Patchwork

What a rush

2010-02-28T18:46:00.004-05:00

Full Tilt emailed a while back about their new Rush Poker games. At first I thought it was one of the stupidest ideas I'd ever heard of. Then, after pondering a while, I realized it had the potential to be the solution to one of the problems that has annoyed me for a long time -- the MMIA.

If you're not familiar with Rush Poker, it works like this. You join a pool of players who've all agreed to play the same game at the same stakes. As soon as you fold your hand you are moved to another table where the cards are about to be dealt. There is a Quick Fold button that will instantly move you to another table even if the action hasn't come to you yet.

After due consideration, I realized this might appeal to the MMIAs, the action junkies who want to do nothing but make decision after decision. It could potentially move them to Rush Poker and leave the regular ring tables for those who like to concentrate on the game and get some feel for their opponents.

Today I decided to give Rush Poker a try. I have to admit, it is a rush. Perhaps too much of a rush for me. I'm not a child of first person shooters and other sensory overload games. I like to occasionally take a breather, give my mind a couple seconds off. The only way to do that in Rush Poker is to sit out.

Aside from the breakneck pace, there are a couple other things that bother me. When a new table is formed, the player who has not played the big blind in the longest amount of time is the big blind. If you're first joining the game, you're the big blind. That part's okay. The problem is the remainder of the seats are assigned randomly. My first three tables I was BB, SB, SB. In theory, you can get stuck playing the SB position several times in a row. You can be UTG far more times than you would at a regular table. Of course, you could be on the button more often too.

I understand they can't make the positions work out perfectly, but I see no reason they can't ensure you aren't the SB any more than you should be and that distribution of seating at the other positions evens out. You might still be UTG three times in a row, but over 100 hands you'd be UTG one-sixth or one-ninth of the time, according to the size of table you're playing.

There is also the issue that this game makes it virtually impossible to play the other players with any intelligence. You are reduced to playing the cards and guessing about the other players' actions based on almost no information. OTOH, the other players have to play this way too. If you're a good technical player but have trouble with the people side of the game, this could be a plus for you.

I found a number of times I was curious about how a hand turned out, but I was whisked off to another table as soon as I folded and didn't get a chance to see the results. If I fold before the flop, I usually don't care. If I fold on the river in a game with three players still alive, I'd usually like to see what happens. No joy on that. It would be nice if there was an option to continue monitoring tables where you've folded.

On the plus side, this seems to be a great game for clearing bonuses. Points are awarded exactly as they are in regular games. If you're dealt cards and the pot is raked, you get points -- even if you've changed tables because you folded. You can effectively earn points on multiple tables without playing multiple tables. Playing a tight game of Omaha where you fold the vast majority of initial holdings, you could easily be earning points on a dozen tables at once while concentrating on just one.

I've yet to determine if Rush Poker will clear the MMIAs off the regular ring games. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Addendum: I just finished a short session playing Rush Limit Hold'em. For the tight player, this may well be the ultimate limit experience. Except for the occasional mad man or calling station, I'm not sure how much benefit there is to tracking player tendencies in limit, at least over the short haul. If you're willing to play a purely technical game against whoever happens to be seated, this game will keep you hopping.

It has been my experience that I can make a fold/no-fold decision pre-flop in about one second for 75% of my hands. (I don't have stats on the percentage, it's just a gut feel.) With maybe 10% of them I need to see what happens before me to make my fold/no-fold decision. With the rest I'm almost certain to stay.

In Rush Limit Hold'em, that means on about 75% of my hands I can click Fold and be playing another hand in about two seconds. Twenty hands a minute would not be out of the question. Of course, that rate is only when I'm folding. Actually playing a hand clearly takes longer, though most of the players in this particular limit game were pretty fast with their decisions. The longest of hands didn't take but a minute or so. The overall pool average is 200 hands/hours. I think that's on a per table basis, not a per player basis.

The other thing here is that the whole game just moves faster because everyone is paying attention. You're either actively making a decision on a hand or in a hand waiting on other players to decide at all times. There's no waiting because other players are on 27 other tables at the same time or somebody has run off to get another beer.

I'll have to time it with PokerTracker to know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me to see a 500 hands/hour rate at this game.

Back in the game

2009-09-30T16:11:00.003-04:00

Despite the lack of recent posts here, I have actually been playing more poker lately. Full Tilt offered a "Take 2" bonus this month of which I took advantage. You had to play two or more tables simultaneously and earn at least one FT point between the two tables. You got bonus money at various intervals, up to a total of $50 for 25 days of play. I played PLO exclusively and collected the last of the $50 Monday night.

Aside from the bonus, the PLO was also reasonably profitable. I actually didn't track the money that closely, but I think I must have won at least as much in play as I gained from the bonus. Given my bonus chasing performance over the last few years this was a marked improvement.

Last night I decided to rejoin The Quest by getting back into the DoNTs at Stars. It was only one tournament, but based on a sample size of one, it seems my previous observations about these tournaments getting a lot tighter are still holding true. That's what I get for posting a bunch of lessons on how to play these.

I had some strong hands early and got up a good amount. Later on I got into a coin flip for most of my chips with my TT versus two big cards. My tens held and I could have coasted from there. I didn't, but I could have. I did end up winning. All in all, a nice return to The Quest.

The bankroll is up to $205. Hopefully I'll retain my interest for a while this time.

Five years ago today...

2009-09-02T23:14:00.002-04:00

Five years ago today a guy who thought he knew how to play poker decided to take a chance on this online poker thing. Pacific Poker was the place. It was chosen because it was where his buddy George played online.

He started playing limit hold'em at a level that was way beyond his bankroll, or at least the amount deposited. And he got lucky. It didn't hurt that Pacific Poker was widely regarded as the site with the worst poker players online. That small initial deposit grew.

Within a fairly short period he began to realize how little he actually knew about the game, despite nearly a lifetime of playing poker at almost every opportunity. Books were ordered and studied. Shortly the initial bankroll had multiplied several times and the confines of Pacific Poker, rich though they were, began to feel limiting.

If memory serves, Poker Room was the next stop, along with a very nice first deposit bonus. Bonus? "Oh, yeah, this is sweet. All I have to do is be reasonably competent and do what I'd be doing anyway, and this site gives me money to do it."

It was about this time that everybody and their maiden aunts thought they could run a poker site, and they were happy to throw money away trying to build a base of players. The Cryptos were particularly sweet, most of them offering regular monthly bonuses just for playing. No special deposit required. And the tables were loaded with drunken Europeans playing way over their limit. The GBP tables were the sweetest. Must have been due to the pubs closing early or something.

Eventually the Poker Room network opened up and some extremely lucrative bonuses appeared. Ah, those were the good old days. Four-tabling $2/$4 limit. Watching the bonus money pile up. Cha-ching.

Never happy with the status quo, the Cryptos started offering micro-limit tables and the action at $1/$2 and above completely dried up. The bonus became very difficult to clear. Eventually it seemed hardly worth the effort.

At some point along the way, the siren call of tournament poker became too attractive to ignore. Bye-bye, limit. Hello, NLHE. Tournaments, tournaments, and more tournaments. The Wil Wheaton-hosted WWDN became a regular weekly stop. Then more blogger tournaments started to appear. If you go back and read the first entry on this blog you'll see it was started just to fulfill a requirement for entry to a blogger tournament.

Then came the day the poker died. Well, almost. I'll leave you to fill in your own Pythonesque skit here. The UIGEA was signed into law. It has so far turned out to be more nuisance than actual death, but it has definitely put a damper on things.

Like most episodes of looking back, it simultaneously seems like just yesterday and a long, long time ago that I sat down at the first virtual poker table. I played for at least an hour pretty much every day for the first couple years. I've been more on-and-off with it over the last three. I'll play regularly for three or four months, then I'll kind of lose interest and let it sit idle for a while.

This year has seen me go through a number of pretty major life changes. I've had three mailing addresses -- one on each of the coasts and one pretty much in the middle. I'm recently coming out of another hiatus that was due mostly to one of those real life changes. Things are settling into a regular pattern again and I find myself catching hints of that siren call just at the limits of my hearing.

I've been playing a bit of PLO the last couple weeks. It seems to be about where hold'em was five years ago -- full of players who have barely a clue what they're doing. You could fit my knowledge of PLO in a thimble and have plenty of room left over, but it's still a lot more knowledge than many of the players I've seen online. Of course, I'm still wading in the kiddie pool. Fun thing is, you can make some real money in the kiddie pool.

The last five years have not always been the greatest in my real life, but the poker has been fun. I've learned tons, made quite a few friends I've never met, and turned a pretty decent profit.

Something I never expected when I threw myself at poker was how much I'd learn about real life from playing a game. Poker has brought me patience I never had before. It has taught me that slim odds are not the same as no odds. One-outers do hit, seemingly far more often than the odds would suggest. It has taught me that the proper answer to almost any question is -- it depends.

I hope by the time I write my tenth anniversary post that the US government will have stopped wearing its ass for a hat and online poker will be legal in all states. I hope it will be regulated by some recognized, impartial party and this will give the average Joe faith that the game is honest and his money is safe (at least when it's not in the pot). I don't give this outcome great odds, but it wouldn't be the first time I've hit a two-outer at the river.

Suckout City

2009-03-07T16:05:00.003-05:00

I just finished a DoNT that had to have a higher concentration of suckouts and re-sucks than any tournament I've ever played. It was both amazing and rather disgusting at the same time.

I played my normal ultra-tight game until blinds got to 100/200/20 and I had blinded down to 1280. (I had taken a couple very small pots prior to this.) I get AJo UTG. We're down to seven players. I figure a push is the only reasonable action here. I get one caller who turns over AQo. I'm already packing up my stuff and heading for the exit. That is until I flop Broadway. No jack comes to save the other guy. I double up and he's down to crumbs.

Two hands later it folds to me in the SB holding KJo. I'd like to see a flop so I call. The BB, who has about 1000 more than me, makes it 600 to go. There are four players with stacks less than half the size of mine and only two more eliminations, so making a strategic withdrawal is the only reasonable course of action here. I go to click on the fold button but somehow hit the call button instead. I guess even your button clicking skills suffer if you don't play every day.

Figuring I've just thrown away 400 chips, I'm shocked to see a flop of KJ8, rainbow. This is a hand that demands to be slowplayed, so I check. The BB pushes all-in. I probably should have folded, but I just couldn't see him having trips. I called all-in. He turns over AA and I'm already counting my chips. Then disaster strikes. The turn is an 8. I can't believe it. Again I'm packing up and heading for the rail.

Not so fast. The suckouts aren't over yet. The river brings a K and I re-suck to take it down. I'm now the BIG stack by over 1500.

A couple hands later the guy who had the aces pushes all-in with 99 and gets a call from another smaller stack holding KJo. The flop is TT9, handing a boat to the guy I almost knocked out. The other guy fills his straight on the river, but it's not enough.

A few hands later, one of the smaller stacks raises with K2s and gets a call from the BB. When the flop brings a K, the K2 guy pushes in. The BB calls and turns over KQs. Of course, the river brings a 2 and another suckout keeps the tournament from ending.

There's maybe ten hands with a bit of blind stealing and not much other action. Then somebody is forced all-in in the SB. I call from the cutoff with AQo. We don't see the cards at the time because not everyone was all-in, but the SB has K6o. The flop brings KK9, with the turn filling his boat with a 6. When the river brings a 9 I figure I'm going to take it with kings and nines, ace kicker, but noooooooo...

A few hands later a couple of the smaller stacks push all-in. One has AJs, the smaller stack has A3s. This should be the last hand. But wait, there's more. The flop is 337. We're not done yet.

A couple hands later I'm in the SB with Q7o. The BB has only 180 left after posting the blind. I call, hoping he has less than an average hand. He does, but that doesn't matter when the flop brings him trips. At least it only cost me another 180.

Next hand we get another all-in from a small stack and a call from somebody with only 185 more. TT vs 44, with the bigger stack having the tens. Again, this should be the last hand. Nope. The guy with fours hits his two-outer on the river.

Finally, we get to the final hand. The loser from the last hand is all-in in the SB. Big stack to my right calls. I've got KK so of course I call. BB checks his option. We check it down, my kings prevail, and it's finally over.

Maybe it wasn't the most suckouts ever, but it sure seemed like a lot of them in pretty short order.

Luckiest I've ever seen

2009-02-24T15:53:00.002-05:00

I played a DoNT last night and watched as one of the other players combined incredibly poor judgment with unbelievable luck, the likes of which has not been seen since Danny Nguyen took down the Bay 101. I don't ordinarily like to put up lots of screen shots, but this is a special event well worth the trouble and the download time. If I were the paranoid sort I'd say the fix was in for this guy.

In the screen captures that follow, I've redacted the player names to protect the innocent. I'm in seat one. The luckbox of the night is in seat 6. I'm sure you'd have figured that out after the first hand.

Here's hand #1.

This makes perfect sense, right? I mean, seriously, who wouldn't limp from MP with 93o. You'd have to be crazy not to want to get into the action with a monster like that.

To get things going in the right direction, he connects just a little bit with the board.

I show hand #2 here, not as an illustration of luck, but just to give you a sense of the masterful grasp of tournament Hold'em possessed by our anti-hero.

What I missed in the screen capture here is that he did a min-raise with Q3s. The guy with A6o who called the min-raise isn't any smarter, so this should be a fun hand.

We see here that not all the luck ran toward seat 6. The truly amazing thing here is that A6o bet 40 on the flop and 40 again on the turn, each time getting a call from Q3s. On the river A6o bet 100 and got a call. The luckbox apparently felt his Q was good. Or this is really Dennis Rodman. (That's a Celebrity Poker joke, just in case you missed it.)

On to hand #3.

If you can raise with Q3 sooted from UTG+1, it seems only reasonable to call UTG with T9o. The poker gods, of course, clearly favor fools. Wait for it...

Another slight connection with the board. Let's do a quick recap. Three hands. Calls or raises with total trash on all three. Result -- four of a kind, a full house, and one small loss. And we're just getting started.

There's no screen cap of hand #4. Our anti-hero called all the way to the river and then mucked his hand. There was an ace and two kings on the board, so I'm figuring he had a powerhouse like 84o.

Hand #5.

An actual solid starting hand for our luckbox. This doesn't bode well. And it turns out not. Seat #5 pushes all-in on the flop and ends up with two pair. At least the other two in the hand just checked it down after they both completely missed the board.

Hand #6 was rather uneventful. Five to the flop. Check around. Check around again on the turn. Check to our man on the button who puts in a bigger than pot sized bet with four hearts on the board. Everybody folds.

Hand #7 was one of my few decent hands. I had AA and raised to 90. Three callers. The flop was J-high with two diamonds. I bet 330 into a 405 pot. One call from the luckbox. The turn brought my third ace and he finally folded to my bet of about half the pot. I was half hoping he would call.

Hand #8.

As should come as no surprise by now, our guy calls with junk.

And as should come as little further surprise, he connects. What I totally don't get is that he checks here. I realize trying to get inside this guy's head is likely to lead to the same experience Jennifer Lopez's character had in The Cell, but I still can't help trying. Does he not think top pair is likely good here? Is he slow playing? Is he really Dennis Rodman and actually has no idea what the little symbols on the cards mean?

It gets checked all the way down and the luckbox takes it.

Hand #9.

Four players see a flop of K22 with two spades. The cutoff bets 150. In what seemed to be a good move at the time, I called hoping to fill my flush, which would have lead to tragedy. Of course, the luckbox still has two cards, so he calls.

The turn brings an ace and it checks around.

As you can see, the river fills the cutoff's boat. He bets 150. I fold. The luckbox -- I swear he can't have any clue what the little symbols mean -- calls. Seriously, how could you possibly call with J6o on that board? This is why I'm writing this up. The obvious luck involved in this guy lasting more than a couple hands is very rare.

Hand #10. Hold on to your hats. This one's a real doozy.

The luckbox actually has a so-so hand this time. Can't fault him for limping. Well, some might argue he should have raised. With the way his luck is running, he's probably a fool for not raising. OTOH, he clearly plays better with junk. Anyway, five players see the flop.

Of course, our guy catches a piece. It checks to the cutoff who makes a pot sized bet. I'm guessing he has a queen and is trying to get rid of any flush draws. Silly wabbit. Hasn't he figured out there's no scaring away the luckbox?

Two folds, two calls. Given how hard I've been on the luckbox, I need to point out seat #8 makes a very stupid call here. At best he's got 7 outs. That makes him about 15% to catch his card on the turn and he's only getting 3:1 from the pot. Dumb call.

You saw this coming, didn't you? The luckbox bets 200 and it gets called around. Seat #8 is getting 9:1 from the pot this time so his call isn't quite so bad, though only if you figure his ace might still be good. Which it isn't.

The river doesn't help the luckbox or seat #8 and seems unlikely to have helped the cutoff. Things get really strange here. The luckbox puts out a miniscule bet of 50. It's a ridiculous bet, but what else can we expect? I can only guess that seat #8 thinks his bluff raise to 200 is going to move everyone else off this pot. Not likely.

The cutoff calls the bluff raise. We now discover that apparently the luckbox really can read the cards. He makes a teaser raise of 150. Seat #8 continues his folly of half-assed bluffs, this time making it 600 to go. It's unlikely he was ever going to succeed with this bluff, but if he had any chance at all he had to put some real conviction into it. Adding 250 on top of what's already gone into the pot isn't going to scare everyone away.

The cutoff finally realizes his queens aren't any good and he folds. The luckbox calls.

Hand #11.

The luckbox has two cards, so he calls. The flop doesn't help anyone so it checks around. The luckbox catches a card on the turn, but either doesn't read his hand right or is afraid someone is being very passive.

The river, naturally, fills his flush and he calls the weak bet from seat #5.

Hand #12 was taken down by the luckbox with an almost pot sized bet on the turn.

Hand #13.

The luckbox gets two cards, and they're sooted, so it's clearly time for a raise. The flop gives seat #5 top pair. Since we need a microscope to find his stack, he pushes. The luckbox, with no hand and no draw, naturally makes the call.

Words fail me here. Perhaps we should all just take a moment and contemplate in silence the awesome power of dumb, idiotic, borderline moronic luck.

Hand #14.

Seat #9, holding AQo, quite properly puts in a raise. I would have pushed right off the bat here considering his stack size, but I guess he was trying to be cautious. The luckbox is holding two cards so he calls.

The luck gets reversed in this hand. Our guy catches a piece of the flop and it completely misses seat #8. Nevertheless, he decides this is a good time to push it all in. As I said, this move would have made a lot more sense before the flop. Now it's kind of stupid. The luckbox has already checked so seat #8 could have seen the turn for free. But he pushes. Of course, our guy has bottom pair so he's not going to be deterred by a pot sized all-in.

Seat #8 lucks out and catches a queen on the river to double up.

Hand #15. Seat #3 and seat #10 both push all-in. Seat #10 takes it with a better kicker and seat #3 is down to crumbs.

Hand #16.

Luckbox has two cards, so he calls. Honestly, the way things are going for him I can't say as I blame him. I'd probably be calling with any two as well.

Luckbox again catches on the flop, but doesn't pursue it. They both check it all the way.

Hand #17.

Seat #3 pushes his crumbs into the pot. Seat #4 and the luckbox call, the BB checks.

The luckbox catches a T on the flop and everybody checks it down. Luckbox wins again. Seat #3 hits the rails.

Hand #18.

This one is somewhat uneventful. Luckbox calls with 83o. Who can blame him?

The flop brings seat #10 and I two pair. It checks to the river. Seat #10 puts in a min-bet. I call. Of course the luckbox, with an 8 high, calls. I think a chimpanzee is playing that seat. Seat #10 and I split the pot.

Hand #19, the luckbox raises pre-flop and everyone folds.

Hand #20.

The luckbox and seat #4 go to the turn. Luckbox bets, seat #4 folds. Yawn.

On hand #21 something remarkable happened. The luckbox folded to an all-in from seat #10. Somebody alert the media!

Hand #22.

Seat #8, UTG, pushes all-in for 545. Seat #10 and the luckbox call.

Seat #8 and the luckbox catch the same straight on the turn. Luckbox bets, seat #10 folds. Luckbox and seat #8 split.

Hand #23.

The luckbox, holding the never-to-be-fooled-with 53o, calls from the button. Who wouldn't? It checks all the way to the river.

Who could have possibly doubted? The luckbox bets 200 and seat #8 calls. Stupid call, especially with so few chips left.

Hand #24 is a huge surprise. The luckbox calls an all-in from seat #8 with the luckbox holding the Brunson and the luckbox loses! What is this tournament coming to?

Hand #25 we get back on track. Luckbox call an all-in from seat #4, this time holding A6s. Seat #4 was clearly desperate because he pushed with 98o. The luckbox catches a pair and seat #4 can't quite make his straight.

Hand #26.

This time I wake up with a playable hand. The luckbox calls with two cards and seat #10 calls.

I catch TPTK on the flop and bet a bit over half the pot. The luckbox still has two cards, so he calls. Seat #10 folds.

The turn brings both straight and flush possibilities. I check, knowing that if there's any way I can be beat, I probably am against this opponent. The luckbox checks. This could mean absolutely anything.

The river doesn't improve my hand so I check again. So does the luckbox. Seeing the cards it's obvious I should have bet, particularly since he was almost certain to have called. I take a pot that almost assures victory in this one.

The final hand.

The luckbox actually gets decent cards and limps in. Seat #10 violates a couple basic rules (don't risk chips when you don't need to and don't ever go all-in against the luckbox) and pushes all-in with 99. Seat #2, down to the felt, decides this is as good a time as any to go home and calls all-in. Naturally, the luckbox calls. Three to the flop.

You just knew that was coming, didn't you? Really, what other cards possibly could have fallen. Okay, they could have all been hearts. Short of that, though, this is the only possible outcome with the luckbox in the hand.

And the magic is finally over. This last hand is one of the few I think he actually played right. Maybe he was just trying to get into the groove.

Let's recap. Twenty-seven hands played. The luckbox bumbles his way to 15 wins and one split. In some ways I suppose the real miracle here is that he didn't piss away his chips on the other ten hands he played to the showdown.

If it wasn't for a few incredibly stupid calls, I'd have to suspect this guy could see not only the other players' cards but the cards that were yet to fall on the board. Maybe he could and the dumb plays were just his way of providing cover. Okay, not likely at a $5 DoN. Still, this is one of the most amazing runs of dumb luck having out over incredibly stupid play I've ever seen. And I've been playing poker a LONG time.

Another milestone

2009-02-18T16:31:00.002-05:00

The Quest has passed another small milestone. The bankroll is now over $200. It's been quite a while since I started with that measly $5. The most notable jump has been since Christmas when I first started playing the Double-or-Nothing tournaments. Those have been incredibly lucrative, growing the bankroll by 66% in under two months. And that includes a couple weeks when I didn't play at all due to travel and lack of an Internet connection. (Which is also why I haven't been posting regular blog entries.)

Despite a few recent losses, my ROI on these is still over 21%. I'm not sure if that's really good or not, but I'm thinking about asking my financial advisor if DoN tournaments are an allowable investment for my IRA.

The competition at these, even in the shallow end where I'm playing, definitely seems to have tightened up recently. I'm seeing lots of players with VP$IP's under 20%. I suspect it's even worse as you move up the ladder.

I played one tournament today where I got absolute crap cards. The most playable hand I got was KQo, but somebody put in a big raise before it got to me and folding seemed the proper move. When I finally got an ace, I was in the SB and it folded to me. I had already blinded down to the point where I needed to make a move and this seemed as good a time as any. I pushed and, wouldn't you know it, the BB has pocket jacks. I make it all the way to 75/150 blinds, play one single hand the whole time, and run into a pocket pair. So it goes...

The other two I've played so far today went much better. I squeaked by in one and dominated the last half of the other. Somewhat surprisingly, or maybe not considering how things have tightened up, the last hand in the latter was played very well by one of the other players. The shortie pushes all-in for just a bit over 2BB. I call with something like K7o. (The shortie was UTG, so he could be moving with any two cards here.) One other bigger stack calls. We check it all the way down. The other big stack had QQ the whole way. Didn't raise pre-flop, didn't raise after the flop despite his queens being an overpair the whole way. It's refreshing to see it played correctly.

Double-Up Getting Tougher?

2009-01-30T13:38:00.001-05:00

If poker has taught me anything, it's that one shouldn't attempt to draw larger conclusions from a small set of occurrences. It's one of the fallacies that allows the sharks to feed off the fishes.

That said, I'm starting to wonder if the sharks aren't beginning to swarm in the Double-Up pool. Until the last couple days most of the Double-Ups I've played have been heavily populated with players who clearly didn't have a clue about proper strategy.

Some of the ones I've played recently, though, have had a majority of players who weren't idiots. Play even in the turbos has dragged on for quite a while, with pressure being applied all around.

I'm playing one right now where the VP$IPs of the last six players are 14%, 4%, 12%, 7%, 18%, and the high of 32%. That's after 60 hands. These all appear to be decent players who know what they're doing in this situation. No rash moves. No panic from the small stacks. It's kind of scary.

I'm dearly hoping this is just a blip and not indication of a larger trend. These have been quite profitable for me.

In case you're wondering, the one I was playing finally ended. The guy with the VP$IP of 32% made a stupid move on the last hand, raising a dry pot on the river when one player was already all-in, but it turned out okay. He won the hand and I added another big $4.80 to my bankroll.

Addendum: I just played another one that went longer than any of the turbo Double-Ups I've played. The play was very, very tight, but a couple of these guys still didn't have a clue about strategy. Three times there was a player who had crumbs left after posting the blinds and this one bigger stack raised pre-flop. He raised! I couldn't believe it. One player left to eliminate. One player who is clearly going all-in for just a bit more than the BB. And this moron raises and shuts everyone else out of the pot. I was screaming at the screen.

There were a couple other times where there were obvious calls to be made and people folded. I recall one where the SB had about 200 more than the BB. (The amount, not the player.) I had a lot of chips so I called from the button knowing he'd push and the BB (the player, not the amount) would call. He pushed, then the BB folds. He's already in for 800 and he folds for 200 more. Oh, well. They may be tight players, but they clearly don't know beans about proper strategy.

Double-Up Object Lesson

2009-01-29T18:37:00.002-05:00

Today I'm going to yet again ram home the point made in Secret #1a. Don't risk chips when there's nothing to gain. This happened on the last hand of a tournament I just finished.

Here's the scenario. Six players left. Blinds are 125/250/25. The SB has 180 left after posting the blind. Proceeding to the left, the BB has 6235, UTG has 1960, I'm UTG+1 with 3140, the cutoff has 1580, and the button has 1380. If you've been reading this series, you know I consider this to be the entire table vs the SB.

