Cake Cashout Update

My Cake check finally arrived yesterday. Obviously it was short $35 so I emailed them and they admitted that they fucked up and charged me a check fee because their system counted my first check request earlier this month as my one free check for the month. They gave me my $35 back and everything is cool.

This entire process has been a massive pain in the ass and huge source of stress, but given the stories I constantly hear about how much trouble people have with check requests on FTP and Stars, I think it could have been a lot worse.

But yeah, ship the $2,965.14 right into my bank account.

Two Pair

Played a little session last night in which I ran into the same troublesome spot three times. Well, two times, but I thought three.

Hand #1

World Series of Poker Champion Leo Wolpert would probably advocating squeezing preflop here, which probably has merit, but I think flatting is fine. I donk out on the flop here because I think I have the best hand but it's very vulnerable and I don't want to risk the button checking behind and a J, Q, or K falling. The button flats me and I think this range for doing so is mostly worse pairs and maybe some overcards he can't release. The turn is pretty great for me and I fire again for value against pairs and get called again. River doesn't seem terrible - it will kill my action against QT and JT but will get me paid against KT. I fire and villain shoves. I don't think he's bluff-shoving the river very often if at all and his range at this point looks to me basically like flopped sets, AK, and KT, with maaaybe some backdoored flushes or QJ. I'm not sure if he slowplays a set like this on a two-tone board and I am so suspicious that he might be doing this with something like AQ or AJ but his line seems pretty monstrous and I eventually apply the Goodeh theorem and fold. Thoughts?

Hand #2

I pretty much butchered this one start to finish but it is still sort of a degenerate case of the same broadly defined situation of making two pair on a river that weakens two pair. I didn't even realize during the hand that the river was just a total blank that gave me three pair, but even if I had read my hand correctly I probably still would have leveled myself into fucking it up. I should probably bet the flop but I stupidly don't because I'm afraid of folding out the shortstack instead of stacking him. So I just let him get there and I think I just made two pair on the river but even though I think improved I'm not sure I want to play with him anymore because the spade draw got there. In retrospect, I think this is a fold because villain's range includes a ton more hands that are ahead of me - any two spades, any T. But I call, reasoning that villain is shortstacked so he's going to be more volatile and his range is going to be wider in the other direction as well. Terrible.

Hand #3

I don't think I ever fold my two high cards facing a minraise in position preflop and when it's checked to me on the flop I'm betting here pretty much always. Turn is a relative blank so I fire again for value against worse pairs and diamond draws. The river gives me top two pair but fills the diamond draw and villain donkshoves into me for 1.3x pot and I tank-fold. I don't think there's much in his range that's worse than me. All of his Jx hands probably check/call and I don't think he makes it to the river with hands like AK or KQ. He could easily be holding diamonds or a 5. I don't think he's bluff-shoving often. I'm really suspicious that he might be enough of a sicko to turn something like JT or J9 into a bluff on this river and part of me wants to call it off with top two pair but instead I apply the Goodeh Theorem and fold. Thoughts?

NL50 Progress

$150.80 / $500.00 after 4,075 hands

Back on Track?

Just wrapped up another nice little session 339-hand, $224.80 session of NL50 while half-listening to my Estates and Trusts professor crow in amazement over how easy it is to buy life insurance using Intelliquote. Again, I enjoyed a very easy session where really no nontrivial decisions came up at all and I won flips and coolered people. It's great to be winning again and I hope this means I'm back on track. I'm feeling refreshed and revitalized and ready to charge back upward and win all the money on Full Tilt.

NL50 Progress

$210.65 / $500.00 after 2,315 hands

S H I P

Just booked a $200+ win over 400 hands of NL50. Didn't really run into any tough spots, just won flips and coolered people. Even though my cards basically played themselves, I'm pretty elated to finally book a solid winning session, and I hope I can sustain this momentum.

NL50 Progress

-$14.15 / $500.00 after 1,976 hands

NL50 Update (Still Losing)

Just lost another $40 in 651 hands of NL50.

Hand #1

Calling pre to setmine, betting the flop in position hoping to take down dead money. I barrel this turn basically always because it's just so good for my preflop call and flop bet range against his preflop call and flop check/call range - I don't think there are many kings in his range and there are plenty in mine. When he calls and the J falls and he checks it to me again, I fire again for basically the same reason, hoping to fold out some of his weak queens and worse pairs that he might have had trouble folding. Are there enough hands that he's not folding to a third barrel left in his range so that I should just check behind? There are a lot of two pair combinations in there. When he check/shoves over me I'm pretty sure he has something like QT or JT or a set so it's a clear fold but should I bet the river at all?

Hand #2

Again, not really sure how to play this river. Villain is a pretty loose 40/10 Russian and I think I'm betting for three streets of value against his draws, worse pairs, and even A-highs. Is check/calling better on the river so as not to give him a chance to shove over me with air? Should I maybe even bet/call against this villain on this board? I don't know how often he shoves with air here.

Hand #3

Floating to steal on the turn but he calls and I follow through on a scary turn card. Again, not sure whether I should bluff at this river or just give up and check behind. Villain tanked briefly before calling with JJ so maybe the problem is that my bet was too small, but I think I would bet this same size if I actually had a flush and were trying to get value. I think the fact that he check/called the turn was confusing and I just sort of defaulted to aggression on a vaguely scary-looking river, but now that I think about it, this river is probably not that scary of a card for his range. I think that a reasonable range for him going into the river is 22-99 and Ax and Kx of spades, and all I'm folding out of that range is 77 and 99 and I'm valuecutting myself against the rest of it. Now that I think about it, checking behind is probably best. Villain shows up with JJ which is very strange - his line seems just to make it difficult for him to play.

Hand #4

I'm so suspicious that he has 88-JJ here but I apply the Goodeh Theorem and fold. Thoughts?

NL 50 "Progress"

-$230.45 / $500.00 after 1,574 hands

No More Rush

Talking to Goodeh and others in #smallstakes recently has convinced me that playing Rush is probably a bad idea for me right now. The difficulty of building strong and thorough reads, and impossibility of finding and exploiting particular fish is probably a bad thing overall for me and cuts into my winrate, amplifying the impact of variance. I still think that I have an edge on the Rush field but I acknowledge that the edge is thin and playing regular tables is probably better for me at this point in my poker career.

So I sat down just now and 3-tabled some regular NL50 and it turns out that I can lose even faster there than I can on Rush! I lost $134 in 387 hands.

Hand #1

This is pretty awful by me and basically happened because this villain had been hammering me constantly with 3bets, which is a situation that I find pretty hard to handle. I call preflop basically to setmine but on the flop I totally lose sight of this plan and decide to float and steal on the turn because I suspect that he has air a lot. The 3flushing A is probably a bad card for this because now his Ax are all ahead of me and he's probably never folding any of them getting 3:1 and some of his flush draws are probably also calling. Unfortunately, I don't really see a clearly better way to play this. Folding to his 3bet pre and just letting him continue to run me over four hands in a row seems bad, open-folding 55 pre seems bad, calling pre and folding to his cbet on the flop seems worse than just folding to his 3bet pre, and calling on the flop and checking behind on the turn seems like it's just begging him to shove any river. Thoughts?

