Poker Blog

I arrived back yesterday from a relaxing few days in the Kilkenny countryside. Since I moved up to Dublin 6 months ago it’s pretty much consisted of playing poker or out gallivanting on the session so it was nice to take a breather away from it all. With a fresh head on me I was eager to hit the tables last night. Despite feeling in top form I ended up self-destructing in the few I went deep in…I blame that country air!

I’ll be grinding online today and might play a live tourney tomorrow. After that it’s down to Stradbally for the Electric Picnic. I haven’t gone to a music festival in over a year so am looking forward to it. There’s a decent line-up and I’ll be aiming to see Leftfield, Massive Attack, LCD Soundsystem, Modest Mouse, Hot Chip, Crystal Castles, Afro Celt Soundsystem, Beardyman and whatever else. Not sure if they’re clashing time wise but I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end. It def would have been better to have the few days of relaxing after the picnic as no doubt I’ll be a shambles of a man the week afterwards.

If by chance I don’t update my blog here next week, don’t worry…it prob just means I’m still wandering around a field blind drunk.

There have been a couple of things in the poker news that caught my eye this week.

First of all, how about this for draconian? In South Africa, a new law is being proposed that will make all online gambling illegal, including online poker. The penalties for breaking this law are ridiculously harsh, at least in theory: you can get a 10 million Rand fine or sent to prison for 10 years, or both. (Don’t you just love the “or both” clauses in these laws?)

It’s not just the operators of poker sites who can be punished. Players too, will be breaking the law just by playing online. Even internet service providers can be arrested, making South African poker legislation just about the harshest in the world (except perhaps some Middle East or Taliban controlled countries, but I’m not really up to speed on their laws to be honest). Of course, all poker advertising in the media will be illegal under these rules as well, but not just yet though. The ludicrous proposals are being appealed and until a decision is reached on the appeal, no-one will be packed off to prison just yet.

It is the casinos who have lobbied hard for this apparently, obviously to protect their own interests by not losing business to their online counterparts. Seemingly it doesn’t appear illogical to those in power to hold brick and mortar casino gambling as legal while outlawing the exact same games because they take place over the internet. What they are proposing is the same thing as allowing Waterstones bookshop to carry on trading but making it illegal to buy a book on Amazon.

So the appeal will give the poker industry some time to get their act together in opposing all this nonsense, while also affording the casino executives and those in power an opportunity to mastermind more stupidity.

Can you imagine being deep in a tournament and having your doors kicked in by a load of moody South African coppers just as you flop the nut flush?

The second thing that caught my eye was a story about a very public argument between big name poker professionals Daniel Negreanu and Annie Duke. With all his self promotion, Daniel Negreanu might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is true to say he is generally regarded as one of the nice guys in poker. You could even go as far to say he is even a bit of a goody two shoes in his pursuit of attaining that nice guy image. So it was with a degree of surprise, and no little hilarity that I learned he had gone on record as describing Annie Duke as er, how do I put this, as an “effing c u next Tuesday”.

Seriously, that’s what he said. The two have never seen eye to eye apparently, but he really let rip when a question about Annie Duke cropped up in interview. He had taken umbrage at her inconsistency in wanting sexual equality for female poker players yet simultaneously describing herself as “the best female poker player in the world” on her website. Personally I would have just chided her for a) telling blatant untruths on her website b) being ridiculously big headed, even if it were true that she was the best and c) having her own website, for it has been scientifically proven that 99% of people that have their own website are knob-heads.

But he chose to go down the effing c u next Tuesday route. And you know how Americans hate the c-word.

To add insult to injury, or maybe I should say “to add insult to insult”, Pokerstars, who sponsor Negreanu,  responded to a complaint from a random customer with this comment:

“Daniel Negreanu is… an entity to himself and as such will always be encouraged to express his views and speak his mind as he would otherwise do so, PokerStars Pro or not”.

Blimey. Sounds like Pokerstars aren’t too crazy about her either!

Annie Duke responded by writing an open letter to Negreanu’s employer. Her letter started calmly enough and her opening gambit was:

“I am not offended by Daniel’s opinion.”

Bloody Hell, I would be!

But she got a little bit carried away. After claiming that she was being “logical” she went on to say that with Negreanu calling her that rude word he was offending ALL women.  I have to disagree with her on this. Yes, it is an offensive word and it might even be true, by some stretch of the imagination that 100% of women are offended by it, but he isn’t saying it about ALL women is he? I mean if someone nicked my wallet and I shouted down the street at him “stop you thieving little ****”,  I wouldn’t be saying it in order to offend all the women in the world, would I? So I don’t agree with you there Annie - I’m quite sure he was just referring to you.

