Bleh, poor start to the year.

Work: Shit. The other lass who helps produce the papers has been in hospital and off sick a lot. Putting together three 8-page newspapers in a week from scratch yourself is a lot more work than it sounds. And it looks like I’m going to be doing it again this week as she’s off again today and text me tonight saying she’s still bad for tomorrow. Without question she’s not well though, one of the most committed employees I’ve worked with actually. Get well soon.

Poker: Shit. I played a couple of really long, heavily losing sessions to start the month. Obviously forgot how to play after a long break. Infact, that is actually true. I un-learned tilt control and was emotionally edgy for the two sessions. Cue spew and heavy loss. Have scrambled to dig myself out of a massive hole and have done to a certain extent, but still will be finishing January with a £1k poker loss

Shares: Shit. After the quite ridiculous commodity bubble Q4 2010 and the first two market days of 2011, I have just seen red day after red day. It’s pretty depressing logging in to see -£400, -£300, -£500 day after day. I’ve actually made a paper profit of £2k this month, but discounting the first two market days I’ve seen loss after loss total over £5k.

Health: Shit. I got majorly fat after Chrimbo and into freezing January. I got an infection the second week in Jan and was in a right state. Cold sweats on top of the usual flu shitty feeling, and I had to do a full week at work as my colleague was in hospital! Not my best week! On the 16th I was 15st 3lbs and looked a mess. Slapped myself around a bit and am on a mega diet and bike routine for the next two months at least. Happy to report I’ve lost 7lbs in two weeks though and am on track for being sub 14st for holiday.

I’ve also paid for a stag weekend, a week in Egypt end of March (gulp!) and have another weekend golf trip to pay for shortly. I’m pretty badly skint at the moment as I can’t withdraw from poker as roll is much shorter than normal, and any share profits are locked up for the time being. I’m hoping newsflow allows for a big sell off in ~6 weeks as I want to get some assets moved around to be more tax efficient and hopefully avoid CGT this year.

For the last week or so I’ve grinded NL50 pretty hard. Incidentally NL50 is a total drool fest compared to NL100 for anyone who’s teetering on that brink. The regs are miles better the next step up and there aren’t any juicy loose-passives to hammer into oblivion either. At least this is true of FTP RUSH, the gulf between the 50/100 levels there is huge.

The grind will continue into Feb where I’m planning on playing a much heavier schedule, as long as I’m not completely head fucked from work Mon-Wed. Initial target is 70k hands but this is far from concrete as I will not make the mistake of playing when mentally ill-prepared again. Lol remove “prepared” from last sentence…

Bring on the lighter nights, better winrate, good weightloss, shares grow and happier blog posts. Good luck all

I’ve had 4 days off poker, been in Bristol all weekend (Thur-Mon) and spent pretty much the whole time eating, eating and ….. eating. Before I took time off I managed to bink a $2,100 ticket in the Poker Stars Steps. I cba to play it atm as the only $2k steps that are running are to tourneys in Brazil and LA and I can’t really drop everything and fly over at a weeks notice.

Therefore I’ve decided to wait for the SCOOPs as they have a number of $2k events and is probably a better shout for a decent return.

Food. As I’ve spent the weekend just going to the cinema and eating meals I figured I’ll post some non-poker related pics…

ButterflyPrawns
Polette al Forno
BLT

*Uploading pics shortly.

I LOVE FOOD !!!!!!

Spent the weekend in Bolton playing the APAT Team event.

Unfortunately I think we only reached the dizzy heights of 14th out of 25 teams with only 2 players ( Andy & Kev ) getting into the points and only one ( Kev ) making the money. Despite this all the guys played well and I think it was level 6 before we lost anyone.

A great weekend though, and APAT events also make a good social, with us bumping into so many people that we’ve met before. I had DOV, a mate from the Raise the River forum on my left for the 6 or so hours I was in the tourney and I think we just had plenty of banter throughout , infact he eventually knocked me out when my cheeky BB special of J9s hit two pair on the turn with which I pushed into his set of Jacks.

