GUKPT Grand Final

Hey!

The GUKPT Grand Final is coming up in a few weeks time and myself and Andi have decided to head down there to play a couple of tournaments and lots of cash games.

http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/festival.php?a=r&n=5718

I'll be hopefully playing the £300 freezeout on Thursday the 19th and then the plan being to hardcore the cash tables. If I run sick-hot, reinvest into the weekend £1k 2-day freezeout which will no doubt be a pretty sick tournament with a good amount of dead money. I feel as though it would be too irresponsible now to buy-in to that directly given my current bankroll.

On the horizon there is also two DTD deepstack events in both November and December as well as the DTD poker Monte Carlo special. A £1000+£90 tournament which I will try my very best to satellite into. There is a whopping £250k gtd prizepool and the structure looks insanely good. I really hope I can get an early christmas present with this one!

Other than that, I played a session last night to little success, yet where I fail my horse succeeds. Big congratulations to Jon who I'm backing for the second consecutive month and who managed to come 2nd in a €10rebuy on Boss for ~$2.2k. 2 months of profit in a row. Turning out to be a very good investment now so well done to him!

£5/£10 NLHE live...exciting stuff

Hey!

Well since the win last week at Full Tilt, there seems to be a somewhat common occurrence on the felt for me. Losing. I never had the intention with this blog about whining about bad beats and being unlucky as I understand it's a two way thing and no-one wants to read about it anyway as it happens to all of us. But to put it blunty, I may have been in some unfortunate circumstances as of late.

Thankfully I've been playing well rolled even for the Sunday tournaments meaning that % wise my bankroll has taken only a minimal effect but still it sucks to play a ton and show you've lost a load of money. Thankfully I'm quite happy to say my game isn't negatively affected these days, probably due to playing pretty over-rolled and I still have a lot of confidence in my abilities to beat the games I play.

It started on Friday losing £1000 at Dusk Til Dawn playing £5/£5, near bubbling a £100 deepstack freezeout where I went from a monster stack then losing 4 all-in pots where I was ahead everytime (not flipping). But I guess live poker must be rigged. I almost came back after the tournament and posted about how bad I run live, but who the hell am I to talk about running bad. Sure I've not cashed in like 25-40 live tournaments now and was very close in this one, but I'm not going to try and blind into a min-cash, I was happy with how I played and one of these days I will cash in one of these fuckers!

Of-course then Sunday didn't go as well as expected either :) but that's Sunday aka. variance fest, so it can't be helped. Plus I doubt I will ever stop loving the Sunday Majors as long as I have the bankroll to keep playing them!

Anyway onto exciting news. On Friday I was looking around which games I want to burn my money in, and there was a quite tough £1/£2 holdem game going as well as a very soft £5/£5 dealers choice game going. I put myself on the list and was very happy to have position not only on the "I can't fold preflop" team but also I had position on most of the table in Paduki games which is arguably the most position-orientated game in the dealers choice mix. Don't get me wrong PLO etc. is very useful to have position with, but due to the lack of information available in the drawing games I feel as if position has an even greater benefit.

I was settling into the game flow and was even winning a good chunk at the start until the deck decided we were arch enemies. I looked around and saw three massive whales I remember playing against at a previous Deepstack weekend at cash games. To my shock, there was a pre-arranged £5/£10 game held, with some decent players in the mix but definately some VERY VERY weak spots. I insta-put my name on the wait-list. Unfortunately, the game was a private game set up by Simon Trumper so I spoke to him and he said he would in all likelihood invite me to the next game on Friday. This week the min-sitdown was £3000 which although bankroll wise is really stretching it (like ~10% of my roll), I was informed that next week there would likely be a £1,000 minimum and I would much prefer to have 3x£1000 shots rather than have to sit down with the full £3000. I also figured, if times do keep getting worse on the monetary front I could try to sell some % of myself although unlike a tournament I would imagine this to be a much tougher task.

Anyway, this is going to be a pretty big stretch of the bankroll, but if it all goes tits up I can move down and regrind it back up. Soft £5/£10 games don't come about too often so I hope I can seize the moment and make some real money before this game dies out.

