So I google "CTS poker setup" the other day in Google pictures, because I want to a show a friend that CTS plays on two 50" monitors and to my surprise the second picture in google is actually a picture of my own poker setup and by own setup I mean this is literally a picture I took for an old blog (CTS's actual setup is the 4th picture with two 53" screens).
So I click on the link and it's a link to this guys blog and this guy is literally claiming that my setup is his setup. I lol'd pretty hard when I read that.

Daniell

I too played the Sunday Million! It actually wasn't as bad as I thought. I thought that given the 36000 man player pool it would take a very long time and be a massive crap shoot. Obviously it was a crap shoot, but since the playing field was so soft there were a lot of good spots early on in the tourney to amass chips.
My stack was up to 400bb pretty early due to some poor postflop play by my opponents. For example this hand:



I think I played reasonably well for the most part, but was pretty card dead when I needed hands. I got lucky to quadrouple near the bubble with 88 on a short stack, but with the quickly rising blinds I saw myself being forced to ship in the money light w/t8s and got snapped off by KQ and didn't make my hand (actually I made a flush, but he one carded me on the river for an overflush).
I think my big stack game is pretty reasonable and so is my short stack, but I'm a little bit hesitant sometimes to make correct ships with less than 10bbs and that's something I need to work on (mainly from a disciplinary stand point). I ended up finishing 3700th just in the money and short of the second bubble for 289$.
I'm definetly gonna check out the tourney section in Mathematics of Poker that Isura suggested and watch some videos on MTTs. After that I should be set for my first larger live tournament. I also picked up a copy of Mike Caro's Book of Tells. Phil Hellmuth's book on tells actually had better reviews across the field, but I'm not a big Hellmuth fan .
I don't think tells are as huge in live poker as some may think, but you definetly need to atleast be aware of them and conciously watch yourself when your playing as not to give away free information.

Daniell

Just finished reading Harrington on Hold'em Volume I and I'm a little bit disapointed about some of his statements in the book. Overall I'm glad that I've finally read it, as I've had it lying around here for a while now. Maybe I was expecting a little bit too much from it as I think it is intentionally designed to be more on the basic side.
I barely picked up any new information for my tournament game, but it was interesting to get inside a tournament players head and see what they're thinking.
Before I go on to the points that I found disapointing I should mention that I don't think Harrington is a bad player, in fact he has a very interesting resumé as he's from a chess and backgammon playing background. He also has some pretty good tournament scores.
Here are some things that I can come up with off the top of my head:

- He will say things like raising 99 UTG (9 handed) early in a tournament is bad. You should limp.
Now Harrington advocates a somewhat balanced open limping strategy and that is not what I question. I question the fact that he claims that good players should be limping there. I think this could be misleading to new players.
- In my opinion Mr. Harrington doesn't differentiate between showdown equity and ex-showdown equity. For those of you who are not familiar with those terms, showdown equity is practically your all-in equity. And ex-showdown equity is basically your ev from playing postflop poker. I say this because in some spots he will just look at his preflop odds and decide whether the hand is callable or not based off of his showdown equity when there is still postflop play to come. Naturally the better a player you are the higher your ex-showdown equity will be and the more hands become playable, in particular speculative hands.
- Raise sizing. Again he goes to an extreme and claims that a 5x raise to an open limper in an online tournament is too small as it will not get any folds, because nobody ever folds online. I should add that the hand he's referring to is QJo to an early limper in MP which is a hand that you probably shouldn't be raising anyway, but he says that raising 5x with it is bad and you should make it either 10x or 20x so you can steal the pot. 20x people! Risk-reward-ratio just commited suicide XD. Now I have a feeling he probably wouldn't make that play, but I don't know why he even brings it up. Just say fold QJo in that spot full stop.
- Postflop play. There was a hand where he said that a good player would never just call the flop with a weak top pair, he would raise for information and then fold to a reraise.
This is obviously pretty terrible advice for cash games, and maybe I'm too novice a tournament player to see that it's obviously a bad play to just call w/qt on q73r when bet into... but I definetly think referring to players that just call the flop bad a bit borderline.
I do think there are some spots in tournaments where you should try to push winning pots quickly a little harder than in cash games, but I'm not sure this is the best example. Spots I could think of would be fast playing and never slowplaying unless you flopped huge or giving up a little ev to take down a pot with lower variance, but I don't think this is a spot I would see this way.

