Spiralling down, down, down.

Hey,

I seem to have had my run-good bug smashed and i'm seeing the other side of that mofo we call variance. I've lost 11% of my bankroll in the past 3 days from constant beats. This doesn't seem alot % wise but its the biggest monetary loss i've ever had. Which is of course bound to happen as you move up in stakes and play higher buy-in tournaments. I can't seem to have hands hold which are well ahead in the games im taking shots in (like the £55 at DTD). Sigh...

So I'm going to take this week off poker as although i don't feel like I'm tilting I still don't think that I am playing my A-game. It's more like my C-game at the moment. I'm not even trying to put opponents on hand-ranges and getting annoyed when c-bets fail etc. I have the biggest tournament of my life coming up next week so I really don't want this burnt out feeling to last.

As a result, I will take up until wednesday night off where I shall start watching some poker videos and doing some further reading to get myself pumped for Saturday!

National Lottery

I bought my first national lottery ticket yesterday while i was at the post office. So i picked my lucky numbers, paid for it (£1.5 a go fufufufufufuuuuuuu) and now im waiting. At first i was buzzing waiting for Friday when the draw comes and they pick the numbers. But now its Wednesday and i'm so bored lol. I'm too much of an action junkie and want to see results now. I bet by Friday i'll be so uninterested that i forget to check my numbers. Well probably not that uninterested as i hear first prize is £26.8million.

My Granddad took my whole family on holiday and said he worked out that if e bought the lottery every week since 16 he couldn't have afforded it. I think this is very true but then again what if he had won ;). I guess the chances are something like 1/14million to take it down. And lets be honest its not the funnest form of gambling. Don't think I'll be doing it again unless its under special circumstances.

Hit 'n' Run

Hey,

I was faced with a tough decision that I wasn't too happy about the other night at Dusk Til Dawn. I was sat at the £1/£2 cash game table for a couple of hours for what was at the time a pretty break even/marginal loosing session. I then got a call where I had to go back home for a bit of an emergency and so decided to wait until my next hand was dealt to go. Ofcourse, i got dealt KK and managed to win a nice pot against a player who had 86 on a "q 8 6" board. The turn was a 2 and the river a Q managing to make me a higher 2 pair. After the hand, i had to go but the players at the table were really shocked that I hit 'n' run and gave me their opinions about it.

Now, i fully understand and in fact hate hit'n'runners but my excuse of an emergency didn't go down too well. I'm not sure whether i should have waited at least another round before leaving despite the urgency or head off straight away. Regardless, it wasn't a true hit n run, i only profited from that particular player about £70 (which isnt huge at £1/£2 games). And i plan on being a bit of a regular in the games always buying in for full, so i guess the arguement could be that the funds will be available if he wants to try it next time. But what would happen in the same situation if I say won a £500 pot? £1000 pot?

It's probably better in future just to state that I'm going to leave a round before (say when it comes round to the BB). Although competent players could use this against me, as typically at the end of the session you are less likely to run wild bluffs or get involved in big pots without strong hands. Any thoughts from the readers?

On other news, it was my girlfriends birthday yesterday and we went out to vodka revolution followed by this super-club in Nottingham called Oceana. It was packed, but the music was really good and I had a great time. Not enjoying the hangover today but that's the price you pay i guess. I also brought her a pair of really nice Swarovski earings which looked great! It was nice to spend a bit of my winnings as a gift.

Tonight i'm off to a bar to meet with some friends for a couple of drinks so will probably play a little bit of online cash or a couple of sng's before hand. Got to keep the poker on the brain and the grind on the mind ;).

Laters!

Playing the cash!

Hey,

Now that the exams are over i've had some more time to just settle down and play some poker! I have had some nice runs at the 50p/£1 tables online and getting used to how the regulars play. So far i think i'm running at a quite solid 6bb/per 100 hands. But i've only played 4000 this year online so that will all probably change and run back to a lower winrate over time!

I have also been playing £1/£2 live with some nice success the last two nights with winning my biggest ever pot with ace high which is always nice ;). I'm not too sure about the regular cash game players at DTD on the £1/£2 tables but i'm starting to spot the regulars to avoid and the players to sit with. There was a £5/£5 omaha going on tonight which was fun to watch as well as the stacks were really deep and due to straddles it was playing alot more like £20/£20 or £40/£40 omaha. Real nice pots.

I've withdrawn about £170 from my roll to treat myself and friends after my successful run this year with the bankroll just over £4000 now :D

This coming week i plan on playing online on tuesday and wednesday night and hit DTD for the £55 and some cash on thursday night. I'll update you with how it goes!

Good luck at the tables!

The £330 monthly deepstack at DTD..

Hey!

I'm so excited, i'm going to be playing the £330 monthly deepstack at DTD which has a guaranteed prize pool of £60,000. Last month the winner got just shy of £30,000 as the guarantee was smashed. In order to afford this I sold 3 £55 shares to friends as investments. Each share is worth 1/6 of the action. If i come first (however unlikely it is..) they can expect to recieve just shy of £5000 going off last months prize pool.

It's going to be so fun! I hope i take it down!

Live heaters finally over - incoming doomswitch!

Hey,

After my sick run the last couple of months live (where i think i have cashed 8/8 tournies including 3 1sts!) i think it has finally come to an end.

I went down to DTD tonight to play the £55 and spend my £25 vouchers. It was going quite well, i slowly ground my stack up from the 4k starting chips to about 5200ish, half the field was gone, and then it happened lol.

