Trying a New Site

As I think I may have mentioned previously, Full Tilt seems to be getting harder and harder in terms of game selection lately.  I’ve heard it said that this can be attributed to training sites like Cardrunners and the like – sounds like a plausible theory to me becuase the average VPIP of tables seems to be dropping, and even when you do find a nominally “good” table its either filled with shortstacks or one total donk with four or five regulars fighting over who can stack the fish first 🙂

So I decided to try my hand at Ultimate Bet for a while.  Wow what a difference – many, many tables in the 50+ VPIP range, and also lots of passivity.  Unfortunately – it hasnt gone so well results wise so far, but hopefully thats just a short term thing.  There is certainly some adjustments to be made – blind stealing looks to be far less profitable, as does continuation betting – becuase of the passive play and a lot of call stations.  So its a case of right back to very basic ABC, play hands straightforwardly and wait for the percentages to deliver the profits.  I think it will be +EV long term, but probably increased variance as well as there are going to be some horrendous beats – I already have had a set of aces cracked by a runner runner straight – but no bad beat stories here *cough*  🙂

All in all, another good example of trying to ultilse good game selection to find the maximum edge.  I’ll give it a try for a few more weeks and report how its going.

A first for me …

… never stacked three people at once before.  Ok I dont usually post HH’s, but this one was kind of unique.  Granted two of them were short stacks, but still, its amazing I got so much action on this hand:

$0.25/$0.5 No Limit Holdem
6 players
Converted at [b][url=http://weaktight.com/]weaktight.com[/url][/b]

[b]Stacks:[/b]
[b]Hero  ($76.15)[/b]
UTG+1  ($10.00)
[b]CO  ($22.80)[/b]
[b]BTN  ($54.85)[/b]
[b]SB  ($1.15)[/b]
BB  ($49.25)
[i][UTG+1 posted $0.5][/i]

[b]Pre-flop:[/b] ([i]$1.25, 6 players[/i]) [b]Hero is UTG[/b] Ad As
[b]Hero raises to $2.25[/b], [i]1 fold[/i], CO calls $2.25, BTN calls $2.25, SB calls $0.9, [i]1 fold[/i]

[b]Flop:[/b] Ah 2c Ac
Hero checks, [b]CO bets $8.9[/b], BTN calls $8.9, Hero calls $8.9

[b]Turn:[/b] Jd
Hero checks, [b]CO goes all-in $11.65[/b], BTN calls $11.65, Hero calls $11.65

[b]River:[/b] 5c
[b]Hero goes all-in $53.35[/b], BTN calls $32.05

[b]Final Pot:[/b] $134.65
BTN shows: 6c 4c
SB shows: 10d 10c
Hero shows: Ad As
CO shows: 6s 6d

Hero wins $152.95 ( won +$76.8 )
BTN lost -$54.85
SB lost -$1.15
CO lost -$22.80

Blind Stealing in Cash Games

Not as much play this week, for various reasons.  Managed to win the HPC Monday Online SnG which was nice, as I’ve been knocked out pretty early the previous few weeks.  Since then though I’ve probably only got about 500 hands of online cash games this week.  This has been partially lack of opportunity but more part of my new deliberate schedule of playing less and studying more.

I’m currently focusing on blind stealing in cash games.  There’s some excellent material written by good players in the 2+2 archives – actually as a comment I find those archives FAR more useful than than the HH discussion threads. Analysis of my Pokertracker database suggests I’ve got a pretty good record with blind steals, however I think I can tighten up this strategy and make it even more profitable.  Especially at the lower limits it can be easy to ignore this strategy – people feel that donks will call with anything and suffer the inevitable beats, or have to toss the hand away when they dont hit.  To some extent that may be true, but the true value of blind stealing comes in when (a) you practice good table selection, and (b) you practice good seat selection on that table.  You need to be targeting the right sort of villian – the tight ones who dont defend much.  I think most people know that playing a wider range in position is correct, but don’t get full value out of stealing becuase they don’t consider the villian they are raising into, or how he/she will play the texture of the board that flops.

So thats been my focus this week, I’ve been dedicating some sessions I would normally play to studying.  I’ve read a lot of theory on the topic now, next week’s focus is going to be analysing my database against some of the concepts and seeing how I’ve been applying it unconsciously in the past – I’m betting I can pick up some areas where I can improve my performance in this area. Even adding 0.5ptbb/100 to your winrate by focusing on these sort of issues can add up to good profits in the long run.

Not Much to Report

Back at work this week so consequently I haven’t had as much time as in the last few weeks to sit down and blog.  I have managed a few cash sessions though, and the week did go reasonably well.  That said though, I’m finding it harder and harder to get a good game on Full Tilt.  The average VPIP’s are down … I generally wont even consider a table unless the average VPIP is well into the forties.  Often when you sit down too the table is four TAGs and one loose donk, and its just a fight to see who can stack the fish first 🙂  I’m seriously considering diversifying to Absolute and UB.  Why those sites?  Rakeback is the major motivator, however I am still a bit reluctant to play there regularly given the chequered history of those sites.  Not that I have particular concerns about cheating at 50nl and 100nl, but I’m still not 100% comfortable supporting those sites given they weren’t too front up about the cheating scandals.

