MoreTBC

An idiots guide to finding leaks in your game when you don't know what you're doing or looking for by me, an idiot (2018 review - Part 2) Ok, I'm back again with more database mining and leak finding in an attempt to become above average at poker. Step two of the leak finding bible suggests looking at how you play when facing a raiser. Ok, I can do that, Date range set to 2017, preflop action filter set to 'one raiser' and VPIP set to 'yes' to make sure I actually played the hand and didn't fold... 124.22 bb/100 :Thumbsup: Next I removed hands I played from the big and small blind because I know I defend really wide from the BB and am likely to flick in a call in the SB if the price seems right.. 234.86 bb/100 :Cash: Next up I removed any hand where I was all-in preflop to see what kind of hands I'm taking to the streets and we're still at a healthy 161 bb/100. I'm not 100% sure how the hand count map works on the right but it helps add a little context to the random blobs of heat on the other side. I'm not sure if it creates a range it expects me to play based on the total number of hands but it doesn't really add up as all. It does however illustrate the hands I'm playing a lot and hides any random punts with J2o :) Leaks did start appearing once I drilled down a little further. If I just look at hands where I'm in EP (or just UTG+1 really) the bb/100 goes into the negative once I removed AA-QQ so it looks like I need to tighten up there. The easilet leak to find was in my big blind defence... What a pretty picture that is :Wow:. It's in the -24bb/100 range. Now this is an overall picture of every hand I played in the last year where I at least called a single raiser but it doesn't really highlight specific scenarios. Let's look at when we 3-bet the initial raiser :- BvB: 390bb/100 (120 hands)vs BTN: 81bb/100 (73 hands)vs CO: 484bb/100 (34 hands)vs MP: 617bb/100 (42 hands)vs EP: 454bb/100 (35 hands)Out of the 303 hands total only 92 of them even saw a flop. I could probably break this down further to which positions when a 3-bet fold the most often and possibly start 3-betting more but that seems a little advanced for just now so we'll just stick to the general rule of thumb that 3-betting from the big blind seems to work and that type of defence is fine. Time to start seeing what we're calling with and when. First of all I filtered the hands to ensure I was facing a raise of no more than 2.2bb as I'm very likely to defend to a min raise or tiny open. Then I made sure there were no antes. I defended a min-raise 107 times with no antes in 2017 and it cost me 4.28bb. This number is a little skewed though as there are Spin'n'Go and variants of the format recorded in the filter so after removing hands with 4 or less players we're down to a total of 39 ante-less BB defends. The result is a miserable -68bb/100. There are 29 different starting hands on the heat map so we're only talking 1 or 2 instances per hand but even the winning combos were for less than a few bb so it doesn't seem worth it. Another obvious spot to tighten up and just let it go. Doing a little more digging showed that calling early and middle position raises was massively unprofitable where as against CO to SB it's actually profitable so I probably need to look at the position of the player raising as well as it's something I rarely do when playing. Now it's time to add antes in things get a little worse. We're up to -55bb/100 when in the BB facing anything under a 2.5bb raise. A quick look at the heat map shows I've never just called KK, JJ or AKs over the 1300 hands for this scenario. I imagine that's unbalanced but nobody will have enough hands on me to know that. I only slow played AA, QQ and TT once each respectively with only QQ being a losing play. This overview states the obvious, defend less, but doesn't really say when so we need to use some other metrics to narrow things down. My understanding of things is that it's better to defend when you have more chips so looking at what were doing at different stack sizes seems like a good idea to see if that theory is correct. < 20bb: 38.84bb/100 (303 hands)20bb to 40bb: -101.05bb/100 (507 hands)> 40bb: -61.47bb/100 (552 hands)Well that theory sucked, kind of. Looking at the hands individually there are less bbs to win/lose when you start with less bbs in the first place so the swings will be bigger stacks. That being said there are clearly issues with the number of hand combos I'm calling with. Next time we'll have a look at that and maybe do a January update as to what's been happening on the ol' Unibets.

An idiots guide to finding leaks in your game when you don't know what you're doing or looking for by me, an idiot /html/images/emoticons/Asset1.png (2018 review - Part 1) Back in February 2017 I took a look at analysing my HM2 database to see if there were any obvious leaks that could be plugged. I'm not clever enough to link the original post but it's the one with all the HM2 screenshots in it :) At the time I had a measly 30k hands to review so I figured now was a good time to revisit the post and see what's changed in almost a year now we have 160k hands to look at.. Again we're going to use http://www.pokerlistings.com/strategy/leak-finding-using-holdem-manager as the guide to looking up stats and we'll compare to what was happening back in Feb 2017 to see if I took any of my own advice from back then. Preflop First thing we checked was VPIP/PFR from early positions. Let's see what things were like back in February:- VPIP/PFR (Total): 17.6%/11.6% VPIP/PFR (EP only): 12.3%/11.3% The article suggests your VPIP from EP should be roughly half your total VPIP so we were raising slightly more than suggested back in Feb. Fast forward to today and we have the following stats:- VPIP/PFR (Total): 19.7%/14.0% VPIP/PFR (EP only): 12.6%/11.8% Seems like it's going in the right direction but possibly for the wrong reason. I've been playing more hands in general over the last year but my VPIP from EP has remained at the same level. I'm not sure if you can directly relate this stat to a range but I'm going to do it anyway. This would be the equivalent 12.6% as a range of hands. I think this seems like a fairly good opening range as well although it could probably do with a little tightening at 8-9max and a little loosening at 6 max. To check and see how close to this I'm actually opening it's time to do some filtering. First of all I made sure I put some chips in the pot as this will remove all the hands I open folded. Next I made the min stack size greater than 8bb. This is to eliminate any small all ins with any two. we are left with the following heat map for 4.8k hands.. There are some rogues on the map that should not be there so lets try and get rid of the pre-flop all ins and see which hands actually made it to the flop.. Ahh, appears we have a problem. There have been some nonsense opens it seems so let's have a look at a few examples and see if there is any logical reason for opening 64o. Misclick?? Soul read? Who knows here, this hand should actually be filtered out but still appeared. Without knowing exactly when and why these rogue hands were appearing in EP it's hard to say why I did things. I'm not opening 64o ever with intent so we'll just call them anomalies. I figured a better way to check would be to see if I'm winning xbb/100 with the 12% range from above and if we're losing with everything outside that range. Not only am I winning over 100bb/100 I'm running under EV wqith hands outside the top 12%. Things change dramatically though when you remove the lower pocket pairs from the selected hands and we get down to a much less exciting -19.33bb/100. The only hands remaining that appear to be winning are KTs and some offsuit broadway combos. There is plenty more analysis that could be done to find out when the smaller pairs become unprofitable based on stack size and other variables but that's for another time. Let's look at the top 12 percent and see if we're winning with all of them. Looks like it's probably worth dropping Axs up to about ATs is probably a good idea. All the hands below ATs have less than 100 hits so I don't think they're necessarily a huge leak but certainly something I'm going to try and curb playing in the next few months. The other thing that might be worth getting rid of is 99 which is a whopping -235bb over 163 hands. I can safely say this is me overplaying the 'Stars nuts' most of the time but maybe it's time to start playing TT+ to be on the safe side. I think ATo/A9o need to go too and possibly KQo or maybe just play them based on the table more than a hard and fast rule. Let's have a look at what I concluded after the last check of the database.. "Even with the small sample I think there are hand combinations that I should be folding in EP that I just don't. I looked at pocket pairs first and did an additional filter to only see hands when I was 50BB or more deep. This is the kinda level when I get my head torch on and go set mining. It pretty much looks like the chart above, I'm losing at everything up to TT. It feels horrible to fold a pair at any time but the stats don't lie, they're costing me chips. There are a couple others I'll probably make a conscious decision to not play as well (ATo and KQo) especially when there are no antes." So basically I've learned nothing apparently. I'm still playing the same hands and losing int eh same ways. That was until I remember that I should really filter the results to only show hands AFTER the last report. Turns out 99 has been profitable for 93bb/100 since March 2017 so maybe it's ok to leave in. Everything else matches up though and KQo and ATo were big losers again. From the small pocket pairs only 55 and 22 have resulted in loses and nearly every other hand combo that I played had <20 results so I've definitely tightened up which is good. If you take the 12% and all pocket pairs out then it's still a negative bb/100 further confirming that these hands need to go so hopefully a post-it note on my monitor telling me to only play the top 12% from EP will help me loss less and win more in 2018 :) Next time out we'll look at whatever was next on the report, I've not looked at it yet :)

December - Week 5 With Christmas out of the way it was time to get back on the grind and chase Iany in the prop bet. Got home on Boxing day from my Mums after a 4-5 hour drive late in the afternoon and got stuck into the schedule straight away. Things began well with a min cash in the Deep Impact for €57 and a UO sat win for a €25 ticket. Picked up a ticket for the Sputnik as well but unfortunately finished 6th in that with only 3 paid. Bricked all the regular schedule so it ended up being a losing day. It was much the same for the rest of the week unfortunately. Didn't cash a single reg MTT for the rest of the year but did cash 3x €25 SNGs on the 27th, playing against Ian I think, and locked up a Nova ticket and a €25 UK tour ticket. Down about €320 for the week and basically wiped out the months profit chasing the prop bet. ** END OF MONTH REVIEW (December 2017) ** +/- for the month: €42.13 (BR Total: €1739.36)Days played: 24Losing days: 17Winning/Break Even days: 7Sessions/Games played - Cash: 11, SNGs: 10, MTTs: 174ROIs - Cash: 27.73% , SNGs: 9.11% , MTTs: -5.90%Still a profitable month but the first negative MTT ROI since August, which was the Bounty Badlands month I think. I think adding €25 MTTs into my play schedule to chase the prop was a bad idea and going forward they'll be dropped. We had a few good results in the 25-50 games but I think it's more important to protect the roll over hitting the big win. I've had pretty decent results in the Nova/Sputnik sats so I think regularly trying to qualify for them will scratch the big buyin itch until we get to the 2.5k mark. Unfortunately we lost the prop bet against Ian but I'm very happy with the results I got trying to beat him. 13 wins and 10 unique MTT names/types in 2 and a half months created one hell of a spike in the bankroll and has set up 2018 nicely. Shipping £80ish to Ian on New Years day wasn't fun though, luckbox! ** End of year review 2017 ** Jan 1st starting balance: €211.59 Dec 31st ending balance: €1739.36 (+€1527.77) Unibet Opens attended: 1 (London) UK Tour stops attended: 1 (Glasgow) It's been a pretty good year all round I think. I've got a graph that could be mistaken for the Bitcoin one but it's trending upwards and that's the important bit right? :) At this point you would expect some sort of "goals for 2018" type thing but I don't really see the point in them. Nothing has changed for me because I type 2018 instead of 2017. I'm still trying to make as much money as possible, attend as many live events as possible and just get better at a game I love to play. Volume, BR target and things like that just create extra stress that you really don't need. If I set a goal to play 200 MTTs a month for example then I will find myself playing some days just to complete that goal and not because I actually want to, that's not how I want to play. The same with hitting a € target, you can't force that. You play as well as you can and the results come when RNGesus decides, there is no other way to make it happen. What I think will be more important for me this year is analysing play and making sure I'm actually playing well so that I can maximise my chances of getting results. Despite the results for the year I still believe I'm a losing playing when put in any other player pool on the Internet so in order to make more money here I need to be able to at least break even or be a slight winning player everywhere else. I've got a good group of players that are better than me that I can talk to about poker so I think this year my game will progress a lot and I'm looking forward to that. I quite like doing the geeky off table stuff like checking ranges and ICM spots so I'll definitely be looking to do that more often this year. That's about it for 2017 then. Thank you to everyone who has continued to read through my waffle over the last year, comment and give feedback on hands and generally just be positive about the blog. Without you guys I'd just not update it as often ;). :Heart:

