Despite the rise and fall, there is a silver lining that I’ve learnt a lot of poker during the process. HU makes you really concentrate on the personality of your opponent. You’re constantly watching his lines looking for repeated habits and weaknesses. Then you’re thinking about how exploit those habits – how to change your range & how to change your betsizing.

Then the other way HU has improved my game is that you have to single table (multitabling HU is just one big headfuck). A lot less autopiloting, a lot more going over earlier streets & hands before taking your action.

So with that experience under my belt I’ve decided to return to 6max, and with a strategy that will sound incredibly unprofitable to many;

First, I’m actually going to aim at a low bb/100. Previously I embraced the No Limit element of NLHE a bit too much – playing for stacks was the only way to play. I think I was over-doing it way too much. I would build a big stack through redline play and lose it all + more with top pair medium kicker all-in donk plays. End result – losing player.
So by aiming for a low bb/100 what I mean is to play a lot more conservatively, being very very cautious about building big pots (esp all-ins), and build a stack 5bb at a time. Small ball I guess.

Secondly, I’m going to single table! I learnt nothing during the periods I multitabled 6max, I just autopiloted very basic moves (pfr, cbet) with very little consideration for my opponent’s character, and some days I did ok, most days I didn’t.

So single tabling & small ball sounds like it’s going to be a really low $/hour, but I don’t care – now it’s going to be all about the poker rather than the $$$. They’re not the same things, even though we keep score by the money we win.

———————-

A little extra; remember my post earlier where I said I was backing Newff a tiny % of his buy-in for the Calgary Open? He still needs more backers – the event usually has < 100 entries, with ITM being 18k (slightly over 3xbuy-in) & 1st place $100k. He has to beat 3 people to be ITM, and he’s a solid player at the $100 husngs.

So if any of you have a few $$$ to spare (my share was just $60), here’s the link again; http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/163/staking-selling-shares/2010-candian-poker-open-5k-heads-up-main-event-shares-823965/

While all this was going on I couldn’t help thinking about everything in a poker context. He was an overaggressive player who was mashing his pot button regardless of pot texture or my range. He didn’t adapt no matter how many times I exploited the same move, and towards the end of the game he was double faulting his serves out of tilt.

Kinda stupid, and probably a sign I’m thinking about poker too much. There was a thread on 2p2 about this with the best story about a guy who went to the optician and read an eye chart saying King, Queen, whenever there was a K or Q.

I’m thinking about moving to Cardiff, and a big factor in that decision was that there are three casinos for playing poker there (well, 2 and a poker room). It wasn’t the biggest reason (mainly I want to get back into rock climbing, plus take up something new like kitesurfing or sailing – Cambridge is too flat and nowhere near the sea), but it was definitely a factor. However online poker is going badly for me at the moment, and I’m starting to think that being able to play live is going to be a really bad thing for me – supposedly live play is easier, but at the same time the BR required is way bigger than what I’m used to. No big deal playing a game which is $0.10/$0.25, but the minimum for live games seems to be £1/£1 or £1/£2 – even if I shortstack with a £20 buyin, that’s more or less twice what I’m used do (and I don’t really want to shortstack). Tourney’s seem to be £16+£4, which perhaps isn’t so bad if I just play once a week maybe. Perhaps I’ll get lucky early on and win a decent starting live BR.

Anyway, if anyone’s played poker in Cardiff, let me know what it’s like…

Update: After Funkeefeesh’s advice of getting some volume in I’ve been plugging away today at the $10 husngs (more games played today than the whole of last month!). Not gaining much though;

The last guy I played kept doing this;

How does that ever make sense?

I know what my problem is, and have really known it all along TBH. I run good, get confident, and then start to embrace the fun side of poker – the gambling!

So I chase draws, make big cock swinging hero calls, thin value bets when I have no value, and generally discard the fold button. All with the obvious consequences.

At the weekend I buckled down and started to squash these urges, and I managed to stall the downswing. It’s not turned round, but the latter half of this month has been breakeven which is better than before.

