Fame!

Mrs MSK has just appeared on Soccer AM having submitted this screenshot to Third Eye which she took during City's defeat by Manchester City during the week...


Sky showed the footage from the game (which is even funnier) and if I can find it I'll post it.

NB: this is the same photo that appeared on OTIB.co.uk on Tuesday night because it was Mrs MSK who took that too. I was at the game, so I can't take all the credit for it ;-)

Anyway, we've got another game on TV in about half an hour - against bottom of the table Sheffield Wednesday. If we win, we go top for our highest league position for 27 years.

LOL, I've just had a king high club flush crushed but that was OK because it was after I'd withdrawn the resources to place my bets on College Football. However, fate intervened in a strange way when I was putting the money on...I'd intended to put some money on Virginia Tech to win the ACC but my hand and the mouse conspired to put it on Florida State instead!

The hand of fate or a dumb mistake? Time will tell!

Hail To The RedCoats

The RedCoats made the playoffs in the EFL after a 7-5 seaon, here's the report:

London, England

Treated to a rare appearance of summer sunshine after the wettest June since records began, the British sports fan had a number of mouth watering events to look forward to today. Would Louis Hamilton win the British Grand Prix? Who would win Wimbledon? Would the French ever speak to us again after the Tour de France began in London today?

45,000 football fans had made their choice to forsake the traditional British Sunday roast and attend last scheduled Lexington RedCoats game of the season at Wembley Stadium. At kick off time (2:30pm BST) the weather was 66 degrees and partly cloudy with an 8 mph easterly wind and it took precisely 3 minutes and fifteen seconds for the scoreboard to light up.

Unfortunately for most of the fans, the points came from the boot of Alexander Iafrate, the Pirates’ kicker. Palmetto’s lead didn’t last long though.

Vauls.

Deep.

7-3 to Lexington with not even five minutes gone.

After the quick scoring outburst, both teams went three and out, although Len Simmons lack of speed and some offensive line issues which plagued the Pirates all afternoon didn’t help when Simmons was sacked by Ned Wick during a promising drive. It didn’t seem to matter: Jeff Kemp was obviously looking for Alexander Vauls but couldn’t seem to find him and the RedCoats couldn’t move beyond their own 20. Despite another sack from Barney Edwards, Mike Heiderman snared a Simmons pass for a TD with 2:05 left in the first to give Palmetto a 10-7 lead at the end of the first quarter.

The Coats drew level when opening the scoring in the second period when Stewart McCauley nailed a 37 yard FG but The Pirates took the lead once more with a 53 yarder from Alexander Iafrate.

At this point the Lexington defense (and there is one) decided to go for glory. Free Agent pickup Anthony McCollum recorded his second sack of the season and on the following play veteran All Star safety Jerome Ellis picked off Len Simmons, an interception that set up a tying 40 yard FG.

The surprise of being challenged by the normally porous RedCoat defense seemed to get the Palmetto offense clicking – an eight play, three minute drive was capped when Charlie Proudfoot took a screen pass in from 22 yards to restore the visitors lead with 3:50 left in the half.

It was a lead that lasted for approximately a minute. Jeff Kemp found Vauls again, this time for a 77 yard TD. Darryl Dodger snared the XP; 21-20 to Lexington.

The sequence of events that may have ultimately decided the game occurred at the end of the first half. Deep in their own territory, Palmetto gave up 27 yards on two more Barney Edwards sacks before Mike Jones picked off a pass intended for Mike Heidermann. Worse was to come: Vauls got his first half hat-trick with 00:55 left.

Half time: Lexington 29, Palmetto 20.

In what has become a depressingly familiar scenario for opposing defenses this season Vauls added a fourth TD grab with two minutes gone in the second half and although Jeff Kemp was sacked by Bret Janowicz on the extra point attempt, Lexington now had a 15 point lead. Iafrate missed a 50 yard field goal attempt after a nine play Pirate drive that took five minutes off the clock and then Lexington attempted something unusual: a sustained drive of their own rather than a bomb to Vauls which resulted in an extension to their lead when McCauley succeeded with another FG.

