Hello all. I play under the sheeprustler screen name on Pokerstars. I play predominantly reg speed stts and mttsngs with some turbos thrown in to finish up my sets. I have been a semi regular poster on these forums since about Mar 2010. I am a 29 year old mature student, in my final year of studying journalism in the University of Limerick, Ireland.

I have been in college since September 2010 and played poker through that time to provide extra funds for college. I would say in terms of natural talent I was a fish in almost every way coming into poker and I am still a fairly average player playing not higher than $15 sngs. From my previous fishy base I have learned a lot and loved learning about poker. I anticipate that it will be very hard to get work when I finish college so I plan to devote a lot of time to studying poker to make it a legitimate form of income. In an ideal world I would find work as a journalist, play poker to provide extra funds and save to do a Masters’ Degree in Economics within the next three years.

I also run a small staking operation with my friend Niall Smyth who won the Irish Poker Open a few years back. This is a business I hope to grow when I finish college. Despite all the vitriol that is spoken concerning scams in the poker community I have had great experiences dealing with other players. I have only run into problems with two players in my time and even then I wasn’t outright scammed. On the other hand I have met some great people through staking and find dealing with and developing stakees a rewarding experience.

I am not rich but I am fairly happy with my life as almost all the things I love doing are free. I live in County Clare on the West Coast of Ireland and love the area and the lifestyle. Unlike most Irish people I enjoy the rough weather. I enjoy getting out playing football, running, cycling, sightseeing or hurling a ball with my dogs. Rugged, beautiful landscape is the best way I would describe the area I live in. I will post pics from cycling trips as the blog develops.

When I am indoors I love reading, watching a good movie or TV series, watching sport or having a beer. I am pretty picky when it comes to the series I watch as I have very limited free time. The Sopranos was one of my favourite TV series while The Life and Times of Tim is my favourite comedy right now. I am currently in the middle of watching season three of Walking Dead which I find entertaining if not brilliant. I still haven’t got around to watching Breaking Bad which is ******ed as I am sure I would love it.

I have made about $20k life time on stars before bonuses and maybe 3k on my Full Tilt account after bonuses. Because I work from morning until night studying for college I don’t get much time to play poker (50 games a week tops) so this blog will be primarily about the things I enjoy doing.

The book series I am currently in the middle of reading are: Game of Thrones (A Feast for Crows); Berlin Noir; Millennium; the Accursed Kings and The Shardlake Series.

I have two sheepdogs Badger and Maggie and I live with my French girlfriend.

I will upload graphs in my next post.

Fairly skewed graph of all the results on my current data base. The redline isn't accurate and any incomplete game is most likely an early bust out. HEM used to have trouble picking up bust outs if not on the FTs of 18 or 27 mans. I think I've played about 20k games lifetime with $20k profit.



These are my results since August 2013 when I started manually correcting the HEM glitch. As you can see I don't get much time to play due to college.

pics of sheepdogs?

IN

Hey dude, how is college life treating you?



Those are my two sheepdogs with a labrador pup I fostered for a few months before Christmas. I called her Kamots after the alpha wolf in a really good documentary called "Living With Wolves" It can be found on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWmOtXSAr1M



This one is of Badger trying to teach me to dance. She failed miserably.



The gf literally sets the hounds on me if I try to sleep in for an absurd amount of time.



Sleepy Kamots

sheepdogs are class...we used to have an old english sheepdog ourselves (we live on land which our uncle farms on)

<3 kamots

College is going grand. In second year of a 3 year degree.

Will check out that documentary. Looks fascinating.
where would you look for journalism? would RTE be in mind at all?

Sweet.

Local journalism would be more realistic initially. If I'm honest the odds of me having a career in journalism are slim. It's something I got a lot less interested in as my degree progressed and I didn't work hard enough at building a portfolio.

I am studying Economics and Politics with the degree and both those really interest me, even if economics is still something I sometimes struggle to get my head around. I hope to do a Masters in an Economics field in two or three years time; probably risk assessment. Another option would be to do a Masters in translation and pair up in a business with my girlfriend. She is a freelance English to French translator. The short term plan is to immerse myself in poker study this summer, get my hourly north of $25 and have a solid financial base to plan life from.