Hand #2

Villain here is 39/24 and I'm willing to play ATs out of position against him so I call pre from the big blind. With one overcard, a gutshot, and a backdoor nut flush draw, I think I have enough equity to float him on the flop, even out of position, since I think he's basically auto-cbetting and I can also bluff any diamond turn or river. I make the nuts on the turn and checkraise for value. Should I perhaps raise more, or even shove on this turn? I didn't want to scare off his one pair hands that he might be willing to take all the way but I had stupidly neglected the need to deny odds to his flush draws. And how should I play this river? I don't know if I get value out of anything by shoving here, since the flushing A scares away a lot of the hands that I was trying to get value out of on the turn. Should I check and call a shove? That seems to allow him to play perfectly against me, checking behind with anything worse and getting maximum value out of his flushes. Should I check and fold to a shove getting almost 3:1? Help...

Hand #3

Stealing pre; never folding to his stupid min3bet getting better than 3:1. Flop seems perfect for me - little do I know that I'm drawing dead. I happily take the free turn card and happily pay what seems like a good price for the river, where I make my flush. He bets out a little less than halfpot. I think his range is pretty wide here but I don't know if raising is good here. I'm hoping to get value out of some worse flushes, possibly some weirdly played trips, but mostly things like AJ and AK/AQ that he can't lay down. I just don't know if he's the kind of player who will pay me off with those hands. When he reraises I think his range is flushes and boats, and the fact that he min3bet me preflop makes me strongly suspect he may be bad enough to reraise me with worse flushes. I call getting better than 3:1 but should I fold?

NL50 Progress

-$187.15 / $500.00 after 906 hands

Thoughts on Downswinging and NL50

Most poker players, including myself until pretty recently, severely underestimate the role that variance plays in determining results even over large sample sizes. Everyone has read the 2p2 posts where people have done simulations based on winrates and standard deviations and found that it's possible to have a relatively enormous edge (3+ BB/100) and still be a significant loser over a fairly large sample (100,000+ hands). Everyone understands on a sort of abstract intellectual level that this is within the broad range of possible outcomes for a poker player. But I don't think anyone actually believes that it will happen to him until it actually does.

I definitely subscribe to the "Survival of the Luckiest" theory of the beginning stages of poker. This theory has been the topic of some discussion on 2p2 and elsewhere, and I think there is a lot of merit to it. Basically, I think that most successful poker players ran really good during crucial periods of their careers, especially in the important early formative stages, and became acclimated to winning. Because their first experiences with poker were so successful, they came to think that crushing the games for statistically aberrant winrates was the norm. So when a successful player's luck begins to normalize, his unrealistic expectations amplify the psychological impact of the downswing that, while the biggest of his career and completely outside the realm of his psychological expectation, is so well within the realm of statistical expectation that it would in fact be an unusual result for it not to occur over a large sample.

Poker communities like 2p2 are infested with people who are still in the initial rungood stage of their poker careers and think their good results qualify them to speak authoritatively on poker and variance and how it doesn't exist and how only donks can ever lose 20 buyins, but who in reality don't have even a rudimentary understanding of the awesome power that variance really has in determining results. If you post a thread on 2p2 on this subject, the two or three voices of experienced veteran poker players who have seen and felt the effects of variance will be drowned out by the shrill cacophony of idiots who have never experienced a real downswing in their lives.

The piece of constructive criticism that I most frequently receive is that I lack confidence. I have long suspected that in reality, I have an appropriate level of self-skepticism and everyone else is irrationally overconfident. I think that there is almost a sort of selection bias that causes the most vocal posters on 2p2 to be overconfident, for the same Survival of the Luckiest reasons I previously discussed.

One of the things that I find most repugnant about the overconfident poker mindset is that it forecloses the possibility of improvement. People who just shrug off every loss as "meh, variance" are ignoring the very real possibility - certainty, I should say - that there are leaks in their games and these losses provide an opportunity to identify and plug them. I guess I'm just not really sure where confidence ends and self-delusion begins, and I'm terrified of inadvertently crossing that line and accepting shot-term peace of mind to the long-term detriment of my game.

This attitude is good insofar as it leads me to search vigorously for leaks in my game and examine lines that I take in a critical light. I think my problem is that I have taken it too far, past the point where it's helpful in this way and up to the point where it's convinced me that I'm an irremediably incompetent poker player. I need to get this idea out of my head and find the appropriate amount of healthy skepticism without turning it into crushing hyperbolic self-doubt. I need to find some way to balance my range so that my "wow, that was so donkish of me" thoughts are mixed in with a decent amount of "meh, variance." I need to accept the unfortunate reality that, in poker as in all walks of life, bad things happen to good people. It's the very nature of the game that it's possible to do everything right and still lose.

I am reminding myself to be a student of the game. This is difficult after having gone off for $3,000 at stakes four times what I'm contemplating playing now - after a heater like that, after demonstrating to myself that I'm capable of doing that, I've found myself sliding into the dangerous mindset that I've already learned all the lessons there are to learn at lower stakes, that I've already solved those games. I am making a conscious effort to avoid that kind of thinking and to try to see every hand as a new lesson to be learned that will strengthen my game in preparation for my next shot at higher stakes.

In that spirit, I am also trying to take this 31-buyin downswing in stride, as a learning experience. In a way, I feel almost like this experience is a badge of honor that demonstrates that I've played enough volume to have started to experience what variance is really like. It's almost as if I've graduated into a higher rank of poker experience.

In addition to all of this, a few other factors are weighing pretty heavily in favor of taking my chances at NL50 rather than quitting poker altogether. One of these is the fact that I still have $260 of bonus to clear and I have until June to clear it. Another is the comforting fact that, in spite of all the shit that I feel like I've gone through over the past month, I'm still a little bit ahead of where I had envisioned myself. When I claimed my deposit bonus on Cake in mid-November, I thought I was barely going to be able to clear it in time grinding six tables of NL50 for two hours a day. I'm back at NL50 now, but at least I spent some time at higher stakes, gained some valuable experience, and earned some valuable rakeback and bonus at a much faster rate.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I feel like the first major downswing is almost a sort of crucible in which the composition of a poker player's spirit meets its first true test. I've fallen so very very far and been beaten down so badly and I've come now to a point where I am face to face with utter failure, staring it straight in its ignominious eye. Will I quail under its demon gaze? With my back to the wall, having lost so much ground, will I fall to my weary knees, despondent, and surrender before the final battle is even fought? Will I give up on myself? Is that the person I am? Is that who I want to be?

No. I know that I am teetering on the precipice of losing everything I've put into this game. I know that failure is possible - perhaps even likely. I know that the remainder of my poker career could amount to nothing more than the final tortured thrashings of a terminal case. But I will rot in a special hell if I let that knowledge intimidate me. I won't submit. I won't acquiesce. I'll fight it - I'll fight it down to the last grubby penny of my meager bankroll. I know that I may end up busto after all. But if that's to be my fate, at least I'll go down swinging. Downswinging. Heh.

So there. I know what I have to do - ten buyins at NL50 and then another shot at NL100. I just played a Happy Hour session of NL50 Rush and I'm down a buyin already, but fuck it. I'm not going anywhere until you see me post the NL2 hand in which I literally lose my last penny.

NL50 Progress

-$52.75 / $500.00 after 519 hands

Fuck

Just played another Happy Hour session of NL100 Rush and lost $356, plummeting through my stoploss for NL100. I'm now 30 buyins down from my peak. Over the next few days I'm going to need to figure out whether to move down to NL50 or just quit poker altogether and save what little is left of my bankroll.

I'm too stunned to talk about hands right now but here are a few so that others can look, if anyone cares.

Hand #1

Hand #2

Hand #3

Hand #4

Envy the Dead

Just played another Happy Hour session and lost another $440. I'm now 3 buyins away from my stoploss at NL100, after which I'll have to make a decision either to move down to NL50 or to quit poker.

