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I originally got StoxPoker free for a whole year by signing up with Titan using them as my affiliate which was excellent really (I now know what a good deal Stox got out of it too, and slightly regret that I can no longer sign up to Titan using my own affiliate stuff). However it ran out a couple of months ago.

So I registered with trulyfreepokertraining.com where your Full Tilt FPPs give you free StoxPoker months (without actually using up the FPPs!). It’s something like 3000 FPPs for a month of Stox, but it’s actually given out in week chunks, so you only need 750 FPPs to get a little bit of membership. CardRunners also is part of the deal, and you need even less points for that.

Having played mostly NL5 in the last few months there wasn’t much chance of picking up a week’s membership, but now I’m back at NL10 I’ve a chance, and in fact last month I actually gained a week!

No email telling me though which was disappointing - in fact the only reason I know is because I checked at the StoxPoker site.

However will I get time to actually watch any training videos this week? I doubt it, but the point is I got something for free!!!

Posted in Full Tilt, NL10, NL5, Poker, Poker Sites, StoxPoker | 2 Comments »

Fingers Crossed For Rakeback

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

I signed up with Full Tilt about a year ago, and at that time I had no idea about rakeback. I think I just saw a referral code on some site and used that – it was only later I realised what I’d done, and it put a big dampener on playing there. I slowly bust my roll and then redeposited elsewhere (Titan I think, just to get the Stox 12 month deal).

Anyway, a while ago I saw posts on 2p2 that it was possible to write to FT and ask to be put on a rakeback program, so of course I did immediately. FT wrote back to say that the affiliate I’d signed up with offered rakeback and I should ask them about it.

They didn’t tell me who the affiliate was though. So I wrote again asking who they were. FT said they couldn’t tell me due to their privacy policy(!?!). I tried a couple more times, but only had the same response so gave up.

But, I just spotted something on a forum – if you ask for the code you signed up with, they’ll tell you! So I asked, and they did! So bizarre, you gotta know the rules to know the rules…

So, quick google later I’ve found out who my affiliate is, and I’ve written to them to see if I can get rakeback. Hopefully I can – it’s in their interest too surely since I’m not playing on FT without the rakeback. Fingers crossed…

Update: Yes – It’s been confirmed, I can get rakeback!!! Whoohoo!

That makes so much difference, I had not been playing on FT at all purely for that reason. Now I can cover up all my bad play with rakeback payments

Even better, they’re going to pay me all the rakeback I should have got over 2008 – so effectively it’s as if I’ve had rakeback all along! Total result – I cannot type enough exclamation marks here to do it justice!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted in Full Tilt, Good Days, Poker, RakeBack, StoxPoker, TwoPlusTwo | 3 Comments »

Keeping A Lid On The Tilt

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Very frustrating session. The ‘Unexpected Value’ series of Stox videos has been talking about how most people (beginners) think the way to win at poker is with big hands, hitting flushes & coolering your opponent etc. while the real way is to consider your opponents hand more than your own (2nd level thinking I guess).

I know what that means, but I still find it difficult to suppress that frustration when nothing ever hits the flop. I think it’s mainly down to impatience – taking pots with cbets, check raises etc is obviously great, but it’s very annoying when after doing that for a bunch of hands, winning say, 50-80BB, and then losing it plus a whole load more because a ‘big hand’ goes wrong

So my session today was swingy, and overall not very good. The only thing that saved it was the last half hour or so when the poker gods completely turned around and gave me hand after hand. No subtleties needed, just get the money in good!

I ended up on three tables holding a stack of about 200-300bb on each. On one table two donors had already stormed off after being stacked a bit too much. So at least it was fun towards the end.

More HUD stuff – I know S1ndr0me was having trouble with keeping his screen clean with multiple tables and a hud, so I thought I’d show a screen shot with the new advanced hud I’ve got. Only four tables, but that’s all I ever play, plus I couldn’t get more than that on my laptop screen (so any more and they’re going to have to be stacked). Anyway, looks pretty tidy to me (the Pokerstars skin is a homemade one, but wasn’t that hard to do);

Update: Played a bit more, and pushed the win up to $24. Happy with that – it’s making the last bad session not so horrible

Posted in Good Days, Multitabling, NL10, PokerStars, PokerTracker, StoxPoker | 7 Comments »

Recuperation Day

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

Yesterday a friend got married, so we spent the day making small talk to old people and drinking to excess. Today I feel a bit ill.

