Twitch Hype

Hello again,

It's been nearly 3 months since my last update and since I decided to make the transition to playing tournaments full time and started being backed on 888, Party Poker and PokerStars.

So far I've found the coaching from Marc Wright brilliant. Most of the time it takes the form of a group session where we will go through a tournament hand history from start to finish when one of the stable has gone deep in an event and discuss each spot as a group. It's a great tool to see multiple thought processes on the same spot because there's a variety of different playing styles among all of the players within the stable.

Results-wise it's been a decent start to the year as part of the stable. It's been a steep learning curve, I've never really put a huge amount of volume into MTTs and before this I've always played on a site where all games are 6-max which means I was really inexperienced when it comes to full ring, so I'm pretty happy with my results so far, and I already feel like a much better tournament player than I was 3 months ago. Below is a Sharkscope graph which combines my aliases on 888, Stars and Party

I set myself a target at the beginning of the year that I would have reached at least $100,000 of cashes on Pocket5s before the end of the year. I've always played 99% of my poker on Sky which is not tracked on Pocket5s so before 2015 my total cashes on there was less than $1,000 if I remember correctly, and I've just recently broken the $20,000 mark ( http://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/lambert180/ ) 

I've also been playing on Sky poker throughout this time, mostly MTTs, but the odd cash game too, but I've retained all of my own 'action' on Sky, so I'm using my own bankroll on there and so keeping 100% of the profits, and it's been a decent start to the year there too.

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I first started playing poker around 10 years ago but it was a very minor hobby at the time and it wasn't long before I was just too busy doing other things and it got put on the back burner. There was probably a good 2-3 years where I didn't play any poker at all, and then 6 years ago I stumbled across channel 865 on Sky TV which was the Sky Poker channel and straight away I was hooked again.

The channel was the perfect mix of being entertaining while still educational, I signed up to play on Sky Poker pretty much straight away and have played there ever since. I've remained a regular viewer ever since, up until 19th March 2015 when they broadcast their last ever live show. It had been a great for years of TV and the sense of community and being able to get to know the oter people on the site really brought out my competitive side and was a major factor in me working as hard as I have to get where I am today.

It was very sad to see the live Sky Poker channel go, but this does bring me on to the last point of my blog.... Twitch!

 

With the closure of the Sky Poker channel, they have said that future plans for media/advertising is likely going to be Youtube, pre-recorded shows and potentially Twitch so I thought it was a great time for me to get my Twitch back up and running and build a solid viewer base ready for if they do start a Sky Poker Twitch channel. I love discussing strategy and being involved in the media side of poker as much as I love playing the game so it's ideal for me.

I've only done 2 streams so far, one morning session and one evening session, but I've got off to a pretty good start there, final tabling 3 events while on stream with cashes totalling around $2000+ and viewing figures have been pretty good considering it's still early days.

http://www.twitch.tv/lambert180/

If you want to get email notifications of when I go live next then you can click the link above and 'follow me'.

New Grind For The New Year

If I'm honest, 2014 was a little disappointing, one serious bink helped make it a pretty good year all round but otherwise I feel like I've underachieved and I largely have to blame myself for that.

Of course the highlight of last year was finishing third at the UKPC 6max side event for £18,000 which at the time was only my 2nd HM flag (I had only played 10 live events ever). Now I've played 11 live events and have a 3rd HM flag after mincashing the Grand Prix Final at DTD. That UKPC bink was nearly 11 months ago now though so I guess I'll have to get crushing 2015 and find something new to brag about!


Towards the end of 2014 I made the decision to move the vast majority of my volume over to MTTs. I'll still be playing cash when the action's good but most evenings are going to be devoted to MTTs now. I spent the last 6 weeks or so of 2014 with this new regime with the best result being a FT in the UKOPS Main Event, busting in 6th for £1956. Here are my MTT stats for the whole of 2014

Then around new year I was contacted by a guy I know from playing on Sky Poker, asking if I'd be interested in joining a stable of MTT players that he's involved with. There are a few people involved in running the stable, one of those and the one providing all of the coaching is Marc Wright. It's absolute perfect timing just as I was going to be starting to grind MTTs myself anyway, to have the opportunity to be coached by one of the best MTT players in the country. I'll be retaining all of my own (cash and MTT) action on Sky, but will be backed for any other sites... Stars, 888, Ipoker, Party etc.

I've only played a few sessions for them up to now, I made my 2nd FT of the stable yesterday and would have been off to a cracking start if I'd managed to take it down but still happy to be in profit at this early stage.

This is going to be an amazing opportunity for me, it's exciting year ahead, and I'm definitely gonna need to put a ton of hard work in to make the most of the coaching that I'll be receiving, but I'm feeling very motivated to make this year a very big one in my poker career.

GL everyone else with your 2015!