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December 31 Flatland Grinder: Limiting MyselfThe last post spoke a little about changing sites. It's been a good move, and I was showing a positive result (about 4bb/100) at the 25nl tables. But as I've said before I get discouraged thinking about moving up the limits in no limit. After .50/1 there doesn't seem to be very many tables with flop percentages beyond the low 20s. This essentially means that most of the time the hands aren't seeing a flop. I could probably beat that sort of table set-mining with an 11%vpip, but that's not my idea of poker, and there's a very good chance that I'd get outplayed. So I finally decided to heck with it all. I recovered my bankroll quite nicely at Stars and the moment I did I made the decision I was supposed to have made a month ago. That is, to learn to play and win at limit poker. There are some pretty substantial differences between limit and no limit play. One of the primary differences is that limit is much more a game of immutable odds and probabilities. No Limit is more about gut feelings and player reads. No Limit players often analogize the difference when playing limit poker as though they were tackle football players playing touch football with handcuffs on.
In the past this has been my biggest problem playing limit. I could never handle the amount of waiting. This was partly due to the fact that I'd never mastered limit, and wouldn't allow myself to multitable. I went from 200+ hands per hour at no limit to 50 at limit. But the appeal of limit is this: If you can beat .50/1 limit, then chances are good that you'll be able to beat 3/6 limit at the same win rate. In no limit it's almost impossible to find a game with stakes that high, and if you can find one, it can be very expensive if you're not up to it. There are always plenty of tables going at virtually any stakes in limit hold em. So long story short, I'm playing limit, and I'm beating the game for a little better than 2bb/100. So far I've only played about 4000 hands which is far too early to pass judgement, but if I can even maintain this win rate I'll have a positive future in poker. If I can't then I guess poker may not be for me after all.
December 11 Flatland Grinder: Not All Sunshine and Smiles"We Germans aren't all sunshine and smiles you know." -German guy on the Simpsons. Well neither are poker players. Particularly when we're losing our shirts. I have said it before that these posts are valueless if all I ever do is report my wins. I've been on a terrible losing streak. I've seen my 20k hand win rate chopped in half by my last 3000 hands. It's been brutal. My flushes don't seem to be holding up, my sets always run into trouble and I don't even want to talk about my pairs. This is why they call it gambling. Had this bad streak hit me in my first weeks back I would have lost my entire deposit. I've dropped about 10-15 buy ins, which is pretty damn extreme. I'm still plus ev, but instead of winning 10bb/100 I'm down to just over 4bb/100. That's a good win rate at any limit, and my losses are just the reckoning of the hot run I had initially. And that's me rationalizing. Where are the rest of the losses coming from? The site I've been playing at has a pretty limited pool of players. I play 6 tables or more at a time, and often I'll have 5 or 6 of the same people at every table. My HUD tells me in a lot of cases that I have a 3k hand history on these players. Consequently, any of them that might be using HUD will have a similar history on me. They know that I'm only raising hands like Broadway pairs AK and AQ most of the time. They know that I"m only calling raises with pairs and AK or better. So when I'm showing strength, they know to get the hell out of the way. This has meant that it's getting more and more difficult to get paid off, and that my opposition is playing a higher quality hand when coming into a pot with me. In a live game I'd be mixing up my play, but that's just not feasible online. Online your best bet is to play it straight. So today I took another beating at the tables and decided that I needed to change sites. Checking over my play, I'm not making a lot of mistakes. But I'm failing to get paid off when I get a hand. I switched over to pokerstars (no bonus though so it's a $2/hr pay cut) and instantly I started making money. It was great because it illustrated that my theory was right. I have been playing well, just having a tough time finding action. Now that I'm new to the tables, I'm cleaning up again. I think I'm going to stick with Stars now. No bonus is better than no action, plus there is a lot more room to move up through the limits as my bankroll grows. Thanks for listening. December 06 Flatland Grinder: The Purpose of Posting.For me the purpose of posting is pretty simple. I like to improve my play. Posting my results regularly gives me a point of reference when things are going wrong and helps to identify losing patterns. However it's only helpful when I'm actually posting losing results and analyzing those losses. Currently I'm running pretty bad. I'm on a 6k hand losing streak out of 20k hands. That sounds a lot worse than it is. Essentially I'm down $100 bucks in cash games for the month. With the run I had upon first returning to the game this was expected. Expecting it doesn't make it a whole lot easier though. I try to make a habit of checking my play for mistakes regularly, but it's more of a scan and conscience check when things are going well. It takes an extended run like this for me to really take a close look at things.
