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…

Glad I scraped it back, although I was a bit bad letting it go that far down. Bluffs are failing completely and utterly on rush poker – there just seems to be too many calling stations. Of course that’s fine when you’re hitting hands, which is probably why yesterday’s graphs were so sweet – I was hitting a ton of stuff then. Today I had loads of small and medium pockets pairs, and loads of AKo hands, but almost none of them seemed to hit at all. On top of that everyone was mashing the pot button on the flop – it was hard folding so often, plus feeling nervous to cbet with the CS’s made it not the most pleasant of sessions.

During the return to zero part I modified my game so that my opening raises were completely ridiculous – all button steals were $0.20 minbets, speculative SC’s were minbets, broadways and big pairs were 3 to 5 big blinds. It seemed to be paying off as well – with minbet raises you don’t need that many to be successful to make a profit, and yet perversley *more* people seemed to fold to the minbet than to the 3bb button raises.

For the propbet, I’m still behind the starting line

but the fact that I was able to do 2k hands just today is amazing! Rakeback is just going to rocket up now, plus I might get some of the variance out of my game. Just got to avoid the tilt induced crashes that tend to come my way every now and again

One thing that’s funny is that on these Rush tables I’m now getting the redline of a multitable grinder;

I’ve *never* had a graph like that before, but is my game better or worse for it? A positive redline might be seen as a good thing, but then my game was always so swingy?! Maybe this is an indication of stability perhaps…

It might also be worth looking into the ironman promotion now as well.

That’s 277 hands in an hour which fits with what FTPDoug said – that’s about two and a half times the normal rate, so awesome for rakeback. Let’s face it – that’s the only way I ever build my roll, so looks like this is my game.

Of course, next time I play I’ll run bad and I’ll decide that Rush poker is a pile of crap. For now though I’m happy enough with it.

Still no confirmation on the Pokerstars WBCOOP. Since this post is going to knock it off the front page I’ll post the link stuff here again…

I upped it to two tables, and found I could cope with the speed. Possibly if I was using a proper mouse and not my laptop pad thing I could do 3 tables. At least that meant the next hour gave me 700 more hands.

Biggest hand was this one. I was on the verge of folding to what could have been a squeeze, and then realised we were both reasonably deep. Implied odds and all that, so I called. Then my sooooted connectors hit

They’ve increased the minimum buy-in to 35bb, which I guess is enough to mess up the short stack strategy. They also introduced ‘shallow’ low buy-in games where the maximum buy-in is 40bb. No use to shortstackers at all, but will please the poorer newbie player who doesn’t want to risk a big stack or play capped.

The other big news was the introduction of Rush Poker. Basically when you fold you’re instantly taken to a new table which has a hand being dealt. The idea is you’re continually playing a hand. FTPDoug reckons you’ll play 2 or 3 times as many hands this way. You still get hand histories, but your HUD won’t be able to cope with it. Also sites like pokertableratings won’t be able to track them either. So, downside is you can’t build good reads on your opponents, upside is more exciting and higher rakeback gains. Sounds like fun though, but I can’t see it replacing the grinder’s game of choice (well, maybe? It’ll attract a lot more fish, plus with the rakeback it might change the game a lot?)

I think the differences between the session where the aggro worked and the one where I spewed were;

a) First session I’d already played for a while, and hadn’t shown myself to be anything out of the ordinary, while the second session I sat down and started firing away. Any idiot could put down as a aggrotard, and this is what happened (my check-raise was reraised every time just about).
b) I picked my spots more carefully the first time. I had got to know the players at the tables, and was able to pick and choose when to push harder. The second session I’d just started, and was basically trying to bully complete unknowns.
c) The second session I didn’t back down. I often continued against those players who pushed back at my 3bets. Consequently I ran into AA several times quite quickly. At one point I had to three barrel bluff, and the final river push finally made the guy fold, but how stupid is that! It worked once, but I don’t think it was a profitable thing to do…

So anyway, 2010 I will stop being an idiot. I’m still bankrolled for nl10, but only 10 buy-ins above the move down point – if I don’t even out I’ll be back at NL5 by February. However, you’ve got to experiment with your game I believe, so I don’t feel too bad (it’s not as if I’m going to turn pro any time soon).

