One in the Eye

Being between jobs right now (i.e. scratching my balls at home whilst getting paid by my former employer and awaiting my new job starting in early November) I have been grinding fairly hard. I am at 22kish hands for October, about to hit Platinum, up around $600 and with almost enough FPPs for the $600 FPP bonus on Stars. I have endured quite a few swingy sessions/days, which has toughened me up a bit and I am finding it far easier to cope with a 4 BI down session right now.

I have also been getting reacquainted with something called the fold button. It sits just to the left of call, and is apparently used when you want to muck your hand and not put further money into the pot. I have found it very useful at times when I think "he's really not raising worse ever here" and would previously have clicked the "call" button, to see exactly how much better his hand was than mine. After a while that got quite expensive and I heard about this fold thing.

Congratulations to Chris Moorman on his second place in the WSOPE main event. It was good to see Chris finally book a big live score, after 187 blow-ups close to or at final tables, the changing of 9 Prime Ministers and several aeons passing.

West Ham have been unable to string results together. We are away at Brighton tonight, which is a big game. After picking up a few injuries, El Hadj Diouf (gobbing at Celtic fans, above) began training with West Ham last week. There are obviously a lot of scrotes in football, however this particular piece of vermin once spat at our fans at Anfield (hilariously denied by both Liverpool and the Merseyside Old Bill until Liverpool climbed down and admitted he spat in front of us, which was as close to an apology as we were going to get).

I can't think of a single player I want to see play for us less than this horrible shit (I tolerated Bowyer twice and I could have coped with Barton), and this may well be the straw that broke the camel's back for my support if he does arrive. He's not even a good player any more, not that this makes any difference. I really hope that he doesn't join, he isn't fit to wear the shirt, and Allardyce should be prepared to steer clear on the advice of the board, who are well aware of the supporter's feelings.

Godspeed.

September wrap

I have racked up around 23k hands in September, for winnings of around $1k. I'm not unhappy, I had one horrible day when I ran 7 BI below AIEV, but I thought that my play was generally good. I dabbled with a hundred or so hands on IPoker - the software tilted me beyond all belief, it seems to take ages to even open a table and it looks like the minimaxmod for the current software is still in development. This is kind of tilting but I will play October on Stars before making any decision.

Full Tilt failed to get their situation sorted, but the Ponzi scheme press release from the DOJ should have ruffled a few feathers. I would like to see the mooted French investor deal go through, purely for the sake of my bankroll (and those of others), however if it doesn't it will fully reveal the utter disaster that was FTP management. If what has been said to have been going on is in fact what did happen, then criminal charges need to follow. Jesse May wrote quite a good piece (I don't have a link) which is worth digging out.

I went to see West Ham lose at home to Ipswich last night. Having seen us turn in a dire performance at home to Peterborough, we did the same again and got the defeat we deserved. We lacked any movement or pace and Ipswich played some really good stuff. I have to reserve a special comment for David Bentley. I have never liked him. When he joined Spurs I thought he was ideal for them - flash and lacking in substance, with the hair gel and the crap tattoos he could easily be a Spurs season ticket holder. All I have seen from Bentley thus far is good reasons why he is playing in The Championship - a lack of pace, an inability to get his head up and play a simple pass and a couple of bottled challenges. We have some big games coming up and it is time for both the players and the manager to raise their game - no goals in open play in three games isn't very good.

Godspeed.

Furst among wankers

Some of you may have seen an open letter from Rafe Furst. To be honest I was astounded that someone could be such a cunt and write this without any hint of an apology to all the people that he has caused severe financial distress to. I won't comment any further, I'm sure you are able to form your own opinions.

I listened to Subject Poker's interview with durrrr earlier. Having listened to this, my view is probably quite different to that of many. Paragraphs are hard, so I'll use bullet points instead.

• Tom comes across as having been really naive and appears to have taken people's word for things too often. That's no crime, he's a young guy and probably hasn't dealt with distressed businesses or simply businesses run by cunts and liars, which I have (and I am hugely suspicious of everything as a result).
• For any stick that he gets, the bloke has already agreed to pay back c. $1m that FTP paid him. He wasn't a shareholder and yet has probably done more communicating on this than everyone at Full Tilt put together.
• He seems to duck a lot of questions, but given the NDA that he signed and that he lives in the most litigious country in the world, he probably should be choosing his words fairly carefully.

Greg Raymer does a pretty good job on CNN of talking about poker here.

Godspeed.

The Poker Gods giveth, The Poker Gods taketh away (a.k.a. FU FTP)

Given that I am currently in the office for only a few hours each day I have been grinding hard. Currently for September I'm at 17k hands/$1k profit, and I am hoping to make Platinum this month and next and (hopefully) trouser the $650 Platinum bonus.  Beyond that I'm not really sure where I'm going to play - I'm tempted to go to IPoker and take the rakeback that's on offer and because I'll never make SN once my new job starts, but my volume would drop by 25% if I played there. The new Stars "Beta" themes make playing a lot easier (thanks to Daleroxxu for pointing that out). Does anyone know if Minimaxmod now runs on the "new" (i.e. 18 months old) IPoker software?

After dropping 8 buy-ins on a pretty bad Monday, I sat in yesterday and played one session with the intent of being more solid and less spewy. It seemed to work out, I think I focussed better and made a lot less mistakes and thought through most decisions. I am going to try and do that for every session in future.