After the psychological turmoil and tiltrage that I've been going through recently, I'm strangely untilted by this past session even though it was my biggest losing session in terms of buyins in the past couple weeks. I think this is because most of my big losing hands were just coolers.

Hand #1

I don't think I'm ever folding to his flop checkraise - the question is whether to call or shove. I think shoving is better because I think he takes this line a lot with AK and I don't think he can get away from it so I think I get value there. When he shows up with KK I think it's just a cooler. Calling and never folding seems okay too because there's a small chance that my shove will scare away his AK and it potentially saves me some money if he somehow doesn't manage to get it all in with his KK. I'm not sure which is better but either way I don't think I can avoid losing a lot of money with AA against KK sitting 188bb deep when a K flops so I'm not tearing my hair over this; I'd be thrilled to hear the perspective of anyone who wants to voice a reasoned disagreement.

Hand #2

Oversetted 171bb deep. I thought about whether or not I could ever find a fold here but against a range that includes sets, AJ, KQ, AcKc, and AcQc, I have 43% equity and I'm getting almost 2:1 to call off my stack. Interestingly, against two players with that range, my equity plummets to 18%, but I don't think the short stack's range is that narrow. If I include A2+ in the short stack's range, my equity rises to 34% again. Pretty sure this is just a cooler or at worst a close decision where I erred on the side of not folding a set, but again, I'd love to hear reasoned disagreement.

Hand #3

Oversetted 100bb deep. A lot of people advocate limping small pairs in early position so I've been experimenting with it a little bit recently. I don't think I like it because it's difficult to limp in early position with a balanced range and it's hard to build a big pot for when I do hit my sets. It also creates the weird situation observed in this hand. I think villain's range is mostly Kx and the point of my line is to get as much value out of a mostly-Kx range as possible. Arguably, I misplayed the river and should just flatcall, because most of his Kx aren't going to lead that strongly on that river and his range starts to looking more like two pairs, sets, and straights. But arguably, I get value out of his two pairs enough to make shoving worth it. Thoughts, anyone?

Hand #4

This is a close and kind of confusing spot for me on the river. Should I check/call to get value out of his missed flush draws? Should I bet smaller out of fear that I'm behind, since a lot of his flop calling range has improved to two pair or possibly even a running straight on this turn and river?

Hand #5

As the pre-flop raiser, villain here check/calls the flop and then leads for less than half the pot on the turn. In my limited experience, I have found that this weird and confusing line usually means nuts or air but I have decent equity against the nuts so I call thinking I'm getting a decent price with okay implied odds to get value if I hit my draw. Little do I realize that I'm drawing dead against what he actually has. My bluff at the river is thin at best and might be flat-out terrible. I'm trying to represent a set or a straight made with 55 or As5s, which is seldom a good range to be trying to represent. Checking behind just seems so bad against his air, though. Is this perhaps a good spot to bet out a third of the pot and fold to a raise?

Hand #6

Arguably, I should fold on the turn here even with my overpair and nut flush draw. I'm getting 3.5:1 on my call and my equity against a range including boats, flushes, and trips is 16%. I don't know if the good implied odds I'm getting against his worse flushes and trips make up for the reverse implied odds I'm getting against his boats. I think the river is a fold when I miss because I'm basically bluffcatching and I don't think he's bluffing often enough to make calling profitable.

NL100 Progress

-$939.89 / $1,000.00 after 7,654 hands

NL100 Update; Introducing Goodeh

It is my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce my new co-blogger, Goodeh. He probably will not post as often as I do, since, as he said, he has a sick job and life that will probably keep him pretty busy, whereas I am one of the least employed people I know.

Goodeh began taking poker seriously a bit before I did and has gotten very good very quickly and is basically pretty sick at poker and life. These days he mostly prefers to play pot-limit Omaha but his analytical poker skills obviously apply to no-limit hold 'em as well.

But enough about people other than me. I just played another Happy Hour session of NL100 Rush and lost a bunch of money again. However, I was mostly psychologically and emotionally under control and I think I played decently overall.

This was the most interesting hand. I've been thinking a lot recently about how to play against the squeeze and whether or not setmining is profitable in a 3-way 3bet pot and I'm not sure about this but I think mid pocket pairs are not terrible hands to experiment with in a situation like this where there's a squeeze and a call by the original raiser. I think midpairs have decent equity in a 3way pot against a squeezer and a preflop raiser who flats the squeeze. So I experimentally call in position. Squeezer is a Russian who is 38/30 over 55 hands.

The squeezer fire fullpot with less than pot behind on the flop but I suspect he's the kind of fucker who does this with his AK and his failed squeeze air hands and his failed squeeze hands that might have caught a weak piece of that flop, like 64 or 75 or like Kc8c, so I shove over for value against those hands and as a thin bluff on the off chance that he's good enough to fold TT or JJ. He obviously isn't, and all the money goes in with me as a 9:1 dog. Not sure if I interpreted the available information correctly in formulating my read here and not sure if my play is any good even if I did.

NL100 Progress

-$506.94 / $1,000.00 after 6,744 hands

Live from Ireland

Hello!

I should probably go into my poker history or something but this is not the time for it. I have just moved from home of 19 years in London to a temporary flat in Dublin, Ireland to start my new career. My employer is a poker company.

At this stage I'm not going to divulge what I am doing or who my employer is but I am pretty hyped, I start tomorrow.

Sorry for the brief and concise nature of this blog, but right now I really don't feel like writing a long post.

An actual poker related post will follow shortly

Good Session

Just played a nice little 384-hand happy hour session where I felt like I was in a really good rhythm and a lot of things went my way - I hit a lot of flops and even when I didn't people folded to my cbets. Psychologically I felt well-centered and stable and capable of folding when likely behind. I didn't win much money but the psychological boost of having things go well is really very nice.

I have a long way to go, but if I can somehow sustain this momentum and keep this mental state, the long journey will be much more pleasant.

NL100 Progress

-$479.44 / $1,000.00 after 6,048 hands

Nope

Just played again and lost another $350. Here are some hands.

Hand #1

Same old story, flop top pair and get raised on a two-tone flop. Never have any clue what to do. I switch to check/call and I think the turn and river are pretty good cards for me given that this is my plan but obviously he rivers a set.

Hand #2

This is just terrible by me. After I get called on the flop I should pretty much be shutting down since I'm only ever getting called by better pairs. After this hand it was like I woke up from some hypnotic state with only a vague memory of what happened and no memory of my thought process past the flop. Maybe this is the way I tilt and I was tilting after Hand #1.

Hand #3

Not sure if I should be 3betting here but folding JTs to a button open seems bad and flatting and playing it out of position also seems bad. I got really excited on the flop because I flopped two pair but in retrospect it's fairly obvious that this is a terrible flop for me because a lot of his preflop raise and call 3bet range either has a set (TT-QQ) or a straight (AK). The turn is terrible for me too because his AQ, KK, and AA are now also ahead of me. I should probably be shutting down on this turn as well but I was irrationally exuberant with my two pair and I fire on overcard turns in non-3bet pots out of habit so I looked at stack sizes and shrugged and shoved. He showed up with QJ which means he's almost as retarded as I am but just a tiny bet less retarded and that tiny bit is enough to win.

I'm playing really badly and feeling lost and out-of-control. I'm beginning to feel physically sick and violent as I lose this big hands. I feel like it would be a shame if I'm actually a good player and I end up quitting because of a downswing but it would also be a shame if I went broke playing online poker and I'm not sure which is more likely any more.

