Finished 20th in event #19 the $2500 6max event. Cashed for $14,400 or so, so a profit of about $11k since I swapped 5% with John aka puddlepirate. Planning on playing the $1500 shootout tomorrow. You can read some updates and stuff on pokernews.com
I had a number of suckouts to get that far but such is tourneys – I don’t think I played bad or anything. The first two hands of the day I was all in, first hand it was folded to me in sb with 75o and a 15k stack at 600/1200/200 and I shipped and older dude in bb later told me he mucked A8o because “he didn’t want to race for 1/2-1/3 of his chips or whatever. Lol old players. Next hand I shipped KTs on the button. I shipped a bunch more until utg who was the loosest player at the table up to this point opened KK, I shipped ATo from the CO and spiked an ace on the turn. Fast forward to the bubble and I opened black aces utg, btn called and both blinds called. Flop was AQ6 two hearts, checked to me I bet 1/3 pot and got shipped on by the button, I snap and he shows AQo and misses his runner runner quads draw. My buddy Jeff aka Jethro87 was unfortunate enough to be the 2nd bubble boy when I busted him for like 2 big blinds in 110th place when 108 paid. The hand previous he ran QQ into AK and lost, so shoutout to him.
Anyways, after the money I probably had about 90k in chips at 800/1600/200 or so. I ended up losing a bit of it back when I flatted KQo with the Q of spades on the btn vs utg open. Flop is K33 two spades. He bets I call. Turn is 7 of spades. He checks I check. River is Jack of hearts he checks I valuebet 12k and he snaps with AKo no spades (wtf?). Then I kinda muddled around stealing and restealing for a bit.
Clayton from leggopoker was on my direct right for most of the day and he was opening quite a bit and I was making his life kinda hell by flatting and 3 betting him quite a bit. The most interesting hand I played vs him was with blinds at 1500/3000/300 when it folds to him in the sb and I say “You know it’s okay to fold one” to which he replies “Ya know I could say the same thing to you” Then he opens to 10.5k or so and I flat 86o with maybe 90k in chips. Flop is K54 rainbow and he cbets 13k or something which I flat. Turn is another K and he checks to me. I tank for a bit and check back hoping to make a pair or straight by the river and check it down or bluff alot of rivers if I miss. River is the ten of diamonds and he bets out 20k and I go all in for about 64k or 44k more and he tank folds. Hehe.
I then lost about 40k in chips where I flatted an old man’s utg raise with black nines out of the big blind and ch called his small flop and turn bets on a K7463 board no flushdraw. After that I got moved to a different table with Seabeast, some asian dude, short guy I played with on day1 and eurolag. I have maybe 110k or something at this point when asian dude utg opens at 3k/6k/500 or something and I re-ship black Tens. He calls with jacks but I spike a ten on the flop vs him and I’m up to 220k or so. I fold a bit until asian dude opens in CO or utg+1 I forget, button ships about 110k or something, I look down at red eights in the BB and reship. Asian dude folds, btn tables AQo and I lose that race. So I’m down to like 15bbs or something, I ship alot until my bustout hand where asian dude opened button to 19k, at 4k/8k/1k and I reship my stack of 120k with KQo which he tank calls and tables A8o. I brick off and I’m out 20th.
I definitely left out a quite a few hands and blinds may have been a bit diff but its close enough. I’m super tired atm and have to wake up in 8 hours to play the shootout which starts in 10 hours. Gl at the tables.
First off, I didn’t end up playing the $2k like I said I was going to. I woke up with a migraine that morning (I’ve gotten them once every couple of weeks my whole life) and by the time I was feeling better it was too late to register. I did end up playing the $2500 6max today however. I made it to day 2, unfortunately really, I have 15,400 chips with blinds at 600/1200 and a 100 ante tomorrow. Pretty sure I’m gonna bubble, but who knows one more double up and I might make the money. There’s currently 137 people left or so and 108 cash. There weren’t too many terribly interesting hands from today, though I played a ton of pots as it was 6max which I liked. I did bluff off about 8k chips to seabeast who was sitting on my direct left on hand where I 4 bet bluffed him small with KQo and he flatted and I just check folded a T99 flop. Not really sure how I feel about it, I probably just should have 4 bet shipped or folded pre but whatever. Anyways I’m super tired and gonna get some rest. Pz.
