Back in the Saddle

I just wrapped up my first session in about a week and a half and came out nicely ahead. Most of my big winning hands were just people doing retarded things and me running really good. As always, my losing hands were much more interesting.

Hand #1
Cutoff is a 17/16 and small blind is a 32/8. I pretty much hate my life when the fish 3bets, since his range is basically QQ+ and AK. Just folding pre occurs to me and I'm still not convinced that isn't the best play. When the flop comes ragged and he leads, I'm not even sure if AK is still in his range. Folding again occurs to me but I dubiously include some worse pairs and AK in his range and talk myself into getting it in. Thoughts?

Hand #2
I strongly considered folding on the turn here, but I didn't because I was still including some draws in his range; unfortunately, there are so many ways for him to be ahead of me that folding might still be best. But then he instapotted the river, which to me could either mean that he rivered the nuts (88, Kc6c, 57) or he's bluffing. It occurred to me that some of his bluffs could actually be ahead of me if he has something like Ad3d that he thinks is no good after I call two streets and decides to turn it into a bluff. That pushed me a little toward folding, but I felt like there were so few ways for him to have the nuts and so many ways for him to be bluffing and his sizing made me level myself and I called. Unfortunately he showed up with a sick range-merging top two pair that he instapotted on the river with a paired 3-flush board. I struggle in these spots because I am still really bad at assigning accurate ranges to nonstandard things like the 1/3-pot donk.

Hand #3
I suspect it might have been best to raise on the flop and try to get it in against his draws and pairs. I flatted because I wanted to try to get more value out of him on later streets, but I think most of his pairs are shutting down after I flat and I don't know if I can avoid paying off his draws when they hit, as one did.

NL50 Progress
$405.80 / $500.00 after 24,555 hands

I haven't been back to the Horseshoe, but I got a coupon in the mail for a free $20 bet at a table game so I'm going to try head back some time soon and put it all on black.

Horseshoe Progress
-$646 / $2,000.00 after 54 hours

Update

My blog entries have become pretty sparse recently, and this is largely because I just haven't been playing much poker. I'm not sure why this has been, but I suspect it's a function of my brain realizing that the rest of my life is so desperately out of order that it's on the brink of becoming a disaster, and diverting all resources away from secondary concerns like poker and toward trying to get my shit together for a last-ditch push into the end of the semester, exams, and trying to find some sort of job this summer.

A few nights ago, I went back to the Horseshoe for the first time in a couple of weeks, with a college friend. Two hands stand out in my memory.

Hand #1

I open from the cutoff with Js9d and get called by the button, a 30ish guy who seems like a pretty typical TAGfish, and big blind, who is a pretty typical loose-weak player who sees a lot of flops and folds on nearly all of them. The flop comes 6d7dTd. Big blind checks and I cbet $22 into $30. Button shoves for $104 all day, making it $82 to me to win a $156 pot (well, $154 after rake). Big blinds folds, I think for a while and call. The turn comes Jd and the river bricks off and the button shows 4d5d and starts berating me with standard shit like "I guess I was wrong, you are a donk after all!" and "how can you possibly call?" His friends at the table join in and for the rest of the night they refer to me as "the donk." He briefly succeeds in semi-tilting me and I respond with "okay, next time I'll fold - is that what you'd prefer?" and he tanks for a second and says "YES!"

A couple of hours later, Alex and Micah from Cardrunners show up and briefly rail me while waiting for their seats. Villain from this hand starts telling them "your friend is a donk" so I tell them the story of this hand. From time to time villain interjects something like "and he didn't even have a pair!" and everyone involved laughs - but we're not laughing WITH him, we're laughing AT him.

Hand #2

UTG, a meek East Asian woman who was at the table with her South Asian husband and has been playing pretty tight, opens for $10 and it folds around to me in the small blind and I look down at AA and 3bet to $35. UTG calls and the flop comes Qxx. I bet $40 into $64 and she calls without much hesitation. Turn bricks off and I shove for about 3/4 pot and she again calls without much hesitation...and tables AJ, drawing dead into the river. She didn't seem like the kind of player who would do something like this and I have no clue what she was thinking here but I'll take it.

