More ups and downs

Since my win from yesterday, I have had some minor successes but also some setbacks, so that my current bankroll is only $75 or so. We'll see how it continues, at least I am happy about the way I am playing.

I realized what I was doing wrong at Party. The blinds increase much slower than at Pacific, and I was simply too impatient. At Pacific, when the blinds hit 50/100 or 75/150 (starting stack 1200 or 1500), you have to start making moves, because the blinds increase every ten hands (!!). But at Party, when the blinds are 50/100 (starting stack 2000) it takes ten full minutes before the blinds increase to 100/200. This means you have much more time to wait for good cards, and there is no need to make desperate moves, and also steals become less urgent.

Another property of the Party players is that they often cannot let go of a hand. Many times, a continuation bet with air is simply not going to work, and I did not take this sufficiently into account. Only when the blinds really mean something (at least 100/200) are the players more liable to lay hands down, though even there you see the most horrible calls.

In my last game, a frequent raiser raised to 600 on the button (level 100/200). I reraised all-in for 2100 (I think it was), and he actually called... with 44. Unfortunately, I did not hold a higher pair but only two high cards, and I lost this race. I suppose that I should not have been racing in this situation at all and just fold to his raise, but he had gotten on my nerves. I guess that was my real mistake in this situation!

A first

For the first time ever, I have won a $22 SNG at Party! It is of course a bit crazy to play in such a game with a bankroll of $62, but I really did not have the feeling that the players there were better (from my previous attempt). Of course, had I lost, I would have switched back to $11 or even $6 games.

I got a boost at the start when a player with QQ reraised me and then called my all-in reraise: I held KK... Then another time, when I raised on the button and the BB thought that I must be bluffing. He moved in all his chips, but I had AK! Since I had about twice his stack, I did not have to think too long about calling (I suppose you have to call regardless of your stack size here).

Maybe one of these days I will pick up the courage to play in a Step 3 SNG directly, without trying to qualify. It is quite amazing, but I only ever played one Step 3 game, and the same holds for Step 4-6. I finished in the top three in every single one of them... Afterwards, I never again managed to qualify from Step 2.

But first I will try a few more $22 games I guess. It is nice to be back to winning at Party too. My winnings at Party are now again larger than they are at Pacific.

Back in business

I won another $5 game, after two second place finishes! It is really a relief to be winning some small games again, you start to doubt yourself after a while.

There as a tough spot where I raised to 400 UTG with 99, a known idiot called but then a very tight player went all-in for 1500 over the top. With a pot of 2300 now and only 1100 to play, I suppose I should have really called here, but I was just too chicken. I folded, the known idiot called with K8 and the tight player held AK... To top it all off, there was a 9 on the flop.

I also needed some luck, when I went all-in on KTs after one limper, the BB with AJo called me and I needed to spike a T on the river to stay alive. Over the course of the game, that BB would eventually donate all of his chips to me. Especially towards the end, when we were left with only three players, it was clear that he really did not have a clue how to play. He had a preflop raise percentage of 30% near the end, and while this won him a lot of small pots of course, he also developed the habit of actually calling reraises with this trash...

Another point where my decision was dubious to say the least was where I went all-in with 22 on the bubble, after the BB from above made yet another raise to 3xBB. He actually called and showed me A2, so he had rather few outs. I did get a scary moment when the board paired, but fortunately it did not pair a second time (which would have counterfeited my pocket pair) and I won that pot.

My decision was not as bad as it may seem, though. It was extremely likely that I was up against two higher cards, making me a slight favorite, so I definitely got great odds. [And in fact, my odds turned out to be even better, because he had only one higher card.] Also, he might fold to my reraise (I naively thought). However, from a point of view of trying to make it into the money, I played way too loose and "should have" folded that hand. After all, winning that hand did not ensure that I would make the money, but losing it would most definitely be the end of the game for me. But it is not easy to play that tight!

I deposited $60 at Party a week ago, to try and clear a bonus. While this is not going to work out, I am quite happy to be just back on $60 again now. Yes, it had been going quite badly...

Bad beats are boring

With that in mind, I am happy to report a positive result for a change. I managed to finish 2nd in a $5 game at Party. Thus my net winnings with those $5 games (since I started my newest database) are again positive now. I am not going to manage to clear the bonus though. I get the feeling that it has become slightly more difficult to clear bonuses at Party, am not sure.

My previous game at Party went less well, but the important thing is that I played well. I went all-in over the top of a short stack who had gone all-in several times before without getting called. Unfortunately, this time he actually had a hand: JJ, and I only had 99. What is worse, the big stack in the big blind actually called with AKs and managed to make a flush... With a third nine, no less :-(

Well, onwards and upwards...

