It left a rather tilt inducing taste. I don't like posting results as much anymore for various reasons but I can't let this swong go unlold. Last Friday I was excited about booking my first ever 6 figure month and then had a pretty brutal weekend. Fortunately I managed to fight back later this week and be up for the month so it's not all bad.
Anyway, besides a few lapses (2 or 3 decent size mistakes with deep stacks) I'm happy with my play this month and it no longer feels like I'm getting owned every time I sit at 10-20+. I've been playing 1-4 tables and it's really helped me improve my reads and develop some deeper analysis of hands that was lacking a few months ago.
Heading out to Ibiza in 4 hours so I will be out of contact for a week. Really need a break from poker and am very happy to be spending some time away with a small group of my best friends. I'm hoping we do a little more than lounge by the pool all day and get drunk every night but hey if worse comes to worse I'l just have to settle for that. Unfortunately I'l miss the leggo party and also the main event so that sucks. I get back to the UK on the morning of Sunday 5th and the last day one is midday on Monday 6th so I think it'l just be too much of a rush and too much hassle to try and get a flight out there and hop straight in to my seat at the Rio. Next year I'l try and plan things properly and get a house for a month or so.
Good luck to everyone playing the main event and lets hope leggo has some more wsop success!
Om nom nom. June is most likely my favourite month of the year. I could be biased toward it since it's obviously the freshest month in memory but looking at the positives and negatives I can't think of a better month:
Positives:
- Everything typically winds down by June and I'm free of nagging responsiblities (i.e school/uni).
- Weather picks up and the cricket season gets in to full flow.
- Major international football competition every other year.
- Usually a holiday of some sort.
- Birthday at the end of the month.
Negatives:
-Hayfever (I get it soooo bad and no amount of pills/sprays/anything else helps).
Can't really think of anything else but yeah it seems June is typically a pretty good month.
I've put off my trip to Vegas primarily since it's a lot more hassle organising it than I expected and a few friends have bailed out. It will also be a rush to get back and go to Ibiza on the 27th and I have visions of what is normally a very relaxed/enjoyable month becoming quite exhausting/tilting. It's also a long way to go just to play a few tournaments. I know it's more than that (going out meeting people etc etc) but I've been crushing online lately and I just want to keep grinding and put in a huge month.
Maybe I'l have a spur of the moment decision to go out and play the ME in July. I get back on the 4th so I could prob make the last day1 but we'l have to see how things turn out.
Yesterday I played cricket for my local team. I played with them all the way through U13's up to senior cricket and after having a couple of years not playing am just starting to get back in to it. At the moment I'm just playing for the SundayXI which is made up of a mix of 1stXI and promising juniors. It's a bit more relaxed than Saturday cricket and I want to get a few Sunday runs under my belt before making myself available for the 1st/2ndXI on Saturday.
Anyway, we absolutely smashed 2nd in the league yesterday and I'm pretty sure Joel broke a club and probably league record with 258 off 125 balls. I played with him all the way through juniors and he's always been promising but wow he's really developed in to a very good player. Unfortunately most of our best players end up at Doncaster Town (which is kinda a feeder club for Yorkshire) so I wouldn't be surprised if that happens, but hopefully we can hang on to him for a season or two longer.
Link to our ridonkulous scorecard vs Stocksbridge > http://rmcc.play-cricket.com/scorebo...sp?id=10667037
Today I went to see The Hangover. I give it a 4/10 which is an admirable rating for a film of it's type. It was exactly what I expected but slightly more fun than I anticipated. Mike Tyson bursting out in Phil Collins' "In the air tonight" was the emphatic lowlight.
When I got home I watched O Brother where art thou which is a film I've been meaning to watch for ages. Definitely one of the best I've seen and a seldom heard of 9/10 for this one. The soundtrack is phenomenal and the acting and writing is great so can't really ask for much more here.
