NEW HORIZONS

Hardly much to speculate on the last few weeks......poker has been put aside giving me time to prepare for the approaching trip. Congratulations to the handful of betfair players and regular bloggers who cashed in in the wsop, i can't say the past weeks haven't aroused intense jealousy. I guess there's always next year, i will make my mark on the live circuit i just need a sponsor, a higher bankroll and less of the 'crazy eyes' when i have a good hand. Not many online poker anecdotes to titilate the expecting reader's palette, however i did manange to make a tasty profit under a different pseudonym on the $10/20 then $25/50 tables.
Aside from gambling i've mostly been abusing the late nighters as everyone seems to be having some sort of leaving do or other. I can only assume that as 30 seems to be the golden age for weddings 25 seems to correspond to a time in one's life where unachieved goals are cloaked by the need to search for prosperity elsewhere, perpetuating the 'quater life' crisis. I can't say that i'm any better, taking a year off to travel feels like a last ditched attempt to embrace the little freedom i allow myself and in a sense i feel shadowed by the formidable prospect of returning home to settle down.
Whatever the outcome, i look forward to the next few months and should cast aside any melancholic feelings i have toward change and realise this is a time of transition where i should embrace the unknown. It just seems that poker leaves you static and fuels the pervasive feeling that it really is a big unknown.

THE HAPPY PUNTER

Well it's been a while and not much to comment on in my illustrious career as a poker player. I have only returned to the tables about 5 times since my last post only to have my frustrations re-affirmed by the nomadic gamblers who insist on buying in for the minimum amount only to persist in following up a large pre-flop bet with a continuation bet on a low flop and then leave the table. Do these people have nothing better to do than sit and relentlessly watch a table before parading their dignity across the cloth? As the featherbrains needlessly cram the pockets of those lucky enough not to get unlucky , i can honestly say that i have fallen short in every sense of the term. For me, luck confutes the popular idea that it is something that exists in accordance with success and brings good fortune. Instead luck manifests itself out from the ordinary to impede bad luck, acting merely as a barrier to fence off impending misfortune. This ill fate has managed to evade the shadows which probabilty and likelihood cast over it and in doing so, permeated my game with outdraws and horrendous beats. As i stated, luck is not just good fortune.....anyone can apply fundamental mathematics to poker and win pots through applied calculation. Luck in poker is to maintain this without yielding to bad luck.

This seems all too pertinent after two all ins played today. Thankfully they weren't on the higher stakes but still a large loss in relation to the ongoing sufferrings of my bankroll. The first one was warranted by a wreckless tool who had lost a third of his stack a few hands before and insisted on calling and raising with rags. I'm on the button and raise $20 on 2/5$ to four limpers with A Qo. Immediately the tool (BB) re-raises all in, roughly covering my $300 stack and everybody folds to me. My reasoning to call being
1)Would he have made the same move with AA, KK? the only real danger hands were AK QQ, however i thought he would have played them less aggressively as he probably would have preferred a preflop call.
2)This was the 3rd time i had raised his BB and been outdrawn to reveal moderate hands.
3)Tilt was prevailing
4)I put him on low pocket pair and felt i was due a trophy in a race.
All this speculation was swiftly reconciled as he turned over A Js after my deliberated call, and surprise surprise.....a jack on the flop ended my campaign. This, i have little qualms over, if it was not for the onlaught of ridicule and hate which ensued i would have shut the laptop and been on my merry way. As it was, i was subjected to the pitiful chant of exultation born out of one's delight for online 'luck'. The character in question assured me the call was the worse of the two, however in retrospect i pointed out the ignorance of his bliss and headed out for lunch. I don't mind the silence of the savage but what i can't put my finger on is the tyrade of abuse for having in my eyes made the correct call and been intensely unlucky.