I found that about 90% of my biggest losses were losses incurred while chasing flushes and straights. There are profitable chases and there are unprofitable chases. Generally when chasing a flush or straight I want to see odds of 2-1 on the flop or 4-1 on the turn to continue. In almost all of the cases, accounting for about 80% of my losses, I had the odds I needed to continue. Unfortunately they were expensive chases, and I've had a long stream of them missing, but that's irrelevant. Poker is a game of numbers. In the long term, playing my draws the way that I have been, I can expect to show a profit. One can even use the old salesman's adage of every miss takes you one step closer to a success. It's purely mathematical and only a matter of time before the numbers shake out. That being said, there is another 20% or so of my recent losses that can't be accounted for by mathematical anomalies. My largest loss was suffered when I chased a flush even after a pair had appeared on the turn. This is a terrible situation to be in with a flush, and unfortunately I hit mine, only to lose to the obvious full house. There are little rules of thumb in no limit hold 'em, and one of the first you learn is to drop your draws when there is a pair on board. That was a clear cut mistake. My other losses were lousy beats. Set vs set, full house vs bigger full house, sets vs straight or flush draw and the opponent sucks out.
I felt I needed to take a look at my losses though. J2 have a belief that long losing streaks are pretty common, but when they creep up to the 8k hands streak, it's time so see where you're going wrong.
I also tried moving up limits as I've said, and the losses I took up there were higher as a percentage of my bankroll than the wins I've made playing lower limits to claw my way back up. But to put things in perspective, I'm still showing a beautiful 8bb/100 win rate at my $25 pl game. I'm negative EV at the higher limits, but I've only logged about 2k hands there, and I'm only about -3bb/100. I'm going to wait until I have my bankroll rebuilt to move back up though.
Some good news to report. I beat out 200 others to take second in a freeroll and win $240 today. I was busted out with the better hand against my opponent too, so I'm very happy with my play. Basically the tourney win brings me positive ev for the month, but I don't like to count those wins as part of my play. Freeroll Tourneys I view more like a lottery win. December 03 Flatland Grinder: Haven't Been Playing.That about says it all. The last entry mentioned moving up limits, and that didn't go so well. I lost about 6 buy ins which is never fun when you're trying to move up. I've logged about 7 losing sessions in a row now, which was bound to happen as I ran about 2 weeks with nothing but wins. I would love to think that I'm above this, and I would love to be above this but I'm not. When I start losing I lose all desire to play. I'm not a gambling man. I find parting with money very difficult, and I tend to step back when I'm losing and take a few days off. Taking a few days off turned into taking a week off this time though. My kids were off school on Friday, so I didn't play at all then, and throughout the earlier part of last week I might have put in about 1000 hands. In all I finished November about 5000 hands short of my goal, or at 75% of my target. Part of the problem is also that I'm finding poker to be a lot more boring than I remembered it. I'm actually looking for a job, and pursuing poker more as a past time than a career for now I think. November 24 New endeavourThe literary website that I've been talking about building is up. (I think I might even have finished it ahead of schedule, whaddaya think of that?) You can check it out here http://www.freewebs.com/redlightlit/index.htm November 23 Flatland Grinder: We're a Movin' On UpThe day has finally come. I've moved up limits and have been playing $50 no limit and pot limit poker for the past few days. I've logged 5 sessions, and all of them have been winning sessions, with a bb/100 rate of 11 or so after about 2000 hands. Far too early to tell, but these initial results have been pretty encouraging. It's ironic that as I write this post on my impressive win rate I'm playing a session and losing quite badly. I've been getting a lot of small and middle pairs, and as it goes with set farming aggressive tables, it's pretty costly to see a flop. Different people play these kinds of pairs under different circumstances. Some people use a maximum raise amount that they'll call, such as 6 bb or 8bb. I use an approach based a little more on game theory. Provided that my call has implied odds of about 7.5-1 if I hit my set I'll call. Long term it's a profitable play, but it can get expensive when the stacks are deep. And right now the stacks are deep and I haven't been catching the sets. I'm also playing at the only 3 tables going with any real action. This is less than half of my usual 7 tables, and consequently the 'long run' is going to take a little longer tonight. November 21 Flatland Grinder: 99; Red BalloonsI love poker. Part of the reason is hands like the following. I spent a lot of time micro-anaylzing a losing hand not so long ago. Here's a winning hand with a lot more to it than there would seem to be at first. Here's the hand history.
