Backup, backup and laydown

It's been a quiet month on the poker, mainly because the hard drive on my laptop died a few weeks ago. All my records, hand histories and spreadsheets are currently inaccessible - hopefully not gone forever though. I don't think there's anything physically wrong with the drive, it's just that Windows doesn't seem to recognise it any more, and none of the software recovery tools I've tried have worked. My next recourse is to take it in to professional data recovery people, but I don't know how much that will cost - I suspect maybe more than it's worth. Valuable lesson learnt though - partition your drives and backup your data.

I tried playing on my desktop machine, but that's a bit older than my laptop and so it can't seem to handle two tables open at the same time. I think I'll treat myself to a new processor and motherboard for Christmas and make my desktop my main poker machine - it's not in the same room as the TV so that might make me concentrate a bit more.

As for the little internet poker I've played, I qualified for Crypto's £150,000 Christmas Cracker but only lasted 12 minutes as I had AA beaten. This really annoyed me as I should have got away from the hand. We're about ten hands in (15/30) and I make a standard 4BB raise from my 2500 stack. I get one caller - the guy who has played most hands so far (about 7). The flop is QJx (two clubs) and I make a continuation bet, which he immediately min-raises. I call and the turn is another Jack. I check, as does he. What does he have?

River is a brick so I bet, trying to take the pot down. He quickly raises me all-in, and the only real play here is to fold. However, I managed to con myself into calling by being convinced that he was trying it on, and that I was still ahead, despite the viable hands he could have which had me beat (QQ, JJ, QJ). He showed QQ and I was gone. I was absolutely livid with myself for such an idiotic, amateurish play - laying down AA in situations like this (when even a modicum of thought would lead to the conclusion you are behind) is a vital facet of the top players' games. In a live setting, I think I would have folded here, but the tick-tick-tick of the internet timer rushed me into a decision.

I also had a slightly tilty cash session, where I kept missing flops, but kept getting my continuation bets called. The one time I hit a flop big (set of sevens on a 972 board) the pre-flop raiser had 99 and my goose was cooked. I wasted more money by being too fancy with bluffs and trying to force people off hands, though I think the real source of my frustration was the slowdown of my desktop computer - I had to turn animations off and even then, the poker was very jerky. This should all be solved by the upgrade after Christmas.

My one live event recently was the £100 freezeout at the Gutshot, which I'd decided to try as I didn't fancy the packed rebuys any more. I managed to come 13th of 50-odd. I initially got no cards and had few chances to steal, so I was very rocky at the table. I got a double up with I went all-in against 3 limpers on my BB with 33 and got a called by the UTG's AK. I got another one when AT spades came up against KQ spades. Oddly, first card on the flop was the Jack of spades. My stack took a huge dent when I had AA cracked by AJ diamonds. An all black flop of Q54 looked perfect for me, but a Ten on the turn and King on the river hurt me badly. From there it was all about trying to steal blinds to stay alive - 13th was OK considering at no point was I ahead of the average stack.

The year is nearly over, and I had hoped to be able to collate a total profit/loss for the year, but that will have to wait until I can get the data from my busted hard drive. My goals for the next year are to win a biggish online comp (like the £15K Guaranteed), cash big in a huge online comp (such as the upcoming $500,000 Crypto event), qualify for another big offline tourney (WSOP?) and spend more time playing cash games, as I get tempted into playing tourneys too much, when my cash games are more profitable for me.