Bank Tilt

Bank Tilt

Friday, 30 December 2011 | 1 comment 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 | 2 comments 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

Still Alive! Barca, Bootcamps and a Big Trip

Still Alive! Barca, Bootcamps and a Big Trip

Sunday, 11 September 2011 | 2 comments Tweet

Another extremely belated update but its been a busy month! Theres been so much going on I'm gunna break it down into sections so that this doesn't become a hideous wall of text.

1) FrankThomas8 and RaisedByJews' Boot Camp

First stop in Barca was back to the No Worries Villa - a really sick place nestled in the mountains just outside Barcelona in Montcada i Reixac. Pretty much a mixture of chilling by the pool in the blazing sunshine, drinking beer and occasionally playing some poker. I was there mainly just to see the guys that I met at the last camp in May but I ended up doing some coaching too which was really cool and is definitely something I'm going to do more of. There were 9 students at the camp ranging from $7 super turbo players to $50 turbo players. There were a couple of really sick nights out and everyone learned a ton which I guess should have been the main thing!

2) HokieGregs Boot Camp

A few days after the first camp was over HokieGreg (high stakes HUsng pro) and his girlfriend Brittney arrived to do another camp this time for higher stakes players. I wasn't actually a student or a coach for this one but it was cool to chill with another group of heads up SNG players and meet people from more new places. Really gives me the travelling bug!

This camp was a lot more poker-focussed which definitely helped me to put in more volume myself and hit my goal for a 10k month




Just thinking back to all the new people I've met in the last 3 weeks, there were people from Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Estonia, Germany, Morocco, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Colombia (more on that later), Belgium, Australia, Norway and the US which is pretty ridiculous. Really makes home seem kinda boring where pretty much everyone is from the same place. I won't be short of people and places to visit for a while!

EPT Barcelona was on during this camp - I opted to grind online instead and not make the trek to the casino in the city for any of the events. Ben Martin came over and stayed at the villa though while grinding a ton of EPT events which was pretty fun - haven't seen Ben for a while since he decided to just stay behind in Vegas when everyone else left and did some travelling around the west of the US. A few of the guys from the camp played the 3k euro heads up event but nobody cashed. Soren (valuelol on Stars) swapped 25% with the guy he was against in the quarter final though and his horse went on to win it for a nice 11k euro 25-ball. He also ran godlike at slots while railing the final and spun 40 euros into 1.4k. What a life!

3) Finding a place

I've never been one for making many plans so naturally the way I did the whole Barecelona thing was to book two weeks at the villa, turn up with a suitcase and work out the rest from there. Three weeks later I'm still at the villa and we finally get three of us together to make a decision on finding a place. I'm living with Anthony (FrankThomas8 on Stars, HUsng/Razz(lol)/MTT grinder) and Geoff (Palinca on 2p2, organiser of these HUSNG camps) which is the first time I've properly lived with other poker players but I'm enjoying the balance of a good grinding atmosphere whilst also being sure not to work too hard :)

Finding a place was a really tilting experience, everyone wants agency fees and proof of income (what of what?). Eventually we find a cool place on online and arrange a viewing. The place is ridic nice with a big balcony and its really bright but the landlord decided to be a dick and not accept us. We spun a good story too about being English teachers but it didn't wash without the paperwork. The rep gives us a number of someone she knows that can help us without any paperwork. Nice and shady.

We end up meeting a couple of hours later at an apartment in Diagonal which is not as nice as the first one but since we're kinda in a hurry to get set up and we could move in there the same day we went with it. They gave us a month-to-month deal too so we're not tied down here. In a couple of months we'll be looking to move into somewhere way better for the same price but it'll do for now. Obviously being a massive luckbox I bink the best room with the balcony so it'll do for now.

I've really been hammering the Spanish lessons, I've decided that theres way too much street cred involved to get lessons so i'll just teach myself with a couple of textbooks and a dictionary. I've been good and worked on it every day and I'm getting more confident talking to people in Spanish - still a long way to go though. Defintiely not leaving until I'm sick good at Spanish because by the sounds of it English and Spanish is pretty much the nut two-language combo for travelling.

I've met a ton of new people through Paul, Joey and Thisje (pronounced Tice) who run the No Worries Villa so building up a good circle of friends in Barca already which makes the move a lot more smooth - would definitely suck to move somewhere really vibrant and end up just sitting at home playing poker all day. I still don't really get the culture in the clubs here though - nobody drinks! The drinks are all ridic expensive so most people are just sober which is pretty alien to me. Don't think i'll ever really get used to that!

