March Results and Superfreakonomics

March ended up being a pretty good month for me. I made ~$34k online and lost $6.5k playing live for a total of around $27.5k. I’ll take it!

Live I played a $1,100 tournament out at Tulalip and only managed to last five hours of play or so. I wrote down most of my hands in a rough draft of a post wsop style, but I dunno if people like these tourny writeups so let me know if you want me to spend the extra 45 mins or so it would take to get it finished up. I had just gotten done reading Gus Hansen’s Every Hand Revealed and to be honest I think I played worse because of it. I’m glad I experimented with it and tried some new things out though, as I certainly relearned why defending your blinds with weak hands is a bad idea! My girlfriend who’s a pretty big poker noob had some great advice for me when she told me I need to “just play my game and not anyone else’s”. I also played in a O8/LHE mixed game live and lost $5.5k. Learned some stuff from that too, may be back, but I’d rather not go into much detail about that here.

Online my graph is a bit deceiving as I won a bunch in the hold’em rounds, both LHE and NLH, a little in O8 and PLO and continued to donk off a bunch in the stud8 round. The good news is I’ve since played a decent amount of low limit stud8, got some more coaching from Chipsahoya over at stox and am proud to say that so far this month stud8 is my biggest winning game at +$11k and it feels great to finally have fixed some leaks and having some success in that game.

HEM Graph

Stud Games



Stud Hi: -$5.5k
Stud8: -$13k
Razz: +$6.6k

This month so far has been a bit rough. I started out immediately on a -$20k downer, followed by a +$25k upper followed by an -$8k downer. I’ve been running good in the stud games and atrociously in the big bet games. I’m currently like -$40k under EV just this month so far, but blah blah blah you don’t care. Basically I slowly grind up my stack a bunch in the limit rounds only to lose it all and then some in some huge $10-$20k pot which I get bad beat or lose a flip in over and over this month. I will spare you the beats and instead show a hand I think I played poorly.

Seat 1: rezzydezzy1 ($6,330.75)
Seat 3: andr3w321 ($16,632.75)
Seat 5: Jeetorious ($4,598)
andr3w321 posts the small blind of $20
Jeetorious posts the big blind of $40
The button is in seat #1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to andr3w321 [Qd Qs]
rezzydezzy1 folds
andr3w321 raises to $120
Jeetorious calls $80
*** FLOP *** [5h 6h Ah]
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 checks
Jeetorious checks
*** TURN *** [5h 6h Ah] [3c]
andr3w321 bets $200
Jeetorious calls $200
*** RIVER *** [5h 6h Ah 3c] [5d]
andr3w321 checks
Jeetorious has 15 seconds left to act
Jeetorious bets $477
andr3w321: stupid 5
andr3w321 has 15 seconds left to act
andr3w321 calls $477
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Jeetorious shows [5c 7c] three of a kind, Fives
andr3w321 mucks
Jeetorious wins the pot ($1,593) with three of a kind, Fives
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $1,594 | Rake $1
Board: [5h 6h Ah 3c 5d]
Seat 1: rezzydezzy1 (button) didn’t bet (folded)
Seat 3: andr3w321 (small blind) mucked [Qd Qs] – two pair, Queens and Fives
Seat 5: Jeetorious (big blind) showed [5c 7c] and won ($1,593) with three of a kind, Fives

Notice my chat. I know I’m beat, call anyways and cost myself an unnecessary $477. I could show you countless hands like these this month in LHE or O8 or PLO or NLH where I know I’m beat on the river, but simply refuse to fold something at the top of my range in a spot because it’s too “exploitable”. The fact of the matter is it’s only exploitable if the villain both realizes it’s exploitable and then does something about it (aka bluffs me) and 90% of opponents aren’t going to notice these little things and will just play their hand face up most of the time. Even I’ll see a spot from time to time that may be +EV to jam the river on, but will end up passing and checking cause I don’t want the extra $4k variance or whatever when I get him to fold 55% of them when I only need him to fold 50% of the time. So ya, not much I can do but keep improving, not let the beats get to me and strive to play better during the bad run than an opponent in my shoes would (aka win Tommy Angelo’s reciprocality game).

Another quick read I recently got done with was Super Freakonomics To be honest I was a bit disappointed as there wasn’t that much new information to me, but I imagine I have only myself to blame for that as I’d already seen the 60 minutes segment on the book which gave most of the more interesting stuff away, as well as having read the original Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.)
book and Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference which had some of the same data and points regurgitated. In relation to gambling my two takeaways were:

1. All nosebleed players were basically in the right place at the right time. I’m not sure if that’s the best way to put it, but basically the book and some of Malcom Gladwell’s books bring up the point that 90% of hockey players were born in the first three months of the year. Why? Because growing up the junior hockey leagues (and most kid sports) divide up the players into elite and mediocre leagues/players. Well it’s only natural that the relatively older kids (aka the ones born at the beginning of the year) are going to be separated and put into the elite league. As a result, they get to play with the better players and they get better because of that and then the same thing happens again next year and this competitive advantage just builds on itself all the way to the professional level.

Well the nosebleed players are no different in this regard. In order to be a nosebleed player you need to have been playing professionally in the ’05 to ’07 range and have built up your roll enough to start playing in the 25/50, and then 50/100, 100/200, 200/400 games as they were introduced and then you’d have to run good enough so you had an opportunity to play in the good nosebleed games with Guy when they ran. I mean every single one of the nosebleed players today basically came up at the exact same time. I mean sure, Taylor came first, followed by Btown, followed by Stinger and cts and Galfond and Durrrr and the Dang bros, krantz etc. but I bet if you did a study and found out the exact date that each of these players played their first hand of 5/10 or first joined cardrunners or first decided to go pro and start grinding every day you would find a remarkable correlation in dates. All of them are slightly different ages, Stinger being the youngest I can think of at 21/22(I think?) and most being 25-27ish, but in terms of poker career they all started at about the same time and moved up in stakes together. The reason not really any new faces have arrived at the nosebleeds since these guys’ rise is there just isn’t as much money in poker anymore. It’s simply not possible to win as much as quickly anymore. There is no Guy feeding the high stakes games or donks giving away their stacks at 25/50 anymore. There is also the live group of players, Ivey, Antonius, Negreanu, Cunningham, Lederer etc who basically all came up at the same time too and have very similar poker career timelines as each other.

I hope the analogy makes sense and I did an okay job of explaining it… obv all those guys all have tremendous talent, but they owe a ton of success to simply timing and being in the right place at the right time.

2. It’s hard wired into our brains for losses to hurt more than wins feel good. Ever feel absolutely sick to your stomach if you have a -5 buyin(or whatever -$x amount day) and just feel kinda good if you have a +5 buyin day? You’re not the only one. “Superfreakonomics” has a great epilogue where they talk about a series of experiments conducted on monkeys. My favorite experiment was one where they introduced two gambling games. In one game a monkey is presented with one grape and by a random coinflip either received only that grape or got a bonus grape too. In a second game, a monkey is presented with two grapes and by a random conflip either receives the two grapes or has one grape taken away. In both games the EV of the game is one grape, but the monkeys strongly preferred the first game that started with only one grape. The monkeys apparently suffered from “loss aversion” where the pain from losing one grape was greater than the pleasure from gaining one.

So there you go, even monkeys feel less good on winning days than bad they feel on losing days! It’s hardwired into us!

The game of life is coming!