Is It All Starting To Come Together?

I read dozens of blogs of blogs on a daily basis. Some are fellow micro-donks, some mid range players and some who play nose bleed stakes poker where one big blind is more than my entire bankroll! A lot of the comments left by players like myself on the blogs of the NL200/400 regulars ask the blog owner when did they realise they were a winning player or was there a clear point where everything they'd learned and tried to put into practice actually seemed to work. You can see clearly on some of the blogs when the change from breaking even to becoming a winner happened. I'm starting to think you'll be able to see that on my little blog from now.

I'm in the process of making the transition from 6 max NL to full ring for a few reasons. Firstly, I find it easier to multitable FR and can play 4-6 games comfortably where when I play SH I don't play my best if I have more than 2 tables open. Also, I am honest about my ability as a poker player and if I find myself on a table where there is someone clearly better than me but I don't want to leave that table because there are a few donators there I find it easier to "hide" from this player at FR than I do at SH for obvious reasons. Thirdly, the vast majority of micro and low stakes players do not have a clue about position and how hand value change with position and with me being pretty clued up on this I have a major advantage. Again, a lot of FR players are very weak, have tried SH and failed and come back to FR as it's less aggressive but have brought many bad habits with them from SH games. Finally, I am wanting to try live cash at some point so this is in theory my training!

Anyway, I really feel like everything is coming together at long last. I am playing some brilliant poker, for micro stakes, making some solid reads and acting on them and I'm really enjoying my poker again at the moment. Yeah I'm still making some ridiculous mistakes which need ironing out but I'm experimenting with plays and bet sizing and for the whole it is paying off. I've played 3.5k hands over the past week and a half and I'm running at over 20PTBB/100 and it would be more had I not been stacked once with QQ, once with JJ and half a buyin last night with AK on an AK4 board. Of course some of this is down to our favourite bitch, variance, but looking at my Poker Tracker I don't seem to running insanely hot, rather just getting maximum value out of my hands and losing less when I lose. Reading blogs, books and forums I realised I was missing out on a lot of value by under betting my hands on most streets, especially the river, but I have altered my game somewhat and I'm so far reaping the benefits.

I put this down not only to the forums and blogs but to the fact I have really cut down my boozing and lifestyle changes. My old routine was to get home to the pub, have a couple of pints, go upstairs and get changed or whatever, crack open a can of cider and play poker whilst drinking. Drinking whilst playing poker is like drinking and playing pool. You get to a level where everything is great, you have that confidence where you're invincible but then it all goes tits up as you get pissed and I was getting pissed every night and not playing very well at all. Now I have a beer when I get home and that's it until I have something to eat later on in the evening and I'm seeing so much more at the tables. Also, a lot of my life stresses aren't bothering me as much anymore, they're still there and they eat at me but I can control them because I'm not depressing my brain with alcohol and other shit all the time. It's fucking great! I'm really looking forward to October and I'm hoping to play between 20-30k hands which if I 4 table on Full Tilt is around 3 hours per day. If I stick to my guns I fully expect to be bankrolled for NL50 by the end of October and I'm aiming for at least $500 profit and I should generate around $300 in rakeback too which would be fucking brilliant and might allow me to pay a bond on a flat and keep my bankroll almost untouched. Here's hoping!

I'll be playing tonight but only one table because Pudding Dad wants me to go through NL with him just to see the thinking behind certain hands and stuff. He's been playing a bit of FL but I'm trying to convince him to move over to the dark side and rinse some fish! I'm not expert but I can give him more than a few pointers and because he's an expert Bridge player he should pick it up pretty quickly I should imagine. So Pudding Mum is making my tea for me so I will be well fed then when she toddles off to work me and my Paw will be hitting the tables on my Full Tilt account so stay the fuck away Spunk Sock! Only downside is I'm going to miss Billy Piper looking smoking hot playing a tart in her new drama. She can't act for shit and looks a bit like a monkey but I definitely would especially when she's in her benders and all her get up. How the fuck Chris Evans rattled that I will never know. Oh I do, money!

I couldn't think of a picture to go with this post so Milla makes a return, the filthy bitch. I've also developed a thing again for Kelly Brook even though her chap is a big fucking puff so might have to add some pics of that tart too!

