Texas Calculatem and Poker Office Blog

I've been working on promoting my new charity voting website. It's hard getting new visitors onto a new site, so I offered people $1 for making a few posts, advertising on the Buy/Sell forums at Digital Point and Namepros, two webmaster forums.

Both offers were very similar, but the Namepros post attracted 5 new users, while the Digital Point post has attracted none. I shall therefore try to identify the cause of this lack of interest from Digital Point visitors.

- The Namepros post was entitled Do you want a dollar?. The DP post was entitled Get $1 for helping this charity site, first 20 people only. I believe that the shorter, questioning, title of the Namepros post may have helped to attract more visitors.

- The NP forum has 33,130 members. The DP forum has 26,964 members. These numbers are fairly close.

- In the NP post, I just specified what people had to do to get the dollar In the DP post I described my plan.

Conclusion?

While it's too early to draw a full conclusion, I'm speculating that the reason for the relative success of the NP post is due to it's simplicity and directness. I'll need to bear this in mind in my future marketing efforts.

Poker Stuff?

Did a couple more SNG's with Rosie and J last night. Rosie got busted out going all in with AQo against KK. J and myself ended up heads up at the end. As usual, J got lucky and got 1st place. SMT SMT.

Am not doing much during the day today. Have a BBQ in Ashford later, but other than that am still just watching Alias.

Anyway, rather than single task, I multi-tasked and have been doing 5 player SNG's. Tried a hyper aggressive strategy of raising 4BB into about 50% of unraised pots. Surprisingly it worked and steadily increased my chip lead. I took a few hits. For example, when my AKo came against 22 (we both went all in), but in general it was a damn solid strategy. I may step back to super micro-limit poker to test this out as it's a high risk high return strategy.

CLICK HERE TO GO FISHING AT LADBROKES POKER

I made the crab soup. Also added peas and carrots, as those are mentioned in other recipes that I found.

Didn't bother grinding the Old Bay Seasoning spices and just chucked them in. Not sure if I got the ratios quite right. My bro thinks I put in too much cardomon. Another problem was the ratio of stuff to liquid. There just wasn't enough liquid in it.

Other than that, the flavour was reasonable. Next time I do it I'll add more liquid and use less cardomon.

Was doing some $0.15/$0.30 with Juice. Not a good session as I wasn't getting the cards.

Just as I was about to leave, I was dealt 72o in the big blind. That's 72o with two colours. Nice! I promptly raised 4BB and there were two callers.

The flop came 2xx. With 2 spades on the board. I was first to act so I bet half the pot. I didn't want to scare off the opposition, and could smell the 7 coming on the turn.

The turn was a 7. Juice smelled the magic and shouted all in. But I bet half the pot again to keep the punters in. One guy called. One folded.

Anyway, I ended up winning the pot when the last opponent folded on the river. Alas, my Poker client crashed when I took the screenshot, so I have no trophy to show my loyal readers.


CLICK HERE TO GO FISHING AT LADBROKES POKER

It's been a long week, and I haven't put as many hours into Poker as I should have. To help unwind I played a few SNG's at Ladbrokes. My computer was feeling sluggish so I didn't use Texas Calculatem or Poker Office.

$2+$0.30 - 1st place, $7.00 prize
$2+$0.30 - 2nd place, $4.70 prize
$5+$0.50 - 3rd place, $7.50 prize

That's banked me a whole $8.00 in profit. Not quite as good as the $15 I got from link sales last week, but every penny counts.

Met an ex-colleague for a drink last week. He's a pro player and has been doing well at $100 SNG's lately. He is a true inspiration, living the dream, and is off to play in Las Vegas next month. Let's all wish him some luck.

I'm going to try to make some Maryland Crab Soup later. Hopefully I'll be able to get the ingredients.


CLICK HERE TO GO FISHING AT LADBROKES POKER

I need a break from the old Texas Calculatem. Being a breakeven player is damn depressing I'll therefore be working my way through a few of the games here:

http://www.everyvideogame.com/

Added some Big Brother news articles to my blapper site. I used to get about 40 hits a day when I had cannel4.com in 2000. Hopefully this news will have more success than that.

Am also going to start regular charity donations using my internet pollution funds (Juice prefers to call this my "slush" fund). Will probably start with £10 a month and will let visitors to my blapper site vote on who to give the cash to. At present I've just set up a few forums here and am collecting a small list of charities from which a few will be chosen for the first poll. My Internet income has taken a bit of a hit due to that shitty search engine, but if things start to pick up hopefully I'll be able to make more regular and/or higher contributions.

Bare hair, wax and nails junk mail

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...

CLICK HERE TO GO FISHING AT LADBROKES POKER

This blog may be ending soon. I'm getting fed up with my lack of progress and have stepped up to the still mediocre level of $1/$2 limit at Noble Poker and Royal Vegas. Laddies seems to be totally dead for some reason. Anyway, the BR is dropping and stands at $290. Not good!

The nice lady who runs wethinkcheaterssuck.com has kindly offered to help me with my cat experiment. The experiment is not going too well as it seems to be that most webizens are cat haters who don't care if a little moggy has no luxury foods to eat.

