Thailand #1 - Patong Stories

I don't think I can be assed writing down a ton of things that have happened on here, there's way too much and there's way too much to do! I'll be posting when I have the time so there could be a bunch of gaps between updates.

Putting pics as we go on facebook... so check there if you wanna see. Will Flickr them at some stage. Actually maybe this link to FB works, if not just friend add me.

For the first 4-5 days we've been partying in Patong, pretty muching drinking and degen'ing up every night. Over the last few days we've travelled around a bit, a different city/part of Phuket each day looking for a nice spot to get a house. We're in Phuket Town today but it's not as nice as we expected so won't be getting a house here. Too big/busy, and not enough cool bars or beaches.

In some ridiculously baller suites on the penthouse floor of a hotel at the moment. We have 2 balconies, 2 TVs, 2 huge rooms each lol, free upgrades ftw!!

Some random stories...

We rented motorbikes (what they call 125cc scooters here) and rode them around some of the southern coast yesterday. Was absolutely STUNNING. We passed a freaking elephant in the wild at some point!! Amazing high up costal views of islands and clear waters. We checked out a get town on the coast called Kata, will almost certainly end up staying there.

We were looking for somewhere to have some shisha a few night back, a couple of girls took us over to a bar they knew. Ended up being the sweetest pool hall ever, off some side street. Pool halls in Thailand rock, there are always cute girls who work rack the balls for you at the end of each game. Played the girls at doubles and they constantly hustled us and insisted that we make crazy shots, great fun and we kept lucking out ;)

... anyways, the point of the story was that I went to the toilet in the bar, I'm taking a piss at a urinal and some guy comes up behind me and slaps a wet towel over the back of my neck. I was like wtfff. Then he starts chatting to me... I continue pissing... quickly, then he starts giving me a shoulder massage lol! While I'm pissing!! As I finish he grabs me by the head and says relax then sharply snaps my head to the left, heard it clicking twice, then he did it the same the other way. I was pretty wasted as we'd been drinking all night and smoking shisha and it was pretty hilarious so I just went with it. I head over to wash my hands and he starts doing some crazy stretches on me, at one point I'm pretty sure I remember him putting me in a full-nelson and lifted me up! Anyways, I tipped him 50baht and left in amazement... back did feel good though!

Patong is insane, it's a total party town. When you go out it's pretty much impossible to come back before 5am. One night we went out to play some bowling and ended up making drinking crazy prop bets on everything which escalated real quickly. By the end of the night we were buying rounds of shots everytime someone got a gutterball. Ended up going through rounds of every shot on the menu, including some crazy Thai whiskys. Last bowling game finished 114 to 113 to 112 in my favour, pretty crazy. We headed into central Patong and hit up a ton of bars, played some Jenga, Connect4 and crap like that, ace fun. Got completely wasted, ended up getting back to the hotel at 7am, ordering a 4pint tap thing, then shipping full english breakfasts. Then came the ridiculous decision to go sleep on the beach at like 8am. Woke up by tourists around us at like 11am completely sunburned and wasted lol. Felt so ill the next day I couldn't eat!

Speaking of food, it's fantastic here. All of the Thai food is really really good. Every restaurant menu has a ton of food too in a ton of different styles, you can get pretty much whatever you want. Eating sweet thai food is real cheap too, we ate at a nice place off the beach last night where a beer and Thai green curry was like £3. Thai beer is great too, Singa is awesome and Chang is like the Thai Stella. Hookerbeater imo. 6.4% but tastes really good, you can get them for 30baht on the beach, that's like 60p!

Peace from Thailand...

Will update soon... honest

Been really busy, mainly drinking. So much freaking stuff has happened that it'll take me like 2 hours to do an update now too... nngh!! I WILL do it over the next couple of days though!

Thaaaiiiiiiiiiilllllaaaaaaanddd!!!

We've arrived :)

Weather is real nice, very hot in the day and the perfect 25-26 at night. Air conditioning ftw.

Flights were good, Thai Air rock.

Patong is probably the trashiest place I've ever been in my life. It's fun, but looking forward to shifting closer to Phuket Town.

Thai girls are HOT.

Traffic is crazy, there are loads of scooters/mopeds, you see tons of random shit like 4 people on a moped and pickup trucks with like 8 guys in the back and stuff.