Other than that, having Jon over tomorrow night to play a smallish MTT session with. I want to see what's up with his game as he seems to be bubbling quite a bit lately which may be taking the aggro-on-the-bubble to a slight extreme. Yet this is hard to justify by just seeing single cold-deck style hands. He could be running bad, but I hope at the end we both learn something and maybe if we're lucky earn a bit of $ along the way!

Other than that, been chilling alot lately with friends and not been working. Which is going to change tomorrow before the grind! So i better get some kip in now. Gl at the felt all!

The Winter is Coming!

Hey!

Well it's really starting to dawn on me now that the winter is arriving. For starters, my annual cold has come around turning me into some snivveling dribbly mess. I guess it also didn't help that last night I was pub-crawling around Nottingham in the cold with just a t-shirt on most of the night, but that's another story :). Anyway I'm cool with getting the occasional cold as it gives me the excuse to slack around the house and play some online poker!

So that's what I've been doing. I put in a longish session today registering from 2pm-9pm and after a couple of final table bubbles I managed to get a decent cash in the $25r on iPoker coming 7th and more importantly a second in a $109 freezeout on full tilt for just over a $4k payday. I would show a screenshot but for some reason its not uploading on blogspot. Meh, you'll have to just trust me on this one!

But it's not all good news. Since being back at uni I've put in a few sessions and really not pulled anything together, resulting in quite a substantial downswing of about $8k. The bankroll has dipped below the $50k mark again, so I'm going to move down slightly and drop the $50r's from the schedule. I think partially why I've not done as well since being back is from playing so much more infrequently and perhaps losing touch slightly with the flow of MTTs, but who knows, the variance in these things are ridiculous.

Whilst playing today I was listening to the 2p2 podcast which this week was actually really interesting featuring top MTT backer Sheets as well as some entertaining stories by Neil Channing. Anyway, as Sheets was discussing about the live tournaments in America doing so badly with getting field numbers and a massive lack of fish resulting in the $5k side events just being filled with regs, it got me thinking a lot more about game selection.

Game selection can be applied to MTT's but rarely is by many people. This is basically trying to find the softest fields to play in to maximise $/hourly rate. For instance, the weekly sunday million on pokerstars is going to be a lot softer than say a weekday $100 rebuy which is filled with the top MTT regulars in the world who apart from a select few seem to just pass money between each other on a sick variance rollercoaster. Then again you do get the sickos like Gboro and Moorman who seem to consistently crush these $100r's despite the lack of evidential dead money.

Now I do game select a bit. For instance, when I had the bankroll for the $50rebuy I would exclusively play the euro sites but wouldn't touch the Stars/Full Tilt $50rebuy due to the much tougher fields found there. Yet it also concerns me that leaving out tougher field tournaments that I am rolled for may well hurt my long-term $ as it can be a very good learning tool to see what the better regs are doing in these higher buy-in tournaments and implement the better parts of their game into my own overall tournament strategy. There is of-course also the lure of being one of the "regs" of the high stake scene.

In reality though from a strictly monetary point of view, for the meanwhile I don't yet have enough money and can find enough softer tournaments to settle my craving without having to play in reg-infested tournaments. Yet due to my approach to the game of wanting to be the best and striving for this I think I will eventually start playing some of these tougher tournaments. On the other hand, reading about some of the better high-stake regs swings they have is also mind-blowing with $100k+ swings placing quite a strain on even the most solid of players.

Anyway, I guess I don't yet have to worry about this just yet. Just got to keep focusing on the softer tournaments available for my buy-in range of up to $200 freezeout and $30 rebuys and if I do manage to be lucky enough to earn a lot more money at this game, I will take shots in the future at some of the tougher fields but try to keep playing the lower-variance and softer fields which are available out there on the internet. If I can keep my ego under control I believe I can go a long way in this game.