Texas Hold'em $0.25-$0.50 PL (real money), hand #P4-54309598-113
Table Moroni, 20 Nov 2007 11:02 PM ET Seat 1: herberthump ($9.45 in chips)
Seat 2: AncusMarcius ($36.50 in chips) Seat 3: YellowManJJ ($24.75 in chips) Seat 4: Maria 26 ($23.80 in chips) Seat 5: Arale. ($24.25 in chips) Seat 6: MrTon57 ($20.80 in chips) Seat 7: L3st3rMurphy [ 9D,9C ] ($23.00 in chips) Seat 8: jonna92 ($10.10 in chips) Seat 10: tranquillozh ($28.65 in chips) ANTES/BLINDS L3st3rMurphy posts blind ($0.25), jonna92 posts blind ($0.25). PRE-FLOP
tranquillozh calls $0.25, herberthump bets $1.25, AncusMarcius folds, YellowManJJ calls $1.25, Maria 26 calls $1.25, Arale. calls $1.25, MrTon57 folds, L3st3rMurphy calls $1, jonna92 calls $1, tranquillozh folds. FLOP [board cards 10C,8C,JH ]
L3st3rMurphy checks, jonna92 bets $3, herberthump bets $8.20 and is all-in, YellowManJJ folds, Maria 26 folds, Arale. folds, L3st3rMurphy calls $8.20, jonna92 calls $5.20. TURN [board cards 10C,8C,JH,3H ]
L3st3rMurphy bets $1, jonna92 calls $0.65 and is all-in. RIVER [board cards 10C,8C,JH,3H,9S ]
SHOWDOWN
herberthump shows [ AC,AS ] L3st3rMurphy shows [ 9D,9C ] jonna92 shows [ JS,10D ] L3st3rMurphy wins $32.50. SUMMARY
Dealer: MrTon57 Pot: $34, (including rake: $1.50) herberthump loses $9.45 AncusMarcius loses $0 YellowManJJ loses $1.25 Maria 26 loses $1.25 Arale. loses $1.25 MrTon57 loses $0 L3st3rMurphy bets $10.45, collects $32.50, net $22.05 After winning this hand I typed in the chat window "Know your outs :)"
Here's why. This is one of those poker hands where the margin of error could be huge. With all of the action against my lowly 99 here my little voice was sending up red warning balloons like crazy. (Yet another brilliantly creative title!)
First of all, on the flop I put Jonna92 on at least a
When it came back to me the pot was 18.95 and I had to call 8.20. My outs were anywhere from 6 (the 7s and the Qs, without the clubs to complete a flush draw if there was one and my 2 remaining 9s being counterfeited by a higher set), or 10 outs if there were no flush draw and no higher set. I was confident that there were no higher straights out there. So averaging my outs to 8 I decided I only needed 2.2-1 on the call, and with only $5 more for Jonna92 to call into a $27 pot I was sure that he'd call too. The pot odds alone made it a worthwhile call, and the implied odds with Jonna's predicted call made it a no brainer. I flat called not wanting to scare jonna out and we had a 3 way pot, which I rivered out on. I showed this hand to a friend of mine and his initial reaction was that it seemed like a loose play. So we crunched the numbers with pokertracker and with pokerstove.
Here is a rough idea of what we got:
My probability of completing my hand by the river was 31.45%.
This translated to needing pot odds of 2.18-1, so my guesstimate of 2.2-1 was almost bang on. To call a bet of $8.20 I needed to have a pot of at least of $17.87.
I was being offered a pot of $18.95 or odds of 2.32-1, better than I needed. If the implied odds of Jonna92's remaining $5.85 are added to the pot, we then have a pot of $24.80, or implied pot odds of 3.02-1.
As it turned out I did have 10 live outs which gave me terrific expectation. In fact, even if I'd had only 7 outs in this hand, it would have been a profitable call. It's only in the event that I had 6 outs or less that this call would show a loss.
What I love about this hand is that it shows the importance of a) playing by the math, and 2) not always being afraid of the worst case scenario. At best one can only put their opponents on a range of hands. You can never know for certain what an opponent is holding. And when you're counting outs in a hand like this, you need to apply that same technique of ascribing a range of possibilities to your opponents. While it may be possible that you're drawing dead, it's equally possible that all of your outs are live, even remotely possible that both your opponents are drawing. With that in mind, the best method for calculating pot odds in a situation like this is to take the average of your range of outs and go with that. I love this hand. I was bouncing around my house for a while after this one, not because of the amount of money won, but because of the complexity of the call and the fact that I played it well.
Incidentally, had I lost this hand, I think it still would have been the subject of a post. This kind of thing intrigues me to no end!
FLATLAND GRINDERIf you're too careful, your whole life can become a grind.
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