An Interrupted Cry

I thought I would do my year end early, not because like MBK I won't be playing much poker, but just to get it out of the fucking way. As I have a lot to say, my usual artful prose will be replaced with semi-random bullet points:

Ennui. For me poker and ennui have always been familiar bedfellows, but fuck me. I could seriously give it up. Maybe.

It's been a good year. Not in the scale of MBK or Wint, but considering my all-round amateurishness I'm moderately pleased. I won just about twice what I won last year. Thank you 6 max NL.

I could and perhaps should have won more. But I spent all my winnings and never really moved up. Goddamn you high on the hog uber-extravagant lifestyle you!

Rolf S's book is by far the best book on PLO. This isn't saying much but is true. Most of the short stackers who have appeared on places like Stars have seemed to have completely misunderstood what Rolf was writing about.

On the subject of Stars, I tried their NL 6 max games and they were much tougher than their old days Crypto equivalents. There were lots of VIP 20, PFR 20 types and the squeeze or thin 3 bet was very common. Bye, bye again Stars.

Betfair – what a fuck up. I mean what a serious fuck up.

If you're not following my blog by a feed reader, you need to. I suspect this will be about as active as GROAN's blog. This could very well be the last post. Then again it might not either. But don't hold your breath.

High Stakes Poker. By far the best poker tv show. Mostly because Gabe Kaplan's commentary is so good. Funny, and occasionally even perceptive.

Danny Boy on said High Stakes show. Man, he was bad. Some bad beats of epic proportions but many, many times he would say “I can't believe you've just so obviously hit a monster and now betting. So unreal. So obvious. But I call anyway.” In comparison Phil Laak looked v v good. And I liked his T-shirts.

One final point, which at first seems obvious, but I've not seen it explicitly said. At the very highest stakes the skill differential is so small you are competiting on bankrolls and the ability to weather variance and emotional control. If all your Foes have 5 times the tank you have, ceteris paribus, you are going to need to be lucky to survive.

Merry Christmas, and Ho, Fucking, Ho.