So I’m staying off the tables as I can’t concentrate very hard. Haven’t neglected poker entirely though – I watched a couple of Stox vids by mbolt1, and they were both pretty good. I don’t think I learnt anything new though, but it did reaffirm that I’m not too far off the mark. At one point he talked about how he was doing just before getting coaching from Leatherass, and he was struggling at 25NL not because he didn’t know how to play, but because of tilt – just like me! (except I’m 10NL. details, details…).

Anyway, he had a fairly customised HUD and had a couple of things that looked interesting, so I decided to see what could be done about mine. I then realised he was using a tweaked version of kraada’s Advanced hud layout which is downloadable from the PokerTracker website. So I installed it;

At first glance it looks kinda crazy, but it’s not that bad. A lot of the useful information is in the pop-ups (the big black box), and rather than one strip of info (with one big popup), it’s now divided into three smaller sets, each with its own relevant pop-up. Information overload perhaps, but I think it’s worth a try to see how ergonomic it is.

The biggest improvement is something I’ve wanted for a while, and that’s betting stats (like call/bet/3bet %) in relation to position. I’ve shown it in the pop-up in that pic. Notice that the player in question (Glazyrin) has a good tag VP$IP/PFR (19/16 – it’s the first two numbers on the strip above his cards), but when you see it split by position, it seems that he’s completely unaware of position (although sample size isn’t quite enough to be really sure of that). At first I thought I was misunderstanding it since I rummaged through player after player trying to find someone who was very tight in EP, a bit looser MP and loose in LP, and I just couldn’t find anyone! I then checked my stats, and I was fine – in that particular session after 60 hands my VP$IP for ep/mp/lp was 8%/30%/49% (from a slightly loose VP$IP of 30% overall)

That was quite an eye opener. You assume anyone with ‘proper’ V$PIP/PFR knows what they’re doing, but when you see that their opening range is pretty much the same at any position it casts a whole new light on things!

Posted in Analysis, PokerTracker, StoxPoker | Comments Off

Can’t Do New Stuff

Monday, May 11th, 2009

After watching Pokey’s Art & Science of Poker videos from StoxPoker I was keen to try out some of his ideas.

There were two things that caught my eye – firstly preflop betsizing, and then targetting villain categories (ie nit, maniac etc).

The preflop betsizing was something I’d seen before from his posts in 2p2, but his videos made it much clearer. Essentially he opened 4 or 5x BB in early position, and then reduced the size as it approached late position, with the button only minraising. There’s a lot of discussion on 2p2 about this kind of thing, with fairly polarised views. The camp that goes the opposite way claim that since the btn is the most profitable position, it should open with the largest raise in order to profit more. Pokey’s view is that a) opening large UTG helps reduce the number of callers, b) minraising on the button has two advantages, firstly that players who were going to fold will fold anyway, and secondly a 3bet will be much smaller, reducing your loss while giving more possible responses.

His idea is based a lot around stealing really, but it also made sense generally. Unfortunately I think possibly it’s not that applicable to 10NL. He was demonstrating on 25NL, and so I figured it would be partly transferrable, but a lot of it depends on how tight people are playing, and at 10NL it would seem that enough people are still playing too loose to make it worthwhile. Minraising on the button actually encouraged people to call, and I faced more problems holding marginal hands postflop than if I’d carried on with 3xBB steals.

So the session went wildly wrong and I rapidly lost about 1.5 buy-ins. It was all stuff where you ended up multiway with hands that just weren’t worth the effort. I might as well be limping in with the rest of them.

So I switched back to my regular style of 3xBB open raises, and I was able to recover my losses, ending up $6 up.

I still like his ideas though, but perhaps I’m not ready yet. Maybe it’s like a golf or tennis lesson where in the short term the coach totally screws up your swing, but in the long term you do improve…

Posted in Good Days, NL10, StoxPoker | 7 Comments »

Statistical Analysis

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

I’ve spent the day mainly watching StoxPoker videos, and frustratingly didn’t have any eureka moments. Unfortunately it even appeared that I’ve been underestimating the strength of hands postflop – Ed Miller was happily bashing microstakes opponents with top pair medium kicker (and even middle pair), even shoving on the river with some of these hands. Obviously the difference comes in that he can easily recognise the dangerous boards, and has the hand reading skills to do this.

