Poker Moth

First: if, like me, you’re the sort of person who irritably closes popup windows on sight, (after having the result of the WSOP main event spoilered by triumphalist marketing jerks, perhaps) you might miss Stars’ latest kerfuffle over being about to deal some eleventybillionth hand or other. One of the giveaways is a straight exchange of 2500 FPPs for $40, which is a nice way to start the day.

Second: the bit where I talk about my navel. This year has been about two things; Ante Up! tourneys and full-ring PLO cash games. I’ll always love the Ante Ups! because they’re honestly and genuinely the toughest tournaments in online poker, and I’d be better off setting fire to my money. (No. Seriously. They’re almost impossible to beat).  And PLO is back on the menu after a kind relative bought me a copy of Rolf Slotboom’s PLO book, and I’ve been using a modified version of his strategy to reasonably great effect. And no, I’m not ratholing. As long as the game stays lively, I’ll stick around until I’ve surpassed a full buy-in, at least. I’m a tournament player at heart, and this approach to PLO is similar to a rebuy tournament; the goal is to quickly double up so you can start to play big pots.

So, I posted something! The blog just got 233 words longer. Woo. I’ll stick some hand histories up later, perhaps.

I’m listening to a lot of music from 1972 at the moment, FOR A VERY GOOD REASON, hence the title of this post.

I’m playing a lot of PLO, the odd NLHE tourney, and generally keeping my head down. There’s not a lot to blog about. I nearly wrote something about Ivey and Shulman in the WSOPME, but… I didn’t.

So, here I am, filling space. I’ll post something worthwhile soon, I reckon.

Long time, no post. Several reasons for this;

1. I’m heinously busy with non-poker work, so I’m not playing all that much, and when I am, I’m feeling guilty about looming deadlines. Finding the time to post on here is tricky, I guess I shouldn’t complain about having too much work on in the current financial climate, but… while it’s nice to have reliable work coming in, I wish I had more time for poker.

2. When I do decide to post, I keep trying to write something about the late Cryptologic network, which closed its poker operations last week. This always ends up with an interminable ramble where I chart the entirety of my poker career over the last five years, and even I’m able to see that no-one wants to read that. (You might, possibly, think you do, but believe me, it’s bloody tedious). So, I’ll get it out of the way here: farewell, Crypto. You will be missed.

3. The Wordpress site has gone a bit mental.

4. Other weak excuses (fill these in later)

Anyway, I won a tournament today, which was nice. Nicer still that it was a relatively clean win; my only suckout in the entire 5 hours was when we were down to three players, and I won a 40/60 preflop race against the very-shortstack. Barely a suckout at all, in fact, but that was the worst spot I won from, and it’s always satisfying to take down a tourney without too much help from the dealer.

Nice to win the money too, of course. Anyway, the main thing is, I’ve cleared that Crypotologic-post blockage. More posts soon!

My mind is made up, I’m down on my luck, I’ve run out of bullets again

I was on the verge of quitting today. Alright, I wasn’t really, but I was having a good old whinge to the Poker Hof about my miserable luck this afternoon, and I may have mentioned my desire to take up… knitting? Something else, anyway. My bankroll was ruined, and my luck had been abysmal; it’s easy to exaggerate these things, but I have no doubt that it was one of the worst downswings I’ve experienced in five years of playing the game, and probably THE worst. No fun.

You can probably guess where this is going (the screenshot below will give some clue), but after I’d finished off some proper, paid work, I decided to play a 180 man SNG. I ran a bad bluff early on, lost half my stack, said hello to the familiar feelings of inevitable failure, started recalculating my bankroll strategy, and then – BOOM – deck/face conflict. I doubled up on two successive hands, and suddenly had my table covered. Not long after, the cards started coming. And coming. And coming. For about ten minutes, I either had aces or kings, or flopped huge. Usually both. And I was getting paid off. Even when the ridiculous spate of big pocket pairs stopped coming – I think I had three pairs of aces, and kings four times, although I lost with one KK and only took the blinds with another – nobody was interested in looking me up. When they did, things like this tended to happen. (All-in on the flop, I bet out, he pushed…)

Overkill

(I choose to remain anonymous for two reasons: a) I’m slightly paranoid, and feel that if I reveal too much about my game on this blog AND announce my Stars screenname, it may be detrimental – which I know is ridiculous – but more importantly b) I have a really fucking stupid screenname, which I can’t change).

