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…