The Worst Winner

My foray into Badugi continues.  For a long time I thought I was going to have to satisfy myself with being the fourth best badugi player after finishing fourth or thereabouts time after time in 80-100 fields.  Yet, I persisted.  Then it was runnerup again and again.  On my first attempt at headsup badugi, I was crushed. With little idea of what adjustments to make my opponent pummelled me with aggression and by the time I decided to make a stand, it was too late. My second heads-up battle was also short-lived but while I didn't win, I think I was just unlucky to be outdrawn a few times, so I left more hopeful. My third heads-up experience was a 40 minute epic back and forth battle, alas, I came up short again. But I persevered and at long last won the nightly badugi tournament outright! I have discovered another couple of badugi tournaments on Pokerstars but they are still maxing out at a $4.40 buyin. Until...  Pokerstars announced a WCOOP warm up series called...

For the best part of the last ten years, poker legend Daniel Negreanu has been documenting his annual WSOP grind through a series of daily vlogs. I have watched bits and pieces over the years but never really followed it fully. But this year, one of my friends was buying a piece of Dnegs world series action through the 'Pokerstake' site. A few of our poker grouped chipped in £50 each, having initially been sold the idea (by my friend) that a big win would equate to a five figure return for us. Alas, after a second look at the numbers, the decimal point moved a couple of places and actually it was highly unlikely we could win more the a couple of hundred pounds, realistically.  Unperturbed, I was invested and decided to follow along with Negreanu's world series vlogs for the summer. It's kind of amazing that not only does Daniel churn out these videos giving an real insight into the world of a top poker pro on a daily basis but also that he's been doing it for so lon...

I had a new favourite game: Badugi.  I discovered the game last year, and after playing just three tournaments, I came up with the following sticky note guide to Badugi to keep myself on the straight and narrow: You get dealt 4 cards, a 'badugi' is when you have one of each suit. The lower the cards the better. Pairs count against you. You get three rounds of drawing and betting. Got a badugi? BET BIG! Drawing to a good badugi? Try get there cheap. Someone else betting big? They have a badugi already. Don't waste chips chasing a poor draw. Obviously there's more to it than that but that was my initial strategic observations and seemed to be enough to make the money about half the time on the nightly pot limit badugi tournament on Pokerstars. It is almost the perfect tournament for me, since becoming a parent I'm very much time restricted in what poker I can play, but this tournament; begins around 9pm which is ideal, it gets 80-100 players meaning it finishes around...

~ probably some Scottish guy It's the final week of SCOOP! And despite the uninspiring run of results thus far, I had high hopes for this week, with tickets for both the hold'em and omaha (low) main events! I'd won an $11 ticket on Twitter, been holding onto a $109 power pass ticket from before SCOOP and won the $215 ticket from just 50 cents as part of the SCOOP League Team Spraggy qualification. That's $335 in buy-ins for this week at a cost of pretty much nothing, with over $250,000 up top to win!  Before the grand finale, I used my $11 ticket for a hold'em tournament but don't have much to say about that, nothing particular noteworthy.  #80-L NLHE   -$11   2571/11603 Outside the big Sunday events, there wasn't too much on the schedule this week that excited me, a lot of turbo PKOs in the later evenings, which I'm not really interested in. But that was fine, before SCOOP began I had planned to play a lot more power path tournaments to see if I could r...

As I looked back on my second week of SCOOP, I often found myself expressing the thought that a lot of the people I played against were fools who didn't know what they're doing, and if you listen to any group of poker players freshly busted from tournaments, you'll probably hear a similar sentiment. And yet, this perspective typically comes from the players who are out, the players that have not won.  A few weeks ago I was playing a live tournament and a friend, 'Brentos', was sat to my immediate right. In one hand he gratuitously doubled me up, blind vs blind, by misplaying absolutely every spot in the hand. In fact, apart from folding pre, I don't think he could have made a single worse decision on any street throughout. Afterwards, I was winding him up but he stuck to his guns and justified why he played the way he did based on how he expected me to play, despite me not doing any of the things he imagined I would do. Our cognitive bias makes us unreliable nar...

