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.

Delayed/Postponed/Cancelled etc

Following the disappointment of missing out on the Philippines package recently, there have been a couple more setbacks in my plans to play more live poker this year.  Firstly, WongaMan found this promotion on this random euro site that involved getting together a team of four players to play series of online tournaments, where points would be awarded based on your position in them, and the eventual winning team would get a $60k package to the WSOP.  This seemed like a great opportunity because the players on this site were apparently terrible (stakes rarely ran above 1/2), the competition was barely promoted anywhere (I couldn't even find information about it on the internet, you had to download the client and find out through there, but this was also a challenge), and the player pool on the site seemed so small that there would be a big overlay.  As well as this our team was going to be WongaMan, BrotherMuzone, MrNicess and myself, which is a team that could only be challenged by perhaps Durrrr, Ivey, Antonius and Galfond.

As it turned out, the promotion was a bit too good to be true because they first changed some of the rules and postponed it for a week, and then postponed it again with no clues as to when or if it will start.  I'm assuming they realised not enough people entered to make it profitable so pulled the plug completely. A similar situation has happened with the Victory Poker contest that I mentioned in a previous blog.  Mark and the other contestants were told they would be flying out sometime in February and I was starting to get skeptical about it as the month was getting closer and closer with no definite dates put in place.  Apparently there was trouble finding a week or whatever that everyone was free for.  Oh wow what shocker,  30 odd people weren't free at the same time.  Remember most of these people are not going to be professional poker players, they are people with jobs that can't just go anywhere at the drop of a hat and and will need notice.  So they have now delayed the competition, also not giving the contestants any solid clues as to when it may happen.  It wouldn't surprise me if it just gets cancelled altogether....obviously after the site has changed the plans another five times and made a load more promises that they can't fulfill.  Oops, got a bit ranty there.

Not sure if it is just coincidental that I have been affected by very poor management by poker companies within a short space of time of whether it's a sign that a lot of them are badly run, or simply struggling at the moment.  Maybe I'm overreacting a bit and expect too much from these companies whom you entrust with handling large sums of money.  Though I remember recently when PKR forgot to put a password on Facebook for a freeroll and all the freeroll regs were absolutely furious that they couldn't have this particular opportunity to win free money at no risk.  This resulted in a very long thread where some of the pkr staff apologised and promised to try to not let it happen again.  I think this is a tad more forgivable than the cases I have described.

Poker has been frustrating this week.  Not for running bad reasons, but because my internet connection has been shoddy all week (well, all year so far really).  I haven't even tried phoning Virgin yet because a forum thread on the Virgin Media website warns you that you just get put through to a foreign call centre (uh oh racist/xenophobe alert) where they have a script about restarting your computer/modem/wireless router which they struggle to deviate from despite your insistence you have done these things and other people in your area are having the same problem.  I went into the Virgin Media shop down the road and obviously the assistant knew nothing of a problem with internet speeds locally.  I intended to get two internet connections a while ago to hopefully eliminate costly disconnections but never got round to it so I may just end up signing up with another ISP.  Even if this costs me say £200 a year, I'm sure it costs me more than this every year from pots I lose when I disconnect.  I'm not sure if it's difficult to set up two connections where the secondary one automatically kicks in when the primary one goes down, I can't imagine it's that hard.

Off to Manchester to play GUKPT this week for a £500 freezeout on Tuesday and then the £1000 main event at the weekend.  Actually looking forward to playing live poker for once, (maybe because I know I can't disconnect in the middle of a hand) so hopefully this leads to some live run good!

PKR has a sense of humour

I forgot to mention when I lost out on the $5k APT package I did get $200 for coming 2nd. Yepee.  PKR sent me an email to remind me of this.

Tilt Blog

Had a rubbish day at cash tables today which was compounded by some very tilting tournament results.  Did a $162 tournament on PKR where I came 6th (top 5 paid) and then came 2nd in a $215 satellite to APT Philippines (obviously only first got the $5k package).  I went into hu with a 3:1 chip disadvantage and after a few hands with my opponent I realised I simply needed to not get unlucky to win.  The guy didn't even know how to bet.  He either min-bet, which was draws, or overbet, which was value hands and missed draws.  He was also open shoving frequently from the button where we were up to 40bbs deep.  Irritatingly, this strategy was actually decent on his part vs me because it didn't allow me to keep pots small with marginal hands and because I never actually had a nutted hand I had to make really difficult hero calls.  I also didn't want to flip or really take 60/40s for $5k with such a bad player.

I managed to get to even stacks at one point before I made what I think is a decent call to one of his overbets and he rivered the trips this time (2 outer obv).  From then on he just shoved over most of my button opens and then the final hand I shoved 11bbs from the button with J7s, he snapped with K4s and I lost.  I had hoped 2011 might be the year where I could do something in tournaments but the signs arn't very promising.

Gonna go and cry like Huerelio Gomes now...