IOM Trip / Zoom

Another long interval between posts... I need to start updating more often again.

Edit: The lack of photos that I took is really an injustice to how nice the island is so I took some pictures to add in when I got home (from Google street view).

IOM

I returned from the Isle of Man meetings with Stars several weeks ago at their headquarters. Thanks to everyone who gave me their messages of support and ideas, it was very much appreciated. It was a really long flight there for me and flying ~14 out of 20 hours was pushing the limit. I basically didn't sleep at all on the way there and was feeling the vertigo, but American played a decent selection of movies and TV from NBC which kept me entertained.

After a day of recovery and meeting up with the other invitees, we had two brain storming sessions on subsequent days in mid March with Stars staff. I obviously can't say a lot compared to what the January elected reps were able to report back as their meeting suggestions were implemented immediately and public knowledge, while the March meetings were pretty much all regarding future considerations.

Here is the list of what was discussed. I'm not going to go into detail on anything:

• PokerStars Financials
• VIP History
• Game Security
• Software
• Impact of WC Change
• VIP Program
• High Stakes Issues
• Micro-Rake

So I can't really offer much else up besides my opinion. I found the meetings really productive from a problem solving and site improving perspective. I'm cautiously optimistic that things are going to improve given that Stars follows through of course.

There is still the odd concern out there that I would like to address that reps/invitees are just in it for their own personal gain. Logically I think that's actually impossible to accomplish even if it is their goal since there are always more than a handful of extremely intelligent players and staff around the table that are more than capable of picking any of those self serving interests apart.

Our schedule was pretty full so there was pretty much zero time for any sight seeing. I managed a half hour walk attempting to go around the block early one morning. That plan does not really work when you keep spiraling up around a hill. I also managed to run around 5 minutes prior to my taxi showing up to take me back to the airport trying to snap some poor quality, non-post worthy pre-dawn photos.

We didn't have any pizza, but the "chips" in the hotel bar were excellent! We also happened to have a few minutes left on our lunch break in the meeting room when real money Zoom was launched on .com. One of the other players grabbed the laptop hooked up to the projector to try it out while I loaded up my laptop. Despite my ability to super use him via projector screen, 4 tables of $0.01/$0.02 PLO was too much for me to handle on a tiny screen to even realize he was at my tables and bluff raising me off a number of pots, much to the amusement of everyone else watching the projector.

Edit: Here's a few pictures I've taken from the internet and google street view. They are basically the pictures I would have taken had I had a spare minute =)

Recovering from the flight, playing poker on the balcony

Out for chips and beer at the hotel on arrival the night before meetings begin.

Out for dinner with players and Stars reps and management at JAR - 2nd night

King Edward Road - Sefton Hotel

Out for a walk early morning

Driving up to Stars HQ

A view of Douglas Bay

I had a great time though interacting with the other players and the staff and would recommend that if you have the opportunity, you should go. The ability to actively discuss issues and ideas is orders of magnitudes greater than forum or email interaction.

ZOOM

The main reason for my lack of posts lately has been a direct result of Zoom, which I've played exclusively since they released it. Along with my new G13 which was super easy to program with Table Ninja, I've been playing some monster sessions that feel like nothing.

I got an email response earlier this from Stars that my January VPP reduction due to WC was 19%. I got a follow up email last week saying 15% of players had been calculated wrong and my actual reduction was only 12%. I am a bit on the laggier side.

However with Zoom, I seem to be a lot more laggy given that I'm only playing 4 tables and can concentrate so much better on postflop hand reading and identifying +EV situations. I'm actually seeing significant VPP rate increases over 2011 rates at all stakes I've played (25NL-200NL). I've also been running really hot and playing fairly well and am currently maintaining a whopping 12-14 bb/100 at 100NL Full Ring over a growing sample. I've also had a good amount of similar uccess at 200NL over a smaller sample, but I had a bit of a 16% W$SD implosion yesterday which wiped out nearly all of my profits from that stake for the month.

I think this is exactly what I needed. For the longest time I've wanted to cut tables to improve and focus more but I just can't bring myself to give up the volume. This lets me keep the volume and cut tables. I've considered trying to 6 table it, but right now I'm thinking why mess with something going so well?

The other great thing about Zoom is the complete lack of startup, sitout and shutdown times. If you're a mass tabler, with the state of the waiting lists in the lobby it's going to take you upwards of a half hour to get 12-24 tables going, and probably longer yet the higher you play. Which means you can't really take a break either once you're in full swing. It's also going to take you a considerable amount of time to shut down while waiting for hands to play out to finish your orbits. Plus you're always going to have that one troll table where someone sits out ahead of you giving you the privelege of playing a discounted orbit at the expense of your agitated wife wondering where you're staying 30 minutes after she told you dinner would be ready in 15 minutes. The discount is all fine and good if you're happy with slashing your hourly rate and don't have anything better to do than not give up that dollar in EV to go do something else. I would literally rather volunteer 3 hours a month at McDonalds if I could get back those 10 extra minutes every session.

With Zoom, you are instantly dealt in to all your tables the moment you join the pool. If you want to take a break you have a reasonable amount of time where you can sit out and come right back where you left off. And shutting down your sessions is as simple as fast-folding your hands to the big blind. This takes a matter of minutes depending on how many playable hands come up.

So with all of this time removed, it makes mini-sessions extremely easy to put in. Instead of playing mindless games on my phone to waste 10 or 15 minutes before leaving the house for something, I can fire up Zoom, put in 50 VPPs and 200 hands. If I did this on average every day with a very modest winrate, it would come out to an extra $1k FPP value and $1.5k winnings on the year and a significant boost towards my next milestone.

With all that combined now, I've gone from a 65k VPP reduced Supernova maintenance goal to a 200k VPP goal. I could potentially go for 300k but it's going to require a significant amount more work so we'll have to see what kind of volume I can put in over summer before deciding. Right now I need a 650 VPP pace for 200k and a 1025 VPP pace for 300k.

Poker Update | Straw Polls Update

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.

LOL CAP games

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.

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.

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 =)

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.

Best day everER

A while ago (my last post lol - I did not actually fall down a well), I posted that I had my best day ever.

That is no longer true. Today is my new best day ever! And oddly enough it came at 50nl. Yes, I broke my resolution. The first half of the month got off to a rough start at 100nl, mostly 5 buyin swongs every day. I got sick of that and said ok lets make some money for once and dropped to 50nl to work on some things.

So I played 50nl for a few days and got my confidence back and moved back up quickly to 100nl and some 200nl and haven't looked back for the rest of the month. My graph is basically a 60 degree ruler starting on the 17th and oddly enough it's going to be my best month ever even though I was breakeven the first 2 weeks. The implications for this are obviously exciting!

Last night I couldn't sleep so I fired up some tables. 100nl was pretty dead so 24 tabling 50nl looked appetizing enough. Ran insanely hot and played my best game ever. Seriously. EVER. I then decided it would be fun to top the PTR winner's list for 50nl for today and continued to play that. 3 sessions later and 7500 hands and I'm +20 buyins. That's about 12 ptBB/100 -- while 24 tabling. I'm about 3 buyins ahead of EV too and didn't actually get into a lot of set vs. overpair or any set vs. set situations so I'm going to take the credit and say that I maxed the shit out of value with mid strength hands and picked some sick spots to shove people off their hands in big pots.

Cliffnotes:
Feeling good
Running good
Playing A+ game that makes my old A game look like a C game

Today's 50nl graph:

Best Day Ever

Yesterday was fun:

• +6 BI in 330 hands and then played another 1k hands on the plateau. Stop at $2/hand imo.
  
• Won a 27 person donkament for $100. 
  
• $82 Step 3 ticket --> $215 Step 4 ticket --> playing in my first Sunday Million which is actually the Sunday 2 Million yay!

Also going to play in the Turbo Takedown considering the sick changes they've made to it. Basically going to be playing to try for consecutive cash's which give you free bonuses of $100(n) up to $1k. And I guess a car would be nice too.
_____________________

I managed to bust out of the WBCOOP Event #2 shortly after this hand which tilted me slightly being results oriented and all. PLO is the game of the future if this is going to continue to be standard. I'm definitely not any sort of PLO expert yet but this baffles me.

