Rock Bottom

My current mental state can be summed up thus:

Arghhh! I think this current disastrous swing is poker karma for failing to show any sympathy whatsoever to James666 when he has been whining about his bad luck for the past four years.

To be fair, I probably deserve it. Even after this horrific start to the month I'm still only down $1k or so in EV over my poker life - which is now about 700k hands. If I can stay almost bang on EV for the rest of my poker career then I have to be happy about that.

Still, in the short-term it's been affecting me more than it should be. I've been getting quite depressed about poker as I lose more each day and I'm also starting to feel less and less confident - which is completely irrational given that I have gone through two similar swings within the past year and recovered within a few weeks on both occasions.

There's a number of things I'll be looking at over the next few days - more mentality work, training vids, hand reviews (all the dull stuff basically) - and then I'll make sure I hit 70k hands for the month and hopefully claw some $ back. It's weird, it's not even the money that annoys me when I lose at poker, I just hate 'failing' at something I am fairly good at.

I played my biggest hand ever this month too - and lost. The guy in the hand was a complete fish so I think my line is pretty fine but what does anyone else think?

Hand info:

Date:	Friday, October 07, 09:50:05 ET 2011
Type:	Cash Games
Game:	Hold'em NL
Table:	40413926
Blinds:	$5/10

Table info:

Seat 1: sobaaad ($1,484.49)
Seat 2: gier1 ($1,616.07)

Seat 3: cevzy ($1,000)

Seat 4: KazakhstanAA ($2,174.12)

Seat 5: james666 ($1,080)
Seat 6: MrStarch ($2,785.34)

Dealt to MrStarch

Preflop: (Pot: $15)

RAISE MrStarch, to $30
CALL sobaaad, $30
FOLD gier1
CALL cevzy, $30
CALL KazakhstanAA, $25
FOLD james666

Flop: (Pot: $130)

BET KazakhstanAA, $130
RAISE MrStarch, to $300
FOLD sobaaad
FOLD cevzy
RAISE KazakhstanAA, to $900
RAISE MrStarch, to $2,455.34
CALL KazakhstanAA, $1,114.12

Turn: (Pot: $4,599.46)

River: (Pot: $4,599.46)

Showdown:

SHOWS KazakhstanAA

SHOWS MrStarch


KazakhstanAA wins the pot of $4,415.24

It seemed quite hard to put him on Q-4....

Funnily enough, I posted about this hand on Twitter when it happened and the great Neil Channing tweeted me back saying 'sorry to hear that. Switch the laptop off and get it back tomorrow. No steaming'. I know Neil a little bit from various interviews and work in the media (FWIW he's probably my favourite interview in the poker world & a great guy) but it's good to know that he has my back too :)

Besides poker - and thank God there is more besides poker! - all is good. I had a great holiday with Hattie on a small Greek island called Symi for a week which involved a ton of beaching, eating and drinking. Perfect. Then we came back and had four nights in a huge Devon cottage for her Dad's 70th birthday with all her family. I had my own Masterchef stress moment there cooking ten steaks to order on a massively annoying AGA cooker too!

I'll finish on a few pics to remind everyone that there is definitely more to life than poker!

The blog debut of Ms. Starch.

Food highlight of the holiday: a whole sea bream baked in sea salt and then prepared for you at the table.

About to eat said sea bream. Don't worry, the starch is just off-camera...

Good luck at the tables or elsewhere everybody!

It's Loud

When I first started this blog, I always envisioned that I wouldn't be one of those bloggers that only updates once every 76 days. You gotta keep the millions happy after all...buuuut as I can't remember the last time I updated I'm already officially slacking. Well, here we go , a new update!!!! (my loyal 14 followers will think Xmas has come early). 

I'm writing this post amidst a scene not unlike Saigon circa 1969. There are 6-year-old kids screaming that they don't want to visit Windsor Castle AGAIN, Total Wipeout blaring in the background and a chaotic scene in the kitchen as three women frantically rush about preparing seemingly thousands of egg and cress sandwiches. We're here in Windsor for my girlfriend's father's 70th birthday party. It'll be fun. Its just a bit loud right now. 

I'm on my iPad writing this so I dont have any access to poker gimpiness I.e. graphs and hand histories. This makes me happy as it means this update will be far less effort than usual. So what's been going on?

- I got an iPad 2 with PKR points. It's awesome. 

- Poker was really good in August. I played 55k hands, won $8200 in cash games and about $3k in tournaments. I ran a little above EV but also feel like I'm playing really well at the minute much of the time. 

- Been watching a lot of aejones's training videos on LeggoPoker.com - great stuff. 