Another joyous encounter occurred a few days back when i got involved with another one of betfair's online delightfuls. However, this delightful punter was on the losing end of a largish pot. Looking down at A 3 hearts i call a $5 raise in late position by an early raiser. With 3 callers (a total of 5 people in the pot) i decide it's worth a shot. Fortunately the button folds to give me absolute position and my luck is fastened by a flop reading Ac 4h 5h giving me top pair, nut flush draw and gutshot straight/ flush. The field checks to me and i make $20 to play. The initial raiser calls immediately before the rest fold, boosting the pot up to around $90. The turn brings a useless 7 spades but not quite as useless as a $25 raise into a $90 pot. So.......................i call. At this point i'm sure he's playing AQ AK with a raise in early position and find it unlikely he would raise UTG with small pocket pair, diminishing any notion of slow playing trips. The river brings a 7 h giving me the A high flush and any suspicions of slow playing trips (by this point; the full house) subside with his hasty check on the river. By this point the pot has amassed to a palatable $140 to which i resumed with a further $110 bet. A hasty call was all it took for this unsavoury oik to break down in a deluge of abuse over the $25 call on the turn. In response, i added that the $25 bet into the largish pot allowed me to draw whilst holding top pair with nut flush draw and the gutshot straight. However my estimation of a $90 pot to be 'large' was apparantly 'pathetic' nonetheless not quite as pathetic as his estimation of a $25 raise. Any comments? i give up and can only assume he was Scandinavian or had the charm of a jacket potatoe.

In addition to my ramblings on the glamour that pervades the online community, i would like to take a moment to applaud the cretin who ended my chip n' a chair experiment about 30 minutes ago. Having won a £1 tournament i used the £5 on heads up which quickly turned to £15. This was shortly doubled to £30 on a low stakes cash table when my KK hit trips against AA. Taking the £30 to a $1/2 table, i arduously grinded for an hour or two until my stack was around $150. Amazing! all from £2. My optimism was further fuelled by two players at the table who called with any pair. Happy days.........until i look down at pocket 10s on the button. 3 limpers had me raising to $8 which got folded round to my companion on my left who re-raised to $18. Having seen the cards he was wetting his pants over i called without hesitation. After the flop came low (3 6 8 rainbow) i took a gamble and went all in against his $60 remaining after his check. What happens next? The usual; Gus thinks his Q J o is ahead and makes the call ??????????? and of course catches a jack on the turn. What kind of a monster?.........if it were not for that call i would have had so much more in this post to write about. Instead i wait, clucking away like a crackhead in a phone box, anticipating my next session. In all seriousness, i shall make the comeback to the woes of online but feel i need some time off before returning and have found myself tied down with more important issues.

Not much else to inspire the journalistic muse however i did decide a couple of weeks back that i was going to cash in a certain amount of the bankroll and take a year off to travel the world. Having already spent most of my late teens and early twenties dithering around the globe, i have gathered my wits and deicided upon the nomadic existence for a while. And so....i pack and move next month and with the transience of a restless hobo i hope to find new lands and take my tanning to new extremes and perhaps, play a few hands.......

6 PAC MAYHEM

Once again i return to the confines of my blog, reaching out to the desolate void on the woes of online gambling. Monday was disastrous as far as 6 pacs go. The first few were a breeze, working on a profit of about 700 until my 88 preflop push was not good enough against A8 with the blinds still low against an equal stack. Plumtting out in 3rd, i reloaded only to find myself in an identical situation 40 minutes later holding AQ. An all in call from 74 s, then a 7 on the flop was my happy slap exit. On to another and time to tighten up and keep the tilt monster under the bed.
Unfortunately the bed began to rumble and out the tilt monster came, consuming my soul like a pie eating contest and a brief apology from a fellow player did little in the way to consol as his A4 outdrew my AK after an UTG all in. Once again, another 3rd place finish. Whatever happenned next i can't really recall in hope of shunning it from the archives of my poker days. For the following hour and a half, i went on what can only be deemed as a multi-table 6 pac rampage. Manically floating from table to table, i managed to squander 1k in what felt like minutes. What seems more detrimental to me at the moment is that tilt manifested itself in a whole new manner in the 6 pacs. Whilst not contending with the patience of cash games, i find 6 pacs to be tiresome during an unlucky run of outdraws. At least in the cash games, with the static blinds, most big decisions are made after the flop where you can generally afix cards by patterns of betting and raise/fold accordingly.
Tournaments however, are merciless to outdraws as most players get all their chips in preflop in the latter stages. Coupled with a few bad calls and a hideous fall of the cards i became possessed by tilt and savaged four toblerones and two cheese and pickle sandwiches whilst trying to focus on three or four tables. Thankfully, a shower and lunch with a friend brought my sugar levels down and helped gather my wits before returning ready to embrace the cash rooms. Four hours later and a 1.6k salvage operation ensured that i walked 600 up for the day.
On reflection, what does this binge mean for my short handed tournament game? Am i simply inept or should i remain impervious to outdraws and bad beats and assert more discipline over my play?