Thai beer is pretty delicious, and relatively cheap. £1/bottle is pretty do-able.


Some pics...

Hotel
Street the hotel is on
Chilling out after arriving

Today is Thai food sampling, pick up a sim card, beach, more drinking. The house hunt starts tomorrow.

Asia-time

Leaving for Phuket in a couple of hours. \o/ Kind of nice timing as it just started snowing here! Looks pretty warm there :)

Got my final jab a half hour ago so I'm good to go, I just need to avoid getting bitten by dogs, bats and mosquitos :P I'm done packing, all of my belongings that I'm not taking are at my aunt's house, and all my Thai stuff is packed. I'm bang on the 20kg for hold luggage, and slightly over the 7kg for hand luggage as my laptop is a beast! Just gotta give my keys back to my flatmate, who's giving me a lift to the airport in an hour.

I'm meeting Craig at Heathrow and we're both on the same flight across to Bangkok then Phuket. Will be meeting up with Erik when we arrive, we're staying here for the first couple of nights and will start searching for a sweet 3-4 bedroom house right away. Will probably head for breaks in Singapore in about a month, and Malaysia in a couple of months. Will have to hit up Bangkok at some point too.

For the next few months I'll be writing mainly about life type stuff. Kind of like a journal for the trip sort of thing so I can look back on it, kind of like Vegas last summer. Saves me tellling the same stories to a lot of different people on skype too.

So for the last few days I've been hanigng out with friends/family, played pretty much no pokers. Was nice to see everyone before I headed off, cheers guys if you're reading. Had a poker game a few nights back, beers/thai-foodage/party a couple of nights ago, movies night on Sat night and packing with my Dad/bro last night followed by some food at Hard Rock. Been mostly drunk/hungover for the past few days, worth it though!

Oh yea, my Dad/bro left at like 10pm last night and took a bunch of stuff like paperwork, etc that I might need them to access for me when I'm away. I still hadn't packed for Thai yet and just had a ton of stuff on my bed that I kind of hoped was everything as I hadn't made a list. I then realised that my travel insurance and PASSPORT was in the file I gave them to take away. Fortunately caught them before they got over the bridge as it's a pretty long drive :O Organisation fail.

18-hours of flights time, yuck. Next post will be from Thailand...

Hand-reading and mental focus

I usually play a hand or two in each session where as soon as we showdown I realise I've made the wrong play. I'll look back on it after the session when reviewing in Holdem Manager and see with little investigation that I made one or more glaring errors.

When playing a session things can distract your focus from playing a hand correctly and cause you to mis-interpret villain's range, this causes mistakes. These distractions could be multiple hands occurring simultaneously when multi-tabling, being distracted by something away from the screen (someone talking to you, etc), or tilt.

So I'll take a look at one of these types of hands, this was from a session today where I quit directly after making this mistake. It's pretty non-standard so I'll explain the reasons for the way I played it afterwards.

^ Big Bang ~ To The Mountains

$2/$4 No Limit Holdem
Converted at weaktight.com

Stacks:

UTG		($902.20)
Hero (UTG+1)		($1209.90)
CO		($979.50)
BTN		($1409.20)
SB		($156.00)
BB		($501.40)

Pre-flop: ($6, 6 players) Hero is UTG+1

1 fold, Hero raises to $8, 1 fold, BTN raises to $30, 2 folds, Hero calls $22

My minraise is a misclick, I meant to make my standard potsize open. Villain is a spewy 42/27 player who from his stats appears to 3bet wide. His BTN 3bet is like 9% which is pretty high.

Flop: ($66, 2 players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $45, Hero raises to $115, BTN calls $70

The flop check/raise is a move I'm kind of playing around with, the idea behind it is that my hand does very well against villain's range but will likely be difficult to play on turn/river due to overcards and villain barreling a high percentage of the time. The idea is to bet pot and try to take it down right then which I think is gonna be profitable outright. There are downsides, like inflating the pot with a marginal hand, etc. But anyways, I'm going off on a tangent, on with the hand...

Turn: ($296, 2 players)
Hero checks, BTN checks

River: ($296, 2 players)
Hero checks, BTN bets $155, Hero raises to $455...