Life is just one long session (blog). It's only 6 pages long if you change how many posts you see per page ;)

December - Week(end) 1 Business is really picking up as far as far as DJing, with gigs every Friday and Saturday until the end of the year. With the exception of the 1st of December I'm working every Friday 9am-2pm in my day job, have a 4 hour break and then do 6pm-1 or 2am DJing. The 1st was the last day I could sneak an afternoon session in and it turned out to be a profitable one. A win in a €4 SNG and 1 buy-in at PLO10 to complete missions started the day. This was followed up by a 3rd in the afternoon €10 Fireball for €26 but then it was balanced out by bricking a €5 Shooting start and losing the PLO buy-in back. Saturday was a short and losing session, down about €18. All guns were blazing on Sunday with my new found wealth. It's didn't go particularly well. 2nd in the Fireball for €28 and 11th in the Cosmic Rays for €95 were cancelled out by a plethora of bricks including a painful direct bubble in the UK Tour final. Profit for the first weekend.. €3.76. December - Week 2 I don't think I was really in the mood for playing on Unibet so volume was incredibly low. I played a total of 5 MTT's between Monday and Wednesday The only success out of them was a 5th in the Event Horizon for €62 which meant I was in the profit for the week. Stone bubbled @Psycho79's invitation on Wednesday after firing 3 bullets which was unfortunate but overall the week was going well. Had a really good session on Thursday with 4 cashes of note. 10th in the Black Hole, 11th in a Shooting Star, 3rd in the Dwarf Star inc. 7 booties for €123 and 4th in the Gargle Blaster for €80. All in all about €170 in profit for the day, result! I didn't play on Friday/Sat due to work and probably a hangover so it was Sunday before we fired up the tables again. Sunday was ugly. Really ugly. I won a sat to the Ice Giant and a sat to the Odyssey and then bricked EVERYTHING! Even bubbled a Nova sat as the last thing of the day to really rub salt in the wounds. All of the weeks profit deleted in the space of about 8 hours :( Profit for the week, €2.15. December - Week 3 Not one to let a -€200 day get me down I headed back to the virtual felt for some more battles. Thankfully Monday turned out to be much better than Sunday as far as profit goes. First highlight, gold trophy in the €10 Meteor for €90. Followed swiftly by a €4 to €25 UK tour ticket win and then a €25 to €100 win. The final big win of the night was a second gold trophy in the Gorsky for €130. It was fast becoming my new 'Daily 4' so I'm glad to finally get that one in the cabinet. It also meant I was starting to make a dent in the lead Ian had on me in the prop bet which had felt like a real uphill struggle until this point. The heater continued with a 4th in the Titan and a gold trophy in a PLO Shooting Star on Tuesday, a UK4 to UK25 win and a UK25 to UK100 on Wed and finally another gold trophy on Thursday as I picked up the Black Hole for €218. The sun run was on!.. until Sunday of course where I bricked everything again 🤣 Profit for the week: €273.30 December - Week 4 Brick city. Until last night (21st) I bricked everything I played. No really massive sessions play-wise but it was about €140 over the 3 days. Last night however was a different story. Spurred on by Iany winning a second major and pulling out another massive lead I got stuck into the big MTTs on the nightly schedule. Event Horizon - BrickAbyss - FT and 8th for €35Sputnik Sat - Win ticket, used €5 MTT to playDwarf Star - BrickTitan - Finished 14th with 12 paid after ICM suicide calling AJo vs K9o preflop BvB and the Flop coming Kx9. I was in 6th or 7th at that point and had an easy ride to the money.Gargle Blaster - BrickSupernova Sat - Win ticketSputnik - 3rd for €333.40 profit from €50 ticket. Not quite the gold trophies I was after but an excellent way to enter the festive period. Up just over €415 for the month and enjoying playing. I don't expect to play to day and it'll be a small schedule tomorrow and then I'm off to my mums for Christmas so won't be back playing until Boxing Day at the earliest. The plan is to grind hard over the last week to see if I can claw some points back on Ian and then in January all eyes will be on trying to get a UO London package.

The extremely late November report I'm never going to become 2 time blogger of the year at this rate :(. I have to confess that the frequency of the blog posts is directly related to how busy I am in my day job. Unfortunately I've been busier than normal and my new office space does not lend itself well to pretending to be working while writing this. On the weekends I'd rather just spend the time playing than typing the blog to be honest. Going forward, I'll need to make some time on a Sunday or something to type stuff out and try and improve the frequency of posts. Anyhoo, on to week 3 in November. Monday started off with a single UK €25 ticket use that must have ended in disaster as I didn't record entrants or my finishing place. Tuesday was a day of near misses which included finishing 8th in the Meteor with 6 paid, 11th in the Gorsky with 9 paid and 4th in a UK €25 with 3 paid. Business picked up a little on Wednesday with a min cash in a €10 Multiverse and a bronze medal in the Gorsky. The Gorsky is my new Daily 4, I hate it and want to win it so bad and can just never get there. Thursday's session only consisted of 2 MTTs, one was a €25 UK tour sat that I stone bubbled (again) and the other was the new Deep Crazy Moon. With getting the €2.50 booby prize in the UK sat and exchange rates being so wild it ended up being a profitable day. With working every Friday night I can only play a few games in the afternoon and I generally just challenge Iany to a SNG battle. This Friday was no different as we battled in a €10, that I won, and then a €25 which neither of us won. All in all a slight losing day. Saturday was another small session, 4 MTTs and a cash PLO session. 6th in the €10 Deep Space for €17 and leaving up nearly 3 buyins at PLO10 meant it was a good session overall. I played a total of 23 MTTs before Sunday, that's really low volume for me considering what I normally play and with the prop bet running. I've been going through a phase where I'm not enjoying playing on Unibet again. It's something I'm going to go into more detail on in a separate post but basically sometimes I can handle the crazy on Unibet and sometimes I can't :) I also sometimes find myself enjoying my time on other sites better and just move some volume there. These were both happening at the same time in November so my Unibet volume was suffering. I made a concerted effort to put in a good shift on Sunday. The day started off well with a gold trophy in a €10 Fireball. It was a very small tourney with only 11 runners but it counts towards the prop and €56 profit before lunchtime on a Sunday works for me. Bubbled a €5 multiverse before binking a Supernova ticket in a sat. Went on a terrible run bricking all the Sunday majors in glorious fashion, with teh exception of the Nova, where I made a decent run and finished 46th out of the 186 runners. The shining light on Sunday was the evening €5 multiverse which brought about the second gold trophy of the day and €200 in profit. I remember nothing about what happened during the tournament other than being sad I got no points in the prop for winning it. Final cash of the day was a min cash in a €5 bounty to round off a 3rd decent Sunday in a row. Week 4 As always with my results, they are a little misleading. Monday's numbers do matches up with the results which is a good start. Back to back Fireball trophies to begin the day in the right way with €62 of profit. Other notable results included a cashes in €1 PLO and €5 Shooting Stars and a final table bubble in the Event Horizon. Took tuesday off/was playing elsewhere and then Wednesday is where things don't quite match up. It looks like a losing day, and technically in pure cash it was. There were however wins in a €4 and a €25 UK tour sats as well as picking up a Supernova ticket. I also finished an agonising 2nd in the €10 Meteor for €52 but it wasn't enough to cover the buyins for the day. Thursday, Friday and Saturday match up almost correctly although I did pick up a second Nova ticket on Thursday night to balance out some of the losses. Sunday was a big day. It started off with a 8th place in a €10 Shooting Star where only 6 got paid and was followed by another 5 bricked tourneys. Then the magic began. Unibet have been running 20 seat sats to the Ice Giant on Sundays and I joined thinking it would get lots of runners but would be good value. What actually happened was that 20 or less people joined and everyone instantly got a €25 ticket for their €10 investment :) I did not convert that ticket into any real money unfortunately but it was a nice thing to get. Then the majors started and it was time to get serious. Min cashed the Cosmic Rays for €50 after firing 2 bullets and the addon. Stone bubbled the Odyssey sat in 11th with 10 paid. Bricked the Spectrum, Nebula and everything else I played... except the Supernova. The Supernova went deep, real deep. It went so deep that I saw the final table. It was about 1am I think when the final 9 took their seats and I was at the lower end of the chip totals. I'd be battling with a short stack for some time and almost felt comfortable with a sub 20bb stack. We were down to 8 when the big hand for me happened. I shoved AQo and got called by a shorter stack with A6s. Unfortunately the flush came in on the river and I was left with about 2bb. In the next hand two players decided to go to war and with one of them getting knocked out I earned a €100 payjump. The next hand I was dealt A2s and shoved over an open and ran into a bigger Ax to get eliminated in 7th. I ran the spot the next day and was surprised with the results. I'm never folding an Ax hand with that small a stack but in ICM voodoo world it's a fold. I might have considered it if it wasn't half 1 in the morning and I had work the next day but at that point on Sunday night I was fine with the €800. Week 5 Half week as the end of the month approached. Small session of 3 MTTs on Monday with an almost cash in the Dwarf Star, a bronze medal in the Gargle Blaster for €117 and an unsuccessful attempt at getting a Supernova ticket. Tuesday was a day off and Wednesday and Thursday were big punt offs. I did pick up a €25 UK tour ticket and another Nova one to keep me in the big one for a few more weeks. ** END OF MONTH REVIEW (November 2017) ** +/- for the month: €1044.06 (BR Total: €1697.23)Days played: 26Losing days: 12Winning/Break Even days: 14Sessions/Games played - Cash: 16, SNGs: 14, MTTs: 214ROIs - Cash: 49.51% , SNGs: -36.67% , MTTs: 39.30% Goals for December Get out the hole and start playing with profit again. :Thumbsup:Blog regularly and post hands for discussion and analysis that will be helpful to the community. :Veryangry:Grind the UO/UK Tour Sats. :Thumbsup:Crush Iany's soul in another propbet :Disappointed:We've done it! I could withdraw the deposits I made during the drunken slots lunacy of 2016 and be playing with pure profit again. It's taken close to a year to do but finally we're back in the black (or green depending on how you look at it). I have no intention of withdrawing just now because I'd like to keep 100x buyins of the games I'm playing in my account as a psychological thing. If I can get over the €2.5k mark I'll start withdrawing money I think or I may take some out to pay for my impending tax bill in January. Either way, we've now completed possibly the most important goal set in the blog. As discussed at the top of the post, hand discussion and posts in general have been lacking. Changing this what I want my next major goal to be. I've got a bunch of non results based stuff floating around in my head that I want to get written down on a few topics so I plan on getting them out this month along with more results posts and some hands. I always wanted this space on the internet to be a learning experience for anyone that read it, whether its on how not to do things or on possibly how things should be done, but either way I don't want it to just be a "I won/lost this this week" blog. I'm really keen to try and head back to London in February for the Unibet Open. My girlfriend is even more keen than I am to go back so I think the plan is that regardless of having a package or not we'll make a weekend of it and head down. With that in mind I'll be heading into the mean streets of the UO sats in the next few months and trying to at least have a run at a package. The prop bet is not going too well but I'm ok with that. With not having the desire to play so much in November I basically knew I was probably going to lose. There is still time and I'm still going to try and win it but if I lose I'm fine too. I've won enough trying to cover the bet and I'm sure I can find another way to get the money back in the future ;) Bosh! Almost up to date now and ready for December. Let's see if we can't pick up at least 1 new trophy for the cabinet and give ol' Iany a sweat.

