Ashton
  Cartwright.com

Busted out after 9 hours. Nothing too interesting to report, except that I was dazzled with how soft the field was. There were no more than 3 experienced players on any table, and people were calling 3 bets with hands like Kq offsuit out of position. . . really amazingly soft. I just played stanard tight agressive during low blinds, and hyper agressive small ball as the blinds got higher. No huge hands either for or against me, so it was a reasonably steady grind. .  just not steadily enough to compete with the blinds alas.

The tourney did inspire me to play a few more large field games online though, so ive been getting involved in the $109′s on stars along with any of the smaller tourneys and the 180 players SNGs that fire regularly. .. Hopefully I will have some good results to report soon enough!

Well I’m all set for my first major tournament. After qualifying online a few weeks back, all that I had to do was sort out some accomodation and airfares. Flying up with Jesse Mckenzie, and then staying with Brendan Rubie and his clique. Should be lots of fun, as they are all people who I will undoubtably get along with very well.

Its been an exciting couple of weeks. .  I had my biggest ever losing session (neg 1700 at the casino) followed by some pretty solid online finishes (a couple of $1000+ days). Ive also started playing some 180 player tourneys on Pokerstars which im currently running at +30% or somthing ridiculous. I suspect I will play a lot more of them oven the comming weeks.

Im sitting at about 35k vpps for the year, and im still confident that I can get to 100k Vpps and therefore lock in Supernova status for next year. Lately ive been Sharkscoping SNGs on pokerstars, party poker, and Full tilt, and so my VPP accumulation has diminished. The Steps that I have been playing on stars have helped keep the levels up though, since the step 4′s and 5′s give huge points, at $15 and $30 rake respectively.

Ive been re-reading Gus Hansens book in anticipation of this ANZPT, and have pretty much decided to be the traditional hyper-aggressive you internet player that I am. I will  primarly be playing small ball, but making a massive amount of raises and re-raises, attacking every pot I can. I find live poker mind numbingly slow most of the time, so hopefully this style of play will keep me fresh Ive sold off about 30% of my action to reduce the varience a little bit, but it will still  be a massive tourney for me. Hope to have a solid final table finish to post when I get back

Haven’t updated my blog for a while, and there is lots to talk about! Ive been having a great time playing poker over the last week or two. I’ve started playing 4 hours or so a day on week days, then playing a couple of sessions at the casino on the weekend, and in between all that just doing website stuff and kickboxing. Pretty good lifestyle.

Ive also started mixing up my formats a bit, playing some tourneys, some SNGs, sone steps, some hyper-turbos, and some cash games. Its been good and has helped me stay fresh. I used to play one format almost exclusively for months on end, just so i could really nail down the sturucture and such. .  but at the moment mixing it up has been working really well.

Amusingly i had a horrendous week on the tables last week. . .  Lost 900 online one day and lost 500 live another day. . . over all the week finished +300ish, which is of course a fantastic result considering I had a couple of terrible sessions.

Today Ive been Sharkscoping soft SNGs $50+, and that has actually eben working really well. I just had my computer upgraded, but it still seems unable to run more than 5 tables at a time with table ninja and tracker simultaneously. Bit annoying, but it won’t be so much of a problem if I keep table selecting pretty heavily and only playing a few higher stakes tables at a time.

Got another step 6 ticket today, which is great. ive got 3 of them now, so I should be able to convert them to entries to ANZPT Queensland, Melbourne, and Darwin. I suspect I will probably sell about 50% of myself in each of these tourneys.. .  because even though I won the tickets online from Steps, $2700 entry for a tournament is still a bti beyond my bankroll, so it would be a bit more sensible for me to sell 50%, and only end up paying effectively $1350 for each entry. .

Darwin particularly im looking forward to. Only 200 runners, so there is a good chance that I will be able to final table. Coupled with the fact that Darwin is pretty remote, even for australias, and it is therefore unlikely to attract all the big pros, the field should be softer than the other ANZPTs.

Ship it one time. . .

