<< Blog Home



Archive for the ‘Full Tilt’ Category

Update

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

I’m now happily entrenched playing $30s, and so far this is proving to be a big month;

So much so that my BR is about to tip over $1k which is a massive milestone for me. When that happens I should probably move to $50s with some confidence even though it only just meets the 20 buy-in level. The main reason I should feel confident is that I discovered the ‘Graph Buy-ins’ option in HEM and it shows a really consistent win rate for my husngs;

That seems to hide the fact that my $20 games were exactly breakeven so maybe it doesn’t mean that much. However I’ve not noticed the $30 games to be particularly scary.

I also played my first pot limit Omaha husng today (for a massive $1!). I won, but to be honest I didn’t have a clue to what I was doing. I just have no feel whatsoever as to what a strong hand is. I thought it might be a good route into playing PLO HU cash, but the traffic is very low so maybe it’s not worthwhile.

Happy Easter Monday!

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Whoohoo – the holiday players are out in force!

Half way through that epic streak I started getting jitters about continuing since I didn’t want to break it. That just shows how I need to bolster my confidence – when the player pool is so weak a real winning player wouldn’t even stop to pee.

So I told myself to just keep opening the tables and carry on until it gets bad. As it was it didn’t really turn bad – even the regs who sat me lost. Finally a spewy player beat me (due to a shove called by me with AQ (my spew!) and then a suckout where he paired his kicker). One loss after 8 games in a row shouldn’t mean it’s all over, but I’m a bit played out now I think. I’m going to play tennis in a couple of hours, so that’ll balance the day nicely (as long as I win).

Security

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

I have recently been called an infamous luckbox by some dodgy russian. I would just like to say for the record that hands like the following only occur once every couple of games – how outrageous to call me a luckbox!

No Limit Holdem Tournament
2 Players

$20 + $1 Heads Up Sit & Go

Stacks:
SB Hero (1,885)
BB Villain (1,115)

Blinds: 25/50

Pre-Flop: (75, 2 players) Hero is SB 4diamonds poker card Jclubs poker card
Hero raises to 100, Villain calls 50

Flop: 6hearts poker card 4hearts poker card 10diamonds poker card (200, 2 players)
Villain checks, Hero bets 200, Villain calls 200

Turn: Khearts poker card (600, 2 players)
Villain checks, Hero goes all-in 1,585, Villain goes all-in 815

Hero shows 4diamonds poker card Jclubs poker card
Villain shows Kdiamonds poker card Jdiamonds poker card

Two cards left in the deck that can help our unfortunate hero!

River: 4clubs poker card (3,000, 2 players, 2 all-in)

Final Pot: 3,000
Hero has three of a kind, Fours
Villain has two pair, Kings and Fours

Hero wins 3,000 (net +1,115)

Villain lost 1,115

I have made my feelings clear that all-in EV graphs are misleading and erroneous, but maybe I’m somewhat biased – I checked my lifetime history, and for cash I’m $340 over expected $ and for husngs I’m $235 over. If I didn’t believe that those calcs were complete and utter tosh then I’d be deluding myself that I can play poker (so I know which delusion is the healthiest!).

Other news – finally made 5k Full Tilt points so that I could order their security key. Seems to have taken ages to make those points (I think I threw away loads on big MTT satellites before deciding that I wanted a key). While I haven’t got vast amounts of dolares in my account it is slowly increasing. At some point this year it’s quite likely to exceed what’s actually in my regular bank account (British indebted society sucks), and if I’m going to get all paranoid about my personal account being online, then obviously I should take all possible steps to secure my poker accounts.

Now I just have to wait 6 months for it to arrive.

March

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

March was a very unexceptional month. Something that’s obvious just from the fact that this was only my 8th post in the entire month – the lowest post count since I started this blog.

husngs;

It was another month of trying to push into higher staked games – each attempt busting out and having to back pedal a bit to regain confidence. My enforced goal of 20 games to acclimatise into $20s almost worked, but once I cleared the Full Tilt $50 bonus I switched over to Ultimate Bet (who’d offered me a $100 bonus, which might just get cleared by christmas at this rate). However I’d only left about $30 in that account so it was back to $5s and $10s (whatever was available) to rebuild the account a bit first. I’d just got it built to about $100 when it had dawned on me that my overall roll is over $700 – I should be trying $30s, not $20s!

Consequently the obvious happened and a couple of $30 games later I’d blown the account back down to $20 or so (that’s at the 125 game mark). Crawled back to $5s and $10s. I probably should just transfer a couple of hundred from another account, but whatever.

Despite my poor results, the husng players at Ultimate Bet are really bad. Preflop raises are fairly rare and you can pin them down to bluffer, station, nit etc fairly quickly. It seems though that I’m my own worst enemy. For instance I’ll have ground them down to 1/3 of the chips and then do some fool move like call a shove with ATo and end up reversing the chip count. My opponent has made so many bad moves that I start to treat their raises with contempt, and inevitably walk into a monster. Stupid stuff. I’ve even changed my avatar to a fish to remind me who the idiot at the table really is…

Cash;

No, I’ve not really returned to cash games – as explained in an earlier post I did a bit of rush to clear the last few $$$ of my FT bonus and somehow accidentally won at the same time. The blue line that shoots off at the end is rakeback + the bonus.

So end result is +$100 (Rakeback on the husngs is $30 which cancelled out the husng losses). Compared to the last two months that’s fairly poor, but I’m not complaining – it’s still a gain!

Next month? I’m determined not to wimp out of playing the stakes I should be playing. That means $30 games. Unless I get a few games in a row that’ll mean transferring some money to my UB account, but no big deal really.

Another Take 2 Promotion at Full Tilt

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

There’s another Take 2 bonus offered at Full Tilt, which has to be the easiest bonus ever to clear. All you have to do is play two tables or one table of rush for about 5 minutes each day, and they give you the money!

The last one was for $50 and you had to play 20 days out of the month, this one’s a lot shorter where it’s just 9 days for $25. Still nothing to complain about :-)

I’d only just managed to clear the $50 rush poker bonus. It had been steadily clearing over the last month and I ended up with just minutes to go and 5 Full Tilt points left for the last $5. So, despite all the obvious dangers, I popped open a bunch of NL25 rush tables with the intentions of fold, fold, fold just to get those last few points.

Somehow though I kept getting dealt great hole cards like AJs and I *had* to see a few flops. You’re probably expecting me to say that it all went tits up and in chasing that $5 of bonus I lost over $50, but no! It went my way for a change! I took a couple of 50bb pots and then shoved a TPTK (I know, dodgy) to see my opponent on a flush draw – it held!

So in exactly 3 minutes and 45 seconds I played 36 hands winning $53! Even more importantly I cleared the final $5 of the rush bonus. Sustainable?

It’s perhaps just as well though – this month has been breakeven on the husngs so far. My attempts at the $20s has been quite swingy, and I’ve not had any major heaters on the $10s to cover it. In fact as of right now it’s actually -ve with only rakeback pushing it into the black (well almost. -$0.50 is close enough).

I then was told that I’ve a $100 bonus on Ultimate Bet to be played out. So I’ve switched there for the time being. The bonus isn’t so great though – once I’d figured out how much rake it would take to clear, it turns out that it takes almost three times as much as the Full Tilt bonus took. So pretty much so slowly that it’s probably not worth it. It’s the same thing for the Cake sign-up bonus – I still haven’t even cleared $10 of that and I’m probably close to the time limit on that one.

Since my site is promoting these sites with their bonuses etc, I think I ought to put some work into figuring out how to compare one site’s bonuses against another, and display them in terms of Rake. I should imagine there will be some big differences…

Update: Wow, the players at UB are annoying. Some guy limped his AA and unfortunately I walked into it with TP – he then typed ‘f u’ into the chat. Aggressive calling at it’s best. Then today I had a player who showed his hole cards every time I folded my button preflop. I had to explain how meaningless that was since it was getting really irritating (so maybe not so meaningless). I’d made a couple of bad moves and he was ahead 2:1 and he started suggesting I needed to go all-in (blinds were still 10/20 – very slow structure at UB). I obliged him with JJ but unfortunately his 99 hit a set.

