Hole Schmole

I really should have written a more upbeat post sooner following that rather siucidely toned post from early last week.

Thanks for all the support from those who left comments or emailed. It's much appriciated.

I was feeling a lot better the folowing day and had formulated a bonus chasing plan. Full Tilt are offering a 100% bonus deal up to a whopping $600! I scraped together the necessary and duly installed their software.


I like it a lot, although I'm sure $600 free has got something to do with it. The traffic is not huge but there's just about enough. They spread Razz tables, which has been a lot of fun and I've bumped into a number of people from ITH who're also working off their $600. I particularly like the ability to turn the table round so you can position yourself anywhere you like on the screen - very handy for multi-tabling.

They've got a number of pros backing them (Howard Lederer, John Juanda, Jenifer Harman, John Lindgren, Phil Gordon). I guess they're contracted to play on the sight for a number of hours per week cos I suddenly wake up and realise that John Juanda has just sat down on my right, on a $2/4 limit table!

I guess it would be pretty easy to have any employee sit down and pretend to be a pro. It's certainly been alleged that Phil Helmuth has been spotted in person at the exact same time that he has been logged in and playing on Ultimate Bet. Still I'm gonna buy into it and claim that John Juanda sat down next to me and stole my blinds like a maniac!

As far as clearing the bonus and rebiulding the role go. I'm doing ok. I started off by dropping almost $200. I'm not back even with about $120 of cleared bonus. I've been playing a mixture of limit ($2/4 and $3/6) and NL ($0.25/0.50 and $0.50/1). Although I feel more profitable at NL these days, limit clears the bonus faster and that is, after all, why I'm here.

I've now got less than 4 weeks to get my research project finished (ahmm and stated for that matter) it should be doable, but it pretty much precludes doing anything else during the day. I'm gonna have to leave the majority of this bonus till after easter. Does anyone know if I can cash out from Full Tilt in the middle of a bonus and still come back later to finish it off?

I played a fiar bit of live poker over the weekend and was pretty happy with mky performance. I took advantage of a very passive table at our home game on Friday night to win a £5 tounrey adn then some more later in a cash game. We played agina the following night with fewer people. I made a bad call in the tourney but covered myself in the cash game.

All-in all. Not a bad wekend. I covered my expenses, at least.