Yesterday I played an online session for the first time in a couple of weeks because Goodeh offered to sweat me for a few minutes.

Hand #1

(After I check/call the turn and the river comes off and I check again:)

[16:13] <Secret_Asian_Man> prob folding to a shoefv here...
[16:13] <Goodeh`laptop> i call

(I call and lose.)

[16:13] <Secret_Asian_Man> lol oops
[16:13] <Secret_Asian_Man> look at me, listening to goodeh and losing a bi
[16:14] <Goodeh`laptop> lol

I deviate from the standard jam-jam-jam line with a big overpair here because I'm experimenting with seeing turns and rivers postflop with big pairs and trying to learn how to play them correctly on later streets, and also because we're 140bb deep. Goodeh seemed to advocate just trying to get it in on the flop and that might be the best course of action.

Hand #2

Similar situation, we're 140bb deep and I have a big pair and I flat with it to try to play postflop poker. Again, I feel like this may have been Fancy Play syndrome and just jamming might have been optimal.

Hand #3

Villain is a 60/15 fish. His river range is either Qx or air and I call hoping to pick off a bluff but he had it. But I'm not sure if calling is right against this type of villain because I'm not sure how often he's bluffing.

Hand #4

[16:26] <Goodeh`laptop> dont hate turning kj into a bluff here
[16:26] <Goodeh`laptop> dont feel that good about my hand
[16:27] <Secret_Asian_Man> yeah i was considering it
[16:27] <Secret_Asian_Man> i was considering foldin gturn tbh
[16:28] <Secret_Asian_Man> and that river would have been rgeat to bluff...

After Goodeh left, I started running good again and clawed my way back up to -$30 for the session from a low of about -$150.

NL50 Progress

$336.40 / $500.00 after 23,661 hands

I feel the need to track my progress at the Horseshoe as well as my online progress, so I'm setting myself a goal of winning ten buyins at 1/2 there and then taking a three-buyin shot at 2/5. Unfortunately I'm still stuck a bunch so that may take a while.

Horseshoe Progress

-$646 / $2,000.00 after 54 hours

I'm Back

I haven't been able to blog for the past couple of weeks because I haven't had Internet access in my apartment. I have an arrangement where I pay my neighbors for access to their wifi, and recently something went wrong with their connection while they were both out of town for spring break and it wasn't fixed until today. For the same reason, I haven't been able to play online at all for the past two weeks.

However, I have logged another 25 hours or so at the Horseshoe playing 1/2 and grinding out free buffets. Ridiculously, I'm now stuck $834 over 50 hours of play. This translates to about -4bi over about 2,000 hands, which I think is within the range of results that could be characterized as standard, but still makes me feel pretty shitty because I feel like my edge at live 1/2 should be massive enough to make this kind of result highly improbable.

The unfortunately reality, though, is that I've been making lots of pretty serious mistakes and losing sizable pots for stupid reasons like not looking at villain stack sizes before barreling and having to fold to a shove getting like 7:1 because I have no pair and no draw. And the times I actually do have a pair, I get raised on the turn and don't know what to do and end up folding and having to wonder, or, worse, getting shown a worse pair by some smug fat old guy. And worst of all, nearly all of my big wins that I can recall have come from sucking out and coolering people. I feel like I've been getting more than my fair share of good luck overall and yet I'm still stuck almost a grand at a game that I feel like I should be annihilating.

Now that March is over and the free buffet promo is dead, I'm undecided about whether or not I'll be going back to the Horseshoe to try to get unstuck. About a week ago, I ran into some Cardrunners employees at my table - a guy named Micah who does graphic design and video intros and also Alex Huang, who is the brand manager for Stoxpoker. I told them I was a TFPT member and hung out with them for a while and they ended up giving me a ride home so I wouldn't have to take the degen bus. We spent the entire ride home talking poker and I gave them my contact info and they told me they would let me know the next time they went and possibly bring other Cardrunners people, so I think I'm just going to sit tight and only go with those guys instead of going back regularly and aggressively trying to get unstuck. Hope they were serious!