All in all Volume II sounds more interesting to me and I'm gonna see if I can dig it up out of one of my moving boxes. Please let me know what you think about Harrington on Hold'em Volume I if you've read it. If your also interested in expanding your NL Hold'em game to tournaments, i definetly think Tournament Poker for Advanced Players by Sklansky is a reasonable read as he does a good job of explaining adjustments that should be made from cash games to tournaments.

Daniell

...is something I should cut back on. I haven't been doing too bad when I've played, because I've been tableselecting, but I find that I have troubles reading the game well and I'm clearly not on my A-game. Even though I still had an edge in the games I was playing with my B-game (or god forbid C-game), I find it very frustrating when I make poor plays against the better players and bleed money to them.
I'm gonna take a couple days off to recover and then refocus and get back into the game. I have exams coming up anyways so it's probably generally a good idea.

Peace

I've been catching up on my tournament game lately. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, because I want to be able to take shots at live tournaments as opportunities arise.
One of the reasons I didn't get round to learning tournaments earlier was that I rarely play them and my time is limited due to Uni so I just focused on my cash game primarily, but since I'm on holidays I finally got round to reading Tournament Poker for Advanced players by Sklansky. It's a book geared towards players like myself (experienced cash game players trying to learn what adjustments to make in tournaments).
Reading tournament literature was actually kinda eye opening to me as I think I've been a little bit ignorant towards certain tournament situations in the past in terms of pushing small ev edges and thus variance a little bit too hard in an attempt not to be like other people nitting it up trying to make the money. While I'm definetly +ev in the tournaments I participate in, I probably have limited myself ROI wise.
Anyways I'll also definetly take a look at the first two Harrington books before I go to Budapest in March aswell. I must have had them lying around my appartment for almost 4 years now, lol.

This coming week will be a week of hardcore Uni grinding for me. I have to take two exams the following week and I've put myself on a tighter time schedule so I could find time to play them pokers. While this surely makes me a more efficient student, it definetly is intense. But hey I'm still youthful so bring it!

On a side note I took some shots at 10/20 the other day, because the games were pretty good. I had the "jesus seat" 150bb deep, but couldn't really catch a big hand. I ended up winning 90€.
For some reason I feel a lot more comfortable with my bankroll nowadays. I guess being more financially secure and with little responsibilites plays a big roll. I also barely tilt. I used to say I never tilt, but this can never really be the case if your human imo. I just think I tilt far less than most.
I'm sure a lot of people say this, but being able to detatch yourself emotionally from situations is super important.
I used to get the most frustrated when I felt I made a poor decision and never really when my opponents made a poor decision and it lead them to winning the hand. I guess that kinda reaction might come from me playing a lot of sports when I was younger. I would allaways be mad at myself for messing up and never mad at others. I allways took full responsibilty. Which is a good thing to a certain degree, but I think in poker you need to take it one step further and realize that you are putting yourself in a situation where you are going to make mistakes and aknowledge before hand that all you can do is be confident in your decision making and never regret your decisions, but instead constantly learn and reevaluate. I hope that makes sense.
Also check out this post by Comanchie from the Leggo forums: http://www.leggopoker.com/forums/psy...102-page7.html I think this is a pretty cool post on the topic.

Finally I've been watching a lot of the videos on the College Humor channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alw5hs0chj0&feature=fvst . I think this is pretty funny and worth checking out if you haven't seen it already. Fwiw it still made me laugh the second time around.

All the best,

Daniell

Hey guys. I've decided to play the Unibet Open in Budapest on the 4th-7th of March. Last year my plan was not to play online MTTs and live cash, but I didn't really stick to it so this year I'm gonna give it another shot.
The Unibet Open circuit looks pretty nice and includes some places that I haven't been to (Hungary, Bulgaria, Czech Republic). You can check out the entire list on their website: http://www.unibetopen.com/
I just booked my flights and I'm feeling kinda psyched about going there, also my Holdem game is feeling strong. The hotel Unibet booked with the tournament is pretty sick: http://www.sofitel.com/gb/hotel-3229...ge/index.shtml
I'm gonna use my VIP points to try and get a place in the main satelites, if I can't get the buy-in that way I'll just buy-in directly. I only have to make sure the event isn't sold out by then.

