Well it looks like I won't have much time for poker over the next three years. Or neccessarily that much money either. I've done the calculations and whilst I won't be living light and will no doubt have enough for some sort of leisure, I don't want to factor poker in to my estimates. For a start it would be a bit lame. And in any case I should like to begin saving, saving in such a way that each year can see a sort of incremental increase in prosperity until such time as I end up marrying and buying a semi-detached in Acton or something.
It even looks unlikely that I'll have a Vic session prior to my September start, although I would like to see the place again before too long. The last time I was there was in Janaury pretty much the weekend before applications started. And it's well over two years since I first set foot in there as can be read about in my previous Hand History.
Well now it is time to bring the story to a close. I don't pretend this to be an easy task: the gap between April 2009 and now has been a long one and there have been fewer great easily memorable 'set pieces'. But I shall do my best to relate them now.
The days immediately following the Vic session were pretty low. I did not feel that I had been through some odd rite of passage. I actually felt genuinely foolish. However the loss had no immediate financial effect and in no way impacted on my ability for study, which is infact usually strengthened in times of misery. Two days after my Vic session I was in a cardroom once more for the UKSPC in Birmingham. I was genuinly excited about the event but was playing pretty recklessly and was out before the dinner break. I decided my dignity was worth more than a free meal so rather than hanging around for the buffet I went home under the full veil of glumness.
There were no more major events during this period (up till the end of exams and after). I remember one May afternoon (self designated-day off) I pretty much sat downstairs in my dressing gown playing tournaments on full tilt, making a loss of about $50 which in my dense mental state seemed like a 'fucking waste' rather than a legitimate investment. Generally speaking if you're still in your dressing gown by mid-afternoon and have not washed it's hard to have a healthy mindset about anything. I also won Pokersoc a second time (post-exams) although it was only for a £100 prize. That plus a visit or two to Stanleys (or Noobleys or Stanjokes as we have alternatively called it) and the occasional home game (including an 8-man £20 tourney). DKSOP still existed but was neither as intense nor as regular as it had been in previous years- credit the fact that third year work actually meant something beyond simply copying and pasting! That and the fact that our second year poker-protaganist (always the first to suggest a trip to the casino or to double the stakes) had long left us.
In June there was also the pokersoc final HORSE and NLHE deepstacks, both of which I enjoyed but neither of which I cashed in. I recall the very last poker games I played at uni being as followes: a fancy dress NLHE tourney at Pokersoc (I came as Phil Hellmuth but busted v. early on) and a three-way £1/£2 mixed game with Goblin and the Conjurer. The pokersoc game was rather offputting: when you see four maths/physics/computer science students/graduands jumping up and down to some music drunk on lager in the Ramphal Building you sort of lose respect for the majesty of the institution (Pokersoc). I feelings when I first entered Pokersoc 33 months earlier were a mixture of florrid confusion and reverence. Gone were the heavy smoking pro's of 2006 (a high proprotion of whom were humanties students). In were the geeks. It isn't gangsters who give poker a bad name these days, it's the misplaced-testostrone bermuda shorts striped shirt BSc's with no discernable interests outside drinking, mathematics, gambling and pornography pay-sites.
Not that I was too different back in July 2009 anyway. From a period stretching July to November (excluding October when I was in Peru) I did get to know the evening tournament schedule on Pokerstars fairly well, and valued having spare evenings in which to grind. To be honest this was one of the most unproductive periods of my life but then... 'life'? I had not decided yet what I wished to do with it anyway, and I had the luxury of time.
One of the features of this period was the WkdSOP, an online series set up by a uni player from the year below and co-managed by me. Aptly enough he came first and I came second. But I didn't really enjoy it. I got easily and quite intensely frustrated at losing to these pokersoc people.
In early September Goblin and the Conjurer came down briefely for another Brighton rack. There were no huge cashes and we lost quite a bit of money. It wasn't even that fun either - when you have two gamblers and it's going badly it's easy enough to cope with. But in a group of three it's easier to get cantankerous, and the idea that you should be doing something better with your time becomes more infectious.
In late September (just before Peru) I had two significant poker experiences. One was live cash at the Vic: Goblin and I had a split going. I finished up quite a bit, but he finished down by a greater amount. So overall we were down quite a bit (no specifc numbers here!) but it was good to play sensibly at the Vic in contrast to my previous attendance. A few days later I scored just under $1,000 in a $5 turbo on Stars. If there had ever been a time for me to consider playing with a serious bankroll, this was it. I had nearly $1300, and ample cushion for comfortable 25NL play, $11 MTTs and $16 STTs, presuming I was EV+ at all three. But I had this little holiday to Peru coming up, so I pretty much withdrew most of it and, ironically, exchanged it for dollars (this being the peg-currency of the Pervuain New Sol).
It was after Peru that I decidedly started playing less poker. I was still interested in it and still drooled over live/online series scehdules but... I wasn't really playing. The long sessions and frequent nights of online tournaments never really returned. It was more sporadic. In early November I did sort of set off on a $25NL grinding project but I stopped that after about a week, and never again was there the same sort of 'project-based' approach to poker. I wanted poker to fit in with other aspects of my life, not the other way around, and I was more interested in the quality of the games I played rather than the frequency.
So it was, that in January I had a trip to the Midlands. It was mainly to visit friends but I also planned to play some poker. Not that the two are incomptabible. The Pokersoc (at least those from the year below) were still about and a home game was organized (5p/10p, deep stacks and a lot of pizza and lager). Goblin lived up in Nottingham, so we went a few nights to DTD. I love DTD even though I've never actually won anything there* and it's odd to think that, though I haven't been there for ages I still remember it extremely clearly.
*Actually I did win something there, just not a tournament: I managed to triple my £40 stack in a 50/1 game after flopping a low flush.
The next major poker session was in early April. I had gone to Goblin's house in Surrey. The election had just been called and it was an exciting time, although frankly I was in the grips of hypochondria (when one worry is over a new one quickly fills the void) something which I snapped out of by the summer when my life became more interesting. Still, this was one of the best poker sessions ('racks') we'd ever had. Despite there being very little in the way of cardrooms nearby (we mainly played online) we were only 40 minutes from Waterloo (I say only...). We were both now enthusiasts for the Vic (Victhusiasts) and I proposed the idea of an all-night session there. After all it was already early evening and if we wanted to go there, we'd better do it properly. So we did. After dinner we sat down at around 9 and weren't out till dawn (which at that time was around 5am). We took a morning tube service to Waterloo and then the early train to Hampton Court. Oddly enough I can't actually remember the result of that session, but it was a great experience. On the final night of the rack we managed to get in the top 1% of the Sunday Quarter Million (as it was then - I don't actually know what it is now) but that only fetched us a couple of hundred, enough to cover earlier losses, I dare say.
On my return to Brighton there came what can probably be called the very last thing even resembling a poker 'project', an attempt to grind up a little money (c. $120 on my Stars account) multitabling $3.25 45 seaters. I don't think I played more than 20 or so of these in the end. Over the next few months I playing activity basically came to nil.
It wasn't until late June when I came to the Midlands again (and what a bittersweet trip that was!) that I was back to the card table. There was the Pokersoc annual deepstack. I was disappointed by the pokersoccers amongst me - I began to realise I no longer had anything in common with any of them (if ever I had). In the second leg of my Midlands trip (early July) I was at Nottingham again and played what to date has been my highest-buyin tourney, a £168 monthly special at DTD. I actually made it a few hours in but no cash.
From July to January I hardly played any poker at all. This is essentially because I was trying to sort out my life which, piece by piece, I did. However, I didn't have any particularly strong desire to play poker either, certainly not online. The only sort of poker which did interest me was live cash at the Vic, where I had a session in early December with Goblin.
At the end of January I had my final Vic session. It was a 1/1 allnighter with Goblin and was the first time I'd gone to the Vic with anything resembling a proper roll for the occasion. We did well and had a great time too, leaving the cardroom around 10 or 11 hours after our arrival. My experience inspired me to reread Harrington on Cash but all that enthusiasm came to and end very quickly. I think I had known at the time that that Vic session would be the last for a while. We all need inspiration from time to time, and much came to me in the late January/early February period. My friends were going places, my London Lust was never stronger, I had nothing else on the horizon and I had sorted out everything else in my life. All I needed now was a good graduate scheme in an accountancy firm. This would keep me away from the poker rooms right up until July (although I had my offer in June).
I still played a bit of poker during applications season but it was minor online stuff. Friend-from-uni set up another mini-series in March using Pokerstars homegames (excellent innovation). I only played a few events but soon stopped in favour of interview preperation. On 6th April (two days before my Big Four interview telephone interview) I remember seeing myself registered for the tourneys thinking to myself "why on earth am I playing a poker tourney tonight? I have an interview in two mornings' time. What makes me so special!"
I made myself lots of promises about things I'd enjoy post-applications season. Whilst I had banned myself from live poker during applications season, it was not specifically one of the things I looked forward to as a motivator. I had always supposed that I would have one live tournament session (which I did in July) and one Vic Session (which I may yet do this month) but nothing more extravagent than that. I think it's fair to say that I'm no longer really a poker player like I was at university. I have my own interests and an ambitions now which have nothing to do with poker. Sure, having a good salary will no doubt make it easier to play any big tourneys I might one day be interested in (liferoll permitting) but this is no longer something which dominates my thoughts. And if ever I needed confirmation that having poker as your main hobby essentially destroys your social life and (to some extent) self-worth, I saw it at the UKIPT, sitting with the grinders
As the title suggests this shall be the last hand history. If I have any more significant poker episodes during the lifetime of this blog I shall post them. But I'm not planning to rebuy anytime soon.
Showing posts with label poker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poker. Show all posts
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
Saturday, 5 February 2011
Deepstack Cash
Up at sunrise again, as I have been doing for around three weeks. The only morning on which I forwent this rigour was a recent trip to The Vic in London, where I did not sleep at all, taking part as I was in an all-night session. It was more or less a break-even excursion but certainly very fun, just as it had been the last time I had done something like this the previous April.
However, I came to realise that much of my lack of success at The Vic (those which I have had have only been minor) could be directly attributed to my style of play. Put it this way: poker is about minimizing losses and maximizing profits given the situations thrown at you. Well I'm fairly good at the former: I almost enjoy folding top pair. But I end up seeing so few pots with speculative hands that I'm never very likely to, say, trump and over-confident overpair with a surpirse 3-5 suited. I end up having to rely on cold decks, but in situations where it is obvious the sort of hands I or the other player has. For instance Aces versus Kings, or flopped set versus flopped flush. Given my tendency to play nut-draw hands I am usually the beneficiary of these pots. But they come few-and-far enough between that they can hardly compensate for the huge number of small pots which I lose.
Now it's all very well telling someone they need to 'loosen up', but fear of changing your style of play is often based on the fact that the looser method has not been articulated to them. The truth is there is no single method anyway. The player has to be facilitated with the concepts which can rationalize looser play. The best concept for this, I am beginning to find, is to think of all transactions as the table as being proportions of the stacks in play. This includes pre-flop action. Those of us who have played tonnes of six-max 25NL (and not neccessarily been that successful there either) may have formed rigid expectations about what is 'right' and 'wrong' in 6-max play. For instance, opening ranges. Of course, a lot of these pre-flop decisions do take into account 'your chance of winning your opponent's stack' - that's why people are less inclined to say, call a raise with 67 suited out of position in a 100BB game.
However, at the Vic the maximum buy in is 200BB, and perhaps around a third to a half of any of the stacks at a given time will have more than this. And here enters my error. I was treating the fullring 200BB game as little more than a slighty-expanded version of six-max 100BB 25NL. So, slightly larger stacks and a few more players - no need to change my pre-flop play substantially. With this in mind, I continued my rather conservative 'raise when entering a pot, rarely call a raise especially when out of position'. The problem here is that I was not thinking about my transactions in terms of the 200BB stacks - I was thinking in an almost preset pre-flop way. A £5 raise, for instance, represents 1/40th of a buy-in. In an online 100BB 25NL game this would be the equivalent to 62.5 cents. Yet I was still thinking of it in terms of Big Blinds, so I would read this as to being the equivalent of $1.25, a five big-blind raise. And so I contined to play tightly, completely neglecting the favourable implied-odds implications. This was causing me to fold way too often and without any real justification. I was missing out on tonnes of favourable situations because I was thinking about poker in the wrong direction: pre-flop forwards rather than river back.
I'm glad I've realized this as it will probably open me up to a more flexible and intuitive approach to poker. For those curious, I essentially had a spell from May to Janaury in which I hardly played any poker. There was the occasional live tournament and a trip or two to The Vic, but none of the ambitious online MTT projects of the past - and no grinding. However, there is always space in my life for one game. In the last 9 months or so it's been alternatively scrabble, Civilization 4, my own board-game creation and at the moment poker. And I have finally reached the stage where I can play at stakes which do not affect my broader finances, the seperation of entities. My game only needs to improve. I shall do for poker what worked so succesfully for my driving - provide myself with a constant narrative of what is going on around and give the brain the information required to make the neccessary connections and make the best decisions.
However, I came to realise that much of my lack of success at The Vic (those which I have had have only been minor) could be directly attributed to my style of play. Put it this way: poker is about minimizing losses and maximizing profits given the situations thrown at you. Well I'm fairly good at the former: I almost enjoy folding top pair. But I end up seeing so few pots with speculative hands that I'm never very likely to, say, trump and over-confident overpair with a surpirse 3-5 suited. I end up having to rely on cold decks, but in situations where it is obvious the sort of hands I or the other player has. For instance Aces versus Kings, or flopped set versus flopped flush. Given my tendency to play nut-draw hands I am usually the beneficiary of these pots. But they come few-and-far enough between that they can hardly compensate for the huge number of small pots which I lose.
Now it's all very well telling someone they need to 'loosen up', but fear of changing your style of play is often based on the fact that the looser method has not been articulated to them. The truth is there is no single method anyway. The player has to be facilitated with the concepts which can rationalize looser play. The best concept for this, I am beginning to find, is to think of all transactions as the table as being proportions of the stacks in play. This includes pre-flop action. Those of us who have played tonnes of six-max 25NL (and not neccessarily been that successful there either) may have formed rigid expectations about what is 'right' and 'wrong' in 6-max play. For instance, opening ranges. Of course, a lot of these pre-flop decisions do take into account 'your chance of winning your opponent's stack' - that's why people are less inclined to say, call a raise with 67 suited out of position in a 100BB game.
