What a month

This month has been very swingy for me, it started off well, but then I went on a 12 buy-in dowswing. I was slowly recovering, playing some NL 200 on party where I then hit a 9 buy-in dowswing. I put in a ton of hands after my trip to Spain though and things started to go my way again eventually finishing the month @ roughly +8k.
To top it off, today I played the 50k freeroll from the Winter League and won. This netted me a profit of 13k. Combined with coaching and bonusses this ends my month @ well over 20k.
I still have to play a little bit more on iPoker to ensure my VIP status for months to come though. I think I might do that now @ 200 as I don't really feel like playing, but I just need to put in the hands for the points and I'd like to take the day off tomorrow.
I also finished 11th in the rake race which is fair enough. I get 150$ bonus for achieving that.
I think I'm gonna go and 8 table NL 200 and 400 full ring for the remaining amount of points I need for my Diamond status.

Out of energy

Today is the last day of the VIP loyalty race. I'm pretty exhasted and as I suspected the top 5 are virtually untouchable for me. Right now I'm in 11th place and I think I have a decent shot @ making the top 10. The good thing about this race is that I'll probably make the highest VIP status in the process, which will net me more RB in future months.
Today I'm also playing the 50k freeroll from the Winter League, I've told my friends already that if I cash for a decent amount I'm getting a new TV plus a Nintendo Wii.
As far as the month is going in general I really can't complain as I've made a huge recovery from a difficult start to the month. Tonight I'll post my results from the month with my graph where you can see a 12 buy in and a 9 buy in downswing.

Loyalty Race

Been grinding it out the last couple of days for the loyalty race @ titan poker. I'm currnetly 13th in the list. My goal for today is to make it to the top 10. The only really financially interesting spots are the top 4, which I think will be too difficult to reach for me, but I will use this promotion to motivate me to put in a lot of hands. So far I've played 1.6k hands, I'm gonna shoot for 2.5k.
I usually wouldn't have this much time to grind 4 days in a row, but I'm still a bit ill from the last day of my holidays so I'll try and use my time well.

Spain

Ok so here I go with my blog entry on Spain. I'm gonna try to give a brief summary about my time there. Basically I have some friends in Valencia that I met in the summer when I went there for a language course. They still study there and told me about this festival, so I decided to drop down and have a look at things. The festival is called "Fallas" and a Falla is like a statue that I will show you in some of the pics below. I don't exactly understand all the details of the festival yet, but over a period of 5 days the 300+ fallas are setup all over town and you can go and look at them. They have huge fallas and smal ones for children. All but one of them are burnt to ashes at the end of the festival and that one that is not burnt is put in a fallas museum. K, here I go with the pics.





Some friends of mine from England.







Some Friends of mine from Germany and Austria. The one on the far right is a guy I met in the summer, the other girls we met there. They went to the same language school as I did in the summer.









A pic with some more friends from the summer. The guy in the middle is an old flat mate of mine, he studies mathematics in Valencia. He does some crazy things when he has been drinking...but super fun to hang out with.






This was the "Virgen" aka virigin. They put flowers on here by hand by throwing them up. The end result is a dress of flowers. I think it took them like 12 hours to complete it.








These are two pics of the biggest fallas they made. The first one is uncontested, because it was some special one of the city, the latter was place 3, both got burned.



Here is a burning falla. Those things get pretty hot, it's crazy a lot of people were running away from it after being too close.

Here are some fireworks. They had a lot of fireworks. Everyday was a big one like this and over the course of 5 days. We guesstimated one to cost something like 200k.

Yesterday I purchased Poker Tracker Omaha and have decided to dedicate 3k of my bankroll to playing PLO 50. Should be a fun experience and a nice change of pace. Not sure how many hands I will be getting in a month, but NLH will obviously still be my main focus.

comeback

It was a tough start to the month, but I took some time off and since I came back I've been running well again for the majority. I think I played pretty well in general though this month.
I think it's too far fetched to say I didn't tilt a bit, but anybody who knows me, knows that my definition of tilt for myself is very mild.
I've also started coaching a bit and I think I might look for more students. I'll probably not coach more than 2-3 people at a time though. My motivation to coach isn't mainly finanacially, but more on the basis of thinking about the game and by explaining my thoughts to others, further improving it.
My next post will be about my trip to Spain, I just need to get my pics from my digicam to my notebook and then start uploading.

