December Round-Up

Sunday, December 30, 2007

December - as I alluded to in the previous post - was pretty much a disaster, in that having awarded myself a free reign over when and how long to play, I basically took the piss and hardly ever played. In total I managed just 25 hours, which should be less than a full 5 days work for a full time player! In that time I made a few dollars short of $1700 and I have $345 pending in rakeback resulting in around £1000 for my measly efforts: enough to keep us ticking over but not acceptable in the long term.

However, some good things have come of the last month in the form of some positive decisions (see previous post) that I have made and that I have enough Iron Man points to get the 25,000 FTP package. When purchased in Jan 2008 those 25k points will take my current total to 85,000. That will allow me to buy the 85,000 point 22" monitor from the Full Tilt Store and I'll purchase a second identical monitor online or in a shop. If all goes according to plan I should have both monitors in place and ready to go by the 1st of Feb 2008 meaning that 12 tables or more will be an option.

I have also (finally) taken the time to figure out how the whole Iron Man system actually works and will now ensure that I qualify most/all months as the freeroll and bonus medals are actually quite a worthy addition to your win rate if you calculate your expected return over a long period and divide it down to a monthly/hourly figure. In the interests of keeping Laura sweet I made some withdrawals over the last two weeks to top up our joint account. I just made a final withdrawal a few moments ago to take my Full Tilt account down to exactly $10,000. It's nice having some round figures to start 2008 with as that way it will be easier to track my progress and also to relay to readers of the blog.

Live Play

This evening I played a 138 person £150+15 live MTT and as well and denting my roll by circa $330 I reminded myself why I really have grown to loath live play. First of it is very slow and very boring, and the standard it truly terrible for the most part…but terrible in a frustrating way. For example, you might sit tight as hell for 2 hours and make a move to be looked up light by a horrifically played hand that is dominated by the 90% of your range that you don't (unfortunately) hold on this occasion. When playing online I believe this is usually because your opponent simply wasn't paying enough attention to notice your VPIP was in the low single digits!! However, live players nearly always notice but they just can't exercise any self control or discipline regardless! You re-raise all in preflop and they mumble, "You've not played a hand China?"....."Aw man!"......"I canny fold this son"….and they flip up A10soooooooooted or the likes and proceed to pump your 9s or JJ or, as can often be the case, your AK-AJ.

It probably wouldn't be so bad if they were likeable but in Scotland the live scene is made up of 90% scum. Horrible, horrible people that I really don't want to associate with. Don't get me wrong, there are some great characters that play and I do miss the banter with those people but a lot of them are your sovereign ring wearing taxi drivers; spastic internet geeks that think they are great because they can play 3 tables of NL25 for 3ptbb/100 over an 8k sample; and finally your usual chavs, drunks, diseased old women and arrogant businessmen that love themselves. I guess one of the advantages to playing online is you don't, generally, get to know the personalities of the people you are playing (probably a good thing) and you aren't exposed to how ugly they are or how disgusting their mannerism are.

As for the tourney itself - it was same old, same old: Card dead all evening; fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, raise-3-bet-fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, raise-win-show-goods, fold, fold, fold, raise-3-bet-AI-show-goods, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, 1st showdown AI-lose-go-home.

There only appeal is the 'quick fix' to monetary problems as a scoop of say £3,000+ this evening would have helped a lot in the short-term. However, even with a 200% ROI, which I have no doubt I could achieve or beat long term in such a tourney, that is still only $700 or so for what would be on average a good 5 hours work. That's an hourly rate that I can almost stretch to playing 9-12 tables of NL$200 if you include Rakeback and other bonuses, so it's probably not worth the strife and the boredom of playing one table of poker in a room of degenerate scum.

So to summarize, I made some money in December, I must work harder, should be sorting out my monitor situation and live poker can get to fuck.

P.S. Noted F-Badger was at the tourney - never got a chance to talk to you Graham as we were never at the same table. P.P.S If anyone wants a laugh click on Smart Poker's blog (links to right) and check out his 3x 30" Monitor set up. That's probably more monitor resolution space than Nasa used during the Apollo Program!

December Graph

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