Looking forward to when APAT announce their season 5 schedule, as hoping to play in a few of these this year.

Dodgy team photo taken from the APAT site

Left to Right ;
Back; Phil Scott, Kev Ridley, Ian Galpin, Dave Bately
Front; Karl Jones, Lou, Me, Andy Cooling

After an overnight flight from Singapore, in which I didn’t get any sleep despite traveling business class, I arrived in Melbourne, Australia at 7:30am feeling extremely tired.

I looked forward to getting out of the airport and to my hotel for some sleep before playing the first event of the 2011 Aussie Millions that evening. I had ran good with airports so far on my travels, with no flight delays and zipping through immigration at each stage. Some butch Aussie Sheila was about to change all that.

In almost all countries what happens at immigration is you hand over your passport, they stamp it, you collect your suitcase and you GTFO. Apparently what happens in Australia is you hand your passport over to butch Sheila and she looks at you and says “Are you alright? You look ill”.

I told Sheila that “I just flew overnight from Singapore and didn’t sleep.”. She looked surprised “ohhhh, oh, you’ve been in Asia?”. I said “Yes, I got off the flight that just landed from Singapore, along with everyone else in the queue.” She shouts for assistance “Bruce, BRUCE, come over here, this guy has been in Asia!”…..

Bruce takes me to one side and starts with the 10-15 minute interrogation:

Bruce: “Hmmm, so you were in Singapore? What were you doing there?”
Me: “Oh, tourist.”
Bruce: “And where were you before that? I see a stamp from Malaysia.”
Me: “Yeah, I was in Malaysia.”
Bruce: “What were you doing in Malaysia?”
Me: “I’m a tourist”
Bruce: “What’s this stamp, Liban?”
Me: “That’s Lebanon”
Bruce: “Oh really, when were you in Lebnon?”
Me: “Before I went to Malaysia.”
Bruce: “Why were you in Lebanon?”
Me: “I’m a tourist”

I was losing the will to live at that point. He starts asking me about why I’m planning to stay “as long as 15 days” in Australia, like 15 days is something out of the ordinary for a visit to the country. Given that the Aussie Open tennis was on for the length of my stay I told him that I will be watching the tennis and playing some poker at the Crown. He then asked me to show him my tickets for the Tennis, which I obviously didn’t have because I was just going to buy them at the stadium, and he made a big fuss over that.

I couldn’t understand what the hell was happening, and why they were putting me through this crap. Eventually the bastard let me go and I just wanted to grab my suitcase and GTFO. Oh no. I had to wait a full half hour for my suitcase to appear on the carousel, then as soon as I picked my suitcase up two guys in uniform were standing either side of me, telling me to go with them.

I then had to go through a massive interview and full search. The bastards took my suitcase apart in front of me and they examined, X-rayed every single thing, as well as test for traces of narcotics. They were even looking at the photos on my camera, trying to find out what I was up to. I had 8 different containers of vitamins and they tested all of those for drugs. The whole ordeal took 2 hours, then after they couldn’t find anything dodgy about me whatsoever they let me into their stupid, overpriced, at the peak of an economic bubble that is about to burst, country!

I got to my hotel only a few hours before I had to play poker, so didn’t get much of a rest. Here is a quick room tour of where I was staying at Skylounge Apartments:

So the first event I played at Aussie Millions was a NLHE Double Shootout on PokerPro electronic tables, which are a bit of a fail. The concept of electronic tables is a nice one but the touch screens were just so damn insensitive. I had to press on it a certain way and often multiple times to get it to do what I wanted. TILT. My table was very soft, except for a few recognisable pros, including Rupert Elder. I ran pretty good to get heads up with a 2:1 chiplead versus an old English guy who played 100% VPIP and 0% Fold to C Bet. He wasn’t the ideal opponent to be card-dead against. Eventually the stacks were even and the blinds were shallow, he raised, I shoved with JJ, he called with AQ and hit an A on the turn FTW. GG. So close to a final table and a cash at my first attempt

