Sunday 30 January 2011

Live Poker...LOL

This weekend was the APAT Team Event, being held at the G-Casino, Manchester. Our poker forum had a team over there, but it was pretty touch and go!



A few months ago we asked people to register interest for the tourney, which was a £50 buy in as part of an 8 man team. We had ~14-18 peeps interested. As such we ran a playoff for the spots in the team. Luckily I had an automatic seat, as that is the advantage of being admin, weeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Anyway as time got nearer it was pretty obvious there were some guys who were really keen to play and when I got offered overtime at work to work the Friday and Sunday night the same weekend I agreed thinking we had plenty of reserves and it would allow one of the others a chance to play and be part of these great weekends. (plus I can;t really afford to turn the overtime down right now, so it;s a win win)

My plan was to go over on the Saturday to rail the guys and play a little live cash.

Anyways by the time the event actually came around we had 6 dropouts and 2 in the last two days before the event FFS!!! It was an absolute fkin nightmare to try and get the team sorted in time, I ended up getting up at 11am on Saturday after only getting in from work at 5am trying to sort out replacements. Let's just say I wasn;t fucking best pleased. Fortuantely we managed to get it sorted and had a team to play the event.

So saturday evening myself and Bullmeister went to Bolton and met up with the guys and unfortunately the tourney wasn't going well. Amatay had donked off most his stack, we already had 2 busted and the rest were not in great shape.


I decided to play some live cash, but only table with a decent waiting list was a 0.25, 0.25/0.5, which I though was 0.25/0.50 NL with a 0.25 ante. It actually was just 0.25/0.25 and max buy-in was £30. sigh. It was interesting though to see how lolbad the live donks are. Seriously we had one guy who for like 5 or 6 hands was raising to £20 pre flop, blind! lol. The standard opening raise was £2 and that normally got between 3-7 callers each time. These guys HAD to see a flop, it was almost like the law!

After a while the table broke up a bit and it ended up infested with nittier fish. Who loved to see a flop, but just folded when they missed.I ended up with about £70 from my original £25 so all was'nt lost. It was incredible though to see how bad they all were!

As for the team event.... well I think we were 16th/25. Obviously the reason we were so shit was because I wasn;t there as team captain to drive us forward and motivate! Our best players were Ant66, Dream Of Vegas and Krosdat, who managed to go deepish, so well done to those three for helping us save a little face!

Bit of luck Newcastle Poker Forum will hold another event at some point this year and I'll go and play that one and obv crush! :)


Right, that turned into a much longer post than I anticipated.

cheers for reading

BM

Monday 24 January 2011

Wrestling

This Rush is some super sick shit. It's definately like the cocaine of poker IMO. The variance is at best, brutal. The nature of the game means there are gonna be a tonne of big hands clashing and thats where you are gonna make or break your profits.

I ran good, then bad, then good, then bad and now ok and thats just in the last 20 days! My graph is like the fucking Himalayas!

I just tend to play straightforward. I do mix it up a bit against the regs, but against the guys whom I have no stats or few hands on I just play pathetically straightforward and so far (touch wood) it is working ok.

I am on target to make Gold level in the Iron Man, although tbh I am not sure what value that has in itself because I've never looked into it.

on a none poker front:


Just had to spend another small fortune on a new pram, moses basket, baby bath and extras and a few more bits in anticipation of the new arrival. Fuck me life is expensive these days. I am looking forward to it and not all at the same time. It's a strange feeling tbh. You want it over with, but you know for six months full nights sleep are none existent!



Went over to a mates Saturday night. Not seen two of them for a while and as usual when we get together it gets messy, fucking rapido. Got there at about 8 and we started heavy on the stellas. By about 1am we started having arm wrestles...lol, but it got worse. My mate has been training for a while in MMA and starts wanting to go out in garden and have a "wrestling tournament". Objective was, on the word go, you had to get your opponent onto the floor and pin both shoulders down. No punching or kicking allowed. Only thing for these guys is I am a lot fucking bigger than them weight wise. Obv though we had been on Stella and stella makes you invicincible.

So sure enough we go out. It's probably minus 2 out there, but none of us can feel the cold. It's adrenalin and beer mixed up. Fucking numpties I tell you!

10 mins later, I am victorious. My weight and height advantage was a bit too much to be fair, but one lad Rob has a fucked leg and the other, Ted has fucked his hand up. hahaha.

Seriously for 30+ year old blokes we are still fucking idiots after beer. sigh.

Found out that Rob was in AE most of Sunday. He had torn a muscle in his thigh vs me and there was some internal bleeding. Brutal. Poor bastard is a window cleaner too!


Moral of the story...know when to stop drinking and don;t wrestle in the garden when pissed!

right, thats enough from me.





laters

Stone Cold Big Miky!

Tuesday 18 January 2011

RUSH'ing again.. sigh

So after playing ~7k hands on pokerstars.fr I have quickly come to the conclusion that the rake is fucking scandalous. I have paid ~$320 in rake @ NL25 in that many hands. I mean I have also been playing RUSH poker and in around 11k hands so far I have only paid ~$170 in rake, which shows you just how much it is. It makes the games too expensve to play IMO.

I mean I could have gone and tried to get gold VIP status each month, but in monetary terms that is virtually worth fuckall to me compared to what I would be paying out. Also I was looking back at 2010 and saw how much the 55% rakeback deal really boosted my earnings and bankroll.

Basically, although the games are pretty damned soft, pokerstars have priced themselves out of the market to play cash their.



