It's Worse Than That, He's Shit Jim

Disclaimer: I don’t like Star Trek, despite the quote.

I haven’t played a bunch over the last week but I had my second lesson last night. Basically, I suck much harder than I thought. This isn’t a problem, I’d rather find this out now. The lesson was pretty cool, Aero explains things really well – he made a point about three betting which was so blatantly obvious that it seems retarded that I didn’t notice it before. Anyway, efforts must be redoubled and I basically need to work a lot harder.

I haven’t played many (virtually any, in fact) tournaments of late. I was reading through a sweat thread for a guy that is on an absurd heater who was deep in an Omaha tournament. As one guy commented in the thread:

There is no such thing as an awful Omaha high play....its either....

OMG I GOTS COOLERDZ!!!

or

OMG I MISSED MY OUTS!!!!

This is true IMO. ;)

West Ham were a bit unlucky to lose to Spurs on Sunday. We fucked up for both goals but matched them pretty well over the pitch and scored an absolute screamer to take the lead. Still, fuck them, Cole gave King and Bassong (who didn’t look all that) a pretty tough afternoon and given the resources we had available I was pretty happy with the performance. Clattenburg, without actually influencing the result, looked (like most referees) a man completely out of his depth and should probably be demoted forthwith.

A couple of really fucked-up things happened at the club this week. Jack Collison’s dad dying on the way to the Spurs game was pretty nasty, but the situation with Calum Davenport was really horrible. The Guardian has what appears to be a fairly factual version of events here, I’ll leave the moralising to the forums, which do this in a far more hysterical and entertaining fashion than I ever could.

Anyway, with the warm-up against Spurs over with, the more serious matter of the game against Millwall is this evening. We haven’t beaten them since the early 90’s and they are massive cunts, so we deserve a result. I can only imagine we’ll rest a few although I can only imagine that Cole will play as we can’t really go into this game with a couple of spotty kids up front.

Anyway, good luck at the tables.

A Jelly Doughnut?

After weeks of messing about I’ve finally pulled the trigger and got a coach for HUNL. I’ve messed about long enough and looked at a few options and probably should have done it long ago, although I’m glad that I took the time selecting someone that I thought was right for me. I had my first lesson last night and would summarise as follows:
1) I have got the right person coaching me. He comes across as smart individual and a cool guy and an easy person to get along with and his methods are somewhat more subtle than those of Sgt Hartman, pictured above.
2) It went a lot better than I could have hoped - I learnt a lot, and also learnt that I’m quite bad.
3) He explains himself really well and has a clear thought process. His approach to the game is exactly what I need. He is also patient and managed to go throughout the whole session without saying “this is the most standard spot ever and you’ve managed to fuck it up, you don’t need coaching, you need a lobotomy”.
4) His coaching is more than just “you give me $100 and you get an hour of my time”. He has a genuine interest in his students doing well.

His name is Aero1441 (although his parents chose the somewhat more orthodox name of Erwin) and can be contact via 2+2, where he does a lot of excellent work on the forums. He’s a Dutch guy and everything went so well that I managed to avoid mentioning Ronald Koeman’s cynical shirt-tug on David Platt during our session. He also has the dubious honour of me linking up his blog to here, which may reduce his street cred by several notches.

He’s also going to ship me $500 for the positive review that I have just given, although this may be something of a waste as nobody ever reads this. Joke, obv.

Otherwise the poker hasn’t really gone well. I’m still running badly/playing worse, which is bad for me but good for the community. On the plus side, Wonderflop (Wayne) is doing pretty well having moved up to $100NL. I’m pleased for him as he has had a bit of a rough year in various ways and hopefully has sorted his game out and will be on the up and up from here.

I don’t really have a lot else going on. I might be going to buy a car this weekend. I’m not looking forward to it as I know nothing about cars, which is probably understandable given that I have never owned one. Given the situation with my parents I really need to have one now, so I’m going to have to bite the bullet and hand over the money. We’re also looking at buying the freehold for our block of flats, which is even more boring than buying a car, so I’ll stop there.

The Premiership kicked off last weekend. West Ham won 2-0 away at Wolves, which is a good way to start. Uncertainty continues regarding transfers but there is a strong rumour about us selling James Collins for £5m to Stoke. Whilst I like Collins for his attitude, he makes a lot of mistakes and the price being mentioned is too good to turn down, providing the money is spent on a forward.

We take on Spurs on Sunday, who beat Liverpool very impressively on the opening day, and then extend yet more East End hospitality to Millwall in the Carling Cup on Tuesday. Some poor bastard on one of the West Ham forums is livid as he has caught swine flu and misses both games, and has sworn revenge on the guy that sneezed on him on the tube.

