profit.
2) Just shove your big hands over raises in the early game. Force your opponents to make a big mistake calling when dominated.
MID GAME:
3) With 5/6 players left, raise a wider range especially if you have a double stack to take down the larger blinds. An open to 500 from a >3k stack to win 100+200 is just super awesome. At 50/100 with less than 1k you want to be shoving pre with top 35% because hanging on for 3rd is a losing strategy.

VOL II
BUBBLE:
1) Dominate the bubble. Raise, steal, go crazy. This is now a stack size game not a card based game.
HEADS UP:
2) At the $5s I have sometimes got to heads up on blinds as low as 80/160. If so identify who is playing fit or fold, and small ball the shit out of them. Against the stations just shovel money into the pot when you have a semi-strong top pair hand. In large blind situations just shove/call a sensible range. #1 rule of HU, be the person betting and not the person calling.

VOLUME III
WORKBOOK:
1) Ship $$$ to Brenos
2) Coaching available at $50 per hour on how to achieve a $10 per hour winrate at $5 SnGs

Finally I've been getting a lot more emotionally involved playing the tournaments. Not like as in pissed off when I get sucked out on, more like fist-pump super happy when I take one down, and fist-smash super pissed off when I bubble. I feel better for it too. Maybe it's good to get involved a bit more. Maybe it's all this new found exercise I've been doing. Anyway I shall keep you all updated on this small SnG side adventure. Stay tuned for my next post, 'How to move up to the $10s and blow your roll' :-)

Why so serious?

2009-05-10T18:09:00.004+01:00

I mean come on. Another equally as bad session has put pay to me wanting to play any kind of poker for yonks now. I get 40% effective stacks in preflop with AA, lose. I double up every short stack going. I lose 480BB pots with the second nuts on the flop, second nuts on the turn where 95% of the money goes in, then the third nuts on the river when he rivers the second nuts and utilises his fold equity shoving with his remaining 10BBs. I also lose a 420BB pot with flopped nuts, get all but 20BBs in on the flop, but the rest goes in on the turn when the board reads 59K8. Let's play guess the hand...

Wishing I'd got a last minute flight out to Belgium to join the footy team, despite being completely crocked. Bah this is rubbish :-((((

Bad session

2009-05-09T01:20:00.005+01:00

A bad session tonight has put pay to moving up for the weekend. I shall have to recoup the couple of hundred or so I lost this evening to recreational players. I ran exceptionally badly in all spots. Had lots of sets and straights versus flushes where opponent has 40BBs, so GG me. Also had one rather horrific overpair and NFD versus middle set in a 450BB pot, I miss. I'm also fairly certain that I made top two pair three times, where my second pair gave my opponent a set, again for something stupid like 50BBs, so again GG me. Ignoring these complete setups what is most frustrating is that all money was insta-ratholed. Cheers for the double up Brenos, I shall be leaving now.

Not checked the Euros yet either, so all could be good when I do. I really don't want to get 4 numbers and 2 stars though. The odds on that must be fucking astronomical (you pick 6 numbers 0-50 and 2 stars 0-9 if you didn't know). Last week when the jackpot was ~£90m, you got £110 for getting 4#s and 2*s. Fuck that! You beat the odds for what must be millions to one, and you get paid less than a hundred to one on your money. The lottery is such a mugs game! So yeah I'll be piling on next week when it rolls over again :-D

An actual winrate

2009-05-07T15:30:00.002+01:00

When the 'win' is a positive number. Hurrah!

Since my previous whinging, I have been absolutely crushing NL50. Which is good, as I should be. It's just that recently a bit of normality has returned and I have been allowed to win some large pots. This level of poker I have mixed feelings about. It can be a complete nit fest of drab, boring, preflop cooler poker. It can at times be a frustrating limp fest where it's very hard to define hands. It is usually always a completely retarded min raising competition post flop, with it being hugely profitable to notice who is doing it when and where, and either as a bluff or for value. The regulars are really bad (compared to what I've had to deal with) and it's easy to take exploitative lines. It's nigh on impossible to win a hand without showdown unless you are in a heads up pot with one of the very best hand readers at NL50. Most regs are so tight anyway they are showdown bound with their 88 or whatever crap is good in that spot like 5% of the time. Consequently my red line (non showdown) now looks gay like Ben's, but conversely the showdown line has gone boom! Tilt is also a much bigger factor down at the micros. It can however every once in a while, be completely hilarious. Some of the beats I have seen dished out have kept me sane. 'I put you on AK' will forever be a timeless classic.

It's obviously beatable (I'm playing 10 tables too, so some poker could be better) but certainly not as much as it was. Even a couple of years ago when I was building my roll things were much easier. I still recognise some names that I played all that time ago, still with the same leaks and making the same mistakes. I feel for anyone coming through now, things are really, really hard. I have tons and tons of experience and possess the knowledge to get out of the micros, but even to even the most intelligent and adaptive newcomer, it could well be an expensive quest. Anyway, I'm rambling.

I'm now even for NLHE for the month, and even with the recent good run I'm still missing a few hundred quid in EV. PLO is just ridiculous though. I am 100% sure I crush the game long run. And I do mean CRUSH, at least at PLO50 and PL100. I continually get it in either good, or very good and lose. I'm missing £1k in EV at PLO but it's important to recognise that this is expected value. Hit the boomswitch and I could easily be over a grand to the good. I shall be sticking to NLHE for the rest of the month to hopefully build back a decent roll.

This is the first time in the Laddies rake race that I've been able to play the first week of the month. In March it was getting my money moved onto the site, and in April I was making my way back to the UK and was unable to play. I'm currently 20th with ~500 points which is ~$2k in rake. That's 30k hands of poker in just a week. This month could well be my biggest ever volume wise. Also considering that 80% of my play has been at NL50, yet only 66% of my rake is from NL50, it is obviously hugely advantageous in the rake race for me to be playing higher. From what I can deduce it's a 2x jump to NL100, then a 1.5x jump again to NL200. At my current winrate I need about 10k more hands to be effectively rolled for NL100 again (damn the poor £) then if I can sustain a decent winrate there and continue at current rate of play, I could be on for a monster finish in the rake race. Even if I don't get out of NL100 this month, 30k hands a week should still secure top 15 which would be a minimum of $6k. Hopefully today will see this right and I shall be back at NL100 for the weekend of recreational players staying in to 'save money' after the bank holiday ;-)

I knew what I had to do but writing it down here, and with my new found sobreity and extra energy from actually doing some exercise, I feel really focused for a hard month's graft. Gogogogogogo!!!

Epic HU grudge match

2009-05-04T22:04:00.003+01:00

Blatantly pinched from 2+2 but so brilliant I just had to post it here.