Being Annoyed

It is not a good frame of mind to be playing poker. But I tell you, it is hard to avoid it. I'm playing badly and I know it, and on top of that I just cannot catch any breaks.

Several times today I got hands like AA, KK, QQ, AK, dutifully raised preflop and got zero callers. JUST ONE TIME I decide to limp with QQ UTG, an idiot with T7 (but they were sooooooted!) limps behind me and the flop comes J77. Obviously.

Through some kind of miracle, I actually managed to win a $5 game at Party, so that today was not a complete loss. But there was a lot to be annoyed about today. I managed to go out in 5th place in a Step 1 game twice (top four places pay) and once I even went out in 9th place, when a complete idiot with 52 called my flop raise on a flop of xx2, and got rewarded by another 2 on the turn. Finally I also managed to finish 7th in two more $5 games.

Once upon a time I won $700 at Party. I do not know how I did that.

More hours of fun for $3

And indeed, I did drop down back to Step 1... and then managed to go out in 3rd place in Step 1, earning me yet another Step 1 ticket. I am starting to hate these tickets.

A modest win

I returned to Party after being lured by a bonus, and joined two Step 1 games. I actually managed to win a Step 2 ticket...

It seems like a good idea to play for VERY low buy-ins for a while (Step 1 = $3). I also tried two $11 games earlier, but I just cannot win a race to win my life at the moment. Oh well, at least as long as I manage to place in these Steps games now, I will not have to pay again (I may drop down to Step 1 of course again).

Continuing to run bad

I don't believe it...

After many games on the bubble, I called an all-in with TT. He has KJ, no K on the flop makes me 75% favorite. Then a King hits the turn and I don't recover.

In the parallel game, I raise with 66 as SB after it is folded round to me. The BB has JJ. The level was 75/150, my stack was about 900. This is what they call a "big blind special"...

I just cannot get a break here! Score so far: five $10 games, two third places, net loss $17. It is simply unbelievable. I have never had such a bad sequence before, certainly not such a costly one.

FINALLY managed to cash again

Third place in a $10 SNG, wow... I almost would have gone out on the bubble again, but I just had a few chips left and managed to outlive the other micro-stack at the table. I went all-in with KQs and got called by AK... I suppose that with such a small stack present, I should have not done anything....

It is small comfort that his call was even worse than my raise. He could not expect to be better than 5:3 ahead (two high cards vs two low cards) so he was not getting the right odds to call. Indeed, the blinds were already 250/500 at this point and the short stack had 840 and would have most likely gone out in at most two more hands. This is not the time at which you want to risk your entire stack, I would think... (Fortunately, although the short stack actually survived 5 more hands, I survived 8.)

Horrible play on both sides!

Eight

I have now had EIGHT successive losses... It has been quite some time (fortunately) since I had such a bad sequence. I think I am not playing well. I was amazed to run Sharkscope on my latest $10 game and find out that I was the only player with a positive ROI at that table. Nevertheless, I managed to finish 8th, chasing a straight for most of my chips. Why did he have to give me such good odds...

Sharkscope has enabled me to see that the level really is different, there are way more fish at the $10 level. It seems I really need to drop to this level for a while, at least until I recover somewhat.

You know what, I'll play a challenge. Let's say 50 $10 games. I am going to multi-table them, planning to play two tables each time, to prevent things from getting too boring. Also, this way I am still playing for $20 per time, but hopefully with more success...

Oh dear

I seem to have lost $200 in the last week or so. Of course, this would be more serious if I had not just won $200 in the two days before that. Still, not a very nice feeling. I finished fourth three times in the last ten games, and fifth two times. Let's hope this is just variance and that my results will improve soon... Else (as soon as my bankroll drops below $500) I will drop back to the $10 level.

Four pocket pairs in 14 hands, out in 216th place

I just had an incredibly frustrating tournament. I got the most amazing cards...

Hand 1, AQo. I call a raise and have to fold on a low flop after there is a bet and a call.

Hand 4, I get 77. UTG raises to 100 and I fold, of course. There are two callers behind me, giving me the right odds to call after all (if only I had known) and there is a 7 on the flop. (Hm, I see now that Harrington actually advocates calling in this situation. Who knew. I thought sevens would be too low. Well, learned another painful lesson.)

Hand 6, I get 33 in second position. UTG raises to 100 and I fold. (No three appears.)

Hand 9, I get 99 as SB. There are two limpers, I raise to 100 and one limper remains. The flop is Ace high. I have to find out where I stand and bet 100, he raises me to 200 and I fold.