NL100 Progress

-$531.49 / $1,000.00 after 5,664 hands

Tentative Fistpump

In a bizarre twist, I ran really good at Rush. I'm cautiously optimistic that this signals that I've finished atoning for whatever sins I committed against the universe to deserve the past couple of weeks and things can go back to the way they were.

NL100 Progress

-$172.34 / $1,000.00 after 5,346 hands

Cleared Cake's Retarded $25 Bonus

Unfortunately, I lost $170 doing it. Now I'm going to 3-table NL100 Rush and try to grind out Iron Man for the day. Wish me luck...

NL100 Progress

-$379.24 / $1,000.00 after 4,845 hands

More of the Same

Some new horrible shit happened to me. After going through the trouble of scanning in all my shit and sending it to Cake so their "processor" could cut my my goddamn check, I got an email back from them saying that they transferred my entire cashout amount back into my account without any explanation. I emailed them back immediately asking what the fuck they were doing and I got this reply:

Thank you for your email. Apologies but our third party check processor recently changed his policy and so it is not possible anymore to cash out via check over an amount of $3000. As the policy was unexpectedly changed and the check processor was not willing to process a requested cash out over $3000 it had to be canceled. Your are free to request the other full amount of a maximum $3000 per check. Otherwise you can cash out through eWalletxpress or Quicktender/UseMyWallet. In relation to the experienced inconvenience and for you as a valuable customer we have now credited $25 in the pending bonus section of your Poker account.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Kind Regards

Sara

CakePoker Support

Back when I titled my first post about this situation "Beat: Cake is scamming me," I was more joking than not, but now I'm really starting to wonder if I'm actually being made the victim of fraud.

Of course, being the degenerate edgemonger that I am, right after I requested my $3,000 check I sat at a few NL100 tables on Cake to try to start clearing the $25 of bonus they gave me. Obviously, this happened immediately. Villain donking out into my top pair/open ended straight draw leads me to raise because people do this all the time with garbage that they fold to a raise, and when he shoves over I think there are a lot of draws in his range so I call getting almost 3:1 with my top pair/open ended straight draw. Obviously villain shows up with a made straight.

NL100 Progress

-$210.55 / $1,000.00 after 2,940 hands

The Usual

Played a few hundred hands just now and lost another $150ish. I guess I will post a couple of the many hands I probably horribly misplayed.

Hand #1

I have been talking to Leo recently and he advocates squeezing with hands like AJ and KQ to take down dead money and avoid having to take a flop out of position with them. Well, I squeezed here and totally whiffed the flop. Betting seems like the least bad of several bad options here so I fire and villain tank-calls. Turn gives me flush outs in addition to my A outs so I shove trying to fold his weak pairs but obviously he flopped a set. Seeya later, $112.

Ways I could could have played this differently:

1. Flat pre?
2. Fold pre?
3. Bet smaller on the flop, which then allows me to bet/fold a non-spade non-ace turn and bet/shove a spade or ace turn?
4. Check/fold flop?
5. Check/fold turn?
6. Bet/call turn?
7. Bet/fold turn getting like 5:1?
8. Quit poker forever?

I think I like #3 though #8 is a strong candidate.

Hand #2

This is just the most recent manifestation of a problem that's plagued me basically my entire poker life - not knowing what to do when I flop top pair and lead out and get raised. Back in old days I would just get it in but people always had a set. Then I switched to folding and people would always show that their flush draws and laugh in my face and needle me in chat. Then I switched to calling and never folding and people would always either have sets or get there with their draws. So here I try reraising and folding to a shove. But this also seems bad because it lets him shove with a balanced range of draws and stronger-than-top-pair made hands. Especially since this is blind vs. blind, he could easily have any two diamonds or AT or T8 or J9 or TT or 88. I have no idea how to weight these in his range or how to play optimally here.

NL100 Progress

-$77.65 / $1,000.00 after 2,892 hands

In which our intrepid hero is frozen in his tracks by a nonstandard preflop line...

Okay, so I just played this hand. Villain is pretty nitty, something like 13/11 over the few hands I've seen him play so far, but I don't think that's really helpful at all. What the fuck am I supposed to make of this min3bet and then flatcall of my 4bet? The fact that villain is even capable of playing this weird min3bet/call line preflop makes me question the usefulness of logic and reason in trying to formulate the best play against him. Does he do this with AK and AQ often enough in addition to his 99-QQ to justify openshoving AK for less than pot on any flop? As usual, I have no idea. I have no idea if I played this right, I have no idea if ranged villain correctly, I have no idea how villain plays various parts of his range, and I have no idea how even to begin to figure out any of these things.

NL100 Progress

$49.45 / $1,000.00

NL100 Update

Made a few big hands and got paid off and also blundered a few times and paid other people off but the former happened a little more often than the latter and I'm up to $169.00 at NL100. I'm running pretty good but not really even enjoying it because I feel like I'm just luckboxing my wins and getting outplayed in my losses and these are fucking kiddie stakes anyway.

I'm still feeling really psychologically unstable and reacting really strongly and emotionally to every lost pot, which is really out of character for me. For example, as this was happening, my inner monologue was something like "okay, late position open and flat, I can probably squeeze here. Great, the original raiser folded, I'm definitely taking this down...wait, what the fuck is the guy who flatted on the button doing calling? Ugh whatever, this clown folds to my cbet on any flop almost always...WHAT THE FUCK is he doing calling me on this flop? His line makes no fucking sense. What the fuck is this? I have ace high, I have to check/fold but GOD I wish I there was some way I could fucking punish this fucker. Fucking dammit, what the fuck could he possibly have there? A set? Two pair? A fucking straight? Does he have an underpair that I can make him fold by firing again on the turn? Is he exploiting the shit out of me with pure air? What the fuck is this? I have no fucking clue what's going on here. What the fuck? No idea what's in his range here but my equity against is probably pretty bad so I guess have to fucking fold here. What the fuck? Fuck! FUCK!"

This is really out of character for me. I used to pride myself on my zen-like ability to absorb beats and just grind away with a placid aplomb. But recently I've been experiencing really powerful frustration and aggravation seemingly ever session. And, in a perverse negative-feedback-loop kind of way, the fact that I'm tilting is further tilting me because it makes me feel worse about myself because I've lost the ability not to tilt.

NL100 Progress

$169.00 / $1,000.00

Welcome Back to NL100

I found some amazing fish this morning and stacked him and ended up $160ish in the black - 16% of the way there, hell yes, let's go. But just now I sat at a couple of Rush tables for happy hour and this happened and then this happened and it made me feel pretty bad. But whatever, just coolers. I think I played them fine.

I've been noticing that recently I've been teetering on the precipice of doing something that I almost never do, which is tilt at the tables to such an extent that it affects my play. I think of myself as being pretty solid when it comes to keeping my feelings of despondency from interfering with my play, but after those two hands happened, right as I was beginning to feel some hope that maybe I was going to be able to string together a few winning sessions after the downswing of my life, I actually felt a physical sensation, a sort of smoldering discomfort in my upper abdomen, and I came pretty close to falling apart.

Even when (I think) I'm playing well, I just can't manage to win. I understand intellectually that the nature of poker is that frequently you can do everything right and still lose, but I've just been losing for so long and I feel so dejected and hopeless that I can't use that intellectual understand to salve the frustration of cooler after cooler. I feel like a little kid being punished for doing something that nobody explained to him was wrong.

