Tilt Breaker Contest!

*** Terms of this contest changed as of Saturday November 6th. Updated contest info HERE.***

Here's your chance to win a completely FREE copy of Tilt Breaker. As I stated in my last post, this is amazingly effective, must-have software for helping you keep tilt from severely damaging your bankroll. Lifetime licenses are currently retailing for $49 at TiltBreaker.com.

To re-cap:

• Play more of your volume on your A game.
• Trailing stop loss to keep you from blowing away your profits.
• Stop checking the cashier during your session.
• No more bankroll crippling monkey-tilt sessions.

I got in contact with the people from Tilt Breaker after my last post and they would like to give one of my blog readers a free copy of their software.

Here's what you have to do:

Send me your best (worst) or funniest poker related tilt story. You can use whatever format you would like. Written, video, photoshop, mspaint, xtranormal or whatever else you can think of.

Email me with your entries by Monday, November 8th. I will pick a winner on Friday of that week and post the winning story on my blog.

Software Review: Tilt Breaker

As I'm writing this, I'm on a "tilt" break. I'm pretty impressed with Tilt Breaker.

This software has been in beta testing for a while and I believe they are almost ready to officially launch. There's a ton of stuff in here for helping you control your tilt, and beyond that, just plain helping you play within the specifications of your A game. I've been using it for a couple of days, and although I think it may cut down a bit on your volume, it's going to make sure the volume you do put in is solid.


The big feature with this is the ability to auto-break your sessions. There are 4 ways to do this and they can be used in conjunction with each other:

• Stop Win - for the people that are into that sort of thing
 

• Time Played - if you're optimal play is within a specific time frame
 

• Hands Played - similar to Time Played
 

• Stop Loss - This is the big one for me. It's not a simple stop loss although you can set it up that way as well to calculate from $0. For me, the best thing about this software is the peak stop loss. It prevents you from blowing away your profits during a session. If I have my stop loss set to 1.5 buyins, my session ends if I start off losing 1.5 buyins since the peak is $0. But just as important, if I win 4 buyins and then proceed to lose 1.5 buyins from that point, it tells me I'm done and my session ends at +2.5.

Once it's running, you're not getting around it. Can't reload. Can't open cash tables. Can't reg for tournaments. And there's a delay countdown timer that says you have x amount of time to finish your hands before we're going to shut you down completely. I tried killing the process a couple of different ways but it's pretty stubborn and pops back up. Serious business. ** Tournament tables already running will continue to run so no worries there.

Several other interesting optional features:

• Tilt Breaker Panic button
• More detailed session info similar to HEM Table Manager tray icon
• Block your cashier box during a session

Everything is fully customizable in terms of what you consider to be a break, how long you need to take a break and how long you want to be locked out for each individual option.

A+ software. It's like Table Ninja for your mindset and your bankroll.

Rebuilding My Game

I'm sure you're all aware from previous posts that my results have been less than stellar since right around June. I am happy to say that I am finally having a great month again. I've started rebuilding my game from the ground up (with a LOT of help).

Where I'm at right now:

• Learning how to play poker. No. I mean really learning poker.
• Confidence is about 90% of all time high.
• Still grinding some 50nl FR - but starting to see glimmers of possible crushing coming back.
• Figuring out why people do the things they do.
• Figuring out why I do the things I do.
• Excited about future implications and looking forward to 2011.

It's nice to be back to being an optimist. It makes life a lot easier.

On a side note: I got a sick "mouse mat" today.

I will end up literally buying everything in the store that has the new spade logo on it.

On a life note: My 2.5 year old daughter has nearly perfected the art of getting out of being scolded and I am definitely in for trouble. "You're my faaaaaavorite," is tough to counter =)

Finally! (non-poker related)

WARNING: Canadian entertainment ramblings below, eh, not an ounce of poker in this post.

Netflix finally launched in Canada last month -- streaming content -- and I signed up right away for the 30 day trial. I've spent a good couple of hours in the movie rating section already so that I can get some good suggestions. It's also oddly addicting. Apparently I've watched at least 700 movies that I specifically remember were bad/decent/good in the past 12 years. That comes out to 1 movie every 6 days, which is kind of an understatement considering that the standard equation for movie watching is movies/week = 2 - (x)(children) unless of course you count The Tigger Movie and the Sesame Street movie Follow That Bird as movies.

