The Law of the Jungle(man)

I played very little poker over the last week, choosing to busy myself with all manner of other shite. I will end up down for August by around $200 pre-rakeback, which is no distaster, having played around 11,000 hands. The wife is at a wedding on Saturday so I will try and play a fair number of donkaments.

I have been having some work done on my flat during the last week, which has been needed in advance of me attempting to sell it next year. It hasn’t been too expensive but I could have done without shelling out the cash all the same. I managed to complete my tax return as well, so HMRC is due to be shipping me £7k in the forthcoming weeks, which is a reasonable bonus (well, it’s my money, but I’ll be glad to have it back).

There have been a few reasonably interesting stories in the poker world of late:
1) WSOP Europe and EPT London begin soon.
2) Shady allegations about Sorel Mizzi surfaced, I don’t think anyone is that surprised.
3) The durrrr challenge part duex got underway, and plucky challenger Jungleman12 has been bringing the smack so far.
4) Shit is getting wierd with UB.

West Ham took a 3-0 beating at the hands of the Mancs, who barely broke sweat. I didn’t think we did too badly, but Spector showed (again) that he isn’t up to it and was at fault for two of the goals. We never got any support to Carlton Cole, and one of the few bright spots was another decent performance from Dyer, who hit the post for the second game on the trot. Hopefully he will find the net next time.

With several people sustaining injuries and requiring minor operations from various clubs, you can tell that the international break is coming up. England are (I think) playing on Friday night, I’m sure the wankers that attend will get on the team’s back, it’ll be just like a home game at West Ham.

It is transfer deadline day today, which is possibly the date I hate most in the football calendar. Last year Sky said that West Ham could be concluding a deal with someone as the lights were still on at The Boleyn, which turned out to be the cleaners. Fuck them and their self-generating hype machine. If somebody can wake me up at the end of it (as long as I haven’t killed myself first), that would be good.

Good luck at the tables.

They're One Thing

HU has seen some sick swings for me in the last couple of days. The good news is that I have made my 10,000 hand target for August, which I am pleased about. On Saturday morning I managed to stack of 7 BI to a massive fish at £50nl, and then proceeded to win most of it back at $100nl last night. I’ve made a couple of pretty big errors in deep pots recently, which are expensive and I need to work on. Overall I’m down around $300 for the month.

Reading through 2+2 last week I picked up on a couple of poker truisms that I hadn’t heard before – the first one is truer than almost anything I have ever heard before and the second underlines the mentality of pretty much any HU poker player, myself included.
1) The more I learn about poker, the harder it gets.
2) A bumhunter is anyone that table selects more than you do.

I watched an “Ansky vs. Durrrr” video on 2+2 last week. I generally don’t watch the very high stakes videos, there is generally too much going on in them, but Ansky always explains himself very well and isn’t afraid to be critical of his own play. A lot of the stuff in there was pretty enlightening; I’d recommend it to any HU player.

After stacking off all those buy-ins to the fish on Saturday morning, things didn’t get any better at West Ham. The complete disaster area that is the tube meant that it is essentially a two mile walk to the ground from any station. West Ham played well for 45 minutes, missed a penalty, hit the post, came out at half time, got rolled over by two goals from long balls and another from a nice cross and that was that. I was fairly encouraged by the performance - Piquionne, Dyer and Barrera provided plenty of reasons for optimism, but we need to sort ourselves out defensively and sharpish. We play Oxford in the Carling Cup tomorrow, I’m sure we will struggle, as we always do against lower division opposition.

Young Boys produced a thrilling display against Spurs last week. Tottenham played badly and were clearly hampered by the plastic pitch, but with Berne missing a couple of great chances to make it 4-1 and the subsequent late Spurs goal, I can’t see anything beyond Tottenham progressing to the next round. Booo.

Good luck at the tables.

L’il Zé

August has been up and down (mainly down) so far on the HU front. I’m down over $400, which isn’t such a disaster given the stakes I have been playing. It just seems like a real drag when you are getting ROFLstomped by someone that is a lot worse than you or hit and run by the worst players that just can fold anything. Anyway, enough bitching, I hate hearing about “OMG I run so bad” (particularly when I am probably not) so I’m sure you do too. On the plus side, midway through the month I have played 8,000 hands, which at least puts me ahead of schedule for my targeted 10k this month. MasterLJ made a pretty awesome post about variance a while ago here, which is worth a read.

Over the last two nights I have played 2,000 hands against a Vamo. Honours are approximately even – he won Tuesday’s session and I won Wednesday’s, despite being down about four buy-ins inside the first 200 hands. He plays quite an odd style (being Brazilian, I would expect no less) and basically three bets pretty much every hand that he plays from the big blind (c. 35%) and seems to struggle to put down a hand (any hand) at times (we played a massive three bet pot deep on a clusterfuck of a board where he had J2o for top pair having three bet pre and bet flop and turn he called a fairly substantial river bet). I made some adjustments in yesterday’s session (min-raising pre to try and keep pots smaller and make more use of my positional advantage being one) and definitely ran better.



