i find it offensive that my own blog makes me fill out a captcha to comment

i wouldn't mind so much except i still get spam comments!

though they are cool spam comments with wise sayings.

tonight i decided to inflict a great pain upon myself. that's right, i cashed out of stars. fully aware of the myth of the cashout curse, i concentrated on not being struck down by the hoodoo.

sadly, i lost out. i won't bore you with the details and .... what's that i hear? you wanna know? sounds like schadenfreude. but i don't want to disappoint you. so here goes.
jj vs qq
qjx flop
bye bye 300bb pot
aj vs kq, he calls me all in on flop of a10x lol. turn j. lol more.
99 vs a5dd again im called all in on turn with a board of 2284dd
aa vs k2hh called all in on flop of 373hh
and the final straw was i had AcAs against 9s10s and flop was 678sss turn Js. lol thanks.

that said, i played pretty bad and made some shocking mistakes which is what i really try to concentrate on avoiding.

i've also had some terrible life news, in that i've literally been sent to Coventry. after being asked to go i had a 'yes man' moment where i thought if i said yes to everyone i would get zooey deschanel. only after putting the phone down did i realise it was a book first and not a film. and everyone knows you can't trust everything you read. another schoolboy mistake.

i want one of these

i'm not yet sure what for, but definitely do want

a busy week of spiders, hotels and things i have forgotten

i've seen on tv that spiders lay billions of eggs and then they all hatch at once and run out like horny trance addicts on crack shooting white stuff everywhere.
never though did i get into my car, only to see them performing their newly hatched ritual on my wing mirror and window. once i'd got into my car, i found it very difficult to get out.
thankfully my passenger was braver than i and casually despidered my car on my behalf.
that was a close encounter.

then i find my flat (not really my flat, just where i was temporarily sheltering from the heat) had no central heating or hot water. so i had to go to a hotel to shower one night. i had to go to town, ending up near tottenham court road since i booked it last minute and they were the cheapest (and it was a 4* woooooo)
only to arrive at 1am and get told by the check in man he has good news. sweets perhaps i though to myself. but no, just an upgrade to some king sweet or something. kinda passed me by till i walked into a room i decided i could definitely live in forevermore. sadly i was getting it at one fifth the real price and forevermore would equate to 3 weeks looking at my bank account.

here are some pics of magnificent room

As for the thing i forget, well i remembered that i had something else funny that happened, but that is all that i can remember. which is probably worse than just forgetting it.

you only tilt when you're winning

i once wrote a post about how i should stop looking at how much i'm winning/losing as it affects my play. i mostly was thinking about the losing side as this gets most coverage. obviously it's tougher to keep going when you're losing and it can cause bad play which causes more losses and this spirals into a decimation of money in account and less sleep in bed.

however, something i had completely neglected until recently was how winning affects me. i recently read someone else mention that winning can cause you to 'tilt'. i never realised how much this phenomenon affected me until last week. i really noticed that i also cared less about each decision when i was winning as my mentality was 'this hand doesn't matter, i'm winning loads even if i lose it.'
that was a session  set to be my best ever till i gave away half the winnings and didn't really care.
as such, it's another compelling reason not to check winnings/losses at least during the session. something i finally managed to do (or not do!) tonight.

i also need to stop obsessing over ptr and daily results. gonna try to check ptr once a week at most (and then cut down to once a month if i can)

after being 6k down in the year (twice) tonight i hit +5 figures which feels pretty good. hopefully i can start putting some volume in and see where it takes me.

kinda forgot my plan to try to include a picture with every post. here was my facebook inbox a couple of weeks ago.

i wonder if facebook is stealing other people's messages too?

getting my head checked out

so i went to the doctor to have a look at some wierd growth on my head. i couldn't see it, but others told me it was was some weird little thing and those are supposed to get looked at.
i turned up at the docs and casually mentioned that i also thought i was losing hearing in one of my ears. he checked out my ear and said it seemed fine. i told him when i was listening to music and things with headphones i couldn't hear well in one ear.
however, his most pressing concern was that i didn't make this point about hearing when booking my appointment at the gp, along with the abnormal head thing. no concern whatsoever about the rapid coordinated degradation of my body. merely, the protocol i had so seemingly spectacularly abused.
anyway, another happy ending as i realised a few days ago that in fact my headphones were faulty and one ear is quieter than the other. i'm not falling apart just yet.

some days

are clearly good.
some are clearly bad.
most are a mixture.
though usually i think one's frame of reference is more based on your perception of things which (allegedly) is easy to change.

