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…

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.

Obviously the sites that offer rakeback will have higher Rake, but for nanostakes (NL10 and less) even with Rakeback Full Tilt was really bad compared to Pokerstars or Party Poker. Guess I’ve just moved my roll to the wrong site.

I suspect if I move up to NL50 I might lose more than just rake though…

$140 lost, third month in a row of losses

I’m tired now of saying that it’s this leak or that leak or it’s all tilt etc. What it’s really feeling like is that it’s all just luck. Some days I get cards, other days I don’t. It’s not suck-outs, bad beats, or river rats – it’s more like sometimes you hit your set when they hit TP, and sometimes you don’t.

My records go back exactly two years now (I’ve probably been playing for three years, but it was a while before I discovered pokertracker & hold’em manager). So I decided to do a lifetime audit;

I’ve played 180k hands (48k in tournaments).
The total winnings (tourney + cash) is -$152.
rackback + bonuses have come to $534.

Final total $381.

However my accounts are a lot less than that, as I had to cash out my entire roll last summer, plus I’ve just taken a share backing BWOP for some live tournaments (Newff had to pull out of his unfortunately). Not sure what to make of it really, other than it’s good to be +ve but somehow still depressing it’s not come from being any good at poker.

I had to show the EV line as well otherwise you might think that massive drop was because I’m an idiot

To those mass multitablers those 680 hands still took 4 hours – with husngs I’d never really been concerned with how many hands I get in and hadn’t realised how slow it is.

The other thing is the crazy rake – 600 something hands at a sustainable (ahem) rate of 66bb/100, and the rakeback is 30% of my winnings! I’m going to have to keep an eye on that – even with the nice Rakeback % I get at this site, a more regular winrate of 3-6bb/100 is going to have a hard time beating the Rake. Hopefully the rake goes down as I go up in stakes (and down in winrate)…

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

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!

This is the graph to date of playing RP;

Mostly in the black I guess, so I shouldn’t be too harsh on it. However the last session (last 600 hands) was a really depressing pit of despair. One of those times you hit nothing while all around you do, bullets and cowboys get no action and the hands that do get all-in action find themselves outgunned

The thing I hate the most though is my redline – I’ll admit I’m not one of those players who have a solid upwardly mobile graph, but when I am doing ok it’s usually red and blue in reasonable tandem. A few bad showdown failures are compensated by the non-showdown and it all looks nice and symmetrical. Today I realised constantly playing against unknowns on Rush Poker meant you couldn’t profitably punish the bluffers or extract from the calling stations. You either get good cards or you don’t.

I am wondering why my swings are so huge though. They’re all about 6 or 7 buy-ins – that’s not normal surely? People get worried when they have a 3 or 4 buy-in dive, over 8 is a downswing of death. Run of the mill for me it seems.

Unfortunately that last downswing has really taken it out of my bankroll – it now stands at a crappy $208. That’s less than a buy-in to the NL5 move down point! Rakeback ought to be about $50 from this rushing around though, but it won’t be in my account for another three weeks.

Oh well.

OTOH my blog’s doing well   The big jump in the last week was because I broke the news about rush poker so quickly – Google sent me loads of people who were searching about the game. Wore off pretty quickly though…