Waking up the neighbours

Probably really showing my age now but I will be going to see Bryan Adams twice in three days in Nottingham on November 29^th and my home town of Sheffield on 1^st December. The “Waking up the Neighbours” Tour is great for any Adams fan but I haven’t seen him live since 1997 when I went with my then girlfriend after she had fallen down stairs and broke her leg and she hobbled into Sheffield Arena on crutches…..never forget that!

But the concert was amazing and even more so because he had two 100ft blow up nude women on stage with him……I have been to many concerts  in my time but the energy that he put into three solid hours made it an absolute five star performance that I will be interested to see if he matches.

So what has been happening with the poker? Well I have had a good spell since the last post but I have been playing STT’s for a change and I won nine out of thirty one and showed a $117 profit. I also just for the sheer hell of it tried to spin up $1 into as much as I could and turned it into $64 in the space of sixteen minutes……pretty cool. But the poker strategy this week has been pretty simple……have as much fun as possible before I kick on next week in what will be another serious week.

I go through bursts like this where I get motivated for a while and then stop.  I told myself some weeks ago that moving to www.pokerstars.co.uk was the best move but my main problem isn’t being able to beat the games at the levels that I play at but simply getting motivated to play. Trust me when I say that it isn’t like Las Vegas when you play on a computer. In fact many people often ask me if I have ever been to Las Vegas or played in the World Series of Poker and that is a resounding no to both.

I think that Las Vegas and the WSOP is for dreamers but me on the other hand, I just like to keep it simple and playing 3-4 events with big buy-ins and trying to wade through those big fields trying to catch lightening in a bottle isn’t really part of my game plan. So I am stuck in an online grind of my own making…….oh well.

Turning a new corner

This week has seen me move into a completely different phase with my poker and for the first time in six years then I no longer write for poker magazines. Since 2005 then I have written for a whole host of them including the WPT, Bluff Europe, Poker Pro Europe, Online Poker Pro, Top Pair, Player Ireland and the 2+2 online magazine. On top of this I have also written three books as well and so that represents an awful lot of written work. But these days then the entire world is going online and this is where the future is.

So I am not just playing poker online now but also increasing my online footprint with the intention of pushing my poker coaching. So today has been a huge day for me in so much that writing poker strategy for hand held poker magazines has come to an end. So what else has been happening? Well I played a session yesterday playing eight tables at NL50 and made around $170 or so.

The session went really well on the whole and I got ahead quite early when I open raised from the cut-off with J-J and was re-raised by the big blind. But the re-raise was quite small and it priced me in. I suspected that I was up against a bigger pair but with stacks of $130 at stakes of $0.25-$0.50 then I had to call when my raise to $1.75 was only re-raised to $4. The flop came J-7-4 with two suits and my opponent checked and I bet two thirds pot. They check-raised and I called. The turn card bricked out and they over bet the pot to which I shoved all in.

They must have been suspecting being behind at this stage but they called and showed A-A and I win a huge pot that really got me started. This is the good thing about playing multiple tables because someone somewhere nearly always makes a big mistake like this. On sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk then the action is nearly always huge and so table selection is never a problem. These are the types of session that I like because when you get ahead early then you feel good and this helps you to play proper poker. At the end of the day then poker is mental game and you need to be on top of you game to optimise your potential at it.