I’ve been reading 2p2 intensely, going over my HH, having other people go over my HHs, talking strat on AIM, and generally becoming an obsessive poker bore. It’s feeling good too.

After a long discussion last night with Yegor (ok, most of it was laughing about roseeker’s downfall) I decided to drop right down to $10 games and set a strong volume goal. I’ve currently 240 games at $10 with a ROI of 13%. I’m going to play another 260 to bring it to 500 games and see if I can nail my game down to a cold impassionate cyborg crushing of these $10 morons. No more hero calls

So far so good, although I’d forgotten how bizarre $10 games can be. For $20 and $30 games the players have become far more rational about their lines, and betsizing is at least in relation to the pot size. $10s it’s still kinda crazy. For example I had 72o in a limped pot. The flop had been checked back so it was a $40 pot on a TJQK board. Villain fires out a bet of $200. Somewhat obvious what to do.

I’m still squishing some gambool tendencies though – same villain 3bet me pre while I had KJo. Against him I felt a call would be ok, but something in me said that he was just going to jam the flop with his A rags if I did. So I 4bet, which KJo isn’t really good enough for, and he shoved. So I thought ‘whatever’ and called to see that he did indeed have A6o. Here was the difficulty of $10 – he had no idea that a 4bet looks really strong and he was supposed to fold A6o. But that’s what we all say in these positions – ‘how could he shove with that!’. Ultimately these are mistakes which make us money. Anyway, neither of us improved, I went down to $900 and then had to fight another 10 minutes in order to finally win.

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…

A lot of threads have been removed from 2p2, but you can still get them through google cache. Accusations include that Ho has filed for bankruptcy in the UK, has run off to asia, never won the $1m he claimed he had etc.

fills a nice gap now that Isildur1 isn’t playing much…

Edit: I forgot to say – the funniest part of that thread above is when Jason decides to prove his innocence through a prop bet. Total degen

It gets funnier – see the man himself

They’ve increased the minimum buy-in to 35bb, which I guess is enough to mess up the short stack strategy. They also introduced ‘shallow’ low buy-in games where the maximum buy-in is 40bb. No use to shortstackers at all, but will please the poorer newbie player who doesn’t want to risk a big stack or play capped.

The other big news was the introduction of Rush Poker. Basically when you fold you’re instantly taken to a new table which has a hand being dealt. The idea is you’re continually playing a hand. FTPDoug reckons you’ll play 2 or 3 times as many hands this way. You still get hand histories, but your HUD won’t be able to cope with it. Also sites like pokertableratings won’t be able to track them either. So, downside is you can’t build good reads on your opponents, upside is more exciting and higher rakeback gains. Sounds like fun though, but I can’t see it replacing the grinder’s game of choice (well, maybe? It’ll attract a lot more fish, plus with the rakeback it might change the game a lot?)

I think the differences between the session where the aggro worked and the one where I spewed were;

a) First session I’d already played for a while, and hadn’t shown myself to be anything out of the ordinary, while the second session I sat down and started firing away. Any idiot could put down as a aggrotard, and this is what happened (my check-raise was reraised every time just about).
b) I picked my spots more carefully the first time. I had got to know the players at the tables, and was able to pick and choose when to push harder. The second session I’d just started, and was basically trying to bully complete unknowns.
c) The second session I didn’t back down. I often continued against those players who pushed back at my 3bets. Consequently I ran into AA several times quite quickly. At one point I had to three barrel bluff, and the final river push finally made the guy fold, but how stupid is that! It worked once, but I don’t think it was a profitable thing to do…

So anyway, 2010 I will stop being an idiot. I’m still bankrolled for nl10, but only 10 buy-ins above the move down point – if I don’t even out I’ll be back at NL5 by February. However, you’ve got to experiment with your game I believe, so I don’t feel too bad (it’s not as if I’m going to turn pro any time soon).

