…or How to Observe Statistical Variance First Hand.

The last two days of poker play, I’ve gotten 9 hours and 4,733 hands in. These have been successful hours, although only at about .86 BB/100. So, this isn’t a complaint, just an interesting observation.

Today, I played 1160 hands and had QQ 14 times. 14 times seems high for that amount of hands. In those 14 times, I managed to lose $14 for an impressive -1 BB/100. Towards the end, I was dreading seeing QQ because it seemed that it wasn’t my night. Oddly enough, I had JJ 15 times and won $30. The lesson to be learned, I guess, is that it really is all about the long term and that things tend to even themselves out in the end, either for a specific hand or just your results in general.

So as I said in my previous post, I’m experimenting with shoving 9 tables into one monitor screen, thanks to Poker Stars allowing table shrinkage. At first, I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to keep up. I constantly felt like I was running behind. But after a few days, I adjusted to the pace. I am playing the slower regular tables rather than the high speed tables - as it is, I’m mentally at my max playing 9 regular tables. If my required reaction time was cut in half, I’d never be able to do it.

There were a few adjustments related to Poker Tracker. I got the heads up display fonts shrunk so that the HUD would properly display on the small tables. The big problem was the little Poker Tracker icon it puts over the dealer info - it doesn’t shift properly when the tables are shrunk. So the icon would always be sitting over the cards in seat 10. And unfortunately, although Stars lets you rotate the table, Poker Tracker doesn’t seem to adapt to that. So I’ve just had to be careful not sit in seat 10, otherwise I end up playing blind (Ok, that’s a Kh, what the hell is the other card? Can I raise with one card?)

I don’t seem to be losing any BB/100 with the change - I’m still a little above 2 BB/100. And this gets me about 100 FPP an hour, which will make getting Gold Star a little more realistic. I have 1666 pts left to earn this month and about 1580 pts to earn to unlock the bonus. Hopefully, I can get both before the end of the month, and then I’ll pull some profit out. It would be about 128 pts a day, and if I can manage to get an hour a day in, I should come pretty close.

So in July how did I spend my time?

80 hours - contract work/programming

~30 hours - carting the entire extended family to a massive array of doctors visits

20 hours - playing poker

but hey, I did play 20 hours of poker, right? I should probably be writing about that

The bad news is I couldn’t seem to win a hand. I played 6600 hands at 1/2 and 2/4 combined, losing $182.  The good news is with Full Tilt’s 6 month bonus, and rakeback, I ended up having a net positive month.   I had played even less than this in June(at least in holdem, I messed around with some omaha and stud), and was trying to get at least a little back in the swing of things in July.  I certainly did that, but in the end its anohter blah month in a very blah year of poker.  i keep repeating the same things over and over here.  I am finding it nearly impossible to focus on poker when I have as many contract hours as I want, and when it takes all of about 15 hours of contract work to cancel out my monthly expenses… everything else is gravy.

As far as poker strategy goes, the best thing I did this month, and every month really, is continue participating in the monthly 2+2 handswap that the shorthanded limit forum does.  One thing that my review pratner helped me realize is that I was stating to nit it up way too much, my stats at 1/2 on the month have me playing a horrible 19/14 game, where I do open up a bit more but not quite enough at 2/4, about 22/18.  I have always had that problem down at 1/2, I try to play tighter and more straigthforward but end up just pussing out of a lot of marginal, but positive, spots.  When I spend time reviewing my hands this month it is with one primary purpose in mind: examine spots where I should be playing more hands… big blind defense, and button play, steal more, defend more, 3-bet in position more, and play better postflop once I do get involved.

This month I intend to stick entirely to 2/4, I am more than rolled for it and am perfectly comfortable there.  So far I’ve knocked out 1100 hands and am down $40, running nicely breakeven and playing for rakeback!  I swear ONE DAY there’s going to be a ridiculous heater and the second it happens I’m going to hop over here and write about it, because every time I sit down to write about or review poker hands in the last few months its been kind of a downer, its time to generate some positive news.

