Memoirs of a Yellow Banana

Movies to watch

2012-10-05T12:28:00.001+01:00

Memento
The Game
Donnie Darko
Primar Fear
Oldboy
Lady Vengeance
American Beauty
The Usual Suspects
Orphan
12 Monkeys

My Birthday weekend in Amsterdam

2012-02-23T22:01:00.000+00:00

Sorry guys this post is long overdue. I had my birthday weekend a month ago and have been really busy so have not had time to update blog with it.

Aaannnyway...so for my weekend my mate Moh and I decided to go to Amsterdam because he's from there and there's nothing better to celebrate a birthday than partying it up and getting....oh I need to filter this...getting Stroopwafels!

We decided to take the train to Brussels and then to Amsterdam because we felt the need to drink up beforehand.

My bottle of Macallan

Whiskey was the alcohol of choice and we both had a bottle to plough through during the 2 + 2 hours ride from London > Brussels > Da dam da dam.

On the first leg, we meet a guy who happens to be American and gay.

And obviously we start drinking with him.

Needless to say, by the end of the first 2 hours, we're completely wasted.

However, because I pretty much finished 75% of my bottle while Moh was taking it easy, I was REALLLY buzzing.

Culprit of it all

So buzzing I pass out on the 2nd leg.

The 2 hours are gone before I know it and while I emerge from the toilet, my eyes are not opening.

Moh's just like, dude we gotta go.

Where? I ask. Oh god, I should have known.

First stop when we arrive in Amsterdam?

Coffee shop. For some coffee obviously.

Moh chugging it down like a boss!

After the refreshments we hit a club. Met some random people inside who took me to some other bar and I left Moh in the club with his dutch mates.

These strangers (4 Chinese girls, 1 Chinese guy) take me to a bar where I meet MORE asians. And no I am not racist, they just happened to be asian.

I don't even remember what we talked about. I just remember leaving that bar with some digits and decided to go stuff my face with Burger King.

Best burger ever.

Go back to find Moh and get home. Saturday is pretty much getting coffee all day, chilling at home, playing poker, FIFA and going out again.

This is the club we went to the 2nd night. Music was awesome, proper hardstyle stuff you'd expect to get in Amsterdam.

Came across this weird poster though on the wall of this club. Thought of Raymond and decided to take a picture because I know how much he loves black dick.

Fresh fries and mayo, nothing beats that after a night out

Amsterdam was just mental. To be honest, it was too intense for my liking. Maybe I AM getting old.

Should I go pro?

2012-02-17T12:50:00.001+00:00

Should I go pro?

I’d like to share my thoughts on this question that I get asked all the time: Should I go pro?

I’m currently a 200-400nl grinder and I can say with 99% certainty that I am a decent winner. I presume this may be where a lot of you currently are or aspiring to achieve. If you would like graphs/evidence, feel free to PM me as I don’t want to turn this into a [x] brag thread.

For many, I am winning good money, heck even great money for my age. Then you ask me, so are you pro?

The answer is no.

I can gladly say that no, I do have a full time job working in Finance. Why? Here are a few of my reasons why:

- Poker is not a secure job.

No matter how good you are, there is no guarantee you cannot have losing months and what this means is it is a job with variability. This leads to many difficulties in life, one being you cannot get a mortgage. So unless you are planning to buy a house in cash or rent for the rest of your life, having poker as your profession is not going to help your situation.

- Poker is stressful.

I can’t even count all the times I couldn’t play because I was too stressed/tilted/tired. Or when I still played while I was and it affected me. Nobody’s a robot, and with multitabling, it’s extremely energy draining. What this means is that it causes stress in life that may or may not affect other things in life, specifically your relationships with your friends/family from your ‘normal’ life.

- Poker will not be around forever.

This is truer than ever given recent developments in the online poker environment. Black Friday made me realize that poker is actually what I like to call a ‘ghost’ industry. It can appear and disappear anytime. Another example of a ghost industry would be the oil industry. Obviously that’s going to take longer but as technology advances and humans find alternative energy sources, the oil industry can disappear anytime. What this implies is that unless you have alternative skills, when the industry dissolves, you will be left with nothing but a CV that has blank years while you clicked buttons online. The poker industry can diffuse due to the fact that people lose interest, edges become too small and/or stricter legislation.