Hey @4soul, I have absolutely no idea :) I don't record start and end times, I just play when I can. I feel like I have a decent amount of success with the early MTTs (9am-12pm GMT) but there are less of them and the fields are smaller so that might be a factor. It's always going to be that the bigger prizepools are going to be in the evening but that's also when the most players are on and in the theory the harder players. Weekdays I'm starting around 6-7pm UK time and finish regging about 9PM. On a Sunday I've seen myself get up at 10am and reg through till 9pm depending on how I'm doing and how I feel mentally. Basically my completely nonprofessional opinion is play when you can and play when you feel like playing, so long as you're making good decisions the rest doesn't really matter :)

Remember, remember, the 5th of November Normally the 5th of November is remembered in the UK because of a bizarre ritual where we set off fireworks and light bonfires to commemorate Guy Fawkes being caught during his attempts to blow up the House of Lords 400+ years ago. For 99.9% of the population that's how it'll be remembered this year too, but not for this guy. For me, the 5th of November will be the remembered as the day Ian Simpson luckboxed his way into winning the Supernova and more importantly, took a huge lead in our prop bet 😠 We'll get into that a little later though, first lets have a look at how the first week of November went on the virtual felt. I played on Wednesday (the 1st) and Thursday (the 2nd) and had two pretty painful losing days. I've developed a little schedule of MTTs I play all the time now in order to try and get the maximum points in the prop bet. The Black Hole, the Gorsky and a €5 Shooting Star are all staples in my session now as the first two only run once a week and the Shooting Star is a name I've not won yet. There is also a couple Fireballs later in the evening that I needed to add to the win sheet too so they get flicked in from time to time as well. Unfortunately I bricked them all with my only results coming from winning a €25 UK ticket and coming 3rd in the PLO Deep Fireball for €15. I also lost on Andrei's tennis tips too so we were down about €60 for the two days. I then took the next two days off. I can't remember if I've mentioned it before but I've now got a weekly residency at one of my favourite bars to work in. They pretty relaxed about what I can play and you can't even get your stuff set up before someone is over asking what you want to drink (for free). This tends to lead to me being hungover on a Saturday so I don't really want to play. I've also been doing Saturday club gigs the last few weeks so I can't play in the evening when I the hangover wears off. So Sunday rolls around and I'm hungover again :) Turns out the club likes to give out free drinks too 😏. Regardless, I getmyself up and ready in the afternoon and start firing away. Bricked the first 5 or so MTTs I played with only a €5 ticket rebate in a Supernova sat to show for it. The first cash of the day came in the Cosmic Rays. A tournament known for it's overlay just now so I felt taking a punt on it was a good investment. I ended up making €80 in profit after a 13th place finish and it was basically a day saver. Other than a second €25 UK ticket win for the week I did not make any money playing MTTs. I did win almost a buy in at NL4 and a €2 completing the monthly missions so €7.83 profit on a Sunday is not to be sniffed at! Look at his smug face with his fancy playthrough videos 😠. When I devised the points for the propbet I did not think either of us would win the Supernova before the end of the year. I didn't even plan on playing Supernova at all and I knew Iany would be away for two UK stops and a UO which basically meant there were 7 or so chances for him to win it. I had the stream on while I was grinding and was blissfully unaware of what was going to happen. Countless times the luckbox hit 2/3 outers and even managed to come back from a 2 or 3 bb stack to make it to the final table. That's when it sank in, he might actually win this thing! I didn't watch the whole final table, it was late and I had work in the morning. I also knew how painful it would be to watch live if he did win and started gloating about it so I went to sleep about 1am hoping that by not watching it the poker gods would spare me in the morning. They did not and I woke up to a plethora of congratulatory tweets clogging up my timeline. Iany's run good had cost me about £80 and I was sad. All the above saltiness is just for fun however and I'm genuinely happy he won. He's been due a decent win and has been going though some terrible run bad recently so it's good to see one of the good guys take it down. I think we've developed a strange but lovely relationship where we both want to see each other do well, just not too well so I can't be mad 🤣. That's not something you get normally when you have only met someone once IRL (technically twice but Ian doesn't remember the meeting at the UO London players party pre-twitch) and basically spend every stream looking for openings to troll the other person. I have the same sort of trolly banter with David Lappin as well and it makes the whole Twitch experience a lot more enjoyable for me. In a rare moment of being nice I'd like to put it on the internet nowthat I'm grateful that they both take everything in jest (as it's intended) and play along and have fun with it. Anyway, momentary lapse in trolliness aside, as it stands today (17/11) I'm 68 points/£ behind so I'm only a few single nightly MTTs (Like the Black Hole) or a Sunday Major away from catching up. It's going to be a fun challenge to keep me busy until the end of the year:) I get back on the horse for week two of November with renewed hunger for gold trophies. The following screenshot will do a terrible job of illustrating how that went. The heater was real. Tuesday brought a gold trophy in the Deep Space Fireball which gave me a 19 point boost and €46 in profit. Wednesday had a 2nd in the €10 Meteor and a min cash in the Titan and Thursday had a 2nd in the Event Horizon and a 2nd in the Gorsky. There is nothing more annoying than being that guy that complains about finishing 2nd all the time but I have to do it! Those 3 2nd place finishes cost me 73 points :waterfall:. Yes, I know, I know.. how can you complain about being nearly €400 up in 4 days? Well obviously I can't :) It now means I am in comfortable BRM territory to play €10 MTTs and add extra points scoring opportunities but finishing 2nd HURTS SO BAD! :waterfall: Anyway, Fri/Sat were small play days as with the previous week and then it kicked off again on Sunday. Unibet are doing a fantastic job just now of sharing out the overlay that happens on a Sunday. If you've won a ticket on a stream or through social media in the last few weeks then the chances are you didn't get a generic one but rather one for a Sunday Major. This is because a number of the majors were given rather aggressive GTDs and they're not quite hitting them. Rumours are afloat that when Kindred discontinue the Stan James brand we'll get an influx of new players that will stop the overlay but until then Unibet have to just take the punishment. They're dealing with it in a good way IMO by basically giving the overlay out in tickets. The Supernova for example was/is overlaying by about €2000 which is roughly 20 tickets. So what they do is give away 15 on 2+2 plus a few via social media and streams. This gives 20+ people who many not normally play the Supernova a chance to experience it and also adds enough players to the event that it looks like it's not overlaying. It still is, giving out those tickets still costs the €2k but the value is shared out amongst more people and it's slightly less per person instead of the majority of it going to the players that are most likely winners anyway. The other beauty of it is that if one of the ticket winners cashes then it could possibly be a big boost to the roll of a losing player and keep them playing longer. I think it's a great way to share the 'free money' and am all for it. I am, however, biased. I got one of those Supernova tickets via the 2+2 giveaway and I was one of those guys that cashed 🆒. It's a lovely MTT to play, the structure is great, you never feel like the blinds are going to swallow you up and you can just be patient and wait for spots. It is however long. It was well past midnight before I made my exit in 22nd place so it's a grind for sure but with 4k up top you can't really complain. I also had an excellent rail both on Twitch and via Skype so it was a lot of fun for both me and the guys I'd swapped 5% with who were sweating the run :) My final hand really isn't that exciting and general consensus was I donked it off so we won't go through it in detail here. Basically I 3-bet jammed AJo UTG+1 for 12bb after a UTG raise and got tank called by AQs from the UTG player. I had been a folding machine for about an hour and had hoped my tight image would get it through but it wasn't meant to be. I almost folded but got overexciting about getting some sort of hand and made a mistake. The cash was €291 so for a freeroll was a decent return and a great way to start my Supernova career :) So we finish the second week of November smashing records all over the shop. New BR record of €1117 and biggest winning week ever (I think) being the two that spring to mind. Off site I've managed to spin up the Party balance from 0 to $200+ via tickets and a 5th and a 2nd place finish in MTTs. I also have a seat at their big Sunday Major this week, The 500k Title fight, via a $4 Spin'nGo to a $8 ticket, to a 44 to a seat so the heater is well and truly on. Join me next time as I tell tall tales of me getting crushed for the next 6 weeks and having to take out a payday loan to cover my propbet loss ;)

