Crushing it / New Goal

As I wrote in my July wrap up, last month was a pretty terrible month for me.  Now, half way through August, it seems that the downswing might not have been such a bad thing to happen to me. I’m sure many other players can relate to this. I worked my ass off watching videos, posting hands on 2+2, and reviewing many of the big pots that I played over the past few thousand hands.

It seems that the hard work has been paying off. Since dropping down to 25NL, I’ve been running at a blazing 12 BB/100. Am I running well also? Sure. But I also feel that I’ve made close to the maximum on my good but not great hands and lost very little on my second best hands. Things seem to be coming together for me in terms of reading hands and determining the ranges that correspond with different lines. When I move back up to 50NL at the end of next week, I am sure that I will not be moving back down any times soon.

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That said, my confidence has increased enough to come up with a new long term goal for myself. So here it is: to be a winning regular at 1/2 within the next 6-12 months.  Everything I do relating to poker from here on will in at least some way contribute to achieving this goal. This will entail of a couple main strategies: continue study (HH review, renewing my stoxpoker membership when the time comes at the end of next month), and sell some of my action to reduce my risk on the way up. Right now I’m making nice profits for some investors while playing 25NL, which will hopefully open up this opportunity sometime in the next few months.

July: the lost month

This month has been dominated by things other than 6max NL for me. I’ve been dedicating more of my free time to things other than poker. And the time I have spent playing poker have been games other than what I usually play. I started off running terribly, losing a few buy ins at 25NL on bad beats. This didn’t bother me much at the time, but for whatever reason I just haven’t felt like playing my normal games.

I think psychologically I just need to convince myself that I can beat those games again. Most of the time I’ve spent on poker this month has been dedicated to either .25/.50 razz, $2.15 heads up SNGs, and staking. So far things have gone well in those arenas for me.

So I’m setting a goal now for the next two weeks to finish this month in the black. It’s looking unlikely that I’ll be able to set another monthly PR, but that doesn’t really bother me. I’m going to have a very busy week ahead of me, so I have my work cut out for me.

June 2008 Wrap-Up

For the second month in a row I set a new PR for cash game winnings. I finished with $243 at a rate of 4.89 PTBB/100 for the month with about another $50 owed to me in rakeback. I played just under 6K hands, which I am really happy about. I started working my full-time summer job at the start of the month and came close to playing as many hands in May when I was free all the time. I’m extremely proud to say that my bankroll cracked four digits, but that was before my downswing and I am back down to the 100s now.

As a sidenote, I’ve been playing .25/.50 Razz and I’m having a great time with it. I read the Super System section and a few 2+2 articles on strategy, and I think I’m up overall. I love playing razz as an alternative to NLHE.

After being a break-even bonus whore a few years ago, it’s nice to know that my hard work (and financial investment in coaching services) is paying off. I’ve come a long way in terms of how I approach the game as well as my mental endurance. I remember when I first started playing on Full Tilt, I thought playing 250 hands was a long and exhausting session (and it is, when you’re playing live). Now I can play that many in just over in hour playing two tables.

Now that I’ve almost won everything back that I lost in one god-awful session about a week ago, I’m almost glad that it happened. It was easy to slip into auto-pilot mode, having posted my first two months in the black over about 10K hands. I know that everyone in the poker community talks about not going on auto-pilot, but I ignored good advice and stopped thinking and working.

I’ve always been conflicted about setting goals for the next month. On the one hand, I obviously would like to do better next month, but it’s also hard to tell myself to do better than I ever have before, especially considering the very small sample of hands I play per month. So I guess I’ll just say that I’d like to play 5K hands of my A game this month. As long as I feel next month that I’m a better player than I am now, I should be happy– in theory at least.

Graph possibly coming soon (but no promises).

Bouncing back from a downswing

Everyone’s definition of a downswing is different. I’m sure there are some pros, or at least players two take playing poker more serious than I do, who are both prepared and used to dropping several buy-ins and remaining confident in their play. For them, dropping a few big pots in a row is just a bad day.

But for the casual player, running bad for a sample as small as a few hundred or a thousand hands can be devastating. I’m personally operating with a 20 buy-in bankroll, which to my knowledge is deep enough to withstand the variance for the small stakes games that I play and the win rate that I’ve experienced since I started actually trying to play well and became somewhat of a student of the game.

I dropped about 4.5 buy-ins in the span of about 500 hands earlier this week. It should have been worse, as I won a 200BB pot when all the money went in on the flop when I had a low pocket pair vs. top set but hit a runner-runner flush. But I’m still here. I have to admit that all those terrible things were going through my mind when I finally decided to put a halt to the bleeding. “Good players like leatherass have 80k hand sideswings, and he’s a prolific winner. I’m not even sure I’ve played 80k hands in my life. What if this is the start of a massive downswing? What if my win rate was only the result of running hot for 20k hands? Is it worth it to continue with poker at all? All this work and thought I’ve put into the game and I still suck.”