So various quick tidbits:

• I managed to dig up $600 to deposit for the Poker Stars WCOOP bonus, which is nice having a $240 bonus to work towards. I always like having a tangible goal to work towards. I’m going to have to withdraw $600 to put it back where it belongs soon, but that won’t be a huge hassle…
• …sort of. Poker Stars withdrawals are now consisting of either a check or if you’re withdrawing over $500, a cash withdrawal at something similar to Western Union. I haven’t looked at the exact details yet, but since I will be withdrawing more than $500, that’s probably how I’ll do it. I will probably wait until close to the end of August, when I have unlocked the bonus, because…
• …I came up with a plan for profit sharing with myself. 50% of all profit over $500 gets pulled out and the other 50% stays in to build my bankroll. This first withdrawal will be a bit complicated, because I borrowed $130 of the $600 from my wife, so she gets a proportional amount of the bonus and any profit I earn. So since I have to be over $500 to get the cash withdrawal thing, I’ll wait to withdraw the $600 until I have more profit to pull out.
• I also made GoldStar status (barely), so I’m earning 2x FPP, which will help towards earning enough to get another bonus to work off. I think I’ll try for earning GoldStar again, but that requires 400 points every 3 days, which under my 4 table plan, is 2-3 hours a day, which is unlikely to happen. However, I’ve been experimenting with upping my table count (see my upcoming post) and that might make it feasible.
• In general, I’m doing well. BB/100 around 2.17. I did have a minor misstep where I decided to play some $1/$2, got whacked with several hideous beats, and then proceeded to donk off some in response. Not my proudest moment, and it cost me $60 some bucks in under 20 mins. Yeesh.
• My graph:

So, I finished 10,000 hands last night and they ended much as they started, with a bit of a brutal downswing (more on that in a bit). My stats and graph:

Hands: 10,381
VP$IP: 17.95
PFR: 8.33
W$WSF: 37.27
W$SD: 56.90
Attempt to Steal Blinds: 31.15

Analysis

So, a quick glance at my stats suggests that I’m still generally on target for solid TAG play, which should be all I really need to be successful at the .50/1 limit tables. My PFR aggression is good, my hand selection is generally good, my blind stealing is good. My winning percentage when seeing showdown is perhaps a bit high. Am I folding too often? Maybe. Getting lucky? Maybe. Some combination of the two? Probably. It’s only 2 percentage points higher than what is generally suggested, which means nothing to worry about. All within statistical variance.

What am I most proud of?

My positional play. I’ve always been “aware” of solid positional play. I would pay lip service to it while still limping every so often with 78d in UTG1, etc. I feel that I’m doing a better job positionally preflop, not only avoiding hands in the early spots, but opening up when close to or on the button. Take a look:

My VP$IP and PFR steadily decrease the farther away you move from the button. I may, perhaps, be a bit too willing to play out of the SB. Part of that comes from playing NL some before this, where the implied odds make it worth it to play more hands from the blinds.

Speaking of which, that’s the other facet of my game where I feel I’ve improved. I also am more willing to pay attention to the size of the pot and let that help guide my post-flop decision making. And not necessarily in just a “here’s what my pot odds are, here’s what I need to keep going” but more in a way of generally feeling pot size and determining if I hit my outs, will the pot size have made it worthwhile?

What have I done poorly?

I’m better than I was, but I still occasionally have trouble letting things go. Players at .50/1 are not tricky for the most part. If they donk into you when the 3rd flush card appears, 95% of the time, they have the flush. If they check raise you on the turn, they’ve got a big hand. I let my PokerTracker HUD and my own feelings help guide me on whether I should be folding, but sometimes I still get stubborn and say “I just need to see what they’ve got.”

Who would have thought that I’d have an archenemy at the .50/1 level. But there’s this one guy…

JokerSad
Hands: 786
VP$IP: 18.77
PFR: 9.79
W$SD: 60.38
BB/100: 0.11

So general stats and my observation suggest that he’s a TAG. He plays generally well, although his BB/100 over my limited hand set doesn’t quite reflect it. So why is this guy my archenemy?

Every time I’m in a pot with him, it seems that he manages to pull it out on the river and steal a big pot away from me. And when I went to look at my stats, I’ve lost $21 to him, and the nearest competitor is another TAG I’ve lost $13 to, and I played 3 times as many hands with TAG#2.  I’ve been generally proud of my play lately though. The first few times this happened, the “man, I hate that guy” switch was flipped, and I wasn’t playing at my best as I attempted to get my revenge. But the past few times when I’ve lost a pot to him, I managed to rein in the emotion and stay calm. Staying calm at all times is one of the things I have the hardest time doing, so this represents good progress.

Next up, my 10,000 hand check-in.

So, nobody currently reading the blog probably knows me, but I used to regularly post on this blog. Then I generally gave up poker, mostly because I blew most of my roll on real life circumstances and never really gathered the money to get back in.

Flash forward to the current day. I had a little over $300 saved. I had a lot of different things that I wanted to use it on. An XBox 360. A Nintendo Wii. A new camera to start learning photography on. A trip to Vegas next year. Too much to choose between and not enough money when I’m giving myself a $45 per month allowance that is going into a 3% savings account. At that point, I had kept getting the cravings to start playing poker again and I decided that it would be a better way to use the money than 3% savings.