You may still be thinking, well, I’m still attracted by the freedom, the money and the lifestyle I can live if I went pro. In that case, I would suggest going through a few factors before taking action on it. Here’s just some that I’ve come up with.

- Can I beat 100-200nl+?

I would definitely suggest you to be able to beat at the very least 100nl before seriously considering going pro. Unless you can do so, the financial reward of it is just not worth the opportunity cost. How do you know you can beat the level? Many articles on sample size and variance but something like 300k hands and you’re beating it at 4bb/100 you can be safe to assume you are a winner.

- Can I deal with the swings?

Mental strength is one of the most underrated aspects of being a good poker player. I’d much rather be a player who is mentally strong but is a 3-4bb winner than a less mentally sound player who is a 6-8bb winner. As a poker pro, you have to be able to put in the hours, meaning playing at least 20-30 hours a week to be returning anything relatively decent. Without mental strength, you’re not going to be able to do that. One good way of testing it out is to try playing at least 4-5 hours a day for a few weeks and see how that makes you feel. If you feel too drained from it all, you’re not cut to go pro. Yet.

- Can I do anything else afterwards if this doesn’t go well?

Always, always, always have at least a plan B in life. Ideally even plan C, D and E. That means you should be finishing your university degree, or in some cases, some professional qualification that you may be pursuing. If poker doesn’t go well, you should always have something to fall back on. Do not make the leap of faith without knowing you have something to land on if you can’t fly.

Feel free to shoot any questions you have about getting a job/poker/life.

Jack Wilcox - A teacher, a friend and a bro

2012-02-06T22:06:00.000+00:00

Today I received news about Jack passing away. I am still shocked from the news and cannot believe it.

I met Jack through twoplustwo 2 years ago. We talked ever since and he was really the best poker buddy I ever had. He was genuinely a nice guy and always willing to help. Without him, I doubt my poker game could improve in such a short period of time. We also came together to work on Higher Level Poker. Besides from poker, he was a great friend in real life. I would go to Swansea to visit and we would go out partying, doing stupid things.

About 1 month ago he decided to move to Thailand with some poker buddies. He bought a scooter for transportation around Phuket. Little did he know that it would cause the fatal accident yesterday.

Jack, I will forever remember you and live my life extra fully because of your good spirit that touched the many hearts of the people who met you.

Degen brag

2012-01-29T20:14:00.001+00:00

Hey guys I've been away for 10 days so sorry for the lack of updates. Was in Amsterdam last weekend for my birthday and went to Tenerife straight after that for work which was supposed to end on Friday but ended up deciding to stay for the weekend as well. I'll be compiling the pics/vids in posts later but there's a lot so bear with me.

Wanted to take this post to brag about my degeneracy/ballerness on my birthday. For some reason I decided that playing 200/400 HORSE while intoxicated after coming back from birthday drinks was a good idea.

For those of you who don't know what 200/400 HORSE is, it's basically a variant of the 'normal' poker and is a compilation of 5 different forms of poker. I won't go into the details but basically the point is that it's not my main game and I've probably played it maximum 10 times in my life. So why I thought it was a good idea to play at 100-200 times my normal stakes, I have no idea. I did only end up playing just 13 hands and just the Holdem and Omaha H/L hands.

