It's A Picnic!

Another very quiet week as we hit another weekend and poker has been pretty much as my last post really. For the record, Ladbrokes has increased to show a profit for the month of 35$ and my Bodog 'challenge' has just reached my 100$ target!! Toot Toot Toot! This puts my Bodog account over $220 up for the month in total, so really pleased that my catious play is paying off!I wasn't too sure if I'm playing a little too cautiously at the moment but it seems to be building a steady increase in my months BR.

I'm really tempted to step up from the 10 or 25$ buy in I've been playing at Bodog, but want to build up my BR a little more (hopefully!) first and see if the standard is similar at the 50$ and 100$ buy in level. I did tell myself that I would play a month of low level games and kind of 'go back to basics' and I don't want to break a steady run so far.
I'm thinking back over last 2 months, and August was very good for me, probably my most profitable month ever, and maybe I got a bit too full of myself and lost a little bit of control. Sure, I had some pretty horrific beats, but maybe if I'd been reading the game better I may have prevented some.

Off the tables, I'm now 3 weeks into my new job and really starting to get into it and make a difference. It's a call centre with about 30 staff at the moment, though I have just taken on 5 more staff that start on 23rd October (3 guys and 2 girls - we need a few more blokes around the place! The girls are nice, but they don't know anything about football or drinking Guinness).
The company are the 2nd largest UK hotel booking agency in the country (turnover £220million last year) and have contracts with some big companies such as Marks and Spencer, Boots and Orange as well as some smaller ones that are equally lucrative, but not so well known. They use us for all their UK hotels, so if M&S are sending a group of sales guys to a particular area, they book their hotels with us.
We also have a conference secton so when Orange or M&S host a company conference or training week, we arrange everything for them from big conference facilities, delegate rooms to the sweets on the tables.
They set up the Northern office in October last year as the head office in Taunton isn't the best location. The basic plan is that we will deal with all the Small to Medium size business that need a little more attention and are generally more demanding, and Taunton keep the biggies.

I am the Operations Manager and my job is to take over once the sales guys have won the contracts. I meet with the client, find out how they want to work, get them set up on our system, communicate this to our staff and then evaluate and report business achieved. I also have to oversee the running of the whole office from Health and Safety, Staff Training, etc etc.
It's a really interesting job and I seem to be having an impact early on which is great. It helps when my predecessor wasn't very well liked and had a really hard management style which rubbed the staff up the wrong way. I have a more 'hands-on' appproach and talk to people about what I want from them, instead of banging fists on the table and demanding it. Seems to get the job done easier all round if you ask me.

Anyway, just waiting for this sunshine to dry off the damp ground a bit before it's wellies on and off to Dunham Park with a picnic. Yes, you heard me right. It's the middle of October, the sun is shining and Mia and I are off to the park with a picnic. Great isn't it! Also glad to report that there are no bumps or bruises to tell you about, though I think we are going to get a bit wet in the park!

The exciting life of a Poker Player

After the bleak period I ran in September, things have been remarkably quieter on the tables for me. I’m only playing at Bodog and Ladbrokes at the moment, and this seems to have helped me calm things down.
I’m a real big fan of analysing the past so you can learn for the future and now my heart rate and emotions have calmed down, things have been really steady. No great wins, no great losses, just a steady period of play to stabilise after losing the most I have lost.
My VPIP is down at the lowest level I have seen, my flops seen % similar, and I think I have become the tightest player ever. This has meant that playing so much fewer hands leaves you open to not hitting as many hands. My stats for October show an increase, which is important of course, but after the poor run, it seems like I’ve won a fortune.

Ladbrokes has been pretty level after 2 weeks of play, maybe the above explains why I just haven’t seemed to be able to get into a flow of hands although I do show a profit of about 20$. Did reach a higher peak but two big hands flopped knocked me back when the river changed everything. Maybe it’s time to start gently loosening up my starting hands to include a few more playable hands, but I’m cautious I don’t fall into another hole.
Bodog is great. I love it. It will be such a big shame when the US clears the gaming laws that will prevent most of the players from participating. Standards are so poor at the 10$ and 25$ buy in; a tight player can pick them off like a sniper. My account here shows a tidy profit of 183$ in October and I have set myself a little challenge (which I have done before quite successfully). I’ve cashed out all but 10$ and am seeing what I can build with a very small starting stack. This really focus’s the mind on what I can and can’t play, coz once the 10$ has gone – I’m bust.
OK, I’m not really bust, but I’m trying to feel like that. So far I’m up to 35$ and my target is 100$ then I’ll cash out back to 10$ and start again. I don’t believe I could do this at any other poker site.

