Italian Vegas

Just a quick post to plug a player I have huge respect for Daleroxxu.

Dale has been kind enough to interview some of the best online poker players in the world and made these available for anyone to listen to.

In my opinion these are the best interviews I’ve heard because they are real, no bullshit to any of them. Dale asks the most down to earth and relevant questions any aspiring online player would want to hear.

Dales interviews to date are:
Jhub3000
Jonathan Little
MI Turtle
Spacegravy
TheLipoFund
Wazz.

I won’t offer the links here, go and check out his blog and you’ll be find links to all of them on the right hand side under “Daleroxxu Interviews”.

Dale has been in the online circuit for some time and his achievments include a winning the main event of the 2006 WBCOOP and he has been crushing SnGs for years now. He is currently ranked 19th for all Double or Nothing SnGs with buy-ins ranging from $36-$100 but I’m sure if he played more he’d easily be higher than that.

If you’ve not heard them get over there and download, they are an awesome listen.

Thanks for sharing Dale.

Custo

SUP Guys. This is a little premature but M’EH, I only have a couple more weekly tournaments over Circus so thought I might as well get this live sooner rather than later. A very busy start to the month seen FTP affiliates Daniel and Mark play four live tournaments across three days (event details mentioned in previous post), fortunately Mark split the Aspers £50 for £1,065 giving us a collective ROI of just shy of 200% in the small sample.

Things slowed down a little after this and we reverted to our lighter schedule of the Sunday/Tuesday tournaments over at Circus, these along with Friday nights down the Grosvenor are the best value weekly tournaments available in Newcastle. No success to report as both Mark and I seem to be making regular deep runs but not quite finishing the job, always seeming to bust somewhere on the penultimate table but cest la vie. Were running below our expected value in these events, they average between 40-60 runners and a very small % of the already small field have a sound understanding of tournament poker. I’m aware of the variance swings however feel like my approach to these tournaments has been a little nonchalant, this has maybe subconsciously lead to a lack of effort as I just expect my experience to carry me through. Evidently it hasn’t and I’ve found myself on the rail whilst others players who aren’t necessarily better or worse than me grind out results, their simply more focused and thus getting rewarded for their effort. So in conclusion a little more concentration required, I’ll report back next month on how that has gone.

Away from the felt I’ve had a few ace nights out with old school friends, friends visiting from out the area, and the Circus crew Spoona, Dan, and Ian (unfortunately not Celia) out and about town, all of which usually conclude with me being a nuisance over one of the three casino’s but all in good merry spirit of course.

Saturday 14th April seen Circus launch their new £50 tournament, this was intended to mirror their old £75 event in terms of structure with a view that the reduction in buy in would attract more runners. I was nursing a hangover after being out with friends on the Friday but soldiered on to show my support to Circus, first off I hit it up over ‘The Living Room’ for a late lunch with Scotty Hocking, Steve Gibson, and Neil Harvey who I’m friends through the local poker circuit and NPF.

An exceptional turn out seen 80 runners take to the felt and generate a £4,500 (including £500 added) prize pool, unfortunately neither Mark or I managed to cash and it was eventually split four ways by our friends Nathan Hope, Brian Ridley, Dominic Davidson, and I believe Jason Elliott but not confirmed. Always nice to see friends get some nice results, so keep up the good work guys. The following weekend Mark was back on the road heading north to Edinburgh for the PokerStars UKIPT £500 main event, I’m sure Mark will be publishing a trip report so watch out for that as he goes over his thoughts and finding a cooler when he runs KK into Dave Maudlin’s AA for a double average stack.

During the same weekend (Saturday 21st) I played the monthly Teesside £100 freezeout, although I lasted longer than my usual 20 minutes I still couldn’t get out of first gear as I lost a race with 77 vs. AKd for an average stack at 150/300. That weekend our luck (well Mark’s) changed in the weekly Circus tournaments as he went back to back splitting on Sunday and Tuesday for £500 and £275 respectively, so it was nice to finally see some return on investment after a baron spell. The Sunday (22nd) tournament was a great laugh as I sweated the final table with Jamie Giles, it was packed with names including Gaz Walker, John Stamatelopoulos, Dave Stephenson, Emma Fullerton, and of course Mark. The dealing was alternated between Ian Robson and Celia Liu so whilst on the rail me and Jamie got the atmosphere going with several chants including “LiuDAWG” in reference to Celia, “FullDOZER” in reference to Emma, and chanting “Jonny Greek, Jonny Greek” when it was John’s turn to act. It was a lot of fun and to make it a little sweeter both Mark and Gaz chopped heads up, I was waiting on Mark (obviously) and Jamie hanging around for Gaz.

