I'm the luckiest idiot on the planet

Last night I returned from Stevenage and my friends wedding. It was a cracking little affair and I was very proud to be the best man. It nearly turned out to be the worst weekend of the year though and let me tell you, there is no greater feeling than breathing a massive sigh of relief.

I went to be measured at my local Suits You about 2 weeks ago and went to pick up my suit last Wednesday. I then headed down to Stevenage and it wasn't until 11.00pm on Friday night that I glanced at the suit I'd picked up.

It was 2 sizes too small.

The look on my girlfriends face instantly told me there was no way I could wear these garments as I struggled to put them on and indeed take them off. I was close to tears and started swearing and punching some of the fixtures in my hotel room. What followed was a pretty sleepless night as I lie awake thinking I had ruined my best mates wedding.

I came to the conclusion that maybe one of the ushers had it and they had got mixed up. So at 8 in the morning, unable to reach them by mobile, I went down to my reception and got the poor girl working there to ring up every hotel in a 5 mile radius to see if they were there. I eventually discovered that all their suits fitted perfectly.

So sounding a complex mixture of angry and desperate I contacted Suits You at their head office. I explained the situation and told them I essentially had 4 hours for them to rectify their mistake.

"The only way you can get a replacement is if you were able to get to our main warehouse" the young guy told me over the phone.

Shit, I thought, that could be anywhere. "Where is it?" I asked.

"Boreham Wood"

Shit, that sounds miles away. Not knowing where that was punched the postcode into my TomTom. I stared in fear as it calculated the route for me.......

7 minutes it said.

The bloody main warehouse, the only place I could get a suit in time for my friends wedding, was just over 1 mile away. If I had stood on the roof of my hotel I could have seen it no problem.

So 10 minutes later I was trying my new suit on kissing the ground the bloke working there walked on. By 9.45 I had a new suit and got back to my hotel in time for breakfast.

My girlfriend saw how I was upset the night before and was a total star. She kept reassuring me, telling me it wasnt my fault, hugging me, telling me it would be ok etc. As soon as we got the suit she let rip "you bloody idiot how can you not try the suit on before last night! etc etc.

When I got back to the hotel I kept breaking into either dance or laughter. I can honestly say I experienced my lowest and highest point of the year in a 12 hour period. I was so elated by the remarkable good luck I experienced that I had no nerves at all about my speech, which went very well indeed and included a few jokes at my expense for the earlier suit shenanigans.

Words cannot express how lucky I got, of all the places to find out I had the wrong suit hours before a wedding I managed to pick the hotel nearest the only place in the world that could rescue me.

No complaining about bad beat stories from me for a while.

UK Pokernews and Danny from Hear'say

Had a lot going on of late (besides the fact that I have barely left the house) - the big news is that I have just been appointed by pokernews to be their senior staff writer for the UK.

I write freelance for them anyway and have a genuine love for the website, having seen it grow from a tiny little site a few years ago into arguably the biggest online poker resource in the world. The live updates are also superb and becoming the most user friendly and attractive ones in the business (Theres a good chance I'll be on the other side of that during the WSOPE in September).

The rest of today I will be spending writing my best mans speech, which is due in on Saturday when I go to Stevenage to send my friend into holy matrimony. I've left it a bit late hoping that my brief (unsuccessful) venture into stand up comedy will carry me through.

The best part about the upcoming weekend is that Danny from hear@say (remember them?) is a friend of the bride and I get a chance to recreate this picture of me harrasing him from my clubbing days about 5 years ago.

PKR - Bridging the Gap between live and online? Nope

When it first came out I said that I would never ever play on PKR. Online poker gets enough of a hard time from live players that I thought an online poker room where you can ‘give off tells’ and wear virtual sunglasses at the table would be one cyber step too far. But last night I went to see the new Die Hard film (surprisingly good by the way) and saw an advert for PKR on the big screen, I decided maybe I should have a look to see if I was missing out on something.

When I play online poker all I care about is the money in front of a player and my notes on them. I have no interest in their hairstyle, the 600pkr point sunglasses or whether they have done a virtual chip riffle in front of me. However I actually spent a good hour last night kitting out my virtual me and developing some trademark taunts for my table.

When I was at the table I must say it was a lot of fun, however, the furthest thing from my mind was playing poker. I wanted to play every hand, just so I could show a bluff and do my trademark dance, I would call bets I never would normally and favour going all-in just because you can ‘stand up’ for the showdown. I also found myself leaving a juicy table because I wanted to change my ‘voice’.

