During my early days on the virtual felt I had designs on constructing a poker site for noobs and I gathered quite a bit of basic information in preparation. I didn't quite get my finger out so the idea never got off the ground but I figured the following was worth sharing.
1997
Online poker was a text only affair with no real money involved. It was played on Internet relay chat (IRC) and was mainly a geeks only affair (including Chris Ferguson and Greg Raymer).
In January Planet Poker became the first online poker room. Initially the only game available was $3/$6 Limit and there were only a handful of players sitting at any one time. Others came along like Delta Casino (who used the same software) but until late 1999 Planet ruled the roost.
1999
The first big player entered the market, Paradise Poker. The site offered Omaha, Seven-Card Stud and Texas Hold'em. The graphics were slick and the software was far faster than its competitors.
Paradise success was largely due to the failure of others. Planet Poker (and others) were found to be using a number generator that could be cracked. They never really recovered from this and by the end of 1999 Paradise Poker became the overwhelming market leader.
2000
Before the end of the year UltimateBet entered the marked and used some of the games biggest names to promote the site. Their choice of Phil Helmuth marked the first time the now common player sponsorship model was used.
Although UltimateBet started to gain a share of the market Paradise were still dominant. By the end of the year Paradise had introduced No-Limit cash games and many of the features we now take for granted such as showing the average pot size in the lobby.
2001
Before 2001 tournament poker didn't really exist. The majority of Paradise pokers 50k players were grinding it out on the limit cash tables. Some of the other sites were running sit and goes and the odd freezeout tournament but online poker was very much a cash game affair.
Partypoker then came into the market with other ideas and they launched by running a huge series of tournaments that culminated in a $1m Main Event on a cruise ship. This was the first $1m guaranteed tournament offered by any online poker site.
In October Pokerstars was launched with the intention of becoming the home of online tournament play. Its first promotion included a $50k guaranteed tournament with a $215 buy-in.
2002
World Poker Tour made its debut on the Travel Channel in the US. It created a huge interest in tournament poker and gave online sites a place to advertise. As a result those sites offering big money pay days started to see huge increases in traffic and this is when the poker boom really started.
The biggest beneficiary of this boom was PartyPoker. They went from nowhere to being the largest online poker room within 2 years. By the summer of 2003 when Chris Moneymaker had persuaded the whole world that anyone could win big it had more players than all of its competitors combined.
Paradise saw its market position fall fast, mainly because it wasn't as yet offering any MTT's. Pokerstars was growing fast and whereas Partypoker used MTT's to get players into their cash games, Pokerstars used MTT's as the end product.
Europe finally took notice and ladbrokes launched its online poker site. They concentrated on the UK and Scandinavian markets and were surprisingly popular. Then many other sports betting companies jumped on the bandwagon. At this time 80% of the online poker market was the US where PartyPoker was easily winning the battle. The bigger it got the more it advertised on TV which led to yet more new players signing up. It soon had tens of thousands of players online at any one time and by 2004 it was making over $1m profit a day.
Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of the action. Most joined through the network model which allowed big firms to enter the market far quicker than if they had to develope their own software.
2004
More start-up sites were entering the market, most notably Full Tilt. It was fronted by some of the biggest names in poker including Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer (who were also involved in the software development).
Poker Pro's have always had a big role in the industry but Full tilt made the pro-led strategy their own. Soon the site had most of the biggest names in poker appearing in TV ads and in a surprisingly short period of time Full Tilt became a major player in the market.
2005
Hundreds of thousands of players were logging on every day across the industry. Poker firms started to go public by selling their shares on the Stock Exchange.
UltimateBet joined Partypoker on the London Stock Exchange with Pokerstars making preparations to follow suit. The whole industry seemed obsessed with cashing out and going public and some of the big players started buying up some of the smaller rooms.
2006
On Friday the 13th of October the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was passed making funding from an online gambling site illegal and everything went into chaos.
Partypoker was the first to react. As a public company with shareholders to protect it could not expose itself to the huge risk to its business so it cut off all US players (80% of its customers) sending its share prices tumbling. Other rooms followed including paradise, iPoker and Cryptologic networks and Ultimatebet sold up and remained open to the US market.
This meant that anyone willing to continue taking US business stood to make a killing. Pokerstars and Full Tilt have always been private companies and reaped the rewards with the former replacing ParyPoker as the worlds largest online poker room.