So despite the 700 I've rated so far, there are a total of 80 in the Watch It Again section. Not terrible I suppose but they really need to get their act together in terms of selection. I'd estimate that of 2009-2010 material, it's probably closer to 5% max of total movies and TV out there. I was instantly disappointed when my first search for The Office came up blank.

I'm not really sure why this is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it might have something to do with our overzealous cultural protectorate over at the CRTC which requires some obscenely high % of content shown in this country to be Canadian produced. So we end up with a boatload full of half assed filler material designed to make sure you sleep-in or put you back to sleep when it's all crammed into early Sunday morning when no one's watching and runs until NFL afternoon kickoff. I think the last decent Canadian show I've watched in prime time would have to be Corner Gas. I can't remember anything else before or after that. My bet's on CRTC shenanigans or Netflix is just slacking when it comes to licensing

Oh well, can't really complain when I'm paying crazy amounts for cable and satellite's no better. I can live with paying $7.99/month for poor movie selection and cut out half of the cable packages I don't watch anyways instead. I did manage to find about 100 movies they have available that I haven't seen yet that might be worthwhile. Hoping that will tide me over until they start ramping up availability.

I've been holding off on buying a PS3 and a new TV for a while now so I've been watching movies on everything but my TV. Desktop, netbook, ipod. Kind of funny that I have a Wii and was looking through their app store on Saturday saying this is stupid, they should have a Netflix app, while I was waiting for the required disk to show up in the mail. I finally get it in the mail today and simultaneously check my email on the way back home to find out that they've just launched a downloadable Wii app ("don't worry about sending the disk back," gee thanks). Read my mind, good job guys.

Come on Netflix. The Office (US version). One time!

New Avatar

I figured it was time to change it up in the avatar department so if you're looking for the old happy flower on 2+2, it's gone into retirement.

I was image-googling synonyms of facepalm -- is that possible??? -- and "exasperated" came up with this gem on the first page as part of a gambling addictions ad. I didn't even type in facepalm or poker or anything but exasperated, lol.

Good times!

ABC Poker

I wrote this up yesterday in what appeared to be a bit of a trainwreck of a thread on 2+2. The OP of the thread was questioning whether "ABC" poker was still applicable in today's games. I was decently surprised at the way it came out so I thought I might as well post it here for everyone, too.

___________________

ABC poker is not nitting it up waiting to easy-bake a fish with TPTK+. Sure, a lot of advice on 2+2 is a hold-over from the boom where people c/c down 3 streets with J high at 25nl. It's all advice about how to stack people that are literally throwing money at you faster than you can pick it up. It's the most LDO advice out there, but it certainly doesn't mean you apply it to everyone at x stake. It used to make up a huge portion of ABC strategy because that's the type of player that made up a good portion of the player pool and was, and is, still the easiest money to take.

ABC poker is simply (imo):

• Playing your hand in a straightforward, optimal, exploitative way based on your opponents' tendencies.
• Maximize EV for this hand.
• Not getting sucked into the FPS bluff vortex.

Conversely for comparison, ABC poker is not:

• Playing hands in a sub-optimal, balanced way.
• Maximize EV for future hands.
• Being overly creative.

The worse your opponents are -- and by 'worse' I mean in a hand reading sense because this is what everything boils down to -- the closer you need to play to ABC. The better your opponents are, the closer you need to play to non-ABC. Optimal ABC strategies for playing K9s on J95r against a 40/5 are going to be vastly different than optimal ABC strategies for playing the same hand against a 10/9. There is no single ABC strategy.

Yes games are tighter. Yes games have a lower fish:shark ratio. Yes, not everyone stacks bottom pair anymore. None of that has anything to do with ABC poker. The fact is, all that has happened is that your average card advantage has decreased due to the above circumstances. Despite that, I really don't think the level of hand reading has increased that much, which means that solid ABC poker still wins money in the micros. The majority of the pool is still level 1 thinking, they're just playing their hand. It's just that they've decreased their disadvantage by tightening up and show up with showdown value more often than they used to.

