Secrets of the Amateurs

Example Of A Leak

2011-12-22T14:40:00.003Z

If you're hoping to hear about technical things I'm changing to improve my game, so you can implement them into your own, I'm sorry to disappoint. The fact is when ElRupert, for example, tweets a link to my blog post (which I do appreciate, thanks mate) and then next time I play he's on three of my tables, it would be cutting my own throat to talk about a lot of the changes I have made.

The reason balance is not that much of an issue in online MTTs is that you just don't build up that much of a history with other regs. That means it's difficult for them to spot patterns in your play (and vice versa of course), especially when you're only taking particular actions with a small subset of your hands. If I blab about them on here and people are reading it though, that cuts out the process of picking them up through piecemeal observation entirely!

I can give you an example of one leak though, as the solution is (unusually) making my play more balanced rather than less, and it comes up quite rarely anyway. Say you're at a final table with a high bubble factor (in English, you don't want to get knocked out right now) and you pick up a hand like AJ or 88 with 18 blinds or so. My original idea was that if I raise small with these hands then I will have odds, even allowing for bubble factor, to call a jam reraise. But AJ, 88 etc is not a sufficient favourite over the reraising range to want to get it in, so, assuming villains will call a jam less often than they reraise (generally a reasonable assumption), I'm better off jamming.

On the surface it sounds plausible, or it did to me, but it's sloppy thinking and it's wrong. DUCY? Quite probably. The problem is that any better hand than AJ is going to get it in with you whatever you do. The fact that AJ isn't in good enough shape against the whole reraising range isn't the issue, what you need to consider is how it does against the extra hands that reraise but don't call a jam. Against those extra hands you're in very good shape because, depending exactly on ranges, there are a bunch of KJ, A9, JTs, 98s and so on that you're way ahead of. Even allowing for 66-44 etc that you would rather force out, you're in good enough shape against the "extra" range that you're happy to get it in against that range allowing for bubble factors.

So the solution is not to jam these "middle" hands but just raise-call them instead, which means I'm raise-deciding with everything I play. It's not a big leak because it's such a specific scenario and both raiser and caller have to have a narrow subset of hands to bring it into play, so not that big a deal. But it illustrates quite nicely some of the ways in which other leaks have developed, particularly :

- Changing something that was working perfectly well before through trying to be too clever
- Fixating on being unexploitable and so
- missing out on opportunities to exploit others
- worrying too much about being exploited by people who mostly aren't capable of it

It's just an example as I say, but it's the kind of wrong turning that I've taken in the last year and it's not the only one by any means!

Addendum : By the way, it's unrelated but I was flicking through the old Full Tilt Tournament Strategy book and while some of it's pretty lol, re-reading the Gavin Smith section I was really impressed. A lot of what he said is standard online aggressive play now and he was way ahead of his time really.

Bounce (2)

2011-12-20T22:19:00.002Z

The real message Matthew Syed is trying to put across in Bounce [1], as I understand it, is how we under-rate the benefits of focused, motivated practice. Hard work. Grind. I have come to realise that for about a year, from September last year to this, I was trying to cruise in poker, making no effort to improve and blaming lack of results on bad luck or the game getting tougher.

I was (and still am if I slip back) in danger of becoming like one of the live pros who were overtaken by the "internet generation". I always felt that they had no one to blame but themselves. Young players came in and devoured the game, they lived for it, players like Durr and Galfond, or Mercier and Elky in tournaments. Starting from scratch they were able to overtake the "old school" remarkably quickly, partly because online poker allows you to play so many more hands per hour, per day, per month.

The thing is though, what was stopping the old school from working just as hard, starting off a long way forward of scratch? Taking the experience they had and building on it with the same focus and determination? Taking what they knew and playing 200 hands an hour online from that base? Complacency and laziness. In other words, nothing. There was no reason why any of them couldn't do what Ivey did, but it was easier to cash the sponsorship cheque and cruise. It's also very easy to say "Oh, Ivey's some kind of supernatural genius, no one else could do that." I wonder who else tried?

That may sound overly critical but I apply it to myself over the last year too. Now I'm making an effort to find and fix leaks in my own game and I've been shocked how many I have found (and am still finding). The problem is it is very hard, in tournaments, to gauge progress because actual $ results are so random. I am trying to find ways to measure how effective my play is outside of just the bottom line. It's not easy but HEM is a big help and there are some tools in there that you can use if you're very careful with them - all-in adjusted EV for example.

As I mentioned in a thread on 2+2 a few days ago, this has also helped with my motivation. It's a positive feedback loop. I have new lines to try and new things to remember - it's very easy to think of something you should be doing, do it for a couple of days, but even if it goes well you forget and move on to the next new trick. I keep a record of the points I should be remembering and mistakes I shouldn't be making, as recommended by Jared Tendler in his book.

As for the bottom line it has been going OK but nothing spectacular. Then again, that's partly due to two or three bad mistakes at final tables, spots where I just did what I always do and what I thought everyone else did, but when I analysed them later I could see how they were wrong. And those are the mistakes that can really cost you $$$. If I can fix those then I'm confident that I can go on an uptick over the next couple of months.

[1] In the first section anyway, the second and third are also interesting but have different themes.

Bounce (1)

2011-12-10T01:04:00.005Z

First bounce, perhaps I should say. I've just finished the book Bounce by Matthew Syed and I thoroughly recommend that you read this book. Don't even finish reading this until you do it. Download it now from the link (install Kindle for PC if necessary, it's great).

I picked this up on a recommendation from everyone's favourite Twittering footballer Joey Barton. The central thesis of the book is not new, it's the basic idea that Malcolm Gladwell put forward in Outliers. Bounce is a much better book though IMO, much less anecdotal and has the advantage of being written by someone who, as Britain's top table-tennis player for several years, freely admits that he used to believe that this was largely due to his own natural "talent" rather than the circumstances of his upbringing combined with extraordinary amounts of practice.

In some ways this is only tangentially related to poker but there's not really anywhere else I can put this now so here is going to have to do :). It does, however, have some relevance to a snippet on a Late Night Poker episode I caught up with today. Players were asked (for some reason) what sporting figures they would like to be/have been. They rattled off more or less what you would expect - Tiger Woods [1], Roger Federer, Michael Jordan.

I know it was just a flip soundbite question but I wonder if the answer "well I'm not sure I'd like to be a world-class sportsman at all" actually occurred to anyone as a possibility. Because you can be assured that those three people have devoted their entire lives to their respective sports. How they will cope with retirement remains to be seen.

Thing is though, I think we really know whether the players actually want to be Tiger Woods, for example. Because they have their own field of excellence in which they already have a platform and an opportunity to excel. Poker. So are they practising with the intensity of Tiger Woods? Every day, like Michael Jordan? Desperate to improve and build on every setback, like Roger Federer? Well, we don't know. But I reckon they probably aren't.

There's one poker player I can think of who might have done. He reputedly played 18 hours a day in Atlantic City for 2 years straight when starting up. He's one of the few "live" players who saw online poker as a tremendous opportunity to learn and improve, rather than just exploit by association. And funnily enough, albeit for completely the wrong reasons, he is sometimes known as the Tiger Woods of poker...

[1] Tiger Woods was chosen by Vanessa Selbst on the grounds that "golf doesn't look like you have to train for it very much" - LOL. That depends how good you want to be. To be Tiger Woods, you have to train incredibly fucking hard for your entire life, is all.

Late Night Poker (Finish)

2011-12-06T17:25:00.003Z

I caught up with the Late Night Poker final today - look away now if you haven't seen it!

In the event, it turned into a rather disappointing crapshoot. The combination of an 8-handed final and only 5 being paid anything at all was always going to tend to produce cagey play in the middle, which leads to blind pressure at the end if the structure isn't set very carefully, and that's what happened.

From what we saw, I think the last 3 players were probably the 3 who played best on the day, and from there it was all about the flips. Sam Holden won 2/2 FTW, fair play to him. I'm sure Luke Schwartz is the best player in the line-up with any depth of stack, but he may have failed to adjust to playing 3-handed with 20bb stacks. Qualifier Rob Okell played very well from what I saw and would have been a big favourite to win if TT > KQ, which it didn't, so gg.

If people really think that calling it "Late Night Poker" makes it more significant than any other TV tournament then good luck to both the people thinking that and the people who made them think it :). That seemed to be the impression they were trying to create.

Anyway, it wouldn't be a TV blog from me without picking someone's play apart in hindsight, so let's do that. Roberto Romanello made what I think is a mistake on his exit hand which (result oriented klaxon) cost him dearly. In truth I don't blame Roberto for what he did, I'd have done exactly the same 3 months ago. From a stack of 13-14 bb he made a small open raise with AQo. The idea is, presumably, to induce some shoves (which you call LDO) from weaker hands and provide some balance for the times you want to raise-fold off that stack.

Balance though, as I said last week, can GIFAFI [1] in a TV single table. This is something I was doing for a couple of months online, but I found that on empirical analysis of a few thousand hands, it just wasn't as profitable as jamming. Inducing shoves from a few hands against which you're maybe 60% overall isn't that big a gain, especially in an ICM heavy spot like this one. The real downside of the play is that you give the BB in particular a very cheap option to call pre and stick it in if he flops anything, which is exactly what Luke does with KJ. Luke chooses to bet out on the J22 flop, where I would have check-raised, but it comes to much the same thing.

Turning it round, this is something you can easily do in the Big Blind when someone minraises and effective stacks are small, just call and checkraise jam any pair or draw. It's even better with antes in play. That's all for now, though I will probably talk soon about a book or two I read recently.

Addendum : @Standaman60 on Twitter mentioned the hand where Simon Trumper raise-calls a 3-bet from about 20bb with AK and check-folds a Jack high flop. One thing I'll say about that hand is that if you ask Simon about it, I'm very sure you'll hear the words "I put him on a middle pair". So this line is somewhat more profitable if your "read" is correct but, as I've said before, if it's wrong you could be burning chips. There's no way this line is beneficial against another AK, and against AQ or KQ it's just horrendous.

[1] Although it probably wouldn't FI, being so balanced and everything.

Protect Your Stack, Not Your Hand

2011-12-02T00:04:00.004Z

I'm finding watching Late Night Poker a little easier to watch if I fast forward through all the dwell-ups. Quicker too. Especially the ones when we know you're going to fold. Seriously. It's better for your image to insta-fold anyway when you're caught bluffing, but I suppose then you don't get so much camera time.

Anyhoo, a moderately interesting hand came up in the last heat. I can't remember stacks exactly, but it doesn't matter for the point I want to make. James Bord opens K9o in the cut-off (fine) and Ram Vaswani flat calls Jacks (probably from around 25bb) in the small blind. I like this play a lot, you can induce a squeeze behind you (it didn't in this case but never mind) or check-raise a whole bunch of flops to leave your opponent with a nasty guess to make. Shoving all in pre lets an aggressive player off the hook here IMO, although 3-betting small to call a 4-bet has its merits. You might argue about balance but I feel balance is an over-rated concept in tournaments at the best of times, let alone in a one-off hundred hand TV single table. And anyway, there is a way I balance it, but I'm not telling you :).

So the flop comes King high, oh well, nothing comes for free and every play has its downside. Ram check-calls James' c-bet which is all standard. Then the turn comes a Queen, so its KxxQ with no flush draw that I remember, if there is it's back door. James now shoves something that looks like about 1.5x the pot [1]. This is a play that I really don't like. A lot of people will say "he's probably got the best hand" and so he can "protect his hand" with the allin bet. Yes, but...

Probably having the best hand is not in itself a reason to bet. If Ram is behind, he has one possible hand with 7 outs (AJ) and a few with 5 outs (AQ, second or third pair) - and he could easily fold some of those on the flop. The rest are 3 outs (worse King) or 2 (underpair like he has). Let's be generous and say 5 on average. James is shoving 1.5x the pot to "protect" the 5/44 of the pot that Ram has equity for if he's behind. Meanwhile if Ram is actually ahead, now James has 5 outs, or 3, or none for the whole lot.

The main reasons to bet are to make a better hand fold or a worse hand call. Now OK, you'd have to be pretty good to call with KT and fold K8 in Ram's seat, but that's not really the issue. If you were to either call both of those hands or fold both of them, then that would be pretty much a wash. With any significantly better or worse hands, Ram is not going to make the wrong decision. It's not the only time I've seen this in the episodes I've watched (so I don't mean to single James out) and I can't blame James and Vicky on commentary for not really explaining this (level one is best for the majority of viewers).

What really rang a bell for me though is that I'm re-reading Gus Hansen's book on Kindle and he does almost exactly the same thing by over-shoving I think QT on a Q high turn. His own justification is the line I use above, that you'd have to be a great player to call QJ and fold Q9, but that (as I suspect Gus knows very well) is not the point. I haven't even mentioned the other possible benefits of checking, viz. that your opponent (Ram in this case) might bluff the river. You are, I should say, usually calling the river after pot controlling in this kind of spot. If the villain bluffs the river then you make more money when you're good as well as not losing the lot when you're behind! And finally (unlikely but still a freeroll) you might be behind and improve to win on the river.

My own summary of this is that any time I catch myself thinking about betting to "protect my hand" in a tournament, I try to think a bit harder. Protect your STACK. That's what's important. Trying to win every pot is going to hurt you if it means that the pots you do lose are much bigger.

[1] I stand corrected if Ram has less than a pot bet left and so effective stacks aren't that high, but that's not how it looks.

Still Here (Again)

2011-11-28T15:47:00.002Z

I think I might start posting a bit more on here, there are a few interesting things I want to talk about. Regarding my own game, I've been completely turning it upside down over the last couple of months. I had a coaching session, which was definitely worthwhile and immediately plugged a few obvious leaks. I stepped down in stakes for a month or two (while still spinning it up on Sundays of course) to try to work on my game.

Recently I've picked the whole thing up and given it a good shake, I've done a lot of analysis with HEM and picked up a remarkable number of clear, systematic leaks. Some of them I will be able to talk about in forthcoming posts, some of them I'd rather keep to myself. I read Clive Woodward's book this week, and while I care little for either Rugby Union or the world of business management, a lot of what he says can be applied to any field in which you are trying to excel. Recommended. One point he stressed was to thoroughly examine those practices that everybody just does because everyone else does and that's how you do it. Check all your assumptions. That's what I've been trying to do, with some interesting results. I also found Jared Tendler's book very interesting and am trying to apply some lessons from that too.

As recent posts on this blog, well recent in terms of scrolling down the page if not in actual time, have been quite focussed on TV poker, a few thoughts on the current state of play. I have been watching some of the current Late Night Poker run and I have to say it's hard work. Vicky and James do an excellent job on commentary but the actual poker, and this applies to much of TV poker lately, suffers because the players are too good!

Allow me to explain. It's not that they are great in a lot of cases, they're just not making very many obvious fishy mistakes. Watching people play <20bb stacks more or less correctly is dull as fuck! I'm not blaming anyone for playing that way, or saying I'd do anything different, but since this format shifted towards higher buyins and smaller fields I think the entertainment value has really suffered. All the fun comes from watching fish disrupt the normal flow by making odd plays, and seeing how the better players cope. Matchroom addressed one end of the problem by having deeper stacks, but in my opinion made a big mistake by effectively excluding weaker players. In the end I think they have realised that the single table tournament format is basically dead and are trying new things instead. Late Night Poker chugs on, but I wonder for how long.

Poker Is To Cricket As ...

2011-05-24T01:20:00.005+01:00

I'm still here, chugging along. I played a couple of SCOOPs and FTOPS but nothing too serious and am still, in the words of Homer Simpson, trying to "dig up, stupid". I did have an interesting conversation though that I thought might bear repeating.

Richard Gryko used to say that playing a poker tournament was like building an innings in cricket. I'm not totally sold on the comparison but there are some similarities. Now, at this point, this kind of article usually starts talking about cricket and moves on to how we apply that to poker. What is (hopefully) more interesting about this one is that we're doing it the other way round - talking about poker and try to apply the lessons learned from poker to something else, in this case cricket.

If you haven't been following me on Twitter then why not, because I bestride the world of Twitter like a colossus. Or at least I retweet some funny stuff sometimes. But if you have, you will know that I've started playing cricket again. After 8 years out of the game I'm pretty rusty, and I wasn't exactly Ian Botham to start with, but there are few problems that can't be solved by throwing money at them, so I've been having some coaching.

My coach is a smart guy, he's played first class cricket and a little bit of poker as well. We were talking about how I was struggling to take my form in the nets out into the middle. The conversation went something like this :

Coach : When you started playing poker, it was for small money, right?
Me : Yes
Coach : And the first time you played for bigger money, how did you play?
Me : Very tentatively, of course. Shaking so much I could hardly pick up the cards
Coach : But now you're more experienced, do you play any differently for bigger stakes than smaller ones?
Me (light bulb above head starting to come on) : No, no. If anything you have to play more aggressively at higher stakes
Coach : Right! So when you go out to bat in a match, it's like playing for higher stakes. You're more tentative to start with but you know that you have to be as positive as you are in the nets
Me : That's it, yes
Coach : And when you have a big stack, or a small stack, does that change the way you play when you're in the game?
Me : Sure, that's one of the key things that determines your strategy
Coach : So having a big stack or a small stack is like going out to bat when its 80-5 or 200-5, it affects your approach but the basic foundation of the shots (or the plays) is the same

Ding! Going out to bat last Saturday and scoring 1 run off the bat in 45 minutes [1] was like turning up for my first ever £100 Stud tournament in Luton and crapping my pants because Devilfish was playing. It may still take a while for me to do myself justice in a cricket match but at least I know what the problem is mentally and how I can go about overcoming it.

[1] Fortunately the scorebook looked a bit better because I was given four overthrows, and my batting partner was thrashing it everywhere so we put on 70 lol.

Update : My coach has linked to this blog entry from his website, Revolution Coaching. If anyone has found their way here from that site, I do recommend Steve's coaching very highly. I'm currently holding down a place in a team at a higher standard than I've ever played before, I even scored 42 a couple of weeks ago - should have got 50 (bad beat). I wish I could be as positive about poker lol.

ZOMG! I'm Not Dead!

2011-02-18T22:52:00.003Z

I'm not even dead in blogging terms. I don't have anything specific to blog about right now but some of you may be wondering why I've been so quiet over the last few months. Particularly why there was no end of year post.

Unsurprisingly, that's partly because I didn't have a great year. I did still make money, and it was still more than I ever made in a regular job, to put things in perspective, but I certainly didn't have anything like as good a year as 2008 or 2009. Looking at Sharkscope I'm on a $50k downswing. Looking back a little further, I'm on a 1500 tournament break even run. But looking back further than that, I made great money in the previous 4000 tournaments.

Make of it what you will. In one way it's the most testing period I've had since going pro, but in another way it's not. What I mean by that is my bankroll is more than robust enough to handle it at this point. If I had broken even in 1500 tournaments straight away, or worse still gone on a $50k downswing (even half of that), I might never have made it at all.

Trying to analyse the situation is very, very difficult because of course variance just swamps everything. I finished 7th in the Party Million in May after taking a beat when even 2nd place would have made it a very good year, and I had a few other spots that could have made a big difference. It's big scores that make the big money and I haven't had one for 18 months and counting. I hope this doesn't come across as complaining, those are the facts, them's the breaks and I definitely had more than my share up to that point.

One positive is that I've been trying a lot of different things over the last few months and have learned a lot by doing that. For example dropping down in stakes and realising that there are still loads of chronically bad players at the 22 rebuy/55 freezeout level. However tough HSMTTs might get, and they are getting tougher there's no doubt about that, there's always the option to step down (even temporarily to regain confidence).

And stepping back I am gradually coming to terms with the fact that I won't ever be a Pocket Fives top 20 superstar. Not even top 100, unless I bink two Sunday majors in quick succession or something like that. You have to put in sick volume to do that, and that's difficult to do in this timezone. I have full respect for Chris Moorman and the other guys who do it, but I think I can take a lot of satisfaction in what I've done while maintaining a life balance, keeping my health and keeping my nose clean, poker-wise. And the start of the day (not the end haha) I can still lie in till 12 whenever I feel like it. Can't be that bad.

ZOMG ! More Premier League !

2010-11-23T23:36:00.002Z

A TV programme where a bunch of sociopathic egomaniacs who are about 1% as famous as they think they are bitch at each other, recycle their "catch phrases" from 5 years ago and throw hissy fits for our entertainment. Well, 'tis the season. Premier League Heat 2 aired on Monday, the first half of it anyway, and having seen everyone in action we can try to divide the players into two camps : those who have at least some conception that risking all your chips early on is bad (or ICM as we call it in math land) and those who don't, as follows :

Yevgeniy definitely knows what's going on. Roland probably does, although he might not use the term "ICM" in case anyone thinks he's a nerd. Ian, Vanessa and Phil L either have some comprehension of it or are just naturally tighter players.

Luke is probably aware of it but just can't help himself trying to own everyone. David, Daniel, Phil H and Tony G have some combination of no clue and can't help themselves trying to own everyone. God only knows what's going on inside the qualifier's head.

That leaves JC who I can't figure out at this point. He's definitely not scared to bluff people, but so far he's managed to do it without risking his whole stack. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt for the moment. I should add though that JC is an excellent hand-reader who is totally fearless in backing his judgement and I have a lot of respect for that.

As usual it's what people say that's as illuminating as what they do. Most of the table is all over David for his "great call" with TT. Cliffs, Tony G opens with 55, David calls with TT, Roland calls with 99 and then Yevgeniy ships I think 20bb with 77. Tony G then makes the kind of play you see in a 10 dollar rebuy online by shipping 100bb with his 55 in the hope that this will get him heads up with Yevgeniy, flipping at best, with about 6bb extra in the pot from the two callers. On your bike in the words of the man himself, although to be fair he does acknowledge it as a mistake afterwards.

So in David's seat, in a winner-take-all situation, good call yes. I'm not going to say great because it's pretty fucking obvious that Tony G doesn't have a massive hand and probably JJ is all he can have that David is behind. In this particular ICM spot, it's a lot more marginal, but with the same assumptions, it's probably OK. Of course in the result-oriented world of TV poker, he called a huge bet without the nuts and was ahead = ZOMG amazing call.

Equally illuminating, in a more subtle way, was half the table mocking Vanessa for "folding AJo under the gun" in the previous heat. Now it depends to an extent on when it happened, but certainly 8-handed 150bb deep I have no problem whatsoever with folding AJ in first position in this event. It's something that Neil pointed out in commentary recently, where a lot of "name players", I think it was Annette in this instance, think they can play any old crap out of position because they can outplay their opponents, which is at best hubris and at worst ridiculous depending who they're up against.

I expect much more ego-comedy in future episodes, not least next week because a Hellmuth meltdown is clearly imminent. Yes alright, this isn't hard to predict from the clips they've already shown. Nonetheless, ain't no meltdown like a Hellmuth meltdown. Perhaps next week he's going to crumple to the floor in an unconvincing mock faint. Unfortunately he's been beaten to the punch there though.

Premier League IV

2010-11-09T22:35:00.011Z

The Premier League is back, if you didn't catch last night's episode you can see it on Channel 4 On Demand (UK only). Now I look at that I can see it's been on for 5 weeks already, but that was online qualifiers and Party Pros playing off for the last two seats, and even my life's too short. Now, these are not the best 12 players in the world (even discounting qualifiers), to be fair I don't think anyone involved actually believes that and you can allow them some hype. But it is an interesting line-up with a lot of different styles of play.

So, before we get into hands, we have the commentary. Phil Hellmuth is first up on the mic and that means we are treated to an hour of self-aggrandisement and highly result-oriented analysis, to say the least. First of all Luke Schwartz five-bet shoves 64 on Yevgeniy Timoshenko, who can't call, and Phil is "standing up and saying Wow". Amusingly, he doesn't actually say "Wow", he says "I'm saying Wow". 10 minutes later Phil Laak 4-bet shoves 88 on Ian Frazer, who has Kings, and now Laak has just made the worst play ever, what a donk, etc etc. Naturally Frazer concurs with this analysis in his interview :).

