Daleroxxu's blogaments.

World Blogger Championship of Online Poker 2012 (WBCOOP)

2012-02-16T19:13:00.002Z

The WBCOOP is a tournament series running from February 23rd until March 4th. It's for bloggers and it costs nothing to enter, zero, zip, nada!

There will be 30 side events, all paying out tickets to the SCOOP (Spring Championship of Online Poker), a $5000 main event, and that's not all, there will be $5,000 cash awarded to the Best Blogger, $1,000 cash for Best Tweeter and $11 in tourney dollars if you bust me or any other Team Online player.

And there is even MORE, a tournament leaderboard that will award:

o 1st place: WBCOOP Trophy, Live Event or Online Package for any Global PokerStars
Event (up to the value of $7,000), 2012 SCOOP Medium Main Event Ticket and a
Special Edition Chipset.
o 2nd place: 2012 SCOOP Medium Main Event Ticket and a Special Edition Chipset.
o 3rd place: Step 4 Ticket and a Special Edition Chipset.

To enter, write a blog post telling everyone what you would do if you won the $5,000 Best Blogger prize and submit it to PokerStars. If you want to know what I'd use the $5,000 for then watch the video above :-)

All the details of the schedule, prizes and how to enter are here: http://www.pokerstars.com/blog_tournament/

Pump Up The Volume

2012-02-06T20:25:00.005Z

It's already well into February and my poker volume for 2012 is way below what I'm aiming for. As part of Team PokerStars Online I have a certain commitment as far as earning VPPs and hours at the tables go. As part of that my goal is to earn 400,000 VPPs this year but I'm only at 22,000 right now.

The main reasons why I am behind already;

The VIP reward changes and at the start of the year mean an extra hour or more of grinding every day for me to get the same number of VPPs. There has also been a recent rake reduction. That is great for improved winrate but means longer sessions to meet VPP goals.

Computer issues didn't help, but I have a new setup now with 64-bit Windows 7, good gfx card, lots of RAM and most importantly - an SSD hard disk. If you use Poker Tracker or Holdem Manager then buying a solid state HDD is the best thing you could possibly do performance wise.

Playing less tables to concentrate on TCOOP (didn't work out so well).

I was on a 'normal' sleep schedule for a while. A good thing for living a healthy life but terrible for playing online poker as the games are pretty bad during the day in Asia with less games running and much fewer recreational players. When it is mid-day here in Thailand, it is 5am or 6am in Europe. I figure the best times for me to play poker are around 11pm-7am Thai Time, which is 4pm-Midnight in the UK.

Despite the low volume my results have been good, particularly at 180s and PLO. Good results are an important motivational factor as far as getting volume in goes. Any poker player knows how tough it is to fire up another session when you have been experience a run of rotten luck.

I will get back on pace if I work hard and pump, pump up the volume. I feel like the 180man SNGs are probably my most profitable game right now, but they aren't going to meet my VPP goals. So going forward I will probably be playing half 180s and half PLO, or something to that effect.

The time zone factor is one of the reasons that I am considering moving back to the UK. When I first settled in Thailand it was before 'Black Friday' and the yanks could still play online. There were good games round the clock. Not so much any more. If I want to take poker seriously then I need to stay up all night and sleep all day. I haven't stepped foot in the UK since the end of 2010, and don't miss it at all, but the better time zone and the UKIPT tourneys may convince me to return.

I could list off a million reasons why living in Thailand is better than living in the UK. So I am pretty much undecided about what to do. There are also more countries in Asia that I want to visit but haven't had the chance yet. Specifically Korea, Japan and the Philippines. It will be a hell of a lot cheaper, quicker and easier for me to visit them from Thailand than from the UK. Heck, even India is only a 5 hour direct flight from here.

I'm feeling like there's a 40% chance I will move back to the UK around June. A 40% chance I will stay in Thailand much longer and a 20% chance I will move to Macau for 3-6 months before moving back the UK.

In the short term I will be leaving Thailand this week, as my visa expires. Normally this would be a good excuse to take a trip somewhere new and fun, but right now I can do without the expense (in terms of money and time spent) so I will just take another bus trip to the Cambodian border (PoiPet).

I will take an agency run trip which for $200 all inclusive involves a 6 hour trip in a VIP bus to the border, crossing into the scary no-man's land between Thailand and Cambodia and staying in a dodgy casino hotel (with no internet connection) for 2 nights. The 2 night stay is so the agent can take my passport to the Thai embassy in Phnom Phen, Cambodia's capital city, which is very far away. When I check out the hotel he's brought my passport back with a brand new 3-month Thai visa. Then get the passport stamped at Thai immigration and bus back to Bangkok.

I've done this trip before. It's not much fun and the food is a joke but it's a cheap and no hassle way to get a visa. The last time I went with an Aussie girl so had some company. This time I will be going alone. Maybe I will try to find a poker game in one of the casinos or find some way to pass the time.

Turbo Championship of Online Poker (TCOOP)

2012-01-19T00:53:00.001Z

Do you like action? I hope so because the inaugural PokerStars TCOOP (Turbo Championship of Online Poker) is about to begin and this isn't your grandmother's tournament series. The faint-hearted among you need not apply.

The next 11 days will see 50 turbo championship events being played out with $10,000,000 in guarantees. That is sure to make for the kind of heart racing, adrenaline pumping action that has never been seen before in the history of poker.

The turbo MTTs have been hugely popular for quite a while so it's great that PokerStars has dedicated a series to them. I'm excited knowing that for a small financial outlay and time commitment I have the chance to bink some huge scores over the next 11 days.

It can be extremely difficult to set aside the time to play in regular speed tournaments, and for that reason I almost never play them them. The TCOOPs are likely to run in the 3-6 hour range and that is perfect for me. I also think the TCOOP structures will suit me a lot. Having played so many turbo SNGs I think that I'm as good as anyone in the world when it comes to playing with shallow stacks. So I'm ready to crush these TCOOPs!

Check out the TCOOP Schedule and give me a shout out on twitter @Daleroxxu to let me know what event you are most looking forward to. For me it has to be Event #2 - No Limit Omaha Hi/Lo, it doesn't get more action-junky friendly than that! I also plan on playing every $22 buyin event. PokerStars has been handing out thousands of free $22 TCOOP tickets to depositors over the last couple of weeks so these events are going to be insanely soft. So my seatbelt is fastened and I'm ready to manoeuvre my way through the thousands of donke... ehh I mean obstacles that stand between me and the finish line.

Two Thousand and Twelve

2012-01-13T04:21:00.004Z

It's 2012, the year of the dragon apparently. Hopefully that means I'll be dragon a lot of pots. UCWIDT?

What does Daleroxxu and a Jehovah's Witness have in common? They both got the same number of presents on Xmas day.

It was the first year that I was alone for Xmas and New Year as I decided to stay in Thailand. My mother sent me an Xmas parcel at the end of November, but sent it airmail - no tracking, so obviously it got stolen way before it got to me. The Thai customs department are about as corrupt as the police, so merry fucking Xmas to the thief that stole my present.

As Thailand isn't a Christian country, all the shops remain open on Xmas day. I seen that as an opportunity. An opportunity to do some very late Xmas shopping, for myself :)

Video games, whisky and snacks. Happy holidays indeed, thanks to shops selling imported goodness.

People think that everything is ultra cheap in Thailand but I end up buying tons of imported stuff that obviously costs way more than it does in it's country of origin. As I sat recently eating biscuits imported from Scotland, ice cream imported from New Zealand and orange juice imported from Florida I wondered what was bigger, my ass or my carbon footprint.

After a lifetime of runbad in 2011 I was hoping that 2012 would turn out to be less rigged. Sadly my 27" Dell 2560x1440 resolution monitor died on January 2nd and I was relegated to my tiny laptop which is useless for playing poker. Most people's new year resolution is something cliché like giving up smoking or getting fit. My new year resolution - 1366x768. Nice joke. I have gotten the monitor replaced already though, so it's all good.

I didn't set any new years resolutions because it's a bit of a stupid concept, but I have been making an effort to be more active. I've been doing some light jogging around Lumphini Park which is a huge 142 acre park and has a running track around it. You have to watch out for the wild life though. I nearly crapped my pants when I was confronted by this Komodo Dragon.

Well, they did say that 2012 would be the year of the dragon. It's just a type of monitor lizard, which I think is pretty harmless unless you are a small mammal.

Lumphini Park is about as close to paradise as I will get any time soon. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world my fellow Team Onliners are living it up on Paradise Island at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure. I didn't make it there but I did make it into the official PCA magazine, showing off my multi-lingual skills.

photo by Donnie Peters

Rather than travelling long haul to brick a single MTT I will be getting my tourney fix this January by playing lots of small and fast events in the TCOOP (Turbo Championship of Online Poker). This is the first year of TCOOP and I love the concept. 50 turbo events over 11 days with buyins in the $22 - $215 range and a $700 main event and $2000 high roller.

Here is a PDF file with the schedule. TCOOP is running on PokerStars from 19th to 29th January.

If you deposit $60 or more by January 18th using deposit code TCOOP you'll get a free $22 TCOOP ticket. That should mean the $22 events will have huge fields and be absurdly soft. I'm hoping to win one of them and get the year of a to a good start. Good luck to all my fanboys who play :)

PokerStars New VPP Award Method - 'Weighted Contributed'

2012-01-01T12:41:00.008Z

As of today, January 1st 2012, PokerStars have switched to a new method of assigning VPPs to players in ring games.

Old and New

In the past each player dealt into a hand was given an equal share of the VPPs earned in that hand. The new method assigns VPPs proportionally based on how much each player contributed to the pot.

With this 'weighted contributed' method the loose players will be rewarded more than they previously were, and the tighter players rewarded less. Winning players, in general, play a much tighter style than losing players, so are likely to be the ones most negatively affected by the change. This negative effect could be anything from very slight, to enormous depending on how tight a player is, but there will also be a few of the loose aggressive winning players who benefit.

Effect

I played my first PLO session of 2012 right after midnight ET. There were a bunch of the usual nitty regs there, probably trying to figure out how much this change is going to cost them. Most of them stopped playing after the first hour and the tables were much, much softer.

I played 2004 hands, would have earned 800 VPPs with the old 'dealt' method, but earned 635 VPPS with the new 'weighted contributed' method. I played 22% VPIP and the table averages were around 33% VPIP.

Of course as poker players we know it's not smart to make assumption based on small sample sizes.

I ran a SQL query on my HEM database for all my hands played in the December 2011 (CAP NLHE + full stack PLO, mostly 6-max). Based on that data it looks like I would take a 10% reduction in VPPs overall.

I also checked to see how the change would affect other regulars.

Most players playing a typical full stacked reg style were affected around the same as me, but mass tabling nits and short stackers were affected to a much greater degree.

I checkéd how the biggest nit that I know would be affected. A guy with screen name b****f**** who buys in for 30BBs and plays a 7.5/1 vpip/pfr style over 5500 hands of full ring PLO. This is a slightly losing player who has previously been making a lot from the PokerStars VIP program. He will be taking a 70% cut in VPPs with the new method. Safe to say his days of leeching off other people's rake and stinking up the games are now over. He and his obnoxious chat every time he loses a pot won't be missed by me, that's for sure.

Most of the 6-max 30BB SSPLO hit and run merchants look to be taking a significant cut. H******J*** who plays 12/7 looks to be losing around 50% of his VPPs and s***t***** who plays 23/17 style a 35% reduction.

Looking at some of the huge laggy fish that make the games juicy, some of them are getting a 300% increase in VPPs.

Going Forward

I expect with this change that most of the break-even and slightly losing nits and 30BB hit and run rats that made the games terrible will either quit or perhaps change their style, with a few of them just taking the hit and playing longer sessions to make up for their pay cut.

So while I see around a 10% reduction in VPPs for myself, I don't mind taking that hit if a lot of the mindless short stack nits who are terrible for poker are basically shot in the head. I'm likely to more than make up for my loss of VPPs though an improved winrate in better games, not just because of less short stackers and break-even nits but though the higher activity of loose losing players. Loose recreational players gaining higher VIP status (e.g. FPP multiplier) and having many more FPPs to spend on higher value bonuses, tournament tickets and satellites will be good for the games long term, as most of that value is going to end up back on the tables.

Of course. what the net effect of the change to the weighted contributed method is will likely take several months to find out. I am feeling overall positive about it but I'm prepared to eat my words if in the middle of the year I have no improvement in winrate and I'm having to grind an extra hour a day to make up for the reduction in VPPs.

Whatever the result though it's hard to argue that the weighted contributed method of assigning VPPs is much fairer than the dealt method. In the past certain players have been getting way more than their fair share.

Of course there will still be a lot of negative reaction to the change from the people that are to be affected the most, the ones that have historically contributed little and taken a lot. Most people only care about their own bottom line, and of course that is perfectly natural, but changes like this are made with the bigger picture and all players in mind. The players that are hurt the most by this will be far more vocal, venting on forums about their outrage, than the many recreational players that have never even heard of twoplustwo that benefit from the change. You end up with 1% of the players making 99% of the noise.

For anyone that accuses me of bias, I'm obviously not happy about my own 10% reduction in VPPs either but I do feel like I will benefit in the long run through better games. I think that a 'winner take all' method', rather than a weighted contributed method of distributing VPPs would be way the fairest method overall, as it would still take away from nits that leech off other peoples rake in the dealt method, but reward the more active winning players more fairly. After all, the player who pays the rake is he who wins the pot.

edit:

The same number of VPPs will be awarded as before, but the VPPs are worth less to a casual player than they are to a high volume player because of their lower VIP status. A Silver Star VIP status player's VPPs translate into milestone cash credits and FPPs at a much lower rate per VPP than a Supernova.

Rake attributed to a Supernova is worth roughly a 36% return to that player.

That of a Silver Star VIP is roughly 16%, Gold Star 20% and Platinum Star 25%.

As far as I'm aware the criticism from players is that this difference in value is basically being swallowed by PokerStars as profit.

I think the difference in value is being overstated somewhat, as the increase in VPPs will mean that casual players will end up in higher VIP brackets for the same amount of play (or get close enough that they play more to achieve it).

If we make the reasonable assumption that high volume players will receive less VPPs under the weighted contributed model, and low volume players will receive more, then yes, the dollar amount returned to the player base as a whole will be reduced.

There were some changes planned including a reduction in rake from 5% to 4.5%, that were supposed to balance that out somewhat. Those changes were dropped at the last minute due to negative feedback on the forums. Some players generally thought that the details of this rake reduction, that included a higher cap for 5-handed play, would make the overall rake higher rather than lower. I believe though that it was intended to be a rake reduction for most players, and an overall reduction in rake.

PokerStars are inviting player representatives to the Isle of Man this month to discuss this. I believe that they are open to a resolution that will result in a slight reduction in rake overall, as was their original intention.

Team Online 2012

2011-12-14T12:21:00.006Z

I'm thrilled to announce that I have agreed with PokerStars to represent Team Online through to the end of 2012.

In a year where many unscrupulous companies and individuals have fallen and dragged the name of online poker down with them, PokerStars has stood tall, providing a quality of service and a level of integrity that is unrivalled in the online poker industry.

I am proud to attach my name to the PokerStars brand. The combination of World's Best Poker Site and World's Best Blogger is a match made in heaven.

I really need to set some goals for 2012 but I'm too busy grinding my ass off trying to wrap up 2011 to even think about it. After losing a week due to illness I'm now at the point where I can't take a single day off for the rest of December if I'm to hit a VPP Milestone Cash Credit.

It's tough though as I still feel very weak and I'm constantly losing my focus during sessions. It's funny, the recent interview I did with Jesse 'OnTheMac' McKenzie I really wanted to do in one take so that I wouldn't have to spend time editing it. That plan didn't work out too well for me as my mind went completely blank about 5 times during our recording. Editing was required. If I can't even focus on a short conversation with someone then god help me trying to focus during long sessions of poker.

I'm just trying to soldier on for the rest of December and then I will take my foot of the gas and switch my focus to getting fit and healthy. I decided not to travel home to Scotland for the Christmas season. The thought of travelling there and back in a cramped economy seat at the cost of $1600 + 2 days of my life, and the effects of jet-lag twice, just didn't seem worth it.

Christmas and New Year is a time of the year that most people look forward to. A time for people to be merry, have fun and spend time with their families. Then January comes around and everyone is miserable again, the hangover month. For me it's the opposite. I'm just counting the days until it is January which will be a much more enjoyable month for me.

Here in Thailand Christmas seems to be quite low-key. It is a Buddhist country with a few Christians. There's some Christmas decorations up in mostly touristy places, but they went up only recently. Compare that to back home where as soon as Halloween is over every retail outlet is sticking up the tinsel and subjecting its patrons ears to 'I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus'. Just awful.

On Sunday night there was a special $1,000,000 GTD Sunday Storm (yes, a million guaranteed for an $11 buyin tourney) as part of the The 10th Anniversary celebrations on PokerStars. There was also a 72 Billion hand promotion going on, with the 72 Billionth hand due to hit during the peak time of Sunday night. I remember checking the number of online players in the client and it was 400,000 (WHAT???????).

I also wanted to play EVhero's Sunday night home game around the time of the Sunday Storm, but the lobby wouldn't open up for me in the Home Games tab in the client. I kept clicking it out of frustration. I changed to a different tab, went back, clicked it, nothing, clicked it another few hundred times out of frustration, nothing.

So I was busy playing the Sunday Storm, some other tourneys and 14 tables of PLO, playing more tables than I normally would since the big 72,000,000,000 milestone hand was about to hit. About 30 minutes in to my session the lobby for EVhero's home game intrusively pops up from nowhere covering my tables. I noticed it was too late to register so I closed it. 5 minutes later it opened up again, what? So I closed it. A few minutes later, it popped up again. GET THE FUCK OOT EVHERO ARGHHHHHHH AKDOSFJG#$OTJ#$)TU@+)#UIT@#$))J. At that point I realised that the bastard thing was going to open up for as many times as I clicked it, which was an absolute shit-ton.

I thought that probably the only way to stop this from happening would be to restart the PokerStars client. The only problem was that I was playing tournaments, and I had some really soft cash game tables up and running. If I sit out, even for a few hands, my tables break up pretty damn quickly. No, it's not because I'm the fish, it's because most players are only playing so they can brag to their friends about how they bluffed Team Online superstar and World's Best Blogger Daleroxxu in a game of 4-card Hold Thems.

It was a solid 3 hours I had to put up with the lobby popping up over my tables, at an average of once every 5 minutes, until it stopped. Every time it happened I could see EVhero's stupid face in the top right of the lobby, grinning and sticking his tongue out at me like he knew what was happening. It's just as well I was having a winning session or I easily could have went on monkey tilt.

I'm guessing the massive number of players on the site at once was the problem. Fortunately there was no lag or any problems at all in the games, so that is the main thing. I still can't get my head around 400,000 people all playing on one poker site at the same time. Poker is HUGE.

The big promotion that is going on right now for the SNG players is the Battle of the Planets Promotion where not only are all leaderboard prizes doubled this week, but if you beat a target score you will win $10,000. This is a huge opportunity for micro stakes players. Even if you only have $30 in your account, you can play 20 $1.50 SNGs with a chance to win $10,000 if you run hot enough.

The final promotion of PokerStars 10th Anniversary will be the $10,000,000 guaranteed Sunday Million on December 18th with a guaranteed $2,000,000 prize for the winner. I have been saving up my rungood all year for this one, so good luck to you guys in finishing second.

Jesse 'OnTheMac' McKenzie Interview

2011-12-05T17:55:00.000Z

Jesse "OnTheMac' McKenzie is an online and live poker tournament grinder who has won the PokerStars Sunday Million and finished runner up at ANZPT Adelaide in 2011.

Watch highlights of OnTheMac's Sunday Million victory on PokerStars.tv

To play in Jesse's PokerStars Home Game sign up with ID number: 560983 Code: Join_OTM

Check out OnTheMac's BLOG / FACEBOOK / TWITTER

U Mad? PokerStars Chatbox LOLs

2011-12-03T08:57:00.001Z

MelowYellow: psssh
MelowYellow: we got hosed by this limey wanker

salabala: LOL
salabala: this site can fkk my ***
salabala: wta joke

slymm: do me favour pro if u got nothign fn fold
slymm: hate fn pros that delibrate when they knwo theyre folding 2min before
King Mort: its cuz he's playing many more tables
slymm: y WELL HES A FN WANKER THAT WHAT HE IS

Rovermeover: reward the brown noses
Rovermeover: up poker stars bums
sourlemur: keep whining, that often works
Rovermeover: i just laugh at the game of skill people keep spouting
sourlemur: and long as you keep laughing instead of thinking everything will be fine
Rovermeover: all these new canadians my arse
Rovermeover: all programed all rigged
sourlemur: can I ask seriously why you play here if you believe that??
Rovermeover: because it means i dont have to sit next to some smelly old bloke in a casino
sourlemur: why not spend it on hookers and blow instead?
sourlemur: i mean, this obviously isn't making you happy

alamoni: u have to admit your odds seem beeter causr of that little spade
Daleroxxu: sample size of 2 coinflips? quite the statistician

dutchpoker3: DLVÂ´V
dutchpoker3: +Â´kvdfS+Â´
dutchpoker3: fwGÂ´
dutchpoker3: PÂ±VFDS
dutchpoker3: +f
dutchpoker3: fp
dutchpoker3: Â´ffp
dutchpoker3: *few+
dutchpoker3: fv<
dutchpoker3: pÂ´fewpÂ´+
dutchpoker3: fewpÂ´
dutchpoker3: kwfepÂ´+
dutchpoker3: fewÂ´p+wfe+Â´mpfew+Â´KWe<*
Baedei: hes a donk
dutchpoker3: sick sick sick sick rigged cancer hooker sote
dutchpoker3: so cancer rigged as hellllllllll
dutchpoker3: kanker joden
Daleroxxu: first time ive seen a dutch guy go crazy in the chat without saying kanker to me
Daleroxxu: oh wait, he said it
dutchpoker3: lALÂ´MSÂ´F+,FÂ±fÂ´Sd
dutchpoker3: Â´fgDS+Â´,FÂ´+a

Boateng: well played
GENGISKAN641: ty
Boateng: blubb blubb
GENGISKAN641: jajajajajaja

9MM4Y0U: lol
9MM4Y0U: fish xD
9MM4Y0U: seriously
9MM4Y0U: i dont understand how stars sponsors players like you
9MM4Y0U: so facking clueless lol
chess87: they just don't know better
chess87: most team pros have no clue
chess87: did u ever see donald play?
9MM4Y0U: lol nopew
9MM4Y0U: man its just too ridiculous
9MM4Y0U: i mean the guy is donking off on the 0,50/1
9MM4Y0U: pretending to be a 'pro'
9MM4Y0U: lmfao
9MM4Y0U: if he's a pro then im phil galfond

JoeIngram1: yesssss
benny1978: yessss
benny1978: better not to gloat no?
JoeIngram1: sorry u have never been excited in your life
JoeIngram1: takes alot of skill to get aces everytime i have a strong hand too, u r almost as good as daleroxxu
benny1978: a supernove elite getting excited by a 5o buck pot!
Daleroxxu: lol
JoeIngram1: i play for 28usd pot
JoeIngram1: 100usd make me **** hard
benny1978: fair enough
JoeIngram1: plus i hit ****ing quads lol
JoeIngram1: ur acting like i hit flush draw
benny1978: :)
JoeIngram1: when some girl suck your **** your probably like meh get off me, u dont get any job

DOOPAMAN: hey deleroxxu go play in heavy traffic
Daleroxxu: i live in bangkok, i do that every day
DOOPAMAN: geek
Daleroxxu: :) love you

faustballmax: arschloch
faustballmax: scheiss brite
Daleroxxu: sorry mate i don't speak german, no idea what youre saying'

WOOWELL: get some pubes dale

000_Aces_000: so hat ya spend ya fpps on?
Daleroxxu: whisky and girls
Pete Rose78: lol
000_Aces_000: gd idea

cabbageshark: ty
Daleroxxu: lol @ ty
cabbageshark: ez game
cabbageshark: any chance off a mention on twitter dale?
Daleroxxu: i already tweeted that some clown called cabbageshark beat me in a pot then typed ty
[OhotniK]ent: :D
Str8F!u$hBoy: hahaha
cabbageshark: lol

cemssen85.: who is Daleroxxu?
Tomfan666: he's a pokerstars pro i've never heard of ...
cemssen85.: Im a Millionare promoter in Germany
Daleroxxu: millionaires dont go round telling people they are millionaires

Dealer: A new game will start in 10 seconds
GotSteez?: LOL
GotSteez?: nice photo
GotSteez?: u still a virgin?

bOorg22: careful with daleroxxu
bOorg22: this is jokerstars

dhanesh192: ediot

Urrr Raise: u look bent

dinos622: daleeeee
dinos622: igneramis

Srganjova: mother****er daleroxxu
Srganjova: u think because ur from pstars u can bluff me?

smokerock247: zzzzzzzzzzz
Dealer: Regular time for player Daleroxxu has expired, TIME BANK has been activated
Drazhaar: 6 table^^
Daleroxxu: was taking a pee
smokerock247: in a piss bottle
Drazhaar: lol
Daleroxxu: no i went to the bathroom, im not an animal
smokerock247: i think u pissed urself cuz u saw me sit down
smokerock247: ;p

TheDieguinE: daleroxuu do you written a book of poker??
Daleroxxu: yes, daleroxxus guide to winning flips
TheDieguinE: you never lose in stars
TheDieguinE: you are a pro

magicJoke656: lucky 9ay
magicJoke656: you really have a 9ay look

JoeIngram1: anohter excellent play by the champ
JoeIngram1: nh :)
Daleroxxu: thanks Joseph :)
00SKIP: lol
JoeIngram1: my mom asked me last night
JoeIngram1: who best plo50 guy u play with
JoeIngram1: i told him this guy dalerooxu
JoeIngram1: he kinda ugly but good player very advanced
Daleroxxu: my mum asked the same and I told her you
JoeIngram1: she google u
Daleroxxu: she said GTFO ss ratholers dont count
00SKIP: from uk not his fault on looks
JoeIngram1: said u ugly but probably good at poker

Sab-riveredu: what tourney did u luckbox to win

donttryit84: what means the heart?
Daleroxxu: i have the big heart
donttryit84: hehe

JD_AKAK: how did u get that spade on yr name daler
Daleroxxu: pwnin
JD_AKAK: what lol
douro200: i think he meant pownin
douro200: that spade is a poker star pro symbol
JD_AKAK: how do u get it tho
douro200: its like above supernova or whatever

rdmr: wp
rdmr: wonder how some people get red spades
rdmr: prob binking donkaments, what else

GotSteez?: you seriously gonna donk bet?
hhdr: hi my friend...
hhdr: I will play all your tables today...
GotSteez?: go ahead
GotSteez?: ill kill ur family
GotSteez?: tonight
GotSteez?: while u watch
hhdr: umad... oh yes
GotSteez?: not really
GotSteez?: u will be
GotSteez?: jsut wait

Smillie1: **** sake
Smillie1: oh u ****en piece of ****
Smillie1: ****en hell
chokkdee387: hahaha
Smillie1: wow
Smillie1: gross
win0815: puh,,,lucky
Smillie1: u reckon
Smillie1: **** sake
Smillie1: sticfk in ya ****
Smillie1: **** me
faustballmax: arschloch

JoeIngram1: dale u r so damn awkward bro
JoeIngram1: i meet u wsop next year and try to help you be more pro less noob
Daleroxxu: ty
JoeIngram1: i have bunch uk friends, they all pretty ugly and awk, prob std there
Daleroxxu: yes all bad teeth and weird accents
Daleroxxu: yet the american chicks love us
JoeIngram1: cool accent
JoeIngram1: yea american chicks love me to
JoeIngram1: keep tempting me i come there **** your girl
Daleroxxu: i live in thailand
JoeIngram1: i come **** your ladyboy there then
Daleroxxu: she is waiting
Daleroxxu: or he
Daleroxxu: dunno what is appropriate
Daleroxxu: heshe
JoeIngram1: i will **** him then he can **** me
Daleroxxu: ahaha

Mr_5LoW: pro bonus
Mr_5LoW: thats what i mean
Mr_5LoW: with pro bonus
Mr_5LoW: vry suspect

russ4u2001: d
russ4u2001: o
russ4u2001: n
russ4u2001: k
russ4u2001: pay
russ4u2001: the
russ4u2001: king
russ4u2001: donk
russ4u2001: not even english!
russ4u2001: u have air and fish it out
russ4u2001: *****
russ4u2001: breath
Daleroxxu: if you are going to be calling other people a donk then you need to buy in for more than 40 big blinds
russ4u2001: zzz
russ4u2001: a4
russ4u2001: fisher
russ4u2001: get ur rod out
russ4u2001: and go to the cananl
russ4u2001: canal
russ4u2001: call
russ4u2001: call
russ4u2001: call
russ4u2001: get the pro
russ4u2001: there
russ4u2001: whats the point playing
russ4u2001: answer on post card
russ4u2001: not even cod
russ4u2001: FISH: a paraphyletic organism

JizzTrigger: Daleroxxu, t's your friend again
JizzTrigger: you kinda look like a teenager keanu reeves
JizzTrigger: enter the poker
JizzTrigger: starring dale

RaydeN08: dontsteal,ugly

Greekman21: fack jesus today
Greekman21: and ever y day
basje001: lol
basje001: nice call
basje001: :P
Greekman21: shut up or i fack you
Greekman21: your choice
basje001: oehh

RABBITO4LIFE: biggest low lives on the net
RABBITO4LIFE: that should be tought a hard lesson
RABBITO4LIFE: die
RABBITO4LIFE: filthy wog
RABBITO4LIFE: dieeeeeeeeeeeee
Daleroxxu: please keep chat respectful
RABBITO4LIFE: dieeeeeeeeeeeeeee
RABBITO4LIFE: filthy wog
Moderator40 [Moderator]: Please remember to keep all chat clean, friendly and respectful at the tables.
RABBITO4LIFE: fk you

Stirling38: gott limp to the red spad big blind
Daleroxxu: your limps are my antes
Stirling38: lol

Nacho737: nice flash draw
Nacho737: you idioy?
Nacho737: lucky GANDON
Daleroxxu: what is a GANDON?
Daleroxxu: is it the boss in Zelda?

piKAxpo: FAKING BING PLAYER
Daleroxxu: BINK

hbtank: thats why daleroxxy have become a successfull pstarspro he never plays a fkin hand
hbtank: thats the key i guess
*that very hand I stack him with quads vs his garbage*
Daleroxxu: hey looks like i played a hand

sep2puku: hey dude, how come you got a red spade logo?
Daleroxxu: by being awesome
sep2puku: i knew it
Razzorca1: heehee
sep2puku: that's a nice pic of your BF
Daleroxxu: yes he is very handsome

