Warren Wooldridge's Poker Blog on Poker Verdict.com

I Miss Annette_15

21 November 2007 by Warren Wooldridge

The Fresh Fish mines some gold, but can't help pining for the company of Annette_15 along the way...

The day after Vicky Coren won the London EPT I joked to anyone that would listen that it could have been me. Not because I was unlucky or played badly but because Vicky and I were on the same table late on day one and when they broke our table she chose the winning ticket; I chose one that saw me go out next hand.

The biggest loss for me though is that an already well regarded poker celebrity would now elevate to truly iconic status resulting in even greater demands on her time than before. We frequently clashed across the green baize at the Vic and now our paths hardly cross. I miss the challenge and excitement that those encounters brought.

And so it is with Annette_15.

Last night I played in the nightly 50 grand on PokerStars, an extremely popular tournament that Annette_15 used to play every single night. We clashed on more than one occasion, but most memorably when... Read more...

I Love The GUKPT (Part Two)

By Warren Wooldridge 7 September 2007

In the first part I told you how the first couple of days went in the Luton leg of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT) where I got my deepest finish yet. This is how I got to the final table...

For Part One revealing what happened on Days 1 and 2 click here

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Day 3

12 players returned for the final day and the portents for a successful day were all around. The kids had woken up late giving me some much needed rest, Arsenal managed to score twice between the M1 and the car park to win their opening match of the season, and most importantly I seemed to have an excellent draw. I had avoided the strongest player left, Adam Stoneham, had the extreme short stack on my left and Nik Persaud on my right.

After 40 minutes I hadn’t won a... Read more...

I Love The GUKPT

By Warren Wooldridge 3 September 2007

I've played in all but one of the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour events but got my deepest finish last time in Luton where I managed to finish 2nd. This is how it happened...

Day One

I like my table. All the Poker Verdict players are playing on the same day which makes for a nice change and all are drawn on tables that are in my immediate environs. This helps alleviate the long periods of boredom that I suffer at the start of any tournament. I can stand up and watch any interesting pots that they might be in without missing any action on my own table.

The cards helped too. I was in mischievous mood re-raising in late position with J-7 off and getting one caller. Flop J-J-7. Kerching. K-K shortly after against 9-9 and I reach the first break with more than 22,000. I have come back for Day 2 twice on this tour with less than that. The next two levels were up and down but I would have breached the 40,000 mark had my A-Q not been cracked by A-J on a board of Q-3-J-7-J. I had Aces three times between levels 4 and 7 and all stood up to get to 45,000. Then a really nasty setback. It is folded round to a... Read more...

How To Mix It With The Best At Omaha

By Warren Wooldridge 27 August 2007

What is it like to play pot limit Omaha against the best players on the planet at the World Series of Poker? Let me tell you...

Three days after arriving in Vegas this year for the World Series of Poker my jet lag had lifted enough for me to enjoy a fantastic experience in the $1,500 Pot Limit Omaha with rebuys. I readily admit that I made a bit of an error of judgement entering this tournament. I made the cardinal sin of not having enough cash with me to rebuy or add-on and also didn’t realise that the rebuy period was an incredible three hours.

So, as you can imagine there was plenty of loose play early on and I essentially only had one life. One bad beat and I would be heading to the rail. The first prospect of this happening came just 10 minutes into the event. Three people had already rebought when I looked at 7h-7s-6h-5s in the Big Blind. The pot was raised and received four callers by the time it got back to me so I felt obliged to call. The flop was a highly encouraging 7c-3h-2h. Now this is the kind of hand that looks a million dollars on first inspection but can quickly go wrong, so... Read more...

The Perfect Play...Almost

By Warren Wooldridge 13 April 2007

Don't you just hate it when a good plan doesn't come together?

I wish I could play the £100 holdem game at the Vic more often. I really do. Although a cacophony of ‘transfer please’ from other tables greets me every time I sit down I think the game for the most part is easy to run over. There’s nothing I like better than a table with two or three people I know fairly well and a mixture of new and old faces making up the numbers.

Although I appear to raise eight pots out of 10 the reality is somewhat different. A series of £15 or £20 raises with not much is all that is needed to cultivate the lunatic image. And so it was last night. The fact that the deck ran over me with flops matching my ridiculously low holdings helped to offset the three bad river beats that I took along the way. It was also the source of plenty of amusement that I was winning medium-sized pots with Q-6, 2-5, and 9-J. Even Hugo the dealer was chuckling away. Has this guy really made a WSOP final table?

I enjoyed... Read more...

