Welcome avid, loyal readers [ thats about 2 of you ] I have starved you long enough!

Since my last entry I dropped back down the levels to 5nl and then 10nl on Stars to rebuild my roll after I had dropped a good chunk at 25nl due to a pretty bad set of coolers, and a little bad play towards the end… but live and learn, and rebuild, onwards and upwards and all that keep thinking on the bright side of life and all that palarva! :) 

So after going some way to rebuilding I made ‘Silverstar’ status on Stars and was given a bonus of $100 if I could achieve ‘Goldstar’ the following month. Now thats alot of hands for me at 25nl (prolly estimate about 80K hands) so I had to change tactics if I wanted to the chase the bonus.

My first answer to this canumdrum was to ‘turn to the dark side’ and short stack 50NL full ring.  I did have an attempt at SS’ing 50NL & 100NL 6max - this involves us not playing as nitty and opening up our range to BTN and C/O steals and so forth. So I had a good read of the available short stack strategy online and messed about with Pokerstove and although I set off like a stallion on heat in mating season the extra variance soon hit and after about 3k hands I was a small 1.5/PTBB winner.

The basic idea behind Ss’ing, is you can use the blunt tool of the all-in preflop and the power of your short stack to basically make it a 2 street game and take away any implied odds for the villians. Suddenly, the shortie is the aggressor and forces the original raiser to know the maths of hand v ranges, which most of them dont.

In fullring games you often gain the benefit of additional dead money with limpers in between you and the light raiser. Overall I have found short stacking 6max to be profitable but the swongs are redic. - full ring is far more safer, but I suspect that more money is to be made SS’ing 6max - if you can handle the swongs that is.

If you learn to SS, you’ll learn to become a warrior at the 25BB and under poker game, which correlates to alot of tournies….and as tournies are where the real donk money and the occassional big score are at. It’s gotta be +ev to become better at playing short stacked as that is a bit of a flaw in my MTT game. I have no problem becoming chipped up and have lost count of the amount of times I have been chipleader at the first break in the EMS league, but once the stacks become shallow I seem to lose my edge - so hopefully my end game in MTT’s will improve.

I think it’s certainly true that if you stop at shortstacking, you are stunting your growth as a player (and boy, it can get boring and mechanical!), but if you take it seriously and follow the maths, I believe it can lead you to conclusions about poker in general which will give you a better all around game.

I also found this nitfy piece of software which can help you on deciding ranges to push etc

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/45/software/short-stacking-strategy-sss-calculator-121624/index6.html

Anyhows, I have more to write but this is getting a tad long and I dont want to go off on a tangent so I’ll have the rest for another post.

The past several days, I’ve found I’m playing less and studying more. I’ve just not been in the mood to play and have been getting my moneys worth from Deuces Cracked vids, having taken in the No Limit Grinder, From The Ground Up, Unconventional Wisdom, Baby Steps and just started the Maths in Poker series.

TBH I’m finding it hard to maintain a balance of playing enough hands, watching enough vids, reading all the many poker mags I get that are still un-opened in their plastic on the coffee table despite my mum’s pleas to shift the buggers LOL and finishing all the books that are still left un-read, or more likely half-un-read.

I read quite a bit of strat too on EMS and DC and together with work and trying to maintain a normal social life and some kind of exercise routine it can get a bit too much with so many things that I want to do, but so little time to do it in.

I really need to sit down and work out a proper poker and life timetable and would be interested to hear how others make best use of their time.

In other non rambling news, I’ve taken a few shots at 10NL, I was up about 4 buy-ins at that level with some inspired play on saturday and peaked the $350 BR but then promptly dropped just over 5 BI’s with some proper just pure donkey bad plays on the sunday so I’m down to just under $300 . I will be dropping back down to 5NL for a spell until I build up a few BI’s for another shot.

I really think I should just not play at weekends, I mean during the week I play and run just fine, but when it’s weekend the fish come out to play! Now, really that should be good, but down here at 5NL thats a receipe for muffings galore. Firstly Rovers get tonked 4-0 by the Arsenal, then the fish start to bite me! Final straw tonight was when  I got all in with KK on a 63T-rainbow flop and my opponent flipped 62o and rivered two pair. I also had KK < QQ on the river and everyone was hitting sets and flopped straights on me left, right and centre.