But what can you do? Head back to work, and figure out why things went wrong. Figure out what situations you make good decisions in, and which situations you’re just completely lost and need to think about more away from the tables.

Ultimately I’ve realized that I was playing on auto-pilot. I wasn’t thinking about my opponents’ ranges. I was playing my own cards and somewhat randomly picking lines that I thought made sense. I wasn’t paying attention for their tendencies or really reacting to the clues about their play that their statistics suggested. I was closing my eyes and shoving with junk without thinking.

After the the introspection, soul searching, and guitar hero playing instead of hold em, I’m realizing more and more that this is a thinking man’s game. It’s about brains, not balls or “heart” as Doyle Brunson puts it in Super System. Maybe you do need “heart,” in that you can’t be afraid of getting your whole stack in, or you’ll be easily exploited by endless bluffs. But the image of the wild Texas gambler is a mirage. You must continually analyze changing situations and dynamics to figure out where the money is going.

So now I’ve learned my lesson.

Hey Phil Ivey

Hope you’re feeling good about that $2M bet you put on the Lakers!

BEAT LA

Vegas Trip Report, Pt. II

My second Vegas session was at the Flamingo’s “poker room.” It was very small. Again, I’m accustomed to the room at Turning Stone in upstate NY that must have about 30 tables. The Flamingo’s room probably had about six or seven. I guess it didn’t really matter in the end, since there were multiple 200NL games going with open seats.

The tables were 10-handed, which was kind of annoying (both because it’s more boring and farther away from 6max than 9-handed, and the 10th player makes things a little too crowded at the table. If only poker rooms spread 6max games…), but fortunately people were constantly standing up for extended periods of time. Maybe they were taking breaks for cigs, or maybe they were going off to gamble at other tables. I once saw a guy at turning stone who would get up after folding a hand and come back with new chips from playing blackjack when he was in the big blind again. I think I’d give that at least an 8.5 on the degenerate gambling scale.

The session wasn’t too long; I would have to say over the course of three hours I only got 100 or so hands in. (Why does anyone ever play live poker?) I didn’t really do much for the first several hands and got myself into a tough spot with AQ when I flopped TPTK. This isn’t going to be a good hand recollection, because I don’t remember the exact cards. But with about $175 effective stacks, I raised to $10 from the CO. Both blinds called. The flop was Qxx rainbow and I bet $25 into about $35. The SB called, making the pot $85. The turn came what seemed like a rag, and the SB shoved for about $140. I didn’t really know what to make of this, as I was planning on checking the turn for pot control and enducing a bluff or making another value bet of my own. My read on the SB was that he was a tight player, as I hadn’t really seen him put any money into pots earlier in the session, so I just folded. That was pretty annoying.

Then my big hand came (notice the theme? aka the hand that made the session profitable). As I mentioned in an earlier post, I like my hands to have a “theme” or “moral” to the story that is a broad poker concept that I’ve learned. The moral of this story is: “Sometimes, it’s good to be shortstacked” because it’s much easier to commit when you only have one pair on the flop and avoid tough spots later in the hand.

I found AA on the button with about $130. I decided that this was a good thing, since a raise and a call would put the stack-to-pot ratio at between 3-5, and I’d be able to commit my whole stack +EV on most flops. UTG and UTG+1 limped and I raised to $15. Both limpers called and we saw the flop with about $50 in the pot. The flop came Ks7s2. Perfect. Plenty of Kings and flush draws will pay me off. Both limpers checked, I bet $30, UTG minraised to $60, UTG+1 coldcalled, I shoved for $60 more, and they both called. Turn and river were both blanks and the villains showed down KT and KJ. Wow. I tripled up and scooped a nice $400 pot.

After another hour or so of junk hands and cbetting without much resistance, I stood up with about $375, close to half my bankroll on Full Tilt. Yikes! Why can’t 200max games online be this soft?

Vegas trip report, part 1

It’s a bit overdue, as I got back from my first (legal) trip to Vegas last week, but I played some interesting poker there that is worth mentioning.

But first, I have to talk about bad beat of fucking Gary Loveman, Harrah’s CEO, owning a small interest in my beloved Boston Celtics. None of the Harrah’s places had the Celtics-Pistons games on the board. Wtf?

Anyway, I only managed to get two medium length sessions in during my stay. I visited the majority of the casinos on the strip and I have to say I wasn’t terribly impressed by the poker rooms. Maybe my expectations were too high, considering I’m used to having the choice of probably 30+ different 50max tables at any given time on Full Tilt, and the only times I played were on weekday afternoons. But still. It’s fucking Vegas.

