Back To Blogging!

Back To Blogging!

Friday, 27 April 2012 | 3 comments Tweet

Its been a good few months since I put up a blog post - but not mainly down to my own laziness this time! I've actually been spending a lot of time putting in big volume and working on my game. I've been trying to be a lot more efficient with my time when I'm playing so there has been far less TV watching and a lot more putting in volume. I'm writing this on a flight back from WPT Marbella to lovely Leeds and even looked over some hand histories at the airport. The game's never over I guess. More on Marbella later though.

What suddenly bought all this on? Well the going has been pretty tough especially online so far in 2012. Started the year shot taking at the $500 games on ipoker again and for the third time around it went hilariously badly. I'm $12k under EV in the 180 games I've played lifetime at the $500 level so not much is going my way but I still maintain that those games are softer than the lower buyins which are more reg-infested. This is course promotes pretty aggressive bankroll management which obviously has the potential to backfire but hey ho, it was fun and I was back down to the $100s and $200s with a mission to get back to the $500s as soon as possible!

Since then its been pretty much breakeven before rakeback though which sucks but I noticed myself auto-piloting and not making optimal decisions fairly often in the period from January-March this year which is far more irritating than not making much money before rakeback. I've been getting involved with 2p2 again, posting on the HUSNG board and talking over hands with other regs on Skype which I never used to do.

Live poker this year however has been much more encouraging. I played a £150 freezeout at Gala in Leeds which made over 200 runners which was a pleasant suprise. Ended up coming 5th for ~£1.5k, AK < A6 for all the chips 4 handed but still a nice start to the year. Since Dusk Till Dawn decided to go ballistic and put huge guarantees on everything I've been playing a few more tournaments than usual there. Had two bullets in both of the £500 re-entries but bricks all round.

With morale not in great shape and online going badly it was time for a trip to Ireland and UKIPT Galway didn't disappoint. I went over with the guys from Main Event Travel who did a great job of sorting everything and generally making life easy on the trip so would definitely recommend. The setup in Galway is perfect - its at a hotel and the distance between the poker tables and the bar is no more than 50 feet. They also don't really like to close bars in Ireland so the drinks were flowing and aside from playing and bricking the main it was wall to wall drinking. The band hired for the welcome party weren't really sure what to make of our decision to cancel their set and make it a karakoe night but the undisputed star of the show had to be Dan Edler with a heart warming rendition of Sweet Child O' Mine. Unfortunately video evidence still exists somewhere of the butchery of Baggy Trousers by myself, Luke Fields, Sammy Mac and Rob Russell.

Up next was the Poker770 event back in Nottingham. Kinda ridiculous structure, €770 buyin with 77,000 starting stacks and a 77 minute clock. 77 days later I managed to make the final despite losing 75% of my stack on the pure bubble with KK < 99 to the eventual winner Tom Langley who I played with pretty much throughout the whole tournament and thought played really well - a well deserved win IMO. Simon Deadman and Andy Hulme (DTD reg, stato_1 on blonde and stars) also made the final along with a couple of Poker770 pros and a couple of unknowns to round out the lineup. As you'd expect with the structure the final started with pretty deep stacks even for a live tournament with average at ~60 bigs. First hand though Simon opens UTG, gets 3bet from UTG+1, I cold 4 QQ from the big in a pretty tough spot where I really thought for a while about folding pre. I end up not having to make another decision as it goes 5bet, 6bet jam, Simons AA vs Tom Langleys KK which get there to make him huge chippo and he never really looked back from there. I was pretty card/spot dead and not in a great seat with Tom on my left and a good aggro Poker770 pro on my direct right. I end up jamming 20 bigs from the button over a cutoff open with A2ss, Tom snaps the BB with TT and the opener has AK. I manage to flop 35xss and turn a 2 but the river bricks and I finish 4th for £9k. An ok result but I should probably work on running better when all in for £15k+ equity. After the double elimination its Stato heads up with Langley but Stato's chip defecit was huge and he ended up coming second for what is still a very nice score.

