The Turning of the Tides

I though I might be in for a huge loosing day today. The cards finally started running bad. (please bear with this post, it's not all me whining about beats).

I twice had lost with KK against AA and lost another half buy-in when my AK hit a King on the flop against AA. Then the mother of all beats (KK against QJ - he raised preflop and called my reraise. I bet out on a ten-high rainbow flop and he pushed all-in. I called. Turn King. River Ace. Ouch!) happened and I found myself in an early $2,000 hole.

I was three or four-tabling at the time (two on PokerStars and one or two on FullTilt) so my concentration was spread somewhat thin but nonetheless it didn't take me long to spot him.

Let's call him Mr. Orca, shall we?

I've never seen anything quite like him before even at smaller stakes. Not only was he the biggest maniacal whale I've ever seen (over 200 hands he ran at 91/68 - apologies for the jargon. This basically means that he saw every hand and raised with almost every hand). He didn't make small raises either. Typically he would raise the $6 blind to $42 or more.

None of this is all that unusually. One often comes across maniacs. Sometime they're at the table for a while the go through two or three buy-ins, maybe then run up a really big stack by getting lucky, but eventually they give it all back and leave with their tail between their legs.

This guy, however, did not stop rebuying. The level of contempt he showed for each $600 buy-in was astonishing.

Over the 200 hands that I spent with him he ran through precisely $10,125.

You know what else, don't you?

I didn't get any of it.

Without fail, the pots that I won from him were tiny and those that I lost were huge. He was like Robin Hood. He stole from me and then redistributed the wealth around the rest of the table, with a generous wad of his own dollars to boot.

It was as if his sole aim was to set me up but then he didn't care about donking off his chips to everyone else. He managed to bluff me out of some big pots early on before I caught on to his game. He showed those bluff, which meant that he was then in a position to value bet me to death. I paid him off.

At the worst point I was about $3,000 down. I managed to grind my third buy-in up to $900 before I finally flopped a big hand against him. I let him do the betting for me but he still managed to get away from the hand despite my all-in on the end giving him 5-1 odds. I guess he had shit!

That hand took me up to $1,400 and I'd almost got back from Mr. Orca what I had previously donated, but I was still in a sizeable hole and those was the last of his chips that I was going to get

Well, those we the last of chips that I was going to get directly. I have to thanks my lucky stars that one of the other players at the table forgot the cardinal rule of playing against a whale: value bet like hell against the whale but nut-peddle against everyone else. He just couldn’t let go of his aces:

I limped and called a small raise with 64 (oy, they were suited!). Four of us saw a Q 6 4 flop. Mr. Orca somehow managed to get of the way and I check-raised the preflop raiser who called. All the money went in on the turn of a 6 (he had me covered) and I scooped the biggest pot of my career to date - $2649.

The pot didn't stop me from being slightly miffed at not taking a greater proportion of the $10K that Mr. Orca dropped on the table - one chap must have taken over $5K of it - and eventually, for one reason or another Mr. Orca failed to redeposit and I was able finally to tear myself away from the screen.

I'd missed my Turkish class, hadn't eaten all morning, had won my biggest cash pot to date and yet I was still down $1,000.

In the grand scheme of things $1000 isn't that much. Even days of loosing $3,000 should be expected occasionally, but maybe, just maybe, my winning streak is over and the tides have begun to turn.

Latest Fashion Accessory: the Ice-pack

It seems that being an injured goal keeper is quite fashionable at the moment. So despite our team's getting turned over 5-0 yesterday; despite being on the end of two horrific challenges; despite being on the end of a torrent of abuse from our mouthy centre back and despite waking up this morning with my right knee the size of a football, I'm feeling slightly smug about my elevation to the class of injured goal keeper. It also means that I can legitimately sit on the sofa all day playing in the various Sunday tournaments instead of painting the large acreage of wood that has recently been installed by our carpenter.

Not much else going on in the life of Pink. Despite the length of the list of things that need to be done around the flat, I'm still managing to squeeze in some poker:

Cash games continue to swell the coffers, although a couple of bad mistakes in the last 24 hours are helping to remind me that I'm anything but invincible; it's also been a long time since I've had a bad run. Not that that means a bad run is more likely to be round the corner, just that I might be less prepared for it when it does arrive. As far as cash games go, I'm mostly playing the $400 and $600 NL tables on PokerStars and the £200 and $500 tables on Betfair. The next target is to be able to play the £500 and $1000, although I'd probably do well to consolidate at the level I'm playing at now; my recent advancement in stakes has been quite relatively rapid and I'm yet to have a really bad run at these levels.

