200k VPP Tomorrow

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!

VPP goal down to the wire

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!

End of June Please

I'm ready for July. June has been an absolute full ring disaster:

But instead of making a whine post, I am actually quite happy with my play. I've been doing a ton of work on figuring out people's ranges and taking optimal exploitive lines and I feel like I'm playing the best that I ever have. For all the talk of games getting harder, there sure are a ton of TAGfish that refuse to fold anything postflop.

Also not checking the cashier/HEM graph while playing nearly as much so that bad habit is starting to go away.

As soon as I start getting my ability to fade draws and win flips vs FPSing reg's dominated hand's kickers AIPF I'm going to be crushing. fwiw I think I only have about 2 tilt shoves in there where my equity was still pretty decent with turn NFDs even though I know they're never folding and everything else is super standard so that feels like a really good accomplishment.

Thankfully I'm up a decent amount in the bit of 6max I played this month. The sick runbad vs kickers carries over into the 280 turbos but I'm still managing $0.0182/FPP over 150 games for the month so that's fine, too.

FPPs: Trying Something New

*June 16th, UPDATE at bottom of post*

I just cashed in my 100k vpp milestone bonus and I've decided to try turning my FPPs into cash in the Sunday 1/4 million 280 turbo sats for $11 a shot.

I've always cashed in 100k FPPs for $1500. I really couldn't bother to wait the extra 2 months to get the best deal of 250k for $4000 even though I know it's illogical to care about when I get the money when it's going to be more. I hate clearing huge bonuses.

So instead of my $0.015/FPP, I did the math on the 280 turbos:

Out of 100 turbo sats and 28k FPPs, if I can cash in 40%, that's already $440 in instant cash as opposed to $420 worth of bonus. Add in 10% 3rd place retries and I get back 2800 FPPs. Cash in 40% of those and that's another $44 for a total of $484.

That comes out to $0.0173/FPP which is better than Supernova rate with no clearing required. And the way these play out I wouldn't be surprised if 55% ITM is possible despite the variance due to structure. These are generally 5nl cash and nanostake tournament players trying to get something besides a Chris Moneymaker poster for their FPPs. Somewhere around $665 per 100 sats and $0.023/FPP is sustainable imo.

At 1000 hands an hour at Supernova multiplier it comes out to 3 to 4 sats worth of FPPs per hour at 50nl and 100nl. Considering they finish in 5 minutes on average and fill up fast, it doesn't really take away from opportunity cost unless you're mass tabling 400nl+ and would need to play something like 6-8 of these for every hour of cash play.

I'll obviously try this out until I run significantly behind my regular bonus rate. So far so good with ITM of 50% and 3 retries out of 20 sats.

^ Cue donkament doomswitch.

* UPDATE*

I've played nearly 100 of these now with some reasonable results. I've cashed in 44% of them which is a little lower than I expected and I've won 3rd place retries in 15%. Quite a bit of sickening villain ability to hit kickers while dominated going on in the last 30 tries. If I remove the 3rd place finishes and discount the FPPs back making it a 2/5 pays satellite, I'm showing an ITM of 50% and an FPP rate of $0.0192/FPP. That's pretty decent considering Supernova is $0.0160, plus this is instant cash.

I'm going to run these up until I hit 186k VPP for the year at which point I'll have to save the next 14k so I have 50k FPP to buy the next milestone.