As planned I've been doing mostly uni work and xmas stuff the last week or so. I made a couple of videos (50nl hu and 50nl 6max) when I got the chance and I think they turned out decent so look out for those. There seems to be a ton of good mid stakes videos at the moment so I thought I'd do something at small stakes which fit with my 'not grinding' schedule nicely.

I feel like my game is pretty sharp atm and I am pretty excited to put in a load of hands. Whenever I take a week or so off I always seem to come back with this renewed hunger to crush and decisions always seem a little clearer in my head, so that's something to remember if I'm downswinging in future.

NYE I spent with a few friends in Hull which isn't exactly #1 nye city to hit but the old town is pretty nice and we went to some decent bars and then a club. Pretty standard. I find it difficult to get excited about new years eve and I often just stay home and be boring, spending new years day hungover and miserable seems like a lol way to start the year but w/e. I think I mentioned I was going to cut back on the drinking and try and lose some weight in 09. obv got hammered, nailed a pizza and then had a fry up in the morning. I'm told Jan 1st doesn't count though so it's all good.

Hope you all had a good one,

Rob.

I'm officially wrapping this year up, zero play until probably the second week of January. So since I can't sleep for thinking of what next year has in store, I'm going to write down some of my goals for 09. No pretty 08 graph since I have dbs on different computers all over the place, although looking back at last years poker goals:

Play 250,000+ hands of NLHE 6max or full ring
Make 200k+ vpps
Beat my 07 tournament leaderboard score of 7325.85
Cash in an mtt for 5 figures ($)
Make $100,000+ total profit
Start coaching (I have decided to put the mentor thing on hold because I have too much stuff to do with poker, uni and marathon, but there is a chance I will do it in after I finish uni).

I achieved all of these and then some (lol at tlb thing). I'm setting some pretty lofty targets for 09:

Play 1mill+ hands of NLHE 6max of hu
Achieve SNE status on stars
Don't play above 5/10 for the first 3 months of the year
Don't play PLO for the first 3 months of the year
Don't play an mtt for the first 3 months of the year
Make money money make money money.

Other goals:

Grind schedule that includes getting up before midday every day, an afternoon session of around 2hrs and a night session of 4-6hrs. (will be more specific with this when I decide on it)
Do more running and go to the gym at least twice a week.
Lose 2st by June (currently at 13 1/2)
Cut down on drinking (most people who know me irl will lol when they read this but I am DEADLY srs mkay)
Find a place to live in July/August, must fall under the very specific category of 'balla' and be in a kickass location. Prob be a medium-large city; currently Leeds at the top of the order although I'm open to ideas to live basically anywhere in the world. If anyone is doing a similar thing and you are a cool guy like me let me know; I already have one poker buddy penciled in, thinking 3-5 would be ideal.

Soooo I think that is all for now, if I think of anything else I'l edit it in between now and the new year. I have some degree work to do for mid january which I'm making some progress with atm albeit slow. The plan is to not play a single hand of poker until I get it done. If anyone sees me playing on stars (I have search activated) between now and the time I mention in my blog I have finished the work I will xfer $1000 to the first person to ship a hh to the comments.

There is one exception to this. I am now making vids for leggo and if I have to get some done in this time frame then the shippage will be waived to allow for me to complete my duties as a leggo pro.

Since I won't be playing I will prob not update till the new year.

I hope you all enjoy my first video and have a great christmas and new year!

Seasons greetings,
Rob.

As planned, I haven't been playing much recently aside from some PLO and a NL session yesterday. I 6 tabled 5/10 and 10/20 PLO most of last week and was doing pretty good. Confidence was up and the games looked decent at 25/50 so I hopped in and got demolished as usual.

After this I ended up at another drinkathon weekend over in Leeds. Friday night was the last big student night at the union before the end of term so I went to that and it was a decent night. Saturday I slept till about 4pm and rolled out of bed straight in to teh shower and then out again. My friends' gf was cooking this epic Xmas for ~13 people. I have no idea how someone can blow up a jacket potato one day and then come up with such an amazing meal for so many people the next day. W/e it wasn't my potato so I'm not complaining.

After this we hung about the flat for a while and went out about 10ish and got moderately drunk. The evening culminated in 50p/£1 at my friends' flat the low point of which was my 8d6d (favourite novelty hand) bricking vs some donks AJo, and me picking all the wrong times to run stuff multiple times.