I’m getting a schedule into order to balance work, play and study 🙂  More details soon, I’m still fine tuning and getting the balance right.

The Magic of Kaizen

I’ve been playing poker for two years now. Sometimes I feel like I’ve made really good progress, and other times I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.  I still have hands almost every session where I am really uncertain of the best play.  I’ve been searching and searching for the right method to learn this game, the “magic bullet” that will suddenly bring the epiphany and transform my game to the next and several higher levels.  But I haven’t found it, and that’s been frustrating me.  But I’m coming to realise I can’t and won’t find it becuase it doesn’t exist.

But something did come to me yesterday.  I don’t know why I had forgotten this, or why it suddenly came back to me.  Several years ago I was involved in a seminar at work on learning methods.  The presenter, Glenn Capelli, was refreshingly different. One of the concepts he taught was that of Kaizen.  On his website, he talks abour persistence as the key to learning, and the vital ingredient in persistence is the concept of Kaizen, a Japanese word meaning taking many many small steps to achieve something.  In essence you dont tackle a big concept, you take thousands of small ongoing steps in a never ending cycle of improvement.  Over time, you accomplish things you never could if you attacked it head on.

I think this conept applies amazingly well to poker.  For too long I’ve been trying to take it all in at once, and it just doesnt work that way.  Instead, I should be focusing on small improvements, step by step.  Focus on a small part of the game, work on it, then move on.  Set a small goal and achieve it. Then another, then another and so on.  Twelve months of this and my game should advance considerably.

I think I finally found that magic bullet, I was just looking in the wrong place.

Post Session Review

As part of my campaign to get serious and improve this year, one aspect I want to place greater emphasis on is post-session review.  While this has been part of my repotoire in the past, its easy to overlook it when you’ve just lost a stack to a two outer, or even more likely, when you’ve had a winning session and automatically assume you played well.  I usually go through PT and drag up the biggest winning and losing hands and have a look-through, but I don’t think this is enough.  For one, I’m not convinced that its always the biggest hands that are really the problem.  If you get stacked getting all in pre KK vs AA there’s not much to look at, and if that’s all you look at then I think things are being overlooked.

One of the things that I have noticed is common since I’ve been on the current downswing is not that there are a lot of big losing hands, but a lot of middle sized losers that all add up to a losing session of a buyin or more.  Here’s an example I plucked at random from my DB:

 FullTiltPoker Game #5039221582: Table Eaker (6 max) – $0.25/$0.50 – No Limit Hold’em – 5:06:10 ET – 2008/01/29
Seat 1: Sitting Out ($10)
Seat 2: SB ($60.30)
Seat 3: BB($50.85)
Seat 4: UTG ($9.25)
Seat 5: CO($80.20)
Seat 6: Hero ($52.65)
SB posts the small blind of $0.25
BB posts the big blind of $0.50
The button is in seat #6
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to Hero [Qc Ah]
UTG folds
CO raises to $1
Hero raises to $3.75
SB folds
BB folds
CO calls $2.75
*** FLOP *** [4h 6s 2s]
CO checks
Hero bets $5.50
CO calls $5.50
*** TURN *** [4h 6s 2s] [2d]
CO checks
Hero checks
*** RIVER *** [4h 6s 2s 2d] [3s]
CO bets $10
Hero has 15 seconds left to act
Hero folds
Uncalled bet of $10 returned to CO
CO wins the pot ($18.30)

Perhaps there’s an argument to bet the turn here, but without delving into the strategy of the individual hand too much, lets assume that the CO had lets say pocket 77.  So there’s nothing much to be done here.  But if you have a two hour session and see 300 hands and have a series of these sort of hands, you end up with a decent loss on the session, and no really big hands to analyse.

So my point here is that I think my current analysis method is missing a fairly large perecentage of the hands where I am actually slowly bleeding (or slowly gaining, if villian folds to cbet) chips.  What I need to do is find a better post-session analysis methodology.  Would be very interested to hear reader’s views on this topic, or if you have read particularly good articles or literature that covers this topic.

Watching Joe Sebok

Cardplayer  is currently reporting that Joe Sebok has the chiplead in the WPT Winter Borgata Open currently underway in the US.  I’ve always been a bit of a Sebok fan since I used to listen to “The Circuit” with Joe Sebok, Gavin Smith and Scott Huff.  Not only was that a good show because it was a great way to keep up to date with whats happening in the poker world from afar, but those guys always managed to inject enough humour into it to make it a real fun listen.  Over time they’ve evolved and Joe now runs his own site and podcast over at Poker Road.