quick update

Hi there! Back from Spain again. I'm gonna be lazy and make a post without a pic here, but I think it's better than not blogging at all :P.
Played some more of the Winter League today and came first in one of the tournaments and 5th in the other. But I hardly won anything, due to the small player pools. Probably paid like 40$ in buy ins and won 85$. Anyway I just wanted to secure my place in the 50k freeroll and I also won a spot in a 10k freeroll on the way.
6 max has been going steady for me so far. I think I should be able to make the green for this month, assuming I can put in enough hands. I've started playing some Party Poker. It's funny playing again on the site where I first started playing poker. I withdrew the rest of the money I had on ABS poker and I usually have two sites with money so I picked Party as my second site to play on.
When I get all my pics loaded up on my notebook, I'll post some more from my trip to Spain.

madness

Yesterday I was travelling from 7am till 3am. It started off with my flight being delayed 1 hour and me consequently missing my train, which happend to be the last one for the day. Then having to wait 3 hours for a bus, then riding the bus for 4:30 hours. Arriving in Valencia and finding out that there is some kinda strike and little taxis and no busses, but I finally made it. Here are some pics from yesterday...Sounds like I'm in a war zone here, but it's just crazy people partying.


Barcelona Airpoirt

I took this pic so you can see that they speak Catalan in Barcelona the bottom lanugage is Castelan (Spanish) the top is Catalan. Catalan is similar to Spanish, but some words are different and definetly confusing for foreigners who only speak Spanish.

Wasted me after travelling all day.

I took this pic whilst waiting for a taxi, this was close the heart of the town in Valencia.

on the road

I'm at the Munich airport right now. This is a pic from the inside of the airport. My next flight is to Barcelona and from there I'm taking some trains to get to Valencia. It's a bit complicated, but I didn't realize that now is our Easter break and thus the direct flight prices to Valencia are bizarre. The average flight was 700 € and to Barcelona I am paying 150 €. However I don't really mind travelling through Barcelona, as I haven't been there before. I think on my way back I might try and leave a day early from Valencia and stay in a hotel in Barcelona for some sight seeing.

relaxing

Been winning again over the last couple of sessions. And yesterday I fired up some low buy in donkaments just to mix things up. Came second in a 10+1 winter poker league event from Titan Poker, but the entrants were low so it only netted me 150$. However it's always nice to final table a tournament. It was a shame I didn't take it down with a 3-1 chip lead hu, but the stack sizes were so small that it was not possible for me to push my edge in the match.
Anyway the good thing about my placing was that it netted me a top 200 place in the league's leaderboard. So I get an entry to a 50k freeroll which is nice.

I will be in Spain for a couple of days at the end of the week and I decided to fly last so I need to go and get that sorted out now. Uni has also started again so I'll only be gone for a couple of days. I'll try and take some pics and upload some to my blog. I will be taking my notebook with me, but probably won't be able to play any poker, due to lack of secure connections (they have some WLAN connections that I can receive in my appartment, but it's not worth the risk in my opinion).

swingy

As planned I put in some more hands today. Right off the bat I lost 3 stacks:

1

This guy was a maniac, definetly a cooler to run into set over set against somebody playing very aggro and too many hands.

2

mixing it up vs a fairly tight early postion raiser. I don't like reraising it here and getting it in preflop that is why I opted to call and raise a good flop. My play worked out besides the part of running into KK.

3

Maybe I am not fully adopted to more aggressive play yet, but I think this is a bit spewy against my first 4bet. I guess some people expect you to 4bet light the first time, so maybe he was just levelling himself here. I don't think his play is necessarily horrible, but I don't think he will turn a profit in this specific spot.

As you can see though my luck soonly turned around. My downswing peaked at -12 buy ins, which I think is a new record, but not a total shocker as I've been on three 9 buy in downswings before. I basically ended up winning some bigger pots and then chipping it up to turn a profit of 650ish.
Here are some of my winning pots.

a

Villain did think befor felting this here. Imo if he is reraising he should be snapping. I don't mind his play here, he can't really fold preflop and cold calling can get him into some icky spots. So I think 4bet felt is reasonable.

b

Villain was a reg here. I think his play is pretty poor. My range is crushing him. He is calling to hope for a flip at best. I'll never have worse aces here except an Adxd.
4 way he needs to look for other alternatives than his line.

c

As you can see people don't give me much respect preflop. I guess one of the advantages of havign a LAG image.

d

Still no credit.

e

Villain in this hand was loose and aggressive (bad). Thus my reasoning for completing 43o against him. His timing was pretty bad so I felt very confident in check calling this river as opposed to betting. He was very aggressive so I expected him to bluff a missed draw practically 100% of the time. Sometimes I get owned here by some backdoor draw. I'm however not concerned about boats, if he has a back door draw it is likely a hand like xc5c or xc8c and that's about it.


