Here’s a good post on 2p2. Various posters giving their history on how started with online poker and how they built their roll.
Quite a few well known names there (to 2p2 people anyway), plus it’s started by Raze who started his roll from a $5 freebie and now plays $200NL…
Ooh baby – my poker biorhythms are really in sync now;
Loads of stuff I’ve picked up from the videos are working. For instance, the blind stealing is still proving wildly successful – one of the many multicoloured stats choking up my screen is ‘everyone folds to blind steal’, as long as it doesn’t drop below 30%, then my stealing is profitable (even 30% is generous, because it doesn’t include hands I go on to win even though they call, and since I have position there’s a good chance I will do ok). This stat hasn’t dropped below 40% yet. Virtually no-one picks up that I’m raising each and every time it’s folded to me on the button. (Update, hmm, I think I’ve got my maths wrong. Maybe it should be 60%? In which case I shouldn’t be profiting? – usual table percentage seems to be about 40-50%)
And then when they do cotton on, there’s more stuff to do. For example in this hand the BB had definitely picked up I was stealing a lot – he had 3bet me from the BB three times already, so either he was on a heater or had decided to 3bet light. So I did this;
Stacks:
UTG ($10.00)
CO ($4.20)
Hero (BTN) ($24.20)
SB ($9.40)
BB ($10.30)
Pre-flop: ($0.15, 5 players) Hero is BTN T
4 (or whatever, cards aren’t important to me here)
2 folds, Hero raises to $0.30, 1 fold, BB raises to $0.90, Hero raises to $2, BB calls $1.10
Flop: 8
A 6 ($4.05, 2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets $2, BB folds
Final Pot: $4.05
Hero wins $5.85 ( won +$1.85 )
BB lost -$2
Risky perhaps, but not a great deal as long as my assumption that he’s defending is right. However in my 3betting light theory he should have folded preflop (I didn’t raise enough), but still a result. Also, as a result, that’s $1.85 won there covers 6 more blind stealing attempts. I’m probably boring you to death about stealing, so won’t go on about it anymore – just one last bit of proof. Here’s the chart for the last week where I attempted to steal from the blind, but filtered for no-showdown (ie either they folded, or they raised me and I folded) – Att to steal stat was 45%;
So I’m pleased with StoxPoker so far. While I’m learning a lot, I’m sure I’m missing a lot too, but that’s ok, you can’t expect to learn everything instantly…
just seen this on 2p2;
who’s the fat guy in the front, and why does Barry’s beard keep vanishing?
Here’s a good thread on 2p2, but unfortunately several posters have really got their literary heads on and it’s very tl;dr Maybe someone can give me the cliffsnotes (I doubt you can shrink it down much, they’re covering a lot of ground).
It’s about bet sizing, and here’s a quote which is excellent in itself;
“The basic principle is to give the other player the hardest decision possible. This is aggressive play, and results in the maximum number of errors by the other player, thus the maximum profit to you.
With a bad player, you may instead try to give them what should be an easy decision that you expect them to get wrong. This is more profitable than giving them a hard decision, because a wrong hard decision generally them costs less than a wrong easy one.
But good players always get the easy decisions right, so you have to give them hard decisions in order to win.“
I guess that’s kinda intuitive, but I still think it’s been expressed very well.
Not being able to play at lunchtimes really sucks! I vaguely browse 2p2 & other forums during the morning (that is between workstuff, honest), get fired up about a certain idea or two, and then when it gets to lunchtime I can’t do anything about it. I have to be normal, and read the news, or find a sandwich van, or go down the pub for a quick 3 or 4 (extra quick since the moment you’re in the door it’s time to turn round and go back to work!).
Today I discovered PokerPad – an AHK (autohot key script) which sets a whole stack of quick keys;
It’s been really bugging me that Pokerstars has the worst betting controls ever – Titan had 1/2 pot and PSB buttons which really made it easy (no 3/4 pot, but all you had to do was click 1/2 pot then click slider once to increase it to 3/4, more or less). So my betsizing on stars is always a little bit off.
So pokerpad looks really cool (once you remember all the keys), although the All in button worries me. On stars I’ve already accidentally gone all in several times by typing 6 instead of 0.6! This pad has two all in buttons – maybe I can disable the one that does it without confirmation though (in other words if it sets the value but I still need to press return to do the bet, then that would be fine).
Anyway, now I’ve a new toy to try out, but I can’t play until later 
Why the hell aren’t I financially independent and not have to work!
There’s a site somewhere which allows you to search poker forums like TwoPlusTwo for hands of various types (ie hands with monotone flops, or paired board etc). It’s actually pretty useful since if a specific situation is on your mind you can search for it on their site and it gives you all the postings on 2p2 where someone has asked about it.
Trouble is I can’t remember the name of the site. I have it bookmarked at work, but unfortunately not on Firefox so I don’t have it bookmarked here at home (foxmarks is cool).
So I turned to Google, and tried the following search phrases;
search hands poker twoplustwo and search hands poker 2p2
and still couldn’t find the site, but I found links to Meteoric Poker on the first two pages of each search!
You probably don’t care, but for a fairly young blog that’s pretty good going – word is spreading! Maybe 2p2 should pay me commission…
I’ll let you know the name of the site when I get back to work tomorrow. Until then whether to donk bet onto a wet board as cbet defense will just have to dwell on my mind. I just hope it doesn’t work its way into my dreams.
Update: Here’s the site; http://www.handcrawler.com – it seems to be a work in progress so far, but hopefully the owners won’t give up on it as it can be very useful…
I’ve spent the day mainly watching StoxPoker videos, and frustratingly didn’t have any eureka moments. Unfortunately it even appeared that I’ve been underestimating the strength of hands postflop – Ed Miller was happily bashing microstakes opponents with top pair medium kicker (and even middle pair), even shoving on the river with some of these hands. Obviously the difference comes in that he can easily recognise the dangerous boards, and has the hand reading skills to do this.
It got me wondering whether I was getting enough value out of my hands. Was I being too nitty? Am I really going to showdown too light? I seem to win small and lose big, but this could just be psychological – ie I remember the big losses more than the small ones.
So I dug into my PokerTracker and thought, how about some statistical analysis? I figured if I worked out the deviation of my wins/losses, it should show some skew somewhere that might help.
Here’s what I ended up with – it’s a frequency plot of win/losses in BB (big bets – 2xbb);
Uh, ok. What now? It was far more symmetrical than I was expecting. That’s a log scale on the y-axis by the way, otherwise the spike on the zero out-weighs everything.
I guess I don’t know what I would see if I was a winning player. Without anything to reference it to there’s not much it can tell me. I’m going to have to post something on 2p2 to see if there’s anyone else who’s thought about this…
Edit: I’ve just noticed on the win side there’s a little peak at the 50BB point, which corresponds to people who I stacked where they had full buy-in (100bb). Perhaps the drop between 25BB and 50BB is a sign of something – maybe I’m settling for a win of about 23BB too much. That’s too big to correspond to a CBet on the flop? Maybe it’s a shortstacker all-in?
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