Worst Bad Beat!

With the opening of my site I can share with you my first bad beat which just happens to be the most painful beat I have taken in 18 months of poker! Not because of the amount(it did sting though!) but because of the situation that took place for it to occur in the first place.

It was a 6 handed $2000 NL Holdem game and we all had full stacks!

Donkey raises UTG to $80, next folds, next minimum raises to $160. I am next, looking at AA, I wouldn't normally go all in here but for some reason I just pushed my entire $2000 stack into the center inexplicably expecting action. The first raiser proved me right instantly calling the $2000 as did the minimum raiser making it a $6000 pot before the flop (rare to say the least)!

At the Crpytologic network cards are turned face up when no more action can take place so you get to see the joy or pain of what you are up against before the turn and river are dealt. The flop was A25 rainbow so I had a set of aces. The first raiser starts crying in chat that he didn't mean to call the all in, which was obviously true as he had 89 and instantly called the all in(oops). The second all in had AK and was drawing dead to a runner runner split pot(lol).

Turn was the 7...

River was the 6 giving the accidental caller the nut straight and my $6000!

The pain was mighty, not only did I lose to runner runner straight here but the donkey had to accidentally call the all in for me to lose the pot!

Back online!

I had been promising to get a website up and going again for quite some time. It was always in the works but poker was just taking up too much of my time to get it together so I kept putting it off. I have always had a website presence where I posted my general thoughts with the last one being TheINClan website which I webmastered for a couple of years. That website was very popular for quite some time amongst the Warcraft 3 community as well as the wider gaming community.

Recently I stumbled across Blogger.com and found that you can publish your blog directly to your FTP site which I didn't realize was possible. That took away the whole chore of coding news and comments scripts which gave me the motivation to go ahead and start posting again quickly and easily! This site can be got too from the url's :- http://www.tillerman.org, http://www.iaingirdwood.com and the ill-fated http://www.expectsomething.com which was meant to have been my new site after TheINClan.com shut down.

As anyone who knows me will know I quit gaming after the 2004 World Cyber Games (around 18 months ago) to take up poker full time. I have been very successful in that time progressing to quite a high skill level in a relatively short period of time. You measure poker success by how much money you earn and in that department I have done well enough to take it up full time with no other source of income for the past couple of years.

However to do that I had to sacrifice gaming, giving poker my fullest and most obsessive/compulsive attention in exactly the same way as I approached Warcraft and Starcraft. In other words I played like a maniac, putting in 12 hour days of poker non stop for 6 months. Things have quietened down now giving me some more free time where I can do some other stuff such as post this Blog daily! I am much more relaxed about poker recently, generally only playing 3-4 hours a day maximum.

I know a lot of gamers who switched from gaming to Poker, I could name 30 probably just off the top of my head so there must be hundreds and hundreds of them who have switched since I started. It was obvious that top video gamers would make top poker players for the most part, even more amazing is that fact that how good you were at gaming seems to correlate roughly to how good you are at poker. This is probably due to the character traits of some top gamers :- Obsessiveness, Drive, Competitiveness and of course some semblance of intelligence. And of course with Internet poker, ex gamers have a huge advantage, being able to Multi Task 7-8 poker windows very easily compared to someone without that same experience who can struggle with 2 or 3.

I am probably going to talk about poker for 80% of my blog but it certainly won't be limited to poker. I still have interests in a lot of other things including gaming which will also be fun to talk about, just like the good old days =) !