NL100 Progress

$5.25 / $1000.00

Strategic Retreat

Well, I crashed through my stoploss for 1/2 and, like a good little boy, I've moved down to NL100 to lick my wounds. After I make 10 buyins at this level, I'll try to move back up. It's pretty miserable to look back and see that at the beginning of the year, I was up $3,000, and that in the intervening time I've somehow managed to bleed it all back, then go on another hot streak and win another $2,000 and then lose that all back too.

Moving down sucks a fat smegma-encrusted dick for the following reasons:

1. My reward for stacking someone is only $100, half as much as it is at 1/2.
2. The standard preflop raise sizes and pot sizes are tiny compared to what I'm used to at 1/2, making me feel like I'm playing kiddy stakes.
3. Rakeback accumulates and bonus clears at half the rate it did at 1/2. (Incidentally, Full Tilt finally credited my account with the rest of my deposit bonus and I've started working on clearing it.) Additionally, Iron Man is twice as hard to clear every day.
4. Even if I run good, it's going to take for fucking ever to dig myself out of this hole with my upside potential cut in half and I feel like it's going to be a fucking eternity before I claw back up to the stakes where I feel I belong.

I don't know how different NL100 and 1/2 really are. I'm terrified that they aren't really that different at all and all of the things that I'm doing that caused me to lose at 1/2 will cause me to continue to lose at NL100. On the other hand, I'm also kind of terrified that they are different and that I'm only good enough to beat NL100 and I'm going to be stuck here taking unsuccessful shots for the rest of my pathetic poker career.

I've been feeling pretty lost when I've been trying to think about poker recently. I feel like I have all of the analytical tools and a solid framework within which to analyze situations, but somehow lack the experience or mental acuity to be able to make this analytical framework useful in practice. I know that if I can just examine villain's actions thus far and put him on a range of hands and figure my showdown and fold equity against his range and act to maximize my total expectation, I should win in the long run. But when I'm actually sitting at a table and I 3bet from the blinds and get flatted and cbet with missed overcards on a T84 flop and get flatted again, I have no idea what percent of villains range consists of 88, 99, TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA, AK, AQ, J9, 97, 65, AT, A8, T8, 77, 66, 55, 44, etc. etc. etc. I don't know how many times he opens and flats a 3bet when he's holding these. Furthermore, I have no idea how often he folds any of these to a 2nd barrel or how often he shoves over with any of this when I fire more than half my stack on a blank turn.

Even when I'm sitting down after a session is over and looking at a hand and stoving ranges, I don't know how many hand combinations to include. And even when I eventually decide on some reasonable-seeming range, the equity result is totally nonobvious. I have no idea how I'm supposed to estimate these things with any degree of confidence in the 25 seconds I have at the table. I don't consider myself particularly bad at math, but I feel like I'm miles away from being able to do this. Is this something that comes with experience? Are some people just able to do it naturally? I have no idea how anyone does this, unless they're some sort of Phil Galfond-like savant. The seeming impossibility of doing this makes me think there must be some heuristic tricks or shortcuts to simplify this analysis, but what are they?

I feel like all good poker players are in on some sort of secret to which I'm not privy, and it might not even have anything to do with whatever arcane secrets Cole South uses to deduce villains ranges accurately and compute equities in his head. I wish I knew what good players know that I don't. I wish I knew even how to find out what they know and I don't.

I constantly hear stories about people who deposited $200 on PokerStars and ran it up to $20,000 in six months. Moving down right now is especially psychologically crushing because I feel like I was so close to achieving that sick dream. I went on a $3,000 tear right as I took a shot at 1/2 and I feel like I was on the cusp of achieving critical mass and going on a nuclear explosion for five figs and becoming the next rags-to-riches Poker Idol hero all-star. But I just can't seem to put it together - I just don't seem to have whatever it is those amazing players have. Hope I can find it at NL100!!! Fuck this whore earth.

I just played another 1,681-hand session and lost $573.15. Poker is going badly. The rest of my life is also a fucking mess. I hate everything and want to die.

Getting Owned All Over

Just played a two-hour session and played four hands that have me reeling in disgust and vicious self-doubt.

Hand #1

After villain bet and called my checkraise on the flop, I had him on exactly 99-QQ. So when the A falls on the turn I think it's perfect for me to shove for a little more than pot. Welp, villain shows up with the nuts. Seeya later, $316.

I have a lot of trouble playing the flop out of position in 3bet pots where I hold missed overcards. The fact that we are 150bb deep here makes it even harder to range villain accurately, and it turned out that he was indeed smart enough to widen his range to include implied odds hands like 6h4h. Since I thought his call preflop and bet/call on the flop meant a weak overpair, my thought was to use the deep stacks to my advantage to put a lot of pressure on him on the turn since I'd shown nothing but extreme strength in the entire hand up until that point. Unfortunately I neglected to take into account the possibility that he had some sort of implied odds hand that made the nuts.

Actually, in retrospect I don't think it's likely he has a set, since I think he tries to get it in on the flop with his sets because the board is suited and connected and my range potentially includes hands that have decent equity against a set. But even so, I think there's a pretty good chance that my line is just awful anyway. Basically, when I take my line, I'm counting on him (1) holding 99-QQ, (2) being willing to put me on a higher overpair or AK, and (3) being willing to fold to a shove when the A falls on the turn. I don't think all of these things conditions are satisfied very often. But honestly, I have no fucking clue. I feel like I know nothing about poker right now.

Hand #2

Again, this is a situation where I'm out of position in a huge pot with missed overcards on the flop. When villain 3bets and calls my 4bet, I have him on 99-QQ and AK, and I feel like I can make him fold by shoving for a little more than pot on this flop and representing KK+. Of course he doesn't believe me and snaps me off with JJ. Seeya later, $219.

No idea what to do here. Check/fold? Bet half pot and fold to a shove getting 5:1? Massively overshove pre? How the hell am I supposed to play this?

Hand #3

Here I call pre because I think I'm getting good implied odds against an UTG raiser. I flop a 15-outer and I raise on the flop because I like to build a big pot to win when I hit and also lay claim to fold equity, both immediately and for later streets. I brick the turn but still have decent equity so I bet enough to let me shove on the river. Of course I brick the river too but my plan was to shove so I follow through and shove. Villain tanks and calls with 2 seconds left in his time bank and obviously he has AA. Seeya later, $203.

Again, I vastly overestimate my fold equity on this board. My range when I shove the river looks like a set or a missed draw and nobody will ever believe that I have a set. (And yet, somehow, it seems like nobody ever pays me off when I actually do have one either. Selective memory, I guess.)

No idea what I'm supposed to do here. Checking behind might be okay if I don't think I have any fold equity at all, which could easily be the case, but it gives him a free showdown and surrenders a big pot to his weak pairs that he could have kept. I could maybe make some tiny bet of 1/4 pot to fold out any missed draws that he might have and possibly scare off some of his weak pairs. That seems easily exploited by anyone good enough to see what it means and shove over it, but will people do that? I don't even know, and that's such a crippling problem. I have no idea how I'm supposed to play this hand and all of my analytical methods are coming up short because I don't know how villains play certain parts of their ranges or even what their ranges include.

Hand #4

Unlike the other hands, this is one where I at least have some idea of what my errors might be. On the flop, my options should be either flatting to keep the pot small with my medium-strength hand or raising more to deny odds to draws. On the turn, there is a very strong argument to be made for a fold. Bet/call on the flop and check/raise on the turn is just such a bizarre line and I'm so confused about what to do, but it seems like in general people only ever do shit like this with the nuts. But it's just so weird and I have no idea what it means and I have omg top pair so I call. I make two pair on the river and I justify calling again to myself by telling myself that I'm ahead of K3 and possibly some AK he would play like this and all of his bluffs. Obviously he shows up with 33 that he held onto on the flop and filled on the turn. Seeya later, $198.