In other news, I finally got a new computer. It's an MSI U230 that I got on the recommendation of the Netbook thread in SH/SC on the Something Awful forums. I'm pretty happy with it overall - it's light and handles streaming video well, which it should since it has a dedicated graphics processor in addition to a dual core CPU. It should be sufficient to handle Mikogo streams so I can finally cash in on offers from #smallstakes to sweat me and help me figure out why I'm barely staying afloat at NL50.

NL50 Progress

$367.25 / $500.00 after 22,898 hands

Horseshoe Update; Redline Thoughts

I've been playing a lot of 1/2 at the Horseshoe over the past week and overall I'm stuck $361 over maybe 25 hours of play, which, hilariously, probably works out to less than 1,000 hands. I initially lost almost 6 buyins through a combination of bad luck and horrific play, but I booked a huge win last night to recover a good deal of it. At one point last night, I was sitting with a $1,000+ stack and couldn't stop giggling every time I looked at it.

Online, I think my play recently has been just okay. I've able to avoid making too many huge mistakes recently but I feel like I'm still barely staying afloat and not crushing the games like I feel like I should be able to crush them. Troublingly, I've developed a massively negative redline deficit, the telltale sign of a TAGfish. This is really frustrating and embarassing because I thought I had solved this problem a months ago, since I kept a nice breakeven and even frequently positive redline when I was playing NL100 and 1/2. Now that I've moved back down to NL50 and my redline looks like a fucking waterslide again, I'm no longer sure why this was the case. Was I doing something different during that stretch to play more monstrously that I've now somehow forgotten how to do? Or was it just because I was getting really good cards and the regs at those stakes were good enough to fold their pairs to my third barrels instead of paying me off?

One hypothesis I've been considering is that I've adjusted suboptimally to villains at NL50. I know that the average bad player at NL50 is more stationy. What I've been doing so far in response to this is one-barreling lots of hands against them. My rationale for doing this is twofold: first, the flop cbet is just so good at getting people to fold and works so often even against players who have a general tendency to be calling stations that it's probably still profitable, and second, checking the flop as the preflop raiser just seems so pathetically weak and basically like begging your opponent to take the pot away from you. As a consequence, my flop cbet% hovers around 80-90%.

But it definitely seems possible that there are flaws in one or both of these components of my reasoning. I've been considering that there may be certain types of loose-passive villains against whom one-barreling does show a profit, but against whom a polarized strategy of either checking or committing to multiple barrels would be more profitable. And there may also be villains - possibly the same villains - who will still play weakly and won't stab at the pot even after the preflop raiser shows weakness by checking the flop. It seems possible that at least part of my enormous redline deficit has come from one-barreling against these types of players, which could be a significant leak. This is something I will try to keep in mind at the tables.

NL50 Progress

$336.60 / $500.00 after 22,365 hands

Paddy's Day

Hi Guys,

This month has been pretty good life wise. Work is really cool, I'm settling in, making friends and enjoying the top secret stuff I'm doing. I've had some trouble finding a place to live, checking out a few different places. I've found a place I'd really like to live so I'm waiting on the current occupants to make up their minds and reject me as an awesome flat mate. Work has been kind enough to extend my stay at the temporary apartments by one entire week, so I am not homeless as of next Saturday.

Today is St. Patrick's Day which if you didn't know is kind of a big deal in Ireland. I get the day off work and I went to be last night determined to get out into town and see the parade. I woke up at 9AM with a runny nose, a fever and a splitting headache so that was the end of that.