UKIPT Nottingham was a bit of a write off. I was pretty tilted from the start because I snap bought in for day 1c because I didn't really want to spend on hotels when Leeds is only a couple of hours away on the train but I ended up pinging a seat in the only sat I played on stars (run better) but despite having a seat for 1c already I had to unreg and play 1b so it was a 9am train for a midday start in Nottingham. I'm far from a natural at this waking up at 8am lark so was not a happy bunny joining the rat race at Leeds station. The only saving grace was that I managed to bust before the last train back so the trip was over in 10 hours and I'm left to remind myself of rule number one: Never Leave Leeds!

Not much longer left before a militant member of the cabin crew will no doubt tell me that I'm endangering the lives of everyone on board by displaying such insolence as to use a laptop AND and ipod at the SAME TIME. So tilting. Who knew that wanting to listen to a bit of Bob Marley during landing would put everyone else in such mortal danger that it has to be banned. The hostesses have a sixth sense for it too! Like when you were chewing gum at school (I know you were) and despite your best efforts you'd always have a manky bin put in front of your face and be told to spit it out. You even get a haunting episode from my childhood to to break up all the poker talk - can't say this blog isn't legit value! If anyone knows a good shrink PM me I guess. I'm pretty sure that when you walk onto the plane wearing headphones they clock you as being a troublemaker; living life on the edge checking the weather forecast on the runway.

This has already gone on too long so I'll put up another post in a few days about the British invasion of WPT Marbella! Take it easy

Leeeeeeeeds and Some 2012 Goals

Leeeeeeeeds and Some 2012 Goals

Saturday, 7 January 2012 | No comment yet Tweet

Its been a pretty hectic opening week to the 2012 - bringing in the new year with LFmagic, Gavz, Tony J, JoeJoe et al in London with a special guest appearance from Galen Cranston (Gakn29) all the way from Canada to bring in the new year in London. First time I've had new year at a club rather than house party so that was cool but with the move into a new apartment in Leeds on the 2nd I couldn't really get too hammered.



Moving in went without a hitch, absolutely loving the location right in the centre of Leeds, less than a minutes walk from the train station. The apartment is on the top floor of what used to be a hotel which is pretty cool on the soundproofing front. I always have to be listening to music while I'm playing and having a subwoofer on the floor has caused complaints from neighbours below before now but still nothing after 5 days so looking good. After disastrous relations with the neighbours in Barca it'd be nice to get along this time around. At least we speak the same language.

I've decided to take it easy on the live trips in the first half of this year to consolidate before Vegas so the plan is to grind a ton online and in complete contrast to lildaves goal of playing 25 live tournaments this year I'm probably going to play less than 10 after playing a good 50+ in 2011. On both the Summer 2011 and Oct/Nov 2011 trips to Vegas I worked a ton on my live cash tekkers and I never really felt like I wasn't crushing those games playing 5/10 so during any extended stay in Vegas this year I'm definitely going to want to move up and grind some 10/20+. I'm not really a big fan of selling action in cash games so I'm just gunna try and take $100k to Vegas and grind 10/20 with some 25/50 shots. Still, June is a very long way away...

Until then I'm going to be grinding the HUsngs a ton as per on iPoker. Had a really rocky December running ~$7k under EV and never really feeling like I was playing great. January started in much the same vain but I've been doing some hand history reviews, had a couple of hours of coaching with HokieGreg (highly reccomended as a heads up sng coach) and discussed some things with other regs and I think I've got my mindset back in the right place so despite being a small loser (~$2k) over the first 300 games of 2012 I've pulled it back and am well on course to book a good month to kick off the year.

After doing some calculations in December it works out that if I put the hours in its pretty easy for me to make a ton in rakeback and even if I'm only a small winner in the games, $100k profit in the first 5 months of the year is ambitious but very attainable. If I can play 5,000 games at stakes from $100 to $500 this splits as follows:

1,000 $100s
2,000 $200s
1,250 $350s
750 $500s

Thats $30,750 in rakeback before we've even started doing some winning. Average ROI of 4.9% to hit the goal. I could definitely end up playing more volume than that though, got 357 games in alredy on the 7th of Jan!

