Pele was sh*te

Also, we were a bit unlucky with the weather. Not that it wasn't hot, but it was also quite wet up around Queensland, and there were a few places that I really wanted to visit which we had to cut out, because there were constant thunderstorms. Having said that, we still had a great time and I'm already looking forward to going back next year.

During our time in Oz, I probably read more books than I have in the last 2 years. I don't really seem to have much time for it when I'm at home, but just before Christmas I picked up one of the 'Ross O'Carroll-Kelly' books at Dublin airport and I was immediately hooked on them. Karen bought me the whole series of them for Christmas and I deliberately held off reading them until we got to Oz, as I knew I'd have a lot of time to kill on the journey over. However, once I started on them they didn't last long. I think I read them all in about 4 weeks and are probably the funniest books I've ever read.

Another book that I eventually got round to reading over there is Gus Hansen's 'Every Hand Revealed'. I'd been meaning to read it for a long time and while I wasn't actually expecting it to be that good, I really wanted to read it just to get some kind of perspective on how the hyper-aggressive players think, as my own style is so different. If any of you aren't familiar with it, it details every hand he plays of any significance during the Aussie Millions tournament that he won a couple of years ago. I was surprised at how good it was and it was a great insight into how the really loose-aggressive players like Gus play the game.

When he talks his way through some of the hands he admits to making mistakes during them. Some people might argue that he plays some of the other hands very badly as well, and anyone who watches him play online regularly will tell you that he makes some crazy plays that could only be described as bad. However, despite all the mistakes that he makes in pots, he still has one of the best tournament records of any player and he's won over 3 million online this year in the big PLO game.

Obviously most of success is down to his undoubted talent, raw aggression and total fearlessness, but it made me wonder if maybe all the mistakes and crazy plays that he makes also add to his long term success. People watch him play online and see him play these huge pots and sometimes he gets his money in when he's in terrible shape, and he probably looks like easy money to the untrained eye. However, I imagine if you actually sat down to play him it would be a very different story.

He might be prone to making the odd crazy move but even then, he can still get lucky sometimes and it must be very easy for him to get paid off when he wants action. You could probably just play very tight against him and wait for a huge hand, and you'd have a good chance of getting paid off (if it holds up), but how much money are you going to lose in the other pots, when he's bombarding you with raises while you keep passing and wait for a sufficiently large hand with which to take him on?

I had a similar experience years ago when I played some guy Heads-up PLO online. I assumed he was some rich sports bettor, who had decided to give poker a try. He played every hand and bet pretty much every flop. Earlier when there were other players at the table, I saw him call a large pot-sized bet on the turn with a 6-high flush draw and nothing else. Some of the plays he made were just plain bad. A few hours later I was down 20k and went to bed. I later found out that I'd been playing Ram Vaswani.

It reminds me a bit of something that they used to have on the 'Fantasy Football' show, hosted by Frank Skinner and David Baddiel that used to be on TV on Friday nights. Every week they had a segment called 'Pele was shite', in which they would show the world's greatest ever footballer missing an open net or passing the ball straight to the opposition or miss-kicking a ball.

Obviously everyone who knows anything about football knows that Pele was one of the greatest, if not THE greatest player ever to kick a ball. However, if for some reason you didn't know this, and just formed your opinion from watching the clips that were shown on Fantasy Football, then you could be forgiven for thinking that you were watching Manchester United and Ireland Fullback, John O'Shea.

Similarly, it would be very easy to make a show called 'Gus Hansen is shite' or Ram Vaswani or any of those crazy loose-aggressive players and show some of the hands that they play badly. But it's very dangerous to just look at a few hands that someone plays badly and ignore all the other good stuff that they do, most of which you don't even see, as they win so many pots uncontested. Hopefully it won't cost you 20k to realise that!