Then she went off on one, asking Pokerstars whether they would be so blasé if Negreanu had offended all blacks or all gay people? And this is where she doesn’t do herself any favours and I start to lose sympathy for her. Because he hasn’t has he? Besides, what a daft comparison to make, equating her being called the c-word with offending the entire black community.

Speaking of daft, sometimes my own stupidity knows no bounds. Having got acclimatised to the heat in Rio, a steady 22-30 degrees in winter, I had stopped bothering using sun cream. But yesterday was a bit hotter than usual and there was this cooling breeze to disguise the heat. So after six solid hours on Lopes Mendes beach it looks like I’ve been boiled alive.

Imagine a really angry Phil Mitchell. Marinade him in a vat of red wine for 2 days, add a liberal sprinkling of crack and tell him you’ve just burned his house down. If you can picture Mitchell’s face after all that, and then imagine someone a shade or two redder, then you’ve got some idea of how red I am right now. 

I’ve moved by the way, which has probably helped contribute to this tanning problem. It was only a 5 hour journey but that’s far enough for the climate to change sufficiently.

On Wednesday I travelled three hours by bus to this little port town called Angra Dos Reis and then I did a 90 minute boat trip to this beautiful island called Ilha Grande (translation – “Big Island”). I’d never even heard of Ilha Grande before I got to Rio but I’ve met dozens of people who have been here and without exception they all raved about it, apart from the poor guy who spent four days here when it rained non-stop. “You have to go there”, “it’s like paradise”, “you will love it” were some of the things I was told.  “Well everybody can’t be wrong”, I thought, so here I am. And I can confirm that they are all spot on. This place is the nuts.

Its name is “Big Island” but it’s not that big really - it is only half the dimensions of the Isle of Wight (not a dissimilar shape either). There are 106 beaches and a good deal of the island is covered in thick forest. There are all sorts of wildlife here and you can hike through the trails in the forest so I’ll stay here for a while I reckon and go exploring. With any luck there will be photos of howler monkeys to come. The whole island is ecologically protected by law and it really is perfect. These laws are quite recent and have only been required with the growth of tourism since 1994 that could have jeopardised the island’s beauty if unchecked. You see, there is a good reason why an island only 90 minutes away from Rio is completely unspoiled – there used to be a maximum security prison here !  This tended to scare off the visitors, but in 1994 they blew it up and tourism has taken off. And why wouldn’t people want to come here? The beach I spent yesterday getting burned on, Lopes Mendes, is said to be the most beautiful beach in the whole of Brazil. And there’s a lot of competition in the whole of Brazil! 

I just have one question though. Having seen how beautiful the island is, and seeing it is home to potentially the single most beautiful beach in Brazil …. why would you chose this place to send the convicts to?

Why not send them all to Australia?

Sorry I haven’t updated my blog in a while, its just hard to find stuff to write about when i’m not playing poker. Well, thats all about to change as I leave for EPT Vilamoura in the morning and I can’t wait. Taking a long break has made me really hungry and excited to play again. I’v got the fire back, so hopefully I can run/play well! For the next 3-4 months I am going to immerse myself in the game that I love.

Just got back from Spain yesterday after another little trip down there with some friends. Was serious craic, but it’s safe to say I will not be drinking for the foreseeable future. It was kinda cool, I ran into Rory Mcilroy down there who I used to be on the Irish under 15 golf team with. Had one or two drinks with him and listened to him talk about his near major win at the PGA the previous week. Got pretty owned by him as we were leaving, I asked him would he and his friends like to come to this club with us, the DJ Fedde Le Grande is playing. To which he replied ”Na, its cool, think we are just gonna go back and have a party on my Yacht”

The only thing gambling related I have to talk about is winning a nice chunk on the PGA. I had only two bets, Mcilroy and Kaymer. 100 euro each way on both of them. Scooped about 6k for it, not bad for a bet I made for interests sake. Was really sick what happened to Dustin Johnson in the PGA, the guy played so well. It was very impressive to watch, particularly after his blow up at the US Open. I’m sure himself and Mcilroy will win a bunch of majors between them over the next few years.

Thats all for now

Nick

On Thursday I headed to Athy for a friendly home game. Arrived at 4pm and had a beer in hand by 4:01pm. That pretty much set the tone for the night as the beer and poker was kept flowing till 7 or 8am. Out of the 4 STT’s we played I cashed in 0. This was very little to do with luck and more to do with me turning into the biggest donk in the world with drink on me…I’m enough of a donk when sober but this is more of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde kind of thing.

