The Calm Before Vegas

Apologies for the lack of posts, but there hasn’t really been much for me to write about lately. I haven’t played any live poker at all since the San Remo EPT, because Monte Carlo cancelled all their PLO tournaments and then another couple of tourneys that I had hoped to play clashed with a friend’s wedding and also Karen’s 30th birthday.

The plan for this month was to play very little and to devote a bit of time to trying to get used to some of the software that everyone’s using these days. On a friend’s recommendation I downloaded ‘holdem manager’, but found it totally impossible to set up. After a lot of effort my brother eventually managed to set it up for me, only for me to slip going down the steps at the front of our house whilst carrying my laptop out to the car and completely wrecking it.

I’m told that’s it’s possible to recover photos etc. from it, which is a big relief as we had a lot of good ones from Oz, but I’m probably gonna have to get holdem manager re-installed again which is a bit of a pain. I did have a look at it though before I broke my computer and it actually looked really good. I can see how I’ve been at a disadvantage by not using it all this time.

Despite the fact that I haven’t been playing much poker, I seem to have been busier this last few weeks than I have been in ages. I’ve made a couple of training videos for the training site I’m involved with – Pokerswat.com and also been trying to watch a lot of the videos from the other instructors there. We’ve got some very good players on the site and I think it’s really beneficial to get a first hand view of how these guys play – some of whom will have a very different style to your own.

I’ve also been to London a couple of times on poker-related trips making some shows for the Sky Poker channel on sit-and-go tournaments, and also visiting Neil Channing to sit in on one of his weekly blackbeltpoker workshops. I really hope the business side of things goes well for him, because I think the players involved with him are definitely getting a lot out of it.

I’m on a family holiday at the minute in Donegal and was hoping to play a few of the ECOOP tournaments on Boylepoker over the next couple of weeks, but unfortunately my Vodafone mobile connection is barely sufficient for emailing let alone playing poker.

I get back on June 6th, just in time for the ECOOP main event though, so I’ll definitely be trying to play that. I don’t get to play many tournaments online these days because I never seem to have much time (and I’m lazy). I used to do pretty well in online tourneys though, so I’m going to try to make time for more of them and definitely want to get a few in before I travel to Vegas.

This is always a pretty quiet time of the year for me poker-wise, but Vegas is just around the corner and after that the tournaments will be coming thick and fast for me. Over the next few months I’ll be defending all of the titles that I managed to win last year (including the PLO side event in Cork!).

I don’t think I can realistically expect to make any successful defences, but I’ll certainly be giving it my best shot. I’m feeling pretty good about poker at the minute so I’m confident that I can get some kind of decent run in a tournament soon.

Also, I’ll try to do some hand analysis or strategy blogs once I get playing again.