To Be Continued.....
Tuesday 27 December 2011
Saturday 24 December 2011
2011 Other Pokerish Highlights/News
Downswong Article
Its always nice to have your back slapped now and then and it was an unexpected honour to have one of my posts (reply in one of Royals threads) get turned into an article on the site. Doing the post/article probably made me consciously aware of some of the cuter points I made in it. This then helped me manage my mindset and game better during my difficult patch this year.
13th PKR Hall Of Famer
Being inducted into the HOF was a highlight for sure. Im not usually a fan of the Hall of Fame thing because they often get diluted giving them less meaning (prob what the previous 12 were thinking :P). It was an honour but I do think I have winged it some. Yeah so I post quite a bit and yeah I've been reasonably successful feltside but I have put into PKR far less than I have taken out. If it wasnt for the forum and some of the regulars on there my game would be nowhere near where it is.
HU game for Stacked v the Beyne
What do you do to dilute the fear factor of stepping toe to toe with a HU monster like Beyne? You let a site organise it and let them put up prizes so that even if you get royally pwned you still turn a profit. I didnt as it happens due in no small part to some run godz :P Its safe to say I'm in no rush to stand toe to toe with the Beynerate again any time soon.
Leeds Events
The Live highlight of the year. Ive made some gd mates over the years on PKR and its always great to kick back and have some giggles while pretending to play the pokers. Without a doubt Prinny is the catalyst for a lot of the community feel and peoples connectiveness to PKR as a site/brand because of these meets. These meets and the dutch ones are what allow regs to interconnect and I very much doubt the community would be as it is without them.
Sheffield Team Event/Holidayz
Getting to school, I mean spend time with foxy is always good and as this was my first ever Live bink it has to be a highlight. This was the second year on the spin I had played and Final Tabled this event so either the structures good or the standards terribad but I wont comment further (structures good btw :P). With Foxy finishing just shy of the FT we managed to hit the bubble spot (top 2 teams paid) but I'm sure the binkage will be ours next year.
2nd HU Championship
So the luckbox managed to bink Muds 2nd HU Championship. I had a pretty smooth ride to the final (smooth being that I ran like god) and then got schooled by the Spudlew. He raced into a 2-0 lead by pwning me in hands and snapping my uber light ships (If only he had some sort of snapping range v me :(). Then I got down to 2 and half bbs in the third and went on a Rocky like comeback heater to bink the next 3 and take the title. It was an epic HU battle and a fitting final for such an event.
Its always nice to have your back slapped now and then and it was an unexpected honour to have one of my posts (reply in one of Royals threads) get turned into an article on the site. Doing the post/article probably made me consciously aware of some of the cuter points I made in it. This then helped me manage my mindset and game better during my difficult patch this year.
13th PKR Hall Of Famer
Being inducted into the HOF was a highlight for sure. Im not usually a fan of the Hall of Fame thing because they often get diluted giving them less meaning (prob what the previous 12 were thinking :P). It was an honour but I do think I have winged it some. Yeah so I post quite a bit and yeah I've been reasonably successful feltside but I have put into PKR far less than I have taken out. If it wasnt for the forum and some of the regulars on there my game would be nowhere near where it is.
HU game for Stacked v the Beyne
What do you do to dilute the fear factor of stepping toe to toe with a HU monster like Beyne? You let a site organise it and let them put up prizes so that even if you get royally pwned you still turn a profit. I didnt as it happens due in no small part to some run godz :P Its safe to say I'm in no rush to stand toe to toe with the Beynerate again any time soon.
Leeds Events
The Live highlight of the year. Ive made some gd mates over the years on PKR and its always great to kick back and have some giggles while pretending to play the pokers. Without a doubt Prinny is the catalyst for a lot of the community feel and peoples connectiveness to PKR as a site/brand because of these meets. These meets and the dutch ones are what allow regs to interconnect and I very much doubt the community would be as it is without them.
Sheffield Team Event/Holidayz
Getting to school, I mean spend time with foxy is always good and as this was my first ever Live bink it has to be a highlight. This was the second year on the spin I had played and Final Tabled this event so either the structures good or the standards terribad but I wont comment further (structures good btw :P). With Foxy finishing just shy of the FT we managed to hit the bubble spot (top 2 teams paid) but I'm sure the binkage will be ours next year.
