Another Sat win and May Accounts

Another win in a $40sat for tonights $250 European Online hampionship PL Omaha event. I was low for the whole tournament , never getting above 2500 chips, but managed to hang in there. Check the value out in these sats.. $3000 overlay for this one with 20 g'teed seats.....fantastic.....wish i had played a few more now.



Accounts for May

Poker Plex : up $300
PokerStars: down $30
Blue Square: up $830
Full Tilt: up $110
Virgin: up $60
Gala: down $80
Playing live: up $130 (up @ cash, down @ tourney)

In total for playing up $1320
Bonus of $250 and rakeback in region of $250 (150@plex &$100@FullTilt)

So +$1820 for the month.

and +$5345 for the year so far.

Bit more like it, although it has mainly come in the last 10 days. Of course I haven't included the two ECOOP qualifications in that figure or the 2x$109 GUKPT sat tikets. I will only include actual cashes in my figures. If I had though then months profit would be +$3366 !! VERY NICE

Tonights and tomorrows games are both on ipoker @7pm start. I will be on MSN on robbieboxseal@hotmail.com feel free to log in and say hi.

Am I a Luckbox !

'Stay Lucky JON' is my signature at a few forums and I can now find out if that is true.
Last night I was introduced to a new piece of software called "pokerEV" and it is Brilliant!
It can tell you how lucky you are on all hands that go to a showdown. Which is great for giving you more of an idea if you are still beating the game in the long term.

This is my graph at Pokerplex for the last week, playameing PL Omaha. A traditionally "lucky" game.



The green line is my REAL winnings and the red line is my EXPECTED winnings (or in other words what I 'should' have won). As you can see I was running good(lucky) for most of the week and then this morning have hit a bad run of all-ins and slumped a bit with my "luck" now pretty neutral for the week as a whole.

I just keep on rolling !

At last ! I did it ! Took down the BlueSquare league play-off game. I must have come in the top 4 at least 6 times before without success. But tonight I did it and a $1060 ticket to the $1.5 Million gteed European Chamionship of Online Poker (ECOOP). This will be my biggest event , in terms of buy-in and prize pool.



The big hand (luckbox) moment came when 4 handed. I pushed in with J,9 of diamonds to get called by the small blind and then to see the Big Blind and chip leader re-push, which forced out the SB. BB had AK and the flop brought two diamonds, and the 3rd on the turn. SB had been holding KQ suited and would have hit a FH. Nice protection for me !! hehe

I tried to do a deal with Blue Square to get the online seat transferred to live GUKPT seats but they were having none of it. Shame, as I really do want to play one of these bigger events and last year winning this would have given me a GUKPT main event seat. Also did a deal for 25% of the action in the ECOOP with "Logie66" when heads up. Funny, at the time it seemed a good idea, doesn't seem quite such a good deal now ! LOL

Sunday 7pm if you want to watch/play......not going to be fast tho.....5000chips and half hour blinds!!

Deal 'em good , till the early hours.

In the shade

Well Im back blogging again today.....because I'm still winning !! Its so easy LOL

An hour on Pokerplex for about +$80 and then an hour on Full Tilt for +$120.

I find FullTilt a really good site with LOTS of PL Omaha games. I also get rakeback @ 27% rate through thehendonmob.com I dont get a bonus there but like Pokerstars they have a pretty good online store and I'm almost half way to getting these little beauties

Play-off game on BlueSquare tonight and trying to arrange a way to go to Blackpool on Saturday for a cracking 15k deep stack,45min clock £200 jobby. Sneaks is up for it too.

Little surge of form !

Just an update as I seem to be winning and it is always nicer doing the blog when winning.

Poker plex has been all short stack PL Omaha this month, mainly $0.5/$1.

Last week has been good, here are the last 1000 hands on the pokergrapher again.


No Live games planned soon, next ones are probably a Grosvenor £150 link game (more of which in a later blog)and hopefully the PLOmaha rebuy locally on the 27th and 29th respectively.

110 chips to champ !!