Thanks for checking in on this uber-confident Pudding! Updates on Pudding Dad and other shit tomorrow!

Days 1-2/88: Total Puddination!

Watch out micro-stakes NL because Yorkshire Pudding is back and on top form! As you'll have read in my previous post I've decided to try take a paltry $88 and play full ring NLHE on Party Poker and see if I can get it to $888 in 88 days. Well if things continue as they are I should reach the $888 an awful lot sooner than I anticipated.

When the USA could play on Party is was a total fish tank but when they were basically banned everyone said the games had tightened up and were nowhere near as profitable. Well Party have done us Europeans a massive favour and taken the game of internet poker to Germany and Russia. No disrespect to any German readers but fuck me your fellow countrymen do not have a clue! Every table as at least 5 Germans prepared to go all-in with 2nd pair no kicker, it's fucking brilliant!

I started off by firing up 4 tables of the smallest NL games which have blinds of $0.02/$0.04 but you can buy-in for $5. I dropped about half a buy-in by being too aggressive and not paying attention but I soon got in the zone and even added another 2 tables for a total of 6, meaning I'm logging at least 300 hands per hour! To say the NL5 games are easy is the understatement of the month, just playing ABC TAG poker is enough to destroy these games. If I hadn't have got carried away with Queens and then again with the slags later in my session (both time vs KK) I'd have made a lot more money than I have! Saying that though I have played 1850 hands of NL5 and reaped $31.40 in profits with an earn rate of 21.22PTBB/100! I'm running at 19/9/2.6 which isn't too bad but is a small sample size really but my postional stats look to be pulling into line now with tight up front and looser nearer the button so I ampleased.

Because I hit the $120 mark I decided to swap a couple of NL5 tables for NL10 tables with the idea if I dropped a couple of buyins I'd drop back to playing only NL5 games. So far so good from the 247 hands I've logged as I've managed a small profit of just over one buy-in ($10.90) and I ffel very comfortable here. I played a bit looser on the NL10 tables because it seemed like everyone were rocks and I ran at 23/12/5 and played mainly small pots and took pots away on the turn and a couple of river bluffs! It's all gravy!

I'm starting my barshift in 10 minutes but I should be able to log an hour's worth of play when I am done with my new "not drinking as much" mentality and also because I have the poker bug and am finding it easy 6 tabling so I can actually log a decent amount of hands for a change! I'll be playing 3 tables of NL5 and 3 of NL10 until my roll hits the $200 mark although when it gets closer to $180 I might swap another NL5 table, but we'll see how I feel etc.

As always thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables. Spunk Sock, I'm gunning for you bitch!

Wheels Of Fortune Continue To Turn!

I didn't log the amount of hands I planned to last night, in fact I didn't even log onto Ultimate Bet, instead I opted to carry on trying to rape Party Poker using the free $50 they gave me last week! Things are going really well in the world of Party and I managed to rathole another $25.64 back to Neteller last night after more success playing PL Omahahahaha. I'm really getting into this game now and am feeling what hands to play. All I need to work on is my bet sizing like when to bet pot etc but that will come with time. So far I have turned the free $50 into $105.93 and I still have the $50 to play with until about September 15th I think. Good times!

Those who have followed me from my old hacked blog will know that the life God's love to turn my doomswitch on and the mother fucker has done it again. As you know I jet of to Lanzarote tomorrow, for a long weekend, at 1535. No problem there, I can get a train from Dewsbury straight to Manchester Airport at about 1030 to get me there for lunchtime, plenty of time to check in and mince about the shops. I land back at Manchester at 0030 Monday morning and the first bastard train out of there is at 0302! WTF! There is no fucking way I am hanging around a semi-closed airport for 3 hours. It gets worse though! If I wait 3 hours for the train I won't get home until 0630 because the cunt takes me to York first where I change trains. Jesus! I've looked at National Express and their first coach is about 0500 and the cunts have a habit of crashing lately so my only other choices are staying in a Travel Lodge for the night or get a Joe Baxi back home. Either way I'm probably looking at the thick end of 50 sheets when I get back. Bad beat!