However, at the Vic the maximum buy in is 200BB, and perhaps around a third to a half of any of the stacks at a given time will have more than this. And here enters my error. I was treating the fullring 200BB game as little more than a slighty-expanded version of six-max 100BB 25NL. So, slightly larger stacks and a few more players - no need to change my pre-flop play substantially. With this in mind, I continued my rather conservative 'raise when entering a pot, rarely call a raise especially when out of position'. The problem here is that I was not thinking about my transactions in terms of the 200BB stacks - I was thinking in an almost preset pre-flop way. A £5 raise, for instance, represents 1/40th of a buy-in. In an online 100BB 25NL game this would be the equivalent to 62.5 cents. Yet I was still thinking of it in terms of Big Blinds, so I would read this as to being the equivalent of $1.25, a five big-blind raise. And so I contined to play tightly, completely neglecting the favourable implied-odds implications. This was causing me to fold way too often and without any real justification. I was missing out on tonnes of favourable situations because I was thinking about poker in the wrong direction: pre-flop forwards rather than river back.
I'm glad I've realized this as it will probably open me up to a more flexible and intuitive approach to poker. For those curious, I essentially had a spell from May to Janaury in which I hardly played any poker. There was the occasional live tournament and a trip or two to The Vic, but none of the ambitious online MTT projects of the past - and no grinding. However, there is always space in my life for one game. In the last 9 months or so it's been alternatively scrabble, Civilization 4, my own board-game creation and at the moment poker. And I have finally reached the stage where I can play at stakes which do not affect my broader finances, the seperation of entities. My game only needs to improve. I shall do for poker what worked so succesfully for my driving - provide myself with a constant narrative of what is going on around and give the brain the information required to make the neccessary connections and make the best decisions.
Friday, 24 September 2010
Hand History - Part 14
Of all the fun months of Third Year, March was probably among the most serene. The weather was just beginning to warm up a little yet exams and long-essays were still a while off. Half way through the month I repeated the previous year's ritual of banning myself from online poker for the duration of the exam revision period. To be honest, what this really meant was banning myself on Full Tilt for 2 months and from Stars for 3 months - I could still play on other sites and I did, including a brief return to Party and a slightly longer period at Betfred. But the main reason for banning myself was to make sure I wasn't lured in by the SCOOP, and I still credit banning myself from the most desirable sites as helping to increase my grades by around 2 or 3 points.
After the end of term things began to get a little more regimented. I had opted to stay at University for the holidays (as most of my friends and housemates were doing too) and try to stick to a revision/long-essays schedule, something I was more or less succesful at.
However, there was one afternoon, the last Sunday of the month, in which I was becoming restless and lazy. I browsed Warwick Poker to find out one of the Warwick pro's had made the final table of the London GUKPT £3K buy in main event. Very quickly a wicked idea popped into my head. Why not go down and WATCH, I can play some £1/£1 NLHE if I get bored too! And I can make my buy-in last the whole night and go home on a dawn train with my return ticket. What could possibly go wrong! I didn't really know the guy who was playing. In fact, I can't even remember his name. Jambon or something? It was just a premise for action, in the same way that supposed 'border disturbances' in September 1939 was the German 'justificaiton' for the invasion of Poland.
I told the Goblin what I was going to do and urged him not to stop me (not that I suspect he would have). My sense of freedom was willing me down southwards, I had to follow it! So off to the Kenpas Highway cashpoint where I took out £250, this being roughly enough for my journey, meals and £200 worth of chips as a bankroll for the night.
As I strolled down the park I felt very happy. It was warm and the people at the park were clearly having fun in that unique start-of-Spring way. I felt very civilized too - a gentleman taking a day off from work to go and play some cards in London. I had even brought a book with me Fernand Braudel's A History of Civilizations.
The train journey was surprisingly quick - I often have to remind myself that Coventry and London really aren't that far from eachother.
It was still mid-afternoon when I arrived at Euston and so I resolved to walk down towards Edgware Road, whose location I only knew roughly. On the way I stopped off at the Poker, Bridge and Chess store. As I got near Marble Arch I still had trouble finding my location. I ended up doing the decadent thing and hailing a cab. He was confused by my request for the 'Grosvenor Casino', but when I started calling it 'The Vic' he knew exactly where I meant. 10 minutes and £10 after getting into the cab, I was there.
I had always been fond of the 'dull English poker scene'. This didn't stem from my own experiences of them. In fact at my first few times at the casino I was pretty anxious. You know, what if one of the regular, fat, bald-headed gamblers starts to make inquisitive glares at you. What if you bad beat the large Polish guy. What if one of the punter's wives gets very lucky in a hand against you.
My fondness for the dull English poker scene came about largely from watching a few televised events. The GUKPT 2007 coverage (which I saw on Pokertube long after it happened) was part of this. I liked the idea of 9 men (and occasionally 1 woman) sitting around after a few days of play, safe in the knowledge that they each have a few thousand pounds behind their belt along with the prospect of a few thousand more by the end of the night. I.e. Final table poker. Yet all rather casual and unglamarous. "I call." I pass." "Pass." "Pass." "How much do you have behind you?" "About 120k" "Right, erm. I raise all in" "Oooh, the online pro from Denmark has a tough decision here. What do you think Roland" "Yeah Ace Queen. Good hand but difficult to play against an all in." "Of course if he did call it would be a race." etc etc
And it was a GUKPT final table I was here to see tonight. Nominally anyway. It had only just started by the time I arrived, though it was very busy. There was no easy place to view from, certainly nowhere to sit down. With this in mind I went to the cash games desk and signed up for three tables, a 1/1, a 1/2 and a 1/3. After around an hour or so there was a space at 1/1 (I have not had to wait so long since then!). I went over to the cashier, bought £200 in chips and took a seat.
Around me was a mixed group. There was one old man who looked a bit like Doyle Brunson, a few studenty types who looked reluctant to gamble. One or two Asian gamblers who bought in for over the £200 maximum.
My plan was to shortstack - buy in for the minimum and replenlish my stack if I lost. The minimum was £40, so I bought in for that. Lost a few chips early on. Was down to about £25. Doyle limps in early position. I raise it fairly large (around £7) with AQ to squeeze out the limpers. Doyle comes over the top. I call. He rolls over QQ and takes the pot along with my first buy in. Nil desperandum, I chuck another £40 onto the table.
One man wanted to buy some more chips from the cashier, but it was closed. So I sold him £40 of mine. After a while I got impatient of sitting on just £40 and so whacked on the other £80 or so which had so far been left unused.
I proceed to lose a few small pots, mainly through playing scared aggressive. This essentially means trying to enter more pots than I really needed to, but entering aggressively as a justification. I.e. to collect the 'dead money' in the middle. I was playing badly, and was not sticking to my original strategy. We already see that I had abandoned my 'five £40 buy-ins' idea! Though such a strategy had its limitations, at least it would have served my intented purpose - playing the whole night, as I may have been able to survive a lot longer on 5 buy ins, even if this meant minimizing my potential profits.
But I was in no state of mind to make a profit. I began to realise how ridiculous this whole adventure had been, and even at one stage thought I might just go and play Roulette because my edge there was probably better (although still unfavourable obviously) than it was at this table. Not that any of my opponents were playing particularly well themselves, but at least they weren't playing scared.
My final hand came at a time when my stack was at around £80. I raised 99 in middle position to £3. The button made it £6. I called. The flop was 865 with two-flush. I bet a small amount,a round £5. He raised to around £10 or £15 (big difference, I know). I paused for a but a few seconds. "All in?" I announced, pushing forward my remaining chips. He called pretty quickly. The turn came a 7. I flipped over my 99 triumphantly as if I had sucked out on his set or something. River was a flush card. He then flipped over his A7 suited to reveal the flush. I was too confused to even feel let down at this defeat. I sorta shrugged my shoulders, picked up my book and scarf and left.
A lot of time had passed, somehow, and it was dark when I took the grim cab journey from the casino to Euston. I decided that cab journey was the last extravegant expense I would indulge in for the time being. I felt guilty and a little stupid, although already a little wiser. I was lucky that I had sold £40 worth of chips - otherwise it would well have been squandered with the rest of it. I got home at about midnight and didn't get to sleep till 3.
Subsequent visits to the Vic have been more successful (and you shall hear about some of them in later installments) but this particular one had been a textbook failure - I had gone down on a whim, I wasn't really prepared and I only got what I deserved. How did I keep my flagging spirits up on the train journey home? I started reading A History of Civlizations.
I wrote a little rhyme about the whole incident the next morning.
It's fun to gamble and buy in deep
£1 blinds, it's fairly cheap
though the rake is fairly steep
But hours later, like a sheep
I had no pile of chips to heap
I didn't fuss, or wail or weep
So out the cardroom I did creep
£1 blinds, it's fairly cheap
though the rake is fairly steep
But hours later, like a sheep
I had no pile of chips to heap
I didn't fuss, or wail or weep
So out the cardroom I did creep
To poker dreams we must not leap
Those gamblers; do not as idols keep
Their eyes heavy from lack of sleep
and sowing all that they must reap
Those gamblers; do not as idols keep
Their eyes heavy from lack of sleep
and sowing all that they must reap
Hand History - Part 13
I should tell you a few more facts about the sheer excess and pomposity that went into that $800 bankroll project.
I actually kept a folder (purple, it was) in which I would keep a written record of each and every single game I played. That's right. Not even a computerised record - a written record, with a neat little 'bankroll update'. This may not seem bad in itself, but symbolically the idea of keeping these things in a folder essentially evoked a sort of permanancy. Bear in mind that my academic work was also kept in folders (seperated by module) and so I had essentially put my poker activities on par with my academic activities, implying that it was almost a module in itself- certainly something that would be carried on through till the end of the year.
I don't have this particular document any more. I believe I threw it out in disgust as part of my end-of-Third Year cleanout. I believe the purple folder, however, is behind my bed somewhere, along with a few other empty folders.
But apart from that little episode, the rest of the term was fairly successful pokerwise. I don't recall any big wins or major losses. I do recall enjoying PokerSoc. DKSOP home games were fairly infrequent. Although all three of my housemates played poker (to varying degrees of intensity but to a similar degree of skill). One November weekend was particularly memorable. Saturday night me and the others went up to Leicester to visit our old housemate who, having dropped out of Warwick, was now in halls at the University of Leicester. Essentially though it was a DKSOP reconvention, and we played tonnes of turbo tournaments, just like old times. On the Sunday evening we returned. I had a 2,000 essay to write for the next day. Goblin had a FTOPS Event - I believe it was a $129 bounty event and that I had 30% of the action. I completed the essay (by 10am the next morning), though Goblin did not make it very far in the tournament - the bell curve was not very kind to him that night (though he had had FTOPS successes in the past).
I did manage to get a free copy of Poker Tracker 3 through some deal they had running on Titan Poker. Not that I am a grinder - I didn't have much use for the software although it's nice to know that it's there if I ever do.
Early on in the term I played a £20 heads up with Goblin. Though this figure isn't particularly extravegant the structure was: 10k, 1 hour blinds. I ended up losing in the 250-500 level. He trapped me with this Queens - I shoved K7o from the big blind. Funny how I emphasise that it was offsuit. Queens, of course, are offsuit by definition, unless you have a faulty deck!
Either way, he dominated the game and it was only a matter of time before he got all my chips.
Going off to the end of term: I had a rather lonely weekend in early December. I almost wrote reams about it but have chosen not to. Let it suffice to say that I came out of it much spiritually tougher than before, and after a brief re-examination of my life priorities (the most important choice you make in life is what you choose to make important) I had about as much fun in Term 2 as I could have hoped to.
And poker went extremely well in Term 2 as well. One weekend our former housemate from Leicester came down. Naturally, we took the opportunity to go down to Stanleys casino, our friend being a former regular and (rightly) considered one of the very best players there. It was a Friday night. It was a Pot Limit Omaha tournament. I think it was a low buy-in rebuy with a fairly fast structure. All tournaments at Stanleys had fast structures, which is a shame because otherwise it's a lovely place to play.
Me and The Conjurer (one of my housemates) ended up getting to the final 3. We made a deal with the remaining guy and split the beans three-way. Conjurer was first in chips, I was third in chips. DKSOPers being a great fraternity (robbing from the ignorant, giving to the needy - us) we split our winnings with the others. It was a pretty nice tourney, although I had gotten a bit tired of looking down at four cards at a time!
Thus you can understand my relief when, two days later, we all went down for a NLHE tournament. It was myself, The Conjurer, Goblin and our Leicester friend The Dragon, the Lion opting to stay at home. He rued that! Out of the fifteen people who turned up to play that day, we came 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Yes, that was pretty much the best possible result. Literally. Yet it didn't seem that odd. I, and I believe the rest of us, felt the same way I always do when I succeed at something - a sort of calm elation, a plateau of success. A sort of magnanimity. Naturally though, like the young gangsters we were, we took photoes of ourselves with all the cash afterwards (although it wasn't that much! fifteen players, £5 rebuy. Or was it a £10 rebuy? It's strange how some details just go unremembered!)
The event which finished off this rather fun little term was the Warwick Series of Poker. Or, the WaSOP for short. I had known about the WaSOP in previous years. In 1st year I had gone to see it while it was going on, and admired the casual disregard the old timers had for the £50 buy in, although I was surpirsed to see a few fellow 1st years in the fray. In 2nd year I had missed the event - it was a bare few weeks after the incidents which led to my temporary withdrawal from the poker scene (how I now hate hate hate letting that happen! I was 19 years old! Why on earth was I domesticating myself so young?!).
Third year however was different. I had the money, talent and freedom to enter the WaSOP.
First came the preliminary event, the WaSOP Pot Limit Omaha. It started off with 10K stacks at 25-50 blinds, intervals every 20 minutes. But as often happened at PokerSoc events, the blind intervals had to be shortened as the usual we've got to be out of this room by midnight! rush ensued. The Conjurer managed to come third, for which I think he got £80. A good start to the WaSOP.
The next day came the grand event, the one so prestigious we had all bought in for it weeks in advance via Paradise Poker, whom were adding value to the prizepool. The WaSOP Main Event, £57 buy in (transposed from Euros, the currency Paradise deals in) 10k starting stacks, 45 minute blinds.
To get myself in the mood for epic tournament poker (although I was already very much in the mood) I watched the documentary of the 1973 WSOP Main Event. This video represented (and still does represent) to me a sort of classic old-school convention of gamblers, which in a way reminds me of what PokerSoc can be like at the best of times, and how DKSOP is all the time. People who are quite happy to get together in their little group, stake some money, play some cards and see who's the best, while happily ignoring what ever trivialities are going on outside the card room.
And theWaSOP main event lived up to expectations. Held in The Isle casino (now part of the Grosvenorchain) it was a large and fairly glamarous location. The tournament started off well for me - I never strayed too far below my starting stack and found myself playing good, patient poker. I was treating it like a marathon, not a sprint. I was playing my hands for value - I wasn't getting into any disadvantageous spots. Goblin (who was on my table), on the other hand, had nothing but bad luck, and the frustration just oozed out of him.
Conjurer was out later, having been placed at the table of death to start with but essentially succumbing to below-average luck as the afternoon went on.
Jonny, who had joined us, also went bust fairly early on.
The Dragon and the Lion were not playing.
I actually kept a folder (purple, it was) in which I would keep a written record of each and every single game I played. That's right. Not even a computerised record - a written record, with a neat little 'bankroll update'. This may not seem bad in itself, but symbolically the idea of keeping these things in a folder essentially evoked a sort of permanancy. Bear in mind that my academic work was also kept in folders (seperated by module) and so I had essentially put my poker activities on par with my academic activities, implying that it was almost a module in itself- certainly something that would be carried on through till the end of the year.
I don't have this particular document any more. I believe I threw it out in disgust as part of my end-of-Third Year cleanout. I believe the purple folder, however, is behind my bed somewhere, along with a few other empty folders.
But apart from that little episode, the rest of the term was fairly successful pokerwise. I don't recall any big wins or major losses. I do recall enjoying PokerSoc. DKSOP home games were fairly infrequent. Although all three of my housemates played poker (to varying degrees of intensity but to a similar degree of skill). One November weekend was particularly memorable. Saturday night me and the others went up to Leicester to visit our old housemate who, having dropped out of Warwick, was now in halls at the University of Leicester. Essentially though it was a DKSOP reconvention, and we played tonnes of turbo tournaments, just like old times. On the Sunday evening we returned. I had a 2,000 essay to write for the next day. Goblin had a FTOPS Event - I believe it was a $129 bounty event and that I had 30% of the action. I completed the essay (by 10am the next morning), though Goblin did not make it very far in the tournament - the bell curve was not very kind to him that night (though he had had FTOPS successes in the past).
I did manage to get a free copy of Poker Tracker 3 through some deal they had running on Titan Poker. Not that I am a grinder - I didn't have much use for the software although it's nice to know that it's there if I ever do.
Early on in the term I played a £20 heads up with Goblin. Though this figure isn't particularly extravegant the structure was: 10k, 1 hour blinds. I ended up losing in the 250-500 level. He trapped me with this Queens - I shoved K7o from the big blind. Funny how I emphasise that it was offsuit. Queens, of course, are offsuit by definition, unless you have a faulty deck!
Either way, he dominated the game and it was only a matter of time before he got all my chips.
Going off to the end of term: I had a rather lonely weekend in early December. I almost wrote reams about it but have chosen not to. Let it suffice to say that I came out of it much spiritually tougher than before, and after a brief re-examination of my life priorities (the most important choice you make in life is what you choose to make important) I had about as much fun in Term 2 as I could have hoped to.
And poker went extremely well in Term 2 as well. One weekend our former housemate from Leicester came down. Naturally, we took the opportunity to go down to Stanleys casino, our friend being a former regular and (rightly) considered one of the very best players there. It was a Friday night. It was a Pot Limit Omaha tournament. I think it was a low buy-in rebuy with a fairly fast structure. All tournaments at Stanleys had fast structures, which is a shame because otherwise it's a lovely place to play.
Me and The Conjurer (one of my housemates) ended up getting to the final 3. We made a deal with the remaining guy and split the beans three-way. Conjurer was first in chips, I was third in chips. DKSOPers being a great fraternity (robbing from the ignorant, giving to the needy - us) we split our winnings with the others. It was a pretty nice tourney, although I had gotten a bit tired of looking down at four cards at a time!
Thus you can understand my relief when, two days later, we all went down for a NLHE tournament. It was myself, The Conjurer, Goblin and our Leicester friend The Dragon, the Lion opting to stay at home. He rued that! Out of the fifteen people who turned up to play that day, we came 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Yes, that was pretty much the best possible result. Literally. Yet it didn't seem that odd. I, and I believe the rest of us, felt the same way I always do when I succeed at something - a sort of calm elation, a plateau of success. A sort of magnanimity. Naturally though, like the young gangsters we were, we took photoes of ourselves with all the cash afterwards (although it wasn't that much! fifteen players, £5 rebuy. Or was it a £10 rebuy? It's strange how some details just go unremembered!)
The event which finished off this rather fun little term was the Warwick Series of Poker. Or, the WaSOP for short. I had known about the WaSOP in previous years. In 1st year I had gone to see it while it was going on, and admired the casual disregard the old timers had for the £50 buy in, although I was surpirsed to see a few fellow 1st years in the fray. In 2nd year I had missed the event - it was a bare few weeks after the incidents which led to my temporary withdrawal from the poker scene (how I now hate hate hate letting that happen! I was 19 years old! Why on earth was I domesticating myself so young?!).
Third year however was different. I had the money, talent and freedom to enter the WaSOP.
First came the preliminary event, the WaSOP Pot Limit Omaha. It started off with 10K stacks at 25-50 blinds, intervals every 20 minutes. But as often happened at PokerSoc events, the blind intervals had to be shortened as the usual we've got to be out of this room by midnight! rush ensued. The Conjurer managed to come third, for which I think he got £80. A good start to the WaSOP.
The next day came the grand event, the one so prestigious we had all bought in for it weeks in advance via Paradise Poker, whom were adding value to the prizepool. The WaSOP Main Event, £57 buy in (transposed from Euros, the currency Paradise deals in) 10k starting stacks, 45 minute blinds.
To get myself in the mood for epic tournament poker (although I was already very much in the mood) I watched the documentary of the 1973 WSOP Main Event. This video represented (and still does represent) to me a sort of classic old-school convention of gamblers, which in a way reminds me of what PokerSoc can be like at the best of times, and how DKSOP is all the time. People who are quite happy to get together in their little group, stake some money, play some cards and see who's the best, while happily ignoring what ever trivialities are going on outside the card room.
And theWaSOP main event lived up to expectations. Held in The Isle casino (now part of the Grosvenorchain) it was a large and fairly glamarous location. The tournament started off well for me - I never strayed too far below my starting stack and found myself playing good, patient poker. I was treating it like a marathon, not a sprint. I was playing my hands for value - I wasn't getting into any disadvantageous spots. Goblin (who was on my table), on the other hand, had nothing but bad luck, and the frustration just oozed out of him.
Conjurer was out later, having been placed at the table of death to start with but essentially succumbing to below-average luck as the afternoon went on.
Jonny, who had joined us, also went bust fairly early on.
The Dragon and the Lion were not playing.
I managed to make it through to Day 2! I was the benificiary of some nutty play of one of the Warwick pros. He didn't want to get through to Day 2 as it would mean he'd have to miss the 'Sunday Majors'. Accordingly he was shoving every hand. With this in mind, my KQ looked pretty good. He had a lower king. And my kicker was good for 35,000 chips or so, and I took this figure with me to the next day.
I turned up again the next day (obviously). Around fifteen remained and the top 8 got paid. My stack dwindled a little to start with but I was making good reads and avoiding calling my chips off behind. Then suddenly we were down to ten. Alas, I was down to about seven or eight big blinds after all that. Two hands into the final table I shove J5o from the button - it had been folded around to me. Am ambitious play, but I had already noticed the small-blind was motioning a muck. Sure enough he did. But then the big blind, after thinking for about 10 seconds, called, rolling over two nines. To suck out I failed, and I was out.
I decided to walk back home, which took ages and took me through some pretty dire parts of Coventry, some of which honestly seemed more like South London than the West Midlands. I felt fairly small on the way back, as one usually does after missing out on a big score (top prize around £1,000 plus lots of PRESTIGE).
And so a fairly eventful term of poker.
Just writing this has made me realise how intensely I miss university life. Ah well, there's a world out there!
But for all these little gems, the most defining of my poker experiences had yet to come. Yea, it was waiting round the corner for now, but soon it would pop out LIKEA BAT. Or should I say, I fell into its decadent nest. Or web. Or whatever. You shalll see!
Saturday, 28 August 2010
Hand History - Part 12
The final night of the Brighton Rack fell on a Monday and, tournament schedules being tournament schedules, the best thing available on a Monday night was a £10 rebuy at the Grosvenor. There may have been a more ambitious tournament at the Rendezvous, but having already experienced once the invincibility of victory followed by the humbling shot-in-the-stomach of defeat, we were not tempted to risk our previous night's winnings on another stab at glory.
The £10 rebuy went fairly badly. I was out first and Goblin fairly soon afterwards. Though I remember what part of the room we were sitting at, I remember very little besides. And so the Brighton Rack ended. We were each up around £50 or so. A lot of playing was done online, although there were no particular highlights or deep runs, I believe much of our profit came from online play. We had been essentially successful in our initial aim - earning enough to cover meals and transport. And it was a lot of fun indeed.
As there is not much to write here I may as well sail on towards September, and the start of Third Year, a year so remarkably different to the previous two.
I kept playing a little during the summer, online mainly. I did have one $200+ tournament win (was an $12 bounty 90 seater, Full Tilt) and by mid September I was around $300 up from where I had started in July.
But it was around that time that, once again, I became greedy. I read an article on 2+2 Forums discussing whether it was possible to make a living at 25NL. Four tables, running at 10 big bets an hour on each... $20 an hour! This was enough to spark the flame of greed, ever present inside me. Oh, if my gluttony were limited to food, it would be alright! But like anyone else, the prospect of a quick buck holds an appeal beyond the merely rational.
Not that my decision was entirely and self-indulgently irrational. The last time I had 4-tabled 25NL (which had been for a few hours back in June) I had done very well, and was alarmed at how easy it was.
This was not to be the case this time. I lost about $150 fairly quickly. Worse still, the aim to my project was rather distorted. Even though my general aim was to 'make money', there was the somewhat conflicting aim of 'achieving SilverStar', SilverStar being the second tier on the PokerStars awards programme.
I couldn't really understand why I was losing, and I stopped playing for a bit.
I did get frustrated with poker sometimes during this period, and occasionally felt an extreme sort of guilt for not doing something better with my time.
At the end of September, just before the beginning of term, I found myself single again, almost a year to the day since the previous time this had happened. The difference being that by now I was quite happy to be so. I won't labour on that, only to say that I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I returned to how things had been eight months earlier - a gentleman of poker, turning up to Poker Society, playing a bit online although increasingly less so due to the demands of Third Year work. However, as I was doing more or less completely what I wanted to do with my time and free from self-conferred restraints, I was happy.
This did not mean I was cured, by any means, of some of my bad habits, pokerwise. On the contrary, I did something which, if read in a history book by people in the future, would look as ridiculous as, say, the Tulipmania does to us now. Essentially, I fell into the perennial trap of the poker player and blamed my earlier failings at 25NL on 'bad luck' along with the fact that I had not been 'sufficiently bankrolled'. I had only had about $250 in my account at the time of my experiment.
Is it any surprise, therefore, that my proposed solution to this problem was to... start with a larger bankroll? An artificially large one at that, so as to provide me as great a pillow as possible.
So it was that at the end of September I sidelined $800 (heaven knows how I had so much money in the first place!) as my 'bankroll'. My aim, simply, would be to increase it over the course of the year. Nothing irrational about this aim, naturally. And it was a very comfortable amount to start on too - 32 buyins for 25NL, a good bankroll for $11 45 seaters, and a good opportunity for me to experiment with fixed-limit games. Just thinking of it now gives me that strange sensation or warmth in my lower limbs. I do not mean it arouses me - heaven forbid! But the idea that $800 could become $900 a month later, $1050 the month after that... it seemed possible. Not only possible but beautiful. Not only possible and beautiful but strangely inevitable.
It wasn't. Within three days of it I was down to $526, at which point I learnt. I was reminded of Cornwallis Burgoyned, for those who know the song. Typical that I should enjoy having failed at something - for at least I failed in an exciting way.
There is so much to say about Third Year and poker that I shall leave things here for now and continue another time.
Not that my decision was entirely and self-indulgently irrational. The last time I had 4-tabled 25NL (which had been for a few hours back in June) I had done very well, and was alarmed at how easy it was.
This was not to be the case this time. I lost about $150 fairly quickly. Worse still, the aim to my project was rather distorted. Even though my general aim was to 'make money', there was the somewhat conflicting aim of 'achieving SilverStar', SilverStar being the second tier on the PokerStars awards programme.
I couldn't really understand why I was losing, and I stopped playing for a bit.
I did get frustrated with poker sometimes during this period, and occasionally felt an extreme sort of guilt for not doing something better with my time.
At the end of September, just before the beginning of term, I found myself single again, almost a year to the day since the previous time this had happened. The difference being that by now I was quite happy to be so. I won't labour on that, only to say that I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I returned to how things had been eight months earlier - a gentleman of poker, turning up to Poker Society, playing a bit online although increasingly less so due to the demands of Third Year work. However, as I was doing more or less completely what I wanted to do with my time and free from self-conferred restraints, I was happy.
This did not mean I was cured, by any means, of some of my bad habits, pokerwise. On the contrary, I did something which, if read in a history book by people in the future, would look as ridiculous as, say, the Tulipmania does to us now. Essentially, I fell into the perennial trap of the poker player and blamed my earlier failings at 25NL on 'bad luck' along with the fact that I had not been 'sufficiently bankrolled'. I had only had about $250 in my account at the time of my experiment.
Is it any surprise, therefore, that my proposed solution to this problem was to... start with a larger bankroll? An artificially large one at that, so as to provide me as great a pillow as possible.
So it was that at the end of September I sidelined $800 (heaven knows how I had so much money in the first place!) as my 'bankroll'. My aim, simply, would be to increase it over the course of the year. Nothing irrational about this aim, naturally. And it was a very comfortable amount to start on too - 32 buyins for 25NL, a good bankroll for $11 45 seaters, and a good opportunity for me to experiment with fixed-limit games. Just thinking of it now gives me that strange sensation or warmth in my lower limbs. I do not mean it arouses me - heaven forbid! But the idea that $800 could become $900 a month later, $1050 the month after that... it seemed possible. Not only possible but beautiful. Not only possible and beautiful but strangely inevitable.
It wasn't. Within three days of it I was down to $526, at which point I learnt. I was reminded of Cornwallis Burgoyned, for those who know the song. Typical that I should enjoy having failed at something - for at least I failed in an exciting way.
There is so much to say about Third Year and poker that I shall leave things here for now and continue another time.
Friday, 18 June 2010
Hand History - Part 11
Brighton Rack - Part 4
Getting a little bored of the metropolis, we decided to head out to Lewes, a picturesque town in the South Downs, only around 12 minutes away from Brighton on train. After a modest pub lunch we walked around for a bit, eventually reaching the end of the high street. We followed the river walk waiting for the next turning.
But the turning never came. To cut a long journey short, we ended up on the dual carriageway. We kept walking and walking till we could find some way of returning into the town. Eventually we settled for a sharp grassen slope, probably around 30 degrees in angle (but of course it seemed a lot sharper at the time). Though I have wrote about the incident in a fairly offhand manner, at the time it was both exhilarating and frightening. There was no pavement, there was no rough area for us to walk on - we were using the same road as the cars. Of course we stayed as close to the side as possible - we didn't walk down the middle - we're not idiots.
Once we had climbed that slope and passed the over-bridge, we were suddenly in less hostile surroundings. The roads had pavements, and we soon re-entered the town. We were pretty relieved, as you can imagine. "Boy, after that, how can we not win tonight's tournament!" quipped I. My theory was, of course, that having survived what was a genuinely dangerous experience we were still alive and in once piece and our enthusiasm for comfortable, normal things (like sitting down, eating and playing poker tournaments) would be trebled - and we'd just do all of them well with a strange sense of invincible ease.
