a little bit of poker

40k hands done now

2010-11-21T21:22:00.002Z

Had a bad weekend of poker, lost $3k on Saturday at 200nl. Ran $2k below EV again but also played pretty poor and made a couple of tilty plays. Got a bit of it back today but still down about 1.2k for the month after being up 1k on Friday. Volume wise its going well so far, may not hit the 60k hands but I will be very close and happy with it as long as I can be in profit for the month also.

I had a really sick hand against Martin Klaesser, hes a German Full Tilt Pro. He is playing almost all the time, I dont think hes that good but he does seem to pretty well against me. I picked up AA on the button, the cutoff was after opening to $6 and I raised him to $18, myself and Klaeser were $500 deep at $1/2 and he raised me against to $48. I went for a call but could easily have 5b him here but he sqzes so much that I know his range is mostly crap and we have had quite a lot of battles in previous hands and he knows I would be flatting everything I 3bet against him here.

Flop came down 7c9s3h and he check calls my $55 bet into a $104 pot. The turn comes a 6c which I am not that happy about as I think it does give him some 2 pair hands and straights. We still have $400 behind and pot is $215, Klaeser checks so I bet $145 and he check raises allin. I more or less instantly called, as I think with the money already in the pot I have to call against his range. I also think he could play KK like this a bit as well and would have lots of combo draw hands in his range. I only need 24% equity to call him and I am pretty sure I have it. I also wasnt bet/folding the turn either as I think that would be a huge mistake with the hand I have.

He turned over Tc9c and had still had huge equity in the hand (39%) and he took down the $1k pot by hitting the T on the river. I am not sure about his post flop line, I like his c/c on the flop but the turn is tricky spot I think, he cant fold thats for sure but not sure if hes better to c/c again or play it as he did. Interesting enough hand I thought and the turn from his point of view is the most interesting.

I got my Black Card status on FTP today which should give me an extra few % rakeback through cash bonuses that can be bought with the points that you accumulate. I didnt get up any mornings this week as I was still hungover and tired from the weekend. I also added up my loses from morning play and I was quite astonised to see that I was down about $5.5k from playing in the morning time. I actually felt the games were softer then but I had no idea I was losing so much due to me winning in the evenings and almost balancing it out. I am going to try and give it a go again this month. Funds in my PP account are low and would like to boost them a bit so hopefully can book a few winning sessions this week.

10 days in, 20k hands played

2010-11-10T22:40:00.003Z

On track so far to reach my goal of 60k hands this month. I have avergaed 2k hands per day so far but the results have been very poor thus far. I really need to get it into my head at the start of a session that people do make hands and are not playing back at me all the time. I sometimes get the idea in my head that this is going on and just spew of a couple of buyins. Its the mental side of my game that I have the biggest problem with. Skill wise I think I am pretty good and will win a lot of pots but I just 5b shove too much and its probably one of my biggest leaks along with calling too much.

Im just after a short 40min session and won $500 and felt I played very well. Managed not to spew at all and won a couple of hands which was nice. Overall I am down $1.3k so far but will keep grinding at it and hopefully can post a winning 60k hand graph. I just need to focus on the mental side and take a few minutes at the start of each session to play calmly and in the right mindset. This is such a crucial part of the game so really need to start getting this right.

Getting the hands in

2010-11-04T00:08:00.002Z

Getting very good volume in so far this month, have played 8.5k hands so far in 3 days. Unforuntately Im down almost $2k. Running really really bad, playing quite well though and have had lots of very interesting hands. Played a 4 hour session there this evening at RUSH poker and lost 10buyins at 1/2. Won 3 at 50/1 but ran shocking. I think I played very well during the session. In the space of about 15 mins I just didnt win a hand and lost about 8 stacks. The thing I am very happy about was that I didnt tilt and managed to recover about $500 but should really have been a lot more.

Going to take tomorrow off as will be too tired in the morning and have astro in the evening. No harm to after taking a battering this evening.

Looking forward to a new month

2010-10-31T19:32:00.002Z

Its great how the mind works, October was my worst ever month at poker, lost over $8k in cash games and now with the arrival of November I can just put that month behind me and look forward to winning the loses back. Its great to be able to put October away and even though nothing really has changed it has a great psychological affect on your brain.

I plan on playing a lot this month, days are getting shorter and weather is getting worse so there will be more time to play as there is less time to play golf!! My goal will be to play 60k hands of poker which would be a lot more than I have ever played before. But with RUSH poker on Full Tilt I can get around 1k hands played every hour while only playing 4 tables. Despite last months loses and a large withdrawal I am still comfortably enough rolled to play 200nl 6max games so plan on playing that in RUSH. Also want to play on ipoker as I have much better rakeback there than FTP so will mix in 100nl games there as well so I can play 8 tables at a time.

There will be satellites starting now for the Irish Open and also the UKIPT in Galway so will try and play some of them also. Would also like to play 1 or 2 live games also. There are a couple on this month that look good so might try them. So the countdown for 60k hands starts tomorrow, I would say the chances of me doing it are about 50/50, really depends how I am running. If I start of badly I will find it much harder to get through them so hoping for a good start. Going to aim to beat the games for 3BB/100 (6bb/100) which is very ambitious giving that the games are getting tougher every day but best to aim high anyway!!

Shipped an IWF ticket

2010-10-12T01:07:00.002+01:00

Just won a ticket to the Irish Winter Festival which is on in 2 weeks time in Dublin, 20 players with 2 packages, very slow structure so never really had to gamble!!

Cash games on the other hand are still going downwards, playing a little better but still a bit of tilt in my play at times. Won a small bit today but lost a good bit a few days ago so still well down (-8k).

I'm not going to concentrate so much on trying to get back to even for the rest of the month. Just want to start playing better when I'm playing, especially HU as I have a huge leak in my game there which is basically tilt control and making dumb moves on the back of that.

Anyways bed time!

Booked a win

2010-10-04T19:44:00.002+01:00

Played a very short session this evening. 34 minutes in total, yielding $173. Played 500 hands of rush poker and to be honest I've no idea how I ended down $100, finished the session thinking I was up at least $100 but its very tough to keep track of your hands when playing it but non the less I was down. A couple of hands I didn't play great, failed to get enough value after a bad turn and the other hand I valued towned myself when I value bet KJ on a K high board and got called by KQ, but not too worried about that.

Opened a bunch of HU tables and two regular played me, one on Paddy Power and the other on Full Tilt, the PP guy hit and ran me, won a 50bb pot on his 4th hand and insta quit. It's one of the most frustrating things that happens so often when playing headsup. On FTP I played over 100 hands with the guy before I quit myself, could only play a short session and let him know that before we hand many hands played but he still bitched and moaned at the end!! But very happy to have 2 winning days in a row, only $5.9k to break even for the month now, at this rate I wouldn't make it but I just want to build up a few winning sessions in a row to get some confidence back into my game again.

One aim this month, get even

2010-10-03T18:09:00.002+01:00

Had my worst start to a month ever, after losing over $6k in first 2 days. For some reason anytime I have a good month the following one is always bad. This has happened everytime I've had a 10k month I proceed to have a losing month after that. So with that in mind my only aim this month is to play as many hands as it takes to get even. So I am around $6k in the red right now. Today I played 3.5k hands and made less than $50. It was all rush poker but will probably mostly play on ipoker for the rest of the month as I have a better rakeback deal there and if I'm putting in a lot of hands I may as well see the benefit of that at the end of the month.

It's so frustrating to get my bankroll up to over 20k, then make a large withdrawel and a few days later is almost cut in half. My own personal plan was to have a $40k bankroll to start 2011 with but that is very unlikely right now. If I had of wrote this a couple of days ago I would have been pretty confident to make it to maybe even 50k.

Since I last posted I played a live tournament were I played like an over aggro monkey. I find it very tough to play live tournaments and will not be buying into any in the near future. I will try 2 satellites on Paddy Power for the Irish Winter Festival as there is 2 big guarantees on there in the next couple of weekends.

Anyway going to try and update every day I play this month to motivate me to make sure I make some money this month. After a fierce downswing I am a huge believer in just booking a win no matter how small it is. I think its good for the mental side of your game just to see that you've had a winning day. So when I go back to even today I quit and hopefully I can string a couple of winnng days together now.

Lovely graph so far this month below:

Vegas and other stuff

2010-07-28T22:20:00.003+01:00

Got back from Vegas about a week and a half ago. Was glad to be leaving by the end of it as I ran pretty badly in anything I done over there. Tournaments were a total disaster, I played the $1k wsop side event, got it in with KK vs AA and then got knocked out with my AK getting outdrawn by AJ allin preflop. Next tournament up was a Venetian deepstack with me getting a decent stack in against a very aggro Euro who 4b shoved on me with K3s against my 99 and I couldn't hold. After that it was a satellite for the WSOP main event were my AK ran into JJ allin pre again, so was on to the last mega satellite were I first got 4 outered on the river by some old American guy and then just to finish me off with live poker in Vegas another old American guy does the 1minute slowroll on me with the AA when I had put all my money in preflop with the KK.

So enough of the bad beats, the rest of the trip was really good with my mate Nelius coming 6th in the Sunday Million for $48k. Was a pretty funny story as he called over to my hotel room to rail me as I was doing well in a few Sunday tournaments. He brought the laptop with him and decided to play a hyper turbo for the Sunday Million and he just finished up the satellite 1 minute after registration and the poor lad had to play it then as it was too late to unregister. He had only planned on winning some $T as it was 4th of July and the plan was to go out in Vegas So another one of the lads called over and we had a few beers and room service arrived with the dinner as it was about 8 hours into the Sunday Million and no sign of him getting knocked out at all, Final table came along with the first few pay jumps being $15k so it was pretty exciting stuff. Unfortunately his 55 couldn't hold against AQ and we missed most of 4th of July but ended up having a pretty good night after that.

Before I left I had finished up with my job of 4 years, handed in my notice for pastures new when I cam back from Vegas. Was a pretty big move and who knows if it will pay off. Luckily enough I have managed to get a temporary 5 week job which will give me some very good experience in an area that I really want to get into. Poker has also being going really well since I have got back with me re cooping all my Vegas losses and some more. Maybe I just spoke to soon, just lost heads up as I wrote this for a €2k tournament in France. Oh well!!! Could be worse won my biggest pot ever earlier though were I sucked out pretty badly against 1 player in a pot that was worth €2.5k. My 22 was too good for AJ and JJ on a 264J board with a magical 2 on the river!!

Anyway that's enough bad beats for 1 day

Vegas time

2010-07-03T00:12:00.002+01:00

Arrived in Vegas very late on Wednesday night, left Dublin at 12.30pm and it was 12.30am (Vegas time) when I eventually got to my hotel. Turned out to be a pretty nasty journey with our flight getting delayed and spending almost 6 hours in JFK as a result. Thankfully the hotel was amazing when we got here. Staying in one of these, the room is just pure class and have a pretty decent view as well up on the 42nd floor.

So far results wise I have got off to a pretty terrible start, I played the $1k event today which started off really well. I was playing super tight for the first 45mins or so when I opened 69s in MP and the button and BB called. The flop came down Q55 and I cbet 200 into the 300 pot, both players called me but the button looked in real pain when calling. The turn then came a 7 giving me a gutshot so I decided that I was going to take another stab at this one as both players seemed pretty weak. I bet 600 and the button tank folded and the BB called. The river was a magical 8 and he put me allin for my 1.8k, I duely called and he said you are probably good. His QJo was no match for my straight.

So was up to about 6k then when the blinds have just gone up to 25/50, I raise KK to 150 and I get 3bet to 450 by a pretty tight player. The guy with the QJo from earlier shoved the last of his chips in and I raise to 1.1k and got shoved on by the tight guy with the AA!! He turned a flush and I was drawing dead. So then had my stack put down to 2.7k and played really tight again for another few orbits, when the guy to my right min raised to 100, I made a pretty big 3b to 425 and he shoved allin, my AK was no good though against his AJo and to the rail I went. Not much I could have done different. I have % in 2 others players so hopefully one of them can take it down for me!!

Have played some live cash as well which I am also down in, playing just ok at that. Standard is pretty bad so hopefully can win some back in that. Also played a bit online which went well. Paddy Power brought us out last night to a very nice restaurant in the Wynn. SW lived up to its reputation as the best steakhouse in Vegas. Had a 4 course meal there which was very nice indeed. We had a private room just off the main restaurant free drink all evening so turned out to be a pretty good night out. Feeling it today though!!

I plan to play some more tournaments over the next few days, the deepstack games in the Venetian look good so will play some of them and also will try some of the megasats for the WSOP main event. Will probably play some more live cash, playing 1/2 at the minute, will stick to that until I can build up some cash as I am waiting for money to come in from Neteller which is taking its time to say the least. Anyway time for some rest!!

Early night

2010-06-20T23:29:00.003+01:00

Was planning a late night picking up multiple WSOP packages but just after busting out of 4 satellites. I played Cake, Betfair, ipoker and PokerStars. Was planning on playing Full Tilt as well but it was going to depend on how I was doing in the others. Seeing as I had busted the rest of them before Full Tilt started I just had no interest in playing it then. Not going to rhyme out my bad beats for the night but it would have been nice to run like normal and win a few allins but wasn't to be. Will try 1 or 2 live satellites when I get to Vegas as a last ditch effort.

Would be nice to qualify obviosuly but if I don't there are still plenty of other great tournaments on while I am out there so intend playing a few of them anyway. Only 9 days to go now till I fly out. Can't wait!!

Finished

2010-06-19T18:23:00.004+01:00

Well I finished the promotion earlier in the week. Took me almost $98k hands and over $12k in rake to finish it. Ended up winning smallish in the end at the cash games. Was up almost $10k with about 3 days to go but ran extremely bad last Sunday especially at 3/6 and 5/10. One particular bad 5 minutes was losing with AA on an A35K5 board to 55!!, getting AA and AK both beaten by AKo allin preflop with both making 4 flushes. But that being said I ran pretty well overall, I don't think I'll ever take on such a promotion again as it took me 177 hours of play in about 7 weeks which is far too much poker for me to be playing. Took up a hell of a lot of my free time and I am really glad to have that back again.

So after it all now I have the seat into event 54 in WSOP, 6 nights in a 5star hotel, $1.3k in spending money and picked up $2.7k in bonuses along the way also. Now I still have 67k points so have the option of getting to 70k and getting a $750 bonus or else I can get to 100k and have a ticket for the Irish Winter Festival which is on next October I think, the ticket is much better value but its also hard to turn cash so not 100% sure what I will do there yet. In rakeback % terms it wasn't as much as Paddy Power had advertised but don't regret this too much as it worked out at a pretty good incentive to play as there isn't a chance I would have played as many hands otherwise and probably wouldn't have went to Vegas either unless I was to get a ticket in the supersats so the incentives were good.

Tomorrow night there are a number of mega satellites for the WSOP main event so will be playing 3 or 4 of them and fingers crossed can pick up a ticket for that. Failing that I will try 1 or 2 live satellites in Vegas for it. If I don't make it there are plenty of other tournaments on while I am there which are pretty good value.

Swingy graph of the whole promo below, some strange enough stats as well. The amounts I won and lost at the different currencies is weird. I guess its probably just to down variance rather than the games being tougher at £ and € tables at 200nl. Even though the winrates are pretty small I can probably put some of this down to not table selecting enough and always playing 12 tables or more. I am looking forward to just playing normally again and not having to grind out hands so much. Hopefully now this can help me get up to playing at 2/4 more often again as I had decent enough success in the small sample that I played there.

92%, almost there

2010-06-12T22:40:00.002+01:00

92% done with 1 day left to go!! Probably won't get it finished tomorrow as I would have to play about 8 hours to get it done. From what I hear if I can get it finished in the next few days it will be fine anyway but would really like to finish it tomorrow. Will depend on the weather I reckon!!

Today went well with me getting about 4% done and winning about $3.5k, played some €10/20 when there was a good spot in the game but didnt run all that well and lost a small amount in this game. At one stage I had €3.5k on the table and a couple of players had me covered, was playing fairly tight and not getting out of line at all. €3.5k is just way to scary for me to lose so took the cautious approach by flatting with AK a few times against the better players but ultimately it came down to a flip when I put my money in vs the fish. Pot was over $3k which is by far the biggest pot I have every played and ended up losing it with my JJ not holding vs AK. I even flopped a clean flush draw but couldn't hit my J or heart and the the fish got some more money which he eventually gave back to the table. Was a good experience for me and hopefully sometime in the future I can play there again but be actually rolled for it and not a scared pussy cat like I was today!!

70% there

2010-06-05T12:11:00.002+01:00

Good enough week $ wise but really finding it tough to get the hands in. Played 10k hands since I last updated on Sunday. I have won every day I have played since so at the end of the day that is more important than just getting hands in.

Off to Donegal now for the weekend, can't wait to take a spin on the new M3. Will bring Donegal a lot closer to Dublin now. It really is great to see all these new roads getting opened up, one good thing about the Celtic Tiger era!!

I probably won't get a chance to play now until Sunday evening but with Monday being a day off I will try and make up some time there, basically only 8 days to go now!!!

60%

2010-05-30T22:33:00.004+01:00

Disaster this weekend as I din't get to play a single hand. Friday was a decent enough day with me playing 2.3k hands but was hungover on Saturday morning and then went to Cork in the afternoon. I got back up about 8ish this evening and had to do a few things to was around 9ish when I got on the PC. I opened up my buddy list and scanned the tables but the games seemed pretty poor. Combined with the fact that I was tired and didn't really feel like playing I just said I will let it go tonight.

In spots like this I normally just play anyway but I think I made a good decision and watched Sopranos instead. I know if I had of played for an hour and lost 1k or so I would just have been thinking "Why the hell did I bother playing?", last thing I want is it to cost me $1k just to make an extra 1% or 2% of the challenge done. Instead I will feel more refreshed tomorrow after haivng a 2 day break.

So now I have 26% of the time gone and 40% to get through which is approximately 40k hands in 13 days or 3k hands per day. This is going to be almost impossible at this stage to get finished on time as next weekend I have to go to Donegal and will find it pretty tough to get many hands in while I am up there. Going to be really tough going over the next 2 weeks!!!

52% now and internet problems

2010-05-24T17:43:00.002+01:00

52% of the way there now with 58% of the time gone. Wasn't a very productive weekend for getting hands in mainly because I was too hungover on Saturday to do anything never mind play poker. Sunday I did manage to play some in between the sun and had my most profitable day ever in cash games. Banking very close to $4k, unfortunately on Friday I had one of my worst losing days losing close to $3k so a small gain!!

Since Friday my Internet hasn't being working. Done all the usual stuff with resetting the modem and unplugging it but wouldn't come back. I have a mobile broadband modem so I used this as a backup but it was pretty frustrating as it was not very reliable which meant a few disconnects. Luckily for me none were too costly. But this evening I was trying to get connected and even though it would connect nothing was happening. With UPC scheduled to come in the morning I gave the modem one last effort. After all I am a telecoms engineer this should be a piece of piss for me. So one last go at dis con and reconnecting all the cables and coax and then giving the modem a hardware reset after about 5minutes it came back online. So good to have the reliable 30MB back compared to the unreliable mobile broadband.

So hopefully that will allow me to get some hands in tonight. Not to many though as I have the LOST finale to watch. Was tempted to watch it this morning "as live" but was far too tired at 5.30am to get up. So back on the grind again!!!