UTG folds. I've got AJo. I wanted to force the SB all-in, so I made a min-raise to 500. In hindsight, I should have just called. The raise was more likely to scare him away. Here's where the larger mistake occurred. The cutoff raises to 1000, leaving 580 behind. Huh? The whole point here was to get the SB to push in with his last chips. Okay, again, I should have just called, but this guy has now compounded my error and clearly violated Secret #1a. All he has to do is stay alive a few more hands, one round at most, and he's in the money. But now he's trying to add chips for no good reason. And he's made it clear to the SB that unless he's holding AA, his correct move is to fold.

Of course, it folds around to me. The correct action would have been for me to fold. But I knew the SB was about 95% to go out in the next couple hands and even if I went all-in against this guy and lost, I'd still have enough chips to survive. And I wanted an opportunity to punish this guy for his ~~stupidity~~ improper play. I know that probably sounds horrible, but his action annoyed the hell out of me. Plus, I could always end it on this hand. I call.

The flop comes AT7 with two spades. I check, knowing the other guy is going to push in and that I'm going to make the call, hoping he doesn't have me outkicked. Naturally, he pushes, which turns out to be an even ~~dumber~~ less optimal move than his pre-flop raise. I call. He turns over KK. The turn and river bring him no salvation.

I know it's hard not to take aggressive action with KK, but you still have to take the overall situation into account. If he'd just called pre-flop I wouldn't be writing this. Absolutely couldn't fault him for that. If he'd checked it down I wouldn't be writing this. He'd have still lost, but he'd be left with enough chips that he might outlast the SB. Re-raising pre-flop was risking chips he didn't need to and pushing all-in with an ace on the board is risking the whole tournament for unneeded chips. And he paid the price.

One can only hope the guy with KK learned something here.

Thus ends today's object lesson.

Double-Up Secrets #6

2009-01-27T01:44:00.000-05:00

I don't have a clever name for this one. You could file it under "collusion", or one of the entries about the small stacks being the enemy, or we could just call it "Use your frellin' head!"

Here's the situation. Small stack moves all-in for less than 2BB. SB, who has him well covered, calls. The BB, who has about three times as many chips as the next closest stack and would in no way miss the chips, folds. What kind of cards can you possibly have that you fold on a chance to force out the final player when you're getting better than 5:1 on your money? 72o is only giving 8:1 against AA. AKs vs 32o is only 3:2 in favor of AK.

Admittedly, the pot odds are somewhat irrelevant at this point and maybe the guy figured he'd just be donating to the small stack, but there is already one caller. This is going to the showdown and two players vs one greatly increases the odds of the one player losing.

If a player moves all-in with less than 2BB and you've got three times as many chips as the next closest player and you clearly won't miss the 2BB, you call. There's nothing to think about here. It doesn't matter what your cards are. You call. End of story.

If you fold and the small stack wins, he gets one or two BB less than he would have if you called. In this case the difference is less than 1BB. If you call and the small stack wins, he gets one or two BB more than he would have if you folded. Neither of these results is likely to make a huge difference in the overall outcome for you. If you call and win, the small stack is out and you're one player closer to winning the prize.

Use your heads out there, people.

Double-Up Secrets #5

2009-01-23T01:25:00.001-05:00

Double-Up Secrets #5: Time your all-in

At some point in these double-up tournaments you're bound to find yourself with a small stack and in need of at least stealing the blinds. And sometimes, regardless of how patient you've been, the cards just aren't cooperating. You haven't seen a decent hand in ages and you're getting desperate. Hopefully you still have enough chips left to make at least some of the other players take notice when you push all-in.

It won't happen all the time, it may not even happen often, but sometimes you'll find the players in the blinds have fairly comfortable stacks -- well situated in the top five -- but not so comfortable that you are of no concern. If your stack is big enough to move them out of that comfort zone if they call your all-in and you win, that's the situation you want.

If you aren't getting cards and are forced to make a move, you're just hoping everybody is going to fold to your bet. By timing your move so the players in the best position to make the call are ones that you can hurt, you maximize your chances of getting the folds you want.

Here's an example from a recent tournament. Blinds are 125/250/25. I'm the small stack with T1085. The next closest stacks have T1535 and T1615. It folds to me in the cutoff. I've got a lowly 98o. The button has T1940. He's likely to not be playing anything but super-premium hands. The SB is the big stack with T5780. He's a concern because he can double me up and barely notice it. The BB has T2520 left after putting in the blind.

In this situation, the BB is comfortable, but calling my all-in and losing would knock him right out of that comfort zone and make him the small stack. If he's a smart player, he's unlikely to call with anything less than AA or KK.

Pushing all-in here with 98o is clearly a gamble, but by evaluating the situation you can maximize the odds that your gamble will pay off.

I pushed and it folded around. I was no longer the small stack and the blinds were about to hit the other two small stacks. Three hands later it was all over. The well timed push with junk was just what I needed to survive until the big stack could knock somebody else out.

The same kind of thing certainly applies to normal tournaments as well, but the comfort zone that exists in the double-up tournaments isn't quite the same in regular tournaments. Players are always looking to acquire more chips and will be far more likely to call what looks like a desperation all-in with mediocre holdings. The threat of dropping out of that comfort zone is what makes this more likely to succeed in the double-ups.

Double-Up Secrets #4

2009-01-21T16:14:00.001-05:00

Today I'm going to write about a topic that's not just a secret for double-up tournaments, it's treated kind of like a poker secret in general. It's often practiced by the pros in tournaments but seldom discussed. So let's keep today's topic just among ourselves.

Double-Up Secret #4: Collusion

Perhaps "collusion" is a bit too pejorative. Let's call it players acting in their own collective best interest.

The situations where this might come into play occur fairly often in the very latest stages of double-up tournaments. (The same concept will often apply in any tournament where the top X players all get the same prize and to a lesser extent in any tournament where the prize steps start getting big.)

Say there are two or three big stacks with T3000 or more and one small stack with less than T500. Say blinds are 150/300/30 and there are six players left. One of the big stacks limps and the shortie pushes all-in. It's almost a lock the limper is going to call since he's getting more than 4:1 on the call. The proper play for any of the big stacks yet to act is to make the call, regardless of what cards they hold. If the original big stack has a brain, he will call. Then, and here's the "collective best interest" part, everyone checks it all the way down. If you caught quads on the flop, you still check it all the way down.

There are two key points here. First, the shortie doesn't have enough chips to put much of a hurt on any of the big stacks. Second, and this is a repeated theme, the "enemy" here is the shortie. It is in the collective best interest of all the remaining players to do whatever maximizes the chances of eliminating the final player. The shortie is all-in, so he's going to the showdown no matter what. The best odds for the other players to defeat him is to have as many hands as possible going against him.

All too often I see this kind of situation arise, and then one of the bigger stacks catches something on the flop and can't resist the temptation of betting his hand. He's lost sight of the true goal -- survival. In this case survival is best achieved by eliminating that last player. And that is best served by having everyone hang around until the showdown.

A similar scenario that will often come up is when one player is forced all-in by the blinds or the ante. Be observant for this and, if it doesn't cost you most of your chips, be sure to call. And pray the players acting behind you know how to act in their own best interest. Again, the proper play is to call and then check it all the way down. Five hands drawing against one have far better odds of coming out on top.

Sometimes that last scenario will arise when there is more than one player yet to be eliminated. The collective best play is still to call and check it down, but you need to watch for shorter stacks who may hit the flop big and decide their personal best interest is served by pushing all-in. For this reason it may be best to only make the original call if you won't miss those chips (they're a tiny part of your stack) or you can afford to call the second biggest stack without serious damage to your stack.

In any of these situations there's always the possibility of some idiot who doesn't know the proper play. He'll catch on the flop and put in a big bet. In this case, all you can do is scream at the screen, shake your head in disgust, do what makes the most sense to conserve your chips, and take solace in the certainty that karma will catch up to him eventually.

There will sometimes be other situations where there will be an opportunity for players to act in concert toward their own collective best interest. In Double-Up Secrets #1 I wrote about a tournament I played where somebody built a big stack and then sat out.

Ordinarily, given the size of the player's stack, this wouldn't be a bad idea. In this case, however, the chips moved around among the smaller stacks for quite a while and this player was eventually in serious danger of blinding out. I was monitoring his stack size and noticed when it was getting low. In fairness to some of the other players, PokerSnore overwrites the player's stack size with "Sitting Out" when the player isn't at the table, so you had to hover over his spot to have his stack size pop up. But keeping track of the size of the other players' stacks, even if they're sitting out, is part of situational awareness. Everyone should be doing this at all times.

With just one more player to be eliminated, it became clear to me that the best course of action for the active players was to simply fold to the BB as quickly as possible. This would move the blinds around and more rapidly deplete the stack of the player sitting out. Sadly, not everyone caught on to this fact. Eventually this player was blinded out and eliminated, but we had to sit through a number of completely unnecessary hands being played out because some players were either unaware of the situation or couldn't figure out for themselves the proper strategy.

I want to make it clear that this was not a situation of someone who was unavoidably detained and fully intended to return. It was clear he sat out on this table as a strategy toward winning. It removed the temptation to play marginal hands and allowed him to do other things while coasting to a win. His sitting out was a strategy, and as such is subject to being taken advantage of just like any other strategy.

At any rate, the larger point is to maintain situational awareness and keep looking for spots where you can further the collective interests of those players most likely to win, which hopefully includes you.

Double-Up Secrets #3

2009-01-19T15:56:00.002-05:00

Double-Up Secret #3: The big stack is also not your friend.

Last time I wrote about the big stack not being your enemy. Just because he isn't your enemy doesn't mean he's your friend.

When it's late in the going -- seven players left or a big gap between the five biggest stacks and the rest of the players -- you don't want to get involved in a serious pot with somebody who can put a bad hurt on you. I'm assuming you're one of the big stacks here. If you're one of the small stacks, you have no choice but to go up against somebody who can put you out or leave you with crumbs. If you're in the top five, particularly if there's a big gap between five and six, you don't want to risk losing a lot of chips.

This doesn't mean you have to run away every time a big stack limps into a pot. You just need to be sure you hit the flop huge before you commit a significant number of chips. If you catch big on the flop and are first to act, go ahead and bet out. The other guy, if he's smart, will run away. If the other guy bets into the flop or plays back at you, you best be holding THE nuts if you continue. The penultinuts is death in this situation. I've written before about how I made this mistake in a ticket tournament. I rode the penultinuts from a sure ticket right to the rail. It's a lesson that has been seared in my memory. Learn from my mistake. Remember, your goal at this point is not chip accumulation, it's chip conservation. You must stay in that top five. It's far better to take a small hit and run away than to risk losing a big chunk of your stack.

I see this kind of thing happen all the time. Guys who could sit out and make the money keep taking risks trying to accumulate chips and often find themselves on the rail with nothing.

You know you're involved with some smart players when you see two big stacks quickly check it all the way down once getting into the pot. They know that playing into each other will just end with sadness for one of them and not really that much additional joy for the other.

This secret covers much of the same ground as Double-Up Secret #1a, but it's well worth repeating.

Quest Update

2009-01-15T18:24:00.002-05:00

The Quest is moving along quite nicely of late. The Double-Up tournaments have clearly been the shot in the arm that I needed. The bankroll is up 58% since I began playing these tournaments. PokerTracker tells me my ROI in these is 26%. I don't know if that's a good tournament ROI, but I know I'd love to get half that return on my other investments. I'm now 25 for 38.

I got email from what used to be Poker.com and is now PDC Poker reminding me that I still have money there. I loaded up their new software and found they sit $0.02/$0.04 NLHE. No short-handed tables, but at least it's another place I can play with the current bankroll. I played for about an hour and walked away with $1 in profits. Overall impression was that the tables were very soft. Much more like I would expect at this level. The tables at PokerStars are hardly filled with sharks, but there are far more decent players in the shallow end than you would imagine.

PDC Poker also sent me a special reload bonus offer, but the clearance requirements look a bit steep. 300 comp points to clear $1 of bonus. Playing an hour of $0.02/$0.04 I earned a big ZERO comp points. At Poker.com you earned comp points for just sitting there. At the new place I can't even find specifics on how the comp points are awarded. I think I'll pass on their fine reload offer.

The bankroll now stands at $169.41. If I can sustain the current pace the next step up should be less than two months away.

Double-Up Secrets #2

2009-01-15T10:35:00.003-05:00

Double-Up Secret #2: The big stack is not your enemy.

Remember, your goal is not to finish with the biggest stack. Your goal is to finish in the top five. This means your enemy, or at least the one you should be focusing on, is the small stack. If you are the small stack, then it's the player with the next bigger stack. Early on this isn't particularly relevant, but when you're down to seven players -- only two eliminations left -- the focus of your aggression should be the two smallest stacks. If there are several stacks all in the same range, all of them should be your target.

These are the guys you want to see lose chips. If you're in the top five, then it doesn't even matter if you're the one winning the chips. You just want to see the small stacks get smaller.

Conversely, these are the stacks you don't want to see get bigger. It's sometimes painful to see these guys take the blinds, but it would be even worse to limp with a marginal hand only to have the shortie go all-in from one of the blinds with just enough that you have to fold. Now you've made his stack just that much larger.

Hurt the small stacks whenever you can, but don't give them chips. Just like in any other tournament, somebody who's in trouble stack-wise is likely to push all-in with anything they think has a chance of winning. You don't want to go up against a small stack with anything you wouldn't be willing to call his all-in with. If he's a smart player he'll read a limp as weakness and an opportunity to pick up some badly needed chips. Be sure you aren't just donating when you call.

If you're finding these tips useful, I'd appreciate you stopping by Poker Weblogs and rating the Patchwork blog. You will need to register there in order to vote.

Double-Up Secrets #1a

2009-01-13T10:00:00.001-05:00

This one is somewhat a corollary of Double-Up Secret #1 and may on the surface sound like another, "Well, duh!"

Double-Up Secret #1a: Don't risk chips when there's nothing to gain.

I just finished playing a Double-Up tournament where I saw this happen. We were down to six. There were three players all with about T800, in serious danger, and three who were in no danger at all. One of the shorties got involved in a hand with one of the big stacks and came out on top, more than doubling up. He wasn't a shoe-in to win, but he was in no immediate danger and with two players still at T800 he should have been folding anything but super premium hands. In his situation I would probably fold anything other than AA, KK, or QQ. I might call from the SB with a very strong drawing hand. But that would be it.

The next hand he was in the BB with the big stack in the SB. It folds to the SB who does a min-raise. The BB is holding AJo. The number one priority at this point is to protect your stack. Short of super-premium holdings, the proper action here without question is to fold. I don't consider AJo to be a super-premium holding.

Instead of folding, he does a min-reraise. This is probably the worst possible play here. He's committed 15% of his very precious stack on a non-made hand. Further, he's made a bet that's sure to be called because the pot is laying almost 6:1. And he's playing against someone with a stack more than twice the size of his -- somebody who has no fear of him at all. I could maybe see making a call here with the assumption you'd fold unless hitting the flop huge, but fold is still the obvious correct play. Pushing all-in would be better than making a min-reraise. The SB calls.

The flop is QQ6. The SB checks. Not holding a Q, I'm checking here. If you put in a reasonable bet, say half the pot, your stack is back very close to the danger zone and you're almost pot committed. Doing that on a bluff is suicidal. He dons his kamikaze outfit and bets T450 into a T990 pot, leaving T1210 behind. The SB calls. Oops.

The turn is a 4, unlikely to be any help to anyone. The SB checks again. Watching as this unfolded, even without knowing the cards, I had the clear sense the guy had gotten himself into a bad situation and just didn't know how to get out. He had enough chips already in the pot he felt he couldn't leave them out there, but he didn't know how to get them back.

I have no clue what was going through his head, but he bet T750 into a T1890 pot, leaving T460 behind. If the SB has anything -- and he must have something or he would have folded to the flop bet -- he's not going to fold to such a small bet now. The BB is clearly pot committed at this point, but doesn't push all his chips in. This is either desperation or somebody holding QQ trying to suck the other guy into pushing him all-in. The SB raises him all-in. Being pot committed he has little choice but to call. Actually, given the way the betting unfolded, it was pretty clear he was toast. It would have been smarter to fold and take a chance on the next hand rather than tossing in the rest of the chips on what was sure to be a losing hand.

The SB turns over KQ and we don't even need to see the river. The two small stacks who were in big trouble no doubt say a prayer of thanks and the tournament is over.

There were many mistakes made here by the BB, but by far his biggest was getting involved in the first place. If he folds to the min-raise by the SB he's still got twice as many chips as the next closest stack and there are two players in serious trouble with just one elimination left. He should be playing turtle and letting the big stacks finish the tournament for him. Instead, he tried to build his stack to no good purpose. One of the short stacks is quite likely to be eliminated in the next round or two. There's no good reason to take a risk on chipping up at this point. Don't risk chips when there's nothing to gain.

A Quest milestone

2009-01-12T13:36:00.003-05:00

As I write this, The Quest bankroll stands at $150.06. That's the 30 buy-ins I need to safely play at $0.02/$0.05 NL. I've been playing at that level for a while, theoretically just getting my toes wet, but now it's official. The Quest is now marching toward the $0.05/$0.10 NL level.

It's always been my intent to use good bankroll management on The Quest. I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the 30 buy-in bankroll. It was no big deal before. If I lost a few buy-ins I could easily refund or just start over. It's still not really a big deal, but the 30 buy-ins doesn't leave me feeling safe. I'd like to see more like 50 buy-ins in the bankroll.

I'm going to advance the buy-in level before the next move up. I'll start dabbling with $10 buy-in events when I hit 30 buy-ins, with the official move coming at 40 buy-ins. For the level after that I'll advance both points by another 10 buy-ins and will then be at the point I consider fairly safe.

You made the call

2009-01-12T10:32:00.003-05:00

Well, actually, I don't know what you would have done because there were no responses to my "You make the call" entry.

Here's the situation. PokerSnore Double-Up tournament. You're in the BB for T300 with T1800 behind. Blinds are 150/300/30. There are six players remaining -- one more elimination and it's over. The short stack has T1415. The next biggest stack has T2430. You're holding KQs. The small stack pushes all-in and it folds around to you.

If you fold, you've still got T1800 and aren't in immediate danger of blinding out, but the SB is coming next hand and you'll be down to T1620. Just as importantly, the once small stack will have T2045 if you fold. He's pretty desperate, being down to less than 5BB. He could be pushing here with almost anything, hoping the other short stack won't play back at him.

If you call and win, the tournament is over and you walk away with money. If you call and lose, you're in very big trouble and will probably have to push with whatever you are dealt next hand. Certainly you'll have to push within the next four or five hands.

I made the call. Ultimately, I reasoned that no matter what I did I was going to have to risk all my chips within the next few hands. Better to make my stand now with decent holdings and hope my opponent had JJ or less, giving me a coin toss.

My opponent had AJo. I didn't catch and he took down the pot.

I was forced to push with 54o a couple hands later and ended up getting outkicked by a 73o. Sad way to end a tournament.

If you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment. I think I made the right choice here, regardless the outcome, but I would like to hear what others think.

Double-Up Secrets #1

2009-01-10T11:37:00.003-05:00

I've long used StatCounter to monitor the activity here on the Patchwork blog. Mostly it shows me how futile is the effort to continue this mess, but I do it as much for myself as anyone else, so I keep going. It's also made clear to me that the vast majority of people who come here via search engine do so by mistake. That was the genesis of the "Maybe you were looking for..." section off to the right (if you're not using Bloglines or Google Reader).

A strange thing has happened recently. Some people have been searching for terms that properly link here. (Aside from "Guest-Tek sucks". It still cracks me up that I'm #1 on Google for that search string. I'll probably now cement that position since I've mentioned it again.) Someone came here specifically looking for "MMIAs". That's a bit of a hoot since as far as I'm aware I'm the only one to ever use that term and even I haven't used it in quite a while. There are still plenty of them out there in case you wondered.

Several of the recent searches have been for information regarding the Double-Up tournaments I've been writing about. Specifically, people seem to be looking for tips on how to win at these. Careful reads of what I've written will no doubt turn up more than a few useful tips, but I've generally assumed anyone reading this blog is already an experienced player and is aware of how to properly play in the types of events where the top X places all get the same prize.

I may come to regret it, but this is the first of what will no doubt be a very irregular, disjoint series of tips on how to be successful at Double-Up tournaments. In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that right now I stand 16 for 25 in these. I was bubble boy in at least three of the losses. (I also gigli'd in a couple, most spectacularly when I went out on the first hand in a KK vs AA battle.)

So, without further ado, here is Double-Up Secret #1.

You don't have to come in first to win.

This may well be firmly in the "duh" category, but it has everything to do with how to properly play in these tournaments. You don't have to build a giant stack. It's a bit like when you're in a group hiking and you come across an angry bear. You don't have to be the fastest runner in the group. You just have to not be the slowest.

With the Double-Up tournaments, you just have to keep your stack in the top five. Much of the time simply not being the short stack is good enough. I'd like to be able to say when you build your stack to size X you can sit back and relax, but I can't. There is no fixed rule on stack size because, like with most things in poker, it depends on the situation.

Generally speaking, if you double up early, this will take you most of the way to victory. If you do so, you should start playing ultra tight. Only get involved in situations where you know you're very, very likely to come out on top. Only play premium holdings and be willing to let go of the drawing hands if there is any resistance at all. I've folded AK pre-flop because somebody ahead of me put in a big raise and I wasn't willing to risk the chips on a hand that will have to connect with the flop to continue. Once you've doubled up your starting stack your objective is chip conservation. The chips you already have will quite likely carry you through, so guard them carefully.

This is not to say you should take undue risks to double up. Some people play these a bit like freerolls, trying to double early, and will push all-in with almost any two cards. If you happen to have premium holdings when this happens, go for it. I don't recommend taking much of a risk though. If you don't have AA, KK, or QQ, it's probably not worth calling. Even QQ would be marginal in the very early going.

Short of a situation like this, play only strong starting hands and maybe the odd speculative suited connector if you can see the flop cheap. Even in the turbos you have sufficient time to build your stack if you don't take a big hit in the early going. Don't be in a hurry. Remember, you don't need the biggest stack, you just need to be in the top five. Once you get beyond the first two or three levels, drop the speculative hands unless you're sure you can afford it.

If you do double up, don't get too confident in your big stack. The blinds will keep rising and you may eventually be forced to engage again. I was in a game the other day where one guy had built his stack to about T4000 and then sat out. Ordinarily a stack of this size at the point in the tournament that he sat out would coast to victory, but this particular tournament dragged on and on. His stack began to dwindle. The blinds kept going up. At some point it became obvious to me that if we all simply folded to the BB as quickly as possible, the absent player would be blinded out and the rest of us would win. Not exactly the white hat way of winning, but this is poker. If you walk away from your seat, you suffer the consequences. The guy did eventually blind out, though it was clear that some of the other players weren't aware of the situation because they kept playing their hands. We'll discuss that topic another time.

You make the call

2009-01-09T20:41:00.004-05:00

Here's the situation. PokerSnooze Double-Up tournament. Six players remaining, meaning only one more elimination to go. I'm in the BB for T300, leaving me T1800 behind. There's T630 already in the pot, including my blind. The short stack pushes all-in for T1415. It folds to me. I'm holding KQs. The pot is laying me 1.83:1. Do I make the call for T1115?

If I fold, I'll be the short stack by about T250. I won't be out of it, but I'll need to catch something to push with in the next four or five hands. (Or there's always the possibility two of the bigger stacks could mix it up, but I'm not holding my breath on that.)

If I call, there's a small chance I'm ahead. Most likely I'm behind. If I'm lucky, he's got JJ or less and we're in a coin flip. If I'm slightly unlucky, he's got an ace. If I'm really unlucky, he's got AA, KK or QQ. If I lose I'll be left with about T700.

Assuming he's got any pocket pair, or ace-anything, PokerStove says I win 42.68% of the time. If I'm just playing the odds, I clearly make the call given what the pot is laying me. But there's a lot else at play here seeing as I only need to survive past one more elimination that isn't me. If I fold, the two next biggest stacks will be T2045 and T2430, with blinds at 300/150/30.

Discuss amongst yourselves. Do I make the call?

Still doubling

2009-01-08T18:14:00.002-05:00

I'm still hitting up the Double-Up tournaments at PokerSnooze. Results the last week have been off a bit. I lost three in a row yesterday.

Very first hand on one of them I get pocket kings. There is a min-raise ahead of me. For some reason the alarm bells didn't go off on this. I'm thinking now that for some reason I didn't notice it was a raise. Two more callers ahead. I make it T140 to go. The original raiser pushes all-in. Combined with the min-raise this should have made the alarm bells ring their loudest. That's why I'm thinking I misread the min-raise as a call. I called. Of course, the other guy had aces. One hand and I hit the rails.

These tournaments appear to have become exceedingly popular. I tried for about five minutes yesterday to register in one of them. I'd select one with just one player registered. By the time I could click on the necessary things to get registered the tournament would be full. Even when I clicked the "register me in any similar tournament" button it took a couple minutes for a table to come up.

As I was writing this I won my third Double-Up of the day. It doesn't quite make up for yesterday due to the rake, but it sure feels good. I was beginning to wonder if I'd lost my touch.

I've noticed that the quality of play in these has been improving a bit. In the last hand of the last tournament one player was all-in in the SB. I had squat, but I called anyway hoping everyone else would grok the situation and do likewise. One other player did and the BB checked. Surprisingly, the BB caught trips on the flop, but he checked it down. The shortie was eliminated and the rest of us walked away with money. It's nice to see it played properly at least sometimes.

The recent tournament losses have set back progress on The Quest a bit, but it's still moving in the right direction.

More doubling, sort ot

2009-01-03T12:55:00.002-05:00

I've been continuing to play the Double-or-Nothing tournaments at PokerStars. One bubble and two more wins making me 6 for 7.

One thing here has started to bother me a bit. "Double-or-nothing" implies you walk away with double what you wagered or empty handed. That only happens here if you disregard the 8% tournament fee. If you're looking at this in a truly logical manner, you can't just ignore that fee. It's money that was in your virtual pocket before the tournament started and is no longer there once the cards fly.

In the non-turbo tournaments that 8% fee means you're really looking at winning 85% of what you actually wagered. That's not really "double-or-nothing". It's a bit better with the turbo versions since the fee is only 4%. There you're looking at winning 92% of your original wager.

Thinking about all this made me realize how PokerStars can afford to sponsor all those pros. The tournament fee percentage is relatively constant across all tournaments. In the deep end of the SnGs they're making about $80 an hour for server resource time. In the shallow end it drops to $4/hour or less, but I'd be willing to wager they're still making a tidy profit even at $4/hour for a resource that's shared among probably dozens of tables. In the deep end they're clearly making a killing.