Poker has been pretty brutal to me this month. I feel I'm playing well but obviously there was some degree of tilt when I lost 7 buyins in 30 minutes playing NLHE. I get to use the runbad excuse (see graph below) but the truth is that I shrugged off losing 1.5k and went off with some friends to see Alice in Wonderland. Poker just simply isn't that important to me anymore in the grand scheme of life happiness; winning or losing.



One of the things I found when I had poker as the main focus in my life was that to a large degree it defined me. Have a bad day at the tables and suddenly your entire night/week/month is ruined. The highs of winning were no match for the lows of losing 2 buyins. In that respect I think my poker game has come a long way and I feel that if I do decide to continue playing any kind of volume in the future that will help a ton.

This will probably be my last month at pokerstars. I'm 2500VPP through a 7.5k target over halfway through the month. I missed the supernova amount by about 400 vpp last month and will lose supernova this month. I've concierged an impulse buy laptop (which I then returned, Dell decided to be cunts so we'll see if it arrives at my door in 3 months time...) so my FPP balance is only around 8k. I'm sure I can blow through it playing sats.

I'll probably end up taking my play to Full Tilt Poker now that I have rakeback and that whole shabang. So look out for Britneygirl121 rocking up a table near you.

Peace out guys, sorry for the lack of updates, I simply don't care enough anymore.

Good luck at the tables.

Trip Report: Horseshoe Hammond

I've been watching this season of High Stakes Poker and just watching people play live has gotten me interested in playing live again, but my regular home game has pretty much stopped running because the host's wife has gotten sick of it. I heard about a promotion at the Horseshoe Hammond that offers a free buffet for four hours of poker play, and spring break just started for me, so yesterday I hopped onboard the 8:15am Chinatown degen bus to take advantage of it. I love how the Horseshoe knows that Chinatown is degen central and offers these free shuttles to funnel the sickos into the pit.

My sleep schedule recently has been fucked and this time I can trace it back to one particular reason that probably deserves its own post, but for now just know that I woke up at around 9pm, so I had been awake for about 12 hours before heading out.

Sitting aboard the bus with basically the dregs of society and inhaling the fumes emanating from the smoke-soaked seats, I realized that I actually love the dirtiness of the whole casino experience. Being surrounded by smelly, grumpy people who I'm pretty sure can't afford to be churning away their income at the nickel slots is kind of depressing but also weirdly serene. Compared to sprawling palaces like Foxwoods and Mohegan, the Horseshoe Hammond is a pretty dingy, gross little boat and it's full of dingy, gross little people and I love it in a dingy, gross little way. As the shuttle departs, I call the poker room and have them put my name on the list for 1/2.

Within about ten minutes of arriving, I'm seated a table full of people who seem to have been playing all night. One of my first hands is against a portly mustachioed middle-aged regular where I raise his limp with KQ and he calls. Flop comes AQ5 and he check/calls my cbet and, when fiddling around with his cards like a lot of these live players like to do, angles them in a way that allows me to see that he's holding a face card. I don't think he plays AK or AQ this way so I'm pretty confident I'm ahead at this point, but I make a mistake by betting about 2/3 pot on the turn, which ends being too much for him to call and blows him off his hand. Oops, misplayed that semi-superuser info.

Next big hand was KK in middle position. I 6x it and obviously get five callers. Flop comes Q32 and the big blind, a very drunk Greek dude who's pulled an all-nighter, donks out for about halfpot. I flat for value against worse pairs and it's heads up into the turn, which is a 6. He bets out again and I shove and get snapped off by his Q3, but I river another 6 to counterfeit. Nice life.

Shortly thereafter, a greasy long-haired guy with a short stack shoves about 20bb over my KQ open and I call getting 3:1. He has AK but the flop comes KQx and the turn and river blank off and I try to keep a straight face through his "what the fucking fuck" tirade. Nice life.

I then proceeded to do a bunch of retarded livenoob things like inadvertently 15x'ing it because I incorrectly thought there was a raise in front of me because a bunch of people called with $5 chips and then check/folding AK after getting called on a ragged flop and JJ after getting called on an AKx flop. Oops.

