Scotland for the UKIPT

Hey!


To say the least, things have been a little slack lately. My last week I've put in pretty poor volume on the whole with limited results. Highlights (or lowlights as they might be) being a few biggish FT bubbles including the Party $100 nightly and Stars $100fo and bubbling a $14k WPT Paris package. What to do though, for every big top 3 finish and package won you're also going to have those times when you brick or bubble hard. It's what we signed up for, best not to whine about it but keep on registering and grind through the variance.


Anyhoo, that's not been the main reason why my volume has slipped a bit. I've finally managed to actually be affected by putting in long hours at the computer screen with minimal breaks. Annoyingly I seem to have found myself with eye-strain making grinding online a bit of a pain, to say the least! In fact it's really annoying. From my research the best way to fix this is to take a break from any form of screens. Oh crap, after having a little think I realised if I'm not grinding online, watching TV, looking at my phone I'm not actually doing a lot. I guess I could read a book...Oh wait...


Sooo this confirmed for sure my trip up to Scotland for the UKIPT Edinburgh. I didn't manage to bink a seat, but other than giving my eyes a break from monitors of various forms, it was also a perfect excuse to test-drive my new car on a long journey up north. And I have to say it performed well :)

Unfortunately their isn't much to report still on the live poker front, I played and busted the UKIPT main event up here eventually losing AK to AA button to SB (so rigged obv!) but got my wannabe live-pro grind on and insta-regged for the £55 turbo starting 5 minutes after I busted. Fortunately for me I managed to flip well in one tournament eventually getting 2nd in it for over £400 helping to pay off most of the UKIPT buyin. Just a shame I couldn't have saved the run-good for the main, but maybe next time!
On the live poker front, I also spent the previous weekend grinding the DTD £300. It's a great tournament, although I wish they'd change the structures a little. It's totally pointless starting 300bb deep and turn crap-shooty 10 hours later, but that's a rant for another time.
So onto the next week, I'm going to mess around at the Fringe festival tonight and tomorrow, seeing Ed Bryne tonight which should be a good laugh. I'll probably donate a bit more to the live poker front on Saturday night playing the £300 side event here. I think I'm 0/20 lifetime on live £300s so the compulsary whine/bink incoming I think! Haha...I wish ;)

After that it's off up to the highlands in Scotland for a few days hiking with my Dad before heading back down south midweek to Nottingham, when hopefully my eyes will have recovered and I can start putting some proper volume in online again.

Until then, gl at the tables guys!

Settling back in

Hey!

Well I'm back in the UK now and have successfully moved into my new apartment. I'm still living in Nottingham, but a bit further out from the city center in a bit more of a chilled environment. I'll miss my balcony in my old flat, but so far I'm enjoying seeing a bit of greenery and not hearing sirens outside my window every night (lol shottingham!). I've also made a pretty big purchase since being back, that is buying a 5 year old VW Passat! After driving in Vegas and moving slightly out of the city, I decided it was definitely time to buy a car again. I really enjoy driving and without trying to sound like a snob, public transport is so tilting. I get my new wheels tomorrow and am eagerly awaiting the incoming freedom :)

I've also got my net set back up again and my set-ups looking pretty good. If I can be bothered I'll take photos of the flat to put on the blog but at a later date. I've been back playing for a week now and I have to say, I'm really enjoying it!

Other than an epic fail of a Sunday yesterday, it's been a good week back with good volume. Highlights include shipping the Stars midnight $100 6max for $4.5k and a couple of turbo binks including a €20 hyper for €2k :)

This forthcoming week I'll be playing online a couple of days before getting ready for my first live tournament back on UK soil. This weekend it's the DTD £330/£100k gtd multientry that I'll be playing from Friday. Suprisingly looking forward to it and hoping for my first DTD deepstack cash ever. Will it ever come? :p

Anyway, gl on the felt everyone, til next time..

Vegas Part 2, Brick Brick Brick!

Hey!