I went back to the hotel for a long sleep then straight back to the casino to play the PLO event that I was very much looking forward to. Unfortunately it was full-ring playing 9 or 10-handed. I’m not too fond of playing full ring PLO, it playing much better short-handed. I was really card dead and missed every flop all the way through and couldn’t make anything happen because so many players seen every flop that there was always someone holding the nuts. Eventually, when stacks were shallow I jammed for about 2/3 of my stack with a suited rundown over a raise and bunch of callers. The original raiser snap re-jammed, and obviously had an AAxx hand, but I was well committed obviously. I was something like 40-45% to win but couldn’t make it happen unfortunately

That day was my birthday, which sucked. Sucks being in a foreign country, where you don’t know anyone and getting your ass kicked at poker on your birthday.

Another day, another tourney. My third tourney in three days was another NLHE Shootout event but this time on real tables. This one only lasted a few levels for me. I lost almost half my stack early after I raised with AK, got 3bet, and shoved. The guy called for 35-40bbs with pocket 9s and won the hand. And I lost the rest after that when I raised JJ, got 3bet, and shoved. The guy called with AQ and won. Story of my life, I get it with plenty of fold equity, being the aggressor, and someone calls looking for a coin-flip, gets their coin-flip and wins it. SIGH!

Since I busted so quickly the day was still early, in the late afternoon. I decided to cheer myself up a bit by taking a trip to Melbourne Zoo. I’ve been to tons of zoos around the world, it’s a good way to get outside, do a bit of walking and see some cool creatures!

The next day I was feeling good and went to play the NLHE 6-Max event. I started off playing really great in this event and had quadrupled my stack up pretty early, to be the, or at least amongst the chipleaders. I was getting a lot of attention from Poker News and one of their bloggers was writing down hands I played and including them in the live updates.

My table was extremely soft and we were playing 5-handed because we had a dead stack blinding off at our table, strongly rumored to belong to Phil Ivey. I had a guy to my right called Dennis Huntley who used to be some big porn king in Australia. He made Australia’s first porn movie and owned some adult shops. We were friendly and chatting a lot so it was a fun table to be at. I was having fun and constantly increasing my stack so I was having a ton of fun in this event.

Near the bubble I got into a huge pot that would have equaled a bit chip-lead or at the very least top 3 in chips. I had JT spades, was pre-flop aggressor in position and got flatted by BB and UTG, Flop was J98 with 2 hearts. It was checked to me, I bet, got check-raised, and jammed in my stack. He tanked a full 5 minutes at least, and decided he was going to call me with AJo, and he obviously held. I hate how he played AJ there, when he makes his call he’s doing horrible against my range, but he was ahead and he won, so congrats to him and gg to me. Again I was the one to shove, with a ton of fold equity and actual equity in the pot, just to get called and lose the hand.

Looking for non-poker things to do, so as not to make my trip to Australia a totally miserable experience, I did a walking tour of Melbourne which was a great way to see the city:

So I was hoping my first success at Aussie Millions would be in the AUD $10,600 Main Event. I actually got really unlucky with the table draw with the few seats either side of me willed with young Scandinavian and American online pros. There was one complete fish at the table, who was reading a poker book, at the table, as he played the main event. WTF? Reading a book on how to play poker, while playing a 10K, seriously? I took a sneaky little photo:

Well I wasn’t card dead in this tourney at all. I kept making very strong hands but they’d always be second best. I lost a big pot where i 3bet TT pre, flopped a set, turn and river completed flush and straight draws and guy leads into me and I have to fold. In the second level I only had 6000 from the 20,000 starting stack, but I easily could have went broke before that if I had played less conservatively.

On the very first hand of Level 3, where it was BB200 with 25 ante, a Scandie raised the button, his Scandie friend in the SB flatted, and I shoved from the BB with 66 for 30BBs. Scandie in the SB called with AQ and flopped the A.

G f’ing G.

