Merry chrissymas

Yes merry christmas yohoho and a bottle of rum. Or soemthing. Hope you all had a good one and rejoiced as you were handed your generic socks and tasteless underwear.

Personally i have eaten a LOT of turkey. I've had to cook a duck, and 2 turkey roasts in the last 5 days so i'm fed up cooking. I like taking over this duty though because basically every1 else sucks at cooking whereas I rule at it. I don't feel this detracts from my masculinity at all. It is basic survival and if i want to roast some parsnips then f ** you i will.

Anyway enough of this nonsense, back to the poker.

I have followed up my good form of late with some excellent cash sessions on party 3-6 limit omaha/8. The american kippers have been excessively generous of late, no doubt boozed up on cheap wine, and I have been happy to take advantage of their magnaminous displays on the tables.

I have taken down a few small HE tourneys recently and have just finished a 365 player 30$ omaha/8 PL freezeout on party. I was pretty lo several times during this but managed to win a few allins getting into the last 50 and eventually built my stack up. By the time I reached the final table I was on about 60k. I won the first few hands and got up to 110K with 2nd on about 60k. At this point i moved into aggressive mode as blinds were 2k4k and all the fish were pretty shortstacked and trying to climb the ladder for $s.

I built up steadily , never fell below 130k and eventually won the heads up in a few hands to net a nice 2.7k win which is my biggest in a while. Sadly the norse horse, aka Royal Flush,had a 80 20 deal with me so i paid his good for nothing ass 540$.

Nevertheless even after the deadwood horse had been paid off, I reflected on a nice result and a good way to start the new year. Yeah well the old year isn't over yet. SHUT UP! look it's 9.07 am and ive been up since 11 am yesterday so cut me some slack.

ANyway best wishes to all you and ill be back soon.

Cat storms to victory

Well, ive alluded to the fact that my NL HE play has been quite shabby recently. THis is funny because its the game ive had the most success in overall and i rarely lose confidence in my game.
However recently i ahve been a kipper and have taken down very few results.

So, amazingly, today i managed to get a couple of results.

Firstly, i played a 40 handed 24 fo this morning. I got to the final table after some good cards. Eventually i get heads up with the same amount of chips as the kipper. Unfortunately i put in a very good impression of a herring in the heads up and managed to lose.

I used to regard heads up at the end of mtts as one of my strengths. I had roughly 3 times as many 1sts as 2nds to testify to this. In this game though, although i was a little card cold and the blinds were a bit big to allow too much play, i still played poorly and deservedly crashed out 2nd. Still a nice 220$ result to further boost my VC balance and restore a little confidence.

Later on i played the 36 FO, 4k grtd, but was out when i moved in on a J92 board with 88 and someone foudn the courage to call with 9T off the &*&*&*^*^ KIPPER. SO out in about 50th there.

After this weak effort, i deigned to play the 24 FO. 146 runners, i saw little early on and managed to reduce my stack to 1400 through some continatuion bets that went wrong.

I slowly rebuilt though and on the bubble refused to be dominated by the larger stacks and called and mvoed allin several times in +EV situations, winning enough of them to keep me afloat. There was one kipper who was stalling on hand for ahnd for ages. I went to his table and explained how hand for hand operated and why his fishy attempts to squeeze into the money were futile. His response to my generous and lucid(if self serving) explanation.... "SetofKIngs has 10 seconds to respond.." dont these fish know they are killing my hourly rate!

ANyway i managed to get a decent stack together, and reached the final table with about 30k or so. I doubled up eventually QQ v A9 , and one by one the other kippers fell till it was me on 70k or so, another guy on 160k and one more on 30k. I thought the CL was a bit of a kipper, as he had made several questionable calls which were lucky to be coinflips and he ahd won them.

We played a few hands then this hand happened.

The table bully raised to 16k on 2 4k, and i reraised from the BB with KK to 40k. I felt like he would call this. flop came K4d 5. I checked, he moved in for my last 40k and i called to find him with 3 3. He failed to hit his runner runner and now i was a commanding leader. I managed to double up the ss and the former chipleader doubled him through again, leaving himself with 28k. I find QTs in the sb now at 3k6k and i move in on him and he calls A7h. I hit 2 pair and now we were heads up.

I was determined to make this count after my earlier capitulation. We were roughly even in chips and we swapped a few pots so i ahd a small lead. Then this hand.

I have KK in the BB, he limps in , i make it 16k, he CR allin. I call in a shot to find him with J4 flop comes AAx leaving him very few outs and i go on to win. HOORAY.


Congratulations to 'Panther2003', who won $1,095 in '$2500 Guar't'd - 12 min rounds' tournament.

The cat is back in business, and the VC bankroll now stands at 2.4k$ so im pretty pleased with how that's gone. Thanks to anyone who supported me and I'll speak to you soon.