Week 1 of this year's SCOOP and I have played more events than I had planned, in part because I am part of "Team Spraggy" in the inaugural  SCOOP League  ! Look, there I am, an integral part of the team, not just some kind of afterthought or anything. A friend asked what I got for being part of the team... and... I don't know. Bragging rights? I suppose it's up to me to make something of the opportunity, some big scores would have me scrapping it out with the pros on the leaderboard. To get those points, I  need to play more tournaments and rack up some deep runs. Spurred on by being in the SCOOP League and other social media hype I found myself with some free time around the start of the first SCOOP tournament and jumped in. Ironically event #2 because #1 is the phase tournament which ironically doesn't actually conclude until the end of the series. I should have known better, the demands of parenting means I can't really play poker until 8:30pm because t...

The Spring Championship Of Online Poker (SCOOP) is upon us and as with every big series, once the schedule has been released, I like to break it down to see which tournaments stand out as my must plays. Ideally, I'd like to play everything but bankroll, work, family and life in general get in the way of that, so working around those things I have the following list: Broadly speaking, that's the hold'em and omaha tournaments that you can register after 8:30pm UK time and the main events. I'm not bankrolled to play anything above the low buy-ins but I was hopeful I could PowerPass my way to some bigger buy-in tickets but so far I have only managed to secure one $109 ticket, which I am reserving for the low hold'em main event, so unless I squeeze in some satellites successes, I'll be sticking to the low versions. This year Pokerstars have introduced the inaugural "SCOOP League" in which the brand ambassadors have split into four teams, and I guess there w...

Twitter was my favourite social media platform but I am convinced that Elon Musk is deliberately attempting to ruin it as part of a bet or prank. Like the 'Brewsters Millions' gambit of having to lose it all to win even more or 'Trading Places' bet amongst a couple of old rich guys just toying with the fates of others. Please excuse the ancient movie references, just look it up kids. Twitter has brought me so much over the years, information, laughs, surprises, piles of poker prizes, and at times a sense of community but it's become tainted and I want better. While the verification system on Twitter has been well and truly destroyed, I suppose for the most part Twitter is much the same as it was before, you just have the constant threat of dumb changes being implemented under the guise of fighting bots before the changes are quietly undone, things like the limiting of tweets you can see, not being able to look at tweets unless you login and such. But with talk of fu...

I visited the self proclaimed "Home of UK Poker" for the first time this week. If you are unfamiliar, Dusk Till Dawn (DTD) is a poker venue in Nottingham created by Rob Yong, it's like a casino but the focus is on poker and not your typical casino games.  Situated in the midst of an industrial estate, Dusk Till Dawn elevates itself from the other grey boxes with a four grand red doric columns framing the entrance. Inside, there's a small entrance lobby and sign in desk, before you move into the cardroom itself. As you enter the main space, there's a bar area to the right, cash desk to the left and in front of you tiered levels of tables creating an amphitheatre centred around the feature table, but more on that later. Having embraced the hermit lifestyle COVID foisted upon us, I have played just one live game of poker since 2019, so sitting down in such a busy venue was fairly overwhelming. We were tightly packed in, and I was seated right in the middle of almost ...

One line is fine, right? Goosebumps and chills in just one leg were unusual first symptoms but that is how it started. The headache and sinus pain soon followed and I knew my fate: COVID. My wife had tested positive a few days earlier and been pretty much bid ridden since, and now it was my turn. We still had a few tests left over from back when COVID testing was a thing, although it doesn't appear to be a thing anymore, the government advice on the matter is now simply "stay at home if you're sick" which seems like reasonable advice for any illness.  I called in sick to work the next day. The chills were no longer restricted to the one leg, full on flu symptoms now, all over. My levels of wellness/sickness varied throughout the day, wrapped in a blanket, if I didn't move and the drugs had taken affect, then I was kind of ok. And a bit bored. What to do?  Poker.  Short stack ninja all the way I fired up the laptop and perused the schedule. I have struggled in rece...