that said, i think today was good. i officially retired from the world of 'work' and will finish up by the end of the month. at that point i will start looking for another house to rent (great timing).
other news from today - i have a 15th follower. this is a magnificent development and is a much more well rounded number than 14. so thanks to all my followers (including me)
other magnificent report from today was playing 5 a side. not only did we manage to finish before it started pissing down but i also managed to make a wonderous reaction save with my nose. on top of that i also managed to add some beautiful red patterns to the top i was wearing at the time. don't tell me i can't multitask.

my dreams are weird. i don't mean the ones when i'm awake. those are also weird but understandable. e.g. today i dreamt of following the car in front of me back to his house. i would wait for him to go inside, and in that time i would write a note. when he leaves his car i would go to it and take both wing mirrors, pick the lock and also take the rear view mirror, leaving my note which says "well, if you're not gonna use them, i might as well take them"

this seems to be a very big mix of thoughts. my last of which is that amazon's recommend thing is obviously broken. i bought *** ** *** **** on my account for a ladyfriend. obviously i've never watched it, nor do i intend to but it now recommends to me all manner of diabolical tv shows. i need to turn it off. or perhaps by many manly things to balance it out, like motor oil and guns etc

scoops

not ice cream, but stars's super tournament fest.
after complaining that tournaments tilt me i could do nothing but enter a couple yesterday. one was a 200 runner winner goes to south africa for the football thing where i busted 40somethingth.
the other was a scoop mid buy in winner goes home (or stays sat at home in his/her pyjamas) with many billions of dollars. (or maybe just one hundred and seventy thousand of them for company. i forget which but it was too many to count in one go).

4500 runners started and i had beat off over 4400 but with my sore hand, tired mind and no more chips i could no longer continue and went to bed with a profit earnt (/won?) at a mere few dollars per hour. over 10 hours of play, but i'm not too disappointed. i think i did ok considering i don't know what i'm doing and i wasn't far from making lots in one fell swoop.

but now, having gone to bed at close to 5am and getting up before 9 (ok, waking up close to 8, and getting up after 9) i am tired. i think i would like to work at google where they have a nap area. i miss that about the early years of primary school. siesta's. only the spanish kept up the idea of a national siesta every single day. almost makes me want to move there. that, along with the fact that the hot women can't say thirty, but instead pronounce it dirty. tempting...

a tied election

what do you do when a local election is tied?
you recount the votes.
4 times.
still tied.
now what?
cut a pack of cards. best of one. high card wins.
welcome to english law.
proof

tor(na)ment

i have decided that playing in tournaments tilts me. not the losing, the beats or the hours of play for a lower wage then you can get walking the streets looking for change. i just find the act of playing them to be boring and painful and just should not play any.
today, of course, i decided to play a few, some freerolls, some not free rolls. playing these alongside each other is bizarre. in some games you're fighting against people who quite possibly think that they are playing snap. or war. or a combination of war and snap they just invented in their heads.
at the same time you're playing people who have a semblance of intelligence and understand that there are no jokers in the deck. when playing many tables it is easy to lose track of which is which.
that actually made it more enjoyable till i realised i was treating every game like it was pretend money.
i think i managed one cash for what could was about 15c. every little helps.

then i decided that i should play cash. i spent most of my time reading the internet and watching telly vision. this did not bode well. i played truly awful and somehow ended up level. as soon as i realised i was not able to snap out of my mental state where i believed people would do what i was telling them to do out loud i decided to quit and eat a steak.

this cheered my up and now i lie here bloated, happy that i didn't lose, but sad because really i did lose since i should have won lots. and instead of playing snap in my mind against myself i am trying to formulate a plan so that when i choose to sit down and play i can get myself in the right frame of mind and achieve a enlightened state of focusness. i believe this to be possible as i am a yellow belt in the world of NLP. having cured my arachnophobia with just my brain i am sure i can fix this problem too.

as for today's pic, it's a photo of a building. a building that won awards for its beauty. voted most architecturally beautiful building in all of sweden. i was taken aback when i first saw it. what say you?