So today was/is the $1500 6max event. I lasted all of about 30 minutes. We started with 4500 chips at 25/50 blinds I played maybe two orbits winning one pot with a cbet and folding pf vs a 3 bet when my bustout hand occured. Utg opened to 150, I look down at 6c6h and flat utg+1, sb flats, and bb squeezes for 600 more. Utg folds, I call and sb folds. So the pot was 1800 if my math was correct and we see a flop of 689 rainbow. He openships for about 2x pot and I snapcall. He flips over black aces, but unfortunately for me the turn was an Ah and I missed my quads on the river sending me to the rail. Not much I can do, I played well and tomorrow is the $2k fullring event which I plan on playing.
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday is all the poker celebs I have seen. Today I saw TJ Cloutier playing chinese poker for $50/point or so I believe. I also managed to see rizen and aejones walking around today, though I didn’t approach either of them. Yesterday I saw Scotty Nguyen(sp?) Jeff Madsen, and a bunch of other guys I’m forgetting atm. I also shook Greg Raymer’s hand and congratulated him on his finish in the $40k as he was walking out with his wife. So that was cool I guess. That’s about it for today, gonna go grind some online.
I’ll leave you with a picture from the webcam at my dog’s doggy daycare place where he is while I’m out here in vegas. Apparently he hasn’t exactly been on his best behavior there…
PS Quick story about registration. When I registered for the event today the lady accidentaly put me in the $2k event tomorrow for the $1.5k I gave her. I suppose I could have taken the extra $500 but I consider myself a pretty honest guy so I went back and got it refunded and switched. Also, quick PSA, don’t get in line to register for wsop events with your friends because that’s how they assign seats/tables. I met a buddy there and he was telling me how his friend and him are at the same 6max table because of this, make sure everyone in line around you when registering is bad/old imo.
So I got to vegas yesterday and played my first wsop event of the year today, a $1500 NLH 9max event. I plan on playing 9-10 events this year and am fully willing to lose the $15-20k it will cost me. I obviously have hopes of winning a bracelet like every other donk that descends on vegas this time of year, but realistically I’ll probably be satisfied if I breakeven on my buyins.
Today’s event wasn’t very exciting, my table was fairly tight with the exception of two donators that busted relatively quickly before I could pick up any hands against them. I made it to the third level of 75/150 blinds with 4k in chips (you start with 4.5k) when utg opened for 500 and utg+2 flatted when I looked down at AKo. I shipped obv, I considered making it 2k or something but it’s going to leave me in an awkward spot with 1/2 pot bet left and I think maximizing fold equity and seeing five cards is way more important than balancing or trying to get sick value from KQ or whatever. I don’t think overcalling can be considered here. Anyways, utg called with JJ and the flat caller mucked after some deliberation. The board bricked out and I lost. Pretty standard and uneventful like I said. Tomorrow is the $1.5k 6max which I plan on playing, hopefully I’ll win my first flip! That’s all for now gotta get some rest gl!
Impressive Police Rescue Dog
I don’t really want to talk about it and I’m sure you don’t want to hear me whine about it. I will be a man about it and continue to post my monthly results as good or bad as they may be. I also lost about $900 in tournaments fees.
