March Review

I know its not quite the end of the month yet, but I do not intend to play any poker tomorrow and so thought it best to do my March Review now.... also haven't posted for a while as have been away over the weekend skiing in the alps :)

First off, Hannes' posted a question in my last blog entry asking why I play 4 tables if I play better poker when I am only playing 2. The reason is that although I play better poker when 2 tabling, my hourly winrate is still bigger when I 4 table. As long as my winrate is over half of what it is when I 2 table then I will make more money by 4 tabling. This is why I usually 4 table, but go down to 2 tables when I want to tweak my game.

I have played a total of 20074 hands in March for a profit of about $500. I don't know the exact amount because the rakeback calculator in Holdem Manager is not 100% accurate.... but $500 including rakeback should be pretty close to the actual value.

Although this is slightly more than my February winnings, I have played more hands. I feel that I have been playing better poker, but (as always) I still have a long way to go. In my defence, I ran really badly in the middle of the month, and then ran breakeven for most of the rest of it.... but that shouldn't be an excuse.

Through recent discussions on MSN with James, I think that I have identified 2 major leaks in my game:

The first one was my blind play when there were late position limpers. I was reminded of a comment I once made at one of the uni tournaments: "Any time you get more money in while you're ahead you're playing well", I would like to retract this comment as it is very over generalised and does not take into account many other factors, the most important being that playing hands out of position vs an aggressive opponent who knows how to use position to their advantage has a huge effect on the relative strength of your hand. With hands such as KTo I would often raise in the BB if the CO or BTN limped, but playing a hand as weak as KTo out of position vs even semi-aggressive opponents is very difficult and almost certainly -EV because of their positional advantage. Versus very loose passive opponents position is not as important because they do not know how to bluff or semibluff and so its much easier to know if you have the best hand, but vs good aggressive opponents, raising KTo out of position is bad because it is very rarely going to make a very strong hand, and it will not be difficult for an aggressive opponent to push you off the best hand using their positional advantage. The discussion concluded that position counts as a 2:1 advantage in the hand and so to play a hand out of position, you should add 33% to your opponents equity which I think is a pretty accurate estimation.

The second leak I discovered, was that I was making very little money on the button, much less than in the cutoff, I think this is due to coldcalling raises with hands such as QJs, ATs and AJo where I didn't want to 3-bet or fold. I think that this is a pretty blatant leak, and it has had a really significant effect on my winrate. This month I have made a whopping $728 in the CO but lost a total of $82 OTB, clearly a massive leak as I should be making even more from the BTN than from the CO. By using the filters in Holdem Manager, I discovered that I very rarely coldcalled from the CO but often did from the BTN, which is where most of my losses have come from. I need to learn to let go of hands such as QJs when there is an early position raise because my postflop edge is not enough to play these hands profitably when I am not the aggressor. I believe that I am also 3-betting a little too liberally from the BTN and am loosing money in 3-bet pots from the BTN too.

I have qualified for Ironman 'Silver' status on Full Tilt, not really a great achievement because the 'medals' are worth very little, but I guess every little counts.

As always, I have learned a lot about poker in the past month and I think that I have improved as a player. I am going to try to fix the two leaks identified this month and attempt to boost my winrate a bit, however I have an increasing amount of work to do for uni at the moment and so will not be able to play very much poker over the next two months, but I will still be keeping my blog updated with the small amount of poker I do play.

As much as I am embarrassed to show it, I can't really write a March review without posting my very unimpressive graph. The green line is winnings and the blue line is winnings + rakeback (though rakeback is not 100% accurate). As you can see from the graph, its one big horrible breakeven stretch, but I'm making money so I can't complain, and I have learned a lot about my game.



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I am going to Spain for a week on Thursday, so wont be able to blog for a week, but will be back around the 11th with some news.

Happy grinding :)

Tilt is -EV?