NOOOOOOOOWAY: mmmmmmmmmmm
NOOOOOOOOWAY: how and why did u keep calling there u moron
mondo nutz: sorry about unrandom bs oooooo
NOOOOOOOOWAY: u had nothing all the way
mondo nutz: yah....y i called
mondo nutz: please complain to ps...cause site isn't random
mondo nutz: they won't take my emails anymore
NOOOOOOOOWAY: u are a shocking player are u sure u should be playing these limits
mondo nutz: im 4 for 4 in pretyping gut shot predictions while on the turn
mondo nutz: im still exploring for patterns
Daleroxxu: lol
mondo nutz: got a lot of the nlhe patterns down
NOOOOOOOOWAY: ur a idiot full stop
mondo nutz: if u think so....results talke though
NOOOOOOOOWAY: and i always lose to bad players like u
mondo nutz: yah....me 2
mondo nutz: y i changed
mondo nutz: cause they reward bad play to average winnings
mondo nutz: to double their profits....
NOOOOOOOOWAY: lol u still think that was the right call dont
NOOOOOOOOWAY: u
mondo nutz: causing good players to play more often, and bad players to stick around
mondo nutz: i know it was absolutely the wrong call
mondo nutz: if the site was random
mondo nutz: or are u to dense to understand the words that i speak to you?
NOOOOOOOOWAY: lol u mug i dont know how ur playing at these stakes u should of lost ur cash along time ago playing like that
mondo nutz: no offense intended
mondo nutz: i started this site with 40$
NOOOOOOOOWAY: idiot
mondo nutz: im over 35k
mondo nutz: however u want to enterpret that...
NOOOOOOOOWAY: lol thanks to the lucky middle pin rivers not even the pros get lucky as u
12cp: daleroxxu, where in UK are you?
NOOOOOOOOWAY: dorset ur up in the highlands right
NOOOOOOOOWAY: daleroxxu could u ask me that question please ive played u a few times on here
Daleroxxu: ive to ask you a question? :S
Daleroxxu: favorite colour?
NOOOOOOOOWAY: sorry im from dorset i did say

mondo nutz: bs site
orfenz: not really mate, i just out flopped you
mondo nutz: u where actually a poker stars favorite
mondo nutz: preflop
orfenz: just UL mate
mondo nutz: no just unrandom site
orfenz: ive been UL aswell. my stack has been up and down constantly
mondo nutz: im 4 for 4 in pretyping gut shotp predictions while on the turn
mondo nutz: they double their profits by averaging winnings
mondo nutz: im trying to learn the plo patterns
mondo nutz: i can spot the nlhe patterns easier
orfenz: ask daleroxx. he's a pro. if theres something wrong with the site i think he would know
mondo nutz: won a trny last night overcalling 2 all in's late game w ten hi
orfenz: wow. thats just really lucky i guess
mondo nutz: because i spotted it a non random
orfenz: dont believe you
Daleroxxu: if u have questions about fairnes please write to gamesecurity@pokerstars.com
mondo nutz: they won't take my emails anymore...so i did my part
orfenz: are you sure mondo or hav you just been having a bad run? it happens to everybody
mondo nutz: bad run for 3 years
mondo nutz: in trnys 2
orfenz: lol stop joking mate
mondo nutz: im actually serious
Daleroxxu: do you think the moon landings didnt happen?
mondo nutz: not a conspiracy nut
mondo nutz: our country was founded on conspiracy agaoinst the crown though
orfenz: stop dude!! totally off topic
mondo nutz: but people don't think conspiracies for money and power happen though
mondo nutz: on topic of conspiracy
mondo nutz: of pokerstars
orfenz: thats what you think poker stars is...?
orfenz: a conspriacy?
mondo nutz: yah to double their profits
orfenz: yeah ok. i tired of hearing your pessimistic thoughts. Have a change of attitude. Might help with your so called 3 year bad run =]
mondo nutz: im a huge winning player...but not as much as should be
orfenz: me 2. i should be winning every hand im in regardless lol
mondo nutz: u should see my stats for non random situations
mondo nutz: non fixed i mean
mondo nutz: another horrible play rewarded
orfenz: just wasnt the flop you were looking for
orfenz: UL
mondo nutz: nothing to do with luck people
orfenz: should've checked.
orfenz: must of been obv that he had a flush draw
mondo nutz: just like the americans....blind
mondo nutz: we commit the worst crimes on the planet
orfenz: brb
mondo nutz: if people only knew
mondo nutz: i didn't vote for obama cause his brother is in the drug trade
orfenz: oh shu t it mate
mondo nutz: and he accepted kickbacks on his house that was investigated
orfenz: getting a bit o.t.t
mondo nutz: his campaign manager was convicted of fraud
mondo nutz: was just all in w/ At vs kt and i cringed
mondo nutz: knew i was doomed

orfenz: what did you have to do to become a pro?
FincaResalso: depends )))
orfenz: if have 10k bankroll do you become a pro?
orfenz: hey dale. are there certain conditions you have to meet?
Daleroxxu: marry the owners daughter
FincaResalso: bravo )))
FincaResalso: I'm too old (((
orfenz: =]

godie707: biitch}}poker satrs help you baastard

Speck ftw: ACE OF CLUBS
SzurtosPeti: Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡Ã¡
den hurtige: lo
Speck ftw: flash with clubs
Speck ftw: I HAD ONCE A ROYAL FLASH

T2011090057 No Limit Omaha H-L $200 + $15.txt
tiaaago: daleroxxu can you help me ?
Daleroxxu: what's wrong?
tiaaago: i acidentaly registered into this tournament !
Daleroxxu: sigh
Daleroxxu: the moderators are only for chat issues
tiaaago: what can i do daleroxxu help me please
Daleroxxu: contact support with URGENT in the title

climafreak: Daleroxxu all the game you are on is ONE BIG CRIMEGAMES
Daleroxxu: thanks for letting me know
climafreak: strange very strange I NEVER GET CARDS TO USE, ARE YOU A HACKER FROM POKERSTARS
climafreak: BUT NO MATTER THIS DOWNLOAD IS ONE BIG CRIMESITE OF POKERSTARS
climafreak: 6 HOURS NOW LOST HUNDRED OF DOLLARS ON THIS ****ING CRIME
climafreak: WILL RAPPORT THIS TO FBI
climafreak: BOTSGAME
climafreak: REALY UNDERSTAND WHY NORTON SECURITY TELLS ME, THERE IS ONLY FEW WHO HAVE DOWNLOADED THIS POKERSTARS PROGRAM
climafreak: SURE MY FLUSHHAND AGAIN IS NOTHING
climafreak: AND AGAIN NOTHING
climafreak: WOW 80 DOLLARS PLAY AND GET NOTHING
climafreak: ONLY CRIME IN HERE
climafreak: NO NOT 80 DOLLARS, BUT 130 DOLLARS DEPOSIT WITH ONLY CRIMEGAME
climafreak: AND YOU ALSO PLACE HOW MUCH I CAN RAISE
climafreak: SMART
climafreak: ALL IS CRIME
climafreak: AND LOOSE MY MONEY IN ALL GAMES TO BOTS CRIME PLAYERS WHO POKERSTARS GET TO THE TABLES
climafreak: such a crime
climafreak: my god
climafreak: such rigged table
climafreak: Daleroxxu such a bull.**** to show here
climafreak: THIS IS ONE BIG CRIME DOWNLOAD POKERSTARS HAVE DONE TO MY COMPUTER
climafreak: YOU ARE SOME ****ING CRIMERS
climafreak: AHHH AGAIN MY AT BLACK FLUSHCARDS IS NOTHING
climafreak: SMART
climafreak: REALY SMART
climafreak: NOW THIS HAVE BEEN GOING FOR 6 HOURS
climafreak: ON MANY TABLES
climafreak: REALY SMART
climafreak: WAY TO STEAL MY MONEY
climafreak: FINE THANKS
climafreak: I WANT TO PLACE AN AUTOPILOT
climafreak: AS YOU DO, BECAUSE THIS IS TOOOOOO MUCH ****ING CRIME
climafreak: SMART FOLD BEFORE RIVER
climafreak: SO WE CANT SEE THE RIVER
climafreak: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE TO PLAY FREE POKER GAMES AND POKERSTARS USING 100 OF DOLLARS, FANTASTIC SO ****ING FANTASTIC CRIME WHO THE SITE ALLOW

MaltedMilk11 [observer]: Dale, how come you dont play MTTs?
Daleroxxu: coz i have a life
MaltedMilk11 [observer]: haha good lad

Chenaab: nice blog oxxu

somesoul: pwned red pro JAJAJAAA

viejasandra1: nooooooooooooooooooo
viejasandra1: what happend fuc.k site
viejasandra1: daleroxxuu beautifull you site

marcusjj4: pokerstars donk noob
Daleroxxu: nice insult, you're very smart
marcusjj4: thay call u a staar go play bingo
Daleroxxu: ok i will go play bingo
Daleroxxu: with your mama
Daleroxxu: :)
marcusjj4: i gonna report u bicous u talk aubout mij mom
Daleroxxu: ok tell them i said hi
marcusjj4: ugly ****

$weetN$a$$y: hey Date philip they should call u donk philip

Fishtripp: u pro??? riiight in my fkin ***
Fishtripp: just one fkin pathetic fatty who win one tournament
Daleroxxu: thats right
Daleroxxu: :) so good
Fishtripp: not a suprise rly
Fishtripp: 18 years old fatty *** who win one tournament and thinks he is the best in the wordl :D
Fishtripp: **** ur pathetic
Fishtripp: back to kindergaren fatty boy
Daleroxxu: do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

Emil Anton: fcking call from pro
Emil Anton: idiot
Daleroxxu: thanks for the feedback
Emil Anton: gay

-Elric Aro-: haha...so fff****ing ba
-Elric Aro-: bluffing against 2 players in omaha
Daleroxxu: wasnt a bluff DUCY?
-Elric Aro-: then what was it fff face? flushdraw and straightdraw on the board and you bet
-Elric Aro-: note made
Daleroxxu: keep making notes
-Elric Aro-: ugly is one of them

Running Like a 3-Legged Dog

2011-11-26T18:05:00.004Z

I am back in Bangkok and back to running like a 3 legged dog at poker and life.

On Saturday night the Thais decided to poison me once again through their absolutely atrocious food hygiene. I ate somewhere just before they closed and now I am pretty sure that they reheated some shrimp that was already contaminated with super bacteria. The dirty, evil, bastards.

After 10 hours of what I will only describe as "hell" (trust me, you don't want a more accurate description) I called out a doctor who jabbed me in the ass with some needles and then sent me to hospital as I was extremely dehydrated and had a dangerously high body temperature.

It was scary for the first couple of days as despite all the fluids, antibiotics and fever reducing drugs constantly being fed into me intravenously I still felt like I was dying. They were constantly doing tests on me saying that they were worried about kidney failure as I hadn't pissed at all, until the fourth day when I was pissing like a race horse, 7 god damn litres. Thanks to that I was discharged on the fifth day.

I'm now back in my condo, feeling really weak and just not myself. My appetite hasn't returned at all. I used to get so much pleasure out of delicious food. Now any time I even think about food I wanna puke.

After being crippled by the medical bill I have to use my one time and hope my travel insurance pays out, which is far from a given. I've been reading through all the small print and there's lots of stuff in there they probably use to screw people out of money. The most worrying to me is that only the first 17 days of any trip is covered. I can't figure out if the fact that I visited Malaysia a couple of weeks ago and then came back to Bangkok makes this a "new trip" according to them.

Insurance is such a terrible -EV bet and even when you "win" they try to screw you out of it. It's like playing poker as the only fish at a table of sharks, who not only have a massive edge over you but scam and angle-shoot the crap out of you into the bargain.

It was probably a mistake to jump right back into playing poker but after losing so many days, and needing to hit my milestone before the year ends, I decided I couldn't waste any more time. I lost 9 buyins at PLO and 16 buyins at CAP NLHE. Basically just fuck my whole, entire, life.

I've started playing CAP recently and have lost 0.85BB/100 over 16,000 hands. The games seem to be completely filled with regulars with not many soft spots. I think because CAP is so simple to play that any competent reg can play a large number of tables, while the fish still only really play 1 or 2 tables at a time.

I'm not sure that the games are beatable before VIP club bonuses (although certainly beatable with VIP club) around the 0.50/1 - 1/2 level because of the toughness of the games and how much is raked. I'd guess they are beatable straight-up at lower stakes because of easier games and beatable at higher stakes (2/4 - 3/6 +) by a great player because less is raked proportionally.

Team PokerStars Online have released a short firm about Talonchick. If you haven't watched it yet then do it right now:

It's great to see someone being very successful though poker and still living a "normal" and healthy life. Apparently you CAN have your cake and eat it - Talonchick proves it!

The 10th Anniversary Promotion at PokerStars just keeps getting better and better. The latest promotion is 10 days of Ring Game VPP leaderboards, with a new leaderboard every day you can win up to an extra $3000 if you have with it takes to grind harder than anyone else. That's exactly what ultimate grinder, Team Online's WizardOfAhhs did a couple of days ago when he won the high leaderboard.

I'm looking forward to playing my part in breaking a world record on December 4th when the PokerStars World Record tournament takes place. With a buyin of only $1 and a guarantee of $250,000 it looks like the target has been set for 250,000 players. I still can't get my head around the thought of a quarter of a million people playing one poker tournament, it seems impossible. First prize is $50,000 and whoever manages to best such a massive field can more than say they deserve it. My money is on Bommel222.

Change of Scene - Kuala Lumpur

2011-11-15T19:50:00.002Z

I am now in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I'm not here by choice, but because the Thai immigration system is a huge pain in my white Scottish arse. I'm here to apply for a double entry tourist visa at the Royal Thai Embassy that will allow me to stay in Thailand through to next year.

When I got to the embassy first thing this morning there was a big sign that warned that they were now refusing tourist visas to people who continuously leave and re-enter Thailand via it's neighbouring countries, as people are abusing it in order to work illegally in Thailand.

Given that, and the fact that I have 7 entry stamps into Thailand this year I'm not super confident that my visa application will get approved. In my favour I have visited 12 other countries this year, some more than once, and made my application with a note saying that I am travelling around Asia for a year and using Thailand as my base.

Fingers crossed, I will find out if I get the visa tomorrow. If not I will try to fly back into Bangkok and hopefully they let me through with another 30 day stamp. Enough time for the floods to clear up and I can take the agency run visa bus trip to Cambodia where the agents grease the officials palms enough that nobody gets refused a visa.

Right now I'm staying in a nice hotel next to Low Yat Plaza on the top floor with a sick view. I have set up a grind station using the hotel TV as a monitor in-front of the window looking towards the Petronas Towers. A nice view is very un-tilting indeed, and preventing tilt is very important when you are playing poker on a hotel internet connection that is for damn sure.

Today was fun. A guy who looked like a Malaysian Snoop Dogg let me play with his snake (ooo err missus) for the bargain price of 10 RM (2 GBP).

I then went to a Shipwreck Treasures exhibition. They had tons of the stuff from 13 different wrecks recovered from Malaysian waters. One of them being a Chinese ship from the Song Dynasty (1000 years ago). It was a good way to spend half an hour for the bargain price of 8 RM (1.60 GBP).

I then visited the National Museum, for the also bargainous price of 5 RM (1 GBP). A lot of museums I've been to have been pretty boring, the main exceptions being the national museum in Cairo and the war museum in Saigon. The Malaysian National museum is quite small compared to other museums but this is a good thing, as there is no "filler". Everything is worth seeing and I was overall impressed by it.

I especially liked the weapons and armour. I'd stand there in-front of them daydreaming, imagining myself wearing the armour and using the swords in battle.

After I spent 45 minutes in the museum I was about to leave when it just absolutely lashed down with rain as hard as you can possibly imagine. Thunder, lightning, the full shebang. I decided to walk around the museum again and 45 minutes later it was STILL hammering it down cat's and dogs. I then saw everything in the museum for a THIRD time, making me now one of the world's foremost experts on Malaysian history, before the rain turned into just a drizzle and I could leave.

I decided to spend the rest of the day doing a Segway tour around Lake Gardens Park which is a 230 acre, awesome, lush, impeccably maintained park in the city. I have taken a Segway tour before, in Prague (see Prague trip report), and it was a great way to cover a lot of distance in a short amount of time without getting tired.

This Segway tour also turned out to be a winner. The gardens are amazing. Fresh air and relaxation, what a great way to spend an afternoon.

Tomorrow I am going for dinner with Jeremy McDonald and his friends who are pro poker players that live here in KL. And if all goes to plan and I get my visa tomorrow afternoon I will fly back to Thailand on the last flight back tomorrow night, fingers crossed!

Faded Getting Owned By The River

2011-11-02T18:50:00.000Z

One Time!

In case you haven't heard, Thailand is experiencing it's worst floods in over 50 years. For the past two months central Bangkok has been under threat of severe flooding. The water level just outside of the city is as high as 3 meters and is being held back mostly by newly installed or newly reinforced flood defence barriers.

Outside of Bangkok over 400 people have died so far, and whole communities have been evacuated.

For weeks we've been told there's a 50/50 chance of central Bangkok being flooded and everyone has been in panic mode turning their buildings into sandbag fortresses. People have even going as far as to build cement barrier in-front of their doors and windows.

At the weekend everyone was put on high alert as it was to be the peak of the water level and the flood defences were starting to crumble. A five day national holiday was called for people to evacuate from the outskirts of the city and areas along the river that runs through Bangkok.

Well, it's now Thursday morning and it looks like for one time in my entire life I didn't get owned by a river bad beat. It's still dry where I am, and the likelihood now is that it will stay dry.

Angry residents of the areas just outside of the city centre have tried to destroy the flood barriers as they are preventing the water from escaping their flooded villages. Fortunately the army have been deployed to protect the barriers so it doesn't look like that is going to be a threat.

So now I'm just hoping that things get back to normal soon. There's a lot of stuff in Thailand that I want to see and do but have been unable to due to the floods.

I also miss paying virtually nothing for bottled mineral water. There has been none for sale since September as most of the bottled water plants that supply the city have been closed, and there's supply problems in getting anything in to Bangkok via road. So, I've been paying a massive premium to drink Fiji and Evian water that's been imported by air. Lots of shop shelves remain empty. Restaurants give you the menu and tell you that half the items are unavailable. It's a huge pain in the ass but I just have to remind myself of how slight these inconveniences are compared to people dying or having the homes and belongings ruined.

The Pokers

As the year end approaches it's always worth checking how close you are to the next Milestone Cash Credit and making a plan to hit it. It would really suck to end the year say 20,000 VPPs away from hitting a milestone because you are losing out on so much value.

I have 60,000 VPPs to hit the next milestone and I'm planning to grind out 1000 VPPs every day for the rest of the year. If I want to take a day off I'm going to have to earn it by grinding harder, such as putting in 4x 1250 VPP days in a row.

I'm playing a bit of everything right now, 6 Max PLO, Heads Up PLO, HUSNG PLO, Hyper 6 Max NLHE SNGS and Hyper NLHE HUSNGS. I'm still pretty much trying to find my feet again and figure out what games I can beat and feel most comfortable with. I've never really been in a comfort zone since I was destroying the Double or Nothing SNGs and had to stop due to the games being ruined by colluders.

I started this year playing only 2/4 CAP PLO and planning to play it for the whole of 2011, but those games were just a trial and PokerStars took them away at the start of March. Since then I've found it hard to adjust to playing 100BB PLO and have been on way the bad side of variance pretty much constantly. Hopefully I will find my feet again by the end of the year and be able to make some solid goals for the year of 2012.

The games have been pretty tough recently. The 6-max PLO tables have been very much filled with multi-tabling regulars. I think it's mostly due to the 70 Billion Hand promotion that's running now, where if you are dealt into a milestone hand you get a huge cash reward. Grinders are playing longer and on more tables. The promotion is pretty sweet for those that are lucky enough to be dealt into a hand, and especially for the winner of the 70 Billionth hand who will win a minimum of $70,000. It's looking like it is going to hit within the next 48 hours so let's gogogoogogo!

I have been jumping in to congratulate people when milestone hands are hit and have been lucky enough to witness some epic hands such as PLO 6-way preflop all-in that resulted in someone flopping a set, with everyone else having some kind of draw. The set turned into quads on the turn but unfortunately for him the river completed a gutshot straight flush. I wish more of the milestone hands were at PLO but they rarely are as hands take longer on average and there are way more NLHE tables running.

I was also there to witness a hand with 7 winners at a micro-stakes table when 7 of the 9 players got it all in preflop and the board ran out a straight. Simply epic.

People are generally playing more tables than they normally do during this promotion and are playing nittier as a result. So VPPs earned per hand seems to be way down right now. Looking on the bright side, people are playing worse and more exploitable as they play more tables than they are comfortable with in an effort to bink a milestone hand.

The promotions never seem to end from PokerStars. The 10th Anniversary promotion is already running and will run up til December 18th when there will be a special $10,000,000 GTD Sunday Million. There will need to be a minimum of 50,000 players or there will be an overlay, and the first prize is guaranteed to be at least $2,000,000. Just insane, that is going to be the ultimate Xmas present for someone.

Poker Community

I want to plug some of my friends who are putting in a lot of hard work to do awesome things in the poker community.

Poker Fuse

PokerFuse.com is a new poker news site that is completely independent of any online poker site affiliation. The Poker Fuse guys have been doing a great job to bring people news from a completely unbiased perspective, and that is really the only kind of news that I like read.

The are also doing well to bring all the poker-related podcasts from across the internet together on one page. Check out their Latest Poker Podcasts page.

EVhero

The best poker video blogs right now are coming from EVhero who plays on PokerStars and has a goal to earn $100,000 in 2011. He's recently been switching from cash games to multi-table tournaments and this is interesting to follow. In addition to his vlogs he also does a podcast called Derping and a poker news show called On The Rail.

The production quality of his videos are very professional, he releases them super regularly and they are always entertaining.

So be sure to check out his website at EVhero.com and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Jesse 'OnTheMac' McKenzie

Jesse is an Australian online poker pro who won the PokerStars Sunday Million this year. He's stepping up his blogging and it should make interesting reading as he writes about his online tournament grind, his lifestyle in Australia and his travels to play in live events.

His talents go further than just poker as he was a professional lawn bowler and he can also play the piano, as he demonstrated when I went quad biking with him in Queenstown, New Zealand in September and we found an old piano in the middle of nowhere.

He's running a couple of competitions at the moment. Inspired by my epic Poker Avatar Tells - 9 Easy Ways to Spot The Fish blog he is giving away a free seat in the PokerStars Sunday Million to the person who can supply an image of what would be the most fishy poker avatar ever. He will even use the avatar on his PokerStars account for as long as it takes him to make a single $5K+ score! Details of the competition are here and please vote for my entry by clicking 'Like'.

Check out his blog at tryonthemac.blogspot.com and you can also follow Jesse on Facebook and Twitter.

Time Tourneys - Learn Them, Play Them, Beat Them

2011-10-27T19:24:00.003+01:00

PokerStars has recently introduced a new type of tournament called Time Tourneys. These are tournaments that last for a set period of time (between 15 and 180 minutes). After they end the prizepool is chopped up based on the remaining players chip count.

I asked my twitter followers who had played these tournaments for their feedback. Opinions were mixed but I was surprised at the amount of just plain wrong opinions. These tournaments aren't crapshoots and your strategy shouldn't be to try to double up and then fold into the money.

[ ] ICM. [X] cEV

When playing the new Time Tourneys there are no ICM implications at all. In a normal tournament payout structure, if you pay $10 to enter, getting 1000 chips and then double up to 2000 chips, the equity of your 2000 chips is less than $20. The most extreme way to think of this is that the winner at the end of a standard tournament will have 100% of the chips in play but only be awarded say 15% of the prizepool.

In Time Tourneys the value of one chip stays constant at all times. If you buy in for $10 and double up then your stack is worth $20. Double up again, your stack is worth $40.

Time Tourneys are like playing a cash game where you and your opponents are committed to playing for a certain period of time, with no option to reload. Of course they play much shallower than a cash game, with large blinds and antes forcing a lot of action.

[ ] Flop / Turn / River. [X] Push / Fold / Call

In Time Tourneys you generally begin with a stack of 15-25BBs and there is a 1/10BB ante. There is some room to make some 2.25x raises to call or fold to a shove in the first level or 2 but it soon becomes a game of push or fold. Even if you run up a big stack, half the table will have stacks shorter than 10BB so it still effectively makes it a push/fold game.

This doesn't make Time Tourneys crapshoots, it makes them highly profitable if you study push/fold math and are able to put your opponents on accurate shoving and calling ranges. As this is just a cEV game you can easily study these situations using an ICM calculator that is set to cEV mode or you can even do it manually with the help of a calculator and PokerStove.

[ ] Bubble

There is no bubble. The time left until the tournament ends should theoretically make no difference to your play. There is no need to play tighter as the end time approaches as it's not like trying to fold into the money in a satellite. You don't gain any equity by folding into the money. It's more like a cash game where everyone is forced to leave the table at a certain time.

Imagine such a scenario at your local cardroom, where they close at 6am and the table has a bunch of people who are up a lot and a bunch of people that are stuck and sitting with short stacks. It wouldn't be uncommon for the winners to start nitting it up as closing time approaches, trying to book a win, and the smaller stacks to start playing very loose to try to get unstuck.

The fact that the game is about to end shouldn't affect how people play, as the next hand is the next hand, whether it's in one minute, one day or one week's time. But it does affect how people play and therefore you should adjust your own play by looking out for these situations where big stacks are nitting it up and you can start stealing their blinds more liberally, or by calling with a wider range than normal when you believe a short stack is shoving looser in an attempt at a last minute double-up.

The only time it would be worth stalling is if you think it's going to be close whether or not you will be forced to pay the big blind on the last hand. In cash games the sensible thing to do when you quit a session is click "sit out next big blind". It's much more important to avoid paying the BB on your last hand in Time Tourneys as the blinds are much bigger. If the BB is 600 in the last level and you started with 2500 chips then you would be forfeiting a value of 1/4 a buyin to post the BB.

Tourney Length

Time Tourneys vary in length. 15, 30, 60, 90, 120 and 180 minutes. The longer the tournament, the higher the variance but the higher the winrate a good player can expect, since you are just playing the same push/fold game but for longer. In theory, in the long run you should make the same amount of total profit playing x 60 minute tournaments as you would playing x*4 15 minute tournaments, assuming the skill level of your opponents remains constant. However there are several factors to consider.

The tournament fee is constant regardless of the tournament length. So you pay 1/12th of the vig to play x 180 minute tournaments as you would to play x*12 15 minute tournaments. In a $10+1 180 minute tourney you are paying a $1 vig to run up a $10 stack for 3 hours, but to run up a $10 stack for 3 hours playing twelve of the 15 minute tourneys you will pay a $12 vig. This is a huge factor that will affect your winrate greatly.

Weaker players tend to bust out earlier, as the cream rises to the top. You are likely to be playing against overall weaker players when you are playing the shorter (15 / 30 minute) tournaments as you are when playing the longer (120 / 180 minute) tournaments.

So you can think of it like playing in a cardroom where they charge each player an hourly fee instead of raking the pots. If you have a choice of cardrooms and one is charging $x per 3 hours and another is charging $x per 15 minutes, you will want to play at the room with the $x per 3 hours fee. But then you look at the $x per 15 minutes room and see that there are many more bad players in that game. So you have to decide on balance which is best for you to play.

Of course, the shorter tournaments come with a lot less variance, and to some people that may be worth paying extra for. In a 15 minute tournament you may only get it all-in and called once, but in a 180 minute tournament it will happen many many times as the blinds rise.

Let's Gogogo

I encourage everyone to give Time Tourneys a try. They are kicking off every 15 minutes in the PokerStars client and you can find them by filtering for Time (new) under Format in the Tourney Filter option.

Right now the buyins vary from $1 to $11. I'm sure that we will see some bigger buyins if this format becomes popular. But for now try them out and send all your feedback to support@pokerstars.com

This Saturday will see the introduction of the Saturday Countdown into PokerStars' Saturday Line-Up. A special $22 Time Tourney at 13:00 ET (19:00 CET). Let's gogogo!

Macau Poker Cup Championship Oct 2011 - Trip Report

2011-10-22T01:37:00.006+01:00

Day 1 - Poker and Partying

As I was going to Macau for 8 nights, and my beloved high resolution 1920x1200 17" laptop bit the dust a month ago, I needed a replacement so that I could continue to grind the online pokers during my trip. Unfortunately it's impossible to buy a laptop with that kind of monitor spec in Thailand. Believe me, I tried in every shop in Pantip Plaza - the huge IT mall, and there was nothing even close. I think the Asian's like their technology to be super small rather than practical, So, when in Rome....

I decided to buy a very small and lightweight, but powerful 11" laptop/netbook. When I booked the hotel online I chose a deluxe room because of the free broadband and HD LCD TV. I figured that with this small laptop, all I needed to do was bring a mouse and a VGA or HDMI cable to hook up to the LCD TV, then I'd be able to have all the benefits of a semi-decent setup (1920x1080) but without the hassle that comes with travelling with a behemoth super-laptop. What a genius I am.

At Bangkok Airport I collected my "VAT Refund For Tourists", getting all the sales tax I paid on everything I bought during the last month shipped back to me. Little do they know that I would be bringing those new clothes and laptop back into the country with me in little over a week.

I took the 2.5hr AirAsia flight direct from Bangkok to Macau. Nice and easy. A good tip for flying AirAsia is to always chose your seat online and pay a little extra for the Red Zone seats at the front or emergency exit rows. The rest of the seats are no place for a grown western man to be sitting. Pre-ordering your inflight meal will also get you served way before the masses and you can chose stuff that's not on the in-flight menu.

I checked in to The Metropole, a hotel a few minutes walk away from the Grand Lisboa where the PokerStars Macau poker room is. I had real trouble trying to find somewhere decent to stay when I was booking my trip because most of the major hotels were fully booked with it being a big national holiday in China. A standard room anywhere decent that still had availability was going for USD$300+ per night. The Metropole looked semi-decent and was $100 per night, so I took that option.

The first thing that I did when I checked in was have a look at the TV so that I could hook my laptop up. Unfortunately the bastards had screwed it into the wall, about 2 meters above the ground. I was pissed off because that meant that I couldn't sit at a desk and use the TV as a computer monitor. I couldn't even access the VGA or HDMI ports, I could see them, but because the TV was firmly screwed into the wall there wasn't enough space to access them, even with my small skinny hands. I was really tempted to go out, buy a screwdriver, and take the bastard TV down from the wall, but decided just to just settle down and play some poker on my tiny laptop screen instead.

That is when I realised that I had left my Pokerstars RSA Security Token back at my condo in Bangkok. Oh dear, could my life get any worse? It would be a complete disaster if I coudn't log into my PokerStars account for 8 days so I started frantically contacting people I know at PokerStars to help me, but was told that I'd have to go through the proper channels like everyone else. ([ ] Thanks Josem).

After a visit to the supermarket to stock up on snacks and drinks (it takes a real sucker to pay the mini-bar prices), I sat feasting and watching movies until the evening when I was playing Day 1B of the Macau Poker Cup Championship - Event 1 HKD$8800 NLHE.

My table was very loose passive as I'd expect in Macau. There were only 2 decent aggressive players at the table, a young Asian guy and a young white guy. In the fourth level I took a heavy blow, losing a big portion of my stack after getting JJ in against the table idiot's 88 preflop. After the 8 binked on the river I had to listen to his cheers and then had to sit and watch him donk around, like opening for 5x and shoving 6x pot on the flop, with MY bloody chips. Very annoying.

A hand came up where the young aggressive Asian guy opened from MP, the young white guy 3-bet from the button, and I was in the BB with A6s. I decided that it was a good spot to cold 4-bet. MP folded quickly but the button shipped his stack in instantly and I had to fold. About 5 hands later the young aggressive Asian guy was in the BB, I was in MP and opened with QJs, the button called and the BB 3-bet. I decided that there was a pretty good chance that he was squeezing light and shipped my 40BB stack in. He had QQ, so that didn't work out. They even ran the board out with two J's and a Q just to torment me.

The night was still early and my friends Bryan Huang and Daren Yoon had also busted the event so we decided to go out partying. We got a group together and went to Cubic, a sick, sick club at City of Dreams where we got a table.

We were all having a ton of fun, then late into the night someone was buying multiple bottles of expensive champagne for every table in the club.

It turns out that it was Stanley Ho's (basically owns Macau) granddaughter's birthday. They must have opened about 200 bottles over the next hour. The staff were running around like crazy with 2 bottles in each hand, each bottle with a sparkler attached to it. It was an insane thing to witness.

