Stanley Casino - Deep Stacked Sunday Poker Tournament

Gaffer sent me an unexpected and welcome text message on Saturday afternoon to let me know that the Stanley Mint Casino in Glasgow were running a £30 Deep Stack poker tournament on Sunday afternoon. I was in the midst of some DIY hell at the time and dreading the thought that it was probably going to take all weekend to complete. The thought of a good, deep stack tourney provided me with all the motivation I needed to beast into the DIY and by 11:55pm it was done.

We set off for the big smoke in glorious sunshine around lunch time and it wasn't long before we were supping a beer and watching the old firm game on TV whilst waiting for the tournament to start. The offer of 4 import beers for a tenner was too good to pass on and we would ultimately sink quite a few more before the afernoon was over.

This was the first week that the Stanley had run the deep stacked Sunday afternoon game and it coincided with an old firm match so the turnout was un-surprisingly a bit low with only 9 players registered.

The game commenced with 15,000 chips, 20 minute blind levels starting at 25/50, yum, delicious...

Within about 20 minutes we had the first drama of the afternoon when one player pushed all in on the river and the player on the button flipped over his cards to reveal a full house, thinking the shove was merely a call of his earlier bet. Drama ensued...

We settled back into play but there was quite an atmosphere at the table for a while after that. The play was good though, the deepstacks giving plenty of room for some fun and games. I setup a pretty tight image after donking off some chips with pocket queens on a straightening board. Just before the first break I picked up Kings and raised pre-flop. The flop brought an Ace and I made a big mistake not putting in a continuation bet to represent the Ace, at the time I thought a slow deliberated check might look more menacing, like I was trying to trap the other player who had position on me. He naturally raised and I went into the tank. My instinct told me he didn't have the Ace and his body language confirmed this but I just couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger and risk my tournament life this early. So I folded and he revealed pocket 10's, more chips donked off. At least my table image was now tighter than a tight thing and this would come in handy a few times later on.

The first hand back after the break I got a good opportunity to put in a nice big raise and pick up 3 or 4 sets of blinds pre flop, which made up for some of the chips lost with the Kings in the previous hand. Play continued and a few players dropped out. Gaffer had a narrow escape against another short stacked player sucking out runner runner Kings to make a set on the river and bust his opponent. However it wasn't to be Gaffer's day when he picked up pocket 10's and feeling the pressure of the escalating blinds shoved his stack into play only to run into me with pocket Kings again, sorry bud.

Three handed and things got interesting. I was about equal in chips with another player who had been playing good solid poker but the chip leader had a big advantage over us and had been playing super wild and aggressive, but we know how to take advantage of that don't we children. So I was reasonably confident that pressurising the solid player and trapping the maniac should get me into the money, and the plan was working, I gradually eased out a slight advantage on the solid player and the maniac was still at it. But then it all went horribly wrong. Perhaps I can blame the 6 continental beers I had quaffed by this point, perhaps not. Either way I made a complete arse of things. I didn't think things through and got punished for it. I picked up King 5 suited and called maniac boy's preflop raise, which by now meant absolutely nothing. The flop came down Ace, 5, 6 and when he put in his standard oversized continuation bet I shoved only to discover that this time our little friend didn't just have an Ace, he had the six as well. Ho Hum, bubbled. What a tosser, I had things under control, knew how to play both the players and was reasonably confident I could eat into the wild man's stack enough to get the better of him and take down the game.

So it was in a beer blurred state of frustration that I stepped back outside into the bright afternoon sunshine with Gaffer to mosey back home and persuade 'er indoors that she should actually be delighted that I was going straight back out to play some more poker in the pub. Well I did, and I won the first game of the night with some devastating heads up play, to come back against a chip leader with a monster stack, and more or less recover my buy-in from the afternoon event. A couple more beers and a curry on the way home, Deep Joy.

This Sunday afternoon poker is an excellent lark and I'd like to make it a regular occurence, all I've got to do is try get 'er indoors to see the light.

I am Iron Man

Last night I finally completed enough games to achieve Iron Man status on Full Tilt poker.

