UK Services PMI - Today, 12:29 AM

A fundamental indicator of forex is UK Services PMI as issued from London and analyzed by Stavro D
Amore at Forex Peace Army.

Detail for event Services PMI 2011/09/05 Date Currency Event name Actual Forecast Previous Revision 2011-09-05 GBP Services PMI 51.1 54.3 55.4

Previous releases Date Time Currency Event name Actual Forecast Previous Revision Spike 2011-09-05 04:28 GBP Services PMI 51.1 54.3 55.4 34 2011-08-03 04:28 GBP Services PMI 55.4 53.4 53.9 43 2011-07-05 04:28 GBP Services PMI 53.9 53.5 53.8 31 2011-06-03 04:28 GBP Services PMI 53.8 54.2 54.3 12 2011-05-05 04:28 GBP Services PMI 54.3 56 57.1 44 2011-04-05 04:28 GBP Services PMI 57.1 52.6 52.6 50 2011-03-03 04:28 GBP Services PMI 52.6 53.7 54.5 30 2011-02-03 04:28 GBP Services PMI 54.5 51.3 49.7 58 2011-01-06 04:28 GBP Services PMI 49.7 52.8 53 34 2010-12-03 04:28 GBP Services PMI 53 53.2 53.2 5 2010-11-03 05:28 GBP Services PMI 53.2 52.6 52.8 20 2010-10-05 04:28 GBP Services PMI 52.8 51 51.3 39 2010-09-03 04:28 GBP Services PMI 51.3 52.9 53.1 21

Bite the Bullet

It's time to call it a day.  With the three largest internet poker sites nearly out of business, it's time to look in a new direction.  It is a very compelling direction.  It is Forex.  Foreign Exchange is alive and well and trending. 

Having followed several blogs and poker sites, it appears I'm one of the last to give it up.  A most distressing event was the closing of one of my favorite sites that was far superior in thinking and strategy. 

In the past week we've opened three practice accounts and signed up for a million dollar contest on CNBC in which we'll use these accounts to improve our performance.  Additionally we've found two excellent resources for help and education.  They are Elliott Wave Projections and Gecko Software.  The software offers a 14 day free trial and includes probably hundreds of video tutorials; a vast improvement to having to read my thirty poker books.  The second is an in depth look into a long standing trending study.  Both are destined to keep me interested into the next millenium.

Revised August Play

We've learned from our new book that strategy in poker games changes as the number of players change. Thus when at a full ring game of nine or ten players we choose our strategy based more on our card holdings than our opponents.

This is the hit-to-win, or TAG approach.

As the number of opponents decrease we change the strategy based more on the way our opponents play. To reorient our thinking we begin to ask “How can we win without cards?”

When we arrive at heads up play, winning hands often is based on not arriving at a showdown.

Based on the above, a more sensible approach to moving into short handed play is to move more slowly from full ring to 6 max. Later down the line, perhaps September or October we'll look more at heads up play.

August Plan

Add new venues in the form of 6 Max and Heads-Up to Full Ring Games. This will expose additional fish available each time I play. Once proficient at the new ones, profitability should increase.

With full ring, the name of the game is cherry pick and only play the very best hands. Thus, our VPIP needs to decrease from 15 plus to 12 or 13.

Start to rank opponents at each venue in terms of BB/100 and maintain a spreadsheet list. Add additional venues of 4 to 5 players and 3 players. Also continue to maintain buddy list for auto rated fish, money bags, and elephants, all loose passive opponents.

Study Heads Up Strategy and begin each session with a few hands of heads up including studying opponents played against strategy. That is start each session at tables with 0/6. Then move onto 6 Max and Full Ring devoting about a half hour to each venue.

Study profitability of each position including hands played.

Improve HUD by changing earnings to BB/100 and changing hands to –K for hands.

The Purge

We're quite happy with the memory upgrade of the Kingston SSD Now 128 GB drive. We have half of the SSD drive memory still available and the old hard drive memory as external storage.

We need to structure SPR ratio understanding. First we'll read excerpts from the Professional No Limit Hold'em book and consider an immediate purchase.

Our playing style needs some definition. The 101 basic style with slightly increased aggression from the CO and the BU is appropriate thru 20K hands.

We'll implement the HUD from Crushthegame.com. However, we now think we'll need to develop our own. We should have the 101 style as a distinct player type. We'll start work on that now.

Next on the priority list is to study use of Poker Stove. See the excellent video tutorial at www.splitsuit.com.

We're liking the info on that site and expect to use it in the near future.

We've started purging our hand histories from PT3. There's no need to keep Tilt, Stars, Absolute and Bodog histories since we've decided to change to the Merge Network. The elapsed time on the purge is 15.5 with an estimated time of 69.5 so we won't be able to play for about 3 days. There's a lot of planning til then.

We're now defining immediate goals.

Delay an Upmove

After considerable thought, we choose to delay for at least two weeks our move to a higher level.

Our graph of results could look much better.

Currently, we are showing loses that might be a divergence from stated 101 principles.

It would be good to show some recovery like two or three buy in winning streak.

There are some instances in which we pushed QQ and AK too aggressively where a fold would have shown far less variance.

We made notes on all six lectures from the 101 series and noted instances on the forum where a less aggressive stance might be preferable.

The Forum is a tool we haven't used enough. We need to read others posts and post our own hands.

Sunk Costs

We have been working the Video 101 series from Crush Online Hold'em, for a month and have high expectations for future results. We have just invested in Kingston's SSD Now hard disk at an excellent price of $199 from B&H Photography in NY. Attempted Installation though was brutal. Finally Comp USA explained that the cover to my computer couldn't be removed by me and they will install plus do the data conversion and there might be problems with the drivers. They seemed very knowledgeable. Another $180. To that add $17 for 1,000,000 hands at the next level of $10NL plus $10 a month for daily hand feeds. Recovering these costs may have been a huge gamble in light of the Black Friday events. We made $80 in May. Our goal for June is $200. This could be quite possible since the next level will have betting twice as high.


While my Acer is in the shop, I've been taking copious notes and will be loaded for bear in a few days.