You are doing psychology I believe? How many hours a week do you spend in lectures or studying? It is something that would be among my first choices to study if I could finance three years in college.

Funny pic of the weird way Badger sometimes sleeps...

I have a couple of blogs going on the interwebs and I am just going to copy all their content on here. As not everyone will be interested in the different content covered I will put the subject matter in bold at the top.

Football

My thoughts on Wayne Rooney's new deal

As a Manchester United fan I see the signing of Wayne Rooney on a £300,000 a week deal as one of the more worrying developments of the past season. It is symptomatic of a club trying to address its severe short term problems by gambling with its long term good health.

Alex Ferguson always stressed the importance of putting the needs of the club before individual players. He never thought United needed a player more than a player needed United. Barely a season after his departure a player who twice wanted out is being consulted on transfers, promised the captaincy and been made the highest paid player in the Premier League.

In October 2010 Rooney wanted to leave Manchester United because he felt the club was no longer in a position to fulfil his ambition. At that time Rooney had won the Champions League, three Premier Leagues and three League Cups with United. The previous spring Chelsea won the title putting an end to United’s four in a row bid; meanwhile Man City were embarking on the biggest development project in world football. This seemed enough to convince Rooney that Old Trafford was not the place to be and his agent sounded out a move to Eastlands. It says a hell of a lot about Rooney’s ability and potential that Ferguson put years of principles aside and forgave him for this incredible lack of loyalty. Ferguson, like most fans, saw Rooney as the beating heart of United’s future.

The belief in Rooney as a pillar player for the club was undermined when he came back from the summer break in 2012 unfit and overweight. The player Ferguson had backed more than any other to be the future of United couldn’t focus on a correct diet and fitness routine while earning £250,000 per week during the off season. This apathetic attitude is in stark contrast to his contemporaries, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who seem determined to improve as players every time they put their feet on grass. It is worth pointing out that in Rooney and Ronaldo’s first seasons together, it was Rooney who was considered to be the more talented player.

After a season of animosity between himself and Ferguson, Rooney asked for a transfer at the end of the 2013 season; one you feel Ferguson would have been happy to grant him if he remained in charge. When David Moyes took charge he was determined to hold onto Rooney. A summer of unrest ensued with Rooney desiring a transfer to Chelsea albeit more diplomatically than in 2010. Three days before the transfer window closed Rooney committed his short term future to United and decided to sample at least one season under Moyes. Since then the club has declined rapidly under the latter’s management and inverse to that decline has been Rooney’s growth in power.

When Matt Busby moved upstairs at Old Trafford he facilitated player power by undermining managerial disciplinary decisions. This time around there has been no suggestion of interference from Ferguson aside from the view of some journalists that he shouldn’t watch games from the stand. David Moyes enjoys more power and authority at the club than any other in European Football apart from Arsene Wenger at Arsenal. However, he seems too weak to exercise that power effectively. In October he allowed himself be publicly blackmailed by Rooney who told the media that he did not want to play in midfield for United. The acceptance of this statement effectively meant Moyes was allowing a selection option be removed by Rooney’s dictation. This situation would not be countenanced by a manager who believed that he and the structure of the club were more important than any player.

This season has been a disaster under Moyes. Now United, previously prepared to let Rooney go, instead find themselves making him the highest paid player in the league. It is hard to be enthusiastic. If Rooney can be the player he has the potential to be and the club man he talks himself up to be, then in today’s market £300,000 will be money well spent. For that to happen the trend of Rooney’s career thus far will have to change dramatically as he comes into his prime.

How I Quit Those Bastard Cigarettes

As a teenager I was a full time smoker. I probably smoked on average ten cigarettes a day climbing to as high as sixty when I spent a summer working in Spain as a seventeen year old. Luckily I got some sense after turning eighteen and I successfully quit. About a year after quitting I smoked a cigarette while out drinking and since then I have smoked frequently when on nights out. Even though I rarely drink these days, it is a habit I wish to shake off. I am writing this blog to reinforce my willpower to break the habit and I hope that talking about my previous experience quitting will help others to quit.

