Free Fall

In the last post (which got deleted, grrr), aside from a reasonably lengthy science update about how I've achieved very little in the lab over the last 10 weeks or so, I described the reversale in fortune I had begun to have at the Party Poker $15/30 Bad Beat Jackpot Tables.

It all started at the begining of last week. Everything had, clearly, been going far too well and it caught up with me good and proper. Now, I dont have a problem with bad beats, in fact I've almost got to the point where I can be glad about them (for in order for it to be a bad beat you opponent must have taken the 'worst of it' and out drawn you and hence you effectively make money on each occurrence), but I'm afraid to say, when it goes on for two consectutive days and you barely win a single pot, it begins to get to you! (phew, long sentence!) It did get to me and I let it affect my game. In fact, I'd say I'm still slightly on tilt now, over a week later. The bad beats have also been continuing and so my time at $15/30 may well be up for a god while to come.

The last week or so have taken a reasonable chunk off what was begining to be a sizeable bankroll. Thankfully it has not crippled me. I'm only slightly down overall since playing $15/30 and I'd saved almost half of my roll outside of my poker account.

So my plan for the coming weeks...

1. Stop playing $15/30!!
2. Cah out a decent amount of my roll into my savings account so I cant mess with it!
3. Play No-Limit cash games and tounraments for the next couple of weeks
4. Re-read all my limit poker books and buy a couple more that I've been meaning to get for a while: (Small Stakes Holdem by Ed Miller and Middle Limit Poker by Bob Ciaffone, which I lost on the bus when I was only two chapters in!)
5. Eventually, go back to limit play again and start off at $5/10.

I'll keep you posted on how things go. Here's hoping I can gather my wits and keep my head.

Multiple Expleetives

Just wrong a huge post about all the science I've been doing over the last couple of months as well as a lengthy poker update.

It's because I'm doing on a F***ing mac and I pressed the wrong button or something goddam stupid like that.

I am not ammused.

Party Poker Million IV (and general update)

Things have continued to go well over the last couple of weeks (I speak here of poker - science is still poo!) and my bankroll is now not far off the $10,000 mark!

I've been playing a fair ammount of $5/10 and also been playing in some more online tournaments. I've had a couple of 1st place finishes in some smallish tournament and another couple of final tables, which had all helped in the bankroll growth, but I'm still waiting for my first really big score. I'm finding it hard to fit it many tournaments - the really big ones can take up several hours.

Party Poker Million IV: This is a WPT (World Poker Tour) event held on a cruise ship and sponsored/orghanised by Party Poker. It's a $10,000 buy-in event with an estimated $6,000,000 prize pool. Party Poker have a large number of online qualifier and sub-qualifier tounaments for a place in the final event. They have twice weekly direct qualifiers ($250 buy-in) but these are always in the middle of the night (UK time). They also have special weekends of qualifiers which are at more sociable hours for those of us on this side of the pond. $250 seems like quite a lot to stick in for one touney so I've been playing some of the $35 sub-qualifiers and have so far one my way into 2 of the 4 semi-final events which are being held over the first weekend in November. Needless to say my finacee is also quite enthused by the idea of a weeks cruise off the coast Southg California!

General Update: Over the last couple of days I've styepped back up to $15/30 and have felt more comfortable than I did last time, although I'm still aware of many leaks that still need plugging.

Last week I went through a few few days of playing quite a lot of No-Limit (and Pot-Limit) ring games. Party Poker's NL and PL games aren't ideal as the maximum buy-in is too small in relationship to the blinds, but - as ever - there are sufficient number of fish to make it profitable nontheless. I was playing on the $200 buy-in tables (blinds of $2/4) and over the few days I was up about $800. I was pleased with that, but I still made a fair number of mistakes. The swings in NL can be brutal and I dont think it's something I'd want to play all the time. One mistake at Nl can be so much more costly compared to limit poker, but NL is definately useful in highlighting some of the general areas of my play that need work on.

Now term has started here in Oxford, the University Poker Society has got back up and running and we had our first session on Sunday night. There were a hell of a lot of people there, which is an excellent sign and we got some good games playing. There were several single table tournies, but I was more interested in playing in the cash games. I played for about an hour on a 10p/20p NL table but I couldn't hit a hand (which was a shame because play was very loose/agressive) and when the table broke for a £10 tournament I was down about £10. While waiting for space at another cash game I played heads up for £10. I didn't know the guy I was playing aginst, but he definately looked familiar. It turned out that he was the guy who came 2nd in the £5 rebuys touney down at the Gutshot - he was the one who knocked me out in 3rd place! Well I certainly wasn't letting that happen again and beat him after about 15 mins! Once I finally got aplace at the cash game I , again, couldn't hit a hand. At one point I hit a set of 5s on the flop only to loose (a lot!) when the other guy hit his staight on the turn. I ended the evening down by about £10, which wan't too bad conidering the crap I was getting delt. I'm definately looking forward to next weeks session.

Generally it's a pretty good standard of play at 'Poker Soc'. There are about 5 of us who make decent money on the internet and there are very few fish, although with the influx of freshers this year, that may change.

I think that's quite enough for now - anyway I need to go and do some biochemsitry (again, I promise an ipdate on all that shortly).

Time to step back and take stock

Things have been getting a bit out of hand recently. I've been winning big over the last 6 weeks: I've worked my way up from 2/4 to 15/30 and my bankroll had grown 10 fold.

It's somewhat remeniscent of what happened at the beggining of the summer when over a couple of months I worked my way from $0.50/1.00 up to $5/10. I thought I was invincble and that my path to becoming a world class poker player was both inevitable and well under way.

On that occasion it took everything to fall from around me to alert me to the fact that none of the above is true. Thankfully on this occasion I realised that things were being to run away from me before something nasty happened.

I had been posting some 15/30 hand examples on the Internet Texas Holdem (ITH) Forum. I knew that my river play had been letting me down so I posted 6 seperate river decisions (eg1, eg2, eg3, eg4, eg5, eg6) to get some feed back on them. Well my plays got (very politely) ripped to shreds, which left me feeling pretty shitty (but at least not broke!).

After sitting around and moping for a while I posted a thread about how everyone on the forum must think I'm a total jack-ass for playing such high stakes and still being capable of making really basic erros. The responses I got were extreemly supportive and helpful and I decided to take a step back and try to consolidate my play.

So... I've cashed out a large propotion of my bankroll (whoohoo - the honeymoon account is looking pretty healthy!) and I've now dropped back down to $5/10. I'm going to play for a decent while at this level, post a lot of hand examples on the forum and gradually work my way back up to 15/30 again.

That's the plan anyhows!