Going over the session in HM afterwards I could see I made an incorrect bluff on the river here. Normally I'd stop analysing the hand there, but this is one of those spots where I KNOW I've made the wrong play... I don't really learn anything from reviewing it. But here what I'm interested in is WHY I did it.

As with a lot of these spots the reason why I made the incorrect play is down to neglecting one hugely important rule. In the words of Selbst & Sensei, before we make any play we should first ask what villain's range is. It's fundemental to every single move in poker, and most important to think about when pulling bluffs and non-standard plays. We first ask ourselves what villain's range is, then we determine the best play versus that range. So why didn't I do that during the hand? ...

When villain calls my checkraise on the turn his range is now pretty polarised. Thing is when he calls my checkraise I get a tiny bit tilted, not much but just enough to throw my mental thought process off and affect my handreading. For a few seconds my mind gets filled with thoughts like... 'fuck he called', 'maybe that was a shit play', 'damnit, that pisses me off, now i'm in a tough spot', when none of that is beneficial to my situation.

What I want my mind to be doing is thinking 'ok, he called... so what is his range now?'. I want to eliminate any negative and unuseful thoughts from my conciousness. I didn't do that here, and when I got to the turn I had a 'fuzzy image' of what his range was because I didn't think about it clearly. I hadn't correctly taken into consideration the huge impact that calling the checkraise made to his range because I was a little tilted. If I don't have a solid perception of his range, then I can't play the rest of the hand correctly.

So what IS his range after the call? It's flush draws (8h9h+ and suited broadways) and TT+ (sometimes 99). There are 9-10 FD combinations and around 30 overpair combinations. He rarely has anything else really due to his 3betting range pre and the check/raise call.

So turn check/check is correct as I'm behind his range.

River completes the flush, he bets half pot. At the time my first thought is if I raise here then my line will strongly match a turned boat or rivered FD. He'd often think I'd check/raise flop with sets/FDs, I could check turn with those hands too then make a strong play on the river for value. So he'd almost always be up against at least a flush. Pretty solid thinking I reckon, but what part did I leave out? Villain's range!! His range is 'fuzzy' to me now, and I decide to just make the play because I feel that it's a good spot.

Without having a good idea of villain's range I can't determine how much he'll fold and therefor how profitable a bluff would be. If I had been clearly analysing his range after the flop I would realise that it was all flush draws and big pairs, obviously flushes are never folding... and noone ever folds overpairs. I could probably get TT to fold, but that's about it. So a bluff here is horrific.

For the results oriented amongst us, villain timed down and wound up calling with QQ.

"Somebody's probably going to go broke"

Phil Ivey has accepted 22-year old Tom Dwan's open challenge to play 50,000 hands with him heads up at $200/$400+ online. If Ivey is up on Dwan at the end of the 50,000 hands then he'll get an additional $1.5m. If the Ivey is down, he'll have to ship Dwan $500k.

If the match goes ahead it will probably be the biggest and most talked about heads-up online poker game ever. Dwan has stated that they have to be multi-tabling across 4 or more tables, in either No-Limit Hold'em or Pot-Limit Omaha.

Some random stats... in his last 50,000 of hands online Durrrr is up somewhere between 6 and 7 million dollars. Phil Ivey is up around $2.5m in 18,000 hands. A lot of that was at higher stakes ($500/1000), but even still you can get a feel for the sort of crushing someone could take over 50k hands.

David Benyamine and Patrik Antonius are also reported to be considering Dwan's bet. The matches will likely take place on Full Tilt Poker and 50k hands will take a month or two to play.

Durrrr stipulated that the only player in the world not elidgable to take the challenge is his friend Phil Galfond :) “A lot of people are confident in their game, but no one I’m aware of has ever backed it up like this,” Galfond said, of Dwan's challenge. “As far as the challenge being open to anyone but me, I take that as one of the highest compliments I’ve received as a poker player.”

Beck, tilt, and thousand dollar river bluffs

This will probably be one of those posts that's more for my benefit than anyone reading it. Good to clear my head of a lot of things that are irritating me.

Pretty poor start to the month. I'm not getting as much volume in as I'd like, mainly due to there not being games running on the site I play at the times I'd like. I'd really like to grind right now, but there are like 2 mid-stakes games running. Currently getting set up at a 2nd site, waiting on money wiring and I should be good to go there this week.