So to the .50/$1 limit tables I went, since with $300 that’s about all I could afford. PokerStars is the room of choice, simply because I don’t have rakeback at FullTilt and the WorldPokerExchange poker tables looked empty (plus they charge you a substantial fee to withdraw). I started off pretty crappy, results wise. But I felt I was playing well, even if the results didn’t show it.  4500 hands in and I was down 40BB and I was starting to worry that I might have some sort of massive flaw in my game, since the last time I tried playing limit again, I got brutally beaten down as well. But then things started to turn around and I grew more confident in my original assessment that I was indeed playing well. Not to say I probably dont have multiple flaws, but I think I’m playing well enough to handle .50/$1 for a while.

My goal? I think my minimal goal is to play at least break even poker and work towards getting GoldStar status and earning the $285 bonus in a few months. My cautiously optimistic goal is to play well enough to get to $1000 and start playing $1/$2. My outrageous goal is to burst forward to $2000 incredibly quickly and start playing $2/$4 and have a steady income stream going so that I can afford all the random stuff I want.

I plan to start posting some hands that I have questions about. I have some questions about river play that I would love to get some opinions on. In the meantime, my stats at .50/$1 full ring:

Hands Played: 5,682
BB/100: 0.96
Hours: 21.56
VP$IP: 18.16
PFR: 8.22
W$WSF: 36.58
W$SD: 56.40

And a pretty graph.

I mentioned to a friend on Wednesday something to the effect of: “I’ve done dynasties on FOFC to try to track and motivate Weight Loss, and one thing I know about myself is that when I’m not living up to my own expectations I just end up not writing anything at all”

That probably pretty well explains what’s happening here, though, it needs to be my responsibility to write more often, and as I said the last time I did, hey, with this post I’m going to pledge to write more often!   Hopefully I will this time.

I snagged $200 in bonus money from FTP for their mid-year bonus, I was i nthe Iron Man program every month but mostly Bronze with a couple silvers.  I’m setting a new goal for the rest of the year.  Earn Gold or Iron Iron-Man Status at Full Tilt every month for the remainder of the year.  I’ve gotten comfortable 3 or 4 tabling the limit games I play(2-4 mainly) and the only reason I wouldn’t be making those reward levels is simply not playing. Clearing the $200 bonus will require me to make 4000 points in July, and unless I get them by having a few 500 point days and lots of off days, just clearing the bonus should get me to gold status.

Since I hardly played any in May, I started back up at FTP in July by 4-tablign 1/2 limit(instead of the game I would normally play, 2/4), and have been crushing it early on, but, its early on.  I’ve only cleared about 10% of the bonus so far, and am up $140 in play at the 1/2 tables.  Lets see how things look after I’ve knocked out a bit more and am putting in more hands again.

Happy 4th of July, I hope everyone is having a nice relaxing day at the barbecue, and good luck at the tables!

Some people yell at their computer when they lose hands as a matter of regularity. Some throw things, pound the desk, etc. I have always held the belief that I should, for the most part, carry myself when playing online in the same fashion as I would at a live game, showing no external reaction to the results at hand. I fail at this constantly of course. I grimace, I cuss under my breath, I grit my teeth, all things that would be *really* noticible in a live game, and i’m not even happy with that, and wish I was better at it.

Well you can see where this is going, right? I’m playing tonight and get very agitated. No, its not going as far as you think its going, I didn’t directly destroy my computer or a loved one or anything Anyway, I’m taking a beating and hit a point where I’m requiring myself to drop down a level with some new, more strict bankroll requirements that I’ve instituted. As I lose my last hand, and click sit out I let out a yell, “WELL F***”. Problem: I’m playing on my laptop, relaxing on the couch, and my cat is sitting on one arm. He freaks out, jumps, catches my ear in two spots, and the back of my neck. Three *solid* gashes. I start bleeding a LOT(ears, as it would turn out, bleed a LOT from superficial wounds), the laptop is cast aside in a panic, and somehow the display ends up cracked. It either landed badly on something on the floor or hit the table next to the couch.

So anyway, its time for a new laptop display, a new ear, and a new cat. Ok, not really on the last two.

And this really sums up the last few months. Just the ultimate in frustration. In April, I made as much money as I expected to be making in January. But in reality, I’m supremely frustrated. If I was just a marginal consistant winner my bankroll could have doubled or tripled now because of rakeback and bonuses. But man its been all over the place, and I’ve basically been a breakeven poker player for 5 months now, only building any at all because of rakeback.

