This'll be my last post before Christmas unless I lucksack my way into winning a mahoosive tournament tonight. So have a great time and have fun with your families. I hope santa brings you what you want.
The jolly man in red and white has continued to be kind to me for the most part. I'm cashing in approx 50% of the 45-man tourneys that I play in, but them being $5 baby tournaments perhaps it's not necessary for me to put up a screen every time I cash. My bankroll at FTP is up to $400 now, which is a nice balance to have for playing with at christmas. I did start to get lazy by Sunday, not giving all games my full attention, and my last few results reflect that.
Managed to play a lot of blogger games though and that was a helluva lotta fun. If only the time-divide across the pond was smaller it could happen more often. Or maybe I need a job that starts at midday. One suckout to report from the british blogger tourney last night, I pushed 8d 9d in the SB and got called in the BB by Cell's AQ, as expected I hit two pair to bust Cell and double up. Sorry Cell, Happy Christmas ! We were both short stacked and I was pushing with any two on Cells BB for a couple of orbits before the call. I busted when either I made a dumb semi-bluff or someone else made a dumber call. When I get home and look at the HH again I may post it up if I think it's worth the hassle and discussion.
Finally I grabbed the below from Kat's blog, had to post up this one. If you need a suckout, if no one else can help, if you can find him...
Ok, Happy new year. There it's over with, back to real life. For the first 6 months you can hope it'll be better than 07, then for the last 6 months you can look forward to 09 being a better year ! So lets get started eh !
I continued to run good up to christmas with results like this on FTP...
Unfortunately to counter this 'Stars decided to be hideous to me a number of times, including a big loss with set vs set on the cash tables. I play cash at stars now, cos their tournament beats feel like making me want to euthanise people, inhumanely.
Everything since christmas has been pretty low quality, I got sick on Boxing Day, proper sick, then 3 days later got man-flu sick and all the poker I played during that week was pointless monkey business. Coin flipping every decision would have worked out more profitable because I was paying so little attention to anything.
So some good, some bad, mostly good stuff though.
In 2008 I only ask that I may be given more tolerance, and that everyone else gets a little bit too. That would go a long way to changing what was the worst of 2007.
Another awesome evening, beer, rock and poker. I walked round to R&R's tonight for dinner and discovered that along with their new Sony Bravia they'd bought Guitar Hero 2 & 3. If you haven't played this before (like me) you're really missing out ! Such an excellent game and wicked fun with duelling players, as demonstrated by the guys in this youtube clip.
When we were all rocked out I wandered the 5 minutes back home and logged on to look up the start time for the BoDonkey, at 2:05 GMT it was a mere 30 minutes away so I figured I could stay awake that long at least. I'd had a late night previously after staying up till 3 so I could play in the MATH anyway, even though I didn't last that long in it so was still asleep by 4am.
29 runners showed up for the BoDonkey, as far as I know I was the only brit and may be the first international listener to the awesome live BuddyDank radio that accompanies the tourney. Tragedy and Buddy did a great running commentary of proceedings and LoveElf was special guest providing insights to relationship questions sent in by listeners. It's excellent stuff and kept me entertained and laughing when I really needed it to stay awake.
Lucky for me the deck really smacked me round the head early on, which made it easy to get into a rhythm and chip up a bit. When the momentum's with you everything seems a little easier and my bluffs were coming off and I seemed to be making good folds at other times. It really helps when you get dealt KK back-to-back in the middle stages too.
When we arrived at the final table I had a monster stack and bled a few chips off to a couple of players early, then continued to run goot and bust a few others. When my A9 flopped a 9 to beat Numenor80's 66 it meant JoeRaggs and I were heads up. It was just shy of 5am and I was feeling ragged, however Smokkee had suggested me earlier on as his pick to win the thing, so I had so extra incentive to carry on the fight. There was just one more problem, we each had over 30BB's and Joe was still playing TAG. It wasn't going to be over quickly unless we both hit monsters.
Strategy time. How to beat a player who only raises good starting hands 90% of the time and only puts money into the pot post-flop when he's made some kind of hand? It was a combination of attrition to win the blinds more often than he did and then whenever I'd taken about a 2-1 chip lead I'd take the worst of it on flops he'd hit, trying to hit my gutshots and flushes. This resulted in a half-hour back and forth where I kept grinding ahead and then Joe's hands kept holding up to bring him back level with me on chips. It must have been pretty boring to watch, it was hard work for me and I was playing every hand !
Finally at 25 past 5 we finished it with this, the jack of hearts is still my lucky card :)
TanOrpheus Ante $ 200.00 JoeRaggs Ante $ 200.00 TanOrpheus Set dealer/Bring in spot 1 TanOrpheus Ante/Small blind $ 1,000.00 JoeRaggs Big blind/Bring in $ 2,000.00
I raise it up to $6000, and Joe calls. Flop is 6s 4h 6d Joe checks, and like I have done every other time I C-bet 8k on the flop, only difference is this time I've hit. Joe pushes his gutshot with 2 overs and I call, turning the jack of clubs to seal the deal. GG all, well played.
Excellent game and the radio made it twice as good to play in. Just wish I was able to stay up and do this more often. So I have some new links to sort out on my sidebar which I'll try and get around to tonight. But for now I've gotta go out and get that chistmas shopping done !