When I tell people I play online poker for a living they often ask me where my edge comes from. After all you can’t see your opponents and get a read off them, right? Lol, well anyways when moving from 2/4 to 5/10 plo I think the main difference is the caliber of regulars that you are going to be tangling with. Below is a list of things I’ve compiled that separate the okay players from the good/great ones of PLO. It’s also where I think a lot of my edge comes from and where I was giving up a lot of money to the better regs when first moving up. Everyone is making money off the donks, but if you can’t do your best to at least breakeven against the regs you are never going to succeed at this game. So without further adiu, good PLO players…
–3bet wide (If someone is only 3 betting AAxx this is 2.5% of all PLO hands, they will be extremely predictable and easy to play postflop when you know exactly what someone has. In addition, they are missing out on a ton of value by not pushing other preflop equity to set their opponents up to make big mistakes in 3 bet pots later)
–don’t call off their chips drawing dead (This might seem obvious and most people think plo is all flips but you would be surprised how often this happens. Consider underflushes and underfulls. You would be surprised how often villains check/call three streets with a flopped 6high flush on a AKJ monotone board, or check/call or check/raise a 669 board with a hand like 4567 and you stack them with 69xx or 99xx and they were drawing dead the whole time. Incidentally, if villains are half decent and capable of folding these types of hands they create great spots to triple barrel bluff on because people are check/raising the nuts on the flop usually and check/calling weaker hands that can’t stand three barrels.)
–don’t always pot it with the nuts (From most players the river pot bet is going to be the nuts like 90% of the time. There’s no reason to bet this large, you might as well bet smaller and give your opponent better odds to call and give yourself better odds to bluff in the future.)
–raise less than pot on flop to get called by worse (I remember a hand I played against a 5/10 reg where I bet a T72 board with A2KQ or something like that and he raised me less than 3x my bet. It’s a spot where I would have just folded if he potted it, and it’s still the correct play even with his bet sizing, but because it was smaller raise I thought, oh he’s just doing this with a weak overpair, weak ten, weak two pair,draw or whatever I can call and improve and stack him. Well I ended up calling, hitting my two pair with a King on the turn and getting it in vs his set. The important point is he induced my bad flop peel with bottom pair and overs with his small raise sizing and if he would have potted it like most bad players do, I would have folded and he wouldn’t have won my stack.)
–raise the flop with less than the nuts (You would be surprised how often some players are literally only checkraising the nuts and nothing else. I mean on a K94r board their check/raising range is literally KKxx and on a T67 board its 89xx and that’s it. Well, its very easy to read and play against and you need to be mixing in some check/raise bluffs from time to time or some thinish check/raises vs people who cbet too much)
-are capable of bluffing (Again this might seem obvious, but there are players who literally snap check back the river when they miss their draw and don’t even consider bluffing. It’s very easy to make a note on these players and adjust accordingly. While plo is a game of drawing to the nuts, you need to be bluffing from time to time)
–don’t always raise with the nuts, call with it sometimes (Consider a KT9 two spade board where I lead out with AQ of spades and get raised pot. It’s a spot I can peel and then lead any spade, K,J,T, or 9 turn. This is like 20 cards, I dunno the exact # you count them yourself, but suffice it to say that it’s definitely profitable spot for me to be calling your raise even though you have the nuts. You need to be calling here some % of the time so you don’t turn your hand completely face up.)
–don’t cbet 90% of the time (I can just bluffraise you a ton and you never get any free cards when you have the worst hand and get check/raised.)
–valuebet thinly (Checkraising the K high flush on the river for example where most people are afraid to do it without the Ace high flush definitely makes you way harder to play against. Most just bet or check/call here.)
–barrel in position (How often does someone check/call an 886 board with 8xxx vs a hand like QQxx. How often is he folding the turn or river with QQxx? Good players take advantage of this.)
Well that’s about all I have for strategy for today. Hopefully you learned something and if you did hopefully you don’t play in my games. In case you haven’t noticed by now I’ve also entered into a very, very, very small partnership with pacific poker. If you haven’t checked them out before you can play some 888 poker tournaments. Unfortunately they don’t accept US customers as real money players, but they do have some cool features like sports betting and backgammon which may be worth checking out. Be good, and good luck!
