September Summary

These summaries are starting to get a bit repetitive but it's good discipline to keep bashing them out.

I started the month badly with a bit of a pounding at the PokerStars SNG tables. Annoyingly I thought I was playing OK, but I just couldn't get a hand to stand up.

I then went on a two week break, due to a combination of work, illness, and other matters which conspired to keep me busy.

Not all matters were entirely unpleasant. The football has been progressing nicely to keep me happy, and of course, I now have a very active 15-month old daughter to keep an eye on.

Toddlers are damn hard work, but worth every second of it. The look on her face when I get home from work is enough to banish any miserable thoughts that are clouding my head.

My interest in poker remains high, and even though I didn't play for a while, I'd still find myself walking down the road to work, whilst replaying hands in my head from weeks previously.

Some people might see this as a step along the path to obsessive compulsion, but I still love thinking about strategy and odds - I just wish I had more time to put it all into practise.

Speaking of which, I'm hoping to play a £50($90) live deep-stack freezeout next weekend at the Stanley Casino in Glasgow.

Tourneys aren't really my game, but I still enjoy playing live. I figured it would be less -EV if I'd actually raised the cash in advance, so I got my shoulder to the wheel at InterPoker and battered through the monthly $100 bonus there.

They have recently loosened the terms to make it easier to earn the bonus - though it is skewed towards limit players.

Any raked hand at a $1/2 or above table now counts. The odd thing being a $1/2 LHE table is ranked the same as (for example) a $1/2 PLO table - where the game is actually at least four times bigger.

Playing a smaller stakes PLO or NLHE game wouldn't earn any bonus at all.

InterPoker is a Crypto site, and it can be a strange place to play. Sometimes it is very Scandie heavy, and the games are certainly less 'good' than on Party or Tribeca, but that doesn't mean they are unbeatable.

Indeed sometime it can actually feel easier to play against a bunch of very tight players, with varying aggression levels - even if it is disconcerting to occasionally get AA cracked by some hyperactive Norwegian who caps with 55 pre-flop.

The flip side of that coin is a few tweaks can earn their reward quickly. Such as calling a raise with AA in-position and letting the pre-flop raiser bet into you until you raise the turn, and extract a couple of extra bets from him.

Adapting to the circumstances of the game is infinitely more productive than moaning about bad beats - and thus it was that my Stars losses became a profit, and the buy-in for Saturday was secured.