2nd HU Championship
So the luckbox managed to bink Muds 2nd HU Championship. I had a pretty smooth ride to the final (smooth being that I ran like god) and then got schooled by the Spudlew. He raced into a 2-0 lead by pwning me in hands and snapping my uber light ships (If only he had some sort of snapping range v me :(). Then I got down to 2 and half bbs in the third and went on a Rocky like comeback heater to bink the next 3 and take the title. It was an epic HU battle and a fitting final for such an event.
2011 Online Poker Review
Pre 2011 Goals
1 x 10k Score
2 x 2k Scores
10 x 1k Scores
To Improve/Get a cash game
Notable Binks/Scores
7.7k for the Sunday Millions 10th
5.5k for the Main Event Bink
3.9k for the Prestige Bink
2.5k for Primetime (Turbo Triple Chance) Bink
2.3k for Xmas Omaha Masters Bink
2.1k for Sunday GP 2nd
1.7k for Terminator Primetime Bink
1.7k for Monte Carlo Bink
1.7k for Monte Carlo Bink
1.7k for Rebuy Primetime 2nd
1k x 8
Online Performance Review
My stats dont really paint a true picture of my year on the virtual felt. My 3rd and 6th biggest scores came in the same weekend in October and the top two didnt arrive until December. The year started well enough but then I had a 6 month spell in the middle where it just wasnt happening for me. The only profit I showed in this time was largely taken up by the Prestige Bink and the 2nd in the GP. Taking those two out of the equation and I was pretty much a break even player during this period and no matter how much experience you have thats always going to prove damaging. During this spell I was still managing to keep my game relatively together but most MTT journeys had a common theme. I was getting deep often enough but as soon as I got in around the FT bubble or just onto FT's I just couldnt win a race for love nor money. Not just standard races but 2 and 3 outer shizzle and this is largely what knackered my bottom lines. I started to cut back and play less so that I could cope better with the run meh and at one point I only managed to put in 1 months standard volume in a 3 month period. This was never going to improve my stats but at least it stopped me from digging a bigger hole for myself.
After having such a shitty run in MTT's I knew I would have to finally take the jump and learn the cash game shizzle. I was having a long hard look at myself and my continued participation in the game and it seemed pretty obvious I had to act while I still had a full compliment of options. I have some obvious mindset issues regarding cash games in general because for me they seem like such mundane affairs. If I could just get a true read on what all these are I could then concentrate on fine tuning my game and plugging in-game leaks. I've always dabbled in cash (NLH+PLO, Full ring+6 seater+HU) from time to time but never seriously enough to have a large enough sample to analyse (1k here, 2k there etc). I think my biggest leak is left over from my early spunky-monkey days and I guess its fair to say that my fear of monster degen tiltage is greater than any fears I may have about not quite being upto beating the games.
I did dabble earlier in the year with some NLHE and PLO 6 seater cash games but due to my lappy spunking on me I lost all the data. At the end of Nov, start of Dec I decided it was time to try and get some sort of sample in. Enthusiasm proved to be my downfall again and although I was relatively successful (I probably run quite good situationally) it felt like a grind in the truest sense of the word. Over the course of 11 days I managed to log the paltry sum of 29 hours. This is a pretty big fail given I would have logged something in the region of 60/80 hours if I had been grinding MTT's.
My brick walls in cash are:
Enthusiasm (although I share this one in MTT's from time to time)
Almost Static Dynamics - My brain feels programmed for big shifts in dynamics due to my MTT background. PLO cash players at the stakes I was playing basically just played as they played and stack depths or how they played different villains was all pretty standard ABC stuff so it felt like the only thing I had to do was click buttons and hope to run good. This is obviously something I struggle with given I have to control my creativity at the best of times.
Exhaustion - I was only 4 (sometimes 6 on PKR) tabling but I found the repetitiveness of constantly clicking buttons and making basic decisions draining. When this was added to my dire levels of enthusiasm it meant that my sessions were generally very short (usually an hour) and infrequent (at most two a day).
Cash Session Results
My cash sessions were split between PKR (22 hours) and Pokerstars (8 hours). Combined I run approx. $300 above EV.
