Nemesis Poker Hand of the Month Award

First of all I think this is going to be little bit of a October review. In Poker terms there is not really anything positive to write about. To be honest I think it was the worst month I ever had in Poker since I started playing. Online all except one session were losing sessions. Normally my October plans were to finally move up in the limit and never look back but as Poker does not do what you wish for I ended up swinging down in October. Since the Durham Poker Society tournaments have finally started again and all the Poker playing students are back in town I started to play a little bit more live. I did not cash in a single freaking tournament I played this month with the two worst results being me busting in the first hand of the Poker soc tourney when I made fours full on the turn and the other bloke turnt Quadzilla with his pocket 66's. Chips in the middle, flip cards over, puke in the dealer's face. Obviously I was unlucky enough to have dealt that hand myself so I would have needed to puke in my own face. What a freaking tragedy. The tourney starts at 5.30 and I park my car always close to the uni building but have to pay and display for the last 30 min. before its 6.00 . In this tourney I was out at 5.35! I couldn't believe I was out before my parking ticket was due. Second bad result was last Tuesday in the tourney I organise myself. I made the final table incredibly short stacked with about 6 BB in the next few hands 3 players bust and we are suddenly already on the bubble. At this point of time I had only 3 BB left and find KK. From this moment I had a unbelievable 10 minute rush to make me the chip leader. I was now very confident to take it down. Somehow I managed to lose my whole stack within the next 15 minutes and busting on the bubble getting my last chips in the middle with AK and run it into TT that flopped a set.

This now brings me to the "Nemesis Hand of the Month" award. And the award goes to... AK.
This hand fucked me all over the place this month. I run it into KK and AA unbelievable amounts of time, could almost never win a flip and got my pairs outdrawn by it too often. Because I'm so annoyed by this hand this month I'm not gonna play the hand for the whole next month, so it can sit in the freaking corner and think about what it was doing to me. That bitch.

Here one of the classic October AK memorable moments:

...hm damn it... doesn't work with the HH as I want it... I see later what I can do. Maybe I see how those hand replayers work.

Anyway I'm not too sad as the losing amounts were normally pretty small. What brings me especially in the cash games to a point I have been thinking about for a while now. Since I am working full time now and my wage is not one of the worst, the stakes I'm playing the cash games in seem to lose their meaning to me. I don't know if it would be a good idea to deposit some more money and just step up to some stakes that start bothering me. I will have to think about that more deeply. Anyway I could need a win in a freaking tourney so I hope I run a little better in November and get a moment of succes. Psychologically this would be pretty important for me. Ok I stop crying know and look forward to whole month of not playing AK. What a bitch.

On the Golf side of life I still only managed to play Par once. I normally play the 9 hole course which is right around the corner from where I live. I am playing a 50 at the moment and this course is a Par 29. On 9 holes obviously. I am getting better but it is pretty slow. Last time I only fucked up my first drive. All the other 8 were something between average and good. Winter kicks in soon and there will be less golf I think but I definetely love this game. Although a 4 or 5 put tilts me more than my AK experiences of this month. If the "not playing AK" experiement works out in December when I start playing it again I will try to do the same with the clubs in my bag that regularly fuck my swings up. Those bitches. Well then November is knocking on the door and I look forward to it just for making this bloody October forgotten. That bitch.

Laters

Truthans

How it all began... (Part II)

On the online front things were always a bit slow. After about 8 months of only playing live I set up an account with PokerStars and deposited $50. I started with LHE and later turned to the 1 cent/2cent cash games. My bankroll double up within a few weeks but then I couldn't play anymore because at my home in Germany we had a Internet connection were we had to pay exactly what we have been using it. Like with a normal telephone line. This made online Poker a bit difficult as my parents did go mad about the trillion hours I spent online and causing loads of monthly costes only to win rediculously small amounts in the 1cent/2cent games. When I arrived in Durham I started to play more online again on Stars but after a few weeks I was sick of it and just burned my Bankroll on Stars by playing bad and silly and just having fun. This is something I nowadays only do in the live cash games. :-) People that have played with me and reading this will now nod with their heads.
In the early 2008 I set up an account with Full Tilt as they offered Rakeback and I was getting more motivated for online Poker again. I deposited $200 and started playing the NL10 tables. About 2 or 3 at a time. This went pretty well and my BR reached $450 within about 3 months. I've got to say this happend with an average of about 5k hands per month. Then the FTOPS VIII eight started and I felt like playing the 6-max NL event for $200+16 which is pretty stupid as it was half my BR but I was in the mood and had some money left and actually planned to redeposit that money if I wouldn't cash. I didn't cash and didn't re-deposit.
After realizing that I was tilting so badly when I got a bad beat in the NL cash games I started to play on the limit holdem tables on Full Tilt as soon as I was tilting. I discovered that those tables were really soft and a ridiculous amount of players were playing 40% - 60 % of their hands preflop. The problem with LH is that you obviously get outdrawn a lot more than in NL as you have not really a chance to protect your hands. But players seem to play pretty bad at the LH tables and I started winning money in almost every session I played with the advantage that LH at these stakes normally never causes you to make a difficult decision. It was a walkover for the first weeks. I stepped up pretty quickly to $0.5/$1 and was still winning. Then I didn’t find a job and needed to withdraw some money. I left $200 on the account to have the BR to grind my way back up. Since that I grinded my way back up to about $450 but for a few thousand hands I am only break even and I do seem to reach the $500 mark again at which I normally would start throwing in 0.5/1 every now and then. Anyway since the mid September I start feeling a little more motivated again and hope to put some more volume in than in the last weeks. Oh every now and then I throw in a $5 HU SNG on Absolute Poker as I have some money left there which I got for free. That means I couldn’t withdraw it. I had like 11$ left on there and invested $10 in a HU Sng which I won and since that playing 5$ HU Sng’s which are incredibly soft but I do not really enjoy them. I have only lost one out of 15 so far. Really running well there.
Anyway this is about everything that happened so far and from now on I’ll be looking forward to see if I can make some progress. Tonight is the little 5 Pound tourney which I organize in a Pub. I really want to win this tonight as I haven’t cashed in a tourney for a few weeks.
Until next time
Truthans

