Secrets of the Amateurs

John Fox said something about how the best time to play was 3am on the last Friday of the month, and that playing just that hour every month wouldn't necessarily be what you wanted to do .. but it would still be profitable ! Well, if I only played the last Sunday of every month I'd have a hell of an ROI that's for sure. This time I saved my bacon (mmm bacon) in the Stars $100 rebuy, finishing 4th for $30K+change. Yes, 4th for $30K, it's a massive rebuy donkfest ! On top of a win in the Paradise E50 rebuy last Wednesday (that has to be my favourite tournament right now), that put me nicely ahead for the month, with a total buyin of $25K in 54 hours play which was a slightly better effort.

I've changed tack on what I'm listening to while playing, it's quite interesting. After trying a couple of brainwave entrainment samples that promised the world and didn't really deliver, I tried Mind Stereo which I really like (and Neuroprogrammer from the same people but that doesn't really apply to poker). Mind Stereo allows you to play music (whether from your own playlist or an internet radio station) and apply pulse modulations that are supposed to help you relax or (more appropriately for poker) concentrate/study better. To start with I was playing this sort of techno (I don't know what it is exactly, trance maybe) for the first half of the session, and then ambient for the second. On Sunday I switched to ambient all the way through, which seemed to work, being result oriented :-). Seriously it's hard to tell whether it's listening to background music with which I'm not familiar or the actual pulse modulation but I do seem to focus better and for longer. It could even be a placebo (not the band Placebo they suck), but what the hell, if a placebo helps me make $30K then bring it on. It turns out both the stations I was listening to are part of Soma FM FWIW. The Drone Zone is my favourite. I should throw them a bone really, 1% or something.

Anyway that's it for me this month. You'll notice no liveaments, screw them. Well I might play the £500 8-Game next week, but seeing as I couldn't be bothered to show up for the £2K, don't count on it. And gg ul to the Camel who busted 11th in the WSOP-E. Could have been worse, how tilting would it have been if Sheringham had won it ?

I'm quite enjoying this series of The Poker Show, but if Jesse makes one more comment about how it's a "disgrace" that there are no UK players in the Caesars Cup team then I'll have to phone up and give him some GBH to the earhole.

Let me clarify to start with that I don't give a monkeys about the Caesars Cup, it's yet another gimmick dreamt up so that Daniel Negreanu & Co can grab some more TV time without having to do anything inconvenient like be better at poker than other people to do it. But Jesse is putting me on super life tilt with this. The European team, with Annette as captain, is as follows : Elky, Dario, Peter Eastgate, Patrik Antonious and Zigmund. If anyone thinks it's a "disgrace" that there are no UK players in it, then it couldn't be simpler. Tell me who should be out and which UK player should be in instead. There are a few you could make a case for being close, but if you're totally objective then you can still make a better case for those already in and a few more (mostly Scandis) besides. There's definitely no one who's such a glaring omission that it's a "disgrace".

At times Jesse appears to imply that there should be a UK player because it's being held here - but then he talks about the selection being "political", and what would be more political than sticking someone in who's not good enough just because they're from a particular country ? A lot of our "great players" have made their reputation on the live UK circuit, or on TV tournaments, which means fuck all because the standard in both of those is dog poop. Tell me which UK player inspires fear when he sits down at the table. That's right, no one.

Update : The more I think about this, the more I can take another angle, which is that it's super disrespectful to Annette and the players on the team. Team poker is super ghey but, having said that, I can't remember a stronger team ever being assembled. It's also the least "political". We all know that people have "played for England" on the grounds of bunging the captain a few quid and giving him a lift to the game. If you pick any UK tournament player, Elky is better. Any cash player, Zigmund is better. Any heads up player, Dario is better. Any champion of this or that, Eastgate is the current World Champ. And any all round player, Antonious is better. And when I say better I mean by a street. This is a super strong team and so, given the super retarded format of what they're playing, they're at least 20-21 favourites.

Further Update : I like saying "super", deal with it ; and maybe there is one better heads up player than Dario.

Poker Show : I've just been on The Poker Show talking about this and straight afterwards Eddie Hearn pointed out that if I thought it was a gimmick event, then why be so outspoken about having the best players in it, which is 100% fair, and it's why I was a bit reticent about even making the post. But there you go. It was just a rant, and after making it, it seemed only fair to let them interview me about it when they asked.

I had Betfair open this evening as I was keeping an eye on their WSOP-E satellite. With $500 buy-in and a $200K guarantee, 5 minutes before kick-off it looked like there was a decent overlay in prospect, with about 200 players registered. Then, next time I looked at it, which must have been about 10 seconds later, there were 300. Still only 200 players in the list, but 300 in the count. The discrepancy remained until the tournament actually kicked off, when the player list jumped up to match the count at 314.

I don't know whether this was down to bad software or shenanigans on Betfair's part but just watch out for this. I asked on 2+2 whether it was just me and one person confirmed, FWIW. There was still an overlay but anyone who registered 7 minutes before because of the apparent double overlay would have cause to be annoyed. I didn't play myself as I was still umm-ing and ah-ing when this started to happen.

Update : (Completely unsubstantiated) story about this here.

My online effort over the last two months can best be described as "half-hearted". Still, if you put the two months together it pretty much amounts to one decent month. In terms of volume anyway, nothing much happened in the way of results and I ended up making about $3K. It's funny how that's pretty much an after-tax wage for a lot of people, but in our world it's just a bit of random noise.

The only prediction I'm going to make for now is that I'm not going to make any predictions. Didn't Gazza say something like that once ? Anyway. Play when I feel like playing and hopefully make enough to keep me on the golf course the rest of the time. Of course there's a bunch of stuff going on in the next 6 weeks as the poker world comes to London, but I can take or leave it. Might play a couple of EPT side events. I will be playing the World Poker Open V in October which should be interesting. I think the "triple chips" aspect is a bit of a mirage ; it just adds a couple of levels on at the start, which you can fold through anyway if you like, especially with it being 8-handed. It'll become the 20BB-fest we know and love soon enough, which suits me obv.

The only other thing is that I've been experimenting a little with different "soundtracks" to my poker playing, but I'm going to hold back on discussing that until I work out whether the effects are placebo or actually lasting, it's quite interesting though I think.

Update : And with all this live action coming up, here's what we can look forward to : being slowrolled by Davros, Creator of the Daleks.