There was great banter had throughout the night and many a sore head the following day. I was supposed to head back to Dublin on Friday but we ended up hitting the golf course. I’ve only ever played golf once when I was about 10 so cant say I was too confident about even hitting the ball in my hungover state. There were some very dodgy shots but enjoyed it very much although we only played 9 holes, sat down for a few cans and skipped to 18th. After that we headed back to the house and it was pretty much a repeat of the previous night.

I played a few mtts online on Saturday night but was regretting it about 2 hours in when fatigue set in. Needless to say there was not much joy. Sunday was a different story as I played 4 mtts and cashed in 4/4, the best result being in the $109 $25k Double Stack. I won entrance via a 5-man SnG sat and finished 3rd for $2,660. I was disconnected when we went 3 handed which was frustrating as feck and have to say thanks to the 2 other players, castaspell and WayneRoooney, for slowing down the play in order to give me a chance to reconnect. There are many out there that would do the opposite so fair play lads! There was a good battle hu between them but castaspell kept his chip lead that he had for the entire final table and held on for the win.

So anyway, things are heading back in the right direction and hopefully it will continue. Will be taking a few days off from tomorrow down the country for a poker and binge drinking free few days…it’s very well needed!

I don’t have a great deal to report on the poker front as it’s only been a few days since I last posted and in that time the internet situation hasn’t improved where I’m staying. I’m just being lazy really – there’s nothing stopping me from going to an internet cafe and putting in some sessions there. But I’ll sort that out soon.

Actually I haven’t been that lazy. I’ve been doing a fair amount of graft on the study side but now I think I’m in danger of overload. Do I actually need 3 million statistics on each opponent? Perhaps I won’t be able to see the woods from the trees if I do too much more. As it is I have 8 miniaturized tables of 6 players on my screen, and when I switch on the tracker I’ve 10 tracker stats over each player so that’s (8 * 6 * 10) bits of info. And now I’ve got my own customised stats on scraps of paper for the 25 players I’ve been stalking. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. I’m kidding myself if I think I can keep an eye on all that.

At some point all this work can actually become counterproductive. Patrik Antonius won $9m last year online and he said in an interview that he had never even looked at a hand history until after he crossed swords with Isildur1 at the end of 2009. That says it all really.

On the other hand, I mentioned David Sklansky last week and I just wondered this: for all his books and theoretical work, what has he ever won? Well I just looked that up on wiki and I can tell you that the bearded one has published 13 books and won three bracelets – all between 1982 and 1983. That’s not exactly prolific and I know who I would rather risk my money against.

It’s whatever works for you I suppose. But I am of the view that the best way to improve at poker is to play as much as possible.

Last week I said I’d be looking for a new place to stay and that I had a place called Barra da Tijuca in mind. Hence the title of last week’s piece was “On the Road Again”.  The perceptive reader will notice that the title of this piece is “Not on the Road Again” and that is because I’ve actually visited Barra now.

It’s not that Barra da Tijuca isn’t a nice place - it is.  After all, this is where the Rio Olympics will be held in 2016. Like I said last week, it’s got an 18km beach, including Prainha - the most beautiful beach in all of Rio (so they say but I didn’t manage to find it).

But it’s just so….so dull. There is a massive long road that runs parallel with the 18km beach and I passed through the area by travelling down this never ending straight road. And all there was along this road were new build condos and shopping malls, for miles and miles and endless miles.

As I looked out of the bus window all I could think was that “this place reminds me of Las Vegas”. Not the actual Las Vegas Strip, as I don’t think there’s another place on earth like the strip - but one of the many giant parallel roads that carve up the desert, like Sahara or Paradise. Then I realised that this road we were on was called Avenida Americas. It seems that this area is actually modelled on America. This is hard to believe because the Brazilians I’ve met aren’t exactly crazy about the US. I suppose they only started building Barra in the last 30-40 years, which might explain it, but I didn’t come to Brazil to live in cloned US suburb. 

This is posh Brazil – where the footballers’ wives live (and the footballers I suppose). Yes, it is very nice but like Miss Macintyre used to tell us at school, the word “nice” doesn’t really amount to much, does it? What sort of a word is “nice” anyway? Well it’s a perfect word to describe Barra da Tijuca. Yes, Barra da Tijuca is “nice”.

It’s very clean and it feels very safe. I’ll bet it’s one of the safest parts of Rio and they will no doubt want to keep it this way for the Olympics . Of course there are lots of beautiful people here, lots of beautiful upper middle class people in their mirrored glass condominiums. Whatever.

