I am over in Ireland visiting family for a week or two as I have been getting into a bad routine over in London involving getting up, checking my search engine rankings (I own a bunch of websites, so this is part of the daily routine) and playing donkaments all day and boozing / playing pool / getting baked on weekends. The grinding MTTs was pretty soul destroying for a while as i ran superbad over a 2 month period (as I have whinged in previous posts) – so a holiday was definitely something I needed to regain my focus and my poker Mojo, if such a thing exists.

Back to basics.. back to heads-up for rolls!

I started grinding headsup on one of my boss media accounts, starting small (100nl) and moving up to 200nl once I had 10-15 Buyins. I had some notable, long and very fun and swingy duels with a guy called r1ckj4ames (we’ve duelled a few nights and I’m up over a few k hands), and some other bums. This change back to heads-up was really what I needed to focus the mind and soul on poker, and I thank god for the deucescracked videos I used to watch, they are priceless for what they taught me about aggression, hand-reading etc.

some fun hands, because a blogpost sucks with no fun hands! (hands are in Euro (€))

http://www.pokerhand.org/?5142202 – Coolered for €1k, but that’s poker, don’t forget it!
http://www.pokerhand.org/?5166187 – Aggro Swede loses to my draw on a ridic board.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?5167260 – Who doesn’t want to play this guy. Really! I’ve been playing pretty aggro and 3betting a massive % of button opens, so I guess w/ metagame this is prolly an ez jam for him.. but this gives u an idea of the aggression and tone of the games v this dude. High variance but high profit for sure.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?5167259 – my new buddy r1ck is so friggin aggro and he will call with bottom pair if your line is baffling. Top pair is the nizzles to this guy, 9x would win the hand prolly but yay for AA.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?5180533 – I decided to play some 5/10euro 6max after a night in the pub. I say “ORLY?” after the hand and obv matey says “headsup anytime…” hehe. w/evarrrrr.. Ship me the €2k pot.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?5180620 – I timebank herocalled this 1.. his line didn’t make much sense.. at lower stakes it’s a snapcall, but when you’re playing above where you should bankroll wise, u gotta think about folding here. go me!
http://www.pokerhand.org/?5183208 – I know if i limp or minr, matey is insta reraising w/ ATC so I reraise and flop gin, good for a €2165 pot

in short, cash is king!

Observations about playing HU/6max cash

- Short sessions for the win.
- if you’re playing, don’t play tired, don’t drink, don’t smokoe doobies
- Bumhunting rules – avoid the regs on 10 tables.. play the hungarian tiltmonkey instead!
- A chatban costs you EV. If you’re chatbanned, you can’t tell the fish that you want to play him on 4 tables, or move up limits. This is very very important!

I got Backed

I got backed on merge by one of the new skins hoping to build up a good team of poker players. I played a few MTTs on there and I have a 255% ROI in the mtts (yeh obv over a tiny sample, but zomg they are sooooft.).. I have yet to win a HU session but I’ve only played 2.. players are either rocks or nits from what I have seen, and there’s not enough traffic to make it your #1 site for now.. but there’s a merger happening soon w/ playersonly and sportsbook.com coming to merge, so that will bring in liquidity and good potential equity, so more on that soon.

GL on the tables, oh and Screw MTTs (well, apart from the 50r on boss!)