I think I've found the source of my crashes. I've been doing some monitoring and testing. Memory seems to be fine so far. I was able to run memory tests for 10 hours without reported errors.
I think the problem is my CPU temperature. I ran some stress tests in Everest and the temperature ran as high as 91 C°. I checked google and apparently the maximum tempereature should be 55-63 C°.
http://products.amd.com/en-us/Deskto...ail.aspx?id=34
Since then I've been monitoring my CPU temperature during various tasks. I just fired up 6 tables on Prima and CPU temperature peaked out at 77 C° I think if I open a video at the same time run that for about an hour that could well lead to a CPU crash.
Last time I checked my CPU fan was pretty dusty and that could hinder it from cooling properly. I've ordered some new cooling paste from my local computer store and when that get's here (should be day after tomorrow) I'll apply it and get rid of all the dust. For the meanwhile I'll play my sessions on my notebook or maybe on my pc whilst monitoring the temperature. I think as long as I stick to the poker software and nothing else in the background I'm good to go. I haven't had any crashes so far with a low to moderate CPU heat.
I also haven't had any crashes since I installed the new BIOS (except maybe once, but I'm not sure since I wasn't in the room and just heard the computer restart) so that could be helping my case too, I'll definetly follow through and deal with the heat problem though, it's definetly not normal.
Norton has also been messing about since I installed my new BIOS. I have a feeling it relies on the BIOS clock for time and that messes with it checking my active license.

Anywho, I'm sure this will be most interesting to all my readers out there XD. I'll be glad when it's all fixed so I can get back to focusing on playing and working on my game as opposed to repairing my computer.
I feel better now though that I dealt with the problem myself. It has definetly improved my understanding of computers.

Dan

Been having a lot of troubles with my PC under Windows 7 lately. Today it crashed for the first time whilst playing poker, so I've switched to playing on my notebook for the meanwhile untill I figure out what the problem is. I think the problem is somehow connected to Firefox, but I don't think that conclusion is necessarily correct as it's not only Firefox that crashes, but also the OS. It's weird though as I've been using 7 for about a month and these problems only started arising the past couple of days. I downloaded this program called Ultimate Boot CD, it has a lot of system tools and I've been running memory tests for the past 3 hours and 3 tabling on the side. Hasn't come up with anything so far, but it did freeze once, which was weird, however I'm not too worried about that.
I think I'm gonna let the program run over night and see if it comes up with any more errors, then I'm gonna move on to hard disk analysis.
This really sucks, I guess stuff like this is the only real downside to maintaing your PCs by yourself when your not a computer expert. I hope I find the problem soon and can get back to grinding on my main setup.
It's also bad timing, becaseI was trying to get my rake race ranking up this weekend and I don't feel comfortable playing more than 5 tables on my notebook.I may hook it up to one of my screens though, or potentially play on my tv.

Finally XD. I feel like it's been ages since I really got to play and work on my game. After I got back from NY I went straight to studying for two exams I had yesterday and now I'm finally done with them. They ended up going fairly well and now I have about two weeks before I have to start studying for more exams. So I'm gonna use those two weeks as much as I can to get my game back up to date and also put in some hands.

Sorry guys, been kinda busy and haven't gotten round to writing this trip report yet. In my defence I've only been back for 5 days and have been running round trying to manage my Uni life.
I'm going to try and write up a different style of trip report here. Instead of following a chronological order I'll write in categories and then add a few pictures as I go.

