Horrendous run

I would love to be able to tell you all that I'm now back on a fantastic winning streak, but i would be an enormous liar!!   The last 3 weeks have been the worst of my short, but generally impressive, poker career.   And its not even down to me playing badly, in a way it would be brilliant if it was because of my bad play because then I would have something to work on & improve!  But it has literally been a combination of coolers, horrendous luck & a significant amount of horrific card-dead brutality !!  I will give you a quick rundown of some of the hands:-

* There is a raise to £8 and 3 calls in front of me, i look down at pocket Jacks, so i 3bet to £40.  This is a pretty substantial raise & I expect to take down the pot there & then OR be 4bet back in which case i might pass my hand if it is from the original raiser, but i will just get my money in against the 3 "callers" as the best i believe any of them can have is AK here as they haven't 3bet themselves (which they would with QQ, KK or AA).   Anyway the flop comes 842 (2 diamonds).  I get the rest of my money in & a guy calls me with J9 of diamonds and obviously another diamond comes for him & i lose

* Guy raises to £8 and I 3bet with pocket 10's to £23, he flat calls.  Flop comes JJ3, pretty good flop for me. I fire a C-bet, he goes all-in for about double my C-bet & i call.  He just FINDS the AJ  and hits quads on the river for good measure!!!

* I call a raise with 55 in a 4way pot and see a flop of K95, nice. Except another guy had flopped a set of 9's!!  Flopped set-over-set is a surefire way to lose money!!!

* I have AQ and raise to £7, flop comes AA7 in a 3way pot.  There is a bet and a call, i raise and get put all-in, I call and he has pocket 7's.  Soooo sick!

* I raise with AJ, one caller.... Flop comes Jack high, I C-bet, he raises all-in & i have to call for the extra.... he has KK.

* I raise with AK to £8, get one caller.  Flop comes K26. Money goes in, he has AA.  ffsssss!


On top of all the above, when i have picked good spots to bluff & make moves I have been getting called reallllllly light.  Basically anything that could go wrong HAS gone wrong & it has been a truly painful few weeks

The 2 hands below pretty much sum up this run!!!!!

* I'm in the BigBlind with 3,5 and the pot is unraised, so i obviously check and see an A24 flop, i have the nuts (but there are 2 spades there too).  Somehow there is a bet & raise in front of me, i reraise & it ends up in a 4way all-in!!  A flush comes on the turn & i somehow manage to lose money after flopping the nuts. I actually won some money on a side pot so it wasn't as bad as it could have been but still, flopping the nuts you would expect to MAKE money on the hand!!!

* I have pocket Aces and after 3 limpers, i raise to £8..... one caller.  I have a little look to see how much more money he has, and i find out its £7 (thats SEVEN friggin pounds!!!).  I flop a set so i check & he checks, i turn QUADS, i check & he checks.  I bet the river & he folds!!!  ohhhhh for the love of god!!!    I make £8 with quad aces!


I wrote all the above on Monday but didn't post it, since then I have had 2 half decent winning nights so i am hoping i have come to the end of this horrific period & can start enjoying my poker & winning some money again!

** Unanswerable questions, 2) Why can't they make the whole plane out of the same substance that little indestructible black box is made from? **

Worst night yet

Worst night yet

Well, i acknowledge that most of my blogs focus on the positive side of poker so i thought i should balance it out with the other side of things, the type of night when you would happily never play poker ever again, when everything conspires to go against you, and most importantly when you lose a lot of money.  Friday was one of those nights.