My first session was an odd 1/3 game at Caesars. I got a free medallion from the Rewards card I got sucked into and used it as a card protector. I don’t think it intimidated anyone, unfortunately. For whatever reason, the max buy-in was $500 for the game. I took three stacks of red chips to the table and sat in one of the middle seats, maybe number 5 or 6. I think allowing close to 200bb deep max buy-ins for these tables is a dangerous trend for poker. The deeper the stacks, generally speaking, the bigger the advantage for the higher skilled players. Got to keep those fish coming back to the tables and holding on to their money slightly longer.

The guy in seat two had an absolute mountain of chips. I had never seen someone with this many chips in a small stakes game before. After taking two or three more stacks from people, he took three and a half racks of red chips off the table! Someday, someday. Seat one was a guy about my age who was reading Harrington on Cash Games during his folded hands. I wonder whether doing this made up for the information he was losing by not paying attention to so many hands. Maybe he could have pulled this off better if he had a magical live version of Poker Tracker.

Random tangent: Poker Tracker 3 is fucking sweet. It doesn’t actually do too much more than version 2, but the built in HUD is more user friendly than PokerAce and can give you 3bet stats, and the new graphs and winning sections of the database are fun. I guess you can also auto-import from different sites at the same time. I don’t usually play on both Stars and Tilt at the same time, so I don’t know if version 2 let you do this. Either way, the importing is done in real time, rather than once per minute, which is nice.

Back to the Caesars game… seats 7-9 were a moderately attractive 30-something woman sandwiched between two friendly Aussies. They were bragging to her about how they go to “poker school” back home. I was curious about this so-called poker school, but decided against dropping in on their seemingly hopeless tricky pickup attempt. One of the Aussies mentioned that at the end of their 25-hour long flight to Vegas, they had to wait on the runway for a while because someone had stolen the smoke detector out of the bathroom. Yikes.

One hand, Aussie A raised to $15 from UTG. I found AA in the hijack and repopped to $50. We both had about $200 to start the hand and I wanted to get it all in on the flop and cut down his implied odds. After studying me for a while, Aussie A asked, “Do you have Jacks or Aces?” In situations like this, I find that just telling the truth fucks with people a lot. “If you’re taking this long, you’re probably in trouble,” I said. After another minute he folded. He must have gotten away from his 88-TT or AK. Bastard.

The guy in seat 3 was a middle aged Indian guy who asked every dealer who came in if there was anywhere at Caesars he could find a chili dog. Maybe his wife at home doesn’t let him eat those or something. In Sin City, ANYTHING goes. But apparently not chili dog consumption, as none of the dealers could direct him towards one.

On my big hand of the session (i.e. the one that made it profitable), I raised behind a limper with AKo from the cutoff to $17. Aussie B, who was playing like an absolute rock, called from the SB, and the limper called. The flop came QsT4s, and Aussie B bet $15 into about $55. I think we both had about $150 behind. I think sometimes when playing live, people don’t realize exactly how much is in the pot. Getting almost 5-1, I floated the bet, thinking his range probably had a lot of flush draws and one pair hands. The turn came off a blank, and Aussie B bet $25 into $80. Again, I was almost getting odds to draw to the inside straight alone. I called. The river was the Ts, pairing the board and completing the flush draw. He checked. Beautiful. I bet $70 and Aussie B folded after thinking for about 15 seconds. Yayy!!! I was tempted to say something like “I bet they don’t teach you that in poker school, bitch” and show him the bluff, but thought the better of it.

“Yeah, that is probably a pretty safe fold,” Aussie A said. I love how in live poker, people actually pay attention to your table image. I hadn’t been playing too many hands on the session. In the 50max tables at least, I’ll fold 49 out of 50 hands, raise preflop, and get 3bet light time after time. I think people will adjust to aggressive players, but never to tight ones.

Part 2 and whatever I can recollect from my second session, at the Flamingo, coming soon!

AQo flops Top 2, hilarity ensues

Time to analyze a hand! I got myself into a tricky spot on the river and kind of screwed myself over. I like to give all the hands I talk about a “theme” or “moral of the story” that is some vague truism or concept in no-limit hold em. The moral of today’s story is: always have a plan.

Full Tilt Poker No-Limit Hold’em, $0.50 BB (6 handed)

Button ($71.40)

SB ($64.15)

BB ($70.05)

UTG ($50)

MP ($50)

Hero ($67.70)

Preflop: Hero is CO with Qs, Ad.

1 fold, MP raises to $1.75, Hero calls $1.75, Button calls $1.75, 2 folds.

Flop: ($6) As, 3c, Qc (3 players)

MP checks, Hero bets $4, Button calls $4, MP folds.

