nov results…

November was a pretty weird month.

I got smashed at poker.

I got really sick.

Out of sheer frustration, I sold half my USD holdings when the AUD was 94c and within a few days, the AUD had crashed to 87.

I ran like Buddah in Chinese poker all month until the last week when all the chumps made big comebacks. Chinese still saved my November though.

I spent a lot of time working on my new rakeback site which will be pretty hot with all the bells and whistles, but dealing with retarded affiliate backends put me on mega tilt a number of times.

All in all, I was able to increase my holdings by 11k AUD on paper which is good as November sucked ass.

I really hate Xmas and everything that comes along with it so I’m not looking forward to gritting my teeth over the next month…

This picture makes me happy….

Posted in Online Cash | 3 Comments »

Top 5 Most common mistakes I see mid-limit NL players make…

I get some emails from people asking why I don’t post more poker stuff. This is because poker is incredibly boring. However, as this is supposed to be a poker blog rather than a rambling travel and lifestyle blog, I feel guilty when I get these complaints and feel I should talk a little poker. I got two emails today about this, so here is some poker stuff for you lucky retards who actually enjoy the game.

One of the emails asked me about the most common mistakes I see mid-limit NL players make, so here is my late-night ad hoc list of what I believe the most common mistakes are. If this list sucks or has no value, that will teach you to come looking here for poker content.

5. Playing Out of Position Without a Plan for the Hand - This is a really common mistake I see weak players make. When playing with position, its a lot easier to enter pots without a fixed plan for how you will react to a wide variety of variables. You can play with more freedom, casually assessing each street on its merits. Out of position, especially against good players, you really need a solid plan for how the hand will develop against particular opponents on a wide range of board textures, facing certain opponent actions and, of course, always taking stack sizes into account.

I’m not thrilled about my own OOP ability but, fortunately for me, a lot of players really suck OOP. I think their biggest mistake is entering inflated pots OOP without any real tangible plan for how they want the hand to go down, and thereby giving up a lot of control by missing spots where they could easily exert some real pressure. Of all the big mistakes I see players make OOP, I think the most common is opening with a small/medium pair or suited connectors and then calling a pot 3bet with a plan that is often comprised of nothing more than “hope to hit a set or combo draw”. Against my 3betting range (and that of most half-decent NL players), this play is suicide. I’ll often call 3bets OOP with small/medium pairs and SC’s but really only when I have a legitimate plan for how I will proceed on a range of flop textures where I don’t hit a gin flop. If I’m playing an opponent who seems to get his percentages right postflop a lot and is tricky and skilled postflop with his use of pot control, I’ll mostly just fold to the 3bet.

In blind defence situations, I’ve experimented a lot with light 3betting as opposed to flatcalling. I think you have to be a lot more talented and skilled to flatcall a wide range. The reason for this is that most of the time, your opponents will be playing with the 80-130bb range and 3betting makes all hands a lot easier to play as the all-in point is reached a lot quicker. 3betting out of the blinds allows you to define hands a lot easier and cuts down on your opponents’ positional advantage. Even when 3betting, you still need a structured plan which takes into account a range of variables. Its just that 3betting makes your plan a lot shorter and simpler.

Unless you are pretty confident you can outplay your opponent postflop, getting involved in a lot of pots OOP without a decent plan is suicide. This is the 5th most common mistake I see at the mid-limits.

4. Playing to a Card - So many players at the mid-limits, including a lot of winners, are guilty of playing a particular style that is comprised of decisions that they believe to be optimal but which are not really all that optimal as they are so predictable. In some respects, this is a big weakness in my game and something I’m actively working on addressing.

It can be very easy to learn a simple style of winning NL play without ever fully understanding why you’re taking certain lines. For someone like me who basically learned NL through forums and HH’s, it can be very easy to fall back into a set way of doing things, opening with x range in y position, c-betting z flops, shutting down here when called, always checkraising certain flops with certain hands and always floating others. I’m a strong believer in optimal lines, but in the current nature of NL games where skill levels across the board are increasing much faster relative to your own increase in skill, optimal or textbook lines can quickly become suboptimal as players adjust to you. Playing to a card is rapidly becoming very exploitable.

For many players, playing to a card is all they have. They don’t have the ability to adjust and choose from a range of lines which disguise their play. Inexperience is often the reason for this, but more often its simply laziness. It’s extremely easy to play to a card and it requires a LOT of hard work to be creative. When I’m playing with no inspiration or with disinterest, I find it hard to be even mildly creative. The 4th most common mistake I see mid-limit NL players make is playing without creativity.

3. Failing to Fully Grasp the Power of Variance - the vast majority of winning NL players that have worked their way up to 5/10 will have a decent understanding of the power of variance, but very few will ever fully grasp how truly sick random events stacked on top of one another can really be. I think you need about 1 million hands and a very cool head to begin to understand the truly brutal nature of swings.

