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.

6 Max swings

Not played a whole lot of tournies this month but instead have been working on improving my 6 max cash game. To aid me i have been using a trial version of poker tracker 3 but have recently purchased holdem manager which apparently is in some way better, i'm not sure how, truth be told i'm such a retard that even installing it is proving to be a little difficult at the moment. Anyway so far i've had mixed success, I'm up $3.7K since i started playing toward the end of October and $1.4K of that is this month. I was up a shitload more than that but had two disaster days where i lost $3K and most of that money was my fault. I ran pretty bad but instead of just stopping i started tilting and jerking off buy-ins all over the place, that was a good couple of days, lol.
Overall i would say that i'm happy with how things are going, i started off running really well and most of my decision making has been quite sound. The main thing to work on is defiantly finding a way to avoid tilting because even if your running badly the players at 0.5/1 and 1/2 are so bad that you can still find ways to win even when the cards aren't negotiating. The main thing that has improved my game has been watching some videos on leggopoker.com, not so much copying what these guys are doing but just seeing what there thinking about during hands and being able to logically justify your actions. I know i'm playing crap when i'll make a bad call or a shit bluff without thinking about it, i'll then go through the hand and just be like, why the fuck did i do that?; thankfully these hands are becoming a lot less frequent. I'm still making a load of mistakes but at least now i'm recognising them and this is the first step to stopping them altogether.
Saved a few hands that i thought were cool/interesting:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3439019

That was a nice turn card and always nice to 3 bet the 75 soooooooooted!!

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3439027

This hand is a classic example of people playing like total retards, his line in the hand is simply awful. Ship his 120 x.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3439026

Sick beat on this one and nothing i can do obviously this worst thing is even if the river blanks you know he'll just call all three barrels with top pair 3 kicker.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3439025

Another mong donk! when he bet the river i was just confused as hell because it makes no sense at all, the stacks were so deep pre which made it fun.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3439022

Finally i nice call by me.

So i'm planning on playing another 10K hands or so this month and obviously a few more tournies but nothing to excessive. In life away from poker 6 of us are heading back to Kent this weekend for a game of golf and a piss up in maidstone. We're also doing a combined 'sports' event on the following; golf, pool, pingpong, bowling, darts and tiger woods 09. I'm not sure how i'll get on but am quietly confident as i'm one of the best at bowling and ping pong and am the man to beat on tiger woods, should be a fucking good laugh! Think i'll play a heavy schedule on sunday but i might be a bit hungover so have to wait and see.

DTD trip report and crushing 100nlh.

My trip to Nottingham brought mixed success, Unfortunately i was unable to cash in either of the tournament that i played but thankfully i was able to win both of my buy-ins back playing cash games. On the surface this may seem like a bit of a waste of time but overall i had some fun and it was good to get out of the flat for a few days.
I left London quite early friday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised how quickly it took me to get to leicester, where i was staying with my friend Joe. After dropping my bag off at his student accommodation (nice spacious room but classically dirty communal areas), we jumped on the trains to notts and got there in plenty of time to play the £100 comp at 8pm. The structure was ok (5K in chips and 30 min levels) but i found myself a little bit bored and in a childish mood surrounded by mostly middle aged men. So in a moment of inspiration i decided to start drinking, 6 bottles of Corona later and i'm all cheered up.
Not a great deal happened in the first few hours as i had very few hands and very few spots to take advantage of the relatively poor standard of play. Soon we were playing 300/600 and i only had 7K, one poorly timed shove (running J8 sooooooooooooted in to AA) and after the monster suckout i'm up and running. I then find AK v AJ at 400/800 and by the start of the 600/1200 level there are 22 left from 90 and i'm one of the chipleaders with 35K. From this spot i'm crazy confident to make the final as i have a huge amount of experience with this stack playing these blinds but alas it was not meant to be. First i get 16K in with 88 v QJ on a 10 6 2 board having made a very good call he hits a queen on the river then i get my last 18K in 3 betting a lag with 66 v AJ when he raises the button, gg me.
So the first tourney was a bit of a nightmare but this was soon behind me by 6am as Joe and i returned to leicester after a lengthy cash game session of PLO and NLH. I won £350 but felt a bit rough by the end of the night and even by the time we returned for the £330 the next day i could think of thousands of places i would rather have been.
Obviously mood is an important factor in poker. When you really want to play your focus is there and inevitably your decision making is improved. Think of the total opposite mood and for some unknown reason this is the one i found myself in on saturday, as a result my play was shocking. I played some of the worst poker that i ever have and nothing went right at all. Every bluff failed and every decent hand was outdrawn and the worst thing was the standard on my table was laughable, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a £5 comp not a £330 one, people were limping in 80% of hands, limp calling 7x the blind raises with 10 5 sooted, cold calling 3 bets with 56 and my favourite gentlemen liked to min raise from the small blind after the obvious 5-6 limpers. The tourney has such a great structure and the general standard is so poor that i would be willing to stake anyone i know who knows the first thing about the game, simply shocking.
Anyway that's the end of my little rant, i busted at the end of level 2 and Joe busted shortly before. We played a lttle bit more round of each and i won again winning a big pot in PLO when it came 963 with me holding 8765 v 99xx. The other guy was a bit of a rock/station so i even waited till i hit the straight because he was so bad that he had to have 99 and nothing else, nice 5 on the river, ship ship.
I got back on sunday and played the full tilt $750K gtd finishing 160th for another frustrating deep/annoying run on a weekly major title and last night i came 30th in the $100 + 1 rebuy + 1 add-on with 27 getting paid having lost AJ V J10 for a top 5 chip stack, nice to see i'm still running like a retard on that site. Anyway i'm still of to a good start this month thanks to being +$3K already playing cash. 100nl is full of morons and thought i'd post a few examples:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3408032

