A few thoughts

It's 1.40am, i can't sleep and i'm not in the mood to play any poker. I thought it was time for a blog entry.

This month has been up and down so far but i've only played about 8K hands, time will tell if it's a good one or not. I'm going home this weekend so planning on playing a lot this week and hope to reach my rather modest aim as far as how much $ i want to make before i head to Vegas. I want to take about $7K over with me but the money i leave behind is more important than the money i take; (not sure if that made any sense). Anyway if the worst case scenario occurs and i fail to cash in a single wsop event i want to make sure that i come back to a healthy role and not have to worry about grinding to hard or even think about going broke and getting one of those job things i'm always hearing about.

I've mentioned a lot in previous posts about how important i think maintaining a balance in your life is. A lot of poker players simply get addicted and lose focus on other aspects of there life, becoming increasingly consumed by greed and the desire for wealth. I want to become a successful poker player, i want to be respected and i want to make a lot of money from the game but those aims should never be achieved at the expense of my friends and family; nor should they come about through me changing as a person. I'm proud of who i am and think for the time being i have a really good balance in my life. One guy who seems to sum up these thoughts is a player called Hoss_TBF; he plays the very highest limits but at the same time seems a really down to earth guy who has a lot of good things going in his life outside a very successful poker career:

http://hoss-tbf.livejournal.com/

His blog is a really good read and is one that i've been following for a while now, would give away my right arm if i could get where he is within the next 3 years.

Think i might be ready for bed now, will blog before i go to Vegas at some point.

new post at last

As you may have noticed i havn't updated this blog for ages and i have a lot to write about. Firstly i'm going to mention that i'm now a sponsored 'gutshot pro'; I'm getting £20K in tournament buy-ins and i get to keep 50% of my profit with 0 make up. I can play 3 GUKPT's, EPT London and then i can spend the other money on the tournaments i want. In return i have to make some videos, post on the forum and blog the tournaments that i play for them on the site:

http://www.gutshot.com/bforum/blog.php?u=21969

The reason that i havn't blogged for ages is firstly i'm a lazy shit and secondly we were unable to get the internet going in the new house for 3 weeks. Overall the move has been fine, i have a bigger room, we have a little garden and all in all i like this place better than the last (even though it's just round the corner).

With no internet at home my opportunities to play online have been limited. Just realised that i havn't even put my graph up for March:

Once again it was an up and down month but obviously i'm glad that once again it was a profitable one. Breaking even after 25K hands sucked but thankfully managed to end the month well and ship some $. I've now played anout 15K hands of 400nl and am up about 10 buy-ins. This is fairly break even but winning a ton at 200nl this year so even if i do jerk off some cash i'm very confident that i can grind it back lower down.

With the internet down i've been playing quite a few live tournaments over the last couple of months. I played 3 comps at the start of March at the international for the Spring poker festival and unfortunately i was unable to get much going. I kept drawing really solid tables that made chip accumulation tough and when the blinds got high i would lose a flip or just run into big hands so i didn't get a single deep run, booooooo.

I have however managed 2 deep runs in both the GUKPT events that i have played recently. The tournament in London was a strange one, i played day 1b and for the first 5 levels i couldn't find many spots to make chips and found myself with about my starting stack at the start of 200/400/25. Anyway the first hand of this level i find QQ Utg and playing an 11K stack i start to think how can i get my chips in the middle, i make it 1050 and a guy in mp who also started the hand with about 11K makes it 3K total. At this point i think shoving is obviously standard, online it is just easy but i looked at the guy and he looked so strong and i thought about his raise (why make it 3K and not shove?); i thought he had me crushed so i told him that i was folding and begged to see his hand, after some persuasion he showed AA and i tabled QQ, hero folds are fun.

After that great laydown the poker gods decided to reward me with some hands. I won KQ v K6 when a shortstack shoved and then 3 bet shoved against James Keys with AQ V his A10 to get up to 30K. Once this happened i was able to raise a lot wider and managed to make a few hands and win a few small pots with air against some weak players, i finished the day with 55K about to start 600/1200/100 and was just over average stack.