300 posts

a landmark, allegedly. mostly of my survival.

i like photos and am gonna try to put one in every post from now on. today's is a tongue twister which i recently took whilst on a ferry. i was on a train but then the train drove onto the ferry:

whilst traversing europe i rediscovered the 500 Euro note. this is worth a lot of money. all in one monopoly-esque note. i would hate to lose one. i hate losing a £5 note. but i do love finding the odd note in a jacket or trouser pocket i haven't worn for ages. imagine the joy at finding a 500euro note!


i don't have any (more) wise words or tales to regale you with on this magnificent occasion. but i will say this:
weekends in poker are either VERY good or VERY bad. there is no middle ground. last week i ran/played bad and wished to shoot myself in the vagina.
this weekend things went first very very good, then very very bad, but i quit before i wanted to do myself any harm.
what could have been, and for a short time was, my best ever day at the poker tables, turned into a very average day.


i realised i still have lots to learn in playing my best and putting in volume.

i also have to quit my 'job' this month so i can do things with my life. like watch every game of the world cup.

i'm narrowing down the things i don't want to do in life in case my acting career falls through. i've firstly decided that even though house is amazing, i don't want to be a doctor. i don't think i'd be very good.
this is on top of knowing i don't want to be an accountant. or a computer programmer. or a recruitmenteer. and definitely not a politician. they are lying turds.

most of my ideas of what jobs are out there come from watching tv shows. the latest show that i am watching is 'the thick of it.' it's written/made by armando iannucci. there was a spin off film from it called 'in the loop'.
i think he is one of my favourite comedians. he is genius. there was a sketch show he did, the first thing of his i saw, and i was hooked.

month's end

i'm done for the month. i almost didn't hit the supernova minimum of 7.5k points. this minimum requirement is down from 10k last year which for me is both good and bad. good because it's easier to hit each month. but bad because the monthly target to hit is lower, yet i still need 100k by end of sept. which would be 11k per month. and as of now i'm on about 40k which is slightly behind they year target even though i haven't yet missed a month.

anyways, here's a graph. a couple of horror session where i'd like to blame variance or something, but really i know i'm to blame for them.

now the boring bit is out the way, there is something very painful i went through a couple of days back. i got  bought a new shirt, and wore it when it was nice and warm. i find it rather presumptuous that other people both assume i need something new, and that i will like what they buy me. luckily, they have good taste.
so, it was warm enough to be naked under said shirt. i left my house and after about 10 minutes of strolling around i realised that the shirt was slowly ripping my nipples to shreds. too late to turn back and change, i had to suffer uncontrollably that evening. the pain only got worse and getting to sleep that night was tough; they still hurt lots the next day. so much so that i spent the whole day trying to ensure that day's t shirt didn't come in to contact with my nipples. i must have looked a bit of a tit.
i've never experienced this before and i was wondering whether anyone tested this shirt out before they decided to sell it to the unsuspecting masses.
i mentioned this to a lady who told me bra's are great for stopping this effect. she did stop short of suggesting i get one. just. but who knows, may she'll be presumptuous and just go out and by me one instead.

i need your comedy help

but first, i would like to vent my hate at all retarded drivers who think using their indicators = right of way.
you are a useless human being. up there with most people who have been on big brother.

anyways, here is where i need your help. i saw this superb note in the toilet at school today. if someone knows of a good response, please leave it in the comments and i will put it up on the wall (and take a photo of any forthcoming response) below this beauty:

i came up with a few, select your favourite if you don't come up with your own

1)whoever the filthy person is who keeps throwing away my paper coverings of the toilet seat, could they please stop?!?!11?
if you are dirty enough to touch something my bum has touched one would assume you enjoy it.
this is a university, i think (and therefore it is, or something).
i doubt anyone else takes dumps here, so i expect to see my paper seat waiting for my morning dump the next day. please stop interfering with my routines. are you not educated enough that you clean up after my shit?

2)i can't stop, i might catch AIDS off you

sweet charity

i have a charity poker tournament this weekend i half intend to play in. the top prize used to be a trip to vegas which i won once. now it's just cash. probably a bit less than the vegas trip would cost, but it doesn't seem so much fun when you can't win a holiday. i guess it's for charity so i will probably go anyway.

in order to warm up i thought i would play some tonight. i started off pretty horrendously (convincing i was practising my giving to charity) and ended just as badly. after unchecking all the post blind boxes, the penultimate hand was this

6-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: utg ($412.70 in chips)
Seat 2: utg + 1 ($804 in chips)
Seat 3: hero ($743.35 in chips)
Seat 4: btn ($677.35 in chips)
Seat 5: sb ($400 in chips)
Seat 6: villain ($416 in chips)
sb: posts small blind $2
villain: posts big blind $4

*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to hero [Ad As]
utg: folds
utg + 1: folds
hero: raises $8 to $12
btn: folds
sb: calls $10
villain: calls $8

