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!

April Wrap-up

April turned out to be really swongy. Thankfully the swong ended on a nice upswing towards the end of this month. I've nearly completed 100k hands of fullring for the month to finish out the 2 group volume props for this month totaling $250 so I'm thinking I might make a little off of that. Doesn't hurt to throw my name on the list when I'm pretty much guaranteed to play enough hands - it is a good motivator.

Had some really sick variance in 2/3 of the 200nl shots I took this month running top fullhouses and AA into quads several times. Variance is expected over 5k hands though. The 3rd shot ended nicely though and I think I'm going to be taking more controlled shots there a lot more often in the near future. Currently running 100nl at 3 ptBB/100 over 45k hands this month and I've only managed to put in about 10k of those on the weekends.

Games are running extremely well in small stakes. Table selection continues to be absolutely amazing with the Stars structure changes and there are still way more 40-100 tables than 20-50 tables which is a good sign. I've heard people complaining at 600nl+ that this is not true. I don't see a reason why Stars couldn't adjust structure according to different stakes depending on current strategies and player bases - no reason for everything to be site-wide. The counter-argument is obviously that it's unethical to try to shuttle fish into regs' preferred games and could be detrimental to the future economy of the game. Overall I think they did a really good job still.

Tried out several Rush donkaments on FTP and all I can say is wow. The fish:shark ratio in tournaments is generally higher than in cash games but these tournaments are off the chart. I obviously only finished on the bubble in both that I played and couldn't keep dodging the minefield forever. Crippled with KK<65o AI on the flop on T75r and a couple standard KK<AA (one on the first hand lol).

I have 8k hands to finish up today and tomorrow which shouldn't be a problem. Right on pace. I am having trouble putting in 6 hours a day with the rest of life going on but that's ok. I'm going to scale this back to a 25 hour week schedule next month.

PokerStars Buyin Changes

Yay!

(understatement - I am slightly more ecstatic than I was when I received video games at Christmas when I was 6 years old)

The change to buyin requirements has finally been implemented on Stars:

• 20-50 bb, with default buy-in of 40bb
• 40-100 bb, with default buy-in of 80bb
• 100-250 bb, with default buy-in of 200bb and ante equal to 20% of the Big Blind
• http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/games/rules/ring/

There's been a lot of worry on the forums about the overlap between 40-50 bb and that the fish that buyin for those amounts would gravitate towards the shallow games. So far, at least in small stakes, it doesn't appear to be a problem. In my estimation, fish tend to like to see flops and call multiple streets to see if they can hit their draw. They can't really do that in a preflop/flop shove structure and I think even if they were to start out playing those games, they are going to get sick of shortstackers' "strategy" faster than regs did at the 20-100 bb tables.

As of last night and this morning, the deep and medium buyin levels have been outnumbering the shallow games by at least 2:1 at small stakes which is a good sign, despite all the shortstackers that 24 table. There's also been somewhat of an influx of shortstackers in the 40-100 game buying in for 40 bb and so far they've been getting crushed trying to implement their style as far as I have seen. They look completely lost by the turn with an extra large (to them) PSB left. Hopefully they'll try out the medium games for a while and be the new fish.

I haven't really had to table select much at all at 100nl since the change. There's generally three 60-80 bb stacks at a lot of tables so I hardly even have to waitlist at all. I guess some of the 40-50 bb fish might be playing the shallow games, but having all the 40-80 bb fish that avoided the 50bb-min games is a laughable tradeoff. The games seem to have loosened up dramatically, especially the deep games - I tried out some 50nl FR deep-ante and was running at about 0.45 vpp/hand which a few other people confirmed. I don't know if that's going to sustain or not, but that's a ridiculously good rate for 50nl.

Overall I really like the changes and I think they're going to be good for the game. But I think PokerStars needs to implement a couple tweaks to the new structure to fine tune it:


I still think they need to get rid of the overlap in buyin. There really is no point to it other than to give the 20bb stacks a decent edge over the 50bb stacks. 40bb is going to drastically reduce that edge imo, as 4bet shoves are going to be much more correct. 50bb just makes awkward stack sizes vs 3bets (unless you make some adjustments and just minraise all the time - assuming the shortstackers are not going to adjust at all to that and 3bet smaller). Haven't done the math on this yet so this is just my logical guestimate - not sure if I will do the math considering I don't plan on opening any 20-50 tables other than to have a laugh at the shortstack on shortstack violence rakefest.