39% but a frustrating day today

2010-05-16T22:23:00.002+01:00

Played the most amount of hands ever in a day today, played 3 sessions in total today with 4.5k hands in total. The morning session was very good with me winning $1.2k and then the second session was also good winning $300 but then lost it all back and much more in the evening session which ended up leaving me down $1k on the day. Not to sure what to blame that on but probably a combination of playing badly, playing to long and playing to many tables at once.

46% of the time is gone now and I am a good bit behind, I really need to up the volume now over the last 27 days. So far I have averaged 1631 hands/day but will need to up that to 2145 hands/day. One of my main problems at the minute is winning while putting in such volume, I am losing slightly so far but this is mainly from tournaments. It's hard to find the right combination between getting as many hands as possible and also making some dollars. Really going to have to work on this.

Finally graph attached so far, pretty desperate stuff. The 4k swing in the middle is were I took a shot at playing only 2/4 tables and failed miserably with me losing every flip, missing every draw and getting coolered. All the hands were pretty standard I think but bad all happened in the space of about 100 hands. Also lost $1.2k in another embarrassing moment which I won't bother describing here :)

Would be nice to have a nice 45deg line instead of the mess below!!

Falling behind

2010-05-13T20:44:00.002+01:00

Have 31% done now with a few losing days there now. Didn't play any today at all as I am too hungover to play right. I probably won't play tomorrow either and don't know what I am doing over the weekned yet so will have to make a very big push in the 2nd half of this. I will try and get up early tomorrow morning and get in an hour or two. It's so tough though to get up that extra hour early in the morning as I love my bed at that time.

To add to that I am not playing the best either, losing pretty badly in 6max games but winning really well in headsup games but you can never get enough hands in at headsup tables so have no choice really. I will just have to work a lot on my 6max games from now on. PPP are having a rakerace promo on their euro tables so I will be playing a lot of them to try and finish high up in that. I have done well enough in their other races so far so heres hoping for another top 5 finish in that

20% there

2010-05-03T15:05:00.004+01:00

At the moment I am just over 20% of the way to Vegas. I put in a lot of hands over the weekend. I am finding it really tough to play this amount of hands and when you read about some of the prop bets on 2plus2 and similar I begin to realise how tough the bets they undertake are. I heard that some online pro played about 40k hands in one day which is quite unbelievable. To think its taken me 10 days to play less than half that its some going. The good thing is that I am winning at the moment and my hourly is hitting around the $50/hour mark now but it has been fierce swingy so far with me having a -$2k day and also a +$2.5k so I probably won't be able to read to much into the hourly until I have around the 100k hands completed.

last night I went kinda deep in a super satellite for the WSOP. I had satellited in through a $80 seat and ended up getting knocked out in 8th place with 2 $13k packages up for grabs but I was never really near getting a ticket. I wasn't picking up any hands at the right times at all. I must also try and satellite into the $700 super sat on PokerStars as them and Full Tilt have the best package on offer because if you end up cashing in the WSOP they buy you into a PCA event or the WSOP next year respectively so its best for me to just try and qualify on one of them sites.

Putting in a lot of hands

2010-04-29T20:08:00.003+01:00

Since I've started this WSOP for free promo on Paddy Power I've 12k hands in 6 days which is a hell of a lot for me, about 3 times as much as I usually play in that time. Worst thing is I really don't have the time to play all these hands, Looking at HEM it has taking me 18.5 hours to play this many which works out at a measly $18/hour in winnings which is much much lower than what I normally make when I would be playing heads up or when I am playing less tables. I'm finding it really tough to play so make the best decisions all the time when I have so many tables on the go. At the end of the promo if I could make over $50/hour I guess I would take that.

It's pretty tough going as I am getting up an hour earlier each day to play before I go to work and then play for another hour in the evening (Dedication FTW). With me starting to get more into golf there really is not enough hours in the day at the moment. I really could do with a 26 hour day I reckon!!! Overall though I am 12% of the way there now with 12% of the time gone. I would like to play about 3.5k hands per day at the weekend and 6k hands over the week which would make 13k hands a week and should get me there with a day or two to spare.

I booked my flights to Vegas for the 30th of June to 15th July the other night for €550 which was a pretty good price. I am flying out that day with 2 friends so should make the trip much better, starting to look forward to it already.

March/April and Irish Open

2010-04-24T17:45:00.002+01:00

March was a fantastic month for me in poker. I had my biggest winning month by far in cash games winning over $9k but lost about €1k in tournaments trying to qualify for the Irish Open. I went deep in a few satellites for it but in the end I bought in and sold off some % to a few different people through IrishPokerBoards.com. In March I showed a lot of discipline in game selection and playing at times when I was really focused and determined to play.

April of course was the downfall of me, I was pretty cocky and confident that I was beating the games really well and not paying much attention to good games and generally squeezing poker in when I didn't really have time to play. Like maybe I had planned to go to the cinema at 8pm and I would sit down at 7pm and say I can fit 30mins in here now and would end up losing a $1k and going off to the cinema then in a rush and down a nice bit of money which ain't great for your humor but loses like this don't affect me too much but in cases like this they are avoidable which is probably what makes them more annoying.

So as I said before I played the Irish Open. I was really looking forward to playing this from the minute I had decided to buyin as I have been dreaming of playing this tournament for the last 4 years and especically after being conned out of a ticket last year. The tournament itself was a €3.5k buying with 10k starting chips which to be honest is not good enough for the buyin. I've played much better structured tournaments before with buyins of about a 1/4 of the Irish Open and considering I am much better at playing with deep stacks in these games I was a bit disappointed and even more so when I had only a 1/4 of my starting stack by the first break after having to fold top house which was basically AA in my hand on a QQ8KQ board. This hand has probably bugged me since but after chatting to a few different people I think I played the hand optimally.

During the game this hand kinda had me on tilt as I didn't get to see his cards and it was bugging the hell out of me whether this guy was capable of pulling off an outrageous bluff there. After the break I nitted it up so much and managed to get my stack back up to about 8.5k for the dinner break. I then managed to get my stack up to about 16k and with half an hour to go I see AK in early position and get 3bet by an young active foreign player and we get it allin and I lose to his JJ. Afterwards I wasn't too disappointed as I felt I played really well over the day and after making a mistake or 2 before the first break I recovered pretty well to give my chance of having an average stack going into Day 2 but I lost the race and that was that.

Last Sunday I played a few online tournaments as I was doing really terrible at cash games and just losing $500+ every session I played so decided that I would try some tournaments instead which turned out to be a great move. I entered the $100 buyin $30k guaranteed on ipoker and beat 302 players after a gruelling 8 hours play to finish first for a cool $7878 which put the month back on track.

During the week I seen an offer Paddy Power have of sending players to the WSOP when you rake a certain amount (~$9k) so I am going to give that a go. It's going to be extremely tough for me to manage this as I don't usually play more than 20-25k hands in a month and this requires about 90k hands in 2months so I will have to up the number of tables and hours this month if I am to succeed. Hopefully I will get a chance to update on my progress on this more often as its a pretty big challenge for me to play that amount of hands but its probably my best chance of going over for the WSOP, bare in mind its only a $1k entry but it also covers an hotel for a week and flights and I would try a few super sats for the main event while I am there unless I win the bracelet in the side event.

Getting out of it

2010-03-13T00:11:00.003Z

Still in the midst of my worst ever downswing in cash games but I am about about half way out of the $14k that has troubled me for about the last 4-5 months. Have been really picky with game selection in the last month which has no doubt helped me win at the rate I currently am. I've been playing as little tables as I can, often only 2 6max at times but I could have up to 10 open in the background waiting for people to sit with me at HU tables from 100nl up to 400nl. I would basically play anyone at 100nl HU no matter how good they are on PTR but at 200nl and 400nl I am not going to be playng someone that I don't think I have a decent edge on.

Hopefully as my bankroll grows I will be able to play anyone at 200nl and be less selective at 400nl as even though I have been playing fish mainly at this level I have managed to lose over $1k at this game alone. But this is really nothing as its not even 3buyins which is just nothing at HU but my point is that its a lot for me and the less edge I have on someone the more chance I have of losing buyins!! But at 100nl its good to play stronger players as it improves your game as there are much less fish as you move up the stakes and inevitably you meet better and tougher opponents so I need to be able to hold my own against these types.

Heading over to Liverpool tomorrow, staying there Saturday night before I get the train to Manchester in the morning for my first game at Old Trafford. Really looking forward to the match vs Fulham as I have wanted to see a Man Utd game since I was about 7 or 8. So hopefully Rooney will continue his form and actually plays on Sunday and United can stay top for the rest of the season now :)

Overdue update

2010-03-01T00:33:00.002Z

Havn't updated in a long time as I have been on the worst run of my life up until the last 2 weeks I guess. Things turned around for me last weekend when I came first in a tournament for $3900 and I won some money in cash games for a change as well as collecting some rakeback and bonus ended up making this one of my most profitable months ever.

Have been up until now playing in tournaments, played about 10 tonight. Most went really bad apart from 2 on ipoker were I was going well in the Irish Open supersat until I shoved allin with A8o for a lot of chips only to get a very relucatant call from QQ. Then in the 250k guarantee I was going really well with about 65 people left and I was over the average chips but my 99 could not hold vs A8 which crippled me, would have moved into the top 10 in chips had a club not fell on the river. Ended up cashing for $1k in that.

Also played a load of other tournaments but probably broke even at the end of them. So after things going well in the last 2 weeks my bankroll has got a considerable boost and I am back in the green for the year now so hopefully onwards and upwards from here on now. With WSOP coming up in July, I would really love to be able to go back again this year so have a lot of hard work and some luck needed before July.

2010

2010-01-10T21:00:00.002Z

So first of all Happy New Year to all my readers. Just got back into poker today for the first time this year. Was away sking for the last week so haven't played any poker in the last 11 days which was a nice break away from the game. Saying that though I have been looking forward to getting back into it after the break off and hopefully will be refreshed and will get back playing better than before. Things got of to a winning start in the short sessions I played today which is exactly what I wanted. Got some heads up action against a regular and destroyed him so that was a confidence booster. Won about $300 from him before he quit me and also played a couple of hands against a few other guys before they went bust/quit. I am well set up this year bankroll wise now after finishing 2009 with a few tournament results and winning some in cash.

The plan will be to play only 100nl for this month mainly at HU/6max but also to get some more PLO hands in also. Going into February I aim to be in a position to be playing 200nl 6max. I have sufficent money on 3 different sites were I am very comfortable to be playing my games so with that I aim to game select much more this year and try play the best games possible over my 3 sites. Towards the end of last year I started playing some heads up SNGs. I done quite well in the small sample that I played so this is something else that I plan to play more off.

I have tried to make up an excel document to track all my profits/loses for the year. I'm not very good at excel, I can do basic stuff but wouldn't be much use at working out formulas across multiple sheets but am giving it a go. I am just basically trying to keep a very accurate track on how things are going for me. Nothing else to mention for now, will post again around the weekend.

2009 in review

2009-12-13T22:23:00.003Z

Have been meaning to update this for the past week or so, but havn't been playing any poker at all so ended up never bothering with it. December started off a total disaster, I only played 6 days and averaged about -$350/day or about -$200/hour. To be fair to me though I ran horribly bad, instead of being down $2.2k I should have been up $450 but I sucked pretty bad at winnings pots when I was a huge favourite to. Last Saturday took the biscuit altogether with me losing 1.8k and after that I had decieded that that was enough for the month and was going to have an early end to my poker month and year. I decieded to play a few tournaments on Sunday which was pretty successful but in the end no major result. I did finish 14th/800 players on Everest for $2.5k but ran QQ into AA for a big pot and that dashed any hopes of a $57k first place finish.

So 2009 wasn't really all I hoped it would be, I went backwards in online cash, started the year taking shots at 5/10 6max and finished it playing 50c/$1 hu cash and 1/2 6max. I did have $8.5k of cash winnings and made about the same in rakeback so wasn't a total failure, I did withdraw a lot of my roll each month for about 8/9 months of the year so never ever really got to progress and move up levels, mostly moved down levels. I also was supposed to play the Irish Open but that never happened due to me basically being robbed of my ticket worth €3.5k. As it turned out I would not have played it anyway due to my uncle Michael passing away that weekend (God Bless his him). Graph of cash games below:

I guess the highlights for the year would have been winning a $13k package and living my poker dream of playing the World Series of Poker Main Event and playing at the same table with some truely amazing players like Elky, Kipster, Marty Smyth, Neil Channing, Scotty Neguyn, Steve Davis and Jamie Gold :). I made my first live final table in the Cork Poker Classic and taking home €5.5k for 8th place. I won the baords Division B heads up league for $2k.

Overall it has been a pretty great learning experience for me, I didn't run great this year and ended the year on a $10k downswing. I never played out of my roll and always moved down levels at some point. Sometimes I should have done it earlier but certainly never once put myself in any danger of busting my bankroll. Overall I made about $25k profit on the year which isn't to bad considering I do have a full time job and poker is getting tougher by the day to make money from.

2010 my aspirations would be to:

Start at 100nl HU cash, 100PLO and 200nl max cash but move up the levels more aggressively/quicker than I have done before. $50k online cash winnings (Fuck the 8k-100k challenge :) )

Play more live touranments including the Irish Open and WSOP ME with a side event.

Win the boards Div A heads up league

No doubt I will get a few hands in between now and 2010 but I would imagine 2k hands and a few tournaments would be the height of it. Havn't played now in a week and am really starting to look forward to 2010 already. Thanks to everyone that read this for the year and Happy Xmas and happy new year to everyone. Until 2010, good luck!!

October is in the past

2009-11-01T21:18:00.002Z

The title is how I will view October, it was without a doubt my worst month ever since I started playing poker and there hasnt even been a close second. I lost in the region of $6.5k between 2 live tournaments, live cash, staking someone in a tournament and online cash games which was the biggest loser by far.

As I just said in my challenge blog, me starting sessions in the wrong frame of mind and knowing before I start that I wasn't going to be playing my best game has cost me a lot of money last month, I still have a decent bankroll so I really need to safeguard it this month. The last thing I want to do is go bust as I have no ambitions to start at micro stakes again and run my way back up.

I think one of the biggest mistakes I have made in the last 2 years regarding poker has been cashing out money. While this may seem like a stupid comment, I really should have cashed out less which would have left me overrolled for limits and be able to move up quicker. This is especially true when you are playing small stakes as the money you make for the month isn't that much so when you take this out your bankroll is not much ahead of were it was at the beginining of the previous month. So with this in mind I do not intend in cashing out in the forseeable future. I may reward myself at times but will not be taking out specific amounts at the end of each month like I have for the last year.

So for Novemeber my main goals are a change in my attitude when I start playing, quitting session earlier and playing well and results will be a minor goal.

Things can only get better (I HOPE)

2009-10-17T09:38:00.004+01:00

Last 10k hands has been a bit of a nightmare, have being player terribly for the last 10 days or so and basically havn't being able to have a winning day. I havn't played in a few days now as I after I lost 5bi quickly in the last session I played on Wednesday I just said that was it until after the Boylepoker IPO which starts at 1pm today. So on the back of losing over $5k the plan is to win it all back and more in that today. But I have a sneaking feeling that won't happen. There will be 1500 others players to beat so its going to be a struggle and with a quick structure it will turn into who can simply run good so not looking good there for me.

My challenge obviously not going according to plan with me around the $4k mark at the moment, so will have a lot of work to do there considering I will be playing lower stakes when I start back into that next week. I've had a downswing like this twice before and also very long breakeven periods so I know that this happens and its no real shock. It's just a matter of keeping the head and riding out the storm. The good thing about these things that I usually find is that you go an a huge upswing after them so hopefully one is on the way very soon and get this challenge kickstarted again. Graph of the disaster below:

Started my challenge

2009-10-08T23:04:00.001+01:00

Read all about it here

Not typing any more as my wireless keyboard has no juice left!!

Killarney and stuff

2009-10-07T16:48:00.003+01:00

Headed down to Killarney last Friday for the €550 main event game, I struggled into Day2 with half the chip average so had about 20BB when I came back for start of Day 2. Day 1 was pretty uneventful, card dead all day long so just played very tight and played very little poker. Day 2 was more of the same really, I did pick up a few good hands but always got them in bad spots, my stack is about 15bb and I get AK in the BB after a limper in MP and the SB limps, I move allin but know I'm not getting called. At this stage of the day I would be happy to get called here as its early in the day and I would like to get some sort of stack together rather so I can have a decent stack for the bubble.

As expected I got no action here, I push allin a few more times and blinds go up and I'm back to 12bb again. I see 33 in the BB and after a MP raiser whos being pretty active makes it 2.5BB I go allin here but get called by AQ and the flop comes down a very scary JT5 with a K on turn to leave me heading for the rail.

I go play some live cash after this which I havn't played in about 1 year, I think it was this time last year when I played 2/5 in the MGM. The 2/5 game in Killarney was nowhere near as soft as the one in Vegas though. I had 2 young English pros to my right, (1 who makes videos for the biggest poker training site, Cardrunners) an old rock on my left and a few others who didn't do much wrong while they were playing. With the expensive rake this game turned out to be an unprofitable spot for me. I played until the dinner break in the tournament at which stage I was stuck for about €300. The worst thing about the game though was that I had no cash to reload. Max I could take from the ATM was €600, so going to have to sort that out in advance any more. Funny thing about live cash is though that I am kinda scared playing it in a way. I don't like losing real money, online I can lose thousands in a day/hours and not care to much about it at all, but in live games I wouldn't really like to flip for a €1k pot.

But, down there I did witness the funniest hand I've ever seen in my time playing poker. So the guys involved were a mid 20 year old from England, big build of a guy and a 25-30 year old from Dublin. So the Dublin is having a few beers and playing very aggressive. He's over bet shoving with his bluffs and slow playing huge hands. So the English guy raises to 800 and the Dublin guy calls. The flop comes down A56 with one club, the Dub check/calls a 1.2k bet or so. The turn is an 8c and the action goes check/check. A 9c on the river and the Dub checks and the English guy throws in a 5k chip. The Dub instant min raises it up to 10k (Earlier he done a similar one with 72 after he limped pre and made trips on turn, he also done it with QQ on an A and K high board and got someone to lay down a pair of As), so the English guy dwells for an age and makes it 20k, dub looks at his hand and at the board and anounces allin for about 3k more or so. The English guy is in distress now and is convinced that the dub somehow made a backdoor straight but obviously he is never folding and calls. The Dub asks him has he got and A?, english guys says no :) and throws over K7 for a straight. The Dub looks at his cards and looks at the board and is still not sure if his hand is no good. He eventually flashes JJ and leaves the table, much to the dissapoinment of everyone else at it.

One thing I have been thinking about the last few days is starting a challenge for myself. Someone else mentioned to me that they were thinking of doing a similar tone. Would basically involve turning $8k into $80k by being really strict with bankroll management and maybe giving myself a set time frame with clear goals along the way. At the moment I lack this and just take shots at bigger games when I feel like it. This approach hasn't worked well recently so maybe a change is in order. Will think more about this over the next day or so, but would like to start something ASAP.

