Thoughts of a Microstakes Grinder

Preliminary Rake Opinion

2012-01-31T03:27:00.010-06:00

Long time no blog.

POKER

Not much going on. I've been taking it pretty easy with poker. I've been way too distracted with rake change discussions. The IoM trip is over and reps are back and unfortunately getting flamed for making counter-intuitive statements after having seen Stars' data. I thought this was inevitable given the way the community tends to work which, apart from the unecessary delay and feeling like not much would be added than what was originally offered January 1st, was precisely why I turned down an invitation to go. I felt the logical outcomes were going to be one of:

Stars is telling the truth and we come back with the same as January 1st. This is the basically the reps' version although they say that Stars is actually taking a bit of a hit now in addition to making large maintenance concessions for this year as a gift for SN/SNE as a good faith measure for handling things so poorly in the first place.
Stars is not being truthful, would have a short chat with the reps and send them back not being able to say anything under an NDA and end up with the same as January 1st.
Stars is not being truthful and would present false data to the reps, sending them back with a good impression and ending up the same as January 1st. This has been the outspoken response by a significant portion of the community, effectively shooting the messenger which is only made worse by the fact that the reps were put in charge of making the annoucnement and therefore they put a target on themselves. These are Stars' decisions and they need to take the credit good or bad.

The one huge red flag that goes up for me is the statement that Stars was completely unprepared for the meeting and that they went through the raw data for the first time with the reps. It just sounds too unbelievable to me that a bunch of incompetents stumbled their way into a full scale monopoly on the industry without any player valuation metrics or revenue forecast tools, effectively being taught how to analyze their own data by the player reps and through trial and error for the first time at the meeting and relying on customer service up to this point. I would tend to think a company that large has some of the best number crunchers in the industry on their payroll.

That said, I do think the reps did as good a job as possible given the situation they were put in and I'm grateful to them for that.

Despite what has transpired here, and we're not completely sure yet as we're still waiting on official numbers from Stars, I would still be more than willing to attend a meeting in the future where the discussion isn't quite as urgent as the beginning of year changes require and now that people have a better idea what to expect out of them.

HEALTH

In non-poker related news, I'm trying to get back on the healthy eating bandwagon. I started at 238 lbs last summer and managed to drop 30 lbs by Novemeber. Unfortunately the holidays were not kind to me and I gained back 10 lbs. My goal is still to get down to a much more healthy 180 lbs which is about what I was in high school.

I stumbled across MyFitnessPal the other day and it's really opening my eyes to a lot of things and the app is super user friendly. My achilles heel is obviously Tim Hortons. Bye bye 500+ calorie breakfast sandwhiches known as the best tasting breakfast food ever invented, 150 calorie double-doubles and 300+ calorie fritters. Hello 50 calorie Splenda+Milk coffees and the occasional 220 calorie yeast based doughnut. Of course I could just drink my coffee black like I do at home, but I'm more addicted to that specific flavour that you can only get by mixing theirs with copius amounts of sugar and cream.

You hear a lot of people out there talking about just having to control portion sizes. While that may be true in that you can basically eat anything as long as it's small enough, it doesn't work for me. I just end up feeling hungry and it ends up not being worth it and discouraging. The key for me is going to be finding decent enough tasting food that's low in calories so that I can eat a better sized portion and say "close enough." I've been obsessed with MFP's food database for a few days now and am starting to slowly fill out a spreadsheet with substitutes:

Boston Pizza is out. Their cactus cut potatoes are definitely out. If I want pizza, thin crust Delissio or Dominoes is the way to go.
If I drink soft drinks it's going to be Coke Zero or Diet Dr. Pepper, both of which taste remarkably close to the real thing. But I am going to try to stick with my Crystal Light singles packs more than anything. Trying to drink straight water in sufficient amounts is a lost cause for me. I need flavour.
I've been avoiding McDonalds like the plauge since last summer. After going through a number of restaurant's menus over the past few days, they actually seem like the better deal cost and calorie wise if you stay on their value picks menu considering the sizes of the meals that you get everywhere else. If I go to Boston Pizza I'm inevitably going to end up paying $20+ and eating 1100 calories between appetizer, salad and pizza which is 2/3 of my daily intake. At McDonalds I can get a McDouble or a Junior Chicken, or even get one of each with a Coke Zero and be at 400-500 calories for the meal under $5 for less than 1/3 of my daily intake. Of course some people are going to be partial to what is considered good food, or at least better prepared food like at BP's, but I've always been somewhat of a processed food freak.
Eating at home is typically best overall as long as you stay reasonable there too. You're still better off running out for a cheeseburger if you're going to fry yourself a ham and cheese sandwhich at home. Homemade salads, sandwhiches, chicken, and fish and even hamburger seem best and I'm fairly happy about that.
I'm not much for snacks, but I do love chocolate, KitKat Chunky bars to be exact. Chocolate chip granola bars seem like a rather poor substitute but they are a 67% reduction. But I did find Quaker Oats Dipps, which are simply granola bars smothered in a layer of chocolate and I can definitely say close enough for a 50% reduction. The Black Diamond cheese strings my kids like are also surprisingly decent and rather filling and I really do like Sun-Rype Fruitsource bars.

As a general rule based on my spreadsheet so far, it looks like I'll be ok as long as I stick to meal items that are 250 or less, snacks at 150 or less, and beverages that are 100 or less with as many at 0 as possible. That will let me easily come in at 1800 per day and hit my goal weight in about 4-5 months.

As for exercise, I've been looking at the big picture as a simple EV calculation. 20 minutes of jogging is about 270 calories burned, the same as eating a doughnut. The enjoyment I get out of that stupid doughnut is less than the misery I get out of jogging for 20 minutes so maybe I should just say no to the doughnut and skip the exercise. But I do plan on getting some amount of exercise in, I was surpised that some of the numbers for Wii Sports are quite high -- Wii tennis comes in at 400/hour compared to real tennis, which I also enjoy immensely, coming in at 900/hour -- and that's something I could do with my family indoors in winter even though it's not quite as efficient as jogging. But it's still a win/win.

This whole health thing seems to be 80%+ what you eat and 20%- exercise when you look at just how much work is required to burn off small amounts of food so that's going to be my main focus for now. I did the original 30 lbs with zero exercise so I think this theory is correct although from what I understand there is some correlation between muscle mass and your Basal Metabolic Rate (how much you would burn if you stayed in bed doing nothing all day).

MFP had a nice little widget so I've gone and added that to my sidebar so I feel like I have some accountability to keep up to. Hoping to get down to my goal weight by later this summer.

2012 1st Quarter Plan

2012-01-09T03:22:00.001-06:00

A few general thoughts first:

The state of online poker seems to be on a gradually worsening downward slope since BF and throughout 2011. Game quality is rapidly deteriorating.
2012 has started off with a vitriolic bang and the community as a whole seems even more venemous than during the Fullstack-Shortstack Wars. Hard to believe.
I do want to say that there are still some very good people in the community. But 2011 was the year I grew up and realized that poker players are humans. It was kind of the same feeling you get when you're mid-teens and people start to talk to you like an adult and you realize that society isn't this wonderful world of heroes that you thought it was. It's just a bunch of people looking out for number one. I do realize how naiive that sounds when applying it to the poker community, but that was my pre-2011 mindset. And I'm fine with people looking out for number one, that's what the game is about, until people come to the illogical conclusion that it's better to have their cookie taken away if it means someone they hate has two cookies taken away rather than to let everyone keep their cookies.
I know that this sounds fairly cynical, but I also think cynicism is fairly realistic at this point in time.

Coming to and admitting realizations:

I'm a winning recreational player. The adage that you can't be a pro until you're a pro -- or however that goes -- is very true. I'm a busy person with a full time job and family with very little time to study and even less time to review. I can't pick when I play, so I play when I'm tired, hungry and life tilted. This is not going to change. This year I have to admit to myself that it's just not going to happen in the foreseeable future and stop being disappointed when it doesn't.
As a winning player you have to choose between one of two evils. You're either going to be a hated mass-tabler who's killing the games or you're going to be a greedy, talentless bumhunter who's killing the games. I believe the latter is the going term for table selection, once deemed a skillset in itself. I suppose you could be a real ego-driven poker player and just close your eyes while clicking on the lobby and play whatever pops up but that just seems, well, stupid.

2012 -- Quarter 1 Plan

My original plan pre-January 1st was to amp up the volume and hit 300k VPP for the year. But now, based on my outlook outlined above and due to a significantly smaller component for rakeback, I'm going to be taking the bumhunter approach for the first quarter of the year. I'll re-evaluate after a few months to see where this is going. I'm going to do my best to lower tables to the point where I'll just barely be maintaining Supernova status. I believe I can get that done with ~12 tables of 50NL given the number of hours I play.

I'm not quite committed to it yet, but ideally I'd almost like to set a volume ceiling target rather than a minimum volume target. I think that may just push me over the edge into making sure I once and for all play for quality over quantity. Needing to cut tables and increase winrate has been a long time goal of mine but it inevitably falls by the wayside in the quest to stay in the VIP prison system (metaphorical prison, before the analogy police show up with a relevance related bone to pick). Now that they've blown the walls out of the prison, I'm finally free to do it. Of course I could have done it before, but the appeal of regularly scheduled prison food always outweighed the appeal of the unknown.

I'm going to be playing on Stars while I research the software, rb/vip and cash out efficiency of a few other sites. I'll re-evaluate everything once FTP is up and running again and will likely make a committment to one site after that.

Good luck to everyone in 2012.

WTH Stars?

2012-01-08T14:02:00.004-06:00

I don't know what's going on at Stars lately. The following is my opinion:

Turning your back on the system that made you what you are by switching to Weighted Contributed to reduce VPPs and FPPs given to nearly all higher volume and/or winning players in order to give back more VPPs but only a small fraction of lower value FPPs to losing players who in all likelihood don't really care about getting a >$0.003 increase on the value of their 10k annual VPPs.
Snap "responding to player input" to remove the mitigating, helpful rake changes after delaying the announcement for 2 weeks because they were "undecided," resulting in all of us getting screwed over for a month before anything is done in a completely unnecessary Isle of Man meeting where player reps are going to be required to sign an NDA which I can easily see resulting in the creating of scapegoats. I still don't know how you go about altering your entire business plan overnight when it apparently took you the better part of 360+ days to figure out in the first place.
I was originally contacted to be a player rep but declined because this can easily be done with online meetings and the only sensitive numbers that may need to be seen are VIP tier breakdowns, I honestly do not care exactly what Stars' bottom line or business plan is, so I was unwilling to waste the player pool's time in order to potentially come back with nothing and not be able to legally explain the situation.
Nanonoko being allowed to exceed the 24 table limit in order to set a most hands profitably played in 8 hours Guinness World Record, which according to the Stars Blog may be open to other players in the future. In my opinion, if this is supposed to stand as an official record, lifting the table limit is an absolute must otherwise it's the same as letting me set the 100m record starting at the 20m line. That's obviously going to result in a further surge against the fish:reg ratio which is already in tatters on most of the site at a time when winrates are at an all time low to go with the massive reduction in rakeback value.

If this is all part of some sort of make poker as close to a breakeven game for regs business strategy, then well done. Otherwise this is just an absolute gongshow of terrible policy change after terrible policy change. I could understand if this was anyone else, but it's so disappointing after being able to put them on this better than the rest pedestal for so long.

What makes this worse, and most likely possible, is the fact that they control the vast majority of the market leaving players with nowhere to go. I don't think any of this would be happening if FTP was still around.

And if you ever wanted to give the new FTP a golden opportunity, this is it. I think a lot of players are starting to reconsider their stance of snap-withdrawing their FTP money as soon as GBT gets it up and running. I never thought I'd say this, but I know I for one will definitely be giving them a shot if they are at all similar to what they were in late 2010.

Occupy PokerStars Mass Sit Out

2011-12-30T02:55:00.005-06:00

Due to recent actions taken by PokerStars:

First changing to Weighted Contributed costing regs piles of money and moving the vast majority of it not into bonuses for deserving recreational players but rather right out of the poker economy and into Stars bottom line.
Second, at first offering to make some rake structure changes that would have recalibrated the new system to give some of that windfall back to players (True Rake + Rake reductions to 4.5%).
Third, abruptly reneging on all of the rake changes except for switching to WC merely one day after the original announcement.

The ensuing uproar after the initial announcement was against the site wide reduction in number of FPPs, FPP value reduction and the increase in rake cap on 5 handed pots from $2 to $3. This was somehow taken as a backlash against the rake changes as a whole. Thus, they have decided to keep the change to WC, but have now removed all of the rake structure changes leaving everyone even worse off than they would have been under the original announcement.

In response, players have galvanized and are planning a 2 hour mass sit out protest for January 1st whereby they will load 24 tables and sit out on all of them politely informing inquiring players about what is happening.

French players on the pokerstars.fr site are reportedly also staging a sit out for the changes that are going to occur on that site.

The current set of demands deemed to be an acceptable way to soften the FPP reduction blow by a high consensus of regs are as follows:

(Originally posted by TheMetetrown)
1. Rake caps of $.50/$1/$1.5/$2/$3 for 2/3/4/5/6+ handed play
2. 4.5% linear rake up to the cap
3. The same proposed reductions [as the original proposal] for Rake at the micro limits. [4% and 4.25%]

PLUS ONE OF THE FOLLOWING TWO OPTIONS

3a. Winner take all rake calculation method
4a. 6x VPP across the board

OR

3b. WC rake calculation method
4b. 6.5x VPP across the board

Note that Stars would still end up with more $/hand using the above consolations on January 1st than they will be getting on the old Dealt method on December 31st. These consolations would quite frankly help some games survive that are going to be killed off under a new WC system due to a complete lack of winners in some games with small edges after rake is effectively increased as well as be enough to satisfy regs in other games just enough to continue to play at the site.

Occupy PokerStars Mass Sit Out Details

Rake Change Update

2011-12-29T13:01:00.001-06:00

After planning changes to the rake structur for a year and still being undecided as of Dec 17th, you'll know that Steve announced the changes as per my last post.

There was one simple overreach in the original announcement. An increase in max rake for 5 handed play. This is where the vast majority of outrage was directed, if you consider people feel like switching to WC is already done.

Today, Steve returned with a new announcement. They are now canceling all of the changes to rake structure due to "player request" even though they think the original deal was still in our best interests.

So instead of fixing one outrageous item in the list the scrap everything including the True rake method and lower rake percentages that would have mitigated the loss of vpp damage done by going to WC in the first place. Note that True actually hurts fixed limit and they're better off with incremental rake which can and should be maintained to keep those games viable.

There is now a full fledged growing mass of players planning a mass sit out to blockade tables (as well as French players apparently doing the same to protest the changes in their games).

Head on over to the zoo to voice your opinion in the sit out or official changes threads.

PokerStars 2012 Rake Changes: First Impression

2011-12-28T20:30:00.004-06:00

Well after the gongshow that was the "big" unveiling of the new ad campaign this morning, PS Steve did come along and announce the VIP (read: rake) changes for 2012. You can read full details about the changes on pokerstars.com or in the official thread.

I haven't seen many people attempt to tackle this whole thing yet from a math perspective and I certainly don't blame anyone. It's a big mess. So please point out any flaws in my logic or math.

The basics:

Switching to Weighted Contributed rake.
Switching from Incremental to True rake.
Adjusting some rake caps.

There is an uproar and a growing movement among the high volume and higher stakes players to organize a sit out. It is still unclear as to exactly how much this change is going to affect micro players although they are generally still upset about any loss. A couple of points of interest here:

There is a change from $2 to $3 rake cap on tables with 5 players. 6max players are stating that about 25% of their hands are with 5 players. This is obviously going to cost them a lot more and will penalize players that are trying to keep tables going as well as table starters before tables become full.
The general consensus is that the WC switch is going to cost most regs between 10-25% of benefits depending on their style and game choice. This is gonig to affect higher volume players more than low volume regs in that 20% of 65% rakeback is obviously much more than 20% of 40% rakeback.

Judging by the adjusted rake caps it appears that microstakes may not be severely affected. The True rake is essentially a set percentage on every penny that's in the pot compared to the former Incremental where a certain dollar value was taken out for every increment in pot size -- $0.05 for every $1.00 for example. This results in a rake increase on smaller pots but overall it seems true that rake will effectively be decreased for most regs who don't play a lot of 2-2.5 bb pots and open for at least 3bb.

5NL - old rake in red, new rake in blue

50NL

So if we use the numbers from FTP experience (note to PT3 users there is apparently a custom stat you can use to find your WC equivalent), and we take a 20% cut in rakeback while overall receiving a 10% reduction in rake in the micros on average, a Supernova is generally going to end up with the following if my numbers are correct:

Before: 40/100 for 40% rakeback (insert your number instead of 40)

After (40*0.8)/(100*0.9) for 32/90 or 36% rakeback compared to 2011

I'm hoping that the 20% number is on the high side. Games weren't nearly as nitty on FTP as they are on Stars so hopefully the $-contributed/hand average -- the single factor for determining rakeback (vpip is a spurious correlation) -- for the player pool as a whole gets dragged down a ton by the shear number of tighter players and it endsup having less of an impact on losses.

Keep in mind that everything I've written and calculated here should be taken with a grain of salt. WC by it's

nature is a very convoluted process that depends on a number of varriables and is impossible to calculate in the straightforward way Dealt is for every player if you don't have all the data. So regs have a solid argument that in general they are all going to lose money, but the fact that very few of them have concrete numbers to put on display that can be applied to other players that the debate about what to do and how much compensation should be required breaks down since everyone is forced into talking about generalities.

As for game softness it is true that no sites that have made the switch have gotten softer so there's really not much reason to believe it will help. Most people arguing it will are plainly just nit-haters. The one argument I can see is that we haven't seen a site make the switch while having a really high rakeback % under dealt which would allow a small subsection of players to survive on Stars but nowhere else regardless of method. We might end up seeing a small forced exodus based on those players now thinking it's not worth it or becoming outright unprofitable.

I'm sure this will be big news through January so I'm definitely going to try to keep on top of the numbers.

Happy New Year everyone and good luck in 2012.

Potential Stars Rake Changes Update

2011-12-21T22:13:00.002-06:00

Note: This is the draft post I eluded to and wrote a few days ago when the news came out. As of the time of this post, Stars has yet to comment to players. I am reserving my thoughts on the VIP program as a whole until they do comment as any additional changes could potentially radically alter the ramifications. I was going to withhold my thoughts on this until there was an official announcement but this is basically all anyone is talking about right now anyways.

I have not paid any attention to what is going on with SNGs and MTTs. These comments are strictly regarding cash games. And of course there is always the outside chance that they are changing payment calculations for affiliates but not for players. This scenario seems rather unlikely.

December 19th:

The proverbial cat is out of the bag. From the PokerStars Partners T&C:

1.1 Ring Game Gross Revenue

shall mean the sum total of a Qualified Poker Player's contributions to Rakes in a Ring Game Hand while playing on software downloadable from the Site(s). Any Qualified Poker Player's contribution to a Rake shall be determined by dividing the total amount that a Qualified Poker Player has contributed to the Pot in any Ring Game Hand by the size of the Pot in that Ring Game Hand and multiplying it by the total Rake taken from that Pot in that Ring Game Hand regardless of the number of players dealt in such Ring Game Hand.

The same was confirmed in an affiliate email sent out today.

They are going to need to make some serious consolations to make up for the reduction in bonus money being paid out because as it stands, a change to Weighted Contributed in isolation is going to have the appearance of a rather large cash grab evidenced by math you can pretty much do without a calculator:

Recreational players contribute more to the pot more often and therefore they will receive a higher vpp/hand rate. Regs contribute less and therefore will receive a lower vpp/hand rate.

Quite simply, VPPs would be redistributed and devalued through a two-prong approach:

More VPPs will be going to players with a lower FPP multiplier resulting in less FPPs in the system.
More FPPs will be traded in at a lower dollar value.

A Bronzestar VPP is worth 1 VPP x 1 FPP x $0.010/FPP = $0.010
A Supernova VPP is worth 1 VPP x 3.5 FPP x $0.016/FPP = $0.056

The more VPPs you siphon towards the lower end of the VIP program, the more you pocket. So that leaves us hoping for some sort of consolation in terms of increased milestones or multipliers or completely revamping the entire system.

The standard argument for Weighted Contributed rakeback is that everyone gets their fair share. That was certainly FTP's line. I agree, however I think that the liquidity and health of the poker economy vastly outweighs the fair share argument. Making a statement along the lines of giving players what they deserve -- and being forced to oblige by removing money from the poker economy by pocketing the difference -- just isn't going to fly. Thus, Weighted Contributed is the most fair and could possibly be used if everyone were getting the same deal. If they're not, it's by far the worst option since it gives everyone their share but also hurts everyone at the same time.

Regs want a good deal to act as props. Recreationals want to play the game they want to play when they want to play it. In my opinion, this is how the Dealt method made Stars the run-away monopoly that it is. Unfair Weighted Contributed turns this entire notion on it's head. Regs are here for the money and WC takes that away from them. Recreationals are here for the recreation and if games aren't running because regs decided it wasn't worth it, you take the recreation away from recreationals.

It's a lose/lose/lose because if games aren't running, the site isn't raking tables. Is it really worth risking the flat out massive rake that regs generate in order to take back some of their rewards? In general, the rake paid dwarfs the rewards clawed back.

Take a full ring 100k Supernova for example:

100k VPP = $16,666 paid in dealt rake.
He receives $6400 in rakeback.
If you manage to take back 25% of that through WC redistributed FPPs, you profit an extra $1600 minus the slight increase you have to give to lower level players.
That means you're laying yourself 10.5:1 odds hoping that he doesn't pick up his chips and leave.

If these numbers were accurate, it would mean that if more than 10% of the 100k Supernova regs leave due to this change -- which in my estimation is completely plausible given that there's an army of slightly above breakeven regs who might deem Stars not worth it anymore -- you've just shot yourself in the foot. And to top it off, your new program certainly isn't going to attract any new rake generators.

Like I said, I'll hold off on my thoughts for the program as a whole until we hear the rest of the story, but I wanted to post an in depth analysis of why I think an unfair version of Weighted Contributed is a terrible idea for everyone involved. Increases to multipliers or milestones or FPP value would be needed to make up for the loss in VPPs so we'll be waiting to see if that happens.

December 21st Update: I've run a bunch of calculations based on the speculation going on in the 3 threads that have been overwhelmed by this in the Zoo and Bonus forums (SNE Pursuit thread and Poll thread in the Zoo, and 2012 Changes thread in the Bonus forum) and I suggest you check those threads out for more discussion.

As a preliminary conclusion to those calculations based on past experience with sites switching to WC, it seems about right that if Stars were in fact to increase the rake --> Table VPP multipliers to 6 and 6.5 to make up for the losses that regs would be receiving, the whole thing would be a push and probably decently fair enough, slightly hurting nits while rewarding fish more and giving everyone else an amount relatively close to what they have now. Of course we'll have to wait and see what the actual decisions are and how they affect game quality to really get a handle on where this is going.

I've been glued to the Zoo and will likely post again very shortly after an official announcement has been made. Stay tuned.

Stars Rake Method Speculation

2011-12-19T19:46:00.007-06:00

I had written up a post regarding what I feel is a near certainty regarding changes to the rakeback structure on Stars based on all of the circumstantial evidence piled up so far. But I do think that at this point it might still be considered speculation on a technicality in that the reported switch to weighted contributed is so far only confirmed to be affecting affiliates starting January 1.

I will re-post my thoughts on weighted contributed along with any other changes Stars does or does not make after they officially comment on what the changes for players will be.

Moneyballin

2011-12-18T21:49:00.009-06:00

I mentioned this in an earlier post but thought I'd explain in a little more detail. I've been using the "moneyball" Oakland A's approach to building my Fantasy Hockey team. I'm in a 10 team roto league where the owners agreed that they wanted to make this year more interesting by adding some role-player stats like blocks and hits as well as switch all of the percetage and average stats to their cumulative counterparts in order to better reward consistency -- average time on ice to cumulative time on ice, goals against average to cumulative goals against. Note that before this year and the return of the Jets, I had not even followed the game until playoffs most years and probably couldn't even name 3 players on each team.

Stats: Goals, Assists, +/-, PIM, TOI, Shots, Hits, Blocks, Powerplay Points, Wins, Goals Against, Saves

I immediately made several observations on the league rules:

Role player stats translate directly to defenceman stats. Stats like hits, blocked shots and cumulative TOI make defenceman vastly superior to forwards, especially offensive minded defenceman that can do it all, shooting, playing a ton on the powerplay etc.
Goalies are the least valuable and highest variance position given that they only account for 3 stats, the pace at which coaches change their mind about who the "starter" is and how much an injury can decimate your chances for doing well on a shallow roster of goalies. There is also a very obvious way to angle the goalie categories. We have a minimum 60 games out of 164 max started for goalie stats to qualify for points. If you're willing to concede the Wins category and ignore the volatile Saves category, you can easily take first in the goals against category by simply playing the minimum 60 games and then benching all your goalies.
The more stats being used the better for this system. Your competitors are still thinking about player value in terms of name recognition and standard offensive stats like points. A lot of equal value stats separates the true team playing stat-monster superstars (Chara, Getzlaf) from the one trick ponies (Sedin brothers).

I recently traded away Henrik Sedin for what was deemed a mediocre player. The league was ready to snap veto the trade thinking I was getting ripped off until I stepped in and said I actually initiated it at which point I was told I was an idiot. Quite simply he gets a ton of assists and above average +/- and people are in awe of a recognizable name on a 100 point pace, but that's all he does. In contrast the player I traded for still gets 2/3 the points but also had 2 to 3 times the number of shots, hits, blocks and TOI so I clearly came out the winner on the trade. My only mistake was I didn't go for an even better "mediocre" player. Players like Sedin are simply outliers in one stat but get recognition if it happens to be points while outliers like Brouwer (hits) and Downie (+/-) are deemed rather worthless. Believe it or not, Sedin was consistently the 4th worst player on my team.

Before the draft I simply created a spreadsheet that gave equal value to all stats and dumped the projected stats from espn into it giving each player a summed value based on each stat relative to the player pool. And then it got labor intensive as I had to readjust my draft order with players moving up to +/- 75 in the top 400.

My Team with Team Value Ratings

After the draft I converted my sheet into player ranking charts for each team giving me a good idea of how valuable the owner thinks they are versus reality. I can quickly see who I need to bench or who I need to play to make up for certain stats. It doesn't help to lead goals and assists by a 3 to 1 margin at the expense of everything else, but that is everyone else's strategy. I can easily dump potential acquisitions into my team to see if they'd be good contributors to the overall makeup of my team allowing me to see the sleepers coming a mile away.