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mary_roach_10_things_you_didn_t_know_about_orgasm.html
$100 freeroll is off. I broke it yesterday playing some 5/10 plo, but luckily none of you caught me :). I’ve grinded a bit back at 2/4 and know I can beat that game really solidly, I see no reason not to play in good 5/10 games. I do however, hope to stay away from anything higher or the headsup tables.
Lost $11k yesterday for one of my biggest days in the red ever. Total downswing is somewhere around $30k which is definitely my biggest downswing ever. Graph is below. Not included is $6k I lost playing 25/50 plo with antes and $1-3k I lost playing 10/20 plo with antes. I’m not gonna sit here and whine about how bad I’m running, the fact is:
I made poor decisions in hands I played(raising when I should be folding or calling, calling when I should be folding, folding when I should be calling etc). I made poor decisions in games I sat in(sitting in tough games, sitting in games I am not bankrolled for). And I made poor decisions in when I played(took time off which made me play worse, not 100% focused when I played, not quitting when I should be, not playing in primetime to take advantage of juicy games).
After especially big losing days I like to remind myself of two things which I think poker players often forget:
1) This is why we are paid so well. Poker players make well over $100/hour. No college degree required. Not many people can go to work and at the end of the money be left with less money than they started the day with. On days where you lose money, you should really feel like you really earned your pay that day(not literally of course, but your theoretical hourly because it was a tough day at work).
2) While playing poker professionally is a financially risky profession it is not a life threatening risky profession. Think about how much poker players bitch and moan about this or that bad beat or running bad or whatever boo hoo my life is so stressful. Why don’t you try being a cop, firefighter, crab fisherman, in the army, demolition man, insert dangerous profession here for a day where there’s a very real possibility you may die every day you go to work. In all likelihood you are making more than these people and yet there’s about a 0% chance you are going to die doing your job.
Anyways, on the bright side of things I did manage to stack the great Stinger for an $11k pot and I also have way less money on fulltilt so if I get hacked there it’s not actually that big of a deal anymore. On stars I have way more $$ but I finally got my RSA token there so I’m not so worried. If you haven’t taken other basic security measures I suggest you follow this guide If you don’t want to pay for roboform you can download keypass for free. It’s not as fancy of a program I’m sure, but it gets the job done.
Also, I will ship $100 to anyone who sees me playing headsup at a headsup table, or sees me playing above $2/$4 plo for the rest of the month. I may renew this for June who knows. There’s sick money to be made at $2/$4 plo and loads of donks. Current plan is to 6 table grind that for awhile, work on my fundamentals, and put in some hours slowly grinding my roll back.
Prittay, Prittay, Prittaaaay Bad Graph
http://www.pokerhand.org/?4230649
Unfortunately it didn’t go my way, but such is poker. It didn’t even really tilt me that bad I just kinda said, well biggest pot of my life, that was fun, reloaded and kept playing. I’ve been doing decently in the 5/10 plo games this month but they have been very, very swingy. I’ve had multiple plus or minus $7k days. The past two days I don’t think I’ve been playing that great and I may play some 2/4 tomorrow to get some confidence back.
The fact that Pokertracker Omaha won’t import ante games tilts me more than anything though. It’s really frustrating to not have any idea how much I’m up/down and only a rough guesstimate. It may be good for me in the long run I suppose as it may force me to go get HEM finally and stop holding out like a dinosaur but whatever I’m really not looking forward to setting that up how I want. I remember setting up PT3 over the course of like 2 days and I only used it for a couple sessions before deciding I hated it.
If you haven’t heard about PokerCurious.com yet you should check it out. It compiles all sorts of poker related data together and puts it all in one place for you. I talk with Zimba (the creator of the site) from time to time and he’s a really great guy who’s been working hard on the site for months so I’m trying to show my support!
I listened to the recent DeucePlays podcast with Andrew Robl and thought it was pretty good but Bart Hansen was pretty out of line for the first 10 minutes or so of the interview imo. It’s pretty damn impolite to ask your interviewee why he got it in bad for a $200k pot and basically berate him for it for a good 10 mins about it. Other than that it’s pretty interesting.