The challenge involved collecting at least 50 iron man points per day for at least 20 days during February. Each $10 Sit and Go that I played equated to 7 points so I effectively had to play 8 x $ 10 Sit & Goes each day.

So what do I get in return for this relentless grinding, well I get a nice little Iron Man icon next to my avatar when I sit down at the virtual felt and I can spend my Iron Man medals on tournament entries or exchange them for free stuff in the Iron Man store.

More importantly though the Iron Man challenge has driven me to play a higher volume of games than I would have normally, and this in turn has led to more profit.... muhahahhaaa.

As is always the case, when I blog about completing a challenge my results go into freefall and last night was no exception. The old bankroll took a bit of a knock and I'm back down to $517. I'm not mad about it though, I made the correct plays and was just the victim of some nasty bad beats. It must be someting like the dreaded cash-out curse that I'm experiencing, lets call it the bloggers curse.

With a bit of luck my new Iron Man status will result in the bullets just bouncing off me and my opponents folding in fear of my elevated status.

Full Tilt Poker - Bankroll Challenge 1 completed

It's been a while since I last posted but I haven't given up on my bankroll building challenge. Since my last post at the beginning of January I played a few more games on Party Poker with little success so my Party bankroll is currently sitting between $500 & $600.

I then discovered I had an unclaimed deposit bonus sitting on Poker Stars so I played a bunch of games over there with mixed results and cleared my bonus. account on Stars is now sitting at just over $100 so it's ripe for a bit of bankroll building in the future.

The good news is that during February I really skrewed the nut and got back to some serious bankroll building activities. I had been itching to get building on my Full Tilt account as my initial impressions of the site were good and the competition reasonably easy. So when I discovered at the begining of February that my initial deposit bonus was due to expire at the end of February I descided it was time to really start busting a gut on Full Tilt. Around this time I also found out about there Ironman challenge and it has proved another good incentive to make sure I play a reasonable number of games each day.

It's been a busy and successfull month. I have had a few ups and downs but have been running really hot recently as you'll see from the graph. At the start of the month I was playing mainly $5 games with the odd $10 mixed in but recently it has been all $10 SNG's with the odd $20 mixed in for good measure.




Running Total: Played 252 / ITM 41% / ROI 17% / Profit $413

That means I've managed to complete my Full Tilt challenge in 65 games less than it took me to achieve the same on Party, and I've done it much more quickly, less than a month this time.

The stats I've just quoted are slightly out because there is $80 of deposit bonuses in there, but there is also a loss of $55 from a player transfer to a friend that I was staking, so the bonuses and the stake almost cancel each other out.

I can thank the Ironman challenge for helping achieve my goal so much more quickly this time as it has forced me to play 8 x $10 SNG's each day. There have been a few missing days when I have had other commitments but I've never managed a month with more than 250 SNG's before. At the start of February I was multi tabling with two tables reasonably comfortably but things tended to take a nosedive when I increased beyond that. Now I am happily multi tabling three tables and the lovely steep section at the end of the graph was achieved running three tables.

What comes next is more work on Full Tilt. I still have one more day of playing to get under my belt before I get my February Iron man medal . My target for March is to go for Iron Man again but by the end of the month to be running $20 tables as the norm and dipping my toe into the odd £30. My bankroll target is to be up to $1,200 by then. And.... I'm going to try and get back into the habit of blogging a bit more regularly again.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year Poker Peeps.

Contrary to popular belief, I am still alive and playing online poker. The euphoria of completing phase one of my Bankroll Boosting challenge didn't result in me jetting off to Vegas, blowing my bankroll and getting a job as a rent boy just to survive, my hourly rate at that would probably be even less than at Poker! Nor did I drown in a lake of Tennants Lager over the Festive period despite giving it a pretty good shot. All the same, I do feel dirty, nasty and riddled with feelings of guilt and inadequacy for not posting in so long. So New Year, new resolutions and at last a new posting...

