SwingSwingSwing's Poker Journey

I played slightly more poker last week due to the fact that the expiry of my Stars Battle of the Planets reload bonus is looming. By my calculations I need to earn about 35FPPs every day from now until July 9th to get my $80. This isn't factoring in my holiday in Germany at the end of June or my cousin's wedding or various visits to friends so I really need to get a move on.

So I've been shortstacking 0.50c/$1 NL full ring. I'm ahead of schedule in terms of FPPs but slight down in terms of cash. My table selection strategy, namely sit at the table with the biggest average pot, is paying dividends when it comes to accumlating FPPs due to the number of donkeys who are willing to gamble their large stacks on marginal hands but is not so helpful as the same donkeys are quite capable of calling my 20BB all-ins with pish. For example, I'm UTG with AKo. I've been quite cagey with AKo in early so I limp in. There are a couple of other limpers and then the loose aggro big blind bumps it up to 8BB or so. Now given this guy's play so far I reckon there's a very good chance he's at it. There's around 12BB in the pot and I've only got 18BB left so I push all in. The limpers fold, the big blind calls with K4s and hits his four on the flop. Rebuy, please. As I've said before, Domination - What is it good for?

If I wasn't so risk averse, I'd be tempted to buy in for the max and nut-peddle. It might get me a bigger payday against these donks.

BritBloggerment rolled around on Sunday as normal but it wasn't good for me. At the first break, I was top 3 after taking a race against Rosie and winning with JJ. First hand after the break, it's folded to me in the small blind and I min raise with KJo hoping to take an easy blind from TanOrpheus who hadn't sat back in. Just before I pressed the raise button, Tan reappeared. He re-raised me a large amount. Now what I should have done was cut my losses but no, I decided he was full of shit and called. The flop came all low cards missing me entirely. I checked, Tan bet, I folded. What should have been an easy blind steal turned into me losing over a third of my stack. My stack then dwindled and decided to push 12BB with a pair of twos from early/mid. But Tan had woken up to a pair of tens and after a bit of a pause he called. Goodnight Vienna.

Ho hum. But I've still a positive ROI so I'm happy!

 Acorn has just announced details of the new EuroBlogger website and tournie and the revamped BritBloggerment logo.  The new logo, seen here on the left, is a 1940's bathing beauty and as I'm a big fan of the music, the fashions and the dancing of the 30s and 40s, I think it looks great. Kudos to Mr Cloud for all the work.

Blah. Busy, busy, busy again. No time to play poker. Although looking back, I can't remember doing anything constructive during the week which is a bit disconcerting.

Came second to TanOrpheus in the BritBlogger last night, which was nice. And a very enjoyable tournie it was too.

It was a bit busy last week. My birthday, Wii Fit and an abundance of footie on the telly were to blame meaning that I actually didn't play any poker until Sunday evening.

Sunday was not a great day. I was not feeling that well and was having a very lazy day indeed. I picked up a little bit in the evening and signed up for two RakeTheRake freerolls, one a winner-takes-all $5000 WSOP package and the other a $3000 freeroll paying the top ten. But as soon as I started playing I knew my head wasn't in it and I donked out of both tournies before the first break. Knowing that I wasn't feeling or playing well, I decided to skip the BritBloggerment thus saving the $5.50 that I would have otherwise donated and went through to the living room and watched Lost.

I don't think this week is going to much better either. OK, there's less footie on the telly (which means it's time to cancel Sky Sports for the summer) but there is a whole load of jobs needing doing that I've been dragging my heels over.

Perhaps this is the time to take a little poker break and recharge the batteries.

Not much to report on the poker front.

The Bloggerments have not gone well the last two weeks. I finished 7th or so last week and yesterday finished second last. Last night was particularily frustrating as I had absolute junk most of the time and when I did get a hand, dremeber had a bigger one.

Oh well.

I only played 4 SNGs last week, cashing in one. One thing I should try and remember is to check if there are any visitors scheduled before entering a SNG. My first SNG of the week was interrupted when the Tesco delivery man rang the doorbell which I completely forgot about. By the time I'd dealt with that I was down to 2 blinds and was knocked out in 5th.

I'm not terribly happy with my SNG results at the $3.40 level. Towards the end of last week my ROI as -24% which is pretty poor. But I know my sample size is small. I've asked Acorn if he could look over some of my hand histories and give me some pointers or some reassurance that I'm not playing that badly.

Looking at my bonus situation, I've got a PokerStars reload bonus to clear before the end of July or something like that. As I only single table SNGs, I need to play something else to help with earning FPPs. Five Card Draw, despite being my best earning game dollar-wise isn't an option either. Having only two betting rounds, the pots are rarely large enough to generate FPPs. So I had a little experiment short stacking 50c/$1 NL. I finished a bit down over all, not having much in the way of big cards to play with but it certainly helps generate the FPPs so I think I'll try it out for real in June to clear the bonus and perhaps make silver star again.

Sunday rolled round once again and being the first Sunday of the month I had the TMF tourney as well as the weekly BritBloggerment on the go.

The BritBloggerment started off well when after 9 hands I (foolishly) chased a draw that hit on the river and got paid off. I hit another draw against Rosie about 30 hands in which took me to around t3500, a figure that I hovered around for the most part of the tournie.