It got me wondering whether I was getting enough value out of my hands. Was I being too nitty? Am I really going to showdown too light? I seem to win small and lose big, but this could just be psychological – ie I remember the big losses more than the small ones.

So I dug into my PokerTracker and thought, how about some statistical analysis? I figured if I worked out the deviation of my wins/losses, it should show some skew somewhere that might help.

Here’s what I ended up with – it’s a frequency plot of win/losses in BB (big bets – 2xbb);

Uh, ok. What now? It was far more symmetrical than I was expecting. That’s a log scale on the y-axis by the way, otherwise the spike on the zero out-weighs everything.

I guess I don’t know what I would see if I was a winning player. Without anything to reference it to there’s not much it can tell me. I’m going to have to post something on 2p2 to see if there’s anyone else who’s thought about this…

Edit: I’ve just noticed on the win side there’s a little peak at the 50BB point, which corresponds to people who I stacked where they had full buy-in (100bb). Perhaps the drop between 25BB and 50BB is a sign of something – maybe I’m settling for a win of about 23BB too much. That’s too big to correspond to a CBet on the flop? Maybe it’s a shortstacker all-in?

Posted in Analysis, StoxPoker, TwoPlusTwo | 3 Comments »

Gotta Tighten Up!

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

After posting my stats here, and then also on the StoxPoker forum, it seems that I’m playing too loose. My stats were about 27/18, and people reckoned I need to lower the VP$IP and increase the PFR (ie don’t limp).

On one hand I was surprised, since 27% sounded ok to me, but on the other hand I’m losing, and the response from everyone was pretty unanimous.

So I’ve decided to sort out my starting hands table, and then STICK TO IT!

I’ve previously been using hands recommended by Pokey on a 2p2 posting somewhere, but I think a fresh start needs a new table. So I’ve had Ryan Fees 6max guide hanging around a while, and it’s well respected, so I’m going with that.

So far I’ve reduced it down to;

UTG open 22+, ATs+, AJo+, 98s+, KQo+, KJs

MP open 22+, A9s+, ATo+, 98s+, KQo+, KJs, KJo, KTs
3bet QQ(TT+), AQs+(AJs), AKo(AQo), (KQs)

CO open 22+, A5s+, A9o+, 65s+, JTo+, T8s+, QTo+, Q9s, KTs
3bet QQ(TT+), AQs+(AJs), AKo(AQo), (KQs)

BTN open 22+, A2s+, A8o+, 54s+, 98o+, 64s+, J9o+, 96s+, Q9o+, T6s+, K8s+
3bet QQ(TT+), AQs+(AJs), AKo(AQo), (KQs)

where the hands in brackets are marginal and only played depending on the other players at the table.

I then powered up Titan poker to have a go, and instantly realised I hadn’t added hands for the blinds! Not the best of things to omit, since the SB is the biggest losing position for me. So since poker time is precious at lunch breaks, I carried on using the UTG hands for the blinds.

So, here’s the result of today at the new tightness;

Different type of graph to normal – it’s the green line that’s the equivalent to the other graphs. I posted it here because of the red line. Apparently it’s normal for it to be -ve rather than +ve. For my entire history mine has always been +ve, and I had wondered if it was indicative of a leak, but no-one’s ever pointed it out as such…

My stats for that session was 23/22, so I’ve definitely achieved my goals (for those 100 hands anyway, so not all that relevant). However I did mess up twice, once against a flush (when I was in BB as well, so shoulda watched out!) and one all-in preflop with AK (beaten by JJ).

So, it’s working out I guess, although it’s too early to say yet. It feels slightly restrictive, especially when I want to steal the blinds, but as with all bad habits it hurts to break them. I also need to sort out my blinds preflop play of course.

Posted in Analysis, Good Days, Leaks, NL2, StoxPoker, TwoPlusTwo | Comments Off

Re: StoxEV by Simon Debanks	09:25, May 07 2010
Re: StoxEV by Meteoric	20:05, Apr 29 2010
Re: StoxEV by yegor_kgb	08:30, Apr 28 2010
StoxEV by Simon Debanks	21:53, Apr 27 2010
How hard can it be! by Meteoric	20:27, Mar 15 2010
Re: Forum Upgrade by Meteoric	14:26, Mar 11 2010

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