I'm wanting to get some more pictures on my blog so I've dug out my camera but now can't find the charger. FFS! The camera on my phone is pretty good so I might have to use that for a few snaps I suppose. Talking of photo's does anyone know the legality of taking pictures of people without their consent? I see some right fucking sites out and about and would like to share them with you but obviously don't want the boys in blue hunting me down for being a perv! It wouldn't just be people though as I have a decent eye for a good photo and I think they brighten the place up a little!

I also seem to have become some sort of semi-shrink! Ages ago I was off my face and couldn't sleep so joined Lycos chatroom (I know stop laughing) and got chatting to some 18 year old Polish bird called Ewa (pronounce Eva obv). We exchanged MSN's and talked bollocks in slightly broken English. Anyway, last night I was playing on Party and she IM'd me and asked how England was blah blah blah and she seemed really down in the dumps saying that she didn't think anyone liked her, especially at college and she couldn't talk to her parents or friends about it because they think she's ok and would just say that she's mourngy. I got chatting to her and told her about when I was her age and how I wanted to be in the popular crowd but was too shy etc and it seemed to cheer her up. I told her if she needed to chat she could talk to me and she replied "Thank you. You is so nice person. It helps talking to you, my friend from England :)" So Pud does some good in the world for a change, it's amazing how just 10 minutes of your time can actually make someone's day and it made me feel really good about myself. Pud the councillor, who'd have thought that?!

I'm working the bar tonight and have some last minute things to do for my holiday so don't know if I will get to play at all. I'm going to try squeeze in a couple of hours though as losing 4 days is going to damage me a little although I do have Monday from work so will probably have a poker day once I've finished unpacking and showing off my tan! LOL!

Take care guys and good luck at the tables!

Bankroll = $173.27
Needed = $4826.73

Pudding Gets Stacked!

Yesterday wasn't the best day for poker and if I'm honest I should probably have left it alone because I was both physically and mentally drained which doesn't exactly aid good, solid poker playing. It wasn't all bad as I still turned a profit, albeit a small one, but profit is profit at the end of the day and I'd take winning $0.01 over breaking even or losing any time of the week.

Things actually started brightly when I decided it would be a good idea to use the unwithdrawable (is that a word?) $25 I had left on Party to play in a $22 SnG and I came 2nd for a nice little $60 which meant I could withdraw $12.62 back to the USS Neteller and leave the original $50 in my poker account. The play was awful. I mean I wasn't even concentrating and I sailed through to the money by hardly playing a hand. If that is the regular standard for the SnG's on Party I think I might have to hit a few more once I have built my roll to around the $1k mark. I eventually busted when I pushed with 33 and KQo called me and villain spiked a King on the flop. Still, that's $80.29 I've managed to earn from this free $50 and I still have 11 days which to play around with it! Could be a little goldmine this free money!

After the SnG I fired up a couple of table of NL10 on Ultimate Bet and got off to a great start when very first hand I am dealt a lovely pair of bullets. With a raise and a call in front of me I bet the pot to look like a squeeze and the initial raiser went all in for the rest of his $5 stack. I of course call and he tables AhKh and I make a nice little profit early on! I then ended getting stacked by some poor play. I raise UTG with ATo after a quiet spell and get one caller who is running at around 35/20/3 and hasn't really stepped out of line but seems to like to call raises with a wide range. I flop top and bottom pair and bet pot and am called. Now I hoped he had something like JJ or KQ here. Turn is a blank really and I bet out almost pot again, villain thinks about it and pushes all-in. This screams "I have a set" but I find myself clicking the call button and of course he's get a set of tens I am felted. Fuck! So after 203 hands and a $9.45 loss I called it a day.

I've pencilled in a big session tonight and I'm hoping to log around 6-750 hands of NL10. I've nothing to do apart from go buy some new jeans for my holiday on Thursday so I should be able to get cracking by about 1900 and log a session until around 2200. I'm averaging around 230 hands per hour playing 2 tables, it'd be great if I could 4 table here because I'd be getting over 450 hands per hour which would be brilliant. I did consider withdrawing from UB and playing on Full Tilt but the rake there is horrendous at NL10. I suppose being able to play twice as many hands and getting 27% rakeback would counter this somewhat but we'll have to see, I might withdraw from UB when I go on holiday, that way I won't have any downtime whilst money is being transferred as I won't be able to play anyway!

