I tried to get onto the Pokerstars Sunday Million through an $11 satellite that guaranteed 100 seats. About 3500 people signed up for it though, so it looked like a bit a grind to get through it. I built up a decent stack quickly, and managed to stay in the top 50 for a couple of hours (10th at one point). However the blinds increased quickly and everyone switched to push/fold pretty quickly – it became a minefield to enter any pot. I also started to wonder about the point of getting through one massive MTT to enter another massive MTT, both of which run into the early hours, and I decided that if I got my ticket I’d just cash it in rather than play. The decision became moot though as I ran into a couple of suckouts and went out 340th – 100 places short of a seat. Waste of time really – I think from now on if I enter a big MTT it a) won’t be a sat, b) starts in the morning UK time…
Meanwhile, husngs continue to deliver;
Merely a handful of SNGs and a nice $50 profit I played on PokerStars for a bit since their traffic is still twice that of Full Tilt and I figured that the $10 husngs should be guaranteed fishy. On the whole they are, but I’m still defeating myself more than being outplayed – aggression works well, but it’s very easy to walk into a calling station’s bottom pair. I’m still trying to get the balance, and it’s getting better, but not perfect yet.
The fourth tournament was a 4 person shootout – very profitable it seems, $11 buy-in for a $44 prize. Only downside is having to wait for the other table to finish in the first round.
Holy Sunday morning TV! Batman the movie just came on, and this just happened. This could be quality!
Update: Solid run at 4 man HU shootouts Won 4 out of 5! Could this be my biggest winning day? $132 – it must be I think, I can’t remember anything bigger, including the day I won $90 in a $2 180man MTT. They are very slow though – I’ve just had to wait almost half an hour for one pair of donks trading blinds before one randomly went through to play me…
Turns out my hourly rate in husngs is comparable to my day job salary. Sooo, if I could maintain 40 hours a week of poker I could be a pro! I think I’ll wait until my hourly rate means I don’t have to play quite so many hours. Oh, and also when I know I’ll be on a heater 100% of the time
The Cake network seem to be taking that software bug seriously, although don’t seem to have determined a cause yet (they’ve just upped the monitoring of hands more).
An excellent response from Lee Jones, their representative on 2p2 forums though;
Q: What if I think I was the victim of a wrongly pushed pot before?
A: If you have a hand history, send it to our support people. If you want to ask our support folks for your most recent 1000 hands or so, feel free. If you can find (and we confirm) a wrongly pushed pot, we’ll ship you $500 for each occurrence. If you were the true winner of the pot and it wasn’t pushed to you, we’ll send you double the size of the pot plus the $500.
Pretty good if you think you can remember it happening. Both Hold’em Manager and PokerTracker validate each hand imported though, so I guess there’s a possibility they may have rejected it and you won’t find it in your database (although it would still be in the original HH). That’s only a guess though, I know they check pot size on each street but checking the appropriate winner might be too much of an overhead for them to bother…
Update: lol, i should have read just a few more posts further They’ve found the problem;
During the hand in question, there was a player who had missed the blinds and been asked to post a dead blind in the cutoff. He didn’t, but somehow there was a perfectly timed lag between the client and the server that caused him to have a “Fold” button presented (though he may or may not have seen it). Probably unknowingly, he clicked a non-existent “Fold” button, which went through to the server. The server has code built in to protect it from extraneous messages such as this (including malicious intent from hacked clients). But it turned out that it didn’t have that protection from a dead blind-posting player if the message was something that shouldn’t have been coming in anyway (e.g. a “Fold” from somebody who shouldn’t be allowed to fold in the first place).
The result of all this was for the system to believe that it had a side-pot between the sitting-out player and the small blind (the guy with the kings). It evaluated that pot, awarded that pot to the small blind, and then had no more pots to award, so it ended the hand.
We’ve fixed the code and are testing it. There’s a pretty good chance we could have gone another four years before we saw this again, but obviously we’re not going to wait and find out. The $500 offer I mentioned above stands; we think we’ve got this one beaten.
As regards the people who were involved in the meteor-strike pot, we’re going to treat it like a bad beat jackpot. We’re going to ship $500 to the guy who had the ace of trump and should have won the pot in the first place, $250 to the OP in this thread for reporting it, and spread $250 around the other players who were dealt in, including the mystery player who wasn’t dealt in but managed to fold anyway. Were it not for him, we’d have never found and removed this bug.
Sure, he loves his poker alright – but has he ever run around spilling his piss bottle around the room and then taken a victory swig? No sir, I bet he hasn’t…
Pre Flop: ($0.06) Hero is UTG with 2 T 2 folds, MP calls $0.04, BTN calls $0.04, 1 fold, BB raises to $0.28, MP calls $0.24, BTN raises to $2.71, BB raises to $3.92, 1 fold
Flop: ($5.72) 4 4 8
Turn: ($5.72) 6
River: ($5.72) 9
Final Pot: $5.72
BTN shows A Q
BB shows K K BB wins $5.36 !!!
