I didn’t have the video feed on the pokerstatic podcast so it was a bit annoying – the presenters just went on and on about it not being a slowroll blah blah, but it made me want to see the hand.

Poor Phil H – to have a hand that crushes your opponent 85-15% and then be generous enough to run it 4 times for the guy, only to see it beat 3/4 times. Enough to make anyone cry, but the treatment he gets off the other players is beyond the pale imo.

Yesterday for instance I bought in short ($10) into a NL20 game, and after an hour my opponent finally gave up – my stack was $32. That was an hour of chipping away without any huge shoves. Is that how it should be? Normally my game has far more variance than that, with a few more shoves causing some big stack sized swings along the way. Seems like a very slow way of winning (an hour of $20 husngs could easily be $100 on a good day), although I should remember that long term my crazy swingy style has generally lost, despite the epic 4-5 buy-in session wins!

I also realised that traffic numbers on these sites is very misleading. For instance I said the other day how EverLeaf was showing only a few thousand players while Pokerstars had a massive 200 thousand. It turns out that PokerStars’ numbers are vastly inflated – the real number is more like 80,000 (according to pokerscout). Still a lot, but not quite the same wow factor. The difference in numbers is that the 200,000 included play chip tables, plus players signed in but not actively playing

120,000 inactive/play chip players sounds a lot. Maybe I’m still not seeing the real numbers here…

Update: Just noticed the latest HEM release supports EverLeaf. I’ll upgrade when I get home. I noticed the that HH text doesn’t include rake taken from the pot, so hopefully HEM is figuring it out somehow…

I know what my problem is, and have really known it all along TBH. I run good, get confident, and then start to embrace the fun side of poker – the gambling!

So I chase draws, make big cock swinging hero calls, thin value bets when I have no value, and generally discard the fold button. All with the obvious consequences.

At the weekend I buckled down and started to squash these urges, and I managed to stall the downswing. It’s not turned round, but the latter half of this month has been breakeven which is better than before.

I’ve been reading 2p2 intensely, going over my HH, having other people go over my HHs, talking strat on AIM, and generally becoming an obsessive poker bore. It’s feeling good too.

After a long discussion last night with Yegor (ok, most of it was laughing about roseeker’s downfall) I decided to drop right down to $10 games and set a strong volume goal. I’ve currently 240 games at $10 with a ROI of 13%. I’m going to play another 260 to bring it to 500 games and see if I can nail my game down to a cold impassionate cyborg crushing of these $10 morons. No more hero calls

So far so good, although I’d forgotten how bizarre $10 games can be. For $20 and $30 games the players have become far more rational about their lines, and betsizing is at least in relation to the pot size. $10s it’s still kinda crazy. For example I had 72o in a limped pot. The flop had been checked back so it was a $40 pot on a TJQK board. Villain fires out a bet of $200. Somewhat obvious what to do.

I’m still squishing some gambool tendencies though – same villain 3bet me pre while I had KJo. Against him I felt a call would be ok, but something in me said that he was just going to jam the flop with his A rags if I did. So I 4bet, which KJo isn’t really good enough for, and he shoved. So I thought ‘whatever’ and called to see that he did indeed have A6o. Here was the difficulty of $10 – he had no idea that a 4bet looks really strong and he was supposed to fold A6o. But that’s what we all say in these positions – ‘how could he shove with that!’. Ultimately these are mistakes which make us money. Anyway, neither of us improved, I went down to $900 and then had to fight another 10 minutes in order to finally win.

Anyway, the point of that partial brag is that I’m deluding myself with low volume. So today’s intention is to keep hammering away and see how it goes, even if it’s a losing streak (unless I get really tilted obv).

I also didn’t intend to blog this early in the morning either, but the first match was interesting. Here’s the match for anyone who has nothing better to do;

My opponent played 2p2 ABC poker all the way – 3bb raises, roughly 70% hands on button, 30% OOP, 3bet reasonably, folded to most 3bets but not all etc. He didn’t seem to tilt, just kept going. In other words he didn’t seem to do anything wrong at all, apart from perhaps being unimaginative.

The game however went my way. In fact I was on the winning side throughout – a couple of times we went back to equal stacks but I never had to come back from behind. Was that because I had an edge? No idea, it’s doubtful…

I sharkscoped him and it turned out he’d been grinding mostly $5s and $10 with some stabs at $20+. After some success initially ($450+) he’s now a losing player (-$150).

I don’t get it – playing a solid game doesn’t mean you’ll win? Have I just been lucky and could easily become this guy (my game count is still less than his initial success stage)?

btw, in before NMIHU,ES… (that means you Yegor )

Update: Hammering away seems to work

ok, still only 14 games but that’s better than 4! Plus my BR is over $1k at last! Guess I have to try some $50s now and go back to scared money

You can only sit at a maximum of two Heads-Up tables without an opponent.

Table names are randomised, to eliminate any advantage to sitting at tables with names beginning with ‘A’.

Players who attempt to abuse the system or make the Heads-Up games unpleasant for others may be banned from playing at Heads-Up tables.

Doesn’t really affect me playing HUSNGs, but figured I’d pass it along…

$50 entry fee, so that makes the most expensive tournament I’ve ever paid for. I considered some of the satellites, but I’d probably take several attempts and be wasting the money and time anyway. If I can pay S1ndr0me $50 in a stupid prop bet, then I can pay it for a tournament where I might do ok. The main downside is that it’s another Sunday late nighter, but what can you do. This time I won’t down a bottle of wine before starting though, so that might help.

Which reminds me – the $215 SCOOP ticket I won on that WBCOOP tourney is getting closer to being spent. Pokerstars has released the schedule for it now, although the heads up tournaments don’t have any $215 buy-ins -the closest are $162 and $270 entries. Can I split my ticket? I need to write to support to find out (now that I’m thinking about it I’ll do it now!). If I can’t split it I’ll have to use it on a regular FR tournament which I suck at. Stupid non-transferrable, non-cashable tickets…

Yeah right. I’ve managed to incorporate swings into husngs. It wasn’t easy, but I did it;

I’ve just lost 10 games in a row. The first 4 were $20s, and after seeing it fall away I switched back to $10s. It just kept on going. I’ve finally broken the streak with a single hand game where I sucked out to get 2pair on the river (yep, would have had a fairly crippled stack if that hadn’t happened).

One thing I’ve noticed though is that Full Tilt is easier than Pokerstars – even though PS has twice as many players there seem to be more newbs on FT husngs, plus the blind structure seems slower (well, seems slower, haven’t actually compared properly).

I think I’ll just piss around on rush poker for a bit just to have some low pressure donking – watch me throw a load more away

FML – down $30 in 50 hands! Ran into Kings and Aces left right and center. Why do I even bother…