On the video front I have a live 400nl vid out today which I think has some interesting spots and a couple of meh mistakes. I should also have a live 200nl up soon which I think is the best I've made so far so be sure to look out for that.
I bought HM today. I tried using it in the past but never got it to work very well because of vista. Well I was able to get the info I needed and it seems to be working ok. It seems like a nifty piece of software and much more detailed than PT3. So I took it for a spin at 5/10 and 10/20 today and relentlessly lost to flush draws for a little over an hour. Pretty pleased with the $36 profit though, ship that:
In other news Everton lost 2-1 in the FA cup final yesterday. This made me sad so I'm not going to dwell on it only say that we were easily second best and Tony Hibbert is still my hero.
I went for another run today as well. I think I might have got mild sun stroke last time since I had a headache for the rest of the day and felt pretty weak. Anyway I only went out for 15mins today but managed to get about 2.5 miles in and it was just the right amount in this heat.
Finally, I picked up a book today while I was relaxing in the sun. It's def worth a read if you struggle with the mental side of the game and variance etc etc. It's obviously geared towards the recreational player and a lot of it will be quite basic stuff everyone is familiar with already. Having said that it reiterates some very important concepts and illustrates them with cool zen/buddhism quotes so def worth a read imo. It's also not full of terribad strat which is of course refreshing in any poker literature:
It's legitimately hot in the north of England today. The sun is out in full force and it's not that fake 'cool' sun that we get 10 months of the year.
The day has gone well so far. I've implemented a "to do" list in to my life and I think it's working well. Not surprisingly I seem to be getting more things done and it's making me feel like less of a bum for sure. I've only been operating this system a few days so we'l see how long I can keep it up. On todays "to do" list I have:
-Write a blog
-Run
-Bicep/Tricep/Situp workout
-2000+ hands of stars msnl (gotta get to 7500 vpps this month and i've hardly played at all on stars lately)
-Do at least 1/2 of part 3 of a video review I'm doing for a student
-Buy a travel laptop/hobiejuan books/contact lenses
-Check rooms/rates and flights for vegas.
I just went out for a 25min run in the blazing midday sun(lol yea it's like mid 20's here i'l prob evaporate in vegas). Before that I bought a Macbook Air off the Apple website. I wasn't sure what to go for and I'd heard the Air was a bit of a novelty/overpriced but looking in to it the newest model seems ideal for what I want it for so I'm confident I made the right decision.
I've also got some other things done off the list but I still need to put my hands in and do the video thingy and look at vegas. I keep hearing about these direct return deals people have gotten from Gatwick for under £500. I must just be a fail at google or something b/c the cheapest I can find are double that. I might just end up getting a 1 stop flight, but frankly I'd rather spend as little time going through U.S immigration/customs as possible on my trip (got pulled up last time and had a long wait that nearly resulted in missing my flight home).
I also made a live 400nl video yesterday which should be out soon if it gets the all clear from Vitas. The sound quality is a bit off since I used a standard mic as opposed to a usb one (I broke mine last week and the one I ordered hasn't shipped yet). Anyway there were some interesting spots early in the vid although it tailed off near the end I think it gives a pretty good picture of how the games play. As I said in my last blog I intend on doing as many vids as poss before I leave for vegas so my daily list should come in pretty handy with getting that done.
Tomorrow is officially a day off from the list as I'm having a bit of an all dayer with some old school friends. We're starting about 11 with breakfast at Weatherspoons and going to Leeds to watch Yorkshire vs Lancashire 20/20 (that's cricket fyi). Hopefully the weather is just as good as it is today and the White Rose prevails in emphatic fashion. Either way I'l prob be snapnecked by the early evening.
Yessssssssss. I turned in my final essay today. It was terribad and mostly consisted of me using exemplary comprehension skills to fill out the word count. I did throw in a few nuggets of decent analysis though so hopefully that will be enough to scrape a pass. Anyway I don't have to think about that now and I can do some sweet "living in the moment" in the next few months.
