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Hmm a whole £4.xx down on Saturday evening and £3.xx up when I played a bit on Sunday. The Sunday one I must have played horrifically because I was flopping well - must have been averaging a set or flopped straight/flush every 10mins or so over 5-6 tables, but still didn't rack up a more respectable win.
Admittedly a couple of those went south (straight vs flush and set vs a board that ran out 4-to-a-flush), but even so, it sort of feels as though I should have gone to bed with an extra £20 (at least) and played pretty poorly overall.
Added bonus though to see that The Baggies not only hang on to 2nd (£25.50, TY Sky) but also blagged a win against Spurs. Result. Fingers crossed that Spurs lose again this Wednesday when Forest visit!
Bit better than playing on Sunday where my team was on the wrong end of a 5-1 battering. Not at all blamed on a makeshift back 4 that had strikers playing as full backs and me playing centre back for the first time in about 10 years.
Standard Sunday shambles!
Less of an added bonus, I took a dead leg early on in the game and today am walking around the workplace like I have a wooden leg. Which I can't really help, but looks quite a bit like I'm taking the mickey out of a recent new starter. Who has a wooden leg. And flashed me quite a dirty look earlier this morning.
Wasn't going to play last night as I was feeling knackered, but having logged on to register for the Punta Cana freeroll I spotted a £5 BH in late reg that was less than halfway to meeting its guarantee so jumped in (obv it just snuck the guarantee by the end of late reg, they always do, not much value around these days!)
Luck swung my way in a 3-way dance with 2-shorties early doors AKs vs 77 vs QJo to get the bounties that left me freerolling.
That perked me up a bit so added a couple of NL20 tables as well. I think starting new tables may be the way to go for the time being, it seems to attract a lot more 1-table / rec players, at least until seats start to churn.
The table draw was kind with 3 of us building big stacks through knocking others out but the random seat generator bringing a new short stack or two across rather than break our table up. All the better that I had position on a serial limper/only put money in post flop with a hand, player so was able to keep seeing free flops from the BB and stealing lots of little pots.
Alas at the FT one of the players just went on an absolute heater and KO'd us all so I had to settle for 3rd, but a tidy little win, boosted by being +£11 on cash as well. Keeps the Sharkscope in the black as well!
A quick hit of the first episode of the new Plebs series on ITV2 before I was KO'd for the night. I should probably know better at my age, but it still has me sniggering like the idiot student I've never grown out of being. Rare to find a decent comedy on ITV, dunno how it snuck into their line up.
pps $60 p/h for the coaching opps I found, most of which seem to offer lower value given my lack of PT/HEM, means I may be sticking to generic videos for some time longer... those alone may have to sail me into being a b/e NL50 player before it can be justified to chuck my cash about... maybe.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29314400
I went through a period of chucking ott-size bets on odds-on shots in order to clear my student debt in my early-20s, complete and utter stupidity in hindsight and insanely lucky that they all came in, but nearly £1m quid on the whim of the Scottish people is different league.
On a side note, I really wish I could rediscover a touch of the idiot carefree-ness of my youth when it comes to poker today. As it is, the mere thought of sitting down with 50% or more of my total roll in play at a single table / tournament starts to bring me out in cold sweats...
I wouldn't bother paying $60 for coaching (£40??), unless you were playing higher stakes.
Not really played against you ina while, but always seems like your are doing pretty well, and if you were to get coaching would be better to get someone from this site - as in they don't use HUDs to play.
All the best buddy
After a two day break due to playing and watching footy, last night ended in quite a deflating +£1.52 for a couple of hours play.
I sat at NL30 for the first time after watching a few orbits of what seemed a fairly playable table and enjoyed holding my own there before walking away with a stack in the mid-£40s. Add in a couple of NL20 tables that I left with a profit and, despite not really getting much momentum on a MC10 table, I wholly expected to see a nice jump of £20+
Not even the £2 needed to buy a lotto ticket. Sigh.
Probably due to increased nittiness, there really wasn't any major pots. The one or two times I did draw a strong hand I got snap folded and I made a lot more (I think) good folds with 1 pair/2 pair hands on rivers that I normally have a tendency to call too regularly.
Been a bad month so far though, not even hit 800pts yet which is poor. Really need to knuckle down over the weekend and cross the 1k barrier as a minimum.
As always though, that will invariably be dictated by the extent of the lure of the local pubs.
The way these hands were playing, I'm convinced the SB had a pair (66, 77 or something like A8) and the CO with the same busted draw as I had.
