Just Married

Well not really "just married".  It was back in August when the big day happened but things have been somewhat hectic since then.  We had a lovely day with perfect weather and it all went pretty much exactly to plan.

We had a short Honeymoon to Paris which was just fantastic.  The last time I was near the place I was about three years old and Charlotte had never been before, so it was fun to explore.  Obviously there was lots of great food to eat and places to visit. The Louvre was particularly stunning.  The scale of it is incredible.  Even with a whole day you could not even begin to do it justice.

The atmosphere of Paris is very different to London.  Whilst you can find the usual suspects like Starbucks and MacDonalds there are still an awful lot of independent stores about and there seemed to be dozens of different small supermarket chains compared to the same few brands on every corner here.  As it was August many of the small shops were closed for their annual holidays, it would be almost unthinkable to see shops in this country closed down for three weeks.  The French value their quality of life far more than us.  We have allowed our rights to stamped upon in the name of progress, big business and globalisation.

Paris feels very uncluttered.  London is such a busy place, a crowded one.  Paris feels well planned, spacious and just a bit more elegant.  The cafe culture that predominates is also very welcoming, though it makes you realise how much we take the tougher no-smoking laws in this country for granted now.  This is one area that I would be happy to see change on a return trip to Paris.

Following my abysmal start to the  the year in poker it was time to go back to paid employment.  After much thought I got myself a Learning Support Assistant job at a Secondary school. Whilst not paying a huge amount of money it at least takes the pressure off for the moment and if nothing else is a worthwhile use of my time.  The school holidays will allow me plenty of time to continue playing poker and I can still get some hours in during the normal working week.  It is also giving me a chance to think about retraining as a teacher next year should I wish to do so.

I wish I could say anything positive about the last three months poker but as with every day in 2012, baring one, I have been experiencing the ultimate nightmare every time I sit down and play.  Nothing goes right. Since my positive July I have now racked up about $6,000 in make-up to clear off before I can even make another penny of profit.  I have been deep in tournament after tournament but I can't win the key hand.  If I get short stacked I always ship into a monster.  If I iso-ship on a short stack one of the two or three people sat behind me wakes up with a dominating hand every time.  If I make an error I get punished.  I'm still convinced I'm playing okay, maybe not brilliantly, but still good enough to be making some money.  Even in the last week I managed to bubble a £1,400 UKIPT Bristol package.  The more this run goes on the more I am starting to doubt and second guess myself.  On the whole I can still start a fresh session it the right frame of mind but six hours into a Sunday Grind the bad beats become harder to take with every hammer blow that connects.  I have still only managed one tournament cash over a $1,000 all year.  Given the spots I have been in this is just absurd.  Poker has never been crueler.  Still, at least I am in profit in monetary terms for the year, even if the chances of adding to it seem to grow slimmer with every passing day. My year to date Pokerstars graph is particularly shocking. If nothing else I will drag this back towards level as a minimum goal for the rest of the year.

Staking: AKA How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sit & Go

Whilst job interviews had been hard to come by prior to last week at least one application came back quickly with a positive response.  I applied to a couple of poker staking sites last month and got a fast positive response from the team at Sharkstaking.com.  After six months from poker hell it is at least a confidence boost that they were willing to set me up with a deal based purely on my previous MTT results and without having seen me play a single hand.

In all respects I am beginning to realise I probably should have done this years ago.  When I took a shot at going pro it was more from a necessity to move from my job than from being in the best bankroll position to consider it.  It was a case of see how it goes.  With a total of $6,000 in my poker bankroll it was about a third of the ideal minimum amount to play poker professionally.  Somehow I muddled through for two years without quite getting the result that would have given me the extra comfort space to get me through the downswing this year.  Of course if I had considered staking earlier on it would have taken the pressure off sooner and maybe kept me in better shape.  I guess that a combination of pride and the thought of having to give away 50% of what I made each month kept me from properly considering it.

My rather amusing start to life as a staked poker player... run bad, run bad, run bad...BINK!

