I played a few husngs instead, which were admittedly really really easy – the only losses were from legitimate bad beats (high 2pair vs low 2pair ends with the villain somehow getting a backdoor flush of all things!). However the traffic was dismal, and the only reason why I got any action at all was because there was one other player who was determined to play.

I then switched to 6max for a bit. Just for fun, no real intentions of taking it too seriously. Amazingly it was actually enjoyable, and I turned a proft that felt well earned rather than luckboxed (srsly). It was also remarkable that the past year of concentrating solely on husngs had also taught me a few things that helped as well.

In particular were the moments that the table broke up leaving you heads up against the other remaining player. They were incredibly bad at heads up play – generally too tight more than anything. You could run over them by just continually betting, and I think in these spots I was winning at a massively faster rate than when the table was full.

I also was less of a calling station, although I’m not sure if heads-up had taught me that. Maybe it did, because things were definitely improved.

However Cake still remained unappealing. I have never before seen my winnings+rakeback line diverge from my winnings line so quickly. The amount of rake I was paying seemed to be horrendous – the Rakeback deal I have is pretty good, so perhaps not so painful, but it just didn’t seem right. On the other hand rakeback is a variance free payment, but that’s kind of stupid – it’s not as if it’s paying bills.

So the plan is to take the money back out of Cake and return to Full Tilt (well, maybe with a detour to BetRaiser and see if a rake-free (no rake!!!) game of microstakes 6max is doable when there’s only 20 people ever on the site). What I am changing though is opening my game up more – I’ll still play husngs, but not exclusively. I’m going to play 6max again, with some MTTs thrown in, and also dabble with some other games like Omahaha (Omalol?). Focussing on one game for the last year was good for my poker skills, but I think it’s not really benefitting me as much as it did. Time to take a sabbatical…

I added a new column which converted their $ values for bb (I think? – probably got it wrong, but whatever), then the lowest values for each buy-in level is bolded. Finally I added another column which gave the bb reduced by my rakeback (albeit at my rate as an affiliate – drop a few points off that for the masses).

It looks like nl5 might be ok with Bodog, and then above that Cake looks good. nl2 is clearly a waste of time. The only thing about Bodog is that it’s not a regular rake sign-up, it has to be a ‘secret’ bonus offer I can offer through people already signed up with meteoricpoker.com and I haven’t figured out how to enable it yet (sooo professional!). I already have the Cake account though, so could just jump in at nl25. No HUD though which is a bit scary.

Consequently I’m not playing much as the moment, it just seems a bit futile – in the early days a session was fun (or not), but the more I play the more I see poker as a long term game with all the sessions merged into a single win-rate, and it’s not that great.

Results for June:

HU Cash:

husngs:

For a whole month that’s an amazingly low hand count. Bear in mind it’s single tabling on the cash games, plus I’ve been away 3/4 weekends this month, so not been playing much anyway.

I had to show the EV line as well otherwise you might think that massive drop was because I’m an idiot

To those mass multitablers those 680 hands still took 4 hours – with husngs I’d never really been concerned with how many hands I get in and hadn’t realised how slow it is.

The other thing is the crazy rake – 600 something hands at a sustainable (ahem) rate of 66bb/100, and the rakeback is 30% of my winnings! I’m going to have to keep an eye on that – even with the nice Rakeback % I get at this site, a more regular winrate of 3-6bb/100 is going to have a hard time beating the Rake. Hopefully the rake goes down as I go up in stakes (and down in winrate)…

Yesterday for instance I bought in short ($10) into a NL20 game, and after an hour my opponent finally gave up – my stack was $32. That was an hour of chipping away without any huge shoves. Is that how it should be? Normally my game has far more variance than that, with a few more shoves causing some big stack sized swings along the way. Seems like a very slow way of winning (an hour of $20 husngs could easily be $100 on a good day), although I should remember that long term my crazy swingy style has generally lost, despite the epic 4-5 buy-in session wins!

I also realised that traffic numbers on these sites is very misleading. For instance I said the other day how EverLeaf was showing only a few thousand players while Pokerstars had a massive 200 thousand. It turns out that PokerStars’ numbers are vastly inflated – the real number is more like 80,000 (according to pokerscout). Still a lot, but not quite the same wow factor. The difference in numbers is that the 200,000 included play chip tables, plus players signed in but not actively playing

120,000 inactive/play chip players sounds a lot. Maybe I’m still not seeing the real numbers here…

Update: Just noticed the latest HEM release supports EverLeaf. I’ll upgrade when I get home. I noticed the that HH text doesn’t include rake taken from the pot, so hopefully HEM is figuring it out somehow…

You can only sit at a maximum of two Heads-Up tables without an opponent.

Table names are randomised, to eliminate any advantage to sitting at tables with names beginning with ‘A’.

Players who attempt to abuse the system or make the Heads-Up games unpleasant for others may be banned from playing at Heads-Up tables.

Doesn’t really affect me playing husngs, but figured I’d pass it along…

Got into work and an hour later was trying not to vomit over my desk – I’m guess I’d put some bad milk into my morning coffee (ironically a colleague joked with me as I poured it saying, can’t be off, it’s still flowing). Bossman let me go home, but despite the perfect opportunity for pokerage I just didn’t feel like.

Meanwhile during that time S1ndr0me was feverishly grinding away – he had seen the unstoppable machine of my husngs create a real threat to his chances of winning our prop bet. 19:41 precisely I get the email proclaiming his victory. If only I’d played through my nauseous haze I could have won (holds arms to heavens and shouts WHYYYYYY????). Only kidding – S1ndr0me’s heater crushing of NL10 was extremely impressive as we can see on his blog. I’m just grateful that the husngs supplied the padding my roll needed to pay the bet. TBH I saw it coming, S1ndr0me’s been playing extremely well lately. He must be rolled for NL25 now, so hopefully we’ll see him take that on now.

I then had a little chat with Yegor about HU, and we decided to go on a play money HU cash table – cash games obviously being very different to SNG’s – higher stakes, plus easy to lose a ton. We (or I) wanted to see how we stood before joining the big boys.

He proceeded to either 3bet/4bet what seemed like every hand. Bluffs I tried to pull required at least 2 barrels, and frequently he called those down with 3rd or 4th pair to add to his already bloated stack. He raised everything, I hit nothing, and it became a bewildering mugging of bloody proportions.

Finally we stopped (um, he  might have stopped out of boredom) with him standing with a 600bb stack. If it had been real money I’d have been royally decimated!

So, a grim day indeed, despite not putting a single real dollar on the table…