The whole Full Tilt saga is starting to unravel. I wrote my money off a while ago, and now I really want to see Lederer, Bitar, Furst, Ivey and everyone else face having to repay funds. Every penny that they have needs to go back to Full Tilt and be distributed to creditors. They should also probably face fraud charges. I know Ivey wasn't a director, but he owned the best part of 10% of the company. Are we really meant to believe he didn't know what was going on? What a mess, and an example of both sheer greed and the stupidity of people prepared to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. If they had any smarts they could have left the US market and continued with a smaller company that remained profitable, albeit that a lot of the player endorsements would have had to stop. They are filth.

West Ham drew 0-0 at Millwall last week. For my own safety I didn't attend, Bermondsey is horrible anyway. It looks like we had enough chances to win it but a point is probably a decent result. We have two home games in a few days against Peterborough and Ipswich coming up. Six point is a necessity, but realistically I think we may only get four at best. Still, we're unbeaten in the league since the opening game, so I can't grumble.

Godspeed, and be sure to drop by www.raisetheriver.com for the Jared Tendler Q&A.

Q&A with Jared Tendler - all you bishes can participate.

I'm not going to fuck about - the excellent www.raisetheriver.com has pulled of a huge coup by finding pictures of mental game coach, author and all-round good guy Jared Tendler in compromising positions, and as a result he has agreed to do a Q&A for any of you bastards that suffer from tilt or other mental game issues (that's all of you) to prevent these from being broadcast on 2+2 and causing embarrassment to his family.*

The thread is here:
http://www.raisetheriver.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=13384

Signing up takes 30 seconds, so no fucking excuses.

A full blog post on how ace I am will follow shortly, until then you can ask Jared to pick around inside your twisted brains (I shudder to think what he'll find in there) and see if he can stop you going on steaming monkey tilt so often.

Godspeed.

* there aren't really any compromising pictures of Jared, he's just doing it because he's a good guy and because Buster has been cyber-stalking him for such a long time and he hopes doing this will get him to knock it off.

Back!

I finished August on around 10k hands and down around $500. After 4k hands in September, I'm up around $500. This is clearly a case of swings and roundabouts, although I'm not sure which I prefer. I'm a good deal happier with my play, having a break, playing only 6 tables and taking a look at the Baluga e-book again certainly haven't done me any harm.

I came back from last weeks after two weeks in Malta with the wife. It's a strange island, very busy and in a lot of ways unlike much of the Mediterranean. The people are very nice, the food is good and it isn't overly expensive if you are careful about it. On the minus side, if you are into long, sandy beaches it probably isn't for you, and the Maltese are utterly unable to drive. It's probably a better place to go in October or May, when it's quieter and slightly less hot. I had a quality break though, I slept a ton and didn't really do too much ("what's new?" I hear you cry), which was what I was looking for. This weekend I'm off to Amsterdam with a couple of mates for a slightly different kind of holiday.

I quit my job just before I went away. My new company is a start-up which is run by people that I have worked for previously. It is not without risks, but could potentially be rewarding if it goes well, plus I am bored out of my mind here. I should be in the office around half the time before I join, so hopefully I can chill out, play some poker and maybe get to the odd West Ham midweek away before I start there.

West Ham have started the season well enough. We have a 100% away record and have let ourselves down at home conceding late goals in three games. I'm not unhappy, we look like we're going to be a good deal more ruthless this year and we seem to have signed well enough at the end of the transfer window. I'm not a David Bentley fan and I would have liked to get shot of Ilunga, but we are going to have some decent players that won't get in the match day 16 that other sides in the division would love to have. Parker's departure was inevitable and I think him leaving will enable Allardyce to make some tactical changes that he wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Otherwise that's it, I promise to update with another poorly written and uninspiring post soonish.

Godspeed.

Trouble

July finished around $300 down - I had one horrendous days where I played three sessions and finished over $800 down (basically I lost a ton of flips and AA vs. KK) - the graph can be seen below. It wasn't pretty but I have run like a God for ages so I probably deserved it and the end result for July wasn't so bad. Having made Platinum in August thanks to Star's generous deal that they have on (and collected the $650 bonus) it isn't so bad and I'm down around $200 in 4k hands during August. I'd like to get close to 10k hands before I go on holiday on the 19th.

The Full Tilt/Alderney meeting was a total wash out. I can't see them returning to business, so it is gg $3k I guess. I'm mainly grateful that it wasn't more and I was fortunate enough to have shipped five figures off there post Black Friday.

The football season opened for us on Sunday. We had far the better of Cardiff and managed to lose 1-0 due to a shocking error from Ilunga and Green failing to save a shot from the otherwise shocking Miller. I thought that on another day we would win that game, we hit the post and had a shot cleared off the line and were beaten by an old fashioned smash and grab. Nolan looked way out of condition and Parker looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. On the plus side I thought Matt Taylor was excellent, as was Joey O'Brien and the two central defenders. We are lacking a bit of pace throughout the side (John Carew certainly isn't going to provide that) but I think we're going to concede a lot less silly goals this season. We have Aldershot in the Carling Cup on Tuesday, which is a good opportunity to get a result under our belt.

The sky appears to be falling in on the financial markets. For anyone under any illusions about just how bad things are right now, I'd highly recommend Tim Morgan's excellent paper (linky). You might not agree with what he says, but it is well researched and has a lot of numbers and facts to back up what he is saying. He also (rightly) points out exactly what got us here - not the banking crisis, but the previous government's choice to spend their way through a boom time.

Godspeed.