At the start of day 2 things went from good to great when i managed to get my whole stack in pre flop with AA v 1010 to get over 100k. I then got moved to a really weak table and despite losing a huge pot with a straight flush draw v an overpair i was able to build up to 160K without any real problem. Then this hand came up with 45 left:

Playing 1500/3000/200 a guy in Ep limped (200k stack), mp calls as well (80K ish stack) and the sb calls (200k stack). I make it 12k more from the bb with and to my surprise they all call. Flop comes J106 and after the sb checks i cbet 25K. Ep calls and other 2 fold. Turn is an 8 and i check call a 30K bet and the river brings a 9 . I bet 50K and he puts me in for 40K ish more which i call. He flips KQ for the nuts, gg me.

I'm not upset at how i played the hand but the river is just so brutal as i'm check calling a brick, if an ace hits i can check fold and if a king hits he wasn't good enough to value bet so i'm winning the hand or not losing anymore chips. When he flipped his hand i felt sick but what can you do? Congratulations to Jambon for finishing 4th and making it to final tables out of two.

After the London event i was gutted but i didn't have to wait a long time to have another deep run, finishing 8th at GUKPT Manchester in my first major tournament as a gutshot pro. I'm going to be writing a pretty long report on my blog over there so i'm not going to go into any specific hands here but i'm just going to say that having started the final as chip leader and being the best player at the table by a distance finishing 8th was like being kicked in the balls, it still hurts two days later.

One thing that the last few months has taught me is that live tournaments are still the strongest part of my game. I have a big edge over the live players because most of them, even some of the pros, have no idea how to play there stack size and struggle to play after the flop and i feel i have an edge over a lot of Internet players who struggle to adjust to the pace of a live tournament and simply do not have the abilty to read there opponents. I'm now really looking forward to Las Vegas and really hoping i can have a big score at the series this year. Here is a list of the tournaments that i'm planning on playing:

Monday 15th June: 12 noon (US time) $2K NLH

Tuesday 16th June: 12 noon $1500 NLH

Thursday 18th June: 12 noon $2K NLH

Saturday 20th June: 12 noon $1500 NLH

Saturday 27th June: 12 noon $1500 NLH

Monday 29th June: 12 noon $1500 NLH

Sunday 5th July: 12 noon $10K NLH Main event.

So basically as you can see its no limit holdem all the way for me this year. I'm playing $20K worth of buy ins but Jambon is staking me for most of it so i'm going to buy about $6K of myself in total. The starting stacks are 3 times the buy-in this year and the clock is still an hour so even in the $1500 events there is still a bit of play. The fields will be huge but as long as i can stay focused and take it 1 decision at a time i'm sure that a deep run in one or two of the side events is on the cards. As for the main event the structure is so good and so much of the field is so weak that busting day 1 with my style of play would have to mean that something has gone badly wrong, let's hope another in the money finish is on the cards.

