December Poker News

December 24th, 2006

Merry Christmas & happy holidays to everyone!

In a few days time I'm going to review my past year as a professional poker player. A brutally honest assessment of areas of my game, improvements and declines, the whole shebang. Should be entertaining and insightful.

That's all I really have to say for now. See you in '07!

December 18th, 2006

If you're looking for high quality poker chips at great prices, check out PokerShopping.com, who are advertising on VentureAce.com for the next few months. (Plug over)

I played the $500 tournament on Full Tilt Poker yesterday, needless to say I didn't cash. What a horrible mentality, but, that's how a bad slump has skewed my approach to tournament poker. Play too loose at the start and opponents start looking you up all the time or play tight and have an insignificant stack when the tournament really starts. It's a balance, I know. A good analogy - in cricket (applies to baseball), when the batsman plays well, the commentators say "He's seeing the ball big". Well, I'm seeing balls the size of marbles, in 2 instances.

It's not all doom and gloom, I squeezed in to the money in the $300 shorthanded tournament on Saturday. 6-max tables are definitely my strength, cashed at the WSOP & Paradise Masters. If only they could run big buy-in shorthanded tourneys more frequently.

December 11th, 2006

I 'played' the Ultimate Bet $1 million guaranteed tournament, which had a staggering $300,000+ overlay. Amazingly UB didn't pull the plug and incurred the huge loss. The head honchos must of been pulling their hair out. My healthy head of hair only found out about the tourney after it started and (un)fortunately they were excepting alternates up to 1 hour after the start. I was seated about half an hour in to the tournament, and lasted a whole 10 minutes! Hey, looking on the bright side, that's improvement on my recent form.

Strangely for UB, the tournament structure wasn't great, with 2,500 starting chips and 30 minute blind levels. All my chips went in with the nut heart flush draw on a 9 high board, the player on my left made the call with 98 and scooped the pot. My play of late has been very transparent and thought processes very shallow, mainly due to not consistently playing every day.

It was almost the same case in the $200 early tournament on PokerStars. Gary Jones, who plays under the handle "P10ker" was at my table and outplayed me on numerous occassions, which at the moment isn't that difficult. In the end, I played like amateur and let my frustrations get the better of me, making a horrible triple-barrel bluff.

December 7th, 2006

Last week I was bragging about my successful record in a certain tournament, seemingly I cursed myself as I haven't cashed in the last 4 attempts. Unlike another poker pro I'm not yet resorting to spending £10K on a lucky rock!