I think the differences between the session where the aggro worked and the one where I spewed were;

a) First session I’d already played for a while, and hadn’t shown myself to be anything out of the ordinary, while the second session I sat down and started firing away. Any idiot could put down as a aggrotard, and this is what happened (my check-raise was reraised every time just about).
b) I picked my spots more carefully the first time. I had got to know the players at the tables, and was able to pick and choose when to push harder. The second session I’d just started, and was basically trying to bully complete unknowns.
c) The second session I didn’t back down. I often continued against those players who pushed back at my 3bets. Consequently I ran into AA several times quite quickly. At one point I had to three barrel bluff, and the final river push finally made the guy fold, but how stupid is that! It worked once, but I don’t think it was a profitable thing to do…

So anyway, 2010 I will stop being an idiot. I’m still bankrolled for nl10, but only 10 buy-ins above the move down point – if I don’t even out I’ll be back at NL5 by February. However, you’ve got to experiment with your game I believe, so I don’t feel too bad (it’s not as if I’m going to turn pro any time soon).

Ok, onto the 2009 review;

Cash:

Tourney:

Well, it’s in the black! (the $40 lost yesterday was 2010, so close thing to ruining the year’s results, lol).

The New Year, 2009
This time last year I’d dropped right down to NL2 – most of my game up to that point had been NL10 at Full Tilt (which was their lowest stakes at that time), and it hadn’t been going very well. So I moved to Pokerstars and dropped down, first to NL5 and then to NL2 as I continued to lose.

The Redeposit – April
In April I finally lost my entire account. I redeposited, and for some reason known only to myself at the time I went back to NL10. I then had a massive heater, gaining $350 in 20k hands. How that happened I’ve no idea! I should go back and look at those hands in detail, but as far as I can remember I was very very lucky – PokerTracker all-in performance says $120 over expected value at its peak.

The Cash Out – July
Inevitably the heater ran out, and I lost a bunch of $$$ pretty quickly. I think I’d upped the number of tables I was playing, plus overconfidence, and that led to much spewage. As it came crashing down a personal credit card problem suddenly arose and I had to withdraw my entire roll to pay for it. In hindsight this was actually a useful thing to happen to me. Firstly, it showed the kindness of friends as they immediately transferred to me a little bit of spare cash to keep playing. Secondly it made me decide to follow bankroll management properly. Up until that point I’d play NL10 if I had over $100 in my account (or over only $50 sometimes). Starting from $30 with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to redeposit in the next couple of months really made sure I did the right thing to avoid going busto again.

The Grind
So I returned to NL2 again. This time my game was much stronger and I rapidly built up enough to move to NL5. I carried on playing well and clipped $200 to move into NL10. I then lost a few buy-ins, and moved back down. Ground up, bust down. I did this 3 times (the three peaks at 41k, 51k and 65k hands). I suddenly realised I was doing the bankroll management slightly wrong – I had a single threshold of $200 where I moved either up or down. What I needed to do was set the move-up threshold higher than the move down one (ie $250 to move up, $200 to move down). This way I’d have a 5 buy-in margin to lose before having to move down.

The Donkament Win – November
I was within $20 of the $250 threshold, and it was taking ages (it says $60 on that graph, but I was also getting rakeback and bonuses which aren’t shown on the graph). It was November now, and I seemed to be on the most miserable downswing ever – no big spews, but not a single +ve session for ages and ages. Then one Sunday I was messing around playing some MTTs (as you can see from the graph above, I don’t tourney much), and suddenly went deep in a $2 180 man SNG. I walked away with $70 – I was finally in NL10 territory again.

The Final Fall
I seemed to be playing well and built my roll up to $450. It didn’t feel like a heater this time, and I felt confident that I was winning appropriate hands rather than sucking out. I decided to look closer at rakeback and see which site was the best for me, and so I split my roll amongst 4 sites – Full Tilt, PokerStars, Ultimate Bet and Party Poker. The difference between the sites was amazing – at NL10 UB and PP was full of limpers who’d try to see every street, while FT and PS still had its usual compliment of 2p2 players. Despite this I’ve failed to profit from them, and even worse seemed to have spewed a ton of money.

Final Roundup
So what’s the roundup of the year? I have to be honest with myself and say I’m not very good at poker. Almost 100k hands, and still being buffeted around by variance and barely keeping above the rake. In fact since my chart shows only +$44 profit, it’s obvious my entire roll ($350 at end of 2009) is made entirely of rakeback and bonuses.

Is that a big problem? I guess not as I still enjoy playing. I still enjoy the challenge of learning a game where it’s clear that gaining knowledge and experience will lift you through the ranks. The frustration is coming from seeing the stakes I play as a goal in itself.

So my resolution for 2010 is to let go of the idea that I’m not a winning player if I can’t ascend rapidly up the stakes. I will play poker at the stakes my bankroll allows, and concentrate on being the best player I can for those stakes. I guess ascending graphs of $$$ won will show whether I’m succeeding, although for me it’ll be how I achieved it that’ll be more important…

Anyway, I decided to do a quick check on PokerTracker to see if my stealing is going ok – I’m a relentless blind stealer and even a constant 3bet defender won’t put me off (especially as all it takes is the odd decent hand against a manic 3betting blind to make it super profitable). Here are the results since April, filtered for stealing opportunities where I raised;

Since I rarely decide not to steal (if both blinds are 64 vpip types I might not, or against a manic 3bettor I admit I do tighten up a bit), it’s obvious that stealing pays – 39BB/100!! It’s almost worth just stealing and not playing any other hands (apart from that being insanely dull).