Almost

I took a break from cash games the past couple days and played a few more tournaments. Along with the SnGs I had loaded up last night, I entered 4 MTT Guarantees. I min-cashed one of them which was a little disappointing after 3 hours for a 100-ish place out of 1000 but I was still super deep in my other remaining 6max MTT.

Nothing really interesting happened except for the fact that I managed to maintain my mid place position from 200 left down to 15 left before I dropped to 12/15. Oh and also that I limped the very first hand with A7s and checked down 4-way on 875K7 and made a 130 river bet in a 150 pot that got shoved on for 2k chips by T9o; I couldn't force myself to fold. So at 12/15 I loaded up the other tables and was a little frightened to see that while I had 18bb and was in decent shape, nearly everyone else was sitting with 40bb except for a couple 5bb stacks. Despite that, I managed to get down to the final table of 6 by just maintaining my stack through blind stealing while people busted around me.

First hand of the final table I pick up AKo on the button and it folds around to me with 500k for 10bb and the pot is 105k and I'm just hoping to start taking down the ever increasing antes. I get snap-raised by the SB who has 750k - I think he's using the auto action buttons as some sort of meta to get people to fold which kind of backfired on him earlier when he did the same thing with QTo in the BB vs a button steal and I was in between with KK. Anyways, he flips over 44, the board runs out 325ss (oh noes), offsuit A (yay! oh... wait...) and that's it for me.

I don't really like his play at all since he's sitting with about 15bb and has a lot of room to play but he's going to be completely crippled if he loses plus the BB is chip leader and will call this pretty light since it's only 1/4 of his stack. So he's best case flipping against everything when he doesn't need to be and would be better off shoving any two the next time it's folded to him in late position in terms of saving his seat vs needing to make a move.

So close to a decent MTT bink. Finished 6 out of 3673 without using my one time. I already wasted that last week on the 50 billionth hand and according to Isaac Haxton you only get a new one when you get a hair cut. Congrats to tbvle on the $56k, but I don't know what he was doing at 5nl when he's capable of finishing 83 out of 2443 in the WCOOP for another $10k.


It does feel nice to know that I can make these deep runs. I've been reading Timex's blog on Card Runners along with watching some of his videos and I'm pretty happy that I'm understanding what's going on and that I'm actually turning it into some decent runs that I would have never had before. My MTT strat from a couple years ago was to basically survive and wait for monsters and this usually ended up with me busting close to either side of the bubble. I'm a lot more aggressive now and I've noticed a huge difference in being able to chip up in the mid stages and accumulate these 20-30k chip stacks required to make deep runs. I'm fistpumping more as well, with the highest frequency being when I bink the turn after all in preflop as a 40/60 dog and whiffing the flop.

I've also been messing around with a bunch of different SnG formats to figure out which ones I like best. In terms of overall structure, the regular 180s are miles ahead but I just don't have that kind of time to sit and play for 4 hour stretches. I've tried out some of the turbo 180s and 45s and I think the turbo 180s might be where I'll put in a bit of volume when I feel like playing something different.

Promo Tilt and Mass Donkaments

So Stars is coming up to their 50 billionth hand which I estimate should hit sometime after 11am EST on the 22nd. I'm a little tilted that they continue to run these silly milestone hand promos. So far I've played about 20-30k hands 24 tabling each time that they've run them and I'm still batting .000. Considering that they have a massive lobby banner, the play is stopped for 1 to 2 minutes, and the host mod chats it up explaining what's going on and people are still folding pre to the shovefest left and right, it seems like it's not really catching on with either the mass tabling grinders who've stacked their tables and AHK fold as soon as it pops up nor the random recreational who has no clue that there's about 5 buyins worth of overlay on their shove.

Sure it's just sour grapes that I can't for the life of me get in on this awesome payout, but I honestly think that it would be better to take the thousands and thousands given away every hour and run a promo that everyone can be part of. For instance, a decent reload bonus in the 50% $300-$600 range once a year when we hit the next 10 billionth hand would be so much better ainec.

