Monthly Archive for August, 2007

My Poker Challenge - €0 to €1k! - Weeks 2 and 3

Published
by
Adam
on August 22, 2007
in Life and Poker
. 0 Comments

Well I missed my usual date for reporting my progress last week because I was too busy getting my Leaving Certificate results and binge drinking for the entire day! For those that are interested, I got 365 points which is statistically an above average leaving cert but when I compare the points I got to the amount of effort I put in then I can safely say that my return on effort was exceptionally high! How does this affect my life? Well come October I’ll be studying Marketing in the local “university level” Institute of Technology for the next four years. The main advantage of this regarding my poker playing is that I’ll be living at home and will therefore still have access to the Internet and be able to play.

I’m currently running along very smoothly and I’m pleased to say that last week saw me make my first every final table in a MTT - a $1500 Value Guarantee Tournament - which I went on to win! I earned $300 for that which is a massive return considering the tournament cost $1 to enter, I didn’t need to rebuy and purchased my addon at the end of the rebuy period bringing my total investment to $2!

Going into the first tournament break, I was only slightly above the average chip amount but I was patient, played my cards and picked my spots and found myself to be one of the chipleaders going into the second break! It nearly all fell apart in the mid-late stage of the tournament when I found AA for the first time in the tournament and induced an all-in bet preflop from a villain who turned over KK and hit his King on the flop taking around 70% of my stack with it! I had, up to this point, been playing tight and picked up the blinds whenever I sensed weakness but now with the relatively short stack I found myself having to take risks and on several occasions found myself at the wrong side of 70-30 situations which I somehow wiggled my way out of! Once I built up my stack again and as play approached the bubble, I found myself being able to steal blinds at will and soar onto the final table with a healthy chip lead. I knocked out 6 (I think) of the final table to go heads-up against a relatively short stacked opponent. I soon became the shortstack as I ran into AK and AA in consecutive hands but recovered through aggressive play and finally knocked the villain out for my biggest poker win yet when my ATs topped his A9o!

At the end of the week I decided to revert back to cash play but played very poorly and was down $30 (~150 buyins) within an hour and concluded that I should stick to Sit N Go’s and MTTs if as I had found them to be both great value for money and great fun to play. I may opt to go back to cash table play in the future, in fact I may have to by necessity as Cash play is very popular in the card rooms here, but for now I feel that as long as I’m making money playing tournaments then I shouldn’t change a thing!

Today I played my first bit of poker since Friday. I opted for 2 $5 dollar 6-Max Sit N Go’s as I find that there are a lot of soft players who are willing to gamble at the early stages who make it much easier to reach the money. I don’t mind letting one gambler double-up at the expense of another in the early stages as I feel that I can play better poker than them in the long run and overcome their chip dominance and topple them when playing heads-up. I won both the Sit N Go’s, netting $21 from each! I had been having mixed success in the Sit N Go’s last week when I started playing them but I now believe that I have adapted my game to counter the trends and styles of play that I’m encountering on the tables which is ultimately turning me into a more profitable player!

Following my two Sit N Go victories, I decided to enter into the $1500 Value Guarantee Tournament on VCPoker which had a $3 buyin with unlimited rebuys within the first hour, an optional addon at the first break and a field of 80 players. The first few levels were very hectic as players were going all-in with almost ATC. I read that the logic behind this is that you are pumping the table full of chips which (as the supposedly better poker player) you intend on winning back after the rebuy period has lapsed. While I’m sure that this strategy does work from time to time, I believe that winning the chips from the rebuying players through tight play is a sounder and more profitable way of playing (well, certainly at this level it is). Once again I was playing tight poker and was picking my spots to steal the blinds. I was very happy that I brought the best hand to the showdown in 100% of my shown hands within the first two breaks. I was the chip leader going into the 3rd hour of play but suffered a few bad beats and made a few bad calls which probably affected my table image resulting in me being unable to steal as many blinds as I would have liked. I still controlled over 15% of the chips at the bubble and was placed 4th until I called an all-in bet by the short stack with my pocket tens only to have another shortstack reraise all-in with QJ. He hit his Queen on the flop and a forth club on the river gave him his flush.

This meant that I was in less than satisfactory shape going onto the final table. I was 7th in chips with 28,000 bu the blinds were 5k/10k and when play started at the final table I found myself UTG+1 meaning the blinds were going to nip me in the arse and decimate my remaining stack within 3 hands. I folded my first hand, a hand that resulted in a player being knocked out, but decided to push all-in with Ts7s UTG while I still had the ability to push people off hands. I figured that if I could pick up the blinds here, I would be able to survive another orbit, giving me a chance to pick up some playable hands or result in some of the other shortstacks being eliminated. Needless to say, my push was folded all the way round to the chip leader on the button who called with pocket kings. The flop gave him a set, the turn gave me a gutshot draw but the river was a blank, and so I finished up in 9th place for $45!