League with Current Team Makeup Power Rankings

Needless to say I was obviously the most clueless dead money owner at the draft. I started Day 1 in first place with an 8 point margin and have remained there ever since. If you want to have some fun with a fantasy sports league I highly recommend joining a stat heavy roto league which provides a mistake rich environment. Take note of how the league rules dictate optimal strategy and how that compares to your opponents' obvious pyschological state as trained, ingrained fans rather than statisticians.

Current Standings - Crushing most stats
Note that I've played more games than anyone, but I'm only 1% ahead of pace.

PC Wars

2011-12-13T07:25:00.005-06:00

Acer Aspire M3470 - $579 (saved $70!)

AMD A8-3800 2.4 GHz quad-core processor and 8GB DDR3 SDRAM
1.5TB storage capacity
AMD Radeon HD6550D

After my KSOD episode, I went out and got myself an Acer Aspire. The first thing I do after the obligatory first setup and Firefox download is unhook everything and try to drop my old video card in to give myself dual monitor support again. Pop that thing in, hook up my monitors via DVI and power up.

Nothing.

Remove video card. Re-connect to onboard card. Receive BSOD on third ever startup. Forced into recovery mode which does some more damage in the dll file department ultimately preventing me from installing postgres no matter what I try nevermind doing it the easy way with the HEM installer. Great. Rinse and repeat recovery process 3 times, getting various FUBAR error messages along the way intermittently researching why on earth I should ever need to uninstall an onboard card on a brand new PC in the 2011 plug and play era to even have my other card recognized. Check the return policy on my iPod while simultaneously resetting the entire POS back to factory presets. Re-pack the box to the best of my abilities. No idea where these cardboard spacers go.

HP Pavillion - $699 (cause you get what you pay for)

AMD A8-3850 2.9 GHz Quad-Core Accelerated Processor and 8GB DDR3 SDRAM
2TB storage capacity
AMD Radeon HD 6450
Integrated Wi-Fi

First thing I notice on unpacking is that it has one DVI port. The box said dual monitor support. FML. But what's this? At the bottom of the case there are 2 more DVI ports oddly enough with covers on them that say "Do not remove." Serious? Yes according to multiple sources, completely serious.

Thankfully I notice an HDMI port alongside the uncovered DVI. Check the back of my newer monitor. We're in business. Now there's only 15 thousand different types of video outputs available to the techno-illiterate public and I have nearly as many cables so there's a good chance that I actually have one of these.

Wife: "Didn't you get one of those with the monitor?"

Me: ... ... ... jackpot.

Now I've had HP desktops for the past 12 years and they've never failed me until the electric company decides it's time to help out the electronics industry again and my surge protector goes on vacation. I obviously decide to kamikaze my way into first installation and plug in every last peripheral that I own before initial startup.

Power on. Standard Next, Next, Next, No, Yes, Next, Large Appealing GO button considering what I've been through the past couple days indicating success!

[x] Dual monitors

[x] Beloved MX Revolution mouse

[x] Network / Internet

[x] Printer (with network support)

[x] Photoshop tablet
[x] Game controller

Everything instantly works and I hit the ground running with easy first installs of Stars, HEM/postgres and TN! Which reminds me, I'm going to actually be able to run TST with a HUD now!

As I type this up I am importing 22 of 68 parts of large file # 3/45. I could be here a while.

General Life Clutter

2011-12-11T16:02:00.000-06:00

Isn't mid December a wonderful time for all of the clutter you've piled up to come crashing down all at the same time?

I have 3 blogposts in draft mode right now and highly doubt I will end up publishing them. They seem like interesting concepts to write about based off changes happening in the poker industry and recent posts from other blogs I read, but once I actually get down to writing them I've been hitting a wall because I either can't convince myself of the factuality of the general statements I want to believe or the concept is too big for me to encompasse everything that needs to be taken into context and make it a cohesive read.

I still need to start Christmas shopping for my nieces and my immediate family. My extended family has said for the last 3 years that we should just stop buying each other gifts and just buy some toys for the kids instead and be done. It's kind of silly when me and my brother swap $50 in Staples giftcards for $50 in Walmart giftcards effectively tying up cash that doesn't need to be spent at those stores in the first place and no one can think of anything they actually want or need. Has it always been this way with adults or is it just a function of the newer card swipe society buying everything they want when they want it? I seem to remember being able to buy awesome gifts for people until I was ~16... But we always end up reverting back to the status quo to make sure that one side doesn't end up changing their mind and getting nothing in return. This year I think we're actually going to stick to it since we decided on a good alternative. We're going to lump our Christmas gift money together and buy some cows/goats/chickens for people in Africa or South America.

My 5 year old PC went into a coma on Thursday due to successive power failures resulting in black screen of death (KSOD) where you get a black screen and your mouse cursor and that's it. Stupid me disabled sticky keys which apparently lets you hack back in to fix this problem. PSA to everyone that puts too much faith in technology: have multiple physical backups of anything important like family photos. We have taken about 2000 pictures per year since our kids have been born compared to the 200 max our parents took, yet we haven't developed anything due to photo overload whearas they had 50/200 decent pictures to add to an album. Luckily I was able to retrieve them through the file backup wizard in my recovery program and I'm going to start looking at cloud options and actually taking the best of them down to the printers.

I bought a new PC on Friday, which I was planning to do soon anyways even though I'm 95% confident my old one will work once I factory restore it, is having issues installing all sorts of stuff. Windows 7 64 bit is driving me a little bit crazy with 2 factory restores already and all sorts of installation errors. My biggest issue is getting both HEM and postgres installed properly at the same time. 4 failed attempts so far. Thankfully I have all 45 massive HH files from Stars to start the days long re-import process. Everything else is kind of meh for how I expected this to be a massive upgrade over Vista.

Random: I fell asleep watching TV last night. The next thing I know my 3 year old daughter is talking to me at 2am "... [with her hand over her head] and there was a spider this tall!" In a daze, I look at the TV. omg Starship Troopers... desperately mash buttons on the remote wondering how long has she been here and how much did she see. She didn't seem scared so hopefully not much. I've been feeling terrible about it all day.

Poker: There will be the inevitable end of year where am I going to play based on new information post. It could be huge in a good/bad way depending who you are and depending on whether the current almost factual rumors based on the source turn out to be true and implemented. Will post a couple days after the announcement which is supposed to be ~Dec 17th iirc once I've run calcs and listened to all of the sky is falling vs this is an awesome change static forum. Anything until then is just wild speculation.

Strategy Distribution

2011-12-04T03:57:00.002-06:00

I was recently reading a post in SSFR by vini about "strategy strategy" and it really got me thinking. His general thesis as I understand it is that you should look out for the well being of your own bottom line since this game is all about winning money -- and in the process the collective bottom line of current winning regs -- and because of this ultimate goal, we should all stop posting strategy.

For the past few years I've posted a significant amount of HH thread strat and have generally thought of it as an overall positive activity for all those involved:

I like helping people and have a tough time staying away from an unanswered question (emotional, personality).
I have literally no one to discuss the intricacies of my passion with in real life and find online strat discussion to be an outlet for that (emotional).
I subscribed to the notion of "owing" something back to the community (sense of gratitude).
I like to receive confirmation that my own thought process is correct (+$).
I saw it as a win/win in that players playing lower would improve and win more for themselves, while at the same time moving money up the ladder and being able to become regs that I could take money from in my games. (+$).

So there's definitely real monetary positives to posting strategy and I can acknowledge that the non-montary positives aren't really necessary if we're thinking rationally and logically about our ultimate goal. But the question is: Is there a better way to accomplish the +$ parts of strat discussion?

Out of 6k+ posts, I've posted at most 10 of my own hands as I'm pretty paranoid that the questions I want to ask give way too much insight into my thought process. I've also found that a lot of the creative lines I like to take get flamed because it's difficult to explain exactly what's going on with the dynamic in a thread vacuum and would give very specific reads to some regs reading it. I'm pretty careful about posting 95% of my strat in threads for stakes lower than where I'm playing to accomplish the win/win but I'm starting to think that maybe those players are going to end up in the same place anyways and I'm unecessarily posting.

And then there's the whole issue with posting in a public forum. Regs do the vast majority of the work coming up with new strategy based off of the work that other regs have done in the past. I think this is where the "giving back" feeling comes in. But the fact is it's still out there for the whole lurking world to take for free and use against you. I sometimes find myself posting some detailed explanation of a certain concept, clicking submit, and then thinking to myself, "Why are you just giving away this concept that took you 2 months to figure out?" I am easily the the user with the highest edited post ratio on the forum. I honestly believe that the generally well written and detailed concept of the week series has had a massive impact on the ridiculous change in game dynamic in micro stakes games.

I'm still on the fence with this. It's really hard to break a habit. On the one hand I still just plain enjoy being able to discuss strategy with a large group of people and a wide range of ideas. On the other hand maybe it's better to just post on subscription based sites that have private forums where the players are generally already going to be good anyways and the nominal costs keep some of the lurking world out.

I imagine I'll just go with the flow. It's kind of a reverse bandwagon effect where no one jumps off because no one else has yet. We'll have to see if enough people are influenced by posts like vini's to make not posting standard. I imagine that's what will eventually happen. Every other trend else has trickled down from mid to small to micro stakes. Remember all of those great thinkers posting tons of strat in the middle of the last decade? I was quick to attribute their mass disappearance to the forum split, but now I think they just came to all of these conclusions a long time ago.

My last few blog posts have probably seemed trending towards this somewhat pessimistic discussion. To put it in context from my perspective: I'm still relatively optimistic about my place in this game for the next while after emerging from running worse than I ever thought possible over 14 months with my thought process virtually intact. But the thought of games getting tougher, and contributing to that, when your long term confidence hasn't fully recovered for the mediocre to above average reg who has less and less time to keep up with the perpetually increasing learning curve is a real cause for concern.

Tougher Games: Why?

2011-12-01T08:17:00.009-06:00

I was starting to respond to a comment from my last post and it kind of turned into a blog post of it's own. I thought I might as well create a new post instead of having this buried in an obscure comment section.

Sammy Blackstar said...
"After coming back to online poker after 1 year from Oct.2010 I'd have to totally agree with this. The traffic on the cash games is pretty much 24 tables at each limit with regs making up the average.

I thought oh well I'll grind SNGs, the traffic is down on those. I think the #1 problem isn't the FPP Pros, it is that there are FAR TOO MANY Poker sites and so it isolates the players to many different places so getting a good game going is hard.

I blame Deuces Cracked and The Poker Blueprint for making this all happen. They show exactly how to mass table 10-50nl and make more then a minimum wage job."

I don't know if I can really blame it on there being too many poker sites. I took a look at pokerscout and added up the peak time cash players that are not ring-fenced -- I discarded all of the .it and .fr and svenska spel etc -- and there seem to be about 40k international peak time cash game players compared to Stars' 46k international peak cash players.

If we took all of those players and stuck them on Stars, sure we'd double the player pool and increase the number of tables somewhat, but I don't know how big of a dent it would make in the shark:fish ratio due to the 24 table limit.

Lets say the current pool is 75% fish and 25% regs on Stars with real fish averaging 1 table and regs averaging 15. That's a 5:1 reg:fish ratio (pretty accurate ime for a mid cross section of the lobby at 25NL-50NL where there's more fish lower and less higher).

Now lets double the pool with the incoming players being a 80/20 split from euro sites. Essentially 155 fish for every 45 regs total for new percentages of 78% fish and 22% regs. With a 1 vs 15 table split it improves to 4.2:1.

That's obviously better, but it's not really going to happen and the same can be accomplished by simply reducing the average tables played by regs to 12 or less (note I'm not saying the average is 15, just for calculation's sake but as a general rule this shows that reducing tables slightly will vastly improve ratios compared to making huge increases in the player pool not having much relative effect).

Compare that to the 80/20 or better split on Euro sites where the software is so terrible that regs can't play more than 6 tables and are not enticed to play there even though it has 60% rakeback. You end up with a super fishy ratio of 1.5:1 through nothing more than a bad software feature.

I do however agree with you that training sites and good poker books literally giving away information for fractions of a penny on the dollar returned is largely at fault as well for turning the pool from a 90/10 split into a 75/25 split.

I distinctly remember people laughing at high priced ebook prices saying "A book is not worth $1000." Sure, a book is only worth $10 in paper and preparation, but the knowledge contained in it is worth thousands if it's groundbreaking stuff that other people don't have access to. I greatly attribute my success and progress in 2009 to the thought process structures in Baluga's Easy Game and I can track the flattening of my graph according to how fast the curve caught up to me as that info trickled out into the public domain.

Training sites and poker book authors vastly undervalue their product. This is a niche market and new information in niche markets is worth a lot of money. College textbooks and classes get you from $25k/year to $75k/year for a one time $1k-$5k purchase on books and $10k-$100k on classes depending where you live -- an amazing return. (Yes you could argue that the information is worthless and the piece of paper you get at the end is where the money is which is true a lot of the time -- but think engineering, graphic design, accounting...).

Poker information does exactly the same thing but people just see it as a book for a game. Full Stop. So it's only worth $29.99 -- giving the smart people that can actually implement it an incredible deal and return on investment in the process -- and authors and sites have decided to go with the mass production approach.

Kind of like how the poker sites are in a "RAKE ALL THE POTS!" mode right now trying to scoop as much as they can while they can by redistributing rake -- think switching to "fun and fair" weighted contributed which was actually less fun and far from fair -- and desperately trying to increase volume.

I can't say I really blame them since it's starting to look like a boom and artificially induced bust fad. Don't get me wrong, poker is not going to ever die out. Slots have always been -EV but they've always survived.

It's going to be interesting to see how the online game evolves. I expect with the status quo there will be a slow, mass culling of regs who get sick of being FPP pros or start only breaking even after rakeback, at which point the game will become more profitable again, leading to another slow decline as some regs trickle in and out of the game.

I only see two ways to avoid this eventual inevitability: reduce tables or have regulation that lets the public know they are free to be perpetual massive whales and a permanent source of disposable income. It's kind of ironic that if this happens, US players are actually going to end up way better off than the rest of us if they don't let us in, assuming their government doesn't rake them to death.

Poker Decision 2012

2011-11-30T08:26:00.008-06:00

So it's that time of year again. Doing the research, figuring out where to play, what to play, if to play for the next year.

I've basically been playing exclusively (99%) on Stars for the past 4 years.
A few of the 'positives':

Traffic - no one comes anywhere close.
VIP program - Pretty much the best VIP program out there when you consider the % you get if you are able to maintain Supernova+ combined with one of the lowest rakes* in the industry (this might be the result of a problem rather than a positive feature). Generally speaking if you can put in 60+ hours a month mass tabling, you're going to get 40%+ effective rakeback. And there's a few other ways to maximize your FPPs further through satellites as well if you're into that sort of thing.
Software - So far it's the only software I've been able to look at that doesn't make me want to smash my monitor. Constant player-specific positive improvements as well, although again this might might be leading to a problem. I didn't mind FTP since it was pretty easy to multi-table but it still seemed kind of clunky. Every other sites' software that I've tried is complete shit.

Problems

Full disclosure: I am part of the problem, sort of.
A ton of the cash game traffic is due to mass tabling grinders.
imo part of the reason the rake is so low is because there's so many nitty mass tabling grinders not seeing flops.
Kudos to Stars for being extremely effective and efficient at upgrading their software according to the wishes and requests of the mass tabling community. They've used a ton of my and others ideas in the official software thread recently and it's easier than ever to play tons of tables.
All of the above inevitably leads to the site being a magnet for mass tabling grinders like myself.'
The vast majority of these players are either Russian/Chinese 40bb 11/9's with 20% 3bet making a good living for where they live off of FPPs, or 12/10 fullstacked regs who you aren't really going to win a ton of money off of, relatively speaking. There's a few of the laggier 19/15 regs out there like myself that I really enjoy playing with from a learning perspective but there's really not that many.

Simple fish:shark ratio experiment:

100 player pool 12 tables, 90% fish, 10% sharks
90 fish seats, 120 shark seats = 1 : 1.33
100 player pool 24 tables, 90% fish, 10% sharks
90 fish seats, 240 shark seats = 1 : 2.66
100 player pool 24 tables after successful marketing campaign where you bring in 33% more fish
120 fish seats, 240 shark seats = 1 : 2.00

People always said FTP was softer and I'm a firm believer that it wasn't because they were actively doing anything to attract fish. It was simply that they had a 12 table limit with 16 table limit available by request. As you can see, the number of tables you allow regs to play has a way bigger affect on the fishiness of the games than how many fish you actually have. And doubly so, the higher percentage of regs to fish you have in the pool in the first place -- this becomes grossly magnified at a 75/25 split. That's why everyone says the Euro sites are super soft despite the lot of them combined not having 25% of the advertising dollars that Stars has.

Essentially, Stars' games are getting tough. Really tough. And from the looks of the small and midstakes lobby, full ring is dying too. Yeah yeah, people have been saying that for years. But it's become increasingly and obviously so when you have midstakes players dropping to smallstakes and smallstakes dropping to microstakes and it makes me a little bit sick having to deal with and think about proper 3bet polarized vs wide value ranges and appropriate 4bet range responses at 25NL and 50NL. We need a poker boom infusion. Soon.

My best alternative is Party Poker, but based on my current rake/month assuming I could come anywhere close with their software and traffic, I'd only be making 20% rakeback there. So as of now I remain a slave to the Stars VIP machine. I really really want to become one of those 6 tabling phenoms that doesn't care about rakeback and learns quick and moves up and logically it makes a ton of sense but there's just something in me that can not stand sitting there waiting for people taking 3 seconds to decide call or fold preflop and I inevitably go back to mass tabling.

So it's a choice between whether poker should be a passion or a means to an end...

[to be continued]

Poker Epiphanies

2011-11-19T18:17:00.004-06:00

Epiphanies.
Aha moments.
Eureaka moments.

If you came here based on the post title hoping to find a quick fix to spice up your game, you're going to be sorely disapointed. That's ok. I am too.

Until fairly recently, I scoured the internet, picked coaches' brains, dove into wells and scrutinzed videos waiting for that elusive ephiphany to smack me upside the head and turn me into a good player. Unfortunately it didn't happen, and I think I know why: Magic bullets do not exist.

We all want the quick fix. Do X = profit more. A cookie cutter response that we can implement now with immediate results. It's no wonder late night infomercials continue to thrive when even above average thinkers are looking for get rich quick formulas.

Poker, like most things in life, doesn't work that way. It's a puzzle you have to put together. You have to see the big picture. And some pieces don't fit - yet.

How many times have you opened a well thread and skimmed to the part where the OP states what concept turned them into a poker monster only to be left thinking "How is that an epiphany?" leaving the thread once again disappointed.

Their statement is still true - for them. For you it's not because what you're trying to glean from it is akin to pulling a single puzzle piece from the box, turning it over and over and wondering how is this supposed to be a horse standing in a pasture?

You're not looking at the big picture. When you start a puzzle, it's tough to figure where pieces go. You pick one up, try a few places, and usually put it back down planning to pick up later. But then as you progress it gets easier and easier to figure out where the next one goes and your success rate increases. And all of a sudden you fit the one key piece - eureka! - that watershed moment when you know where everything else goes and rapid fire them into place.

Your poker game growth is exactly the same. You need a base to build on and the more you understand, the easier it is to understand new concepts and how to implement them. Trying to track down poker epiphanies is a lost cause because you won't have the same moment as anyone else - you're putting the puzzle together differently than they did and your key piece will be different as well. You work on the 3bet part in the bottom left corner a bit, you work on postflop lines against TAGs over here a little bit, you work on hand reading in the top right corner, back to 3betting, join the postflop plan with the preflop plan, join the hand reading with the postflop lines and the range manipulation and all of a sudden you fit those few key concepts into your big picture. You step back wondering how you didn't see all of this before. It all makes sense now.

The path to poker enlightenment is not through finding the right piece to make everything clear. It is about working on your understanding piece by piece so that those eureka moments have the opportunity to occur.

Stop trying to have an aha! moment and have an aha moment!

Thoughts on becoming a dinosaur

2011-11-12T05:56:00.002-06:00

As far as the average age of online poker players goes, I'm getting pretty old nearing 30. I'm sure there must be a bunch of guys my age that still play poker online but they generally don't seem to participate in the community as much and probably just go back to lurking. It kind of seems like once you've been around for a while, you lose a bit of interest in active participation and have some forum burnout so I'm holding out hope that it's not just the decrease in age related brain function that leads to the community being swamped by people born shortly before Justin Bieber and after I learned my multiplication table.

Several things got me thinking about this this week:

I have a Facebook account. I don't Facebook. Ever. People will call me and say "Where are you staying I left you a message." To which I respond, "No you didn't, I just checked my answering machine." To which they respond "facepalm.jpg." I find the entire concept frivolous. I'm a minority
I have a Twitter account. I've never tweeted anything. It's a bit of a paradox in that it doesn't have all the frivolty of FB, yet people's tweets are even more trivial than status updates. One day I will start using this once I figure out what I want to randomly say to the world.
I finally became curious about all those cartoon faces plastered around the forum and discovered Rage Comics. I've been reading them non-stop for 2 days. Funny stuff, but apparently there's this thing called reddit and I am the only person alive that has no idea what that's about yet.

So here are some things you have to look forward to as you pass a quarter century on the planet:

The music you listen to starts to stay the same. And your playlist slowly trickles into the classics sub-category.
If you're a video game addict and find anything at all to do instead for even 6 months, there's a very good chance you'll never go back.
You start to realize that your parents were a lot more right than you thought they were when you were younger. Don't worry, you still think they're wrong now.
You can keep up with the lingo since you're surrounded by people 33% younger than you but it just sounds lame when you try to use it.
You realize that you've become boring and logical and think back to how much fun it was to be an irrational idiot. But you can't go back to this either because you'll just look like you're trying too hard.
You mellow out. A lot. If you've got massive tilt problems, don't worry they will go from 3-10 outbursts per day to twice per week in a matter of 5 years.

If you play this game long enough:

Every decision in life becomes based on + or - EV. And then that progresses along with your game exploring flop and conversation lines thinking about what's going to happen on future streets to manipulate range and maximize expectation. And you learn how to avoid shitty spots. Learn to fold. Some things are better left unsaid.
If you manage to move up at all, the highs and lows aren't as extreme even though the variance is larger. You start to separate yourself from the money even though for the longest time it seems like its an impossible task. But one day you wake up and realize it hasn't bothered you in months even though you're breakeven. You're ecstatic about a $30 day at 2nl. After a while a +/- $300 day at 100nl is just meh. It happens shortly after you start to disregard the cost of buying something irl because it's only a big blind.

Thinking back to how I got into poker is quite interesting. I didn't really know anything about the game outside of hand rankings when I started playing freerolls but it's amazing how my personality, skill sets and interests all collide in this game. It has a mind of it's own and seeks out people that fit the criteria. I'm sure most winning players have some combinations of these and it's what keeps them interested. I'll list a few of them:

Creativity: I've always loved being creative whether it's coming up with new ideas like the ones I've submitted in the Stars software thread (one click popup color coding, sit out next bb and close this table, efficient no-rake or time added run it twice), my music as a classicaly trained pianist, or art (even though my skill here has dropped off dramatically).

Individual Competitiveness: I played sports in high school, but I really enjoyed relying on myself. I played on the varsity soccer team but had no use for playing anything but goal keeper where I was most separated from the team concept. I felt like it was just me vs the ball coming at me. I also hated group projects in school and didn't want to have to rely on other people's incompetence. I would do 5 times the work on my own project if it meant I could blow everyone else out of the water. Poker's like that, it's you against the world.

Analytical Problem Solving: The one subject I really enjoyed in school was math. Nerd, I know. And in particular if I could pick my classes, it would have always been statistics and probability with a small dose of algebra. Those word problems where "train A (40 mph) is travelling towards train B (25 mph) starting 40 miles apart, how long till they crash?" and 10 green, 5 blue, 7 purple marbles in a bag probability questions were the nuts. If only they knew they were preparing me for a life of profitable gambling.

Poker is quite a bit of all three: You're on your own in a highly competitive game. You have to be able to analyze situations quickly, putting the ever shifting concept puzzle together to create a window of opportunity as best and as fast as you can before Baluga Whale and AE &#%*$ Jones come along and blow the whole thing up again. And then the pieces don't fit in the correct places anymore and you come up with creative ways to make them fit somewhere else, or better yet, create your own custom pieces.

My one biggest downfall is that procrastination outweighs competitiveness. If you don't have the natural skill and rather need to learn in order to be competitive, this is what is going to stop you from becoming good at life and good at poker. I couldn't be bothered with soccer practice, give me games every day. I couldn't be bothered to review hands or watch videos, give me 24 tables every day. This has to change but I'm just not sure how.

This is a bit of a rambling post and I don't know if it's of interest to anyone out there, but I wanted to get this written down while I had a moment of clarity and felt like going on an analogy spree.

(That's probably the wrong face. I'm still learning.)

PokerStars 10th Anniversary

2011-11-09T18:31:00.000-06:00

Long time no blog.

POKER

I haven't had a lot to blog about over the past month or so. Poker is finally starting to work itself out again and I am finding my thought process changing a lot, seeing a ton more value and bluff opportunities in spots I had never really considered before. So while I'm trying to figure this all out, my graph has been a little swingy but the upswings have been relatively large and I'm happy with that.

WSOP

There weren't many cash games running last night -- I assume due to the WSOP Main Event Final 3 and it being a Tuesday -- and I think I watched about half of the final table. I was pretty impressed with the overall production: live on a 15 minute delay with every hand shown only after the hand was over and some really great commentary that wasn't dumbed down at all. I think they did go a little overboard with the whole "Does his story make sense?" line being used nearly every other hand and somewhat wrong in the sense that they stated over and over again that betting means you're saying your story is that you have a pair and if it doesn't make sense you probably have a stone cold bluff and they seemed to ignore the whole equity side of things. That said, they did manage to do a good job of explaining ranges.

I have to admit I found the first bit quite exciting, especially the sick hand where Heinz turned bottom 2 pair into a river c/r bluff to try to get everything worse than a flush to fold on a 3 flush QT98x board. After that the match seemed to slow dramatically, probably due to the way the cards were dealt and I decided to maybe watch it later.