I also played a little 7 card stud and also PLO on Party last night and was amazed at how bad the standard of play in both was, especially in Stud. I'm no expert in either game, far from it, but I know the basics and might give both games another shot tonight for a change of pace. Omaha is crazy as fuck and I really enjoyed playing it, even if I did only break even!

Thanks for reading, I'll see you at the tables!

Bankroll = $147.63
Needed = $4852.37

Off To A Good Start For Once!

Well I've started my quest to take $50 to $5k in 200 days and it's all so far, so good. With the my first day's offical play also being the day I have Pudding Jr I wasn't expecting to play at all until I'd finished my bar shift but he fell asleep around lunchtime so I jumped on for a quick 30 minute session.

Party had given me $50 which I couldn't withdraw unitl I had to clear 600 points with before 7th September. I was initially going to grind this but decided to just stick it all on a NL50 table instead. I played about 70 hands then Booooooooom! A donkey raised UTG and I 3-bet with AK on the button. Flop comes JJK and donkey bets pot I jam and he calls with QT and misses and I am sat with $120! Kerching! I try to withdraw my balance, less the $50 from Party, and it lets me so everyone's a winner! Bankroll boosted! I played a little on Party after my barshift last night and managed to spunk away $25 on a semi bluff against a rock. I think I might enter 2x $11 or 1x $22 SnG when I've finished work tonight, at the end of the day it's free money which I can't touch so it's a no lose situation!

I officially started my challenge this morning on Ultimate Bet and with my bankroll being boosted to around $120 I decided to take a shot at NL10 with the plan to drop to NL2 if I lost a couple of buyins. Thankfully I never needed to do that as I managedto get off to a good start for a change and ended up $20 plus change to the good from 419 hands! I never felt out of my depth, nor did I think I would do, but I found out I can't play more than 2 tables there because of the way the active screen jumps around like some crazed crack whore after a fix. There was one point where I needed to act on all 3 tables I had open and they were switching from one to the other so badly that I couldn't act! I ended up checking on 2 of them just to stop the bastards from flashing! Anyone know a way around this?

Biggest Pot Won = I think I played this ok. I'd been active and wanted to let villain do the betting for me. It seemed to work as I got to stack him!

Biggest Pot Lost = Again I'd been pretty active. My bet on the river was more of a blocking bet because if he bets here say $1-$1.50 I'd really have a tough time folding but him instantly jamming after this bet said I was beat. I showed my AT and was surprised to see a set as I'd put him on a bigger Ace or even A9.

In other news I was awarded a Gatsby award for blog of the month by none other than UkGatsby. Paul gives out these awards every month and I'm pretty chuffed he's chosen my blog for this particular award, especially as my old blog was hacked and I lost all my old posts. Hopefully I can reproduce some of the craziness of the old blog here and get a few more readers!

Still not 100% sure what is going on with the potential Mrs P. I spoke to her Friday and in the early hours of Saturday morning but still not really any wiser. I've decided it's going to be a case of if she wants to chat or whatever she can contact me, I've chased for long enough. I'm off on holiday for a few days from Thursday so perhaps it's come at a perfect time for everyone really?

Right, I need to get ready for work soI'll leave it there I think. Enjoy the rest of the weekend and thanks for checking in!

Bankroll = $143.76

Needed = $4856.24

A Cheerful Pudding

Although yesterday's post wasn't overly doom and gloom I wrote it at home in quite a sombre mood. I even told former Mrs P on Wednesday that I wasn't really bothered about the situation when really I was. I'm pretty good at pretending about how I feel about stuff when it comes to my emotions, it drives my mum mad and I bet a few others too. I think the fact that I described my feelings as being "numb" spoke volumes. Anyway, things have already started to look up after a long conversation with potential Mrs P this dinner time.