I am pretty burned out this month, played a lot of hands, especially towards the start of the month and I think that it has had quite a big impact on my game. I have been pretty much breakeven for the last 15K hands and I can't just say 'varience', there are some clear leaks in my game. I have been playing between 4 to 5 tables and am playing for longer and longer sessions. Often I find myself getting frustrated after about 2 hours because I am not up very much and then I start to loose concentration on the game and tilt. Tilt comes in a variety of flavours, and tiredness + frustration produces a very potent but subtle form.

I am well on track to qualify for 'Ironman silver' this month and so I am going to try to take the rest of the month easy. I am going to take a few days off playing this weekend and try to watch some more deuces cracked vids as well as posting on the 2+2 forum.

Last night I played in a $10+1 tourney on Full Tilt just to mix it up a bit and ended up coming 21st out of about 290 when I lost a race with AJ vs 66. I think I played well during the tournament and managed to do well despite being very card dead (66 was my highest PP and AQ my highest non paired hand in 3 hours) as well as running 55 and A3 into AA when I shoved the BTN vs the blinds, I lost both hands but luckily was up against smaller stacks. After the first hour my stack never got above 15BBs so I was shortstacked for almost the entire tourney but I managed to hold on and I was just unlucky not to win the 50/50 at the crucial time and therefore busted in 21st for a disappointing $16. I think that my biggest leak was playing too tight on the bubble, where I think I should be shoving any 2 when folded to me OTB, because I need to build a decent stack.... but I intend to play a few more small buyin tourneys this month so will see how it goes.

Decided to play a 1 hour session today 2 tabling so I could really concentrate on my game. I opened up a bunch of tables and picked the best 2. I have to say.... by playing 2 tables and really concentrating on every hand, I think I produced some of the best poker I have ever played. Maybe I was just running well, but I planned every hand and thought carefully about each decision and not once did I find myself in a tough spot with no idea what to do. I think that cutting down to just a couple of tables is really beneficial and I am going to try to do it once a week or so to try to improve my game.

Will try to post regularly over the next few weeks. Until then......

Plodding along

Sorry about the lack of posts recently, I have been very busy with work, and when I have not been working I have been playing.

March has been 'interesting' since my last post on the 6th. In the last 11 days I have played a whopping 11250 hands of poker, generated $453.97 of rake and all I have to show for it is a loss of $13.93. Add rakeback to that however and it looks more like $100 so I guess its not 'too' bad.

In my defence I have been running very very badly, I have been dealt AA 54 times for a loss of $92.03 with a measly 40% won at showdown and at one point I was down $280 just with AA.

Although I have been running bad, I think that my play is still improving, I am becoming more and more confident at 50NL and I think that I am almost at the point where I feel comfortable that I can beat the game, although I still have some major leaks which need to be fixed.

I am doing the iron man challenge on Full Tilt this month, will not be able to make iron, but am on track for silver and should be able to make gold. I don't think that the iron man promotion is very good value, but I would like to prove to myself that I have enough stamina to do it.

Have also purchased Holdem Manager to replace Poker Tracker 2, I debated for quite a while before getting it because I had tested out the beta and had trouble getting used to the interface, but I bit the bullet and forked out $55 for the 'small stakes' version which will import hands up to 50NL (there is a $25 addon to purchase the 'full' version which will import higher stakes). I have now managed to get used to the layout and HUD and I love it. It is still being developed and so there are some bugs and a few features missing but there are regular updates and 'Roy' seems to be pretty good at fixing all the issues.

Here is my graph for the month, the green line is my poker winnings and the blue line is poker winnings + RB (i.e. net winnings), its been a pretty breakeven month so far, but hopefully I will start running better soon. There is a pretty sick downswing in the middle where I dropped about 6BI at 50NL and then a long breakeven stretch where I decided to play 25NL for a bit. The final 5000 hands are 50NL again.



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And just thought I would share a screenshot from today where I tured quad kings, doesn't happen everyday. (Admire the table mod :))



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Term has now finished and am going home tomorrow, getting the train down to London and am going to see if I can grind out 3 hours of poker on the train if they have wireless... should be interesting.

