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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 

YOU GOTTA PLAY WELL TOO

Here I am again at dead-on 5'oclock a.m. The Midnight tourney at Full Tilt, $69 +$6, has just finished........I took the chip lead on the very first hand of the final table and never looked back: unrelenting aggression and some good fortune too. I went in heads-up with a 6-1 advantage, holding $650,000 chips to Beardy's $110,000, with the $30,000 in the pot, having dealt with most of the other offenders at the final table personally. Heads-up was swift, steady and relatively risk-free until I quite fancied my Q7 and pushed all-in. Beardy, from Stoke-on-Trent, rightly reasoned his A-9 offsuit would do the business, but didn't reckon on the posse of Queens that came to my aid. The good news is that the field was a little larger this time, 259 entrants in total and the winning prize was a pretty special number.....

My lucky number has always been 118, since it was assigned to me aged eight years old when I was packed off to Scarborough to learn Latin and other strange habits. Twenty years later, fully obsessed by numbers - I once guided my friends to an unknown destination through the vagaries of North London solely by the number plates of the cars in front; eventually they lost patience, and I relented and bought the A to Z, only to find the street was two minutes from the petrol station. No they weren't convinced either - numb to the power of number they were - so twenty years later I was given a 'mala' or necklace out in India, by a fakir, who said it was beautiful, but no use at all to him as it did not have 108 beads (One hundred and eight being quite special and sacred to many (1 to the power of 1 multiplied by two to the power of two multiplied by three to the power of three, thus expressing the totality of three-dimensional space). So naturally I took my gift and counted the sandalwood beads, finding out the total was 118, which suited me fine. Several years later, on a Friday night, the night before Diana's funeral, I managed to drive head-on into a black Mercedes, driven by a beautiful divorced lady, with two children.....(number plate 75 JP). Everything was fine bar my Renault, my passengeer's nerves and my necklace, which became imprinted into my neck with the seatbelt impact. So I needed a new car, which duly materialised a week or two later, courtesy of a kind lady at The Bridge Club, and before I could say "let's fall asleep at the wheel and write this one off on the motorway" I had a reasonably priced upgrade, a little white Polo, and the number plate was 116. About this time I decided to count my beads again, which now totalled a miraculous 116 - another of life's affirmations. Those who have read 'The Alchemist' will know about the language of the universe.

So where is this all going, other than serving the fine purpose of calming me down? Well if you have a lucky number, you should also pay attention to its multiples. Thus, 232 is significant, and also 464 - in particular this one has followed me as a friend, four being a number of materialisation (you need four points before you can create something substantial; three merely gives you a triangle, which has no solid form). So tonight's magic number is..... $4646.46 - which is pretty damn weird. I kid you not that was the fruit of my five hours of labour. I have taken the account over the five figure mark - in fact I have won back my stake from Vegas, including the buy-in for the smaller event - and yes even before I came across the film, I had been imagining myself winning the Big One. I just need to raise my game first. So anyone with any suggestions......

"Congratulations you finished the tournament in 1st place. $4646.46 will be credited to your account" Yeah baby!

So go check out The Secret, www.thesecret.tv and start to change the world - and if you are wondering where this total non-sequitur fits in, then you need to go read the next post down, from four days ago.

5:05 AM | Permalink |  

Saturday, September 23, 2006 

AND THE SECRET IS.....

I sat down in front of my Imac nearly seven hours ago - Max, my son, was asleep upstairs. Curiously he had requested Tales of Shakespeare three nights ago, and tonight we finished off The Tempest, of which I knew little, barring the existence of a character called Ariel, and the eponymous tempest in there somewhere. In a word it starts bad, bit stormy, but Prospero comes good and redemption is had by all. So what you may ask? A truly crappy synopsis of one of the great works of literature. Well it sort of mirrored my fortunes tonight.