I managed to only keep the losses down to just over 4.5 buy-ins and decided enough was enough for the night and to shut down the tables before I began to tilt and vent my frustrations on here instead.

Overall though apart from at weekends, I’m playing very well and doing quite well at 5NL. I’m hoping that by next month I can step up to 10NL, or I might look into getting staked for 25nl over at stakeashark, although cash baps have not gone well on there for others and I’m not sure what the interest would be.

Anyhows, I’ve signed up to Deuces Cracked and have just finished the No Limit Grinder series, which was quite good. Theres a 2nd series of this one starting out so I might head over and download the first episode of that one now.

Well August is over with, the last couple weeks of the month I started a $0 to $??? challenge on Pokerstars as detailed below in my other posts. I’m now up to $78 and have played just over 10K hands of 2NL during this time. Despite running quite bad at times in critical big pots, I’ve managed to turn a steady profit and have been beating the level for 13.5 PTBB’s/10.

Over the next month I will start off at 2nl again and add in some 5nl when I hit $100 BR. Below are my stats, if you can see anything which I could improve please feel free to coment but remember I’m playing a slightly more passive game pre-flop and so my cold-call is a little higher than normal.

Quick update for you while I’m in the mood! I’ve been playing a fair bit of poker again this past week. As some of you may have noticed the odd one or two 2nl hand posted in the EMS ring game section.

I’m not embarrassed to be playing 2nl, I know I can comofortably beat 25nl, as proved in my 20k hand challenge earlier in the year and I also beat 50nl when I played that on Full Tilt. However, real-life money shortages caused me to withdraw most of my ‘roll, which means I’m now out of debt which is great news … but I’m seriously limited at the pokers tables with the no roll. I also believe that learning cash again from scratch can only be of benefit to me as although I was winning I did have leaks.

So I’ve been working from the ground up. I could have deposited this month and gone to 10 or 25nl, but I’ve decided to do a lil’ personal bankroll challenge thingy on Stars.

I started with a zero balance, and used about 400 FPP’s to enter some sats for the 100K. managed to qualify in one of these and un-reg’d for the T$. I then used the T$11 to enter some $1.20 SNG’s, and turned that into $20.

So now that I had some cash to play with I started up playing some 2nl 6-max games, 8-10 tabling this past week buying in for 300 big blinds (max of 500 bb’s) and played a tad over 7K hands for a win-rate of 8ptbb/100. I know I could easily beat this win-rate but I started off running quite badly, and then had spots of tilting as I got used to playing the 2nl donks and learning their tendancies. I settled down and cut out the tilt-calls and have been improving in an upwards direction to now have a balance of about $42.

The plan is to grind up to $100 at 2nl, to give me 20 buy-ins at the next level which is 5nl. It’s an aggressive approach as about 30 buy-ins is the norm. But once I hit 5nl, I won’t be moving up to 10nl until I have 30 BI’s for the next level.

Hopefully I will move up to 5nl, in about 3 weeks. Unless I move some of my roll from Virgin over to speed up the process.

Anyhows, bye for now.

As promised… belated APAT Forum Team Challenge write up, yea I hear you all say - just what we want to read about, old newz!! lolz

Okay so last month I represented Team Eat My Stack in said event, alongside fellow EMSers Dean, Bas, Lee Ming, Ramchip, Tony C, Chelsea2005, Niggy, Tallguy and of course our spiritual leader JeffChef! Now for some reason APAT events and structures seem to suit me, with < brag >3 final tables under my belt previously < / brag > but I was looking to go one better this time and actually convert a final table into a win!

Typically, on both days I had Bas ringing me to make sure I was turning up, as I did my standard Phil Hellmuth impression of late entrances and on the first day I arrived in the casino sweating after running or power walking more like lol 15 minutes from where I’d had to park my car and ran straight into the card room just as the players where sitting, talk about timing!

Early on I was card dead, a theme that would haunt me later in the tournament, but I moved up from my 10K starting stack to 12K with a couple of bluffs (standard!), I raised 89s UTG and double-barrelled to take down the pot, and then another with KQs when an Ace came on the river, I thought it was a good scare card as I’d raised pre and he folded and showed TT face up, I said good fold of course

Then after alot of nothing and plenty of patience showed, yes I can play patiently when I want to! I had a hand which put me up to 16K, when I won a 4K pot at 50/100 blinds when I managed to make quad Queens with AQ, the guy paid me off on the river with what I think was a full house made with JJ-99 although I never saw his cards as he threw them in the muck when I showed.