PKR
496 hands @ PLO25 with $33 loss (-26bb/100)
1320 hands @ PLO50 with $181 profit (27bb/100)
1031 hands @ PLO100 with $517 profit (50bb/100)
620 hands @ PLO200 with $518 profit (42bb/100)
Pokerstars
1483 hands @ PLO100 with $1,205 profit (81bb/100)
The sample is small and I intend to make sure I have more specific cash game targets for next year to try and motivate myself into getting a reasonable level of volume in. The above cash samples would have been bigger had it not been for that MTT wench delivering my best results of the year in my very next session.
My top 2 scores for the year arrived in consecutive days. I bubbled the FT of the Sunday Millions when my AK came unstuck against AJ aip for a 3rd in chips stack. To say I was dejected is something of an understatment. I've been close to 100k top end scores 3 times now and I still dont understand how I came up short (No Final Tables) in any of them. So far a 2 outer, a 3 outer and a lost flip (villain snap calls 20bb with ducks in the BB) are the hands I will have to carry with me for some time to come. The one true positive I took from this Millions performance was that I was pwning on an epic scale and I knew I was at the top of my game. During my Millions adventure I was also involved in the Main Event on PKR and managed to get through to day two with a top 5 stack. In truth if it hadnt been for having to play day two I may well have taken some time out from the virtual game in order to lick my wounds. As it turns out I learned a lot about myself over this weekend and it was nice to top it off with a bink. Its not every weekend that you make two good scores and feel that you played to the best of your abilities. Pwning Staszko in the Millions, making a sick Ace high call v Cody and coming back from being a 6 to 1 dog in the ME heads up were obvious highlights.
Overall I have to be satisfied with how things turned out given that this year has been the most testing since I got involved in the game. The most satsifying thing has been how I have managed to grind out the worst patch without having my game implode like it did during my first real swong. I might not have hit the heights that I was hoping for but I did manage to come out of the other side of it.
Roll on 2012.
1 x 10k Score
2 x 2k Scores
10 x 1k Scores
To Improve/Get a cash game
Notable Binks/Scores
7.7k for the Sunday Millions 10th
5.5k for the Main Event Bink
3.9k for the Prestige Bink
2.5k for Primetime (Turbo Triple Chance) Bink
2.3k for Xmas Omaha Masters Bink
2.1k for Sunday GP 2nd
1.7k for Terminator Primetime Bink
1.7k for Monte Carlo Bink
1.7k for Monte Carlo Bink
1.7k for Rebuy Primetime 2nd
1k x 8
Online Performance Review
My stats dont really paint a true picture of my year on the virtual felt. My 3rd and 6th biggest scores came in the same weekend in October and the top two didnt arrive until December. The year started well enough but then I had a 6 month spell in the middle where it just wasnt happening for me. The only profit I showed in this time was largely taken up by the Prestige Bink and the 2nd in the GP. Taking those two out of the equation and I was pretty much a break even player during this period and no matter how much experience you have thats always going to prove damaging. During this spell I was still managing to keep my game relatively together but most MTT journeys had a common theme. I was getting deep often enough but as soon as I got in around the FT bubble or just onto FT's I just couldnt win a race for love nor money. Not just standard races but 2 and 3 outer shizzle and this is largely what knackered my bottom lines. I started to cut back and play less so that I could cope better with the run meh and at one point I only managed to put in 1 months standard volume in a 3 month period. This was never going to improve my stats but at least it stopped me from digging a bigger hole for myself.
After having such a shitty run in MTT's I knew I would have to finally take the jump and learn the cash game shizzle. I was having a long hard look at myself and my continued participation in the game and it seemed pretty obvious I had to act while I still had a full compliment of options. I have some obvious mindset issues regarding cash games in general because for me they seem like such mundane affairs. If I could just get a true read on what all these are I could then concentrate on fine tuning my game and plugging in-game leaks. I've always dabbled in cash (NLH+PLO, Full ring+6 seater+HU) from time to time but never seriously enough to have a large enough sample to analyse (1k here, 2k there etc). I think my biggest leak is left over from my early spunky-monkey days and I guess its fair to say that my fear of monster degen tiltage is greater than any fears I may have about not quite being upto beating the games.
I did dabble earlier in the year with some NLHE and PLO 6 seater cash games but due to my lappy spunking on me I lost all the data. At the end of Nov, start of Dec I decided it was time to try and get some sort of sample in. Enthusiasm proved to be my downfall again and although I was relatively successful (I probably run quite good situationally) it felt like a grind in the truest sense of the word. Over the course of 11 days I managed to log the paltry sum of 29 hours. This is a pretty big fail given I would have logged something in the region of 60/80 hours if I had been grinding MTT's.