New Year:
For New Year's I had first planned not to go to Times Square, but after speaking to the locals everybody seemed to think that if we hadn't been there before, we should definetly check it out. The reason I didn't want to go was because from my experience of New Year in London it would be very packed and involve a lot of walking around in the cold for long hours.
Basically we left our hotel around 4pm to head for Times Sqaure and by about 8pm we hadn't reached it and were told that we also couldn't get any closer, but it was in viewing distance. Standing in the cold for 4 hours looking at a billboard that said "Cheer if your cold" didn't sound very appealing so we decided to head out to 7th and Bleeker to look for some clubs (a local had told us the day before that this was a place we could check out for some clubbing). In retrospect we found out that to get to the Times Square comfortably you would've needed a VIP pass which you need to purchase in advance for about 200$.
Anyway as we arrived at 7th and Bleeker we did find some clubs, but most of them were full. By this time it was about 9pm and we really had no clue what to do. We asked around a bit, but didn't receive any satisfying answers. This was when I realized that to get to the kinda places you want to go you need to ask people who look like they go to those kinda places, which seems obvious I know, but was key to finding where we needed to go.
I ended up speaking to a girl on 7th Street who told me to head to the Meat Packing district and look for a new club that opened. This may sound funny, but I don't know the name of the club we went to and the people we met inside also didn't lol, but I guess we were speaking to wrong people. We basically walked by and it looked decent, but didn't take a step back to read the name.
We got in, through a bouncer for 100$/person, he claimed the front door entrance was 250$/person which may or may not have been true either way average pricing to get in was pretty high at New Year's and this way we didn't have to deal with dress codes or lines. (We weren't necessarily dressed for admittance to any club becuase we had originally planned to go to Times Square for 9 hours). The club was pretty nice inside, but small, apparently it had been recently renovated.
The people were international, but relatively friendly, a bunch of nice girls and everybody was pretty drunk due to the New Year's open bar ^^. All in all we ended up having a good time and were fortunate to find a nice location to party at.


Times Sqaure madness

Asian chicks we ran into looking for a place to go to

A picture from inside the club

My friend Sini and I in the club

Scandinavian girl from the club

NBA:
NBA was loads of fun. I'll admit I haven't really been into Basketball much in the past. I just allways preferred football, but nowadays it seems a lot easier to get bball action than football action (simply because you need fewer people to do so), so I have been playing it some more and trying to learn the rules of the game.
We went to watch the Nets vs the Cavaliers on Jan 2nd and Knicks vs Pacers on Jan 3rd.
It was cool to see LeBron and Shaq playing and there were a lot of good plays. Trey Songz also showed up for the half time show that was also a nice bonus as I haven't seen any Rappers or RnB singers perform before.
Madison Square Garden is very nice and the atmosphere was a lot better than in IZOD. It humoured us that the Americans play their national anthem before every game and there was a lot of dancing. We actually ran into some female dancers before the game, I should of taken a snap shot for you guys XD. The Knicks ended up taking the Pacers apart and won by 42 points I believe.


IZOD centre

Shaquille on the free throw with Lebron watching

Me infront of Madison Square Garden

Sini inside Madison

Weather:
It was very very very cold in NY. There was allways an icy wind blowing, sometimes it was unbearable. One taxi driver said it hadn't been that bad in 9 years.


Me trying to reenact how bad the wind was.

Food:
I guess it depends what your compairing to, but we were really disapointed with how fatty the food was on average and how difficult it was at times to get some healthy food. Even a lot of the healthy food places had pretty poor food and what's the deal with serving Hamburgers and calling them sausages XD (two instances).
I guess in retrospect you just kinda have to know where to go. There were definetly some nicer places aswell.
Unfortunately we found a pretty good Italian restaurant down the street of where we stayed, but it was on the very last day of our stay otherwise we wouldn't have had as much reason to complain.

People:
It could be just me, but I found the average New Yorkan not to be that friendly. A lot of people seem very distant as if they couldn't care less when speaking to you. It's almost like your not paying them so why should they be nice. We also found that some people seemed intimidated on the street when we asked them for directions. Coming from London I'm used to people being very friendly and polite, but that wasn't really the point. It was more so that people just didn't seem to care.
Bare in mind that we also met some very friendly and outgoing people and I don't want to generalize here, it's just something I noticed.

Shopping:
The shopping was great. The US is very very cheap if your from Europe especially if you go to Outlet Malls in Jersey City like we did. Jersey City doesn't have any taxes and they have very big discounts. You just have to be careful not to go to overboard, because of customs. Buying a ton of electrical devices is definetly a bad idea.


Sini on a shopping spree

We literally shopped till we dropped.

Hotel:
The Hotel was fine, but we didn't get what it said in the description and we could well have made a big deal out of it, but it wasn't that and we weren't paying that much so it was fine....