Final Blue Square league game tonight. I started in 5th place, 4 points behind 3rd and no chance of catching top 2.

3rd and 4th got eliminated early, so I needed to come 7th or higher to get 3rd and 2x$109 GUKPT sat tickets. So there I am in 8th waiting for someone to go and it doesn't happen, next thing I'm low but hanging in. I go 3 circuits with my BB taking it down each time when all-in. At one point I have 110 chips and average is 5k !! I am really just hanging in desperately for 7th, cashing(top 3 only)is not a consideration. LOL
Then someone goes out, so I push in next two hands and amazingly three minutes later I am up to 5k myself. On this surge of fortune, I rush through to a chip lead and take the last 5 players out to win the tourney and $750 (+ the 2x$109 tickets)




Poker is a great game!

It's not Terry's

What a game!!

ManU v Chelsea, I'm talking about. A real proper game with both teams going for it, none of this boring "we dont want to lose this" type of game, but two teams who have great players and are so well matched. In the end it was classic drama too, almost film script type stuff, I dont like the idea of penalties (should be played out properly from a sporting ethos) but it is great entertainmant for the spectator. Don't share the sympathy for Terry, I like the guy he is a passionate and honest player even if he is too slow to be rated as highly as he is, but if he is going to take the glory for scoring the winner then he has to take the heat for when he misses too. He didn't cry, thank god, but from the look on his face you could tell he wanted a chinese type earthquake to hit just so he could jump in the hole and get swallowed up !!

Due to babysitting had to watch it at home until the missus arrived half way thru extra-time, so I popped down the local. Everyone was pissed, seems great when you've been drinking all game but when you turn up sober it just seems so yobish. Sneaks was in there (maybe pissed) and I forgot to mention his recent GUKPT at Newcastle, where once again he made the 2nd day, but then fell fowl of an IDIOT who called Sneaks (AQ) pre-flop raise from late position with (5,10), because he thought Sneaks was "at it". The flop came down Q,10,5. Absolutely Bogus flop and that was it ~ chips went in , no help . Unlucky mate. Bolton is his next GUKPT date in Sept.

Talking of big comps , the leagues haven't gone quite as I wanted, the Gala just hasn't taken off at all and dont think I will bother again there until next league starts. The Blue Square one has me in 5th, but no chance of catching 1st with just Sundays game to go. Can get 3rd tho, prizes for top 4 only.

Off all next week, so might try to get a live game in somewhere.

Tonight off camping with the family Hi-De-Hi.

League rumbles on

The two leagues have been rumbling on and in the Gala league played a fair few games , but just got nowhere AT ALL !! not even final tables once in 6 attempts !
The Blue Square league has gone better. Tonight I ended up 3rd for $300 and 10 more points, which puts me into 3rd place. Should have been more but the league leader sucked out with a river to stay in and is going to have a large lead going into the three last events. I made a squeeze play from the BB with trash and ran into an all-in push from the Button which i had to let go ( he showed KK) and one big hand really destroyed me later when on a 679 board all the chips went in with me holding A10 hearts ( 2 on board) for flush and gutshot draw against LAGs 69 two pair. I missed .....sigh.

An intersting hand happened early in freezeout section. All the chips went in pre-flop between 4 of us and the lead changed on every street!
Pre-flop: It was AA v 88 v AK v (my)QQ
Flop: 8J2
Turn: Q
River: 10

Everyone felt the emotional roller-coaster on that hand, fortunately I was big chip Daddy and stayed in.

Current BlueSquare league standings here http://www.bluesq.com/bluesquare/bspoker/bluesquarepokerleague.shtml

Champions league final tomorrow, got to babysit the kids , so I'll watch it and play the BlSq league game as well. Might get out to the pub later , good mate just returned from getting married in Mauritious and he is a MAN U fan. Just fancy them to edge it tomorrow, but too close to bet on with the odds being so tight.
Did you know Derby made the European Cup semis in 1974 under Cloughy and it was later found out that Juventus had bribed the Ref. And look at us this year.

