End of Feb update

February ended up being a really good month for me where I mananged to post really solid results despite not playing many hands, mostly thanks to running good in the 5/10 games.  The games have been good for the most part, though it's easy to play in fishy games when you get a load of nutted hands.  This month went exactly how I would love every month to go for as long as I play poker for a living.  Lots of small winning days and few losing days so no major swings and thus much less stress.  Unfortunately poker isn't always like this and I fully expect to be cursing the game anytime soon.

I haven't been able to play for the last week or so because I had some sort of stomach bug/food poisoning type thing which completely knocked the stuffing out of me and left me feeling rather sheeeit.  It's amazing how you can go to bed one night feeling fine then wake up the next feeling so grim.  To make it worse I found water leaking from my bathroom ceiling the same morning because of a recurring problem with plumbing from an upstairs flat so had to sort that out despite feeling like I was going to faint any moment.  Fun!  My loyal readers will be pleased to know I am feeling better now.  To illustrate this I will use Doom.

I did feel like this:

Now more like this:

Thanks to some of these:

Hope to get to this eventually:

I miss those old school games.  I also watched the latest episode of HSP yesterday and predict this will be the last season of the show as they've dismantled the really funny AJ Benza and Gabe Kaplan duo and the lineup this year is rubbish compared to previous years.  This season does seem to have some really soft spots which I'm sure is great for the pros at the table but not for the viewer.  If I wanna see random people with too much money play hands terribly I can just go to my local casino.

Durrrrrrrrrr

I remember looking for a video of this hand before but couldn't find it but then I saw it linked today in a 2+2 thread.  Definitely my favourite ever hand of tv poker.

It just breaks all the rules of how you are 'supposed' to play in an 8-handed pot on a dry board with a weak hand.  Also shows what you can do with deep stacks.  Pretty amazing.

Win some-lose some

Been grinding a decent amount this week while back at my parents' house.  I'm back here because my boiler broke down in my flat and the people in charge of organising getting it fixed are pretty imcompetent so these things take a while.  I have to tell the property management people who have to tell an engineer to come round who then tell the property management people what needs doing who tell the landlord the quote for this and after he approves it the work can get underway.  Each one of these processes seems to take a day.  Meanwhile I have a freezing cold flat and no hot water.  The only way to really hurry this process up is to bust peoples balls and phone around constantly to see whats going on but this is also a pain in the ass.  Next time I rent, I won't be doing it with Leaders.

Being back at the 'rents has been good though because I have just been able to concentrate on the grind whereas for some reason in Brighton I always seem to have a bunch of errands to do.  I'm lucky that my parents don't mind me being very lazy and not really contributing to anything in the house.  Poker has gone ok, yesterday I had a good session and really felt like I was playing my A-game, doing stuff like turning made hands into bluffs in spots where I would usually just give up.  Unfortunately, I had a pretty bad session today where I may have made a couple of mistakes.  These mistakes arn't half as bad as ones I see other regs making so thats reassuring.  I predict that 2011 will be the year that certain regs who have previously made a lot of money on pkr don't make any.


Recently a lot of the poker community has been really intrigued by the Ashman bet that went down recently where he attempted to run 70 miles in 24 hours.  For a very detailed explanation of exactly what happened check these two blog entries: One / Two.  To someone with a low level of fitness like myself this seems impossible but when I asked my mum (who can run a sub four-hour marathon) she thought his chances of winning were very good considering he is a very fit individual who runs regularly.  I was more interested in the concept of two friends betting massive amounts of money (and very significant to them), in circumstances where one of them could have endangered his health.  I always think bets are supposed to be fun, or with an intention to do something positive, like quitting smoking for example.  Really sweating the result because the money won or lost is so significant to you is not fun in my opinion, and I wouldn't enjoy winning much either because you will have the bitter feeling of seeing a friend lose a lot of money.  Haseeb acknowledges that it was a bad idea in the end, though I don't agree with some of his reasons for going ahead with it in the first place.

I'm going to see Arsenal vs Barcelona on Wednesday with free tickets from pkr.  Though I'm a Spurs fan, it will be a good opportunity to see the best club team in the world, BARCELONA (after Spurs of course).  I read this interesting interview with Xavi in the Guardian today.  The guy's just a football genius, and has a lot of insightful things to say.

Live poker frustrations and plo

Not had much to blog about recently, hence the big gap since the last one.  Gukpt Manchester was very disappointing as I managed to bust both tournaments without a hint of going deep and also lost all three cash game sessions.  As a result, the trip ended up being rather expensive and I left with a strong dislike of live poker.  There were some good moments, including BrotherMuzone destroying a £5/5 game for about £7k.  Though I suppose the ultimate run good award has to go to Pete 'Macdaddy' McAdams who shipped the main event for £58k.  Congratulations to him (through gritted, jealous teeth haha).

Online has been going much better recently, I've even been dabbling in some hu plo, just playing whichever regs will play on ftp.  It's quite odd that about three quarters of the regs won't play me despite me having very little plo experience (this can be verified on my ptr page).  My ptr page will show that I am a good winner at hunl so I suppose that is enough to put a lot of people off.  I cannot complain about people not playing because I have been very strict on table selection recently and been avoiding players who I believe I have an edge on hu just to avoid high variance situations.  Anyway, I'm sure I am a big fish in these games but hopefully I can just run good forever!  Here's an interesting hand:

	Hand info: Date: 2011/02/04 22:05:00 ET Type: Cash Games Game: Omaha PL Table: Abduh Blinds: $2/4 Table info: Dealer, Posts small blind $2 Seat 1:Button ($1,117) Posts big blind $4 Seat 2:BB ($1,057.75) Dealt to BB Check odds Preflop: (Pot: $6) RAISE Button, to $12 RAISE BB, to $36 RAISE Button, to $108 CALL BB, $72 Check odds Flop: (Pot: $216) CHECK BB BET Button, $128 RAISE BB, to $600 RAISE Button, to $1,009 and is ALL-IN CALL BB, $349.75 and is ALL-IN RETURN Button, $59.25 Check odds Turn: (Pot: $2,115.50) River: (Pot: $2,115.50) Showdown: SHOWS Button SHOWS BB BB wins the pot of $2,115 with two pair, Tens and Nines
	I'm not going to attempt to properly analyse this hand because as I said, I'm a fish, but I think his bet/shove on the flop here is pretty bad with the third best overpair and the third best flush draw.  Obviously I absolutely nailed this flop with 3 pair and an oesfd, conveniently removing the 6h and the Jh from his fd outs.  This reg wasn't as good as other ones I have played because he didn't three barrell in loads of spots where it was very difficult for me to have a hand where I could call with and was mostly just playing his own hands and the board.  I ran very good in the allins which is obviously a vital part of plo so that helped.