The Silent Feline returns

Apologies for lack of updates. I've been trying to sort out my living arrangements and this has distracted me for a bit. Anyway pending the return of presumably glowing references for the cat that my estate agents have requested, I will be moving to the beautiful locale of the brighton marina shortly.

This is within spitting distance of the rendezvous casino, not to mention several pubs, so i expect to resume my debauched lifestyle of gambling and drinking shortly upon arrival.

Other News?

Well I haven't performed too well in the last 2 weeks and have barely broken even. I put this down to bad luck(obviously), being a little unsettled due to moving between ealing, brighton and the mean streets of Upper Warlingham, the london suburb equivalent of west compton. At least, that is the picture Royal Flush will paint of it should you ask. In actuality, it is a peaceful, leafy suburban district where the pimps, gangstas and hoes are replaced by squirrels, foxes and the odd deer.

Nonetheless in this time i managed to take down another omaha hi lo PL tournament, making 3 in the last month. Ive only started playing these recently so it is cool that i'm having some success. I find cash games very easy, but tournaments are always a different kettle of fish and i'm learning bit by bit. Many of the stalwart principles of NLHE tourney play, such as tight aggression, changing gears and bubble punishment all apply so I'll get there in the end.

Also, I note Hectorjelly has decided to stop posting on 1808. Although i rarely read the forum there these days, this is sad news. He is easily one of their top players and his analysis is very good. He doesn't tolerate fools gladly which rubs some of the kippers up the wrong way, but I'd rather have a rude excellent poster on my site, than a bunch of polite morons.

I jsut hope he stops chasing those polish women and pulls his finger out and updates his blog as it was always very readable.

As for me, I've posting on blonde poker recently. It's a good forum, graced by its eponymous meister Dave "El Blondie" Colclough and some other interesting and funny posters.

I've been asked to mock kippers by many folk. There's no need to ask twice, this is the cat's vocation and if it's kipper mocking you want, Kipper mocking you shall receive!

There's a poster on the site who, though he seems a nice enough guy, is highly confused with certain aspects of poker. I won't name and shame him but let his name be a mystery.

Here are some priceless snippets from the mysteryman's poker book of theory.

" if i get a k utg depending on how things are im probably out of 10 times, gonna limp twice raise maybe 2 or 3 times fold the rest"

Fold AK UTG 50% of the time. hmmmmm.

Dunno where to start. Clearly ridiculous, AK is rated as one of the strongest hands in holdem, mainly due to the fact that it is only dominated by two hands. Passing up equity here is the equivalent of carefully gathering a knife, a gun, a stapler and a pen and paper and proceeding to fire the gun at your feet, saw your nose off with the knife and staple the bloody mess to a piece of paper on which you write "screw you face, never liked you much anyway."

Another point brought up was in a live sitation where several people had deepish stacks. UTG limps, UTG+2 calls the 1600 BB with 44, its folded round ot the BB who riases to 4800 and UTG calls the raise. Does 44 call the 3200 raise off his 40k stack?

HELL yeah! Especially as he beleives the BB has a big hand AK KK or AA. The debate centred around whether this was a correct fold, with the majority of respected posters all saying its an easy call for implied odds.

Mystery disagreed of course. I have highlighted the most fishy of his comments below.

"i think the laydown preflop with 4 4 is correct, if he has u on a big pair, hes not really gonna know where he stands with a flop of something like 4 q k, if he has u on a big pair u could easily of just made trips on the flop. the correct preflop fold imo, calling a raise preflop when u know ur a huge underdog is just bad poker no matter wot odds ur getting"

Has he ever seen a good player? Dan negreanu, Doyle brunson, Phil Ivey, sod it most of the top professionals have built careers out of being able to play weak hands well yet mysteryman(who ,as he ceaselessly reminds everyone, finished 14th in the ladbrokes league last year - yes 14th!) feels qualified to cast judgement on these guys as playing "bad poker." Laughable really.

The "no matter wot odds ur getting" is funny too. More kippery than 15 cans of kipper concentrate crushed into a matchbox and calling a reraise with 72 o/s.

Other gems from mystery included the idea that he would fold the nuts, if he got too much action(god forbid you get action with the nuts) and "outplay" people later, and the idea that people who "know how to play poker" would fold AA preflop to too much action 1st hand of the WSOP.

I posted a quote from Paul Phillips refuting this and showing how folding AA to a table of allins is roughly equivalent to folding KK to A rag three times. He has yet to reply.....

I went into this in some depth so I'll post the link here rather than repeat my exasperated response to his rubbish. It's cool to have different opinions on poker but when you are talking nonsense front up and admit it.... you'll improve as a player!

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=6510.15 - This is folding AA preflop to a table of allins.

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=6461.0 is where folding the nuts on the flop is talked about.