Bonus chasing

ipoker ( that is mainly Blue Square for me) are having their billionth hand promotion at the moment. With the billionth probably going to be dealt in he next 48 hours. Along the way they have milestone hands every 200k and 5 million, so decided yesterday to have a blast and catch one of them. Got logged onto 6 tables playing short stacked PL Omaha...can't do much damage here I thought. I only had a few thousand hands till the milestone so was probably only playing about 10 hands per table. I will just sit here mega tight and hope to get lucky and hit the magic numbered hand for a nice 1k bonus.
The bottom line is ...I missed the magic hand....but did get drawn into moving all-in 4 times for $40 in that 10 minutes and lost them all !! so a rather costly $170+ spent in 10 minutes fishing for a bonus.

I'll try and have another go when the big one comes around as that carries a nice $50k bonus, no matter what stakes you play. Lets hope it happens early moning here about 8 am, when it is the quietest.

The Simpsons

D'OH as Homer Simpson would say.
Just been on the phone and thought I had already registered for tonights Blue Square league, but hadn't and now too late D'OH, still compensation was I got to watch Bart and family with my daughter ( only thing Dad and 5yo daughter can watch together and enjoy).
Ive been going well too, 2nd in league just a point behind leader, thanks to a second place last night.

I had managed to just sit quietly and watch everyone donk themselves out with some questionable calls...... imo. So there I've ended up 2 handed and staring at the wrong stack in a 35k v 145k match. I go into a mammoth heads-up battle and slowly, without a big hand clash, claw my way to a 135k v 45k lead and then get it all-in with KJ v K7. The guy flukes a river flush and I can feel my focus go, I dont go on tilt, but I kind of know I am not going to win it now. And sure enough I just seem to lose/blow a few pots before I end up with it all-in with A9 v AJ and that is that! $375 instead of $625, 12 points instead of 15 and 2nd space in the league instead of 1st!.

As for the phone call it was some simple Indian lass trying to sell me a cheap balance transfer to a MBNA card. I had great fun forcing her to admit that I should transfer it to a Virgin C/card instead of MBNA as they were offering better terms. Took me 14 minutes though, and my chance to enter the BLUEsquare game was gone. D'OH

bit of tourney success

Played a couple of the Gala and Blue Square league games last few days.

2 bad beats in the Gala games have left me with no points to worry about, remember it is best 5 only that count before mid June so not worried yet. I think this is my best method of getting a UK Tour seat.

In Blue Square league, I bubbled the final table in the first 2 comps and then tonight I managed to get a 2nd place for the first cash ($300) for 13 BSq league games. I was unlucky a lot of times too, especially with AA when i got it all-in with the eventual winner only for him to turn a 9 to trips up his pocket pair.

Also played the Barrow online game last night and took it down , although the highlight was outplaying Honeymonster on one hand only for him to do it to me next hand with his trips v my top pair Ace kicker, but wait another hook hits on the river to luckbox me the top Full House.

oh yeh Honey .....Mission accomplished !

Dealing myself Bad beats

Great sporting success for Barrow this w/end , the soccer have made the play-off final and the Rugby are now 5 from 5 and top of the league !

So going into last nights Poker tournament, I was kind of confident of continuing success in 'my' sporting arena. Quiet early table and I managed to nudge my stack up 20% or so. Then this happened:

Dealing for the missing button , I was the small blind @ 200/400. Two limpers, and i got QQ so I raise to 3k leaving myself just under 8k so i can get away if a Ace or King flops. No fears though the flop comes Jxx. Easy push for me and get called by BB who has JJ, no way out really. I then even dealt him the case J on the turn for Quads !So I potter off to the cash table, feeling dissapointed with the poker gods , but nothing more. The cash game has a few hyper LAGs on it, so picking your spot is the game. Double up + against one of them and then this happens:

Dealt AA on the button, me dealing again, Ive dealt mnyself so many good hands at this place, I have started to feel guilty about it. Early position raiser to a £1, 5 callers so I re-raise to £5 and get 4 callers !! "No respect", yet torn between thinking good, but not this many callers. Flop comes a reasonable Q,Q,10. I have to push when it is checked to me and I get a caller, thinking he has the Q, I reluctantly flip my bullets for him to show K,10 of hearts. Only a 10 can save him, so I flip over the turn (5) and river(3) ...no ten.. and I am about to scoop the pot when the cheering alerts me to the fact that I have dealt runner runner hearts to give him the flush and the £50+ pot. FFS!