I've seen a lot of posts on various blogs and forums about how setting monetary goals isn't a good idea and everyone wants to have these wishy washy achievements but at the end of the day no matter how many times you went to the gym a week or whether you managed to keep the pet hamster alive for 52 weeks of the year, if you didn't make money, you had a shit year. So there it is, rather than doing what everyone else is doing and giving a list of bullshit stuff and keeping a number in their head for how much they wanna make I'm just gunna let you know that $200k is the marker for the year. I'm don't plan on doing any high variance stuff like playing tons of live tourneys or going on big road trips this year, although Vegas in November I was adament I wasn't going then lildave managed to convince me in 10 minutes so theres definitely potential for impluse travelling. The only things definitely on the horizon are the Irish Open and WSOP 2012 right now.

Congrats to LFmagic and Marcin Milde for their respective Sunday Million binks in the last few weeks. Congrats also to Sam Grafton (SamSquid on stars) on crushing the start of 2012, been some good rails already so far this year!

Bank Tilt

Bank Tilt

Friday, 30 December 2011 | No comment yet Tweet

I've pretty much mugged off the blog since posting about Colombia but once again I was too lazy to post about stuff as it happened and a couple of months down the line its all a blur and doesn't seem like there would be many interesting things to write about. With regards to Vegas, I'll say that lildave did a fantastic job of blogging about the trip, so if you haven't read anything about it check out his blog :http://lildaveslife.blogspot.com

After leaving Vegas and heading back to Barcelona there was the ridiculously tilting experience of having to wire money back from the Bellagio to the UK. My bank being Nationwide this was a massive stumbling block - basically Nationwide isn't a real bank so they can't handle international wires. Many phone calls later and now being on first name terms with most of the staff at the Bellagio cage it shook down that the only way to get my bankroll back to a bank would be to open a new bank account which meant flying back to the UK to do just that.

As most people can probably imagine, banks aren't really suited to dealing with poker players. Bank like to know whats going on and they like to call the shots so when you stroll in to open an account and the answers to the questions 'will your salary be paid into this account?', 'do you have any proof of income?' and 'do you actually have a job?' are no, no and no they don't really warm to you. The next problem is the word 'poker' and this is gunna be the game changer. At this point it depends who you're dealing with. It becomes clear pretty quickly that whoever is sitting on the other side of the desk can sort you out if they want to, so a little profiling is useful.

If you're up against the 40-odd year old woman in HSBC then once you throw in that you're a professional poker player she is probably gunna look at you like you just crawled in through the sewage pipe and should probably return because her honourable and reputable establishment doesn't deal with 'people like me'. She didn't offer me an HSBC account.



On to Barcalays then and the manager there fit exactly the same profile as the gatekeeper at HSBC so I didn't even bother. Absolutely struck gold at Santander though, the manager on duty was a 20-odd year old guy that found the poker thing all very interesting so 20 minutes later I have a bank account that actually works. Now I've just got to wait for an avalanche of paper to come through the mail to be able to use it. How they surmise that posting 10 separate letters with cards and security numbers in them would be more secure than just giving them to be at the bank I don't know but the charade continues for about a week until its all up and running. For the pennies they give you in interest it'd probably be far less hassle to just keep it all hidden around the house Rounders style.



I'm moving into a new place in Leeds with Ben Martin and Luke Fields on the 2nd so if all goes well my next post will come from there and it'll be some goals for 2012. Renting an apartment is another ridiculously irritating encounter with the real world but thats a story for another time. The first of my goals I think will be to keep accurate records so that I can actually do a decent yearly review starting with 2012!


Hope you all had a good christmas and the best of luck for 2012

25,000 Miles: Leg 1 - Colombia

25,000 Miles: Leg 1 - Colombia

Thursday, 17 November 2011 | 3 comments Tweet

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that there was a big trip planned - its now been 5 weeks since I've played online and my (hopefully triumphant) return to the ring begins today. As much as the gaps between my blog posts would suggest otherwise, a big blog post waits for nothing!

