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Archive for March, 2010

March

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

March was a very unexceptional month. Something that’s obvious just from the fact that this was only my 8th post in the entire month – the lowest post count since I started this blog.

husngs;

It was another month of trying to push into higher staked games – each attempt busting out and having to back pedal a bit to regain confidence. My enforced goal of 20 games to acclimatise into $20s almost worked, but once I cleared the Full Tilt $50 bonus I switched over to Ultimate Bet (who’d offered me a $100 bonus, which might just get cleared by christmas at this rate). However I’d only left about $30 in that account so it was back to $5s and $10s (whatever was available) to rebuild the account a bit first. I’d just got it built to about $100 when it had dawned on me that my overall roll is over $700 – I should be trying $30s, not $20s!

Consequently the obvious happened and a couple of $30 games later I’d blown the account back down to $20 or so (that’s at the 125 game mark). Crawled back to $5s and $10s. I probably should just transfer a couple of hundred from another account, but whatever.

Despite my poor results, the husng players at Ultimate Bet are really bad. Preflop raises are fairly rare and you can pin them down to bluffer, station, nit etc fairly quickly. It seems though that I’m my own worst enemy. For instance I’ll have ground them down to 1/3 of the chips and then do some fool move like call a shove with ATo and end up reversing the chip count. My opponent has made so many bad moves that I start to treat their raises with contempt, and inevitably walk into a monster. Stupid stuff. I’ve even changed my avatar to a fish to remind me who the idiot at the table really is…

Cash;

No, I’ve not really returned to cash games – as explained in an earlier post I did a bit of rush to clear the last few $$$ of my FT bonus and somehow accidentally won at the same time. The blue line that shoots off at the end is rakeback + the bonus.

So end result is +$100 (Rakeback on the husngs is $30 which cancelled out the husng losses). Compared to the last two months that’s fairly poor, but I’m not complaining – it’s still a gain!

Next month? I’m determined not to wimp out of playing the stakes I should be playing. That means $30 games. Unless I get a few games in a row that’ll mean transferring some money to my UB account, but no big deal really.

Another Take 2 Promotion at Full Tilt

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

There’s another Take 2 bonus offered at Full Tilt, which has to be the easiest bonus ever to clear. All you have to do is play two tables or one table of rush for about 5 minutes each day, and they give you the money!

The last one was for $50 and you had to play 20 days out of the month, this one’s a lot shorter where it’s just 9 days for $25. Still nothing to complain about :-)

I’d only just managed to clear the $50 rush poker bonus. It had been steadily clearing over the last month and I ended up with just minutes to go and 5 Full Tilt points left for the last $5. So, despite all the obvious dangers, I popped open a bunch of NL25 rush tables with the intentions of fold, fold, fold just to get those last few points.

Somehow though I kept getting dealt great hole cards like AJs and I *had* to see a few flops. You’re probably expecting me to say that it all went tits up and in chasing that $5 of bonus I lost over $50, but no! It went my way for a change! I took a couple of 50bb pots and then shoved a TPTK (I know, dodgy) to see my opponent on a flush draw – it held!

So in exactly 3 minutes and 45 seconds I played 36 hands winning $53! Even more importantly I cleared the final $5 of the rush bonus. Sustainable?

It’s perhaps just as well though – this month has been breakeven on the husngs so far. My attempts at the $20s has been quite swingy, and I’ve not had any major heaters on the $10s to cover it. In fact as of right now it’s actually -ve with only rakeback pushing it into the black (well almost. -$0.50 is close enough).

I then was told that I’ve a $100 bonus on Ultimate Bet to be played out. So I’ve switched there for the time being. The bonus isn’t so great though – once I’d figured out how much rake it would take to clear, it turns out that it takes almost three times as much as the Full Tilt bonus took. So pretty much so slowly that it’s probably not worth it. It’s the same thing for the Cake sign-up bonus – I still haven’t even cleared $10 of that and I’m probably close to the time limit on that one.