Despite that setback I managed to turn £50 or so profit and then late on we managed to get an Omaha game going with 7 players. Fantastic , it was No Limit as Pot Limit was going to prove too difficult at that time. Great fun, some real good Omaha hands clashing and about 5 Full Houses were hit on the flop!!
The best part was the standard of play was awfull, with only one guy really having any idea how to play and I outplayed him beautifully in the only hamd we clashed in. I have to say I was quite dissapointed to only leave a further £59 up in the hour,I felt that confident and saw over 90% of flops.


Half way thru the first Blue Square league game for May and going OK, more later in the week.

May , leagues and little bonus

I've decided for May to just go a little slower on the poker playing front. This is especially true with the poker plex bonus, where I always seem to end up playing like a nutter in the last week or so to make the bonus while ignoring all family life, and strangely my wife doesn't seem to appreciate my efforts at increasing the Robbiebox clan wealth.

So instead of playing for a $500 bonus by getting 3400 MPPs, I have gone for the $250 bonus which only requires 1500 MPPs. I still get the 30% rakeback on top, but now I am also earning a little quicker too as each bonus 1$ only takes 6 MPPs instead of 6.8 MPPs as before.
Obviously I cant earn as much, but i can spend more time on a couple of tournament based leagues with gauranteed tourneys and extra end of league prizes. Namely the Grosvenor GUKPT league on Blue Square Poker and the Gala GCBPT league on Gala Poker.

I won't go into much detail, but will post the links to both .

http://www.bluesq.com/bluesquare/bspoker/bluesquarepokerleague.shtml

Basically the Blue Square league runs for 3 weeks every month, all 15 tourneys counts (so a bit more commitment required) and there is good added value to each tourney, especially in latter games although end of league prizes aren't great.

http://www.galapoker.co.uk/club/pn41.go?page=promotion5&lang=20&sid=377209244272317914151914&ms=MS

The Gala league runs for 6 weeks every 2 months, where just your best 5 tourneys count (so doesn't matter too much if you miss a few) , the gaurantees for each tourney dont look great but the end of league prizes are good ($9000+ worth) with GCBPT live packages for top 3.

So expect to hear about my triumphs or tears over this in the next few blogs.

But first of all is a live charity event here in Barrow tomorrow night, dealem 'up !

April accounts

April feels like a dissastorous month. I have made both a gross and net loss !! First month for ages i have posted a net loss and it has left me a little dissilusioned with online poker. I will have to refocus my efforts for May and intend to make use of the two National Poker tour online leagues....and their added value...more in a later post on this.

Accounts for March

Poker Plex : down $1070
PokerStars: level
Blue Square: down $250
Full Tilt: up $45
Playing live: NO PLAY

In total for playing down $1275
Bonus of $500 and rakeback in region of $350

So -$425 for the month.

and +$3525 for the year so far.

Losing just over £200 shouldn't really be a major problem to my bankroll, but I have made the mistake of withdrawing into my main account and using it for general living. This was due to my Nat West card needing renewing so couldn't deposit , thus my bankroll gets hit hard and I cant replenish it.

Got a live local tourney on Sunday, not played one for ages or met everyone, so really looking forward to that !

Made it ....with 8 minutes to spare

11.52pm was bonus completion time, lost it all if i didnt get them played by midnight. The Chelsea v Liverpool game was another thriller with extra-time , so that slowed me down a lot. Was multi-tabling 6 tables for a while.

Lost a little more so defo made a loss for April.

Will post month accounts tomorrow and a slightly different plan for May.