Hand 14, I get JJ and raise to 120. Three callers, among them the idiot with the Ace from just now. Flop is 542... all clubs. I bet, one opponent calls and he raises me 450. I have no choice but to go all-in here, he has JT of clubs. I had 600 left, the pot was 1400 and I just had to assume that he did not have two clubs. After all, what are the odds...

It was really an incredibly frustrating experience for me, especially after surviving two hours in yesterday's tournament and doing quite well (not well enough to cash though). Well, back to the SNG's I guess.

PS: lost 2 $20 games and a $30 game, for a total loss of $75.50 for the night. I guess it is time to go to bed :-) Don't get me wrong, I would have preferred to win tonight, but just a few months ago such a loss would have been catastrophic - actually impossible, because I did not play for such high buyins. The good thing is that I still have a bankroll of over $600, and that is after cashing out $1000 overall during my short poker career :-)

I Don't Like Thursdays

In an MTT, after nearly two hours, I went all-in on the button after UTG minraised. I still had 10 x BB, I could have seen a cheap flop with my 88. My opponent thought for quite a while but eventually called with AJo (he had three times as many chips as I did). If I had just called, I could have gone all-in (or even just bet) on the flop and he would have had to lay it down. As it was, he hit a Jack on the river.

Today I registered with Sharkscope, enabling me to see a lot more information, and to do 150 searches per day. This means in particular that when I start an SNG, I can immediately look it up in Sharkscope and spend 10 searches to find out who the sharks are (if any).

Tonight I played in an SNG with 6 or 7 winning players, it was quite surprising (since generally 1/3 or less of all players are winning players). I went out in 9th places after a bit of bad luck. The next SNG went better, although I only made it to 3rd place there. My ROI in the new database is still nearly 100% :-)

Sharkscope is really a treasure trove of information. I could have registered a long time ago, but the first time I looked at it, $15 a month still seemed like a lot of money for this service. Now that I make $15 per day (well... almost), it does not seem like so much! Here are some fun graphs. The first one explains the title of this post.

A Mistake

To counterbalance my previous post, here I will highlight a mistake I just made which was pretty bad.

I had T9s in early position and limped. Stack 1150, level 50/100 (soon to increase to 75/150). This could perhaps also be classified as a mistake, but this is still sort of ok. The player to my left calls, as does the BB. Flop is 367 rainbow. Now this is actually a reasonably nice flop for me, since there are no high cards (nothing above my cards). The BB checks and I bet 200 (pot is 375). The last player goes all-in for 938!

I automatically fold.

This was a big mistake. Not just the fold, but the fact that I wasn't even thinking about the possibility of calling. In my mind, I was bluffing, got caught, and had to give up the pot. But this is completely wrong. Even though I have only a gutshot, it is looking very much like tens, nines, and eights are all outs. I would put him on A7 at best. If he has two pair or a set (or 4-5...), why should he go all-in? In fact he might even have two high cards, though to me it looks like a bad spot to bluff. On the other hand, if it was a bluff, it worked!

So anyway. I should have considered that I had 3+3+4 = 10 outs twice. This does not make me a favorite, but now it is time to consider the pot odds. The pot was 1488 and I only had to put in 850 to call. Oops, to be precise the pot was 1400, because my opponent had me covered. So I was getting pot odds of 1400/850 = 1.65:1. That is enough - my odds according to PokerOffice were 1.6:1, and that is ignoring the backdoor flush draw that I have, which would add a few percent.

In fact, it would have been enough for me if I had just looked at the PokerOffice screen and noticed that my odds were colored green. That indicates it is OK to call.

The mistake was not as bad as I thought before I did the calculations. The bet was only marginally in my favor (meaning that over time, I will only make a small profit by calling this bet). Still, it is worrying that I did not even THINK about calling. I remember now that I have written about this problem before too, a long time ago. I thought I had fixed that...

Hot

I swear, I started this blog to write about my mistakes and try to learn from them, but if things are going well, how can I not write about that?
It seems that I picked the perfect time to start another new database in PokerOffice too... My previous one had again grown to over 100MB, making the program slower and slower. Look at the "in the money" column...
That's right, I cashed in a $30 game for the very first time! This was only my second attempt, and I actually had a good shot at winning it, but I could not resist calling an all-in with a good flush draw when I suspected that he was also only on this flush draw. (After all, there were three hearts on the table.) This was true, but unfortunately he held the King and I "only" the Queen...

Also (and as long as I am bragging anyway) I actually played two of these games simultaneously, I started to play a $20 game while waiting for the $30 game to fill up. It can be a bit confusing at times, especially because Pacific does not allow window resizing. (At least not the old version of the software that I am using - the new version is still not supported by PokerOffice!)

