LOL donkaments

Well january ended pretty good showing $22k profit, which got me back on track after december. Then february came around and it has all gone tits up again on the cash front, $17.7k down in 2 days. A lot of that came in a 25/50 session yesterday, where i bluffed off a buy in and then recieved this little gem a few hands later.

http://weaktight.com/94428

Gave up after that and logged off, something I wasnt doing in december. Despite the fact it was a rough hand/cooler its still gonna have an effect on my play in the rest of the session so best to stop for the time being.

Ayway came back later in the night after some food and a nap, to play a few tournaments for a change of pace. f.tilt 162, ipoker 50r and 300f/o, and party 200 f/o. Never got going in full tilt and bubbled the 50r on ipoker. The 300f/o on ipoker was going along steadily when this card crash of a hand came up, talk about action flop.


http://weaktight.com/94429 ---------- ugh


This just left the party $200 friday special, i plodded along for most of this comp and then went to work on the 2 bubble periods, the money bubble and the final table bubble. This put me in 2nd position once we started the final. All was going to plan, i was playing small pots, chipping up and then we were 5 handed. I had 340k, 2nd place had 250k and others had 70k/140k with the BB at 8k. For some reason I went after the 2nd place guy big time and it backfired with us gettin all in on the turn, me no pair no draw, obv, and him turned full house magic. Felt like a right twat after that but I still think going after the 2nd place guy was a good idea just needed to apply a bit more subtelty and deft. We get 3 handed and go on break, BB is gonna be 12k, I have 94k, leader has 700k, and other guy 240k. 240k wants to deal, I say no. After a bit of luck and some well timed pushes i was back level with the 240k guy and leader had 500k. Leader ends u bustig with me and the other guy taking about half his chips each so we start HU with equaly chips, me having a few k more. He says chop? Im really tired and there isnt that much play left in the structure so i agree, $9k which help offset the dismal cash session a little.

Funnily enough, the day before dave(geeforce1) had a 20k losing session on ipoker cash and then played a few tournaments later. He took down the 109r on stars for $20k to make him even for the day, lol

Getting back on track

Since my last post I have started playing more regular again at 10/20. Although fighting it out with dave (geeforce1) for the action is tough as he plays 14 hr sessions on a regular basis. Me and dave have been friends for a long time now and came up together in the poker world, we have never played against each other on the 6 max cash tables and am not about to start. We do play live together, usually drunk on 1/2 and its a car crash but great fun.

I feel confident everytime i play again now but will be far more aware to never become complacent again. Ive also been watching some HU videos on cardrunners and trying to improve my HU game. My main reason for this was because at the moment I can only play when the tables are relatively quiet and I am usually the oe starting tables. This leads to some prolonged HU games while I wait for the table to fill and was an area where i was leaking a lot of money in the past.

Just been looking through pokertracker to find some interesting hands from the last week but none really seemed worthwhile posting. I went to see the big buddha on koh samui yesterday (pictured) and is supposed to bring good luck. Seemed to work yesterday as I booked a $10k win, despite losing with AA twice all in preflop for full buy ins. Might be worth visiting every day while im here if it guarantees $10k days, :-).

To address the issue with not being able to play 10/20 all the time I am looking to get a roll going on party as they seem to have 4-5 10/20 games going at the hours i am available to play. I will earn the money first on ipoker and withdraw it before depositing on party. Hopefully that will happen within the next 2 weeks. Its always hard moving to a new site, figuring out the good regulars, looking to exploit them etc.. This takes a lot of time, but needs to done if i want to play 10/20+ on a regular basis which I do.

As far as tournaments go, moorman has been tearing it up in 2008, check his blog. He is on the verge of breaking into the top 10 rankings on pocketfives which would be immense. I am going to try and play a few events in the upcoming ftops on full tilt and play the full compliment of sunday tournaments on a couple of occasions in the coming months. This is to try and keep my tournament game a little sharp in preperation for wsop and also the chance at a $100k+ score, lol. As far as WSOP goes, me, geeforce, moorman and allinstevie should be getting a house. We have seen a pretty sweet place that was apparently ricky hattons base for the floyd merryeather fight, altough that might just be a sales pitch. Dave is in the process of booking it and hopefully it will be confirmed by the next time I post so I can put up some pics.

