Quick update

Not really had as much time to devote to the game as I would like recently, so my sample sizes are small, but so far I have played 6 of the $15+1 Stars 9-man SNGs and had a 1st and two 3rds for a 27% ROI. I'm still a little unsure whether I am properly bankrolled for these, so I'm not playing more than two at a time, which is a bit of a waste I suppose but it should keep a higher per-game win-rate at least. Hopefully soon I can start to 4-table happily and without bankroll concerns holding me back, then I'll have a proper sample size to judge my results.

I have also played a handful of $3.80 Super Turbos on Full Tilt (yes, despite my saying I withdrew all my money I actually didn't take it ALL off... I took most of it off, and the rest will likely follow next time I have a decent sized purchase on my credit card that needs paying off). These are crazy, you get 300 chips and start at 15/30 blinds, so it is shove or fold lolz. Of course there are morons who don't grasp this and limp/fold or limp/call as normal, but really there is never any decision after pre-flop (unless you have junk in the big blind and nobody raises). Most of the people on Cardplayer who have tried these are reporting good results, so I had a bash earlier and played 4, winning 2 of them for a 100+% ROI!!!! (did someone say "small sample size" again? Quit bursting my bubble!!!). The problem is, these games are dangerously addictive, and I can feel they might start to creep into my game selection in the near future more than they should... I hope they don't mess up my real poker.

MTTs are still mis-firing, although I'm playing fine. I mis-click folded AA today though for the first time; I was clicking in another browser window when my table popped up and my cursor just happened to be exactly where the "fold" button was :( I'd been shoving like a maniac too, I'm sure my shove would have got action. Sucks but hey.

Running normalaments

Ok, not to jinx anything but I seem to be running normally again... I'm not getting constantly sucked out on and am even pulling the odd suckout off myself. I've started playing the $15+1 STTs on Stars, although I am a little concerned whether I should be with just $400 in my Stars roll. Having said that, I cashed out from Tilt for $630 so there is a little more in my roll than is actually online at the moment, and the play in these things is really pretty ordinary to be polite. I've bumped into a handful of solid multi-tabling TAG regulars who obviously "get" SNG play and are tough opponents, but really despite being 3x the stakes the games feel just as soft as the $5.50 games I used to play on Full Tilt and crush for something like 40% ROI.

It feels nice to actually be winning money again. After two bustos in these games last night I ummed and ahhed about playing another and decided to go for it... and took it down. I had a nice suckout to set me rolling when my AK beat KK, and then I took out another two players with the same hand when one guy went nuts preflop with 77 and a shortie decided his two baby cards were probably live and he was getting great pot odds... King on the flop and I have a nice chip lead. Gets even better just after when I raise the cut-off with JJ and the big blind calls then donk shoves into me on a 4h-7-7h board... shows down 66 for lolgoodgameaments. At this point I have over half the chips in play on the bubble, and just crush the table for a bit. It was a perfect spot to have a big stack because the others were all fairly similar so all had an eye on each other and pretty much gave up playing pots with me without a huge hand. I think 5 or 6 consecutive orbits they gave me free rides in the big blind, and I never got played back at when I stole. I burst the bubble myself when I called a shove with A10o and the guy had Q10o which was just about perfect for me, and then promptly doubled up one of the others by running a Q6o steal into 1010. He used his chips to bust the other player and we went heads up. I figured it was going to be yet another "so near yet so far" game when I 3-bet shoved over him with KQo and he called with Q4s, only to nail a flush. So gay. But I wore him down again, being very aggressive, and it set it up perfectly when I got AKs and shoved on him and he called with A10o. He flopped a 10 but I turned a flush and all was well with the world again. OFFICIALLY A WINNING PLAYER ON POKERSTARS!!!!

AQ in Sit-n-Gos

Ok, I have only played 4 SNGs since yesterday (2 wins, a 3rd and a bubble) but already my old bogey hand of AQ pre-flop at low/middle blinds has come up again. Well, when I say bogey hand that is probably not the right term... what I mean is, I am caught in two minds (maybe more) about how best to play it.

Originally when I began playing SNGs and did very well, I was very aggressive with it and this approach had a lot of success by 3-betting and 4-bet shoving this hand; I found enough people willing to go to the wire with AJ, A10 and medium pocket pairs that my approach seemed to be +EV to me. But then I took some of the advice from the SNG section of the Cardplayer forum, where many players seem to fold AQ to 3-bets early on, and started playing it much more cautiously, with the result that I was raise/folding pre-flop an awful lot and having to fold to c-bets on whiffed flops even more often, and I was leaking chips as a result. My results dipped noticeably.

