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

I am $414 ahead so far with the Jackal but I am running into difficulties in playing enough hours and this may be even more of a problem next month. I have managed to play around 2.5k hands so the earn rate so far is $16.56/100 hands. This equates to $4.13/100 per table or just over 8bb.

Still early days of course but I am going to try to get someone to play The Jackal for me as a test starting next month. I have also been playing some heads up again but things haven’t gone too well and I am experiencing what i think is a correction.

Still been a good solid start to the year though but the Jackal is currently running at $59/hour in total……but early days like I said. I am going to have a few other areas next month that are going to be taking up huge chunks of my time so posts may be less but hopefully somebody with a temperament far better than mine will report some better results than what I could have achieved with The Jackal.

What I should have done was give the Vulture to this guy and let him use that, I would have bet my bottom teeth that he would have earned more. Still…..all water under the bridge. So starting the 1st Feb I am going to be concentrating on HUNLHE and will be leaving the Jackal to someone else.

The results will still get reported obviously so do keep a look out for that,

see you soon

Carl

I was playing a NL400 heads up last night when the following hand came up. I was in the big blind with 10s-6s. I had bought in for $400 and had watched a certain player for a while. They had run well and had amassed around $1000. I was a little up on them so effective stacks were around $420.

They were very LAG even for a heads up and we were only about ten hands into the contest. They raise to $12 and I think that all three plays have merit at this stage but I decide to call for balance. The pot is $24 and the flop comes 4s-3c-2s giving me the flush draw, gutshot straight draw and two overcards.

Leading out with a draw of that size is a solid line and probably better than check-raising which is the line I chose. So I checked knowing that they would c-bet although I think that leading out is the better line. Anyway I check and they bet $16 and I check-raise to $72. They insta all-in shove for their entire stack! The effective all-in is for $336 as this is all that I have left.

The pot is $504 and it costs me $336 so the pot odds are 1.5/1. I could have as many as 18 outs here but the likelihood is that I may need to make the flush or the straight as the six may not be enough although the ten might be if they are shoving a medium pocket pair. Even discounting my outs for non nut hands, tied hands and possibly hitting second best hands then I cannot be much worse than even money here so I called.

Anyway he shows 4d-3d for top two pair and the turn card is the Kc and river card is the As giving me a flush on the river. Then it all kicked off……I have been called some things in my time but this was something else. I almost reported the guy to be honest but then I just sat back and laughed because some of the things were so funny. Although later on I suspected that he could have been trying to make me think that he was tilting when he wasn’t!

I listened for a while but then left the game as I had other things to do like watch the football and you don’t often see ten goals in a game of football do you. The jackal has had two more sessions since we last spoke and I have won a further $211 so a decent start on the whole.

See you soon

Carl

I had an e-mail yesterday from what seemed a charming lady asking me for the details of Paul McKenna’s weight loss book and program 

Please ladies and gents, I am not a health and diet advisor so no more e-mails on how to lose weight as I can’t even be certain that my weight is off for good yet

Anyway back to the poker and I actually played the first session proper with The Jackal yesterday and lost

Actually I was unlucky so no sweat and the loss was only $34 but I will be keeping a running total on the blog. I am four tabling NL50 six max and the amounts will NOT include rakeback like last time with The Vulture.

It seemed a bit weird playing six max at such a low level but I am sure that I will get used to it. Something else that I struggled with was the speed at which the hands come around. I have seen videos with players 24-tabling six max games and I simply don’t know how they do it.

It seemed like my audio prompt was bleeping constantly playing only four bloody tables let alone twenty four. I made a couple of bad decisions and in fact the session was far more erratic than I was used to with The Vulture.

I was $100 up at one stage and $150 down which is something that never happened with The Vulture. Actually a horrible thought came to me yesterday and that is if I cannot make this pay now that I am talking about it on my blog…….on a scale of one to ten….HOW BAD would that be

I will have to think of some excuses and get them ready over the next week or so. Seriously though, the only problem should be my own indiscipline as it was with the Vulture but even that didn’t stop me make $25/hour.

Should be an interesting few weeks but I will struggle to play this and play PLO and HUNL as I only have so much time although I did play 2 hours at $200 PLO last night and just about broke even which was brilliant because I was down about $500 at one stage.

see you soon

Carl

I had an e-mail yesterday asking me about “The Jackal” and when it will be available. Well firstly I am not even sure if it ever will be although I expect the answer to that to be yes although I recall saying that last year for “The Vulture”. Funnily enough I got the inspiration for both of these systems and the PLO system that I also have planned for the back end of the year from reading and listening to Paul McKenna.

