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February

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

February husngs was looking pretty good until I decided that I needed to take some higher shots. I tried a $30 game, followed by some $20s and they all went bad. So today I covered some of those losses with $10 4man shootouts and did pretty well, getting back almost $100’s worth. That’s still short of where I had been but it’s no big deal – it’s important to take these shots. I’ve seen a bunch of people on the forums who’ve played thousands of games at the $10s and less who just fail to move up (they ask questions like ‘is 100 buy-ins nitty?’). Those $20 games didn’t seem much harder, but lose 5 in a row and the BR hit is still hard to take. Hopefully next month a shot will stay solid and I’ll be in the $20 zone properly (I’m already rolled for it, but to blow it all so I *have* to play $10s would ruin my day too much).

Less said about the cash games the better. As I said before, not going back there ever again (well, apart from the inevitable HU cash games I guess);

Feel free to shoot the ducks…

New Account – Cake Poker

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

I decided to open yet another poker account, this time on the Cake network. Choice was between Cake Poker and doylesroom, and after a bit of forum browsing I went with Cake Poker. Doyle’s Room has had a few customer support issues lately which might be minor problems, while there’s nothing but praise for Cake (confusing that it has the same name as the network, but I’m sure you’re following this…).

Previously I’ve mentioned that I was holding off on new accounts until I was at NL50 or NL100 so I could clear sign-up bonuses effectively, but now I can’t be bothered. I’m not rising up the ranks quickly enough in cash games to get to that point any time soon, while at the same time husng’s are mostly pulling in more cash than these bonuses offer anyway (well mostly, that $150 crash in my last post was pretty painful).

So far this morning I’m $100 up playing $10 games. The lobby’s not packed, but I rarely have to wait more than a minute for a game. Level of play has been pretty bad too, although not any more than Full Tilt or Pokerstars.

Interface is really clean and easy – I haven’t had a single misclick yet which is a good sign. Deposit and creating the account was all straightforward too.

The main reason I wanted a cake account was for their hand tracking policy – no HUD allowed, plus you’re allowed to change your screen name once a week. HEM imports the hand histories fine though (almost – it made a mistake on the prize for a 4man shootout, although it made the same mistake for a Full Tilt shootout as well once) – the strange thing though is that it doesn’t record your opponent’s names. Everyone is called CakeSeat8 etc. Makes it hard to go back and analyse a particular tournament when you can’t remember which one it was, which I guess is the point. Notes you make on players in the Cake interface do stay with that player even if they change their name, so that’s useful – essential even.

I’m happy so far (certainly while the new signup boomswitch is on!). Apart from I think I’ve put the tv remote into the washing machine with the bedding…

Update: The remote comes out of the washing machine looking incredibly clean. And it still works! (once it had dried out). I’d recommend it to anyone with grubby remotes…

One Chip Wonder

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Here’s an old classic thread from 2p2 that just got bumped from the dusty depths.

I’d noticed on some MTTs that some players choose bet amounts like $2999 which result in a really tall chipstack graphic, obviously they’re hoping that their huge appendage has a bit more fold equity. TBH they’re probably right, and it’s not a bad tactic against the lower stakes fish.

Well the OP of that thread goes to the opposite end – on a table with lots of limpers (omaha in his case, but there are some nlhe hands in the thread) he chooses his bet amount so that it’s a single chip. For instance everyone’s limping in with $0.50c chips and he casually raises to $25.50 (with a premium hand obv) – the next player just sees a chip like the previous limpers (doesn’t notice the colour change obv) and calls thinking he’s limping and then suddenly realises he just put his whole stack in.

Even better is that often there’s some left behind and OP pushes the last few dollars and is getting a fold!

Hard to believe some people are that dumb, but the proof’s in that thread :-)

Cake Tackles Software Bug

Friday, February 5th, 2010

The Cake network seem to be taking that software bug seriously, although don’t seem to have determined a cause yet (they’ve just upped the monitoring of hands more).

An excellent response from Lee Jones, their representative on 2p2 forums though;

Q: What if I think I was the victim of a wrongly pushed pot before?

A: If you have a hand history, send it to our support people. If you want to ask our support folks for your most recent 1000 hands or so, feel free. If you can find (and we confirm) a wrongly pushed pot, we’ll ship you $500 for each occurrence. If you were the true winner of the pot and it wasn’t pushed to you, we’ll send you double the size of the pot plus the $500.

Pretty good if you think you can remember it happening. Both Hold’em Manager and PokerTracker validate each hand imported though, so I guess there’s  a possibility they may have rejected it and you won’t find it in your database (although it would still be in the original HH). That’s only a guess though, I know they check pot size on each street but checking the appropriate winner might be too much of an overhead for them to bother…

Update: lol, i should have read just a few more posts further :-D They’ve found the problem;

During the hand in question, there was a player who had missed the blinds and been asked to post a dead blind in the cutoff. He didn’t, but somehow there was a perfectly timed lag between the client and the server that caused him to have a “Fold” button presented (though he may or may not have seen it). Probably unknowingly, he clicked a non-existent “Fold” button, which went through to the server. The server has code built in to protect it from extraneous messages such as this (including malicious intent from hacked clients). But it turned out that it didn’t have that protection from a dead blind-posting player if the message was something that shouldn’t have been coming in anyway (e.g. a “Fold” from somebody who shouldn’t be allowed to fold in the first place).

