My blog will be coming to an end soon, and since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d do a list. Everyone likes a list at the end of the year, and this one also doubles up as a Christmas gift to any poker bloggers out there.

I’m going to list the seven most successful blog posts of my two year stint as a Unibet Ambassador, along with some thoughts as to why these were the most read.

I should note that I’m in no sense an authority on this subject. This is merely what I know – perhaps as much for the starting poker blogger than the established one. Two years ago I had never blogged before – merely written a column for Bluff Europe for a year or so – hence, I was literally starting from scratch.

In terms of marketing my blog, I was on my own. Unibet did not explicitly push the blog, rather the other way around – the Ambassadors were expected to push their own blogs and hence drive traffic to their site. My first post got a grand total of 17 hits and although I can’t remember, I was probably not too disappointed at the time.

I realised that grinding the traffic up to a respectable level might take considerable effort. I got myself a twitter account and started marketing on Facebook. After a couple of months I put together a google group of my poker playing friends for a direct email.

Poker forums are another good source of traffic. Unfortunately, as my blog was Unibet branded, many of the poker forums had a conflict of interest (e.g. Hendon mob with Full Tilt), so I had to rely on other people posting for me – which meant writing something that other people would actually read and remark upon!

As time passed, I managed to get posts into the 100+ readership and beyond. This is my hundredth post for the Unibet Ambassador blog, and I now figure to get around 100 readers or so for each post I write. So without further ado, here are the top 7 blog posts (in reverse order, Chrimbo-stylee, of course):

7. Tournament Blogging: A wake up call (399 hits)

In seventh place is possibly my most controversial post. It’s all very well slagging off Full Tilt when half the poker world has money tied up there and might not get it back. It’s another thing critiquing the poker blogging community, of which I was of course a part.

Being the intelligent, diligent and honest bunch they are, I got exactly the response I was hoping for: a far-reaching, intellectual debate with many major bloggers getting involved (Rick Dacey, Barry Carter, Lee Davey etc.).

Having achieved that goal, this blog was always going to be retweeted, linked to in other blogs, and generally talked about. This was the kind of post which marketed itself. It has to be said, however, that this was my pet subject (I had written at least half a dozen evidence-based articles about the luck factor in tournament poker and how people underestimated it). I was definitely shooting from the hip, but with a gun I knew well!

6. My mid-poker-life crisis (414 hits)

The major source of traffic for this one was Twitter. In general, if I got a lot of hits from Twitter, it was usually forum legend KevMath who was the source. When he retweeted my tweets, my traffic would triple.

This was another “straight from the heart” post explaining my thoughts and concerns about where my poker career was going. I think this kind of post does well because it engages so many everyday grinders. Secondly, I also shouted out well-respected but not well-known blogger Lildavefish. I republished a graph from his blog which showed he was running 160 buy ins below expectation. That’s the kind of thing poker players want to know about.

5. No More Heroes? (547 hits)

The first of three articles in this list inspired by or reflecting upon Full Tilt’s fate post-Black Friday. The poker media was swamped with articles describing what had happened. I pitched my tent as one of the commentators on the story.

Having had a run in with Full Tilt in the past, and having had a friend of mine in the industry warning me for years that Full Tilt were dodgy, I was in a position to say “I told you so” with gusto.

This post may have been popular because of its attempt to dispel a few myths about poker sponsorship and in particular its most high profile beneficiary, Phil Ivey. Most notably, the biggest source of traffic for this post was a Romanian poker forum. This was the thanks to the efforts of a colleague at Unibet. But it just goes to show that blog posts can be well received anywhere.

4. Here Lies Full Tilt (630 hits)

This post was written early enough in the timeline of a story to actually catch some mainstream readership looking for the details. Hey, I wrote a news piece!

The story of just how in debt Full Tilt was (complete with figures) was perhaps the biggest of the year. Combine that with reports of the ineptitude of the FTP management and you have a great story.

