Another blog cliche: the old "Sorry for not updating for six weeks" post! Hurrah! I was in two minds about whether to update ever again, because frankly most people's blogs suck and I don't want to add to the weight of trash which causes the internet to sag. This was really just meant to keep people up to date on my WSOP progress for the people who had pieces of me, but I realised I didn't even finish that yet.

Cliffnotes: I didn't win

Fairly Short Version: Phil Laak is at my table, but more annoyingly there's a highstakes cash pro to his left, and a highstakes cash pro to my right. I think they were both live pros, but they were both decent enough. About five hands in, TV cameras are around Laak, they stop filming if I beat him to a pot, they stop filming when he folds, etc. Pretty standard I guess. Early on, Mr. Laak (we never got on first name terms came up to me and whispered "so kid, so kid, kid, how'd you get those chips kid?" and "it was one big pot right, kid, hey kid, or was it slow over the day kid?", to which I replied "I'm not going to tell you". He looks surprised. His face falls. He looks down. He goes back to his seat and sits down. I kind of felt a bit like I'd kicked a puppy. Amended my thought to "kicked a pigeon" and felt a lot better about myself.

An orbit later, Laak limps, cash pro overlimps, middle aged guy who looks surprised to be playing limps, SB (other cash pro) completes, and I raise AA from the BB. Laak calls, surprised guy calls. Flop comes 842 and I bet 3/4 pot. Laak mumbles and folds. Surprised guy mumbles and calls. Turn A and I double barrel. Surprised guy min raises for about 30% of his stack, and of course I just shove. Of course a flush is possible, but so are smaller sets, pairs + flush draws, etc, and I have a redraw anyway. He tables KJ, I blank, and I'm down to average chips.

To cut a long story short, I get 3 bet by Mr. Laak or cash pro a lot, so have to tighten up with my average chips now. I fluff up a 4 bet bluff by acting differently when placing my bet (so dumb), and I'm pretty sure Laak catches it and shoves. I essentially tread water until the end of the day, then lose a bigish pot on some cooler I forget after six weeks, and am left with about 20bb. The antes are huge so I decide to simply pushbot, whereupon I immediately pushbot my AJ into cash pro's AA. Flop comes AJx and I fail to hit my 1000/1 shot. At least, I think I did, I had left the table by then. Oh well!

Oh yeh, and on the last level, Phil Laak goes round everyone on the table (shortly before busting), naming them all saying it has been a pleasure to play with them. Except he stops at me. And doesn't say anything. And goes and sits back down again. I'm pretty sure I didn't look like a kicked puppy though, so +1 mindgame score me!

Spent the next two days sulking. Back to London a few days after that, round a friend's house for the weekend, then off to Estonia. I've been here a month now, living in Tallinn, above the old town square. Rent is perhaps a third what I'd be paying in London for this, beer costs $4 and the girls are pretty. So it's all good.

I think I'll upload some vegas photos tomorrow, and maybe some of Tallinn too. Not sure if I have any Leggopoker'ers, though I do have a couple of Greg's 21st...

PS: For those of you who don't actually know me personally (if such a person is reading my blog), I HATE PIGEONS. I hope this clears up the Phil Laak joke in the second paragraph for you.

Another unimaginative blog title, I guess I'll never win the Nobel prize now. It's descriptive though, as yesterday I played the fourth Day 1 of the WSOP main event. I had picked the fourth day because the first clashed with the 2 + 2 meet, the second with the 4th of July (when I'd be hungover anyway) and the 5th when I'd definitely be hungover.

This sounded great in theory, but in practice I was so hungover on the 5th that I really wasn't in any state to function that day. I got up at 3pm and was planning on sleeping at midnight but was totally shattered by about 7. Stayed up anyway, and body decided to interpret midnight as naptime. It woke me up at 3 and I did not enjoy much success with sleep from that point onwards. I got out of bed at 9, moved house into the Palms (our lease ran out as planned), stocked up on headache pills and headed over to the Rio for some cards.

