DreamTeam V - Here at Last

It is 02:00 on a chilly October Saturday morning , why am I awake !!! well sleeping early evening for 3 hours does not help !!! I have to be up at 7.30 to take my car to get new Tyres and then off to Brum Land for the Final. Maybe writing a few lines will send me to sleep, if not my few followers ;-)

I joined DT V around halfway through on my own Account, in a team with Jamie Briggs and assorted Fine Players, I scraped into 6th place from the 8 , mainly helped by two who did not play much if at all lol. I had one Final Table and helped the team to get to almost Average ChipStack at 2pm today. The Stacks are Deeeeeeep much deeper than last year and we finish earlier - a cunning plan to get more to come back on Sunday ;-) we shall see.

I am quietly confident, well nothing new there lol, looking forward to the battle, I have played a LOT of Live Poker since my last DT IV 12th place finish, even getting Headsup in a small rebuy, and making the last 40 or so in the GUKPT Manchester main event. Unlike last year, when I was petrified of CASH GAMES I have got the bug, and enjoy that side of the game immensely now.

Good News work-wise, I am contracting again at the same place I finished in March, just a 3-monther until the end of the year but who knows .... I was there for 2 years at one stage after countless extensions :-)

Well, off for another try at sleeping ! Hopefully there will be good things to blog about on Sunday/Monday :-)

Luton time again :-)

Has it really been a year since my one and only cash at a GUKPT Event ;-) oh well, my excuse is that I slowed down my live play considerably since then ! Things have not changed much job-wise, I am still unemployed, I have my 13 week review at the Job Centre this week where we will discuss options, including work that is not in my preferred area !!! B&Q here I come lolol , well nothing strenuous allowed due to Asthma, so I won't be forced into any hard labour !!

Poker has taken a few new turns, I have signed up for Virgin Poker via AWorldofPoker.com and will be rediscovering CASH at a very low stakes and trying to progress slowly. MTTs I still can't see anything more value than Stars ! I love the 7000 - 10000 runners, I have the patience for them, and if I play for 5 hours without cashing, well it's all experience.

I have reloaded on Full Tilt and love it there for the STTs, my favourite is the 90seater doublestack turbo knockout !!!! and if you had said that to me last year I would have thought you were bonkers !!! 3rd in a $3 and 6th in a $6 grrrrr wrong way round, but the potential is there.

I am following the blackbeltpoker story closely, not sure I am keen on returning to iPoker so may give that a miss when their new site opens. Badbeat is still interesting , I am joing a team for the rest of the Dreamteam but not sure of any more involvement .... if they would have me anyway lolol

Is it really June next week :-)

I spend far too much time reading other people's blogs and poker forums than taking an interest in my own attempt at online immortality :-) Having said that, the few blogs that I track are equally tardy. I look in on Steve Holden's blog, which is one of the best I have seen, he posts daily or so it seems and tracks many other interesting blogs. If he is an A then I am a D- must try harder.

So what has happened since my last entry ? I am no longer with Badbeat, I could not turn around my deficit quick enough, combined with finishing my IT Contract early March, means that I need to spend my time and focus on other things in life.

I signed on to Benefits a few weeks ago, the Housing Benefit is the main one, and it covers most of my Rent, but the so-called Job Seekers Allowance is a farce, the "state" has decreed that I need £64.20 a week to live on and that is what I will get.

I defy anybody to survive on that for a serious length of time without some kind of "help" from friends and relatives. I have not asked the question yet where does Poker Winnings come into the equation, I am starting at low levels on many sites where I had loose change lying around.

Poker is fun again, as there is not the "pressure" to perform. I even qualified for a £1000 GUKPT Main Event in Manchester via £50 rebuy Sat. And the £200 expenses and £100 Cash I won that night just about covered the trip.

And lastly, the football season finished for me a few hours ago :-( the FA Cup Final will be of very low interest :-) At one time my two teams Manchester United and Hamburger SV were in the running for their League Titles, their National Cup and a European title :-) in the end only 1 came true ! although HSV squeezed into the Europa League with the last kick of their last game.

