Apologise for not posting in a while but this may be all I can manage these days. I have promised to keep all informed about my three systems. Firstly the Jackal and while I do not have an up to date report…..I do have the figures after c25k hands. Richard is $1234 dollars ahead which equates to $4.93/100 hands. It is good to give a $/100 hands figure as this allows for differences on poker sites where the software isn’t as fast or they have extra players.

But this is 9.87bb/100 which seems high to me although once again the 25k hand mark is short. But both The Vulture and Fox systems started on the 1st March but I don’t have any details of the results yet. Been really busy of late and the bad news is that it will simply get busier. I will be revealing details of these systems this year and how to get them so do keep a look out for that in the coming weeks and months.

Did manage to play some PLO over the weekend at $200 and lost four buy-ins so not too great. Anyway speak soon and take care.

Carl

Ok so I promised a few weeks ago to write a daily blog but this month has just not been possible for me. I have undertaken even more work and I haven’t even played poker in ages as well. Although starting 1st April I will be doing a 100-1 challenge in which I try to turn $100 into $10,000. I may even start as low as $50 yet but I have pencilled this in time wise so it is likely to happen.

This will run alongside the Vulture, Jackal and Fox systems so April should be a really exciting month. I am also in the process of trying to lose a couple of stone in weight as well so I am having to tough things out. The challenge won’t be to win 10k, it will be to keep my control whilst playing for tiny amounts. Seeing as I have no history of doing this for long periods in the past then it will be tough.

Anyway, we have reached the 20k hand mark with The Jackal and we have come on since the last post and we are $749 ahead. So we are $3.745/100 hands which is an excellent 7.49bb/100. I am very pleased with this and we have been running well over the past week or so.

The Fox six handed limit system starts on Monday as does The Vulture re-run so keep a look out for those results. One small downside though, Richard may not be able to play The Jackal after April as he will be moving so getting the originally intended 100k hands may be a problem. He has though offered to increase the hours played so I am hoping for about a 75k-80k sample size.

If we can replicate 7.5bb/100 after that many hands then I will be very happy. I was going through my Poker Office data yesterday as I intend to play against a couple of players who I have targeted this week providing that they turn up. They tend to be weekend players anyway mainly but they fit very nicely into the unthinking LAG category. If you can catch them when they don’t hit flops then you can get them in spew city.

Anyway fingers crossed, will try and play some heads up or PLO this weekend but starting 1st April, any poker that doesn’t involve the three systems or my $100 challenge will be very thin on the ground. I wish that there were more hours in the day.

Anyway, see you soon

Carl

I know I keep saying that I will post every day but you know how it is. I cannot seem to bring myself to find the time to write long posts. So what I plan to do is write short snappier posts and make them more often. That way they will not be boring and it should reveal everything that is going on.

Right enough of that, what is happening with The Jackal? Well we have slipped back just as I predicted and the results after 10k hands is that we are ahead by $312. That is $3.12/100 or 6.24bb/100. We haven’t actually done badly but 10k hands is starting to get to be somewhat significant.

Good news on The Vulture and Fox systems, I have managed to get two players to road test these. One is starting on the 1st March but the other is hoping to get started at the end of the week. Now you can see why I haven’t been posting…….too damn busy.

March should be a great month having all three systems playing side by side and me being the nervous parent looking on

Fingers crossed……..as for my poker results…….you seriously have to be joking…….there are only 24 hours in a day you know. Which gets even worse when you have to watch the football, looking forward to Milan vs Man Utd tonight.

See you then.

Carl

I have to say sorry for keep promising to make this a daily blog and then I keep dropping days. I just seem to have too much work and not enough time to do it in. But you wanted to know about The Jackal right

Well at the end of week 1 we are ahead by $314 after exactly 22 hours of play so $14.27/hour so far. However this isn’t what we need to be looking at and this is the bb/100. By the way, do not confuse this earn rate with ptbb/100 which isn’t the same thing. These are merely bb/100 so in $0.25-$0.50 this means $0.50/100 hands.

We have played near as damn it 5k hands so the rate is 12.56bb/100. This is even bigger than the last check and according to Richard, he hasn’t got exceptionally lucky. Although luck can be measured in different ways and you don’t always see your good look. For instance, you raise with K-K and get called by 10-9s and the flop comes 10-6-2 rainbow and they pay you off all the way to the river……this is good luck and it isn’t always having your aces against kings or flopping a king when its the other way around.