*** FLOP *** [7h 6c Kd]
sb: checks
villain: bets $24
hero: calls $24
sb: folds

*** TURN *** [7h 6c Kd] [Tc]
villain: bets $52
hero: calls $52

*** RIVER *** [7h 6c Kd Tc] [Ac]
villain: bets $128
hero: raises $527.35 to $655.35 and is all-in
villain: pauses


pauses



timer starts



pauses some more






calls $200 and is all-in
Uncalled bet ($327.35) returned to hero

*** SHOW DOWN ***
hero: shows [Ad As] (three of a kind, Aces)
villain: shows [8h 9h] (a straight, Six to Ten)
villain said, "lol"
villain said, "nitrolling"

seeing as his stats are 19/17 i assume that means he has happy to be a nit who slowrolls?
if i'm wrong, someone please let me know.

as for his chat, if i knew him personally i think it would be quite funny. seeing as he is a nonymous, i do not understand what he was trying to do.



i saw the south park that has now caused lots of controversy. aside from the irony in trying to prove you're peaceful by threatening people's lives, it also hilarious because in an old episode (pre denmark cartoons) they had a mohammed character - an episode which still reruns on comedy central!!

the great great british return

i don't really understand most people's complaints about having their holidays extended. sure, families esp with little kids and people who only had small budgets for holidays get hit hard; most people i met though, were on business and weren't too fussed by an extra week off work, all expenses paid!

i'm gonna have to fight airlines and insurance to get flight monies (should be easy), hotel monies (less easy), train tickets monies (even less easy) and hopefully a sustenance allowance (much less easy)

moron of the day was found in a newsagents at 5am in cologne. she asked a shelf stacker if he knew when she'd be able to get the next train to london on eurostar. he said he didn't know and that she should try the information people. she replied "I spoke to them and they couldn't help so I thought I would try you"
really, you couldn't make it up.

i think i took some funny photo's but will have to check and put some up.


have almost forgotten how to play poker and have 10 days left this month to play at least 6000 hands. really need to aim for 1000 hands per day (and double on weekends) starting from this weekend.

but first i have a couple of episodes of house to catch up on.

Iceland

SO WHEN THE UK ASKED ICELAND TO BE PAID THE MONEY OWED IN CASH, IT SEEMS THEY MISHEARD.
AS WELL AS NOT BEING ABLE TO TYPE IN LOWER CASE IM STUCK IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE WITH NO IDEA OF WHEN OR HOW I'LL BE BACK.

a brag that's really a beat

back in profit for the year at 2/4!

next target, back in profit at 2/4 on ptr

here's a graph showing some awesomely terrible ups and downs.

 it's quite funny (but only in hindsight. at the time it's about as funny as stabbing pains in the brain) how sharp the downs are. especially that massive one in the middle. that vertical down line essentially means it would have been slower to lose money by setting some on fire.


so spring is here, women are walking around with less clothes on, i've seen the sun for two days in a row, i'm also gonna leave my 'job' very soon, (to finally, officially, become a bum) and have a holiday this week.

all that's left to do is start writing my sitcom.

went to the dentist last week. i dunno what it is about old people in dentist waiting rooms but they like to talk to everyone else in there. last time i had someone from mauritius, this time was some old dude with a pony tail. talking about how the dentist is always behind schedule as said dentist walks into the room. but old people seem to have no shame doing things like this. i wonder why not, and whether i'll be like that.

as for the dentist, when he found out i didn't have an electric toothbrush he was surprised and then told me off. but he wasn't as shocked as my friend, who thinks i'm the laziest person since that fat mexican who couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. i do wonder why i never got one. i think i should have. after all, i think all the pavements (sidewalks to my american cousins) should be replaced by those travelators/moving walkways/flat escalators that you see in airports.

oh, and if anyone knows a good electric toothbrush lemme know, thanks.

time to update

i know when it's time to update my blog because either
1) someone has commented and therefore at least one person has read it
or
2) i'm the last one to update on yakshi's list of blogs, and then i feel like i'm letting them all down

luckily, i do have a couple of things to say

firstly, i have definitely improved my poker skills as i finally received some abusive comments on ptr. something along the lines of
you ****ing suck, you're ****. why are you playing at 2/4? you ****ing suck.

thanks to the villain who wrote that, mainly for their generosity. if everyone paid me thousands of dollars to dish out a line of abuse i would happily take a few more lines of anonymous internet abuse. but only if you paid well.

secondly, i would like to offer some poker advice. not because i want to share, but because what i am about to describe annoys me so much; and i very very often hear/read people talking/writing about making a play due to how much (or little) they have invested in the pot.
this myth is dispelled in poker 101 namely:
money in the pot is no longer yours
how much you have put in the pot is wholly and totally irrelevant. the only thing that matters is what odds the pot is offering you, and how much equity you think you have against your opponent.