I have been trying to lose a couple of stone for years without success and following Paul’s advice on weight loss has not only helped me to lose weight but also to keep it off. But the advice struck a chord with me in how following simple steps repeatedly and without fail can achieve a huge snowball effect.

Like the reader said yesterday, playing NL50 is hardly going to make you rich but following Paul McKenna’s advice isn’t going to turn me into Mr Universe either……that is not the intention. In the same way that I am not cut out to have a body like Mr Universe, the overwhelming majority of poker players are not cut out to play high-stakes poker or play poker high enough to make them rich.

So the reader missed the point there to be honest with the greatest respect to her. The point of all this is to alter the fortunes of millions of poker players at the bottom and not to turn then into Tom Dwan or Patrick Antonius.

Success can be measured in many different ways but then again that can be said for anything. Interpretation has a huge effect in our everyday lives and poker is no different. Somebody who was losing money playing poker would look up to someone who made $10/hour at it. Someone who made $50/hour may look upon the player who was making $10/hour with contempt.

We are not talking about becoming a part of millionaire’s row here or becoming rich, we are talking about playing poker better than you did before and making more money than you did before or in most cases, making money where you were once losing it. That in itself is tremendous success and we need to start looking at poker in an entirely new way. Instead of trying to be a “professional” poker player or a “high-stakes” poker player……why not aim to be a “successful” poker player……..now you don’t need to be on Rail Heaven to achieve that do you?

See you soon

Carl

Recent readers of Pokersharkpool will have missed my challenge last year to show that a player with little bankroll could make a living wage playing NLHE cash games. Just to fill in recent readers, I made $25/hour multi-tabling NL50 full-ring games over 75k hands.

When you spend most of the time folding then this isn’t difficult to do and I had a good 33% rakeback deal to facilitate that. I couldn’t stay motivated due to the low stakes although I had been playing 25-50 NL at the time so switching from $25-$50 to $0.25-$50 messes with your mind.

Funnily enough I am now playing far lower than what I did in 2008/2009 so I am probably in the mindset to make this work. I think that I could have made $35/hour+ had I been focused. Regular readers will recall that I dubbed this system “The Vulture” because it fed off the carcases of low-stakes novices who were coming into the game at the bottom.

Also I haven’t got the time or the inclination to sit at my desk playing poker for 40 hours/week but if I did and I could retain motivation then I think The Vulture could have produced $1000/$1500 playing 8 tables. I even think $2000/week is possible although a little extreme for most.

$1000/week though is certainly possible and this is about £600/week NET. For a forty hour week then that equates to £15/hour which would be something along the lines of £25/hour if you were in a job and paying tax and NI on that.

I was supposed to be getting The Vulture into print last year but never got around to doing it. However I will be starting my 6-max NLHE system shortly which I am calling “The Jackal” and once again I will be starting at NL50. I haven’t played four tables at 6-max before (or at least I cannot remember doing it) so I will have to feel myself in.

I will not be increasing or decreasing levels, the test is to try and see how I do and how much I make playing NL50 on a per table per hour basis. I have often said that more and more poker players should experiment by playing more tables than moving up a level as a means of making more money.

But Pokersharkpool will be expanding this year and I want to make The Jackal part of that expansion. Now all I have to do is find at least 10 hours a week to play poker on top of everything else. Speaking of poker, I played two mixed sessions at NHLE heads up. Won $400 from a very good player and left only to then lose three buy-ins at $200 PLO so a net loss of $200 but still a great start to 2010 results wise.

So keep a look out for The Jackal and I am hoping to start it this week.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

I had someone e-mail me a few days ago regarding the merits of poker books. They specifically asked me if they were worth it in an age where poker coaching sites are taking over big time. I don’t know if it is me or what but I have always preferred the feel of a book in my hand with my feet up reading at my leisure.

But that is not the full story anymore, I believe now that there are not many books on the market that can do a better job than the coaching sites. Many of the books are written by players with little or no experience of online poker or the books are not written with online poker in mind. The problem here is that online poker is precisely the environment where that knowledge is going to be put to use so here we have a problem.

There are huge differences between live poker and online and this is not always readily apparent to novices. There are some very good poker books out there though and it would be unfair to criticise them all. I think that some of the strong young Internet pro’s have produced some good books of late. I also think that when certain players knock poker books then they obviously haven’t read the right books.

The older poker books in my opinion merely serve as nothing more than primers these days, books that will take people from novice to maybe intermediate level but no further. Back when I started playing then there was nothing more than books to go by and when I turned pro in 2002, my level of knowledge back then would make me no better than an intermediate player now just 8 years later.