Anyway, it comes to bubble time. It was in third place. It gets folded to me in the small blind with t3350 at 100/200 and I'm holding AKo. Zagga is in the big blind, sitting in 4th place but not short stacked. A few hands back, Chipleader Rosie and pushed her massive stack all in. No one called and she said that she had 72o, the Bloggerment's comedy hand. With this in mind and the hope that Zagga might think I'm trying to bully the bubble boy, I decided to push all-in with AKo. My plan worked like a charm and Zagga made the call with A8o. Unfortunately, the poker gods weren't that impressed and decided to put an eight up on the flop and, boom, my stack was decimated.

Only having 4 big blinds I wasn't left with much choice. K4 hitting a 4 against a pair of threes and a resteal with KJ got me back in shape. A further walk and a couple of blind steals got me back to around t3500 but I was still tilting a bit after the earlier AK loss and managed to run my pair of sevens into Jacks leaving me with around 4BB again. I doubled when my Q7 held against 76. By this time, the tilt was ebbing and I folded a few trash hands before pushing with a pair of 8s. Zagga called with AKo. "No Ace, No King" was my mantra as the flop came down. Zagga didn't hit. "No Ace, No King", I kept repeating as the turn fell. It was a Jack that paired the board. Whew. "No Ace, No King", I shouted as the river card came. It was a ten and for an instant I thought I'd won the hand until I noticed that the ten had brought a second pair to the board and that my pair was counterfeited. The chips floated across to Zagga and I was out. Bubble boy for the second time in my last three entries. Arghhhhh!

Zagga went on to take first spot, winning $27.50. I can take a bit of solace in the fact that I came third in the TMF tournie that I was playing at the same time which was worth $28.

Yip, I took it down again last night. Due to the fairly small turnout, the first prize was only $34 but after my $100 arse kicking at limit holdem last week it was a welcome addition to the bankroll.

Another solid and patient performance by myself with the added bonus that I was able to exploit my tight image a bit more which won me the odd pot that perhaps I shouldn't have. HighOnPokr was the Bubble Boy. He was unlucky to run into my jacks on his last hand but I was very impressed by the way he had played the small stack.

 A very enjoyable tournament indeed. I wonder what my ROI is now? 

Not much to report.

I meant to do a post last week following my bubbling in the BritBloggerment. But I didn't get round to it. So there. Basically, I finished fourth.......again.......

In other poker news, my SNG game is going through a bit of a slump at the $3.40 level and I've taken a bit of break while I learn some more. I've also returned to the limit holdem world to try and get my PokerStars bonus worked off. And I've came to the conclusion that I really prefer playing limit so I've pulled down some of my limit holdem books from the bookshelf, blew the dust off and have started to re-read and re-learn. Results so far are pretty damn poor and I've been get my arse kicked, losing over $100.

And that's all for now. I've played virtually no poker this week as I came down with a terrible case of man-flu on Sunday, leaving me achy, sniffly and grumpy. It's past the worst so hopefully normal service will be resumed in time for this Sunday's BritBloggerment.

Good luck at the tables.

Computers, eh. They run OK most of the time and then they kick you in the arse. Really hard. Last night was one of those times.

It's Sunday evening and I'm playing my usual poker tournaments, the monthly TMF and the weekly BritBloggerment. I couldn't get going in the TMF and busted out 8th out of a rather small field of ten. But I was doing pretty well in the BritBloggerment, getting the chip lead during the second hour.

The bubble bursts, leaving myself, Acorn and Cell to fight it out. I was still chip lead but not by much. Just after play recommenced after the second break it all goes pear shaped.

"Not enough storage space" bleats my network traffic monitor software. Uh Oh. I'd been getting this error on and off for the last week and hadn't been able to track it down. I knew I was in trouble as it seems to lock up the whole system. A couple of times over the last week, I'd been able to do a graceful shutdown and restart but the normal way to fix it was to turn off and restart. Knowing that I had to act fast, I powered the machine off and restarted. But for some reason, XP decides it wants to do a chkdsk this time which it hadn't bothered doing before. "Oh Crap", I thought, "That's going to take a while". My next thought was just to go through to the living room and use the "old" laptop. But I had turned off the wireless internet earlier on as I wanted to watch TV while playing and the video senders that send the tv signal through to the office interferes with the wi-fi. Bollocks. So I fire up the PC that my girlfriend uses. It's an older machine and boots up much slower than I remembered. Anyway, I get logged on and start PokerStars. Of course, I haven't used that machine for poker playing for a long time and the version of PokerStars on it is quite old. So old, that it isn't able to update itself. Bollocks. So I start my browser of choice, Opera, and go to pokerstars.com, dismissing the "do I want to upgrade Opera" prompt, to get the latest version. I finally get back to table to see that my stack had been blinded away from 12K to 1K. I'm forced to push 39s which loses to Acorn and I bust in 3rd place.

I believe "Argghhhhhhhhhhhh" was my general feeling.

Looking over the hand history, it's clear to see that my pc problems basically ruined the rest of the game. Instead of being a battle between three good players, it became a match that Acorn, due to his position at the table, couldn't really lose. He was the recipient of most of my big blinds and Cell just had to steal enough to overtake my stack to ensure second place with minimal risk. There wasn't really any other way to play it either. Acorn's stack was growing due the free blinds on offer from my stack and Cell wasn't going to risk busting out in third while I was unable to play. I'd have done the same myself.

Ach well.

But it ends on a good note. In a fine display of sportsmanship, not often associated with Leeds fans :-), Cell transferred $5 to me so that, in effect, we finished joint second. A very sporting gesture indeed.