Turn: ($14) 7s (2 players)

Hero bets $10.5, Button calls $10.50.

River: ($35) 4c (2 players)

Hero bets $21, Button raises to $55.15 (All-In), Hero calls $30.45 (All-In).

Final Pot: $141.60

Button has 5c 6c (flush, queen high).

Hero has Qs Ad (two pair, aces and queens).

Outcome: Button wins $141.60.

My thoughts: I’m not that pissed that the guy caught his flush and stacked me on the river. I played the river terribly and I probably ended up giving him the implied odds he needed to call 2/3 pot bets on the flop and turn. The Button was very, very loose, I believe his stats were about 75 VPIP/ 15 PFR. So I like my flop bet and my turn bet, as I’m getting value out of all the single pair, worse two pair, and draws that are in the Button’s range.

Then comes that ugly river club. The pot is $35 and there is $55 left to bet. I think the bet is okay, but the line should definitely have been bet/fold. Maybe I just got nervous because I was in a big pot with a fairly vulnerable hand, and I didn’t think it through. I need to remember how important it is, especially on the river, to choose a LINE, not just check, or bet.

But I just saw $35 in the pot and decided to bet about 2/3 of it, without considering what I would do if the Button shoved. I think the best line here is close between bet/fold and check/call. Bet/folding is really good, since we get paid off by AK, maybe a worse ace, the aces that paired kickers, and the other worse two pair hands. A lot of these second best hands check behind if I check and I lose value. In addition, (which eluded me at the time) a raise on the river is going to be at least a set. Even sets might just check behind since the flush card came in. I should have been able to fold pretty easily, especially considering the button had loose and passive tendencies.

If the button were more aggressive, check/calling could have been okay too. I get to see a showdown without losing my stack if he bets with a flush or a set. Again, some sets might even check behind if they fear that I made the flush and am now going for a check/raise. I also give the button a chance to bluff (or stupidly bet for value with a worse made hand). There aren’t too many draws that didn’t come in, but hands like 99, 88, 66, or maybe an awkwardly played KK or JJ might have floated and now hope I might fold a better single pair type hand.

So, in the future, I need to remember the importance of choosing an entire line on the river, not just a single action.

Also, I’m not entirely satisfied with my preflop play. A 3bet would have gotten the button to fold his 65s to fold for sure. Stupid 65s. I guess AQo is kind of a weird hand, since AKo and AQs are pretty safe to 3bet often, and AJo is pretty safe to fold often. Where does that leave AQo? I probably could have 3bet, since the original raiser had a 14 PFR, which is somewhat wide. That range contains a lot of low-mid pocket pairs that either fold to a 3bet or call and then fold to a flop bet after missing the set.

WSOP 2008 Underway

Congratulations to Nenad Medic for winning the first bracelet of the 2008 Word Series of Poker. The Canadian outlasted Andy Bloch to take down the 10K pot limit tourney, which won him a bracelet and almost $800K.

Some great places to follow along with the action are Poker News, for live chips counts and official stuff like that, and Tao of Poker, the blog of a former poker reporter who is chilling at the WSOP for the summer to get the behind the scenes scoop. I’m told that Poker Wire has live updates too, although I don’t read that site and can’t give any insight into its quality. Last year at the WSOP, a couple other sites got caught stealing chip counts from PokerNews.

May 2008 Wrap-Up

I ended up having one of my best months yet on full tilt and pokerstars. Even though I appear to be mired in a downswing right now, I got off to a very hot start at 50NL, which more than offset some of the mistakes and poor play that have plague some of my recent sessions.

For the month, I finished almost $150 in the black, at a clip of 2.28BB/100 over 7K hands, and I’m owed a nice fat rakeback payment of $75. So that makes it about $225 all told.

I also won about $265 over a very small sample (I would have to ballpark it at about 250-300 hands) playing 1/3 at Caesars and 1/2 at the Flamingo in Vegas, so I can’t really complain about the way things have been going lately. I won all the money on a huge hand with AA against two donkeys who flopped top pair and together tripled me up, and some more on a nice bluff in a pot that got too big for the tight villain to take the heat of a decent sized river bet.

I feel I definitely improved in some areas, but there is a ton more room for improvement, obviously. I’ll be the first to admit that I made some really dumb decisions in big pots. I need to learn how to breathe and think through my decisions when I’ve been “going to war” with certain villains. I also need to work on assigning ranges more. Fortunately, there is an article in the June issue of the two plus two magazine about exactly this. I’ve skimmed it and it seems to be good.

On the plus side, I feel decently confident in planning out hands, and I am getting stronger and stronger at choosing the appropriate line on the river. I will hopefully be able to address these lines in hands I plan to post in the near future.

Graph: