This is why we play the game...

...because of people like this:



It just goes to show how much money there is to be made out of this game.

Christmas

Its a load of bollocks isn't it.

I can't be arsed buying presents so I give money, most of my family can't be arsed buying me anything so I get money. So everyone is oh so exstatic with their 'gifts' but nobody is any better off than they were in the first place. So whats the bloody point.

The best thing about it tends to be the good food and copious amounts of alcohol that it seems almost compulsory to indulge in, I am definately a fan of that.

Merry Christmas all.

Little Jack?

It appears Burnley are after young Jack Wilshere from Arsenal in the January transfer window. He's only 17, but in pre-season he looked like a world beater (against Rangers, admittedly) but recent performances haven't been as impressive. I am not sure he is what we need to be honest, it's our defence that is useless, not our creative players. Potentially he could be a great player but he's a bit small at the moment and looks like you could blow him off the ball, he still has time to fill out though. If I was Arsenal I would have him on the weights every day. If he can show his best form he could be a good addition for us.

Decided to register for the $3.5KGTD's again after yesterdays final table but only lasted till level 3 when my AA was no good for oppo's JJ all in pre, I wasn't sure about my chances of catching up when he flopped quads! Unregistered from the other and decided to go to the gym instead.

Check out Jack the little worldbeater...

Final table

Fired up the $22 and $11 $3.5K GTD's on iPoker this afternoon, final tabling one of them in 4th. Was never in contention to win it, lack of cards at the final table didn't help the cause eventually getting it in with KQ vs oppo's A9 and he held.

EDIT - just took down this 45 player SNG whilst watching TV. Not been a bad day! Haven't played one of these for a short while, I think I had slipped into bad habits and was over-complicating by raising too much. All you have to do in them is play really tight and hope your hands hold, which thankfully they did the majority of the time.

Too much plum duff

Feeling pretty shabby, too much plum duff! I always remember the ex burnley manager Stan Ternant saying this about his players after a particularly poor boxing day (or new years, not sure) performance. When asked by the media what was the reason for the thrashing, he said 'I think the players must have had too much plum duff'. I don't even know what it means, too much beer? Over-indulging on festive food? Who knows. Definately a bit of both in my case!

I am really looking forward to 2010 now after a slightly disappointing 2009 pokerwise, on the whole. During 2008 I was regularly making more money per week playing poker than I made during a full week at work. I would work 4 or 5 day weeks and play poker during my days off or evenings and I would regularly make £300+ in a week, and sometimes it was more like £500 or £700, just from MTT’s on the old Crypto network. I went into 2009 with hopes of quitting my day job, poker seemed easy money and after all I was only playing smallish buy-in tournaments – the logical progression was onto bigger buy-in’s and obviously with that bigger wins. In them days though I didn’t really have much of a concept of bankroll management, it is only through reading blogs and forums that I became aware of its importance. I used to build my bankroll up and as soon as I won anything halfway decent I would withdraw it and usually leave between £50-£100 in my poker account. I would then repeat this process again and again, so I was never playing the biggest tournaments on the site as I never built a roll big enough to accommodate these, although I did occasionally ‘lottery’ into them.

Onto 2009 and I therefore have big plans for myself, and rightly so as I had achieved some good results and must have banked thousands from my poker wins. Things started to go downhill once William Hill moved to iPoker, although not from the off. I came 2nd in one of the welcome freerolls William Hill ran to welcome us to the new poker software, and also won a 180 player SNG on Pokerstars to record a profit of nearly £1K for the week. From then on things started to go wrong, not 100% sure why, it's probably numerous reasons but this is what I 'think' went wrong:

Cryptologic network, to anyone who remembers it had quite a small player base. I started playing on iPoker and the tournaments were a lot larger, and as a result I wasn't able to hit as many cashes as I was used to. This in turn led to me questioning my game, and altering things, when really it was just variance kicking in (you obviously need a lot more luck to win tournaments with a few hundred players than you need for tournaments with less than 100!). Therefore I had gone from playing good poker (but not cashing) to playing bad poker and having no chance of cashing. You also need a lot more patience and concentration to win the bigger tournaments, the tournaments on iPoker were going on for hours longer. Therefore in order to combat this variance, you have to play a lot more volume, which is something I have never been good at. As a result of my lack of success I started looking for other games I could beat, namely the 45's on Full Tilt - I had some success in spells but never ran as well as I was hoping, probably due to the amount of good reg's on there also. I would constantly see the same names at my tables and would sharkscope them and see that they were tens of thousands in profit from about a million $11 SNG's. What does confuse me about these regs is why they don't move upto bigger stakes when they are such consistant winners!? Baffling.

The last few weeks I have probably just been meandering into obscurity, totally devoid of any plans. No monetary goals, no volume goals, no recording of profit/loss, and I have played STT's, multi table SNG's and MTT's so obviously it is difficult to settle into your 'A' game when you are constantly playing different formats and structures of poker. I have had some success in the 90 mans (as I mentioned in a previous post) and also been playing the odd $11 ten player STT whilst watching darts (only four, but 2 wins, one 3rd and a no cash for a small profit).

2010 will be better though, I am confidant of that. I just need to set some realistic goals (volume goals instead of monetary?) for January (but not now whilst I am pissed) and stick to them. I just need to think about what I want to play on a consistant basis, this isn't easy at all.

BurnleyJohn signing out.

What comes around goes around

Had this little beauty early on in the tournament, I was almost embarassed by the river card! (I wasn't though, these retards bad beat ME all the time!) I knew I couldn't get away with it though...






... and sure enough we enter the second hour of the tournament and I get my aces cracked. So my luck lasted about half an hour or so, not bad...






Anyway, heres a picture of my new bird


Laters

4 final tables...

... although only in the 90 man KO SNG's on Full Tilt. I decided to try and give variance the shove by playing more volume. A comment in my previous post about playing weak hit home, and I think I have been playing weak due to my lack of tables on the go at once, being more worried about exiting the tournament instead of worrying about building my stack, leading to me getting rather shorter than I would like. So last night I decided to fire up 4 $6.50 90 man knockout SNG's and see how I got on. I have never been the best at multi-tabling, but the only way to get better is by doing it and I think I can just about manage 4 without it being to the detriment of my game, the results certainly suggest so anyway! I managed a 61st, 18th, an 8th and a 5th for a small profit although I was disappointed with this as I was in contention to final table 3 of them, and had some good stacks in two of them. I think in hindsight I was more interested in knocking people out, instead of trying to ladder up the money which is what you should be doing on a final table. My bad, you learn as you play them and I haven't played that many of these in the past. This afternoon I tried to fire up another 4, but went out of one quite early so it ended up being 5. I managed a 75th, 30th, 11th and two 3rds to give me $147 profit over the 9 games. The good thing about these is that even if you don't get to the final table, you often get some of your buyin back with $1 for each player you knockout.

Things aren't going too well on the MTT front though, and I am playing way out of my bankroll which isn't good. I'm just pissed off with $5 games and the millions of players to beat I guess, so I will probably just keep grinding the 90 manners seeing as though it is going well! Here is a hand from yesterday, which pretty much sums up my MTT fortunes. I congratulated him on his nice hand. It is so frustrating as these retards knock me out and still get nowhere near the money, I know, I checked. Q9, NH! WP SIR....