The final weekend of August so the Grosvenor host ‘The G Cup’ where I found myself in the unenviable position of being without a team, despite being a proud loyal member of the Cubs since it’s launch last year. Without going into any detail our former captain Patrick retired from the NPF and the team was also retired by proxy, I disagreed with how situations developed and openly discussed this with Dave over the NPF. I ended up contacting Patrick via facebook to discuss the Cubs future and he appeared to walk away from the Cubs in the same casual manner he did the NPF, asking me to take over as captain whilst he pursued other interests. It was never my intentions to captain a team but felt I owed it to myself and the remaining team members to take it on at least temporarily for the imminent ‘G Cup’. I then began to put some provisions in place to get a team together, I found it very frustrating trying to contact people which proved my initial non interest in captaining a team and the duties that come with this responsibility. Anyway to cut a long story short, I couldn’t gather enough interest so handed the responsibility over to Chris Waugh who also struggled to generate the players. This left us both without a team until captain of the Ninja’s (Ian Bertram) kindly asked us to join his team as he had a couple of drop outs, so in the end I represented the Ninja’s for this one off event in my Cubs attire. Ian likely quickly regret offering me a slot as I was ridiculously hung-over after hitting it up in town the night before till like 6:00am, so I made a brief appearance before busting out after 20 minutes.

Prior to ‘The G Cup’ I was still undecided as to how I was going to go forward in regards to the Cubs, I have since decided I’m not cut out for captaincy (as demonstrated by passing the duties over to Chris) and will step down from the position whilst withdrawing myself from selection should any other Cub affiliates look to undertake the role. I would like to close the subject by wishing Patrick and the rest of the Cubs all the best in their future endeavours, both on and off the felt.

Finally next month is exciting with the CBMPT visiting Teesside for it’s fifth leg on Friday 10th, which has a bunch of Newcastle/Teesside characters in the field and is always good fun. I’ll be playing the full schedule which includes;

Date: Friday 10th September
Free Online Casin: Gala, Teesside
Buy In: £200 (+£20) NLH
Time: 18:00
Starting Chips: 7,500
Clock: 30 Minute

Date: Saturday 11th September
Free Online Casin: Gala, Teesside
Buy In: £500 (+£50) NLH Main Event
Time: 14:00
Starting Chips: 10,000
Clock: 60 Minute

Date: Friday 10th September
Free Online Casino: Gala, Teesside
Buy In: £100 (+£10) NLH
Time: 17:00
Starting Chips: 7,500
Clock: 30 Minute

However if I make day two of the main event I‘ll have to drop the closing £100 event. Then the weekend following the CBMPT I’m hitting it up in Las Vegas with Rob Richardson and a few cockney boys (maybe Alex Joblin and Dominic Davidson too but I need to speak with them to see if they still plan on flying out) I met out their last year, staying over at the luxury resort and casino Wynn which is a little out the way down the south end of the boulevard but with;

AAA five diamond
Mobil five star
Forbes five star
Michelin five star

Making it one of the finest hotels in the world, I’m cool with the little extra travel to get into centre strip. Inbetween the drunken nights of debauchery, glamour, glitz, and gaudiness my tournament poker schedule is;

Date: Saturday 18th September
Online Casino: Venetian
Buy In: $300 (+$40)
Time: 12:00
Starting Chips: 12,000
Clock: 40 Minutes

Date: Sunday 19th September
Online Casino: Aria, City Centre
Buy In: $150 (+$25)
Time: 13:00
Starting Chips: 10,000
Clock: 30 Minutes

Date: Monday 20th September
Free Online Casino: Bellagio
Buy In: $300 (+$30)
Time: 14:00
Starting Chips: 10,000
Clock: 35 Minutes

If I find the time (or can be arsed) whilst not either hitting it up at the bars, clubs, strippers or playing tournament poker I’ll be grinding the 200NL, 300NL, and 500NL over at Bellagio and Wynn so I shouldn’t be hard to find if your in town, so well excited about my seventh trip to the bright lights. Then things go quite in the tail-end of September, where I’ll look to relax and go back to my lighter schedule. So stay tuned guys for next month as I’ll look to do a trip report to detail my Las Vegas endeavours as well as bringing back our ‘In The Tank’ section with a guest I think you’ll all find very interesting.

