November results

This is my November results, 2nd best month ever, i'm pretty happy [and there's a few hours of November left, so we may still crack it]. The huge downswing was HU at 10/20, the rest of it grinding mainly 5/10. I think i'll be avoiding HU from now on.

Now that i've looked at it again, this bet was pretty daft, but at the time i felt like the bollocks when i shoved here and got snap called. Fwiw, im 100% sure both villains snap call Ah+ here, so maybe it wasnt too daft.

***** Pacific Hand History for Game 146991349 *****
$5/$10 Blinds No Limit Hold'em - *** 11 26 05:21:16 2007
Table Starry Night (Real Money)
Seat 4 is the button
Total number of players : 5
Seat 10: adamratv ( $1756 )
Seat 1: dollaGes ( $1000 )
Seat 4: rossini3 ( $332.4 )
Seat 5: Hoooooof ( $1896.75 )
Seat 6: Yougef ( $985 )
Hoooooof posts small blind [$5].
Yougef posts big blind [$10].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hoooooof [ 9d 10d ]
adamratv calls [$10].
dollaGes folds.
rossini3 calls [$10].
Hoooooof calls [$5].
Yougef checks.
** Dealing Flop ** [ 9s, 10h, 2h ]
Hoooooof bets [$35].
Yougef folds.
adamratv calls [$35].
rossini3 calls [$35].
** Dealing Turn ** [ Qh ]
Hoooooof checks.
adamratv checks.
rossini3 bets [$70].
Hoooooof calls [$70].
adamratv calls [$70].
** Dealing River ** [ 9h ]
Hoooooof bets [$1781.75].
adamratv calls [$1641].
rossini3 folds.
** Summary **
adamratv shows [ 8h Jh ].
Hoooooof shows [ 9d 10d ].
Hoooooof shows [ 9d 10d ].
adamratv shows [ 8h Jh ].
adamratv collected [$3633].
Hoooooof collected [$140.75].

adamratv >> oh my
adamratv >> sorry gotta take that pot and walk
dollaGes >> nh
Hoooooof >> gg
dollaGes >> sick

How can a company be run this badly?

So after giving me my comp points back the other day [another reg i was speaking to, RKrystal, also had his reinstated]. Pacific poker, in their infinite wisdom have taken the ability for me to conver my comp points away. I really hope they never intended to give it back to me and i've done them for $7k. According to PT, i've paid $53k in rake total at Pacific [more like $60k considering how many hands PT has missed]. Never in my life, will a company get that much money out of me in such a short amount of time for such a bad service. If i paid £30k for any
service in 5months in the real world, i'd go sick if they treated me like they do. I suppose though, that it allows me to derive a very good income, and for that I should be happy.

Went for a meal with my parents tonight because they were passing down the motorway, it was really nice, I had sardines on toast [7/10, good nothing spectacular] Seabass w/fennel, cherry tomatoes, olives [9/10, fish and olives were cooked to perfection] and panna cotta with blackberries to finish [9/10, it really was fantastic]. I love eating out in decent restaurants so much, but especially in ones that aren't up their own arse, the waiters don't try to look down on you and the atmosphere is way more chilled out.

Poker has been a little swingy the last few days, and I haven't been playing great. Been making some strange calls, and been playing a wee bit too loose PF i think. I'm well up but thats only through running great at 10/20. I'm breakeven at 5/10 over the last 4 or so days but up nearly $20k at 10/20. I'm at about $45k for the month so far, so with any luck, I might break $50k again.

I'm constantly messing with my ranges at the moment, i played ridic tight yesterday to see if it had any effect, but it didn't at all. My image with the regs is seemingly entirely based on historical stuff. My UTG opens were getting 3bet all over the place which is pretty interesting to know, def something I might do in the future, they seemingly see my stats as like 26/22 or whatever they've got me as and take no more notice than that. In fact i probably played 12/8 for 4hrs yesterday [and admittedly i was almost suicidal at the end of that experiment, being a nit sucks]. Kinda made me realise how few players are paying attention which is pretty awesome to know, perhaps switching gears, which is something i've never given much credit to as a concept [apart from slowing down when your image is bad] could definitely be a very lucrative move. Having a player think im raising 19% UTG and 35% on the button can only be good when its 5 and 15 for periods of time. Definitely something i'll give some thought so, but i'm not sure it is entirely +EV because most of the hands i play are generating a profit [or should be!] in a vaccuum anyway.