Self Assessment - SNG edition (Part 4) FINALLY we get to the 4th and (hopefully) final part of the this SNG review. Since it's been over a month since the last part a quick recap:- buy-in: $0.10Players left: 2Current position: 1/2 with 10/1 chip leadThere are not too many hands left so let's just rattle through them one by one. Hand 60: J2 of diamonds - Raise and take from the sb Hand 61: ATo - Villain shoves for just under 3bb and we call. Villain shows J9o and hits a J on the river to double up. Hand 62: 42o - Raise and take. Possibly a mistake? Hand 63: 55 - Walk Hand 64: T4o - Raise and take Hand 65: 74o - Villain shoves J3s for 2.5bb and I call. Again, not sure if this is a mistake or not. Feels like for that amount any two should be fine but I don't know HU. Board bricks and villain wins with J high Hand 66: 99 - Raise and take Hand 67: K9 - Walk Hand 68: A4o - Raise and take Hand 69: J9o - Villain shoves A2o for 2.3bb and I call. Ace ont eh flop to seal another double up. Hand 70: T4s - I raise to 2000 (Blinds are 800/400/160) and villain shoves for another 1500 or so. At this point I figure I can't fold and just make the call. Villain has KJs so things are not looking good. Luckily I was due a win in these all in battles and the board ran out 3TQ8Q and we pick up the gold! There you have it. Not the most interesting HU battle but I'm fairly confident there were some big errors being made. If anyone has any thoughts on the HU let me know, I have no idea about how to play it and I've been too lazy to do any research :) Normal blog service resumes now with updates on my battles with Mr Simpson and my amazing ability to be awesome at averageness!

** END OF MONTH REVIEW (OCTOBER 2017) ** +/- for the month: €539.68 (BR Total: €653.17)Days played: 25Losing days: 9Winning/Break Even days: 16Sessions/Games played - Cash: 16, SNGs: 33, MTTs: 245ROIs - Cash: 28.32% , SNGs: -3.38% , MTTs: 47.87% Goals for November Get out the hole and start playing with profit again.Blog regularly and post hands for discussion and analysis that will be helpful to the community.Grind the UK Tour Sats.Crush Iany's soul in another propbetComplain about the new MTT schedule until it's the best one on the interwebz Well then, what a month! It's not often you almost 6x your bankroll without winning a major MTT. Lots of really positive deep runs and satellite wins have really boosted the ammunition's cabinet to a level last seen in November of last year, where I went on almost the almost exact same month long heater winning almost the exact same amount. It's actually scarily close. Nov 2016 was a +€581.86 month, with 240 MTTs so the numbers are really similar. I had a look back and the bankroll peaked way back in October 2017 at €888 so we're creeping closer and closer to a new record and more importantly closer to making a dent in the deposits and getting back in the black. The plan is to hopefully get to a 4 figure roll before withdrawing any money. I'd like to keep enough bullets in the clip to be comfortable at anything up to €5 in order to be able to compete with Iany for the prop bet and because the payouts really ramp up at the €5 stake. We've made sure that the kryptonite from the last decent BR value is buried deep in a rolling 6 month self exclusion so there should be no reason for the value to dip outside poker playing (and the occasional dip into @AndreiBN's excellent Tennis picks). Outside actual cash, the UK tour ticket roll remains steady at €312 in tickets. I'm not really sure when I'll fire a final because I have no idea what I should have in the reserve before firing and Manchester unfortunately falls on the weekend of my work Christmas party. It's also silly season as far as DJ gigs go so I can't see me being able to find the time to get down there. I become insanely jealous every time a UK tour weekend rolls around and everyone tweets and posts about how much fun they're having/had... I want in! I think what I'll do is try and get a few packages ready for 2018 and then make the time to get around as many as possible next year. As far as the other goals go they all remain pretty much the same. I find myself handpicking MTTs that I've not won in order to win points in the propbet over just playing everything and I think I'll continue to do that. Less tables and more focus seems to be working for me so we'll stick to that. I've crossed out the MTT schedule moaning because I've basically given up on it. This may be an unfortunate side effect of them being so proactive in the past but I really feel Unibet has dropped the ball with customer interaction in the last few months. It was easy to forgive them in the past knowing that the schedule was one of Robin's many tasks but now that they have hired a tournament manager you would think the interaction and speed of updates/information should be multiple times faster. I might be being naive about the ease of the role or what it entails but if your sole responsibility is looking after, what is a relatively small schedule, you should have plenty of time to be active here or on 2+2 collecting feedback and suggestions. Simple requests like an updated schedule spreadsheet cannot be that hard to deal with. This also trickles over to the bug squashing side of things. We're several months down the line on some recurring bugs that, while maybe not major or widespread, still make the client sub-par when put up against the best. Not being able to see what a min-cash is may not be the biggest worry in the world but not being able to see hole cards is. I don't understand how an issue of that severity is not a priority every month over something like adding a € sign to the cash games levels. I've asked several times if there is extra logging I can run or anything else they would need to help nail these things and have had no response. I've said it before in the blog, I want the client to work and be great because more people will play here, which ultimately benefits me. I'm not sure if they already have it but if they don'y I don't know why Unibet doesn't have a beta program set up to test monthly updates a few days in advance. Things like this months rebuy bug could be easily found by a few active players getting the clients a few days early. There is a tremendous community here that are willing to help with these things for free and I'm not sure why they don't utilise it more. Anyhoo, rant over for the month :) None of the above is personal in any way to any of the staff I've had interactions with it's just me venting my frustrations at not being able to do more to help. Like a said earlier this is probably an adverse effect of the interaction being so good in the past and the discussions here and on 2+2 being so open and productive.. you expect it to always be like that. The SNG recap WILL BE DONE THIS WEEK! If I have to skip a Sunday session to get it done I will. I need to get it out of my life! Ain't it great to have the walls of text back in these posts ;) Edit: Forgot to mention, I'm going to take the results sheet offline. There is one simple reason for this, it's getting to big. Chrome is a resource hog as it is so I'd rather just stick it in Excel and have it be a little more lightweight and remove a tab. If anyone actually cares or looks at it I can upload the results at the end of each month but I can't imagine anyone actually looks at them other than when I posts the end of month stuff.

Oct Week 4 Knowing Iany was away in Brighton all week I decided to cut back a lot on play for the last week in October. My sleep pattern had been messed up for a while so I was always feeling tired and just wasn't mentally focused on playing so I figured now would have been the perfect time for a little break. It worked for Monday as I didn't play anything and just watched one of the free TPE videos that's available online. Tuesday I fired one MTT and it was the €5 Gorsky. I refuse to call it by it's full name because it's just too long. It had been overlaying pretty frequently, IMO because the name of the MTT didn't have a GTD in the client, so it was an obvious choice as my single game to play in the background as I watched a movie. I had mentioned on 2+2 about my theory as to why the overlay existed and to my surprise the very same evening the GTD appeared in the MTT name. Coincidence? I have no idea actually as David has been rather quiet on 2+2 in the last week or so. Either way, it lead to no overlay but a €600 prizepool instead of €400 so no complaints here. Cue a couple of hours of play and a silver trophy after a long HU battle. The pain of not closing out these MTTs is magnified knowing how many points are on the line in the propbet so I was actually disappointed to make €90 on the day. It's crazy I know, but I wanna win the prop so bad! I didn't play well heads up and it reminded me I really need to finish the SNG analysis so I can learn more about HU play. Wednesday and Thursday were both small losing days as I splashed around in the UK tour pool and tried to go back to back in the Gorsky. Was DJing Friday so no play their either. Saturday was a much better day. I had all day and night to play and although being rather hungover got involved in a large session starting in the afternoon. Things didn't look good to start with as I stone bubbled not 1 but 2 Milky Way sats and bricked my first 9 or so tournies. I had converted a bunch of tickets into €1-2 MTT tickets so I was firing everything that was running. Things started to turn around as I picked up 2x €25 UK tour tickets in a row and made another FT in the Gorsky for €50. This was followed up by a FT in a PLO Fireball and a €2 Shooting Star. By teh time I finally finished playing just after Midnight I was up €20 but feeling good about my play again. Sundays are always hit or miss. This Sunday was one of those rare times where it was a hit, a big hit. First win of the day came in a €1 sat for a €10 ticket that we took down. I wouldn't normally play these as I don't really like the 1 in 10 structure but there wasn't much else running at the time so I flicked it in. I earmarked that ticket for the Cosmic Rays later in the day. This was followed up by a bubble in a €5 Shooting Star but I got enough bounties that it was a still resulted in a tiny profit. The next cash came in the crapshoot that is the Spectrum. For some reason Unibet forgot about the clocks going back an hour and this resulted in the Majors starting an hour early, so 3pm UK time. I expected big overlay in the early ones so I was ready to fire in the Spectrum. Luckily I only fired two bullets and an addon but I managed to survive to the FT and take 5th for €140. I was chip leader with 9 left and then ran into some terrible variance losing with AK twice in a row. On the FT I got a walk with Aces and when we were down to 5 I shoved from the button with AJ being 4/5 and the short stack woke up with Aces. My bust out hand was also AK so it seemed like that just wasn't my hand. The session carried on as I was deep in a €5 Multiverse and doing well in a €4 UK sat. I ran really good in the Multiverse and dominated the FT to take down a gold trophy and a bankroll doubling €232. I also shipped the UK sat to win another €25 sat. I was ready to end the session at that point at around 9pm but decided to flick a €25 UK ticket in as all the regs were in Brighton. There was 4 entrants and 2 €100 up for grabs so it seemed like good value. It turned out to be excellent value as I picked up the ticket in about 40 minutes. An excellent way to round off my best poker day in a long time! Profit/Loss for the week: €395.60

