Well its been a month since my last post. And to be honest I had serious doubts that I'd even be back to post again. But here I am full of vim and vigor.
After a thoroughly break even run at SnG's (no need to say "I told you so") I'm back playing cash again. I've only played 2000 hands but I'm a healthy £23 up. Split over $0.02/0.04 @ party poker and $0.02/0.05 @ stars. Feeling pretty pleased with that too. After the monster run in the summer @ $0.01/0.02 I had real trouble psychologically moving up on stars and that's when I lost confidence and entered the SnG wilderness.
Changing your game when running bad isn't such a bad thing. It seems to clear my head and forces me to focus on different aspects of the game. Which in turn seems to pay dividends when returning. Make sense? well it does to me.
Alas all good things come to and end. I managed to get myself a modded xbox and a copy of Forza 3 at the weekend. I'm an absolute nut for driving games so I can see poker taking a back seat for a bit while I tear up the track. Mind you it won't last long if I can't get on live! as that's where the real challenge in these games is.
What else. Oh yea, Got a beast of a surround sound amp to go with my new popcornhour A110. Its an ONKYOTXSR507.
mmmmm connectivity. Gonna have to spend the next 3-4 months scouring ebay for decent speakers and ripping my daughters boyfriends HD-DVD collection. lol T2 came out at 21gig with HD audio. lol love it. 2TB hdd anyone?
As you know dear reader. I got pretty pissed off after the summer hols and haven't played any cash since. I've played a ton of sit n gos which culminated in a monster grind yesterday. Some 50 games of the $1 and $3 variety on party poker Ending up with me being $10 down but clearing an instant cash bonus of. yup, you guessed it $10. FFS how fucking typical is that? SO that was yet another 5 or 6 hours of my life I won't get back.
I read a blog on pokerstrategy the other day about a lad who'd cashed out and then set a little challenge of turning 4k fpp's into a roll. Well within a month he was playing NL50. How cool is that? Ain't ever gonna happen to me. I had 1500fpps last week which I converted to T$33 playing the 6max hyper turbo to the Sunday 1/4 million. "That's not bad S1n" I hear you say. No its not. In fact these little games are awesome if you know a little ICM. however I've played the T$33 out on $3+.40 games only to break even. SO again a complete fucking waste of time.
So this is how its gonna be. Got half term hols in 2 weeks and I am gonna grind the cash tables for a solid week. Just like the summer. Theres $150 in stars and £80 in party. If I can turn a profit I'll probably keep with the game. If not I'm gonna gamble the rest playing games I am not rolled for. I'll bust out and that will be me an poker done with. I can't be fucking around for another year spending hours at the PC making pennies. It's not healthy and its no longer fun.
Oh yeah and I've got some kind of fuckin hack on my PC which is also pissing me off a treat. Somthing has hijacked my google results in both IE and Firefox. When I search it brings up the results just peachy but when I click on the link it redirects to a bunch of random shite. Doesnt do it everytime but maybe 1 outta 3 clicks. Outpost pro cant find it nor can malwarebytes. I know its areg key somewhere but I can't bloody find it. So big ass format tonight (sigh) got a new Dualcore 2.50ghz intel chipney that I'll chuck in and a couple of sticks of 2GB DDR2 (currently dualcore 1.86ghz with 2x1gb) and I'm gonna bite the bullet and crack (dare i say it) vista on. Theres nothing more annoying than fixing PC's all day and having to go home and do your own. I am so gonna ghost this time. I say that everytime but never do.
And Finally I watched X-FActor last night Mrs S1n wasn't best pleased when I said that all the artists on there were suckers of satans cock, each and every one of them. Reminded me of the legendary Bill Hicks. Enjoy!
I have always copied music. For as long as I can remember. Even as a small child My friends dad showed us how to tape the charts on his Hi-Fi and I can remember when I was a kid and I am talking under 12 here spending a morning making a mix tape to play my mum and dad. My old man told me it was good except the wombles track I'd put on it.
In the early 90's from about 91-96 I had various jobs in the "Business" From a security guard at big studio then moving on and being a tape op and finally a mastering engineer. Until I imploded due to substance abuse and moved to Wales to get away from it. Infact one of the guys I worked for had written one of the first byte for byte CDDA grabbing programs. It went by the name of CDGRAB which at the time he sold for £50. The internet was just becoming more mainstream and I can remember because we had access to burners and ripping software we were ripping all the goods right at the source. Later the place I was working at got a contract cleaning vinyl and transferring them to CD-R for a radio station. They built me a special room to do this with a lovely technics 1210 with oftron cartridge, De-clicking hardware, DAT, Two Denon CD players, CD-Recorder, three different AD/DA converters. It was a fucking awesome room. Needless to say I took the opportunity to copy my now quite large record collection to CD-R.
