Bloggers / Dave Allan / 11 May 2009 / Leave a comment

It's Week Two in the Black Belt Poker house and we once again are delighted to welcome back popular blogger Steve Holden to the Betfair Poker Blogs

Mid morning I fire up again stacking up another 4 hours at the tables and I'm leaking like -£350 at one point this afternoon. Time to call in a plumber.

It's back to the grind for Steve with the levels rising for Week Two - Cash Tables $0.25/$0.50 NLHE 6max/HU, PLO or $20 2 minimum STTs, grief off the missus and a meeting with Phil Laak.

Monday I start with an early Monday session and am surprised when Andrea puts her head round the door around 9am, "you not working today" I enquire - "No, it's a bank holiday, thought we'd all go to Alton Towers today" Needing to put the hours in on Black Belt Poker I have to decline the offer not to Andrea's amusement - On tilt I then spew off in my first session of the day dropping over £100 in the first three hours. I take a break for around two hours in which time I study the STT's deciding where to launch my next assault. I then do a 4 hours session on a mixture of STT's and HU and finish this session £40+ giving me a net of -£60 for the day.

Tuesday I get some early sessions in today so that I am able to take the missus out later for dinner and try to make up for yesterday. I'm in a good mood after my second session yesterday and I'm very confident that I can soon turn my figures into the black. 90 minutes later and my soul has been destroyed - £110 and I don't consider that I been playing that badly. Mid afternoon and I'm over £260 down for the day and needing to put some funds into my account. I complete a 7.5 hour shift with a winning £60 session. We go for a nice meal putting my shit day at the tables behind me. I then head down to Walsall for some live action and take part in their £50 Deep Stack event, getting home around 4am after busting out in 6th place.

Wednesday I fire up some tables when I get in from Walsall feeling quite good with my deep run but after 90 minutes I have to hit the sack as I'm falling asleep at the mouse and fear some misclicks, Mid morning I fire up again stacking up another 4 hours at the tables and I'm leaking like -£350 at one point this afternoon. Time to call in a plumber. I get my mate Paul King to come on-line with me and give me a sweat session via Team viewer. I finish the day on a positive

After cashing in 6 out of my last 8 tourneys with 4x1st 1x2nd and a 3rd So a 7.5 hour grind and a swing in the latter stages to give me a net figure of +£110

Thursday Leaving my house around 9am I decide to travel down to London today for the workshop rather than stay in a hotel last night as it gave me a few extra hours at home. I drive down to Stanmore Tube Station then get a travel card for the day. I get to the Loose Cannon for just after midday and the place is already busy. I order some food, chatting to fellow graders and mentors the shy tensions that existed last week are no longer present, as people are more confident with each other now.

Neil Channing opens the workshop at 1pm with a talk and tells us that there is now over 700 people signed up to BBP and we learn from Jen Mason the sites getting around 800 hits a day and obviously increasing daily. Julian Thew, Dave Colclough and Richard (Chufty) Ashby are the latest high profile pro's to join the ever-growing list of members to BBP.

On chatting with the other lads it's obvious that a few of them have done their bollocks in and are seriously thinking about leaving as they feel that they are too far behind to catch up. Neil reminds the group that the profit was never going to be the underlying criteria that we were to be judged on and for the ones in the red we can still turn it round and be one of the eight just by getting some upward swings in our graphs, everyone can still qualify he reminds us all.

During the afternoon we were watching some high stakes poker clips on the big screen, we had paused this particular hand on the river bluff bet involving Phil Laak and Patrik Antonius and we were debating if the raise pre flop utg with AJ was bad " put your hands in the air if you think that's a shit raise utg" says Nik Persaud, just as half a dozen or so graders raise the hands in walks Phil Laak - he walks over to the screen and yells at Antonius "Fold you sick fucker". Phil stayed for the rest of the afternoon giving the graders an insight as to why he played various hands from various positions. He also made himself available for some one to one chats and some advice and also answering general questions. It was a real pleasure and surprise to get Phil Laak turn up and gives you an insight as to how important Black Belt Poker is to the community as a whole if we can get players of Laak's stature turning up.

I am buddied up with Eoin Kennedy, so we swap numbers and agree to some mutual sweat sessions over the next few days. During the mid afternoon we were broken into four tables where we then analysed and discussed some key hands. I had been asked to take in two hands from the DTD event at the weekend and took the two hands against Lucy Rokach and Nicola Jones in. The table then gave their opinions at every street of the hand resulting in various differing opinions on how the hands could and should have played out - one thing that was agreed by my group was that Lucy was and still is one of the top European lady players ever to have graced the game.

The workshop is concluded when our table play heads up on the laptop against one of the other groups, a series of 4 bet shoving with more garbage than Boy George ever swept up results in our group coming 2nd and threats of revenge next week. We are also informed that there will be a graders competition on Sunday night at 8.30pm and all graders will be expected to log on and play.

I get back home around 10.30pm drained but having enjoyed the day immensely.

Friday It's Edward's (Andrea's lad) 13th birthday on Saturday so I decided to get my hours in nice and early today so I can keep the evening clear and have Saturday off to get some quality time in with the family, who over the last two weeks or so have been a little neglected whilst this grading process is taking place. I do a three-hour session resulting in a £5 profit followed by a four-hour grind eating the earlier profit up when I finish £5 down and a break even day.

Saturday Didn't play any poker today and used this as my day off although that doesn't stop you from doing stuff to promote the Black Belt Poker awareness.

I obviously update my own blog on a daily basis, I've created this blog in February 2008 mainly to waffle on about my soccer team (Aston Villa) and to talk about my Poker exploits and travels keeping bad beats to an absolute minimum. Since the start of this year I intended to post at least every day something that I have maintained so far, posting as much as 4 times in one day.
Adam Goulding (AKA: Snoopy) told me that Betfair were going to do a piece on the grading and wanted to follow an individual through the grading process in his footsteps much like a fly on the wall, Snoops asked me if I would like to take this project on and I told Adam that "I'd be honoured" so a certain amount of my time is taken up with getting this article ready and making sure that I don't come across as a total donk.

Bowling and Edwards birthday obviously come first today but once they're all settled in front of the TV armed with XBOX and DVD's it's time to prepare this weeks article - this is of course after my rant on my blog about the Villa.

Sunday Managed to get about two-hours sleep as Edward and his mates were on the xbox all night and lads being lads and all that, I think that a sleep over should be called a "playathon" anyway, what else would you expect from six lads!!

Whether it from lack of sleep or just running bad I just cant get running today.

Three hours into the session and I'm down by £185 on the day. I sit and analyse where the leak is and discover that I'm getting beat 7/10 by runner runner, now that's running bad.

Another hour on the stt's then I decide "right, I'll fire up some cash tables"

I bash it out on the cash till the end of my session getting back my losses incurred today.

This weeks total was -£134

Summary

Half way through the grading and although stressful at times it seems to have flown by.

The new levels start tomorrow.

The site is just growing and growing well past peoples expectations, If you haven't joined yet then follow the link at the bottom of this article.

The camaraderie with the fellow graders together with the learning and participation at the workshops make it a joy as well as pleasure to be part of the first intake of students.

Totals to the end of week two:

Week One -£190

Week Two -£134

Total -£324

Read More about Black Belt Poker

Black Belt Poker Grading - Week One with Steve Holden
Heads Up SNG - Position - Sorel Mizzi
Heads Up Sit and Goes: Balance - Marcus Bateman
Heads Up Sit and Go - The Nature of the Beast - Marcus Bateman