Well unfortunately the Vegas trip is coming to a close. I'm flying back to the UK shores on Thursday. I'm kind of meh about flying back, sure it will be cool to play some online poker again and I'm missing my girlfriend, but damn this is Vegas. I love this place!

The lifestyle out here is really awesome and something I'll definately miss. Bar the past couple of days, every day has been bright sunshine, the food out here is incredible and not too pricey and it's just a lot of fun hanging around with the house mates drinking, gambling or doing whatever. Shame it's not sustainable, but hey, I guess that's what holidays are for!

So far on this trip since the last blog post we've been helicopter riding over the Grand Canyon, seeing Cirque Du Soleil, out for some incredible meals including some of the best fast food in the world. Nom nom nom, fat times. God bless America :p


It's also just been nice chilling and relaxing with others as normally at home I have little time to just put my feet back and relax. This might seem surprising to most readers given my current line of work. But normally I'm grinding for 12+hours a day 5 days a week and my off-days are usually spent away from the house with friends/girlfriend or doing chores. So to sit back and watch episodes of Arrested Development without feeling guilty about slacking feels pretty nice too :)



But it's not all good news. The main event has arrived and for me has gone way way faster that I would have liked. Just so you guys have slightly longer to think of burns, I busted in the second level! Fail!

I made it to the first break just above average grinding my 30,000 starting stack at 50/100 up to around 32k. Then things went tits up. Big time! I ended up putting my money ahead in a couple of spots with 2 pair vs one pair hands including with AQ on an AQx board vs some old guys AK who then managed to bink his king on the river after all in on the flop.

The rest went in when I was dealt AA , opened with 3 calls, got squeezed from the small blind and I just 4bet shipped it. He couldn't snap me off any faster with QQ, which turned out to be a fantastic call after the first card on the flop was a queen.

Moral of the story, never trust the ladies in Vegas ;)

So now after a very disappointingly short run in the main, I've got two tournaments left to work my way into some more profits for the trip. After my bink in the Venetian $500 I'm not back to around even (frickin main event, fastest $10k I've ever spent :p). So it would be nice to get going and have one final score before heading back home.

But if I can't get anything going in the two remaining tournaments, I won't mind too much. This summer has been amazing and I'm definately going to miss the Vegas lifestyle.

Vegas Part 1, bink bink bink!

Hey!

We're over half way through the Vegas trip now and I've played 14 out of my 24 tournaments. So far so good as I've managed to luckbox my way to finally getting a live score getting the majority chop in a $500 Venetian tournament for $25,500. Although the score itself somewhat embarrassingly doesn't pay off my trip in itself, it's my first live tournament win in a very very long 0time and as you can imagine I've been over-the-moon since :)

Other than that, I got a deepish run in a WSOP $1500 coming 91st/3kish runner something for $4300 and a few near cashes. I feel like my live game has improved a lot since I've been here and I'm actually enjoying the live grind quite a lot. Surprisingly I haven't even thought about playing online again while I've been here.

 When I'm not grinding tournaments I've either been chilling by the pool, various adventures up mountains, eating way too much nice food and generally just having good times. I really like the lifestyle out here and having a car with the freedom it brings here is really good.

This coming week I'm playing more of the same in terms of tournaments. I wouldn't mind next year learning some of the mixed games though just to break up the constant no-limit holdem grind but the fields seem really soft this year especially at the world series and I think I would feel bad missing out on some of the juicy fields.

So this coming week I'm kicking it off with a $500 caesers heads-up tournament that the majority of our house is playing then a few more NLH tourns spread between the Venetian and at the Rio. Then the build up to the main event will start which from what I've heard will be the ultimate grind and a great way to finish the summer off....especially if I can run good enough to cash!

Hopefully the run good continues and I can manage to get another really good run before the trip ends.

GL at the tables all!

Helllooo Vegas!

Hey!