Re-label the buyin structures "Shallow, Medium, Deep" and colour code accordingly as per Full Tilt. I prefer "Normal" to "Medium" but a ton of people think that's unethical wrt the fish thought process. The lobby is a mess of descriptions right now. The last thing you want to do is have recreational players have to read through a somewhat complicated looking information banner and try to find the game they want in a lobby that's currently a wall of text. This re-labeling and especially colour coding  is pretty much a no brainer and just about everyone is calling for it so I would expect this to be implemented relatively soon.

Overall, good job Stars. A few minor fixes should make the site completely in tune with current strategies and player bases.

Test-Pro

I officially started my 7 months of test-pro on Saturday and will for the most part be putting in my hours Monday to Friday with at most 4 hours on the weekend. I have several goals in mind:

 

• Set up somewhat of a schedule.
• 30 hours per week.
• Focus on improving and moving up.
• Watch a lot of videos.
• Get some coaching.
• Hammer out a few milestone bonuses.

 

If I can make a decent run at this without being able to play much on the weekend, I should have the skill, mindset, bankroll and savings to actually do this for real. The conditions I’ll be playing in now will be slightly tougher than conditions for being a real pro: more hours squeezed into fewer days, no weekend fish (although without the stress of actually needing to make money).

 

Saturday and Sunday are my "days off" where I go to my day job, but I managed to get in a couple hours Saturday anyways and won 4 buyins in a couple hours so I’m already ahead of schedule =)

 

I’ll keep any updates related to this under the “Test-Pro” label until the end of October.

Non-poker books

I think I'm going to start getting back into reading some books. There's a bunch of classic books out there that I've always wanted to read and now with all my extra time off I'm going to start reading a bunch of them. I seem to be biased towards the dystopian books for some reason or another - I really enjoyed Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.  Besides good classics, I'm a huge fan of Stephen King-ish type novels.

Currently reading:
Under the Dome: Stephen King

Reading list in no particular order:
20,000 Leauges Under the Sea
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Catcher in the Rye
Catch 22

... oh and of course playing poker when I'm not reading...

Ship the +8 buyins today. SessionLog.doc FTW.

Back in the black!

Quick update:

Caught up on a ton of sleep
Feeling really good
Trying out a session journal to record goals and results (not $)
Got out of my poker funk.
Huge day at 50nl 6max: 10 buyins in 6k hands by 4pm
Maintained A game state of mind for 4 one hour sessions
Going to have 5 days off of work per week until November as opposed to 2 with full salary (bink!)

Had a big opportunity for tilt and ended up joking about it with the other player in chat instead. Hand History:

Stars 50nl 6max

Preflop: Hero has JTs as PFRer, c/r happy Villain calls in SB

Flop: Tc5d4s, checks through
Turn: 5s with the flushdraw out now, Hero bets 2/3 pot, villain c/r almost pot, Hero soul-reads that Villain has squadoosh and calls to induce river bluffs
River: 2c and Villain leads for 3/4 pot, Hero snapcalls and gets shown 22

Hero says: "nh"
Villain says: "that's generally my strategy, make stupid plays and then get there"
...

So hopefully you guys won't have to listen to me whine for a while :)

gg March

March can diagf afaic.

My month in a nutshell (over and over and over and over.............. again):

Poker Stars $0.25/$0.50 No Limit Hold'em - 9 players - View hand 607219
The Official DeucesCracked.com Hand History Converter

MP1: $82.10
MP2: $29.25
CO: $53.45
BTN: $45.25
SB: $63.25
BB: $67.65
UTG: $116.00
Hero (UTG+1): $50.00
UTG+2: $50.00

Pre Flop: ($0.75) Hero is UTG+1 with 8 8
UTG raises to $1.50, Hero calls $1.50, 5 folds, SB calls $1.25, BB calls $1

Flop: ($6.00) 6 8 9 (4 players)
SB checks, BB checks, UTG checks, Hero bets $4.50, SB folds, BB calls $4.50, UTG folds

Turn: ($15.00) 4 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $11, BB raises to $61.65 all in, Hero calls $33 all in

River: ($103.00) T (2 players - 2 are all in)

Final Pot: $103.00

BB shows Q J (a straight, Eight to Queen)
Hero shows 8 8 (three of a kind, Eights)
BB wins $100.00
(Rake: $3.00)
villain says "that's poker at its best!"