The October grind Look at all these new bloggers trying to take my crown, how dare they! 🤣. Better show them how it's done with another uncomfortably long blog post about the magical world of MoreTBC. Sunday Oct 1st and Oct Week 1 I started off my first Sunday session with some SNGs. I've tagged them as 'Elite Promo' but I cannot even remember what the promo was. I think it was something to do with the EO but I'm not really sure. Either way, I played 5x 5 man and 5x HU €1 and did fairly rubbish. One HU win and one 5 man win for an overall loss. Only wins for the day were a FT cash in a €1 Turbo and winning a ticket to the last ever Sunday Entitled.. Which I promptly busted in a bout 4 minutes with a set over set cooler. Monday brought on the beginning of the new, and rather confusing, space themed schedule. I picked up my first cash in a Wormhole but bricked everything else, also losing trying to complete missions, to have a small losing day. Tuesday to Thursday were all winning days. Tuesday had another Wormhole cash, a Multiverse cash and even some cash wins completing missions. Wednesday had a couple of small wins thanks to ticket buyins and Thursday brought 3 HU wins in a row and 2 buyins at PLO. The missions really do help you diversify your play. Small loss on Friday completing missions and then small winning days on Saturday and Sunday completed a decent first week back on the grind Profit/Loss for the week: -€4.28 (+1 €25 UK tour ticket) October Week 2 Another week, another random collection of SNGs. The 20 years promo started running so I fired into the HU SNG streets. Played 10 x €2 and won 6 and lost 4. On the MTT front Monday didn't go very well with a single min cash in a Multiverse and two near misses in a Wormhole the Meteor Shower. Picked up my first decent result on Wednesday with a 2nd place finish in a €1 Wormhole. Also received a free bet as part of the 20 years promotions that I turned into a nice profit. Friday brought the first UK tour ticket win as I picked up a €25 ticket. David Lappin was streaming and giving away tickets for fun and as part of the giveaway jumped into a SNG with anyone that would battle with him. Whoever knocked him out got a €25 ticket so I managed to sit down with NMP and a couple of the other chat regs to battle it out. It got down to Lappin, NMP and myself and after crippling him with an apparently well played QQ hand I collected the bounty and the ticket a few hands later. NMP ended up winning the SNG but I was happy with the ticket :) The run good continued on Saturday as we picked up a gold trophy in a €1 Wormhole, FT'd the Multiverse and won two €25 UK tickets in a row. Had another couple of close runs but could not collect any more prizes. Sunday brought the delayed DaVitsche League to the schedule so I got involved in that. I played 6 of them and FT'd 1 of them but basically gave up by the evening. First decent result came in a €5 Shooting Star bounty where I finished 2nd with 10 bounties for €47 profit. I bricked all the new Sunday majors but did pick up a bounty in the Ice Giant from the ticket I won from Lappin so we'll call that a slight profit ;). With no work on Monday the session ran late and that led to another 2 deep runs and a gold trophy and silver medel combo. 2nd in the €2 Meteor Shower and 1st in the Singularity for a combined €50 of profit. Another decent week. Profit/Loss for the week: €125.64 October week 3 We start the third week of October booking another prop bet with Ian Simpson. I think the prop started as a conversation between Ian and Lappin about who could win the most of the new Space themed MTTs but then when Ian mentioned it on stream I stole the idea and ran with it :) Basically we both have until the end of 2017 to try and win as many different space themed MTTs as possible. The names have points assigned to them according to their frequency per week and their buy in. You can view the current points structure HERE and it has a second tab on it to show the current scores. At the end of the year the person with the least points has to pay the winner the difference between the scores at £1 a point (up to £200 cap). At the time of writing this the scores is 46-27 to me as I've won (spoiler alert) 4 different named MTTs and Ian has a single win. I've always found that the best way to start a prop bet like this is to get an early lead and apply some pressure so that's what I did. Gold trophy in the €2 Multiverse and €20 of profit. Bricked the rest of the evening unfortunately but three wins in three days has hopefully set the bar for the prop. Tuesdays was full of near misses, which seem to hurt a lot more now that it's worth not only the prize pool but potentially Ian Simpson money. 2nd in a Singularity, 2nd in the Meteor Shower, 3rd in a Shooting Star and 5th in a PLO Fireball were all painfully close to points wins but €37 profit was a nice consolation. Skipped Wednesday, bricked Thursday, skipped Friday and then picked up another trophy on Saturday. A €2 PLO Deep Space for €36 added to my lead in the prop and the BR. I also binked a €4 Step-it-up and FT'd a Singularity so it was a profitable day. Sunday was another brick day apart from a single FT in a Shooting Star for €22. Profit/Loss for the week: -€50.20 That's us bang up to date :) I'm up €70 for the month at the moment and fairly comfortably ahead in the prop bet. Ian is in Brighton all week so I don't think he'll be winning anything anytime soon. I actually plan to take a few days off and do some off table work. I've been slacking on it recently and although I'm getting some results I don't feel like I'm playing well at all. This should hopefully include the conclusion of the SNG review I've been dragging out for about a month as it's something I really want to finish. Off site, it's been a mixed bag. I did not bink a Caribbean package unfortunately but it has now created an amusing spike on my sharkscope. I continue to be profitable on Ipoker, which I found out the other day is actually the home of the .fr Unibet client, but the click and collect promo on Party has now ended so I am getting no more free sat training :( Plan is to now focus on Unibet until the end of the year to make sure I don't start 2018 funding Ian's dreamies bill. I have fading dreams of making Manchester at the end of the year for the UK stop but I've not been playing the sats frequently and when I do results have been mixed. If anyone has anything they'd like me to do a post about after I finish the SNG review let me know. I'm tempted to do the $1k sat but not sure if I want to go through the pain of losing my virtual thousand bucks again :Waterfall:🤣

#InBNWeTrust

Man I've been slacking with this. I spend all my time complaining these days ;) ** END OF MONTH REVIEW (SEPTEMBER 2017) ** +/- for the month: €19.98 (BR Total: €113.04)Days played: 16Losing days: 8Winning/Break Even days: 8Sessions/Games played - Cash: 13, SNGs: 3, MTTs: 48ROIs - Cash: -30.89% , SNGs: 17.33% , MTTs: 6.10% ** FULL RESULTS ** Goals for October Get out the hole and start playing with profit again.Blog regularly and post hands for discussion and analysis that will be helpful to the community.Grind the UK Tour Sats.Complain about the new MTT schedule until it's the best one on the interwebz It's been easily my quietest month on Unibet for a long time, so much so I didn't even want to write blog posts about it. The MTT schedule bored me, there were no promos I wanted to play and I was just enjoying my time playing on other sites. Despite all that I ended up making a tiny profit on the month thanks to a very late MacGregor/Mayweather payout and winning the €2 Daily Deepstack on the 30th for €40. I was consistent with my UK tour results as well so I still have 3x €25 and 12x €4 to work through in October. I'm sure you've seen that I'm not very happy with the new MTT schedule so I won't go over it again here but I'm confident it'll get sorted sharpish and if I have to be the one looking like a complaining :Heart::Hearts::Heart: to help get it done then I'm happy to play the role. I want to get more of my play back on Unibet but it's only going to happen if the games are fun and interesting to me. Off site it's been an interesting start to October. On Sunday I played either a $1.10 or $8.80 sat feeder on party (I can't remember which of the free tickets got me further) that turned into a $20something feeder that turned into a $109 feeder that turned into a $1050 final ticket for next Sunday. 20 packages GTD for some thingy in the Caribbean in November. The lack of in-depth knowledge about it should highlight how low my expectations are :) I might get $5 rakeback, which would be nice. I played a €2 Twister (which is the iPoker networks version of a Spin'nGo) last night and got a 100x multiplier. Unfortunately I finished second and won nothing after getting the following sequence of hands when heads up.. I was not impressed :( I've accumulated $10 of free money on 888 playing nothing but freerolls they keep giving me tickets for so things are going quite well there too. The chop and change between all the sites has kept things interesting but I'm ready to come home :). I plan on finishing the SNG review but I want to do a little research on HU play before I do so I can have a better understanding of how bad I'm playing. It will be done this month though, promise!

Self Assessment - SNG edition (Part 3) We're back again with part 3 of the $0.10 SnG from the start of the month. Down to 4 players and blinds are 150/300 with a 30 chip ante. The HM3 hand replayer has now completely crapped out and will not show me in any of the rest of the hands so we're going to have to go back to good ol' fashioned text for the rest of these. Hand 36 Bit of a strange one this. I don't think the limp is the right thing to do looking back but I may have felt at the time that the opponent wasn't one to fight back often or lightly. I also think that's why I donk lead as well (Which you can't see in the screenshot). With the BB having so few chips they're only going to call/shove when they catch a piece of the board so a bet on a board like this is going to take it down most of the time I think. What I think I should have done is shove pre. I'd normally look at a hand like Q8o and not even consider shoving in a spot like this but apparently it's the cool thing to do. As always we'll take these ranges with a pinch of salt because I would expect any Ax hand to be calling as well as any pair so I'm not going to be shoving 72o in this spot even though it's supposed to be profitable. This does show that I need to keep an eye out more for when I'm the big stack and can apply maximum pressure. Villain folded to the flop bet and we pick up some more valuable chips. Next two hands (87o BTN and J7o CO) are folded, a walk in the BB and then I somehow realise I'm supposed to be shoving any two and fire all the chips in with 93o and pick up the blinds. Hand 40 sees me shove A3o from the button and get called by the SBs AQo. The SB only had 4bb to start the hand so it wasn't a huge hit to the stack and we stayed in first position. Did a quick check of the shoving range and we're still at 'any two' so everything appears to have played out fine there. Slight mis-step in hand 44 where I fold T7s from the button. ICM voodoo says anything up from T3s+ is fine but as with most of the other spots there needs to be some allowance for the stake of the game and how far away from optimal everyone else is playing. If we're results orientated the flop cam K26 all clubs and I had suited diamonds so I saved myself from losing some chips :) Hand 47 Not too sure why I didn't call this all in for 2.7bb but apparently it was a good decision. Now I don't fully believe the voodoo machine because it says the CO should only shove the following:- 19.6%, 55+ A3s+ A7o+ K9s+ KTo+ QTs+ QJo Much like the last hand I went over any pair, any Ax and any broadway combo is going in here. I don't care what the voodoo machine says. It also says I can only call with 10.7%, 44+ A8s+ ATo+ KQs but I think if you widen the COs range this range widens too. Even more bizarrely the BB can call with 92% of their hands! It's no wonder Dara runs ultra marathons, he probably needs the time to get his head around this madness. My only justification for folding is that the CO has been really tight and is more likely to have something over nothing, that and the voodoo saying it's right :) Hand 52 sees me folding J5o from the button which is 'officially' a mistake (just, J3o is the lowest shove according to Kevin Nash) but one I'm happy to make based on all the previous theories above. Hand 55 Another one of those spots where I didn't know what to do because someone had put chips in the pot before me. Giving the villain a wide enough range to include limping KJs means I should be punishing him with anything I have according to the voodoo. If I had then you would expect the BB to fold and if I get called by the button I win the chips. Definitely something to consider for the future. Hand 57 finally sees an elimination. I go all in from the CO with QTo and the SB calls for his last remaining 2.7bb. They have A2. Board goes JTQ... K... T for the ultimate emotional rollercoaster and we are finally in the money! $0.06 of sweet sweet profit locked up. Two hands later the run good continues. Dealt A3s in the SB with 15bb I shove and the BB calls for their remaining 5.7bb with Q2s. Considering the button had 3.9bb this seemed like a bit of a punt at the time so I've gone and checked it. SB 100.0%, Any two BB 36.3%, 44+ Ax K3s+ K6o+ Q6s+ Q8o+ J8s+ JTo T9s That's a nice little table it's created there, much easier than doing a screenshot. Note to self! Sure enough it was a little wide of a call. Cue another soul crushing river as the board went 9TKQJ for some straight over straight brutality. Finally we're HU! Ok, that's enough words and pictures for today, we'll be back, possibly tomorrow, with the finale where I butcher HU play and still come out on top :)