The apartment itself is a bit of a disaster - so far we're pretty useless at everything. It took us 3 days to find a proper supermarket, only one burner on the hob works, the oven doesn't work, we don't know where to put the bins out, we don't have a key for our postbox and we got the washing machine to work once but can't remember how that happened so can't replicate it! How I've made it to 22 i'll never know. We got internet sorted though! Priorities, yeah?

4) The Big Ass Road Trip

Anthony managed to bink an online sat to LAPT Colombia a few days ago and lildave has been badgering me to come to vegas in October and since the dates coincided perfectly I gave in and agreed to go. Probably gunna pay home a visit too on the way back. The schedule:

October 12th - Fly from Barcelona to Medellin, Colombia via Madrid and Bogota. Play the main there (its only a $1k but the buyin in Colombian Pesos is 1.9 million, ballin) and generally enjoy my first trip to South America. Oh, and try to get out of the country without somebody planting cocaine on me would be pretty cool too.

October 17th its off to Vegas, gunna stay at the Aria on their poker rake which is pretty good value for $79/night, the rooms are really sick. Gunna be there over Haloween which obv Vegas goes nuts for. lildave is already on it having booked the nut table at Surrender, the nightclub at the Encore casino 7 weeks in advance! Theres a $15k prize for the best costume too and while as guys we obv have no shot at winning it should be pretty fun to rail.

November 7th back to London for a few days, home for a bit then back to Barca until the Monte Carlo at DTD on December 19th. Its September and the end of the year seems only just round the corner :(

I also have a prop running with lildave, a race to 10k that started September 6th. lildave has since then put very little volume but managed to book a decent win yesterday to luckbox his way back into contention. As it stands now though he's still pretty crushed with me being +$6k on day 5, I think his profit number is somewhere around $1.5k. He was down nearly 2k so if he comes back and wins this I'm gunna be unimaginably tilted. Hopefully I can run good in the next few days and go in for the kill! Three meals in vegas is all thats at stake, but pride is definitely a factor. A loss for lildave will result in persistant ridcule for the forseeable future - you have been warned!

Congrats if you made it all the way to this point! Next post will hopefully be a prop bet win!

Upping Sticks to Barca

Upping Sticks to Barca

Wednesday, 10 August 2011 | 3 comments Tweet

Yep its been about 6 weeks since the last blog so cliffs from then:

Jakes birthday at Marqee - best night out in Vegas hands down

Main Event - bust 40 from the bubble AA < 99

Chill for my last week in Vegas - didn't play any poker, just looking forward to getting back to the online grind after 7 weeks off.

I was pretty happy to be back after 7 weeks in the madness of Vegas. Getting back on the HUSNG grind was the #1 priority after seeing family and friends in the first couple of days that I was back. Somehow the screen on my laptop broke on the flight leaving me having to play on another laptop with no HEM which was pretty tilting. Definitely never going to do that again, it would have been a better idea to just not play! I did pretty badly and never found my flow. Seven weeks out of the games definitely didn't help either but I didn't play great and ended up dropping some bean on Stars.

With morale pretty low I decided to take a trip to Leeds to see lildave and Sykes and join in with some of the Leeds live games. I played a couple of times in the 2/5 holdem game and came out winning about £1k pretty much all in non-showdown pots which was a pretty good result. I had my head back in the game and started turning it around online too so the trip was a success.

From Leeds I went to the Deepstack weekend at DTD in Nottingham. Ended up entering on both start days - both days I built a good stack but couldn't win a big flip in the last level the first day and ran KQcc into AA on 942cc in a 3bet pot and failed to do a get there second day - again in the last level of the day.

Heard some really sad news in Nottingham too - Tim Blake who plays a lot at DTD had a stroke at his hotel the morning of the tournament and is still in hospital in Nottingham. All the best to him, hope to see you back at DTD soon!

Since then I've been crushing pretty hard online - back on my own laptop with my awesome HUD and besides brief stints I've been in the zooooooone putting up a 14.5% ROI

Now onto the main event - moving to Barca!

I leave on Sunday, going back to the No Worries Villa to help with another heads up SNG boot camp along with stars reg FrankThomas8 and FTP/Lock reg RaisedByJews. During the week we'll also be house hunting and I'll be in Barcelona for the forseeable future. We're winging it a little but just turning up and looking for a place to stay when we get there but we'll be able to stay at the villa for as long as we need to most likely so even if it drags on and we knock in some money staying there I really wanna find the right place so it'll be worth the extra time and expense.

I've spent a lot of this week learning some Spanish. The first 3 days have gone really well - definitely getting to grips with it faster than I thought I would and its nice to be learning something new that isn't to do with poker! Definitely going to put a lot of hours into learning the language mainly because I'd rather not be treated like another tourist when I'm there and it'll also be useful for future trips to South America.

If all goes to plan my next update will be from sunny Barca

Buena Suerte