Life summarized in 4 bottles.

Cracking month

My previous set up was a desktop, 2 screen (17" & 19") monitors. The upside of this set up is the number of tables without any overlap and the ability to have extra things on the screen without any risk of misclicks like IM's, Holdem Manager Pokerstove etc. The downside is that its damn unsociable.

I recently purchased a 19" Compaq laptop for about £350 which has allowed me to play poker and spend the time with the missus. Same thing different location but she feels like im spending time with her. Fair enough. This, in turn, has led me to lay around one and a half the amount of hands than I usually play a month which has also led to my record month in profits.

Its almost month end so I best not speak too soon. I will post the graphs/stats in a few days once I lock the profit in for Jan.

A Silver Lining - I Suppose

I work for a US investment bank and yesterday saw our stock price plunge over 50%. There are another round of job cuts soon and morale is at an all time low. The economy is f*cked. Not just a little but seriously f*cked. Im surrounded by people who are feeling the pinch. I am now seeing those people that looked quietly confident they could ride this out, starting to crack under the pressure of the barrage of daily news. I still feel we have further to fall. I believe that we are not at the bottom and over the next 3 months earnings season there will be more shock and more suprises from behind the curtains of companies yet to speak. Economically the world is screwed.

With all the bad news surrounding us at the moment I have found one part of this that is a positive to me as a poker player in the UK. The exchange rate to the US$.

Currently, on my trading screen, the spot rate is 1.3803, in July last year we were 2.0

This is great for any winning players. Firstly any $ we have on the US sites have gained 35% value. Secondly any profits we make are also now worth a lot more. We are playing the same level of players but our profits (and losses) are now worth more. This is bad if you are a losing player but great if you are a winning player.

Good winning players should be playing in USD and raking this in while the pound is weak making sure they continue to cash out to take full advantage of this situation.

Jan so far.

Im on a rush! Its been a while. Ive made around $1800 this month which includes that $950 bad beat jackpot.

Even though I try my best to shrug off the times when I cannot win an 80/20, lose all my coinflips and run card dead for a couple of thousand hands it still gets you down and makes you question the game and question your play. Then comes a rush and everything is rosy again.

This is a common cycle I feel with the game of poker and I say every single one if us goes through this. Im 'lucky' I guess that I do not have to rely on poker to pay any bills, never needing to withdraw any funds as I have a well paid full time job but for the players that rely on this income the feeling must be amplified on both up and down turns.

When you are on a downturn remember..

-Tighten up
-Drop down to build confidence and to not play scared money
-Reduce number of tables
-Table select well. Move tables if conditions change
-Review your session
-The good cards will come. Natural distribution


Maybe ill write a bigger post soon on controlling the tilt of a downturn.


Monday funny
http://wiifail.com/

bored at work? try and beat my score.

http://www.blinkyou.com/codes/flash/squares.swf

Bankroll back to $5k

I hit this target just before I came back to the UK. I then had to remove $3500 for some house renovations and have now built that back up. Graphs and stats to follow this weekend.

Im still reluctant to take any shots at 200nl though. I want to feel 100% comfortable at 100nl but still have a few leaks that I need to work on.

I will review this again at $6k


Here's the discussion from the previous post hand range question.
http://www.raisetheriver.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7102

What is Villains range here.

An interesting hand came up last night. I was 3 buyins down from a mixture of some bad play, wrong seating and a few villain suckouts. I thought I was not on tilt but looking back at this hand I see that I limped J8 on the button. This should have been a fold or a raise pf imo. Not weak limping with offsuit 2 gappers.

Anyway villain is an 18/14/2.4 reg over 550 hands. I have no other reads and have not played any real big pots with him before.

Note we are 160bb deep.


$0.5/$1 No Limit Holdem
6 players
Converted at weaktight.com


Stacks:

UTG		($232.10)
UTG+1		($256.15)
CO		($41.85)
Hero (BTN)		($161.60)
SB		($105.05)
BB		($238.17)

Pre-flop: ($1.50, 6 players) Hero is BTN

UTG calls $1, 1 fold, CO calls $1, Hero calls $1, 1 fold, BB checks

Flop: ($4.50, 4 players)
BB checks, UTG checks, CO checks, Hero bets $4, BB folds, UTG raises to $17, CO folds, Hero ?