And soon we did sit down - on the return train to Brighton. After going to an Arcade near the seafront, we had a nice fat meal at WokMania, a Chinese buffet which has since been renamed and their range of food extended. It was all washed down with rather a lot of Coca Cola.
We waddled over to what would be the third and final casino of the Brighton Rack - the Brighton Mint. I had actually been in there in February just to have a browse. It was part of the same group as the Stanleys casino I mentioned a few Parts ago.
It had (and I can only assume, still has) a casino area on the ground floor and an underground card room with four tables and a mahjong set. And I mean underground lit-er-al-ly not figuratively - it wasn't shady or dodgy, it was below the level of the entrance.
We had turned up here on Thursday night hoping to play the £10 Rebuy, but only four people showed up (ourselves included) so we went home, a little disappointed.
There was almost a repeat of this unpleasantness tonight, but we managed to get to eight persons, the minimum required being six.
Thus we started on the final table, dealer dealt, an eight-man sit and go. And it was all men, by the way. The few times we saw women playing at the table they were always the wives or girlfriends of some of the other players present. The only other women present were dealing the cards or bringing the drinks.
One of the men we encountered was one I was pretty sure we had seen both at the Grosvenor and at the Rendezvous - a Cypriot by the name of Michael. He didn't make it very far.
The rebuy tournament lasted 90 minutes, and Goblin and I spent the minimum. He built up a fairly substantial stack. Though I don't remember much of the action, he has since admitted that he got into some fairly lucky situations. For my own part, I was playing alright and made some decent laydowns. I was enjoying the match a lot though. As I had been hoping, I was still in strong spirits from our near-death experience and every moment at the table was a pleasure.
During the break we chatted with some old guy. They were all old guys - I believe this man had been in one of the professions, accountancy or something. The same guy had, during the rebuy stage, boasted about his playing system. "If I have a top pair, I'm raising. If I have second pair, I'm betting and calling. Simple". He was out fairly quickly after the freezeout stage.
One guy had spent £60 in total. He managed to get to the final three and just fell short of making his money back (three paid). Fortunately Goblin and I were both still in too, and so all that was left for us was to play a token heads-up match. Goblin had the chip advantage. I got Jacks on the button - stack probably around 9 big blinds or so. I limped, Mike shoved. I insta-called, flipping over my trap. He had Ace-King and converted his hand to a pair. He won 1st place I won 2nd. It was literally the best result we could have hoped for.
We probably made around £60 each from this triumph, so not quite as big as the first night, but certainly better than LOSING.
Part 12, the final segment of the Brighton Rack, will follow shortly
Getting a little bored of the metropolis, we decided to head out to Lewes, a picturesque town in the South Downs, only around 12 minutes away from Brighton on train. After a modest pub lunch we walked around for a bit, eventually reaching the end of the high street. We followed the river walk waiting for the next turning.
But the turning never came. To cut a long journey short, we ended up on the dual carriageway. We kept walking and walking till we could find some way of returning into the town. Eventually we settled for a sharp grassen slope, probably around 30 degrees in angle (but of course it seemed a lot sharper at the time). Though I have wrote about the incident in a fairly offhand manner, at the time it was both exhilarating and frightening. There was no pavement, there was no rough area for us to walk on - we were using the same road as the cars. Of course we stayed as close to the side as possible - we didn't walk down the middle - we're not idiots.
Once we had climbed that slope and passed the over-bridge, we were suddenly in less hostile surroundings. The roads had pavements, and we soon re-entered the town. We were pretty relieved, as you can imagine. "Boy, after that, how can we not win tonight's tournament!" quipped I. My theory was, of course, that having survived what was a genuinely dangerous experience we were still alive and in once piece and our enthusiasm for comfortable, normal things (like sitting down, eating and playing poker tournaments) would be trebled - and we'd just do all of them well with a strange sense of invincible ease.
And soon we did sit down - on the return train to Brighton. After going to an Arcade near the seafront, we had a nice fat meal at WokMania, a Chinese buffet which has since been renamed and their range of food extended. It was all washed down with rather a lot of Coca Cola.
We waddled over to what would be the third and final casino of the Brighton Rack - the Brighton Mint. I had actually been in there in February just to have a browse. It was part of the same group as the Stanleys casino I mentioned a few Parts ago.
It had (and I can only assume, still has) a casino area on the ground floor and an underground card room with four tables and a mahjong set. And I mean underground lit-er-al-ly not figuratively - it wasn't shady or dodgy, it was below the level of the entrance.
We had turned up here on Thursday night hoping to play the £10 Rebuy, but only four people showed up (ourselves included) so we went home, a little disappointed.
There was almost a repeat of this unpleasantness tonight, but we managed to get to eight persons, the minimum required being six.
Thus we started on the final table, dealer dealt, an eight-man sit and go. And it was all men, by the way. The few times we saw women playing at the table they were always the wives or girlfriends of some of the other players present. The only other women present were dealing the cards or bringing the drinks.
One of the men we encountered was one I was pretty sure we had seen both at the Grosvenor and at the Rendezvous - a Cypriot by the name of Michael. He didn't make it very far.
The rebuy tournament lasted 90 minutes, and Goblin and I spent the minimum. He built up a fairly substantial stack. Though I don't remember much of the action, he has since admitted that he got into some fairly lucky situations. For my own part, I was playing alright and made some decent laydowns. I was enjoying the match a lot though. As I had been hoping, I was still in strong spirits from our near-death experience and every moment at the table was a pleasure.
During the break we chatted with some old guy. They were all old guys - I believe this man had been in one of the professions, accountancy or something. The same guy had, during the rebuy stage, boasted about his playing system. "If I have a top pair, I'm raising. If I have second pair, I'm betting and calling. Simple". He was out fairly quickly after the freezeout stage.
One guy had spent £60 in total. He managed to get to the final three and just fell short of making his money back (three paid). Fortunately Goblin and I were both still in too, and so all that was left for us was to play a token heads-up match. Goblin had the chip advantage. I got Jacks on the button - stack probably around 9 big blinds or so. I limped, Mike shoved. I insta-called, flipping over my trap. He had Ace-King and converted his hand to a pair. He won 1st place I won 2nd. It was literally the best result we could have hoped for.
We probably made around £60 each from this triumph, so not quite as big as the first night, but certainly better than LOSING.
Part 12, the final segment of the Brighton Rack, will follow shortly
Saturday, 12 June 2010
Hand History - Part 10
Brighton Rack Part 3
We left you off with tales of a much deserved defeat at the hands of the smarmy grinders of the Brighton Grosvenor.
(Incidentally I now remember how Goblin went out - he shoved two live-connectors from the cutoff and was called by a high ace, if I remember correctly? He lost of course (otherwise I wouldn't be mentioning it), although the guy who won conceded that Mike's cards were the sort of ones it was best to go all in with on account of their likely liveness.)
If I recall correctly, we didn't play for the next two nights. However, by Saturday our appetite was back, and we were ready to sit down to some fish and chips. The only thing on the menu was a £10 Rebuy, but it was better than nothing.
The diner in question was the famous Brighton Rendezvous. Famous amongst poker players anyway. And just to clarify, it was a casino, not a restaurant. That was just me using confusing metaphors, battering my 'fish and chips' joke until it is no longer edible.
The Rendezvous was rather different to the Grosvenor. It was much bigger for a start, although the card room area itself was rather cramped. The poker tables, rather than being the default 9/10 seaters, were infact designed to sit 7. Out of a starting field of around 90 (again, bigger than the Grosvenor fields which had typically been around 40) Goblin and I were sat at the same table. I played few pots and made few challenging decisions. Goblin never got a stack early on and spent the last 10 minutes or so going all in very liberally just for the chance to get a stack. This is probably a good strategy, but it's just that much more annoying when it doesn't work because it's expensive. Our average buyin for the night was £60 (after splitting), which was depressingly high, as usually when I go into a rebuy tournament I expect to spend my initial buy in and a top up, and only make a rebuy or two if I get unlucky.
The people around my table were a mixed bunch, though none of them seemed particularly talented. To Goblin's left there was an East-Asian guy who was always happy to show his cards. To my left there was a retired man, probably in his mid/late 60s. In one pot against him he bet out on an A35 board - I didn't have anything so I folded.
"Deuce-four?" I asked him, smirking.
"What?" he asked?
"Deuce-four?" I asked again.
He looked at me as if I was mad! Perhaps I should have said "did you see those three cards on the board - the Ace, three and the five. Well, if you had a two and a four in your hand, they would made a straight, as you'd have a run of cards going from Ace-to-Five (and Aces are low, remember). If you did have that hand, then it was better than my hand and it deserved to win the pot. Because it was the best possible hand on that board, although quite why you'd be playing deuce-four, sorry, a two and a four in that position is beyond me, hence the sardonic smirk in my initial asking of the question."
Goblin went bust shortly after the break, so now it was up to me. Not that my being the only one left would have affected my play in the slightest - it was an arbitrary consideration. There was no reason to hurry - I had waited long enough on the first night and it had been worth it. Now it was his turn to wait.
However, if human pressures weren't hurrying me, the blinds schedule was. At the Grosvenor blinds had gone up every 25 minutes during the £5 Rebuy. Here they were going up every 20 minutes, so it was that much more crapshooty. Even winning an all in provided only a little relief, as it would only be another round of blinds before the blinds went up again, and suddenly your M of 6 becomes an M of 4.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. The cloud in this case was the fast structure, the silver lining was the fact that the tourney was progressing rapidly, and it wasn't too long before we were at the final three tables, each playing seven-max. It was here that things got exciting. I made a classic survival shove with King Eight on the button versus Ace King on the small blind. Obviously I won, and sneered apologetically at the small-blind guy.
Two to my left was a small guy who looked a bit like Joe Hachem. It was clear from his general demeanour that he was from London, and he kept talking and saying things. Once I shoved pocket tens from UTG. Hachem pipes up ' ah yeah, got to respect the under-the-gun all in, he must be strong'.
We were getting close to the prize money. Top prize had originally been processed as being £1,490, but they had chopped some money off 9th place so that 1st was now the more aesthetically pleasing figure of £1,500. I was fairly relaxed at the prospect of winning all this money. It was the most I'd ever had the chance of winning (save a few online tournaments) but at the same time it wasn't silly money - it was a lot, but it sort of made sense in the scheme of things. We had put forward a combined £120 in this tournament, and so £1,500 seemed like a just rewards.
Unfortunately I came nowhere near it. I busted in 15th place as my A9 ran into AK.
Mike had decided to play a 1/1 cash game in the meantime. I joined him later on.
It was only 20 minutes after sitting down that I was identified as the tight player of the table. "I'd love to have what he's waiting for!" laughed the old man to some younger older man (probably in his 50s) to his left. I later entered a pot with ATo and was heads up against the old man. I bet out £8, to which his response was "take it! take it! [it's yours!]" - I waited for him to muck before flipping over my Ace-high. I had intended it as a bluff. "I bet he thinks that's really clever" he said to the guy to his left "I had the same hand". He was indignant, but I had only flipped my 'bluff' to show off that even if I was playing tight I was still going to take pots away with nothing.
Meanwhile Goblin got involved in some huge pots with a student. I believe the said student ended up folding two pair on a three-flush board. I think, after the flop all-in four bet from Goblin, the student may have been correct in folding, but he sure took a long time about it.
Goblin finished up in the cash game, myself marginally down. On average we were £15 up each, softening the blow of the tournament loss.
The bus journey home was fairly relaxed. The old man himself was on the same bus, and we had a good conservation about poker, although he did seem to want to talk rather more about what his son and daughter are up to, and the respectable professions they were following.
So all in all a strange night at the Rendezvous.
Two more nights came to follow - I shall talk about them both in Part 11.
We left you off with tales of a much deserved defeat at the hands of the smarmy grinders of the Brighton Grosvenor.
(Incidentally I now remember how Goblin went out - he shoved two live-connectors from the cutoff and was called by a high ace, if I remember correctly? He lost of course (otherwise I wouldn't be mentioning it), although the guy who won conceded that Mike's cards were the sort of ones it was best to go all in with on account of their likely liveness.)
If I recall correctly, we didn't play for the next two nights. However, by Saturday our appetite was back, and we were ready to sit down to some fish and chips. The only thing on the menu was a £10 Rebuy, but it was better than nothing.
The diner in question was the famous Brighton Rendezvous. Famous amongst poker players anyway. And just to clarify, it was a casino, not a restaurant. That was just me using confusing metaphors, battering my 'fish and chips' joke until it is no longer edible.
The Rendezvous was rather different to the Grosvenor. It was much bigger for a start, although the card room area itself was rather cramped. The poker tables, rather than being the default 9/10 seaters, were infact designed to sit 7. Out of a starting field of around 90 (again, bigger than the Grosvenor fields which had typically been around 40) Goblin and I were sat at the same table. I played few pots and made few challenging decisions. Goblin never got a stack early on and spent the last 10 minutes or so going all in very liberally just for the chance to get a stack. This is probably a good strategy, but it's just that much more annoying when it doesn't work because it's expensive. Our average buyin for the night was £60 (after splitting), which was depressingly high, as usually when I go into a rebuy tournament I expect to spend my initial buy in and a top up, and only make a rebuy or two if I get unlucky.
The people around my table were a mixed bunch, though none of them seemed particularly talented. To Goblin's left there was an East-Asian guy who was always happy to show his cards. To my left there was a retired man, probably in his mid/late 60s. In one pot against him he bet out on an A35 board - I didn't have anything so I folded.
"Deuce-four?" I asked him, smirking.
"What?" he asked?
"Deuce-four?" I asked again.
He looked at me as if I was mad! Perhaps I should have said "did you see those three cards on the board - the Ace, three and the five. Well, if you had a two and a four in your hand, they would made a straight, as you'd have a run of cards going from Ace-to-Five (and Aces are low, remember). If you did have that hand, then it was better than my hand and it deserved to win the pot. Because it was the best possible hand on that board, although quite why you'd be playing deuce-four, sorry, a two and a four in that position is beyond me, hence the sardonic smirk in my initial asking of the question."
Goblin went bust shortly after the break, so now it was up to me. Not that my being the only one left would have affected my play in the slightest - it was an arbitrary consideration. There was no reason to hurry - I had waited long enough on the first night and it had been worth it. Now it was his turn to wait.
However, if human pressures weren't hurrying me, the blinds schedule was. At the Grosvenor blinds had gone up every 25 minutes during the £5 Rebuy. Here they were going up every 20 minutes, so it was that much more crapshooty. Even winning an all in provided only a little relief, as it would only be another round of blinds before the blinds went up again, and suddenly your M of 6 becomes an M of 4.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. The cloud in this case was the fast structure, the silver lining was the fact that the tourney was progressing rapidly, and it wasn't too long before we were at the final three tables, each playing seven-max. It was here that things got exciting. I made a classic survival shove with King Eight on the button versus Ace King on the small blind. Obviously I won, and sneered apologetically at the small-blind guy.
