Fish and Chips

A poker themed blog, charting the demise of my degree and the rise of my poker career.


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Thursday, September 30, 2004

Damn You: Computer Geeks and Road Works

[This is going to be somewhat briefer than it would have been. I've already writen it once, then managed to deleted it so i've lost a little bit of enthusiasm!]

Before I get down to any poker updates, I have a couple of rants that I need to get off my chest.

1. Computer Geeks: Long and short of it - bastard technical-techie-nerds at the lab have blocked Party Poker so I cant play while I'm waiting for my experiments not to work (I realsie that an update on all things biochemical is long overdue).

2. Road Works: Summery - lots going on in oxford - pain in the arse - have to spent about 90 minutes a day on a bus, blah blah blah.

Right, that's about where I'd got to when I managed to delete the... [insert a suitable stress reliving noun here].

Poker, albeit less of it, has been going pretty well and the bankrol is continues to climb. I'm still playing the Party Poker $5/10 Bad Beat Jackpot tables, but I have also been unable to contril my desire to always play at the limit just that little bit too high for my bankroll. At my current level of capital, that limit just out of my reach would be $10/20. I have been playing a spot of $15/30 (wtf!).

I've played about 400 hands of $15/30 and I'm up about 15 big bets. The standard is better, but it is still noticeably weak. There a a few VERY good players and a number of pretty good ones, but there are still a large number of morons. It's impossible to tell after so few hands what sort of earn rate I could maintain at this level, but what I do know is that if I had a bat run of cards it would totally cripple me - I REALLY need to learn to live within my means (jees - where have I heard that before - it's a good job my parents dont read this blog!).


RIght, I'd better don my lab coat and go do some work.

Bollocks

Just managed to delete a really long post I was writing. Crap.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Back on Track

Things have started to go my way on the internet over the last couple of weeks. I mentioned a couple of post ago that in order to rebuild my bankroll I had been playing mostly low stakes no-limit tables and some SNGs. After a few consecutive days of good cards things were looking up and I managed almost to double what I had in my party poker account. By that point I had just about enough to be able to start playing at the $2/4 limit tables and after a decent break from limit poker it was fun to get back to it.

I decided to try out the relatively new "Bad Beat Jackpot" tables at Party Poker - they have limits from $2/4 up to $15/30. Party have recently introduced these tables and they seem to be proving very popular with the fishies! Essentially, Party Poker take extra rake (a percentage of each pot - usually 5% up to a fixed maximum depending of the stakes of the table) from each pot and add this to the ever increasing "Bad Beat Jackpot" untill someone hits it. To qualify for the jackpot a hand better then Four-of-a-kind 8s must be beaten. The looser of the hand get half of the jackpot, the winner gets one quarter of the jackpot and the rest of the jackpot is shared around the rest of the people sat at that particular table. Quad 8's is beaten so very rarely that the jackpot can get huge - I think the last one was around the $200,000 region; on the other hand, there are so many people playing on Party Poker at any one time that the jackpot is hit around about once a week. This frequency combined with the vast ammount of $$$ up for grabs means that the fish turn out in massive shoals!! Initially I was a bit concered that the play wouldn't be sufficiently bad to compensate for the extra rake that I'd be paying, but I soon stopped worrying about that! The vast majority of players there just seem to be mesmorised by the ever increasing jackpot displayed at the bottom of the screen and all my good hands were getting paid off.

I was sure that sooner or laster the bad beats would catch up with me but for the time being I just kept stacking up the $$$.

In the meantime I decided to open an accoun on Empire poker. I'd never got round to it before and it meant I could take advantage of a $100 bonus for joining and also get a free copy of Matt Hilger's Book ("Internet Texas Holdem"). I worked off this bonus in a couple of days and set about re-reading Matt's book.

After a brief spell on Empire, I just had to get back to Party's Bad Beat Tables! This time with a slightly sweeled bankroll I thought I'd see how I got on at the $3/6 tables. Low and behold, the fish were still there when I returned and so were the easy $$$. In one 4 hour weekend session playing 3 tables I netted about 50 big bets.

I absolutely dont mean to be boasting, I'm just expressing a huge ammount of surprise at how soft these games seem. I feel like my game has improved over the summer but I really dont think that can account for all this extra winning. I'm still waiting for a huge reversal of fortunes - over the whole of the last few weeks, I've had only one (very small) loosing session. In a way it would be much more reassuring if I were to loose a bit, then I wouldn't feel so much as if everything is about to come crashing down around me!

When I first got back up to 3/6 having had such a nightmare at the beggining of the summer when I moved up prematurely from 3/6 to 5/10 I promised myself that I'd stick with 3/6 far longer than any recommenndations for bankroll management that I'd read just so the same thing didn't happen again.

