I’ve been toying around with the idea to do a big giveaway to go along with my book release recently and finally have figured out all the terms. I really wanted to have an opportunity for someone who bought the book or plans to buy the book to win big and I think this promo should get people excited!
Contest Details
To qualify all you have to do is tweet me @moorman1 a picture of yourself with a copy of my book, Moorman’s Book of Poker, in the funniest/craziest place you can think of (e.g. underwater, sky diving, anything crazy or interesting go for it!) along with the hashtag #moormansbookofpoker.
I will pick a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winner who will then in succession get their choice of the following prizes. Once someone has selected a prize, that prize option is no longer available.
Contest Prizes
Prize option 1: A hand history review of an online tournament they have played along with a teamviewer session where they get to rail an online final table I play in real time
Prize option 2: A year long poker sweat of me for 2015 (1 % freeroll of me in Aussie Million Main event, LAPC WPT Main, WSOP Main and WSOPE Main)
Prize option 3: A personalized signed copy of the book and a 1% sweat of me on a regular Sunday session in January
I think there is merit in each of these prizes, from potentially making some money to learning some invaluable information to aid in their development as a poker player.
The closing date of the competition will be 1 month from today (January 18th, 2015) just before the start of my Aussie Millions Main Event. I will announce the winner in a tweet within that week.
Good luck and get tweeting! I can’t wait to see the pictures you guys come up with.
Yesterday I realized that my last blog was nearly three months ago! So I made a conscious effort today to sit down and write about everything I’ve been up to lately. The last 3 months have actually been non-stop with the release of my book and traveling across three continents to play live and online tournaments.
September was WCOOP on Pokerstars and I decided to go to one of my favourite places in the world, Playa Del Carmen in Mexico. In my opinion the time zone for playing here is the best out there because you get to live as normal a life as possible which really helps for such a long series. On the rare occasion that I was able to take a day off in the series it’s also really nice to have great weather and a beach within 50 metres of our place. Unfortunately for me the WCOOP grind didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I started off strongly by winning the Winamax €300 6 max PLO event for just under €20k but although I had 8 WCOOP cashes none of them were that significant. Particularly disappointing was bubbling both the $10k high roller event and the $5k main as they are two of the biggest online tourneys of the year. All in all though I was happy with how I played which is the main thing.
From Mexico I headed off to London for a month which I was really excited about. I hadn’t been home for a long time so it was great to catch up with family and friends and competing in EPT London is always very compelling. EPT London is my dream tourney to win because my parents and all my friends would be able to watch the final table live and EPT’s are also very prestigious themselves. I ended up making a real run at the main event but ultimately came up short and finished in 38th place. My tables throughout the tournament were incredibly tough and it increased my hunger to win an EPT because it really is the best of the best who play them. During this tournament I ran a competition with the winner getting a free % of myself. It was great that I went deep and the woman who won, Truly Ko, got a sweat at winning a nice sum of money. Unfortunately she had to settle for $200 but hopefully she can spin it up in the poker challenge she set for herself over the coming months. I’m determined to win big for one of my poker fans in the near future and have a huge promotion involving my book which I will mention in my blog next week.
Another reason why I was in London was for my official book launch at the Vic Casino. It was really cool that they supported me and were able to provide us with such a wonderful venue for it. The whole event was a blast and went really smoothly, even my speech! It was awesome to finally get my hands on a real live copy of the book and I felt a great sense of accomplishment with what I had achieved. All those hours putting it together were definitely worth it in the end. It’s crazy to think that I’m a published author now, something I would never have imagined even a year ago. The reviews I have read for the book so far have been great and I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from people. I really do think it can help your game considerably and I can think of much worse Christmas gifts!
From London I headed off to South Africa for the WPT there and more importantly a holiday in Africa (a continent I had never been to before.) This trip more than lived up to my expectations. Katie and I spent 2 weeks there but the time flew by and even though we packed so much into our trip (safari, shark cage diving, elephant sanctuary and lion parks) there were so many other things that we wanted to do that we didn’t have time for. My two favourite parts of the trip were the short trip to Cape Town we took and a visit to the monkey sanctuary that we hadn’t actually planned for. The monkey sanctuary happened to be right next to the more well known elephant sanctuary and in our rush to make sure we got to the Elephants on time we actually had a spare hour to spend with the monkeys beforehand. The monkeys were incredibly friendly and unlike in most zoos I’ve been to before they had a huge area to live and play in. All of the monkeys seemed incredibly happy and most were bold enough to approach us and hangout. One guy in particular, named Mr T, had no fear at all and for the course of the next hour we became best mates. When it was time for me to leave he even refused to let go and clung to me so much the guide had to practically pull him off my shoulders.
Cape Town was perhaps the most beautiful place I have ever been. I hate to sound cliché but it really did look like a postcard there. While we were in Cape Town we took a tour out to Gansbaii where they have a large population of Great White sharks and cage diving tours. Funnily enough it was almost one of the most disappointing things I’ve ever done because it was out of season for sharks. The first two hours on the boat were spent anxiously searching for sharks to no avail. My mind was starting to drift and become frustrated that I was missing the Kickoff online for nothing. Then out of nowhere we saw a huge great white shark and there wasn’t even time to get nervous as we were jumping right into the shark cage and less than a foot away from the sharks mouth! The diving was a huge buzz and something that I’d highly recommend others to do.