Since my site is promoting these sites with their bonuses etc, I think I ought to put some work into figuring out how to compare one site’s bonuses against another, and display them in terms of Rake. I should imagine there will be some big differences…

Update: Wow, the players at UB are annoying. Some guy limped his AA and unfortunately I walked into it with TP – he then typed ‘f u’ into the chat. Aggressive calling at it’s best. Then today I had a player who showed his hole cards every time I folded my button preflop. I had to explain how meaningless that was since it was getting really irritating (so maybe not so meaningless). I’d made a couple of bad moves and he was ahead 2:1 and he started suggesting I needed to go all-in (blinds were still 10/20 – very slow structure at UB). I obliged him with JJ but unfortunately his 99 hit a set.

20 Games of $20

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Completed my 20 games. Took a little longer than it should of (felt crap on Sunday and last night – too much staring at computer monitors).

And here’s the result;

Not bad – ROI 23%. I’m not over the moon about my play though – I sucked out on quite a few of those games, plus I ran into people with plummeting sharkscope graphs who still managed to beat me (some of these graphs are losses in the thousands of dollars! I can’t imagine what it would feel like to suddenly discover sharkscope and look yourself up to see a chart like that). So room for improvement, but the important thing is that I now feel quite comfortable with $20s :-) All I need now is a heater and I’ll be trying the $30s!

Also tonight I came 15th in a HU MTT against 400 other runners which was nice. Shame the buy-in was only $2! I came away with $16 prize money from that – these MTTs run every day at 7pm and are great for winding down after work. Two hours of bashing low stakes droolers while risking only $2.

Need to Set a Goal

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

I’m still struggling mentally with moving up with husngs (as well as struggling to post frequently by the looks of it, sorry about that!).

My $10 games are doing ok;

But my $20 games aren’t;

and it seems to be a regular pattern – I have a go at a few $10 games and if it goes badly I give up and do something else (so bad for volume). If it goes well I have a quick shot at a $20 and when that goes bad I return to $10s, win a few and give up for the night. Playing like that I won’t get really into the $20s until I have a miniheater streak and win 3 or 4 in a row – which is what happened with the $5s and $10s – both limits I had a nice winning streak of 5+ games (or even 10+), and then I was extremely comfortable at those limits.

So either I wait for that winning streak, or try something else. So I’ve decided to try something else and set myself a goal. What I’m going to do is play 20 x $20 games – no backing down (unless I lose 10 in a row, then I might stop). Hopefully they’ll go well, and ease my discomfort for this level…

Return of The Mojo

Monday, March 15th, 2010

It’s one of those weird monday nights – everyone I’ve played has been really, really, really bad! :-D

So far it’s 6 games won out of 7, and the last game was an $10 8 man shootout. I noticed that 5 people had already signed up and figured I might as well join in – the prize is split between the 2 finalists $52/$28, so compared to a 4man it’s not that great, but I felt like killing some time and having a gamble.

Plus I was running hot – so hot that even FT couldn’t handle it! First game of the 8man we were all in and I was in bad shape needing a K on the river to complete a straight. Just before the river card was dealt Full Tilt completely hung – it just stared at me showing me the straight draw, taunting me! Then it crashed completely. I thought ‘oh well, gg’ and restarted Full Tilt not expecting much.

As I logged in the game popped up with the fuckwit villain hammering away at his bet button – a K must have landed!!! He’d blinded me back to a 50:50 stack size and I started rebuilding. I was up to 75:25 and he shoved. I called with A7 (blinds were getting a bit high) to see 88. Flop and turn missed, and then the river hit! That guy must have been so pissed (muhahaha).

I went on to win the 8man making $77 for the night – that rescues this month which had been down $80.

I’m a bit worried about my net connection now though. Full Tilt is disconnecting a lot, plus my modem is also checking out fairly often as well. The two combined aren’t making life easy.