Poker Stars Freeroll Pot Limit Omaha Hi Tournament - t125/t250 Blinds - 8 players - View hand 499287
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

BB: t17225 M = 45.93
UTG: t23395 M = 62.39
UTG+1: t70 M = 0.19
MP1: t18214 M = 48.57
MP2: t2640 M = 7.04
CO: t25867 M = 68.98
BTN: t5730 M = 15.28
Hero (SB): t35107 M = 93.62

Pre Flop: (t375) Hero is SB with J 8 7 Q
UTG raises to t875, 5 folds, Hero calls t750, 1 fold

Flop: (t2000) 9 7 6 (2 players)
Hero checks, UTG bets t2000, Hero raises to t8000, UTG calls t6000

Turn: (t18000) 2 (2 players)
Hero bets t18000, UTG calls t14520 all in

River: (t47040) A (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: t47040
UTG shows A J 5 J (a pair of Aces)
Hero shows J 8 7 Q (a pair of Sevens)
UTG wins t47040

This tournament kept me away from FPSing a lot in my cash games. I might throw one in if I'm planning on playing a longer session and see how it works out.

Blizzards, Run Goods and Donkaments, oh my!

So today is the first time in the decade since I got my drivers' license that I actually got stuck. At least I did it right. Black ice and white out conditions made for some interesting driving on my way to work this morning. I'm pretty thankful no one happened to be coming in the opposite direction - I did about 60 feet each at 45 degrees, sideways, and backwards. A co-worker happened to be behind me and brought me to work (yay!) and another co-worker brought me right back before I was going to call a tow-truck and pulled me out (bink!). ty sirs.

The grey lines represent where the road ends and the ditch filled with 5 feet of snow starts. Unfortunately I don't drive a Jaguar irl but I can put one in my diagram because it's my blog.

Other that that January has been super awesome. On track for my best month ever. The major factor here has been my no-50nl-FR-New-Years'-resolution which I have stuck to. Plus it helps that I've been running at 5 ptBB/100 at 100nl FR over what's becoming a small significant sample.

I'm about to start playing in WBCOOP Event #1. I have a love/hate relationship with donkaments - namely loving the start and hating the end. I've been reading a bit about cEV and some of Tommy Angelo's thoughts on dollar value of your seat so hopefully that will start to work out for me.

2010 Resolution

New Year Resolution for 2010: No more 50NL Full Ring. It's time to move up. You can't really become comfortable doing something unless you actually do it.

I've had a really good start to the year at 100NL and 200NL FR. I'm starting to really enjoy the game dynamic at those levels and I'm finding myself getting a lot better in 3bet/4bet pots. Also feeling a lot more in control postflop and manipulating peoples' ranges pretty effectively. I'm still playing 50NL 6max as I haven't accomplished the winrate that I think I should be having there yet.

I recently read Dusty Schmidt's new book, Treat Your Poker Like a Business. I'd say it's about 30% motivational, 20% promotional (which I found quite lame considering I already paid $ and anyone reading this book already knows about rakeback and Stox) and 50% content - about 1/3 of that new-ish content. I was actually hoping for more of a workbook style, but it ended up being more what to think about with not much what to do. Anyone thinking about going pro (ie. people that need to know this info) might be a bit disappointed in it seeing as how most of the what to think about is already available for free on most forums. Still a decent read.

But if I take anything from this book, it's the fact that I need to treat my bankroll not as money, but rather as inventory. It's just an inventory of chips used to aquire more chips. Invest x chips here and expect a return of x + y chips here. Hopefully I can maintain that mindset and continue moving up this year.

Good luck to everyone in 2010.

November is finally over

Haven't posted in a while. I seem to post a lot less when I'm not winning, which has been the case the past couple of weeks. I've been basically breakeven after a very swingy second half of November.

I think it's a combination of bad sleeping habits and trying out new stuff, then trying to find my way back to fundamentals when something doesn't work out. That can lead to some frustration and trying to force things. I've also taken a couple of failed shots at 200nl FR and 100nl 6max in the past week so that has a lot to do with it as well.

Part 2 of my 25nl series is out now and Part 3 is on the way. If only I could keep running as hot as I do in my videos... lol... maybe I should just start recording all my sessions and talking through my thought process out loud.

First 3 25nl videos almost complete

Well I've almost got the first few videos for my 25nl series on Best Free Poker Coaching finished and hope to have them up soon. I think I'd call it more of an intermediate level series. From my own experience this is about where most winning 25nl and even 50nl regs are at. They typically have a really good understanding of fundamentals which puts them ahead of the average losing/breakeven player but sometimes have a bit of a disconnect between applying some concepts correctly and meshing their overall strategy.


So I'm going to try to demonstrate how a lot of those standard concepts work together to help the 25nl reg get to that next level in their game with this series.