The thing is, in Hellmuth's world, and Frazer's too I suspect, the concept of "range" hasn't yet come to light. When you think about the hand in terms of ranges, of course, Laak is making a fairly standard play against Frazer's three-betting range, in that he expects Frazer to fold some of it and he expects to have reasonable equity against Frazer's calling range, which might be something like [AK, TT], against which 88 is 31%. Now, you can argue that stacks are a bit too deep (Frazer has around 50bb I think), or that Frazer isn't folding much of his 3-bet range (impossible to tell without seeing more gameflow). Conversely, you can argue that Laak has ICM on his side, as he has Frazer well covered and the points system means that ICM is in play here (unlike most TV SNGs). Even so, you could convince me that the play is somewhat -EV because of stack sizes, but the point is that Hellmuth seems to have no idea why Laak made the play.

This comes up throughout, as Hellmuth repeatedly says things like "well JC isn't going to call here .. oh he does call". He's really quite bad at predicting what the players will do in various spots. And my point is that, even if, for the sake of argument, we agree that Phil is right and the other players are all donks, someone who fancies himself so much as a great hand reader (working out someone's hand from their betting action) ought to be a lot better at predicting what players are going to do (working out someone's betting action from their hand).

Well at least we were spared Phil's WSOP commentary where he was, by all accounts, even worse. Going back to the Schwartz-Timoshenko hand, I thought it illustrated an interesting point. Briefly, Vanessa Rousso limps, Timoshenko raises KJ to isolate in position, and Schwartz 3-bets 64o in the blinds. At this point Timoshenko has a decision. IIRC, Schwartz has made it 35k and stacks were about 280k at the start of the hand. With a stack of around 4-5 times the pot, shoving is definitely an option. You can weigh up the merits of shoving vs 4 bet-folding in various scenarios and it's probably quite close until you reach this one : if Schwartz has nothing but is prepared to bluff-jam over a 4-bet, then jamming >>>>>>>>>>>>> 4 bet-folding. That's probably not even enough >s. This kind of spot comes up on 2+2 every now and then and the super-confident regs will generally say "of course you shouldn't shove because 4-betting small achieves the same result if he has nothing ZOMG LDO you donks". I like to call this Devilfish syndrome. If your assumptions are correct then one play is somewhat better, however it could be massively worse if your assumptions are not correct. You can then take your choice between factoring in this uncertainty or calling your opponent a fucking idiot if he does what he shouldn't have.

Then we come on to ICM. The points structure for the heats is 16 to the winner, then 11-8-6-4-3-2-0. Based on these points alone, when play starts each player has a bubble factor of almost exactly 2. In simple terms, if you get all your chips in on hand 1, you need to be a 2-1 favourite to make it +EV. Just to illustrate how huge this is, suppose we're playing, on hand 1 it's passed round to me in the small blind, and I shove without looking. You, in the big blind, know I haven't looked. What hands can you call me with? Have a guess, it's in the footnote at the end [1].

ICM is fucking huge here and it's something that a lot of regs on the internet don't allow for correctly, never mind old-school live pros [2]. Consult Kill Everyone for a lot more detail on the subject. Anyway, in high bubble factor situations there are basically two ways you can approach a hand, either keep the pot small or be the first one to put all your chips in with good fold equity. The problem with the second approach is that you are relying on your opponent to be aware of the situation too ; if he just calls anyway then the two of you are spraying equity to the rest of the field like champagne off an F1 podium. I have decided that you're not generally going to get rich by trusting in opponents to do the right thing, and so I tend to try to keep the pot small in ICM-heavy spots unless I have a sizeable edge.

This comes up in the first elimination hand where Daniel Negreanu is "coolered" by Phil Laak. On the face of it, Negreanu's flippant "what could I do" interview seems fair enough ; he flops bottom two vs middle set about 50 blinds deep. Basically, Frazer raises, Negreanu calls with 65s and Laak calls behind with 66. It comes T65cc, Negreanu bets and now Laak raises, Frazer folds. Negreanu gurble gurbles a bit as per usual and then sticks it in, Laak calls LDO and Daniel gets "the bagel".

Once again we don't have the benefit of knowing gameflow, but Laak is generally on the T side of TAG and I think it's safe enough to say that he isn't bluff-raising this flop, but he could certainly have a big draw. Cutting short the Pokerstove analysis (DIY if you want to know), if we give Laak A-x of clubs (questionably IMO but let's be generous) as well as the sets and the combo draws then Negreanu's equity inches up to 45% which is just about good in chip terms. However, accounting for ICM, it's way short. Way way way short. Certainly I'd have been inclined to have a look at a turn, insta-check-fold a club and then make a decision on anything else. Daniel though is happy enough to say "cooler, what can I do" and walk off whistling. Anything rather than actually admit being, or even ask yourself if you were, wrong.

It's kind of funny that I'm advocating the old "take off a safe card" line compared to Daniel Negreanu's "I go arrr in", but this is what happens when ICM considerations are ignored in favour of the kind of "can't get pushed around, must be table captain" dick-measuring that we can expect from this line-up over the next few weeks. Even if you don't play poker (though why anyone who doesn't play poker would be reading this is beyond me), armchair psychologists can have lots of fun playing "spot the projection". Just as long as they get Hellmuth off the commentary ...

Update: The more I think about that last hand, the more I think Negreanu can actually fold the flop. I know, it sounds insane. However, if you posit that Laak is not bluffing ; has no worse made hand (eg an overpair) ; is never folding the flop or the turn and doesn't have A9cc-A2cc (except A5cc) then we see that Negreanu is 36% on the flop and only about 42% on a safe turn. Put it this way ; to make this even close to a call then you have to overturn those assumptions and say that Laak can be bluffing, or have an overpair, or some weaker flush draws. What it most definitely is not is a shrug-your-shoulders-what-a-cooler-what-could-I-do hand.

Another thing that occurred to me is that starting off with 150bbs and a bubble factor of 2 is a unique situation. You're just never that deep with a high BF in a normal final table situation. This could make for some more interesting spots in the shows to come.

[1] You can call with [88+, AKs]. Yes, AKo is a fold.

[2] To some extent the live pro attitude of "waiting for a better spot" is actually better than the internet style "I only play for first" in high bubble-factor spots, albeit for the wrong reason. The spot in consideration is often simply bad (in terms of $ EV) and so waiting for a better one doesn't even come into it. You could argue (and FredTitmus just did on ICM) argue that this is only semantics, but this falls down when the same live player folds for a better spot with 40 players left, because he just likes folding for a better spot.

Grind on the Mind

2010-10-29T17:59:00.006+01:00

I know this blog has gone a bit dead but there really isn't that much I have to say. I didn't play all that much for 2-3 months but now the summer's over I'm going to put in some hard grind till Christmas at least. The plan is to play 100 tournaments a week (pretty much 20 a night 5 nights a week) and see how that goes. I have some idea of goals I want to meet if I can keep up this volume, it's hopefully not too much of a jinx to admit that having the #1 UK ranking on Pocketfives is a goal. Maybe that's a little ambitious, and of course even P5s ranking is very luck dependent, but it's nice to have something to shoot for. It really depends if I can bink something significant, obviously I'm plugging away every Sunday, and there's an FTOPs coming up in a couple of weeks as well. Pokerstars are promising a re-vamp of the UK evening schedule which I'm quite hopeful will lead to more playable tournaments. They have also improved the structure of the 109r tournaments, which have been my absolute nemesis over the last two years!

As for other things that I have often enjoyed blogging about in the past, I think I'm about done with them. What I've come to realise is that people generally do what they have to do, and they have their reasons. People take sponsorship with corrupt companies, act like asses on TV to stay in the spotlight and so on because they lack the character and, in most cases, the skill to do well just playing poker. "To do well" might be a bit subjective, many of them could probably support themselves quite easily getting it quietly but their ego won't let them do it out of the spotlight.

That's just the way it is, and the healthiest way to deal with it is to lol at them and move on. I'll blog any thoughts I have but don't hold your breath, and in the meantime I'm on Twitter as "GetItQuietly" and you can follow me there as I (ironically given my choice of username) occasionally post updates when I'm deep in a worthwhile tournament. You can track my progress on Pocketfives as well (Country: United Kingdom ldo), currently at #16 but I've only been grinding for a week or so and hope to crack the top 10 fairly soon.

Oh Go On Then, Main Event Results

2010-07-18T21:08:00.003+01:00

Just for funzies, as the golf commentators say because they won't bet on the cut number for £1 (seriously), Main Event results of our featured players were as follows :

TV Pros (19, Gus Hansen didn't play)

David Benyamine cashed for $138k
Scotty Nguyen $49k
Hoyt Corkins $36k
Allen Cunningham $25k

Total $248k, Net +$58k

Euro Pros (19, Peter Eastgate DNP)

Theo Jorgensen $255k
JP Kelly $57k
Praz Bansi $49k

Total $360k, Net +$170k

2+2 etc (all 20 played)

Eric Baldwin $138k
Phil Galfond $57k
Christian Harder $57k
Thayer Rasmusson $42k
Jason Mercier $28k
Shannon Shorr $28k
Clayton Newman $21k

Total $371k, Net +$171k

Total buyins $580k, Total Net +$400k, ROI 69%.

For what it's worth. Which isn't very much :)

Final WSOP Results

2010-07-04T12:41:00.008+01:00

Final results are now in. A couple of events haven't quite finished, but none of the selected players are still in so we're basically done. Before we start I want to put a huge qualifier on this. I've been watching a lot of the World Cup (obv), and it's quite tilting how often people come out with statistics that are based on a completely insignificant sample. There should be someone sat in the corner saying "Sample size ... sample size ... sample size". Only on one occasion did I hear someone point this out. During the Argentina-Mexico game, the Radio 5 commentator said "Mexico have scored all three of their goals in the last half hour of games in this tournament". David Pleat, bless him, replied "That's just a quirk". Stunned, the commentator simply repeated himself by saying "Well, it's a fact that all three goals were in the last half hour", entirely missing the point which is basically "so fucking what".

At least goal timing is something that might possibly be correlated to something real, for example England have scored many more of their goals, proportionally, in the first half of games than the overall average, in recent tournaments, which you could definitely argue is correlated with their inability to pace themselves during games, ie they run around like madmen for an hour and are out on their feet for the last 20 minutes. Pundits have also been saying stuff like "The reigning European Champions have never won the World Cup" as if there could be any possible negative correlation between the two. Any at all. I certainly can't think of any possible reason why this should be true, and if you can't do that you should be suspicious of any such conclusions drawn from small data samples.

So bearing all that in mind, we can very cautiously address my WSOP results. Here they are, in a nutshell :

TV Pros : 465 tournaments, $2.87m buyins, $1.95m returned, down $920k

Euro Pros : 323 tournaments, $1.33m buyins, $2.10m returned, up $770k

Internet Kids : 416 tournaments, $1.59m buyins, $1.03m returned, down $560k

TOTAL : 1204 tournaments, $5.79m buyins, $5.07m returned, down $720k [1]

So Euro pros win the day. Raise the 12-starred flag ! Overall, 1200 tournaments isn't a ridiculously small sample ; it's moving towards something that's at least a little significant. And bear in mind that the biggest single win by any player was Praz's $515k. In order to have recorded a collective ROI of 100%, which seems the minimum of what many people believe WSOP ROI to be, generally, the group would have had to find eleven more $500K scores. Let me put it this way. If the 20 TV pros had trebled their return, they would have wound up at +100%. I can guarantee you one thing - if that had happened, if for every "TV Pro" result there had been two more of the same, the media would have creamed their pants about "The Year Of The Pro".

I'm not going to comment on individuals who had poor WSOPs (tempting as it is), it just seems mean. You can Sharkscope any of them if you're interested. It did seem to me as the series progressed that people who were playing every tournament they could were struggling. We can definitely correlate this I think ; there must be issues with tiredness, and people who were multi-tabling for whatever reason (IMO it's burning money unless you have huge bracelet bets to make it worthwhile) were bound to suffer for it. In addition, "Winner take all" bracelet bets are going to negatively affect EV as players crash and burn rather than picking up place prizes.

Of 24 players who paid more than $100k in buyins, only three made a profit. And two of those (Mortensen for $12K and Kravchenko for $7500) were small. The exception was, of course, the superhuman Phil Ivey who made $107K profit. This is slightly skewed because Men Nguyen had $88K in buyins and made $700k+ profit, being the biggest winner of all by a distance.

Overall it was an interesting thing to do and in conclusion I think I'll put it this way. The exercise has done nothing at all to alter my belief that players' $ expectation at the WSOP is much lower than most people believe. I believe that the good players aren't much better than the field and there's a huge randomising effect because of simple tournament variance. For the rest, consult Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness". See you next year !

[1] If those don't add up exactly it's just rounding errors

Update : One final note. I'm banging on about not reading too much into results from 1200 tournaments, whereas this is the understanding of sample size more prevalent among poker fans (from 2+2) :

"Can people stop saying either Dwan OR Hellmuth is bad at PLO? You can criticize specific plays they make-- anyone can make a bad play-- but they both made a big run in this tournament and Hellmuth also finished 7th at an earlier PLO event at this WSOP. I think that pretty much establishes that they are both skillful players."

Hellmuth finished 7th and 11th in two of the six PLO/PLO8 tournaments this year. Better still, Durr finished 17th in one. And that establishes that they are skilful Omaha players. Sigh. Of course, they still could be good PLO players (and Durr almost certainly is) ... then again I should probably be grateful, because if everyone understood things like sample size and variance then there really would be no money in poker, everyone's solid.

Yet Another WSOP Update

2010-06-27T11:53:00.002+01:00

Biggest news this week of course was Phil Ivey's bracelet, which moves him into a tie on 4 with his ex-wife (as tweeted by the legendary DougLeePoker). Ivey becomes the 2nd of my 20 "TV pros" to break through into profit (cf 4/20 Euros and 5/20 Internet kids). This clawback pulls TV Pros to $600k in the red, Euros are still $800k up and Internet kids now $400k down after a bit of a dry spell. To be fair, that $400k is entirely attributable to Justin Bonomo, Jason Mercier and Mike Watson who have played a ton of events with little success.

Had I picked Richard Ashby or Sam Trickett in my Euro list they'd be even further up - congrats to Richard for his 2nd place in the $10K HORSE. Devilfish is chip leader in the $5K PLO8 after busting Hellmuth in some douche-on-douche action which ended with both players swapping f-bombs. Stay classy guys.

Meanwhile I've hardly been playing at all, enjoying the football and spinning a bit of $5-10 Stud High on the side. I've made more money on the football so far :). Once that calms down I'll be back at the grind.

Another WSOP Update

2010-06-20T11:55:00.006+01:00

Past the half-way mark now and the pace is beginning to tell. Various reports I'm hearing suggest that it's more fractious out there by the day, and I doubt it's going to ease off soon. Anyhoo, it's been a fairly quiet week for our WSOP trackees. Euro pros are a comfortable $1m up thanks to Flushy's second big score, this one an eye-watering $300k for second in the $10k Omaha 8. Maximum respect ! Moorman and Elky have also chipped in with decent scores to keep them ticking over nicely. 2+2ers are about $200k down, not too much going on there. TV pros, however, continue to dig themselves deeper and deeper, with the sole exception of Men Nguyen. Men is heads up in the $5K 6-max as I write, guaranteed $410k and gunning for $250k more ftw. A win would pull the TV pros back to $500k down.

Without Men it would be a complete trainwreck for this group ; not one of the other 19 is in profit and some of the stats make gruesome reading. We will, however, wait for the rest of the series before laughing too loud. One more interesting factor to relate is that only 2 of my 60 chosen players have failed to show - and they're both Danish, Eastgate and Jorgensen. Dr Pauly suggested on a recent 2+2 podcast that a lot of Scandis aren't showing because of tax issues which I could believe. Good podcast by the way, excellent interview with Barry Greenstein, check it out. And well done to Mike Ellis, yet another one for the good guys !

As for me, I enjoyed putting some volume in for a few weeks but soon enough it reached the point where I thought "fuck it, football's on". You know what I'm like by now :). The only thing I'm going to commit to medium term is playing Sundays. Must play Sundays. Quite looking forward to tonight after a break. Besides that, woteva. As I alluded to on Twitter, I'm becoming more comfortable with not feeling that I have to prove anything to anyone. We'll see how it goes.

And finally, great post on 2+2 from chicken10der in a thread about WSOP disappointments :

"lisandro won 3 bracelets last year and doesn't have any this year. what a dropoff, i guess he just forgot how to play. how did he get so bad in one year?

Update : Nguyen 2nd, TV pros currently $750k down.

WSOP Update

2010-06-13T12:23:00.002+01:00

On it rolls. Main controversy this week was when a dozen or so guys entered the Ladies Event, but I'm staying out of that one :). Massive congrats to Richard Ashby (Chufty online), I've said before I'm not especially funking for British players but it so happens that Praz, James, Richard and Neil are all top guys and I'm really pleased for them. No slight intended to Sam Trickett who I've simply never met :).

Anyway, neither Richard nor Sam were in my Euro list, but Dario Minieri picked up $50K in the Stud 8. Then while checking that I realised I had missed him off the entrants in the $50K Players Championship, so there went that :). Despite that, Euro pros are still $750k to the good. 2+2ers are almost even thanks to Jeff "yellowsub" Williams winning $320K. TV pros, however, haven't done anything significant since Men Nyugen's stud win and are now $900K in the red. Top bracelet hoes are Phil Ivey with 18 events and (though he's not on a list) Tom Dwan with 17. Those prop bets really focus the mind !

If there is a trend starting to manifest, it's that people who are playing every event they can really aren't doing very well. None of the 11 players who have played 12+ events are in profit, and quite a few have won next to nothing. There is some mixture of cause and effect here - if you get a result you're more likely to take a few days off, plus obviously the worse you do the more events you're able to enter, but even so it will be interesting to see how that pans out. Overall the 60 players are about even, that is slightly down but I have counted buyins for the $10K Omaha 8 which has only just started.

Rhythm Of The Grind

2010-06-06T01:14:00.003+01:00

I'm getting into the swing of this grind and finding it generally easier than I thought it would be. Pretty much playing Friday through Monday, and then Wednesday if I'm free and feel like an extra session. So I try to fit my socialising into Tuesday-Thursday, then at the weekend I'm hitting quite the groove. It looks something like this :

11.30 - Get up, breakfast, surf the web, see what's going on in the WSOP, review play from previous night if necessary, etc
1.30ish - Hit the driving range/course/park (for short game practice). A bit of fresh air and exercise goes a long way. Pick up some food on the way back.
3.30 - Eat. What would you call it ? A sort of afternoon equivalent of brunch ? Anyway, eat, and maybe watch a training video or some old High Stakes Poker or something.
Whenever - catch a 60-90 minute power nap. I think that's my favourite bit.
6.30ish - Get up again, maybe a light snack. Surf the web again. Catch up on any emails or anything that need doing.
8.00 (7 on Sat/Sun) - Grindomatic ! Fri/Sat/Mon, play about $4-5K worth of buyins, aiming to finish around 3.30am latest. Sunday, more $ and longer hours, depending on how deep I go of course. Was actually up till 8-30am last Sunday !

Generally I feel fine when I'm playing, and out in the fresh air walking or playing golf, maybe a little bit zoned the rest of the time. Poker has been going great, and could easily have been a lot better, have had a ridiculous number of deep runs in things without closing as much as I'd like, but a great deal of that is out of my hands with the various flips and coolers you have to fade in tournaments, especially late on.

WSOP Tracking Update : The Euro pros have flown out of the blocks with Praz ($500K) and Neil ($270K) picking up huge lumps and Flushy chip leader in the PL (1st is $190K) at time of writing. Massive congrats to all of them of course, three of the UK's very best tournament players. 2+2ers are only slightly down in buyins (normalising the effect of the $50K event somewhat) but $250k down in money terms, and TV donks, sorry pros, are $850k in the hole, muhahahaha. Guarantee you when one of them binks $300k it'll be "Year of the Pros !". GTFO. Biggest bracelet chasing hoes so far are Ivey, Raymer and Bonomo with 9 events each, closely followed by Lindgren and Negreanu with 8. Those 5 players have no cashes yet, that's right, 0/43. Yes, Hellmuth is only on 7 but he is slightly hampered by lacking that "get chips or get gone" mindset. And overall, the whole 60 players are about $400k down, that's including binks for $500k and $270k ! More description of random noise masquerading as analysis next weekend.

Update Sunday AM : I'm not going to do this every day, but as some events were ongoing when I wrote that ^^^, Flushy shipped it for $196k, congrats to a top player and top man ! Men the Master won the Stud for $390k (no editorial comment). Ivey and Lindgren cashed for $3K each. 2+2ers Terrence Chan and Jason Potter are in the last 20 of the Limit, gl to them. Pros now only $500k down and over all 60 players now $150k up.

Futile Attempts To Impose Order On Variance

2010-05-26T17:18:00.003+01:00

The weekend went pretty well, ran up about $18k of buyins for a smallish profit. A lot of things about putting this grind in were quite surprising ; I'll probably comment in more detail once I've done it for a bit longer. So far I've felt fine when playing, just a bit spaced out the rest of the time. Even with this volume, 80 tournaments in one weekend doesn't mean a damn thing in terms of results or ROI. It's kind of funny when people say "I'm going to 3-bet a bit more aggressively and see how that goes", and we all say things like that, when any differential effect would be like a ripple in a tsunami.

More to the point right now is that I'm following up my idea to try to track some players in the WSOP. Now that a) so many players are on Twitter and/or blogging and so on and b) there are no rebuy tournaments, it's a lot easier to track how much money people have spent, which is of course a completely necessary half of the equation. The other important thing to do is pre-select your players. This isn't just to pick out "the best players" like in a Fantasy League, and I stress at this point that the lists below are not meant to be the best players, just quick top-of-the-head lists of people who are likely play a lot of events and be featured in news updates. The idea of the pre-selection is to cut out all of the bias that arises after the fact. "Year of the Pros" and all that bollocks. So, stressing once again that these aren't "best of" lists and so I don't give a flying fuck if your heroes (or even you) aren't in them :)

TV Pros : Benyamine, Bloch, Corkins, Cunningham, Ferguson, Greenstein, Hachem, Hansen, Hellmuth, Ivey, Lederer, Liebert, Lindgren, Matusow, Mortensen, Negreanu, Men Nyugen, Scotty Nguyen, Raymer, David Williams

Euro Pros : Akenhead, Bansi, Black, Channing, De Wolfe, Dempsey, Duthie, Eastgate, Grospellier, Jorgensen, JP Kelly, Kravchenko, Luske, Mahrenholz, Minieri, Moorman, Obrestad, Pescatori, Marty Smyth, Ulliott

2+2 + co : Aaron Gustavson, Andrew Lichtenberger, Christian Harder, Clayton Newman, Cliff Josephy, Eric Baldwin, Gavin Griffin, Jason Mercier, Jason Potter, Jeff Williams, Jon Aguiar, Justin Bonomo, Mike Watson, Phil Galfond, Randall Flowers, Shannon Shorr, Steve Gross, Steve O'Dwyer, Terrence Chan, Thayer Rasmusson.

Also I don't care if Annette is a TV pro or Jason Mercier doesn't post on 2+2 that's not the point. Stop being a nerd. The only point is that I have pre-selected the players, however arbitrarily, and we observe how they perform, thus eliminating survivor bias. Join in ! Make your own futile predictions :). I predict that group 2+2 wins, group TV Pro wins small/breaks even, group Euro Pro loses. But that's probably my own bias at work !

Update : Just for fun, check out this list of cognitive biases and think about how many of them show up in poker reporting. My estimate would be an absolute shedload :)

Enough Jibber Jabber

2010-05-20T13:25:00.003+01:00

Quite a lot happening lately. I've hit a bit of form on Pokerstars and Full Tilt with some nice results in the last 2 weeks. It's very interesting playing those games at the moment ; in my opinion (FWIW) the regs in the bigger tournaments on Stars and Tilt are making some plays that are quite exploitable. It's funny how they all copy each other as well. Obviously I'm not going to say what these plays are right now. Plays might be the wrong word, it's more strategic than tactical in some areas. All very cryptic, but you'll just have to work it out for yourself :)

I have also decided to step it up online, push for 30-35 hours a week rather than my lazy 15 and see how that goes. If you look at the really big winners on the databases, one thing you notice is that they rarely pass up an opportunity to play big field tournaments for decent stakes, meaning Sundays and festivals. Now, I have a major problem with the way Stars run their festivals because structures are too slow (you heard me) and many tournaments run for 18+ hours at a stretch, which I think is just plain unhealthy. FTOPs, which run every 3 months now, and the various Euro festivals are something I will be focussing on though, with of course ECOOP coming up on Boyles next week.

