Student Poker Blog

For the last few days I’ve been suffering from a slight pain in my fingers, and I’m guessing that it came from typing so much. So thats why I haven’t posted in a while, but as soon as I’m feeling better I will get some more posts up.

I’m going to invest in an ergonomic keyboard soon I think, and also learn how to touch type. At the moment I just use my two big fingers for typing and it seems to have worked well for me up to this point. Touch typing looks so cool as well when you see other people do it, so I want to be one of those people. The ergonomic keyboard should help with my hand positioning too, and so try and avoid and future pain in my hands or fingers.

The ergonomic keyboard for anyone that doesn’t know is the one with the slanted keys. If you notice when you hold your hands out, they curve inwards slightly, which is why the ergonomic keyboard is more suited to naturally fit the shape of your hands.  So it should be great fun trying to get to grips with that.

Now anyways, my fingers are starting to hurt, and I’ve got some revision to do. I’ll catch up in about a week or so’s time.

Good luck to anyone sitting exams!

Well I made it back to my student accommodation a few hours ago after a pretty good Christmas and New Years. I have come back a little earlier than most so that I can catch up on all the work that I didn’t do over the holidays. I’m not sure if other people have exams this January and have had some solid revision schedules on the go, but suprisingly enough mine looked pretty promising at the start but failed to materialize. The first day was great, but after that it was mainly drinking and eating pringles, and in fairness I didn’t even look at my notes.

So now I’m back to get as much work done as possible, I’m sure I will be fine for the exams if I get my head down and work. Physics isn’t the easiest subject in the world but after a while things start to click and everything comes together. So when I get going with revision the work starts to make more and more sense as I go along, so it becomes much easier. However, there is the one module that doesn’t interest me at all and the work is incredibly hard, so the outcome of that exam should be pretty entertaining. I have 5 exams in all to do, each with there own varying difficulty.

1. Maths Module 1 - Should be easy
2. Maths Module 2 - Should be easy
3. Astronomy - Should be fine (multiple choice exam… nice)
4. Physics Module 1 - Tricky but do-able
5. Physics Module 2 - Difficult and I don’t enjoy it

So thats the general look of it. I’m guessing with the right amount of work I will pass them, but I can definitely see some exams being far less fun than others.

With very little people being in the student village there is not much to do. My schedule isn’t going to be too packed with going out, so its a great opportunity to get some work done. I’m guessing that the next week or so is going to look something like this:

13.00 - Wake up and sort myself out (I sleep late so you know)
13.30 - Browse Internet, see if theres anything new happening
14.00 - Do some revision
15.00 - Make some food, probably curry or spag bol
15.45 - More revision
17.00 - Go to gym, or squash if I can find a friend
18.30 - Food
19.00 - More revision
21.00 - Browse internet/MSN
23.00 - Revision again
1.00 onwards - I just do very little in this time but I end up staying up quite late, probably until about 4 ish.

So there we go. Its probably the worst schedule ever but I make it work. It would be much better to shift the schedule back a bit so that I start earlier and sleep earlier, but my body clock has been pushed around until I’m almost nocturnal since being in Uni, I don’t know how it happened but it did. So hopefully this works out well, theres plenty of time there to work.

I’ll let you know how things turn out in a few weeks time.

Every now and then Party Poker likes to give me a free $10 in my account for me to play with. They will normally do this if I havent played at the room for a while, so they like to try and entice me back to the room by offering me some free money to play with. Obviously I’m not going to object, so I always take up the offer and see how far I can get with the $10. I know some of you might be thinking ‘why not just withdraw it?’, but the terms and conditions will normally state that you must play so many raked hands or accumulate so many points before you can withdraw the money, so you either play with it or you don’t.

But anyways, most of the time I lose the money within a few minutes at the tables as I try and go for the big win. But this time I decided to take a different route and dabble in some online casino. Now I wouldn’t advise people to play online casino games because of the fact that the odds are never in your favour. Although it is perfectly possible to win money from time to time, it is not going to be possible to win money over the long run like you can in poker. But seeing as this money was free and stuck in my account, I thought I would give it a try.

The first thing I decided to play on was the slots. I enjoy playing on fruit machines when I’m out in town so I thought that these would be equally as fun. However, they are quite different and have 5 reels with no buttons or whatever, so you either win on the lines or you don’t. Furthermore I don’t know what combinations win or not, as it seems like the winning lines are picked almost completely at random. But aside from this, I wasn’t winning much money nor was I having much fun, so I took my money elsewhere.