Should I be raising flop when I do have a bit of it other than the draw (eg 4 or K turn will also likely bink) vs a donk lead which tended towards 1-pair hands? The turn was read as weakness, but at the same time gave me a great price to draw to the flush... should that have been raised?
If it was a 7 instead of a 9, I'd have been playing this like the nuts from pre-flop onwards
Should I really be raising this sort of middling hand from the blinds, knowing that it is unlikely to be in terrible shape vs the wide range of the limpers, but is rarely going to hit top pair sort of hands and will potentially be a pain to play pre-flop?
In retrospect, I probably should be bet (then folding) on the river to get value from Ax sort of hands? The raise on the turn really felt like an Ace (at the time), but I suppose in retrospect a passive player is never min-raising me without a 9 after limping pre? As it was I no doubt lost the minimum here, but that is no doubt just results orientated!
pts up to 997 and almost looking respectable for the month. A little bump up as well after spotting a fairly soft looking NL50 table and leaving with just more than a double-up.
Not going to lie, I did do a quick little dance around the living room after winning my first £100 pot. Which is a particularly bad idea at the moment, as I haven't put up a new curtain rail in the house yet so all my neighbours and passers-by get to see me doing some sort of cross between a dad dance, a chicken looking for some corn, or possibly were set to call an abulance for fear I was having a fit.
Was a bit of a come down to otherwise be adding up just small £1-£5 wins back down the stakes, but it all helps to move in the right direction.
Talking about the lack of curtains, I'm starting to wish I hadn't purchased such a wreck of a house. Friday night spent painting the radiator currently laid out in the middle of my lounge. With bespoke radiator paint. At no point in life did I ever think I'd need to know such a product existed. No-one warned me that being a homeowner requires a proportionate decline in how much fun can be had in life!
On a similar topic of relatively boring lumps of metal, which is what most drilling equipment is, I was reading some articles about one of my misguided Oil & Gas stock purchases this morning and was introduced to this company http://www.teekay.com/Home/default.aspx - which pretty much contains the sort of imagery and words I'd expect to see if Sky's Tikay ever started his own website.
Thankfully my poker continues to move in the opposite direction to my share account, which will be getting no top-ups for some time...
Daft things is, I made some sillier moves after this hand so wasn't exactly playing with scared money, but couldn't bring myself to potentially call off my money so soon after winning it.
I've played the oppo quite a few times at NL10 and, if they play the same, can easily be dumping chips in with worse. In fact, I'd normally be taking the c/c line with this hand at those levels - the flush is obviously scary, but there are lots of smaller pairs and worse aces which can be in his range and just taking advantage of having position vs players that have played the hand passively.
Would 3-bet pre for value every time here. Btn's range is gonna be so wide isolating the limpers you will take this down pre a riddic high % of the time.
River is a fold imo not a bottle job
I was handed a couple of gifts last night that masked some sizeable losing hands that I played poorly... someone 4-bet bluff shoving T9o preflop when I had KK and someone (normally very tight) calling me down with 76s on a QQ6Kx board when I had KQ... I've obviously been seen to be barrelling off too frequently of late!
I'll post the other hand for further critique, but got well schooled by Acegooner. Will also throw up (in both senses of the term) where I kept firing into a flopped K-high flush.
Both of those were made more frustrating given that I only sat at that NL30 table because I could get position on someone I've played at NL10 and yet I almost completely failed to get into any tangles with him before he left. Sigh.
A bit of me was tempted to shift this towards a 'Road to Punta Cana' diary... but Acegooner pointed out that DTM didn't make priority last month, so the micro-level package is pretty much already gone and any NL10 grind will be for the cash prizes only. I'm neither sufficiently rolled nor skilled to grind the low stakes.
I don't care about the poker so much, but having barely escaped the desolate wasteland that is Swindon over the past 9 months, the inspiration of a luxury holiday in the sun is almost sufficient to make me give up my life for 3 weeks to 'book the win'.
I mean... I still have more than 3 weeks holiday to take before Christmas and am in the sort of job where that could be taken at relatively short notice. Plus I am definitely going down with man flu and could do with a few days recovery this week.
I may play as much NL10 in the evening this week as I can (or as my laptop allows me to) and work out just how much additional volume might be requried to catch the early leaders (and hope that DTM has entered the code early doors). At least I should have a fighting chance of a handy cash payout then.
That said...