I Spent The Night With Annette_15

2 March 2007 By Warren Wooldridge

Warren Wooldridge aka Fresh Fish locked horns with the Norwegian teenager on PokerStars recently...

I am always amazed when high profile online poker players with big tournament wins to their name turn up in relatively low limit tournaments. Kwob20 was seen playing regularly in the nightly $10 rebuy tournament on PokerStars the week after he won the second of two bracelets in the site’s World Championship Of Online Poker (WCOOP), which together netted him over $75k.

And so it is with Annette 15. I am reliably informed that she is a regular in the $50 rebuy on PokerStars. This is an event I have recently started playing as a substitute for my old $30 rebuy fix on the sadly demised Paradise Poker.

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Fate Denied Me A Big Score

26 Feb 2007 Warren Wooldridge

Warren Wooldridge had a chance encounter with Fate, a cruel mistress, on the GUKPT...

Hats off to my good friends at Blue Square and everyone involved in the Grosvenor UK Poker Tour (GUKPT). Two legs in and it’s already an undoubted success. When I went to the launch party at the backend of last year the only events I imagined myself playing were London, Luton and possibly Brighton.

Bolton and Walsall are already fond memories and I now intend to play in every event. I can’t honestly put my finger on the appeal. It certainly isn’t the locations or the food! I think a big factor is bumping into the same people and the sense of community that has been established. Although people recognise me and ask how Poker Verdict is doing I tend to keep my own counsel and a relatively low profile. Poker Verdict sponsored player BadBeat does all the extrovert stuff and a brilliant job he is doing too.

That said, I did find myself telling my table at Walsall that there was no real need to worry how they were playing as the result was already... Read more...

What A Funny Guy!

13 Feb 2007 By Warren Wooldridge

Love him or hate him you have to admit that Daniel Negreanu is lol funny...

Love him or hate him Daniel Negreanu is one of the poker world’s great characters. I confess to reading his blog as soon it is published but I am beginning to realise that I do it to scratch some annoying little itch when frustrated in my own personal or business life.

There is no doubt in my mind that Danny Boy has changed. I was there in the front row, sweating Dominic Bourke, when Daniel made his breakthrough at the 1998 WSOP in the $2,000 pot limit holdem event. It still sticks in my mind when he knocked out another Englishman, John Morgan, in 7th place. On a board of Q-Q-A-7-2 John, in full Brummie mode, asked politely if Daniel had a queen. "I have a bunch of queens" our hero replied as he flipped over quads.

Daniel has gone on, of course, to be one of the best poker players in the world. His record particularly on the WPT speaks for itself and there is no doubt that if he remains fit and healthy he could break every record in the book.... Read more...

Touching Poker Greatness

21 November 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

Warren Wooldridge has played poker with the stars and sometimes even managed to come out ahead...

One of the great plusses in playing poker as a semi-pro is the lack of financial pressure when you hit a flat spot in your tournament results. Taking a break is not as punishing when you don’t have to rely on poker as your sole source of income. So, if you are not playing purely for financial gain what is the big attraction? I’ll tell you.

It’s all about playing against top drawer A-list poker cognoscenti. With all due respect to Devilfish, Wolfie and El Blondie I am talking about the true heavyweights. It doesn’t get much better than sitting next to Doyle Brunson for a couple of hours in a WSOP event or Gus Hansen in the London EPT event at the Vic.

If your game is half decent which mine threatens to be all too rarely it can be great fun to imagine you are in the same league as them. But the sad truth is that they are blessed with better cards and enjoy a great deal more luck than your average guy. How else do you explain two WSOP... Read more...

A 7,500 Win on Paradise

10 August 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

The flop continues to hit Warren "Golden Fish" Wooldridge in the face...

It might sound like a truism but when it comes to online tournaments the more experience you have the better. You need to know HOW to win and this comes by playing as much as is technically healthy.

Adapting to the pace of a tournament is crucial too if you are to take the top prize. In the same way that you can’t win a big tournament on the first day, you can’t win an online tournament in the first hour. So what would help you? Knowing how long it will take to win is handy. If you know it will take six hours and end in the early hours of the morning, it should influence your tournament strategy. If you know the winner will receive on average 400 hands and play 80 of them, then that is good info as well.

In practice, what can you do to avoid the temptation to click the call button as you haven’t played a hand for 20 minutes?

The answer is to get distracted. I know you should be spending this down time watching your opponents play and pick up... Read more...

Hitting the WSOP Pay Dirt (Part 2)

11 July 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

How did Warren Golden Fish Wooldridge fair on his first WSOP final table?

