sick heater

This is my month up to date. I'm on a pretty sick heater over my last 4k hands as you can see. The rest of the month has been very swingy, but I managed to keep in the green all long.
I think a 23 BI heater is probably the biggest I've been on so far. I do think it is justified though given the amount of 80-20s I was losing. In the end everything is variance.

I spoke to Matt today about our hand bet and we agreed to call it off. I'm slighlty ahead of him, but we're both with family friends and having to play poker isn't optimal for me right now.
I think the bet fullfilled it's purpose though, we both put in a lot of hands (by our standards) which is great.
Since I've been in the UK I've been 4 tabling mostly, because I played on my mother's computer and she only has a 19" screen. I'm not sure it made much of a difference in winrate for me, but you definetly have enough time to think about hands and how you could have played them better, which is great.

I think I'll take it easy for the rest of the month since I don't have to play anymore. I'm thinking of getting in some nl100hu hands when if I decide to play. Basically to continue with my 5k hu challenge and work on my HU a bit.
When jan starts I'll jump straight into 2/4 with a healthy bankroll and reasurance in my game.
I'll also be getting xdsl and a new desktop computer with a second 20" screen.
I think at times I wasn't playing my A game, because my hardware tilted me. Somehow I've always managed to have computer's w/ compatability problems. This mainly due to the fact that I always try and get PC's that fit my needs and are not extravagant, but this time I'll try and aim a bit higher than the minimum. I'm looking into a medium-class PC and not an office PC. High-end is a bit over the top for me imo.

I've been watching a lot of comedy lately here on SKY television, I like comedy cause it helps me unwind from poker. A lot of people don't think playing poker is difficult (in a draining sense of way), but it is. The higher you play and the more you think about the game the more it is like studying and you constantly need to focus and be on the top of your game.
Anyways I saw this show called the Sarah Silverman show which is easily one of the most bizzare things I have watched so far. From what I understand main actor is playing an altered version of herself. One that has no shame whatsoever and says whatever comes to her mind.
It's a different sense of humor in a positive way. You guys should check it out and tell me what you think.

2 hands I thought I might share with you:

Pot of the Day

I was contemplating reraising pre, but decided not to. Villain is a reg. He was running @ 18/16 at this point. I had a tight image, but for some reason villain decided I was weak here. I got it in 80-20 and managed to win the flip ;). He must have been putting me on some weaker draw.
I guess the J and the T on the flop let him believe that I was less likely to have a set here and waited my range more to hands that he had FE against. His turn timing was interesting as he made a very quick check raise.

I make a good read

This hand was tricky. I knew I had played with villain before, but my HUD hadn't uploaded yet (when you play with HUDs a lot you tend to start relying on them too much, my bad I guess).
This was my first hand at the table so I tried to use the information I had at hand. I didn't even want to 3-bet pre, because I didn't know how villain would play postflop, but my hand figures to be ahead of an average CO player's range, plus there was potential dead money in the pot so I raised it nonetheless.
Basically I picked up some key timing tells that lead my poker instincts to tell me that I was good here and I guess this shows just how strong timing tells are with weaker players.

This was quite a long blog , I hope you all had nice Xmas dinners.

Take it easy.

edit:

And RTR hasn't been hacked, they sent an email a couple of weeks back and it's just something they're testing, so it's all good.

Hacked

I think my raketherake stats page was hacked. I am not 100% sure yet, but it definetly looks like it. I need to take measures fast to make sure they are unable to hack anything else related to that account.

thoughts on variance

This is my graph for my last 3k hands. As you can see I recovered from my 9 BI downswing within a short period of time. 9 BI is definetly one of my larger down swings in my career so far, but it can happen and you can also play perfectly and lose 12 BIs or play poorly and win 5.
Basically what I am getting at is that poker is a game of high variance and you have to be aware of this at all times. Imo it's crucial to have the correct mindset when playing. Always favour making +ev decisions over winning $ and don't get frustrated when things don't go your way.
Also don't make short term monetary goals. I honestly don't understand people who make prop bets over who can make more money in a given time period on a specific limit, because assuming that both players are of equal skill, play the same amount of hands and never tilt, it's negative ev gambling, because you'll be relying on luck to win the bet (I guess you could argue about this, if say both players were to play 100k hands, but I think you get my point).