I've decided not to play the dtd 1k and the 6max in Dublin and go to Vegas slightly earlier than anticipated. Dtd coincides with both the Champions League final and the Fa Cup final (everton, everton, everton etc etc) and Dublin is just a straight mission/too much hassle for a 1k tourny. I'm gonna look online and book my vegas flights asap prob for the weekend before the 2500 6max on the 8th, which I plan on playing.
I'm umming and ahhing over whether to take a laptop or not. If I decide to, I'l have to buy a new one since my xps is way too big to take. I'm thinking of going for a mac, maybe a macbook air since they're very light. If anyone has suggestions for a good travel laptop leave them in comments, that'd be grand, ty.
On the video front I plan on making as many as poss in the next few weeks so I have a backlog for while I'm away. I realise I've not been great with getting vids done but that's because they just take me so damn long and I've been busy with uni. I'm going to do some midstakes stuff and maybe a huge multitabling 1/2 or .5/1 if I can get a workable frame rate and I can keep up with the action (I think a pause and record 9-12 tabling vid would be a bit meh).
That's all i got, hope you're all running better than this:
OK so I did my tale of the tape in my last blog and said I like Hatton ftw @ 9/5, I've been thinking a bit more and the best conventional line I can see is Pac 11/8 by KO TKO or DQ (numerous UK bookmakers have him at this). Hatton cuts up and Pac wins a brutal fight with a late stoppage. I'm going round to a friends now to watch the undercard and sink some beers, super excited, I even went out to my garage and did some weights in preparation.
I'm not going to go on about this programme to death since I think it's become fairly standard to reference the wire in some way in the modern poker blog (as oppose to the traditional poker blog) and it's obviously important to keep things fresh. That said here is one of my favourite scenes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQbsn...eature=related. Not the most interesting/meaningful scene I'm sure but you've gotta respect writing like that imo.
Tomorrow evening is ppv time with Manny Pacquiao vs Ricky Hatton from vegas and what looks like a decent domestic undercard. Williams vs McDermott has the potential to be pretty explosive (fwiw McDermott is an excellent price at 7/4) and I'm looking forward to seeing Tony Jeffries in action although I have no idea who the guy is who he's fighting and it's only Jeffries 2nd pro bout so he's prob a bum.
Re the Hatton-Pac fight, I don't really have much of a clue. It's so close to call, although if I was betting I would def back Hatton @9/5. Apparently bookmakers in vegas have Pac @ 1/3 which is absolutely redic given Hatton has owned 10st for the last 7 years and he looked much better vs Malignaggi in his first fight under Floyd snr. I think part of it is that Pac is so popular (probably more so than Hatton worldwide) and a lot of the 'hope' money is going on him this time whereas it usually goes on Hatton hence he's typically a really bad price. I guess he's probably still a little underrated in the US as well although I can't say for sure, I mean he got well beat by Floyd, but Floyd is Floyd.
Also I don't buy **** in to the fact that Manny won't get walked down b/c he took a much bigger De La Hoya apart. DLH was so undercooked in that fight it was unreal, it was hardly even a contest. If I were Hatton I'd be a little more concerned about Pac tkoing Barrera/Marquez/Morales when all those guys were still at their prime or pretty close to it. Anyways should be a reaaaaly good fight unless someone gets stopped early, the styles just clash such that it can't go 12 and not be a good fight. I'm not betting on it though, just gonna sit back and enjoy. Dropped £1k randomly betting on Barca to beat Chelsea in midweek and they did everything but score. This one doesn't need a bet to make it more interesting anyway.
Anyway, back to the grind that is Jean Baudrillards' "L'esprit du terrorisme". I have to write stuff about reality. wtf is that?
P.S. There is a £1k at Dusk Till Dawn at the end of May (Nottingham) and the inaugural European Short Handed Championships at the start of June (Dublin) both of which I'l probably be attending. If anyone else is down shoot me a pm.