           I had sat down with about £80 on a decent table, some good action but not full of maniacs. I had got myself up to about £220 by playing some good solid poker & picking up a couple of hands, then the following happened.....  I pick up pocket Jacks under the gun. I start to pick up some chips to raise but then i notice that this really active player next to me is already getting hold of chips to call me, so i pick up an extra few £1 chips & make it £11. Now this obviously seems like a big UTG raise, but in these £1/£1 games if one of the first people to act after you have raised, call the raise then you are likely to get several callers, and with Pocket Jacks i would really rather just get it heads up.  He still calls me regardless & so does 1 other person. Not ideal.  Anyway, the flop comes down K,10,4 (all hearts) and i have the Jack of hearts.  I have to continuation bet so i make it £28, the active player makes it £78.  Now, i know he has a lot of moves in his game & i know he thinks i am quite a tight-solid player so i could just be C-betting & giving up to any resistance from him.  I also know he could easily be doing this with just the Ace of hearts or an open-ended straight draw (OESD).  I give it some thought & decide that about 30% of the time he is making the raise based on the fact i will just give up on the hand & fold, about the same amount of time he is doing it just with the ace of hearts/OESD. And the final 40% he is doing it with a hand that genuinely has me beaten (King, or set of 10’s/4’s).   So, if only 40% of the time he has me beaten, & of that percentage my Jack of hearts would be good a decent amount of the time if another heart comes, then i think shoving all-in here is +EV.  I decide to just get it all-in & hope he folds or is on a draw. I get the rest of my money in & he calls pretty quickly. Siiiigh, i must be beat. The rest of the board bricks out (7 of clubs, 9of spades i think) and he turns over K10 for a flopped two pair with 10 of hearts.  I wasn’t disappointed with my evaluation of the hand as i was correct in the fact that if another heart had come then my Jack of hearts would have been good.  Against a lot of other opponents I might have just folded to a raise on the flop but due to the amount of hands he plays & how aggressively he plays then i am happy with how i played this hand.

            So, i reload for £120, and more than double it up with some good play & not too many great hands.  I’m sat with £280 then this horrible hand happens. No need for big description... i get pocket kings, another guy has pocket aces, all the money goes in & i lose.  Now this kind of hand happens in poker (its one of those “coolers” i talked about in a previous blog), but if you are going to be on the receiving end then you would just rather you only had like £100 or less in front of you at the time. Or at least your opponent only has about that. Unfortunately the other guy had about the same as me so i lost the full £280 in front of me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Ouch.

          Again, i reload but only for £100 in case any tilt descends on me. I play the next 3 hands so i look like i am on tilt to the table but i’m just playing the strength of my hands.  4^th hand i pick up KingJack & raise, get one caller.  Flop comes AKJ, ideal as i can keep betting & looking like i’m tilting but i have actually flopped a monster. I bet just under the pot (nearly £20) and he makes a comment about me “steaming” and calls. Turn brings the 2 of diamonds, which puts a flush draw out there. There is £55+ in the pot & i have about £60-70 left, so i just go all-in.... it looks bluffy & i want him to call.  He obliges & shows A10.  River is, yes you guessed it, 10, to give him bigger 2 pair.  Ohhhh for fucks fuckin sake!!!!

            I reload for my final £120, and within 5-10 minutes there is a raise to £6 infront of me & a call, i make it £26 with pocket Queens and then get raised all-in.  I’m never folding here so i make the call.  Flop comes KK4 and he whips over his AK for a flopped set, no queen comes to dig me out of the hole & that was that.

            In the space of what cannot of been any more than an hour & a half i had lost £420 of my own money.  But as i had been nearly £150 in profit before it all went wrong, that is a swing of almost £600 in 90 minutes!  That is HUGE in a £1/£1 game (600 big blinds!!!).  People might ask why i didn’t just go home when i was in profit, well it just doesn’t work like that. I was playing well & stood to make a lot of money on that table the way it was playing.  You just cannot account for such a horrific run of bad luck/lack of cards going your way when you are in a coin flip situation (my QQ vs AK means i’m a 56% favourite).

            I have had a few days off since then, partly due to my birthday celebrations, but mainly because i felt like i needed a break from poker. Nearly headed off to casino about 2 hours ago (Monday night) but decided to have just one more night off from it.

Unanswerable Questions (i am going to finish each of my blogs off with one of these totally unrelated-to-poker bizarre life quandries, i don’t know why!!)   **Why does my home answerphone say “Thanks for calling” AFTER the person has hung up??!!**

One of the biggest calls of my short "career", or was it an easy one ?!!!