2 biggest hands during session:

Poker Stars $200/$400 Limit Omaha Hi/Lo - 2 players -
Pre Flop: ($300) Hero is BTN/SB with Q T 8 9
Hero raises $200 to $400, BB raises $200 to $600, Hero calls

Flop: ($1200) Q 3 J (2 players)
BB bets $200, Hero raises $200 to $400, BB calls

Turn: ($2000) Q (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $400, BB calls

River: ($2800) 2 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $400, BB calls

Final Pot: $3600
Hero shows Q T 8 9 (HI: three of a kind, Queens)
BB mucks A A 3 4
Hero wins $3598
(Rake: $2.00)

Poker Stars $200/$400 Limit Hold'em - 2 players -

Pre Flop: ($300) Hero is BB with T K
BTN/SB raises $200 to $400, Hero calls

Flop: ($800) J A Q (2 players)
Hero checks, BTN/SB bets $200, Hero raises $200 to $400, BTN/SB calls

Turn: ($1600) 7 (2 players)
Hero bets $400, BTN/SB calls

River: ($2400) 9 (2 players)
Hero bets $400, BTN/SB calls

Final Pot: $3200
Hero shows T K (a straight, Ten to Ace)
BTN/SB mucks 4 J
Hero wins $3198
(Rake: $2.00)

5 minutes 1.7k.

Report for January:

Love how my HEM now has a line for 200/400.

Taking your game to the next level

2012-01-19T11:23:00.003+00:00

Some of you blog followers are poker players like myself. The majority of you will be playing micro/small stakes maybe live in the casino and possibly online.

For the recreational/self-proclaiming competent player, videos like these ones amaze you and make you aspire to be like Daniel Negreanu, able to name specific hole cards for opponents.

Humans have a innate tendency to imitate. This means you will have gone and attempted the same. Some opponent raises you call with a hand say 99. He bets on 862r, bets on a T turn, a Q river. You 'put him on AK' , decide to call and he has AK. You feel a sense of invincibility and self-attribution bias kicks in. You claim the credit, winning the hand, to your 'superior' reading ability. Next time you do it, opponent ends up having QQ, you feel that you got unlucky and you place the blame of the failure on a lack of luck.

You don't review your line of thinking and you continue to believe in your awesome reading skills because humans possess selective memory. They ALWAYS lose with AA. They ALWAYS see an A on the flop when they have KK. They can ALWAYS hero call because last time they did it they won.

But among all the things here, the key mistake you're making is you're not thinking about poker in terms of ranges. You're isolating specific hands rather than assigning a range of hands opponents can have.

When I was moving up and improving, I had a few aha moments and one of those was realising the importance of ranges.

It's not easy to start off because of your habitual ways of hand analysis. A good way to start would be thinking about his range like a pie and as the hand plays out you eliminate sections of his pie.

For example, you raise from early position with AA and somebody you know who is quite tight /straight forward decides to call in the big blind. the flop is 862 once again and you decide to make a bet when he checks to you. He calls and checks a 2 turn. You bet, he calls and checks a K river. You bet again and he decides to shove into you for a small raise slightly less than 2.5x your bet on the river. If you were to think of ranges this hand becomes an extremely easy fold and you can easily pinpoint what he has.

To start that process you think about the hands he would call your preflop raise. The first slice of the pie. You know he's tight but you're not sure how tight so let's assign a looser range for him. Let's say he calls all the suited aces all the suited kings, all pairs and suited connectors. That's already a really loose range of hands. On the flop when he check/calls you can instantly eliminate a hand like 9Ts because he's not going to be calling that. So his getting to the turn range is (22-AA,A2s,A6s,A8s,K2s,K6s,K8s,45s,34s,56s,67s,78s,89s and some random suited 8s and overcards you think he may have). Once you bet the turn and he continues, his range is sliced further as you can now eliminate all the overcards and the weaker pairs like 33. On the final street when we bet, and he shoves, he is never shoving an 8 because you have raised from early position bet flop bet turn bet river so in his shoes, his only decision is calling or folding. It is also extremely unlikely that this type of player is bluffing in this spot because 1. he has so few hands he can really bluff with and 2. it's just not a spot he will be bluffing because of the strength of YOUR range when you take this line.

So you realise his shoving to you range on the river consists of all the fullhouses, some 2s and basically never a bluff. (It would also be stupid to assume he shoves K6s as he has no reason to believe you will bet/call a worse hand and to be fair he should never have a hand like K6s/K8s anyway) It becomes an trivial fold and a fold that people don't make enough.