At the table section next to us were a few tall Arab guys. Excited at being handed free champagne, one of them decided to shake up the bottle as if he was an F1 driver that just shipped a Grand Prix and a bunch of us got sprayed with champagne. Everyone was shocked and stepped back. I ran up to the barrier between our areas and screamed at them and told them what a bunch of inconsiderate assholes they were to do such a thing.

Five minutes later, I was standing talking to Daren when all of a sudden, WOOSH, I got absolutely soaked by the Michael Schumacher wannabe bastard who again decided that champagne was for spraying on people rather than drinking. Again everyone backed off but I was raging. I kicked a chair out of my way then kicked down the barrier between our areas and went nuts at the guy with the bottle. At that stage the guys were apologising to me profusely, but I think that was only because the bouncers were there and ready to kick those guys out. I didn't see them again after that. Good riddance.

I just find it amazing how little respect and thought for other people it takes to do such a douchebag act. To do it twice is just plain taking the piss. It was still a good night though. We stayed til around 4:30am when we were all extremely wasted.

Day 2 - Hangover, Burgers and Video Games

I only slept for about 4-5 hours that night and woke up feeling absolutely awful. I hadn't eaten a meal in 24 hours so figured that would be the best place to start in trying to feel normal again. Since I didn't even have the energy to get out of bed I would have to order room service. The only problem being that just reading the menu made me feel sick.

So I tweeted out the menu to my twitter followers asking for advice.

I opted for the 'safe' options on the menu and ordered D2 - Sweet and Sour Pork with Pineapple and D3 - Sautéed Diced Chicken with Cashew Nuts. Strangely there was 3 phone numbers for room service, and I had to call all of them and speak to five different people before I got someone who could speak English.

When the food arrived it looked decent. The lack of knife and fork annoyed me though, as the only thing I can eat with chopsticks is noodles. I got stuck in to the food but it was completely inedible.

The pork was like 80% bone and gristle. Judging by the shape of it I was pretty sure I was eating pigs feet. The chicken in the other dish, when I could find any of it, was just plain horrible.

I almost felt like turning vegetarian just because of this meal. Yuck!

Eventually I was able to drag myself out of bed and over to The Venetian where I know that they have a Fatburger.

I omnomnomed on a deep fried chicken burger with bacon and cheese and a fatburger with bacon and cheese and felt all the better for it.

I then shipped it over to The Underground, a video game arcade at Macau Fisherman's Wharf.

I spent a good few hours there playing the sick setups they had of Outrun 2 SP, House of the Dead 4 Special Edition, Initial D in the sick Sega Cycraft motion-simulator and The Bishibashi - and addictive button bashing game.

Burgers and video games. What an awesome day.

Day 3 - Pizza, Poker and Breaking Bad

The next day was also filled with games and great food. I got access to my PokerStars account ([X] thanks Steve) and visited Pizza Hut where I had an extremely delicious Lobster Soup in Puff Pastry and a Super Hawaiian Pizza (beef, peperoni, ham, pineapple).

That prepared me for playing Event 2 of the MPCC - $5000 Knockout Bounty. The runbad was instant, as I found myself drawn in the 8-seat. I hate sitting right at the end of those tables because there is absolutely nowhere to put your legs. Very annoying.

The table was very soft though with 4-5 players limping and calling raises and seeing every flop. I had a guy on my right with what could only be described as a 'pointy wizard beard'. I think he got lost on his way to audition for the part of the headmaster in the Asian remake of the Harry Potter movies. I was desperate to pick up a hand and take one of these clowns down to valuetown, and was patiently folding most of the time but making some chips back by raising the limptards in position and they were check-folding the flops they didn't hit.

At BB200 I had slightly over the starting stack of 7500 and a fool with 5000 chips open limped the HJ. I was on the button with pocket 8s and raised to 750. Everyone folded and he called. The flop came 754r, he checked, I bet 1000, he called. So there was 3800 in the pot and he had slightly less than that behind. Turn was a 9 and the guy tanked then checked, then turned round to me and started grinning. He picked up his bounty plaque and started waving it around and rubbing it on his forehead and all sorts of weird stuff. I was planning on just putting him all in on the turn but all his jumping around convinced me that he was super strong so I checked back. River was a 2, he checked, more weird jumping around, I checked back and he showed me 98s for a turned pair of 9s. Sigh.

A couple of rounds later, I was on the button again when the same guy limped. I raised it from 200 to 725 with pocket 10s. This time the young kid in the BB cold 3-bet it to 1600 and the limper folded. It seemed like such a good spot for him to be 3-betting me light because he probably knows I am isolating the donk limper in position with a wide range. I give a lot more credit to young guys for being capable of making this play than the older guys at the table. Anyway, I shoved for around 6600 and he snapped me of with KK and made quads. mbn.

The only thing keeping me off tilt was the fact that I had downloaded an HD TV-Rip of the season finale of Breaking Bad while I was away. I really didn't want to watch it on a stupid little laptop screen so I decided that I was going to take the TV down from the wall so that I could hook my laptop up to it. For this I needed a screwdriver. It was very late at night and my only chance at getting one would be at the small supermarket. I arrived just before they closed and amazingly they did sell screwdrivers.

So I settled down with a bunch of snacks and watched the Breaking Bad season finale in glorious HD. And what an episode it was. It blew my mind. I sat and watched it over again straight after.

Day 4 - The Lost Day

For the next 36 hours all I did was sleep, snack and play online poker. I was still feeling super rough from the partying on the Saturday night. I don't think I've ever drank champagne without it leaving me feeling ill for days later.

Day 5 - Haute Cuisine, Pandas and The Mad Swede

I decided that I needed to get some proper food inside of me and my twitter friend Phil Lau aka @Plau31 suggested that I try the high-end Don Alfonso 1890 restaurant at Grand Lisboa. It's the Macau branch of highest michelin rated restaurant in southern Italy.

It was the middle of the afternoon and I was the only customer there, so a very comfortable and relaxing experience. The service was world class.

I ordered a 5-course lunch, which I live tweeted to my twitter followers as I nommed my way through it.

I got things started with the Canadian Bison "Carpaccio" with aged Parmigiano and revised Italian green sauce and got stuck right in to the delicious basket of breads. That was followed up with the Pumpkin soup, fresh burrata cheese from Puglia and sautéed blue-foot mushrooms with fresh thyme. The soup was out of this world. What a great idea to have a soft creamy cheese in the middle of the soup, it works really well.

I had a middle of course of Home-made ravioli stuffed with wild pheasant ragout in "Genovese" style andcoulis of pistachio from "Bronte" followed by a main of Lavender encrusted sole fish served with wild spinach. What can I say? It was a huge step up from all the crap I'd been eating for the previous week.

And nice and simple to round it all off, a few scoops of Home-made Italian Ice Cream (hazelnut and vanilla). So good!

How could my day get better from there? With a trip to the Macau Giant Panda Pavilion of course. It took some getting to, as I got into 2 different taxis and couldn't get them to understand where I wanted to go. I just kept saying "Panda, Panda", but taxi-drivers speak next to no English in Macau. I then remembered that I had seen a big poster advert for the Panda Pavilion so I went there and took a photo of the poster. The next taxi I got in, again he didn't know what a Panda was, then I showed him the photo I just took and he was like "öhhhhhhhhhhh" and took me straight there.

The two Pandas are called Kai Kai and Xin Xin. They were given to Macau by China in December 2009 to mark the 10 year anniversary of Macau's return to China. It was awesome just to stand watching them playing and eating. Check out the little video I made of them.

From watching pandas to playing with donkeys. That evening I played my third event of the MPCC series. Event 5 - HKD$2500 Knockout Bounty. By far the smallest buyin event that I would be playing.

I got off to a great start when I skilfully got JJ in versus AK on a KJx flop for an early double-up. Giving me a nice 10K stack to play with.

At my first table I was in the 2-seat and the guy in the 1-seat just shook his leg up and down rapidly and constantly. Because we were all squashed together around the table my leg was touching his and it was just really uncomfortable and weird. He was shaking even when he was not in a hand, and when he was in a hand shaking even more vigorously. Then he stopped shaking during one hand. He had picked up KK, got it in and doubled up. So I guess super premium hands are the the antidote to shaky leg syndrome.

In the third level at BB200 there were 2 idiot limpers and the shaky leg guy in the SB raised to 850, with leg still shaking. I cold 3-bet from the BB to 1975. He 4-bet me to 3850, leg still shaking. I 5-bet shoved for 8500 and he instantly turned over 75o and pushed his cards towards the muck.

I didn't play any other big pots until BB400. With a 9K stack I opened to 1000 with pocket 5's and both blinds called. The flop came down 884 flop and the SB who had the same stack size as me lead for 1100. The guy in the BB instantly shoved for 3500. I reshoved for 8000. SB folded instantly and BB turned over 43o. *BINK* a nasty 4 on the turn. The guy went ballistic jumping up and down cheering. I don't particularly like someone over-celebrating when they suck out on me but that seems to be the norm in Macau so I wasn't to bothered. That was, until he sat back down and started looking at me and laughing, picking up his chips and waving them at me and cheering. Pointing his finger at me, saying stuff in Chinese and laughing his ass off.

Really? REALLY? Are you serious? I absolutely couldn't believe what was happening. That guy has to be the most classless piece of shit ever to play poker. How does a grown man, who has sat silently the whole time, turn into a little brat of a child laughing and gloating over the turn of a card? I stood up and gave him a piece of my mind but people told me that he doesn't speak English at all. Unreal, I couldn't even let the guy know what a classless dickhead he was.

Of course, I took a photo of the guy. I will soon have enough photos of people I've played with in Macau displaying atrocious poker etiquette to add a Wall of Shame to my blog. He's the guy in the blue jacket (foreground is shaky-leg guy).

My stack had decreased to only 3.5K before I could find a good spot to shove. At BB400 I jammed from the SB with 98s. BB woke up with AQ and somehow I sucked out on the river. I followed that up by winning 2 all-ins versus shorter stacks (TT > AJo and 77 > 66) to give me a nice 17K stack and a couple of bounties. Easy game.

Not long after that I was able to stick it to the gloater. Still at BB400 (with 50 ante) I was in the BB and a weak player in MP opened just for just 900 (he had been limping or 3x-ing previously). The loose-passive gloating bastard called from the button. I had K9s in the BB and 3-bet to 2950 with K9s, feeling like this would take down the pot most of the time. Initial raises folded quickly and the gloater tanked then called. The flop came down Q76 and I lead for 4500. He called pretty fast. Turn was a 6, there was about 16K in the pot and I only had about 9K behind. I decided to give up, because there wasn't much that he called the flop with that he would fold the turn with. I checked and he checked behind. River was an Ace. I figured that was the perfect card for me to bluff and shoved my stack in. The guy tanked a full five minutes, maybe more, before turning over a 7 and throwing his hand in the muck.

I was delighted to slam down my King-High face up and scoop the pot. The guy freaked out slamming the table, but then he was acting like my best friend. He came over and shaked my hand and he was telling the new dealer and his friends about the hand and shaking his head and smiling. I guess I won his respect by bluffing him? I dunno, it seems weird.

We got down to 30 players, with 16 being paid when a sick, sick hand came up. It was BB1000 (100 ante I think) and I raised to 2250 from the HJ with 63o. The European in the CO though for a while before calling. This guy was playing fairly straight-up. I expected him to be folding all of his garbage hands, re-raising me with premiums and flatting with a bunch of medium aces, broadway cards and suited connectors.

The BB also called and we seen a flop of 953 all hearts (I have 6 of hearts, 3 of spade). BB checked, I checked, CO bet 2000 and BB folded. I thought that he'd be betting when checked to here with pretty much his whole range on this board. I was going to check-shove but his bet was so small and I had 18k behind. I thought it would be better to try to check-shove most turn cards, so I called. The turn was an offsuit 4, I checked, planning to shove over his bet, but he instantly announced "all in". There was about 12K in the pot and I had 16K behind, with him having me well covered.

He sat there like a statue while I tried to figure out what to make of his shove. Well, he didn't have a hand that wanted to get value out of so I definitely wasn't drawing dead for starters. He shoved the turn so damn fast. I tried to joke with him telling him that I had a little angel on one shoulder telling me to fold and a little devil on the other to call this maniac with bottom pair. The whole table and the rail were laughing but my opponent was absolutely stoic.

After a very long time I made the call. He tapped the table and said "good call". I was expecting to see something like QJ with a heart or Ax with the ace of hearts for the nut flush draw and a gutshot, something like that. He turned over KdTd and was drawing to only 4 outs. Thankfully I faded and shipped a huge pot.

It wasn't long before we were hand for hand on the bubble with 17 players left and 16 being paid. I was one of the chip-leaders and was raping the bubble for all it was worth. There were guys openly talking about how they were planning to fold into the money. I just min-raised every hand that was folded to me and build a very nice stack never seen a flop. That was until some punk kid got fed up of me and shoved his average sized stack over me with the T9s. Pretty bad timing for him considering that I had AK and snap called. This pot was for a huge chiplead. The flop ran out T93 and the turn was another T, so I got screwed hard. From there the bubble went on for another hour of hand-for-hand play but I was still able to run my stack up from 12BB to 20BB during that time.

The first hand after the bubble burst the guy on my right open shoved for 14BBs from EP. I had AK and re-shoved for 20BB. The guy in the BB then insta called his for 15BB stack. EP guy had Q8o and the BB had AA, siiiiiigh. The flop ran out K96 all clubs and I had the Ace of clubs so I got a good sweat out of it, but brick, brick. I got my last 5BB in the next hand with KT and lost to AQ, so that was that. I finished 13th for $4400HKD and 4 bounties worth $500HKD each. Pretty disappointing.

While I was playing that tourney there was a PokerStars welcome party which I missed in it's entirety. It was very late into the night. I was, however, invited to a small after-party at a music club with about 20 people who were mostly PokerStars staff or partners. I had some fish and chips on order with the Grand Lisboa cafe but was told it would be fine to take it with me because we had a private room at the club.

So I was the first one in the room, and was sitting eating my fish and chips at one of the tables. A short time later everyone arrives to the room and I am still stuffing my face. This one big tall Swedish guy who looked completely wasted stood over me and offered me a hand shake. I smiled and politely told him that I couldn't shake hands right now because I was eating. He just shook his head at me and walked away. I thought that was very rude. I mean, I was clearly eating with my hands, and was very nice and polite about it. Did he really think I wanted to transfer the bacteria from his hands into my mouth?

Every time I use the toilet in a public place I see guys taking a piss and leaving without washing their hands. I'd say its about 50/50 on whether a random guy will wash. Where people are drunk the odds get much worse. I've even seen guys use the crapper and not wash their hands. Absolutely disgusting. So at best it's a coin-flip that if I shook that guys hand that I'd fade germs being transmitted from his dick to his hand, to my hand, to my food and into my mouth. He might as well be asking me to suck his cock, the rotter.

The party was a lot of fun, in a nice big room with 2 tables, leather sofas and 2 big TVs with Karaoke. People were playing drinking games and having a blast. I was the only one that was stone cold sober as I was busy min-cashing that stupid donkament while everyone else was getting drunk. The big drunk Swedish guy shouted across the table at me "HEY, what is your screen name?". So I told him "It's Daleroxxu". He said "WHAT?". I said louder and clearer "It's Daleroxxu". Again, he shakes his head and shouts "WHAT IS YOUR SCREEN NAME?" and again I tell him "It's Daleroxxu".

It was so loud, with music and people shouting and having a good time. It was hard enough to communicate with someone who wasn't even next to me. But he kept asking and I kept telling him. After the 7th or 8th attempt I gave up and told him "It doesn't matter, but my name is Dale". He just snapped and went crazy at me. I could barely understand what he was saying because of his thick accent and slurred speech from being wasted. The guy that was sitting between us sensed trouble and disappeared pretty fast. The Swede moved towards me and started ranting "I could be a billionaire, I could be a businessman for all you know". I'm like "huh"? just completely perplexed about what is going on and what he is saying to me. He screams "I AM A BUSINESS MAN. I AM A RICH BUSINESS MAN". I'm just like "ooooook, why are you telling me this?" and he points to my PokerStars patches and shouts "SO WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU THEN?".

By that stage everyone had moved to the other side of the room leaving this nutcase with me. He just gave me an absolute torrent of abuse. He went on a rant "You think that I am a bad poker player because I am a business man? I am winning player so FUCK YOU. You think you are a superstar in poker well FUCK YOU, you think you are better than me. You are not better than me, *laughs*, in-fact it is the other way around." The whole time I hadn't even said a single word. He's got it into his head that I think he's a bad poker player because he's a businessman but I haven't event spoken since he told me, so rudely, that he was a business man. I was in complete shock about what was happening but at that stage I knew I was dealing with a real mental case.

I have been in situations before where I've been sober and around completely obnoxious drunk people and it's not much fun, but there I was, at a PokerStars party, representing PokerStars, not knowing how to deal with this mad man that was verbally abusing me. I tried to calm him down and ask him why he was saying all this stuff, but every time I opened my mouth he would get madder and louder and telling me to shut up while he is talking. He just kept repeating the same stuff over and over along the lines of "I am very rich", "I am business man", "you think you superstar", "I AM BETTER THAN YOU". I felt like a young Charlie Murphy getting bitch-slapped by the crack-head Rick James as he screams "I'm riiiiich biiiiiiiatch".

I walked away from the cretin and told some of the PokerStars staff about what had happened and pointed to the guy. I asked who he was and was told that he was just a guy called Roger Spets, one of the players. Whew, I thought he was likely to be some parter or affiliate with PokerStars, because that was who almost everyone else in the room was, and was glad to hear that he wasn't. He seen me pointing over to him and stormed over to me and screamed "FUCK YOU" in my face, spitting heavily as he did it. He walked away and came right back and did it again "FUCK YOU", right in my face, covering me with spit. I believe that will go down in history as the only time someone has done such a thing to a Scotsman without receiving a beer bottle to the face in return.

Roger Spets

I said to the PokerStars guys that I can't take this level of abuse, if it was any other setting I'd have killed the guy by now. They need to kick him out right now or I'm leaving. At that stage he came over again and told me to fuck off, flicking his hand about a centimetre from my face. A couple of guys then got a hold him him and talked to him. They brought him over to me and he shook my hand and said that he was sorry. I tried to ask him what he was upset about because I hadn't even said anything bad to him but he wouldn't let me speak. Any time I spoke he would get mad, "I am TALKING, can I FINISH?". I had to stand there for 15 minutes while he constantly shook my hand and spoke a load of nonsense that I could barely understand. He was saying stuff like "You need to know that even when I lose at poker, I win, because my businesses make so much money. I can retire now if I want and I am rich for my whole life."

I know a lot of wealthy people and I don't know one single one of them that goes around telling people how rich they are, bragging about their wealth. Its completely repulsive. It kind of reminds me of that kid in high school that goes around bragging about how many girls he has slept with, when the true number is ZERO. Get the fuck out mate. I couldn't shake the guy off as obviously nobody else wanted to talk to the psychotic bastard, so I decided to just leave. I mean, I am used to crazy Scandies making my life miserable at the table, but I can't allow it happen away from the table. On the way out I found a bunch of people I knew playing on electronic darts machines in a main area of the club so stayed for another hour or so and actually had some fun. So glad the mad Swede didn't completely ruin my night.

Day 6 - The Main Event

The next afternoon I played Day 1B of the $20,000HKD Macau Poker Cup Championship Main Event. There was an excellent structure with the 20K starting stack and long levels.

I lost a lot of chips in the second level when a 40-ish yr old Asian man opened from early position, two players called in late position and I completed from the BB with 8d6d. The flop came 7d5d5h, so flopped a straight flush draw on a paired board. I led out, feeling like I could easily rep a 5 with my BB calling range and leading out looks strong. The initial raiser tanked then called and the other 2 players folded. I figured that he was likely calling me with pocket pairs, overcards with a flush draw, maybe getting stubborn with bare AK or a 98s. He raised from early position so I wasn't expecting a whole lot of 5's to be in his range.

The turn was an offsuit Ace and I fired out a decent sized bet. I thought the Ace would make him more likely to fold any pocket pairs he called with on the flop, as a big part of my range for taking this line that doesn't include me having a 5 would be a nut flush draw with AdXd. He tanked again and then called. I thought it likely that he himself had the nuts flushdraw with AdXd at that point. He could be slow playing something huge like 7's and his tank-call is a big act, but at that stage it felt genuine. The river was a 9 and I lead big again, for just over half his stack, representing that I have at least trip 5's or a missed draw. Since I thought the most likely hand for him to have at that stage was AdXd that would obviously make it seem less likely that I was on a draw and it should be easy for him to fold top pair.

Anyway, he tanked again and then popped his head up and said "OK, I don't think you have a five, so I'm going to go all in". Hahaha, oh shit. It was like a line straight out of the movie rounders. If I actually had something like A5 or 75 in that spot I would be hating my life because it's such a big tell that he has an absolute monster hand. Probably 77 or AA.

Oh well, that sucked. At least I brought back a nice healthy snack from the break :P

I ended up bluffing most of my chips off at BB300 when a young Asian guy opened to 700 from MP, I called out of the BB with AhJd and the flop came Kd8d7h. I checked flop, he bet 1000, I raise to 2700 and he made an uneasy call. I had 11K behind and he had 7K. I though it was most likely that he had a weak top pair. Turn was Qh and I shoved. He called pretty quickly with KJ and I didn't get there. In hindsight it wasn't the best board to bluff at because it was so draw heavy. It seemed like a good idea at the time though, given that it was the main event and people weren't really getting it in for stacks early with top pair.

I was rocking the 12 BB stack for a couple of levels. I then had 10BB and it was folded to me in the SB with 8d6d (same hand I flopped the straight flush draw with earlier). Second time lucky? I moved all in but the BB instantly called with Kh5h and again I didn't get there. GG, sigh.

I think it always feels better to lose a big tournament on a bad beat or cooler rather than a failed bluff, because at least then you can just curse your bad luck rather than beating yourself up about what happened. I tried to cheer myself up with some food at shopping at the Venetian.

The Grand Canal Shoppes has 330 stores and as it's Macau there is no sales tax, perfect. The only problem I had was finding stuff to fit me. In Asia even an XL top is quite a tight squeeze. A bunch of times I would find something I like and then ask for it in a bigger size and they would laugh and say that is the biggest size. Ridiculous.

Day 7 - Sleep and Six Max

I stayed up the whole night playing online and slept during the day until evening, when I played the $10,000HKD 6-Max Event. I was sat with my back directly to the rail which was about a chair's length behind me. There were always a bunch people there and I could hear them talk and practically feel them breathing on the back of my neck. Every single hand I had to duck down and look at my cards very, very carefully and that got extremely tiresome.

The table was very soft except for the one aggressive guy on my left. In the 5th level he 3-bet my opens 3 times in a row and I folded. In level 6 (BB400/25a) I was hovering around the starting stack of 10K and it was folded to me in the SB. I decided that I was going to fold garbage hands and raise with anything semi-decent, planning to shove over him when the aggro guy in the BB 3-bets me. So I looked down at 8h5h and decided that would do. I raised and as I expected he instantly 3-bet me. I shoved and he snapped me off with TT. gg and another big SIGH.

I just spent the rest of the night relaxing at a nearby spa, trying to lose the huge amount of tilt and frustration that had built up inside me over the week.

Day 8 - Poker, Pigeon and Pizza

On my 8th and final day I played Event 9 of the MPCC - $6000HKD NLHE. This table was annoying because I had 2 different guys wearing big headphones and sunglasses taking ages over ever stupid decision like open-folding preflop. Every time I was in a hand they would stare me down. It was hard to keep a straight face because I just wanted to laugh so hard at these clowns.

A funny hand occured in the second level when one of these guys raised, 3 people called and I called from the BB with 8c7c. I check-called a sick JcTc9h flop. The turn was an 8, I checked, the guy stared me down for a minute and made a massive bet. I sighed and mucked. He slammed down KcQc and like he was the freakin man and shouted "I thought you had Queen, I hoped you had a Queen".

I busted at BB200 when I got AhJd in on a JcTc3c flop versus TT versus the other clown that was staring me down every hand. When the cards flipped over he stood up and shouted "NO CLUBS PLEASE". Hahahahaha it must be nice to have to fade runner-runner clubs for a chop, fuck my life. Just as I was putting my jacket on an Ace hit the turn and the whole table started laughing. I would have been some nice justice to go runner-runner boat on his ass after his pleading to the dealer for no clubs, but it didn't happen.

Since it was my last day in Macau I thought I should try some of the local delicacies so found a small cafe and ordered what I think was roasted pigeon. I say "Ï think", because it was one of the few items that didn't have an English description, just a picture. I guess there probably isn't too much demand for it from westerners. So I sat eating a pigeon, complete with head, along with further Chinese delicacies such as coke zero and a club sandwich.

I spent the rest of the evening playing video games at Underground. Because video games are 100x more fun and 1000x less expensive than playing poker. I wanted to round off the night with a trip to Pizza Hut but that hand closed already. So I went to Ristorante il Teatro, the Italian restaurant at the Wynn, which was superb. I was given a table looking out over the Wynn Fountain Show and the food and service was amazing. Unfortunately I ate so much that by the time my main course of pizza arrived I could only eat half of it. It's very rare that I don't finish a meal.

Day 9 - Zài Jiàn (Goodbye)

When I was getting my stuff together to check out of the hotel the next day I had to re-attached the TV to the wall. In trying to do so I accidentally ripped apart one of the cables and couldn't get it back together again.

So the TV basically didn't work.

Time for a sharp exit. I got my deposit refunded at the front-desk and sped off in a taxi towards the airport.

Zài jiàn!

Buddha Jumps Over The Wall

2011-10-01T14:55:00.000+01:00

In just one weeks time I will be paying my third visit to Macau this year to play a bunch of events at the Macau Poker Cup Championship.

It is held between October 7th - 16th at the PokerStars Macau cardroom in the Grand Lisboa casino and includes 10 events.

I'm planning to play 6 events, including the Main Event. But hopefully less, because that will mean I've went deep in some of them :-)

To get myself in the Chinese mood I decided to pay a visit this afternoon to Ping's Shark's Fin in Bangkok, which is a famous upmarket Chinese seafood restaurant. It's normally frequented by Thai celebrities or families celebrating a very special occasion, or me, wandering in wearing shorts and T-Shirt and slurping on a juice box.

I went there specifically to try a highly extravagant soup that I'd read about called "Buddha Jumps Over The Wall". It is a very rich shark's fin soup that takes 2 full days to prepare and is normally only eaten at special occasions. It contains 20-30 different ingredients, mostly non-vegetarian, such as sharks fin, abalone, pork, dried scallops, sea cucumber, Jinhua ham and chicken. The soup is so named because it's so delicious and aromatic that it could entice the vegetarian monks to jump over the walls of their temple to get some :-)

The soup was super delicious but at a cost of 2100 Baht ($68USD) for the soup, a fruit platter and a Pepsi Max it was easily the most expensive lunch I've had in Thailand. I think that most Thai people could eat for a whole month off 2100 Baht. And, as amazingly delicious as the soup was, I left the restaurant still feeling hungry. 15 minutes after I left, I found myself sitting in Burger King nomming on a Triple Outlaw and a X-tra Long Chicken Club with Bacon burger. Omnomnomnomnom.

After my trip to Macau I look forward to enrolling in a Thai language school to improve my language skills. It's an insanely tough language to learn, but I am insanely smart, so it's no problem. Mai bpen rai.

At least when I am able to speak Thai fluently I won't feel guilty about laughing at Thai people who butcher the English language.

I found a site recently called French-Fried which is a blog for sharing funny Tinglish (Thai English). I'm sure I will be making contributions to it soon.

Even funnier than that site is a YouTube video I found of some English deviant in the filth ridden resort of Pattaya, in his cheap-and-nasty hotel room trying to teach the cheap-and-nasty toothless bar-girl he picked up some English.

For any of the Daleroxxu fanboys that live in London or are in town for the EPT, if you are free tomorrow (Sunday 2nd of October) then you may well want to take part in a little treasure hunt that PokerStars has set up. To win the EPT Quest, which will award one person with a free seat in the £300 + £30 ‘Win the Button’ side-event, you will first need to follow the clues given out by the @PokerStars Twitter account. Look out for tweets with the hashtag #EPTQuest to crack the code and turn up at the secret location.

[ ] Had a Great WCOOP

2011-09-28T15:44:00.003+01:00

My WCOOP went:

[ ] great
[ ] swimmingly
[ ] average
[ ] bellow par
[X] FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

The runbad curse started on the first day of WCOOP when my laptop died and stayed with me for the duration. For the past 3 weeks I've been sitting here at stupid times of the night, surrounded by pizza boxes, using a shit PC with Windows XP connected to a 32" TV, taking atrocious beats for equity greater than my net worth to button-clicking donktards from countries that I've never heard of in my life.

I'm now trying to recover from the experience and get my life back to normal, starting with trying to get back onto a healthy sleep schedule. Since I can't stay awake for longer than 10 hours at a time it is proving mighty difficult. I have to leave Thailand in the next few days because I just got the 30-day visa exemption stamp when I returned from New Zealand. What a huge pain in the ass. In the near future I will be enrolling into a school for a full year and that has the benefit of allowing me to apply for a 1-year ED (education) Visa.

At least there was some awesome and exciting news recently. It came in the form of a forum post from PokerStars software guru Stefan:

"PokerStars is developing a fast moving ring games product. We expect it to be available for public beta testing in a few months."

Yes please! It's nice to have something to look forward to. Can I please have it in time for Christmas please Santa Stefan please?

If any of my blog-followers still aren't tweeting on twitter then you twats are missing out on a lot. Twitter brings the poker community together like no other medium can. A very funny trend that was started on twitter by @TheMicros recently was #WorstPokerNicknames

Highlights include:

Allen "Butter Knife" Kessler (by @reillygolfpro)
Barry "The Hood Rat of Poker" Greenstein (by @TheMicros)
Chris "Judas" Ferguson (by @jparellano27)
Daniel "Man Poker" Negreanu (by @eponymouspoker)
Gus "The Mun-Dane" Hansen (by @TheWiseLemur)
Layne 'High-Five Me Back' Flack (by @Daleroxxu)
Men The Masturbator (by @TheMicros)
Michelle "FTP Doug" Claiborne (by @Kevmath)
Mike 'The Moobs' Matusow (by @Daleroxxu)
Paul 'Inuit' Clark (by @Daleroxxu)
"Pensacola" John Cernuto (by @Kevmath)
Thomas 'Armadillo Skin' Preston (by @Daleroxxu)
Todd 'Worst Poker Nickname EVER' Brunson (by @Daleroxxu)
Vanessa 'dyslexicfuck' Selbst (by @Daleroxxu)

It can be quite a depressing experience to read the NVG section of TwoPlusTwo in recent times. It seems like every thread on the front page is about some shady site or scumbag player that has screwed people over. Somehow I was able to find some entertaining stuff in there, such as the epic photoshop lolz in the thread Ilari is a shark (prove inside).

Also, photoshop legend Eponymous has created a new poker comic strip called Mucking Aces featuring a superhero resembling Phil Ivey who has a weakness to Craptonite :)

And EmceeWhiteNoise is back with Da Pokerz! Rebuy a sequel to his hit poker rap song Da Pokerz!.

There are some sick lines such as "Listen Kathy Liebert is Arousing To Me, Girl show me your 'moneymaker' like 2003" and "Always trading girls like this here's the NASDAQ, So when I dump you, don't cry like Matt Affleck".

Same old shit dog, just a different day.

2011-09-14T17:32:00.002+01:00

Here we go again..