FullTiltPoker send you regular articles, written by people someone has heard of - which are always useful. The moment you think you have nothing to glean from anyone else's take is the moment of hubris. So the last piece of advice was to move out of your comfort zone, and play a level higher than you are used to, provided you have the bankroll to support it. Particularly applicable to the Lowroller, who has been gradually building the 'roll' a few hundred dollars at a time, risking little, playing weaker players. All very well, but it doesn't raise one's game much, and this method becomes quite dull, and then you lose your hunger and next comes the losing streak. Hunger is everything in poker. Hunger and confidence.

So last night after playing Omaha $1-$2, where the maximum buy-in is $200, I decide after finishing just out of the money in a Sit and Go (six people all paying $55 with the top two getting cash) to go and 'win' it back the fast way. So down I go to the lobby, where everything is just dandy, but no sign of anyone playing Omaha at $2-$4, but there is a $3-$6 'Cap' game, which means that the most you can bet on any hand is 60 times the big blind, so $180. So I sit down with $360 , whisk it up to $770, take a couple of beats on the river, and find myself with just over $130 - not good. My first adventure at the higher limit ( well second in fact - you can check out the last 'post' for more tales of online madness) was following an all too familiar pattern: win early, fail to cash in and leave, lose the winnings, then play hard to try and win it back. I was all set to cash it in, but I wanted to go to bed having passed the milestone of $5,000. Anyway I wasn't going to let the game beat me, so I fought back and a few hours later I left the $3-$6 table with $352, with a sense that I could handle the higher echelons. It didn't help that the second game I'd been playing $1-$2 Omaha saw me make two bad decisions which cost me a couple of hundred bucks. So I went to bed down a hundred or so, several hundred short of the magic 5K - by the way this is a completely fallacious approach - go to bed at $4,999 or $4,875 or when the matchsticks keeping your eyes open start to draw blood.

So today I moped about, not quite with it, slightly irritable, clutching my medium wave radio, hanging on the putts and drives of those adventurers at the K-club. Mr Micawber had it right you know. Self-imposed misery, until finally I pull the finger out and cook roast chicken with the bread sauce, and it all goes down well, and I begin the night job, which to begin with didn't feel great. I started at the $2-$4 Omaha table with a degree of fear and trepidation, and to cut a long story short I am down over a grand in under an hour - I didn't make my draws. I lost twice big time to bad players with aces, with my draws failing to materialize, and bought in the maximum for a third time, determined to play better - I can't really claim bad luck. But most of all the fear had dissipated, and I played well, and my $400 buy-in at one stage crept up over the $600 mark, albeit briefly. In the meantime I had entered the midnight MTT - multi-table-tourney, $69 + $6 (registration - for my hard-working friends at FullTilt). This was a DS tourney - they love their jargon - meaning instead of $1,500 chips, you start with a double stack, giving you more time to play poker, rewarding skill (yes I can hear the laughter). It usually takes four to five hours to reach its conclusion. Anyway I had decided that once I busted out of the MTT, I would quit for the night, before I really did some damage on the Omaha. In fact I quit the Omaha just after 3 a.m. with $567, so I had clawed back a little.

So what is the secret? The Secret is in fact a film I watched recently - www.thesecret.tv - and it is remarkable. Having learnt what the secret is, tonight I put it into practice. To summarize, the primary law of the universe is the law of attraction. What you think about you attract. I was playing fearful poker, I was inevitably going to lose. Fear is the most important hurdle in the whole of poker. If you are out of your comfort zone, fear is more likely to trip you up. So during the hourly break in the tournament I sat with eyes closed and saw myself winning the tournament, and attempted to experience that feeling of winning - and then I get brought back by the omaha table beeping at me - it was my turn to act: I had AAQJ, double-suited, as good as it gets, so I raised and got four callers. The flop came Q-10-7, 'rainbow' and I checked in middle position. Anyway the hand got checked to the river, by which time I had made the 'nut' flush and won a modest pot of $55. So a good start for The Secret - what you think about you attract - I hadn't exactly bet fearlessly, but the flop wasn't great for me.

