Friday, October 03, 2008

 

September Wrap / New Set-Up

September turned into a bit of a washout online, I only managed 44 hours of play, and probably did well to take 8-9 days off in the middle either side of having a streaming cold. I still put $23.4K in play, thanks to some creative accounting ; you could easily count the WCCOP ME as $2K in, nothing out or $7K in, $5K out, but seeing as I made a conscious decision to play after winning the satellite I thought this was OK. Made my volume look better, that's the main thing :-). Even with that, I only returned $10.4K for a $13K loss.

That's been in the post for a while, in fact it's the first meaningful losing month online I've had in 2 years (the previous worst being only a $3K loss). On reviewing my stats more carefully, and without wanting to read too much into the noise, I think I may have become a little complacent in smaller tournaments. My overall ROI and so on is great, but it's heavily skewed by 3 big results, and if you take out the "Sunday Specials" and so on, I'm only running at 60% in the run-of-the-mill comps. This could, and should, definitely be improved. I have a few ideas as to how to do that and we'll see how they pan out.

On top of that my 24" monitor arrived yesterday and it is so sick. Very comfortable 1900x1200 resolution, and with the old primary monitor now being the secondary at 1600x1200, we can do some serious multi-tabling. I gave it a spin last night, it's certainly intense ! Kicking off at 7pm, I managed to be all done in 17 tournaments by 11.30 . Imagine that if you play live and you get frustrated by being knocked out of a comp, 17 bad beats, coolers and standard bustouts in 3 1/2 hours [1]. Maximum number of tables was 11 I think, which is busy at times but manageable. Party's new upgrade helps, much better for multi-tabling.

So I would be able to put in a lot of volume this month, except I'm kind of on tour. Barnsley, Dublin, Maidstone. All the glamour stops. Hopefully I can still keep the volume up to scratch despite that, and then really kick on in November, which has LEOCOP (Ladbrokes), FTOPS and ECOOP (iPoker) plus all the rest.

What We Learned This Month :

River play. River, river, river. I'm just about managing to turn "I have a set/trips/whatever, how can I pass" into "just a minute, can I beat anything except a bluff here ?" when someone springs to life and raises all-in. I even managed to pass a set on Betfair yesterday after someone min-raised the turn when the flush came in, and the board didn't pair on the river. I hope I was right ... A certain amount of thinking ahead on the turn can help too. Should I bet large, deny him implied odds, and call the river whatever, or bet small (but enough to deny immediate odds) and pass the river to a scare card ? Stuff like that.

The other main thing is that the re-steal is starting to lose its power. I shipped 16BB on a button raiser in the Warm-Up last weekend with JTs and he snap called with K2s. OK he was an egg, but even so. Players are also beginning to wise up to this play somewhat on sites like Ongame. Of course this means we can reraise a bit wider for value, it's all a rich tapestry.

Finally I'm plugging the odd leak deep stacked. The EPT really opened my eyes to this, as well as the recent Christensen/Fox book which is very good on stack/bet sizing. Even hands as strong as AQ can be a world of trouble deep-stacked, early position on a full table, and you're losing so little just passing them, if anything at all. Of course we're not truly deep (80BBs or more) online all that often, but it still helps.

[1] The first hour was bustout free. Well, they were mostly rebuys.


Comments:
Hi Andy

You say that you should be hitting higher than a 60% ROI, is this because you think you can beat the game for more or simply you want more dosh?

I'm sure you already know 60% ROI at the stakes you play is pretty good money, well very good to me!
 
You can't be satisfied with what you're currently making as a poker player, as otherwise the thirsty players below you will catch up and you'll make less next week.

It's probably possible to make about 90% ROI in these things too, so there's always room to improve..
 
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