Position stats;

Position 1 is cutoff, and it’s always worth watching out for that ultratight player on your left who lets you steal through the button – extremely worth it in fact, you can see from the positional stats that it’s a higher BB/hand rate. Mainly this is because the button is just so obviously a stealing position that blinds give it a lot less credit than they should, while the CO is seen as a regular position and will respect your raise . I’m not a big fan of stealing from the small blind though – you’re generally only gaining one big blind while risking three and you’re OOP if called. Not a big enough deal to make a fuss about…

The problem is that these microstakes just don’t generate enough frequent player points to clear the bonus effectively. For instance Last night I had an hour long session at NL10 on 3 tables – this cleared about $2 of the bonus. I’ve a month to clear $100 – not going to happen! Fortunately it comes in $10 payments so I should clear some of it (maybe half?), but it’s frustrating to see that free money just out of reach.

This is where a happy coincidence of my rakeback research and some correspondence with S1ndr0me this morning comes together for a possible solution;

Clearing the bonus is linked to frequent player points (or Full Tilt Points), which are 1 point for every $1 paid in rake. Full Tilt uses the dealt method for rake (see my last post), so you don’t actually have to put any money in the pot to be attributed with that rake, you just have to have the cards dealt to you.

So, if you sat at a higher stakes full ring table and played super tight (QQ+), you’d be clearing that bonus far faster than if you played your normal 6max manic shove fest at NL5. To make it cost effective though, you have to avoid losing too many blinds, otherwise your losses will be more than the bonus you’re trying to clear.

So what would it take to be worthwhile. It has to be a ‘dealt method’ rake site obviously. You obviously have to be absolutely self-controlled. Playing hands out of your bankroll is going to be suicidal – the aim of this exercise is to be dealt lots of hand and lose nothing, not to win $$$. The loss will come from two things – losing your blinds, and losing the hands you do play. The latter is usual shortstack strategy – you’ll only be playing premiums like QQ+, which will at least win you the blinds. The former is not so easy since as a short stack you’ll have almost no fold equity and so stealing from late position isn’t going to be so easy. That means it’s possible to have a stack that’s *too* small. Playing above your bankroll the big drain will be the blinds, so it’s a fine balance between a safe stack size and the gain from the rake. The usual 20bb may be enough, but it’ll be the absolute minimum. However increasing it to improve your fold equity also increases your losses when those premo hands get sucked out on.

To sum up the strategy, table select the tables with the highest average pot. It has to be full ring obviously (Edit: not so obvious actually – the dealt rake is split between the players, so a FR player has 1/9 of the rake in a pot, while a 6max player has 1/6 – the balance comes down to loss due to blinds versus gain from less players. I’ll have to think about this). I’m undecided as to whether it should be 20bb or 50bb buy-ins – I’ll need to experiment as to whether 20bb has any stealing potential or not (possibly there’s a reason to pick the nittiest tables too, but not sure yet). SSS strategy has to be followed religiously, although I’d drop all unpaired hands other than AK, and PP under TT – having said that some risks would have to be taken to steal blinds from the button (actually CO maybe more effective since everyone knows the BTN is on a steal). Equally leaving the table on doubling up is also mandatory.

All that’s left is to try it out. If it works on this Full Tilt holiday bonus then it may be worthwhile signing up at the other ‘dealt method’ sites (Cake does it I believe), and do a bit of early bonus whoring. While being at microstakes the boost this would give my BR would be far more meaningful than when I’m doing ‘standard’ bonus whoring at NL100+.

However, I did mentioned this to S1ndr0me, and he’s tried the short stack strategy on and off and doesn’t think it’s a good idea. I can see where he’s coming from since SSS is fairly high variance really. I’ll proceed with caution I guess…

Edit: for those landing here from Google, my results from trying it out are here.

In this case tilt was in the form of boredom, plus a little bit of contempt for the pennies we were playing with;

The SB had 3bet defended my ‘steal’ several times in the last 40 hands or so, so when this hand was folded to me I was pretty much willing him to 3bet me (ok, not exactly folded to me, but the CO limping barely counts). However when the BB followed I knew that continuing was a bad idea – at 10NL I would have folded without too much grief. However, I’d been playing for about an hour, was doing well & feeling fairly bulletproof, and continued just for kicks. When the SB shoved and BB folded, it was unlikely the SB was bluffing but the possibility existed – whatever though, the mistake was preflop…

Anyway, here’s the chart;

Not sure what happened at the start – I was messing around trying to upgrade PT at the same time, so probably not paying enough attention…

That big drop right at the end is due to this train wreck of a hand;

I realised I was throwing money away in 2NL & 5NL because I wasn’t valuing my chips high enough – I was thinking things like, ‘a shove, oh it’s only a dollar, I’ll call’. So, today I nittied myself up, and it seemed to work, for a while at least. After a morning of grinding away, I then fuck up a couple of hands which destroyed all that work – in both cases I totally overvalued my hand and could have avoided it.

So, today came out as;

Strangely familiar – just like early on when I’d show decent winnings and then blow it with a couple of big losses. Lack of focus clearly.

So, current history of playing on borrowed money;

Still no excessive profits, clearly you’ve backed the wrong horse

Good news on the general money front though, I think I’ve sorted out the worst of it and possibly can redeposit next month…

update fwiw;