(Rake: $0.36)
Obviously not a common thing, but you’d expect this to never happen! Full 2p2 thread here. Hopefully it’s a hoax, but there’s no sign of that from the thread…
Got into work and an hour later was trying not to vomit over my desk – I’m guess I’d put some bad milk into my morning coffee (ironically a colleague joked with me as I poured it saying, can’t be off, it’s still flowing). Bossman let me go home, but despite the perfect opportunity for pokerage I just didn’t feel like.
Meanwhile during that time S1ndr0me was feverishly grinding away – he had seen the unstoppable machine of my husngs create a real threat to his chances of winning our prop bet. 19:41 precisely I get the email proclaiming his victory. If only I’d played through my nauseous haze I could have won (holds arms to heavens and shouts WHYYYYYY????). Only kidding – S1ndr0me’s heater crushing of NL10 was extremely impressive as we can see on his blog. I’m just grateful that the husngs supplied the padding my roll needed to pay the bet. TBH I saw it coming, S1ndr0me’s been playing extremely well lately. He must be rolled for NL25 now, so hopefully we’ll see him take that on now.
I then had a little chat with Yegor about HU, and we decided to go on a play money HU cash table – cash games obviously being very different to SNG’s – higher stakes, plus easy to lose a ton. We (or I) wanted to see how we stood before joining the big boys.
He proceeded to either 3bet/4bet what seemed like every hand. Bluffs I tried to pull required at least 2 barrels, and frequently he called those down with 3rd or 4th pair to add to his already bloated stack. He raised everything, I hit nothing, and it became a bewildering mugging of bloody proportions.
Finally we stopped (um, he might have stopped out of boredom) with him standing with a 600bb stack. If it had been real money I’d have been royally decimated!
So, a grim day indeed, despite not putting a single real dollar on the table…
Thanks for the really kind words m8. I’m very surprised that it all came together yesterday. And to be honest I’m pretty amazed that I won at all. The possibility of you running away with it was very real.
Dunno wtf is up with that Rush heater tho. It seems like a cash machine to me. sample and all that I know, still very promising
Meteoric
Keep withdrawing until the bank sends their boys round I say!
There’s no reason why rush shouldn’t be a winning format – you might lose a little from having no reads, but is that outweighed by the volume of hands + rakeback? Quite easily I expect – I should imagine it’s now better to consider $/hr as the metric of choice rather than bb/100..
i think thats the way forward for HU SNG. Super aggresive.. needs balls tho,,
hope you’re feeling better
Meteoric
Yegor said I was being aggressive in all the wrong spots – he couldn’t see what I could realistically be representing (it was TPWK every time, ldo!). I lost a few games today, which wasn’t a disaster, but I’m going to put some thought into what he said.
Feeling a lot better – Mother Bessies Jam Roly-poly pudding & custard has remarkable healing powers (provided it’s not shared with anyone else)
it’s interesting how we percieve things differently. i thought you were the one constantly betting and raising and i was only calling or folding i think my betting lines were standard(for me) – flop cbet – 60ish, turn cbet ~40
and i 3bet you like 5 times for value and 2-3 as bluffs. maybe i had good run of cards so it may seem like every hand..
Meteoric
lol, strange – I was definitely intimidated, but I guess I overcompensated for something that didn’t really exist (I took all the rope I needed to hang myself!).
I had uploaded that play chip session to that hand replayer and was going to go through it at lunch time. Something was wrong and no hands appeared (same for everyone’s replays, so a server fault on their side). I’d really like to find a better session replayer, but there aren’t many around where you can upload a session *and* embed it into the forum…
The bad was my cash games – I started out the month after some in depth revision of my play, and came to the conclusion I was pushing too hard with paired hands (not PP) – overvaluing them and trying to get too much value. I was doing well at all-in play, and making good value out of 2pair+ hands, but the weaker made hands were wiping out those gains.
So I trimmed down my game and initially it seemed to be working – a nice 12 buy-in climb. It then collapsed dramatically, and to be honest I’m still not sure why;
At the bottom of that dive Full Tilt bought out Rush Poker, and I instantly switched, lured in by the appeal of big rakeback and racking up a large volume of hands. I’m not a big volume player, and the idea of boosting the number of hands was to reduce variance, but somehow I became swingier then ever. I possibly could have worked my way back to zero, but I was dispirited with the whole thing. My new year’s resolution was to not care about the limits I play, and just go with my bankroll, which is still fine, but it hurt to be within $8 of moving down to NL5
However at that point I switched to HUSNGs. Which was the good half of the month
For some reason I’ve been unstoppable – $5 buy-in games went fine, enough to give me confidence with the $10s. I then won 75% of $10 games – 17/23! Yesterday I tried some $20 games (not january I know), and won 2/3, so early days there – however the cash profit from these is astounding. Furthermore I’m not feeling bad (much) when I lose a match, not like when I’ve just spewed 4 buy-ins at NL10 – however that could be because I’m on a winning streak, sooo I’m not going to make too much of that right now.
