Resurrecting the auld blog and 2008 review...

Apologies to the 2-3 people that actually read this for not bothering to update for most of 2008, no actual reason for it other than I am a lazy git and completely forgot about it. Says something really, we can sit there and suddenly remember something that happened 4 years ago and is ridiculously obscure, but we can also be lazy and say "I need to update my blog" and then forget about it 5 minutes later, why is that?

Anyway, after reading a couple of resurrected blogs over on the APAT forum, as well as other blogs that might not be linked to the right but will be later, one of my Poker New Years Resolutions is to get this off the ground properly and start again. I'll leave the old entries up so you can read/laugh but here we go again...

2008 review:

When I last posted at the end of February, I was playing solely for BadBeat whilst working part-time in the NHS and had a new girlfriend who I was slowly beginning to teach poker. Now, i don't play for BadBeat any more, I have a different girlfriend and I still work part-time in the NHS! The BadBeat thing kinda sputtered out really when one day they hadn't refilled my account, so I contacted them and they said something about "not contacting your mentor". Granted, this might have had something to do with my playing between 10pm-4/5am in the morning and not being around much cos of work and sleep...so I decided "let's leave it at that" and walked away. I don't have a problem with BadBeat and would recommend them to anybody who is a solid, winning player at low stakes but has no bankroll. If you can put the effort in that they ask, then go for it. I just couldn't balance poker/work/gf and so dropped the poker to concentrate on the increased work hours I was getting and the gf.

I then made the mistake of breaking one of my cardinal rules: Do not have a girlfriend that does not like poker - yeah, that ended well. Combine this with not liking work and slowly going insane, plus not playing much poker because my bankroll had been drastically cut by life necessities, and I was ready to jack it all in. Then I went down to Blonde Bash 7 and met Julie. 3 weeks later I found myself living in Weston-Super-Mare, looking for work within the NHS down there and sharing a house with Joobs. It's amazing how things can just change out of the blue sometimes. I regret some things about moving so quickly, namely that I don't get to any more of the Chezger regular games (but that's a different story), but apart from poker-related regrets, I am so happy that I moved out of the North-West and down to Bristol. Oh, and before you lot ask, Julie's as big a degenerate as I am when it comes to poker!! Just gotta find a job now...

Poker in 2008:

After I left BadBeat in March, I somehow found myself solely focusing on tournaments, mainly on Blue Square and Poker Stars. Blue Square was quickly abandoned however in favour of the more versatile and user-friendly Stars, which is where I play most of my tourneys. I mainly play the "Deep Stack" series of tournaments, where you start with 5000 chips and 30 minute blinds, and making a final table at the weekend can often find you playing for 14hrs solid. Despite the length of time for all these tournaments, I love them for the amount of play you get in them and the large amounts of "dead money" you find as you go along, bearing in mind my definition of dead money in a deepstack tournament is someone who has no clue of the strategy required to play in these, and can be found shoving Ax os for 2500 at blinds of 15/30 because he/she's lost half their stack early on.

My stats for 2008 on Stars have shocked me, I have a 5%ROI and made the money about 1/5 times (25/115). My ROI is mainly because of a 3rd in a midweek Deep Stack in October for $463 - just a pity I didn't keep it all as I sold some of myself to a friend because I wanted to take a shot and they put up the cash.

Plans/Resolutions for 2009:

I put these up every year but never find myself sticking to them, mainly because a year is such a long time in poker and in my life, and a lot of things can change in that time!

• Start my SNG staking and be a winner (see below)
• Go to Vegas (this is looking likely)
• Win an MTT on Stars
• Win a Deep Stack tourney on Stars
• Qualify for a live event over £200 (EPT/WSOP/GUKPT/GBPT/DTD £300)
• Try and get back into the Live Updating/Journalism side of poker (any help with this is much appreciated!)
• Win enough to buy a CardRunners account then win enough to maintain the payments on it!
  

We shall see how these go!

SNG Staking:

One of my main reasons for resurrecting the blog is because I have just begun (today) a new staking arrangement through Blonde Poker. The arrangement is solely to play $10 SNG's on the Blonde Poker cardroom and I intend to hopefully work my way up the levels with help from my backers. My plan is to post hands/results on here and use this as one of the ways in which to improve my game. So far I have played 8 games and had the following results:

Played: 8
1st: 1
2nd: 2
3rd: 1
4th-10th: 4

I'm planning on putting some hands up on here for review but I wanna check whether my backers have a problem with this before I do.

Anyhow, that's about it from me for now, all I gotta do is remember to update this thing...