Wasps 1 Guests 0

I’ll summarise poker first and then move on. I played around 10 donkaments on Friday. I felt I played pretty well for the most part and had a pretty big stack in the 20 1r 1a on Stars before managing to run AA into JJ on a T hi flop where the guy binked a J on the river and then AA into 66 where the guy turned a straight. Being the calm, rational individual that I am, I was absolutely fucking livid having managed to lose with KK vs. KJ on a J hi flop in the 109 on Stars where I had tripled up early and was going well and only just refrained from a standard TCarnage doomswitch email to Stars. J

Anyway, enough of the positives. The HU has been going terribly. I haven’t played well, managed to run KK into AA twice yesterday and am suffering from tilt of Hellmuthian proportions. I have been in touch with a guy that I want to coach me so hopefully can get something going with him fairly soon.

TBH I hate writing lame stuff like I have above. The game is a tough one and if I don’t like it I can go and take up something else. All I can do is:
1) Be less of a pussy and quit fucking moaning like it hasn’t happened to anyone else ever.
2) Try and improve and iron out the (many) errors in my game.

Otherwise I was at a wedding on Saturday. The reception was at the Groom’s family home, which was an absolutely massive gaff outside Cambridge with gardens to boot. It was a pretty cool day, the only downer being Cambridge having the largest wasp population in the country, and they were angry cunts as well, and managed to sting multiple people. There was some sort of dual Vicar/Priest thing going on in the church (she’s Catholic, he’s C of E), it was probably the best crossover collaboration thing I’ve since Run DMC and Aerosmith decided to make a record together.

Given the way that I am pissing through poker funds I have strongly considered making a withdrawal. The longer life goes on I’ve decided I need a car, having never owned one before, so I might as well use some poker money to buy it. It should be a cheap one as I haven’t driven for over 15 years so probably will be a complete liability behind the wheel. Watch out pedestrians.

The football season kicks off next week. Surprisingly, nobody seems prepared to either loan or give us for free a striker of any repute, so we’ll all have to wish really hard that the one we have doesn’t get injured. We lost 1-0 to Napoli in our last friendly, but supposedly didn’t play that badly. More importantly the Napoli fans did what Italian fans are best at – attacked anyone that didn’t look like was up for a fight and they had outnumbered by at least five to one. A 15 year old kid got stabbed as well, which all seems fairly par for the course after the charming reception we got in Palermo. Hooliganism, the English disease, for sure.

The Charity Shield was reasonably entertaining, although I was less than pleased at the performance of Ben “he’s Manchester United’s reserve, therefore England’s number one” Foster. The Mancs played some lovely football at times and Nani looked good until he popped his shoulder out (alright, he looked like a 1980s Bronx pimp, but he played well).

Retard Frog-Squirrel

At the end of each day I quite often watch an episode or two of South Park. I enjoy the childish humour, particularly at the end of a long day. The other night I think I saw possibly my favourite sketch. It doesn’t really need much introduction, except that it features Mr (well, Miss) Garrison trying to explain the theory of evolution, despite her disagreement with it. The rest of the episode is notable for Cartman’s attempts to freeze himself until the release of the Nintendo Wii is too painful and Ms Garrison flinging poo at Richard Dawkins.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5027481876893938900

Otherwise, it looks like an American guy by the name of Clarke Hunt is interested in buying West Ham. Given that he is unlikely to reduce our transfer budget below its current level of zero, this can only be good news. Hunt is the nephew of a guy called Bunker Hunt, who made himself famous (and busto) by attempting to corner the silver market in the 1970s.

To be honest the whole situation is really fucking boring but I would like to get the thing resolved as the club’s ownership was clearly shoved into an asset management company with a view to being sold at some point, so sooner seems preferable to later. Some of the internet cunts that should know about these things seem to be hinting that there is some truth behind it. So with American owners I guess it is out with Bovril and the romance of the FA Cup and in with big pointy foam hands, foot-long hot dogs and cheerleaders.

HU has been an unmitigated disaster this month. In an attempt to stop the rot I think I am set on a coach that I found through 2+2. He’s a Dutch guy, I like his forum posts. There were a variety of choices, he appealed for a number of reasons – including that he seems like a likeable guy, he seems to have a sound theoretical approach (which I really want for myself and is key to being any good), he’s in my time zone and he (and his blog) indicates that he does the coaching for more than just money (he indicated he was available for help “out of hours” as well). After the weekend I’ll try and get a session or two booked up with him.

