I’m back. I am finally playing poker again after being shut out by the events of Black Friday. I have always had a tiny stash on Black Chip Poker but the games were just so bad after Merge stopped taking new players I didn’t feel like it was worth playing. I logged on the other day and found a .25-.50 stud8 game going and I hopped in. It was great! Even though I haven’t played in six months I came in and pretty much thrashed the game. I have made about $25 in 3-4 hours of play so far which isn’t much of an hourly rate but that isn’t really my goal right now.
Right now I just want to play and get better. That’s it, not to make enough money to move up or to buy this or that, just get better. It’s weird after having all that time off that I feel like I am starting with a clean slate and I am able to see things more clearly. It’s like I was too close to things and I have stepped back and now I can see everything. I am not playing with a HUD or worrying about my “redline”, I am just going out and playing my game. I have been able to pick up players tendencies better by just observing how they play their hands. I have a better sense of when to jam and when to slow down too. I think with all those hands of No Limit I was just too damn jam-happy and now I can see that I am not that far ahead or maybe even behind and there is no way my opponent is going to fold.
I can see now that limit games really suit my personality better, and with the upcoming regulation of Ipoker in the U.S. I think it will be easier to find a good game. I still feel I can dominate spit pot games and I can get an advantage at the stud games so I am really looking forward to playing some HORSE once things get settled. And I am not going to worry about moving up or any of that other shit. I am just going to play my game and when I feel ready I will move up.
I am also pretty happy with the news coming out about Full Tilt repaying players. I had really thought that money was gone but now I am more optimistic. I really thought that $3,000 was gone. If I could get it back it would be really nice to have something to start playing with on MGM or Harrah’s new sites. I really need to see about their affiliate systems as well. Who knows if they are even going to use the old system or not. It would be nice to get in early though.
If you want to stop by and say hi to me on Merge you can find me playing under the screenname “Ih82botherU”. See you there!
I can’t deny it any longer, something is wrong with my game and I am not going to be able to just play through it. These swings have been absolutely crushing my spirit. Yesterday I played a session around lunchtime where I won about two buyins. I remember thinking “This could be the day I finally break out of this slump.”
If you look at my graph you can see I couldn’t have been more wrong. Some early beats spiraled out of control until I found myself stuck seven buyins (-$350.) I had some crazy stats which totally pointed to tilt. I played about 2,000 hands and my vpip was 17% and my wtsd was 33%. Those are way too high for full ring. My w$sd was only 36% which isn’t surprising considering the other two numbers. I got stacked three times with pocket Kings and once with pocket Jacks and I should have been able to get away from three of the four at some point in the hand. It was a night of me saying “He can’t have it again, right?” and they always did.
The question is what do I do now? Well, this isn’t my first time on the crash-n-burn trail. First thing I am going to do is screw it down tight. I am going to shoot for a vpip of 11 or so and try to keep my pfr around 9. Hopefully I can keep myself out of these tough spots I keep getting into. Just nit it up for awhile. Hopefully that will stop the bleeding. The second part will be tweaking my HUD and really working on using these numbers to my full advantage. I am also going to try and ditch the abbreviations so I am not so cluttered and maybe make a few pop-up panels for myself.
Parts three and four kind of go together. I am going to dig through Hold’em Manager and find the spots where my ranges are out of whack and then drop down a limit to work on my aggression. At least that way if I become a total spewtard it won’t be as bad as if I was experimenting at higher limits. I know already that my raising ranges are almost all for value. I hope this also improves my ability to put my opponents on a range of hands while I am at it.
Well I have a lot of work to do so I will end it here for now.
I was chatting on Skype last night with a friend and I showed him a hand where I had 3bet KQ on the button. The flop came down
I cbet about $4.50 into $9 and my opponent check-raised me to $12. I flatted his raise and the turn was
He checked to me and I went ahead and moved all-in. My opponent tanked forever and finally timed out and folded. My friend asked me why I had 3bet preflop and I told him it was for value. Then I told him I flatted the flop check-raise because my opponents range was extremely polarized here and my friend thought the call was fine. That’s when I dropped the longclaw theorem on him-
The most bluff-raised flop in micro stakes poker is Qxx
There are two main reasons for this-
- Queen high flops miss AK. Everyone loves to put you on Ace-King when you raise preflop and obviously you missed this flop. If they raise here there is a good chance you will fold
- The Queen is a scare card to pocket Jacks to pocket Deuces and they can make you fold
The basic premise here is that Queen high flops are really hard to hit, which is true. The problem with this logic is that Queen high flops are really hard to hit, so why are you raising? When you raise here you are really not representing much. A lot of the hands that you flat preflop that have a Queen in them like KQ, QJ, QT and even AQ are going to want to get to showdown so that will tend to take them out of your value range for raising. That only leaves slowplayed Aces and Kings and flopped sets that you are raising for value. That is a really narrow range and its even harder to represent.
