“I raise”

I stopped playing Xbox tonight for like 60 mins and threw away $200 on monkey tilt. Great. And I STILL haven’t got my roll back off Poker770! Honestly those guys are scum and I’m starting to get worried. I will be linking this blog to them as soon as (hopefully) I get my money. I will also email it to baldy Fabien Barthez who is supposedly their spokesman. Shysters!

Bought an Xbox360 last week and as a result I haven’t played any poker at all.

I am COMPLETELY addicted to Xbox live, honestly there is nothing equally pleasurable and infuriating as playing GTA4 and PES2008 on Xbox live.

That is all. Normal service will resume at some point when I get bored / broke. 

I continued playing on Poker770 this weekend, primarily because I pretty much have my entire roll there and moving it would have meant no poker, however I’m finished for the weekend now so have just cashed out everything… hmmm I’m feeling pretty anxious about the amount of money this company now owes me! I’ve still not received last weeks cashout, and last night I sent a pretty scathing email highlighting that I was the affiliate manager for a UK poker site and that I would be blacklisting them if I did not receive a satisfactory response. Shock horror… I’ve not heard anything back.

Anyways… pokerwise, strange weekend, for the first time in ages I started great, up about $400 in a couple of hours, which allowed me to GAMBOOOL… which didn’t go so well. I got stuck $175 in a $25 re-buy, and managed to throw away a really bigstack in the $50k gtd $109mtt. However I’ve finished in profit about $100 so all is not lost.

Fingers crossed Poker770 will give me my money at some point this decade then I need to pick a new home. I’m really tempted to go back to Stars, just cos they’re bloody good. However it makes sense to find the fish… and they’re not really at Stars, so gonna have a big old think about what I’m gonna do. 

Poker770 are an amatuer outfit and I’m done with them. Honestly I’ve never felt so frustrated with a poker site. I had a fairly large cashout due on Thurs, which as always with this site meant I had to chase them up and find out why it had not been processed. Que, slow stock responses in broken English telling me it will be sorted. Then I see their payment to my Neteller account has been "declined", this is the second time that has happened, funnily enough my two biggest cash outs, which kinda makes me worry about the financial liquidity of this site. And to cap it off, the site is now technically screwed, it’s taking me like 10 attempts to login, then when I do get in I can’t even join a game. Tested it out on another skin and it is fine, so def just Poker770.

Bah, last straw, had enough of dragging my money out of these guys. So where to? Well I wanna stay on Ipoker, so thinking I might go back to Victor Chandler, they were the very first poker company I played on back when they were independant and I never had any probs. Fingers crossed they are still good on the cus serv front, god I miss Pokerstars support!

Hmmm, now to see if I can snatch my roll from Poker770’s grubby fingers…

I’ve played a LOT of poker this weekend. The result… $46 profit. Haha. Oh man I suck sometimes.

I’m playing really swingy at the moment, phases of winning everything then absolutely nothing, and in general I’m playing way below my average, however I seem to have been petty lucky with the big cashes in mtt’s which has kept me happily in profit. My Sharkscope profit graph on Ipoker just looks really spewy (albeit a significant winner), if I was looking at someone elses graph and it looked like that I would assume they were very very aggressive and possibly prone to tilt, so maybe that’s it.

Anyways,this weekend I was about breakeven on everything, I would guess-timate that I wagered around $1.5k, so hmmm 3% roi, ship it. The only thing worthy of mention was that I finished 27th in $35k gtd for $205, that was a strange game, I crushed the mid-stages and then when we got into the money just nothing went right for me, it felt like every steal opportunity was raised before me, and I was card dead mainly.The occasional legit move I made seemed to be auto-folded all the way. Hohum, sometimes it happen, I’m under no illusion of how good you need to run to win these things, although I was thinking in my head what I could spend the $8k 1st place on.

Anyways, I’ve successfully avoided all the football results today and am looking forward to watching MOTD in a short while, COME ON WIGAN!

Adios

Edit - Ok, I was interested, so I had a look at my cashouts, and in the last 6 weeks I’ve cashed out $3,796 profit, so I’m obviously doing something right.

Edit 2 - FCK YOU CHANNEL 5 NEWS. Got the telly on mute and just happened to glance up and see Ronaldo score a penalty. Bah. 

Edit 3 - Just played 38 hands of $2/4 L and sneaked away with $40 profit, booya, $86 for the weekend now. Btw, limit poker is a fucking joke, no one ever folds and despite winning the eqiv of 30bb/100 I still wanted to murder someone for how irritating it was. 

Been a strange old week.

Bank holiday weekend was a mixed bag, Friday I got extremely drunk very quickly after the dissapointment of the job but thankfully managed to avoid making an arse of myself and ended up back at my place with a mate eating pizzas and kebabs. Mmmm healthy.

Saturday me and a mate went on a massive hike out in the Calderdale Valleys which was just lush, first beutifull day of the summer and a really good 16 mile workout, gotta say I really enjoyed it and it really took my mind off things.

Sunday… I popped blisters… nice.