Onto the future. This weekend it looks like I'll be playing this new tournament series at Dusk Til Dawn. 20/20 or something like that. It's basically a 1-day £100 freezeout on both the Saturday and the Sunday. I expect I'll just hardcore out on Saturday playing the tournament followed by cash and leave Sunday to the online grind as my hourly has to be greater there (see game selecting already!). I'm not sure how the structure will be but I'm almost 100% sure the field will be soft. I'de much prefer if the buy-in was higher but whatever, maybe this way the field will be a bit bigger and a bit softer than the DTD Monthly £300 deepstack which I love to play.

A good poker friend Ant also won a package to a tournament series in Slovenia during late November which would be good fun to go to for a long weekend, but from what I gather the buyin for the main event is €1k, which is still a bit of a strain on the bankroll to be honest. So we shall see, maybe if I win a lot at cash in the next few days I can take a shot but we shall see indeed.

Hope everyone has been keeping well and running good!

Mixed games

Hey!

As the work load has been increasing, my time playing poker has been decreasing quite a bit. I've still managed to put in a few sessions and these have mainly been with other players around where we have discussed hands a lot with different lines. So although, I haven't put in a lot of volume I do feel that my game is improving still somewhat.

The most notable session I put in was yesterday on Sunday where I played pretty much every major on every site making the total buy-in quite high for the day. Despite cashing for over $2k I was still down on the day so that sums it up a little :). The best run I got was in the $109/$40k gtd on stars which I came 13th out of roughly 2000 runners for $1400. Other than that I min-cashed the iPoker $500/$1m gtd for $800 and cashed in a $30r for $160 on stars. I also managed a small cash in B2B in a €100 freezeout for €250ish. Despite not doing particularly well in anything, I enjoyed the session and played pretty well.

After Ireland my thirst for deep-stack live tournaments has only really grown. The new season of GUKPT starts soon with their £1000 buyin tournaments. There are satellite on iPoker on wednesday $100r, Friday $50r and Sunday $150fo. I think I will slap some money on the Blue Square skin and try to base my online sessions around these days when I am free. That will leave plenty of time during the week to get work done/go out partying and also hopefully win me a seat or two some of these GUKPT events whilst my bankroll is still too low to buy-in directly to the tournaments. I could buy-in direct if there was one conveniently near and sell say 50% of my action which is a definite possibility worth bearing in mind too.

For the rest of the year, the following GUKPT tournaments are going on:

Leg 8
Thanet
October 12th - 18th
October 15th - 18th

Leg 9
Blackpool
November 7th - 15th
November 12th - 15th

Grand Final (£3000 main event)
London
November 19th - 29th
November 26th - 29th

Realistically though it does seem that Blackpool might be the only one I would play this year as I just realised now that Thanet is at the end of this week and the Grand Final is a £3k buyin!

Other than that, the DTD will continue with their £300 monthly deepstack which I'll hopefully play every month and as of next weekend they are starting a 20/20 weekend. Whereby on both the Saturday and Sunday afternoons there will be a £100 deepstack 1 day tournament on both days. I may give it a shot on Saturday but Sunday is a going to be a maybe as the buy-in is pretty small and if I got deep I'de miss out on all of the Sunday tournaments online which would have more value in playing than min-cashing a £100 freezeout for £60 profit or whatever. On the other hand I could just go a bit mad on the Sunday tournament playing very loose aggressive trying to either build a big stack at the start or busting allowing me to be back in time to play the Sunday tournies. I'll think about that nearer the time!

On the subject of Dusk Til Dawn, I've been doing pretty well lately on their cash tables. In particular playing the somewhat swingy £5/£5 dealers choice game. I'm doing quite well playing a patient and selectively aggressive game with a lot of limping pre and playing off the other players at the table. Sometimes you get very passive games where its more nut-peddly and everyone limps every pot. Other times you get very aggressive tables where there are multiple raises and re-raises pre which change the dynamic of the game postflop significantly too. What I am unsure about however, is how to improve my game a lot. I guess I should practice online a bit more on some games like Paduki and watch very carefully at how the better players at the table play their holdings. But for games like super-stud which there isnt as much of an online variety I think it will be very difficult to improve and I think it would be all too easy to create leaks in my game and stick with them for a long time. Perhaps the best option would be to really trying mixing up my play.