Well a lot has happened the last week. I've arrived in Vegas, got a car out here and settled into the house we're renting for the Summer. It's really nice with a big pool, big living area and I've even got a 4-poster bed. Balla!

I haven't got much time but I'll give you all a quick update:

Tournaments:

I'm so far 0/5 bricking every event pretty hard. In each event so far I've gone semi-deep in everything but yet to make a cash. Many more to come though!

One time?


Food

This is Vegas, you got to talk about food! Well I've had some incredible meals already since being here including some amazing Sushi, Steaks, Burgers. They really do good food over this side of the pond. Probably why everyone's a tad bit larger over here too! One of the highlight meals has to be going to one of the local breakfast-diners which serve so much good food like omelettes, pancakes and eggs. Mmmm, I wish they had diners like this in England in Nottingham. I'd probably go every day.


Fun Times

We've also been doing quite a lot of fun activities outside of gambling which is awesome out here. It's far too easy to over engross yourself in gambling or poker in this town, yet it has so much more to offer. Highlights have to include driving over to Nevadas adjacent city an hour away. The place is called Boulder City and is host to Lake Mead. A huge lake in the Nevada Desert apparently bordering 4 states. We hired a powerboat for Chud's birthday and one of those tube things on the back and spent the day drinking on the lake and throwing each other into the lake at top speeds. Highly recommended tilt-buster :p

I met up with a couple of other friends as well and after a somewhat disappointing start to the tournament schedule without a cash yet, I went around the massive shark aquarium at Mandalay Bay with a couple of friends. Not only does it bring back memories of nightmares I had when I was a kid, I was actually really impressed. Normally at aquariums they have a bunch of boring fish or colourful little things no one actually cares about. This place just has the biggest and the best, pirhannas,  giant snakes, jelly fish, alligators, and of course a huge shark reef.

I may not have picked anything up from the sharks in the tank, but it really was a great trip and I'd highly recommend it to people visiting Vegas.

Anyway, I've got another $1k WSOP event in an hour so got to get ready to crush it, or get crushed, as the case may be :p



Best of luck at the tables all.

It's almost time for VEGAS

Hey!

It’s been a while since I last updated the blog. So what has happened with me. Well unfortunately the month thus far hasn’t treated me spectacularly well, but I’m not actually down money so I really can’t complain. I’ve put in a lot of volume online this month which has kept me afloat after so far being 0/9 in SCOOP M’s and 0/4 in Live MTTs this month. Don’t worry though, saving all that run good for next month in Vegas! :)

So I’ve had a few binks in some of my regular tournaments and a few final tables that has kept me a float. The win in the €15r/€25k was a real personal victory. I've FT bubbled that tournament 5 times lifetime and it was turning into a bit of a nemesis tournament for me. Thankfully my first time final tabling it after playing it for the best part of 2 1/2 years and I win it. I’m really enjoying my online schedule at the moment and I’ve found a nice amount of tournaments to grind each night without being overwhelmed with too many tables. Which would be fine if the euro sites had timebanks or had clean and simple layouts like Stars. But alas! I’ve always been under the impression that it’s much better to play less tables, possible sacrificing short-term hourly whilst having longer to think through situations and make better decisions so as to actually improve as a player. After all, in todays mid-high stake tournaments, playing a nitty ABC style just won’t suffice. Unless of course you run like pillow100 ;)

Now that it seems very probable that I’ll finish in the top 20 in the iPoker $5k WSOP deal I’ll probably cut down my volume for the rest of the month. I’ve played a lot this year pretty much without taking too much time off. I also know that this year in Vegas I plan on playing far more live poker than I did last year too so I’d like to be mentally ready for this and not feel too burnt out. This has the potential to be an epic Summer. I’ve also got to move out my flat at the end of this month and I’m moving into another place just out of Nottingham center. Change of scenery and all that. What a fucking hassle though lol.