Next was the Blackjack tables, and Blackjack is a game I quite enjoy. Its good fun betting against the dealer, and with good strategy you can increase the odds that are in your favour, but ultimately the overall odds will always be slightly in favour of the house (unless you can card count that is, but thats not possible to do whilst playing online). I managed to hit a lucky streak and win a few hands and thus a few dollars, so I took my overall bankroll up a few notches up to around $35, which was nice. But it was a slow process and only being able to double your money on each hand meant that the thrill of playing Blackjack left after a while. Things seemed to just get a little repetitive, so I went back to the casino lobby to see what else I could find.

Whilst browsing around it was obvious that Roulette was to be the next game of choice. This is also a really enjoyable game, and can offer some really nice wins if you get the right numbers. For example, if you managed to bet on the right number coming up, you will win 35 times the amount you bet, so it’s good to be lucky in this game. At first however things started out pretty slow and I was floating around the same mark with small wins and losses. I’m not very tactical when it comes to placing bets, I just stick the chips down wherever looks good and hope for the best. Turns out I hit a nice streak and won quite a bit of money, I picked the right number two or three times and so my overall bankroll ballooned. Maybe I should start playing casino games more, and less poker =].

At the end of my casino exploits I had my intial $10 bankroll up to $100, which is pretty good. I’m quite far off the mark when it comes to having enough points to be able to withdraw the money, so I’m going to have to play a few hands at the poker tables later. I might dabble in a bit more casino because I’m not too worried about losing it, but I’ll give poker a try when I have the time to see how that pans out. But overall my casino experience was enjoyable, but I wont be putting any of my own money into any casino games I can tell you that for free. I always stick to poker because its a game that you can consistently win money from, whereas you can always expect to lose more money than you win in casino games.

After losing my debit cards last saturday, I finally got one through today. Didn’t expect anything to come through from the bank on a Saturday but there we go. So although I say ‘cards’ I only really had the one, but the next one shouldn’t be too far away. Luckily it was the card for my main account where I keep most of my money, but unfortunately I have been given a new pin even though I asked to keep it the same. But I think its possible to change the pin through the ‘hole in the wall’ anyway so its no big deal, but it definitely needs changing because I am so familair with the old one.

Anyways, I decided to celebrate by making a deposit at Titan to check out the action at the 10c/20c tables. Turns out that the table I sat down at wasn’t as fishy as the last time I played at the room, but after a few players dropped out and were replaced the dynamics changed a little and there were some very obvious bad players. I think that there are still a number of people that are enjoying the festive season with a dash of online poker, despite the fact that they are pretty clueless when it comes to strategy and are relying on the luck of the draw. But I’m not going to complain about that.

Even though the table at the start was of a decent standard, I managed to get things going with a nice hand. I was dealt 3c 3s on the button and called a 4BB raise from someone in mid position. I felt the implied odds were there  because they had a decent size stack, so I comfortably made the call. I’m obviously looking to hit a set on this flop, and if I don’t I’m going to make an easy fold. 

Turns out another player made the call and came along for the ride. I was happy to see a 3 come down on the flop, and even more happy to find out that both of these players had decent hands. All the money wen’t in on the flop, and no cards came to improve the other two who were holding an overpair and top pair respectively. Theres not a lot that they could have done to save themselves from losing here, it was pretty much a cooler for the both of them. So worked out to be a nice $32 pot to get the session started.

The rest of the session was pretty standard, as I floated around the same mark for a while with small wins and small losses. There was another hand that I managed to win a nice amount from, around about $20 or so. I can’t remember the details but I think I had a straight, and I think they must have had top two pair. Either way I finished the session with about $50, which works out to be around $30 or £15 profit. This is more than I would usually make in an hour of play at one 10c/20c table, but I’m not going to make any complaints.

Its nice to get back into the swing of things with a decent win, especially considering I was just at one table and on MSN at the same time. I’m not exactly sure how much of an impact being on messenger whilst I play poker is having on my game, but I still feel that I am able to continue to play profitably, even though the amount that I win per hour is more than likely reduced. I’m not that great at multi-tasking to be honest. I will make a post in the near future about being on messenger and playing poker at the same time, I’m sure that most people have done it or do it from time to time.