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Day 7: This is day 7 of my final (I hope) attempt at giving up the dreaded weed (cigs), I say final because due to ill-health it could be my final act.
I have been a heavy smoker since the age of 15 and have never been able to pack it in, towards the latter part of my life stopped trying. 5 yrs ago I started having breathing problems and was is
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 Caspar Berry has nearly run out of things to say about Ace-Jack offsuit. As he brings his thoughrs to a conclusion, they seem to be clouded by visins of a hot chick in a bikini...
For those of you who want to enjoy your poker and not get too bogged down in the boring expectation calculations that underpin the decision making process of poker, yo
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 Life is good. I have a beautiful loving girlfriend, a caring family and a lovely home; I’m a partner in a thriving business; I own a German sports car [sorry, where’s this going? Ed.] which goes exceedingly fast and every night I lay my head on the finest Egyptian cotton pillows. Yet still this feeling remains deep inside the pit of my stomach – I
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 Many players believe that they can enhance their game by adopting certain practices within their lifestyle. Seasoned pro Cyndi Violette attributes a lot of her success to a strict macrobiotic diet, while poker brat Phil Hellmuth prays to the universe, leaving notes on mirrors with messages like, “Today is going to be a good day. Great things will h
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 I’m Sick. Seriously sick. No matter what I do to control what’s happening to me, it’s taking over and I can’t stop it. No, I’m not The Incredible HULK... it’s something far more dangerous and sinister... I love poker!
Yes, the glorious game has become a permanent fi xture in my once moribund life. Over the last two years I’ve become an allsingi
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 I recently hosted an 80-player tournament with the assistance of the lovely people at Betfred. It was a great success overall, but during the early stages I’d heard that one particular guy was constantly aggravating players.
After spending 20 seconds at his table I was indeed able to confi rm all reports: We had a Class A, bonafi de tool in our
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 Freaks like us are not generally too fussy about where poker games occur. A game of poker is a game of poker as far as I’m concerned, which explains how I fi nd myself sitting in a charity match for some conglomerate monster that has very kindly decided to give 0.0000001% of its weekly profi ts to charity. Bless ‘em.
The guy who runs the tourne
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 The world really is a very small place. Just a month after leaving Montreal for Europe, I found myself at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport boarding a plane for Korea and the PokerStars Asian Pacific Poker Tour. I travel a lot, all the time, but I love Asia and hadn’t been there since I went to China in 2001, so I was really excited.
It was an 1
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 Last month I told you how much I was looking forward to going to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. Well, so much for that! It was the worst WSOP of my career.
It all went so badly wrong. But I think I learnt two big lessons from it.
The first is that I don’t have to win every single pot just because I’ve put some chips in. It’s ok to fig
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 As I write this, I’m really, really mad. I just busted out in 31st place of the $50,000 H.O.R.S.E event at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. They only pay down to 16th. I’d been in great shape, so I’m absolutely furious.
I built up my stack from 100,000 to 160,000 in the fi rst three hours of play and this was the most chips I would have
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 Hi everyone. I’m writing this column from Riviera Maya in Mexico where I’m staying at a yoga retreat. It’s really important before an intense period of play - like the World Series of Poker, where I‘m going to play in about 20 tournaments over a six weeks period - to be in a good, strong state of mind. And to do that, sometimes you have to just sit
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 Last month I was in Las Vegas playing the WPT World Championship at the Bellagio. However, before I talk about that, I want to tell you how I got there! I’m friends with Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque Du Soleil who, like me, is from Montreal. He’s massive back home and about a year ago he started playing poker.
A week before the big $25,0
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 I’ve had a crazy month. In less than 30 days I found myself in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Las Vegas (again!), San Jose, Montreal... and then I ended up in Monte Carlo! So what can I tell you? Well, I could tell you all about the fi rst event I played last month: the NBC Heads-Up Championship in Vegas. It was a great event and I had loads of fun. I had
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 Pommo has left the building! Well, he just isn’t with us this month. Instead, Virgin Poker’s Ali Masterman steps in to offer a story we all can aspire to...