You are basically starting to get into the leveling war here. Raising a dry Queen high flop is second level thinking, i.e. “What does my opponent have.” By raising you are saying that you don’t think your opponent hit this flop. This is great vs players on level one who look at their cards and see they can’t beat a Queen. The problem is when you raise and your opponent is on the same level or even third level thinking, i.e “What does my opponent think I have.” When your opponent knows that he can’t have hit the flop very often and knows that you know that he knows that it is a good spot for you to bluff. He also knows that your raising range is going to be extremely polarized on this flop and if he is good he can outplay you by rebluffing you or letting you value-town yourself.
You have to be good at identifying your opponents though. A raise from a player who is playing 24/12 or 30/10 will often be a hand like AQ or KQ who has top pair and is betting it for value. They are still on that first level of “what do I have” and they are betting for value. A better target here is someone like a 12/9 or a 15/13 with an aggression factor of 2 or more. They are much more likely to be thinking on the second level and raising you because they don’t think you can stand the heat.
Hello Lovely ($85.15)
Brian Caby ($50)
OneGoodLooking ($14.15)
trixter23 ($62.20)
stonecoldms ($50)
Foldasaurus ($68.70)
longclaw ($50)
bulldog34 x ($38.35)
nurssbetty ($50)
Hello Lovely posts (SB) $0.25
Brian Caby posts (BB) $0.50
Dealt to longclaw 
fold, fold, fold, fold,
longclaw raises to $1.50
bulldog34 x calls $1.50
fold, fold, fold,
FLOP ($3.75) 
longclaw bets $2
bulldog34 x raises to $6
longclaw calls $4
TURN ($15.75) 
longclaw checks
bulldog34 x bets $10
longclaw calls $10
RIVER ($35.75) 
longclaw checks
bulldog34 x checks
longclaw shows
(Pre 54%, Flop 70.9%, Turn 86.4%)
bulldog34 x shows 
(Pre 46%, Flop 29.1%, Turn 13.6%)
longclaw wins $34
I was really wondering what I was going to do if bulldog shoved the river here. I was really wanting to call, but luckily for me he didn’t fire the third barrel. If we look at the flop here there isn’t much you can raise for value, AQ, sets, and maybe Ax of clubs. The turn does nothing but take 33 out of his range which only strengthens my hand. The river doesn’t change anything either so if he does fire I really need to think about how capable he is of 3 barreling me. Most players at this level will give up on the river and when they do put it in on the end they have it.
I would also like to point out that this does not apply if x>7. Any Q hi flop with a J,T,9, or 8 should be considered an action flop and my theorem goes out the window. There are a lot of hands that can be raised for value, two-pair, sets, pair+gutshots, overcards+gutshots, basically it is going to be real hard to continue without a read on your opponent without a good hand, and even then there are going to be a lot of scare cards on the turn and river.
One last thought here, if you do find someone raising here with a Queen you should take a note of it and take a note on their line. Something like a raise flop, check turn, bet river could be for value, especially if y0ur opponent is good enough to understand that you are trying to control the pot. When that happens, take a note and keep an eye on that player.
It is coming up on two years since I had my wreck, which means my laptop is almost two years old. In the time I have owned it I have installed and uninstalled a lot of programs. I had a lot of crap running that I had no idea what it actually did. My computer had gotten so bad that my last virus scan took six hours to complete. I’d finally had enough so I decided to reformat and reinstall Windows.
When I bought my computer back in 2009 it came with Vista. I really wanted to wait for 7 but considering my Acer laptop was in pieces that wasn’t an option. When 7 was release a later that year I couldn’t wait to upgrade. I was really happy with 7 and it was pretty much everything Vista should have been and it had done well for me for the last 18 months or so, but my install was showing its age. It took me close to two minutes to boot up and any sort of malware scan took hours to complete. I was using over two of my available four gigs of RAM just doing normal everyday tasks and the computer was just plain sluggish.
It was time for a little spring cleaning. When I had upgraded to 7 I went with the in-place upgrade path instead of a clean install. This time I just went ahead and nuked it, reformat and reinstall. It went a lot quicker than the last time and when it finished I went straight to Windows update and got my system up to date before I did anything else. I had almost 100 patches including the Service Pack One which took about another hour to install. When all that was finished I made a backup image of my system on a 40 gig partition on my second hard drive. This way when I want to start fresh again I can use that image instead of the Windows 7 DVD which should be a lot quicker.