Poker Update:

Still grinding out 50nl 20-50bb tables which have been amazingly good so far. I had been running at 7.5bb/100 until I slashed that in half today with a 5k hand breakeven marathon. Just one of those can't win a coinflip and every overpair runs into perfect perfect c/c c/c. I do think I've got nearly everything back under control and am feeling a ton more confident than the past few months. I'm at 17k hands of 50nl right now and I'm considering moving up again at 20k-25k hands if my next few sessions produce good results. Still sticking to the plan.

180 man turbo mass table attempt TR (somehow tournaments seem worthy of reporting on, don't ask me why):

I tried out the MTT/SnG grind yesterday. Haven't done that in a few years and I was probably 2 tabling them back then. I managed to get Table Ninja set up to continually register me and managed to get twenty $2.20 180 mans going. The play in these is obviously atrocious but I ran fairly bad against dominated top pairs turning 2 pairs a lot. I was actually planning on loading more to see how many I could play before attempting this at higher stakes but decided to cut it short due to the run bad. I think I might be capable of 30 at a time at this point.

I finished about 6 or 7 of them on the bubble with 19-23 players left and 18 cash while getting premiums in and whiffing a lot of AK. Most of those would have put me in top 5 and contention to win so that's a decent amount of confidence boost considering I haven't really played anything resembling these in nearly 2 years. I haven't even read HoH because it felt a little dated on my skim through and a ton of it seemed ldo.I am going to be reading Kill Everyone shortly so I'm excited about that.

Thankfully on the very last 180 I had open I hung on into the money with about 4bb left and decided it was time to take some chips. I doubled up 4x by winning 60/40s and 40/60s to make it to the final table in 8/9. At this point I really got into it considering ranges vs equity vs payout which is weird for me considering it's a $2 donkament and while the pay jumps are large, the actual $ amount isn't. I pretty much sat around taking a few blinds to maintain my stack at 20bb while 4 players knocked each other out. Once we got down to 5 handed I started to cardrack a ton and took down some decent 10-20bb pots to get into 2nd and 3rd place range.

No one adjusted at all throughout the final table and I was just waiting for opportunities to exploit. I was nearly out several times but managed to fight back and win some coinflips to end up 2/3. The guy in 3rd place didn't stand a chance against myself and the overagressive chip leader as he was running about 8/8 over the 50 or so hands that I had seen him and blinded out fairly quickly and eventually getting his 88 in against my KK.

Going into heads up I had about 90k of the 270k chips in play. A couple hands in I managed to pull ahead after getting AK aipf against AJ. At this point I don't think he really adjusted from his 26/20 style except that he now played every hand exactly like how he had been playing the button throughout. His basic strat was to float a ton with any piece (his stack had been extremely volatile the entire FT) and fire at scare cards. He had a standard open at this point of 2.5bb but he was open shoving every 5th hand which makes me think he was shoving any pair, any ace and a couple KQ type broadways.

After a bit of this I offered up a chop with even stacks because I felt that this was going to become a coinflip with no edge pretty fast and it was an 18 buyin difference between 1st and 2nd. I wasn't even sure if it was possible in that format, but he didn't respond anyways. Shortly after, I finally caught him calling my KK in against A6 and holding to put him down to 30k chips.

I thought now I just have to win 1 of 2 all ins to take this down. That didn't happen when AK whiffed against JJ and lost to AT to put us back to even. He really just continued this open shoving concept for a while and I finally called with 44 not wanting to get down past 100k chips with blinds getting up to 5k/10k soon since his style and the blinds were reducing the skill edge pretty fast. He flipped over KJs and spiked a K on the turn to end it and take the $108 while I was left with the $72 consolation. In retrospect I don't really like my call since I'm flipping at best with everything and taking whatever tiny edge I had with 8bb left would have been better than this gamble. Overall I was pretty happy that I ended the day with an 83% ROI, probably not sustainable but I'll take it =)

I don't know if I'll get back into SnGs since they're overrun with DoNs unless you're playing turbos and I'm really not a fan of the DoN. The 50/50 payout is just too flat for my liking since better players should want top heavy structures since they'll win more than their fare share of matches, while imo it keeps the money circulating longer thus being raked off more resulting in lower RIOs for everyone (I haven't done the math on this, just seems logical to me). Regardless, the strategy is more similar to satellites than to real tournaments and it invites too much collusion in being able to chip dump while using the excuse of weird survival techniques wrt the large ITM satellite style structure.