Fair play to the guy, he’s one of the few game opponents on IPoker at the stakes I play, and has been courteous enough. I think he’s keen to play again, and much like me probably just wants to get some action and not be snap sat-out by some idiot reg nitfish.

Elsewhere on the poker front, congratulations to MTT superstar and all-around nice guy Mement Mori for becoming the latest CardRunners instructor. I don’t know Mement particularly well but has always been helpful and pleasant around the forums, and it seems well deserved so good luck to him.

West Ham started the season badly with a 3-0 drubbing at Villa. Given that they had no manger it was a terrible result, but it is just one game so hopefully we can put it behind us against Bolton on Saturday. Except that we always lose to Bolton, so we probably won’t.

Good luck at the tables bishes.

Weird Fishes

Poker has been somewhat meh of late. I am down around $400, mainly at $100/£100/€100nl, which isn’t a disaster. I managed to stack of $600 to a lolbad guy on Friday, only to win a lot of it back from him on Sunday. Fair play, he’s keen to give action and hopefully will do again. I also 4 tabled one guy at €100nl for 800 hands, when I told him I was quitting in a few minutes he typed “scared?” in chat. This was funny for three reasons:
1) I had played him at 50nl before, when he had quit me after 50 hands as I was “too good”.
2) FWIW I felt I clearly had an edge over him, but some regs seem to think it is unfair to quit when ahead, which is retarded, as neither party would ever quit.
3) Yes, obviously I’m scared you moron, that’s why I’ve sat here for 800 fucking hands over four tables, and now I’m suddenly crapping it. Clown.

I played some donkaments last night, I played good but didn’t run good, including getting KK in vs. AQs for the chip lead on the exact money bubble of the FTP $163 against someone that seems to have a track record of sucking out against me and losing, and busting soon after for a min-cash. Fuck that guy.



There has been some relatively interesting/amusing/shocking poker stuff around of late.
1) Things don't look good at Cake Poker.
2) Bachelor Frog tells us about his life.
3) Jungleman is playing the durrrr challenge, which has the potential to be really good if durrrr and Patrick ever finish up.
4) Barewire speaks the truth.

Martin O’Neill has quit the Villa job in a huff over transfer funds. I’m not going to go into my views on him here, I can’t be arsed, but this is good news ahead of our opening fixture at Villa Park on Saturday. I’m sure they will rattle off a routine 2-0 win all the same. Roll on the new season anyway, this one has the potential to be interesting.

England have a friendly against Hungary this week. I’m not one for having a pop at Capello, given the resources he has available, but to drop various players that went to the World Cup but stick with the senior members of the side that let him down the most (Lampard, Terry, Barry, Rooney) seems ridiculous. I thought Barry had a shocker, Terry and Lampard were poor and Rooney looked like a different player. At least Rooney and Barry had the excuse of coming off the back of some injuries. The retirements of Robinson (which I entirely understand given the treatment he got and that he should have gone to this World Cup) and Brow plus the situation with Cole and Carrick at the Charity Shield (which was a fairly entertaining game) don’t bode well and I wonder how long it will be before England are looking for another manager. Whether he is the right man I don’t know, but changing the manager won’t be a solution to England’s problems, which run a lot deeper than that.

Good luck at the tables.

July Wrap

July finished with me grinding 14k hands for a loss of one dollar and twenty seven cents, which made it feel really not that worthwhile. I’m not that unhappy given that I probably didn’t run particularly well over the course of the month and probably didn’t play my best overall. I’d like to get in another solid month of volume and try and mix in some more $100nl over the course of August.

The best thing I saw on the forums this month was this thread by that_pope. Everything about it is fucking hilarious and I highly recommend going through the whole thing.

We are creeping towards the beginning of the football season and West Ham have won all of their pre-season games (I’m not sure that this is a good thing, two of the best seasons that we have had have followed us losing every single pre-season game). It appears that Scott Parker will be moved on, which is probably unsurprising in the grand scheme of things – Grant supposedly thinks Hitzelsperger is a better player (and has done well so far) and Parker probably deserves better than playing for us. Whilst I find the Spunk Brothers constantly being in the press somewhat annoying, we’ve done pretty well in the transfer market thus far in the transfer window so far so I can’t grumble.

Liverpool might be being bought by some Chinese blokes, according to the BBC. I’m sure the Scousers will be delighted to see the back of Hicks and Gillett, although I’m always suspicious about buyers from the Far East where the background and identities of people aren’t always clear and you wonder if they will have the best interests of the club at heart. I guess it can’t get much worse than how things are currently.

I went to see Inception the other day. It was good, although my feeble mind was somewhat confused at times. It’s worth a watch if you get the time.

Good luck at the tables.

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."