Since I last posted I have been pursuing my ongoing bankroll challenges and I'll fill you in on all the gory details in a moment. But first a shameless plug for the other activity that has been consuming a large proportion of my time, my new web design business Weblomania. I've been busy with my first comissions and have been really enjoying working for myself. I'm currently busy with a couple of new client sites and working hard marketing the business and trying to fill up the order book. Needless to say if you are looking for a good web designer / developer, give me a shout.

Apologies for the shameless plug, back to the poker...

Party Challenge 2:

Well it had to happen! As soon as I hit the $600 bankroll target things started going a bit Pete Tong. I managed to quickly build up to $655 then proceeded to gradually fritter my way back down to a lowly $438. Since then I've been plugging away at the $5's and $10's gradually working my way back up. So here I am, 87 games into phase 2 of the challenge and I've only actually played three $20's. The bankroll is currently sitting at $587 so I'm nearly back to where I was 5 weeks ago!

Full Tilt Challenge 1:

Slightly better news on the Full Tilt front. I haven't played an awful lot of games on there yet but my results have been very promisng. I've worked my bankroll on FT from $200 up to $298 playing mostly $5.00 games without any drama. That gives me an ITM of 49% and a very respectable ROI of 39%. I'm going to have to crank up the pace on Full Tilt though as I have a bonus to work off and I don't want it expiring on me.

Other Stuff:

I enjoy playing MTT's and have had a little success in them in the past, but hadn't played many recently due to my SNG focus.

During the holidays I spent some time treating myself to a few MTTs and cashed in 2 of the 3 ~850 player $10 tourneys I played and managed a 12th in a 146 man $50 MTT.

I really enjoyed the $50, it's the only MTT at that level that I've played online, I played it as a bit of a Xmas bonus to myself. I felt I played well, was feeling very comfortable going into the last 20 places with an average stack and a good read on quite a few of the players. But I made a bad judgement on a player I thought I had a really good read on and busted just before the final table. Ho Hum, it was fun and slightly profitable.

I've also been playing some short handed Sit and Gos on one of the other poker rooms. The blinds are quite fast and the starting stacks quite shallow so I've been really enjoying the fast, wild pace of them but I've not really won or lost anything on them, they've just been an amusing distraction.

So now it's the New Year and time to knuckle down to the challenge again, wish me luck...

My hourly rate playing poker online sucks

It's not exactly a huge surprise that my hourly rate playing poker online sucks, but at least I can measure it and try and improve it as I work through my next two challenges, and that's a start I guess.

In this post I'll start delving into some of the statistics relating to my 1st Bankroll Boosting challenge on Party Poker, watch out for a few more postings on stats coming in the next few days too.

The eagle eyed among you may spot some slight discrepancies in my stats, this is due to a difference of 5 games between my two information sources, poker tracker and my Excel bankroll spreadsheet. This has been caused by playing the odd game on my laptop and not capturing the hand historys results for poker traker. The difference equates to 5 games and a profit variation of just $10, so the stats are close enough for me not to worry about trying to correct them.

I've been using an excel spreadsheet to track my results more or less since I started playing poker online and I continue to use it even though I now use Poker Tracker to record everything and am reasonably comfortable finding my way around it. I log every game in my spreadsheet and it gives me a really nice snapshot of where I am at. I start a new page in the spreadsheet each month, or with each new challenge and have a summary page at the front that errr... summarises everything. If you don't alreaqdy use a spreadsheet or Poker Tracker to track your game, you should. Feel free to download a copy of my poker spreadsheet and use it yourself. I'll post a video tutorial on Poker Tracker sometime soon as it is a bit daunting at first, but the data it can give you is just awesome.

The challenge took approximately 2.6 months, during which I played for 163 hours. That equates to approximately 1 month's work in a 9-5 job. After all that effort my hourly rate equates to $2.48. To put that in perspective the national minimum wage in the UK, expressed in dollars is $11.38. To feel comfortable enough to become a professional poker player I would want to be earning £75,000 a year which would equate to an hourly rate of approximately $75. For my next two challenges I need to be looking to increase my hourly rate rather dramatically, lets set a target of say $4.00 per hour on my Full Tilt Challenge and $7.50 on phase 2 of my Party challenge. In short I need to play more hours, with more simultaneous tables, at higher levels and achieve better results. Should be easy then!!!!!

