April roundup

In short...

• 10k hands
• Lots of beer = not much volume
  
• Vegas house booked
• New poker coach, hookem148
  
• $500 profit + $500 loyalties = Roughly +$1k month
• Bankroll now $12,500
  

Pretty swingy month really with +2k and -2k type sessions. The downslope at the end was a -$1.7k night where I played everything perfectly but got beasted... meh. Kind of felt like I didn't really run too well this month, hard to tell much over 10k hands really. No point in over-analysing a sample this size, I'm happy with the way I played.

Enjoyed my first session with Brian... looking forward to more next month.


Next month is the warm up to the WSOP:

• As much NL cash as possible
  
• Irish Masters in Dublin, Ireland
• Blonde bash at Dusk Til Dawn, Nottingham
• Olympic Open in Riga, Latvia
• Book Cali/Vegas flights
• probably lots more beer...

Will likely be offering stakes in myself in some of the events above, will post details soon.

Plans for next few months

Ughhh, feel horrible today. Heavy one last night with folk from work, mixing drinks for the loss. Stomach says Guinness and champayne don't go too well...
Spending today just completely lazing about watching the snooker and relaxing to mark the start of my holidays. I'm basically off work for the next 3 months, except for a week I have to go back in for before leaving for the US. So I don't fully return to work until mid-july at the end of the WSOP. Preeetty sweet! :D

Played about 9k hands this month, been pretty swingy... my last session was -$1.4k. Up for the month, but not by much. So anyways, there's a ton of stuff going on and will be going on over the next few months. I should be blogging a lot more, certainly when I'm in Vegas I'll be blogging a lot about what's going on.

Vegas
Finished picking people and the house, so that's booked now. Should be a blast, I'm sharing the house with Dan from LA, Pete from NJ, and Roman from Sydney. Couple of the guys are pros, and everyone plays MSNL cash games along with live tourneys. All seem to have pretty similar interests, the house has a plasma HDTV so Pete's bringing his 360/wii guitar heroes, etc which is ace.

Super fucking excited about the wsop! Really looking forward to meeting people and hanging out, there are a ton of people I'd like to meet. That said, definately ship me a mail or something if you're gonna be at the WSOP and want to grab a beer or come over and hang out. Will definately need to get some parties on the go.

Oh yea, here's the house... lagoon style spa, pool table, fitness room, and glass office ftw. Costing us $1k each for the month which I think rocks.


Been thinking about what I'd like to play when I'm across there and reckon I'll mainly play 2-5nl, some sats to the ME, and a bunch of tourneys. I'll be making a post about staking for the tourneys closer to the time, but I probably want to play a couple of $1.5k wsop events, some $330 and $550 venitian deepstacks, and a bunch of other stuff. Looking at around $5-6k worth of buyins, hoping to get 50% staked... it'll definately be a +++++EV investment for anyone staking as these fields are so soft, and it's a lot of fun to rail on cardplayer if you're not in Vegas. Will do a proper post on staking next month.

Rough Schedule
Here's what I've planned so far... Gimmi a shout if any of this stuff fits with things u might be doing, it's always cool to meet people and hang out when travelling. Looking forward to meeting Marc and BTimm, would be great to hang out with other folk too.

April
29th - GTA IV release
30th - Launch party

May
3rd to 5th - Irish masters in Dublin?
10th to 11th - Blonde bash 6 at Dusk 'til Dawn Nottingham
12th to 19th - Olympic open in Riga, Latvia?
24th to 31st - Week as a professional poker player?
Or maybe like Amsterdam/Copenhagen/Prague or something if people can be assed

June
2nd to 9th - Back to work for a week
10th - Fly out to San Fransisco
12th to 15th - Drive down the west coast to LA?
15th - Catch a lift from Dan into Vegas and check in to WSOP house

July
7th - My birthday, wheeeeee
13th - Fly out of Vegas, back to Edinburgh

New coach

I'm real happy to be starting work with Brian 'hookem148' Rue! My objective for the coaching is to plug all of my leaks at 2/4 & 3/6 and make the move up to high stakes. Brian moved through MSNL up to high stakes while being mentored by Taylor Caby and is now a guest pro for CardRunners.com. Brian has previously coached Verneer and SirNeb, really excited about starting work with him. I'll be taking advantage of a lot of coaching over the next few months, will be taking longer coaching sessions lasting 2hours.

I'll be playing the first session with Brian tonight, him railing my play, all 1/2 to start with.

Learn from the pros

It’s not a bad plan… however unfortunately I’ve had to part ways with my coach, Messiah. He’s got a new job working long hours so he’s not going to have enough time to maintain a bunch of poker students. It’s a pity to lose him as a coach, I learned a lot and still felt we had a way to go. Congrats on the new job Dave, best of luck and hopefully catch u in Vegas.

