champions

When these Euro championships were starting, at first I wasn't too bothered cos England weren't playing but I got a sudden realisation just before the start that half the Liverpool team would be in the Spanish squad, so why not follow as though they were England.

So I did and had a few quid on them and all of a sudden I had found my enthusiasm for the tournament again.

Add to that the fact that Spain had by far the best squad and, for once, the team I am following wins the things!

Come on you Spain!

.......Fernando Torres,
Liverpool's number nine!!!!!

Lazy lazy lazy

There just aren't enough hours in the day......

either that or I'm just too lazy!

I just never seem to get around to updating this and when I do I can't remember any specific hands as it is a while since I played them.

So I'm toying with the idea of changing the tack of this slightly and paying a little less attention to specific hands.

I don't know, I'll see how it develops.

Since I last updated I've played a couple of times coming 8th for something like £120 and busting out the hand before the rebuys ended and not bothering to rebuy, especially after passing on 2 occasions with suited connector type hands with only 1000 chips and blinds at 100/200 only to see the flop give me a full house if I had played!

However, the biggest event in the last couple of weeks was courtesy of Ladbrokes.

I won a share in their horse last year and because it didn't run due to injury it was carried over to this year too.

Well they had a shareholders event at Windsor a week last Monday and I qualified for that in the freeroll which gave me the night's accommodation in the Copthorne Hotel in Windor and hospitality at the racecourse with free food and drink and a poker game afterwards in the hotel - along with $150 expenses.

I had a really good time, meeting the other 19 players who won their way through.

we ended up having a little STT after the event between 4 of us in one of the players' rooms, the highlight being me calling an all in bet when a flush card hit the turn when it was heads up for the other player to show his flush that he had mis read as the Ace of spades he thought he had was the ace of clubs!

Great read by me then (not) - as he thought he had the flush even though he didn't!

However the best part of the night was one of the horses called Finnegan McCool, an 8-1 shot who romped home in an 8 horse race where I used all my sport betting skills by using the theory that "we're on a Ladbrokes poker event and there is a horse called McCool running. I read his blog every time it's updated so I've got to put some money on it!!!!"

So thanks to Mick for a nice little earner!

Anyway, I'll try to keep this up a bit more regularly.

Pokerplayer Championships

Haven't played live this week because I'm playing today in the Pokerplayer Championships in Bolton. I'll be setting off in a few minutes.
I did play a couple of tournaments on Ladbrokes where I won a very well structured $5 event for $600 odd but the best thing about the tournament was that when we got to heads up there was still a lot of play left. The heads up battlle went on for a good half hour or more with the chip lead swinging quite a bit. But I managed to overcome a 671k to 178k chip disadvantage to win.

However, more exciting was the opportunity I had in the Ladbrokes main event added tournament on Thursday where I was chip leader with about 20 players left. Unfortunately the average blinds in this event was on 7 big blinds at this point and I ended up going out in 12th with 44 against QQ after having got away with quite a few steals.

I could have been a lot luckier though as one hand I had raised about 3 times in a row and then I picked up 77 under the gun. Because I had been raising quite a bit at this point including 4 of the previous 6 hands (with good hands I might add - but they hadn't been shown down) so I felt that if I raised again I would be leaving myself open to a reraise with a much wider range so I folded. It did end up getting raised and called by 88 and AK-unfortunately, had I played I would have made a full house and won. That would have given me 3 times the 2nd place's chips but that's the way it goes and I don't like to say "I would have made xx" when I'm in a hand.

I'll update today's tournament tomorrow hopefully.