Swings are pretty brutal at the current stakes I'm playing, so I've decided to stop shot-taking at 5/10 for the rest of the month. Now that I need to withdraw 'wages' from my bankroll each month I think losing another few buy-ins there would stress me out too much.

I'm like $3k down at 5/10 across a very small sample of hands there this month, there were 2 hands that I played badly and 1 where I got owned by a good regular. The latter I'll go over in coaching, but here are the first 2 which I know I misplayed...

Hand #1
In this hand we're $2000 deep, I flat a 3bet in position with QJss vs a very loose 3bettor with a high 3betcbet. My image at the table is very tight. Flop came 963cc he cbet $210 into $255, I bluffraised to $500, he thought for 10secs then called. Turn was a 4o, check-check. River was a 2o, he checked, I bet $1000. In hindsight his range is pretty polarised to TT-QQ and flush draws. There are more overpair card combos than there are FD combos and I'll never fold an overpair so I just gotta check back.

I remember a bunch of thoughts running through my head like "I can't win this pot without betting", "I don't want to show this down as I'll expose my flop play to villain", etc. Unfortunately in these spots at 5/10 I my mind kind of glazes over and I don't handread as well, I tend to look at the amount of money in the pot, get excited and misplay my hand. Something I'm working on fixing.

Hand #2
This occurred around 5 mins after the previous hand. The previous hand tilted me, but I thought I could play on. Evidently that was not the case. I isolate 67hh from the HJ, CO and UTG limper call. Flop is 89Thhs, I bet, loose/bad CO calls. Turn is the Qs, I check, villain bets pot ($280) with $500 behind. His range here is so polarised to the J here that I need to fold, but I make a tilted shove convincing myself that he could be betting a FD which is rarely the case.

Even after this hand I still played on, which in heinsight was a really bad decision. I gave myself the reasoning that my image was now so bad at the table that I could just nit it up and get paid off a ton... an excuse I used to give myself ages ago to play on tilted. The fact was that I did play on tight, but weak/tight and tilted, which is bad and outweighs any advantages of my poor table image. In future I won't play on tilted under the reasoning that my image is bad, I need to regain focus or quit.

Big leaks I gotta fix
1) Stopping spewing ;D I'm making a TON of river bluffs and high variance plays at the moment, really to get a feel for how effective they are and just generally try new things out. 5/10 is not the place for this! Hence why I won't be playing any more of it until the end of the month. But yea I'm working on plugging the spew, but I knew this would happen as I work more aggressive plays into my game and put myself in more tough situations so I have to accept it, but work on fixing it.

2) Getting tilted then taking 20mins to realise I'm playing weak/tight and quit the session isn't acceptable. I need to be able to recognise that I'm off my A-game and quit instantly. No excuses or conditions take priority over this. State of the games don't matter, my image doesn't matter and needing to log a lot of hands doesn't matter. I must analyse my mental state and quit within a few minutes if neccesary.


Other shit
I got my tourist Visa for Thailand today... wooooooo! I also managed to get some last minute jabs that I almost missed, one of them is a course of 3 injections the last of which I'm getting on the morning of my flight out... close!!

Been helping my flatmate interview people to fill the spot in the flat I'm leaving in Edinburgh. It's been fun, there are a lot of wierd people out there :) Went out for an Thai meal last night, had this amazing fruit curry with pineapple, grapes, lychees, delicious. Went to the awesome Stand comedy club in Edinburgh where they had a newcomers night, they have like 10 different acts who get different lengths of time based on how good they are. Was pretty awesome, some absolutely terrible acts, but some of the guys were really funny. Shipped free tickets for Slumdog Millionaire tomorrow night which I've heard is fantastic...

13 days to Asia-time \o/

Coaching

I believe that the best way to improve and plug leaks in your game is to have a player that has crushed your limits give you 1-on-1 personalized coaching to plug your leaks. I'm currently offering coaching to NL players at $50nl & $100nl for $100/hour and players at the $200nl level for $150/hour.

Sessions
I'm very flexible to whatever you want to use my time for. I'd suggest starting out with a railing session on Teamviewer/Skype playing in your current games so I can get a feel for your skill level and tailor your coaching to suit. Further sessions can be structured with more railing, you railing me play in your games and hand reviews or database reviews. I also find it very effective if you record a session of yourself playing and we review it together pausing to discuss tough spots and explore strategy.

