Sunday 28 February 2010

Some more progress

Afternoon, today I had my first loosing session after putting in about 1k's worth of volume 4 tabling, being down 3 dollars at the end of it is nothing so I'm not too bothered, though I did play worse today and didn't manage to win my big races such as KK AK vs JJ, and QQ KJ AI pre. I was expecting a blip after yesterday evenings session where I managed a nice 2.5 BI over about 600 hands. At the moment I'm playing ABC poker but today I haven't hit too much and less of my Cbets and check raising are getting through. I made a very bad call with top pair on the river after a bloke flopped quads and bet out all three streets.

But at the end of this afternoon's session I'm still up by just over 7BI which I'm happy with over the last 3 days. I find 4 tabling much easier now with software and although it's bad to completely rely on it I think that at 10NL people rarely mix things up and so the sample seems to have become more useful than I thought it would.

Because stats are a novelty to me at the moment, here is what they were at the end of the session on respective tables.

14/9
11/8
16/13
14/10

Action Tony no longer exists.

And thanks for the comment and offer Isaac though I'd like to kill this game first before any staking or moving up. And it's great to hear from you again :) I'll probably have an update tomorrow or tuesday as I'm back at the school....boooooooo.

X

Saturday 27 February 2010

One last take.

It's not really necessary to point out the fact that this blog, along with my poker career (if you can call it that) is on its deathbed. Since september I have played almost no poker at all and there isn't a truly valid reason why. While I have decided to 'give it another go' several hundred times, they have all been completely lacklustre faliures and I'm not very proud of it.

Which brings me to now. I'm currently in France working as a language assistant in a private school, and it's treating me very well. 550 euros a month, free apartment, 18 hours work a week, with free food during the day. I've yet to discover a downside to it so I hope it continues.

Moving on to poker, I haven't put any money into Stars, as I still have 30 dollars leftover from my last withdrawal. I am having one last go at building a bankroll- I've set myself no targets at all apart from to not give up when things don't go your way, and play logically as opposed to thinking that pokerstars 'owes' me after I get coolered or vice versa. For this, I have bought poker tracker (more accurately Tom has a spare code which he has given me, which is incredibly generous.) This will keep me completely honest and tell me about my game so I can pinpoint my mistakes instead of blaming it on life in general which was a convenient and unfortunate habit I had last year.

Talking of which, I think last year my game worsened. While I wasn't throwing money around at the table, I was very loose and it came back to bite me. Online I was most certainly down, somewhere in the region of $150, which doesn't sound much- but when I think about how much online profit I had after 6 months of actually learning the game then I'm very disappointed in my performance. My only saving grace is my slightly above average ability to play live which put me in for a small profit. Online my concentration levels are frankly pathetic, as demonstrated last year. My Willhill and full tilt graphs, and to a lesser extent my stars graph tell quite a story, which you can look at at your own leisure. But enough about how much of an anticlimax last year was, I am giving it one last shot- I can't really say how confident I am but I know it's not 100%.

So, about these last 3 days. With this 30 dollars I have, I am treating it as if it was the first stake Isaac ever gave me. That magical $50 which set me on my way to becoming a semi-reasonable micro-stakes player. Poker tracker has given me all the information I need thus far and I know I am more profitable because of it. No more calling raises with K10 in the small blind or 78s.

My current game is Full ring 10NL and this is what the graph shows.


As you can see I am up roughly 5 buy-ins, up until my dip at the peak I was playing well and running well. I have found that my most profitable strategy is to trap and slowplay as much as possible, but obviously not all the time. The amount of river donk bets I have check called, or the amount of non beleivers looking me up after I check the turn after a C-bet has been the foundation for my small profit so far. While it's fair to say that I'm probably not getting the maximum value out of my hands, for the moment I'm going by small pot won > big pot lost.

I'm running nicely at 8.55BB over just short of 3k hands. At the 2k mark it was 15 which was obviously unsustainable. My first dip came after I made a bad call with an overpair after a guy shoved his stack after he completed his flush on the river. I didn't really understand it as he didn't put the standard value bet in so I called and got the bad news. Incidentally though the 3 previous times I made the same call and they turned out well. The next dip came after I raised JJ into the BB who flat shoved. I dwelled for about 20 seconds and called as I thought that's probably the worst way to get value out of a monster- but I lose on the turn to his 66. That's about as bad as it got. I stuck at it surprisingly and clawed some of it back. I'm going to play another session now.

Reward for the gayest post ever- but I do miss DUPS and I hope that some of the other guys like Isaac Gambon and Hannes will update their blogs and let us know what's going on. As a side note I highly doubt anybody reads this anymore, but I would appreciate a comment just to see if you're all still playing.

Tek care lads. X