Added up every pot > 50bb and it's 2/3 this shit and 1/3 bad play due to tilt from this shit (if you count shoving 30%+ equity for 0EV bad play when you know they're never folding). Possibly my first losing month ever if things don't turn around fast. I think I've hit the "worse than you ever thought possible" because it's not possible to run worse than this imo - and I've had more than a few gross runs. $2k+ under EV plus unbelievable amounts of KK vs AA and set vs weird straight coolers between 2/3 50nl and 1/3 100nl for the month in only 75k hands.

Everyone on the forums wants to talk about ranges and playing peoples' ranges but I have a new improved plan: take your absolute hand strength and just +1 it to find out what they have. Oh and FYI people don't fold hands when they don't beat anything when I shove because they have an under pa--ooooohhhh shiny over there! ie. bottom-pair-no-draw is +1 of nut flush draw. Don't think about making that NFD either because they get their cards swapped out for a set that boats up when you hit your NFD.

Multi-Tabling (or why not to)

Download PDF version of this article

I've had a few requests to write an article on multi-tabling and decided that might be fun so here it is. I'm certainly no expert on the topic but I'll share what I've tried and what works for me. This article is going to be fairly long because I think a lot of people underestimate just how drastic this issue is with regards to the advancement of their poker career (I should know). There's a link to download this as PDF at the top if you'd like to print or view offline.

Know why you're multi-tabling and why you shouldn't be. There are a few factors that go into deciding how many tables you should play. A lot of them are connected and seem to contradict each other in some cases. They also generally boil down to 2 main issues:

Skill and Hourly.

The first thing most people think about when multi-tabling is increasing their hourly rate, which isn't a terrible thing because it is the primary reason to multi-table. Simply factoring winrate on a given number of tables at a certain stake vs another combination of winrate and tables and stakes is one way of deciding.

Experience

Your skill level is going to be the first indicator of whether or not you can add more tables. Skill comes from experience and experience in a wide range of situations against a wide range of opponents is going to tell you what the "standard" play is in almost any given situation. This allows you to free up thought process resources for the non-standard situations.

For example: If you are a new player where you know the standard play in 60% of situations and you play 10 tables, you need to think about 4 decisions and autopilot 6 decisions at any given time. Now if you add another 10 tables, you need to think about 8 decisions and autopilot 12 decisions in the same amount of time.

If you are an experienced player (who I'll call the pro) with a million quality hands under your belt and you know the standard in 95% of situations, on 10 tables you need to think about 0.5 decisions at any moment, while 20 tabling you need to think about 1 decision.

At 60 hands/hour the new player will have to think about 240 vs 480 hands when picking between 10 and 20 tables while the pro looks at a range of 30 vs 60 hands. You can clearly see that the increase in tables does not affect the pro nearly as much in regards to decisions per hour compared to the new player. It's still a 100% increase, but in terms of decisions/hour it's a huge difference. In order for the new player to attain the same level of focus as the 10 tabling pro (30 hands requiring thought process per hour), he should be playing no more than 1 table for 24 hands requiring thought process per hour. 2 tables would be about the equivalent of a 20 tabling pro.

Improve and Move Up vs Mass Table Autopilot

But playing a couple million hands and adding tables in the process once you've seen everything there is to see is not all there is to it. There is a point in mass tabling where focus levels drop to the point that it is hard to work on improving and you simply end up autopiloting.

There are 2 types of autopiloting:
a) clicking buttons based on 1st level absolute hand strength
b) making automatic decisions based on experience and a solid grasp of ranges and hand reading.

Option b is obviously the better option. In order to do that however, we need to again work on experience and improving, which means playing less tables to free up thought process.

We also have to consider our poker endgame and opportunity cost. The ultimate goal of the game for any serious player is simply to make money in the most profitable and efficient manner possible. So figure out how much you want to ultimately make per hour and then figure out what kind of winrate, number of tables and stakes will get you there. Everything in between where you are now and that ultimate goal is just a journey and an effort towards the end goal. A lot of players - myself included - fall into the trap of mass tabling now for short term benefit. This is simply an unecessary detour on the path to your ultimate goal.

Hourly

Lets take two identical players who have the same winrates (4 ptBB/100 on 8 full ring tables for $9.60/hour) and play the same stakes (25NL) and same amount of time (20 hours/week) and send them down different paths.