Arsenal took Milan for 2-0 yesterday which I am very pleased about. Arsenal play a fun style of football and it's always a pleasure watching them. Wenger does a really great job there and I am sad already for when he decides to leave. I hope Arsenal can go far this year and hopefully win it. I think Wenger and the team def deserve it.

As expected Heroes is pretty good and addictive. I'm up to episode 17 so far of season 1. The story line is pretty decent. My fav character so far is the Japanes Kid, he just amuses me somehow. I'm also fond of Japanes culture though, so I'm probably biased.

I like

Sup folk! I'm still feeling pretty good about my play yesterday, I don't think I played any hands tilty. Tomorrow I feel good about getting back into the games. What I'm gonna try and do is play 5-6 tables instead of 7-8, because a lot of my edge comes from thinking through spots well as I don't play an ABC style.
Right now I'm going to watch Arsenal v Milan in the Champion's League. Arsenal is my team and I will be rooting for them. I think they have a decent shot at beating any team and many would consider them to be under the top 3 clubs in Europe, including myself.

Time off

I decided to take a day off, clear my head, watch the first season of Heroes and then try and get back on track again.

9 buy ins down

Just had a pretty big downswing session. 3788$ over 2k hands. I think I played well though, I'll go over my hands here as a form of review.

big pot

A somewhat standard spot. I reraise light vs an aggresive opener and get cold called from the BB. I decide to cbet to try and get him off over overcards and small PPs. This is the only marginal spot I can find in this hand. I bet 74$ to win 114$ meaning that he should fold the flop: x*114+(1-x)*(-74)=0
114x-74+74x=0
188x=74;x=0.39
39% of the time for the play to be break even, so I don't mind it. I think the turn bet could be a bit bigger so I can get the money in more easily on the river. Evaluating his play, I think his hand can be tricky to play and I don't mind his cold call given our stack sizes and his position. The river is a very close spot, but I don't think I am valuebetting worse here given our dynamics.

reg on reg

Another standard hand I think. Villain plays it straightforward and avoids tough decisions which I think is a fine play here.

good table

Needless to say I think villains play is terrible, but I am not complaining.

flopped the nuts

I don't like the way villain played his hand. I don't think he will show a profit here very often by check calling me out of position with a 7 high flush draw. It's really hard to get paid off with flushes when you are not the one leading the betting action. I am not sure if he would have also checked had he not picked up extra outs, his standard line may be to lead the turn here unimproved. I guess he made the most of it by check raising the turn to get me off of marginal hands that I would be betting to protect but would fold to a raise. Good spot for me to be in anyways.


awkward

This hand was a bit awkward to play. Villain is pretty solid. I don't like 4betting him here given the stack sizes, because I think it forces him to reraise with a tighter range, so I opted to call and checkraise a low flop. Since the board was really dry. I made a small checkraise to about 2.25 and he just called. On the turn I decided to represent air, but in retrospect I think I should just shove it for value from 99,TT,JJ the river is a really awkward spot, because it is hard to valuebet QQ here in my opinion. There is a small chance I am behind here to AA and KK and now also to TT. I think 99 will fold and I am only getting value from JJ. I don't know how I would have reacted to a bet, because I don't think he will be betting JJ here often enough for my call to be good. I really think I cost myself a lot of value by not betting the turn.

amusing

Another fish I found, I find it amusing that he tries to bluff me off of a hand on the river with a 75$ bet into a 314$ pot.

the biggest station I've seen so far

This guy was just completely bonkers. He was raising roughly 65% of his hands and I was cold calling a lot with decent hands in position hoping to get value from this guy. I decided to bluff raise him once on a very dry board, he snapped and insta-overbet-donk-shoved the turn for 600 into a 150 pot.

light call down

This guy was fishy and seemed to have some bluff in him. I know that some fish lead with their top pair hands here, but not all of them. I decided to call down here getting good odds with all the draws missing and he showed me air. I think it's important to note that a lot of these guys have a lot of randomness in them so one shouldn't try to delve too deep into their minds to avoid self-levelling.