Limit Omaha/8 - the dominant game

Limit has surpassed NLHE in my poker book as my biggest earner. It's a great game. I really like the way the equity constantly changes through all the streets, so every street you face a new decision and are constantly forced to reassess strategy.

In NLHE generally, it often transpires that you are put to one key decision on one particular street. This will often be of the variety, does he or doesn't he have it. Of course sometimes the decision is purely a mathematical one, based on pot odds and likely ranges but more often you are asking yourself questions such as, "is this a bluff or will he fold if i push here."

In contrast in om/8, especially limit, the maths is dynamic, and many unusual situations are thrown up, such as hands where the nuts, particularly straights, are dogs to drawing hands. This is an adjustment many converts from holdem find hard to make.

For example, let's say u are dealt a nice hand like Ac 2c Ks Kd. You make a raise and are called by 789T double suited, a hand a lot of former holdem players like, due to the presence of suited connectors.

the flop comes down 569 with two clubs and a heart. Now 789T has hti the nuts with a backdoor redraw to a heart flush and some backdoor fh draws. Great flop! Well, despite the fact that he has nuts with a redraw, vs a drawing hand, he is actually behind on the flop!

http://twodimes.net/h/?z=1401926
pokenum  -o8 7d 8h 9d th  - ac 2c kd ks  -- 6s 5c 9c
Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 820 enumerated boards containing 6s 9c 5c
cards          scoop  HIwin  HIlos  HItie  LOwin  LOlos  LOtie     EV
9d 7d  Th  8h    224    497    323      0    141    328      0  0.458
Ks Ac  2c  Kd    293    323    497      0    469      0      0  0.542

So while 789T will cap the flop, he is losing a portion of every $ he puts in here. The other aspect of this is that if he makes the unwise decision to cap the flop, then he will be committed to further bets on later streets when he may be drawing dead or very thin.

This situation shows the importance of hand selection and care with certain hands. Most players are far too blase with this sort of thing which makes the game very profitable, if u are prepared to think about your hands and situations.

The VC challenge continues....

Well, I've not been putting much time into the VC challenge recently, however I have built my balance there up to 750$ now. Part of this was a cheat as i entered one of the VC bonus promotional codes in (vcradio1 i think) which gave me 50$ once i had earned 2500 action points.
This was easily done in an hour at the PLomaha tables, in which time i made about 100$ too so all good news!

Clearly the 1k is in sight now and this gave me the idea to scour round some of my other accounts where i have a residual small balance. Paradise immediately sprung to mind. I haven't played there for a while. It was profitable for me, but for some reason i grew not to like the site; whether it's the fireworks as you win a pot, the way players vanish in a magic cloud when they are knocked out of tournaments, the tiresome choice of whether to have donuts or champagne next to your virtual table, I DONT KNOW! I simply got bored of the site, although it has a lot going for it in some ways.

Plenty of kippers, the only site i believe to be on a par with party for poor quality players. Good range of freezeouts and some omaha tourneys which i like.

Anyway to cut to the chase i opened up my account and discovered 33$ just lying there untouched. Ok , let's get grinding. I thought PLom/8 was probably the safest route so i chucked my money down on a 50$ max buy in table and began grinding.

The players here seemed abysmal as expected. An orderly queue of kippers formed to be scooped, drawn out on and quartered by the cat. As the awe-struck and dumb-struck fish set fire to their $s in sacrifice at the sacred altar of the high priest of all things feline, i pondered on why some people don't get better at poker.

I mean I used to be a fish. But losing some money taught me a lesson and i strived to get better. So I did. Why can't they? Sometimes I want to reach out and stick my hands into cyberspace and strangle some sense into these people, even if it cuts into my profit margins.

Anyway, needless to say i destroyed kippers left right and centre, cleaning 6 of them out and running my table balance up to 220$ in less than an hour. Easy!!!!

So next step is to get this up to 1k at which point I can truly say I own all the small stakes fish and start making some real money at the bigger tables.

In other news, I've recently been playing omaha/8 limit rather a lot at party. I used to play these tables before but left due to a falling out with corals, my party skin of choice at the time. Now I'm back and already the ripples caused by a large feline launching himself into the waters of the 3/6 and 5-10 tables are being felt.

One fish started quoting my poker tracker stats at me the other day! He passed his blind to one of my riases, saying," according to PTO, you only ever raise AA or A2 so i'll give you respect and pass." I then proceeded to raise his blind every round, until in fury he reraised me and i capped.

Flop came 224.

I bet out he called.

Turn came K.

I bet out he check riased me i reraised he capped.
river came J.

He bet, i riased and he called.

He showed A245 for 2s full of fours.

I showed AKK3 for Kings full of 2s.

I scooped.

"Lucky ****."

Never claim you know the cat's game or he will punish you mercilessly.