January Wrap-Up

With the month nearly at an end, results have been awesome - nearly 14,000 hands played (more than I have done before) and profit of $2.6k, with rakeback to come. Weeeeeeeee! I'm pretty pleased with this - I have definitely run well and played some people that I am surprised haven't electrocuted themselves by dribbling too much on their PC whilst playing, but I have played well enough and kept tilt to a minimum. My Ipoker account balance is now $7k, which rules given that it was under $2k at the start of December.



I am finding MTTs somewhat frustrating and haven't hit a decent score in a while. I probably don't play enough to justify playing them, so I will be focusing my efforts on HU cash for the time being. I'm thinking of taking a shot at $100nl, which isn't much of a shot as £50nl is effectively $80nl at current rates. That said, I am kind of happy with my progress at present.

West Ham picked up a 1-1 draw at Portsmouth, despite a blatant elbow in the build up to Portsmouth's equaliser, I am not unhappy with the result. We look to be signing Benni McCarthy (after the Blackburn game on Saturday) and with Cole back and Nouble showing some promise (although he does look like he's free styling at times) the forward cupboard looks marginally less bare than it was. We still need a right-back of some description, I'd rather not do Spurs a favour and take Hutton off their hands as I think there is better value to be had elsewhere.

Scott Duxbury was handed his P45 at West Ham today. Good riddance, having presided over a couple of major fuck ups, the cunt should think himself lucky that he hung on as well as he did. I'll be glad not to read his spin in the papers any more. Speaking of P45s, mine is delayed due to my company's sale having been stalled, probably due to Barrack Obama's words the other day. I am quite happy with things as they are, so this doesn't bother me one bit.

More interesting than all of the above (and a reward for anyone that got this far without stopping to either sleep or read something more interesting) are the two following poker bits of gossip.
1) Man on the run. This can't be good for the poker economy, as my experience of French poker players is that they are so bad that they make the Italians look good in comparison.
2) Ho ho ho. A friend of mine was briefly coached by Jason. He was, by all accounts, an absolute wanker that deserves all he gets. He also looks like a transvestite. One thing that has pleased me is that he appears to have taken all the money that he has scammed and dumped it back to the poker economy, so it should be filtering down to most readers of this blog at some point soon.

Good luck at the tables.

Into The Light

There is little to report on the poker front, although I am off work tomorrow and Friday and should get both some tournament and HU cash time in then. I’m up to 9,000 hands of cash played for the month now, so I should comfortable exceed the 10,000 hand monthly target that I have set myself.



After many months of doom and gloom, West Ham (well at least half of it) has been sold. The new owner (pictured above in the fetching Ron Burgundyesque jacket) is porn merchant David Sullivan. Sullivan, Gold and Brady made a pretty good job of sorting out Birmingham City, and whilst I don’t agree with the proposed move to the Olympic Stadium, I am not unhappy with the buy-out, particularly given the staggering amount of debt that the club is in.

By all accounts the new boys will waste no time in booting current CEO/spin merchant Scott Duxbury and Director of Football Gianluca Nani out. They had a good record of backing their managers at Birmingham, hopefully that will continue here as I am overall not too unhappy at the Zola/Clarke team.

Here, Sullivan can be seen handling (reasonably well) some questioning from Chris Morris. It is worth watching, mainly because Morris is superb.

Work has slowed to a crawl and basically we’re all sitting around here waiting to be made redundant. With the wedding coming up I am basically using the time to sort out a ton of administrative stuff, go to the gym and try and lose some weight and generally take it easy, as opportunities to do so are few and far between.

We finished booking the honeymoon the other day. We have a pretty cool trip lined up, starting in San Francisco, driving to Lake Tahoe, then back past San Francisco and down the coast for a few hundred miles, stopping along the way. From there we roll onto Palm Springs, before finishing up with three days in Las Vegas (how romantic). It is a pretty cool trip and I am really looking forward to it, and obviously it is better than being at work.

Good luck at the tables.

The Beginning of the End

Not for me and pokerz, for me and the current employer. My company, which is part-owned by RBS, has been subject to an auction process over the last few weeks. It looks like we’re fairly close to finding a buyer, and at a guess I’ll be out of a job. This isn’t the disaster that it sounds – this is unlikely to happen overnight (as if I am laid off it will be constructive dismissal).

Basically, should they decide to give me the boot (I’m not sure they’ll require an advanced 2+2 surfer at the new place), they need to invoke a one or three month “consultation period” where they basically tell you that you are going to get the heave-ho. In this time I basically would do not a lot, probably making a token effort to come into the office (which is basically what I am doing now). I am on three months notice, so they would be likely to pay me that off. They would also be bound to pay me my bonus for 2010 (which is due in March 2011) and my 2009 bonus (which is due in March 2010) plus a redundancy payment. Overall, I’d be absolutely chuffed if they gave me the boot, I’d do well out of it financially and get to spend some (more) time doing fuck all. The missus wouldn’t be best pleased, but there you go. Furthermore, blog readers can look forward to updates on what is happening on the Jeremy Kyle show, which I’m sure they will find fascinating.

