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My name is VBlue and I'm a Pokerholic.

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VBlue:
Blog Date: 17th September, 2009
The Heron - Pub Poker League

Stop Press: Heron Thursday Night"d Crew Take up Sports!

With our numbers down to only 15, from a high of 27 only a few weeks ago, I ask Faz where the regulars are spending their Thursday nights now.

With Knocker and Gav both working, Rex at kick-boxing and Sean playing football, I am gravely concerned about this change in lifestyle.  It seems to me that their priorities are all wrong.  Then, I am forgetting that I am a pokerholic.

I arrive late, having closed up the shop in Windermere, and with Everton vs AEK Athens on T.V. I go into live multi-table mode.  The really annoying thing is that I can see the T.V. from where I am sitting, but only through a block glass partition, resulting in watching the match with a kind of fly-vision.

After legging it between T.V. and peeling a look at my hole cards, and folding them, I decide to give up on the match with 2 early goals putting Everton in control.

Card-dead, pretty much, until the final hand before the break.  I pick up AQ (could have been AJ) UTG, with about 2,400 chips at 100/200 and open for 650.  The Kid thinks I am at it and puts me all-in from late position with 99.  I call and fail to hit.  Again, the right play and I pretty much knew that my raise looked like an early position steal, with the break already being called before I saw my hole cards and making my bet. 

The Kid goes on to win; a first win for the season at this venue, following on from a run of v.good results at The George & Dragon.

Live Running Toal = +£30

Online results to date will follow when I get a spare minute at home to run through them.

VBlue:
Blog Date: 22nd September
The George & Dragon - Pub Poker League

To cut a long story short, I tried to steal the blinds from the SB and got called by 4 players.  Check-fold.

With about 2,200 chips I raise to 600 at 100/200 with AQ and the break approaching.  I get put all-in and immediately put my opponent on AK.  I know these guys are loose though and factor in pocket pairs I have over-cards to and call.  I run into AK and am out in 9th.

Well, my instincts are definitely proving to be reliable.  I will have to cut down on the second guessing that creeps in occassionaly.   I had fold equity, but I was playing 4-handed and blinds were coming round, so perhaps it was still the right move, as Rob confirmed he probably would have shoved with a mid-range pocket pair too.

Live Running Total = +25

I am now only two days away from a holiday of a lifetime....and I am starting to burst at the seams.

I have big, big plans for when I return and will be online to share them with you.

VBlue:
16th October, 2009.

Re-ee-wind, "Bo-selecta"

Grab your mental fishing rod and cast your mind back to when you first fell in love/hate with poker. 

The following sequence should be imagined with a blurry border, to indicate recalled memories:

I had played a little poker with my Dad and my brother, plastic toothpicks or pistachio nut shells were often used as currency in games.  We played on holiday; sat on the balcony of an apartment in Corfu aged 8 being one particular memory.

The game was introduced to me as brag or variant thereof.  I had no understanding of how the betting worked, but knew the hand rankings.  I enjoyed the game and played occasionally...

Fast forward to Manchester 2002 and Season Five of Late Night Poker.  Jac Arama, The Hendon Mob, Phil Hellmuth.  I shared a house with a Physics PhD student, who was taking a year out to play online poker.  We arranged home games and assigned our own nicknames.  Tom was "The Swan"; often caught swan-necking a look at your holecards, despite his continued denial.  "The Count", Rob was an accountant for a private firm, but had to count all his bets out in single chip denominations - I call your 200, that"s 10 (ha-ha-ha), 20 (ha-ha-ha), 30 (ha-ha-hah), 40 (ha-ha-ha)!

Saturday afternoons were then spent at an internet cafe in Withington, playing at pokerroom.com.  My biggest single win being a $150 win at a $30 sng.  I remeber my hands shaking from the adrenaline.

The next few years were spent playing sporadically online, mainly proving to be a break-even player.  My biggest cash out was $600 from a $50 deposit, which I took to Barcelona for my 30th birthday.  This was almost exclusively from playing $5 sngs, although I did not keep a record of no. of games played.  Biggest MTT wins in this time were in the region of $350 with a 9th place in a 700-odd runner tournament.

Following the appearance of a national pub poker league owner on Dragon"s Den, I got into the pub poker scene, hosting a weekly game, which has now been running for 2 years.  I quickly realised that I was the best player at the game, and after some early fancy play syndrome, I found the antidote and began to take a good share of the wins and cashes.

I now had an appetitie for bigger live games and got onto google, looking for any local action.  I made contact with a local poker club and played at an event they held in W.Cumbria; out first hand after the rebuy period closed, with KK into AA.

Later that year, I began to run events for them, alongside my continued pub poker events.  More on this in a later post...

About 12 months ago, our poker club announced their annual Leaving for Las Vegas competition, with a 5 tournament league offering a one week holiday to the WSOP 2009 with $1,500 in buy-ins, flights and accomodation at The Bellagio.  The Piranha and I decided to play and took a couple of mates. 

With 76 runners, I took down the opening event and covered the cost of the next four tournaments with the 1st place cash prize of £360.  I then put in two reasonable results in the following tournaments to stay in the top 2 overall, with 2 guaranteed main prizes!