it's also a poker lesson that can be transferred into real life.
how much time/money you have invested in something shouldn't affect your future decisions, (as that is effectively money in the pot which is no longer yours), rather how your future will be affected by the current decision is all that matters.


it's halfway through the month and i've played about 3 hands. i'm away for the week next week as i will be hunting moose (and shooting them but only with cameras) on snowmobiles in Sweden, so will have to get 15k hands in this and next weekends.

mutha flippers

i often have lots of well constructed, thought out posts that i start writing in my head. sadly, i never get the chance to write them down because i'm doing distracting things like driving, showering or trying to fall asleep.
last night however, i decided to make some bullet points of thoughts i had. how they will look in the clear light of day is anyone's guess.

the first thing i thought of was how i won a big flip last night when i played. utg min raises (added a note at this point to say he was a fellow retard), i 3 bet to $24 or so, and button who is a terrible reg 4bets to $92 or something. he's playing 450 and i cover. retard folds and it's back to me. i figure if i shove he 1)calls with small pairs because i must have ak if i shove, and 2)i didn't wanna play qq oop because an ace always flops. so i shoved. he superduper snap called. with ak.
ace on the flop, thanks stars. queen on the river. thanks stars (non sarcastic the second time)

this reminded me of the halcyon years of poker before anyone knew what they were doing. and this was the time i discovered you could three bet with anything in position and get called pre, followed by a check/fold from your opponent on basically any flop because you had to have aa to 3 bet. good times.
i even played on a table where one guy said in chat "i know what you're doing, i'm gonna catch you" and then he continued to play in the exact same way.

anyway, then i started thinking about how much better i am at most things than i was one year ago. and one year ago i had the same thought about previous years. then i started thinking about how i'm probably becoming less awesome as time goes on as i tend to a status of true awesomeness. but then i realised, that such a state is impossible to attain and what it actually happening is each year i am improving less and less as a human  - which is probably me becoming old and stuck in my ways etc.

i can't remember what i called this concept but it did imagine drawing something i called an improvement derivative involving graphs, differentiation and integration and how it leads to a decreased rate of becoming more awesome. then i realised if i tell anyone about this they'll think i've been eating too much fruitcake since, after all, you are what you eat.

and in case you were wondering the title is a homage to the flight of the conchords. if you haven't yet seen it, you must! but only season 1, and the second half of season 2.

jinx?

sometimes i avoid talking about the rungood when i rungood as i don't want it to end and fear that writing about it will end it. that's pretty high up on the retard list. just below tabloid horoscopes, and just above me.

when i last wrote
since then i've employed the -$800 target which i am yet to hit. 
I did take my time to consider whether or not i should write it at all. of course, the results were that i did indeed write that sentence.
and the very next session i hit my target spectacularly, and kept on playing. i did somehow manage to stop pretty soon after though, down about $1200.

so i finally hit my target! hi 5. 

i once read that thinking about something (which you're at least partially in control of) can affect its outcome. kinda like a kriss akabusi pma (positive mental attitude) advert which i remember from childhood but can't find on youtube - and if it's not on youtube i'm beginning to think it never existed.

recently i've been watching a lot of house so considered buying a motorbike. when i asked my friend about his motorbike and if he'd ever crashed (he said only once and it hurt), and then he crashed a week later i felt partially responsible for implanting that thought into his head.

i can't tell if that's insanity or genius. they say it's a fine line between genius and insanity although i don't think  the two are mutually exclusive. i think it's just some genii (if that's not the plural it should be, how cool that word does look) appear insane to everyone else. and maybe if you can't tell the difference between insanity and genius that's why it looks like a fine line.
i'm pretty sure i'm rambling nonsense here so i'm gonna stop.

pma's all round

end of month!

this month has gone pretty pretty fast and i only played about 11k hands

halfway through the month got someone to look at how badly i was playing this year.
whilst i kinda knew the two major flaws in my game (had already mentioned them here a few times) having someone else tell me to stop being retarded helped immeasurably.

here is graph. left of red line is pre 'coaching'. to the right is post. one bad spell where i played in a terrible state of mind. sometimes i just sit down thinking, "i've been doing so well recently i'm surely due a time to lose." and then obviously i lose when i think like that.
so since then i've employed the -$800 target which i am yet to hit.

anyways, here's the graph.

today is april first. i slept till after noon so missed if anything interestingly fake happened. a few years back i left a message just after midnight, for a girl in a quiet whispery voice, saying something along the lines of "they're here...they've finally come to get me. get help...." before hanging up, turning off my phone and going to sleep.