What range are you putting villain on here ? Whats your next move ?

Any readers are welcome to comment apart from dubs who has talked over this hand in detail with me already.

The Card Virgin

Where have I been...? Well, Over the past few weeks I have been in the process of setting up a card school at a local club. I dont want to go into too much detail in this post but it's something I have been working on for some time now.

Last night saw me giving my first poker lesson with few friends and a few guys I have not met before. I was taken aback by a few questions I was asked by this one guy. He was a friend of a friend and told me he had no poker experience before.

- What value does a King or an Ace have ?
- How many suits are there in the pack ?
- Its probably good to know how many types of cards in this pack. How many Aces are in this one ?
- Is AQ better than AK ?

Jeez, i wasnt ready for that curveball.

Last night cemented the fact that I cannot assume anything when it comes to teaching poker. This guy had never seen the contents of a full pack of cards and did not know the order ranking of picture cards but I assumed, at the beginning, that everyone in the world would already know this.

Another thing I took from last night was that our poker language is very easy to communicate and understand when you are around other poker players but have you ever tried to describe a hand scenario to a non poker player and found that they stare at you blankly as if you have just spoken to them in Swahili. I have to change my language when teaching and stop assuming the world has poker knowledge.

Tom 'durrrr' Dwan challenge accepted.

For those who havent seen Tom 'durrrr' Dwan set a challenge.

“I’m making this heads-up challenge to the world. Anyone can accept. Four tables, minimum of $200/$400, and I’ll put up $1.5 million to their $500,000. We play 50,000 hands minimum and if they end up a dollar after rake they keep the side money or whatever. So basically, if you and I played and you won a dollar, you would get my $1.5 million and if I won a dollar I would win your $500,000.So I’m giving a million dollars free if anyone thinks they can do it.”

He then added another rule which ruled out one player, Phil Galfond, who he must have decided he would not be confident in beating.

He's got 3 acceptances for the challenge.

Phil Ivey
David Benyamine
Patrik Antonious

Details are yet to be finalised. This will be very interesting to watch.

2008 A reasonably successful year

Overall I feel 2008 was a good year for me in all apects of my life. My online poker bankroll grown from 500 to over 6k and live I have made around the same.

I havent played as much as I would have liked, logging 80k hands. I didnt have a 'number of hands' goal but I feel like it should have been around 120k (10k a month)

I didnt manage to play in any large online or live tournaments due to moving back to the UK in the middle of the year then spending a shedload of cash knocking through walls of my house to prepare for the imminent baby.

I am still at 100nl. I wanted to be at 400nl by this time but a withdrawal of most of my online roll resticted any move up to 200nl and squashed any thoughts of 400nl. To be honest though, I dont feel ready for 200nl as of yet. I am 100% confident I can beat 50nl and i want to feel that at 100nl. I am a winning at 100nl but I am still making mistakes, big mistakes and if i do that at any higher level I will be picked apart.

I have learned a lot this year and some concepts have finally clicked into place. I am making less mistakes but still have a long way to go.

So this leads to 2009. What do I want to achieve and what are my plans to get there.

I want to be a winning player at 200nl

I want to log at least 120,000 hands

I want to become better at beating the regulars at my level

I want to make $20k in total

I want a $1000 day

I want to play in atleast 1 $500+buy in tournament

All this is achievable. What I have found in the last year is that you dont just get better by playing. You get better by putting in the effort to find the things that are going wrong. You have to search for those leaks, review hand histories and be open minded when it comes to others opinions about a situation. I have found that having a few people to talk over hand histories, to share your bad beats and your suckouts relly helps your mindset when playing.

I would like to thank Dubspoke for his insight and support. I would like to thank Ray (get yourself a blog) for his help in the first part of the year. I would like to thank the missus who is now seeing the results of all that poker talk. Last of all I would like to thank all the monkeys that played poorly against me and that have a special place in my buddy list. Without you all I would be just another losing poker player trying to figure out what went wrong.

2009 - lets hope the UIGEA gets trashed.

Time to make some real money.

Ryverrat.