Once again, I put my own commentary on the piece (read: anger and despair), but I think the major driver of traffic for this article was the many links within to other pieces: cliff notes, interviews, and so on. I basically wrote a one-stop-shop article about the story and got it off the press in a timely fashion.

3. Et tu Ivey? Then Fall Tilt! (649 hits)

The third and most popular of the Full Tilt posts. This is where I laid bare my story of having found a bot on Full Tilt poker in 2008 and them basically refusing to do anything about it. It’s the closest I’ve got to writing a piece of investigative journalism, but it’s delivered in a much more flippant style.

All three of these posts I’m sure sold themselves through word of mouth and by the popularity of the subject matter. The major source of traffic was Twitter and I suspect that this is largely down to KevMath (who many poker players on Twitter turn to for their updates).

And even though I say so myself, this blog had a pretty cool title

2. The Dark Side (813 hits)

Once again, the major source here was Twitter, but in this case countless Twitter mavens retweeted this post. I even had retweets from people outside of poker with 50,000 followers, plus it got listed on bluffmagazine.com and cardplayer.com.

Somebody wrote that it was the “best facts-based article about poker”. That’s very complimentary, but I think it’s more a “tell it how it is” article rather than presenting any facts. I’ve always attempted to talk straight about the negatives in poker, despite the potential conflict of interest.

Historically, people have wanted to play down the dark side of poker, as if it’s the proverbial elephant in the room (if you ignore it, it isn’t there.) Well, it is there, and the more we talk about it, the more we are likely to be able to do something about it. Who knows, maybe poker will become more acceptable and we’ll make MORE money if it does?

I hope the popularity of this post was down to the fact that many people in poker agree with me on this sentiment.

1. A Christmas Cracker of a Hand (1151 hits)

Way out in front is a post which didn’t get tweeted by KevMath, yet managed to be my only post ever to get over a thousand hits. It’s a simple one, written in a histrionic style about a poker hand between two of the most well-known poker players in the UK.

It might have helped that this post was put up a couple of days before Christmas last year, when everyone was off work, but the major reason is that it was retweeted by Vicky Coren who, with over 60,000 followers (at the time, right now it’s almost 90,000), is a pretty significant connector in the poker Twitter world.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog as much as I enjoyed writing it. I’ll be back in the New Year with a blog related to poker but with a more general interest theme. Please email me at picklemanpoker@gmail.com if you would like to be added to the mailing list for that blog when it goes live.

All the best,

Alex Rousso

Every now and then, poker players take risks . In the summer I ended up entering a 3pm starting two-day tournament at the Venetian (the $550 PLO) despite the fact that I had just got off the plane from London and it was 11pm my time. By the time I went to bed it was 4am and I’d been awake for 27 hours straight. Not a great way to enter day 2. I went on to finish 8^th for $5600.

Sometimes those risks don’t pay off. The £1k Monte Carlo at Dusk Till Dawn in Nottingham was the last major tournament of the UK calendar and given that my sponsorship with Unibet was shortly coming to an end, it was one I had to play. I had an Academy to teach in London on the Saturday, which would be during day 1B. No problem, I thought. I’ll play day 1A and drive back to Nottingham on the Sunday if I make day 2.

Albert Sapiano told me about the traffic on the M1 on the way up to Nottingham (I had come up that morning from North Norfolk). There was apparently a huge contraflow around Luton and it was murder.

I doubled up on the last hand of day 1A (what a spot to pick up Aces!) and made day 2. Being careful, I checked the other ways of getting to Nottingham from London which avoided Luton. I could go via the A1(M), but it would add another 20 mins to my journey. With my stats/economist head on, I concluded that my expected loss going through the M1 contraflow would be less than 20 mins, so I should take the M1.

Damn. If only I’d been to that lecture about risk averseness. Sure, perhaps on average the journey time via the M1 will only add, say, 15 mins, but when the contraflow goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. Using a different economics theory, it’s sometimes worth a guaranteed penalty of 15 mins to make certain that you don’t suffer a disproportionately worse outcome.

