Poker Blog Tourney

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 6667178

Experiment over

I stopped at 40 hours after accidentally seeing my balance at Ultimatebet and shortly after the same again happened on Ladbrokes during a reload. It also didn't help that I saw I was down 20k on Ultimatebet when I thought I was around even. It was all good though after checking around all the accounts. The other sites took care of the loss there plus five figures of profit. It is just to hard to avoid seeing your balance during reloads at some of the sites. Oh well =)

Tunak Tunak Tun Wow

The new Draenei race from the forthcoming World of Warcraft Expasnion has a pretty interesting dance sequence. Blizzard employees obviously spending too much time laughing at Tunak Tunak Tun like me =)

Away

I am staying at a friends house for a few days but someones post in the comments reminded me to post the following link for Poker Torrents. I won't be posting links anymore to poker torrents now that this site exists. Just bookmark it and join up. It has FAQ's and forums if you get stuck :-

The Poker Bay. All the latest WPT's and NBC Heads up matches are there as well as much much more. Enjoy!

Stu Ungar from 1981

I got lazy about ripping this but finally did it after being reminded by some people. It is the last 5 minutes or so from the 1981 World Series of Poker. Stu Ungars second win. A large contrast I think with the 1997 footage some 16 years later.

The poker experiement is still going strong. I am at 26 Hours and 10 minutes played. I played pretty badly yesterday, semi tilting all day. I am getting nervous not looking at the cashier when I feel myself losing over the past couple of days =) I am determined to stick it out though.

Agent911 gave me a link in the comments to the E3 presentation video of Supreme Commander. Check it out, looks very impressive so far!

250 Hours Blind Experiment

I am doing a somewhat interesting experiement over the next 250 hours of play. This involves never updating my daily statistics which I keep religiously and never looking at the cashier on any poker site I play. In other words after a week I will have absolutely no idea how I'm doing at poker.

I have already started and am at 16 hours, 30minutes played and all I know is that I am probably down but I wouldn't be suprised if I was even or up either. It is just a general overall feeling. If that is how clueless I am after 16 hours just think what it will be like on hour 249 =)

I reckon it will take me 2 months to complete although this will require playing more than I have recently. It may even make me play a lot more just to get it over with, I have been playing quite a lot over the past few days. I have no reason to cash out or cash in. The only thing that would screw me over is if I go bust on one site some time during the run. Then it will give me a clue to how terrible I am doing and I might have to quit this experiement prematurely :)

Current hours played : 16 Hours, 30minutes.
Start date : May the 12th
Estimated time of completetion : Late June or Early July.
Sites played : Ultimatebet, Pokerstars, Littlewoods(Crpytologic network), Ladbrokes and Partypoker.
Limits played : Mostly $2000 ($2500 at Ultimatebet) NL Hold'Em tables but with one or two £2000 ($3800) NL Hold'em tables or $5000 NL Hold'Em tables. I will not sit at $10,000 or £5000 NL Hold'Em tables once during this experiement.
Tables played : Five or Six tables, 95% of the time 6 handed or less. I will force myself to play only one heads up game whilst multi tabling or 2 if they are particularly good.

Now the question is, will I play better or worse not looking at daily statistics? Technically it shouldn't matter but psychologically I think it might. At the end of the day all you have to do is play each and every hand as well as you possibly can regardless of previous results. Right? =) I guess we'll see.

It will certainly be exciting tallying up my totals on hour 250.

Supreme Commander

Agent911's comment to my Starcraft 2 post inspired me to research this game as I am getting desperate for some new competitive RTS to be released that is of the same quality as Starcraft. Only so much grinding in the World of Warcraft can be done before you begin to lose hope.

I am really harsh though when it comes to non Blizzard RTS titles because not one has come close to being of the same quality as the Blizzard titles so far. Even the most disappointing one - Warcraft 3 is vastly superior to any non Blizzard RTS. Sad but true.

I found a Gamespy preview from July 2005 that has a lot of really promising information in it and some pretty cool screenshots of Supreme Commander.



Some promising huge unit battles in this screen shot. I just hope the units have some individuality about them like in Blizzard titles. I didn't play Total Annihilation much but one major fault I thought with it was that all the units felt the same and looked similar with small variations. I really HATE that. This is one of the same problems I find with the Age of Empires line of games too. A hundred variations of a unit on a horse. So please don't have 15 variations of a small chunky tank in this game. I'm begging you!

"The modern RTS, Taylor asserts, has been moving inward: in games like Warcraft III you deal up close with individual units or small squads. Taylor wants to move outward." - This was one of the biggest faults with Warcraft 3, I want Starcraft style battles again with a similar economy. Not 5 units on gold and 8 units on wood and you are done =(

The game was at E3 and gamespot put up a small text preview with some new information on it today.



