Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

Poker this weekend has consisted of some $1/$2 at Royal Vegas Poker. I made about $6.50 single tabling while watching more Alias. The chart shows that I've been taking a beating lately. Poker Office is telling me that I'm playing about 20.35% of hands to the flop, with 7.37% pre-flop raises. Overall I'm tight-aggressive pre-flop and neutral post flop. While the books recommend aggressive play post-flop, I find that it just kills me. I mean, I raised earlier with TT pre-flop. The flop came with rainbowed undercards. So I bet the flop. An ace comes on the turn so my opponent (who called me down) won with AQo. Reviewing his play, I can't say that he played poorly. On the flop, he had about 8/1 pot odds and was 7/1 to hit his overpair. ARRRGGGHHHH!!!! As you can see, my BR has also taken a hammering. But this is due to late night SNG's with the Rottie and Acornman. I was fished out by J8o after going all in with AKo pre-flop. Nice!

Anyway, the reason why I've not done much Poker this weekend is that I went to Coventry for a MMA seminar. It was nice to see a few old faces and my master now has lots of grey hair. However, he was unimpressed by my loss of warrior spirit and I feel that he was correct. Afterall, my accountant and myself seem to have lost any sort of competitive spirit. Why train to be the best fighter if you're never going to get in the ring? Why join the pulling contest when you can go to Platinums? Why strive have a better job than your peers when you can make more money gambling?

Moving on from my personal inadequacies, the course was pretty good. My master has moved on from purely Muay Thai and Eskrima, and now incorporates submission fighting in his repertoire. He also teaches Ju Jutsu as well. This would all be well and good if I trained regularly. However, my recent training has consisted of Muay Thai, and all that involves is thumping people with feet, fists, knees and elbows. It's pretty straightforward stuff, though there's a lot of depth in the techniques for those who care to study it. The course on Saturday involved lots of Vale Tudo style techniques. These combined wrestling and striking and I hadn't really done any of that before. As a result I was pretty shit and didn't know what the guy was on about half the time. Later on, though, the instructor showed some interesting techniques that combined striking with trapping in a way that could be implemented by gloved fighters. These could be useful in sparring, but until I get my stamina up I'll just continue to get hammered every time I spar. So in order to toughen myself up I've brought my old leg weights and dumb bells up to Balham from back home. I've got enough space in my flat to train, but may as well admit that I probably won't bother doing anything. SMT SMT. Should probably work on my footwork too. This is probably one of the most undervalued area in fighting arts. I may be a scrawny shit, but back in the day I used to fist fight with larger chaps, using my feet to both position myself for counter strikes and to stop myself getting fit. In my current state, though, I'd probably get a kicking from a Karate white belt.

Oh well. It's nearly Monday. May do some of the old Poker Office with Juice after my Sunday roast beef later. And need to install the Eclipse PHP IDE to get my webdev accelerated.

Was reading the Sunday papers earlier. The business and money sections are full of stories of worried investors losing millions from recent uncertainties and stock market declines. The pictures accompanying these stories are commonly of worried looking American floor traders. Such images show how little finanial journalists know. Short term traders, such as locals on the CBOT floor, will be thrilled, not concerned by these recent events. Chaos means volatility. And volatility means opportunity. And opportunity means free money. I just hope some of it comes my way...

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