So there I was, in the gridlock, a hundred miles from Nottingham, thinking my ETA was around 1.10pm, or 70 mins into day 2. What does a poker player think in those circumstances?

Being the maths bore I am, I punished myself by working out how much the traffic jam was costing me. So here it is:

My stack was 84,500 and the blinds for level 11 would be 800/1600 with a 200 ante. There would be 9 players at my table, and for the sake of argument, I’ll say that 27 hands would be dealt per hour. Level 12 would be after 60 mins and would be 1000/2000 w/200.

(Oh, and by the way, you can forget about the hope that – as with many places – they’ll actually start at 12.15pm after some general faffing. The DTD is a tightly run ship and they’ll definitely start on time.)

So that’s three rounds at 4200 (800+1600 + 9 x 200), which is 12,600 and around half a round at 4800 (1000 + 2000 + 9 x 200), which is 2,400. All in all, the traffic jam would cost me 15,000 in tournament chips. The buy in was £1000 (+£90 – but the juice is not in the prize pool) and you get 30,000 in chips starting stack. Since we had not reached the money, the tournament chips were still worth their initial value. So that 15,000 cost me £500.

Or £7 a minute.

I played a hand in the Unibet Open Riga that sparked a discussion, so I’m going to share it with you here.

It’s towards the end of day 1A, about six of the nine players at my table have been there since the first hand, so we all know each other reasonably well. I have a stack of about 18k at the 600/1200/100 level, so around about the perfect re-shoving stack.

A fairly decent, fairly tight and pretty straightforward player raises UTG+1 and it’s folded to me in mid position. With AQo I elect to flat call. I’m not doing this to get away from my on certain scary flops, but for value. Saving the details of the actual hand for later, the point is that the standard thing to do is shove here. In fact I had about a 10-minute chat with blogger Chris Hall about it afterwards. His claim was that you’ll always get more value by shoving and if anything can some small to medium pairs to fold.

My argument is as follows:

1)   For bigger hands than AQo (AA, KK, QQ, AK). Whether my opponent or someone behind me has a better hand than me, shoving in no circumstances gets them to fold. The odd super tight and short stacked player may opt to fold AKo behind me if it’s for a fair amount of their stack, but other than that I don’t gain by shoving on these hands, and if anything certain of them can be spooked by the odd flop and me being in position.

2)   Big hands my opponent won’t fold (JJ, TT, 99 and probably 88 and AJs). This is a mixed bunch in that these are the hands I lose value against if I hit my overcard and they get away from it. Note that this lot is a relatively small part of my opponent’s range.

3)   Hands my opponent will fold if I shove pre-flop, but I have decent value against (medium Aces, bluffy suited connector hands, other suited paint hands KQs, KJs etc.). This is a major part of my opponent’s range that I want to get value against. If both of us hit an Ace, I stack him where he would have gotten away pre-flop. I take a risk that his semi-bluffy hands get there against me, but most of the time they don’t, and he bluffs off a lot of his chips into me and I call for value with my Ace-high hand. Note that this is a major part of my opponent’s range, and the part I get most value from.

4)   Hands my opponent will fold that I want him to fold (smaller pairs than 88). I really don’t think that this is enough of my opponents range to warrant major consideration. Tight, ABC players will tend to open fold 22-44 in early position so it’s only 55-77 I’m trying to get a fold from. This is around 10% of my opponent’s opening range from here.

There’s also an outside chance that by flatting I’ll get away from my hand cheaply if some Uber-nit behind me shoves (with one of the bigger hands). That, as I say, is not the reason I’m doing this though. My main reasoning is that AQ is a big enough hand to flat for value and keep my opponent betting – a sort of Stop and Go in position if you will.

It also slightly merges my flatting range in this spot. It’s fairly commonplace to flat with AA and KK and an M of 6-10 for value, so why not flat some extra hands which have decent value against my opponent to keep him (and others) guessing?