"However, if you, like Taylor, want to keep things big, you'll be able to take advantage of some of Supreme Commander's other unique features--dual monitor support, which lets you keep one eye zoomed in on one of the game's huge battles, and the other on a zoomed-out view of the world to keep track of larger developments in the war." - Very cool feature, perfect for us poker players who already have dual and tri monitor set-ups =)

Another recent E3 review from someone at Shacknews. I just noticed that Supreme Commanders Acronym is SC. That is really unfortunate since everyone uses the exact same shortcut for Starcraft. Silly mistake =)

Agent911 works for Gas Powered Games and I believe is working on the networking for the game. It goes without saying that if you don't have a battle.net style in game ranking system then the game will fail at the first hurdle. No community = no future. Apart from the quality of the Blizzard games, Battle.net has been one of the major reasons their titles have survived with huge communities of players over many years. No gamespy please or just as bad would be a terribly implemented Battle.net clone as we saw in Age of Mythology. Got to do it well or not at all =)

Polish and perfection is the key to huge success, something that only Blizzard has done so far in RTS in my opinion. Supreme Commander is slated for an early 2007 release!

Tourney Result

Another small but tough line up this week with half the field being internet poker millionaires and the other half being $100 grinders! =)

Congratulations to Tasario who took out H@££INGGOL heads up for the victory. Kirderf managed to take third even though he quit and sat out to go the movies from 12th place onwards. How many times have I told you that you are rigged Fredrik? You make money not even playing.

Do you like my placing? Kind of embaressing but H@££ forced me in on a 50/50 when he raised and I reraised with QQ and he pushed all in with AK. Another rigged player =)

Starcraft 2 soon to be announced?

Blizzard Job Application

This job application is practically tailored for me. I wish this job had come up a few years ago, I would definitely have tried to get it.

Look at the pluses :=
* Game design experience on a shipped product with head-to-head game-play
* Experience in designing and playing Real-Time-Strategy games
* Has played Blizzard strategy games extensively
* Played Warcraft 3 and/or StarCraft competitively

In your cover letter please answer the following questions :=
* What games are you currently playing?
* Which competitive online games have you played?
* What is your win/loss record in your "Top 3" favorite competitive games?

I played Warcraft2 for 3 years, Starcraft for 1 year, Broodwar for 2 years and Warcraft3 for 2 years. I was #1 at Warcraft 2 in all the various ladders/leagues many times over. Same for Starcraft/Broodwar for the first year when I played a lot and the same for Warcraft3(Reign of Chaos).

Not only that but Blizzard used many of my balance suggestions from the INClan website when I did extensive balance analysis of their changes in patches for Warcraft3.

My favorite all time games and most played in order are :-
#1. Starcraft/Broodwar
#2. Warcraft2
#3. Warcraft3/Duke Nuke'em 3D

Anyway, it is still exciting that Starcraft 2 might be announced soon as what else can it be? What else? This got me excited today and it is probably over 2 years away =).

Stu Ungar and Tourney

Remember the tournament tomorrow(2:30PM EST/7:30PM GMT at Pokerstars, pw:tillerman), don't let Tunak Tunak Tun below make you forget now!

I said I would post an old WSOP snippet, this one is from the 1997 World Series of Poker where Stu Ungar pulled off his 3rd WSOP victory.

His physical demise from drug abuse is obvious but tomorrow I'll post an even older WSOP snippet from 1981 when Stu Ungar won his second WSOP. Quite a stark contrast!

Screw Stu Ungar

I was going to post a snippet from the 1997 Wsop today but instead I came across this video. I've only watched it around 15 times today, 5 times during my poker session today where I did good.

This is the greatest shit ever. I am going to learn the dances and buy the orange outfit(he is my favorite closely followed by Mr Green).

Sunday Tournament

This sunday at 2:30PM EST (7:30PM GMT) will be the 3rd of my weekly tournaments. The first one was won by Elky and the second by Ackbleh. The line-ups are pretty tough for a $50 entry tournament but the honour and prestige you gain if you win are right up there with a WSOP bracelet event. The password is again : tillerman.

I was looking through my DVD's and saw I had the WSOP's from the early 80's through to the late 90's. Not all of them but I'm sure some of you haven't seen any part of them. I think I will upload small snippets of interesting parts as I find them to youtube.

For now though here is TonyG Part 3 from the Paris WPT :-


A couple of new torrents are out also, the second episode of the NBC National Heads up Championships as well as WPT Season 4: Pokerstars Caribbean Adventure.

In other news, Pokerstars has finally got rid of the rebuy trick, no more regular 15K+ stacks. Flat lined 2k-4k stacks like all other sites now :)