A few hours in, it folds around to a short black dude in the small blind who's been pretty tight and he completes and I pick up AA in the big blind and 5x it and he calls. Flop comes J96 and he check/minraises. This, of course, always means the nuts but I know nothing about these games or this guy and I have AA so I 3bet planning to fold to a shove. He shoves and somehow my plan goes down the shitter and I end up tanking and calling and praying he somehow has AJ or QT but obviously it's 99 and I double him up. Terrible. This same dude went on to flop a set against someone else's AA later in the day and talking to his friends about how he's going to try to find someone to "sponsor" him.

I horribly stacked off again about an hour later. I limped 7s8s in early position and we were 4-handed going into a flop of 6s5s3d. I lead for about the pot and everyone calls. Turn comes 2c and I bet out again and get called by two people and the third shoves, laying me a little better than 2:1 on my stack. I'm not sure if it's right for me to call here because I think my flush draw is frequently dominated by at least one of these fuckers but I'm a huge fish and can't fold all my equity so I call. One of the old guys folds 84 face-up and the guy who shoved shows A4 and dodges my 11 remaining outs and suddenly I'm down to my last bullet.

At this point I've grinded out my four hours and can claim my buffet trip and go home, but I'm stuck and I'm playing to get unstuck even though I'm starting to get tired. Also, I ate four or five bowls of cereal before leaving since the one pot that I have for cooking real food was dirty and I didn't want to wash it, and that volume of milk working its way through my digestive tract was now creating substantial abdominal discomfort. I should probably also just stop and eat and go home at this point because it's been a while since I've put anything into my stomach and getting regular food intake and adequate sleep is important not just for my general health but also so I can start making gains again in the hundredpushups workouts I've been trying and failing for months now (maybe this deserves its own post too).

I got a call from FedEx around this time too and they told me that they had tried to deliver a parcel to my address but nobody was there to sign for it. This parcel is obviously the second installment of my Cake cashout, a check for about $2,500. They offered to let me pick it up and I told them I would, but I eventually decided that I wanted to keep playing. In retrospect it's pretty clear that I was just generally not making great decisions at this point. Life was basically throwing me excuse after excuse to get out of there and I tossed them all away and just sat there stewing.

In spite of this generalized malaise that had gripped me by this point, I played pretty solidly for a while and rebuilt my stack to about $400 just by taking down lots of pots with cbets until some time midafternoon when they started playing back at me on scary turns where I ended up bet/folding pairs a few times in a row (QQ on JT26sss, AQ on A625sss, 33 on KK8T).

Toward the end of my session, an old lady who has actually been seemingly playing a pretty solid TAG game limps in middle position and I raise my button with KQ and get called by the big blind and her. Flop comes AKQ and it checks around to me. I bet, big blind calls, and old lady shoves, laying me a little better than 2:1. I'm pretty confused and tank for a while before calling, expecting to see either JT or a bluff, but she shows up with AK. GG, old lady.

Last hand, I'm down to about half a stack when I pick up AJ on the button and a shortstack in the blinds shoves over my raise. This guy has been pretty nitty and this should probably be a fold but I'm pretty tired and possibly vaguely tilted and I just watched a Stoxpoker video about light 4-betting and 5-betting against LAGs and completely inappropriately misapplied it to this utterly different situation to which it was totally inapposite and called. He had KK but I rivered an ace to stack him and he spat some insults at me and the dealer before storming off into the darkness. I suppressed my laughter long enough to pick up my chips and leave, down about $300 over an 8-hour session.

I got my free buffet ticket at the podium and cashed out at the cage and went upstairs to enjoy my free buffet that only cost me $300. My horrible series of misplays continued at the buffet, where I tiltingly loaded a plate with pasta dishes at the Italian station because I didn't survey the entire selection and thus didn't see that there was prime rib at the carving station. After I was done eating, I wandered around the pit for a while until the degen bus came back to pick me up. I got home at about 8:30pm and insta-fell-asleep, but woke up around 2:30am (actually I guess 3:30am, gg daylight savings) feeling this vague restlessness so I got up and wrote this post.