In many ways, it would be far more equitable for the poker sites to charge a flat hourly fee for sitting at a table. But that would make the charge far more obvious than rakes and tournament fees do and would no doubt scare away a lot of potential customers.

As to the quality of play at the DorN tournaments, it continues to be quite horrible. With only two eliminations to go, two players on life support and a third with an M of about 3, I watched as the two big stacks pushed all-in against each other. Stupid, stupid move.

I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on these guys. I once pushed all-in on the bubble of a ticket tournament where I could have easily folded my way to a ticket. I had the penultinuts and figured the odds of the other guy having the nuts were slim. I was wrong. But at least I learned from that experience. Last night I folded AKo against a small raise ahead of me. I probably had the best hand, but with two eliminations to go, one guy with less than 2BB, another with just a bit more, and a third with less than half my stack, it simply wasn't worth the risk. My goal at this point is survival, not chip accumulation.

Too many of these players appear to be falling into the trap of wanting to build huge stacks. There's nothing wrong with that if it's early in the tournament. Late in the game, however, you don't want to take any unnecessary chances. Fifth is the same as first in these things. You don't need the biggest stack to win. All you need is to still be seated when that fifth player is eliminated. One of those big stacks I mentioned above threw away a win. He could have clicked "sit out" and made the money. Instead, he took a chance on increasing his stack and went home with nothing. Thanks for playing.

I'm going to continue playing the DorN tournaments as much as possible. The turbos are kind of nice because the whole thing is over in about 30 minutes. I usually don't bother even trying to play if I know I have less than an hour available. With these turbos I can probably play four in that time. (Two at a time.)

I only wish more players would play at turbo speed. Far too many players seem to be simultaneously playing on more tables than they can really handle. It makes action even at the turbo tables a real snooze-fest much of the time. Given that PokerStars has actively been courting this kind of non-action, I'm thinking they should really be called PokerSnooze. If you want to play 20 tables at once, I'm sure the action is coming at you non-stop. If you play just one or two tables at the same time, keep the coffee handy. You're going to be needing it.

Double or Nothing

2008-12-30T12:47:00.003-05:00

PokerStars has started a new type of SnG tournament they call "Double or Nothing". From what I can see on the games list these are all single table, 10-player affairs. Half the field doubles up, half hits the rail with nothing. They play, or at least should play, much like the ticket tournaments where the top X players all get the same prize. Except in these you only have to beat half the field.

I've played three of these at the $5 level and have cashed in all of them. They may play differently at the higher entry fee ones, but in the ones I've played I'm pretty sure you could practically fold your way to the money. Certainly playing nothing but premium hands until forced by stack size to do otherwise would appear a solid strategy.

While these are still young and many players are figuring out the proper strategy, I think I'm going to hit them up big time. The turbo ones play out very quickly. Neither of the ones I played lasted much more than 30 minutes. $5 profit in half an hour is better than I usually do at the $0.05 NL tables.

There are some frustrating moments, such as in the last hand of the last one I played. On the bubble, one player was down to less than 1BB and clearly had to just pick a hand and pray. He did, and three others called to see the flop. Since we're on the bubble and all but one win the same amount with the next elimination, the clearly correct strategy here is for everyone to check it down and hope one of us has a better hand than the guy who's all-in. I caught a small piece of the raggedy flop and checked like I should. But Mr. Big Stack figured this would be a great time to push in his huge stack. Idiot. He had top pair, but the short stack had a pocket pair. The all-in forced the other two of us out of the pot. Had I stayed I would have caught queens up and taken the pot. Luckily, the short stack's pocket pair was very small and the pair of sevens Mr. Big Stack caught on the flop took it down. The proper play here -- to check it all the way down -- seems so obvious to me I'm shocked when other players apparently don't see it.

Since I last wrote here I had another of those horrible sessions where I kept getting good cards that came in second. Very frustrating. I had one pretty decent session where I won almost two buy-ins. It didn't quite make up for the big loss, but at least I felt better.

With the help of the Double or Nothing SnGs the Quest bankroll has hit a new high of $131.06. As time allows I'm going to keep working the Double or Nothing tournaments. So far it's easy money.

Mid-week update

2008-12-09T23:13:00.003-05:00

Tonight was one of those nights that make me want to walk away from poker and never look back. The idiots were out in force, making mistake after mistake and having the card gods sweep down to save them.

It started out okay. In an early hand I had AKs in the SB. Four limpers ahead (this is 6-max) so I make it 6BB to go. Three calls. One was okay, one was very questionable, one folded afterwards so I don't know.

This kind of thing was rampant tonight. A couple limpers, a large raise, and then everyone calls. It was like everyone really wanted to play craps. It didn't matter how big the raise was, at least half the table called.

The flop comes Q-high. Check, all-in for 2/3 the pot, and a call from the button. I wasn't getting quite the odds I needed to make the call, but it was close. I called. The checker folded. Three to the turn.

The turn paired the board but didn't help me. I check. Here's where I think the button made a mistake. He was betting into a dry side pot, but he's either very strong and trying to suck more money out of me or he's trying to force me out. He bets $0.10 with $3.82 in the main pot. What is that? If I just called a $0.80 all-in bet on the previous card, it would seem likely I'd call a bet considerably larger than that, so it doesn't seem like a bet for value and with the pot laying me 39-to-1 the only way I'm not calling is if I know to a certainty that I'm drawing dead. No way I'm folding.

The river brought my king. I was concerned one of the other two may have lucked into trips when the board paired so I just checked. The button again puts in a $0.10 bet. I just don't get this. Of course, I call. The button turns over AQ. Pretty strong, but considering I was the one raising pre-flop he should have been more aggressive to see where he stood. If he'd have bet $1 on the turn I'd have folded. He probably figured me for an overpair, but then why bet at all? Take the free card and be happy. The original all-in had pocket 6's so I was up $3 on my second hand at the table.

From there it pretty much went downhill. Three-outer at the river. Two-outer at the river. And another of the "I'll call any pre-flop raise with total crap and then luck out" hands. All of them from the same player. Very discouraging.

I also ran into several rather frustrating calling stations. This used to come up all the time in limit, but I've not seen it much in NL, even in the cheap seats. The player has a decent, strong hand, but refuses to bet it and refuses to fold no matter how much you bet.

I've had sessions that were much worse financially, but for some reason tonight was especially frustrating. Other than the one hand mentioned above, it seemed like nothing went right and lots went wrong.

The week in reivew

2008-12-08T11:44:00.003-05:00

Last week I wrote about my trip to the Hard Rock casino and the rather poor results. I've been reflecting on that experience and have concluded it was just one of those sessions. One big loss due to somebody making a ridiculous pre-flop call and then getting lucky. Most of the rest of the time I just wasn't getting any cards. It happens. No reason to get discouraged about it.

I played a bit more on The Quest and am up $13 on the week. It may not sound like much, but when you consider that's a 12% increase in the bankroll, it's not bad at all.

I probably shouldn't get too excited since the vast majority of it came from one hand. It was one of those right place, right time, right opponents kind of things. I'm UTG with AQs. The guy in the cutoff has been playing extremely loose and aggressive. I've noticed that almost without fail when there are limpers ahead of him he'll put in a big raise. Of course, I want to raise here, but I figure I'll let him do my raising for me. I call, one fold, then the LAG, just as expected, raises to 5BB. The button calls, two folds, then I call.

The flop brings J97 with two of my suit. Figuring the LAG will again bet for me, I check. He does, though his almost pot-sized bet was a bit more than I would have liked. The button calls. I'm getting slightly more than 3-to-1 from the pot so I make the call. (I probably would have made the call even if I wasn't getting the right odds since I'm likely to stack one or both of my opponents if I hit.)

The turn is my card, the 6 of clubs. This couldn't be better. The board is now J high, so an overpair might still think he's good, and there are obvious lesser flushes, and a ton of straight draws. Sticking with my plan of letting others do my betting, I check. The LAG bets about half of what he has left, which is actually a rather small bet into this pot. The button calls. I figure one or both of the other guys will probably call a small raise here, so I make it a little more than double the original bet. The LAG calls for the rest of his stack. As you'll see in a minute, this makes absolutely no sense. The button also calls. We now have a $10 pot and the button still has $3.65 left. I have him covered.

The river makes things even more interesting. The 4 of clubs brings lots more lesser flushes into play and adds even more straight opportunities, though anyone playing those with four clubs on the board is an idiot. I decide not to be coy and just push in my whole stack. The button calls and sadly (for him) turns over the penultinuts. He had KK from the start, with one of them a club.

The LAG turns over ATo, with no clubs. As I said before, this makes his turn call of my raise look very stupid. He's got nothing but a gutshot draw, and even that is likely (and in reality is) drawing dead. If this was a tournament I might understand, but this is a ring game. When you know you're beat, it's time to fold, no matter how much you have invested.

A very nice $18 pot (at $0.02/$0.05 NL!) for a $9.73 profit. Not bad at all.

Two things struck me during the play of this hand and reflecting back on it later. First, the button played it poorly. He was in good position to (re-)raise both before the flop and on the flop. If he'd done either, I'd have probably gotten out and he'd have won the hand. This is $0.02/$0.05, so it's not reasonable to expect stellar play. I just point out the error for educational purposes.

Second, and this may tie into the first point as well, I realized after the fact that if I had been playing more than two tables it's quite likely I might have overlooked the tendencies of the LAG. PokerTracker would certainly have displayed the guy's 87% VP$IP and let me know he liked to play essentially every hand, and the other stats would have told me he was aggressive, but it's unlikely I'd have had time to dig through the stats to find his %PFR with limpers ahead of him, if there even is such a stat. That I had noticed his tendency allowed me to use it to my great advantage and completely disguise the strength of my hand. I don't recall how long the button had been sitting at the table or have any idea if he was playing multiple tables, but he's either very passive or was concerned that the LAG's pre-flop raise might indicate aces. If he'd been paying attention, he'd know the LAG's pre-flop raise indicated nothing about the strength of his hand.

Other sessions during the week were far less noteworthy. In fact, they added up to just about zero. One table accounted for the whole profit for the week.

I'm still learning about the new PokerTracker and what it can do. In the Reports section they have a sample "Fish List" report. Is it a bad sign that I show up on the fish list?

Poker Weekend

2008-12-01T09:27:00.002-05:00

I took all of last week off work and had time to play more poker than I have been of late. The most interesting bit, poker-wise, was Friday when I went with my brother to the Hard Rock Casino in Tampa. They recently began offering Vegas-style table games and my brother wanted to play some blackjack. I, of course, went straight to the poker room. After maybe a ten minute wait they seated a new table of $1/$2 NL. State law allows a maximum buy-in of $100.

I got a couple decent starters near the beginning and took down some small pots. Then came a long dry spell. Fold, fold, fold, fold...

The guys at this table didn't seem quite the mix of idiots and okay players as I saw on the casino cruise. I suppose the $100 buy-in might have something to do with that. One guy was seriously overbetting at the beginning. It may have just been nerves. He calmed down after a bit and his raises were more in line with what I consider normal play. There was only one guy of the starters who seemed out of his depth. He was playing way too many hands and staying in with very mediocre holdings. Somehow he managed to win just enough to stay afloat.

My stack, on the other hand, just kept dwindling. If I tried to play a speculative hand cheap, somebody would almost always come over the top big. If I saw a flop, I'd miss it by a mile.

Then I had the misfortune of catching a hand. I get KK in the SB. Four limpers ahead of me. I'd like one or two callers on this one, so I made it 5BB to go. The BB calls, then all of the limpers call. I couldn't believe it. We haven't even had the flop yet and this is by far the biggest pot of the day.

The flop comes Q-high with two spades. There's $60 in the pot already, so I bet $40. The BB pushes all-in. It folds around back to me. I'm looking at the stack of chips the guy has pushed in. The dealer looks at me and says, "He's all-in." It was like he expected me to either fold or push all my chips in too. I finally had to ask him, "How much is there?" Turns out to be a $4 raise. Gee, let me think about this. $144 in the pot and it's going to cost me $4 to call? I don't know, that's a toughie. (I don't mean to go on about this, but the dealer's actions at this point just struck me as odd.)

Of course, I make the call. The BB turns over Q9 of spades. Okay, I get the push on the flop. He's got top pair and a flush draw. No problem. But how the hell do you call a 5BB pre-flop raise with a crap hand like Q9s? This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. Naturally, he rivers a spade.

I got KK one other time and also managed to lose a good chunk of my stack with that one.

After the first fifteen minutes of play I don't think I won a sizable pot the whole day. I know none of them were big enough that I felt I needed to tip the dealer.

In other poker activity, I played one of the new FullTilt "matrix" tournaments. I don't know if the whole concept is flawed or if it's just the way they've implemented it, but I thought it sucked. You play four tournaments simultaneously against the same opponents. Seating on each table is different, but it's the same players on all four tables.

They split the prize money so half goes to normal payouts on each of the four tables and half goes into the matrix pot that's awarded according to points. You get one point for each person eliminated before you on each table and two points for each player you send to the rails. The quicker among you may have realized this really means you get three points for each player you send to the rails, two for knocking the player out and one because you moved up a spot from the elimination.

I didn't care for it at all. It's too difficult playing four tournaments that are all in exactly the same phase at the same time. There are lots of delays due to players being busy on other tables. I think they're awarding too many points for eliminations. From the difficulty in getting one of these started, I gather there are a lot of other players who share my opinion.

I played Dr. Pauly's PLO tourney on Saturday. Not that I made much of an impact. I never got anything going and faded out somewhere in the middle of the field.

Sometime over the weekend I played in a normal SnG. I recall knocking someone out early when I slowplayed aces and caught a huge flop. Then I slowly redistributed the chips until I was back to my starting stack. I did that a couple times. I remember being on the good side of a couple horrible suckouts. In one of those I ran KQ into AA, catching one Q on the flop and rivering a third. I got to heads up with a 5-to-1 chip lead. The other guy was clearly not used to playing heads up. In these situations I try to keep telling myself, "Be patient." I did okay in that regard this time. I had the guy on the ropes at least three times. Each time he sucked out. Given that I wouldn't have been heads up if not for a couple sick suckouts, I suppose I can't complain too much. It's still very disappointing not being able to seal the deal when you've had the guy down to just a couple big blinds.

I played some cheap NL on The Quest, but had a run of just horrible cards. Considering how bad the cards were, I was probably lucky to only drop a bit over one buy-in.

Last night "60 Minutes" did a segment on the cheating scandals at Absolute and UltimateBet. Let me sum it up for you. Online poker is illegal (or so they allege). It's unregulated. It's virtually impossible to stop. Massive cheating has occurred. Nobody is serious about going after the cheaters. The end.

If you've spent more than ten minutes reading online about these scandals, you already know more than "60 Minutes" revealed in their story. I was rather disappointed that they simply said, "Online poker is illegal," instead of taking a few more seconds to note that this is simply the position of the justice department and not a matter of settled law. A fine point, perhaps, but now there are millions of people who believe online poker is absolutely illegal and all those playing online from the US are criminals. Of course, that aspect is probably second to the implanted notion that cheating is rampant and online poker is not to be trusted. This story could go further toward killing online poker than the UIGEA.

Weekly Update

2008-11-24T17:46:00.002-05:00

I seem to be on a semi-regular schedule of weekly updates on Monday. No specific plan here, it's just happening that way.

When I got home from work on Friday I immediately joined a $2+0.25 two-table SnG at Full Tilt. I did reasonably okay, making the final table. Then some idiot with a big stack decides to throw his chips around. Two calls to me in the BB with AQs. I raise to 4BB. One call and then a push from the bigger stack. I correctly make the call as he turns over QJo, making me a 3:1 favorite. Of course, the flop brings a KT and he rivers a 9 to send me home. What got me was some clown not in the hand typing "nh" into the chat. Was that sarcasm or was he really so stupid to type "nh" when the guy hits a 15% shot on the river? Oh well, that's poker.

On Sunday I played another $2+0.25. Just a single table this time. I made one stupid move early and never recovered. I get AKo in the SB. There are three calls ahead of me so I make it 5BB to go. The guy in the cutoff, holding 34s makes the call. For the life of me I don't understand this. He puts in almost 20% of his stack on a real long shot hand. Of course, he hits it big when the flop brings 567. Assuming that flop had to miss anyone who called a 5BB pre-flop raise, I bet 2/3 the pot. The other guy naturally pushes. This is where I made the stupid move. Even assuming the guy missed the flop, if he pushes at this point he's probably got me beat. I'm getting 3:1 pot odds, but I think it was still a mistake to make the call. Well, obviously it was a mistake since the best I could hope for at this point was a runner-runner chop.

I hit a few hands after that, but I would have needed an incredible run of luck to survive after that hit.

Seeing how early I was likely to be exiting that tournament, I jumped into a $10, $15k guaranteed tournament. I never got any traction at all in that one. Then I made a stupid move with ATo and ran right into AA. I guess I was getting impatient because I wasn't getting much in the way of cards and when I got something halfway decent it never amounted to much. Didn't quite make the top half of the field in that one.

I played a bit of $0.02/$0.05 NL on behalf of The Quest. I had some decent sessions Sunday, earning $9.81 total. I'm taking all this week off, so I played a bit this afternoon, winning $2.63 in one session. The Quest bankroll is almost back up to the all time high. I shouldn't really be playing $0.02/$0.05 with this bankroll, but I'm willing to take the small chance in order to build the bankroll faster. If I start losing big I can always drop back.

The Weekend

2008-11-17T11:10:00.002-05:00

I played a bit more poker this weekend than I have in a while. Friday I played a bit of ring NL at Stars on behalf of The Quest. I made one big mistake. I knew better, but I did it anyway. Ended the session down a few dollars.

Saturday I played Dr. Pauly's PLO tourney at Stars. My cards ran hot and cold. Fairly early it looked like I was on my way out so I signed up for a $3 rebuy satellite to the Sunday Warm-up ($750k guaranteed). Then I ran AA into AA and rivered a small straight to take down what should have been a split pot. Another AA victory and instead of small stack I was in third.

This was good news and bad news. Good news because I was still alive, but bad news because the rebuy started right about the time we went to the break in PLO. I have enough problems counting outs in PLO. Trying to do it while also playing a rebuy hold'em tournament is really more than I can handle. It was made somewhat easier by my getting absolutely nothing playable in the rebuy, even considering it was a rebuy.

I ended up rebuying a couple times and doing the add-on at the break, but I went out tragically early in the satellite. In Dr. Pauly's tourney I went out in fifth, I think, when I ran QQ into AA and we both flopped a set. Oh well... At least Pauly's tournament is always fun.

I'm taking off work all next week and have been considering heading to the Hard Rock in Tampa to play some live poker. My casino cruise experience has me thinking I could probably do okay at the Hard Rock. Perhaps I'll try hitting The Quest a bit harder this week to practice up.

Little Questing

2008-11-10T07:27:00.003-05:00

I jumped into a cheap SnG on FullTilt yesterday on behalf of The Quest. This was the first tournament in my recollection where I had good success playing on almost entirely chutzpah. Until fairly late I got no really good cards at all. Suited connectors were the best I saw.

This was, however, a table full of people who were almost all obviously playing their cards, not the board or the other players. I stole pot after pot with impunity. I even was forced to show some of the total junk I was playing and still no one seemed to catch on that most of the time I was betting with air.

When it got down to heads up I was slightly behind. It took just a couple hands to correct that. I turned up the heat even more and my opponent clearly didn't know how to handle it. It didn't hurt that I actually started getting some cards. I think heads up might have lasted five minutes. If only they were all this easy. Add another $6.75 to The Quest bankroll.

My Full Tilt bonus chase is officially over. I cleared $20 of the $50 bonus and lost $170 doing so. Well worth the effort. (Where's that sarcasm emoticon?) This was not considered part of The Quest since I was playing way beyond my Quest bankroll on this.

I'm planning to take all of Thanksgiving week off of work. This might be a good opportunity to head back over to the Hard Rock in Tampa. It's been two years since I played the $275 tourney there on Thanksgiving. They've been offering $100 buy-in NL for over a year now. Maybe it's time to check it out. If it turns out to be anything like my recent experience on the casino cruise it could end up quite profitable.

Why, oh why...

2008-10-27T09:18:00.002-04:00

Why do I always fall for these "free money" offers? Full Tilt sent me a "Free $50" offer. All I had to do was claim it, and then clear it as a regular bonus in the next two weeks. It's been long enough that I've done one of these that the many pitfalls have been forgotten.

I used to live for poker bonuses and was very good at clearing them. It became obvious long ago that at anything near the level I normally play, bonuses clear best at limit. So I used to play a lot of limit, and was pretty good at it. But then the bonuses dried up and I realized NL was a lot more fun, so I switched.

Now, along comes the Full Tilt bonus and I'm trying to play $1/$2 limit again. My first session of bonus clearing I lost more than the total bonus. I did better during my second session, actually winning some money, but didn't make up for what I lost in the first session.

Last night I sat down for what was intended to be a short session before going to bed. There were no tables immediately available, so I got on the wait list for several. After a few minutes they started popping up. Before I knew it I had four tables going. And the cards were coming like you wouldn't believe. AKs, AKo, AQs, KK, QQ, JJ, AJ. In the first five minutes of play I must have seen 20 premium hands. It was hard to keep track they were coming so fast, but I believe I won ONE hand out of the bunch. Before I could barely blink I was down $20 on three different tables. What stung the most was that in almost every case, the guy who won had no business being in the hand in the first place.

I would do far better to get nothing but crap cards that I can fold all night. Losing with a long series of premium hands just adds insult to the injury.

I recall reading an article a while back where the author attempted to scientifically prove that the schooling of the fishes was a fallacious concept. I don't recall all the details of his proof, but I'm pretty sure he overlooked some aspect of the real world conditions.

Party Poker was the ultimate proving ground for schooling of the fishes. I remember when I first started playing there. They had these "beginner" tables where only people in their first X days of play could sit at those tables. I joined Party long after I'd started playing seriously. I almost felt guilty sitting at those tables. Almost. For the first week or so it was literally like taking candy from a baby. These guys might as well have just transferred their funds to my account.

Then the tide turned. The schooling of the fishes hit with a vengeance. In most of the hands I played, I'd start way in the lead against any other single player, but when you get eight people seeing the flop and staying to the river if they caught even the tiniest bit, your opponents will collectively have the advantage on you almost every time. You aren't playing against a bunch of single fish, you're playing against the whole school. And the school will win the majority of the time.

To be completely fair, I'm probably dragging a number of non-applicable NL skills into the limit arena. I definitely read bluff far more often than is correct. With the exception of the very bad players, bluffs in limit are pretty much situational only. I need to keep repeating this to myself.

Or, better yet, I need to stop chasing these stupid bonuses. Nothing good ever comes of it. In the last three years I don't think I've made money on a single bonus.

Another tournament

2008-10-16T09:27:00.002-04:00

I fired up PokerStars last night for the first time in ages and checked out their cheap SnGs. The rake at the low end seemed a bit cheaper than Full Tilt, but not by much. Except they had these "Double or Nothing" tournaments that paid the top five double their entry fee. The rake on those was only 10%, but you have to figure they're likely to last only 20 minutes or so.

I got into a $3+0.40. I should have saved the money. Card dead. Card dead. Card dead. AQo was the best I saw. Went out in 5th when somebody caught a runner-runner flush after I pushed all-in with TP on the flop.

On the plus side, I noticed PokerStars is apparently now offering Badugi. That should be loads of fun. I didn't see any Badugi tournaments in the list -- wasn't looking for them -- but I did notice it's listed in the tournament filter.

Tournament Time

2008-10-13T10:24:00.002-04:00

Full Tilt recently sent me a please-come-back free money offer. While checking it out I again came across Chris Ferguson's article on his $0 to $10k project and noticed he had played some tournaments during the endeavor. This got me thinking that it might be fun to toss a few tournaments into the mix.

Checking at Full Tilt, I discovered they do offer SnGs for poor folk, but the rake is pretty steep. The 25% rake at the $1 SnGs is ridiculous, but at $2 it's down to 12.5%. Still higher than normal, but acceptable.

So, Saturday night, already tired enough to be thinking about going to bed, I signed up for a Turbo $2+$0.25 1-table SnG. The cards weren't terribly kind. With the rapidly increasing blinds I quickly found myself shortstacked. Then I woke up with AA. I put in a small raise and get one caller. Flop comes ten high. I check. Other guy bets more than half my stack. I push. He calls and turns over AT. Of course, he rivers a third ten and I hit the rail.

Sunday I decided to give it another go. This time I got into a non-turbo, so the blinds increased at the normal 6-minute intervals. This was a fairly typical cheap tournament. A couple people played it like it was a turbo freeroll. We got down to six rather quickly, but we stayed at six for a long time.

The tight play allowed me to steal quite a few pots. I even played the hammer a couple times. Eventually the blinds caught up and people started dropping off. I made a nice push back at the one other mildly aggressive player and he backed down, allowing me to take a very nice pot and the chip lead.

I had some trouble figuring out my opponent when we got heads up. I will often make a min-raise from the small blind as a way to put pressure on the big blind and to send a message that I think my cards are decent. Several times this guy came back with min-reraises, which really baffled me. I suppose he's making a statement, but I'm getting 5-to-1 on my call. Heads up I'll make that call with almost any two cards.

The other guy had the chip advantage going into heads up, but I quickly rectified that situation. I kept chipping away until he was in serious trouble. Then I find myself in the big blind with the Brunson. He makes a min-raise. I debated a bit, but eventually made the call. Then I got lucky. Flop comes 22x. Now I'm trying to figure how to get all his chips in the pot. I check, he checks. On the turn I get even luckier as a ten falls. Deuces full of tens. And there are three diamonds on the board. I'm praying he's got a couple diamonds. I make a small bet, he calls. The river brings another diamond. I again make a small bet, he pushes all-in. I'm sure he figured he was back in it as his king high flush was revealed, but, sorry, Charlie.

I'm not sure playing at this level is doing a lot for my skills, but it is kind of fun.

Live!

2008-09-13T19:54:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. That's mostly because I haven't been playing.

Friday night my brother and I drove over to Port Canaveral and took the Sun Cruz casino tour. On the way to boarding they had a sign-up board for poker. They were offering a $60 sit-n-go that would start as soon as the ship cast off. All the other poker, and other gambling, had to wait until the ship passed the 3-mile marker. They can apparently start the sit-n-go because no money changes hands until the ship has crossed the gambling line. My brother and I both signed up.

Poker is on the top deck. Thankfully, the entire floor appeared to be non-smoking. They had eight tables, though only two were in use -- one for the tournament and one for what I think was a $1/$3 NL cash game.