You can go your whole poker life without fully understanding the sickness of variance and you’ll be fine if you are mentally strong enough to not let the worst of your downswings negatively effect your play. 99.99% of us do not have this Zen ability. Almost all big downswings are compounded by bad play. I’m not talking about tilt here specifically, although tilted play by definition, is bad play. The 3rd most common mistake I see mid-limit players make is assuming they need to adjust their play when they really don’t.

All winning poker players are trying to make optimal decisions all the time, but its very easy to misinterpret a simple downswing as a cosmic shift in the playing ability of your opponents en masse, and then make the assumption that you’re getting run over and need to change your decisions. Logically, this assumption is obviously incorrect. Players don’t simply get drastically better in a short period of time. If a regular you play with has played a certain style for 6 months, but all of a sudden, he seems to be walking all over you, chances are he’s just hitting cards. All my big downswings are directly compounded by my assumption that I need to drastically alter my long-term proven winning playing style to adjust to increased aggression.

2. Tilt and the Ability to Recognise the Pattern and Take Steps to Minimise Exposure to Tilt - I don’t really tilt in the traditional sense of blood rushing to the head making me lose my mind and play horribly. But I definitely tilt just like most players - for me, tilt usually means I begin to play too aggressively. I might move up a gear and start playing 28/23 when the situation doesn’t call for it. This obviously results in sub-optimal play which can be very damaging when playing with small edges. It can be really damaging against good players as upping the aggression level gets you in a lot of tricky spots postflop. As I’m already playing sub-optimally, the damage gets exponentially compounded.

The ability to rapidly recognise the slow buildup of tilt is something that I’ve gotten a lot better at over the last year. But recognition means nothing if you don’t have the discipline to take drastic steps to limit your exposure on the slow buildup to tilt, let alone when you’re completely tilting. It takes a lot of self-control and discipline to rapidly assess a situation and state, “I no longer have positive expectation in this game.” The 2nd most common mistake I see mid-limit players make is failing to effectively recognise the buildup to tilt and take steps to limit their exposure to it.

1. Poor Game Selection - If you are not actively practising quality game selection, you are either a genius or you’re giving up a lot of edge. There is a common saying which is very true: “You could be the 6th best player in the world, but if you always play the top 5….”

Game selection is more than simply avoiding tables stacked with good players. You need to understand how your playing style stacks up against the table’s playing style. To use my game as an example, I play about 22/17 preflop and postflop I’m very aggressive early but a lot nittier overall postflop than I would like my opponents to realise. If I’m sitting in a game where the table is playing very loose-aggressive postflop, I have the tools to adjust - but only when I’m playing well. When I’m not playing well, my postflop decisions can be poor, and playing in a game like this will result in a lot of situations where I feel I’m getting run over and I respond with poor decisions.

Depending on my mood and how I’m playing, I will occasionally have greater expectation playing on laggy tables, particularly HU or short; but on most days, I’m better off playing with the nits.

The ability to (quickly) assess the skill level of your opponents is important. As a general rule, regulars are often skilled whilst unknowns or transients are more likely to be “taking a shot” or blowing off steam. However, you should be well aware of how your game matches up against all the regulars at the site you play. There are many winning regulars that I have high expectation against as they are mostly trying to avoid me and target transients. I probably have greater expectation against these regulars than I do against randoms. On the flipside, there are many regulars who match up very well against me and against whom I have painfully high negative expectation. To be a consistent winner, you need to be able to objectively assess whether your negative expectation against these guys is outweighed by any positive expectation you have against the rest of the field on any particular table.

The most common mistake I see mid-limit players make is grossly mis-judging their net expectation against the field.

Posted in Online Cash | 4 Comments »

october results, more usd/aud gheyness…

October was a pretty good month for poker, won about 30k online, lost 10k sports and flips and expenses, and of course, lost another 10k on the USD crash. Tony G called the USD a “3rd-world currency” on his blog, and I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. I’m numbed to the pain now, each month I lose another 10-15k on paper when I calc in AUD, its surreal.

2007 running online stats:

2/4nl - 5.7bb/100
3/6nl - 5.8bb/100
5/10nl - 3.5bb/100
10/20nl - 3.3bb/100 (includes shortstacking)

(other small samples - includes a lot of drunken shortstacking)
15/30nl - minus 2.8bb/100
20/40nl - minus 1.1bb/100
25/50nl - minus 1.6bb/100
50/100nl - minus 40.5bb/100

—

Melbourne taxi drivers are nuts. They are the weirdest people ever. I like to sit in the front of taxis as I don’t mind a chat, but Melb taxi drivers are insane, they really freaked me out to the point where I would sit in the back and pretend to be asleep. They make Manila taxi drivers look professional.