This last sentence got me thinking about my thoughts of different poker sites and how I seem to fare at each one. Laddies (predominately European in my experience) has always struck me as a tough place to play, Bodog and CD (predominately US) seem easier by comparison. I can’t seem to win SNG’s at Laddies or Bodog though, yet my stats show Inter and CD has huge earners. More thought to this I think.

Off the tables, I had a great 2 hours with Mia at the party and I don’t think we’ve both laughed together as much as we did that day, and when we got back home. Cathy working weekends and me taking over the Mia duties has made us closer. Usually I see Mia when I get home from work when we are both tired from the days exertions, and don’t seem to play too actively.
There was the scariest moment in my life when we were playing on the couch. Mia likes to crawl on the sofa, up my legs, chest, on to my shoulders and stands high saying ‘too big, too big’, which she thinks is really funny and giggles uncontrollably. Our sofa’s have quite high arms and as she tried to get round the back of my head, she fell, bounced off the arm of the sofa and hit the wooden flooring with a thud before I could catch her.
The thoughts that run through your mind are horrible, as I’m sure any parent will concur, and in the few seconds it took me to get round to her, I had flashes of all sorts of injuries and hospital visits. She was so quiet as well, which scared me. Then I got to her and she didn’t appear to be breathing, just lying there with her eyes glazed and mouth wide open. She was almost frozen for about 10 seconds then burst into the biggest cry ever, which bizarrely was a massive relief. I think it was the shock more than anything, I cuddled her for a minute before thinking, shit, what if she’s broken something and I’m cuddling her and making it worse. I laid her down on the sofa and checked her arms, legs, back, chest and head and could find no swelling, bruising apart from a red patch on her knee. She was so pale for about 10 minutes and would not let go of me. Then she gradually regained herself and 30 minutes later was back to normal though she got a bit upset when I had to nip upstairs to the loo!

OK, I’m off, enough here for one post I think.

Common Poker Mistakes

Hope you are all enjoying your weekend, congrats to Mr Acorn and his football team for their remarkale efforts in winning their first 3 games in the Euro champs qualifiers. No disrespect intended, but I had to look twice when the score came in whilst watching England v The Mighty Macedonia. Normal service resumed, is all I will say about the England game. A team full of alleged world class players at home, versus a team of footballing nobodies, and we hardly make their keeper make a save. Where are we going wrong?
Well, a distinct lack of world class strikers and a Zidane type create midfielder are two things that jump out.

Anyway, back to more Pokery topics, and I was reading a magazine article talking about the top ten most expensive mistakes a poker player makes. It didn't say they were in any particular order, and I think they missed one out, but here we go:

1 - Playing too many hands
People want action, they pay their money to play poker, not to fold, and God bless'em for it. K3 can beat AA, so they try to keep that VPIP around the 90% mark.
2 - Playing your position wrong
Most of our opponents probably give no thought to position at all, nor to how players will act after them.
3 - Thinking your a 'natural'
Apparantly, lots of people think 'I'm a natural poker player'. I don't even know what one is.
4 - Getting too emotional
Guilty, let's just move on.
5 - Playing at the wrong stakes
Works at the 'playing too low', as well as too high. Feel like you want to step up a level? Try it, you can always move back down.
6 - Focusing too much on the cards
You've got to play the player as well as the cards.
7 - Not knowing when to quit
Heard this from a few bloggers - last hand syndrome, stop loss / stop win works well for me.
8 - Not knowing the odds
Seems that many players online make no consideration for odds and probability.
9 - Being too predictable
No variance in raises, high pairs = 6 x bb raise? Good players pick this up pretty quick.
10 - Not getting help
Read a poker book? Ha ha, not me, I'm too busy calling. There's a wealth of knowledge out there - yet so many never take advantage.

The only one I would add to this list is: Not betting your hand when you make it. So many times I see players check when hitting their flush or str8, hoping to induce a check/raise. Not the worst strategy in the world I know, but if there's an obvious flush or str8 draw - a good player is going to check his two pair or set, and you make nothing more. A value bet here is going to be called if you're opponent has a strong hand against your stronger one.

Right, off to get Mia ready - we are off to a birthday party this afternoon, and I've just spent 20 minutes getting a knot out of her hair. She's going through a phase of twirling her hair with her fingers when she gets tired, and is getting it into all sorts of knots that would take a well trained scout leader to untie. Hopefully, the place we are going will be large and contained, so I just just sit quietly in the corner and watch her wreak havoc amongst the toys and other children.
I'm suffering with a bit of a chest infection, and having asthma, means I sound (and feel) like I'm a 30-a-day smoker! I'm not a sickly person and rarely go to the doctors, but think I might have to see him next week and get something stronger to clear it up. Don't want to take any time off work though, with me being new, and as my Doctors doesn't have early or late appointments, I'll probably just soilder on.

Hopefully it will clear up soon, I have a very nice bottle of red wine in the rack, and am really looking forward to getting it open!