I think this is also something to think about in terms of bankroll management. I believe I practice very good bankroll management and always have. I started off with a 15 BI rule and right now I am at 45. It definetly requires a lot of discipline to play 15 BIs well, assuming you don't want to busto. I wouldn't advise people who think they can easily tilt not to consider using this for obvious reasons.
If I were to start a new career from nl 2 like I did originally I'd most likely follow a 25 BI rule till I hit nl 100 and switch to 30-40 from then on.

I've played my 5k hands on 1/2 and I could move up to 2/4, but I am not sure if I want to do this right now. I'll prob wait untill january and give it another shot. Even though I am not playing with scared money large $ swings may effect my mood and it's christmas after all :).

HERE you can find my biggest hand for the day. When he checked to me I thought it was pretty apparent I had the best hand, but I was a bit worried about being check raised valuebetting so thinly. I thought about this for a second and I realised this is a good spot to bet to induce a check raise. It took villain 4 seconds to shove on me and I'm glad my play worked out. He obviously thought I wasn't repping much, but he wasn't either ;).

graph + KRANTZ

I decided to graph the session for you that I was talking about yesterday.
Right now I am rereading KRANTZ's well post from the 2+2 archives. Some interesting stuff in there, you should check it out. KRANTZ had a sick run this year and I believe is the biggest winner in NLH for the year. He is also the owner of the training site 3-bet.net which offers various coaching possibilities. The site however seems to be hacked right now (lol).
I think I am gonna go and chill a bit and then play some 1/2 when the games are good.

Huge Swings

Today during my session on Absolute I was down 2k at peak, which is the equivalent of 10 stacks. That is a pretty huge swing to have during one session. However my mental strength is probably one of the keys to my success and I was able not to tilt and win back 1.5k leaving me at -500 for the day. I am glad I am having this variance on 1/2, even for me being down 4k during a session is tough.
I am not going to bore you with HHs of coolers. Basically I couldn't win flips and was also losing as a big fav (80%+ equity).
I'll try and get back to posting some interesting hand histories.

Besides poker I guess all is well, I haven't been too social so far as I've been grinding to catch up on my hand prop bet. I'll make the minimum of 30k hands for sure, but not sure how much I can play after that. Unless I don't hit a heater soon I prob won't be playing 2/4 this month. But that's no biggy for me. I realize I have the skills and I just need to patient and disciplined.

lol ub

Seriously UB, your site could be so good, but you just don't get it. I was playing when all of a sudden the software crashed on me. It's not like this is the first time it happend to me either. It's a fairly well known waiting list bug which they claimed to have fixed. But whatever, I gave UB like a billion chances and they disapoint me time and time again (which is the main reason why I withdraws from their site). Atleast I was able to leave them on a "positive note" as I was up a little bit over 2 buy ins on 1/2 when this happend.

UB

I'll be playing on UB for the remaing days of December. I like to change sites when running poorly on a specific site. I think I'll play 5k hands on 1/2 and then go from there. I still have enough money to continue playing 2/4, but I think it will be good for my game to move down for a bit.

I transferred money from Absolute to UB and that took about 10 minutes which is pretty nice, however I shouldn't be playing right now, but packing (same procedure as every year).

Poker and Life

Hi guys! Been running poorly @ 2/4 lately. Dropped 1.7k yesterday. I think I am playing well though. I've been analyzing my plays and posting hands on Cardrunners. I am running into a lot of obvious coolers aswell:

Top set

Fwiw I'll get it in here all day. I had 74% equity on the flop. I intentionally reraised instead of shoving to get him to do something silly and he complied.

Top two

This hand may not seem so obvious, but I think his range is polarized towards combo draws and weaker two pairs. He was 33/20/3 so a lot of hands that have me beat he will typically be raising pf.

Standard

Vs a reg on this board for 100bb I am never folding.

Middle set

Another standard hand vs a reg for 100bb.

Thos were the biggest coolers from my session yesterday. Add some tricky spots and your down 4 stacks.
I am still playing some good 1/2 tables on the side to fill up my table slots. Running pretty well on 1/2 made 400 from the couple of tables I was playing.