As for Sundays, I think I have been leaving money behind by not extending my Sunday sessions. I played till 5am last Sunday and still felt good till the end, albeit I was one-tabling for at least the last 3 hours. So the plan is to play later sessions Friday through Monday, with Tuesday to Thursday as recovery time. Again, this is similar to how some of the big winners seem to operate. A couple more decisions I have made are not to talk about stats and numbers on here - they're all out there if you look for them, start off on Pocketfives under 'Bonified', most of my screen names are on there, then you can check other databases ; and I'm not going to the WSOP. Definitely. 100%. Well 95. Don't put me in any of your prop bets or fantasy teams anyway. I am thinking about trying to track a reasonable number of players at this year's WSOP though, now that so many people are on Twitter and such and there are no rebuy events, it's a lot easier to track buyins, so it would be interesting to make some kind of measurement (statistically insignificant though it might be) of ROI.

Anyway, I shall be modelling myself on Phil Ivey for the foreseeable future :). Tough call, but you have to aim high ! Basically STFU and get the money. If I get annoyed with everyone in poker who wants to talk the talk without backing it up, the least I can do is set an example to myself.

April Wrap / FTOPs and SCOOP

2010-05-03T13:45:00.003+01:00

Once again I managed to put in good volume through April despite a week in Dublin at the start ; once again though results didn't come and the month's total was $32K in $18K out for a $14K loss. I'm pretty sure I have identified some leaks though. It's all Lee Nelson's fault. Well, and partly mine. My (faulty) line of thinking was "well I'm playing lots of tables so I'd better play unexploitably and stick to the book ranges". Problem one was I kept doing that out of laziness when I had fewer tables open, but the bigger problem two was that it's really not necessary. People just don't call allins as light as they should do across the board, and it doesn't take long to run some analysis on Hold-Em Manager and work out how often people are calling and reraising as opposed to how often they should be. And even when I am multi-tabling it's not a problem to just open-raise and then, if reraised, click Time, give him a range, stove it up and fold the first time or two if necessary.

So with that, and a definite attempt to focus on process rather than results, I kicked May off with a spinup over the weekend. Neither of the $2K events proved fruitful (FTOPs 2-day and SCOOP 6-max) but I had deepish runs in the FTOPs KO (23rd/5000) and SCOOP $200 6-max (192nd/7000) last night. Unfortunately I was brutally coolered in both within the space of 5 minutes, I'll spare you the details. Nonetheless, there's nothing like a deep Sunday run when you accumulate some chips to bring back the excitement. $3300 for 2nd in the Ongame 100 Turbo was a nice bonus as well. I played much better with a mindset of "just keep making decisions until there are no more to make and see what happens". I'll try to take that into the next couple of months.

Patrik Says No

2010-04-28T12:57:00.003+01:00

Good interview with Patrik Antonious on Pokertube. Those of you who don't spend most of the day watching cats chase squirrels might not have time for the whole 50 minutes, but if you do I recommend it. If not, do check out the last 10 minutes where PA gives Harrahs and the WSOP both barrels. And quite right too, if only more of the top players would take a stand like this. The problem is that the most high-profile players (not at all the same thing as the top players) are highly dependent on their bracelet count to keep the endorsement money rolling in. Obviously Hellmuth is the prime example. I mean I've probably said enough about Hellmuth by now but, in a nutshell, the guy is a fucking joke. He only plays WSOP and TV events now and, by all accounts, he plays them terribly. What tilts me the most is that he is almost certainly the highest-profile, most recognisable player in the world. How did it come to this ? That the most well-known player of this awesomely cool game is a) not even very good at it and b) such a whining pantywaist ?

Anyway, /derail. I don't think Durrr gives a fuck about WSOP bracelets ; Antonious, see interview ; Ivey a bit more so but I have to wonder how much WSOP he'd play without the prop bets. What PA says about Harrah's making the schedule to suit their own ends (the very fact that it's in June/July in the first place for one) and no TV money coming back to players is spot on. I consider the "name players" to be as much part of the problem (see Players Advisory Committee) as all they want to do is perpetuate the myth that results 10 years ago, hell even 5, entitle them to more recognition than the swathes of better players who have come into the game since then (I don't include myself in that by the way).

So, think globally, act locally. I know I say this every year but ... I really don't think I'm going out this year. I really shouldn't, that's a fact. As for practical arguments, I'm pretty sure I have a better expected earn sitting in my front room, and I don't need a big score because I'm not broke. Enjoy if you're going but include me out this year.

Insta-Folding

2010-04-03T13:22:00.002+01:00

One good thing about playing these tournaments is I've had a chance to chat with a few of the online guys - Moorman, johne147, railtard, rivermanl and probably a few more I've forgotten. It's very refreshing to see how well these guys and a lot of the younger players conduct themselves, as well as play. In part, I think it's because they realise that one tournament in isolation is just a massive luckfest and they don't take it too seriously ; but it's mostly because they're smart enough to realise that sending out bad vibes all the time is bad for your EV in the game and, more importantly, bad for yourself personally.

One thing a lot of them do is insta-fold in situations where they've been caught bluffing and have no other option left. Now, a lot of live pros never even think about showing some consideration for other people and keeping the game moving so I don't expect them to buy that argument. What they need to realise is that insta-folding is much better for your image than fake-tanking. It's much better to send out the message "I'm either bluffing or I'm not in these spots, and you have to guess" compared to "My range contains a lot of medium-strong hands that I've raised without thinking the consequences through and am now going to tank-fold". Then again, aforementioned live pros would also have to a) have some basic grasp of the concept of a range and b) realise that call is miles better than raise-fold with medium strong hands in very many situations.

While I'm here I busted the main event 10 minutes from close yesterday when I ran into Aces. Villain took 30 seconds to call with no one else in the pot for some reason. I opined at the time that this reason was that he was a fucking cock, not being able to help myself after a long day. Needless to say he was some old rock, not a pesky three-betting, range-merging kid. Oh well, at least there's still some value in the fields.

Dublin

2010-04-01T18:39:00.003+01:00

I'm in Dublin for the Irish Open starting tomorrow. I have also succumbed and signed up to Twitter as GetItQuietly . You won't be reading about what I'm having for breakfast or what I'm doing every hour of every day, I'm going to keep it poker related. If you are interested, I will be doing chip counts and stuff from tomorrow, the tournament starts at 3.30. This is not an April Fools (unfortunately) :).

As for March, while I'm here, I don't have the stats on my laptop but I think I lost $3K or something last month putting me almost dead level for 2010 so far .. grindy grindy grind. It could be a lot worse ! Finally I have been playing some heads up just for fun, I think I have absorbed quite a lot from watching various heads up videos (especially Ansky's which are great). I've just been playing $50 buyin on Full Tilt and almost everyone has quit on me so far which can't be too bad a sign. It's definitely good for my game ; I don't mind playing regs, in fact I'd like to play against good players because it's really for improvement rather than profit. I'll know I'm getting somewhere when people insta-sit out on me :)

Kicking It Live

2010-03-10T17:56:00.005Z

I have three live tournaments coming up that I'm looking forward to (really !). My live MTT record in the last 3 years is about as bad as it can be, if you don't count shootouts (both WSOP and TV). In my defence I haven't entered many at all, but even so, I haven't cashed in a live NL MTT since Tunica in January 07. While it's not a big sample size, there are a few things I think I was doing wrong, so I have been thinking of a few different things to try. Not least the kind of table image I'm trying to put forward (without going into details for obvious reasons).

First up is the Black Belt Live tournament at the Vic, starting on Friday. You can back me to ship the cheese at 50-1 in a 300 runner field. If you like burning money :). Then I should be playing GUKPT Main Event in two weeks time, and I have booked the Irish Open first week of April. I might squeeze in a couple of Omaha prelims as well. Hopefully it will be fun. For the moment I'd rather do it like this, playing decent UK & Ireland tournaments rather than jetting half way across Europe or indeed the world.

Update : Busted Black Belt Live before the first break (yes, with 20K chips). Did somewhat better in the GUKPT on Thursday, managing to stay patient throughout the day and doubling up in the last round to 50K. Today I couldn't resist limp-reraising 55 for 48K (after Neil limped in front of me and Toby Lewis raised from the SB). What could I do, there was 14K in there :). Toby had QQ, gg. Still, it was a tough table and it was just about to go 1K-2K so I was going to have to gamble pretty soon one way or another. Overall I was a bit happier with my live game and am looking forward to Dublin.

Awesomeness Tilt

2010-02-22T10:22:00.003Z

Well not really. But I have been tilting more than I should lately (which is at all). What tilts me is when I know on some level that my opponent has a big hand but go ahead and call (or even worse raise) anyway with some bogus justification about "not being exploited" because I have a decent hand too. The fact is that when some random on a Euro network makes a play in a certain pattern (I'm not going to say what these patterns are for obvious reasons :)), he's not carrying out a super-subtle double bluff, he just has it. A year ago I would just pay him off, go "ZOMG, cooler" and forget about it. Now I have been putting a lot of volume in (especially this month) I can see it happening but I can't find the discipline to fold. So I swear at the other guy (verbally not in the chat box) for being such a donk when I'm actually angry at myself.

What I need to do is find it in myself to say "Thanks for letting me know you have a monster when you get all the money if you play it normally - fold". If someone really is making these plays without the goods then it doesn't take long for this to become obvious - often before you've even got involved with them yourself. It's definitely best to give them credit the first time and make a note. I think it was Goldfinger who said "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action". Not a bad metric to use.

Anyway, until I can master the tilt-tasticness I'm going to cut down to 6 tables. Pruning out the three tables I know I have lowest expectation in anyway doesn't cost much. I'm also going to try to avoid the type of game that I know tilts me more, including heads up tournaments and super satellites. I don't play a lot of supers but I did try an Irish Open satellite on Boyle last night which I managed to bubble. I still picked up E2100 so it wasn't all bad but I was really kicking myself afterwards because at least twice I had a big enough stack to switch off, go to bed and still win the seat for sure. Once again I found myself railing at the other players (at the time) when I only had myself to blame really. Still, maybe if I kicked myself as hard all the times I donk out of a regular tournament when someone is shouting "big hand ! I have a big hand here !" at the top of their voice I might stop doing that too.

Despite all that I'm $10K up this month ($40K in $50K out). $40K is great volume in basically three weeks, as it happens that's about it for February as I'm very busy this week and then off on holiday for a week from Saturday, but it's all good.

Update : Chopped on Full Tilt for $14K so yeah, that seemed to work :)

January Wrap

2010-02-01T13:32:00.004Z

Another strange month ; I had 2 1/2 weeks off in the middle where I barely played a hand, but still managed $24.6k in buyins, which I only topped in 5/12 months last year. Unfortunately I only returned $6.7k winnings for my worst online month, well ever I suppose. Ho hum. I need to find the correct balance with the new 30" screen ; at the moment I think 9-tabling 3x3 works best. Apart from that I'm really trying to focus on increasing volume and keeping my game as close to "A" as often as possible. These are both much more important than making my "A" game better. Using the radical plan of staying up later every night (not just when I'm playing), I hope to be able to put in longer sessions, have a better choice of tournaments to play and be more alert while I'm playing them. We'll see how that goes in February. I intend to pump up the volume.

In other news, Pokerswat have sold up and transferred their videos to DragTheBar. All the videos I made on Pokerswat are now available there. If you had a Pokerswat membership, that should carry over. I don't know whether I'm going to make any more.

99% Perspiration

2010-01-09T23:13:00.004Z

Don't get excited, this is nothing to do with Bluescouse. I just wanted to reference the saying that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration in regard to poker.

If I asked you who was the most natural godlike genius in the world of poker then I think the most common answer would be Phil Ivey. It would be my answer. In the latest Million Dollar Cash Game, the producers have somehow managed to squeeze a decent interview out of Ivey that's quite revealing. In it he admitted that when he started playing poker he played "18 hours a day for 3 years - poker was my life".

Funnily enough, 18 hours a day for 3 years comes out damn close to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour requirement to become world-class in any field. If anyone's playing better than Ivey right now good luck to them - in the first episode of this cash game he played a pretty tough table like his own personal fiddle. Even so, it's well worth remembering that Phil Ivey did not just walk up to a poker table and start owning everybody from Day One. The message that you need intellect and a hell of a lot of hard work to succeed in poker is, fortunately, not one that's ever presented in the poker media. It is massively for the best that instead the media and "TV players" constantly talk up nebulous concepts like "heart" and "reading people", characteristics that new players and fish alike can easily convince themselves that they already have.

As for me, I've taken some time to examine my own game and I think I have patched up a couple of medium-size leaks. It's always good to look for things to change during a dry spell (without changing just for the sake of it) ; when you're running good, just keep doing what you're doing and ship the cheese. When you're not, it can be good for your confidence to take some different ideas into the fray. "Trying them out" helps motivate oneself to keep putting the hours in, even if the new concepts only come into play in a small percentage of hands. Tonight I played my best session for some considerable time, I was really happy with the way I played. Of course I blobbed everything 0/15 for -$3000, but that's variance for you.

I'm off to La Manga this week (screw all this snow crap) ; hopefully I'll still be able to play online in the evenings. I'm sure that might sound a bit sad but if I can put some sessions in and feel that I'm earning money (Sklansky bucks at least) then it'll be a lot easier to justify staying out there for longer, if I like it. We'll see how it goes.

Update 11/1 : If anything I played even better last night, and to prove it I cashed once for $340. Luckily I had a small swap with Neil in the iPoker Million just before I bubbled it. If you can't play well, swap well !

December and 2009

2010-01-03T13:15:00.004Z

Contains yearly results (aka brags) so if you don't want to see it, look away now ...

I will gloss over December ; to even call my effort in the month half-hearted would be overstating the case. Oh well, I probably deserved a bit of time off. 2009 overall was a strange one. On the surface, it looks competely in line with previous years - in fact my Net $ per tournament is insanely consistent, being $179 in 2007, $182 in 2008 and, believe it or not (I wouldn't) $182 in 2009. The insanity comes in because more than half of this year's profit came in one tournament.

It wasn't the only time I went deep in a Sunday major but it was by a large margin ($131K compared to $81K) the biggest first prize on offer for an online final table, and obviously binking it made a huge difference to my final total. The six months following that were very sketchy ; mostly I'm sure I wasn't running, let's say, as good as I usually do, but even so I think my play has been a bit sub-par. I've been watching a lot of cash videos and while I've learned a lot, it has kind of screwed with my tournament game because the play is so different (especially compared to high limit cash). The bottom line was I made $253K online which was about $20K down on last year and $50K down on my target.

I broke even live results-wise, meaning that I profited by the money people gave me to play with (for some reason known only to them). If I was lucky in my biggest online final I thought I was a bit hard done by in the TV final (the one Roberto Romanello won) so maybe it does even out to an extent.

Moving onwards and upwards I'm not going to deal in targets this year, I'm just going to play as many Sundays as I can (being one of the few people in the online MTT world who is actually rolled to play them) and apart from that as and when I feel like it. Live isn't a priority ; I'll have a look at what comes up regarding UK TV tournaments, and maybe play the odd satellite online if it fits my schedule, but I'm definitely looking to tone down the sponsorship angle and just try to GIQ (for a change). I think there's no point learning online NL cash by now, that ship has sailed. Maybe PLO or Mixed Games but every time I do start on these I give up pretty quickly !

Outside of poker (this is as good a place as any I suppose) I'd like to take more care with what I eat ; I get plenty of exercise with the golf so that's no problem. And nuts to football, as I said in that blog a few weeks ago. Apart from that, just remind myself that life is good, as we all have a tendency to take things for granted after a while. I might take a few bad beats or have a few months where not much goes right but it beats heading off to work at 8-30 on a Monday morning !

No More Hands

2009-11-30T19:41:00.004Z

In case you're on the edge of your seat waiting for the other two hands, I decided they were pretty standard. Basically I flat called from about 25BB with suited broadway, flopped top pair and ended up losing to 1) a back door flush and 2) top pair better kicker. It happens. And as pointed out below, the KK hand is probably a pretty standard bet-call as well so meh.

While I'm here I can "do" November ; it's been an odd month. Despite Amsterdam I've put in some decent volume. I binked two tournaments (Party 150 and Ongame 50 rebuy) in the early part of the month when I wasn't playing particularly well, then in the second half I played much better and did my brains obv. Still up on the month in the end though. I've been watching a lot of videos on Bluefirepoker, Phil Galfond mostly, they're really good and are helping me no end in regard to hand-reading and exploiting opponents according to their tendencies.

There are also a couple of interesting threads on 2+2 that are worth checking out, one about Shaun Deeb retiring from tourneys and another being the one that pops up every three months or so asking Does any long-term MTT grinder still enjoy it ? I chip in to emphasise keeping a balance ; I think it's hugely important. There's no way anyone could keep putting in Deeb-volume indefinitely, but I still do enjoy playing 3 (max 4) nights a week and spending some time thinking about how to improve. For example I could play tonight, but I'm skipping it to just chill. The golf course was half underwater today :(, so I'll have more time to play next couple of months anyway.

Also : ZOMG, I played with this guy in a TV Sit-N-Go !

Two Hands

2009-11-24T13:33:00.007Z

I have four hands to talk about, and while they're all slightly different, they split quite nicely into two pairs and I want to bang on about them at great length so I thought I'd split it up. All four hands happened within the last two sessions, and what they all have in common is that even six months ago I would have just whacked the money in and said "ZOMG Cooler FML". But now, after playing about half a million hands in three years, I am beginning to pick up some rudimentary hand-reading skills. And I really wish that was a joke.

The first two hands are spots where a judicious turn check would have saved my "tournament life". First one's from memory as it's on Paradise. Middle stage of the tournament, I have 20K and I think it's 300-600, something like that. 3rd position open-raises, I call in the cut-off with AQ and one of the blinds calls as well. Flop comes Axx rainbow, blinds checks, raiser checks, I bet, blind folds, raiser calls. Fairly standard so far. People tend to overplay medium hands on Paradise quite badly so I like my hand here and am preparing to go to the felt with it [1]. Turn, however, is an offsuit Ten. He checks I bet he calls. River blank he checks again and something tells me I should check back, but there's only 6K behind and at least 20K in the pot (maybe I started with less than 20). I can't resist the bet, he calls with AT.

The point is that when we think a little bit deeper than "ZOMG AQ stack off" and do some hand reading, it gets more interesting. He should have quite a narrow range for check-calling the flop. Logically it should only be something like AJ-A9, KK-99, maybe a small set. There aren't many players on Paradise (or anywhere really) tricky enough to check-call AK there. Given that range, a Ten is probably the worst card to come off on the turn. It hits AT and TT obv. It should make AJ very uncomfortable (if he has AJ) because now what can I have that he beats ? What can he reasonably call a turn bet with that I'm still in front of ? AJ seems like about it. So I'm way ahead or way behind (3 outs max either way), which is usually a good pointer towards checking a street, and seeing as I had the option to check either turn or river I could have taken one of them.

The second hand is in the Party $150 last night. I have 2600 and it's 30-60. I pick up KK in the cut-off, standard 3x raise, big blind calls. Flop T75 rainbow, check bet call, all pretty straightforward so far. Turn is an 8 (making a 2-flush). Now he checks, I bet, he raises all in, I sigh-call and can't bink against 87. Same again, let's do some hand-reading when he calls my flop bet. Reasonable hands that I'm still well in front of : AT-JT is about it, even AT might have checkraised or led flop. Reasonable hands that now have a pair+draw : T9, 99, 98, 97, 86, 76, 66, 65. Hands that now lead : T8, 88, 87, J9, 96, 64 (the three straights being less likely) [2]. The rest aren't so likely, maybe A7, KQ/KJ/QJ, stuff like that, plus a few hands that were already in front, sets mostly. He was playing 40/7 so he could easily turn up with any of those hands pre-flop. As in the previous hand, the turn has helped about as much of his range as it could possibly have done. The temptation on the turn for me is to think "ZOMG must protect against T9", but you always have to balance protecting your hand against the possibility that you're just shovelling money in from behind [3].

In the event, he has so many semi-bluffing hands that I don't think calling the check-raise is too bad. I'm at least 55% against the range if he check-raises all his pair+draws. The point is that checking the turn allows me to pick up a ton of information on the river. What card comes off obv, and then what he does. If it comes something scary like a J, 9, 6 or 4 I can fold to a big bet for two reasons. One, the line check-call flop, check-check turn, bet large river is very often an attempted turn check-raise that now wants to make up for the lost value on the turn. Two, when these cards hit, he either got there or he has showdown value, and if he has showdown value he's very unlikely to make a big bet. Again, at this level of tournaments, there are very few players sharp enough to turn something like A7 into a bluff on the river. Neither will they balance their range by betting something like JT that rivers two pair. To summarize my river action : scare card, check behind, bemoan life and probably call a small bet, fold to a big one ; non-scare card, bet if checked to, probably fold to check-raise, call a small bet, bemoan life and probably call a big bet. It's not perfect but it's probably better than just whacking it in at 55%/forcing a lot of losing hands out on the turn.

[1] People like me by the looks of it ...

[2] Notice how many extra hands come in here because of the 5 on the flop. T72 would have been quite a bit different.

[3] Notice on TV that no one ever says "Well [hero] should bet to protect his hand" in the particular case where villain has a set.

October Wrap / Amsterdam

2009-11-02T21:59:00.002Z

Nicked $5K last month and another $3500 yesterday with a 3rd in the Tilt $69 6-max. That is a great tournament by the way, people spew horrendously just because it's 6-max, or for whatever reason, anyway they do. I have decided that I need to change my outlook a little bit ; for three years I've always looked forward to playing, but now not quite so much. Nonetheless, if playing online keeps me on the golf course the rest of the time instead of in an office then that's what I need to do, and I need to approach it more professionally. It's still fun going deep in a tournament, but the rest of the time I need to play well and not be too gung-ho about "double or bust" even if it's slightly dull at times. It's still 100x less dull than a real job so I need to just suck it up.

Apart from that, finally saw my WPO heat today, or Part 1 anyway. I liked the way it came out generally, the changes Matchroom have made have really improved the show. Slightly disappointed that my flop 3-bet against Schaffer with the nut low (alright a straight draw) missed the cut, whereas all my donk calls were front and centre, but Phil Laak wasn't too hard on me so I can live with it. Woteva. Speaking of woteva, I thought Luke Schwartz made a couple of odd plays that made him look not quite so good when you can see the cards, but woteva.

Off to Amsterdam next week with Withnails Poker School. Check out the site if you haven't seen it, there's a 3-minute interview with me looking like a pumpkin head thanks to Tristan's cheapo camera work. It has occurred to me that in the last three live tournaments I played I have re-shipped the standard 20BBs only to get called by KQ, KJ and KQ again (I was actually in front of the KJ because I had KQ aka the nuts). If that's the way it's going, I need to be a bit more patient live in those spots. I can always wait to the jam stage, especially with high live antes.

World Poker Open V Tonight

2009-10-28T17:52:00.003Z

Part 1 (of 2) of my heat is on Five tonight at 00:10. This has taken me by surprise ; I would have missed it if Kevmath hadn't posted it on 2+2. Normally they send out DVDs to players before airing but I haven't received one for woteva reason, so I haven't seen it. To remind you, the heat features Timoshenko, Akenhead and Schwartz and should be more worth watching than previous programmes of this type.

Update : Funnily enough, Matchroom alerted me to this just now, and I should get a DVD in the week - but you'll see it before I do if you watch tonight !

What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up

2009-10-13T13:35:00.002+01:00

I had to give myself a talking to and a slap yesterday. Hey, I could pay someone to do that. Anyway, I was a bit down after the WPO heat but on reflection the fact that there were 3 better players in the heat wasn't the problem so much as a lack of mental effort all round, particularly when in hands against the other players. Make a note and move on.

Without bragging (I've done far too much of that already), even three years ago I wouldn't have thought I could come as far as I have, never mind 5, when I was working 9-5 and not really winning much playing live, or 15 years ago when I had a shit job and no money. But what of the future ? Where, or who, do I want to be 15 years from now ? Someone on 2+2 today suggested that 25 years from now most MTTc-ers would probably look like Devilfish. Now that's a chilling thought. As much as I rag on Devilfish at times he does command a lot of respect in the poker world, and can play extremely well when he wants to. Nonetheless, I do not want to be Devilfish 15 years from now. I'd much rather be Freddie Carle.