Towards the end of it Bart asks Andrew if he’s interested in learning other games like 8-game mix on stars. It kinda got me thinking about whether I want to too. I feel like I’m becoming a pretty decent plo player and consider myself pretty decent at NLH, but learning six new games just seems like such a momentous task that it seems almost unattainable. Also, I’m not sure if it’s even worth it. I really wonder what a guy like Boosted J’s hourly one tabling the $400/$800 8 game is. I don’t really know. I’m also not really sure if there’s ever going to be any huge HORSE boom with people flocking to play limit/stud games. It is interesting to think about though and maybe I’ll start playing a few k hands a month of low limit stud/o8/2-7 whatever just to see how I like it. I know stinger made a mil playing plo way before it was the cool thing to and dabbling in the other games now before lots of people start learning them may be the time to do it. At least something to consider I think.
So I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted and there’s been a couple reasons for that. #1 is probably that I get about three spam comments(which turn into e-mails to me) per day which really tilts me because I go to check the e-mail just to make sure it’s spam and when it is I have to logon here and mark it and get it deleted. It wastes a lot of my time and in general makes me very unmotivated to spending any more time on here making posts. I’ll probably look into IP blocking or just disabling comments altogether in the next week or so who knows.
Anyways, Petaluma and San Francisco were a blast. Dodgy wrote up a good summary of the trip in his P-town post if you’d like to hear about it but I’m not going to reinvent the wheel or anything. Noel also posted footage of our epic camel encounter! I will put up some pictures tho!
Dodgy, Me and Alcatraz
Sealions
Me, Noel and the Golden Gate Bridge
Dodgy, Noel, Me, Bridge and San Francisco (Thx for this one dodgy)
Me in Alcatraz
A couple things I’d like to note from the trip. Gordo’s has delicious burritos. I wish they had a place like this in Seattle. We ate there twice. The 101 Casino in Petaluma has an unbeatable 3/6 limit game. The blind structure is $1 small blind, $3 big blind, and $1 bad beat jackpot on the button every hand. There is a $4 rake taken every single hand whether a flop is seen or not. So if you raise from any position preflop, and everyone folds, you get your money back. So in other words, by choosing to play a hand, you are risking something to win nothing. Now we just went there to have fun obv(it’s 3/6 limit, I don’t even know how to play that game) and for drinks but even those were $4 a pop. Well we ended up getting kicked out after getting into an argument with another patron anyways but my point is I give this a casino a big thumbs down and wouldn’t recommend this casino to anyone.
Okay, on to April results. I didn’t play much, but I game selected very well and was playing my A game when I did. I just felt kinda burnt out from the grind but my recent vacation has gotten me re-motivated and I’m hoping to have a big May, both $$ wise and volume wise. I’ll just post NLH screenshots because plo play was split between laptop and desktop but I played 6,905 hands and won $978 playing plo. I also lost $1,315 playing tournaments and $800ish playing 10/20 with antes. In total not including rakeback I made somewhere around $9,256 in April.
NLH Ptracker
NLH Graph
I really enjoyed playing with antes but I will probably avoid those games in the future unless they are the only ones with action for the simple fact that I’m pretty anal about collecting my hand histories(if I wasn’t I’d play on cake way more) and as of right now it doesn’t look like pokertracker is going to be capable of tracking these games. As far as strategy goes in these games, the blinds are bigger so you are effectively playing bigger stakes. The equivalent of $16/$32 blinds are in the middle at a $10/$20 6max game with antes except the cost per hand is more evenly spread across the players obviously instead of just two people contributing to the pot pre-preflop each hand (ya that’s right I’m coining the street). So if you buyin for “100 big blinds” you effectively have 62.5 big blinds if people raise pot preflop, which is $88 at $10/$20. So the two takeaways should be that
1) Winning lots of small pots is much more profitable in ante games and
2) Buying in deep definitely makes sense at these tables, unless you are used to playing 63 big blind poker