I'll be travelling to Kent tomorrow over christmas. I'll be taking my notebook with me and 4 tabling some. I am thinking of depositiing and playing on UB for a while to mix things upand because the Absolute software on my 15,4" screen is really hard to read.
Right now I gotta get some stuff done before I leave, I'll be updating if anything interesting occurs though.

L8rments.

NL 400 meh + video

Ran pretty badly at 400 yesterday, basically I got stacked three times in 7 hands in cooler situations. Here a brief summary of that orbit:

1

Probably the closest of the 3 hands. I was getting 1.7-1 to call and I had a note on this guy that he likes to gamble. I need 37% equity to call. It's close, because he raised UTG, if he was raising from a later position this is an easy call anyway.

I am in bad shape vs QQ+:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 20.701% 16.81% 03.89% 22456944 5190822.00 { QQ }
Hand 1: 79.299% 75.41% 03.89% 100721124 5190822.00 { QQ+ }

but if you had AK into the mix:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 40.207% 38.35% 01.86% 114253440 5540034.00 { QQ }
Hand 1: 59.793% 57.93% 01.86% 172607388 5540034.00 { QQ+, AKs, AKo }

Then I should definetly be calling. Even if this was -EV I don't think buy much so to me this is a cooler. Given that it's so close I think folding is fine here too though, especially since villain was a weaker player and we can probably get our money in with a significant edge at some point later on.

2

Set over set on drawy board.

3

This guy was a preflop and postflop maniac.

Despite getting stacked on my NL 200 table aswell I managed to only be down 1k for the day.
Shortly after this I decided to go and make a video.
It's on NL 100. I think it's ok, but I also think that I can do better. If I make a video in the future I'll probably try think about some concept that I'd like to address in it.
I hope you like it and feedback is always welcomed:

VIDEO

Winning again

Was able to put in a winning session yesterday. Ended up +840. Matt was sweating me and I think the session went pretty well. Just a few hands:

Big Pot

This was a pretty funky hand. At this point I had no idea what an overbet by villain meant. I decided that a raise looks strong and if he was making some kinda move calling gives him room to go crazy on the turn again. The turn card is awful, but I figured there are still a lot of hands that he could play the same way that I still beat I call and he shows the underset which is a great result untill the BB goes wild. I call with odds and suckout. I run g00t.

Variance

Brought me quickly back to reality though by reversing my river suckout.

Fold flop lol

Not much I can say here, glad he improved on the turn.


As for non poker related stuff, uni is now over and I still will have to learn for my finals in january and february, but I now have a more flexible time schedule.
Next week I'll be travelling to the UK for christmas so that should be fun to meet friends and family again.
Today I'll be having a small a party at my new place. It's the first time I am inviting people over, should be good.
Get back to you guys later.

Practicing Spanish with ABS support

lol:

Esteban: Please hold one moment
you: vale
Esteban: Do you speak Spanish?
you: a little bit
you: i am learning it at university
you: do you?
Esteban: Si, yo hablo español. That is an easy sentence.
you: yea
you: i figured you might because your names sounds spanish
you: por eso he escrito en espanol
Esteban: That is very good. Your writing is perfect.
you: muchas gracias :D
Esteban: Con gusto! :)
Esteban: The bonus has been credited to your pending account now.
you: k cheers
Esteban: Good bye!
you: good bye
you: hasta luego ^^

Rough Day

Had a rough day at the tables today. First I made a mistake early on for 500$ where I stacked off for 150bb with KK to AA vs a guy who had a very low 3 bet %. I wasn't looking at the stats at the time and then after I stacked off I realised his only holding in that spot could be AA. Frustrating, in retrospect, but mistakes are expensive in NL holdem.
Besides this I was getting moved in on every time I was bluffing and people were never paying off my big hands. The times where I had average strong hands my opponents had slightly stronger hands.
I guess I wasn't running completely bad as I somehow managed to end up only -120$ for the day over 1.5k hands. I was lucky to get on a table with a maniac who payed off my top two with K high (he leads shoved into me on the river with a missed draw giving me 3-1 to call).
So far I can't really complain as I am still up on my shot @ 2/4 and if I can lose little whilst adjusting that's great. I am gonna go review my session and post hands on Cardrunners. L8rs.