So now I am of a mind to return to my previous aggressive approach with AQ pre-flop; my experience of the range of hands people will call my shoves with when 4-bet over is obviously vastly different to the posters on the forum, so I am left in the agonising scenario of having to either a) ignore all my own experience and learnings and trust to the experience of others instead even though it conflicts with mine, or b) ignore well-thought out advice from a selection of experienced and reasonably successful players who specialise in this format. Neither option really sounds very appealing when you lay it out like that. But all in all I think I have a slight preference for failing in my own way, since I have already briefly tried and failed by doing it the other way previously. This might be down to variance, but it also might not.

The hand that prompted this post can be found posted here, along with responses:

http://forums.cardplayer.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=63980

I titled it a "standard" hand, knowing full well that many of them would want to open-fold it pre-flop* and would think my line was spewy and not at all standard, and there are already the nitty voices speaking of how we should fold to the re-raise at this early blind level. They sound convincing, but I have made more by 4-betting than by folding, I am positive.

Gah. This is why poker is such a great game though. Even experienced and highly competent players can disagree on what is optimal. Put me in mind of "Caro's theory of loose wiring" that he speaks about in his classic "Caro's Book Of Poker Tells", where he illustrates two different example hands where the cards dealt to each player and on every street are identical but the end result in terms of winner, pot size and which players were in the hand are very different, because some of the players play their hand differently but plausibly from one example to the next. (The rest of the book is pretty outdated now to be honest, but it was classic at the time). I don't really know where I am going with this, but it popped into my head so I wrote it. I think I'll just let this post trail off quietly...

* hyperbole for comic effect, obv :)

Sit'n'Gogogogogo

Played 2 $5 SNGs just now and won them both; it appears my idea has some merit that the poker gods approve of. I didn't actually have many flips, but my small edges held... Ax hands held off Kx hands all-in pre-flop, and I sucked out goooooood on the bubble of one of them when I shoved 67s in the small blind and someone made an idiot call out of the big blind with K8o (if you don't get why it was an idiot call, go and learn ICM now), and I flopped two pair and filled up on the turn. It's always nice to make an hourly rate of ~$30.

Poker seems fun again. Shame I have to go out to play tennis later this evening or I would embrace the $5 donkfests whole-heartedly (I have solved my anger issues on the court by the way... now I simply just hit balls around and don't care where they go. They seem to mostly go in the right places still, so it's working out fine!). Also, there is a strong possibility of a new job on the horizon, which would force me to keep slightly more regular hours than I do now and thus limit my hours on Full Tilt, but it would also allow me to put some more money towards my bankroll than the pittance I have been able to afford it so far, so maybe my poker 'career' will benefit overall, who knows.

Back from the abyss

Ok, so after one final bad beat at my live donkament last Thursday (guy called my shove with KJo on a 10-8-3 rainbow board, I had QQ, he rivered a K), I stopped playing. I really wasn't in the right mindset to play any tournaments... I realised I was playing too many hands too early, on the basis that if I was going to get shafted by the dealer then better to have it happen early before I had wasted too much of my time, and obviously that attitude is not conducive to winning poker. I still feel like poker isn't worth investing too much time in, but am wanting to play again, so as a result I am contemplating returning to the single table Sit-n-Gos for a while.

This is my current SNG results "snake" -

I played these from January to April as my standard fare, and did consistently well (Sharkscope lists me with a 38% ROI at an average stake of $5)... it really helped to grind my bankroll up. But they are a very dry form of poker, you feel almost robotic when playing them... you sit tight early and only play premium hands, and then you go nutso near the bubble and steal like crazy when the blinds are bigger. A lot of people would say it isn't even poker, which is a short-sighted view but I can totally understand why they would say it. The skill-set required is very different from an MTT, let alone "real" poker (ie. cash games), but it is a game of skill nonetheless. I'm not sure I will play them for long, because even a hot streak at Sit-n-Gos doesn't compare to the thrill of going deep in a large(ish) MTT field, but maybe the fact that they rarely last more than an hour will stop me from getting impatient... also, when I have my feel back I should be able to multi-table them more easily than I do with cash games or MTTs.