I've obviously not played NL20+ during previous rake races of this style. In theory, if all the regs from those levels fight among themselves at NL10, would it be expected that the games will become much softer at NL20??
Perhaps I should just take the 3-week opportunity to be a medium-sized fish in a temporarily shrunken pond?
FWIW, my thinking here is that being out of position, if I bet the turn I would open myself up to being semi-bluff raised by spade draws / KJ/JT or similar which would have been spew and could leave me dumping the hand. I planned to c/f any big bets I faced on a river spade and almost certainly also if an A or 9 arrived.
I didn't really place the heart draw so much, given that I had the Ah, although in truth I'm not sure the bet size said anything other than value and I probably should have found the fold.
Ace said in chat that I should have value bet turn as well and would get a fold... can't disagree with that. Just another example of over-thinking a hand (when I'm not good enough to think at those levels!!)
Stack sizes influenced my decision on the turn... wouldn't be full potting here normally!!
Felt like the oppo would still be there with Ac or even Kc hands as they had been playing creatively. Therefore didn't want to give a free card and let them catch flush / hit an over card on the river.
Think this is probabaly too aggro with only a pair of jacks though?
Sigh. No hiding on the bad days. BR heading south.
On Tuesday I didn't adjust to playing with 2 extra tables, was way too loose and donked over £30 away, predominantly via bluffs against oppo I should never, ever be trying to do so against.
Yesterday I got away from that and, with a bit of luck in one hand vs Curt360 (NFD + overs vs flopped set) helping to boost the smaller pots I was picking off, I wandered off for dinner around £20 to the good.
After that was just a (probably overdue) car crash session. Standard stuff, aipf and oppo spiking sets or 4-card straights, flush vs nut flush, gutshots hitting on the river, plus while I was hitting flops about as regularly as Heskey used to hit the target, on the rare occasion I did blag a set, straight or flush I seemed to always run into a flush/FH.
Meh. That's what bankroll management is for.
So pretty happy that I think I'm pretty much readjusted to playing extra tables again... although if the brief tables that were put up yesterday are anything to go by then Curt360 is a shoe-in for the fancy holiday. At my levels it probably remains worthwhile playing NL10 for a couple of weeks and bagging a cash bonus though.
It will be interesting to see how many of the front-runners in the micro table stick with it for the month. If the package gets tied up then I'm not sure how profitable it can be for higher stakes players to MMT NL4 to win no more than £300 vs just playing their normal stakes/game and (I imagine) winning far more from the games?
£1,904.50
My AIPF skills are still nil. Post-flop was much kinder and helped me bounce back from the last couple of days.
Compared to the last rake race I mucked about with, back in early 2013, my game has very definitely improved but I guess that will mean much bigger daily swings this time around (hopefully ending in a winning month pre bonuses!)
"If you never get caught bluffing, you're not bluffing enough" (source unknown)
Pretty much sums up the biggest difference. I was a total nit last time and so it's hard to see big negative swings while avoiding every marginal spot. It's definitely more fun this time around
I like to think it's improving me as a player as well - lately I was definitely calling too much in position and bluffing TOO much, but those leaks are largely forced out when there are twice as many tables to respond to. If I'm going to play A4s heads-up post-flop then much rather do so with a 3bet pre and give myself a backup plan if I don't flop 2pr or a FD.
The far worse part of this week is having had man flu the whole time. I struggle to sleep during good times but it's done my head in to be coughing and spluttering so much lately. Even opting for a spicy curry yesterday failed to hit the spot.
I may have to end plans to join friends on the dry October and reach for the whisky later tonight. Purely medicinal, zero pleasure.
I really don't know why I called this. Regardless of any reduction in my thinking time from multi-tabling. And not even needing to factor in that Curt (playing probably 3 times more tables lol) is going to play a super-strong range all the time... even if we were both 1-tabling there is no way that this is ever a bluff on the river.
I know it's either JJ or maybe 22... the only remotely feasible hand I can beat is 66.
I thought all of this through in game.
And yet I still clicked the call button.
DOH!
In retrospect, I also think there was value in donking out in this spot... it's unlikely I have a 2 here (A2s or 22 the only feasible hands?) so may get a couple of calls from people thinking I'm maybe taking a punt with an 8 or a middling pair?
Obv the turn check was only because I thought Curt might fire again if he had AA / KK / QQ (and even JJ/TT tbf).