Calling my raise on the flop with 33 seems terrible in general, but against me, it might not be bad overall because my inability to fold against his weird out-of-nowhere aggressive line on the turn and river after he gets there is laying him sick implied odds. Is he bluffing rarely enough that I should fold on the turn getting 3.5:1 or on the river with top two pair getting nearly 3:1?

I feel like I've just played so many massive pots recently without having any idea if I'm playing them right. I was up $2,000 at one point this month and now I've lost it all and I'm barely even for the month. I've crept back within four buyins of my 1/2 stoploss. I'm also massively stressed out over my situation trying to cash out out Cake and not knowing whether or not $6,600 has been stolen from me. My sleep schedule has been fucked recently and I've missed tons of class and my academic life is falling apart like it does every semester. And I just spent my 23rd consecutive Valentine's Day alone. I wish life would stop owning me.

How NOT to Bluff Checkraise the River

Just played this atrocity of a hand. River seems like a pretty obvious check/fold and even the flop is arguably a fold against this TAGgish villain with nit tendencies. But since I am a poker genius, I decide to turn top pair/top kicker into a bluff on the river. Villain valuebets enough to allow me to shove for more than the pot and I somehow convince myself that I can make him fold his AT, sets, and weak flushes if I do so. Obviously, I get snapped off by TT - seeya later, $322!

My thought process is absurd. Nobody is ever folding a set or a weak flush here. The only hands villains folds are the ones I'm already beating, and possibly AT, and there are very very few of those in his range (he maybe, MAYBE takes this line with an ace and the queen or jack of diamonds) compared to sets and flushes. I need to be making this play for value only, and only when I actually have the nuts. But obviously, the next time that happens, villain will fold and show the second nut flush.

I can't believe that after all this time, I still have this much trouble folding TPTK in the face of sustained aggression. You would think that after this much time, I'd have made some progress on this front, but it seems like I'm just discovered new and even more insane ways to avoid folding. I don't understand why it's so hard for me to just get away from these hands. I absolutely have to find some way to start doing so.

Beat: I'm Being Scammed Out of $6.6K by Cake Poker?

Early last week, I requested my cashout check for the balance of my account on Cake and I've been looking forward to receiving a check for about $6,600. Imagine my surprise when I checked my email and saw this message:

We have been informed by our check processor that your ID, although adequate for our purposes, is not clear enough to be used as ID verification for check issuance. We would request that you provide another digital copy of your photo ID that is much cleared and has better contrast. Our check processor will then be able to complete the processing of your check. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause you.

Please let us know if we can be further assistance

Kind Regards.

Alejandra

Cake Poker Cashier

What the fuck is this?

It's pretty standard for poker sites to require some sort of identity verification before they allow you to withdraw any money, but I've already jumped through this hoop. In order even to enable the check request cashout option on my account, a few months ago, I had to send them an 11MB png-format digital photo of the top half of my bank statement and my passport. Every word on every document is perfectly legible. But apparently it's not enough for Cake's "check processor." I would love to hear the rationale behind this and I would love any guidance on what would be "clear enough."

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to try to find a scanner at school and do a high-resolution scan of my documents and send them in again. But if what they already have isn't good enough, I can't imagine that any sort of scan will be. This is especially weird because Cake's service and support has always been prompt and helpful in the past and I've never had any problems with them until now. I really don't know what the next step is if they still won't let me cash out and I'm kind of freaking out about this because my Cake bankroll represents a fairly large percentage of all of my assets. I really, REALLY hope that they just want a slightly higher resolution image and there's a scanner at school I can use and I get my check soon.

gg, irs.

I've been working on my taxes recently and, since 2009 was the first year I've made any actual money playing poker, I've been familiarizing myself with the tax provisions relating to poker winnings. Now, I should say at the outset that politically I'm more or less a social democrat and I don't at all mind paying taxes to contribute to the maintenance and upkeep of our government and the multitude of services it provides us. If anything, I think taxes in this country are in general too low and I'm in favor of broader government-administered social welfare programs. But what I've learned about the way poker winnings are taxed, especially the way MY poker winnings will be taxed for last year, has been pretty tilting.

[Nothing is this post is legal advice, and nobody should rely on it. This post is simply a recitation of my best understanding of the way poker winnings are taxed. I'm not a lawyer or an accountant and I'm especially not YOUR lawyer or YOUR accountant. If you want legal or tax advice, you should seek the counsel of a lawyer or accountant licensed to practice your jurisdiction.]

Basically, the IRS treats poker winnings like any other gambling winnings, requiring that you declare your winnings as income and allowing you to deduct your losses, but only to the extent of your winnings. So if you are stuck on the year, you can't take a deduction for the amount you're stuck; you can only deduct up to the amount of your winnings.

This is pretty shitty for poker players, since a poker player being stuck for the year is not really that different from a business being in the red for the year but the business can take a deduction for its net loss and the poker player can't. I think the rationale behind this policy is that productive business is something the government wants to encourage, so it's willing to subsidize bad years for businesses, but gambling is something the government doesn't really want its citizens doing, so it doesn't give the same tax advantage to gambling losses. This seems ridiculous. A poker pro having a losing year is much more analogous to a business having a losing year than it is to some degenerate spending thousands on scratch tickets, yet for tax purposes it's treated like the latter rather than the former. gg irs.

Initially, I thought I could just net my winning and losing sessions and report the net as income, but I dug a little deeper and it turns out that the IRS requires poker players to report all of their winning sessions as income and itemize deductions and deduct all losing sessions as itemized deductions. Furthermore, the IRS has never explicitly defined what constitutes a "session." While the limitation on deductions for losses is mildly tilting, this itemization requirement combines with the murkiness of the definition of a session to put me on apoplectic hippo-tilt.

The most aggressive position I could take with respect to the definition of a session would be that a session lasts until I move money from my Cake account to my bank account. Under this definition, my entire play over the course of the past year has been one long session. But I doubt this would hold up in an audit or in court, since it would basically allow me to skirt the itemization requirement entirely.

The most extreme way to define a session in the other direction would be to say that every hand you play counts as a "session." Even less extreme than this, you could say that, for online poker, every table session counts as a session, and it would still impose incredibly burdensome accounting requirements on online poker players who multitable. Trying to track every single buyin at a table, auto top-up, and the amount in my stack when I close the table would be a goddamn nightmare. And I, a casual microstakes online player for 2009, would end up having to report probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 of income and then take itemized deductions for $98,000. This would be completely ridiculous.

The compromise that's most widely advocated by people who have written publicly available materials on this subject is to define a session as any continuous period playing the same game. This definition is pretty much in line with what most multitabling online players consider a session and basically allows us to use the "Sessions" tab of Hold 'Em Manager to account for our sessions. It's still needlessly burdensome, but it's not nearly as burdensome as trying to track every auto top-up. I've adopted this method and will be using it to prepare my return.

My anger over these policies is driven by three considerations. The first is that, regardless of the definition of a session, in nearly all cases, reporting all winning sessions as income and then deducting losing sessions ultimately creates the exact same tax liability as netting winning and losing sessions and reporting the net as income. So all of the tedious bean-counting serves really no purpose other than to force poker players to waste time and effort keeping records. gg irs.