I don't mind the turbos but it would be nice if more stakes were running consistently. It would be extremely difficult for someone to move from the bottom up, for example there's a ton of $2.20s and typically only a handful of $7.70s running, with a huge jump in player pool size again in the $12s forcing people to play 6x higher instead of the normal 2x to 3x stakes.

In other news, I finally met an irl poker player. There are basically zero within a hundred mile radius of my house so this is kind of an anomaly. Hoping to head out to play some live $1/$2 and from stories I've heard, it's definitely beatable =)

Planned Poker

I decided late last month that I need to do something different to get myself out of this 3 month funk. The eventual plan was to actually plan my next chunk of hands instead of running around stakes and games like a chicken with my head cut off.

So I set up a simple Excel file to implement a plan for my next x amount of hands and I would stick to it until that chunk of hands was completed and keeping a comment section updated with a running dialogue of my mindset and how sessions were turning out.

My first entry: 20k hands while 8 tabling @ 25nl FR. I needed to drop down to regain some confidence and start rebuilding.

Result: I'm at 19k+ hands right now. The first 10k hands went amazingly well and I was running at about 23 bb/100 (big blinds). I went on a sick 10 buyin downswing over the next 4k hands getting coolered left and right and spewed about 2 or 3 stacks. At that point I had color coded nearly 1/3 of the 25nl 40-100 game player pool and it was an overwhelming sea of yellow nits with few green loose-passives to be seen. And the ones I was seeing were of the 30/5 variety.

So I finally resigned myself to the idea of taking a serious look at the 20-50 bb games and sure enough, there's a really decent distribution of yellows and greens and the greens are all shapes and sizes ranging from 30/5 20bb stacks to 80/20 50bb stacks with even some pink 80/60 maniacs showing up once in a while. I ended the last 6k hands on a large upswing winning back the 10 fullstack buyins and finishing at 11 bb/100 over the sample. I did switch back to mass tabling these since there's so few late street decisions and I found myself sitting around a lot playing 8 tables.

This is kind of sad since I thought this structure change was the solution to the shortstack issue which made 20-100 games seem unbearable to me. It sure seemed that it was going to work for the first couple of months. And then the 80/20s voted for the 20-50 games. And I guess I learned my lesson that it's about what the fish want to play, not what I want to play.

I marked about 300 hands over the course of my 20k hand chunk in the last 2 weeks so I'm going to go over those spots and decide what my next 20k hands will entail. Some of them are seemingly mundane 3bet spots that I take down pre or flop raises that end the hand but I think that it's good that I'm actually marking these hands that don't go to showdown for analysis. I certainly felt like I was on top of my game during sessions where I put in a flop bluff raise with AJ on T63 achieving a fold and then had the mental capacity to think about wanting to analyze that spot later.

Right now I'm thinking about either jumping into 20-50 50nl games or potentially doing 10k more at 25nl and then using those profits to move up while becoming more comfortable in this shallow game. Will depend on my analysis of my play in those hands and what I want to work on.

A couple common misconceptions

A couple of illogical misconceptions have been frequently popping up lately that I'd like to address.


Raising for information, finding out where you stand, defining hands.

These are all essentially the same thing and none of them are a reason for throwing money into the pot.

Poker is a battle for information. Correction: Poker is a battle of incomplete information. It is not about who is going to gather the most information to use against their opponents (while paying the price for doing so). It is about who can make the most correct wagers based on the information already available.

That only leaves 2 options. Getting worse hands to call: Value. Getting better hands (or significant equity shares) to fold: Bluff. Information, initatiative, and any other reason that people cite for betting or raising is merely a by-product of one of those 2 options.

A prime example of people betting to see where they are at is that 38/4 that donkbets 100% of flops against you to see if you have AK or not. I always let them know where they're at by raising my AA every time they donk.

Leave this one to your home game buddies and try to control your giggles while they spew their flawed strategy along with their money.


You can't fold on blank rivers if you called the turn.

I don't know for sure where this idea came from and It's been a while since I read bits and pieces of Super System but it seems to be in that sort of thought process framework - putting your opponent on a specific hand, trusting your instinct, etc.

