The Poker Moth

This video provides a chillingly accurate document of what it’s like to play tournament poker professionally.

(God bless Failblog)

I’m actually running rather well at the moment, as it happens, but it’s always worth remembering what lies around the corner.

Ah, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve just been knocked off the final table of the $15,000 Guaranteed on Pokerstars, finishing seventh (of 5841), spinning $5.50 into $554.90 in the process. This took a total of eight hours and twenty eight minutes, which is the longest MTT stint I’ve managed in a long time. (The record remains a ten hour marathon on Party Poker back when I’d just started playing; I finished third then for about $1500).

I’ve been due a decent score in a deep field MTT; I can’t recall making a final table in a 2000+ runner tournament this year. (I won a big freeroll a while back, but that doesn’t really count). Pleasingly, I pulled this off without getting anything like lucky until the eighth hour; the only suckout I managed until the final two tables came against a shortstack who barely had enough chips to cover my opening bet (her pocket jacks cracked by my flopped set of fours). I managed to win a couple of coinflips with Ace-large along the way, but nothing where I was more than a 45% dog. On the other hand, I saw overpairs setted on three separate occasions, all of them in huge all-in preflop pots; considering the way the cards were falling, I’m extremely pleased with my performance. It would have been nice to bag the $3,600 first prize, of course, but I ended up getting shortstacked after failing to knock out a shorty with 55 v AQs (a race which would have been worth $300 dollars if my hand held up), and then I cleverly ran AQs into KK on the next hand.

December’s been pretty good to me so far. Christmas isn’t cancelled! And god help the world if I start to catch some cards…

ALL HAIL MIXWIT!

Long-time Moth readers (that’ll be me, then) may recall that I done a long post about pokery music, back in January. I wrote it out, published it, then edited the post to link each track up to Youtube, Seeqpod, and smilar… and after several hours of gruelling searching and linking, I clicked “post”, and WordPress ate my edit. I was not happy.

I am happy now, because of Mixwit, a site that combines the MP3 searching excellence of Seeqpod with the DIY mixtape angle of (now sadly defunct) Muxtapes. This allows me to proudly introduce… A POKER PLAYLIST!!1

It doesn’t have *everything* from the original post (I’m particularly sad that Cassetteboy’s seminal “Cos We’re Living Off Adam Clayton/Grunder” combo is nowhere to be found), but it’s got a fair few songs on there. They’re currently in alphabetical order; I may try my hand at a little sequencing later, but for now, rejoice!

(Many thanks to MarkX, of (excellent telly blog) Broken TV fame, for tipping me off about Mixwit).

Announcing your hand in the chat box, then dwelling up while you decide whether to play your hand or not.

e.g.

UTG player minraises, is reraised by the button, then types -

“Button raise? I have a decent pair here, come on”

And then proceeds to run the clock down while he makes his “decision”.

As a speech play, this would work well, if your decent pair is AA/KK and you continue with the hand (by reraising, natch). Sadly, I’ve never seen anyone attempt this; when players call their hand out, they’ve invariably decided that they’re done with the hand, and everything after that is just showboating.

KINDLY STOP WASTING MY TIME, SIR.