The first leg was an extremely long-winded trip to Colombia. Since this trip was properly organised a month in advance for the first time in my life the flights were dirt cheap. This meant lots of tilting connections though, so the first leg goes Barcelona > London > Miami > Colombia and through what could have only been divine intervention I managed not to miss any of the connections.

Most travelling players take a ton of flights a year and they all kinda blur into one but the flight from Miami to Colombia had some of the best aerial views I've ever seen. The flight was 3 hours and I spent pretty much every minute checking out the views. The flight path went down the coast of Florida, over the Caribbean Sea, Cuba, Montego Bay in Jamaica and then over the mountains of northern Venezuela and Colombia. It was pretty much cloudless and unfortunately I only had the camera on my phone so I couldn't take many more pictures but this one of the Cauca River Valley was probably the best of the lot.



Medellin is pretty much how you (or at least I did) expect a South American city to be. The streets are packed with people milling around small stalls and food vendors, the roads are packed with cars that fell out of the 1980s complete with maniacal drivers and everyone is conversing in lightning-fast Spanish. I've lived in Barca for nearly 3 months now and my Spanish gets me by day-to-day but I really didn't stand a chance. Talking to other people was alright once they got through the British accent but understanding responses? No shot. Kinda annoying to have a basic knowledge of the language and yet still having to be the tourist fish using broken sentences and hand signals. My Spanish did improve while I was there - more through listening than actually speaking but you learn fast when nobody speaks any English at all.

The trip didn't really get off to a great start with my suitcase not showing up but given that I was on the tail end of a 16 hour trip through 3 continents I didn't have the strength to argue. I was pretty skeptical of the 'don't call us, we'll call you' arrangement with the baggage handlers but I was just happy to get to the hotel and pass out. Colombia has a bit of a reputation for being full of drug peddlers and gunslingers and from what I saw the latter is definitely true. It was kinda weird to see an armed security detail and a checkpoint outside the hotel.




Guns seem to be a compltely accepted part of the culture in Colombia. The US has a bad rep for loose gun controls but in Medellin its the norm to see a guy just walking down the street with a gun in a holster. The security guards at the casino had a less subtle approach - they tended to just stroll around with their guns in their hands. The guy posted on the main entrance with a double barreled shotgun the length of his arm (yes really) spend a lot of time looking pretty smug.

I didn't sort out any local currency in advance which came back to bite me - I missed day 1a because I arrived too late to the only place in the city that would exchange Euros, but managed to get it sorted the next day and the stack of notes was pretty cool. This is 2k euros which comes out at just over 5 million pesos. Unfortunately the 'MIL' on the note is Spanish for thousand, not million. How they managed to hide millions of dollars of drug money when the biggest note is worth $26 i'll never know.



The event that I went for was the LAPT with a $1k (1.8m peso) main event. I bricked this pretty quickly but didn't have enough cash on me to play the $3.5k high roller so just skipped it and played a bit of cash. The standard was pretty poor but I never really played very well or had much help from the deck so ended up down about $2k on the trip but it was a great experience and I'd definitely go to South America again. Next time I go my Spanish will be a lot better so that won't be so much of an obstacle to having an extended stay.

So back to the airport I go with another long trip, this time going Medellin > Miami > LA > Vegas. US Homeland Security had other ideas though.



The guy on the desk at immigration immediately looks at my passport and says "So you're going from Colombia to Las Vegas? We need to have a little talk". This came complete with the 'not angry, just disappointed' tone. I get escorted to the interview room and they manage to pretty much draft an autobiography for me. The fact that I only had $400 on me seemed to fuel their skepticism about my trip to Vegas and the whole poker player thing, then again if I was carrying $20k in cash I can't imagine they'd have been too thrilled either. At this point it occurs to me that if I was trying to traffic drugs to Vegas; 'Professional Poker Player' would be a pretty legit cover story. I doubt this helped me out either. Two hours later they degrudgingly let me go through to customs where the guy looks at my blank declaration form and cheerfully instructs me to 'exit along the red line'.