The only thing that ever tempted me to play PKR previously was because I envisaged very fishy cash games with newbie players who are attracted to the video game element of the site. I was right, but regrettably I was one of the biggest fish. A game like that has so much going on unrelated to the hand in question that you cannot help but be drawn into acting, showboating and general tomfoolery. Game selection isn’t all that great either, another sign of PKR as the recreational players hideout.

I’m not going to lie, it was fun and I will play again, but purely to let off steam than to make money. I’m sure that there is money to be made on PKR but I’m more than happy just to save up enough PKR points to give my little man a Stetson hat.

Gay Rag and Bone Men

It’s Wednesday and I’m only just recovering from the weekend, a stag party in the nation’s capital. I was the best man and let everyone down by being the first person to turn in on the Saturday night session, which was pretty grueling, not in the drunken sense but physically.

After a previously sleepless night we made our way into Kings Cross to do a pub crawl of the central line; one pub per stop on the 27 stop tube line. The icing on the cake was that we all had to buy one top and one hat from a charity shop for less than a fiver and randomly assign these clothes to each other.

The session was grueling not because of the fact we were drunk, or hungover, but because after no sleep the night before we found ourselves doing a lot of walking trying to find pubs that were open. A lot of the stops on the central line were in the Business and Commerce districts and nothing was open on a Saturday, which meant that we were often wandering round aimlessly trying to find a backstreet pub. I think we must have covered a good 7 miles at least and it didn’t help that we were all dressed like Gay Rag and Bone men.

I’ve never been one for dressing up like a plonker for a night out and was a bit hesitant. It didn’t help matters that I was given the bright boobtune top and pope hat but when there is a large group of you it takes the sting out of it. The truth is, in any other city you’d feel a berk and put on obligatory Geordie accents (an easy way of communicating “we are on a stag do”), but in London nobody batted an eye lid, in fact half the people in the pubs looked like they were with us anyway.

Still a good time was had by all, especially as it looked like it was set to be a disaster when we were stuck on the M25 in the pissing rain listening to reports of severe weather and terrorist attacks on the radio. Now I have a month to prepare for the best mans speech.

I'm backing Phil for the big one

3 months ago I was from the school of poker that loved to see Phil Hellmuth lose, carefully edited television coverage (and occasional childishness from the Brat) made us all believe that we could go to Vegas and beat Phil and put him on tilt.

Then I interviewed him a couple of months back and……well, nothing had really changed much. He was a very nice guy but he still managed to tell me he was the greatest player of all time before I had asked him much, I still thought he wasn’t as good as he thinks he is.

I’m not sure exactly what it is that’s changed, I certainly hope its not to do with the fact that I have his phone number in my mobile, but I really want him to destroy the WSOP this year. The introduction of so many stud/razz/Omaha/hi lo games this year seems a cynical way to ensure a pro gets a bracelet and to an extent the hold’em events are ‘expected’ to be won by nobodies.

Maybe by doing so well so far in the huge NLHE fields in some way has restored my faith in the pro vs the field. Perhaps its because its nice to see somebody I’ve heard of at the final tables and that makes poker a more enjoyable spectator sport. If Phil could win another bracelet or maybe make the final of the big one then surely this is can be our ‘for’ argument in the is poker a game of skill argument that we all have at times. That a pro can win the main event before and after he poker boom and that it doesnt matter that there is 100 or 10,000 players, as long as you beat your table.

He would of course, be unbearable if he actually won the big one, but maybe poker needs that? Moneymaker, Raymer and Gold all seem to have been one hit wonders and although Joe Hachem has proved his is a genuine champion of the sport; perhaps we need the Poker Brat to raise the bar for the large field generation of poker.

Phil is 7-1 to place higher in the main event than any previous champion; I think that is the safest bet to take this year at the series.

The Saver - The worst business decision in poker

While 95% of the poker population are already in Vegas I humbly made my way to a local poker festival in my home town of Sheffield. In all honesty it was a pretty poorly organised affair but a very nice bunch of people to play with. It also helped that I made it to the final 3 and we did an equal three way chop of the prize money. We then proceeded to play for the trophy and I went out the very next hand. I don’t normally do deals and always want to play for the win, but I was a significant short stack at the time and the deal worked out perfectly for me.

One deal which I wasn’t pleased about occurred a few hours before, when we were down to 11 players. With 10 places being paid and a number of very short stacks, everybody wanted to agree to a ‘saver’; a deal whereby the price of the original buy-in is taken from the top end of the prizepool and given back to whomever goes out on the ‘bubble’. I did not agree to this and it didn’t win me any friends.

“You obviously don’t make many finals” one guy told me

“You always do a deal” another one said.

