New Poker Blogage Discovered

A recent post on ITH lead me to discover some rather cool poker blogs, which many (should probably stop kidding myself about the number of people that actually read this drivel!) of you may well be aware of - but I thought I'd stick in the links in any case:

Guinness and Poker : Known as "The Godfather of Poker Blogging" Iggy's (or Ignatious, to give him his full title) blog contains links to almost every poker blog out (but not yet this one) there are well as regular updates and links.
Linda Green's Blog : Linda Green is a dealer at The Bellagio in Las Vegas. This blog gives a wonderful insite into life at the other side of the card table.
Lion Tales : Richard Brodie is a dot.com billionaire who now plays the pro-poker circuit.
Paul Phillips' Journal : another player on the pro circuit.

I hope that not too far down the line my poker stories are interesting enough for my blog to be in the same bracket as those above, but for now it's head down, time to get a degree and then time to build a roll!

I've done well over the past week or so to stay clear of internet poker. I've been working hard in the lab and seem to be making progress, although time is seriously running out on me. Today is not going so well, however. I'm really lathargic and I can feel last week's new-found motivation slipping away.

Whilst I may have been able to stay away from online poker, I wouldn't have been able to function without getting at least some play in...

We had our regular home game on friday night which is a 5p/10p NL ring game. It was a really good evening. There was pleanty of wild betting and some pretty big hands (for 5p/10p, at least). I doubled up early on with a flopped set against an open ended straight flush draw. Almost immedaitely after that I busted the same guy again when I made a dirty call with a middle pokcket pair and gutshot draw. He had an over pair and I hit my gutshot on the river - ooops! Other notable hands: I flopped a set of jacks against a flopped straight and failed to improve, but as fate would have it the same guy flopped a set of jacks and let me see the river cheaply where I hit my straight!! The most outrageous hand of the evening was when I flopped a king high flush on a queen high board. I bet out an got one caller. Another queen came on the turn and I check riased all in. The other guy calls and flips over trip queens. THe forth queen came on the river!! Overall I finshed abour £20 up which wasn't bad off a £5 buy-in.

The weekend was pretty hectic. We (my finacee and I) we're supposed to be going down to London for her Mum's birthday, but she had a driving lesson in the morning and was going wedding dress shopping in the afternoon. I was supposed to be busking/carol-singing late morning/early afternoon and then neede somehow to cram about 5 hours of lab work in before finally heading off and probably arriving late at the restaurant. At the last minute it turned out that her Bridesmaid hadn't made an appointment at the shop an so cancelled on her at the last minute. This meant we might actually stand a chance of getting down to London at a reasonable hour so I bailed out of the carol singing and headed straight to the lab. Five virtuous hours later we were on our way down to London ready to stuff ourselves full of Cypriot food, and stuff we did!

We stayed the night at the girl's parents who then stuffed us full of Sunday lunch the following day before we rushed back to Oxford so I could fit in a few more hours in the lab. Somhow I manged to condense all that I had to do into only 3 hours which meant that I was able to get to the weekly poker session with the University Poker Society. We usually play a 10p/20p NL game which sometime goes up to 20p/40p as the evening progresses. On this ocasion it was pleanty wild enough at 10p/20p! I made a bad call early on and had to reach into my pocket again. I made a standard sized raise preflop with AQs and got 4 callers behind me. The flop came QTT and I made a pot sized bet. A good player doubled my bet and for some crazy reason I decided to go all-in. He called with JTs. I'm not exactly sure why I made that play it was pretty damn stupid. He'd be unlikely to make that play with and hand like KQ or KJ and although he's quite capable of sticking his money in with nothing I dont think he'd have chosen that moment to do it with two more player left to act behind him. Still, we live and learn!

More to come - just gonna do some science!