However something happened after I left london and that was Napster, MP3 and of course that little application bit-torrent. It's basically Pandora’s box and its been opened and there really is no way of stopping it without us consumers having our liberty seriously compromised. And this is what the likes of Allen and Barlow want to happen. Heres how I see it unfolding. ISP's / the government start monitoring torrents and limewire. Legislation is passed allowing the deep inspection of our internet traffic packets. People get cut off, fined, whatever. Music companies get what they wanted and the government gets to look at all our data. People move away from bit -torrent to a more secure form filesharing. SSL encrypted Usenet at first and probably a newer secure torrent style application. Record labels start to get twitchy again and lobby the government for more action to be taken. Suddenly it becomes illegal to use encrypted data on a domestic connection. All encrypted data has to approved. And then where are we? Fucking 1984 that’s where.
Why? Because people like allen and barlow and their labels just cant recognize that the revenue stream that was the album sale is now all but gone. I'd be curious to know how much take that made from their last tour. I bet you its more than I am gonna earn in my life time. And lily started her career on myspace before signing to a major. She got signed because she was pretty good. She coulda been good on her own. What happened to building a fan base by working hard and touring? Surely that’s what its all about. Its uncomfortable at times... hard graft at others. And possibly boring as hell. Hey that sounds like everyone else job. Welcome to the real world.
No the album is just an advert for the real thing. Earlier in the year I went to see metallica (not the best example I know) £55 for the ticket, £35 for the T-Shirt and $14 for the FLAC recording of the show 3 days later . Oh you want me to spend another £15 on the album. nah I don't think so. That’s my budget for music for the whole year. I have a family and mortgage and a car.
I'm off to download the discography of everyone that contributed to lily's blog and then I'm gonna burn 10 copies of each and give them out at a party tonight.
Inspection week at work for the next 5 days. For those that don't know. Here in the UK our schools get inspected by "The Man" once every four years. "The Man" sends a hit squad in and they do their level best to ruin morale and generally disrupt a perfectly good school. Theres a big build up with everyone running around like headless chickens which climaxes with the entire school running around like a giant headless cock. So I am now stuck in the office waiting for the phone to ring to deal with the next crisis.
This week I've continued playing SnG's on both party and stars. Every thing was going just fine until the end of Saturday. After about 4pm I couldn't get in the money for toffee. Then yesterday was the same. I think I played a good 10-11 games and got a single solitary 2nd place. Screwing my ROI royally. looks something like this now
played: 91 ITM: 43% ROI%: 14.7 (20% is the benchmark. Still better than the bank :))
Not sure whats happened although I am pretty sure this is standard. Not keeping my cool on the bubble and playing hands when I don't need to. Theres a little leak right there. I'm not gonna let it get to me though as before the weekend I'd been pwning the games quite nicely thank you very much. Lets see what this week brings :-)
I kinda mentioned I'd do a little uber micro SnG challenge with a member of Pokerstrategy.com. Uber micro cause I only had £5.72 in Titan poker. The idea was to play $.50+.10 games and see if I could roll it up a little. Well I didnt fancy the 7 min blinds on those so I opted for $1.+10 games of which I lost two in quick succession. This was followed by a "fuck it" moment (first sign of degeneration setting in?) on saturday night when on my 3rd can of wife beater, I entered a $5 game hoping to wipe out the rest of the roll and be done with Titan for good. Not to be tho as I promptly finshed 3rd and doubled my roll. The irony of it.
Finally theres a nice little bonus coming my way courtesy of Pokerstrategy.com. Two more TAF registrations last week and I've cleared the $50 min to cash out. One of the TAF's has run up 51 strategy points in a couple of days so they look good for clearing the extra 50 to award me another $15. so looking at adding $70 to my partypoker roll later in the week. Possibly $85 if the other TAF gets a shake on. Fingers crossed.
Edit: played pretty good last night 2xDNF 1x2nd and a 1st all at party. However I marked all the incomplete games in HEM as complete and its dropped my ROI down to 11.8%. I know I actually won at least one of the incomplete games. damn
Back after a bit of a hiatus. Just been keeping my poker head down. I haven't made a tweet or even checked my mail. I've not even looked at a cash game for what feels like forever but is in fact about 7 days. Instead I've made a return to micro Sit and go's. $3 games on party (which I am grossly under rolled for) and as of today $3+.40 games on stars (which I am amply rolled for).
For the moment I am really enjoying the change of pace. From the endless grind of cash. I'm now playing games that have a start middle and end. It really is a different ball game and skill set.
The only HUD I am using is LongHUD. And longHUD's Pokerstrategy.com's SnG charts (obviously). These charts really do seem to work well for microstakes. For the times I get heads up I'm trying to employ the SAGE (Sit And Go End Game) system which is also aided by LongHUD's ability to show your stack size as BB's. More about SAGE later.
So far its looking a bit like this
Tourneys: 51 ITM: 52% ROI: 33.4% Won: $50.60
It's not even close to a S 'n' G sample where even 100 games only represents a 23% of being accurate (I read that somewhere). Hence no screenshots as I don't wanna get hung up on numbers just yet.