Well even the best laid plans... etc.. etc.

So yesterday I decided to move up from $3/6 to $5/10. I'm sory - I just coundn't resist! My bankroll had raced past where it was at the begining of the summer and from a couple of hours of dabbling the starndard at the 5/10 bad beat tables seemed only marginally better than at 3/6.

Well, after about 10 hours of play at 5/10 I'm up about 50 big bets, which is pretty crazy. I made my first withdrawal yeasterday and stuck it in the 'Honeymoon' account and with any luck I should soon be able to withdraw all of my initial investement.

Appologies for my egotistical rantings, I just hope I haven't sealed my fate!

I'll kep you posted.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Finally, A Final Table!

Woohoo, I've at last had a decent tournament showing!

I've been trying to play more tournaments recently as there's always the potential to hit a really big win. I've had limited sucess in the online tournaments I've played so far. I've finished just inside the money places on several occasions, but never won anything substantial. In the few live tournaments I've played in I've had a couple of finishes just outside the money but nothing else.

So, last night I headed down to the Gutshot Cardroom in London to play in the 'Beginners' Night £5 No-limit Holdem tournament. I hadn't planned on heading down untill that afternoon when I got a call from a friend saying he was going to be there. I ended up being really short of time after waiting an age for the bus to show up and because of the low buy in it's a really popular tournament so I knew the places would fill up early. I phoned up the club to see if I could reserve my seat and but after about 10 minutes on the phone trying to persuade them, I realised that it was a no go, but I was on the bus already, there was no way I was going home now. At 7:40pm, 20 minutes before the tournamet was due to start while standing on the platform of Notting Hill Gate tube station about a 30 minute journey from the club I got a phone call from my friend saying that he'd managed to wangle me a seat but I absolutely [b][u]had[/b][/u] to be there in time. Yikes!

I sprang off the tube slam into a huddle of people waiting to get on and I nearly took the bariers with me as I left the station, but at 8:05pm I arrived panting and sweating just in the nick of time to take up my seat right at the back of 115 eager chip-riffling poker players all crammed right together - sardine style.

Being a rebuy tournament naturally one would expect play to slightly looser during the first hour. Never had I seen anything as wild as this. There were 50 rebuys on our table alone. Most pots had more than two people all-in and what with all the calculations needed for the numerous side-pots that arose, we only managed two laps of the table during that first hour. Needless rto say within those 20 hands or so I didn't get delt anything spectaular. I rebought a couple of times when my AT and then AJ failed to stand up in 6 handed pots (fairly unsurprisingly). I got lucky on the very last hand of the rebuys period when my A8 overtook JJ 99 and a couple of other hands (everyone all-in, naturally) to quintuple me up. This, together with a final top up, left me with just over 3000 chips (each buy in having been for 500) and in a pretty comfortable position going into the freezout part of the tournament.

For the rest of the tournament I got delt fairly mediocre hands and was always slightly below average in chips, but I made enough of the right moves at the right times (mostly stealing blinds) to ensure that I kept my head above water.

They were playing as many as the final 18, proably becasue the night was aimed at 'beginners', (although there were pleanty of the usual suspect there too) but there wasn't any significant money in relationship to the buy in untill the final 9. As may be obvious from the title of this post, I made the final tablem albeit with a somewhat vunerable stack.

The final table started off serisouly tightly with the first 5 or 6 hands being folded round to the big blinds. But soon enough people started knocking each other out and I was barely involved in a pot before I found myself looking at 6th place at the worst and the real possibility of a decent score, but it was getting to the point where I was going to have to win more than just a few blinds. Fortunately this came when my allin bet holding QJ on a Q42 board was called by some egit with K4 who thankfully failed to improve.

By the time we had wittled ourselves down to four there was one guy sitting on a massive stack with about 120,000 chips. I had about 30,000 and the remaining two had around 20,000 each. I was relying on the big stack dealing the crushing blow to one of the other stacks but unfortunately the one knocked the other out so I was gonna have to work hard and/or get lucky to make second spot. In the end I could cope with the blinds of 5,000/10,000 and found myself all-in with A3 which lost painfully to Q8 when an 8 came on the river.

All in all, I was very happy with my play and, obviously, the £250 I got for 3rd place! I think my play has definately improved over the summer; I'm now going to those extra levels of thinking necessary really to make the difference.

Things have also been going very well on the internet recently, although somewhat at the expense of the ammount of work I'm putting into my research project, but those are two stories that can wait a while.

In the meantime I'm off on holiday for an extended weekend to Brussels. I'm surprising my finacee so I only hope she doesn't read this before then!

Laters.