My brick walls in cash are:
Enthusiasm (although I share this one in MTT's from time to time)
Almost Static Dynamics - My brain feels programmed for big shifts in dynamics due to my MTT background. PLO cash players at the stakes I was playing basically just played as they played and stack depths or how they played different villains was all pretty standard ABC stuff so it felt like the only thing I had to do was click buttons and hope to run good. This is obviously something I struggle with given I have to control my creativity at the best of times.
Exhaustion - I was only 4 (sometimes 6 on PKR) tabling but I found the repetitiveness of constantly clicking buttons and making basic decisions draining. When this was added to my dire levels of enthusiasm it meant that my sessions were generally very short (usually an hour) and infrequent (at most two a day).
Cash Session Results
My cash sessions were split between PKR (22 hours) and Pokerstars (8 hours). Combined I run approx. $300 above EV.
PKR
496 hands @ PLO25 with $33 loss (-26bb/100)
1320 hands @ PLO50 with $181 profit (27bb/100)
1031 hands @ PLO100 with $517 profit (50bb/100)
620 hands @ PLO200 with $518 profit (42bb/100)
Pokerstars
1483 hands @ PLO100 with $1,205 profit (81bb/100)
The sample is small and I intend to make sure I have more specific cash game targets for next year to try and motivate myself into getting a reasonable level of volume in. The above cash samples would have been bigger had it not been for that MTT wench delivering my best results of the year in my very next session.
My top 2 scores for the year arrived in consecutive days. I bubbled the FT of the Sunday Millions when my AK came unstuck against AJ aip for a 3rd in chips stack. To say I was dejected is something of an understatment. I've been close to 100k top end scores 3 times now and I still dont understand how I came up short (No Final Tables) in any of them. So far a 2 outer, a 3 outer and a lost flip (villain snap calls 20bb with ducks in the BB) are the hands I will have to carry with me for some time to come. The one true positive I took from this Millions performance was that I was pwning on an epic scale and I knew I was at the top of my game. During my Millions adventure I was also involved in the Main Event on PKR and managed to get through to day two with a top 5 stack. In truth if it hadnt been for having to play day two I may well have taken some time out from the virtual game in order to lick my wounds. As it turns out I learned a lot about myself over this weekend and it was nice to top it off with a bink. Its not every weekend that you make two good scores and feel that you played to the best of your abilities. Pwning Staszko in the Millions, making a sick Ace high call v Cody and coming back from being a 6 to 1 dog in the ME heads up were obvious highlights.
Overall I have to be satisfied with how things turned out given that this year has been the most testing since I got involved in the game. The most satsifying thing has been how I have managed to grind out the worst patch without having my game implode like it did during my first real swong. I might not have hit the heights that I was hoping for but I did manage to come out of the other side of it.
Roll on 2012.
Friday 23 December 2011
Poker - The Beginning
On Tuesday the 28th of September 2007 I played my very first hand of No limit Texas Hold'em. I had an online betting account with Sky and clicked through on a banner advertising their poker software. A different form of gambling I thought, that'll do me. I took a quick look at the hand rankings, read that a flush beat a straight and figured I was ready to jump in and pwn. My first ever game was a 5p/10p, 6 max game and I sat down with a full stack. From that very first single tabling session I knew I had finally found my gambling Nirvana.
The first couple of weeks followed the deposit, withdraw or busto cycle at £50 a pop. Looking back now I'm not quite sure how I managed it but I was basically breaking even. Then things really took off and my only conclusion is that my poker career started with a gert heater. I somehow managed to spin up a four figure roll by two tabling with 50% of my roll on the line (lolz, BRM FTW) before I hit the ground hard. A bit of epic, soul destroying run bad (or run normal) and a shot or two of whisky was all it took to send me to bustoville.