This is a clear indication that the older books do not cut it in the modern online poker world unless you are playing low-stakes and do not have any aspirations whatsoever towards moving up. Then you can make money from total beginners and novices who do not know any better and do not have the ambitions to become a good player. So there are some good books out there but it is the recent books that I am talking about here.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

Played three more poker sessions since the last post and I seem to have started the year like a freight train! I had a huge near miss yesterday when I was considering backing Dave Chisnell to win the BDO World Darts Final. If I could have managed to get better than Evens then I would certainly have lumped on massively but just couldn’t get that price.

Chisnell was stepping into uncharted waters but then again Adams is dodgy under pressure so the game looked like a coin flip. If I can get better than Evens on a coin flip then I am seriously interested but the bookies know it as well and there wasn’t value anywhere in my book.

Lucky I couldn’t get the price though seeing as Chisnell got chinned 7-5 although he was just one leg away from taking it to 6-6. So I had a close shave there but I laid Man Utd at Birmingham and that came up nicely as did two sessions of $200 PLO which ended up a combined $411 ahead. I also played some NL50 as well to try and get back into the feel of it for my proposed challenge this year and won a massive $34 so no complaints.

The year has also gone reasonably well with regards my stable of players that I am staking. Now reduced to a far more manageable and streamlined six, they are starting to repay the faith that I had in them. I suspected that 2010 would be a profitable if unspectacular year and the ten days seem to be following that trend.

I was almost scared away from playing PLO200 after hearing of some very good players who were merely recycling money at it. Although in all fairness they were playing on Full Tilt Poker which is a far tougher site even though it gets the player numbers. If you want to make consistent money in online poker then you are better off keeping it low and also off the big huge sites like FTP and Stars.

See you soon and take care

Carl

I have played two more sessions of $200 six handed PLO since last post and I have further success to report. I won $97 last night and a further $191 the previous session which now takes me nearly $900 ahead on the year so far. I have dropped down to one table and I find that I can read the play far better. I started out playing 3/4 tables simply because this was what other successful players were doing.

It was obviously a big mistake and not something that I want to repeat. I have not used tracking software but as the games get tougher than using an Omaha tracker will become inevitable. So far 2010 hasn’t provided me with a losing session as yet but after the bad end to 2009 then I am in need of things going my way somewhat.

I have been thinking about rejoining a coaching site that specialises in PLO but the thing is that I think that my system of play does quite well when one tabling so I am reticent to tamper with something that feels like it is doing well. It is hard these days to go anywhere without the latest scandal on Full Tilt Poker being talked about.

Isildur losing $4.2 million to Brian Hastings in a single day and then it comes out that him and Cole South along with Brian Townsend were sharing information on Isildur. Don’t like to say that I told you so (OK so I said it) but a quick flick back through my recent posts will reveal what I said. May have been last month or November but I said how the big boys would be plotting against him.

I think Isildur was a little naïve staying around for so long, I would have hit and ran and then come back at a later date with a different MO. Any player with a massive seven figure roll is going to be up there to be shot at and when you get the best in the world taking aim then your days are numbered…..the kid should have cut it short.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson can be seen at www.pokerloco.com/thedean

I almost had two bets that would have lost out yesterday. I almost laid Phil Taylor at really short odds to win the PDC World Darts Championship and didn’t and also Arsenal at West Ham yesterday in the FA Cup. Something didn’t feel right and I swerved them both and was happy when both of them won.

You may have guessed reading my blog that I am an avid sports bettor and sports watcher as well and I don’t just write about and play poker. In fact I am starting to digress more and more these days to trading on the betting exchanges and the time between 1pm and 4pm is dedicated to that.

I did play a $1-$2 PLO game yesterday only days after saying that I wouldn’t touch the game in 2010 but I did manage to win over $200 ($217) for the session so that puts me over $600 up on the year so far. This year though I am going for small and steady rather than playing too high. My steady aim is to make $1000/week although time may prevent me from doing this.

Actually it is only when you drop down in levels that you realise how much $1000/week actually is. But that still puts me well into the top 1% of online poker earners so I suppose that it is still something to be proud of. I am also going to be using Poker Office as well more this year as I will also be multi-tabling NL50 and NL100 more.

My aim is to go for easy profits this year as I need to make sure that I make some money and I cannot afford to gamble like I have done in the past or play in games with marginal value. Should be an interesting and profitable 2010 (if slightly dull)……anyway…..see you soon and take care.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson can be seen at www.pokerloco.com/thedean