What I would say to anyone who does come to Brazil for the 2016 Olympics though, is “spend as little time in Barra as possible!” It’s a damn shame to think that people will come to Brazil in 2016 and only see the inside of some Barra Shopping Mall. If you want to do that you might as well go to Dubai.  Or Birmingham.

Heading home from Barra, when someone on the bus told me it was known as the “Brazilian Miami Beach” that sealed the deal for me. I’ll be staying put for a while. Yeah, give me Copacabana over Barra any day, with all its crime and pimps and hookers.  At least it’s got a bit of character. Ha ha, I’m probably not making any friends with the Rio tourist board here.

Put it this way - if Copacabana was a madras curry, then Barra da Tijuca is a cheese sandwich. A processed sliced cheese sandwich at that. On white bread.

But if Copacabana is a madras, Rocihna is the vindaloo.

Rocihna - the largest favela in Rio

 

Rocinha is the biggest favela in Rio with a population of 150 thousand. That’s an estimate as I’m pretty sure they haven’t conducted a census. There are 800 favelas in Rio apparently, but whatever the exact population, Rocinha is easily the biggest.  They have a saying about the favelas:

Living in a favela is an art
Nobody robs, nobody hears, nothing is lost.
Those who are wise
Obey those who give orders.

When night falls you can see all its lights twinkling from up the hillside. The funny thing about this is that no-one pays for their electricity in the favela – all of it is stolen from the mains.

You can get a guided tour of Rochina if you want. At the hostel I’m staying at they organise favela tours. When I left Praia do Rosa to come to Rio my good mate Joao, a Brazilian, said to me “please don’t go on one of those tours. And make sure you give shit to the people that do”

He is right of course. The argument in favour of the tours is that the money from the tours ends up in the favela and improves the quality of their lives. But who does the cash actually go to? I don’t expect the people who run the favelas are elected, are they?

No. It’s just morbid voyeurism for rich westerners. So I’ll be perfectly honest, I am a morbid voyeur, no different to everyone else and I want to look around a favela. But there is no way I’m going round with a load of wet-behind-the-ears tourists with cameras.

So when a guy from the hostel who has friends up in Rocinha offered to take me round there on Wednesday morning I agreed. He vouched it was safe where he would be going and mindful of my views of these tours he told me in the exact words that this was “not a favela tour”. However, come leaving time, 15 other people appeared - English Aussies, Americans, Kiwis and my Austrian mate Hannis.  “I thought you said this wasn’t a favela tour” I said to the hostel guy. “It isn’t”, he replied with a straight face. Hmmm. I was getting a funny feeling about this. It was obvious what he was doing: he had asked us to meet around the corner from the hostel and he was just taking us on his unofficial favela tour, probably a bit cheaper than the hostel’s version with some of the proceeds going into his sky rocket. No problem with that, but let’s not pretend that it isn’t a favela tour shall we?

Just as we were about to get on the mini bus, I bumped into Pedro, a young bloke from Rio that I’ve become mates with.  He asked me where I was going and I told him we were off to Rocihna but that I had my doubts because I had sworn I wouldn’t be going on a favela tour. He said “Rocihna, wow, I’ve never been there”. Then with a puzzled look at the group he said “that is a favela tour”. Well of course it was.

That was it for me. If Pedro has never set foot in Rocihna and he has lived in Rio all his life, what business do I have going there? So when they all got on the bus I didn’t and I told Hannis “sorry man, this is just a tour and I ain’t going”.

Later that night one of louder members of the group told me what a great day I had missed, how fantastic it was, how a select few of them had met some of the top boys and had their photos taken posing with AK-47s and pistols. This justified my decision not to go. Who wants to stand around boozing in a shanty town with a bunch of gun toting middle class “bad-asses”? (I’m sure there’s a rap in there somewhere).

Mindful of Joao’s words, I told him what I thought of favela tours and said although I wanted to go, I wouldn’t be seen dead in there with 15 gringos, nothing personal.

I got a slightly different viewpoint from Hannis. He said it was amazing how all these people who were living in abject poverty were so friendly and welcoming. One woman even let him hold her 5 month old baby.  They had a few beers with the locals and he said it was funny watching one old boy of about 70 snorting his coke off the back of his hand in the middle of the street. I was surprised there wasn’t any bad feeling from the residents but it must be said that the average Brazilian is friendlier than the average European. That’s what I’ve noticed anyway.

And I might just yet get my chance to go to Rocinha. Hannis tells me that they have a very wide selection of high quality cameras on sale there. 100% legit I am sure with a full money-back guarantee and online help available.