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3408032

http://www.pokerhand.org/?3408032

I've moved up to 200nl ahead of planned and things have gone very well so far. I'm still watching a lot on leggo poker and this is really helping with my though process during hands. The one obvious major difference in mindset between cash and tourneys is going from how do i make sure i survive? to how do i extract maximum value? I'm working hard and so far have only had 1 tilting session, apart from that i'm happy with my game and running very hot v the right players.
In other news i'm still feeling a bit lazy but have managed to get half way through freakenomics which is a very interesting book, it's mentally demanding but certainly changes the way that statistical data can be analysed and explores a lot of the topics that i myself find quite intriguing, i.e nature v nurture and individual human greed. Finished prison break series 1, fucking awesome and i'm now onto series 2 which my friends have give mixed reviews. Going to see Russel Howard on friday which should be cool then out on the piss with a few of the boys from home. Not sure when i'll blog next but for now the goal is simple, another solid $10K month.

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.

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.

Monthly Goals

Got back from Devon yesterday afternoon and as expected had a good time. We left at 6am on Friday and from that moment on was pretty tired, playing a lot of golf in the day and then drinking till midnight every night. We played a 54 hole individual competition and i got off to a nightmare start, finishing dead last by 7 shots after day 1. I hadn't played for a couple of months and only 3 times this year so i wasn't shocked by this outcome, i was also giving 3 of the guys between 4 and 8 shots a round so it wasn't looking good. I played a lot better on day 2 and was still in last place but had shut the gap to 3 shots on mike and Liam so the 3 of us went out in the wooden spoon match on the final day. After a ding dong battle with Liam i managed to sneak past him on the 17th to finish 8 out of 9. I played better each day and by day 3 was at my very best tee to green, i putted terribly however which cost me a lot of shots and overall i was just glad not to finish last. Congrats to Ben 'big cheese' Warwick on his victory who played very solid all week and deserved it 100%. I only lost about £50 on the golf course thanks to my victory in the closest to the pin comp and won £30 in the paper/scissor- rock comp after a dramatic 4-3 victory against cashy in the best of 7 final. That's 2 in a row for me and am very pleased to rank myself as the number 1 player in the group, if not the world. We also played a 7-man £5 poker crapshoot which i obviously won winning every single all in pre showdown along the way, my favourite being the 8-3 V A3 classic coin flip scenario, lol. As far as the rest of the holiday goes, rooms were fine: 4/5. Food was good enough and a lot of it: 4/5. The main problems were that it felt a bit like an old peoples home and the rest of the people were mostly over 40 but this is to expected from a golf holiday i guess. Looking forward to next year.
Looking into the immediate future i've decided to set myself some goals for the upcoming month. I've been a bit of a lazy fucker of late and i think my results have reflected this. September was a decent month and it was nice to get back to winning ways after a shit August but i threw away a lot of good chances for $5K + paydays and am looking forward to trying to change this over the next few weeks, i also feel like i once again didn't put the hours in and am looking forward to pushing myself as hard as i can. Finally i ate real bad throughout the last few months and havn't put the hours in the gym and in the swimming pool since my return from Las Vegas. So with this in mind my goals for the month are:

1) Play a minimum of 100 MTT's before the end of October Ranging from anywhere between $50 to $550 freezeouts and $30 - $100 rebuys.

2) I'm not allowed to eat any fast food including pizza, indian, chinese, kebabs etc. Also make a conscious effort to eat less crisps, chocolate and biscuits.

3) Swim at least 20 times. Each session being 100 lengths of the 15m pool.

4) Go to the gym at least 10 times. 2000M on the rowing machine each time and weights as well.

So those are my 4 simple goals for the month and i think with a bit of hard work i should be able to manage. I was thinking about giving up alcohol but that might cause my body to die of shock so i'll just stick to fast food. I don't think i've gone a month without eating junk sine i was about 12 so this could be a struggle. As for the poker i'm not sure what effect a dramatic increase in play will have on my results. If i can keep my ROI above 100% on party and Full tilt i would be a very happy boy as that would result in a $10K month. I think the average day will be something like this; get up at 1pm, eat, go to the gym/pool between 2pm and 4pm. Play tiger woods-watch tv/read and eat dinner until 8pm and then play 4 or 5 tournies starting between 8 and 1am. The sleeping pattern might get a little fucked but as long as the last tourney i play doesn't start later than 1am and i'm always up before 2pm i should get plenty of sleep and be rested enough to achieve my goals. Will probably to a progress report after each week explaining how each of my objectives are going, who says poker player have no structure?