Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Sunday 31 July 2011

Big Weekend and Tournaments

Just come back from a Newquay stag do, pretty hectic but good people and had a great time. Trouble is I feel that I'm getting too old to crash in crappy bed in a small dorm with 3 other blokes and a communal bathroom serving 20+ people. Also spending a good part of the day on the beach without sun cream has given me burns that are causing me a lot of pain. I suppose these things must be tolerated for such a 'good' cause :P

Quick word on the cricket, I thought it was a very honourable decision by Captain MS Dhoni and the Indian cricket team to withdraw their appeal for the wicket of Ian Bell in the Trent Bridge test match. At the time I remember being pissed off that he was out but after seeing what had happened felt that despite the confusion the decision was correct. But doing what they did in the interest of the game was pretty classy. It was just a shame that the batsmen were not sent out first or that there was not even an announcement about what had happened and that the umpires and Indian cricket team had to endure the jeering when they came out after tea.

I just played a few tournaments tonight, no cashes but now I'm on Stars and there are so many running I'll probably mix in a few with my cash game bursts. The reason being that sometimes I just don't feel like grinding cash. Tournaments still feel like fun; I'm not a very good tourney player and I find the preflop equity decisions pretty interesting. There is also so many bad players in the micro tournaments that I'm sure that I could still make money in them regardless of my skill.

Again, making money is about getting in as many hands as possible. In tournaments unfortunately because my mental arithmetic is not that good, I find it pretty hard to do any more than 6 at a time because of the constant calculating that's required every time the blinds change. For anyone who is not an experienced player, strategy is heavily dependent on the size of the preflop pot with respect to the size of your stack. Simply put, the larger the preflop pot compared to your stack then the more looser and the more aggressive you should play.

Tonight there was three close preflop decisions. I checked them all with SNGWiz (a tool which helps to assess strategic tournament decisions) and the only error was a preflop shove where a late position raiser was called by the small blind and I shoved with QJs to try and win the pot without showdown. I knew that the first raiser would be folding a lot due to his wide preflop range and that the small blind caller's range likely didn't have {QQ+, AK} in it so my equity would not be terrible even if I was called. In the hand itself my opponent called with AJ and I was crippled. But SNGWiz made it a very small mistake after I'd adjusted the parameters for the players in the actual hand. The reason why is because I had almost 15x the preflop pot (just blind money) which is a little too much to risk with this hand. QKs would likely have been a certain shove though so it wasn't a large mistake.

Now that I'm back at work I'm sure that I won't be able to play quite as much but I really think that I'm good enough that playing a mix of tourneys and cash will get my bankroll growing in the right direction. GL

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