A little over two weeks ago I was well on target for my best cash month ever at poker, not only this but it was also on the back of 2 very solid months......I'd been on a pretty decent heater (by my standards). The poker gods and my self-destructive/retarded play had other ideas. As you can see from the graph below I really crashed and burned.
The downswing started with a frustrating HU session against a pretty bad reg. I quickly lost 2 buyins Vs him in very standard spots (all in pre with KK Vs his AJ then top two in a 3 bet pot Vs a flopped set), at this point I should probably have quit as I know how bad I play as soon as I'm the slightest bit tilted but carried on only to make a very bad river call, at this point I finally quit. Since then I can't think of a session where I've played really well, I seem to be spewing off buyins on a daily basis at the moment. This combined with the fact that I've not been running great over the last 20k hands has lead to the biggest downswing I've ever had. It's also made me painfully aware of how mediocre I am at poker, I've got a database now of almost 800k hands and I just can't get my winrate above 5bbs/100 as soon as I start nearing that figure I go on some monster downswing or breakeven stretch and I'm back being a 4bb winner. I like to think that when I'm playing my A game I'm around a 5.5-6bb/100 winner, however because I spend half the time playing my B/C game I never actually attain these winrates.
All I can take from last month is that I really need to address the tilt I suffer. What I should have done was give myself a break for a couple of days to take the momentum out of the downswing. I guess all I can do is try my best not to repeat what happened last month.
Besides me being a moron at poker I've been really motivated to skate recently as I got a sweet new setup, the weather's been amazing and an awesome new skatepark has just opened up in a neighbouring town. Here's me putting them through their paces at the new park.
I got back on Monday from the Nottingham UKIPT held at the Dusk Till Dawn Poker Room. As most of you probably know a £1 million prize pool had been guaranteed for the tournament, pretty good a buy in of £770. Win the huge prize pool and relatively cheap buy in it was no surprise that there was a large turnout for the event with a total of 3 day 1s it was going to be a long tournament............well not for me anyway.
Being somewhat organised I'd registered for Day 1c (Friday) about a month in advance which was good as it soon became apparent that it would sell out. I drove Myself, Si and Will up on Thursday afternoon, we arrived in good time and booked into our hotel before heading out for some food with Todd Swain aka ToddSwain of PKR (2nd in Masters fame). After a very mediocre Frankie and Bennys we headed to a studenty/hipster bar for some drinks, it was here we met fellow PKR player JJBird after several pints we decided to call it a night and like true professionals we headed back to the hotel for some sleep before the big day.
After yet another mediocre Frankie and Bennys we arrived at DTD were I managed to find my table and get seated. It was the usual mix of people, I had position on a middle aged woman whom I learnt was staking a load of people in the tourney she clearly played a lot of these live events but generally played pretty tight and very straight forward. One of the better players at the table was a live cashgame player, from what I gather he plays a lot of £5/10, I was told by a friend who's played with him that he will do some werid stuff. He didn't disappoint and ended up shoving around 15bbs with 76s from MP Vs UTG+1 min raise open with about 5 players still to act. I don't really see how this can be profitable given the number of players still in the hand and the fact that it was a min-raise with no antees so even when he takes the pot down pre he doesn't win much. As it happened I was sitting there with AK and was pretty happy reshoving, my hand held to knock him out.
I think it was after this hand that I reached my tournament peak of around 18k in chips and with starting stacks of 15k it's pretty obvious I never got up and running. I'm not really happy with how I played, I made several pretty bad mistakes, the worst was probably trying to value bet a weak overpair Vs the woman staker, as soon as I bet I remember thinking 'Don't call!!!!' not the best thing to be thinking when you're trying to value bet. She ended up calling with a slightly better overpair. WP me. My eventual exit hand was a pretty standard spot where I squeeze called a shove with AK for around 20bbs and lost to Jacks.
After my standard cooling off period and a couple of drinks I begrudgingly joined a £1/2 table with £300. I wasn't really in the mood for cash but as everyone else I was with was either still in the tournament or grinding cash it was my only option besides hitting up the pit games. Given that I'm the least degen poker player in the world and don't really enjoy pit games (or gambling for that matter) I opted for the cashgames. I still have real issues with live cash, firstly I get bored pretty quickly and secondly it always feels like I'm playing for loads of money. I play considerably higher stakes online but loosing money live always seems to hurt so much more, I guess it's because I don't feel detached from the money like I do online.
My brief stint of cash went pretty well, I won a £600 pot when I flopped a set in a 3 way 3bet pot with 22 on a AJ2hhh, I opted to lead flop as I think the initial 3 bettor would pot control with a lot of his Ax hands. The turn and river were perfect for me with the board running out AJ2hhhA8 I just lead flop+turn and shoved river, the guy tanked for a bit before calling, I don't really see many live players folding trips here. I managed to build a stack of around £750 by winning a few small pots before I 3 bet sqeezed and called a short stacks shove with AQ only to get in against KK. I was happy to end my cash session with around a £300 profit when Si busted out knowing that he'd need my support at the bar. That was the last of my poker for the weekend as myself and Will took the opportunity on Saturday to visit old Uni friends in Sheffield.
The UKIPT weekend was good fun it didn't even feel like I lost any money as I'd bought into the tournament several weeks in advance, this is definitely something I'm going to do in the future as it really takes the sting out of it when you (inevitably) bust.
In online news, my tourney run continued when I won the Wednesday night High Roller after really WORKING the 2nd place guy. Cash games have been going pretty well I've been hitting up the 2/4 games on Ongame and it's looking like this will be the first time in months where I end up playing more 2/4+ than 1/2.
I'll leave you with a hand I played yesterday during a HU session Vs an old PKR reg.
