Student Poker Blog

For those of you at home playing a little poker over the Christmas Holidays, I have thrown together a few good festive poker tips that should help you on your way to winning some money at the tables. Christmas is a great time to play online poker because so many people will have time off work to play also, and so you should see a nice increase in the number of players and thus an enjoyable increase in the number of fish. Hopefully you will find these festive tips handy for the next time you pull up a virtual seat at your favourite online poker room.

1) Don’t Play Drunk
By no means am I suggesting not to get drunk over the holidays, but simply try to avoid playing online poker after a couple of beverages. Its so much easier to lose money online than it is in real life, as you don’t have the ‘feel’ of the money infront of you, and so you are a little desensitized to the losses. Therefore you might find yourself making wilder plays and what not that you wouldn’t make if you were completely sober. I have been guilty of playing online poker whilst innebriated on the odd occasion, and it never seems to work out too well, no matter how good my intentions may have been. So save yourself a bit of money and finish off the pringles and watch some TV rather than logging into the poker rooms after a night out.

2) Take Advantage Of Americans
The Americans also celebrate Christmas too, and so its fairly likely that they will be playing poker after a couple of drinks in the night. The Americans are 5 hours behind people in the UK (roughly), so if you sit down at the tables any time after 11 o’clock in the UK you may well find yourself sitting down with some Americans that are well-oiled and ready to dump their chips. Just make sure that you are not drunk aswell, as it kind of defeats the object of taking advantage of the drunk players.

3) Play Within Your Bankroll
Although at this time of year there is a lot of good will and Christmas spirit flying about, you should try not to get carried away with it all and become too fruity when deciding what limits you are going to be playing at. Keeping within you limits and following the correct bankroll guidelines is key to being a winning player, and staying safe through the bad runs of cards. Hopefully the holidays will be kind to you and you will experience a brilliant run of cards and find yourself adding a lot of padding to your bankroll, but for those who have a worse time of it… you will thank yourself by sticking to the right limits at the end of the day.

So I hope you find these quick Christmas Tips useful. Some of them are just common sense and you probably know about them already, but its good to be reminded from time to time. Good Luck.

The first 11 or 12 weeks (can’t remember exactly) of University this year seemed to have flown by, as it doesn’t see all that long ago that it was Freshers week in a non-stop party. Looking forward to being home for a longer period now, seeing as I have popped back and forth on the odd occasion to see family and friends, and get some essential washing done on the cheap. Looks as if I will be actually heading off with all my stuff in a few days time, which is actually quite late seeing as it seems that around 80% of people in the student village have already left to go home for christmas. There is only a handful of student that will be staying in University Accomodation for the majority of the holiday period.

Its been a great first semester, and I’m greatly looking forward to the next one. If it is half as good as this one has been, then it will definitely be an enjoyable time. Although there is slightly more work than I expected in Uni, the social life is great and more than makes up for the hours in lectures and labs. But then again I am doing a degree, and that isn’t going to earn itself and I’m not going to learn anythign by not going to lectures and such.

Although I am looking forward to the month-long break, I can see it being packed with quite a bit a revision for the 5 module exams that I will be sitting in January. I am confident in 3 of the modules, but the other 2 are pretty tricky, and I’m going to have to do a decent amount of revision to get them down. I’m fairly sure that I will be able to fit revision around my busy drinking schedule this Christmas so I’m pretty positive about the exams. However, it will probably mean that I will have to cut down on the poker for a little while, but I can live with that.

My recent endeavours to save a little extra for Christmas presents and drink went pretty well, and managed to win around $80 (£40) to help line my bank account, which happens to be looking a little weak as of late. I had a decent run of cards and won more money than normal for the amount of hours I put in, but I’m not going to complain to anyone. Guess I’ll have to deal with a possible downswing at the the start of next year, as well as the probable extra weight I put on over the holidays.

Seeing as my student loan is on its last legs, and the christmas holidays are approaching, I think its time to start hitting the poker tables a little harder to add a little padding to my bank account over the holiday period. There are a lot of parties that will be requiring my attendance, and I also need to buy a handful of christmas presents, and I’m not sure if my bank account can handle it in its current state. The drink just isn’t going to pay for itself.

I headed over to the Full Tilt tables tonight because I recently withdrew my money from Titan, and I realised I had a little left over in the FT account the play with. I know I normally play at Titan, but its nice to have a change of scenery every once in a while. So I took a seat at the $0.50/$1 heads up tables for a quick session. I was quite a bit above the limits that my bankroll could handle, but I wasn’t overly concerned about losing the $50 I was going to start with, as I am planning on grinding it out at Titan after I make another another deposit there. I am having a little trouble withdrawing from Full Tilt at the present time, so it wouldnt be the end of the world if I had a cold streak of cards and lost.

The game went pretty well, but was full of ups and downs. The session wasn’t too long but I felt I was playing my cards pretty well, making the correct moves in most instances. I don’t really play too much heads up if I’m being honest, as I’m more of a 6max player. But I didn’t feel too uncomfortable playing heads up and things were going okay, and I left the table about a tenner up ($20). There were a lot of fluctuations and decided I would sleep a little easier with a small win under my belt rather than a small loss, so I got up and left after about 30 mins of play.

I can’t see me being able to withdraw the funds from my account before christmas, so I will leave it there for a while until I can get home and maybe withdraw it then. It’ll probably be safer thinking about it too. I’m guessing my Uni internet network isn’t a big fan of Full Tilt Poker or one or two other poker rooms, so maybe they’re trying to prevent me from withdrawing money and such. But its no big deal, Titan Poker works fine, as do the majority of other online poker rooms. I’m not sure if this is a problem across all Universities, but I’ll be interested in finding out if anyone fancies making a comment.

So things seem to be getting off to a good start, hopefully my cards will be pretty good throughout the rest of the week so that I can buy some of the classier drinks over the holidays rather than the usual 8 cans from the spar.

As some of you viewing the blog right now will recognize, I am now using wordpress as a way to blog about student poker life a little more easily. Wordpress for those of you that don’t know is like a bit of a program that allows you to write artciles and such in the form of a blog, and its a pretty simple and effective way to keep a blog.

I know that the design for now looks a lot different to the main site, but I am looking into making it look the same as the rest as the site so it doesn’t feel as though you are leaving the site every time you read this blog.

But anyways, on a positive note it means that I will be able to write more blog posts in the future and write them more frequently, so it should prove to be a good move in the long run. Just added an about me section if any of you are interested in reading about me, I’m sure you are.

So yeah, I thought I would let you guys know what is going on, expecially if you have noticed a bit of a change since you last visited the site.