Every Friday, at work, we are allowed an hour for lunch instead of the usual 30 mins and because where we work is a bit out of the way the company puts on a coach for us and takes and collects us from God's own city of Leeds! I don't usually bother, instead I grab something from the canteen here, get a nice coffee from the coffee shop over the road and have a couple of smokes before doing blog stuff and surfing the t'internet. I popped in today though because I needed to sort my travel insurance out for next Thursday when I go to Lanzarote with my olds. Reason to be cheerful number one: £15 was all it cost! Earlier this morning I received a text from potential Mrs P asking how I was and stuff and I said I'd ring her on my lunch. We chatted as usual and she told me that all this didn't mean the end but that we just need to do it differently. She went on to say that she doesn't want to be with her boyfriend and she wants to be with me but wants to do things properly and not jump from one relationship straight into living with me in another, which is fair enough I suppose. Apparently it was viewing the flat last Friday that made her realise she was rushing into everything too quickly and it freaked her out so she stuck the brakes on.

Anyway, long story short it looks as is things might still be happening. I need to sort a place out for me to go to and she's going to sort her shit out and get her own place too and then once the dust has settled we can take it from there at our own pace without having to rush anything at all. It's not going to happen overnight but it's a start I guess and better than being left in limbo and not knowing what and why everything all of a sudden came to a halt. Like I said in the comments to the last post, time will tell. Also in a good mood because I had a pint of lager and a jacket spud with cheese and chilli for my lunch!

So my poker challenge begins in a little under 10 hours and I will then have 200 days in order to make $5k from NLHE cash games. It was going to be ending on 19th April 08 but I think 200 days sounds better for blogging purposes! I'm starting by playing at Ultimate Bet and sitting at the short-handed NL2 tables before moving to NL10 and NL25. Once NL25 is reached I will be considering changing sites, probably to Full Tilt, because I'm having trouble multi-tabling on UB at the minute. My two problems are the lack of resizable tables on UB so I have horrendous overlap and also the fact that their "force table to front" simply doesn't work properly so it gets annoying and causes misclicks and wrong bet sizes when another screen becomes active! I've emailed support but they're about as useful as cock flavoured lolly pop in all honesty and they're probably looking for a generic email to send me right now to fob me off! I can cope with misclicking and losing out on a $0.45 pot right now but would be a bit more pissed off at a $14 pot so a change may be needed unless a solution can be found. I've Pudding Jr staying tonight so I won't get to start until he hits the hay and by that time I'll probably need a beer and something to eat so it'll almost certainly be midnight by the so I'll hit the tables for a couple of hours before getting some shuteye.

Well that's all for now folks, good luck at the tables, have a great weekend and thanks for reading!

Pudding's $50 to $5k Challenge

For too long I've fucked about, jumping from cash games to SnG's to MTT's with no real focus, just the hope of a big score so I can play decent stakes for decent money and have the remote possibility that I can use poker to fund a better lifestyle or ideally play full time for a living. The problem is it doesn't work like that for most players. It's a known fact the vast majority of players are losing players and fall by the way side. In fact a lot of seemingly winning players are actually losing players long term but are riding a good spell of variance. It's time to prove to myself I can do this and time to get serious about my game and make poker start to pay.

I have great belief in my game. I'd probably get killed at NL200 and above, currently, but I know I can beat the micro stakes for a decent score on a regular basis. I have the knowledge, know the theory and have the balls to make plays and read games but I have a few leaks that I need to plug in order to succeed. One downfall is strange because it is down to patience. When I'm playing I can easily sit there for an eternity and wait for the right situation to arise which is a good thing but I am very impatient when it feels like a challenge isn't progressing as quickly or smoothly as I would like and I often start playing more tables etc rather than focussing on the end goal which is often months away. I guess I become kind of blinkered. Readers of my old blog know I like a drink, and poker and drink don't really mix too well. I hate to think how much money I've left at the table due to drinking the amber nectar so that is one leak I need to plug right away if I am to become profitable. There is a very fine line between being ok to play and having alcohol cloud your judgement and I cross that line with an alarming regularity. I don't think living in a pub helps but that situation should be changing when I get back from holiday on the 11th September. Those are my main two problems really. I could include over thinking hands but I can adapt that quickly to my table and adjust the way I think to suit the donks or the tougher players.