Thats all for now,

Pab

Time to reflect

After celebrating new year, and eventually sobering up I had time to reflect about why December was such a bad month for me, worst ever in fact. It would be easy to attribute it to running bad and continue as usual, but i think that would be a little naive and immature of me. The 6 weeks or so prior to December were my best on record for online poker and i think that in turn that set me up for the disastrous December. I have reviewed all of my sessions throughout the month and my play gets noticeably worse and worse as the month goes on and on. At the start of the month I felt invincible and felt all i needed to was turn up and win without any thought or effort.

I did seem to run really bad on full tilt to lose the first $20k or so with some horrendous beats that I wont bore you with the details of. However after that I was obviously becoming frustrated and impatient about how my results were going. I started playing the step 5 SnG's on stars for the PCA and quickly burnt through $8k and no package, wp pab. The rest of the month up to christmas I played pretty badly and was leaking money all over the show, and some bad beats mixed in didn't help my situation in the slightest and just increased my frustration. Christmas came and it was break time, drinking took over and poker didn't figure in my daily routine which was good as the $50k losing month could easily have become $70 or $80k.

Since new year as i said i have reviewed all my sessions to determine the cause of December's atrocities. Yes i ran bad but i made the situation worse by tilting and playing bad. I have watched some Cardrunner's videos, something i haven't done since i went on my super hot streak. I am making a conscious effort to play no more than 4 tables and to give them my full focus and not take winning for granted just because i am a good player.

I hope i have learned from my mistakes in December and will be able to tackle running bad in a more professional manner next time which there inevitably will be. I hope now i will step away from the tables sooner and review my sessions in detail to determine the problem.

I have just played my first real session of poker at high stakes since new year and was very pleased with the way I played and how much more in control I felt. $11k to the good i just over an over was a bonus as well. Some of the 10/20 ad 25/50 players on ipoker are just so bad, im gonna name and shame art113 as the biggest donk on the site IMHO. I feel in a much more positive frame of mind about poker again and am hopeful about stringing some good sessions together.


Thanks for the comments to my previous post. Alex, Ukgatsby and m3boy, thanks for the good luck 08 message, same to you guys too. Busted man ill look your blog up as soon as ive published this entry, so a return link would be appreciated, Snoopy - lol


I think i have rambled enough now, bye for now

Pab

Happy New Year

Start off by Saying happy new year to anyone who reads this. 2007 has been a pretty good year for me poker wise, 2 decent live cashes at the start of the year in aussie millions and EPT dortmund. Both seats wear won online so showed a nice profit from the two tournaments. Still dissapointing to be a coinflip away from getting in contention for some lif changing $$, o well ill kepp dreaming.

Online has mainly been all about cash games for me, I have done really well except december on all sites. December has been a complete write off with it ending about down $50k. Not the ideal way to end the year but since the rest of the year that preceeded it was v.good i think id be a fool to complain too much.

I am 50/50 about going to the aussie millions again in January 08, the main factor in going is that I would only have to pay 50% of the buy in due to a deal I had with geeforce during a $1k super sat. After that nothing really planned until vegas where I hope to go out for the whole series and rent a house with a few poker friends and genereally have a blast.

My main goals for 2008 are to keep improving on my cash game play, and to make a final of a tournament with at least 1k sterling buy in. This might be a bit optomisitic as im unlikely to play any in the first half of the year but its still soemthing id like to do. Hopefully it will be one with a TV appearance as well for a brucey bonus.

Thats about all for now, Gl to everyone in 2008, have a great night tonight and see you on the other side

Bit of a lull

Not a lot been happening pokerwise really, after my last bad session during the nightmare macau trip I didnt play harldy any poker up until about 5 days ago. It was a mix of being ill, no solid internet conection and doing some touristy stuff in Hong Kong that prevented me from playing. Put in quite a few hours over the past 4-5 days and they have been very very frustrating. One session the other day, I ran into 8 sets in little over an hour playing on 3 tables. 1 time I had nothing, 3 times I had an overpair and 4 times 5 I had 2 pair, sigh.

Money wise i have just been treading water really, win 2 buy ins 1 session lose 2 the next. I feel like i am playing pretty well but my timing seems a bit off, hopefully that will come right soon and turn the break even sessions into winners. No idea if this will be my last post before xmas but if so Merry Christmas to all.