September

2009-10-01T10:26:00.004+01:00

Very dissapointing month this was. Started of reasonably well but had a lot of $2k and $3k losing sessions which gave a pretty stressfull month of poker. The main problem was that I couldn't seem to get 2 winning days in a row which lead to a very swingy graph

So in total I ended up about $2.5k after rakeback and bonuses BUT I managed to lose quite a bit playing online tournaments which I am going to have to stop buying directly into games that cost over $150, I bought into 7 of these this month and showed no return in any of them. I was quite unlucky in that I bubbled a super satellite for the PokerStars WCOOP ME which was worth $5.3k. So after taking the tournaments into account I ended up $1k in the green.

On brighter news I did buy my first car which I am delighted with so far, I got a 2007 VW Passat. It's a top of the range model and is in mint condition with only 35k miles on it. I bought it in Eniskillen and they bought it directly from VW who owned it previously. It has a lot of factory fitted extras such as heated seats, parking sensors, a VW bluetooth phone kit which is worth about €800, full leather, electric seats and has all the usual stuff such as electrics and AC etc. Really looking forward to driving her down to Killarney now for the Ladbrokes €550 game which is on this weekend. Came 28th/830 last year so would be a good weekend if I can beat this.

Live tournaments are much easier I think than online ones and also the fact that I don't get bored/frustrated as quickly in live ones as you don't really want to look like a fool in live games and I am less likely to spew off a stack (Already jinxed myself for the weekend) so fingers crossed I can run well but more importanly run well near the big money end as I failed to do this last year.

For October the goals will be to play 35k hands at 200nl and also play a lot of 100nl HU against easy competition.
Not to play any online tournaments unless they are satellites.
Do well in the Boylepoker IPO and qualify for the Paddy Power Irish Winter Festival or else buy into this and sell of some % to anyone that is interested.
Have $20k online bankroll at the end of the month: MOST IMPORTANT ONE

Thats it for September, was glad to see the end of it for poker reasons only as its nice to see a new month which I always look at as a fresh start, If anything eventfull happens in Killarney I will try post about it early next week.

First $10k month

2009-08-31T19:51:00.002+01:00

Just had my best month ever. Online cash went pretty well with $5.3k in winnings from that and also the €3.7k profit from the Cork tournament means a total profit of $10.6k for the month. June was also really good but I ended up playing the WSOP in June so can't really count the $10k for that.

I did put in a decent amount of hands from Tuesday to Friday and made $1.5k over those 4 days so that helped things, that week was pretty swingy with me being in the hole for $2k at one stage but winning $2.5k on Friday turned it all around for me.

Goals for September would be to remain disiplined with my bankroll and just take shots at 400nl when the games are good. I would also like to play more 200nl HU as well, but will probably play most of my games at 100nl HU and 200nl 6max. I would also like to play some more tournaments so will try and make some time for them over the month. Poker Stars have a their big tournament series on in Septemeber so will try and satellite into a few of them. Graph for the month below:

Good weekend in Cork

2009-08-23T12:57:00.002+01:00

Was down in Cork last weekend for the Macau Club Irish Poker Classic. I played the 2nd starting day and it got 158 players in total. My first couple of tables were ok, however I played pretty badly on the first 2 tables. I was playing 2 loose and just calling down bets the whole time, they were mostly situations were they either had the nuts or air, like I run AJ into K9 on a KKJ2K baord and such rubbish. My third table settled me down a bit as I had bigMickG on my direct left with a very loose guy to his left. Rob Taylor was on my right but there were no hassles there as he plays very tight. This table was pretty good to me and I finished the day on about 51k AFAIK.

Day 2 my starting table was ok again, no big names on it really until later in the day. I was a card rack for the first level of the day. I open AA utg and everyone folds even though I have probably been the most active at the table and I show the table. Very next hand its folded to the SB and this guy was a middle aged Cork guy who just wanted to see a cheap flop. He was asking me will I check if he calls and had being doing this the round before also. I was never ever checking to him and I was thinking this guy might be setting up a trap by calling. I look down at AA for the 2nd hand in a row and of course he instant folds when I raise it up. So AA back to back and I just take the blinds. I run so good yet so bad!! I do make a full house later on with A7 when I check back the A68 baord, turn is a 7 and I bet about 2/5 pot and get a call, river is the A and he leads out for 5k and I stick him in. He calls and shows 45 for the straight. He should know better than to be calling me with that rubbish!!!

Same story again a few hands later. UTG limps and I raise it up with AcKc, one guy folds and another guy calls. I put him on a decent hand here, a good pocket pair or maybe AQ. The flop comes down 89x with 2 clubs giving me the nut flush draw. I bet out and he calls. Turn (Jc) is the only card in the deck were all the money was going to go in. I bet and he raises allin over my bet, hes got QhTh and is drawing dead. My stack is now up to almost 100k and I am one of the chip leaders at this stage. The rest of the day I play snug enough, made a few moves that got picked off but played solid enough and laid down a few hands now and again which turned out to be good folds.

Next big hand, the button limps and the SB calls, I raise it up from the BB with KJs, the button goes allin and SB folds. It is about 35k more for me to call and there is about 15k in the pot. I really can't put this guy on a big hand here. I just kept thinking this guy wanted to see a cheap flop with a small pocket pair which I would be flipping against. I just never see him playing AJ, AK, AQ or JJ+ like this so I make the call and my read was correct, he had 88 but I failed to hit. Later on the same guy again raises UTG and I reraise him with QQ, his stack is short enough so I don't mind getting it in vs him here. Of course hes got the AA and I failed to spike a Q. so I've being allin twice so far with all 5 cards to come and lose both. Near the end of the day my table gets quite a bit tougher, Smoothcall from boards gets moved 2 to my left and we have a few buttons vs BB battles which I won!!! Then the overall winner gets moved to my direct left who was no fun to play with either. And to make matters worse the chip leader at the time gets moved into my right. We end up playing down to 16 players that night so I go back to Day 3 with €2k in the bag.

Day 3 my table draw is really crap, I am the shortstack at the table with all the big stacks, I fold and shove my way to the final table which wasn't the best draw either. I have John O Shea to my direct left where it will be very tough for me to shove into him as he will know exactly what my range is and will make the correct call on me most of the time. I end up going out in 8th with a short enough stack, I see 99 and go allin after the eventual winner raised preflop. He made an easy call with KQ as my stack was 9bb at the time I think. K on the flop and I was 3/3 loses for allin situations.

Overall I was pretty happy with how I played and I think the experience I got from the WSOP helped me a lot in this. €5.5k was also a good result even though I had sold 20% of myself before it started I still made €3.7k profit from the weekend after tipping the dealers and settling up with my investers. In October there are a few good tournaments coming up that I would like to play. I have already registered for the Boyle Sports Irish Poker Open and would like to play the Killarney event but there is no option to buy directly into this event without getting ripped off so I may just leave this one. Killarney is a bit far away and might just leave it out this year. The PPP Irish Winter Festival is on in October so I may play that and sell some % again.

Since I last posted up I have played 5k hands online and won about $250 from that, if only I hadn't of played like a donk in the last 20minutes of my session this morning that would have been 1.4k. :(

Yesterday I went playing pitch and putt with one of the lads from work out in Liffey Valley. I am shocking bad at golf but with a handicap we done some gambling on it. After the first 5 holes I asked for a handicap of 5 which was pretty bad deal for me!! We had €20 for the winner and also for every hole under I won by I got €6 and Kevin got €5 for everyone he done better in. There were also €10 for Kevin if he got a par and €18 for me. €60 I got a birdie and €25 for Kevin!! Very interesting prices. We also done a lot of side bets like giving odds for hitting the green and putting it. In the end I came up €27 in front, mainly due to pulling off a wonder shot on the 17th to leave me a 4ft put for the birdie. I sinked it and this put me up nicely for the day as I was getting destroyed by Kevin on the main bet. Kevin ended up winning by 8 shots so my 5 handicap wasn't the best deal for me.

This week I am working on Monday and have the rest of the week off. I am going to book my helicopter lesson that I got for my 24th birthday, it is almost out of date as I turn 25 on Thursday!! I also have 4 golf lessons to take which I got last Xmas, I am a bit slow at getting around to these things, so plan to take these lessons this week and kick Kevins ass at golf next time we play. Poker wise I will try and play 10-15k hands this week and also a few tournaments some nights as I won't have work in the morning. A few trips to the gym is also on the agenda.

Thats enough written now, will probably post up on Saturday with how the week went.

August going ok

2009-08-12T00:07:00.004+01:00

August has been ok so far I guess, I've had a $3.7k downswing so far which was 21 buyings between 100nl and 200nl games. I did play pretty badly during these 3k hands and these swings do happen especially when most if it is at HU. 6max games have been going really well with some very good games on Full Tilt especially with the new ante tables that they have there, it makes the game a lot bigger than normal and pots can spin out of control easily enough. I am running pretty well overall this month so hopefully than can continue.

On Friday I am heading to Cork to play in the Macau Main Event, its a €1.1k buyin. I have sold 20% of myself which I think is a good idea as €1k is a lot for a tournament buyin. I did try a couple of satellites for this online but they didnt go well to say the least. I'm looking forward to playing it as it will be my first tournament since the WSOP. Upon reflection of the WSOP, I have thought about the way I played and some of the things I should do differently to give me a better chance of winning so hoping to put that into practice this weekend.

Graph of the month so far below:

July was good

2009-08-01T10:47:00.003+01:00

July was a really good month for poker. Was in Vegas to play the WSOP, won a decent amount online. My heads up game is improving a lot and my 6max game is still very sharp. My online bankroll is in really good shape as I have plenty on 2 seperate sites to play 100nl heads up and also 200nl 6max.

My main goal for August which is to keep playing the above games and be ready in September to take shots at 200nl HU and 400nl 6max. I think the way I will do my roll for future games is to have 70BI for HU and 35BI for 6max at 400nl so I would need about $14k before I play these games regularly. Due to higher swings at higher limits I will add 10BI extra for HU and 5BI extra for 6max if I can move up to 3/6 or 5/10. I would really like to be within touching distance of 5/10 by the end of the year. This will take a lot of work between now and then as I only have 5 months and would need to improve my game a lot to reach these stakes as that is were the real money is in poker. A bankroll of about $45-50k woud be required to get there so its probably not realistic to be there by the end of the year especially if I cash out a lot.

Graph is below for July, up over $3k when I include bonus and rakeback with approx 25-30 hours played during the month. Had very little time for poker due to work commitments and also being in vegas for a week. This month I would like to be able to play 40-50 hours for the month.

Not much happening poker wise

2009-07-22T21:16:00.004+01:00

Being really busy since I got back from Vegas so havn't got a chance to play much poker at all. I've got maybe 6-8k hands in so far this month which is about 25-33% what I normally play in a month for the last 18 months. When I got back from Vegas I worked 2 long days and then went to Killarney on the Thursday and Friday to be groomsman for one of the lads I was good friends with at college. Had a great time down in Killarney, great town to go out on the beer in but was a bit wrecked as I never really got a chance to recover the jetlag from Vegas.

To be honest I'm still not recovered I don't think. It just seems to be all go all the time. For example I get up on Sunday after 3 days drinking and have to drive from Killarney to Dublin to get home and get clothes and stuff for a return journey for work on Monday morning. Work a long day on Monday, then finish at 10pm on Tuesday night followed by a meer 10 hour today which is very short really for me lately. Weekend is coming up now so heading out on Friday for work drinks and then heading to U2 in Croke Park on Saturday night. The following weekend I'm going to plan to just relax and maybe get back to playing a bit of poker at the weekends once again. I have some golf lessons to take which expire soon and also a helicopter lesson to take so that weekend should be a good time to take them. But seeing as its a bank holiday weekend something will probably crop up.

Poker wise there is a festival coming up in Cork that I would like to play in. There are a few online satellites for this so will probably give them a go. I probably won't play it otherwise as the buyin is €1.1k and I can't really spend that much of my bankroll on one tournament. I might try and sell some percentages for it if anyone is interested. I guess I will see how this months results go.

Down in Bantry for work at the moment and there is not much to do here at all. I wanted to watch Dragons Den on BBC tonight but there is only the 4 Irish stations in my hotel room which kinda sucks. Will get it recorded and watch it again. There is some poker player on it trying to sell himself to the Dragons. They will buy him into some tournaments and he will give them a % back. Would be interesting to see how the Dragons react to such an offer. As far as staking goes I made a slight profit from the 2 players I bought stakes in for Vegas. I had 1% in Nicky Power who just transferred me a cool $300 as he cashed for the guts of $30k in the WSOP main event. A really nice man and was so happy to see him go deep in it. Was really hoping he was going to final table it so I could fly back to Vegas in November and watch him take down the $8.5million. 1% of that would set me going nicely!!!

Next update will probably be end of the month when I should have all my hands on the one laptop and hopefully produce a winning online month. Till then, good luck...........

Home time

2009-07-11T18:16:00.002+01:00

So I got knocked out of the WSOP on Wednesday, really wasn't bothered in putting in an update that I busted out!! Of course if I had of made it through I would have been the firs to update!!! Heading back to Ireland now in a few hours, really long trip ahead of me and I am dreading it to be honest. I hate flying so much and the thought of an 11 hour flight and then another 1 hour flight scares me!!!

Vegas has went well since that, just after I bust from the main event me and another Irish lad go playing crabs with "Mc Lovin" from Superbad, hes busto and we all pool together $60 each and play together on the same table, 2 hours later we leave with $1.5k which was pretty sweet. I have just been on the beer since I got knocked out, went to an amazing night club last night called "XS", it really is the place to be in Vegas. The nightclub is out of this world and if you are single or even not you will definetly love it!!! Girls are amazing in there!!!

I played some live poker yesterday and lost $400, on my very last hand I pick up AA and of course I lose an $800 pot with them to an aggressive Norwegian high stakes player who is just after being busted from the main event and is playing some small stakes for the fun. He literally doesn't care about money!!

Overall the trip has been profitable, online I won about $1k for the 3/4 hours that I played, live was obviously not but I was freerolling here so not to bothered about that. Had a great time and played with some of the best player in the world, learned alot and really looking forward to coming back next year. Will keep things updated once I get back home with the usual online stuff. Also a bit hungover while writing this so apologies for any silly English!! Laters...........

Through to Day 2

2009-07-07T18:03:00.002+01:00

I made it through to day 2, absoulety horrible stuff for the last 7 hours of play. I had the softest starting table ever and left it with 62k. I then get moved to a new table and I have Elky 2 places to my left (for those who don't know him he's this guy) and to be honest I was scared ****less of him the whole day, he just didnt seem to make a mistake the whole time at the table and chipped his way up to 120k by opening every other pot and not getting involved in any big hands. Pretty class act, and of course my dumb self tried to bluff him with 3 barrells. Hand went like this:

I'm at the table about 45mins or so and havn't had to show down a hand yet, I've got about 60k and Elky covers, so loose enough player who is starting to get a bit drunk limps in in MP, I isolate him with A7o OTB to 1100 with the blinds at 150/300, elky calls from the BB, which he has been defending quite a lot too, MP also calls. So flop comes KK9 rainbow and both players check, I bet 1700 and elky calls and MP folds. Turn is a 6c which puts 2 clubs on board. Elky checks again. I bet 3.5k and he calls again. River is a blank and I fire the third barrell for 7.5k I think. He thinks for 1-2mins and calls with AcQc. So after this hand I am in bits and quite annoyed, don't play a hand for ages because I am so card dead and also a bit tilty.

My stack dwindles down to about 33k or so and I get it back up to 52k again before the last break. After we come back, I make a bad call in a 15k pot and lose more momtemum, I play maybe 3 more hands after this were I cbet and am raised or I call and don't hit the flop and give up. Table was very very aggressive with there always been a raise and plenty of 3betting also with a few shortstacks who were shoving over raises and stuff. So after the blinds go through me a few times and just missing flops I finish the day on 22,175 chips. Was just glad to make the 2nd day tbh and get a new table draw. That table was easily the toughest tournament table I ever had to play on and was just delighted to get away from it with some chips. Easily the most frustrating day I've had in poker for a while. Also its pretty true that when you can't spot the fish at the table then you are the fish!!

Will be great to have today off now and I can relax and hopefully the jetlag will have left me by the time tomorrow comes around. Going to take it really easy today and definetly not playing any poker, was pretty sick of it after 10 hours of playing yesterday. Going to go to the Vegas Shopping Mall, then hit the pool/man made beach. Will probably go for some nice food then and afterwards catch a show somewhere.

Landed

2009-07-05T19:27:00.003+01:00

Landed in Vegas yesterday, feeling a bit worse for wear at the momemt. Trying to get used to the time difference so stayed up until 5am Vegas time and got 6 hours sleep last night. Going to go shopping today now with Annette just to relax and try not think about poker or that too much.

Went down to the main even yesterday just for a look. Place looks amazing with all the lights and 1k players playing. The sound of people playing with chips is unreal, seen a few of the pros playing. Met up with a few Irish lads last night and went to one of the nightclubs in the Bellagio. Put $50 on black in the Rio before we went and of course we all hit. Had $25 on 27 as well as thats my birthday but 29 came up!! So we went to the Bellagio after this and I went to the ATM as I had no money yet. Went to bring out $2k and the ATM is charging me $55 so fuck that. The other lads are at the roulette table and of course I miss it because the ATM is trying to screw me and what do you know but 27 comes up twice in a row just as I am missing, just my luck!!

Went to "the bank" night club, Annette says its some famous place that people from the Hills go to but wasn't that great to be honest. Place is just a rip off. Cost $40 to get in and the was $15 per drink, pretty expensive for a night out!

Of out for the day now so will update tomorrow

June and Vegas

2009-07-03T13:53:00.002+01:00

June is just over and it was probably my best month ever in poker. I won 2 satellites for tournaments in Vegas with one being the World Series of Poker. I have everything sorted for that now. I am registered for the main event, I just need to turn up on the day and show them ID and I get my seat number and I am ready to go. I got an email from the WSOP saying that I was registered and they also said that I could unregister if I wanted and pick up $10k instead!!

This was incredibly tempting for me and I was seriously considering taking it but ever since I started playing poker or watching it on TV all I wanted to do was play in that tournament. So now that I had the chance to play in it then I couldn't really turn it down. It's like the World Cup of poker with all the top poker players from all over the world meeting up in Vegas for the biggest poker tournament of the year. I guess it was the appeal of this that attracted me so much. It's not like there is many other sports in the world were you can actually play with superstars in their field. It would be like turning down the chance to play against Man Utd or Barcelona in the Champions League final.

I am heading off in the morning on a 6:40 flight to London and then a direct flight to Vegas, pity I hate flying but what can you do!! 4 flights in a week will probably scare the bejesus out of me but hopefully it will be worth it in the end. I will arrive in Vegas at 2:10pm (Vegas time) on Saturday and will probably just try and relax that evening and not do much, the following day I have off and will probably use it to go shopping or something not to stressfull. I don't intend to play any poker anyway!! The Monday is the day I am registered to start the event (Day 1D), there are 4 starting days for this as there will be 6-8k players in this tournament. Everyone seems to say that day 1D is the toughest due to more pros playing that day, but I think if I played the Sunday I would be to wrecked from travelling all day the previous day and the 8 hour time difference will have me in bits.

Regardless of wether I get through Day 1D or not I will have the Tuedsay off with more play then on Wednesday if I get through. Then on the Thursday is another break in the tournament were I am set to play in another small tournament that will have only 27 players with 6 WSOP packages for 2010 on offer and also $20k for the winner. I hope to do well in this, seems a bit more achievable.

