Bad news is that it cost my the last half of my bankroll and I had to redeposit. What’s even more stupid is that it was still my showdown hands that cost me most of the money!

It seems to me I’m minimising my wins while maximising my losses. Playing the TAG style seems to be exacerbating that too, probably because my non-showdown hands are no longer contributing to my winrate.

Back to LAG? I don’t know, and TBH right now I don’t care. I was having an extremely stable session this morning, and had carved out 2 buy-ins in small-moderate pots, and then got kicked back to square one against a set magnet.

Small wins, big losses – I’m pretty sure this is the key though, I need to flip this around somehow. 7k hands on Carbon now at -18bb/100. Still within the realms of variance though I suppose.

Update:

It was raining today, so played quite a lot of poker. It was frustrating, very swingy stuff, but after a while it seemed to look like it was forming a general upwards line. Roughly it was climbing at 10bb/100, so that’s good.

However it didn’t end well;

Villain on that last hand is a 27/12 who frequently shoves the river, although I’m not sure whether it’s a bluff or not – by the frequency alone I’m assuming it can’t be fat value very often. Somehow he’s built up this massive 500bb stack, and I wasn’t far behind with 300bb (at least 100bb of that was his). I was wondering if we’d end up in a pot where he did his shove the river trick and not realise the consequences of being so deep;

So it was me that got stung. I’m not sure what I expected, AA,KK or AQ maybe (he never 3bets either – ever! Not preflop or postflop – got caught out by a flatted AK a little earlier before noticing that).

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…

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…

http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/April11/scheinbergetalindictmentpr.pdf

AFAIK Full Tilt have already put out a release saying that they’re pulling out of the American market entirely, and 2p2 reports that their client software update this morning is already blocking log-ins from the States. Pokerstars have a statement reassuring people that it only affects Americans and people’s accounts are safe. No idea what AP have done, I’m guessing nobody really cares that much about them.

A lot of people are pointing out the suspicious timing of the event with regards to the District of Columbia deciding to regulate poker (plus general noises of regulation in a bunch of other states). Is it a corporate conspiracy to destroy the main sites in order to allow a US-only (and US based) site to dominate their local market? A bit too much hollywood probably, but quite possibly it is linked in some way, in at least it’s a cleaning house before regulated poker gets going there. Pretty dumb though to bring down an industry in such a heavy handed way though.

For all the poor suffering of the Americans (who have my sympathies), I might actually profit from this situation. A few weeks ago I bought a load of stock in Party Gaming. They were about to merge with Bwin, and it looked like an excellent opportunity. Even though their online poker was a shadow of its former self, their general online gaming business (bingo etc) was easily outstripping any losses from their poker business. With Bwin their player base would be strengthened, and while it still wasn’t going to compete against PS & FT, it was definitely going to be viable certainly until a possible return to the States 2012ish. My thoughts were to buy a moderate stock which should gain a bit on the merger, but mainly had the chance to rocket if US regulation sorted itself out.

However I was immediately hit by a regulatory change in another country – Germany decided it was going to ban live sports betting, plus tax gambling companies 16% on bets. Bwin’s market is largely in Germany, and a lot of speculators felt that this rate of taxation would completely destroy that market. BPTY shares dropped 30% in two days flat!

The masssive volume of shares that moved during that period were also very suspicious. Lots of people were suggesting the bad news from Germany had been used to heavily short the stock, and it had been a deliberate manipulation by the market makers.

I held onto the shares (from stupidity mainly – I hadn’t set a stop loss order, and it all happened too quickly to get out in time), and generally the view on Germany is that the news isn’t all that bad (and it’s not set in stone yet anyway, so may change). When the stock bottomed out and stopped crashing I even bought more shares since they’re clearly undervalued now, and I’m still banking on a return to the US at some point.

So now black Friday happens! I’m imagining that even a lot of non-US players won’t be comfortable staying at FT & PS, and Party could get a player boost. Also Party’s competition has taken a massive blow, in fact this will be a huge boost to every minor poker site out there – FT & PS dominating was great for the players, but maybe not so good for the industry as a whole. This could be a slash and burn action that actually regenerates a much healthier market. BPTY should strengthen on that basis, but I am wondering if people aren’t as rational as that, and what could happen is the bad guy image of online gambling has been bolstered (not to mention the vulnerability to goverment regulation), and we could see the share price drop even further.

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…

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).