Then just before the dinner break I had a fairly big decision come up. Blinds where 200/400. There was a MP raiser who made it 1200 to go and I looked down at pocket Jacks on the button and raised it up to 3500, the small blind folded, and the big blind thought for just a second and then almost insta-pushed all-in for 11.5K more. The MP guy quickly folded and it was on me as JeffCheff watched on behind me. It was roughly a 11.5K call for me with the pot about 20.5k giving me around 1.78/1 to call. If I called and he had AK, AQ or TT and I held up and won I would be shipping it on about 32K if I folded I was down to around 11K with the blinds due to go up to 300/600 very soon . However, studying him I did put him on a strong hand, possibly a very strong hand. His range in this situation on a tight range would prolly be AA-JJ,AK - a looser one AA-99, AQ+. Personally I put him on either QQ, KK, AA or AK and my hand didnt stack up well against that and JJ actually only has 49.8% aquity against the widest range option.

With my equity being 49.8% of 20.5k = around 10.2k and with it being 11.5k to me call, this was borderline whether to call or not for me with pot odds of 1.8/1 almost and the advantages of a big double through in the tourney brings. The tight range had me at 24% equity, which made my pot equity around 5K. Thus I had to decide whether at best to flip for a big double up, or at worst take the worst of it so I thought for a while, but eventaully went with my read and not wanting to flip at this stage with still some play and folded.

But then it went from bad to worse, I got it in pre-flop with TT v a shortie with A9 , who proceeded to hit two pair on me and put me down to a measley 4 BB’s. I was almost out. However I didnt panic, and got it in pre flop in UTG+1 with 99 and was looked up by AJ and finally a hand held and I got a much needed double up.

I was still struggling, but somehow, with some re-steals all-in and timely moves, I managed to add to my stack and move up to an about just below average stack of 16K. Then there was a key hand, the button a guy I knew and respected from past APAT events raised from the button, I peep down at Ace-Ten off and push all-in on a re-steal. Now the button starts rambling on about bad beats on another table and about keep being raised off hands, he said sorry he knew he should not be calling and ‘no offence against me, he’d had enough’ lol. He called my all-in with KJs which was a bad call imo as if he lost he would be really seriously crippled, it was basically a call for his tourney life. If I knew he was tilty I might not have re-stealed but he suddenly re-ignited his tilt from a previous table and called! I was ahead but just barely at around a 55/45 favourite. I was worried this was the time I was going to get muffed, however an bullet hit the flop and my fears eased as the board ran out and I doubled up to 32K.

As the day wore on I got moved to a table full of huge stacks with around 40 left of the 200 or so starters. I raised 99 up after an EP limper and the chip leader pushed all-in, I folded and he showed Aces, lol at live player over-pushes with the nuts.

My next big hand was kind of funny actually. I picked up Ace-King, yep Big Slick, the feared one … a guy who looked like Sam Farha pretend ciggie thing in mouth and all raised in EP … I 3bet him  … and he tanked … and tanked … started asking me questions and giving it some chit chat. I was thinking he must have QQ-TT or something, then he folded and tried to muck his hand but his cards flipped over and he showed A7o, the table including the dealer laughed. He was seriously thinking of calling or pushing with A7o (after limping in EP!) and even defended himself saying he put me on 66 exactly! …

Anyway, next was a cruicial hand, and one that I’m quite proud of the way I played it. I’d just raised up two hands in a row (including the AK hand previously mentioned) and then looked down at KK in middle position. I did a standard 2.5x BB raise again. A lady (who went on to win the tourney actually), called on the button. Flop came Jd6d8x. I thought for a few seconds trying to look like I hadn’t hit, then checked warily. In came the expected 35K bet from the lady, I pretended to think, gathered enough chips for a call knowing I was going all-in, but then stacked all my chips and pushed hopefully making it look like I’d changed my mind about what I was planning and was on a draw … she called my CRAI with 99 and the board ran out and I held up to put me up to 175K, and I ended the day on 178K about 3rd or 4th in chips with 24 remaining.

Day 2 came … though the cards did not, although I did get a bit of early luck with KJ outdrawing AJ and K3 hitting a 3 on KT in a BvB all-in battle. These two pots and some steady play brought me to the final table as the chip leader on 330K with 2 others on around 300K.