When we consolidated to two tables I was lying in about 10th place and I have to admit the final seemed an awful long way off. I was helped in my quest with some poor play from the one opponent I feared, Jan Sjavik. With blinds at $1,000-$2,000 and limits of $2,000-$4,000 I raised from the button with Kc-Jh and Jan defends his small blind with Qc-Qs. Jan checks a flop of Qh-7c-2h and I try to steal the pot. Jan flat calls. The turn brings the 9h and Jan checks again. I check for the free card and the river brings the 4h completing my Jack-high flush. Jan now wants to bet. I raise, he calls, and he has slow played his top set to death. This pot sees me back in the comfort zone.

We go to the dinner break 12-handed and my lobster-Montrachet combo tastes all the sweeter after I bluffed my opponent on the final hand before the break with a modest pair of sixes. He folds top pair and is obviously thinking about it during his own meal as he rushes over to ask me about the... Read more...

Hitting the WSOP Pay Dirt (Part 1)

10 July 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

Warren Wooldridge aka Golden Fish has been going to the World Series for 10 years and had never made a Final Table until, well, read on...

My 2006 WSOP venture was heading towards an ignominious end. I had played in six previous events and failed to cash in any of them. I am honest enough to tell you that I played badly in Event 2 (the $1,500 NLH) but that I was the victim of some truly bad beats in the other five. I was so dispirited with the way things had turned out that I almost didn’t play in Event 11, the $1,500 Limit Hold'em event.

At 11.55am I made an impulsive decision to buy in based more on damage limitation than any expectation of doing well. $1,500 might last me until the dinner break if I was lucky whereas I was capable of blowing that in an hour in a cash game the mood I was in.

The event got off to a quite comical start. My first table saw my neighbour escorted away from the table after 40 mins for non payment of taxes! Shortly after our table broke and still nursing my starting stack of $1,500 I played a hand that I will remember for a long time.

Level 2 had just... Read more...

Get Your Money Out

25 January 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

Warren Wooldridge aka Golden Fish says make sure you test the cashing-out function if you're playing online...

Everybody who plays poker for real money aspires to winning real hard cash. A pound won is twice as sweet as a pound earned and all that. The beauty of your average home game or trip to your local casino is that barring exceptional circumstances you know you are going to leave with the readies if you’re a winner.

One of the main reasons that buying merchandise from the internet was slow to get off the ground was the security issues involved. Online poker was much the same. Once you reassured yourself that you weren’t being ripped off when you made your first credit card deposit, the next big test was to see if the money arrived when you cashed out.

Poker accounts

Now let’s get one thing clear. The vast majority of online players do not cash out. Either they don’t win or they like to keep the money in their poker accounts. But EVERYBODY aspires to the BIG WIN. That’s why we play satellites and... Read more...

20 Minutes of Mayhem

22 January 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

It is a marathon not a sprint, says Warren Wooldridge aka Golden Fish...

Most live big buy-in tournaments with a slow ante structure are a long slog to the final table. You can spend hours creating a table image, sussing out your opponents, chipping away and avoiding big confrontations. After all, you can’t win it on the first day, right.

The championship event at Luton on 21 January 2006 gave 140 players a starting stack of 10,000 chips, opening blinds of 25-50 and an hour long clock. I was installed as joint tenth-favourite and found myself at a table of relative unknowns. Mentally prepared for the long slog ahead, finishing the first day with double the starting stack would not have been that bad a position to be in. Enter stage right a crazy young American and the first hand of the event.

Crazy Yank opens for 200, I raise to 800 with J-J, everybody else gets out of the way and Crazy calls. The flop comes 3d-4-7d and the yank checks. I bet 1,200 into the 1,675 pot and the yank makes it 2,400 to play. After a... Read more...

A Final Table On Paradise Poker

14 January 2006 By Warren Wooldridge

Golden Fish played in Masters Event 6 on Paradise Poker - the $200 rebuy and add-on NLH - and this is how he got on...

Masters Week at Paradise Poker was a great success in terms of turnout. Every event had a prize pool in excess of its guarantee and that is always a good indicator that a site is exceeding even its own expectations. From a personal point of view, the only negative was that all the tournaments started at 9pm UK time which was not ideal for working folk like me. Not to be put off though, I earmarked the Saturday night event, the $200 rebuy NL Hold’em as a must play and I cleared my Sunday morning diary of any commitments.

Normally in rebuy events, I play loose and fast in the early stages in an effort to build a sizeable chip stack and I take as many rebuys as necessary and always add on. However, a combination of a slightly more cautious approach and a better than average run of cards meant that no rebuy or add on was necessary. Even without adding on,... Read more...