First & foremost, apologies for the delay since my last post. All my other posts have been made after something happened in one of my sessions that had inspired me to write about it. Although i have been playing a lot & still doing well, nothing major has happened that has spurred me to come back on here & inform you all about! However, i will try to post at least once a week from now on, even if its just some interesting hands that have happened etc etc

Sooooo, onto this post.... and the title says it all really. I played a pot the other night that i felt was one of the best (and most difficult) calls i have made since i started playing full time. Hand was as follows :-

Ok, so I'm in the BigBlind for £1, there's a straddle next to me for £2. The game i was playing was very "limpy"/passive preflop, with potential for BIG pots still postflop. I have Ks9s. There are 5 callers for the £2, I see no point in raising as I will be OOP (out of position) vs everyone except the SmallBlind so I call the £1. Flop comes TJQrainbow, I have flopped the 2nd nuts, which essentially becomes the nuts as I don't see anyone limping with AK (although I can't completely rule it out I'm like 95% sure). SB checks, I check, straddler checks. There's a bet of £15 and a caller, so I flat call as its the least dangerous board ever for my hand. Turn brings the 7 of clubs which does mean a 2nd club on board, I check, the original better makes it £25, other guy folds, I think & then raise it £65 more. At this point i'm thinking he probably has 2 pair here so I'm raising for value so that I can comfortably ship the river and the bet will just look like a standard river all-in. He thinks & calls. Before the river comes I am thinking "just put the 3 of hearts out there, or another brick", but ohhhh noooo, the river card is a friggin Jack which does not bring the flush, although if he's playing 2 pair then he could have just boated up quite easily. I check & he almost instantly puts in more than enough to cover the £115 I have left.

I think against virtually anybody else at the table I fold cos they don't have bluffs in their range & would just check back with anything but a Full House. But this guy is capable of bluffing after i have shown weakness on river & I'm getting great odds to make the call. I still go "in the tank" for a good while, i re-think the hand, what else could he be taking this line with??  If he had 2 pair on the turn then would he not just put me all-in there & then, not just call my raise because its a scary looking board for him. KJ is definitely the other most likely hand, he would have a pair & the straight draw, it could also possibly be KJ of clubs which would give him the up&down straight draw AND the flush draw (although surely he would get this all-in on the turn too). So KJ off suit then... seems more likely than 2 pair.  I decide that he probably has KJ approx 60-70% of the time, and a full house the rest of the time. Its costing me £115 to win about £340 so i'm getting 3to1 odds to make the call, so basically i have to make the call.  I push my chips over the line and say to him "if you haven't got a full house then i win with the straight", he nods his head to insinuate that i win and then he mucks his hand

Following the hand, everybody at the table discussed it for about the next half an hour.... i dont like to give too much away about how i think & play hands to my opponents so i try to keep quiet & just let them talk. But in my own mind i'm having a little conversation with myself too.  I know upto about 4 or 5 months ago there is no way i would have made that call on the river. I would have just been pissed off, assuming he's just hit his full house & folded pretty quickly.  But now, my level of thinking through hands has improved a lot & so has my thinking around pot odds etc etc.   Well, either that or i somehow managed to convince myself that i was ahead & made a hero call that worked out for me on this occasion..... what do you think ?!!  How many times would you have made the call, percentage-wise??   I am interested to hear your views....

Why Do People Hate Money??

In poker sometimes people almost literally tell you what they have got without saying the actual words.   I don’t mean little “tells”, like betting patterns or looking nervous or anything else like that... i mean they tell you their exact hand!  Well, if you are concentrating on what is (and has been) going on at the table they do anyway.  Let me give you 2 examples i have seen of this in the last week.