White Rabbit, White Rabbit, White Rabbit

And for even more luck "A pinch and a punch for the first of the month" :-) now where did I put my 4 leaf clover ? I am going to need all the luck in the world to dig myself out of my BadBeat "hole" " months since my last blog, and the last 3 weeks have been badddddd !!! I started 2009 with the "sickest" hot streak I have had in the last year. I won an MTT for around $1400 I came 2nd in a DreamTeam event for around $600 and then came 2nd in a MTT for around $700. If only those three had been the only games I had played these past two months lolololol

I tried my best to "grasp" the 6max 25/50c Cash game in January, I was within $70 of breaking even then lost around $300 in the last few days of January. I then started even worse beginning of Feb and had a good talk with one of the top BB Mentors who "banned" me from Cash. That coincided with my 2nd place MTT and after around one week into Feb I was up $1700 for the year ...... what happened next was one of the fastest slides I have ever had. I have been battered, bruised, broken by all kinds of ipoker badbeats mixed in with some tilty steaming and bad play

I am now "resting" and reconsidering all options along with BB.

Live Poker has been interesting shall we say, I had a bad Brighton and have given Walsall a miss, I played my favourite £75 at Luton Friday and while busting AA with QQ allin , I then went on to lose with AA vs a flopped set ..... "It's ONLY a pair" as the commentators on Sky Poker love to shout :-)

The one success so far in 2009 has been the DREAMTEAM , our team The Wacky Raisers ( a name I am proud to say I suggested) are joint 5th with 2 games to go before the Live Final in Birmingham later this month. Much respect has to go to Adam - our Swedish Rock :-) who is not at all like the wild and crazy stereotype of a "Scandi"

Adam is also a BadBeat affiliate and that is something I have also become :-) so if anyone who is not with BadBeat already is reading this :-) feel free to contact me

I have developed my own website as well using Fasthosts Sitebuilder but it is not ready yet for general release, it has been remarkably easy for a Mainframe Dinosaur like myself to create something that looks semi decent.

Happy New Year

10 minutes to go , 2008 has been an interesting year on many levels ! but as far as Poker is concerned it has been dominated by Badbeat. It will be interesting to see how 2009 turns out, I was made a Trader in November and promptly lost all my profit of the year in the last two months !! It must be a curse being a trader as many traders have had similar stories recdntly, but Badbeat is probably the best place to be when you are on a downswing as it is their money after all and you would hope they would do all in their power to look after it :-)

I am working the first quarter of 2009 as an IT Contractor, so will have some funds for live play, I am aiming to go to Brighton and Walsall for the first two GUKPT Events and March will see me shoot for my highest target so far ...... EPT in Dortmund !! I need to go to Germany soon for various reasons and this is an ideal opportunity. The main event buyin is 5,000 Euro which may be beyond me but who knows .....

Time Flies ......

..... and before you know it , it is nearly the end of October ! clocks go back Sunday and it is getting cold ..... brrrrrrrrrrrrr :-(

I notice that most of my fellow bloggers are almost as bad as me at keeping up to date ! I guess the novelty soon wears off ;-) my Facebook page is almost as bad.

Mentoring

What a great concept, and one of the best things about Badbeat :-) had a session with John Conroy on Friday and learned quite a few things about my game and where it can improve, so far so good , it is early days but I feel good things ahead of me.

I have started looking on the "old faithful" Jobserve for another IT Contract, there are quite a few interesting Contracts out there, one in particular starting 1st January ..... talk about forward planning ! it is in Munich of all places, one of my favourite Citys that I have worked in before.

I am also looking at Translation-type openings, and one very intriguing one came up while browsing a Forum, I will be following that up later.

The next week will be pretty busy as I have to get myself into gear on a number of fronts and start planning the next few months in more detail.

GUKPT Bolton - least said the better ..... it was a good experience in the £100 is about all I can say, was absolutely stone cold card dead for first three levels, limped into a couple of pots and missed the flop, raised with AK missed the flop had to fold to multiple action, then a few hands after the first break find the monster 99, get a couple of min raisers/limpers so get it allin, one guy dwells for ages and then decides his AT is worth throwing in half of his stack. Booooom Ace on flop Ten on river to rub it in !

Good to see Glenn Ashworth again, he had won the £200 event a few days earlier :-) did not have such a good time in the Main Event, pushed with an oesd on flop from what I recall and tptk called him and held up.

Looking forward to Wednesday and the Croatia - England game ! and as an added bonus, Andy Murray is doing pretty well in the US Open , so will be good to see some BRITISH success ..... or failing that SCOTTISH failure ;-) ;-)