Hopefully i'll get some hands in tonight, i'm v. close to hitting 200k hands in my DB, so that's a fairly big milestone, my big [pointless] aim is for $250k in 250k hands which i think is def doable, just need to run at >$1.15 or so a hand for the next 50k hands, which might just be doable. I've done that for the last 150k hands buts i suspect ive been running hot at the higher stakes, so its a pretty big ask.

I just found $6875 [woooooooooooo!]

A long time ago, I exchanged several emails with Pacific poker regarding their comp point reward system.

It basically went like this:

Pacific: We're taking your loyalty bonus away because you've won money here.
Me: Wtf? You stingy bastards, do you realise how much rake i've paid?
Pacific: Yes and we apologise but the decision is final.
Me: If i start losing, can I have my loyalty bonus back?
Pacific: No, now fuck off before we doomswitch you.
Me: Ok, please don't do that, i'm very sorry.

Today, I was nosing around the cashier section, and went into the comp points section to see how much money i would have if they hadn't taken my bonus away. It said something like you have 339k points, click here to convert. I clicked and $6.7k was credited to my account!!!!!!!

Although this is obviously great, it does concern me that Pacific may now consider me a fish that is simply having a lucky run.

In other poker news, today was pretty good, made a few buyins, the games were pretty tight and taggy at times but i think im dealing with it pretty well.

Coaching & being coached

I've always been a fan of coaching, i've always found huge benefit from getting a v. good player to look at your game. I've had 5 or 6 coaches so far and had my first lesson with a new one today - MDMA managed to fit me in for a sesh. This guy has his rep for a reason, jeeez he's clever. I've still got to finish my lessons with BobboFitos, so i'll have him to talk theory with and MDMA to sweat me. I'm hoping that this will allow me to a) beat the games for a higher winrate and b) be able to make a living player poker for a longer time. I see it as an investment - though $8k is a lot a month, perhaps 4 lessons/month would be better.

I've also been doing some coaching myself, our lodger [he has many names, any from Vulture/Bellick/Cunt/Squatter/Liberty Taker/Splitting Headache/Joe Hutton is fine] has been playing $50nl on pacific and i'm pretty proud of his progress, he's thinking about the game, and putting a lot of effort in. I've also been coaching a guy named Chris [Milky on 2+2] from the uNL forums. He's a nice guy, has a drive to succeed and is receptive to my ramblings, so that's pretty cool. He also helps a lot of people out in uNL, so it's nice to try to help a helper out.

Something that i'm a little peeved about [not really lol, i'm still pretty stoked] is that, without a pretty sick next 112 hands, i'm not going to hit $100k at 100k hands of 5/10:

Heads up poker can crawl off and suffer somewhere

Lol, i lost $20k to a fucking terrible player on friday night at 10/20. This is something i'm pretty ashamed about. I'm going to take a week off i think, catch up with my uni work, buy some stuff, eat sushi and then come back and play 5k hands of 2/4 as punishment. I should be able to jump back into the bigger games fully prepared.


This is November so far:

I'm not going to make any excuses about my play heads up, I wasn't good enough, and I need to rethink my game. I've decided i'm going to be really hard on myself about my losses from now on, I spoke to some random dude on AIM today and he told me about all his theories that FTP is rigged against him. It is my opinion that thinking that you are unlucky or that the site is rigged, or that you ran badly is all an external factor that you can't control, but it gives you an excuse not to work on your game. I don't want this to happen to me, I lost a lot of money because I didn't adjust my stupid fucking bluff happy, straightforward bullshit identikit strategy to a guy playing a very different game. I carried on playing when I was tilted, tired, dehydrated and pissed off, i'm annoyed at myself for that, I need to give myself the very best chances of winning big. I want to crush the games this year and losses like this will make me get to a stage where I can compete with the best players about. I'm not going to be lazy about my game or make excuses any more.

I thought this was quite a cool idea. I'm studying corporate social responsibility at the moment and it's got me thinking about companies and what they can do environmentally and socially. I'm not sure if all companies [and innocent in this case] have entirely the best intentions with these campaigns but it does mean there's another couple of trees out there after i've lapped down their awesome smoothies, so that's pretty cool. I also like being able to plant trees without getting muddy [or indeed out of my chair]

In other news:

Holy fucking shit, today was crazy:

The last few weeks have been ridic:

[this is lifetime but you see my point]