Allow me to introduce myself; I am a poker nut. I work for a poker company by day; I play poker when at home by night. Having worked at Virgin Poker for the last couple of years I’ve seen t
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 Despite the fact that poker is all about exploiting your opposition and being entirely self-serving at the table, the poker community runs various benefits and charity evenings, successfully raising thousands for numerous good causes.
On a recent visit to Baden, Austria, I finally had the chance to do my own minor good deed with my ill-gotten p
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 Ego is a massive part of being a poker player, and I’m sure we can all think of a few famous players that prove this point. It’s also something I’ve been accused of in the past. It’s definitely a poker truism that confidence plays a big part in being a winning player and I certainly like to exude an air of arrogance at the table, but there’s a fine
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 One of the reasons I don’t play so much live poker is because the atmosphere in card rooms can often be intimidating or downright unpleasant. Poker attracts a variety of people from the super-nice to the socially retarded (probably more of the latter) and I’ve always wondered if the reason internet poker is so popular is that you don’t have to sit
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 Las Vegas is my home. I’ve been lucky enough to spend several months of my life there. When all my journeying is done and my ambition satiated I’ll end my days there. I’ll sit by the pool with my Hawaiian shirt open and my gold chains resting on my bloated 55 year old belly. In this bliss I’ll contemplate life and poker and my indecently young wife
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 First of all a confession: unlike most of you, I started my poker life playing Limit Hold ’em. I discovered the game on holiday and the next few years were a slow descent into Vegas living, poker dreams and a ‘well spent youth’… but that’s for another column. The point is apart from a few tournaments, I played almost entirely limit – grinding out m
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 I’m starting to feel settled in here at Flush and it’s time for me to be honest with you all. I’m a bit… well… sick. I actually have a variety of sicknesses, but only one that’s relevant to discussion here.
Put simply, the festering creeping disease that lies dormant yet always nagging and scratching at my waking mind is that I yearn to play po
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 Every one of you has dreamt at sometime about being on the TV; to be the leading guest of a poker show, right? I was born in 1978 and like many others was brought up on bread and TV. Like many others, I also really wanted to be on the TV. Of course growing older and realizing that dreams aren’t everything in life, day by day you become more realist
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 Poker pros used to dread the sight of other well-known pros at their tables in big tournaments. Now they are starting to more fear the ‘whipper-snapper’ Internet players at the table. Luca Pagano explains why.
One of the most interesting opportunities a player has online - particularly at pokerstars.com - is to be able to qualify for major even
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 The other night I logged on to Ultimate Bet and noted that its kindly corporate apparatchiks have come up with a new game. Or rather, they have taken a very old game and devised its online metamorphosis. Step forward, Roshambo, an ancient, transcultural form of combat that many of us will have played as children. In other words, rock – paper – scis
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 Better a bad day in the water than a good day at school. So goes the old saying in surfing, a sport I’ve enjoyed for some 20 years and about which I’ve just finished a book called Surf Nation: In Search of the Fast Rights and Hollow Lefts of Britain and Ireland. Its premise is that, taken collectively, Britain and Ireland represent a surfing nation
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 Before I started playing poker my idea of bubbles was heavily influenced by chemistry lessons. Not that I was any good at chemistry - in fact I was so bad at it that my school quietly removed me from classes before I could do any lasting damage to either the Bunsen burners or my own perilously fragile confi dence in matters of science.
However,
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 Readers fearing for my sanity can sleep easy: I have found somewhere to play poker in Cornwall. Last month’s column may have been written from a padded cell after Dave “The Devilfish” Ulliot swam ashore at the Cornish cove I now call home and pillaged my bankroll, but a month is a long, long time in poker. My liberty has been restored, and here I a
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 I’ve just moved to Cornwall. Not just any old part of Cornwall, but a little place two miles from Land’s End. Land’s End! The name says it all. I can take a stroll and be on the beach within minutes, and what do I see? Nothing but the sea, because here on the edge of the known world, that’s all there is. These past few weeks it’s been a pretty expl
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 The Lawman is dead, long live The Swindler. With a new identity comes a new appreciation of the maths involved in poker. However, just because you appreciate something, doesn’t mean you have to like it.