So for starters Sharkstaking are providing me with a $750 stake.  On one level it may not seem like a lot but the advantages are many.  First of all the stake gets topped up to that amount each day so there are no worries about running out of funding, unless the company decides to stop the agreement.  So although a prolonged period of run bad would mean not making any money at least some one else gets to pick up the tab for my inability to win almost any hand where I get the chips in good .  There are plenty of other advantages.  They are going to set me up with a coach and provide at least two coaching sessions a month.  This has been delayed so far as the guy they want to set me up with has been in Vegas solidly for the WSOP over the last month.  I should also get an automatic upgrade to a VIP Moneybookers account which will be very useful.

As a lot of my problems this year came from trying to grind cash games on nitty sites I have decided to go back to basics.  My success has been predominantly from MTTs and I neglected the sort of volume I should have been putting in for the first half of the year.  Sharkstaking will only back a maximum of 50% MTT so at least 50% of my play will be Sit and Gos.  If I have neglected any discipline in recent years it has been the sit and go.  I played a lot when I was first learning the game but since I have played mostly on PKR and it is a pretty poor place to put in sit and go volume I haven't played many in recent years. Hopefully this is where the coach will be beneficial as I know my SNG game needs bringing up to scratch and I'm also happy for a different point of view on my MTT play. So I can play up to $20 sit and gos and $30 tournaments with an option to review things further down the line.

Whilst I used to get bored of sit and gos grinding a large volume of them has felt like a breath of fresh air this time round.  I really want to crack absolute bankroll discipline this time and the deal and what I am playing should very much encourage that.  I can't say I started well prior to my big MTT Sunday on the 15th.  I didn't run well to kick off with but I'm also aware that I wasn't playing a great sit and go game.  First of all I had no hands on anyone so obviously I ended up making some bad decisions against good regs and bad regs.  I also just ploughed into a huge range of formats including 5, 6, 10 and 30 seat games mixing up turbos, regular speed games and double or nothings.  This was a mistake.  Playing one format at a time stops you making silly errors.  On several occasions I made terrible ICM shoves in double or nothings on the bubble because I was playing 3 regular payout turbo sit and gos alongside it.  I also seemed to be doing better in the 5/6 seat games than the 10 so I have decided to focus on these for the moment.  So now I play the 30 man turbos on 10 seat tables which take a while to fill and either 5 seat top 2 paid games or 6 seat double or nothings depending on what I feel like.  Hopefully I will start running better, plug a few of the small leaks I am half aware of and begin to start nosing my results into profit. 

My next blog will be all about the deep tournament runs from the other week and I will probably include some of the hands if I can get HEM2 working properly.  It is annoying me greatly at the moment due to a variety of odd bugs.  They really need to get some updates sorted as it just feels so clunky compared to HEM1 at the moment despite a lot of potentially superior features.

The Dark Knight Returns

Poker has actually been quite eventful since my last blog.  After hunting for some backing I got a deal from the guys over at sharkstaking.com.  It wasn't huge but considering that they have neither met me nor actually seen me play a hand of poker it at least cheered me up that my stats actually have some merit.  I will come back to this properly in a blog next week.  All I will say for now is that I of course started with a pretty awful downswing as per the 2012 norm.  However just when things were looking glum, down nearly $2,000 in a couple of weeks, I went and final tabled a $20,000 guaranteed tournament and the big weekly Ongame $200,000 guaranteed ChampionChip event on the Sunday just gone.  I rode my luck for a change in a couple of big hands early on but then charged on towards the final tables of both.  I came 8th in the smaller one for $700 and then 5th in the ChampionChip for about $9,300.  Obviously I need to clear off the deficit and then split any profits 50/50 but at least it feels nice to be making some money again.  If it wasn't for a pair of cracked aces 5 handed it could have been a really awesome evening as first prize was $34,000 .  I will return to this tournament in another blog next week.

When I started this blog I did promise that it wouldn't always be about poker.  So for today the good poker topics can wait a while as what I really want to write about is Batman.  Today sees the release of 'The Dark Knight Rises' and I have been psyched beyond belief all year for this film.