1, Very last hand of a session & I raise with AK from the button, guy next to me calls & so does this slightly crazy guy on the other side of the table. Just as the flop is about to be dealt, the crazy guy says “call the police, come on, call the police”.  Now, this means one of two things, he is either about to commit a crime OR he has pocket 9’s and wants to hit another one on the flop (thus giving him 999).  I pick up on this instantly but the guy next to me is too busy talking utter shite like he has been all night & totally misses it.  So, the flop comes K,3,9.  Shite-talking guy bets out £15, and the crazy guy just shoves all-in for like £100 more.  Now this crazy guy has been very active virtually all night & people have been trying to pick up hands against him to catch him out when he inevitably raises. So, ordinarily this is virtually an automatic call if shite-talker has a King.  I fold my AK here without a second thought cos i KNOW crazy guy has pocket 9’s (he told me with the “call the police comment”), but shite-talker is oblivious to this & calls with KJ.  Crazy guy proudly throws over his pocket 9’s and scoops the pot.  Shite-talker says to someone else “thats sick, how does he find trip 9’s there when i have hit top pair?”   I chose not to divulge the information i had heard!!  This example especially i just thought was hilarious afterwards.  Initially cos the guy said it in the first place about the police & even more so that the other guy could’ve saved himself £85 by just folding if he had been concentrating on the hand that he chose to get involved in by calling my raise. 

2, Player in seat opposite the dealer has just been having a pretty long conversation with the dealer about a hand he played the week before with Pocket Jacks & how he hates them etc etc.  Dealer deals the next hand & this player starts laughing & says “you won’t believe it”, another lad says “believe what?” and this guy says “oh never mind” and then he raises.  Looking around the table it seems pretty obvious that some people were listening & know what the lad has, and a few others are clueless.... the two lads who call his raise are the ones looking confused about the conversation!! The hand plays out & the guy with pocket jacks wins on a rag board, but the two lads again could have saved themselves a few quid there.

These 2 examples are just a small sample of some of the information people voluntarily give to you & others choose to ignore (or fail to hear)..... they obviously have too much money already & don’t want any more!!!   Surely if you are going to get involved in a pot then you want to be aware of everything you can regarding  your opponent, the hand & have all possible information available to you.  This is why i don’t understand people who sit there for full multi-hour sessions with their music blaring in their ears, they miss out on so much information off people by listening in to, and engaging in, conversations etc etc.  A lot of the time after hands have finished, people will tell you why they played certain hands in a particular way, again giving off masses of information.  If you are new to playing live poker, then yes you can read all the books in the world & play for a million hours on the internet to improve your game, but sometimes its the easiest things in the world that can win (or save) you money.

On the subject of hating money, the amount of times i have heard the phrase “oh ok, i know i am behind but i call” is just ridiculous.  If your instinct or reading of the hand/your opponent makes you believe that you are behind in the hand then why don’t you just fold you muppet?  After all money saved is money gained!  Don't get me wrong, if they are playing against me then i want them to call when they are behind but i just don’t understand the mindset of these people!! DO THEY NOT LIKE MONEY?!!!

(On a non-poker related subject, i have to just announce that my 5-a-side team absolutely destroyed Graeme Robinson's team 33-5 last night!!! The two pints you owe me for the side bet are gonna taste amazing Gra!)

Coolers

Aaaaah, “coolers”..... That dreaded word that poker players hate.  Well, we hate them if we are on the losing end of one.  If we are the winner of a “cooler” hand then we are happy, overjoyed even!!!  But we generally don’t speak about the hand for a good few minutes, especially to the person on the receiving end. That is because the person on the receiving end of a cooler is usually on “suicide watch” at this point in time & we do not want to tip them over the edge.  We have all been there & we just want to sit & bathe in our own self-pity for a while, we certainly don’t want to talk about it.  The main reason is because virtually EVERY single cooler will be for a big pot and/or both players stacks inevitably.  When someone has just lost their entire stack in one hand, the last thing they want to hear is “awww thats horrible mate, you couldn’t have done anything different though”

At this point, half of you are thinking “What the friggin hell is a cooler Andy?  We aren’t all poker players”.  So here is the best way i can explain it..... During any given hand/pot, 2 players both have such strong hands that all they are thinking is “I need to get all my money in the middle here & make sure my opponent does the same”.    Basically it’s when 2 extremely strong hands come up against each other & all the money is going to end up in the middle one way or another.

