The pokerpod.com will be proud to be opening on the 14th September! To celebrate this we will be hosting a $100 FREEROLL on the 27th September for all our active members!!! To be able to take part in this freeroll, which will be held on FULL TILT POKER, simply register in the pokerpod forum. For information on the pokerpod.com please click here

We will also be covering the exciting 25k Heads Up Pot Limit Omaha World Championship On Full Tilt poker. This will be the highest buy-in heads-up PLO tournament ever held, with a field of the world’s best live and online players ready to prove they’re number one when it comes to Pot-Limit Omaha.

  

  

Top professionals such as Team Full Tilt’s Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen and Patrik Antonius are expected to play.

The main event starts on Saturday September 6 at 15:00 ET.
 

                                       
                                           *Just some of the names who will be playing in the 25k Buy in event

Full Tilt will be holding special 'Sweat Tournaments' whilst the Heads Up Championship main event is running, giving away more than $5000 in added money.

Brian Townsend (AKA sbrugby)

Brian Townsend is currently one of the most successful online poker players around. Seen playing with the likes of Phil Ivey and David Benyamine regularly, you may be surprised to learn that just a few short years ago he was playing the same low buy-in tournaments as you and me.

In 2004 Townsend started out by depositing $50 on Pokerstars and quickly going bust on the $.25/$.50 limit tables.

Not to be discouraged, he deposited again and began to work his way up the limit table levels. For a little under a year he kept at this, while reading every book he could find on the subject of poker, along with online blogs and forums. “I read everything I could get my hands on,” said Townsend in a post he made on 2+2 Forums, “I have every poker book available at Borders, and some that are not.”

In April 2005 Townsend moved up to the 2/4 limit games. After this he graduated and decided to move to Las Vegas to play poker full time for three months before graduate school started. He was playing there at the 5/10 limit and is quoted as saying at this point of his life “Poker was all consuming. I would play and read about poker 14-16 hours every day.”

At this time he was attempting to move on to the 10/20 limit. This latest move was turning out to be rather unsuccessful causing him to lose about $5,000. In his 2+2 blog he said “…looking back I wasn’t playing my best because I wouldn’t think about hands that I was playing. I would just multi-table like a robot.”

Mid summer 2005 Townsend tried his hand at a no limit live game at the Mirage in Las Vegas. While he had a rocky start playing live he really took a liking to NL. He started playing 2/5 NL games around Vegas and went back to thinking about hands and what he was doing, rather than mechanical multi-tabling.

After a summer of mostly live play Townsend started graduate school. Due to his self-proclaimed irresponsibility he spent this time living on a friends couch and playing poker from his computer in her living room. During this time he also moved up to 10/20 and eventually 20/40 limit and higher.

Eventually, Townsend started playing live NLHE at a small poker club in Ventura, CA, to which he credits growing and maturing his game. Townsend has said he recommends playing live deepstack to improve your game, at this club he learned the importance of position, pot control, value bets, and having a wide range of hands.

After this he started playing no limit online, beginning at the .25/.50 NL level to ½ within a month.  He subsequently moved up the blind levels month by month to the large buy-ins he now plays successfully.
A couple pieces of advice Townsend gave in interviews and blogs that struck me as most crucial were:  Always play your own bankroll with your own money. “Part of moving up is that you need to play lower limits in order to build the skills to play in the bigger games,” Townsend has said. Also to play the limits you win at and play in proportion to your bankroll. In a Bluff Magazine interview he said of this “I would keep playing a limit until I would have 20 buy ins for the next limit game. I would move up, and if I lost I would move back down until I had regained the 20 buy-ins. I would repeat that process all the way up the limits.

Needless to say this strategy has served him well. Brian Townsend is now one of the top online players and a lead poker instructor on Cardrunners.com. He has made appearances on NBC’s Poker After Dark, World Poker Tour, and has made final table of a WSOP-C event.

In the Bluff Magazine article Townsend was asked when he realized he could support himself by playing poker. He responded one April “I made $36,000 playing $5/$10NL on Party Poker. I moved up the next month to $10/$20NL and made about $60,000. Then I started into the $25/$50 and $100/$200 games and was making $150,000-$200,000 a month. I realized I should pursue it full time. I spoke to my professor and dropped out of grad-school.
Brian Townsend is a model online poker player and someone to keep our eye on as he moves up the professional poker ladder. In my opinion, we could all improve our game a little by heeding his expert advice.

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