When I was done installing the OS and making the backup I still had a lot of work to do. First thing was to get an anti-virus program running. I have been using Microsoft Security Essentials on all the computers I work on for awhile now. It works well and it is free, and unlike some other free AV’s it doesn’t give you a bunch of pop-ups asking you if you want to upgrade to the paid version. Next thing was all the programs that I use on a regular basis, things like Firefox, Skype, Itunes, Dropbox, Teamveiwer, and other various things. I found a really great way to do it over at 2+2 on the computer technical help forum. Ninite is a free service that has a ton of popular free software like the stuff listed. All you have to do is check the programs you want and tell it to run and it does the rest. It installs everything automatically for you and here is the best part, it does it without installing any of the crapware like the browser toolbar add-ons that they try to sneak in on you if you do it yourself. It’s really a great service and saved me a lot of time.
After I was done with all that I installed all my poker stuff, HEM, Stars, Tilt, and the rest. I am still getting things back to normal there. I did mess up and forgot to back up my notes and my HUD setup before I reinstalled so I guess I am starting fresh there. I also started a new DB in Hold’em Manager that only has hands from this year. This really sped up when I run my reports and I still have my massive DB on my home computer so everything is OK there.
I am really happy with the way things turned out here. I really breathed some life into this old laptop by cleaning it up and I hope that I can last until next year before I get a new one. My accountant told me I needed to make this one last awhile because I have deducted a new one the last three years. I guess its around an 18 month cycle that just fell perfect so hopefully I can pull it off. I do need a new battery though but other than that I think I should be good to go.
NL Holdem $0.50(BB) Game#28709458330
misaulftp ($25)
pst1689 ($22.50)
GG_UNDERtheSEA ($50)
Rafale B ($47.70)
drazen526 ($58.05)
ColsPlyr ($44.80)
bosctlax ($36.45)
getnavi ($58.40)
longclaw ($62.85)
misaulftp posts (SB) $0.25
pst1689 posts (BB) $0.50
Dealt to longclaw 
fold, fold,
drazen526 calls $0.50
fold, fold, fold,
longclaw raises to $1.50
fold, fold,
drazen526 calls $1
FLOP ($3.75) 
drazen526 bets $26.25
longclaw calls $26.25
TURN ($56.25) 
drazen526 bets $30.30 (AI)
longclaw calls $30.30
RIVER ($116) 
drazen526 shows 
(Pre 51%, Flop 3.2%, Turn 0.0%)
longclaw shows
(Pre 49%, Flop 96.8%, Turn 100.0%)
longclaw wins $113
Boy did I need that. I also found a new card plugin for wordpress that I hope to get installed this weekend if I have time. Guess I am a bumhunter coz I am just going to hit and run on this post. 
*edit* If you like these cards and have a WordPress blog you can find the plugin here- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cards-poker/
Well, for me at least. I played a little over 43,000 hands in the month of February and I made a grand total of…
$99.75
That comes out to $0.002 a hand or a winrate of 0.23PTBB/100. What makes it even worse is that after my first 6,000 hands I was up over $400 already. I was psyched and poker was easy. Then everything went to shit. I can say that I have run bad over this stretch. It’s not anything that would show up on an EV graph either, not bad beats really, more like coolers. Pocket Queens were keeping me up at night with thoughts of calling a raise out of the big blind and then check-calling down on a Ten high board only to be shown Aces or Kings. I am still not sure what to do in that situation. At $50nl I am never comfortable getting them in preflop with full stacks. I guess I should be folding turn or river somewhere because I doubt anyone is good enough to triple-barrel a wiffed AK in that spot, if they are then good onya for them.
I have also been value-owning myself over this run. I bet three streets with a King-high flush on a paired board in position and my opponent calls down with the Ace-high flush. I guess that kind of thing happens when you go for thin value. I also ran into a little bad luck. Here is a hand where I made a good read for nothing-
longclaw ($186)
StDom ($46.25)
djdustin ($8.40)
Hello Lovely ($54.40)
fkdlaka ($21.30)
SaphireBlack ($50)
Brownbeat ($55.30)
PRino99 ($24.25)
shutton ($79.55)
longclaw posts (SB) $0.25
StDom posts (BB) $0.50
Dealt to longclaw 
fold, fold, fold, fold, fold,
PRino99 raises to $1.75
fold,
longclaw raises to $5
fold,
PRino99 calls $3.25
FLOP ($10.50) 
longclaw checks
PRino99 bets $19.25 (AI)
longclaw calls $19.25
TURN ($49) 
RIVER ($49) 
PRino99 shows 
(Pre 82%, Flop 87.2%, Turn 95.5%)
longclaw shows
(Pre 18%, Flop 12.8%, Turn 4.5%)
PRino99 wins $46.55
This guy was a 19/12 over a small sample size. I three bet here against a 1/2 stack because I am perfectly ready to get it in preflop. He flats instead and the flop comes King-high. I check my Jacks and he shoves for 2x pot? My read was he couldn’t beat the King and I was right. The problem was he had the only hand that still beat my Jacks. I guess when things are going bad they really go bad, and even when you make a good read it doesn’t mean you are going to win.
