I also decided that I want to play more hands in position, and not just against the blinds. If someone has opened before me, my strategy for a long time now has been either 3bet big hands, call pocket pairs, or fold. I guess this is fine (or normal even), but surely it means that when I open, the chances are I’ll be OOP unless it folds to the blinds? Sure my late position ranges are wider than my early position ranges, but while that means I do play more hands IP, they’re weaker hands too.

So I thought what kind of hands can I play if someone has opened before me (other than the PP’s and big Ax’s). I guess it has to be a less dominated range than the opener. So I figured if I call with the range of the position earlier than the opener, then I should be IP with a stronger range? Probably not the most intellectual of strategies, I suppose I should really be considering hand strengths in a different light, ie suited connectors and ranges that don’t overlap theirs (that has a name I expect – merged, balanced, aga range?).

As it happened the situation almost never came up – not enough seats at 6max really. If on the button and the MP opened I never had a hand in my UTG range, CO opening I didn’t have a hand from my MP range etc. I think it happened three or four times at most. And I think those hands went 50/50 anyway (mostly missing & folding to the cbet, or betting when unraised and getting a fold), so no great insights there anyway. I probably should put more thought into it and consider a better calling range that’s based on something more intelligent really.

On another plus note Carbon have sorted out my bonus code, so now I’ve 3 months to clear the 150% deposit bonus. I reckon that’s plenty of time as long as I move up before the end. We’ll see.

but infuriatingly it’s already showing my terrible non-showdown +ve, showdown -ve trend. Terrible because overall it never shows a profit – I’ve seen very few people with this kind of graph, and even less who are profitable (Giev Money being one of the few).

Taking my hands from the last 20k or so, my non-showdown is winning at 10bb/100, which is quite a rate considering that’s virtually most people’s overall winning rate (at nanostakes), yet that is blown totally out of the water with showdown losing at -530bb/100 (wtf!).

I’m not sure which way I’m getting this wrong – am I calling down light, or am I being too strong on my value hands (turning what should be +ve showdown hands into smaller but +ve nonshowdown hands)?

Looking at my Carbon hands, the bulk of mistakes seems to be hands that end up all-in (both pre and postflop). In particular I’m being very light with short stacks, and looking back at it this is adding up to a lot of moronicness.

Nevertheless, the frustration is really about the lack of ability to change – I’m constantly pushing myself to be nittier and nittier, yet the carbon graph is a scaled down version of the 20k graph. Nothing is changing. I’m chipping away at something that is fundamentally flawed, and I’ve yet to see what it is…

Re Phil Ivey, yeah I saw that -was chatting with Yegor as the story was emerging. Initially it looked pretty good that he was speaking up, but then after Full Tilt’s response came out, and we had a closer look at the filed whatsitsname (case?), it was clear that Ivey’s out for himself and this is massively bad for the US players. He may have ruined any short-term chance of them getting their money back, and possibly even long term if FT can’t recover. One part of FT’s response was interesting – they say he owes them a large sum of money. Not many people seemed to have picked up on this, and I’m wondering what ‘large’ means to them, not to mention why he would owe them…

This year’s Rush 5nl looks like;

Somehow my losses are exactly equal to the rake I’ve paid. So it really has been 50/50 all the way, with Full Tilt being the only winner thanks to Rake.

Which brings me to my other frustration – Leak Buster has my leaks as pretty much just W$SD (won $ at showdown) being too low. Every other stat is smack on target, even WTSD% (percentage went to showdown). Basically I’m showing down the same amount of hands as a winning player, except my hands are losing more than theirs.

So Leak Buster’s final analysis – I need to run better? Who knows…

Anyway, with the redeposit I’m going to switch games (again). I’m going to drop Rush and go back to regular table games, with the aim to work on my player reading skills. So basically trying to understand player types and how to exploit them, which isn’t really possible on nl5 Rush (too many players, not enough time to build proper stats on them, with position on you constantly changing). It’ll have that double edged benefit of reduced volume though (slower to throw money away, but less visibility of progress through variance).

