Thursday 30 October 2008

Come on you Spurs.

I was lucky enough to have tickets to the Arsenal V Spurs game last night and as i'm sure any football fan would already know, it turned out to be an absolute classic! To come back from 4-2 down with 89 minutes played and get a point away from home was an awesome result for us and i'm proud to say that i was there. The only problem was that i was in the home end so obviously i had to keep my celebrations to a minimum and do most of my celebrating in my head. Overall i thought that it was a bit of a lucky result, Arsenal dominated the game for long periods and when theo got the ball i was shitting myself because his pace is electric and he played really well. Having said that Spurs stuck in the match and scored 2 great goals, David Bentley you hero! As far as the new manager goes i think that it's a decision that had to be made, Ramos finally learns English and gets fired, i guess that's football. Still it looks like Harry has had a immediate effect and i'm sure that come Christmas we'll be safe in mid table and can hope to push up into the top half in the new year, we've always been a cup side anyway, lol.
On a personal note not a great deal has happened since my last post, i've been a lazy lazy fucker and most have my time has been spent wanking, sleeping and watching prison break series 1; 10/10. Having set out with such hope at the start of month to try and be fairly productive i have failed miserably. I've had somewhere between 8 and 10 takeaways, been for 6 swims and been to the gym a pathetic 4 times. Despite theses short-Cummings i have managed to achieve 1 of my for monthly goals by racking up over 100 Mtt's. My results have been mixed and have continued on from the same trend as before, do well on party and suck balls on full tilt. I lost $5K this month on ftp but thanks to 3 decent scores on party i won about $14K on that site and am +$9K on the month, this has also been aided by the dollar getting stronger so it converts to around £5.5K and the best thing is its all tax free obviously. Tournaments have always been stronger for me than cash games but seeing how much some of my friends have made playing cash has urged me to take closer interest. I've downloaded poker tracker 3 and poker hud and have been working hard on my 6 max cash game. I've only been playing 4 tables of $0.5/1 but the software is helping a lot with game selection and i'm watching a lot of videos on leggo poker to try and improve. Although i still have tons to learn i've made a good start and am about $1.5K up this week, although i have the bankroll to play 3/6 i'm more than happy to start playing low and just try and improve enough to crush theses games, planing to move up to $1/2 at the start of December but i wont be doing that until i clear $5K at the lower level first.
My big news is that for the first time in over a month i will be leaving London! Scary! I'm going up to Nottingham tomorrow to play some live tournies, the first at 8pm is a £100 Freeze and the next is a two day £330 deepstack running on saturday and sunday. The structure of the two day comp is fairly decent so i should have a fairly big edge, i have no idea how many runners to expect but would be disappointed with anything under 60. Will do a full write up when i return to sunny London and i might set a few more realistic goals for the month we call November.

Saturday 11 October 2008

A tale of two sites.

Just gonna start by saying that this is my 50th post, when i started writing this blog over a year ago now i thought it may well be another short term project that i ultimately got bored with and gave up on. Despite these immediate concerns however i'm very pleased that i've been able to maintain the blog and in return i think that it's allowed me to keep my poker in perspective and allowed me to express myself freely so i would say that overall it's been a success. Personally one of the major advantages for me is to be able to look back in time and see how i was doing at any given time and i certainly hope i can keep going with it even if this poker thing goes tits up.
My October goals have started with mixed success. First up the no take-away rule has failed horrendously; Liam and Mike have gone to Dublin for four days and we weren't able to do a big shop. Although i share the responsibility as i could have walked to Asda and bought a load of healthy stuff the simple convenience factor was to much for me and dominoes were on there way, i lasted 6 days btw. Since then i've had 2 chinese takeaways, might as well go down in a blaze of glory.
The swimming and gym sessions have also got off to a pretty bad start. As i sit here writing this it's coming up to 2am on the morning of the 12th, i've been swimming 4 times and to the gym twice so i'm way off my target of 20 and 10 respectively. It's going to be a huge ask to reach those targets but i think if is stop being such a lazy fucker i can do it; there are so many free hours in my days it would be a huge shame if i couldn't manage something that in reality should be fairly easy.
The one goal for the month that is of course going to plan is the increased amount of poker tournaments that i've been trying to play. I've racked up over 40 already so getting to 100 should be no problem whatsoever. Quantity however is of course a distant second in importance in this instance to results which as the title of this blog suggests have been mixed. Unfortunatley i'm -$3K on fulltilt and this is a big disappointment. I've made some conscious changes to my play in order to adapt to the site but i think i need to make some more. I've ran quite bad at the wrong times but i still seem to struggle in the middle stages of a lot of tourneys when maybe i hit the panic button a little to early and try and force a move or call off in a spot where deep down i know i should be folding. The worst thing is that i know in a lot of full tilt tourneys i've not played my best and as i've said before being a pro is not about playing your A game some of the time it's about bringing it most of the time and if i can do this i'm sure a decent score on that sight will arrive before i go on holiday to South Africa in a couple of months. Fortunately things have been going much better on my beloved party poker where i'm +$9.5K over the last 12 days. I've only made 2 final tables but on both occasions my concentration has been 100% and i've won them both in style. I feel really comfortable on this site as soon as i get a stack together i'm very hard to beat, god bless those party donks. I havn't posted a hand for a while so i'' stick this classic up just to annoy cashy when he reads this:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3310610

Quite standard for me really, to lazy to explain.

So as far as poker goes i'm up $6.5K on the month and will be more than happy if i can get to +$10,000 by the end of October. Hope to put a big effort in next week in the pool and gym and hope to get back on track in relation to my goals. Fuck the no take-away rule, why change the habit of a lifetime. Just as a side note i smashed through Harry Potter 7 and i feel like a prick for saying it but as a series of books they were fantastic and get better and better as you go through. The author has an amazing writing style and just as was the case with the davinci code i couldn't book the last three books down. To anyone who has only watched the films and is a cynic of Harry Potter i would urge them to read the books, they are phenomenal. The next two books i'm going for are 'the curius incident of the dog in the night time', by Mark Haddon and Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Both have outstanding reviews and am looking forward to both. On the DVD front i'm 6 episodes in to the first series of 24 and i wouldn't say i'm enjoying it but i'm thrilled by it if that makes any sense at all, looking forward to seeing how things turn out cause at the moment the wife is in a car with a killer, the daughter is kidnapped by an evil genius and as for Mr Jack Bauer he seems to be fighting a 1 man battle against the rest of the world.