Maybe it's been carried over to No Limit from Limit. I'm certainly no poo-flinging expert, but it would seem more applicable to that game and maybe it still applies there since turn and river mistakes are not the huge disasters that they are in NL and you're generally getting ridiculous pot odds to call a lot of rivers. So it ends up working in a right action, wrong reason kind of way.

Relatively recently in poker history, we have switched from putting people on hands to putting people on ranges. Those ranges narrow each street as villain acts and reacts. Villain has as many subset ranges in a hand as he has decisions to make. He raises range A preflop. He cbets range B on the flop. He checks range C on the flop. He raises range J on the river...

In some cases our hand is going to be +EV against his turn betting range. His range for betting the river is then going to narrow and we might be -EV against that range. In that case, calling the turn and folding the river is the correct play.

For example, we might have AA and be playing against someone that we know will double barrel the turn with top pair on a K763 board but we know that he will only triple barrel sets or better. So we know that we should call the turn and fold the river while thinking about bet/folding the river if checked to us.

This one should be relegated to the table captain of your local card room while he encourages everyone else at the table to become a station for large bets.

Standard

*** WARNING *** Standard 80/20 flop hand history beat. Move along, nothing to see here. It nicely sums up my life for the past 7 weeks which is why I'm posting it as a semi-update.

Standard 1/2 pot cbet in 3bet pot for induceaments since I expect this 40/30 to ship all flush draws, Jx, KQ, AK, AQ if I haven't "committed" yet.


Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 8 players - View hand 811834
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

CO: $74.35
BTN: $50.00
Hero (SB): $52.00
BB: $50.00
UTG: $26.65
UTG+1: $51.55
MP1: $50.00
MP2: $50.00

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is SB with Q Q
1 fold, UTG+1 raises to $2.50, 4 folds, Hero raises to $6.75, 1 fold, UTG+1 calls $4.25

Flop: ($14.00) 5 T J (2 players)
Hero bets $7, UTG+1 raises to $22.50, Hero raises to $45.25 all in, UTG+1 calls $22.30 all in

Turn: ($103.60) 4 (2 players - 2 are all in)

River: ($103.60) A (2 players - 2 are all in)

Final Pot: $103.60
Hero shows Q Q (a pair of Queens)
UTG+1 shows A J (two pair, Aces and Jacks)
UTG+1 wins $100.60
(Rake: $3.00)

Re-listening to Tommy's 8 fold path which is helping me get through this shit.

BR Rebuilding Plan

I mentioned in my last post that I'm going to pretend I have $500 and work my way back up to re-pad my bankroll since I'm a huge life nit. I'm still actually rolled for 100nl by most people's standards but other people's ability to withstand variance without moving down makes me sick. My BR took a large hit between cashing out a decent amount at the beginning of June and the ensuing soul crush.

So far so good. Played 10k hands at 25nl for 8 ptBB/100 in the last 3 days so I only have about 4-5 buyins to go to move back up to 50nl again. That's a solid $40/hour 12 tabling 6max so it's really not that far off my 100nl 18 tabling FR hourly. And there's virtually zero stress and zero risk. The only really difference is that bonus $/hour drops from $19.90 to $7.75. I'll cut that difference in half once I move up again next week.

I'm starting to catch up on the DC podcasts and they're really interesting with a lot of interesting and good information. Just downloaded all of the Stars/2p2 Podcasts but I'm a little tilted at them using long titles that don't let me see who's in the interview on my podcast list on my iPod. I put a text file with the list on a different app so I guess that will have to do.


25nl Observations:

• TAGs and nits are extremely straightforward and transparent.
• LAGs are extremely bad and spewy. All of them.
• People limp a lot. Limpers are 100% fish and generally won't fold any piece postflop.
• Everyone calls down and stacks off much lighter than I am used to.
• Implied odds are ridiculous.

Suggestions:

• Play straightforward most of the time.
• Punish limpers.
• Let LAGs hang themselves and induce spazz. Widen your 3bet value range against them.
• Take cheap draws with high implied odds instead of semi-bluffing a lot unless you're the PFRer making cbets.
• There are a lot of very floatable TAGs on good boards with position.
• Bet/Bet/Shove your monsters.