I was really gutted. I now had 5 free days, that I had originally planned to go visit Sydney if I busted the main event on day 1. But since I was running bad, and hadn’t been able to play much online so far in the year, I decided I would just stay and grind online from my hotel for 5 days. It didn’t work out well for me, I had 4 sessions in a row where I ran miles bellow all-in ev and lost most of what I had in my account. I attempted to run my account back up playing $114 SNGs. I played in 25 of them and cashed in 2. 2 and 3 outers crushing me left, right and centre. G f’ing G to my bankroll.

I just tried to find more non-poker things to do to take my mind off the heart-breaking poker results.

A great experience was visiting Melbourne Aquarium that is near the Crown Online Casino. I loved the penguins!

And I had a full day out at the tennis. I got a premium seat ticket for Rod Laver area for a day that included the Women’s Doubles Final and Murray vs Ferrer in the Men’s Semi Finals of the 2011 Australian Open.

I celebrated ‘Australia Day’ at an outdoor concert at Federation Square. That was fun.

6 days after busting the Main Event at the Aussie Millions I was back to play the Bounty Feature Event. This event is NLHE and has one pro per table who is designated as a bounty. I had Team PokerStars Pro – Tony Hachem on my direct left who was our table’s bounty. I’ve met, played and chatted with Tony before, live and online, so we got on well and had a good laugh, until I doubled up through him. I 5-bet shoved KK pre and he called with JJ and for once in my entire life I won a pot. Unfortunately he had me slightly covered so I didn’t get the bounty, and then he was on my left with a crippled stack. I ended up min-raising and limping into most pots because he was so short stacked and the bounty was significant. It wasn’t to be though, they broke our table table!!!!

The new table wasn’t so kind to me. I turned 2 pair versus a flopped set and was lucky to only lose 2/3 of my stack. I ended up busting when I raised and got called, flopped 2 pair with A8 on A83 and got check-raised. I shoved it in and he snapped with AK, but I couldn’t fade the K for the 60bb pot and my tournament life.

On my last day i played the Turbo NLHE event and got close to cashing before a battle of the blinds versus a Scandie, where we got it in pre and his JT owned my AQ with a T on the river. So 0 for 7 in cashes at Aussie Millions, not what I was hoping for.

I left Australia disappointed and headed off to Bali, Indonesia to relax for 4 days.

Been away on the slopes of France, banging myself around on my snowboard. I haven’t put much time to playing poker over the past few weeks. Im still on the uptrend and will start to do some good analysis of hands which I will put on here.

In the meantime subscribe yourself to Verneer’s $200 – $10,000 post on 2p2. Once he hits this he will be giving it all away to charity.. Top top man

How can anyone lose at 10nl with this type of play !!

Full Tilt Poker, $0.05/0.10 No Limit Hold’em Cash Games, 6 Players

Flop:($3.55) (5 Players)

BB checks, Button bets $.50, BB raises to $2.60, Button raises to $7.87 and is all-in, BB calls $5.27,

Turn: ($19.29) (5 Players)

River: ($19.29) (5 Players)

I’ve encountered a strange software glitch the last week or two on pokerstars. What?! a glitch? on stars software? never. Its very rare i find something to complain about with pokerstars, and the first time ive encountered a problem with their software. now im not sure if its actually a pokerstars problem, or a problem on my end, but a problem it is. for the last few weeks ive been spotting players ive decided to call ‘phantom supernovas’ all over the place. theres been at least one on every 4th table or so and its tripping me out. so what is the phantom supernova u might ask. well for some reason im seeing supernova stars on random players who are definitely not supernovas. i see someone as a supernova, then 3 minutes later its gone, then i see them on another table and the red stars are showing again. this may not seem like a big deal, but its very misleading and since we thrive on information its just downright -ev.

so i emailed stars about this, first i got the generic reply saying they couldn’t confirm or deny these players were supernova. (i sent them screenshots of a couple of phantoms i knew for a fact weren’t sn) “pstars cannot disclose 3rd party information” blablabla. anyways so i emailed back telling them too answer my original query and that i wasn’t asking them to confirm anything and i got this reply.

Hello Eric,

Thank you for contacting us.