WANTED CASH

Been a while since i last updated and things seem to have gone from bad to worse. Can't seem to get the cards to go my way and everytime i'm up against a lesser hand i get outdrawn in every pot including the many races i find myself in, in the latter stages of the big mtt's. The bankroll has been substantially hemorrhaged the last two weeks where large losses have perpetuated fear and allowed my game to be dictated by trepidation. Post loss analysis has led me to believe that fear of being outdrawn is the main factor to my overbetting the pot when i think i have the best hand only to find out 10 % of the time i don't. Whilst i realise that i have displayed restraint and discipline my game still lacks a tolerance for the long haul when my cards go dead and i take a bad loss. There is a certain amount of lack of respect i have for the 2/5 tables and cant seem to adapt my game to the lower stakes after a continuum of losses on the higher 5/10 10/20 rooms. Whereas i realise this is integral to any cash game, my bankroll has suffered as a result of moving up stakes when running bad and tilting. I need to learn better bankroll management if i am to avoid an inevitable swing. Speaking to another well known cash player online, he finds his remedy in the larger 6 pacs which mitigates the swings.
So far this month 7.2k up having narrowly missed my 10k target before nose diving face first into a nauseating, hot diffusion of pain and anger during a disatrous spell of cards and play. It feels almost therepeutic venting my frustration into the empty void that is my blog but hope that soon i shall return with riches amassed from a set holding up against a flush draw or pocket pair withstanding AK. Anyway, this incessant jiberring has upset me and resurfaced some of those tilt demons. i will most probably take the next week off and begin the recovery after a well deserved break. Seems all to much of a shame as there was talk of going to Vegas 2 weeks ago for the world series but i guess that can hold. One thing i do intend to do is update a better log of some of the hands i play but with the losses have found it easier to contemplate my overall game and chronicle a disheartened sentiment......sigh

AN ITCH IN THE GAMBLING ODYSSEY

Having decided to pack in the daily grind of work, i decided two months ago to cash in and turn my semi-professional habbit of online poker into a full fledged search of long term profit. My story started out from the same heap of small stake wannabes who had managed to overcome the 50c/$1 blinds and soon found myself graduating to the 2/5, 5/10 and eventually 10/20 tables on cryptologic. Although most of my time has been divided amongst 2/5 tables, i have recently found the higher stakes to be much more lucrative.
The month started off badly when my set of queens with a king kicker were rivered to a full house Q 4 (4 on river), all in on turn, by a wreckless player who was not perturbed by my 12.5 k push on 25/50 table. There was however some comfort in the fact that i had worked an $800 stack on a smaller stakes table up to the 12k on the 25/50 table so only £500 down for the beginning of june. Since then everything seemed to be going swimmingly with a profit margin of about 9.5k for june, until.....today. It still confounds me how certain players can justify and rationalise moves they make for such large quantaties of money. Without this sounding too much like a bad beat rant, i do fully appreciate the benefits of bad decisions for those who understand the fundamentals of good play, but it seems little in the way of consollation when days of solid play are absconded to some half wit who thinks his A 10 is ahead on a 10 j 3 board against my J 10...to the effect of a 2.5 k re-raise of my 400, calling me all in, to pull off a running straight.
How can these players justify themselves as honest human beings if not just pathetic rats, scratching around the depths of others misfortunes. My pervading thought tells me that these reprobates will get their ill awaited comeuppance...just why cant it be against me?