The fourth began with another Lexington rarity: the first TD catch of the season by Gerry Brown. Then it started getting really ugly. Vauls added another TD, Barney Edwards started running through the Palmetto offensive line at will – more than doubling his sack total for the season in the process – and stalwart defensive back Mike Goodman recovered a fumble. Although Mike Heiderman scored for the Pirates with 00:35 seconds left, the last play of the regular season was yet another TD for Vauls – his sixth of the day and 43^rd of the season.

But the drama wasn’t over yet. Confusion at the end of the game led to game officials placing a call to the league office concerning the play off situation. While a transatlantic debate took place, Coach Roberts paid tribute to Coach Ovell.

‘Mike has had the best season that I can remember a rookie coach has had in this league – I think he has to be considered for the Coach of the Year award. He’s stepped in to a brand new situation and come out with a 7-5 record; six months ago we didn’t know who the Pirates and their coach were, now everyone in this league will be looking to see if his team will be on their schedule in EFL XIII. And groaning if they are.’

Then came the announcement that brought the house down.

‘This is an important message for RedCoat fans. All of you who are interested in travelling to Bermuda for the play off game against Hamilton…’

The crowd noise drowned out the end of the sentence. Louis Hamilton didn’t win at Silverstone, the French are still speaking to us even though they all pretend they don’t understand English and although it’ll probably be millennia until a Brit wins another Wimbledon title (errr...not quite), yet not so long ago no-one thought the Lexington franchise would either have a winning season or reach the playoffs.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce that the 7-5 Lexington RedCoats travel to 11-1 Hamilton Knights in the first round of the EFL playoffs. God save the Queen!

I also had another freeroll success. I basically backed into $1 on one of the bigger sites having somehow beaten 5566 other players. I won't reveal my methods but suffice to say 'not paying attention' looms large once again.

Actually, I will share them with you. Here's a link to Dave Scharf's book. They're all in there and I thoroughly recommend it.

I am not quite sure what to do with my dollar yet, although it has invoked the 'if you win, you need to at least make a deposit' rule.

Freerolls and other thoughts

Without giving anything away, I've been making some on line poker observations recently.

I had the most success at at small stakes pot limit tables. That shouldn't come as a complete shock. I also won some cash at a new player free roll.

Worst: the William Hill free rolls. The game speed is glacial and the rewards are so low as to be not worth the effort. I've been scraping into the top 30% of players by doing extremely little and to be honest there have been a couple of times when I've invoked the mercy rule and bet wildly on hands that aren't worth it just to finish the game.

Seems to me that free rolls generally are a bit of a crap shoot...errr...I hope you see what I mean there. I'm thinking of doing an experiment to see how far I can get with auto fold/muck switched on, although to be fair to those players who enjoy participating in them it's probably better if I don't play free rolls at all. To paraphrase a football manager whose name escapes me, you get nowt for coming 489th.

Bit of an update: I had another incredibly small scale success in a $1 Buy In Bet365 No Limit Tournament. I placed 40th of 434 and won a massive $5.04, but it was the most exhilarating £2.50 I've ever won. I went all in a couple of times when I was about to crash out, won the biggest pot in my short online poker history ($13.2k) and generally had a whale of a time, including a 20 minute dinner break when the Chinese takeaway arrived. More than made up for the moaning about stuff elsewhere.

Something I would strongly recommend: try to keep accurate stats of how you do in any session you play even if it's play money. I've been doing this with my sessions and to be honest I've made a pretty poor job of it - to the extent that I'm going to junk what I've already done. I might even stop recording my progress in free rolls as I'm obviously not taking them seriously at all.

Fantasy baseball is still going well, I'm still first (I've been top since St George's Day or April 23rd if you don't know when that is) and a rather ridiculous 33% of my roster have been voted to appear for their respective leagues in the annual All Star game. Here are two blokes from my fantasy team that haven't been:

Matt Holliday OF Colorado Rockies

Kelvim Escobar SP Los Angeles Angels

Basically, Holliday is playing for an average team in the less spectacular National League. All his key stats are better than a lot of the players from the American League but it's probably because he doesn't play for one of the glamour teams that he's not been selected by the fickle American public. If he keeps this up, that will change.