P.P.S. I hate to use pps since ps should obv be included in the main body and pps promoted to p.s, but I think this qualifies enough for a pps:
So I haven't updated in a while since I haven't been playing a whole lot and nothing very interesting has been going on. I'm still trying to grind out a degree somehow and hopefully that all works out because I've done so much of it it would be ridiculous to fail at this stage. I won't bore everyone with the details but I'm resiting some stuff I didn't bother to do last year because I'm a failure.
Sooo, exciting stuff is that once I have this out of the way I will be free to have a really great summer. A lot of my old friends will be finishing their uni stuff off in a month or so time and will be looking to have a few months fun before they nosedive in to jobs so it will be great to catch up with them. We've already booked a week in Ibiza at the end of June which coincides with my birthday (in fact it's two of our birthdays, back to back days while we're out there) so if I survive that I am planning on heading out to vegas for a couple of weeks at the start of July. I'm still not 100% on this, it really depends on what is going on and who I can get to tag along but I feel like I should at least get out there for a week or so just to experience the city and see what all the fuss is about.
After July I imagine everything will be settling down a little and I'm hoping to get a new place with a few friends in Leeds (yep Yorkshire>rest of world). Nothing is really planned yet but I'm really looking forward to a change of scenery. I wish I had some interesting poker content or something but I don't, this is the best I can do:
River: ($654) Q (2 Players)
SB bets $620.40 and is All-In, Hero calls $620.40
Results: $1,894.80 Pot ($3 Rake) SB showed 6 8 (a pair of Queens) and LOST (-$940.40 NET) Hero showed K K (a full house, Kings full of Queens) and WON $1,891.80 (+$951.40 NET)
Until next time...
edit: to the person who was wondering what spinning was, a circle of ~15 pedal away on exercise bikes while the instructor guy plays dance music and barks orders to adjust the resistance on your bike.
Lots of things have been going on since I last updated, I think this is my longest break from blogging since I started a little under two years ago. So here is what has been going on in poker and in life:
February:
Started off well. I was feeling the strain from playing so many hands every day and trying to keep up sne pace but I was doing ok. First week of feb I took my first weekend off to go play some live in Nottingham. Didn't go well, I got back on the Monday tired, hungover and poorer. I also felt like I needed to get loads of hands in having just taken a few days off, so I played and ran pretty bad for a few days and lost quite a bit.
Eventually I realised how bad this bazzilionty tabling no life tilt fest was getting for me and decided to 4 table for the rest of the month. I was trying to change some things that had crept in to my game due to laziness and think I did that pretty well for those few weeks of 4 tabling. I wasn't having great results but was pretty happy with how I was playing and felt I had a much better review/playing time ratio than before.
Here are two graphs taken from the same time period of my attempt to be a grinding superhero vs my attempt to play good poker:
9-15 tabling 2/4
1-6 tabling 5/10
There are obv a handful of players who make loads playing huge volume low variance crushbot. F knows if I know how they do it though, I'm def not cut out for it.
Soooo, my plan for poker is just to play whatever I feel up to 10-20 and no more than 6 tables. I have been dabbling practising my multi tabling at 1/2 but it's a pretty big cut to my hourly and probably not worth it.
Other things good about playing higher and less tables is that I get to do things other than playing poker:
Today I was up at 9am, played a two hr sesh between 10 and 12. I watched some tv and had lunch, have just been for a run and now I've got some time to put in a blog and chill out before I go to my first spinning class at 7. I mean it's pretty lame but I figure once I sit down on that bike I'm not going anywhere for an hr so it's a lock that I'm going to get some decent cardio in. I'm thinking of going to buy a bike at Halfords at the weekend so this should be good practice and hopefully mean I'm not super stiff after my first ride. Cycling is definitely something I want to get in to and do a lot of over the summer months. I'm a novice (talking about proper cycling I know how to ride a bike ldo) so if anyone has any experience or some good ideas for what sort of bike I should be getting comments would be much appreciated. I want to do a few hours 2 or 3 times a week out on the road. I have no idea how far that would be since idk how fast I go on one of those things but I guess it would be ~10miles?