Two to my left was a small guy who looked a bit like Joe Hachem. It was clear from his general demeanour that he was from London, and he kept talking and saying things. Once I shoved pocket tens from UTG. Hachem pipes up ' ah yeah, got to respect the under-the-gun all in, he must be strong'.
We were getting close to the prize money. Top prize had originally been processed as being £1,490, but they had chopped some money off 9th place so that 1st was now the more aesthetically pleasing figure of £1,500. I was fairly relaxed at the prospect of winning all this money. It was the most I'd ever had the chance of winning (save a few online tournaments) but at the same time it wasn't silly money - it was a lot, but it sort of made sense in the scheme of things. We had put forward a combined £120 in this tournament, and so £1,500 seemed like a just rewards.
Unfortunately I came nowhere near it. I busted in 15th place as my A9 ran into AK.
Mike had decided to play a 1/1 cash game in the meantime. I joined him later on.
It was only 20 minutes after sitting down that I was identified as the tight player of the table. "I'd love to have what he's waiting for!" laughed the old man to some younger older man (probably in his 50s) to his left. I later entered a pot with ATo and was heads up against the old man. I bet out £8, to which his response was "take it! take it! [it's yours!]" - I waited for him to muck before flipping over my Ace-high. I had intended it as a bluff. "I bet he thinks that's really clever" he said to the guy to his left "I had the same hand". He was indignant, but I had only flipped my 'bluff' to show off that even if I was playing tight I was still going to take pots away with nothing.
Meanwhile Goblin got involved in some huge pots with a student. I believe the said student ended up folding two pair on a three-flush board. I think, after the flop all-in four bet from Goblin, the student may have been correct in folding, but he sure took a long time about it.
Goblin finished up in the cash game, myself marginally down. On average we were £15 up each, softening the blow of the tournament loss.
The bus journey home was fairly relaxed. The old man himself was on the same bus, and we had a good conservation about poker, although he did seem to want to talk rather more about what his son and daughter are up to, and the respectable professions they were following.
So all in all a strange night at the Rendezvous.
Two more nights came to follow - I shall talk about them both in Part 11.
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Hand History - Part 9
Brighton Rack - Part 2
Hmm, I'm not entirely sure why I kept the previous Hand History so brief. I was basically half way through telling a story! Mad! I could have just waited till I get home (for I was fain to leave the house midmorning) to write a bit more, but I was in some sort of desperate rush to publish what I had already written. Completely arbitrary!
Almost as arbitrary as I and Goblin's decision to play the £50 Second Chance at the Brighton Grosvenor that Wednesday night. Arbitrary because we were using the old 'well it's profit anyway, we may as well take a shot'.
And take a shot we did! Our wallets were well padded from last night's victory, and so up we went to the cashier, confidently. A few of the people recognised Goblin as the guy who had won last night. But the atmosphere was fairly different. At least on my table. The previous night my table had been fairly talkative - I remember us talking about the WSOP Main Event 2007 Final Table, the last such tournament played before the November Nine nonsense. Tonight, everyone seemed that much more serious and marginally more talented. When I had been playing yesterday, the guy who was button when I was big blind had been a fairly passive student of the 'go on let's limp and try to see a cheap flop variety'. Tonight the equivalent guy was still somewhat studenty, but of the enter every pot with a raise and try to take it down when they other guy shows weakness variety. i.e. good. He managed to bluff me off one pot - I had 99 on the BB and had called his button raise. We checked the flop - there were a few high cards. I bet around 500 on the turn (around 2/3 of the pot) and he insta-raised to around 1700. I folded. He showed Q2 for a bluff. It didn't seem that he was trying to scare me or anything - the flip was completely impersonal, almost routine.
I felt a little out of my depth. They probably weren't so much better than me in hindsight, and if I were to play a 24 hour cash game with them I think I may have been able to hold my own without too much difficulty. But this tournament had a strange atmosphere. We had gone in with a blasé victor's confidence - even if it was technically Goblin (not me) who had won last night, we did tend to view the successes and failures as being something that we shared. We both play well and avoid tilting off our money, so neither of us should take an individual win as a great exuberant triumph. Nor should we take each defeat as some sort of tragedy.
But defeat was precisely what came next. The blinds were 50-100, and my stack was now 4,500 having started on 5,500. Basically the student guy had Aces and I had Kings. I took the second chance (paying another £50 for the privilege) and kept playing.
Goblin didn't take his rebuy/addon stack. I can't remember why - it seems we had both sort of given up on the tournament a little. I don't remember what happened with him and I didn't see it (perhaps he can post here if he remembers), but it wasn't too long after the break before he was out.
The break is worth mentioning itself. Normally casino half-time buffets consist of neat cold sandwiches and, if we were lucky, profiteroles. But as this was a higher buyin event, our buffet took the form of cooked food over in the restaurant area. There were all manner of foods - pizza sticks, chicken, potato salad... a classic feast. It was a nice, if rather temporary and stilted, vindication. "You're in the big league now, boys!"
We were quickly relegated. Mike was already out when he saw me bluff of my entire stack. It was a paired board. Caller made a sort of "it'd be rude not to" quip when I bet the flop. He checked to me on the turn. I BLASTED it all in. He called with his trip sevens. My Jack-8 had no way of sucking out of him with one card to come, and my stack was washed away with the river.
It was only 10.30pm when we left the casino, and we mulled around the streets of Brighton for a bit. We were fairly light hearted about it all, but tonight's losses had pretty much cancelled out the previous night's success.
We had been to the Grosvenor twice in two nights now. We would take a little break from there for now. We had another place in our sights but [closes the book while looking up at the camera] that will have to wait for next time!
Hmm, I'm not entirely sure why I kept the previous Hand History so brief. I was basically half way through telling a story! Mad! I could have just waited till I get home (for I was fain to leave the house midmorning) to write a bit more, but I was in some sort of desperate rush to publish what I had already written. Completely arbitrary!
Almost as arbitrary as I and Goblin's decision to play the £50 Second Chance at the Brighton Grosvenor that Wednesday night. Arbitrary because we were using the old 'well it's profit anyway, we may as well take a shot'.
And take a shot we did! Our wallets were well padded from last night's victory, and so up we went to the cashier, confidently. A few of the people recognised Goblin as the guy who had won last night. But the atmosphere was fairly different. At least on my table. The previous night my table had been fairly talkative - I remember us talking about the WSOP Main Event 2007 Final Table, the last such tournament played before the November Nine nonsense. Tonight, everyone seemed that much more serious and marginally more talented. When I had been playing yesterday, the guy who was button when I was big blind had been a fairly passive student of the 'go on let's limp and try to see a cheap flop variety'. Tonight the equivalent guy was still somewhat studenty, but of the enter every pot with a raise and try to take it down when they other guy shows weakness variety. i.e. good. He managed to bluff me off one pot - I had 99 on the BB and had called his button raise. We checked the flop - there were a few high cards. I bet around 500 on the turn (around 2/3 of the pot) and he insta-raised to around 1700. I folded. He showed Q2 for a bluff. It didn't seem that he was trying to scare me or anything - the flip was completely impersonal, almost routine.
I felt a little out of my depth. They probably weren't so much better than me in hindsight, and if I were to play a 24 hour cash game with them I think I may have been able to hold my own without too much difficulty. But this tournament had a strange atmosphere. We had gone in with a blasé victor's confidence - even if it was technically Goblin (not me) who had won last night, we did tend to view the successes and failures as being something that we shared. We both play well and avoid tilting off our money, so neither of us should take an individual win as a great exuberant triumph. Nor should we take each defeat as some sort of tragedy.
But defeat was precisely what came next. The blinds were 50-100, and my stack was now 4,500 having started on 5,500. Basically the student guy had Aces and I had Kings. I took the second chance (paying another £50 for the privilege) and kept playing.
Goblin didn't take his rebuy/addon stack. I can't remember why - it seems we had both sort of given up on the tournament a little. I don't remember what happened with him and I didn't see it (perhaps he can post here if he remembers), but it wasn't too long after the break before he was out.
The break is worth mentioning itself. Normally casino half-time buffets consist of neat cold sandwiches and, if we were lucky, profiteroles. But as this was a higher buyin event, our buffet took the form of cooked food over in the restaurant area. There were all manner of foods - pizza sticks, chicken, potato salad... a classic feast. It was a nice, if rather temporary and stilted, vindication. "You're in the big league now, boys!"
We were quickly relegated. Mike was already out when he saw me bluff of my entire stack. It was a paired board. Caller made a sort of "it'd be rude not to" quip when I bet the flop. He checked to me on the turn. I BLASTED it all in. He called with his trip sevens. My Jack-8 had no way of sucking out of him with one card to come, and my stack was washed away with the river.
It was only 10.30pm when we left the casino, and we mulled around the streets of Brighton for a bit. We were fairly light hearted about it all, but tonight's losses had pretty much cancelled out the previous night's success.
We had been to the Grosvenor twice in two nights now. We would take a little break from there for now. We had another place in our sights but [closes the book while looking up at the camera] that will have to wait for next time!
Hand History - Part 8
I haven't posted a Hand History instalment for over two months now! This is partly because I haven't played poker in six weeks and so it hasn't been at the forefront of my mind or the top of my blog agenda (blogenda).
But the prospect of a tournament at DTD in July, UKIPT/GUKPT Brighton side events (in July/September respectively) and a Club Championship in October are all whetting my poker appetite like a large slab of steak with a dollar sign branded into it.
So what better way to gear myself up for a nice round of tournament poker than to talk about a previous round?
July 2008 - The Brighton Rack
Back in April 2007 the Conjurer and River Goblin came to my house for two nights. We played some poker against each other and also against one of my old Ryle friends - a £5 freezeout. The purpose of the visit had not been poker-specific and we did not venture into any cardrooms. Nor had we intended to. Though we had all broken our casino-virginity I believe we all had a slight youthful disregard for the establishments which, fun or not, were still seedy, populated with weirdos and not the sort of places you could expect to tell your mother you were going without being moaned at.
July 2008 was different. For a start, only the River Goblin came down. Also, rather than being for two nights, it was for nearly a week. I was still sort of playing in secret, though I had got to the point where I didn't really care if she found out - I was living such a nitty lifestyle at the time anyway (early mornings, driving lessons, work assignments) that I wasn't in the slightest bit interested in having my free time restrained too.
The first evening I met the Goblin at Brighton Station. He shared out some homemade sandwiches and some Nestlé Smarties cakes. It wasn't really a full dinner, but like countless gamblers before us, we were going to rely on the hospitality of the casino and sustain ourselves on the sandwiches provided during the tournament break.
The tournament was a £5 Rebuy. It was not my first time playing here - I had partook in a £10 Rebuy back in April a few days before university. I had managed to come 7th in that despite being scared money. I had gone out after getting A7o all in from the button against 77. It was a lousy way to go out, but at least I had cashed and would feel comfortable here in the future.
However, no amount of comfort could prepare me for the rather measly run of lack I had on this particular occasion. One one instance I had an overpair to the board versus two people with third pair. They both hit their kickers, leaving my hand third best. After the rebuy period ended, it wasn't long till I lost the remainder of my chips.
Goblin did significantly better. So much so, that I was standing for nearly four hours on the sidelines. By around 2am it was down to three players, Goblin with the advantage. He got it all in with Jacks. The big blind, who had not looked at his cards yet, flipped them over one by one. The first one... an ace. The second one... an ace! "GET IN!" he shouted. "GET IN!". Aces won that pot, but Goblin was far from dead stackwise and managed to get to heads up, whereupon a split was arranged. We had been splitting our buyins and prizes, and as a consequence we both profited the same amount - around £90. It was a pretty ideal way to start the Rack, and the taxi journey back had that excellent sense of justification, the feeling of victory. "Yep, we won."
We were both pretty tired - myself from sweating, him from playing and by virtue of the fact that he had been awake since 6am. It was now 3am and... you do the maths. Still, we have since referred to these sort of wins as 'classic tired gambler victories'. My PokerSoc win back in January had been one of these - I was in a pretty bad physical state as there were no drinks machines around and I hadn't brought anything myself - thus I played thirsty for five hours.
Of course there is a certain rationale behind tired gambler victories - when you're tired you tend to be calm as well, and therefore less excitable or prone to rushed decisions. Therefore you just sit there and... end up winning.
There was slightly less rationale behind what we did next. It was a great gamble, in a purely literal sense of the word.
Hand History - Part 9 will continue shortly, with the Second Part of the Brighton Rack
But the prospect of a tournament at DTD in July, UKIPT/GUKPT Brighton side events (in July/September respectively) and a Club Championship in October are all whetting my poker appetite like a large slab of steak with a dollar sign branded into it.
So what better way to gear myself up for a nice round of tournament poker than to talk about a previous round?
July 2008 - The Brighton Rack
Back in April 2007 the Conjurer and River Goblin came to my house for two nights. We played some poker against each other and also against one of my old Ryle friends - a £5 freezeout. The purpose of the visit had not been poker-specific and we did not venture into any cardrooms. Nor had we intended to. Though we had all broken our casino-virginity I believe we all had a slight youthful disregard for the establishments which, fun or not, were still seedy, populated with weirdos and not the sort of places you could expect to tell your mother you were going without being moaned at.
July 2008 was different. For a start, only the River Goblin came down. Also, rather than being for two nights, it was for nearly a week. I was still sort of playing in secret, though I had got to the point where I didn't really care if she found out - I was living such a nitty lifestyle at the time anyway (early mornings, driving lessons, work assignments) that I wasn't in the slightest bit interested in having my free time restrained too.
The first evening I met the Goblin at Brighton Station. He shared out some homemade sandwiches and some Nestlé Smarties cakes. It wasn't really a full dinner, but like countless gamblers before us, we were going to rely on the hospitality of the casino and sustain ourselves on the sandwiches provided during the tournament break.
The tournament was a £5 Rebuy. It was not my first time playing here - I had partook in a £10 Rebuy back in April a few days before university. I had managed to come 7th in that despite being scared money. I had gone out after getting A7o all in from the button against 77. It was a lousy way to go out, but at least I had cashed and would feel comfortable here in the future.
However, no amount of comfort could prepare me for the rather measly run of lack I had on this particular occasion. One one instance I had an overpair to the board versus two people with third pair. They both hit their kickers, leaving my hand third best. After the rebuy period ended, it wasn't long till I lost the remainder of my chips.
Goblin did significantly better. So much so, that I was standing for nearly four hours on the sidelines. By around 2am it was down to three players, Goblin with the advantage. He got it all in with Jacks. The big blind, who had not looked at his cards yet, flipped them over one by one. The first one... an ace. The second one... an ace! "GET IN!" he shouted. "GET IN!". Aces won that pot, but Goblin was far from dead stackwise and managed to get to heads up, whereupon a split was arranged. We had been splitting our buyins and prizes, and as a consequence we both profited the same amount - around £90. It was a pretty ideal way to start the Rack, and the taxi journey back had that excellent sense of justification, the feeling of victory. "Yep, we won."