In the first orbit of the FT, I picked up KJs in the small blind. Rich Offless, who I noticed liked to limp on the button because I think he likes to try and outplay others post flop limped on the button. I call in the SB and the BB checks. Flop came two of my suit, spades. I check-call Rich’s bet. Turn is the Ace of spades and I hit my nut flush. Turn goes check-check. On the river I put out a value bet, which Rich then small 3bets. I pause a while and then 4bet him, barely more than a min-raise like 1.25 times his bet and he quickly folds - obviously making a move. I was up to 450K establishing a proper chip lead.

The cards though still would not come, I was getting dealt trash like j3o, 74o, T2o, Q3o etc etc and was getting 3bet off hands.

Then I picked up 88 and raised and was 3bet all-in again by a short-ish stack, I called and he had AQ for a 280K flip and he hit a Queen to take the pot and put me back down to 310K. If I win that pot, it would have moved me up to about 600K and I could have been more dominent. Momentum was not going my way. As it was I had to scrap and 3bet all in with 88 which I picked up again over an MP raise. He said he folded AQ, but I expect he had more like AJ or ATs. I hit a nice 2 pair with Q2 in a SB v BB battle but other than that I was so card dead it was unreal. In the end the blinds got very high quickly, I was no longer chip leader as the lady from the KK CRAI hand the night before had gone on a massive heater getting AK, KK, AA, AK & AA in the space of 6-7 hands, it was unreal.

Down to 4 players and on the medal bubble, not that I was really putting that as a considerion - I wanted to win! We swapped blinds about then the UTG folded, BTN raised to 100K, SB folded and I 3bet him all in with KQ of spades. It was a call for his life as he had me barely covered. He tanked. Then called with AQ and I didnt improve and that was that. It was a difficult spot really. Maybe I could have passed, I prolly prefer to do this with 67s, but with the raise coming from the button and the prize structure so top heavy and KQs being like the best hand I’d seen on the FT apart from two 88’s I went for it. Heres is the forum link for the exit hand anaylsis

Overall I was very pleased with how I’d played. I played some of the best tournament poker I’ve ever done. I got lucky in a couple of spots pre-FT but you need that, but in the end I didnt get the right cards or spots on the FT where it mattered, a familar story!

APAT official Tournament Report

Video’s from the APAT Team Championships, Blackpool (July 19-20 2008)

Pre-Final Table interview

Final Table Introduction

Losing a flip when chip leader, 88 v AQ

Interview after exit in 4th

Sorry for the lack of updates guys, ’tis terrible I know but I really haven’t been playing enough poker to warrant a new post until now. Basically I got pig sick of getting deep in tournaments only for BT to go and disconnect on me and totally ruin things. Thing is the house we live in, is a new house that was built on what used to be a farm so the internet connection is really bad for everyone around here. It puts me on life tilt so hard sometimes.

Anyway I had a bit of break from the interwebs pokers while we got rid of BT and tried SKY (we wanted the Tv anyway as you can’t get cable here too!) and it seems a bit better. Not great like, but a bit more stable anyhows so far … touch wood. So what have I been doing in the meantime away from poker? Well I’ve been enjoying my social life alot more and it’s been good to have a break away from grinding at a pc for hours. I’ve also been working on reclaiming bank charges, credit chard charges, PPI loan insurance premiums and more at moneysavingexpert.com. It will take some time and alot of letter writing and legal mumbo jumo but Ive worked out I’m owed about £3k in total that I’m looking to claim back … including interest I’ve added on top of course at unauthorised overdraft rates of course!

Aside from that I’ve been doing alot of research and work into becoming a marketing affiliate. I have several poker websites that I’m looking to develop with the help of Ramchip and the folks over at PAF. Also my father recently closed down his security business and had a domain name he had no use for, so I decided as an experiment to turn it into an affiliate and thus Talbot Security Services is now a Surveillance Gadgets & Spy Electronics site ! I’ve only been working on this for a few days this week, but I’ve optimised the site for SEO fairly well I think. I just need to add alot of content and organise the different individual pages into a more presentable form. Sorry I’m rambling here…

My Poker websites will be my main focus though. I have plans for a website dedicated to ring game/cash game poker, a comprehensive website for beginners, a poker video site and more. I’m really excited about these. I’ve always been interested in websites and as I work in the IT industry, albeit in other realms the glove fits and I’m enjoying affiliate marketing so far.