Warning: I am about to talk about a lot of poker hands. If you don't play the game much, this is going to make little sense. However, I'll be asking questions when I'm back in London, so please remember to take notes.

HSBC had ****ed up my bank wire (twice), so I had to buy in with cash. I did this the day before play, so was sitting with a load of other direct buyins. This isn't great because they likely all have a lot of money which could easily have come from poker. This isn't terrible though because they could just be rich, or they could have won a live satellite at the last minute. They also probably aren't taking it too seriously or they'd have bought in earlier. Or HSBC didn't like them either.

During a break I ran into Brandon Schaefer and mentioned that everyone at my table was saying what a terrible draw they had, whilst I was thinking "Hey! This is great!" My plan going into the tournament was to play a lot of hands whilst deepstacked (100-200bb) against the live/tournament players because I am used to having so many blinds and they are not. This worked perfectly to start with.

These guys simply aren't very used to having so much play, and I could abuse them pretty heavily (poker slang, for any of my friends who don't play but made it this far - I didn't actually shout at them or remind them of their priest or anything). I spent the first three levels very tired or hyped up on caffeine, so my hand recall isn't great. Suffice to say I double barreled a lot of scare cards, cbet a lot of good flops and checked a lot of bad ones, checkraised obvious spots and so on, and basically all of them worked. Nobody seemed to think I was messing anyone around, despite the fact I did it in basically every single spot I was able to. Some perhaps more regular hands:

QQ UTG - I think this was at 100/200 and so I open to 500. UTG + 1 three bets and I call. Flop 972 and I check/call. Turn A, check/check. River A, I valuebet vs. TT or JJ or perhaps even 88? I don't know this guy very well except he plays live: Most live pros suck obviously, and the ones that do generally do not take thin value, they only bluff or have the nuts. Therefore when you take thin value against them they tend to get worried about what's going on. I'm not saying that QQ is superthin here, but a lot of live players don't expect me to bet it. Anyway - he calls with JJ which is super standard, but he seems to be a lot more annoyed with the hand than he should be. I think he was scared of me from that point onwards too. This was good, because he turned out to not be bad after all.

50/100: T7 BTN - I had "defended" my button with all kinds of crap, often by raising and almost always getting away with it. I decided to overlimp vs. EP and MP because I was pretty confident that at least one of the blinds would call and I'd rather play vs. lots of players with this kind of hand anyway. For background, EP is a weaktight old guy who nonetheless plays ok preflop, MP is a non-crazy-gambler young asian who limps too often and has weird continuation bet tendencies (i.e, doesn't make them when I think he should, makes them sometimes in bad spots), but both are otherwise decent. Flop comes 6 8 9 which is obviously a good but not brilliant flop for me, who it checks to. I bet, BB folds, EP folds, MP calls. Turn comes J and MP checks. I bet here to get value from a set (hah), but mostly because it's a good scare card and I don't think that a naked club is exclusively his range on the flop. It's PART of it obviously, but that's ok because I don't intend to put another cent into the pot if he shows any interest. He calls and I am done with the hand - then he surprisingly checks on the 2 river. This may be a spot where I should have thought about the hand a little harder: I don't think anyone at the table really realises that I'm messing them around quite so often, particularly this guy. It's a terrible card to go for a river check/raise because the only hand you can expect me to bet here is a on such a blank card. Therefore I think I can put his range as a straight, a small flush that hated the turn or a set. Will he fold a small flush? I dunno, and it doesn't really matter because the other hands are prominent in his range too and live players don't like folding "big" hands very much. I should probably have bet small on the river and hoped for a call from 66 or something. It turns out that he had 99, and whilst his turn play was fine I really hate his preflop and flop. Oh well.