POKER -- Part 2

So I ended up firing up a bunch of MTTs and actually played really well in all of them. I think I finished something like top 10% in all 6 and made one deep run in a $1 rebuy (I only play $10 or less MTTs since I'm basically lighting money on fire) where I finished 8th out of 1700 for a decent cash. I just kept telling myself do not get bored and have a melt down mistake like you always do and my chip stack kept climbing. I think if I can maintain that kind of mentality it will really help both my cash and MTT games.

I did end up making a mistake at the end when everyone had about 12 blinds left. I had TT on the button and MP1 shoved. He was running 15/12 but pretty much all of his opens were steals and I thought to myself it's better to open shove with 75s next hand than to call here since his range is like AJ+/TT+ at worst and its stupid to call for a gamble with so much play and fold equity left as I contradictively thought TT 12bb can't fold and clicked call knowing it was wrong.

POKERSTARS

Pokerstars is having their 10th anniversary celebration and by the sounds of it it's going to be pretty huge. They also have fast moving ring games "coming soon" which could be interesting. I've offered up Pokerstars Tachyon Tables as a name to go with the space theme although I'm sure it wouldn't make sense to a lot of people and they'd have to google it first.

Really interested to find out what #4 is since it's obviously important enough for it's own row in the chart.

Looking at Mesas

2011-10-24T09:14:00.001-05:00

Last night I was pondering how I managed to go from a nanonoko style graph up until 2009 to a sudden, Saskatchewan style watch your dog run away for 3 days flat plateau breakeven graph in 2010.

Specifically speaking, what the hell happened in early 2nd quarter 2010? And it's not just me. Those that were crushing are still crushing, but a ton of the mediocre / above average regs like me somehow ended up with these weird mesa graphs and we've subsequently seen a lot of people that played small stakes consistently for years having to move down.

And, like the mesa over there --> it wasn't a gradual flattening out of winrates either. It was a sharp, sudden change, and most of us have never recovered.

The obvious event to point to was the advent of the 20-50 games on Stars which happened around that time. But that doesn't explain why most seem to still have not recovered now that 20-50 is gone.

I'm at a loss as to why this is:

With the dissolution of 20-50, you'd expect winrates to start to resemble 1st quarter 2010 even if they were somewhat lower due to tougher games. The end of the plateau.
Are cap games still having that large of an effect on the player pool?
Black Friday hasn't really affected winrates at all afaik.
It can't be that the money's drying up because that doesn't explain the sudden leveling off and the continued breakevenness. Plus the player pool has been fairly constant.
Concepts have trickled down and it's ridiculous that 25NL is now running at 15%+ table 3bet vs PFR, but again, that should show gradual progression.
There's so many graphs out there like mine and the time frame comparison is just eerie.

So what exactly happened between A (pre 2010) and B (post 2nd quarter 2010)? I would love to hear some theories. Note: In before someone blames it on sucking at poker, I acknowledge that fact. But there has to be some sort of catalyst for the sudden change between March-May in most of these graphs.

Point Form Ramblings. Check.

2011-10-10T01:25:00.005-05:00

POKER

Started upswinging again after my last rant.
Trying to stay calm.
Remember to valuebet.
2.5x multiplier sucks. I can see why recreational players that are smart irl but are just bad at poker think this is a bad deal when they're capable of shopping around.
4 days ahead of pace to get Supernova back by end of the year.

HOCKEY

Jets get blown out in home opener. 5-1. Ewww.
First goal against them within 3 minutes.
Byfuglien needs to step it up. Or fight someone.
Fantasy hockey league HUD-matrix = Great Success!
102 points out of a max possible 120 so far. 2nd place has 77 points. Easy Game.
2% of the season is complete so my sample size is obviously large enough.

POLITICS

Updated the straw poll results chart again.
Herman Cain is scooping polls left and right and is now 1st Tier right behind or tied with Ron Paul imo.
Front-runner Rick Perry has a total of 6 Top 3 finishes to tie Gingrich's 6 and has yet to win a straw poll.
Front-runner Perry has been relegated to 2nd Tier with Bachman and Huckabee.
Front-runner Perry is somehow still regarded as Front-runner Perry.
Ron Paul remains 1st Tier with little change to his numbers other than winning yet another poll for a leading 8.

Standard GOP Skype Group Session:
Paul: Well, the Federal Reserve...
Gingrich: You're alllll nuts...
Palin: Wait for it... WAIT FOR IT...
Bachman: : menacing stare :
Perry: Hey guys watch this: [quote] CNN: Front-runner Perry | click | FOX: Front-runner Perry | click | CBS: Front-runner Perry [/quote] Neat trick huh?
Romney: attentionwhore.jpg
Paul: and the IRS... nation building... bail outs and moral hazard...
Gingrich: I'm surrounded by morons...
Palin: WAIT FOR IT!
Romney: : rolleyes :
Perry: Ok Ok I'll tell you how it's done, see if I change my first name to "Front-runner... "
Palin: Just kidding!
Paul: : tap : : tap: Is this thing on?

BOOK

I've also been reading Mark Steyn's After America. Amazingly good book and to paraphrase one of the Amazon reviews: Mark Steyn is incapable of writing a dull sentence. Concise, witty breakdown of the breakdown in society, economics and politics.

Some gems:

As Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado fumed to a room of voters in 2010, "We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view, we have nothing to show for it."

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. - Herbert Stein.

If you're careening along a road toward a collapsed bridge, you'll certainly stop, one way or the other. But it makes a difference, at least to you, whether you skid to a halt four yards before the cliff edge or whether you come to rest at the bottom of the ravine.

According to CBO projections, by 2055 interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues. But I don't think we'll need to worry about a "Government of the United States" at that stage. By 1788, Louis XVI's government in France was spending a mere 60 percent of revenues on debt service, and we know how that worked out for the House of Bourbon shortly thereafter... So take your eye off the far prospect, and instead look about fourteen inches in front of your toecap. Within a decade, the United States will be spending more of the federal budget on its interest payments than on it's military... by 2020 the government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of it's revenues in debt interest. Whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. Just to clarify: we're not talking about paying down the federal debt, just keeping up with the annual interest charges on it... The superpower will have evolved from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers... If that trajectory holds, we'll be spending more than the planet's entire military budget on debt interest [by 2050].

We've spent too much of tomorrow today - to the point where we've run out of tomorrow.

There's nothing virtuous about "caring" "compassionate" "progressives" demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born... It's not just about balancing the books, but balancing the most basic impulses of society. These are structural and, ultimately, moral questions. Credit depends on trust, and trust pre-supposes responsibility. So, if you have a credit boom in an age that has all but abolished personal responsibility, it's not hard to figure how it's going to end.

China is dangerous not because of its strength but because of its weakness... the People's Republic has a crude structural flaw: thanks to its disastrous one-child policy, it will get old before it gets rich... That's actually worse news than if China was cruising to uncontested global hegemony - because it means that Beijing's calculations on how the Sino-American relationship evolves are even less likely to align with ours. China has to maximize its power before demographic decay sets in. In other words, it has strong incentives to be bold and to push, hard and fast.

Industrial power [which Steyn compares to today's government power] should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. - Justice Marshall, 1948.

In Europe, there are no kids or grandkids to screw over. In the end the entitlement state disincentives everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. If the problem with socialism, as Mrs. Thatcher famously said, "is that eventually you run out of other people's money," the problem with Greece and much of Europe is that they've advanced to the next stage: they've run out of other people, period.

Steyn goes on to detail a lot of issues in society and how they affect the economy. One that really struck me as profound was the technology issue. If you took someone from 1890 and transported him to 1950, he would be blown away by the advances of the past 60 years. Leaps and bounds in the fields of transportation, medicine and communication. Transport him another 60 years in the future to 2011 and he's rather underwhelmed by how little has changed. Everything is slightly faster and the toys are a little more shiny but, aside from the advent of the Internet, that's it. We haven't cured anything despite the plethora of cure _____ support bracelets. We haven't solved any energy dependencies. We're still using the same basic TV, radio and phone technologies. Where's my jet pack I was promised in the 80s?

He's a little on the liberal-bashing bias side of things but to be fair he gives it to the conservatives too since they haven't done anything to fix it when they've had the chance and he states quite frankly that government grows and grows regardless of who's in charge. If you're looking for a good read regarding today's economic and social issues this is definitely one you want to pick up.

NHL Season

2011-10-06T05:56:00.000-05:00

Besides being overly excited at not having any chance of actually going to a Jets games in the next 3 years unless I win what I expect to be 1 of 1000 tickets with ~800,000 people trying to win the right to buy them and having to watch games on TSN, I picked a rather exciting (eccentric?) team for my fantasy hockey league.

It's a rotisserie league, which means that you get points towards your overall score based on how you do in different stat categories. We use the standard Goals, Assists, +/-, Penalty Minutes, Shots and Time On Ice, Goalie Wins, Goals Against and Save % along with a few role player categories like Hits and Blocked Shots to keep it interesting.

I got crushed in last years league. So I re-thought the strategy behind trying to win multiple stat categories and came up with the conclusion that it's fairly useless to aquire all the "best" players and crush the Goals and Assists categories and fail miserably at the other 8 or so categories. Case in point: Stamkos. Nets a lot of points, doesn't do a damn thing besides that. He's about number 4-5 on most peoples' lists. He's 30th on mine.

So being the HUD-bot that I am, I grabbed the top 400 ranked players and their projected 2012 stats, threw the whole mess into Excel, figured out the average for each stat and then gave each player a relative ranking for each stat and summed them up for an overall relative rank. The result: I have a bunch of guys that are either extremely good in one category (Downie's PIM) and will nearly crush that category by themselves or are above average and very well rounded. I am going to look like a genius if my theory pans out or an idiot if it doesn't since the majority of my players were listed by ESPN rankings as 100+ on the draft list. According to my calculations I have a 20% edge over the field of 9 other teams at this point.

Besides the few top scorers who are the most valueable for being able to win the scoring categories outright (Ovechkin, Sedin's), there is a very fast drop off in relative value for forwards while defenceman become important quickly, especially the ones that can contribute a ton offesively due to their high value in Blocked Shots, ATOI, Hits, and PIM. I consider goalies to be on the lower value end since they're only participating in 3 categories so the fact that the rest of my league picked goalies in the first 3 rounds helped a lot in getting me Sedin along with stat monsters Lucic, Hossa and Chara.

When it was all finished I was pleasantly surprised to find the majority of my team coming from Boston, Vancouver, Chicago and Detriot. I thought I might as well continue with this HUD-bot strategy and I'm going to be tracking Power Rankings trends to decide which players I want to play against which teams. For example, if I have 2 starting goalies and the teams they're facing Ottawa, Edmonton and Tampa Bay, clearly it doesn't matter so much which of my 3 goalies is best compared to which team they're playing against. Vice versa for which goalies / team defence my skaters are going to be playing against.

Should be fun.

At a loss for words...

2011-09-30T20:55:00.001-05:00

In true blogger fashion, I'm going to write a post in stark contrast to my last. A flip-flop as they would say.

I was feeling the best about my game that I ever have as of last week. I still am, theoretically speaking, although numb would be more appropriate right now. In the time since then I have gone through yet another cruel stretch of attempting to navigate the random 2 pair / backdoor gutshot mine field and failed miserably.

Preflop: find a target.
Flop: aim.
Turn go (all)-in for the kill.
River: KABOOM!

The resulting carnage:

I'm really starting to question exactly how much of this game is luck and how much is skill and if anyone actually has any idea what their "longterm winrate" is or has even glimpsed the long term itself. I thought I had after my first 1.5 million hands. How wrong I was.

I am fairly confident that you can at least breakeven at a fairly high level if you're not a retard simply because there are so many complete retards playing still, and yeah games are getting stupidly difficult due to the dirt cheap dissemination of training videos and ebooks that should be running at $200+/month and $1k+ per book based on the value of the info (nevermind them being disseminated at no cost in some way or another over the internet), but you should be able to theoretically make some money if you use half your brain. Thankfully this proves I'm at least not a retard.

But when you pit all of the theory that you have learned from forums, training videos, studying, coaching and high priced e-books against the amount of variance which is apparently possible over a million hands, it is starting to look to me like skill doesn't stand a chance.

You are at the mercy of the RNG.

Now I don't mean to say that online poker is rigged. My analytical 2+2 brainwashing has taught me that is a blasphemous statement unless we're being Cereus. But I think most people that have not been in a position to experience the extremes of the variance bell curve do not have a clue as to what is actually possible. Perhaps I'm just a ridiculously unlucky outlier in the grand scheme of things, but how do any of the top winners playing midstakes or higher after 500k lifetime hands know that they're actually winners and not just on a relatively short term massive heater -- ridiculously lucky outliers?

I know there's a ton of other variance not accounted for in AIEV such as hand stetups and coolers and the amount of the time you hit or dodge draws before getting all-in and how many sets you don't bink on the turn. But I still think AIEV is a fairly significant measure over very large sample sizes and it's certainly better than nothing.

I've used several different coping mechanisms over the past year+ to deal with this, the three most prominent being:

My entire poker 'carreer' has been one massive freeroll off other peoples' money.
I'm playing "correctly" enough to theoretically win Sklansky$.
They say I'm going to wake up one day and this bad run will all be over (tick... day 428).

Those reasons are beginning to sound like some fairly weak sauce compared to the shitload of work I've put into improving. I don't really know where I'm going to go from here. I'm still putting in the volume and am going to try to grind out Supernova one more time by the end of December (barring ending up busto). Out of the three years that I will have made it, this has been by far the most difficult, including my first time which ended with me 24 tabling 100NL right through December to the 31st.

But if my stupid luck doesn't start to improve to somewhere near average over the next 250k hands, I think I'm going to say gg next year. I don't need the headaches and energy strain of putting in hours of study and analysis only to be led down the high stress path of demoralizing 80/20 loss one after another.

The Great Divergence

I've read a few other blogs from some well known players who have gone through 400k+ hand breakeven / downswings and have gone on to do very well once they snap out of it. That is my motivation right now. If it doesn't work out, I'm not going to sweat it.

This was a fairly long post so I guess I wasn't really out of words... more like almost out of rope.

Poker Update | Straw Polls Update

2011-09-18T03:46:00.004-05:00

US GOP POLITICS

I've continued updating and tabulating the data provided for the 2012 Republican presidential primaries straw polls. One interesting note in the Wikipedia entry for the CNN Tea Party Debate:

"A straw poll was held at the September 12 Republican debate, to find out who the debate audience thought were the front runners, both before and after the debate. Before the debate, Ron Paul came first, Rick Perry came second, and Michele Bachmann came third. After the debate, Ron Paul was still first, Michele Bachmann came second, and Herman Cain came third^. CNN have not released the full results of this poll, instead holding an online poll which omitted Ron Paul from the choices^."

Without counting that win, Ron Paul has won 4 consecutive straw polls (one of them being a first place tie) dating back to mid August, crushing the field in 2 of those and only having Perry for competition in the latest California poll yesterday.

Now that there have been 17 polls, I added a Win statistic to the list alongside Top 3 Finishes. I split wins as 0.5 each for polls that were basically tied such as Georgia 04/16 and Georgia 08/27. The breakdown for top three frontrunners as of today:

Average vote %
Paul 20.7%
Perry 14.4%
Romney 14.4%

Top 3 Finishes
Paul 10
Romney 8
Cain 6

Wins
Paul 7
Cain 3
Romney 2

This chart has grown substantially since I last posted and it will update as I make changes, but I thought I'd post it again for convenience. 1st, 2nd and 3rd Tiers are based on my opinions of the overall results of the three statistics I posted above and can be found at the far right side. Scroll down for graphical representations of the data.

POKER

I think I posted a while ago that I was rebuilding my BR from basically nothing ($100 playing 5NL). It's been pretty rough at some points and I have really felt like just giving up some weeks. But my game seems to have restabilized after some extensive changes I made to my overall game strategy so I'm really hoping this lasts. I think I've pulled back ahead of the curve with a lot of study and out of the box thinking. Specifically thinking about what certain tendencies and actions really mean vs what seems standard.

I haven't really talked to any poker people or frequented the strategy forums of 2p2 lately. I just needed to get away from the way that those HH threads go down with all the "standard" vacuum answers. I'm kind of feeling like if you're trying to move beyond figuring out what standard is (and after a few million hands, you have seen everything standard), threads that disregard history and detailed table dynamics are rather counterproductive.

I've built back up to my usual 50NL bankroll and have been playing a mix of 25NL and 50NL full ring. I lost my Supernova status last month but I'm fairly confident I'll get it back by the end of the year now that I'm moving up again and have a lot of motivation to put in volume. Granted I have a relatively small sample of 30k hands where my thought process is firing on all cylinders and villain lines and actions are really making sense to me so this could still all go down in flames, but I'm more optimistic about my game right now than I have been in probably a year or more.

Stars: Run It Twice

No Stars does not have run it twice despite that sub-title. From what I understand they have been avoiding it because they don't want to have to charge extra rake for the extra time it takes to deal out the hand. I think the following would be a good option. I posted the following in the Official Software Improvement Thread in the zoo earlier this week:

This is how you add Run It Twice without requiring any extra time to deal the hand out and therefore not needing to add any extra rake.

It doesn't affect Stars' profits based on rake/hand per hour/table
It doesn't affect the hands/hour of players not involved.
It evens out variance for people that agree they want to even out variance.

Add the following: "Options > Run it Twice > All | Preflop | Flop | Turn"
If all-in players preset settings match, the rest of the hand is dealt twice.
Player A = Flop+Turn, Player B = Turn only, if all-in on flop, run once, if all-in on turn, run twice.
When the hand is going to be run twice, split the pot and move it as indicated during the time between the closing action on that street and the next card being dealt.
Ideally what you want is moving chips and dealing cards respectively in unison so that it's exactly the same amount of time as running it once.

Ignore stack sizes here ldo, illustration purposes:

From a grinder's perspective I would hope they implement this. On the other hand fish that get their money in consistently bad before the river and choose to run it twice would lose money significantly faster since they are shortening the long run.

HEM1 Multi-Table Ratio

2011-08-27T13:28:00.001-05:00

There was a request on the forums this week to figure out winrates and hourly based on multi-table ratio in HEM. This has been sorely missed in HEM1 but is being included in HEM2. If you're like me and think that despite HEM2 still being in Beta mode and wanting to cut them some slack, you're going to wait it out until PT4 arives because so far HEM2 is a massive resource hog and "looks like a 15 year old girls MySpace page," here's a MTR Extraction excel sheet I made to tie you over.

Multi-Table Ratio Extraction Sheet

Just go to your sessions tab, filter for HU, 6max, FR by number of players. I think it's important to filter just by one stake because your winrate is going to drop at higher stakes obviously and you just want to find your optimal number of tables. Once you have your results, right click them and save as Sessions.csv. Open that up in Excel and copy everything. Paste it into the MTR Extraction sheet in the cell indicated. Adjust the 3 variables to your filtered game and you should have your results. The % of hands required is there to push out the outliers such as the few 1-3 tabling sessions I had that totaled 43 hands and +/- 170 bb/100 etc. Top graph is winrate by tables, bottom is hourly by tables. As is, the MTR sheet will support ~500 sessions so you'll have to adjust some formulas if you need more than that. It's not formated to look nice at all, but it does the job.

I got in a little early for the HEM2 beta testing just before the public beta release came out and tried it out for a few days before giving up in frustration with the constant crashing and huge amount of lag I was experiencing. I thought it was just my dinosaur of a PC giving me issues, but apparently people with more up to date systems are experiencing the same thing. That and it kind of seems like they've loaded it full of gimmicks that are more fun to look at than actually being helpful.

I do remember pre-ordering PT3 and being very disappointed and managed to whine enough about the HUD fail to get my money back after 5 months of "commercial" release before switching to HEM, and PT3 eventually turned into a decent product. I really don't want to go through that again with HEM2 so I'm going to wait to see if PT4 is decent. If it's not, I'm just going to be happy with HEM1 for the next year until one of them gets their stuff together.

Ron Paul

2011-08-18T02:35:00.003-05:00

I obviously wasn't the only one that noticed the overt concerted effort by the media to stifle Ron Paul after the Ames Straw Poll (Last Post). When did we switch from terms like "journalism" and "free press" to "mainstream media" anyways? However much the latter like to portray themselves as the former, they appear to have become quite divergent professions. I can only hope that a lot of Paul's stances on fiscal issues are starting to make a lot of sense to voters, if not only because a lot of his predictions are quickly coming to pass.

Quite similar to the 2006 UIGEA to 2011 Black Friday time period, it seems as though even some of the smartest people around are quite happy to stick their heads in the sand even though from a logical, rational, captain hindsight saw this coming a long ways a way type of world view where you remove your invincibility goggles, it is abundantly clear that the status quo is unsustainable. I don't know if it's ideological apathy or just plain laziness (the term blissful ignorance comes to mind), but too many people are happy to carry on business as usual in a dysfunctional system that will inevitably crush them by design as long as the system isn't in active free fall around them. Those that can see it plain as day and try to warn us only to be frustrated beyond belief as if trying to explain the concept of gravity to people who think the world is flat are ridiculed as Chicken Little's.

If I had to pigeon hole myself into one socio-economic mindset, I'd have to go with consequentialist libertarian -- the notion that having liberty leads to results like prosperity, efficiency and peace. This is why I identify so much with his platform. If you're an American reading this blog (or an international reader looking for solid, ie. "radical" sustainable policies), definitely check out Paul's campaign website and his stance on a number of important issues.

A small sampling of his platform, most of which I agree with:

Repeal ObamaCare and end its unconstitutional mandate that all Americans must carry only government-approved health insurance or answer to the IRS.
Stop the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from interfering with Americans’ knowledge of and access to dietary supplements and alternative treatments.
Vetoing any unbalanced budget Congress sends to his desk.
Avoid long and expensive land wars that bankrupt our country by using constitutional means to capture or kill terrorist leaders who helped attack the U.S. and continue to plot further attacks.
Guarantee our intelligence community’s efforts are directed toward legitimate threats and not spying on innocent Americans through unconstitutional power grabs like the Patriot Act.
Follow the Constitution by asking Congress to declare war before one is waged.
Stop taking money from the middle class and the poor to give to rich dictators through foreign aid.
Ron Paul believes no nation can remain free when the state has greater influence over the knowledge and values transmitted to children than the family does. Returning control of education to parents and teachers on the local level is the centerpiece of Ron Paul’s education agenda.
Fighting to fully audit (and then end) the Federal Reserve System, which has enabled the over 95% reduction of what our dollar can buy and continues to create money out of thin air to finance future debt.
Opposing all unfunded mandates and unnecessary regulations on small businesses and entrepreneurs.

There are a number of other issues that he addresses at length and can be found all over Youtube such as ending the ineffective war on drug and the cause and effect of moral hazard. The media has coined Paul's lectures and statements as rambling in the little coverage they have had of him. I read that as this guy thinks about concepts in well thought out logical and correlating terms rather than what fits well into a 3 second soundbite. You're bound to become a bit wordy when you're explaining the concept of gravity for the 17th time to people who refuse to accept that the entire theory they've developed to explain why they don't go flying off into space is flawed.

LOL Straw Polls

2011-08-14T08:58:00.009-05:00

POKER

Long time no blog. I've been figuring out a few things here and there, a few steps forward and a couple back. Steadily making some progress but I think I still have a ton of work to get back to where I was at the beginning of the year. I've been exporting some of my HEM reports to Excel and conditionally formatting them to see what stands out in certain situations compared to others with some fairly good (if not obvious results).

POLITICS

Now I'm not an American citizen, but considering that the Canadian media covers the US presidential campaigns more than our own elections, the degree to which our economy rides on hoping the elephant sleeping beside us doesn't roll the wrong way, and my proximity to the border, I think I am allowed to have an opinion. Plus it's my blog =) Here's some foreign perspective. And I have to warn you that it's fairly narrowly focused and blatantly so because the entire process, from my perspective, is a complete sham on par with having potripper call you down with 9 high and knowing plain as day that you've been superused. You can't have a real democratic presidential campaign until this problem is seen for what it is and fixed.

* * *

I continue to be baffled by the complete media blackout of Ron Paul's campaign. Quite reminiscent of '07/'08. If all you watched was the news -- from any 3 letter source -- you'd think this was the Bachman / Pawlenty / Palin show and everyone else was already an also-ran.

When you consider that Paul receives by far the most campaign contributions from members of the military of any party, doesn't have a lobbyist in sight, and has the most Constitutionally consistent voting record of anybody and is thus considered to be a radical fringe candidate, it tells you just how far off base and out of touch the GOP -- and Congress as a whole -- has become.

So why won't the mainstream media touch this radical politician with a ten foot pole? I mean, that's what they live for. Radical, fringe, shocking, stand out from the crowd = ratings. That's why they headline cats playing with iPads instead of the ho-hum everyday people dying in Africa. There is something very, very wrong in the US when the media is making a concerted, counter-intuitive effort to guide the course of democracy by propelling 2nd and 3rd tier candidates into the spotlight and stuffing 1st tier candidates (if not the outright front runner) into an also-ran pigeon hole.

Case in point. Results as % of votes cast. Top 3 is a numerical count.
(scroll right for averages and top 3 finishes and scroll down for charts):

Standard article following the latest results:

"Bachman won today's straw poll, narrowly edging out Paul" [ 3 more paragraphs about Bachman ].
[ 2 paragraphs about Pawlenty].
[ 2 paragraphs about the rest of the field - excluding Paul ].
[ 2 paragraphs filler to end the article ].

Seriously? Paul crushed 3rd place Pawlenty by 2:1 and was only 1% off a win and all he gets is an participatory mention in one sentence of Bachman's 3 paragraphs?

This should be the consistent top tier Paul and Romney / up and coming Bachman show with a side of Sarah Who? The people who are actually listening to the speeches and looking at platforms have given fairly clear indication of which ones they like. But I would be very shocked if you took a random public poll which resulted in Paul and Romney being the clear favourites the way their head-and-shoulders above average straw poll results would indicate.

There's something obviously very scary about Ron Paul to a lot of powerful people. Maybe it's time to find out what considering the state of the status quo broken government.

SNG Results

2011-07-23T16:22:00.002-05:00

Temporary Switch?