Final gains: $120 including rakeback. $70 without rb – have to admit, rush poker did win in that respect!
February I’m concentrating on HU. Maybe this is a turning point in what kind of game I play, we’ll have to see…
ps. forgot to mention 21st in the WBCOOP main event as well
Also got two weeks of stox from trulyfree, better get watching some vids I guess!
So having played 8 hours of poker into the wee hours, I came away with a $215 SCOOP ticket. Two hundred and sixteen dollahs!!! Yeah!
Or maybe not. Looks like SCOOP tickets aren’t redeemable, at least not going by last years rules (haven’t tried with this ticket, so hopefully I’m wrong, but I saw on another blog a similar thing so I’m thinking I’m SOL with this).
So can I win loads of dosh with it? Um, no, I can win a place to another tournament. SCOOPS is a steps tournament – that $215 gets me into step 4. I have to win that, and then another to see any money.
Like that’s going to happen…
Hmph. How much could I have won playing 8 hours of husngs or cash? If it wasn’t for the great atmosphere of it, ie the chat with other bloggers, the live blogging etc, then it was a big waste of time.
Fake Profit: a ‘$215′ ticket
Real Profit: two new additions to my blogroll; Black Widow of Poker & Rabbi Poker News (there’s a few others I want to hunt down too – ppl who were chatty during the game)
Last year SCOOP was cash tourneys, for sure. They were split into 3 or 4 buy-in levels (something like: micro, low, high, and baller) and then there were different variations and games, pre-lim and main events. You;ve gotten a ticket good for one high event at least; I don’t know if they let you chop it up across multiple low or micro events.
I think I only played in one event last year — a micro buy-in six-max NLHE game — and hit a tiny cash placing 3,700 out of 22,000 entrants. Pretty good though as I never play 6-max and had a former FTOPs winner on my left the whole time.
Step tickets are for the birds though. There are pros that grind out the higher steps all day making it nigh impossible for someone from outside their clique to keep climbing….
FYI, I emailed support to find out if you can hack the $215 SCOOP ticket into smaller amounts. I’m more likely to play a couple of the small / mid events (omaha, mix, etc.) then to blow it all in one $215 tourney. Will keep you posted.
John
Nice work. Play the $215 and TAKE IT DOWNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
Meteoric
ah, good. That all sounds cool.
Reckon I’d want to split the ticket too – perhaps 4 x $50 tournies maybe? Definitely can’t redeem the ticket though (found the email)
Meteoric
BTW – I have a forum (obv). Feel free to say hi
Meteoric
also, anyone know kalamiis’ blog? or ErickRiveraD? They were chatty guys…
Unfortunately, as per our promotion’s terms and conditions, please note that we are unable to comply with your request:
‘Event tickets are not transferrable. Event tickets awarded via promotional tournaments must be used in that event or forfeited, as they have no value outside of the tournament to which they grant admission.’
I am never one to back down, so I emailed a different person at PokerStars to see if I could split the SCOOP ticket.
Much better response:
“Hello CKBWoP,
First off, well done in the tournament.
Secondly, we should be able to split down the $215 SCOOP ticket for you, the best thing to do is wait until the SCOOP schedule has been announced and then we can arrange for the tickets that you require.”
That’s cool – I wouldn’t have thought of doing that.
All your comments are landing in my spam folder – trying to figure out why (I shouldn’t have to approve every comment if you didn’t get chucked there…)
I’ve had an unusual number of blog hits from Estonia and Mexico city the past couple of days, that unusual number being 1. Eric Rivera seems to be an up and coming tourney player connected to the Intellipoker community; I’m sure we’ll here about him again. As for Kalamiis the Estonian, I poked around but have no idea.
As for splitting the ticket, you never know. I imagine there could be enough whales out there that you could get good value out of the whole ticket in a $215 SCOOP event. Last year Stars promoted the heck out of it. At the tail end of this week’s 2+2 pokercast Mike & Adam interviewed the guy who binked third place in Sunday’s special 2 million guarantee — a guy whose normal stakes were ~$4 180s — suggesting taking a stab outside you’re normal bankroll management limits isn’t always a bad thing!
Meteoric
I wrote to PS support, and they said they’d ask Eric Rivera and kalamiis if they’d be happy for their URL’s to be passed on.
PS support also said it would be a good idea for us to be able to look up player’s blogs, but they’d have to have asked our permission first – so they’re going to work that into next year’s WBCOOP.
I played on PokerStars for a bit since their traffic is still twice that of Full Tilt and I figured that the $10 husngs should be guaranteed fishy. On the whole they are, but I’m still defeating myself more than being outplayed – aggression works well, but it’s very easy to walk into a calling station’s bottom pair. I’m still trying to get the balance, and it’s getting better, but not perfect yet.
T
4
8
K
Lol, it’s like a bad beat jackpot!!! a huge pot you win you’d be praying that it gets it wrong and ships it to the other player!
Oooh. Thanks for the update; I had stopped keeping up with the 2+2 thread. Interesting glitch; I’m glad they got to the bottom of it.