As per what we told you on the previous email, we investigated the matter
further and can confirm the information is showing correctly on client’s
tables. With this we mean, the info displayed on your screenshot is not up
to date.

We notice you are running a third party application along with PokerStars
due to the stats being displayed on each player. Please try running
PokerStars without the third party application and look for the players you
believe are Supernova to see exactly what we are seeing.

If you have further doubts or report, please do not hesitate to contact us
back and thank you for choosing PokerStars.

Regards,

Juan Carlos G
PokerStars Support Team

im really not sure what this email is saying, but im reading correctly there saying my software isn’t up to date? or that its the fault holdem manager? correct me if im wrong pokerstars, but doesnt ur software update automatically? and how would holdem manager have any affect on me seeing red stars? i guess i should’ve expected anything but a real response or a solution. instead they’re playing the blame fre online game that companies just love to play. anyways i reinstalled pstars a couple of days ago, yet i continue to see phantoms all over the place. it actually cost me alot of equity on the $27 20k ft. i saw some1 i thought was supernova limp utg (didn’t have many hands on them and they had raised every hand they’d played so far) so i folded my aj rather than shoving it as i would over a fish. turns out this guy wasn’t supernova, in fact he was a massive fish bowl and i wouldve tripled that hand had i shoved. instead i folded and ended up busting 3 hands later. sigh. today i decided to just turn off all vip display options, obviously no info is better than false info, yet im still seeing these phantoms every where. i know just assume there not supernovas and act accordingly though its still really disconcerting. if anyone else is seeing this can they please comment below.

2_basic isnt supernova, i know him and he has confirmed this.

random phantom

random phantom 2

hey all

This is not a huge update pokerwise (though it wont stop a huge essay!), part of the reason for the lack of updates is that I have barely played since November.

My 9-5 job is taking up a lot more than 9-5, my daughter is growing up fast (we had her first birthday yesterday already). I have been pretty unwell through most of December and with the Xmas holidays barely played.

So when I have played its been kinda bad as well, I am basically break even for the last 2 months though that is only about 20k hands in total. I moved across first to i poker to take advantage of rakeback with victor chandler, I did pretty well on i poker.
But, the skin moved across to Entraction and man does it suck. The main reason is the software, its just so bad. No timebank, no selecting seat, no hot keys or scripts, the layout of the table is terrible and your HUD can’t fit on it, worst of all if you get heads up on a Full ring or 6 max table then the software has a glitch which means the BB and btn are the wrong way round.

All this taken into consideration you can barely play even 4 tables without timing out. So I hate the site pretty much despite the nice RB i get. Throw in some huge coolers, run bad and a little bit of ‘soft tilt’ and we are breakeven.

So I am switching back to i-poker for Feb, its a decent site in all. Sure the software is not of stars or FTP quality but its bearable at least plus the regs are worse than on entraction and still has a decent player pool.

In the meantime I have been playing some mtts again, part of the reason for playing some cash amongst lower variance, easier hours etc. I wanted to get better post flop….

Well week one of mtts pretty much showed this building up some huge stacks early on and outplaying the mtt donk that are out there pretty easily. However, I did not cash once! Thats right I didn’t get deep or even cash once. Now granted I lost some huge flips coolers. bad beats blah blah blah.
After about 5 days of this something was not right… So I re-examined how I was playing and my play with 30-40bb sucked.
Missing spots to chip up, missing re-steals, squeeze spots and I was barely 3 betting both for value with slightly more marginal hands (in spots where it makes sense to do it) and as a bluff.

I think that when playing a different discipline, it takes a while to adapt. It certainly did when I switched to cash and was getting it in far to light with 100bb stacks. So being used to 100bb deep, I wasn’t making the necessary adjustments being shorter.

Certainly postflop I think different lines work better in a mtt than cash virtual games. For example in a cash online game, bet flop check turn and bet river doesn’t get called down light that much. In a MTT its a golden line for fish to pay off with weak top pairs and even 2nd pair hands or even to induce bluffs from air.