July 9th Edit: I just hit my 20 hypothetical buyins last night and this continues to run so well that I'm seriously considering going for 25nl July Ultimate Grinder instead of moving back up. Seems like such a beat to play for a badge that's not even real lol. But that's probably not going to happen since I'm going to start splitting up my volume between Stars and FTP playing Rush and that's not tracked (thankfully).

But the hourly is really good, the variance is virtually nothing (38 ptBB/100 standard deviation compared to my usual 34 ptBB/100 for FR), I have had 3 stress free days feeling happy, and my confidence is building a lot at the same time. Everyone had a 5 day head start and I'm now in the top half of the list.

Frustrated

I'm at a loss as to how to explain my last 50k hand stretch. I find it kind of funny that I'm positive $ in pots smaller than 50bb but making pots larger than that activates one sick doomswitch monkey. I'm actually being a ridiculously accurate psychic and calling out cards while sweating all in pots as a decent favorite lol.

To top things off lately a lot of the fresh batch of noobs on 2p2 seem to have monster egos which is always good for the game. Apparently I'm a troll (standard) and a demagog -- yes a demagog,  "gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears and expectations of the public—typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes," (Wikipedia) you know, like Hitler, for pointing out obvious logical flaws in thought process.

Funny how I never seem to see this message in any threads within 2 weeks of adding someone to the list. I guess they either move on, create a new account once they realize good posters don't put up with douchebags, or go busto.

Graphs since beginning of June.

Pots smaller than 50bb:

Pots larger than 50bb:

Result:

I got some coaching yesterday which helped me find some spots where I was missing a lot of value and spewing a little too much and I'm feeling really confident again postflop. I'm just waiting for variance to turn around, all-in hands to start holding up, and the worst runner runner cards in the deck to stop slapping me in the face.

Still feeling like I'm playing some of the best poker of my life so amazingly my confidence is still high. Would be huge if that turned into actual dollars instead of having to spend them at the Sklansky Mall.

My plan right now is to pretend I have 20 buy ins for 25nl and run it up how I would if that was actually the case. I think this will force me back into the strict value bet frame of mind. Ran up 5 buyins there in a couple hours playing 6max this evening and will get back up to 50nl once I win 15 more in the next couple days. To the people asking wtf am I doing at 25nl in chat, I have been self-imposed chat banned for the last few months, it's too much of a distraction for me.

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.

No money in full ring...

[ ] everyone's solid.

Had a sick good run in a short 45 minute session last night finishing up nearly 4 buyins. I found the following hand a little amusing.

Back story:

I sit down at this table specifically because of this guy sitting 2 to my right. I've only got 75 hands on him at that point but so far he had been running 45/30 and had stacked top pair 2x and 2nd pair 1x vs regs, losing all 3 hands obviously.

My 2nd hand at the table I'm dealt KK in the SB. An MP reg opens, my target 3bets, I pretty much snap-cold-4bet. MP reg flats which I found slightly disturbing and fish flats too. Whatever I'm not folding KK if the board comes out low, which it does - 973 two tone. So I obviously bet/call the flop although I think it's close between checking and letting the reg ship his QQ+ but I'm scared that being OOP it's going to check through which I don't want. Reg tank-calls his QQ (yay!) and of course this genius to my right shows up with 77 and ships. He then goes on to say how hard he owned us both.

The very next orbit, he's already lost $100 out of the $300 stack immediately prior to this hand (another bad 1 pair stackoff where he was actually ahead):

Poker Stars $0.50/$1 No Limit Hold'em - 7 players - View hand 726635
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

UTG: $131.10
UTG+1: $43.20
MP: $134.25
CO: $100.00
BTN: $203.40
SB: $188.40
Hero (BB): $120.50

Pre Flop: ($1.50) Hero is BB with K A
3 folds, UTG says "nice ha", CO raises to $3, BTN says "brutal", BTN calls $3, 1 fold, UTG says "lol", Hero raises to $14, UTG says "only at pokerstars", BTN says "only at jokerstars", 1 fold, BTN calls $11

Flop: ($31.50) 8 4 K (2 players)
Hero bets $19, BTN calls $19

Turn: ($69.50) 4 (2 players)
Hero bets $34, BTN calls $34

River: ($137.50) 3 (2 players)
Hero bets $53.50 all in, BTN calls $53.50

Final Pot: $244.50
BTN shows T K (two pair, Kings and Fours - lower kicker)
Hero shows K A (two pair, Kings and Fours)
Hero wins $241.50
(Rake: $3.00)

BTN says: "wtf"

BTN says: "how did i lose that hand?"

