Delusions of Grandeur

Following my nice rush in July I've kept the momentum strong in August putting in what is a lot of volume for me. I'm not much of a sucker for long hours doing much of anything, but I've really been forcing myself to play more and the results are freaking killer.

On the left you can see my Iron Man page for the month. . . I haven't had a lot of 1k points days but this month they are happening over and over again as I've taken to playing an early session more regularly. Whenever I happen to wake up and feel sufficiently awake I'll just start firing up sit and gos. I've been signing up for: $6.50 90 mans, 12+1 90 Mans, 24+2 90 mans, 24+2 45 mans, and lastly, a growing addition to the roster of games I'm playing regularly, the 69+6 45 mans.

That's a total of five games that I get registered for when I log on, and as soon as one opens I join the list for the next one of that type. My goal for the first hour is to have 12 tables open at the next break (there's a 5 minute break every hour on full tilt). My goal on one of these short sessions is to cram as many games in to the shortest time possible, and as these games never really last longer than 2 hours I know that I'll have finished up the session and can start the rest of the day, within about 2.45 hours.

Then I do whatever it is I have to do, and I start my evening session which is more of the same except I'll keep replenishing tables as long as I can imagine still wanting to play two hours into the future.

It's been going great. My one bummer is that I have yet to make progress in the 75$ 45 mans which is the "graduation" limit for the 45 man sngs on full tilt since there isn't a higher limit for that format. The tricky part is that it's nearly 3x the buy in for the next lowest limit so not only is it the biggest buy in game for the class, thus holding all the top players, but playing it involves at least 2x the variance that is possible in the 26$ games since the field is so much tougher on average and therefore the players edge is smaller.

My record on the 26$ games speaks for itself. There's still a lot I can learn and a lot of situations that I could play better, but really there aren't very many people beating that game as much as I am. I'm proud of the progress I've made with this format. . . but the style I use at the 26$ level doesn't seem to be working at the 75$ limit. Either players are playing better and I have yet to adjust, or I've been seriously unlucky in my limited sample size. As the first line in the pic above shows I'm down almost $2300 over the 158 times that I've played the limit, earning me the sharkscope fishbowl next to my name. I honestly feel like I've been unlucky when playing them, but there's a lot situations where I've been all in preflop with tens against aces, jacks against kings, and on. In the 26$ level I don't worry about these hands much since players are so loose that I think I'm more than fine just getting it all in preflop with these hands except under unusual circumstances. My fear is that at the $75 level players aren't stacking off as light in general (because there are still plenty of total donks in those games) but they are 3 betting light a ton which makes my job very tough and very swingy since I never quite know where I'm at.

Or maybe I've just been unlucky? So many of my games have ended the same way: I'm short stacked and I shove some hand in the sb against a similar stacked bb and the bb has aces. Or they have KTo to my A5s and catch a king on the river. Or I shove ten big blinds from the button with K8o and the small blind has AQ and the bb has AA. Over and over I've been in these situations where I say to myself "it's mathematically correct to shove here" and so I force myself to, yet they consistently have the 5% of hands that have me crushed.

It's a tough spot analysing poker situations because there are so many factors to consider. Do I need to tighten my play in certain situations? Or have I been getting unlucky and I should keep playing the game I know? The tough part is that if I tighten my game where it shouldn't be tightened I could become a losing player! It really is do or die. . .

Over all I've felt pretty unlucky the last few days, losing a lot of big hands as big favorites. The strangeness of variance never ceases to surprise though. A ton of agonizing losses are sometimes all made up with a couple of carefully timed suck outs and a won coin flip or two. I've been on an awesome rush the last couple weeks and can easily have a personally record breaking month if I can keep it up (which is hard to imagine since I am easily running well above expectation).

Finally cracked one of these bitches

August Contest

BadBeatsPoker.net regularly has contests in which different forum members wager a small sum to see who can score the highest ROI playing a minimum number of tournaments of a particular structure.