Anything imported in Brazil costs an absolute fortune, including cameras but I need to buy one. I’ve got a little confession to Joao and his fiancée Natalie, who lent me their spare camera in May. It’s broken, or more correctly, I broke it. I don’t know how exactly but it doesn’t work and I need to replace it. So ironically, I would like to go to the favela to replace Joao’s camera. Ha ha!

In fact some lads from the hostel went up there again this morning, just a small group of four, including a local. But I had to decline the offer because I had to write this blog. Who knows, perhaps WW3 breaks out in the favela today and maybe I’ve been spared from some terrible fate because I was busy writing this?

Paddy Power could have saved my life!

So things have picked up a bit over the last two weeks. I’m still grinding the low buy-in mtts and trying to keep it to no more than 4 tables at a time. It has definitely helped as I’m focusing more on actually “playing poker” rather than just depending on tracker stats and playing abc. I played around 50 micro/low mtts over the week, final tabled 5 of them and shipped 2. It’s a grind but I have to say I’m enjoying it. I feel like this experience has brought back the hunger to win again which I seemed to have lost. I think I got used to running like the sun so it kind of caught me off guard when things took a turn for the worst. It’s a lesson learned and, although I’m not out of the woods yet, I’ll be more prepared for it next time. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that…

That’s pretty much it for now and it’ll be the same for a while until I’m happy to move back up. At least I can start playing satellites again so if I manage to sat in and bink something it would speed up the process. For the moment I’m in no rush and content in the fact that I’m back moving in the right direction:)

I had been planning to put in a minimum of six hours poker a day last week but the curse of the internet struck me again.  During one session I was disconnected whilst playing 8 tables but luckily I got the connection back, finished my games and got out of there faster than a brown-panted Ross Kemp. Miraculously I didn’t lose but the writing was on the wall after that.

Every day since then, I checked the internet speed and did a “ping test” before playing. If there was any problem whatsoever I just didn’t risk it. Unfortunately there have been problems so I haven’t put in a shift since Tuesday. 

I did manage to buy that little piece of poker software I was talking about in last week’s blog though. So instead of playing this week I did a ridiculous amount of work analysing my opponents’ games. You know, how often people raise from the button, whether they limp and then re-raise and so on.  I got quite into the geekery of it all, to the point where instead of looking forward to actually playing I was waking up in the morning and thinking “oooo, I wonder whose game I can look at today”. I can be incredibly sad sometimes.  If I carry on like this, one day I’ll look in the mirror and David Sklansky will be staring back at me.

And nobody wants that.  

There’s one guy in particular I’m looking forward to doing battle with though, having studied his game harder than anyone else’s.  In fact I’ve been paying such an unhealthy amount of attention to this particular person’s habits that the next time we play I will practically know what he is going to do before he makes his own mind up. 

I have a bit of a confession to make here. There is one hard core regular (who shall remain nameless) that I play against who puts in such a huge volume of games that I swear he must never sleep. Whenever I log on to play, he is there, sitting at every table that I am playing at. He doesn’t just “multi” table – he MEGA tables.  Plus he always seems to be in the small blind or button relative to my big blind and he always ends up sticking me all in at some point. I don’t mind this – I just call him a bit lighter - but he is just so unbelievably lucky.

And this is the real issue. I swear that he is a witch who sits there stroking his black cat Satan as he bad beats me again “Deal me a five for the inside straight Satan, let’s crack Freddie’s aces again”. And then a five rolls off as he and Satan both cackle an evil laugh.

He never ever speaks in the chat box either. I tried to ask him about his volume, how he could play so many games and so forth, but he never replies. Finally, after a million bad beats I emailed the support staff at Paddy Power saying I had my suspicions that there was a player on the site who was not legit. “No-one can play that many tables for such long periods”, I moaned.   “I think he’s really a computer” (a “bot”).

Straight away I got a reply saying that they would look into it and so I waited eagerly to see what they came back with. Now I’ve got to say this was a pretty desperate move on my part. Looking back it was more in hope than anything else – a sort of: “please be a robot and please let them ban you so that I won’t have to play you again”. After all, would I have cared if I was beating him all the time?

Within a few hours of sending this email I got a shock. Someone made a ridiculous play against my nemesis and put a bad beat on HIM for once. And in the chatbox my witch-with-black-cat-nemesis made a sarcastic comment like:

“ha ha nice play”

Huh? He spoke!

“So you’re real then! How come you never speak” I asked him immediately. “I thought you were a robot!”

“Sorry mate, too busy to chat”. And back to work he went. Ooops.

Well I dare say he is probably too busy to talk with the likes of me when he is playing three million hands a week. I told him how amazingly jammy he was, just for the record and all that. I think he found that quite amusing. 