I’ve also being looking at some 6 max cash game hands for Wayne. I have enjoyed them as they tax the grey matter, although they provide an opportunity for public humiliation as Wayne’s new coach has largely disagreed with me on every hand thus far, which probably explains why I have always found cash games bad for the bankroll. More importantly, Wayne’s new coach (linky on the right) seems like the man for the job and hopefully he’ll have Wayne moving up in no time.

I’m at a wedding this weekend. Her indoors is going down on the Friday night, which means I will spend the evening sitting in darkened room playing donkaments.

Bobby Hundreds

I managed to play around 25 donkaments this weekend. They largely ended up with the familiar not running or playing well routine (with which most donkamenters are familiar with, apart possibly from Breeth), but squeaked into three cashes which redeemed it from total disaster. I managed to finish 9th in the FTP $18k on Sunday morning – I wasn’t all too happy about my bust out hand but I was the shortest stack at the table and it can probably be justified.

I played pretty well during the tournament (including a sick 3 bet pre flop and then double barrel on the flop and turn), which was very weak in general and confirmed that there is still a lot of value in tournament poker. Dreday from PXF was on my left for a fairly long period, which kind of cramped by style. I 4 bet bluffed him at one point and we eventually got it in BVB with my QQ vs AK for a monster pot, where I held. The worst thing was that I felt like total shit throughout and promptly went and vomited right after I busted.

The HU hasn’t been going so well, but I’ll look to kick that off again soon and probably get some coaching. I tilted off an unholy amount of monies to a terrible French guy in the small hours of Saturday when tilted. Hopefully the rakeback I’m due should compensate somewhat.

This post on Andy Ward’s excellent blog put me straight after I was feeling somewhat down about the game this weekend. It also mentions Isabelle Mercier (no pictures though, to my lasting disappointment).

http://secretsoftheamateurs.blogspot.com/2009/07/unreasonable-expectations.html

Having ditched PXF last month, I signed up for a trial at PokerSavvy. The videos that I have watched there have been a breath of fresh air and piss all over most of PXF’s content.

Aside from poker and nausea this weekend, I saw “Man On Wire” on TV. For those that haven’t heard of it, it’s a documentary/film about a French tightrope walker that during the 1970s thought that putting a big wire between the two World Trade Centre towers and then walking across it would be a really good idea. The whole thing is absolutely awesome and the guy’s utter fearlessness and dedication to pursuing his art (which I guess is what it is) is amazing.

West Ham’s pre-season plods along. We got rolled by Spurs in China (we were lucky to get away with losing by a single goal and, more worryingly, they looked way fitter than we did) and then beat the stiffs of China’s best team a day or so later. We’re still horribly short up front and it looks like Upson will be sold to fund some firepower up front. I’ll be sad to see him go (he’s probably our best and most consistent player), but Danny Gabbidon (who was magnificent for us prior to his injury problems) may provide an adequate replacement. Dyer also put in a decent shift against the Chinese side, although he did flag towards the end. I can’t see us getting near the top half next year, but if we avoid relegation I’ll be well pleased.

It’s the last day of the third Ashes test today. A draw looks favourite but England do have an outside chance of a win if they can grab a couple of early wickets.

A quick hello to Amatay, who has been linked up over here à. He’s a West Ham fan and lives fairly close to where I was brought up, and therefore should be respected. The only reason I may change this opinion is if (i) he eats babies in his spare time or (ii) he is related to Harry Redknapp. Him taking a look here has probably increased my readership by 33%, making this one of the hippest and fastest growing sites on the internet that doesn’t feature naked ladies. Or something.

Bobby Robson popped his clogs the other day. I’ll sign off with some amusing Robby Bobson related stories and leave the mawkish stuff to The Daily Mail.

“Journalist to Shola Ameobi: Do you have a nickname at the club?
Ameobi: Not really, no.
J: So what do the lads call you?
SA: Shola.
J: And what about Sir Bobby? What does he call you?
SA: Carl Cort.”

“Bobby is at a book-signing in Newcastle. Little kid gets Sir Bobby to sign his book after queuing for ages. 'Have you signed a lot of books today, Sir Bobby?' 'Oh, hundreds, son. Absolutely hundreds'

Kid walks off with his signed book, and glances down at the inscription; 'Best Wishes, Bobby Hundreds.'”

“Gathering the England team at the airport before they went abroad for a friendly, Sir Bobby got into a bit of a flap when he realised Peter Reid wasn't in the departure lounge. After a frantic search yielded nothing, he asked one of the coaching staff, 'Where's Reidy got to? We can't leave without him!' 'Er, you didn't pick him, boss...'”

“And the time he got in a lift with Bryan Robson, turned to him and said: "Morning Bobby." "Err no boss, I'm Bryan YOU'RE Bobby."”