50/100: My strategy is to rarely threebet preflop because I want to play as many deep pots as I can where I can hurt people. This is therefore my first three bet in two levels - MP opens, LP calls and BTN calls. I squeeze from SB with KQ - MP folds, LP calls (? - and this was the same guy as the 99 hand) and BTN folds. I'm happily putting LP on a pair, AT type hands or perhaps KJ etc. Flop comes Q6::5 and I cbet. I don't know if this is right or not, because it doesn't hit his range very hard and he's likely only calling with hands that beat me. However, spades are also in his range, and perhaps I can make a street of value from 88 (or 99 or whatever. He calls, turn comes J which makes me dislike my hand now - I also can't get any value from anything anymore, and I don't think this is a good double barrel card for reasons outlined above. I check, and he checks behind. Hmm! Turn comes K and I still can't see a lot of value here so check again. He bets about 1/6th of the pot and I obviously call - he shows KQ for a split, and my largest pot of the tournament so far (15k total I think). He says that he could tell I was weak pre-flop. By three-betting for the first time that day? Perhaps that really was it, but he couldnt' tell when I was weak in general because I stole five hundred pots from him. Perhaps he just wanted an excuse to play.

100/200: I raise UTG with JJ, EP is an old guy who I haven't seen play a hand really. He three bets me. I call for set value and check/fold the low flop, he shows KK. I love old guys.

100/200/25: EP limps (he's done this too much, and he doesn't look like an online player as he's missed some river...

Have their title as "Credit Card Roulette"? Most of them are probably poker blogs though, and so as to surprise and draw you, my reader, I shall save the phrase until my post body.

As I mentioned earlier, whoever invented this game deserves a punch in the face. For the uninitiated, it is a system for paying for your meal. Most poker players fall into the "I love variance" (gambliers) or "I hate variance" (more like regular people, only who spend vast amounts of their time playing a game which survives purely because of the variance). Credit card roulette was invented by the former group.

One person at the table takes a credit card from each diner. They shuffle the cards until whoever's turn it is calls out a number: The nth card down is removed from the shuffle. This is repeated until one card is left, which is then used to pay for the meal. Therefore, over the longrun you'd expect to pay the exact same amount as you would if you were going dutch, it's just that the longrun of dinners can take quite some time.

A week or two ago, we went to Del Monico's, a posh Las Vegas steakhouse. Actually, it wasn't anything like as posh as I thought it'd be, and the steaks were all ~$50, which to my Sterling-attuned brain is pretty reasonable. Of course, that didn't stop us from racking up a $900 tab for dinner. Credit cards are whipped out, side bets are made (oh - PS - the best illustration for this game I can think of is that when the bill comes to < $100, some people like to play for the bill PLUS a couple hundred dollars, just to keep it interesting), and the shuffle begins.

The guy who lost it (I'm afraid I ddin't catch his name, Indian guy whose name sounded suspiciously like Michelle but who I couldn't ask for a third time without looking as weird as I undoubtably will should he read this) said something along the lines of - "Oh well, at least I didn't lose a big one this time!", whipping out about a kilo of $100 bills.

$100 of dinner paid for by someone else, this must be what it's like being a girl! I can see why people wear dresses on Saturday nights! Ahem. But then came the dreaded "9" steakhouse.

Apparently this is one of the trendy places in Las Vegas right now. When we were standing outside waiting, some UFC fighter (apparently famous) walked out with Jenna Jameson. Some American footballers were there. Etc. Of course I recognised none of them, but I trust this simply demonstrated my cool in the face of celebrity, thus demonstrating the fact I often go to trendy restaurants and infact may well be famous in my own country, it's just that the Americans haven't heard of me yet.

We end up at Jenna Jameson's old table, where one of the waiter's points out to Dave (Orange) that he's sitting in the same spot. Dave promptly goes to the restoom for reasons unknown.

Anyway - to cut a long blog post short - another $50 steak (very good) and another $1,000 bill. There're six of us but it's JP's birthday so he doesn't have to roulette. You can of course see where this is going, as I lose my fifth or sixth roulette of the trip so far - I'm already running bad, but this is the biggest meal us six have had by practically a factor of ten. Fortunately Danny owes me some money so I get him to pay for it. This scares the waiter somewhat - he pats Danny on the back, comforting him over his bad luck to which I have to point out that I lost but Danny owed me a grand anyway. I guess even in 9 people don't lend each other a thousand dollars. Welcome to poker.