Anyway my point was that this is what a proper day should look like, rather than roll out of bed in to office chair and 12 table until bedtime. It is really making the world of difference to my general mood day in day out so I'm going to continue to try and look for other things to do that don't involve poker that will hopefully keep me on a healthy sleep pattern.
Aside from this I've also been doing some coaching and making a few videos. The coaching is good and I'm learning new things about 'how' to coach all the time. At the moment I'm in the process of doing a few video reviews. They're very time consuming and a cut to my hourly but I enjoy them and I think it helps my game to go over other players' games in such detail. With the videos I just finished up a 2 part 200nl video where I did pause and record analysis. I think it turned out ok and I spent a **** ton of time on part 2 so hopefully there is some good in depth stuff in there to get people thinking better about the pokers.
In other fairly rigged news, my hair is going grey.
So, I went to Elland Road on Wednseday with my Dad to watch Leeds vs Southend. I'm not a Leeds fan (Everton ftw) but my Dad is a lifelong fan and used to go to every game before he got lumbered with a familly. For those not familiar with the English football league there are 4 professional leagues each consisting of ~20 teams. The teams are promoted/relegated based on their performance in the league and once they get in to the top division, the Premier League, they can qualify for european competitions and the like. Leeds United are currently in the 3rd tier of English football, League 1 as it is known (top is premier, 2nd is championship, league 1, league 2 etc). They were in the top league for many years and have had great success, but due to some financial mis-management and some poor transfer decisions they have gone from one of the top 6 teams in the country to mediocre League 1 obscurity. They also lost a playoff to get in to the Championship last season to my hometown team Doncaster Rovers so needless to say the fans are pretty pissed and they are getting 1/2 the attendance they used to when they were in the top league (averaging just over 20,000 this year I think).
Anyway Leeds won the game 2-0 despite not playing too great and now sit just outside a playoff place. They have just got a new manager who I think has the capabilites to get them back in the championship so even though I'm not a fan it would be nice to see them go back up and start doing well again (particularly when there are such minion clubs like Nottingham Forest in that league )
Fantasy Football is getting exciting again at this time of the year as well. I'm in a $200 2p2 league and currently sitting in 3rd/28. There is quite a bit of dead money but the top end of the league is very competitive and high scoring. It's all very close and I just hope I don't finish 4th and bubble. Also the person organising let some guy who finsihed 3rd overall last year and top 10 the year before (out of over 1m players) play and he is about 100 points adrift at the top. Catchable but ffs seems pretty rogged to me. Here is my team, if you are familiar with fantasy premier league and have any suggestions let me know:
So on to a brief poker update. I f'd myself in the A after cashing out a sizable chunk of my stars roll when the x rate looked good at ~1.45/1 about mid jan. Doomswitched straight after that and had to deposit or play 1/2 for a week or two. Ended up making a smallish deposit with the £ at a 23 year low vs the $, fml. I try and keep an eye on these things and read up as best I can so it is v frustrating to get pwned like this. Oh well, I had a good week after that and am up about 10k since so that alleviated some of the life tilt issues of the whole incident. I also played betfair a few days while I waited in vain for the £ to pick up. PLO games seem pretty incredible on there and 5/10 is significantly softer than stars 5/10. The regs are fairly decent for the most part but there is just so much more dead money. Unfortunately there isn't enough traffic/the software is too tilting for me to make it my regular site but I'l def be checking out the action on there from time to time.
And finally I have a 5/10 vid out today, if you have any thoughts plz to be pming me/leaving comments in the forum.
Gl all,
Rob.
Edit, almost forgot, fallen a little behind pace due to stars hiatus:
, 7
, Q
, 2
(5 players)
K
dealt to Hero (BB)
4
2
)