We were both pretty tired - myself from sweating, him from playing and by virtue of the fact that he had been awake since 6am. It was now 3am and... you do the maths. Still, we have since referred to these sort of wins as 'classic tired gambler victories'. My PokerSoc win back in January had been one of these - I was in a pretty bad physical state as there were no drinks machines around and I hadn't brought anything myself - thus I played thirsty for five hours.
Of course there is a certain rationale behind tired gambler victories - when you're tired you tend to be calm as well, and therefore less excitable or prone to rushed decisions. Therefore you just sit there and... end up winning.
There was slightly less rationale behind what we did next. It was a great gamble, in a purely literal sense of the word.
Hand History - Part 9 will continue shortly, with the Second Part of the Brighton Rack
Monday, 24 May 2010
Reading
I never read an awful lot as a child. I found it neither aesthetically enjoyable nor intellectually stimulating. However, while at university reading became a matter of course (literally). Though I did not always enjoy grinding my way through essays on the Early Modern era, reading did become a key part of my routine in a way it had not before.
One of the most enjoyable solitary pursuits at university was when I read something which was not course related. I didn't have a lot of time for this though, for there was only so much energy I had for reading and most of it did indeed get used up plowing through the archives.
It was only once I graduated that I began to take reading a little more seriously. I began to miss the simple pleasure of sitting down and digesting words.
When I was in Peru in October I spent quite a lot of time looking through the books on the shelves of our hosts. Though they were mainly in Spanish or French, the idea of reading began to appeal to me a little more. It just seemed like a very civilized pass time.
I had brought along some English books with me. One was a copy of Around the World in Eighty Days, a book I had actually taken out from the school library around ten years earlier and had never returned. I read it while in Peru and left it as a gift for my fifteen-year-old cousin, who had a few other Verne titles on his shelf. I also took along Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, a text I had supposed to have read in 2nd year at university but had never got round to. I didn't finish it in the end. Like the period itself, the book was ostensibly dull.
By the time I returned from Peru I had settled to the idea that book reading was an excellent passtime, and was often far more rewarding than staring vapidly at the computer. Not that there is anything wrong with computers, but you must remember that a computer is simply a tool. A servant. You must not let it become your master. And I could not let myself spend every night tapping away at my machine until my eyelids started to bat and my head sway with fatigue. Reading represented a nice inbetween, a bridge between the work of the day and sleep.
Anyway, here's what I've read since starting the Log
Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries (1971) - 275 pages
Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (1953) - 526 pages
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726) - 316 pages
One of the most enjoyable solitary pursuits at university was when I read something which was not course related. I didn't have a lot of time for this though, for there was only so much energy I had for reading and most of it did indeed get used up plowing through the archives.
It was only once I graduated that I began to take reading a little more seriously. I began to miss the simple pleasure of sitting down and digesting words.
When I was in Peru in October I spent quite a lot of time looking through the books on the shelves of our hosts. Though they were mainly in Spanish or French, the idea of reading began to appeal to me a little more. It just seemed like a very civilized pass time.
I had brought along some English books with me. One was a copy of Around the World in Eighty Days, a book I had actually taken out from the school library around ten years earlier and had never returned. I read it while in Peru and left it as a gift for my fifteen-year-old cousin, who had a few other Verne titles on his shelf. I also took along Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, a text I had supposed to have read in 2nd year at university but had never got round to. I didn't finish it in the end. Like the period itself, the book was ostensibly dull.
By the time I returned from Peru I had settled to the idea that book reading was an excellent passtime, and was often far more rewarding than staring vapidly at the computer. Not that there is anything wrong with computers, but you must remember that a computer is simply a tool. A servant. You must not let it become your master. And I could not let myself spend every night tapping away at my machine until my eyelids started to bat and my head sway with fatigue. Reading represented a nice inbetween, a bridge between the work of the day and sleep.
Anyway, here's what I've read since starting the Log
Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries (1971) - 275 pages
Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (1953) - 526 pages
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726) - 316 pages
Alistair Cooke's American Journey (1945) - 310 pages
Robin Skelton, Two hundred poems from the Greek Anthology (1971) - 76 pages
Jo Swinnerton, The London Pocket Companion (2008) - 143 pages
There was a spell for about there months (mid Feb to mid May) where I hardly read at all, though I'm not quite sure why.
Currently reading a few others, namely Imperium by Robert Harris, Crashes by Robert Beckman and Major: A Political Life by Anthony Seldon, my old headmaster. I'm also half way through Harrington on Cash Volume I, but am in no hurry to read that as I've sort of grown a bit bored of poker.
What's that, bored of poker?
It's not chronic boredom. I haven't grown out of it. I just don't want to spend too much of my spare time playing it, particularly not online tournaments. (Indeed, I have not played at all this month). However, I still relish the prospect of playing some UKIPT/GUKPT side events, which will be coming to Brighton in July and September respectively.
My financial situation is fairly vague at the moment (long story), but I would like to go to the 1/1 tables at the Vic some time this year with at least five full-buy ins (200BB) once I have a sufficient bank roll.
Am wondering whether to post this on Three Men on a Blog. Probably not. It doesn't really go with the blog dyanmic at the moment. Of course, as I represent 33% of the authorship, I have a role in setting what that dyanmic is. But as a general rule, the more a blog post is about me (rather than about a thing) the more likely I would be to post it here.
Robin Skelton, Two hundred poems from the Greek Anthology (1971) - 76 pages
Jo Swinnerton, The London Pocket Companion (2008) - 143 pages
There was a spell for about there months (mid Feb to mid May) where I hardly read at all, though I'm not quite sure why.
Currently reading a few others, namely Imperium by Robert Harris, Crashes by Robert Beckman and Major: A Political Life by Anthony Seldon, my old headmaster. I'm also half way through Harrington on Cash Volume I, but am in no hurry to read that as I've sort of grown a bit bored of poker.
What's that, bored of poker?
It's not chronic boredom. I haven't grown out of it. I just don't want to spend too much of my spare time playing it, particularly not online tournaments. (Indeed, I have not played at all this month). However, I still relish the prospect of playing some UKIPT/GUKPT side events, which will be coming to Brighton in July and September respectively.
My financial situation is fairly vague at the moment (long story), but I would like to go to the 1/1 tables at the Vic some time this year with at least five full-buy ins (200BB) once I have a sufficient bank roll.
Am wondering whether to post this on Three Men on a Blog. Probably not. It doesn't really go with the blog dyanmic at the moment. Of course, as I represent 33% of the authorship, I have a role in setting what that dyanmic is. But as a general rule, the more a blog post is about me (rather than about a thing) the more likely I would be to post it here.
Monday, 29 March 2010
Hand History - Part 7
"Ring in the new year with double player points."
This was the wording of Full Tilt's rather depressing advert at the time, displayed on the top panel of the Full Tilt poker client.
"The thing is I have to go to Cardiff to get any good games."
A depressing man in his late twenties talking to another at Gloucester station, somewhen in January.
The most depressing thing about that man is that he looked a little how I might look in ten years... if I wasn't careful. He was heavy, scruffy and had clearly lost his spirit somewhere along the way.
I vowed never to become that man. I decided that my relationship with poker would be a healthy one and it should not interfere too much with the rest of my life. It certainly shouldn't dictate it.
Nevertheless, I did play quite a lot during the Christmas holidays and for a good chunk of the term. At the very end of the previous term (Christmas) I had decided to see what I could do with a $600 bankroll. This was a little less arbitrary than previous attempts and designed with longterm profit and game improvement in mind. I put $150 on four sites - Party Poker, Ladbrokes, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.
To start with things didn't go very well, and I was down to $500 fairly quickly. Ladbrokes subtly increased their cashgame rake to 6.25% (there was no announcement, I had to spot and quantify the change myself) and there weren't enough STTs or good MTTs for my liking, so I withdrew from there fairly early on in the project.
During this period I generally played 25NL, $5.50 or $6.50 sit and goes and MTTs of buyins up to $5.50. It was fairly strict bankrolling but I didn't mind - I really was playing with the long run in mind. I did, however, manage to play my first $26 MTT on Full Tilt after winning a ticket in a player points freeroll. I believe it was a Bounty MTT. And I did win a bounty, but failed to cash, coming 60th whereas only 45 were paid.
One Bounty MTT I did cash in was at PokerSoc, my third ever cash there. Two weeks later I made my first ever win. That was a good moment, and it was made all the sweeter by the fact that I beat 8 Years, that being his name on account of the fact that, through his Undergraduate, Graduate and PHD studies he had now been at the university for that amount of time. I didn't have anything personal against the man, but he epitomised a number of aspects of poker playing I didn't like: greed, misplaced testostrone, and an over reliance on 'maths'. He was shoving all over the place. So when I got KK on the small blind, I knew I had won the match. I limped. He instashoved. I called - his K9 was in pretty poor shape against me and the £110 prize was mine. It wasn't just a personal victory though - Mike (who had already won PokerSoc back in October) came third. 8 Years had got pretty frustrated with me for apparently softplaying against in - Mike was on the big blind with two more big blinds in his stack. I folded my 45o from the small blind. 8 Years asserted that I should shove 'any two' in that spot to try to take Mike out of the tournament.
Over the course of this term I resumed my relationship with her, and things were simply brilliant. But soon she and poker would collide. She had never liked my hobby for the same reasons most women wouldn't - it was gambling and seemnigly a waste of time. If it was just my time I was wasting however, she would probably not have minded. But it soon got directly in the way of our relationship.
To cut (what seemed like a very) long story (at the time) short, I was at a poker tournament one night when I really should have been with her. I'm not particularly proud of what happened next, but I think it was the best option at the time: I basically opted to stop playing as it it were proof that poker basically meant nothing to me. The same day I withdrew my remaining online money.
Truth be told, I came to regret this decision a little. Given the choice betwen her and poker I chose her, but I regret having allowed it to degrade into such a dichotomy. In truth, I still played some poker. I didn't go to PokerSoc and I didn't play online much, but I continued to play against my friends (nothing would have prevented me from that). I just toned down public appearances. At the time I was too cowardly to be completely honest with her.
However, one thing I did would have happened either way. On April 1st I banned myself on PokerStars and FullTilt, for two and three months respectively. The reason for this was my need to buckle down and do some work, as I had a degree to salvage. I did this fairly well, considering the mess I had made of things in Term 1, and managed to pullthrough with a mediocre but stable 2-1 for the year.
DKSOP continued as normal, and when Ryan came to live with us on a more permanent basis we had five resident poker players. Results of the serieses were as follows.
JANUARY 2008
Alex 91, Housey 88, Mike 20, Johnny 20, Seby 10, Ryan 10
after ten games
FEBRUARY 2008
Housey 70, Mike 60, Alex 53, Seby 15
after eight games
MARCH/APRIL 2008
Mike 80, Alex 40, Ryan 40, Housey 30, Seby 20
after eight games
MAY 2008
Seby 140, Alex 105, Mike 55, Ryan 43, Johnny 30, Housey 20
after nine games
That's right - I won a series. Finally! During my birthday month too! We had had four different winners for four seasons, so the June series was, supposedely, going to be something of a climax!
It wasn't though - we hardly played at all (credit exams and people going home early) and so there wasn't really a series at all.
In the next part of Hand History I will talk about the eventful playing of the Summer.
But I can't help but look back at this installment (Part 7) without an air of sadness and lameness. My relationship with poker had gone from one end to another. No one forced me to tone down my playing. I didn't have to.
judge for yourselves
This was the wording of Full Tilt's rather depressing advert at the time, displayed on the top panel of the Full Tilt poker client.
"The thing is I have to go to Cardiff to get any good games."
A depressing man in his late twenties talking to another at Gloucester station, somewhen in January.
The most depressing thing about that man is that he looked a little how I might look in ten years... if I wasn't careful. He was heavy, scruffy and had clearly lost his spirit somewhere along the way.
I vowed never to become that man. I decided that my relationship with poker would be a healthy one and it should not interfere too much with the rest of my life. It certainly shouldn't dictate it.
Nevertheless, I did play quite a lot during the Christmas holidays and for a good chunk of the term. At the very end of the previous term (Christmas) I had decided to see what I could do with a $600 bankroll. This was a little less arbitrary than previous attempts and designed with longterm profit and game improvement in mind. I put $150 on four sites - Party Poker, Ladbrokes, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.
To start with things didn't go very well, and I was down to $500 fairly quickly. Ladbrokes subtly increased their cashgame rake to 6.25% (there was no announcement, I had to spot and quantify the change myself) and there weren't enough STTs or good MTTs for my liking, so I withdrew from there fairly early on in the project.
During this period I generally played 25NL, $5.50 or $6.50 sit and goes and MTTs of buyins up to $5.50. It was fairly strict bankrolling but I didn't mind - I really was playing with the long run in mind. I did, however, manage to play my first $26 MTT on Full Tilt after winning a ticket in a player points freeroll. I believe it was a Bounty MTT. And I did win a bounty, but failed to cash, coming 60th whereas only 45 were paid.
One Bounty MTT I did cash in was at PokerSoc, my third ever cash there. Two weeks later I made my first ever win. That was a good moment, and it was made all the sweeter by the fact that I beat 8 Years, that being his name on account of the fact that, through his Undergraduate, Graduate and PHD studies he had now been at the university for that amount of time. I didn't have anything personal against the man, but he epitomised a number of aspects of poker playing I didn't like: greed, misplaced testostrone, and an over reliance on 'maths'. He was shoving all over the place. So when I got KK on the small blind, I knew I had won the match. I limped. He instashoved. I called - his K9 was in pretty poor shape against me and the £110 prize was mine. It wasn't just a personal victory though - Mike (who had already won PokerSoc back in October) came third. 8 Years had got pretty frustrated with me for apparently softplaying against in - Mike was on the big blind with two more big blinds in his stack. I folded my 45o from the small blind. 8 Years asserted that I should shove 'any two' in that spot to try to take Mike out of the tournament.
Over the course of this term I resumed my relationship with her, and things were simply brilliant. But soon she and poker would collide. She had never liked my hobby for the same reasons most women wouldn't - it was gambling and seemnigly a waste of time. If it was just my time I was wasting however, she would probably not have minded. But it soon got directly in the way of our relationship.
To cut (what seemed like a very) long story (at the time) short, I was at a poker tournament one night when I really should have been with her. I'm not particularly proud of what happened next, but I think it was the best option at the time: I basically opted to stop playing as it it were proof that poker basically meant nothing to me. The same day I withdrew my remaining online money.