So whats the difference between SnG's at party and stars? Well the payout structure and rake for a start. Party charges $3 ($2.40 + $0.60) for the game with the rake included and pays $4.80 for 3rd, $7.20 for 2nd and $12 for 1st place. Compare that to Stars who charge $3+.40 and pay $6, $9 and $15 respectively. Stars also starts you with 75BB and 5 minute blinds compared with party's 50BB and 4 minute blinds. This makes stars games considerably longer and IMO the competition is a bit tougher. Yesterday I played a game with a 30min bubble where it was me that finally made the mistake, shame.
LOL I am still pretty pissed about the whole pokerstars FPP thing and after doing a few sums I've worked out that while I'm playing SnG's I need to play about 19 $3+.40 (2 fpps) games a day for a whole month to reach sliverstar. C'mon pokerstars you can do better than that! Over at party its a little over a point per game and you need to earn 400 to release $10. lol on reflection they are both shit :-) However at the bottom of the VIP feeding pool as I am at least you can get some cash back off of party.
Right that really is all I have time for. The phones already ringing once every 4 words typed.
The summer of love is over. we've moved on from LSD and free love. yes, its the disillusioned post. "Crash and burn, baby" Dunno if its a quote or I made it up but it seems to fit.
Right enough of the bullshit. After spending the summer running super hot. I couldn't move up and make it stick. NL2 on pokerstars is a cash machine that breeds bad play and bad habits. The people playing are the the same as the person that started this blog almost a year ago to the day. You can win money by playing a style that simply doesn't work at another level. you can get aweh with all sorts of shit. but most importantly there are certain (and I fear my biggest downfall) BASIC plays that just don't exist and they all involve 3betting. Combine that with the total limperama makes it easy to simply limp marginal hands and pump anything made. TPTK will win ALL the time. I could go on.
So 35000 hands go by and its fair I've made over $100 in that time. However, It slowly dawns on me that I am never gonna make any serious money doing this. Y'know not even enough to take the Mrs to Amsterdam or something door to door like that. I don't think I've got what it takes to get to the "next" level of thinking to even progress successfully to even NL5. Where there are more people (like me) trying to make something of their game than there are who have just got home from the pub and in a fit of compulsive desire have guiltily opened an account.
This realisation has then left me struggling at NL2. So I've the past few days I've taken a break from cash and pokerstars. I think I've OD'd a bit. Like when you play a computer game (which it is, obviously) and you just get to that point where you simply cant play to that same bit only to get defeated again. So since going back to work. Which has been a total mare. I've been playing a few $3 s 'n' g's on party.
Pokerstars Roll: $130
I think the change has done me some good. Running pretty goot. For another post tho.
Morning campers, just a week to go now before I am back to work.... booooNevermind, I'll be able to spend my downtime reading about pokes and writing more posts than is necessary :-) Safe in the knowledge that the next grind is just 7 weeks aweh. Ah the joys of working in a school.
Well I've run pretty good since moving to NL5 or 5NL whatever you wanna call it. Good except yesterday where I lost $8 (My Buy-in at this level). Ahhh Sunday bloody Sunday. I know how U2 felt now :-) Anyway heres what my NL5 hands look like since moving up.
Just gotta keep this going for this final week and I will have achieved everything I could possibly have hoped for. I'm also heading fo a few little landmarks. A year bloggin (can't wait for that post) and 100k hands.
What else has happened this week? Well only the biggest heads up battle since (insert name here) Vs. (insert name here). Oh yeah I'm talking the epic battle between myself and the villain that is Meteoric. I'll give you a clue who won.... It wasn't me. He beat me 3-1. I foolishly made the mistake of being a gentleman in the first match which cost me dearly in the long run. I wouldn't mind but we played some pretty nose bleed stakes, I'm talking 4 x $1+.10 so no doubt the reason I didn't speak to him on Sunday was he'd been hitting the champers a bit hard during his victory celebration. Anyway nice one m8 you played a blinder in that last game.
Gonna lose my Goldstar status at stars at the end of the week (which I only got by doing a quiz I technically shouldn't have) and tbh I'm a bit pissed. 28000 hands and $70 in rake this summer. I know, the rake is a piss in the ocean but 159hrs of play says I am a dedicated pokerstar . It would be nice not to be dropped back to bronzestar with no chance of improving. Pokerstars rewards for anyone not multitablingNL25 or better are pretty poor imo. /rant over
And finally due to my entry into the WBCOOP earlier in the year I've got a free entry into a qualifier for this years WCOOP. So I'm bound to take that down or a least get to the final table ;)
mmmmm connectivity. Gonna have to spend the next 3-4 months scouring ebay for decent speakers and ripping my daughters boyfriends HD-DVD collection. lol T2 came out at 21gig with HD audio. lol love it. 2TB hdd anyone?