So where is this all going? Well to cut a long story short, the $13,000 guarnateed tournament went well. It went very well. Indeed. Yes I took it down. At every hourly break I spent a minute seeing myself winning, actually attempting to experience it.
Heads-up took most of an hour. I started with $400,000 chips to his $200,000 and twice doubled him up, but each time bullied my way back, before J-J took down his A-8. I still have the words on my screen:

"Congratulations! You finished the tournament in 1st place. $3,910.92 will be credited to your account"

So that is the secret. It truly is an astonishing movie. I'll be ordering another copy soon. In the meantime, dawn is on her way in damp Donny. I'll be awake again in a few hours for a game of golf, and I'll be applying that secret, you better believe it.

5:13 AM | Permalink |  

Saturday, September 02, 2006 

BACK ON THE VIRTUAL HORSE AGAIN

ONLINE MADNESS

The online madness is over - As part of my package for the WSOP I won $11,000 - $10,000 of which was my entry, $1,000 was my spending money (credited to my account), with free accomodation at the MGM thrown in on top. Anyway the $1,000 never made it. I blew just over half of it through a combination of bad luck and bad play, before deciding it was a good idea to put my last $400 or so in the $5-$10 PLO game - this does not mean gambling with freedom fighters - not recommended, but rather Pot-Limit Omaha, where you get four cards rather than two, of which you must choose from your hand and three from the board. It is an action game, requiring a considerable bank-roll - my friend who plays high-level internet poker, usually No-Limit-Holdem, blew virtually all of his six-figure bank-roll without making any bad calls, before finally turning it around. He has now returned to the safer waters of No-Limit Hold'em.

So I doubled up my stack to just under $1,000 in the space of ten minutes, and yes you can guess the rest. Ten minutes later PartyPoker and I were saying fond farewells. A similar pattern was repeated when I returned from Vegas: this time the PokerStars account - a little over $400 - went to some grateful Yankees. They are now searching in vain for The Jollyconeman - my online identity - as an easy mark, but I have moved onwards and upwards. I have discovered FullTiltPoker, which is Mac compatible. I cashed in $600, which over time - a lot of time, mind you, nets me a further 'free' $600 - so far I have received $250 of my bonus, having notched up around 50 hours of play. I have reincarnated as No-Limit-Shiva, and as befits the Low-Roller, I have yet to progress beyond the $1-$2 games. PLO has been a good source, and the MTTs - multi-table-tournaments. Regularly these attract 150-200 people, and typically last four hours or ten minutes depending on how attached you get to your pocket 10s. I have played four - first time out I ended up third. I raised a large amount with K-J suited to get called by K-10. The flop came K-10-2 and I was history. Still $750 for four hours of enjoyment means the kids might be getting those Christmas presents after all. My first instinct, at that stage in the tournament, holding $100,000 in chips was to push all-in from the small blind as there was over $12,000 in the pot from blinds and antes. This probably would have taken down the pot uncontested - K-10 should probably fold.

Second time was not successful. Holding $4,500 in chips, having just doubled up, I pick up 10-10 and limp for $100 from under the gun, which is called twice and then raised to $600 by seat 6. Knowing that the safe option is to fold, I decide to see a flop which comes three small cards - 8-7-4 rainbow. I opt to go for the check-raise and he calls with pocket Jacks. Another tale of bad poker, you might say. Limping with medium pairs is clearly correct in my opinion, as you can not really stand a re-raise. Calling the raise is not great, although I have just about got my pot odds if I hit a set. If I don't I must walk. However it is possible for me to win this pot but only against a good player: instead of flat calling the raise, I might reraise, representing a very big pair. This would have been the only way to prevail.

The third attempt saw me make my way to the final table of 9 with a small stack, and busted out 8th after pushing all-in with A-6 of Diamonds. In fact pushing with a small ace is often less than optimal, as you regularly find yourself getting called by A-K or A-Q, which leaves you with very few ways to win. On reflection I should have waited either for a better hand or better position (I had fired the A-6 of Diamonds from under the gun - first to act) or for another player(s) to be eliminated - there were two potential candidates with similarly small stacks. Eighth place was worth just over $300, with each place paying at least $100 more.

2:08 PM | Permalink |