In addition to this I make myself available to discuss hands outside of sessions (using weaktight.com) so that you can gain instant feedback on hands you have trouble with. This gives you an accurate response to how you've played a hand rather than a lot of varying and largely inaccurate responses when posting on a forum.

Results
The best way to check my most up to date results is using PokerTableRatings. Send me an email (bazclef at gmail dot com) if you're interested in coaching and I'll let you know my screen names on the sites I play. Or you can give me a shout and I'll send you a screenshot of my results from HEM. My most recent posted results are here.

Experience
My students enjoy the benefits of my experience and resources in a bunch of different areas. In the past I've been coached by Verneer(CR), Messiah(DC), Hookem148(CR) and DJ Sensei(DC). I'm currently coached by Bobbofitos(LP). I'm a member at all of the major poker training sites and own a copy of the $1.8k Slowhabit/CTS books. I've played poker seriously for over 3 years and have been a pro since the start of this year.

Recommendations
"Barry is a great coach who thinks very clearly about the game. Many players have what it takes to be a good player, but few have what it takes to also convey those thoughts that make them a good player to their students. Barry is one of the people good enough to do both well. I highly recommend him as a coach."
~ BTimm

"Barry very quickly recognised the areas for improvement in my game and his clear communication and reasoning helped me make the changes easily. Most importantly, it's had an instant affect on my results!..."
~ TDM83

"+EV"
~ Anomaly16

"Barry's strengths come from the combination of his logical thinking and mental focus. As well as him helping me plug the leaks in my game and teaching me to think through each hand in a way which has infinitely improved my game, the amount of emphasis he puts on all the other aspects of the game such as game selection and playing your A game at all times to name only a couple, is what has really helped to change the way I think about poker."
~ Mcronix

"Public Health Warning.

Hiring Barry will have serious implications on your poker. He'll chase Mr Weak-Tight from the door and give a Mr Nit a good kicking. He jumps on your leaks quicker than an enthusiastic plumber. Working with him allows you to tap into the mind of someone who has been there and done it at your stakes.

The only downside to hiring Barry is that he's Scottish so probably spends your money on Special Brew, tabs and string vests."
~ Dog

"Baz teaches people to think about the game rather than just telling you to bet here or check there without knowing why, which imo is exactly what you want a coach to do. At the end of the day you won't always have him sitting over your shoulder and telling you what to do so knowing the correct decision to make and why is vital.

As well as being a great coach he is great guy as well. Always there when you need him and you can tell he takes a genuine interest in your game and how you are doing. Hiring Baz was easily one of the best decisions I made as a poker player and like anything in poker, good decision are always +EV."
~ Wonderflop

"I'm glad i took baz as a coach. The main thing i wanted was a coach who would be available to answer to all my questions, and not only during coaching times. He helped me to deal with a lot of situations, to improve my in-game/out-game thinking process and also with psychological issues towards the game. On top of that, he's a really nice guy !"
~ Sedeete

Drop me an email if you're interested, I'm bazclef at gmail dot com.

Happy New Year

December was a pretty weird month, over my last 2 days of play I had my biggest ever swings losing $3k a few nights back before having a sick $5k day yesterday, all at 2/4! This will likely be the last month I'll post results...


So overall 2008 was a fantastic year from me both at and away from the tables. GTA shipping was one of the biggest achievements in my life, turning pro has been my dream since I started playing poker I'm really happy to have taken the jump, it rocks.

My only real poker goal for 2009 is to make $150,000. I'll be advertising coaching hopefully by the end of this month, looking to take on around 4 students preferably at 50nl/100nl. As for my own development I'm very excited to say that I'll be getting coached by DJ Sensei from DeucesCracked this year. I think he's the perfect guy to help add more creativity to my game.

I'm booked to fly out to Thailand on the 19th of January, not too far away! Looks like there will be a ton of 2p2ers across there, probably around 10-15 dudes! I got a 1-way ticket so don't have to rush back or whatever, will likely stay out there for 2-3 months. Will try to get to Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong too. Pretty fucking excited :)

For me 2007 was the year of hard graft, 2008 was the year of change, 2009 will be the year of freedom.

Have a great year, all the best.