So with a few things changing it’s really time for me to re-evaluate my current poker learning process…

Video Training Sites
I’ve got a subscription to LeggoPoker which I really like, the quality of content in the videos is very high. Been looking at DC quite a bit recently too and it looks great and a lot of fun, similar to Leggo. Think I’ll definitely be signing up there soon. Keeping my eye on Stox too, some of the mathematical work TheBryce is doing is pretty incredible.

Coaching
After the coaching went so well with Messiah I definitely feel that I’d like to continue along that route. It just accelerates the learning so much faster as coaches are able to pick up on your specific weaknesses and offer fixes immediately. It’s the next level above video training sites. So I’m currently looking for a new coach with the immediate objective of improving my 2/4 and 3/6 game, then making the move to high stakes. If you can recommend anyone please shoot me a mail or a comment.

Chatting poker
In addition to this I’d like to increase the network of poker players I know – particularly guys who are playing mid or high stakes. It’s always good to have people to chat over hands with, particularly guys that are thinking at a higher level. Should be a fun learning experience in Vegas this summer too, with a bunch of strong players staying under the one roof.

Cheers for the comments on the previous hand by the way... more to come.

Hand dissection #2

On to the next hand... I think this spot is really tricky, be interested to see what line people would take here.

Shortie shove gets in the way of 4bet spot
I guess we can just ignore the fishy short-stacks shove here and it's more of a question of whether we want to 4-bet the true villain, SB. I think we basically 4bet here every time but should I bet an amount that will let me get away from the hand if he shoves, or should I just go ahead and play for stacks here?

My preferred play is to raise to $110 total, meaning villain would have to call $86 into what will be a $262 pot. It'll leave us an effective $260 behind, should I be thinking about folding if he 5bet shoves? Or is there a better way to play this akward spot preflop?

Cheers dudes

Hand dissection #1

Gonna dissect some hands I posted a while back, hopefully get some input on them.

Here's the first...

Turn double barrell?
Do you fancy firing $120 on the turn? Are we folding out enough? I'm putting villain on a middle pair type hand. I guess he could have A7 or a set too.

I think the flop raise is fine. SB has shown weakness by leading out superweak, he has some sort of draw like 90% of the time so I think he folds to my big bet like 80% of the time. I only have 1 other player left to act behind me and he's going to need a stronger than usual hand to call as my flop raise represents strength. I think the flop raise is +EV on it's own, but if it doesn't take it down I can fire at a non draw completing turn card and some scare cards and take it down a ton of the time. I've got 2 overs, a gutshot and a backdoor flush draw too so I've got some value to improve.

On the turn my hand has lost a ton of its value. I've got gutshot and pair outs but they could easily be counterfeited. So now I'm more inclined to bluff as it's likely to be the only way I'll win the pot. The A is a great card to bluff at, if he has a middle-pair or draw type hand without the A he's likely to fold it. Pretty unlikely he flopped a set or 2pr as he didn't try to protect it. I only need to bet $120 into $172 to bluff and I think he has a draw and folds to my double barrell about 50% of the time. So I think double-barrelling is most profitable here.

I guess the question is how often is the A in his range? (He's 16/10 over a tiny sample) Also does he ever play a set or 89 this way?

Ship it

Yea this is a poker blog, but I've been working on this game for the past 3 years so it's a huge achievement for me. Now that it's done I should be able to play more poker for a bit too... that's the theory anyway however beer seems to be getting in the way pretty frequently.

GTA IV will be in the shops on the 29th of April. Go pre-order it and stuff.


Also, check out the full UK 360 TV trailer here. Love the camera pan at the end to show the city skyline. I saw it on TV tonight but it was some gay cut down 30second version.

Irritating first half of the month...

Boooooooooo.

Most of the brutality in the graph is due to variance at $3/6. Definately the most crazy half of a month I've ever had. Felt like I was cruising up $2.2k early on then getting slammed back down really hurt.

Last night I played a 1000 hand breakeven session, felt like I ran pretty bad, didn't make too many mistakes. Tonight I played another 1000+ hand session finishing down about $400. Towards the end of the session I lost a couple of big $3/6 pots where it's possible I made poor decisions, although they certainly weren't terrible.

I don't want to overthink things because it could just be that I'm not running too well at the moment it's only 5k hands. However I kind of feel like variance has fucked me up a bit. Since the -$1.5k day I've been pushing my play a little too much. Maybe subconciously trying to "win back" the money and get back up to where I was. I do feel irritated that I was $2.2k up for the month, and I'm now breakeven and I don't think that's a good attitude to take into sessions.

Another thing I feel at the moment is that I've kind of set a target in my head that I'd like to get my bankroll to $20k before leaving for Vegas. Giving me $10k cash, and $10k online. This is a nice idea, however I'm basically setting myself a monetary goal, and a tough one at that. I'm completely against $$$ goals, they've got no benefits and they fuck with your game a ton, adding anxiety, stress, etc.

