End o' March

Since my last update I have played quite a lot of live poker and not much at all online.  I played the £1500  GUKPT event at the Vic where I made day 2 but busted very early from there.  I lost two key pots which could have altered my progress significantly in the tournament.  The first was on day one when I raised to 1300 with K2cc from the CO at 300/600/75 with 30k and guy with 23k calls in BB.  BB villain was middle aged, looked like a live pro with headphones etc and studied me closely before calling.  I was pretty new to table so had to go on my basic reads like his appearance to assume how he played and his level.  Flop came 57Q with two clubs, he checked and I bet something like 1600, and fairly quickly raised to 4600 I believe.  I think this is a super duper standard call here which is what I did.  Turn was a K and he very quickly shoved which was about 17k into 13k.  I really don't see how I can fold here even though I know that hes sooooo rarely 'bluffing' here for his tournament life based on assumptions I made about him.  When I say 'bluffing' I'm putting things like 89cc into this range because I just so rarely see these live players play combo draws like this.  Anyway, I make the call and he has the 75o which holds and I'm crippled.

I managed to survive the day with some shortstack all-in run good and end the day with 20bbs or so.  Next day, can't remember the blinds but I raised QQ with 22bbs utg+1 and got called by another middle aged gentleman in the bb who had 19bbs.  Flop came Jxx, he led I called.  Turn T, he bet most of his remaining stack I shove, he sigh calls with J9o and starts walking away from the table shortly before the J hits the river leaving me with 3bbs.  Next hand I shove Q9o and get called by 44 and lose. GG.  I'd say calling too light out of position in situations like this is one the bigger mistakes the typical live player makes, though I guess in these situations it worked out for them.  I think I broke even in cash games in London, though I only played small.  Apart from that we just went out eating and drinking in London and stuff which I find more fun than playing live poker.

Gibraltar was a lot of fun too and it was great to catch up with my relatives that live there as well as our PokerStrategy buddies whom we are staking at the moment.  Didn't realise how big PokerStrategy was until we went out there and I found out more about it.  Talking to these guys you get to realise how big some staking and affiliate businesses in poker can be, as well as just how big the worldwide poker industry is.  Someone told me (probably unverifiable) that PokerStars raked $20 billion last year.  Pretty sick.

In other news, it's my birthday next week which I am very unexcited about to be honest.  I usually try to arrange some sort of decent occasion but have been lazy this year and barely organised anything.  My birthday falls on the 5th which is when Spurs played Real in Madrid in the first leg of the Champs League quarters so will likely do something around that.  Whatever.

My plan for April is to grind 30k+ hands online and play a bit better than I have in the last week.  I'll also try to get a few tourney sessions in there too.  Then in May I'm going to do the GUKPT Summer Series in Brighton and PKR Live.  Both these events should be fun and would be cool to get back in the black for live pokers for 2011.

Jesus, this blog is boring.  Maybe this video will redeem it a tad........

<3 Pilkington

Solid week

Following my tourney score I have carried on running pretty hot with some decent sessions at cash.  This has inevitably led to some 'winner's tilt' where I'm auto-piloting too much and running on my B-C game because I have got a bit complacent about the fact that I will win whatever I do.  At least I am aware of this I suppose.

I've also lacked some motivation to play hands because I have already made a decent chunk of money in March and have got off to great starts to months before, only to crash and burn which has affected my confidence for some time after.  My ideal mindset should be just to play the best poker I can, come what may the short-term results.  Unfortunately my brain doesn't seem to work this way so I should probably just work with it as best I can.

I'm contemplating taking the NL cash games easy for the next week or so and putting in some decent time into learning PLO more.  I've been playing some of this at various stakes with some heads-up and short handed.  It's been interesting so far.  I am definately spotting my opponents making some mistakes, though they probably see me do more obvious ones.  For example, I have been having good success value betting low flushes pretty heavy in spots where villains take very passive, pot-control lines and getting paid off well.  I assume that at lower limits, like in NL, people simply arn't value betting thin enough.  My mistakes are probably much more fundamental ones, that I hope to fix by watching some videos, looking into some strategy and playing more.

I also should be putting more time into the staking stuff I have going on at the moment, which could be more time-consuming in coming months.  The stakees we have at the moment are all doing well (whether by staker influence, being good players anyway, or just running hot, who knows) so that's really pleasing.  We currently have a skype group that we all contribute to and it works really well because often people have contrasting ideas on how to play hands and different approaches to the game which causes debate and makes people think deeply about hands.  This really is the best way to learn in my opinion.  It's much more about teaching yourself to analyse as many variables as you can at a given time, and assessing which ones are most important in making the correct decision rather than trying to build a 'playbook' where you have a default move for every situation.

Also, going to London on the 18th for a £1500 GUKPT event with BrotherMuzone, Mr_Niceness and even Wongaman is making a rare foray into the live poker scene.  James666 is also going so it seems PKR players will be heavily represented there.  Hopefully I won't lose all my money like in Manchester.  Then the weekend after going to Gibraltar to visit some relatives and a couple of the stakees that also happen to work out there.  Should be fun.

Well done to Spurs on getting to the Champions League quarter finals.  Can't wait to see who we get drawn against next week.  Whoever it is,  Bale's gonna fuck their shit up!

Liking donkaments now

Got my biggest ever online tournament score last night coming 2nd in the $55 DNG on Stars for $16.6k which I am pretty darn happy with, tinged with a hint of disappointment in not winning.  This tournament was shaping up to be a typical min-cash affair as I limped into the money with a below average stack until I hit a hot streak with about 4 or 5 tables left and amassed a load of chips, instead of the usual blinding down until 10bbs and losing a flip to collect some pocket change.  I continued to cooler people and win allins when necessary until we got three handed which dragged on for ages and the person who got short kept winning allins to survive and I went from being commanding chip leader, to short stack, to chip leader, back to average stack before the other two players got all in and one got knocked out.  I went into hu short and never really recovered.

I definitely made a load of mistakes at various stages of the final table.  I know this because I was frequently stumped as to what the best play was with my very limited experience of playing between 20 and 40bbs deep but overall I think I did decent and was happy to be seeing my opponents making obvious mistakes to allow me to reassure myself I had a good edge.

Going to play some more tournaments tonight to ride this hot streak for all it's worth including the big Sunday Million Anniversary tournament where the winner will get over a million bucks.

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.