Same old shit dog, just a different day.

Here we go again..

You know how playaz do, when we play, how we play

Here we go again..

WCOOP

I got back from New Zealand almost two weeks ago. Every day, or rather night, since then has been the same old shit. Wake up at Stupid O'Clock, play WCOOP tourneys the whole night, bust WCOOP tourneys before the bubble, go to sleep.

I was running 0 for 25 or so in SCOOP/WCOOP events this year but then finally got a cash in the WCOOP-13 PLO8 6-Max 1r1a which payed 72 players. Yes, I finished 72nd. But at least I broke my duck.

Unfortunately I haven't managed to cash in anything since then but have still been playing well. I've been running up some big stacks only to get clowned by some donkey-monkey-clown mutant hybrid of a being each time.

I'm just off the back of playing WCOOP-29 Knockout No-Limit Omaha Hi/Lo 6-Max (with antes), the tourney that I was most looking forward to playing, so I guess I will blog rant about how bad I ran in that. I was amongst the chip leaders most of the way through and had a super soft table full of weak-passive idiots and one Ukranian lagtard super-donk.

The super-donk took a huge chunk of my stack when he open raised 4x, a short stack shoved for 20x, I reshoved to isolate for 90x and super-donk called with A532ss. An atrocious call.

Hand History: http://www.pokerhand.org/?6207574

This is how his hand fares against mine:

Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 500000 sampled boards

cards	scoop	HIwin	HIlos	HItie	LOwin	LOlos	LOtie	EV
Ac 2c Kh Th	187951	302152	175658	22190	0	39431	143591	0.575
5c 2d Ah 3h	93691	175658	302152	22190	130042	0	143591	0.425

He's calling a huge shove where he has very little invested and my range is super strong, to get it in with 42% equity against my hand.

2 hands later I busted after UTG raised 2.25x, super-donk 3-bet to 6x and I 4-bet shoved for 38x with AK33ss. Super-donk called with the ATJ4ds and won. Sigh.

Hand History: http://www.pokerhand.org/?6207587

Omaha Hi/Low 8-or-better: 500000 sampled boards

cards	scoop	HIwin	HIlos	HItie	LOwin	LOlos	LOtie	EV
Kc 3d Ah 3h	194819	242860	254842	2298	173734	15300	12064	0.544
Jc 4c Ad Td	154643	254842	242860	2298	51372	117349	12064	0.456

Each time I shove over him with what should be plenty of fold-equity AND the best hand, but he calls AND wins. Must be fucking nice.

I didn't even pick up a single bounty in the tournament. Several times I had them drawing dead to half the pot and on life support for the rest but the river gave them the medicine that they needed.

I'm planning on playing another 7-10 WCOOP events. I need to ship it crucial or I'm in a pretty bad spot. I haven't really been playing anything else other than bricking WCOOPs for the last 2 weeks and for the 2 weeks before that I was in New Zealand.

New Table Theme

There has been a very cool update to the PokerStars software recently as the new Nova table theme has been made available (although it's still considered to be in beta). This new theme has been created with the purpose of making multi-tabling easier.

Comparision:

PokerStars Black Theme 640x470

PokerStars Nova Theme 640x470

PokerStars Black Theme 483x361 (smallest size)

PokerStars Nova Theme 483x361 (smallest size)

As you can see, where it really makes a difference is on the very small tables. In the traditional themes the font is barely readable, you can hardly see the stack sizes or bet amounts. In the new Nova theme the font is large and readable no matter how small you size your tables

Unfortunately the new theme does not work with TableNinja.

The TableNinja support rep on twoplustwo, '8=~Fool~=8', said:

Each theme basically requires a new version of TableNinja. Its the most complicated and time consuming type of feature to add. We may add support for other themes in the future but we haven't currently announced any plans to do so.

It's likely very poorly designed software if it truly needs to be rewritten to support a new theme. TableNinja is all about making multi-tabling easier, the new Nova theme is all about making multi-tabling easier. It sucks that we can use both of them at the same time :(

New Zealand Trip Report - APPT Queenstown Snowfest

2011-09-09T01:13:00.003+01:00

(tl;dr. cliff notes at bottom)

As soon as I heard about the PokerStars APPT / ANZPT Queenstown Snowfest poker festival, to be held at the end of August, I was already planning my trip.

After spending most of this year living in sweltering heat, I welcomed the chance to visit the beautiful country of New Zealand during it's winter.

I was flying in to Auckland but had a connection at Changi (Singapore Airport) with 3 hours to kill. Fortunately Changi is easily the best airport in the world, and it isn't even close.The fast sky trains take you between the terminals which are all very clean, well organised and have relaxing music playing at all times.

Awesome stuff to pass the time include the free movie theatres, gym, swimming pool, singapore's tallest slide, a nature trail, a butterfly park, overnight hotels and day-rooms, free wifi, 200 free internet terminals, free foot and calf massage chairs, entertainment deck with free PC LAN gaming and XBox 360 / Playstation 3 terminals, indoor and outdoor gardens, hundreds of shops (tax free), gourmet restaurants, rest areas with snooze-chairs where you can sleep, and probably a whole bunch of other cool stuff that I missed in the few hours that I was there.

I played some video games, visited the butterfly park, then bought some Burger King and took it into the theatre to chill, eat and watch the movie Rango. I usually hate airports but Changi just blows me away. I was actually dissapointed when it came time for me to catch my connecting flight to Auckland :(

I booked all my flights for my trip with JetStar (Quantas' budget airline) because they have very reasonable priced Business Class seats for their long haul flights. It's not the type of business class you'd get on a major airline, in fact it's more comparable to what you'd get from a long haul Premium Economy seat with British Airways or Qantas. Big wide pitched leather seats (in a 2-3-2 arrangement) with tons of legroom and leg rests, with the chair reclining enough to be able to sleep. I was also smart enough to chose my seat number ahead of time, to get in the front row, so that I didn't have to deal with someone in front of me fully reclinging their chair into my space.

They gave me a Video on Demand tablet with movies, tv shows and music, 2 hot meals, unlimited snacks and drinks, a blanket and a bag with socks, blindfold, earplugs, toothbrush, etc. Each way, the business class seats were only about $350 USD extra on top of the economy fare, so completely worth it for an 11 hour flight. I took some Xanax and slept for the last 7 hours of the flight, something I'd never be able to do in an economy seat. Sleeping on the plane was essential as it was an overnight flight with a 5 hour jump in time, landing in Auckland at 11am local time.

I heard that a taxi from the airport to the city was $100+ so I decided to take the Airbus Express which is only $26 return and leaves every 15 minutes. It also stops/picks up right outside the serviced apartments that I was staying at on Queen Street, which is the main street in the city. The bus service was very fast, clean and had plenty of space.

When I checked in to the Quest on Queen serviced apartments I planned to take a quick shower and then go out and do stuff. Well instead, I took a long shower, then lay on the bed for a little nap. When I woke up and it was dark outside. Damn, I wasted the whole day sleeping.

By the time that I got something to eat it was about 7:45pm and I remembered from when I was researching things to do in Auckland that there was an indoor snow slope with real snow called Snowplanet, and I remembered that it was open until 10pm. So that seemed like a day saver, to take a trip to Snowplanet and spend a couple of hours practising snowboarding and giving my barely used leg muscles a work out, in preperation for hitting the real snow slopes when I got to Queenstown.

I put on the clothes that I would snowboard in, threw a bunch of stuff in a bag in dashed out of the door. There was a taxi at the traffic lights and I jumped in and asked him to take me to Snowplanet. He had never heard of it but handed me his GPS. I typed in 'Snowplanet' and it found it right away, so off we went.

We seemed to have been driving for absolutely ages, which I thought was strange, because I remember seeing it on google maps and it looked like it was just outside the edge of the city. I leaned over and looked at the meter and it read $90. WTF!!!! Daaaamn, I thought this would be a $40 trip and that I'd be there already. I asked the driver to look at the GPS and tell me if we were nearly there. He said that we were half way there. Fuck my life. I had underestimated how ludicrously overpriced taxis are in Auckland AND how far away this fucking place was, an absolutely lethal combination of fail!

At that stage the smart thing to do would have been to ask him to turn around and take me back. But I usually make the completely wrong decision, so I just sat there until we eventually got to Snowplanet at around 8:30pm and I handed over $180. OUCH! The place was in the absolute desolate middle of nowhere, and I had no idea how I was going to get back, but wasn't wasting much time thinking about it as there was only 1 and a half hours before they closed.

I bought a night pass and snowboard/boot rental for a toal of $70. I paid another $5 for the locker. By the time that I got my boots laced up and headed onto the slope I realised that I had no gloves on. I went back into my locker and DAMNIT, I didn't bring my gloves. At that stage it was getting real late so I just thought "fuck it" and went snowboarding without gloves. I figured that as long as I didn't fall down much it would be ok.

I approached the T-bar to go to the top of the slope and failed hard at trying to mount the thing. I fell over into the icey cold snow. This "snow" felt like acid burning through my hands, absolute agony. Then, once I had sucessfully made it to the top of the slope, I just stood there trying to remember how to snowboard. I've only ever been snowboarding, at a similar venue in Scotland, about 6 times, and haven't been since a year ago. Of course I fell straight away, my hands completely red and frostbitten. Then, halfway down the slope, for some reason I was leaning back at the time that I needed to turn and couldn't shift my weight fast enough to prevent me from crashing straight into the side wall :(

When I made it to the bottom of the slope my hands were bright red, swollen and shivering. To hell with that. I walked back out and through to the reception area. I asked the girl if I could borrow or rent a pair of gloves and she said no, that gloves are only available for sale, except they had already closed the SnowShop so I couldn't get any gloves. I showed her my hands and she was shocked. She went looking around and eventually found a pair of gloves to give me. "That'll be $25".

So back out I went, up to the top of the slope, this time with gloves on, only to have another great fall like my name was Humpty fucking Dumpty. For my 3rd - 6th runs I was pretty much able to stay on my feet and shred up the slope nicely, but by then it was very close to closing time, 10pm.

I asked the reception if they had a phone number for a local taxi company, which they did. Sadly, with my Thai SIM card, I wasn't getting any reception, but they let me use their land line to call. They said that it was no problem, they have a car nearby and he will be there in 5 minutes.

I sat outside waiting in the freezing cold for ages. I remember checking the time, 10:15pm, as I sat there watching the staff from Snowplanet leave and walk one by one to their cars. I got more and more worried as each minute went by. By 10:30pm the last few staff had left the building. I sat there as the lights went off and the last 3 cars drove away. Oh fuck.

I just didn't know what the hell to do. There I was, my first day in a new country, stuck in some random remote location late at night. I was sure that the taxi had stood me up at that point, half an hour late! I only had $120 left in my pocket, and had withdrawn the max from the ATM that day, so even if the taxi had got there I didn't even think I'd have enough for the fare back.

I figured that I would just have to walk and try to find the nearest town (with no map / GPS / anything) to see if I could get a taxi from there, and failing that would have to hitchhike for the first time in my life. I started walking down the only route that leads to Snowplanet, a narrow country road, in the absolute pitch dark. I was using the Flashlight app on my phone to barely light the way. Every time I heard a noise, I would turn in that direction and shine the light. It was like a scene from the Blair Witch Project.

I have since looked up this road on Google Maps. Here is what it looks like:

One on side was a big road / motorway, inaccessible due to a huge ditch filled with trees and bushes. On the other side a whole load of nothing. The hilariously named "small road" was 2km long.

After 20 minutes of walking, with my legs sore and tired from snowboarding, I was close to the end of the road when I saw a car's headlights shining up the road. The car drove right past me. I though that had to be my damn taxi because that road is a dead end and there's bugger all up there, except for Snowplanet and a race track, both of which are closed. I stood there waiting, because I knew that they would have to come back down the same road.

Eventually I saw the headlights and I stood in the middle of the road with my arms waving. The car stopped in-front of me, I saw a taxi sign, "TAXI FOR DALE?", yes! After getting in and telling him how pissed off I was he agreed to take me for a flat $100 instead of using the meter.

So for a total cost of $380 I got 6 runs of a stupid indoor snow slope, bruised legs, frostbitten hands that I had to put a steroid cream on for the next 4 days and a long, freezing, dark walk on a country road in the middle of buttfuck nowhere New Zealand. Fuck my fucking life.

The next day I took it easy, wandered around the city then visited the Voyager (Auckland Maritime Museum). The museum was interesting enough, lots of exhibitions that celebrate New Zealand's seafaring history and the centrepiece being the yacht Black Magic that won the America's Cup in 1995.

After I got bored of looking at boats, I took a trip on a boat, for a few hours cruising around the Auckland Harbour with a stop-off at Rangitoto Island.

That was a nice relaxing way to spend the day. The weather was glorious, 15 degrees C, calm, blue skies.

I then took a long walk along the coast, until I reached a place called Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter. There were tons of penguins and sharks there so I was very happy :)

The next day I had a flight to Queenstown. I checked in to the 5* Sofitel hotel which was part of the APPT Queenstown Snowfest package.

The hotel was outstanding. I was a huge fan of the jacuzzi bath tub with TV. I am very picky when it comes to hotels and usually can find a lot of fault with them. With the Sofitel Queenstown, I would have had absolutely zero to complain about, if it wasn't for the fact that they are a bunch of robbing bastards for charging a "special discount rate" of $150 for 6 days internet with capped download usage. Seriously, wtf, $150 for internet, kiss my ass. Fortunately it wasn't a problem as I was able to hook onto a WiFi signal coming from a nearby hostel, so they didn't get their $150 from me.

The first thing I did after getting checked in was to go shopping and buy a belt. Every time I stay in a hotel I always manage to leave something behind. This time I had left my belt behind in Auckland and now my trousers were hanging low like some kind of hiphop gangsta from da hood. I had to pay $23 for some cheap crap belt that I could easily get for $2 in Thailand, while the shop owner made fun of me and my low hanging trousers.

In evening I went for dinner with Calvin 'cal42688' Anderson who is a sick MTT and SNG player on PokerStars and has just moved from the states to Mexico to continue playing. People kept telling me that when I'm in New Zealand I have to eat the lamb. So I ate some lamb, and it was delicious.

The next day I headed over to the Sky City Casino to play day 1 of the APPT Queenstown Snowfest Main Event. The field for the tournament was small and tough. I had a maniac Dutch guy to my left. To his left was Jonathan 'xMONSTERxDONGx' Karamalikis and to his left was Grant Levy. Across the table was recent PokerStars Sunday Million winner Jesse 'OnTheMac' McKenzie.

When I tried to outplay these guys I soon found that I had only just over half of the 20K starting stack after 90 minutes. Fortunately I then picked up KK utg and got it in on a KJX flop versus JJ. Even a blind squirrel can play the nuts :)

Shortly after that I stacked up to 46K, and close to the chiplead, after skillfully picking up the KK again. I 3-bet pretty big from the sb after lady called Leanne Haas raised the button. She called and I led the Th4h4d flop and jammed the 7c turn for 1.5x pot effective. I had been playing very loose so far and played a line that looks most like a flush draw and overs. She tanked and called me with 55.

By the last hour of the day I was up to 75k with the chiplead. Then I spewed off 1/3 of my stack, most of it to Andrew Hinrichsen who I tried to bluff 3 streets when he had the second nut flush. Oopsy. Still, I ended the day with a very healthy 48k but was quite annoyed with myself.

On the way back to the hotel I visited the famous Fergburger, a gourmet burger restaurant that is so popular in Queenstown that it's even boldly printed on the map. I got myself a 'Tropical Swine' burger with prime beef, streaky bacon, edam cheese, pineapple slice, lettuce, tomato, red onion, aioli and tomato relish.

I took it back to my hotel and munched it. It was absolutely delishhh, omnomnomnomnomnom. I was eating at Fergburger ever day of my stay in Queenstown, it's just too good!

That same evening there was a PokerStars Welcome Party at the casino with free food and drink. I LOVE free food and drink, so that was great :) After getting completely wasted, I late registered for the nightly side event 'Double Chance PLO'. I was playing the tournament with the same people I was getting drunk with at the party, Joel Feldman, Luke Edwards, Octavian Voegele and Ryan McKay.

As this tourney was being played while the PokerStars party was still going on we were flipping coins to decided who would go over to get some free drinks and bring them back. I lost a couple of times and blinded off pretty badly because of it. There was a huge rush as the bar tab limit came close to being hit and I ended up with 3 vodka-cokes sitting in-front of me on the table. Happy days.

Despite being drunk I played a solid game. Everyone was going nuts and I was basically just playing a tight solid full ring PLO game. By the time we got 3 handed and in the money it was just me and the only 2 non-drunk people at the table who were left. I skilfully got it in preflop with double suited aces against KKxx and had a 2.5-1 chiplead heads up against a guy called Gareth. Our heads up battle lasted over an hour until I was sitting with all the chips in front of me.

Binking an event at Snowfest is made even better by the fact that event winners are given a PokerStars.net snowboard. Very nice indeed!

Talking of cool PokerStars merchandise, I made a little video to show you guys what is inside the APPT Players Bag.

I had the next day free as there was another Day 1 of the main event. I took a trip up the Queenstown Skyline Gondola which had some sick, breathtaking views.

While I was up there I also did the street luge 5 times. It was decent fun but could have been faster and more dangerous. I think with these types of things, in developed countries, they are too safety conscious. If this was in Thailand the luge would have no breaks and be down a main road with traffic.

I played another side event that night, a NLHE tourney. I lost a fair chunk early on when some punk limped UTG with pocket 5s. I raised with AK, he called and the flop came A5X. Fortunately I checked back the flop and he only got 2 streets of value out of me. As it happens, turn was a 5, so he made quads. Must beeeee nice.

I ended up busting when I 3-bet shoved AQs for 13BB against the guy I played HU with in the PLO the previous night. He snapped me off with the AKo and I didn't win. It was almost worth the $550 buyin though just to be at the same table as Dennis Huntley, who I gave the nickname "The Ron Jeremy of Australia". Dennis is somewhat of an underground figure, having made Australia's first porn movie and having owned a chain of adult shops. His table banter is hilarious, he never shuts up whether it's before, during or after a hand, he'll always have something to say, mostly good natured ribbing. Most of it during that tourney was at "the frog", a French guy at the table.

The next day it was on to Day 2 of the main event and I had an absolute roller coaster of a time. My table was very, very tough with basically every seat being a young MTT pro.

I ended up spewing most of my chips off after 4 bet shoving on a young Euro guy that 3-bet me from the BB. I had T6 of spades and he of course had AK. The flop came down 887 with two spades. Oh hai. The turn was a Ten. BOOM. Just have to fade 4 outs on the river. Which, of course, was an offsuit ace. Unfortunately my masterful play wasn't rewarded this time.

I was then moved to new tables twice. I was the only person during the whole tournament to ever win a coinflip against eventual tournament winner Marcel Schreiner when I jammed 76s for 17BBs over his open raise and he called me with 55. "A classic race!" said Tom 'Tollgate' Grigg who was to my left. I don't mind my shove there, there's antes and he's opening wide with the big stack.

Eventually I was busted by Jackson Zheng when I shoved 13BB from the BB over his CO raise with K2s and he called me with Q8s and won. I finished 30th, which wasn't quite good enough to be in the money unfortunately.

That night I went for dinner at Barmuda with Jesse Mackenzie and his friends Brett and Jacky, where we sat on comfy sofas in front of a log fire eating delicious food and scotch. Happy days.

The next day I was up bright and early to do something scary, but fun. The Shotover Canyon Swing. This involves jumping from a platform on the edge of a cliff 109m/360ft above the Shotover River, where you free-fall and then swing out before you hit the sharp rocks at the bottom.

I was pretty confident about doing it, until I got to the point where I was standing at the edge and looking down. DAMN that was a long way down.

I enjoyed my jump so much that I went for a second jump. This time strapped to a chair, just for the hell of it :)

Afterwards I was in need of more adrenalin so I look a jet boat ride on the Kawarau river.

A bunch of people got sick and had to be dropped off, haha, pussies.

I then met up with Jesse, Brett and Jacky again and we went to do some ATV / Quad Biking. I took some video clips but couldn't get any of the best bits because there was mud flying everywhere.

On my final day in Queenstown I went snowboarding at Coronet Peak. This was my first ever time snowboarding outdoors. I decided to take a private lesson and we started off on the beginners course working on my turning.

On one of the runs I got absolutely T-boned by a 4 year old girl who was bombing it down on skis and took me flat out. Totally her fault. My snowboard instructor told her off and she looked like she was about to cry. I myself was about to cry after taking the brunt of the force with my foot. I took off my boot and socks and my big toe was bleeding but wasn't broken. Damn.

I thought it would be funny when I'm back home and telling people that I got injured snowboarding in the New Zealand mountains, and they'd be all like "Oh man, what happened? Did you fall going for a sick jump or something?" and I'd have to be like "errm no, a tiny little girl knocked me over and made my toe bleed!".

After recovering I was able to do some of the intermediate runs at Coronet Peak and had a lot of fun there. The snow was mostly soft and the weather was glorious and warm.

Unfortunately, as I was getting changed at the end of the day in the locker area, some bastard STOLE my belt. What the absolute fuck! Whoever was sitting beside me just picked it up and left. When I got back to town I had to go into the same shop as before, pay another $23 for another cheap crap belt and have the same dickhead shopkeeper laugh at me once again.

That final night there was yet another free drinks affair at the PokerStars Wrap-Up Party. I talked to five people who wanted to tell me about how terrible I played a hand in the main event, and each time I would say "oh I think I know which hand it was", and it would be a totally different hand each time, haha fml.

I was sad to leave Queenstown, there was so much cool stuff that I didn't have the chance to do. Hopefully I will be back some day. I flew out the next day to Christchurch. Annoyingly my flight was delayed but I met Simon Watt (the guy who beat Durrrr heads up for a WSOP bracelet last year) who bizarrely checked in for his flight 3 hours before take-off, and sat drinking with him in the bar.

When I got to Christchurch I stayed at the airport hotel because the whole of the city centre of Christchurch is taped off due to some brutal earthquake damage. On my second day in Christchurch I was taken on a full day tour by a former pilot who used to have a business taking 100 people on tour buses every day but had to lay off his staff and sell his vehicles and is now lucky if he is able to take 1 or 2 people out in his SUV. The tourism industry in Christchurch basically came to a complete halt after the serious earthquakes and many such businesses have been ruined.

The tour started with some scenic site-seeing, a visit to a small local chocolate factory, then a tour round the city to see the effects that the earthquakes have had.

On my last day in New Zealand I was spent the whole day a couple of hours away at Mount Hutt to do some more snowboarding. Again I got a private lesson which helped a lot.

I'm disappointed that after starting to get good at snowboarding that I won't be able to do it again any time soon. Who knows, maybe I will go to Korea or Japan early next year and do it there. It's a long wait though.

When flying back to Bangkok I missed my connection in Singapore. Fortunately JetStar put me up in the $340/night Crown Plaza and a free dinner voucher for the restaurant. It worked out pretty well because I was able to have a relaxing bath, a slap up dinner and a long sleep, then take the 2 hour flight to Bangkok in the morning, getting there nice and refreshed. Easy game!

When I got to Bangkok I got a lot of funny looks as I wheeled my trolley through with a huge PokerStars.net snowboard on it. I think there's a fair chance that this is the only snowboard in Thailand :-)

Cliffs:
Singapore Airport is awesome.
Spent $380 to do 6 runs of a stupid indoor snow slope.
Won a PLOament.
Didn't win a NLHEament.
Jumped off a cliff, twice.
Snowboarded for reals.

World Championship Of Online Poker (WCOOP) 2011

2011-08-29T15:18:00.001+01:00

We are now just one week away from the largest and most prestigious online poker series, the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), which will be held on PokerStars.com between September 4th and 25th. There will be 62 events over 22 days, with large fields and huge guarantees - totally a whopping $30,000,000

The first time I saw the list of tournaments for the 2011 WCOOP I got goosebumps. I took an initial glance and saw words like 'Big Ante', 'Ante Up' and 'Shootout'. My eye's lit up. Then as I scrolled down the list and seen a PLO Knockout, a PLO H/L 6max 1r1a, a No Limit Omaha H/L, and tons of other action tournaments, I was shivering with excitement.

In the 2011 WCOOP I am planning to play almost all of the Omaha tournaments and a fair few of the Hold'Em tourneys, especially the Shootout, Knockout and Ante Up variations. I will probably end up missing a few that I want to play because it's going to be really difficult to keep a healthy sleep pattern and still be able to play everything, but I will see how it goes. Anyway, hopefully I will run good for once in my life and get me a nice shiny WCOOP Bracelet, and yes, the obscene amount of money that comes with winning a WCOOP event would also be quite nice :)

I also recently took a look at the list of satellite tournaments to the WCOOP events, and it's insane. They are running around the clock, starting every few minutes, every single day. Even the sats with as low a buyin as 40 FPPs or $1 have guaranteed WCOOP seats. It's sick to think that tons of people will be playing in WCOOP events, that they qualified for with just a single dollar, and have a chance at winning hundreds of thousands of dollars - life changing money! Even for people who can afford the buyins and will be playing the WCOOPs anyway, playing the satellites is sure to be a smart decision. At the very least I'd recommend that everyone play in the Mega Satellites that are running every Sunday with hundreds of seats guaranteed.

Check ou the Live Satellite Feed where you can click on a sat and it will open up in your PokerStars client.

Playing the standard PokerStars Step SNGs is also a smart move because the Step 4 tickets can be used to play any of the many $215 WCOOP events. So you can grind up from the $7.50 Step 1 SNGs and get yourself into tournaments with seven figure prizepools. You will see me grinding the Steps in the run up to, and during WCOOP.

Here's the list of WCOOP 2011 tournaments. Let me know which events you guys are planning on playing and whether you are buying in direct of playing sats. Good luck everyone!

PokerStars Team Online Followers Freerolls

2011-08-20T01:59:00.005+01:00

I’m proud to be a member of Team PokerStars Online. Along with myself, the fastest poker player in the world Randy ‘nanonoko’ Lew, WCOOP Event Winner Anders ‘Donald’ Berg, twitter wizard and MTT specialist Shane ‘shaniac’ Schleger, we make up some of the biggest names in online poker. Now, you will have a chance to test your skills against me and the rest of the team, for FREE!

Team PokerStars Online is going to give you a chance to win some cash by playing in our new Team Online Freerolls.

Each month, $1000 will be up for grabs. You will also get the chance to play against me and other Team Online members, all with bounties on their heads. Eliminate a Team Online member and win a $25 bounty. It’s that simple.

If that isn’t enough, PokerStars is giving you even more chances to play and win. There will be TWO Freerolls every month!

To enter the $1000 Team Online Freeroll, all you have to do is create a PokerStars account and make a real-money deposit on the PokerStars client using the Marketing Code ‘daleroxxu’.

For players who can’t deposit but still want to play on PokerStars, there’s still a tournament for you to play. This tournament will also be played by Team Online members and if you our fortunate enough to bust one of us, you will win $10 to help build your bankroll

To enter the $100 Team Online Freeroll, all you have to do to play is:

Download the free software.
Open a new PokerStars.com account.
After registration, go to "Cashier" and enter the bonus Marketing Code "daleroxxu" when depositing.
You are now ready to play!

New Signups Freeroll Details

Tourney Name:	Team Online $100 Freeroll
Date & Time:	12:00 ET - The first Sunday of every month.
Buy-in:	FREE - just signup using the Marketing Code ‘daleroxxu’ and you are eligible to play in the freerolls every month.
Prizes:	$100 prize pool in each freeroll. 20% payout structure. Team Online member bounty - $10 for each Team Online member you bust.

Depositors’ Freeroll Details:

Tourney Name:	Team Online $1000 Freeroll
Date & Time:	13:00 ET - The first Sunday of every month.
Buy-in:	FREE - just create an account with PokerStars and make a deposit using the Marketing Code ‘daleroxxu’ and you are eligible to play in the freerolls every month.
Prizes:	$1000 prize pool in each freeroll. 20% payout structure. Team Online member bounty - $25 for each Team Online member you bust.

To register for a Team Online Freeroll tournament, open the PokerStars lobby, click ‘Tourney’ & ‘All’.

*PokerStars reserves the right, to cancel, modify or suspend this Promotion at any time.

Poker Avatar Tells - 9 easy ways to spot the fish.

2011-08-18T02:12:00.015+01:00

This is an update to an article I wrote last year (formally '5 easy ways to spot the fish.')

When you play live poker you can usually tell a lot about a player without even playing a hand with them. The way they look can be quite a reliable source of information. Well, the same is true with online play, you just need to look at their avatar.

Here are the top 9 types of avatar that will let you spot the fish at the tables.

Stupid Pet

Well done, your pet is a retard - and so are you!

The guy who believes it's a smart idea to put sunglasses on a dog is the same genius who thinks check min-raising a set on a wet flop is a sure fire way to poker success

Studies have shown that pets and owners become more alike over time, so when you see that stupid pet avatar you know for sure that you're playing against a certified moron. You may as well be playing against the pet, he's drawing dead. Take this clown down to valuetown.

Most likely to say: "omg so f rigged"

Pocket Rockets

Why not show everyone how "into poker" you are by choosing some cheesy poker-related image as your avatar? Popular choices include pocket rockets, royal flush or a picture of some cartoon shark.

Yes, these fools are the same people that turn up to the casino to play 1/2NL wearing some ridiculous "I'm all in" t-shirt. Most of these guys will be new to poker but those who aren't will not have improved since, or will be worse than when, the first time they played the game.

Will usually own at least 2 books by Phil Hellmuth and spend more time typing in the chatbox than playing hands.

Most likely to say: "I hate all these frickin donkeys, they make it impossible to win. I play better against people that know what they are doing, at least you can put them on a hand".

Lame Sports Team

So you support some lame Euro or South American sports team that nobody gives a crap about? Nice! You should totally make their emblem your poker avatar, and let everyone know what an absolute fish you are.

This Eurodonk or Latinfish loves action because he thinks that poker is some kind of sport. It's not, so you would be wise to stop playing like a maniac and typing "jajajajajajaja" and "vamoooooo" into the chatbox after every hand.

You will experience a lot of variance when playing against the Lame Sports Team avatar fish, but ultimately he will spew it all off.

Most likely to say: "JAJAJAJAJA. DU ARSCHLOCH FICK DICH"

Douchebag

The douchebag pic is a favorite avatar of your typical egotistical, fake tanned, kissy faced douchebag. I mean, when you spend your whole entire day looking in the mirror it's the natural to chose a photo of yourself as your avatar. I wonder, do these guys really think that other poker players want to sit and look at a picture of some dude's face while they are playing? I guess they do! Right-click -> Block Image -> GTFO.

With an ego the size of the BP oil spill, these players have way too much confidence in their ability as poker players to ever feel the need to learn how to play better or take advice from anyone else. Every hand of poker for them is personal and they will try to outplay their opposition at every opportunity, generally spewing off large amounts of money in the process. Value-checking strong hands to these guy will make you rich.

Most likely to say: "ty" (straight after winning a hand)

Windows Sample Picture

A very popular avatar among the fish is to use a section of one of the few sample pictures that come with Windows XP.

These fish usually have a screen name that is just a bunch of random characters (qwertyuiop) or their name followed by lots of numbers (john23897189).

They are always 100% hopeless because they puts as much thought and intelligence into their poker game as they did when choosing a screen name and avatar.

Most likely to say: "Hey Dale, where did you finish in the last SNG? U see the beat I took?" (When I'm 16-tabling, lol)

Famous pro

When you suck at poker, why not trick people into thinking you know what you're doing by using an avatar of your favorite pro player. Phil Ivey or Stu Ungar seem to be the most popular choices.

