I really wish they were, but it doesn't seem to be. I am now officially a losing PLO cash player, and while I haven't kept detailed stats over the years on my NLHE cash play I suspect I am a marginally losing player in that too. I'm not really sure what the problem(s) is/are.
Tournament play still sucks balls as well, although I still have faith in my game in that format. I thought I was going to cash for the first time in a week last night when I lasted ok in an Omaha Hi donkament, but then I bubbled when I flopped middle set on an A93 rainbow board only to find some knobhead had open-limped an AAxx hand and flopped the only hand that I was behind.
Someone please make it be over.
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Vicarious living
My poker life has been slow recently, due to various commitments I have only managed to log 12 SNGs and a couple of short-lived donkaments in recent days (+43% ROI in the SNGs though)... I am not hating the game as much though, and I consider that a valuable bit of progress. So this post is really to wish the best of luck to the posters at http://forums.cardplayer.com/forums who are playing in the World Series of Poker Main Event... I believe there are 3 of them, Loretta, Lucko and Lucko's girlfriend LJ (see linked blogs on the right), and I believe they all registered to begin play today (Day 1c). Best of luck to them all, let's hope at least one (hopefully two) can make it through to Day 2 and then beyond!
Thursday, 3 July 2008
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 :)
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 :)
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Higher stakes, lower skills
Today I played the $11.5k guarantee on Full Tilt with my lone token I had saved. I had foolishly assumed the play would be better than I was used to, but after I lost 1/3 of my stack to a guy who called a raise pre-flop with 10-2s and lost almost all the rest of the chips when my KK got limp/re-raised all-in from someone with 88 and he made quads (rest of my chips went next hand when my A7 lost to A6, obviously). All my good correct folds were followed by flops that hit my freshly mucked hand full in the face, and everyone else's bad calls were rewarded. It's just horrible. And what is even worse is that I am whining about it, which I hate doing because I know I shouldn't care; it happens to everybody and I am not being especially unlucky, and frankly it must be dull to read about. But when every tournament the last week+ has been this way, what else can I write here? If anyone was reading this blog, I really wouldn't blame them for not bothering any more given recent post quality.
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Tuesday Ramblerments
The only game I have played since my last entry was the Tuesday night Rambler series event... given my new-found love(/hate) for Omaha the idea of a HA (lol at Full Tilt not wanting to call it a HO game) tournament was appealing enough for me to stay up for the 2am start time. There was a better turn out than previous weeks since the basketball is over now (I think, I don't follow it because it's full of oversized freaks), 2 full tables I think. I went out in 7th, in predictable fashion... losing a race to Loretta with AJ v 66. Was teased by a flop which gave me 18 outs twice, but he was running so well he was 90% favorite to win every flip and 75% favorite to win when he was well behind :( The one that hurt more was in an earlier Omaha level, where I got rivered with AcAsQs4h all-in pre-flop against KhKcJc10c (65-35 favorite orly?) - if I had won that I'd have been top 3 in chips, losing it put me bottom 2 and took all my momentum away. My hand actually got stronger and stronger on every street; flopped an ace, turn gave me a flush draw to kill all but 4 of villain's outs, but 4 outs is enough to bend me over and intrude upon my anal passage these days.
Nice tournament though, anyone reading this who doesn't already know about the series should check out http://nyramblerpoker.blogspot.com for details... next week is PLO8, which appeals to me but at the same time is a game that I suck at, so I will be there providing dead money and just trying to suck out on everyone.
Nice tournament though, anyone reading this who doesn't already know about the series should check out http://nyramblerpoker.blogspot.com for details... next week is PLO8, which appeals to me but at the same time is a game that I suck at, so I will be there providing dead money and just trying to suck out on everyone.
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