Greetings and salutations, hope you've had a good weekend and that you administered more bad beats than you took. I've started my pre-christmas week off work and things have generally been going my way since thursday night.
For instance, getting down to two tables in a 45-SNG with twice as many chips as the next man
You would have hoped that it's certainly winnable from there and thanks to a rush of great cards at the end it was
I also took down 6th in 180-SNG, shame I'm not in the RTR challenge they've got going on over there at the moment
And won an $11 seat to the Sunday Hundred Grand in a $2 tourney with 216 players that paid out 39 entries. Not that I needed to satellite in, but any tourney practice is good tourney practice.
Sunday was another good evening's play, I hit up the 45's on FTP again and took 3rd and 5th in two $5 games, then played a $10 game and this happened :
Nice for my bankroll at FTP :) in less than a week it's grown from just under $30 to just over $300. So tonight, if I can stay up til 3am I'm gonna spend a bit of that cash playing Monday at the Hoy with our US counterparts... keep the coffee coming !
… then I'll begin. This post is not here to deliberately try and annoy anyone, it's just to get it off my chest and let you know what I'm thinking, in case you were interested. It's been a draft for a long time, but drafts have a destiny and this is fulfilment. A year ago I loved poker and I loved blogging about poker, if you've hung about you'd notice they've both pretty much dried up. A lot of stuff has happened in that year. I bought my own property, went on holiday, went out with an ex, split up with an ex, made some poor decisions about x, y and z and followed through on those decisions in indescribably ungentlemanly ways. There's been good times and bad times, often I've been an idiot. Occasionally I've been a genius !
Mostly the last few weeks I've been wondering why I haven't felt "connected" to poker, for such a long time. I haven't posted anything where I thought "That was a good one" in a year. The thing it boils down to for me is, how shall I put this, commercialisation and organisation. I loved playing poker before I had a blog because it was all me vs the enemy. Then I happened across Iggy's blog one day and started to read about other bloggers. Tao of Poker, April, and Al Can't Hang, are just a few of the first blogs I started checking daily to get my fix of blogger updates. Before long I was emotionally attached to stories about people I'd never met, like EastEnders or Corrie. Eventually I got my own blog, and many of these wonderful people linked to me, commented, even IM'd and chatted. Over time I read some British poker blogs and my list of readers and reedee's spread. As I type there are over 180 blogs in my google reader, and because of how they were discovered I love to read nearly all of them. Don't worry I am getting to a point here.
For me the brilliance about blogging is the freedom of it. I found a blog and I could tell I liked the person writing it. Because the writer is a good blogger she links out to other blogs, she expects nothing in return except hopefully regular updates. Maybe there'll be a link back if the feeling's mutual. By following link thru link thru link I found a network of like-minded people. It felt like I was a part of something, I'd found it, I was now contributing to it and I didn't care who was reading because the chances were they were like me. I was welcomed into a community with open arms.
Then someone had an idea. They could get a load of bloggers onto a forum, and make a couple of bucks from the site traffic. They could even get the uk blogs under one banner, so they were all in one place and easy to find. Fair enough. It was a good idea and well implemented but unfortunately for me, it broke something. Not only was I no longer part of something that was "mine" but our regular weekly game between friends became an open tourney with attendees who I didn't know and who didn't know me. So it didn't take long before there were arguments at tables and on blogs and I soon got detached from the scene as the comradery disappeared. None of these fracas involved me directly, but it did taint things.
There is a certain respect that exists between bloggers who find each other through friends. We fight on the same battlefield night after night against a common enemy and even though it's an every man for himself game, we still want to see our friends and friends of our friends do well. I loved poker because I was playing for myself, I loved blogging because I was blogging for myself, and I loved reading blogs because they were blogging for themselves, but they were speaking to me.
You don't need to comment and tell me how it wasn't meant to be like this. I know it wasn't, and believe me when I say "It's not you it me". Truthfully. This piece of the web is on life support at the moment. It needs love, attention and a little hard work. I just need to remind myself what made me love it in the first place, and go back to build on those solid foundations. This post has very likely turned into an very dramatic version of events, with far more gravitas than is necessary, so thanks for reading it and just "check yerself" before you start responding to it. This post is for me, and I just feel better getting it written down.
Hope to catch you on the IM, or at the felt if you're feeling lucky.
Sat down for a $3 90-man sit n go on Full Tilt last night, played ABC poker and got a very easy 3rd with little effort and no moments of trickery or brilliance. Was fun but obviously didn't need huge amounts of focus. Tomorrow should be interesting, late night planned for the Hatton fight, and at least 6 poker players invited including the local scottish whale. Nothing better than taking money from a Scot who thinks he knows how to "ride mah luck". Only prob is he usually drinks so much wine he has to be baby-sat through every hand and it slows the game down to 6 or 7 hands an hour. Not sure I'll cope with that B-S again so I'm taking the laptop too in case some real games for a distraction.
Ornate -
adj.
1. Elaborately, heavily, and often excessively ornamented.
2. Flashy, showy, or florid in style or manner;
Push -
1. To exert outward pressure or force against something.
2. To advance despite difficulty or opposition; press forward.
3. To expend great or vigorous effort.
Ornate Push - The messy ramblings of a troubled poker player and tilted mind.