Self Assessment - SNG edition (Part 2.5) @monkeyheaven has kindly finished off my analysis of the hand above :). The range ICMIZER puts the opener on is far too wide and its going to be closer to 20% or even less and with that range of cards a call is inevitable. With the stake being so low it's also more likely I'm getting a call regardless of what my opponent has. I did re-run it with an 18% range and 67s was not a shove which kinda confirms all this. I got another opinion from the resident blog superfan, Remk_95 , and he also agreed it was a check over a shove. ...Well that's what I did :) Unfortunately I can't show you what happened in the replayer because HM3 is still super buggy and it shows the hand now as me not being in it so here it is in text form :) 6:Clubs: 4:Hearts: 8:Spades: (Pot 870) I check and the villain bets 300. I have no cbet stats on the player so cannot use the HUD for information. I was fairly confident considering my stack that they are going to bet on any flop to try and take it down so I raise to 900. Villain calls and panic ensues as we go to the turn. 8:Diamonds: (Pot 2670) I go for broke and throw in my last 1165 chips. Villain folds pretty quickly I gave Remk the flop on Twitch and he said he would have just shoved flop and on reflection I agree with him. You would expect a raise pre-flop from any pair so I think it's safe to rule most of them out besides perhaps AA or KK looking to induce. This leaves broadway combos as the most likely hands in their range I think so a shove is likely to get rid of those types of hands unless the villain is feeling particularly gambly. I suppose with the check raise you are sort of doing the same thing as shoving but it actually looks a little stronger maybe? If I was the villain and I saw a donk all-in I'd be inclined to call with AK/AQ or suited broadways that match a suit on the flop where as if I cbet and get raised I'd think the short stack actually hit the flop and I can get away from it. If I had check-shoved maybe we don't even get to the turn? The turn didn't really change anything as far as I was concerned. If they have an 8 I'm going out and if they have what I think they have I'm still ahead and sticking the rest of my chips in can't be that bad. Turned out it wasn't in this case but I don't think I'll ever know what the right option was on the flop. Hand 32 I wanted to check this one because I feel fairly comfortable with shoving ranges when it's folded to me but I have no idea how much or how little limps effect a shoving range in these kind of spots. I'm also now not last in chips so things have changed a little in regards to ICM I think. Time to go back to the voodoo machine and see what madness it comes up with.. Much like the last hand I think the ICMIZER has the limpers range far too wide in this spot as his stats would suggest he's not super loose. I still think if we shaved 10-15% off his range we're going to be OK with the jam so in this case his limp doesn't not appear to make much difference to our decision. Any debates on this one? The next hand I get dealt the same cards but suited clubs and it's another raise and take. That's us back up to where I had intended to finish last post. Hopefully going to get another batch of hands out the way Thursday/Friday to try and get to heads up and a world of mistakes :)

Self Assessment - SNG edition (Part 2) So we're back again for part two of my dissection of a $0.10 SnG. We're up to hand 15 of 71 and things are going just fine. We have just over starting stack and the table is down to 7 players. Hand 16 This hand sees us UTG+1 with pocket 5's. We're sitting on a stack of around 14bb. I was pretty confident this was a shove at the time but I thought I'd check again. It's really close but it is just a shove. I actually folded this hand because I felt like with it being a $0.10 game and with the action the way it had been I was likely to get called light and I didn't really want to have 5's in that spot. I think this would fall into the "wait for a better spot" category. Is there any argument for shoving there other than the slight +ev? Hand 21 Business has picked up in the last 5 hands and it's down to just 4 players now. Blinds are 100/200 with a 20 chip ante and I'm faced with the following strange scenario in the CO/BTN depending on how you look at it. I instafolded this at the time but having been through a few of these types of things before I'd suspect that I can shove pretty wide here and pick up some chips. My theory would be that because I am 4/4 I have the least ICM pressure. Turns out I was wrong. Both the player before and after me can shove really wide but I'm handcuffed to 21% of my hands. I find this kind of ICM voodoo fascinating. I have little to lose and they have lots to but I'm not supposed to shove wide apparently. There could easily be an argument that at this point the other players are going to be playing tighter on the bubble and that a shove like this, while not being +ev according to ICM, would be profitable in an exploitative sense but maybe that's crazy talk, let me know. :) In the very next hand I have almost the exact same scenario with JTo in the CO. Results for that came out at 19.8% of hands so basically the same range as above. In hand 23 the chip leader gave me a walk, a clear indication that they are not particularly ICM aware. Nothing like winning chips with 36s :) I get dealt pocket 7's on the button during hand 25 and get a shove through to pick up more valuable chips. Hand 28 A fairly straightforward looking shove but again I wanted to look at where this hand sits in the range of hands I could shove in this spot. As expected any Kxs is a fine shove and considering I can go all the way to 53s it doesn't seem like a thin shove either. What I found more interesting was how wide the BB can call. Pretty much any two broadway cards are fine to call with here and even things like K8s. I don't know if I would find a call with Q9s normally but apparently it's making money :). The shove got through and I get myself up to 12bb. Hand 31 Spots like this confuse me all the time. Do I shove? Do I check and hope to hit something? I figured the best thing to do was run this through ICMizer so that I would at least be able to rule out shoving and make my future choices a little easier. It's glorious to click one button in HM to copy the hand history and one button in ICMizer to paste in all the details I tell you, glorious! Downloadable hand histories FTW! Well I wasn't expecting that! Edit: I'd typed a couple hundred more words and done the next hand but none of it autosaved :( We'll pick this up next time as I can't be bothered typing it out again today :)