My overall net profit is rapidly approaching $2000. In the last seven days, I earned $258. These numbers are just amazing. I never expected that it could be so easy to earn so much money with a hobby. Of course, it took me quite a long time to get to this stage! It is less than five months ago that I bought the Harrington books, which turned me into a winning player. Thanks Dan :-)

PS: another picture added.

My mortal fear of the turn card

I have got to get over this fear.

A couple of days ago I looked at some old blog post of mine and read that I should not overbet my won hands, chasing away my opponents.

In fact, I read this in a post as well as some old notes of mine...

This problem is really persistent, it seems. I will give some examples based on a tournament I played in tonight. I got dealt KK twice in the first hour... At the end of this hour, I had 1000 in chips (you start with 1200), but this was due to a desperate and stupid short stack who reraised me with Q9s, making it impossible (that is, mathematically wrong) for me to fold.

1. Level 25/50. KK as BB, raise to 200 = 4BB. One caller. I actually played this hand sort of OK, I checked the low flop and he bet 100. I raised to 250, he folded. Still, there was no need to checkraise, I could have check-called.
   
2. Still level 25/50, 8 minutes later: KK UTG. Raise to 150 UTG, extremely loose SB calls. He bets out 250 on the flop, I go all-in?? Why??? Because I am scared of the turn card, that's why. It hurts to admit it, but it is true. ("But what if it is an Ace?")
3. Level 75/150. AA in 2nd position. At least now I don't need to fear an ace on the table. (I would actually prefer not to see any aces on the table, I guess: I'd never make any money...) Minraise (not bad), only BB (same loose player as above) calls as BB. Flop is Qd5d5c. He check-calls twice, first 150 and then 300. (At least I am not going all-in here.) Now I am down to 500. He checks again on the river and I stupidly bid 450. Why? Because I am greedy and want to get as much as possible of my stack in the middle. He folds, of course. I think it would have been difficult for him to fold to a final bet of 150, seeing as the pot was now 1700...

Of course it would be even worse to just limp into pots with these hands and lose them to people who get lucky, but I have really got to face more turn cards with hands like KK and QQ. I absolutely need to stop raising big and going all-in on good hands. I need to tell myself that winning 500 less in a pot is just as bad as losing 500 more.

Hopefully writing an entire post about this subject will help me to remember this lesson and earn more chips in the future!

I did not yet write how this tournament ended. On the very next hand after I got AA, I got JJ UTG. I raised to 3BB = 450 again, there was one caller and the short BB with 900 went all-in! I went all-in to isolate on him, but the idiot caller liked his AQ so much that he could not fold it against two all-ins. The short stack had AA, but I was beating the idiot until the river, which was the final missing Ace...

OK, so it was a setup against AA, but if I had earned more chips earlier, I might have survived even this confrontation (although, to be honest, the idiot is probably also calling with his precious AQs when I put in 500 chips more...) An alternative play here is to flat call the all-in of the short stack and see a flop three-handed. If it does not contain an ace and I go all-in then, the AQ guy might be less inclined to call. What do you think is best?

Anyway after this I made first place in a $20 SNG, so a profit for the night :-) [Note: the above problem (fear of the turn) does not really affect my SNG results, because there is far less post-flop play, especially at the decisive later stages when the blinds get high. I started to play some MTT's again for the variation and also to hopefully improve my play.]

Third place??

Something very strange happened tonight: I finished third in a $20 game! There must have been something wrong with the servers :-) It was the first time that this happened in over 30 games. Compare this to my 12 second places...

I also tried a $30 SNG for the first time, but it did not go very well. Players got eliminated quite slowly. It also took a long time for this game to fill up. It could be that there were actually some better players there (I only checked out one of them who had indeed quite nice stats at Sharkscope).

Overall I made a loss tonight, but I am still in the black for the month. Indeed, my ROI over the more than 100 games with buyin $10 and $20 is still over 40%...

Good times

I am staying in a hotel which offers wireless internet, but at a price: one hour costs 4 euros, three hours costs 9 euros... However, on Monday there was some sort of problem with this network, and since it was fixed the network is open!
I assume that the system administrator made some kind of mistake, but I am not going to inform the hotel about it... even though my hourly profit from playing poker is now high enough that I could afford to pay this rate.

Anyway, so I found out that the network was open tonight and I opened a $10 game while waiting for a $20 game to fill up. Soon I was playing them both and here is the reason for the title of this post: I won both of them :-) So I earned $117 in less than one hour (after subtracting the buyins), not bad!

I had a bit of luck when I needed it, and got some good cards, but I think one thing that really helped was that I did not bet too much with my good hands this time. I have a tendency to overbet my winning hands, scaring everybody off and not making as much profit as I could.

Also nice things happened like a player going all-in on a flop after hitting top pair, at the same time as I hit two pair.