Eventually eleven people sat down for the tournament. The mix of players was about what I'd expect at such a venue. A couple guys who had more than a clue or two, a couple complete novices, and a few who probably thought they knew what they were doing. I'm not sure exactly how long the levels were. We got about one full rotation in each of the first few levels. The blinds went 100/200, 200/400, 300/500, 500/1000, 1000/2000. The whole thing felt reasonable to me. Certainly not designed to be a long tournament, but not rushed to the point it was an all-in fest.

Not surprisingly, the novices busted out early. I got a couple good hands I was able to take advantage of and managed to build a comfortable stack. Once we had a bit more elbow room, the game tightened up. I grabbed the initiative and stole a few pots. One hand I woke up with pocket rockets, which turned into quads, but I couldn't get anyone to play back at me.

When we finally got to three the dealer immediately started pushing chop. I thought I was better than either of the other two so I suggested we keep playing for a while. Nobody seemed to care much one way or the other, so we played on. When we got down to two the other guy offered to chop, but I had him two-to-one in chips. Plus, I knew I was better than he was. Sadly, the cards dried up for me. The other guy ended up taking it, and then, being the good winner he was, rubbed it in that he'd offered to chop it.

They immediately offered a $40 "beginners" tournament. About all I recall about that one is that Mr. Good Winner was the first one out, and the guy who took third in the first tournament and I were the last two. We went back and forth for about 15 minutes. I was up by a few hundred and offered to chop it. The other guy agreed.

Another $40 tournament was immediately called. Willing participants were getting scarce. We only had six at this one. My largest accomplishment in this one was sitting around watching as the first three players were eliminated, not losing many chips while it happened. Then I managed to catch a hand and eliminate the third place player. Mr. Good Winner and I were the final two. Not wanting to have it rubbed in again if he lucked out, I agreed to chop it.

For the night it was one second and two chops with me ahead in chips. Total, adjusting for tips, +$200. My play was solid, though could have been a bit more aggressive at times. Only one suckout, and even that was only 2-to-1 against when the chips went in.

I was a little disappointed there wasn't more poker action on the boat. Just the one tournament table and one cash table. The cash table was full pretty much the whole time.

If this is the kind of crowd the boat is drawing, I can see why the other gambling cruise line went out of business. There is a new one that's supposed to open soon. They're advertising all sorts of free stuff, so it will be interesting to sail on that one and see what kind of crowds they get.

A fun hand

2008-08-20T12:31:00.005-04:00

I was fooling around yesterday playing a bit of cheap PLO8 at Full Tilt. A couple decent hands had built my buy-in from $4 to $6.50. One of the players had been slowing the game and I was thinking about leaving the table when I got this hand.

UTG folds. UTG+1 makes a min-raise. The cutoff makes it $0.75. Button folds. This puts $1.10 in the pot when it gets to me. With action from two players and one yet to act, I figure this isn't a time to get greedy. I pot it for $2.55 with the expectation of maybe one caller, possibly ending the hand right there.

Then the BB pushes all-in for $1.45 more. UTG+1 calls all-in. The cutoff pushes all-in for another $1.60.

This sure didn't go the way I planned. I'm thinking one caller. Now it's $3.05 to me with three players already committed. Of course, I call.

I can understand UTG+1's action here. The other two were just, well, let's say they made less than optimal plays.

I don't think I've ever busted three players in one hand before. Oddly, the table cleared out after this hand.

I played in Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament last Saturday. I didn't realize until I read it in someone else's blog that the good doctor had added a buy-in to the Sunday Million tournament, which explains the MUCH larger than normal turnout. I signed up expecting to see the usual two or three tables of players. Turns out we had 55 runners at start time. I played very tight and managed to capitalize on the few good hands I got. Sadly, there just weren't enough of those good hands to get me through. I busted in 15th.

That's about it for me and poker over the last few weeks. Perhaps in honor of the 1st anniversary of The Quest, I'll start playing with some regularity again. We'll see how it goes.

Taking a break

2008-07-28T11:05:00.002-04:00

Without specifically intending to do so, I've taken a break from The Quest and poker in general. We've switched to a four day week at work, which wouldn't be so bad if it was four 8-hour days. You wouldn't think it would make that much difference, but that extra two hours a day really puts a crimp in things during the work week.

By the time I get home, relax a little bit, and grab some dinner, it's often been well past 9:00. I find myself even more sleep-deprived than usual, so I don't feel like doing much other than vegetating on the sofa. Playing any of the blogger tournaments, which I hadn't been doing much of anyway, is completely out of the question due to the late starting time.

And, on top of all this, I've finally started getting into a computer game I got for Christmas last year.

Something had to give and it looks like it was poker. It wasn't planned that way; it just sort of happened. Not that I'm giving it up or anything. With having Fridays off I've given thought to heading over to the Hard Rock to play live. Now that they're spreading $100 buy-in NL it might be worth my while. Haven't actually done it yet, but I'm thinking about it.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll rejoin The Quest again soon. I just need to get used to this new schedule and figure out how to find the time for it.

1 in 649,740

2008-07-09T10:59:00.004-04:00

It was once again not a very good night on The Quest, though the hand above definitely brightened my attitude. And not only did I hit a royal flush, I got paid for it. Not as much as it seems it should be worth, but given that these types of hands usually pay next to nothing, it was a decent payoff. Too bad Stars doesn't have a bonus for a royal.

I have to wonder a bit about whether the odds of hitting a royal flush have been calculated correctly. I got the odds in the title from some web page. According to that page there are 2,598,960 possible ways to make a hand in Hold'em. Four of those are royal flushes. So the odds of a royal flush are 1 in 649,740.

I know I've played at least 300,000 hands of ring Hold'em. It might be closer to 500,000. I've varied during my poker "career" from keeping very good track of every hand and not keeping track at all. Several times. So I don't have hard proof, but I'd guess I'm on the low side of 500,000.

This is the fourth (or is it the fifth?) royal flush I've had in online ring games. I know it's at least the fourth because I got two of them at a site that gives a 100xBB bonus for, as they call it, a "royal straight flush". (That just doesn't roll off the tongue quite right.) And I know I got another one previously because I was disappointed that I didn't get a bonus. There may have been one more in there. And none of this is counting tournament play, where I vaguely recall having hit a royal flush at least a couple times.

According to PokerTracker I would have a few more if I hadn't folded before the river. (These were hands where I held just one card of the royal and folded it before the flop because it came with a crappy partner.)

So here I am with less than 500,000 hands played and I've had at least four royal flushes, plus a couple more I would have had if I'd been stupid enough to play K3o into a pre-flop raise. I've never considered myself especially lucky at poker. Sure, I've had my share of suckouts, but no one has ever accused me of being a card rack over more than the time span of a tournament or two. If anything, I've had the impression that luck, if there is such a thing, is slightly against me. Knowing how far ahead I am on the royal flush curve, perhaps I should reevaluate that impression.

Speaking of the not very lucky department, despite the one really good hand, it was another down night for The Quest. I finished the evening with $4.46 less than when it started. I made one stupid move that cost me a fair bit, but otherwise the big losses were to idiots who called my big bets despite not being remotely close to getting the right odds. Nothing but an inside straight draw and one guy calls a 2/3 pot bet with just the river to come. I'm not sure if it's the bad luck or the rewarding of stupidity that makes me more upset.

I should also put in a good word for the Popopop Universal Replayer, which is what I used for the picture of the royal flush posted above. This is a great tool for reviewing hands during play and going over your play after a session. The chiclet scroller at the bottom of the screen is great for zeroing in on decisive hands. I've not made much use of the export feature, but it looks decent. And, best of all, the replayer is free!

Weekend Update

2008-07-07T10:52:00.002-04:00

Since things were not going well with The Quest, I essentially took the last week off. The little bit I played was more of the goofing off variety, nothing serious.

In that vein, I've been playing a bit more PLO, and doing halfway decent at it. I still don't have a great deal of confidence, but I think I'm getting a better feel for it.

PokerStars is having a big "2X" promotion this month. The first week of July it was double VPPs. (Or is it FPPs? I've never been able to figure out their convoluted system.) Other than during the comparatively rare bonus chase at Stars, I've never put much emphasis on accumulating points. I do know it's virtually impossible to earn points in the shallow end of the NL pool.

So, with "2X" as an attractant, I decided I'd have a go this month at attaining one of the metal levels at Stars. Looking over the rules, it appears $1/$2 limit is the best compromise between points and minimum exposure to bankroll damage. I four-tabled $1/$2 limit for five or six hours over the long weekend. I'm happy to report that I need only 999,327 VPPs by the end of the year to reach Supernova Elite status. That's only 144 times the total number of points I've accumulated in the entirety of the four years I've been playing at Stars, but, hey, I still got a shot.

Actually, even hitting SilverStar level, the lowest level that requires something more than breathing to attain, may be in jeopardy if I don't play a whole lot more limit. Unfortunately, I've come to really hate limit. The inability to push somebody off a draw is such a handicap.

Plus, the limit tables at Stars have always been incredibly tight. When you see an entire table with a see-flop of 16%, you know you're in for a rough ride. On the plus side, play generally seems to go much faster. So you can get in lots of non-raked hands per hour.

I had a bit of trouble making the shift back to limit, but eventually started to feel comfortable, if not exactly happy. After a bit of up and down, I finished the weekend up $12. That's less than 1BB/hr. Not great, but not terrible considering how long it's been since I played much limit.

If I were to do this more, I would definitely be looking into doing a three or four screen arrangement and getting a dozen or more tables going all at once. While this may sound like I'm trying to become a MMIA, I'd at least be missing the I(nconsiderate) part because I'm sure I'd have little trouble keeping up with a dozen tables at once. With four tables going my attention was wandering well over half the time.

Last night I decided to rejoin The Quest. I got on one of those wild tables where players are making irrationally large raises for no apparent reason. One guy seemed to be a repeat lotto player. He wouldn't push on every hand, but any time he thought he might be in the lead, he'd push it all in. And then re-buy. And re-buy. And re-buy. I bided my time and when I was dealt KK, I bet in a manner I knew would induce at least one other player to push. Turned out I snared two. And my kings held. One hand, nice $8.50 profit, thank you very much. The table broke up just a few hands later so I called it a night. At least now I'm back over the 20 buy-in mark.

I've fallen and I can't get up

2008-06-30T11:22:00.003-04:00

The Quest did not go well this weekend. I've been on a horrible dry spell as far as cards go. It's been a near endless stream of unplayable junk. If I get something marginally playable, either someone will raise and force me to fold before the flop or the flop will miss me completely. On the very rare occasion I get a real hand, it's almost certain it will be the only time in an hour that everyone will fold. On the even rarer times when I hit the flop, it seems some clown, against all odds and any kind of reasonable logic, will call to the river and suck out.

I haven't even tallied the damage yet. I was too depressed and pissed off when I finished my last session. If I stick with the bankroll management plan, I'm definitely back to $0.01/$0.02. Given the way things have been going, that may not be such a bad thing. At least the damage will be less.

Blowing off some steam seemed like a good idea after that session, so I found a really cheap tournament and was going to push all-in on every hand. It's a rather silly thing to do and is not exactly fair to the other participants, who may actually be taking this $1 tournament seriously, but I felt like doing it anyway. But I couldn't. First hand I get 32o. Next hand was something equally as bad. I finally compromised in pushing on any hand where it seemed to actually make some sense. If I would ordinarily make a big raise, I pushed. It worked, for a while.

This was an super-turbo with 3 minute levels. You'd think in a tournament like that the players would pay some attention and take their actions quickly. You, however, would be completely wrong if you thought such a foolish thing.

Anyway, despite the far more frequent pushing all-in, the blinds still caught up very fast and I busted in 5th or 6th. Even worse, the therapy value was very minimal.

I played in Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament on Saturday. Despite the continuation of mostly horrible cards, I somehow managed to hang on to finish 7th. And, no, we didn't start with 7 runners.

Friday was a down night, spent camped in front of the TV.

I'm torn between dropping back a level and hitting it hard, and taking a break for a while. Perhaps I'll just see what kind of mood I'm in tonight.

Bad, bad night on The Quest

2008-06-26T10:45:00.002-04:00

Last night was the worst night yet on The Quest. If I'd had any sense about me I'd have quit as soon as I realized the cards were even deader than the night before. I got horrible cards, which is all the more frustrating when you're playing 6-max, and even that's shorthanded, and there are a couple aggressive players at the table. You know these other guys are stealing pots right and left, but you've got cards that are unlikely to beat even a bluff.

In all honesty, however, I can't put all the blame on the cards. Bad cards will often result in a down night, but you need some donkey moves or some really bad luck to make it a very down night. Part of the problem was it took me a while to realize I wasn't playing with the normal fish. One of the tables was filled with decent players. What's the line from Rounders? If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker. Last night, I was the sucker. I was trying too hard to make my crappy cards work.

The loss of three buy-ins pushes the bankroll down below my established minimum to play $0.02/$0.05. It's only a bit below, so I may risk one more buy-in tonight. If I lose that, it's definitely back to the shallowest part of the pool.

Not a good night

2008-06-25T12:14:00.002-04:00

It was not a good night on The Quest. I fell victim to my old demon of seriously overplaying TP with a good kicker. In this case, it was against someone who inexplicably thought Q3s was worth calling a 4BB raise with ("But they were sooted..."), but the blame ultimately falls to me not listening to what his bets were telling me.

The result on another table was also not so good, but I fought back on that one to make it back to almost even. Combined with small positive results on a couple other tables it left me down a wee bit over a buy-in for the night.

Yesterday I got email from PokerPages about some new tournament software they're beta testing. If I remember correctly, a couple years ago I participated in a heads-up challenge that used something available through PokerPages to allow us to play heads-up tournaments for free. I honestly haven't paid any attention to it since then. The email said they were giving away free money as part of the beta test so I took a look.

After installing the software and signing up, they gave me T$1000 to enter tournaments. Allegedly you can get topped back up to T$1000 any time you drop below. I don't know what the deal is going to be long term, but it looks like they're setting up some kind of subscription thing. I gather this is to avoid it being an actual gambling site. They'll just have competitions among their members and award small prizes out of the subscription fees. At least that's my guess. For the beta they gave me a free weekly subscription. Not sure at this point if it will expire at the end of the week or if it will renew.

Last night I played a T$100 tournament. Winner got something like $32 plus a bunch of T$. T$10,000 starting chips, 50/100 blinds at level 1, ten minute levels. Only 55 runners. It looked like it should be easy. That was before I saw my cards. They went from bad to worse to could-it-get-any-uglier. And the play was even slower than on the Stars ring tables where everyone but me is a MMIA thinking they're cool because they can hold up play on 20 tables at once. I made a stab at a bluff that cost me a lot more than it should have. Then I dropped a huge part of my stack when some clown called my all-in with an inside straight draw and caught it on the river. Best hand I saw all night, TT, ran straight into AA and I hit the rail.

I'm sure it's just luck of the draw, but it always leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I go to a new site and come away feeling like I've been abused. I don't know if it's worth my time to go back.

New Weekly Total

2008-06-24T11:19:00.003-04:00

The time vs bankroll graph has been updated with last week's results. Big move this week, almost $27, mostly due to moving up to $0.02/$0.05 where the prize values have more than doubled.

Last night I played for just a short time, but still added $6.64 to the bankroll.

Things are getting a bit more exciting with the increased pot values. I was a bit concerned that all my time at $0.01/$0.02 might make me afraid of the much bigger pots at the higher levels, but I seem to be adjusting okay. Perhaps all that time playing tournaments has helped in this regard.

Here's the bankroll graph for those using readers.

Weekend wrap-up

2008-06-23T12:49:00.002-04:00

My plan to single table $0.02/$0.05 until I was totally comfortable with the new level went out the window before the day was done. It wasn't even a conscious thing. I sat down Sunday night and opened two tables without even thinking about it. Maybe this means I'm already "comfortable" at the new level. Based on results, I'd have to say that's the case.

Even with two tables open the play was horribly slow. I was getting very bored waiting to do something. This wasn't aided by the dearth of playable cards. My VP$IP was in the mid-teens range. My goal at this level and shorthanded would be closer to 30%, but I'm not playing total trash just to get there.

I was able to capitalize on a couple of the decent hands I got. The evening sessions added almost $8, bringing the total for the day to $12.93. Far and away the best $ day yet on The Quest. If I can keep close to the BB/100 rate I had at the previous level we should see very good progress on the size of the bankroll.

Rainy Weekend

2008-06-22T14:19:00.003-04:00

Saturday I played Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament for all of eight hands. I Gigli'd on one of those hands where all you can do is shake your head in amazement at the way poor play gets paid off sometimes. I don't claim to be a PLO expert. I wouldn't even claim to be anything more than barely fair at PLO. But I still have to wonder about calling a pot-sized flop re-raise when all you have is bottom pair and an OESD. And then calling a pot-size turn bet that commits three-fourths of your stack with just the OESD and a very weak flush draw that could easily be beat. Sorry, it was one of those hands that I can't let go of. From my perspective, my opponent made absolutely horrible decisions all the way to the river. The only thing he did right was make me put in my last chip when I knew I was beat. Yeah, I'm bitter about it. So what?

On a brighter note, I cheated my Quest plan a bit and started playing $0.02/$0.05 when I was $0.36 shy of having the 20 buy-ins I set as a minimum. My first couple sessions went well, putting me up $5.05 on the day and moving the bankroll over the minimum to flirt with $0.02/$0.05.

Based on first impressions, I'm seeing more serious players at this level, but still enough total fish that a decent player can turn a nice profit. So far my BB/100 is even higher than at $0.01/$0.02, though it's obviously way too early to tell if that will hold. Sadly, play at this level appears to be as slow, if not slower, than at the lower level. I'm going to play just one table at a time until I'm completely confident at this new level, so the slow play may be just next to torture.

Mid-week update

2008-06-18T12:13:00.002-04:00

The Quest proceeds on schedule, or maybe a bit ahead. Two or three more average nights and I should hit the 20 buy-ins I want before flirting with $0.02/$0.05.

I was tempted to jump the gun and have a go at it last night. When I checked the available tables I noticed the "see the flop" percents still looked juicy, but considerably less so that at $0.01/$0.02. Big shock, eh? It's not at all unusual to find a few tables at $0.01/$0.02 in the 60%-70% range. At $0.02/$0.05 the best I saw was 50%. I decided to stick with the plan and stayed with $0.01/$0.02.

On one table I doubled my buy-in, mostly due to players who couldn't let go of top-pair, no kicker. On the other table I mostly took smaller pots and slowly added to my stack. Both tables got off to a decent start, which I find much more comfortable than losing early and having to fight my way back to even.

Monday night was another slightly better than average night. I finished the evening up just shy of $3. Two more nights like the last two and I'm moving out of the shallowest part of the pool. Get the life preservers ready.

The Weekend

2008-06-16T10:55:00.003-04:00

Friday night I got in the mood for Kat's Donkament by having a couple margaritas at dinner. The real kind, on the rocks, not those watered-down slushy things. Then I fixed a big gin & tonic when I got home. In the proper mood, let the donkery begin!

As is my habit, I did an immediate rebuy. If losing chips, might as well lose as many as possible. Very first hand I get QJs and figure that's good enough to join a 4-way all-in. Naturally, it was Julius Goat with the massive 92s who took down the pot with a full house. Rebuy!

And that was my last rebuy of the night. Next hand I catch QQ in another 4-way all-in. I was accused of playing unfair by going all-in with an actual hand, but so it goes around the virtual poker table. Three hands later I caught KK in another 4-way push-fest. Five hands into the tournament and I'm sitting on a 10k stack.

I don't think I've ever been the really big stack in one of these things, at least not in the very early stages when everybody is pushing on any drop of paint. Turns out there's a side benefit I'd not realized before. When your stack is way the biggest and you come in second place, you sometimes take away almost as much, if not more, than the winner. Good to know should you ever find yourself in this situation.

My cards rather dried up for a while. Sitting on such a big stack there seemed little point (other than the sheer fun of it) in pushing with nothing, so I did a lot of folding. Until Kat did an I'm-bored push and I sucked out a straight at the river. My stack was up to 18k.

A total nonsense hand, 63s, that I played cheap flopped the nut straight, eventually turning into a flush, growing the stack to 22k. JJ vs 88 took me to 26k. Another mid pair vs junk brought me to 29k as those remaining joined the final table.

My stack eventually grew to 44k before my AA fell to K2o. I should have seen it coming. I really hate it when I fall in love with those first two cards and can't give them up. And having it happen against the second biggest stack only adds to the injury. In one hand I went from chip leader to seriously short stack.

I hung in though, building my stack little by little, eventually moving back into second place with a river suckout against the big stack. Many hands later I bubbled on a straight over straight hand.

It may sound odd to speak of being proud of your play in a donkament, but I was quite pleased with the way I recovered from the big hit. Going from about M=6 back to second biggest stack and well in the hunt is not bad. Would have been nicer if I'd made the money, but so it goes.

The Quest was up and down and back up again over the weekend. Had a decent session at lunch on Friday. Then made the mistake of playing after the Donkament and had two disastrous tables. Play later in the day on Saturday got me almost back to even.

Sunday I played just one session, but it was great fun. Within the first few hands on two different tables I ran into lotto players while holding AA, and both held. On one of the tables I later ran into another of the one-card-too-late plays. I started with KK, had a few limpers ahead, so I put in a decent raise to thin the field. Two callers. Flop is something like Q73. I bet a bit more than half the pot and get one caller. The turn gives me a set of kings. Somewhat to my surprise the other player pushes all-in. I've got the nuts so, of course, I call. He turns over 77. My set holds and I leave the table with more than four times my buy-in. I finish the day up over $7, bringing the bankroll to $89.65. If things continue as they have I should be ready to start flirting with $0.02/$0.05 by next week this time.

Quest Update

2008-06-13T14:20:00.002-04:00

Down night on The Quest last night. Played an early session where I dropped a buy-in on one table and won a bit on another.

Today I played for a little while at lunch and made up for what I lost last night. Most of it was the result of one hand where I called an all-in from a shorter stack. I had pocket queens, which ended as an overpair. It wasn't that strong to be calling such a big bet, but this was one of those hands where I just didn't believe the other guy. It felt like he was trying to push me out, which meant he had nothing or at best something that was vulnerable, like top pair on the ten high board. He had nothing.

Tonight is Kat's Donkament at Full Tilt. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to make it, but I'm going to try.

Saturday is Dr. Pauly's PLO tourney at PokerStars. It kicks off at something like 16:20 EDT.

Decent, short night

2008-06-12T11:32:00.003-04:00

I've been feeling under the weather this week and haven't played much. Monday I was still stinging from the weekend and decided it was best to take some time off. Tuesday I was really dragging. I slept my way through an evening of partially watched TV on the sofa. I think I started to watch three different shows and have no idea how any of them turned out.

Wednesday I got home a bit earlier than usual and sat down to play before dinner. I hit a quick double up and decided to bank my winnings and go get some food. My intention was to play a bit later on, but that never happened.

The double up hand was rather interesting. I get pocket sixes. The BB and I see the flop of 699. Chips coming my way, I can just feel it. The BB puts in a normal sized bet and I call. The turn is another 9. Great. My flopped boat can now be counterfeited and I can be drawing totally dead if he's got the case 9. Again the BB bets an amount that's not all that scary and I call. As if things weren't already interesting enough, the river brings the last 6, giving me quads. The BB pushes all-in. As I push the "call" button I'm wishing Stars had a bad beat jackpot. The way my luck has been running it's almost a sure thing the BB has quad nines. But, no! He turns over AQo and I scoop a nice pot.

If I'm really back to my winning ways I should be ready to move up fairly soon. Only time will tell if the bad run is over.

The Quest takes a small stumble

2008-06-09T16:39:00.002-04:00

Friday night I donked it up in Kat's Donkament rebuy on Full Tilt. I think I only rebought twice, though I was doing doubles, so with the add-on I was in for $7+$1. I should write these up sooner as the details are already quite foggy. Oh, hey, whaddaya know, there's a tournament summary file here on my hard drive. It seems I bubbled. How did that happen?

Saturday I again played in Dr. Pauly's PLO tourney at Stars. I don't recall too many of the specifics, but I do recall I bubbled in that as well.

The Questing on Saturday was fairly successful, finishing the day up $4.09. Sunday, however, The Quest took a stumble. It felt a lot worse than it actually was, being one of those days when absolutely nothing went right. I got precious few solid starters and the few I got almost always missed. It was one of those nights when toward the end you just know the inside straight your opponent has been drawing for is going to hit on the river, despite the fact that you've been betting the whole way to deny him odds by a wide margin. It was a night of many "Sklansky wins" since my opponents made mistake after mistake, and still my chips ended up in front of them instead of theirs in front of me. Variance is a bitch. I finished the day down $4.45. I suppose it seems worse since I've been having so many good days of late.

I also noticed, thanks to PokerTracker, that several of the tables I was playing turned into tables that would have seemed tight at $2/$4 limit full ring bonus clearing tables let alone at 6-max $0.01/$0.02 NL. I don't think shopping for better tables would have helped on Sunday, but I may have to start paying a bit more attention to that. When I'm the "loose" player at the table, there's something seriously wrong.

Another good night on The Quest

2008-06-06T15:45:00.003-04:00

Last night proved to be my second biggest night so far on The Quest. On my very first hand I was dealt AA and ran into someone who just didn't want to believe I could get a premium hand on the my first deal. The flop was all low junk and I couldn't believe he'd have called my pre-flop raise holding two of those type of cards. So when he pushed in all his chips it didn't take long for me to call. First pot of the night and I double up.

Sadly, I should have walked away from the table right then because that was my high point, though I still finished up almost $2 at that table.

The other table took a bit more work as I slowly built my stack. This was one of those tables with mostly passive players and I was able to steal a lot of pots.

Then, right before I left the table, I got into one of those hands where the other player was one card too late in his actions. I was dealt pocket nines, put in a small raise, and got one caller. The flop was J33. Check, check. Turn was a 2. I bet half the pot, he called. This was his mistake. The river brought my third 9. I bet about half the pot and he immediately pushed all-in. Pocket jacks or pocket threes were the only hands that had me beat, so it didn't take much thought to make the call. He turns over 22. Caught his boat on the turn but gave me a cheap shot at making my hand. I suppose it wasn't really that bad a move on his part since I only had four outs (not that he knew that), but it still ended up being one of those huge overbets that can reasonably be called only by someone who has you beat. Like me.

Finished the night up $6.29. The bankroll is now up to $82.80. $0.02/$0.05 is getting close.

Big night on The Quest

2008-06-05T00:28:00.003-04:00

Tonight was the best night yet for The Quest. Early in the evening I two-tabled for about half an hour, finishing up $1.49.