So overall it’s been a very successful fortnight for me. Unfortunately iPoker doesn’t provide any tournament summaries so it’s nigh on impossible for me to calculate how much I have won/lost using any method other than: adding my current NETeller balance (€344.05) and my current poker account balance (€27.03). When I do this, I get €371.08!. So after three weeks, I am over a third of the way to completing my goal and as college looms I’m starting to realise that the €1k could very well come in handy in the very near future!

The CAO Points Race - Not Over Yet!

Published
by
Adam
on August 20, 2007
in School and Thinking
. 2 Comments

This year saw an awful lot of contradictory reporting on behalf of the Irish media who were reporting on the exams. At times it seemed as if they were merely out to scaremonger the already stressed out candidates. “CAO Points Race Not Over!” they would report and point to the fact that more candidates applied to the CAO this year than last year implying that points too would rise across the board. However as a candidate myself, I knew two things that the reporters didn’t take into account when writing their hastily put together insights into the mechanics of the college system - A) Colleges are ever-expanding - this means that while the number of applicants may have risen, the number of places to be allocated were also rising and B) It didn’t take a genius to realise that many people who were sitting the Leaving were people who had little or no intention of going to college and instead wished to take up a trade or pursue a PLC course!

I knew that these two things would result in points remaining relatively static with some courses obviously rising and some falling but todays headline in the Irish times “CAO Points continue to fall” offered false hope to a number of borderline candidates who grew ever more optimistic about the prospect of being offered their first preference course! It’s true, points fell in more courses than they rose in but competition was still fierce amongst candidates applying for business/administration courses and many courses are listed with a * following the first round offers indicating that not all candidates who had the minimum amount of points were offered a place for that course, instead finding that a random number assigned to them in February sealed their fate!

So contrary to what the media is reporting, the points race isn’t over yet! Many of the students who will not receive a college offer within the next few weeks will opt to pursue a PLC course and then apply to college next year and the trend seems to be that more and more mature students are finding their way into college meaning that next year will see what I predict to be record numbers of applicants to CAO. The third level colleges may be expanding and adding many new courses to their repertoire as each year passes, but there’s only so much expansion they can do in a year and I’m not hesitating in saying that next year could see the Points Race really get started!

Three Support - A Positive Experience

Published
by
Adam
on August 17, 2007
in Geekiness and Ramblings
. 0 Comments

I remember back in May when I was choosing a new phone provider, one of the companies that my friends were urging me to stay away from was the relative newcomer to the Irish market - Three. All over the net there were horror stories about poor customer support that only got worse after they outsourced their call centre to India. Apparently they didn’t want to even know about you after you bought your phone, let alone help you with any problems that you may be having and on the odd occasion where you did by chance get through to an agent who was willing to help, you found that you couldn’t understand them or be understood! Nevertheless, I opted to plunge for them, hoping that a) nothing would go wrong and b) if it did, their customer care could solve it! 3 months down the road, something did go wrong but I’m happy to say that my experience with 3 Support is a positive one…

I was impressed with almost every aspect of Three’s services. While their call tariffs were expensive, their texts were cheap and cheerful and I was saving a massive amount of money compared to my previous operator, O2. I was particularly fond of their “walled-garden” which offered tonnes of 3G services free of charge and I made certain to buy their data package addon which allowed me to access any website for as little as €5.99 per month! However, I did always feel that the term they dubbed their service - “Mobile Broadband” - was a little too generous as oftentimes pages would load up at a snails pace as their remote proxy struggled to process requests and oftentimes died just as you had managed to page you wanted!

I wasn’t really that bothered about it, because I didn’t really use it that much but it was when I was suddenly asked to reverify my age that I started to get a bit frustrated. Three require that all customers who wish to have access to “almost every website” must first go into a Three store with a passport so that their account can be verified. That’s fair enough but I verified my age in May and now it was asking me to do it again! It was around this time that I spotted this vast thread on Boards.ie which seemed to indicate that Three were now taking people off of their web proxy by request!

I sent Three customer care an email and within an hour I was contacted by a Three representative who apologised for the Age Verification issue and said that Tech support were provisioning measures that would mean that I wouldn’t have to verify my age again and also they were going to update my account so that I would no longer be using their proxy! The only downside to it was that I would have to wait up to 48 hours for these changes to take place but I suppose it was going to be worth it!