When I was young there were many things about smoking that aroused my curiosity. A lot of people in my age group and the age groups just above me smoked. A lot of adults I encountered through my parents’ social circles smoked. I heard a lot of conversations centred on smoking. Even though these were almost always negative I got a weird sense of community from smokers and I wondered what it would be like to be part of that community.

Before you ever smoke you are warned by all and sundry not to do it as “you will become addicted”. I think the problem with these warnings is that you end up programming kids to be addicted before they even smoke their first cigarette People warning me I would be addicted didn’t numb my interest. I still wondered what the experience of smoking or even being addicted to smoking would be like. I think that consciously or subconsciously my friends and I set out to be addicted. In our perverse way we thought that smoking alone wasn’t cool enough, we had to be addicted as well.

Luckily when it came to quitting for the final time I had already consciously thought about this and knew it was something that contributed to my mental addiction. Even though I was only eighteen, it was probably my fourth or fifth time trying to quit. Ironically, I think my group also saw trying to quit smoking as being a part of the smoker image. The fact that my final time was my fourth or fifth time was crucial; I had failed a number of times and from experience I had learned enough to ultimately get over the line.

If I’m honest I happened upon most of the strategy that helped me quit accidentally. I didn’t realise at the time how important some of the things I was doing were. I randomly chose January as the month to quit and this turned out to be crucial in helping me do so. I didn’t read Allen Carr’s book then and I still haven’t but I have heard people talking about it and certainly some elements of my strategy are similar to his. My experience with smoking leads me to believe we are both mentally and physically addicted. It is rarely easy to polarise the two into distinct separate camps but I think if you can address some of the reasons for your mental addiction you can approach your physical addiction with more focus. The fire-power you previously wasted on your mental battle can be redeployed to fight the physical one.

When I stopped smoking in January 2003, I knew the date I would quit about two months in advance. I was a person that for the most part enjoyed the process of smoking but didn’t enjoy the current side-effects or want to experience the potential future ones. Because I had a strong belief that I would stop on the date set I didn’t carry any guilt about smoking. I really enjoyed smoking then and when I smoked I would think about all the reasons why. Because I had smoked guilt free for two months I had become aware of most of the reasons why I liked it. I didn’t realise it at the time but this was the most crucial thing I did that helped me stop.

Knowing the reasons why I enjoyed smoking helped to alleviate a massive mental battle. In the process of quitting when I got a craving for a cigarette, that craving seemed more logical and reasonable to me. Because of this my natural tendency was to understand and not to fight it. The craving would push on me all the reasons I enjoyed smoking, willing me hard to smoke a cigarette. I would think, “Yes, they are all good reasons to want a cigarette but I have greater reasons for not wanting one”. I still went through the physical longings but they were much easier to handle than if my tendency was to fight them.

It was also crucial that I believed in the reasons I gave myself for quitting. If I was in doubt as to the validity of these reasons they would not have overpowered my urges. I think a lot of smokers put the harm of smoking out of their minds. The threat to their health does not seem real enough. When they try to quit their motivation is not strong enough and they fail. If you genuinely feel that your reasons for wanting to smoke are stronger than your reasons to quit you can address this imbalance by learning and thinking more about the ill-effects of smoking. Information is excellent fuel to set the propellers of motivation in motion. People sometimes put the dangers of smoking out of their head and think “**** it, I may not get cancer” or “**** it, we all die anyway” but living with the side effects of smoking as an older person seems to be something people rarely consider.

I know that spending time in a hospital ward with a stomach infection at sixteen provided part of the basis for my motivation. There were a lot of old people in my ward, the majority of whom had smoked all their lives. One had survived cancer and had his voice box removed. Others had never had cancer but their quality of life was abysmal anyway. There were sixty years olds in that hospital ward who looked and acted ninety years of age. This experience was important in forming my motivation because it made me realise that even if I am one of the lucky ones who avoids cancer what are the benefits I will experience? Smoking is a life or death gamble and the prize for winning that gamble is a pretty ****ty one.