Unregistered Plus Heads Up SNG Hand Chart

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Pokerwise I’ve had a crappy weekend, and the way I was playing I decided to unregister from the miniftops heads up tourney :-(

I did manage to sort out some problems with my game though (around tournament 15), but as you can see from the red ‘luck adjusted’ line I ran into enough ‘bad luck’ to not make any difference (tbh I don’t put any credence into these EV adjusted values at all, but like any good statistics; when they prove your point they must be right). It was pretty bad though, and one game I was up $2550 vs $450 when I disconnected – by the time I rebooted my shitty modem and reconnected I was the one with $300 left :-(

Nevertheless, the problem I sorted out was my starting range. When I started out on husngs I was playing by instinct, taking my 6max range and widening it out to what felt right, and all was good with big rocketing graphs every day. I then found a starting range on husng.com and started implementing that.

Since that day I’ve broken even. Small sample, but it wasn’t right at all – I was getting into too many marginal spots, ending up overcommitting and spending most of my time fighting to come back from behind. So today I took a step back and thought what a heads-up range for SNGs ought to be. Basically since in a husng we’re playing shortstack poker most of the time, it makes sense that the Nash table is giving us the right distribution- after all, it’s calculated from the all-in preflop equity you have in a hand based on two players under shortstacked conditions.

So I twiddled around with the ratios until it presented 70% and 30% of the hands (so 70% is my opening range on the button and 30% is my calling range on BB). In this table the 70% is everything except the light grey, and the 30% is in bold;

A K Q J T 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
A AA AKs AQs AJs ATs A9s A8s A7s A6s A5s A4s A3s A2s
K AK KK KQs KJs KTs K9s K8s K7s K6s K5s K4s K3s K2s
Q AQ KQ QQ QJs QTs Q9s Q8s Q7s Q6s Q5s Q4s Q3s Q2s
J AJ KJ QJ JJ JTs J9s J8s J7s J6s J5s J4s J3s J2s
T AT KT QT JT TT T9s T8s T7s T6s T5s T4s T3s T2s
9 A9 K9 Q9 J9 T9 99 98s 97s 96s 95s 94s 93s 92s
8 A8 K8 Q8 J8 T8 98 88 87s 86s 85s 84s 83s 82s
7 A7 K7 Q7 J7 T7 97 87 77 76s 75s 74s 73s 72s
6 A6 K6 Q6 J6 T6 96 86 76 66 65s 64s 63s 62s
5 A5 K5 Q5 J5 T5 95 85 75 65 55 54s 53s 52s
4 A4 K4 Q4 J4 T4 94 84 74 64 54 44 43s 42s
3 A3 K3 Q3 J3 T3 93 83 73 63 53 43 33 32s
2 A2 K2 Q2 J2 T2 92 82 72 62 52 42 32 22

The husng.com table varied in that it had the entire suited side for opening under the button with the junk as mainly the bottom section of the unsuited corner. TBH the husng.com table was for a cash player, and so that’s a very different dynamic, so I’m not saying it was wrong. But for husngs, it was totally unsuitable. My games instantly improved, with the number of awkward decisions vastly reduced. Shame the number of idiot calls that sucked out on the river didn’t.

Also I don’t care what anyone says about not needing hand charts. They’ll tell you that heads up is fluid and your range depends entirely on what’s best to beat your opponent. That’s true, but without having a solid and appropriate foundation from which to add or remove hands you’re just building castles in the air…

MiniFTOPs Event #9

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

I’ve bought my entry into Full Tilt’s miniftops event #9 (the heads up one of course).

$50 entry fee, so that makes the most expensive tournament I’ve ever paid for. I considered some of the satellites, but I’d probably take several attempts and be wasting the money and time anyway. If I can pay S1ndr0me $50 in a stupid prop bet, then I can pay it for a tournament where I might do ok. The main downside is that it’s another Sunday late nighter, but what can you do. This time I won’t down a bottle of wine before starting though, so that might help.

Which reminds me – the $215 SCOOP ticket I won on that WBCOOP tourney is getting closer to being spent. Pokerstars has released the schedule for it now, although the heads up tournaments don’t have any $215 buy-ins -the closest are $162 and $270 entries. Can I split my ticket? I need to write to support to find out (now that I’m thinking about it I’ll do it now!). If I can’t split it I’ll have to use it on a regular FR tournament which I suck at. Stupid non-transferrable, non-cashable tickets…


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