Hope your all keeping and running well guys, bye for now.

So I’m back in Vancouver from the world series.

Actually that was a while ago but whatever. Mid-july I think?

Series ended up being successful despite being down on live tourneys for the trip. Made a bunch online and at live cash virtual online gamess. Even up for the trip on random craps and blackjack actually, thanks to a black-out drunk session I played after XS one night. Woke up with a bunch of extra money and had to be filled in by some friends as to just exactly how lucky I was getting

The main event was a let down, as it is for like 90%+ of people who play I assume. I made it to day 2 with a shortish stack and busted early.

Enjoyed the trip overall but it didn’t quite meet my always high expectations

NOw that I’m back, I’ve kind of promised myself that I’d try to better enjoy the beautiful city I’m in. I always brag about the awesome stuff to do in Vancouver, but I never seem to be doing it! So I’ve been hitting some trails, beaches, did a bit of boating, and of course I try to hit up all the best restaurants.

Oh speaking of restaurants, I just remembered something funny that happened in Vegas.
I actually emailed it today to a podcast I listen to (Two Jacks in the Hole , comedy podcast not at all about poker. check it out!) for a segment they do called ‘glitches in the matrix’. SO I shall cut and paste:

After a night of degeneracy, me and a buddy are leaving the casino and see some b-list celeb shooting dice.
The table has a pretty big crowd and it painfully obvious it’s because of this one guy.

Me and my buddy really could care less. We keep on and get to talking about how ridiculous it is that people get so starstruck.
We pretty much agree that there are virtually no celebs that we’d actually care that much about seeing. Just normal people, right?
Sure it’s cool but nothing to lose your mind over.

I go on to tell him that I actually might be taken aback if I saw Shaq or something. Mostly the fact that he’s gigantic, but also because I love basketball and grew up watching him.

So anyways, we leave it at that and call it a night. The next day we head over to Mix restaurant @ Mandalay Bay with a bunch of other poker players and grab dinner.

About half way through dinner, a giant African American gentleman walks into the dining room and the place starts buzzing a bit.

If you couldn’t have guessed it already, Shaq is walking right towards us with a fine dime piece on his arm. He walks up and looks over at our table of twelve (who are all staring at him) and says ‘Wassup fellas!” as he walks by. He ends up getting seated right next to us.

Pretty weird right?

Anyhow, I also hit up Calgary this past week. They had the canadian open poker championship. I went 0/2 in the events, but my buddy Ricky(rask88) basically chopped the $1000 event for first place money and I had 10% of him! Easiest $4k I ever made. Met a bunch of cool people on the trip too, and the drive up there has amazing scenery.

Next up for live events, I’m looking towards the British Columbia poker classic. This will be my second year doing it and hopefully I can have better success. Oh and hopefully a murderer doesn’t win again.

Ok this is getting too long I’m off to bed. I’ll update tomorrow if I win the sunday million or something

Plug your leaks and improve… FAST!

I’m not into posting up my monthly results any more but I’m comfortable sharing my results from the $200nl that I played this month – mostly in the daytime when the higher game onlines aren’t as juicy. I’m sure poker players can figure out the $$$ pretty quickly!

Following up from our first session last week, Matt sent me this cool email, I thought I’d share…

I’ve taken on 4 new students over the last couple of weeks and things are going great, so I’ve decided to take on a few more.

“Thanks for opening my eyes… I had no idea how much it would change just after one session… Soooo much easier… It’s like I’m playing a different game online.”

Ok so I came up against a really odd spot recently that I grossly misplayed and I thought i would share as I have not put up any hands or strat so much recently.

I posted this on a couple forums so I will just post the hand in that form, then my response and lastly a couple of very good HS pro’s responses….

so lots of replies stating that flating or 4 bet/fold are best. both are really bad to me intutively so I did some math on it….

I agree shipping in 90bb here is kinda gross, but if we 4 bet and he ships we are crushed and have turned Ak into a bluff

flatting is really akward stackwise and playing it OOP is gonna be really difficult, which is kinda why the hand is akward. I am pretty sure that flatting will show a a marginal expectation overall at best. However I think its better than 4 bet ship still as below

flat pre

I made it 3k pre he now makes it 13.2k which is pretty large, if i flat there the pot on the flop is 28k and villain has 95k behind.