Cash games in June went poor enough, hardly got to play at all and any time I did play I was probably too tired to be playing and thus ended up losing about $1k this month. I guess thats what happens when you work 99hours of overtime in 1 month!! Plus I said last month that I hadn't had a losing month in 7 months so I was due one at this stage I guess.

Thats it for now, I might bring my laptop with me to Vegas if I can get the screen to work again and keep this updated with how Vegas is going for me.

Run good continues

2009-06-22T23:15:00.003+01:00

Had a really good week online and barely played at all!!! I qualified for another tournament in Vegas, it's a 21 person tournament were there will also be 6 pros/celebs, each of them has a bounty on their head worth a package to next years WSOP and $20k for the winner. Not many other details on it yet but should be fun. I booked my flights to Vegas, pretty dear at €809 and they are getting more and more expensive by the hour it seems.

I also just won the boards.ie Serie BA HU league were I won 10 from 13 and took the title with a nice bonus of $2014. Also played about 3k hands online and done well there too winning about $1k so a decent week and right in time for Vegas as well which suits nicely. Will boost my bankroll a bit if I want to play some cash games over there or buy into any tournaments.

Not much else to report on, still unreal busy at work, put in a 6am - 12.30 greuling day last Thursday were I was so wrecked I had to book an hotel for the night as I was too tired to drive home which was an excellent decision.

Also, many thanks to all the comments left, really appreciated. Nice to know people read it now and again. :)

Going to Vegas

2009-06-15T03:32:00.001+01:00

Just won my $13k all expenses paid package to Vegas for the World Series of Poker

WSOP satellite night

2009-06-14T10:36:00.003+01:00

I am registered for 3 WSOP satellites tonight. One on Everest, Ipoker and PokerStars. The really annoying thing is that they are all on at different times. Would suit me much better if they were on at the same time but they start at 6pm, 8pm and 9.30m respectively. I satellited into the $535 ipoker one, spun up $83 on my Everest account for the $503 buying and I bought directly into the $370 buyin for the PokerStars one. Satellites are by no means something I am good at but like every fish I may as well give it a try and hope to get lucky.

I have been trying some PLO at 50nl but it seems I am just as terrible at it. Played 200 hands today and just never won a hand and of course anytime I flop the nuts I get outdrawn in the sickest ways possible. But I am still going to keep trying at it. I have $1k set aside to get better at it with an account that has rakeback and a %600 sign up bonus so will just try keep trying to improve.

Thats it for now, bit of work to do shortly but then I will be back on this evening trying to luckbox a WSOP ticket, laters.....

Back at it

2009-06-01T12:06:00.003+01:00

So after my last post I took a break for around 10 days which was refreshing. By the end of it I was looking forward to playing again. Breaks from poker are good as it can become quite consuming at times and after the last session I had it was definetly time to take a break from it. The month ended up respectable at the end of it but still not anywhere near were I want to be to cover my withdrawels each month. By the middle of May I was well on track to my best month ever but I had 2-3 very tilting session were I had 3 days of between $1.2k and $1.7k loses which were mostly from tilt and playing terribly.

I used to have this problem quite bad last year also but I managed to overcome it by quiting early on, for some reason I havn't being able to do that this month and will have to work on it. Someone said to me that you should just quit when you have made an amount that you are happy with but this amount is hard to define and also not a good idea to quit if you are playing well and the games are good. Quiting when playing bad and when the games are bad is a must though. There is no point in being down $1k and lets say your hourly rate is $50/hr and trying to grind back your $1k, in reality this should take you 20 hours to get back so whats the point in playing that extra one hour. I think at HU games this doesn't apply as much as you can be playing some guy who just ran really hot and is sitting there with your money. It's impossible and unwise to leave quit this guy if you are can let the loses unaffect you as you know that this guy is just in for a gamble and is going to donate all your money to some regular who you never have a hope of getting it back again.

So the results for the month are fair, I'm on a good streak of winning months at the moment with 7 winning months in a row now with an avergae hourly of $35 plus all the bonuses and rakeback which would probably bring it closer to $50. Graph and stats for the month are below, I had taken some shots at higher stakes when the games were good and my bankroll was about double what it currently is now due to withdrawing.

Also one last thing I am now top of the Boylesports HU league with 2 games to go, I think 3rd spot is guaranteed for me now, but really want to go on an win it. Hopefully I don't jinx myself now as its just over $2k for the win. One time!!!

A very very bad session

2009-05-21T23:54:00.003+01:00

Was about to go to bed at around 10pm but went on PC for a few minutes first and then checked to see what fish were online. My biggest buddy fish who I was up 7k against before tonight was sitting at 6 HU tables so I just seen the $ signs in my head and couldn't resist. The guy has been feeding me all year took me for $1571.65 today. It could be worse as I am still up $5.3k on him but today was just a real kick in the teath. I was on tilt since I was down about $200 on him and just kept donating to him and he kept calling with the nuts and 2nd nuts against my air. When I did value bet my top pair and trips or straights he always rivered with some 2 pair, flush, house or what ever.

So far this month I am up about $800 with rakeback and that to be added on but my bankroll is in bits after this month because I have withdrawn close to 5k and days like today don't help.

My bankroll is down to $4.5k right now so going to take a break for a few days and then come back fresher next week. Have a couple of things planed for the next few days so that should keep my away from the tables. I'm going to have to go back to 100nl for a while I think and grind out again. I could probably table select well at 200nl and just play a few tables on my roll but will see when I come back. It's so dissapointing as I had been playing pretty well for most of the month. But I gotta stick to some sort of bankroll management before I tilt off the rest of my roll.

Anyway time for bed

Nice day

2009-05-09T00:51:00.000+01:00

April

2009-05-01T19:16:00.003+01:00

Good enough month overall I guess, online cash went well with me grinding almost 20k hands and also playing a few online tournaments but no success in them at all. Played a few satellites for the WSOP on Stars but had not joy in them at all which cost me several hundred dollars but I guess it will cost a bit more to qualify for a 12k package unless I get really lucky.

Cash went fine with me moving up to 200nl near the end of the month and even taking a shot at 600nl and 1knl when there was a big fish on, this made me $600 odd at 600nl and I lost about $300 at 5/10 so was still profitable. Felt pretty scary having 1k on the table again as I havn't played over 100nl or 200nl in about 3 months. Yesterday was a bit of a crap day when I lost $600 where I ran terrible but it didn't even come close to evening out how well I ran this month in total which was pretty sweeeet. Also I have had 6 winning months in a row which feels good :)

Heading to Liverpool tomorrow for a Stag party which should be fun. I havn't been on one before so looking foward to it. Will be trying to get tickets to see the Pool vs Newcastle match as well which will be tough to get I would imagine. I was working down in South Hill in Limerick today which was a nice eye opener to say the least. I took a few photos and video clips, might try to put them to music in the next few days.

Graph for the month is below as usual:

update

2009-04-20T20:11:00.003+01:00

Not a whole lot going on really, have been playing away at 100nl mainly until I get to 50buyins for 200nl. Not to much further to go right now. I still have played a few 200nl hands when the gams are really good but mainly 100nl HU and 6max. I did manage to get a seat with direct position on a midstakes fish so I sat in and we played a 1.3k pot which I won, was ahead on each street and he paid me off with 2nd pair on a board that had a lot of draws but they all bricked, I had a full house so that was ok. It was a nice boost to the bankroll which takes my winnings for the month up to $2.5k so far.

I've been trying to get tickets for the Man Utd vs Man City game but not having any luck so far, the flights over are cheap enough so if I could manage to get 2 tickets now I would be sorted. I have been trying Viagogo but still havn't managed to pick any up, the tickets get snapped up as soon as someone puts them on sale. So I'm basically refreshing the page every few minutes while I am online.

I tried out MiniMaxMod for ipoker and I have to say that it is really really good. I was never one for using scripts while playing poker but this program does all that for you and even better it resizes the talbes so that you make them smaller because the ipoker software is so terrible it only gives you 2 table size options with one being too big and the other being too small and they are also badly laid out.

Thats it for now...

Update

2009-04-08T11:52:00.002+01:00

April has been really swingy so far. I've been playing a lot of 100nl 6max and I have found it hard to adjust to these games after having not played them for over 6 month and also I have been used to playing mid stakes for so long and I seem to forget at times that 100nl players do not play or think like 400nl players which has lead me spew quite a lot. I am also playing too loose at these stakes, playing tighter and better postflop is were I will make money from these guys so I've been trying to do that and I am having much better results.

I have also being playing HU but not doing great at that as I just lose patience to much and I am always afraid that the guy will quit and run off so I try even harder to win it back off him which usually ends up in me losing more to him. So I know what all my mistakes are I just need to implement them. I have even being playing 50nl HU because my mate from the last post moved down levels so I sat in with him there. I actually had a losing session to him a few days ago were he was running so unreal hot that I just quit him as I wasn't really in the mood to play him. It's also no harm to let him win now and again as he is down a lot of money to me and I want to give him some encouragement to play me. Hustling FTW!!! Got it all back with good interest the following day so no damage done really.

I've played a few hundred PLO hands as well but don't really have a clue what I am at there yet so will try and watch some beginner videos on that soon. I also bought into a PPP Irish Open qua lifer on Sunday night but lost a flip and got knocked out in 24th or so, had I of won that flip I would have been in pretty good shape for a ticket but it wasn't to be. Results so far this month I am up about $600 or so which isn't to bad considering I was up $900 and then back down at -$600 all of which was in the space of 5k hands or so. Volume has also being pretty good this month with me having played about 9k hands already.

Irish Open is on this weekend and I had planned on giving the super satellite and the last online qualifier on PPP another go but won't be doing that now. I was also planning on heading out to it for a while over the weekend but not sure if I will be back in Dublin for this now. I guess if my some miracle that I get bought into this I will come back up and play it but otherwise I plan on spending the weekend in Donegal.

I also had really terrible news yesterday morning when my mum rang me at 8.15am and I just knew before I answered the phone that this wasn't going to be good news. My uncle/godfather died of a massive heart attack that night which devastated me when I heard it. I really was in such shock and cried for the first time in a long long time. I am heading down to Letterkenny for the wake now and the funeral is tomorrow. When things like this happen it really puts bad beats into perspective.

I found my best friend :)

2009-04-01T21:08:00.005+01:00

So I came back from a break, or more of a half break I would say as I played some tournaments for the week I didn't play cash games, not much success in them apart from a few satellite wins. I got an Irish Open satellite ticket out of it which I must play tomorrow night as there doesn't seem to be a hope in hell of me getting an Irish Open ticket any other way :( :(

So when I returned to cash I found a guy on ipoker who recovered me from a near 3k loss into a winning month which I am gratefull to him for. I think this guy deserves a graph of his own against me were I will display his stats vs mine and we can examine the difference!!! Only joking about the examining!! Here it is:

Bad news is that I think I have busted him, poor guy was actually a winning player if he take out the 48buyins he lost to me which is really really sick when I think of it. When I played him earlier he wouldn't top up once he fell below 100bb which he always used to before but he let himself wittle down to 21bb earlier and then quit, lets hope hes wins a big tournament soon or gets paid or whatever.

My own actual graph for last month is quite disturbing looking, I played so so bad at the start of this month and went on tilt so often while playing in heads up games which you MUST avoid or else your winrate will suffer so badly. All in all the month wasn't so bad as I made about 1.2k from cash games including bonuses which I am happy to take considering how bad I was doing when I last posted.

In other poker news I am doing good in the boylesports HU league with me winning 4 games from 5 against some very good opponents so hopefully I can string a few more wins together and challenge for first place and a really nice price.

So I have some goals for next month:

Play more 6max and get good at it again
Keep playing heads up games
Withdraw $2k from my roll for savings account and still be in profit for the month
By some miracle play in the Irish Open
Move back up to 200nl 6max when I have 50buyins for it
Play 2k PLO hands, HM just added support for it so want to give it a go now

Thats it for now, more regular updates to follow once again I hope

Taking a break

2009-03-13T22:16:00.001Z

That's it really

....................... and a little challenge

2009-03-08T23:58:00.006Z

Poker has being going really really bad lately, just nothing is working at all. I have lost all confidence in my game at the moment. 6max is going OK I guess but I haven't really being playing much of it at all. At HU I have invested a lot of time into it in the last 6 weeks or so and I am not getting any rewards from it at all. In total I am up about $1.3k from it but all that came from hands at 1/2 when a mate was sweating me so really I am break-even at HU which just sucks so so much after having played close to 25k hands at it so far. My results for the year so far are pretty miserable and the targets that I set at the start of the year are looking hugely optimistic and at the time I thought that I was holding back at what I could achieve.

I guess when I set a goal of $50k in cash games it seemed pretty easy to do as its only like 11buyins per month at 400nl and you have it. Problem is I am no longer rolled for 400nl as I have taken out much more money that I am currently making so even though i am up 3k this year my bankroll is 6k smaller than what it started off at in January so I'm just going to have to stop withdrawing for the time being until I can get my roll build back up to a reasonable amount again and be better rolled for 400nl.

I've being playing some tournaments in the last while and they are just soul destroying, its quite sick the beats that I have taken when being deep in numerous tournaments. I dunno, I guess most lads that play them would say that their is a lot of skill in them but if you can't win flips or AQ against AQ etc then you are fucked.

Anyway I actually started this post yesterday when I was really annoyed and pissed off so today I had a while to think about it and I also read Spencer James Blog which I find good as I like the way he talks about the game and seems kinda level headed and he also seems to be having a shit time with poker. So with those things in mind I decided to set myself a small challenge, I basically took a screenshot of my HM winnings for the year so far in each stake and game type and seeing as its got a lot of red figures in it I want to turn them green. So here it is below:

So the idea is to beat each stake below 2/4 for at least 5BB/100. Hopefully the 100nl 6max will be easy enough to beat, I'm not trying to beat them over huge sample sizes or anything but one thing is for sure that by the time I get it done my roll will be much better than it is now, currently I have about $8.5k online with about $1k more in satellites and tokens. So with a fresh approach and some rules for HU set in my head I hope to get back into the winning way again because poker just ain't any fun losing or breaking even. So with that in mind off I go to start this challenge!

Snow Patrol - Run

2009-03-01T12:31:00.003Z

I present to you: Snow Patrol - Run from the O2 last night

I was in the O2 last night to see Snow Patrol, my favorite band and they didn't disappoint, it was a great concert and the O2 is a deadly venue for a concert.

I did manage to play a few hands of HU yesterday and got the craziest action I have ever seen in my whole time playing poker. This guy just didn't fold preflop at all for any amount of money or % of his stack, he was opening to huge amounts and re raising 90% of my opens so I got it in pretty light against him a few times but he got it in lighter and obviously won them all. At one stage he had $800 on the table and I had $100 but I got it back pretty quickly as he was just so wreck less and crazy and wouldn't fold a pair at all or a gutshot or any part of the flop at all so was pretty easy to win it all back once I had some kind of pair. I was so scared the whole time that he would just quit me but thankfully he stayed to give all the money back and some more!!

months end

2009-02-28T12:12:00.002Z

Have finished up poker for the month, played exactly 16k hands for some reason! Winning month online but not happy with it at all. I played about 75% HU and it didn't go well at all, the variance is pretty massive in it and I can see why you need a huge bankroll for it, 100 buyins is what I was using for 100nl as you feel completely comfortable at all times. I've had some 20BI swings this month in it and ended up finishing down $260 at it, its only 2.5BI so not the end of the world but hugely disappointing for me as I wasn't able to control my emotions once when I was running bad or getting coolered. I played one guy who was pretty decent and lost 5BI to him in 109 hands, I kept it cool and just quit him and said "gg" as there was basically no point in me playing on vs him, it wasn't even a deep table and I would find it hard to get money out of him unless I was able to cooler him like he done to me 8 times.

6max went very well over 3.2k hands or so, I am able to play a bit looser now after having played so much HU and I feel that HU improved my 6max game a lot as I am very comfortable getting into marginal spots and playing people in HU pots.

I have only played like 2k hands in the last 7 days due to being really really busy with work and I also have friends visiting me this weekend so poker is finished now for the month. We are going on the beer later to watch the rugby and then I am heading to the O2 to see Snow Patrol who have been my favourite band for the last 3-4 years I guess now, basically ever since they released "Run", this is probably going to be my 7th time seeing them live and can't wait to see the new O2 as its supposed to be deadly.

Monte Carlo was the one of the nicest places I have ever been to. The city is so small and really beautiful with everything being so clean and tidy. The place is ridiculously expensive though. In our hotel a bottle of Corona was €10 at the bar and a club sandwich was €27, just unreal stuff. Though to be fair they did upgrade our room for us when we got there so that was pretty sweat. I mainly just relaxed when I went over there and ate out each night. Went to a really really nice Argentian Grill in the Fairmont Hotel which is a top class hotel. I went for a the Wagu steak which was nice but not as nice as the one I had in Vegas, it had a lot to live up to in fairness.

I done some gambling afterwards in the Casino were I lost €100 at blackjack and won about €220 at roulette which was sweet, my girlfriend was playing roulette as well and she was always putting €8 on number 5 until and of course the one time she didn't 5 came up. It was so funny I thought, welcome to my world!!

I probably broke even with poker this month between live and online, the GJP deepstack tournament cost me about €1200 and I won about $1.5k online so possibly down a small bit but will probably be up with rakeback!! Graph below for online cash, played some sngs as well were I won a bit as well.

Monte Carlo in the morning

2009-02-19T23:26:00.002Z

Going to Monte Carlo in the morning, really can't wait to just land there as I don't like air travel at all. I booked into a top class hotel so can't wait to just relax for a few days now and forget about work!

Haven't played much poker at all recently. I've started playing some 6max again and that's being going really well except that I am running hugely under expectation but I won't worry to much about that as I am still winning at a good rate, I'll only complain about that when I am losing.

Anyway just a quick update as I have to get up in about 4-5 hours and pack my suitcase for a 7.15am flight to Nice, here's hoping the weather is a bit nicer there and than it is here!!

Work has been busy

2009-02-11T19:55:00.002Z

Haven't got a chance to play much at all in the last few days. I played a decent amount on Saturday were I ran terrible. I lost 13BI against one guy at HU. He was pretty bad and just got huge hands all the time and I kept having hands to pay him off with. They were mostly +EV but they all went his way and we even got it all in on the flop 250bb deep for a $500 pot were I had an open ended straight flush draw and he had QJ on a J high board and of course I never hit half the deck.

So Sunday I ended up going on a 20BI upswing and finished up about 18BI that day which was decent. I played for an hour on Monday and won a small bit, not even a full BI. I was playing in poor games against pretty tight players and lost a few flip against them. They are annoying to play against really because they never pay you off unless you can manage to get them on tilt and then its FUN!

Work has been very busy the last few days with me putting in very long hours and really early starts, worked 14 hours yesterday and 13 today so pretty wrecked now and won't bother with poker at all. I guess I should be grateful that I have a job these days and I wouldn't say I am complaining about it but its tough getting up really early everyday and I just be wrecked by the time I come home! Not much point in playing when I am wrecked tired so I will just leave it and hopefully Ireland will score a few goals and win this match, they are 1-0 down at the minute.

Also, I don't think I will bother with putting up results every Wednesday any more as it's just a pain to do sometimes. I will just put them up at the end of the month. Plus weekly results matter about as much as daily ones as they don't really represent anything at all. Instead I will just write up a post when I feel like it and post the results at the end of the month.

