Nevertheless, I seem to be doing ok despite what this chart looks like;

The dive downwards was the spewy aggrotard mood that I mentioned in the last post. Autostealing every blind and easily knocking everyone off their hand had made me a bit slaphappy, plus I really saw the $10 stacks as more or less worthless and so stacked off too light too many times.

So yesterday I returned to taking things a bit more seriously and thought that I needed to force myself to just ignore the 4 buy-in spew since it was going to take quite a few hands to climb back up. Somehow though I hit hand after hand and everyone seemed happy to throw their stacks at me. So I managed to win it back in less hands than I lost it, an incredible swing really.

Single tabling is still enjoyable (well obv when stacks are flying like this), being able to chat while playing is fun and action hasn’t been so slow as get boring. No desire to add a second table yet, and even if I did I think even one more table would negate the whole reason I decided to single table. I just imagine myself playing live and it all seems reasonable.

Glad I scraped it back, although I was a bit bad letting it go that far down. Bluffs are failing completely and utterly on rush poker – there just seems to be too many calling stations. Of course that’s fine when you’re hitting hands, which is probably why yesterday’s graphs were so sweet – I was hitting a ton of stuff then. Today I had loads of small and medium pockets pairs, and loads of AKo hands, but almost none of them seemed to hit at all. On top of that everyone was mashing the pot button on the flop – it was hard folding so often, plus feeling nervous to cbet with the CS’s made it not the most pleasant of sessions.

During the return to zero part I modified my game so that my opening raises were completely ridiculous – all button steals were $0.20 minbets, speculative SC’s were minbets, broadways and big pairs were 3 to 5 big blinds. It seemed to be paying off as well – with minbet raises you don’t need that many to be successful to make a profit, and yet perversley *more* people seemed to fold to the minbet than to the 3bb button raises.

For the propbet, I’m still behind the starting line

but the fact that I was able to do 2k hands just today is amazing! Rakeback is just going to rocket up now, plus I might get some of the variance out of my game. Just got to avoid the tilt induced crashes that tend to come my way every now and again

One thing that’s funny is that on these Rush tables I’m now getting the redline of a multitable grinder;

I’ve *never* had a graph like that before, but is my game better or worse for it? A positive redline might be seen as a good thing, but then my game was always so swingy?! Maybe this is an indication of stability perhaps…

It might also be worth looking into the ironman promotion now as well.

Consequently I probably did a few more FPS plays than I should have, but they pretty much all went my way. A bit dangerous that as it’ll reinforce the mistaken belief that I’m the master of manipulation and I’m going to get too cocky.

Anyways, here’s where I’m at. $100 – half way there;

Today was 350 hands, which is around that toothshaped notch at the end (yet again the session started with losing a stack – this time QQ finding itself against KK, standard stuff really).

MiniUpdate: PlusEV is awesome. I’ve got to January 2008 and it keeps getting funnier & funnier. My head is starting to hurt a bit now tho…

MicroUpdate: hmm, read them all now. That was a quick two years – guess it’s getting harder to think of funny stuff. Well worth the migraine though.

The problem is that I know the basics, and when thinking straight can apply them well (including postflop). Once I start winning I start feeling bulletproof and play back at hands which I should just be folding. A few fancy plays go my way and I’m trying to win every pot going. Of course it doesn’t end well…

This month started with a few huge hands that went my way and gave me a 7 buy-in headstart. It took losing every penny of that plus a bit more before I realised I had to take a step back and see that I was being an idiot.

So today I folded when I was obviously beat, and didn’t float all those missed flops. It was a bit swingy, but came out up in the end;

Even nicer, this was on Ultimate Bet where my account had been seriously depleted. This put it back to a reasonable amount where I could multitable without worrying about the dreaded ‘you have insufficient funds’ popup when trying to reload. If my next post has a similar graph then it looks like I’m back on track.

As an aside, Yegor suggested playing limit hold’em. Such a weird game! While the blinds were $0.05/$0.10 the swings were tiny and similar to NL2 – no wonder bankroll management is much lower for limit compared to no limit. It was also a struggle against draws – getting AA preflop was always a minefield as you try to build a pot while watching each street conspire to give your opponent that straight with his 67o.

Compared to NLHE, limit hold’em is allegedly much lower in variance while the contribution from the player’s skill is less (pot odds become a bigger factor than bluffs). Possibly that might be a plus point at microstakes though. Also it may have less of the internet generation of players (ie more players coming from live games and less from 2p2), which might be useful too. I’m not sure how much effort I want to put into it though, but possibly more than PLO – I’m coming to hate variance…

The downside is that it’s harder to multitable 6max since your turn comes around so much quicker, but 8 is still within my capability (at least for this SSS stuff where my VP$IP plummets to 15%).

So I started clicking away, and it quickly became obvious that this was going to be a high variance thing and I was way out of my bankroll comfort zone. I was immediately surprised how readily people called your shoves, even when you hadn’t entered a pot for the last 30 hands. I started out taking as many pots as I lost, but then a few went awry and I started to doubt what I was doing. So I stopped after only 20 minutes.