These "poker enthusiasts" spend far too much time watching poker on TV and not enough time working on their own game. Word of advice guys, you're never going to get better at poker by watching Mike Matusow and Chris Ferguson play a donk-n-go on Poker After Dark. And just because you watched durrrr 3-bet 73s in a deepstacked TV cashgame it doesn't mean that you can do the same thing profitably with a 30bb stack in some turbo SNG.

Most likely to say: "I knew you hit the damn flush, I knew it. Nice chase donk." (after paying off a huge river bet)

Annoying Couple

What better way to show your undying love for your other half than to use a picture of you both as your poker avatar? I think I'm going to be sick!

This is the same guy that turns up to play the $50 donkament at his local casino while his girlfriend closely rails him, until he donkcalls of his entire stack because he didn't want to get bluffed in front of his girlfriend. The entire table thinking "GTFO" as they walk away with their hands slipped in each others back pockets. *PUKE*

If this fool isn't smart enough to realise that he will be stuck with this avatar long after the girl dumps his donk ass, then he's not smart enough to win at poker. We poker players will be taking money from you just as easy as your chick did. GG son!

Most likely to say: "hi everyone, best of luck"

Athene / Chiren80

This is another very accurate tell that a player is bad. Unfortunately these players are rarely found playing above the very micro-est of micro stakes offered on the site.

People with Athene avatars are all newbies to poker, struggling to learn how to play a game that doesn't involve running around a virtual world casting magic spells on hobgoblins and gnomes.

The Athene avatar player is almost always atrocious at poker but when their main influence and inspiration in poker isn't even a winning player himself how could they turn out to be anything other than terrible?

Most likely to say: "POOOOONED" (After hitting their 3-outer on the river).

Ugly Baby

What is it with people who have babies that think everyone else wants to see them? I couldn't care less that you have a baby and I certainly don't want to look at the wrinkly little bastard while I play poker. It's a pretty terrible idea to put photos of your young children on public display on the internet in the first place, but to put those photos up while you gamble away the nappy/diaper money is just lolridic. Not to mention that you're just asking for some wise ass to write "Hey, what breed of dog is that in your avatar?"

In my experience, baby-avatar donk is almost always a loose passive calling station. Typical full ring VPIP/PFR in the 37/9 range. When you have screaming kids to look after and stop you from sleeping you're never going to have the time or concentration to improve as a poker player. That is why the baby avatar is one of the most accurate online tells available, always a fish!

Most likely to say: "That's my child!"

Dale's Mailbag 2 - I answer your questions about poker and life.

2011-08-09T21:17:00.004+01:00

Not a day goes by without me receiving messages from my fans. Most of these messages are asking, what are quite frankly, stupid questions. Regardless, I took some time out of my busy schedule to make a vlog replying to a select few fanboys messages.

Macau Trip Report

2011-08-04T13:12:00.006+01:00

As my Thailand visa expired on August 1st I was forced to leave the country, although I could come back as early as the same day! Previously I had taken road trips to Cambodia and back, but was fed up with that and thought that a better idea would be to take a couple of days vacation to somewhere that I could fly quickly, cheaply and directly from Bangkok.

I considered a bunch of a places that I haven't visited before but since I only wanted to go away for 2 nights I thought it would be better to go to somewhere I was familiar with, so I would know about the fun stuff to do and where everything is. It was an easy choice. Macau, the 'Las Vegas of the East'.

I flew in to Macau on the Monday afternoon and checked into my hotel at the Lisboa, the oldest hotel in Macau. It is connected to the Grand Lisboa Casino where the PokerStars Macau poker room can be found on the top floor. The last time I was in Macau I found it near impossible to find decent western food, until after about 5 days I found the Pizza Hut in the old city, which is miles better than the Pizza Huts I've been to in any other country. So I went straight there for a slap up meal, a delicious grilled platter that included some tasty cheese filled sausages and chicken wings, some cheese, bacon and pineapple hot pastries, a thin and crispy meat lovers pizza, iced lime and blueberry drink and a fruit hot honey drink. Omnomnomnom, so delicious! About $250HKD for all of that, not bad at all.

I then went for a bit of shopping. The last time I was in Macau I remember shopping in the Watsons there and they sold Dark Chocolate Snickers that were imported from the USA. These are delicious and unfortunately the only place in the world I've found them for sale (outside of the states) is Hong Kong and Macau. So I was a man on a mission. I walked straight in, and up to the 3rd floor where I located my target, and proceeded to wipe out the entire shelve.

At that point I thought my mission to be complete, but as I was taking the above photo an undercover agent from Watsons approached me to ask me what I was doing. "I am shopping, what are you doing?" I asked her. She just stood beside me saying nothing. I walked a few steps, turned around and she was stuck to me like glue. I asked her "Can I help you?" and she said "I want to know what you are doing". I told her to "keep following me and you'll find out". I walked up to the counter and paid for my dark chocolatey goodness. I turned round to the woman and said "you've just witnessed my dark side", and casually walked out. She must have been thinking "WTF?", but it's better that I leave her bemused than have her know the truth - that Dark Chocolate Snickers hold a mysterious power and that I was planning to smuggle them out of China.

At night I went to play a small MTT at PokerStars Macau. There is a regular game every day of the week there except for Tuesdays. The buyins range from $500HKD - $2000HKD, with regular festivals such as the Macau Poker Cup offering bigger buyins up to $50,000HKD. It's worth checking out their tournament schedule in advance if you are planning a trip to Macau.

It is very convenient because you can buy directly into the events from your PokerStars account in $USD and also be paid out winnings back into your account. If that wasn't enough, you even earn VPPs and FPPs on the tournament fees. Great to see the awesome PokerStars VIP Club being extended to these live tournaments at PokerStars Macau.

I played the Monday night $500HKD Bounty tournament. We started with 2000 chips, at BB50, with 25 minute levels and played 10 handed.

There were 3 tables but eventually over 40 people entered as there were many alternates that would take the seat of a bustout, even several levels in where they were starting super short stacked. I counted how many hands we got in per level and it was 11 - 12.

The standard of play was very, very poor as I expected it to be. I had the guy on my right "talking strategy" non stop, and of course he was absolutely atrocious. At BB50 he opened to 275 UTG, everyone folded and he slammed his pocket cowboys down onto the felt like he was the man. Several hands later he flatted a big raise preflop with K3 and shoved for 4x the pot on a K86r board. He happened to get called by QQ, and spent about 5 minutes talking about how his "opponent doesn't know how to play poker with strategy".

The English guy across the table asked me if there was a bounty on me. I held up the bounty chip that each of us were given and said "yes, there is a bounty on me". He asked, no "is there a special bounty?". I told him "you already have the supreme pleasure of getting to play poker with me, and you also want something extra for knocking me out? Don't be greedy, it's a sin!" hahaha.

The English dude was quite a nice guy but not very poker savvy. He also made me laugh later, when he pointed to the 3 bounty chips that a player had collected and asked "so if someone busts you out will they get all of your bounty chips". Really? REALLY? This must be the stupidest question in the world. In this scenario the winner of the whole tournament collects all the bounty chips. Nice bounty tournament! It isn't even a case of a lack of knowledge, from being new to poker, it's a case of lack of intelligence. It reminds me of the home games I used to run where one of the guys had a stand up argument with me about how many outs he had because "you never really know how many outs you have because some of them could be in other peoples hands or in the burn cards". LOL get a brain morans!

I didn't pick up any premium hands or find many +ev spots to shove. I was doing well to still have 1600 chips at BB300 when I jammed Q7 from the HJ with a tight image. Got 3 insta folds, then the English guy in the BB sighs and says "I think I'm going to have to go with this one", looks at his cards again, says "ok, lets do it". I turn over my cards first and stand up, he looks at my hand, and THEN he turns over QQ. What a filthy slowroll. They bloody slowrolled me the last time I played here as well hahaha. I don't even think this guy knew he was doing something wrong though.

Oh well, it was fun. As it was still early I headed over to the Beverly Plaza Hotel to experience the best of Chinese hospitality. Easily the highlight of the trip.

The next morning I was up bright and early at 9am as I had planned to go on a 6 hour tour of Macau with a tour group. I was picked up from my hotel and the first stop was the Golden Lotus Flower which was given by China in 1999 to mark the hand-over of Macau from Portugal to China.

From there we went to see the facade of St Paul's Church, which is all that remains of a 16th century church that was later destroyed by fire. It's now a world heritage site. It looks stunning from the front, and from the back you can climb up and look through the windows.

Next to the church is the Macau Museum which is built into a 16th century fort. The museum is interesting enough but the best thing about visiting it is that as you exit from the 3rd floor you are led onto the roof of the fort and have some stunning views of Macau.

Next up on the itinerary was a visit to Fisherman's Wharf which is a kind of theme park with a man-made volcano, Colosseum, Aladdin's fort, underground video game arcade and 150 shops and restaurants. The buildings represent the style of many of the world's famous ports.

We stopped off for lunch in one of the restaurants and were free to wander around for half an hour after that. Of course, I found my way to the video game arcade very quickly!

The best views of Macau come from the top of the 338 m (1,109 ft) Macau Tower. There is a shopping arcade at the bottom and sick panoramic views at the top, as well as adventure activities such as a sky walk and the world's highest bungee jump. I took a rain check on the adventure stuff!

From there we headed to the oldest temple in Macau, A-Ma Temple.

We were then lead to a cookie shop where they sell all the local made cookies, and there were tons of free samples. I looked at the prices; $88HKD per box was pretty standard, such a rip off. No doubt the tour guide is getting a cut from everything the mug tourists she brings to the shop spends. I have seen this crap before, I have travelled around the world and know all of the scams and tricks related to tourists. The locals in Macau are fairly poor and they are not spending $88HKD on boxes of local made cookies. You can go into the old city and pick up this stuff at a fraction of the price.

Anyway I tasted all of the free samples, which were at least 20, then got them to give me a free drink of water and I walked out buying nothing. Cheers for the free snack.

That was the end of a quite enjoyable tour around Macau in glorious weather. It was 34 degrees C with a nice breeze. The tour guide remarked on how high the humidity was but it seemed low to me compared to Thailand.

In the evening I visited the Venetian to eat and watch the Cirque Du Soleil show ZAIA. A good tip for anyone that wants to travel for free around Macau is this; All the big casino/hotels have a free shuttle bus to and from the ferry port. You can take the shuttle bus there from your hotel then get on the shuttle bus for the hotel that you want to go to from the ferry port. This is how I got to the Venetian for free, taking only 5 minutes more than it would in a taxi.

If you do ever take a taxi in Macau don't stand for the scum of the earth shitbags that wait outside the hotels and try to charge you 2-3 times the meter price. Taxis are everywhere so just walk a few meters and hail one down on the street. I don't like to see anyone putting money in the pockets of these arseholes that try to scam the tourists.

The Venetian Macau, which is over double the size of the Venetian in Las Vegas, is hugely impressive. It's the largest hotel in Asia, the 6th biggest building in the world (by area), and the biggest casino in the world. I took a wander round the shopping arcade which has an indoor blue sky and opera singers singing from windows. Macau is a duty-free country so shopping is relatively inexpensive and there are hundreds of shops in the Venetian. I bought a nice polo shirt in one of the shops for a reasonable price.

I then went in search of food. With the show starting in 30 minutes I didn't have enough time to go eat at a restaurant so went to the big food court. I walked all around it and every stall was Asian food that I didn't know what it was, and most menu signs were written in Chinese. I had almost walked the full circle of stalls when I seen a sign "FATBURGER", oh yes, ship it. I gots me some delicious freshly cooked Fatburger. Omnomnom.

After filling my belly I headed off to the ZAIA Arena and took my seat bang in the middle of the 4th row, just a few minutes before the Cirque Du Soleil show started. It was a great seat for watching all the action that happened on stage but at several points I would have to turn around or look above as the action moved into the arena itself.

The show was 90 minutes of fantastic entertainment and some stunning acrobatic performances. I got covered in foam, streamers and balloons at various points of the show, not to mention having popcorn thrown in my face by one of the clowns at the start. lol clownaments.

ZAIA was a great way to end my short vacation.

I stayed over another night and leisurely took a 2pm flight back to Bangkok the next day. Immigration officials took a look at the 3 previous "tourist" entries to Thailand this year, stamped my passport and welcomed me home :-)

Award Nomination and Upcoming Trips

2011-07-29T22:31:00.004+01:00

I have been nominated for a British Poker Award in the category of "Best Social Media User", which I'm lead to believe is the most prestigious of all categories.

Please vote for me at http://www.thebritishpokerawards.com/

And be sure to join the other thousand of people following me on the twitter: @Daleroxxu

I am up against Kieth "The Camel" Hawkins, Sam Trickett and Team PokerStars Pro UK's Vicky Coren and Liv Boeree. I have my work cut out for me as the pesky blondites over at the Blonde Poker forums are starting a campaign to vote for The Camel who is well known to be 'anti-poker awards'.

I was inexplicably left out of the Best Blogger nominations, and somehow left out of the best PLO player nominations. My friend Jimmy Atkin who is the unofficial third best blogger in the world (after the official best blogger in the world, Daleroxxu, and unofficial second best blogger in the world Amatay Jones) did get a nomination for Best Blogger so be sure to vote for him.

Please let me know in the comments if you do vote for me for the social media award.

My visa for Thailand runs out on August 1st so I have get my ass out of the country. I can't be bothered with the awful bus trip to Cambodia that I've done twice already. It's time to turn visa-runs into fun little vacations! So, I'm taking a direct flight from Bangkok to Macau which is only a couple of hours and $100. I'll be staying for 2 nights at the Lisboa hotel where I famously reported on it's "Hooker Mall" in my Macau Trip Report from earlier in the year.

I'll be playing the Monday night knockout MTT at PokerStars Macau at the Grand Lisboa. On Tuesday I will be doing a 4 hour tour of Macau during the day, then attending the Cirque du Soleil show ZAIA in the evening at the Venetian Macau Resort.

My friend Eric from Miami who I met at the World Cup in South Africa last year (see trip report) and celebrated new year with in Prague (see trip report) is coming to Bangkok for 5 days in a couple of weeks time so it will be good to see him again.

In a few weeks time I will be traveling to New Zealand where I will be playing at Queenstown Snowfest which is a APPT and ANZPT tournament.

http://www.appt.com/tournaments/queenstown/

I've been in touch with the APPT team at PokerStars to find out more about the event. They are putting me up in the luxury 5-Star Sofitel Queenstown Hotel & Spa. I did ask about extending my stay there with days before and after the event, as flight arrangements proved imposible to make for my check-in and check-out days. They came back and said it's $431 NZD per night, which is kinda expensive, so I chose to extend my stay in New Zealand by flying in and out of, and staying a few nights, in New Zealand's two largest cities, Auckland and Christchurch.

I will fly to Auckland and spend 2 days there, before taking a 2 hour direct flight to Queenstown for the 6 day poker festival, then taking a 1 hour flight to Christchurch and staying 3 days there before flying back to Thailand.

Satellites are running for the event on PokerStars now. There are sats for ANZPT Queenstown Snowfest and sats for APPT Queenstown Snowfest. These are the same tournament, but the packages are different.

The PokerStars package for APPT Queenstown Snowfest is worth $4800USD includes Buyin + Hotel + Tourism. I asked the APPT team what tourism includes and they said that you can "select from a PokerStars snowboard, concierge/room credit or room upgrade." The satellites for this package award $1000 cash from the sat prizepool

The ANZPT Package is worth $3800USD for buyin + a less expensive hotel + tourism. The satellites for this package award $500 cash from the sat prizepool.

There are also some seat+hotel only and seat only sats. Go to EVENTS->APPT and EVENTS->SPECIAL to find the satellites.

I hope to see some familiar faces in New Zealand. One person that I know is going for sure is Team PokerStars Asia Pro Bryan Huang who I met in Singapore (see trip report) and Macau earlier this year. I have already challenged him to a snowball fight.

Queenstown looks to be an amazing destination for a poker tournament, as with so many of the PokerStars tour events. It's great to go play an event where there is a big tourism aspect to the trip. I know that if I happen to not do well in the tournament that I can spend the rest of my days snowboarding and having fun, rather than being stuck in a hotel/casino somewhere I don't want to be. So I know that I will be having a gret time in New Zealand no matter what (ok, I need to fade breaking my leg on the snow slopes!!).

It sucks that I will be flying while the Supernova Million freeroll is running on August 20th. GG to ~$300 equity :( If you are a Supernova on PokerStars make sure you play this quarterly tourney because it's the sickest value freeroll that you're likely to play.

A really cool online tournament that is coming up this Sunday night is the Red Spade Open. It's a $55 buyin tourney with $1,000,000 guaranteed and at least $200,000 to first place. There will be many famous faces from the Pokerstars Team Pro and Team Online roster playing in the event and if you bust one you get a $100 bounty. The event is 3pm ET / 8pm BST / 2am here in Thailand.

Unfortunately my flight to Macau leaves very early Monday morning so I can't play this time around. You will need to hope that PokerStars runs this event again if you want the Daleroxxu $100 bounty. I really do hope this tourney is a success and is run regularly as it would be a great replacement for the Turbo Takedown.

New Condo in Bangkok + Looking Forward to WCOOP

2011-07-04T06:34:00.005+01:00

It's been over a month since I made the switch from living in hotels, as I have been doing since December 2010, to actually having a place to call home. I got a 1 year lease on a condo in central Bangkok. I took a little video to give you guys a tour of the place:

I had to view a ton of places before I found something I liked. I wanted a place that was close enough to tons of good restaurants and to the BTS sky train station, yet quiet and peaceful enough to relax. I wanted a proper high pressure overhead shower, not those stupid bathtubs with shower attachment. I wanted a north-facing apartment so it doesn't have the sun beating on it the whole day. I wanted a gym and a long swimming pool so that I can start getting some exercise.

Well I eventually got something that ticked all the boxes, so I'm pretty happy.

The condo is brand new, so everything is very modern and clean and shiney! The location is great, right in the heart of Bangkok, very close to the Asoke BTS sky train stop and Sukhumvit MRT underground stop,but just far enough away that it's peaceful and quiet and no stupid suit salesmen, tuk-tuk drivers and massage girls hassling the white people. There's also a free tuk-tuk service that comes with the condo where they will drive you to the nearby locations. So awesome.

Another huge plus is that a 7-Eleven opened up next door to this building. 7-Eleven in Thailand is the stone cold nuts. They sell a great range of products and everything is the same price that it is in a big supermarket.

You can also pay all of your electricity, Internet, mobile phone, etc., etc. bills at 7-Eleven. Since most Thai people don't have a bank account or credit card, the standard way for people to pay their bills is by taking it to 7-Eleven and paying by cash.

I love the 25 Baht (~50 pence / ~80 cents) little fresh microwavable snacks they sell. Things like sweet chicken with black sticky rice, teriyaki burgers, charcol chicken with thai spicy sauce, seaweed chicken rolls, fried bbq chicken with honey, drooooool, they are all delicious. So useful when I'm playing online and feel a little hungry, to just stick one of those in the microwave and omnomnom.

A good tip for anyone that is travelling in Thailand and is sweating their ass off in the 40c heat is to dive into your nearest 7-Eleven. They all ice cold air conditioning!

I was able to arrange to have the Internet set up ready for me moving into my condo, which was a huge bonus. The Internet in Thailand can be sketchy at times, just like the power. It's normally during one of the big thunderstorms that it cuts out for a minute. So, I hacked my T-mobile USB modem to take a local SIM card, which I pay 129 Baht (about $4USD) per month for 100MB 3G usage, to use as a backup. Failing that I have a 3rd option, to broadcast a wifi network from my HTC phone which has a SIM card for another Thai network. Making sure that you can finish your hands or tournaments when there is an internet or power outage is crucial for any serious poker player.

I've been able to replace the room service that I got used to when living in hotels with ChefsXP which is a delivery service in Bangkok where they bring you food from any of the good restaurants (about 80 to chose from) on a motorbike super fast for zero markup. I love it! Unfortunately all the restaurants close around 10:30pm, but there is 24 hour McDonalds and Subway and both deliver.

I got my tourist visa extended to 90 days recently so don't have to step foot out of the country until August 1st. I'm thinking about going to Macau for a couple of nights and playing some small donkaments at PokerStars Macau around that time. Seems a better idea that flying out and back into Bangkok on the same day just for the sake of getting my passport stamped.

Later in August, between the 22nd and 28th, is the PokerStars APPT Queenstown Snowfest in New Zealand. After learning to snowboard last year then failing to make it to EPT Snowfest in Austria, I'd sure like to attend this.

Queenstown is really tricky and very expensive to get to from Bangkok, it would be quicker, easier and cheaper for me to fly back to Scotland, but hopefully I can figure something out.

I'm committed to playing 1 more PokerStars tour event of a decent size before November and this looks like it will be my best option.

Right after Snowfest is the World Championship of Online Poker, better known as the WCOOP, on PokerStars. The schedule has already been announced!

So I will be spending the first 3 weeks of September playing in and no doubt hosting a bunch of these events. Please can I improve upon the 0 for 17 performance in this years f*&%ing SCOOP? I sure hope so. My ambitions at the start of this year included winning a WCOOP bracelet. Right now I'll be happy for one semi decent score!

Theres a whole load of Omahahaha games scheduled that I can't wait to play. I've already marked out the events that I will play for sure, then work in some more events around these.

05 September (Monday)
11:00 ET - WCOOP-04: $320 PL Omaha
07 September (Wednesday)
06:00 ET - WCOOP-10: $265 PL Omaha (Knockout)
08 September (Thursday)
06:00 ET - WCOOP-13: $215 PL Omaha H/L (6-Max, 1R1A)
09 September (Friday)
11:00 ET - WCOOP-16: $215 PL Omaha (6-Max)
12 September (Monday)
17:00 ET - WCOOP-25: $215 PL Omaha (Turbo, 1R1A)
14 September (Wednesday)
06:00 ET - WCOOP-29: $265 NL Omaha H/L (Knockout)
15 September (Thursday)
11:00 ET - WCOOP-33: $320 PL Omaha (6-Max, 1R1A)
16 September (Friday)
14:00 ET - WCOOP-36: $530 FL Omaha H/L
21 September (Wednesday)
14:00 ET - WCOOP-51: $320 PL Omaha H/L
22 September (Thursday)
14:00 ET - WCOOP-54: $2,100 PL Omaha (6-Max)
23 September (Friday)
17:00 ET - WCOOP-57: $215 NL Omaha H/L (10-Min Levels)
24 September (Saturday)
10:00 ET - WCOOP-58: $530 PL Omaha (Heads-Up)

Thanks to Jared Tendler who sent me a copy of his new book, that he authored along side Barry Carter titled 'The Mental Game of Poker'. This is some great reading for anyone that wants to get their head right for playing poker professionally. I wish I wasn't such a slow reader so that I'd have gotten through more of the book by now, but what I have read so far has been very eye opening and helpful. I will let you guys know my thoughts about the book in more detail once I've read the whole thing.

Friday the 13th - Not My Favorite Day of the Year

2011-05-22T17:14:00.003+01:00

SCOOP (The Spring Championship of Online Poker) began on Sunday 8th of May, and I was pretty damn psyched about it. After going 0 for 7 at the Aussie Millions this year, I was keen to make amends for that and hit at least one big tournament score.

The events all had kick-off times between 10pm and 4am Thailand time, and had deep structures. I was also hosting a whole bunch of the final tables. So, in order to be able to make my participation feasible I had to adjust my sleep schedule so that I was waking up just before the events that I wanted to play started, and staying awake through the night until the early afternoon.

Almost a week later, it was Friday the 13th (fml) and I was 0 for 15 in cashes at SCOOP. I just felt horrible, like a zombie due to the constant losing, staying awake for long hours and eating only the nasty takeaway food that I could get delivered to my hotel. The Greek takeaway I had that night had also left me feeling bloated and kind of sick. The only clean clothes I had left were the ones that I was wearing and I was surrounded by garbage since the maid obviously didn't have access to my room. Not a great situation I found myself in.

By 10am I had finished hosting my last final table, much earlier than usual, so before going to bed I called the maid to clean my room and I took out 2 huge heavy bags with all my clothes to the place that does my laundry a couple of streets away. I arrived to see that their doors were closed with a big sign saying that they were on holiday for a few days. SIGH. So I turned around and started walking back, when a bad ass storm started and left me absolutely drenched with dirty polluted Bangkok rainwater :(

Obviously when I got back to my room the maid was in there, so I had to stand around dripping wet, waiting for her to finish so that I could strip off and take a shower. After I did have a shower I felt absolutely awful, just sick and my whole body aching. I passed out on the bed for a couple of hours and woke up drenched in sweat. I had a fever such that I felt like I was on fire, my head was pounding, my whole body was in pain, and was spewing from both ends of my body.

The Paracetamol/Codeine that I had didn't seem to have any affect, and I ended up calling the hotel reception telling them I needed a doctor. I had to speak to 3 different clowns before someone could understand what I wanted. I just kept saying "DOCTOR, get me a doctor" as these fucking morons kept asking me to repeat what I was saying and passing me over to their equally imbecilic colleagues.

Eventually a doctor arrived. He took my temperature, and it was over 40c, which he said was so high that it was life-threatening. I immediately got 2 injections in the ass and was taken to hospital, that was only a few minutes away, where I was hooked up to an IV drip and given a bunch of medication. Incredibly, the fever and intense pain were all but gone in a very short period of time, and not long after they helped me to sleep!

When I got discharged from hospital in the morning they gave me a bunch of medication to take. Unfortunately there was no morphine included in all of that, beats :(

For the following week I could barely eat. I think it was the only week in the last year where I have lost weight rather than gained it. I am now eating better and slowly getting my energy back though. My sleep schedule is now that I'm waking up and going to bed at "normal" times, so no more SCOOP for me. But I couldn't resist playing last night, I stayed awake to play the SCOOP-34-L and M PLO 6-Max $55 and $530, and the Supernova Million Freeroll. I ended up busting all of these super early, so I did get to sleep at a reasonable time after all.

I think I'm done with SCOOP now for 2011, with a record of 0 for 17 in cashes. There are 2 more events tonight, including the main event, but I will have been awake 12 hours by the time they start and to be honest I just don't have the heart to play them.

It's a terrible situation I find myself in. Every single month this year has been a losing one for me, I've lost at SNGs, lost at PLO, lost at online MTTs and lost at live MTTs. My all-in EV lines show winning play, but the bottom line is me getting screwed over and losing money. Sure, I've ran bad at poker, but I could have played better and yes, I could have played higher volume to smooth out variance, but there's a ton of reasons why I didn't and they are mostly related to running super bad at life. Somewhere in the last year I've picked up a huge amount of bad karma, and I can't even think where from, but it's brutal.

I've just taken out a 1 year lease on a condo in Bangkok (very close to Asoke BTS and Sukhumvit MRT), that I'll be moving in to on the 28th of May. It's just a small 1-bedroom place (about 55 sq meters), but it's brand new, nice and has everything I need, huge fridge, couple of LCD TVs, blackout curtains, rain shower, cable TV and Internet. The communal area has a gym and infinity edge swimming pool, sauna, jacuzzi etc. so i will try to make sure of that to get back in shape a bit. It's much cheaper and better than living in a hotel, so I'm looking forward to it!

I can also have a good laugh at this poster of Grayson 'Spacegravy' Physioc every time I get off the SkyTrain at Phrom Phong:

I'm just going to kick it here in Bangkok for the next 12 months, I'm not even sure if I'll bother playing much poker during that time, right now I feel like I'm pretty much done with poker. I'm just going to relax and play if or when I feel like it. After my 12 month lease is up, I'll re-assess where I'm at and what I want to do with my life.

People keep asking me if I'm going to Vegas for WSOP. No, I can't play online from the USA, so I obviously won't be stepping foot in that country in the foreseeable future, if ever.

I've also been asked (several times by my cousin who plans to play it) if I will be playing UKIPT Edinburgh in August, the only Scottish PokerStars tour event. No, I won't. The tourney buyin is only £550 and a return shitty economy flight to Edinburgh via London from Bangkok is minimum £900. It would cost me at least £1500 in travel, accom, food expenses to go play it, meaning that I'd need an expected 300% ROI to make it a break-even proposition. The brutality of the 20 hour journeys each way would mean several days of my time would be wasted travelling and recovering from travelling. I won't be playing it.

A few weeks back, I was tweeting about how I missed the dark chocolate Snickers bars, that simply aren't available in Thailand. I was having cravings for them. Well Shane 'Shaniac' Schleger heard of my plight and sent an emergency food aid package to me from the other side of the world. It arrived a few days ago, a package full of flat, squashed, but delicious Dark Snickers. It wasn't the only package that I received from the states on that day though, Jonathan Little sent me his brand new book on tournament strategy, some emergency aid to help my under-performing tournament game. From the small amount I've read so far it's excellent, and it's a breath of fresh air to read a book written by a consistent winning poker pro rather than some crank author that purports to be a poker pro, but really makes most of their living from writing books. Hopefully I can overcome my short attention span to make it the first book that I read fully since I was 14 years old, and will let people know more about it in a future blog.

Supernova's Night Out in Bangkok, Thailand

2011-05-08T02:19:00.004+01:00

Supernova VIP players at PokerStars have such a tough life. For example they must worry about what they should spend the enormous number of frequent player points that they accumulate on. Should they regularly buy $4000 cash credits, or save up a little while to buy entry into an EPT main event, or even save up a bit longer and buy a brand new Porsche? These are difficult decisions. Like Biggie Smalls didn't say: "Mo' FPPs, mo' problems".

PokerStars wanted to make life a little easier for their Supernova and Supernova Elite players, by treating them to a night out in Bangkok, Thailand, hosted by Official Best Poker Blogger In The World™ and Team Online Superstar - Daleroxxu.

I hired the VIP room at my local pool club in the late afternoon, for anyone that wanted to start the night early. After playing pool in so many bars back in the UK and never once having a table that wasn't FUBAR'ed, it feels like a real luxury to play on a professional standard table. The sick sound system, sofas and girls running around racking up the balls and bringing us food and drink were very nice also.

ChoboPokeR_r and WrongButton, a German and an Englishman, who have lived in Thailand for a couple of years showed up to the pool hall and we played some doubles. With one of the girls who works there playing as my partner these guys didn't even stand a chance :)

Since pool is too much of a skill game, and they didn't stand a chance, they challenged me to bowling. Off we went to Siam Paragon which has extremely nice and brand new bowling lanes. We ordered a bottle of Scotch, which is exactly what should be drank when in the presence of Scotland's most famous and best poker player, and had a fun couple of games.

I did happen to finish last in both of the games, which I attribute to bad variance. The guys thought my technique could use a little work, but I disagree.

We then went to dinner at one of the best French cuisine restaurants in Asia, 'The Reflexions', at the Plaza Athénée hotel. This restaurant would class as super luxurious in London or New York, so by Thai standards it's absurdly extravagant. The cost of a food and drink, per person, ended up being more than an average Thai person's monthly salary.

There were 7 of us there for dinner, including bigbadray2k and azn_baller3, who is very much Asian and very much a baller. At our table there were 6 different nationalities: Scottish, English, German, American, Australian and of course azn_baller3 representing the Thais. There is a large community of professional poker players in Thailand, who come here form all over the world, to stay in a sick house and live like kings.

The food was beyond delicious, and this would easily rank as one of my top 5 meals in my entire life. I had the 'Foie gras terrine, stuffed cherry with shallot compote' and 'Creamy lobster bisque soup with medaillon, fresh milk emulsion' to start with, followed by a delicious 'Honey peppered glazed Challans duck breast, roasted turnip in foie gras fat, poached fig in red wine and duck jus'.

Of course the portions aren't exactly large, so even though it was 11pm already and everyone was really keen to go on to a night club, I managed to convince everyone to stay for some delicious desserts. I had an apple pie with ice cream which was like no apple pie with ice cream I've ever had before, truly out of this world.

Omnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnom.

I loved the food at The Reflexions, although the other VIPs were more interested in ordering expensive bottles of wine, with everyone toasting "To PokerStars" after each bottle was poured.

With everyone well fed and merry, we headed on over to an up-market nightclub. The venue was excellent, with some great live music - that wasn't too loud that we couldn't talk, lots of space, and hot girls everywhere.

All the Supernova and Supernova Elite VIPs that attended the 'sick night in Thailand' asked me to pass this message on. "Thanks PokerStars!".

And the girls asked me to pass this message on. "Thanks PokerStars!".

So, yeah, thanks PokerStars, we all had a blast! ;-)

Getting Owned By Donks And Mosquitos

2011-05-05T21:36:00.003+01:00

Not long after writing my last blog, my visa extension for Thailand ran out and I had to briefly leave the country if I wanted to stay there any longer.

The nearest border is Cambodia, so I went to Cambodia, in a "VIP" bus where the toilet reminded me of "The worst toilet in Scotland" from the movie Trainspotting. Ewwww, I'll wait til the gas station thanks. Oh, it's just as bad? Never mind then.

The whole process of going there and coming back, to get a new 15 day Thai Visa-On-Arrival took about 9 hours. So I just prepared a bag with all my essentials (passport, money, drinks, food, video games and monkey) and got through the whole journey with no problems.

Unfortunately poker is still going terrible for me. I'm still running bad with all-in ev and just haven't been getting the kind of volume in that I need to even out variance. I've been keeping my tables down to 6 so that I can concentrate and improve, and also haven't been putting in a lot of hours due to being awake a lot during the daytime recently when the games aren't very live, STILL suffering from Myokymia (although slowly getting better), and taking medication which makes me too drowsy to play.

I had one of my worst sessions recently where over a few thousand hands I lost 15 buyins, running 14 buyins bellow All-in EV.

That session really hurt. It took a good couple of days of serious binge eating for me to get over it! I guess the money isn't that much but I always think in terms of buyins or BBs, not real cash, and it just hurts me when prolonged negative variance, that I can't do anything about, results in my failure to be able to move up from PLO50. I need to move up sooner rather than later, I certainly can't keep 6-tabling PLO50 if I want to start earning more money than I spend each month. I've already kissed goodbye to tens of thousands of dollars this year.

I've been considering getting an apartment here, as an alternative to burning a few grand every month on a hotel. But to get an apartment would mean taking a 6 or 12 month lease, paying 2 months deposit + 1 month in advance, signing up for utility bills and probably a long wait to get Internet installed. So it's a big commitment and hassle and I don't like even small commitments or hassles in my life, so that is obviously a problem.

I like where I am just now, in a deluxe room on the top floor of a nice hotel, where I can have the air-con blasting at 17C all day long without caring about electricity bills, have a delicious cooked breakfast every day, and check out whenever I feel like it. It's also very clean. I've never seen a single insect or mosquito, that was until recently....

I was lying in bed the other night, nice and relaxed, about to drift off to sleep, when I heard a loud buzz right in my ear. My whole body shook with panic, and I jumped out of bed and turned on the light. I absolutely can't stand any kind of flying insects or creepy crawlies, especially anything that can bite or sting me, and I was damn sure that noise was a mosquito!

I knew that I wouldn't be able to sleep if I knew it was still in the room. So I stood in silence trying to find out where it was so I could kill it. All I could hear though was the sound of my heartbeat. I started to doubt the existence of this mosquito, that maybe I was going insane and my mind was playing tricks on me. Or maybe something else made the noise, a spring in the mattress or something. After 15 minutes of failing to find a mosquito I turned off the lights and went back to bed.

10 minutes later I'm starting to fall asleep when I hear a loud buzz again then something land on my arm. My whole body spasmed so damn hard and I flew out of bed, turned the light on and stood there with a cold sweat coming over me. There is DEFINITELY a BIG mosquito here.

After another 15 minutes of trying to find this evil bastard I decided to open the curtains and one of the windows. I sat in the darkness for a while, hoping that the mosquito would be attracted to the light outside and GTFO. It seemed like a smart line to take, and after a long wait, I felt pretty confident that the mosquito was gone already, that I had outplayed it, so confident in fact that I went back to bed and fell asleep immediately.

It was only late the next evening that I noticed a throbbing red lump on the side of my neck. I got absolutely done! How the hell did I get defeated by something with a brain the size of a pinhead? This is how I feel after every losing session of PLO where some sub-human clowntard that is playing every hand and calling every bet spikes his gutshot to stack me, then immediately leaves the table. Getting hit-and-run by donks and mosquitos, fuck my whole.. entire.. life! :(

A couple of days later, however, as I leaned over to get a cold drink from the mini-bar, the bastard mosquito appeared and I instantly slapped my hands together. There he was, lying dead on the palm of my hand, the stupid minuscule brained villain outplayed by the skillful hero after all. Beware all PLO hit-and-run donks, this is your destiny.

So my 15 day Visa-On-Arrival ran out a few days ago, and since I still felt like staying in Thailand, but don't feel like doing visa runs so often, I went back to Cambodia again, this time to get a proper 60 day (extendable to 90 days) Thai visa. It meant staying for a few days at Poipet on the Cambodian border, while an agency took my passport to the Thai Embassy that is in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, very far from the border, to apply for the visa on my behalf.

While sorting the visa out through an agent was extremely hassle free, I did have to spend a couple of nights in the hellhole that is Poipet on the Cambodian side of the Thai-Cambodia border. Google "Poipet" and all you will see is stories of how this is an awful place full of crime, pick pockets, scam artists, prostitution, child prostitution, beggars, crooked casinos.... the list goes on and it's all true. The agency put us up in The Tropicana which they said was the best hotel/casino in town. It was god awful, and the food was something they wouldn't even serve in a prison. That is what my time in Poipet felt like, being in a prison. I certainly didn't go out much!

But at least I now have the option of staying in Thailand until the start of August, without leaving the country, if that's what I chose to do.

Tomorrow night should be a lot of fun. I am hosting a night out in Bangkok for a bunch of PokerStars Supernova VIPs. I'll be taking them to the boxing stadium to watch professional muay thai fighting from ringside, and then for some fine dining at one of the most highly acclaimed french cuisine restaurants in Asia, with PokerStars footing the bill for the entire night. Life is awesome when you're a VIP!

I will let everyone know how the night went in my next blog. I look forward to relaxing before the SCOOP starts in a few days time, where I will be playing in and hosting a whole bunch of the events.

Which SCOOP events will you be playing? Schedule.

One Month in Bangkok

2011-04-10T21:35:00.006+01:00

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. One month in Bangkok makes a Daleroxxu,,, whatever, I take everything in my stride son. Yeah, it's gone by pretty damn fast but I've been in Bangkok for little under a month now.

After my first week here I decided that I didn't like the location of my hotel much. It was in a quiet area where locals live and some small shops, a location that I chose to get away from the annoyances of the tourist areas.
Unfortunately there were no decent western food restaurants near by, nor was it anywhere near the Sky Train which goes pretty much everywhere that I'd want to go in Bangkok. I checked out of that hotel and checked into a hotel suite between Asoke and NaNa, a location heavily frequented by tourists and therefore also by annoying slimey suit salesmen, Tuk Tuk drivers, market stalls taking up 90% of the sidewalk, whores, gruff ladyboys, screaming women offering "MASSAS MASSAS" and filthy beggars. Basically anyone that annoys me while I walk down the street I have nothing but the strongest loathing and contempt for. I'd happily stand by and watch any one of them die in a grease fire, but was willing to put up with them so that I could be next to a BTS Sky Train station and a load of 24 hour restaurants. It's also an area that I was already familiar with due to my last visit to Bangkok.

My new hotel room, while large, comfortable and with a fast and stable internet connection, seems to be jinxed though, because no sooner had I set up my laptop and sat down to watch the latest episode of my favourite sitcom of 2011, Outsourced, than the screen froze. I rebooted and the screen was all garbled with green lines and wouldn't boot up properly. DAMN. The same fucking problem that has caused me so much grief this year, and that I have had "fixed" twice already, once in Malaysia in January and then in Bangkok in February.

I immediately packed up my laptop and took a taxi to Pantip Plaza, the huge IT mall in Bangkok, to find the geezer that "fixed" my laptop the previous month. He pretty much admitted that he had just done some quick fix the last time because the part that needed replaced is extremely difficult for him to obtain due to my laptop never being released in the Asian market. He said that I would need to leave it with him for up to 3 weeks, but he would fix it at no extra charge. So I left it with him then just kinda wandered around Bangkok like a lost puppy, not knowing what to do with myself now that I was laptop-less.

After some comfort eating in one of my favorite restaurants, I went straight back to Pantip Plaza as I had decided to buy a cheap laptop, or PC, to use while my laptop was being repaired. It made sense because with no computer, I couldn't play poker, e.g. I couldn't work and make money! Trying to find a suitable laptop was a waste of time, even in the IT centre of the country, this huge mega mall, there's not a single laptop with a 17" 1920x1200 resolution screen that I need to tile my poker tables. Not even anything close.

I ended up at the very top level of the mall, at a big computer store called IT City. I bought their cheapest PC and their best monitor, for a total cost of 12,690 Baht (USD $423). The PC was pretty basic but still with a dual core intel CPU and 2gb of ram, plenty good to run PokerStars and Holdem Manager. The monitor was a 22" BenQ 1920x1080 resolution, not quite what I was looking for but it was the best they had and was close enough.

The PC didn't come with Windows installed. I said jokingly to the boy that was serving me "Of course, why would anyone want the cost of a Windows license included in the price of their PC when there are at least 50 stalls in the Plaza selling a copy for 100 Baht?". He said that he could have someone install Windows 7, Office, Photoshop and more onto the PC for 200 Baht (USD $6.66). Pretty damn hilarious that in this big legit PC Store the staff are making arrangements for me to get pirated software loaded up onto my brand new machine, but that's just the way of life in Thailand, fuck international copyright laws, every movie, game and software application is copied and sold freely and openly.

No sooner had I taken receipt of my PC than a teenage girl put it on a trolley, and whisked it out of the legit PC store and into a shady looking stall elsewhere in the mall. 40 minutes later I paid the girl her monies for services rendered and got my brand new Windows 7 PC into a taxi home.

I hooked up my new PC straight away, switched it on, and as Windows started booting up I see the big letters XP. Are you fucking kidding me, the bitch gave me XP! I was ranting about it on Twitter straight away and one of my friends DM'ed me "Haha! At least you walked away with XP. Last Bangkok girl I was with give me more letters and viruses than that ;)". Thought that was pretty damn hilarious.

The idea that this the new computer would more than pay for itself by allowing me to play poker while my laptop was being repaired turned out to be another great Daleroxxu idea that ended up as a huge epic fail, as I lost in my first couple of sessions, sigh!

Something that had been annoying the hell out of me was that my left eyelid was constantly twitching uncontrollably. It's a condition called Myokymia and I've been the victim of it a few times over the last few years, but has always gone away on it's own within a week or so. This time it started back in Macau at the end of February, and I expected it to just go away on it's own, but more than a month later it had gotten worse rather than better. It got bad enough for me to go to the hospital to see a doctor who gave me some tests and asked me a lot of questions about my lifestyle. I left there under strict instructions to completely cut caffeine out of my diet and stay the hell away from staring at computer monitors until the twitching stopped. Apparently staying up through the night, staring at little poker tables on a laptop screen continuously for hours while getting super stressed out and drinking copious amounts of Coke Zero wasn't exactly helping my problem!

I barely played any poker for about 10 days and only drank fruit juice and water. I am about 80% cured from the twitching so far, and hoping it will go away completely. I just wish I knew to take the break from long sessions online BEFORE i bought that damn replacement computer.

13 days after taking my laptop in for repair, I got the phone call saying that the part had been replaced and that the laptop is now working like brand new and ready for collection. Hooray! I'm now rocking the dual-monitor setup and have a desktop PC to rest my feet on. This is more screen real estate than I've had all year, I almost feel spoiled, until I remember about the 30" 2560x1600 Dell that is currently gathering dust in my parents attic :(

As the 30 days on my Visa On Arrival are almost up, I had several choices if I wanted to stay here longer. Go to the Immigration Bureau and pay 1900 Baht (USD $63) for a 7 day Visa Extension, do a visa-run by bus to Cambodia for another 15 day Visa On Arrival, or take a return flight to KL or Singapore for another 30 day Visa On Arrival. I could also stay over for 1 or 2 nights in one of those locations to visit the Thai Embassy and get a 2 month (extendable to 3 month) Tourist Visa. Yeah, I really should have done that while I was chilling in Kuala Lumpur for 16 days last month, but I did come to Bangkok on pure impulse, getting here only hours after deciding to come, so it's more to do with lack of planning than me being lazy.

I decided that the easiest thing to do was just pay for the 7 day extension while I decide if I want to stay here longer, so I found the location of the Immigration Bureau from their fabulous website http://www.immigration.go.th/ . Maybe if the Thai government's IT workers would take a break from continuously blocking and censoring the crap out of my favourite websites and spent a little time working on that site it wouldn't look like it was created in 1995 using Windows Notepad and MS Paint. I circled their location on the big map that I had and took a taxi there. Despite showing the taxi driver this clear and large map he couldn't find the place, and was driving around in circles. We were pretty damn close, because he stopped next to a train station, that I could see on the map and I knew exactly where to go from there, but he couldn't understand me because he didn't speak English. Still I was pointing out, using the map, where he had to go from here, and he was still clueless. I couldn't make my mind up whether this guy was just the stupidest monkey ever to drive a cab or if he was just trying, successfully I may add, to run up a huge fare on the meter. Eventually we got there and I shipped him the HUGE fare he ran up of 120 Baht (USD $4).

The Immigration building looked old and there were about 1000 poor looking asian people sitting on the ground outside with pieces of paper in the baking sun. There wasn't one single white person there, in fact all the asians were staring at me like I don't belong here. After wandering around for 5 minutes failing to find the part of this building/complex where I pay my money and get my passport stamped, I joined a queue of asians holding forms just so that I could speak to someone who works there. When I got to the front of the queue I was told that Immigration services has been moved to the new Goverment Complex starting from 2009, and that this place only handled special work permits for citizens of Laos, Burma and Cambodia. Fuck me, I really don't belong here! This government complex turned out to be so far away that it wasn't even on the big fold out map of Bangkok that I had. So ridiculous that they moved locations in 2009 and the same shitty map to the old building is still on their shitty old website!

I jumped another taxi, but this time made sure the guy knew where we were going before I stepped foot inside the cab. He said it was about 20 minutes on the highway, damn that's far away, but at least he knows for sure where it is so no problem. And this cab ride was no problem until we gained some speed on the highway and the driver seemed to have trouble keeping in lane, with some occasional swerves. As soon as he started slapping himself in the face I knew what was up, I've used the old slapping ones self in the face trick to stay awake myself, this bastard was falling asleep at the wheel. His next trick was to take a handkerchief, soak it with a bottle of water and pat his face with it. I seriously wanted to ask him to pull over and let me out, but by that time we were in the middle of nowhere on a highway, am I seriously going to get out there?

He did get me there alive, to the very modern government complex. I appreciated how new and clean and well air conditioned this place was while I was sitting in a queuing system for 3 fucking hours to submit and collect my passport and visa application. I'm 100% sure there must have been someone I could bribe to get it done faster, I just didn't know who. So after all of that nonsense I, at last, had a stamp on my passport allowing me to stay for 7 more days in the Kingdom. The bastards should really have given me one extra day to make up for the whole day it took me to get the damn stamp!

I now have another week to decide if I want to stay here more longer term. I do like where I'm at just now, I'm very close to the action yet just far enough up the side street that it's very quiet, and staying on the top floor of the hotel helps with that too, so no problem sleeping during the daytime. While it's certainly way more expensive to stay in a hotel than rent a condo, I like the flexibility of being able to check out and change my plans at a days notice, rather than having a commitment to rent a place for at least 6 months, and also have to sign up for utilities and get an internet connection installed. I reckon the money I save on not having to pay an electricity bill for the air conditioning that I have blasting 24/7 keeping this room at a comfortable 17 degrees C makes up for paying extra to live in a hotel. That and the huge amount of food I consume at the buffet breakfast that's included with my room.

On the negative side, the weather in Bangkok is absolutely killing me. I can't stand it. Every day is around 38 degrees C and 92% humidity. Walking around outside is like walking through a sauna. I only have to think about going out during daylight hours and the sweat starts pissing out of my pores. I've pretty much given up on going outside before 7pm, but as all the malls are open until late night and there's plenty of 24 hours restaurants here, I can still sleep the day away and live life at night time quite well. Even at night though, the heat and humidity cause me to go through a whole suitcase of t-shirts within a few days. My laundry bill would be astronomical if it wasn't for the fact that I wash all my clothes by hand in the sink like a 1940's housewife, instead of paying the absurdly expensive hotel laundry service costs like a sucker. Actually I found an absurdly cheap laundry place nearby, that would do my whole laundry for the price the hotel would charge for one t-shirt, so I think I can stop doing the hand washing. Oh how I'll miss the days of soaking wet clothes hanging on anything that is remotely hangable all over my room.

I was moaning about how I want the weather to change to Shaniac on Twitter late one night, right before going to a restaurant. I then went out, got to the end of the road, a bit sweaty already, then crash-bang-flash-swooooosh I got completely owned by a heavy thunderstorm. I'm used to my clothes being a bit moist by the time I get to the restaurant because of sweat and humidity but this time I was sitting there is completely soaked through clothes eating my dinner. But on the plus side, the storm washed away all the filth from the streets. It was the first time I walked home late at night without having to navigate my way past 100 gruff looking ladyboy whores. In fact there wasn't a single one of them. Seems like they'd been washed away by the rain like the filthy disgusting cockroaches that they are! Apparently the wet season is beginning now in Thailand and will last for 6 months, this is the time of year that westeners go home. Even jcar9271, who I stayed with in Phuket last month, has decided to GTFO from his 'sick house in Thailand' this week. Judging by the size of his cheesy grin in his blog photo he's pretty happy with that decision.

I have been enjoying my food recently. I've had a whole month of eating out at least twice every day to figure out, by trial and error, where to go for the best food. For instance the Nachos at the JW Marriot are miles better than any of the Mexican restaurants I've been to here.

I should really capitalize on my research and write a 'Fat Bastard's Guide To Bangkok' book.

I did find the Hard Rock Cafe here at last, on my third attempt at looking for it. It's being renovated and is located on the top floor of a building covered in scaffolding. No wonder I couldn't find it sooner. Hard Rock Cafe is my favourite restaurant chain in the world. You are always guaranteed a top notch meal there no matter where you are in the world. In fact I would have to say that they are 'the PokerStars of restaurant chains' in that they are better than their competitors in every single way.

Talking of PokerStars, I'm super pumped about the Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) that is coming up next month. I'm not sure where I will be in the world when it kicks off but even if I'm on the moon I'll be sure to be playing in a ton of events.

At least one more week in Bangkok, then,,, whatever, I'll figure it out!

Ballin' in Bangkok

2011-03-22T22:00:00.003Z

With a few hours until checkout time at my hotel in Kuala Lumpur, having failed miserably at finding a suitable more long term place to live in the City, and not willing to pay the full cost of a 5 star hotel room every night after my roommate Amatay shipped his English ass back to the UK, I made the snap decision to book a first class flight to Bangkok that night.

I had gotten bored of KL already after 16 continuous days there, and was missing Thailand already. (Be sure to read my trip report from the last time I visited Bangkok if you haven't read it yet).

My flight didn't leave until 10:30pm, so for once I wasn't in a rush to get to the airport. Most flights involve me sleeping through my alarm, rushing around having not packed the night before, and getting to the airport a few minutes before they close checkin. So, at 6pm, after shipping a late checkout, and with lots of time on my hands I left my luggage with the concierge and enquired with the group of Taxi drivers outside the hotel on the price for a trip to the airport. They wanted RM180 (USD$60). I tried to haggle but they said it was a fixed price, and when I said "no thanks" they laughed at me and told me good luck walking there.

These Taxi drivers in Kuala Lumpur are pure scum. In particular the ones that wait outside hotels. They refuse to use their meter and will try to scam you for 3 times the fair price or more every time. Just pure filth. I'd managed not to use any of the ripoff merchant's services during my stay in KL, preferring to walk to a busy street and flag down a metered taxi rather than the ones that sit and wait in strategic locations waiting for a tourist to shaft. They most likely make most of their money out of people who are going to the airport, since they are the only taxis waiting outside the hotel, and people can't walk farther with all their luggage to find a non-bastard taxi to take them.

So, with time on my side, I took a leisurely stroll into town, shipped a great massage, picked up a delicious cookie dough milkshake, then found a metered taxi at some traffic lights. The driver drove me back to the hotel to pick up my bags, stopping in front of the same exact scumbag taxi drivers who were waiting in a line outside the hotel lobby. They, and the porters (who are likely getting kickbacks from the scum taxi drivers for letting them wait outside) didn't seem too impressed that I had outplayed them.

As we drove off I gave them a nice big middle finger "fuck you" through the back window. Total spent, including the massage and milkshake, was under RM90 (USD$30).

Daleroxxu > Scumbags!

So after an amazing couple of hours in the air, eating a delicious 4 course meal and lying back in the bed chair all snuggled up watching Due Date, I arrived in Bangkok just before midnight. The hotel I booked offered me transport for 1100Baht (USD$37). Instead I caught the last train, that left at midnight, into the city at a cost of 30Baht (USD$1). Daleroxxu outplayed the scumbags once again.

The last time I stayed in Bangkok I stayed in the Sukhumvit area with the rest of the tourists. This time I chose a more quiet location, In Makassan / Siam, with less tourists (and therefore less scummy taxi drivers, suit salesmen, massage girls and whores hassling the tourists) but still fairly close to some huge shopping malls.

My room was perfect for my needs. A nice comfy king sized bed, 24 hour room service, free wired broadband, desk facing TV and at last a comfortable chair to grind in. My back has been killing me due to grinding poker on my laptop in completely unsuitable chairs in hotel rooms.

and you know that you're in Bangkok when your hotel Minibar includes a packet of condoms, lawl.

So that is where I've been living for the last week, and it's been really nice, but unfortunately the last couple of nights has seen the Internet continuously crap out, costing me money when I'm in the middle of a poker session, and I've failed at getting the incompetent staff here to do anything about it. There's also no decent western restaurants near this hotel, and good food is important to me. So I've arranged to check out today, and have booked myself a room in hotel in Sukhimvit, and near a restaurant that I ate some excellent meals in during my last stay in Bangkok. The hotel is near Nana, so I am prepared to deal with the army of Thai whores / bar-girls that will be fighting over me every time I go out at night time.

Unfortunately the pokers still aren't going well for me at all, and I am break-even for the month in the games. I've just continuously run terrible when all-in as you can see from the all-in ev line on the graph.

It's been a horrible experience, resulting in a lot of screaming and binge eating. I could really do with the 30 buyins worth of ev that's been robbed from me by the stupid fish idiots that I play against :( So I am still playing PLO50 for now, until I can grind my PokerStars account up enough to play higher. Sigh.

3 weeks ago I only had $38 and a few FPPs in my busto stars account after some bad bankroll decisions, insane run-bad, and using the last $1400 in my account to buy into the Macau Cup Main Event which went terrible for me. Fortunately I still had some Stellar Reward bonuses to cash in, and got $700 by using the Supernova Concierge service, so that got me back into action. Despite breaking even in the games I have managed to make a bit of money through FPPs/Bonus, so I now have a comfortable amount to play PLO50 but not enough to play PLO100. I never want to play PLO with less than 100 buyins in my account. The swings are just too huge! But with a lot of hard work hopefully I can move up again SOON.

Should I stay or should I go now?

2011-03-15T19:19:00.001Z

This is my 16th day in Kuala Lumpur after quiting the failshow that was Tour of Cards to concentrate on playing online poker and doing whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. Unfortunately the pokers still haven't been going too well. I've been running massively bellow all-in ev almost every session, and it's driving me insane. I have been getting in a lot more volume these last 2 weeks but it's still not enough. Maybe when I stop running like death I will be able to play longer sessions.

In addition to poker depressing the hell out of me, the 4-star ghetto hotel, that my fans may remember from the "Daleroxxu's Messy Hotel Room" video was making me completely miserable. Their crappy bed and desk chair gave me back ache, their pool was like a pond, and the "hot" breakfast food was always cold and so terrible that it was laughable.

So a week ago we went looking for a better hotel, and found a really nice 5-star hotel in the best possible location, with an awesome restaurant and large roof pool and garden. We visited the hotel before booking it, letting ourselves in to have a look around and check out the pool. Everything looked completely balla, and we were able to confirm with the staff their that their internet was free and broadband speed, so we went straight online and booked a room. It was such a huge advantage to be able to go visit the hotel in person rather than read the hotel reviews online that are written by a bunch of bogus shilltards.

This is the view from our window, of the Petronas Tours lit up at night.

I've really been enjoying my food since leaving Macau, where western food is non-existant. I'm staying just a short walk away from Hard Rock Cafe, my favourite restaurant chain in the world, and have been making the most of the close proximity by shipping a lot of meals there recently. Omnomnomnomnomnomnomnomnom.

I haven't been doing much tourist stuff here in KL, because I'm quite nocturnal, but during a rare spell of daytime awakeness I went back to visit the Bird Park again. The same place that loyal Daleroxxu fanboys will remember from my Malaysia and Singapore blog in January. I like being around birds and animals much more than around people, so it's a nice place for me to spend an afternoon.

I also managed to catch the Bird Show that they put on. It was a bit lame and for kids. LOL.

As everyone knows there was a major natural disaster in Japan on 11th March. I was supposed to be there, until the 12th of March! That was what was on my scheduled itinerary for Tour of Cards before I cancelled all my flights and just shipped it over to Malaysia. I guess I don't run so bad at life after all, sick fade!

The English fish Amatay Jones is shipping his English ass back to England in just a few hours time, because he misses the chavs, freezing cold weather and hugely inflated prices of his home country. Good luck with that son, send me a postcard, totally jealous so I am.

It's 3:20am just now and I still have this hotel paid for until 6pm this evening. After that I don't know if I want to stay in KL, or go somewhere else. I have made an effort to find a balla apartment here, but haven't found anything that meets my criteria so far. I'm kinda bored of KL to be honest so I might just fly to another city or another country tonight, hmmm. My immediate plan is to play poker for a few hours, ship the super amazing hotel breakfast buffet, sleep, then figure out what to do at the last possible moment!

Batu Caves and Running Awful

2011-03-09T03:48:00.002Z

I'm still living in the same hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that I have been for the last 9 days. At last I've seen daylight though, after so many long sleeps day after day I've ended up waking up so late that I'm actually "waking up early" (4:20 am this morning).

The pokers are pretty quiet during the daytime in Asia so I decided to spend some time away from the computer, and went to visit the famous Batu Caves which are a huge Hindu shrine full of monkeys. Obviously I just take videos of things that I do so that I don't have to write about them, so here you go:

On Monday evening I hosted the Final Table of the Sunday Million 5th Anniversary Special, where there was nearly 4 and a half million dollars still in play. Somehow I was able to control my jealousy at the 9 players who had ran a $215 buyin up to six figures in cash, and had a lot of fun with the hosting.

I've since recieved many compliments on twitter and from players in my games on my final table commentary. Thanks, it means a lot, I was glad to bring some personality and entertainment to the occasion. This is the reason that PokerStars has their pros host the final tables of big events rather than an anonymous support person.

In other news I am running like the devil at online poker. After bricking the Sunday Million, a session of 60 SNGs where I lost 17 buyins, and dropping 19 buyins (23 buyins bellow ev) at PLO I was faced with having to drop down from the already low micro donks stakes I'm being forced to play right now. Fortunately for me I have good friends backing me up. Out of the blue I received a $2000 transfer from my friend Nick, telling me to use it to pad my bankroll until I felt comfortable.

Since my former 'career', and now 'very expensive fucking hobby' as a poker player is going completely tits up I have had to start thinking about my future and of ways to start earning some money again. Fortunately when you are as famous as me, opportunities are never far away, and several companies here in Malaysia have been fighting over me to be the face of their brand. My agent, from elite agency Joker Royally, has negotiated for me two lucrative sponsorship deals.

Chillin' in Kuala Lumpur

2011-03-05T20:29:00.003Z

This is my 6th day in Kuala Lumpur since leaving Macau. I haven't seen daylight one single time since I got here. The curtains in my hotel room have stayed closed while I sleep during the day, before getting up in the evening and going out for dinner, then grinding on PokerStars all night. I've been staying up long enough to get my free hotel breakfast at 6am before hitting the hay before sunrise.

I will be viewing some apartments in the next few days, hopefully to find something suitable for me to live in for the next 3-5 months. The English fish Amatay has still been following me around from country to country like a lost dog and will be here until the 16th of March.

I'm super excited at the chance to win >= $1,000,000 and a Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 this Sunday, well Monday for me because I live 13 hours in the future. That is the first prize in the special 5th Anniversary Sunday Million on PokerStars, this Sunday at 16:30ET. I will also be hosting this event, so I'll be there at the final table even if my chipstack isn't! Hopefully one of my good poker friends takes the tournament down so I can be the first to congratulate them.

I checked out a couple of awesome poker documentaries recently. The first was 'A Kids Game - The Story of Online Poker' which is available exclusively on BlueFirePoker. This is the trailer:

The second one is a documentary made available free by Team PokerStars Online. 'I AM NANONOKO' focuses on the life of Supernova Elite and Team PokerStars Online's Randy 'Nanonoko' Lew. It was produced with Ryan Firpo of 918 Films, who was behind the Busto to Robusto series of films.

One of my favorite music tracks at the moment comes from PokerStars SNG grinder Frenzuh. Every day he's hustin' and he ain't got no time for them hoe's coz he gotta grind them $12 turbo sit n goes, and that's fo' sho'.

Peace.
-Dale

Macau Poker Cup Trip Report

2011-03-05T02:55:00.005Z

I wasn't too impressed with Hong Kong and hoped to find more enjoyment out of Macau, a small island less than an hour ferry ride away. I wasn't going to do much sightseeing there, as I was going to play in the PokerStars Macau Cup series of poker tournaments held at the PokerStars Macau card room at the Grand Lisboa Casino.

Our first impressions of Macau were great, as we had checked into the super luxurious Grand Lisboa Hotel. Everything about this hotel is amazing. The rooms are very large, the beds are amazing, there's a large Bang and Olufsen TV with free movies on demand, free mini-bar, nice desk and chair for sitting at my laptop, fast and stable wired and wireless Internet, bathroom with TVs, hot tub, steam shower, I could go on and on and on about things I love about the hotel and not find a single thing I don't like, it's that good!

After we used the awesome spa and the half-indoor/half-outdoor swimming pool we went to play Event 1 of Macau Cup, the Charity Event. Since we were 45 minutes late due to excessive use of the spa and pool we had to buy in as alternates and then were playing with about 20BB stacks. Normally I'd be happy pushing around a 20BB stack but the tables were 10 handed and there were no antes in the structure, so it wasn't so great. I ended up going deep but pretty much bubbled, story of my life.

The next day I played event 2, another very fast structure, 10 handed tables and no antes. Meh. I was sat to the left of EPT Monte Carlo champion Pete DeKorver. The rest of the table were a bunch of huge donks, as is standard in Macau. I busted after a few hours in a spot that was likely so standard that I can't remember what it was. This put me 0 for 9 in live tournament cashes for 2011, after the 7 events I bricked at this year's Aussie Millions.