The outcome? We both hit an Ace and I stacked him – he had A9o, which surely would have folded to my reshove pre.

So what do you think? A nice variation on a standard move, or doomed to miss out on extra value?

It may not sound like much, but it was tasty. And at only 1 LVL (Latvian Lat = £1.25 or so), it was a bargain! A bowl of soup on a cold rainy day in the Baltics is enough to warm my heart, and so, sad though this may be, is a bargain. The combination of the two is going to cheer me up no end.

It was day 1B today, so I took the opportunity to do my usual stroll around taking in the sights. Unfortunately, as you can see, I wasn’t blessed with the weather (but I did find a second use for the heated floor in the bathroom – as a radiator for rain-soaked trousers). In fact, fate has it that it’s going to be fine on day 1A and day 2 (which I am playing) and it’s rainy and dull for day 1B and day 3 (which, barring a massive spin up, I won’t be playing).

The old town is charming. It’s typical of most Eastern European old towns such as Prague or Warsaw: cobbled streets and medieval squares. I kept finding myself looking for remnants of the Soviet Era. There’s an almost romantic mystique to that now – but obviously it wasn’t romantic at the time. My vision of the old Soviet Union was one of grey modernist buildings and industrial revolution landscapes, but had I come to Latvia during the communist era I would have seen something a lot different. It’s difficult to imagine what it was like, especially since the Cyrillic signs have all been replaced by Latin text. Still, did turn a corner to find this:

Evidently there are a few things that remain!

Although there’s a certain element of the taciturn Eastern European about them, the Latvians are a cheerful bunch. Of course, the centres of capital cities are rarely like the rest of the country, but I’ve found everyone to be friendly and engaging, and maybe it’s just me getting old, but there was something about the trinkets in the market places which made me think I wasn’t buying the same old touristy tat. Presumably I was, but I’ll leave my family and friends to decide that on Christmas day.

In a couple of hours the last event of the Unibet Open season will start. This is the last time to pick up leaderboard points, and sitting in third place, I have plenty of good players over my shoulder.

Last night was another great Unibet opener. After a meal with a few of the Unibet regulars, we ended up in the Skyline bar: 26 floors up overlooking the old town of Riga. There were a few drinks sunk, lots of bonhomie and plenty of expectation in the air for the staff, the bloggers and the players alike.

During the night I ran into two others in the top ten on the leaderboard: Davor Pavic (seventh) and Tim Verbon (fourth) and of course, we had to chat about the leaderboard. Essentially, there is nothing any of us can do – just play our best game and hope to cash as deep as possible. As it gets to crunch time, where laddering one place could mean €0 extra prize money but €1000 extra leaderboard money, there will be some ICM considerations, but that won’t be relevant until day 2. (And I’m not going to blog about what I think those ICM considerations should be until after the fact ).

I’ll take this opportunity to say what I think the advantages and disadvantages are for this year’s leaderboard.

Firstly, the most controversial issue is that it’s funded by the players: 5% of each prize pool is taken to make up the leaderboard fund. For the regulars on the tour, this makes no odds, as it essentially redistributes money that was already in the pool. However, it’s a great disadvantage to those who only enter one or two events. Good luck aside, they are essentially playing for 5% less of the prize pool than they entered.

I worked tirelessly to try to get UK and Ireland players to the Dublin UO (it’s essentially my home event), but most of the players I know actually opted out because they knew about the 5% to the leaderboard and hadn’t played the earlier events. For them it was like losing 5% of their ROI before they’d even entered.

Second, the distribution of the prizes could have been improved. The winner gets 40% of the prize pool and it pays ten places. The standard argument here is that players only look at the value of the top prize, so you have to make it as big as possible. I think while that might be true of other gamblers (and poker players of five years ago, perhaps), this might be becoming a bit of a myth for poker players. These days, the majority of them are quite canny mathematicians who know that there’s only so much they can control their own fate in this regard. Slowly but surely (with the exception of the WSOP Main Event which appeals to a wider audience) the prize distributions in tournaments are smoothing out. Think about it: by the time poker has created its x-hundredth millionaire, the news story that poker creates millionaires is not so big.