Flop comes xxx he c bets to say 17k (60% pot) the pot is now 42k with the villains having 78k behind, now I have 2 options shove or fold with effective stacks

a) 66.66% the time we lose 13.2k = -8.7k

b) 30% time we hit the flop, against his 3 bet range of say TT+/AK

c) 3% of the time we hit the flop and he flops a set

a = -8.7k

b = +18k

3 hands we beat from 7 (assuming he c bets all hands that 3 bet pre) c bet fold and we win 43% of the time = +18k

2 hands beat us from 7 29% of the time but they stack us for = -57.4k (198k*.29)

2 hands chop from 7 29% of the time = +57.4k

c = -6k

total = +3k

4 bet/call or ship

shows a -3k expectation versus a range of 3 betting TT/AK and calling KK+/AKs

overall i think FOLD is actually best to the 3 bet!

in this spot his bascially he only one at the table that can hurt my chip stack, is jamming 90+bb spewy here? his 3 bet is largish so i dont think i can flat OOP here very prfotably

and lastly here is some of the pro’s reposnse to the hand

‘Fold pre. Put him on a range for this huge of a 3bet, you can’t flat OOP vs it profitable, and 4bet shipping is hugely spew. You have plenty of chips, this spot is not going to come up often at all unless you view him as a monkey. Just fold and move on, you opened UTG, he has no reason to 3bet you this huge on the button without a monster trying to get it in. Flatting oop looking for an A or K is going to be very -ev.’

‘this spot is not going to come up often’

“is really important.

pelousesf (BTN): BB = 90.6, t108711
Warpgs (SB): BB = 20.5, t24618
Elviski24 (BB): BB = 27.1, t32560
buffyslayer1 (UTG): BB = 109.2, t131085
SpOs Im GoOd (UTG+1): BB = 36.7, t44017
acehole67 (UTG+2): BB = 44.6, t53524
stackshady (MP1): BB = 7.6, t9108
10YURA10 (MP2): BB = 26.3, t31543
Colombian_Us (CO): BB = 9.8, t11795

I am not 100% sure on the math, but it looks right enough

Pre Flop: (t3600) buffyslayer1 is UTG with K A
buffyslayer1 raises to t3000, 5 folds, pelousesf raises to t13200, ????????

No real reads on villain, he is running 18/13 with 4% 3 bet over 85 hands ihs a slight losing player over 500 mtts

i know you’re never supposed to fold AK preflop, and in general that is true, but there are spots and this is one.

Soooo, I’m done for the year. I haven’t actually quite updated my spreadsheets yet, but I think it’s going to end up something like breakeven on my own coin, and about in about $5k of makeup, over maybe 500hrs and 6 months. I’ve been much worse about keeping records of the live stuff, but I’m guessing roughly breakeven there too, maybe down a little.

So, fairly disappointing. I was playing well for large parts of it, probably the best I ever have, although there were definitely times where I let the downswing get to me; -$35k at one point, so about 400buyins over maybe 2000 virtual games. Fairly unpleasant. Luckily I had a nice score recently which helped wipe out most of my makeup: Bink. Then last weekend I got coolered for the chiplead with 15 left in The Sunday Million (and I don’t capitalise lightly), which was pretty crushing, but reassuring after a bad spell (for those who don’t know, The Million is the biggest weekly tournament online, 1st being ~$250k. Coming 15/8000 players and breaking even on the day is pretty devastating considering that my place in the tournament was worth maybe $70k in equity – in effect, I lost $70k in one hand). Finally, my coach Matt LaGarde, after looking over the hand history of the 320 score, said he didn’t have a lot of advice, and was impressed with how I played. I think being told by mlagoo that I play pretty well is a major achievement!

So all positive signs. Shame I don’t have any money really. The 28k score didn’t get me out of makeup so I didn’t see any of it, (despite my mum suggesting I could pocket a few $k of it for myself! shocking) and The Million was stupid and evil. Even a 9th would mean I actually made some money, y’know, for food and stuff. Oh well, it was probably the last tournament I’ll play this year, as next week I’m going away. For the best I think, I doubt I’d be playing well, at least for a little while.

Which leads me to the next bit – I’m off to India again. Yay! Going motorbiking with my dad for a few weeks in the same area I was biking last year (I’m far far more prepared for the biking, hopefully no more crashes to write about…), then he’s heading home and I’m off down south along the coast. Pretty excited, getting itchy feet here, in need of a break/change of scenery. I’ll be turning this back into a travel blog for the next 3 months, so come look at purty pictures and read about me almost dying in a myriad of strange ways.

