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Better Maybe? Or At Least, Not So Awful

Friday, March 4th, 2011

So I’m cbetting more, folding to raises more, and brand new opening range. Is it working? I’m not sure, it definitely feels a lot better, but results aren’t exactly stellar;

Especially as this is NL5! Nevertheless compared to my previous Rush outings this is incredibly good believe it or not. Apart from today – if something could go wrong, then today it did. Nobody folded to a cbet, villain’s draws always got there, Aces cracked, and I’ve never seen so many monsters end up as split pots! AA vs AA and then stuff like this;

$0.02/$0.05 No Limit Holdem

6 Players

Stacks:
UTG ($10.82)
UTG+1 ($10.05)
CO ($1.27)
BTN ($5.40)
SB ($1.44)
Hero ($5)

Pre-Flop: ($0.07, 6 players) Hero is BB Ahearts poker card Qclubs poker card
4 folds, SB calls $0.03, Hero raises to $0.15, SB calls $0.10

Flop: 8hearts poker card Aclubs poker card Qspades poker card ($0.30, 2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $0.30, SB calls $0.30

Turn: 8clubs poker card ($0.90, 2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $1, SB goes all-in $0.99

River: 8diamonds poker card ($2.89, 2 players, 1 all-in)

Final Pot: $2.89
SB shows a full house, Eights full of Aces
5diamonds poker card Aspades poker card
Hero shows a full house, Eights full of Aces
Ahearts poker card Qclubs poker card

Hero collects $1.35 (net -$0.10)
SB collects $1.35 (net -$0.09)

I’m not saying I didn’t make some mistakes today, but I’ve been making fewer and that’s made me notice that sometimes things just go downwards no matter what you do. The cards just don’t come, they always have it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Weird how it happens in streaks, although I guess it’s because it’s a streak that it’s noticeable.

So dunno if leakbuster is helping yet. I suspect it has, but there’s still a long way to go yet. Certainly playing 10k hands before doing an analysis again is stretching my patience (that’s a week & I’m only a third of the way through).

First Supernova Elite of the Year

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Congrats to azntracker for making SNE in 59 days – breaking all previous records!

Economics

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

I’ve played a bunch of hands at 6max now – generally I was winning which is good. I then had a bash at some MTTs and got nowhere so I’m back to my original deposit on Cake. At least it’s not less than what I started out at. I still think I should withdraw the money and go back to Full Tilt, but the effort is too much at the moment (so lazy!).

Money is on my mind though – I was looking at mortgages to get an idea of what kind of depost I need, and it seems to be going up each time I look. It seems the maximum mortgage I could get is about £200k, which gets you a 1 bedroom flat in Cambridge. I looked at the house prices in Sheffield where I used to live, and they look a bit more reasonable, but then when I looked at the job market that was lower paid too. That would mean I could only get a smaller mortgage, which meant a 1 bedroom flat again! It’s not like I’m low paid really, so god knows how everyone else manages (well, they all get married and buy as a couple. Guess I really do need to marry for money…).

Anyway, I found this website which shows how prices have changed in the UK over the last 10 years;

Regular stuff like food, drink, pensions, petrol was all roughly up 40% so that’s what I’m taking as the yardstick to measure everything else against.

House prices up a whopping 123%

Average salary up only 13%

Level of UK Consumer debt up 158%

How can that be a reasonable way of living? I must be stupid living in this country, esp without rakeback

Variety

Monday, February 21st, 2011

So I deposited on Cake, but merely moments later a chat from Yegor popped up saying don’t play nl25 hu. Rake and lack of ability would probably make it a bit suicidal. Of course I disagree totally with the ability part :) , but it did stop me.

I played a few husngs instead, which were admittedly really really easy – the only losses were from legitimate bad beats (high 2pair vs low 2pair ends with the villain somehow getting a backdoor flush of all things!). However the traffic was dismal, and the only reason why I got any action at all was because there was one other player who was determined to play.

I then switched to 6max for a bit. Just for fun, no real intentions of taking it too seriously. Amazingly it was actually enjoyable, and I turned a proft that felt well earned rather than luckboxed (srsly). It was also remarkable that the past year of concentrating solely on husngs had also taught me a few things that helped as well.

In particular were the moments that the table broke up leaving you heads up against the other remaining player. They were incredibly bad at heads up play – generally too tight more than anything. You could run over them by just continually betting, and I think in these spots I was winning at a massively faster rate than when the table was full.

I also was less of a calling station, although I’m not sure if heads-up had taught me that. Maybe it did, because things were definitely improved.