GJP deepstack report

2009-02-07T14:33:00.006Z

Got knocked out of this late last night with 30mins left to go in day 1. I was pretty happy with my play all day but have been thinking about my exit hand quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that I should have folded it preflop but its pretty close.

I had a pretty tough starting table with some very good players and people with some very solid results on it. I even had the WSOP main event winner from 1999 on my table and to be honest he was probably the softest spot on the table. Rory Brown was on my right and I later on in the day I was able to pick off a few of his isolation raises against the early limpers who loved to limp and he loved isolating them so I had direct position on him and I done this a couple of times. The first hand I play was interesting, I opened J7s in LP and was called by Mark McKeever from the button. We were 1000bb deep so I wanted to get into a lot of pots early on and build a loose image and hopefully get paid of when I am able to make a hand later on. So the flop comes down QJx with no flush draw as far as I can remember. I bet 350 into the pot and Mark calls, turn comes another J and I bet 750, now it gets interesting. Mark makes a raise an he says he means to make it 2100 but he actually put in 20100 as he put in 2 10k chips instead of a 2 1k chips. He says he made a mistake but I don't know they guy from anywhere so I am a bit dubious, it could be some kind of angle shoot for all I know but to be fair it can be easy enough to mix up your chips at the very start of a tournament. Anyway I fold and show the J, he says great fold and later tells me he had QQ for a full house. He never showed so I don't know but he did say that he doesn't want to get into a raising war early on with QQ when we are so deep so who knows.

The next interesting hand I get is against http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=119895 when he opens in EP and I call with QTs, the flop is AJT and he checks and I check behind. The turn was an A and he bet it and I called, the river was a K making me the flush and he bet 500 into a 750 pot or so and I just called, I didn't see to much value in raising him here as he seemed pretty solid and most of the As in his range have made a full house so I just call and hes got KK for the full house.

I play a few more pots and I basically keep my chip count around the 48k-52k mark and maintain my loose image especially to Nick Slade who is taking a bit of an offense to me raising his blinds all the time
I raise another few hands after this and I am usually attacking Noel Furlong and Nick Slade's blinds all the time as they guys will both call with such marginal hands and I am happy to play lots of pots with them in position. After about the 6th time of me doing it he decides that he will call without looking at his cards. So that's fine with me!! I have AhQh and I make it 450 and he calls, blinds are now 75/150, flop comes down K9x with a spade flush draw, he checks and still hasn't looked at his cards, I check behind as I feel he will definitely raise me here as he's going to try and rep any 2 cards here as he says he will only look once I bet. So the turn is an A and I bet 650 and he calls, the river is another As and he bets 1150 and again I flat call as I feel hes only bluffing or has a flush, I really can't see him having the other case A here to often so I call and hes got Qs4s for a flush. Not looking at your cards it obviously the way to play poker!!

Noel Furlong has obviously had enough of me raising his blinds and for the 3rd time this day that I open and Derek Williams calls Noel 3bets from the blinds and each other time I folded, this time I have 33 and I had opened for my usual 3x to 600 and Noel makes it 3k, I go into the tank for a while and make it 7.4k. The 2 other times he had KQs and AQs so his range is most definitely not monster hands. Also, I have never once 4b or done anything crazy so I think he will give me plenty of credit here and he folded saying he had JJ. I also got the impression that his guy was really really old school and he will think that if I 4b here that I have KK or AA.

A bit later on I get AA and get 2 streets of value out of Mark when he folds Jx to my river bet on a J high flop. We then clash a bit later on in an interesting hand. Someone limps and this start an avalanche of limpers, so I complete in SB with 6d3d and Mark makes it 1100 in BB and everyone calls again so I peel a flop too. Flop is Q96 with no flush draw. Mark bets out 4k and it comes back to me after everyone folds. I tank it up a bit and count out ~12.5k hand put it in the middle, he folds TT after some deliberation.

I get moved table around the 8th level and I see one face I know, Sean Gregory whom I played with for a full day at the JP Masters game back in May. We tangled a hell of a lot that day, I raised almost every single time he limped in that day as he loves to see cheap flops with a huge range of cards. He is a good player and very hard to put him on a range of hands so a tricky player to say the least and a dangerous man to have a big chip stack. I fold all my hands for the first orbit or so just to see what the table is like, there are a few French players on the table, Troy Prendergast and a few other Irish lads.

So the first hand I decide to play is QQ which I have in the BB. Sean limps in early position and 2 more limpers follow, the guy on my right who I don't know the name of makes it ~3k and I make it 7.6k. Next thing I know Sean makes it 16k and I am in utter shock. Everyone folds around to me and I am getting almost 4/1 on the call with all the limpers and the original raisers money. Sean starts talking and he knows I have a big hand. I know hes got KK+, I really doubt he does this with JJ or AK and QQ is pretty unlikely. Sean says that he doesn't think hes good enough to fold it if I shove and he covers me and he could also be saying this with AA so I'm never thinking of shoving here. I was more thinking about calling or folding, I figure if I hit a set I will get paid here and I am getting immediate odds of almost 4/1 and about another 7/1 for his stack so I call and the flop comes A high and we end up checking it down and both know what each other has!!

I open 88 in late position later on and Sean calls me again, the flop is 8d9dQx and he check folds cheakily showing me a Td!! The blinds and antes go through me a few times and I am getting no spots to steal blinds as the laggy french guy and Sean are in the blinds when I am the button and they are never folding so I can't open too loose against these guys. So my exit hand goes like this. Blinds are 500/1000/100 and there is 35 mins left in Day 1. I have 44k and Troy covers slightly. Troy is a good aggressive player and looking back now I should have folded my hand preflop. Troy opened in early position to 3k and I called in late position with Ts8s, I was expecting the French guy and Sean to come along to but they didn't oblige. So the flop came down KsQsTd and he bets out 4k, at this point I had 2 options I though, call and see the turn and perhaps shove it allin on most turn cards or else raise now and commit myself to the hand as I will usually have 9-14 outs here and be in a flip situation unless hes got AsJs which would be a disaster. So I made it 13k and after 5 mins Troy shipped it in with AA and I missed 14 outs and was gone from the tournament.

Overall I thought I played pretty well over the day and picked good spots to make a few re-steals and a few bluffs. Thanks to all the lads that took a % in me and I hope you will know I put in my best effort at this. I plan on playing a few more small tournaments between now and the Irish Open, probably 1 or 2 at the weekend in the casino in Dublin.

2009 Week 5

2009-02-06T10:44:00.003Z

I'm a bit late with this one. I didn't play any online poker on Wednesday or Thursday. I gave the supersat a go for the GJP deep stack event. Nothing really happened for me in this. I played fine I think, had a poor seat given that I the 2 fish at the table had position on me. They were 2 french players who were really really annoying with their slow rolling, collusion and running like gods.

The collusion was as blatant as I had ever seen, I'm not exactly sure what happened preflop or the bet sizing on the flop but the pot was 1600 I think on the turn, beardie French had bet a Kd2d2x flop and the shaved head Frenchie called. The turn was another diamond. Beardie checks and skinhead bets 500, they start talking to each other in french and beardie folds AdKx face up while the other guys shows him the Q high flush, now how this guy could possible fold here I will never know. We were still in the rebuy period as well so not a huge deal if he got knocked out. So he was basically getting 4/1 on a call and he folds top pair and nut flush draw!!

They also done some horrible slow rolling to some of the Irish players at the table to the fury of the rest of the table. They would turn over a Q on a QQ988 board and afterwards and wait for the other guy to show and then he turns over the 9 for a better boat. But enough about French players!!

February has started off pretty ok with with me winning about $400 playing HU despite playing pretty poor at times and running into coolers all the time. Avoiding tilt when playing is really tough. There has been a number of times were I am playing against some fish and he just keeps winning pots all the time because I never make a hand and he just cannot fold bottom pair so if you can't make middle pair its frustrating. More so when you eventually make a hand he folds or you 3 barrell yout 9-14 out draws but he calls you on river with middle pair when you miss. I've stuck with them and thankfully they havn't quit me to much yet and I eventually beat them but by the time you take the rake out of it you don't win all that much really!

I am playing the GJP deepstack at 2pm today. I really am looking forward to this event now. I have sold about 37% of myself which is a little bit more than I wanted to sell but I had mentioned it to a few people and didn't want to say no then when they said they would buy it. It's also good to know that I could have sold more than this which is good for confidence as well. I'm going to head for a swim now to freshen up for this a bit. I'm just after playing a few SNGs and some HU there for a little practice for it. Both went well, I played a $60 9 man which I came first and also a $104 double or nothing one which I came in the top 5 so doubled up there as well. Full Tilt site is still rigged towards me, played a $109 9 man one on it and with 5 left I get my money in on the turn as a 80% favourite but he hits his outs which would have given me a big chip lead on the bubble but it wasn't to be.

Results for the week were $400 in cash and $175 in sngs and -€210 in the super satellite for a poor week. Hopefully a big cash on Sunday can change all that around though!! I will try and do a trip report on my GJP festival.

GJP Deepstack

2009-02-02T23:15:00.002Z

I've sold my 40% for this, thanks to everyone who took a piece. I'm still half thinking about playing in the super-sat but not quite sure yet. Its a 50/50 race at the moment I guess.

Have had a decent start to the month so far at HU, played 1900 hands for a little over $500 or 5 buyins so hopefully that trend can continue!! It's just so great when you sit down at a table and some guy sits with you. I check him up on table ratings like I do with all my opponents and low and behold hes a huge donater, pretty solid graph from this guy!!! At least hes going in some kind of clear direction!

January Results

2009-02-01T10:47:00.003Z

By the end of January I was really really disappointed with my results, around the middle of January I thought I could be on for my first $10k month as I was up over $6k at that stage, but for some reason around the 15th of every month my results go BAD, but that's just superstition and I am not that type so won't worry to much about that. Graph and results for the month are below, I done pretty ok at 400nl and below but 600nl and above was frustrating over the all be it small sample.

So goals for February are very simple:

Improve my results on January
Play the GJP and have a good game at it.
Play only HU for the month but this will be subject to change and how well I am doing at it. Judging on yesterdays days play it may not last long but I will use the new month as a fresh start on it and forget about any good and bad results I had during January.

That's it for now, I still have 10% to sell for the GJP if anyone is still interested!! :)

2009 Week 4

2009-01-28T22:25:00.002Z

Another disappointing week online, had 2 very tilting sessions in succession were I dropped over $2.5k between them. Best forgotten about at this stage and won't even recollect them on here. On the plus side my HU game is improving a lot and I'm starting to spend much more time playing it and really really enjoying playing it right now compared to 6max. I made $1.5k playing HU this week and lost a ton playing 6max.

On that note I have been moving money around online and have put 25BI for 100nl HU into 4 accounts and put the rest in the bank. No point really in having money online that I don't really need for my roll, hopefully it will be safer in the bank!! I'm going to learn how to play HU for the month of February. The aim is to get really comfortable with it and playing tons of pots against other reasonable opponents so I can move quickly up to 1/2. The games can be ridiculously easy if you game select well and try to avoid tougher opponents. Variance can be quite high so a big bankroll is paramount. I probably am one to make some rash decisions at times so don't be surprised if I am back playing 6max on the 2nd February!!

I tried a supersat for the GJP deepstack festival next week. I played uber tight early on, basically seeing no hands what so ever. I folded JJ in the very first hand on the turn on a T high board after and Trippie from boards opened UTG and bet the flop into 3 players, he also bet the turn into 2 players and after another guy called on a 436T flush draw board I gave up the best hand, just as well as I would have been rivered!!! Results oriented thinking for the win. I went out when my AK ran into AA and that was that. No complaints there, was some very good players in it compared to the rebuy one where I lost HU for a ticket around Xmas time.

I plan on buying directly in now, there is another live super sat the night before it but to be honest its on at a really bad time for me due to work and also the fact that its going to go on pretty late and the tournament itself will last 3 days its not great preparation for a live 3 day tournament in terms of being fresh and focused for a 3 day marathon. That's one thing I realized about Killarney, by the time the third day came around I was totally wrecked due to being nervous going into the final day and also the fact that I played 26 or so hours of poker over the previous 2 days which is tough going mentally and physically.

I will most likely sell 30-40% of myself for this as a €1650 buying is not an amount my poker bankroll can comfortably afford. Me playing it as a €1k buyin would be much better for me I think and would also reduce variance. If anyone reading is interested in taking a % leave a comment or PM digiman on boards.

Miserable results for the week are -$500 over 6.5k hands, will post a full graph of the month in a few days when its all over.

2009 Week 3

2009-01-21T21:44:00.003Z

Pretty bad week results wise, 3/6 and 5/10 can put huge dents into your bankroll when you do badly at them so I've decieded not to play any more 5/10 until I build up a larger roll. I will still play the 3/6 games when they are going because for some reason there does be usually 1 really soft spot at the table but unfortunately the rest of the table I probably have 0 edge in so the swings will be even bigger when this happens. I deposited more money on Full Tilt and Poker Stars despite both accounts being rigged against me severely but I want to learn how to play HU so I just put more money on those sites as Stars is good for HU action at 100nl and the games play super fast so 2 tabling is really good and you get about 450 hands per hour doing this, plus the games are super soft at these stakes.

On other news, LOST is back on the tv in USA tonight and I am such a fan of the show I will be downloading it in the morning before I go to work so it will be ready for me when I get back home. I really can't wait to start watching it again. 24 has also started back on TV again so have been watching it as well.

My results for the week are below. I lost $3.5k playing above my regular game which is really disappointing but if you don't take shots you will never get anywhere so I will just try grind through them. Anyway screenshot is below:

Very bad session

2009-01-15T22:32:00.002Z

Pretty awful session there, lost 2 stacks at 5/10, one was awful by me and the other one I ran trips into a house. Played 1300 hands over 2 session and both were awful and mostly at 400nl, in the 2nd session I was down 2k for the day within 10 hands and managed to get it back to -500 but then then lost another 1.6k in about 10 hands and just quit down 2.1k. To be fair I've had an unreal month so far so this was bound to happen sooner or later. Just gonna concentrate on 2/4 and 3/6 now for the next while till I get the roll built back up a bit after today's loss and a big withdrawal as few days ago.

2009 Week 2

2009-01-14T23:47:00.002Z

I've been extremely lazy this week with regards to playing poker. Today for example I managed to play 3 hands. I logged onto the site and the games look pretty poor. There was really long waiting lists for all the tables and I got on one after a few minutes. I won all my hands as the table was breaking, they are all obviously scared of me and ran away. One guy stayed but the inevitable happened him and he lost all his money to me. He left and I waited for more tables to pop up but none were coming so I just logged off!! Laziness is a killer

But results wise its been a good week. I got 2k hands in and won a nice bit of money. I've been running pretty hot to be fair and also had my biggest winning hand ever when I won a $2.2k pot with AA against a very bad player which was very enjoyable. I played some more 5/10 this week and didn't really feel all that comfortable at it. There was one bad player on 4 tables so I 4-tabled it for about and hour and got nothing going at all, I was giving up on pots pretty easily which is unlike me but the higher stakes just got to me I think. I hope to keep taking stabs at it when games look good but will mostly try and concentrate at 2/4 and 3/6 as I took out a nice bit today as the dollar is strong against the euro again so its a good time to take some out. I'm going to south of France in a month so will be nice to have some extra cash over there as I hear its pretty expensive.

Anyway its getting late and I've work in the morning so will wrap up with a screen shot of my graph and results for the week.

Jman launches new training site

2009-01-11T16:49:00.004Z

Just lost my biggest pot ever today when I was playing some 5/10. I played the hand like a fish and was pretty tilted after it. I won't even post the hand history as its so bad but it did involve me trying to bluff someone off an obvious QQ or AA and the $2070 pot got shipped over to AA. The session wasn't all bad though, I did manage to lose only $300 at 5/10 after playing pretty well on another table and losing the minimum with AQ vs AK on an AxxKx board so that was ok. I done well at 2/4 and 3/6 and won just over $500 in total so not a bad 30 min session. Games where pretty poor so didn't bother playing any longer and was just after losing the $2k pot so just quit.

I'm also updating my blog lists, I'm deleting any blogs that havn't been updated in a while and going to add in some other blogs from jman, aejones, krantz and FWF. Well I just tried adding in Aejones blog but it keeps linking to some post in the leggo poker forums so I will leave it out. Jmans blog doesn't seem to work properly with the RSS feed so it looks like it will be permantly stuck at the bottom!! Sort it out Phil next time you read this!!

Jman (My favourite high stakes player) launched a new training site today which I will sign up to later for 6 months at a cost of $229. The problem is I already have 3 subscriptions to other ones at similar monthly fees. I'm thinking of dropping Cardrunners as they are producing very little high stakes content recently from the likes of CTS and stinger and only get a video from raptor very rarely. The Brian Townsend videos are still pretty good but its hard to justify paying for all these subs when I only watch about 10 videos per month which costs about $90. Deuces Cracked is still really good as the Krantz and FWF video series are usually top quality and I have recently joined Leggo Poker for 6 months and intend on watching all the aejones videos there.

I'm still running very hot so the big downswing is not to far away I think. I've a feeling its going to come right now when I taking shots in the 5/10 games. A couple of buyins lost here is going to be $1k a go so will need to be cautious here for a while. Will put in another update on Wednesday hopefully.

2009 Week 1

2009-01-07T20:07:00.002Z

So from this post on now, I'm going to be trying to update the blog every Wednesday with results and that from the previous week. I might put in random posts every now and again about more random stuff as I am planning on running a triathlon later this year and hope to put in some posts about how that is going or other random stuff like holidays planned etc.

So the year has gotten off to a flyer really, played 2.5k hands across all limits from 1/2 to 10/20 but the vast majority have been at 2/4. This will be my main game now as long as I have over 35BI for this. If the tables are poor then I will add play 1/2 as well. I have been actively searching all the games from 2/4 to 5/10 and if there is any soft spots in the 5/10 games I will sit in and play. I'm not exactly rolled for 5/10 but I don't think playing 1 or 2 tables of it when there is a big fish in the game will do to much harm if I play tight and try nothing fancy.

I did play some live poker this week, I met up with zuutroy (Robert) and RoadSweeper (Paudie) from boards for a few pints and some live poker in the Fitz. I actually hate live poker after this really tilting session. I played for about 2 hours and was completely card dead and ended up getting bored and spewing off money like a donk. I managed to lose €350 in about 2 hours so I went home around 12.30 and called it a night there. I went online to see if there were any soft games but the waiting list for the soft table was way to long, not surprising when some fish done $1.5k at a 200nl table. I got none of it but one of the players there wanted to do some flips so I said I would a $200 flip with him and in the first one my Ts3c beat his 6h8d and then we decieded to do one more and again I kicked his ass with my Ks5h beat his 5s6h. So that softened the blow of losing around $500 in the casino. I took the $500 out of my poker bankroll as I made a rule last year of my own money not going into poker, just poker money going into my personal account.

I am trying to tie my coach down to Monday evenings for coaching but hes a tough man to get! I hope to do one session a week from now on as I find it really helpful and definitely improves my game. It's great to have a high stakes player watch over you now and again when you are playing and ask him questions about tough hands and situations that come up.

So the graph for the week is below, very good week and a good start on my goal of $50k winnings for the year. So overall I won $2730 this week when I take the live poker out of the online winnings.

