A Fish and his Chips

[Chipaccrual]

LOL, nice pic.  

Face for radio, that"s me.


What I should say about the structure is that it"s pretty much as good as you will get it for the timescales involved.  What it does mean is that there appears to be little post flop play.

That is caused not just by the structure, but also by the players.  The likes of James Hartigan and Julian Thew on our table were doing a lot of initial raising, but the majority of the rest of the table were sat waiting for monster hands (At times, me included).

One of the guys joined our table with about 8k.  Went on a crazy run, doubled with AA, then with KK, then got it in with KK again versus QQ and AQ.  Happy days, the only hand he"d shown before that was when he raised with 63 and Julian shoved with 66.  The original raiser was priced in to call, but you could see he was totally embarrassed to make the call, eventually did, and they both chopped it with a straight.  MBN.  

[Chipaccrual]

Clear Skys and then the Sky fell in.

Sat in seat 8, I had Team Sky Poker player Glitterbabe to my right.  To his right was Julian Thew.  To his right was James Hartigan.  FML.

Really enjoyable table though.  We were quickly made the feature table on the live stream, and away we went.  Little to report in the first two levels.  Won a couple of pots and was upto 6k.

Must be nice to be as popular as you Leigh  

Des would have been proud.  I was sat the opposite end to the camera, so APAT logo on show for the duration.  

[Quasar]

"don"t know if I can face the one day structure"

You look really young in that pic Leigh. Love the expression on your face.
Looks like you are thinking  "how am I going to tell my mum I"ve spent my months pocket money on a poker game"  

[Chipaccrual]

Flattery is good Debs.    It"s because I"d got my hair cut, just in case I was on the telly.  

[cincicrappykid]

"don"t know if I can face the one day structure"

You look really young in that pic Leigh. Love the expression on your face.
Looks like you are thinking  "how am I going to tell my mum I"ve spent my months pocket money on a poker game"  

lol RUN FOREST RUN   HAHAHAHAHAHRR

[Chipaccrual]

You may or may not have been aware that Betfair had a few problems on Saturday afternoon/evening, meaning no access to their services for customers.

Unusually, they have posted up an explanation as to what went on, so customers can simply understand the situation.

When the website failed on Saturday, our first step was to disable Betfair for all our customers on the web, API and mobile services. Once we identified the actual problem, we determined that we needed our website "available" but with betting disallowed. We recovered the site internally around 18:00 and re-enabled betting as of 20:00 once we were certain it was stable.

Here is what actually happened:

After performing certain types of website changes, an issue developed that caused our servers to temporarily slow down, processing just one thing at a time (single threading) instead of thousands of user requests in parallel. This "single threading" behaviour was introduced some time ago to protect against occasional broken pages caused by serving content while it is changing. In tech speak, our servers weren"t thread-safe on certain types of content changes.

This has been an operational concern for several weeks as our traffic has reached record volumes week after week. While we had several operational protections in place to limit these types of changes during peak load, we missed an important one. Every 15 minutes, an automated process was publishing exactly the type of content that triggers the issue described above. Yesterday we hit a tipping point as the web servers reached a point where it was taking longer than 15 minutes to complete their update - essentially rendering the servers unusable.

Then in an attempt to quickly shed load, we triggered a process to disable some of the computationally intensive features on the site. Unfortunately, the way this was done triggered a complete recompile of every page on our site, for every user, in every locale. Under our normal Saturday usage, recovery took several hours.

After spotting the pattern, we"ve recognised this has been going on with varying impact since February 8, 2011. During periods of increased user traffic, our customers would experience this issue in the form of slow navigation or a "sticky" user experience. Yesterday was simply a tipping point, made worse by our recovery attempt.

We"ve fixed this problem now. We"ve disabled the original automated job and rebuilt it to update content safely. We"ve tripled the capacity of our web server farm to spread our load even more thinly. We"ve fixed our process for disabling features so that we won"t make things worse. We"ve updated our operational processes and introduced a whole new raft of monitoring to spot this type of issue. We"ve also isolated the underlying web server issue so that we can change our content at will without triggering the switch to single-threading.

We believe these changes will bring the stability we all desire for Betfair and thank you for your continued custom.

That explains it then.  

[samuel_9]

I like the last part ................SO we wont make things anyworse?........nice to no they DONT no what there doing

[AAroddersAA]

Clear Skys and then the Sky fell in.

Really enjoyed the day at the G Casino Luton for the Sky Poker Tour.  160+ runners with a 5k starting stack and 30 minute blinds.  Had a quick catch up with Tighty and met up with Rich Baker and Dai, got my seat draw.  Table 16, Seat 8.  Last table, so probably first to break (Errr, wrong, would be last to break), not a problem though, shouldn"t be too tough a table.