Player A instantly jumps to 24 tables of 25NL for a 2.5 ptBB/100 winrate and doubles his hourly to $18/hour. He progresses very slowly and finally moves up to 50NL and continues to 24 table there 6 months later and for the rest of the year at 1.5 ptBB/100 and $21.60/hour. After a year he's won $20,592.

Player B continues down the 8 table ($9.60) path and progresses faster, being able to analyze situations and learn. In 3 months he moves up to 50NL and wins at 3 ptBB/100 ($14.40). After another 4 months he moves up to 100NL and wins at 2 ptBB/100 ($19.20). After a year he's won $16,128.

This obviously looks like an argument for mass tabling. But lets take a closer look at Player B's situation. He's still only playing 8 tables at higher stakes and making less per hour. But he's primed to play higher stakes on more tables now. What happens if he decides to increase to 12 tables at 1.8 ptBB/100 ($25.92) or 18 tables at 1.5 ptBB/100 ($32.40) or 24 tables at 1.3 ptBB/100 ($37.44)? Maybe he continues to improve to the point where he can 24 table at 2 ptBB/100 ($57.60)

Or continues to move up and then add tables? Or a combination of both? He has a lot of options as to how he wants to increase his hourly rate, whereas Player A has artificially capped his hourly rate because he hasn't developed the skillset to play higher stakes and he's maxed out on tables.

Player A has also played more hands, which one would think means more experience. But the value in that experience is going to be drastically diminished due to less focus. Experience therefore is defined as a qualitative term rather than quantitative.

Adding Tables

Player B now wants to start adding tables. The best way I've found to do this is to add 25% to your table load. If you play 4 tables, add 1. If you play 8 tables, add 2. 12 tables, add 3. A good indicator of too many tables is timing out. If you start timing out, scale it back a table or two.

I strongly suggest that this is fluid (just as I believe many things in poker should be) because your focus is going to be better for some sessions than others and if you normally play 12 but are feeling rushed or taking longer for decisions there's nothing wrong with cutting it back to 8 for today.

Layout

Belok has already done a great post on 24 tabling like a pro so I won't go much into this.

Here's the 6x2 layout I generally use. I can have up to 4 layers stacked on top of this for 24 tables. I have a 25" widescreen at 1920x1080 that I play on, and I use a second 21" widescreen for the lobby and HEM, which helps for table selection while playing so your lobby doesn't constantly have tables popping over top. A 30" would be ideal for less overlap.

I also use a stacked layout with an AHK table mover if I'm mass tabling. Typically, tiled tables are better for note taking but I find if you have a way of moving tables out of the stack to focus on them, this method is better for notes because the note should never get covered by another table popping up.

So don't be Player A - aka me. Play fewer tables, work on your game and move up. Once you've reached a stake where your ultimate hourly rate is possible, start thinking about mass tabling. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to cut this short... my 24 tables keep stealing keyboard focus from this post and that annoying timer alarm is going again.

Whine ITP

** Warning: Beat Post ** Cliffnotes for those that don't like reading about beats

ugh. You can basically take my last post and invert it (graph and all) over the past 5 days.

There's something to be said about spiralling downswings. Beats + Tilt leads to Bad Play. Bad Play means not picking up enough value to outweigh the Beats. So the solution then, is to cut out the Tilt so that the equation can not be completed and perpetuated.

The first 2 days were pure monkey tilt. Sets and AA/KK/QQ (always running into 1 pair bigger -- for those that do not know: KK>QQ, AA>KK, 22>AA) were my biggest losers and I was sum-negative with all of these. Big Pots = Big Variance. The 3rd day was just plain slow-bleed frustration. The last 2 days have been no better variance-wise, but my thought process is right back on track and I'm theoretically crushing again in an alternate universe where Sklansky runs the FED. It is encouraging to know that my bad play game is EV neutral so that's a positive.

The bet/bet/check-fold trend continues vs everyone from 10/8 to 72/5 as the most innocuous boards continue to run out 4 flush/straight. I'm all for a rule change stating flushes must use both holecards aside from the fact that when fish call off their stack vs my flop shove with As4h on AhKs3h9hQh and think they've made a brilliant psychic play which is apparent by my "nh" followed by a simple "ty" -- they are typically still level 0 even after cards are flipped up.