20 Games of $20

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Completed my 20 games. Took a little longer than it should of (felt crap on Sunday and last night – too much staring at computer monitors).

And here’s the result;

Not bad – ROI 23%. I’m not over the moon about my play though – I sucked out on quite a few of those games, plus I ran into people with plummeting sharkscope graphs who still managed to beat me (some of these graphs are losses in the thousands of dollars! I can’t imagine what it would feel like to suddenly discover sharkscope and look yourself up to see a chart like that). So room for improvement, but the important thing is that I now feel quite comfortable with $20s :-) All I need now is a heater and I’ll be trying the $30s!

Also tonight I came 15th in a HU MTT against 400 other runners which was nice. Shame the buy-in was only $2! I came away with $16 prize money from that – these MTTs run every day at 7pm and are great for winding down after work. Two hours of bashing low stakes droolers while risking only $2.

Return of The Mojo

Monday, March 15th, 2010

It’s one of those weird monday nights – everyone I’ve played has been really, really, really bad! :-D

So far it’s 6 games won out of 7, and the last game was an $10 8 man shootout. I noticed that 5 people had already signed up and figured I might as well join in – the prize is split between the 2 finalists $52/$28, so compared to a 4man it’s not that great, but I felt like killing some time and having a gamble.

Plus I was running hot – so hot that even FT couldn’t handle it! First game of the 8man we were all in and I was in bad shape needing a K on the river to complete a straight. Just before the river card was dealt Full Tilt completely hung – it just stared at me showing me the straight draw, taunting me! Then it crashed completely. I thought ‘oh well, gg’ and restarted Full Tilt not expecting much.

As I logged in the game popped up with the fuckwit villain hammering away at his bet button – a K must have landed!!! He’d blinded me back to a 50:50 stack size and I started rebuilding. I was up to 75:25 and he shoved. I called with A7 (blinds were getting a bit high) to see 88. Flop and turn missed, and then the river hit! That guy must have been so pissed (muhahaha).

I went on to win the 8man making $77 for the night – that rescues this month which had been down $80.

I’m a bit worried about my net connection now though. Full Tilt is disconnecting a lot, plus my modem is also checking out fairly often as well. The two combined aren’t making life easy.


MeteoricPoker rakeback

Cellsino Poker

40% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Everleaf Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Monthly

300% up to $500

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Minted Poker

40% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Everleaf Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Monthly

$250-$2,500

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Cake Poker

33% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Cake Poker

Rake: dealt

Statistics: Daily

110% up to $600

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Americas Cardroom

27% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Winning Poker

Rake: dealt

Statistics: Monthly

100% up to $1,000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

True Poker

27% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Winning Poker

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Monthly

100% up to $1,000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Fortune Poker

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Boss Media

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Monthly

200% up to €1,000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Poker Heaven

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Boss Media

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

200% up to €1000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Paradise Poker

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Boss Media

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

200% up to €1,000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

PKR

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: PKR Network

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Monthly

100% up to $800

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Red Star Poker

33% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Cake Poker

Rake: dealt

Statistics: Daily

250% up to $1,500

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Unibet

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Microgaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Monthly

30% Loyalty

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

NoiQ Poker

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: IGT Poker

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

200% up to €1000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Interpoker

30% Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Boss Media

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

200% up to €1000

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Carbon Poker

- Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Merge Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

150% up to $750

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

GR88

- Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Merge Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

150% up to $750

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Bulldog777

- Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Merge Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

150% up to $750

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Overbet

- Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Merge Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

100% up to $600

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!
MeteoricPoker rakeback

Black Chip Poker

- Rakeback

Featured Offer

Network: Merge Gaming

Rake: contributed

Statistics: Daily

150% up to $750

Signup Bonus

Get Rakeback Now!