Grinding away

As you can see from the graph above february wasn't quite as successful as January in terms of winnings or consistency. I ended up making $5.7K over nearly 45K hands but after getting out the blocks like a greyhound i ended up breaking even for a long period; truth be told i'm a little disappointed.
Two things that i am happy about are my attitude and the the fact that i increased my volume, i'm playing a fair bit these days and still enjoying the challenge of 6 max. I constantly tried new things when breaking even, my playing style, the number of tables i was playing etc but looking through the hands i'm still tilting to often and still making to many mistakes. Having said that i ran pretty badly at times and i think a couple of months ago i may have even have had a losing month with the cards i was dealt because at times it was just brutal. Still i'm happy to have had another winning month and badly want to win $10K in March, i'm still going to be playing mostly $1/$2 this month but i have the bankroll for 2/4 and even 3/6 so if i can get up on the month early i may well look to stop being a fairy boy and move up sooner rather than later.
My live poker was fairly limited in february as it was bloody cold outside and leaving the flat is a pain in the arse. Joe and i went back up to Nottingham to once again donate to the monthly £300 two day event at Dusk till Dawn, the structure of the tourney is excellent and most of the players are terrible but as usual i was unable to take advantage of these important facts. I thought i played decent again but as far as live poker goes if gutshot/the international is my party poker then DTD is without doubt my fulltiltpoker.net! It just seemed like in every big hand i played it was me facing the big decision to call or fold, i never had the hand that was value betting/ bluffing it was always does he have my strong hand beat? I made some big folds and one great call but i felt a bit like Negraneu on high stakes poker constantly facing bets, AK when it came 99k9x obviously he has called my raise with 97 off or AA on a 10 9 6 3 2 rainbow having played the hand passive and he shows up with 66. In the end i busted in the fourth level, i didn't give up this time but no matter how bad the opposition are in these things to make a run in a tournament you need a little luck along the way.
My second live trip of the month was the fourth annual Reading series of poker last weekend. The fun started at big cheese's place on thursday night with a darts tournament; i once again scored ok but my inability to hit a double resulted in an early exit with Ben running out the eventual winner with a 3-2 victory of Futon Mike in the final. From there we hit the golf course on friday morning and to my great surprise i actually played well. All in all it was one of the most enjoyable rounds of my life, the weather was great and the other 3 guys i played with (Ben, Liam and Cashy) all had good rounds so the standard was fairly high. Liam took down the 7 man stableford competition with 46 points (good for £70) and i ended up in 3rd with 36. I also won £15 off cheese in sidebets and £60 (main event buy in) off cashy by beating him by 1 shot and another £10 for beating cashy and big cheese at doubles playing with Liam 'the bandit' Kelly. Having played so poorly in SA it was nice to play some solid golf and am now looking forward to my next game.
After golf we headed back to the hotel to check in and grab a shower before the £20 IHO comp that evening. It was great to see some of the lads from uni again and spent much more time drinking and fucking about than playing to seriously. It was no surprise that i busted after a couple of hours and quickly increased my consumption of alcohol to catch up with the few lads that managed to bust before me. Soon most of us were busto and headed straight down to spoons to meet up with even more people and soon it was 15 lads round a table getting well and truely on it; it isn't to hard to guess what happened next. Anyway after we were removed from the premises we soon bundled into bar risa and quickly hit the dance floor, i was off my face by this time and remember a lot of dancing and a lot of hugging other pissed up sweaty men but not a lot else; the night was rounded off by the group splitting; half into the chicken shop and half into the srtipclub, for once i was in the cool half off the group and soon paid up £20 for a lovely young lady to rub her melons in my innocent face.
One hangover later and minus the big cheese (worst man with a hangover ever!) we got ready for day 1 of the RSOP main event. Long story short we started on 12K i had an annoyingly tough table but was determined to give a decent account of myself. I didn't do a whole lot throughout the day but ended up on 28K having played some super solid poker and for once no huge bluffs. After this we were soon in the union and well and truly on it. It was cool to go back to the union and all in all i think we all had a good night, a personal highlight for me was organising a 5 on 5 boatrace in the middle of mojos, god i miss being a student! Day 2 wasn't a very long one for me as i soon lost 10K with J9 of hearts when it came 972 v's KK then lost AJ of spades v Q8 when it came Q65, 2 spades. I won a few small pots to get me back up to18Kish but then ran JJ into Jack 'the lemons' KK playing 400/800 oh well at least i played good. Overall it was a top quality weekend but i don't think we will be going back next year, even though Uni was the best 3 years of my life i think that it's time to move on and Newquay will be are last student trip, can't wait to go out with a bang!!
Away from Poker the 4 of us are moving round the corner so Mike can get his own room finally and not have to live in the lounge. The move is at the start of April and shouldn't effect me much at all really, we will still be in the same complex and still have full access to the awesome facilities that this place has. On that topic i've been such a lazy shit recently, couldn't have been to the gym more than twice last month, simply shocking! Also i've booked my trip to Australia and New Zealand for the middle of July until the middle of September. Jambon has sorted a house for Las Vegas but i need to book my flights at some point this month and then i can think about what events i want to play, one time let me run good!
Anyway think that post brings me up to date quite well. The International is having a festival next week and i'm planning on playing the £500 main event along with a couple of the side events which should be good fun. High Stakes season 5 is starting soon and that should be fucking awesome as usual, hope to look forward to another winning month.