As for the poker in South Africa I ended up playing two live events. The first of which was a $6k high roller event with a small field of 55 entrants after rebuys. I was happy to only be in for 1 bullet and despite nearly bubbling was a huge chipleaer with 4 players left having nearly half of the chips in play. From there things didn’t really go to plan though. I ended up making a bad river call getting 4 to 1 on a call with trips but in reality my opponent always had a flush or straight in this spot. After that things didn’t go my way and I ended up getting third for $37k. All in all it guaranteed me a profitable trip but I really wanted to have the problem of trying to transport their cool trophy home!
The last part of my trip was the WPTUK in Nottingham at the Dusk Till Dawn casino. Simon Trumper and Rob Yong run things at DTD and if you’ve never played there before I urge you to in the near future. They really look after the players and are always setting ambitious guarantees. Without them who knows where UK poker would be right now. As for the main event it was a £3k re-entry and after quickly dusting off my first bullet I managed to double even quicker with my second. Day 1 went really well for me as I finished with a top 10 stack and even managed to sell 10 books to my opponents at the table!
Day 2 was much more of a grind and at one point I even had to fold AA with the Ah on a 234 all heart board. It was a weird situation where I knew I was behind because of the heavy 3 way action in a 4 way pot but there was so much money in the pot that I was almost getting the right price. In the end I decided to fold because I felt it was likely that the two all in opponents both had a flush and being only 10 places till the money it would be ICM suicide to draw at the remaining 4 hearts. Luckily my decision was vindicated when my opponents had KJ and Q8 of hearts. Obviously we should never be results orientated in poker but it definitely helped that the board ended up bricking off!
Day 3 started with 51 players left, 45 of which would cash. There were going to be 6 very disappointed people and obviously I wasn’t trying to be one of them but I figured that I would go into hyper aggressive mode because with a big min cash of £6k and people playing for 3 days and not being in the money yet there would definitely be some scared money about. Things in poker don’t always go to plan though and after I lost a big flip early into the day I found myself being the one sitting out until we made the money! Shortly after the bubble burst I reshoved KQ into AJ and couldn’t get lucky. Another cash and deep run though is good for confidence and I feel like I’m in a great position to make another big live final table at either GUKPT Grand Final or EPT Prague which will be my last two live events of the year.
Lastly, I have an exciting huge promotion coming up which will be open to anyone with a copy of Moorman’s Book of Poker. Check back for my next blog next week where I will share all of the details and don’t forget to buy your copy to be eligible..this will be a prize you don’t want to miss.
The power of the mind and positive thinking is something I’ve been trying to focus on more in recent times and I’ve come to the conclusion that positivity in life is strongly linked with success and happiness.
One of the biggest benefits of being positive/optimistic is happiness. Optimistic people believe that negative events are temporary and manageable in that they can change their actions in the future to alter events and stop the same negative events from occurring again, i.e. learning from their mistakes. On the contrary a negative person believes that nothing is their fault and wishes failure on others to aid their jealousy issues.
Now you may ask what does this have to do with poker? In my opinion positivity is essential to being a successful poker player in the long term. No matter how good you are at this game there are going to be times when things aren’t going smoothly and you are in the middle of one of those dreaded downswings. You really learn the most about a poker player and their character not when they are winning and everything is favorable, but when times are tough and they are unsure where next months rent is coming from.
Personally I had to come through my toughest time in poker within the last year. Prior to the WSOP in 2013 I was forced to get out of backing because I had over extended myself, and made a lot of bad decisions along the way. My poker bankroll had taken a big hit and I had to drop down in stakes and concentrate predominantly on online poker until I was in a better situation. I decided once I did get in a better place I would allow myself the luxury of traveling the live circuit once again.
At first I really struggled with this because I was more focused on how much was up top in any given MTT versus just playing every hand as optimally as I could. Previously I had played poker to have fun and travel the world (enjoying the freedom and meeting new people along the way) and now at this point I was playing to make money and I found that I quickly became overly negative. I noticed myself being jealous of players whom I believed I was better than and wrote them off as just getting lucky when they won certain events. I didn’t like the person that I was becoming and decided that it was serious enough that I would talk to someone about it.
Stephen Simpson’s website: http://www.drstephensimpson.com
A friend of mine suggested a guy called Stephen Simpson* who is an elite performance coach from the UK and he agreed to have a couple of sessions with me in which we discussed a ton of stuff that I had never told anyone about before. In these sessions we did some basic meditation and breathing exercises and I talked about what I wanted to achieve in life both in and outside of poker. He mentioned that I needed to find ‘the zone’ while playing and if I could do that then good things would happen for me. The key to finding ‘the zone’ was to be solely focused on poker whilst playing but equally important was also to be working on myself as a person outside of poker and to set myself targets consistently. It is worth noting that I went on to win my first ever live major at the WPT just weeks after my final meeting with Stephen.