That pot burst the bubble, and it was the last big starting hand that I had, but by that point I had what scientists refer to as “fuck-you chips”, and it really didn’t matter what I was holding any more. Two further hours of nice, controlled aggression later and I had won the thing, and more than doubled my bankroll in the process. Not a moment too soon, frankly. I was due, to put it mildly. In fact, I’m still due, but…

I FEEL BETTER, NOW.

Dear Internet;

I’m having a lovely time. Weather’s horrible, but I own coats, so why would I care about that? Just nice to be on holiday, frankly; feet up, cup of tea, cigarette, a bun, a tweet (or twelve), a spot of Fallout 3. I don’t think I’ve sworn at anything this week – apart from when Scolari got sacked, of course – everything’s just nice and calm and relaxed. No stress, no gnashing, nor wailing, and certainly no chuntering. Put it this way; I’m listening to a lot of Fleet Foxes and Brightblack Morning Light, and I’m not even stoned!

Wish you were… oh, look, you are. Well, grand. Byeee!

Ah, it’s nice to have a holiday, and I’ve earned it. Not money-earned it, but grief-earned – the last fortnight has been extremely difficult, and I can’t solely blame bad cards for that, as I’ve definitely made things worse through bad game selection and worse me-management. As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing a lot of heads-up multi-table sit ‘n’ gos on Pokerstars, recently. This started off with me on a tremendous streak, quickly taking down several tourneys and banking a lot of money, and deriving a lot of enjoyment out of inputting my results into a spreadsheet, and watching the ROI ticking along at an (obviously unsustainable) 120% plus.

I’ve been around long enough to know how stories like that end, but even I was surprised by just how viciously my results corrected themselves. Sharkscope gives me a 70% ROI across all sit’n'gos over a statistically significant sample, and I was ready to see my HU SNG stats drop down to this sort of level. When the drought started, that happened quickly, but it didn’t stop there, and before long my ROI over the entire month long run of HU SNGs was down to 20%. When you consider where it was at after the first week or so, that’s a hell of a downswing.

So, what have we learnt, here? Well, heads-up tourneys aren’t just swingy, they’re SWING-AAYY. Swingy like Harry Connick Jr on a bungee, even. Not so much variance, as variouch. And also, more relevantly, we’ve learned that I’ve had a fucking horrible fortnight, riddled with swears and wails and gnashes and chunter. At first, I thought that I’d just stop playing HU, but making the adjustment back to ANY OTHER KIND OF POKER AT ALL is proving to be impossible. I’ve been turned into some kind of feral lunatic, and I simply don’t have the patience to play good poker. I just get adrenalised, and then angry, and then stacked. This isn’t controlled aggression, it’s madness.

So, I’m taking a break. I have no idea how long it will last – probably no more than a day or two; but however long it takes to recover my calm, controlled game. This obviously means that I will be playing a small amount of poker whenever I suspect my head may be in a good place, which means I technically won’t be taking a break at all, but I certainly won’t be playing because I feel obliged to earn money. The way things are at the moment, earning money seems an unlikely prospect, so I may as well relax for a bit, and maybe… err, yeah. Maybe do some of that freelance work which is massively overdue?

Anyway, file under: “skills every successful poker player needs”, namely – KNOWING WHEN TO STOP.

I’ve just realised I need a real, not-in-London holiday, too. Bugger.

…alright, not another summer, no. Not yet, anyway. But! A new year is upon us, and I’m keenly aware that I need to FIGHT THE POWER, so it’s relevant.

The power, specifically, is the power to play *poker*. Not poker, but *poker* – clever, tricky, aggressive poker. The problem with being able to play *poker* is that you end up doing it in spots where it’s best to do the opposite, and that leads to gratuitously spewy behaviour. I seem to have been doing a fair amount of this at the moment, so it’s time to (kinda) publicly chastise myself in an attempt to add some much needed *decorum* to my game.

NOTE TO SELF – the best time for tricky aggression is on or near the bubble, and that’s especially true in low-limit tournaments,. Pushing people around is only worthwhile when you are SURE that they are capable of laying down a hand, and most people are not. BEHAVE YOURSELF.

This post has been brought to you by a sense of frustration from a bad week following a very successful December. And, fuck me, it’s twenty years since Fight The Power was released. I AM SO OLD

This video provides a chillingly accurate document of what it’s like to play tournament poker professionally.

[wpvideo 2GEH5TTm]

(God bless Failblog)

I’m actually running rather well at the moment, as it happens, but it’s always worth remembering what lies around the corner.

