Author Topic: If Carlsberg did dull poker blogs, they'd do this one  (Read 225017 times)

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monkeyman

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If Carlsberg did dull poker blogs, they'd do this one
« on: May 30, 2008, 14:40:18 PM »
Here goes, I"d thought I"d have a crack at this blog malarkey not because I think anyone gives a damn about what a low-stakes fish like myself has to say, but I"m hoping it might, by means of constructive criticism and outright abuse where necessary, enable me to work out where I"m going wrong. In my mind Harrahs have a gold bracelet with my name on and Victoria Coren is going to bombard we with marriage proposals sometime soon. Back down on planet earth I"m likely to be found trawling the depths of whatever $5/$10 fishfest I can be bothered to log into on any given day and will probably have to continue in my call centre job until that letter from Full Tilt finally arrives asking me to confirm acceptance of their sponsorship offer.    
  To start things off, a little bit of background. I"m primarily an internet player. Norfolk is a great place to live if you like unspoilt countryside and inbreeding but is next to useless if live freezeouts float your boat. Although I"ve played in this season"s APAT regionals, 3 APAT nationals (luton last year, Cardiff and Edinburgh this year) and been to Las Vegas twice live poker is at a premium in my part of the world. I"ve got a rotating list of 12 poker sites on my computer the most frequently used of which are Full Tilt and Betfair.  If you are at a table with a character call "Simonthemonkey" or an abbreviation of this, the chances are its me. I also masquerade as "Whatafish" on Virgin, "Imafish" on Sky and "Idrivedractors" on Bluesquare.
  I"ll start things off with a short lesson on playing discipline. Recently, Chris Ferguson turned no money at all into $10000 and his intention was to demonstrate the importance of bankroll management. I"m not personally acquainted with the guy (and as an atheist I don"t believe he exists, but I digress) but I suspect that at no point during his challenge did he stumble home drunk at 2.30am on a saturday morning after a night clubbing, switch on his computer and start to play 5 card draw for the first time ever without knowing the rules of the game.          
« Last Edit: March 19, 2011, 12:31:40 PM by monkeyman »
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APAT

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #1 on: May 30, 2008, 15:05:37 PM »
Fantastic opening post Simon, good luck with the blog.

Mikeyboy9361

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #2 on: May 30, 2008, 15:12:23 PM »
Had a little chuckle at that. But $5/$10 low stakes!!!!! Did you mean 5cents/10cents, cos that is low stakes, but $5/10 certainly aint, well not in my book any way.
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nosey-p

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #3 on: May 30, 2008, 15:41:22 PM »
I dream of playing $5/$10

monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #4 on: May 30, 2008, 15:51:37 PM »
If only I really meant $5/$10 cash games, I really should have been more explicit. On the odd occasions when I play cash, I"m a 5 cent 10 cent man normally. $5 or $10 is my usual tourney buy in. whoops! ;D  
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Mayfair

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #5 on: May 31, 2008, 09:08:54 AM »

In my mind Harrahs have a gold bracelet with my name on and Victoria Coren is going to bombard we with marriage proposals sometime soon.


Maybe marriage proposals maybe taking it a bit far but she may ask you to be in her next *adult* movie. :o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_More%2C_with_Feeling_%28book%29

GL with VC and the bracelet though.

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Mayfa1r

monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #6 on: May 31, 2008, 10:46:44 AM »
So, friday night and I"ve got a choice to make. Do I go out, have a beer or five and admire a bit of eye candy or be billy no mates and play poker. This isn"t as obvious a decision as it sounds as Norwich is a great place to live and has plenty to do in the evenings, but in nightclub terms its more Kings Lynn reserves than Manchester United.  A couple of my old stomping grounds have been closed down within the last year, so the only four clubs left are on the same road and grim. Two are full of 18 year old  hoodlums who I"d expect to see awaiting lie detector test results on "Trisha", one has a 50/50 babe/dirty old man split and has staff with a king-size attitude problem and the remaining one contains more monsters than Jurassic Park. As I ran the wrath of Bigfoot,Nessie and all their scary friends last week, my decision was to attempt some bankroll building at home.
  One of my many faults as a poker player is poor game selection. I tend to decide what to play on the spur of the moment and I"m inevitably influenced by what happened in my last session. As I warm-up, I decided to start with a little cash action and after 30 minutes playing 5c/10 NL holdem I was an epic 79 cents in profit. Buoyed by my success, I decided to go looking for Gus Hansen or John Juanda on the Full Tilt cash tables but my impressive return on investment had sent them packing. I"ve made a few quid this year on FT"s hold em/omaha  split sit and gos largely by concentrating on playing the omaha hands. I can"t pretend I"m an omaha expert, but there are a lot of players out there who play it apallingly, so given that I have a modest income, I don"t mind grinding out a few quid by playing people who are even less clued-up than me. Just for a change, I decided to have a go at playing omaha only SNGs on Betfair. The thinking behind this is that I used to play a lot of hold em SNGs on the site and the standard was poor so I assumed the omaha standard at the same buy-in would be equally bad. My assumption was correct and despite making a pig"s ear of a couple of hands, I managed a couple of second places which gave me big $16 profit. All I need to do now is work out how many nights I need to repeat this feat before I can pay off the mortgage.    
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Mr Tubbs