- Amazing UFC show in RIO. Big Nogs KO was an awesome upset while Anderson Silva again proved what a monster he is. Going to BAMMA courtesy of PKR next weekend which should be cool too. 

- Had a nice day in Margate recently visiting my uncle Tony Jarvis who was the main inspiration for me getting interested in poker in the place. From about 1975-2000 he was a professional poker player - well before the term was widely accepted - playing every day in the Vic in London. Back then, no limit Hold'em barely existed of course and so he made his living playing in the country's biggest 7-card Stud games. It was around a £1,000 buy-in back then which, with inflation and so on would obviously be a really big game in today's money terms. Tony always has some great stories about the characters from those days. He basically played with everyone (and was friends with) who has ever been 'famous' in UK poker, including Devilfish, Donnachea O'Dea, John Duthie, the Hendon Mob and so on. Apparently the best player by an absolute mile was Ben Roberts, who earned so much money from those games in the 80s that he was able to buy the newly built penthouse flat directly opposite the Vic itself. Nice commute to work. 

- Off on holiday to the Greek island of Symi in about two weeks. Very excited as it'll mainly involve drinking beer and eating great food in the sun.

I'm being summoned to help out with party planning now - presumably to blow up balloons or similar - so I'm off. 

Cheers for reading Starchites and I wont leave it as long between updates next time. 

Have a good one! 

The Nation Doesn't Expect

My good friend Nick Roberts recently started up a football blog at http://inoffthebar.org/ which you should all check out. I wrote a little piece on the England football team for him this week - you can view it here. As always, any comments, criticisms or - especially - praise :) are always welcomed. I'll be back with another poker blog in the next few days but until then...

The Nation Doesn't Expect

I’m one of those rare football fans that has never really supported a team. Sure, I’ve had dalliances with Leeds United, Chesterfield FC and – due to a man-crush on King Jose Mourinho – Chelsea, but I’ve never felt the same passion for the club game that all my friends have. Instead, my love of football has always been directly linked with the most miserable, frustrating and infuriating football team of them all: England. 

Every one of my defining memories of football involves England. I was five years old when I saw tears streaming down my brother’s face in the summer of 1990. I thought someone had died. I later learnt the tears were due to some dude with a mullet attempting to revolutionise the space race.

Six years later and I was loving Euro 96. My best friend Rob and I alternated going round to each other’s houses to watch the England matches. It started off well with Shearer’s goal against Switzerland before that quickly deteriorated into one of the dullest games of all time. Then Gazza killed the Scots, we battered the Dutch and Psycho Pearce finally found his smile again to knock out the Spanish.
 

So onto the semi-final of all semi-finals against the hated Germans. It’s one of those games where you can literally remember every single minute. It had that rare ingredient that can turn some football matches into unforgettable pieces of history; drama. As Shearer headed us into the lead within five minutes, my young naïve self thought that life was always going to be this great – that football was always going to be this great. Little did I know that Gary Neville’s cross, Alan’s stooped little header and his eternally crap ‘one hand in the air, everyone say yay’ celebration was as good as it was going to get football-wise – EVER. As soon as that bastard Andreas Moller tucked away his winning penalty with stereotypically Germanic aplomb (and had the audacity to strut too, grrrr!), I bombed out of the living room and wept on the stairs. The next day at school everyone heard about me crying and proceeded to verbally batter me like only 11-year olds can do. I just couldn’t understand why the others didn’t care as much.

It's all downhill from here....

1998 was basically the same, except with a different opponent. I missed Michael Owen’s goal because I was having a wee. Although the onset of alcohol has likely increased my enjoyment of football in the long-term, a much neglected aspect of beer is that it forces you to relieve yourself during some of the most iconic memories in sporting history. Owen’s goal, Di Canio pushing the ref, Zidane’s headbutt – all missed because I was having a tiddle.

It’s probably best to skip over the Keegan and Erikkson years. Besides ‘Germany 5-1’ does anything truly stick out? Be honest with yourself and you’ll say ‘not really’. Keegan sucked. Erikkson was what he was – a fine manager of a good-but-never-great England team. We specialised in competence and never excellence, hence our prolific run of quarter-finals. Looking back it would have been better if we’d just got battered 8-0 in every World Cup game instead of limping out in the QFs, at least that way the press would have some truly interesting things to write about. 

Let's not even mention McClaren.

Did this really happen?

No, the last great hope for England fans was Fabio Capello and his voyage to South Africa and the 2010 World Cup. All the ingredients were in place – a great qualifying campaign, one of the world’s best players in Wayne Rooney and a manager who absolutely, positively TOOK. NO. SHIT.
 