I would have taken 20% off the top place prize (making the top three prizes 20%, 15% and 10%) and given 2% each to 11^th-20^th place on the leaderboard. That way, whoever binks first place is still only too pleased to be handed an extra €20k or so on a platter (let’s face it, they’ve already done well from their year if they won the leaderboard), but you’ll get another thirty or so players thinking that they might be freerolling the last event of the year (and thus are more likely to make the trip to Riga) because they’ve got a great chance of finishing in one of the 11-20 places.

Lastly, I’d keep the tie-in to online poker and, if anything, strengthen it. I’ve run into countless players on the tour over the year who didn’t even know about the leaderboard. Whatever was being done to market it, more needs to be done. Unibet made a great move by tying the online events in to the live events. For the next season, this needs to be pushed to the max. This year, we give points just for entering the live events. Perhaps give away points just for entering the online events?

This week I’m inspired by one of the more colourful poker bloggers in the Blogosphere, Dave “lildavefish” Nicholson. He simply writes about his life, his thoughts and his escapades on and around the poker table in his own mad, erratic yet intriguing style and manages to produce one of the most fascinating blogs out there. Certainly the life of a young poker degen.

Being neither young nor degen, an account of my week might by comparison be a bigger snoozefest than the North Norway Opium Eaters’ Society annual hibernation dinner. Still, stuff did happen, so here goes.

First, I binked a seat to the Unibet Open Riga. This was especially thrilling since in the previous time I entered a Unibet Open satellite I won . . . a seat to Riga. The second satellite was a freeroll open exclusively to UK players only. As it required earning a certain number of VIP points to qualify, there were only 12 runners in the tournament. So with the package worth €2500, that was over €200 worth of freeroll each! Well, I did tweet and Facebook you all about it . . .

Anyway, since Riga’s already in the bag, winning the second satellite means I get to go to the next Unibet Open, which has just been announced as:

Prague in February!!

That’s a good result on balance. Unlike the EPT, the Unibet Open series tries to send its players to new destinations each year, yet Prague has been on the schedule twice before. That may be a disappointment for those wanting pastures new (we had four debutants this year with Malta, Barcelona, Dublin, and Riga), but it is surely less of a strain to repeat the process every now and then?

Personally, I love Prague. The combination of great bars, cheap beer and amazing sightseeing makes it perfect for a poker tournament. And the Hilton is a great venue. In general, the Eastern European destinations represent much better value for money, and the cheaper the destination, the better the hotel, the better the grub and the more free drink there is behind the bar!

The UO in Malta this year was in the opulent Portomaso Hilton which was a stone’s throw from the buzzing St Julian’s area. I’m hoping Riga – as one of the cheaper destinations – will be another memorable venue.

Looking forward to next year, the news that Unibet will be re-entering the French market is very big. France was probably Unibet’s biggest market before regulation hit, and the Opens will benefit greatly from having the Frenchies back. Hopefully, we’ll get a UO in France before the end of 2012? Having seen some of the casinos there, I think it Paris would be a great destination, but maybe Cannes would be a good option too?

I also found myself planning for next year a lot in the past week or so. I must confess I’m a little jealous of the tweets of all the twenty-something poker players bouncing from Amneville to Amsterdam, Loutraki to Marrakech. It seems the choice is either to totally immerse oneself in the circuit, which costs six-figures in entries, hotels and flights, and never see one’s home, or have a kind of half life, where one can’t commit to most poker festivals until it’s too late.

Of course, I should be so lucky to have such problems, but it does remind me of what’s so good about the WSOP. For that month in Vegas, there’s nowhere else on the poker planet you should be. Right now, trying to pick a path between this festival and that (both home and away), trying to fit it with other commitments in life – especially at this time of year when both future sponsorship is uncertain and the schedules of the tours are not out yet – is a bit of a nightmare.

