I figured out that all the fees for selling and buying shares had come to about £120 in the last month, which was a bit of a shock. Share dealing rake obviously. I need to calm it down a bit and just sit on the shares I have now. That was the original intention, but I got caught out in a bit of rollercoasting…

For poker I’ve been playing on Cake – 6max, ultra low stakes. More for relaxation rather than anything intense since I’m still very busy on that web contract. I logged in and found $60 just sitting there, so decided to see if I could build it up a bit. Reckon I’ll try a 10 buy-in BRM which is edgy, but I can’t face nl4 for too long. Setting that limit means at least I’ll have to put some effort into nl4 before spazzing it away at nl10. Plus Cake is kinda interesting with no HUD allowed – I’m making a lot more efforts with the notes (like ‘spazz bastard owes me $8′, ‘called me fish – DIAGF’ etc).

For returning to Rush I’d need to redeposit, but I want to see how Full Tilt copes over the next couple of months first. I expect them to be ok, but who knows what damage has been really done under the covers. That may change next week since I have the whole week off, and once the Cake money is spewed out, I’ll need to go somewhere obv.

Money is on my mind though – I was looking at mortgages to get an idea of what kind of depost I need, and it seems to be going up each time I look. It seems the maximum mortgage I could get is about £200k, which gets you a 1 bedroom flat in Cambridge. I looked at the house prices in Sheffield where I used to live, and they look a bit more reasonable, but then when I looked at the job market that was lower paid too. That would mean I could only get a smaller mortgage, which meant a 1 bedroom flat again! It’s not like I’m low paid really, so god knows how everyone else manages (well, they all get married and buy as a couple. Guess I really do need to marry for money…).

Anyway, I found this website which shows how prices have changed in the UK over the last 10 years;

Regular stuff like food, drink, pensions, petrol was all roughly up 40% so that’s what I’m taking as the yardstick to measure everything else against.

House prices up a whopping 123%

Average salary up only 13%

Level of UK Consumer debt up 158%

How can that be a reasonable way of living? I must be stupid living in this country, esp without rakeback…

I played a few husngs instead, which were admittedly really really easy – the only losses were from legitimate bad beats (high 2pair vs low 2pair ends with the villain somehow getting a backdoor flush of all things!). However the traffic was dismal, and the only reason why I got any action at all was because there was one other player who was determined to play.

I then switched to 6max for a bit. Just for fun, no real intentions of taking it too seriously. Amazingly it was actually enjoyable, and I turned a proft that felt well earned rather than luckboxed (srsly). It was also remarkable that the past year of concentrating solely on husngs had also taught me a few things that helped as well.

In particular were the moments that the table broke up leaving you heads up against the other remaining player. They were incredibly bad at heads up play – generally too tight more than anything. You could run over them by just continually betting, and I think in these spots I was winning at a massively faster rate than when the table was full.

I also was less of a calling station, although I’m not sure if heads-up had taught me that. Maybe it did, because things were definitely improved.

However Cake still remained unappealing. I have never before seen my winnings+rakeback line diverge from my winnings line so quickly. The amount of rake I was paying seemed to be horrendous – the Rakeback deal I have is pretty good, so perhaps not so painful, but it just didn’t seem right. On the other hand rakeback is a variance free payment, but that’s kind of stupid – it’s not as if it’s paying bills.

So the plan is to take the money back out of Cake and return to Full Tilt (well, maybe with a detour to BetRaiser and see if a rake-free (no rake!!!) game of microstakes 6max is doable when there’s only 20 people ever on the site). What I am changing though is opening my game up more – I’ll still play husngs, but not exclusively. I’m going to play 6max again, with some MTTs thrown in, and also dabble with some other games like Omahaha (Omalol?). Focussing on one game for the last year was good for my poker skills, but I think it’s not really benefitting me as much as it did. Time to take a sabbatical…

I added a new column which converted their $ values for bb (I think? – probably got it wrong, but whatever), then the lowest values for each buy-in level is bolded. Finally I added another column which gave the bb reduced by my rakeback (albeit at my rate as an affiliate – drop a few points off that for the masses).

It looks like nl5 might be ok with Bodog, and then above that Cake looks good. nl2 is clearly a waste of time. The only thing about Bodog is that it’s not a regular rake sign-up, it has to be a ‘secret’ bonus offer I can offer through people already signed up with meteoricpoker.com and I haven’t figured out how to enable it yet (sooo professional!). I already have the Cake account though, so could just jump in at nl25. No HUD though which is a bit scary.

The last one was for $50 and you had to play 20 days out of the month, this one’s a lot shorter where it’s just 9 days for $25. Still nothing to complain about

I’d only just managed to clear the $50 rush poker bonus. It had been steadily clearing over the last month and I ended up with just minutes to go and 5 Full Tilt points left for the last $5. So, despite all the obvious dangers, I popped open a bunch of NL25 rush tables with the intentions of fold, fold, fold just to get those last few points.