Now, the first thing most of you are going to say is WTF is Freddie Carle. Well, that's kind of the point. This guy gets the absolute lot in the Vic. The cake. I'm not saying I want to take up residence in the Vic 24/7 but the point is he gets the lot in his chosen field, and no one's ever heard of him. According to legend he has never even been to Vegas. Now that's getting it quietly. And that seems to be a much more dignified way of life when one reaches the sunset years. Or even now. So from now on, keep doing what I do, take the odd shot live but don't take it too seriously, and cut down on the bragging, definitely. That's probably going to be hardest of all ...

World Poker Open V (Contains Spoilers)

2009-10-10T14:44:00.007+01:00

I'm playing in the first heat of the WPO V tomorrow (Sunday) at the Palm Beach. Anyone's welcome to come along and rail, if you really haven't got anything better to do :-). Having said that, it's a relatively strong line-up. More to the point, my heat sounds tougher than any TV table I've played before. I'm up against James Akenhead, Luke Schwartz and Yevgeny Timoshenko ; these guys are not just excellent all-round players, they also know the fundamentals as well as I do. James and Yevgeny are running hotter than the sun right now, mbn [1]. Ian Frazer's in the mix too, and I expect online qualifiers to be stronger than usual as they came through $700 satellites. Mind you, on Party. But I know Rob Sherwood, who's a very good player, has qualified online (he's not in my heat) and I'd expect a few more. Luckily I know how to do what so many people have failed to do against me in these ; suck it up and gamble against better players in the right spots.

This is still good value for me to play but without the Boyle sponsorship (and the lucky patch of course) it would be marginal. On top of that, I think this might be the "last hurrah" for TV 6-maxes, at least at the level below Poker Million and so on. Paradoxically, as fields become tougher, it makes for worse TV. When three guys in every heat, and five in every semi, realise that there are three basic stages :

1) Fold
2) Reshove
3) Shove

then it's not going to make for exciting TV. I think Matchroom realise this, and I fully understand why they're trying to branch out into Heads Up and stuff like that. This one is "triple stack" but all that means is two more levels of stage 1 on the front. We'll see how it goes. I'm glad I'm playing this as my contribution to the poker world coming to London - it's way the best value in terms of exposure and sponsorship for me. But after this I'm probably going into lockdown during the winter, and just cracking on online, brief trips (freebies in fact yay) to Dublin and Amsterdam excepted.

While I'm here, great interview with Neil here on the 2+2 Pokercast. He's very candid about his ups and downs and, of course, amusing as ever in his anecdotes. It starts about half an hour in I think, somewhere like that.

[1] Which of course gives them no inherent advantage but they'll both be super confident and free of doubt when it comes to their game.

Results : Well I'm here flicking my plums and trying to get out of it in the Sunday donkaments while the heat's still going on, which is result enough. Playing deep stacked against people who are better than me certainly wasn't as much fun as torturing donks with re-shoves starting at level 2. I could have saved a hero call or two but even with 50K more I'd still have 4-bet jammed AQs on Timoshenko's open and a qualifier's 3-bet with the same result (qualifier calls with 99 and I unaccountably miss). And now I've just passed AQ to a re-shove and a call in the Warm-Up to find they both have 88. Sometimes it's just not your day.

Apart from that I won't spoil too much, although there was one amusing hand where Timoshenko and Akenhead got it in on a coinflip. Even when the universe didn't explode as a result of this immovable object vs irresistible force of rungood, it somehow didn't come out as a split pot. They both hit the flop though obv.

Another Late Turnaround

2009-09-30T23:55:00.005+01:00

John Fox said something about how the best time to play was 3am on the last Friday of the month, and that playing just that hour every month wouldn't necessarily be what you wanted to do .. but it would still be profitable ! Well, if I only played the last Sunday of every month I'd have a hell of an ROI that's for sure. This time I saved my bacon (mmm bacon) in the Stars $100 rebuy, finishing 4th for $30K+change. Yes, 4th for $30K, it's a massive rebuy donkfest ! On top of a win in the Paradise E50 rebuy last Wednesday (that has to be my favourite tournament right now), that put me nicely ahead for the month, with a total buyin of $25K in 54 hours play which was a slightly better effort.

I've changed tack on what I'm listening to while playing, it's quite interesting. After trying a couple of brainwave entrainment samples that promised the world and didn't really deliver, I tried Mind Stereo which I really like (and Neuroprogrammer from the same people but that doesn't really apply to poker). Mind Stereo allows you to play music (whether from your own playlist or an internet radio station) and apply pulse modulations that are supposed to help you relax or (more appropriately for poker) concentrate/study better. To start with I was playing this sort of techno (I don't know what it is exactly, trance maybe) for the first half of the session, and then ambient for the second. On Sunday I switched to ambient all the way through, which seemed to work, being result oriented :-). Seriously it's hard to tell whether it's listening to background music with which I'm not familiar or the actual pulse modulation but I do seem to focus better and for longer. It could even be a placebo (not the band Placebo they suck), but what the hell, if a placebo helps me make $30K then bring it on. It turns out both the stations I was listening to are part of Soma FM FWIW. The Drone Zone is my favourite. I should throw them a bone really, 1% or something.

Anyway that's it for me this month. You'll notice no liveaments, screw them. Well I might play the £500 8-Game next week, but seeing as I couldn't be bothered to show up for the £2K, don't count on it. And gg ul to the Camel who busted 11th in the WSOP-E. Could have been worse, how tilting would it have been if Sheringham had won it ?

The Best Of British ?

2009-09-09T19:21:00.013+01:00

I'm quite enjoying this series of The Poker Show, but if Jesse makes one more comment about how it's a "disgrace" that there are no UK players in the Caesars Cup team then I'll have to phone up and give him some GBH to the earhole.

Let me clarify to start with that I don't give a monkeys about the Caesars Cup, it's yet another gimmick dreamt up so that Daniel Negreanu & Co can grab some more TV time without having to do anything inconvenient like be better at poker than other people to do it. But Jesse is putting me on super life tilt with this. The European team, with Annette as captain, is as follows : Elky, Dario, Peter Eastgate, Patrik Antonious and Zigmund. If anyone thinks it's a "disgrace" that there are no UK players in it, then it couldn't be simpler. Tell me who should be out and which UK player should be in instead. There are a few you could make a case for being close, but if you're totally objective then you can still make a better case for those already in and a few more (mostly Scandis) besides. There's definitely no one who's such a glaring omission that it's a "disgrace".

At times Jesse appears to imply that there should be a UK player because it's being held here - but then he talks about the selection being "political", and what would be more political than sticking someone in who's not good enough just because they're from a particular country ? A lot of our "great players" have made their reputation on the live UK circuit, or on TV tournaments, which means fuck all because the standard in both of those is dog poop. Tell me which UK player inspires fear when he sits down at the table. That's right, no one.

Update : The more I think about this, the more I can take another angle, which is that it's super disrespectful to Annette and the players on the team. Team poker is super ghey but, having said that, I can't remember a stronger team ever being assembled. It's also the least "political". We all know that people have "played for England" on the grounds of bunging the captain a few quid and giving him a lift to the game. If you pick any UK tournament player, Elky is better. Any cash player, Zigmund is better. Any heads up player, Dario is better. Any champion of this or that, Eastgate is the current World Champ. And any all round player, Antonious is better. And when I say better I mean by a street. This is a super strong team and so, given the super retarded format of what they're playing, they're at least 20-21 favourites.

Further Update : I like saying "super", deal with it ; and maybe there is one better heads up player than Dario.

Poker Show : I've just been on The Poker Show talking about this and straight afterwards Eddie Hearn pointed out that if I thought it was a gimmick event, then why be so outspoken about having the best players in it, which is 100% fair, and it's why I was a bit reticent about even making the post. But there you go. It was just a rant, and after making it, it seemed only fair to let them interview me about it when they asked.

Public Service Announcement

2009-09-06T22:22:00.003+01:00

I had Betfair open this evening as I was keeping an eye on their WSOP-E satellite. With $500 buy-in and a $200K guarantee, 5 minutes before kick-off it looked like there was a decent overlay in prospect, with about 200 players registered. Then, next time I looked at it, which must have been about 10 seconds later, there were 300. Still only 200 players in the list, but 300 in the count. The discrepancy remained until the tournament actually kicked off, when the player list jumped up to match the count at 314.

I don't know whether this was down to bad software or shenanigans on Betfair's part but just watch out for this. I asked on 2+2 whether it was just me and one person confirmed, FWIW. There was still an overlay but anyone who registered 7 minutes before because of the apparent double overlay would have cause to be annoyed. I didn't play myself as I was still umm-ing and ah-ing when this started to happen.

Update : (Completely unsubstantiated) story about this here.

July / August Wrap

2009-09-01T11:03:00.004+01:00

My online effort over the last two months can best be described as "half-hearted". Still, if you put the two months together it pretty much amounts to one decent month. In terms of volume anyway, nothing much happened in the way of results and I ended up making about $3K. It's funny how that's pretty much an after-tax wage for a lot of people, but in our world it's just a bit of random noise.

The only prediction I'm going to make for now is that I'm not going to make any predictions. Didn't Gazza say something like that once ? Anyway. Play when I feel like playing and hopefully make enough to keep me on the golf course the rest of the time. Of course there's a bunch of stuff going on in the next 6 weeks as the poker world comes to London, but I can take or leave it. Might play a couple of EPT side events. I will be playing the World Poker Open V in October which should be interesting. I think the "triple chips" aspect is a bit of a mirage ; it just adds a couple of levels on at the start, which you can fold through anyway if you like, especially with it being 8-handed. It'll become the 20BB-fest we know and love soon enough, which suits me obv.

The only other thing is that I've been experimenting a little with different "soundtracks" to my poker playing, but I'm going to hold back on discussing that until I work out whether the effects are placebo or actually lasting, it's quite interesting though I think.

Update : And with all this live action coming up, here's what we can look forward to : being slowrolled by Davros, Creator of the Daleks.

Readjustment

2009-08-18T10:58:00.003+01:00

My game has felt out of synch since coming back from Vegas - it's hard to explain but it's just a sense that I'm doing things that worked (enough of the time) a year ago, but now they don't. Too often I make a play, then when it's on my opponent I immediately think "this isn't going to work", and it doesn't. There is a definite element of rock-paper-scissors to online tournaments (especially on Stars and Tilt where the standard is a little higher) in that certain plays (the steal reraise is an obvious example) become more and more prevalent until the point where you're more thinking about exploiting the play (and other players' belief that you are using the standard play) than making it.

So I'm taking 10 days or so off for a break and to work out some new options. I can't play this weekend anyway so it seems like a good time to do it. I can't really put it all down to post-Vegas blues ; it's been at the back of my mind for a few months, and I think individual big results like the Warm-Up win have papered over the cracks. Nil desperandum though, it's always good to be aware of these things. While I'm here I'll be on Channel 5 tomorrow (Wednesday) night in the final of the ... which one was it ... EPO V I think. Not that I final all the time, I just get whichever really prestigious event it is mixed up with the other really prestigious events :-). Anyway, enjoy. A friend of mine described me as "unflappable" recently, I think he might change his mind if he sees this one where I look definitely flapped at one point.

Ooh, almost forgot. The EPT London schedule is out, and it rocks. Shootouts ! 6 max ! 8 game ! Stuff with numbers in it ! I could happily not play another live 10-handed NL MTT in my entire life, but these sound good. Stars are promising to facilitate online buyin (with FPPs for rake !) as well. I like the sound of "European 8-Game Champion" :-). I haven't got a clue how to play triple draw, and not much more in Omaha 8, but that should put me at least 3 games ahead of most of the field. In conclusion, WSOP-E can DIAGF, EPT London is where it's at next month.

Unreasonable Expectations

2009-07-28T10:02:00.004+01:00

I enjoyed this documentary which someone linked to in a thread on 2+2. It's one of those "pick 4 people and follow them through the WSOP" jobs, in this case Isabelle Mercier, Fabrice Soulier, Luca Pagano and (somewhat incongruously) Joe Hachem. This takes place in 2006 when Hachem was the "defending champ".

http://pokertube.com/Movies.aspx?movie=3028&title=The_Passionate_Eye_-_Poker_Face-_Documentary_1_8&player=1&page=7&FreeText=documentary&list=9

If you're interested, watch it before reading the rest of this post where I spoil it. Anyway, what I find interesting is the emotional reaction of the players to their results, as follows.

- Pagano whiffs everything. He's obviously quite down about it but drives off into the sunset saying he's going to get back to work online and on the Euro circuit.

- Soulier doesn't even make a Day 2 until the very last event, which was one of the bracelet events they tacked on in 2006 after the ME had started. He finishes 4th for $50K to get out of it (it's the one that Praz won). That's pretty much what I did in 2007, so I know how relieved you feel to get out of it like that. Soulier looks relieved as well and comes across fairly positive on his way out.

- Mercier makes a final table quite early and finishes 5th for $175K. But she's gutted that she didn't win. She whiffs everything else and ends up storming out of the ME saying stuff like "six months preparation for the worst day of my life" and "I was sure I was going to win". This is where pumping yourself up too much for the WSOP can get you, and it's not a good place. Cashing for (presumably) $100K+ profit is something a good player will manage only one year in 3 or 4. If you're still not happy when you do it, you're setting yourself up to be depressed every year. To what extent Isabelle believes what she says about always being so sure she's going to do well is unclear. It might just be a form of positive thinking to get into a confident mindset. That's all very well until you start believing it, which is a major problem going into something like the WSOP where the variance is so high and so few people walk away with a bracelet, if that's your only goal.

- Hachem ... well we know what Joe's like by now. Despite making two finals and a good profit, we get shots of moody Joe staring into the sunset and playing online alone in a darkened room. Tough life. The thing is, in a way I feel sorry for him. I don't think this guy is ever going to be happy until he gets some professional mental help. Whatever he wins will never be enough to "prove himself" to his (perceived) critics and enemies.

Getting your head right going into the WSOP is a very difficult balancing act. You have to accept that you're probably not going to make what you could have made in your regular game at home in the same time ; probably not even going to make a profit ; and, on a day-by-day basis, probably not going to cash the next tournament. It's the one year in 4 or 5 where you do really well that makes it worth while. At the same time, you have to be positive and confident enough to play your best. Pumping yourself up with "I'm the best, I'm going to win one this year" is just setting yourself up for a fall, mentally, when it doesn't happen.

What works for me is to remember that they're just another bunch of donkaments no different from any other. Which, when you strip away all the hype, is exactly what they are. But in Vegas, the city of hype, and in the Rio, with pictures of winners flaunting the bling everywhere you look, that can be very hard to do. In the end, if you're a professional player, you have to ask yourself whether it's worth taking 6 weeks off your regular game (and maybe another month afterwards due to the comedown) to put yourself through this, in tournaments that are less and less value with each passing year. I'm glad I didn't this year, although I would be, seeing as I had my best month ever online. Whichever way you do it, you can't escape the variance :-)

Looking Like A Dork

2009-07-20T23:37:00.002+01:00

*** WARNING this post contains spoilers of European Poker Open shows that will be on your screens in the next month. Look away now if you don't want to see them ! ***

If it's not too late, anyway :-). I've seen them (semi-final and final) and they both make me look like a dork. Partly because I have this habit of swaying back and forward in my chair like a 6-year-old, but mostly because of the way the poker hands look. Basically, twice in each show, I ran my bag of filth into JJ+, which never looks good. I know, myself, that all the plays were standard (albeit one or two were a bit thin), and I guarantee you that in spots where commentators wanted me to fold to reraises, that would have been ridiculously exploitable, and there were definitely players on each table (Neil and Karl for a start) capable of exploiting. And as we know, 90% of the moves that get through end up on the cutting room floor.

But I knew all that before I saw the DVD. What surprises me now is how rattled I look at one point in the final. I remember feeling a little off balance but certainly not as much as I look on screen. The overall impression is of someone with a very one-dimensional "shove and hope" game. But you know what ? Maybe that's not a mile off. I was wondering this evening, while spinning a few turbo tournaments, whether too much short-stack online tournament play inhibits my development as a player. Luckily I soon pulled myself together and came up with the correct answer - so do I have to give any of the money back ? *Dr Evil voice* how about Nooo.

Poker is not a sport, it's not about being on TV and it's not about being a face on the circuit. It's about getting the fucking money. THE MONEY. To get the money, you find bad players and you play lots of hands against them. This guy [1] understands it - he's like the cash version of me IMO. Find worse players than you and play a ton of hands against them. I know what my hourly is and I know how few people in poker can match it, and in live poker, how very very very few. And if the style of play required to do what I do is considered one-dimensional, hell if it is one-dimensional, then so much the better, because that makes it easier and so I can do it listening to Megadeth. If I want to expand my brain I can use my considerable free time to go and take a philosophy course, or whatever. Which I might just do.

[1] Yes, the latest entry is about ligging it up in Vegas. Everyone can have a holiday :-).

Post Mortem

2009-07-11T19:35:00.000+01:00

On reflection, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over a tournament in which the following happened :

- I lost 45K "Sklansky Chips" in preflop allin situations
- I flopped one set in 22 hours and didn't get on
- I had a net chip loss with AA over the tournament
- I had a ridiculously tough table on Day 1

Now, it's true that I had some "hidden luck". No one came over one of my 3-bets in 22 hours [1]. I had a couple of key pots on Day 2 when I was low and I would have been in big trouble if my opponent had hit the flop (with whatever he was holding). But it's a stretch to call my luck even average over the 3 days, and as I said before, you need a hell of a lot more than average luck to go deep.

If there's one thing I might have done it's make a couple or three river folds. Having said that, I played all the hands to induce on turn and river and when you do that it's really not a big leak to make those calls. Other players might well have lost the same amount and not even got to showdown, while losing value against any worse hands. I probably should have folded the Aces against the king of the nits on a TTxxK board, but the other two I can live with.

Overall, once I broke my 0/3 streak of unlucky table draws (counting 2007 and this year), I could see how much value this event really is. Amateurs just can't keep it together for 10 hours of poker, unless they're constantly increasing their stack. So many people fall apart once they lose a pot or two, or can't make anything happen for a level. You can almost see them thinking "I had 50K an hour ago .. jeez, got to get it back". Some of the plays I saw on Day 3 were so bad, generally when people were scared to play multiple streets and made overbets that would get called by a better hand and only a better hand. Or ludicrous river checks with big hands because people didn't want to get raised when they weren't holding the nuts.

I'm definitely going to stay till Friday, why not. Playing online tomorrow, we'll see how that goes, mostly in terms of physical comfort playing on a laptop without my space-age chair. Then I have the option of playing the Venetian $5K on Monday or online for the rest of the trip, or even having a couple of days off, it is allowed :-).

[1] Technically the old guy on Day 3 put his 25K in on top of my 15K 3-bet. Seeing as I was committed and I had the best hand though, I don't think that counts.

Bustooooo

2009-07-11T01:34:00.005+01:00

Sigh. Frustrating but there wasn't much I could do really. Briefly and without trying to spin anything :

- Moved up to 150K after turning a full house OOP, could maybe have made some more but meh
- Lost flip when old guy inexplicably raise-called 20BBs with Q9s. I had A3s but lost.
- 3-bet an UTG raiser with KQs, thought it would look strong enough to fold out most of his range and I have a flexible hand if I get called. Apparently not as he called with 22. Flop Q92, check behind/call/(perhaps questionably) call. Annoying because he only wins the hand if he flops a 2, and he only makes more than one bet if I flop top pair as well. None of which gets me my chips back.
- Drain down to 30 missing and getting played back at on every flop
- Snap Hevad Khan's SB push with K9 and chop with his K6
- Open-jam a couple, then re-ship 18BBs with K9s, he calls TT, it holds gg.

Which is a shame because my first table was really soft. Major donktastic action again and again. But it was the kind of over-aggressive donkery that you need a hand to punish, and I didn't find one. Ho hum. I wasn't bothered about min-cashing anyway, and I'd need one hell of a lot more luck than that to go deep. I'll see if I can change flights and come back on Monday. Ehhh, or I might stay (till Friday), play some US timezone online.

Back And Forth

2009-07-09T07:49:00.003+01:00

Pretty strange day today. First of all I was epically slowrolled by the floorstaff. I turned up to my expected table, only to find it full. An announcement directed all Seat 10 players into Amazon, so I found someone in there and showed him my slip. "Oh yes, " he said, "You're on the ESPN Final Table". ZOMG ! I looked at his list of players and the name Phil Hellmuth was the first I saw. Super ZOMG ! XOMG ! Then I looked for my name. Just as I realised it wasn't there he said "Oh no, wait a minute".

So I was packed back off to Court 318 where I spent the rest of the day. The first two levels were a complete non-event, I made 3K profit, mostly thanks to TT > JJ against a short-stack. The next hour and a half was a complete mare, I was stationed out of 50K chips, the worst one being AA v AT on a flop of TTx. Worst thing was my opponent, a classic old American nit (right down to the bracelet from 1989), was shaking his head throughout the entire hand. Just like he did when he had quad Aces. Sigh. Luckily I won a couple of key pots, I 3-bet squeezed another old guy and Robert Mizrachi (who was on my immediate right) with AJo, Mizrachi called, flop A high and I had to go with it with only 1.5 x pot left, but he folded. I 3-bet the same old guy with KQo and got to showdown on a KJxxx board, beating AJ.

From then on I ground and ground and ground, raise/c-bet and 3-betting when I could. As the day neared its end I met with less and less resistance. By the last half hour I was calling and outflopping people just to annoy them, and I finished with 118. If only every level was the last of the day. Half the field tightens up and half the rest just crack wide open. Old guy #2 called 25% pre with JTs to flop a straight flush draw against KK and get there on the turn. One of the stations cold 4-bet KQs with no fold equity. And so on.

Mizrachi was the only "face" at my table all day, and he wasn't a problem, which isn't so much as a comment on his play, which was fine, but just the fact that no one short of Ivey is really a problem when you have position on them every hand. Amazingly, I'm pretty sure that no one has come over one of my 3-bets in two days. 18 hours of poker. Amazingly lucky probably, but I'll take it, seeing of course as I had a real hand about 10% of the time. So I will have a little over average with 2000 players left on Friday, which is not exactly poised to win it all, but it's nice to have a shot.

One Down ...

2009-07-07T18:45:00.006+01:00

I had a great day 1 yesterday and finished with 96K. This looked very unlikely at one point. To start with, Phil Galfond sat down 2 to my left, probably one of the 10 players in the entire event I least want to be on my left playing 300BBs. On his left was a player he obviously knew, who turned out to be Shannon Shorr. Two to my right was a player who entered a ton of pots ; initially I thought he might be the value but on the first break I found out it was Scott Seiver. Seat 1 was playing really well too (as Shannon says in his blog).

After getting involved in a levelling war vs Shannon in the last hand before the break (I 4-bet/folded 98s lol) I was down to 23K before dragging my first pot when I rivered a straight against Scott. Then I started to take the aggressive route and reraise pre where possible, which is risky but I think has to be done on a tough table. Through the day I reraised AK and AQ in a lot of spots where I would just have called online. Luckily I hit enough flops for this to work, it's hell when you get called and miss in that spot. It's also worth noting that my high 3-bet frequency helped me in the pot against Shannon below.

A couple of things happened to change the dynamic ; first of all I 3-bet Scott 4 times in about an hour and he passed them all, then he started open-limping and min-raising instead. Shannon knocked Phil out blind-vs-blind and a much weaker player took Phil's seat, in fact I think I took all his chips by the end of the day in about 3 chunks. I started to hit some hands and pick up 10K here and there.

After the dinner break the cracks started to open up in the weaker players, as tends to happen, particularly a couple of older guys who decided to show those whippersnappers that they couldn't be pushed around, with predictable consequences. I 4-bet jammed QJs on Phil's replacement when he made a perfect 3-bet to be shoved on and he insta-folded, next time he jammed on me and I had AA, must be nice. I took about 20K off Shannon in the hand he describes in his blog (at the end), I thought he might have had AQ there. I'd also like to officially confirm here that I was not playing with Shannon's balls.

I 3-bet/folded one towards the end and we only played 3 hands after they stopped the clock (ZOMG this system is so so much better than just playing out the level) so I didn't quite make 100K. Once I got going I really enjoyed it, it was a tough table but at least there was no bullshit, no hollywooding, just a tough game played with respect. I don't recognise anyone on my Day 2 draw, but I have two Frenchmen on my immediate left so that should be fun !