2008 is over

2008-12-29T11:28:00.004Z

Well it is for my poker anyway. My last day was a bit crap and a poor way to end the year finishing down -$1.2k in very few hands without doing a whole lot wrong really. The month overall was pretty good I guess, I had $4k in winnings and have played hands at all limits from 100nl to 1knl and the only one were I was a loser at was 100nl. 400nl is still remaining to be really tough and high variance for me with 5 days this month with loses between $1k to $2.5k but also had my best ever winning day this month of $3.2k.

I'm off down to Cork now to see the girlfriend and bring her back up to Donegal for New Year's Eve and then back to Dublin after that so lots of driving for me over the next few days which I ain't looking forward to at all. I'm half considering driving to Dublin and then onto Cork because half the road that way is Motorway but going down the midlands would be a lot shorter. The prospect of either ain't to appealing right now.

My quick review of 2009 is basically:

$13k online cash winnings
€2k tournament winnings
$1.5k live cash winnings
~ $8k rakeback
Fingers crossed for an Irish Open ticket.

Aspirations for next year are:
Keep up the coaching
$50k in online cash winnings
Play the Irish Open
Qualify for the WSOP ME
Play a WSOP side event
Be the future star of Irish Poker (Thanks Gary Clarke!! :) )

Personal goals are to:
Get good at golf
Go back to the gym and complete a triathlon
Do well in my career as a telecommunications engineer
Start saving money from poker on a monthly basis and use it to buy something really nice like a house deposit or nice car!!

So that's it for 2009, next year will see my start the year with a bankroll of $15k and hopefully this time next year will be killing the 5/10 games on the internet.

Good luck to anyone who read this this year and a Happy New Year to you all

November Update

2008-11-30T23:00:00.005Z

November was a decent enough month. I got the most amount of hands so far this year and had a winning month. I also finished my Irish Open promotion and I am now waiting to get my hands on the ticket. I played a few tournaments this month also.

First one was the Bruce Poker €250 and didn't do great, ran my KK into AA after about 8 hours play which is annoying but pretty standard really. I played well at the start but kinda tilted a bit after some donk sucked out on me in a big pot that would have put me up to 75k when the average was about 30k, instead I was back to average and spewed off some chips. I calmed down over the dinner break and later got moved table and I shoved QJ in the first hand for the flop to read JJJ and my opponents TT drawing dead. Put all my chips in a few more times but got no customers which was a good thing. Was a well run festival with the usual people at it. A lot of familar faces from Killarney there.

The other tournaments were today where I satellited into the Sunday Warm Up and cashed for $406 which was fine and also the $75 6 max game on FT were I cashed for $133. I tried a few other small buyin tournaments and satellites as well today but nothing of note to report.

About 15mins ago I lost HU for a $2.8k package to the GJP deepstack game next year. Played pretty poorly in this to be fair, got lucky a few times but the structure was a pure crapshoot with the final table being allin or fold. My exit hand was as follows which was kinda strange to say the least. The villan limped the btn which I seen him do 4 hands ago with 35s. He had 36bb and I had 12bb. I look down at 9dTd and ship them in. He snap called with Q8o and takes down the ticket.

Cash went pretty ok this month, had $1.8k in winnings. The last week went well as I was stuck before that. Stats and graph are below as usual. I have been meaning to write a post about being in the right frame of mind and having the correct attitude before I start into an online session. Hopefully I will get it written up in the next few days. Bankroll is just over $10.5k at the moment with some bonuses to come in, about $500 so that will boost it to $11k by the end of the week. Hopefully I can have a heater now for the end of the year and get as close as possible to my inital goal of a $20k roll for the start of 2009. Going to be pretty unlikely now unless I win some tournament as I can't see me winning 45BI at 200nl this month.

October, poor online, good offline

2008-11-06T11:21:00.000Z

October is best described by the title really. Online was not much of a success at all. I started the month with a $6k bankroll and by the end I had $8.9k but $2k of this I had deposited from winnings in a 1/2 and 2/5 cash games in Las Vegas. I had brought money out of my roll to play over there so felt it was only right that I put it back online again. I didn't put my Killarney win back into my poker account, basically funded some of my holiday with that and lived it up a bit more than I would have had I not have won.

Online I won about $30 playing about 13k hands or so which is the lowest amount I have gotten in this year yet. Results wise I done ok at 200nl and not so well at 400nl. I think I played well enough at both I think, I made some high variance plays at 400nl that I probably should have avoided considering I was taking a shot at it. Making some plays like 5b shoving 89s and TJo against light 4 betters didn't work out to well when I got called by AT and AQ even though I had a nitty image.

I've been playing more HU last month again. Some of the results aren't in the graph as I played some on my brothers laptop and FTP didn't save the hand historys for some reason but the results are good which is the main thing. I really like playing it, especially if I can get 2 tables going against the same person. It makes for some interesting spots depending on what hand is going on on 1 table and what's happening on the other and create some good dynamics. In general 100nl HU is very soft on any site I played it on. I will try and take a few shots at 200nl when the bankroll gets bigger. 60+ buyins would be what I would like for 200nl HU as the variance is so much higher. The annoying thing about it is that its quite hard to get games if there are no fish around. The so called "regs" don't want to play you if you are any way good at all. So many times I've sat down to play, the "reg" is basically hoping I'm some fish but after 20 hands or so types in "gg" and leaves.

So October is over and we are in November already, things have started of well this month and hopefully they will continue like that. My goal when I started this blog was to have a $20k roll at the start of 2009, that is never going to happen now, as I type this it stands at 10.5k, I have taken out more money that I would have liked so if I had not of withdrawn I would have about 16k which would probably have seen me with the 20k roll but hey you got to treat yourself every now and again as well. I'm getting closer to clearing my IO ticket, I'm about 73% of the way there now. Another 12k hands at 200nl should see my clear it so hopefully I will have that done by the end of the month. I guess the new goal for January would be to have 400nl as my regular 6max game and 200nl as my regular HU game.

Graph for October attached below, ran a little bad to be fair, low green line shows what I should have won if there was no "luck" in poker but hey thats poker :)

Will post graph later, at work now!!

Las Vegas & Killarney Trip Report

2008-10-22T14:05:00.002+01:00

Killarney Trip Report
I'll start at Killarney, I went down to play the Ladbrokes €550 game there a couple of weeks ago. I had bought in myself after trying 1 online satellite with no success. It was the biggest tournament that I have ever bought into before. My father bought 10% in me for the fun and I usually do well in any games that he has a small stake in me so it was a good luck omen as well which did work.

So I got down there on the Friday after driving down from Dublin, I was feeling a bit wrecked when I got down there so by the end of the night I was really just waiting for the clock to finish on Day 1. I was never used to playing for such a long time in a poker game and it was pretty tiring both mentally and physically. I was lucky enough on my first table down there, it was a soft enough table and not 1 person was really playing back at me at all. I was liberally raising every pot I entered and throwing in a few 3b with air as well which were quite successful, especially one with 8d4d which made a straight on a 8765 board where I won a decent sized pot.

My second day was a hell of a lot tougher where I encountered several good players over the course of the day including last year’s winner and also this year’s winner. I came into the day with 3 times the average chip stack and finished the day just below average. I had quite a few interesting hands over the course of the day but I had tightened up considerably since the day before as my antics from the previous day just would not fly on these tables. I probably was too tight around the bubble but I actually really wanted to go home with at least €1k considering I had bought in myself.

My third day was a real non starter, I think 39 players or so made it back and I ended up coming in 29th, the very first hand I made a push with Q4o in the CO after it was folded to me and I got the button to fold AQ which was a good result, 2 hands later I pushed again with KQo and got through which was brought me up to just over the average stack. After that I really saw no cards at all, I seen ATo when I was UTG but I folded it as I only had 11bb so it was basically push or fold for me. My main demise was when I pushed the button with Q6s to run into a smaller stacks TT, first card out was a Q but 2 more Ts really crushed me!. Very next hand I had 3.5bb left and I had A6o and I pushed only to run into TT again which only made a set this time!

So that was a brief report on Killarney, it was a great tournament, really well run with a good blind structure, even though it did turn into a bit of a crapshoot for me at the end but that’s the way these things go I guess. It was my biggest tournament cash to date which I was happy with, would have loved to have got near the real money but it wasn't to be. I did get a Hendon Mob profile though so I can now consider myself a true poker great!! :)

Las Vegas Trip Report
I was on holidays last week in the US, I flew out to San Fran last Saturday for 3 days before I my stay in Las Vegas. This was my second time in Las Vegas, was there on a J1 a couple of years ago when I was pure broke. This time I had some money with me so it was going to a different story. I had booked into the MGM Signature which is a complex of to the side of the MGM hotel and casino. It was just a stunning hotel which really was above my expectations. I booked a suite which had a fully fitted kitchen (which I never used!) and a living room with HD LCD and then the bedroom with another LCD and even one in the bathroom as well which was the size of my bedroom at home.

I had booked a helicopter trip to the Canyon before we went out, my girlfriend, my friend John and his girlfriend Ciara all went out in what was just an amazing experience. I had never been in a helicopter before so that was an experience in itself, but it was so cool to fly over the Hoover damn, Lake Mead and then finally fly through the middle of the Canyon and land at the bottom of it and have a champagne picnic at the bottom. We flew back into the Sunset on our way back to Las Vegas for another night out on the beer.

The next day we had booked tickets to see Cirque du Soleil in the Bellagio. We went to see "O" which really is an amazing show for anyone to go and see. It is basically several gymnasts doing acrobatics over a swimming pool which will leave you in awe the entire show. We had great seats up near the front of the theatre, there was so much going on, at times it was hard to know what to focus on.

I played a few hours of poker while I was over there. I had put some of my online roll onto my credit card so I could play some while out there but in the end only played 2 days while there for about 4-5 hours in total which is very little for live poker. I ran pretty well while over there, the first day I played some 1/2NL in the MGM while the standard was just shocking and I got paid off pretty easy by bottom pair and the like. The second day I played a bit in the $2/$5NL game in the MGM. The standard was a small bit better but more comparable to 25c/50cNL online. I ran really well in this game getting paid of for pots over 1.2k with both AK and AA, I finished up this session with $1.9k on the table from a starting stack of $500 which would go down in my top 5 best poker sesisons ever which was sweet.

I played a little blackjack over there as well in which I done ok in, I don't know much about this game so I was definitely a fish as far as the Bellagio and the Venetian were concerned. I won about $100 or so playing this and another $250 playing roulette. I only played roulette when drunk. Me and John both decided to put down $50 each on black for one spin while we were on the way to a club. We won and it bought a few drinks. Next night I took one $50 spin on black again and won, following night me and John gave it another go while enroute to Ghostbar in the Palms, out luck was lasting and again we won.

On my final night I went for a meal in Craftsteak with my girlfriend. I had decided before I went over that I wanted to have a Kobi steak while I was in Vegas. This restaurant specialized in steaks so it seemed to be the place to get it. Before I went out I had said I was going to spend no more than $200 on a piece of meat but I seen the "8 oz Japanese wagyu beef grade 12 A5 filet mignon all the way from Kagoshima in Japan" I had to try it out, $240 of the finest steak I have ever had. It really was just a melt in your mouth steak, so tender and juicy and delicious flavors helped by the sauce that it was sitting on. I would recommend anyone to try on of these once.

On the last day I missed my flight from Vegas to San Fran and was in great danger of missing my flight from San Fran to Dublin which would have been a real disaster. I slept in to 9:30am when my flight had departed at 9:28am!! We rushed to the airport hoping to catch another flight ASAP but the next one was not until 12:10pm while out flight back to Ireland was at 2:35pm. In fairness to US airways they done every single thing the could have to make sure we made our connection back home. They put our luggage through from one plane to the other which was a huge help, gave us seats at the front of the plane and asked the other passengers to wait for us while we departed the plane first at San Fran and didn't even charge us for the flight!! We rushed through the terminals at San Fran, running to the Aer Lingus checkout desk to print of out boarding passes so we could get through security and make our flight home. We eventually did, I was really thinking that my poker winnings were going to have to go on a flight back to Ireland as I am pretty sure Aer Lingus would not waive the costs of the flight these days.

Online Poker Update
Poker has been going really well this month, I had a short session at 2/4 last night which was good to get back into it. I have spread my bankroll over a 4 sites while I try to look for the best games going. My Irish Open ticket is about 59.6% done at the moment so hopefully I can get it close to 75% by the end of the month. I have only played about 6k hands online this month so far but have been doing pretty well, about $3k in winnings which is nice and total winnings of the month from live and online are about $7k, so hopefully I am on course for my best month ever.

That’s it for now, hopefully I will get another update of how online is going at the end of the month with a better recap on online poker.

Vegas in the morning

2008-10-14T02:05:00.000+01:00

That is all...........

Tilted off a lot of money

2008-09-21T21:37:00.002+01:00

Today was the biggest losing day I've ever had in poker. I lost $2.3k at 200nl which is pretty tough going. To be fair I can't go and say I got unlucky in ever hand and got it in as a favourite all the time. I was only down about $700 in EV so there is about $1600 that I have to take into account. I did have a lot of 3b and 4b pots where I stacked off with houses, sets, top pair only to lose to quads, flushes and a lot of sets.

I probably forced myself into playing as I wanted to get this bonus cleared asap so I can move off ipoker once again. I was 12 tabling today and ended up getting in 5k hands which is the only good thing that I can take out of today. I now have 35% of an Irish Open ticket so just need to keep grinding away and hopefully do it without losing. I am still up about $1k for the month so its not to bad.

I've been trying to organise things for my trip to San Fran and Vegas. Got my hotel in San Fran booked, its in Union Sq. which is in the centre of the city so its in a great location. I plan to book the helicopter trip to the Canyon this week and also book a show. Looking like "O" is the one that we will go see.

I also bought into the Killarney game which is on in 2 weeks time. Cost me $775 to do so, After today this stands at around 10% of my roll which is probably not a great idea but its a one of thing so I will let it slide this time. I guees to be fair when I bought it my roll was over the $10k mark but today its considerably less.

Couldn't be bothered putting up any graphs or stats as they are just tilting to look at, as glorious and all that they are. So thats it, just a quick update really of whats happened in the last week. Until next time.

Traffic, traffic, traffic!!!

2008-09-11T15:43:00.005+01:00

I changed jobs there about a week ago. I'm still with the same company as I was before hand but now I am working in an office out in Dundrum and travelling from Blanchardstown everyday which is proving to be a real pain in the ass. I used to work as a field engineer for a mobile phone network before this and things were a bit handier to say the least which allowed me a lot more time for playing poker and reading about it etc.

Now I have to leave the house everyday at 7:30am and try get to work for 8:30am, not easy some days with the traffic going into Dundrum off the M50 does be really bad some mornings. I have been trying a few different routes from going in through the city centre and exiting the M50 at Tallaght but all my efforts have been been in vain, with the time always being around the 60mins. Luckily in the evening its not quite as bad, usually around 45mins with the new barrier M50 helping a lot. So this means I don't get home now until around 6pm which really messes up my evenings poker meaning a lot of evenings I don't have time or am less bothered in playing because I am tired or whatever.

Before hand I used to be able to play in the afternoons if things were quiet at work and I could get my session done nice and early or perhaps read 2+2 or watch a few Cardrunners videos. Basically a long story short my time for poker is a lot lot shorter now and will continue like that for the forseeable future.

So far this month I've gotten about 9k hands of 100nl and 1.5k hands of 200nl. 100nl has been really frustrating for me to play on Ipoker. I'm finding it tough to adjust to all the passive NITs, I'm break even over those hands at 100nl and I think I'm playing pretty well but running pretty poor to be honest. I've has set over sets a couple of times and the usual AK and KK into better hands all in pre flop. But what I wanted to take out of this was a confidence boost. A lot of sessions I played I went into the red at the very start so often and often found myself down 4-6BI after 10 minutes. The only good thing about this is that I put in longer sessions when this happens which is good as I need to accumulate as many points as I can so I can win my Irish Open seat.

Right now my bankroll is about $8.2k so from now on I am going to play 200nl as I really can't be bothered with 100nl anymore. Last Sunday Betdaq had a €100k freeroll were I got a free ticket for it. I wasn't able to play it so I ended up getting blinded out but took about $410 from it so was pretty happy with that. My poker coach is off on some trip at the minute so he won't be able to coach me now for a while. I may look into getting another coach but hav't thought to much about this yet.

I really really want to play this tournament in Killarney. I've the Friday booked of work now so I just need to qualify for this or have a good month and possibly buy into it. I was going to play a JP poker satellite on Friday night but went out on the beer instead, which resulted in me being in poor shape on Saturday and played no poker at all on Saturday or on Friday. So I will really try and play the next satellite he has and then one on Ladbrokes if I've no luck in that one.

Above are the stats so far for the month. I was playing pretty loose and aggro at 100nl and calmed down a bit when I started playing 200nl I've been happy with my postflop play, picking out the bad spots to c-bet more often and winning my fair share of pots. As usual my biggest strength in poker is taking down pots that nobody wants and putting lots of pressure on players. This can be seen in the graph below where the red line indicates pots I have been taking down without getting showndown.

Anyway that's it for now. GL

Moving back down for a while

2008-09-03T20:52:00.003+01:00

I took a week off from poker after not really taking any sort of break for quite a while now. I've moved down levels now probably 9/10 times now since the start of the year and twice I've dropped down 2 levels in a short space of time. Thankfully this doesn't bother me too much, obviously I would rather have move up all the time but using good bankroll management is probably what I have done best this year since playing. I've never played with less than 15 buyins this year and 95% of the time never less than 20BI. At the minute I am well enough rolled for 200nl but I really want to get some confidence back again, so to do that I'm going to play 10k hands or so at 100nl and LAG it up for a while and try to get some confidence back into my game again.

I have started to play on ipoker again and to be honest I really am hating that god damn site. I'm playing on it because I want to clear a bonus that will give me an Irish Open ticket. I need to generate 100k points which I should be able to do in around 50k hands at 200nl which is where I hope to be clearing them but I would imagine it would take around 70k hands at 100nl. I've got 7.5% of it done so far after 3k hands at 100nl and 1.5k hands at 200nl. The Irish Open ticket is worth about €3.5k and is an event I would absoulety love to play in. I went out there last year for a while to watch it and there was a great atmosphere there with some really big name players there.

So far this month I've played nearly all 100nl and I am not enjoying it at all. The software is really bad on ipoker and my tables overlap even on a HD moniter. The 100nl games are as tight preflop as 400nl on Everest are which I thought were pretty tight but at 400nl its normal enough. There are so many 14/12 regulars at ipoker and quite a lot of 25/4 types as well. Then there are all the shortstackers who are the bain of a lot of players lives. I am having trouble adjusting to the non aggressive nature of 100nl. Very few players are 3b/4b light at all which is just something I am going to have to adjust my game too.

Hopefully next week or when I put up a new post I will be getting ready to move back up to 200nl for about the 5th time!!!

August is now done

2008-08-26T08:04:00.003+01:00

August started of great for me at 400nl but ended badly to say the least. I got off to a great start at 400nl, I was running well and just not getting into any bad spots at all. Poker was going so easy, when I had a hand I got paid off and I was also able to lay down hands as well. Then something happened around the 13th August were every single big pot I was in was a pure nightmare, the most common theme was people playing badly against me and me paying them off all the time. Most of these are just coolers and I have to learn to accept them so once again a good learning month poker wise. At the end of the month I finished down $1650 across 200nl and 400nl with me losing around $6.5k in the last 12 days or so. I also had a few tilty sessions and there was several days were I lost over $1k but again this is nothing really to worry about when a buyin is 400nl.