A few examples of coolers then, and i couldn’t do this blog without commenting on the worst cooler i have probably ever seen which happened to a mate of mine (Danny Fogg) at Salford Grosvenor this week... So Foggy has got JJ on a J74 flop.  There are 5 or 6 players in the hand, there is a bet of £3 & a call, Foggy makes it £11, original better reraises, Foggy goes all-in & the other lad calls with pocket 4’s.  So they both have a set, its virtually impossible for either player to fold a set regardless of the board but this is like the driest board ever too! Foggy at this point is a 96% favourite and, not wanting to slowroll, shows his JJ and as the river comes the remaining 4 to give the other lad quads he wins about a £200 pot.  Foggy actually took it reasonably well & laughed but the only other option is to cry & he wouldn’t have wanted to do that at the poker table!!

Another example is from a few weeks ago, i have 67 of diamonds in the big blind & its limped round to me, i check & the flop comes down all diamonds. Now, the chances of flopping a flush are 1 in 118 so its a massive hand for me.  I check-raise & the other lad just calls, i am putting him on a hand like top pair & he doesn’t wanna see another diamond, or maybe Ace of diamonds with a pair too & he is playing it passively.  When the turn is a non-diamond he goes all-in & i snap call. He turns over a higher flush!   Siiiiiiiiigh !!

Aces vs Kings is another much simpler version of a cooler as quite often it will be all-in preflop.  I actually got aces vs a friend of mine's kings at 235 the other week, but we didn’t get it all-in til the flop as he played it sneakily & just flatted my raise preflop. On a 10 high flop he led out, i shoved & he made THE quickest snap call of my life!!! The turn & river were bricks & i won about a £200 pot.

So, to sum up.... coolers are like the devil himself interfering in a poker game !! they are cruel to the loser of them, but they make the best bad beat stories ever and, once they have calmed down, usually the person will literally tell anybody willing to listen!

My next blog is already partially written & is entitled "Why do people hate money?", it should be on here by Tuesday

Frustration

Remember in my first post, i mentioned poker can cause extreme frustration.... well tonight was one of those occasions.  I arrived at 235 Casino in Manchester at about 11:30pm & left at 5:30am.  Now thats 6 hours of playing poker, and in those 6 hours i can remember playing a total of 6 hands. I'm sure i played more hands than that but i must have literally seen a flop cos i was in the blinds & then folded to any action cos yet again i had not hit anything!!  Looking down at hands like 9,2 7,3 6,2 8,4 6,3 9,5 time after time AFTER FRIGGIN TIME !!!  Jeeeeeeez!  There were about 6 or 7 times when i thought about just calling it a night & going home but i stuck it out.  After those 6 hours, i was somehow a huge £25 in profit ! Wooooo! hahahaaa!   Although to be honest, ANY profit is a huge bonus after a night like i had!

Ok, the hands i can actually remember.  I raised a lady called Val all-in on a K,Q,5 (2 clubs) flop when i had 6c7c, she called the extra £40 with A10 (no clubs) and a 6 on the river meant i won the hand. How she called my all-in was a little strange to me, but hey-ho!    The next hand i remember i had KJ in the small blind & called a raise to £4. I actually hate the way i played this hand from start to finish, so i'm just going to quickly tell you the outcome.... the flop comes KJ10, original raiser C-bets, there is one caller, i raise enough to let them both know i'm not folding, original raiser folds & caller goes all-in, i have to call even though i know i am behind, he turns over Q9 and i sigh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FFS!