Regarding the actual site, I'm quite a fan of the simple old school style layout. It has a large and simple centralised title that describes exactly what the site is about, and contains a few stories about the site's subject matter. Spaced here and there are traditional banner adverts and adsense. So as a whole, this is a well set up site for a small niche market.

In terms of content it seems that the lady has had a hard time. Being a single male web geek I don't really have much to contribute to her cheaters list. However, I have been cheated on many occasions by bookmakers such as Sparteng Endax (that is obviously spelled incorrectly as the cheating cunts will probably try to sue me otherwise).

In order to keep me amused, I set up this page to see how long it would take a forwarded email to get round the city and return to the office. However, all I've achieved is learning that the world seems to hate cats. How sad. I put a chat facility on the page and here are some of the things visitors have said:

Lack of food + annoying cat = obvious solution = kebab time!

you got 81 people here (probably 75 of them were the webmaster)...looks like the cats gonna die

My colleague is very annoyed that the top results for Cat Scratch post searches in Google are commercial.

Here is a picture of his favourite type of cat:

Have finally cashed out my £27.86 referal fee for refering Juice to Inter Poker. I think the whole $500 NL challenge made me about £10 profit. And Juice got some good experience from the whole thing. It's a pity it didn't work out, but that's Poker!

Read up on one of Juice's leads. This post by Gastronome seems a bit belittling to people like Juice, Kronsdat, Rosie, myself and even the great Acornman. Not everyone can be a pro and we all have other careers, with Poker being (for me atleast) yet another subject in which I am trying to Excel. No one can excel in all areas, but if we don't try than we have no chance of success.

Anyway, the Google PR of this blog is worth far more than I know I'll ever make from Poker so I'll just continue to abuse it...

This is something I'd like to try cooking in the future. I tried some in my recent US road trip and it was pure magic.

The bloody Ask Jeeves robot has taken down my Blapping site. I am not happy. Despite sending me fuck all traffic, it has consumed 8 times more traffic than Google. This is not good. Downtime=loss of income. ARRRGGGHHHH!

On a more positive front, Kronsdat has returned to the world of Poker. Let's all wish him luck.

Our dear Rosie hates Cockney Rhyming Slang. Especially when Juice starts talking about Thomas the Tank Engine.

I was surfing through the useful but pretentious wikipedia site (here's my pretentious profile: fcmisc and found that they are missing Thomas on their cockney page. I therefore did my bit for society by adding Tommy to the page. Let's see if one of their voluntary monkeys deletes it:

Click here to view my contribution to society.

Speaking of society, I was having dinner at a mate's place last night. Was asked the question "What do you do for society?" How rude! And then today, while trying to organise a KFC eating contest, I was told:

"Think of the starving orphans..... Don't you think eating competitions are the epitome of everything that's wrong with society?"

To which "The Rage" replied:

"You can't eat starving orphans. They don't have the same finger lickn' coating."

I'm not sure what sort of moral line this blog is supposed to draw. But surely buying lots of chicken helps drive the economy. The economy pays the country's coffers. And the country's coffers allow Gordon Brown of the Labour Party to pursue his Debt Pledges.

Did anyone vote in the local elections? I didn't bother as I don't know any of the candidates. All I do know is that I'd like to have the dog shit removed from my street as it's been building up lately. A neighbour even stuck a notice up on a lamp post threatening to redeposit the shit into the owners' letter boxes unless they got their act together. I'm definitely a fan of cute doggies, but I do agree that it's very vile and selfish when dog owners allow their best friends to foul public areas.

Got sent a picture of the scariest cat imaginable. It belongs in a Zombie movie. The owner insists it looks cute so I've put it on kittenwars to allow the internet community be our judge. The cat is called Nimou and has yet to be approved. Maybe it's so frightenning that the moderators have all died of heart attacks?

I also put a picture of Charlie on puppy wars. No one has voted on him.


CLICK HERE TO GO FISHING AT LADBROKES POKER

I'm finally having a comeback with my BR. At time of writing Poker Office is telling me I've played 50% of hands this session. But I've been getting the hands and am not too concerned.

My recent style of play has been "tight is right" pre-flop. However, I am limping most lethally post-flop.

I've been waiting for the hands and hitting my opponents with big calls on the turn and river. Why bet and scare them off when you can be a call station? And besides, my prior losses were caused by stupid large bluffs when I knew I was behind.

The strategy is working well so far and I'm looking forward to buying some French bread with my winnings, and trying out Kronsdat's crouton recipe.

Poker aside, I went Thai Boxing again today. The moves are starting to return, though no one at the club believes that I'm 26. SMT SMT.


CLICK HERE TO GO FISHING AT LADBROKES POKER

I made some French Onion soup today. It is pure magic in a bowl. Even Texas Calculatem can't do that! I added some mushrooms to the recipe. Not sure if it was a good choice or not as it gave the soup a strange sweetness. Anyway, hope you like the photo.

community site

Who owns these shoes? Someone left them in my flat a few weeks ago.

They are a bit skanky and were left in a "City Organiser" bag. If unclaimed in 30 days I'll bin them.