You may have scratched your head when your read the word "nearly" in the preceding paragraph. Well, it turns out that the only situation in which this system changes the ultimate tax liability of the taxpayer is...SURPRISE, the situation that I am in! My situation is that the total of my losing sessions for last year is less than the standard deduction. So I still have to report all of my winning sessions as income, but it doesn't make sense for me to itemize my deductions since the standard deduction is still larger. So I, and various other poor people similarly situated, end up paying a much higher marginal tax rate on our poker winnings than richer poker players for whom itemizing deductions makes sense.

How sick is it that our supposedly progressive income tax scheme creates such a horribly regressive result? How sick is it that the only situation where the burdensome accounting measures imposed on poker players make any difference in their final tax liability is when it increases the tax burden on the very poorest of players? This is such a fucking brilliant and devious way for the government to punish poor people for gambling. gg, irs.

Now, the third and final consideration that tilts me when I think about this is the fact that in practice, nearly no poker players will have given this as much thought as I have or researched this as deeply as I have. I am confident that the majority of them will not even report their poker winnings as income, and the majority of those who do will simply net their wins and losses for the year. And they will probably be fine because they won't be audited. So the real effect of these arcane regulations is to punish people who make a good faith effort to understand and obey the law. gg, irs.

In sum, with respect to poker, the federal income tax harshly penalizes impoverished, law-abiding citizens. gg, irs.

I can sort of understand the rationales behind these policies. Poker is not productive work in the sense that it doesn't really create, it just transfers consumption. Society would rather have people donig some value-creating productive work than grinding away at the tables and taking money from fish who do. Furthermore, the government doesn't want poor people gambling with what little money they have, so it imposes regressive taxes in an attempt to discourage this behavior.

But I'm not a pro who sits in the Venetian all day preying on drunk tourists and banking six figs a year who never plans on doing anything good for society. I'm a 23-year-old who is trying to get through law school. I'm looking forward to a long and productive career practicing law, advising entrepreneurs and investors in small businesses. I also want to defend people accused of crimes who would otherwise be swept into overcrowded prisons by an overstressed and imprecise criminal justice system, and stand in court to vindicate the rights of people who have been wronged. I live off $1,200 a month in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the biggest cities in America, scrimping everywhere and making substantial cutbacks on my standard of living in an effort to keep my student loan debt as low as possible.

I'm not some degenerate gambling addict who spends an entire minimum wage paycheck on scratch tickets and ends up on public assistance. I started grinding microstakes last year, mostly for the fun and challenge of the game, with some hope of maybe creating a little side income for myself to enjoy life a little bit and not have to live like such a pauper. I played smart and ran good and ended the year a couple thousand bucks in the black. Now I sit down to do my taxes and find all of these nonsensical rules robbing me of the value of my standard deduction.

Surely, there are better places for the IRS to find the $700 of taxes that I have to pay than my meager bankroll. Surely, the IRS can find that $700 somewhere other than my empty pockets. But just as surely, it doesn't give a shit and will happily take its disproportionately large cut of my modest poker winnings.

gg, irs.

Interesting Spot, Possible Mistake

I ran into this spot at 1/2 Rush just now.

I don't like squeezing preflop with AJo - I have to fold to a 4bet so it's basically turning AJo into a bluff and I think calling and taking a flop gives me better chances.

The idea of my checkraise is to fold out some of his weak value hands like 55-99, possibly even TT and JJ, K9, QT, etc., and also to build a big pot against his stronger hands so that I can win a big pot if I hit. I'm pretty much planning on getting it in if he 3bets me since I still have 12 outs against his sets and two pairs and 7 outs against his flushes. But in that case I'm expecting to 3bet to $100 or so, some amount that signals that he's willing to call it off, not to shove his entire remaining $200 stack into this $70 pot. So sick.

I hadn't taken into account the decision that I would have to make if he shoved over me, since I see that so rarely. And I think his shove is just barely enough to deny me odds to call. Against even a fairly generous range of 44, KQ, and connected and 1-gap clubs, my equity is roughly 35%, which is barely what I need to call $170 to win $260 profitably. If we take out some of his KQ combinations and add in a few more club combinations and a few KK and QQ combinations, I can be as bad as 30% to win. But if we add some bluffs into his range, I start to rise back up to break-even equity. It's so close and so sick.

One big big mistake that I made in playing this and that I didn't realize until I started stoving postgame was not realizing how badly his boat redraws hurt my equity if he has a set or two pair. I have 12 clean outs against those hands, but he has so many boat outs that I'm still only 35%. I knew that fading cost me somewhat but I didn't realize that it cut that deeply into my equity. I'm glad I know this now.

The other I might have been able to better to make this an easier decision would be to size my checkraise differently, either smaller to make it an easier fold or larger to make it an easier call. The size I chose is basically perfect to make it impossible for me to play against a shove. I wonder if villain realizes how sick this really was.

Rush Degeneracy

Over the past few days, I've played exclusively 1/2 Rush and pretty much only during Happy Hours - gotta get those Full Tilt Points and save up for a CardRunners membership. I've been running amazingly good, taking full advantage of the initial deposit boomswitch, and I'm up about $1,000 so far this month over about 3,300 hands. I'm going to finish clearing the first $100 of my bonus within the next few days, certainly before I can deposit again using eChecks. I'm also faithfully grinding Iron Man and I'm pretty optimistic about making it. 200 FTPs a day isn't hard at 1/2 Rush.

A few days ago I shocked myself by making an the sickest, most unbelievable herocall I think I've ever made. Here is the hand history.

Calling the 3bet preflop is marginal at best and is actually probably losing in the long run. Since this was Rush, I really had no read on him and no idea about his 3betting range from the blinds against a button open, but his raise was just so small and I'm getting 2.5:1 and I have decent equity against a lot of hands that people 3bet there.

On the flop, his smallish cbet on that extremely connected board starts to trigger some of my bullshit detectors. I think he could make a bet that size with his missed AK and AQ to collect dead money if I also missed, but I think his strong made hands bet more on that flop to protect against the multitude of draws that could still be in my range - any two spades, any 7, any J, of which there are potentially still a ton in my range. This really illustrates why it's terrible for him to make such a small 3bet preflop and let me call with such a wide range.

In spite of how weak I think he is at this point, raising is not really a consideration for me. I have middle pair and a backdoor flush draw and it's still possible that he has something like JJ or a set that is strong now and still has decent equity if a draw gets there, or even just a badly played KK. So I elect to call and peel a turn here.

The turn card is great for me, giving me 9 flush outs in addition to my second pair with A kicker. I'm pretty sure all 9 of my flush outs are clean here, since even the board-pairing Td only puts him ahead of me if he already has a set, and he seldom does when he takes this line. Likewise, I think my A outs and 9 outs are clean most of the time, since I don't think he takes this line with AA or AT. So when he makes that less-than-halfpot bet on the turn I think he's actually laying me good odds to try to make a flush, two pair, or trips on the river.

I call. The river pairs the 8 on the board. Villain shoves $212 into a $120 pot. Unless villain is Spirit Rock playing on a friend's account, I think this is rarely if ever a bet for value and is almost always a bluff. If he actually has a hand that he think he's betting for value, I don't think he makes this shove overbet because he's afraid of folding out all of my medium-strength hands that would call a more reasonably-sized bet. I don't think he's willing to make this kind of play that would basically be a bet on my ability to herocall.

As I click to call I'm literally shaking IRL and when he shows and the pot ships to me I feel this massive adrenaline dump and I'm basically euphoric for the next 15-20 minutes. I still think it's supermarginal and if I hadn't been good, this post would likely be dedicated to berating the shit out of myself for making such a retarded call. But I was good, and it's one of the greatest feelings I've ever had in poker.