It was a disaster. We won one match. Against Slovenia. Even while watching Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal against Germany it was impossible to really summon up any great feelings of anger or injustice. Sure, it should have been a goal. But then they’d have just gone on to beat us 5-2 anyway. They were great, we sucked. 

What does the future hold for England? I’m not going to lie, it will probably look much like the last 25 years. Miserable. Come Brazil 2014 there will be a lot more toddlers in England wondering who died as their brother storms up to his room, tears in his eyes, muttering ‘fucking Andy Carroll’.

July Review

Barring a disaster in the next few days July was a really strong month. As I mentioned in last week’s blog I have been running super-hot in tournaments on PKR, with profits of around $8,800 this month. I can’t expect to replicate that every month of course but it’s definitely made me realise the potential benefits of adding more MTTs to my weekly schedule rather than just dismissing them off-hand while I 9-table the cash games.

I do wish that PKR had a few higher buy-in tournaments though, as it’s sometimes hard to get motivated to play MTTs where you must finish in the top two spots to get a prize over $1k. I guess that’s just a common downside of playing mid-stakes cash games where you’ll regularly have $800+ pots every hour. However, the fields are always much weaker in an MTT than at a $2/$4 cash table so it just about evens out in terms of EV and hourly rate etc. The other bonus of tournaments is that you instantly get more exposure. I’ve had more people on PKR just this month add me as a friend or now consider me a good player for doing well in a few tourneys than being a winning cash player for over two years. I certainly consider cash games the more skilful variant but, still, it’s nice to get any form of acclaim – even if it is just from the PKR Forum! Hopefully my performances this month will get me nominated for MTT Player of the Month too – I’m planning to win another tournament this weekend so that they can’t possibly leave me out…

Cash Games

I haven’t got as much volume in this month as I’d like but my results have still been quite good. Here’s the graph, and as you’ll see, I actually ran BELOW EV for once! 

Around $5k profit is solid for just 31,000 hands (in June I played over 70,000 hands by contrast) and it’d be much improved if I hadn’t lost a ton of money every time I played PLO in July. I’m currently just playing Hold’em to retain my sanity.

It’s hard to believe that my monthly profit in July is around seven month’s salary in my old job at PokerPlayer magazine. I realise how lucky I am to have a job which I love doing and – when it’s going good – pays really well. However, I know that this might not last forever so I’m going to try and make the most of it right now by putting in a ton of hours at the table, working hard on my game and not taking it for granted. That’s why I’ve made sure to keep writing as much content as possible for Stacked and PokerPlayer - I want my options to always be open if poker ever falls through.

Incidentally, my first regular column, titled The Daily Grind, is featured inside PokerPlayer this month. It’s a great honour to have come full circle in working for them, initially just as an ‘Online Writer’ three years ago to having a regular column now – thanks to Alun Bowden for the opportunity.

Hands

1)
Seat 1: zisiszamuck (Dealer) ($657.60)

Seat 2: IJoker (SB $2) ($1,170.73)

Seat 3: MrStarch (BB $4)  ($487)
Seat 4: japete ($893.76)
Seat 5: Rhymenoceros ($709.03)
Seat 6: WongaMan ($716)

Dealt to MrStarch

Preflop: (Pot: $6)

FOLD japete
FOLD Rhymenoceros
RAISE WongaMan, to $12
CALL zisiszamuck, $12
FOLD IJoker
CALL MrStarch, $8

First of all, this is a pretty tough lineup for a PKR $400NL game. The only reason why I was playing here is that I had direct position on IJoker who seems to be a massive fish. Flatting Wonga's raise with 66 from the BB is pretty standard and obviously I'm looking to flop a set or get some kind of cool flop that I can try and steal the pot from.

Flop: (Pot: $38)

BET MrStarch, $26
CALL WongaMan, $26
CALL zisiszamuck, $26

I've been experimenting with donking out a lot more in cash games and thought this was an interesting spot to try and take it down quite cheaply. Wonga's hand is often just going to be two overcards, and while zisiszamuck's range is considerably wider he is also going to have a load of QJ, 33 type hands that will fold to a donk bet. The hand being three-way also makes it harder for Wonga to raise me as he has to worry a little about the player acting behind, as well as me. Even with an overpair I think he'll sometimes flat this bet. As I get called in both spots I plan on just giving up on a lot of turns.

Turn: (Pot: $116)

CHECK MrStarch
BET WongaMan, $82
FOLD zisiszamuck
RAISE MrStarch, to $225
FOLD WongaMan
MrStarch wins the pot of $420

Besides another 6 this is the best possible turn card for my hand. Leading out would be fine and the usual line to take but I felt a check-raise gives me the best possible chance to get Wonga to fold. It also looks like I have a hand better than one pair almost always. The only downside is that I commit myself to the pot and would have had to call off the remaining $200 or so if Wonga decides to jam. Still, I think this hand was played quite non-standard and creatively and I like my line.