Update : Phil Galfond's ME blog here. I didn't really play a hand with him so I have no idea whether he considered me a "solid young player" or "soft spot" :-). Really surprised he folded KK, he must have had a heck of a tell because the simple dynamic of how often he was open-raising skews the hand to such an extent that I would have thought KK was a snap-shove there.

Let Us Gogogogo

2009-07-06T16:23:00.003+01:00

We're up to bat today then. 5 levels for us, and I expect to be 10-handed to start with at least. I've slept better with each night and feel OK at the moment, I did kind of conk out yesterday at 6-30pm so I hope I can do better than that - at least that coincides with the dinner break anyway.

I don't really mind what happens, in terms of results, I'll just try to focus on playing well and enjoying it. Process >>> results. Eckhart Tolle says so and Dr Bob Rotella agrees. This is easy to say when I've been getting the absolute online, but I'd have to go so deep in this to win a life-changing amount that it's super unlikely, plus my life is awesome so I probably don't even want to change it anyway. It's going to be mad today (at the least the field will be capped at 2700 and I expect them to squeeze more in somehow) so good luck finding any updates, but I'll try to update Facebook at dinner and on here at close of play. If not before, hopefully :-)

BTW I'll be starting on Brasilia 158 and wearing a T-shirt with "ZOMG" written on it if anyone wants to stop by.

Vegas Checklist

2009-07-02T12:57:00.003+01:00

[x] Gus Hansen haircut
[ ] $130K (can't get it off Stars in time, which is probably for the best)
[x] $25K
[x] Matches
[x] T-shirts with "LDO", "FML" and "ZOMG" written on them
[x] 7-disc Tarantino box set
[ ] Noise reducing headphones, can't find them skjdfbnskjfbdbd
[x] Liqourice comforts and Silk Cut for beleagured front-line troops

Let us gogogogo. And yes, this post is a transparent filler to present the last playlist :

Playlist 7

Metallica - S & M (Disc 2)
Whitesnake - 1987 (remastered)
Beck - Odelay
Live - V
The Cure - Greatest Hits
Tiger Lillies - Live In Russia 2000-2001
Tori Amos - Abnormally Attracted To Sin
... that seems to be it. Go to "Chants" playlist if still in I suppose.

Software (2)

2009-07-01T11:31:00.004+01:00

OK so before I got sidetracked owning Daniel Negreanu and rubbing $100s on my chest, I was talking about software. The two programs I have found useful with multi-tabling are Table Ninja (for Stars) and Full Tilt Shortcuts (for Full Tilt ldo).

Table Ninja was much easier to set up to work how I want it to, but after a couple of days of tweaking, FTS is now up to speed. If you have/pick up FTS and you want to use overlapping tables, the best bet is to go to the Table1 tab and set it up as follows :

- Highlight the Active Table with Pending Action
- Highlight (non-active) Tables with Pending Action
- Select "Activate the Next Table with Pending Action"
- Activate the Table the Mouse is Over

and leave everything else blank. That pretty much causes the correct table to come up and stay up until you've done something. Both of these allow you to set bet sizing to a reasonable default and tweak using the mouse wheel if required, which is great. TN lets you select a button to mash when you want to go all in (I use "Insert") which rules, but I can't seem to make FTS do that. Anyway both of these are recommended for multi-tabling. One gripe with FTS is that it can display your M on screen, which would be great, if it simply got it right. Half the time with antes in play it doesn't, so that actually costs you time because you look at it and then have to re-check it anyway.

They're both good for cash and/or Sit and Goes as well, when you set them up for SNGs they're great for auto-opening more tables when you're playing, which used to be the bane of my SNG life. Needless to say though, once I had one of "those" SNG sessions at the weekend I decided they weren't the future (again) after all, that always happens.

Those were the only two packages I shelled out for in the end, the others I tried didn't come up to scratch. Tournament Shark is a nice idea, in that it will automatically display buyin/ROI stats for every player at the table, unfortunately it clearly makes no attempt to calculate rebuy tournaments properly, which is enough for me to give it a miss. If you need to, you can use ThePokerDB to paste an HH into a box and it displays all the players' stats at once (usually), and it looks much more accurate to me.

If anyone likes any other add-ons or scripts that I haven't mentioned, do chip in with a comment !

Playlist 6

Megadeth - Rust In Peace
Presidents Of The USA - Presidents Of The USA
Smashing Pumpkins - MACHINA: The Machines Of God
Midnight Oil - Diesel And Dust
Blur - 13
Chris Isaak - Wicked Game
Some more Bach
Some more Gregorian Chants

Best Month Ever

2009-06-30T10:05:00.002+01:00

So yeah, shipped the Warm-Up last night which was great. It was a strange one, for most of the night I had a better shot on Party and I was focussing more on that. When I busted Party in 18th there were still 80 players left in the Warm Up ; the Party tournament only had 1200 runners compared to 4000 in the WU so it ran much quicker. From that point I grinded along until I suddenly won two flips to take me from 23/26 to 2/26 in five minutes.

Anyone in London knows how hot it is right now. I'm not an Internet slob or anything, but at 2am it was still 26 degrees in here with all the windows open, and I was reduced to sitting my T-shirt and pants playing this tournament. I know, it's not a pretty picture. I made the final without much further incident - there was no FT bubble at all as 10th and 11th went out on the same hand. Going in 5/9, the payout structure mandated very careful play against the bigger stacks, especially with the super-loose chip leader and a good 2+2 guy on my immediate left. The other players weren't great though and I knocked a couple of short stacks out ; firstly a guy min-raised from 10BBs in the SB, I shipped QTs and he called with K3s (sick induce as someone rightly said in the 2+2 sweat thread). Rivered him for flush > two pair, then I called a short SB push with Q4s and "held" against JT. Those two hands might have been the other way round (as in Q4 > JT might have been earlier), whatever.

Four-handed was relatively deep with everyone having at least 35BBs IIRC. Even so I felt that it wouldn't be long before two of the other guys got it in, which they did when the chip leader shipped 9x against Aces on a 9 high board and then rivered another 9. I doubled through the 2+2 guy with TT > A8 completely standard, then he went out to the chip leader 44 < 55. Heads up I was 3-1 down but chipped away at him pretty well. Being able to check-raise two pair and then split trips on the flop helped. I unloaded a sick bluff with T9 after I three-bet him pre and followed up the AQx flop. On the blank turn there was 14M in the pot and I had 11M left so I just thought "one for the crowd" and shipped it. He folded and said "nh", lol. Couple of hands later I raised with KK, he jammed 25BBs over it with K7s, gg wp.

Which was nice. I'm glad that's my biggest win now ; when people ask in interviews about "greatest achievement" I'll say that instead of 2nd at the WSOP - as soon as you say the word "second" their eyes start to wander as if they're thinking "fuck this, let's find an actual winner to talk to". Can't say I blame them either. So obviously confident going into the Main Event, without any unreasonable expectation. Without being too result-oriented, I'm pretty happy with my decision to skip the prelims anyway.

Playlist 5 :

Slayer - Reign In Blood
Pearl Jam - Ten
Catherine Wheel - Happy Days
Prince - Lovesexy
Bjork - Volta
kd lang - Live By Request
Starsailor - Love Is Here
Cistercian Monks Of Stift Heiligenkreuz - Chant - Music For Paradise
Brian Eno - Ambient 1 / Music For Airports

BINK

2009-06-29T14:01:00.002+01:00

Shipped the Warm-Up last night, which was nice. I'll blog in some more detail later on, as I was up playing it till 3-30 and didn't get much sleep after that, but obviously that feels really good. It's the first tournament of any import that I've won on Stars. It was funny, every time I was all in it seemed to be a flip, and I won them all obv. There were some cool hands in the final, especially heads up, so I'll let you know when the replay is up on Stars, I'm not sure if it will have commentary or not but there should be some version with all hole cards shown. So I'm definitely on a break for the rest of the week, prior to Vegas (flying out on Friday).

Playlist 4 (#3 was the lucky playlist last night BTW)

Fall Out Boy - From Under The Cork Tree
Killers - Hot Fuss
Rush - Permanent Waves
Hepburn - Hepburn (lol)
Bjork - Post
Madonna - Ray Of Light
Tori Amos - Boys For Pele
Neil Young - After The Gold Rush
Jeff Buckley - Grace
The Benedictine Monks Of St James - Gregorian Chants (Disc One)

Follow The Money

2009-06-28T12:53:00.003+01:00

It probably comes across like I'm obsessed with Negreanu and Hellmuth, but I do fancy myself as the amateur psychologist, and what a couple of case studies we have here. As I said in the post on GIQ about sophism, a sophist frequently falls into a contradiction because his arguments are thought up on the fly rather than constructed in a logically consistent way. Imagine my delight when Negreanu pulled this one out last night :

09:39 pm "Also, for those too dense to understand the ramifications of the event not being on television, look at the type of players that would NORMALLY play if their sponsors put up money, but didn't. That creates value for ALL of the players since the majority of the sponsored players are -EV. Has nothing to do with "being on TV", but has everything to do with sponsorship dollars that are gone from the event. "

10:59pm "Seems to me that it's mostly an issue of semantics in terms of the name of the event. If the event is called "The Players Championship" it can use any format that the players think crowns the best all around player."

He wants an event to "crown the best all round player" that's also good value from an EV perspective. Anyone spot the problem ?

If Daniel, or anyone else, wants to be "crowned as the best all around player", it's a lot simpler than that. Go and find the biggest games with the most money on the table, whatever they happen to be right now. Beat them. Basically, be Phil Ivey. Five years ago, the biggest game was the mixed game in Bobby's Room. Fine. Now the biggest games are NL and PLO, and they're mostly online. All that "The best all around player" has to do is sit down and beat the game. There's no point beating HORSE now because the best players don't play HORSE because (duh) it's not the biggest game. If it was, they'd pick it up soon enough, and then you wouldn't be the best at it any more, DUCY ?

As a side note, it is possible that the best players find more value in second-tier games. Isaac Haxton mentioned aejones, ansky and a couple of other players when asked on the Poker Show who the best players are currently, as they're crushing 25-50 and so on. So do that instead. It's just that if DN wants a shot at being considered the best, then he should stop wasting his time making fantasy pools with matchups like Allan Smurfit v Surinder Sunar (seriously), and bring his game up to speed. When he calls out some random guy on the Internet to play 10-20 and then insists on only one-tabling, it just shows how far behind he is. No wonder he wants to push one donkament as some kind of measure of anything.

Playlist 3 :

Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold
Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
INXS - Kick
Oceansize - Frames
Portishead - Third
Bjork - Medulla
Bach - Brandenburg Concertos
Future Sound Of London - Lifeforms (Disc 1)

Update 30/6 : Hats off to the obviously very intelligent and astute Flawless_CED who made the following post on 2+2 yesterday (forum note: always big up someone who agrees with you ldo)

"Summary of thread and timeline of events:

1) Pros own at poker before TV
2) TV makes NLHE popular
3) New generation of young players learn to really own NLHE
4) Old pros no longer winning consistent bracelets shy away from NLHE
5) Old pros try to make more non-NLHE events at WSOP so they can keep spotlight on them
6) They fail because the viewing public doesn't give a F about viewing their limit/horse events
7) Spoiler: If non NLHE events did gain popularity, wouldn't be long before online guys just learned to own those too... only reason they don't now is because the money is in NLHE."

Flogging A Dead HORSE

2009-06-27T23:07:00.005+01:00

The $50K HORSE has started, but it's 50 runners down on last year. There's no doubt that this is because it's not televised. Even Stars and Full Tilt don't have bottomless pockets and they're understandably reticent to cough up 50 large for players to play a non-televised event. You would think that this is a good time to take stock and think, ok, the $40K has pretty much replaced this, and off to the glue factory with the tournament.

Daniel Negreanu, however, can't let it go. I get involved with him in this thread when I shouldn't have done, but his constant sophistry drives me round the bend. It is utterly transparent to me that Negreanu's problem is that he doesn't want to face two facts :

1) There are now loads of players who are as good as him at NL tournaments (or better)
2) No one wants to watch limit poker on TV

So he has no fast track to a TV final. He can't even play the "Invitational" because he's never won the ME. I bet he was grinding his teeth about that :-). A lot of these guys need to wake up and realise that they are extraordinarily lucky that they were playing well/running hot around 2003/4, when most of the TV stars were "created". If they were five years younger, they'd have no end of a harder task making it to the same level. I don't mind that, that's the way it happened and I accept it. But they also need to accept the way things are now, and demanding totally unnatural tournament structures to suit themselves is not the way to do it.

As for the sophism, it's funny that Negreanu reminds me of Annie Duke so much in this regard. It's no wonder they hate each other so much - people often hate what they see of themselves in others. /armchair psychology :-)

Playlist 2 (I think this one's my favourite !) :

Megadeth - The System Has Failed
Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime II
Rush - Power Windows
The Good The Bad & The Queen - eponymous
Radiohead - The Bends
JJ Cale - Greatest Hits
Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
Various - Buddhist Chants & Peace Music
Future Sound Of London - Lifeforms (Disc 2)

Software (1)

2009-06-27T12:37:00.003+01:00

Right, I was going to talk about software. First of all, I downloaded Holdem Manager, and it basically owns Pokertracker. Maybe that's partly because I couldn't get Pokertracker 3 to work, but anyway. It works on more sites and has more useful stats like 3-bet frequency. It also has a very cool feature for SNGs where it calculates your EV adjusted according to the "luck factor" of allins. At first I was sceptical about this but when I looked at it closely, it really does do this properly - it works out the ICM of every hand (even ones you're not involved in) and how the final result compares to the equities when the chips went in. Of course this doesn't completely adjust for all the luck, but it helps. With the other multi-tabling software (which I'll come on to), I've been playing a few SNGs on the side. They seem to be a lot softer (at the 50-200 level) than they were a couple of years ago - maybe a lot of the grinders have moved on. So I don't mind spinning a few of them if I don't feel like a full tourney session.

One other thing while I'm here, I thought I'd share my "poker playlists" with you, I have 7 of these at the moment, each one is basically a 7-8 hour playlist that starts off rocking (rock dammit) and becomes more chilled as the evening goes on. Enjoy :

Playlist 1

Trivium - Shogun
Evanescence - Fallen
Rush - Subdivisions
U2 - Under A Blood Red Sky
Bjork - Vespertine
KT Tunstall - Eye Of The Telescope
Sigur Ros - Takk
Benedictine Monks Of The Abbey Of St Maurice - Gregorian Chants
The Orb - UF Orb

Six Times A Night

2009-06-22T21:00:00.003+01:00

I stepped it up a notch last night after being inspired by watching Jon Spinks' video on Pokerswat where he plays 20 tables. And does the video commentary ! Pretty impressive. I thought if he could manage that I could squeeze in a couple more tables. I downloaded some software to help with that, which I'll go into in a later post, some of it was very good, some not so much. FYI that's software that makes table selection and mouse input easier, nothing that suggests plays or anything like that. Anyway, while 10 tables was the most I could manage, I cashed a personal best (as far as I can remember) 6 times ; 3 min-cashes plus $5600 for 2nd in the Tilt $69 6-max, $7500 for 6th in the Ongame major and a WSOP seat on Stars that I'm cashing for $12K.

I think the extra tables helped me push through that "dead zone" I find in online MTTs where there's like 3x the players to be paid left and my attention starts to wander. Having 4-5 tables open at this point instead of 2-3 really helps. And of course more volume = more money as long as you still play well enough. The WSOP seat was nice, binked the Double Shootout on Stars. Even when you cash it in, it's somehow more satisfying than winning the same amount elsewhere. Cashing it is obvious because I already have an arrangement with Boyles, but even if that wasn't the case, I'd advise anyone who has the option to cash it, play as a free agent and you're almost certain to get a better deal if you make it deep (if you even want a deal), now there's no extra incentive up front.

I'm glad I'm not out there now, it's starting to sound pretty testy. To get a fair picture of the WSOP you need to be following players from the start, not as they pop up on the final table. Just reading, say, Pokernews gives you the latter and it's very misleading. Checking out, say, Blackbelt or the Hitsquad (or many more) shows you the picture without result bias. From my POV, clearing $40K here in a month has helped as well :-). Having said that of course, gl to Neil and Barny in the shootout today, and Padraig in the PLO.

You Wait Two Years ...

2009-06-15T10:25:00.002+01:00

... and then two come along all at once. Congrats to Roland on winning the $5K PLO8 last night. I heard the interview he did with the Poker Show just prior to the final and he sounded really sharp and focussed. While Roland himself said that he had played "less than an hours PLO8 in his life", again, it just goes to show that if you know tournaments and you can play poker well generally, the game doesn't really matter.

With two bracelets and two 3rd place finishes (Ben Grundy and Michael Greco well done to them too), while I always take the view that poker is an individual game and nationality shouldn't really come into it, hopefully this will spur other UK players to step their game up. I'm starting to wish I was there myself, but we'll have a go at it next year maybe. I will be there for the ME, annoyingly I had a great chance to win a package on Boyle last night but for some reason I stopped doing what was working so well and made a couple of loose calls that cost me dearly. I did enjoy playing it though, perhaps I will put some more effort into online satellites in future, especially for stuff like WSOP-E and EPT London.

Poker Show Interview

2009-06-12T10:53:00.003+01:00

My interview with Jesse and Matt on the Poker Show is now online, go to The Poker Show Archives, Show 20 Part 4, starting around 19:20. It was a fun interview to do because it was live and unedited so I could say some stuff that would usually be edited out in for example a TV format, so I was able to say that 10-handed live NL tournaments suck, and so on.

Meanwhile massive congrats to JP Kelly who scooped a bracelet in the $1500 PL. I remember JP turning up at Luton aged 18 and just tearing the tournaments up from Day 1, really pleased to see him take this one down.

Meanwhile In Vegas

2009-06-08T18:30:00.002+01:00

The big news this week of course was Phil Ivey winning his bracelet, and many prop bet millions. Daniel Negreanu also finished 2nd in a LHE tournament after having the chip lead heads up (something I can sympathize with). What's interesting to note, I think, is the games they won (or nearly won) in - NL Single Draw and Limit Hold-em.

As Terrence Chan says in his excellent blog, "If you cannot beat a typical WSOP $1500 tournament field in any given game, you are a lousy excuse for a poker pro." Not just that, but I would contend that for anyone who is even competent at a limit game, they have a much better shot at a bracelet in that game than in NL events.

Note that I say "shot at a bracelet" rather than "EV". You might have better EV as well, depends, but really when you go out to Vegas you almost have to leave EV and variance at home. As Rolf Slotboom said to me last year (where's Hugo when I need him to do a comedy Rolf accent), if he only cared about EV he'd be sitting in his front room playing online. The limit games have much smaller fields, which gives you a much better chance of winning, LDO.

NL events are now either stacked with top players ($40K), humungously large fields ($1K) or a fair slice of both ($5K). Every year it's more difficult to win a NL bracelet, and that's not going to change any time soon. All the vibes I'm picking up from blogs and updates are backing this up - less value than people expected, less value than last year. Also, let's face it, playing NL 10-handed is hella boring (another point echoed by Terrence Chan), and I lose focus very easily when I'm bored. So if it's bracelets you want, just become vaguely competent at all the HORSE games and you'll have a much better chance. You've got a year to do it and plenty of games online to practice in. I might even do it myself !

The Donk Factor

2009-06-08T11:32:00.005+01:00

A couple of very interesting hands came up last night in the Sunday specials. First of all the monthly Party Poker Million, $600+40 buyin, $1M guaranteed, lots of satellite winners. I have 25K (starting stack 20) playing 100-200 when a player in early position makes it 700 from a 60K stack. I have TT and make the standard call. Button calls, then one of the blinds makes it 2600 from a 15K stack.

This raise size is very telling. With 2400 already in there and 15K back, he could shove if he wanted to, and might well do with AK (I'd just call but a lot of players will shove). Instead he raises even less than the pot. In this spot, his range is hugely weighted towards AA/KK. I figure that if I call it's just for set value, and I won't have that against the guy with 15K, so I'm only calling if EP calls. He does, I do, and so does the button, 4 players to the flop with 10K in the pot.

It comes AJTcc and the original 3-bettor, first to speak, jams his 15K. EP folds. Sigh. It's Party and I has a set. But what's he going to show me other than AA ? AK doesn't fit the pre-flop action. Surely KK wouldn't open-jam there. He has to be either one of the 10% of players who might raise like that with AK pre-flop, or a complete nutcase, or making a "fuck this I'm bored" play, which you would think was unlikely an hour into the comp, but it's happened before. I can't find a pass and he has AA ldo.

It's at least a sign of progress that a year ago I would have been like ZOMG-instacall-oh bugger. It was just a ridiculous spot where you actually could fold a set with 10K in the pot and only 15K behind, but it's so hard to do in the heat of the moment.

Then again, check out this hand from the Warm-Up on Stars. It's 2500-5K plus antes and I have a nice 350-400K stack, somewhere around there. Middle position opens to 15K (he's pretty deep too), I call with AQs, and now the blind 3-bets to 35K. Once again we have this tricky small squeeze-like bet that sends out so many contradictory signals that it's very often a big hand that someone doesn't know what to do with. MP folds and I decide to take a flop in position, would probably fold if I wasn't suited. Also if the flop is A high, he's heavily weighted towards KK (or even QQ) as there's only one combo of AA left and I can try to get to showdown.

Flop comes KQQ, bink. If he has KK I'm going broke here with no qualms. So he bets I call, turn blank he bets I set him in and he goes into the tank. A friend watching the hand says on IM "looks like AA", I'm just about to agree when he calls and shows 88.

So there you go. However much you trust your read, there's always a chance that your opponent, if he's unknown anyway, is just doing something so ridiculously stupid that you could never work it out using logical analysis. In this case I quite like the play pre-flop as it's very deceptive but when I stick around even after he's representing a big hand on that flop he has to shut down. Trust your read but always allow for a bit of a donk factor !

PS In the end I finished 24th in the Warm-up, lost another 2M flip, balla. All you can do is put the volume in, get into these positions as often as you can, and hope to win your share from there.

Desperate But Not Serious

2009-06-04T12:56:00.003+01:00

If you didn't already know how desperate ESPN are to stomp all over the game just for ratings, news from Vegas courtesy of Padraig Parkinson. Even in the "Tournament of Champions", they changed the final table to 10-handed to ensure that Hellmuth was on it. With 1100 chips. Which he lost in the first hand.

The first time this happened I was quite angry about it, now, really, what can you do but laugh. Even in this rinky-dink joke of a "tournament" that was basically designed by ESPN to ensure they had some "faces" to work with, they still had to fuck about with it to get the desired result. Serve them right that McEvoy and Varkonyi, two of the most faceless, characterless and moderate players from the whole roster (and that's saying something) made it through to heads up. Padraig throws in that they did this for Chris Ferguson in a $1500 comp last year as well (something I was unaware of), but again, by now, who gives a fuck. So why am I blogging about it you may well ask, well just to let you know how low they can go :-)

Back in the real world, I'm thinking about taking Pokerstars off the schedule for a while. I'm $18K down on there this year, but the real reason is that the play on there is so different to all the Euro sites [1] I find myself constantly switching back from one mindset to another when I'm trying to play, and I think it's costing me EV all round.

[1] Full Tilt is kind of in between the two and much less of a problem.

Another Late Winner

2009-06-01T11:16:00.002+01:00

This is at least the third time I've pulled out a big score in the very last tournament of the month. I picked up 3rd in the Ongame "ChampionChip" $200 freezeout, for $20K. It was a touch disappointing not to win after having a monster chip lead through the final table, but I lost an unavoidable 2 million chip flip (AdQ vs 8d8 on 743ddd flop) and then ran 88 into AA soon after. Ongame tournaments are quite strange, 10-handed, no antes, and usually an average stack of around 15BBs towards the business end. This doesn't sound very promising, but in practice if you chip up and get ahead of the game in these you can crush. People raise/fold like they never would on Stars any more, play super-weak around bubbles and generally suck.

I was already scratching out another $5-6K month before that, so it ended up as a good one. I'm also vaguely tracking how much I win/lose (hopefully win after that) online during the WSOP and that counts :-). Although these things are swamped by variance in any one night, I did make an effort to stay focussed about 3-4 hours into the session, when I often start thinking "fuck it, let's try to double up" and take too many marginal, or even -EV, shots.