That's it for this quick post but I'll post some more statistics on phase 1 of my challenge soon, so we can drill into the profitability of different game types and start looking at hand ranges, positional play etc..

Till next time..

Poker Bankroll Building - New Challenge Commences

Now that I have completed stage 1 of my bankroll building challenge and boosted my bankroll on Part Poker from $200 to $600 I am ready to progress to my next challenge. However for the next stage I am going to run two seperate challenges.

My initial challenge was inspired by Alex Martin's excellent "Bankroll Boosters" article in the September 2007 edition of Inside Poker magazine. The first half of my new challenges is to move onto the second phase of this and boost my Party Poker bankroll from $600 to $1,200. The second half of my challenge is to repeat phase one on another poker site.

The rules are as follows...

Full Tilt Challenge 1
I have deposited $200 on Full Tilt Poker and am going to work it up to $600 playing $5 and $10, 9 man Sit and Go tables. There are various reasons why I've decided to do this on Full Tilt including.

• Great 100% deposit bonus (could be worth $200 to me as that's what I initially deposited)
• Site is always busy
• The software is really nice
• The games I've tried so far seem reasonably good, the players are more preictable and passive than the loonies I keep encountering on Party
• The blind structure is a bit slower than Party which will favour skillfull play more then luck

I have already started playing a few $5 games on Full Tilt and my bankroll is already up to about $240 with an ROI of around 40%, when I get it to $250 I'll start testing out the $10 tables.

My goal is to maintain a better ROI than my initial Party Challenge and reach my profit target in significantly fewer games than the 316 it took me on Party.

Party Challenge 2
My target on Party Poker is to boost my $600 bankroll there up to $1200 by playing $20, 10 man Sit and Go tables. The target timescale is 2 months and 300 games with an ROI of 10% (which will be tough if I'm running two challenges concurrently)

I will provide a little more detail on both challeges as I start posting about my progress in them. I will also be posting a review of Full Tilt and some detailed stats, analysis and strategy articles over the coming days and weeks.

In the meantime if you have any questions, suggestions, comments or abuse... just leave a comment below. If anyone wants to join me in my challenge and try it too I would be delighted to accept the challenge, although I won't be going for a Tank vs Dale mental endurance marathon. If you haven't tried Full Tilt or want to Join me click the Full Tilt banner at the top right of my Blog and claim your 100% deposit bonus.

Wish me luck, Here goes....

Poker Bankroll Building - Phase 1 Completed

Woohoo...

I've just got time for a really quick posting before I head off to bed. As you can see from the title I've just completed phase 1 of my bankroll building challenge. I haven't had a chance to play online much over the last week but tonight I managed to squeeze in 6 x $6 SNG's and finished in the money in 4 of them with 2 x 1st and 2 x 2nd.

Running Total: Played 316 / ITM 41% / ROI 15% / Profit $415.40

That concludes phase 1 of my challenge, tomorrow I will start two new challenges.

Check back over the next few days for a flurry of postings containing statistics, analysis, strategy, advice and the low down on my next two poker challenges. If there is anything you particularly want me to post about leave me a comment.

Holla

High Stakes Poker - Sammy Farha vs Jamie Gold

Oh my god, this show is just so awesome, each new episode sets a new standard in TV poker. This episode should be re-named the Sammy Farha show as we see lots of action between Sammy and 2006 World Series of Poker winner, Jamie Gold.

Both these players love to gamble and like to talk a lot during the hand to get reads on their opponents, well you'll see a mastercalass in this episode. Raisy Daisy...

If the video panel below doesn't show up properly use the links below to watch the videos on PokerTube.



High Stakes Poker Season 4 - Episode 13 - Part 1/4
High Stakes Poker Season 4 - Episode 13 - Part 2/4
High Stakes Poker Season 4 - Episode 13 - Part 3/4
High Stakes Poker Season 4 - Episode 13 - Part 4/4