Basically, the last month or so of poker getting enough VIP points to win into a few extra tournaments has been a bit of a grind, and I think I need a rest. So it’s a few days off (missing the first half of the GUKPT Grand Final) before jetting off to Riga on Wednesday.

You may have seen the following in your own home game. Two players in a cash game get all their money in before the river, flip their cards over, see that it’s a race, and agree to take some money back to save on variance.

A friend of mine recently contacted me about this. He was claiming it was wrong for the players to do it, but didn’t know the technical reasons why it was wrong. You may remember a hand on Poker After Dark this year where exactly this situation took place between Phil Hellmuth and Mike Matusow. Click this link to see the hand on youtube.

There was plenty of internet discussion about the hand at the time, mostly covering how Matusow passed up an obvious edge and how if he couldn’t afford the gamble, he shouldn’t be in the game. None to my knowledge tackled whether it was wrong in any technical sense. I believe it is.

The reason is that playing a hand aggressively carries with it both a risk and a reward. The risk is that when your opponent finally calls down your bets, you may find yourself in hot water having put a large amount in the pot with a subpar hand. The reward is that every time your tighter or more passive opponents fold, you get all that fold equity.

If opponents are more likely to agree to take money back when they finally get it in against you, then the risk portion of that equation gets diminished while the reward portion remains the same.

Granted, opponents will only ever agree to take money back (rather than run it twice for example) if the hands are near enough 50/50, so I think that means that you can’t capitalise on it often enough for it to be an angle shoot. Nevertheless, it is a trick which favours the loose aggressive players.

It favours them even more in games where two hands are likely to be close to even money in the first place (these are games where fold equity is of paramount importance). In my home game, we quite often play 6-card No Limit Omaha hi/lo with two turns. As you might imagine, in this game it’s quite often the case that two hands get the money in and turn out to be close to even money against each other!

Matusow was right to ask Jetten (who’s fold equity Hellmuth and Matusow essentially split when they did their deal) whether he minded them doing the deal. Jetten did not mind and on this occasion little harm was done. However, if someone is running over your home game with aggressive play and then asking for some money to be held back if they get called, it might be time for you to play table captain.

Yesterday saw the sixth and last Unibet Open Online of the year and with it the second last chance to grab some Leaderboard points for 2011.  I’ve come second in one, missed one altogether (while at the WSOP) and busted the other four.

This was the first year that Unibet added online events to their popular and respected live tournament schedule. They would need over 83 runners each time to hit the guarantee of €25k (the buy in being €300+20). This they did on all but one occasion, a couple of times getting well over a hundred runners.

The tie in with the live series of tournaments was strong. The leaderboard paid out only if you had played both an online and live tournament. From a commercial point of view, this was a savvy move. It’s crucial for betting websites to get people online and Unibet’s major suit is its live poker and sports betting VIPs.

From a player point of view, the online tournaments were a good bet, though not without their teething problems. The player standard for a tournament of this magnitude (roughly equal to a $500 major) was pleasingly low. I would wager that if they continue with the online series for future years, plenty of sharks will be swimming in this direction.

My major gripe is the structure of the UO online. 10k in starting chips and 20 minute blinds certainly seems generous, but when the first three levels are 25/50, 50/100 and 100/200, effective stacks can be in mid-tournament territory after only 40 minutes (which is pretty quick for a “Major”). By comparison, the Sunday Million has 10k starting chips and the first three levels are 20/40, 30/60 and 40/80. Granted, the latter tournament has only 15 minute blinds, but it takes 90 minutes rather than 60 to get to the end of 100/200 level.

This may not sound like a lot, but it means very little time can be spent sounding out the opposition with a deep stack. By the time you get to know your table, everyone is only 30-50 big blinds deep and it’s a whole different prospect to start 3-betting light or calling with marginal hands in position, and so on.

