London, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Cool New Promos

Hashtags for Hand Histories

I wanted to kick off this blog by announcing that I will be having some fun promotions over the next few months. I’ve decided to do this to try and connect with other players more closely. I have been receiving a lot of messages from people asking me for strategy advice/videos and unfortunately at this time I have decided against making poker strategy videos. However, I have three interactive promotions over the next 3 months in place.

Hashtags for Hand Histories Twitter promotion

The first of the 3 is as follows: I will review players hand histories and give my opinion on the hands, what you did good and what I would have done differently. I want you guys to tweet at me @Moorman1 with the reason why I should pick your hand history and use the hastag #moorman1 in the tweet between now and Nov 10th. I will select 5 different people and review up to 3 of their hand histories. I will post the picture of winners names on my Instagram @moorman1 account on November 11th. From there I will contact all 5 winners directly to get their hand histories and go over the hands in a blog post within the next week after the competition ends.

London, Los Angeles

Since WCOOP finished I’ve remained pretty busy. Firstly I rushed off to London to make it intime for the UKIPT High Roller event and the EPT London main. Unfortunately neither of these worked out for me. I did however have a great trip to London where I got to meet up with my family and many friends including a mini uni reunion with some of my closest mates from that time. It’s cool that even though we hadn’t seen each other in so long we all got on great still and it almost felt like yesterday that we were kicking it at the Essex University student union.

Later in the week I made it to Wembley with a few of the British poker lads for the England v Montenegro European Championship Qualifier where (surprisingly for England) we managed to play really well and win 3-1. It was my first time at the new Wembley and I must say they really did a great job on redeveloping it (even if it did take forever!)

chris-moorman1-moornan-uniThe next day was truly epic. Toby Lewis, Chris Brammer and Tom Middleton (Middy) organised an all expenses paid trip to the races at Newmarket for the lads in order to celebrate Middy’s EPT Barcelona victory. At 11am 35 of us boarded a party bus that the boys had hired out. There were so many legends on the bus that it’s impossible to give everyone a shout out but some of the bigger personalities included Sam Grafton, Kev Allen, Richard Trigg and Paul Brammer (Chris Brammers Dad!) The atmosphere on the bus and throughout the day was electric and some of the boys even managed to land a 50-1 winner in the last race. The day served as a great celebration for Middy’s achievement and shows how close the UK poker community is. Poker is essentially an individuals game so it is really nice to have such a close knit UK group to fall back on when the going gets tough / if you need advice or on the flip-side to come and rail you to victory on that WSOP or EPT final table!

That next Sunday I woke up feeling a bit the worse for wear after the previous all day shenanigans, but It being a Sunday I was more than ready for the online grind. After a few days off I was feeling particularly hungry and ready to go and I actually managed to have 1 of my best Sundays of my career, winning 3 tournaments! These were the Brawl and Trex on FTP for around $75k combined plus the Party 60k guaranteed for another $14,000. Those results with another 4 final tables meant that by the end of the day I had cashed for $100,000 and was two thirds of the way towards a record setting 18th triple crown. That triple crown would have to wait though as I had a flight booked to LA the very next day to stay with my girlfriend for the week.

While in L.A I’ve been taking some time off poker after a hectic few months. I did a photoshoot for the Bluff Europe cover and an upcoming All In Magazine feature which I think turned out real well and should be out very soon. Apart from that I have been up to a few non poker activities which were all really fun. My favourite activity of these was Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios. This was much better than your typical halloween haunted house etc. Universal Studios is turned into a giant halloween horror park for the night with six walkthrough zombie mazes/scarezones.

Here is a small preview of whats in store for someone who braves it:

[youtube width=”620″ height=”360″ video_id=”zdWpP0m1xCM”]

Also I was privileged to attend the Magic Castle which is a showplace for some of the greatest magicians from around the world. You get to see the tricks from close up and it isn’t overcrowded because its a members only club.

Off to Vancouver

For now though its time to get on that online grind again. I’m flying to Vancouver tonight to stay with two friends of mine Rhys Jones (Floppinhel- the face in my stars avatar) and Jonas Mackoff (Donut604) and hopefully I can put in some more big Sunday scores. From there I will be back in L.A for my first American Halloween (pics to follow) and then I’m off to Montreal for the month of November where I’m hoping to put in some serious online volume to hopefully reach my target of regaining the Pocketfives number 1 ranked online player in the world.

Wish me luck and I look forward to hearing from everyone about their hand histories! Remember to use #moorman1 on all your tweets!Remember to use #Moorman1 on all your tweets!