I like in hold'em when I'm thinking about hands to go through all the possibilities and try to establish reasoning behind them. For instance, I c-bet the flop for value, I check-raise as his range can't handle it or I check/fold as his range is very isolated to strong holdings. I need to get to a similar level in the dealers choice game where I can start putting people on hand ranges and then carefully thinking through the various options available to me on how to win.

Regardless of how I choose to improve on my mixed game action, it will take a long time playing exclusively live due to the hands/hour being so small. I'll keep at it, and might mix in some omaha hi/lo low stakes online to work on that game for a bit too as being quartered sucks!

Hope all is good, gl on the felt!

Back from Ireland, a little online play

Hey!

It's been a while since I posted so I figured I might as well update you all with what's been happening. For starters, I've just come back from the Ladbrokes Irish Poker Festival which was ridiculously fun. Aside from drinking way too much guinness I managed to also play a ton of poker which was really quite refreshing having not really played at all since coming back to uni. Despite the constant bad beat stories and people telling others how to play their hands badly, I really did enjoy all of the live poker over the weekend.

On the tournament front I seem to be maintaining the moorman1/shaundeeb style of epic failering. I managed to beat 2/3-3/4 of the field in both the €600 and €300 freezeouts but busted both tournaments less than 100 people shy of the money. Pretty standard bust outs on the whole losing flips and cold decks it's just a bit of a shame I couldn't really get anything going in either tournament deep. Meh, I'm probably a massive tell-box or something :P.

The €600 tournament was really epic and I wish I could play that every weekend. It's a 3 day event and attracted almost 800 runners with a juicy €100k for the win. It had a ridiculously good structure too with a 1 hour clock starting off at 25/25 with a 15,000 starting stack. In the first 4 hours I managed to grind my way up to 20,000 but from then on couldn't really get anything going, eventually busting on day 2 after playing about 14-15 hours. Woops :P. Still it was really fun and the quality of play was so bad. I think this is mainly due to the amount of satelitte winners who were playing. It still made me laugh the people that busted in the first level 600BB's deep complaining how their aces got cracked then hearing how they made it 200 pre, got 3 calls and then spazzed out and got it in on the flop. Or this other guy who my room mate was playing cash with who busted the first level 600BB's deep when he had a straight run into a made full house complaining how unlucky he was. Are you joking? Getting it in 600 BB with a straight on a paired board is just beyond bad! Anyway yeh, it was an amazing tournament and I was really gutted when I busted at level 600/1200/100 as I was building a really good history and had a good read on the other players and felt I was qutie image aware. I think this will definately spur me on to try and qualify for more live events in the future.

Plus the fact that the banter on these poker weekends is too good. I was lucky enough that my poker playing friend from Uni decided to come a long too which made for some great drinking and generally funny banter. I doubt it would have been as fun otherwise, so for future trips I think I'll have to take poker mates with me to ensure the good times keep on rolling by!

On the online front, I have put in a couple of sessions online without much to brag about. I final tabled a €75rebuy yesterday but came 6th for about €500ish which isn't overly impressive.

Due to work and time commitments at uni I will be playing a slightly different schedule than that that I played over the summer. I'm still not sure how often I'll play but it will generally be when not much else is going on with friends and I just want a quiet one in I guess!

-7:00pm: $108/$15k gtd (Ongame)
-7:30pm: $22r/$19.5k gtd (Full Tilt)
-7:30pm: €25r/€20k gtd (Ladbrokes)
-7:45pm: $50r/$45k gtd (iPoker)

-8:00pm: €75/€10k gtd (B2B)
-8:00pm: $50r/$50k gtd (OnGame)
-8:00pm: $165/$50k gtd (Full Tilt)
-8:00pm: €50r/€25k gtd (Boss)

-9:00pm: $165/$50k gtd (Stars)
-9:00pm: $108/$10k gtd (OnGame)
-9:25pm: $109/$12.5k gtd (iPoker)

-10:15pm: $108/$18l gtd turbo (OnGame)
-11:00pm: $200 turbo (Full Tilt) - Depends if I have a few other stacks, if not I'll skip this last one.