Later I got a very polite email from support saying that although their investigations were confidential they were absolutely satisfied this was not a robot at work.  Of course I already knew this by now but I had forgotten to email them the “news” of my discovery and ask them not to bother. How embarrassing.

Personally I find it a big effort to play more than six tables but some people are naturals. Of course he wasn’t a robot, or a witch with a black cat - just a very good poker player who is also very good at multi tabling.

When you’re playing sport and an opponent really gets on your nerves you can almost guarantee they are playing well. That’s not always true of poker, but it certainly was in this case. It’s the highest compliment I can pay him that not only did I wrongly think him of being a robot, I have basically stalked him for the past week to work out how he ticks.

But I’m glad I have. To quote Terry Pratchett: “If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star… you’ll get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”

Yeah a bit of hard work doesn’t hurt. Now I know that he flat calls with AK, how he plays AA-JJ at each blind level and what sock he puts on first in the morning when he gets dressed. The thing is, none of this will help me, I guarantee it. Next time he puts me all in with 87 I will call with A7 and he will river an 8.  That’s poker.

I suppose I ought to put this hard work to use though and actually do some playing though. Just as I travelled 1100km north to Rio in search of a better connection, I ought to make tracks again in search of my holy grail – a decent wireless connection that never cuts out.

I’ve been in Copacabana for nearly 11 weeks now, so maybe it’s time to move on. I hear Colombia is a fantastic place and I will definitely go to Buenos Aires at some point. But it’s cold there just now and it will be until about November. I can get cold weather at home so Argentina can wait.

I do love Rio though so maybe I’ll stick around here for a while. There’s a place in Rio called Barra de Tijuca which has an 18km beach, so I might find a hostel there with a good wireless connection and make that home for a month.

Rio. Be a shame to leave completely just because of the internet wouldn't it?

By the way, a friend of mine took a picture of Cristo Redemptor during the world cup (below).  The powers that be in Rio decided to dress up Cristo with a bit of green and gold lighting so that all around Rio you could see this:  

But if this was supposed to bring good luck to Brazil, their plan failed completely. Within one day of this colour change, Brazil were knocked out by Holland. Oh dear.

And do you know what happened next? 100 thousand Brazilians emailed the Catholic Church to complain that the Dutch team were robots, led by van Bommel who was in actual fact the Terminator.  Honest.

I have just returned from holiday in Puerto Banus in Spain with 4 friends. I had an unbelievable time but right now my body is having a tough time dealing with the affects of staying out partying till 8am 5 nights in a row.

One of the nights we got a table basically on the dance floor when the DJ Bob Sinclair was playing in this club called Dreamers. It was unbelievable craic. I wouldn’t have been a Bob Sinclair fan before, but I am now. It was crazy in there!

Most days consisted of waking up about 2pm and crawling down to the pool to attempt getting a tan. Then about 10pm we would begin the beer/vodka consumption. We played alot of ‘drinking poker’ before we went out to clubs. How it works is you bet in gulps from your drink. This got quite entertaining, particularly when we changed it from NLHE to PLO. I made one of the sickest calls of my life when I had a ‘few’ beers on me. Calling my friend Wendel’s shove on the river with 22A5 with the board reading, Q4439. The celebrations that occurred when I revealed two deuces was quite entertaining. Obviously this is a terrible call, but it was pretty funny in our slightly drunken state.

We made some good friends out there also which was cool.  Firstly a profession MMA fighter from Dublin who is also a talented poker player. And secondly and more importantly a cool group of Norwegian girls from Oslo who party harder than any group of girls I have met before! Scandi birds >>>>>>>> All other birds

Its 12.30am now and I am up in 5 hours to fly down to Kerry to take part in the World Invitation Father and son golf championship. I’v been before and its such an enjoyable few days, just hanging out with my Dad and playing a great golf course. My brother and my Dad won it a few years back, so theres a bit of pressure to deliver.

Apologies about the lack of poker content, the break from poker is nearly over. First on the agenda is EPT Vilamoura at the end of the month, straight to Cannes from there and then onto London. I’m pumped for it and itching to play!

Later

Nick

So I’m a big quitter. I played 255 6man SnG’s, both super turbos and turbos, on the first day. I was down 19 buy-ins at the end although my tracker, with $EV adjusted, showed I ran 17 buy-ins below EV. It was mainly when I’d get to HU that the doomswitch was clicked and that’s where it’s important to be running good as the % difference in payout has a substantial effect on returns(1st=70%, 2nd=30%). I definitely set the bar too high with the ROI target. I’d be confident it’s possible to achieve 10% in $11 turbos and most certainly in normal speed but I doubt it’s maintainable in super turbos. Anyway, whether it is or not, I wont be the test subject to find that one out! When I woke up the next day I told my mate I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork then do that again. He laughed and said he’d settle the bet for a few pints.