I am convinced that this is still too high. I think it would take a million hands for the earn rate to smooth out but 100k will do. By the way, we are not counting rakeback either in with these earn rates. So the bottom line is that I am very pleased after week 1.

I played some $2-$4 and $3-$6 six max limit hold’em over the weekend and won just over $100. If you think that I have taken leave of my senses then fear not. This was the maiden session of my even later system The Fox which is my low-stakes six max limit system that I have been working on. If I can get someone to road test this then I may get all three running side by side, now wouldn’t that be something

see you soon

Carl

I have some upto date figures after five days of The Jackal and we are ahead by $211 after 15 hours of play and 3749 hands. So it is $5.62/100 hands at the moment but that is four tabling. So we are at 11.24bb/100 which just HAS to be too high due to the small sample size.

Richard wasn’t always four tabling because because he was playing at relatively quiet times of the day. My sources tell me that 1-4bb/100 is solid and 5-9 is very impressive. I asked about 10bb+ and have been told that it is very rare and indicative of small sample sizes so we have been fortunate so far but I will settle for 4bb/100 at this stage.

So even though we have dropped around $50 since the last post, we are doing very well and I am pleased. Shame that I cannot say the same for my own poker play, I dropped 50 big bets at 10-20 limit the other days after swearing to myself that I wouldn’t play the game.

Actually though I was dumped on and lost two huge 20+ big bet pots when my K-K was rivered by a Q-Q hitting a set in a huge multi-way pot. This just shows that my boredom levels are rising. Still though I have to say that I played well and single tabled and I really zoned in but the muppets got away

See you soon

Carl

We are into day 4 of the Jackal trial and I am pleased to report initial success. We are already five full buy-ins ahead at +$256. This seems too good to be true and seems way ahead of what our Sklansky Dollars should be although I haven’t seen any data yet so you are as much in the dark as me.

I have seen 10ptbb/100 in six max so its possible I suppose but early days yet…..very early days. Apparently though it has been swingy so far and we were ahead by over $300 at one stage and down to $100. Or maybe its me, maybe the swings in six max really are that normal. I have only ever played NL50 full ring and so has he.

I think that it is in safe hands though and is why I gave him the job. Been no poker for me as I was busy on the exchanges yesterday and then watched the Leeds vs Tottenham match. Will struggle to get any work done next weekend with loads of live cup football and me taking the missus away for Valentines, lord knows what I am going to do during the World Cup

See you soon

Carl

I did say that I would give daily reports on the progress of The Jackal but unfortunately that means often having nothing to report. I didn’t get an update last night so the Jackal is as it was yesterday and is ahead by $144.

However I will be talking about my own poker play today and I want to have another modern sample size with The Vulture. I fully intend to do what I should have done last summer and that was to get The Vulture down into print. I want to see if I can still maintain the earn rate that I made in 2008-2009 when I was on Cake Poker.

I don’t see why not but sources have told me that the NL50’s have tightened up so I may have to adjust. What I don’t want to do is end up writing stuff that is out of date so hence the trials. I am trying to get Richard to agree to doing both although that would mean him playing full-time. The problem is with the Vulture is that I need to be there in person actually doing it.

I am once again going to pick the softest site that I can find that has decent enough action on NL50 and see how it goes. My scheduled start date is 1st Mar which is a full month after the Jackal but I intend to get them both running side by side in about four weeks time.

So look out for that, ideally I would like to expand these systems to mass table them. With the right rakeback scheme in place, the right discipline and if you can find enough tables even if that means playing several different sites at once then I think that $100/hour is possible. But anyway, that’s all pie in the sky as it stands so will just have to see over the coming weeks.

see you soon

Carl

Everything seemed to go my way yesterday, I had someone contact me from ages ago with some money that they owed me that I had actually written off so that was nice. Then the job that needed doing on my car ended up being nothing to worry about.

Then I get news that The Jackal won $144 on the first day after only two hours of play….what a start

Then it gets better, I sit down in a $400 PLO six max game and within a couple of minutes I can see that these players are very aggressive. One player has around $1500 and another has $3300 and they really look like they know what time of day it is.

I play really tight (had no choice given the hands and the action) but then I get aces with a king and one of the aces is suited. I am in the big blind and it gets raised to $14 and then there is another pot raise after a caller. It gets to me and I now lower the boom and pot it again. I am happy to only see one caller and I am first to speak and ship the rest in on the flop.