Cliffnotes:
Standard runbad in big pots
Nominate Sklansky to chair the FED
4 flush is the bane of my existence
Brilliant psychic fish

Sorry for the whine, I hope it was at least entertaining. Here's to hoping the long run pops his head in here any minute now...

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.

FTP Rush

I've been checking out the FTP Rush games the past couple days. Couple things I noticed right away: no HUD possibilities, no image, no real reads besides stack size and line (although I am working on a system to do post session review and apply that info to player notes and colour coding). It's basically poker in a vacuum.

Considering it's watered down or completely missing so many key elements of the online game, I almost feel bad to say that I actually enjoy it. Each table basically runs at 4x a regular table in hands/hour. I don't really have any BR over on FTP so this is actually perfect for me. I can play 4 rush tables = 16 regular tables with only 4 buyins + change and build it up quite quickly.

It also effectively turns all the 1 tablers into 4 tablers who are making 4x as many mistakes per hour - well maybe not quite that much since hand ranges are stronger due to the impression of having to play fast (you don't) and the ease of getting better cards with a simple auto-fold pre.

With all that said, I'm still on the fence as to whether this is good for the game in the long term. People will run out of money much faster. People will clear bonuses much faster. People will earn more rakeback. No one can improve playing more than 1 of these tables and having the HH replay open.

Very interesting and innovative concept at the least. I'll have to continue to evaluate. I'm considering grinding out a quick Iron Man on FTP due to this while maintaining Supernova on Stars so that I'm primed for either site in case one takes a nose dive in the loyalty program department.

PokerStars Haiti Earthquake Appeal

Just a quick post to encourage everyone to donate to the Haiti Earthquake Appeal at Stars and the funds set up at other sites. Stars is matching whatever is donated


From the PokerStars News:
The appeal is running until noon on January 31, and here's how you can get involved:

- In the PokerStars lobby, go to Tourney >> Special and enter one of the dummy 'Haiti Earthquake Relief' tournaments listed there. 'Buy-ins' range from $1,000 all the way down to $1. You will not need to play an actual tournament, instead all of the 'entry fees' go straight to the fund.

- Alternatively you can make a private player transfer for any amount to the account 'Haiti Fund'. Go to 'Requests' in the client top menu and select 'Transfer Funds'.

As of January 18th, $400,000+. gogogo

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.

2009: Year in Review

What a busy year. Lots of poker. Lots of life.

I nearly completed my poker goals for the year. I wanted to be a 200nl reg at this point but I'm not quite there yet. Despite that I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out. I ended up with a lot less time online than I anticipated and still managed to learn a ton of strategy and work on my game a lot offline.

I started off the year still playing mostly 25nl with some pretty big confidence issues. After finally figuring out how to consistently beat 50nl in the first few months of the year, I decided I wanted to take a more pro-active approach to learning and decided to cut down on tables for more sessions. I decided to start taking mini shots at 200nl which worked out well for the most part and played a good mix of 50nl and 100nl throughout most of the year.

Confidence is such a tricky thing. Without it, you get run over. With the wrong kind, you get into all sorts of FPS and put small stakes regs that litter the 100nl+ games on this pedestal of genius. But with the right kind of confidence you feel like you can hold your own and that your normal poker thought process is enough to beat this game without going to the 7th level.

I did go through a pretty soul crushing last 2 months of poker for 2009, December being one of my toughest months ever. I came very close to having my first losing month but managed to pull it back together the last few days to put in a decent result.

I also joined some great coaches over on BestFreePokerCoaching.com and started doing a bit of coaching myself. I really enjoyed putting out some videos - and it's tough to do when you're getting crushed by variance in your regular game - and they helped me think through exactly what I was doing and pointed out a few mistakes to myself.

In life, my daughter turned 1 year old and we found out that we are expecting another one this year! So life will be super busy again but it's so much fun and I wouldn't trade it. We're about 96% finished the house we built a few years ago and should be completely done in the next couple months - those last final details always seem to get put off.

2010 is going to be interesting. I'm probably going to get a decent amount of time off and that should help with some family time and VPP accumulation. I finished up 2009 with 150k VPPs. I was hoping for 200k but it just wasn't going to work out. So this year I'm hoping for 200k-300k or more and that's going to require some moving up. Hopefully those goals will work together.

I hope everyone out there had a great Christmas and Happy New Year!