My taxi driver to the airport kept going on and on about high finance and giving me his broken English advice about investments and his opinions on all current affairs. He was beyond retarded, I invited him to post on JokerNetwork as he’d fit right in.

My taxi driver to Crown the day before chewed my ears off the entire trip telling me his thoughts on gambling and trying to persuade me to give up this “evil” vice. He told me incredibly boring parables from his native Afghanistan which had no punch-lines and no message apart from “gambling is bad”.

It was good to be back in Australia for a bit, but there is something really weird about the Australian trait of espousing one’s retarded, ignorant (and sometimes racist) views on anyone who’ll listen. I’ve traveled all over the place and its definitely an Australian trait I think. Australia is full of broke people who think they are experts in everything. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so common. Ofc I’m mildly elitist, but surely if you’re stone cold broke and driving a taxi for $12/hour or whatever, isn’t this a massive banner saying “I really have no clue about anything”?

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mid-term scorecard - a tilt-free fortnight….

Whenever I hear the word “brazilian” I don’t think of Brazil - I’m not sure what that says about me but I hope its good. Speaking of Brazil, it is now the leading front-runner for where I will be living next year. The other contenders are Melbourne, Brisbane, Manila or Greek Isles (but I don’t think I can afford Europe).

At the start of this month, I was talking to a Sydney friend of mine named Puzz who is a decent grinder at the mid-limits. I’d just dumped a stack in a spot that wasn’t horrible, but it was just meh. Like, if you looked at the HH, you might think “that’s not so bad” but I knew it was bad at the time and that has been my problem over the last few months, winning 10-15k each month but not playing optimally, not playing with any real motivation or intensity, just going through the motions, giving up edge calling off in bad spots with the mindset of “why the hell not - poker is ghey anyway”.

Anyway, I was talking with Puzz about some friends of mine who are starting up a coaching website soon and I was telling him these kids really know their shit, that they weren’t mediocre chumps like myself with lots of limitations. I was telling Puzz that I think my biggest strength in poker is knowing all my limitations and just having the discipline to avoid any tricky spots or opponents. This is obviously not sexy poker but Puzz said a random comment “yea but you seem to be getting the job done”.

That comment got me thinking - a lot. I realised I wasn’t getting the job done at all. I was treating my online play as an annoying chore to be avoided whenever possible (I played 13k hands last month). I decided this month, I was going to play the absolute best I could possibly play. I wasn’t going to worry about (insert generic winner’s name here) winning 70k this month, or (insert generic winner’s name here) up 470k for the year, or all the chumps who make final tables in tourneys who wouldn’t know their outs for any given hand if they were given multiple choice options. I was going to get the job (MY job) done!

So I went to work with that in mind and it seemed to work over the last fortnight. Every time I was faced with a marginal spot, I got rid of the flippant attitude I’ve had over the last 6 months and got intense. Maybe my fortnight’s results are mostly just upswinging, but I definitely think my new mindset helped. I’m not quite back to how I was playing in Feb/Mar but I’m pretty close I think, maybe 10-15% off.

link to above graph if you can’t see it properly in this crappy column

Of course, its possible the ridiculous unstoppable AUD will wipe out my little 30k fortnight by the end of the month, but there is still value in winning, even if you’re winning worthless US dollars.

That will pretty much finish off my online play for the month, as I fly out to New Zealand tomorrow for my mate’s wedding, which should be pretty fun, even if Christchurch is not exactly the most exciting city in the world. I’ll then slip over to Melbourne for the PokerNews Cup and, hopefully, some sleazy nights in Revolver and catch up with Franky, a dear dear friend of mine who I’ve greatly missed and I hope has missed me too.

In between, I’m working on a few exciting projects which I’ll talk more about later - basically, I’ve been pretty lazy all year and depressed since I dropped that 70k to the Koreans in the riggd live games, but the time for crying is over and its time to get back in the game. No more fortnights spent watching entire TV seasons back-to-back achieving nothing - no more 10 hour sessions of neutral EV Chinese poker - 2008 is going to be a big year, and I’m going to start getting ready for it….

See you chumps in Melb in a week….

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can’t get the groove on…

(a lil skanky Loehan for Franco…)

——

I been playing some long sessions - HU is pretty interesting, there is huge value but I’m still pretty crap at it - I pay off in such joke spots in the heat of the battle. I always think I’m making some genius thin call, but in hindsight, its just joke fish payoffs.