This is a relatively simple example. You should be able to now realise that Daniel Negreanu's read in the 99 hand was good, but pretty easy. A weak tight straightforward player calls a raise preflop and a bet/raise on the flop of 246r. In this spot his range should basically be 22/44/66/35s(unlikely)/46s(unlikely)/88(unlikely) and overpairs. However overpairs should be discounted because they would reraise preflop at least some % of the time.

When DN checks the paired board river and gets bet into, opponent is not betting any 1 pair hand as DN's hand is quite faceup as an overpair, so basically his hand is always a house, never a bluff, 22/44/66 one of those. Regardless of which one, 99 becomes once again an easy fold.

So stop putting people on specific hands without thinking about ranges. Once you do, you'll find that it's so much easier to read people based off betting patterns and that poker (mostly) isn't about having a poker face, identifying somebody's tell nor getting lucky.

Happy birthday to me

2012-01-17T20:38:00.000+00:00

Woah dudes and dudesses, I'm turning 24 in...4 hours. I'm sat at home just grinding away with the Jack in the hand.

This year nobody's around to buy me presents so looks like I gotta buy myself my own. Now let's see, what do I want...

I've been sitting here for the past 30 minutes and I still can't think of a good idea.

Meh. I suppose buying impractical things can wait.

Some way to go before I hit my 100k target this year.

Before you start thinking oh what a sad guy he's staying at home clicking away on his computer on his birthday, I do have plans for tomorrow, Thursday and hitting Amsterdam for the weekend on Friday!

Trip report and pics to come.

Last year's poker recap

2012-01-08T01:09:00.002+00:00

So...

Now the year has started, time to recap 2011 for poker.

Results....drum roll......Ta da!

To be fair, 90% of these hands were played between Jan to April 2011 as I had to take a break from poker for Level 2 CFA. After that Black Friday happened and I couldn't play on FTP anymore. Since then, haven't really had time to get back into poker so dropped quite behind my goal of 100k...

Oh well! New year, new start, goal this year is to reg 2/4 and hit 100k. More importantly, I will have to put in at least 35k hands a month.

Starting the year well but not well enough to be honest.

Should be putting in at least triple the number of hands and should be making a rate of 2k a week to hit my goal of a hundo.

Def gonna get into grind mode starting tomorrow. Also, going to start making vids and offering coaching once again so book early if you're one of my students.

2011 Year of Realisation

2011-12-30T19:36:00.001+00:00

New Year's Eve is just around the corner and another year is ready to pass by. As I skim through my memories of 2011, it is a concoction of emotions. 2011 is the year I made my first 50k clicking buttons online. 2011 is the year of heartbreaks. 2011 is the year of the bros. It is also the year of realisation.

The single most important thing I've realised is that one has to learn to love oneself. There will be times you will have to be alone. You have to be able to enjoy your own company. There will be times where others will criticise your ways. You have to stop giving a fuck about what the unimportant people think. There will be times where you feel that nobody loves you. You have to love yourself. Only when you love yourself will anyone love you.

Fortunately, I have also realised I have some of the coolest people in the world around me and I do not need to feel emo too often.

One of the sickest moments in life was definitely taking this picture in Amsterdam with Ray and Helbert.

The Chans just being awesome.

So New Year Resolutions?
- Crush CFA Level 3
- Get back into poker properly and reg 2/4+
- Hench up 85kgs (currently fluctuating 78-80)
- Visit at least 10 different cities in at least 5 different countries
- More to come

How am I gonna spend my NYE?

Just going to stay at home and spend it with the fam.

Live every day like it's a new start to the rest of your life not just on New Year's Day.

Happy New Year everyone!

This day they call Christmas

2011-12-26T19:10:00.002+00:00

That time of the year again. I spent it going here with the Chans.

Obviously they go shopping while I go to the poker room because I'm a degen.

Table fish woo. The one in the cap is the silent loose passive Irish fish. The one picking his nose is the noisy aggro Canadian. Then you have Mr. Know-it-all-but-is-actually-an-idiot British noob. Obv I'm just another quiet introverted chink. Can't deal with hearing these losers talk strategy when they have no idea what they're doing.

