March Update

One more day in March and I'm not sure if I'll be playing tomorrow or not so I'm updating my blog now. I've had some mixed results for the month playing 25nl - a few really bad tilt sessions, some sessions where I was totally focused and making great reads but losing anyways, and some really great sessions where I found some fish to hand me a bunch of buyins.

I'm slowly getting more used to the 25nl flow. Some players are a lot more aggressive here than at 10nl so patience really pays off. Most of them are still weak-tight though. I've played a total of 11k hands of 25nl this month and about the same for 10nl.

I ran quite poorly at 10nl and that's where most of my tilty sessions were so my winrate for that is only 3.7ptBB/100 over 12k hands, which is quite low for me. I would often drop down if I was playing poorly at 25nl, not really the best idea when I should probably just quit for the day.

25nl was a much better level running at 7.1ptBB/100 over 11k hands. I played a lot more nitty at this level and I think I need to get over that. My work on aggression is starting to pay off though and I'm keeping it above 2 for the most part. I'm going to start taking shots at 50nl hopefully this week if I continue to run well at 25nl. I'm thinking maybe 20k total hands at 25nl would be better before I make the move permanent according to my bankroll management post - that's only another 9k and I'm playing about 2k a day when I get a couple of hours.

I've heard that 100nl is actually easier than 50nl because so many TAG regs get stuck at 50nl and take a long time to move up. I guess I'll have to find out for myself. There must be a bunch of gamblers that figure anything less than a $1BB isn't any fun and that's less than the minimum at most casino's anyways - usually they offer $1/$2. They don't realize that online is MUCH tougher than live. I've read that 25nl is comparable to $1/$2 live and the game plays totally different, not as many limpers and the standard raise is much lower. I hardly ever play live so I don't have a lot of experience with that and can't imaging opening for 12BB and getting 1 or 2 callers.

Anyways, graph is obviously needed:

Small Swong Today

I had a bit of a spewy start to the day. I don't know what my problem was but I was tilting quite a bit, running card dead, and trying to force hands. That led to a 3.5 buyin loss. I managed to get everything under control again though and got those buyins back finishing the day at -$2, lol.

I'm almost 1/2 way to my goal of 10k hands at 25nl for this month and I'm running at 11ptBB/100. I'm actually a little more than 1/2 if I count Everest, but I didn't keep great records there when PT didn't work for me. If I keep running at this rate, I'll have just enough to meet the $ requirement for my BR plan, as well as the required winrate.

I was hoping to play a little more tonight, but the tables are dying down. There's only 65k people on, and that's only 1/2 of what it is at peak hours. Surprising for a weekend, but maybe it's because of the holiday.

I'm starting to notice a lot more regs than at lower limits, too. There's a few guys that seem to be machines that are able to play 16 hours a day on at least 4 tables (I'm assuming because they're on in the morning and still on in the evening when I come back). I don't know what they're doing at 25nl if they can play that much. That's got to be at least 3-4k hands a day if they take a couple breaks and they don't run too bad either.

Long Term Plan - Bankroll Management

I decided on a longterm bankroll management plan to help me move up levels. I stuck around at 10nl far too long (over a year) without considering moving up. $25 was a lot of money and it was scary to lose that much in one hand until quite recently for me.

So here's my plan, I play one level until I hit the top $ limit, have at least 10k hands at that limit, and I am beating that limit for at least 5ptBB/100 over the last 10k hand stretch. If I meet those requirements, I move up. If I drop below the lower $ limit at the current level, I have to drop down and work myself back up to the upper $ limit fo the lower level. fjdsajflk; That's confusing so:

10nl - $0 - $500
25nl - $400 - $1500
50nl - $1250 - $2500
100nl - $2000 - $6500
200nl - $6000 - $14,000

... and so on - hopefully.

This essentially gives me 5 buyins to lose at the new level before moving back down and regaining confidence. And the higher up I go, I give myself more of a cushion in terms of buyins.

