Seems like a slam dunk jam by general consensus then, thanks guys!

March

Overall, it's been a pretty mediocre month. Got crushed at the start for 25BI or so, then went on a pretty big heater at the end of the month to finish roughly break even. Volume suffered in mid-month due to a lack of motivation and an excess of feeling sorry for myself. The last week or so I've felt the urge to play much more frequently. I turned on RIT at the depths of my run-bad and started Godmoding almost instantly. Guess that's been the problem for the past 20 months

I've not played a single hand of live poker this month, which makes me sad. If there was an Eco-system that allowed me to make a good living (£80k/yr) at the live tables, then I'd definitely be a part of it. Sadly as it stands id have to move cities, and even then I'd probably have to switch to PLO to accomplish that. I'll be smashing as many hours of live cash as possible at Barcelona this Summer to make up for it.

A few hands from the past little while:

1. Pretty sweet runout vs reg



2. I can probably exploitatively bet quite a lotbigger on this flop vs this opponent



3.



4. Fold is probably best here vs this cat, seems pretty close though



5.



I'm probably about done playing for the month, as I'll be really busy until Saturday now. Had a look at the SCOOP sched, and a lot of the good events are at awkward times for me. Hopefully I can still play a lot of them, and win 7-figures or so.

Hope you all had a good Easter, and a successful April to come.

Lied about being done for the month and managed to get a 3k hand session in this morning. It went really well and I won around 600bb. Feel like I'm playing well at the moment and definitely have regained a lot of lost confidence and drive for the game this week. I've worked really hard off of the tables this year, so hopefully I'll see some good results in the way of $$$.

Zoom 500 broke for like 3hours this morning, which is the first time I've seen that happen in a long time. Fingers crossed it isn't a recurring event.

With today's winnings, I've finally been able to book a winning number (albeit a small one) - which feels huge given that I was down nearly $15k at one point!

1) VS reg



2) Fun spot vs reg and rec



3) VS whale



4) Same guy



5) VS reg



6) VS reg



7) Weird one



8) Think this is a call in review



Good luck at the tables, people.

Nice to hear you're on the right side of some variance mate! The AJdd is really interesting. I think you got loads of options - i may check the flop or bet the turn. As for river sizing i would sigh call. Once you open the bluff door, you gotta call! Are you coming to ukipt? I'm pretty sure you're uk...

Thanks fella, it feels good! Good to see you're crushing as of late as well. Not going to make UKIPT this year, unfortunately. I'm UK based yeah, but have other commitments.

As for AJdd, I'm still pretty happy with betting flop here. We want to bet a decent amount on this flop, and I like our AJ combos for a few reasons. Agree river is a call, especially with river sizing. In real time I didn't think that this villain would be getting out of line enough (perhaps he isn't) to justify bet call.

April has started pretty well for me, and I seem to have carried forward some of the momentum from the end of last month. The games have been really good in general too, with a really good reg:rec ratio. Some of the tougher regs seem to have vanished from the games, too. Which is always nice. Losing someone from the pool who wins at 5bb/100 frees up quite w lot of money to battle for.

I got a pretty hefty tax rebate this week, which I wasn't at all expecting. This will save me having to withdraw anything this month, so I'll hopefully be able to cushion the roll a bit and start eyeing up some of the softer 1knl games.

Some hands from yesterday:

1) This was the first hand I VPIPed this month



2) vs reg



3) vs reg



4) vs reg



5) vs rec



Also found myself on the good side of some preflop coolers, which is always nice

Here's a short extract from the thing I've been writing. I'm calling it Whale Hunting in the 21st Century.

There's some sweary words in there, which obviously 2p2 doesn't like. Hope it still reads OK though, enjoy!

___________________________________

1. Desperate




I lay down on the crisp white sheets of my assigned Holiday Inn single bed, with my head absolutely bursting. Swimming with all the thoughts of things I could have done slightly differently. The avoidance which I could have practised toward off the **** state of affairs that was about to become my life...

I double checked my wallet - yep, broke. Totally ****ing broke. £12.44 to my name, and with two Visas and a MasterCard which I’d overdrawn to their -£1500 maximum in the past 72 hours. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But as I glanced over the flecked white paint on the window ledge, the frosted concrete carpark below looked a lot more inviting than it had done on previous nights.