2011-07-23T16:18:00.003-05:00

Jumping from game to game was absolutely killing my bankroll. I was getting extremely impatient with cash games. I decided that maybe I need to take a bit of a break from cash and instead of being a reg-fish donator I'm using that money to freeroll my property taxes. I cashed out everything but $100 and decided to start back at the bottom. The following sequence then occured:

I freed myself from slaving away for VPPs. Yes I'm going to lose a ton of money in rakeback, but positive winrate + freedom > rakeback + negative winrate + misery. This is supposed to be a game. Games are supposed to be fun amiright?
I started playing 1c/2c to rebuild. This went well at first winning about 20 buyins in the first 4k hands, but the impatience started to set in again and I somehow managed to lose half of it back in the next 2k hands.
I switched to PLO for 10k hands because high variance is what's needed to rebuild a BR quickly - there's another impatient word.
I decided I needed to play something structured with a clear beginning, end and goal. I went alllll the way back to the beginning of my poker 'career' and starting playing some SNGs on Stars. $1.50 Turbo 9 mans to be exact.

I don't know how long I'll play these or how high I'll try to climb the SNG ladder but it's going really well so far. You'll notice the spreadsheet I've added in my next post with a link in the sidebar since I made myself online busto and can't afford a sharkscope widget or whatever other people do. I started out 8 tabling and switched to 10 about a quarter way through the 147 games I've played so far. ROI dropped very slightly although I'm not really sure how fast the variance in these things evens out. My HEM results trending tab is pretty much a horizontal ITM line with ROI slowly climbing as I get better and get more 1sts.

I pretty much know nothing about SNG strategy other than that aggression is good and people are bubble nits so I'm going to start looking into that. Moshman's book has been sitting on my desk collecting dust for a number of years and is only 10% read and my CR sub is almost up so I'll quickly download and watch as much as possible. I also have no idea what the comparative skill levels are to cash. $1.50 = 2NL , $3.50 = 10NL, $7 = 25NL ? If anyone knows the answer to this please post a comment.

I'm not ruling out re-depositing a good chunk of my BR if I get into a more permanent zen state of mind, going back to cash, or getting Supernova again but I'm not at all worried if I don't do any of that. If it happens it happens.

Need some advice

2011-07-14T17:10:00.002-05:00

I keep skipping from plan A to B to C and back with ever increasing frequency. Jumping from game to game and limit to limit. I'm starting to feel a bit of desperation which is very unsettling. Almost like someone flipped a switch a million hands ago and left me hanging there and doesn't appear to be coming back. Lifetime graph so you have an idea what I'm talking about:

I really don't intend for this to be a whine post at all. I'm honestly just pulling my hair out at this point and need to figure out what to do with this game. I still really want to enjoy poker, but running and playing like shit really sucks the enjoyment out of the game after an extended period of time.

My current situation:

Full time job + Family
Have roughly 60 hours per month for poker and diminishing
Removed most of my BR since BF and it typically doesn't go back online
I (like most people) think I'm a relatively smart person

What I've done:

Read basically every mainstream book there is
Read every strategy post on the forum
Can probably give you at least the gist of if not a theoretical guideline of most concepts
Don't have time to watch videos because if I get a chance to sit down at my computer, I want to play
edit: 14 coaching sessions with 5 different coaches
Knowledge does not translate into results
Built a BR from $0 to playing 200NL and all the way back down to playing 25NL
Played weak-tight 11/9 and LAG 19/17 and everything in between
Played + and - redline postflop styles
Mass tabled and 6 tabled

Ultimately where I want to be:

I want to be that small stakes 200NL / 400NL guy that can just make low 5 figures per month after rakeback seem easy
Essentially make 2-3x my salary so I can quit my job.

I just don't know how to go from my current situation to where I want to be because I'm sure those guys that make it seem easy put in a ton of hard work. And I just do not have the time to commit to a lot of hard work but surely a part time player that puts in a medium amount of work should be able to survive at 100NL.

I've been falling way behind the curve and it kind of seems like the explosion in free or near free poker information in the past couple years has brought everyone up to speed very quickly. But it must be true that everyone playing micros and small stakes is still terrible if there are people making money at mid and high stakes, so there's still a lot of value in this game even though the migration of players to lower stakes seems to be increasing.

Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated in the comment section or email.

LOL CAP games

2011-07-13T08:45:00.003-05:00

Thought I might grind out a few quick VPPs in some CAP games on Stars. LOL:

2000 hands
Steal success: 52%
3bet success: 42%
Flop cbet success: 26%
Turn cbet success: 0%
W$SD: 36%
Profit: negative 23 "buyins"
EV: negative 4 "buyins"
Standard deviation: normal NL FR
23 hands AIPF: 0/4 when dominated, 0/6 when dominating, 0/7 flips, 1/3 when crushed, 1 chop and 2 losses AK vs AK
??????
How is this freaking possible?
DIAGF

Favourite Hand

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 1370313
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

UTG: $22.35
UTG+1: $7.05
UTG+2: $29.85
MP1: $22.95
Hero (MP2): $25.00
CO: $10.35
BTN: $10.00
SB: $12.20
BB: $10.00

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is MP2 with K 9
1 fold, UTG+1 calls $0.50, 2 folds, Hero raises to $1.50, 4 folds, UTG+1 calls $1

Flop: ($3.75) K 9 7 (2 players)
UTG+1 bets $5.55 all in, Hero calls $5.55

Turn: ($14.85) T (2 players - 1 is all in)

River: ($14.85) 8 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $14.85
UTG+1 shows J 3 (a straight, Seven to Jack)
Hero shows K 9 (two pair, Kings and Nines)
UTG+1 wins $14.15
(Rake: $0.70)

Rigged.

That is all.

Golf TR.

2011-07-11T03:34:00.001-05:00

I actually managed to get out to a golf course this morning for the first time in 2 years. I used to golf fairly regularly back towards my high school days, probably twice per week but life has kind of just filled up with other things since then. 5am felt pretty early as I had a ~2 hour drive to meet my group for a 7am tee-time at their local course but it was a really nice morning at 23 degrees already.

They decide they want to degen it up and play $1 per hole skins with one mulligan allowed on each 9 holes which I obviously oblige to even though I haven't picked up a club the past few seasons. Keep in mind these guys are even bigger nits than I am and prefer to play $0.10/$0.20 with 25bb at our home games. =)

The first two get off some decent drives and I set up my tee fully expecting my ball to get a bit of air time by being driven downwards off the tee, bouncing up 10 feet in the air and making off for the weeds on the right. To my surprise, my ball decides to take off 225 yards straight down the middle and I win the first 3 holes in similar fashion, knocking down 8 foot puts while everyone else was 2-putting.

After that things kind of evened out and I my forearms started to ache a bit once they had a chance to rest during the breakfast break. The skins started to carry over a lot and I ended up with the best overall score but just didn't win the right holes and finished at +$7. I got destroyed on the island green par 4, first nailing a rock, bouncing off the bridge and back into the water and then overshooting the green where I was able to take a drop on the fringe, as well as on a monster par 6 that was a chore to get to in 7 considering I wasn't hitting my irons that far by the 17th.

They use a weird rule with respect to lost balls penalties: +1 for literally lost ball and +1 for the drop resulting in +1 if it's out of bounds and you pick it up and +2 if it's in the water and unretrievable. Sounded kind of silly to me, but it added a bit of strategy in that it seemed better to take two safe shots than one risky shot that would cost you on average 50% more than normal if you mess up. Final tally was 104 which they of course counted as 108 considering I "lost" four. Not terrible considering the circumstances although I think I could have shot 97 if my short game wasn't completely out of whack on the back 9 on at least 8 of those causing a lot of chip shots to get on. Definitely going to try to get out there a bit more this year.

Poker

Every time I've sat down the past few days I start loading tables from the lobby, get to about 8 and then say eff this I don't feel like playing and insta-close them before I post blinds. Not that I haven't been winning, but I just plain haven't felt like it and have instead headed over to the 6max hyper-turbo shove fests with mediocre results after running super hot at 49% ITM one day followed by 8% ITM the next to even out at 33%. I think these are defintely profitable although I don't much care for the change to the 10/20 start for 25bb rather than the old 25/50 10bb start. I think I understand shovebot strategy a lot better than the average person that plays these and just end up bleeding off a couple blinds sitting around waiting to implement it because by the time you have unknowns' 25bb stackoff range figured out along with the nuances of what a minraise means, you're down to a formulaic 10-15 bb anyways.

In one of my last posts I said I was going to withdraw and move down to 10NL 6max. My plan seems to change every time I write up a new blog post as I'm feeling kind of wrestless and impatient with poker at the moment. Almost immediately after I wrote that, I did withdraw but kept playing 25NL Full Ring after a couple of sessions of 6max. I'm just at that point again where I'm torn between making easy money and getting tired of the same thing over and over again without seeing large improvements although I feel like I'm playing extremely well right now. Waiting for the next boom I guess.

Taking a few steps back

2011-07-04T22:33:00.001-05:00

It kind of seems like you have to be really fluid in your approach to this game and I'm going to be taking what feel like a few more steps backwards in my poker life.

I was a little late to the Full Tilt Poker license gongshow boat, not having read any other blogs or the zoo or listened to podcasts for the past couple of weeks until yesterday and I also only play on Stars. I'm sure you've all read about this ad nauseum so I'll just post some cliffs for those that have been under a rock somewhere like me. As far as I can tell from skimming forum threads it kind of looks like it went:

$1 in FTP$ != $1 in USD since there's not enough to go around after the DOJ seizure and the $60M shortfall in what is essentially player credit due to inability to process transactions coming in pre-BF.
Not paying back players sufficiently is a violation of their license.
License suspended / revoked by Alderney Gambling Control.
FTP is completely shut down worldwide in the middle of regular play with no warning. Can not connect at all.
FTP claims "maintenance" and to this day still say they are "updating" on their website.
Hearing date set for July 26th.
European investors to the rescue!
Ivey drops his lawsuit against Tiltware.

To their credit, the Isle of Man put out a statement saying that Stars has continued to show that they are in full compliance with their license. That said, I think I'm going to take a step back and play on a much smaller bankroll for the time being as I really can't afford to see that amount *poof* into nothing no matter how unlikely it is on Stars with a rather large property tax bill coming up. FTP has shown their incompetence over and over pre and post BF, while Stars has shown the complete opposite, but everything still feels chaotic with new sky is falling here and there messages every other week. Online poker has taken a beating and a number of steps back in the past few months. I don't want to be left holding a bag of monopoly money if another random bombshell drops despite having very high confidence in the integrity of Stars.

So for now I'm going to take a step back as well and withdraw most of my BR, drop down to 10NL, try to learn 6max in a more serious and focused way, and practice some more aggressive bankroll management than I have in the past. Hopefully I'll feel like I'm on more of a freeroll once I build it back up. I've become way too comfortable in the past just sticking it out at whatever level I feel best at and that has led to a lot of burnout and de-motivation to learn. Tentatively, I plan to start with $500 and move up at 30 buyins giving myself 10 buyin shots and whatever happens with my VIP level happens, although I would be shocked if I don't reach Supernova again by the end of the year.

June Review

2011-06-30T13:48:00.000-05:00

June started off with a huge rollercoaster over my first 10k hands winning and subsequently losing back 15 buyins. I then started the slow climb at a respectable 6 bb/100 over the next 3 weeks with a nice even graph. I was pretty much in the hand reading zone for the longest stretch that I can remember.

Hand reading is more important than every other skill set combined.

June ended off with another rollercoaster via taking a shot and running really well only to lose it all back the next day. Allan Boston says don't play the day after a huge win. It's too much of a careless freeroll.

I didn't quite hit my goals for the month as a few life projects came up.

80k hands, 72 hours
Did not even look at the M100 program yet
Spent the past 2 days outside in 32 degree heat / 90% humidity staining my deck
Finished up my wife's online store

I think I would have likely accomplished 100k hands if I didn't have the other projects to work on so I feel pretty good about how much volume I did put in. This turned into the 2nd best month I've had so far this year overall, and best month in table winnings if you disregard rakeback.

I'm at 60k VPP and will lose Supernova if I don't finish the other 40k up by the end of September. This is going to be really dependent on if I move up or not since my current stakes makes 10k VPPs in a month a bit of a stretch with my schedule. Moving up a stake would make 15k per month pretty easy. Even if I drop back to Platinum for a month or two, I'm only going to lose between $150 and $300 in VIP value so it's not that terrible.

Poll: Reading Material

2011-06-23T11:05:00.001-05:00

I'm trying to get back into reading some books. I used to be quite a nerd and thoroughly enjoyed reading 200 pages a day back in high school. I need some reading material at work and picked up a bunch of the free public domain classics on Amazon that I haven't read or finished reading yet and thought might be interesting.

I've posted a poll over on the right with what I would consider to be the top 5 of what I have downloaded right now. I'm also still trying to finish Stephen King's The Dome as well (massive book measured in weight instead of pages).

If you have any other suggestions on awesome books to read please comment below. I'm partial to:

Dystopian / Post-Apocalyptic -- 1984, On the Beach
Sci-fi -- Azimov, HG Wells
Political satire -- Gulliver's Travels, Animal Farm

type stuff with the odd King or Koontz style horror/thriller thrown in, although I used to read a ton of Tolkien and Robert Jordan, too.

CRTC Broadcast Rant

2011-06-23T09:07:00.013-05:00


Access Denied

I'm trying to watch some WSOP on ESPN3. Impossible. I live in a modern, western, high-tech, democratic country that somehow manages to impose Chinese style censorship for fear of having our little Canadian minds flooded with non-Canadian content. There's a reason some people call us the friendly dictatorship.

This is the mandate of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission:

"The CRTC’s mandate is to ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public. The CRTC uses the objectives in the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act to guide its policy decisions.

Broadcasting

In broadcasting, the CRTC ensures that all Canadians have access to a wide variety of high-quality Canadian programming as well as access to employment opportunities in the broadcasting system. Programming in the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect Canadian creativity and talent, our bilingual nature, our multicultural diversity and the special place of aboriginal peoples in our society."

High Tech

The Broadcasting Act hasn't been overhauled since 1991. To put 1991 into technological perspective, it's the year Nintendo released the SNES in North America.

So here I am trying to access some great content online from around the world and I'm met with a stream of "Access Denied. This service/product not available in your region," over and over again. Here's a sample of some of my issues:

ESPN3 - Access Denied
Various live sports feeds - Access Denied
Netflix Online Streaming - Reduced Library
Hulu - Access Denied
Cable TV - Somewhat decent Canadian networks unwatchable on Sundays while they try to cram every last half-assed Canadian production (ie. hunting/fishing/travel shows with about 75% dead time to boot) out there into the everyone's at church time slot to get their required content percentage in for the week before they switch back to the ABC/NBC feed of football or golf.

I'm not really about to go the VPN workaround route since I can just fill my time up doing other stuff anyways but it's just so damn annoying that you can't do something online when you want to do it.

Government sponsored cultural engineering, based on technological rules written 20 years ago, being run by a 65 year old, ftw. In 2011. Canada needs to get with the program.

Adventures in Mouse Repair

2011-06-21T16:41:00.000-05:00

There probably aren't that many hobbies or professions out there that where out a mouse so quickly. clickclickclickclickclick... 2000 rapid fire clicks per hour. At least for those of us who aren't comfortable doing everything by hotkey.

The past couple of weeks have been somewhat frustrating mixed with the odd weird two pair. I stack my tables, and my left click was worn out leading to a lot of mis-calls raises and folds. It's an odd mix of emotions when you click it back 3bet 73o thinking "Oh shit, this problem has cost me more than a new mouse already..." flop two pair and think "LOL, this problem has won me more than a new mouse already."

Today I had enough but couldn't stand to part with my MX Revolution after being through so much with it and decided a DIY repair was in order. I found a pretty great guide here for my specific problem. 3 hours later, problem solved! 1/2 hour to read the guide and watch a Youtube video for verification to take it apart carefully. 5 minutes to bend the paper thin contact switch back into shape. 1 hour to figure out how to put the contact switch back in properly. 1.5 hours trying to find the 2mm x 2mm white clicker plastic insert on your white rug after it jumps out of it's casing only to say "F this my old one can go without a right click," and steal one from there.

Instructrions: DO NOT LOSE !!!

So to all the regs out there, you can rest assured I won't be making any more spazz looking 3, 4 or 5 bets from now on.

Hand of the Year

2011-06-17T01:13:00.002-05:00

And the winner is... today's Royal Flush!

Poker Stars $0.10/$0.25 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 1344825
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

BB: $25.00
UTG: $25.60
UTG+1: $25.17
UTG+2: $27.59
MP1: $8.65
MP2: $11.10
CO: $18.34
Hero (BTN): $25.00
SB: $69.69

Pre Flop: ($0.35) Hero is BTN with T Q
UTG raises to $0.75, 5 folds, Hero calls $0.75 and is in before "Fold Pre", SB calls $0.65, BB calls $0.50

Flop: ($3.00) A 5 K (4 players)
SB bets $1, BB folds, UTG raises to $2.75, Hero calls $2.75 thinking "Wouldn't Jc be so sick?" SB calls $1.75

Turn: ($11.25) J !!! (3 players)
SB bets $5, UTG calls $5, Hero deceptively calls $5 (plus he has all the cards that let anyone continue vs a raise)

River: ($26.25) K (3 players)
SB bets $25, UTG calls $17.10 all in, Hero takes a screenshot while trying to figure out if he's misread his hand and calls $16.50 all in

Final Pot: $76.95
UTG shows A A (a full house, Aces full of Kings)
Hero shows T Q (a Royal Flush)
SB shows K J (a full house, Kings full of Jacks)
UTG wins $1.20
Hero wins $73.75
(Rake: $2.00)

I'd like to thank all my fans, my mom, and especially PokerStars RNG for such a sick set up!

Other than that poker has been going relatively well again. I continue to get smacked around to the tune of -100bb / 1k hands in EV at 50NL in the few sessions I've put in there but have been consistently beating 25NL and will probably stick to my plan of playing there for the rest of this month. I'm a bit behind on the number of hours I wanted to put in with only 38 so far - on pace for 100 hours would be 56 so that's about an hour per day that I've been slacking off. I've been fairly busy with a ton of yard work, hauling in crushed rock for finishing up my landscaping and seeding some new grass. But I am keeping up much better in terms of actual volume at 45k hands so I'm pretty happy with that.

For anyone who doesn't have this poker news site bookmarked yet, check out Subject: Poker headed up by NoahSD and crew. The updates are little sparse but their reasons for that are pretty solid and I like their approach to covering poker news.

Welcome Back NHL!

2011-06-07T12:42:00.007-05:00

Finally!

Winnipeg is getting an NHL franchise back. To celebrate, I cooked up a new avatar for the forum. It's been a long time coming and a ton of big let downs along the way for this city to get a professional team back since the Jets moved to the desert and became the Coyotes.

We seem to have always been number one on the list to get one of the disasters that are the failing teams in the southern US, but the conditions were never just right. We've come so close to reclaiming the Jets from Phoenix numerous times but it's never lined up perfectly as the suburb of Glendale seems to be willing to flush debt guarantee money down the toilet year after year.

Listening to some of the ex-pat Canadians living in Atlanta, it sounds like it will be a few years before people there realize the team even left. As an owner you have got to know that your ship is sinking when the few people that are willing to pay for tickets and show up are confused by icing and offside calls. This is going to be in very stark contrast to Winnipeg and the younger players on the former Thrashers team who haven't known anything else are in for a pretty huge awakening when you go from a no-name face walking the streets of Atlanta to being the biggest celebrity in town. I imagine being a professional hockey player in the south is somewhat similar to being a professional poker player anywhere outside of Vegas. No one understands what you do for a living.

Note to Commissioner Bettman: The NHL should adopt a bylaw stating your city requires 30 days of near or below 32F weather per year or be north of the 37th parallel to even be considered. You know about the 3 Advantages of Poker. The 3 Advantages of hockey marketing are just as simple: North. Cold. Population.

Back to Winnipeg. The MTS Centre is a small, but new arena smack in the middle of downtown. The cost of living and wages here are relatively low and this has always been the sticking point to getting a team back. Not enough money. Not enough seats. Enter Mark Chipman and True North Sports and their marketing plan. Pure. Genius. It's a 15k seat arena. They had a plan to not only sell the place out, but to make it sustainable long term: Lower the cost of the relatively small number of high end tickets, raise the cost of the nosebleed seats slightly to compensate. And sell them for 3, 4, 5, 7 and 10 year blocks at a time with better seats requiring longer commitments. No more huge season ticket drives every summer trying to re-sell every seat. Targeted, staggered groups instead, every few years.

Their goal was to sell 13k season tickets. There was a meeting for the business community to continue to buy their box seats, but now at $180k annually on average, more than 3x the price of what they were paying for Moose games (AHL hockey). The overwhelming response was "Where do we sign?"

First dibs on season tickets were then given to long time Moose season ticket holders and they were sold to groups of fans online over a few days with timing depending on how long you had owned your seat, creating this feeling of tickets being somewhat rare. They sold 7158 tickets over the course of a few days. Tickets were then offered to the general public, and all 5842 tickets were gone in 17 minutes. I predict a huge spike in keyboard sales in Winnipeg due to mass F5-ing. And the marketing continues even for those left out with a waiting list membership that gives you team store discounts.

The name of the team is still up in the air and rumor has been that TNS has been trying to distance itself from the Jets name and history. Personally, I think by using the old Jets name you've got a huge built in fan base. Where else on this continent (outside of perhaps Quebec City) do you see people buying and wearing fan apparel en masse for a team that left more than a decade ago, and wearing it throughout their entire exile? People want their history back.

June Goals

2011-06-02T16:50:00.001-05:00

A few thoughts about what I want to accomplish in June. I haven't been one for goals lately because they either don't get accomplished and the realistic ones that I do set and accomplish don't really give me any satisfaction in getting them done. So I've kind of taken a whatever happens, happens approach for the last while.

But this month I want to set goals for a different reason. I want to keep myself on track instead of just slacking off. I seem to be somewhat obsessed with spreadsheets and wanting to fill them in with new data as often as possible. Nerd, I know.

So here's my June plan:

100 hours and/or 100k hands at 25NL. I get these confidence boosts at lower stakes and then jump up to deposit money into regs accounts at 50NL and 100NL and I end up with lower confidence than I started with. If I can stick to something I know I can crush for a extended period of time, I'm going to be happy.

Try the M100 workout I've seen on a few other blogs. Apparently it's impossible.

Continue to lose weight. I'm only 5'11 and 5 months ago was a half pound short of 240 lbs. Contrast that to the healthy 175 lbs I was with daily high school basketball and soccer practices but this is what happens when you keep the eating routine and drop the exercise. Today I'm feeling much better and have a ton more energy at 209 lbs. I seem to get into these weird cliffs and plateaus where I'll lose 4 lbs in a week and then stay there for 2-3 weeks before the next big drop. I haven't exercised at all over that time period besides a 3 mile walk we've started doing with the kids every other night. I've cut fast food from 4 meals a week to 1.5 meals a week and eat chicken nearly every day. I also basically replaced my entire pop consumption (which was at least 1 can every 2 days) with Crystal Light singles packs and Tetley instant ice tea packs.

I've already got the poker spreadsheet going for the year so I'll have to make one up for the exercise thing if I decide the M100 program is for me.

Some more Hourly / Weekly Analysis

2011-05-25T16:31:00.000-05:00

I took the data that I posted the other day regarding my hourly and daily winrates and broke it down into weighted values based on my winrate for the hour or day and the volume I play during that time period. I wanted to see how it would affect my winrate if I adjusted my playing schedule (realistically) and it seems that I can increase my hourly winrate by 78% by changing what time of day I play the most at and by 56% by moving more of my volume to weekends. I'm not sure how to combine the variables of both to come up with an overall improvement factor without getting data broken down into full 168 hour one week sections.

My next step based on that is to try to set up scheduled session times. I typically find my mind wandering off after about an hour and a half, but my A game is probably gone at around the hour mark. Breaking even for a half hour isn't terrible either when you can pull in 3.5 bb/100 in rakeback.

Current outline:

Weekdays:
7am-8am: Wake up. I'm a morning person.
8am: Watch a video while everyone's still sleeping (1 hour-ish).
9am: Breakfast and family time.
11am - 1pm: Play fewer tables and focus on what I learned in video.
1pm: Lunch break.
2pm - 5pm: Play more tables in grind mode.
Quit for day unless I don't feel tired after 10pm.
All of this on a gradient of fewer tables and skipping sessions early in the week and more tables and adding extra sessions towards the end of the week.

Friday:
Poker Day.

Weekends:
Wake up.
Work and/or grind my face off alternating 8am - 10am and 11pm - 2am.
Suck it up with little sleep since I'm going to take a good deal of Monday and Tuesday off.

Stopped a bad session in it's tracks!

2011-05-25T09:20:00.004-05:00

I played ~400 hands this morning and dropped about 1.5 buyins. Unfortunately 1 buyin was a misclick J9s where I thought I had AK on the BTN getting it in pre against AK which I was obviously happy to see but still whiffed. It was starting to feel like one of those bad sessions where everything is going to go wrong so I just clicked the sit out and close all tables button.

Sure enough:
0 sets.
My preflop raises were 3bet 25% of the time.
Ran at 30% W$SD and 33% W$WSF (52% and 49% are normal here).
Flop cbet success 0% (normal is 48%).
Turn cbet success 0% (normal is however spewy people feel day to day).

The above is going to generally translate into running into tops of everyone's ranges. If I were getting 3bet a lot and/or cbets were not working and I was still winning, then people are playing back at me. But when I can't win with or without showdown there's no point in over adjusting and playing back at people who are just card racking against me.

I think this could have very quickly turned into a negative 4 or 5 buyin session if I decided to tilt instead of close it down so I'm pretty happy that I caught it really fast.

Hourly and Daily Winrates

2011-05-23T17:12:00.002-05:00

Today, I took a look at a nice little feature HEM has for compiling your winrates and stats based on the time of day and day of the week under the Reports tab. I put together a bit of a spreadsheet based on that to see what time of day is best or worst for me. This would basically tell me when game quality is good and/or when I play my best. I found the results over a 300k hand sample for this year fairly significant.

A few observations for hourly:
Results are fairly terrible between 5pm - 11pm with the odd exception of 6pm - 7pm.
Decent, mediocre results from 8am - 10am and 12pm - 2pm.
Good results from 10am - 12pm and 2pm - 5pm.
Excellent results from 11pm - 3pm.
* Very small sample from 3am - 7am.

What I'm going to take away from the hourly:

Terrible results are probably mostly due to playing non-A-game and getting tilty after 5pm. Be very careful about playing this time frame.
Regs go for a supper break from 6pm-7pm?
Tables are not bad during the morning and early afternoon but not nearly as many fish as at peak time. Probably not a lot of regs awake either so it evens out a bit.
I probably play my best during the early afternoon until supper time. Euros also getting home from work.
Play fewer tables to focus more playing against more regs.
Mass table weekends and maybe one afternoon session a couple days during the week.
* After midnight is skewed as shown below.

Observations based on day of the week:
It is true that I hate weekends because it's a variance minefield but I also make the most money by far on those days. At least now I have the data to prove it and can disregard my selective memory.
I don't know what it is about Tuesdays but it's probably the day that absolutely every fish is back to work and out of money and the games are at their deadest.
The rest of the week is kind of marginal but good enough to FPP pro against a lower Fish:Reg ratio.

* I generally work only weekends which explains the high 11pm-3am winrates. It also possibly explains some of my less than stellar results over the past year when I think back to how much money I used to make and my ability to play higher stakes when I wasn't working the weekend shift all the time. On Saturdays and Sundays I generally either don't play at all when I work a night shift and I play for a few hours after 11pm when I get home from the day shift. This is most likely skewing the after midnight hourly winrates because I tend to go to bed before 11pm fairly religiously during the week.

Actions based on day or the week:

Play as much as possible on the weekend in the short amount of time I have.
Quit sessions early and quickly during the week if they start off bad.
Put in more sessions in the 8am-4pm time slot skewed towards the tail end of that during the week to make sure I have a better chance of weekday A-game.
Take Tuesdays off to study or just plain take a break for the next while.
Figure out why I've played 2x as many hands on Mondays as any other day this year.

I'm going to stick to this for the next few months and then re-evaluate. I assume some of this is going to shift with the American player base now gone and everything might move forward a few hours.

Supernova Quarterly Fun

2011-05-21T14:45:00.002-05:00

Guy is running 32/4 and I imagine has paid dearly for those red stars. Seriously has not lost a pot afaik. He thinks I'm FOS because he keeps binking bottom pair against my Ace high and not folding.

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, 0 Tournament, 150/300 Blinds (9 handed) - PokerStars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

Hero (MP1) (t11158)
MP2 (t9075)
MP3 (t10100)
CO (t12213)
Button (t18100)
SB (t12664)
BB (t17929)
UTG (t8725)
UTG+1 (t10375)

Hero's M: 24.80

Preflop: Hero is MP1 with A, A
2 folds, Hero bets t900, 3 folds, Button raises to t2400, 2 folds, Hero raises to t11158 (All-In), Button calls t8758

Flop: (t22766) A, Q, 10 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: (t22766) K (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t22766) 6 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t22766
Results:
Button had J, J (straight, Ace high).
Hero had A, A (three of a kind, Aces).
Outcome: Button won t22766

Good luck to everyone else that's still in.

Thoughts on 18% W$SD

2011-05-20T16:11:00.001-05:00

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to stop this cycle. I get on these really decent runs where I play awesome and feel confident and motivated and hands hold up for a couple of weeks as I steadily grind up a good nanonoko-style-graph profit thinking I've finally gotten out of this shit hole of the longest breakeven stretch ever.

Then I hit the odd day here and there every couple of weeks where I play a session or two and the RNG decides it wants to skydive off my graph at 15% to 30% W$SD with normal W$WSF and WtSD for 2k or 3k hands. I feel like a massive underdog every hand unless I have 80%+ equity when all-in -- past 80% I assume I am ahead which is worth a little prayer to hold -- and completely destroy 2/3 of my monthly profits in a very short time frame. This results in me feeling dejected and unmotivated to play at all for at least the next week and is the main reason for my laughable volume over the past year.

I know that I could try to avoid playing when things are going this terrible but it's kind of hard to catch in a couple of thousand hands which is literally a few hours when you can brush off the first few coolers and suckouts and say "ok you're playing fine, nh" only to be smacked a few more times in a row before realizing it's going to be one of those -8 buyin sessions.

I'm just spinning my wheels in a rut trying to gain some momentum only to slide right back down every time.
Definition of insanity...

Example from today. I just start to feel like there's zero chance river is ever a brick here when I get into these shitty high variance spots during these sessions.

My thought process goes something like this:
I'm ahead of his stack off range. Quick estimation is 60-75%.
Drag the slider all-in.
FML here goes another buyin but it's the "correct" play.
Just fold just fold just fold just fold.
Click. Shove.
Villain snapcalls. Bink. Sometimes the nice ones at least say "ty."
Story of my life.

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 1315999
DeucesCracked Poker Videos Hand History Converter

CO: $17.25
Hero (BTN): $50.00
SB: $48.75
BB: $25.00
UTG: $71.70
UTG+1: $25.10
UTG+2: $75.10
MP1: $50.30
MP2: $23.50

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is BTN with Q K
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $1.50, 1 fold, MP1 calls $1.50, 2 folds, Hero calls $1.50, SB calls $1.25, BB calls $1

Flop: ($7.50) K J 7 (5 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG+1 checks, MP1 bets $5, Hero calls $5, SB folds, BB folds, UTG+1 folds

Turn: ($17.50) Q (2 players)
MP1 bets $10, Hero raises to $43.50 all in, MP1 calls $33.50

River: ($104.50) 9 (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: $104.50
Hero shows Q K (two pair, Kings and Queens)
MP1 shows T 8 (a straight, Nine to King)
MP1 wins $101.50
(Rake: $3.00)

/whine

Hand of the Day

2011-05-11T21:58:00.000-05:00

This hand made my day.

This is against a sweatshop reg who thinks every CO, BTN, SB or BB seat is a 3bet seat when the PFRer is in one of those but still manages to somehow run TAG stats. I'm sure you all know who I'm talking about. He also seems to apply this logic to every time I open from anywhere regardless where he is sitting and has taken a liking to flatting my 4bets as folding to a 4bet is out of the question. He generally seems to be FOS as his default line -- hence my CRAI for value -- but has the largest luckbox I've ever seen. I'm obviously a bit peeved on the turn thinking "You have got to be kidding me (again)" before the river hits.

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players - View hand 1304496

BTN: $49.15
SB: $68.30
BB: $112.05
UTG: $21.20
Hero (UTG+1): $68.80
MP1: $50.00
MP2: $49.50
CO: $51.75

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG+1 with K A
1 fold, Hero raises to $1.50, 2 folds, CO raises to $4.50, 3 folds, Hero raises to $12, CO calls $7.50

Flop: ($24.75) 5 6 3 (2 players)
Hero checks, CO bets $12, Hero raises to $56.80 all in, CO calls $27.75 all in

Turn: ($104.25) 9 (2 players - 2 are all in)

River: ($104.25) 3 (2 players - 2 are all in)

Final Pot: $104.25
Hero shows K A (a flush, Ace high)
CO shows 7 8 (a straight, Five to Nine)
Hero wins $101.25
(Rake: $3.00)

LIVE! From the Basement to the B&M

2011-05-08T04:32:00.004-05:00

I wrote most of this a week before Black Friday and now that I'm seeing more and more live poker trip reports I was inspired to finish it up. It's a bit of a short story / trip report from my first live casino experience about 4 weeks ago. Hope you like it.

The Journey
"Backstreet's back, alright!" Ugh. 90s Theme Weekend on the local radio. Hero appreciates being able to understand the words as much as the next guy -- Must be getting old -- but Backstreet certainly doesn't need to come back. He turns on his iPod. No Bluetooth -- he's only a microstakes grinder -- he has to use the lighter adapter FM transmitter he got for his birthday. "Here they are! Mike aaannnnnnd Adaaammm." This will have to do.

It's a grey, dreary day. Just above freezing with a steady shower hitting the pavement. About as much as you can ask for on a Friday in early April with winter threatening to come roaring back any minute. He's on his way to the local casino. It's 2 hours away, which is why he's never been to one before, besides the fact that it always seemed a bit indimidating. Looking out the driver side window, spring flooding is well under way. The fields look more like small lakes. Two feet of gravel shoulder hold the water back from swamping the two lane highway as the third wheel makes another smart ass comment on the podcast.

Hero has played this game for nearly five years and had yet to set foot in a poker room. Upon arrival he turns into what appears to be the parking lot in front of the casino and weaves around the valet service looking for a spot to park. Every single one of them is full and are marked with what appears to be yellow squares on the pavement. There's an empty one in the last row and the square marker is fully visible. It's a handicap spot. What kind of a sick joke... there's gotta be 400 handicapped parking spots here! Two more times around the block and he finally finds the "General parking in back" sign.

After wandering around a bit in the lobby of the hotel he manages to find the corridor to the casino. At the end, the incessant zylophone sound effect being played by the man on the stage spinning the bingo ball drum completely changes the atmosphere. After Hero's eyes adjust to the darker lighting, he's hit by a wave of electronic slot machines with a wheel chair or a walker sitting at every one. That explains the parking lot.

After wading through a sea of slots in multiple rooms and running in several circles, Hero finally finds what he's looking for:

The back half of the casino containing the table games and poker room is on the other side. Hero finds an ATM in the 18" corridor between the men's and women's restrooms and waits in line for a 30 something to stuff a wad of 100s into her wallet before she scrambles off back to the pit. Hero is scared money. He withdraws 100bb for 1/2, puts half in his pocket to put on the table and the other half in his pocket to rebuy if necessary.

There's six tables in the room. Four of them are running. All $1/$2 No Limit Hold'em. No one's on the waitlist and it doesn't take Hero long to get into a game.

The Line Up

Seat 1: Hero. This seat sucks. 3 of the 4 dealers like to constantly lean over their chip tray. The automatic in table shuffler directly in front of Seat 1 is kind of interesting but makes folding awkward. It's really tough to see the action in seats 8 and 9 and causes a lot more prompting than necessary and a few checks after seat 9 had bet and a "That only works once buddy" response from some of the other players. It is a decent seat for interacting with seats 2-5 though.

Seat 2: The whiner. It's his birthday, 32nd in fact, and he's supposed to out for dinner with his girlfriend but her babysitter bailed. He runs extremely bad and can't get a top pair hand to showdown without the board running out 4 to a flush or straight. General FML attidude.

Seat 3: The News Anchor. At least, he looks remarkably similar to Devin Scillian from Detroit Local 4 news and is happy to throw out the fact that he has a lot of money to burn and is playing in the $1100 MTT the next day. His wife apparently crushes online but is too indimidated to play live. Super friendly, talkative and polite guy.

Seat 4: Nitty Old Guy. I assume this is what everyone means by live old nit-regs. Super weak-tight-station willing to c/c down with 2nd pair + flush draw and folds to a token $2 bet in a $50 pot on the river when his draw misses. He's a 1/2 reg because his wife is a bingo reg and they wander back and forth between the poker room and the bingo area to swap cash depending on who's up.

Seat 5: Crazy Limp Fish. Random hick with massive swings and rebuying for 300bb at a time. Has a goofy smile plastered on his face the entire time and likes to see if he can bust people with 72o because that's funny. "Anyone that knows me knows that when I limp/reraise it's AA every time." True story told after stacking Asian LAGtard's AK aipf and raking in a 400bb pot.

Seat 6: The Mid Life Crisis. Scruffy 40ish year old who plays relatively well and straightforward. Drama drama. Corderoy pants are a little slippery which is bad for having your wallet fall out at which point he sits there in shock looking like a drooler while the dealer calls surveillance. Thankfully Crazy Limp Fish sees it on the floor under the Seat 6 chair and says "It's right there, numbnuts. Where's my finder's fee?"

Seat 7: Quiet TAG. 50ish Mike Ditka lookalike. Nitting it up and fat value betting, pretty solid adjustment to the game with an obvious nit-value range. Doesn't say a word all night besides "Raise."

Seat 8: Good LAG native kid. This guy can't be more than 19 and is just going wild with the preflop iso's and semi-bluffs. Apparently cardracking and crushing the table. He cashes out shortly after Hero sit down so they don't get to clash. Security shows up with the $100 chip lockbox so he can trade in 240 red $5 chips and then escorts him to the cashier. He gets replaced by a young Tom Dwan for most of the night who burns through $400 before realizing his iso/cbets aren't working.

Seat 9: Asian LAGtard. Overvalues absolutely everything and is more than willing to fire off 300bb with air. Endless supply of Sir Robert Borden's ($100) in his pocket. High variance is an understatement.

Other Noteables:
Too good for 1/2 dude in his 40s and wearing a 90s sportjacket keeps wandering back and forth from the poker room to the blackjack tables. He asks when the 10/20 game is going to start. Host: "I can gaurantee you there will be no 10/20 game tonight." 10/20 pro: "Put me on the interest list for 10/20." That was a lonely list. Eventually he stoops to our level and sits at the next table over looking trying to look completely disinterested after waiting for three hours.

Drinks on the House every 2 hours!

The Hand
Hero only gets seriously involved in 2 pots the entire night after playing 150 hands. The concepts of isolating and cbetting are a complete lost cause even when he goes with a standard live large iso so limping along it is. Hero rakes in a few orphan pots, three in total. The term 'orphan pot' doesn't really apply to this game either. The only medium size pot he plays, he opens JTs UTG and managed to get HU with Mr. Mid Life Crisis, taking it down with a bet, check, check/call line when villain decides to turn his 88 into a bluff on J733K.

Hero's been overlimping and seeing some flops. Stack has dwindled a bit.
Hero is BB with AsQs
Preflop ($3):
The Whiner limps.
The News Anchor calls.
Old Nitty Guy calls.
Crazy Fish calls.
3 folds.
Asian LAGtard raises to $14.
Hero Calls $12.
The Whiner calls $12.
Old Nitty Guy calls $12.
Crazy Fish folds!
Flop ($58): Qh Ts 8s --> Jackpot!
Hero slowplays cause there's no way this flop is getting checked around.
3 checks fml.
Asian LAGtard bets $80! [Ks Qd]
Hero calls $80 and is all-in. [As Qs]
The Whiner calls $70 and is all-in. [Ks 3s]
Old Nitty Guy calls $60 and is all-in. [Ad Td]

Hero is in total disbelief looking around, wondering what is going on. He's so flabbergasted that he can't even match hands up to the board and doesn't know whether he has the best hand or not. Spade ONE TIME! Turn, 3c. River, 6c. Blank. Blank?

Hero is still trying to figure out what everyone has while LAGtard is reaching for the pot. LAG's half of the table puts up a unified "HEY!" The dealer is also trying to figure out what everyone has. "I have top pair top kicker," says LAGtard holding up the King of spades. Hero's half of the table lols and points at Hero's Ace of spades. The dealer requires two full forearm swipes at the pot to push 60 red chips and change all over to Hero's corner. Hero auto-folds the next two hands while he's busy stacking chips.

Two hours of limping and check/folding later and Hero decides to call it a night. Profit: 300 big blinds for a 200 bb/100 winrate. Not too shabby. He fills up a rack of red chips and heads to the front of the poker room where he's traded four black chips to take to the cashier. Taking the intended long walk back through the pit he can see how easy it would be for most people to just throw down a black chip on a hand of blackjack on the way out.

Back in the car its raining again while Olivier Busquet makes some profound statement about the key difference between a good player and a great player is the ability to control tilt. Hero is definitely planning on coming back as he empties the contents of his wallet on the passenger seat and counts his profits.

**********

For anyone that hasn't seen this yet, it's an absolute must watch.
'Too late, axe in car' makes me burst out laughing every time.

Recalibrated

2011-04-30T01:24:00.003-05:00

I think I've decided what I want to do poker-wise for the rest of this year now that everything has pretty much shaken out.

The Plan
8 - 12 table 6 max cash
Focus on learning
Forget about VPPs goals
Take maney

I've changed my vpp goal progress bar to 100k to essentially forget about grinding out a larger number. I'm certain I'll earn more than that at this point since I'm going to be winning at 50NL+ and should play about another half million hands this year. This will result in about another 100k vpp from today forward. But I'm not going to kill myself trying to get the 200k milestone while breaking even mass tabling and if I don't feel like playing I'm just going to take a day off. If I move up and earn more vpp/hand and make it there then I will consider it a true bonus and good for me. Breaking even for another 8 months to earn a milestone is kind of a non-bonus and more of a stress inducing lifeline imo.

I've done the mass tabling micro stakes for marginal winrates thing long enough. It's time to become good at this game and put some real effort into it again. I've fallen way behind the curve, or at least everyone's started to pass me. I'm going to make some smart investments in my poker knowledge and have already re-sub'd my training site accounts and I'm watching videos like a mad man which I haven't done in well over a year. It's amazing how much the confidence and anti-tilt zen come roaring back when you actively focus even though I don't have any real results to show for it yet.

I'm already in the process of creating my own Poker Bible (ty King Spew for this wonderful idea) based on info I glean from those videos and insightful forum posts. Right now I'm basically taking 3-5 pages of notes on a video, similar to how I would take notes in a uni lecture breaking everything down. I then have a video summary page where I list point form the two or three things I learned and can try to implement. Once I start to build up a decent repository of video summaries I'm going to take those point form ideas and throw them into my Final Poker Bible classified by skill set and topic. Need to work on my blind stealing? Chapter 3. Need to work on when to barrel? Chapter 7. All backed up with references and links to where I got the info.

This will create my growing overall game strategy base. Two benefits to this. I have a default to go back to if I start getting off my game, like a system restore. Secondly, I can see how and when certain changes were made and hopefully can roll them back if they're not working out.

In a way this whole Black Friday thing has been good for me personally. I don't think I would have changed what I'm doing if I hadn't safety cashed out 1/2 of my BR and forced myself to rebuild. I've thought about joining a discussion group but I just don't think I have the time to make that work in addition to my poker hours, plus I find Skype and AIM really distracting while playing. I'm starting to gain a real appreciation for the work ethic and discipline the big winners must have and I think I'm finally going to do this right.

10 Days Later

2011-04-24T21:58:00.007-05:00

Ok well more like 9.5 days later.

This will likely be the last post I make regarding Black Friday unless something major develops. This whole situation is so messed up and I don't really see that much point in rehashing catastrophic developments that are at the same time meaningless to discuss with the same people who experienced the whole thing. What's the point in discussing the bomb that we all witnessed go if in front of us with the people who witnessed it or personally had their legs blown off? It is what it is and it feels like the poker community is powerless to do anything about those issues anyways. More disjointed thoughts to follow -- probably not going to link source very much of it since it's fairly easy to find all over the place and this is more my opinion than anything.

The Good (Great!) News

Much to everyone's surprise and contrary to popular predictions just prior stating no one would see a penny within 6 months if ever, there has been a remarkably fast deal made between the sites -- Stars and iirc FTP, unsure about UB as of right now -- and the DOJ to get the players' money back to them once a suitable processor mechanism is decided on.

More Fallout

Business partnership deals hastily cancelled between casinos and online sites.

TV poker being cancelled left and right. ESPN and Fox Sports both cancelling all of the online site produced shows. Who knows if ESPN is even going to cover the WSOP now that a ton of the money to run the production is gone.

All that build up of the illusion of legitimacy has vanished.

The continued silence from sponsored pros who normally have everything to say about anything is becoming rather deafening.

I lose a little more respect for Doyle every time he opens his mouth.

So to sum up the current situation:
People that should be speaking up are not. People that should not be speaking are.

All of the rats that were more than happy to take a ride on the "illegal" Stars/FTP/UB pirate ship and take their share of the plunder and knew that the DOJ armada was lurking somewhere cloaked in stealth mode have abandoned ship and are trying to save face by distancing themselves from those dirty, criminal pirates now that the DOJ has opened fire.

There's a ton more stuff going on out there but it just makes me very pessimistic even thinking about it so I think I'll leave it at that.

What I'm going to watch for from this point on:

Legal proceedings, if any actually go forward.
Where the player pool gravitates to.
Developments in competition between sites or continued lack thereof.
Watching for a wild turn of events somewhere in the world that could trigger a new mini-boom.
Working hard and preparing my game for the next mini-boom if it happens.
Preparing my life for that hissing sound of the online poker flame going out if it doesn't.

On a positive note to end this, online poker has effectively hit near rock bottom. At least as close as it can get while still being profitable and worth playing. There's only moving up from here. A year in this industry is 5 years in the real world. 5 years online is an eternity. Just remember, 5 years ago Party was the biggest site on the planet. Anything is possible.

Doing the Blogroll Shuffle

2011-04-24T01:26:00.000-05:00

I've begun the process of migrating the non-updated blogs in my list to a blogroll archive page over there on the far right side. I want to keep the sidebar manageable, legible, fresh and up to date with new content so I'm setting the bar at around 1 to 2 months without a post before links get sent to the archive. They will of course be reinstated if they happen to revive themselves at some point in the future. There's just too much good information and interesting and funny stories out there to delete them forever.

I imagine there's a good possibility that given the events of the past week a lot of people will stop blogging and I wanted to be ready to add some new blogs. I hope that's not the case and that everyone affected can turn their blog into a fun live poker trip report log.

If you have a blog and would like to swap links give me a shout here or on 2p2.

Time to Recalibrate

2011-04-18T16:55:00.000-05:00

At this point everyone out there who's been effectively banned is trying to figure out if they should join one of the smaller sites that are still servicing Americans and decide if it's worth playing at those sites considering ability to multi table, traffic and implications of the DoJ going after them, too. At this point the "no notice of UIGEA breach because poker is a skill game" defense for sites still transferring with Americans holds no water imo although it's a pretty solid defense for the Big 3. I'm obviously not a lawyer though so I could be wrong. Good luck to all of you in whatever you choose to do.

For the rest of us it seems like things are ok on the surface as much as they can be. It's hard to comprehend how there's now these two separate poker worlds existing in parallel universes. One continuing on as if almost nothing ever happened. The other living in complete chaos. The ability to see the chaotic world without having to deal with it's problems still makes our world feel like everything's still a bit up in the air when it probably isn't.

Personally I am scrubbing any goals and plans I have made. It's time to recalibrate and see what the landscape looks like when the dust settles. No immediate goals for stakes or number of tables or VPPs or even what site although Stars has been the most trustworthy in the past which is what we need now so I'm willing to put my eggs in that basket for the time being.

Black Friday

2011-04-17T05:33:00.018-05:00

Just a couple of disjointed thoughts on this. The more that the implications of this sink in, the harder it is to believe it. This post came out a little pessimistic so save it for a rainy day if you're enjoying a day off.

No news is frustrating. What can we really expect in terms of information at this point? Nothing is really going to make a difference at this point with respect to Americans being able to play online. So I guess the question that needs to be answered is what's happening with the money. I don't know which is worse: not knowing what's happening with your money or the prospect of not playing for an indefinite period of time.

We apparently have Mr. Tzvetkoff and the sites themselves to blame for this entire situation in a payback for payback kind of way. In retrospect I suppose we have ourselves to blame for silently accepting this arrangement instead of clamouring for an above board deal.

I haven't done a thorough search of the internet but the complete lack of sponsored online pro statements is somewhat conspicuous. Most of the sites have been really good about letting players speak their minds, but I guess when it gets down to real business and political / legal fights it's better just to keep your mouth shut if you're a 'representative' of a company in the loosest sense of the word. EDIT: Somewhat confirmed by DN on his twitter page: "Not ignoring #BlackFriday and as much as I'd love to discuss it, I've been advised not to for now. As soon as I can, I'll add my two cents."

Mpethy has written up a good summary of the charges.

Seeing new HHs irrationally gives me that feeling you get when you're embarassed for someone who doesn't realize what's going on. I just kind of feels like, "Seriously? You want to know whether Baluga Theorem applies to the hand when Mr. Seidman can't even play poker in his own damn house?" Everything seems to be of secondary importance at this point.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens with all the poker TV shows out there now. How many networks are going to want to air shows sponsored and produced by alleged criminal corporations who's founders are either on trial for fraud -- that's a great word for instilling confidence in future customers and investors whether convicted or not -- or fighting extradition. CNN Money brought to you by the honest folks at Arthur Anderson.

And will they want to even put patched up players for said corporations on display for non-sponsored broadcast events like the WSOP now that every aquaintance and family member of every semi-pro in America is going to be running around saying "I told you it was illegal!" I can very much see ESPN mandating 'no patches allowed' this summer. I suppose that would depend on whether they're even going to try to restore online's image in the US and if not then they might ad well patch up for the benefit of the Euro and Canadian broadcasts.

Not that it really matters as the WSOP and a ton of other events like the Stars sponsored tours (NAPT etc) and PCA are going to take a huge hit in the turnout department without all those luckboxing mega satellite entries out of the US.

This has unbelievably huge negative ramifications even if you are still allowed to play. Marketing has probably got to cool it with the outright promotion while they go into damage control mode. I assume guaranteed tourneys are going to be chopped up into itty bitty pieces. The only thing that will probably be up in the air is the loyalty programs -- I don't know if they'll all cut back due to decreased revenue, or if they'll fight over the rest of us even harder. Mpethy did make a good point about profit margins being higher though now that they are rid of the processor fees so there might be more cash per player to go around.

Will also be interested to see the effect on training sites and how poker theory progresses without a huge portion of the contributors. This might be a good opportunity to get back ahead of the curve.

It's tough to be optimistic at this point and I think a lot of us, and especially Americans are going to need to see a glimmer of hope before pessimism isn't purely realistic speculation.

EDIT: Stars has gone ahead and adjusted (in some cases slashed) the values on their guaranteed tourneys to reflect their new target demographic in Europe.
Sunday Kickoff $50k (iirc) --> $75k for European friendly start time
Sunday Storm $250k --> $300k in the last couple weeks --> $200k
Sunday Warm Up $750k --> $500k
Sunday Million $1.5M --> $1M

Image of the day: Significant blog graph.
Spike on April 15th. Rest of the graph is a fairly representative 75-90 visitors per day and I've never had more than 120 before.

Attack On Online Poker

2011-04-15T15:10:00.017-05:00

Note: I have changed the title of this post. It was meant to be somewhat of a dry, witty remark based on the December blackout crisis, but I don't think it helps the situation considering the traffic I am receiving and the realization of how serious this actually is. I do not think this is a good time to panic. We all know what happens when people spazz withdraw en masse and I don't want to contribute to that.

3:52 EST Friday
Pokerstars, Full Tilt and Cereus have just been charged with a litany of offenses regarding fraud and money laundering. Web sites apparently seized. So far only UB's website shows the FBI warning for me although there are many Americans stating all four show this message. American players are reporting widespread notices when attempting to sit at cash tables on Stars that US government regulation is preventing them from allowing Americans to play.

From Reuters:

Prosecutors also filed civil money laundering charges seeking to recover at least $3 billion from the companies, which are all based overseas, court documents said.

Two of the men were arrested on Friday, one is expected to turn himself in to law enforcement and eight others are not currently in the United States, prosecutors said.