Small 2/4 session review

Decided to try and add more pictures for eaziness of reading. As you can see the session turned out well. Had to quit early though, because I had a slight headache which sucks cause I am behind in the hands bet, but I should be able to balance this out once uni finishes at the end of the week.
On to some hands:

1.41k pot

I think this is my biggest pot so far in my poker career. I did think before sticking it in as my opponent was a fairly reasonable player. He claims to be a PLO player that plays NLH because the games are so good. I was able to narrow down his range to a point where I felt confident enough in my hand to reshove. Imo with a player behind him he should be inclined to play sets fast on this board as well as KJcc for the combo although going for an overcall with a weak player behind isn't that bad of a play. It's very unlikely he is peeling the naked gutshot. I also 3 barrelled villain out of the last hand we played so he could be frustrated at me. Given all these factors I felt confident in reshoving and I was a bit surprised at villains holding, I thought his range was more polarized towards draws.
After this hand villain was constantly berating me saying how bad I was and how much luck is involved in NLHE, not very classy. He also claimed that he was constantly outplaying me, he went on and on which was slightly frustrating, but I think he will be a profitable player in the future.

Easy money

This guy was playing really bad. Raising 35% of his hands and never folding to a reraise. If the flop comes one over card I am not folding.

Value betting

At first I felt like shoving here, but wanted to make it look like I could have a bluff so decided to raise. Imo his line looks a lot like air or a J and these guys don't like folding. I don't even think it's that thin since these guys call worse a lot.

Thin

I don't think he has a K here too often and there are a lot of draws on board. I think it's important to think about a comittment decision on the turn. WIth a higher kicker it's probably a no brainer.

Meh

I really don't like my flop check here. My first thought was I check here to mix up my range between the times when I check fold so that villain can't steal relentlessly, but a) this guy was passive and b) this guy's a donk so I am levelling myself by mixing up my range here.

On the other hand

I like my play here. Similar idea to the above hand but makes a lot more sense given the stack sizes and my hand.

Board: 5c 2c 8c
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 49.798% 49.80% 00.00% 493 0.00 { AcKs }
Hand 1: 50.202% 50.20% 00.00% 497 0.00 { TcTh }

Interesting that I am not a favourite here in this hand, I think it's due to the fact that villain can make a set and negate my overpair outs, but nevertheless I got it in well and have FE against a lot of 1 pair hands.

standard

Had a lot of decisions when this hand occured. Pretty standard in retospect for 50 bb, not much I can do. It was just one of those spots where I had a weird feeling before hand. Must have been villains bet sizing that gave me that feeling. I purchased a book called "blink" which discusses how we subconciously process certain situations and this must have been one of them. Villain was 35/16.

this was bad

Flop raise was too small. This happens to me quite often when I move up in stakes. 84 looks like a large amount but in reality it isn't, 104-120 is far better here. On the turn I call getting 2.55-1 needing 3-1 to hit my boat. My plan was to lead all in if I filled up figuring he was commited with a flush.
I really hate calling off large bets with draws, but I'll rarely be drawing dead in this spot so I think it is ok. But really I am mad about my betsizing on the flop.
Comments on turn play are welcomed.

cooler

Not much I can do here given the stack sizes.

looks spewy

But I had a read and played the hand accordingly. Basically this was shortly after the hand I played where I took down the 1.41k pot against the same player. In my opinion there was a decent chance he was tilting and so I didn't want to get raised on the flop and throw away the best hand. I figure he is capable of 3 barreling here given my flop check and he played the hand well. In future I'll be less inclined to think this player tilts bad as all his plays seemed reasonable after the pot, he was just berating me a ton in chat and generally fluking about NLHE players and that PLO has way more skill etc..
Hands like this make for interesting plays based on history though.

my friend jr

His pf call shows how little respect he gives me which surprises me, but is something that I can use to my advantage. Jr plays all the stakes from NL 200 to NL 3k from what I've seen so far.
From my perspective his river call was bad, which I can't go into too much detail on because I'd be giving away too much information, but I can understand the call from his perspective. I levelled myself in this hand, because Jr doesn't give my enough credit. I expect some interesting battles between Jr and myself in the future and I'll surely be reviewing his game to otpimize my play vs him.
I think I could have played this hand better by two to three barrelling him here. My line represents to narrow of a range and I think betting the turn generates more FE against his approximate range.