After dinner I fired up three tables. That got a bit hectic. With that experience, I seriously doubt there's any way anyone could expect to play a dozen or more tables without knowing you'll be delaying action on more than a few of them on pretty much every hand. IOW, I was right on the money referring to these clowns as Massively Multi-tabling Inconsiderate Asshats.

Anyway, I took a very small loss on one of the tables and very nice profits on the other two. Most of the winnings came from two hands. The first was when somebody apparently just couldn't believe I had his queens beat, despite a pre-flop raise and a large flop re-raise. On a turn card that helped no one, he pushed in what he had left, about half the pot. The way the cards had fallen I found it very hard to believe he'd gotten any help from the board, so I called. My aces held and I made a nice $2.13 profit on the hand.

The other big hand was a three-way all-in in which my AKs prevailed over A4o and KQo for a $3.68 profit.

After that little run I decided to bank my profits and call it a night, up $9.49. A few more nights like this and I'll be flirting with the big action at $0.02/$0.05!

Bodogery

2008-06-04T10:21:00.002-04:00

Smokkee's Bodog blogger tournament was last night. I was settled in for the evening in time to play this time. Not that it mattered much.

The cards were not especially kind. I got AA and KK once each, but both whiffed, taking down very small pots. There were a few other decent starters, but all I really managed to do was keep my head above water. After two hours my stack was still roughly the size it was to start with. Smokkee busted me out when I took A9 up against his QQ. I finished 19th of 42. Very lackluster performance.

I was a bit tired by the time that was over so I didn't do any Questing. I'm hoping to put in a few hours tonight.

Too many posts

2008-06-02T16:46:00.004-04:00

This marks the 200th post for Patchwork. I'm not going to bother with any kind of retrospective because, frankly, I doubt I've said enough of significance in these 200 entries to fill a paragraph. It is rather remarkable, though, that what started as something strictly to get me into "blogger-only" tournaments has managed to last to the 200th entry. It's a good thing I find myself entertaining.

Some comments about the blog in general would probably be in order. In retrospect, I'm not so sure the name "Patchwork" combined with my poker moniker, Patchmaster, was such a great idea. Well over half the hits on the blog are from people looking for information about Scott's Patchmaster lawn seed or some "patch work" game that must be available online somewhere. I'd probably make more money selling grass seed online than I ever could from poker.

The number of people coming here not by mistake has increased since I joined Poker Weblog$. I hope that trend continues. It would be nice to know I'm not simply confusing half my readers.

I'm also quite surprised at some of the other Google searches that turn up Patchwork blog entries near the top of the results. My ranting about the horrible internet connection I had while living in a hotel for six months when I first moved to Orlando has made me #1 if you search for "guest-tek sucks", a fact I'm sure endears me to the hearts of Guest-Tek hotel services management.

The number of readers from countries other than my own also surprises me. I noticed this when I first started the blog, but back then I think these were mostly bored people just paging through the random blog circle at Blogspot. More recently these readers seem to be coming here on purpose. Well, at least those who aren't looking to spruce up their lawns.

I also should give some thanks to the fine folks at Blogger and Blogspot. I've never fully wrapped my head around how all this stuff works, but it does work, quite well most of the time, and I've been able to use it without understanding it. That says quite a lot about what a great job they've done. I can sit here and blather on about poker or bad hotel wireless internet or whatever else strikes my fancy and not worry my bloated head about how or why my words actually get read by other people.

Often while writing my blog entries I've thought I had some appreciation for how Allan Havey must have felt on Night After Night performing to his "audience of one". On the other hand, Allan knew at least one person was listening. When the occasional comment comes in I'm always shocked and amazed. People read this crap?

For those following The Quest, I've decided to alter my bankroll management rules to maybe kick this thing up a few notches. Until I hit the $25 buy-in level, I'm going to move up to the next level when I have 30 buy-ins at that level. I will allow myself to test the waters at the next level once I've accumulated 20 buy-ins for that level. Since I'm playing $2 buy-ins right now, I'll start flirting with $5 buy-ins when the bankroll hits $100 and officially move up when the bankroll hits $150.

I've adjusted the speedometer to reflect these new rules.

Tonight was a decent night on The Quest. I didn't play much last week and had been basically even on the week until tonight.

There was one amusing incident. It's not like it's the first time I've seen this, but it still kind of cracks me up when people whine about how you sucked out at the river when the reality is that they played their hand poorly and you actually had them beat before they even made a move.

In this case I caught bottom pair and four cards to a J-high flush on the flop. SB checks. I bet half the pot to build it a bit in case I hit the flush and to see if I can get any information. One fold, two calls.

The turn brings a J, giving me jacks up and still the flush draw. Now the SB decides to bet half the pot. He actually had top pair kings on the flop but was either afraid to bet them or maybe thought he was being crafty. With only a 7 kicker, I'd have bet them on the flop when the pot was smaller and got some info on where I stood. If I got resistance, I'd get out cheap with my weak kicker. If he'd done that, I'd have likely folded and he'd have probably won a small pot.

So he bets half the pot into my two pair at the turn. I come over the top with triple his bet. Other guy folds and it's back to the SB. He makes a min raise. This is another move that baffles me. If this was a table full of sharks I might be a little afraid of this bet because it looks like he wants me to call. But this is not a table of sharks and this bet just looks confused and weak. It's possible he's got a set, but there are two flush draws on the board. That's a very risky way to be playing a set. If I've got a set, I'm putting it all in the middle right here. I decide to just call and see what happens.

The river brings my flush, not to mention a Broadway straight possibility. Now the SB gets brave and pushes it all in, a bet slightly larger than the pot. I think for about two seconds and call. If he's got the ace or queen flush, good for him. Of course, he's got top pair, kings, and I rake in a very nice pot. And, the reason I launched into this story, then came his comment, "last card."

The SB was one move too late this whole hand. If he'd done on the flop what he did on the turn, he'd have won a small pot, but at least it would have been a win. If he'd done on the turn what he did on the river, there's a real good chance I'd have folded. Instead, he waited until the board showed two obvious possibilities he was beat, not to mention several set possibilities which were quite strong given the way I'd been betting. Maybe he figured me for a set and thought a big bet on that river would scare me away, though his comment leads me to believe otherwise. Anyway, his weak play early on got him into big trouble at the river.

I don't mean to just make fun of how poorly this hand was played. The more I got into describing it the more I realized it was classic mistake after classic mistake. I doubt any regular readers will learn anything from this, but maybe a new player may someday stumble on it and pick up a tip or two.

Well, that's it for the 200th entry. Hopefully I'll still be interested in doing this for another 200 entries.

Lost Weekend

2008-06-02T13:09:00.004-04:00

No, I'm not referring to the TV show. I've never seen it and have no interest in it.

I usually try to recap my weekend play on Monday. As I was going over in my head the poker happenings of the last three days I realized most of it has faded away. I recall playing Kat's Friday night Donkament, and vaguely recall not rebuying 32 times like usual, but I have almost no recollection of the tournament at all. According to the tournament summary I found somewhere on my hard drive, I finished in 7th. I'll have to take the summary's word for it because I'm drawing a complete blank.

I do recall about seven hands from Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament on Saturday. Well, I recall two of the seven hands. In the first I tangled with Pauly. Don't recall what I had. Something worth playing but that missed the flop. I got the impression he was trying to either double up early or bust so I hung on longer than I should have and ended up donking off a third of my stack. In the first hand. Six hands later I get it all in with my AAxx vs AKKx vs QQxx. Flop brings a K and I go home far from repeating last week's performance.

Having exited the PLO tournament so early I signed up for one of the WSOP freerolls Stars is running every hour. This was the first time I found one that started less than 45 minutes from now and that still had seats available. All I remember about this one was getting it all in with JJ vs AK vs AQ. Flop is KQJ, making me 80% to win. Turn is a blank, making me better than 90% to win. Naturally, the river is a T, giving each of the other two Broadway and they split my stack. I know I played it right, but that just doesn't seem to make up for the huge sucking sound that came at the river.

While waiting for Pauly's PLO tournament I joined The Quest for a bit. Suckout city. I guess I've been fortunate of late to have avoided a long string of bad beats, but that's what I hit on Saturday.

I briefly considered going back to The Quest after my tournament losses, but I knew I was on the verge of megatilt, so I fixed some dinner and watched TV instead. I was still feeling a bit tiltish on Sunday so I didn't play at all.

So it's been a slow week for The Quest. I have been two-tabling of late, not that it has obviously improved my win rate. On Saturday it just increased the loss. But even two-tabling I didn't spend many hours Questing this week.

I've been reading some things that make me think my bankroll management plan for the lowest levels may be overly conservative. Rather than sticking with the plan of having 50 buy-ins before moving up, I may cut back to 25 or 30. When I hit $25 buy-ins I'll probably want 50 of those in the bankroll, but at $5 and under I think I can probably sneak by with less.

Cheating follow-up

2008-05-30T13:31:00.004-04:00

Yesterday Ultimate Bet released the results of their investigation into the alleged cheating situation. Full text is here. Here's the short and not-so-sweet:

The investigation has concluded that certain player accounts did in fact have an unfair advantage, and that these accounts targeted the highest limit games on the site. The individuals responsible were found to have worked for the previous ownership of UltimateBet prior to the sale of the business to Tokwiro in October 2006. Tokwiro is taking full responsibility for this situation and will immediately begin refunding UltimateBet customers for any losses that were incurred as a result of unfair play.

The fraudulent activity was enabled by unauthorized software code that allowed the perpetrators to obtain hole card information during live play. The existence of this vulnerability was unknown to Tokwiro until February 2008 and existed prior to UltimateBet's acquisition by Tokwiro in October 2006. Our investigation has confirmed that the code was part of a legacy auditing system that was manipulated by the perpetrators. Gaming Associates, independent auditors hired by the KGC, have confirmed that the software code that provided the unfair advantage has been permanently removed.

If one is to take Tokwiro at their word, and I have no reason not to, they appear to be dealing with this in a very reasonable manner. It would have been nice to have seen a bit more due diligence on their part before buying UB in 2006. And it would have been very smart on their part to launch a full investigation immediately following the Absolute scandal. But I've made more than my fair share of mistakes in the business world, so it's hard for me to be too critical. If they carry through with making cheated players whole and complete all the security tasks they've outlined in the full news release, it would appear they've acted in good faith. I may yet take advantage of that free $100.

Not much happened on The Quest front this week. Tuesday I just felt like taking a break. Wednesday I was in a mood and experience told me playing poker would be setting myself up for mega-tilt. So instead of poker I watched that awful Andromeda Strain remake that was on A&E. Thursday I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up just in time to go to bed. I think I'm becoming my father.

I've been playing with the new Version 3 of Poker Tracker. The tighter integration between PT and the HUD is nice. The couple times I've tried it the display has worked well. The Table Tracker portion could be quite useful, though I'm a bit bothered that it will be a monthly fee add-on and that they haven't settled on pricing yet. Plus, it doesn't work at PokerStars and the details on when it might be working are a bit sketchy. I'd hate to become dependent on a feature and then have it become too expensive.

Tonight is Katitude's $1 rebuy donkament at Full Tilt. Saturday is Dr. Pauly's PLO tourney at Stars. If recent weeks' progression is any predictor, I'm due to win this week. If karma is involved, Change100 will bust me out in a horrible suckout before the end of the first level. Should be fun to see which is stronger.

Cheating

2008-05-27T16:21:00.005-04:00

Dr. Pauly linked to an interesting thread at 2+2 today and suggested that other bloggers do the same so the story gets the coverage it deserves. Hard to imagine my link will pick up much that his misses, but I've posted it anyway because I want to comment on it.

I've seen the video of the Absolute Poker cheating. Even posted it here a week or two ago. I thought that pretty damning evidence.

Perhaps a video recreation of the Ultimate Bet situation would convince me as well, but I have to say that based on the statistical evidence posted at 2+2 I'm not convinced. Fewer than 3000 hands is insufficient to base any statistically valid conclusion. Of anyone, the folks who hang out at 2+2 should be among those most familiar with the long run consisting of hundreds of thousands of hands, not a couple thousand.

I believe I've written before about one particular guy I used to run into at Poker Room back in my bonus chasing days. I absolutely could not win against this guy. No matter what happened, if the two of us got into a hand together, it was about a 98% probability that he'd win. I don't have access to the Poker Tracker data, but I know this was over a several month period of me playing two to three hours a night. I'm sure I played well over 5000 hands against this guy.

This fellow was my number one nemesis. I lost more money to him, by a wide margin, than any other player in my Poker Tracker database. And here's the kicker -- he was a major losing player. He was bleeding money at an incredible rate, at least at the tables we played together. I must have been the only guy at the whole site that he was in plus territory against.

I wasn't losing to him because I was playing poor poker or he was playing great poker. As can be seen by his overall results, he was not a good player. I wasn't losing to him because I was seeking to even the score or because he was targeting me. I was losing to him because of variance, plain and simple. It just happened that when we got in a hand together, he would almost always end up with better cards.

I'm sure had he not wisely given up on playing poker, at least at Poker Room, I would have eventually evened the score and most likely taken a lot of money from him just like everyone else had.

All this said, some of the other things outlined in the 2+2 thread go a long way to convincing me that something not right was going on. The account name changes at very suspicious times, the deletion of accounts immediately after they've been outed at 2+2, the tie-in between Absolute and UB, all these make me rather glad I did not take advantage of the free $100 at UB. Not like somebody would be using super-user mode at the $0.01/$0.02 tables, but I don't want to play at a site where it appears systematic cheating is going on at any level.

Following my second place finish in Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament on Saturday, my poker karma had apparently not been properly balanced. I played a two-table SnG where I built up a nice stack early, only to bust out after back to back very bad beats. Monday I played a very cheap tournament at Poker.com, staying near the top of the pack much of the time, again to miss the final table due to a couple really bad beats. One of them was the type where all you can do is scratch your head trying to figure what the other guy was thinking when he pushed all his chips in, only to watch your chips heading in his direction when it's over. I profited a big $0.57 in that one. Well worth the three hours.

The Quest had some ups and downs over the weekend. The bankroll gained $5 this week, which seems to be about average since I rejoined The Quest in earnest. I'm going to have to find a way to step things up a bit. At $20 a month gain it's going to be another ten months before I have the bankroll to move up. I can't spend another ten months at $0.01/$0.02.

I suck(out) at Omaha

2008-05-24T22:55:00.014-04:00

Dr. Pauly once again hosted his Saturday PLO tournament at PokerStars this afternoon. I just found what looks to be a pretty cool hand viewer program so we'll try to graphically display exactly how much suckage occurred.

I can't quite figure out how to make this look like I really want and I'm tired of futzing with it, so we'll just alternate pictures and text.

On the very first hand I get what look like decent openers, so when it folds to me in the cutoff I make it 3BB to go. boscodon calls and the blinds both fold.

The flop misses me completely, but I c-bet in the hopes it missed boscodon as well. He calls.

The turn misses me too so I decide to slow it down. I check, boscodon checks.

The river brings me an actual hand. I'm a bit concerned about the flush possibility, so I put in what's sort of a semi-post oak bluff. By betting small I'm trying to represent something stronger than what I actually have. But boscodon still calls.

And, as we now see, the suckage has begun. boscodon had me all the way to the river. In all fairness to me, however, if boscodon had just once bet like he was holding those cards I'd probably have run away.

I don't want to over do it with the graphics so I'll just post summaries from here on. The good Dr picked up a nice pot when his AKK4 turned into broadway. A while later I picked up a medium sized pot with pocket queens. Then I dumped even more when I made the classic blunder of betting the idiot end of the straight and USC55ND24 came over the top big time. I recovered from my blunder by walking away. It was a good move as USC55ND24 showed the top straight.

A number of seating changes later change100 and meeshelle moved to my table. This was particularly notable because meeshelle had 7500 chips. The next largest stack at the table was 2900.

Change100 put a bit of a dent in messhelle's stack when she slowplayed AAKQ, got it all in on the flop of TT7, and boated on the turn when the third ten came up.

Meeshelle eventually restored her stack to its former glory and boosted it even further when boscodon apparently decided to bluff at a connected board. Unfortunately, meeshelle was holding the nuts. Now, with a stack more than three times the next closest, the big stack bullying began in earnest.

Then came the first of two brutal suckouts against change100. I was very low on chips and actually couldn't have been happier when she potted it before it got to me. KKQT with a suited K is a dream hand when you're as low on chips as I was. I joyfully pushed in the rest of my chips. I wasn't quite so happy when change100 called and tabled aces. Since this all happened before the flop and this being Omaha I still had about 97 outs, but what happened was still pretty ugly.

On the very next hand came this. Change100 flops the nuts and I go runner-runner to take it away. Most of the money went in before the flop. I figured I was beat on the flop, but I was getting better than 4-to-1 and on the surface it looked like there were lots of ways to win this. In retrospect I'm not sure I had remotely as many outs as I estimated at the time. But, again, I sucked out and change100 hit the rail. It's probably small consolation, but your chips were put to good use, change.

Then it was time to suck out on meeshelle. Reviewing this hand I honestly don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I was just fed up with meeshelle playing big stack. Maybe I was getting hungry and figured it was double-up or dinner. In any case, I pushed all-in with a weak two pair and a really mediocre flush draw. Meeshelle called and I rivered my flush.

That hand significantly changed the situation. Meeshelle still had a lot of chips but no longer the way biggest stack at the table.

Soon after this we made it to the final table. I caught a couple decent hands and took medium sized pots with them. Then I went up against meeshelle with what I'm guessing looked a lot bigger at the time. Short story, I hit a very small flush that was big enough to take a very nice pot and make me the big stack by a factor of two.

The big chip lead didn't last long as on the very next hand the fates decided it was time to balance the karma. CSuave doubled up off me on a rivered two pair.

Two hands after that I sent meeshelle to the rail with this beauty. For once, I was in the lead right from the start.

CSuave sucked the lead away from me with this one. To be fair, he had quite a few outs, but there was still a bit of a sucking sound when the chips moved in his direction. More universal balancing.

More ugliness and karmic balancing followed and instead of having more than twice as many chips as anyone else I found myself in the middle of the pack.

Quite a few hands later I went on a bit of a rush, taking five out of six in a row. The highlight was the hand where I flopped broadway and sent Mr Nick UK to the rail. By the time the rush ended I was back on top by 7000 chips.

A few hands later Astin bubbled when bayne_s turned a straight and Astin was committed with just top pair.

Next hand everyone but Capt. Homer moved up the money ladder as his three pocket tens were no match for my flopped pair of aces. This gave me double the next closest stack. I tried to play big stack, but it was tough to get away with in this crowd.

The tide changed when CSuave outkicked me by one when we both rivered aces up. I was still well in it, but it's a lot better having twice the stack of the next closest.

Bayne was next to go when his pocket aces went down to my flopped two pair. At this point DrPauly was in the lead with 15.5k, me in second with 14k and CSuave in third with 11.5k.

The very next hand DrPauly and I mixed it up with me pushing all-in on the turn with top two pair and an inside straight draw. Pauly had second pair with 13 outs to a straight. He rivered his straight. Unfortunately for him, it was also the card I needed for my inside straight, and mine was bigger. I now had 28k, CSuave had 11k, and Pauly was on life support. CSuave sent the good Dr to the rails two hands later.

We started heads up with me having almost a 2-to-1 chip lead. We played 57 hands before the winner was decided. The decisive hand was about 18 hands into heads up. I know I said I'd only do summaries after that first hand, but this one deserves more than one picture.

As you can imagine, I'm thrilled to death with this situation. Pocket aces, one suited, with a Q kicker and CSuave has pushed all-in.

Here's an unexpected development. I'm figuring we're going to push and I'll still have a big lead.

I'm still thinking push.

It's my miracle card. I'm counting my winnings at this point.

Oh, cruel, cruel river.

I fought back to almost even, but never regained the lead. CSuave played it very tough, eventually putting me away with a one-two punch of a slowplayed flopped full house and a flush that was just a bit bigger than mine.

Congrats to CSuave on the win and thanks to the good Dr for hosting another great Saturday afternoon tournament.

I'm in the yellow!

2008-05-23T17:05:00.002-04:00

Got off work early today. Made a quick stop at Costco on the way home. Barely broke $100. It's a sad day when I can't hit at least $200 at Costco without really trying. It's their own fault though. They stopped carrying this fantastic frozen tortellini I used to buy all the time. And all the grapes were moldy. Not that I'd have bought $100 worth of tortellini, but between the disappointment of no tortellini and the moldy grapes, I just headed to the checkout with what I already had.

Donked out of a cheap tourney at Stars. I was on semi-tilt after a ridiculous suckout and pushed with my top pair even though I was about 85% sure the other guy had a set. He did.

With that as prelude, I rejoined The Quest. Very first hand I flop an OESD and K-high flush draw. Somebody was betting the whole way, but they weren't betting enough and everybody kept coming along for the ride. Priced me in all the way to the river where I caught my flush. I stick in a mediocre bet and one guy min-raises me. I came very close to folding, assuming he had the ace, but I made the call. His flush was smaller than mine and I got a great start with a $1.39 pot.

Very next hand I again luck into a decent flop and eventually took down a $0.56 pot. Two hands and I've almost doubled my buy-in. Very nice.

Maybe a dozen hands later somebody tried to represent a flush against my top two pair. Again I figured there was a good chance I was beat, but there must have been something about the way the guy was betting that made me suspicious. He had total air and I took a $2.14 pot.

Another long wait and many false starts later, I rivered trips to take a $1.81 pot. The guy had me until the river, but his weak bet on the turn allowed me to stick around to take it from him.

Usually I take a lot of small pots in these games, but today there weren't many small pots. I won just the four hands described here, but they gave me a $2.46 profit for the session, pushing the bankroll over the 30 buy-in mark.

I've dabbled with multi-tabling over the last few nights. Turned a profit each time and had no trouble at all keeping up with the action, but it is harder trying to get a read on people when your attention is split between even two tables. I will probably continue to dabble with it until I'm ready to move up.

I emailed Bodog about the tiny font they're using. Their response was that I should reduce my screen resolution so everything would look bigger. Gee, why didn't I think of lowering my resolution so everything on the screen could look like crap? Oh, maybe because I knew it would look like crap? I know their support has to deal with hundreds of issues every day, but this is their response to a complaint that I can't read the screen? Reduce the resolution so everything is really blurry? Yeah, that's going to be a big help.

I think what bothered me most was that I had to respond and suggest their solution was somewhat less than satisfactory and ask that they pass my complaint up the line. I guess I wouldn't be quite as concerned if I hadn't complained about this exact issue two years ago. They clearly either don't get it or don't care. Anybody up for an age discrimination charge against Bodog?

Bodogery and more

2008-05-21T11:08:00.003-04:00

The Bodog blogger tournament was last night. For once I actually remembered in time to sign up and play.

Before I get into the tournament I have to say something about the Bodog software. There are some things about the software that I rather like. They've been fairly consistent in the notion that while poker in the real world is played around a table, online is not the real world and there's no reason the game display has to emulate a table with people sitting around it. Bodog has tried a number of different designs over the time I've played there. The most recent one is pretty good.

But Bodog has had one consistent problem with every rendition of the interface. The interface is obviously programmed by a bunch of 20-somethings who have absolutely no concept of how difficult it can be for those of us on the back side of the hill to read small print. Part of the problem is my laptop which has a native resolution of 1920x1200. Setting it to anything else produces a horrible looking display. With most other programs there's some way for me to make the print larger so I can actually read it. Full Tilt and PokerStars both now allow me to make the game window big enough that I can see it without any trouble. Not so the Bodog software. There's no adjustment I can find for font size and I can't make the window larger. I can't partake of chat because I can't read it. The type is too damn small. I had a headache after the tournament last night from squinting at the screen for so long.

I wrote to Bodog about this ages ago and got a reply stating this was a common complaint. They've made dozens of updates to the software since then, completely redesigned the interface, and still most of the print is too damn small for my presbyopia-plagued eyes to read. Bodog, if you want me and others like me to play on your site, you have to fix this. There are few places left to play for those of us from the land of the formerly free. I'd love to spend more time playing at Bodog, but I can't read the damn screen!

Okay, enough ranting about Bodog's minuscule font. I was on fire during the first few levels of the tournament last night. I kept getting decent starters and the flop just kept hitting me. My stack had grown by 50% in very little time at all. And then the cards stopped coming. I went from being obvious table captain to some guy in a little dinghy being towed behind the real boat. And in shark-infested waters like these, you have to be extremely careful about going into the water without some weapons at hand.

From the end of my rush until I finally busted out, I don't think I won but maybe four very small pots. I was basically a spectator, watching my stack slowly disappear. I busted out in 23rd of 41. It was very disappointing because at the first break it looked like this was going to be a great tournament for me. So it goes.

Having busted out fairly early I still had plenty of evening left to join The Quest. Sadly, I should have just gone to bed early. I took a bit of a hit early due to a flopped second-nut straight where it took me a bit too long to realize there was a higher straight possible. I manged to recover to the point of a small profit. Then I got carried away with QQ, running headlong into a three-way all-in against 66 and KK. The kings and I both ended up with sets. At least I wasn't the fool pushing in with 66 against a raise, a re-raise.

I was able to turn a small profit with the second buy-in but still finished the night down $1.61.

There was one hand after my re-buy that kind of bugged me. I know here in the shallow end it's pointless trying to find logic in the play of many of the participants, but I just can't help myself. There's the occasional hand where I just have to sit back and ponder, what the hell was going through this guy's mind?

I get AK in the cutoff. It folds to me and I make it 3BB to go. I don't mind action, but I don't want all of the remaining four players to call either. The SB calls, everybody else folds. Perfect. AK plays great against one opponent. Flop is JTx, rainbow. I c-bet half the pot, SB calls. I'm thinking maybe I need some help here. Turn is a K, just what the doctor ordered. I figure I'm in the lead, but now there are two diamonds on the board. I bet two-thirds the pot. SB calls. The river brings a Q and the SB insta-pushes. Of course I call. The SB tables A9 for a split.

So let's review. Holding A9o, the SB calls the cutoff bet because, well, he's got an ace and he's defending his $0.01 blind. He calls a half the pot bet on the JTx flop because, uh, he has a runner-runner straight draw, and he's still got an ace. On the turn he calls a two-thirds the pot bet because now he has an inside straight draw. And, of course, he still has an ace. Those aces are like gold, you know.

I'm sure he thought he played this hand perfectly. I know I should stop trying to find logic where I know there isn't any, but sometimes I just have to scratch my head and wonder what possible thought process lead to these decisions.

