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I’m having a big motivation problem – I start to play, and if I don’t win the first couple of games I give up. Moving to the $30 games has meant that this month is bigger than any previous month – my win rate is the same as when I was at the $10s and so everything is 3x bigger, but that cuts both ways and the fear of a sudden 10 game losing streak just freaks me out too much. And so as soon as I lose one or two games I just shut down. Totally rubbish!

Which means that this weekend I’ve only played 6 $30 husngs. A pathetic 15 minutes worth of poker out the entire weekend! I did play some PLO as well – an entire 20 minutes worth. All of it breakeven – 54% itm.

What really bugs me is that during the week at work I spend an excessive amount of time thinking about poker, reading 2p2 etc. Being a programmer is a real headfuck of a job though, and by the time the downtools whistle blows I’m so totally braindead all I want to do is go home, eat, watch tv with some beers & fall asleep (best way of describing coding as a job is imagine that each day you’ve been given a book of hard suduko puzzles – you have to finish the book by 5:30pm. Next day start another book). The weekend is the big chance to get some poker time in, and then I go and blow it due to a belief that I’m about to downswing.

Dammit. One day I’ve got to win the Sunday million so I can get my priorities right…

Posted in Poker | 3 Comments »

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.

Posted in Bankroll Management, Bonuses, Full Tilt, HUSNG, NL25, No Limit Hold'em, Poker, Ultimate Bet | 1 Comment »

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…

Posted in HUSNG, NL10, No Limit Hold'em, Poker | 6 Comments »

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…

Posted in Bonuses, Cake Poker, Good Days, Hold'em Manager, HUSNG, Poker, Poker Sites | 6 Comments »

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

Posted in Poker | Comments Off

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 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.

Posted in Poker, Poker Gossip | 6 Comments »

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…

Posted in MTT, Poker | 1 Comment »

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