Confident start to the year

Thankfully this year has got off to a solid start. I played just under 35K hands of 6max online and despite a poor start (fucking jet lag!!), i ended up winning just over $8K. I can't of played more than 5 tournaments online and truth be told i'm not missing them a great deal; 6 handed cash games are making me a better player and are providing a steadier income. I'm still a big fan of tournaments and in my own opinion still a much better tourney player but for the next few months i'm going to be playing mostly online cash.
I'm also pleased to report that my only two live poker outings of the month have both been a relative success. I've played a £100 and a £300 comp at the international and made the final table on both finishing 7th and 5th respectively. Although making both final tables is showing good form obviously i'm disappointed to have placed so poorly each time; still a £2000 profit isn't a terrible return for a couple of nights work. I'm probably going to head to Nottingham again next weekend to take on those idiots from Dusk till Dawn for the monthly £300, will hope to run better and play better than on my last two outings to the midlands.
Away from poker life is still pretty sweet. We're in the process of sorting out an extension on our current contract on the flat but at the moment things are still up in the air. I'm going to be living in Vegas for a month or so from the start of June until the end of the WSOP. I haven't spoken to Jambon yet about a staking deal but i'm hoping to play 3-5 side events along with the main and will be trying to pay about 1/3 of each entry fee, ship the bracelet one time etc etc. When i get back from vegas i'm planning on doing about 6 weeks of travelling round Australia with my friend Juliet and hopefully with some skiing in New Zealand thrown in as well. After that it's Oakhampton and then who knows, lots can happen before then but for now life is good. I've decided to try and make the blog a monthly thing excluding big occasions (deep run in the main event etc) so anyone out there following this it probably wont be updated until the start of march. One more final exciting thing to look forward to is the RSOP III which is in a couple of weeks, the poker should be fun but the piss up, golf and banter will no doubt be better.

Bring on 2009

I got back from South Africa a few days ago and as expected i had a really good time. There were 16 of us spread over 3 houses with everyone sharing a swimming pool and 3 golf courses and tennis courts within a 10 minuet drive. As i'm used to a incredibly relaxed lifestyle it certainly wasn't to hard for me to get back into holiday mode and i'm glad to report the whole family got on well and i've even started likeing some of my cousins as they get older and less annoying. Most days consisted of getting up about 9am (big shock) and then going to play golf or going to the beach and then just chill out in the afternoon reading, swimming and playing the awesome game that is clappy clap. This was followed by a really good meal, was so nice to eat well for 2 weeks in a row; washed down with a few nice beers and usually a game of trivial pursuit, shame the game was 25 years old as i was usually reduced to 2 or 3 correct answers a game.
Unfortunately despite getting in 6 rounds of golf in good conditions i was unable to put in a strong round. I played some decent golf in spells but i lost so many balls that it made a good score difficult. On the plus side i was able to beat my younger cousin at tennis twice, much to his annoyance. I'm also sure playing singles in 25 degree heat will be good for my fitness even if at the time it made me feel like a heart attack was inevitable.
I think the main plus side of the holiday is that i've come home mentally refreshed and i really want to play poker which is always a good sign. This excitement was probably the reason that i played a 5 hour 200 nl session as soon as i got back to the flat despite having slept for only 1 hour on the flight, woops. Obviously being stuck $1500 for the year sucked pretty hard but thankfully i managed to win it all back over the last few days and am now +$400 on the year, go me!! As far as plans for the year go i'm not exactly sure what i'm going to do. Newquay in June, Vegas in June/July and Oakhampton in September are all a lock but my sister is moving out to Australia in a few weeks and i would quite like to go and see her and maybe visit New Zealand or Thailand whilst i'm down there, have to wait and see. As for poker targets i'm still keen to work on my 6 max game over the next few months and try and play 30 hour weeks if i can. $100K would be a great amount to win in 2009 but if it doesn't happen then so be it, right now i'm looking forwards to my first full year as a poker pro and enjoying my life as much as possible.

Stuck in a moment

I haven't blogged for a while and although the reason behind this can usually be explained by a bad run at the tables in this instance this is not the case. Things are going fine but for a while i just felt like i was stuck in a bit of a rut and didn't really feel like expressing the negative emotions that i was feeling.