I'm gonna hit the 3k pts mark this month, that's my target volume wise. It's not an easy task when playing mostly micro stakes... even when moving back to NL20 in a couple of weeks it will still require a hard push.
I could probably add lots of bad beat stories from the weekend, but a) that's boring and b) it means I'm due to see my KK/QQ/AK crack aces lots of times in the near future
So instead a sumnation of the movies that provided the background to my weekend cards.
Space Jam - never actually watched it, pretty terrible in the main but intrigued to see what the greatest ever Basketball player could do acting wise. Lola Bunny is no Jessica Rabbit. Apparently there is soon to be a sequel. Bizarre. Modern cartoons are rubbish though, right?
Moonraker - Ms Goodhead. Snigger. I may be in the minority, but IMO Roger Moore was the best Bond. Not as good as The Spy Who Loved Me though. The effects in the space scenes were pretty mint given they're pushing 40 years old now.
Superman - I can't believe this was made before I was even born... For it's age some of the special effects are still fantastic... I'm old, I still prefer movies that aren't full of the crazy OTT CGI that fills today's films. Plus they had way better soundtracks then. Modern theme tunes never seem to stick as much as they used to. Lois Lane just seemed like a b@tch. Superman should have nicked Lex Luthur's female sidekick.
Welcome to the Jungle - I was probably paying too much attention to hitting my laptop at this point, but this just seemed utterly terrible. Although my head needs examining if I thought an acting combo of The Rock and Sean William Scott would be much better than that. If I'd stopped playing cards I'd have felt like I'd wasted two hours of my life and considered seeking compensation from the film studio.
Hmm not sure if yesterday was a touch or not... current total may include the latest rewards payment?
Averaging 150pts a day at micros is a tough ask. I have a new found respect for those that have been rumoured to have made priority playing only NL10 or lower.
My employers have signed up to a deal that lets us get cheaper Apple stuff next year... this may warrant further investigation to find something that can cope with the Sky software better than my 5-year old laptop. I'm sure I can cope with the corresponding salary reduction. You don't need to eat as much when you have good tech in the house.
Do you ever make withdrawals?
Re the Coaching, might be worth playing a good amount of hands at 20nl before you decide to take anything up.
So in the main, that turn around in run good came my way last night. I did very briefly clear the £2k barrier but then dropped £4 right at the end by gambling AQs vs JJ pre (was a poor/tired call).
Poor volume though as I was playing footy last night.
Well, I say playing.
I was on a football pitch and appeared to have had my feet replaced with spanners.
Wearing an early 2000s Forest shirt had a tendency to do that to footballers.
And thank you to the previous posters for doing a good job of talking me into buying a very expensive new laptop/desktop... I still have a few compatability concerns (not least that I'm an Android fan phone-wise and I hear suggestions that the switch may necessitate me buying an iPhone as well... sigh)
oh yeah - no withdrawals yet since I started this Larson... the life nit in me is planning a shift of money to somewhere I can a small amount of interest though...
Lessons from the tables 1 - I'm not good enough to slow-play hands
I was going to leave this table as well, but then a couple of softer opposition sat down so I opted to stay a while longer. And yet I kept getting myself into hands with the 3 (NL20+) good quality regs at the table - such as this one BvB
Ordinarily I'd insta-4-bet this pre, especially out of position (which in this case would have taken down a risk free pot) and on the rarer occasion I flat then I'd almost always c/r the flop and hope a slightly worse hand comes along for the ride. But no, I wait till I've fallen well behind to make my move, protecting against the flush draws and initially thinking that BB must have a lower set or possibly AcKc.
Deserved outcome for 'fancy play' syndrome!
This was about an hour or so after the hand above vs one of the reg names above me in the rake race and accordingly playing a very tight range due to the number of tables, as well as having me well pegged (in the main...)
That was my excuse for not 4-betting anyway, where I figured he'd insta-fold anything other than KK/AA if I raise again pre-flop.
I was kidding myself that there was anything other than sets in his turn shove range.
So I called on variance to favour me for a change and sucked out. My apologies to the oppo if he happens to be reading this.
Despite being pretty knackered I did foolishly play yesterday. My play was akin to
But the poker Gods had sympathy with me and let me run like
So that leaves me at £2,014.99 and 1,106pts
Over 1/3 of the way to my 3k points target with 22 days to go... although I'm not sure my laptop is going to survive the month lol
I mean seriously, how do people reach priority playing just micro stakes... they must be machines!
Just to let you know I've sent you a PM.
GL for the rest of the weekend.