The result of all this was for the system to believe that it had a side-pot between the sitting-out player and the small blind (the guy with the kings). It evaluated that pot, awarded that pot to the small blind, and then had no more pots to award, so it ended the hand.

We’ve fixed the code and are testing it. There’s a pretty good chance we could have gone another four years before we saw this again, but obviously we’re not going to wait and find out. The $500 offer I mentioned above stands; we think we’ve got this one beaten.

As regards the people who were involved in the meteor-strike pot, we’re going to treat it like a bad beat jackpot. We’re going to ship $500 to the guy who had the ace of trump and should have won the pot in the first place, $250 to the OP in this thread for reporting it, and spread $250 around the other players who were dealt in, including the mystery player who wasn’t dealt in but managed to fold anyway. Were it not for him, we’d have never found and removed this bug.

The Passion!

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Sure, he loves his poker alright – but has he ever run around spilling his piss bottle around the room and then taken a victory swig? No sir, I bet he hasn’t…

Grim Day for Meteoric

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Yesterday was a bad bad day.

Got into work and an hour later was trying not to vomit over my desk – I’m guess I’d put some bad milk into my morning coffee (ironically a colleague joked with me as I poured it saying, can’t be off, it’s still flowing). Bossman let me go home, but despite the perfect opportunity for pokerage I just didn’t feel like.

Meanwhile during that time S1ndr0me was feverishly grinding away – he had seen the unstoppable machine of my husngs create a real threat to his chances of winning our prop bet. 19:41 precisely I get the email proclaiming his victory. If only I’d played through my nauseous haze I could have won (holds arms to heavens and shouts WHYYYYYY????). Only kidding – S1ndr0me’s heater crushing of NL10 was extremely impressive as we can see on his blog. I’m just grateful that the husngs supplied the padding my roll needed to pay the bet. TBH I saw it coming, S1ndr0me’s been playing extremely well lately. He must be rolled for NL25 now, so hopefully we’ll see him take that on now.

I then had a little chat with Yegor about HU, and we decided to go on a play money HU cash table – cash games obviously being very different to SNG’s – higher stakes, plus easy to lose a ton. We (or I) wanted to see how we stood before joining the big boys.

He proceeded to either 3bet/4bet what seemed like every hand. Bluffs I tried to pull required at least 2 barrels, and frequently he called those down with 3rd or 4th pair to add to his already bloated stack. He raised everything, I hit nothing, and it became a bewildering mugging of bloody proportions.

Finally we stopped (um, he  might have stopped out of boredom) with him standing with a 600bb stack. If it had been real money I’d have been royally decimated!

So, a grim day indeed, despite not putting a single real dollar on the table…

January Results

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Half good, half bad month.

The bad was my cash games – I started out the month after some in depth revision of my play, and came to the conclusion I was pushing too hard with paired hands (not PP) – overvaluing them and trying to get too much value. I was doing well at all-in play, and making good value out of 2pair+ hands, but the weaker made hands were wiping out those gains.

So I trimmed down my game and initially it seemed to be working – a nice 12 buy-in climb. It then collapsed dramatically, and to be honest I’m still not sure why;

At the bottom of that dive Full Tilt bought out Rush Poker, and I instantly switched, lured in by the appeal of big rakeback and racking up a large volume of hands. I’m not a big volume player, and the idea of boosting the number of hands was to reduce variance, but somehow I became swingier then ever. I possibly could have worked my way back to zero, but I was dispirited with the whole thing. My new year’s resolution was to not care about the limits I play, and just go with my bankroll, which is still fine, but it hurt to be within $8 of moving down to NL5 :-(

However  at that point I switched to HUSNGs. Which was the good half of the month :-D

For some reason I’ve been unstoppable – $5 buy-in games went fine, enough to give me confidence with the $10s. I then won 75% of $10 games – 17/23! Yesterday I tried some $20 games (not january I know), and won 2/3, so early days there – however the cash profit from these is astounding. Furthermore I’m not feeling bad (much) when I lose a match, not like when I’ve just spewed 4 buy-ins at NL10 – however that could be because I’m on a winning streak, sooo I’m not going to make too much of that right now.

Final gains: $120 including rakeback. $70 without rb – have to admit, rush poker did win in that respect!

February I’m concentrating on HU. Maybe this is a turning point in what kind of game I play, we’ll have to see…

ps. forgot to mention 21st in the WBCOOP main event as well :-)

Also got two weeks of stox from trulyfree, better get watching some vids I guess!



Forum

Re: Forum Upgrade by Meteoric Today at 02:26 PM
Re: Forum Upgrade by yegor_kgb Today at 06:14 AM
Forum Upgrade by Meteoric 22:22, Mar 10 2010
Re: New version by yegor_kgb 20:19, Mar 09 2010
Re: so i cashed out.. by yegor_kgb 22:11, Mar 03 2010
rakeback by yegor_kgb 13:02, Mar 03 2010
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