As Amatay had also busted the event pretty quickly we went for a bit of exploring and found the famous "Hooker Mall" at Hotel Lisboa (the old hotel across the street from Grand Lisboa). The hooker mall is a circle of shops where tons of Chinese hookers walk non stop looking to get picked up. As for as I can tell it works like this, apparently prostitution is legal as long as the girls aren't soliciting themselves, so they keep walking around this big circle until a guy walks along side them and picks them up. It's such a ridiculous / awesome thing to see, we couldn't believe our eyes.

Of course, where the world's best blogger goes, so does a camera. I whipped out my phone to get some sneaky film of these hookers, unfortunately one of them saw it and started yelling at me. Fortunately for me I walk faster than some tart in high heels can run!

Macau Cup Event 3 went a lot better for me, the structure was a little slower and there were antes. I was coasting around with about 25BBs (which was about average) not far from the bubble when I shipped 97s over a raise and 2 flat calls. The original raiser folded, as did the first caller. Only one more guy to get through, a Philippine guy who tanked for ages, stared me down and asked me questions. Eventually he calls with 76s and I have him dominated, skill game! The 9 kicker held up as the board ran out JJ7-5-4. Ship the big stack to Daleroxxu.

From there I got to play a lot of pots and accumulate chips as we approached the bubble. Then the Dutch lucksack Pete DeKorver was moved to my table with his 12BB stack, which he doubled up though me twice, first by 3-outing me and then by winning a race. SIGH!

They ended the day as soon as we were in the money. I was a top 3 stack with 30 players left and feeling great.

When we resumed play the next day I lost a couple of races in the first few hands and not long after that I was caught jamming from the button with 83o versus two uber nit short stacks in the blinds. Showing down that junk and bleeding away 1/3 of my stack in previous hands forced me to tighten up a lot and I just sat there folding my junks hands for a little while until the blinds became so high that very few of the 15 or so players left had more than 20BBs behind them. I ended up calling a 6bb cutoff shove with Q7o from the BB, which I think is fine with the huge antes and that I thought he was jamming blind. The guy flipped over 76 and the flop gave him a straight. FML.

The very next hand I busted my good friend Daren Yoon when he shoved a 3 or 4BB stack from the button and I shoved the small blind to isolate with Q9. I played the shallow structure well but unfortunately I bubbled the final table after the Dutch luckbox Pete Dekorver shoved ~12BB UTG with K9o and I called my ~10BB stack off with AJs and lost. gg me, 11th place :(

I was really unhappy because all the money was at the final table. They also roll the blinds back for the final table, they halved them! I didn't know this at the time, maybe I would have played a little less loose if I knew, maybe ;-) I guess I should be happy to end my run of not cashing in live events but I really felt that I would win that tourney. The field was so damn soft and I was playing great, the cards just didn't run out well for me.

With all the poker I didn't get much of a chance to do sightseeing in Macau. But I did go for a little wander into the town centre, away from all the huge casinos. It's a nice enough place, despite the lack of any western restaurants other than Pizza Hut and McDonalds!

Way more cooler than the town was the fountains outside the Wynn casino. For me, these are more impressive than the fountains at Bellagio, Las Vegas, just because you are so close to them, it's extremely entertaining.

After a terrible year of online poker for me so far, I just had enough money in my PokerStars account to buy in to the Macau Cup Main event. It did leave my account pretty much busto though, talk about bankroll management! At that stage I didn't really care. The donks playing in Macau are the very worst poker players on the planet, so there was no way I'd be missing out on playing this.

The main event started with me being sat at the same table as Pete DeKorver, who I was getting a bit sick of seeing his face by this point! Then my friend Daren Yoon sits down to the seat on my left, and tells us how the seating assignment isn't random. Apparently he bought 4 people into a previous tournament and they ended up all sat next to each other. I asked the table who had bought in directly online and 6 of us in a row raised our hands. There were only about 25 direct buyins online from the whole field, so an unlikely coincidence. It reminds me of UKIPT Galway in December when I was assigned a seat next to Team PokerStars Jude Ainsworth, Julian Thew and Liv Boeree. At least on that occasion they admited a problem and took a break to redraw the seats. On this occasion we just had to wait until our, much tougher than average, table broke.

The tournament started off well for me when a huge clown basically dumped his whole stack to me, check raising me on the turn with zero fold equity on a Q894r board with AK. I had QQ.

I had around 4 times the starting stack by the 6th level, when I got in huge pot with a Japanese kid. After a raising war preflop the flop came all K63 all spades. I had KcQc. Check Check. Turn was blank and he lead 1/2 pot, I called. River was another King and he jammed for around the size of the pot. I tanked and eventually called, he sighed and hung his head. I flipped over the KQ and he sighed again, shook his head, then held his cards above his head to show to his railtard friends behind him, while standing up. He then slammed down Qs9s onto the felt and cheered and started high fiving his bastard friends. As he's counting his chips he berates me in broken English for flat calling with KQs in that spot. What a little c***!
If you see this guy at a tournament, and get a chance to slowroll his ugly ass, go right ahead, because he deserves it.

With a crippled stack I ended up shoving 5d3d over a raise and was snapped off by TT. gg me!

I didn't play any more events after that. I just started trying to rebuild my busto PokerStars account by cashing in some Stellar Reward bonuses and grinding micro stakes PLO. What a thankless grind that was!

With 1 day left in macau and no willingness to play live poker, I took a wander into the ghetto area of Macau, just to see what's up. It's unbelievable, 10 minutes walk from huge luxury casinos with fountains dancing to the tune of "Money makes the world go round, the world go round" are people living in poverty. What I found most incredible though were the shops in this area. They all sell the most absolutely ridiculous junk imaginable. Half of the shops I couldn't even work out what it was they were selling, it was just a guy sitting amongst a load of old crap watching TV. So strange.

The next leg of my world tour was to be Cebu in Philippines. Well, I had a change of plans at the last minute. Hours before I was due to set off, I cancelled all of my flights and booked a direct flight from Macau to Kuala Lumpur.

I am now living in a hotel in KL, while I look for a balla apartment here. I have a 90 day visa that I'll likely get extended to 150 days. I decided to settle down somewhere so that I can concentrate on my online poker career which has been more like a very expensive hobby than a career this year. I also have a commitment to PokerStars to represent them, not just through my blog and wearing patches at live events but more importantly, being a member of Team Online, by actually playing significant volume on their site. Unfortunately it's been difficult and at times completely impossible for me to play significant volume over the last 2 months.

I will close down the Tour of Cards site soon. The blogs at tourofcards.com have been merged into my original blog at http://www.daleroxxu.co.uk

Since arriving in KL I've already put a ton of hours in online and have grinded my account up to $3900 from the few bucks and FPPs that I had left. I hope to grind this up much further over the coming weeks and play higher stakes PLO again, this time with better bankroll management.

I'm also very much looking forward to the SCOOP in 2 months time, and plan to play most of the NLHE and PLO events, and a bunch of the "other game" events. So far this year I haven't played any online MTTs because I haven't had the 7-12 hours to put aside to play them. Now that I'm settling down I look forward to being able to play more MTTs, and be in good shape to take down a title when SCOOP comes around this May.

Hong Kong Trip Report

2011-03-04T17:55:00.001Z

I had been getting used to the cheapness of Vietnam and Thailand in recent weeks, so it was a bit of a shock to the system when I couldn't find a decent hotel room in Hong Kong for under USD$170. Since I was only staying there a few nights and I had the mug Amatay paying for half of my hotel rooms, it was fine though. I ended up booking us a nice room at The Luxe Manor on Kimberly road which describes itself as "A luxurious, high-tech and european Kowloon boutique hotel".

The beds were super comfy, breakfast buffet was awesome and the internet was the fastest I've ever used in my life. Nuff said!

On our first day in Hong Kong I was dragged to the Space Museum by Amatay. It turned out to be awful, and for kids. I wouldn't have even enjoyed it if I was a kid, it was like one of those boring excursions that we'd be forced to go on by the school. I had more fun checking out the cool lanterns that were outside.

At night we checked out the famous 'Ladies Market' which is a late night market selling a load of old shit. Don't let the name fool you, they don't just sell shit for ladies, they sell shit for everyone, and everything they sell is shit! I more enjoyed the real shops on the streets surrounding it, which also seemed to be open super late. Around 10pm and there's still a bunch of people out buying clothes and stuff. Makes you realise how much the UK sucks, when they close every store at 6pm.

We then hit the bars in Lan Kwai Fong, as recommended by my friend Bryan Huang. It was an area with tons of small bars and people drinking on the street. I didn't enjoy it much because everywhere was so busy and cramped, you couldn't move. I like having some space, but unfortunately there isn't much of that in Hong Kong. Just as we were about to leave the area, some retard opened a bottle of beer against the side of a wall and it all sprayed on my jacket, I was steaming mad but the clown just disappeared into the crowd. FML!

Hong Kong is an extremely densely packed city, but it is much more cleaner than other big cities in Asia. There isn't the filth and beggars on every street like in Bangkok. On our first day in Hong Kong we had walked around for a while without getting hassled.

So many places I've been this year there's scumbags who hassle the tourists on the street. Then we turned the corner into Nathan Road, when some Indian guy approached me and asked me if I wanted to buy a watch. WTF? Myself and Amatay laughed, because it seemed so random, why the hell would I want to buy a watch from some guy on the street? I said "It's almost as stupid as those guys trying to sell us suits in Thailand when it's about 40 degrees C". I had barely finished my sentence when another Indian guy asked me if I wanted to buy a suit, hahaha, FUCKKKKKKKKKK OFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!

Nothing pisses me off more than being hassled when I walk down the street. Leave me alone you fuckers, I don't want or need what you have to offer so just do one and GTFO.

Unfortunately these clowns selling fake Rolex's and cheap suits are everywhere. None of them are Chinese, they all look Indian, and there's a whole fucking army of them, everywhere! I've watched them (no pun intended) and they will stand on the street waiting, not hassling a single Chinese person, but when one white person walks by they are around him like flies around shit. Leave people alone you scumbags!

The next couple of days in Hong Kong we spent our sightseeing time on the Big Bus Tour. It's a bunch of open top buses, that go on 3 different routes around Hong Kong, and you can hop on / hop off. It seemed like a decent way to see a lot of Hong Kong in a short amount of time. I wasn't that impressed though, there just didn't seem to be much to see, just a bunch of big buildings EVERYWHERE.

One of the stops on the bus tour was Aberdeen Harbour where we could do a little ride on a traditional Chinese Sampan boat. It looked terrible but the Amatay thought it looked awesome, so we went and did it. It was terrible! This little boat just minced around the harbour at 0.1mph for 30 minutes, then we had to stand there in the middle of nowhere for another 30 minutes waiting for the next bus. After this and that bloody Space Museum the fish Amatay got to make no more decisions about our itinerary!

A much better decision, by yours truly, was to take a trip up Victoria Peak on the trams. The peak gives the best views in the whole of Hong Kong. Unfortunately there was a lot of cloud, so the views were not so awesome, but it was a lot more fun than the stupid sampan boat.

On our last night we checked out the Golden Arcade, a huge complex famous for selling computer products at the cheapest prices, and the Goldfish Market, where fish and amphibians are kept (in terrible conditions) and sold. Every shop banned photography but undercover journalist Daleroxxu was there with his HTC Desire Z phone shooting a few videos.

We also watched 'A Symphony of Lights', the world's largest permanent sound and light show. I was well impressed, it was easily the highlight of Hong Kong for me.

Next stop, Macau for the PokerStars Macau Cup.

Saigon, Vietnam Trip Report

2011-02-25T17:37:00.000Z

Neither myself or the English fish Amatay knew very much about Vietnam other than the famous Vietnam war in which the communist North Vietnam defeated the USA backed South. But what better way to find out about a country than to go there and experience it? Just a 1 hour flight from Bangkok, Thailand and we landed in Ho Chi Minh City (better known as Saigon).

Vietnam is still a communist state to this date, in that there is only one political party - The Communist Party. However, other than the lack of democracy, their citizens seem to have all the freedoms of any western country. I didn't see anything that would make me think that the Vietnamese people are under oppression. There's no real government presence visible, and you only have to walk around Ho Chi Minh City to realise that their economy is capitalist. Private businesses and international brand shops are everywhere (but thankfully there's not a single McDonalds to be found!).

As we set out to explore the city on our first day we walked out of our hotel, to the end of the street, and I remarked about how good it feels to walk down the street without being hassled by the prostitutes, lady boys, beggars, slimy suit salesmen and tuk tuk drivers of Bangkok. Then as we turned the corner some geezer runs up beside us and says "Where are you going?". I've been to enough cities around the world to know a dodgy geezer when I see one so I obviously ignored him. "What do you need?" he said. "GTFO" I said. "Where you go? I can take you? What you need? I can get you" he shouted. "GET THE FUCK OUT!" I shouted back at him. He seemed to get the message.

Crossing the road for the first time was a scary experience. The roads are about 8 lanes deep with people riding scooters and none of them stop at pedestrian crossings. You just have to walk out slowly and they somehow drive around and avoid you.

The roads are just perfect for a game of Frogger!

After we crossed the road safely there were 3 guys standing on the other side next to parked scooters. They asked us where we were going, we ignored them, they asked us if we needed a ride, we said no thanks. Then they offered us some prostitutes. This was about 3:30pm in the afternoon. As we walked around we found these scumbags on every street corner. Between 1-4 of them, on, every, fucking, corner. Harassing the hell out of anyone that's white, first with an offer of transport on the back of their death-mobile scooter and then an offer of "a lady". Occasionally two "NO"s to those questions would result in an offer of drugs. This nonsense is very annoying but after a while you just get used to it like it's normality. Assholes shout at and harass you as you walk down the street and you just ignore them. Standard.

Eating out in Vietnam is LOL cheap, as we found out on our first night. It's even cheaper than in Thailand, incredible! However, one of the common tourist scams that I read about Vietnam is that some restaurants, for the tourists, will pull out a western menu, with prices to match. As we looked around for somewhere to eat dinner we found one such establishment. They had main courses listed for between 200,000 and 400,000 Dong. That's like $1-2. As we looked at the menu next to the door this old guy in a suit, presumably the manager, practically pushed his employee on the door out of the way so that he could present us with the Special Western Set Menu. A choice of 2 different set meals, priced at $20. GTFO. I insta shipped the menu back to him and told him "I don't feel like paying the white man tax tonight son.".

We did easily find a place with great food and super low prices and had 3 tasty courses and a cocktail for about a fiver. The only bad thing was that they served us our next course when we had barely started the previous one. Soup, appetizer and main course were all on the table within five minutes of each other. It was so weird.

We sat a table on the low balcony area next to the street. That seemed like a good idea until we had every street hawker in the area come up to us trying to sell the biggest load of old crap, and then this ghostly looking woman holding a baby that stood there no shorter than 5 minutes, right beside me, crying and moaning and droaning "im so hungry, my baby, im so hungry, my baby" as I sat there right in-front of her trying to omnomnom my fat ass through 3 courses of food before it got cold. I ended up seeing that same cow 3 times during my short stay in Vietnam, a professional beggar, pure scum!

On our second day in Saigon, we did a lot more exploring. We checked out Ben Thanh Market, where a lot of the locals shop for food and items.

With the temperature and humidity absolutely destroying us we quickly looked for an alternative to walking. We had seen these vehicles called Cyclos, that are basically bicycles with a seat on the front for a passenger, and decided that it would be fun to have some guys pedal us around the city for a while. I had read previously that the going rate for Cyclos was 50,000 Dong per hour ($2.50), and that they were everywhere, just sitting there all day with no customers. So, feeling generous, we decided we were going to pay double that - it's only fair for what seems like hard work, and approached a couple of Cyclos. I asked them how much and the fat guy said something I couldn't understand then tried to get me onto the Cyclo. "No, how much do you want to cycle us around?" I asked. "How much do you want to pay?" he replied. I told him we'd pay them 100,000 per hour and within a few seconds his fat ass was cycling me around Saigon.

The Cyclo guys dropped us off at the War Remnants Museum, which contains exhibits from the Vietnam War. This place was previously named The Museum of American War Crimes but the name was changed in the 90's after Vietnam became a more liberal country and started trading relations with the USA. On display were many planes, tanks, guns and bombs as well as an exhibit on Agent Orange with some disturbing images showing it's effects.

The Cyclos were waiting for us when we got out and they recommended that we go to Reunification Palace (formally Independence Palace, before the commys took over). This was where South Vietnam's leader stayed during the Vietnam War and the war officially ended when Tank 843 of the North Vietnam Army smashed through it's gates. Unfortunately this place was pretty boring. It's basically just a bunch of rooms with a big table and some chairs, that you aren't even allowed to enter. There is a replica of Tank 843 outside, but that's about as awesome as it gets.

After coming out of the palace we asked our Cyclo drivers where they recommended next. They said something I couldn't understand, and kept repeating it. I asked them to show me where it was on the map and after pretended not to understand me a few times until they eventually showed me. It was some place miles away, and at the 2 miles per hour this fat slob cycles at he was obviously looking to run us up with a big fare. It had been 90 minutes since we hired these guys and we just wanted them to take us somewhere close by and end the fare. They cycled a few blocks and dropped us off at the Museum and then when I said that we were ending the ride here and wanted to pay, the fat guy got all offended. I said that we just wanted to do stuff on our own from here on and he got clingier than a Thai girl, he just didn't want our relationship to end so damn fast, he had his mind set on the long term.

Being nice (we're already paying these guys double what the going rate is) we pay them 200,000 Dong for 2 full hours, even though we only used them for 1 and 3/4 hours. I ship my driver 2 x 100K notes and the fish Amatay hands him 2 x 500K notes. Just as the guy is about to grab it out of his hand (with a HUGE smile on his face) I grab it first and tell him those are 500Ks not 100Ks. The fat glutton Cyclo guy's smile drops.

Then the greedy fat bastard gets all angry and says is "no, it's 300,000 Dong each". Oh really son? He gets really aggressive with me and in amongst all the Vietnamese or incomprehensible English he says that it's 200,000 for the ride and 100,000 for his tip "You like, you tip. You like, you tip". We stood there for 5 minutes having this argument when the fucker burned my hand with his cigarette, almost certainly on purpose, the greedy guts obese busto ass clown that he is. After that we just walked away from them, and into the museum, which was absolutely horrendous.

We decided to get out of the city centre on our third day so took a boat ride up the Saigon River to see the Cu Chi Tunnels. It took about 2 and a half hours but the weather was hot and the scenery was awesome.

Once we got to the tunnels they sat us down to watch a half hour propoganda documentary that looked like it was made 30 years ago, celebrating the Viet Cong and the civilians that contributed to winning the war, often referring to them as "American Hero Killers". They featured one little girl who "Helped KILL 13 AMERICAN SOLDIERS. She was awarded the medal award of AMERICAN HERO KILLER, for her efforts in KILLING 13 AMERICAN SOLDIERS." It went on like that......

After the video we were shown some of the common traps that the Viet Cong would leave around the jungle for their enemy. Then we were offered the chance to purchase some bullets at a vastly inflated price so we could feel what it was like to fire guns in the Vietnam jungle. Of course I got out the cash and grabbed an AK47, pow pow pow. After some target practise we went down the actual tunnels, which have been widened by 20%, and the 1 foot squared entrances made into big stairways, to allow us fat western tourists to experience them. The Cu Chi tunnels are only a small part of a huge tunnel network that runs under Vietnam and was extremely important to the Viet Cong in winning the war. Inside the tunnels it's extremely cramped, hot and and humid, with little air. You have to squat and shuffle your feet to get through them. It's extremely uncomfortable for just a couple of minutes so I cant begin to imagine what it must have been like for the VC soldiers who used them for long periods of time.

Our fourth day was a bit of a write-off. We woke up super late, decided that we were going to visit Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens, one of the oldest zoos in the world. But we found the Hard Rock Cafe on the way there and omnomnomed some amazing burgers.

Unfortunately, after our visit to Hard Rock, we ended up arriving at the zoo just as they were closing. Fail. We spent the rest of the day at the pool/bowling/video game arcade at the top of Diamond Plaza, then I grinded some poker on PokerStars from my hotel room, running just unbelievably terrible as I have been doing all year, and lost 40% of the small amount of money left in my account. Sigh.

On our last day we did make it to the zoo. The entry fee was 8000 Dong, that's like 40 cents, L-O-L. Three hours of entertainment for some pennies, gotta love Vietnam.

On our last night we ate at the same place we did on the first night. AGAIN they shipped us all courses at once, wtf! haha.

Next stop - Hong Kong

Thailand Trip Report - Bangkok and Phuket

2011-02-17T12:17:00.008Z

On the 4th of February I travelled from Bali, Indonesia. After a couple of nice Malaysia Airways business class flights via Kuala Lumpur I was in Phuket, Thailand, well relaxed and well fed, ready to enjoy myself. Unfortunately however, I had to wait around Phuket Airport for nearly 3 hours hours to meet online MTT legend Simon 'Amatay' Jones, who was flying all the way from England and will be travelling with me over the next 5 weeks. His flight was delayed. As I sat at the meeting point, just past immigration/customs, I was thoroughly entertained by watching the constant stream of 90 year old white men walk through and meet/greet their 18 year old Thai brides. So sick.

We stayed in Phuket for a full week. My friend Joel 'jcar9271' Carr, who is a PokerStars Supernova SNG player gave me a room in his balla Villa in Chalong and the fish Amatay stayed in the cockroach infested apartments down the road.

Joel also sorted us out with a brand new scooter each, but after seeing how crazy these Thais drive on the way from the airport we weren't too keen on using them. However it turned out that scooters were the only reasonable way to get around where we were staying, so we had a few practise sessions on some quiet roads and then braved the busy highways.

After learning to use the scooters we were barely off them the whole day. We zipped around, exploring the island and just generally tried not to get killed by the numerous retards driving on Phuket's deathroads. It's a pretty scary experience at first, driving on Phuket's steep winding roads where there's seemingly no speed limit and all sorts of ridiculous obstacles to avoid. Obstacles including loose gravel, huge pot-holes and countless people driving food carts and scooters along the edge of the wrong side of the road straight into traffic. It's also very standard to be simultaneously overtaken AND undertaken if you try to leave a safe gap between yourself and the driver infront of you. We got used to the roads and the scooters very quickly though and they were a lot of fun and gave us a huge amount of freedom to see and do some cool stuff.

At night, while Amatay was busy chatting up the ladyboys in Chalong's bars I decided to stay in because I was extremely keen to grind some profits and FPPs on PokerStars. January was a devastating month for me financially after bricking all 7 events that I played at the Aussie Millions, spending $10,000 on hotels, travel, food and entertainment and almost busting my bankroll on PokerStars, not to mention that I was without a working laptop for the first 10 days of the month so was unable to play online. I planned to play at least 5 hours every day while staying at Joel's house and he set me up a nice desk to grind at and had 2 stable internet connections. within 90 minutes of starting my first session of 2/4 CAP PLO I ran worse than ever before and spunked off all but a few hundred bucks of my roll. I kept getting AAxx double suited in preflop against 2 mega whales with junk, getting 2:1 on my money with around 48% equity in the pot.

Needless to say I won very, very few of those races!

I tried to take my mind off the pokers by getting up early the next day and heading over to Kata and Karon beaches to relax.

The beach is fun for me for a couple of hours, after that, not so much. It gets very boring very quickly. The only interesting moments are when some Thai guy walks past with some absolute crap that he's trying to sell to tourists and I can some entertainment from laughing at him. I think Amatay would be happy just lying on the beach listening to his i-pod all day long, but I convinced him to get up and go do a bit of exploring with me. We drove around and found a bunch of depressed looking elephants in shackles which their owners use to give rides to the tourists at around $45 per hour per person. It looked quite dangerous and a shame for the Elephants so we decided to pass on the ride.

We then drove up some steep winding roads to visit The Big Buddha of Phuket, a towering monument that is visible from anywhere on the south of the island. The road leading up to it was extremely steep in places but fortunately there was very little traffic. I did end up coming off the road at one point but had slowed down enough that there was no damage done. Once we got to the top there were a whole bunch of tourists and very few Buddhists. There was a huge market of stalls that you had to walk though, selling cheap crap stuff aimed at tourists, before you could get up close to the Big Buddha. We weren't that impressed with the monument, and it still seems to be under construction, with scaffolding surrounding it.

After dark we went for dinner and spent about $4 each on a 2 course meal with drink. Food is insanely cheap in Thailand, in fact EVERYTHING is insanely cheap in Thailand. For a couple of grand per month you could live there like an absolute king, live in a balla house, eat out for every meal, have massages every day, and much more. After dinner Joel was sitting grinding SNGs, so I decided to sit at the desk he set up for me beside him and grind microstakes poker all night long to try to rebuild my Stars roll. After about an hour it was going well and was up 7 buyins, before losing them all back, then my laptop crashed mid-session. No big deal I thought, lost a bit of money I had invested in some pots but whatever, just rebooted, logged back in and started playing again. 5 minutes later I get a bit of rungood back, flopped sets on a bunch of dry boards with fish betting into me, when the graphics on my screen go all garbled and my laptop turns off. It never came back on after that, video card was dead, huge huge beat.

My video card had originally died on January 1st in Prague and I had to wait until January 10th in Malaysia before I found someone who could fix it. Whatever they did obviously wasn't good enough because a few weeks later there I am again with a busto laptop. The problem I have is that my laptop is special in that it has a 17" screen with a 1920x1200 resolution, that I absolutely need to play poker on, as I can only play with tiled tables. It's near impossible to buy a laptop with that spec in a shop, and it's not easy to order a replacement video card or laptop online and have sent out to me since most places only ship to the cardholder address. I'm also spending a short time in each place I visit before moving on so having a friend in the UK/USA buy me something and then having them courier it to me, trying to predict my exact address on a certain day and the delivery date of the courier, seemed like a bad idea too. My first reaction when my laptop died was that I just wanted to quit my travels and settle down somewhere to just concentrate on playing online poker, however I decided to just see how things went over the next couple of weeks, and just have fun without thinking about poker or blogging.

The next day was Amatays birthday so he got to decide how we spent the day. So we went exploring for a nice beach to spend the day at then made plans to go for a big night out in Patong in the evening. We didn't have to drive far before we found a much smaller and nicer beach than the one we visited the day before. It's called Nai Harn.

In the evening myself, Amatay, Joel and another poker player living on the Island, Nick, went out into the degen capital of the world, Patong. Everywhere you look in Patong there are ugly ladyboys standing on at the side of the street and sleazy old western men with young Thai prostitutes on their arm that they've easily picked up from one of the many, many go go bars. As we walked along one of the main street I had girls constantly come up to me, stand right in front of me trying to get my attention, slap me on the arse or grab my forcefully by the arm. It would be really flattering if I hadn't already seen them do the same thing to some geriatric bag of bones seconds earlier.

Initially we avoided the sleaze by going to a nice Mexican restaurant on a roof terrace, and then to an awesome and huge pool hall with nice tables which was super cheap. Then we went out drinking, and checked out some of the sick stuff that goes on, but I will keep this blog tasteful and not mention any of that. Needless to say the pervert Amatay, who's blog only became popular after he populated it with porn links, was loving every minute of it. Myself, not so much, just isn't my scene, but the night was a lot of fun anyway.

What was an awesome night unfortunately ended with Joel being robbed of his wallet and phone by 2 disgusting ladyboys as he drunkenly tried to get into our driver's car. I was taking photos at the time because I thought it was hilarious that there were ladyboys harassing him, it was only when we got back to Joel's house that we realised that the bastard ladyboys robbed him.

The next day was a write off as everyone slept all day. I was the only person that didn't get wasted the night before so I was pretty much kicked around on my own all day and was pretty depressed about not having a working laptop and not being able to use the spare time to grind myself out of the mess I'm in with online poker runbad. I drove to Banana IT, the biggest IT store there to see if I could find a laptop to buy that was semi suitable for me, but their largest screen laptop was some low resolution 14" nonsense, completely useless. Pretty boring day but in the evening I went with Joel and his wife for food, a massage and to eat at the best banana pancake stand in Phuket. Omnomnomnomnom.

The next again night and I went back to Patong with Amatay, as we wanted to watch some live Muay Thai boxing. It was a lot of fun but pretty expensive by Thailand standards at $65 for a ticket. We bet each other on every fight which made watching the fights way more entertaining. We were even in the betting before the very last fight when I convinced Amatay to up the bet from 100 to to 250 then my guy pretty quickly shipped the knockout blow to Amatays donk fighter, gg son.

After the boxing we went around Patong, experiencing more of the degen capital of the universe. This place is just crazy. Words cant describe what it's like there and videos don't do it anything near justice, especially since you can't use cameras in the places where the really sick stuff goes on.

On our last day in Phuket we hired a longboat to Coral Island, a nice beach and crystal clear waters with tons of tropical fish swimming right up to the shore awaited us.

I took PokerStars Monkey with me and he enjoyed a bit of sunbathing.

And then a game of poker with the locals.

After a week in Phuket we took a flight to Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand, staying in a suite on Sukhumvit Road where all the action is. We went out exploring on our first evening and after a 3 course meal in a classy restaurant that cost about a tenner, we didn't have to walk too far before we found a place that reminded of us Patong, it was called Nana Plaza and as soon as we started walking around there we were getting hollered at, grabbed by the crotch, etc. etc. etc. etc. by the Thai whores. The streets surrounding it were almost as bad and also had many ladyboys, and beggars, that we could barely squeeze past for the rows of market stalls selling fake shit and people eating next to stalls that were frying up cockroaches or some similar disgusting shite. What a place.

We just found some British pub to play pool and listen to live music, before we sat on their terrace for a while watching the degeneracy pass us by. On the way back to the hotel Amatay hopeless haggled with an old lady selling wallets. He ended up with one branded "Billobang". LOL.

We got up early on the next day to experience Bangkok in the daytime, and it did seem a lot more like a normal city. All the whores, ladyboys, hot smelly foot carts and fake goods market stalls were gone but there were still a few beggars lining the streets. After a whole load of pissing about trying to organise a city tour we ended up just exploring Bangkok on our own, taking every mode of transport available. The SkyTrain and taxi riders were very comfortable and safe, the Tuk Tuks and back of motorcycle rides, not so much.

We ended up at Plantip Plaza, a huge IT mall, as we needed to buy some software to fix the computer noob Amatays computer. The plaza is huge and filled with everything IT related at the lowest prices, and has a bit of a reputation for the huge amount of software piracy that goes on there - and no wonder why, there's about 30 different stalls where you can get a copy of any software, video game, movie or porn that exists, for a couple of bucks per disc. Like the prostitution that goes on in Thailand, the piracy is so blatant and open that the police obviously turn a blind eye to it and allow it to go on.

I found a laptop repair man in the Plaza, in a little unorganised shop surrounded by laptop components. I told him what was up with my laptop video card and he was convinced he could fix it, so I went back to my hotel and got the laptop for him. He quoted me a price of 5000 Baht (£100/$160) if he fixes it and no charge if he can't fix it. I didn't even bother to haggle, as is standard with everything in Thailand, I'd happily ship him the money if he fixed it for me.

"Come back tomorrow 6pm, laptop will fixed" he said confidently, and I left it with him.

We wanted to check out the National Stadium and big MBK mall that is attached to it, which was a few blocks away, so we negotiated a cheap price with a Tuk Tuk driver and off we went. Our driver started telling us something about how he was sponsored by a Tailor and gets free gas and a lottery ticket for being sponsored or some bullshit, whatever. After 10 minutes driving, way longer than our journey should have taken, he pulls up outside this tailor shop in the middle of nowhere and asks us to go in and have a look as it will help him out, they will give him free gas. Fuck our lifes, we go in and there are eight salesman waiting like vultures and no customers. They sit us down, I have a look at the shirts, ask the price, tell him he's a ripoff merchant and walk out. Once we get the Tuk Tuk driver clown to actually take us to where we asked go we are sitting in his deathmobile for another 10 minutes before passing the place he originally picked us up (the bastard), and another 5 minutes til we reach our intended destination.