Anyhows in my next post I’ll give you all a lil write up, belatedly, on my last live poker game I played in, the APAT Team Forum championship.

Realised I haven’t updated in a while so here we go, live poker wise, I did go to the £75 MTT in Bolton and ended up about 20th/45 when my QQ ran into a set of 5’s when the blinds where geting hefty, can’t complain. The tourney was quite good, 10K starting stacks, 40 min blinds for first 2 levels, after that was 25 min levels, although the blinds did double every level so not quite on par with an APAT/Virgin event structure wise, but fair decent for a local donkament anyway.

At the Dusk Till Dawn Team Challenge, I was pretty card dead all the way, ended up 29th/60 when I pushed with J2o to steal the blinds and was called by A8o which held. The blinds where geting very crap-shooty so you had to steal to keep alive, but on reflection maybe I should have waited for better cards, hand before I pushed and got no action with AKs which I showed, I dunno it was one of them and our team didnt do very well either.

Online, I’ve been playing limit poker most of the month, and was wining at $0.50c/$1 but then moved up to $1/$2 and wasn’t quite good enough making a loss, so overall my bash at limit produced break-even results.

I realise that I’d need to work at my limit game quite hard, and taking advice from others, all the fish are at NL these days, so I’m heading back to Full Ring NL.

I need some motivation to play, as tbh I’ve not been quite into poker recently as I once was, I need another challenge.

Thus I am going to start fair low down the stakes, 10NL on Stars, and plan to play at least 20K hands at that level. When I reach 20K hands, I will repeat and play another 20K hands to compare win-rates and then hopefully move up to 20/25NL and repeat, well that is the plan anyway.

I want to be playing 50NL regularly by the end of the year. These are my goals and I will stick to them, only deviating to play EMS leagues and donakements earned from FPP’s (will be playing the sats to the 100K to turn FPP’s into cash), wish me good luck.

Well I decided to give messing around at 2NL a miss and have a bash at small stakes donkaments on Stars while I wait for the new month to kick in upon which I will head mainly back to cash games.

 So far, well it’s been fun. I’ve been outdrawn left, right and centre and given a 1st class ticket to bad beat central and back, but I’m still smiling. I’m enjoying playing tourneys again, my MTT game defo needed some work so after a bad start to the $4 180s I’ve headed back into profits thanks to a FT in a $2 180, a 5th place in a $4 180 and a 1st place in a $3 45-man tourney and a few other small cashes in the 45’s.

The 45 man Turbos seem to have less variance than the 180s, one bad beat in the 180s and your out in 30th or so even if you play perfectly, but with less of a field in the 45’s there’s more chance to cash and a higher ITM % even though they’re turbo’s so I think I will stick to mainly 10 tabling them via cascading for short bursts of poker junkie action with a few 180s here and there.

In other news, there’s a £75 live 10k starting chips MTT in Bolton tomorrow, thinking of going if my wage has hit my bank by then.

Lo all,

In my last update I was talking about March being a good month for me cash wise and it was, clearing aprox $1,200 at the cash tables. But for the last two months I’ve barely played like 1k hands of ring game poker due to me being very busy with some other projects, hence lack of updates here.

Basically I’ve been having a go on the stock & shares making some monies and also planning some new websites that I will launch, eventually… Although I’m pretty good at SEO aka Search Engine Optimisation and I did create a few HTML websites as a kid, my design skills pretty much suck balls badly so I’ve been learning how to use Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop and the like and generally swotting up on all things websites.

I am however planning a return to the virtual felt on a more perma basis starting 1st June. Will probably play on Pokerstars as there’s no deal’s out there which interests me in terms of rakeback etc.  I recently purchased PT3 in preparation for this and until the new month kicks in I will probably be playing some 2NL to test the program out and just to generally chill.

In the EMS donkaments I’ve been experimenting with my play, seeing more flops, open limping, lots of meta game plays and basically doing loads of annoying niggling stuff that winds people up and the text books say that you shouldn’t. I have confidence in my post flop play and believe I can come up with a good ‘un-readable’ style out of it if I tweak it a little with my normal non-ems tourney TAG like style that I have been playing in tourneys like the DTD Team Challenge, where I have just been playing solid poker.

I think I’ve cultivated a nice donk-tard laggy image in the 2nd half of this seasons FO league and hope to use this to good effect and see some better results in the next seasons league