I withdrew about 1/3 of my roll today to pay for some bills since I'm technically rolled for 100nl but have no intention of moving up from 25nl for another 8500 hands, and I'm still overrolled for 50nl even after my withdrawal so no sense in having that money sit there and do nothing when I don't need it.

Back to Stars 25nl

I moved back to Stars 25nl yesterday. Everest was going good but it was a bit much in terms of variance for 10nl - nevermind 25nl. That and the bonus clears so slowly at the micros; I cleared about $30 in probably 15 hours even though I tried to start tables to earn double points and clear 2x as fast. That and I was really starting to miss PT and PAHUD.

So I went back to Stars and started nitting it up at 25nl full ring again. My game is usually a bit more open than this but I am trying to be very selective in the hands I play and for what reasons, and making sure I have a reason to play a hand. This leads to very little cold calling preflop and I almost always have the initiative when I'm in the hand. I think my nittiness is a bit misleading for the regs because my range is not actually what a regular nit would have and I probably play a few more speculative hands when I'm up against someone giving me good implied odds. The HUDbots are definitely going to be off on their reads.

Today's been good: running 9/6/6 <--- yes, finally working on my aggression factor. I got some advice that I should be deciding on the flop how I want to play the hand and putting my opponent on a range and acting accordingly right away while my actions are still inexpensive. According to the Fundamental Theorem of Poker you basically want to raise when you're ahead and fold when you're behind (ie. play the way you would if you knew what your opponent's cards were), the only time you should be calling is when you are getting pot/implied odds to hit your draw and even then calling is not always the best option.

So for today that has resulted in postflop aggression factors of 6, 14, and 2.5 for each respective street. I've been running pretty good today so that's why they are quite high, but I am normally trying to keep my flop and turn AF at least around 3 and my river AF around 2.

Played just under 1000 hands today 6 tabling and ran at 27ptBB/100 for a nice profit.

Wow I Suck at Flipaments

I found a table that appeared to be doing flips this evening, which is pretty standard for Everest. There's a guy shoving over anyone that limps, so I'm obviously limp/calling my strong hands and folding the rest.

I went on a nice 4 buyin slide against this guy:

AQ<22
AQ<87
AK<98
AQ<65 (there were 3 other callers here with AJ, A8, and KQ - 65 won with 2 pair AI PF)

Villain sits out up 7 buyins after shoving 350BB into 2 stacks of 200BB each with T2o. Sigh.

It's been a good couple days at Everest

Everest is being quite good to me so far. I find that the 10nl tables play similarly to the 2nl tables on Stars in terms of table dynamic - a lot of limping and calling and calling down with any pair, top pair no kicker hands are the nuts, etc. The skill is probably a little better than the 2nl tables on Stars but not by much for the most part.

You'll often see a couple of guys like me that are cleaning up multiple tables sitting with 3+ buyins and the rest are sitting with 1/2 to a full buyin so it's really easy to see who to avoid playing pots with and I think those players understand this, too. So it hasn't been too much of a struggle playing without my HUD. I still can't figure out those hand histories even after converting them in Poker Tracker. They won't import for me. I'll probably just MS Paint those hands into my graph later, lol.

I've managed to put in about 6 hours in the past 3 days and I'm up 10 buyins at 10nl so far. I think I'll be playing the 25nl tables there as soon as I have about $200 on that site (I just made the minimum deposit of $50 for the bonus I signed up for). My calculations show that I'm running about 21ptBB/100 over 2500 hands with 3ptBB/100 of that coming from the bonus. I went on a bit of a variance swing last night with a 3 buyin swong where I had 80,90, and 95% equity on 3 hands when I got all the money in and lost so I would be running a little better than this if not for those hands.

My bonus is 10% cleared so far so I'm guessing it will only take me another 25 hours to clear at 25nl if pots are double the size.