I presume Unibet chose this structure for live-only players to find the transition to online easier. It’s as if they wanted to keep the stack sizes and blind levels the same for both the live and online experience. However, the two types of tournament are basically different animals and it’s wise, in my opinion, not to mess with what works too much.

I’m hoping that Unibet are pleased with their first dalliance with a live/online tournament schedule. It was quite a bold move, but it has been a success in the first year. There’s no question that Unibet’s USP as far as poker is concerned is the Unibet Open: a strong brand with a great market presence for what is otherwise a relatively small player in the online poker world. With some more marketing and perhaps a tweak to the structure, the UO online could earn its place along side the live events.

This week, four months after it began, the WSOP Main Event concluded in the Rio Hotel, Las Vegas. The winner of this event was crowned the World Champion of poker. There’s no question that the WSOP ME lives up to its name as “The Big One”. With a prize pool of almost $65 million this year it’s over four times bigger than the next biggest poker tournament, the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event.

After winning a tournament of such magnitude – besting almost the entirety of the poker community’s finest – the last person standing in the Main should definitely be feted with some grandiose label. However, I’m not convinced that “World Champion” should be it.

That the winner of one event should be crowned champion of the world in any game is questionable. A few examples abound, my favourite of which is the 100m sprint event at the Olympic Games. It seems that the easiest and fairest way to determine who is the fastest sprinter on the planet at that moment in time is to get them all together on a running track and make them run 100m against each other. The bloke down the pub would have a pretty hard time convincing you that if his mate Dave was there, he’d run faster than that.

With poker, the arbitrariness of a tournament winner’s rise to victory is well documented (by myself at the very least). Crowning the winner of the Main as the champion of the world – notwithstanding the fact that it’s the biggest and richest tournament on the whole schedule – is no less arbitrary. The sour protestations of the bloke down the pub might be more appropriate here: if Dave were to enter this event, he’d stand a reasonable chance of becoming World Champion. That means the moniker is inappropriate in my view.

Case in point. A few years ago I was round my mate’s place. My mate turned to his flatmate and said “what you up to this weekend, Bob?” Bob replied that he was flying to Canada to enter the World Championship of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Cue an avalanche of ridicule, banter and impromptu competition (while Bob was in Canada we ended up having an RPS championship of our own to see who paid for dinner at Dim T in Highgate).

Would you believe it, Bob ended up becoming World Champion.

“Yeah, but,” you protest. RPS is obviously all luck whereas there’s a skill element to poker. Such hopeful posturing always reminds of that line from the film Rounders: “Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table at the World Series of Poker every single year? What are they, the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?”

Suffice to say, they don’t. Not even close. We’ve come close to having a back to back final tabler a couple of times in the modern (post Moneymaker) era, but that’s all we’ve done: come close to having one.

That’s precisely why we have the November Nine. Because each year – despite there being literally dozens of big names in the Main Event – the odds are overwhelming that seven players or more will be relative unknowns. We need a four month hiatus just to market the hell out of the November Nine enough to make it seem like a big deal. There were murmurings in the ranks this year that this trick is beginning to get old.

More to the point, if the November Nine was a cute marketing exercise, will a post Black Friday America have the stomach for more of the same? Don’t get me wrong, the WSOP team do an amazing job of branding the event. Bracelets have a simply staggering amount of added value for the poker community and the Main Event is possibly the only aspect of poker which is marketable to the mainstream media. But where to go from here now that people are showing palpable signs of not caring and anyway the marketing dollars are drying up?

The answer lies in what’s next for American online poker. It’s no secret that the biggest advertisers for the WSOP were Stars and Tilt. The show itself will definitely go on. (There were almost 7,000 runners this year in the Main despite the absence of hundreds of US online qualifiers via Tilt and Stars.) How the show will be branded, marketed and broadcast is more in question. It might take the regulation of online poker in the US to bring the Main back to former heights.

