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Couple of questions to get it started
What is your most memreble poker moment involving yourself or someone else all together
and....
Who is your favourite poker player. And why.
Comments
Most memorable is tricky...
I guess the biggest win at the Irish Open will always be up there but it's funny isn't it? We tend to remember losses more. The WSOP $1500 event in 2010 where I played heads up for almost 6 hours and where I got it in for the win 6 times still stings a bit. If there is one that I ever wake up thinking about it's that. I also remember a lot the Poker Million won by John Duthie in 1999. My starting table had Layne Flack, Surinder Sunar, Hamesh Shah, Johnny Chan and Phil Hellmuth...I was terrified. One hand involved me four-betting vs PH with 89 off...that was extremely unusual and bold play in those days. He declared that I must have kings or aces but he still came and asked me at the end of the day as he had made a big fold (he said queens). There was a WSOP main event when I went pretty deep one year. Joe Hachem's brother Tony had bought some of those flags you put on sandcastles and he was obviously using the Ozzy one. He gave me the Union Jack and I put it in my stack. I got shown a little on TV with it. The buzz of making day 4 in that event is hard to beat. In terms of other people I remember James Akenhead both the November 9 when a turn that doubled him up with his KQ vs AQ was amazing and also when he lost heads-up with AK vs 104 for the bracelet. Staking someone when they win a lot is a mental feeling, you have no control...it's fun. Also Vicky Coren winning the EPT London at the Vic. We had played there in £3/£3 pot limit hold-em games for years and a big tournament once a month might have a £10,000 first prize...an EPT seemed mad...my own experience in that event was weird too. I finished about 13th and I felt I could have easily won it.
I think the real answer might be a day when I played a £100 freezeout in the casino in Russell Square, maybe it was 2001 and I'd been playing three or four times a month for ten years or more. I made the final and there were at least three people from Late Night Poker on the table. It was the most I'd ever dominated a final at that time, I built a stack with ease and I felt like they were all totally terrified of me. In the end I ran really badly and finished about 5th but I just remember the feeling of knowing how much they hated playing with me. That was the day more than any other that I thought I could do this for a living and these guys are not anything to worry about just because they have been on TV.
Poker player and films I'll save for another time.
I have never seen any of the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings movies nor have a I read the books so I'd have to say Star Wars which is a classic Western. Until last Christmas I'd only seen the "proper" Star Wars and not even seen The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. Now I've completed the three I think that is it. May have to watch them again. I've probably seen the original about 20 times which is a pretty low number for me with films I like.
I had a Hobbit computer game for my ZX Spectrum. It was amazing how good the games on that computer could be considering it had basically zero memory.
Outside WSOP my favourite for a while was City West where they used to hold the Irish Open. The day I had 18,000 euro stolen from my room which was on a floor with no CCTV and the hotel were basically completely useless I sort of went off it.
Melbourne is a lovely town and the casino is pretty impressive...sort of like a Vegas place...no theme but lots of restaurants, bars, shops, a bowling ally, a cinema, two nightclubs and a huge casino all in one complex.
I guess the answer has to be the Vic though. You have to understand there was a time when I took being a regular to a ridiculous extreme. I would literally go 320 days a year and play 14 hours every single day. I was there more than any member of staff and I ate all my meals there and knew who was working what days and all the gossip around the building. I only go back a few times a year now and it seems weird looking back.
Nightmare player is anyone who is great post-flop. I tend to play more post-flop and less pre-flop but the game is often played to a formula before the flop and it's hard for one person to be any better than another at knowing what to shove 15bbs with blind on blind and what to call. People who float and are capable of big river bluffs are always dangerous.
I think some of the really good ones I've played would be Isaac Haxton, Thomas Bichon, Albert Iverson, Lee Markholt and Michael Tureneic. I'm thinking plenty of people here won't have played with those four and may only have heard of one or two...I would always say the good deep-stack cash players are the best.
I definitely don't want the responsibility of picking a winner for a whole months rb. It would be tough for me to answer without mentioning how great the tipping site I'm involved in is.
Phantom is totally correct. During the time when I was posting a tip a week on here I suffered a terrible run. I was obviously picking things at decent prices, lots of 10/1 chances that I thought should be 7/1, a bit of +ev on each one but that was just my opinion. It's a bit like poker though...in tournaments with biggish fields you can have a decent edge and just run a bit poorly and that's variance as we know. It's pretty similar on the horses.
I guess my main advice would be to think more about the chance of something winning than thinking "what is going to win this race/event?"
Some good questions there Arrogant. Thanks for them, sorry for the delay in answering, trying to do a few a day in some sort of order.
I think you are right. The written material on sports betting is not so good. I would say that there are some good articles on my tipping site and also on the Pinnacle Sports bookmakers site that have some of the basics of sports betting. On our site if you went and read the main body of the Road to Riches articles since we started you'd learn something. I find Twitter is good and I follow loads of sports betting and horse betting people. Generally you can assume that if I retweet something it's because I think that person knows what they are talking about. The big exchange sites all have lots of good articles as for them making people better at betting is a good thing.