Raymond Bitar, 39, of Full Tilt Poker and Isai Scheinberg, 64, of PokerStars were charged with violating the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act and other laws. Absolute Poker owners Brent Beckley, 31, and Scott Tom, 31, faced similar charges.

This could actually be the end for our American friends. It might be a while because 2+2 servers appear to be completely overwhelmed and I can't navigate there with any consistency but I will update later as more information becomes available.

As far as I've seen there has been no official statement from the PPA as of yet.

4:55 EST
Just managed to get back on to the 2+2 forum homepage.
"Most users ever online: 13,237, Today at 4:31 PM."
That's as far as I got. This is huge.

5:21 EST
Managed to get back into the Leg forum shortly with no new updates.
Made a quick perusal of the 50NL FR Stars lobby. 3 Americans, each 1 tabling. I assume this is the remnant that were still playing those tables when the shit hit the fan and hadn't sat out and closed those tables yet.
15,471 on 2+2
Took a couple of screenshots off of Pokerscout traffic counter. The first is around 3:50 PM EST. The 2nd was at 5:20 PM EST.

7:30 PM EST
Played a session on Stars over the last couple of hours . American-free and the lowest number of people I've ever seen during peak Friday time. I can only imagine the feeling of dread American grinders must be going through right now knowing that this is most likely the much anticipated doomsday.

First Impression of the New American-Free Cash Games
Of course this is really preliminary and I have no idea what traffic will do once Americans are gone for a couple weeks, but it looks like us foreigners will be ok. There's a noticeable volume drop, but games were extremely good. I got crushed by a wave of ATC 2 pairs of course, but we're generally left with legitimate Euro fish and Asian half stacks. Considering that (luckily) the games are now 40bb, the current state of the game if it remains as is is tenable for those of us still able to play. If they weren't 40bb, poker would be dead at least on Stars -- read: overrun by 20bb Euro / Asian players filling 95% of the lobby with 20-50.

I think this goes to show just how many American multi-tabling TAG Supernova semi-pro seats were being taken up compared to how few American recreational seats there were. It's a sad day when the games actually appear better with Americans gone and captain hindsight can see how untenable the status quo was with the difficulties of getting money online for people that want to gamble it up and the appearance of questionable legality. It really demonstrates the need for meaningful regulation to kickstart another mini-boom in the US.

Perhaps this is the final shove needed to force US lawmakers to finally write up real regulation legislation if for nothing else than to prevent this from both going further underground and to stop the courts from filling in huge voids with their own opinions now that this fight is front and centre.

Here We Go Again: Canadian Election Primer

2011-04-04T02:02:00.006-05:00

Here's a quick primer on the quirky institution that is the Canadian political system for those non-Canadians out there. The government is dissolved and they're off to the races. Some of them have yet to realize that the gates have opened -- at least that's how much I've been paying attention, and I'm the most politically interested person I know. Thankfully we only have to listen to the rhetorical drivel and mudslinging, I mean campaign promises, for one month. This is quite merciful compared to the 18 months Americans are subjected to. This will be a bit tl;dr but you'll get a good idea of how Canada actually (de)funtions when the veil of textbook definitions and theoretical purpose is pulled away.

When are Federal Elections held? There are 3 possible situations where an election can be called:
1) 5 years since the last election.
2) If the government (governing party) decides they want one.
3) If the government is defeated on a confidence vote (must-pass bill), such as the current situation with the budget. This isn't ever an actual disagreement with the bill, it's just when the opposition thinks they are ready for an election.

Majority vs Minority Governments:
If a party wins 50%+1 seats they have a majority government. It is then their sole discretion as to when the next election is (option 1 or 2) since everyone in the party always supports the motions of confidence put in front of them because they're obviously not going to do anything that could cost them their job. If a party wins less than 50% but garners the most seats (possible in a 3+ party system) they are traditionally given a minority government where all options are possible. A third type of government is theoretically possible in a coalition which would combine their seats to create a majority. This would cause a lot of unprecedented drama (understatement).

Pros and Cons: I'll preface this with the fact that Canadians hate elections. We hate elections in winter when we have to trudge through a blizzard. We hate elections in spring when we're dealing with flooding. We hate elections in summer when we want to turn off the TV and go on vacation. We don't quite hate elections as much in fall as the kids are back to school and we're looking for some entertainment, but most would still rather watch a few episodes of the new soon to be cancelled sitcoms. Majority governments sit back and enjoy the status quo getting absolutely nothing done - don't rock the boat - but we don't have the overwhelming dread of elections around the corner. Minority governments get a lot done because the opposition is just chomping at the bit to bring them down so they have to keep up with doing what we want them to so they don't at any point look bad if at all possible.

Political Structure - From the ground up:
The way the power structure actually works in Canada is precisely opposite of the way it is laid out in terms of authority. Messed up, I know. But the thought of having it set up the 'right' way is horrifying.

Bureaucrats: In Canada bureaucrats are typically known for being huge policy wonks and are able to hold rather long term positions because of their willingness to use any playbook put in front of them. A fairly stark contrast to the rabidly partisan counterparts who get swapped out fairly quickly en masse when power changes hands in the US. I had a political science professor who always said if you want real power in Canada, don't be a politician. Be a bureaucrat. They decide how, where and when policies are implemented and enforced.

House of Commons: We elect Members of Parliament to represent us nationally in the House of Commons in Ottawa. This is considered to be the lower house, similar to the House of Representatives in the US. Everyone votes only for their local rep who is part of a national party. The party that wins the most seats becomes the government. The leader of that party becomes the Prime Minister and head of the country, kind of like if the House majority leader would become president. Geographic distribution of the 308 seats is determined by population, roughly trying to encompass 100k people per seat with one caveat. During the 1980s Quebec thought they were so special that to protect their specialness, they needed to be more special than the rest of us and held the country hostage trying to hammer out a new constitution demanding minimum 25% of all seats regardless of their relative population. This is apparently not enough, see below.

Senate: This is the upper house, meant to be a "sober second opinion" free of the ramifications of being unpopular because they are unelected but rather appointed by the Prime Minister (GG, see below). Essentially what this boils down to is a bunch of politically rewarded old guys rubber stamping every bill that comes up because they've got better things to do in their retirement. Everyone is pretty much in agreement that this needs to be abolished or turned into a regionally based elected house. That is, except for the old guys raking in a nice paycheck for nothing and the politicians losing the utility of an effective loyalty gimmick.

Governor General: The representative of the 'official' head of state, the queen. We're still part of the British Commonwealth (royal family and all that jazz) even though they couldn't be bothered with us. The feeling is mutual. What this means is that any time the Prime Minister makes some sort of traditional or formal declaration, decision or appointment, he sends it off to the GG as a 'recommendation' and she/he reads it to make it official. Imagine Barack Obama having to be a ventriloquist and whip out the Mini-Me version of the queen every time he says something formal. However the potential for the previously reffered to coalition may actually give the GG the first real, meaningful choice they've had to make in the past century as they are officially responsible for handing over governing power.

The Parties:
This is essentially a perpetual dual between the Liberals and Conservatives with a few odd people wanting to jump into the middle of the action but haven't heard that you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight. I'll rate these on a left to right 0-10 scale using the US Democrat and Republican parties as the 0 and 10 standards.

Conservatives (5):
Led by current Prime Minister Stephen Harper. General all around control freak appearing rather cold and calculating most of the time who is fairly effective at getting his message across and getting things done the way he wants. You know it's almost election time when the snapshots of sweater-wearing, piano-playing-and-serenading Steve at the Conservative Christmas party start showing up to lighten his image. Steve and the Conservatives are as far right wing as this social program loving country allows, kind of like George W. Light. This party is the phoenix of the Progressive Conservative ashes Brian Mulroney left behind combined with the ultra-right wing now defunct Refoooooorm and Alliance parties of Preston Manning who Don Ferguson does an amazingly good imitation of. Originally combined to avoid the right wing vote splitting keeping the Liberals in power, they were to be called the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CCRAP). Also known as the Tories.

Liberals (0):

Pretty much the definition of a US Democrat, considered slightly left of centre here (fun fact: English Canadians use the French spelling of center). Led by Michael Ignatieff, Cambridge / Oxford / Harvard professor known for thinking rather highly of his intellectual self. This is the party of more well known Prime Ministers such as Jean "a proof is a proof" Chretien and Pierre "just watch me" Trudeau. Also known as the Grits.

New Democratic Party (- 4):
These are your run of the mill union heroes. Current leader is Jack Layton. The very existence of this party is what prevented the Liberals from grasping a permanent majority government by splitting the left wing vote and allowing the new Conservatives to get a foothold. Kind of ironic that they're the ones giving the right wing party they ideologically despise the opportunity to form government. For that, they are eternally doomed to shout from the far side of the House and current forecasts state they don't have any reasonable chance at actually becoming the government in the next 100 years. The Bloc has more seats and a better chance at 0%. Exercises in futility repeated election after election. Insanity.

Bloc Quebecois (?):
Somewhat of a ragtag group led by Gilles Duceppe. This party only runs in Quebec. I admittedly don't know a lot about this party because of that. It's tough to say exactly what kind of ideology they represent as they tend to be supported by rural conservatives and urban unions. I do however find it odd that not only is a political group who's stated goal is the destruction of the country not charged with treason, it is welcomed with open arms into the House. Democracy at it's finest.

Current Seats

Conservative

Liberal

Bloc

NDP

There's a few other odd parties, notably the Green party who runs across the board and are obviously left wing environmental types yet to be elected to a seat, but these are the important players.

The interesting situation here is that we've been in this stalemate where we have election after election after short stints of minority government for the greater part of the last decade and everyone's getting sick of it. My suspicion is that if we get the same result again, the 3 opposition parties will be trying to catch a good public vibe on proposing a coalition majority government of Liberals, NDP and the Bloc for stability's sake as opposed to the instability of another minority Conservative government -- at least that's what they'll say to the GG. This could also easily backfire if the vibe comes down as a government no one voted for takes over by ironically installing the Separatist Bloc as the ones propping the whole thing up. We'll have to see what the 3 Stooges have in mind.

April Fools: 7am and already leveled

2011-04-01T07:24:00.004-05:00

Woke up this morning and fired up Firefox and see an unassuming line of text below a plain Google logo.

New! Gmail Motion: Turn your email into a true body of work.

I actually thought they were totally serious until I scroll down to this image and think, "You have got to be joking. I will stick with my mouse and keyboard. Idiots."

I then scrolled a bit further and realized today was April 1st. Should have realized right away after hearing about the Brett Favre nth unretirement last night.

There need to be more days when people can be stupid and creative. The world would be a better place if people would better learn to relax and how to efficiently waste time for fun's sake.

And The $60k Goes To....

2011-03-29T09:35:00.008-05:00

Pogo650 at a 5/10 Limit Table. $102k total. Congrats.

I'm just thankful it's over. These volume promotions always seem to reg infest the tables to no end. I woke up this morning and went to see if the 60 billionth hand had hit yet and they still had 2 million to go, so I quickly fired up the 50NL lobby to see minimum 5 on the waiting list for every table. No problem, I'll just start up my own tables. I play mostly stacked and was pleasantly surprised to find my tables insta-filling.

That is until I actually started playing and realized that it was every reg imaginable filling seats. I play at a lot of different hours so I've seen just about every reg there is and I think just about every one of them from every part of the planet set their alarm clock to get their 0.2% chance at 24 tabling into free money.

This was confirmed by the mass exodus that occurred on hand 60,000,000,001. Within 2 minutes there were literally 25+ tables in the lobby with one reg left on them who hadn't bothered to kill the table yet.

~~I don't really understand how Stars thinks this is a good promotion.~~ Scratch that, I do know and it's why they've set it in stone for the next 40 billion hands -- note: 40 more billion hands, once completed, will equal about 1/3 of Stars' entire existence to that point in time. That takes quite a bit of confidence and commitment from the marketing department. But what it does is irrationally motivate people like me to fire up 24 tables and play till our ears bleed trying to win the lottery while they rake the shit out of us.

But from an actual promotion point of view in terms of bringing new money to the site, it's just laughable when you constantly see some random fish, after hearing the whole spiel from the moderator, say "WTF does this mean? zzzzzzz.... [folds]."

That's kind of counterproductive considering that Stars' stated VIP program goal for this year was to simplify things. A lottery with a payout structure based on VPP rates over the last x hands (including this one), is not simple when one fifth of the table doesn't even know the difference between a VPP and an FPP or how many they're earning or why everyone's shoving or why they're being berated for the next 5 minutes by the railebirds. Deposit bonuses, small instant cash bonuses at Supernova rate, even throwing more money onto the new depositor bonus would all beat this.

This lottery promotion doesn't help improve the poker economy at all. Stars rakes in x times more than usual and redistributes some of it by throwing random token amounts at a very select few. I seriously doubt anyone is making a deposit to try to hit one of these even if they somehow knew what was going on.

Of course this post would be completely different if I wasn't so bitter about not being dealt into the 60B hand...

Stars Milestones: Here We Go Again

2011-03-21T08:43:00.008-05:00

Stars just announced the Road to 100 Billion Hands with the first stop at 60 Billion. So far I'm 0/3 with these milestone hand promotions so I thought I'd get up early and be the first one out here in blog-land to post about it and collect the ensuing good karma.

Once again, they are going with a VPP formula that encourages people to stop tables from breaking:

$50 base + ( VPPs earned in last 50 hands x $50 ) = WIN!

This means on average, most players sitting for 50 hands at a 50NL table would receive about $500 with the winner of the hand doubling that. Would be really awesome if they changed they're minds on this -- and I manage to bink one of course -- and made it the last 60 hands, then 70 hands etc. leading up to the 100 Billionth hand. So the way this is typically going to play out for those of you that haven't witnessed it before is the following:

Everyone anxiously watches and waits for the milestone to hit.
Milestone #____ is about to be played on Table _____!
All 40k cash players converge on that table, spam crashing the chat box.
The waitlist, regardless of stakes, irrationally and instantly tops 185 players.
1/3 of the table wonders wtf is going on everyone is shoving! Folds.
1/3 are mass tablers not realizing they are part of the milestone. Folds.
Everyone else shoves.
Flipfest!
Spam chat box is now filled with "LOL nice folds morans!"
Repeat

Good luck to everyone else putting in mind numbing volume trying to hit one of these in futility!

Confirmed: Saturdays Are Rigged

2011-03-19T19:08:00.000-05:00

I don't know what it is about Saturdays but the RNG seems to get replaced by the unavoidable minefield that blows up in my face again before I get a chance to catch my breath from the last one. It's like I'm just sweating every hand I shove turn with a set on a 2 tone board and praying to dodge the 4:1 which everyone else apparently knows is coming when they're getting 1.7:1 on a call.

I mean, something is seriously effed up when I flop sets with 20% of my pocket pairs and still manage to finish the day in the negative. Maybe I should be raising to all-in minus 2bb or something to find a way around the doom button.

Still positive for the month and feeling awesome about my play but it just makes me want to puke when I put in 50k hands by the 3rd week of the month and see a 1.6 bb/100 beside my 4.1 EVbb/100.

Gmail hacked

2011-03-13T03:22:00.001-05:00

My gmail account was hacked about 11 hours ago and sent out some random, obvious spam about diplomas. Thankfully they shut down my account after apparently only one email got out. I just reactivated my account now which is why this blog was down most of the day. I'm not sure if any damage was done on this blog yet so please be sure to hover links and double check your status bar to make sure everything looks legit and please let me know if you find anything out of the ordinary.

I suspect this was just a standard bot hack for spam use so most likely there wasn't a real person in my account and therefore wouldn't know I even have a blog, but I was a little freaked out when I tried looking at my blog and it was down thinking it was deleted.

Superstar Showdown: Isildur1 vs DN

2011-03-11T15:33:00.000-06:00

Just read about this on the Stars blog. I haven't really ever paid much attention to the promotional matches that FTP set up with the Durrr Challenge or Stars' Superstar Showdown aside from hearing who won while listening to the Pokercast.

This one kind of caught my attention though. Daniel Negreanu taking on Isildur1 over 5k hands on two separate days with stacks carrying over. $150k on four 50/100 tables for 15 buyins. DN has been 'practicing' playing 4 tables to get used to multi-tabling. This is what really blew me away: The face of online poker has no experience playing four cash tables where decisions need to be made 'quickly.'

Needless to say when you consider the cash game multi-tabling inexperience -- if you actually consider 4 tables to be 'multi-tabling,' granted it is HU -- combined with what appears to be a rather large skill level gap, without an extreme amount of card racking on DN's part or Blom going absolutely batshit crazy, this is going to be a bloodbath.

I mean, I like the guy's character and all (except for that rather unfortunate douchebag looking display on The Big Game wrt Robl not straddling) but there has to be some sort of other deal or staking going on here inside the promotion because I really can't see Negreanu being this illogical when it comes to burning his own money.

GL though!

Sunday Million 5th Anniversary

2011-03-06T07:46:00.012-06:00

Think I'm going to put up the cash and play this thing. I literally never play the Sunday Million because it's way outside my buyin level comfort zone but you aren't really ever going to find a $5MM guarantee at $215 so I'm going to jump on it.

{ Edit: I had a Step 2 ticket I decided to run up in the last couple hours. Step 2 was easy peasy when I decide on the 'look-like-a-fish' strat for the first few orbits which worked out nicely when I limp/call an out of nowhere JJ all-in shove with AA my first hand and run 65/20 the first 3 levels. Step 3 I managed a do-over the first time around and the second time I knocked out Stars Pro Dag Palovic to secure my seat in the Million with 3 minutes to spare. Cost me a total of $37.50 to get into the Million. GG Steps. It's looking like 50k+ entries and $10MM at this point. }

I've played one Sunday Million before going the Steps route and managed to bubble out with about 50 people left before the money iirc. Hoping some of my new found run good will carry over. I'm kind of torn on whether I want to give up 30 minutes of the Sunday Million to try to get in through the massive hyper turbo they'll be running although I suppose I could just play both and have an extra ticket if I win that.

I'm always a little amazed at the payout structure of tournaments and how top heavy they are. And these Sunday majors are of course notoriously flat compared to most. I'm quite luck/risk averse so this pretty much explains why I'm not a fan in general. I mean, 50% of the $5MM prizepool in a 25k+ person donkament goes to the final table with 9th place only getting $30k. That's messed up in my world but I suppose that's the whole point and it does bring new fish in hoping for that elusive, impossible huge score just like the corner gas station does with the lottery. My spread the wealth mentality, of course, comes from the viewpoint that my chances of making the final table are realistically 2000:1.

Good luck to everyone else playing this monstrosity!

{ Edit #2: And I'm out. Terrible table draw that just refused to break no matter how many players we went through. 60/15 and 25/20 aggrotards on my left with 3x as many chips as everyone else. And then I get this range of hands dealt to go with it: }

I need a bigger bucket

2011-03-05T20:36:00.003-06:00

Just another quick note: HUUUGE thank you to Stars for the new buyin structure / funneling fish back into my game or whatever you want to call it. I call it happiness.

Here's a snapshot of me grinding along when I get whacked upside the head with a frying pan essentially rendering me unconscious for the next 8 months:

I started a new database for 2011 and here's a graph to date. All of the upswings up until the point of exile were played on Full Tilt. All of the downswings were played on Stars. 100% of volume has been played on Stars since the exile.

Software Conglomeration Post

2011-03-05T12:14:00.000-06:00

I posted earlier this year that I was planning on doing a bunch of software reviews this year but things have changed and I've decided to write up this conglomeration of my current setup instead.

This stemmed from the fact that I was generally unhappy with my ability to find software out there that does exactly what I wanted it to do without getting something custom written up for me. My biggest issue by far was being able to get rid of bad tables and load up new ones. I wish I was an AHK pro as that would make life a lot easier. Closing tables is quite labor intensive when mass tabling considering that once you sit out next bb on a table it disappears to the bottom of the stack. Stars apparently does not see the logic in adding Sit Out and Close Next BB This Table to their play controls after it's been requested ad nauseum even though they have exactly that function to close all your tables.

I'm also currently trying out Notecaddy and I'm fairly happy with it so far. The biggest thing initially for me was the ability to take "notes" based on actions in a concise way since I basically take zero notes on my own. Up until this point my notes basically consisted of remembering how regs generally play different ranges and feeding off the game dynamic along with stats. I also can't make any sense out of taking notes like most people do by writing up what happened on xyz board with 1/2 PSB when villain was OOP and he turned a back door flush draw. That means nothing to me. Having note caddy quantify the percentage of the time this reg cbet and shutdown or that reg pot controlled a certain hand strength is much more useful to me. This is essentially my custom stat program as HEM does not have the ability to create custom stats like PT3 does. I'm still up in the air about the automatic color coding as I sometimes have to reset my colors in the Stars client and I'm not really completely sure about how I want to classify people - need to do more tweaking in this area since I only have 20% of people falling under an auto-color category.

So back to closing tables... I was obviously using the standard stuff that every grinder out there is using: Table Ninja, HEM, and a table layout manager (SaT in my case). I quite enjoyed the stacking and tiling functionality of Stack and Tile moving tables in and out of the stack based on hands where I vpip. There's also some other nice stuff out there like Placemint and a plethora of useful AHK scripts. But the ability to close specific tables efficiently was just not available.

Along comes Thois with his discontinued Table of Interest and after months and months of everyone pleading with him to sell it to them, he makes it free and unsupported. And guess what! It closes tables where I'm sitting out! Now all I have to do is Table Ninja hotkey sit out next bb target table and ToI closes it for me once that happens solving nearly all of my problems. I grabbed a simple table counter AHK off the forum, modified it to display different background colors based on how many table I have open and now I've got just about everything I need.

The only thing left on my list is something in the HUD that will tell me the quality of the table based on my own rules. Theres a lot of stuff out there that falls just short and right now I'm still relying on the old HEM table vpip/pfr averages and taking a quick look to my right.

The as of now shelved Table Retriever would have been a huge boon to opening/closing and categorizing tables based on user preferences. The beta testing on this software was very exciting in that I could automatically close tables based on number of fish or number of regs or stack sizes (my definitions of each) and their location around the table. Unfortunately it was put on hold indefinitely when Stars made the buyin structure changes and the developer decided that the vast majority of business which was supposed to come from shortstackers using it to rathole rules automatically leaving according to their own stack size and a rathole timer list would be lost. I still see a ton of value in it for automating table and seat selection for the regular grinder.

I tried out Table Scan Turbo which has a small HUD with table information. Very useful in that it has a fish on this table stat as well as a popup displaying a pretty useful table summary with player names, player type symbols and stack sizes. Not quite what I'm looking for though as a table full of bad regs might look bad when it's not. This might be worth another look as I didn't do a ton of customization.

Next I went back to the HEM HUD. Note that you can add the redundant Player Score from the HEM Scanner to the player HUD - I can see someone has a score of 5+ which indicates they're a fish according to my rules, or I could just look at their vpip/pfr which would tell me exactly the same thing. Also note that the HUD displays table vpip/pfr averages. I find it completely illogical that they have not gone ahead and added Table Score alongside table average vpip/pfr. This would actually be the most useful tool out there to gauge table quality according to my specifications. Sure Table Score is visible from the Scanner, but you can't actually close tables from there. That would be another nice feature and combined would make HEM Scanner the nuts.

So overall I'm pretty happy with my current setup and I've seen a marked improvement in my winrate now that I'm regularly table hopping in and out of 3-6 tables every 15 minutes and I feel like I'm 90% of the way towards what would be an optimal mass tabling system for me.

Things are looking up!

2011-02-27T16:03:00.003-06:00

Games have remained relatively good since the changes on Stars. Weekends have been incredibly good. It's nice to see the 60/5's coming out of the woodwork again at 50NL and 100NL. I'm back to my 3 stake range of what I consider to be my home stakes: 25NL to 100NL. I thought I'd give a quick update on each for this post.

25NL has become extremely easy and very transparent.
Nits and TAGs play their hand straightforwardly typically in a weak-tight or obviously strong way.
LAGs and maniacs over-do everything and c/c down 3 streets with 2nd pair is most likely profitable.
Everyone's showdown value+ range is extremely inelastic so go ahead and exploit the shit out of your bet sizing depending on what you want to accomplish. Note that SDV is overrated by most of 25NL.

50NL is back to not being a huge nitfest.
Nits are still set mining nits.
Some TAGs are somewhat more floaty and better postflop but they pick the most obvious spots to apply the latest epic strategy concept post.
Ranges are generally inelastic early in the hand or when the pot is small. Tops of absolute strength ranges are inelastic. Mid and bottoms of ranges are extremely elastic in large pots and on later streets.

100NL is much more of a gradual step up in terms of skill level from 50NL for the first time in recent memory. This is encouraging in that perhaps some new money is being deposited there from the former 20-50 players and hopefully money is already starting to move up.
Plays very similar to 50NL with two caveats: More preflop aggression in the obvious light 3bet and squeeze spots and regs playing stickier postflop and most likely outleveling themselves a ton.

I'm still pretty wary of the effects of the rampant preflop aggression going on even though games have improved a ton since the changes. I'm all too aware that I'm most likely wrecking the enjoyability of the game for that 30/15 20% fold to 3bet guy when I value 3bet wide with KQs and he would rather just see cheap flops to quad mine J6o and c/c down postflop to see what's going to happen with his sooted hand. I imagine this game is much more enjoyable if you can do all that fun stuff without having to stack off constantly and busto your account in a relatively small number of hands. There has to be some $/hour or $/hand value involved here and if I were them I'd be fealing kind of ripped off and frustrated in terms of entertainment value if I'm a standard fish.

In some awesome life-news, I am going to get to play pretty much full time poker for 9 months total this year. Stars is looking good again so I'm going to be putting in 95% volume there with Rush on the backburner when I want to change it up.

I'm fairly confident now that the disaster that was 2010 was:
a) instigated by the Stars changes.
b) my unwillingness to leave terrible games.
c) mounting frustration leading to perma-tilt and steady rate of spew.
d) eventually realize that in the 2010 state of the game and my 2010 progressing state of mind, I could not win at small stakes.
e) lesson: it's kind of silly to get upset and then attack people by throwing fistfuls of cash at them.

I'm back to 2 winning months in a row now. Note that before June 2010 when the Stars lobby settled down into it's rut, I had never had a losing month pre-rakeback. Between June and the end of the year, I had 4 small losing months and 2 breakeven months post-rakeback.

