Secrets of the Amateurs

I picked up a moderately interesting (Kindle) book on Amazon the other day : Poker Is Dead.  The author makes a brief and fairly one-sided case for online poker being effectively unbeatable in 2013. Nonetheless, he might have a point, at least to an extent.

It was because I had been thinking about the viability of online poker tournaments for a while that I checked it out in the first place.  When in doubt...check your stats.  Holdem Manager has a neat feature allowing you to filter tournaments by day of the week (I'm sure you can tell where this is going).  Looking back over the last 19 months [1] my record excluding Sundays is an unimpressive ROI of around -15%.  The sample size is only around 1300 tournaments but it's all I have.  More to the point, stats like EV bb/100 hands are equally uninspiring.

I'm not saying that weekday tournaments are unbeatable.  I'm not even saying that I couldn't beat them (for a small amount) if I was more careful with game selection and played with a bit more commitment.  I suppose what I am saying is that I can't be arsed.  Back in the day you could beat tournaments for a very healthy clip every day of the week just by playing a basic TAG game, being sensible in big (in terms of BB) pots, cranking it up around bubbles, knowing your short stack basics and being aware of ICM at final tables.  There was absolutely no need to ever "get in anyone's head" or even read hands.  Once I played a certain amount of hands I obtained a reasonable idea of how many bets particular hands are worth in different situations.  If a hand's worth two bets then bet the flop, check the turn and call or bet the river.  The fact of the matter is that I've made the money I've made while hardly ever thinking about my opponent's hand.

Sundays are still good, and probably will be for the foreseeable future.  As and when you go deep in a tournament that has 1000+ runners, you will find a lot of value.  But for me at least, trying to grind midweek seems completely pointless.  Maybe this will change if the US comes back or the last available market (China) is tapped, maybe not.  And I should stress that this is not meant to be a negative post.  If anything it's positive.  I'm happy enough to let it go, play once a week on a Sunday night in the $100-200 range and find something better to do the rest of the time.  Including play live, where there might still be a fair bit of value around £500-£1k buyin.  Nothing lasts forever and I'm very thankful I was able to latch on early enough.  I'd hate to be starting out now in any form of the game.

[1] I'd have to dig up records from an old PC to go further back than that, and prior to that may be irrelevant anyway.

If you're on Twitter you probably already know this, but if you aren't you might not, especially with 2+2 being down, but anyway I superbinked the Party Pokerfest $640 Main Event for $215k.  Superbink!

I did an interview with Pocketfives yesterday.  Here's the link.  I really wanted to talk about Narrative Fallacies, Selection Bias and so on but the interview was fairly brief and probably P5s isn't a receptive audience to that kind of thing.  I did manage to sneak in a rant about how online tournaments shouldn't last more than 12 hours without a proper (ie sleep) break.

Anyway, the Narrative Fallacy is pretty much what makes the poker media go round (and most of any other kind of media).  My friend and yours Nicholas Naseem Taleb defines it as follows (via wikilesswrong.com)

"The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding."

This goes all the way back to tribesmen thinking that the drought was a punishment from the Gods for something they did (or even more invidiously something they didn't do).  This is basically how religion started, which should give you an idea of its power.  In this case, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say, here or in an interview, that I've been working on my game really hard and this is the culmination of that work.

I have been working on my game, not as hard as I'd like to claim, but harder than I have for a while.  However, all this one result proves is that I ran like Jesus for 700 hands.  I won all my flips, got it in good 2 or 3 times, all the usual stuff.  It's reminiscent of a TV tournament I played where I "cruised through the heat and semi" (won about 10 allins in a row) before "the wheels came off in the final" (lost 4 allins in a row).  What I did then was what I did on Sunday, i.e. played as well as I could and gave myself a better chance of winning than players who didn't play as well, but no more than that.

All you can do is play the best tournaments you can find and keep plugging away.  Over the course of a $90k downswing I can think of 3 or 4 occasions (including the exact same tournament last year IIRC) [1] where I didn't win the second-last or third-last flip and came up short.  Back in the day when Daniel Negreanu used to talk sense (it was a long time ago) he said that you can't treat a big win as a windfall, you have to treat it as a wage earned over all the tournaments you didn't win.  As the downswing lasted 3000 tournaments online, which is something like 1000-1500 playing hours, I can now say I've earned $120k over that time at around $100/hour.

For some more modern-day wisdom there was an exchange on Twitter I really liked earlier in the week, one of the younger players tweeted about being in a SCOOP final with his horse there too, loving the game!  Chris Moorman then said that wasn't loving the game, loving the game is grinding the $20 deepstack at 4am.  And he's dead right.  You need to have that love for the game to put in the supergrind, and I don't.  I think now I can accept that and, while I'm not going to retire from poker, I'm not going to play any $20 rebuys for a while because I just don't want to.  The whole point of this was doing what I want to do, and I'm very thankful that this result is going to allow me to do what I want for a while longer.

[1] I didn't RC at all.  It was a $640 on Party almost two years ago when they were running the tournament monthly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.