Plus, thinking through it I was not playing my A virtual online games looking for all these little spots and read based moves that allow us to chip up in mtt’s so that when the beat/cooler happens we are not dead and when we win it we get huge dominating stacks.

Anyways after doing this, I played 2 great sessions at the back end of last week, getting super deep in some big fields again and playing good poker. I think i got like a 30th in a 6k runner MTT and 11th in a 500 runner.
But, most importantly I got back in the groove and played how I know I can. Added with somewhat better postflop skills hopefully this bodes well for my mtt virtual game!

I am doing a bit of a tune up session with top class mtt player this week. Being out of the poker mind set for a while (not really reading forums, discussing hands, watching vids) means I feel like I have picked up a couple bad habits so I want to make sure my thought processes are spot again……

All in all though I certainly remember why i love mtts, and am going to making sure I split my schedule between mtts and cash going forward.

gl at the tables everyone, and thanks to all those who have pestered me to update!

Like I mentioned, made no progress in the hilo stts this month, so wondering if the last two months were just a fluke? Very marginal profit in them, really only playing them at present for the iron man thingy and to clear the end of year bonus, but thinking of going back to the plo mtts once this is done…this one saw me finish 2nd and we almost had an even chop where I got $277, it swung back and forth. I was certainly not at my best in this tournament, made a few poor calls, guess I’m getting out of practice, which is another reason for getting back to them

Going to be a losing month on the sports betting baring a miracle sunday, but will be backing murray to win the tennis at an amazing price of 2.44, hopefully that will go well.

Hope you are faring well and good luck.

I recently hit around 30BI at 10 so have decided I’d had enough and after talking to my coach I decided it was time to move back to 25. Have only played 3 session so far and apart from one fishy lapse I’ve played pretty much super nitty the whole time. I know my nittyness is totally exploitable by the more aggressive regs and fish however I think it’s possible to use your tight image to play back from time to time; especially against the 3 bet monkeys and mass multi-tablers. But TBH apart from not spewing or tilting too much I don’t think I’m playing well at the moment. Trying to avoid spewing makes me tighten up too much and I go into passive mode. So Cbet and double barrel frequency has dropped lower than I know is healthy which is impacting my non showdowns.

My first goal is not to spew off or get involved in marginal situations where I end up carelessly dumping chips. I’m playing four tables and trying hard not to tilt or get over excited. Just staying calm and mainly waiting for my value hands to try and turn a profit. It’s so much easier to get away from a hand if you remind yourself that another hand will be along in a few seconds.

First observation is that even table-selecting quite hard there are way fewer super fish than at 10. The fishy 1 tablers are of course generally bad but mostly not playing an outrageous number of hands. I’m actually quite shocked there are so few really bad players. In fact I noticed a few good players who are also winners at 50 & 100. So I guess making a profit mostly comes down to how you play against the more competent but not great players like myself.

My short term goal is to start winning at 25 and then move up to 50. I’m setting another challenge to win 20 BI at 25 which will give me an adequate roll for 50. Hopefully I can start to take a few shots at 50 when I feel the time is right. As you can see from the graph on the right I was bleeding chips through my last few hundred hands which is almost certainly due to lapsing into a weak tight style. So time to take a look at some hands and start to play like I know I can.

On the work front my boss took a pop at me the other day which was kind of shocking. No point in going into the details but she was somewhat unprofessional. As someone who has been around the block a few times and held a fair bit of responsibility in my career, it’s hard to take sh*t from someone who has never taken a risk in her life. I think she might have realised that her behaviour was off as she has been as nice as ninepence since. There are massive internal changes going on at the bank which are resulting in redundancies which obviously is worrying the permies but does not excuse her behaviour. But as a contractor there is very little I can do. I just smile and take the money for as long as they will pay me.

so january continues and i made yet another final table. im very disappointed with this one, i really feel like i should’ve done more. but in the end there was very little i could as i ran my a5s into 77 btn vs blind. i got 7th in this same tourny a few months ago and got coolered there to aq- ak bvsb. oh well, shrug it off and load more online games.