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Heads Up the times they are a changing

I was going to post this entry yesterday but I thought people may have taken it as an April Fool's prank. (writes Yorkshire Pudding) Yesterday I lost my job. No joke, it's entirely true, I no longer have a job after having my contract terminated with immediate effect due to breaking the company rules for internet usage.

To cut a long story short I got myself into trouble a couple of months ago for using the internet when I should have been working and received a final written warning for my troubles. Then a couple of weeks ago my boss was taken ill at work which left little old me to hold the fort as everyone else had finished for the day. There was no work at all to do so I did a bit of surfing but some of the people, from another team, who work at desks behind me took exception to this and grassed on me to my manager. As I was on a final written warning already my boss decided to investigate my internet usage over a two week period and it was excessive but also showed I had used two proxy sites to bypass the company firewall to gain access to two well known poker forums. However, they believe that I was accessing gambling sites and the fact I had deliberately navigated around the firewall was enough to say I had committed a "gross misconduct" and I was sacked.

To be honest it has probably done me a favour long term as I wasn't happy there and the job was getting me down.If it weren't for my internet usage and sending a few emails around then I would have probably have gone crazy there! Obviously number one priority is to get myself another job to bring in some pennies and pay bills etc but I need to sit down and work out some figures to see what is best for me and my current situation. Initial calculations indicate that I could probably work only 24 hours a week and still be in the same financial position and lifestyle that I live already, as long as Mrs Pudding did something similar. Mrs P is dying to get back into the workplace after nearly two years off after the birth of Step Pudding, her son. Depending on what hours we were offered from our potential roles we could look after Step Pud whilst the other wasn't working and it'd mean I had more free time to spend with Pud Jr, Step Pud and my family and friends and also allow Mrs P to get back into a normal routine and meet some like minded people rather than having a baby for company during the day! One other thing this would allow would be more time at the poker tables both live and online, something that has been a bit of an issue lately. Mrs P doesn't mind me playing but by the time I have travelled home from work, had our tea, got Step Pud ready for bed then it's almost 2100 and a lot of the motivation has been drawn from me. Hopefully, if this is the route we go down then I should be able to log a lot more volume than I have over the past year and start to earn some half decent money from the game I love!

I have decided that during the month of April I will be playing Heads Up Sit and Go's (HUSnG) exclusively. I toyed with a few of them last month and had decent results and the lower stakes are certainly beatable especially as everyone I've come across seems to love to bluff and overvalue weak,often dominated hands. From searching various forums it seems that the variance in HUSnG isn't as crazy as some forms of poker so large swings of wins and losses aren't that common which helps my often fragile state of mind.It also means you don't have to have as much of a bankroll as a cushion and from researching it looks like a winning player with a 10% Return On Investment (ROI) would need around 20 Buy-ins not to go bust. To achieve 10% ROI you would need to win slightly less than 3 of every 5 games. Another advantage is the time they take. I played 4 standard speed games last night and two games were over in 10 minutes and the other two lasted 25 minutes. This means I can sit down, have a quick game or two whenever I have a spare 15 minutes or so and earn a nice hourly rate for my troubles and torment! I really enjoy pitting my wits one on one, mano o' mano and trying to spot betting and timing patterns and making plays on my opponent based on these.

Of the four games last night I lost the first and won the other three for a nice little profit of $18 and an hourly rate of $15.88. I would have gone four wins from four but for a crazy hand in the second level of the blinds. I'm sat with 1445 in chips and my very loose opponent had 1495 after posting the 20 and 40 blinds. This opponent loved to min-raise on the button and call raises preflop with a huge range and was very aggressive particularly on the flop so imagine my delight when I get dealt a lovely pair of black Aces! He completes from the button so I make it 120 to go, he thinks about it and makes the call. Flop comes 4c8dQs and I bet 120 into the 240 pot, hoping that my opponent has hit the flop also. He then makes a min-raise to 240 which, based on previous play, I read for him for hitting the flop somehow. I'm not afraid of sets as he'd have raised preflop with 44, 88 or QQ and I doubt he has Q8, Q4, or 84 so probably something like QJ, QT, 98 or something similar. I know he finds it difficult to let go of any part of the board so I make another raise, this time to 640, hoping that he pushes over the top of me thinking I'm making a stand against his aggressive play. Instead he flat calls meaning the pot is now 1520 and we both have less than 760 chips each which also means neither of us is folding at this point. Turn is 3d and I push all in and he instantly calls and shows me 8s for second pair but also a 4h for flopped two pair! LOL! I miss the remaining two Aces, 3 queens and 3 three's to suck out on him and a 10h on the river seals my fate, not the best of starts! So from an 86% favourite preflop I was actually a 18/82 underdog by the turn! You've got to love this game sometimes! I played the same guy in my next game and got my revenge when I rivered a King to give me a higher two pair than him! Justice!

So a nice little profit but it's very early days. I'm hoping to play a good few hundred of these babies by the end of the month, by which time I should have a pretty good idea if I am any good at HUSnG!

As always thanks for reading and best of luck at the tables!

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