I'm not sure why Escobar wasn't picked. He has similar stats to Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers but I think the problem might be because he's had a stint on the Disabled List and - unlike Verlander - he hasn't had a no hitter this year. All he did (on the same day as Verlander got his no hitter) was strike out 14 batters in six innings. I imagine the US press went nuts for Verlander and Escobar's achievement was lost in the shuffle.

Ah well. They're both making more money than I'll ever see, so that's probably some consolation.

Not quite a WSOP bracelet, but...

A $25 win on Bet365 will do, won't it?

I got to the final table of their weekly new player freeroll on Wednesday and fluked fourth spot - there really is no other way of describing it. Having sat in the guaranteed $10 spots for most of the evening I managed to be a penny pinching, cheese grating tight arse and stole fourth when the player in front of me (who had something in the region of twice my chip stack) went all in and lost.

Bingo. Or not ;-)

More to follow.

Here's one for you: according to reports coming from Barcelona this morning, Thierry Henry is off to North Eastern Spain, which now seems to be confirmed. The Arse are 1000-1 to be relegated on William Hill and talking of Arses*, I'm pretty sure this is about to happen too...

Merde. Je departerai aussi.

Oh joy. I've just realised that it's possible that I might be able to buy a Thierry Henry replica Barcelona jersey on holiday. Fantasy Football indeed.

* Third 'arse' of the day. I must be in a good mood.

Summer's here...so it must be time for...

Poker and baseball, two of the activities I have something of an interest in.

To be honest with myself, the only reason that I've got back into them is because of a lack of anything happening on the football front. There are the usual daft transfer rumours fuelled back the inventiveness of journalists - on one level, Barcelona are supposed to be interested in Arsene Wenger and on another level, City are interested in Hibs and Northern Ireland striker Ivan Sproule.

Ivan Sproule, Ivan Sproule, Ivan, Ivan Sproule,
When gets the boule, he scores a goule...

Obviously I'll let you know if we buy The Sproulemeister, but this is not important now apart from the fact that sightings of Norn Iron replica shirts at The Gate might go up.

Fantasy baseball is going well...too well. I've been top of my Brits only league since St George's Day and currently have a 19 point lead. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but let's just say that spending far too much time and effort on scouting players is paying off. It's fun, it keeps me off the streets and out of the pub etc.

Poker is another matter though. I don't play that often (it's been a while since I played a live home game) but I like to mess about on line - I've been getting back into it recently, but only when I can afford the time.

That's actually a lesson I learned the semi hard way - I probably played cards a little too often at school when I should have been concentrating on my A-levels but hindsight is always a blessing isn't it? Looking back on several periods of my life I've always enjoyed playing cards. I'd love to be good at chess, but I don't have the application for it; draughts is fun but too much like snap...so poker it is then.

Here's what I've been up to recently. I've been blagging on freerolls as I'm too tight to part with real money (although I do play with real money when the mood takes me) and in keeping with my overall description of 'marginally profitable' I've done relatively well. For example, on Sunday I came fourth in a loyalty points freeroll at Pokerworld (admittedly not one of the bigger sites) and I had a funny but rather manic session on Monday where I played simultaneous tournaments at Pokerworld and bet365. So basically, I'm looking for low traffic sites that offer freerolls with small player bases right now. I will report back with any findings, but I finished just outside the scoring positions on Pokerworld (14th of 132) and got bored and went all in to finish off my bet365 session finishing 199th of 3587 players.

The reason why I got bored? I knew I wasn't going to be placed, it was getting late and it was my turn to make the tea.

That's pretty hardcore. Not.

Whether it's deciding on which hat to wear, raising trips on the turn or leaving the table for a comped tuna sandwich, poker is all about decisions.