extreme poker

A rather mental close to 2009 at the Loose Cannon Christmas special. A free bar and dinner (subsidised by the rake) that my compatriots took full advantage of led to a rather nice upswing at year end, hiking my bankroll by another £1,200.

Not too much I’d care to report online, however a comedy moment mid-evening when Jimbo’s 5-bet with 42s all-in pre-flop ran into Smalls’ Aces, and somehow managed to stand-up. Captured the comedy on video here:

And so with that little boost, the year closes showing a rather nice £8,265 profit. A pretty consistent upward trend, although mostly as a result of running good through September and November.

Looking at 2009 together with previous year’s performance, the pattern’s pretty clear. It seems I’ve managed to be a benefactor of our the home games through 2004/5/6/7. 2008 was the year my main game shifted to the Loose Cannon, and at the hands of the Baron I suffered a series of punishing (partially self-inflicted) losses. However by start of this year, despite almost hitting rock bottom (my lowest point was one of net profit reduced to £290 on 12th Dec 2008), I finally sorted my game versus this new and far more challenging crew and once more started to prevail.

Am looking forward to keeping up the momentum into the next decade.

Whups! Gave it all back, and some.

First 30 minutes grabbed a seat in the same £20 game as Tuesday, racking a £100 profit in short order.

Around 11pm noticed a 2/2 dealer’s choice table opening with £50 min buy-in, so shifted to that. Stacked a player early with a K-Badugi vs a draw, but that was really the last winning hand I saw for the night, as over the next ninety minutes I managed to spectacularly stack off in a succession of bad plays and outdraws:

• All the profit and my first stack lost in another Badugi hand, shoving a Badugi to the ten into an eight after the third draw.
• My second £100 lost quickly afterwards in a hand of five card Omaha8, shoving the nut flush and nut low draw into two-pair that filled-up on the river.
• Third stack lost in a hand of Superstud (dealt five cards, discard two, turn one face up, play out the hand like Stud8), overbet shoving with AA3 on the first betting round into an active player showing a 4. He improved to two-pair, while my pair of aces didn’t improve.
• Fourth stack a bit of a blur to be honest, think it may have been frittered away in two halves of Omaha and four card Irish.
• Fifth and final dealer’s choice stack in Omaha8, my AA2344 triple suited (!!) all-in pre-flop outdrawn by something like A478TQ single suited. There isn’t an online calculator for six card Omaha hi-lo, but I’m pretty sure I must have been something like 80%.

Made a shift to the 1/2 NL hold’em, but my luck wasn’t to turn.

• Lost the sixth stack with a poor play, opening TT for £8, taking four to the flop of KK3, and stacking-off on the safe turn after nobody showed any interest. With so many players there’s just too much chance the king is out there, I should have saved £100 here.
• Seventh and final stack with KhQd on a Qh8h4h board vs AhTh. I don’t think I’m ever getting away from this one in a game where my reputation is VLAG.

All in all then a rather horrendous two hours at the poker table. To be fair, profit from the Tuesday night absorbed some of the blow, but if I’d planned better would have either stayed and killed the 1/1 hold’em game in my inebriated state, or stayed sober if I was going to take-on the regulars at their own game.

Lesson learned (again!!). Booze and poker don’t mix!!!!!!

No Limit, Sheffield style:

1. £1/£1 blinds
2. Minimum buy-in £20, maximum unlimited.
3. A LIVE straddle of ANY amount may be placed from ANY position, first man to get his money across the line goes, play proceeds from the seat to the left of the straddle.
4. Players are required to explain their inevitably flawed thought process following the play of each hand to the player to their immediate right.
5. Monotonously.
6. Raising appears to be absolutely forbidden at any point in the hand from any seat.

Suffice to say that I broke rule 6 in 50% of hands dealt. To counter-balance this, the opposing nine players adopted the exploitative (LOL) strategy of buying-in for the minimum £20 and playing call/fold poker exclusively.

Rapidly adapting to these rules, the following robotic playing style yielded a £245 win in 100 drunk minutes at the table last night:

• With tight dullard to my immediate left (see rules 4 & 5), straddle to £3 from every button/cut-off. (He had the temerity to explain to me no less than three times that I was giving my money away; thank you for the poker lesson Dr Antonius, but I think I’ll do it my way just the same…).
• Play 100% of flops, unless (in accordance with rule 6) random idiot has already opened for an overbet shove of 20x (circa once per round).
• Bet every flop, double-barrel every turn, triple-barrel every river. Take down 90% of pots from uninterested opposition who seem to not comprehend the concept of raising.
• Induce table tilt and sly smirks from the rather attractive dealer by showing every bluff, i.e. six hands out of ten PER ROUND!!!
• Balance frequency of bluffs with pre-flop shoves of top ten hands, all of which I was lucky enough to be called on and stand-up with.

Only slight downside to the night was my accidently randomly insulting a gang of Chinese lads at the table. When shown a huge hand on the end, I remarked “Hou Daai” (very big), however was interpreted as “Pok Gaai” (bastard!). Having ‘revealed’ the fact that I could understand some small percentage of what they were yelling at each other mid-hand, they reverted to the safer course of insulting me rather than talking about their hands. Things had just started to take a sinister turn (“hey, why you such lucky boy?” / – perhaps because I’m playing poker and y’all are calling off your bankrolls £20’s at a time?) when I elected to cash-in and split for the night at 1am.

All in all a very satisfactory experience. Will definitely be returning on my next overnight trip opp’Noorth.