How you find your motivation depends on what your feelings on smoking are. Every doubt you have about quitting is not something to be blocked out or denied. It is your brain feeding you data about the reasons you won’t quit. Try and listen to each doubt individually and seek out information relating to it or allow yourself to think about the doubt and decide if it makes sense. The reasons you find in your time preparing to quit become logic injections (Jared Tendler 2011, The Mental Game of Poker), ready to be rolled out when the physical withdrawal symptoms may make you forget the reasons you wanted to quit in the first place. It should be useful to write down at least three of these logic injections for the times when the cravings become so bad you don’t see the point in not smoking. Look at them as your back-up parachute.

When I first quit smoking I did it on a Monday which I am sure is the day most people choose; picking Friday seems a little ambitious. The first week off cigarettes is fairly challenging; you can expect quite a few strong physical cravings each day. The first night out is probably the hurdle that most frequently trips people up. You will be put under more pressure and feel much differently about your cravings than you did at home or at work. I hate to say it but don’t expect any support from other smokers. When someone in a group gives up smoking it is often seen as a game with everyone waiting to see when the quitter will crack. It makes quitting more challenging when others don’t believe you can quit but because others expect you to fail doesn’t mean you have to.

Getting over the first night out is tough but extremely rewarding. You will have a clearer head not just that night but on the following day. The difference between a hangover as a smoker and a non-smoker is the difference between a holiday in the Bahamas or in a caravan with Fr Noel Furlong.



If you can bank that first night without a cigarette your enjoyment and the next day’s clear head will help form more motivation making your next night out easier to handle.

I find that on the first week even though the challenge is at its highest, so is your motivation and this provides an interesting energy mix. In hindsight I think the feelings of victory from getting past each individual craving actually provided me with substitute stimulation to nicotine.

A new challenge presents itself in the second and third weeks when the physical cravings become weaker and the battle lines are less clearly drawn. Your day lacks the same stimulation you had when you smoked or initially quit and you start to become bored. Through all the times I tried and failed to quit smoking the time I got tripped up most frequently was through general boredom in the second or third weeks. When the physical cravings lessen it starts to feel like you are losing something. You look at your life and suddenly realise all the situations when you smoked are no more. The montage reel of your happy memories with smoking starts to play. It feels like you just dumped the family dog by the side of a road because he pissed in your slippers. It’s not too late to get him back. Let’s bring the dog home, let the good times roll and forget the whole thing ever happened. These times are extremely challenging because you are in a situation where you genuinely feel your life would be better if you smoked. Your body and your mind are fighting the adjustment.

These feelings may seem like they will last forever but they won’t; for me they dissipated after the first three weeks. From there on out life gets far more enjoyable. You start to reap the benefits of being a non-smoker fairly quickly. After the first two or three days you will notice your lungs are clearer; after two or three weeks the difference is monumental. You have a lot more energy, both mental and physical. Things taste and smell better. A lot of people are surprised by the strong sense of smell that returns after quitting (I had to have a shower right away). The fears of heart disease and cancer that played out in your mind are no more and your sense of well-being is increased immeasurably.

As I mentioned earlier in the blog I failed at quitting a number of times before succeeding .You probably will too. Quitting smoking is a huge challenge. It’s perfectly normal to fail. We don’t set out to fail, we set out to do everything in our power to succeed, but when failure happens our brain has consciously and unconsciously learned and there is a lot of data to analyse. Getting angry and judging ourselves as an individual failure instead of human beings makes it harder for us to access that data. If you do fail try to go easy on yourself. When you are ready to try quitting again you have a much better chance of getting over the hurdle that tripped you up this time.

It was with the benefit of hindsight and studying the psychology relating to learning and poker that I realised why the strategy I accidentally embarked on was so crucial to me quitting. The main source of my recognition was Jared Tendler and Barry Carter’s book “The Mental Game of Poker”. My next blog addresses quitting smoking through the lens of theories presented in that book.