Well I got a 2nd step 6 ticket on Pokerstars which is pretty cool. There were 2  Poksters Pros on the table, but they were both knocked out early by bad beats (much to my benefit!). I played generic poker, didnt have any big hands particularly, but I did have a very impressive piece of luck in that the massice chip leader sat out for the last 10 muinutes of the game, and consequently was blinded out without playing a hand! Just goes to show the importance of a stable internet connection and ideally a back up connection. . . .

Has a feeble +650 session at the casino on the weekend too. I played a couple of 1k+ pots, each as a massive favourite, but lost them both, so a +650 session is actually a good result considering. . .  still would have prefered it to be a $2650 session of course!

Was goign to write more, but Jesse McKenzie just called and suggested a casino run this arvo. .  so I will do that instead of the 20 things I was meant to do today. . . It doesn’t take much for me to decide to play poker rather that anything I had planned

Been a busy couple of days online for me.

Spend most of Sunday playing tounraments and SNG’s again for no apparent reason other than I felt the urge to mix it up a bit. Performed moderately well, ran quite deep in a couple of tournaments finishing in the top 2% of players, but still just short of the final tables where the relevant money is.

I did fine on the 18 man SNGs as usual, but most interesting was the solid results that I got in the Steps on Pokerstars. I ended up with three step 3′s and I think four step 4′s which was pretty cool, and a step 5 as well I believe. Today I played steps and tourneys  again, finishing 21st out of 1600 in a rebuy tourney, and adding a step 6 ticket to my collection. Very cool. In the step 5 that I played, I actually lost with KK vs QQ very early on, leaving me with just 215 in chips. Luckily the blinds were still low, so I was able to survive until I got into good enough situations to throw my money in the middle. I won’t hesitate to admit that it required a lot of luck to come back and win that one, but I definitely gave myself the best possible chances by staying focused, rather than jsut throwing my few remaining chips in the next hand.

No poker tomorrow. Have to get my car regoed and such, and will hopefully be able to get a good training session in at the gym.

Peace

I’ve had a week without poker this week as I helped a couple mates (Rhys, Aaron and Ryan) move into a beautiful apartment right next to the casino earlier in the week, and then had my brother return engaged from a 6 week sailing expedition. Pretty cool stuff, but it has all definitely cut into my poker hours a bit.

The remainder of the week looks to be no more likely for poker alas. Some of my gym mates from Jabout are competing tomorrow night (Muay Thai for anyone who isn’t familiar with my gym), and it will be fun to go along and support them. Also Saturday day/Saturday evening I’m meeting up with a good friend from the city that I haven’t seen for a year or so.

Will make up for it next week I suspect. Hoping to play some Hyper Turbos on Stars, and also get in some Casino time, since those games are so soft that it dazzles me sometimes. . .

I have recently been talking with Dave Caines, a new poker friend of mine, and the outcome of which was that he suggested an article regarding which format is best from new players to focus on would be pretty useful. I agreed whole heartedly and intend to write one in the near future. I fear that to my mind such an article would by necessity be somewhat long, so I shall probably do it in small sections until the whole is completed to my satisfaction.

In the meantime, I though I would detail how I personally became a professional poker player. That article can be found here: How to Become a Professional Poker Player.

Just posted a new article up on my main site, on the topic of how to play suited connectors.

This is also my 300th post on this site, which is an arbitrary milestone. . .  but a fun one none the less! I shall likely get time for much more regular updates since I have been playing live poker so often, as it lives me with plenty of mental energy for writing.

had a quiet but profitable session at the casino this week. 6 hours +$470. Not a huge result in dollar terms, but since I was just playing very fundemental poker and was mainly on the $500 table, it was a satisfactory result. I did play on the $500 -$2000 table for a while, but we were 4-5 handed for most of that time, and Im not really interested in short handed play. I’m a full ring junkie from way back

Haven’t had any more games this weekend, so I will endeavour to get some more website work done. Wrote an article yesterday How To Bluff In Poker, at my main site if anyone is interested in reading it.