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Archive for April, 2010

April

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Best month ever;

Start of the month moved up to $30′s, and by the end I’d moved up to $50s! :-D   It’s borderline on the $50s really – I think I’ve even dropped back under the threshold already, but it’s all very close. The only thing I’m disappointed about is volume, even though it’s only a few games short of previous months – it is my biggest weakness, and no matter how much I moan about it I still struggle to improve.

The tiny bit of cash I played was just for the Full Tilt  Take 2 promotion, and TBH it was a mistake and I’m thinking that I’ll not take up a promotion that requires cash play again;

Notice the blue line taking a jump at the end – that’s the $25 bonus. The whole reason for playing cash in the first place!  Admittedly the biggest loss in that graph was not while I was trying to clear the bonus (which only took 5 minutes of play each morning) – it was just one  stupid night where I decided to have a quick spin at nl25 and it went really bad! Clearly not my game though.

Final total with rakeback & bonuses = $482, although I also cashed out $120 to pay for some bits & pieces, including husng coaching. So far I’ve only had 2 HH’s reviewed and not a sweat session yet. Taking it fairly slowly as I want to digest properly what I get back before paying out for more. So far so good though, and I’m very pleased with what I’ve got so far.

On Sunday I’ve the SCOOP tournament paid for by the $215 ticket I won at the blogger’s championship. Really really hoping I don’t crash out before cashing, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Nevertheless if I do cash it’ll put a nice margin to play those $50′s with, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Movin’ On Up!

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Played my first $50 husng today, and won it! Ridiculously stupid game, my opponent was a massive calling station who hit every time. I was up and then down, then really down, and finally climbed back to win. Nice introduction to new limits…

Then I lost the next two. Well, there you go :-) No problem, just getting my toes wet. I might need to mix in some $20s & $30s still so I don’t get too scared, but it’s all good!

When ABC Doesn’t Help

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

I woke up early this morning for some reason, so obv fired up the laptop for some pokerage. A few days a go I had one of those perfect sessions where I won a couple of 4man $20s and a couple of $30s for a nice profit of $180. Only 4 matches, yet since the hourly was five times my day job rate it gave me happy daydreams of being the baller poker pro. The next couple of days however reminded me how meaningless a winning streak of 4 games is as I failed to win anything at all. It’s lucky two of those winning games were 4mans as I’m still showing a profit from that.

Anyway, the point of that partial brag is that I’m deluding myself with low volume. So today’s intention is to keep hammering away and see how it goes, even if it’s a losing streak (unless I get really tilted obv).

I also didn’t intend to blog this early in the morning either, but the first match was interesting. Here’s the match for anyone who has nothing better to do;

My opponent played 2p2 ABC poker all the way – 3bb raises, roughly 70% hands on button, 30% OOP, 3bet reasonably, folded to most 3bets but not all etc. He didn’t seem to tilt, just kept going. In other words he didn’t seem to do anything wrong at all, apart from perhaps being unimaginative.

The game however went my way. In fact I was on the winning side throughout – a couple of times we went back to equal stacks but I never had to come back from behind. Was that because I had an edge? No idea, it’s doubtful…

I sharkscoped him and it turned out he’d been grinding mostly $5s and $10 with some stabs at $20+. After some success initially ($450+) he’s now a losing player (-$150).

I don’t get it – playing a solid game doesn’t mean you’ll win? Have I just been lucky and could easily become this guy (my game count is still less than his initial success stage)?

btw, in before NMIHU,ES… (that means you Yegor :-) )

Update: Hammering away seems to work :-D

ok, still only 14 games but that’s better than 4! Plus my BR is over $1k at last! Guess I have to try some $50s now and go back to scared money :-)

Wargames

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

I’ve been doing a bit of programming with Pokersource, which is an open source library that does poker calculations – for instance with this library I could write my own pokerstove application. It does all the hard work, all I have to do is create a nice user interface and feed it the hole cards, board etc.

Since pokerstove already exists there’s not much point recreating the 5 high straight, so I decided to aim higher and crunch some numbers for Omaha.

My first goal is to calculate relative hand strengths preflop for a HU game. Plenty of people have done this for hold’em because there aren’t that many combinations (with two hole cards there’s only 1326). However with four hole cards the number of combination is massive, and to calculate the hand strength of a particular hand you need to run it against the entire range of those combinations. Plus if you want the perfect result then for each hand vs hand combination you need to run it against every possible board. That’s just way too much number crunching, so I’ve taken a few shortcuts.

Firstly the obvious shortcut is that you don’t have to consider every suit combination – AKAK is the same as AKAK.

I then didn’t calculate for every possible board – I took a random sample of 100 games (monte carlo style really). I was a bit concerned that this isn’t that many, but it looks like it’s more than the propokertools omaha calculator is using, but I had to choose some number. (plus yes it’s all multithreaded and hammering nicely at all 4 cores of my cpu – I’m not a total coding fish)

So with those short cuts I started it running on Monday. Today it finally finished. Three and a half solid days of crunching! If I’d chosen 200 games I don’t think it’d be twice as long, but it’d be near enough.