The bankroll once stood at $15.5k during August but due to me cashing out $2k to buy an amazing 46" LCD and losing $6.5k its back down to around $7k. This isn't the end of the world by any means but is a big blow in my aspirations to have a $20k bankroll by the end of the year. In fact only about 2 weeks ago when I was ruling 400nl over a short sample I was thinking I'm going to be playing 1kNL by the years end. Dreams can fade fast sometimes.

The plan now is not to play any more poker until at least September and hopefully I can come back with a new self confidence in my game. When I start back into I think I will play 100nl for 10k hands or so and try to rebuild from there. I'm still rolled ok for 200nl but I think it would be no harm to play some 100nl for a while again. I'm also going to be 24 tomorrow, nothing much planned, will go out for a meal with the girlfriend and will most likely go back home to Donegal for the weekend. My trip to San Fran and Vegas is getting closer with it only being about 6 weeks away now so really really looking forward to that. I still have to book an hotel for San Fran, hopefully I'll sort something out there in the next week or so. I usually don't get all the excited by holidays but I really am looking forward to this one.

As usual I have my monthly graph above, pretty grim reading. Back in September.

My July, My July

2008-07-31T21:49:00.003+01:00

Since I last updated I have taken some more shots at 400nl. They have went well in monetary terms but I did find it pretty tough. When there were no fish at the tables I probably was the fish so I stepped back and moved back down to 200nl again. While at 400nl I won 2 pots worth over $1500 each which was an amazing feeling I have to say. I was on such a high that evening, to be fair in one of them I sucked out a little. I opened 77 UTG and 2 fish call. We are all nearly 200bb deep and the flop is 478 rainbow. I bet into both players and I get minraised by the first player and the other guy folds. I re-raised him and he again min-raised me, I had a set so I wasn't folding and he showed me 56 for the nuts but an 8 on ther river shipped me a pot of over $1500. The sickest thing is this guy had just lost a $1500 pot to me 3 minutes earlier on another table so I ended up the day $1700 which was my biggest ever winning day in online poker.

The following day I played some more 400nl over the next few days and I lost most of what I had won the previous days. I have to admit I did get coolered a lot on those few days. I got AK in very far behind twice, QQ in vs AA and I lost AA to AQs. All those hands I got all the money in preflop and didn't win anything. Other than these I think I played well enough but I think I got a very cheap lesson in that I am not rolled for these games even with over 20 buyins. These hits are what made me drop back down and grind it out at 200nl for another while. I hope to be able to take a few more shots at 400nl in August. Most of these will be while I am getting coaching which has been working well so far. When you know that someone who is watching over you that you respect I tend not to do anything stupid and play very solid.

In other sorta non poker news I booked my holidays to San Francisco and Las Vegas in October for a week. I booked all my flights and also my Las Vegas hotel but I still have to book an hotel for San Francisco. I really can't wait to go. I'm going with my girlfriend and a friend of mine and his girlfriend so it should be a great time. I don't intend on playing any tournaments over there as they just take up to much time and I am going for a holiday rather than poker. No doubt I will play some cash games over there though!! I also want to go to a show, see the Grand Canyon and I read about this shooting range there that sounds like a good buzz. A helicopter ride over the strip is on the agenda as well. I'm going to start withdrawing $200/week from poker for some extra spending money while I am there which hopefully will allow me to do some things that I would not have done otherwise.

So the customary graph for the month is below. I really am delighted with how I done this month and I have to be honest I hope to beat it next month so hopefully the poker gods are listening and will give me some more positive variance for the month.

Half way review

2008-07-21T10:33:00.005+01:00

I've been meaning to put up a post about how the year has went so far and as its been just over 6 months since I started at 50nl, so it seems appropriate to do this now. Looking back now, I'm not really sure why I couldn't beat 50nl but with the rakeback and sign up bonus I was rolled to play 100nl so I moved up anyway. Perhaps one of the reasons why I wasn't a winner at it was because I was running way to many bluffs versus calling stations and being overly aggressive in a game that you don't really need to be all that aggressive to win at. I guess I also had FPS (Fancy play syndrome) which just means trying to make the perfect plays/bluffs all the time. One thing I am sure of though I had really really bad tilt issues back then and I still have tilt problems but not to the degree as I had them back then. When moving up limits this will really slow you down and I spent quite a while at 50nl so my top tips for anyone trying to beat 50nl are:

Get the basics right, cut out the limping, play your big hands strong and fast.
Always play ABC poker, no need to do anything different to beat the game
Make sure you have rakeback and a clear-able sign up bonus.
Avoid tilt.
Table select the best games (lots of NITS at 50nl trying to move up, loads of fish at this level so need to play against them).
Sign up to a video training site, this will improve your play a lot by watching how experts can easily beat these games.

So I then moved onto 100nl and went on a heater at the start, making 20BI in about 4k hands so I was off to a flyer. I just ran really good, was putting coolers on so many people and rarely getting sucked out on and of course sucking out myself the odd time. I found the move from 50nl - 100nl really easy because of this but once I was settled in at 100nl and the heater was over I found things started going downhill and I needed to improve my game. The aggression at 100nl was pretty high and had lots of spewy regs stacking off PF with KQs, AQs, TT etc and I also found myself doing this.
At this point I took a step back and tryed to figure out what was the best way to couteract this. I figured folding to 3b was making me a lot of money. I could easily outplay most of these guy post flop so thats what I needed to do. There was no need for me to be getting into inflated pots with 78s and being OOP against some aggro guy. These hands play so much better in multiway raised pots not 3b ones. So my tips for 100nl would be:

Don't call 3b OOP with less than TT/JJ and sometimes fold AQ. (This may seem weak but I found it to work well)
3b IP more than you do OOP. Regs at this level didn't like folding to 3b so you want to be playing these pots IP.
Spew less, this is the biggest leak for all regs. They are just to aggro.
Start figuring out good spots for value betting, this will improve your game a lot.

I took a very quick shot at 200nl when I had 20BI and well I was playing 50nl after that so enough said. I then rebuilt again and also moved sites. This worked very well for me as I again went on a heater when I moved to 100nl, I moved through 100nl very quickly and started getting some coaching and started taking shots at 200nl. This time 200nl went pretty well and I was up to 8k and was starting to think about 400nl again. Doomswitch then hit and I was back to 100nl again rebuilding my roll.
Around this time I decieded to get a new desk, comfortable leather chair and a new 24" moniter for the new desk. Set up below:

I think comfortable surroundings are really important when playing poker. I have the desk pointing towards the wall so its hard to look at the tv when playing so less distractions is good. The new screen is a great investment, I was able to 10-12 table without any overlap which is great when mulitabling. I really hated having to stack tables on top of each other and misclick quite often which is a pure pain.

So at the minute 200nl is going really well, I've also done a coaching session at 400nl and the games seemed good which is encouraging. I've got just over $9k now so I will try and hold off taking a proper shot at 400nl until I have at least 25BI. I guess my aims now for the year will be to have taken a few shots at 1kNL. This is highly ambitious but I am that way anyway so no harm in it. To play 1kNL I would really want to have at least $30k so time will tell if this is achievable. Hopefully it will be as I don't cash out to often. I'm also planning a trip to the US in October, going to visit San Fran and Vegas over a week, I've being to both places before but I loved them when I was there so no harm in going back again.

Below is all my stats for the year so far. 125k hands is a lot for me but I think I have learned a hell of a lot and I am 10 times the poker player I was 6 months ago. All the top players say that there is so much to learn in poker and I really am starting to believe this. I think I have come along way since I started playing 50nl in January. I've played a decent buyin tournament which I played well enough in. I've moved from 50nl to a stage where I'm starting to take shots at 400nl which I'm delighted with.

Looking at my stats I think its quite interesting how they have slightly changed since moving from 50nl to 200nl. There are constant trends in them all. So as I moved up through the levels the following has happened:

Win rate has gone up in them all, but the sample size at 200nl is to small to really know how good of a winner I am at it.
I've tightened up as I moved up levels but not to a point where I've got to NITTY, I would consider my 200nl stats as a decent TAG.
My PFR/VPIP has merged closer to 1, 73.3% at 50nl, 81.8% at 100nl and 82.5% at 200nl.
My 3b% has decreased, I put this down to playing better players who play back more at you so I had to decrease this.
My 4b% has increased but this should happen as my 3b decreases my 3b range will have gotten tighter so my 4b range of hands is pretty similar, slighly wider if anythings.
I am squeezing a bit more but hopefully I am picking better spots for it.
My WTSD% has increased which I am a bit worried about but to be honest I am not really all that sure on the relevance to it for the way I play.
W$SD% is fairly similar, I would love to get this higher but I bluff quite a bit so inevitably this will stay low when I bluff in bad spots.
One thing which is good is that my W$WSF is increasing all the time even as I have moved up limits. I'm really happy with this as this is a really good indicater how capable you are as a poker player and how well you play post flop.
My aggression has also increased which I think is natural as the games are more aggressive as you moved up.
My 3 barelling is quite high as I do it quite alot and its even higher at 200nl than any other level. At 200nl I calculated it to be 5.84% of hands that I open with. This is probably quite high but it's not a stat I have really looked into and havn't compared it much to other players. It was 5.09% at 100nl so it just means that I am being more aggressive.
So overall I think my stats are going mainly in the right direction and it shows that I have adjusted pretty well to each level I think.

So a recap on the poker goals for the next 6 months are:

Play some more big buyin tournaments, the Killarney festival and the Paddy Power Winter festival. Playing one of these is a big ambition.
To be able to beat 400nl and 600nl, with an aim to me ready to take shots at 1kNL

So thats it until probably August now where hopefully I will have more positive news, Until then good luck at your games.

Its been a while

2008-07-13T19:11:00.005+01:00

Haven't got around to updating this in a while mainly because I'm playing bad. Right after my last update things went very downhill. At one point I was -$3610 on what I was. When you see the drop in my graphs you will see that I dropped $1k in about 40 hands, 4 of these were me just plain tilting, something I have obviously not gotten over. And once again I did $400 being an ass at 1kNL but hey I'll learn yet.

Things in July have been fairly swingy so far, I've had 4 -$800+ sessions but I am up about $1400 so far this month and I have played nothing but 200nl this month so far. I've been happy enough of how I've been playing so far this month. At the minute I am fairly confident about my 200nl game. I've racked in 22k hands so far and I am beating it for 4.25BB/100 or 8.5bb/100 so thats a fairly decent winrate but the sample size is to small really to take much meaning from it.
I've found the games a lot more aggro than 100nl and I've tightened up my game quite a bit since I was playing 100nl. I can have session at 200nl where I am 17/14 but so far this month I am 20/16/3.5 over 10k hands. I think I play my best around 18/15 when I try to NIT it up a bit and don't get involved with the insane 3b/4b that is going at these levels. In one session this month I was 3b 35/270 hands which is quite insane and 8 of those was from the same player who really was killing me and I dropped $450 to him that day, each time I shoved over his 4b, once with AQs and the other with 66, both plays aren't good so I gotta give him credit, he MADE me do it really so well played him!!

Currently my online cash bankroll is $7.6k. I really hope to be getting close to $10k by the end of the month and hopefully sometime in August/September I can start taking some shots at 400nl. This is where I want to be playing, the level above where I currently am!! I really want to keep moving up all the time, likelihood of me ever reaching high stakes game 10/20+ are slim to none but I will keep trying until I have resigned to the fact that it is impossible. Poker is only a hobby for me and the money I have in my account is all winnings so going bust wouldn't be the worst thing in the world but hopefully I will have the discipline not to do that. Hopefully valor will be back coaching me again after his WSOP was cut short due to a family death. My condolenscence to Gavin and his family.

My stats so far for this month are shown below, a few things I need to work on are my "W$SD%" and "Avg All-in EV%" as both are below 50%. I am also losing from EP and MP so far this month so I really need to plug those leaks also. Hopefully with getting in more hands and really working on my game I will achieve this. I have also signed up to Deuces Cracked which is so far been very good. I think Foxwoodfiends videos are excellent and he explains things really well.

I hope to have another update in before the end of July so until then. Good luck.

No WSOP, some APAT, tons of clapping and the usual cash.

2008-06-17T17:59:00.003+01:00

It's being my 3rd eligible year to play in the WSOP due to my age and also since I started playing poker and I still haven't played!! This isn't a huge surprise, a few months ago I played a few satellites on Stars to try and qualify but I was only wasting money, played numerous Step 1s and never even made it on to Step 2, I could have played at least 7-8 of these and never to have progressed is just a disgrace I think. So what do all good poker players do when they can't beat a level or lose money at it......... yes they move up so thats what I did. I bought into a step 2 and was onto step 4 without having to replay step 2 or 3. So I decide to hold off on Step 4 for a few days and then one Friday evening I play, after about 4 hands I get a phone call and there is a mobile phone site down in Sandyford........ just great, have to go through the M50 traffic at 6pm on a Friday and leave me $215 buyin tournament. So I'm on the way over coming up to the toll bridge and I ring the network monitoring center and what do you know the site is back on air. Well this probably just sums up my WSOP attempt this year. I didn't play another sat after that and that was about 2 months ago now.

But I still really wanted to go as I thought my game has come on a lot this year and I have went from 50nl-taking shots at 200nl with 20Bi and moving straight back down to 50nl afterwards but I'm now back up at 200nl and very well rolled with over 40BI and getting closer to a magical 5 figure bankroll in so far less than 100k hands which is a good achievement in itself I think. I've also played a few live tournaments this year and played fairly well in them I thought so with that in mind I was going to buy into either the Stars 200 seat guarantee or the Full Tilt 150 guarantee but as it got closer to the time I realized that working Monday to Friday just doesn't really fit in with the playing satellites to 7am on Sunday morning. I could have asked for the day off and probably got it too but hell if my boss/parents/girlfriend thought I was going to take a day off work so I could play a poker tournament then this wouldn't go down well at all. Now don't get me wrong this wasn't really the reason I didn't do it. I just didn't really want it enough this year and I feel this time next year I want to be playing 600NL and 1kNL, then I will be in much better shape to be thinking of Vegas for the WSOP so I will have plenty of time and a much better bankroll to be playing such tournaments. I do intend to go to Vegas this year in October with my girlfriend and another couple, it won't really be to play poker thought but I'm sure I'll get a few cash hours in when I am over there.

I played the APAT on Saturday, was hungover as could be on Saturday morning, didn't get to bed to 6.30am but don't think it affected my game to much in the early stages anyway, later in the day I was getting tired for sure but in deep stacked tournaments this is probably to be expected. I started off on a table which has had 3 dead stacks and as these guys had paid in they weren't going to be lifted until they were blinded out which took about 5 hours, this left for lots and lots of easy steals and at one stage another dead stack came into my right. One guy from Birmingham wearing some Full Tilt gear had a dead stack to his left and 2 to his right, he had the best seat in the house as the guy who was button to his BB let him have 6 walks and this guy as counting them each time and letting the table know about it, unfortunately I was in way too early a position to be stealing them but that didn't stop me stealing other peoples blinds, by the time I was on 35k the biggest pot I had won was 4.5k which says it all really, the guy to my left who was just unbelievably tight I was able to take his BB 6 times in a row when it was folded around to me in the SB and he never played back once, same went for when I was on the button, nobody wanted to play back at me at all.

By the time I was on a stack of about 40k I got involved in a 36k pot against the only player at the table who was willing to play back at me. I opened AhJd to 3k at 600/1200 in early position and he called on the button. The flop was Ad3d3x and I lead for 5k, full sure I have the best hand and I was prepared to call a shove. he shoved for 9k more and I snapped called him, he tabled 7d8d with the flush draw and the fact that I had the Jd he was about 25% to win the hand, but he hit a 9d on the turn and even then I still had a good few outs to hit but it wasn't to be. After that I was back down to about 24k when I should have been on about 60k so it was a bit of a setback. My stack didn't get much bigger than this for a long time.

We got moved tables when we lost the dead stacks so I had to adjust a good because I had to go from 6 handed to 10 handed and straight onto a new table full of new faces. I played very few hands at this table, stole the blinds a few times and at this stage players were dropping like flies. When we got down to the last 30 people it slowed down a small bit as they were going to end the day when they got to 20 people or at the end of the 14th level, which ever came quicker. I was on about 25k and the blinds were at 1k/2k so I was in push or fold mode, I could never get a hand to push with and when I did someone else had pushed before me. I got 55 and 77 during this time but I felt they just weren't good enough to be calling off most of my stack with. So then a player with an 80k stack opens to 10k at 2/4k and I ship over for 13k more with TT and he calls with his AQs, I was feeling good about it as TT had been hitting sets on this table all day long, and when the flop came ATx I had the hand almost locked up. Now at this stage I felt is where I should have started pushing more to try and not get blinded out as the blinds were going to be 3/6k soon. Instead I played tight and eventually pushed with ATs and got called by AJ and he held up.

Now I was in deep trouble, we were on the 3/6k level and I had about 20k in chips and 1 more person needed to be knocked out before that day ended so it comes to my BB and I don't look at them until everyone else has, I don't usually do this but thought this was a good time as I don't want to be giving out any tells that I have 72o or something. So the SB pushes on me and I snap call him with my AJ, hes got 8sJs and even on a A8x flop which has 2 spades I get knocked out when the spade falls on the river. Overall I was very happy with how I played in this, don't think I done a whole lot wrong all day but just didn't catch the breaks when I needed to. I think I will play a few more live tournaments in the next few months, there is a €500 game on in my home county Donegal in 2 weeks so I might take a trip home to play that.

The one bad thing I would think about the tournament was the need to clap for every person that got knocked out, fair enough having a clap for the first knocked out and then one for yours truly when I was the last person to go on the day. It's just a bit annoying when you are in the middle of a hand and everyone all of a sudden and when it gets to the stage when people are getting knocked out quickly you are clapping every few minutes. Our table did have a really good clap when the first dead stack eventually got knocked out!! Was kinda funny to see people take a look around and nobody leaving the table!!

So I got in 5.5k hands of cash this week which wasn't to bad considering I didn't play at all on Saturday or Sunday. I ran good at 200nl and played less than 200 hands at 100nl. Will be playing 200nl full time now unless the games are really bad or I fall below 35BI for 200nl. I think I am adjusting well enough to 200nl and the added aggression so far. I started off really tight a few weeks back but I have opened up a lot more and have become more aggressive myself. I am also approaching 100k hands for the year so I will likely do an update with all my stats for each of the levels varying from 0.01/0.02NL to 10/20NL!!! Stats for the week and a graph are below:

Until my 100k hands update in a few days.......

A solid quiet heater of a week

2008-06-11T09:22:00.006+01:00

Had solid week since I last wrote up here. I didn't play too much this week due to a mate being up for the weekend so had no poker on Saturday and very little on Friday or Sunday. Was hungover on both Saturday and Sunday and combined with the fact that I had little time to play I didn't bother.

Again this weekend is going to be similar, I have work day out on Friday. The boss is bringing us to the Rally School in Monaghan, I really can't wait to drive the Impreza rally car and the BMW, mk2 escort and the mini should be great craic as well. Heading on the beer then after than, followed by me playing the APPT in the Fitz on Saturday which is a 2 day event and should be good. Havn't played a live tournament in 6 weeks which is about normal for me. Hopefully I learned something from the JP Masters event and I can go deep in this one.