This week I've played a couple of sessions 9 tabling 400nl without a HUD and I'm loving it. It really forces me to pay attention to important stuff rather than the dumb numbers that just get in the way and don't really mean too much. I'd advise everyone to at least give it a go, I found it very refreshing and will probably play this way in future. Also the games are gooooooooooood.

Other than that things are pretty steady and most of the month has really been winding poker volume down for Xmas. I obv don't have to take a break but I feel like I want to/have earned it. My brother is home and has saved up 3 weeks holiday from work so I should get to do some fun stuff with him (mainly involves thrashing him at PES09) as well as some other friends who are back to see family.

I went to the gym today and had a decent workout. It's going ok but I need to get a bit more structure in to when I exercise to make sure I'm gettting at least 3 decent ones in each week. That will def be on my 09 goals list.

Ok since this has been a generally pretty boring update I'm going to recap one of my LAPT hands since I've been promising that for ages.

day 1, 100/200/25. 7 handed young azn who has recently moved to the table (turns out to be azntracker high stakes sng player) opens HJ t600. I flat otb with A7s local station tard (lt) calls in bb. (azn had 13k I have ~13 donk has 10). Flop is A24r, lt checks azn bets 1100, I call lt folds. Turn J azn bets 1900 I call. Really not enjoying this call at the moment as it feels like a vbet but at the same time I know he expects me to peel him with some pps on the flop and he has been pretty barrely/good aggro so far (and I'm also beginning to have thoughts of jamming the river if he bets smallish). River 10, he bets 2250 I slide my remaining 7750 over the line after about 10 seconds, he looks absolutely disgusted and folds. I am met with a series of wat expression after flipping up the A7 and proceed to roll over the table for the next hr until it turns pretty nasty as a slow procession of 2p2ers/decent live pros arrives and we end up with the most ridiculous table. At one stage it looked like this (bear in mind this is mid day1 and there are a ton of local and recreactional players left in)

1: Really good online mtter, staked by evanski
2: JMPRODIGY, came 2nd, hu snger, very good.
3: 20 something nosebleed pooflinger.
4: Humberto
5: Me
6: Thuy Doan
7: Some old nit woman with a stud bracelt can't remember name but categorized as 'good nit'
8: unkown hsnler
9: Booshiet

We also had Stevie444 but he didn't last long after getting pawnted by seat1. Since the tourny was generally pretty soft this table was a hudge beat. I'm also used to been surrounded by morons whenever I play live so it was quite surreal playing at a genuinely tough table. I got moved to a table of idiots about 2hrs before the end of the day thank god (I should mention where I managed to get 88 in vs QQ for a bunch of chips and suck out). And I also spoke with azntracker in the bar a few nights later and he told me he folded AT. Maybe some more nuggets from my trip next time:

Later,
Rob

I went across to Dusk Till Dawn last Friday and degned the hell out of the place all weekend. Got there on the Friday played a £300 with a decent structure and bustod uneventfully after about 5 levels (1hr levels 10k chips). Afterwards I hopped in to £5/£10 uncapped and bought in for £2k and ended up about 400 down. I had basically the nut low seat with John Kalmar (finished 5th in WSOP a couple years ago played suprisingly well) and Rob, the 20 something guy who owns the place and plays pretty decent on Kalmars left. There were a couple spots at the table but unfortunately I couldn't make any hands vs them and it was really the sort of game you needed to make a few hands in. I was about jam 42o all over Kalmars face after he really quickly popped my 190 iso of a straddle and call to 500 (about 2.2 deep) but unfortunately the caller who started the hand with ~400 came along with his ATo and he chopped it up with Kalmar who had the same hand (fwiw Kalmar was bluffing and wasn't doing some sick value stack off). The only other interesting hand was turning 85 in to a bluff on a 510J9 and having the guy fold AJ face up like a hero. I generally played pretty tight and my image was even tighter. I played through till closing at 5.30am frustrated to be down but happy that this game might run again on Saturday and that I could open up a bit with my image/better seat/reads.