I entered their 45 man contest in June which I had high hopes for, but with the Vegas trip and some poor online results I never stood a chance. This month the contest revolves around the 90 man turbo knock-out sit and go's on Full Tilt. I've been playing these for awhile. . . the action is pretty chaotic with the fast blind structure but as a rule the play is just horrible in these things so it's well worth the agony of high variance slug fests. In general be prepared to lose many, many of these things, but when you hit the top spots it's really worth it, so gamble it up.

Anyway, I think I have a good grip on this format so I was happy to enter all three contest brackets- a $6 over 25 games bracket, 13$ over 50 games, and lastly the $26 over a 100 games.

There's a blogger/poker player I follow who has made it his stated objective to make more than 200k playing this exact game between last May and this coming December. I think that's amazing, so I'll say it again.

He plans to make 200k over a 8 month period playing $13 and $26 games. His strategy is to play a whole lot of them. If you average $6 in profit per game you play, you only need to play 333,334 sit and go's in a 8 month period and presto.

That's a lot of sit and go's. Makes you appreciate the job title "sit and go grinder."

As horrible as it sounds to slave away like that, sit and go after sit and go, 16 tables at a time, 12 hour stretches of just clicking and clicking and clicking. . . but still that's a lot of money, and you can have a lot of fun for 200k. . .

So, this month I thought I'd try my own heavy sit and go grinding experiment playing that very game. After all, my ROI is better than that players, but we'll have to see how I hold up and how many hands I botch trying to cram in as many as I can.

Today I played 54 of them for a profit of $637. Not bad, but I plan on doing better. These things are easy.

Here's my average finish position for today. . . not sure why I like this graph. The two firsts really help the bottom line as you can see how many non firsts there were.

Here's my graph for finish positions over the 527 games I've played in them total- gives you an idea of the variance in them, and also the importance of aggression near the bubble aiming for that first place prize:

The Jabber Wock Songs

I know of two songs that incorporate the lyrics to The Jabber Wock in some form or another. . . and here they are.

Luckily I love both bands and think both are great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo-WlTbTCwA

Eh, on second look can't find the Aceyalone track on youtube. Will keep looking. . .

Here's some guys I've never heard of doing an entertaining version however. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4PoGMofbMk

Also, July is looking better every day :)

Good Times

Been reading Tommy Angelos book Elements of Poker (scroll down the page, here's a review for you too) and was completely blown away by the end of the book, which is at the tail end of the last chapter (go figure) which discusses integrating a healthy lifestyle and meditation in order to profit more at the poker table. I really loved this bit and it sums up a lot of things I've been thinking about lately and so I decided to just type it out and share it. To give this author his due here's a link to his website which has many articles for free, and also gives access to his coaching services. Enjoy!

A Process of Illumination

During bad times, we get unhappy. Let’s say we wanted to be less unhappy during bad times. We could train ourselves to do it, if we were to use our bad times as opportunities to practice getting better at getting over bad times. The ideal arrangement would be if we had lots of bad times to practice on, so that we could get better even faster.

So, to help us accelerate the process of learning how to handle bad times, we decide to invent a new game. We call it: Bad Times. The purpose of Bad Times is to cause bad times for everyone. The more the better, and the worse the better.

We’d want our game to unleash waves of agony and anger, again and again, on every player. We would call our game a success if it caused depression, oppression, beguilement, defilement. Bad Times would follow us around and cause us grief, by souring our relationships, our disposition, and our grapes. We would design and refine our game to be seductive, and addictive, in multiple ways, so that its snares snag many, many times.

Our game would not be like chess. At chess, whoever plays the best wins. Where’s the agony in that? Our game must be viciously unjust: the better you play, the more exquisite will be your torture. To that end, we will employ a significant randomizing agent. Something like randomly selected pieces of paper with markings on them would work. We would attenuate the luck factor so that it causes the maximum amount of confusion, and delusion, and bad times, and very bad times.

Our game would not be like football or any other game that has teams. A team forms a supportive network that makes losing easier. We’ll have none of that in our game. Not only nobody and I mean nobody shares your pain, they will probably enjoy it.

