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Bankroll Devastation

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Ok, now I’m not so keen on Rush Poker.

This is the graph to date of playing RP;

Mostly in the black I guess, so I shouldn’t be too harsh on it. However the last session (last 600 hands) was a really depressing pit of despair. One of those times you hit nothing while all around you do, bullets and cowboys get no action and the hands that do get all-in action find themselves outgunned :-(

The thing I hate the most though is my redline – I’ll admit I’m not one of those players who have a solid upwardly mobile graph, but when I am doing ok it’s usually red and blue in reasonable tandem. A few bad showdown failures are compensated by the non-showdown and it all looks nice and symmetrical. Today I realised constantly playing against unknowns on Rush Poker meant you couldn’t profitably punish the bluffers or extract from the calling stations. You either get good cards or you don’t.

I am wondering why my swings are so huge though. They’re all about 6 or 7 buy-ins – that’s not normal surely? People get worried when they have a 3 or 4 buy-in dive, over 8 is a downswing of death. Run of the mill for me it seems.

Unfortunately that last downswing has really taken it out of my bankroll – it now stands at a crappy $208. That’s less than a buy-in to the NL5 move down point! Rakeback ought to be about $50 from this rushing around though, but it won’t be in my account for another three weeks.

Oh well.

OTOH my blog’s doing well :-)   The big jump in the last week was because I broke the news about rush poker so quickly – Google sent me loads of people who were searching about the game. Wore off pretty quickly though…

Got Carried Away

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Whoops, in the stupid belief that I could cope with 4 tabling rush poker I threw away $64!

My biggest mistakes were unfortunately while I was deep – I hit trips on a 727 board, both of us with 200bb stacks – the money went all in and he had 22 :-(   It’s kinda difficult since clearly his shove screamed that he had a major hand, certainly better than my sevens, but the NL10 game at rush poker is full of crazy people – shoves like that are happening all the time. This is perhaps partly because NL10 is the lowest stakes so we have all the NL2 & NL5 people there, plus the speed induces people to play a bluffy reckless game.

So I took a step back and had a breather – during this time I figured out how to export my HEM stats into my Full Tilt player notes (since the HUD’s useless with rush). It didn’t help that much though as I don’t seem to have any history with the people I’m seeing on the rush tables. I guess that’s a consequence of NL10 being the lowest limits again.

So I restarted, and this time added another piece to my Rush strategy – ratholing! I switched down to 2 tables and whenever a stack gained more than 20bb I closed it and then joined another. Obviously not an optimal strategy for a strong player, but I lack the experience and self-discipline at playing deep, and if I don’t cap my game like that I stand to lose some big hands.

Anyway, it went better;

The improvement is mainly from going down to 2 tables, but I think the ratholing is probably a good thing for me to do, at least for now…

Update: It’s a good feeling when you lose an absolute bucketload of money, and then have the ability to win it back :-D

I almost posted this chart at the 1.6k hands mark but thought I’ll just make it a real profit – duh, that of course made everything spin out of control. Made it on the second attempt though :-)

For the prop bet I’d be negative still if it wasn’t for rakeback – I’d be at -$6 but with Rakeback I’m +$38! That’s a lot of rakeback…

Today’s Rush

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Not so hot today :-) Now four tabling rush poker;

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 :oops:

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.

My Go At Rush Poker

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Finally got round to having a go. Since I ran hot I like it :-)

That’s 277 hands in an hour which fits with what FTPDoug said – that’s about two and a half times the normal rate, so awesome for rakeback. Let’s face it – that’s the only way I ever build my roll, so looks like this is my game.

Of course, next time I play I’ll run bad and I’ll decide that Rush poker is a pile of crap. For now though I’m happy enough with it.

Still no confirmation on the Pokerstars WBCOOP. Since this post is going to knock it off the front page I’ll post the link stuff here again…


Online PokerI have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: 930826


Update: lol, I still like rush poker :-D

I upped it to two tables, and found I could cope with the speed. Possibly if I was using a proper mouse and not my laptop pad thing I could do 3 tables. At least that meant the next hour gave me 700 more hands.