So I decided to go back and start grinding the micro mtts. As well as running like a two-legged dog lately, I feel I’ve been doing a lot of “auto-piloting”. I reduced the amount of tables I’d normally play on a big grind, cut out browsing the interwebs while playing in the early stages and focused more on what was going on at the table rather than depending mainly on my tracker stats. I feel this helped a lot and kind of went back to the roots etc. The week was still a grind and a 1/2 as I continued to go deep but run into trouble in the important stages. A killer was in the $17.5k $10 rebuy on Friday night with 14 remaining and I shipped my stack with AKo, called by the chip leader’s KQs and a Q hit the river to KO me. That would have set me up for the final table but wasn’t to be. I give out when folk go on about standard bad beats so will leave it at that…they just tend to hurt when running bad.

Anyway, I had a good run at it last night going deep in the majority, making 2 final tables and shipping 1 of them. It was a $4k GP with a $5.50 buy-in and received just under $1k for 1st. I’ve always said that I get a buzz from shipping an mtt no matter what the buy-in but, after the recent bad run, I can tell ya that it felt extra good! It was like a weight off the shoulders and did wonders for the confidence. With hope I’ll be back playing the bigger games again soon(it sucks to be missing out on the FTOPS atm) but for the moment I’m gonna stick to the micros and hope that this is the turning point.

As usual, The B-Team bounty mtt is on tonight and I’ll be there with the lads so hope to see you there. Till then, happy grindin’!

What with the World Cup and one-thing-or-another (for there is always one-thing-or-another) I didn’t play much poker in June and July. So I resolved to put in some serious volume during August. I vowed to play eight tables at a time every day until my eyes bleed - a noble aim indeed as I am sure you will agree.

This new work ethic really paid off. I was getting good cards, winning games, the hours were mounting up and so was the profit.

“Things are looking up”, I thought. “Next month I’ll go up in stakes”

And that’s when I realised something for about the 100th time in my life. Only this time it will be the LAST.

If you ever, ever start to have ideas that you’ve got poker cracked you are in for a nasty shock. This game has a habit of slapping you in the face. Your JJ vs his AK fails to hold and your AK vs his JJ fails to hit. Eleven times in succession. Or my personal favourite, the one that never fails to put a smile on my face (not) - my AK vs his 88. I flop an ace, he rivers an 8. That sort of thing. Add in a bit of human error as well, such as clicking “call” with 94 offsuit when someone is all in and accidentally entering a $300 tournament instead of a $50 buy-in (and losing it), and all of a sudden in the space of two sessions that nice pile of cash has been decimated into a very meagre one. It happens.

I’ve not gone broke or anything. I’m still a small winner but without the terrible beats I’ve had put on me I would be a mile ahead.  I put my hand histories through Holdem Manager (an excellent statistics package for poker players) to view my “Expected Value” winnings, ie what I would have won with normal luck. Instead of drawing a graph of my profit and loss it put up a message saying “don’t cross any roads today – you will definitely get run over”. Honest, it did.
If you start to think you’ve got the right to win then that slap in the face is as inevitable as the next Danny Dire film being a crock of shite.  Of course it’s good to be confident - personally, when I’m confident my reads are better - but complacent - forget it!

It’s happened so many times now you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. I think the exact point at which I started getting delusions of grandeur was when I started thinking about going up in stakes and actually counting my future winnings. So I will never have this idea again. That’s not to say I won’t step up in stakes because I hope I do. But I won’t start counting my chickens again. Ever.

More important than the bare results is that running badly (and losing) can actually affect the way I play. It shouldn’t but I think it does because I’m just not as fearless when I’ve been slapped down with a few beatings.

I’ll give you an example: when I’m running hot I say “I’m in the small blind - do I shove Q3 into the big blind for my last 5 big blinds?”

I reason that “it’s for half his stack - he’ll probably only call 25% of the time” so I shove. He usually folds and I usually win. Even if he calls I might hit. But when I’m losing I fold because I think he’s going to call. I might recall he called me last time with K10 and so I fold.

The important thing isn’t winning or losing that hand, it’s making the right decisions. And that Rafa, is a FACT. So today I shall buy the standalone version of Sit n Go Wiz and analyze all those games I lost. Sit n Go Wiz is a computer package that tells you whether you made errors in the end games of sit n go tournaments when it comes “push or fold” time. Yeah, let’s see what SnG Wiz has to say about the way I play. I would have bought it in June after my 30 day free trial expired but you can only buy it online and I didn’t have a bank card because of that little fraud I told you about in a previous column. But hey presto, on 2 August my new bank card arrived, a mere 50 days after I requested it. Well done Halifax.