I simply couldnt face the bullshit, rigged software ( :D lolz) for a while and it took me over a week before I decided to give the poker lark another bash. Like my first attempt I was racing through the stakes with the same trusted BRM in place (lolz) and before long I was into the K's. Its hard to describe how good I thought I was at the time. I was hearing people feltside saying how they had played for a decade or so and I was smashing em all to bits. I literally felt like the best player on the planet (uber lolz). To celebrate my godlike poker skillz I decided I should reward myself by taking the day off to buy a stockpile of my favourite tipples (money was tight due to personal circumstances and life run bad) before going on a day bender with a mate. The morning after the night before the first thing that came into focus was my laptop dangling off the edge of the coffee table with my two credit cards sitting beside it. I honestly couldnt remember hitting the virtual felt but there was a chorus of "oh fks" going on inside my head. When I gathered the required coordination skills I pulled the lappy close and logged onto my account. As soon as I saw the transaction history I was met with my all time, degen, worthlessness low. Not only had I spunked off my roll but I had hit my cards too. What a fkn tool I was. Thankfully I have never even come close to repeating this level of knobish degeneracy since.
Within a week the bruises had died down some (although the pain still remains) and as Poker was partly to blame for getting me into this shitty spot, poker needed to get me out it. I needed help and put in the first bit of work towards getting better at this crazy poker malarkey. After finding odds and sods online I found out about this BRM shizzle and decided I would try and do things properly from now on. I started to venture into the MTT games and even back then as a relative (or total) noob I could see that I had an edge on most. It didnt take me long to bring my credit card balances back to zero and I was gradually getting more and more seduced by that sexy MTT wench.
First MTT Score
I was still green as fk but I somehow managed to get to the FT of Sky's premier event, The Open. It was a 6 max game with a terribad structure but I was happy as a pig in shino to be sitting there with a monster 4/5BB stack as the FT kicked off. There were 3 big stacks and 2 with about 10bbs and like the noob I was it was all about the laddering and waiting for aces :D
In the first hand I was in the SB and one of the 10bb stacks ended up busting. Then another busts taking me down to the final 4 players. I was so loving the rush of laddering like it was some 5th level strategy I had just invented (lolz). When the blinds came back round to me I had little more than 2/3bbs left and one of the most bizarre hands I've ever been involved in took place. The stack sizes of the villains ranged from 12bb upto probably 30bb with the big stack sitting to my right. First player to act Jams, button Jams and then I did my best laddering dance ever as the big stack in the SB Jammed. This was the first time Id sat on a final table with the top end being more than £200 and some of the prize jumps in this were more than that. I obviously fold my hand and cross my fingers that the big stack takes one of the other two players out. The players flipped the cards over and the big stack has Aces v 99 v X (another PP I think) and his hand holds. I found myself HU in one of the strangest FT's Ive ever played in even to this day. I obviously lost the next hand but the gods had delivered me a 2nd place payout of something like £1.2k/£1.6k (how I cant remember is beyond me, doh). I think from that moment I knew I would be hooked on MTT's for life.
Before Poker
Nipper Years
If I said I never had any gamble in me till I found poker I'd be something of a gert liar. I'm not sure if its a nurture or nature thing but its fair to say I've always had that bit of Gamble/degen about me. Betting and gambling was always around me when I was growing up so its hardly surprising I got sucked into many different forms of it. Many of my most enjoyable kiddie memories revolve around going to the dogs with my Dad and his clan. At 10 scoring a goal like Gary Lineker or spraying a pass like Glenn Hoddle were the only things that ever came close to achieving the same buzz.
Some peoples greatest childhood memories may be seeing a singer perform or going on a fab holiday to some far flung exotic location. Mine was seeing Scurlogue Champ binking a race at Sheffield and outscoring even the wildest of wild stories my dad used to tell me about him. Meeting the living Legend and his owner/trainer post race was the pinnacle of my child years. Just thinking back now sends excitable chills racing down my spine. The dog was just the most awesomest racing machine ever. Its not just that it binked for fun but it was the super intelligent way he binked em. Its as though he was just taking the piss all the time and would almost always be miles behind coming onto the last lap. He would then just blow the field away like they had stopped still and snatch the bink at the last second. Nice memories :)
If I said I never had any gamble in me till I found poker I'd be something of a gert liar. I'm not sure if its a nurture or nature thing but its fair to say I've always had that bit of Gamble/degen about me. Betting and gambling was always around me when I was growing up so its hardly surprising I got sucked into many different forms of it. Many of my most enjoyable kiddie memories revolve around going to the dogs with my Dad and his clan. At 10 scoring a goal like Gary Lineker or spraying a pass like Glenn Hoddle were the only things that ever came close to achieving the same buzz.