But alas, the red line is not an exit. The red line leads to a queue of people waiting to be subject to a full baggage search. At this point I'm feeling pretty fortunate that its just the baggage thats being searched. The line to be searched unsuprisingly didn't exactly match up with the demographic of passengers coming into Miami. Of the 20 or so people waiting I was the only white guy and the only one that spoke English. We'd have made for a pretty amusing identity parade. I can't see me being cast as the next Pablo Escobar in an upcoming hollywood production but I guess you never know. Another hour later I'm officially free to go and fortunately the stopover was supposed to be 4 hours so I didn't miss the connection to LA.

The 45 minute flight into Vegas landed at around 10pm which is just about the nut time - Vegas at night looks really sick and the view definitely gets you psyched to be there.



Next up, Vegas adventures...

Rungoods & HUSNG.com Debut

Rungoods & HUSNG.com Debut

Sunday, 25 September 2011 | 1 comment Tweet

The action on iPoker has been really sick the last few days with huge fish sitting $500 games and doing chunks in. My main goal for HUSNGs this year was to become a $1k reg and at the moment as we move into the last few months of the year I'm well on track to hit that target, greatly aided by 4k and 5k days this week!

I decided to have a punt in the $5k WCOOP Main, I've sold off half of my action and looking forward to a shot at $1milly. Opinion seems pretty divided on how tough or soft the field is going to be. Still, should be fun either way. I've been concentrating so much on my HUSNG game that I haven't really had any time for online MTTs and the idea of being tied to a 10+ hour session really doesn't appeal to me. I definitely couldn't do the sick MTT grind that most of the people that I know in poker do. Mucho respect to those guys imo, they certainly work for every $!

My first video for HUSNG.com went up this morning - its just a short review of a $100 turbo but its getting decent reviews and hopefully theres more content to come!

Gl everyone playing the WCOOP main - hope to see at least one person I know on the final table!

Sunday Funday

Sunday Funday

Thursday, 22 September 2011 | No comment yet Tweet

Things have been moving along nicely this week - no dramas with the landlord and excited about moving into the new place. Pics here:

http://www.markbcn.es/en/ficha.aspx?ido=1509

I've never really been a huge football fan but the atmosphere here for every Barca game is so electric. Even the league games against some of the most budget clubs has everyone psyched for it and we've been in bars or at friends houses for every game so far this season soaking it up. Getting tickets to a game is definitely on the to-do list but they're notoriously hard to get hold of if you want decent seats. Hopefully an opportunity arises soon though.


I managed to ship my prop bet with lildave which should have been crushed but once I made got up to ~9.3k I hit a 160 game breakeven stretch while dave gained a lot of ground. Dave got up over 9k at the end so it was a decent race to the finish but getting so close and dropping 2k three occasions was mega tilting



The bet was only for 3 meals in Vegas but there's nothing quite like sick meal courtesy of lildave to prepare for the live cash grind. Cheers buddy ;)

Now to actually explain the title of this post. Apparently my staking $$ still run golden. The coach from the first Barca HUSNG bootcamp that I went to (pistons87) sold some for the 10k WCOOP Heads Up so I flicked in the 10% and he managed to luckbox the win for a nice 119k payday. Was an insanely good sweat from the first round to the last so muchos congrats to him.

Still not sure whether I want to play the WCOOP main or not. I guess I just just not be a nit and play it I think I'll just see how I feel on the day. Playing a 5k when you're really not feeling it sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Also muchos congrats to Joejoe Whittaker (joejoe1337 on stars) for coming 2nd in a WCOOP 1k for 265 beanbags and another 30 for 5th in the 265 turbo WCOOP on the same day and all just 6 days before putting poker on the back burner and heading off to uni. Very well deserved and definitely gunna be the biggest baller in Hull!

Good luck to everyone WCOOPing this week