Fish and Chips

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


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Friday, March 28, 2008

Quarterly Update

As you can see it's been over a month since my last post. That's the longest I've ever gone without posting. I hope this blog isn't completely going to dry up, but it certainly seems to be dying a slow death.

I'm increasingly busy these days, although I guess I'm comparing my business to when this blog started and I was a lazy student, so my alleged business now probably doesn't count for much! In any case, I do have less time for faffing around on t'interweb than I used to and what time I do have is therefore almost all spent playing poker.

I thought I'd do a quick summary of the first quarter of the year and have a quick look back at the aims I set myself back in January to see if I'm still on track:

My life goals for this year were (a) to continue to be happy with life in general, (b) get on the fast track promotion scheme at work, (c) learn Turkish, and (d) run a marathon.

(a) I'm certainly happy with life, which is far and above the most important aim.
(b) The fast track promotion scheme at work isn't open for application until later in the year.
(c) I'm not spending any time learning Turkish at the moment, but I am having the occasional opportunity to put what I do know into practice at work and now I've finished all my training at exams at work, I should have some more time to spend studying.
(d) I'm doing quite a lot of training for a marathon. Last weekend I did a half marathon (self-organised), which went pretty well. I had pencilled in the Istanbul Marathon in October, but it looks as though Mrs Pink and I may be going away for a couple of weeks in September, which wouldn't work very well for final training.

Poker so far this year is going reasonably well. I haven't hit any of the goals yet (make $25k, achieve earn rate of at least $30/hour, play in and score in large tournament, and go to Vegas). I'm happy with my earn rate so far ($40/hour) and although I'm not putting in enough hours yet to be able to hit the $25k mark by the end of the year, hopefully I can up the hourly rate as I build the bankroll back and move back up stakes (I'm playing $100 and $200 tables at the moment).

I think a trip to Vegas this year is unlikely, as we're planning a relatively expensive trip to Kenya in September, but who knows; if the bankroll rebuilding goes well then maybe it can be justified. I have some friends who are up for heading out to Vegas in June while the WSOP is going on and crucially they have other halves who get on well with Mrs Pink, who - understandably - wasn't really up for the idea of coming out to Vegas just to watch me play poker.

In other news:

  • The Salisbury Poker Championship was a great success and we raised about £400 for Harambee Schools Kenya. I thought it would be a little rude to win my own tournament so I gracefully came in 2nd! Dusk Till Dawn kindly donated merchandise and money in online accounts so I was able to donate an extra £50 for my 2nd place finish.


  • I headed up to Dusk Till Dawn two weekends ago with a couple of mates. We played the £75 on Friday night, in which I made it to about 14th place only a few spots off the money. But the real highlight was the cash game. We were all pretty boozed by this stage and what was once a pretty soft £100 max cash game turned pretty crazy when a drunk John Kalmar and Normal Pace joining the action. It was good to bump into WonkyJim again who was also at the table, although I could have done without padding his roll quite as much as I did!


  • That’s about all of note. With any luck you wont have to wait over a month for the next post!