“Is it fair that someone gets all this way and gets nothing?” was another comment.

I don’t actually have any objection to the £200 entry being taken from the prizepool, my objection was down to the fact that the bubble is one of the most significant and profitable part of any tournament. During this time I was raising every hand at my table and everyone was looking at me daggers:

“What are you doing?” they were asking “this is not the time to be bullying, we are nearly at the final” – I actually thought I was going to be chased out of the casino.

I had a healthy stack and the bubble was the time to turn it into a monster. Many players do not play optimally on the bubble when they know they can fold their way to the money and there is a hell of a lot of dead money to be picked up. The fact that everyone was objecting to my bullying and there not being a saver only spurred me on to do it more, because it was obvious I would get away with it.

I was in Ireland last month having a Guinness fuelled chat about this very situation with well known players Mick McCloskey and Matt Tyler, we all said the same thing, that the ‘saver’ is the worse business decision in poker. We all agreed that if you are the chip leader on the table during a bubble and a short stack goes all in on your big blind and you have aces, you should still fold. The reason being is the small amount of chips you get from shorty is nothing in comparison to the pot after pot you can take from the medium stacks at the table who are desperate to fold their way to the money.

The players were telling me that the saver speeds the game up towards the final table because the action is looser, which is true, but that is not what I wanted at all, I would have been happy for an hour long bubble because of the potential pots I could have scooped along the way.

Where I and the rest of the field differed was they were thinking only of the guaranteed return they were getting, whereas I was thinking about the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prize pool. I wasn’t interested in getting another £150 back on my buy-in I was looking ahead to figures with another zero on the end and wanted to build my stack to get to play for those prizes. In the end it was causing such a stir that I caved in and agreed to the saver, which in retrospect worked ok for me because it helped us make a deal which worked out in my favour later on.

It was actually a really nice little tournament and despite not making many friends on the bubble the final table couldn’t have been more fun. A really friendly bunch of people and maybe that was why they were so keen to introduce the saver. It’s a very close knit poker community in Sheffield and maybe I should pay heed to the way in which they were all looking out for each other rather than keeping all eyes on the big prize.

I’m still never agreeing to another saver again though.

OK Donk! You and me heads-up

One of the many things that online poker has introduced to the world that rarely happens (rarely, it does happen) is the challenging to heads-up matches from people you have rubbed up the wrong way. In poker, this has become a modern form of duelling, you suck out on somebody and enrage them to the point that they challenge you to a heads-up match, usually for stakes larger than the game you are in.

I had this happen to me today, I limped with pocket aces into a guy whose blind I had been stealing constantly, I knew he was due to take a stand against me, he shoves all-in with ace-ten and I call and bust him from the SNG. “I’m waiting in a $200 HU match for you, come on you p ussy, me and you know d ick, you scared?” etc etc etc. I’m not sure why he was so annoyed at me for beating him with the best hand but he stuck around for the rest of a lengthy Sit and Go berating me.

This rarely happens in casinos, largely because A) Heads-up games are not available most of the time and B) You can actually see each other, I assume most of these angry people are short, Napoleon complex, and wouldn’t dare challenge a bigger man to a heads-up match in case he suggests they just go for an honest punch-up instead. I elected not to join him, partially because I was on a bubble in the SNG and also because I found it funny that he wouldn’t leave my table and was enjoying disappointing him. The question is, should I have gone into the match?

Now, ego is no reason to go into these games, I felt I had no need to prove myself and if you readily accept these challenges to prove yourself then you will never be playing your ‘A’ game. Is it potentially a profitable game?

If you are well versed in heads-up matches, then it is a definite yes, if someone you have already bested challenges you to a game you excel in then you surely will come out on top most of the time. If not then it simply isn’t worth it.

A good reason the take the challenge is that your opponent is definitely on tilt, I’ve only met one person who actually plays better when they are angry so unless its that guy then you are going to get them mano vs mano when they are not 100%, the best possible time to get heads-up.

If, like me, you are at a crucial stage in another game, as you likely will be because of the initial challenge, then you have to weigh up the expected value of the game you are in compared to the heads-up match on offer, the chances are the game you are in will be more profitable because you will have this players chips and the prizes on offer will be more than the doubling of your money a HU match offers.

If the match in question is at a stake higher than you are bankrolled for (and they often will be as is the nature of the challenge) then you certainly must not take the offer, even if you do win this is not a long term profitable strategy – playing above your bankroll in an emotional tear up is a recipe for disaster.

So the next time you are childishly challenged to a heads-up game, swallow your pride and simply ask yourself – is this profitable?

If all else fails, insult their mother.