If you've come this far you may wonder how I managed to lose 9 buy ins...here we go.

dude

Can't really complain about this spot. We were 120 big blinds deep, but when you move up in stakes it is important to realize that hand values go up in stealing spots so I'm commiting myself pf by reraising. I think villain definetly overplayed TT here and I don't like his reraising size as he is commiting himself with a lot of bluff hands without necessarily knowing it.

move

This villain was reraising light a lot so I decided to put a move on him on a good board. This happend to be one of them, sadly enough villain had the nuts here. Definetly a high variance spot though. I did the maths on this situation today and I'm pretty sure it's plus ev given the right dynamics.

set theorem anyone?

I think the Beluga Theorem commands me to muck my hand on this turn, but I didn't know villain that well at this point and a lot of logical sets were unlikely plus I had top two and the turn card only completed a gutshot straight draw. I decided to commit to my hand on the turn and villain showed me the unlikely 66.

marginal

This is definetly the most questionable play of mine today. Villain was 26/22/4 and calling my bets light. It really doesn't make much sense for him to lead with anything decent here. I decided I had fe and outs so I shoved. He snapped with the second nuts. I guess he levelled me in this hand and I have to give him credit.

big draw

I flop the straight and flush draw and just stick it in. Bit of an overbet in retrospect, but I was playing a couple of tables and just stuck it in. It's good in a way, because it gives higher flushes bad odds to draw. Villains call is horrendous, because my range is crushing him. I have a feeling a reraise may have gotten him to fold, but you never know with these guys.

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 55.051% 54.14% 00.91% 536 9.00 { 6h5h }
Hand 1: 44.949% 44.04% 00.91% 436 9.00 { Kc6d }

read play

My read on this guy was that he leads weak and is capable of firing multiple barrels. My read was correct, but he backdoored me. I interpreted the river as a good card in this context, because it made it less likely he actually had a hand.

oops

I must admit that I thought he lead into me multitabling (I might play less tables next session) but the way the hand actually played out my play wasn't terrible. I see him cbetting here often enough for my semi-bluff to show a profit.

AA

Villain takes a very fishy line and folding here is out of the question, especially with the backdoor nfd. He happens to show up with a hand and I miss, but this will definetly be a high ev spot for me long term.

Ok

I think my play here is ok, I think the flop and turn play is fairly standard. On the river I check to induce bluffs from missed draws and if you check to induce you need to pay off the bet. I'm not sure his stats actually converged with my assumption that he'd bluff a missed draw, but I was putting him on a missed draw and played accordingly. Again my read was correct, but villain hit an out to beat me.

Turned second set

I actually considered folding this river, because this villain was very very nitty. His hand looked alot like QQ and AJ to me, but I wasn't sure if he was capable of raising KQ and QT for value here so I decide not to make a hero fold. I think the way my games play I'm fine with calling here as the edges I am pushing are not as tiny as they may get at higher stakes, I just couldn't find the time to fold here, but definetly not a nice spot to be in.

More sets

Very standard cooler, with my equity against their ranges I need to snap call and hope to hold up.

Sucked in

Is what I got in this hand. I feel his insta min flop bet can be air a draw or a J. I just couldn't find a fold with all the draws and the fact that I had position, but it could have been the better play. As played I think the turn call is fine and the river was more of a potodds/keephimhonest/figureouthowheisplaying call.

I will try not to post my entire session. These were the biggest pots I played for the day I feel confident with my play in the majority of those hands, but I think I'll post one or two in a forum to get some second opinions. I'll take a break now for the rest of the day and try and come back refreshed tomorrow. As it stands I'm down about 2k for the month, nothing too tragic.
I'll be back!

Feb results

Obviously I'm lame, because I didn't play as many hands as I should have been playing :/, but I am working on it. I need to really try and put in the hours to reach my yearly goal for 08. Since this is HM bb = big blinds and not big bets, I ran at about 7.3ptbb/100 which is nice. From what I could tell though I was still running above my expectation slightly, but not by too much, since I did run into some coolers @ 3/6 and had good table selection @ 2/4.

I've also started coaching a bit this month which is an interesting experience. Right now I only have one student and I'll see how it works out. I think it will be a nice learning experience for both of us.


My plans are to go to Spain for 1 week in March, but since I won't have too much uni for starters I think I should be able to put in some hands early in the month. I hope to be hitting the 3/6 tables again soon aswell.