Somehow though I kept getting dealt great hole cards like AJs and I *had* to see a few flops. You’re probably expecting me to say that it all went tits up and in chasing that $5 of bonus I lost over $50, but no! It went my way for a change! I took a couple of 50bb pots and then shoved a TPTK (I know, dodgy) to see my opponent on a flush draw – it held!

So in exactly 3 minutes and 45 seconds I played 36 hands winning $53! Even more importantly I cleared the final $5 of the rush bonus. Sustainable?

It’s perhaps just as well though – this month has been breakeven on the husngs so far. My attempts at the $20s has been quite swingy, and I’ve not had any major heaters on the $10s to cover it. In fact as of right now it’s actually -ve with only rakeback pushing it into the black (well almost. -$0.50 is close enough).

I then was told that I’ve a $100 bonus on Ultimate Bet to be played out. So I’ve switched there for the time being. The bonus isn’t so great though – once I’d figured out how much rake it would take to clear, it turns out that it takes almost three times as much as the Full Tilt bonus took. So pretty much so slowly that it’s probably not worth it. It’s the same thing for the Cake sign-up bonus – I still haven’t even cleared $10 of that and I’m probably close to the time limit on that one.

Since my site is promoting these sites with their bonuses etc, I think I ought to put some work into figuring out how to compare one site’s bonuses against another, and display them in terms of Rake. I should imagine there will be some big differences…

Update: Wow, the players at UB are annoying. Some guy limped his AA and unfortunately I walked into it with TP – he then typed ‘f u’ into the chat. Aggressive calling at it’s best. Then today I had a player who showed his hole cards every time I folded my button preflop. I had to explain how meaningless that was since it was getting really irritating (so maybe not so meaningless). I’d made a couple of bad moves and he was ahead 2:1 and he started suggesting I needed to go all-in (blinds were still 10/20 – very slow structure at UB). I obliged him with JJ but unfortunately his 99 hit a set.

Sooo, what can I post about? Not much I guess. Full Tilt is still proving to be the best site to play husngs – plenty of players and not much waiting for a game. Tonight I’ve been playing on Cake (under the alias ‘Rolf Lmao’ – geddit? ), but it takes too long to sit and wait for someone to join you, so I’ve been joining anyone waiting on a game $25 or less (not many $25s, although the one I played I won – whoohoo!). So far been doing ok, but not getting many games over $10.

Here’s a great hand though – I love bluffing, but when someone showed me that they folded top pair it makes it well worth the many, many times that I get called down;

There is some history on that hand – I’d played the same line of cbet, check turn, fold river about 3 times, with him making a PSB on the river each time. So I was actually waiting for a hand to have some value to take this line anyway, but I figured he’d also give the click-it-back action some credit on the river anyway, and a bluff would work just fine too (which it did lol!). However I had been putting that PSB of his as a stone cold bluff to simply buy the pot, and to see him fold away a hand with decent value really surprised me. I guess those other PSBs weren’t bluffs at all (maybe).

Oh, and here’s another one (different opponent);

Possibly a bet for value more than a bluff, but very thin really…

Previously I’ve mentioned that I was holding off on new accounts until I was at NL50 or NL100 so I could clear sign-up bonuses effectively, but now I can’t be bothered. I’m not rising up the ranks quickly enough in cash games to get to that point any time soon, while at the same time husng’s are mostly pulling in more cash than these bonuses offer anyway (well mostly, that $150 crash in my last post was pretty painful).

So far this morning I’m $100 up playing $10 games. The lobby’s not packed, but I rarely have to wait more than a minute for a game. Level of play has been pretty bad too, although not any more than Full Tilt or Pokerstars.

Interface is really clean and easy – I haven’t had a single misclick yet which is a good sign. Deposit and creating the account was all straightforward too.

The main reason I wanted a Cake account was for their hand tracking policy – no HUD allowed, plus you’re allowed to change your screen name once a week. HEM imports the hand histories fine though (almost – it made a mistake on the prize for a 4man shootout, although it made the same mistake for a Full Tilt shootout as well once) – the strange thing though is that it doesn’t record your opponent’s names. Everyone is called CakeSeat8 etc. Makes it hard to go back and analyse a particular tournament when you can’t remember which one it was, which I guess is the point. Notes you make on players in the Cake interface do stay with that player even if they change their name, so that’s useful – essential even.

I’m happy so far (certainly while the new signup boomswitch is on!). Apart from I think I’ve put the tv remote into the washing machine with the bedding…

Update: The remote comes out of the washing machine looking incredibly clean. And it still works! (once it had dried out). I’d recommend it to anyone with grubby remotes…