Scared Money

I have had a mixed month so far, with some more disastrous attempts at 100nl and a brutal day where I played 3,000 hands and dropped $700. Overall I have played a satisfying 9.5k hands and am down around $400, which isn’t an utter disaster. I’m kind of annoyed as some of my losses are undoubtedly tilt related, but I played a lot better in my last session.

I’m glad to have finally removed the last of my money from Chili. Withdrawls taking two weeks is at best incompetent and at worst shady, and I feel a lot better for having that portion of my roll on Hills.

Note to IPoker $100nl regs: you are, almost without exception, the biggest group of pussies I have ever seen in my entire life. The HU $100/£100/€100 tables nearly always have at least one person sitting at them, yet there are relatively few games going on. Try sitting a reg at three tables and you’ll get snap sat-out. The $20nl guys have more balls than you do, why not try playing someone that isn’t drooling on themselves, you might actually get to play some poker and even learn something. Wankers.

Elsewhere in poker, the November Nine are now all set. Matt Affleck must be absolutely sick about his bust out hand, but that’s tournament poker I guess. Elsewhere, PokerStars seems to have made proper refunds for the DoN collusion that was going on, but not actually fixed the collusion itself.

I had a shitty cold at the back end of last week. Although I have recovered, I am still absolutely knackered all the time and it is starting to piss me off. We spent last weekend looking at potential areas to live, which was relatively successful and we have a good idea, but I was absolutely exhausted by the time we got back.

West Ham completed the signings of Pablo Barrera and Frederic Piquionne. Both will definitely improve the squad, so I can’t grumble. The whole Loic Remy thing is becoming very boring, I’m pretty sure I’d be better off sleeping in until the season starts. Bar Man City, nobody is really doing much business so right now (Bolton have made a couple of decent acquisitions but I don’t see anyone down the bottom moving heaven and earth) I’m relatively optimistic for a finish of somewhere towards the top end of the bottom half of the league.

Good luck at the tables.

Strike Action

I finished July a thoroughly satisfactory $1,400 up, which I am very pleased with. I thought I played well throughout. June has thus far seen me play 3,500 hands, and after some epic run good against a bad reg yesterday evening I am up $200. Volume would have been higher, but for… IPoker.

Basically, IPoker suffered an enormous software failure which saw their games largely out of commission for over 48 hours. The support from the various skins handled it in their usual fashion – badly. I got a text from a mate who works at one of the skins who said it was all IPoker’s fault after a back office software upgrade. There were a lot of very unhappy regulars on 2+2, I think I’d be exactly the same if I only had money on one site and played poker for a living.

Having built up a reasonable roll on my old IPoker skin and after some bad publicity for them (Chili Poker), I decided I’d do much better by shifting my roll to William Hill, where I secured a rakeback deal and started to do just that. Chili have been very slow allowing me to make withdrawls – the last one took the best part of two weeks. I spoke to a couple of guys on 2+2, one said he had problems also and it wouldn’t surprise me if they had a few issues. The way their support handled it didn’t encourage me either (taking ages to reply when they are normally very quick, failing to meet deadlines that they had imposed to pay my money, then refusing afterwards to set a new deadline). Whilst their bonuses are good, I’d urge anyone wanting to deposit on there to exercise a little caution – there is no reason why a cash out onto Neteller should take two weeks, and I’m not moving what they should consider to be large amounts of money off the network.

The World Cup concluded last night, I won’t go on too much about the game as you probably saw it. I lumped a load of money on Spain before the semis to leave me around even for the tournament. I’m not sure whether Webb lost his bottle or was under orders from FIFA, but he failed to send people off when the decisions were obvious, and the fucker normally can’t wait to get his red card out in the Premiership.

West Ham appear to have signed Pablo Barrera, the Mexican winger and self-styled “Mexican Cristiano Ronaldo”. The bloke looks quick, but if he does join and whether he settles remains to be seen. We also seem to be moving towards signing Loic Remy, but I can see us being beaten to the punch when a good side come in and offer him a deal. Roll on the football season.
My company got bought out last week, so we’re going through an integration process with our new owner. The new owner appears to be excellent and very switched on, however redundancies are inevitable and I think it’s 50/50 if I stay or not. Whilst the job market isn’t great right now there is some stuff out there in my field and the terms of the pay-offs being talked about don’t sound awful, so it might not be the worst thing in the world.

This weekend the wife and I are hiring a car to drive around various areas that we might want to go and live in. Taking on a massive mortgage in the current climate doesn’t exactly fill me with joy, but needs must and I’m starting to get pissed off with the noise, dirt and great unwashed of Hackney.

Good luck at the tables.

Closing gag: A bloke goes into Rothbury police station and says "I heard ya was looking for a Geordie nutter like. I'm here to hand meself in."



The copper looks up and says, "Fuck off Gazza."