Monday went out for a drink with lady K, drank too much and we ended up back at mine… naughty naughty.

Pokerwise, this week has been really strange, I’m $900 in profit but have been playing really badly. Played 3 medium sized sessions and finished session 1 -$130, session 2 -$30 session 3 +$1,060. In short I’ve been playing terribly (also partly running bad) in the single table tournaments, but just about making my money back in MTT’s, then last night I managed to take 2nd in a decent size tourney for just over $1k.

I can’t believe I finished 2nd again, so infuriating, 1st was over $2k. My mtt record since Iswitched to the Ipoker network is so weird, I’m cashing with alarming regularity and have made a ton of final tables but I just can’t seem to finish them off and it’s technically cost me loads in missed winnings. On Pokerstars my final table record was immense, infact I’m looking it up now…

Pokerstars MTT Final Table Record

26 Final Tables
8 x 1st Place Finishes
2 x 2nd Place
2 x 3rd Place

My Ipoker record off the top of my head guess-timate is something like

9 Final Tables
0 x 1st
3 x 2nd
2 x 3rd

Hmm I dunno, maybe variance, maybe to do with structures etc, although the recent cash we were heads up with like 25bb v 35bb so I can’t have any excuse for losing that. And before any mathematical smart arse pipes up, yes I understand the concepts of relevant sample size and deviation, still it pays to analyse any data available.

Bizarrely I got an email from Poker770 this morning asking if I would be prepared to answer an interview for them to be used for promotional material. Had a quick look through the questions and they seemed pretty banal,"How long you played poker? What do you do with your winnings? What advice would you give a new player?" blah blah… thing is I’ve found the customer support and general level of service on the site to be pretty below par so I’m not exactly keen, however I just thought I might be able to blag some freebies (100% rakeback yo!) so I’m gonna give it a little thought.

I didn’t get the job. Gutted would be an under statement.

I am so anxious and nervous at the moment it is ridiculous.

I had a job interview on Monday which is now down to 2 people, me and one other guy and I will be finding out some time this week. Honestly I can’t stress how much this job would mean to me, I won’t go into too much detail but it would involve me working largely in the Middle East, Dubai, Saudi Arabia etc… I mean shit, jobs like this don’t come along every day!

It’s an internal position so I know the other guy quite well, in fact he’s actually a pretty good mate, so either way things are going to be pretty rough between us, and in all honesty I really can’t predict how it is going to play out. In poker terms I would says it a pocket pair vs overcards all-in pre-flop scenario, just really close. 

Wish me luck! 

Well I haven’t posted for over a week which you can basically translate as I wasn’t winning! Had a crazy 7 days of poker, pretty much all last week I got my ass handed to me repeatedly and I was really stressed out. Had to withdraw a big chunk of money for non-poker related stuff and I "thought" I had left myself enough of a roll to comfortably multi table the $22’s but oh no, I forgot about the variance monster who preys upon the weak and vunerable waiting for the perfect moment to strike down upon thee with great vengeance!

So obv I went on a crappy downswing costing me somewhere around $300-$400, which wouldn’t normally be a problem… but it was. End of Thurs night, I figured I pretty much had to drop down a level to avoid the risk of ruin, I was pretty fucked off with myself and poker in all honesty.

Becoming a reclusive hermit I decided to stay in this weekend and put in some serious hours and "sort my shit out". Well it went pretty well… in fact, I finished the weekend in profit just short of $2k. Awesome, variance monster has a nice side too, bit of a jekyl and hyde character he is.

I’ve put the full results below, but to summarise, the majority of the money came from 2 mtt’s, I didn’t win either which was a bit annoying, but 3rd and 2nd still pay out a significant amount to get me out of a hole. All in all I profited at every level stt I played, and cashed in 5 out of 10 MTTs final tabling 3 of them. Fucking awesome, I want every session to be like that!

11 x $11 STT 2/4/5
5 X $22 STT 3/0/2
6 X $33 STT 2/0/4

OUT    $429
IN    $652

$5 MTT
$11 MTT        3rd $859
$3r MTT        $58
$3r MTT        $5
$5 MTT
$4r MTT        4th $108
$33 MTT        2nd $939
$109 MTT
$5r MTT
$10r MTT

OUT (inc re-buys) $235
IN    $1,969

Total profit for the weekend $1,957.

Only a smallish session, I’m really not putting in the hours at the moment.

11 x $22    2/4/5
4 x $33        1/3/0

$11 mtt
$22 mtt    $56

OUT    $407
IN    $656

Comments… well I’m winning again which is always nice, but I seem to have returned to the "can’t win heads up curse", which in the 6max games is essential due to the payout distribution, however I’m not going to complain. Oh and the $22mtt cash… I bubbled the final table which really stung, first was like $2k, and man I am seriously overdue a decent mtt win!

As mentioned at the start I’m really not putting in enough hours at the moment. I have a comfortable bankroll and am kind of cruising in 3rd gear or something, however I seriously need to earn some cash for non-poker reasons so starting Saturday I’m going to be hammering the stt’s and mtt’s.