How it all began...

Alright, let’s try to get this blogging thing started. I have no idea for the moment how interesting this blog is going to be but may be it will develop and help me to evaluate my progress in Poker and if not then at least I have got something more to do when it is quiet at work and I can’t think of anything else to do.
I should probably start with some history about myself just to get this a little more personal I guess. My educational career started in Germany, which is where I originally come from, in a small College in a east German city called Gera. I studied Business Management and Administration there for three years and after finishing I decided that I want to do a BA in the same subjects. As this would have taken me another two or even three years to do in Germany I decided to come to England and do it within one year. (Yeah, loving England) So a good friend of mine, his girlfriend, my girlfriend and me moved over here in a two bedroom house very close to the college. The sick thing about this is how we moved. As we did not have enough money we had to organise everything very cheap. So I borrowed a van of my brother and we got all our stuff in there including a Pearl drum kit, four bicycles, a Marshall TSL 100 with a 4 x 12” Marshall 1960 box, four guitars and a full size Poker table with 12 chairs. Of course we had our normal stuff like clothing and the other less important things in there as well. As the van was only a 3 seater my mate, his girlfriend and me drove up the 1000 miles all the way through Germany, France, Belgium and England (We arrived in Dover and went to Durham). We arrived the next day at about lunchtime after about 18 hours of travel. We spend half a day in our new house went to sleep and next morning my mate and me drove the 1000 miles back to the deep east of Germany because we had to bring the Van back and pick up my girlfriend. So another 16h or so later we arrived back in Germany. Spending half a day at the old home, went to sleep, got up next morning and did the same 1000 miles one more time with my very cosy Citroen Saxo. FFS is was completely fucked after those days and it took me a few days to recover. I’m not gonna move house in such a silly style again. Anyway we arrived in England, studied for a year, got the degree and decided we like Durham. So we stayed and now work and live in Durham.
I’m 23 now and play Poker for a little more than 2 years with more or less minor success. I’ve done the usual things like reading Theory of Poker, two German Poker books called Poker Schule and Poker Uni, Nigel Goldman’s “Make a Million with Onlline Poker” which was actually the first book I’ve read about Poker and it was a present by the author who I coincidently got to know when I lived in Spain and played Poker in a pub with some mates and he asked if he could join. We played a SNG and he busted in the first hand with K9 and left five of his books as presents on the table.

I guess my biggest success was a live tournament win in Germany. The tourney was € 15 buy in and was half shootout half freezeout. Everyone had to play a 10 seater SNG first and the winner qualified for the second stage which was a freezeout then. You could play as many qualification SNG’s as you wanted but obviously had to pay € 15 for each you played. I managed to win my first table without even having had to play HU as I knocked 2nd and 3rd place out with my QQ. For the freezeout there were 30 players left and I got had a nice rush of cards and had a big chip lead by the time I was HU. In the first hand my opponent only had one BB left and he doubled up but in the second hand I got 88 which held against his 55. More than 200 players participated in the qualification SNG’s but only the top three players got some prizes. In Germany cash prizes were and still are forbidden for Poker tournaments so you always get some kind of a different prize. In this tourney 3rd place got a set of 500 Poker Chips which is completely ridiculous. Second place got a cheap digital camera and my first price was a full size Poker table with 12 chairs and a buy in for a 888 sponsored 100.000 € guaranteed tournament with max. 1000 players in the Czech Republic. The Poker table is brilliant and I love it but it is not of much use for the moment. In the old house we used it as a large kitchen table because I had a carpenter make a wood cover for it. The tournament of 888 was cancelled 24h before the start. I had already flown over to Frankfurt and stayed at a friends house and wanted to go to Czech the next day. In the night I received the call that the tourney was cancelled as some officials did not allow the Casino to put large tents on their premises to accommodate all the players as they could not have accommodated 1000 players inside the Casino. So I spent some completely useless 5 days in Frankfurt and went back to Durham. What fucking waste of money and time this was. I was considering to claim compensation but just wanted to forget about all this bullshit and didn’t do anything. Except that I only won minor live tourneys with the biggest cash win being € 150. Not very impressive. I know. This is getting really long now and I will stop here and continue this later. I can't really risk to put everyone off reading this blog within the first post. To be continued...

Truthans