The flop is K-X-X with few draws and they call. Turn card is an ace and I think that they were drawing dead as I recall. Anyway I win a near $1k pot and leave with their money

I wasn’t wimping out, these guys looked very good which begs the question that I shouldn’t have been in the game in the first place but you know me

But the Jackal’s good start pleased me the most and before I leave, I also had £100 on Sunderland vs Stoke to end in a draw…….good times.

JACKAL RUNNING TOTAL……… + $144

See you soon

PS (someone asked me yesterday why I am not playing the Jackal myself…..answer is simple…TIME)

Carl

Here we go then on my biggest adventure of the year and I am not even playing……how about that. The Jackal road test starts today and I haven’t been in touch with my guinea pig yet so I don’t know if he has started or not. The test involves four tabling NL50 six max and we are trying to get to 100k hands.

I have provided Richard with a $1000 bankroll as its only fair that if the system goes pear shaped that it isn’t his money that goes west. The problem is that he is a winning player as well so if the system fails to work then it is going to cost him money as well as this means that he cannot play his usual SNG’s and NLHE full-ring.

So the plan is for him to play around 20 hours a week which should get us around 300 hands an hour. We are hoping to get the 100k sample in 4 months at the outside. If the Jackal starts being successful then we will look at possibly playing more hours so the 100k sample could be reached sooner than that.

I also need to point out that I am not divulging the site where he is playing. The reason I am doing this is for several reasons. Firstly we have carefully selected this site because I have it on good authority that the games are softer than usual. But if that proves not to be the case then we will change sites in mid-stream if need be. Also, if all goes well then I don’t want players coming in on our project and tightening the games up.

So you are all on a strictly need to know basis and you don’t need to know……yet

Don’t worry though because when the time comes, all will be revealed. Also remember that this is now a DAILY BLOG with daily updates of The Jackal and if and when the road test is successful then both The Jackal and The Vulture will be available through Pokersharkpool.

I will also be restarting my video blog as well which I haven’t done for ages so look out for some interesting videos once again. Had a good session last night at $200 PLO and won just over $500. It’s funny but everytime I win then I feel that I have an angle on this game and when I lose then I don’t…….

Problem is that I haven’t had a big enough sample size at PLO to form a concrete conclusion but I am really starting to prefer this game over hold’em.

Anyway see you tomorrow.

Carl

I have to apologise for not posting lately as often as what I have promised. But the good news……starting 1st Feb is that this will be a daily blog except for the 14th Feb when I am taking the missus somewhere special for Valentines Day.

Things have been really hectic lately and I have finally got someone lined up to play The Jackal properly from next month. We have agreed that he keeps all winnings and rakeback and simply pays me a kick back if and when he reaches $5k.

I am struggling to find the time but I do know that Richard is a winning reg at NL50 full-ring. Here though he will be playing six max for the first time. To say that I am nervous is an understatement as I will be reporting the results on here and they will be totally out of my control.

Although in the light of my horrible spewy sessions with The Vulture in 2008-2009 then that can hardly be a bad thing. At least with him then I have someone who will be professional all the time and who will respect the money. So it all starts proper on Monday of next week so keep a look out for that and the daily reports.

Speaking of reports, I managed to play a few sessions of $200 PLO since last post with mixed results. Managed to get around $1000 up for last week and was feeling good until I lost nearly five buy-ins in a single day. I guess that the increased variance in PLO is new to me so I am having to get used to it.

January has been mediocre on the poker front after starting out really well although winnings are winnings I suppose but the effort didn’t seem worth it. I may stick to heads up play next month and see how that goes. The PLO has definitely dragged my hourly rate down for January and it would have been a good month had it not been for the PLO.

I am fixated with trying to improve at this game. At heads up I think it is important that you hide your ID because it is all so easy these days for people to datamine and even buy ready made databases. You cannot afford for players to know your game before the get go. Although in heads up play against good players (which they tend to be at $200) then feeling them out and metagame factors are key.

What else is new, well in December I managed to avail myself of a copy of “Let there be Range” which is the e-book that I mentioned some weeks ago that cost $1800. It took me a while to get around to reading it what with Christmas and other things getting in the way. It is written by Cole South and Tri Nguyen. I think the book is excellent although probably too technical for many players.

I definitely improved my game as a result of reading it……in fact scrap that…..I improved it tremendously. Just shows you that in the modern online poker world…….young is best

See you soon

Carl