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #7 on: May 31, 2008, 14:05:56 PM »
Top read Monkeyman
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monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #8 on: May 31, 2008, 14:54:26 PM »
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monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #9 on: June 01, 2008, 10:05:16 AM »
A couple of my regular recent faults came back to haunt me last night and destroy what little chance I had of some serious cash. I played in Full Tilt"s MSOP event 2 which was a NL hold em tourney with a $15 entry and attracted about 5500 players. My first table seemed pretty passive and a lot weaker than I"d expect for the money on offer, so despite being card dead fro the first hour, I managed to build my initial stack of 3000 chips to just over 5500 by the first break with some raising,reraising, check-raising and any every other trick I have in my repertoire. I moved tables in the 2nd hour and was amongst some much bigger stacks who were playing a lot more aggressively. I decided on a change of tack and thought it better so play a much tighter game. Again, I was completely card dead for most of the 2nd period but about 5 minutes before the next break i doubled up. I had A 9 offsuit on the button with  the action folding round to me with the exception of one mid table limper. I made a standard raise and was called by the limper. The board came J 7 2 rainbow, the other guy checked, so I bet 2/3 of the pot with the intention of trying to steal the chips but leaving enough behind to allow me to fold if he came over the top. Again he called my raise. The turn was a 9 meaning I had 2nd pair top kicker and the betting was as before i.e he checked, I bet, he called. The river was a 3 and meant that there were no flush draws out there, but there was a potential straight, but I thought it highly unlikely he would have bet 8 10 due to his pattern of betting.
This time, he checked, I bet and he reraised me all in. I had a tricky decision to make, as I had to consider that he had been slowplaying an overpair to the board and if I got my read wrong, I was out. I decided to call as I felt he was probably playing overcards and trying to bully me. Thankfully I was right and he turned over A Q, doubling me up. For the first half of the third hour I stumbled along with around 10000 chips then 2 hands happened within 5 minutes which saw me depart. I had A
7 suited 2 before the button when everyone folded to me and I decided to make a standard raise. The 2 players to my left folded, the small blind went all in and the big blind folded. I called the shove as I thought he could have been making the move with a wide range of hands some of which I would have been a favourite  against. He turned over 55 which held up leaving me with about 5000 chips. Shortly after I had A Q in mid position, shoved, got called and failed to catch a card meaning I lost to my opponents 44 and was out of the tournament.          
  As I mentioned further up this page, this tournament illustrates 2 things which have haunted me on a regular basis recently. Firstly the number of times I"ve been eliminated in the 3rd hour of deepstack tournaments. In the APAT online events, if I"d managed to convert all my penultimate table finishes into final table, point-scoring ones, I"d be leading the national rankings (somehow I"m still not too far off the pace). If I make a continuation bet and get reraised, I call way too often and put my tournament life in peril. Ho hum, I"m sure I"ll learn one day
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monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #10 on: June 02, 2008, 17:59:54 PM »
Sunday night is traditionally when all the online sites host massive guaranteed prize tourneys. Yesterday I couldn"t decide which I was going to have a go at so I did something radical which some of the internet-playing whizzkids are probably unfamiliar with. I switched off my computer, set foot outside my flat on a day when I didn"t have to be at work and went to meet  a ......  GIRL. Yes folks, a real flesh and blood one rather than the type that has to be inflated.  What"s more she looked enthralled as I went through my full range of bad beat stories. So folks, I have made an important discovery. The way to a lady"s heart isn"t through diamonds, or for the more fiscally-challenged amongst us, chocolate, its through poker! So the next time I"m a free man and lurking in the temples of sin along Norwich"s Prince of Wales Road I have a plan. When my eyes meet a suitable lady of my choosing, I"ll stride boldly over and say " What percentage chance does a pair of 8s have against AK suited" and she will be powerless to resist!      
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monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #11 on: June 03, 2008, 20:05:48 PM »
Can you keep a secret? Betfair"s omaha cash games are the softest on the internet. Don"t tell anyone, I don"t want this one getting out.  ::)
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APAT

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #12 on: June 03, 2008, 21:01:05 PM »
Just pop that in the newsletter!

monkeyman

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #13 on: June 04, 2008, 19:23:23 PM »
As mentioned before, I have a number of different poker sites downloaded on my computer. Their there for different reasons and I look upon them all in a slightly different way. During one of my many moments staring out of the office window at the Norwich Bypass, I started trying to compare how I felt about poker sites to members of the opposite sex. In case anyone I currently know, will know at any point in the future or anyone who works as a libel lawyer ever reads this, the following comments are made for comic effect only and do not in any way truly reflect my real thinking or anything I might ever have thought or actually done. Honest. Yeah, really!
  My thoughts towards Full Tilt are much like being in the honeymoon period at the start of a relationship. You feel like you"re spending your time with the best you can get, you"re not sure what the future holds but today feels good.
  Betfair is the reliable friend. The relationship is purely platonic, you know you"re never going to get excited but you go back to them on a regular basis because you know you"ll get plenty in return.
  Pokerstars is the stunner who you"ve got absolutely no chance with. Looks great, seems to have plenty to offer and you"ve had plenty of cracks at it in the past, but ultimately you know you know you"re never going to have much of a return for your efforts.
  Partypoker is the character of loose virtue you return to every now and again when you feel a bit naughty. You know it feels wrong, you know you"ll probably end up frustrated, but you"ve had some great fun in the past and you occasionally give it another go just in case you get a major result.
   If I was to try and think of myself in similar terms, I would be the poker-playing equivalent of a cheap whore; will normally try anything if I think there"s an easy few quid in it. ("You want a good time guvnor?" You do, Ok what do you fancy?"   "You want to what? Play Razz? Sorry, I don"t do funny stuff"                
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Roscopiko

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Re: Am I a fish or what?
« Reply #14 on: June 04, 2008, 19:51:02 PM »
that is my post of the year.....so so v true