Yorky Pud

Although the title of this blog entry is a Britney Spears song and the picture accompanying it is also of the head-shaving nutcase the actual entry has nothing to do with her. Long time readers of my ramblings will be more than aware that I am the undisputed king of starting poker related challenges without ever completing them and it looks like I have gone and done it again, though this time through no fault of my own. Well sort of.

A few days ago I wrote the entry “Pot Limit Omayha” which essentially highlighted plans of learning how to play pot limit Omaha on Betfair Poker. One of the main reasons for this was the fact I had almost finished the Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler and Barry Carter and was going to put my new found mental game skills to a serious test. That was until Mr Carter chirped up over on his blog.

Now I have known of Barry for a few years now as his was one of the first blogs I discovered when I started writing myself. Over the past six to nine months I have spoken to him on a more regular basis, in fact he was the person who put me in touch with PokerNews for the live reporting gig that I do from time to time and has also passed the odd article my way too for the UK PokerNews site. With that in mind I know he was not trying to derail me in his blog, merely point out I could be switching to PLO for all the wrong reasons and that I could be setting myself up for failure.

Part of Barry's post says, “One of the things we strongly stress in the book is that you should work on your biggest leaks first before trying to develop new skills. You really need to work on the issues in your 'C game' before moving towards mastery, otherwise they are just going to show up again (and probably sooner and much worse in a game like PLO),” which is a very valid, much akin to using the book to learn  to run a marathon before you've even managed to run a mile (something he said to me over Skype.)

In the past I have, quite ironically, played PLO because I was frustrated with the variance in Hold'em. This sounds ridiculous because the variance in PLO is massive compared to Hold'em but in my little world I had convinced myself that I would be able to deal with it better because it was more expected, if that makes any sense, but the truth is I do not feel 100% ready to take PLO by the horns so it is probably best not to try and tackle it at this moment in time.

Another reason is that I have been doing some matched betting and there is no way to separate my Betfair Poker bankroll from my Betfair Sportsbook bankroll. This is only a problem because the tight-ass bookies I am placing matched bets with do not return my stake for the free bet they award me so I have to place this free bet at much higher odds to make it worthwhile. An example of this was last night's Scum versus Shalke where I stood to “lose” £180 and change if the score was 2-0 but “win” £225 on another bookie if it was that score. Having to tie up big chunks of my bankroll means I could be left unable to play if I had a few buy-in loss, and I don't want to go redepositing every five minutes.

That leaves me still playing NLHE is one way, shape or form and I will update properly in my next blog post, which will be tomorrow if I manage to bink a decent score or probably on Sunday/Monday if not. LOL! Until then, thanks for reading and good luck at the tables.