Self Assessment - SNG edition (Part 1) There seems to be one thing you hear about constantly when anyone talks about becoming a good poker player in today's climate.. study. I'm fairly confident I read a tweet/reply from Dara O'Kearney the other week saying he does about 18 hours of study a week... *goes off to find tweet* 20-30 hours!! 30 hours is 4 day shifts at work for me, that's almost a full time job. It clearly works for Dara as a day doesn't go by where I open Instagram and find a story chronicling another final table run. I however, do not have 20-30 hours a week to study. In fact, I don't have 20-30 hours a week to play most of the time. It did get me thinking about what ratio of my free time I should use for study vs play. It's something I'm going to ask all the streamers/tweet Dara about to see what they think and try and work out a rough average to work with. I'm taking a guess now at 1 hour study : 3 hours play as the ratio. I'm also going to pose the question as to whether your level of skill and knowledge plays a factor. I would think at the highest level of game more study is required to find the smaller edges but at a lower level it's more about nailing the fundamentals 100% of the time. Edit: This has already taken me a few days to write and I've got Dara's responses here: Tweets. You'll have to open some of them to see other replies as it spilt into two at some point. I wish I did have 20-30 hours to spare for poker I'm starting to enjoy the studying and learning part of the game. I get a strange satisfaction out of seeing a situation and knowing that the decision I will make will the correct one because I've looked at something similar in the past. Even without doing hand reviews or proper study I get tested with pop quizzes about poker situations by my girlfriend, even though she is blissfully unaware that she's administering them. I was sat the other night playing some massive field MTT I had been given a ticket for from one the 'other' sites and I get A9o in early position. I fold. Two players after me go all in, as they tend to to in these hyper freerolls, and we get to see the flop, turn and river. "Told you, you should have raised with your ace" she says. I think the flop was Axx and two more bricks so that I would have won the hand. The other two players had JTs and 4's. "I'm pretty sure I'm behind both of those hands" I replied as I opened the ProPokerTools website. I had passed my test :) Checking these little things from time to time reminds that slowly you might actually be getting the hang of the game. This might be one single situation out of millions of possible scenarios but it then generates a tree of related scenarios that use the same rough equities. You might be the one with JTs and think you're up against 55-77 and A2-A8 and with this info you know you're going to be a slight favourite. A good thing to know in the heat of the action! The more time you can spend doing these things, the bigger the tree of scenarios you create, and hopefully remember, the easier it will be to make the right decision in any given situation. That's my theory anyway ;) With this months promo not being to my taste I've found myself playing on sites outwith Unibet a lot more recently. This have been advantageous from a studying point of view because it allows me to collect hand histories for pretty much every game I play. I also managed to get myself into the Holdem Manager 3 beta so I decided that I'd make a fresh database from the 1st of September and make a conscious effort to run it all the time, tag hands and review tournaments and SnGs after their done. I also though it would be a good idea to do some of the history reviews here and essentially talk out loud. I could go through them on my own and just say I played brilliantly but there are much smarter people than me on this forum that I can gleam information off of if I just write it all down and let you point out all the mistakes :Cool:. The first game I'm going to review is a 10-man $0.10 SNG on 888. I've been getting daily spins on the site for the last few months and they tend to give out tickets to freerolls that run daily at various times. These freerolls pay out 2000+ players so the min cash is normally $0.10 or so. I've managed to rack up a whopping $1 or so in winnings and decided I'd use it on a SNG or 2. I also knew I wanted to do a hand review like this so I needed some hands to go over and I think SNGs provide the best source of material because they include Push/Fold decision, ICM decisions and also some deepstack early game decisions that relate to MTT play. The SNG lasted 71 hands and we'll just get this out of the way now, I won it. I think it would be easy to just pick another SNG where I didn't cash and try and work out what I did wrong but I think there is equal merit in looking at a game that ended well to see if decisions were correct or if I just ran well. I also specifically remember tagging a number of hands in this game because they were spots I was unsure about. Better mention the HUD stats as well as they'll be appearing on all the replayer screenshots. The stats represent the following things from left to right :- Name / Big Blinds /VPIP% (Voluntarily put in pot) /PFR (Pre flop raiser) / Post-Flop aggression factor / Recorded hands Steal attempt %/ Fold to steal %/ 3bet%/ Fold to 3-bet % / C-bet % / Fold to C-bet % There was a good discussion between @Karl_Parrish and Dara (I'm not stalking him, honest) on Twitter recently about the use of HUDs and whether they're a good or bad thing. Karl has written an excellent blog on why he thinks they're a bad thing which you can find here. It's a good read and makes so excellent points as to why they could be a bad thing for poker. I personally like having a HUD, mostly because I like knowing how many big blinds I have. I know it's a simple calculation most of the time but hovering over a rectangle on screen is just that little bit easier. I'm also terrible at paying attention to hands I'm not in so my HUD buddy does it for me. It doesn't want to look at Facebook or Twitter, it doesn't watch Twitch so it can troll Ian, it just sits looking at the poker table watching what players are doing. Every now and again I'll ask it if a player has been playing a lot of hands and it'll give me an answer. The answer will never be something like "He has aces, fold", it'll always be something like "VPIP 12%". HUDs don't tell you how to play against someone in the hand you're in, they just tell you what that person has been up to in the past. It's an indication of what they might have but by no means is it a guarantee. Anyway, the HUD debate is for another post.. Let's get to the SNG then! The blinds are 10/20, we start with 1500 chips and and I'm seated UTG +1 for the first hand. Hand 1 UTG folded, I folded and then it went limp, limp,, fold, HJ makes it 4x, CO calls, BTN calls, BB calls. BB donk leads for 490 (pot). HJ clicks it back to 980, BB moves all in and HJ calls... and then there were 9. This should hopefully give you an indication of the level of play and action in these SNGs. Things seems to move pretty quickly in terms of chip movement and it appears a number of players are not thinking too deeply about their plays. I'm going to skip any hand where I think the decisions to fold pre-flop is obvious and to give you an idea of what I think is obvious here's the first 10 hands in short form. With the A3s hand in the SB there had been two limpers and the blinds were 20/40 with a 5 chip ante so I was calling 20 chips into a pot of 185 which is 9.25:1. I like those odds :) On the QTo hand UTG had limped and then UTG+1 shoved for 600 chips (10bb) which is why I folded. I think it's a fold pre-flop from MP anyway but when you just see the runout it looks unfortunate. UTG had 7's and UTG+1 had A3s Hand 11 There have already been another two eliminations and we are down to 7 players. Blinds are now 50/100 with a 10 chip ante. We are dealt Q5s in the big blind. UTG limps and it folds round to the small blind who completes and I check. Flop comes 665 with two diamonds. UTG bets 200 into the 370 pot and the small blind folds. This was the first real decision I had to make and the first hand I marked. Looking at the HUD it's a mixed bag of information. Villain has played 45% of the hands so far but has never raised, so they like a limp. Unfortunately he has not made a c-bet or folded to one so we have zero post flop information to go on with this decision. Is there a standard action here? I have no idea but here were my thoughts. Villain shouldn't really have a 5 or a 6 in their hand. I'd expect a player that is limping a lot to have Broadway type hands or a low to middle pair. With me having a 5 and there already being two 6's on the flop that makes either 5's or 6's tricky to have. Also the bet size seemed strange. You can't customise the quick bet buttons on the client so the villain has typed that number in, not just randomly clicked the 1/2 pot button. It seemed on the large size to me because if I had a 6 I'd want my opponent to catch up a little and I wouldn't want them to be scared off a call. With that in mind I check-raised and UTG folded. Is that a losing play long term? Hand 12 We're in the small blind now with As3h and 18bb behind. It folds round to the button who limps for 100. I complete in the small blind and BB checks. Flop comes 6s7hJh. I check, big blind bets 100, button calls and I get out of the way. Preflop I was getting nearly 6.5:1 to call so I think it's OK but from my tiny sample of hands (3kish) the SB is the only position with a negative bb/100 so maybe it's the kind of hand I should let go and just keep the chips. I don't really know :Speechless: Hand 14 Facing two limpers I wasn't exactly sure what to do here. If it was a higher stake I'd be very weary of the limp from the 8bb stack but thankful HUD buddy has been taking notes and is showing that both players have been playing lots of hands and never raise. I was confident that if it had folded to me unopened the 8's were a snap shove but I wanted to check just how wide I could shove. So I did.. There are definitely some hands there that I wouldn't shove with in that range and given the stake and general level of play I'm likely to get called more than I should so I don't think I'd want to get it in with T8s. I also checked to see if the two limps made much difference to my shoving range using ICMIZER. Those two little limps basically cut the shoving range in half which is quite surprising to me. It also throws up some of that ICM voodoo where AJo is a fold but KJo is a shove and the same with A9s and K9s. I don't think I'll ever understand the dark art of ICM :Rofl: Everyone ended up folding and I picked up a helpful 4bb. That's enough words and pictures for one post I think. We'll return part 2 to have a look at the middle part of the game.

Thanks for the kind words guys. We've been here before so I'm not too concerned about the grind back. I got €50 from Bounty Bandlands so the month starts with just under €100.

August wrap up - It's been a rough one The hunt for Bounty Badlands glory has taken it's toll on me, both mentally and financially. It was always going to be a risky option to try and go for the high leaderboard, playing €10 and €25 games, when you start the month with €550 in the account but it seemed to work out OK last time so I didn't see the harm in trying again. On the last day of the month as I type this out it's clear to see that harm can and has been done. My results sheet for August is a wash of negative values and crimson filled cells. Since my PLO bounty victory on the 8th I have had just two winning days. €12 was the profit on both of those days, only €12 :(. The rest of the month has been filled with sessions full of runner runner bad beats, never making my draws and watching my opponents always hit theirs. Now I know it's easy to blame coolers and as humans we have selective memories when it comes to remembering bad things over good things but I really have been getting battered this month, honest!. I consider myself I pretty level headed guy and 99% of the time can brush off a bad beat knowing that I'm going to win in that situation in the long term but there is only so many times you can see things like your aces get called by 72 suited preflop and then the board go runner runner for a flush I can take. I got to the point this month where I just didn't want to play on Unibet. I'm still at that point now :(. Having seen the promo for next month I don't like the sound of sitting at NL4 grinding out 150 flops per day for the chance to win €35. I have zero interest in that. The MTT schedule isn't due to change until October at the earliest so with my now decimated BR I have the choice of 4 or 5 MTTs to play on any given weeknight. Having to move down in buy-in will also increase the chances of me getting it in good and getting punished so it's tough to get motivated at all. They are also adding casino spins as a reward for completing a step in the missions next month which I cannot use so I don't really want to complete those either. The only saving grace is the UK tour. I have managed to continually turn over a comfortable number of tickets during August and results have been ok. I have played 2 UK tour finals this month and I stone bubbled both of them, including running into Startlinggrope/ChapInAChairs Aces blind vs blind for the KO. Despite this I still have €133 worth of tickets now after starting with €50 at the beginning of the quest so things are not too bad on that front. I expect those sats are the only things I'll be playing consistently in September. I've been playing a lot more off site this month too. A few of the other sites have been offering free daily sat tickets for thing and I try to play them as often as possible. I'm not worried so much about the 'rags to riches' prospect of winning something from nothing but rather getting free sat practice against people that are actually trying. You can practice all you want on play money but once you reach the 2nd or 3rd tier of a sat structure people are really playing and in some cases have bought in with money so there is much less mucking about. It provides a great platform to practice and learn about this specific format of poker and I've been enjoying it. As long as the sites keep offering them I'm going to keep playing them :) Let's get the results out the way.. ** END OF MONTH REVIEW (August 2017) ** +/- for the month: -€512.83 (BR Total: €42.70)Days played: 24Losing days: 19Winning/Break Even days: 5Sessions/Games played - Cash: 14, SNGs: 6, MTTs: 249ROIs - Cash: -16.34% , SNGs: 90.43% , MTTs: -26.71% ** FULL RESULTS ** Goals for September Get out the hole and start playing with profit again.Blog regularly and post hands for discussion and analysis that will be helpful to the community.Grind the UK Tour Sats. No change for Septembers goals. Back to basics and working on my game. Let the games commence!

GL in the DSO!

Variance: An American Horror Story "F**k this game, f**k it right in the face" - MoreTBC (13/08/17) I imagine an expletive filled rant is the way many a Sunday night grind finishes. Above were my exact words after getting it in good with AJs versus ATo only to have the T play on a flop A ♦️ ♦️ ♦️ ♦️. It completed a session where my aces were cracked in the Sunday Deepstack by tens and in the Ten-X Bounty I went all in on Axx with AKs, after calling a small stack shove and having the biggest stack at the table call, only to have the big stack call me with QT and go runner runner Q and T. There have numerous other trips to the dark side of variance over the last 48 hours but eventually my tolerance to bad beats ran out and the rant came out and the client was closed for the night. The pain of being battered by run bad was coupled by starting to watch a new TV series. American Horror Story is by no means new but for someone that finds themselves watching Twitch more than TV I'm a little behind the times. For anyone that does not know about it my limited Google search suggests each season revolves around a generic horror theme. Season one for example is about a haunted house and tells the story you've read 100 times in a horror movie synopsis about a family that moves to a new house with a terrible past. Season two is about an Asylum and the trend continues like that. I watched the majority of the first season during the Sunday grind and I've been enjoying it. It's weird and basically a story I've watched countless times before in movies but the way they've done it makes you want to see what cliche is going to happen next. It did get me thinking though, variance and the swings in poker have all the traits of a good horror movie. Lets use the premise from above about the haunted house as our example. In the movies the start of the film is always the family moving into their new house, or making their first deposit. Sometimes it can be for a good reason, like a new job, and sometimes it can be for a bad reason, like the cancellation of Supernova Elite. Either way things always start off well. Friendly neighbours, deposit bonuses, life is good for the first few scenes. Of course we all know this never lasts long and eventually the films protagonist starts to make themselves known. Objects move, doors bang.. runner runner bad beats. The peaceful existence of both family and players starts to slowly unravel. Eventually you find yourself looking into the shadows as you hover over the 'All In' button with AA to see if it's there, watching you. It is, and it's ready to give the other player a pocket pair and a set on the flop. The climax of the film always requires a head on clash between good and evil, deuces against AK. At this point the family are usually down on their luck, they're on their last buy-in, and now they have to go heads up with evil itself, variance. One last all in to determine whether the world is going to end, and they'll have to redeposit, or if they can live happily ever after... with a bankroll. In the movies the families deuces nearly always hold and life is good. In the poker world sometimes the outcome is not so rosy. Either way the film always ends with a tease that there might be a sequel. "You have received a new bonus" I started thinking about other horror films that accurately describe what variance is like to poker players and the best one I could come up with was a 2014 film called 'It Follows'. IMDB have nicely summed it up in one line for me. "A young woman is followed by an unknown supernatural force after a sexual encounter." What you learn very quickly at the start of the film is that if you have sex with someone the supernatural force is after then it'll turn it's attention on you. It'll then slowly hunt you down until it gets you or you pass the curse on to somebody else. This basically sums up variance. Every time you hit a two outer on the river you pass the curse of running bad onto the next unsuspecting victim. In the film this doesn't happen a lot but in poker it's a constant battle. The only way to beat this monster is by making good decisions. Sometimes it'll still chase you down even though you're making the correct choices and sometimes you'll pass it on making bad decisions but the good players will always stay far enough away from the monster to survive. A combination of the haunted house storyline and 'It Follows' is how the second week of August has been for me. It started all nice and happy with many wins and slowly descended into terror and bad beats. Sunday was the final scene and it was one of the few times a movie didn't fade to black with a happy ending. Don't worry though, there will always be a sequel here and after taking tonight night off to do a few re-writes we'll be back filming and trying to make a blockbuster hit :)