The way that i spend my life is certainly unusual and although i wouldn't trade it for anything else, like all things there are downsides to go with the positives. Sometimes i get bored or frustrated and one of the things that bothers me the most is my selfish nature and the whole moral question of gambling for a living. I try and remind myself that i play for my own enjoyment but it can be hard to get your head round the fact that i make a living out of other people losing money. This feeling is also heightened in cash games where you can obviously take more off individuals than in tournaments. Still what's great about poker is that it's a game of skill and if someone wants to get better and turn themselves into a winning player then there is a wealth of information out there to help them do that.

Wow, when i started writing this i had literally no idea what i was going to say so i guess all of the above is the truth, even if it is a bit of a rant.

Online Report:

Since my last post my online poker addiction has brought mixed success. In tournaments i've pretty much being having to take it hard and fast from everyone out there. Full tilt poker officially hates me, every time i log onto there site i'm sure administration is thinking of a fun way to bust me out, hmmmmmmmmm set on set, flush v flush, KK v AA or shall we just do the usual where i get my money in as a 3/1 favourite and win about 5% of the time. The field are bigger and better and my volume hasn't been great as i refuse to play low stakes MTT's but having to constantly ship money to my neteller account and then to my full tilt account is not much fun at all. Also with the $ getting stronger against the £ having to ship money the other way is a real kick in the nads. As for party tournaments things have been a little break even for my liking but i'm not to worried as i have an ROI for 2008 of 148% and have won a rather impressive $47,824 this year without even having a big score. Those morons have paid for my right to sleep till 2pm and to spend £40 a week on takeaways and to go out and get pissed whenever the hell i want, long may this continue!! Just looking at my OPR stats i also have got a lot better at closing out tournies with 8 wins from 25 final tables in 08. Seeing as all the money is on the final table this is something that i feel extremely positive about, final tables are my bag baby, just wish i could make a few more of them.

Ok so brag over onto cash games, monthly graph:

As you can see things were a bit shit for a while but am currently up about $2500 which is coolio. More importantly i think that i've learnt a lot about 6 max and my game is going from strength to strength, just wish i had been learning 6 max cash 2 years ago and then i might be a $10/20 reg like Jambon and be smashing it up. Overall i'm up about $9K since the end of October which is a good start all things considered. The exciting thing is i still have a shitload to learn and i'm really enjoying the game at the moment, my hand reading skills have always been my best skill and if i can avoid tilting 2009 could be a big year for me in the world of online cash.

Live Report

After my last rather disappointing trip to DTD i decided to head back up there at the start of this month to play the £1K annual event. The structure was awesome, same as the WSOP main event and obviously i was hugely confident in doing well. My starting table was fine and in general quite tight and easy to control, i was playing fast but not crazy and got a really nice double up in the second level with KK v AQ on a AKx flop. To be honest i think my style just confused the guy, i was raising a lot pre but as usual was trying to control the size of pots, bluff dry boards and extract value where i could but in his simple mind maybe he was thinking i was a maniac and top pair was the nuts. Unfortunately for me that hand was as good as it got as i busted in the fourth level. It wasn't a case of one cold deck or one bad bluff it was just simply nothing went right. Every bluff failed and every good hand lost, i then lost 15K with AQ v 1010 on a AJx board when he made trips on the river, what made it worse was he was fat, welsh and shit. After the early double i thought the chance of me not making day 2 was about 20/1 but the experience taught me that sometimes it just isn't to be. I'm proud that even though i was a complaining little bitch i still don't regret a single decision that i made and i'm looking forward to playing as many live deepstacks as i can, without doubt the greatest form of poker.

Surprisingly i haven't mentioned already that i'm flying out to South Africa tomorrow for Christmas and new year. I'm going with my mum, dad, sister, aunty, uncle and two cousins and we're meeting up with the rest of mum side, who live over there. It should be a lot of fun and i'm kind of glad that i wont get to play poker for a while so i can take a break and reflect on a few things in general. We get back on the 5th i think so i'm planning on doing a blog then which will be all about what i hope to achieve in 2009, i've been saying for a while that i plan on winning the WSOP main event in that year so will have to make that goal number 1.

Graph

It took me a while to work out how to upload this as i'm that retarded.If the numbers are unclear just click on the graph, It catches the downswing beautifully and the long grind back to former glory. I'm putting a few more hours in of late and i hope it pays off with continued success, graphs are fun.