Biggest hand was this one. I was on the verge of folding to what could have been a squeeze, and then realised we were both reasonably deep. Implied odds and all that, so I called. Then my sooooted connectors hit :-D

NL Holdem $0.10(BB) Replayer
SB ($25.11)
BB ($12.38)
UTG ($2.71)
Hero ($18.41)
CO ($24.65)
BTN ($9.60)

Dealt to Hero 7clubs poker card 6clubs poker card

fold, Hero raises to $0.30, CO calls $0.30, fold, SB raises to $1.40, fold, Hero calls $1.10, fold

FLOP ($3.20) 4diamonds poker card 3clubs poker card 5clubs poker card

SB bets $2.10, Hero raises to $5.10, SB raises to $23.71 (AI), Hero calls $11.91 (AI)

TURN ($37.22) 4diamonds poker card 3clubs poker card 5clubs poker card Tspades poker card

RIVER ($37.22) 4diamonds poker card 3clubs poker card 5clubs poker card Tspades poker card 8spades poker card

SB shows Kclubs poker card Khearts poker card
(Pre 79%, Flop 4.9%, Turn 0.0%)

Hero shows 7clubs poker card 6clubs poker card
(Pre 21%, Flop 95.1%, Turn 100.0%)

Hero wins $35.22

Duh

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

First hand amazing – I get AA and four of us go all-in! My bullets hold up (I was 61% favourite fortunately), and I win a $23 pot (yeah, shame they were all small stacks).

Then over the next 300 hands I take a serious nosedive and end up $33 down. Unbelievable. I think I must have had some kind of aneurysm – Several times I called a big river reraise with TPTK, which all obviously lost to sets, straights etc. Several of them I even thought ‘this is obviously a set’, and still like a dumb fuck I called them down and handed over my money. What’s the point of getting better at reading hands when I don’t listen to myself!

I then went on wtf couldn’t care less tilt and called a bunch more TPTK’s and lost a few more stacks. Really, really, really bad!

Still Playing Solidly

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Another $20 towards the grand $200 challenge. I’ve been feeling hungover all day after a few too many beers last night when a friend turned up in Cambridge out of the blue. At the same time I’ve been super keen to get back on the tables now that I seem to have put my finger on my biggest leak. So today I wasn’t up to mass tabling (lol, 6 is mass tabling to me!) and so only played three tables but made the effort to really watch the other players.

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.

Concentrated Luck

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

After my big thinking session yesterday I started today with a definite goal to watch those hands where I haven’t hit the flop. I wasn’t going to stop bluffing, but I was going to make sure I controlled the pot down to minimise my mistakes. $1.70 was a watershed amount – that’s pretty much two calls preflop and a cbet. Not that my bluffs are limited to cbets, but you get the idea I hope.

The session started out with a spot of bad luck though – I had AK in the BB, and 3bet the CO who’d opened. He minraised me so I shoved. Unfortunately he had KK. Fortunately I hit one of my aces! Unfortunately he hit the last K in the deck on the river. So I started the session from -$10 :-(

I chipped away and won back that $10 by about 30 hands later (30 hands! At the time it felt like a slow but steady increase, but 100bb in 30hands?! Perhaps I expect too much too often). I was really happy that I was avoiding the dumb mistakes I’d been making yesterday and that my regular play was showing a decent enough winrate. So I figured that the time was right to up the volume a bit and I opened a few more tables so that I was  6 tabling.

The extra tables went fine, and I was happily winning. I’ve fallen behind S1ndr0me a bit so needed to keep grinding away.

Then this happened all on the same table; First I got AA in the SB – BB and UTG raised me, I reraised, BB shoved, I called and won a $30 pot.

Next hand I folded pre.

Next hand I had AA in the CO. I reraised the MP, UTG called, MP shoved, I called and won a $50 pot.

Next hand I had KK in MP. I raised, and CO reraised me, I 4bet, he shoved, I called and won a $19 pot.

Amazing. Three premiums in a row plus action from the table. :-D

Current results for the bet;


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