Overall I played pretty badly and ran pretty hot. Ending the session down less than two buyins is pretty great considering how awful some of my decisions were. I'm still confident that I have a pretty massive edge in these games and my biggest leaks are just lapses in discipline and self-control. Actually, part of me thinks the previous sentence is true for pretty much every poker game I've ever played - my psychological game has been undergoing very rapid evolution recently and maybe this deserves it own separate post. Additionally, the circumstance surrounding this trip were less than ideal (not much sleep, hunger/indigestion) and in a lot of ways, I put myself in a position not to be playing my A game. There's a lot of money to be made at the Horseshoe and with spring break upon me, I plan on making a serious effort at claiming my share of it over the next couple of weeks.

What Goes Up...

Just wrapped up a big losing session. I lost of lot of big hands that I'm not sure I played well. Help:

Hand #1

Villain is 49/11 and I don't really know how to weight his range here. I think he gets it in on the flop with most of his sets but I can easily see him flatting them too. I think he holds onto most of his pairs but I can easily see him folding them too. My turn shove is hoping to get it in against a pair that he can't release and still have 10 outs against his sets but it turns out that I actually have 16. Obviously he dodges them. But I have no idea whether or not my play was correct because I don't know enough about villain's tendencies.

Hand #2

Same villain. I'm calling his stupid min3bet hoping for basically this exact flop. When he flats my checkraise I have the same problem as in the previous hand, where I think his range is mostly weak pairs but maybe some sets and I don't know how to weight them. When the super-scary turn falls, I bite down and shove for twice the pot, reasoning that his pairs really have to think twice about calling and even if they do I have 15 outs against them going into the river. I've been watching some Ed Miller videos on Stoxpoker and I've been trying out plays like shove overbet semibluffs against weak players, hoping that they get confused and make mistakes. He tank-calls and it turns out that I have way fewer outs than I thought. This is admittedly a high-variance play, but I'm not sure that it works out often enough to be worth making, since a lot of the hands that fold might just check that turn and give me a free card, and a lot of the hands that call are going to have a higher club and I won't have any flush outs.

Hand #3

Same villain again. My first big mistake in this hand is not 3betting enough to cover the short opener. In doing so, I trap myself into this ridiculous situation where I'm forced to flat when he shoves because of that stupid rule that doesn't let you shove over a shove. I feel like there was a time when I understood the rationale behind that rule but I've forgotten it and if anyone wants to refresh my memory, I'm all ears. Anyway, I cbet the dry flop and villain shoves and I make the second big mistake of the hand - stupidly instafolding because I'm scared of the absolute size of the shove while ignoring effective stacks and the fact that I'm actually getting almost 3:1 on this call with two overcards and a backdoor flush draw. This stupidity ended up working out for me because villain had A9, but even looking backwards, I have no idea whether or not a call would have been right because again, I have no idea how to range this villain. I think he has TT or JJ a lot there but obviously he showed up with A9, and he could conceivably have all sorts of hands. Help...

Hand #4

Similar to Hand #3, I need to decide whether or not to stack off getting 3:1 with two overcards and a backdoor flush draw. Here at least I gave myself the chance to make a reasoned decision, but I decide to make the call and got shown a set. I thought I was against mostly pairs and I really didn't think that 88 was even in his range after he min3bet and called my 4bet. I'm not sure if I should have considered possible sets or slowplayed KK+, or weighted them heavily enough to shift the analysis toward a fold.

I'd been feeling so good about poker recently but this session brought back a lot of old the feelings of confusion and disorientation and uncertainty that I had been starting to clear from my head. It also undid a lot of the progress I had been making toward my 10-buyin goal. Hopefully this is just a blip and I can get back on track and crush my way up to that goal soon.

NL50 Progress

$85.05 / $500.00 after 16,586 hands