August week 1 - 31st July to 6th August 'Start as you mean to go on' someone said at some point in the history of time. It's a motto I subconsciously decided to live by as the first tournament of the month resulted in a 3rd place finish and 5 bounties. The €10 turbo bounty providing the ideal start to a month of bounty hunting. The evening session did not match teh positive start to the day unfortuantely. I only picked up 1 bounty and did not cash anything for money. I did play a UK25 sat which I promptly busted and then while attempting to close the window I had a brain fart. I saw the popup as "Would you like to rebuy? Yes/No" even though it's a choice between rebuying with a ticket or cash so I ended up firing an accidental cash bullet. Luckily it paid off and I picked up a €100 ticket 🆒. As I've mentioned before I don't intend to go for the low league during the Bounty Badlands promo but I think there's cash value in playing them. I'm happy to say this theory was proved right on Wednesday as I finished 11th with 9 bounties for a nice €22 haul. Up in the dizzy heights of the high league things went from good to great as another 3rd, this time in the €25 bounty, resulted in 6 bounties and a €120 payday. Unfortunately that was it for the night, minus a token bounty in the Ten-X Turbo. UK tour sats were also not successful with 2x €4 and 2x €25 tickets down the drain. Worked on Thursday so no play outside a quick mission completion. Friday saw another return to the €10 Turbo Bounty final table with a 4th and 5 bounties added to the stack. No other results to note and another UK €4 and €25 ticket torched :( Saturday brought some positive results as I finished runner up in the Four for Noon and the lunch turbo for €40. Was working at night so couldn't get stuck into the bounties :( Big ol' Sunday session was on the cards and it was probably a 12 hour day. First cash of the day was a back to back FT in the €4 lunch turbo, collecting a bronze medal for my troubles and €11.66. Next results was a glorious 9 bounties in the €10 Turbo Ante Bounty and another 3rd for €48. Rounded off the night with a small cash in the 'Early' €4 Bounty and a 4th in the €25 bounty inc. 4 bounties. All in all a good way to round off a pretty decent week. Profit for the Week: €34.47 Monday 07/08/17 Another good start to the week with 6 bounties collected (3 at €10 and 5 at €25) along with the first conversion of a €4 UK ticket. Internet crapped out at the end of the night and when it came back on I was bubbling the Ten-X Turbo :( A losing day but a positive for the Badlands. Tuesday 08/08/17 Ohh boy do I have an ICM corner for you today. We'll get to the voodoo in a moment but first a quick look at the results for the day. Finally picked up a gold trophy after an epic heads up battle with @KostenBerg in the €10 PLO bounty. 9 bounties and €97 for my troubles. Also picked up single bounties in both Ten-X events to keep my quest for the Badlands leaderboard alive. The UK tour grind was also fruitful as I won a €4 and €25 to pick up my second €100 of the month. To round off the evening I won a HU SnG and a buy in at both NL4 and PLO10 while completing missions. Now then, let's crunch some numbers... Hand 1 All of the following hands are from the €25 UK tour sat and are around the same two levels. I don't have any particular reads on anyone and at these stack depths it probably doesn't really matter. In order to do the calculations I found this cheeky little site http://www.holdemresources.net/nashicm. It'll calculate the Nash ranges for you if you give it stack sizes and payouts and is a whole lot cheaper than ICMizer :) Now you always hear stories about players folding aces in sats and when this hand came up those stories crossed my mind. We've seen in some previous calculations that the calling range can be pretty tight in some situations so I really wasn't sure what to do. I also can't remember 100% what I did here but I'm pretty sure I called. Would you have done the same? Let's see what the voodoo machine thinks.. It's a lot of letters and numbers I know. The first column is the position of the first player that goes all in, the second is the position of the player that calls the shove and the third column is any player calling the shove and first call. I've highlighted where we are in this particular case but I think it's good to show the whole thing so you get an idea of what you could call in any of the positions in a situation like this. As you can see there are not many hands we should be calling here but QQ is one of them. I think there is an argument that while it's profitable it may be so thin that it would make sense to wait but we all know people are not shoving nash ranges on Unibet :) This is the point I realise I highlighted the wrong range :) We're in the 15.4% range and it's a pretty clear call. I thought it would be closer but it seems not. Hand 2 Turns out this is from the €4 UK sat but it's a similar situation to the one above. Again I think I called because I felt blind on blind I'd be ahead of a good chunk of the hands he was shoving and I'd still have a few chips if I lost. Again, I'm surprised at just how wide we can call in this situation, as well as how wide you should be shoving. Villain has KJo. Hand 3 Now this was the last hand of the €25 sat. I remember calling and thinking back to what I was saying in hand 1 about people folding aces and thinking it was a terrible call. I can't remember the exact board but I think there was a K and A and the second short stack knocked out the smallest stack and everyone got a ticket. When I was trying to decide if I should call or not I figured that I had the chips to lose and that I only need to beat one of them to end it. Let's see what the voodoo machine said.. It's super thin but it's a call. Even aces are just +0.19 and you're breaking even with JJK and AKs. It's one of those where you could happily fold and know that you have more than enough chips to still be in an excellent position to get a ticket, or you can be pure maths and make a high variance but profitable call. So there you have it, some interesting spots to mull over. If you're railing the Badlands leaderboard I'm in 6th as of the early morning of the 11th with 66 points. Leader has 83 but it doesn't take much to catch them up :) I'll be back next week with another bounty update and some more ICM and push fold stuff for you to look over.

Yeah, not too sure why they have starred out the aliases and it also seems strange to use initials on the main Unibet website leaderboard and aliases on the in-client one. Make it easier for people to rail me I guess :) I have an update to do shortly but quick prop bet update is that Ian politely declined the bet because he is taking a week off this month and won't be playing enough sessions to make it a fair fight. I was not aware of this before proposing the prop :) I'm sure we'll do something in the future.

** END OF MONTH REVIEW (JULY 2017) ** +/- for the month: €347.60 (BR Total: €555.53)Days played: 28Losing days: 15Winning/Break Even days: 13Sessions/Games played - Cash: 22, SNGs: 15, MTTs: 246ROIs - Cash: 0.88% , SNGs: -57.42% , MTTs: 16.58% ** FULL RESULTS ** Goals for July Get out the hole and start playing with profit again. :Speechless:Blog regularly and post hands for discussion and analysis that will be helpful to the community. :Wonder:Grind the UK Tour Sats :Thumbsup:Point one is going to take a while so we'll skip that but there seems to be an upward trend towards that being completed at some point before I die :) Blog posts have been fewer and further apart. This partly due to the work office move giving me less time to type, partly due to it being a bit of a boring month regarding play (until the end of the month) and partly because I'm still trying to work out how to make it a more interesting read going forward. UK tour grind is going well. I've been trying to play the 3x nightly €4 whenever I can and the odd stab at the €25s. Ticket haul is always changing so it's hard to keep up for results but as of the end of the month I had 1x €4, 4x €25 and 1x €100. I've already split the 100 and a 25 as well as giving away the 25 Pirahn gave me (as he wouldn't accept it back) to Mynona so she can try and reach another UK event so the current ticket collection is already different :) Goals for August Get out the hole and start playing with profit again.Blog regularly and post hands for discussion and analysis that will be helpful to the community.Grind the UK Tour SatsBounty Badlands supremacy and (hopefully) prop bet 2.0 with Ian SimpsonMuch the same for the goals in August. The grind continues to both get into profit and to make another UK tour stop. I'm going to have to be a little more aggressive I think and play more UK €25's as I'm running out of time for Nottingham and really need to get at least one package before the end of the second week in order to have time to get time off work and get things booked. Bounty Badlands is a promo that really works for me. I like bounty tourneys and I tend to do well in them. I had thought I might try for the High and Low league but after one day quickly found it's just too much. I don't have the patience to sit in a €1 grinding out the small wins and it's too many tables. I'd rather focus on the high league and the UK tour. What I am going to do is play the two evening €4 bounties because I think they're going to have a lot more value to them this month. More players, playing looser, to try and get on the leaderboard can only be a good thing. I've also created a prop bet for Ian :) I have sent it to him but he was drinking in Malta so did not confirm it was booked. Darkangel asked me why the % I'd give away if I lost was so high. It's an understandable question, Ian would be in line to win multiple thousands of pounds if I won a UO event... But let's be honest though, that's not going to happen :). The much more likely outcome is that I min cash a UK tour event, win roughly £400 and have to give him £40. I also think it's more balanced that my % is much higher because I can play every day of the month for the bounty promo if I choose whereas Ian tends to only play when he's streaming. He also streams twice a week during the day where there is only 1 qualifying bounty tournament. I have multiple times more opportunities to score points than poor Iany so it makes sense to me that less of his potential winnings could be lost. Ian is also going to attend a lot more live events than I will so that also increases his chance of cashing. I won't be in Vegas or Brighton for sure and all the other stops are package dependant so it may be 2018 before I have a chance to pay up :) Ian on the other hand will be at them all I expect. Anyway, that's the concept, we'll see if he agrees when he returns to streaming :)