"HOW DO YOU CALL THAT?!" Blog

Hallo!!

Ein herzliches Willkommen hier bei Pokerstrategy!

Very nice intro to your Blog, I think I will follow you on your way. I want to hear more about the NPPL. It sounds very funny. Buy drinks to get chips. ♦

Do you want to make the quiz also, or do you anly play at Stars?

Hey dude welcome back to NZ

I used to play/work for NPPL a couple years ago, but quit when I got sick of 'fish with money' getting to final table after playing 2-3 hands

As for your home games, we do the same to, just smaller stakes (we all broke). 7-deuce as well, but we mix it up with pineapple and NLO.

Will keep following your blog and GL ♠_cool:

Hi,

how's everydone doing? Sweet. So before I get started with the my new post, I will just quickly get back to Silicernium and bazerk.

I did the quiz the day I signed up, I just have not decided yet if I want to join Party Poker or Everest Poker. I really don't see myself playing on too many more sights then Pokerstars and 888, but I will see and probably take advantage of the nice welcoming gift. I will definitley have a little yarn about NPPL in the future, but for now let me say that you will see stuff there, that you will probably never see at Pokertable anywhere else, for example snapcalling all ins with 9♦2♦ and crushing Aces with it; or being able to quadruple up through raffles and drinks. I want to dedicate more time this topic so I will leave it at this for now.

Our homegame will be something I will be writing about quite a bit here, because I will probably summarizing big pots that we play, but while I have the chance I will tell what types of games we play. Mostly we play No Limit Holdem, but we do always have a few orbits of mixed games. Besides NLH we play PLO, Pineapple and a bit of Stud. Also at the end of the night we have our "$1" gamble, but more about that a bit later.

"... but it is not gambling."

I am sure that most of you have had to deal with parents or in my case girlfriends that do not approve of your gambling habbits. And of course everyone has had the discussion about if poker is gambling or not.
There are two ways to win an argument with your girlfriend about if poker is gambling or not and none of them work.
The funny thing is that once you invite them out to dinner poker doesn't seem to be the problem it was ten minutes ago.

The reason I am posting something about this particular topic is because my funniest poker story relates kind of to it and I would like to share it with you.

So I went to visit my girlfriend and her family. I was told over and over again not to talk about religion, politics and poker, so I kind of mentally got prepared for it. All of them are great and since I am still trying to impress them I just stuck with avoiding anything that can lead to a poker conversation.

Well I was watching the football with her Dad on ESPN, as suddenly an ad for the Main Event coverage came up. I thought to myself, stick to the gameplan as her Dad suddenly asked if I had ever played poker. Ok, obviously I am not going to lie about, but I will also not tell him that all I do is play poker and sleep, so I just told him I played every now and then with some mates. I also said that I tried to avoid it because it would piss his daughter when I played. Then he told me something I did not expect to hear... He told me that he once got his wife and my girlfriend a voucher for a hotel somewhere (not quite sure where exactly) and while they were gone he got mates over for a cash game and according to him they played for 3 days straight. LOL. From there on I still stuck to my story that was just an occasional player, but we had a little talk about.

So what i am wondering now is what do you guys tell your parents and your girlfriend when they have a go at you about playing (too much) poker?

Well my mum is a pretty 'carefree' woman, supports what ever I do. As for the missus, she's been playing as long as I have. She is also super supportive of me when it comes to grind/study time. She plays in our home game. And she is my biggest fan

She is also a member of this site too. So I'm pretty lucky in that aspect, she'll never tell me too 'stop!'.

Finally I can write something about one of our cash games that we played. So jus to kick things of just let me tell you the basic concept of our cash game. We normally play $.20/.$.40 No Limi Hold'em. The average buy in is $40 and the session normally last from 8pm until 3am, sometimes even longer. Alrighty we started of five handed at 8pm, because there was a game on in town, where you could in a PS3 (It was a freeroll as well...). I can only really review hands that I played in detail, so I am just going to review the hands I played.

Hand No.1

Alrighty I was in the big blind. UTG+1 raised it to $1.20 and the Button called $1.20, it came around to me and I looked down at J♠ J♣ . The ranges of the guys I was in the hand is pretty massive in cash games, so I decided to raise it up to $4.10. UTG+1 folded instantly and the player on the button took quite some time before making the call. Now at this stage I want to note that this was only the third hand of the game, so we each had a stack size of $40. Also he did not look like he wanted to call (when I say that I mean that his neck was pulsating like you will not see anywhere else). At this stage I am putting him either on a week Ace or I am putting him on 2s - 4s.
The flop comes 9♥ 7♠ 6♦ . I decided to contiuation bet for $4.30 and after he called after tanking for about a minute. At this stage I am figuring that he might or probably have hit the board. Definitley not a set, because he is the type of player that will not slowplay a set at all. The turn was an 8♣ and now I am figuring that I can see where I am at and bet out $8.30. Again he took a ridiculous amount of time and he did not look like he wanted to call at all, but did and end up making the call. At this stage I just got carried away and put him on Ace 9 and figured he will not be able to get away from it if he has not believed me until now. The river brought he 2♥ and I decided to push, because I was pretty sure I had the best hand and that I was going for value. He tanked for literally five minutes and made the call.
What hand do you think he had? I will post the right answer in the following post.

The Battle of the Monsters!

One thing that I noticed about that game last night is that we had an usual amount of monsters up against each other. The first matchup was Hem's Queens vs Ben's Kings. (Btw... Hem won the PS3... yeah boyyyyyyyyyy) The money was all in preflop. Hem said before the hand was played out that the reason he pushed is because Ben is a very aggressive and very loose player (not in a bad way though. I personally panic against him every time, because you just never know what he might have). Nevertheless Hem spiked a Queen on the River to take down a $90 dollar pot. Btw... at this stage we were playing 9 handed.