For what its worth I don't think I had ever seen as much spew as I saw on my table tonight. I mean, there were family pots (everyone limps) up to 150/300 which you would NEVER see online! Not even on crypto ;). So one quite young spew tard raises in the CO for half his stack (about 4bbs with 4 behind). I look down to see AJs in the SB and obv ship it in. He calls and turns K2offsuit. Ok thats not too bad, i mean i wasn't that far ahead but still, a very nice portion of my stack just got taken away.

2 hands later, im sat with about 12-13bbs and KK comes. Yes double up time!! So i raise to 700 at 150/300 and get a call and a reraise all in from the button. I call and so does the original caller. 55 and 66. The flop came 6xx and off i go home! Oh well, can't say i havent enjoying having my hands hold live the last couple of months.

I'm currently 6th in the £55 leaderboard so will be heading back on Saturday after my final exam to see if i can improve on that at all and probably play some live cash after! Can't wait!

Until then back to the books, then i'm looking forward to some serious poker and some serious slackage!!

Internet tilting!!!

Hey guys,

After getting really bored of studying i decided to load up a few tournaments on party poker and on cryptologic. Unfortunately i missed some of the better tournaments due to my late sign up (like the £6k gtd and the party poker $18kgtd) but still managed to get a few nice tournies in the mix.

As i was nearing the end of my session, the internet just became 100% unreliable, disconnecting every 2 minutes. I was on the final table of the £22/£1000 gtd and the £33/£1500 gtd so as you can imagine i was fuming watching myself be dealt AA with 10bb's only to be disconnected and timed out!! I'm still not sure what the problem was whether it was ISP related/dtd software related or just one of my housemates leaching all the bandwidth. But after 2 kicks to the router later it seemed to have stabalised!

Well coming back in the £1500gtd from my 12,000 stack to 5000 i was pretty frustrated with 7 people left. However, i guess the cards just came my way and i turned it around to make a nice profit for the day. Perhaps the poker gods took sympathy, who knows :)


Anyway, i've heard that crypto (the site hosting the skin dtdpoker) is closing down in a month. This is really sad news as i love the crypto tournies, so will be trying to maximise my time playing these for the past month before i have to find new skins to play on.

Got to go back to the books, later all!

A new blog for a new year!

Hey guys,

Just starting out a new blog for the new year. I know im a bit delayed and all but with university exams its been kind of slow.

Regardless, about myself:
-20 year old student in Nottingham, England
-Started a fresh bankroll in the summer at $100 and by the new year to roughly $4k (£2700 at the time)
-Mainly playing online tournaments and the occasional 50p/£1 cash games live.

My Poker resolutions for the forth-coming year:
-Have a £5000 bankroll by Easter
-Have a £7500 bankroll by the start of summer
-Have a £15,000 bankroll by the start of 2010!

So those are the monetary goals. To get there i have decided i will spend more time studying and improving my game. I'm sure i have leaks, just got to find them and fix them ;). I also would like to play more live especially deep stack tournaments such as GUKPT or EPT or something similar. Although i'll have to satelitte into something like this which kind of sucks.

Anyway, onto this new year, well i haven't played as much as i would like to due to Uni exams (which are going so-so) and a pretty bad case of food-poisoning. But luckily enough managed to take down a £55 tournament at Dusk Til Dawn (local cardroom) for £1100 which was very nice. Biggest "up" day so far and definately a healthy boost to the bankroll. Other than that i've played a bit of cash this month, mainly on the 50p/£1 tables online at crypto and im up 1 1/2 buyins at quite a solid 4.5bb/100 so im happy with this too. Not bad considering the only reason i was playing it was to grind out the £25 bonus. Funnily enough, i've paid £153 in rake too which sucks big time and i will have to do something to sort this out in terms of a rakeback deal or playing more cash to qualify for the crytpo rakeback option.

Last night being a sunday i loaded up alot of tournament tables and even though i got deep in 3 tournaments didn't profit on the day which is a big blow. I final tabled the party poker $8rebuy but came 10th after loosing a race. The tournament was really soft but it did just turn into a big crapshoot at the end and im sure the antes are significantly smaller than they should be. Oh well, i think i'll keep playing this tourny as it is a nice one. On pokerstars i managed to get super-deep in the $11/$10k gtd but came out in 26/3240. Just loosing those crucial flips seems to be really damaging. Its frustrating getting so deep and only coming out with $68...But i guess i won't be complaining if i took down first place where all the money is weighted. Similarly, i had a good run in the $11rebuy/$70k gtd but placed 84/2400.

I'm really unsure what my plan is in terms of online tournament grinding. I enjoy stars and full tilt and their software. But the variance is sickening. I got really deep in those two tournaments and beat 99.2% of the field but still manage to end the day on a down. I have two minds about this. One is that i should keep grinding these tournaments on a regular basis and sooner or later i will win those vital flips near the end for the big money or i stick to the smaller, low-variance, options of crypto/partypoker and possibly one other network. I'm sucking pretty hard at full tilt tournies lately but pokerstars i seem to be quite consistently getting in the top 100 and then loosing races at the crucial times. Maybe there is a problem with my game, i'm not sure.

For now on, ill stick to grinding out on crypto/party and leave pokerstars and full tilt for the big day: Sunday. If i'm not getting enough volume in i'll probably try adding another skin in. I'm thinking Betfair, but the software tilts me pretty hard. Or maybe pacific but same goes so i'm not sure.

Sorry for the long first-post. I doubt they'll all be this long. Anyway good luck at the tables!