Anyway in all the shows Joe always seems to come off as the guy who is trying hard but can never quite get the results or the accolades – being Barry Greenstein’s son it must be a fairly large shadow to live in.  He’s also a guy that has taken up the game (relatively) recently so in some ways he’s easy to identify with, the newcomer battling to learn, improve and aspire to greatness in much the same way that all of us amateur grinders would love to.  I’m not sure that Joe would agree with this impression, but for me at least I always hope to see him finally break through and take a WPT event down or win a WSOP bracelet – it would be inspiration to us all that with hard work you can come into this game and make an impression.  Sure he’s got a great coach in Greenstein, but that must work both ways in terms of the expectation placed on him as well.

 In any event, I’ll be cheering for Sebok to win, or at least make the final table.  Go Joe!

 UPDATE – clearly spoke to soon, just checked Cardplayer and Joe has busted.

Clearing the Mind

Ok so as you may have picked up from earlier posts, one of the primary things I don’t ever want this blog to turn into is a place where I just come to vent and tell bad beat stories.  I have fairly strong opinions on this 🙂  Trouble is, when you are on the worst run of your life, its really hard not to think about it!  So rather than post about coolers and beats, what I am interested in is this … just how do you clear your mind and regain that balance?

There are of course, several good books on the subject and many articles scattered all over the internet.  In book terms, I like both Schoonmaker’s “Your Worst Poker Enemy” and Hilger’s “The Poker Mindset”.  (Side note – I registered as an Amazon affiliate and was going to promote those books here – becuase I think they are excellent – only found out AFTER I registered that WordPress doesn’t allow it!).  But I’m also interested in how “real” people handle the inevitable period in their poker lives where they run worse than they possibly imagined.

For me, I’ve thought about it hard and come to the conclusion I need to make two major changes to my approach to cope.  Number one is that I have been physically dormant for far too long, and I am getting back into exercise in a disciplined and regular way.  I think feeling fitter and healthier can only improve my general state of mind.  Secondly, I’m going to take a far more disciplined approach to poker play and study.  I’ve developed a schedule whereby I have 10 hours a week to play, and 6.5 hours a week to study.  Outside those times, I’m going to leave poker right alone.  That might not sound like a lot a week, but in between full time work and family life, that’s a pretty full schedule.  I’m conscious that although I’ve taken a whole heap of beats and coolers over the last few months, I’m also guilty at times of sitting down and firing up a few tables on a whim – which I think is not conducive to A game play, (a) becuase you are not in the right frame of mind, and (b) becuase I don’t do proper post session analysis when I play ad hoc.

So there’s my two major changes, with the primary goal of clearing my mind and taking a more disciplined approach.  I’d love to hear from readers how they deal with keeping focused and balanced in their poker careers, irrespective of whether they are running hot/cold or normal.

The HPC Poker Bankroll Challenge

One of the things we are doing here at HPC Poker is a little idea I came up with called the 2008 HPC Poker Bankroll Challenge.  Essentially it is an incentive for HPC members to work hard on their game, set a goal and work steadily towards improvement.  Becuase we have people playing quite different stakes, we are using a BR Index, much like a stock index.  Participants in the challenge took their bankroll as at 1 Jan, and equated that to an index of 100.  Each week (in theory) we are reporting back on the HPC Forum on our progress.  So far we have had a double up, a few of us slightly down or level, and even a complete bust! 

I’ve heard it said its not good to set monetary goals for poker, becuase no matter how well you play variance can always come into it.  While this is true enough, I think the index is a moderated version so to speak … and its not a goal in itself so much as a motivator to take your BR seriously and play with discipline.  Ultimately, thats all you can really do BR wise – have a good set of rules and stick to them hard.  It definitely works in the group environment, and lets the up and comers compare on a level playing field with those HPC’ers who have been playing longer and have larger rolls.

Min Raises

Was just doing a bit of surfing and read this little gem over at Covert Ops 100k challenge.  This one post rang so true to me I immediately wanted to blog it, as much to share as to jam it into my memory!  The line in question:

 3. minbets/raises are usually weak hands. Min-reraises are usually strong hands.

 As they say in the (internet) classics, QFT, Quoted For Truth.

I might even go so far as to say minraises full stop.  I agree on the weak lead, this is usually what it represents, a feeler bet blindly hoping that you will fold.  But the minraise is often the gotcha move.  It happens to me so often lately.  For example, lets say you have a loose crazy at your table, 70 VPIP.  I’ve been waiting to catch this guy, and I pick up lets say AQs in the CO.  Std raise to the donk in the BB who calls.  Flop comes Q 8 2 rainbow.  Lovely.  Villian checks, standard continuation bet, donk calls.  Turn is a non-descript 4, donk checks, I bet for value, get insta-minraised.

Painful experience is that nine times out of ten donk has Q4 here and makes two pair.  It’s the minraise I hate becuase of course you cant put villian on precisely Q4.  Maybe he’s got a Q and picked up a gutshot, maybe he still has the naked Q, maybe he’s got 99 or something.  The point is with the minraise you’re often getting great odds to continue.  So you might call that minraise only to have villian lead pot on the river, again screaming strength.  Then what do you do?

 I hate the minraise.  Its usually villian instantly mashing the raise button with glee as they make their hand, but I hate throwing away a good hand getting 4 to 1 or so to continue.