There was a sharp knock at the door, and I remembered that I’d ordered a sandwich from the hotel’s late-night room service. I threw on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and walked to the door, swinging it open a little too hard, so that it crashed heavily into the adjacent wall.

The man in front of me looked startled. He was in his early 20s, with light brown hair in a forward parting, and a galaxy of freckles strewn across his forehead. In his hands, a tray with a tall glass of apple juice, and a single toasted sandwich sitting uncomfortably on a bed of tired looking lettuce. I raised an eyebrow at him, which I felt communicated all that was needed.

“Your room service, sir.” He chirped.

“Cheers”, I murmured in response, reaching out and grabbing the tray from his limp grasp. As I turned to place it on the dresser behind, he spoke again.

“That’ll be £12.10, please.”

Must have misheard him, I thought. “How much was that?” I enquired.

“Emmmm, twelve pounds and ten pence, please” He said again more clearly.

I picked up the menu that I’d ordered from earlier, and glanced at the ‘Cold Food and Snacks’ section. Roast Chicken and Coleslaw sandwich - £4.95.

“I don’t think that can be right, the sandwich was only a fiver.”

“£4.95, that’s correct. But it’s £2.15 for the juice, and there’s a £5 tray charge on anything ordered from our room service menu.” was his autonomous response.

“Jesus ****ing Christ!” I reeled. “Five pounds to carry that little ****ing tray up two flights of stairs and along a corridor?”

“I’m sorry sir, that’s our standard price point across all of our branches. If you look at the bottom of your menu the…” He began in reply.

“Oh for ****’s sake, whatever. Just take it.”

I emptied the meagre contents of my once fat wallet onto the tray, moved the plate and glass onto a worktop and thrust it back at him. Some coins spilled outwards and onto the carpeted hallway. He flapped a little as he tried to catch them, and opened his mouth as if to speak again. I shut the door on him abruptly, and walked backwards into the room, leaving the food and drink on the dresser. I lay face down on the bed, covered my head with a pillowcase, and screamed as loudly as I could into the mattress.

Paying over the odds for a chicken sandwich isn’t something that would usually bother me, at least not to this extent. But when you travel to play poker, and have just lost £16,000 in a £5/10 No Limit Hold’em game, you tend to feel a little bit more frugal than usual…


2. Beginnings



It was around August when I got the call.

“****, man. ****! My dad’s going off his nut here. What’s happening? Where are you? What are your thoughts?”

Andy was an old friend. We’d stumbled through University together: Meeting on a chance encounter at a coffee shop – neither of our regular acquaintances having bothered to turn up to lectures on that particular day. He sat alone on a small circular table, his shoulder bag perched on top of a dark green replica army coat, with a black coffee in one hand and a novel in the other. The Rum Diary, I believe. I’d sat opposite and struck up a conversation – probably around travelling or something – and we’d fast become friends.

“I don’t know, man. I don’t even have a job, or any money.” I lashed back.

“Christ, you’re a clever guy. You’ll find work somewhere. I can spot you half of your rent for the first month or two, anyway. I’m only paying utilities.”

And that was that. The flat belonged to Andrew’s Mum and Dad, hence his rent reduction. I paid £400 a month, with utilities on top, for a small, but functional, room in a 3-bedroom, council house conversion. It sat at the top of a long, steep hill in a rough, sideshow district of Aberdeen. On a clear day, with the sun up, it had the most incredible long-lens view of the sea. Interspaced by the jutting columns of the city’s few, grey, ominous, high rise flats. A sea I would soon come to know all too well.

I moved in the morning after the call. Much to the surprise and dismay of my parents, to whom this was the first they had heard of my move. Seven cardboard boxes piled high and taped shut; 2 labelled ‘clothes’, another ‘books’, the rest unlabelled – my pen had run out of ink – with a couple of Johnny-come-lately jumpers and an old acoustic guitar perched on top; thrown haphazardly into the back of my two-litre Volkswagen Golf and driven at high speeds into the city. From there they’d been unloaded to a corner of my new room and slowly unpacked over the next couple of months, by order of need and necessity.