Ok, onto the 2009 review;

Cash:

Tourney:

Well, it’s in the black! (the $40 lost yesterday was 2010, so close thing to ruining the year’s results, lol).

The New Year, 2009
This time last year I’d dropped right down to NL2 – most of my game up to that point had been NL10 at Full Tilt (which was their lowest stakes at that time), and it hadn’t been going very well. So I moved to Pokerstars and dropped down, first to NL5 and then to NL2 as I continued to lose.

The Redeposit – April
In April I finally lost my entire account. I redeposited, and for some reason known only to myself at the time I went back to NL10. I then had a massive heater, gaining $350 in 20k hands. How that happened I’ve no idea! I should go back and look at those hands in detail, but as far as I can remember I was very very lucky – PokerTracker all-in performance says $120 over expected value at its peak.

The Cash Out – July
Inevitably the heater ran out, and I lost a bunch of $$$ pretty quickly. I think I’d upped the number of tables I was playing, plus overconfidence, and that led to much spewage. As it came crashing down a personal credit card problem suddenly arose and I had to withdraw my entire roll to pay for it. In hindsight this was actually a useful thing to happen to me. Firstly, it showed the kindness of friends as they immediately transferred to me a little bit of spare cash to keep playing. Secondly it made me decide to follow bankroll management properly. Up until that point I’d play NL10 if I had over $100 in my account (or over only $50 sometimes). Starting from $30 with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to redeposit in the next couple of months really made sure I did the right thing to avoid going busto again.

The Grind
So I returned to NL2 again. This time my game was much stronger and I rapidly built up enough to move to NL5. I carried on playing well and clipped $200 to move into NL10. I then lost a few buy-ins, and moved back down. Ground up, bust down. I did this 3 times (the three peaks at 41k, 51k and 65k hands). I suddenly realised I was doing the bankroll management slightly wrong – I had a single threshold of $200 where I moved either up or down. What I needed to do was set the move-up threshold higher than the move down one (ie $250 to move up, $200 to move down). This way I’d have a 5 buy-in margin to lose before having to move down.

The Donkament Win – November
I was within $20 of the $250 threshold, and it was taking ages (it says $60 on that graph, but I was also getting rakeback and bonuses which aren’t shown on the graph). It was November now, and I seemed to be on the most miserable downswing ever – no big spews, but not a single +ve session for ages and ages. Then one Sunday I was messing around playing some MTTs (as you can see from the graph above, I don’t tourney much), and suddenly went deep in a $2 180 man SNG. I walked away with $70 – I was finally in NL10 territory again.

The Final Fall
I seemed to be playing well and built my roll up to $450. It didn’t feel like a heater this time, and I felt confident that I was winning appropriate hands rather than sucking out. I decided to look closer at rakeback and see which site was the best for me, and so I split my roll amongst 4 sites – Full Tilt, PokerStars, Ultimate Bet and Party Poker. The difference between the sites was amazing – at NL10 UB and PP was full of limpers who’d try to see every street, while FT and PS still had its usual compliment of 2p2 players. Despite this I’ve failed to profit from them, and even worse seemed to have spewed a ton of money.

Final Roundup
So what’s the roundup of the year? I have to be honest with myself and say I’m not very good at poker. Almost 100k hands, and still being buffeted around by variance and barely keeping above the rake. In fact since my chart shows only +$44 profit, it’s obvious my entire roll ($350 at end of 2009) is made entirely of rakeback and bonuses.

Is that a big problem? I guess not as I still enjoy playing. I still enjoy the challenge of learning a game where it’s clear that gaining knowledge and experience will lift you through the ranks. The frustration is coming from seeing the stakes I play as a goal in itself.

So my resolution for 2010 is to let go of the idea that I’m not a winning player if I can’t ascend rapidly up the stakes. I will play poker at the stakes my bankroll allows, and concentrate on being the best player I can for those stakes. I guess ascending graphs of $$$ won will show whether I’m succeeding, although for me it’ll be how I achieved it that’ll be more important…