I can’t be all negative though. I’m only negative in the poker sense. Moving back home, and quitting my job, no matter what happens, has been the best thing I’ve ever done. My contract work looks like it may continue indefinitely, and I actually have a second potential contract offer in the works. The help I’ve been able to give my family, and the time I’ve gotten to spend with them after having lived away from home for 13 years, is priceless. It looks like there’s a reasonable chance that this will lead to self-employment in some form in the end. Perhaps there’s still hope for my poker game, this post doesn’t signal any sort of defeat by any stretch. Its more of a “wow poker has been a massive frustration so far, but the experience as a whole has been wonderful and totally worth it” message.

Three different sessions, three quits that I’m really proud of:
1) 3 hours at Stars 3/6. I won a few pots early, but got stuck about 25 BB. That’s a bit over $150, which, since I’m still adjusting(and semi-shot taking) to 3/6, stings when it happens quickly. But the table is good, my mindset is good, and I never tilt. There’s a gradual climb back up, the fish are very co-operative and stay for the entire session, I play over 300 hands 1-tabling, and I have a massive turnaround, get my rungood on, and crush the game. The fish finally get up, and I get up with them. I play 350 hands, and win $180. A great, balanced session where I played well throughout, and only left when the table conditions dictated the game wasn’t good anymore.

2) 45 minutes at Cake 3/6. I go on a big rush early. I’m up $120 after about 15 minutes. I stay steady for awhile, up $140 about 40 minutes in. Then I take 3 beats in a single orbit. Its bad. One of them is a runner runner WTF hand to take out top set, dude capped his turned draw and hit it on the river, while I capped the nuts. Two other ugly rivers and I’ve dropped $85 in 6 hands. Bad thoughts start setting in. The dreaded “I SHOULD be up over $250 now and on the rush of the month” I planned on playing longer than this. The table is still good. I’m not positive that I’m tilting. But I’m not likely playing my A-game anymore. If anything else happens I might tip over, and I might not have the sense to leave. Its time to leave now.

3) 1 hour at FTP 3/6. I can’t win a hand. I literally go over 60 hands without winning a pot. I’m catching bad, I’m running bad, and I’m taking some hits. I make a close fold on a flop in a multi-way pot, and watch the cards come runner-runner perfect, woulda had a straight flush vs what turned out to be a flopped boat. Ah well, I think I made a good fold anyway. I’m down a bit, $50 over 30 hands or so, not even a blip, and then, as mentioned, I go 60hands without winning a pot. After 110 hands I’m down $225. I finally catch a good hand, flopping a set vs the biggest fish at the table, but a runner-runner flush puts that good hand out. I’m down $270 in a bit over an hour. I’m shot-taking 3/6 here, and I don’t think I played badly, but I’ve hemorrhaged 50 bets in a very short amount of time. The table is still good, but its not as good as it was when I started. i don’t have the worst seat, but I definitely don’t have the best. I’ve got a 33/23 LAGTAG on my right between me and the fish now(who snapped up the seat before I could after the 60/30 donk that was there before left). Its just not my night. I don’t need to chase my losses, and I don’t think I can play my A-game in this situation. I take a deep breath, click sit out next blind, and am done.

Three different situations, one where I was down and came back, one where I decided to “book a win” after I catch myself reacting poorly to a couple beats, and one where I just get completely owned from start to finish and just have to accept that its going to happen sometimes. In all three situations I think I made expert decisions about when I needed to quit. I’m more happy about my quitting decisions than whether or not I lost or won in those sessions.

Regarding the last one specifically, the assbeating, to steal and paraphrase from one of Tommy Angelo’s thoughts on quitting in “Elements of Poker” (ps. BUY IT, you won’t read a better collection of thoughts on poker):

I’m playing limit holdem, i’ve been playing awhile, and I’m running flat. I’m not tilted, yet. If I was to get involved in another swollen pot and lose it, I might be. I’ll play one more big pot. If I win it, I’m back. I’ll take a quick breather and hunker down and see how I hang in. If i lose it, I’m done. I flop my set, I play my hand well, and I lose on the river, and I stick to my plan, and I quit. When I stand up from the table, I feel bad because losing feels bad, but I feel great about the escape.

That last line in bold… I fucking love that line. And I love poker right now. After running super hot early inthe month, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to push my way into 3/6. I’ve given some back, but I can feel myself getting better every day. Artifically, I still want this to be a $1000 month, but really, I don’t care. 3/6 limit 6-max swings are big, at least for me right now(but from what I can tell for everyone always). $1000 isn’t even 200 BB, whether i make that number or not just depends on how I run over my next 1500 hands or so. But damn I feel great about where i’m heading right now.