All in all I think 2/4 is still very beatable. It'll take more hands before I fully adjust to the stakes/regs, but I feel confident and am lucky enough to have had a good start so far.

Didn't play much today

Put in about 400 hands today. I converted my database today to SQL and that was taking ages to do, so I decided to hop into a NL 100 HU game. Played 100 hands against a fishy player untill my database was finished and then I went to play some 2/4 ring game. Ended up 50 in the hu match and another 150 in the ring game.
I know not many hands but the action was decent as I started off my ring game with a rush of cards.

The third hand I played

A pretty dry and coordinate board, but this guy was playing 60/30/3 datamined, plus showed some aggro tendencies. I think this is pretty standard with top two here. I actually don't mind losing a big pot early on when moving up as it helps me adjust to the stakes quicker and avoid playing scared.

Not scared for sure

Were deep in this hand, but this was against the same villain as in the hand above. He snapped the flop so I think his range is fairly wide in this spot. Later on he told me he had the nutflush draw.
If he had AKs this was a really nice result as getting it in on the turn is high varaince against 15 outs.

They try

I based this hand mainly on timing tells which I feel pretty confident in. I snapped the river he insta left the table what else can I say.

I'll be getting in some more hands tomorrow on 2/4 the games look pretty good on Absolute. Loose passive fish are the best obviously but the aggro donks are also great to play against and not as high variance as one may think since they call way way too much.

2/4 action

I'll be playing some 2/4 the next session. I feel confident in my game and I have the bankroll. So there is nothing holding me back.

Not feeling great

I just played a fairly bad session where I could have lost a fair amount. I was a bit unconcentrated not really thinking to indepth about my decisions. I need to get my sleeping pattern back to normal and also start working out again. Still ended up +800 on the session though, so I guess I was running hot.

2/4

I am almost there now. I don't need many more buy ins to move up. I've started mining the higher games and they look quite good on Absolute, ergo very beatable.
As long as I don't hit some bad negative variance I'll be up in no time.

Small Prop Bet

I made a small prop bet with my friend probability. We arranged that for every 1k hands in difference we'll pay the other 10$. So if I play 20k hands and he plays 30, I'll owe him 100$.
I doubt the gap will be that wide, but it's something that should keep as going as we both didn't reach our target hands last month.

edit: Whoever fails to reach 30k hands will also owe the other an extra 100$.

December

I think december will be a good month, I have a positive feeling about it. My goals are to move up to 2/4 for good :P, play enough hands (especially playing regularly), win Taylor's protege contest (a little optimistic I know).
Yesterday I installed Holdem Manager. For those of you who don't know it, it's an alternative to Poker Tracker that is faster and has more options you can find it here. I created a new database and I'll be using it to track and analyze my play for this month.
Poker Tracker has reacted already to this and is making PT 2 (see what opposition can do).

Last month I said I'd play 5k hands HU, I don't think I quite managed that, but unexpected occurences made it difficult for me to achieve this task. I'll get back to HU once I move up to 2/4, that will be my main focus for now. It's difficult to move up and focus on learning a new game at the same time.

Today I'll be playing in the Absolute Turkey Bowl freeroll which I qualified for. It's a 5k freeroll and I think i have a reasonable chance of cashing (notice the uber self-confidence).

As far as the other areas of my life are going, I can't complain I guess. I have finished the majority of my uni work and it has gone well.
I guess what did suck is that I haven't been working out for almost 2 weeks now. I just didn't find the time which is really bad. I want to go now, but I arranged to go shopping with a friend for furniture and stuff, plus in the evening is the freeroll. I need to balance this.
Right now I'm gonna do my usual saturday cleaning (bachelor appartments typically aren't very tidy ;)). Out.

It's over

I'm done with my session and these are the final standings:

Hands: 4,926
Profit: +37.90$
Points: 10,016.89

I was up more but lost about 500 in the last 100 hands with the flopped nut straight vs the straight/flush draw and with top two vs a set. That's variance I guess. Atleast I managed to come back. Towards the end I was mixing up bet sizes a bit and called with 99 on AAJJ2 cause I thought my pair was good.
Time to relax I guess. Not sure I'll review this session. There were 1 or 2 interesting hands, but it's tough to go through 5k hands to find them.
Next session will be on UB, I am really interested in how the games are. L8r.