I have also been looking at my graph and my non-showdown winnings have gone to shit. I think Mpethybridge from 2+2 has a pretty good idea on where it should be at micro-stakes. It is OK if it goes down, but if it is more than half of your showdown winnings you are doing something wrong. Basically if you are up like $2k in showdown winnings you don’t want to be losing more than about $1k in non-showdown hands. Anymore than that and you are probably leaking money somewhere. When I was destroying the game this was right about where I was at. Last month it was I won $1768 at showdown and lost $1668 in non-showdown pots. Obviously something is wrong here and I need to take a hard look at my database. Maybe even drop a table or two until I get back on track.
January has turned out to be a really interesting month. I started off really well and then things went to shit quickly and I found myself in the hole for a bit. I ended up grinding through it and I am back on the upswing again and I am looking at a decent month considering the lack of volume I put in. Most people probably put in more volume during the winter than they do during the rest of the year just because there isn’t much else to do. Unfortunately for me the cold and the snow means I have to work more hours to get in the same amount of miles and that chops out my time at the tables. I finally qualified for bronze level Ironman yesterday if that tells you anything. Dropping stakes didn’t help much either with the points but I am back at $50nl Rush now so hopefully February will be easier.
I also re-upped with Deuces Cracked. It had been almost a year since I let my subscription lapse and I was listening to Deuce Plays and I just got the itch to go back. I really like the roster of coaches they have over there and the big thing for me was the fact that they do more than Hold’em. I grew up playing stud and I still like it, especially Stud 8, but it has been a long time since I played anything but no limit. Now I am all over the place and it feels really good. I accidentally bought a second copy of HEM from D.C. when I was paying for my subscription (yes I am an idiot) so I asked them if I could get the Omaha version instead. I actually got an email from Joe Tall himself the next day with a new code for Hold’em Manager/Omaha Manager combo. Since then I have logged a few thousand hands of PLO and even a few hundred of Limit Omaha 8. It is really nice to finally have a HUD to pick up on the other player’s tendencies. I even played some 2-7 triple draw the other day just to play something different. I would like to get into the ten game mix tables on Full Tilt soon but the stakes I am comfortable at don’t seem to run very much. Maybe I can run my roll up a bit and take a shot. I will definitely have to play some LHE along with a bunch of Badugi before I do that though. We shall see.
I actually have some time now so I think I will go ahead and log some hands before I have to leave. I am not sure what game I will play, maybe just open up Full Tilt and pick a random couple of tables.
Wow, I am not really sure what to say. These last two days have been really, really tough. I have calmed down now but it wasn’t pretty earlier. It has been a long time since I launched a mouse across the room but today makes two in a row. I have screamed at my computer so much I am surprised I still have a voice. I have gone over things and I know there is no way I could have won with the way I am running but I probably could have saved a couple buyins along the way somewhere. Here is the damage-
I am really mad about that redline going to shit. Looks like my showdown stabilized but my swing continued downward because I kept having to fold. I have run over my stats and they are just brutal. My wtsd was 24% which is pretty normal for me but my w$sd was only 41%. I have been flopping sets 6.6% of the time, which comes out to about once every fifteen chances when the average is 12.5% or once every eight flops. Sets are still one of your biggest money makers in poker and without them it has been rough.
I ran a filter to see how I was doing in certain situations. I had 40 instances where I had an overpair on the flop and I am -$97.84, and I am running above my EV because I rivered a set of Aces vs a flopped set of Nines. Queens have been particularly bad for me. I am down $93.80 with them over this run. Anytime I have gotten action with them I have been shown Aces or Kings or a flopped set. It is just nasty and I will be glad when it is over. This bad run has wiped out my hot start to the year and I am back in the red. I am going to take the rest of the night off and see how things are tomorrow. I really don’t like posting these kind of things but this one just couldn’t be helped. Good night from Sioux Falls South Dakota.