Post Feb 10th / Pre Server Restart

2011-02-13T13:04:00.000-06:00

20-50 is dying off slowly but surely. At stakes where it still remains, the waitlists are huge with regs trying to keep them going. At 50NL and 100NL the 100bb+ games are making up a good 60-67% of tables compared to CAP and remaining 20-50 combined. This is a very good sign as it shows a huge influx of the 20-50 crowd moving towards 40-100.

I would estimate that pre Feb 10th, it was a 3:2 ratio in favour of 20-50. It appears that would mean if the current dilution of the 20-50 player pool continues, fullstack tables should end up as a 3:1 favourite in the lobby over CAP. And CAP is still new and exciting as of right now 3 days later, that will wear off. It's also being mass tabled by a bunch of mediocre SSers who are just not going to be able to make it unless they find breakeven after rakeback enjoyable. When it's all said and done and the lobby settles down after a couple months, I'm optimistic that fullstack poker will outnumber CAP by at least 4:1 if not better. And then there's the possibility of moving CAP off into it's own tab on top of all that.

There's really only one way for me to fully describe the state of the games as of this moment. EA Sports NHL 95. That is, in a medium length memory sense relatively amazing. I've been playing 25NL and 50NL since the change waiting to get back into 100NL once things finish reorganizing and realizing winrates of 14 bb/100 and 8 bb/100. Granted small sample over only a couple days.

But the games just plain feel different. So what does my old Sega Genesis addiction have to do with describing this? I literally played NHL 95 every day after school with a passion for running a 2.5 goal per minute average because the goalies were just not programmed fast enough and wrap around to the far side using a backhand shot or sending a pass + one time shot from the crease line to my slightly far side centre were 95% sure things. I literally ran up 12k goal seasons like it was my job and was disappointed at games with less than 120 goals and non-shutouts were unthinkable.

That is how I feel right now when playing. I am becoming somewhat disappointed if my winrate for 25NL drops below 12 bb/100 and go into stack a donk mode to get it back up there. It's been a very long time since I could bet/bet/shove my QJ on J76xx for value and find multiple 88/20s on fullstack tables during the same session. We have seemingly stepped through the worm hole leading back to 2007. But all of us average regs are now monsters compared to what a good reg was back then considering what we've had to endure and the amount we've had to learn over the past year just to survive.

My current state of mind: slightly cautious, overly optimistic, feeling like Aaron Rodgers scrimaging with 14 year olds.

February To Do List

2011-02-07T05:01:00.005-06:00

HU4rollz?

OK, time to actually put in some serious work and get things back together. I got my CardRunners renewed this week and started watching a bunch of videos. I downloaded everything iPod compatible that wasn't MTT stuff, sat down at work this weekend and just started watching.

First video I watch because the title sounds like maybe it's about me and I'm a little vain: The New Poker Climate. Topic: The Death of the Lazy Grinder. It is about me! Discussion centers around running around with the biggest bucket you could find catching money falling from the sky 5 years ago vs 5 regs scrapping over every last dollar in the random fish's account now and how damn hard you better work if you want to stick around.

Second video, 13 Scariest Leaks. It's a Halloween comedy special and has some good back to basic information in it. This is now my go-to video if I feel my mindset starting to slip back into the FPS, they're playing back, general out leveling myself paranoia. I've played 2 rather long sessions after this while being sleep deprived with a total of 7 hours passed out in the last 72 (which is when I monkey tilt super easy), with very little beat induced tilt and the few times I was about to lose it I caught myself, said you better stop or you have to quit. Huge accomplishment.

On Deck, Mount Micro 2011 and A Little R&R.

Some things I want to work on this month so I can feel like I accomplished something:

Revamp my colour coding system - colour coding by TAG, LAG, nit, fish etc is redundant to my HUD.
Delete notes file and colour coding and actually start taking useful notes. No more auto-pilot.
The above is going to require fewer tables - Feb 10th = 6-8 tables of 50NL and 100NL on Stars or 4 Rush tables.
Post session review: pick the 2 regs I saw most during my sessions for a day and create battle plans in HEM.
Keep watching videos. Minimum of 3 per week. Take the good basic stuff out of them and do not apply the fancy shit unless I am positive it's against a level 2 or 3 reg that actually knows what's going on.
Pick up volume pace post-Feb-10th. FTP Black Card is currently on pace. Stars Supernova maintenance is a bit behind.

I've been pretty swingy in both my mindset and my results. Everything seems to be going great and then I run into one of those disaster sessions. That said, if I can manage to keep the tilt monster locked up, I can easily reduce the losses in those < 35% W$SD sessions to about one third of what they are now. And losing less is the same as profiting.

Still sitting on the fence wrt Stars vs FTP right now as I'm enjoying Rush more and more and seeing that it's the best of both mass tabling and focus oriented worlds. Still completely hate that they make me play a set minimum per day and can see myself falling into the having to buy Iron Days trap.

Countdown to Stars Christmas is on.

Stars vs FTP Value Tracker

2011-02-01T13:57:00.008-06:00

Note: Those that downloaded before 6:30pm EST today, please re-download as I found a few bugs.

While I'm waiting to decide on whether to go back to Stars or not, I thought I should get a start on Full Tilt's Iron Man and Black Card statuses. I'll make my final decision once I see the layout of Stars' player pool after the 20-50 tables are gone.

So in the meantime I wanted to actually see the differences and made myself a spreadsheet to track my earnings and bonus value on both sites. There are 3 sheets in the excel file: Stars, FTP, and combined with a number of entries to help you track your value. Yes, some of this can be tracked in your HH tracker database, but I think it's interesting to see how your bonus value and effective rakeback % moves based on how much volume you play and which bonuses you receive over time in the Rakeback to Month End column.

I've highlighted the cells in the screenshot which you'll want to use to enter data. The rest have formulas. I kind of suck at creating a locked working document for download so I've left everything unlocked. I've added my data sans winnings to give you an idea.

It currently calculates FPP value based on your regular bonus -- $1.5k for 100k FPP = $0.015/FPP. I also have a calculation for Full Tilt Point value if you buy Black Card cash bonuses although I assume you would just leave those points blank if you're not BC. I'm not all that familiar with the FTP VIP program yet and there seems to be a lot of variability in the value of medals so I just left a spot to enter direct $ for those under Other Bonuses. I assume you might have to manually adjust the Other Bonus tab to account for MGR hits. I'll hopefully update this as I get a better grasp of the FTP program.

Value Tracker Excel File
Enjoy!

Beginning of the end...

2011-01-27T11:26:00.008-06:00

... of shortstackers playing No Limit Hold Them. CAP Tables have arrived! I had just posted my speculation that 20-50 is on the way out due to seeing CAP in the lobby when I hop on over to the zoo and find that it is in fact completely true and confirmed by Steve! I am ecstatic.

20-50 games will no longer be offered and are going to be phased out between February 10th and the next server restart. NLHE tables (including Euro tables) will be 40-100 bb and label free along with 100-250 labeled as deep. They also blatantly said that CAP may be moving to it's own tab. Also great news considering it's as different to NLHE as Limit is. Also really great news is that there is no CAP at 25NL and below and everything is 40+ bb down there which should help make games juicier, cost less in rake, and help money move up.

Interesting addition: NLO Hi/Low 6max.

Thank you PokerStars. I am going to finish out the month at Full Tilt and will be back on Stars in February to see the last 20-50 tables die off before the server restart.

LOL Scamaments

2011-01-27T03:12:00.012-06:00

Well I've had a wonderful month getting scammed so far. 3 times in fact.

1. I'm channel surfing this evening during a commercial while watching Storage Wars and the headline on CNN AC360 shows 9/11 Coin Scam. This is of course the last scam of the month (so far) and I'm thinking here we go again. A few years back my mother in-law bought each of us one of those 9/11 commemorative coins that apparently had real gold and silver from ground zero.

Sure enough, Anderson has the NYPD officer in charge of recovering the silver and gold in the basement and he says there is absolutely no way that these specific coins are in any way real. Lawmakers are currently trying to get the FTC to shut down this company. I don't feel so bad now about being such a klutz and insta-dropping mine on the floor when it was handed to me which in turn caused the case to crack open and the contents to spill everywhere which caused the hinge on the piece that stands up off the coin to break. It all makes sense now.

2. I bring my car in to repair a coolant leak and get my sparkplugs and wires replaced. Yes how could you guess that a car repair scam would be in this list? I was not entirely shocked when the first option on the Better Business Bureau website complaint form was Car Repair. I'm quoted $350. I drive my car to the shop at 11am and I'm told it should be ready in a couple hours. 5pm I give them a call.to see what's up since they close at 5:30pm. They had some unexpected issues (thanks for calling to let me know), and I can stop by at 6pm to pick it up. So I show up and oh guess what, they tell me there was a gaping hole in the coolant manifold and that the attached pulley system was broken. +$550 and an extra $100 tax for an easy $1k total. I sense bullshit and want to check this out and say "No problem, I'll pay it with my online bills at the end of the month." I'm told they don't do online bill payments and I need to pay now before my car leaves. Now alarm bells are going off because I distinctly remember paying the last 4 oil changes and a wheel alignment online. My car has become a hostage for ransom.

$1k debited from my account and I immediately check this out with someone that knows better than me what's going on. Turns out my car is incapable of physically driving if the pulley system was in fact broken. Don't know how I got it there in the first place. I also get to hear a story about how this person's friend had his interior door panel broken, crazy glued back together, and then told it was like that when it was brought in. $650 lesson going to the scam artists that are officially licensed dealers that are charging 2x for parts and labour and then scamming you on top of that. Should have waited for my regular small shop guy to have the time to look at it.

3. I get home from work just before Christmas and my wife says there was a guy there canvasing the area for donations. He's from a local church and his kid is going on a trip to the Caribbean to help build a school or something. I don't know why the kid isn't doing the canvassing himself (or why he's canvassing at all as I later found out they live in a house 3x as big as mine and drive several vehicles per person). I instantly say "lol you got scammed," she says "lol that's what I joked with him about."

It wasn't a scam at all. The deal was he sells us gift certificates for the local grocery store and the grocery store gives them 10% of the sales. We shop there anyways so whatever, here's your $60 for my groceries this week. Yes after thinking about it we realized that was a measly $6 and why he was saying people down the street donated $500. So he takes down name and address for cash. My wife is standing there waiting for a receipt and he says "Sorry, no receipts." He says he'll be back by the end of the week once the store prints out the certificates and insta-leaves.

Two weeks later, nothing. We phone the church to see if this guy was for real. Indeed he is and the certificate is on the way. Two weeks later, nothing. Another call to the church and the guy shows up instantly at my door. Not with my certificate, but with his address chart and a check mark beside our address indicating that in fact, we do have our certificate. Gee I must have just totally forgotten about receiving it, that kind of thing happens every day. You'd think they'd at least get people to initial it, but no. They distinctly remember dropping it off at my house and handing it to a 40-50-ish year old woman. lolwut we're late 20s? "Well it must have been your babysitter." Babysitter lolwut? (we're looking for a 40-ish year old babysitter but they do not exist btw) And he takes off after a thinly veiled comment indicating that he thinks we're lying.

Another call to the church asking wtf is going on and they say "Oh that sucks, we'll fix it up and buy you some gift certificates as our blessing." Our response was "Seriously? You think we're scamming you and that we already have them and need another $60?" The guy is back at my door in a half hour with $60 in certificates which he or the church obviously bought just now. We basically tell him to gtfo with his blessing at which point he says "Well can I at least give you half?" He honestly thinks we're scamming him and he's doing us a favour. Sigh, gtfo. I'm just thankful we didn't give him $500 cash.

Oh, the suspense...

2011-01-23T15:31:00.032-06:00

I'm anxiously waiting for buyin changes at Stars just like everyone else I'm sure. It's now the 23rd and I have yet to hear anything 100% concrete. There's a lot of extremely solid favourable rumours going around but at this date it's starting to feel like the Reid bill... it's absolutely going to happen... wait... wait... maybe won't happen... time drags on with deadline approaching...

From what I understand, Stars does their server restarts on Wednesdays which I would think means that the changes will be implemented then and the last Wednesday is this coming 26th. That is unless they allow people to finish out the month and roll out new tables on the 31st with the old "20-50 tables will remain until they close or until the next server restart."

The pending anxiety over all this is actually fairly encouraging. I mean, they wouldn't really plan on having no changes and be slow rolling us this whole time would they? Anyone with half a brain would just come out and say "no changes" immediately if their was a done deal decision about no changes.

I was reading through the post I made shortly after the original changes. Mine and others' suggestions to make the current arrangement tenable were seemingly ignored. 40-50 bb overlap was never removed. Appropriate labelling or color coding was never implemented. The lobby is still the complete mess that it was on day 1 although they did add filters but this does't really help when new players are looking at a wall of 1 mirrion tables.

Fingers crossed for Wednesday. After that I'm going to start becoming desperate.

Home Game

Finally made it out to my regular home game for the first time in ages. There's a new guy there which is always fun trying to figure someone out. He comes luckboxing out of the gate and wins 4 stacks within the first hour -- we manage to get in maybe 20 hands an hour given the conversation and people not realizing action is on them. 3 flushes and a fullhouse later he's sitting 250bb deep (yes we start at 50bb stacks, lame). So I obviously rebuy because my 2 pair get it in on the flop is no good vs this guy. He's also fairly obnoxious and getting under everyone elses' skin. I like him already.

People show up and we get 8 handed. I nearly lose another stack when Q8o is no good vs A4o on Q84r. We also have a minimum rebuy rule where you can't rebuy until you're down to 20bb -- also lame. 22bb left sees me over limp J9o on the BTN with 5 limpers plus the blinds who obviously complete/check. Flop KJ9ss. Jackpot. 16bb in the pot and UTG bets 2bb, 4 players call and now the pot is 26bb. I ship for giggles and get called in 3 spots. Turn 9 omg. River 9 zomg for the super fullhouse and I hold against AK, K3 and TT and I'm finally deepstacked. I'm dealing and everyone says lol-rigged.

Deepstacked play means I can now limp literally every hand and virtually run 100/0 for the rest of the night. There is no such thing as an isolation raise in this game because you don't want to be that guy that doesn't let people hit hands and have fun and see flops and showdowns plus everyone's calling anyways. Obnoxious new guy is probably not getting invited back because he's firing out 8 bb into 12 bb pots with bottom pair in position "because everyone checked that's why." He eventually gets his ATo in vs KTss on AQJss, I say weeeeee royal draws, turn is a blank, river the guy hits the As and the room erupts.

Fun night and I end up +650 bb after 6 hours.

Don't be a fool, stay in school!

2011-01-17T03:43:00.013-06:00

This is apparently the logical advice spouted from the masses every time a college athlete decides to pursue a professional career before finishing their senior year. "Get your degree so you have something to fall back on in case it doesn't work out." Seems like common logical sense. I never really paid attention to this thought until I was reading about Heisman winner Cam Newton planning to skip his last year and reading the mass response of how stupid he is for doing it. The stay in school crowd is wrong and here's why:

To get the most obvious part of the fallacy out of the way, and this is true no matter who you are, school will always be there to go back to. You can pick up in the same spot you are now (maybe a few refresher courses in the mix). College doesn't disappear forever the day you enter the draft.

So what kind of a measurement do you need to gauge whether to temporarily drop out of school or not? Opportunity cost. For 99.999% of people, the lost opportunity cost of leaving school without their degree makes staying in school a good decision. The number of years you decide to take off is exactly how many years you are going to be behind on the career seniority and pay scale ladder along with potential missed opportunities down the road due to being lower on the ladder (although the degree related job itself will generally be there for the foreseeable future). Essentially, you're passing up your long term implied odds.

College athletes, however, are facing a reverse implied odds situation because their job may not be there in the future due to the possibility of running into a career ending injury before they even get there. If you would be offered the choice of staying in school vs a million dollar professional contract, how low would the chance of injury in your senior year have to be to turn down the million dollars now? Even a 3 to 5% chance -- which I think is accurate considering how many 20 year careers are out there -- resulting in an EV of degree + $950k 1 year later vs EV of $1MM now is too high. The degree is certainly not worth $50k especially when you consider the utility of $1MM nevermind the potential implications of tens of millions of dollars in the future and the opportunity itself being extremely rare. The degree in comparison is relatively worthless considering the assumption that you can always go back if things don't work out while having a mountain of money to fall back on. This is essentially a reverse opportunity cost situation.

Analogy:

I'm in my dorm spinning in a chair taking props on how long until I pass out. The prop on how many Big Macs I can eat while doing this is already over. In walks Bill Gates looking for smart people. I don't know what he's doing here. He says "Hey, you would be an interesting sideshow for my employees. How about I pay you $100k to knock yourself out for the next year?"

My degree is going to get me an entry level job at $80k with a pay scale range upwards of $250k within 8 years. So I tell him to gtfo since I can't pass up my career opportunity cost. If instead, Bill Gates walks in and offers me 1 billion dollars with additional info that he will find someone more ridiculous than me in the next year 10% of the time, I say I will spin 24 / 7 / 365 starting now while passed out even if there's a 40% chance I die in the process, no problem. This indicates that at some point in between those offers, this becomes an easy decision because of the fact that I'm being offered the utility of life changing money that may not be there in the future.

Moral of the Story:
If you're ever faced with a situation where you're being offered guaranteed life changing money now with any chance of reduced future prospects if you defer, don't be an idiot. Take it now. If you're on Deal or No Deal with $800k, $400k and $1 cases left being offered $350k by the banker, don't be an idiot and say "Well my EV is $400k No Deal!" Take the money. You're not running this twice and you only get to play this hand once in your lifetime. If you're a college athlete being offered a pro contract before graduation, take the money.

Finishing your accounting degree so you have an $80k 9-5 to fall back on while adding 5% risk to your million dollar contract plus future earnings is just plain stupid. On the flip side, taking the million dollars now so you have a million dollars to fall back on in case you have to go back to that $80k 9-5 is perfectly logical. Common logic applies to common situations. Uncommon situations require you to actually think.

This is somewhat ironic because common situations are actually relatively close decisions while uncommon situations are very easy but apparently counter-intuitive to a lot of people.

Taking a Break - Adventures in e-Commerce

2011-01-12T09:01:00.006-06:00

I hadn't even realized this but I've been taking a break from playing. There isn't much poker content here but if you want to read about a day in the life of a website installation noob this is for you. I didn't really intend to not play, but I've been working on getting my wife's online store up and running for the past few days and really haven't put any hands in. I do have a bit of Photoshop and HTML / CSS coding experience but I just don't see how anyone that's not charging an outrageous fee -- and by outrageous I mean completely reasonable considering the amount of work -- could be bothered to make a site from scratch with all the cheap templates out there and the infinite possibilities of php includes.

So they obviously pick a nice template that runs on the open source Prestashop engine. By the way, I have zero experience when it comes to setting up e-commerce. The engine is still fairly buggy in my opinion and working in the back office is not at all intuitive nevermind the structure making me say "huh?" more than enough times and the fact that my template of course uses undocumented workarounds for things as simple as changing the logo. Thankfully it's as simple as jumping over to the template site's live chat and having them think I'm a moron to get this figured out. By the time I'm done, I'm fairly sure they are going to be running close to 0EV on selling me this.

My current project is shipping. Their "stable" version does not have product specific shipping. lolwut? Yeah the engine will pick shipping rates for you based on weight or price ranges. Oh but product specific pricing is in version 1.4 beta! Download beta --> update --> template implosion --> delete --> re-install --> try again --> implosion. Note that each step here takes a good 30 minutes due to FTP moving like 5k files. So what to do? Workaround! I figure I can set a "weight" as shipping price indicator rather than actual weight. 1 kg = $1, 2kg = $2, 3kg =$3. Easy game.

FTP... ranges... things that make you shake your head in disbelief... maybe there is some poker content in there. That said, I am thoroughly enjoying it and having an "a ha!" moment for every few hours of hair pulling frustration makes me happy.

Poker

I've been messing around with some shortstacker maths trying to get inside their heads. I know I know. Why would I ever want to get inside their heads. Well in case Stars does something crazy like not change the structure and I in turn do something crazy like stay there, I want to know what makes these guys tick.

It's become abundantly apparent to me that good shortstackers' shove ranges are extremely tight some of the time while having ATC some of the time. My goal is to figure out when is when based on opener's range, calling range, dead money and shorty's stack size. It's starting to make a lot of sense to me and while they all vehemently deny playing off a hand chart, I think for the most part you could easily play off of a situation chart. Granted there are more situations than most people would realize and something as simple as having 5bb more in your stack can cut your shove range in half or more for some of them.

Quotes of the Day

2011-01-10T00:02:00.013-06:00

I was listening to the 2p2 Podcast from a few weeks back and they had Alan Boston on with a quick lesson on leveling. Quite an entertaining interview if you want to go check it out (#150). A day in the sports-betting life followed by a few interesting Stud hands followed by a few comments on Stu Unger.

"The kids, when you'd see 'em have it all-in and neither one of them would have anything playing heads up and you understand that they know well he didn't have to have anything for his 3bet so I don't have to have anything for my 4bet. Well I know he 4bets light so let me shove on 'em with nothing and I know he shoves light because he knows I 4bet light so I'm calling. I used to laugh at it but now I understand it. That's how all that money would end up in there and neither one of them would have anything. It's all perfectly logical."

In forum entertainment, there was some discussion between Fullstacks and Shortstacks on what a good winrate is when along came this little gem:

"Also, you claim 3bb winrate is not good. You realize that that's 15% of the effective stacks, right? If a 100bb player was winning 15bb/100, would you tell them their winrate was crap?... I'm pointing out that if you have only 20bb to work with, then 3bb/100 is good. You're generating 1.5 buyins per 1000 hands. If a fullstacker was generating 1.5 buyins per 1000 hands, you'd wet your pants in praise.

... It should be blindingly obvious that part of what impacts your winrate is the game you're playing. "Good" or "bad" winrate doesn't just apply across all games and stakes. What could be a"good" winrate for a high stakes badugi player is very different than what a "good" winrate for a micro NLHE player would look like."

I was wtfbbq'd into submission and have been summarily informed that SSers use effective winrates where the formula for quality of winrates is WR(fs) = WR(ss)*5. Yes that's right. A SSer winning 3 bb/100 is the same thing as a fullstacker winning 15 bb/100, bb = bb and $ = $ be damned. This is validated by the fact that SSers are playing CAP Holdem, a very different game than No Limit Holdem just as high stakes Badugi is very different from micro NLHE. 3 bb/100 is a good winrate if you're playing CAP.

In other news, Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit!

* I apologize to any SSers reading this blog. Nothing personal. I am frustrated with structures and don't have any other outlet besides this blog so I have to vent now and then.

And one more from the old blog spam-box:

"This whole information is absolutely interesting. I like the new ideas raised in this blog really impressive, in the line way I like the design and the the way it was written. buy viagra"

"Update: Changes to ring game min/max buy-ins, if any, will be announced and implemented by the end of January."

2011-01-09T00:25:00.004-06:00

That's the word from Pokerstars Steve. Here's how I see this situation:

If they are not making changes, I would think the logical thing to do would be to announce that there's no changes rather than leading us on and on. We've gone from (paraphrase) "We're taking our time making important decisions," to "Changes (if any) by the end of January." That sounds like a decision. Cycle back to the first sentence of this paragraph.

So now that the speculation train is full speed ahead there's a few possible outcomes based on the most important issues people brought up. I'm leaving out deep games since they hardly run anyways:

1. 40-100 games are dead
2. 20-50 is a rake machine
3. 40-50 overlap is bad
4. SSers playing CAP in an NL game

Scenario 1: 20-100 only
Fixes problems 1, 2 and 3... sort of
Now we're all the way back in 2000-something before the introduction of 50bb min games. Let the rathole complaints resume. Note that games do improve from their current state -- until the army of SSers that have been banished from applying their edge against 100bb-wider ranges everywhere else around the world descends on Stars like a flock of red-winged blackbirds.

Scenario 2: 40-100 and 20-50 with lower 20-50 rake
Fixes problem 2
This would most likely be feasible and the same complaints would continue but I think a lot of smart full stack regs would adapt to the much more beatable 20-50 depending on exactly how much they lower rake. Expect 40-100 regs to start new complaint that their rake should be lowered as well, which only makes sense given that in both cases it's skill edge that's declining but for different reasons.

Scenario 3: 35-100 and CAP
Fixes problems 1, 2, 3, and 4
This would be ideal -- or some variant of 30+ min to 70+ max. CAP players playing CAP. NL players playing NL. And like I said in the 2011 VIP Changes thread, after the fish fall where they may and if CAP becomes popular when it's labeled as CAP then I will say goodbye Stars, gg SSers, NL is no longer the game of choice. But at least I will know that CAP is what the fish actually wanted to play and that they weren't being tricked into playing CAP when they thought they were playing NL and I was wrong all along.

Scenario 4: 20-50 and 40-100 No Change
Cycle back to my migraine.

Scenario 4: 20-50 and 40-100 and CAP
Further segmentation.

Fingers crossed.

2011 Software Reviews

2011-01-07T08:57:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been looking around at a bunch of software out there designed to automate many of the chores involved with playing online poker. What I've found so far has been absolutely great. There are a lot of very talented poker players / programmers out there that understand the grinder's issues and headaches and have come up with a bunch of ways to reduce mouse clicks and stress to let you have more time for decisions and save energy.

You'll notice I've rearranged the blog a bit and it's slightly wider to make room for the improved sidebar. I've added a Software I Use section and I'll start adding the software I have continued to use on a day to day basis to that list as my reviews roll in.

Decisions give me headaches

2011-01-05T17:01:00.018-06:00

2011 has started off as a literal migraine. I'm not really sure what to do. I have so many options, but they all seem to suck:

Stars 20-50 small stakes FPP pro with very marginal winrates
Stars 40-100 small stakes FPP pro with reg infested tables
Stars 40-100 micro stakes UGL at 25NL
Euro sites with good winrates but beyond horrible software
FTP with a scummy changed rakeback deal

Stars 20-50 small stakes
Games are decent but winrates are low with reduced skill edge to add to the CAP shove/fold game that the 20bb stacks insist on mixing into an NL game.

Stars 40-100 small stakes
I have never seen more reg infested tables in my life. This is unsustainable and regs are going to eat each other alive until there's nothing left. Additionally I have never seen this many regs moving down which I think is clear evidence of what's going on.

Stars 40-100 micro stakes
Maybe I need to just move down and make some money as well. I seem to have a small edge at 50NL. I have a large edge at 25NL. I can probably beat this game for a decent clip.