A new job then put me out of the 4th event, with a proxy player nominated and a very respectable finish kept me in 2nd place overall with 1 to play.

Heart-break was to follow.  With something like 15 points separating me from the player two places behind me and my nearest rival out, I fell in 40th place.  The 4th and 5th placed players made the final table and overtook me in the league table and my WSOP dream was over, bar a 1/50 shot at a wildcard.

Update to present day to follow...

VBlue:
After following the APAT for a couple of years now, but yet to play any of the main live or online Championships, due mainly to bankroll, I have now signed up as captain of Team Carlisle for the upcoming Online National League.

I"ve just read back over my previous blogs and wow, some of the poker chat is weird.  Most of what I had been playing was just so standard.

I have started a new blog, off site, following a thread I had going on a UK poker forum.  I would like to link you to that now and ask for APAT members interested in my story to follow.

I will be following some of the others on here myself.

I hope to provide an interesting and entertaining read; my game has moved on, but I can"t guarantee that the attempts at humour have  :).

To get you up-to-date my story really re-starts here:

For the last three months, I have been restructuring my finances (debt), holidaying in Ibiza, re-discovering a social life (offline life brag), and taking care of some other personals.

Over that time I have dabbled in a little v.low stakes online poker and a few pub games, but nothing serious. Now I"ve got myself straight and have money to reload. I now want to go about my poker in a more structured manner and have noted fellow Black Belt Poker disciples, going about their game in a similar manner.

Revisiting sitandgoplanet.com before my exodus, I took up their free four part "blueprint guide" to low-stakes STTs, and so I began stripping my game down and taking the approach as a beginner would, or possibly should. I finished up four-tabling the low stakes STTs on BBP. The result? I did my entire bankroll for the first time since I joined up last year at launch. More importantly, the cause? For those who remember, or can at least picture this, several years ago on TV"s Celebrity Fit Club, in the opening episode, BDO Darts Champion, Andy "The Viking" Fordham, took up the 100m to test his fitness. He walked about 30m before an ambulance had to be called, following his collapse on the track. I ran that good.

I also continued to play outside BRM when my roll got hit and my ROI plunged into the icy depths of sustained minus figures for the first time. I was prepared to go bust rather than play micro levels, as I believe it would have taken too long to rebuild my roll playing so low.

During this time, I worked through the blueprint and began using SNG Wizard (30 day free trial) to sharpen my ICM skills. I have now. All-in-all I believe that my bubble play is correct, despite not using the differing ranges that opponents may be playing. This is something that I will add to my game as I take notes on opponents.

Briefly, I have begun a return to the four part blueprint to recover some sections and to ensure that my game has not slipped. I have already noted one or two points that I have lost sight of when making decisions on hands.

I have also purchased Collin Moshman"s book, after someone posted their surprise that I had not already devoured, slept with, and photo-memorised the entire content of.

I have shopped around a little and I"ve found that at low stakes the rakeback on offer at the likes of Titan (ipoker) and Stars does not compare favourably with achieving and maintaining Orange Belt status with online poker"s highest kicking site, Black Belt Poker. My grind will continue on their ipoker skin and I plan to use my belt points wisely in the Dojo Sessions provided by the Black Belt Poker mentors, although I may also need a new cap to replace the one I threw in the air when out clubbing in Blackpool the other week (well, it was a tune)!

I have broken down the hours required multi-tabling to earn and sustain Orange Belt status, taking up where I left off with 4 tabling at the $5 STTs - about 10-11 hours per week.

I am going to ensure I earn my 10% reduction for forum activity, so together with updates to this unofficial blog, I will be posting and commenting on others hand dilemmas on the Black Belt Poker forum.

I plan to also play some tournaments away from the STT grind, looking for value in table selection. My local poker club has a weekly game where I think I can have a strong run in 2011, with a goal of winning the Online Player of the Year trophy and cash prize. The value increases due to the monthly $500 freeroll offered to qualifying players. Similarly, I will be returning to the Amateur Poker Association Tour for their online national league game, determined to increase the Carlisle club weekly player numbers to help us climb the league structure and win some added live seats.

I will also be using one or two other sites to qualify for some weekly/monthly freerolls, bonuses, and guaranteed tourneys with decent overlays. I believe that the competition is soft on this site and the bonuses are good for low stakes MTT players.

To further develop my game, identifying opponents tendencies through structured note taking will be built into my playing sessions, noting good ICM players and other pertinent plays and styles.

To bring me right into 2011 and the age of video training, I have requested a Deuces Cracked subscription from Santa so I can see what they have to offer and how I can use it to improve my game.

Having a goal is of huge importance when trying to achieve anything, preventing inertia and complacency of results.

My target is currently to achieve a 10% Return On Investment playing 250 STTs in December, based on four-tabling. I have not yet targeted an hourly income, but I feel like ?10 is where I would like to get to in the fairly immediate future. I have also targeted to increase to six and eight tables by the end of the month and climb the buy-in levels commensurate with a hopefully rapidly inflating bankroll

With $200 deposited on Thursday night and a short 1 hour session under my Yellow Belt I feel like now is a better time than ever to really get what I want from poker.

Chipaccrual:
Good luck with this Mark.  Let"s get those Carlisle number up.   :D

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