Sunday night I have bought in for the Full Tilt WSOP 150 seats satellite. The damn thing is on at 11pm on Sunday night so its not ideal. Its basically 1/24 chance of qualifying, there is one on Stars a couple of hours earlier but it works out at about 1/35 chance, buyin is smaller of course but I just decieded that if I was going to buyin I would give myself the best odds of going through. I could easily pull out of this at the last minute, will probably try a satellite as well as I'm not 100% comfortable with paying this much into a tournament ($535).

So to my cash games, I'm still grinding away at 100nl mainly and taking the odd shot at 200nl when there are some soft looking tables. I've been sticking to this fairly well and don't intend to play 200nl fully until I've got 40Bi for it, so cash BR has $1300 to go before I get to this stage. So I managed to play 500 hands of 200nl and 3.7k hands at 100nl. I done well in both and ran really good at 200nl. I only played the softest tables I could find and well it worked a treat. I won to pots worth $620 and $880 and a few other ones here and there. I'll post up the $880 one as I should have folded the flop but I decided to peel the turn and hit my set which turned out to be a real action card as it gave my opponent the nut flush draw on the turn and he went with it. Thankfully I held up and took down the biggest pot I have ever won. Screenshot of boards post below:

So the general consensus was to fold as he will only be firing the flop into 2 players with a strong hand and there are very few turn cards that I want to see and the size of the pot will be get really big and make it just to difficult to play.
So the weekly graph and stats are below:

So hopefully next week can go well with a couple of good tournament scores which would go down nicely. Would love to be able to go to Vegas this summer so fingers are crossed

It's been a crazy past 9 days or so

2008-06-04T22:28:00.004+01:00

Things have been crazy since I last played, I've hit incredible bad variance at 100nl, played a tilted 18 hands shortstacking 2kNL, had a really good coaching session and done well at a small shot at 200nl.

So the bad shit first, well 100nl has been a disaster, I ran 11BI below expectation which has been damn hard to deal with considering I had played fairly well, just the usual bad beats from the donks but I have to admit it has just been really tough to deal with mentally. The strange thing was I ran the worst when the games were really really good. I went online on Saturday night and set up about 10 tables, loads of fish everywhere but I was down more than $700 in less than 30 minutes so I just left it and went to bed. Trouble was I couldn't sleep to well, just thinking about this bad beat and that one.
So next morning I get up an play some more, next thing I know I am down $400 more and tilting so bad. So instead of stopping I jump into a $2000 game with $200 and proceed to get stacked 3 times, each time it was like a 65/35 type hand in my favor but none of them held up so bah. Anyway this is just so wreck-less and I hope I learned a lesson from it. Funny thing is when I see some guy sit into my regular games with 10BB I laugh at him. Joke was on me this time. Graph and stats for the 100nl period are below.

Had another coaching session this week and I was very happy with it. I played some 200nl as I felt this would be better value and more educational for me and had valor watching me and advising on what he thought the best lines to take were and talking about the different situations that came up or could have arisen. I just played very tight and tried not to play OOP were possible. I then played about 2k hands myself in the following days and things went really well. I ran a couple of BI above EV and got paid off with a lot of my big hands which is nice when you start off. Graph and stats are below:

When I was trying to withdraw money from Everest the strangest thing I have ever heard off regarding a poker site happened me. I took out money twice from my roll to pay for the coaching and got it transfered to Neteller. About 7-8 days later I still hadn't received either withdrawal so I sent Everest a mail about it and they tell me that they never took out my original deposit of $500 from my CC as there had been some error with the CC company. Now the strange thing was they never told me this and let me play away with the $500. So now I need to withdraw another $300 and we are quits. So basically I withdraw the money to them!!! Quite bizarre I think.

There are 2 big WSOP satellites on Full Tilt and Poker Stars that I intend to play on Sunday 15th June, they are a $535 and $370 buyins with 150 and 200 packages guaranteed respectively. I'm not exactly rolled to buy directly into them so I will try a few satellites first but I do intend on playing in 1 of them and if that means having to buyin directly then I will. Other option is I have $600 on Full Tilt that I will probably try and spin up to the $905 required to play both.

Finally the total online BR at the minute is $5.6k with $4.8k of this for cash and the rest is on Full Tilt and GJP for the odd tournaments that I might play.

Almost a 10k hand week

2008-05-26T21:33:00.004+01:00

Its been the most amount of hand I've squeezed into a week ever I would say and well I certainly didn't match last weeks record profits it was a good week learning wise anyway thats for sure. I had to deal with a 13BI downswing but I grinded that out by running really good at 12 tabling 5k hands on EVT. I had my coaching session with Valor on Friday night and found it to be good, he was very observant of what I was doing as I would have expected and asked me lots of questions about why I was doing certain stuff and what my ranges would be for calling certain players and what ranges I put them on just based on their stats. I found it kinda hard to reply to his questions while playing 4 tables as when I am playing I really need to just play and concentrate on the game. Overall I think he thought my game was ok, I definetly cbet way to much and am probably over aggro.

When I was 12 tabling on EVT I found that I was a lot lot tighter obviously as I just can't play as many hands on that many tables without losing tons of money. So I played less aggressive, cbet less pots and just didn't really play back at many players who were 3b or 4b me, they really needed to do it a lot before I would play back, simply because I didn't have time to be doing that. This resulted in me being way more stable, just value betting all my TP hands etc and earning a nice bit of rake. I'll post up my stats and graph for the week below. One thing that is really obvious from the graph is where I started to play 12 tables, just right at the point where the red line starts leveling off, this is fine as my won at showdown shoots up.

Now I want to figure out where I make the most money, playing LAG on few tables or playing TAG on many tables. Also looking forward to more coaching sessions this week so until next week!

An Update

2008-05-18T22:43:00.004+01:00

Well, things have went very very well since I last posted. A few things have happened since then. The biggest one has been I have moved my roll from Carlos to Everest, I returned the moniter to Argos and bought a new one. I also moved back up to 100nl when I had 2.2k as I felt that I was wasting my time trying to grind it out at 50nl when I could already beat 100nl well and 22BI should be enough to take a shot. I have also organized more coaching for myself and also won a ticket to the JP masters €750 game which I have played.

So I'm playing 100% of my cash games on EVT now, its been working out very well for me, I have been killing the 100nl games there over a small sample and the softness of the games so far makes up for the small rakeback %. I'm playing about 27/22.5/3.3 so far on the site and I am finding this to be a winning formula so far. I've had to make some small adjustments to my game since I moved to EVT to adapt to the loose play there compared to Carlos. My stats and graph are below and its been a great past 4 weeks for me. Bankroll now stands at $3.9k.

I returned the moniter I bought from Argos, after getting used to it I really was lost without it so I bought this one. It was supposed to arrive on Friday but UPS didn't bother showing up with it, so hopefully I will get it tomorrow. I found the extra moniter great for playing poker as I could play 8 EVT tables with no overlap on the 2 screens. My new moniter had full HD resolution so I really am looking forward to getting it set up.

I had gotten 2 coaching sessions from ianmc38 from boards which I found very good. However with Ian traveling in the other side of the world it was hard to organize some sessions so I have organized with valor, also from boards for coaching which should be good as he is a high stakes player so I should pick up some good stuff there.

I played my first big poker tournament about 2 weeks ago over the May bank holiday weekend. I won a $55R satellite on GJP and took the ticket worth $1150. I found it a great experience and though I played well for the most part of it, I was disappointed with my exit hand as I called an allin when I was very far behind with only 12mins to go in Day 1 after playing for 8 hours. But I will put it all down to experience and hopefully one day I can use it if I can mange to play more big events. Hopefully the WSOP and Irish Open over the next few years.

So thats it for now, good luck at the tables!!!

Weekly Update and playing for pure fun

2008-04-21T23:49:00.005+01:00

Have had a good enough week poker wise, didn't get many hands in at all at 50nl but was very happy with how I played at it. I really loosened up my game from what I was playing at 100nl. It's just so much easier to do it at 50nl though. But the idea is to be able to do the same at higher limits. I haven't played many hands at all just because I decided to go back to Donegal for the weekend to see the family and stuff. On Saturday morning I sat in at a 100nl for a short while when a friend was online. I was just messing about open pushing over raises and just having a bit of fun with a $20 stack. Then I played some 0.01/0.02 just to play for pure fun, I was opening nearly every hand and chatting away to the other players in the chatbox. It was all good fun and enjoyed it immensely, its a break from the seriousness of the grinding. Had a few interesting hands that I posted on boards. Other than them there wasn't to much that was interesting. My stats for the week are shown below. Really happy with my LAG game at 50nl and I enjoy playing like this, it can be very spewy at times but this is quite hard to avoid when playing like that.
I also bought a desk for my laptop this week as it was just messing the kitchen table way to much and the girlfriend was getting a bit annoyed with it so I bowed to the pressure!!! So with the nice big desk I impulse bought a 22" Samsung moniter from Argos. I fully intend to take it back within the 16 days as I just bought it to see would I like it.

I played about 150 hands with it today and I didn't really like it so far. I'll give it a few more days before I decide wether I will buy one or not as this one is going back regardless. Its way to expensive in my opinion for what it offers. I would rather get one with 1920x1200 resolution as it would be much better for playing poker. But we will see how it goes.

Last thing is the bankroll now stands at $1584.17 so I just need to keep on building and try to get back playing 100nl as soon as possible.

Its going to be a fresh start

2008-04-14T09:23:00.002+01:00

Not sure at the minute how cut out I am for poker. This year has went fairly well to be fair and I've made a bit of money at it. Up until the end of March my BR stood at $4.2k and I was beating 100nl for 4bb/100 which I was happy about to be honest. I then took a shot at 200nl and it went a total disaster, I tried to play my 100nl game at 200nl and I got destroyed to be honest. I lost 1k in about 500 hands playing badly.

Now I have taken out the remainder of my roll and put it into my bank account and I'm going to keep it as profits for the year and I'm left with $1150 which I'm going to use to play 50nl again and this time I am going to destroy it and try to kick out any mistakes I have in my game and just try to learn it better. I also plan on putting up weekly updates on here on Mondays.

The new plan is to take the $1150 bankroll and build it up to 3.5k and then start taking shots at 100nl. I'm also only going to play 4-6 tables and actually concentrate on my game and what others are doing but most importantly put more thought into my decision making and thought process.

Unitl next time......

Everest Poker

2008-04-05T14:30:00.002+01:00

2008-03-24T12:16:00.006Z

Since I posted last things havn't really been going great. When I got to $4k of a roll I took out my original investment to Carlos of $1.5k as I wanted to just be playing with the profits that I have made from online poker. This just makes me feel more secure when I am playing as I now know that the money I am playing with wasn't my hard earned cash to start with.

So this then left me with $2.5k or 25 BIs for 100nl. I got of to a terrible start at 100nl for the month, In my first 1600 hands of the month I managed to drop $1100 which was a bit soul destroying. I then moved back down to 50nl for a while and made a bit back, I felt that I was crushing this game at the time as in my first 2 sessions I made 10BIs, but then I started playing badly again and was back to were I started again.

At this stage I then started watching some cardrunners videos and this was very worthwhile to watch. These players are just a different class and its very good to watch their style of play and try to learn from it. Their thought process in hands is very insight-full and this is something that I need to improve on when I am playing. I took a few days of from playing poker so I could try and come back with a clear head and stll have my bankroll in tact.

When I came back I stupidly took a shot at shortstacking 600nl and 1000nl. It was very profitable but pure luck as well, I won all my races and sucked out big time one guy when I flopped a set and check the flop, he caught up with a straight on the turn where all the money went in but I filled up on the river to give me a $600 pot. The plan is the next time I play 600nl I will be rolled for it but this is a pipedream at the minute.

I also played a few tournamnents this month, I cashed for more than a $100 in the 35k guaranteed on ipoker. I made a stupid call when I was 11th in chips with 72 left and crippled my stack. I went out in 55th I think which isn't to bad out of a 1400 player game. I also came 4th in a 100 man $10 rebuy game for $225. My bonus also cleared this month which gave me a boost of $300 and at present my bankroll stands at $3020 so with rakeback to come in I hope to be at around the 4k mark for the start of April.

I'll post up my 100nl graph and stats for the period so far. Its very gloom looking but I am starting to recover at least.
So thats the story so far this month. The plan at the minute is to start taking shots at 200nl in April and be properly rolled for it by the end of April which I want somewhere over $5k for it, preferably $6k, but we will see how it goes. I'll try stick in an update at the start of April and see how things stand when I get my rakeback in the account.

A fresh start in 2008

2008-03-03T20:47:00.008Z

At the start of January I opened up a new account with Carlos Poker with a good cashback deal. I think this is crucial to any poker player these days as you really need that extra bit of money to boost your bankroll and it can turn a losing month into a bad one.

I said to myself that I was going to start afresh in 2008 and just forget about what ever money I had won or lost up to that, to be perfectly honest I'm not sure if I have been in profit since I started playing as I didn't keep any accurate records, I actually think I am up about €1500 - €2000 but this could be wrong as its easy for anyone to forget the money they lost and just think about the times they've won. So with that in mind I am taking note of whatever money I have deposited into different accounts or played with in the casino. So to date my spending is as follow:

Carlos €416.04 / $600 - I went on to lose this and deposited another:
Carlos €681.58 / $1000
VC poker €50 - wanted to play in an Irish Open Freeroll
Poker Stars €15 - played the Sunday 100k once, other time I forgot to play it and lost the $11!!
Sporting Emporium €55 - played the €75 scalps game one night
Jackpot €150 - a drunken night at the end of January

Holdem Manager €50 / $80 - poker tracking software.

So to date I have spent about €1420 on poker and my online BR currently stands at $3617 (rakeback of around $250 is still to be added to this) which is the equivalent to €2400, so to date I am up €1000. So where this money has come from is described over the next couple of paragraphs.

The screenshot below is from sharkscope where I made a few $ playing $20 30 man tournaments and some other 10 man sit and goes, also in there is a $110 6 man SNG which I played while chasing loses one day. Something I have tried to cut out of my game.

I also played a good few hands at 50nl and at the end of it I was actually down money which was very annoying. I thought I would be able to beat this level quite comfortably but due to tilting problems I had a few sessions where I dropped a lot of money, around $500 3 times, this was very upsetting at the time and every time I made the money back I done the stupid thing and I would tilt it all back again. You can see some really quick drops in the graph, basically where I played bad and then tilted ever more off. But it does make for a funny looking graph!!
So if you examine the graph you will notice that I make money in a completely different way to most poker players. I make my money from pots that don't go to showdown red line, basically I play my hands very aggressively and they don't get show down, in showdown pots I am really bad because people call my bluffs so the showdown winnings are bad blue line. My actual winnings green line is the difference in the two and as a result of bluffing to many calling stations which is poor on my part, I lost money playing 50nl, with the rake back added in I showed a small profit over 25k hands which is very disappointing. My stats from poker tracker at 50nl are shown below. I have split them into 2 as basically on the 23rd of January I had a coaching session where the only thing that we discussed was my PF game, which as you can see I did improve a hell of a lot which can be seen from my winnings and stats:
Some of the main differences in my game from the coaching was my PF raise, instead of calling and limping more I now raise a lot more. I am still playing the same % of hands but playing them a lot more aggressively, you can see that my stealing % is also a lot higher which means I am picking up a lot more pots from the button and the blinds, this is very important in improving your win rate. Basically I have improved my game quite substantially in my opinion for this level.

Once I had $2000 in my poker account I started taking shots at 100nl, to date these have gone very well over a small sample size of hands. I am now comfortably bankrolled for 100nl and I am feeling pretty good with my game. I am going to finish this post of with the same graphs that I have used above.
So as you can see I ran really hot over the first 3.5k hands or so, since then I've had 2 $450+ downswings but I recovered from both of them so I am happy enough. One of the main differences is that I am up money in showdown pots which is where I want to be. Its also nice to be still making money in non-showdown pots, with the 2 of these combined I think I have the basis of a good game. My stats over this period are below:
1 thing I want to work on now is improving my PF raise and getting my W$WSD higher as I think these are important to my game. My stats aren't as good as they way they were at the end of my 50nl so I'm going to take a few days of playing poker now and try and work on this. I'm also going to sign up to cardrunners and watch some of their videos as I have been hearing nothing but good reviews about these from fellow 100nl players. So thats it for now, I will try and keep this updated each week from now on. Next week probably won't have much of an update as I don't plan on playing many hands this week, more of s review week and study week.

My poker story so far

2008-03-03T20:07:00.005Z

The first time I remember playing poker for money was back in my first year in college when a few of my college mates emptied out their money boxes and we started playing some 5 card draw for 1c and 2c. To be really honest I don't remember if I won or lost, but the next time I played poker wasn't for another couple of years.

Then when I left my work experience in Xilinx my colleagues at the time gave me a poker set for my leaving present. I brought it home that evening to my house and the next evening we started playing poker fairly regularly. We played a few times a week, usually 5 of us for €2 a game.

Then it started, I had a betting account with Boylesports and put some money into a poker account and started playing very low stakes cash games and sit and goes. I had no bankroll what so ever, I usually put in €5 and cashed out when I got to €100. I was doing well at this and was able to give myself spending money while in college. I think this was when I realized that I could make a few extra euros in the week from what was an easy way of earning a few bob.

Since then I have played hundreds of thousands of cash hands and quite a few tournament both online and live. I rarely ever play live, usually when I have been out for the night and have had a few pints so this is something I try not to do anymore as it usually ends up costing me money. To date my high points in poker have been splitting a €100 buy-in last Xmas 4 ways for €650 each, doing really well out of the GJP freeroll with 2 1st places a 2nd and a 3rd, collecting me a total of around $1200.

Perhaps one of my biggest highlights was 4 days in Las Vegas were I spun $20 at a 2-4 limit table up to $700 over 4 days, where I got involved in my biggest pot to that date. I had sat in at a 1-2NL table with $60 and played really really tight, basically I had all my gambling money on the table. After a while I had gotten up to about $250 and called a $7 straddle in the pot with QhJh. There was 4 other players in the pot and the flop came out 89T rainbow flop. I checked as a beginner would usually do with the nuts, the player after me goes all in for about 50, another player calls and I re raise all in. The player that flat called looked at me for ages and started talking to me saying I know you flopped the straight but I call anyway. I heart was racing at this stage. 80% of me wanted him to call, the other was kind of wanting him to fold because I didn't want to get outdrawn and go home a tell a bad beat story. Anyways he had a set of 9s, the other player had a set of 8s. I was never as nervous in my whole life, even though I was a big favorite to win the hand it felt at the time like I had to miss every card in the deck. Anyway the turn and river changed nothing and I scooped my biggest pot to date.

Hopefully I will be able to return to Vegas later this year around the time of the WSOP event, I will try a few satellites on Poker Stars for the main event. I would love to play it but at the same time I know it wouldn't be in my favour to play it but if I get in for cheap well I ain't going to say no.

A getting started post

2008-03-03T20:05:00.001Z

I've tried a few times already to start a blog but it has just never happened for no good reason. This time I am just going to put up a post to get it started and then go from there. I'm going to try and update it every week about my poker progress from 100nl up.