Quest Graphs

2008-05-20T12:05:00.004-04:00

Here are slightly larger versions of the graphs detailing progress on The Quest.

This first one shows progress toward advancing to the next level with a safe bankroll. I've defined "safe" as 50 buy-ins of 100 times the big blind. I've arbitrarily defined 30 buy-ins as the dividing line between the red and yellow zones. Since there's nothing below the $0.01/$0.02 level at which I'm currently playing I just have to leave the bankroll at risk even though I'm in the red zone. If I ever get to the point where I move up a level, the red zone will indicate when it's time to drop back a level and do some recovery. When I hit the green I'll be properly funded for the current level. When the speedometer pins out, it's time to move up.

This graph shows bankroll progress on a weekly time frame. The time scale isn't continuous because I left out the weeks I was inactive. This is a decent way to display results because it smooths out some of the daily fluctuations that are bound to occur.

Finally, this is the graph of the raw session data. When I first started I actually did record it session by session. Lately I've been making daily entries, combining the results of multiple sessions on that day. Doing it on a true session basis seemed like the data would rather quickly become unwieldy. The Google Docs spreadsheet is pretty good, but I'm not sure I want to be sending thousands of lines of data back and forth every time I join The Quest, so some small amount of summarization seemed reasonable.

Quick Update

2008-05-20T00:54:00.003-04:00

Another good night on The Quest. Up $1.49 in less than an hour. If I could live on $1.25 an hour, I'd have a new profession.

The graph has been updated. One more good session and I'll be out of the red zone. I'm getting anxious to step this up even more, so I may start playing two tables. I don't think it will be too much strain at this level.

TheWeekend

2008-05-19T00:25:00.006-04:00

Saturday was Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament. I monied last week, so I was looking forward to having another go. Unfortunately, real life intervened. About 15 minutes in to the tournament I had visitors and had to sit out. By the time the visitors left I was down to crumbs. I pushed it all in before the blinds took it. No joy.

Saturday night The Quest made a very decent score, finishing the night up $4.84. It may not sound like much, but that's over 9% of the bankroll at the start of the day. I recall there being a couple big moves that worked well.

Sunday I again played the Britbloggerment. Things moved a bit faster this week, it taking only 50 minutes to make the final table instead of 80 minutes. I got off to a slow start, but at least I didn't need to dig myself out of a huge hole like last week.

When we got to the bubble, the cards completely dried up. By this time it wasn't exactly a tea party, so I either had to be first to push with total garbage or just keep folding and hope for the best. By the time I finally got dealt QJo, they looked like just one step below AA, so I pushed. Unfortunately, somebody with AJo called. Neither of us improved and I went home as bubble boy.

During Sunday night's Quest I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn't have just taken the night off. My play was mostly spot on. I think I only made one semi-serious mistake. But the suckouts were terrible. I recall one that went exactly as I'd planned, the other guy pushing all-in, me making the call and having him beat, him hitting his 3-outer at the river. I had to reload after that one.

I got most of it back on a suckout that went in my favor, though I comfort myself knowing the idiot should have never made the call pre-flop, so it was really his fault. (Pretty good rationalization, eh?) I mean, seriously, who calls a 3BB pre-flop raise with Q8o? That's just stupid.

At any rate, the suckout got me almost even. A couple good hands right before I quit gave me a $0.41 profit on the night. The bankroll now stands at $56.72. Yellow zone here I come! The graph doesn't yet reflect these numbers. It will be updated after tomorrow's play.

Not much new

2008-05-16T14:58:00.003-04:00

The Quest was joined for just a short while last night. I got home later than usual and after dinner I couldn't pry my ass off the couch. Before heading to bed I played for maybe 20 minutes. It almost turned into a rather lucrative 20 minutes.

My table had two of those crazy people who keep betting way more than is called for and then raise each other as if the size of the raise was indicative of the size of their cajones. It took less than two rotations to figure one of these two guys was going to over-raise pretty much every hand and then the other would come back over the top.

I made a couple half-assed attempts to play mediocre hands, as much to openly demonstrate that I was a weak fish as anything else. Then I kept folding until I caught some good cards. Flopped a set on one hand, just tagging along with the crazy guys on the flop and then pushing all-in on the turn. They backed down and I took a rather nice pot.

Crazy guy #1 seemed a bit less crazy than crazy guy #2. #1 was clearly wary of me after than first hand. #2 had no such fear. We got it all in with me holding AK and him holding AQ. I'd have ended up with a very nice stack if the board didn't river a second pair, neutering my king. I think I actually lost money on the hand due to the rake.

After that hand both of the crazy guys settled down quite a bit, betting amounts that were more in line with the size of the pot. I realize everyone is entitled to bet however much they want, but it still irritates me to see players who insist on open-raising $0.20 into a pot with $0.03 in it. Go play $0.02/$0.05 if you want to bet that much into an unraised pot. (I know it sounds stupid to get concerned about such small amounts, but I'm trying to approach this seriously and in proportion to the stakes. I've not played $1/$2 NL, but I'm guessing you don't see a whole lot of open-raises to $20. Or am I wrong?)

I've come upon an offer of free money to sign up at some new (to me) sites. Ultimate Bet is one of the few big sites I've never signed up with, so I'm eligible to get $100 free money to play with there. I'm debating whether I should take advantage of this, moving The Quest to UB and adding the $100 to the bankroll. It kind of cheats the idea of turning $5 into $5000, yet is still in line with the basic idea of starting very small and building the bankroll to a decent size. I'm conflicted on whether I should sign up and add this to the bankroll or not.

I just went off to look up some things about UB before finishing this entry. I guess during my time mostly away from poker over the last year there were some big doings at Absolute and now allegations of the same thing at UB. I had read a number of different allegations of cheating at Absolute but was unaware at least one such incident had been proven beyond doubt and they've been fined and put on probation with the oversight body. This YouTube video is quite revealing, pun intended.

Quest Update

2008-05-14T00:30:00.004-04:00

Another good night on The Quest. My first session before dinner I got rather lucky when I flopped a set of kings against the other guy's pocket aces. The board pairing on the turn didn't hurt, removing what little concern I had about that flush filling.

You see the slow play with aces a lot at this level. I've done it myself a number of times, but I have to wonder about the actual wisdom of it. Considering I had kings, in this case I certainly wasn't going away, but if he'd come back over my small pre-flop raise, my call might have given him a better clue about what I might be holding. He might not have been quite so eager to push all his chips in the pot. He played it passive all the way to the river, where, far too late, he finally starting betting. I put chips in on every street, though I tread lightly so I wouldn't scare him away.

I took a couple very small pots after that and decided it was time for dinner, up exactly $2 for the session.

Later in the evening I sat down again. This time I spent at least the first 30 minutes folding. I don't think I made it past the flop once. Just as I was beginning to think I should give it up for the night, the cards improved. I won a few small pots and was soon back to even. A couple small sets helped me finish the second session up $0.64.

The bankroll has now crossed the $50 mark. If things continue as they have been of late I should be out of the red zone some time next week.

I've been giving more thought to how to speed this up a bit and have almost concluded I should start playing as many freerolls as I can find. I can always keep a table of ring open at the same time. It may end up with me actually spending more time at the ring tables. I looked into cheap SnGs, but I don't think the payoff is worth it. The time is likely better spent playing ring. Or maybe I should buy in to two dozen tables for $1 each. Playing so many hands at once should help smooth out the variance.

Weekly Quest Update

2008-05-12T23:09:00.004-04:00

Two sessions in The Quest tonight, combined for a $2.53 gain. That recovers the last from the three bad nights this week and bringing the bankroll to a new high of $49.62. The upward trajectory has slowed a bit, but at least it's still moving upward.

Made a couple nice plays tonight, including an all-in where my top kicker was the deciding factor. I'm still letting some pots get away to what's either atrociously bad play or some wickedly good play. I'm leaning toward the former, especially when there's an all-in followed by a call, neither of them having better than second pair, my top pair taking the pot if I hadn't folded. No worries, though. As I've said here many times, my track record with calling all-ins without spectacular holdings are very poor. I'll stick with the small ball and let the lotto players fight among themselves. Unless I'm really, really sure I'm ahead.

Britbloggerment

2008-05-11T18:06:00.004-04:00

I've seen the Britbloggerment mentioned in a few blogs but had never played until today. Overall, I have to say it was one of the better played tournaments all around. Only 13 runners to start, but it took an hour and 20 minutes to lose the first four and get to the final table. Considering the total prize pool was all of $65 I would have expected a lot more goofing around and big hammer plays.

I got off to a decent start, adding about $600 to my starting $1500. I had blinded down a bit when ResdentEvil made it 3BB to go and I min-raised him, hoping he'd come over the top big time. He did, pushing the rest of his 1365 in the pot. I instacalled. When the cards were turned over I could hear ResdentEvil cackle, "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never to get involved in a land war in Asia. And only slightly less well known is this: never take pocket aces up against a Scotsman when his tournament life is on the line!" He turned a third queen and I was left with about M=7 in only level 3.

I had just enough chips to scare people a bit, but not enough to do much aside from push or fold. I was patient and pushed when the time seemed right. One time of which was, oddly, me again taking AA against QQ, this time, fortunately, not held by a Scotsman. I prevailed and was back in the hunt.

As the stacks started to dwindle I got lucky a few times and caught reasonable cards when a smaller stack pushed. As we got to the bubble I was far behind, M of about 1.5 and less than one-third the chips of the next larger stack. I started pushing with anything remotely reasonable and either the other players were scared to bubble or they just kept getting crap. Next thing I knew I was in second. Then I sucked out on Katitude when I turned a K against her QQ.

We were down to three and I had a healthy lead. Then I made the mistake of calling mauzj's all-in with my 33. He had a massive Q2o. The board counterfeited my pair and I dropped into third. A few hands later I got retribution when I pushed with 76o and got called by mauzj's KQo. I flopped a 7 and rivered a 6 to take down a nice pot.

A few more nice pots and I moved into a commanding lead. We got down to two when my A9o held up against Rosie_m_t's KTo. I had an almost 5-to-1 chip lead going into heads up.

It was all but over when mauzj moved in with K9 vs my KQ. But he caught one of his three nines to take a commanding lead. The final hand I again got it in with the best of it, but mauzj caught his cards and I didn't.

Well played all. It was a fun time.

Someone check the temperature in hell

2008-05-11T00:49:00.006-04:00

I cashed in a PLO tournament. It's a bloody miracle.

Okay, so there were only 17 runners. And, for a change, I actually got some very decent cards. Early on I got a nice bump when I got priced in on a nut flush play and it hit on the river. The real luck was that somebody else had the second nut flush. I'm not sure I made the best play when I just called his river bet. There were two players to act behind me and I figured a call might entice one of them to call or maybe even toss in a raise. If I'd raised I thought there was a good chance I'd chase everyone out. As it turned out, one of the players behind called, so my plan sort of worked.

That pot gave me a lot of breathing room and I was able to wait for the cards to come. And they did come. I got big suited pairs more times in this tournament than I think I have in the last 100 hours I've spent at PLO.

We got to five left and stayed there for a very long time. When we finally made it to three I had a small chip lead over ResdentEvil and Alexe55, though only 1500 chips separated first from third. My big mistake was when I overplayed pocket aces. I should have bet them bigger before the flop when I probably would have taken it down. Instead I waited until the flop when Alexe55 caught two pair. So I finished third. Congrats to ResdentEvil for taking it down.

I also played one of the freerolls that might lead to something big. These things are so complicated I can't keep it straight. It was free so I played. Finished 161st of 2000+, with the top 50 making it to the next tournament. I mostly just played tight and let the freeroll idiots knock each other out. My big mistake in this one was running AJo into a slowplayed KK. It looked like the perfect situation. UTG limps, one MP player limps. It looks like two weak hands with just the BB to act behind me. So I push. Which was exactly what UTG wanted.

Can I please have my bath size Dial back?

2008-05-10T15:17:00.004-04:00

My exchange with PokerStars concerning the MMIAs has begun to remind me of the comedy sequence of letters between a hotel guest and various members of the hotel staff about the soap in the guest's room. The guest has brought his own soap and would like the maid to stop dropping off additional little hotel soaps each day. (It obviously would have been easier to simply throw them away, but it wouldn't have been nearly as funny.) The guest keeps making contact with a different member of the hotel staff, and each of them communicate up or down the line a different version of exactly what they think the guest wants, none of them communicating anything that results in satisfying the guest's simple request.

The issue with PokerStars has several aspects. The first is that each email to support goes to a general address. Whoever happens to be the next available lowest level support person is the one who initially reads and often responds to your email. Sometimes they recognize that the issue is over their head and they kick it up the line. Even when it makes it to a supervisor, it likely won't be the same supervisor to whom you're actually replying. So far I've not received a response from the same person twice.

Because each response comes from a different person and they may not have taken the time to read the entirety of the previous exchanges, there is a tendency to repeat a lot of basic and completely useless information. In this case I've been told about a dozen times that, technically, each player has the right to use the entire 25 seconds they have available on every single decision. I get that, PokerStars, can we PLEASE move beyond it, because I may go postal if I'm told that one more time.

In my reply to the email saying they really wanted reports from players of abusive MMIAs I asked if there was some code phrase or password I could use to indicate I understood the situation and to cut through the normal support BS response. The reply to that once again informed me that each player had the right to use the full 25 seconds they have available for every decision, exactly the BS I was trying to avoid.

The other issue is that Stars either doesn't really have a formal policy on MMIAs or they've done an atrocious job of communicating that policy to their support people. It's been a vicious circle of being told reports of abuse can be made, being told there's nothing they can do, being told they really, really want reports of abuse because that's the only way they have of policing the matter, being told there's nothing they can do, rinse, repeat. Each time, of course, being reminded that each player has the right to use the entire 25 seconds available to them.

I have grown weary of the fight. In my last reply I told them they need to define a policy, communicate it to their people, and enforce it. Until they get their shit together on this, I'm done with it. And there seems to be little reason for them to get their shit together.

It's pretty clear they've done some math and decided they make more money by satisfying the players who want to sit at 24 tables at once (that, I'm told, is the actual table limit in the software) than they do by keeping the games moving at a reasonable pace. They say they're interested in keeping everyone happy, but it's not like they're going to openly admit they don't care about satisfying the single-table player. Actions speak louder than words, and so far their actions are speaking quite clearly.

I'm torn between attempting to make a point by opening 24 tables and playing as slowly as I can on all 24, encouraging other people to do the same, and simply picking up my chips and moving somewhere that has fewer MMIAs. The problem with the latter is that Stars is the only place I've found with $0.01/$0.02 NL tables, and that's the only place I can play with reasonable bankroll safety at the moment.

So I see three choices: continue playing at Stars at least until I build the bankroll to the $0.05/$0.10 level; move elsewhere and take my chances with a grossly inadequate bankroll; or drop some more money in the bankroll to up the safety level. I suppose I could do like Chris Ferguson did and start playing freerolls to pad the bankroll. That seems a real longshot way of doing it. I actually think I'd be better off buying in for half a stack and taking my chances with the nine and a fraction short $0.05/$0.10 buy-ins I already have.

I got the computer fired up and logged into Full Tilt about 20 seconds too late to join the Friday blogger donkament. I was really in the mood for this one too. There's a nearby upscale restaurant that's apparently been having some trouble attracting customers so they've started offering some happy hour specials. There's something really incongruous about a place where the cheapest entree on the menu is $17, but they have $1 beers. Four beers and half a $21 appetizer plate later, I was definitely ready for some rebuy madness. But it was not to be.

Instead I played an Omaha tournament. I don't know why I keep trying that game. I seldom get dealt decent cards, if I do the flop misses me completely, and I have little skill at post flop play. I doubled early against someone even worse than me, but made a couple stupid mistakes and was out before the first break. I should obviously stick to Hold'em. And I will, right after I finish Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament.

MMIAs

2008-05-09T11:37:00.004-04:00

PokerStars is starting to annoy me. A Massively Multi-tabling Inconsiderate Asshat (MMIA) sat at my table again last night. I searched on him and found he was on 15 tables. There was another one consistently delaying the game too, but he was smart enough to remove himself from search so I couldn't tell at a glance how many tables he was on.

I hate running to the local authority figure to tattle, but this is really out of control. So I wrote support again. This time I got a reply that was basically polite but had clear overtones of snottiness telling me that they'd already told me there was nothing they could do. Except one of the previous emails said they'd contact the MMIA and tell him to dial it back a couple notches, and that's exactly what I wanted them to do.

I fully realize PokerStars most likely doesn't care in the least what happens at the $0.01/$0.02 tables. They offer them only in the hopes people will gain confidence there and eventually move up to a level where the rake actually makes them some money. But if the agonizing slowness of play annoys the players sufficiently, they'll be taking their action somewhere else. As of this moment of annoyance with PokerStars, that's my plan. I'll build The Quest bankroll at the PokerStars micro-limit tables until I can afford to take my action elsewhere. I'm sure PokerStars will be crushed at this news.

I'm also wondering if I might not do more good joining the dark side rather than trying to defeat it. While my official Quest bankroll won't support it, my actual PokerStars bankroll would let me sit at every $0.01/$0.02 table they have. If a couple people fired up as many tables as the software allows I'm sure the hands per hour rate could easily drop to the 10-15 range. Perhaps that would convince PokerStars this is something that deserves their attention.

I'm sure I won't do it. It just annoys the hell out of me when I see something that's clearly not right and the people in charge appear indifferent.

I suggested to PokerStars that one way to address this is to reduce the time bank by five seconds for every table over four. If you want to play ten tables, that's fine, but you better be able to take your action in the 35 (or 18 on fast tables) seconds you have available or your hand will be folded. This at least provides some kind of penalty for firing up more tables than you can handle and annoying the other players with your slowness. Let me know if you have other innovative ideas on this.

The Quest did not go well last night. A retelling would involve a lot of bad beat stories, so I'll just sum it up as one stupid play, several idiots chasing and hitting four-outers at the river, and a long, slow comeback from early losses. I had battled back to being down just $0.50 on the night, but ended up losing another $1 before calling it quits.

The graph has shifted to weekly rather than daily updates so this loss is not yet reflected. And I have the weekend to make up for it.

Nothing of interest here

2008-05-08T10:16:00.003-04:00

I was concerned enough about the massive multi-tabling slowdowns that I wrote PokerStars support about it. They replied that while it is technically within the rules for someone to take the full 25 seconds on every decision, if review of the records shows consistent long delays for simple decisions and the player in question is on multiple tables, they will contact the player and politely suggest they play fewer tables. So if the consistent long delays bug you, contact support and complain.

I also included my suggestion to have the client software monitor response times and refuse to allow additional tables to be opened if average response times are below some threshold.

While Questing last night there was an interesting incident. One hand folds to the SB, who completes, and the BB checks. Flop comes TTx. Some clown who folded types into chat, "Figures. I folded T2." I replied, "Thanks for discussing the hand while it's still live." (In retrospect, perhaps the sarcastic attitude would have best been left out. A simple, "Don't discuss while hand is live," might have been better.) He came back with something like, "You're welcome," and it kind of went downhill from there. What amazed me was him eventually turning it around as though the problem was me complaining rather than him cheating. My original intent was to simply remind him not to do that and then let it go, but his attitude annoyed me almost to the point of reporting it. I didn't, but I considered it.

Finished the night up a bit over $2, making up for most of the previous night's loss. The graph is starting to get a bit crowded and difficult to read when reduced for display on the blog. (Not that the original is all that much bigger.) I'm working on something that will be more of a summary graph.

Update: I modified the graph to show weekly bankroll status rather than session by session results. Close inspection (probably with a magnifying glass) will show the dates are not continuous. I did not include data for the weeks when I didn't play. At least the bankroll data points should be easier to read on this one, even if the dates are illegible.

A couple things

2008-05-07T10:45:00.002-04:00

Two topics for today. Since the first deals with narcissism and one of my favorite topics -- me -- let's start with that.

I was reading someone else's poker blog recently and came upon an amazing bit of arrogance and condescension that I'm pretty sure was not intended in jest. Even knowing the individual involved has a very high opinion of his or her own poker skills, I was surprised to see such narcissistic thoughts actually written down for all the world to read.

I've always been one to lean toward self-deprecation, though usually also have a fair sense of where my talents and performance lie in the overall scheme of things.

A clever way to get where I intended to go with this is eluding me, so let me cut to the chase. I've played literally hundreds of thousands of hands, hundreds of tournaments, spent hundreds of hours playing live short-handed games with some pretty decent players (and a few not so decent players). I've seriously studied the game for three or four years now. When I say something about my skills being several levels above $0.01/$0.02 NL I hope it's taken as an honest evaluation and not arrogant bragging. I would hate to come off sounding like the blogger I mentioned above. And, no, I'm not naming names, so don't bother asking.

The other topic for today is rude behavior at the tables. I suppose it's a bit of a pet peeve, but it drives me crazy when someone is consistently late in taking action when it's their turn. We all occasionally step away or get distracted and time out when it's our action. I'm not talking about taking 15 seconds to fold pre-flop once an hour. I'm talking about when you look at the chat window and see nothing but "so-and-so has 15 seconds to act".

There was a player at my table for a fortunately brief period of time last night who was like this. I've seen him before and knew what to expect as soon as he sat down. Last night, though, I decided to check if he was simply not paying attention or was playing too many tables. A quick search showed him sitting at ten different tables. Ten.

I know there are players who can actually handle playing ten tables at once. If you have tables consistently beeping at you because you have just a few seconds left before your action times out, you aren't one of these players.

I also have to question why anyone would want to play ten tables of $0.01/$0.02 NL. I've lately been inclined to try playing two or three tables just to keep boredom from setting in while waiting for others to act. But I fail to see any reason to play ten tables at this level.

If you're interested in making money, $0.01/$0.02 isn't the place.

Honing your skills against players at this level is a bit like using room temperature butter to sharpen a knife. Yes, everybody has to start somewhere, and there is something for beginners to learn at this level, but playing ten tables at once is not a typical mark of a beginner.

So what I see it coming down to is a rather futile activity that accomplishes little other than to be rude to other players, consistently slowing their game down because you think you're being cool by playing so many tables.

The poker sites should monitor this activity and not allow additional tables to be opened if you are consistently delaying play at the tables you're already playing.

On a more mundane note, The Quest did not go well last night. I made a stupid move against a player who had time and again demonstrated his inability to fold. At least this time it was me doing the pushing and not me stupidly responding to a push. After moving to another table the cards dried up so I didn't get much of a chance to make up what my stupidity had lost.

One thing I've learned about play at this level is that many of the players can not be bluffed out of a hand. If they have as little as an overcard, many of them will call any bet. Bluffing, unless you have a good read on the players involved, is usually just a way to lose a lot of chips. If you're not getting the cards, the best thing is to take the small lumps and wait out the cards. Better to lose a quarter of your buy-in to blinds and cheap false starts than to lose several buy-ins on bluffs against the unbluffable.

More Questing

2008-05-06T00:25:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid I used to love to play football. It was one of the few sports where my low center of gravity gave me an advantage. Somewhere along the way some coach who probably didn't know what else to do with me told me to line up in the backfield. On occasion I'd actually get to run with the football. Slowest guy on the field and they give me the football. It had to be that low center of gravity. I never made it past what today is called middle school in anything that could be referred to as organized football.

Whenever I would get the ball I had one goal -- the goal line. Anything short of that was failure in my book. I could sneak under somebody and be 50 yards down the field before they noticed and ran me down, but if I didn't get in the end zone I considered that run a failure. In retrospect I realize I was trying to meet impossibly high standards.

I have somewhat the same standards when it comes to fish and poker. If I don't get all their chips, I consider that encounter a failure. Nothing bugs me more than seeing some fish get chewed apart by the other players while I continue to get total junk cards and can reasonably do nothing but fold. One part of my brain says I'm playing smart poker and that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. But some other part smells the blood in the water and desperately wants to get in there and rip off a piece, regardless of whether I'm in position to do so or not.

Tonight I ran into a couple of the wild ones. The ones who keep making ridiculously large bets in spots where it makes little sense. I'm probably being more cautious than I need to be, but unless I'm about 95% sure I'm holding the winner, I'll let them walk with the big bets. (Unless it gets out of hand. Then I'll lower my threshold to about 70%.) I've learned that the safer route to consistent winning sessions is for me to play small(er) ball.

Of course, I'm not above using their tendencies against them, luring them into making the big bet when I've got the nuts. I did that a couple times tonight. Always fun.

I played two sessions tonight with just a short break in between. Between the two I finished
the night up $2.84, bringing the bankroll to almost $48. I'm encouraged by the much better progress I've been making lately. Part of me says this is just an aberration and I'll never be able to maintain this 50BB/100 win rate. But another part says I'm killing this game because I'm playing many levels below my skill and have simply learned how to avoid the traps that exist down here.

One hand in particular stands out from tonight. I was heads up with one of the wild ones. He seemed to be a bit smarter than most of them. I had stung him once or twice and he had been largely avoiding me. These tables have a tendency to be very passive pre-flop so I play a lot of connected cards as long as I can see a cheap flop. I call with JTs UTG. Three of us see the flop of J73, two-suited. BB checks, I bet the pot, button folds, BB calls. The turn is junk, but puts three spades on the board. BB checks. While I wouldn't be surprised to see the BB sticking around with either a 7 or a 3, my spidey sense tells me to put on the brakes. I check. River brings another 3. BB checks. This is one of those situations where any bet I make can only be called by someone who has me beat. Plus, given this guy's loose cannon nature, any bet from me could quite likely be looking at a push with about a dozen ways that I'm beat on this one. I check. He turns over the nut flush. I so wanted to ask him where the other half of that pot was.

Oh, I almost forgot. This same guy, who kept tossing all his chips in the pot, actually called a river bet while holding quad kings, leaving the other guy with about 30BB left behind. I almost timed out on the next hand as I stared at the screen in disbelief and amazement. How do you not realize you've got quad kings? He bet the river, the other guy raised, and this guy just calls. He'll stick all his chips in the pot pre-flop with K7o, but he won't raise with the stone cold nuts.

Yep, no 90MPH fastballs in Little League.

Slow Sunday

2008-05-05T10:07:00.004-04:00

Did a bit of Questing Sunday afternoon. I don't know what it is about weekends, or maybe it's just bad luck of the draw, but I ran into more consistently slow players than I've seen since my Days at the monthly William Hill stall-a-thon. At least in the case of William Hill there was some logic to the slow play since many of the players were being paid by the hour. The fewer hands they played, the less money they risked, hence the slow play. At Stars it's far more likely to be either people playing more tables than they can really handle or people simply not paying attention. Either way, it's inconsiderate and rude. You may quote me on that.