March Update

So far in March, I have played 4011 hands of 50NL for a total of $128.85 (3.21ptBB/100). I started the month well, running up about $210 of profit, but then went on a rather sudden 4BI downswing, taking me back down to almost breakeven for the month. I was quite surprised at how much loosing 4BIs at 50NL effected me emotionally, not through tilt, but it made me doubt my game so much. It just seemed that every move I tried to make was the wrong one, and my opponents were constantly outplaying me by 3-betting me preflop when I had a weak hand, or check-raising the flop whenever I missed. This of course is standard variance, and I know it is, but even so, the simple procedure of loosing almost $200 in about 500 hands really got to me.

Once I had got over my stupidity and realised that $200 is only 4BIs, and that 4BIs swings were going to happen on a weekly basis, and that much bigger swings are guaranteed to happen at some point, it became much easier to deal with it. I resisted the temptation to play 25NL, but played a bit tighter than my normal game at 50NL so as to avoid tricky (high variance) situations, the result being that over the final 1000 hands, I made it back to my current total of just under $130.

I believe that poker players learn the most when going through downswings, and this most recent one has made me realise that since I have moved up to 50NL, I am much more emotionally attached to the money that I am playing with. 5-6BI swings happen regularly at 6max and to be able to deal with them I need to think of money in terms of buyins, not in terms of $$.

I have now finished watching the Unconventional Wisdom series at Deuces Cracked which has really changed how my thought process works when playing, some really great stuff in the videos and I would highly recommend it to anyone playing 50NL-200NL.

In other news, I have $200 stuck on Battlefield Poker which I cant access because of this whole microgaming scandal. Not sure exactly what is going on, but apparently the company that controls the funds has gone into liquidation and all the funds have been frozen at the moment. A lot of people have a lot more tied up in the affected sites than me, but would be nice to see my $200 again. (More info here)

Febuary Review

Febuary has been a very important month for me. Up to the 6th of Febuary ,I was playing 25NL on Full Tilt to get used to the software until I started playing 50NL. I found the players at 25NL to be mostly weaktight, often raising or 3-betting preflop, but playing very poorly postflop when they did not hit a hand. Having had a bit of a tough time at the end of January, I managed to adapt my game to the 25NL players, and over 6000 hands of 25NL over the month of February I ran at 9.2ptBB/100 hands, netting a total profit of $275.

On the 7th of February, the money for my stake arrived, and I entered the world of 50NL. It was very quickly clear that 50NL was a very different game, with the average player being fairly loose and very aggressive. I would regularly run into 60/30 type opponents against whom I had had little experience playing against. The end result of all this extra aggression was higher variance, since bluffing and semi-bluffing were used much more frequently at this level, I would often find my self putting my stack in whereas I would have probably folded at 25NL.

As would be expected, I struggled to do well at 50NL. Initially I ran very well and managed to suckout a few times with KK vs AA and quickly ran up a $250 profit. However, it was clear to me that my good results were due more to running well than to playing good poker and on reviewing my sessions I could see that I was spewing a lot of chips playing medium sized pots. I was giving up too easily and regularly getting pushed off the best hand and finally, I dropped $300 in 2.5K hands.

After 8000 hands of 50NL, I had only a $100 profit and so decided to spend the rest of the month playing 25NL. I signed up to deuces cracked and watched some 50NL as well as a lot of 200NL videos in the Unconventional Wisdom series, and I slowly managed to understand where my leaks were.

All in all, February has been a great month, even though I did not do very well at 50NL I have learned a huge amount and am confident that I will be able to beat the game. Pre February 7th my winnings were $156 + about $40 in bonuses and from the 7th until the end of February I netted another $220 + about $80 in bonuses and $100 in rakeback, taking my monthly total to about $600 of which $200 is going to my staker (50% of the $400 from the 7th to 29th).

Here is my graph and stats for the month