Trying Out Everest Poker

I started playing at Everest Poker today to get a break from Stars. I still really like playing there but I thought this would be a nice change of pace. I signed up and got the bonus so I started out playing some 10nl to see what the competition was like...

Well I just might stay at Everest for a while - the games are very very soft - I must say they are much softer than Party. I'm not sure if this has to do with all the gamblers coming in from the casino section or what, but I sure like it.

The only drawback so far for me is that I'm having trouble with getting the hand histories into Poker Tracker properly, but just taking notes instead seems to do the trick. At Stars I had been assuming everyone was weak-tight until they showed me otherwise. The players at Everest are a little different, most of them are loose-passive/passive. They are calling down huge pot sized bets and turn c/r with a bare top pair no kicker and hands like that.

For example, I was getting 3bet every other time I raised by the same guy whether he was in position or not so I pick up QQ and 4bet him back and he 5bets all in with 88 <-- the 5th bet is not always AA apparently. And here is one of the last hands I played today with me having AA:

Flop: Ac9s8s - I pot it. Villain calls

Turn: 9d - I pot it again. Villain min-raises. I call (he's only got 1/2 of his stack left now so I figure I'll let him try to hit to stack him since I think he could fold to a shove if this was one of the weak-tights at Stars. Meh, who am I kidding he wasn't folding).

Flop: Kd - I figure either he was on a draw that missed or he'll bet an Ace or 9 so I check. Villain bets $1 out of his remaining $5 into a $10 pot and calls down my c/r with ATo. I know, right?

So if this continues (me winning 4 buyins in the span of 1.5 hours) I will stay at Everest for a while. Maybe it was the deposit boomswitch, lol, but being incredibly patient for any 2 pair or better hand pays off huge at this site.

I've got a banner link on the right side if anyone's interested in checking it out. I'm sure some of you have noticed that I'm trying out the affiliate thing. They've got a nice $100 "Welcome Bonus" that clears incrementally as you play instead of you having to clear a certain number of points before you get any of it like most other sites. I just can't find the mysteriously hidden Everest Points Store...

Settling back into full ring 25nl

I decided to settle back into grinding 25nl today, just 4 tables. During my breakeven stretch I think I was a little tilty in the impatient department and played far too many marginal hands. So I sat down and crunched a few ptBB/100 numbers and made myself an Excel ptBB calculator to remind myself that you don't have to be up a whole lot in an hour to be considered to be crushing the game - I consider "crushing" to be 10+/100 at 10nl and 8+/100 at 25nl etc. This sure helps to reduce the number of marginal situations I get myself into and the result is me playing more hands that I am in control of.

Played 500 hands so far today at 15/100 and would like to play another ~9500 in the next week or so before I start trying to move up to 50nl. I am currently overrolled for 50nl and almost rolled for 100nl, lol I'm such a nit.

Oh and here's my graph for the year so far - I haven't posted it in a while. That ugly stretch in the middle is the last week of January until the last week of February.

BBV4Life Update

I just got home on Sunday. I haven't played much poker in a while as I've been away at the hospital waiting for the arrival of our baby girl! This week has been pretty busy with everything going on and all the visitors, but things are starting to get back to normal. She's quite adorable and is letting us sleep at night so far, which is nice. So pics are needed obviously:



Other than that, I have been playing some 10nl full ring trying to get back into it and I'm playing fairly well. I'll be trying to put in 2k-3k hands per week minimum from now on. I haven't played at Party in a while so they shipped my $40 to play with and gave me 2 weeks to clear 320 points to unrestrict it. I turned that into about $100 during this week but didn't manage to clear the points before the deadline today with everything going on so I quickly blew the last $35 that I couldn't cash out on blackjack 1/2 an hour before the expiry. Probably should have just flipped it to double up fast and cash out some more. Oh well. I'll be back at Stars for a while until they ship me some more free cash.

Brag: New baby!
Beat: Not as much time for poker.
Variance: I don't care that there's not as much time for poker.