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.

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.