2) It's quite possible I got owned - as usual - by Muzone in this hand.

Seat 1: MrStarch ($666.10)

Seat 2: BrotherMuzone17 (Dealer) ($706.37)

Seat 4: Crusader33 (SB $2) ($897.56)
Seat 5: robburgundy (BB $4) ($451)

Seat 6: LtViper ($416.44)

Dealt to MrStarch

Preflop: (Pot: $6)

RAISE MrStarch, to $12
RAISE BrotherMuzone17, to $40
FOLD Crusader33
FOLD LtViper
RAISE MrStarch, to $97
CALL BrotherMuzone17, $69

I open QQ from the cut-off and Muzone 3-bets me from the button, as he does about 50% of the time. The thing that makes this hand tricky is that our stacks are at about 170BBs deep. Despite that, I'm still more than happy to get QQ all-in preflop against Muzone. While he'll show up with AA and KK a fair amount of the time, he's also prone to jamming worse hands, obviously AK and occasionally a big bluff.

However, because we are deep he can flat my 4-bet in position with a much wider range than would ever be profitable if we were just 100BBs deep. In fact, at 100BBs deep I don't think there would be a single hand that Muzone would flat a 4-bet with. But a little deeper here he knows he can put me in some torturous spots later on in the hand. Most likely his range will be TT, JJ, AQ, smaller pairs and suited connectors but, really, he could have just about anything except AA, KK, QQ and AK.

Flop: (Pot: $212)

BET MrStarch, $130
CALL BrotherMuzone17, $130

Good flop for my hand and a standard c-bet. I'm still happy to call if off at this point obviously.

Turn: (Pot: $472)

CHECK MrStarch
BET BrotherMuzone17, $467.37
FOLD MrStarch

Pretty ugly turn in theory but then again it doesn't change much as Muzone can't really have KJ or have floated the flop with a hand with a King in it (besides something weird like K8 suited). With hindsight, maybe this is a call but I think I walk into JJ or 88 a fair amount of the time. It just seemed hard for him to bluff in this spot as my hand still looks really strong and I think he would expect me to call with QQ in this spot most of the time - therefore making his range a fair bit stronger.

That's why Muzone is so good though, he continually puts you in tough spots that other players don't and has you second-guessing yourself constantly. Almost a week after this hand I'm unsure whether I played the hand well or not. Hopefully Bro will let me know what he had so that I can sleep at night...

3)

Here's the final hand I'll post. This is the biggest pot I won this month.

Seat 1: Najammq ($1,729.25)
Seat 2: langechuckyy ($1,083.80)
Seat 3: BHeisterkamp ($466)

Seat 4: MissFORGETFUL123 (Dealer)  ($2,588.75)

Seat 5: MrStarch (SB $5)  ($1,517)

Seat 6: japete (BB $10) ($1,060)

Dealt to MrStarch

This was about as good a line-up as you'll get at $5/$10. Japete is awesome and Najammq is fine but everyone else is probably a big loser in the game.

Preflop: (Pot: $15)

RAISE Najammq, to $30
FOLD langechuckyy
FOLD MissFORGETFUL123
CALL MrStarch, $25
RAISE japete, to $130
FOLD Najammq
CALL MrStarch, $110

I'll 3-bet KQ suited a fair bit under usual circumstances but you can rely on Japete to squeeze in a spot like this almost all of the time, with or without a usual hand. That's one of the reasons why playing him is always difficult (but fun) - each pot quickly balloons in size. Anyway, while it sucks to be out of position versus a good player, I can't fold KQ suited here so I call. The plan is to hit any part of the flop and just check-call him down as he'll definitely fire multiple streets - especially as he likely considers me scared money at $1000NL. (I used to be, I'm just about un-scared money now...)

Flop: (Pot: $300)

CHECK MrStarch
BET japete, $155
RAISE MrStarch, to $440
RAISE japete, to $765
CALL MrStarch, $480

Incredible flop for me with a good flush draw and two overcards. I'd be quite happy if Japete just folds to my check-raise but I'm still going to have around 50% equity against his range so it's fine to just get it in here and now.

Turn: (Pot: $1,985)

River: (Pot: $1,985)

SHOWS MrStarch


SHOWS japete

MrStarch wins the pot of $2,147

A cool King on the turn and I out-race his JJ to win a $2,150 pot. Easy game eh :)

Good luck at the tables everybody and have a great week. Follow me on Twitter @Starch_Jarvis!