I've been playing the odd tournament here and there and I think I'll be focusing my efforts more on tournaments over the next few months. Now I can afford to buy into the bigger weekly events on a regular basis, it would be nice to be able to go after that really big score.

I'm also in pursuit of a place on the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. I had a massive brainfart last night on the bubble of a satellite for the weekly $650 qualifier and ended up finishing 9th with 8 places up for grabs. Ugg.

Watch this space for details of a live charity poker tournament I'm planning for December.

Chasing the Elusive Cigar

Thursday night, 7:30pm British Summer Time: Betfair's qualifyer for the Asian Poker Tour. With an extra $8K package added by Betfair, this was a pretty juicy qualifier.

58 people put up $250 which, along with Betfair's $8K contribution, provided two seats and $3K, $2K, $1K for 3rd, 4th and 5th place respectively.

I had a good feeling about this tournament. I coasted along picking up enough pots to keep up with the average chip-stack. Just before the final two tables I doubled up to put me in the top 3 or 4 where I manged to stay right through to the final table.

We lost our first casualty at the final table but remained 9 handed for what seemed like a life-time. It was made to feel even longer when I lost a huge pot with AK against JJ and found myself as the smallest stack by a long way. However, a fortuitous double up and the splitting of a pot when I ran my AJ into someone's AK and I was right back in it.

The remainder of the players were dropping like flies and I didn't really have time to notice the bubble bursting: I was garunteed at least $1,000. Then before I knew it another player had busted and I had picked up AQ in the small blind - a great 4-way hand. The button raised it and I came over the top. he quickly called and I buried my face in my hands when his AK was flipped over. A pair on the flop gave me the slightest of hopes, but it was not to be and I finished in 4th place only two spots away from an all expenses paid trip to Singapour and a $5K entry into the Betfair Asian Poker Tour. The $2,000 I got for 4th place was a sizable consolation, but I was gutted not to have walked away with the big prize.

New Home

As you can see Fish and Chips has relocated to its own webspace. I've had this domain for amlost two years and have finally got round to doing something with it. Who knows, maybe in another couple of years I'll actually create a website for it too!

Life continues; it's excitments are unabated. I've been playing very little poker. In fact I seem to be doing very little outside of work at the moment. That being said, a couple of interesting extra-employment activities include Turkish classes and a semi-regular football game. That's a slight lie as they both have work-ties. The Turkish classes are arranged and paid for curtosy of the job and the football is a work-associated team.

I see that the December Vegas Blogger gathering has just been anounced. Unhappily our December Vegas trip has had to be cancelled as the friedns we were going to come with are no unable to make it. I'm a lot less gutted than I might have been about it. It frees up some leave so I'm going to take some shots at qualifying for some upcoming tournaments. I've got my eyes on Betfair's Asian Poker Tour as well as any of the EPT events.

If I fail to qualify for any of those (extreemly likely) then Mrs. Pink and I will probably take a long weekend somewhere in Eruope early in the new year.

Nothing else to report. Move along.

Religion meets Technology

Our recent holiday in France found us in Lourdes for a brief stop off. That place is a fucking freak show. It makes Christianity look like some crazed cult. In no other place would you give a second look at someone in a wheel chair or with any other obvious disability or illness. In Lourdes the air is thick with desparation and frenzy. That place creeped us out.

This photo provided some light relief (click to enlarge):

Asia, Save Us!

With the imminent signing of the Port Security Bill, effectively crippling the US online poker sceene, we Europeans are gonna be firmly relying on a rise in popularity of the game in Asia to restock the fish.

Betfair have got the right idea. Their upcoming inaugural Asia Poker Tour is a shrewd move and, with any luck, will catalyse a boom in that part of the world. I'd almost certainly be trying to qualify if the rest of my annual leave wasn't ear-marked for a December trip to Vegas. I'd certainly encourage as many of you as possible to try and qualify and help spread the poker bug East.