Some peoples greatest childhood memories may be seeing a singer perform or going on a fab holiday to some far flung exotic location. Mine was seeing Scurlogue Champ binking a race at Sheffield and outscoring even the wildest of wild stories my dad used to tell me about him. Meeting the living Legend and his owner/trainer post race was the pinnacle of my child years. Just thinking back now sends excitable chills racing down my spine. The dog was just the most awesomest racing machine ever. Its not just that it binked for fun but it was the super intelligent way he binked em. Its as though he was just taking the piss all the time and would almost always be miles behind coming onto the last lap. He would then just blow the field away like they had stopped still and snatch the bink at the last second. Nice memories :)
Keep your eyes on the dog at the back.
A-Levels
I was skipping lessons to bink tards dinner monies at hearts to fund crazed weekend booze sessions. My edge in these games was pretty big which seems odd looking back as its mostly a memory and only part strategy/logic game. There were about 3 or 4 good players and I formed a partnership with arguably the best player. This involved either getting into a team game v two other villains or soft playing each other when we could in single player games. We would then share the combined profits straight down the middle and I cant ever recall us having a losing session. I guess this could be seen by some as cheating but I like to think of it as simply offsetting variance.
Uni
Uni
When I hit Uni (ye kinda surprised myself there) I was missing lectures going on day gambles down to laddies. If something had a market I had some monies on it. Looking back its easy to see that these were some of my darkest days . While most students were attending lectures and getting drunk on alcopops a few nights a week I was sinking more than a gallon through the day till the bookies closed. Days would then be rounded off with another gallon and a bottle of the super strong juice (not one of your 5 a day).
I was pretty anal in my quest to dig out any edge I could on any sport available. I would find any and all info I could before having a punt on it but given how out of it I was I'm not sure how reliable this research was. The gamble got the better of me more than once though and it took a pretty epic fail day to shake me out of my retarded ways.
During the World Cup I remember putting a large wedge of cash on some footballing superpower v a minnow. The punt was a win/win, half time/full time and the bet was meant to be eze monies. I think the initial bet was about £200/£300 which was a big slice of my student loan at the time. Things didnt quite go as planned. Brazil went 1-0 down and when it looked like I had burnt my money I started to offset my bets on other multiple scores, half time and full time results. I was fully inside the “I'm a fuck up and I have a gambling and drinking problem” zone and after quickly racing to the bank I had my little financial world on the line to the sum of about £1.3k. This might not seem like the biggest of figures but considering my student loan had just come through and I had yet to pay the terms rent it left me with about enough for a tin of Aldi beans, a bottle of Whisky and my train ticket back to Yorkshire (Uni was in Wales). When the final whistle sounded I rushed to cash in the slips to see what kind of damage I was looking at. Not even the surprise of finding I had made nearly £20 profit managed to rid me of the feelings of utter stupidity and worthlessness. I promised myself that day that I would never allow my degen side to get the better of me again (other fails to follow).
I was pretty anal in my quest to dig out any edge I could on any sport available. I would find any and all info I could before having a punt on it but given how out of it I was I'm not sure how reliable this research was. The gamble got the better of me more than once though and it took a pretty epic fail day to shake me out of my retarded ways.
During the World Cup I remember putting a large wedge of cash on some footballing superpower v a minnow. The punt was a win/win, half time/full time and the bet was meant to be eze monies. I think the initial bet was about £200/£300 which was a big slice of my student loan at the time. Things didnt quite go as planned. Brazil went 1-0 down and when it looked like I had burnt my money I started to offset my bets on other multiple scores, half time and full time results. I was fully inside the “I'm a fuck up and I have a gambling and drinking problem” zone and after quickly racing to the bank I had my little financial world on the line to the sum of about £1.3k. This might not seem like the biggest of figures but considering my student loan had just come through and I had yet to pay the terms rent it left me with about enough for a tin of Aldi beans, a bottle of Whisky and my train ticket back to Yorkshire (Uni was in Wales). When the final whistle sounded I rushed to cash in the slips to see what kind of damage I was looking at. Not even the surprise of finding I had made nearly £20 profit managed to rid me of the feelings of utter stupidity and worthlessness. I promised myself that day that I would never allow my degen side to get the better of me again (other fails to follow).
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