Some of the play in the shallow end is still rather baffling to me. It's probably not worth a great deal of thought because I'm fairly certain there's little thought, or at least little right thinking, that goes into it. But I still can't help trying to find some logic in the play. Like putting in a min-raise with 85o from EP. What possible logic can there be in that play?

Oh well, looking for logical or decent play at this level is as pointless as complaining about the play. Don't mind me, I'm just venting. I don't want to do it at the table and scare anyone into doing something drastic like reading a poker book or anything like that, so I do it here instead. Aren't you lucky.

So The Quest finished the afternoon up $0.91, bringing the bankroll over $45 for the first time. I had intended to play again in the evening, but I ended up watching a couple movies instead. Recently I'd seen a couple references to Office Space that got me interested in watching it again. Actually, I'm not sure I'd ever seen it start to finish. Too much rap, too little Jennifer Aniston. Still pretty funny.

One of those sessions

2008-05-04T02:18:00.002-04:00

On Saturday I had one of those sessions. You know what I mean. The kind of session where nothing connects, nothing pans out. If you got dealt eight cards and were double-suited in every suit, the flop would bring three cards of a new fifth suit never seen before. This time there were no big one hand losses. No calling of all-ins with second best. Just a continual drain. It could have been worse. I finished the session down just a bit over one buy-in.

I tried to clear away my bad luck by playing Dr. Pauly's Saturday PLO tournament. I did okay fairly early, building my stack to 2700. Then I had the misfortune to run my pocket kings plus suited ace into pocket aces. Fortunately I had the bigger stack and at least survived the battle. I made the final table, but just barely. I sucked out against pocket aces to double up but then almost immediately blew it all on a flush draw and a backdoor straight draw.

After a dinner break I went back to The Quest and managed to win back my earlier losses plus a little bit. Again, nothing really exciting. Just a lot of small pots and a couple mid-sized ones.

One interesting thing I noticed concerned my behavior toward one other player. There's got to be a name for this, but I don't know what it is. This other guy was seeing the flop on almost every hand. He was losing mostly due to his own stupidity, but there were a couple bad beats in there and I could tell he was on tilt. I basically went on tilt trying to chase him. It was nothing terrible and I usually didn't chase far, but I played a number of hands I would have ordinarily folded if not for what I perceived as an added profit opportunity. Fish-induced tilt? Juicy-target tilt?

They call me Straw Man

2008-05-02T10:08:00.006-04:00

Full Tilt has long been running their "Iron Man" promotion. Earn 500 points on 25 different days in a month and you're an Iron Man. The problem I've had with this is that I never remember to start it at the first of the month. (Note to FTP: If you want lots of new participants, send out a reminder at the beginning of every month. And I mean a reminder specific to Iron Man, not just a regular "tip from the pros" that includes a link to Iron Man info.) 'Round about the 10th or 15th I'll remember it, but by then it's too late.

So this month I figured I'd start early. I know from long experience clearing bonuses that the best way for me to accumulate points is at limit. I used to be able to play four tables without any problem at all. If I'd had another display, or the sites supported resizeable windows at that time, I'm sure I'd have been able to do at least six. A bit after 7pm last night I sat down to earn me some Full Tilt points. I looked for action at full ring 2/4. Two tables, both full with waiting lists. 1/2? Three tables, all with waiting lists. I ended up at $0.25/$0.50 because that was the only place I could get a seat right away.

There were a lot more 6-max tables available at all the limits. It's an odd thing. I get killed every time I play 6-max limit. It's probably due to what I cut my teeth with. NL I greatly prefer 6-max, but I just can't get my bearings at 6-max limit.

I played for over an hour and earned all of 25 points. I did eventually find a seat at a higher limit table. Don't recall if it was 0.50/1 or 1/2. Regardless, it didn't seem to make much difference with the points.

About 11pm I decided to give it another shot. I got on the waiting list for two of the looser 2/4 tables. Ten minutes later a seat opened up at one of them. This was a table filled with some of the slowest limit players I've ever seen, particularly at 2/4. At William Hill the 1/2 tables used to fill with people purposely delaying so they could clear the five table hour bonus risking as little money as possible. You never saw that at 2/4. I played until almost midnight. A seat on the other table never did open up.

Based on my experience of last night, the "iron man" part refers to the fortitude you need to wait for a seat to open up at a table where you have a chance of earning some points. The evening ended with me earning all of 39 points, 11 points shy of the minimum daily rate for any of the Iron Man categories. So much for my attempting to reach Iron Man status. I'm not comfortable playing much above 2/4, assuming I could find a seat without waiting a week, and it's obviously impossible to earn enough points at lower levels without spending way more hours than I'm willing to devote to this. Call me Straw Man.

One rather odd thing did happen during this experience. I won money. I couldn't tell you the last time I won money at limit. I did see a few of the usual suckouts. Not being able to price out the flush draws kills me. But by the end of the evening I was up about $25.

Due to my time becoming a Straw Man, I didn't spend a lot of time on The Quest. I finished my brief session up a big $0.15.

Upon re-checking my re-checking of Wednesday's results, my original numbers were actually correct. Yesterday I overlooked that I won $0.10 in the last hand.

Oops, I did it again

2008-05-01T10:27:00.003-04:00

Wee bit of a set back in The Quest last night. Or, as they'd say on Wall Street, an anticipated correction to the irrational exuberance exhibited by the markets recently.

Once again, I stupidly called an all-in and wiped out a buy in plus a small profit. At least this time I was holding something better than TP. When will I ever learn?

I reloaded and fought my way back, making up some of the loss. I'm thinking right now that I miscalculated last night when I filled in the spreadsheet -- the loss should be greater -- but I'll have to check the hand history to be sure.

I'm not too upset. It was a good run, but I knew I couldn't go on with winning nights forever. Hopefully this is just the aforementioned anticipated correction and things will carry on as before now that this is over.

Edit: Turns out I was both right and wrong about last night's loss. It was greater than what I put in the spreadsheet, but only by $0.10. I had thought earlier today that I was off by $1. So I lost just $0.66 on the night. Could have been far worse.

I love play pokah

2008-04-30T10:28:00.003-04:00

Chau Giang loves poker. I heard him say so, and his reported behavior certainly bears it out. He's well known for playing literally days on end. At one tournament, I think it was a WPT event, after playing all day to make the final table, he went and played high stakes ring games all night, showing up at the tournament final table without getting any sleep at all.

He first came on my radar during a WSOP Omaha final table when he stood up, brushed his hands up and down over his nipples (through his shirt) and said, "I love play pokah." Funniest thing I've ever seen around a poker table. (I don't mean to make fun of him. Giang is one of the world's best and I should be so lucky as to ever sit at a table with him. But it was incredibly funny. See the video.)

I mention this because an odd thing happened this morning. I woke up at 5am. And it wasn't one of those wake up, look at the clock, roll over and go back to sleep awakenings. It was the eyes pop open and whole body says, "I'm awake!", kind of awakenings. This is very, very rare for me. I'm more of the hit the snooze button five or six times and eventually drag my ass out of bed kind of person. After hitting the bathroom, and realizing I was really awake, one of the first thoughts to come into my head was to go see if there was any action in the shallow end of the NL pool at Stars.

I had intended to continue The Quest last night but I fell asleep on the sofa and didn't wake up until way past bed time. Still, even if I went one night without my poker fix, I don't recall ever having the urge to play poker at 5am.

Despite this odd 5am poker urge, it has occurred to me that, unlike Chau Giang, I don't love playing poker so much as I love winning at poker. My current streak of 14 winning poker days in a row is what's stoking my desire to keep playing. When I'm running good I can't get enough poker. It continually tries to work its way into my thoughts during the day and sometimes even fills my dreams at night.

But when I'm running bad I find myself almost hating the game. I'm sure this is why I've taken so many long breaks over the last year. I'll do particularly poorly in a few tournaments and have some big losing sessions at ring games and it will occur to me that there are at least a dozen things I'd rather be doing than sitting in front of the computer getting sucked out on one more time.

Given what I know of poker outcomes and having had some very bad runs, I'm not sure what this says of my long term prospects with poker. I'm probably destined to a series of extended breaks after bad runs, followed by a renewed interest after the time away. Or maybe I just need to schedule periodic vacations from poker.

Regardless of what happens in the long run with my poker "career", I do know one thing. I love win pokah.

Edit: Photo added

Games gone by

2008-04-28T18:19:00.002-04:00

Recently I mentioned my early online poker days of bonus chasing. Truth be told, I made far more money off bonuses than off play of the cards. I was good enough to play even most of the time against other decent players and could take serious advantage of the occasional fish that would swim by. Except at Party. The schooling of the fishes there would often seriously kick my ass.

Back in the good old days, if you had the bankroll to sit $2/$4 limit, the mad skillz to break even, and the time to spend tedious hours four-tabling, you could easily clear $500 a month in bonus. In the glory days, when new poker sites were coming online at the rate of about one an hour and had tons of start-up promotional cash and no one on board who had a clue about a sustainable business plan, that monthly bonus rate could easily top $1,000.

Eventually, reality started to set in. Bonus amounts came down out of the stratosphere, clearance requirements moved up to a point that was sustainable for the site and near torture for the player, and a far less profitable (for the bonus whore) equilibrium was reached.

I still get email from a few of the sites I used to play but have now declined my action thanks to asshat Bill Frist pandering to what he thought was his constituency. (That worked out well in those mid-term elections, eh, Bill?) One such site sent me a message recently that they'd upped their monthly bonus to $200. This was one of the Cryptologic sites. I went to check it out.

It seems the good old days are back, at least if you don't live in the land of free and the home of the brave. Many of the Cryptos are now offering a $200 per month bonus. William Hill is also still offering their usual £5 per hour (for the first five hours) bonus along with a £100 per month bonus. The two bonuses clear in parallel.

There are eight of these sites offering roughly $200 per month in bonuses (some are in £'s, but the exchange rate makes it very close to $200), plus the additional £25 from William Hill for sitting there picking your butt for five hours. $1650 per month, and that's just the Cryptos.

The clearance rates on these bonuses vary a bit from site to site, but are in the range of 8x to 10x. The bigger problem is likely to be getting sufficient action. I just checked and there are 803 players online. Admittedly, it's the wee hours of the night in Europe right now, but that's still a pathetic number considering the population from which they're drawing. And, unless they've eliminated the micro-limit tables that got them in trouble in the first place, most of those players will be at tables where it's virtually impossible to clear the bonus.

So I guess it's good news, bad news. Great bonuses that will be almost impossible to clear.

Another decent night on The Quest. Up $1.75 bringing the bankroll to $44 and change.

Life is like poker

2008-04-28T10:20:00.002-04:00

It is, perhaps, a sign of spending too much time playing and thinking about poker that one sees poker parallels in almost every real life circumstance. I'm sure my co-workers are quite tired of my poker analogies to practically everything. On the other hand, I'm quite certain poker has made me far more accepting of many of real life's little trials and tribulations. Suckouts happen. Going on tilt because of one doesn't help at the poker table or in real life.

On the drive to work today I saw some vultures trying to go after a rather small bit of road kill in the middle of the street. There were just enough cars coming through that they couldn't grab it before the next car came by. As I drove past I looked in the rear view mirror and saw two of the vultures go toward the tasty morsel at the same time. They saw each other coming from opposite directions and both stopped short of the prize. As they stood there eyeballing each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move, a third vulture swooped down, grabbed the prize right from between the two of them, and flew away. You connect the dots.

Sunday I played two sessions. The first went quite well, finishing up not quite $2. The second was much more of a roller coaster. I was at one of those tables with a couple huge over-bettors. When questioned about his $0.50 non-all-in flop bet into a $0.12 pot, one player responded that he wanted to price out the flush draws. Four times the pot. Yeah, I think you priced them out. And risked a big chunk of your stack against somebody having flopped a small set against your TP.

I see so many basic mistakes like this and have this urge to provide a bit of guidance. Not that it would be appreciated or heeded. And, really, who could blame them. Would you take advice from someone sitting at the $0.01/$0.02 table? So far I've resisted the temptation, mostly.

Anyway, the second session was up and down. At one point I was close to having to add more chips but managed to double up and get healthy again. Finished the session up about $0.80 or so, giving me a profit of $2.48 on the day.

This endeavor is starting to remind me of my early online days when I was actively bonus chasing and making money at $2/$4 limit. The key then was to identify the bad players and pounce on any opportunity to pillage them. Punish them severely for their mistakes. The profit in the shallow end of the NLHE pool comes from two places: stealing small pots, and taking big pots from players who can't read the board. The latter will continue putting money in the pot when holding bottom pair, no kicker, even when you raised before the flop and the flop brought two faces.

$2/$4 limit eventually tightened up and there were precious few of the easy targets left, at least at the places I was playing. I'm sure the going will get a lot rougher as I move up in limits with NLHE as well.

Pauly, Badugi, and The Quest

2008-04-27T01:31:00.002-04:00

Played Dr. Pauly's Saturday PLO tournament. Just when I think I might be getting a bit of a handle on PLO, I discover I've been kidding myself. I still can't figure what hands are worth calling a raise with, at least pre-flop. Some hands kind of play themselves in that situation, but there are a lot of hands between the obvious folds and the obvious re-raises where I'm at a loss. I can only console myself with the near certain knowledge that many other players haven't a clue either.

Also played the Badugi freeroll at Pokercs.com. Not sure why I bother. Even with the benefit of some idiot basically giving me all his chips about two minutes into it, I still didn't last half an hour. The starting stacks are way, way too small for pot limit and the size of the starting blinds. It's just a crap shoot. I think this may be my last attempt at this one, even if it is free.

Got in a couple good sessions on The Quest and moved the bankroll over the $40 mark. If the current trend continues I should soon be out of the serious danger zone. Though it's been 12 winning days in a row. Experience tells me that's not going to continue. Or maybe I've finally learned how to successfully play at the $0.01/$0.02 level.

Speaking of that level, it never ceases to amaze me when people sit at the lowest possible level and then criticize the play of others, as though it was reasonable to expect professional play at the two cent table. Complaining about the play at the two cent table is like going to a little league game and bitching about not seeing any 90 MPH fastballs.

I should probably just turn the chat off, but sometimes it's rather funny. Like tonight when someone volunteered "KQ" after a hand I had won. (KQ would have given him TP on the flop, with me being saved by the river.) Then someone else says, "The hand history says you had 63." (I thought about saying the same thing, but figured there might be a few people who didn't know the hand history showed the mucked cards and I didn't want to give away the secret. 63 meant the guy had no business calling my pre-flop raise and even less business calling my flop bet.) Then the first guy says, "No, that's what I thought you had." Yeah, right, that's always what people mean when they type two cards into chat without anyone asking them anything. "Yeah, that's it, that's what I thought your cards were. Yeah, that's the ticket."

Donkerific!

2008-04-26T01:12:00.003-04:00

I'm glad Kat's Friday tournament is called a Donkament. It gives me a good excuse for my play.

15 runners. 125 rebuys. 12 add-ons. I tried to get into the spirit of things by taking what chances I could during the rebuy, and I didn't let a little thing like getting total crap cards stand in my way. I pushed at every remotely reasonable opportunity, and failed almost every time. I have no idea how many rebuys I made, but I'm quite certain it was way more than my one-fifteenth share of the 125.

I took a few all-ins during the first hour, but got sucked out on a couple times and then couldn't get any traction. Toward the end of the rebuy period I was getting desperate to build a stack and kept pushing with anything that had any chance, and kept running into hands just a little bit better. And they held.

At the end of the rebuy I was near the bottom of the pack with 3700. The big stack at my table had 24k. And as bad as the cards were during the rebuy, they got worse once it was over. It was another of those nights where I might as well have sat out.

I did take a few decent pots and managed to stay afloat, but it was a cycle of win enough to be okay, then get crap and get blinded down.

Once desperation set in, I got very lucky. I kept getting it in with the worst of it and sucking out. It felt like the universe swinging back into balance, what with all the horrible luck I had during the rebuy. One of the observers commented that he hadn't seen me get it all in once where I wasn't behind. Of course, he didn't have the benefit of seeing my cards when I made the push and the other guy folded. I'm pretty sure I was ahead in at least one or two of those. Through donkerific suckouts and just a wee bit of decent play, I somehow managed to make the money, taking third.

Among all the horrible cards I saw were a few hands that looked like gems. Three times I got pocket aces. (Yeah, I know, that seems in direct contradiction to complaining about the cards, but even the aces didn't make up for the rest of the crud.) The first time I played them fast and took almost nothing. The next time I slowed it down. Even caught a set on the turn, but lost anyway to a low straight.

The third time was my last hand. I slowplayed it again. Looking at a two-suited flop of Q52, I thought my dream had come true when the betting escalated until all my chips were in the pot. Then ElSnarfGrande turns over 52. Great slowplay.

Despite taking $30 for third, I'm pretty sure I lost money overall.

Earlier in the evening I added a bit to The Quest bankroll. I was looking over the spreadsheet and noticed I've been at this for eight months now. Admittedly, I've taken a few rather long breaks and haven't even played 60 sessions yet, but that's still quite a while with only $32 profit to show for it.

On the other hand, it is a 640% return on my investment, not counting time spent. If my other investments had done that well over the last eight months I'd be typing this from a beach someplace while half-naked native girls brought me drinks with umbrellas in them and waved palm fronds to keep me cool. I guess it's all about perspective.

Another Rollercoaster

2008-04-25T00:46:00.003-04:00

Why, oh, why can't I listen to that little voice that tells me I'm beat and should fold as fast as possible? It could have been much worse, but I dumped about $1 into a pot when I was about 95% sure I was beat. I told myself I should fold to the big river bet, but I still pushed the Call button.

I started fairly strong, then the hand above happened and took all my winnings and about half my buy-in. I struggled back to positive territory. Then a lotto player sat down. I should know better than to roll the dice with these idiots, but I was sure I was ahead when he pushed all-in. I was right about being ahead, but then his massive 52o flopped two pair and I lost the rest of my initial buy-in.

I took a little break to clear my head, then sat down again. This time things went differently. I took a few big pots, induced an all-in when I knew I was WAY ahead, and next thing I knew I was up over a buy-in at this table, making me whole for the night and providing a decent profit. Considering I was facing a one buy-in loss earlier in the evening, the result was quite good. I'd be happier with myself if I hadn't rolled the dice and if I'd listened to the little voice.

The variety at this level can be both interesting and frustrating. One table will show respect for any raise. Another will get callers all around on a 3BB raise from UTG. And most of them will be calling with air. Keeps you on your toes.

Odd night

2008-04-24T12:03:00.002-04:00

Twas an odd night on The Quest. A bit of a roller coaster, thankfully finishing on an up.

Strange behavior from one player who kept popping in and out, pushing when he had nothing, slow playing when he had a big hand. I don't know how many buy-ins he went through. I know I took a couple from him (and sadly gave most of them to someone else).

The table I was at most of the session last night was one that showed little respect for pre-flop raises. Several times I came in UTG with a 3BB raise and the whole table called. And there always seemed to be one guy who refused to believe my pre-flop raise and subsequent bets signified anything important. All the better for me. If it wasn't for once again overplaying TP, and a couple suckouts, it would have been an excellent night.

The cards were very kind. I caught full houses, and was able to capitalize on them, four times. My worst hand was when I ran KK into a slowplayed AA. That was costly. But the boats saved my bacon. Finished the night up almost $1.

The going is obviously slow at this level, but I'm not displeased with the progress. If things keep up as they have the bankroll should be out of the danger zone in a few weeks. I've been giving some thought to trying the waters at the next level, but I'm trying to resist the temptation. Maybe when I make it to 30 buy-ins.

Blog Bidness

2008-04-23T18:05:00.003-04:00

It has always bugged me that the standard blog templates available on Blogger used fixed width columns. I don't know about the vast majority of visitors, but my browser is at a size that leaves a ton of empty white space around the text. There is probably some school of journalistic design that thinks this is very stylish and hip. I didn't attend that school.

A little bit of white space to set things off is a good thing. A lot of white space with this tiny column of text floating in the middle of it is just stupid. I'm reminded here of a clever twist on a familiar saying that is firmly grounded in reality. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be.

All of this is a wordy lead up to me finding a new Blogger template that adapts the column sizes to your browser width. I may make a few more changes over the next couple days. Depends on how ambitious I feel. Let me know if the new design causes any problems for you. If you're using a RSS reader you should see no impact.

Speaking of RSS readers, I've regularly used Bloglines to check on most of the blogs I follow. It has never been the speediest of sites, but it's useful and free so I continued to use it. Of late it has seemed even slower than usual, often to the point of being non-functional. Maybe the lack of any apparent method of generating income from it has finally caught up with them.

Anyway, I've switched to Google Reader. I tried it when it first became available and there was something or other I didn't like about it. Whatever that was, they've either fixed it or it doesn't bother me anymore. Like most Google apps, it's a bit spartan, but so far it hasn't made me wait several minutes to pull up a specific blog. If you're in the market for a new aggregator you should check it out.

Moving sideways

2008-04-23T10:43:00.002-04:00

I had wanted to play in the Bodog blogger event last night, but I had some allergy issues earlier in the day and had to take a Benadryl. This is one of only two medications I've ever taken that can knock me out cold. The other is the Tylenol with codeine. One Benadryl will make me rather drowsy, but I can usually get by. Two Benadryls will put me out like a light. I took just one yesterday afternoon. I made it through work, but it caught up with me when I got home. Sprawled on the sofa after dinner and couldn't move for a couple hours.

I finally came back to life about 10:30 and decided to continue The Quest. The intermediate results were pretty good. I had almost doubled my buy-in within 30 minutes, but then I got stupid. Fell into the same trap as always, calling big bets with nothing but top pair. Dumb. The little voice told me not to do it, but did I listen?

I was fortunate to have won early so I could end the session still up a big $0.02. Hopefully this will be the expected backslide and I can continue adding to the bankroll from here.

MATH Monday

2008-04-22T10:09:00.002-04:00

I played the MATH last night for the first time in ages. Not sure why. I finished watching Sunday's episode of Wire in the Blood via DVR (good show -- BBC America Sunday nights) a few minutes before 10PM and next thing I knew I was signed up and being dealt cards.

And what crappy cards they were. At one point I seriously considered just sitting out because it wouldn't have made any difference in my play. Fold, fold, fold, fold. Maybe I've been spending too much time in the cheap seats, but this struck me as a hyper-aggro table, even for a blogger event. Very, very few were the hands that saw a flop without a raise. This made it very tough to take a speculative stab with the odd suited ace or suited connector hand, which were about the best I could hope for last night.

I'm sure my play looked incredibly weak. In a way I suppose it was. But when somebody opens their jacket and shows me the butt of a gun sticking out of their waistband, I like to know I at least have some bullets in my gun before I pull it out. And I don't necessarily mean "bullets", if you know what I mean. Coming over the top of a pre-flop raise with the hammer may be a cutesy move in bloggerdom, but it's never struck me as an especially smart move in the larger scheme of things. If I'm going to put a big chunk of my stack in the pot, I at least want some kind of chance should I be forced to push the rest in. Not that I'm above a stone cold bluff, but I prefer to be holding something that stands some kind of chance.

The player to my right raised every single time from the button when it folded to him. Once, maybe twice, I had something that I was able to push back with, but he stole the blinds more times than I could count because I kept getting junk. My undoing came at his hands when he once again raised from the button and I felt my ATs was enough to push back with. He had something like AQ and there were no tens to be found on the board.

One thing that was blatantly obvious was the difference in play between this game and the shallow waters in which I've been wading lately. As I said before, there were no family pots in this game. Seldom were the hands where even half the table saw a cheap flop. And there certainly weren't any players who continued to play their small pocket pair against constant resistance and a flop with all overcards. Not that I was expecting any.

Since my exit came fairly early, I licked my wounds for a little while and then rejoined The Quest. Happily, I found a table filled with the aforementioned fools who couldn't get away from a hand if they had even the tiniest pair. I was continually shocked and amazed at the junk people were playing in large pots and taking all the way to the end. These guys clearly had no concept of pot odds or having any idea of where they really stood in a hand. It was great fun and just what I needed to get out of my MATH funk.

It's funny how these things run. For the longest time I'd been getting tables with mostly players who seemed to know what they were doing. Recently it's been nothing but tables filled with the clueless. I actually have trouble believing it when I'm at such a table. I keep expecting fate or lady luck to jump in and say, "Hold on a minute. I'm not going to let you take the candy from those babies that easily."

Last night I got a higher than normal number of good hands, but the size of the win was mostly due to having opponents who let me punish them severely for their far less than optimal play. My biggest issue was trying to decide exactly how much would be too much for that final value bet. Thinking it over after the fact, I'm not sure there was a too big.

It was getting late and I kind of wanted to quit so I could go to bed, but I also didn't want to walk away from such a money making opportunity. Then a lotto player sat down and that was my cue to go. I finished up $3.61 for the session.

Is it odd that I drop $26 on the MATH and don't really give it a second thought and yet get excited about winning $3.61 at $0.01/$0.02 NL?

The Weekend

2008-04-21T00:42:00.003-04:00

Played Kat's Donkament Friday night. Been a while since I've done that. I think I may have broken my previous record for rebuys. I'm not sure, I lost count. I do know I got a bit tired of getting it in with the best of it and watching the what-the-hell-were-you-thinking hand suck out again and again. I wasn't always in with the best, but in those cases I generally lost like I should have. Oh well, that's kind of the point. Play like a donkey.

Things started tightening up a bit once some of the stacks got rather sizable. Though a few of us, you know who I mean Buddy, continued to rebuy, and rebuy, and rebuy.

I made it to the final table but was pretty seriously shortstacked and didn't last long. Congrats to whoever won. I didn't stick around to find out who took it down. It was good rubbing elbows with the usual blogger suspects again.

I've been playing a bit more PLO and PLO8 recently. Not like I'm changing focus, but it's nice to shake it up once in a while. And my Omaha game could certainly use the practice. Played at Stars a while on Saturday and did pretty good. Any time I can walk away from an Omaha table with more than double my buy-in, that's a good session. I wish I could say it was my great skill at Omaha that was the deciding factor, but truth be told I simply got some great cards. For a change.

Played a couple short Quest sessions Sunday night. Both turned out reasonably well, up $2.67 on the night. I actually happened to find a couple tables filled with the kind of players you'd expect to find playing $0.01/$0.02. It's surprising to me that doesn't happen more often.

The bankroll has hit a new high of $31.75. If the past is any indication I should shortly be having a couple horrible sessions where I lose multiple buy-ins. Here's hoping I can break with the past.

I've probably mentioned it enough already, but the Google spreadsheet gadgets are very cool. I love that I simply update the spreadsheet and the blog displays are automatically updated with it.