I’m hitting Vegas on June 3rd and plan on playing pretty high. Here's my schedule. I’ve sold off 50% of my action but it’s still quite a big monetary risk. Get rich or die tryin’ right? For anyone that is interested in following my progress to root me on or laugh at me going busto, I’ll be updating this year pretty frequently on twitter, and you can follow me here!

Anyway, just under 2 weeks left before it all kicks off. And I am pumped. Vegas baby!!

April Showers, onward and upwards to May

Hey,

In the end April turned out to be pretty fail on the poker front. Check it out below:

 (dark red line not the lighter pink one at the top)

As you can see it was a pretty swingy month. I missed by target buyins of $30k by about $1.8k but I'm not too fussed about that as I played a fair bit live going to Spain, DTD and Walsall for tournaments. Unfortunately I have nothing whatsoever, not even a deep run to brag about. But so it goes. Saving all that run good for Vegas, I hope ;)

Online the month was pretty rough and my lowest profit month in a while. I'm cool with it though. I had more than my fair share of biggish FT bubbles this month in the larger buyins on my schedule. What probably is noticeable though is that my ROI for the month is still pretty solid. I know sharkscope ROIs have a tendency to be pretty inaccurate but I think this shows I ran good in my small stuff and bad in my big-buyin stuff. Afterall, that's why you play the smaller stuff too, to help off-set the bigger buyin MTTs. Let's hope in May I run horrific in all my $20 freezes and ship all the loot in the $100s this month then!

One other pretty catastrophic bad beat that has affected me pretty badly this month is the dealings of Black Friday. When I say pretty badly, let me just point out that I am in no way as badly affected by this as most, but still it kind of sucks. I won't go into the specifics of what happened on April 20th as most people reading this blog will probably be pretty clued up about it. But basically my WSOP $10k package that I won with AP looks like it's gone for good. I guess that's karma for depositing on the crooked site in the first place!

After the Americans have been kicked off the site for good, AP which focused heavily on the US market has pretty much become a ghost town. Not only has the site got pretty much no traffic whatsoever now, but with rumors and articles circling the internet about it's shareholders having disputes as well as the fact that even Europeans are having trouble withdrawing $250 every 2 weeks I think it's fair to say that there is a pretty good chance the site will go bankrupt. And I don't think you even need a top-notch Economics degree to figure that one out. I've got a lot of US friends with a lot of money locked up on these sites, so fingers crossed for everyone. As for me, most likely losing $10k sucks pretty bad, but c'est la vie. Treating poker like a business it's one of those things you have to cross-off as a bad debt and change your plans accordingly.

So despite the amazing weather we've had this month, April to me would have seemed more fitting with black clouds and thunderstorms! But hey, I made profit on the month so I can't complain!

Onto May and it's a long month of online grinding ahead of me. I've won a seat to the DTD Deepstack for my monthly £300 donation this coming weekend before SCOOP starts on PokerStars. The schedule is pretty damn awesome and I wonder how badly the SCOOP-high events will be affected by the lack of US players now. On a good note though, the times for a lot of the SCOOP events have been moved to more euro-friendly time patterns so we don't all have to stay up til 11am if we get a deep run. It's nice to be considered sometimes ;)

I'm not sure exactly how much SCOOP I'll play as I do like to steer clear of large field MTTs like the plague. But they don't come round too often and a sucker does win the lottery every week. So who's to say I can't be next weeks winning sucker? In reality I'll probably play most of the low events and take some shots in the medium events, cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Other than that I'll be grinding a lot on iPoker this month trying to maintain myself in the top 20 in the tournament leaderboard to win a $1k seat in Vegas next month as well as playing the PKR £750 main event in London much later on in the month.

This is also the last month before I head to Vegas for the Summer, so a good one to get my hopes high would be nice. I wouldn't mind getting $40ks worth of buyins for the month under my belt, but at the same time I think with so much stuff to sort as I'll be moving out of my flat at the end of the month too as well as getting everything ready for Vegas, my volume might suffer a little as a result. We shall see. I hope this is a good month....

Gl at the tables all!