It had to happen. In many ways, it was a miracle I’d avoided them so long. Ten months of poker without once running into my bete noire, numbers
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 With the online action a little slow, Lawman turns his back on no limit hold’em and ventures bravely into the unknown…
It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday, the kids are rampaging across the village aristocrat’s land and my wife is upstairs. We returned the night before from a trip to Ireland, and Karen is still unpacking. Why do women always take
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 I ’ve probably said this so many times over the last two years that it’s becoming more farcical with each utterance, but I REALLY want to play more live poker.
I recently picked up a sponsorship deal that evaporated almost before it had begun, when the company decided to reverse out of the industry (and before you joke, I’m only 90% sure their
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 When Joe Hachem won the World Series of Poker Main Event back in 2005 he could never have known how busy his life was about to get. Flush somehow got 20 minutes with him out in Vegas.
‘Spare Time’ isn’t really a concept relevant to a WSOP World Champion wandering the corridors of the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. If Joe Hachem looked – even for a nano
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 Well I’ll give you this – you’ve got stamina! I mean the EPT Grand was only, what, fi ve months ago, and here I am still prattling on about it! Then again, short of coming down to the Flush offi ce and holding a gun to my head there’s not a lot you can do to stop me is there? Why not turn the page and save us all the bother?
No?
Ok – then l
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 So... last time I attempted to entertain you with my take on the preliminary stages of the Monte Carlo EPT. The bad news? There’s more!
In the main tournament room, I’m scribbling away at my note book – making notes on interesting table draws – when Hendon Monbster, Barny Boatman walks in. I fi nd myself hiding because I still owe him 50p (he l
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 Okay... so the Egypt stuff was pushing my luck. But hey! What’s the point of having a monthly column if you can’t abuse it every now and then! So, pokerrelated you say? OK, how about the Grand Final of the EPT in Monte Carlo?
Now I know that if you’re someone who really cares about poker you’ll already know everything about the actual event fro
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 ‘Life’s a bitch, Toti’ I say to my Egyptian friend, increasing my sofa-bound angle of recline to an almost horizontal aspect. ‘Indeed’, Toti agrees, a huge plume of strawberry-flavoured smoke rising from his mouth. The pipe between us issues forth its trade mark “hubble-bubble”.
He had earlier apologised for being a little late in replenishing
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 Sometimes you can get so focused on the big issues, that the small, important details pass you by. In poker, there are so many small, important details to keep track of (stack sizes, blinds, position, player characteristics, etc.) that it’s easy to miss the big stuff and suffer as a result. I played out in the Aruba Classic a while back, and found
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 Tilting eh? Perhaps you can control it, or perhaps - like most of us - you can’t.
Personally I find tilting is a phenomenon generally misunderstood by non-poker players. Visions fi ll their heads of PC monitors being thrown though windows, keyboards snapped in half, and large quantities of dead laptops heaped in a landfill somewhere just outsid
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 When I started writing about poker, I pretty much pictured myself sticking to the obvious. Interviews with Hellmuth… tournament reporting… hand analysis… that sort of thing. However, as soon as I started travelling to and from the big tournaments with some of the actual poker players, I realised there were far more interesting things to talk about
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 In the process of researching for the various articles I write, I get to play with all manner of poker-related toys. Needless to say that in this modern age many of them are aimed at online players. Not least of these virtual gadgets are the various tools that plug into your online game and promise to make your life easier by calculating everything
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 It’s yet another beautiful morning in Las Vegas, and I'm up early (well, early for Las Vegas anyway) to beat the registration queues that have become a regular sight in the MGM since the gorgeous brown poker room opened its doors back in March 2005. Sure enough I'm one of the first few to be bothered at this ungodly hour (it's not even nine o'clock
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 Before poker consumed my life I was in the video games industry for 15 years. When I began in the early nineties it was an enthusiasts’ industry, with boys in bedrooms boshing out games in a matter of months and selling them through mail order. No one took you seriously; everyone asked you when you were going to get “a real job” and then looked dow
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