Newff (a husng player on my blogroll, even though he doesn’t post anywhere near enough!) wants to try his hand at the 5k HU main event at the Canadian Poker Open in August. He started a thread on 2p2 asking for backers and people were putting up 1% shares which is about $60. I figured I could just about spare that, and he’s probably got a better chance of cashing than I have of throwing that at my $10 husngs . So I threw my share into the hat. Hopefully he’ll get enough for the ticket, although it’ll take quite a few people when everyone’s just up for 1% shares…

However I was watching some youtube of the final table, not realising it was the one where that had occurred – put into context it’s surprising he didn’t go completely ballistic. The whole thing is really worth watching – how to be completely run over by your opponents getting good cards;

episode 21, part 1/4
episode 21, part 2/4
episode 21, part 3/4
episode 21, part 4/4

(Sorry United113, 2nd Phil post in the same month – just grin & bear it…)

It was so easy to review them that I’m tempted to record games by default. The only thing that makes me hesitate is that while recording it makes Windows a bit glitchy occasionally. I’m already plagued with disconnect problems, so dunno if I want to add more crappiness to it.

I started out recording using the trial version of camtasia, and that was pretty good once I figured out how to set the frame rate & compression. At £200 for a license though it’s too expensive to buy (I’m not installing any warez – too much trouble with malware).

So then I tried UltraVNC screen recorder which is free, and it worked perfectly. Slightly more glitchy than camtasia, although I’d upped the framerate which was probably the cause. Here’s the result. I tried uploading it to YouTube and it came out really fuzzy which is a shame as the camtasia ones worked quite well, but I’m not bothered by that.

Which means that this weekend I’ve only played 6 $30 husngs. A pathetic 15 minutes worth of poker out the entire weekend! I did play some PLO as well – an entire 20 minutes worth. All of it breakeven – 54% itm.

What really bugs me is that during the week at work I spend an excessive amount of time thinking about poker, reading 2p2 etc. Being a programmer is a real headfuck of a job though, and by the time the downtools whistle blows I’m so totally braindead all I want to do is go home, eat, watch tv with some beers & fall asleep (best way of describing coding as a job is imagine that each day you’ve been given a book of hard suduko puzzles – you have to finish the book by 5:30pm. Next day start another book). The weekend is the big chance to get some poker time in, and then I go and blow it due to a belief that I’m about to downswing.

Dammit. One day I’ve got to win the Sunday million so I can get my priorities right…

Husngs;

It was another month of trying to push into higher staked games – each attempt busting out and having to back pedal a bit to regain confidence. My enforced goal of 20 games to acclimatise into $20s almost worked, but once I cleared the Full Tilt $50 bonus I switched over to Ultimate Bet (who’d offered me a $100 bonus, which might just get cleared by christmas at this rate). However I’d only left about $30 in that account so it was back to $5s and $10s (whatever was available) to rebuild the account a bit first. I’d just got it built to about $100 when it had dawned on me that my overall roll is over $700 – I should be trying $30s, not $20s!

Consequently the obvious happened and a couple of $30 games later I’d blown the account back down to $20 or so (that’s at the 125 game mark). Crawled back to $5s and $10s. I probably should just transfer a couple of hundred from another account, but whatever.

Despite my poor results, the husng players at Ultimate Bet are really bad. Preflop raises are fairly rare and you can pin them down to bluffer, station, nit etc fairly quickly. It seems though that I’m my own worst enemy. For instance I’ll have ground them down to 1/3 of the chips and then do some fool move like call a shove with ATo and end up reversing the chip count. My opponent has made so many bad moves that I start to treat their raises with contempt, and inevitably walk into a monster. Stupid stuff. I’ve even changed my avatar to a fish to remind me who the idiot at the table really is…

Cash;

No, I’ve not really returned to cash games – as explained in an earlier post I did a bit of rush to clear the last few $$$ of my FT bonus and somehow accidentally won at the same time. The blue line that shoots off at the end is rakeback + the bonus.

So end result is +$100 (rakeback on the husngs is $30 which cancelled out the husng losses). Compared to the last two months that’s fairly poor, but I’m not complaining – it’s still a gain!

Next month? I’m determined not to wimp out of playing the stakes I should be playing. That means $30 games. Unless I get a few games in a row that’ll mean transferring some money to my UB account, but no big deal really.

Less said about the cash games the better. As I said before, not going back there ever again (well, apart from the inevitable HU cash games I guess);

Feel free to shoot the ducks…

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…