The combination of running really good and making sick plays like this and having them work out has me feeling extremely confident in my game.

First Few Days on Full Tilt

I finally deposited on Full Tilt a few days ago after confirming with their email support that I could get the full bonus. This wasn't clear because the eChecks initial deposit limit is $100, but I explained to them that I'm going to be depositing much more than that later and they are usually willing to credit the rest of the bonus to an account in these circumstances. Also, my last rakeback payment came in on Cake so I requested a check for my entire account balance. I'm pretty excited to receive it and curious about what it will look like. I'm also kind of anxious about whether or not my bank will actually accept it, since I hear it's pretty standard for poker sites to use sketchy checks from small disreputable foreign banks.

I've been grinding up my initial $100 mostly at the Rush Poker tables and I've been running really hot and I'm up to about $600 now. Rush Poker is amazing. It's just so easy to put in volume and clear out bonus and grind Iron Man. It's also easier for me to process cognitively than multitabling. I'm still not sure how it compares to normal multitabling in terms of game EV, since I'm not really sure if the Rush attracts more grinding regs like myself or more action-junkie fish. Also a factor is that my HUD doesn't work correctly on Rush, and my HUDless handreading skills are pretty useless in Rush since opponents change every hand. I'm going to give more thought to these factors before making a decision to switch mostly or possibly even exclusively to Rush.

This is the one massive instance of rungood that represents basically all of my winnings on FTP so far. The flop seemed pretty much perfect and I was more or less hoping to get it in, and when I saw that big bet and call I was basically fistpumping. But then I get 3bet and 4bet all-in by these two superdeepstacks and when the action comes back to me I'm actually strongly considering a fold, even getting better than 3:1 on my call. My fear at this point is that there's a pretty good chance that my pair-and-draw is up against both a stronger made hand and a stronger draw. I think that a good percentage of the time, one of these guys has AA/KK/a set and the other has Ahxh. I made the call, which I think is ultramarginal at best, figuring that sometimes I'm up against two worse draws and I'm ahead and sometimes I'm up against two made hands and all my flush outs are good, but I don't know how frequently those situations occur compared to being totally dominated. In retrospect, I think I'm seldom if ever actually ahead here after a UTG+1 preflop raiser make a fullpot cbet in a 4-way pot on the flop and shoves over a call and checkraise, and with two deepstacks getting it in ahead of me I don't think my non-nut flush draw gives me clean outs that often either.

What it really comes down is that I may not be psychologically capable of folding such a "pretty" hand in a 3-way pot, even given the strong evidence from the action ahead of me that I'm crushed. Leak?

McRib is Back, Part II: The Triumph of Reason

Yesterday, in a brazen act of rationality, I went back to McDonalds and got a McRib meal for lunch and ate it. I did this largely just to prove to myself that I could, and to smash the irrational results-oriented part of me with the sledgehammer of reality. I know that McDonalds has pretty immaculate standards of food cleanliness, making it unlikely that it was the cause of my illness. I also heard that a bunch of other people around my school got sick with similar gastrointestinal problems around roughly the same time I did, and seemingly none of them had eaten McRib or even gone to McDonalds.

Yet, in spite of all of this evidence, part of my brain is still tries to convince me that a causal connection exists where only correlation can be observed. Inferring causation from correlation is something that humans seem pretty much hardwired to do, which makes sense in light of how potentially useful this sort of rudimentary pattern recognition would be in nature. I'm sure my distant ancestors benefited from their aversion to eating any more of those bright red mushrooms in the woods by the stream after they got curious and ate one and nearly died the next day. This is the same basic principle of classical conditioning that allows animals to be trained. Even if this sort of results orientation weren't heritable, it would still certainly be taught, and aspects of it are probably even learned without active instruction during the early stages of development.

This is why I think of eating McRib as a psychosymbolic act of defiant rationality. It's a manifestation of the ability of the complex, high-functioning, uniquely human parts of my brain analyzing reality and coming up with an answer contrary to the one that's being broadcast on full power by my crude reptilian brain. It's the triumph of reason over ignorance, enlightenment over fear, thought over instinct.

I did not get sick.

January Results; February Goals

January has been a roller coaster month for me at the tables - I moved up to new stakes and went heater of my life and then immediately went on the downswing of my life. Here is my final results graph for the month:

And here is the breakdown by stakes:

As you can see, in spite of a big downswing that inspired all of my whining for the past few weeks, I'm still up nearly a grand on the month. I also shipped about $500 of rakeback and cleared around $300 of bonus, making January 2010 by far my best poker month yet. I'm obviously running unsustainably hot at NL100 but I'd like to think that I'm also underachieving at 1/2.

I don't attach too much significance to the EV line and how good or bad I'm running in terms of all-in EV. I think poker players in general focus too much on this one measure of variance just because it's easy to quantify and put on a graph, and don't realize how many other ways there are to run good or bad. Just because you got it in with 78% pot equity and lost doesn't necessarily mean you ran bad - your equity could have been a lot worse against villain's range and you just lucked into a really good spot and he happened to resuck. This doesn't get reflected on the graph. Likewise, getting it in with 3 outs on the turn will kill your EV line but you could easily have been doing well against villain's range and he just happened to have the nuts this time. That said, I do take some comfort in the fact that I'm running somewhat under EV and that my EV-adjusted winrate at 1/2 is positive.

Interestingly, my redline is positive for the month. This has never happened before and I have a few ideas as to why my non-showdown winnings have become positive. I think part of it is that villains at NL100 and up are just better players and are less willing to pay me off when I have a big hand and fold to my valuebets more. But I also have been trying to make some minor adjustments in my game that I think manifest themselves as redline boosts. For example, I've become a lot stabbier in limped pots where I would otherwise have given up and folded, and I've been trying to rein in my cbetting somewhat when I have air so I lose smaller pots when I don't connect.

Back in August and September I grinded out sick volume and put in 30,000+ hands each month. I think those days are pretty much over and I doubt I'm going to be volumegrinding at that rate for the foreseeable future. I'm at a stage where there are just too many nontrivial decisions that require careful thought and time for 8-tabling to be manageable. I expect to be playing between 10,000 and 20,000 hands each month for at least the next couple of months.

Additionally, I'm pleased to report that I finished clearing my deposit bonus on Cake and have little reason to continue playing there. The 33% rakeback plus Gold Stacks bonuses are extremely appealing, but the game selection is just so limited compared to Full Tilt or PokerStars. I'll be moving to Full Tilt within the next few days and depositing to start working on clearing that bonus.

Goals for February

1. Deposit on Full Tilt and get on pace to clear the full bonus. Additionally, investigate the feasibility of grinding Iron Man and whatever other promos and bonuses FTP offers and maximize EV with respect to those.
2. Focus on making good decisions and improving my thought process, rather than being results-oriented and crumpling psychologically in the face of variance. Downswings are an unavoidable aspect of poker and I need to toughen up psychologically so I'm not miserable when they happen.
3. Live a more balanced and healthier nonpoker life. This entails fulfilling my academic and professional obligations (i.e. going to class and finding something to do over the summer), getting my sleep schedule under control, not letting dirty dishes and laundry pile up, and just being less shitty in general.
4. Continue posting on this blog, expanding to include more posts on nonpoker subjects. This will hopefully help broaden my audience (which I think currently consists of one dude who has it on his RSS feed [hi kydub]) and also help me organize and process my thoughts and feelings about other aspects my life.