Most of my recent play has been on Full Tilt's RUSH poker. Once again I don;t wanna jinx myself, but I am doing ok, plus the fact of the rakeback and the ironman I am currently trying to hit.

My plan is to look for a new site to grind alongside Full Tilt, that gives me decent rakeback and leave a bit on stars.fr to play MTT's.

Enjoying poker ATM, but not really putting in any serious time or effort tbh. Just got myself this little gadget

means I can watch all my .avi files of Dexter, Entourage, Dueces cracked vids etc etc, via HD on my TV. weeeeeeeee

On a none poker front I just spent the last week or so doing up the spare room to change it into the little lads' new room. Jesus it gets expensive quickly. He is thomas tank engine mad, so it's curtains, bed, border, bin lightshade, toybox etc etc. Looks good though now and that means the nursery is now free, ready for the new arrival.

oh man all those sleepless nights and waking for the 3 hourly feeeds.... good times!! lol.

right oh, better get back to the grind of work.

laters

BM

Sunday 9 January 2011

Play-On

Footy:



Well I am slightly dissapointed Roy Hosgson has left Liverpool. It was awesome seeing the red shite  falling to peices!!! Will King Kenny do any better? I hope not!

Everton got a very very good win over Tottenham this week, beating them 2-1 in what looked a really really good game from the highlights. Burnley still have no manager, but I think Malky Mackay is front runner according to the local press. Not sure he has enough experience tbh though, although anyone is better than that wanker Brian Laws.

Poker:

Struggling ATM. The pokerstars RNG is tanning my arse and to be fair there is nothing I can do about that, but I am also really really spewy in certain spots, especially when making calls where I know I am likely beaten. This is something I seriously have to work on as it's meant the difference between a couple of winning or losing sessions.

Rush poker is going ok , but I am still very very wary because I know how fucking variance ridden it is. So not gonna jinx myself until I have put the full month in.

Watched a few training vids, but not sure I am comfortable 3/4-betting as much as they insist you should just yet because of the levels I am playing and the types of players that you run into.

Anyways I am just gonna play on for now and see where it takes me.

Cheers for reading

BM

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Up your arris!

god damn it. I fucking jinxed myself on that post just before New Year about wafllecrushing, as I am now experiencing the arse end of some shitty variance. It doesn;t help that it's sending me on super-mega-gofuckyourself-tilt. I just HATE giving the worst players fucking credit for having a hand and I am STILL overplaying that peice of shit that is AK (because it NEVER EVER FUCKING HITS FOR ME!). Think I have shipped it in with AK about 3 times and I always seem to be against QQ and they always seem to hit their Q. lol. They hit one of their two oust, but I cannot hit one of my six! FUFUFUFUFUFU.

I am getting into some really horrible tough spots. i.e. getting two pair on a 3 flushing board and facing aggro. Getting sets and then the board 4 flushing or 4 straighting on my ass. The fish are also floating the shit out of me I think the bad players now call my C-bets close to 100% and I think it;s just too spewy to fire 3-barrells against a donko that won;t fold top pair for love nor money.

I am just gonna stick at it and keep playing. I am now 6 buy-ins down this month, some of it has been spew for sure, but also had some bad luck with set over sets (btw I am not good enough to fold a set despite the river overbets by villain!). :)

/rant

I joined back up to DeucesCracked yesterday and planning on trying to watch at least one vid a day and plan to properly review my HH's and also look through my oppo's (regs) HH's and see if I can pick out patterns in their play.

Just got to plug on for now. Some of the players are horrific. Just gotta keep remembering that and getting their dosh.

Saturday 1 January 2011

2010 Review + 2011 Goals

Just going to keep it brief:

2010:


Jan = +$1637.19
Feb = +$340.43
Mar = +$841.57
April = +$442.70
May = +$2890.99
June = -$394.58
July = -$483.42
Aug = +$2778.62
Sep = -$140.43
Oct = -$152.68
Nov = -$149.31
Dec = +$485.19


Yearly Total = +$8096.27

I played a total of 147,640 hands in 2010 on the cash tables, but my biggest financial successes came in MTT's with a few decent binks boosting the BR.

2010 started out a decent year for me poker wise. I had a bit of discipline and was playing regularly. This continued for a couple of months until I did the normal and lost focus for a while. I dabbled in bits and bobs, but struggled to really get back into it. I ended up withdrawing a majority of my roll to pay for RL stuff and at the time I didn;t regret it. I have managed to build it back up slowly and hopefully will kick on into 2011!

2011

First and foremost we are due to have our second child in early March and as such this is going to take up a lot of my poker playing time for the following few months, so I am not going to get unrealistic with my goals as I know playing time is going to be fairly limited.

I am going to stick at playing cash at my current site for now and see where that takes me, with the odd MTT sessions and probably some Rush poker too here and there to mix it up.

GOALS:

1. Play at least 120k hands of cash.
2. Spend more time watching training vids and maybe reading a few mindset type books to try and help control the tilt.
3. Start reviewing sessions and having sweat sessions again with Snake. I still felt my game progressed most when we were continuosly talking through hands and strategies. It got me thinking much more in depth about my game and my weaknesses.
4. I am not a big fan of monetary goals, so I'll just try and beat what I made last year.
5. Keep building the forum.
6. Play more live events!


I'll do my best with all of those. Fingers crossed!

I hope all the readers of this blog have a cracking 2011 and I hope it's good and prosperous for each and everyone of you.

ATB

BM