I played some donkaments last night with little to report bar a 9th place on Party where I busted at the final table with a questionable play. HU cash is continuing to go fine, I’m at over 7,500 hands for the month now and still ticking over a nice profit.

West Ham go to Aston Villa on Sunday. Villa are a decent outfit, their Carling Cup game against Blackburn last night was excellent. The Liverpool vs. Reading game was absolutely sensational on Wednesday too – despite the devaluing of the competition in recent years (thanks Arsene), I still enjoy it as much as ever and the two big upsets in the third round this year will have done wonders for interest in it.

West Ham still hasn’t been sold. Supposedly the dildo salesman and his mate are in pole position as they are the only ones with some money, the Intermarket lot are talking a good game but haven’t actually shown anyone that they have the money to buy it, Tony Fernandes it twatting about it relentlessly and an Italian fraudster that owns Calgiari is also interested. It is hardly the agony of choice, but given that I don’t have a choice anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

Redknapp was charged with cheating the public revenue yesterday. It is a shame they haven’t got him with anything more substantial/serious, but hopefully they can interrogate him in a dignified fashion that also extracts a confession for anything else he might have forgotten to tell them.

Sustainable, IMO

I’ve been putting off writing this post for a while, as I really don’t want to jinx the current good run that I am on. I played some donkaments on Friday, I cashed in three without going super deep, but felt that I played well enough. I also had the pleasure of being sat with Joka briefly in the Stars $109 freezeout. Obviously I courtesy three bet him at one point (for a change I actually had a hand) but because he is good at poker he folded and I cursed him under my breath and add him to my ever-growing slowroll list.

However, following on from a very good month at HU last month, I’ve absolutely flown out of the traps in January, and am currently up c. $1,800 over 6,000 hands, which is 39bb/100. Sustainable, IMO. I’ve got some good volume in, with over half my monthly 10,000 hand target accomplished inside 10 days.

I’ve been taking on a couple of the regs, and played over 3,000 hands against one guy who I am currently up 20 buy ins on at GBP 50NL. I have run well against the guy, but he is simply too aggressive a lot of the time and I am fairly confident I have the beating of him. We played an epic 1,800 hand session on four tables over two hours last week, which I really enjoyed. I’m not sure if he’ll play me again, I kind of get the feeling he will. I have also played another reg who was terrible, but beat me fairly soundly a few months back (if he is terrible, what does that make me?), that I have outplayed fairly comfortably over c. 1k hands since. I think I’m playing a whole lot better than I was three months ago and am a shit load less tilty, which is saving me a fortune. I’ll probably stack of 20 buy-ins over the next week or so, so watch this space.

It has taken a while, but I think I am getting the hang of cash game poker. Up until recently I had basically had a real problem with folding once I had put money in a pot (in the words of Bond18, “folding is a sin and he is a pious man”) – of late I have been able to click the fold button when it appears right and simply move on to the next hand. I got way too attached to strong pre-flop hands and was unable to re-evaluate street by street (or if I did re-evaluate, I’d ignore the results of the re-evaluation and call anyway). I’d also be simply too eager to get money in with hands on the flop when often calling may be the better play, instead of simply shutting out all of my opponent’s bluffs.

I’m still bad, but I’d like to think I’m finally making some progress. It has taken 100,000 hands, eight months, a reasonable amount of coaching and a lot of frustration, but hopefully I am now at least a winner at the stakes that I play.

Most of the football was snowed off this weekend. I wasn’t sorry, it was baltic outside and we could do with the extra time to get Cole and Parker fit.

It is still snowy here, and since the poker snowmen picture was so well received, I thought I would include this one of two snowmen having sex. Don't pretend you don't think it is funny, it clearly is.



Good luck at the tables.

It's Cold Outside

Three days back at work has confirmed to me that I really don’t like it that much. It is chucking snow down here and England are 101/1 chasing a monster 466 in Cape Town and West Ham got dumped out of the FA Cup by L’Arse. Happy Fucking New Year.

Poker has started well, I’m nicely ahead playing heads-up after finishing up around $1,700 last month, with rakeback to come. Her indoors is out on Friday and a couple of other nights during the month, which should enable me to stack off a considerable amount in tournaments too – so the MTT community, you are welcome for me juicing the prize pool for you.

New Years Eve was a sterile affair, I stayed in and went to bed early, it was fucking tremendous – I didn’t get tucked up for a single overpriced drink that I had to wait 20 minutes for. We were at a wedding on the 2nd of January, which was a good do. Stag do preparations continue in earnest, I’m still scared.

West Ham’s ownership status remains up in the air, with Gold & Sullivan/Intermarket/Tony Fernandes/Some Americans all in the frame. Knowing the Icelanders they will probably hang on to the club and ship out a couple of players instead. I won’t recount the defeats to Spurs and Arsenal here, although I was somewhat heartened by our performance against the Goons.

I’ll keep this update brief as (for once) I don’t have much to say – except, Wayne, if you’re reading, YOU SHOULD NOT BE AND SHOULD BE PLAYING A SESSION INSTEAD. Give us a cuddle, you cunt. ;)

Good luck at the tables.