This is the sick hand of the night, i had to reload for another £150 after the previous hand & have literally not played a hand for about an hour. I pick up KQ of diamonds which looks absolutely huge compared to the other million hands i have seen all night. I have straddled to £2 and a pretty solid player makes it £10, there is one caller & i flat call too.  Flop is 10,J,A rainbow.... Nice, i have just flopped the absolute stone cold nuts.  I do my best impression of someone who has yet again missed the flop & check. Original raiser makes it £20, the caller folds, i have a little look at his stack, he has £75 behind so i call (I'm 90% certain he has A10 or better so he will be getting the rest of his money in on the turn). The turn is a 4, i check, he shoves the rest in & i snap call.  The river is a Queen & he turns over AK so the queen on the end means we are splitting the pot cos we both have broadway.  Sit there for hours, play like 2 hands and then happen to flop the nuts in a biggish pot only to end up chopping it.... FRUSTRATING!!    After that i bluffed a 3 diamond board against a guy who was happy with his profit for the night & took a pot off another lad when i turned two pair & check raised him as there were 3 diamonds out. Unfortunately he folded but these two pots got me back into profit for the night.

The funny part is that at 5:20am some guy comes & sits down for the last 10 mins before the casino closes. In those 10 mins he flopped quads against a guys overpair, he rivered the nut flush in a massive pot against 2 opponents & then turned a straight in another all-in pot!  He sat down with £30 & 10 mins later he had about £450. Absolutely ridiculous!  MUST BE NICE!!!!

Right, with that i am signing off !  The morning ended well as my favourite butty van has returned in Birchwood so i got a bacon & egg barm on the way home!!

So far....

Ok here goes, i have set this up more for my own benefit than anything else as i appreciate it will probably bore most of my friends & family to absolute tears to read it !!!  More than anything its just a way for me to vent the complete mixture of emotions that attempting to make a living out of poker brings with it.  Those of you that play poker seriously (or even as a hobby) will know the range of emotions this game we play can put you through : frustration, joy, occasional giddyness, actually wanting to cause an opponent some physical pain, pride, wanting to play 24hours a day, never ever wanting to sit down at a poker table EVER again etc etc etc!!   Also, when i have had a  particularly good or bad session i usually cant sleep for a while after it so writing this blog will fill some time til the tiredness takes hold !

Right, so where am i at with my poker "career" (term used very loosely hahahaa!)?? well i started playing for the Pokerfarm in December/January after giving up my job as a store manager at Phones4u to give myself a chance to play poker full time & see how it went.  The Pokerfarm are a company that stake you to play online, they give you a daily amount of money to play with & they take a percentage of your winnings (if there are any!!).  After 3 months of ups & downs with them, they eventually decided to stop staking a lot of their lower stakes players from various offices around the world, including me & a few of the lads i had met through playing there. I was pretty pissed off at the time as i didnt feel as though they had kept their side of the bargain with us, promises of weekly coaching from experienced pro's never materialised & we were basically left to fend for ourselves with no long-term experience of multi-tabling cash tables online whilst under pressure to make money for them or be "released" by them.  The only time i ever got any real help was when i bribed Alex to sit with me for half an hour in exchange for half of a pizza hahahaaaa!

As it turned out, leaving the Pokerfarm was the best thing that could've happened to me. I had barely made any money playing for them & was playing at the casino a couple of times a week to top up my income.  I was advised to contact a company called BankRollSupply.com to get a similar staking deal to Pokerfarm, but while i was sorting that out i started going to the casino 5 or 6 nights a week playing cash poker & turning a reasonable profit considering i play relatively low stakes (£1/£1 blinds).

BankRollSupply (BRS) have since agreed to take me on, providing i watch some instructional videos & pass a few tests, but i have put that on the back burner at the moment as i believe i will make more money playing live at the casinos than doing that.  Also, in the last month or two i have started playing online Multi-table tournaments, getting staked for them by a lad i have met through the casino.

So my days at the moment consist of playing online tournys from about 6pm til midnight ish then heading to one of the Manchester casinos til about 6am most mornings.  its not great for my sleeping pattern though, as i sleep most of the day!! Its all very flexible though, so on thursdays & sundays when i play football i just dont play online at all & head up to the casino after a few post-football beers (shandys!).

Well, thats enough boredom for one day..... my future posts (ramblings!!) will be based on my experiences around the poker tables.  Hope to post a (slightly) more interesting blog in next few days !!