So... before I move on to play my next session I need to do a few things

• Clear my head of any monetary goals.
  
• Do a PT review of the month so far, find out where any issues in play are.
• Lose any thoughts of trying to "win back" the money that I had earlier in the month.
  
• Assess if I should continue to play $3/6 or if the swings are a bit too much at the moment.
• Fully review all hands from the previous few sessions.

I think sorting these things out will help me move forward with the month profitably, because at the moment I feel in a kind of gamble gamble mood. Like I want the $2k back I had earlier in the month... which isn't like me.

bleh

I should really stop posting pictures of variance and work on my game and psychology. Seems that I've maybe lost focus a bit in that.

After looking over the biggest hands from tonight it's pretty clear that I was running bad, but that made me start playing bad also. Wasn't analysing ranges and hands enough, and was basically auto-pilotting the session... first time I've done that in ages. I'd say about 2/3 of the losses were variance, 1/3 were bad play... which I'm real annoyed about.

lol ru serious?

Kind of follows on from my previous post...

brb, going to set fire to things. :)

Chillin'

Not too much grinding been going on since my last post, just lots of chilling and drinking which has been wicked. Had a quiet one today though so put some hands in from midnight-2am, prime Saturday night time for soft games. Ran really well and had my most profitable single session to date. Ship ship!


Vegas
In the final stages of sorting out the house now, picked a place and finalised the other 3 guys that I'm staying with. I'm really happy with the house... It's a spacious 4-bed place with a lot of cool extras and really good surroudings, about 8 miles from the Strip. Will post a bunch more info on the place over the next few days once I finalise the booking. Suuuuuper excited about Vegas and the WSOP, 2 of the guys staying in the house have already won Main Event seats, I'm gonna set aside some of my roll to play sats on Stars.

Cheers for the comments on the previous hands (Marc), always appreciated. I'll be reviewing them over the next few days.

Some hands

Not really blogged any hands over the last month... here are a few of the toughest spots I've got into recently. Comments please!

Turn double barrell?
Do you fancy firing $140 on the turn? Are we folding out enough? I'm putting villain on a middle pair type hand. I guess he could have A7 or a set too.

Another double barrell turn Ace vs good player
Good spot to against a 21/17 reg?

Minraise then weak turn bet
Bleh, what does this mean? I don't get it, I mean a weak lead here would probably mean like 87/89 something like that. But he could just check behind here, I guess he's more likely to have a strong hand now? What do u reckon?

QQ preflop line check
TAG 3-bets me, shortie 4-bet shoves. 5-bet over the deep TAG here to isolate against the shortie? Can I fold if the TAG 6-bet shoves me this deep?

Check/fold, his 22/33 is good?
Guy is like 11/7 so I think this is a pretty easy muck given his line.


Here's some Down for BTimm, the gig was awesome!

Better post something I guess...

Well... not played too much so far this month. Seem to have a lot going on despite not being at work that much. Spent pretty much all of last weekend hanging out with friends and drinking so missed out on getting hands in then.

Out at a gig in Glasgow tomorrow night, then taking the next couple of days off work as my bro is coming over to hang out. Gonna get out and play a bunch of sports and get into the studio to do some jamming with some guys from work which should be fun.

Vegas House
Been doing more work on the Vegas house, I would post some pics and links but I don't want anyone nicking the houses I'm after. ;) Moving towards having a house booked for the end of the month. Some of the places are reeeeally sweet!! Got to find a place that's close to the strip, affordable and that everyone's happy with though. Should still probably have room for another person, so if anyone's interested in staying with a bunch of poker players (we're aged 22-25) over the series, give me a shout!

Training Sites
I don't want to jump on the CR bashing wagon... I'd still recommend people starting out with a training site join CR. The main reason for this being that the community is fantastic and you'll be motivated by a lot of smart and dedicated people. Their SSNL videos are good too, the Brymstar vids are a great place to start.

However... I've been a member at Leggopoker for a month now and I'm really happy with my it. The frequency and quality of the MSNL videos is WAY ahead of CR. The videos are much more fun to watch and I just feel like I'm getting a lot more out of them. How much you learn is really going to come down to the ability of the teacher to articulate his thoughts in the video and the Leggo coaches do this REALLY well. Finished watching all of aejones videos which were fantastic, he touches on concepts I've never even really heard being talked about before. The SEABEAST videos are awesome too, he's just such a good teacher, I'd definately pay this guy the $300/hr for coaching if I was playing 3/6. Overall, I'd happily pay $200/month for this site, It's f***in amazing. If you play 1/2+ get a membership now!

Anyways, here's the lame amount I've played so far this month :) I'm running bad at 1/2, and hot at 2/4... which is nice. 2k hands? :S