I figured out that all the fees for selling and buying shares had come to about £120 in the last month, which was a bit of a shock. Share dealing rake obviously. I need to calm it down a bit and just sit on the shares I have now. That was the original intention, but I got caught out in a bit of rollercoasting…

For poker I’ve been playing on Cake – 6max, ultra low stakes. More for relaxation rather than anything intense since I’m still very busy on that web contract. I logged in and found $60 just sitting there, so decided to see if I could build it up a bit. Reckon I’ll try a 10 buy-in BRM which is edgy, but I can’t face nl4 for too long. Setting that limit means at least I’ll have to put some effort into nl4 before spazzing it away at nl10. Plus Cake is kinda interesting with no HUD allowed – I’m making a lot more efforts with the notes (like ‘spazz bastard owes me $8′, ‘called me fish – DIAGF’ etc).

For returning to Rush I’d need to redeposit, but I want to see how Full Tilt copes over the next couple of months first. I expect them to be ok, but who knows what damage has been really done under the covers. That may change next week since I have the whole week off, and once the Cake money is spewed out, I’ll need to go somewhere obv.

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.

Here’s today chart – solid headed play, back on track thankfully…

Today I played properly – folding poor hands and playing good hands aggressively. That being said I had an AA hand crushed because I paused on the turn. He probably wouldn’t have folded QQ anyway;

So, finally came out in the black and feel happy with that;

The other loss was also a bit cruel – I had hit my set on the flop (22′s I think), the board paired with aces and I built the pot up to a bit bet on the river (which was a J). The villain called and had AJ

Stacks:
UTG ($1.71)
UTG+1 ($8.20)
CO ($9.73)
BTN ($5.16)
Hero (SB) ($5.59)
BB ($4.20)

Pre-flop: ($0.06, 6 players) Hero is SB 9 9
4 folds, Hero raises to $0.12, BB calls $0.08

Flop: 9 K 8 ($0.26, 2 players)
Hero bets $0.20, BB raises to $0.60, Hero calls $0.40

Turn: K ($1.46, 2 players)
Hero checks, BB bets $0.32, Hero raises to $0.64, BB raises to $1.04, Hero calls $0.40

River: 8 ($3.86, 2 players)
Hero bets $3.83, BB goes all-in $2.44

Final Pot: $9.37
Hero shows: 9 9
BB shows: 8 K

Hero wins $1.39 ( lost -$4.20 )
BB wins $7.98 ( won +$3.78 )

I didn’t even have time to reload (fortunately) and then this with same villain;

I only one won hand in the whole session (fortunately a three way monster). So crap…

The flip side of that is that when you do have a strong hand, it’s easy to get a decent sized pot at the end. As I realised I wasn’t being very convincing with cbets and turn reraises I stopped and started playing only hands that hit the fold. However, my losses from failed aggression outweighed my wins on solid hands.