Macau trip report, sigh

So, after much deliberation I decided to go and play the APPT macau event. Macau is a place I wanted to visit and coupled with the face that a few people I knew from the UK were going I was looking forward to a good trip. My flight from singapore gets delayed which means I miss the turbo ferry out of Hong Kong and it takes me 4 hours to get from hong kong to macau. Check into my hotel at find that there is no internet facilities in the room, wtf. After a pretty goods sleep I get a taxi to the Grand waldo hotel and set about trying to buy into the tournament. I go to the cashier and ask fro $5000 from my visa debit card, no problem sir blah blah. 10 mins later, sorry sir it needs to be a proper credit card. Am looking for anyone that might know me who plays on stars who can lend me some cash but nothing materializes. Finally bump into rick and booder but none of them have any spare cash. Speak with a pokerstars rep about buying in from my stars account, no go. Eventually get a name of a guy staying in the hotel who might be able to help. 20 mins later and a guy opens the door of his hotel room and hands me $4k cash what I transferred to him on stars a moment ago and quickly closes the door without saying a word.

Eventually fill out all the paperwork and get bought into the comp with 15 mins to spare, phew. I was an alternate though and they had already squeezed some extra tables in beforehand so there was no chance of any more so i had to wait patiently. If i hadnt travelled so far and had all the BS so far i would have not bothered playing. 1hr 40 mins in and I finally get a seat. I hit peak of around 14k stack but never really get going. No real hands of note before we enter the 150/300-25 level with me on a precarious 8k. 3 limps in front of me and I limp with A2 clubs on the button, SB completes and BB checks. Flop comes K 8 2, and it is checked all the way round, turn is another 2 and the SB bets and the BB calls, action to me. The SB has played some of the strangest poker I have ever seen so far, he limped for 200, and after a short stack pushed for 2k who was called, then another guy is all in for 4.5k, he calls the 4.5k leaving 3k behind. The other guy in the pot who called the original short stack push also calls the 4.5k total. Flop comes 8 high and they both check, turn is a K and one guy pushes and the guy who originally limped for 200 passes, he said he had 99. So back to my hand, the SB could have anything and the BB is likely on a draw, I push all in and the SB calls and the BB passes, SB flips KK and im toast. Such a weird hand, but im never passing in that spot.

Because I busted before the dinner break I was not issued with a ticket for the buffet, how tight? Rick and booder also failed to make the dinner break. I went back to the hotel and ordered some room service, 4 hours later and misfortune number 400 for this trip strikes and im shitting through the eye of a needle for the next 2 days with barely 10 mins between each sitting. My ability to play any more poker, sightsee, or hang out with rick and booder gone, I was happy to check out and get to the airport. I will definately try and re-visit macau at some point to exercise all the demons from this trip. Also Ill make sure im bought into any tournaments well in advance as being an alternate sucks.

I should have sensed bad things were going to happen on this trip as the day before I left I played an online session and dropped $12k on ipoker, but to be fair I played really bad and could have easily lost more. Since then I have been playing on Full tilt and managed to drop $25k making nice $37k downswing for the week, weeeeeeeeeeeee. On my mac at the moment so dont have any hand historys to post, but my last session on full tilt was painful, 3 times all in on the turn with nut str8 vs set, lose all 3, one for $8k pot at 10/20. Another two buy ins were set over set and the final straw for the session was AA vs QJ all in on Q high flop. A pretty rough week overall, but the downswing on poker was probably to be expected as I had the crazy $100k upswing over 3 weeks not long back. Probably gonna stay off the poker until december kicks in, forget about november, lol

Change of plans, viva macau

Firstly sorry for the lack of updates but i made some radical changes to my travelling plans at very short notice and to be honest just forgot about the blog, oops. I decided to vacate Australia as I didn't want to spend 6-7 months in Sydney as ive already spent a lot of time there in the past. Wasn't an easy decision leaving some of my good friends there who im sure will have a great xmas and new year.

My immediate plans has seen me make my way to macau for the pokerstars APPT which should be a lot of fun, as well as catching up with a few mates from home rick trigg and booder from blonde who both won seats in the step things on stars, :-) I hope there is still space to buy in when I arrive so fingers crossed. It will be my first live poker comp since wsop main this year so am really looking forward to it. After macau live poker goes on the backburner again until wsop 2008 where I hope to be out there for the whole series.

Gotta end this post now as im on a 30 min interent timer and no idea how long is left, will try n put some pics up from macau and write a trip report on here, drinking is bound to be involved.

3 way chop 1 time stars?