I'll also try to mix in at least one live satellite per day as I'm not hooked on wanting to get involved in the circuit!

The issue with this schedule though is because I'm only registering for a much smaller time period, the tournies I do register all have a much higher average buy-in than that of the schedule I was playing over the summer. For instance, I have dropped out most of the $50 freezeouts and $10 rebuys which do help lower variance. On the other hand, these lower buyin tournaments do have larger field sizes which increases variance. Despite that the fields in the lower events are softer so I can expect my ROI to be higher. If only I could 20 table my A game, but thats just not an option. No way. So I'll stick to this for the meanwhile. If I go on a $10k downswing (which is way too easy with the average buyin being around $180), I'll re-evaluate, probably drop some of the 50 rebuys and get some more $20r's and $50fo's back in the mix.

I'll try to update with how I do when I do play. But until then, good luck at the tables all!

Back on the live scene a bit

Hey!

Having settled back to uni in Nottingham for a few days, I figured it wouldn't be long before I'de need my next poker fix to keep me ticking over. And what better way to get it when Andi text me asking if I fancied a trip down to Dusk Til Dawn to play some of the cash games.

We headed down last night on Thursday at about 10ish to find a few tables of £1/£2 running and some £2/£2plo which quickly filled. I won't go into too many details with the hands but it was a very good evening for me spinning my initial £300 up to £1300 on both the holdem and the omaha tables.

Unfortunately near the end of the night I took a pretty big pot off Andi my friend on the £1/£2 table when I raised 8s9s from mid position and got a few callers. It was checked round on a Ah9h4s board. The turn gave the 8d giving me two pair. UTG led out £30 which got 2 callers and I squeezed it up to £150 or something. Andi made the call with a gutshot and flush draw then led at me for his last £60 on the river, which I had to snap-call scooping a pretty big pot. Never good taking money off your mates but its bound to happen if you are playing at the same tables, and the levelling wars can always be fun ;)

Inspired by Andi I thought I'de play a little more PLO this afternoon online at the measly 25c/50c blinds. Having had a good run on stars as of late but due to the shitty internet connection which seems to have blocked the ports stars uses, I decided to play on iPoker today. No idea why but I must seriously be down like 30 buyins on that network. I cannot get a hand to hold or win a flip. I'm not really the superstitious type who prefers to play on one network more than another because I have more luck on one, but really, william hill please give me a break! I still want to get 10,000 hands of winning poker at each level before moving up and hope I'm not stuck at 25c/50c for too long! I can't really whine I guess, its just maybe theres something subconsciously in me which insta-tilts from the shit software or something. Might try full tilt again despite the players being noticeably better. Not sure really!

Hope all is good for everyone, gl at the tables

The end of the summer

Hey,

I'm back from holiday in Tunisia which was really fun. It involved lots of sun, sea, quad biking, jet skiing, drink and nice food. I arrived back last night, unpacked a bit and played a little PLO winning 5 buyins a $0.25/$0.50 in a short 250 hands, but I'm still stuck over $1k lifetime at this level so it's nothing to be impressed about!

Tonight will be the last proper online MTT grind session in the foreseeable couple of weeks as I will be driving up north to Nottingham tomorrow during the day and will in all likelihood be spending a lot of time relaxing and catching up with friends who I haven't seen all summer. On the horizon is the OnGame Grand Series of Poker starting on the 27th September which I'll try to play a bit of, but other than that it looks like my volume will decline quite heavily in the forthcoming month.

The summer itself has been a really good experiment. Quite a few of my friends were working throughout the summer and I took the time to see what it would be like playing poker as a professional to see if primarily I could make a profit in it putting in decent volume and secondly if the lifestyle suited me.