The first video is going to be about the 3 types of advantages we have in poker and how to use them to make decisions about whether to play a hand or not along with player categorization and tendencies and what kind of adjustments we can make according to that information.

The second video will build on that and look more at hand selection and ranges versus different types of players. Based on this we can look at playing different types of hands against different types of players and having a plan for those hands that meshes our preflop actions together with our postflop plan.

The third video is still a little up in the air as to what I want to look at. Right now I'm thinking of going more in depth with our postflop plan in terms of equity and aggression. I imagine this will look at finding more spots to maximize value and steal pots using our equity. Probably more focus on hands like suited connectors and suited broadways that give us those equity shares where we can remain aggressive rather than the more binary hit or miss hands.
So look for those to come out soon on Best Free Poker Coaching. By the way, I need a name for the series, so if you have any ideas for that or other concepts you'd like to see, let me know!

200nl shot, fail

I'm obviously not ready for 200nl yet psychologically. I played pretty decent today and I think I can compete there, but I finished the session down "only" 1.5 BI after starting up 1.5 BI and I feel kind of sick about it. Thankfully that's all I was down after running 2nd flush into nut flush 3 hands in a row on the same table against the same 30/15.

Kept running into sets after that even though I pot controlled it pretty well and got away with not paying them much but then got a little frustrated about flush under flush and overpair vs set situations happening constantly and spewed my JJ overpair vs a BB (12/11 with 25% c/r) c/r on a low board. Decided it was time to quit after that when I was telling myself just fold to the c/r just fold, it doesn't matter just fold, but no i 4bet/call the flop, sigh.

Will try again next month.

25nl Full Ring Video Series Ideas

I'm going to be doing a 25nl Full Ring series on Best Free Poker Coaching over the next few weeks and need some ideas. If there's anything you'd like to see, leave a comment and I'll try to incorporate it into one of the videos. I'll be starting off with some pretty basic stuff and hopefully move into slightly more advanced topics towards the end.

Some concepts I'm thinking about covering:

The 3 Advantages
Player Tendencies and Hand Selection
Isolation, Cbetting and Texture
Bet Sizing
Basic hand reading
Equity and Aggression

Each subsequent video will build on the concepts of the last and my goal is to provide an overall framework for how to turn the 25nl Full Ring game into your personal ATM =)

I'll keep this post updated as I think of more topics I want to cover.

New Full Ring Coaching Site

There seems to be a lot of demand and short supply of Full Ring NLHE video content and Best Free Poker Coaching is going to be a great resource for this. I joined the other 7 coaches there and we will be making full ring videos and offering coaching. These guys are just amazing and I've learned a ton from them so make sure you check it out. There's some great deals too like gift cards and licenses to Poker Tracker 3 or Holdem Manager with the purchase of package deals.

I've been looking to get into coaching for a while now and this is the perfect opportunity for me and I think making videos will be a lot of fun and help me improve my own game as well.

Other than that I've been playing a good mix of full ring, 6max as well as getting into some PLO 6max which I find extremely fun to play and so much more complex in a lot of ways. It's nice to keep things fresh with a number of different games that I can beat and I'm starting to see equity and play making spots in some games that are more common in others.

Put in a nice 6 tabling session of PLO25 today and ran pretty well: +7 buyins over 700 hands. I decided to purchase the HEM Omaha addon yesterday and I'm using my NLHE HUD but I'm not really sure that it's all that useful beyond identifying fish via VPIP as per usual. Air is so minimal from 99% of the players that I've encountered so far and I guess that's expected in a game that's about making the nuts with a redraw to the nuts.

I started off with some really fishy stats of 38/17 and was cold calling 33% - I don't know for sure if this is fishy or not and have no idea what "standard" is. But I'm starting to notice a lot more good spots to isolate and I'm starting to understand the preflop equity a bit more so those numbers are slowly merging - I'm now running 35/23 but still have no idea if this is proper strat or not. I'm going to see how much of this game I can figure out on my own, it's a good complicated math problem.

The rest of the month has been a bit of a roller coaster... er... make that 2 way escalator, of winning money at my regular game, taking shots, running sub-standard during shots, repeat - but I'm still happy with the results as I'm learning quite a bit during my shot taking sessions.

So yeah, make sure you check out Best Free Poker Coaching and all the coaches there!