Even this badass card protector I got for being cool is more interesting than the table talk.

So I ship a few hundos and take the Chans out for dinner.

Mama Chan feels the need to pose for pictures with anything she can grab hold of. In this case it's a cup of coffee.

Obviously runs through the family. Chocolate this time.

Papa Chan looking like a boss.

Hey look, it's a car trying to look oriental.

Hopefully next year I have better things to do like getting wasted and passing out. Merry Christmas everyone.

Perks of parents visiting

2011-12-22T11:02:00.001+00:00

Asian parents ftw.

Having parents visiting isn't always the best thing you could hope for nor is it optimal. But these are the times when I'm loving it!

Coffee Prince - tick

2011-12-22T10:36:00.002+00:00

A bit girly I have to admit but I recently finished this Korean TV series called Coffee Prince. Pretty awesome to be honest. It has the standard Korean drama touches such as rich girl poor girl, start off hate end up love. What intrigued me was the twist that the main male actor confuses the main actress as a boy. Through his interaction with her he cannot control his growing feelings and ends up loving her despite thinking she's a guy. The most beautiful part was him succumbing to his heart and deciding to love him/her even though he/she was a man.

The girl is afraid of revealing her identity as a girl because she is afraid that if she does, he will leave her and she won't be able to see him again. To control/mask his affection for her, he even attempts to get them to become sworn brothers. Because she loves him so much, she would rather be able to hang around him as a brother than not see him at all.

You have got to watch it yourself to find out what happens but it's definitely one of the better Korean series out there.

Oh and the supporting actress is F-I-T.

BRO

2011-12-21T11:19:00.001+00:00

Me looking like a right douche wearing sunglasses indoors and Ray just being bigtime as per usual.

So this is what I woke up to first thing in the morning. Bro Ray had sent me a SICK Christmas e-card. For those sick enough to watch it, it's here: http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/5s3mvp1ZzfZxI70u

Big thanks to Ray, always great to wake up with a laugh.

While on the site, produced this bad boy as well

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/TdCnLJc0WKmiCv74

Poker updates and the holiday plans

2011-12-20T10:27:00.001+00:00

As some of you guys may already know, I am one of the main instructors/coaches for a poker education site I co-own with a few mates. We produce videos, write articles and provide a community for online poker players to improve. You can find the site at www.higherlevelpoker.com.

Haven't been running too well lately. Ever since Black Friday, I haven't been able to get into the groove. Took a break for the CFA Level 2 and was travelling so never really had time to grind the tables.

Started back on Stars a couple months back and have been 4k below EV since. Getting quite frustrated with 6-max nowadays, I feel as if the edge is getting smaller thus causing more variance. I am considering other options such as HU, PLO or just quitting poker (in that order).

Don't think I'm in the right mindset at the moment, going to take a break from the tables.

Will be renting a car next week with the family, driving around the UK, love driving, can't wait.

Time to enjoy the Christmas and the New Year!

I told my parents I love them

2011-12-19T16:37:00.002+00:00

Not sure if this is an Asian thing or not but ever since I can remember, I never told my parents I loved them. Maybe it's a guy thing.

A few weeks back, I realised that I have never really said I love you to the most important people in my life. I'm a strong believer of living life with no regrets. So I did.

The chat kind of went like this:

Me: Hey, just wanted to tell you that I love you.
Mum: Are you sick? Do you know who I am? Who are you?
Me: Yeah Mum, it's me and I know it's you.
Mum: What have you done now?

Although she was quite alarmed, I knew this must have made her quite happy. If you don't/haven't already, tell your parents you love them.

It starts HERE

2011-12-19T16:10:00.000+00:00

Hi. That's me. Yes that's right. Why? Go figure.

So I plan on remembering this shit called youth when I'm so old I won't be able to stand up (both physically and down there). Facebook just doesn't cut it.

I'm going to fill this space with pictures and random blatherings. Enjoy.