Ok, onto the 2009 review;

Cash:

Tourney:

Well, it’s in the black! (the $40 lost yesterday was 2010, so close thing to ruining the year’s results, lol).

The New Year, 2009
This time last year I’d dropped right down to NL2 – most of my game up to that point had been NL10 at Full Tilt (which was their lowest stakes at that time), and it hadn’t been going very well. So I moved to Pokerstars and dropped down, first to NL5 and then to NL2 as I continued to lose.

The Redeposit – April
In April I finally lost my entire account. I redeposited, and for some reason known only to myself at the time I went back to NL10. I then had a massive heater, gaining $350 in 20k hands. How that happened I’ve no idea! I should go back and look at those hands in detail, but as far as I can remember I was very very lucky – PokerTracker all-in performance says $120 over expected value at its peak.

The Cash Out – July
Inevitably the heater ran out, and I lost a bunch of $$$ pretty quickly. I think I’d upped the number of tables I was playing, plus overconfidence, and that led to much spewage. As it came crashing down a personal credit card problem suddenly arose and I had to withdraw my entire roll to pay for it. In hindsight this was actually a useful thing to happen to me. Firstly, it showed the kindness of friends as they immediately transferred to me a little bit of spare cash to keep playing. Secondly it made me decide to follow bankroll management properly. Up until that point I’d play NL10 if I had over $100 in my account (or over only $50 sometimes). Starting from $30 with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to redeposit in the next couple of months really made sure I did the right thing to avoid going busto again.

The Grind
So I returned to NL2 again. This time my game was much stronger and I rapidly built up enough to move to NL5. I carried on playing well and clipped $200 to move into NL10. I then lost a few buy-ins, and moved back down. Ground up, bust down. I did this 3 times (the three peaks at 41k, 51k and 65k hands). I suddenly realised I was doing the bankroll management slightly wrong – I had a single threshold of $200 where I moved either up or down. What I needed to do was set the move-up threshold higher than the move down one (ie $250 to move up, $200 to move down). This way I’d have a 5 buy-in margin to lose before having to move down.

The Donkament Win – November
I was within $20 of the $250 threshold, and it was taking ages (it says $60 on that graph, but I was also getting rakeback and bonuses which aren’t shown on the graph). It was November now, and I seemed to be on the most miserable downswing ever – no big spews, but not a single +ve session for ages and ages. Then one Sunday I was messing around playing some MTTs (as you can see from the graph above, I don’t tourney much), and suddenly went deep in a $2 180 man SNG. I walked away with $70 – I was finally in NL10 territory again.

The Final Fall
I seemed to be playing well and built my roll up to $450. It didn’t feel like a heater this time, and I felt confident that I was winning appropriate hands rather than sucking out. I decided to look closer at rakeback and see which site was the best for me, and so I split my roll amongst 4 sites – Full Tilt, PokerStars, Ultimate Bet and Party Poker. The difference between the sites was amazing – at NL10 UB and PP was full of limpers who’d try to see every street, while FT and PS still had its usual compliment of 2p2 players. Despite this I’ve failed to profit from them, and even worse seemed to have spewed a ton of money.

Final Roundup
So what’s the roundup of the year? I have to be honest with myself and say I’m not very good at poker. Almost 100k hands, and still being buffeted around by variance and barely keeping above the rake. In fact since my chart shows only +$44 profit, it’s obvious my entire roll ($350 at end of 2009) is made entirely of rakeback and bonuses.

Is that a big problem? I guess not as I still enjoy playing. I still enjoy the challenge of learning a game where it’s clear that gaining knowledge and experience will lift you through the ranks. The frustration is coming from seeing the stakes I play as a goal in itself.

So my resolution for 2010 is to let go of the idea that I’m not a winning player if I can’t ascend rapidly up the stakes. I will play poker at the stakes my bankroll allows, and concentrate on being the best player I can for those stakes. I guess ascending graphs of $$$ won will show whether I’m succeeding, although for me it’ll be how I achieved it that’ll be more important…