Outside the National Stadium we say a smaller stadium with some activity surrounding it, so went to take a look. It seemed that there was a Thai Premier League football match on in a couple of hours, and was the first game of the new season. Buriram PEA were playing the local side BEC Tero. Seemed like a good way to spend the evening so we bought tickets for 80 Baht (£1.60) and Buriram replica tops for 350 Baht (£7) and chilled outside the stadium for a bit. It was pretty clear that we were the only white guys around and just in case we forgot it, all the Buriram fans (from the town Buriram in northern Thailand) were staring at us non stop and pointing at us haha.

There was a fun atmosphere inside the small stadium, these Buriram fans really know how to support their team. I tried to teach these Thais some real football chants such as "Who are ya? Who are ya?" and "The referee's a wanker, the referee's a wanker!" but they didn't seem to catch on. The match was good quality and our boys went home with a well deserved 2-1 away win.

After the match We braved another ride in a Tuk Tuk and told him to take us somwhere good to watch the Man Utd vs Man City game that had just started. After missing a fatal crash by little more than the width of a ball hair he dropped us off in Nana, the degen part of town that we had visited the night before. Oh well, we went to the one bar in the area that didn't have hookers in it, the same British pub from last night, and watched it there. Another awesome match, topped off by a spectacular late winning overhead-kick goal by Rooney.

On our last day in BangKok we used the railway system to get to the old city, next to the river. We weren't too impressed by the ghetto that we were walking around in so tried to see if there was a way that would could take a boat trip on the river. We found a travel agency at the train station to get take us on a private tour of the river and canals in a longboat, along with a stop at a Buddhist temple. The river looks pretty disgusting, and is likely used by the many shanty households that line it to dump their sewage. "It would be a huge epic fail to fall into this river" I thought to myself just before making the leap from the pier to the shakey wooden longboat. Luckily I held for one time in my godforsaken life, and sat down in a comfortable seat in the middle of the boat ready to enjoy the tour.

As soon as we set off down the river and picked up a little speed I was getting some water sprayed over me, with no way to avoid it. Eurgh. It wasn't too bad though and I forgot about it after a while, until we passed another wooden longboat going in the opposite direction, and crashed into a wave than drenched me and my expensive camera. I run so f bad, I swear to god. The fish Amatay survived without getting wet and just laughed at me. Since I was filming at the time I guess you all can laugh at me too...

The driver, the spitting image of Johnny Chan, told us to move to the front of the boat if we wanted to avoid getting wet, and from there on the tour was a lot more enjoyable. We had a little old tour guide woman sitting behind us pointing at stuff and talking to us in broken English but we could neither understand her. but that was a waste of time as we couldn't understand her terrible English and the noise of the boat meant we couldn't hear her anyway. We just sat back, chilled and enjoyed the ride. Of course we stop at some bullshit floating market, some women on longboats trying to sell tat to tourists. Everyone wants to sell you something in Thailand, and usually what they are selling is absolute crap. After showing us all the junk items she had she opened a box which was full of drinks, so she wasn't completely useless to us. We sailed the river and canal for about an hour before we stopped off a the big temple, that was well worth checking out. It had some crazy steep stairs on it, and didn't look at all safe, so obviously we climbed it.

After the river cruise was over we headed back to Pantip Plaza and amazingly the laptop repair dude had got my laptop up and running, telling me that he replaced the processor on the video card. Epic win, I could start blogging and playing online poker again, but had a huge amount of catching up to do and not much time. We just dumped our bags in our hotel, went out for dinner and a stroll, then found ourselves in yet another degen area, Cowboy Soi.

We went into one bar as they had loads of big screens showing the English football highlights. Maybe 30 seconds went by before a very pretty Thai girl sat beside me and started chatting to me in perfect English. That was quite weird because I had been in Thailand for 10 days and hadn't spoken to a single Thai person who's English was even somewhat decent. As Amatay and I sat watching the football, this girl was still sitting close beside me. The situation was a bit awkward so I bought this girl a drink. No sooner had I done that she had her hands all over me, kissing my cheek etc. etc. then asked me if I wanted to take her back to my hotel. I declined, telling her that I was going to go with my friend to play pool instead. She wasn't too impressed that I prefer pool to whores that speak perfect English because they are chatting to westerners every single night looking for business. Another 10 minutes went by of me sitting drinking and watching football, and her beside me, when She said "give me 2 minutes, I'll be right back". We figured she had gone to get another girl for Amatay, because maybe I wasn't going with her because I didn't want to leave my friend alone. As soon as she left, we left in the opposite direction straight to the pool hall, where for a fiver and hour we got the VIP room with a sick table, stereo, and our own personal servant girl to bring us drinks, rack the balls up and even stuff like pull out and put away the rest out when we needed it. Like I said, in Thailand you can live like a king on not very much money at all.

Next stop, Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Bali, Indonesia Trip Report

2011-02-05T12:14:00.005Z

After a disastrous Aussie Millions in Melbourne I took a direct flight to Bali, and Island in Indonesia, to relax for 4 days.

I was going to book a hotel in a quiet part of the island but I had a friend who was also in Bali at the same time, staying in the party town of Kuta, so I decided to stay there. I stayed at the Discovery Kartika Resort. It was very luxurious, and so it should be for $200 USD per night. That kind of money goes a long way in Indonesia!

One of the best features about my room was that it had a popcorn media player attached to the TV, with hundreds of new movies and tv shows on the hard drive that you could watch for free. What an awesome thing to have, and really makes staying there so much better. Why have I never seen this in any other hotel? Because they are too concerned with getting $14.99 from people who occasionally want to watch a pay-per-view movie, than being concerned with making all their hotel guest's stay much more pleasant.

My first day was spent doing the full spa package at the hotel. The body massage, head massage, body scrub, aromatherapy and even a male manicure, LOL. The girls who worked at the spa were all young and hot, and looked after me well. I left there feeling like a million dollars.

Next day I went to Waterbom Water Park which was just across the road from my resort. I had a great time there. They have tons of good rides and you can load up money onto a wristband before going in, and get massages and food and drink around the different pool area, so good!

My friend Henrik that I met at UKIPT Galway in Ireland last year was staying at the Hard Rock Hotel with 3 of his Swedish friends and they invited me to go party with them one night. We first ate a delicious dinner at the Hard Rock, and then went to visit a hostel were about 12 other Swedes were staying. We were drinking and having a laugh beside the pool and in one of the rooms. These guys and girls were all paying like 10 bucks a room, between 3 of them, at this hostel. It looked decent enough for the money they were paying but not somewhere I'd want to stay on a vacation.

We all went out in a big group to go party at the nightclubs on Legian Street and stopped off at a lot of little small bars along the way. The heat and humidity was killing me so I just wanted to go to a proper bar with air-conditioning, as it's not much fun trying to party fully clothed in a sauna! When we did get to the big bars and clubs I had a great time, and we stayed out til around 5am.

An hilarious thing we witnessed was a crazy woman who was going nuts at cars that were going past. Of course I took out my phone and started filming her.

On our way back one of the Swedes insulted a group of ladyboys and got absolutely bitch slapped. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. Really wish I was filming when it happened. We stopped off at the hostel and there was a whole load of drama as we seen some guy through his girlfriends suitcase into the pool with all her clothes, ipod, etc. One of the Swedes wanted to beat the guy up and the rest of us helped get the clothes out of the pool and laid them out to dry.

I didn't get back to my hotel until 6am, and barely had any rest before going on a full day road trip to Ubud. I booked a private tour with driver and guide, so I could tell them where to take me and decide for myself how long I wanted to stay in each place. We stopped off in lots of little village areas along the way and there were shops selling clothes and silver that had demonstrations on how they were made. So I watched the demonstrations for free, then didn't buy any of their overpriced crap :-)

The journey home it started lashing down with rain and I thought we were going to need to swap the car for a boat!

While we were in Ubud the highlight for me was the visit to the Monkey forest. I stayed there for ages feeding and playing with the little monkeys. The forest is a sacred religious area with 340 macaque monkeys and a temple. Well worth a visit!

I didn't do anything else interesting in Bali, just got massages and relaxed on the beach. Very un-interesting but very enjoyable :-)

Melbourne / Aussie Millions Trip Report

2011-01-30T23:47:00.005Z

After an overnight flight from Singapore, in which I didn't get any sleep despite traveling business class, I arrived in Melbourne, Australia at 7:30am feeling extremely tired.

I looked forward to getting out of the airport and to my hotel for some sleep before playing the first event of the 2011 Aussie Millions that evening. I had ran good with airports so far on my travels, with no flight delays and zipping through immigration at each stage. Some butch Aussie Sheila was about to change all that.

In almost all countries what happens at immigration is you hand over your passport, they stamp it, you collect your suitcase and you GTFO. Apparently what happens in Australia is you hand your passport over to butch Sheila and she looks at you and says "Are you alright? You look ill".

I told Sheila that "I just flew overnight from Singapore and didn't sleep.". She looked surprised "ohhhh, oh, you've been in Asia?". I said "Yes, I got off the flight that just landed from Singapore, along with everyone else in the queue." She shouts for assistance "Bruce, BRUCE, come over here, this guy has been in Asia!".....

Bruce takes me to one side and starts with the 10-15 minute interrogation:

Bruce: "Hmmm, so you were in Singapore? What were you doing there?"
Me: "Oh, tourist."
Bruce: "And where were you before that? I see a stamp from Malaysia."
Me: "Yeah, I was in Malaysia."
Bruce: "What were you doing in Malaysia?"
Me: "I'm a tourist"
Bruce: "What's this stamp, Liban?"
Me: "That's Lebanon"
Bruce: "Oh really, when were you in Lebnon?"
Me: "Before I went to Malaysia."
Bruce: "Why were you in Lebanon?"
Me: "I'm a tourist"

I was losing the will to live at that point. He starts asking me about why I'm planning to stay "as long as 15 days" in Australia, like 15 days is something out of the ordinary for a visit to the country. Given that the Aussie Open tennis was on for the length of my stay I told him that I will be watching the tennis and playing some poker at the Crown. He then asked me to show him my tickets for the Tennis, which I obviously didn't have because I was just going to buy them at the stadium, and he made a big fuss over that.

I couldn't understand what the hell was happening, and why they were putting me through this crap. Eventually the bastard let me go and I just wanted to grab my suitcase and GTFO. Oh no. I had to wait a full half hour for my suitcase to appear on the carousel, then as soon as I picked my suitcase up two guys in uniform were standing either side of me, telling me to go with them.

I then had to go through a massive interview and full search. The bastards took my suitcase apart in front of me and they examined, X-rayed every single thing, as well as test for traces of narcotics. They were even looking at the photos on my camera, trying to find out what I was up to. I had 8 different containers of vitamins and they tested all of those for drugs. The whole ordeal took 2 hours, then after they couldn't find anything dodgy about me whatsoever they let me into their stupid, overpriced, at the peak of an economic bubble that is about to burst, country!

I got to my hotel only a few hours before I had to play poker, so didn't get much of a rest. Here is a quick room tour of where I was staying at Skylounge Apartments:

So the first event I played at Aussie Millions was a NLHE Double Shootout on PokerPro electronic tables, which are a bit of a fail. The concept of electronic tables is a nice one but the touch screens were just so damn insensitive. I had to press on it a certain way and often multiple times to get it to do what I wanted. TILT. My table was very soft, except for a few recognisable pros, including Rupert Elder. I ran pretty good to get heads up with a 2:1 chiplead versus an old English guy who played 100% VPIP and 0% Fold to C Bet. He wasn't the ideal opponent to be card-dead against. Eventually the stacks were even and the blinds were shallow, he raised, I shoved with JJ, he called with AQ and hit an A on the turn FTW. GG. So close to a final table and a cash at my first attempt :(

I went back to the hotel for a long sleep then straight back to the casino to play the PLO event that I was very much looking forward to. Unfortunately it was full-ring playing 9 or 10-handed. I'm not too fond of playing full ring PLO, it playing much better short-handed. I was really card dead and missed every flop all the way through and couldn't make anything happen because so many players seen every flop that there was always someone holding the nuts. Eventually, when stacks were shallow I jammed for about 2/3 of my stack with a suited rundown over a raise and bunch of callers. The original raiser snap re-jammed, and obviously had an AAxx hand, but I was well committed obviously. I was something like 40-45% to win but couldn't make it happen unfortunately :-(

That day was my birthday, which sucked. Sucks being in a foreign country, where you don't know anyone and getting your ass kicked at poker on your birthday.

Another day, another tourney. My third tourney in three days was another NLHE Shootout event but this time on real tables. This one only lasted a few levels for me. I lost almost half my stack early after I raised with AK, got 3bet, and shoved. The guy called for 35-40bbs with pocket 9s and won the hand. And I lost the rest after that when I raised JJ, got 3bet, and shoved. The guy called with AQ and won. Story of my life, I get it with plenty of fold equity, being the aggressor, and someone calls looking for a coin-flip, gets their coin-flip and wins it. SIGH!

Since I busted so quickly the day was still early, in the late afternoon. I decided to cheer myself up a bit by taking a trip to Melbourne Zoo. I've been to tons of zoos around the world, it's a good way to get outside, do a bit of walking and see some cool creatures!

The next day I was feeling good and went to play the NLHE 6-Max event. I started off playing really great in this event and had quadrupled my stack up pretty early, to be the, or at least amongst the chipleaders. I was getting a lot of attention from Poker News and one of their bloggers was writing down hands I played and including them in the live updates.

My table was extremely soft and we were playing 5-handed because we had a dead stack blinding off at our table, strongly rumored to belong to Phil Ivey. I had a guy to my right called Dennis Huntley who used to be some big porn king in Australia. He made Australia's first porn movie and owned some adult shops. We were friendly and chatting a lot so it was a fun table to be at. I was having fun and constantly increasing my stack so I was having a ton of fun in this event.

Near the bubble I got into a huge pot that would have equaled a bit chip-lead or at the very least top 3 in chips. I had JT spades, was pre-flop aggressor in position and got flatted by BB and UTG, Flop was J98 with 2 hearts. It was checked to me, I bet, got check-raised, and jammed in my stack. He tanked a full 5 minutes at least, and decided he was going to call me with AJo, and he obviously held. I hate how he played AJ there, when he makes his call he's doing horrible against my range, but he was ahead and he won, so congrats to him and gg to me. Again I was the one to shove, with a ton of fold equity and actual equity in the pot, just to get called and lose the hand.

Looking for non-poker things to do, so as not to make my trip to Australia a totally miserable experience, I did a walking tour of Melbourne which was a great way to see the city:

So I was hoping my first success at Aussie Millions would be in the AUD $10,600 Main Event. I actually got really unlucky with the table draw with the few seats either side of me willed with young Scandinavian and American online pros. There was one complete fish at the table, who was reading a poker book, at the table, as he played the main event. WTF? Reading a book on how to play poker, while playing a 10K, seriously? I took a sneaky little photo:

Well I wasn't card dead in this tourney at all. I kept making very strong hands but they'd always be second best. I lost a big pot where i 3bet TT pre, flopped a set, turn and river completed flush and straight draws and guy leads into me and I have to fold. In the second level I only had 6000 from the 20,000 starting stack, but I easily could have went broke before that if I had played less conservatively.

On the very first hand of Level 3, where it was BB200 with 25 ante, a Scandie raised the button, his Scandie friend in the SB flatted, and I shoved from the BB with 66 for 30BBs. Scandie in the SB called with AQ and flopped the A.

G f'ing G.

I was really gutted. I now had 5 free days, that I had originally planned to go visit Sydney if I busted the main event on day 1. But since I was running bad, and hadn't been able to play much online so far in the year, I decided I would just stay and grind online from my hotel for 5 days. It didn't work out well for me, I had 4 sessions in a row where I ran miles bellow all-in ev and lost most of what I had in my account. I attempted to run my account back up playing $114 SNGs. I played in 25 of them and cashed in 2. 2 and 3 outers crushing me left, right and centre. G f'ing G to my bankroll.

I just tried to find more non-poker things to do to take my mind off the heart-breaking poker results.

A great experience was visiting Melbourne Aquarium that is near the Crown Casino. I loved the penguins!

And I had a full day out at the tennis. I got a premium seat ticket for Rod Laver area for a day that included the Women's Doubles Final and Murray vs Ferrer in the Men's Semi Finals of the 2011 Australian Open.

I celebrated 'Australia Day' at an outdoor concert at Federation Square. That was fun.

6 days after busting the Main Event at the Aussie Millions I was back to play the Bounty Feature Event. This event is NLHE and has one pro per table who is designated as a bounty. I had Team PokerStars Pro - Tony Hachem on my direct left who was our table's bounty. I've met, played and chatted with Tony before, live and online, so we got on well and had a good laugh, until I doubled up through him. I 5-bet shoved KK pre and he called with JJ and for once in my entire life I won a pot. Unfortunately he had me slightly covered so I didn't get the bounty, and then he was on my left with a crippled stack. I ended up min-raising and limping into most pots because he was so short stacked and the bounty was significant. It wasn't to be though, they broke our table table!!!!

The new table wasn't so kind to me. I turned 2 pair versus a flopped set and was lucky to only lose 2/3 of my stack. I ended up busting when I raised and got called, flopped 2 pair with A8 on A83 and got check-raised. I shoved it in and he snapped with AK, but I couldn't fade the K for the 60bb pot and my tournament life.

On my last day i played the Turbo NLHE event and got close to cashing before a battle of the blinds versus a Scandie, where we got it in pre and his JT owned my AQ with a T on the river. So 0 for 7 in cashes at Aussie Millions, not what I was hoping for.

I left Australia disappointed and headed off to Bali, Indonesia to relax for 4 days.

Singapore Trip Report

2011-01-25T14:48:00.055Z

After taking the first class bus from Malaysia, the immigration point at Singapore took 5 minutes, nice and easy. No sooner had I passed through into Singapore than it started raining very heavily. It barely stopped raining the whole time I was in Singapore unfortunately :(

I checked into a cool little boutique hotel, kinda expensive and small, but otherwise excellent. I was unpacking my suitcase when I got a phone call from Team PokerStars Asia Pro and Asian Player of the Year - Bryan Huang, who invited me out. He was good enough to take me on a tour around Singapore with his beautiful wife Summer and his mother in law who had also just arrived in Singapore. It was a great way to see a lot of Singapore and learn about it's history and culture in a short period of time.

What I find interesting about Singapore is how many different and diverse cultures live there, and live side by side happily. A good example of this I saw was a huge Islamic mosque, that is right next to the oldest Hindu temple in Singapore, Sri Mariamman Temple, where people go to pray that they don't get diseases or to be cured. We stopped there and had a look inside:

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We then went for dinner with Bryan's mother, father and brother at Jumbo Seafood. Pretty much everything I ate there I had never tried before. When the chopsticks were handed out Bryan looked at me and laughed "don't worry, we'll get you a fork and spoon. I kept asking "what is this?", "what do I do?", "which parts do I eat?". Bryan's wife Summer was laughing and said I was like an alien who had just landed on earth hahaha.

So that was a great day, thank you very much to Bryan for his hospitality. Unfortunately for the next few days there were constant huge storms so I couldn't do anything outdoors at all. A lot of the stuff I had planned to do, like a walking tour, I just had to forget about. Struggling for indoor stuff to do I took a trip to the Singapore Art Museum.

On my last night in Singapore Bryan put me in touch with his friend Hansel who took me out to a club with his friends, which was awesome. Or at least I think it was awesome, because I have almost ZERO recollection of what happened that night.

I hadn't eaten much for 3 days, we got bottle service and I stared drinking Vodka straight. I remember that much. The rest of the night is a total blur. The next day I found a ton of photos on my phone, and just flicking through them laughing hahaha.

I've no idea how I even got back to my hotel or anything that night, or how I even knew which hotel I was staying at or street or anything. It was 3pm the next day before I was conscious, and I was supposed to have checked out at mid-day. So I ended up having to pay the hotel an extra $100 to check out late. Luckily my flight to Australia wasn't until night time.

And off I went, to Melbourne, Australia, to play the 2011 Aussie Millions poker festival.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Trip Report

2011-01-22T11:42:00.017Z

I flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from Lebanon where I was doing a bit of sightseeing and owning some Arabs at poker. The journey had a stop-over in Dubai, but we would continue the journey on the same airplane, so it was nice and easy. We were given a transit-pass to go into the departures lounge for a while, then back onto the plane.

Dubai airport was really nice, for many reasons but eeeeeespecially for the FREE WiFi - huge plus!.

When I got to Malaysia it was very early in the morning. The airport is a fair distance from the centre of city but there is an express train, so I took that option. It was very fast, clean and quiet, and guess what?

Yes! It had free WiFi, on the train, superb! This should be standard in 2011, but some countries you go to you can barely even get a decent internet connection in your hotel room and are often charged a extortionate price into the bargain.

I got to my accommodation at the awesome Traders Hotel around 7am. I thought that there was no chance of me being able to check-in that early, but I was really nice to the cute girl at hotel reception and she said "well, maybe if you can wait 1 or 2 hours we can have a room ready for you." I told her that wasn't a problem and asked if there was somewhere for me to eat breakfast. She showed me to the amazing buffet that they have, and I tipped her $5 US, which isn't that much money but to someone living in Malaysia it's probably a big deal.

So I went for breakfast, in this super nice restaurant with a huge and delicious buffet and chefs that will make you stuff fresh including smoothies and yogurts with the fresh ingredients of your chosing. Heaven! I had been eating for about 3 minutes when the reception girl walks in and comes up to my table. She hands me a bunch of stuff and says "Here is your room key sir. Your room is ready and your luggage has also been taken up to your room for you." Epic win, I was able to get into my room, sleep and wake up by the time that I was officially supposed to be able to check in!

The Traders hotel was very nice and I've given you guys a little room tour in this video:

The first thing I did in Malaysia was look for somewhere to get my laptop fixed. I quickly learned about Low Yat Plaza, a massive technology mall over 7 floors, so took a trip down there.

After sorting out my laptop I tried out one of the restaurants on the ground floor. For the cheap price of $4 USD I got a pepper chicken steak with egg, rice, noodles, vegetables, soup and a can of coke. The meal was delicious. I almost felt guilty paying so little for it!

I was mega happy to have a working laptop again, and being able to blog and play online poker. My first session of the year on PokerStars was a nice winning session at 2/4 PLO. Happy days.

My friend Bryan Huang noticed from my facebook status that I was in Kuala Lumpur, so he put me in touch with his friend Darren Yoon, another poker pro. I went with Darren to Zook which was a really nice high-end club. I was able to walk straight in with Darren past all the people waiting in line like bitches outside, so that was awesome.

I had a lot of fun with Darren and his friends, and afterwards they took me to this little food stall where I had the best chicken and rice ever. I dunno if it was because I was super drunk and hungry, but it tasted out of this world. Omnomnomnom.

Thanks to Bryan for putting me in touch with Darren and thanks to Darren for being such a great host.

The next day I noticed the weirdest bruise on the back of my leg. It was just the weirdest shape and I can't even remember how it happened. Must certainly be a UDI (Unidentified Drinking Injury)!

Really weird huh? But nowhere near as weird as the bruises that ended up on my back after I went for a massage and returned with a back that looked like a pepperoni pizza.

What I got was some Asian massage technique called 'Cupping', where the woman put these vacuum suction cups on my back. Although my back looked a mess I left feeling great, and it only cost $12USD for the 1 hour massage.

Other cool things I did while in Malaysia included a visit to the KL Bird Park which is like a zoo for big ass birds.

I had so much fun in Malaysia that I stayed there a day longer than I was supposed to. I had booked and paid for a flight to Singapore, but decided to write that off to spend the extra night in KL. My friend Darren recommended that I take the first class bus to Singapore, that only takes 5 hours and is very comfortable and cheap.

I was so glad that I chose this option over flying. The bus was very nice. Downstairs was a lounge with big screen TV and upstairs had 16 big reclining massage seats with video and games on demand, power point for laptop and hot meals brought by a stewardess. The view from the window was great, passing by lots of little villages and countryside. So much better than dealing with the hassle of an airport / flying.

The immigration point at Singapore took 5 minutes, nice and easy.

Check out my Singapore trip report.

Lebanon Trip Report

2011-01-14T11:40:00.008Z

After an awesome time celebrating the new year in Prague, Czech Republic with my friend and my brother I headed off to Lebanon alone. For some reason I couldn't convince anyone to come to Beirut with me. I guess most foreigners knowledge of Lebanon only goes as far as knowing about fairly recent wars and assuming it is a dangerous place to go to. In fact Lebanon has been totally safe for more than a couple of years and it is a beautiful country with diverse culture and many great places for travellers to visit. It was one of my 'must-visit' countries on my travel itinerary.

I took a flight with a short stop-over in Budapest, where they had free WiFi, epic win! Hopefully I will return to Hungary in the near future to see more than just it's airport. I landed in Beirut at around 3:10am, about 10 minutes late. The taxi that I had arranged through my hotel was waiting for me and the driver made it clear that he was not happy that I was late. I tried to tell him that 10 minutes is standard variance for a long flight but he just huffed and puffed. When we got to the hotel I said "it's 25 American dollars, right?" He replied by saying "yes, but you were late, I had to wate for you.". I told him "No worries, I will give you a tip, here is $30, is that good?". He said in a loud voice "It is ok, but it's not good." Then when I tried to pay him he wouldn't take the $20 note because there was a slight crease down the middle which is completely standard. He made a real fuss over examining all the 20s I had and chosing the most unspoiled one. By this time it's coming on 4am and I am NOT AMMUSED!!!!

So this was the first Lebanese person I met, a total scumbag, nice, great first impression to give to someone visiting his country, what a true hero he is. One of the worst things about visiting any country is dealing with the scum of the earth taxi drivers. Guaranteed to be unfriendly and to try every trick in the book to scam you.

I went to sleep as soon as I checked into my hotel in Beirut and woke up at mid-day. I just got ready, picked up a map that was in my room and headed out into downdown Beirut, not knowing where I was going or anything haha. Just strolling around the city. That probably isn't the most advisable thing to do when you are in a city for the first time to be honest.

A lot of the buildings downtown are really decrepit and there's even buildings covered with bullet holes from the previous fighting. However I stumbled upon a really nice campus that belongs to the American University of Beirut. I was able to walk straight past the strict looking security guards at the gate by walking beside a group of students returning to the campus.I would make a good James Bond! :)

The campus was really cool, some very nice buildings and areas to chill, cats running around everywhere, big sports field at right on the sea front. I took a walk around and ate some nice food in one of the restaurants. People were staring at me as I ate. Yes, I stuck out like a sore thumb hahaha, oh well.

After leaving the campus and taking a walk along the sea front I happened upon Hard Rock Cafe. I wasn't even looking for it. It was like IT found ME. Even though I had already ate I couldn't resist and went in to get stuff my face with delicious Hard Rock food. Omnomnomnom.

After leaving Hard Rock it was absolutely lashing down with rain, damnnn. I tried to cut back through the university campus to get back to my hotel but this time the security guards wouldn't let me pass. I tried to find alternative was around and that proved to be impossible. The traffic on the roads wasn't moving at all, but I still looked for a taxi. When I found one, he wanted to charge me $15USD for a ride that should be $2-3USD. and started walking in the rain. I told him the only way he was getting $15 from me is if he sucked my dick. So I started walking in the rain.

Then I saw 2 students come out of the university and asked them to help me. They tried to sneak me in but we got stopped by the guards. Then they said that we were just going to the gym which was right next to the entrance so we got in, went down a lift then I was able to freely walk back through. Easy game!

That night I went out in the city and had a few drinks and some delicious Lebanese food, but got an early night to prepare for some epic adventures next day.

I booked a tour as part of a small group with a guide. First thing in the morning we drove out of the city into a village and stopped at a cafe to try some local made cheese which was excellent, and then onto the town of Anjar where there are some ruins from the 8th century.

We then headed off to Baalbek where there are ruins of temples that are much, much grander and better re-constructed. It is a truly awesome place to see with your own eyes, at times jaw-dropping. For such an amazing place there was not too many tourists walking around and being noisy that you would see at ruins in Greece for example.

We spent a lot of time in Baalbek. The weather was great, clear sky, no wind, about 16C, so I was walking around with a T-shirt on. The tour guide was wearing a big jacket and kept asking me if I was cold. She said "I feel cold just looking at you!". Only 2 days ago I was in Eastern Europe dealing with extremely sub-zero temperatures, the weather in Lebanon certainly felt like T-shirt weather to me.

We were then taken to a 5-star restaurant and given a huge table full of Lebanese food to share between us. It was glorious, all sorts of delicious meats, pastries and dips, most of the food being very healthy too.

After our bellys were full of lovely Lebanese noms we went to visit Chateau Ksara which is a wine company with it's base on top of some old caves that were found in the 1800's. The caves are used to store the wine. So we got a tour around the caves (I took some video but it was worse than useless given how dark it was down there)

We were then taken for some wine-tasting.

I tried about 6 different wines, all delicious. I think when you taste wine that you are supposed to swill it around in the glass, sniff it, sip it and spit it into the sink thing. What a waste of good alcohol!!! I just gulped it down :-)

Of course, straight after the tasting they then led us into their shop and tried to sell us some of their wine. I think everyone bought bottles except me. The wine was nice, I just didn't buy any out of spite, I hate anyone encouraging me to buy stuff in that manor.

All in all a great tour, lasting the whole day, from dawn til dusk. You'd think I'd be tired after all that? Hell no! I took a trip to Jounieh to visit the Casino Du Liban where they spread the unlimited texas hold thems. It's quite a taxi-ride from downtown Beirut to Jounieh, about 45 minutes. By the time I got there it was after 9pm and I had get up early the next day to fly to Malaysia, so I wasn't impressed at all when I had to register to get in the casino and the whole process took more than half an hour.

The casino was really grand and nice, like something you'd see in a James Bond movie. Everyone was dressed in very smart shirts and suits, then there was me - dressed in a hoodie and jeans that haven't been washed since I started traveling a couple of weeks ago! :-)

There were only 4 tables of poker running, (this was a Friday night), there were 3 tables of 2-5NL and 1 table of 10-25NL. Everything in the casino is played in US Dollars. I had to wait for ever to get a seat. I was railing the games and it was just ridiculous, every seat at every table was filled by an Arab guy, no westernerns at all in the games, and everyone was playing LOOOOOOOL BAD !!!! The 10-25NL game looked even softer than the 2-5NL tables, but I didn't have enough hard cash on me to play it without buying in short. All the games were being played very deep - the buyin restrictions are min 50BBs and max 300BBs.

A seat finally opened up at 2-5 and I was rewarded for my patience with QQ on my first hand dealt. Of course some clown doubled me up with ace high, ty ty. The game was wild, someone was getting felted every single hand, and they'd just rebuy another 200BBs like it was nothing. An old Arab gentleman at the table busted and rebought 3 times in 3 hands. It was simply ridiculous, a standard hand would be, 2/5 Blinds, one guy open raises to 30 preflop, another guy pops it up to 100, various donking around until they eventually show down with J9 and A6.

I didn't play a single hand for 25 minutes, just waiting for a hand like a nit, when I picked up AQ and made a nut straight versus a lower straight and stacked a fool. And that was that, basically played 2 hands, and won the maximum. I couldn't stay any longer because I wanted to get a proper night's sleep ahead of a long flight the next day. But just that one hour in the casino more than paid for my whole trip to Lebanon, flight / hotel + everything else. Easy game.

Next stop on my travels - Malaysia!