On Saturday the two guys who I had gone with, Joe and Will were still in the 300 so I went along with them and played cash while they grinded resteal stacks. Unfortunately the only game running was uncapped £1/£2 but I had nothing else to do so I sat in and made about 400. I sucked out in a big pot with AK vs 772hh4x K vs TT (yes I c/c c/c after 3betting a young competent guy who had raised big over a straddle and shown a tendancy to never fold to 3bs). So he is not very happy about been stacked by the table donkey and stands up and asks me to play hu 5/10 (I had also stacked him with QQ>AK aipf at this point also). I just say um yeah ok, we get a dealer (£30hr between us no rake pretty good imo) and I'm sat there waiting for him to get money and kick this thing off. He sheepishly comes back and and says 'I can't get any more money out today' which was obv a bad thing but also fun that he pwned himself since he was a complete tool.

After this I started drinking and played the £200 at 6pm and ran my 7500 starting stack up to 22k in the first 3hrs playing pretty loose and good. I lost like 18k just after the break trying some ridonkulous double float no fe river shove and I was thinking it had worked after he went in to the tank and started shaking his head and shuffling his cards in an 'im about to fold' manner. Unfortunately he found a call and I busted a few hands later after flopping tptk vs a set.

I got a seat in the 5/10 game but unfortunately the two fish who were playing the night before were not around. I ended up about 250 up after 3 hrs of play and then I was summoned to come celebrate Joes £5k chop in the 300 by getting all 3 of us at 50p/£1 and getting absolutely hammered and monkeying around a load. I allocated around £400 toward monkeying around and had reached that number in about 1/2hr only semi drunk at this stage. woops. There were many highlights, one of which included Joe asking somebody how the weather was in valuetown after he checked through a QQT95 hu and made a small river bet and got called. Joe confidently rolls his T8o with the lame tongue in cheek speech and the guy flips AA. A few hours later I was propping flops with this dbag young police officer; We did £20/£40/£80/£160. So two of your colour on the flop you get 20, 3 you get 40 and so on. On an A109cc board I snapped off his huge overshove (like 110 in to a 40) with red KQ and the board ran off 7c 4c. He flipped Kc5s but I still made a profit. Unfortunate though because I was pretty drunk at this stage and had my 'hows the weather in Scoopsville' line ready.

On Sunday I took down 100 large back in Leeds after taking 3rd in the poker society £10r. Afterwards I went out with some guys from the society and we ended up at some club. Basically it ended up been complete carnage. We got through 60+ sambucas and a bottle of (horrible) champagne between the 5 of us. Somehow I ended up with two of the guys in a casino playing £1/£2 at ~5am and even more to my amazement was that I had to keep an eye on THEM. esp since one was been super loud and degenerate and about 1/2 the table looked like they had double digit convictions. I managed to get us out of there alive (I think it helped our cause that he donated 300 to these guys) and I rounded off the most horrific weekend of poker, drinking and degeneracy with 2 Egg McMuffins; confident that I had already shaved 5 years off my life for the weekend and that another couple wouldn't hurt.

Back to reality now and I've been trying to start on a small stakes hu series. It's quite frustrating though since the action is so sporadic at 50 and 100nl and it's hard to get a decent game on a few tables going since regs just quit after 5 minutes of you 3xing the button. I have something recorded that I'l look at tommorrow and do an audio for if I think it's worthwhile. I'm also working hard on PLO at the moment and finally got PTO and am hitting the pokerev hard after each session. It's going decent and I'm enjoying it so that's good. Thanks for reading and gl at the tables...

What a crazy month. I didn't play for the first 10 days due to lapt and came back fresh and ready to grind. Things started off really good at 3/6 thru 10/20 and aside from ~2500 hands it was all looking pretty good. Unfortunately those hands occurred at 25/50 where I dropped 30k this month. I still ended up for the month due to plo and mtts so it's not all bad, just a little frustrating. Here is the NL graph:




+20k at mtts and +10k at PLO. Idk I think this could have been a pretty ill month if I'd shipped Costa Rica (or got like top 5) and ran a little better at 25/50. Also had a deep run in the mill (35/bazillion) and a few other sunday tournys but just haven't got anything to stick when it has mattered. Oh well.

I am anticipating a fairly relaxed and poker free December so there won't be any more lolgraphs for a while I'm afraid. I've really been thinking a lot about what I want to do pokerwise next year. My original plans were to do plenty of travelling next year but I feel with the state of online poker and the worse case scenario future, I need to put in a huge amount of hands next yr and ship it relentlessly. I have been considering going for SNE on stars next year but I'm a little sceptical as to my ability to grind that many hands and put in quality poker over and over. I definitely like the idea of multi tabling lower for while though. I can deal with losing what I would consider 'a lot' in a day but it just takes over your life playing for so much money all the time. It's all relative of course, if I had a $1M roll i'm sure my estimation of 'a lot' would be quit a bit different.

