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.

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…

$140 lost, third month in a row of losses

I’m tired now of saying that it’s this leak or that leak or it’s all tilt etc. What it’s really feeling like is that it’s all just luck. Some days I get cards, other days I don’t. It’s not suck-outs, bad beats, or river rats – it’s more like sometimes you hit your set when they hit TP, and sometimes you don’t.

My records go back exactly two years now (I’ve probably been playing for three years, but it was a while before I discovered pokertracker & hold’em manager). So I decided to do a lifetime audit;

I’ve played 180k hands (48k in tournaments).
The total winnings (tourney + cash) is -$152.
rackback + bonuses have come to $534.

Final total $381.

However my accounts are a lot less than that, as I had to cash out my entire roll last summer, plus I’ve just taken a share backing BWOP for some live tournaments (Newff had to pull out of his unfortunately). Not sure what to make of it really, other than it’s good to be +ve but somehow still depressing it’s not come from being any good at poker.

husngs;

It was another month of trying to push into higher staked games – each attempt busting out and having to back pedal a bit to regain confidence. My enforced goal of 20 games to acclimatise into $20s almost worked, but once I cleared the Full Tilt $50 bonus I switched over to Ultimate Bet (who’d offered me a $100 bonus, which might just get cleared by christmas at this rate). However I’d only left about $30 in that account so it was back to $5s and $10s (whatever was available) to rebuild the account a bit first. I’d just got it built to about $100 when it had dawned on me that my overall roll is over $700 – I should be trying $30s, not $20s!

Consequently the obvious happened and a couple of $30 games later I’d blown the account back down to $20 or so (that’s at the 125 game mark). Crawled back to $5s and $10s. I probably should just transfer a couple of hundred from another account, but whatever.

Despite my poor results, the husng players at Ultimate Bet are really bad. Preflop raises are fairly rare and you can pin them down to bluffer, station, nit etc fairly quickly. It seems though that I’m my own worst enemy. For instance I’ll have ground them down to 1/3 of the chips and then do some fool move like call a shove with ATo and end up reversing the chip count. My opponent has made so many bad moves that I start to treat their raises with contempt, and inevitably walk into a monster. Stupid stuff. I’ve even changed my avatar to a fish to remind me who the idiot at the table really is…

Cash;

No, I’ve not really returned to cash games – as explained in an earlier post I did a bit of rush to clear the last few $$$ of my FT bonus and somehow accidentally won at the same time. The blue line that shoots off at the end is rakeback + the bonus.

So end result is +$100 (Rakeback on the husngs is $30 which cancelled out the husng losses). Compared to the last two months that’s fairly poor, but I’m not complaining – it’s still a gain!

Next month? I’m determined not to wimp out of playing the stakes I should be playing. That means $30 games. Unless I get a few games in a row that’ll mean transferring some money to my UB account, but no big deal really.

After 600 hands I was down $27 (NL10). I stopped playing and thought how familiar this was. Every 6max session lately has been a losing one. Not suckouts or bad beats either, just me being spewy.

So I went back to husngs ($10 ones – Monday’s always a bad day, so wanted to play for fun rather than pushing myself into $20s). Six games later I was still unbeaten. $57 from an hour’s play.

What’s the point in playing 6max? Obviously none at all. I’m down $180 this year playing that stupid game, while I’m up $460 playing husngs.

So, time to give up playing anything else other than heads up (well, apart from some MTTs just for the big event of it).

Previously I’ve mentioned that I was holding off on new accounts until I was at NL50 or NL100 so I could clear sign-up bonuses effectively, but now I can’t be bothered. I’m not rising up the ranks quickly enough in cash games to get to that point any time soon, while at the same time husng’s are mostly pulling in more cash than these bonuses offer anyway (well mostly, that $150 crash in my last post was pretty painful).

So far this morning I’m $100 up playing $10 games. The lobby’s not packed, but I rarely have to wait more than a minute for a game. Level of play has been pretty bad too, although not any more than Full Tilt or Pokerstars.

Interface is really clean and easy – I haven’t had a single misclick yet which is a good sign. Deposit and creating the account was all straightforward too.

The main reason I wanted a Cake account was for their hand tracking policy – no HUD allowed, plus you’re allowed to change your screen name once a week. HEM imports the hand histories fine though (almost – it made a mistake on the prize for a 4man shootout, although it made the same mistake for a Full Tilt shootout as well once) – the strange thing though is that it doesn’t record your opponent’s names. Everyone is called CakeSeat8 etc. Makes it hard to go back and analyse a particular tournament when you can’t remember which one it was, which I guess is the point. Notes you make on players in the Cake interface do stay with that player even if they change their name, so that’s useful – essential even.

I’m happy so far (certainly while the new signup boomswitch is on!). Apart from I think I’ve put the tv remote into the washing machine with the bedding…

Update: The remote comes out of the washing machine looking incredibly clean. And it still works! (once it had dried out). I’d recommend it to anyone with grubby remotes…

The 5k freeroll I went out about 9000th – playing a few hands which all missed on flop + failed to get a cbet fold tends to cripple your stack, followed by the inevitable shove as the blinds begin to bite. I saw S1ndr0me hold on a bit longer as he doubled up at some point, but later even he succumbed to a AJ vs A9 seeing a 9 on the flop. Bit of a waste of time really anyway – you have to beat thousands of others just to cash $10? What’s the point…

The Turbo Takedown is similar, but at least the cash is better. I had poor hands throughout, although at least this time I did build my stack a bit. However again the blinds were ferocious and eventually I failed to stay in. I was tantalizingly close to the money – from a field of twenty-two thousand people (!!!), only 6900 were left and 5oooth place paid $78. But beating 15,000 other idiots wasn’t enough and I was left empty handed. Yegor railed me throughout (nothing better to do, really?) and said that I needed to have built a stronger stack and taken more risks. He’s right, but I was feeling a bit risk averse unfortunately.

So, no new update to November’s results. Might play tonight, but whatever.

Plans for December? I’ve decided that all my plotting and calculations on what’s the best rakeback etc is all a bit pointless when done in a vacuum. What I really need to do is actually put my money where my mouth is and test it out.

So I’m going to split my bankroll equally between Pokerstars, Full Tilt and Ultimate Bet. I’ll switch my sessions equally between the three and see how it goes (I’ll try to match it so that by the end of the month I’ll have roughly the same number of hands at each site). At the end of the month(s) I’ll also factor in Rakeback and bonuses into my winnings and see which site comes out on top. I probably should add in Titan, but I don’t want to spread the BR that thin on any one site.

This hopefully will factor in things such as the ‘softness’ of the sites, table selection etc, and see if it’s true that if the players on Ultimate Bet are that much worse than Full Tilt, then it should show a better winrate from that site.