What We Learned This Month

As above about making an effort to stay focussed at the right time. I'm also playing better with a 30BB+ stack, by really thinking about what a bet's going to achieve (make worse hand call or better hand fold) and just checking when neither works. I still have to work on acting without thinking when I have a good hand and get min-raised or something, but we're getting there.

Changing Landscape

2009-05-31T15:03:00.004+01:00

So the WSOP's off and running with the $40K NL. Well done and/or commiserations to Neil for his run and 20th place finish, I think that's pretty much 1/1 for the tournament as there wasn't really anyone else I was funking for :-). Now, one thing I don't want to do is point to the results of one tournament and say "Look, Internet players rule !". It annoys me enough when people do that for the live stars. But there was an interesting comment on Pokernews next to the live updates :

"besides Raymer and forrest, the dream final table espn was looking for wont happen"

Indeed it won't, and indeed that was exactly what ESPN were looking for. Their problem is, there's no longer any way they can make this happen in an open tournament. If the buyin is high enough to keep the riff-raff out, as it was here, then what happens instead is that a lot of very good Internet players step up to play. And not just the tournament players either. There were a lot of guys in this tournament like Ansky and Traheho who have made the final, also Raptor, Durrr, Brian Townsend, Terrence Chan, and so on. The difference between tournament and cash play is often over-stated IMO ; if you're a good cash player it's really not hard to learn how to play the 20BB stack (as hard as some of the live players make it look). But these guys are really, really, really good with 100BB+, especially compared to a lot of the tournament specialists (whether live or online).

ESPN's best bet for a "stacked" final table remains the $50K HORSE, which was the whole point of the event in the first place, but predictably enough they have realised that most of their audience is going "He can't go all in ? Why not ? Wait, split pot ? What the hell is this crap ?". Which is why they've ended up putting the charity tournament on their 4-event schedule. Can't blame them, I can totally see why they did it. There's also a "tournament of champions" or something like that which may be televised, I'm not sure.

This is neither good nor bad. It just is. Everyone involved simply has to adapt. It's one reason why so many sponsored pros spent such a big part of their budget on this event. It was by far their best shot at TV exposure. If they have any sense they'll buy in for the charity event ASAP before it fills up. The charity angle looks good too. And it's not even their money ! Win win :-)

Update : As it happens, in the first version of this post I fell into another classic trap. I know that the live updating is a difficult job, but the fact is that the hand reports you see online are not very reliable. Again, just how it is, but they're simply not accurate enough of the time to use them to make judgements on peoples' play. So that's something else I'm going to try to avoid !

Making The Grade

2009-05-26T15:20:00.003+01:00

I don't know all the ins and outs of who did what in the Black Belt Poker Grading, but I do think it's an interesting example of how the journey is more important than the destination. You can see two extremes on the Grading page, irrespective of who actually became what belt. There are people who tried to make the most of the process day by day and people who seem totally focussed on the end result and whether they "passed or failed".

Needless to say the first group will have developed as poker players, and maybe even as people, far more than the second. And, paradoxically, I'm sure that the people who did pay most attention to what they were doing day by day, hour by hour, hand by hand actually had the best chance of achieving the desired result in the end. With this being the topic du jour on the forums, that's the angle I wanted to highlight anyway.

Vegas !

2009-05-24T09:32:00.002+01:00

Booked the flight this morning, to cover the Main Event and the $5K at Venetian if I'm out of the ME. The indecision was playing on my mind so I thought I'd better just do it :-). Worst case I have to cancel and I can still change the flight to next year.

They have changed the payout structure in the ME this year ; I wouldn't say "fixed" but it's an improvement. Apparently they were all set on arsing it up again until Greenstein rolled up and said "you guys need any help with that ?". According to the internet (so it must be true) they were trying to do it by hand. FFS, have they not even heard of spreadsheets ? Anyway, sort of 14th-6th is quite flat, which is potentially fantastic if you're on the last two tables and not too bothered/delusional about how much sponsorship $ the FT is worth. That should be the bubble of all bubbles. And seeing as nobody got Tonya Harding-d last year in the delay, that just about swings it. I'll probably stay in the Venetian, and as I said below, accept what I need to accept about how it all works and enjoy it.

Vegas ?

2009-05-20T17:22:00.003+01:00

I might go out to Vegas for 10 days after all. I'm so indecisive. Or am I ? But it's quite tempting because there are certain things I can do to make it more enjoyable, as follows :

- Man up and play some bigger comps. If I want to spin up $30K, do it in like 6 tournaments in 10 days instead of drakking around playing $1500s for 5 weeks. The fields will probably be tougher but then again lol donkaments, plus smaller fields makes for a better chance of a final table run.

- Stay somewhere other than the Rio. Wynn/Venetian are only a $10 cab ride away and then if I'm not playing I can just chill, not bad places to hang out !

- Ignore everything I don't like about it and accept what I can't ignore. That's the way it is.

- Book for 10-14 days and come back if I haven't won anything. If I hit big, stay out and live it large !

I might leave it late. Hotels shouldn't be a problem and if I have to pay a grand extra for a late flight, what's that compared to the spinup anyway !

Update : Surprisingly, I changed my mind again. Looking at Main Event / Venetian $5K if bust out / holiday if bust out of that, for about 2 weeks.

EZ Life

2009-05-11T18:49:00.004+01:00

I moan a bit sometimes, as we all do, but it's just letting off steam. In truth, I have a sick EZ life. I play a game of cards for 15 hours a week and that enables me to have everything I need. Everything I want, even. I can make my own hours and play as little or as much as I like. I've had a pretty sketchy year so far online, no score over $15K that I can recall, and I've still made as much as I ever made in an entire year of having a good job. And that's just online, not counting the TV donkament.

But the point of this post isn't just as a brag. Well not entirely anyway :-). I wanted to express how perplexed I am by the fact that half of 2+2 wonders why I do it. For example :

Why Play MTTs ?

Cliff notes, "Simple question: why should I or anybody else play MTTs, especially NLHE MTTs?"

My response

I love the stuff about "not pure poker". It makes me think of a pair of "Suits You Sir" tailors going "Well Sir, did we win this money in donkaments ? Went ALL IN a lot did we Sir ? Get out of here you scum, we don't want your money". Except that never happens, does it.

That's just an entree though for this very interesting thread :

Most makeup / How long

Just ignore the last 100 posts or so which are nits arguing about selling makeup. It's the eternal question of whether playing the live circuit with a backer is really a good idea. Maybe it's even more basic than that, going right back to Joey Knish v Mike McDermott. Grind or glory ?

First of all, I don't really understand what makes one form of poker more of a grind than another. Over a year (or a decade, or a lifetime), you play X hands of poker for $Y. What difference whether it's tournament or cash ? Or X hours for $Y if it's online vs live. But again, what difference ? You play poker, you get paid.

If you want to argue that it's cooler, or more fun, to play the live circuit for big money, I might well accept that. If you were playing off your own money. I'm the big shot, I'm playing the $25K Bellagio. Er, if my backer agrees it. Right. And it must be lots of fun to be 6 figures in the hole and needing to win that back before you see dollar one.

So anyway, in this thread, I end up getting into it with Gobbo starting from post 258. I didn't want to be personal about it, and fortunately I did resist the temptation to react when he called me "retarded" and "a nit", but the fact is that his statement "MTTs are really fucking hard to make a living in" is total nonsense. See the title of this blog post for the actuality. If he meant "getting out of $100s of K in make up is really fucking hard", fine, but then that's what he should have said !

There are some great posts in the thread though, especially from Seabeast and Timex. One of the things Timex said was that many people over-estimate their EV in live tournaments. Judging by Gobbo's estimate of $500/hr, he's one of them. I didn't get to ask him if that was before giving the backer his cut (in which case the player EV is $250/hr which is no better than what you can do online) or after (in which case he's claiming a base EV of $1000/hr, O RLY). The reason I didn't get to ask him is because he left the thread after I asked him to explain this :

"So you're telling me being a nit and sacrificing hundreds of thousands in equity so you can grind out a living and never turn poker into anything is a good goal to have? That seems awful. I would quit poker now if I didn't think I could turn it into something eventually."

Something ? What ? What does he mean ? I have no idea. And maybe this gets to the heart of the disconnect. People are chasing ... something. I don't know what it is. They don't seem to know themselves. But they need this something to make it all worthwhile. Gobbo would "quit now" if he couldn't turn it into "something".

If there's one thing I can tell you from my life (lol sample size 1), it's screw tomorrow and live for today. I tried to "make a career", I had pensions and PEPs, I scrimped and cut back so I could "invest for tomorrow". And for what ? If it wasn't for poker I'd still be living hand to mouth right now. As soon as I said "fuck this, I'm getting off" my quality of life went through the roof. And if it hadn't worked out, big deal, like I wanted to be a Business Unit Manager anyway (yes really, a BUM). I could have got a job in a library and been just as happy (happier if anything, I could tell people to shut up all day).

You don't need "career goals" and you don't need to "turn poker (or whatever you do) into something". That's snake oil they sell you to keep your nose to the grindstone, or keep you coming to the WSOP every year. I don't know where I was going with this post, but now I'm here ! Just like life :-)

Update : Seabeast nails it here. Absolutely nails it.

Calling All Sickos

2009-05-05T16:44:00.003+01:00

I received an Email today telling me about the latest poker software aid. If you sign up to this service, you will be Emailed or text messaged any time a particular player sits at an online cash table. What I loved was the reasons they gave why anyone would want this :

"Whether you are looking for your friends, keeping tabs on one of your horses, or just want to know when your favorite pro has signed on to an online poker room"

Super lol. As if anyone would use this for anything except being messaged when the Guy Laliberte of their stakes sits down ! It takes bumhunting to a new level. When you reach this point, maybe you need to take a look at your life IMO. Imagine teeing off at the 14th, or perusing the dessert menu, when the text arrives. Drop everything ! I could make a slightly higher hourly rate than normal !

Meanwhile I finished 12th in the 100 rebuy again last night. And 7th and 13th in a couple of turbos, FML. Having lots more fun with the UTG reraise dynamic. Last night someone click-4 bet me from UTG and I totally fell for it, he had AA. slkedfsklfnslkdfn.

April Wrap

2009-05-02T19:58:00.003+01:00

After all that to-ing and fro-ing, I still managed to put $25K in play through April, and made an acceptable profit considering the absence of a big score - August was the last one which is a little disappointing but there's nothing you can do about it but keep at it and there's always next Sunday !

I've tweaked my schedule again and it feels really good now. I play both $100 rebuys on Stars ; for the first one, I'm just nitting it up for the rebuy period while I'm eating dinner, surfing the net or whatever, then I add in some of the shorter tournaments that start at 8pm - Party 150, Paradise E50R, Ongame 50R, Betfair 100 and so on. I take up any slack with turbo satellites on Full Tilt (they have some nice turbo FTOPS sats at the moment), kick off the $100 rebuy turbo at 9, and round it off with some more turbos from 10-11, finishing with the $200 FT Turbo.

This means I'm leaving out some tournaments that I've done well in this year (like the iPoker 2045 comp and the Tilt 100 rebuy), basically because they just go on too long. The way I have it set up now, if I'm still in anything at midnight then it'll be very close to the business end. In the long run, tournaments is tournaments, and results in one particular tournament are so dominated by variance that it's a mistake to read too much into them.

I'm quickly adjusting to the dynamic in the Stars 100 rebuys, with 3 deep runs last week - annoyingly losing flips to finish 15th, 6th and 10th, but that should come soon enough. This way I can put $2K in play in a 4-5 hour session, and because it doesn't go so late, happily play more nights per week which is great.

Finally, I'm going to be playing a few Omaha tournaments this month, in FTOPS and ECOOP, as part of a fun project with BoylePoker, so look out for that. The angle is "teach a NL donk [me] to play Omaha tournaments [in two weeks]". But how hard can it be :-)

Post Post Match Analysis

2009-04-30T19:32:00.004+01:00

Thanks for all the comments on the post below, it seems there are more people lurking on here than I thought :-). Keith also started a thread about it on blondepoker which I was directed to just now, and thanks again for the nice things people said on there. In addition to Flushy below, a couple of people on blonde suggested "click 4-betting" as I believe the kids call it. One commenter said click 4-betting only turns my hand into a bluff if I'm a nit, to which I would say, hello I'm Andy and I play 13/9 :-) [1]

Maybe if I play a few more 100 rebuys I'll have a better idea of the dynamic, for now I freely concede that I could be quite out of touch as to what peoples' ranges actually are in these situations. On reflection I'll change my final recommendation slightly, and say that with [KK-JJ] you can probably mix 50/50 calls and jams. Or in other words, after all that, it doesn't really matter what you do with Jacks. Math is idiotic indeed ...

[1] Or in other words yes, I'm a nit

Update : Tonight I final tabled the 100 rebuy (coughturbocough). At one point someone 3-bet my UTG raise with about the same stacks and I was all set to shove it in his eye when a short stack called behind, so I bailed out. 3-bettor had KTo :-). Soon afterwards the same situation came up on Betfair, I jammed my 77 and ran smack into Aces. Doh !! Against good players ! Not Betfair donks !

Post Match Analysis

2009-04-29T11:52:00.013+01:00

An interesting hand came up in the $100 Rebuy on Pokerstars last night. I thought I'd lay out my "post hand analysis" here as an example of how to go about this. Playing 800-1600/150, the table is 7-handed and we're fairly close to the bubble. I have 75K under the gun and raise to 4200 with JJ. It's passed to the cut-off, an aggressive "ranked" player, who makes it 10600 out of his 84K, and it's folded back to me.

If I look at the stack sizes, it may be barely possible to 4-bet to something like 25K and fold to an all-in, but that's turning my hand into a bluff and I think it's a poor option (mainly because I'll end up folding when he jams AK). So the remaining options are to commit, call or even fold. Folding obviously has an EV of zero from this point.

Let's look at committing. A good starting point is to assume that your opponent will play "perfectly" and this gives you the minimum EV of the play. If I jam 70K we assume that he calls AA-JJ [1] and folds all underpairs - which sounds reasonable. If he has 2 overcards then it's not a big deal whatever he does, because he can call 64K to win 87K, so he needs to be about 42% to make the call, and AKo v JJ is 43%. I'll simply assume he calls AK and folds any other unpaired hand. So if he calls it'll be JJ v [AK, JJ+] for 153K, we'll be 36.5% to win for pot equity of 56K and overall equity at my decision point of -15K. If he folds I'll take down the 18K pot. So I can see that if he folds 50% of the time, the play will be +EV to the tune of 1.5K. [AK, JJ] is less than 3% of his total hands (when I have JJ) so if he's even 3-betting me with 6% of hands (whether the other 3% are TT, 99, AQ etc. or other semi-bluffing hands doesn't really matter) then jamming > folding. With this player and the bubble dynamic (I had been fairly active with open-raises) my judgement is that this is clearly the case and so jam > fold.

If I call it becomes more complicated, but I can still make some assumptions and estimates, and see where that goes. 12% of the time I flop a set, and then it's a question of how much I can make with the hand. Almost certainly one more bet (by check-raising), which should be at least 15K. But I won't always stack him, and don't forget I won't always win even if we get the chips in (for example v AA on the flop he'll still have 10% equity). Say on average I make another 25K off a set. That doesn't sound much but remember I'm out of position against a good player, that's not a great spot to get paid. About half the rest of the time (44%) I flop an overpair [2], and once again it's time for some guesswork. If he does have [QQ-AA] it's going in and I'll be in bad shape ; with 10% chance to suck out the EV of that is around -55K. If he doesn't, again it's a bit nebulous but I might pick up about 20K on average. Remember that a flop like T93 looks good but it's really not that great - what can he pay me off with ? TT and 99 got there and any other underpair can't stack off. Finally, if an overcard comes I'll probably have to just give up. Trying to check-call on say a Q high flop sounds dodgy, without working it out exhaustively. So that gives us the following :

12% flop set, EV +42K (the 17K in the pot when I make the pre-flop call plus 25K more)
11% [3] flop overpair but up against QQ-AA, EV -55K
33% flop overpair which is good, EV +37K
44% flop underpair, EV -6K

Total weighted EV = +8.5K.

What If ?

In the event I did call with the intention of getting it in if I flopped an overpair or a set and giving up if I didn't, and given the assumptions above that looks like the correct play (in the actual hand an Ace flopped and I check-folded the turn after the flop was checked). However, now I've done the hard work, I can learn a lot more by asking a few "what if" questions (skipping the working for these) :

What if he's 3-betting with say 75% semi-bluff hands and 25% [AA-JJ, AK], which could well be the case ? Jamming pre-flop now has an EV of .75*(+18) + .25*(-15) = +10K. Call and see the flop has an EV of +13K.

What if I start with 100K instead of 75K, is jamming still an option ? In this case, he needs to fold 55% of his hands so (perhaps surprisingly) it probably is.

What if I have a smaller pair ? According to my assumptions, if I'm jamming, then 22 is not much worse than JJ ! I can add JJ to his calling range, and 22 is 51% against AK rather than 56% (JJ). But even so, insta-4-bet-jamming 22 is profitable if he folds 55% of his hands. With TT he has to fold 53% of his hands. So with this kind of stack (40-50 BBs) I should open-raise more small pairs with the intention of 4-bet jamming, but only against the right 3-bettor !

What if I have a bigger pair ? Hard to quantify but just calling with AA/KK in particular could be very profitable indeed ; he's liable to put me on a hand more like TT/JJ and by the time he finds out the bad news a lot of chips could be in the middle.

What if I have other unpaired hands ? Well AK just jam ldo, AQs is about as good as 22-88 and all the other suited hands a little less good ; they're close and it really depends very much on his call/fold ratio of hands when I jam.

What if I have some crap ? Can I 4-bet bluff to 25K ? Possibly. The mantra on 2+2 is "never put 1/3 of your chips in pre and then fold", and it's certainly not something you want to do habitually so that it's exploitable, but as a one-off against this kind of player it's an option. It does look pretty strong. I would prefer to have about 15K more chips back just so I can raise a bit bigger ; even making it 25K here leaves almost exactly one pot sized bet for the flop, and the raise is small enough so he can just call it, which would be awkward. I was watching a replay of the 10K SCOOP final that Jude Ainsworth won and there was a certain amount of this kind of thing going on, which was interesting.

What if he outplays me on the flop ? Primarily by not putting any more money in when JJ is good. Now the EV of calling pre goes way down. If he plays perfectly [4] the EV of calling drops to about +2K, if he's 50% semi-bluffing pre (cf +8.5K), and about +6K if it's 25/75 (cf +13K). The better he plays post-flop, the more I should lean towards jamming rather than calling pre (fairly obvious really).

What if he's not a good player but an egg ? Two things. Firstly his pre-flop range is going to be much tighter. If he's an egg with weak-tight stats, he's pretty much never re-raising with TT or worse [5]. Now jamming is just a spew, but calling for set value alone becomes the best option, because he's a) more likely to have an overpair on the flop and b) he's an egg so will pay off more. And of course we can call with any lower pair for set value just as profitably. I need to have the discipline to let it go when I flop an overpair though, which is easier said than done !

What if I'm in position ? If the reraise comes out of the blinds, it's hard to quantify but it's clear enough that this makes calling pre-flop better. I can make more money when I flop a set, or an overpair that's good, and I have a better (albeit still quite small) chance of getting to showdown with JJ if an overcard flops.

What if he does call with TT/99 ? Sounds unlikely but if he views me as a LAG it could be possible. If he also calls with just TT, the EV of jamming increases by up to 5K (in the case where he calls/folds 50/50 pre). Of course this makes jamming a small pair much less attractive. This might come into play if there's some history between me and the particular villain.

If two options are close, which one is lower variance ? If he's 75% semi-bluffing/25% [AK, JJ] then if I jam, I'll be knocked out of the tournament 16% of the time. If I just call, I'm only knocked out if I flop an overpair/set and lose which I reckon is about 10-12% of the time. So calling pre-flop looks like the lower variance play (not really a surprise). Note however that in some circumstances, for example if this is the last tournament of the night that I'm still in, I might actually choose the higher variance play if EV is close !

How Do I Like His Play ?

In a vacuum, he's putting in 10.5K to win 7K, so if I fold at least 40% of the time, it's immediately profitable. That's going to depend how wide my opening range is. Under the gun, even though it's bubble time and I'm playing fairly aggressively, it's not that wide. I think he probably has to find some more equity post flop. What I don't like is that he's pretty much giving me set odds by only making it 6500 more, with 80K "to be won". I like this play a lot more if the reraise is closer to 10% of (remaining stack + pot), so he'd have to make it about 12K with these stacks ; or the raise to 10500 would be good if starting stacks were about 60 rather than 75. The other good thing about the bigger raise is that it pretty much removes 4-bet/fold as a bluff from my options. Of course the downside is that the bigger raise makes 4-bet jamming more attractive.

We can also see that a mix of 25% value/75% semi-bluff (folding the 75% to a jam) makes jamming any pair clearly good for me (the initial raiser). To make this 50-50 I think a semi-bluffing range of [AQ(s), KQ(s), AJs-QJs] is not bad ; remember that these hands only come into play when I call, and I'm mostly going to call with middle pairs like JJ/TT. Of course the play has metagame advantages because now he can get more action when I 3-bet AA/KK. Again note that I can screw this play up most effectively if I just call AA/KK as the initial raiser.

Conclusion

So all in all, we can learn quite a lot from this, hopefully. The "vacuum" play looks something like jam [AK, QQ], call [AA, KK, JJ], jam [AQs, TT-22, maybe some suited broadway] against a LAG opponent most of the time, and call [TT-22] for set value against an egg.

I should do this kind of analysis more often, and I'll put it up on this blog where appropriate. One final point, take a look at how small the equity differences are compared to stacks and pot. We're playing 75K for potentially a 150K pot, and we're talking about differences in equity of around 5K from play to play, and that's going to vary quite a bit according to how accurate (or not) my assumptions are. So don't sweat the close ones, especially if you jam and he turns over AA !

[1] It makes little difference whether we add JJ to that range or not because there's only one combination of it, and the equity is split in that case anyway. We'll put it in there just for completeness.

[2] At one point I worked out how likely various pairs were to be an overpair on the flop, and that's the number for JJ IIRC.

[3] Assuming here that his hand range is 25% AA-QQ, 25% AK, 50% something else.

[4] But still assuming he pays off with an overpair if I flop a set. He isn't a superuser !

[5] And even AK is weighted lower because weaker players usually make a bigger 3-bet with AK

Almost Enough

2009-04-23T20:49:00.002+01:00

When Henry Ford, who was (in real terms and all that stuff) richer than Bill Gates at the time, was asked how much money he needed, he said "Just a little more". And it is hard to stop. But nights like last night certainly help. After feeling really good all week (physically), last night I found myself propping my eyes open with toothpicks at 1am, trying to get out of it in the 100 rebuy on iPoker. And I was playing so badly. In the end of course I donked out 12th for a loss of $4 on the tournament and, more appositely, $2K plus on the evening. Then I couldn't sleep and felt like shit for half the day today.

I'm not going to make any definitive statements as to stopping this or playing that instead, but I am going to cut the poker down over the summer. I really haven't been playing well this year but have still made decent money somehow [1]. It might be a good idea to cut out grinding the workaday tournaments that go on till 3am for a while at least, before I do it all back. What I said here is pretty good for a start, I may try 6-max PLO rather than NL cash but whatever. Working on my golf game for a few months instead isn't going to send me broke.

[1] No wait, LOL donkaments, that's how.

Sick In The Head (1)

2009-04-15T23:44:00.003+01:00

The title refers to one of my favourite pieces of online chat, received by the Camel after his opponent made a mystifying all-in call on the flop only to go runner-runner ftw. It seems like a good fit for the post(s) I'm going to make though.

Here's an interesting thread on 2+2 : Negreanu bashes Hellmuth on radio. Negreanu, apparently [1], lays into Hellmuth for "not being good enough to play with" Ivey, Antonius, Durrr etc. Now, anyone who's seen the excellent current series of HSP [2] will spot an immediate degree of irony. My initial psychological read was that this was a clear case of projection, and I was going to leave it at that.