Had close to the most frustrating session of my life tonight. Played 1000 hands against this maniac, who raised 100% of SB hands, and 3bet me 50% of the time I raised. In 1000 hands, I hit TP or better against him twice, which was so frustrating as I think I could have taken about 10 buyins or more off him as he was pretty tilty. He’s down about 25k on my PT stats over about 4k hands so he’s pretty bad. When he finally left, I cried a little. This has pretty much been the story of my last 3 months, I been finding some soft opponents but can’t make them pay. This other guy I play with every day plays 65/12 and is down 22k over 3k hands and I’ve easily shipped him about 10k in last couple months in some pretty ugly spots.

This is how ridiculously bad my HU friend is and I lost $1200 to him in the session…

$10/$20 Blinds No Limit Hold’em
Table “200 Flops, I Finally Hit One” (Real Money)
Seat 7 is the button
Total number of players : 2
Seat 6: Villain BB ( $2246 )
Seat 7: Hero SB ( $1750 )
Hero posts [$10].
Villain posts [$20].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ 10c 10h ]
Hero raises [$55].
Villain raises [$170].
Hero calls [$125].
** Dealing Flop ** [ Qc, 7h, 10s ]
Villain checks.
Hero bets [$181].
Villain calls [$181].
** Dealing Turn ** [ 6h ]
Villain checks.
Hero bets [$481].
Villain raises [$1875].
Hero calls [$898].
** Dealing River ** [ Qs ]
** Summary **
Villain shows [ 9d Qd ].
Hero shows [ 10c 10h ].
Hero collected [$3496].

—-

This is the other TP I hit, I’m undecided about my turn/river calls. Was probably bad, as he used a lot of pot control unless he’s betting draws, in which case, he just triple barrels whether he hits or misses. The draw missed and I paid him off reluctantly.

I didn’t 3bet pre cause he had started 4bet pushing on me whenever I 3bet so I waiting patiently for 1000 hands and got 1 x TT which I got a stack from, 1 x AK and that’s it. Sigh.

$10/$20 Blinds No Limit Hold’em
Table “Ok I Pay You” (Real Money)
Seat 6 is the button
Total number of players : 2
Seat 6: Villain SB ( $2030 )
Seat 7: Hero SB ( $4261 )
Villain posts [$10].
Hero posts [$20].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ As Jd ]
Villain raises [$50].
Hero calls [$40].
** Dealing Flop ** [ Qd, Ac, Kc ]
Hero checks.
Villain bets [$100].
Hero calls [$100].
** Dealing Turn ** [ Qh ]
Hero checks.
Villain bets [$200].
Hero calls [$200].
** Dealing River ** [ 5d ]
Hero checks.
Villain bets [$500].
Hero calls [$500].
** Summary **
Villain shows [ Jh 10s ].
Hero mucks.
Villain collected [$1716].

—–

I got pretty lucky in this pot as I would stack off here for sure on turn if this shortstack donkey didn’t jump in and save me by going to town with his underpair. My HU friend then decides to check his set down - nice work Sir.

$10/$20 Blinds No Limit Hold’em
Table “Who Do I Have to F to Hit a Draw” (Real Money)
Seat 7 is the button
Total number of players : 3
Seat 5: SB ( $523.36 )
Seat 6: Hero BB ( $2447 )
Seat 7: Villain Button ( $2000 )
SB posts [$10].
Hero posts [$20].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ 9c 8c ]
Villain raises [$80].
SB calls [$70].
Hero calls [$60].
** Dealing Flop ** [ 6c, 3d, 7h ]
SB checks.
Hero checks.
Villain bets [$140].
SB calls [$140].
Hero raises [$541].
Villain calls [$401].
SB calls [$303.36].
** Dealing Turn ** [ 4s ]
Hero checks.
Villain checks.
** Dealing River ** [ 2h ]
Hero checks.
Villain checks.
** Summary **
Hero shows [ 9c 8c ].
Villain shows [ 3c 3s ].
SB shows [ 4c 4d ].
SB collected [$1566.08].
Villain collected [$195.28].

——

I really think I’m knocking on the door of a few 30k months, but it doesn’t look like August will be ice. I got a good feeling about October though.

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july results - the comeback king…

July was mega-gay. At one stage was down about 25k. Had a great last week, so only finished down 10k for the month overall.

I’m pretty sure I suck at poker though. I played a week accidentally overdosed on Hydroxycut (I misread the instructions and was taking 3x the loading dose). I played some pretty ridiculously bad hands during that week, felt like I was wired the whole time, didn’t know what the hell was going on.

My plan for August is to play a lot of HU as that’s where I made my last week comeback. Stars have HU cash tables now which is pretty hot so hopefully there will be some fish around.

My online stats for the year are now:

2/4 - 7bb/100
3/6 - 6bb/100
5/10 - 4bb/100
10/20 - 0.5bb/100

I’m going to mostly play 2/4 and 3/6 and HU for August and peddle tight. I also plan to totally dominate the Manila APPT in a couple weeks so after August, I’m going to be pretty loaded and sexy.

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