BTN says: "we both have top pair"

UTG says:  ;)

I lol'd irl. Good to see that there's still actually people out there that don't fully understand the rules. I miss the days of Jack high call downs, but this confirms that poker is not dead.

It's a Boy!

We finally had our 2nd child 13 days overdue last week. I was waiting to post until I was able to put a few pictures online but life has been a little bit busy so far with two kids now. Busy but fun!

8 lbs 12 oz and 21.25" tall. Very hungry little guy who we've knicknamed "Starvin' Marvin" (no that's not his real name lol).

Managed to grab this photo off of Facebook so far. Need to get better ones online still. Thanks for the comments guys!

OTF OTT OTR = tilt

Just a little rant here but it appears that some forum somewhere has started using acronyms for "on the flop," "on the turn," and "on the river" and the influx of noobs with less than 50 posts seem to be bringing it with them in waves to 2p2. I don't know why it bothers me considering a ton of other stuff is standard to acronymise (is that a word?) like UTG and SB and EV but it does.

I will continue posting using all three words with respect to which street I'm talking about out of spite. I'm also rather old in terms of online poker players (late 20's) and I am probably just resistant to change.

=)

6max so far...

First week of May was absolutely amazing and I made a lot of money because 82% of "regs" call down with absolutely any piece

Second week of May has been absolutely terrible because 82% of "regs" call down with any piece and have added +78 to their weird 2 pair making skill. The apparent strategy reminds me of homegames. "If I can hit my Queen... (Q5s on T42r)..."

I find it amazing that cbets have been working approximately 34% over my last 12k hands while I manage to win at showdown 42%. Easy adjustments obviously but I need someone to turn off my doomswitch so I can get my run-average back. Here's to hoping I can start fading luckboxes again. I do find it comforting that the vast majority of 50nl puts me on AK 52% of the time. The other 48% of the time the flop is Axx or Kxx and they put me on KQ or AQ.

May = 6max

After putting in 100k hands of full ring in April I think I'm going to give 6max a shot. I want to see which one suits me better for long session grinding and I want to keep my skills in both dynamics up to date. I did play a few thousand hands of full ring the past couple of days as well as final tabled a 135-player Rush tournament for a decent score. That was mainly the result of me swonging +4/-4 buyins at 100nl to breakeven on FR cash yesterday and feeling kind of bad about it, still up several buyins there for the month.

I've played in a few SCOOP events but so far haven't really been able to chip up very well. Typically running around average stack for the first 3-5 hours and then crash and burn. Very card dead plus I feel like I've wasted 4 hours of my life when I run set under set or Queens into Kings or some other random postflop bullshit that cripples me or knocks me out. It's really not worth it for me if it makes me feel like not playing poker at all afterwords... might as well stick to cash then. Kudos to all the donkament pros out there that can handle the long hours and months of winning nearly nothing in anticipation of that huge score without jumping off a bridge in the meantime. I had to laugh at the 42% final table payout for the last SCOOP event I played considering there were 18k entries. Seriously, spread the wealth a little.

Today I decided to start watching a bunch of videos again and really think about my decisions at 6max. So I obviously 18 table 50nl so I could focus and get back into the game flow =) 7k hands later I'm up 10 buyins so far. Will probably put in another 3k hands or so today. Pretty sure I win the internets for volume in micro-6max games (aside from CJ and Chiren of course).

I'm really hoping I can move up to 100nl 6max without getting crushed again. I think my understanding of ranges vs lines is approximately 34x better this time around compared to the end of last year so it shouldn't be a problem.

Baby was due last Saturday so I'm expecting to become even more busy any day now. My 2 year old daughter is extremely excited so that's nice.

Planning to hit Supernova for 2010 sometime next week. Time for some milestone bonuses!

EDIT: Make that 1 more hour for a total of 8k hands and 14 buyins and my last Stellar bonus for the day!