London, WCOOP and $10 Million in Cashes

After Los Angeles I returned back home to the UK for my good friend Dave (geeforce1) Gent’s wedding to his fiancée Giselle (Zel.) Although I don’t get to see them very often they are two of my best friends and along with Paul Foltyn are the first people I met through poker.

The wedding was a really good time. They had hired out a wonderful venue Stupton Hall and it was good to catch up with a lot of old friends which I had met whilst travelling with Dave and Zel.

wedding

After this I decided to spend a month in London and stayed with Liv Boeree. She has an unbelievable penthouse and was an awesome host. I grinded FTOPS there and almost got my 2nd FTOPS jersey but finished short in 2nd (yes a 2nd, hold the comments) place in the $129 KO FTOPS which was good for $62k.

Liv even convinced me to help her put together a new couch for her patio. Although very daunting at first with the millions of different pieces and limited instructions I managed to get it done just in time before the BBQ she was hosting that night.

chris-mooorman-couch

Florida for a week to play the Seminole Hard Rock $10 million guarantee. The format of the tournament was a $5k rebuy with unlimited reentries. I know people who fired off about 8 bullets, but fortunately I managed to run up my first entry into a very workable stack after day 1. Matt Savage did a great job organizing the tourney and it was surprisingly well ran for its inaugural year. Also it totally crushed the guarantee by $2 million.

My table on day 1 was pretty absurd with 2 people dusting off their 300bbs in level 1 and crazy hands throughout the day. I even got to play against rapper Nelly for a bit! Day2 didn’t go as smooth and I found myself short approaching the bubble. Fortunately I managed to hold with A-K v K-10 to double up 10 spots before the money. From there things went much better for me until I got jacks all in versus tens for a top 20 stack. The AQT board gave both of us a sweat but I couldn’t resuck on the turn and river and busted out in 261st place for a small profit.

The rest of the week I spent resting up and enjoying myself before the WCOOP grind that was about to commence. I did find time to hit up a theme park and a water park, though. Bush Gardens was a place I had been to as a 12 year old boy and found amazing. Although some of the rides seemed nowhere near as big or scary as when I had been on them previously they had introduced some new rides including Sheikra, which proved to be a thrilling ride. The animal part of the park was something I didn’t remember too much from my childhood but was particularly well done with the feeding of giraffes being a highlight.

chris-moorman-moorman1-feeding-giraffe

The water park I went to was Blizzard Beach, which is part of the Disney Resort. This was the park I had wanted to go to the most as a kid when we were on holiday in Florida, but unfortunately we had left it till the end of the trip and there had been a hurricane so the park was shut. That meant I had never got to go on Summit Plummit which is a 120 foot drop slide which you can reach speeds of up to 60 mph. I had been waiting to go on this slide for 16 years and it was well worth the wait. The rest of the park was a bit of a letdown with it being more for kids than adults but the layout of the park was in true Disney style; picturesque and very well done.

Since I was already in Florida I decided to return to one of my favorite places for the month of September, Playa del Carmen, Mexico for the WCCOP held on PokerStars. Evidently it is hurricane season down here so I haven’t felt too bad staying in grinding all day, as the weather here is starting to resemble London.

hurricane

Grinding went pretty well here right from day 1 and all in all I managed to win 11 tourneys this month with the biggest being the FTP 1k for $56k. Despite cashing 10 times in WCOOP events I was unable to go deeper than a 13th place finish in the $320r 6 max PLO tourney. The big news of the month though, was that I hit the $10 million in lifetime online cashes mark.

10-million-cashes-pocketfives-badge

At the beginning of the month I had noticed that I was about $250,000 short of this mark and I always knew I had a shot at getting there during the WCOOP due to the insane prizepools at this time of year and that I would be playing 23 days straight! My dream was to win a WCOOP to get over the line and I had a few semi sweats at it but in the end I had to settle for the next best thing, which was winning a regular tourney to make it. This was still amazing though as I got the normal jubilation of shipping a tournament plus the once in a lifetime feeling of hitting the $10 million line. PokerNews and PocketFives were reporting a lot on my progress and I was overwhelmed by the responses I got from my friends and fans when I finally made it.

As I write this I’m flying off to London today for the EPT there. I’m hoping I can final table two EPT London events in the same year, but this time finish 7 places better. To get so close last time at my home event only increases my desire to get myself in that position again. It’s going to be great to meet up with all my friends again who I haven’t seen for a few months and I’m particularly looking forward to Tom Middleton’s belated EPT celebration party. The plan is to hire out a party bus for the day, hitting up the races and then partying through the night. Hopefully my next blog will be good news about that EPT!