When you play a lot of poker you do get these swings. Even a top player could play 1000 sit and gos and break even. It’s unlikely, but eminently possible. And if you play for long enough, it will happen. If you play a lot, you have to learn to take the rough with the smooth.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a couple of blokes a couple of weeks ago. Earlier that day I’d been sat at the beach chatting to this very pleasant lad from Scotland. He’d asked me how I was funding my trip and I said I was running a bit short so I’d really need to play some serious amounts of poker. Now later that day he must have told these two lads in the bar because all of a sudden they rocked up and sat themselves down next to me, and like he’d known me all my life one said:

“So you’re the poker player? How much do you make?”

Now this has to rank as a top 5 most personal question you can ask someone. I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone what they earn and this bloke doesn’t even know my name. And it just so happened I’d had a losing session before I came out an I wasn’t really in the mood. I gave him some answer about it being hard to say, how I never play the same amount of time each month and how short term luck affects results, even over a month. I absolutely did not give him a figure.

“So how much do you make on average?”

I obfuscated again. Well it’s none of his business is it?

“What’s the most you ever lost”?

Blimey, why can’t he at least be nosey-happy instead of nosey-schaudenfraude and ask me “what’s the most I ever won”?

Fair enough, they were a bit tanked up, with me being stone cold sober on the smoothees so I’ll always cut a man some slack. But why do I always get in this sort of conversation? I managed to change the subject by introducing myself and asked them about their travelling. I assumed they were travelling but he was actually on holiday. One of them works for a firm of actuaries apparently, the other I forget, but he was reasonably posh bloke with a home counties accent and he had this superior demeanour.

Despite this I was impeccably polite to them and not in the least bit spiky. But then one of them said something that irritated me. After I’d been speaking about poker he looked me, turned to his mate and said “Maybe I should start playing poker”. He might as well have said “if you can do it, anyone can”.

So I told him this: “If you’re thinking about doing it, I’d offer you this advice: as with any form of gambling, if you dislike losing money more than you enjoy winning money then it probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you really love winning then you might enjoy it. Now everyone likes winning money and dislikes losing money, so I’m talking in relative terms here. Liking winning more than you dislike losing. See what I mean?”

He didn’t say anything and I managed to escape soon after and leave him with that thought. To be fair he probably thinks I’m an idiot. Maybe I am, because I sure as hell dislike losing more than I like winning and I still play the game.

Like I say, I was polite to him but perhaps if I had ran into him last night after my horror sessions I wouldn’t have been. Just think how that conversation might have gone:

Bloke: So you’re the poker player?

Me: And you must be the sex-case. Because you really do look like a massive sex-case. Sorry mate, just a little joke of mine.

Bloke: How much do you make?

Me: None of your effing business pal. Just kidding, ho ho. Seriously though, it’s hard to say.

Bloke: How much do you make on average?

Me: Sigh. So as well as not being able to take a hint, you’re unsubtle as well as nosy and think your’re being clever by asking me to take an average as if I ‘m not able to see through that little plan and I’ll just tell you. OK then, one hundred million pounds.  By the way, how long is your penis? Can I see all your medical history notes?

Bloke: What’s the most you ever lost?

Me: I never lost a game of poker in my life. Not one hand. Ever. Do you think I’m some sort of loser? Are you calling me a loser? Would you like to know what I do to people who call me a loser?

Bloke: (looks at me, turns to his mate) Maybe I should take up poker

Me: Sure, and I’ll take up snooker for a living. That’s really easy as well. Then I’ll win a golf major because if John Daly can then so can I.  Piece of piss, hole-in-one.

Bloke: I don’t follow

Me:  You know what the worst thing about poker is? It isn’t the downswings - it’s talking to the likes of you.

Bloke: Uh?

Me: Look, I’ve got nothing against posh people, or people who went to private school, it’s just that you are an enormous tit. As for doing what I do? You look like the sort of bloke who has never had a bet in his life. You probably buy stocks and shares because you think it’s “respectable” but you cry when you lose £10 and then try to sue your stockbroker. I tell you what, instead of gambling, why don’t you stick your money in the bank at 1% and buy some Premium Bonds if you’re feeling really wild?

Ha ha, perhaps my recent run of bad luck has brought all this back to me. But he’ll never know that this is what I really think. He probably thinks I am a very polite individual with somewhat strange advice, and not at all bitter, twisted or two-faced. Good to get it off your chest though isn’t it?