Mountain climbing is painful, but Bad Times would not be anything like mountain climbing. A mountain climber is so busy at not freezing to death and not falling to death that his pain doesn’t really get a chance to cook properly. Our game would have gaps in the action, plenty of time for steaming, and simmering, and stewing, and boiling, plenty of time to allow the thinking mind to wander off and injure itself, so that we can practice healing it.

Let’s see. What else. Oh, I know. Proximity. We’ll sit in a circle as close as we can get without touching. That way the bad vibes of Bad Times can spread easily and quickly, spraying fertile spores of conflict. And let’s have comfortable chairs that stick to people who are stuck. And we’ll have dealers, ghastly beasts possessing wizardly powers, able to raise the frequency and pungency of the bad times.

What would be at stake? What could we put on the line that would pour on the pain? What could we lose that would amplify the anguish? Pride? Of course there would be that, but loss of pride is not nearly severe enough to do the damage we’re after here. Plus, everyone doesn’t have it, so everyone can’t lose it. We need something that is universally valuable. Something everyone has, and wants more of.

We decide that in our new game, the loser will pay, not only in pride, but also in cash. Money buys time, and food, and choices. Money is time, and food and choices. Money equals food. Food equals life. Money equals life. Broke equals death. In our society wagering money is as close as we can get to betting our lives. With so much at stake, our game is sure to cause desperation, and treachery, and man, this is truly a nasty game we are inventing here.. Do you think we’ll be able to get anybody to play?

We play our new game, and the bad times come, and we remember to follow our breathing. In, and out. In, and out. By doing so, we set aside our thoughts about what went wrong and step away from our thoughts about what might go wrong, and for that moment, when those thoughts are gone, so too is unhappiness. By eliminating the past, and eliminating the future, we give ourselves this present. We will practice this process of elimination, using our new game, and it will become for us a process of illumination. Let us play.

. . . .

In other news, this month is looking good :)

Monster session

I was aiming for 75 games today but only got 65 in. I plan on crushing this week before we head to some hippy madness out past Mt Hood this weekend.

I ran pretty hot tonight. . . but I think that's fair for a change of a pace!

Embarrasing HU session

I've always loved short handed poker though I've shied away from it recently online. Not sure why as I think it's a ton of fun since you get to play a ton of hands.

Last night I tried my hand at it again and felt truly blessed to have a true and complete donk to bash heads with.

In fact it was easy riding for the first hour playing where I busted him over and over again to increase my $100 starting stack to over $550. He was an awful player and at some point he began shoving in preflop over and over again. When someone shoves $110 into your $1 big blind you can afford to fold quite a few times as long as you win when you call.

The first time I called he flipped up 86o which luckily bricked out against my AJ. Several hands later I called him with A5s and he showed up with A7 to take the pot down and finally double up at which point he started playing somewhat more carefully. Perhaps surprisingly the call with A5s was probably not a great idea even though I think he was shoving at least %80 of his hands if not more. Fact is A5s is just a %57.8 favorite over his top %80 of hands (which includes 95o, 34s and up) which is more then enough edge in a vaccum, but for the purposes of this session it increased his stack to a size that could actually be a threat to mine and made for some very uncomfortable situations against this maniac.

The next hand he won I'm still scratching my head over. The problem was that I was busting him over and over again by slow playing my big hands and calling his inevitable shove. This made it really hard for me to make the lay down that I wish I had made here:

***** Hand History for Game 13404208520 ***** (Full Tilt)

$100.00 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Wednesday, July 15, 04:50:01 ET 2009

Table Crazy (heads up) (Real Money)

Seat 1 is the button

Seat 1: rrich508 ( $237.20 USD )

Seat 2: J4bberW0cky ( $507.80 USD )

rrich508 posts small blind [$0.50 USD].