Ah, I shouldn’t complain. I’ve just been knocked off the final table of the $15,000 Guaranteed on Pokerstars, finishing seventh (of 5841), spinning $5.50 into $554.90 in the process. This took a total of eight hours and twenty eight minutes, which is the longest MTT stint I’ve managed in a long time. (The record remains a ten hour marathon on Party Poker back when I’d just started playing; I finished third then for about $1500).

I’ve been due a decent score in a deep field MTT; I can’t recall making a final table in a 2000+ runner tournament this year. (I won a big freeroll a while back, but that doesn’t really count). Pleasingly, I pulled this off without getting anything like lucky until the eighth hour; the only suckout I managed until the final two tables came against a shortstack who barely had enough chips to cover my opening bet (her pocket jacks cracked by my flopped set of fours). I managed to win a couple of coinflips with Ace-large along the way, but nothing where I was more than a 45% dog. On the other hand, I saw overpairs setted on three separate occasions, all of them in huge all-in preflop pots; considering the way the cards were falling, I’m extremely pleased with my performance. It would have been nice to bag the $3,600 first prize, of course, but I ended up getting shortstacked after failing to knock out a shorty with 55 v AQs (a race which would have been worth $300 dollars if my hand held up), and then I cleverly ran AQs into KK on the next hand.

December’s been pretty good to me so far. Christmas isn’t cancelled! And god help the world if I start to catch some cards…

So, first of all; it’s been quiet around here. August went pretty sour after my last post, and I finished the month on a small loss. This had the usual detrimental effect on my workrate (and blograte) and now I’m hardly playing my bread and butter stuff at all.

I’m playing Stud/8 instead. This is a game that I’ve been trying to get my head around for years, with very little success; I’ve read Ray Zee, I’ve messed around in micro low limit cashgames, and I’ve encountered the game in HORSE, and I’ve never been able to understand it… until the other day, when I decided to enter a Stars Stud/8 freeroll. Four hours later, I had qualified for a proper tournament (scant reward for four hours of limit tournament play, but better than nothing), and more importantly, I finally understood Stud/8.

Or at least, I think I did; the usual caveats apply with regard to the deceptive nature of poker success. Four hours of superswingy hi-lo madness does not an expert make. However, it gave me some confidence to try some slightly higher limit ring games, and even better, it gave me the confidence to play HORSE sit n gos.

My pre-epiphany HORSE strategy would be pretty straightforward; punish the fish on the games I’m good at (O8 and Razz, and to a lesser extent, Hold’em – I hate LHE in tournaments, and it’s the one game where the average HORSE fish knows what to do), and then sit the hell back during the Stud and Stud/8 rounds. This is a pretty sucky strategy, obviously, so I pretty much stopped playing HORSE.

However, with my new found confidence and maybe-skills, Stud/8 is the HORSE round I most look forward to, and my straight Stud play has also improved of late, meaning LHE is now my least favourite game in HORSE. I genuinely didn’t see *that* coming, but now that it has, I’m delighted; since my Stud/8 epiphany, I have a 100% ITM record in HORSE sngs (admittedly over a very small sample, but still), and it’s rapidly becoming a candidate for bread and butter game status. And given my somewhat bruising experiences last month, it’s main competition for that place is not from NLHE tournaments, but Stud/8 ringgames.

STUD/8! It’s the future. Maybe.

“HAH. Take a look at these hands. Take a look at these hands. The hand speaks… the hand of a Government man. ”

Which is another way of saying, I’m governing again. The last twenty four hours have seen me notch one piddly but mildly encouraging 6th place finish in a bog standard Crypto MTT, and then a somewhat unfortunate 2nd in a rather nice guaranteed tourney, which was particularly gratifying as I didn’t get my chips in bad until we were heads up (and even then, I was never more than a 40/60 dog).

So, I’m healthily green for August, and in love with poker again. WHICH IS NOT GOOD. I used to be utterly dispassionate about my results, (which is the best way to cope with the nonsense the game throws at you), but that cold, dead-eyed apathy that I used to have mastered continues to elude me. (To continue the Remain In Light nonsense, I’m supposed to be far more Crosseyed And Painless). That’s probably because it’s a whole lot easier to be apathetic about your results when you’ve got a healthy bankroll behind you, and I’m still a long way from my comfort zone. (Hence all the Navel Gazing; I’m currently using this blog to talk myself sensible, which is kinda dull, but necessary. I hope to be talking about poker, rather than poker and me, very soon!)