Sat in seat 8, I had Team Sky Poker player Glitterbabe to my right.  To his right was Julian Thew.  To his right was James Hartigan.  FML.

Really enjoyable table though.  We were quickly made the feature table on the live stream, and away we went.  Little to report in the first two levels.  Won a couple of pots and was upto 6k.

Then got it allin preflop against Julian.  AK v AQ.  He"d been running quite good at the table, so everyone was quite shocked that he didn"t hit his queen outs.  So, upto 12k, and get it allin preflop again with AK.  This time against James Hartigan for his tourney life.  James has KQ, and although we both made a flush, my ace of clubs was a nice comfort against his queen of clubs.

Now on 19k, and got three times average.  I get another one allin preflop against a 5k stack.  Pocket Jacks up against Ace Ten.  Board comes AAxTx.  Nothing wrong with it, just unlucky.

I then play Ace Four of clubs.  I wasn"t completely happy with the way I played it, but actually it probably wasn"t that bad.  Blinds were 300/600, folded round to me on the button.  I raise to 1750, big blind calls.  Flop comes out with two clubs.  I bet out, BB calls.  Blank on the turn.  Big blind bets out, I reraise, BB flat calls and leaves himself about 2.5k back.  River brings the killer club.  Big Blind checks, I bet 2.5k, and eventually he reluctantly calls with his 9-10k stack now in the pot.  I declare the nuts, and he just goes "oh".

Up to 25k, and that"s pretty much where I stayed for the next two hours.  Just couldn"t find positions or cards.  Tries a few steals that got played back on, managed to get a few through, but the levels passed, and before I knew it, I"d gone from three times average stack to less than average stack, but down to two tables.

Blinds were now 1.5k/3k/300.  We are down to 19 players, and the top 17 are getting paid, with £220 a minimum cash.  I"ve got 21k, average is now about 40k.  If I can get a double up, I"m convinced I can do some damage in the latter stages of this.

It folds round to me in mid position, and I have pocket eights.  Having not seen anything for ages, the temptation is to much not to ship it in.  The player to my left pretty much instantly declares allin.  Folds round the rest, and I"m up against poclet queens.  A quiet "One Time Please Dealer" under my breath, but out came a queen on the flop to kill any hopes.  he just had me covered, so I departed in 19th place.

Thoroughly enjoyed the 7 hours of play.  The structure is a bit brutal, but means you have no option to play from the early stages.  My problem is that I"d built a stack, but then didn"t push on.  But the cards for those 2-3 hours were truly horrendous.  I spent the last couple of hours with Dai Llewellyn to my right, and I"m sure he will vouch for all the Sighs and FFS every time I got dealt two cards.  Dai managed to cash, so well played to that man.

All in all, it was a really enjoyable table to play poker on.  I only actually had five showdowns in 7 hours.

AK v AQ ( For Tourney Life) - WON
AK v KQ - WON
JJ v AT - LOST
A4 v Mucked - WON
88 v QQ (For Tourney Life) - LOST

Don"t know where I get this ATC image from.  

Many thanks to Tighty and Tikay and all the guys at Sky, who work very hard to make these events great fun.  Not sure if I"ll play another one this season, don"t know if I can face the one day structure.  

The final at DTD gotta worth a go, thats the one I want to play (it"s a bit above my bankroll tbh but I don"t mind taking a shot now and then). I will have a couple of goes at qualifying for Cardiff as well.

[Chipaccrual]

The final at DTD gotta worth a go, thats the one I want to play (it"s a bit above my bankroll tbh but I don"t mind taking a shot now and then). I will have a couple of goes at qualifying for Cardiff as well.

Unfortunately, the Sky Grand Final is the middle weekend of our Coast to Coast in September.  I wonder if Jack and Geo fancy a slight detour.  

[technolog]

The final at DTD gotta worth a go, thats the one I want to play (it"s a bit above my bankroll tbh but I don"t mind taking a shot now and then). I will have a couple of goes at qualifying for Cardiff as well.

Unfortunately, the Sky Grand Final is the middle weekend of our Coast to Coast in September.  I wonder if Jack and Geo fancy a slight detour.  

We have a day off on the Sunday if that"s any good to you?

Personally I"m planning on having a bit of a thick head

[Chipaccrual]

[Chipaccrual]

A Weekend Covvie Break

It only seems like yesterday we were crowning Brian Martin as European Amateur Poker Champion, then regretting it when we saw his personal "champion" photo.