J4bberW0cky posts big blind [$1.00 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to J4bberW0cky [ Jh Jc ]

rrich508 raises [$4.50 USD]

J4bberW0cky raises [$18.00 USD]

rrich508 calls [$14.00 USD]

** Dealing Flop ** [ Jd, 9h, 9s ]

J4bberW0cky checks

rrich508 checks

** Dealing Turn ** [ Qd ]

J4bberW0cky checks

rrich508 checks

** Dealing River ** [ Qc ]

J4bberW0cky bets [$9.00 USD]

rrich508 raises [$218.20 USD]

J4bberW0cky calls [$209.20 USD]

rrich508 shows [Ac, Qs ]

rrich508 wins $473.90 USD from main pot

J4bberW0cky doesn't show [Jh, Jc ]

Eww is probably the best way to describe it. From there it just got worse as he proceeded to crack every big pair I got. This guy was so aggro I just couldn't find folds in any of these spots.

***** Hand History for Game 13404561680 ***** (Full Tilt)

$100.00 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Wednesday, July 15, 05:40:14 ET 2009

Table Crazy (heads up) (Real Money)

Seat 2 is the button

Seat 1: rrich508 ( $683.40 USD )

Seat 2: J4bberW0cky ( $105.00 USD )

J4bberW0cky posts small blind [$0.50 USD].

rrich508 posts big blind [$1.00 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to J4bberW0cky [ Kd Ks ]

J4bberW0cky raises [$2.50 USD]

rrich508 calls [$2.00 USD]

** Dealing Flop ** [ 7c, Js, Td ]

rrich508 checks

J4bberW0cky bets [$5.00 USD]

rrich508 raises [$15.00 USD]

J4bberW0cky raises [$28.00 USD]

rrich508 raises [$665.40 USD]

J4bberW0cky calls [$69.00 USD]

rrich508 shows [Ts, 7s ]

J4bberW0cky shows [Kd, Ks ]

rrich508 wins $578.40 USD

** Dealing Turn ** [ 9d ]

** Dealing River ** [ Tc ]

rrich508 wins $209.50 USD from main pot

***** Hand History for Game 13404510542 ***** (Full Tilt)

$100.00 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Wednesday, July 15, 05:32:48 ET 2009

Table Crazy (heads up) (Real Money)

Seat 1 is the button

Seat 1: rrich508 ( $667.60 USD )

Seat 2: J4bberW0cky ( $116.70 USD )

rrich508 posts small blind [$0.50 USD].

J4bberW0cky posts big blind [$1.00 USD].

** Dealing down cards **

Dealt to J4bberW0cky [ Kc Kd ]

rrich508 raises [$2.50 USD]

J4bberW0cky raises [$9.00 USD]

rrich508 calls [$7.00 USD]

** Dealing Flop ** [ Qs, 3c, 6s ]

J4bberW0cky bets [$13.00 USD]

rrich508 calls [$13.00 USD]

** Dealing Turn ** [ Qc ]

J4bberW0cky checks

rrich508 checks

** Dealing River ** [ Ac ]

J4bberW0cky checks

rrich508 checks

J4bberW0cky shows [Kc, Kd ]

rrich508 shows [6h, Ah ]

rrich508 wins $45.50 USD from main pot

And so on and so on. Looking at HEM I can see right now that I:

Lost $155.55 with AA which I recieved once

Lost $143 with KK which I recieved three times, losing all three!

Lost $333.20 with JJ which I recieved twice, losing both!

Lost only $30 with QQ which I recieved once!

And so on. I think I lost with every pocket pair all said and done and it's just amazing! Maybe that's why I don't play more HU cash online!

Anyway, I'm going to give it another shot sanz beer. I'm really bummed about that because I've been really trying to approach the game in the best, most professional way possible but let my guard down for some reason. The think I hate most about the introduction of booze into my game is the doubt it creates after a loss. As in, was I playing as well as I thought I was? You just don't know until you dig through the hand histories, which can be really painful after a night like that. Considering the hand above with JJ where he runner runnered a bigger boat. . . I have to wonder if the influence of booze isn't painfully obvious. What booze is good at is extending the length and breadth of your emotions. . . and there is just no place in poker for emotion.