We use marketing gimmicks such as the November Nine and calling the winner the World Champion at our own peril. Those outside of poker have their preconceived opinion of poker, and to them, a World Champion of poker is doubtless just as laughable as a World Champion of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

So I beseech all those who market poker both within the community and without: please stick to telling it how it really is. Let’s try to concentrate on what poker does best and hope that the good will out.

I recently blogged that I would be giving up on cash games online. The games are getting quite tough, the spectre of increased taxation is hanging over online poker, and I really don’t have enough time to learn and improve my game. To be honest, if was a bit of a toys-out-of-pram moment.

All I can say is, “hey, if you can’t throw a strop in your blog, where can you do it?” Eh? Not online? Not in the public forum in front of hundreds of people? OK, point taken. Well, anyway, shortly after that I had to prepare for an academy on Pot Limit Omaha (my cash game of choice) with Richard “Chufty” Ashby, who is one of the most successful PLO players in the game. Spurred on by the will not to look distinctly second best, I took to the books to brush up on my PLO.

The most advanced text I’ve read in Omaha is an ebook by Tom “LearnedfromTV” Chambers. It’s one of those ebooks which you can only afford if you’re super rich or a high stakes player. Being neither, I just got the free preview.

It seems that when I originally skim read the text (time poverty again) I misinterpreted something. Having rethought the issue, I went back to the tables and – hey presto – back to winning ways. I really didn’t take much. Turns out I was three-betting preflop with the wrong range of hands, and that was affecting my decisions all the way to the river. Enough to change a positive EV line to a negative one.

It’s only in this modern game, where so many players know what they are doing that such a drastic change could result from such a minor tweak.

After five profitable sessions I posted my first negative one yesterday. Shortstacks coolered me, big stacks got there improbably, the mouse flew into the wall (mice can fly in my house, and regularly do); it was a blast.

It’s sessions such as that which make me think of improving my mental game. Best of the bunch in that department is Tendler and Carter’s book “The Mental Game of Poker”.

Funnily enough, the section that was most relevant to my play yesterday was just published on the Hendon Mob Forum today. The section covers an method of learning known as “Inchworm”. In the words of the authors themselves:

If you’ve never seen the way an inchworm moves, it starts by stretching its body straight, anchors the front “foot,” then lifts up from the back end, bends at the middle to bring the two ends closer together, anchors the back foot, and then stretches its body straight again.

When you reach a new peak in your ability, the front end of your range [‘A’ game, ‘B’ game, ‘C’ game, etc.] takes a step forward. Your best just became better and that also means that your range has widened because the worst part of your game hasn’t moved yet. The most efficient way to move forward again is to turn your focus to the back end of your range and make improvements to your greatest weaknesses.

I’d made some great strides in improving my ‘A’ game by changing my three-bet preflop range, now it was time to clear up my ‘C’ game which still contains (and will always contain?) tetchiness, anger and despair. In other words, all the old faults were still there, I was now playing with them in some slightly different situations.

The following are some notes to self regarding my what needs to improve. I may be indulging myself by doing this in my blog (me? ) but at least I’m doing as instructed in the book, and if there are any online 6-max PLO players out there, perhaps they can benefit too:

1. Stop calling three barrels light. It’s tough to play out of position, and in the modern game when everyone is aggressive, being reasonable passive where one flops a hand decent enough to call a barrel or two might be the way forward. However, very few players three-barrel as a bluff (in low/mid stakes PLO) so calling down light is a leak.

2. When a bad shortstack looks like they have it – they have it. What’s more, these players are so used to letting other players take the lead in a hand (e.g. so they can check raise them all in with their draw/made hand) that they are really easy to play against. Stop with the “ah, they’re short stacked, I’ve just got to shove it in against them”. Make them suffer from reverse implied odds, not you.

3. Tighten up. When one ups one’s three betting percentage preflop, it’s easy to get carried away by calling and open raising even more. Play fewer hands, but play them more aggressively.