But, back we went to the G Casino in Coventry at the Ricoh Arena, for more fun, frivolity, and plenty of poker.

It was another cracking APAT weekend, with a slightly new structure, a tweeked payout, and quite a few new faces sat at the tables.  But one thing didn"t change, it was another huge success.

Many thanks must go to Ruben, Karl and the whole team at the G Coventry.  They are really putting the place on the map when it comes to poker events, and they have the casino to back them up.  The weekend culminated in one of the best APAT heads up"s I have ever witnessed.  It did go on, but everyone that was watching in the casino, or on the feed at home hopefully really enjoyed it.

Eventually, Mark Briggs became the 888poker English Amatuer Champion, with Craig Dawson in a very respectable silver medal position.  Both came across as really top people, as did the rest of the final table.  Really pleased for Deb Kimm making the final table.  Her game has come on massively over the past 12 months, and she"s getting the results that she deserves.

One for the mods in the PLO, with Paulie D taking the spoils, after a good heads up with Duncan Hodgkins.  Both had made day two of the main event aswell, so had a marathon amount of poker.  As we left the casino, Dunc was still in the casino"s own deepstack tourney, going for his third cash of the weekend.

On the non-poker side, the less said about the early hours of Sunday morning in the casino bar, the better.  Andy Overton wasn"t quite sure what to say to me when he returned to the cardroom later that day.  It was quite funny.

Big thankyou"s to the whole of the APAT team.  Once again, Maylis and James did a great job with the feed, and were supported superbly by James Barber, Dave Howard, Ben Cundall and especially on Day Two, by Mark Porter.  Mark came across as a bit of a natural on the mic around the final table time.

So, onto Newcastle on the 23rd and 24th on April, with the UK Home Nations Team event on the Thursday and Friday.  Four days in Newcastle, should be epic.

We desperately tried to give away some stuff on the forum over the weekend, but Tighty"s competitions seemed to pose too much thought requirements for most.  So, if you"ve managed to get this far in reading my blog, here"s something for you.  Send me a pm with Bunch Of Fives as the title.  Let me know your 888poker alias.  I will select one forum member on Friday, and will ship them entry into all five of next weeks APAT Bunch Of Fives promo tourneys.  But, shhhhhhhh, don"t tell everyone.  

Thanks Coventry, you were great.  Newcastle has a lot to live up to.  

[Fatcatstu]

You do rather good write ups sir

You will be petrified delighted to know that the stockton massive will be back in force (well at least me and phil at this point) in Newcastle, see you there

[Chipaccrual]

Could APAT weekends be an addiction ?

I"d posted the title as my facebook status earlier.  When I used to play APAT events, I"d always fall foul of what I would call an "APAT Hangover".  You"ve been knocked out of the tournament, and ideally you just want another APAT event to start straight away.

With online poker, this is pretty much the case.  There"s normally a suitable game to play on one of the many sites around the place.  But live poker is different.  In the past year or so, I think I"ve only managed to play any sort of live poker on three occasions whilst away for APAT events.  And when I get home, I"m always really keen to play, so normally that results in a few online sessions over the next few days.

This year for me is slightly different, as I"ve plans to play regularly in some live events.  And I don"t have to wait long after the weekends exploits in Coventry, to get my own taste of tournament play.

It"s the BlackBelt Poker live this weekend at The Vic in London.  I"m playing Day 1a on the Friday, and am really looking forward to it.  Good structure, nice venue, and only 90 minutes on the train for me.  One of the drawbacks to living on the south coast (And to be honest, there are very, very few that I have come across in 17 years), is that the poker venues are pretty dire.

Southampton and Portsmouth both have casinos and various legal and illegal card rooms, but there is very rarely decent structured events on.  The Grosvenor Summer Series will be in Southampton again this year, but other than that, you need to travel to Brighton, London, Luton, Bristol, if you want to get any real quality events.

It is understandable really, half of Southampton and Portsmouths catchment area is the waters of the Solent (Oh, and the Isle of Wight), so from a business point of few, when it comes to locations, you ar never going to see the likes of a DTD decide to open.  It just makes no business sense.

Jealous of the Midlands ?   When it comes to poker venues, it"s tough not to be.  A bunch of great venues on your doorstep, and only an hour or so from London or Manchester.  Not bad at all.

So, for me, it"s the train, and London calling on Friday.  Day 2 is the Sunday, and I really do hope I"m not about to rail the first matchdays of the APAT Online National League.    Here"s hoping.

[Jon MW]

... 
One of the drawbacks to living on the south coast (And to be honest, there are very, very few that I have come across in 17 years), is that the poker venues are pretty dire.
...

It"s full of southerners, that"s the other main one