Playing @ VIP Poker
...it's around 11am and I'm hungry but there's not too much in the house. There's this great coffee shop down the road that does the best Full English breakfasts - sausages, bacon, eggs, beans, waffles, black pudding and friend mushrooms. They do a great cup of coffee too, so I finish what I'm doing and have a stroll down. While I'm waiting for my food and drinking my Americano I check my emails and FaceBook on my iPhone, then check in for a few hands of poker at VIP Poker. It's an app just like Zynga Poker with a lot of similarities, and I play at both these sites as well as Pokerist for fun and practice for the real thing. My goal is usually to work my way up to $1,000,000 chips from just a few thousand by playing regular poker and no tournaments. The reason I do this is that it teaches me to be careful with my money and to play focused even when I'm relaxed. If you loosen up and make stupid bets in practice you can get into bad habits and make expensive mistakes when you play for real. I'm a perfectionist and there's no such thing as too much practice, you can always be better than you are.
I'm in a $500/$1000 room which is much higher stakes than I ever play for real. The most I'll even go to is $2/$4 because the risk is lower and I can make a comfortable living from playing small stakes. At the most I maybe risk $200 a day, but have usually doubled if not tripled my initial stake after an hour of so. It's not uncommon for me to be $1000 in profit by the end of the day, often it's more than that. If you use your knowledge, experience, intuition and you make the right decisions the cards will be on your side. I know people who play for much higher stakes than I do but I figure unless you need to, why risk more than you have to?
Anyway I'm in this room and there's this guy called Christian777; at first I think it's his name not his religious orientation. Then a girl joins the table with an avatar photograph of her in a bikini posing by a pool. Straight away the morons on the table are saying 'hi' and 'how r u' to her, which works in my favor because the more they're looking at her the less they're looking at their cards. This Christian777 guy though is different, he starts abusing her over chat calling her 'slut', 'whore' and the other usual insults. Repressed much?!
The girl ignores him and gets on with her game but this guy won't let it go, so I take him on head to head. On the river I have three kings which is good enough for me against a guy who is checking instead of betting because he's too busy spitting bile at some girl he doesn't even know. I go all in and he takes the bait and he's gone. Silence at last, but then he returns with a new stake and starts the abuse again. The other players catch on and start betting tough against him too because he's so irate and not thinking straight. We keep bankrupting him and he keeps coming back in the game with more money to shout abuse and lose even more chips.
By the time my food arrived the girl in the bikini had made $17000 profit and moved to another table, and the religious extremist had been bankrupt and come back eight times. Some people just don't learn, and it dawned on me as I began to eat that if the guy was so religious in the first place what the f**k was he doing in a poker room gambling in the first place.