Euro Sites
Tried out a short stint on RPM on the Merge network. The software makes me think that pulling out my teeth with pliers for donations on Youtube would be a more viable option. Granted Merge isn't really a Euro site since it accepts Americans, but it has Euro site software and I was quickly reminded of why no one plays there even with great rakeback. I found it difficult to follow action on 6 tables and the betting section of the GUI is pretty much the opposite of how it should be designed -- it has way too many buttons that are spread out over a large area requiring a ton of mouse movement and avoiding misclicks shouldn't be a chore. I also found it extremely annoying just trying to get tables going even against the same 5 bad regs on every one.

FTP
Games are decent from what I can tell but the rakeback hit is enormous if you consider me coming from my 42% 2x Supernova down to an estimated 22-25% + Iron Man. I also don't like the idea of being chained to my computer 25 days a month. Yes I play that many days a month, but eff them if they think they get to make that decision. I'm starting to realize why even the good LAGs haven't seen a benefit from the weighted contributed shenanigans since they end pots early and play a ton of small ball. It's only the calling stations that are seeing any "benefit" from this but unfortunately they don't have rakeback and I have to assume Howard's stacking bills in his basement laughing hysterically at everyone.

What to do?
It looks like my best options are to either beat 25NL 40-100 or to FPP pro 100NL 20-50. In terms of my mental state, 25NL might be the better option. In terms of winnings + bonus, the 20-50 games are going to provide more but with a much bigger headache than the relative ease of micros. I'm so undecided. I just know that I'm addicted to Stars software to the large detriment of the other options. Plus they suck you right into that annual program so that once you have made it, you can't give it up because it was a damn lot of work getting there.

If I started a new site...
I think the following system, while not optimal in short term profits, would still be profitable and keep the majority of people happy. It's my opinion that all of the overhead with servers and security and support staff pales in comparison -- by far -- to the net profits of any large site out there. My wish list for JH1 Poker in case anyone wants to donate 6 figures to help me start it up (btw on a serious note, here's to hoping the community run open source project actually takes off if for no other reason than to force this price fixing stalement back into competition):

Rake: 4bb cap at 50NL and lower. $3 cap at 100NL and higher. Keep it stake relevant. Money needs to flow up the ladder. The current state of things really dilutes the poker economy and people are forced into playing the same stakes way too long to build their BR because the rake is tough to overcome when the games get tougher. You can't call 10bb rake in a 200bb pot at 25NL and lower anything but highway robbery. No one noticed when you had droolers calling down with J high. Lower rake would be a shot in the arm to boost the economy and would at least be a bandaid until sites were able to effectively recruit brand new players again. Static rake with declining skill edge is a recipe for disaster. At some point the game will become unbeatable and I think people are starting to realize it will be long before the game is solved and everyone plays game theory optimal solely because the rake is too damn high.

Structure: I do think that the argument that 100bb poker has too much of an edge over fish has some validity. They want to see flops and all the regs out there complaining about shortstackers are doing exactly the same thing and making shortstacked postflop scenarios with their rampant 3-betting in 100bb games. Everyone knows that preflop sizing dictates how big the game plays. Lowering the max buyin lowers effective SPR. Lower SPR makes it less correct to fold thus regs will have to scale back wide 3-betting as they have less room to maneuver. That said, I also strongly believe that the argument that fish bleed slowly at 100bb poker is true in that they can win a large pot to keep themselves going for hours compared to winning a small pot at 20-50 that gives them a few more orbits. 20bb needs to be stuffed into its CAP game place. From a skill/luck ratio, I don't know if the remaining NL game should be 30-100 or 40-100 or 30-70. I would be fine with any of these and I would hire someone smart to figure out the correct ratio. All I know is 20bb min is too low and 50bb max is too low while 100bb max may be too high.

Max Tables: I would actually consider lowering this quite a bit. I would want to see actual reg:fish ratios in the site's database to make a decision but it should generally result in at least 6.5:2.5 FR and 4.5:1.5 6max. I'm going to take a wild guess that 12 tables would be way better than 24.

Rakeback: I'm kind of torn on whether the VIP system to make people work for their bonus is better than straight up rakeback. The former is better to keep fish playing longer. I will forever remember the guy on my right at a 50NL table that burned through $250 to clear the last $40 of his bonus and had a VPP countdown going in chat. The latter is perceived to be better from a grinder's point of view although I think in reality they benefit equally either way and just have to wait a bit -- I mean, they're playing anyways. Stars VIP program is fairly linear although I might flip it around and offer more rewards to the bottom to keep them feeding the pool like reload bonuses and faster/better bonuses.

State of the community
I've never seen the informed poker community in this much disarray. Everyone seems pissed off at someone. Shortstackers and fullstackers sniping at each other like never before. Fullstackers vs Stars. Everyone vs FTP. It kind of feels like the sites have gone all out for bottomline and to hell with their loyal customers who complain but are met with a wall of silence or stonewalling. You all need to get back to keeping people happy.

*************

Poltical Sidenote: I had to restart my PC after posting the above (SplitSuit's comment below is on the state of the community) so I sat down and watched some Parker/Spitzer on CNN. I happened to jump into the middle of Spitzer's interview with Alec Baldwin and I was kind of blown away by how well-informed and in tune he seemed to be with regular people and the state of the middle class, especially considering the fact that he accurately described how 22 years of the US being run by out of touch Yale and Harvard grads has had a significant effect on the middle class. When asked, "How do we know you're not just acting?" he responded with a fairly profound statement implying that the American public is not given enough credit for being able to read people. I have no idea what his ideology is but he sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about so I just subscribed to his blog and am eager to read through it.

200k VPP Tomorrow

2010-12-29T00:27:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow's my last day. Finally. It's been a very tough grind since I decided in early November to get to work on reaching 200k VPP, I believe I had about 145k at the time. I was starting to lag behind last week so I decided I needed to increase my VPP production since I am fairly burned out and the thought of putting in more volume per day than I have been was just gross. Played some 100NL FR with some mixed results, not terrible but I hated the larger dollar swings.

Then I decided to switch it up and mass table 6max. 20-50bb 6max. What a gong show. The variance is actually kind of low ime, which is weird since people are absolutely terrible and willing to get it in a lot. It is very refreshing to bet/bet/shove your TPTK for value again. I mean you can't really go wrong shoving turns against half-half stackers.

Also fixed a lot of my game the past few days using a fancy poker program I call a calculator. It's free, just search your computer for calc.exe. Started punching in numbers in terms of required success frequencies and came out with some very obvious answers. Of course I've known for a very long time that aggression doesn't have to work often and that's why it wins, but it has always seemed very counter-intuitive to me for some reason. I said enough is enough, just do it. And it works! Still selective aggression obviously. But there's a lot of spots that go under selective.

I have 800 VPP to go and should finish it up tomorrow. Or the next day if I slack off. It's another 3 hours of play basically and I've been doing 4 hours per day. Today was extremely fun. Aggression got me the following results: + mucho Sklansky bucks, lots of 6max 50bb reg beration for doing apparently stupid things and skydive without a parachute off the EV cliff to end the day. I'm so happy about being finished with this race that I'm finding a lot of things funny again.

Still deciding on 2011. No official announcement from Stars on buyin structures. The 2011 VIP thread was apparently for announcing the non-changes to the loyalty program while, to paraphrase Stars' rep in that thread "buyin issues will be dealt with separately." Like Stars is actually going to set off the bomb to start another flame war between short and full stacks to announce they aren't changing anything.

I've noticed my blogroll over on the right hasn't updated in a lot of cases, which is completely understandable as blogs typically come and go as does motivation to write. I won't remove anyone since they're still good reads, but I am looking to add some fresh content so if you'd like to do a blog link exchange send me a message here or on 2p2.

Happy New Year everyone! Good Luck in 2011!

lol Poll Spinaments

2010-12-19T15:51:00.005-06:00

I was just reading an article on CNN headlined "Bad News for Palin" in which a new poll stated that 6/10 Americans would not consider voting for Palin. I'm personally not for or against her as I haven't really paid much attention to her policies. My initial impression in 2008 was that she was a bit of a gimmick, and my 2nd impression is based on the only episode I watched of Palin's Alaska in which she seemed like that loud relative that is often out of line but is someone you can depend on to stick up for you when you're in trouble.

Anyways, I just found the spin on the poll results to be kind of silly. I'm going to round this to make it simple. 6/10 said they would not consider her. 3/10 said they would consider her. 1/10 said they would definitely support her. This is apparently bad news for Palin if you believe the media. I'm no statistics or poll expert but a little bit of rational logic works wonders here.

Assumptions to keep this simple:
The US is 50/50 Republican and Democrat
All Democrats said they would not consider her.
All people that said they would consider her are Republicans.

If 50% of the no consideration results are Democrats, that means the remaining 10% are Republicans that would not consider her. Lets then break down the Republican vote which will double the remaining numbers to total 100% of the (R) vote:

20% will not consider her.
60% will consider her.
20% will definitely support her.

Now maybe the general US population has not been exposed as much to the effect of splitting the vote among multiple candidates as we are here in Canada with 4 major parties and 1 or 2 legitimate fringe parties which lets you form majority governments with less than 50% of the vote, but these poll results are hardly bad news when you consider the number of candidates in the primaries.

Lets say there are 10 candidates that make it to the debates. Her 20% definite support alone is double her fair share. If she were then to receive only her fair share of the 60% considering her, she'd be sitting at 26% of Republican support. This definitely puts her into contention when you split the vote. If she were to receive no extra share of support from the 60% considering her, she would still have more than her share of total support until they were down to 4 people due solely to the 20%. 25% can put you in the top three vs two other 25% support candidates with the remaining 25% split up between a number of long shots.

So already, 2 years before the election, she's already ahead of, if not leading, the pool of Republican candidates. And in the end if she were to win the nomination, it's most likely those 20% of Republicans that said they would not consider her would suck it up to prevent a Democrat from winning, or at least not vote at all, it's not like those 20% are ever going to vote (D).

No one would say, wow Phil Ivey only has 5% of the chips at the final table of the WSOP, yet he's estimated to win 20% of the time, that's terrible news for him. Contrary. That's great news for him. Yes it's true that Phil Ivey and Sarah Palin will both not win the majority of the time. That holds true for all politicians as a whole. The majority will lose most of the time in races when there's one seat and more than 2 people running for it. Simple math.

Kind of reminds me of the financial 'experts' they put on the news saying XYZ stock is probably going to drop today. They base their analysis on the fact that the stock is expected to drop 70% of the time. They then go on to ignore the pertinent fact that if it drops 70% of the time and loses 10% of it's value, but goes up 30% of the time and gains 100% of it's value, it's a better bet to buy it than not due to expected value. Of course the experts are more concerned with appearing right most of the time than actually saying something right most of the time.

I find it odd that these are the people that we let govern mainstream thought and public discourse. Whether through shear ineptitude or outright playmaster spin they somehow always make statistics and polls say whatever they want them to say, even if it's exactly the opposite of reality.

Variance: Disillusioned

2010-12-14T14:39:00.001-06:00

My test-pro project is coming to an end. My goal was to be able to consistently win and put in a long term winrate of 4-6 bb/100 over a large sample.Variance has thoroughly scuttled my attempts. While I don't have an extremely large sample because of the demotivation to put in volume I've experienced the past 6 months, it is still a relatively large sample of 288k hands. I'm becoming somewhat disillusioned and synical with poker and it's going to take some crazy sick run good in the next 2 weeks or a 1 outer announcement of rake reduction to even make me want to sit down at my computer next year. I'm in all out grind my milestone and be done mode as of right now.

It kind of sucks that this blog has turned into my personal whine centre but I don't really have much else to do lately.

2010 graph so you can kind of see where my head is at right now. That point where the green goes down and red continues to go up is where Stars changed the structure. Maybe the structure isn't really that bad in terms of game quality. But for some reason they decided to doomswitch me at the exact same time to make me think it was that instead of someone cranking up the variance voltage.

Here's a better look at the carnage since that point.

There's only so many times I can say I'll wake up one day and it will all turn around. Extremely frustrated with everything. Now I'm in this stupid milestone chase that's eating up insane amounts of my day because I took so many breaks the past couple of months, especially a wicked November, and don't feel like playing at all.

Oh and we can't forget the SECT street by street EV graph which is a much better measure than all-in EV. Yes that's 120 buyins.

gg Pokerstars RNG.

Bad session, some thoughts about goals

2010-12-06T04:11:00.000-06:00

This post is more for my own reflection more than anything - some whining, some complaining, some thoughts. Skip this one if you don't like hearing about other people's bad luck.

I ran terrible today. Played about 4.5k hands and managed to run 14 buyins below EV. AA

The past 6 months have been an utter nightmare in my EV world. Not just the standard stuff that shows up in the graph but all the tops of ranges that don't show up in the graph as well. I've gone from being a 100nl reg taking successful shots at 200nl earlier this year to struggling to breakeven at 50nl. I still have a lot of confidence in my game but I'm not sure how worth it it is to put myself through this breakeven hell and sweating every AA AIPF. I've become a fairly grumpy person and I don't want my life to reflect whatever my graph is doing.

I've got a long way to go in terms of emotional control. I need to make some major changes in my approach to the game if I'm going to continue with it in 2011. I've put a lot of pressure on myself to get better so I could go (semi)pro and make what are to me the insane amounts of money 200nl+ regs make but instead seem to have taken a few steps backwards this year although I am starting to move forwards again. That pressure is leading to a lot of forcing things while playing and it's become one of my major stumbling blocks on my road back up.

A little brainstorming for my options:

Play less tables. Try to improve. Try to play competitively at small and midstakes. I hope the Peter Principle doesn't apply to me at 100nl already, but it seems you have to be fairly competent there already just to be a small marginal winner. I would be extremely happy if I could get back here with my former winrate. This all takes a lot of work and effort which is tough when you don't have as much time to watch videos and review hands and do sweat sessions and discuss strategy compared to the time my competition spends doing those things.

Continue to mass-table micros. Possibly drop to 25nl where it's basically easy money. This is my life for the past 2 to 3 years and it's the definition of insanity if I'm trying to improve. Same thing year after year with the same results - getting no where. Seriously how many people out there have put in more than a couple million hands and they're still playing 50nl with the intention of moving up?

The problem is I need to align what I'm doing with my goals to get rid of my stress. Alternatively, align my goals with what I'm doing. So it looks like I can set my goals to either put in serious study and less tables to improve and get to the stakes I want to, or just accept playing micros without any intentions of moving up. I haven't decided which is my new goal yet but right now my actions and current goal are conflicting and it pisses me off to no end.

VPP goal down to the wire

2010-12-05T16:00:00.000-06:00

I'm coming down to needing to put in some serious hours to finish up 200k VPPs and get milestone bonus. I currently have about 22k remaining. My situation isn't that much better than before as I thought in my last post now that I consider it. The days that I do work will most likely result in maybe an hour of play at the most due to longer days, whereas before I would have gotten in 3-4 hours after work.

So that means that I need to get down to business during the days I do have off to make up for it. 20 weekdays left to play. Assuming I don't play at all on Saturdays or Sundays, that's 1100/day. At about 225/hour playing 50nl, that's 5 hours/day. Sounds very doable if you don't understand how much time I waste getting sucked into checking my hockey pool for potential sleeper free agents in a league that's winner take all that I have no chance of winning at this point along with all the 'interesting' stuff going on in the zoo and checking 4x per day to see if Stars has announced changes for 2011. I'm going to try my best to put in 2 hours on days that I work to chop off 900 more each week which should leave me an extra hour of room to slack off each day that I don't.

The Stars VIP program is really great but it does have that one caveat that it runs as an annual program and everyone throws good play and improvement out the window in December in favor of mass grinding to purely put in volume. I think that whatever I decide to do next year, I'm going to pace myself to hit it at the end of November instead so that I can ignore the program after that and keep working on things in December and take advantage of all the people like myself.

Here's to FPP pro-ing the next 4 weeks!

Good news for me!

2010-12-02T16:57:00.000-06:00

I thought I was supposed to work 13 days this month and use 5 days of my personal holiday time + 5 days of Christmas vacation. Instead, I am supposed to work 9 days this month and use 0 days of personal holiday time + 5 days of Christmas vacation. And still get paid exactly the same thing. Yay me!

200k VPP is going to be lol-easy now.

Current state of upper-micro / low-small games on Stars

2010-12-02T03:23:00.000-06:00

Something needs to change in 2011. Either Stars has to unkill the games or I have to get better. Hopefully both. Prepare yourself for a very long read. I suggest an x-large coffee.

Jesus Lester posted a very sobering comment about the current state of the games and I am tending to agree with him a lot on these points. I'll just quote him in entirety (names wrt graphs omitted, bold is my emphasis):

"At $0.5/1 20-50 tables, the games are almost unbeatable right now, I don't know if this is true at other limits but I'm guessing everyone's winrate has taken a hit. Very good shortstackers like xxxxxx or xxxxxx are still doing well by feasting on chumps like me, as are solid fullstackers like xxxx or xxxxxxx who adjust well to the games. However, their winrates have also taken a hit and if they aren't beating the game, nobody is.

It's not that the 20-50 games are a terrible idea, however; it's that the games are loaded with semi-competent regulars who can still be beaten by great players, but the edge for anyone who is actually going to put in time at 100nl is so small. Take a look at the graphs of myself, xxxxx, xxxxx, xxxxxxx, and others starting at about the middle of this year and while all of us are terrible, we're all losing a lot more than we used to, so much so that if the games continue to get tougher many of us are going to be forced into retirement. I don't know how much those guys in Mexico are willing to play for but I'm not gonna go crazy next year for $50 an hour, it's either get better at poker, which I am unlikely to be able to do, or go back into the workforce.

Now, looking at these graphs, or the graphs of any other serious volume player at 100nl, will surely bring a huge smile to many in this thread, but remember you reap what you sow. It's not only shorstackers that are suffering, but the weak, nitty fullstacked regs who the solid players used to crush. These guys are playing 20-50 because, though most of them are losing there, having to play in the deepstacked games against solid regulars is even worse. Guys like xxxxxx, xxxxxx, xxxxxxxx, or xxxxxx have all seen their winrates drop precipitously.

I know MT2R gets absolutely no respect on here, but his concerns about the games being broken up and the shortstackers unintentionally protecting the fish are on point; this is demosntrated by the dwindling winrates of the weak regulars post-changes. Many of these regulars were sick of playing against shortstacks but they, like many of you, cannot see the forest through the trees.

Now, there may be other explanations for dwindling winrates or a bunch of previous winners becoming losers-- for example, capping the buy-in at 50bb is obviously going to hurt the winrates of the fullstacked regs-- but primarily it is about the new environment the games were in, and the failure of the whiners and complainers to recognize that they had it a lot better than they thought they did. The current system is going to lose players one-by-one as the effect of the rake upon a game that has gotten significantly more difficult is huge.

Unfortunately for me there is no going back to the times where a pretty awful poker player can make money in games. I guess the best fullstacked regs are really getting over on this sytem, but even they should be suffering as the number of games they can play dwindles while all the breakeven-to-losing regs try to hold onto their glory as it slips away from them in the 20-50 games.

I know it might be classless to list weak players by name in this post, I want to make clear that almost all of these guys play better than I do and while it is obviously an insult to list them in this manner, I did so only so those of you who don't know what has happened to the games can take a look at PTR graphs and see the horror that has been foisted upon a significant portion of the population by a vociferous population of the best players (along with weak fullstacks who foolishly thought the changes would benefit them) and foolish Stars executives."

So I did some research of my own to figure out if it was true that other people were experiencing the same thing as me. There were a lot of players who's games are far better than mine that are still crushing everything they play and are still able to move up. But there are also a lot of players who's games are better than mine that seem to have severely stagnated like myself. I'm providing a sample of what I've found, my graph is included here as well. Names are obviously not needed. I'm just trying to establish a trend. The red line indicates approximately early June:

To add to what Jesus Lester said while thinking back to pre-changes, I can kind of see where everything went wrong now. Thank you captain hindsight. Fullstacks were complaining about playing against shortstacks. I was one of them. We were begging for a change -- although I don't think any of us wanted or anticipated the 20-50 games but rather hoped for 20-35 and 40-100 games. I do recall a lot of comments about overlap in game structures being a bad idea immediately after it was implemented.

That said, we used to have 20-100 and 50bb min games and I think a very important point that hasn't really been discussed is exactly how the segregation and migration was put in place but here's a snapshot:

Pre-Changes:
20-100 --> Shortstacks + Fullstack Regs + Fish in nearly equal amounts
50bb min --> Fullstack Regs + Fish, my estimate being a 3.5:1 ratio.

Post-Changes:
20-50 --> Shortstacks + Halfstack Regs + Fish, 4:2:3
40-100 --> Fullstack Regs + Fish, 7:2

The fact that a ton of fish are playing 20-50 is only half the problem. And fwiw it's only in terms of the ratio of fish per table compared to regs. Less regs playing 20-50 obviously results in "more" fish and I think the argument about fish preferring shallow games is kind of silly. Take for example a pool of 5 players, 2 fish and 3 regs. 3 regs play 5 tables each while 2 fish play 2 tables each resulting in 15 reg seats and 4 fish seats. Reduce it to 2 regs and 2 fish. Now it's 10 reg seats and 4 fish seats. No more fish than before but it looks like there's more of them.

But back to segregation and migration... Pre-changes, regs were evenly spread out between games. Post-changes, regs have migrated to 40-100 in swarms. So what's happened is that you now have a choice between reg-infested 100bb poker with a smaller skill edge if any at all, or tolerable shallow games with a smaller inherent edge than what you were used to pre-changes due to stack size. Thus, Stars relatively killed their games by restructuring the ratios of player types per table along with buyin amounts.

I'm not sure how I would go about fixing this at this point. There will always be fish depositing and there will always be geniuses waiting to take their money. But I think the vast majority of a site's profit comes from the average non-genius regs (short and fullstacks) like myself who fill the tens of thousands of seats in between trying to get their small piece while sifting money through the rake machine. If you eliminate their edge and their piece and force them out of the game, you destroy your profits as money moves fast between fish and geniuses. We are the middle men grasping to hold on to nuggets here and there while they get chipped away by better players and the site.

I'm coming to accept that from a business standpoint, shortstacks generate a lot of rake and they will probably never get rid of them. That said, somebody in management really needs to come up with something to make everyone happier than they are now by adding more skill edge back into the game. I don't know if that means scrapping current structures and going back to 20-100 to right the ratios, or reducing rake a point or two, but in my opinion the current system is very clearly not sustainable when I, as a 200k VPP Supernova have to seriously consider site selection because tables are that bad and/or I'm just not that good and competition is only getting tougher, nevermind the guys that run closer to breakeven winrates or put in less volume.

I already used my one time applying for Online Pro so hopefully the player panel will step in and use their's to turn this thing around. I don't know first hand about what the games are like higher or lower, hence the title, but hearsay says the higher games are even worse off. 30 days and counting.

Not much happening

2010-11-23T03:24:00.001-06:00

Quick update on where I'm at:

Racing to 200k VPPs. Worst case scenario is I have to grind out 800/day in December if I continue to slack off in November. Very doable. I only work half the month. Thinking about 100nl and/or 6max for a good portion and then taking the last week off.
Mostly 50nl right now with 100nl shots. Running bad but still being able to maintain a good winrate is very enjoyable (understatement).
Feeling very good about my game and where it's headed. Figuring out regs. Maximizing value.
Anxiously awaiting Stars' announcement about 2011 changes.

Card Mod: Quarter Suit Stars Deck

2010-11-13T08:52:00.013-06:00

Hey guys, I'm going to start working on some card mods for Stars. It's been quite the learning process compared to what I understand is a relatively simple process on FTP decks. I've always been a bit of a photoshop hobbyist and thought it might be interesting mixing two of my hobbies together.

Here's my first crack at it. I had actually conceptualized this about a month ago but it took me a while to figure out how to put it all together. Quarter Suit Stars Deck seems to be an appropriate title. I really enjoy using it for Omaha as the colors contrast nicely. It also comes with a full set of card backs - 5 bright, easy to see colors that should be very visible on most tables and 1 dark color. I'll be introducing this one at $5.

Quarter Suit Stars Deck

I will email your card mod within 12-24 hours (most likely sooner) after payment. You will need Winace or a similar unzipping program to install.

Contest Winner!

2010-11-13T06:50:00.000-06:00

And the winner is... bobby13!

Sorry to bobby and Splitsuit for the extra sweat. I didn't realize I had to moderate comments on the last post already =)

bobby13's guess of 3500 is within 163.36 bb of my actual 3336.64 bb below AIEV. Congrats! If you could post your 2p2 screenname as a comment below or give me some other way to contact you I'll get you your free copy of Tilt Breaker.

Thanks to everyone who put in a guess! And now it's time for me to slam the lid on this graph and get back to trying to run average =)

Tilt Breaker Contest Update

2010-11-06T08:05:00.000-05:00

Ok so since you guys are a bunch of nits and don't want to send in your tilty stories I'm forced to change this up =)

I'll make this easy. To get your free copy of Tilt Breaker, you need to guess how many big blinds below all-in-EV I ran during my Summer of Runbad 2010. I am including all full ring hands between June 1 00:00 and September 30 23:59:59. There's a total of 124,776 hands.

Post your guesses as comments below to 2 decimal points. You have until Friday, November 12th at 12:00 EST. 1 guess per person. Closest guess over or under wins. In the event of a tie, the over will take it.

200k VPPs: On Pace

2010-11-01T03:54:00.001-05:00

I'm currently on pace to hit my 200k VPP goal by the end of the year on Stars. I need 625/day for the rest of the year and have been averaging about 600. I do have the last 2 weeks of the year off of work so it shouldn't be a problem.

Starting to think about goals for next year. Some preliminary thoughts:

Decide on 300k or 400k VPP pace and hit the ground running January 1st.
Find an optimal improvement process.
Continue to smash my thought processes apart and put in serious study.
Move back up.

My game improvement really stagnated this year and I kind of fell behind the learning curve a lot. There was a ton of run-bad this summer, but I honestly think if you are serious about this game that you should strive to make your game good enough to show profit even during run-bad at these stakes. Regs are slowly getting better as a group and I was starting to fall behind. I don't know, probably due to burnout.

I kind of feel like I've been in an all-out-sprint to catch up this month and I feel pretty successful. At this rate I think I can pass a bunch of them again shortly. This game is so swingy, not just results, but everything that goes along with it. Results --> motivation --> volume --> improvement. Everything is connected. That's the wrong order but I think it's the one that most of us live by. Not only do you have to rearange your in game thought process, you have to rearange how you think about the game.

If only I could cut results out of the equation and have improvement be my motivation to put in volume.