At first Andrew and I lived alone; re-acquainting over long drunken catch sessions which would extend into the early hours of the morning. We would lie on opposing stations - his a fold-out futon, mine a 3-seated leather sofa - and throw a tennis ball back and forth for hours and hours. We’d talk the world to rights and intermittently play iphone DJ/bartender; introducing one another to any developments in our choice of drink, or soundtrack

After a few weeks of this, we extended some branches in search of an additional one to our two. A third would provide new perspective, experience and, perhaps most importantly, financial aid to our delicate situation. Stuart moved in less than a week later. He was a fellow West Coaster, with a colloquial Ayrshire-ian twang. A couple of years older than Andrew and myself, he was filled to the brim with exciting tales of exotic and mysterious lands. Contemporary Stuart was an engineer at a subsea mechanical works in the city. But a few years previous, in his wild-man years, he had been a travelling labourer, fruit-picker and mad-hat philanderer, who had worked his way across Europe, South Asia and most of Oceania. Stuart became a good friend to us both, very quickly, and when the three of us would go drinking, it would always be a catastrophic and lightning affair.

I quickly got a job at a record store in town, where I worked maximum hours for minimal pay, for a short, horrible bigot named Lee. Andrew worked there as well, as did a rag-tag selection of wayward musicians and meandering students; people who had either been lost in the system, or who were trying very hard not to be found: There was Chuck, a heaving, hulking, ginger Shaolin monk, who knew far too little and spoke far too often; Bradley, a bespectacled, pugilist and warrior-poet from a much different time and place, who had very clear ideas about exactly who he should be, but was a little less decisive on the how; Chris, a cool, kindly father figure to much of the store, who was something of a cross between Saint Nicholas and Ice Cube, if you can imagine that; Romy, a short, cute, much subjugated Jewish girl, with eyes sad and beautiful enough to feature in National Geographical; Clark, a Cyborg-Viking misanthrope, with brilliantly cutting wit and absolutely no time for pleasantries; and Mac, perhaps the saddest and most cautionary of the lot, a kind, funny, soulful guy, who had seemingly fallen on hard times somewhere around 10 years ago and just failed to ever get back up.

For the most part, they were good people. But an after school special on the trials and tribulations faced by a young person in 21st Century Scotland. With the nation’s economy in the trashcan, and everyone who could successfully count to 10, and spell their own name being shoe-horned straight from high school into any University that would take them (and there were A LOT), degrees had become meaningless: Fancy pieces of paper with which to frame and decorate your hallway. Insurmountable debt was commonplace, and employability an afterthought. Our nation had failed its young people – a lost generation of young adults, from whom the ‘Coming of Age’ chapters had been torn from their stories and burnt. Apprenticeships were a thing of the past. Internships paid somewhere between zero and **** all. And all the while, the degree factories kept on churning out more and more new graduates with every passing year. So there was the army – where you could go off to some distant, sandy place and fight illegal wars for a faithless government. Or, for the pacifists, there was retail work.

The shop paid £6.50 an hour, which on a forty hour week came to a little over £1000 a month. Rent, food and utilities were around £700 a month, with probably another £50 on top of that for the cost of running my car about the city. The work was long and tedious. Mostly it involved moving heavy things from one place to another. On rare occasions there was the opportunity to engage with customers of substance. To discuss music, film or literature on something more than a sedentary level. Those were the good days. But generally, yeah, it involved moving heavy **** around, and dealing with junkies, trying to sell their piss-stained copies of B-movies for cash-in-hand. I was pretty broke most of the time, and any spare cash I did have tended to go pretty quickly. Usually the weekend following payday, on beer and blended scotch. I needed to find some way to supplement my income, and didn’t feel I had the constitution or the connections required for dealing drugs...

swear i was just gonna come in and ask for ur writings thx will give it a read later

(Think about) Ask(ing) and you shall receive!

good read, not boring

post more , gj

+$1.1k 1400 hands, short session today as feeling pretty braindead.

Dusted off 140bb with AsQx on 4TJssx 9d 2s vs 44, after check/raise flop and calling a 3b. Ch/ch turn, ch/jam river. Think the line is okay overall, but the HH has vanished.