I’m going to try and deposit on Carbon (Merge network), but they’re having issues with so many players moving to their site and attempts so far have failed. So back to Full Tilt possibly if it fails again.

Didn’t go so well;

I did clear $5 of the bonus during that disaster though!

Everything I did seemed to meet some kind of resistance – flop cbet success only 45%, 3bets all over the place, and generally everything was awful.

I looked back over the hands, and of course there were some terrible ones – usually 3 barrel bluffs, but not too much that I should be ashamed of.

So I dropped down in stakes just to stop the bleed, and gave up on the bonus.

Instantly there was a difference – my cbets were working! They folded to my steals, they folded to my 3bet defending in the blinds, they even started paying off the odd hand or two;

Flop cbet success now at a reasonable 60%.

Small sample size (in both cases really), but I can’t believe nl5 should be so different to nl10. Surely they should be more or less the same?

Either there IS a difference, and everyone’s solid at nl10 (!?!), or I experienced a bad downswing – my opponents really did just ‘have it’ each and every time.

I also can’t believe I’m still writing about these nanostakes, but maybe understanding these swings is part of the learning process. I’ve never put in large amounts of volume, and over-reacting to swings in the BR like this has probably not been too healthy. Never mind, I’ll just enjoy the game for being a game for now…

So ended the session some 5 buy-ins down, which is pretty shocking (although not expensive at nl5). Not all the hands were bad call-downs, I was running into a lot of sets & 2pairs, although most likely I was also overvalueing my TP hands. It’s one thing seeing your leak, it’s another applying yourself to patch it

Anyway, Leakbuster says;

River aggression too high and going to showdown too light & too often. The SB reraise steal is not something I’m worried about (I’m actually showing a profit from the SB which is pretty cool). If anything I’m losing too much from the BB, but Leakbuster doesn’t seem to think so.

However my river agg% is too low, which is counter to the W$SD% & WTSD stats? So confused there, although I’m definitely making very dubious calls on the river against obviously made hands. I should just concentrate on this I think…

Apparently I’ve got worse!

The biggest leak apparently was losing at showdown too often (obviously a bad thing to lose at showdown, but what they mean is that I’m not folding earlier in the hand enough). Their ‘ideal’ range is about 51-58%. Previously I was 46.7%, now it’s 46.4%, so failed there (oh, actual stat is W$SD%, so bigger the % the better).

Next was Flop fold to cbet – I wasn’t folding enough, they want 46-63% and again I’m still falling short with no improvement from previously.

However my cbet% has rocketed from 40% to 80%, actually overshooting their recommended range (but only by a couple of percent, earning me an A-).

So I’m annoyed with myself now – I thought I was folding LOADS more, but evidently not. I was even thinking that I was playing better, even though it took a bit of spewage mid-way;

Well, probably I am playing better really. There’s definitely fewer catastrophic crashes where I continually failed to fold marginals vs obvious monsters – I have folded a lot more QQ, KK & Aces than ever before!

Here’s a hand for amusement’s sake. Possibly if I didn’t show results it would even look reasonably played (plus subtle nanostake brag involving stack sizes)

Especially as this is NL5! Nevertheless compared to my previous Rush outings this is incredibly good believe it or not. Apart from today – if something could go wrong, then today it did. Nobody folded to a cbet, villain’s draws always got there, Aces cracked, and I’ve never seen so many monsters end up as split pots! AA vs AA and then stuff like this;

I’m not saying I didn’t make some mistakes today, but I’ve been making fewer and that’s made me notice that sometimes things just go downwards no matter what you do. The cards just don’t come, they always have it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Weird how it happens in streaks, although I guess it’s because it’s a streak that it’s noticeable.

So dunno if leakbuster is helping yet. I suspect it has, but there’s still a long way to go yet. Certainly playing 10k hands before doing an analysis again is stretching my patience (that’s a week & I’m only a third of the way through).