I ranked the hands in order and the win% had a nice range of 20% to 70% which suggests it’s not a waste of time doing this exercise.

Unfortunately it looks like I might have missed some hands out – the worst hand was 5555 at 19%. What about 2222? Looks like it’s not in the list! I need to figure out why my program missed that.

Then also unfortunately it looks like I may have to increase the number of iterations. The best hand is AA66 at 74% – weird, isn’t is supposed to be AKAK double suited? That comes in 14th place with 71%. This is a result of only doing the 100 iterations – a massive error range of +/- 3% at least :-( I’m currently crunching those two hands using the entire board range to give absolute accurate numbers, but that could take a couple of days to produce the answer.

So not super successful so far – I need to increase the number of game iterations, which is obviously a trade off against crunching time. I suspect to get a reasonable result it’s going to have to crunch for a couple of weeks…

Poor Motivation

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

I’m having a big motivation problem – I start to play, and if I don’t win the first couple of games I give up. Moving to the $30 games has meant that this month is bigger than any previous month – my win rate is the same as when I was at the $10s and so everything is 3x bigger, but that cuts both ways and the fear of a sudden 10 game losing streak just freaks me out too much. And so as soon as I lose one or two games I just shut down. Totally rubbish!

Which means that this weekend I’ve only played 6 $30 husngs. A pathetic 15 minutes worth of poker out the entire weekend! I did play some PLO as well – an entire 20 minutes worth. All of it breakeven – 54% itm.

What really bugs me is that during the week at work I spend an excessive amount of time thinking about poker, reading 2p2 etc. Being a programmer is a real headfuck of a job though, and by the time the downtools whistle blows I’m so totally braindead all I want to do is go home, eat, watch tv with some beers & fall asleep (best way of describing coding as a job is imagine that each day you’ve been given a book of hard suduko puzzles – you have to finish the book by 5:30pm. Next day start another book). The weekend is the big chance to get some poker time in, and then I go and blow it due to a belief that I’m about to downswing.

Dammit. One day I’ve got to win the Sunday million so I can get my priorities right…

Money Not Chips

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

I’ve withdrawn some money!

Just a little ($120) – that’s the first time since I had to take everything out to pay credit card bills and restarted from scratch. It’s not something I really want to do since every step backwards on the BR is time lost in getting to higher stakes, but there was a couple of things I wanted to get. Since they were poker related I thought it’d be reasonable to use some of my BR for them.

First thing was a HH review by a coach. ChicagoRy posts on 2p2 a lot and seems a smart guy. He plays $100s, has a good record and can certainly teach me something. The HH review was $40, and he was clear and it all made sense what he was saying – however to get the most out of it I’m going to have to send him at least one more and then maybe a sweat session. One HH review isn’t going to revolutionise my game (I guess it’s like tennis lessons – get an individual lesson and it costs about £20. It’ll improve your serve a little, but won’t turn you into Federer instantly). Several HH and a session will add up to a fair bit of $$$ unfortunately, but the time seems about right. If the rest of the week goes well I’ll send him a second HH and take it a step at a time. If the rest of this week bombs, then it’ll have to wait.

Second thing was Omaha holdem manager. A bit of a frivolous buy, but during the times when I don’t want to gamble too heavily (ie reg peak times of the US afternoon) I’ve been knocking about with $1 PLO husngs. Cheapest way of playing PLO heads up! Postflop I’m getting more confident, but I’m still clueless about preflop (is it ever worth 3betting?). My opponents seem more clueless though, so it’s hard to know if I’m thinking clearly or if they’re just spazzing out;

Pot Limit Omaha Tournament
2 Players

$1 + $0.10 Heads Up Sit & Go

Stacks:
Hero (1,620)
BB (1,380)

Blinds: 10/20

Pre-Flop: (30, 2 players)

Hero is SB Khearts poker card 8spades poker card 3clubs poker card 9diamonds poker card
Hero raises to 40, BB calls 20

Flop: 6diamonds poker card 5hearts poker card 7clubs poker card (80, 2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets 80, BB calls 80

Turn: Jclubs poker card (240, 2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets 240, BB raises to 480, Hero goes all-in 1,500, BB goes all-in 780

River: 5diamonds poker card (3,000, 2 players, 2 all-in)

Final Pot: 3,000
Hero shows a straight, Nine high
Khearts poker card 8spades poker card 3clubs poker card 9diamonds poker card
BB shows a straight, Eight high
Adiamonds poker card 8diamonds poker card 3diamonds poker card 4diamonds poker card

Hero wins 3,000 (net +1,380)

BB lost 1,380

lol, to be fair when I chose that HH (mainly just to test if the convertor worked) I didn’t realise he had a straight. Maybe not such a spaz after all…

### PokerStars Changes HU tables ###

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

If you sit out continuously for five minutes, you’ll be removed from the table.

You can only sit at a maximum of two Heads-Up tables without an opponent.

Table names are randomised, to eliminate any advantage to sitting at tables with names beginning with ‘A’.

Players who attempt to abuse the system or make the Heads-Up games unpleasant for others may be banned from playing at Heads-Up tables.

Doesn’t really affect me playing husngs, but figured I’d pass it along…


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