GUKPT London, Online Sundays!

Hey!

Well my GUKPT London attempts were a bit fail. I'm not going to go into it, but I doubt I've ever ran as bad before playing poker. Of course its kind of inevitable to come some time as I figure I've played well over 1million hands by now so you've got to have some moments where you lose every flip, every 80/20 etc. To not go into a bad-beat post, over the weekend I lost 4/4 times with my flopped sets, 2/2 times with AAs, 2/2 times with KK's and 1/1 time with Queens. I literally didn't win a showdown sigh.

Thankfully I was playing £2/£5 with over 50 buy-ins and somehow didn't lose more than I did given the run of cards I seemed to get fucked over with. One day I will hit big live. It's due!

Other than that, the weekend was actually a whole lot of fun. It was really fun chilling with Andi in London and Edgeware Road never dissapoints. Doubt I'll ever get sick of Lebonise food, just a shame they don't seem to have any restaurants near my house or at uni! The shisha was also great. London is an amazing town, and I do aim to live there sometime in the next 10 years. What I would do however, is not have a car. I made the epic mistake on the Saturday of driving into town from Sutton (Andi's house who I was crashing at). It took 3 hours in the afternoon to drive the 15 miles. FML haha. It was probably a sign from the poker gods that the day wasn't going to go well as I lost close to £1.5k once I did finally arrive. Woops :p.

I think the important thing though is to be decision orientated not results orientated. After hands, particularly live as they come around so much less, I always try to think of many other possible lines I could have taken in the hand. Such as check/raising rather than leading, different bet sizes and how I feel my opponents would have reacted given their range not just their specific holdings.

I think live cash will also be really beneficial as when I'm out of hands, rather than zoning out, I try to improve my hand reading game. You can learn a lot about how people play if you put them on hand ranges and if the pot does get to showdown (which is seems to more so than online) you can get a great deal of satisfaction by pin-pointing down the participants almost exact holdings.

My future plans remain to focus on my MTT game, and this will inevitably lead me to the live arena where tournaments are often much deeper and hand analysis plays a much greater role than online where stacks are often shallower and having a close to flawless preflop game is of much greater importance. If I do see myself playing higher stakes in the future, such as $100r and $1k freezeouts, I will need to define an edge and due to so many of the top MTT'ers having very accurate preflop MTT games, I think that practicing live on hand reading and developing a more solid post-flop game can only lead to benefits. You often find many top cash game players doing well on the tournament circuit due to the deeper level of play where they can fully exploit their opponents 100bb+ deep whilst having a relatively optimal preflop game with 30bbs and less. I would like to be in the situation where I would not be ran over 200BB deep or something against an aggressive opponent who has position on me if such an event did occur.

OK, enough of the ramblings!

Sunday was pretty cool. Got back from London about 6ish and suprising not disheartened from being fucked over all weekend, decided to load up some tournaments. Nothing special, but I did get a few deep runs and knocked out another pro on full tilt. GG chad, thanks for the t-shirt :). The best was in the $30 rebuy which I final table bubbled AK to AQ. Kind of summed up the weekend, but whatever, this shizz happens!

The iPoker ECOOP (European Cup of Online Poker) has started this week. I'm 1 tabling the $215/$250k gtd. I don't plan on playing many of the events, partially due to my recent downswing putting some monetary pressures but also I'm getting a load of deadlines coming up soon. That and 3 weeks til the end of term, so I plan on partying it hard with my friends before I become too isolated back home in Dorset away from the hustle and bustle of uni life.

Hope all is good for everyone, keep up the grind and keep smiling :)