So I have set myself a challenge which will start on Saturday 1st September 2007 and will run until Saturday 19th April 2008, which incidentally is my 27th birthday. I am going to start with a bankroll of $50, or as close to that as I can, and grind my way through the 6 max micro NLHE cash games until I reach a bankroll of $5k. From start to finish is exactly 34 weeks which means I'd have to earn an average of $21 per day from day one. Obviously starting at NL2 this isn't going to happen but once I hit NL50 it should, in theory, be a piece of piss! Two reasons I've set a challenge of this length are firstly because I have a lot of shit going on at the minute and could be without the net to play poker for anything between 6-10 weeks in the not too distant future and also so that I can try to learn to stay focussed on something long term rather than get caught up with what's happened in a singular session.

I'm going to start off by playing a singular table of NL2 on Ultimate Bet. I have some outstanding bonus dollars on there that clear at very slow but steady rate and I also get 30% of my rakeback which should help a great deal. I want to learn to walk again before I start running and iron out any bad habits and become more positional and make notes on players rather than rely on 10-12 stats displayed above them by my HUD. Once I am comfortable fully with one table I will add more as it is obvious your hourly rate goes up if you're a winning player. I will be following a semi solid bankroll management plan albeit a pretty aggressive one which I'll explain later but it's going to allow me to take the occasional shot at the levels above without putting too much at risk.

I will be applying the following rules:

1.) Always be true to myself. If I am being outplayed accept it because it happens. Find another table.
2.) If I don't feel like playing then I won't. Simple as that. Too often I play for the sake of it which is -EV.
3.) If I feel like I'm going to tilt then I'll sit out and make myself a coffee or have a fag or something until the feeling passes.
4.) Accept bad beats happen to good players more often than bad.
5.) Don't be results orientated, just make plays that I believe will maximise expectation over time.
6.) If I go bust I stay bust.
7.) When I hit $5k, brag like fuck and treat myself to something nice!

I'm really looking forward to this because it's going to make or break me as a poker player. If I can't do this then I'm going to need to make some sort of other plans to finance some of the things I want to buy and places I want to see. If I can do this then I'll be as chuffed as a puff with two arseholes and the sky is the limit from there. It'd be a great birthday present on the 19th April 2008 if I can look at my online poker worth and see a nice shiny $5k looking back at me. I need something to distract me from the real world right now, I'll post about the goings on soon but Pud's real life world has fallen apart a little so I'm wrapping myself up in my online one until everything goes away!

Only time will tell if I can do this. Wish me luck and keep coming back for updates and rants from yours truly.

Like A Phoenix From The Flames

Guess who's back? Only little old me! I went to sign onto my old blog today and there was absolutely nothing there! Nothing, nada, zilch. It looks like I may have been targeted by some twat who thinks it's funny to go around and either change all the posts the owner has ever written to porn links or to just straight delete it. In the past couple of weeks I know that Iggy aka "The Blog Father", Cadmunkey, Kenn and Micro Limit Donkey all falling victim to this cunt. Get a life or put your obvious skills to some use you piece of shit!

For those of you who have followed me from my old blog you know all about me so I'll just say hello bitches. For those of you that are new and have somehow stumbled across here I hope you like what you find and continue to come back. My blogs are mainly about my poker playing, mainly No-Limit Hold'em but I also love to have life rants, speak my mind about various subjects (often without thinking) and from time to time I go off on one and go a little bit crazy and off the wall. I don't usually set out to directly insult people or piss them off but it happens from time to time as I express my opinions in my own unique, from the hip style! If any of my posts or comments offends you please feel free to let the other readers know, just don't expect me to give a shit because to be honest as it's my blog, written in my words and they are my feelings. I used to wear my heart on my sleeve on my old blog and document my every up and down and that will continue so hopefully you'll start to feel you know Yorkshire Pudding and feel part of this blog.

As this is technically a new blog I'm going to totally start from scratch, as if I've never played before. All wins and losses from now on are going to be documented here on these virtual pages and hopefully as my blog grows with time so will my skills and obviously bankroll and I'll have something to look back on in a couple of years and see the progress I have made. I'll be starting a cash game challenge in the next day or two, I'm just waiting for Neteller to confirm they've received my massive deposit of around the $35 mark! Micro-stakes madness, bring it on!

That's it for now boys and girls. Thanks for checking in and best of luck at the tables!