I got into comics pretty late. It was only when I got a permanent contract in an Ottakars branch during 2004 that I read my first graphic novel.  I had inherited the graphic novels section amongst a load of others and I found myself curious about this art form that I had never really paid any attention to before.  The first thing i read on my breaks was 'Superman: Red Son'.  It was smart and sophisticated story telling.  The next thing I picked up was a new edition of 'Batman: Year One', Frank Miller's excellent and pretty definitive version of the Batman origin story.  I followed that up with Miller's seminal 'The Dark Knight Returns' and I was just blown away.  I moved on to a whole range of writers and characters but whilst most of the interesting work in comics was being done outside of the mainstream I always had a great deal of time for Batman.  I bought up a whole series of the graphic novel bind ups of classic stories and then ended up ebaying a lot of single issue runs that came highly recommended.

The world of comics has thrown up a lot of great characters, a lot of clever ways of telling parables and engaging with a primarily teenage audience.  There is something though in the story of Bruce Wayne that transcends almost everything else in the super hero genre.  For me the character is as interesting and iconic as Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet.  A boy who watches his parents murdered in front of his eyes and grows up with a dedication and determination to try and stop the horrors of crime being inflicted on others like it was on him.  It is a story full of tragedy and grief. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that his path means that he can never enjoy an ordinary life.  Those closest too him are doomed to end up suffering because he cannot give up the Batman, he cannot give up the sybmbol he has created as Gotham will always need him and that means an immense amount of sacrifice in his normal life.

I must have first watched Tim Burton's 'Batman' when I was about eleven and remember really enjoying it.  After getting into the comics I revisited it and was immensely disappointed. I didn't recognise the character that had so caught my imagination.  In 2005 Christopher Nolan put all of that right with 'Batman Begins'.  It stands as a really good film whether you have an interest in Batman or not.  What really thrilled the Batman comic fans though is just how right the characterisation of Bruce Wayne finally was.  Burton and his writing team made a number of mistakes.  The first mistake is to take us into the character via the eyes of investigative journalists.  It distances us from Bruce Wayne and never allows us to get properly under his skin.  'Begins' rectifies all that by keeping Batman off the screen for a full hour.  That time gives us the chance to get to know Bruce and the tragedy of his life.  We can both empathise with him and feel pity for him.  The casting is also better.  Whilst I think Michael Keaton is a great actor he doesn't make for a very believable Batman outside the costume. He is slightly built and has little muscle.  You need to believe that this character is capable of flattening everybody in the room should he choose to do so and with Keaton this is just laughable. Christian Bale was a perfect choice.  He brings both the physicality and athleticism required but he also has the burning intensity.  With Bale the dedication and the fanaticism is rammed home constantly.



'Batman Begins' uses 'Batman: Year One' as its launch pad but the real strength of it is not in copying the origin tale but in actually managing to improve upon it.  there are so many clever ideas and touches that a fan of the Batman comics could do nothing other than love it.  The follow up 'The Dark Knight' was also a revelation.  If the first one was the film Batman fans had always wanted to see then its follow up was one they never expected to see.  If BB was dark then TDK was just one of the most oppressively bleak films to ever be disguised as a summer blockbuster.  Once again the most impressive feature to fans was just how right they got The Joker.  In the comics he has been represented in a million and one different ways over the years.  Through the writing and the performance of Heath Ledger they somehow distilled the perfect essence of the character, that he is pure chaos.  Whilst overall this version of Gotham was a little more closer to reality than the world of the comics it once again stood as a great film for the casual viewer and a great film for bigger fans of the character.

I really hope The Dark Knight Rises delivers an excellent third chapter to the story.  History shows us that nailing all three films in a trilogy is an exceptionally hard thing to do.  I had huge confidence in the build up to its release.  I even felt good about it when the first reviews started appearing as all seemed to say it was as good, or almost as good, as TDK.  Then the reviews from the hardcore comic fans started appearing and now I am a little bit worried.  I have avoided anything spoilery but the suggestion seems to be that for the first time the characterisation is off and this is my biggest fear.  I want this film to be awesome because they have got so much so right so far.  Please, please please don't let this Batman geek down.