I will likely attempt an SNE pace month in January (assuming other plans don't pop up) and see if I think I can realistically sustain it for 12 months. I'm comfortable with 9 tabling but a little meh when it gets much more than that. I can't ever see myself playing more than 12 shorthanded nlhe tables on a regular basis since it is such a grind and really really not fun at all. I'm getting to grips with 12 a bit more now and will probably try to do that whenever I play this month to practice for my SNE grind.

I purchased 4 albums yesterday:

Kanye West: 808 and Heartbreak
Kings Of Leon: Only_By_The_Night
Stereophonics: Decade in the Sun
Guns 'n' Roses: Chinese Democracy

I mention this since I had probably never gone in to HMV and bought a chart CD before and yesterday I bought 4! I am not a huge fan of Kanye West since I feel like a lot of his music is pretty generic poppy stuff (the bad kind). I have always thought he's a pretty talented artist though and underachieves since he can basically just produce whatever the fck he wants and people buy it. After reading a review from a pretty reputable source though I decided to give it a go and it's decent but not great (3 stars worth a look). Kings Of Leon are one of my favourtie bands atm so buying their CD was a no brainer although I haven't listened to it yet. I used to like some Stereophonics stuff but they haven't done anything decent for about 5 years, not sure why I bought this I just saw it with the other chart CD's and grabbed it on impulse (the wonders of marketing). Guns 'n' Roses was a mandatory purchase although I don't hold out too much hope for this one. I also grabbed The Wire Season 1 since everyone is raving about it (some clowner told me it was > Sopranos the other day) and will be working my way through that over the festive season. Oh yeah since we're on the subject of music and I have just listened to this for the first time in ages, here is Hotel California by Alabama 3 from 'La Peste':
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dl3ZT2zxug
This is one of my favourite covers, I think it's a love it or hate it, I love it.

In other news I shipped the video contest which I am obviously pretty happy about. I'm sure the competition was pretty strong given the general poker knowledge I see flung about the forums on a daily basis so to be first is a very pleasing achievement. I'm looking forward to the other vids and I hope you all enjoy mine.

My next blog will def include some hands I played in Costa Rica. Rather than do a full blown trip report I will just randomly include hands at the end of blogs (it wasn't a particularly interesting trip aside from the poker) so look out for those, there should be some entertaining ones.

Thanks for reading,
Rob.

I went to Leeds last weekend to see some friends and we went out and got drunk etc. The night was a little bit meh given we had such an incredible lineup of pissheads/degenerates. We got split up throughout the night for various reasons and I also wasn't on top form and was constantly dozing off in the nightclub we went to. This was during my 'transition' phase of getting back to a normal sleeping pattern so I had been up at 5am in the morning and obv couldn't hack the boozathon that began around 6pm through to about 5am.

On the Sunday I stuck around and went to the uni poker society £10 freezeout. Unfortunately I got horrifically coolered by my old housemate when I 5bet shoved with 43s and ran in to his KK. The flop rolled off A42 but alas he faded it and I headed off to the rail to go load up some donkaments. I grinded throughout the evening and went reasonably deep itm of the warmup before TT
Throughout the week I've taken a few shots at 25/50 and was doing ok until I had a bad day and lost 17k in a few hundred hands. I think I played fine and am happy with the way the games are to continue playing in them when I feel good. I will most likely have a look back over some hands and maybe post a few in the forums although at the time I wasn't beat up about playing anything badly. There were a ton a medium sized pots that I lost at sd where I couldn't really do much but take the lines I did. It will be interesting to see what some guys who play in these games regularly think though. Fwiw I think leggo forum>>>2p2 and that is a testament to all the great players who contribute to the community and the thought and effort that is put in to alot of these posts. A recent response by Bobbo springs to mind http://www.leggopoker.com/forums/hig...html#post31914

Anyway, I'm up about 10k at plo in the last couple of days and a few k 12 tabling 3/6 so that's good. Always a boost to have a few nice winning days after a failed shot. Tomorrow I'm going to grind tournaments all day and cross my fingers for a big score. I managed to get a few thousand on to full tilt so I should be able to get some good volume in with bigger buyin tournies and maybe skip some of the smaller ones on stars that I usually use to plug the holes/keep me interested. The one thing I need to NOT do is go 0/bazzilionty and tilt off a ton of money playing cash. This has been a long standing Sunday tradition of mine and well; now I have a bit more money to lose, I should probably try and put an end to it.