End result was a loss of only $14 which was remarkably good considering how much luck was involved – ridiculously this was actually offset by an accident when I was setting things up – I had installed Windows 7 the day before and Full Tilt still had its default settings. So I turned on autorebuy but messed up the 20bb setting, which resulted in me sitting at a table with a full $50 stack! I was folded to on the BB, and then in the button had KQs so thought I’d at least see the flop. I then took it down on a cbet, netting me $10! (I then quickly left the table!). So net result -$4 I guess PokerTracker all-in ev claimed I was $50 under ev, but I think  it got confused by a threeway pot where I had QQ and so did one of the opponents…

On checking the bonus I’d cleared a few more dollars and it seemed that it matched up to general opinion that it’d take 7000 hands at NL50 to clear $100. I realised that playing 7k high variance hands just isn’t the way to clear a bonus…

So I switched back to my regular 4 tables of 100bb buy-in 6 max, now at NL10. After an hour and 380 hands I’d won about $30, and this only went to confirm that trying to play 7000 break-even hands just to clear $100 is a very stupid thing to do. Best to just accept the bonus and then ignore it – anything you clear is literally just a bonus!

I then had a break and came back for another 300 hands, but didn’t really improve much (all I achieved was halving the BB/100);

• My play would have been natural, not effected because someone was watching
• We could concentrate on one table at a time
• We could skip hands where I folded preflop

The final reason is only partly a good idea – obviously you miss what the other players have done at the table. Fortunately I hadn’t filtered the session on ‘put money in’ so we did at least see hands up to the point where I folded, and it was these hands that my sweat partner bought up a good point.

In several instances there had been a couple of limpers and I folded on the button (with complete trash like 83o etc). He pointed out that since I was on the button it was still worth raising while I was building up a picture of who my opponents were. Whether they fold or call (and then what they called with) was golden information when I had no other history on these players. He pointed out that I should be really taking notes on players and try to classify them (even at NL5). As the session went on, he made me classify various players at the table – then in later hands this information made it vastly more clear why certain players were doing what they were doing. So I was convinced.

This morning I opened up a couple of tables and tried to put it into action. The note taking facility on PokerTracker isn’t that great (or at least, I haven’t got the hang of it) so I just opened up notepad and figured that would do while I only had two tables open. The first difficulty was getting time to write the notes – it was like being a multitabler newbie all over again. I need to develop some acronyms and make the notes more concise.

It worked fairly well. Players rapidly showed whether they were calling stations or loose passive way before my HUD kicked in. I adapted to what I was seeing and ended up with a flawless session. It was perhaps an easy session though – everyone seemed to be huge stereotypes of what I was looking for, and even without the note taking I would have noticed how passive some of the guys to my left were. However as a first go I’m still a believer. Furthermore, it was actually fun – I had wondered if going back down to 2 tables would be dull, but to be honest it reawakened the player in me – I suspect that multitabling has really dulled my poker senses.

What I need to do now is stick to a low number of tables and improve my speed at getting those notes down. I guess I’ve got to nail down PokerTracker’s note facility, and come up with a clear and sensible notation.

Update: So what does this mean;

Meteoric’s Looseness vs. Win Rate

this one too;

Meteoric’s Aggression vs. Win Rate

All the ABC poker guides say tight play is better than loose (at NL5), and agression is better than passivity. If that’s true, why don’t those scatter plots slope down from left to right? A few outliers in the top chart slightly give that impression, but really taking the image as a whole it’s generally fairly symmetric.

And there we go… sigh.

On the poker front I’ve found a cool new toy. Not that new actually, but before you had to pay for it and now it’s free! Poker Shortcuts is an application based on AutoHotKey stuff, and creates lots of keyboard shortcuts for poker sites like Full Tilt or Pokerstars.

My first thoughts about shortcuts is that I can’t be arsed, and I’m happy with the mouse. However I did want something that would open up tables a bit quicker for me – I’m now 6 tabling at NL5 and while it doesn’t take long to open up 6 tables, it could be quicker!

So I found out that Poker Shortcuts is now open source, which means free, which is nice. I downloaded it to try out, and it’s almost mindblowing in the way it changes the way you multitable.

Firstly it did help open up those tables – I still have to choose the table and click on the seat, but it does the rest (it sets my buy-in and clicks autopost blinds). However once playing then you really see the power.

The active table pops to the front as usual, but now it has a nice big red border so it unmistakable. My mouse cursor automatically appears over the fold button (took a bit of getting used to – I’d move towards the window and find I was actually moving away because the mouse had already moved there) – and since you’re folding 80% of the time that’s perfect. You just go click, click, click, ah, need to bet so slide slightly to the right.

It also sets the bet amount in depending on what your action is going to be, ie preflop it’ll set 3xbb + 1/limper for you, on later streets 75% of pot etc. This is a bit disconcerting and I’m not sure if I totally like it. Might be good though.

It clicks the time bank button for you automatically too – this has to be a life saver as I’ve missed several pots now where it timed out while I was busy on another table (chatting to someone with a female avatar who *must* be a hot chick right?).

Plus it can show M as a HUD variable. But I suck at tournaments so that’s useless.

There’s probably plenty more to discover, but for a first try it’s already impressed me. The only worry is that new Full Tilt updates will break it, but I think that’s the main reason it’s gone open source – it had become too much of a liability to charge people for the thing when it could so easily break. Hopefully there’ll be enough techy poker players out there to keep it up to date…