Obviously though, being 2+2 and in particlar NVG, words were said and someone made an offhand comment about how they didn't think DN could beat 10-20 online. Up popped the man himself to immediately throw down a challenge, oh I bet I could beat it, let's play this many hands for this amount of bet.

Also as usual, there followed a lot of back and forth about what the terms should be. I don't think DN came out of that very well with his insistence on 1-tabling, I basically agree with this post FWIW, but that's not really the point I'm focussing on here. The real point is that Phil Hellmuth is a sick man, and not the good kind of sick. Here is a man who is totally running on ego. Totally. It's not so much that he thinks he's better than he is ; it's that he can't take the slightest (even implied) criticism without feeling obliged to attack his "enemy", start reeling off all his achievements, etc. etc. His uncontrollable ego is the source of all the self-aggrandising comments he makes.

These are the comments that Negreanu is "bashing" him for, but the great irony is that as soon as DN feels under threat he reacts in almost exactly the same way, and the cause of this reaction is the very same as the cause of Hellmuth's. E. G. O. I don't mean to single these two guys out but the thread in question, with DN's own comments, is a fantastic example of how this all works. You watch any of these TV programmes and they'll be rife with this kind of thing, riddled with it, and particularly among the American "live elite" who are so rattled by Durrr basically coming in and owning them out of nowhere. And by no means is this restricted to the top players ; it was very noticeable in Dublin in particular how many players of all abilities were so wrapped up in their egos.

I still have a way to go myself (and anyway, saying "I'm the best at having no ego" would be more super-lol than anything above) [3], but seeing the problem is the first step, and it's a very big step.

[1] I know I should listen to the actual interview. But I can't be arsed.

[2] Up until this week's where the new line-up really sucks.

[3] IIRC Matusow said something like this once although my memory could be playing tricks there.

Update : I'm sure some of you have spotted the inconsistency of me saying I was coming off 2+2 and then referencing 2+2 threads in the next two posts ! Well, I thought I could stay on it without getting involved in discussions in the sort of "proving I'm right" style. But in fact I couldn't, so this time I am going to drop off it for a week or two at least. Probably :-)

Live Tournaments - They'll Never Catch On

2009-04-14T19:15:00.003+01:00

I'm glad to be back at home after spending most of 5 weeks away (and the rest with no kitchen and a front room full of boxes). I enjoyed Day 1 in Dublin a lot, but that was almost entirely because I was at a congenial table, I was able to chat to Barny Boatman all day and there were quite a few other pros on the table, so the game kept moving and douchery was at a minimum, except for one pathetic stall job on the last hand to avoid taking the blind.

The Day 2 lineup was almost a polar opposite. One guy talking crap to himself, everyone else pretty much silent, and all too much Hollywooding and posturing. All these signs pointed to better value of course, but I failed to get a resteal through and lost the 40-60, gg. I didn't play the E1500 and an hour into the charity event I was almost glad to bust on a flip.

Every year it's more necessary for someone to stand up with a microphone at the start of these events and say "The TV table's over there. The rest of you are not on TV. So stop acting like you are and get on with the fucking game". Tillllllllllt. Considering the fight, flight or freeze options, I'm going with flight I think. I have very little desire to play live MTTs now and going to the WSOP looks like a 20-1 shot at least. I can just about cope with live poker on a good table where you can talk to people and keep the game moving along, but once the sunglasses/baseball cap/30 seconds to fold every hand crowd roll in I'm almost grinding my teeth.

The overwhelming majority of live tournament players are sick - but not the good kind of sick. Poker has a way of bringing out the worst in peoples' egos, and frankly as a race we're sick enough as it is in that sense without poker making it worse ! I shall expand on this in due course :-)

Update : The guy who stalled the last hand of the day has started a thread about it on 2+2. It will be interesting to see where that goes.

Made Day 2 !!!!1!1!11

2009-04-11T10:30:00.007+01:00

In the Irish Open that is. For the first time in a while in a decent live comp. I'm pretty much freerolling after a hand in I think level 2 where I limped UTG with 44, caused a limpfest, flopped a set, and then my opponent turned a straight but let me off for about 2K. It was strange because he played well after that ; when I spoke to him briefly at the end of the day he immediately said that he had played that hand quite badly. After having to fold QQ on a T high board on the river (his line was a super-weird flop raise, turn check behind, river raise) I was down to 6K.

After that though I never showed a hand as I chipped up without running into anything big enough to call me, and from a high point of 16K I ended the day with 12.5, blinds will be 400/800-50 today. 15BBs, right in the sweet spot :-). It was another fun day, albeit a fairly tough table in regards to the standard of play. Today we'll be gambling LDO, and if we catch a double up or two then it's game on. If I'm really lucky I'll make it to the TV table, then I'm bound to run good. You should be able to find a live stream somewhere via www.irishpokeropen.com

Update : Busto within the first level today, I squeezed with 88 to move up to 17, then shortly afterwards I tried a re-steal against the same initial raiser, and he called me with A9. Good call, wrong man for me to try it against :-). I was still super-live with Q6s but somehow didn't get there.

I've also decided to come off 2+2 for a while, see if I prefer that, I expect I will, inasmuch as I care at all about anything on there now the ratio of annoyance : amusement is about 4:1 (or maybe 9:2), I mean really, I don't care about 99.9 percent of the people on there and should pay more attention to myself and my friends, which is hopefully what I'm going to do (similar thoughts apply to QPR and football but that's hardly on topic in this blog !).

Asking The Wrong Question

2009-04-08T23:25:00.004+01:00

Moderately interesting thread on 2+2 here :

What can the Bellagio do to get their tourney players back

Basically the Bellagio has had puffballs blowing through it for the prelims to the WPT 25K at the end of the month. A $5K event attracted 27 runners and paid 3 places. Obviously there are a lot of contributory factors to this, the economy LDO, and it's not really any concern of mine anyway. Unfortunately the guy who started this thread is the majorly tiltworthy Chainsaw.

If I ever do call myself the King of the Nits, it can only ever be a joke because this guy is the fucking Sith Lord Emperor of the Nits in Perpetuity throughout the Universe. He's that guy who's always bending the TD's ear for more levels, smaller antes and longer rounds, all for "the good of the game", or in actuality to give him more time to sit there waiting for Aces.

In the end I cracked and had to wade in, although as you can see I did make an effort not to be too personal. I soon regretted this as another 2+2 nemesis of mine, Todd Terry, soon had me up in front of the beak for the admittedly vague statement "winning players prefer to play online irrespective of structure". If I had inserted the crucial word "should" it would have been much closer to what I meant, so fair enough I suppose, but really, if anyone can't beat online tournaments for more than they beat live, per hour, then they're doing it wrong (online that is).

Which is all by the by. As Chainsaw & co are actually at the Bellagio and I'm not, I am forced to concede that they are more entitled to talk about changing structures and whatnot. The point I really want to make is that the thread is totally asking the wrong question. Have another look. He's basically saying "How can we make things change so that everything is back the way it was before ?". A much better question would be "How should I adapt to the current changes ?", and indeed, teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish to eat, "How should I adapt to all changes in the poker environment on an ongoing basis ?".

And those are questions we can't answer in one line. Except in a negative sense. In that one wrong way to adapt is by stalling on the bubble in online tournaments. You can take the nit out of the Bellagio ...

March Round-Up

2009-04-01T19:17:00.002+01:00

Well March was a bit of a write-off in the end, as expected. I dropped £3500 in the Vic (sample size 4 tournaments) and $5500 online (sample size a barely more significant 45 tournaments). As I mentioned below, the live tournaments were surprisingly enjoyable [1], albeit not the value they used to be. At one point on my immediate left (in the PLO8) I had Messrs Shoreman, Sunar, Parker and Wernick. On the plus side, I made £120 playing cash. That should iron out those tournament swings !

No change to the plan going forward. Play when I feel like it. That means saying No to "I'm going out tomorrow, so I should play tonight" and equally No to "well I'm definitely playing tomorrow so I should give it a miss today". I can change that plan if I need money. Right now I don't, even after spending it like a teenage Arab for two weeks. Which I should do more often. As for the WSOP, when the time comes, if I want to go, I'll jump on a plane. Till then I won't play any satellites. Unless I want to. EZ life.

Of course we can only take such a hedonistic position if we're playing entirely off our own shilling, so I will be off to Dublin on a jolly next week for the Irish Open. I think I can handle the imposition though :-)

[1] Not an April Fool. Who could compete with Newcastle United anyway ?

News From The Front

2009-03-22T13:21:00.002Z

I finally played some actual tournaments, the PLO8 on Friday and the 500 Double Chance NL yesterday. I made it through half the field in both before losing the various flips and allins that you have to fade in tournaments, but think I played pretty well, especially in the NL. I even managed to get away from one hand that I'd never have passed online, but I'm 99% sure that my read was good and I played the hand correctly considering who my opponent was.

I have been surprised how much fun it's been so far, maybe I've just been lucky with the table draws :-). I've been making a few plays and trying to push the envelope a little bit, which has at least kept me interested and kept people guessing so that's all good. The plan from here is to play the 300 one rebuy on Tuesday and the Main Event (1500) on Thursday, and maybe mix in a little cash action in between.

Live Tournament Spinup Let Us Gogogogogogo

2009-03-15T19:05:00.004Z

I didn't manage a full break this week. I couldn't help it. How am I supposed to take a break when Paradise run a Stud tournament with a double overlay ? And then Full Tilt start some rocking WSOP Double Shootouts ? I'm only human.

Luckily I managed to resist playing tonight, I say luckily because I had a schedule all planned out but then Stars moved half their events back an hour, again. I'm sure this was completely unconnected to the Warm Up being 2000 players short of guarantee. Stars are lagging behind IMO, either that or Full Tilt are catching up. You might remember me complaining about Stars dropping the ball with WSOP Double Shootouts last year. What happened was the first one needed 63 runners to cover the $12,500 package. It got 62. Stars cancelled it. The next one was cancelled with 58 runners, the next 54, and within a week you could stick a fork in it, it was done.

This week, Full Tilt have started some shootouts. The first two or three were a few players short of the guarantee, but they ran anyway. Obviously within about two days they're filling up every night. Tilt have also relaxed their T&Cs, as far as I can see, so that you don't have to pimp them if you win a seat. So I'll be trying those, and yes, that means I'll probably be doing my bollocks in the desert sun again for anything from 2-6 weeks this summer. Beats sitting in an office watching the 3 hours of British summer through the window I suppose.

As of the now though, the kitchen is all go and I'll be playing live tournaments, providence help me, for a couple of weeks, mostly GUKPT but I might pop into this London Poker Circuit to have a look at that as well. I have five grand in £50s burning a hole in my pocket so let's rock.

Join me LOLing at Hellmuth

2009-03-12T16:34:00.004Z

Phil Hellmuth bitches like ... well, a bitch, quite frankly

An online chat session is good if it has one or two diamond lines - this one has at least six. Sample :

"PHILHELLMUTH: why U three bet with 6-5?
PHILHELLMUTH: OK
PHILHELLMUTH: U wanna play bad so be it
PHILHELLMUTH: Ill play even tighter
HOSS_TBF: sweet heavens xmas has come early"

Incidentally I played against Hoss_TBF in a limit tournament last summer, he was a cool guy, and he knocked me out IIRC. But now he's even cooler.

February Wrap

2009-03-02T19:23:00.001Z

Even though I said I wasn't going to set myself a target for monthly volume, 43 hours last month was pretty lame :-). Luckily I shipped $15K with a win on Full Tilt to end up with almost as much online profit as January. Adding $36K profit [1] from the TV donkament made for a good month all round.

This month I have a real excuse for low volume as the kitchen is scheduled for 2 weeks from the 16th so I'll be larging it in the West End and playing GUKPT Vic. A change is as good as a rest, hopefully. I started off on the right foot with my first Sunday deep run in a while, ending up 38th in the Party Million. Great tournament by the way, $600 buyin, $1M guarantee, first Sunday of every month. Some compensation for Ongame dropping their monthly Grand.

What We Learned This Month

Nothing specific, basically still working on the theme of knowing when to slow it down at final tables just a little bit. This depends to a large extent on the payout structure, but on some sites there are definitely spots where marginal situations can be avoided because you can, for example, double your money by seeing off two players. I stress only marginal spots though, and spots that I call marginal typically wouldn't even be considered by a lot of players :-). Hopefully I'm not missing out on any wins, but turning a few 7ths and 8ths into 3rds and 4ths can make a big difference.

[1] Incidentally this is a good example of how what you see isn't always what you get. That's what's left of the $50K after taking out swaps, (partial) buyin and sponsor clawback, and most players would lose a higher proportion than I do.

When Reads Go Wrong 2

2009-02-25T14:23:00.002Z

Devilfish is at it again in this week's Premier League. Holding 42cc on a board of 99xxx three clubs, Devilfish bets his flush only to fold to Juha Helppi's min-raise (with Ace high) getting better than 5-1 odds. I'm going to give Juha full credit for knowing his opponent here ; he knows that Devilfish backs his reads 100%, as I said last month, and he wins the "battle of levels" by knowing that Devilfish will think that the minimum raise can't be a bluff.

Sometimes people knock the "math call" on the river when you sigh and pay someone off getting these odds, but if opponents know you'll make that call, then they can't pull this cheap bluff. On top of that, if they do try to bluff you when you have the nuts (or as good as), then you stack them because they know the min-raise won't do the job.

The Premier League has been quite entertaining so far but this was a pretty tilting episode, we had Hellmuth on commentary again (I thought they all did one each ?), and Annette was understandably annoyed with Devilfish when she reraised him 12BBs allin with AQ and he's like "lol, KK, I tarped you with my live pro speech play mind games". Hellmuth of course makes some retarded comment about "if you have to go allin with AQ there, which I don't". These guys are just so full of themselves, they still seem to think that it's all about advanced psychology when everyone has 15 blinds. Oh well, it sets a good example to the masses I suppose :-)

Beat The Clock

2009-02-14T17:09:00.006Z

I said I hadn't learned anything from playing in the latest TV tournament, which is technically true, but I did think of something while watching the turbo heat. The way this works is, all the runners up from the heats go into this second chance turbo, 7 hands per level and 20 seconds to act on any decision. I was just reading Stuart Rutter's blog and he said that commenting on these turbo heats in a poker blog is like commenting on blindfold Subbuteo in a football blog, which is a good line, but there is still plenty of scope for making mistakes in this format.

How to handle 7 hands per level is something I have thought about before. Just play one hand at a time according to what blinds you're on now. A lot of people go nuts and overplay their hands massively in the first couple of levels just because it's a turbo, which is quite bad. But don't underestimate how much of an issue 20 seconds to act is as well.

The key point here is that this is live poker. You don't have numbers popping up with exactly how much is in the pot, the stacks, and the bet(s). So a hand came up where I think the cut-off raised, the button pushed with Ace-bit of something and the small blind found Jacks, with the stacks between 20-30 BBs. The player with the Jacks seemed to lose focus while he was trying to work out the size of pots and bets, and allowed his hand to be counted down and killed.

Now maybe he was going to fold anyway, although it seems unlikely to me. His real mistake was that he didn't do any thinking in the other players' time. Consider chess, for example, playing with clocks. When it's your opponent's turn, you're not staring out the window. You're using his time to think about what he might do and how you would react to it. In this format, players should be doing two things while the action's not on them.

Firstly, they should be making every effort to at least estimate how many chips the other players have, particularly the players on their right (who might move those stacks in before them). If you have to flat out ask them in between hands, then do it. Secondly, while I normally don't look at my cards until it's my turn, in this format you should absolutely look at your cards as soon as you get them, so you can start to plan ahead. This occurred to me in the shower the next day (as these things do) and I thought, wow, that's just so obvious now, but I wouldn't have thought to do it at the table.

Finally, as a measure of how costly this kind of mistake can be, the player with Ace-bit, who would have been covered by the Jacks, took the pot down and went on to win the entire tournament for $200K !

EPO Wrap (Spoilers)

2009-02-14T11:33:00.009Z

I'll keep it brief, you can find hand details and so on in the Matchroom Forum if you're interested, and I don't want to spoil the eventual broadcast for anyone else. Binked the semi to go through with 290K (average 230). At one point in the final I had a great position, 40% of the chips in play 5-handed. But then it all went spectacularly tits up and I ended up 3rd for $50K.

Which is nice but anyone who plays the tournament circuit will know it's frustrating to be that close and then fall short. Still, when I say "at one point I had a great position", at one point 72 players all started off even, including a lot of better players than me. I thought I played OK, nothing inspired but no serious mistakes over the whole tournament.

I can't think of anything much I learned at the table, but the apartment was a massive succeed [1], it probably paid for itself 10 times over in terms of EV. I could sweat the morning semi online and be at the studio in half an hour when it looked like it was winding up. Whereas this morning it took me 90 minutes to get home from Liverpool Street alone. Nice apartment too, it's basically like a good hotel room with your own kitchen to boot. Worth thinking about if you're planning to play a festival in London.

Finally I went out with Neil and Karl for a curry afterwards, the food was great and while Neil was a bit down over his 5th place finish, he told us all about http://www.blackbeltpoker.com/ which sounds very exciting and one to keep an eye on, you can sign up for Email updates via that address.

[1] massive pass ? what's the opposite of a massive fail ?

Update : You may notice that I have tidied up the links on this blog. Please don't send me a request to swap links unless I know you because unfortunately 99% of poker blogs really suck, so the odds are against you ...

Finding Some Form (contains EPO spoiler)

2009-02-08T12:10:00.003Z

A couple of good results this week ; on Wednesday I shipped the $150 freezeout on Full Tilt for $15K. Which was nice. Key pot, I think this might have been around the cash bubble, but anyway I thought some guy was trying to push me around so I insta-4-jammed it in his eye with KTs. He even more insta-called with AK but I binked a Ten. I played pretty well 4- and 3- handed to amass a big chip lead and shipped it.

Yesterday I played my EPO V Heat and shipped that as well. I'd like to think that this was mainly due to my tenacity and selective aggression in the first 3 levels which kept my stack around 100K even though I had nothing to work with in terms of hands. In truth, it was partly due to that, but a bit more to going 3/3 on allins from that point.

As an observation, this event is clearly tougher than last year, by a distance. I was pretty lucky with my draw, I had two good players to deal with but many of the other heats have 4 or 5 tough spots. I stuck around to watch the heat after and that was a good example. There was some really good play, especially from Dave "Dubai" Shallow who absolutely played the spots off the cards and was unlucky. A lot of people are catching on to how much value these tournaments are which means, of course, that they aren't going to be so much value in future. It's evolution baby.

The semi-final is on Thursday. Last time I was so wired after the semi I could hardly sleep at all and really wasn't at my best in the final, so I have booked an apartment in Liverpool Street for two nights. I estimate the EV of two more hours to at least doze as being way more than the cost of the apartment ... in the event of making the final of course. That's why I've booked two nights though, it's so it's like a mini-holiday whatever happens. So it's not a bok. It's not ! Alright, it is. The biggest bok ever. What can I do.

Finally, I know there isn't a lot for beginners in this blog, at least not since the very early posts, so if you're quite new to poker or tournament poker then I must pimp my videos on Pokerswat. I've just finished a 5-part beginner series on the site, I'm very pleased with how they've come out and the feedback I've had so far is very good. These are all available on the Silver membership, which is $19 sign-up fee and $11/month. Ok I'm biased but that's tremendous value IMO.

When Reads Go Wrong

2009-02-03T22:30:00.002Z

There was a very interesting hand in the recent coverage of the WSOP-E main event. It was about 3 places off the money, and I think all the relevant players in the hand had about 25-30 BBs. What happens is, French guy limps in EP, then it's passed around to a Finnish player on the button [1]. He finds the Kings and limps behind.

I think this is a great play because he has just the perfect players in the blinds to do this to : Devilfish and Matusow. Devilfish swallows it H, L and S by raising to 8BB with AJo. Matusow and Frenchman pass, Finn moves in and now Devilfish realises what's happened but (more or less) correctly calls, given the spot he's in now with 1/3 of his chips already in the pot.

This is the thing with players like Devilfish IMO. He's a great reader of hands in live poker, one of the best, especially when picking up tells and indications of strength/weakness. The problem is, I think, that he is so confident in his reads he doesn't seem to consider the potential cost of being wrong. In this case, he's backed his read that a limper behind can't have anything, and so making it 8 BBs to win about 4 BBs in the pot is clearly a winning proposition. Which it would be, if he hadn't inadvertently committed himself, and so was really risking 25 BBs to win 4.

So when you're playing against this kind of player, it can be worth making an unorthodox play to give them a false read, because they're so confident in their own reads that they tend to over-commit to them. And it's not as though the hero is risking all that much here. If the blinds just complete/check he's playing a 4BB pot with 25BB behind. He still has no problem committing on a non-Ace flop and if the EP limper hits a set or a blind catches two pair, that's still unlikely enough to just take it on the chin. NH WP IMO, and to be fair Devilfish, not always the best loser, compliments him on the play on his way out.

[1] Mustn't say Scandi because Finland isn't part of Scandinavia LDO !

On The Other Hand ...

2009-02-02T11:48:00.002Z

Free To Be Free

January Wrap

2009-01-31T01:10:00.003Z

Still not sure whether I'm going to give you actual $ numbers this year. Maybe I won't. But in the absence of any big scores, you can generally assume that I'm grinding at around 30-40% ROI, on average. That sounds crap, but remember it's without the big scores. The biggest 2 or 3 scores you pick up will generally constitute a big wedge of your profit in MTTs, over whatever period of time, if not all of it. I didn't win anything disproportionately big last year, but even so the two biggest results accounted for half my profit.

I was certainly in that ballpark this month ; the good thing was I smashed all existing personal bests for volume. 200+ tournaments, $50K+ buyins and 100+ hours (if barely in each case). Having said that my previous record hours/month was 96, last January. We'll see if I can maintain the level a bit better this year.

Anyway, if December was the month of Full Tilt, then January was the month of iPoker, where I ran red hot, mostly in their various 2045 (GMT) tournaments. I do recommend these, you can even pick up an overlay on occasion. I also did quite well on Party, but basically did my bollocks on Stars, as usual lately ... oh well, at least I don't live in the land of the free, so I have more than two sites to play on. Oh, and I picked up a $500 bonus on Party. But don't get too excited, that was for cashing in all the points I have earned since the year dot. At this rate I'll get another $500 in about 2017.

What we learned this month

A ton of stuff. Just a ton. That's what has really been most satisfying this month. I'm using Pokertracker again (while kicking myself for doing without it for so long), and using that to help me make a bunch of reads and take player-specific lines. As I said last month, I'm moving away from "standard 2+2" lines, and trying to exploit these lines in others / misrepresent my hand by playing in a non-standard way, when appropriate. I can't be more specific at the moment, sorry.

Into February

The kitchen isn't going to be done till March, so I should be able to crack on for this month at least. I am playing the next TV 6-max which is being filmed this month, I haven't had the full draw yet but once again there are a few more faces in it than I would have expected. As long as I can dodge Annette and Neil I like my chances though, and even then we'd be flipping in that format.

WSOP SHMSOP

2009-01-26T14:05:00.002Z

The WSOP schedule is out. Cliff notes :

- $40K NL event at the start
- No rebuy events. Off all people, Negreanu lobbied for this to stop players from "buying a bracelet". You have to laugh.
- Final table in November again
- Apart from that, pretty much same old.

Me, I'm not planning to go, at the moment. You have to try to avoid rationalizing this kind of decision with fake reasons. For example, Matusow recently claimed that he and Hellmuth weren't playing in the just-filmed series of High Stakes Poker because they felt it was "inappropriate in the current economic climate". Right. Not because you're busto and totally outclassed in the game respectively. Similarly, I could talk about being green by not flying, or taking a stand against the corporatization of poker, but the truth is I did my bollocks last year and didn't enjoy it. I'm still nicely up in WSOP events thanks to 2007 but the bottom line is I can make more money at home.

Thinking about it, the WSOP is not really for me anyway. I mean people like me. Professional online tournament players. The WSOP is for the TV pros and the kids with a dream. Better to just accept that and deal with it. It's still kind of annoying how many people regard bracelet count as an indicator of standing in the poker world, but that's their problem. I might still play the ME, especially if Stars can sort their act out with the double shootouts this year. If they don't, I'll probably just make a late decision, and not worry about it for now.