Truth be told, I came to regret this decision a little. Given the choice betwen her and poker I chose her, but I regret having allowed it to degrade into such a dichotomy. In truth, I still played some poker. I didn't go to PokerSoc and I didn't play online much, but I continued to play against my friends (nothing would have prevented me from that). I just toned down public appearances. At the time I was too cowardly to be completely honest with her.
However, one thing I did would have happened either way. On April 1st I banned myself on PokerStars and FullTilt, for two and three months respectively. The reason for this was my need to buckle down and do some work, as I had a degree to salvage. I did this fairly well, considering the mess I had made of things in Term 1, and managed to pullthrough with a mediocre but stable 2-1 for the year.
DKSOP continued as normal, and when Ryan came to live with us on a more permanent basis we had five resident poker players. Results of the serieses were as follows.
JANUARY 2008
Alex 91, Housey 88, Mike 20, Johnny 20, Seby 10, Ryan 10
after ten games
FEBRUARY 2008
Housey 70, Mike 60, Alex 53, Seby 15
after eight games
MARCH/APRIL 2008
Mike 80, Alex 40, Ryan 40, Housey 30, Seby 20
after eight games
MAY 2008
Seby 140, Alex 105, Mike 55, Ryan 43, Johnny 30, Housey 20
after nine games
That's right - I won a series. Finally! During my birthday month too! We had had four different winners for four seasons, so the June series was, supposedely, going to be something of a climax!
It wasn't though - we hardly played at all (credit exams and people going home early) and so there wasn't really a series at all.
In the next part of Hand History I will talk about the eventful playing of the Summer.
But I can't help but look back at this installment (Part 7) without an air of sadness and lameness. My relationship with poker had gone from one end to another. No one forced me to tone down my playing. I didn't have to.
judge for yourselves
Sunday, 14 March 2010
Hand History - Part 6
Summer holidays were long - three months in total, from the end of June right through to the last gasps of September. Being a man of leisure, I spent much of this time playing poker. Near the end of June I deposited on Full Tilt Poker, a modest sum of $150. I mainly played low stakes cash (25NL) and MTTs with small buy ins.
I didn't too well at either. With the MTTs I must admit I was rather unlucky. In a $5 Six-Max MTT I bubbled with Kings against Ace King (top prize was over $200). Worse still I was sitting on the stairs while playing as my connection was having trouble, so it was a doubly inconvenient and frustrating experience. As for my 25NL experience, I falled into the 'any two' trap again. If someone raises to $0.75 and you're in the big blind with 69o, you should call, yes? Not only do you have a good chance of making a straight, but it will be a really disguised one too. And hey, if you hit a pair it may well be good. And if you don't... outplay your opponent!
Well, alas 69o does not have a good chance of hitting a straight. And if you hit a pair you are unlikely to get paid off if you are beat. And I simply wasn't good enough to outplay my opponent.
It's worth pointing out at this stage, lest this account seem too depressing, that I was slowly creeping up the stakes and raising my comfort level, even if I wasn't neccessarily making any money. If this all seems a bit one step forward one step back, I assure the reader that it was really all four steps forward and three steps back.
On the first day of August I wrote a little bit of self-education on my poker game - reminding myself that tight is right. I was down around $100 (£50, or four buyins) and sort of realised I hadn't been playing in a logically sound way. I don't remember much about my playing in August - there were no major successes or heavy losses. It was a little socially poisonous though, something which got worse in Septemeber, where once again I got all excited about bankrolling. I had around $100 on Ladbrokes poker, and a few dollars on some other sites, and promised myself to keep extra-tight records.
On the first day of August I wrote a little bit of self-education on my poker game - reminding myself that tight is right. I was down around $100 (£50, or four buyins) and sort of realised I hadn't been playing in a logically sound way. I don't remember much about my playing in August - there were no major successes or heavy losses. It was a little socially poisonous though, something which got worse in Septemeber, where once again I got all excited about bankrolling. I had around $100 on Ladbrokes poker, and a few dollars on some other sites, and promised myself to keep extra-tight records.
All rather pointless as you can guess. The trouble with all these bankroll projects is that there was no real concrete aim to them. I was bankrolling for the sake of it. I wasn't trying to improve my game and I wasn't really trying to make money. I was just playing within a completely arbitrary framework. Of course, I didn't really realise it at the time.
I was still playing too loose. When I came to Warwick for a few days in early September, it was even noted how I was 'calling more' preflop. Alas, I had fallen back to the loose logic of 'any-two'. I lost around £70 over the course of three days, which felt like a lot at the time.
My Full Tilt roll had been dwindling fairly consistently too. I just wasn't winning anything! I did play a little 25/50 H.O.R.S.E., something which I mentioned briefly on my old blog.
Once I settled back at Warwick for good I was back in the company of all my poker-playing friends. And we did indeed play a lot of poker. Though I enjoyed the freedom to play (it wasn't always easy to play at home: connection, family et cetera) I continued to suffer a string of fairly depressing results, both live and online. On one visit to Stanleys I got knocked out fairly early. As it was a Sunday afternoon tourney and started early, it was still light outside as I walked home in the heavy, sticky rain, wondering how I had got myself into such a situation.
The most nostalgic and symbolic episode of this period was the computer room sessions. Alex's friend Dave was a PhD physicist, as well as being a regular at our poker games. While the physics computer room was open to all during working hours, thanks to Dave we were able to access them out-of-hours. From this ability stemmed all-night online poker sessions, including plenty of tournaments on Ladbrokes. We occasionally ordered from pizza hut, having them deliver to the place under the bridge by the physics labs, where one of us would pick it up. We would usually go home at around 6am in the fresh, cool morning air. For me this soon became the walk of shame - the long walk down the physics concourse and the twenty minute crawl home gave us time to mull over our losses like the desperate gamblers we were.
Near the beginning of term I broke up with my then girlfriend, also at Warwick. If I haven't mentioned her before it's because this is meant to be about poker, and not a chance for self-indulgent recollections about other personal malaise. But I mention it now because it fitted into the general theme of uuuurgh that became Year 2 Term 1 which, as you are about to see, was probably the single most decadent, and the break-up marked the dividing line between Sebastian Evans the civlized, reluctant gambler and Sebastian Evans the lazy degenerate.
I didn't go to all my lectures, I didn't keep in touch with old friends and I maintained frosty relations with her. I was nervous, unhealthy, tired, smart-alecky and vapid. My poker game had become even looser and, to make matters worse, I was playing a lot. I often got knocked out of PokerSoc which due to blindingly obviously unneccessary bluffs and staying up fairly late playing low stakes tournaments on Ladbrokes. Sometimes, desperately, I tried to play while simultaneously study - a formula which never works and don't pretend it does. We had a very poor, overloaded little internet connection which often caused the online poker rooms to hang.
I also played on Stars a bit, where I was in a rush to clear a bonus. I was playing $5 STT after $5 STT to accumulate enough VPPs. My understanding of variance was still fairly poor, and on one occasion where I played 4-tables at a time (for the first time in my life) I was genuinly surpirsed that I failed to cash in any of them. WHAT ARE THE ODDS. OH MY GOD.
I was losing consistently in DKSOP too, and though I was never told, suspect people must have noticed how badly I was playing. We did have some fun, big games though. There was a 25p/50p Dealer's Choice game with Felix. I ended up losing my £25 buy in an Omaha hand. A3 on an AA3 board versus an Ace with two fullhouse redraws one of which, the Jack, hit.
We also hosted our first MTT. Eleven people showed up, putting forward £10 a piece. I went out with TT versus AA. He had 4-bet preflop and I came over the top for not a lot more. My justification for putting so much value on a pair of tens was... "I put him on Ace King".
We once hosted a £5 rebuy. It attracted 5 players, Mike Alex and I along with two non-DKSOPers. Annoyingly enough, it was the two non-DKSOPers who walked away with all the cash: £100 for 1st prize and £45 for second. Thus the average buy in had been a hefty £29!
We regularly held cash games, which were very popular with the Indian contingent of the University of Warwick PokerSoc. They were noisy and loved betting 'pot'. They also loved smoking it, so it transpired, but that's another matter.
On one such visit we were playing 5p/10p with fairly deep stacks. I flopped a set of sixes versus one of my opponents kings, an overpair to the board. We managed to get it all in. However, it had been so long since I had won a pot that I asked whether it was OK to run it twice, despite my being a 92% favourite. I won both runs.
You'll be revieved to know that things came to a head in December, though not after getting slightly worse first. For four nights in a row in Decemeber I saw the Ladbrokes 5am server refresh. That is to say, I was busy playing on Ladbrokes for four 5ams in a row.
As it was winter, this essentially meant I got up when the sun was already going down - a very depressing state of affairs.
Fortunately, some sense was soon talked in to me, and over the next two years never again would the decadence of this term be matched. I have covered this period with distinctly negative hues. It wasn't that bad really. To be honest, for all the moments of despair, I quite enjoyed it. In its own way it was a fun and relaxing existence. It's not something I hope to repeat, but at least it's a period I learnt something from.
If any DKSOPer reading this has any further anecdotes about this period please post them under comments. You can even post as anonymous if you're really ashamed!
For the record, there were no official 'seasons' during this term either, hence my not posting any season results.
I was losing consistently in DKSOP too, and though I was never told, suspect people must have noticed how badly I was playing. We did have some fun, big games though. There was a 25p/50p Dealer's Choice game with Felix. I ended up losing my £25 buy in an Omaha hand. A3 on an AA3 board versus an Ace with two fullhouse redraws one of which, the Jack, hit.
We also hosted our first MTT. Eleven people showed up, putting forward £10 a piece. I went out with TT versus AA. He had 4-bet preflop and I came over the top for not a lot more. My justification for putting so much value on a pair of tens was... "I put him on Ace King".
We once hosted a £5 rebuy. It attracted 5 players, Mike Alex and I along with two non-DKSOPers. Annoyingly enough, it was the two non-DKSOPers who walked away with all the cash: £100 for 1st prize and £45 for second. Thus the average buy in had been a hefty £29!
We regularly held cash games, which were very popular with the Indian contingent of the University of Warwick PokerSoc. They were noisy and loved betting 'pot'. They also loved smoking it, so it transpired, but that's another matter.
On one such visit we were playing 5p/10p with fairly deep stacks. I flopped a set of sixes versus one of my opponents kings, an overpair to the board. We managed to get it all in. However, it had been so long since I had won a pot that I asked whether it was OK to run it twice, despite my being a 92% favourite. I won both runs.
You'll be revieved to know that things came to a head in December, though not after getting slightly worse first. For four nights in a row in Decemeber I saw the Ladbrokes 5am server refresh. That is to say, I was busy playing on Ladbrokes for four 5ams in a row.
As it was winter, this essentially meant I got up when the sun was already going down - a very depressing state of affairs.
Fortunately, some sense was soon talked in to me, and over the next two years never again would the decadence of this term be matched. I have covered this period with distinctly negative hues. It wasn't that bad really. To be honest, for all the moments of despair, I quite enjoyed it. In its own way it was a fun and relaxing existence. It's not something I hope to repeat, but at least it's a period I learnt something from.
If any DKSOPer reading this has any further anecdotes about this period please post them under comments. You can even post as anonymous if you're really ashamed!
For the record, there were no official 'seasons' during this term either, hence my not posting any season results.
Saturday, 13 March 2010
Hand History - Part 5
Well, here we are again!
I spoke at the end of Part 4 about how the first few months had been something of a Golden Age in my poker playing 'career'. Indeed it had been. Not only had I enjoyed it, but I was probably around £150 in profit by the end of term. This didn't represent a huge boost to my financnes - nor would losing it have been a particularly significant burden. But it was a lot considering the average buy in we played was somewhere between 3 and 5 pounds.
However, the term Golden Age is neccessarily comparative, and decline soon followed. Quite how long this decline lasted, you shall see.
The 5 week Easter holiday was fairly boring. I was tired, uninspired and lazy. Despite, or perhaps, because of my winning, I was over-cautious in my poker. Rather than doing what I had been doing for the last three months (playing casually, enjoying myself, winning) I started employing artificial bankroll strategies and projects. For instance, one project called "$100 Guaranteed" (a reference to prizepools) involved playing ten five-seater $2 STTs on Ladbrokes. There was no real point to this project at all, I just caved in to my life of arbitrary schedules and plans.
It wasn't only Ladbrokes I was playing on. I also deposited on PKR. At one point I had all of $50 over two the two sites, and as I had developed a bankroll-fetish I theorised as to what sort of games I should be playing. Again, no real point to this as I had plenty of money to redeposit if I wished to.
Despite my cautious approach, during this holiday I had one of the most depressing poker experiences of my life. I was playing a $1 6-person STT on PKR. I had already reverted to a top-down view, the 3D gameplay of PKR being fairly offputting once the novelty had worn off. As we were down to the final 3 the chip leader started talking to some observer. They seemed to know eachother. The observer said he'd played with Tony G recently. The chip leader started talking about some $100 tournament he had played yesterday.
Out of the blue they started insulting me. I think it's because I'd chosen a deliberately stupid charecter profile - thick glasses and a huge affro. When I asked this 'pro' why he was playing a $1 STT, he said "for fun". They suggested I "wait for my carer to come back". I had never been insulted at a poker game before and was pretty frustrated. I ended up coming second to the rude guy. For the record, I was a substantial favourite when the chips went in, yet he thought it a sort of victory when he sucked out. I was so agitated I had to take a walk in the park. Of course, the joke was very much on me. Why should I get emotional about being insulted at a $1 STT? Whatever childishness there was on their side, there was plenty on my side too.
I did manage to finish up £9 though!
Slim consolation. It was a generally frustrating start of term too. As far as my poker was concerned, I starting playing looser, adopting the 'any two cards' philosophy that it doesn't matter what your hand is - play your opponent's hand. The chances are they haven't hit either!
Obviously such a method only really works if done at the right place and right time. However, I was doing it for its own sake and gave up on the things which had made my game profitable in the first place: tight-aggressive play. Rather than choosing my spots carefully, I regularly raised Q4o on the button because it's above average in this situation.
Obviously such a method only really works if done at the right place and right time. However, I was doing it for its own sake and gave up on the things which had made my game profitable in the first place: tight-aggressive play. Rather than choosing my spots carefully, I regularly raised Q4o on the button because it's above average in this situation.
I was doing poorly in DKSOP. Now I am aware of variance. I was then, too. I may have been running above-average in Term 2, and below-average or average in the first few weeks of Term 3. But just because you're running worse, doesn't mean you're not playing worse too.
The results from Season 3 were as follows.
SERIES THE THIRD (Apr-May '07, 4 weeks)
Da Nuts: The Dragon
Da Bluff: The Conjurer
Da Outdraw: The Lion
1st 2nd and 3rd respectively. Note that none of these three players are me.
DKSOP then adjourned for exam season.
I didn't play an awful lot of poker in May despite not having an awful lot of exams. I continued to indulge in artificial 'bankrolling'. Sometimes I would buy in for $13 on a Ladbrokes $0.10/$0.20 table, because $13 represented approximately 5% of my profit since January. I didn't to too well at these $20NL games and, in hindsight, was playing beyond my abilitiy.