Two more things I need to mention. Tonight Ricky Hatton fights Paulie Malignaggi and it should be an interesting fight. I feel like Hatton should win this fight but I don't know whether he is as good as he was and Malignaggi is really in a make or break situation after sucking in his last fight and getting beaten by Cotto. Hatton also has a new trainer in Floyd Mayweather snr and I always have reservations about fighters who get new trainers at late notice so i'm pretty nervous about his one. I'm going to say Hatton struggles in the opening rounds and presses on later in the fight to win by 3-4 rounds. Whatever the outcome I think this will be a good fight and am really looking forward to it even though the undercard is the lamest thing I have ever seen.

Finally I'm thinking about playing this http://www.dusktilldawnpoker.com/festivalinfo.php?id=11. The structure looks ridiculously good and assuming a huge shipment of Scandanavians aren't arriving on 3rd Dec it will be super soft. If anyone is going let me know and we'l grab a few beers and laugh at how bad British players are.

Thanks for reading,
Rob

P.S. Congrats to Tom for winning a gukpt prelim for £20k, coach me on reverse marketing plays vs -L2 thinkers?

Things are going good at the moment. Poker is amazing and i'm finally getting some life stuff done. To celebrate my body clock being back to some semblance of 'normal' I went to the gym yesterday and had a good workout. I also got a personal trainer since it seems to be the thing to do and he has a 3 week program worked out for me to get me back in the groove before we can move on to some more intensive stuff. I killed most of his projected workouts which I think surprised him given the shape I'm in, but what can I say, I'm hardcore.

Later in the day I went out for a steak with some old school friends and we drunk the night away so that was fun as well. Really great night out; there's something special about catching up with old friends. Poker wise I've played about 9k hands since I got back from Costa Rica and am wrecking. Hopefully I can get in another 20k hands before the end of the month and continue to ship the dizzle.

Thanks for reading,
Rob.

Today I played some 10/20, I was down almost 20k at one stage, no biggie, i'l just 4 table mezplz hu and win it all back.




To be fair, mez was only accountable for ~10k of the comeback and I obv ran super hot vs him, although I did trample on his face whenever he tried to fck with me deep. After that I found a couple of donators playing 6max and was lucky enough to be the donatee. I also got the kk>aa aipf deal which was nice as well.

Aside from this I've played some 2/4, 3/6 and 5/10 the last few days depending on what the games have been like. I also played some hu sngs and am down a few k playing 500s-2ks. I think I'm +ev vs quite a few of the regs and a marginal loser vs some of the better nits. I'd also like to point out how ridiculous it is that Adonis112 is up over 300k. I think this fact helps underline how dumb the variance in hu sngs is, esp turbos. I know I said I would not be calling people out in my blog but this guy is such a **** to everyone in chat I don't really care. I think stevesbets completely wrecked him the other day, and I was rooting for steve, that's how big of a dbag adonis is. Anyway, lolsngs and all that crap, I think i'l steer clear of them for a while they're so damn tilting.

For the rest of the month I will probably alternate between 4 tabling 10/20 and mostly 9 tabling lower. This will hopefully provide me with a mix of playing some really good players at 10/20 and working on my game, whilst getting a steady cash flow from multi tabling lower stakes (sounds good in my head anyway). It's not like 9 tabling makes me a robot or anything, but it is a lot easier to be thinking about theory and different lines/sizing playing less tables, even if those lines aren't always the ones you go for, there just tends to be more thinking and ideas swirling around in my head. I'l probably throw a few interesting lapt hands out there in my next blog, too tired to do in depth hand stuff at the moment though. Also Macio I do plan on getting back to you in the next few days, you are not forgotten!

Later,
Rob.

Blah 9th for 17k. Congrats to fees for winning all the money. Trip report to follow.

today was awesome. I had a good breakfast and a swim before the tourny and finished the day 1/38 with 180k. One time plz.