The next day I decided to check and see if I was off the godforsaken proxy and when I went to visit a site, it loaded instantly! I also went to download the GMail web app which was, like all other third party apps, blocked by Three. It worked! I then tried the Opera Mini mobile web browser and it worked flawlessly! Opera Mini really will change the way I can browse. It introduces a tonne of interesting and efficient features to help enhance my web browsing experience and I can see myself using it for a while to come!

So congratulations to Three for coming up trumps when the day that I had been dreading finally came and I had to contact you! Three have been taking a lot of slack lately regarding their mobile broadband service and their efforts to help people with issues but I can safely say that this was a reassuring experience for me and my approval rating for Three has never been as high!

My Poker Challenge - €0 to €1k! - Week 1

Published
by
Adam
on August 10, 2007
in Life and Poker
. 2 Comments

So one week has passed since I started my challenge of making zero money into one thousand and so far I’m exceeding my expectations, but unfortunately it isn’t my poker that’s being the shining light, instead it’s moreso my cunning use of bonuses which see’s me up €115.

My initial €8 ($10) bonus on VCPoker was quickly chewed up as I foolishly played where I am most comfortable, at the $20NL Ring tables. I could only play on one table at a time and had to sit each time with my entire bankroll in play. At this point I didn’t have Poker Tracker or Gametime+ running but I found that I didn’t need either to help me read my opponents and make moves which were working and after solid play for two hours I had more than doubled my money to €23 and could now afford to sit at two tables, once again without PT or GT+ running. Once I switched to multi-tabling however, my fortunes started to turn as I could no longer focus solely on the one table and couldn’t gain any insights into my opponents through observation.

I lost half my bankroll in a hand where I was trying to play the player, not the cards. A few hands prior to it, I looked down at AJs in mid position and made it $1 to play, all folded except for the button who made it $2.40. I thought about it and folded and then I told him what I folded and this is the key reason why I did what I did the next orbit when I looked down at KTo and raised once again to $1. Once again, all folded except for the button who once again made it $2.40, I realised that this was the exact same play as before and remembered that I had told him that I folded AJs so any reraise I put in would be indicative of me having a hand greater than that. I also considered that he was making a move, as he knew that he had previously knocked me off AJs with the same raise. I shoved and he called. The board came down Q84 J 4 which didn’t help me in the slightest and he turned over AKo to rake in a pretty substantially sized pot which included half my entire bankroll! He must have been bricking it when he saw the Queens and Jacks as he could have only made that call if he had put me on AJ or AQ. I felt hard done by, but in retrospect it was a very optimistic play that deserved to have me bust out!

With only a tiny amount of money to play with, I decided to look for other “no deposit needed” offers on other sites and accidentally came across the casino site, CasinoClassic which proudly advertised that it offers €500 to new members to play with for one hour and you get to keep anything that you win above that amount. It seemed too good to be true and in hindsight it was as I was required to deposit €20 to access the bonus that I had won after the hour trial (which was the maximum of €200), when I deposited the money I learned that I had to wager my bonus 30 times before I was able to withdraw anything and my favoured game, Blackjack, only counted for 10%, so I would have had to wager 300 times €200 (€60,000!) before any of my bonus money was unlocked! I decided instead to play European Roulette and wager 50% of my bankroll on Red and 50% on black. I was risking 100% of my money for a 87.5% chance of merely breaking even but by breaking even I would be unlocking a bonus ten times my initial deposit! After every few spins I’d check the banking window to see if I could withdraw and finally I saw that I was able to withdraw €120 of my bonus into the safety of my Neteller account. What I learned from my brief encounter with an online casino was that they are to kept away from. They lure you in with a big promotion and use the small print as an excuse to have you keep playing for your money. They also don’t have an option to let you know how much you’ve wagered which can only spell trouble for those who are immersed in their games!

So after a bit of luck, my bankroll was back up to €100 (I’m subtracting the €20 of my own money that I had to deposit to unlock the bonus). I then set about joining as many other poker sites that I could in order to avail of bonuses and exclusive freerolls and started playing in $5 “6 Max” Sit N Go’s on iPoker with a great deal of success. I was looking set to cash in on my third consecutive game when I pushed all-in on the bubble with JJ and the villain (who I had covered slightly) called with J5o. I was a 95% favourite to win the hand, he needed twin fives to win and of course he hit them both on the flop, leaving me drawing to a one outer which never hit. I was left with 350 chips with the blinds at 150/300, so in the next hand, I pushed from the SB with my remaining 200 with K7o and was called by the Button who turned over K8o to knock me out in third spot and out of the money.

After one week then, my bankroll is now at €115.93 with an additional $7 to be unlocked on Titan Poker if I start earning points. Overall it’s all looking pretty rosy, not bad for a shoddy weeks work :).