Joe’s Blog

I think the site is looking a lot better now – this past week has been a fairly intensive process of fixing difficult little bugs and adding in missing functionality and I think Trikkur and I are both a bit knackered!  I’ve loved working on it and really want the site to succeed – all the feedback has been extremely helpful so please keep it coming.

Maybe it’s just the computer geek in me but I see a lot of parallels between developing/refining a computer program and improving one’s poker game.  Bugfixing is very much like ‘leak finding’ – the problem with bugfixing as a process is that when you fix one bug the very process of fixing it sometimes creates or brings other bugs to the surface.  The same is often true of leak finding – eg when I first changed from a passive fish into a bad TAG for the first time, I started to play more aggressively and pick up more pots without showdown (yay!) but started losing money trying to bluff calling stations off pots (boo!).  Until I learned to distinguish between different players and start valuebetting drastically more and bluffing drastically less against the fish, I hadn’t really plugged a leak – I’d just moved my leak.

Since I’m fixing bugs I’ve just fixed a bug with image uploading in the blogs so I’ll take this opportunity to post my graph of all the 6-max hands I have in my HEM DB (25NL, 50NL and some failed shots at 100NL).  I’m planning a holiday with my gf in New York so I cashed out my Full Tilt HU bankroll and now just have $1100 left on Party Poker so it’s going to be 25NL for a while .

Hi everyone, I’m Joe and I’m the primary coder behind the new Pokertrikz site.  I live in London and I run a small company producing online games for TV shows and started playing poker back in 2005.  I soon found out that I was rubbish at poker and proceeded to lose quite a bit of cash playing MTTs and SNGs with absolutely NO idea what I was doing.  Amazingly I managed to place for $1000 in a Ladbrokes tourney and, knowing that I had gotten very lucky, cashed out for about a year!

In 2007 I got the poker bug again and joined Full Tilt and later Cardrunners – after a couple of months of devouring every video they had on offer, an exceptional new members video appeared by a guy called Trikkur.  It was great to see a video of such high quality by a forum member so I contacted him through Cardrunners and we did a couple of coaching sessions which were incredibly helpful.  Before I knew it he had set up Pokertrikz and on one of his videos requested a programmer – I got in touch and .. a very long time later .. here we are today

My blog posts will be a mix of poker and life – recently I’ve been so busy working I’ve hardly played poker since Christmas.  Before then I was managing to maintain a decent winrate at 6-max 50NL and below over 300K hands but whenever I moved up to 100NL I’d get spanked like the bitch that I am.  Frustrated, I then decided to learn 50NL HU which became my main game until the work took over.  Anyway as things start to settle down I intend to play more poker, get more involved with the Pokertrikz forums, and maybe post a video or two.