PKRreg ($1,993)
WongaMan ($2,158)
WongaMan posts (SB) $5
PKRreg posts (BB) $10
Dealt to WongaMan
WongaMan raises to $20
PKRreg raises to $80
WongaMan raises to $195
PKRreg raises to $485
WongaMan calls $290
FLOP ($970)
PKRreg bets $1,508 (AI)
WongaMan calls $1,508
TURN ($3,987)
RIVER ($3,987)
PKRreg shows
WongaMan (sheepishly) shows
PKRreg wins $3,986
I'm pretty happy with how I played the hand given the game dynamics, he was down around 2-3 buyins at time I'd 4 bet around 3 times each time winning the hand either pre or with a Cbet on the flop. I know he flats 4 bets fairly wide hence the 4 bet, given the stack sizes and the dynamic I felt flatting is small 5 bet was fine. I felt the overbet shove on the flop was more likely to be a draw or just straight air as surely he'd want to give me some room to shove a draw if he had a strong hand. Anyway as John Locke would say........
It's been an age since I last updated the blog, I've actually been pretty busy (as busy as a poker player can be) over the last 6 weeks or so since my last post. With the poor action at 1/2 and above on PKR particularly in the morning and early afternoon I decided to put some money onto another poker site. This is something I've been meaning to do for a while, as I'd like to have my bankroll spread across a couple of sites. For one it's a little extra security (you know the old saying about having all your eggs in one basket) but the main reason is so that I can maximise the amount I play. I can now log on and instantly start 6 tabling as opposed to having to sit around on empty tables waiting for action.
I started out grinding $1/2 on the new site with a monster 8 BI roll. Thankfully I ran good and managed to spin up to a roll of around 20-30 BIs and am now dipping into the 2/4 games, these so called dips haven't gone too well but so I'm currently back at 1/2 nursing my wounds. This is the first time in almost 2 years that I've put in any serious volume on another site, so it was interesting to see how the games differ from PKR. The most noticeable difference is the increased aggression pre and post flop, generally people seem to either 4 bet or fold when being faced with a 3 bet. Obviously there are ways to deal with this and I'm fairly happy with how I've adjusted.
With a constant supply of games I was able to put in just over 50k hands and book my first really solid month of the year. I still managed to put in around 13k hands on PKR spread across 1/2 through to 5/10 where I ran pretty well. This month I'm hoping that I can move up to 2/4 on the other site and get back to the days where I play the majority of my hands at 2/4 and above. So far the month has started well, I've managed to make a little in cash and have finally ended what has been an awful run in Tournaments on PKR with a HighRoller final table and me winning the Vegas $4.5k WSOP package. Huge commiserations go out to JJBird who nut bubbled the satellite.
I say 'awful run' but in reality I'm pretty sure I've still run above EV in tournaments on PKR, as you can see from my sharkscope below I ran like god over the first 20 or so tournaments I entered. I then proceeded not to go on a fairly big downswing, in that time I nut bubble the $5k WTP Dublin package and the 500 HR. I ran pretty bad tournament wise during this time but also made a tonne of mistakes, on the upside the downswing wasn't as bad $$$ wise as a lot of the HRs I entered was with player points earned from cash games so I was basically free-rolling them.
In non-poker related news I'm now part owner of a company called the Sourdough Pizza Kitchen. A good friend of mine approached myself and Will (BrotherM) a while back about the possibility of starting up a company with him. We're now at the stage where we're a registered company with us down as directors along with 3 others all with a 20% stake in the business. Currently we're look for a premises to open up shop, at the moment there are two strong candidates, one in Upper Clapton and the other one near London Fields/Hackney. If all goes according to plan we should have a pizza place up and running within the next 2-3 months. For sometime I've been wanting to branch out away from poker as I don't think it's going to last forever, in the 4 years or so I've been playing the games have got tougher to beat and there's always the worry of new legislation, there's even been talk about taxing poker players in the UK. I'm pretty aware of my own abilities in poker, I know that I'm a reasonable winner in most of today's 1/2-2/4 games but I certainly don't have any great natural gift for the game which means a few years down the line I may not be able to beat the games for a decent living. This pizza kitchen is the perfect chance for me to get involved in something outside of poker so I won't be totally screwed if I get to the stage where I can't make money from poker anymore.
If anyone is interested in sampling some of our fine pizzas, the E5 Bake House (under the archways of London Fields Station) holds a pizza day every Sunday. You can also follow the Sourdough Pizza Kitchen @SourdoughpizzK on Twitter and Facebook.
As you can see from the picture, things aren't critical for me but they're not great either. I've not really been enjoying poker since the Dublin WPT, largely due to the fact that I can't string together a few winning days and also because I feel that I've been playing badly during this period. I seem to catch myself doing something spewy on a daily basis at the moment. It's got to that annoying stage where I've lost confidence in a lot of the decisions I make. There's on particular reg at the moment who I just can't play well against, he's certainly one of the best regs on PKR and has run well Vs me but I'm at the stage where I just level myself in so many situations resulting in poor decisions against him. He must love playing me atm, because it's basically free money for him. Anyway, hopefully with a bit of run good I'll be able to get out of this breakeven stretch and get back to form. I'm planning on entering the UKIPT in Nottingham in April, a bink would go down very nicely right now.
Apart from playing badly and not really making any money from poker I went on an awesome last minute trip to Holland for WinterClash (Europe's largest rollerblading comp). Given my washed up status I was there mainly to watch and cheer on a few mates who were entering. The park which the comp is held in is awesome there are some really interesting obstacles to skate and from a spectating view there's a bar which makes for great atmosphere during the comp.
Here's an edit of the comp for anyone that's interested.
Right back to poker.
This is the kind of stuff happening to me at the moment, FWIW I hate my 3bet sizing on the flop but w/e.