Well, it’s that time of year so here we go-
I just missed my goal of $5,000 for the year but if you add in the $600 worth of Ipod touch and Sony camcorder I received from the points store I made it. It was really a weird year. In 2009 I played almost all of my hands at Pokerstars, but after they changed the buy-in structure it was a real headache to find the 100bb games I wanted to play. I tried the 50bb games for awhile but they were full of the pushbots shortstackers that I hate. The 100bb games were full of players who had at least a decent idea of what they were doing so there wasn’t as much easy money floating around. I wish they would just go to the Full Tilt model where there are Cap tables for the shortstackers, 35-100bb tables for the standard buy-in, and they can keep the 100-250bb w/ante tables. I kind of like that better than the straight 100-200bb tables at Tilt.
Speaking of Full Tilt, what a difference a year makes. I was on a long boycott of them because I signed up when they were just a small site and Party and Paradise ruled the poker world. Unfortunately I had no idea about rakeback and I ended up tagged to an affiliate that didn’t offer it. I emailed them several times trying to get switched but they would not do it so I just quit playing there. Then I received an offer in my email box, Full Tilt was willing to offer me a “cash back bonus equal to 27% of my MGR.” Sounds a lot like rakeback to me so I took it. The only difference is my MGR gets dinged by more stuff than normal rakeback accounts (I think), and I have to earn 1000 Full Tilt points per month to keep it.
What else happened? RUSH POKER! If you see my graph I played almost 250k hands this year. If you would have told me I would play this many hands in a year I would have thought you were crazy, but now it is definitely possible. I can average over 1,000 hands per hour now and still maintain a 2ptbb/100 rate at $50nl. Most of this year was spent accumulating a war chest and hopefully I can crack $100nl pretty soon. Right now I am knocking the rust off at $25 after my long poker vacation. I would like to get back into 6max again as well, but I don’t want to lose my focus on moving up the full ring ladder. We shall see, maybe I can finally get Paul to teach me heads-up. I can always wish, can’t I?
OK, Goals for 2011. I doubled my earn from 2009 to 2010, so I am going to try to do that again. That would put me at $10k for the year which is quite a nice chunk of change for a hobby/second income. I also want to try some tournaments (still haven’t done that.) I switched to cash several years ago but I think I want to try to get lucky and make a big score. It would make getting to that $10k goal a lot easier. Non-poker goals include lose some weight/get into better shape but I say that every year. I am going to pull a little out of my role and replace my ancient fuse box in my house with a breaker box finally and clean up the wiring after that is done. It really is a miracle that my house has not burned down yet. When I redid the mancave I found some wiring that had gotten hot enough to melt the insulation inside the sheathing which scared the shit out of me. Recently I was in the attic above the garage trying to clean up a bit and I found out that my garage door opener is plugged into an outlet that is not in a box. The wire were simply stripped and attached to the screws on the sides and then they wrapped the entire thing in black tape. Maybe it is a good thing the garage door is broke and we don’t use it anymore. More things around the house need to get done, maybe finish the bathroom I started three (four?) years ago and get the mancave finished. I still haven’t run well enough to buy the tile for the floor and now the electrical has bumped it from the priority list.
Who knows what if any of this will actually get done. I am going to try though, and this year I really mean it. Off to grind out my year-end bonus, see ya!
Yeah, it has kind of been that way this month pokerwise. It’s not that I am losing my ass or anything, it’s just that I have been so busy I haven’t even played since 12/11. I have all kind of excuses though. Bad weather has really been a pain in the ass. Last week I had a trip to Fridley, MN that took a little over 13 hours instead of the 10 it normally takes. This really cuts into my playing time because normally I would leave myself an hour to play to get in the hands I need for Ironman. Well obviously that didn’t happen and it cut into my sleep time as well. Family stuff has gotten in the way as it always does during the holidays. Running from house to house visiting all the different sets of relatives takes up a lot of time, and I guess I could bring my aircard and laptop but the wife really frowns upon that kind of thing. When you throw in everything else this month like the Christmas shopping and decorating the house and all the other stuff that comes this time of year I just decided to punt.
I can’t even play today. We are getting ready to head to St. Louis to watch the Rams take on the 49′ers in a big NFC west match-up. I can’t wait to go, the Rams need to win out to get into the playoffs but that would be so huge after a 1-15 season last year. I will try to play some tonight when I get home if I am not too tired. I am going to have to get some hands in quick if I am going to keep my cash-back bonus. I really wish I had normal rakeback at times like these but it is better than nothing. Oh well, time to jump in the shower.
Let’s go Rams!!!