I successfully reached all the monetary goals I set both at the start of the summer and at the start of the year whilst putting in a lot of volume and simultaneously working on my game throughout. Since the start of June I made over $40,000 net profit which in itself is pretty impressive although with tournament poker it can be so difficult to see what is the effects of positive variance.

The lifestyle however gave me a few calls for concern. The game itself remained really fun (although I did win a lot which might have swayed my view) and I loved playing all the same nightly tournaments and trying to out-level other regs. I also managed to keep a good level of fitness up frequenting the gym quite a lot.

However, what struck me as some of the more challenging aspects of poker in the future is the lack of social life and meeting new people that comes with the job. It really struck me, other than going to clubs and dancing with drunk girls I really wasn't meeting any new women which would make future relationships hard. Not only that but the hours that are required to grind online MTTs living in the UK registering from 7pm-2:30am rarely sleeping before 6am are also really unsocial resulting in me sleeping in most of the day then getting ready for the nights session once again.

I'm a social person at heart and it was way too easy to just stay inside for 3-4 days in a row almost losing track of time. I would say then that for those that are interested in pursuing professional poker careers when you are single and young is to move out and find a grind-pad with other players who are like-minded out-going type that also want to put in good volume. I'de recommend looking at other hobbies and classes giving you the opportunity to meet other people where you can talk about other stuff than poker.

It's way too easy in this line of work to become a sort of social recluse.

That was online. I played a fair bit at my local gala casino too in the cash games. Live games you can meet more people, but really they aren't the type of people I want to be meeting. First of, it's mainly older drunk business-men, many degenerates and big mouths. I'm much more interested in meeting attractive women and interesting people of my own age. Don't get me wrong, I still do really enjoy live poker but at times it can be painfully slow. I'm not sure how people like Phil Ivey manage when he used to play 80 hour+ weeks just grinding out the cash tables.

So looking to the future.

I want to finish this year at university and get a good grade for my three years work. What I don't want is to spend night after night grinding it out online but instead I want to spend my evenings chilling with friends, meeting new people and having fun away from the computer. I love online grinding, but over the summer it made me realise that I can be sat in front of a computer almost any time later on in my life and due to the social structure of university it would be a great shame to let it pass me by without fully taking advantage of what it has to offer. Not only that, but I have a hell of a lot of work to do next year which will probably occupy a lot of my time anyway. I will however, hopefully be playing a few more live tournaments such as the DTD deepstack, Irish Poker festival and perhaps a few GUKPT's as they are very fun and can be easily offered as a break from reality. Plus, I don't want to lose some of my poker talent that I've worked hard to build on over the past couple of years.

After my final exams next summer I hope to head of to vegas over the summer and just go mad. Play a ton of poker, party like theres no tomorrow and enjoy life being young with a bit of change in my pocket. After that I'll either be heading to North Europe (London, France etc.) to live and possibly play poker/work somewhere or even explore the USA a bit more. The winter time I'de like to be skiing and the Spring would be fun to spend in Asia living somewhere like Thailand, Cambodia, Japan etc. I Think the best option is to leave my options open on this one as the various opportunities may just present themselves and I'de like to have some flexibility in my planning.

After that I suspect, although it's hard to tell now, I'll head back to England and look for some line of work that interests me whilst keeping my bankroll (assuming I'm not busto!) in some sort of savings account that I can then reinvest in the future into setting my own business up.

Although the future does seem a bit hazy right now, I want to maximise my time. Already I'm seeing some of my friends from school that have really done nothing with their lives since leaving school, still working in the factory that we had part-time jobs in at sixth form or part-timing at Tesco watching the years go by. It it quite saddening and I just hope I maximise my time and you do only get one shot!

I think to summarise this pretty long mind-spew this old quote has quite a lot of relevance: "Poker is a hard way to make an easy living". And I do believe now that there is a lot of truth in it.

I'm looking forward to the grind tonight that starts in 3 hours time. I'll be playing the majors on stars, B2B, Full Tilt, OnGame, Boss, Ladbrokes so it's going to be pretty hectic and maybe I can just bink something nice to finish off a great summer!