Ben reloaded for another $60 (we cap the entire buy in amount per player during the night at $100 just so no one loses the big bucks, even $100 is quite a bit for us). And literally in his second hand after he rebought he woke up with Kings again only to be up against Jacks Aces. So it looked like a short night for Ben after they each got the money before seeing the flop. But this time fortune was on Bens side spiking a King on THE RIVER(!!!). They got Ben a pot over $100. (In our cash game we normally let players run the board multiple times, but in each case Ben did not want to run it more than once.)

PROFITVILLE

So at roughly 3 am we called it quits. 3 players had gone bust and about 3 other players (including me made a profit). I made a profit of about $51 and have now made about $360 bucks in the last 6 games we have played. I will start posting the Excel Sheet results if the others agree to let me publish there full names.

We are done with cash games for this year, but next we are going keep going again and when a few more of my mates come back I am sure a few of them will be happy to review a few hands of our cash games as well, until then... thanks for reading and please feel free to comment.

I know there is a seperate section about what goals you want to achieve in 2012 with poker, but I do still want to write a bit about my own goals here.

I guess when I started playing poker I really just enjoyed the social aspect of the game more, than the idea of making money. Now that I have been playing for a while the financial aspect of playing poker has become a lot more important. I have set myself little financial goals in the past, but more importantly to me personally are things I want to do in my life related to poker. So here is my Top 5 list of things I want to do.

1. Play the WSOP Main Event

I'm sure the number is something that every poker player dreams of once you have seen the ESPN coverage. Playing the Main Event is something is really want to do at least once in my lifetime. I do not even have to sit at the same table as some pro, I know from TV. I just want to sit at the table and play the biggest and best tournaments with the best in the world and see how well I can do in it. I am sure that one day I will play it, but until I have the money it will only remain a dream.

2.Perfect my game as much as I can

When I think back at my first game and remember the stuff I would call or the stuff I would raise with makes me be ashamed of myself. But looking back I must also say that I have come along way over a period of two years. I am far from being anywhere where I could be but I am only 21 and there is still heaps to learn. I am always eager to learn you things about the game and I really want to reach the point where I can look back at this blog and say to myself... man you have come along way from then.

3. Bad Beat and Slowroll Phil Hellmuth

I am not the kind of person who enjoys bad beating people (of course I'll take the chips anyway) and especially not the person who slowrolls people, but I can help but think how funny it would to turn out Q10o to show Phil Hellmuth a rivered straight. I just want to present when he has one of his outburst.

4. Get a 100% winning streak on the Jack Links Beef Jerky Wildcard Hand

Just want to beat Norman Chad...

5. Play the APPT Queenstown

That is a goal I have set myself for the near future. I want to play in New Zealand's BIG ONE and try and do as good as I can in it. I still think I have to prepare way more for an event like that, since I have not got any experience in big live tournaments.

Hi,

back again for a new edition of my amazing blog. Ok so it has been a while since I have posted anything on Pokerstrategy really. Since my last post a lot has happened, we have had a new Main Event champion, we have an Octo-Nine and Antonio Esfandiari won the Big One for One Drop. Normally I tend to follow as much poker as I can in terms of following live reporting or watching the coverages on Youtube.

It has been pretty mean to see Antonio Esfandiari winning the Big One, because it just shows you what you can do with the right attidute. Pius Heinz won the Main Event, which is a biggie. I remember watching the entire final table (3-handed) one day before an economics exam. How Ben Lamb got knocked is beyond me... I know King Jack is pretty strong three handed but reallyyyy... you want to put all your hopes on a coin flip at best in that spot. Ah well... enough of all that.

The homegame that my flatmates and me have grown significantly and we already have a webpage and all that stuff. I think by the time I wrote my first post on here we had like 12 regulars, now we have about 30. So we always get good home games going. Online Poker is still the same really for me. Cash games still do not tend to be my thing online, MTT don't seem to be it either but the SnGs are still the bomb. My flatmate Madi and Me have been doing really good in the $3.50+R 180 man on stars (he actually does way better than me, I think he won like 4-5 of those within two days which is a pretty big deal for us money wise.) I have won a few of those as well and normally run quite deep in those if I am in the right mindframe. Another mate of mine Brady has been killing it on 888, which reason a few of us went over to give it a shot. Obviously 888 is softer than Stars, but that does not explain how Brady has been doing so good.

I played the Red Spade Open... I don't want to talk about it. The guy who won it Nurlan81 was killing the table. This is a guy whose biggest win online was a $100 before his $244k score in that. That gives us hope that maybe one day we will be able to do the same.

I have started reading a lot of articles on strategy and have come across some pretty good articles by Mike Caro. He has a very good way of writing his thoughts down and they are normally very entertaining to read. Here is a list of the articles I have been reading from Mike Caro.

In terms of live poker I have really been just getting into the 25c/50c homegames really and occasionally playing the odd pub game in town. The homegames in the first season of our league went quite alright. I ended up a winner but it went to towards the end of that month. A few weeks ago I also came second in the Regional championships, which I am quite happy with and a few months ago I won a $100 live buy in tournament. At that stage it was my biggest live buy in to a live tournament. The field was quite good, but I won a few flips, so rungood was definitley there at the time.

I have to write an assignment now on Game Theory (yes I still go to Uni) and once I have done that I will see if I am keen to write a few more articles for my overly popular blog. In the mean time, feel free to watch this video that I found on youtube. Cracked me up big time.

Hola
germany5590