1) Was not loving life here on the turn vs weird reg thing



2) vs reg



3) vs regish



4) vs can't help himself, but v good reg



5) vs rec

Enjoyed your writing man, especially "Desperate". Would def read more and poker-wise good that you seem to be doing much better now! Nice results recently and GL for April

Thanks and thanks. I'm pretty bad at letting other people read anything that I write in general. So really appreciate any feedback and comments. Both excerpts are part of one bigger story.

Very nice writing. Make sure you keep working on it Looking forward to buying the finished product.

GL in poker. Keep crushing.

great thread, great extract. gl in april!

Thanks very much guys, I really appreciate it. Means a lot.

hey, late on the reading part but just now found the time. i m not sure if you went for it but i found the second bit much more enjoyable to read than the first, mainly by the stylistic choices you made. also i just ifnt he subject slightly more interesting than a degenament life cash session so thats def palyed a part. would read again

Hey man, thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate your thoughts.

Yeah I definitely made a conscious decision to have two different styles of writing. The first part is meant to seem hurried and harassed because of the subject matter and it being foreshadowing for some stuff that's to come. The second part is much slower and more refined, I guess, because it's just an introductory piece.

I prefer the second part too, personally. But a lot of people have said they like Desperate more.

I do get why people would like the former and fwiw it's a great style for the subject matter. I just don't love the subject haha

FWIW I thought the second part is significantly stronger than the first, which would be improved a lot by going through it and ruthlessly trimming any redundant words - it's no harm to leave the reader to fill in the blanks a little.

You don't have to name the exact amount maxed out on the credit cards, for example, it doesn't really matter what it is since everyone will presume that its a very large number in comparison to £12.44 which is all that matters, and leaving it up to the imagination a little might whet people's curiosity. Another example is that there's only one wall the door could slam into, and everyone will have a mental image of which wall it is, so you don't need to specify that its the adjacent one, unless there is something interesting on the wall for the door to slam into - a shiitty yellowing framed photo of another equally grim Holiday Inn, for example.

Hope that doesn't sound overly nitty or critical - I'm trying to do some writing myself and its tough to even get started let alone have something you're willing to post in public, but I've noticed I have this tendency to over-explain as well so I thought I'd mention it, its a fairly common leak I reckon!

Nice work anyway, its a good setup, somewhere like a record shop is great for having a rotating cast of interesting characters, lots of potential there. Dunno if you've ever read anything by Muriel Spark (I'm guessing you're Scottish?) but she's the master of taking a disparate group of characters, putting them in an enclosed environment, and bouncing them off each other, could be worth taking a look.

In, GL. You may want to look into Wu Tang Financial.

Nice thread mate, GLGL

Fair comments. I don't particularly like the subject either - mostly because they're true events.

Thanks so much man, really appreciate the comments and the critique. I agree with you for the most part about cutting superfluous words. I'm a big Hemingway fan. I'm also a massive over-editor of my own writing (probably why it takes me so ****ing long...) and this is only a first draft. So I'll likely bin a whole lot of it.

Definitely not overtly nitty and/or critical. Wrt getting over the stigma of posting something in public - no one person's opinion on my writing is ever going to make me feel as insecure as all the **** I imagine people thinking while they read it, in my head. So just go for it. I'd be more than happy to read anything that you want to share.

Thanks man, I really enjoy your thread. Never heard of Wu Tang Financial?

Thanks bro, are you Luckbox on stars?

___________________________

Back to poker for a little bit. Played a lot of hands today and won a small amount. Really pleased with my volume, although I definitely played some C game during my evening session. The games were amazing all day, and I wait listed a few bigger games, but they either broke before I got in or the wait lists were never ending.

Some hands from today:

1) vs tough aggro reg. Really not sure here. Seems likely he either under or over bluffs this board texture at 200bb. I was feeling a bit snakebitten at the time, so took the lowest variance route. I have so many Ax hands, and should definitely call/call/fold some of them.



2) Optimistic from rec



3) vs reg



4) regs



4) vs rec



5) vs reg?



6) vs rec



7) Punto vs splashy rec

A2s is not even close to a call on the turn imo

i mean, so much better hands to call, and A2s can't be +EV for that size

also call call fold a lot on this texture can't be a great idea