Creating your own happiness outside of poker will ultimately have a huge effect on your mentality whilst playing. If I’m not happy with myself at a certain point in time (say I’ve not worked out and eaten unhealthily for a period of time) then I will find that one or two losing sessions of poker in a row can start to alter my mindset completely. Whereas if everything in my life is going well outside of poker then I tend to look at poker in a much more objective way in terms of how I played in a particular session rather than my short term results. I’ve come to find that life goals outside of poker really help your game and achievements in poker.
I’ve always been an extremely competitive person, which is key to being a professional poker player, but sometimes it can be a hindrance in this game. At times you can want to win too much which will force you into making mistakes. This happened to me this year at the WSOP. Unfortunately I had some issues with my passport and ended up missing the first 30 events or so. Obviously it was impossible to ignore the WSOP going on because it was all over my twitter and facebook feed.
I ended up watching most of the live streams at home in the UK through the night and when I finally made it to Vegas I felt like I had never been more ready to take home one of those shiny bracelets. Unfortunately this completely backfired because I spent most of the next 3 weeks trying too hard to win the tournament on day 1. I managed just one minimum cash throughout the remainder of the WSOP in the $3k nlh, which lead me to reevaluate what I was doing and helped me learn a very important lesson along the way.
Chris Moorman Playing at the Final Table of World Poker Tour LAPC
Sometimes you can actually be your own worst enemy at the tables, it is important to not get in your own head while playing poker. I have a great personal example of this recently. I was a big chip leader in the LAPC main event with four people left and felt so close to winning the title that I was already thinking about what to say in the winners interview in between hands! That quickly changed though because I became super complacent, which led to me making a few mistakes in huge hands. On top of this I didn’t allow my mind to let those mistakes go and I even ended up misreading my hand in a key spot.
Fortunately for me I went on break at the right time and remembered the important things Stephen had taught me, and just did a little mental reset. After the break ended and with nothing to lose I was able to make a comeback and show that no matter how bad of a situation you are in at the poker table, never give up.
Lastly, an essential part of being a positive person whilst playing poker is to surround yourself with positive people. Lets face it, no one likes listening to bad beats or hard luck stories and if you constantly find yourself having to deal with these whilst grinding it can only impact you negatively. In a live tournament I would much rather hang out with the person on break who I can’t tell how many chips they have by their mood and demeanor than the person who wants to talk about everything that was unlucky and went badly for them in the past two hours. Try to be the former person not the latter when playing and I promise you that you’ll enjoy the game more and likely see better things happening to you as a result.
So far 2013 has been a great year for me. I’ve accomplished a lot of goals, including an FTOPS win, my first EPT final table – which was made even sweeter by achieving it in London, and another WSOP final table. One of the most important though, has been working to conquer my 10 million dollar target. Obviously I’m talking about online cashes, and I’m so proud to be the first person in the world to hit 10 million.
So what has most of this year included besides poker scores? Well I’ve been quite active off the live and virtual felt as well. I’ll break down the last couple months.
I kicked off the New Year at PCA enjoying the mostly sunny weather. Between tournaments I found time to get up to some shenanigans including swimming with stingrays with my friends Sam Chartier and Trishelle Cannatella and a night out with the brits.
From there I headed to Las Vegas to participate in the NBC Heads Up Invitational. I was so honored to be asked to compete, and was hoping to show everyone that even though I am known for getting second, I actually am decent at heads up. I played great in round one to beat poker legend Carlos Mortensen, but unfortunately the draw wasn’t too kind to me and I ran into Jungleman (Daniel Cates) in the second round and found myself coolered in a 3 bet pot pretty early into the match. I still had an awesome time being able to be a part of the whole thing. It’s an event that is really great for poker as a whole.
I spent most of February checking out Playa del Carmen, Mexico. First off let me start by saying if you haven’t been, go immediately! This place is great; a perfect beach town, with awesome people and an incredible vibe. I definitely found it hard at times to have a balance between poker and life outside of that, but I made sure to take in as much of the culture and scene as possible. One highlight was checking out one of the seven wonders of the world, Chichen Itza and then ziplining through the jungle.
In March I was back home in London for the EPT, and needless to say that turned out well for me. I built a stack quickly on the first day before a huge mistep that almost brought about my demise. I six bet queen ten suited into pocket queens versus an extremely aggressive opponent but managed to make a flush on the turn. From then on I felt like I was freerolling and really brought my A game for the rest of the tournament. Unfortunately I lost a couple of huge hands on the day leading up to the final table so I ended up making the final table with only 20bbs. I knew I was going to need some luck to double up, but it just didn’t happen for me this time when I ended up going out in 8th place after losing a flip versus Theo Jorgenson. It still was an awesome experience because most of my family and several of my friends were able to be there and see me on the final table in my home city.
In April I was off to Berlin for the following EPT hoping to build on my run in London. I really love this city, mostly from my awesome memories with the lads from the last few years (a second place finish in the High Roller event the previous year also helps!). Although the main event didn’t go to plan with an early day1 exit Berlin still remained good to me as I was able to score another second place finish in the 2k euro side event.
