I haven’t written a blog since the Grading, so thought it was about time I wrote a few things. This month, I’ve played a lot of poker, balancing my time between the online Omaha games, some of the bigger online tournaments and some live games at the Vic and Barracuda. Also, I managed to make a trip up to Dusk Till Dawn for the £1,000 Monte Carlo deepstack event which I had a lot of hope for, but maybe the 102 Jägerbombs the night before was a mistake...
If I’m being honest, I’ve done my bollocks in online tournaments this month, probably around $11,000 invested with $2,000 worth of cashes. I’ve only had one real deep run where I was down to the last 100 in the $1million guaranteed on Full Tilt but it didn’t work out. I gave the ECOOP Main Event a spin but five percent percent of Nik Persaud’s min-cash wasn’t enough to book a winning Sunday. I’m pretty sure I’m just really bad at online comps because I don’t seem to be going deep very often and when I do I’m not able to fold any strong hand. In fact, come to think of it, one single hand of Omaha and a load of literal coin flips are why pieces were not done.
At around 4am on one of the Sundays, I took a third of Nik’s action in $25/50 Omaha cash to see if we could spin something up. There was a $16,500 pot, which came in pretty handy!
On the same day, I managed to cash for £2,000 in a freeroll at Maxims casino but Nik forced me to spend a decent chunk of that on an umbrella. To be fair, it’s a pretty nice umbrella.
I have officially self excluded myself from the game ‘Lodden Thinks’. I might start playing again if I get some kind of handicap but I think the fact I’m 20 and normally playing against people almost twice my age puts me at a big disadvantage. Basically, I always lose when I play and the only reason I can think of is that it must be during those 17+ years when you find out how many feathers are in a pillow and the population of lions in Africa.
On January 3, I’m off to the PCA [PokerStars Caribbean Adventure]. Sida [Yuen] has booked all the flights and hotel and I was about to prepare to tally up what I owed him when he came up to me after doing his bollocks at the Vic and offered his £550 to my £500 in the complex game of high card wins. £2,200 later and Sida was licking his wounds. The good news is that will cover most of my expenses.
Anyway, I was grocery shopping in my local Marks and Spencers in Wimbledon and I bumped into Craig McCorkell who I’d met before at the LPC [London Poker Circuit] and I didn’t realise he lives near me. He asked me if I was going up to DTD and offered me a lift, pretty random but I’ll take it. I got up to Nottingham and found a few UK circuit regulars at the bar. Obviously this got messy and not long after we were coin flipping for 102 jaegerbombs. Cheers, Tom Rutter.
The next day I woke up in my hotel room with a bone dry mouth, no recollection of the latter part of the night and not sure why there was McDonalds all over my room. A few days later, one of my friends was talking to a cab driver who said he drove some poker players home that night that offered him £100 to take them to McDonalds and said they travel the country playing poker tournaments, but always win because they know what the flop is going to be...
Surprisingly, I played pretty well in the tourney except for one hand against Rich Trigg. I ended up getting bad-beated by the Mad Turk near the end of Day One and got a lift home from Luke ‘FullFlush’ Schwartz in his new Bentley. Meanwhile, I was expecting this to be a really comfortable trip but, like the amateur I am, I threw rock versus Ramsey [Ajram] and found myself in the tiny back seat. Pretty standard for me to buy all these guys into the tourney and get stuck with the back seat on the way home.
I went to watch the Darts for the first time a couple days ago. It was a good laugh despite my horse Alan ‘The Saint’ Tabern deciding to miss seven doubles for the match. GG Carpet. It was still a really good night, but seeing as the beer was free it was always going to be.
Fingers crossed for getting the cake in 2010.