If I had £1000 and I wanted to do something to make a living it wouldn't be sports. My ROI on racing is around 11% at the moment and sometimes it's 22%, let's say it's around 15%. My ROI on football is around 3% and NFL is less.. If I have around four racing bets a day on average and four others and I need to make £3000 a month to live on then my average stakes per month will have to be £36,000 and I'll spread that over 240 bets so each will be £150 (I assumed my average ROI between the sports is 8.5%). That means that if I start by betting 7 losers on the bounce I'll be broke. My records show that 7 consecutive losers is really easy to do but I'd also have a problem of how I get all the bets on when racing and sport often takes place all at the same time on a Saturday and I have to lay all the money out in one go.
I think it would be hard to do all this without at least £5,000 but you would probably need more. The next problem would be that if you can't find 8 good bets a day on average you'll have to bet bigger on four a day. If you can live on less it would help but I think it just needs to be a part-time hobby that you can make some money on if you don't have the bankroll to make a living.
I guess the markets that are most established and "solid" are the hardest in some ways so NFL at kick-off, the premier football at kick off the Champions League at kick off. On the other hand those markets often contain inherent bias like for example recency bias where people over-bet things they have recently seen...teams who won big on telly the week before. This means they can be beaten. I tend to think all sports are different but the most frustrating are those where you do lots of homework but can't get much of a bet on like the specialised sports that less people watch. I can't see the point of taking the time to master betting on cycling or rugby union for example (outside of the big internationals) as it's so hard to get big bets on.
I sometimes now say I'm retired. It's quite tedious telling someone you have been a professional gambler for 28 years and to have to reply four times as they try to find new ways to say "so you actually win?" "do you lose more than you win?" or "don't the bookies always win?". I find myself wanting to hear about what they do much more. I said professional gambler on a lot of forms earlier in my life. I'm not sure it really helps. I've had three different high street banks close my account over the years with no reason given. On the way into the US I said bookmaker once...the guy thought, as most Americans do, that that was basically the same as mafia.
I would consider a bankroll challenge. I'll think about it.
My average day has changed a lot over the years. It used to be wake at 11am...go to the Vic at 1pm...arrive at 1.30pm...stay until 5am...eat all meals there...repeat that 320 times a year...take off one day every three weeks...spend some of the "days off" in Vegas playing poker. There was also a time when it would be wake up at 10.45am...bet on every single dog race in the morning...bet on every horse race in the afternoon and evening...bet on all the football matches I like the look of between the races...study rugby/golf/darts/snooker for future bets...stay up to 3.30 am betting on NBA...I had that routine 7-days a week for 20 months once...I took three weeks off to go to Vegas and I gained 5 stone and won a lot of money. It wasn't good for my health longterm though.
These days in the summer I generally wake at around 7.30am...do some Twitter and have a cuppa...post on Sky...answer emails...look at the racing for two hours...text bets to a dozen people to help me get on...update my spreadsheet as they send back bets they have got on...have some lunch...play around on Twitter...watch every single race until about 9pm...check in the afternoon if my darts/football/tennis expert friends have any bets...if it's a Wednesday have a look at the weekend's golf event but usually don't actually have a bet...read the forum and watch every day Newsnight, C4 News, Daily Politics from the planner and watch every week Question Time, This Week, University Challenge, Marr, Peston and The Sunday Politics...all of those happen between races so the pundits on TV don't drive me too mad and so I can avoid watching any adverts. If it's a Wednesday I may study the weekend racing and if it's a Monday or Tuesday I may actually get a friend to do all the betting stuff and go to lunch but it will usually be with someone I either bet against, who follows my bets or who places bets for me. In between all that stuff I sometimes have to write things for the tipping site and I usually have to chase people for money on the phone.
If it's winter the racing is way less hectic. I'm likely to have around 25% of the number of bets and everything will be dependent on how well Saturday afternoon goes. I do have to worry about NFL though. On Monday I start tracking the lines for the next week and I stay up until 5am watching the live game. Tuesday I ignore the sport as much as I can. Wednesday I listen to a podcast and again I do that on other days, probably get through four a week. I read a few things and chat to friends about the games. On Thursday I stay up until 4am watching the game. Friday I usually try and get some bets on the NFL but this year I'm going to attempt to get everything done on Thursdays. Sunday I used to wake at 6am and write something about every game by noon. This year I hope to do this all on Thursday so I can sleep more. I never move from the internet from 1pm tpo 6am on Sunday and I watch the games on Red Zone where you can see every TD. It's hard to be watching and playing poker online but I try.
I never really have a holiday which doesn't involve gambling but although I do work around 90 hours a week I feel like I'm lucky to not have to go into an office and to not have a boss.