Sooo… that’s about it, back a week or two before christmas. Might get a few sessions in then, but I’m pretty much calling 2010 closed for business. I’m distantly looking forward to getting back to it next year; assuming I can earn some moolah there are some fun trips lined up – PCA, vegas for the WSOP, probably some EPTs, and obviously the GUKPTs and UKIPTs again. But before then I’m definitely in need of some space.

Bring on the curry and motorbikes.

Well yet again I have failed to update regularly enough and been reminded to do so. I’d love to know who you are Mr or Mrs Anonymous, but thank you again for reminding me and please note my update is up less than 24 hours of your comment.

Unfortunately I haven’t got a lot to report on at least not for another month or so.

I’ve double up the BR since I last posted so yay for me! I’ve done this via micro stakes cash & HU SnGs, really enjoying the HU SnGs but not so much the cash, I really think I’ve engrained tournament forms of poker on myself. I don’t know what it is I just cant seem to get down with cash and the only success I had was short-stacking which is hardly a long term prospect I wish to pursue.

Been flat out with work (non poker realted) and a few poker related projects which I’ll be sharing shortly, hopefully be the end of next month. But since my last post which was a little over 2 weeks ago I’ve probably played less than 5 hours.

I know this is a sucky update so bear with me. Will have some good and longer news to report early-mid September. Really just making this post so you all know I’m still here

Cheers
Custo

meh another few months gone without updating my blog sorry to the few that actually read it .

anyways Im due to go on my stag do on friday down to newquay for the bank holiday weekend, what a fucking mare that as been to orgainise. Started booking it about 3 months go had about 8-10 peeps wanting to come then when the money was due for the rooms about 4 pulled out. Then yesterday another m8 who said hes defo coming 100% pulled out grrr… So that leaves 4 of us. Should still have a good laugh, got a room spare in the digs if anyone is interested…

onto the poker front. The bankroll is still moving upwards at a steady rate, Which is a good thing its just that ive been thinking I should take more risks for bigger gain. For example Im going to have a 20 game online shot at the $12/180s. See how I do and basically play some more, but if the Bankroll goes below $1500 then I’ll just focus on the 2′s to build it back up.

Ive been playing some $6/18 mans due to a challenge on I did pretty well in them too so carried on playing them. Only a really small sample but they feel pretty easy.

Since the last post Ive purchased another monitor which now I can comfortably 6-8 table with a view to work upto 12. Had pretty decent results because of the extra tables too.

$2/180 stats:

$6/18 stats:

welcome back.

…. the bed won.

had a wtl;dfr (way to long;didn’t fucking read) uber post lined up but …. the bed in my digs needed fixing. there were 3 nails sticking out where they really shouldn’t have been. in fact, there should not be any nails ! wtf ?
its one of those cheap “pine” beds. a flatpack special. previous roomy obv broke the fucking thing and tried a bit of DIY to fix it. basically hammered in a load of fucking nails to re-attach the slat support rail to the main frame …. now, eddie the english was a lovely lovely lass, but, to put not to fine a point on it, she was a fat cunt. so at some point the slat support rail parted company from the frame, hence the botched DIY.
so i thought, easy, remove the 3 nails, DRILL three holes, insert 3 screws, job done …. err no. 17 nails and 8 screws later …. job done, fml

on a slight side note, my kids beds are the same basic design …. except my bed has nice round finnials atop the legs …. kids beds have SHARP wooden corners atop the bottom legs …. i know they are sharp, my lower legs will be used as evidence ( my testimony reads thus – after coming into contact with sharp corners, lots of “bastard, you fucking bastard” or arrrggghh cunt, you fucking cunt” while collapsing in various states of distress …. )…. my mrs reads this and the beds will be on the bonfire, H&S will be rounding up the manufacturer/designers for a very public flogging and our newly appointed lawer will be issuing a lawsuit for $10 million fucking dollars …. oh and if my kids actually hurt themself …. you seen my other half when she is really really angry ??

so already wtl;dfr.

and poker. well, wsop from pokerPeoplesPlace is all done. closest i got was one 2nd place in stud8 and one cash in a nlhe donkfest to be fair, i did run/play like the proverbial jackass in equal measure. and the cost of all that good clean fun was $85 and i won $55 …. now thats a result !!

doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun ! i’ve a $3 omaha tourney to play, laters.

pleasant dreams

Ship the £1k day on the RUSH tables. Pushing the month towards the “totally awesome” category

Shame no super lie in come the morning, will try to stay positive about work but it’s proving harder and harder lately!