If the story up till now depresses you don't worry - June offered a little gasp of progress.
I made up my mind that I should make a serious effort to get good at poker, even if this meant lowering my stake.
I had played on Stars before, albeit only for play money stakes. It was the only site with regular play money 5 card draw games, after all!
But in early June I deposited exactly $200. I had also recently bought a copy of Poker Tracker 2, though I had not installed a HUD.
My plan was to play $10NL. I hadn't decided how many hands I was going to play, nor for how long - only that I was going to play on one table at a time. I had never really multitabled in the past, and was not ready to start.
I did very well, and over around 2,000 hands (which took... a few weeks) I was up to around $300.
I also managed to get to the Final Table of an MTT. It was the 10.00am (or 15.00ET) $2 tourney. This tournament still exists at the same time and format (1500 chips, 15 minute blinds) as it did then. From a 629 player field I managed to get into 8th place. The guy (witchypoo) who had sucked out on my earlier in the tournament ended up coming 7th. My prize was twenty-something dollars. Not an awful lot obviously, and immediately after the tournament ended I realised that I had been playing too cautiously in the endgame phases. As Mike had warned me earlier on in the tournament, "in order to live... you must be willing to die."
It was a nice way to start on Stars, and ever since then it has been my main site. Though the circumstances in which I started this bankroll project were rather grim: bored, unshaven life-apathy, I still look back on this as the model for success: play at a stake you are comfortable with, stay focused, don't rush or over-complicate things and... win!
After exams we squeezed in another DKSOP series. The games were almost exclusively higher stakes than the ones earlier in the year, a reflection of the fact that it was the end of the university year and everyone wanted to splash out. We had our biggest tourney yet: a £10 buy in with an optional rebuy and add on - total spend £30. I didn't do too well in this tournament, but it was very fun, and by the time we finished heads up (Housey versus Alex) the blinds were 2000-4000, with a total chip count of around 160,000.
SERIES THE FOURTH (Jun' 07, 1 week!)
River: The Dragon
Turn: The Conjurer
Flop: Royal Fish
On the topic of big numbers, it was over June that we saw some of the biggest and sickest games. I didn't play in all of them, but here's a brief of some of the bigger action.
Alex vs Felix
Played a £40 Heads up match against Felix (a German friend working in Leamington) on the evening following the £10 1R1A. Alex lost, but he was confident that he could beat Felix is they played again. Which they did... for £80. Alex won that one. One wonders whether they would have played a third time had he lost.
Alex vs Ryan
Played a high stakes cash game with their blackjack profits. I do not believe either of them were sitting on any more than £150, but at one point the blinds were raised to £5-£10. At one point Alex made a huge bluff, covering his face in his shirt for the agonising few minutes while Ryan pondered the decision. He folded.
DKSOP 10p-20p cash game.
Not ridiculously high stakes. Alex bought in for £400 though. Well, I managed to double up a few times and rolled my initial £10 buy in up to £105. It was my biggest winning session to date, and was shortly followed by another winning session where I made another £70 or so. I remember walking back home at 5am once (by myself, the others had elected to sleep over but I had to be on campus the next morning). By the dawn's early light and under the humid balm of the Midlands summer, I remember thinking to myself that I may as well just go professional. I didn't, of course. Nor did I inted to.
I had not been keeping strict records during this Term and do not really feel well placed to estimate whether I finished up or down. By June I had returned to my tight, aggressive, lucky ways. I now expected to win whenever I sat down at the table.
Soon this would give way to callow and careless cockiness, but it was a good way to end the poker playing year.
I talked about my name 'Royal Fish' earlier, and how it evolved from Straighting Flush Meadows.
The reason is thus: one I got a Royal Flush in February I temporarily changed my name to Royal Straighting Flush Meadows. I simply abbreviated this to Royal Fish.
Friday, 12 March 2010
Hand History - Part 4
It being the new year (2007), and I having a penchant for keeping records, I started an Excel file in which I reported all my poker fluctuations.
As luck (and some skill) would have it, the first three months of 2007 were one long unbroken upswing. Halfway through January I was already £50 up, and very, very smug about it.
I approached the game with a new found aggressiveness. One of my catchprases at the time was "it can't have helped you... 500 [chips]". I also realised I didn't have too much problem folding big hands pre-flop.
I started playing on Ladbrokes poker in late January, and it sort of became an outlet for my rationality. I would just calmly win sit and go after sit and go - usually $2 buy in, sometimes $5 buy in. Once when I was in Brighton for the weekend I even played a $1 5-card draw MTT, in which I bubbled with trip fours against trip fives.
As luck (and some skill) would have it, the first three months of 2007 were one long unbroken upswing. Halfway through January I was already £50 up, and very, very smug about it.
I approached the game with a new found aggressiveness. One of my catchprases at the time was "it can't have helped you... 500 [chips]". I also realised I didn't have too much problem folding big hands pre-flop.
I started playing on Ladbrokes poker in late January, and it sort of became an outlet for my rationality. I would just calmly win sit and go after sit and go - usually $2 buy in, sometimes $5 buy in. Once when I was in Brighton for the weekend I even played a $1 5-card draw MTT, in which I bubbled with trip fours against trip fives.
That said, I seldom played any online MTTS, or cash games. Indeed, I still had a sort of revulsion towards cash games. This owes greatly to the fact that even though I love playing poker I'm not a huge gambler. And while a £5 tournament buy in offers a sort of 'damage limitation' (you can only lose £5), a £0.05/£0.10 game means you can lose £10 on any given hand. Worse still, you would have to risk another ten pounds if you wanted to keep playing!
In DKSOP I faired fairly well. We expanded a little, and it wasn't rare for us to have 7-person games. Though the core players remained Alex, Housey, Mike and myself, we had a large stock of semi-regulars who rolled in occasionally.
Usually these people were coursemates, PokerSoc players or random people from nearby kitchens. However, one of the fellows we played with was a friend of Alex's from the Stanley's Casino in Coventry.
And during this term I would, for the first time in my life, step into a casino. 'Twas the Saturday of the 24th of February that we rolled in: the main four along with Pascoe. I liked the place immediately, despite being a little nervous. It seemed fairly friendly and quite prosperous. And yes, there were no windows.
The tournament was a £5 rebuy. Something which, looking back, surprises me, is the fact that we had not arranged any sort of splitting of action. We were all playing with our own money for our own prize.
In DKSOP I faired fairly well. We expanded a little, and it wasn't rare for us to have 7-person games. Though the core players remained Alex, Housey, Mike and myself, we had a large stock of semi-regulars who rolled in occasionally.
Usually these people were coursemates, PokerSoc players or random people from nearby kitchens. However, one of the fellows we played with was a friend of Alex's from the Stanley's Casino in Coventry.
And during this term I would, for the first time in my life, step into a casino. 'Twas the Saturday of the 24th of February that we rolled in: the main four along with Pascoe. I liked the place immediately, despite being a little nervous. It seemed fairly friendly and quite prosperous. And yes, there were no windows.
The tournament was a £5 rebuy. Something which, looking back, surprises me, is the fact that we had not arranged any sort of splitting of action. We were all playing with our own money for our own prize.
I stayed fairly quiet for the duration of the tournament, both in terms of my play and my demeanour. But somehow I, along with Housey, Mike and Alex, managed to make it to the final table of ten. We were very pleased with ourselves. I believe, however, only Alex managed to make it into the money - top five places were paid. I believe I went out with pocket sixes, but my memory of it is very hazy.
Still, it was a lot of fun to play in the casino environment. The tournament structure was a little crapshooty, but I had been used to crapshoots my whole life. First in school, then in pokersoc, and by now in DKSOP. Over the course of the term we had nearly 200 tourneys in DKSOP. This, over the course of a seventy-day term, presents an average of three a day. We would often have long sessions, sometimes going over to Alex's house (he was a non-Fresher and did not live on campus) and staying there the night, else taking a cab back to campus at 2am.
On one such evening we played the biggest game to date: a £15 freezeout. The stacks were 10,000, the blinds 25-50, and the blinds went up every ten minutes. There were seven of us - top prize was £70, 2nd prize was £35. Well, I won. Even though I have won larger prizes since, the calm elation I felt on winning was amongst the purest and best I had ever felt. My life was going quite smoothly at this time, and so the victory seemed to just fit in with this.
10 minute blinds may not seem very 'deep' to you. Well, it wasn't. However, this compared with the fact that we often played 5, 6 or 8 minute blinds.
On Monday 26th of February I had my first real success at PokerSoc. It wasn't a win, as you can see, but it felt so good. It was the first time I had been close to making a big score too. I hadn't folded to the money, I am pleased to say. Indeed, when we were down to two tables I was all in more than once. In once such instance, I was called. I remember saying "if a four on the river comes, I think I'll vomit over the table." One guy took my comment literally, and said he'd never seen someone vomit over the table before.
Luckily the 4 didn't come, and I didn't vomit, and do this day I have never been physically sick at the table, although I was sick back in Demcember '06 a few hours after the Australia v. England freeroll, although that had everything to do with a bacterial infection and nothing to do with a bad beat.
In early March a few of us went of on a JailBreak journey, and ended up reaching Cologne Airport. I won't talk to much about the JailBreak right now. I mention it only out of the curious fact that we actually played a little bit of Poker while in the airport. We each had ten chips (blinds were 1-2) and played a 'skill series' where the only moves pre-flop were all in or fold.
Still, it was a lot of fun to play in the casino environment. The tournament structure was a little crapshooty, but I had been used to crapshoots my whole life. First in school, then in pokersoc, and by now in DKSOP. Over the course of the term we had nearly 200 tourneys in DKSOP. This, over the course of a seventy-day term, presents an average of three a day. We would often have long sessions, sometimes going over to Alex's house (he was a non-Fresher and did not live on campus) and staying there the night, else taking a cab back to campus at 2am.
On one such evening we played the biggest game to date: a £15 freezeout. The stacks were 10,000, the blinds 25-50, and the blinds went up every ten minutes. There were seven of us - top prize was £70, 2nd prize was £35. Well, I won. Even though I have won larger prizes since, the calm elation I felt on winning was amongst the purest and best I had ever felt. My life was going quite smoothly at this time, and so the victory seemed to just fit in with this.
10 minute blinds may not seem very 'deep' to you. Well, it wasn't. However, this compared with the fact that we often played 5, 6 or 8 minute blinds.
On Monday 26th of February I had my first real success at PokerSoc. It wasn't a win, as you can see, but it felt so good. It was the first time I had been close to making a big score too. I hadn't folded to the money, I am pleased to say. Indeed, when we were down to two tables I was all in more than once. In once such instance, I was called. I remember saying "if a four on the river comes, I think I'll vomit over the table." One guy took my comment literally, and said he'd never seen someone vomit over the table before.
Luckily the 4 didn't come, and I didn't vomit, and do this day I have never been physically sick at the table, although I was sick back in Demcember '06 a few hours after the Australia v. England freeroll, although that had everything to do with a bacterial infection and nothing to do with a bad beat.
In early March a few of us went of on a JailBreak journey, and ended up reaching Cologne Airport. I won't talk to much about the JailBreak right now. I mention it only out of the curious fact that we actually played a little bit of Poker while in the airport. We each had ten chips (blinds were 1-2) and played a 'skill series' where the only moves pre-flop were all in or fold.
On the fifteenth of March we had our biggest game yet - a £20 Deepstack tournament. Stacks were 10k and blinds went up every 20 minutes. With a seven player field, this was about as large an event as we could get. Given the date, I remember warning the participants to beware the ides of March! Little did I expect an actual incident. Alex, who had already secured the season lead, was the first person to get knocked out. Johnny had a phonecall someway through the game and said he had to go, but wondered if Alex (who was still hanging around) could take over from him. Pascoe was furious at this suggestion, as he reckoned Alex to be a far better player than Johnny and thought it was unfair to effectively give Alex two shots at winning. It was unfair on the EV of the other players, after all.
I suggested that Johnny could withdraw from the tournament and take his £20 back from the prizepool. His stack was around average and so there didn't seem anything too objectionable about this solution. But Pascoe objected, as did Alex, as apparently it affected the gameplay too dramatically. In the end Johnny agreed to just go and allow himself to be blinded out. In the end, Gee (Alex's friend from Stanleys) came first, while Mike and I split second place money. The three of us agreed that the Johnny incident was somewhat unfair and so we pooled £20 from our collective winnings to return his buy in, a sort of gentlemanly affirmation that the spirit of friendship was slightly more important than a few measly pounds.
It was a messy end to the DKSOP season. But what a season it had been!
SERIES THE SECOND (Jan-Mar '07, 10 weeks)
CHAMPION - DragonRack, 720
RUNNER UP - Royal Fish, 625
BUBBLE - The Conjurer, 576
4th - River Goblin, 464
5th - Komeback Kid, 203
6th - All In, 98
7th - Gee 'The Law', 95
8th - Jonny Two Pair, 83
9th - Will 'The Shark' Lees, 73
10th - Jawad 'Batman', 43
11th - Steven, 8
12th - Adam, 5
You notice how many names there are on this list. The bottom two people literally only came for two games, but the points distribution is a good indication of the distinction between regular and semi-regular players.
CHAMPION - DragonRack, 720
RUNNER UP - Royal Fish, 625
BUBBLE - The Conjurer, 576
4th - River Goblin, 464
5th - Komeback Kid, 203
6th - All In, 98
7th - Gee 'The Law', 95
8th - Jonny Two Pair, 83
9th - Will 'The Shark' Lees, 73
10th - Jawad 'Batman', 43
11th - Steven, 8
12th - Adam, 5
You notice how many names there are on this list. The bottom two people literally only came for two games, but the points distribution is a good indication of the distinction between regular and semi-regular players.
The term now over I... went home. As you might expect. My game was better than it had been at the end of last term. Though I still didn't think especially strategically. But I was making the transition from a tight-passive game to a solid game. I was capable of being aggressive sometimes, but still playing in a fairly tight and effective style. I just didn't do stupid things and didn't lose chips uneccessarily. Sure I still had the reputation for being tight. But I was winning
If I had to think of a Golden Age for my poker playing days, this period would probably be it. It was exciting, yet never dangerous. We didn't play for life changing amounts, yet there was a real sense of competition. We had hundreds of games and yet we never seemed to tire of playing. There was nothing quite like the simple pleasure of sitting at a table with chips, cards, snacks and an evening to spare. Though the most interesting poker experiences were yet to come, these were surely the most fun, and consistently so too.
If I had to think of a Golden Age for my poker playing days, this period would probably be it. It was exciting, yet never dangerous. We didn't play for life changing amounts, yet there was a real sense of competition. We had hundreds of games and yet we never seemed to tire of playing. There was nothing quite like the simple pleasure of sitting at a table with chips, cards, snacks and an evening to spare. Though the most interesting poker experiences were yet to come, these were surely the most fun, and consistently so too.
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