As per your MSN, I am making this a non-one-and-done blog. Also, Adrian, I have not played any multiplayer Civ4 today: I hope you are happy with yourself.

So anyway.

Yesterday I went to bed at 4am. Today I got up at 8am because some ****er on a tape recorder was calling to sell me something or other. They let it ring 40 times (I was in bed, counting), then hung up. Then they called back five minutes later. I got out of bed, yelled "**** YOU" and hung up. At least, I hope it was them.

I think I fixed my sleep schedule via watching Wimbledon to midday then napping til 2. This seems to be a big problem for everyone I've talked to who isn't playing many events this week, so it's not like there's trouble finding people to go and do things with at 2am (er, so to speak). Bad sleep schedules mean that the day seems to be over so fast. It's easy to sit around and do very little as a poker player.

David/Jacob, you've made me spawn a "dear diary" blog post, adding me to the ranks of the tedious blog poster. Seeing as I'm already damned though, I'm going to compound the mistake by whining: Today I lost fifteen buyins, all through coolers and bad beats, and IT REALLY WAS BAD LUCK (as opposed to playing badly and pretending I've been struck by lightning, for those of you who don't play cards much), as Nick was sweating me for the second half of it. It's surprising how I am a lot calmer - not that I usually tilt - when someone is looking, though I suspect he was born on an Indian burial ground or something - I live a good life and do not deserve that much bad luck by myself.

I was going to talk about Cirque du Soleil, but we're going to go and watch the Blue Man thing shortly, so perhaps I can write two reviews in one, get paid by the Las Vegas mayor and lead a double life as a theatre critic.

Oh, and as I'm at the WSOP, here's my $2500 six max trip report: I got backed into the event, arrive five minutes late to find that there're only two others on my table already. Guy to my right is opening every hand and guy to my left is folding every hand, so after I fold twice I three bet twice in a row (T7 then 99) and he gives up on this plan. That was the highlight of my tournament. Soon everyone is at the table, and the first full round we played we had three three bets. By the end of the third round, every player at my table had three bet once

And I was going to continue that story but I had to run out to see the Blueman thing - just got back. Suffice to say I got cold four bet twice and won zero showdowns and infact only saw two showdowns, out on the third level. More blog tomorrow unless David/Jacob objects.

Ideally, this blog title would mean that I've been lazy updating my Leggo Poker blog and am returning to a neglected journal, a journal you have somehow missed on your previous visits to this site.

In reality, it actually means that I've meant to start a blog for a while but haven't got round to it. Infact I wrote about three entries a month or two ago elsewhere and forgot about it until just now, but let's not mention that again.

A few people reading this will do so because they saw a new post on this site: These people probably know a lot about poker. Whilst I may know a few of these people, and a few of these people may have a lot in common with me, my blog-aim is to let my friends know what I'm up to, and most of these friends don't play as much poker as we do. I'll end up explaining things here that we poker players already know all about, so I apologise to them. Well, I apologise slightly. I'm not going to let it get to me too much.

The time is 0430 so all you're going to get for the rest of this first post is a synopsis, I'll try to do some more in the next few days. So bullet points:

• I've been in Las Vegas for the last three weeks, and I'm going to be here another three

• I'm playing poker for a living having quit my job at PokerStars at the end of April

• My sleep schedule is ****ed

• Whoever invented credit card roulette deserves a punch in the face

• Two of my flatmates (Carrotsnake and Roger Mansfield, for those of you who frequent 2 + 2) and I have played much too much Civilisation 4 for our own good

• I have not played as much poker as I should

• Me, the aforcementioned Carrotsnake (Danny), Roger Mansfield (Nick, weirdly) and Orange (Dave) went to see Mystère, a Cirque du Soleil show this evening. It was good. I shall probably post about that tomorrow

• Goodnight