However Cake still remained unappealing. I have never before seen my winnings+rakeback line diverge from my winnings line so quickly. The amount of rake I was paying seemed to be horrendous – the Rakeback deal I have is pretty good, so perhaps not so painful, but it just didn’t seem right. On the other hand rakeback is a variance free payment, but that’s kind of stupid – it’s not as if it’s paying bills.

So the plan is to take the money back out of Cake and return to Full Tilt (well, maybe with a detour to BetRaiser and see if a rake-free (no rake!!!) game of microstakes 6max is doable when there’s only 20 people ever on the site). What I am changing though is opening my game up more – I’ll still play husngs, but not exclusively. I’m going to play 6max again, with some MTTs thrown in, and also dabble with some other games like Omahaha (Omalol?). Focussing on one game for the last year was good for my poker skills, but I think it’s not really benefitting me as much as it did. Time to take a sabbatical…

Microstakes HU Cash

Friday, February 18th, 2011

So Yegor reminds me how expensive the rake is for nanostakes HU cash. I went to PTR and looked at the their Rake comparison page, which calculates the average rake per 100 hands from their database (rather than using the poker site’s arcane rake calculations). I came up with this table for the three sites that do HU less than nl50;


nl2 nl5 nl10 nl25 nl50
Cereus $ 0.62
1.85 3.00 5.00
bb 0.31
0.19 0.12 0.10
35.00%
0.20
0.12 0.08 0.07
Bodog Poker $
0.66 1.60 3.90 6.82
bb
0.13 0.16 0.16 0.14
28%?

0.10 0.12 0.11 0.10
Cake Poker $


2.87 5.00
bb


0.11 0.10
38.00%



0.07 0.06
iPoker $ 0.57 1.16 2.62 3.30 6.30
bb 0.29 0.23 0.26 0.13 0.13
30%?
0.20 0.16 0.18 0.09 0.09

I added a new column which converted their $ values for bb (I think? – probably got it wrong, but whatever), then the lowest values for each buy-in level is bolded. Finally I added another column which gave the bb reduced by my rakeback (albeit at my rate as an affiliate – drop a few points off that for the masses).

It looks like nl5 might be ok with Bodog, and then above that Cake looks good. nl2 is clearly a waste of time. The only thing about Bodog is that it’s not a regular rake sign-up, it has to be a ‘secret’ bonus offer I can offer through people already signed up with meteoricpoker.com and I haven’t figured out how to enable it yet (sooo professional!). I already have the Cake account though, so could just jump in at nl25. No HUD though which is a bit scary.

Sharkscope Verboten

Friday, January 21st, 2011

Just seen in the 2p2 husng regs thread that someone got warned by Full Tilt for using sharkscope;

Hello ___,

We are contacting you about your Full Tilt Poker poker account.

It has come to our attention that you have been using a prohibited program while playing on Full Tilt Poker specifically Sharkscope.

At this time we have taken no action on your account however please familiarize yourself with our prohibited programs page which can be found here:

http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/prohibited_programs.php

Specifically under “not permitted during play”:

2. Programs or services that provide additional information on opponents that a player would not normally be privy to:

Certain programs, websites, and subscription services provide extra information on opponents which may not be used during play. For example, the use of shared databases of tournament histories, results, and statistics are not permitted. Specific examples include:

* SharkScope
* Top Shark
* Smart Buddy
* Poker Table Ratings

This email is a one-time warning for this offence. Any future infractions of this nature will result in the possible suspension of your account.

Thank you for your cooperation. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us

Really surprised at this, since FT previously got caught snooping on where people were web browsing and 2p2 kicked up a fuss about lack of privacy (or was it PS? Hmm, can’t remember now), so I didn’t think they actively checked for SS anymore. I’m not using it much anyway these days – figure it was more bad than good for me as the sharks & fishbowls were making me overcompensate even before the match had started.

PS = Bingo

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Good grief, Pokerstars is testing me to the limits. Just had a game with some guy who’s chat was full of ‘hotrunner’ ‘OMFG’ etc. At one point he thought I could see his cards :-)

Trouble was, with all the BIG hands he was hitting all sorts of crap.

All the way to final hand – 2nd game today where my Sklansky bucks was even more than the real $$$’s I could have won.

hmm, giving up now as I’m spazzing. I’ve won 9-6, and I’m down -$6? That seems pretty bad – FT has worse rake, yet I don’t remember ever being 57% ITM and still down in winnings there…


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