The Day After Tax Day

2008-04-16T17:18:00.003-04:00

Monday night I was stuck doing taxes. I procrastinated as long as I could, but finally had to face the tax man. Toughest part was trying to sort through the few stock sales I made last year.

I don't keep the best of personal records in that regard, rather depending on my online brokerage to have the information available. They sent me a fancy statement at the end of the year showing how much my gross sales were, but the statement didn't say anything at all about profit or holding period. Thankfully, they did have the information online, though I had to dig more than I thought I should have to find it.

By the time it was all over I had to fork over another $188. Not too bad, all things considered. I'd like to send my personal thanks to George Bush for making the total tax bite a lot less than it would have been eight years ago. Let's hope certain members of Congress stop making asshats of themselves and make the tax cuts permanent.

The biggest surprise came on Tuesday when it took less than ten minutes at the post office. Even that would have gone a lot faster if they'd had more than two clerks behind the counter. I know they're the US Postal Service and obviously know their business better than I do, but it was what is historically one of the busiest postal days of the year. And they staffed fewer than half the windows. I'm just saying...

I didn't have too much time available last night and felt like just having some fun at the tables, so I tried to play some PLO8. Poker.com has been really slow and the only table with any action was a full ring $0.05/$0.10. As I discovered last night, full ring PLO8 is not the game to play when you're in a hurry for some action. At least not if you want to do something other than donate your buy-in.

At 6-max you can often win with rather mediocre hands. Full ring PLO8 is a game of the nuts. If you don't have the nuts, odds are very good that you'll not be taking any chips out of that pot. Being patient enough to wait for a hand likely to turn into the nuts does not fit well with being in a hurry for some action.

What I'm trying to say is, I got my ass kicked. It was mostly stupid play on my part. There was a bit of simply missing all of my 27 outs (or maybe I over-counted), but it was mostly stupidity and wishful thinking.

I gave up on PLO8 after a short while and went back to The Quest. It was a short but positive session, finishing up $1.67.

Full Tilt has long been running a series of posts from their poker pros on various aspects of poker. Howard Lederer recently posted something about SnG strategy. I realize I don't have much standing to question Howard's advice, after all, he's "The Professor" and I'm, well, nobody, but something about his column just had an odd feel to it.

Howard suggested many players use the wrong strategy, taking chances too early in an attempt to build a big stack and take a run at winning the whole thing. He recommended taking a tight, conservative stance until you've made the money. After that you can start taking much bigger chances.

The key point of his argument was that distribution of 60% of the prize pool is determined when you get to the final three. (He was speaking of single table SnGs where the money distribution goes 50-30-20. Since there are three of you and you're each guaranteed at least 20% of the prize pool, that's 60%.) He further argued that since there's only a 10% difference between third and second, making it to at least third is more important than positioning yourself to finish higher. Personally, I'd say the difference between third and second is 50% since second pays 50% more than third, but I'm probably using funny math.

When you deduct your cost from the payout the difference becomes even greater. For ease of calculation let's say it's a ten person tournament with a $10+$1 buy-in. The price pool is $100. Third pays $20. Subtract your $11 buy-in and your profit is $9, or 82%. Second pays $30, giving you a profit of $19, or 173%. Your profit for taking second is more than double the profit of taking third. Coming in first gives you a profit of $39, or 355% of your investment.

Each step up the payout ladder, beyond the first one, provides double the profit of the previous step.

I'm not sure exactly where this has brought us, but I'm glad I took the journey. I knew there was something about Howard's analysis that struck me as not quite right and now I've put my finger on what it was. Characterizing second place money as 10% more than third place is just wrong.

I'm not suggesting Howard's strategy advice is wrong, but I do think there are some major holes in his justification for the strategy. His suggested strategy is also rather simplistic. Admittedly, he's just writing a short column and proper SnG strategy could fill a book. Okay, maybe a big pamphlet. Or maybe a really big blog entry. Hmmmm....

The Weekend

2008-04-14T10:02:00.002-04:00

I took a short break from The Quest to clear my head after the last loss. I've been using my account at Poker.com for my "fun" poker. There's only a bit over $200 in that account and I have no intention of depositing more, so I have to be careful to not go broke there.

The Badugi action has been a bit light, so I played a little Omaha, both PLO and PLO8. I'm getting a lot better at knowing when to run away.

My big weakness at this point is knowing which hands are worth sticking with pre-flop when I'm facing a raise. My gut feel is to fold anything other than very strong hands, but the 6-handed game I've been playing tends to attract players who play with no apparent strategy at all. I've seen pre-flop raises from people who turned out to have something like QJs and a couple low cards.

I have the feeling I might be leaving money on the table by folding to too many pre-flop raises. OTOH, I've been walking away with more chips than I sat down with most of the time, so maybe I should stick with what I've been doing.

I played the Badugi freeroll again on Saturday. I didn't last even 30 minutes.

Sunday I played some more PLO8 at Poker.com. There wasn't much action and I was forced to play way over my bankroll at the $0.10/$0.25 table. It worked out in my favor. There was one big hand where I flopped two big pair and rivered the boat. I managed to induce a big bet from the other guy that put me all-in. It's very nice to double-up like that.

I finally got back to The Quest Sunday night. That session was another one that turned mostly on one big hand. I don't recall all the details, but facing an all-in at the river I reasoned that if the other guy had the only hand that beat me he'd have played it differently. In other words, he wasn't telling a consistent story with his bluff. I was correct and doubled up.

Finished the session up $1.77, bringing the bankroll to $26.06. It's getting tough to resist the temptation to move up a level just to get this thing rolling a bit faster. At the rate I'm going it's going to be next year before I move up to a $5 buy-in. Perhaps I need to start multi-tabling. I've been trying to resist that so I can concentrate on the play, but it goes so slow I'm afraid my attention often wanders.

Do the Badugi

2008-04-07T12:47:00.002-04:00

Sunday was even drearier than Saturday, so I spent the whole day around the house doing not much of anything. Not-much-of-anything being not the most interesting of endeavors, I pulled up Poker.com and checked out the fast and furious action at the Badugi tables. To my great surprise, there were actually two people playing Badugi for real money.

I couldn't not try to take advantage of this situation. I sat down with $10 and gave it a spin. Can't say that I met with much success. At one point I was down almost half my buy-in, but recovered a bit before ending the session down about $1.

Poker.com also had another Badugi freeroll that I signed up for. This site is a bit odd. It's the only one I've seen whose official time is in the central time zone. Or maybe they don't observe Daylight Shifting Time. This kind of messed me up because I was expecting it to start at 4:15pm EDT and it didn't actually start until 5:15pm.

I know this thing is a freeroll and I shouldn't be complaining about "free" anything, but I feel compelled to mention that the structure of this thing sucks. $1000 stack, blinds start at 10/20 and increase every 7 minutes. If your first couple shots at getting involved with a pot don't end successfully, you very quickly find yourself needing to push it all in and hope for the best.

This situation is not improved by the large number of players who obviously have no idea how to play the game. One guy at my first table must have thought it was some variation on Omaha. A couple times he called a final bet and turned over two big pair. And he had actually been raising during the hand. This kind of thing could be considered as an effective increase in the blinds, making the cost of early play far more expensive than it would be with players who had a clue.

I didn't even make it to the first break, though it's good evidence supporting my complaint that I outlasted almost two-thirds of the field. At least this time I didn't get seated at a table full of no-shows.

I need to give this a bit more thought, but some cursory consideration of counting outs in this game would indicate very conservative play and early exits from non-made hands are the best strategy. My gut says you should stay out of most hands that require you to draw more than one card. The only exception would be if you can play cheap and have nothing worse than a two-card 5 to start from.

Specific strategy aside, I am positive that the vast majority of people I've seen play this game play far, far too loose. If you could find a reliable game online, you could probably kill by simply considering the odds and your outs. It's clear most players don't.

Dreary Saturday

2008-04-06T01:39:00.003-04:00

A lot of rain fell from the sky today, much of it apparently landing right on my game. It being rather nasty outside, I found myself sitting around doing not much when time for Dr. Pauly's PLO tournament rolled around. My Omaha game still sucks, but I decided to play anyway.

I played a bit of NLHE while waiting for the tournament to start. Dropped $0.30. No biggie.

I feel so out of my element with PLO. I just kept trying to remember that Omaha is a game of the nuts. If I wasn't holding something very, very close to the nuts, I got out of the way. I'm pretty good at that, getting out of the way. I actually did sort of okay. Played very tight and managed to outlast about two-thirds of the field, almost enough to make the final table.

Unfortunately, the chip leader, who was really the chip leader, was taking good advantage of his advantage. His stack just kept getting bigger and bigger. The blinds eventually started catching up and I was forced to play some very marginal hands. Nothing much came through. I finally had to push it all in with a so-so hand with a lot of possibilities. Somebody had something just a bit better and none of my draws hit.

Later in the evening I decided to play some more NLHE. I should have watched a movie. It was one of those sessions where absolutely nothing hit. If I had good starting cards and bet, two people would irrationally come along, I'd miss, and one of them would river something to beat me. If I had something marginal and folded, the poker gods would taunt me by showing me I'd have flopped a full house if I'd stayed. The whole thing was made worse by two idiots who would consistently stick around even though the odds were overwhelmingly against them, then river something to take down a big pot. Every single time.

I started getting rather pissed about the whole thing and probably tilted a bit toward the end. My last hand I had AQs. It limps to me on the button. I make it $0.08. I know this will only chase one or two of the limpers out, but I figure I've probably got the best hand and might as well start building the pot. The flop brings A95. Cutoff bets, I raise, it folds back to the cutoff who calls. Turn is a J. Cutoff bets. I've only got a bit more than the size of the pot left in my stack so I push it all in. He calls and turns over A9. I probably should have played it less aggressively with just TP, but I couldn't help but be impressed with the stellar play of calling a 4BB pre-flop raise with A9o. That was exactly the kind of thing I'd been seeing all night. Actually, that was one of the less idiotic pre-flop moves. Nights like this make me wish Badugi was more popular.

The bankroll is now $4.30 lighter than it was at the start of the day.

Quick note

2008-04-03T10:26:00.003-04:00

Played for about an hour last night. We got down to just three players at one point and one guy thought he could bully the table. He took quite a few chips from me on one hand where I started strong but the board missed me completely. The next hand unfolded the same way, but I decided I was tired of his tactics and would either double up or end the night. We both missed the board and I came out on top.

A few small pots after that brought me up to $1.13 in the black and it was time to call it a night.

The going here seems really slow, but given that an average win rate at NL is supposed to be 5BB/100, I'm not doing bad. I've not been keeping detailed hand by hand records, but I'm quite sure, even with the couple of big setbacks, I'm winning way more than 5BB/100.

Small ball

2008-04-02T00:16:00.002-04:00

Played a while tonight on a rather passive table. Stuck with smaller pots. I was actually surprised at how quickly I added to my stack winning just 6 or 8 cents at a time.

At one point several players left the table at the same time and we played three-handed for a few minutes. It was clear the other two were way out of their element. I cranked up the aggression a couple notches and viciously took their pennies away from them. I took one chance on a slightly larger pot, but I read it right and my big turn bet sent the other guy running.

I cashed out up $0.90. It doesn't exactly make up for last night, but I'm happy with it.

Reversal of fortune

2008-04-01T10:10:00.002-04:00

I knew my good run on The Quest had to come to an end eventually. I was just hoping it wouldn't be quite so soon.

Last night was a bit of a setback. I dropped 2+ buy-ins.

One of these days, maybe, I'll learn to stay away from the big pots. I almost never seem to win them. I make most my profit from taking smaller pots and the occasional steal.

I had only played a couple hands when I got dealt 55 on the button. I put in a small raise and it folds to the cutoff, who calls. Flop brings a jack and a couple junk cards. Check, check. Turn brings a king. Check, check. The river fills my set. Cutoff puts in a small bet. I figure this is nothing but a steal attempt. I raise it to about 3 times his bet. He immediately comes back over the top. I stop and look at the board. I can see him with a king, a jack, maybe even a slow play with KJ. Pocket K's or pocket J's? Mo chance any sane person would play it that way. I push it all in. He calls and turns over 64. 64? He called my pre-flop raise with 64? The "junk" cards on the flop were 32.

It's a rookie mistake, but I was so blinded by my set I never even saw the possibility of the oddball straight.

I lost another buy-in with bottom full house. Two pair on the board. I knew there was a chance he had the top full house, but the way he'd played it made me think it was unlikely. That's what I get for thinking I'll see rational play at this level.

Last night brought out some truly atrocious play from my opponents. Sadly, it was generally against other players. It's funny how the bad play where somebody calls down a whole string of big bets with bottom pair doesn't really bother me much, but when I see somebody playing good cards badly it drives me crazy. There was a whole bunch of that last night.

There are bound to be setbacks on this path I've chosen. I'm going to do my best to not let it bother me. At this level at least I can tell myself, "It's only $4."

Graphs have been updated to reflect the unfortunate outcome.

Weekend Quest

2008-03-31T11:16:00.002-04:00

I continued with The Quest this weekend, playing a couple sessions on both Saturday and Sunday. It must have been lotto night at PokerStars on Sunday because it seemed every table I sat at had some clown pushing all-in with annoying frequency.

Despite the lotto players, I managed to turn a small profit each day. The bankroll has finally achieved a new high. I'm almost halfway to having a moderately underfunded bankroll for $0.01/$0.02. But I'm making progress.

The one thing that bothered me a bit about Sunday's profit is that much of it came at the expense of one of the lotto players. I had played one hand rather stupidly and lost almost half my buy-in. When ATo showed up with the lotto player in the SB, I put in a small raise knowing he'd push all-in. I was right. He had A5. Instant small profit on the night.

It all played out exactly as I had planned, so I suppose there's no shame in it, but it just felt cheap and tawdry. I don't like rolling the dice like that, even if I was fairly sure I had the advantage going in.

I tried playing a SnG Saturday night, but my cable internet went out just as we were about to get seated. It came back up in the middle of level 3. I hadn't been blinded down too bad, but I just couldn't get my head into the game after dealing with the nice internet folks and having to reboot the modem, router, and computer several times. I busted midway through the field of 27.

The graphs have been updated. I'm really liking the clean, simple look of the Google Docs graphs. They work quite well in this setting. My only concern now is how the plot will look when I add a few hundred more sessions.

More fun Google gadgets

2008-03-28T13:54:00.002-04:00

I've added another Google spreadsheet gadget to show progress on The Quest. This is a gauge showing progress to my next immediate goal -- the required bankroll to safely move up to the next level. I'm assuming, at least at these lower levels, that 50 normal buy-ins of 100 times the big blind is the "safe" bankroll level. I will probably increase that to 100 buy-ins before reaching the goal.

Starting with only a $5 bankroll I was, and still am, seriously underfunded even for playing $0.01/$0.02, so the gauge shows me still well into the red. I set the "caution" yellow level at 30 buy-ins. Once I hit 50 buy-ins of $2 I'll be in the green (properly funded) for $0.01/$0.02 and will be building toward moving to the next level.

As for The Quest itself, I played for about an hour last night. I've written before about having trouble reading the players at this level. Maybe I've spent too much time playing against poker bloggers or in tournaments with people who take the game rather seriously. You certainly see a variety of styles in those situations, but the skill levels of the players don't seem to vary quite as much as with the players in the very shallow end of the NL ring pool.

It's unusual to find tournament players still at level one -- only concerned with what's in their hand -- or who appear to be completely incapable of reading the board. In nano-stakes holdem you bump into players at this level quite often. It's certainly expected given the stakes.

The problem is you also see a lot of people more like me; people who have a good understanding of the game but are seriously short of funds or simply enjoy the game and don't care about the money. Assuming another player is decent and knows how to read the board (or how to bluff effectively given what's on the board) can cause you to leave a lot of money on the table. Assuming the opposite can cost you even more.

Last night I was at a couple tables with quite a few players who apparently were still at level one. It took me a while to figure that out, though I was able to take advantage of it a few times once I did. I recall one hand where faced with a board showing two overcards, a couple possible straights and a flush, one guy called down every one of my bets with his pocket tens (that he grossly underbet pre-flop).

I finished the night up $1.61. I can't help but feel I should be doing far better at this level, but I'll still take the profit and feel good about it.

The Quest Graph

2008-03-27T10:21:00.004-04:00

I have updated the graph for The Quest. If you're reading this at the actual blog site rather than through a reader you should see the new graph to the right. Clicking on it should bring up a large version that's actually legible. If you have problems with it let me know and I'll try to hack my way through the html.

In the course of updating this I discovered it was easier to create the graph I wanted using Google Docs spreadsheet than it was using OpenOffice. I suspect OpenOffice allows for more powerful graphical presentations, but for simple stuff Google Docs seems easier. The other benefit of using Google Docs is I can enter my updates from anywhere. Definitely a plus.

I'm still working on getting the graph to update automatically without me having to edit the blog and change the picture reference. That would make things much simpler.

Edit: Things just got much simpler. Using a Google Docs gadget I was able to get the graph to update by just adding the data to the spreadsheet and re-publishing the gadget. Very cool.
Edit2: The Google Docs gadget does not produce a larger version when clicked. I'll have to see if I can make it do that, but the auto-update is far too convenient to give up on.

Not much new

2008-03-24T18:06:00.002-04:00

After my fun time with Badugi, I've been trying to play some more but it's hard to find a game. Even play money games are few and far between.

So I'm back to playing a bit of holdem. I rejoined The Quest over the weekend, putting in maybe three hours at PokerStars. Last night I was at a table for quite a while with players who didn't suck and seemed to be taking the game seriously. That's pretty rare at the $0.01/$0.02 NL tables.

I was doing okay, up $1.25 or so. Then I seriously overplayed top pair three times. The third time I even said to myself, "Here I go, overplaying top pair again." But did I listen? Nope. Spent the next hour and a half trying to get back to even.

After quite a while of tortuously slow but otherwise reasonable play, Grandpa-somebody sat down and ruined the game. Okay, everyone is entitled to play their chips and cards any way they want. But this clown clearly sat down to play lotto, not poker. First three or four hands he pushes all-in on his first action. Congratulations, Grandpa, spend that $0.12 wisely. Somebody finally got tired of his antics and called him, had him big time before the flop, but, of course, Grandpa sucks out.

I decided it wasn't worth chancing it against this idiot so I accepted my $0.57 loss and called it quits for the night.

I've moved most of my poker stuff over to a new computer, but haven't installed the gizmos that let me create the nice graph of The Quest. As soon as I can figure out how to export a graph from OpenOffice Calc I'll update the graph with the new numbers. Despite the Sunday night loss I finished the weekend up a bit. Exact numbers are on the other computer. (Like anyone cares.)

On an almost completely unrelated note, I picked up a pretty cool new computer tool/toy last week. Back when I was four-tabling limit I found I was getting a bit of repetitive stress from reaching out to work the mouse in my far less than ergonomic computer setup. I reasoned I could improve the situation if I could just find something I could hold in my lap that would let me enter my action at the various tables. My search for solutions led me to the Wacom Graphire graphics tablet. It worked quite well. I could hold it in my lap and point at spots on the tablet with the stylus to enter my actions.

At work I've occasionally got sucked into doing some graphics layout stuff of one kind or another. I'm one of the least artistic people on the planet, but it started when I was the only one free to work on an ad layout. I found the software to do the job, brought together a bunch of images into an arrangement I really hated, but everyone else liked, and suddenly I'm "the graphics guy".

So I was doing some more work along these lines last week and was having a very tough time using the mouse to do what I needed. A quick trip to Best Buy and I had a new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet. (My Graphire is among my many possessions still on the other side of the continent.) I'm not sure that the Bamboo is any better than the Graphire, but it does have the requisite glowing blue ring at the top, the ultimate sign of techie coolness. Anyway, the graphics tablet is great with the graphics program I'm using. Today I was experimenting with the calligraphy brush tool. I'm going to have to coolest signature for my email.

If you do any paint program stuff or work with Photoshop or anything similar, for $100 the Bamboo is a pretty nice tool that can make using these programs far more natural. And if you're four-tabling limit holdem, it might save you from a repetitive stress injury. (I don't recommend it for NL due to the horrible interface most sites have for entering bet amounts. The keyboard is the only way to go for NL.)

Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Badugi!

2008-03-17T14:20:00.002-04:00

I got an email a few weeks ago from someone at Pokercs.com reminding me I had some money in an account there. I had no recollection of ever signing up at PokerCS, and it turns out my recollection was correct. It was called Poker.com when I signed up. I don't know if they lost the URL in a custody battle or what, but that address now takes you somewhere else, so it makes sense they changed the name. And they're asking new players to go to Carbon Poker. I don't know what's up with that.

Anyway, turns out I did have some money left there. So I've played a bit of shallow end 6-max NLHE a few times in the last couple weeks. I was playing Sunday afternoon and getting bored because the action was rather slow and I was getting dealt nothing but junk. Checking out the tournaments I saw a freeroll coming up soon so I signed up. I initially read the listing as "PL Badgui" and thought, "Yeah, that pretty much describes their interface -- bad GUI."

Then I noticed it actually said B-a-d-u-g-i. Bah-doo-gie? What the hell is a badugi? Sounds like some kind of Italian sports car. Or maybe some mystery meat dish you'd buy off a cart on a Bangkok street corner.

Thankfully, I had a few minutes before the tournament started so I did some Googling and at least was able to read the rules. Interesting game. In case you're as unfamiliar as I was, here's a quick rundown.

You get dealt four cards. It's triple-draw, with you being able to exchange up to four cards at each draw. Betting rounds after the deal and after each draw. The idea is to make the best low hand, aces playing low, but you have to essentially discard paired cards and cards of the same suit. If you have A355, you'd throw away one of the fives and play a three-card hand. If any of the remaining cards were of the same suit you'd discard the highest of them and play a two-card hand, or a one-card hand if they were all the same suit. (You don't actually discard them, they just don't count toward your hand.) A four-card hand beats a three-card hand which beats a two-card hand which beats a one-card hand. If players have the same number of cards in play, then the values are compared like in lowball.

It sounds weird, but it's kind of an interesting game. And like with many of the other non-holdem games, there are a lot of people who seem to not have the vaguest clue of what they're doing.

For instance, there was a guy at my first table in this tournament who quickly figured out almost everybody was actually sitting out (though, of course, the software didn't actually indicate that, and even delayed at each player before folding them) and he could take the blinds if he raised. It took me a bit longer to catch on to the sitting out part, and even longer still to get some cards I was willing to take against even a random hand. But I finally started playing back. And this guy would come back at me with crap, drawing two when I was already pat with a four-card seven.

It wasn't too long before I had all his chips and it was me putting in the raise every hand to steal the blinds from the players who didn't show up.

Sadly, but not too sadly, since it was incredibly boring, I got moved from this table to one where there were three live players and three stiffs. The other two players at this table seemed a bit loose to me, but not really terrible. Not like I would claim to be a qualified judge of this, having had all of 15 minutes experience with this game, but it seems a bad play to me to call for half your stack and then draw two. But that's just me.

Things went back and forth a bit. Another live player got moved to our table and I took his chips, giving me a big lead over the other guys. Then some guy with a stack twice as big as mine sat down. Nothing like just starting to enjoy the feeling of being king of the hill and then be quickly put back in your place.

I did okay for a while, steadily increasing my stack. Then I made a dumb play. One of the other original live players from this table had shown a propensity for making big bets with rather marginal hands, often not even a four-card hand. So when I called his all-in with a three-card five and one draw left I figured there was a good chance I was ahead and probably had a fair number of outs if I wasn't. He had a four-card jack and I missed my draw.

I went all-in the next hand with my few remaining chips and busted out around 200th of 1500. I'm sure I could have finished much higher if I hadn't made that one mistake.

If you see Badugi listed anywhere, you might want to give it a try. At the very least I can say it was fun.

Bodogery

2008-02-06T13:51:00.001-05:00

I did come off hiatus last night to play in the Bodog blogger tournament. Not that it mattered. The cards were not kind.

I got pocket kings once, only to watch as an ace fell on the flop. Then there was the hand where I turned the nut straight against a flopped two pair and watched in horror as the large pot went for naught when the river put my nut hand on the board for all to share.

I tried to bide my time, waiting for the right hand to make a move, but even with the super-sized starting stacks the blinds caught up. That hand where my straight got rivered for a chop really hurt. That was my big hand. Perfect set up. Very dood odds of taking most of the other guy's chips. 86% to win. Sometimes it's just not your night.

I finished toward the middle of the pack, 28th of 52 or so.

It's nice to see the turnout at these events picking up like this. Thanks to Bodog for hosting and sweetening the pot like they did.

It's Alive!

2008-02-05T00:45:00.000-05:00

I guess it's been a while. I could come up with lots of excuses -- the job got in the way, life got in the way, I lost interest in poker... again... the sun was in my eyes, I tripped over a rock -- the net result is the same. I was gone, now I'm not. At least for the moment.

The triggering event to my return was an email I just got from Bodog. They were offering up some pretty juicy blogger events before which I mentioned on several occasions. Well, they just got a lot juicier. I hope it's due to a great deal of success in attracting bloggers to play these things. The last time I played the attendance was still a bit on the low side. Certainly not to the level that would reasonably justify adding over T$550 to the prize pool. But that's what the email says.

And it's enough to get me to consider coming out of semi-retirement. There are a couple small hoops to jump through for this one, but I'm going to jump. Assuming I don't go back into the mode of forgetting all about poker, I'm going to be there tomorrow gunning for my share of that extra equity. Hope to see you there.

I'm in the mood...

2007-11-13T17:12:00.000-05:00

I don't know, maybe I'm back into the mood for poker. Two nights in a row working on the quest. And last night I actually made modest progress. Up $1.59 for the session bringing the bankroll to $23.30.

I tried a few times to use the Phil Gordon approach. As I suspected, it didn't work particularly well. If you raise it a reasonable amount, people seem to look at it like, "It's only six cents more." If you raise it a lot, they seem to think you're trying to buy it and will call anyway. I suppose that doesn't mean the approach is a complete failure. My pocket aces probably took a considerably larger pot than they otherwise would have due to my early raise.

I have no hard evidence to back it up, but I'm of the opinion that at this level a strategy I'll call "tight speculation" is the right way to go. Normal tight aggressive play, modified to play a lot more speculative hands where you can get in cheap. If you don't hit the flop big or have a ton of outs to a monster, bail to any pressure.

Last night I got mostly junk right up until just before I had to quit. I was down over $1 at one point, but slowly worked my way back up. Then I hit a couple big hands. I would have had a nice double-up in there too if the other guy hadn't hit a 3-outer at the river to split the pot. I ended up losing money to the rake on that one.

The Bodog Blogger tournament is tonight. Not sure yet if I'll make that one or not. Give it a try if you haven't already.