Nicotine addiction is mainly a mental thing. These days I can smoke a few joints (mixed with tobacco) at the weekends and for the rest of the week when I'm not blazing I don't think at all about smoking cigs, although I do crave weed at points during the week when I don't have it and i'm not sure if it's partly me craving the nicotine buzz.

Agree with "mainly mental" but I think the physical side is crucial to recognise as it causes a lot of difficulties quitting. A lot of people blame themselves when they can't quit as they see themselves as weak when actually it is a tough undertaking for anyone.

Are you a reg or just a regular reg?

I am a semi-regular regular reg.

Subscribed
More dogs' pic plz

I'll try

Cats, Dogs and Micespace

My house has been taken over by an army of mice. I became aware of the invasion at one o’clock last Wednesday morning when a brave young soldier decided to take the battle to my bedroom.

Myself and my girlfriend (Pauline) were falling asleep when I became convinced I was hearing noises; something was moving in the room. I got up, turned on the lights and went back to bed again three times because I couldn’t see anything. I have a terrible track record of tripping out and thinking there is something in the room so my girlfriend ignored my paranoia. Sometimes I don’t properly wake from dreams and I think there are things moving around my bed. Or I do weird **** like fling the duvet or the pillows to the ground thinking they are explosive devices. To be fair, this almost always happens the day after drinking while I am still stuck in that parallel universe between dreams and reality.

Anyway, eventually Pauline started to hear it too and we figured the noise was coming from my wardrobe. I half-emptied it but couldn’t find anything. I then stopped searching when I heard some scratching. I stood in silence for a few minutes until a mouse decided to poke his head out from between my shirts to say, “How’s it going?”

I laughed my ass off and Pauline freaked out.

So I started emptying the wardrobe and the room trying to remove any hiding places for the mouse. I opened a window to let him get out. I didn’t want to splatter his brains all over the carpet, and also I don’t really have anything against mice once they stay out of my house. It took two hours of moving beds and a screaming girlfriend before eventually he had nowhere left to hide. He couldn’t climb the smooth wall up to the window so he just sat under the sill staring at me. I think he had given up the fight not realising I had no interest in killing him. I left my hurley (Irish sports bat) against the wall and he climbed up that and made his leap for freedom.


My hurley and I.

Job done and a happy sheeprustler went to sleep.

The next day I regretted my leniency. Pauline heard another mouse moving in the kitchen as did my dogs who went ape-****, howling and barking. I climbed up on the counter and could see droppings all over the cupboards. ****. I have lived in my current house three years and we have never had a problem with pests; my luck had run out.

I laid five or six traps but this mouse is some sort of Jedi. He has taken the cheese from two traps that didn’t go off. I bought newer, super-sensitive ones and he won’t touch those.

We decided, “**** it, let’s get a cat.” So we got a cat. The cat is cool. His name is Felix and he is definitely one of the most chilled out creatures I have ever interacted with. He sits on the couch all day licking his balls and only moves when he needs to eat or take a crap. In fairness, he also leaps off the couch every time he hears Morris (the mouse) and he has made sure he stays trapped behind our cupboards. Otherwise, he just purrs constantly and generally looks like the cat that got the cream.


Felix the Housecat.

It was a few days after getting to know Morris that I located his mother ship. We have a compost container in the back yard and I found three mice having a good chin wag on top of it. They escaped down their tunnel system after spotting me. The composter, now called Micespace, is essentially a mouse utopia. A moist, warm space where some idiot human comes and tops up the food supply every day. The ****ers are definitely laughing at me.


Micespace

I have a problem in that I can’t lay poison as my dogs or cat may eat the dead mice and in turn be poisoned. I also haven’t been able to let the cat into the back yard yet as Maggie (one of my dogs) hates him. She has tried to take a chunk out of him a few times; although I am pretty sure they will make friends eventually.


Maggie aka Queen Cersei

Until those ass-holes form an alliance, Micespace will continue to be the Promised Land for mouse-kind.

Lovely animals

Thanks man.

Cool name btw, do u rustle many sheep?

Sure do. Will post pics of sheep in a near future blog.