Backed Into A Corner

2009-01-19T22:31:00.003Z

As soon as I say I'm going to spend less time on 2+2, a couple of really interesting threads pop up, LDO. First of all, Bond vs Bakes. This reminds me of a book I read recently, Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" (recommended), and a chapter in there where he talks about plane crashes. Most plane crashes, it seems, arise because of a series of mistakes, maybe up to 8 or 10, that have a cumulative effect, rather than just one big mistake. And that's what happened here IMO. From Bakes sitting down to play a satellite without reading the T+Cs and then swapping 50% with Bond late on (a highly questionable move at the very least), all the way through to the screwy backing deal they end up in, payments being missed, the horse degenning off the money ... it's almost never-ending. It's an utter mess to try to sort out who owes what, but I find it disappointing how many people take the line "let me find a legalese technicality in favour of the person who I like and who I have already decided should be in the right". Anyway, there are many salutory lessons in there about what not to do if you're in a backing, swapping or staking arrangement.

Then today, Gobbo posted about playing online MTTs for a living. You should definitely read the whole thread. Stealthmunk wins so far for his hilarious, and right on the money, denunciation of the live circuit. What surprises me here is how many people think being backed is the way to go. It's just beyond me. When you're backed, there are basically two states you can be in :

1) In profit. 50% of your profits go to someone else, or
2) In makeup. 100% of your profits go to someone else.

And this is desirable because ? People take the problem "I can't play live 10K tournaments without a backer" and come up with the wrong answer, "I need a backer". The right answer is, of course, don't play live 10K tournaments. The beauty of online tournaments is that there are so many of them on offer, at different buyins, that they are totally scalable. If your bankroll drops, you scale down your buyins. If your bankroll drops perilously (to less than $10K off the top of my head) then you might be better off switching to SNGs until you build it back up. But the options are all there. A lot of people seem to be trying these "challenges" where you build X into 100X. Given enough time, I don't think I would have a problem turning, say, $1K into $100K. I'm not going to do it though - do you really want me to cut my hourly to 1/10 its current amount just to prove a point ? Nonetheless it's doable. It's like I said in a recent video I made for Pokerswat. Being good at teh poker is only half the trick. Being disciplined, putting in the right volume and getting/staying out of the "big score" mentality is probably more important in online MTTs (providing you're basically a winning player).

So I'll be keeping an eye on that thread too. And finally of course 2+2 does still throw up the odd one-liner LOL. Greekfish made another post about how unfair it is that people criticise him boo hoo, under the title "some serious donks on this forum". The first response was "no u". /thread imo, as they say.

Some Changes

2009-01-12T12:50:00.002Z

It's just coincidence that this post appears early in the New Year ; I've always believed that if you need to change something, then change it now. But I am taking a different attitude towards a few things, as follows :

Play 6-max Cash

I'm certainly not foregoing the donkaments to switch to cash ; all I'm doing is any day I'm not donkamenting I try to put in two or three half-hour cash sessions, for the sole purpose of improving my medium and deep stack game. I think this is helping a lot already, I feel a lot more comfortable with 40BB+ in the donkaments, especially out of position. I've read Ryan Fee's online book and have almost finished Danny Ashman's (by the way I recommend High Stakes Bookshop ahead of Amazon for quicker delivery of new releases). As it happens I've made a few hundred $ so far which is a bonus !

Make more and better opponent-specific plays

Turn off the auto-pilot and consider OPR, Pokertracker stats and any recent history when you get into a hand. Obviously this is a 6-max cash kind of angle, but anything that makes me engage brain before clicking mouse is good. If I have to cut down on the number of tables I'm playing to do this, that's fine, it's not much of a loss to cut out the 2 least profitable tournaments in a session.

Spend less time on 2+2

A lot less. I could go into this in depth, and might still at a later date, but just sticking to the strategy angle, there is very much a "2+2 style" in tournaments that I have fallen into when I should really be thinking about playing against this style exploitatively. The High Stakes MTT forum was a good idea in theory, but in practice threads tend to either be "shove ldo /thread" or endless "how many angels on the head of a pin" arguments about which of two perfectly serviceable options is slightly better. Don't get me wrong, there are some excellent posters on there, but many of them post less and less often, and what's left is the "stars" holding court, which kind of grates because a lot of those guys are massive life losers IMO (but again not all).

Forget live tournaments

They are a complete waste of time unless you can find some kind of deal that gives you a partial freeroll (at least 50%), and by that I do not mean a makeup deal. Those are complete smoke and mirrors and basically not much better than getting a loan off Jim Davidson on the TV. I can put $3K in play any night of the week I like, and $4K+ on Sundays, with a vastly superior hourly rate, lower variance, zero hassle and zero expenses. On the downside, I won't get my picture in Bluff Europe - oh noes. Live play is so subtly different from online that trying to mix both regularly can screw up your instincts and feel IMO. I can probably make an exception for TV 6-max games because they are quick, great value and basically little more than avoiding egregious stack mistakes, which seems to be beyond most people (even the superstars in the Premier Poker League [1]).

Increase volume while maintaining life balance

I can put in a bit more volume if I'm careful with my health, which is the whole combination of diet, exercise, sleep patterns and general awareness of the body. It's so hugely important not to burn out though. You need to shear the sheep of online poker tournaments, not kill it. By which I mean kill it for yourself by playing so much that you can't stand it any more, or so much that you need to take stimulants and/or relaxants to do it, which is going to screw your long-term health. Even something as apparently standard as coffee, if you can't play without it, you've got a problem. As I mentioned in another post, one reason the tournaments are still soft is that good players have burned out mentally and aren't playing any more. What's better, making $750K a year for 2 years or $300K a year for 10 years ? And this is seriously exacerbated by the fact that when they stop grinding online, they still can't walk away from poker entirely, so they play live, get involved with backing from either end, and that's a really slippery slope.

Anyway that was a bit of a digression, but for me, I should be able to fit in Sundays + 3 weekdays, and work it around the rest of my life, and make good money. That's the plan going forward for sure.

[1] I didn't want that to sound bitchy but what the hell, that's basically how it is.

2008 Wrap (Brag post obv)

2009-01-03T22:32:00.005Z

So 2008 pretty much rocked. As I mentioned below, my return per tournament was remarkably close to that in 2007 (around $180). So twice as many tournaments = twice as much mobney. My average buy in was significantly higher ($205 compared to $152), and the total profit was $272K, at about $380/hour. Sweet IMO. Finally, while this is an estimate going by the average number of hands/tournament recorded in Pokertracker, I made about $120/100 hands.

I don't think many people realise how much money you can make playing online tournaments if you're actually any good and you practise good game selection. Oh alright, and you run super hot. To make that kind of money per 100 hands I'd have to be either killing $10-20 NL or very good at $25-50, and I'm almost certain that either of those would involve far bigger swings [1] (cue Dave D to tell me I just haven't run bad yet). Which would be true, but even so, you won't see me moving on from the tournaments for a while yet. This is one reason why I think tournaments are softening up ; a substantial proportion of the really good players have burned out and moved on to cash, heads up, the live circuit (lol) or whatever. The other, in response to Rob's comment below, is just through observation ; I'm sure I see more and more brain dead spazzy spewy retarted mouthbreathing plays from villains as every week goes by.

Moving into 2009, if I can just keep that at the same level I'm going to automatically make about 30% more in £ just because of currency rates. I should be able to increase my $ volume somewhat by cutting out the sites with crappy software (mostly the Euro sports betting sites) and stepping it up on Stars and Full Tilt instead. I won't be playing live much, maybe only a TV 6-max donkfest or two, and maybe WSOP ME, we'll see. I definitely won't be wasting 6 weeks chasing bracelets this year. Apart from that we'll just keep cracking on and see where that takes us.

[1] Technically far bigger downswings. Of course tournaments will always (hopefully) have massive upswings, but when people talk about swings, it's downswings that they mean. I haven't tracked what my biggest downswing is, but my worst month in two years has been a $12K loss, I haven't had 2 losing months in a row and I usually keep about $30-40K online and have never been in danger of having to redeposit. Bok ...

Update : Interesting New Year post from Ansky on Pokersavvy here. Now, Ansky is a guy I respect tremendously, his videos are really good, he plays $25-50 NL and Heads Up, and maybe higher for all I know. I'm pretty sure there's no way I could ever play cash NL as well as he does. And his target per 100 hands for this year ? $150.

December Wrap

2009-01-01T00:28:00.006Z

2008 wrap-up to follow [1], but first the month of December ; thanks to a storming run on Full Tilt (of all sites), I ended up $38.9K in, $55.5K out for a $16.6K profit. It's been insane on FT for the last 10 days or so, as you can see here. It's even better if you check out the monthly summaries, which show a profit close enough to zero for 23 months, and then $28K in December.

What We Learned This Month

Quite a lot. While of course the FT run was mostly due to massive rungood, it was also slightly down to perseverance on the site, after reminding myself that there was really no reason I shouldn't be winning on it, and a general tightening up/slowing down that I have been implementing in the last couple of weeks. Basically trying not to re-steal every single time it looks on, and convincing myself that not everyone is always re-stealing on me either, especially in the smaller tournaments. I think the games are getting softer and softer (more on this later), and the softer they get, the better it is just to play ABC and wait for them to spew horrifically.

I have also formulated some better ideas for dealing with limpers pre-flop, and am finding more and more spots where I auto-call (or auto-shove) and suddenly think "oh no, he must have X", which he does. There's that AK play below, and there was another on Party a few days ago where I should really have found a fold with QQ even though I was only 16BB deep. The more of these spots I can turn into actual folds, the better I should do, at least until I actually fold something wrongly, which generally aligns the subconscious properly anyway once it happens enough, if you see what I mean.

[1] Cliff notes : I played twice as many tournaments as in 2007, and made twice as much money. Who'd have thunk it.

Onwards And Sideways

2008-12-22T17:01:00.003Z

More angst last night as I reached the last 4 tables in the Full Tilt Sunday Brawl and the iPoker $300K before being doomswitched into 27th and 33rd respectively. Hyachachachacha. People on 2+2 and so on are asking if the games are getting tougher ; in the tournaments I play, they seem to be getting even softer, with more and more bad players making more and more bad plays. And hooray for that ! Definitely not complaining.

Sometimes this gives you an opportunity to release a hand that you miss through "auto-playing". I picked up AK in first position in the Warm Up last night, playing about 40 BBs, and made a standard raise. A random player in late position made it about 2.5 times my raise, about 7 BBs. So all I can do here, I thought, is shove. There's no point calling or raising less than all in. So I shoved and lost to AA. But why couldn't I just fold ?

A random player in the Sunday Warm-Up just isn't going to make a move against an UTG raiser in that spot. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that he has [AK, JJ+] and that he isn't going to fold any of it to the re-jam. In addition, the smaller reraise weights his range even more towards big pairs and away from AK. Even without this extra weighting, I'm about 40% against his range, and I need to be 45% given the size of pot and stacks. And frankly JJ might even be a bit of a stretch. 30 BB stacks would have been OK, or if I was in a later position, but here, maybe "I has AK and we're not deep" isn't good enough. One to think about.

While I'm here, I will be playing in the "Marty Smyth celebration tournament" on BoylePoker tomorrow at 8pm (GMT), which should be fun, there are lots of bounties planned. I will also have my own cash table (now that's fame) opening up which I'll have a spin on, so come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Considering the blinds will be .25/.50 though, that's not really very hard ...

Heads Up EZ Game IMO

2008-12-08T15:29:00.003Z

I made the last 8 of the Heads Up tournament on Stars last night, taking my game-by-game record in the tournament to something like 15-4. In the first round I laid down the pwnhammer on Dario really hard, as follows :

Hand #1
Poker Stars $200+$15 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t10/t20 Blinds - 2 players
Hero (BB): t1680
Dariominieri (BTN/SB): t1320
Pre Flop: (t30) Hero is BB with Jc Th
Dariominieri raises to t60, Hero raises to t240, Dariominieri calls t180
Flop: (t480) 5d 9s 9h (2 players)
Hero bets t260, Dariominieri calls t260
Turn: (t1000) 4h (2 players)
Hero bets t1180 all in, Dariominieri folds

Hand #2
Poker Stars $200+$15 No Limit Hold'em Tournament - t10/t20 Blinds - 2 players
Hero (BB): t2110
Dariominieri (BTN/SB): t890
Pre Flop: (t30) Hero is BB with Kc Js
Dariominieri raises to t60, Hero raises to t240, Dariominieri calls t180
Flop: (t480) 6d 5d Ah (2 players)
Hero bets t260, Dariominieri raises to t650 all in, Hero calls t390
Turn: (t1780) 9h (2 players - 1 is all in)
River: (t1780) Qc (2 players - 1 is all in)

Final Pot: t1780
Hero shows Kc Js (high card Ace)
Dariominieri shows Jh 8c (high card Ace - lower kicker)
Hero wins t1780

Total domination I'm sure you will agree. I also shipped 4th in the Party $500 for $5K + change so it's been a good start to the month. I've been making another beginners video for Pokerswat, and something I was talking about there struck a chord with my own play - I've been avoiding certain sites and tournaments because I've been running bad in them, which is stupid. At the end of the day there really isn't that much difference between tournaments with the same buyin on various sites, and I'm cutting down my volume pointlessly. Hopefully fixing that will help with throughput this month.

November Wrap

2008-12-01T00:04:00.002Z

Unless I pull something off deep, deep in injury time (one tournament still playing, 250 runners left) it's going to will end up have been a slightly frustrating month. Lots of nerdy 7th and 12th place finishes with only one decent score, 2nd on Ladbrokes (in a chip count because they were taking the server down lol) for $9700. So with just one late result to come, it's $40.5K in, $34.0K out for a $6500 loss. Meh, I can live with two winning months and two losing months when it goes +88, -13, +52, -7 . At least I put good volume in, although the festivals (GSOP, ECOOP, FTOPS) all helped with that and I did next to nothing in them in terms of results.

What we've learned

Not sure it's all that much really, which is a disappointment. I've been playing more aggressively on the various bubbles, which is good, as I was in danger of slipping into bubble-wussiness at one point, but it hasn't really paid off because I haven't caught the breaks in finals. Certainly for spells I haven't been playing all that well, and maybe need to slow down and avoid super-marginal spots where my estimates of peoples' ranges are a bit off. Anyway, I've just run AK into KK so that's a definite final score, and at least I can go to bed.

I know I'm going to get no volume in at all till next Sunday so $30K is maybe even an optimistic target for volume next month. If I end up having a new kitchen fitted I might as well write the month off almost entirely, but we'll see what happens.

Over-Egging The Pudding

2008-11-17T23:07:00.005Z

Matchroom have almost completed the line-up for the next Poker League thing. Now I've seen next to nothing of the previous two series, as this is a format in which, in the past, "banter" was encouraged at the table. That's "banter" in the poker world, we in the real world would call it something more like "obnoxious disrespect for your opponents and your game". But it takes all sorts, and if you think Devilfish and Tony G are funny (some people do apparently) then this one's for you.

The current line-up, though, has me scratching my head. Let me just say straight off that this is not because they are bad players. I'd run to the hills before taking on this line-up without added money. JC Tran, Annette, Nenad Medic and Durrr have been added to the core of the stronger players from previous series, and they're all top players. What puzzles me is that none of them are known for being animated at the table. Not that this would be a problem if this was a 100BB+ cash game, like the Poker Den. That's the other thing. When you have no weak spots donking it up, the blinds catch up very quickly and the play soon becomes routine until it just degenerates into an all-in card-catching contest.

So unless they suddenly announce Hellmuth as the last player, and it'll be must viewing to watch him get pwned by everyone, I'm struggling to see this working. Oh well. Not that I'm the camera's best friend myself ; following on from the semi, I saw the final from April on the web today (Channel 5 have cocked up the playback so the final's actually on the web before it's broadcast on TV, which is midnight Wednesday night). In this one, I play three hands and get it in with the worst of it every time. Ho hum. The hands in between where I steadily accumulate don't make the cut because I'm not doing stuff like calling 86o out of position to check dark/fold the flop, as was shown in the 2nd semi (before I got bored with it). Even so, if you can catch this anywhere, it's probably worth watching for one hand between Neil and Marc Goodwin, which was funny enough at the time but is super lollerskates on TV.

My own verdict, having seen all of those now, and after playing the other one last month, is that it wouldn't do me any harm to open up and be myself on these things. It's true that 95% of what you say on TV comes across worse than it would in real life, but jeez, I couldn't look as much of an idiot as [insert name of favourite TV idiot here] if I tried my utmost. And if the play makes me look a bit donkish, who'd notice one more, out of the hundreds we've seen over the years.

Update : Let pwning commence :-). Cliff notes - Hellmuth is in, and you can read him either damning his opponents with faint praise or saying they're good but not as good as him at that link. I've had a small investment on all three outsiders (Juha, Andy Black and Vicky) as there can't be a big difference in expectation with this format IMO.

Pokerswat

2008-11-08T12:16:00.002Z

If any of you were wondering what the second thing was, it's the launch of the Pokerswat training site. I am one of the video instructors on the site and I'm quite excited about this going live and getting up to speed.

As you can see on the front page, there are three free sample videos so I'd encourage you to check these out. When you click on one of these, it will initially seem to not do anything but just give it a little while and the content will appear. My own video here is specifically aimed at beginners, so bear that in mind !

So have a look around, explore the site, and when it comes to considering signing up, there is one thing I'd like to say. I've gained considerable benefit from joining a couple of existing training sites over the last 18 months or so, and have no doubt in saying that the subscriptions I have paid have been returned at the tables tens, if not hundreds, of times over. Someone posted on 2+2 that when you initally look at a training site you think "Why is it so expensive ?". Then after a few months of using it you think "Why is it so cheap ?" ! And that's spot on IMO.

I'm very happy with the content I've submitted to the site so far (including a live recording of a $65K tournament win) and I'm looking forward to checking out the other videos from some very highly regarded players. So, advertisement over :-), and of course I can answer any questions either here or on the Pokerswat forum.

UK Poker Open

2008-11-07T10:25:00.005Z

Couple of things happening this week, first of all I played the 888.com UK Poker Open V in Maidstone. The heat was pretty random but after winning an all-in flip with A8 against KJss on an 863ss flop I was mostly ahead of the game. AA > JJ helped too, as did a truly ludicrous raise/fold by Surinder which I'll probably go into in a Boylesports blog pretty soon. Heads up I had a 3-1 lead which I promptly lost to a flop 5-outer, then I thought I played pretty well and ended up winning the last flip.

The semi-final yesterday was very frustrating. There were no weak spots and a lot of open-raised pots. I ended up playing one hand of poker, in which I was thoroughly owned, and showing down one hand, the mighty J7o which I had shoved with 6BBs. That might sound rash but we were playing 7-15 blinds 6-handed, with an average stack of 8BBs. Just one of those days when everyone else won their first allin, often from behind, but I went 0/1 gg. I think I know what to do about this next time, but that's going to remain a genuine secret, sorry :-)

Funnily enough, the semi from the World Poker Open in April was on TV on Wednesday night as well, and even though it was the exact same structure, there was a lot more play because three players managed to bust out by the middle of level 3. I often say that the amount of "play" in a tournament depends more on how recklessly or cautiously people play than the actual blind structure, and this was a good example. The TV version showed even fewer of my hands than the DVD version I had seen. I think I can see why a lot of my hands don't make the cut ; first of all, I tend to take lines that make things simple on later streets, and secondly I tend to act fairly quickly generally. TV loves big dwell-ups in difficult spots and I just don't tend to be in these spots ! So you'll just have to imagine how I went from 200K to 380K by apparently folding every hand :-).

Making Hay While The Snow Falls (Extreme Brag Post)

2008-10-29T18:44:00.003Z

As noted previously, I was already having a good month going into Sunday. Stars changed their schedule in the middle of the day, rather annoyingly, which buggered up my plans so I didn't play the Million but decided to play the $215 Heads Up for a laugh, last tournament of the night. I figured that reading Moshman's Heads Up book (which is very good) made me an expert. And it turns out it did, 7 wins on the bounce before losing the final netted me $7K and change.

Then on Monday I had a really good night, making final tables on Betfair (4th), Paradise (4th) and Ongame (ship it). The Ongame $50 Rebuy was very nice, one of those tournaments when it all goes right. I won a huge pot AA over QQ with 12 left and was never threatened in the final. This late flurry saw me up to $34.9K in buyins, returning $87.4K gross and $52.5K net on the month. It's the first month in some time where my profit has been significantly more than the biggest single win. I even managed to cash some out at $1.55 on Monday before the bounce later in the week. I know, I know, MBN.

What We Learned This Month

Nothing specific tactically, just sharpening up my reads all the time and acting on them with more confidence. With the new setup, it was good to play too many tables for a night or two just to adjust. It's like the fable of the overcrowded house and the wise men telling them to take a goat in for a couple of weeks. Then when they kick it out again, everything's great. Or was it a song ? Anyway, settling back to 12-14 tournaments a night, generally no more than 8-tabling at once, is now relatively comfortable and doesn't impact on decision making too much. I'm playing much more efficiently now (adding in the turboes has helped), in January my (total buyins/hours played) was $270 whereas it's been over $500 for each of the last two months. Of course if you busted out of everything in 10 minutes that number would be huge, so you have to be sensible with that, but I think it's a good indicator that throughput is much better.

So I'm feeling confident going into the TV donkament on Friday, but what the hell anyway, it's only $6K (if you made it this far through the bragging I hope you can take that one) and we'll just see what happens.

Annette Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas

2008-10-26T08:39:00.005Z

It's the UK Poker Open this week, being filmed in Maidstone, and I'm in the mix again. It starts tomorrow, I'm playing on Friday, as in the heat draw (and odds) here. It's safe to say that I have a more difficult heat than in the last event, but I'm still confident I have a good chance going into this. As long as Jesse hasn't bokked me. I think it's quite funny where he says I'm "more solid than Annette". Does that even mean anything ? It's like being hotter than absolute zero. He might as well have said that I'm more emotionally secure than Hellmuth. And hence the title, although of course it includes another obscure reference.

In general it's not as soft a field as I was anticipating but on the other hand lol donkaments so we'll see what happens. The semi-final from the previous event should be on Channel 5 on Wednesday night/Thursday morning around midnight, you should also be able to pick it up after the event on the Five Demand website (UK only). I've already seen a version of this and unfortunately the game dynamic 4-handed, which was very interesting at the time, doesn't really come across but that's not surprising, there's only so much you can do in an hour.

As of the now, I'm going to take advantage of the time difference tonight (Daylight Saving having ended here but not for another week in the US) to play some of the later tournaments, like the Sunday Million and the Tilt $150 rebuy. It's also the start of the LEOCOP festival on Ladbrokes, which has a leaderboard freeroll for the controversial extra seat in the Poker Million semi-final. That would be funny to win that, just to see everyone's faces when I roll in as the "freeroll Internet n00b".

Dublin

2008-10-20T19:51:00.003+01:00

Had an enjoyable three days in Ireland for the Boyle Sports IPO. I liked the structure of the main event, although they had two (logical) days to run through 1300 people there was still some deep stack play at the beginning. I started off much better than I ever have done with 10K chips in the past - still, this is probably at least somewhat correlated with the buyin ($200 rather than $10K). When I flopped two pair after a button raise and convinced my opponent to disbelieve me and double me up to 40K, I was in decent shape. Then I doubled two opponents up in unavoidable pre-flop coups, but made it back to 40 with two double-ups of my own. Then I took a pretty gross beat in an 80K pot to cripple me to 1.5BB and they disappeared on the next hand, gg.

My bad beat was put into perspective on Sunday when a lady told us an unfortunate tale of how she was, most harshly, mistaken for Kathy Liebert by two French guys. That's just mean IMO. But you've probably heard that one already, given the poker media's resemblance to snarling hyenas when it comes to fighting over the one amusing anecdote that pops up during the average 3-day tournament.

As for me, if I'm going to travel much more in the next year I'm going to have to prepare a bit better. 4am sessions in the bar don't really do it for me any more, and TBH nor does sightseeing. I can't really buy schlepping into town just to go "ooh look, a building". I thought it would be a nice change to go without my laptop for 3 days but in fact it was just irritating not to have it :-). 700 pages of Stephen King filled the gaps, just about, but overall there was a real buzz about the place, you could tell people were really up for playing a big international-style tournament for $200 and that was the great thing about it. I'd definitely recommend it next year if that's more your budget, and even if it's not quite frankly.